Form v. content

Every since writing was invented, a subtle dynamic has been at work.  There has always been a tension between what was written, and how it was written.  In the very beginning, form and content alike were trivial; inventories of a king's storeroom, lists of goods, tallies of herds - all were represented as notches on a stick, simple scratches on a broken pot.  At some point a leap was made, and these signs gained a life of their own; instead of being identified with the things they described, they became simply ways of describing them - or anything else. With that independence from the original defining object came a freedom of form.

It was obvious - so the argument must have gone, thousands of years ago in the dusty court of some king or emperor - that modifying the shape of the letter did not destroy its meaning: and with the dubious nod of agreement from that king or emperor, the rising profession of scribes gained at a stroke their unique power over our perception of the world.

For as they well knew, changing the form may leave content intact in theory, but it can also refract it in subtle and often dramatic ways.  From this flowed the power of those same scribes - not to change irrevocably, but to inflect, to suggest, to subvert, by means of the shape and placing of letters and words they employed for their king's or emperor's commands.  The battle between content and form - which itself mirrored the struggle between the literalism of the absolutist powers and literacy of their interpretive minions - had begun.

In some cultures there has been an effort to reconcile these two opposing elements of creation.  For example, oriental poets were judged as much on the beauty and aptness of the calligraphy they employed in writing out the poem as in the words and meaning of the poem itself.  For Islamic civilisations, where certain types of creativity - religious, for example - are so circumscribed by what may or may not be represented, there has been a preoccupation with written form which is obsessive, though the results are undeniably beautiful. Western society has veered the other way; it tends to ignore form altogether.

When a monk in a medieval monastery was taught to write the uncial script, he had failed to master it until it was an exact replica of his master's own uncial hand.  To learn to write meant to learn to write in that and no other way.  Each age may have had its own style and ideal, right down to Victorian copper-plate, but the scope for individual flourishes was always intentionally limited.  For the West, writing has meant what you write, not how; there is simply no artistic form or tradition which caters for personal expression through calligraphy.

This century, that bias has been continued.  It was reinforced by the typewriter, whose central idea was the mechanised reduction of each letter to anonymous uniformity.  Today it has gone further; with the introduction of the word-processor not only has the movement from paper to screen replaced the physical element of writing with a purely logical one, it has become totally impersonal.  Every word can be produced in any style, and hence of itself has no style.  Form no longer exists; content has won.

(28.12.87)

Index