Paper: An Elegy. Ian Sansom

be compared with a sheet of paper: thought is the front side and sound the back; one cannot cut the front without cutting the back at the same time; likewise in language, one can neither divide sound from thought nor thought from sound; the division could be accomplished only abstractedly, and the result would be either pure psychology or pure phonology.’ We can’t seem to abstract or extract paper from our thinking, or our thinking from paper. We change. Words change. But the paper remains the same. It can absorb everything, and be absorbed into everything. Even the most advanced and cherished technologies of our age resemble the page: the iPad is like a jotter; the Kindle like a book; the mobile phone a pocket diary. And the page continues to determine the rhythm of our reading – on my Kindle, page 2 still follows page 1, as sure as night follows day, and the long shadow of paper continues to determine the very colour of my reading. Why black marks on white, on screen, if not because of paper?

      It is perhaps because paper is forever disappearing and reappearing in this way – burnt, lost, discarded, disowned, rediscovered, restored, reified – that it remains ancillary to most academic study, so insignificant and inessential as barely to merit discussion outside specialist books, journals and publications. (In Japanese there’s a phrase, yokogami-yaburi, which means to tear paper sideways against its grain – idiomatically, it means ‘perversity’ or ‘pig-headedness’. By ignoring paper, we are perverse; we go against the grain.) Because of its everyday usefulness, paper is an artifact without a popular history. Paper: An Elegy is an attempt to trace and recover some of this history in its many forms.

      What this book is not, strictly speaking, is a history of paper. It is, rather, a kind of personally curated Paper Museum, a boutique museum, perhaps, or a musée imaginaire, an imaginary museum, a term borrowed from André Malraux, novelist, art historian and also, somehow, in that extraordinary French way, French Minister of Cultural Affairs from 1959 to 1969. Malraux realised that many of the objects that people now think of as art were not originally regarded as art at all: they were totems or amulets, emanations or images of the gods. ‘In the seventeenth century,’ writes Malraux in The Imaginary Museum of World Sculpture (3 volumes, 1952–54), ‘a Sung painting would not have been compared with a work by Poussin: that would have meant comparing a “strange-looking” landscape with a noble work of art.’ The imaginary museum, according to Malraux, was a ‘song of metamorphosis’, a ‘re-creation of the universe, confronting the Creation’; it was a celebration of all that might be called art, rather than everything that had been art. So, in the Paper Museum, a Dickens manuscript might sit alongside blue sugar paper and brown paper packages tied up with string, forming a kind of vast paper mirror in which we might view ourselves and our world – colossal, dreadful and amazing.

      Any history of paper, it should further be said, for the purpose of clarification – and in particular this history of paper, which is not a history of paper – is not the same thing as a history of the book, nor indeed the same thing as a history of writing. There are plenty of such histories already. There was of course writing before paper, on birch bark, clay tablets, ivory, wood and bone, papyrus, palm leaves and silk. And there is writing after paper. There were also books before paper, on papyrus and parchment; and there are books after paper. Paper: An Elegy is not really about books, though books are undoubtedly one of the most ubiquitous of paper products. Nor is it a book about paper-making, in itself a vast and fascinating subject. Paper: An Elegy is, rather, an attempt to show how and why humans became attached to paper and became engrafted and sutured onto and into it, so that our very being might be described as papery.

      Because everything that matters to us happens on paper. Without paper, we are nothing. We are born, and issued with a birth certificate. We collect more of these certificates at school, and yet another when we marry, and another when we divorce, and buy a house, and when we die. We are born human, but are forever becoming paper, as paper becomes us, our artificial skin. Everything we are is paper: it is the ground of activity, the partner to all our enterprises, the key to our understanding of the past. How do we know the past? Only through paper and all it records – and through architecture, of course, though architecture, as we shall see, rather depends on paper. So. Paper wraps stone.

