Wed, Aug 10, 2005 page9

• Computers can't replace reading

  As libraries increasingly make room for computers, many argue that only books -- and the sensory access of the real -- can unleash imagination

  • By Marina Warner / THE GUARDIAN
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  One of the earliest books I remember was a copy of the Ten Commandments, each one filling a double-page spread like Moses's tablets of the law, the words of God on one side, and on the other, a picture, presenting a pair of children in bright colors, busily transgressing.

  If you think about the artist's problem for a moment, it becomes clear that picturing fundamental acts of human wrongdoing does not lend itself to images in a child's early reading primer.

  "Thou shalt not commit adultery" showed the little boy and his playmate kneeling on the floor on either side of a waste-paper basket; they were tearing up books and throwing away the pages -- some of these were illustrated, though not distinctly enough to see how.

  

  ILLUSTRATION: MOUNTAIN PEOPLE

  As the daughter of a bookseller, I quickly grasped that adultery was the sin of tearing up books -- and, figuratively, spoiling their contents, like scribbling on the pictures, which I was also commanded not to do.

  How the mind makes pictures from words or with words; how thoughts take shape; how connections happen between existing data and new experiences which are summoned through representations only; what their material reality might be; how they are memorized and stored in memory ready for retrieval and further use, have been questions since thinking began, even before most people were reading.

  Aristotle wrote that the mind cannot think without pictures -- he used the word phantasmata for these thought-pictures. Consciousness studies have intensified the search for answers to this most beautiful mystery, and the varying analyses of neurologists and philosophers have in turn inspired critics and writers to think about the mind's eye and its relation to reality. Elaine Scarry, a wide-ranging America critic, reflects in her study "Reading by the Book" on the methods writers use to communicate their envisionings to us, bring events and characters to vivid pictures as we read: what the neuro-philosopher Antonio Damasio calls the "Movie-in-the-Brain."

  Some of Scarry's suggestions are eccentric, but she asks the right questions, especially in an age when reading is under siege: how is it we see the scene in the carriage in Madame Bovary so vividly? How is it that the faces of Dickens' characters come up in front of our very eyes? John Carey, in his maddening new book What Good are the Arts? returns to the example of a prisoner, who after reading Lord of the Flies, exclaimed in delight at the huge power of his own imagination.

  At the beginning of Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte describes her heroine as a little girl, mind-voyaging through the pages of Bewick's History of British Birds: Jane confides to us: "Each picture told a story; mysterious often to my undeveloped understanding and imperfect feelings, yet ever profoundly interesting: as interesting as the tales Bessie sometimes narrated on winter evenings... With Bewick on my knee, I was then happy: happy at least in my way."

  This catches the feeling of pleasures that arise beyond being lost in a book - being lost in the way the book loops back to life, to other stories, and by capillary attraction grows personal associations and memories.

  Frequently, after a book has made a deep impression, and a scene has remained with me, indelibly, I will return to the passage and find that it's made up of a few sentences only, sometimes of great simplicity; and that its impact lies in that part's relations to the whole of the book, the timing of its happening, and the way the writer has led up to that moment and then away from it. It is a chord, but the chord would not sound without the piece and without our immersion in it: the movie in the brain takes place between the work, its writers, and its readers over a period of time.

  The Internet is a library, a reference library, brilliantly adapted to looking something up, creating inventories, updating catalogues, adding new entries in a dictionary or an encyclopaedia, and consulting directories. The Web serves magically to store knowledge that would be costly in paper, in volume, to print: references, appendices, original background sources, documentation of a detailed kind, extra apparatus in general. But I don't think that writing and reading as acts of imagination can exist in cyberspace only; words don't become flesh for me unless I print out and read the materialized text; but even so, the uniform, ugly look of the copies does not draw me into the mood of the work and its meaning or imprint its contents on my memory as deeply as reading it in a book.

  To give you an example: I teach a course on the tale, on tellings and re-tellings of famous stories, and I saw that Seamus Heaney had published a new poem, The Testament of Cresseid, after the Scottish Chaucerian, Robert Henryson.

  The original is a powerful piece, and it has been powerfully rendered by Heaney, who feels an affinity with the, Scots register phonetic and linguistic -- what he calls the distinctive hum of the poet's voice. It takes up the story at the point it usually ends -- after Cressida has been abandoned by Diomedes.

  In Henryson's tragic meditation, the gods gather to punish her, and their punishment is leprosy. She's begging in the street at the gates of the convent that has taken her in when Troilus rides by.

  He sees something familiar about the face of the leper, and not quite placing the ravaged countenance, the throws something into her begging bowl.

