Tony Tremblay

Writing Technology: Some Probes Toward a Consideration of Compositional Media

 "A goose quill put an end to talk,
 abolished mystery, gave us enclosed
 spaces and towns, brought roads and
 armies and bureaucracies. It was
 the basic metaphorwith whichthecycle
 of CIVILIZATION began, the step from
 the dark into the light of the mind.
 The hand that filled a paper built
 a city."

                  (Counterblast 14)

Reading, at least in the West, moves the mind from left to right in a regimented teleology. We've known this since Marshall McLuhan and The Gutenberg Galaxy. Working backward from effects to causes after the method of Poe and the French Symbolists, McLuhan discovered that as the reader's eye moved from left to right to interpret thought, so did the writer's pen move to express it-and so was formed the consciousness of the civilized world from precisely that movement. McLuhan termed that movement the paradigm of "efficient causality." It was a paradigm that began, Harold Adams Innis and Eric Havelock concurred, with phonetic literacy (the alphabet), and since the Greeks it has grounded our entire western sensibility. One no less qualified than Ezra Pound, another of McLuhan's teachers, remarked that western civilization must doff its hat to Homer. (Pound's "poem containing history" was just such a gesture, a modernization-thus extension@f what began with the blind poet.)

But can what McLuhan, Innis, and Havelock said of literacy in general, also be said of reading and writing in particular, the so-called "speech acts" of literacy? While reading has remained the largely unmediated activity of eyes and text-with the exception of eyeglasses and alterations in font size, typescript, and typography, reading remains an extension of the eyes-writing has been much more radically altered by technological advance. In fact, the technological evolution of writing in modem times from quill to pen to typewriter to dedicated wordprocessor to computer betrays an important ideological bias in our culture: the production of meaning rests more with writers than readers, contrary to what post-structuralists like Stanley Fish and Roland Barthes contend. In short, technology has favoured the writer over the reader, providing the former with methods and tools that the latter has not enjoyed. The phrase "the production of meaning," when considered from the point of view of technology, seems to weigh decidedly in favour of writers, pampered as they are by the arsenal of tools at their disposal. But the point is not to argue the ideology willy nilly; the point is to ask how the technology alters the speech act" itself.

J.L. Austin, the originator of "speech act theory," posited in How to Do Things With Words (1962) that the "performative" bias of all language stems from its ultimate desire to hybridize emotional effects (in other words, meaning) and in turn approximate those effects (or that meaning) in the reader, making the "speech act," in other words, a complex and allinclusive "performance." If literary language is similarly performative, and if its "performance" is likewise all-inclusive (a stretch of Austin's theory, admittedly, but a reasonable one), so too must its mechanical production be somewhere implicit in its utterance. How, then, is the technology of writing complicit in the production of meaning?

The question is important beyond its unashamed capitulation to the recent resurgence in McLuhan interest; it is important mostly because today literary meaning is being manufactured (read Chomsky if you will) on computer. Ink and typewriter ribbons are not yet obsolete, and probably never will be, but they are becoming less and less pervasive in the manufacture of text. Rudy Wiebe's latest novel, A Discovery of Strangers (1994), provides an interesting point of entry and illustration. Wiebe has admitted that his latest novel was composed completely on computer, the first of his many novels to be electronically composed. All of his, earlier works-most notably The Temptations of Big Bear (1973), chosen in this context for'its narrative and thematic parallels witha Discover were the products of pen and typewriter. One passage from each of the two works, quite randomly selected (and this is a key point), provides incisive witness to the differences in technologizing the speech act. The first passage is from Big Bear:

 Running Second's round face peered
 at Big Bear over the tea tin; he
 sighed and in a moment she came
 with cups of the black tea. He had
 considered killing too, often. He
 studied SittingBull intensely;
 trying to see it. To kill by bullet
 and knife and club-anything, choke
 them-every white unless they fled
 beyond running water: sometimes it
 was given him to see as if he stood
 precisely on the edge of it flat
 and upright, and if it was a buffalo
 he would kill or a horse he would
 take it came so motionlessly close
 into the frame of his vision that
 individual hairs curling in sweat
 laid themselves open before his
 sight. He had waited for this also,
 sometimes prayed so endlessly it at
 last froze into conviction: he
 would not see it. Never like this
 man, his squarish battered face
 glistening in the memory of such
 wars fought and one more coming in
 raging joy. The hot cup burned in
 his hand, and Big Bear suddenly
 understood Crowfoot had not said
 a word. (100)

A similar theme is developed (and in the same Jamesian voice) in A Discovery, but, "hailed" by computer technology, comes off much differently:

