'This will kill that'. Architecture's revenge on the book

Even though we talk about the hundreds of thousands of books that are sold at the fair each year, all studies confirm the shameful reading rates. Buying books is easy, but reading takes time and has therefore become a luxury that few can afford. 'Today, language, and especially the language that young people read, is reduced to the captions of images', warned George Steiner.

What strange art is this, what magical effect could a mind have that would allow it to escape from itself, from the circumstances that define us and from the time, in order to dwell on the elements of the lives of others? Books can extend our line, introduce extraordinary variables, voices that resonate off-screen, implausible echoes, give us elements that we lack, expand the conversation, and if we take into account what cultural critic Neil Postman tells us, culture is nothing more than this, the embodiment of the many conversations we have, conducted in a variety of symbolic ways and through different means. In his decisive volume of analysis of our time, published in the 1980s – Amusing Ourselves to Death –, Postman pointed out how the news of each day was nothing more than a figment of our technological imagination, in a period in which we are increasingly unable to piece together fragments of events that are reported to us from every corner of the world. Now, four decades later, Postman’s preface to that book remains one of the most powerful eschatological lessons of our time, a prophecy whose force strikes us today with all its scandalous readability. In that text, he compared Orwell’s dystopia (1984) about fascist repression with the trivial and insubstantial society imagined by Aldous Huxley in his 1932 novel, Brave New World. “We had our eyes fixed on 1984. When the year arrived and the prophecy failed to come true, more thoughtful Americans sang softly in their own praise. The roots of liberal democracy had endured. Wherever terror had gained expression, we at least had been spared Orwellian nightmares. But we forgot that alongside Orwell’s dark vision there existed another—a little older, a little less well-known, equally chilling—Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.”

Because there is no point in replacing his words with a paraphrase that, however hard we try, would always end up tarnishing the clarity and firmness of the original expression, we prefer to continue with the direct quote of Postman's words: "Contrary to common belief, even among the most educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy something similar. Orwell warned of the danger of being dominated by oppression imposed from outside. In Huxley's view, however, there was no need for a Big Brother to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and memory. According to his prediction, people would end up loving the oppression to which they were subjected, and adoring the technologies that nullify their ability to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to do so, because there would be no one to read them anymore. Orwell feared those who would take away our access to information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much information that we would be reduced to passivity and pure selfishness. Orwell feared that the truth would be hidden from us. Huxley feared that we would drown in a sea of ​​irrelevancies. Orwell feared that we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared that we would become a frivolous culture.

As Huxley wrote in Brave New World, civil liberties advocates and rationalists—ever vigilant in their efforts to oppose tyranny—“failed to take into account the almost infinite human appetite for distraction.” “In 1984,” Huxley added, “people are controlled through pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled through pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will destroy us. Huxley feared that what we love will do it.”

The arts of attention

It is true, as someone once said, that “if the future is the future, it will always be unexpected”. And this may even be what allows us to establish a ‘quality’ in our assessment of the future, so much so that it has become commonplace to notice how the future used to seem better, how it used to fascinate us and even how we wanted to lead ordinary lives for the simple pleasure of following the next episodes. The loss of quality in the future creates a feeling of nausea, since every morning we wake up and the news seems to have fallen into an elliptical and exhausting movement. Instead of a perpetual surprising plot, we wake up to a repetitive plot, increasingly demanding and sordid, rude and immoral. And in this context, reading a book is for many an amazing luxury, finding that calm and intense environment in which to become involved without letting anything interrupt us, enjoying the privilege of the arts of concentrated attention, what Malebranche defined as the “natural piety of the soul”, seems to be a small utopia even for many of those who used to be able to get more out of books. In a certain sense, the time for books seems to have been expelled, to have become impractical, because it requires a degree of seclusion, silence and dedication from us that encounters countless obstacles in the life we ​​lead. “It is a banality to prove it,” George Steiner pointed out, “these arts have undergone a widespread process of erosion in our days; they have become an increasingly specialized university ‘profession.’ More than eighty percent of American teenagers cannot read silently; there is always a background of music, of greater or lesser volume. The intimacy, the solitude that allows for an in-depth encounter between the text and its reception, between the letter and the spirit, is today an eccentric, psychologically and socially suspect singularity. It is useless to dwell on the downfall of our secondary education, its contempt for classical learning, for what is learned by heart. From now on, a kind of planned amnesia prevails in our schools.”

