Reading Robert Darnton’s “What’s the History of Books?”
In “What is the History Books?” Robert Darnton redefines the notion of text when he lays out the model of the communication circuit, a social cycle by which the text is produced or created, consumed or “re-created” by the string of constituents directly involved with the literary work.
By engaging himself in the scrupulous pursuit of book history; by undertaking the enormous task of archival research, (shall we call it sensible eavesdropping); and by scrutinizing the past through its proofs—particularly the physical or material, socioeconomic political or even psychological aspects involved in the production of the printed text called book, Darnton provides clarity to the materiality of the otherwise elaborated notions of text, which have always been perceived either metaphysically or intellectually. After all, the text is simply material, a commodity that can be altered, whose authenticity is therefore endlessly open to discussion.
Initially Darnton considers the history of books—everywhere recognized as one important discipline—as the social and cultural history of communication in print. For him, anyone pursuing the study of book history must seek to understand how ideas were transmitted through print, and to understand how exposure to the printed word affected the thought and behavior of mankind in the hundreds of years [1989]. Then he belabors the case story of Isaac Pierre Rigaud, a cunning bookseller in a provincial district of Montpellier in eighteenth-century France who sold Voltaire’s Questions sur l’Encylopédie, a supplementary text to Denis Diderot’s initiated compendium on Enlightenment titled Encyclopedia or systematic dictionary of the sciences, arts and crafts.
After leafing through the letters in the dossier belonging to the bookseller Isaac Pierre Rigaud, Darnton uncovers that French icon Voltaire was equally a crafty author in that he played tricks with publishers and printers when it comes to his works. Voltaire himself tolerated STN’s pirated editions and made deals with them only to be able to spread his ideas on Enlightenment. Voltaire pursued sinister means perhaps to try to attain nobler ends—propagate notions of this so-called Enlightenment, a philosophical tendency which according to some modern scholarship proved rather only intellectual and hardly levelheaded.
Such portrayal affords us the chance to see the dynamics of the people directly involved in the production of text. They are the elements in the communications circuit which altogether make possible the existence, inexistence, or even mal-existence of the literary work.
While other historians might study the work’s circuit of transmission at the stage of its composition, its printing or its assimilation in the libraries, Darnton concerns himself with the least familiar link in the diffusion process—that is the role of Isaac-Pierre Rigaud of Montpellier, the bookseller. Darnton recognizes that the new book historians seek to do away with the task of bibliography by focusing on the general pattern of book production and consumption in a long period. In principle, the new book historians ought to discover literary experience of ordinary readers they concentrated on the most ordinary books, they have always sought to obscure familiar events—counter-Reformation and Enlightenment—in an effort to elucidate how much traditional culture outweighed the avant-garde in society’s literary preoccupation. They are said to compile statistics from requests for copyright, analyze content of private libraries and trace ideological currents through neglected genres. All these efforts may have not ended with firm set of conclusions but posed new questions, attempted at utilizing new methods and tapped new sources [Darnton 1989].
Their example influenced movements through Europe and US such as the reception studies in Germany and printing history in Britain. The 1960s and 1970s have witnessed the enrichment and the expansion of the field of study. This was the time when new book historians converged in cafes, created new journals, founded new centers and disseminated their research on an international scale [Darnton 1989]. The expansion of the field of study became as gnarled as the fields or disciplines engaged or brought about by all its researches. Unfortunately, there was prevalent crisscrossing of disciplines which must have disoriented the explorer in more ways than one.
Ask Darnton on the consequences of this new field of study and we would infer from him that the explorer of this field of study is troubled or overwhelmed by the new ideas. He is confused by competing methodologies which made him do more laborious and meticulous tasks. Thus, the history of books becomes nebulous if not a tiring pursuit because of the multifarious disciplines that it entails or it intertwines and because of the painstaking tasks it requires.
Meanwhile, through time and space, the concept of text has been given new perspectives by scholars, theorists and others who involve themselves in the literary pursuit. When a new book historian like Robert Darnton takes on the task of deciphering the general patterns of book production and consumption in a period of time, he renders more proofs for us to consider the materiality of such text in varying degrees. Robert Darnton dissects the anatomy of a book laid bare to say much about the kind of the environment there was in the time of its creation and consumption, through the various elements in the communication circuit. All these elements bear significant or insignificant influences to the text itself.
