Track Changes

A Literary History of Word Processing

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780674969445
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Scrittura creativa

The story of writing in the digital age is every bit as messy as the ink-stained rags that littered the floor of Gutenberg's print shop or the hot molten lead of the Linotype machine. During the period of the pivotal growth and widespread adoption of word processing as a writing technology, some authors embraced it as a marvel while others decried it as the death of literature. The product of years of archival research and numerous interviews conducted by the author, Track Changes is the first literary history of word processing.Matthew Kirschenbaum examines how the interests and ideals of creative authorship came to coexist with the computer revolution. Who were the first adopters? What kind of anxieties did they share? Was word processing perceived as just a better typewriter or something more? How did it change our understanding of writing? Track Changes balances the stories of individual writers with a consideration of how the seemingly ineffable act of writing is always grounded in particular instruments and media, from quills to keyboards. Along the way, we discover the candidates for the first novel written on a word processor, explore the surprisingly varied reasons why writers of both popular and serious literature adopted the technology, trace the spread of new metaphors and ideas from word processing in fiction and poetry, and consider the fate of literary scholarship and memory in an era when the final remnants of authorship may consist of folders on a hard drive or documents in the cloud.

ONE

WORD PROCESSING AS A LITERARY SUBJECT

Not long after he began work in earnest on the mechanical tabulating machine that would be called the Difference Engine, the nineteenth-century British inventor Charles Babbage found himself a regular guest at the table of Samuel Rogers, a poet who lived in a lavishly rebuilt house in London’s St. James overlooking Green Park. The two had struck up a friendship through Rogers’s brother, a banker, with whom Babbage had financial dealings. Rogers’s breakfasts had long been an institution among London’s literati, a place where Coleridge might talk with J. M. W. Turner as Walter Scott passed a pot of jam to Byron. Babbage, of course, was no poet, though from time to time the idea of writing a novel had crossed his mind as a means of financing his long-deferred work on another project, the Analytical Engine—the device whose design foresaw many of the principles of a universal machine that would be articulated by Alan Turing a century later.

At one such breakfast, however, Babbage the polymath found himself discoursing not on his engines, or mathematics, astronomy, or indeed any of the numerous other topics with which he was acquainted, but on composition. How did a poet work, he inquired: Did one start with a fast, rough draft of the whole and then go back to revise, or is the process sentence by sentence, line by line, laboring over each until it was just so before moving on to the next? His host employed the latter method: Rogers ventured that he had never once written more than four (or maybe it was six) lines of verse in a single day, so fastidious was he about the perfection and polish of each. It was said that Robert Southey, by contrast, flew through his drafts, turning out poetry and prose at prodigious rates and going back to revise only after he had a thick sheaf of pages. And so it goes, a bit of literary table talk of the sort writers have been engaging in for centuries. Still, here we have the individual generally credited with anticipating the concepts of modern computation chatting with some of the foremost literary figures of his day about the nuts and bolts of writing and revision.¹

Word processing would seem an obvious literary subject, for table talk or otherwise. Many of us must imagine that its present-day ubiquity was somehow preordained, the trajectory of its uptake as smooth as the convex curve of a classic CRT screen. And indeed, word processing’s standard narrative possesses an overwhelming sense of inevitability. Typically one of the very first moves journalists or technical writers would make in introducing readers to the topic was to align it with the long history of prior writing technologies. References to Sumerian cuneiform or monks in scriptoria or Gutenberg’s printing press suddenly abounded in the computer industry. “Thousands of years ago, people put their thoughts down on clay tablets,” began Byte magazine’s December 1984 review of WordPerfect. “Modern authors have the word processor.”² These contemporary descriptions sound a lot like today’s TED Talks and other Silicon Valley disruption scenarios: “A word processor is, quite simply, the most amazing thing that has happened to writing in years,” begins the author of a column in the August 1983 issue of Writer’s Digest.³ Ray Hammond, just one year later in the preface to a handbook about word processing addressed specifically to literary authors and journalists, agrees: “The computer is the most powerful tool ever developed for writers.”⁴