From stone letters to lead letters

And yet, these days, a celebratory event full of moralizing power is taking place in a privileged area of ​​the capital, and year after year it insists on publishing figures that seem to express a phenomenon of massive adherence and intoxication with books and reading. We can already foresee that the number of visitors to the Lisbon Book Fair will once again exceed or at least be in line with last year's. There is always talk of around a million people who spend three weeks strolling through this kind of open-air shopping mall, and an event that promotes a fabulous scam at a time when bookshops are being driven out of city centres due to property speculation. Even though we talk about the hundreds of thousands of books that are sold each year at the fair, all studies confirm the shameful reading figures, making it increasingly difficult to swallow the constant propaganda recital of this institution, captured by the big groups in the publishing and bookselling sector. And if we consider that around 50% of all book sales occur in the period leading up to Christmas, we can see that this is an increasingly seasonal sector, and in which all the promotional hype only serves to generate irreparable distortions, so much so that in the weeks leading up to this fair period, bookstores already know that either they move there and pay a second rent, or they might as well go on vacation. Basically, independent structures are forced to be present, but always in a relationship that illustrates and maps their blatant marginality in the face of groups capable of creating autonomous pavilions, authentic bazaars that disrupt the norm and nullify the prospect of a harmonious meeting space, in which a horizontal relationship prevails between readers, authors, booksellers and publishers. It is a kind of revenge in which the layout of the space once again imposes itself on the pages of a book, whatever it may be. 'Ceci tuera cela' ('This will kill that') is the phrase that comes out of the mouth of Claude Frollo, the archdeacon of Notre-Dame de Paris, as he opens the window of the cloister, looks out over the Parisian cathedral and then returns his gaze to the book he has open on the table. This is how Victor Hugo prophesied, in his 1831 classic, how the grandeur of architecture would be dethroned in favour of the profusion of possibilities contained in books. Stone letters were replaced by lead letters. Hugo thus explained how Gutenberg's revolution would empty and annihilate the importance of ancient works of art and architecture, which were the 'books of humanity' before the printed word transformed the heritage of generations into something indestructible – precisely because it was a simple, light and infinite instrument. The new monuments of the future would no longer be temples, churches or pyramids, but great literary works. And it is from this perspective that the book was written, with the ambition of becoming a building immune to ruin. “When compared to the thought that becomes a book and for which a little paper, a little ink and a pen are enough, how can it be surprising that human architecture has abandoned architecture for the printing press?” It is not that the so-called ‘Bibles of stone’ have disappeared, but they seemed to have been relegated to a secondary position at the end of the Middle Ages. Thus, if until the 15th century, architecture had been the main record of humanity, and until then not a single minimally complex idea had emerged in the world that had not been transformed into a building, so that all the notions that captivated the popular imagination, as well as religious values ​​and dogmas, had their monuments, seeking to perpetuate themselves, suddenly the book appeared, which could be easily destroyed, no longer depended on the effort of handwritten copies, but could be printed in large numbers, reproducing itself and with it all that 'anthill of intelligences', that 'hive where all imaginations, those golden bees, arrive with their honey'.