Such job of a book historian gives more advantages to literary scholarship. Darnton claims that some book historians trace back to the period before the invention of the movable type, and printing students source out newspapers, broadsides, and other forms aside from the book [Davidson 1989]. Interestingly, though the field can be expanded in such approaches—this history of the book primarily concerns books since the time of Gutenberg, the German printer and pioneer in the use of movable type. Darnton sounds optimistic enough that this area of research, having developed fast in the last few years, may be sooner at par with—the history of science and the history of art—and may eventually belong to the canon of scholarly discipline.
The past of this so-called history of books will attest how a field of knowledge can assume a distinct scholarly identity; it is when several disciplines converge—clash [at one point], or when they share a common set of problems all having to do with the process of communication. Concrete questions in varied disciplines come into view [Darnton 1989]. To follow on answering these questions, scholars cross paths and find themselves in the middle of various, other fields of study. Such setup must have favorably compelled or inspired them to constitute a field of their own. Later the adherents of the discipline enjoined historians, literary scholars, sociologists and librarians and anyone else—for that mater—who desired to understand the book as a force in history.
Book history—through the efforts of book historians—acquired its own journals established research centers, organized conferences, and formed lecture circuits. This time, adherents and or followers could easily be identified by a common cause. Theirs was a group anticipating a frame of mind that welcomed expansion and became excited with the bringing forth of fresh ideas.
The history of book history traces back to Renaissance—and, or beyond this period. The old, established strains of the discipline are said to have formally begun in 1800s, or in the nineteenth century. For one, the study of books as material objects gave birth to analytical bibliography in England. Instrumental are the following entities and publications: Library, a publication entity and Borsenblatt fur den Deutschen Buchhandel theses in the Ecole Pratique. Meanwhile, the current scholarship, a less traditional strain of study is said to have taken root from the 1960s France for which the following entities and publications were instrumental—Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, an institution and two publications, L’ Apparition de livre by Febvre and Martin and Livre et societe dans La France du XVIIIe siecle by the 6th section of Pratique des Hautes Etudes [Darnton 1989].
More particularly here, the book historian gets to unravel facts about the past, or notions about the society otherwise disclosed or chosen to be hidden by people who wrote history. There is always the thrill in getting face to face with the reality of the past, and an equally thrilling task of even trying to rewrite it taking cue from the facts uncovered. Such predicament in this pursuit lays bare opportunities that perhaps might help establish the text as a highly volatile artifact.
Laying bare the anatomy of his communications circuit, Darnton goes through different insights which can be found in the experiences of each constituent in the circuit.
As regards the work of French author Voltaire, Robert Darnton makes clear an alternative path to consider when we look at texts. The path gives way to a broader world where the constituents have essential, respective functions. The communication circuit is itself a bigger reality—a real world of interaction and dynamics that virtually obscures the lordship of the author to his work.
In Darnton’s endeavor as book historian, we are ushered into asking questions about the author’s physical environment or his practical incidences. Answering questions on the author’s milieu, given or hardly perceived will help us fully understand the transmission of text. Here we get to profile the author as he is situated in the bigger circuit (Darnton 40). For one, Voltaire played his part well by playing it slyly and cunningly. Darnton ascertains that French Enlightenment icon Voltaire virtually corrupted, or pirated his own work to propagate the ideas embedded in them.
Significantly the pirated editions of Voltaire’s works however, served as means to further the distribution of this author’s work. There is a noted modification and revision of his texts so as to supply added information which might have contributed to gain more influence.
Meanwhile, the publishers—the editorial press—appears to be the richest of all sources for the history of books. For instance, reading into the archives of publishers will supply us sizeable, significant information on how a certain literary text became a force in a particular country, city or civilization. Answering questions on how publishers drew contracts with the authors, or how they networked with the other constituents in the circuit will take us deeper into the recesses of other various disciplines.
Publishers’ archives are chances to unearth past realities. Through these prized artifacts, we can decipher the attitudes of readers toward books and the context of their use through the way books were presented by the publishers’ catalogs (Darnton 40-41).
Gabriel Cramer, Voltaire’s official publisher of Questions, complained to Voltaire about his sly schemes when he learned of STN’s attempt to take over his market because of Voltaire’s bargained version with STN. Voltaire retracted his offer to STN, and the latter is left to keeping with the corrupt, substandard work.
