Lev Grossman on Book - Living, Loving, Thinking, Again

Lev Grossman*1 “From Scroll to Screen” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/books/review/the-mechanic-muse-from-scroll-to-screen.html

先ずLev Grossman氏は、現在進行している書物の紙から電子テクストへの移行は書物にとってグーテンベルクによる活字印刷発明以来の変容であるという。しかし、この変容を理解するためには、時代をさらに遡って、紀元１世紀における「冊子（codex）」の登場を考えるべきだという。

In the classical world, the scroll was the book format of choice and the state of the art in information technology. Essentially it was a long, rolled-up piece of paper or parchment. To read a scroll you gradually unrolled it, exposing a bit of the text at a time; when you were done you had to roll it back up the right way, not unlike that other obsolete medium, the VHS tape. English is still littered with words left over from the scroll age. The first page of a scroll, which listed information about where it was made, was called the “protocol.” The reason books are sometimes called volumes is that the root of “volume” is volvere, to roll: to read a scroll, you revolved it.
Scrolls were the prestige format, used for important works only: sacred texts, legal documents, history, literature. To compile a shopping list or do their algebra, citizens of the ancient world wrote on wax-covered wooden tablets using the pointy end of a stick called a stylus. Tablets were for disposable text ― the stylus also had a flat end, which you used to squash and scrape the wax flat when you were done. At some point someone had the very clever idea of stringing a few tablets together in a bundle. Eventually the bundled tablets were replaced with leaves of parchment and thus, probably, was born the codex. But nobody realized what a good idea it was until a very interesting group of people with some very radical ideas adopted it for their own purposes. Nowadays those people are known as Christians, and they used the codex as a way of distributing the Bible.

「冊子」以前の書物というか文字を読み書きするメディアは「巻物（scroll）」と「タブレット」だった。「冊子」という新技術は「タブレット」から進化した（軽量化？）。「冊子」を書物の主要な形態に押し上げたのは基督教徒であった。

One reason the early Christians liked the codex was that it helped differentiate them from the Jews, who kept (and still keep) their sacred text in the form of a scroll. But some very alert early Christian must also have recognized that the codex was a powerful form of information technology ― compact, highly portable and easily concealable. It was also cheap ― you could write on both sides of the pages, which saved paper ― and it could hold more words than a scroll. The Bible was a long book.
The codex also came with a fringe benefit: It created a very different reading experience. With a codex, for the first time, you could jump to any point in a text instantly, nonlinearly. You could flip back and forth between two pages and even study them both at once. You could cross-check passages and compare them and bookmark them. You could skim if you were bored, and jump back to reread your favorite parts. It was the paper equivalent of random-access memory, and it must have been almost supernaturally empowering. With a scroll you could only trudge through texts the long way, linearly. (Some ancients found temporary fixes for this bug ― Suetonius apparently suggested that Julius Caesar created a proto-notebook by stacking sheets of papyrus one on top of another.)

「冊子」がもたらしたもの。「非線形的」「ランダム･アクセス」的読書の可能性。「冊子」は（構造上）どの頁から読んでもかまわない。また、ブックマークすることによって、以前読んだ頁に戻って再読したり比較したりすることが容易にできる。
電子テクストは「非線形性」と一般に考えられているほど相性がいいわけではない；

We usually associate digital technology with nonlinearity, the forking paths that Web surfers beat through the Internet’s underbrush as they click from link to link. But e-books and nonlinearity don’t turn out to be very compatible. Trying to jump from place to place in a long document like a novel is painfully awkward on an e-reader, like trying to play the piano with numb fingers. You either creep through the book incrementally, page by page, or leap wildly from point to point and search term to search term. It’s no wonder that the rise of e-reading has revived two words for classical-era reading technologies: scroll and tablet. That’s the kind of reading you do in an e-book.

Grossman氏は冊子という形態は「非線形的読書」のために構築されている（built）とまでいう。また、「小説」というジャンルそれ自体が冊子というフォーマットに「最適化されている」とも；

The codex is built for nonlinear reading ― not the way a Web surfer does it, aimlessly questing from document to document, but the way a deep reader does it, navigating the network of internal connections that exists within a single rich document like a novel. Indeed, the codex isn’t just another format, it’s the one for which the novel is optimized. The contemporary novel’s dense, layered language took root and grew in the codex, and it demands the kind of navigation that only the codex provides. Imagine trying to negotiate the nested, echoing labyrinth of David Mitchell’s “Cloud Atlas”*2 if it were transcribed onto a scroll. It couldn’t be done.

”the codex isn’t just another format, it’s the one for which the novel is optimized.”という主張に関しては、「ケータイ小説」の文体問題が参照されるべきか*3。
さて、Grossman氏が「冊子」を擁護するのは「非線形的」な経験の可能性故である。また、この「非線形性」こそが映画や音楽などの他のメディアではありえない読書固有の経験なのである。
Lev Grossman氏はCodexというタイトルの小説を書いているのだった*4。

*1:http://www.levgrossman.com/ See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Grossman

*2:For review, see Tom Bissell “History Is a Nightmare” http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/29/books/history-is-a-nightmare.html

*3:Eg. http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20071221/1198238160

*4:For review, see Polly Shulman “'Heart of Dorkness'” http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/21/books/heart-of-dorkness.html