My brother-in-law's family maintains a giant warehouse in New England where they keep a mountainous stockpile of consumer goods and household artifacts they have accumulated over the years.
Every time I think of this hoard, I feel a glow of excitement and gratification. I like to think of so many things held onto and maintained, all in a big pile. I know of no way to explain this reaction on my part, other than by that "tendency to the heap" that William Hazlitt once deemed a universal feature of the human mind.
Most of the family on my side, though, feel differently. The thought of the pile—the heap of accumulated stuff—makes them shudder with horror. They itch and burn with the desire—restrained only by the laws of private property—to get in there and start throwing things away.
These may seem like opposite tendencies. But really, they are frère-ennemis. Two sides of the same coin. Complementary and mutually-reinforcing parts of the same dialectic. The hoarder and the tidier—like the "radical and the reactionary," in the words of the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer—are locked "together as in an unhappy marriage [...] molded by one another, dependent on one another." (Hass trans.)
In short, they have far more in common than they imagine.
Both, after all, have set themselves an impossible and infinite goal. Each is chasing utopia. The hoarder is stumbling toward the El Dorado of infinite possession—the idea that everything could be owned and piled up and preserved in one place. The tidier, meanwhile, chases the impossible dream of infinite refinement—the filing away of all unnecessary excrescences; the gradual reduction of life to its barest essentials.
(The dialectic between these two poles is thus not unrelated to the oft-observed period oscillation in art and architectural history between the poles of classicism and romanticism—the minimalism and "flatness" prized by high modernism; versus the frills and doo-dads and bric-a-brac that both preceded and replaced it, during the periods of art nouveau and, later, postmodernism.)
Nicholson Baker's 2001 book Double Fold is the quintessential hoarder's book. As such, it is in many ways an eccentric book. A crank's book. Baker seems even to relish the idea of himself as a paper-crank. After all, his specific hoarder's task is to try to preserve the world's paper artifacts: the books and newspapers that carry within each of their pages an irreplaceable part of history.
And the end of the book finds Baker sitting atop a pile of old newspapers he has managed to save from the incinerator. "I'm a little stunned," he writes, "to think that I've become a newspaper librarian, more or less, and have the job of watching over this majestic, pulp-begotten ancestral stockpile." The climax of this nonfiction account is thus one hoarder's ultimate fulfillment and actualization of Hazlitt's tendency to the heap.
And so yes, the book is silly. Yes, it is pedantic. And obsessional. And repetitive. And self-righteous. But if we didn't want these things, what were we doing reading a Nicholson Baker book in the first place? It's all these features of minutely-observed crankery that make his writing so endlessly entertaining in every case. If Baker sometimes becomes annoying in his pages, then—he at least never stops being compulsively readable and great good fun.
One might think—though—that the world doesn't need more paper cranks dedicated to preserving musty and unused volumes of bound artifacts until the end of time. After all—isn't that what librarians are for?
But—no; apparently not—and this is what sets Baker off on his mission. He discovers that many libraries are not in fact staffed by hoarders, as one might expect, chasing the utopia of the ultimate pile of books. Instead, they are staffed by tidiers—many of whom dream of reducing the collection. They lie awake at night fantasizing about gradually eliminating books and clearing out more shelf space (one speaker in an anecdote Baker shares even reveals that the secret suppressed Freudian wish of many a librarian is actually to rip up the pages of books!)
This leads to the bizarre utopian schemes that Baker chronicles in the book—efforts to microfilm or digitize whole libraries—and throw away the books!
Here is where I say that the two sides—the hoarders vs. the tidiers—are really kindred spirits, locked in the same dialectic. Because each is haunted by a dystopia; and each is activated by a vision of utopia. And the two are mirror images of each other.
The dystopia of the tidiers is the vision of the endlessly-accumulating pile: the mound of books that grows inevitably year-by-year due to the rate of literary production.
