the book will kill the edifice by daniel fairbrother
‘The book will kill the edifice.’ ‘ This will kill that. ’
Thus Dom Claude Frollo – Victor Hugo’s Archdeacon of Notre Dame – feared for his church. His fear, examined at length by Hugo in a digressionary chapter of which David Foster Wallace would have been proud, is said to have two meanings. First, on the surface, it is ‘the terror of the ecclesiastic before a new force – printing.’ Here it is not so much the church itself which is doomed but the sort of speech it houses; the monopoly of the pulpit, and the library of rare manuscripts feeding it, is to be undercut. Second, though, there is a threat to architecture itself; Hugo thinks that somehow books can compete with buildings directly. If this sounds paradoxical, it is because we normally think of books
as offering something intangible – quite unlike buildings, if not entirely fictional. For Hugo, though, this doesn’t hold: buildings were first silent bearers of memory, mere markers for the tribe, and then carriers of fragmentary inscription. 1 ‘Last of all’, he says, ‘they had written these marvellous books which are equally marvellous edifices: the Pagoda of Eklinga, the Pyramids of Egypt, and the Temple of Solomon.’ But now, with cheaper editions in paper – not stone – it is impossible to return to an age when ‘you would have thought that the world had cast off its old raiment and clad itself anew in a white raiment of churches.’
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courtesy of Eyal Weizman and Verso
Modernist white raiment
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