Coming into academia from the margins of Postcolonial Studies, when it was heroically striving to give an academic voice to indigenous cultures in the 1980-90s, I am aware that any celebration of the book is likely to be considered by some to be a subtle denigration of past traditions of oral composition and recording. What is worse, these days celebrating the book might also be resented by those who owe allegiance to futuristic forms of digital reading or what one can call visual orality—the use of mixed media, rooted in TV and film technologies, to tell stories and convey information. The book is in a terrible squeeze between those two positions. And yet, the book needs to be championed as the prime site of literature.

Before doing so, one also needs to face the fact that literature is not an idealist construct; it is not a form of immaculate conception in the human mind. It is shaped by the media of its recording. Literature in cultures of primary orality—if the word ‘literature’ can be used in that context, for its etymology denotes writing—was fashioned by the medium of breath which recorded it. For one, oral literature’s construction was often repetitive and contained many redundancies: you can find echoes of this even in written epics rooted in earlier oral cultures, such as Homer’s Odyssey, where the same god is heralded with the same description or phrase every time he or she appears in the narrative. Such repetition served various mnemonic purposes in a culture where the story had to be memorized, and there was no written text to consult. Moreover, the enunciation and preservation of oral narratives were mostly linked to their practical usage, either to record lineages, sacred stories, foundational myths, or to provide information about, say, foraging and shelter-building.

It is with the book—also in its earlier forms—that ‘literature’ slowly gets riven into ‘creative/artistic’ and vocational/professional/trade literatures. Whatever the drawbacks of such alienation, for ‘(creative) literature’ the book offers serious advantages. One can argue—despite the well-intended objections of many of my postcolonialist colleagues—that literature comes into being only with the rise of the book (including its early manuscript form). Here is a medium that, after breath and stone and other media, shapes what we now know as literature, because once words can be written down extensively, they can also be written down exclusively. The separation between literature and trade or vocational literature is easier to introduce, propagate, and sustain. This has drawbacks, but it also has serious advantages.

The book, contrary to what has often been claimed, is not just an elitist project; it is also a hugely democratic one. Historically, this can be illustrated with the example of India, where the earliest book manuscripts are associated with Buddhism and the non-Brahminical language of Pali, not with the Sanskrit treatises and epics of Brahminical Hinduism. Evidently, Buddhism—as a ‘religion’ with a middle caste following and without the institutional hegemonic privileges of Brahminism—used the written word extensively to connect across large spaces and periods.

The ancient Vedas, passed on orally from one consecrated Brahmin to another consecrated Brahmin, remained unchanged, and unrecorded in writing, until after the ‘bookish’ challenge of Buddhism and other such ‘sects.’ As Wendy Doniger notes, the Vedas, which were recorded orally (and, one can add, institutionally: through the Brahmin caste), were preserved in one iteration: “every syllable preserved for centuries, through a process of rigorous memorization.” Hence, there are no variants of the Vedas, in comparison to the later epics, such as the Mahabharata, which were recorded both orally and in writing, and so they exist in multiple versions. This brings forth the other democratic aspect of the book: its ability to escape capture and to survive as a minority position. For dissent to survive and be passed on in oral societies, it would require large areas of support. Individual dissent would exist, but it would never get recorded or passed on. The book, despite all kinds of inflicted burning, enables this. After all, the book can be moved across space and time, which means that it can more easily survive spaces and times hostile to its contents. This physicality increases the possibilities of literature, delinking it from social utility.

Another aspect to how the book enabled literature to be literature is embedded not in the words written down in a book, but, so to say, in the spaces between the words. “When you speak, you automatically stop thinking; it’s like being released from a contract,” says the authorial narrator of César Aira’s Ghosts. Unlike oral recitations and speaking, the book actually enables thinking, including dissenting or deviant thinking. The kind of contemplation it demands and permits is unique.

Aristotle held contemplation as the highest human capacity, ranking it above activity, because it involves thinking about the cosmos, which far exceeds in beauty and complexity any work of human hands. From his perspective, actually reading a book—the work of human hands—would not be true contemplation. I do not follow this Aristotelian definition of contemplation. Instead, I think of it more in terms of “deep attention”, a phrase that the Korean-German philosopher, Byung-Chul Han uses interchangeably with it.

But, interestingly, when one reads literature, one reads not only the words, accessed within the purported transparency of all other disciplines, but also between the lines and between the words. Literature depends not just on words, but also on silences, contradictions, and noise to convey its meanings. One can use the image of the blank spaces that lie between words and paragraphs and chapters in a book to illustrate this: in literature these ‘blank spaces’ also count, and the book, as a medium, enables us to pay deep attention to these ‘blank spaces’ too. At its best, one can argue that the book enables us, despite the limitations of language, to contemplate what Aristotle considered the “eternal”—that which actually escapes language. Eternal is not the word I would use for it, given its many misusages since then, but I think it will suffice to convey my point here.

Will this “eternal” nature still be available when we move to futuristic media (digitized reading and visual orality)? In a series of fascinating books, Byung-Chul Han doubts this, pointing out that the “medium of thinking is quiet” and noting that deep attention is not compatible with multi-tasking and incessant pop-ups, among other things. The book obviously also offers a greater capacity to slow down and focus than current futuristic replacements, and both of these are essential for deep attention. Visual orality, with its tendency to define our imagination—something capitalized, literally, by all those super-hero and fantasia films and computer games today—also curtails the borders of contemplation. There will obviously be some advantages to this shift to digitized reading and visual orality, but they are unlikely to accrue to our writing and reading of literature. This will affect our capacity to contemplate and pay deep attention to everything outside and inside us.

The ‘literature’ that will come out of it, if the book is largely abandoned as the primary medium for literature, will be very different from what we have had for a few centuries now, just as the ‘literature’ of primary orality was markedly different. It will affect the way we ‘contemplate’ the cosmos and how we understand ourselves.

Featured image by Freepik

 

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Tabish Khair is an Indian writer, academic and journalist, born (1966) and educated in the small town of Gaya in Bihar, India.

After finishing his MA from Gaya, he completed a PhD at Copenhagen University and a DPhil at Aarhus University, Denmark, where he is now an Associate Professor. He has been a visiting professor or research fellow at various universities and has received Carlsberg, Leverhulme, and other academic grants. Khair is also an internationally published novelist.