The freedom and flexibility that word processing apparently afforded—what Michael Heim experienced as bliss—seemed so absolute that it was hard to conceive of the technology as even having a history apart from the long series of clearly inferior writing utensils leading up to the present-day marvel. Yet, however inevitable the development of word processing might have seemed in the history of writing writ large, serious literature—belles lettres—was another story. Hammond acknowledged that among creative writers, “computers have a terrible image, one which at best bores writers and at worst terrifies them.”⁵ The exception should not be surprising. John Durham Peters reminds us that according to the best evidence we have, writing was invented as a mnemonic device for bookkeeping and calculation, not as a surrogate for speech. And he notes that books—let alone anything we might care to characterize as belles lettres—have never been the mainstay of printing, which gravitated overwhelmingly toward instrumental texts like bills, records, indulgences, and reference works.⁶ Likewise, scholars such as Peter Stallybrass and Lisa Gitelman have demonstrated that the mainstay of printing in the West since Gutenberg has been so-called “job printing” (a nineteenth-century term), as opposed to codices and books, with perhaps the exception of the Bible itself.⁷ And according to John Guillory, it is the intra-office memo (not the novel or the sonnet) that stands as the “humblest yet perhaps most ubiquitous genre of writing in the modern world.”⁸

Approaching word processing as a specifically literary subject therefore means acknowledging that we seek to concern ourselves with a statistically exceptional form of writing that has accounted for only a narrow segment of the historical printing and publishing industry. Moreover, for the literati, word processing was invariably burdened (not buoyed) by the associations carried by the gerund in that compound term, which could function as a foil for nothing less than humanity itself. “The writer, unless he is a mere word processor, retains three attributes that power-mad regimes cannot tolerate: a human imagination, in the many forms it may take; the power to communicate; and hope,” opined Margaret Atwood in a 1981 address to Amnesty International.⁹ When conceptualist Kenneth Goldsmith—who has built a reputation on his verbatim transcriptions of traffic reports and newspaper dailies—declares, “I used to be an artist; then I became a poet; then a writer. Now when asked, I simply refer to myself as a word processor,” he implies that he is merely part of the zeitgeist; but in fact the comment provokes us precisely because of word processing’s associations with mechanization, automation, and repetition; bureaucracy, productivity, and office work.¹⁰

Novelists, dramatists, poets, and essayists nowadays set preferences and manage files more often than they change ribbons and zing carriage returns. Yet neither the designers of word processors nor the inventors of the typewriter envisioned literary writing as the inevitable application for their machines. The typewriter was initially conceived and marketed as an aid to the blind, deaf, and motor-impaired, and for taking down dictation. Hammond calls it a “desperately limited tool … totally linear in operation, frustrating a writer’s attempts to mold a piece of writing as a whole.”¹¹ (For Hammond the computer is much closer to working with paper and pencil than a typewriter is, a conclusion we have also seen in Robert Sawyer and Adam Bradley’s observations about WordStar.) Nonetheless, typewriters would enjoy early and notable associations with literary culture and creativity, as catalyzed by Twain’s celebrity and most fully embodied by T. S. Eliot’s typing of The Waste Land a generation later, a poem in which a typist (that is, a type writer) figures prominently.¹² Hannah Sullivan has shown how typewriting during this period was quickly assimilated into individual authors’ workflows, though still functioning primarily as a site of revision and correction as opposed to free-form composition (most writers continued to draft longhand).¹³ Some writers learned to type up manuscripts for themselves, numerous others employed secretaries and assistants—an often gendered dynamic that, as we will see in Chapter 7, was reproduced decades later with the advent of word processing. Typewriting also became an important part of the representational fabric of modernism through figures as diverse as H. N. Werkman, Gertrude Stein, and Bob Brown.¹⁴

Darren Wershler, who has given us perhaps our best book on typewriting, enumerates the iconic imagery that quickly took hold: close-ups of the hammers and keys, inky letterforms steadily stamped behind a ribbon, or else (aurally now) the staccato chatter of the mechanism to signify productivity.¹⁵ The totality of this image complex was as absolute as it was in some sense unexpected—as Adam Bradley astutely notes with regard to fiction writers, “it is a testament to their success in harnessing the typewriter’s capacity as a tool for creative expression that we most often think of typewriters in the nostalgic light of the hard-boiled writer cranking out pages by dim lamplight.”¹⁶ (Ernest Hemingway took to staging photographs of himself at his typewriter in which he appears to be looking into the face of his muse like a toreador staring down a bull.) Yet Bradley also reminds us that the association between typewriting and literary productivity “was a mastery achieved only over time, and with many casualties among those authors unable to adapt.”¹⁷