This becomes one challenging part of the endeavor—these most neglected, often ignored or worst thrown away documents appear to be the most critical material for the book historian. Also, these provide the most rewarding part because in these documents, one may see the interplay between aspects of the circuit.
The printing shop is said to be the most popular of all roles in the book production perhaps primarily for the analytical bibliographer whose task is to spell out the transmission of texts by way of explaining the processes of book production (Darnton 42).
The Société typographique de Neuchâtel (STN), Voltaire’s underground printer, with which Isaac Pierre Rigaud must have extracted better terms otherwise turned out to have delivered incomplete incompetent, less-quality copies of Voltaire’s Questions. Isaac Pierre Rigaud was outmaneuvered by the devious schemes of Voltaire himself as he related with the printers and the publishers. This story makes us question the credibility and authenticity of the text because of the political, socio-economic and other external factors surrounding its existence. Here the notion of the materiality of text is even more brought to light.
According to Darnton, bibliographers engage in substantial study and research in pursuit of correct, authentic information on the literary pursuits of the characters in question—of texts and authors. The work even opens up to new, uncharted fields of study. Substantial analytical bibliography can provide clarifications to the jarring questions on social and literary history. For one, reading printers’ manuals and autobiographies does more than help demystify myriad enigmas. Had Tomas Pinpin, the first Filipino printer (at least according to Zaide) ever written a manual for his profession or perhaps an autobiography? We can always ask Ambeth Ocampo, Manuel Quezon III, Bambi Harper or Isabel Ongpin.
Going further along the circuit, Robert Darnton places the role of the shippers or the middlemen in the marketing aspect—though in real life, each component of the circuit readily entails such aspect. In more ways than one, these people represent a collective entity which determined the oscillation of book trade in areas outside cities, in the provinces remote from the centers (Darnton 42). The limitations in the means of transport certainly determined what kind of texts reached readers of a locality. Even in separate studies Robert Darnton tackles how unorthodox literature traveled long way avoiding authorities and becoming more accessible to readers in varying degrees and incidences, making underground economy thrive, flourish and survive.
Socioeconomic and political dynamics—war, political turmoil, government, or even nature’s elements as weather—directly affected how the circuit flows, how the material text is transmitted. Here the physical written text faces dangers of alteration or even annihilation. Their existence (and perhaps essence) hinges not on the ones who created them, who wrote them—but on those who will un-write them, who will undo their corporeal existence. The text becomes a social artifact, a consumer’s good like food and textile whose shelf life may initially be halted by the these constituents of the circuit.
Studying the aspect of the bookseller—as illustrated by Darnton’s Isaac Pierre Rigaud—helps us piece together the jigsaw of the evolution of book trade (43). When this happens, it affords us more clarity on the commodity-ness of the text. Pursuing this study can give us information not just on movements but also tendencies.
Working under the new strains of book historians, or on the least familiar aspects of an otherwise elite-stricken studies on Voltaire, Darnton tackles the publishing history of Voltaire’s Questions in the experiences of an obscure bookseller whose role in the proliferation of the text itself proved rather essential.
Zooming in on the case of whose experiences with the other people in the trade perhaps helped spread Voltaire’s Questions through cunning irregular and deviant means, Robert Darnton reinforces the fact that the text as a material, or commodity [shall we say “priced” not anymore “prized”] and hereby steals the text its credibility.
Thorough considerations of books as commodities provide perspectives to history of literature. In the case of Isaac Pierre Rigaud, Robert Darnton claims that book trade is a confidence game—reading into more letters, correspondences, contract forms, exchange sheets, invoices, etc. will help us elucidate how the “game was played.”
As regards the last but not the final constituent in the circuit, Robert Darnton declares that the aspect this entails is central to textual criticism. Complementing and complimenting the works of Booth, Iser, Fish, Ong and Culler, he considers literature as an activity; it is the making out of meaning within a system of communication. Robert Darnton seems to support the contentions held by the reader-reception theorists like Stanley Fish.
He acknowledges that reading has evolved through time; literature is not a canon of texts. It is indeed beneficial to study this aspect of readers because texts virtually influence readers how to read them (Darnton 44). Texts shape the response of readers, and sometimes the appearance of the texts affect the reception.
