Abstract
Reviewed by: Martyn Lyons, University of New South Wales, Australia
Roger Chartier is fond of short books. The slim essay, rather than the weighty blockbuster, is his preferred mode. Some might wish otherwise, regretting that he does not give us just one big book on the printing and publishing contexts of three national monuments – Shakespeare, Cervantes and Molière. Perhaps only Chartier could write such a book, but we will wait in vain for it. Instead we must be satisfied with books like this one, with little more than 180 pages of text.
The Author’s Hand is a collection of 12 lectures, chapters, articles and a postface, most of them previously published in French, Spanish or Italian since 2002. Cochrane’s translation is excellent, but she nevertheless runs into awkward moments in Chartier’s more abstract passages. The essays are arranged thematically rather than chronologically, and they demonstrate all the advantages and drawbacks of such collections. On the one hand, they allow us to identify an author’s individual trajectory more clearly than in other books. His priority concerns, his favourite historical sources and his obsessions all emerge. On the other hand, the 12 essays inevitably contain repetition, and they return to a few common reference points, like Víctor de Paredes’s printing manual of circa 1680, or Don Quixote’s often-quoted visit to a Barcelona print-shop. Furthermore, the central theme of the book is only intermittently treated.
Chartier’s first aim throughout The Author’s Hand is to stress discontinuities in the production of the written and printed word in early modern Europe. In the eighteenth century, he argues, the author became recognized as sole and original creator of a literary work, and a new respect was paid to his or her signature as a token of authenticity. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, texts did not always have a single author. Literary works (especially plays) were produced collaboratively, in a world where what we call plagiarism was accepted, and in which the unauthorized re-use, imitation and revision of texts was commonplace.
A second objective of this slim volume is to demonstrate the multiple interventions which took place in the course of its production. Authors like Cervantes would compose a rough draft, from which a fair copy was made by a professional scribe for submission to censors and printers. Translators, compositors, censors and correctors were all involved in changing, punctuating and adding to texts. There was no pure and original authorial version, and texts were chronically unstable. Here Chartier echoes Adrian Johns’s critique of Elizabeth Eisenstein’s arguments in The Printing Press as an Agent of Change.
Anglophone book historians will above all appreciate having an English version of Chartier’s 2008 inaugural lecture to the Collège de France, entitled (after Quevedo) ‘Listen to the Dead with Your Eyes’. The inaugural lecture is an exacting rite of French academia. It involves paying homage to intellectual ancestors and mentors, in this case Henri-Jean Martin, Don Mackenzie and Armando Petrucci, with further bows to the Annales school in the shape of Lucien Febvre and Fernand Braudel, with acknowledgements to Ricoeur, Bourdieu and Borges thrown in. The inaugural constitutes a succinct manifesto of the lecturer’s methodological agenda. It inevitably recalls previous works and ideas (Chartier’s recent book, Inscrireet Effacer, and his work on Shakespeare’s lost play, Cardenio), which are summarized and used as stepping-stones to the next project. The inaugural also indicates the subject of the series of lectures to follow, to which it is both the opening and an explanatory key. Chartier performs the ritual in sparkling style. He says much about Cardenio, his earlier essay on the fragility of texts as they pass through different reincarnations, and this is a kind of prequel to that book.
This lecture and the volume as a whole also contain reflections on the role of the historian. Postmodernism has forced all historians to reconsider their texts as literary artefacts, structured by certain narrative conventions and mobilizing a range of rhetorical devices. Chartier insists, in contrast, that history is not fiction. It retains its specific disciplinary qualities, embodying criteria of verification and techniques of establishing proof. The historian ‘reads time’ or better, ‘reads times’ in the plural, since Braudel taught us to analyse and articulate the various overlapping time-scales influencing historical changes.
Chartier has done more than any other historian to theorize the history of reading and reception. In his Collège de France lecture he lucidly outlines his main analytical approaches, based on the fundamental concept that the meaning of all literature depends on the material form in which it is produced, and on the methods by which readers appropriate it.