The heart of the exhibition is in the adjoining Galerie des donateurs – a small, quiet, dimly lit room. Moving anti-clockwise around eighteen glass cases containing materials from the BnF’s Barthes archive, we follow the painstaking and painful development of A Lover’s Discourse, which was a bestseller in France when it was published in 1977. (Samoyault reveals that 70,000 copies were sold in the first year alone.) From an intimate “journal amoureux” whose pages record a series of personal incidents from the summer of 1974, through reading and teaching notes (Goethe, Plato), filing systems, diaries, pages from the book’s manuscript and eventually the corrected typescript, the final text unfurls. Its roots in a life and a love are laid bare, as is the physicality of Barthes’s method of working: ink colour changes often, as do writing instruments and materials; new passages are taped or stapled over existing text; different forms of index are sketched and re-sketched; a heavy blue marker pen strikes out unwanted phrases, such as five lines of commentary on Stéphane Mallarmé’s Pour un tombeau d’Anatole which did not appear in the published book. Punctuating these preparatory materials are artworks produced by Barthes during the period in question, while headphones at the far end of the gallery play music by Schubert, Brahms, Schumann and Fauré. (Barthes was an amateur pianist.)
Hands are now used only for turning pages. The spread of the fully guillotined book has robbed today's reader of two great pleasures - the pleasure of cutting the pages (if I were Laurence Sterne I would now insert an entire chapter in praise of paper-knives, ranging from the humble cardboard cutter given away by booksellers to every purchaser of a book, to bamboo, polished stone, and steel paper-knives, not forgetting the scimitar designs (Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco), the matador-sword paper-knife (from Spain), the samurai-style cleaver (Japan) or those ghastly things in imitation-style leather sheaths which together with diverse other objects of the same ilk (scissors, pen-holder, pencil-box, universal calendar, memo pad, leather-clad integral desk-blotter, etc.) constitute what is known as a "desk set"); and the even greater pleasure of beginning to read a book with uncut pages. You will recall (for it wasn't that long ago, really) that books were made of signatures folded in such a way that the cuts needed alternated thus: eight pages needing, first, the upper edges cut and then, in two pairs, the side edges. The first eight pages could be read almost entirely without a paper-knife; of the next eight you could obviously read the first and last, and, by lifting them up, the fourth and fifth. But nothing more. The text came with gaps which held surprises and aroused expectations.
Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote for more than four decades on an Underwood portable. For him, his machine was a kind of first editor. “If this typewriter doesn’t like a story, it refuses to work,” he said. “I don’t get a man to correct it since I know if I get a good idea the machine will make peace with me again. I don’t believe my own words saying this, but I’ve had the experience so many times that I’m really astonished. But the typewriter is 42 years old. It should have some literary experience, it should have a mind of its own.”
I'm not talking about the countless skin tags, warts, and missing toenails, or even the more exotic yellow, scale-encrusted dimple of an old bullet wound, or a gnarly third-world surgical scar. Boils, lesions, psoriasis, eczema, folliculitis, active volcano acne, blisters, whatever. These are nothing.
I'm talking about black sponges growing off the skin, flippers, stumps, spines that warped to accommodate a third kidney, hairy purple square-foot patches of alien flesh, a secondary anus.
Through TW's work, the germs of writing proceed from the greatest rarity to a swarming multiplicity: a kind of graphic pruritus. In its tendency, then, writing becomes culture. When writing bears down, explodes, pushes toward the margins, it rejoins the idea of the Book. The Book which is potentially present in TW's work is the old Book, the annotated Book: a super-added word invades the margins, the interlinea: this is the gloss. When TW writes and repeats this one word: Virgil, it is already a commentary on Virgil, for the name, inscribed by hand, not only calls up a whole idea (though an empty one) of ancient culture but also "operates" a kind of citation: that of an era of bygone, calm, leisurely, even decadent studies: English preparatory schools, Latin verses, desks, lamps, tiny pencil annotations. That is culture for TW: an ease, a memory, an irony, a posture, the gesture of a dandy.
At a signing at Fortnum's, she is mistaken for an assistant and happily wraps the customer's purchase. During a research trip to Mount Carmel her driver crashes into a market-stall and she returns to her hotel in a police van. If someone touched a pen she was using, she threw it away rather than write with it again.
Like Esperanto a generation later, shorthand spread through a counter-culture of early adopters – spirit-rappers, teetotallers, vegetarians, pacifists, anti-vivisectionists, anti-tobacconists. Pitman himself associated shorthand with ‘the dawn of religious freedom’ and ‘the dawn of political freedom’ (verbatim transcription, he claimed, prevented parliamentary reporters from privileging favourites). His empire grew with the British postal system. In 1840, he condensed his method into a ‘Penny Plate’ the right size for sending through the new penny post. A network of ‘gratuitous correctors’ (Pitman’s language veered between pedantry and hucksterism) encouraged autodidacts in the provinces to send one another their shorthand exercises to be marked; later, chain letters called ‘ever-circulators’, composed in shorthand, were sent through the imperial mail. When correspondence was conducted in shorthand, Pitman claimed, ‘friendships grow six times as fast as under the withering blighting influence of the moon of longhand.’ Those exchanges tended to link men to other men, with the notable exception of a girl called Martha Watts, who practised her shorthand by sending Pitman love letters. When the suspicious Mrs Pitman finally broke into her husband’s desk, she had to persuade a student to transcribe them for her: Pitman had been too busy spreading shorthand across the world to teach it to his wife.