The tidiers panic at this prospect for the same reasons the public freaks out every few years when they happen to think of the inevitable future of land-fills. Won't—the tidiers fear—they simply get bigger and bigger, year after year—as humanity adds more permanent and non-biodegradable waste—until eventually there will be nothing but garbage—the garbage will cover "every scrap of the living earth," to borrow a phrase from D.H. Lawrence?—until the "trash" is "all there is," to quote Donald Barthelme?
This is the same nightmare that haunts the tidying librarians: the "fear of the demon Growth," as Baker calls it—"alive in the stacks, doubling relentlessly, a monstrous exploding pustule of cellulose."
This—Baker suggests—is what really motivates the tidiers to want to microfilm or digitize all the books—that is, so they can throw away the originals and save space.
But, in order to sell their project to the public—he maintains (which probably cares much less than they do about the volumetric limits of the average library building)—they concocted a different nightmare—a false or at best grossly-exaggerated version of events, according to which the microfilmers need to act now, because currently, the existing paper originals are all mouldering into dust!
The tidiers knew the public would not generally support the idea of librarians destroying books. That's hardly what we imagined we were paying them for. And so—they came up with the narrative that the books were inevitably destroying themselves already—devouring themselves from within, due to the acidity of the paper, and thereby crumbling into oblivion.
Thus, the idea of slicing and photographing—and then, discarding—the books could be portrayed as an act of preservation, rather than destruction.
Both sides—in this debate—used the rhetoric and imagery of conflagration to sell their case. And it's easy to see why this was effective. Since Fahrenheit 451 and the Nazi rallies—the idea of "book burning" has always stood in our collective liberal consciousness as a manifestation of evil: an encapsulation of the pigheaded philistine fascist urge to destroy what it does not understand.
Moreover, the idea of burning books evokes those terrible losses of collective memory that we owe to library fires of the past—the burning of the Library of Alexandria, in which irreplaceable works of human knowledge were lost for all time—or, more recently, in our own time—the burning of the Los Angeles public library in 1986, which Charles Bukowski (a former patron) commemorated so achingly well in his poem "the burning of the dream."
And so, the tidiers used the imagery of "book burning" to try to convince the public that only a project of microfilming and digitization can save our collective memory. The advocates of their position produced a documentary—in Baker's telling—called Slow Fires, which argued that the paper artifacts housed in libraries around the world were slowly devouring themselves from within—turning into dust almost as if they were being gradually consumed in flames.
To which argument, the paper-hoarders retort: you, the tidiers, are the ones who are burning books. Or, at least, destroying them by other means. Baker tries to come up with an estimate of the total number of paper volumes that have been lost so far to the tidier's agenda—and finds that few microfilming libraries even keep track of the number of books and bound editions of newspapers they are destroying each year.
And so, the advocates of hoarding make free use of the imagery of book-burning as well. "Slow Fires is the title of the Commissions's widely publicized film about the self-destruction of books containing acidic paper"—reads one article aptly titled "The Latest Forms of Book Burning," by one of the hoarder advocates, whom Baker approvingly quotes—"[but] the copies used in the Commission's program of microfilming [...] are doomed to a much swifter conflagration."
Baker himself pictures the program of the tidiers in some ways as a vast and sinister crematorium—referring at one point to "the column of smoke rising from the sawmill" where condemned old newspapers were being fed into the furnace. He descends into true rhetorical excess when he gets on his soapbox about chemical deacidification efforts, which he also opposes for some reason—speaking of scientists feeding books into "gas chambers" (the Holocaust imagery I'm sure can't be accidental).
Not everything in Baker's version of events, then, is offered entirely in good faith either. Not only is it unfair to implicitly compare feeding books into a deacidification bath to stuffing human beings into a system designed for industrial-scale murder; he also seems to think that he can score points against the tidiers' and microfilmers' arguments merely by evoking certain sinister connections.
Multiple times in the book he drops hints about CIA and military involvement in various microfilming endeavors. And I'm still not sure what that's supposed to prove. If the CIA was spending some of their taxpayer-funded work-hours microfilming books in the 1950s, instead of poisoning, drugging, or assassinating people, that seems like time comparatively well spent.