Any alterations in the text constrain readers; looking into reading societies will clarify on the reception of texts (read: how readers read texts). Attitudes towards the printed material have evolved and so has the sensibilities of communities who interpret them. Questions on who reads what, when, where, how, or why—link reading studies with sociology. This renders the field of study too interdisciplinary.
William Harmon and C. Hugh Holman consider text as anything isolated for attention, especially a piece of writing. Since about 1960, through the pioneering work of Roland Barthes, text has taken on a special meaning, distinguished from that of work. Whereas work is a closed, finite product of traditional canonical literature, a text is open process with which one can interact creatively. Then Roland Barthes sorts the text into two types—the lisible and the scriptible (1995). French scholar Denis Donoghue elaborates that lisible texts are said to be parsimonious in offering plurality while scriptible texts are lavish in this respect because they are “ourselves writing, engaged in the play of the world” (1995). This statement rings true to the experience of Robert Darnton’s Isaac Pierre Rigaud. It was his sensibility as a crude businessman and his failure as such against the workings of other constituents in the circuit that determined the physical availability of the text in the locality.
In a recent web article titled “A Historian of Books, Lost and Found in Cyberspace,” Darnton relentlessly professes that in this modern age of computers and high technology, he still finds the primordial book indispensable for anyone who would like to consider the literary pursuit. He prefers the primordial book invented since Guttenberg and upholds its supremacy to the computer:
Consider the book. It has extraordinary staying power. Ever since the invention of the codex in the third or fourth century AD, it has proven to be a marvelous machine—great for packaging information, convenient to thumb through, comfortable to curl up with, superb for storage, and remarkably resistant to damage (Darnton 2004).
Darnton recognizes the ultimate advantages of the printed text, more specifically, the book—from its convenience to its durability.
It does not need to be upgraded or downloaded, accessed or booted, plugged into circuits or extracted from webs. Its design makes it a delight to the eye. Its shape makes it a pleasure to hold in the hand. And its handiness has made it the basic tool of learning for thousands of years, even before the library of Alexandria was founded early in the fourth century BC (Darnton 2004).
Equally, however, Robert Darnton recognizes the genius of the present mode of information called Internet. He finds in it an interest to enormously promote or perpetrate (the immortality of) the book—by advancing a virtual project, an electronic book about the history of books in the Enlightenment. Furthermore, he anticipates that his project will bring to fruition, being so convinced of the power of Internet which he compares to the omniscience of God. Ultimately Darnton has treated the text as highly material, not at all something perceived in any other vaguer means.
In point of fact, Darnton worked with American Historical Association (AHA) in their landmark project, the Guttenberg-E launched in 2000. The effort has projected an electronic monograph which features downloadable songs, maps, café gossip, and other items his literary research on the historical France from which realities in history can be retrieved, or more favorably experienced. Interestingly, here is the impressive ability of the Internet to re-create reality in its virtual sense.
Darnton’s confidence on the electronic book that he has envisioned with this publishing entity is simply baffling:
The world of learning is changing so rapidly that no one can predict what it will look like ten years from now. But I believe it will remain within the Gutenberg galaxy—though the galaxy will expand, thanks to a new source of energy, the electronic book, which will act as a supplement to, not a substitute for, Gutenberg’s great machine (Darnton 2004).
Given such sensibility, we are deemed to deduce Darnton’s dire demand to consider the text as a physical object, one which renders all other previous text’s definitions very disparate if not totally inane. He then progresses from all these by saying that modern man has entered the information age, in that some would claim that the modes of communication have replaced the modes of production as the driving force of the modern world.
He disputes such view and its value as prophecy, saying it will not work as history, because it conveys a plausible sense of a break with the past. When Darnton declares that every age was an age of information, each in its own way, and that communication systems have always shaped events, he attacks the problem of how societies made sense of events and transmitted information about them, something that might be called the history of communication.
Through the years in the history of literary criticism, text has been defined in multifarious ways or variedly by theorists. For Barthes, for instance, text is an “autonomous entity with a logic of its own above and beyond the intentions of the author or the social context in which it is written. It is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.” This refers to the intertextuality of literary texts.
For Darnton, the text achieves a different sense, or meaning. The text or written work undergoes a communications circuit, whose elements are active participants in the production dissemination, creation, appreciation, re-creation or de-creation of meanings and ideas.
