Book Review: Palimpsest

Palimpsest: A History of the Written Wordby Matthew BattlesWW Norton, 2015The main text of Matthew Battles' new book Palimpsest: A History of the Written Word is just a little over 200 pages long. On one level, this is of course farcical: humans have been writing for roughly the last six thousand years, and the craft and very idea of writing have thoroughly shaped the life of man on Earth. Doing any kind of justice to such an immense subject in 200 pages is so manifestly absurd that one immediately starts casting about for what the author's angle must be, what game he's playing, what trick he's trying to pull. These are not ideal questions to prompt in your readers.On another level, however, the thing can of course be done. If Wikipedia has taught us anything, it's that every subject in Creation can be traduced to a briefing paper if only the traducer's will doesn't falter. The basic outline of the long story Battles has to tell can, after all, be rendered with any amount of concision – here, we can pretty much squeeze it into one sentence: the food and produce excesses resulting from humanity's mastery of agriculture necessitated the rudimentary record-keeping that eventually gave rise to the practice of writing, which then proliferated throughout subject matters and societies. Not very inspiring, but it gets the job done.The job Battles does in Palimpsest lies somewhere north of that single sentence and its slightly-engorged Wikipedia cousin, but you can definitely get there from here. Despite his critical lack of elbow-room, he opens with exactly the kind of pseudo-poetical philosophizing you'd think would be the first thing to get jettisoned, although in his defense he's fairly good at it:

Writing needs us more than we need it. Like chess, neoclassical architecture, and religion, it is a thing that feeds on consciousness, requires the human mind in order to survive and propagate. To describe it this way takes away no grandeur or wonder from the magnificent contingency that is writing; indeed, it's the basis of my celebration. Writing does not have to be – and yet it is, in a multitude of forms. And it is evolving ever more speedily in minds made fertile with text, image, and imagination.

He starts with Paleolithic pictograms, races through writing's earliest formalized development in China and ancient Sumeria, speed-tours Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, and has us in the era of Gutenberg before our umbrellas are fully dried out. “With writing's advent,” he tells us, “language ends its prelapsarian phase, trading oral language's mythopoetic effusion, innocent and promiscuous, for precision and fixity.” And with that fixity come certain requirements, the mere thought of which gets Battles philosophizing again:

And yet for all its beauty, for all its willing proliferation, transformation, and abundance, writing is hard. It submits us to a painful tuition; it exacts a price. It's fair to ask: what does writing want? Writing presents us with enormous, nearly insurmountable cognitive hurdles – so much about it resists the easy transmission of thought and sensibility made possible by half a million years of human evolution. We evolved to communicate face-to-face and side by side; gesture accompanies word like cleaner fishes clinging to the body of a shark.

He breaks his book up into six chapters, a Foreword and and Afterword, and he breaks those chapters up into far too many smaller segments where he gets to trot out a virtually complete run of writing-related cliches, from “ghost in the machine” to “by the book” to “tabula rasa” to, of course, “the writing on the wall," each delivered with more mind-numbing inevitability than the one before it. And just when this almost entirely rote tour could get interesting – around page 170, when his breathless narrative hurtles into the late 20^th century – Battles' joie de boilerplate suddenly abandons him. He spends much more time nattering on about the written messages included with the Pioneer and Voyager space probes than he does with the burgeoning digital world that's revolutionized the entire concept of the written word as literally nothing else has done since the first hominids made halting cave-paintings of all the beautiful animals they were planning to slaughter. In a book about the comparatively rapid evolution of the written word (for humanity's few hundred thousand years on Earth, nobody seems to have written anything), this kind of fourth-quarter shrug is a mystifying anticlimax. Maybe Battles should have insisted on an extra 15 pages.