When not changing the format or shape, the writer can change the text the page contains, so that the subversion becomes internalized. Laurence Sterne, composing his Tristram Shandy in the 1760s, introduced blank pages, pages filled with ellipses, and even a page printed completely in black. Lewis Carroll, in order to provide a limitless map for his Snark-hunters, designed a page that was completely white. And Guillaume Apollinaire with his Calligrammes, poems written in the physical shape of their subject, and concrete poets such as the Brazilian Haroldo do Campos, imposed a new shape to the page from inside, drawing the reader’s attention away from the straight margins into new and startling textual designs.
This interior restructuring is of course quite ancient. Many are the medieval manuscripts that play with acrostics and crossword-puzzle-like grids, multiplying the use of a page many times. As the broadening of restrictions became apparent, the text began to breed its own commentary. The page metamorphosed into a series of concentric spaces, as when Scripture, for instance, written in a narrow central panel of the page, was carefully surrounded by a gloss, which was in turn surrounded by further annotations, which then received the reader’s scribbles on the margins. These spaces are not in themselves protectionist: the comments of the third space, for example, may annotate either the central text or the gloss; the scribbles may refer to the notes, the gloss, or the central text. To take just one among thousands of possible examples: one of the manuscripts of Aristotle’s Parva naturalia, now in the British Library (MS Royal 12 G.ii), from the second half of the thirteenth century. The text itself occupies the center top right; it is framed by glosses derived from Averroës and written presumably by a certain Henry de Renham of Kent. In turn, there are interlinear commentaries on both Aristotle and Averroës that look a little like our own proofreader’s notes and are written in a smaller hand, filling the spaces left by the glosses. Dante’s proposed four possible levels of reading — literal, allegorical, analogical, and anagogical — acquire physical reality on Henry de Renham’s page, as text, gloss and commentary on text, and gloss quadruplicate the space allotted by the page to the text.
Sometimes the tyranny of the page is subverted on one level only, but that in a way that is powerfully intimate and personal. Montaigne, whose scribbling habits amounted to a conversation, would continue the dialogue at the back of the book he was reading, including the date on which he had finished it in order to better recall the circumstances of the event. Though Montaigne’s books were in various languages, his marginal notes were always in French (“no matter what language is spoken by my books,” he tells us, “I speak to them in my own”), and in French he extended the text and its notes through his own critical comments. For Montaigne this reading method was necessary for what he called his “quest for truth”: not the story as given by the words within the confines of the page but the reflection of that story, mused upon and retold by the reader Montaigne in spaces reclaimed, there where the page left itself vulnerable to encroachment.
These blank spaces, left after the writer has tried to vanquish what Stéphane Mallarmé called “the terrifying whiteness of the page,” are the very spaces in which the readers can exercise their power, in those gaps that were for Roland Barthes the essence of the erotic thrill, the interstices in the text (but we can apply this to the physical text on the page as well), which he described as “there where the clothes gape.” In those openings between the edge of the paper and the edge of the ink, the reader (let us stretch this image as far as it will go) can cause a quiet revolution and establish a new society in which the creative tension is established no longer between page and text but between text and reader.
This is the distinction made by Jewish medieval scholars regarding the Torah. According to the Midrash, the Torah that God gave Moses on Mount Sinai was both a written text and an oral commentary. During the day, when it was light, Moses read the text God had written, and in the darkness of the night he studied the commentary God had spoken. The first action submits the reader to the authority of the page; the second forgoes the page and submits the text to the authority of the reader.
Conscious of the danger of the page’s supremacy, the great eighteenth-century Hasidic master Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev attempted to explain why the first page of each of the treatises of the Babylonian Talmud was missing, obliging the reader to begin on page 2. “Because however many pages the studious man reads, he must never forget that he has not yet reached the very first page.” That is to say, the commentary of the Word of God has no foreseeable beginning, neither on paper nor in the reader’s mind. By the elimination of the first page, no page could be said to force the Word of God into an explanation.
Since the page defines the text it contains by marking its beginning, middle, and end, eliminating the first page can be seen as an act of defiance. The nineteenth-century moralist Joseph Joubert went further. According to Chateaubriand, Joubert’s library contained only the texts that Joubert was truly fond of. “When he read,” says Chateaubriand, “he would tear out of his books the pages he didn’t like, thereby achieving a library entirely to his taste, composed of hollowed-out books bound inside covers that were too large for them.”
Joubert did not in fact destroy the sequence of pages; he merely interrupted it with moments of silence. In our time, Raymond Queneau tried to destroy the order imposed by the numbered pages by dividing each page into dozens of strips, each carrying a line of text. In this way, readers could construct their own pages by composing (as in the child’s game book of mix and match) a near infinity of new texts. Queneau called his book A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems. Julio Cortázar, in a better-known example, proposed a book, the novel Hopscotch, that had the appearance of submitting to the given sequence of pages but then destroyed that semblance of order by suggesting first that the reader should follow a sequence of chapters other than the one set out in the table of contents and then that the reader allow either chance or personal choice to dictate the order in which the chapters were to be read. Here the reader claims supremacy over both the space and time of the reading.
Flaubert, as he was writing Madame Bovary, read certain sections of the novel to his friend Louis Bouilhet, but confessed that as he did the narrative time of those pages (113 pages, from page 139 to page 251) became not his own but something dictated by the flicking of the pages itself. “This afternoon,” he wrote to Louise Colet, “I ended up abandoning my corrections; I no longer understood anything; immersed in my work, it became overwhelming; what seemed now like a mistake, five minutes later no longer seemed like one; it’s all a series of corrections and corrections of corrections that are endless.” And earlier he had written, “The middle pages of all long books are always awful.”
Is our lot, in this electronic age, at all different? Electronic reading alters certain parameters. Reading on the screen precludes (up to a point) the time-restricting quality of reading on paper. The scrolling text (like that of the Roman or Greek scrolls) unfurls at a pace that is not dictated by the dimensions of the page and its margins. In fact, on the screen, each page shifts shape endlessly, remaining the same in size but altering its content, since the first and last line keep changing as we scroll, always within the fixed frame of the screen. Though reading a long text on the screen is thoroughly inconvenient (for physiological reasons that may, no doubt, change as we evolve), it does free us (if we want to be freed) from the very temporal realization of progress illustrated by the thickening bulk of pages held in the left hand and the diminishing bulk of pages held by the right.