Avatars of the Word by James O鈥橠onnell, Harvard University Press,
拢16.50/$24.95, ISBN 0674055454
IS there room on the shelf for more than one history of reading? James
O鈥橠onnell proves there is with his Avatars of the Word. His
entertaining anecdotal style and easy movement between past and present is
reminiscent of Alberto Manguel鈥檚 earlier work A History of Reading
(HarperCollins, 1996). Of course, O鈥橠onnell comes at the subject from a
different angle鈥攖his is a history of reading rooted far more in the
university library than the bookshop.
O鈥橠onnell is concerned with the changes in what and how we read brought about
by the computer revolution. Mostly he wants to blow away the cobwebs of myth and
misunderstanding. Doom-laden predictions of the demise of books and reading are
dismissed with reference to other revolutionary moments in the history of
reading: the invention of the library, the move from scroll to codex, the
invention of printing. Each of these generated fears that proved groundless, but
initiated unpredicted changes.
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The introduction of printing by Gutenberg, Caxton and their fellows, for
instance, did not spell immediate redundancy for the copyists who earned their
living writing out books by hand; it actually brought them more work for a while
as extracts from printed books were copied out to be passed on to others or to
make up private anthologies. And such anthologies, O鈥橠onnell suggests (one of
the delights of this book is the way one idea slides seamlessly into the next),
might well provide a model for the way we will deal with the overload of
information that electronic publishing is going to make available.
As professor of classical studies and vice-provost for information systems
and computing at the University of Pennsylvania, O鈥橠onnell can write as
authoritatively about St Augustine or St Jerome as he does about the Web. Thus a
Californian university鈥檚 experiment in creating a 鈥渧irtual library鈥� prompts him
to suggest that all libraries have been 鈥渧irtual鈥�, right back to the time of
Cassiodorus. If, as is argued, cyberspace and free access to all literature via
the Web is going to kill off libraries, this is to misinterpret their role as
simply a depository for books. In fact, O鈥橠onnell argues, their role throughout
history has been as much about organising and accessing information as storing
it, and that function is going to be more important than ever in cyberspace.
But whenever he talks about modern libraries O鈥橠onnell means university
libraries and whenever he talks about electronic publishing he is referring to
academic journals. Thus we begin to glimpse his hidden agenda, which finally
becomes clear in a chapter helpfully headed: 鈥�(For Professors Only)鈥�. There is,
it appears, a war going on between those who are teaching students merely to
pass exams and those who believe that it is more important that they understand
and explore ideas; this book is a blast from the liberal side.
All of a sudden, Avatars of the Word seems to change direction. The
final third may have some urgent and cogent arguments for those in the battle,
but there is a danger that it might fatally unbalance the book. So let us not
forget, as the discussion becomes partial and partisan, that behind it all is a
fascinating and important glimpse of a reading revolution that may affect us
all.