SWATI PANDEY
on Stephen Greenblatt’s Lucretius.
Ancient iconography (XIV) of Medieval Scribe and Titivillus, literary demon and “patron demon of scribes”Stephen Greenblatt
The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
W.W. Norton & Company, September 2011. 356 pp.Books. They have an almost alarming corporeality. Stephen Greenblatt, esteemed Harvard professor and founder of New Historicism, tells us that between the eras of papyrus and paper, books were often made of the pumice-smoothed skins of sheep, goats, deer, or, most luxuriously, of an aborted calf. The act of writing required rulers, awls, fine pens, and weights to keep the surfaces flat. Ink was a mix of soot, water, and tree gum; it was revised with knives, razors, brushes, rags, and page-restoring mixtures of milk, cheese, and lime. Squirming black creatures called bookworms liked to eat these pages, along with wool blankets and cream cheese. In the silence of monastery libraries, even the books’ contents were indicated by bodily gestures. Monks copying pagan books requested them by scratching their ears like dogs with fleas, or, if the book were particularly offensive, shoving two fingers in their mouths, as if gagging. In Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, these objects, offensive or sacred, are the primary players.
Those who tended to, or searched for, or even wrote the books — monks, Renaissance book hunters, and ancient Greek and Roman poets and philosophers — are decidedly secondary in The Swerve. Though “nothing lasts forever,” as Greenblatt mournfully says of papyrus, which crumbles in a few centuries, poor humans don’t last nearly as long as that substance, or even as long as a solidly bound and decently stored modern paperback. This rings all too true for Greenblatt, who lived with a mother obsessed with her imminent death. (She died quite old, after having spent decades instilling grim terror in her son, as he admits in a frank preface.) In The Swerve, however, death is nothing, and people aren’t much either.
