The Double-Edged Word: Vulnerability and the Book

Sreetilak Sambhanda

The book is a cultural symbol whose reputation few can dispute. Reading is universally encouraged, and a society with a book culture is perceived as cultured, progressive, and politically mature. Books are benign creatures: innocent, and even vulnerable. Are they? This seems to be a dangerous form of certainty to have. As DEA agent Hank Schrader from the American crime drama Breaking Bad puts it, “A guy this clean has got to be dirty.” Has the book always been just hiding in plain sight? Here is an investigation into three things: what the book has done for us; what it has done to us; and what we have done to the book, or what will become of it. 

Part One: Booktopia

“Reading maketh a full man,” wrote Francis Bacon in 1597 in the essay “Of Studies.” Education as well as moral upbringing in our modern era revolves around books, or their surrogates in other formats whom it is also fair to call books. Academic rituals and rites of passage are mediated by books, and doctrines such as “Today’s readers become tomorrow’s leaders” confer on all book-related endeavors unassailable religiosity. Humanity has progressed, prospered, and grown cultured through its unquestioning adoration of these simple objects.

In an article tracing the evolution of books from vellum to e-books, The Economist exulted: “No army has accomplished more than printed textbooks have; no prince or priest has mattered as much as ‘On the Origin of Species;’ no coercion has changed the hearts and minds of men and women as much as the first folio of Shakespeare’s plays.” Books gave authority to people’s assertions as they were assumed to contain well-considered and validated thoughts. They became the celebrated badge of honor for the sole brainy species on the planet.

Jorge Luis Borges famously visualized the world as a library consisting of an infinite number of hexagonal galleries: “When it was announced that the Library contained all books, the first reaction was unbounded joy. All men felt themselves the possessors of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal problem, no world problem, whose eloquent solution did not exist – somewhere in some hexagon. The universe was justified; the universe suddenly became congruent with the unlimited width and breadth of humankind’s hope.”

One of the most quotable eulogies to the book as a historical institution came from the American historian Barbara Tuchman: “Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change […], windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.”

What makes books great, and last across centuries? Salman Rushdie makes a point: “[O]ne of the things that I think is that any book that lasts fifty years, hundred years or more, it never does it by accident. There is only one reason why books last, which is people think they are worth reading. And as a result, it is people’s fondness for books that makes them survive, and nothing else.” That is how committed the writer is to the cause that brought him near martyrdom. What explains such cheeky and triumphant optimism? It is writers who know that books are small objects that hide the largest armories in the world.

If all this is what the book can do for you, can you ask what you can do for the book? Writer and publisher Roberto Calasso attempts this in his book The Art of the Publisher: “To what extreme can the art of publishing be taken? Can it still be imagined in circumstances where certain essential conditions, such as money and the marketplace, basically disappear?” The answer, says Calasso, is yes. He cites the example of the Writers’ Bookshop, the undercover publishing house set up in Russia at the height of the October Revolution which was “No longer a place that produced new books, but one that sought to house and circulate large numbers of books (some valuable, some ordinary, often incomplete, but all destined to oblivion) that had ended up at their shop stall through the wreck of history. It was important to keep certain practices alive: to continue to handle those rectangular paper objects, to leaf through them, order them, discuss them, read them in the pauses between one task and another, and finally to pass them on to other people.”

We are grateful and contented. The Great Book Dream lives on.

 

Part Two: Bibliocracy

One of the most celebrated and iconic lunatics in literature Don Quixote was addicted to books – chivalric romances, to be precise. “In short, our hidalgo was soon so absorbed in these books that his nights were spent reading from dusk till dawn, and his days from dawn till dusk, until the lack of sleep and the excess of reading withered his brain and he went mad. Everything he read in his books took possession of his imagination: enchantments, fights, battles, challenges, wounds, sweet nothings, love affairs, storms and impossible absurdities. The idea that this whole fabric of famous fabrications was real so established itself in his mind that no history in the world was truer for him.” Books not only claimed Quixote’s mental health, but inspired his numerous misadventures and turned his life into a tragicomedy. Cervantes, the creator of this legendary character, seems to be retorting to Bacon: “Reading maketh a mad man.”

The trouble with books stems exactly from the blind trust they have managed to earn. This is most aptly represented on the cover of a 2001 edition of Czeslaw Milosz’s book The Captive Mind. The bronze sculpture by British artist Bill Woodrow titled Listening to History startles us with an inconvenient thought: that books can blind, and bind. Woodrow’s exposé counters the book delusion and complements Milosz’s thesis on the constriction of intellectual freedom by ideological dogma. 