      Paper: An Elegy will address and acknowledge the great pathos of paper, and our nostalgia for its past: the thickness and weight of old writing paper; the tattered posters of our idealistic youth; the increasing vulnerability and scarcity of all those scraps of paper that represent our personal and collective history. But above all it will be concerned with the paradoxes of paper, the ironies of its uses, its multiple meanings, its values, and its extraordinary scope and scale. The fact that a piece of paper may be a priceless artifact – a painting or a manuscript – or a piece of litter. The simple fact that it may bring glad tidings, or spread bad news: a love letter, and a suicide note. That it is both adequate to communication, and inadequate to thought: antecedent to thought, and a posteriori. A form of external memory, and the means by which we forget. Lacking in substance, yet full of value. Material and simulacrum. Vulnerable and durable. (Tales of lost manuscripts are legion: Carlyle’s famous manuscript of the first volume of his The French Revolution, used by a maid to light the fire; Thomas De Quincey losing his notes for Confessions of an English Opium-Eater when ‘The spark of a candle [fell] unobserved amongst a very large pile of papers in a bedroom’; Tennyson losing the manuscript of his Poems, Chiefly Lyrical from his gaping great-coat pocket.) Delicate yet sharp, and capable of inflicting cuts. Ephemeral yet everlasting. (Byron in Don Juan: ‘To what straits old Time reduces/Frail man, when paper, even a rag like this,/Survives himself, his tomb, and all that’s his.’) Everything and nothing: the ultimate MacGuffin. An object that somehow magically grants us access to ourselves, that leads us from the surface into imaginary worlds, and deep within, a threshold to what Henri Bergson called ‘the uninterrupted humming of life’s depths’.

      And the greatest irony of all? Paper’s most powerful magic? Simply this. That paper allows us to be present – or to appear to be present – when we are in fact absent. It both breaks and bridges time and distance. I am talking to you now, for example, on paper. You cannot see me, and you cannot hear me. I may, for all you know, already be dead. But by the mysterious application of pen to paper, and by your patient reading, we have between us conjured the illusion of communication: a voice on the page, and my disappearance into that voice on the page. Paper provides for my self-invention, my self-disclosure, and my self-erasure. Total visibility. Perfect camouflage. In William Golding’s novel Free Fall (1959) the narrator addresses the reader: ‘I tick. I exist. I am poised eighteen inches over the black rivets you are reading, I am in your place, I am shut in a bone box and trying to fasten myself on the white paper. The rivets join us together and yet for all the passion we share nothing but our sense of division.’ Here I am. There I go.

      Paper: An Elegy is intended in part as a technological and material history, but more importantly as a symbolic history, or a history of symbols, of how paper becomes sacred, and sacralised and fetishised, how it promises and provides us with freedoms, and imposes upon us clear boundaries. There is, alas, much paper that will be missing from the book: no decoupage; no exam papers; no musical scores; no Top Trumps. Online, such limits do not apply: we can just click through. (And let me mention here some words, phrases and ideas that might send you scurrying to Google – papier poudré, papillotes, papeterie, paper-ministers, paper-skulls, paperage, papercrete and papercreters, the infinite history of litter.) There are so many types and kinds of paper that I have had to leave unfingered and untouched. Among Japanese papers alone, there are, or were, hundreds of unexplored treasures: hiki-awase, once used as the inner lining of a warrior’s breastplate; hosokawa-shi, used for government land records; shibugami, the persimmon-juice-impregnated paper used for the sacks in which grains and cereals were stored; the rickshaw driver’s padded paper coats; the paper used to wrap medicines; the paper used to wrap a kimono. The sounds of different papers. The smells of different papers; the smell of ammonia used in large office print machines. The collection is not complete. But it has begun.

      We have lived in a world of paper, and we are paper people. In Salvador Plascencia’s novel The People of Paper (2005) – a masterpiece of paper, on paper – a monk named Antonio becomes ‘the first origami surgeon’. His skills are extraordinary, but he is, inevitably,