  It's heart-breaking, and unforgettable, and it made that impression on me -- and on the students in my class -- because it so happens that Heaney has only published this poem in a limited edition from the Enitharmon Press, and the library at Essex University generously agreed to buy it for the collection and lent it to me for the class.

  Often we work from photocopies, but we passed this book around and read aloud in turn from the pages, very carefully, and the book's material presence changed our relationship to the poem and imprinted it more richly in memory.

  The students were able to fall into the book and let their consciousness fill with the pictures and the passions that Heaney's Henryson was working up, and it helped tune their ear to that hum of the language.

  As it is a creative writing class, it is crucial that they do this, for without the footfalls of writers who have gone before it is not possible to find your step in the present. I believe their ethical and aesthetic imagination was touched, almost literally, by contact with the work, and fashioned by that touch.

  What can be said of a book can be extended to the place of reading and to ways of reading. Thus, I believe computers should never be thought of as replacements for books and reading books; that libraries should not become workstations; that the emphasis on teaching children and students through the use of personal computers and downloaded documents has contributed gravely to the psychological and cognitive difficulties of students and younger people, with serious consequences for all of us.

  I'd like to propose a re-evaluation of some older ideas about developing understanding as well as deepening responses and pleasure that one takes from the representation of experience in literature, however unpleasant. Friedrich Froebel was one of several Romantic pedagogues who, under the influence of Rousseau, founded kindergartens; he believed in educating children through their senses -- through direct bodily involvement with shape and colour and form and texture and weight and process: children were like plants and needed physical nurture for their qualities as individuals to grow.

  Froebel's theories in turn influenced Maria Montessori, and then entered the psychology of the Bauhaus, where in the foundation year, students were sent out into the streets and the countryside to gather up examples of every kind of matter in every state: from smooth pebbles to burst balloons, floating thistledown to torn posters, to re-acquaint themselves, as if they were children again, with every sensory circumstance in which reality has its being.

  I was at a children's party once where they had one of those mirror lamps casting flecks of light across the room. A little girl caught one of these on the palm of her hand and bent down to taste it. At the other end of the spectrum of pleasure, I read about a scientist, who, when he was small, asked his mother why birds didn't eat slugs. She replied, "Because they taste nasty," whereupon he picked one up and licked it -- and it did indeed taste nasty, and burned his tongue.

  Today, the concept of the material environment has itself changed, and with it brought about the de-naturing and disassociation of minds in development. What is needed is fresh emphasis on the real, palpable, enfleshed materiality of our surroundings. We need to be able to lick stars and slugs!

  This priority given to tactile rather than visual qualities conveys increasing resistance to the dematerialised cybercoolie, the individual in cyberspace: in contact with a keyboard only. The new British Library is wonderful -- but the lack of a clear vision for the Reading Room at the British Museum after the library's move has extinguished the very heart of that magnificent palace of memory and thought; all the munificence of Paul Hamlyg Room and the consequent survival of the book-lined Dome has not prevented it from dying.

  I went there recently to show a friend, and a young museum curator was sitting at the desk with a tray on which there were a few items: a cylinder seal, a Roman coin, a shard, and we were invited to touch them -- a forlorn attempt to reanimate the room, and a struggle to substitute sensory experience for the darkening of readers' imaginations once so active there. This is why it is crucial not to dismantle existing libraries and replace them with IT laboratories and personal workstations; both are needed because they fulfil different functions in education and in pleasure.

  I know every generation demonizes the technology of the young: and every form of reading has been decried on its first appearance.

  In many literary battles, I've taken the side of the Moderns against the Ancients. But reading in cyberspace seems to me to make different use of cognitive faculties, unfleshing the word, and correspondingly disembodying memories.

  The poet Ruth Padel, who recently published Tigers in Red Weather, once told me about a primary school group visiting London Zoo in the days when the big cats enclosure still contained tigers.

  The children had been carefully prepared, with lessons about the animals, video footage, maps and photographs. When they reached the big plate-glass window of the big cats enclosure, one little girl looked, gasped, and turned to her teacher with shining eyes and said, "But Miss, you never said the tigers would be REAL."

  I hadn't seen a real tiger when I first read Blake's words "Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright" and his poem was thrilling, and it holds the essence of tigritude, and tigers -- as well as mermaids -- made pictures in my mind. Of course we gain knowledge without immediate sensory access.

  It would be absurd to suggest that nothing can be experienced imaginatively that has not been experienced in actuality. But we can't build tigers in the mind's eye without the work of association and that needs imagination and memory, and both these cognitive powers respond better to the impact of physically embodied things in surroundings that are themselves the product of long and deep human connection.

  This is an edited version of a talk given to the Friends of the Bodleian Library.
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