“An unexamined life is not worth living,” Socrates is believed to have said. Would it be too bold to ask if an unquestioned book is worth reading? The consecration of the book – as the Book with a capital B – over the centuries by the cultural establishment replaced the book mystique with the Book orthodoxy. The innocent adulation of books as the very “justification” of the universe made us unmindful of the other side of books: the written word is double edged; it can empower and enlighten as much as engender historical and prolonged vulnerabilities. The Little Red Book and Mein Kampf have also influenced the direction of history just as much as the works of Aristotle, Shakespeare or Darwin have, although with entirely opposite results. 

We often witness wars between books of the sacred and the profane persuasions, fought by their human followers. The “war of words” or a book-vs-book conflict is a veritable clash of civilizations, in miniature. Writer Salman Rushdie suffered slashes of the double-edged word at every level of his existence – spiritual, political and physical. Yet he did not drop his weapon, but chose the defiant title Knife for his memoirs on survival after an attempt on his life in 2022. 

Vulnerability of the book is an equivocal idea. While celebrating the book as a metaphor for all of human knowledge and recorded experience, it is unfair to forget that the word “bookish” is not a compliment. The book is just as much a metaphor for ossified ideology, dogma, unquestionable authority and obscurantism. In this avatar, it has justified, inspired or caused oppression, violence and tyranny. Unsurprisingly, several expressions in the English language that contain the word “book” evoke meanings related to authority, discipline and penalty. If you do something “by the book,” you are rigidly conventional. When you “book” a ticket, you are granted a valid claim on a seat in a theater or on a plane by an authority. If you are “booked” by a police officer, the law has recorded an offense you have committed, and you are likely to be “brought to book” for that. The expression “to throw the book at somebody” means to punish somebody as severely as possible.

A recent article examines devious use of books for propaganda: “During the cold war Western intelligence agencies subsidized authors, sometimes very good ones. The CIA set up literary magazines in France, Japan and Africa. One purpose was to counter censorship by autocrats. Another was to make global culture friendlier to Western aims. British intelligence services commissioned works of fiction that supported empire. […]  Rudyard Kipling’s role as a propagandist for the British empire is often forgotten. British intelligence recruited the author during the first world war to write fiction that sought to undermine Indian nationalism.”

Part Three: Bibliomorphism

The book has a third role: as a commercial product, as a packaging and distribution format for intellectual property. How does this antiquated entity fare in the modern, digital marketplace? Have the reading habits, business models, and publishing economics made the book vulnerable?

The publishing industry (of which this writer is a part) puts books at the mercy of the market, where they are more often judged by measure than by merit, discriminated against by arbitrary gatekeepers, misunderstood by marketers and belittled with the moniker “content.” As platforms evolved beyond print, from paper to pixels, there emerged new ways of exposure, and exclusion too. At one time ebooks were thought to be the main “disruptors” that made books, book culture and the book industry vulnerable. But this was a revolution that wasn’t. “The ebook is a stupid product. It is exactly the same as print, except it’s electronic. There is no creativity, no enhancement, no real digital experience. We, as publishers, have not done a great job going digital. We’ve tried. We’ve tried enhanced or enriched ebooks – didn’t work. We’ve tried apps, websites with our content – we have one or two successes among a hundred failures. I’m talking about the entire industry. We’ve not done very well,” said the CEO of one of the “Big Five” English language publishers in the world in an interview. Cognitive science is on the side of physical books too, as are committed fans of the paper objects who find them as important a discovery for humanity as fire. 

Yet, people desert books and reading. Through cognitive conditioning, the human brain has evolved to be more distractible and stimulation seeking. Function-specific formats have splintered the traditional role of books and print: the web for academic research and reference, mobile apps for instant information and news, the re-invention of listening, algorithmic intelligences for adaptive comprehension, and so on. All these offspring and avatars that trace their ancestry back to the book are books too, and perhaps equally formidable. The infinite number of interconnected galleries that make up the Library Borges spoke of is already one we frequent every day. A smaller, metal-and-glass object has taken the place of the paper object. And the Library is essentially a book of all books, with a mind of its own. We may call this phenomenon bibliomorphism.

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How should we coexist and deal with books? This question is answered by the intriguing title of Malayalam writer N. Sashidharan’s 2012 essay collection Pustakangalum Manushyaranu, which translates as “Books are also human.” While this title leads us to an evocative slogan “Book lives matter,” we might polish it still into a handy philosophy: if books can be human, they can be both good and evil; friendly guides and crafty manipulators; they can liberate and enslave; tell the truth as well as conceal it; they can be everything that we can be. Admire them conditionally. Believe in the book, with caution.

References 
  • Bacon, Francis. “Of Studies.” Index of the Project Gutenberg Works of Francis Bacon, edited by David Widger, Project Gutenberg, 30 Mar. 2019, www.gutenberg.org/files/59163/59163-h/59163-h.htm. 
  • Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Library of Babel.” Fictions, Penguin, 2000, p. 69.