 "People I think can kill themselves,
 trying to carry too much," he says. 
 "And also, there is Whitesickness. 
 Traders won't trade you that, o no,
 they don't offer you sickness for furs
 or food, but often a person receives
 it anyway.  As a gift, Isuppose... 
 something from Whites, a little extra. 
 When I was a boy more than half the
 southern Pointed Skin and Cree people
 were killed by a blistering, bleeding
 sickness thatno medicine could stop. 
 Wolves androcks didn'tgivethem that,
 neither did caribou. And the very best
 trader guns couldn't kill it
 either.... * I was foolish, I thought
 sickness was no more than blisters,
 bleeding perhaps, and some People lost
 in their bodies. Or even eaters eating
 parts of us.  But that's not it-the
 sickness they bring is aspirit, of
 things. It is connected somehow to
 this endless killing of more and more
 small animals, and this shining little
 shit they hang around People's necks
 where nothing so bright has ever hung
 before. Look, The Hook can never take
 it off or he'll lose it, and so even
 the sun plays with it everyday. Behind
 their quick kindness, These English are
 deadly.  Their coming will destroy us."
 (264, 269)

Though both passages are clearly "performative" in how they implicate and therefore "command" the Western reader to some action (if only a private admission of shame), both are quite different in syntactic construction, a difference, I am arguing, that is related to their medium of composition.

The first passage from Big Bear, written without the aid of computer, betrays its textuality more openly than the second: its punctuation is more intrusive; its sentences and clauses clearly begin and end on cue, resulting in a noticeable abruptness of stops, starts, and authorial manipulations; and its cohesion is flawlessly executed through Wiebe's manufacture of an impressive syntactic infrastructure of properly placed modification, pronoun referencing, and careful agreement. As "performance," Wiebe's first passage is perfectly pitched and articulated the Latin root of "articulate," articulus, means member or part in a sequence, as joint or knuckle divides finger. Wiebe's pre-computer prose is likewise subdivided by an autonomy of units that, when taken together, comprise the whole. His paragraphs, like the one above, are complex infrastructures, as are his sentences, as are his clauses; all work together as knuckles, fingers, and bones do to form the hand. The pre-computer movement of his literacy is, in a word, periodic.

The second passage, written with computer, is quite different. Though the deliberateness of Wiebe's "performative" utterance still functions at the level of syntax, that syntax appears much less periodic in design, and consequently more unruly. His computer-generated prose is more lyrical, more metonymic (abstractly associative), and, finally, my key point, more alive to what McLuhan called "the resonating interval"-in short, the gap, the place where all the action is. In the first passage, gaps between sentences and around coordinating conjunctions are exposed caverns we quickly traverse, via Wiebe's mastery, to avoid falling into; our journey is made smooth by a seamless narrative-hence, mastery. In the second passage, by contrast, spaces are resonating intervals of action, across which competing discourses vie for ascendancy-so much so that Wiebe must constantly muscle his way to imposing some discipline on his own narrative.

The asterisk illustrates the point: where I have inserted the asterisk in the second passage is exactly where the thought from page 264 is again picked up and completed on page 269. To produce meaning in 25 lines takes six pages because of a rebellious narrative digression that takes five pages to placate. (A skillful rhetorician, Wiebe presumably knows that some kind of closure is necessary to ground his narrative.) The preciseness of Wiebe's pre-computer grammar in the first passage gives way to the unruliness of his computer-generated text in the second, to the point where his compositional medium in the second instance threatens, ultimately, to supplant grammar and teleology in an erratic eruption of polyphony. Authorial mastery is replaced by textual insurrection. Simply stated, computer-generated text, precisely because it can be, is frequently revisited and opened-up and reconstituted as the more deliberate, periodic, and "finished" pre-computertextis not. Consequently, computer-generated narrative would seem to write itself from within, satiating its desires intratextually, whereas pre-computer narrative is written from the outside, from arm's length, so to speak, less from its own narrative demands than from its creator's tolerance to revisit (and risk disrupting) its own finely chiselled grammars and hard-won infrastructure. The result is that computer text has a much longer half-life as text than ink- and typewriter-generated "copy." As Walter Benjamin theorized, "hard copy," that which invites "mechanical" duplication not electronic violation, has a reverence and finality that digitized Os and 1s do not.

Language, too, mediates thought by its own insistence of form, the action of which is not dissimilar to the effect of technologizing media on utterance. Clearly, then, all extensions of our speech, whether via form or touch, produce radically different copy, not only because the action of the tool (whether Pound's Chinese "ideogram" or Henry Petroski's "pencil") is implicit in the production of meaning, but also because different writing technologies impose distinctly different demands on the body of the user, demands which also are implicit in the speech act.