In all, these contentions collectively point up to the idea that the world itself is nothing but a culturally endorsed system of signs of shared codes, conventions, and ideologies, a textual system whose free play is limitless.
Other Notions on The Text
Roman Jakobson
In 1960, Roman Jakobson proposed a model of interpersonal verbal communication which moved beyond the basic transmission model of communication and highlighted the importance of the codes and social contexts. In Jakobson’s circuit, there are only six constitutive factors of the circuit—the addresser and the addressee—and what mediate them are the context, message, contact and code:
The addresser sends a message to the addressee. To be operative the message requires a context referred to (‘referent’ in another, somewhat ambivalent, nomenclature), seizable by the addressee, and either verbal or capable of being verbalized, a code fully, or at least partially, common to the addresser and addressee (or in other words, to the encoder and decoder of the message); and finally, a contact, a physical channel and psychological connection between the addresser and the addressee, enabling both of them to stay in communication (Jakobson 66).
Roman Jakobson argues that we human beings are not only text-producing animals, but also critical ones. Criticism is a way of life, about making of choices, or at best, the formulation of values (Jakobson 1987). All the more, these declarations are echoed by Darnton’s work when we come to consider that Voltaire’s seminal text served as a tool for people to assume their functions in the circuit. Their criticalness has taken rise from their actual roles in the society.
Levi-Strauss
For French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, writing entails domination, in that it becomes a higher and more evolved order of language and civilization (Levi-Strauss 1955). For one, Levi-Strauss says that not having writing equates to not having history, if at all. By and large, Levi-Strauss hinted at the fact that writing is a form of social organization. In this sense, Darnton does not only support this contention; his endeavor in fact affirms that writing [the literary text] becomes a social tool, not just to make constituents of a community interact but primarily to give them functions in the society.
In his Nambikwara account, Levi-Strauss seems to have said that writing intercedes into power and dominion (1955). I would like to interpret this statement into the text of Robert Darnton. This is very true in Darnton’s illustration of the roles of the constituents in the circuit. The text becomes the mouthpiece of each constituent in the event or moment that it reaches his part and therefore demands of his participation. In the story of Isaac Pierre Rigaud, we realize that Voltaire had had his own means of dominating what he created through freely and consciously allowing the pirated versions for a purpose which must have appeared all too noble to him. Isaac Pierre Rigaud also did his part in the domination by submitting to Voltaire’s final arrangements.
Robert Scholes
Robert Scholes believes that a text is a communicative object. Of all types of texts, the literary text is the most valuable text for it requires and encourages the most study and interpretation for its own sake (Scholes 1982). For Darnton’s study, Voltaire’s text has done more than being a communicative object. It has become a tool for interaction between and among persons going through their social functions and affairs. The pursuit of the book historian himself calls attention to itself—the meticulous tasks entailed in this study practically pay attention to the text not just as an object but as a bodily matter for endless scrutiny.
Works Cited and Sources Consulted
Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Vincent B. Leitch, et.al., eds. New York: Norton, 2001.
Chandler, Daniel. “Semiotics for Beginners.” www.aber.ac.uk. 01April 2004. The Media and Communications Site. 02 April 2004. <http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/ documents/S4B/sem08c.htm>.
Darnton, Robert. “Robert Darnton: A Historian of Books, Lost and Found in Cyberspace.” www.historians.org. 2004. American Historical Association. 30 March 2004 <http://www.historians.org/ prizes/gutenberg/rdarnton.cfm>.
Darnton, Robert. “What is the History of Books?” in Reading in America: Literature and Social History. Cathy Davidson, ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.
Fish, Stanley. “Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics” in Is There a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1980.
Harmon, William and C. Hugh Holman. A Handbook to Literature 7th ed. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1995.
Henderson, Greig E. and Christopher Brown. Glossary of Literary Theory. University of Toronto English Library. 31 March 1997. <http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/glossary/>.
Jakobson, Roman. “Linguistics and Poetics” in Language in Literature. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy, eds. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987.
Levi-Strauss, Claude. “A Writing Lesson” in Tristes Tropiques. 1955.
Lodge, David, ed. Modern Criticism and Theory. London: Longman, 1988.
Makaryk, Irenea, ed. Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: Approaches, Scholars, and Terms (Theory/Culture). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
Scholes, Robert. Semiotics and Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982.
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