Inscription and Erasure: Literature and Written Culture from the Eleventh to the Eighteenth Century (review)

Roger Chartier, one of the prominent figures in the field of "book history," published in 2005 a book called Inscrire et effacer, now excellently rendered into English by the eminent translator Arthur Goldhammer. It is a short book with an ambitious subtitle, and not surprisingly its method is that of the case study. There are chapters on Cervantes, Ben Jonson, Goldoni, and Diderot, among others, aiming to show how some authors were "acutely aware" of the "material embodiments of the written word" and "frequently transformed them into subjects of literature." As a pleasant set of variations on a theme, the book is appealing.

But for readers who do not skip the introduction, the book's charm will be undercut by a conceptually flawed attempt to provide a theoretical framework for the individual discussions. His approach, Chartier says, refuses "to separate the analysis of symbolic meanings from that of the material forms by which they are transmitted." This "longstanding" separation, he claims, has been abetted even by those who have paid attention to "material modes of inscription"—such as analytical bibliographers, whose discipline is "almost exclusively devoted to the comparison of printed objects, an obsession with lost manuscripts, and a radical distinction between the essence of a work and the accidents that distorted or corrupted it." He is here echoing an inaccurate, but often repeated, view of inten-tionalist editing; and such editing, even when correctly described, is not a part of analytical bibliography, which simply investigates physical evidence, without being tied to any one approach to editing. For Chartier, it is "pointless" to attempt distinguishing the intangible verbal work (a creation in the intangible medium of language) from any of its physical presentations. But authors' intentions are historical events, worth trying to reconstruct; doing so is in no way incompatible with an interest in the material forms of texts and the effect they often have on readers' responses. These approaches are complementary; to rule one out sets up a barrier to the fullest possible understanding of the past. It is disappointing that Chartier accepts unfounded clichés regarding these matters.