Take the pen. Could the phallus ever be more pleasing? Could the user ever be more exposed? The pen most radically extends the user: his style, moods, repressions, and creativity. Who cannot recall the sting of beingjudgedby earlyteachers whoequatedill-developeddexterity (manifest as poor handwriting) with sloth and inattentiveness? (My own memories date back to one Catholic nun in particular who donned an inflexible wooden stick and ominous headgear.) The point, however, is that the pen, more than any other writing instrument, licenses our individuality; among generations who were schooled under the pedagogic credo that "children should be seen and not heard," penmanship was often the first expression of one's style. "Style" comes from the Latin stylus, which was an early instrument used to scratch symbols on hard surfaces. Likewise, the hockey player's autograph (from graphein, literally, "self-drawing") registers his permanence in a flourish of personality on a paper surface. As usual, our language will betray its secrets when coaxed.

To understand the action of the pen in the production of meaning, one need only consult a volume of interviews with writers in which the interviewer has included draft samples of the writers' works. While the typewritten drafts are rarely (or neatly) disturbed by the intrusion of emendations (emendations which usually run parallel to the periodic flow of the text), the longhand drafts are mostly a complex geometry of intersecting lines, deleted words and sentences, inserted bubbles and contoured columns of revised text, and other violations of the original. Why does longhand invite defacement more readily than typescript? (Why do graffiti artists use other artists' longhand as writing surface rather than the block-lettered surfaces of city signs?) Perhaps one reason is because, as the most radical extension of the body, the pen appears more naturalized, seeming to mediate thought less than the typewriter. The typewriter stands between thought and utterance more insistently (though this, too, is a deception) because it announces itself quite openly as a mediating deviceas cognate technology. To test this premise, consider the first typewriters: they were exaggerated and vulgar machines. Tall, heavy, and immobile, they announced their discursivity in a rude display of their innards, as all new technologies do. Derrick de Kerckhove, McLuhan's successor, concurs on this point, observing in his latest book "an inverse proportion between high-tech and invisibility: that is, the more high-tech, the more discreet the medium; the lower the technology, the more bells and whistles are needed to prop it up" (97). It should not be surprising, then, that in the early days of typewriter technology, carriage gears, belts, bells, and keypunch pathways were not only visible for inspection, but were an intrusive part of the speech act itself, implicating themselves in the production of meaning.

By contrast, seeming to exist as diminutive because it is so naturalized (so innocuous an extension of the arm), the pen makes no such claims of itself, eliminating a conscious hurdle in the movement from thought to utterance. In short, hand-written text is easier to violate because no mediating totem was used to produce it. Because users "wear" technology, as McLuhan observed, the more vulgar the headdress, the more reverential its totem effect. The typewriter, and to a lesser extent the computer, implicate the user in just this sort of tribal/cultural voodoo, the ultimate effect of which registers at the level of the speech act: longhand copy, in the age of automation, is never more than draft copy, while typewritten copy announces a finality that commands a resistance to change. And so, as the above would seem to suggest, the pen is closer to the computer than to the typewriter in the way that text invites the pen to revise.

The evolution of the typewriter over ink was clearly less an advance than a technological imposition, both in how the typewriter extruded the practice of writing and in how the body itself was literally repositioned to effect an utterance. First, with the advent of the typewriter, the speech act became serious modem "production," complete with the factory sounds of productivity. The rhythmic and noisy dance of fingertips on keys replaced the expressive forming of characters on paper. What was largely a solitary and silent activity became public. The presiding clich6 of the age of the typewriter thus became the image of a harried typist, domiciled in a busy office, surrounded by dozens of pieces of crumpled paper. The scene was one of action and disorder, peopled by social types in the frenzy of their comings and goings. The imagery is telling: what the typists were producing was flawed (hence the overflowing baskets), but nevertheless they were producing, their action placing them squarely in the midst of the emerging discourse of commerce, far-removed from the private, the bohemian, and the inspired. Production was the central metaphor, as was writing's suddenly "public" extension.

Jack Nicholson's unforgettable typewriter scene in The Shining is the classic cultural articulation of the anxieties attendant in just this sort of production: simply put, "Too much work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." The typewriter, as Jack discovers, is a public extension of the modem and cosmopolitan; therefore, it is dangerously incongruous with the crushing solemnity of a deserted northern hotel. Its demand for steady production is too insidious for a rustic imagination that equates isolation with inspiration. And so, caught between the modem and a dated image of his vocation, Jack snaps. (What use would seed catalogues have been to Robinson Crusoe except to make him insane as well?) Contrary to what appears to be its theme, The Shining is not about the tortures of privation but about the effect of technology on the Romantic landscape of the imagination. McLuhan would have approved, especially of the fact that telepathy, a "tribal" extension of the human sensorial eventually saves the day by proving more powerful than the ultimate symbol of visual/modem man's typographic hegemony-the typewriter.