The greatest of crimes

No matter how much it is said that a book is fragile, and that a building is a book that is infinitely more solid, lasting and resistant, and even if demolishing the constructed word is only possible in a revolutionary moment, the book offered human thought not only a means of perpetuating itself in a simpler and more accessible format, but also captivated it into a much deeper relationship of intensity with language, allowing it to excavate increasingly narrow passages within it, an entire underground network, a much more discreet, sometimes secret, effect of contamination, all the more dangerous because, “as long as a text survives, somewhere on the face of the earth, even in a silence that nothing comes to break, it remains susceptible to resurrection”, Steiner reminds us. “It can wait centuries until it awakens a life-giving echo”. But our Book Fair has allowed us to see the imperatives of market concentration take shape each year, and in this way, books are suddenly disqualified, at a time when sales serve precisely to hide the real crime against literature, which, because it is somehow hidden, appropriates all the privileges and support to leave us increasingly powerless. And this crime, as Joseph Brodksy points out, is not reading books. “A person pays for this crime with his whole life; if the criminal is a nation, it pays for it with its history.” We condemn the persecution of writers, acts of censorship, the destruction of books by fire, but that is not enough. “We are powerless in the face of the worst crime: not reading books.” In an enlightening introductory note to the anthology Paisagem com Inundação, the translator, Carlos Leite, offered us a very clear perspective on the Russian poet’s reading of these tensions. “Could the increasing atomization of modern society, the reduction of people to insignificant zeros, the nullification of individual destinies in mass form, despite everything, constitute a fertile ground for the emergence of more individual consciousness? Yes, despite everything. For the world it may be too late, but for the individual – because language, that is, art, that is, literature is the proper ground for his freedom – there is always the possibility of escaping the ‘common denominator’ and ascending to the ‘numerator’ of the fraction that represents the world, towards ‘autonomy, towards privacy’. ‘Regardless of the entity in whose image we have been created, […] for the human being there is no other future than that enunciated by art. Otherwise, what awaits us is the past – the political past, first of all, with all its entertainments of mass politics’. On the other hand, the general material well-being of a society is no guarantee of greater freedom, as we know, because it is not synonymous with greater dignity”.

'Books are in no hurry'

Thus, and ultimately, now that books are losing their influence or preponderance as a support for the effects of the socialization of culture, and if through new media and artificial intelligence tools that specialize in reading works and providing immediate summaries, all this web of subterfuges to avoid direct confrontation with great literary works, perhaps books can persist as a last resort, a last resort for those who are overcome by immense nausea and filled with suspicion in the face of the distractions that everyday life pushes us towards, all this trivial and insubstantial plot that expresses the reservations of ancient religions regarding images, their prohibition and iconoclasm, understanding how images, in their variable and indefinitely reproducible forms, would come to deprive consciousness in the future. “Already today, language, and especially that which young people read, is reduced to the captions of images,” warned Steiner. It would therefore be up to a few radical remembrancers, worshippers of this living object, to “save what remains of this shattered world in order to make the best of it”, as Walter Benjamin wrote. The very trick of Artificial Intelligence is to free us from the effect of deep concentration and distillation of knowledge that can only be acquired with difficulty, subjecting everything to a processing of the densest areas into commonplaces, simplified formulas that end up emptying all meaning. But this very thing reminds us that culture is precisely what remains when everything has been forgotten, and constantly requires a long process of selection and filtering, but also of rescue and resistance in the face of summaries that exchange masterpieces for the lukewarmness of ready-made ideas that increasingly push public opinion towards the affectations of redundancy and stupidity. Alongside the technical improvements that led Umberto Eco to say that the book is like the spoon, the hammer, the wheel or the scissors, objects that, once invented, cannot be improved, the book-object tells us how far we are from the possibilities it opens up for us, and if we are in a hurry, we are simply unable to read. “Books are not in a hurry”, stresses Steiner. “An act of creation is not rushed; it reads us, it privileges us infinitely”. Everything that appears as an impediment to reading, in fact, imposes itself as an obstacle in this opening to infinity, working to reduce the future to something absolutely predictable, that is, to do away with the unexpected, to kill the future. In the opposite direction, instead of mere reading suggestions, we have highlighted some of the most unique and stimulating readers of our modernity.