Baker even turns Archibald MacLeish into one of his villains—portraying him as a CIA spook whose tenure at the Library of Congress coincided with an effort to replace paper copies of books with microfilm. This seems unfair to MacLeish—who, among public intellectuals during the McCarthy era—actually stands out for maintaining a principled civil libertarian position.
Here Baker's notorious tendency to a certain self-righteousness is fully on display. But again, I say, it does not impair in any way the pleasure and entertainment-value of Double Fold.
But is Baker right on the merits? Where, ultimately, do I come down in the great paper hoarder vs. tidier debate?
My sympathies obviously incline to the hoarders. As stated at the outset, I share their "tendency to the heap." The thought of a vast warehouse permanently storing an ever-growing supply of old books fills me with excitement. Much as—for some reason—as Baker puts it (and convincingly demonstrates), "certain purificationally destructive transformations of old things into new things seem to excite" other groups of people—including, it would seem, a surprising number of librarians.
If the utopia of the hoarders is the ultimate, ever growing heap—the opposite utopia of the tidiers lies in cleanliness, minimalism—the reduction and dwindling of the collection—the safe packing away and permanent storage of information—now divested from its cumbersome paper carrying—in ever-smaller filing cabinets. (Even if—as Baker points out—microfilm proved not to be as permanent as its advocates thought; or really to improve much on the shelf-life of paper.)
In the near–quarter century since Baker wrote his book—has anything changed? Digitization of books—then in its infancy—has obviously proceeded much further; and the technology to perform it has improved. The ability of computer servers to store information into perpetuity is better than it was in 2001 (when Baker compared digital storage to "a family of elephants in a zoo: if the zoo runs out of money for hay and bananas, for vets and dung-trucks, the elephants will sicken and die.")
But still—paper has actually proved to have more durability than the "Slow Fires" doomers suggested—and may still be a better means for obtaining something close to permanence than either microfilm or digitization.
Besides—as Baker is forever pointing out—it's possible we can have all of the above. We can make digital copies of the contents of books without destroying the original. The latter we ought to handle—as Baker suggests—as what they are: irreplaceable human-made artifacts.
He suggests librarians should see themselves in the same role as museum curators: who wouldn't destroy the Mona Lisa, just because they had successfully captured a photocopy of it.
I'm perfectly on board with Baker's suggestions. Though I confess I don't myself have a curator's attitude to books. People who know me are always accusing me of disrespecting these artifacts—since I tend to mark them up and write in them as I read my way through them. My friends see this as a sacrilege committed against the holiness of books. I see it as a way of better processing and absorbing—and thereby honoring—their contents. I think (in my hubris) that a well-marked book is a book left better than I found it.
So, I am no one's exemplar of a museum-level respecter of paper. (Nor have some of the great makers of books in history necessarily been great respecters of them—Malcolm Cowley shared an anecdote at one point about a drunken E.E. Cummings—tired of the pile of books his intellectual friends seemed to accumulate everywhere they went—urinating on a set of them. How's that for sacrilege?)
But still—I think—there is an irony in my method of consuming books that Baker could not have foreseen in 2001—a twist in the odyssey of the great digitization project that he probably did not see coming. Back in 2001, digitization seemed to be the enemy of paper. But now—shopping on Amazon—virtually the only way I can obtain a copy of a book that is otherwise out of print—particularly one in the public domain from the nineteenth century, say—is to buy a terribly-printed paper copy that simply reprints a digital scan or plain-text translation of the contents of one of these books.
And so—a quarter-century after Baker's warning about the "assault on paper"—paper appears to be having its revenge. We threw out all the copies of digitized books. And—as a result—now the only way to obtain a hard copy of the original is to order Amazon's machines to churn out a new paper copy of the digitized text.
So round and round it goes. The great cycle of history completes itself. Paper attains its victory in the end, over the would-be killers of paper-made books. "If the Red slayer think he slays," as Emerson wrote, "he knows not well the subtle ways [...] I keep and pass and turn again."
No comments:
Post a Comment