But the typewriter is otherwise insidious, most so in its effect on the body of the user. Whereas over time the user of the pen became an inevitable lounger, more and more prostrate in the application of his tool (the obvious limitation being the ball-point's tendency to run out of ink when angled to hail gravity), the user of the typewriter (and computer) must be seated. The more proficient the user, as anyone who has typed knows, the more practiced is his erectness, for the typewriter must be addressed as the kneeling supplicant addresses the pew. Both are acts of contrition: the more prolonged the kneeling or typing, the more the back must be straightened to release strain on the lower muscles. Typing for more than brief periods is like trying to maintain perfect posture during a lengthy sermon-before long you become aware of your entire body. Surely the typewriter's public imposition and emphatic demands on the body are implicit in the speech act. For one, the impulse to write must be very strong indeed; for another, one's writing periods must be briefer, as must be the mind's forays, and body's stretches, during the production itself. As well, in the "public" writing houses-offices, libraries, and academic departments (residuals, all, of an earlier time)-the factory sound of the typewriter must demand of its user a concomitant output. Times when the keys are silent (i.e., "thinking" times) are inherently less valuable because they are not productive. When the writing machine is silent, the factory grinds to a halt, at least from the point of view (the "ear shot") of those around the typist who know when and at what speed and intensity meaning is being produced. In effect, then, the typewriter forces its user to address boundaries: the tolerances of the body's musculature and the attentions of the writing house's ever-present eavesdroppers. (As government and call centre managers have discoveredand as Foucault would have observed-workers police other workers on the expansive panopticon that is the modem, cubicled office floor. Give everyone an office with a door that closes and productivity would presumably drop.)

The user of ink, in ink's infancy, had no such concerns; he addressed only the table. Consequently, writing tables themselves became works of craftsmanship and art. As the pen became more portable-i.e., evolved beyond the well of wet ink, which required a firm surface and proximity to user and paper (so as to avoid messy drips in transit from ink well to page)-so did the writing table become less magisterial. In the age of mechanical and automated writing production, writing tables are no longer tables but desks, their purpose structural support and the carriage of paraphernalia. As we've evolved from the ink well (high formalism) to the pen (leisure) to the typewriter (rigidity) to the computer (flexibility), so has the design of our support structures evolved. Today, in a renewed age of flexibility@f portable keyboards, notebooks, and "mini's" that rest comfortably in laps or tuck neatly into pockets-our bodies have become ground again for a host of ergonomic advances that complement and prop us, implicating themselves anew in the production of meaning. Surely all this attention to our bodies is less a result of our advance in human factors than it is our bodies' retrieval of a repose the likes of which we haven't enjoyed since before the typewriter "chained" us to our desks and sentenced our writers to clerical serfdom.

McLuhan would probably have observed that the computer and its culture of "friendly" peripherals are both an advance and a rear-guard action, retrieving the leisure and portability and spontaneity of the pen while extending the speech act to a degree of play that would have been unimaginable to the decadent poetaster on his chaise longue (or in his deserted northern hotel). As Dave Godfrey and the "Gutenberg Two" generation announced a decade ago, the computer itself is both muse and publishing house, obsolescing the privileged elitism that for some two thousand years cloistered the speech act. (Imagine, if you will, Ezra Pound with free access to desk-top publishing capability.) While it has indeed come to pass that the computer has revolutionized the "public" production and dissemination of meaning-our largest enterprises today move mostly information, as McLuhan predicted forty years ago-the computer has yet to unmask a generation of writers proficient in the production of literary meaning. It is still only in the private and historically reified domain of the serious author's study-a museum, really, of high literacy-that the speech act is being altered by the computer. And while the appetite for global links promises ever-more progressive innovations in real-time and high-definition technologies, the existing writing technology remains complicit in the production of literary meaning purely at the level of syntax. However, because that technology invites narrative for the first time to write itself from the inside, as the second passage from Wiebe demonstrates, the continued "outering" of our central nervous systems in virtual and neural networks suggests the probability of ever-more unruliness of polyphonous text. As new technology legitimized the re-make of "classic" film narratives, could ever-evolving writing technologies legitimize the rewriting of periodic prose? Is this, perhaps, what Wiebe has given us in A Discovery of Strangers?

Works Cited

1. de Kerckhove, Derrick. The Skin of Culture: Investigating the New Electronic Reality. Toronto: Sommerville House Publishing, 1995.

2. McLuhan, Marshall. Counterblast. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Limited, 1969.

3. -. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962.

4. Wiebe, Rudy. A Discovery of Strangers. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.

5. - The Temptations of Big Bear. 1973. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Ltd., 1976.

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