Cinema has furnished some especially vivid portrayals of those casualties. Consider the typewriters (equally monstrous and mundane) that tortured William Lee in Naked Lunch (1991) or John Turturro’s character in the Coen brothers’ Barton Fink (also 1991); or the way in which Stanley Kubrick used a typewriter to record the deteriorating mind of Jack Nicholson’s character in the film adaptation of The Shining (1980). (The scene where Shelley Duvall confronts her husband’s prodigious output of pages, all containing repetitions of the same phrase, is a restaging of Truman Capote’s famous put-down of that other Jack—Kerouac—“It is not writing. It is only typing.”)¹⁸ It would seem that word processing can’t help but make for a poor cinematic prop by comparison, facilitated as it is by mass-produced machines made of plastic, not metal, the bold rattle of the keys replaced by muted clicks and clacks, the backlit screen but a pale counterpart to the existential whiteness of the page.¹⁹ “The idea of taking everything and cramming it into this little electronic box designed by some nineteen-year-old in Silicon Valley … I can’t imagine it,” David Mamet once declared.²⁰ Computers thus seem far removed from the most iconic renditions of literary authorship: more fax machine than fountain pen, we might say. “I am surprised by how much I like my computer,” admits Anne Fadiman. “But I will never love it. I have used several; they seem indistinguishable. When you’ve seen one pixel you’ve seen them all.”²¹

By contrast, evidence that the typewriter is now a consummate literary subject (and object) is seemingly everywhere today: typewriter appreciation pieces, some thoughtful, many merely wistful, are a mainstay of journalists and essayists;²² the Internet routinely spawns lists of famous authors and their favorite typewriters;²³ hipsters carry typewriters into coffee shops and set them up next to their espresso (and then post pictures to social media);²⁴ Steven Soboroff’s collection of typewriters belonging to everyone from the Unabomber to John Updike regularly tours and is exhibited for charity;²⁵ Tom Hanks, a well-known aficionado, bankrolled an iPad app called the Hanx Writer that imitates the look and especially the sound of a typewriter on a touchscreen;²⁶ and when Hanks wrote an op-ed for the New York Times to launch the Hanx Writer, he lamented that audiences at Nora Ephron’s Lucky Guy (in which he had recently starred in his Broadway debut as tabloid journalist Mike McAlary), got only the subdued clickety-clacks of word processors in the on-stage newsroom, rather than the hardboiled racket of vintage typewriters.²⁷ As tellingly as any of these, when Manson Whitlock’s New Haven typewriter repair shop closed after his death at the age of 96, the story was covered in the New York Times. “I don’t even know what a computer is,” he was quoted as saying in 2010.²⁸

The ubiquity of computers and word processors has clearly allowed us to retroactively buff and varnish the typewriter’s aura of authenticity. Thus typewriter collector and scholar Richard Polt has collected numerous such instances as I have been describing into an attractively produced book entitled The Typewriter Revolution, whose opening manifesto enjoins readers to hold public “type-ins” and otherwise promote typing’s tactility as an alternative to the seductive distractions of the “data stream.”²⁹ Just as importantly, however, we should acknowledge that vectors of influence can be bidirectional and recursive, and otherwise follow strange loops—a phenomenon evident in the work of artist Tim Youd, who stages public performances in which he retypes, word for word, page by page, classic American novels on vintage typewriters in a place associated with the book in question.³⁰ For each such project, Youd sources the same original make and model of typewriter that the author used to write the book. The novels are then retyped in their entirety on a single page of typing paper—that is, when Youd gets to the end of the page, he simply replaces it in the rollers and starts typing on it again from the top. The results are striking: dark, abstract Rorschach blots that bear some resemblance to Concrete Poetry, though the physical page itself is left in tatters, a latticework held together only by what cumulative negative space has remained intact in and around the inky palimpsest of typewritten letterforms. While this work might seem like the ultimate expression of typewriter fetishism, I would suggest it is just as much marked by word processing for the way in which Youd’s retyping reimagines books as data, reflecting an aesthetic (and anxiety) that is all about the “processing” of words, the commodification of canon and tradition, and the sheer vastness, scope, and density of written text in the present.

“God looked down at the writers and said, ‘I haven’t done anything for these people for a long time, hundreds of years, so I’m going to make up for it,’ ” Frank Conroy is quoted as saying during his tenure as...