The appeal and meaning of a tapestry is best appreciated by distancing oneself from it. Especially for large tapestries, one has to stand back 15-20 feet to take it all in. But what if you kept walking towards it? What would you discern? This was roughly the analogy employed by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre when he was undertaking the final revisions to a French book he had just finished. The year was 1784.
“I’m poring over the proofs from morning until night,” he wrote to a friend. “This typographical manner of reading them so utterly destroys their meaning that I sometimes don’t know what I’m reading: I am in the situation of a man who, seeing a tapestry, instead of considering its subject, occupies himself with counting the threads.”
It is the manner of ‘reading typographically’ that gives this book its title. Adjudicating the case is Geoffrey Turnovsky, Associate Professor of French at the University of Washington, Seattle. That is not to say this book is trial! Far from it, as it is expertly written and quite engaging, despite the ostensibly dry subject matter.
Turnovsky relies heavily in this book of the concept of the “typographical consciousness” of eighteenth-century readers, which was “their inculcation into the habits and habitus of print literacy.” By habitus he is here employing a concept formulated by the late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu “for describing a set of ingrained habits and dispositions that shape behaviour and beliefs prior to any calculated thought.” Even this book does not contain the information I used to expect in a book: what font size is used, and what typeface?
The typographical consciousness of readers shifted in the last decades of the eighteenth century, with the mass publication of books by Rousseau (lead photo). Put succinctly, they didn’t really care anymore about the book itself, only its contents. “The sentiment of Rousseau’s reader is in line with contemporary reflections on reading,” but his success was preeminent. His readers established a “unique relationship with the author.” They were, in effect, the first groupies: fans who were so immersed in the characters Rousseau created that many actually believed them to be real people. Rousseau received more fan mail than any writer in the world.
Some French readers, visiting England, enquired about the health of Rousseau’s fictional characters who he placed in that country. “These types of articulations,” writes Turnovsky, “have come to mark the specific historicity of eighteenth-century readers, who might be modern in their taste for certain kinds of immersive literary entertainments but remain distant from us in their confusion about how fiction is meant to operate. In fact, there is very little to indicate that these readers gave even a second’s thought to the dilemma, let alone that they were ‘obsessed’ with it.” It is important to realise, when reading novels from that period, that the typical reader then was not “well versed in the practice of willing suspension of disbelief.”
I applaud Turnovsky for taking issue with leading scholars in this book, but his arguments are a little tricky to follow as he does not identify who these experts are, beyond giving their name, and the book lacks a comprehensive bibliography. One must wade through the notes (62 pages of them) or simply resort to the internet to get the relevant data quickly. I will delve here into two academic disputes to elucidate the advancements Turnovsky is making.
Speaking of the work of Robert Darnton (former director of the Harvard Univ. Library), he states that Darnton’s “discussion of the typographic consciousness of eighteenth-century readers misses the forest for the trees” when Darnton states it has “disappeared now that books are mass-produced for a mass audience.” Turnovsky counters that “it would be misleading to overly differentiate these readers from those of today on the basis that readers are now trained as readers to ignore, in most cases, such bibliographic niceties. The truth is that in the larger historical sweep, Rousseau’s readers stand out far more for their indifference to the physical book than for their attachment to it.”
Turnovsky also highlights the work of three scholars (Steven Price, Yannick Seite and Janine Barchas) for a thorough scolding. All three highlight “typography’s role in cultivating readers’ belief in the authenticity of the letters” that formed various novels, such as one 1761 book by Rousseau. He insisted that each “each letter in the 1761 edition begin at the top of a new page” to imitate the allure of an authentic collection of letters.
“In formulating these arguments,” argues Turnovsky, “these studies take for granted that typography inherently poses a problem for the reader’s ability to buy into the narrative conceit of the epistolary novel. Print, in these studies, presents a paradox that needs to be overcome through tricks of typographic tromp-l’oeil.” I must admit that I love that phrase, which I just highlighted in italics; quite brilliant!
The issue Turnovsky has with all this trickery is that the actual number of books printed that actually use such visual effects was very small. These “authorial interventions represent outliers to what was a much more pervasive and meaningful trend in the opposite direction.”
Going back another century, to the seventeenth, the author does an excellent job at explaining “gallant reading, as a deeply socialized reading style that gauges the benefits of reading in terms of social integration and polish.” Meant to appeal to the upper classes, “the corpus of gallant texts flooded the literary scene starting in the 1630s.” A new demographic of people in the professional class read these books as it provided “them with linguistic and behavioral models that they could imitate and adapt into their lives.” Instead of reaching just the 2,000 aristocrats of France they were written for, a large swath of the public was thus engaged in creating the French society that was ripe for the huge output of novels in the following century.
A delightful book on a rather enigmatic topic, it can be profitably read not just by the few who wish to be a professor of French, but the many who – like their seventeenth-century counterparts – were eager to read a fine book to advance themselves.
Photo: An eighteenth-century portrait of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In the public domain.
Reading Typographically: Immersed in Print in Early Modern France is by Stanford University Press. It lists for $70.