Imagined Realities: Meaning and Textuality in the Middle Ages

Anyone who has lived in an apartment building for any length of time understands the phenomenon of selective deafness. My building is home to professionals who long ago stopped having parties that require police intervention to keep the peace; dogs are not allowed, so late-night barking does not disturb my sleep. Most of the time, the sounds I live with are not intrusive. My hardwood floors creak softly, in the companionable way one expects in a ninety-year-old building. The teacher who lives upstairs punctuates his nightly ritual by removing his shoes (as I suppose) and dropping them one by one to the floor with a thump. The plumbing groans to protest the cold weather and the passing of another Georgia summer. Late in the evening, freight cars rumble past, lumbering along in the wake of the engine's distant whistle. Until I have a visitor who complains about the "ungodly noise" in my apartment, I don't even hear it. Any of it. All of these sounds are so woven into the aural fabric of my life that I no longer notice them. In the same way, most of us are desensitized to the pervasive presence of the written word in our daily lives. From the time we wake in the morning until we sleep at night, we are constantly bombarded by street signs, product labels, warnings, menus--all require our literacy without drawing our conscious attention to the requirement. Textual literacy is the sea in which moderns swim, and most of us notice it about as much as koi notice the water in their pond. Not only is text omnipresent in contemporary life, it is nearly omnipotent as well; just as we often fail to notice its presence, we also neglect to reckon with its power, thereby multiplying that power exponentially. Yet our familiarity with the technology of reading controls some of our most basic actions. Confronted with a blank grid and told to fill in the squares with non-alphabetic, non-numeric symbols, we begin in the upper left, proceeding to fill each line horizontally before beginning the next line again at the left, just like reading a text. Readers of Hebrew or of Arabic do the same, but begin at the upper right corner and progress horizontally from right to left, as their texts progress. Without realizing it, we "read" the physical world much as we do a text: we scrutinize objects on a shelf or table from left to right, beginning in the upper left corner. This unconscious focal orientation influences the placement of images in advertisements, photographs, paintings, even sculpture that can be viewed from any angle. Television newscasts almost always position the anchorperson on the left side of the screen, with the story graphic on the right; although the story is ostensibly the more important feature, the eye of the audience is drawn first to the anchor, around whom the news centers. Further, texts underlie most of the power structures of our world, whether political, religious, or economic. In the United States, basic assumptions about the way American values and government are structured can be traced back to their articulation in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. In religious circles, moral and ethical behavior is codified in the Torah, the Gospels, or the Koran. Economics offers perhaps the most obvious dependence on text as founding reality: the millions of dollars that change hands weekly on the stock exchange do so only as text. Even on the individual level, we no longer pay for goods or services with money (certainly not with actual gold or silver); instead, we write a check or debit our bank accounts to pay our bills online, and no valuable substance actually changes hands: the entire transaction is text-based, but we rarely stop to reflect on that disjunction. Identity theft is rampant in America in a way that would be impossible in a non-text-based society; all that is required is the manipulation of alphabetic and numeric symbols in a computer, and victims who often have no legal recourse are responsible for the debts of the criminals who have assumed their identities. …