Thinking about the Type Archive and Francesco Griffo, whose 15th century designs were the precursors to Bembo, a typeface I’d first heard of from thesis-writing Vaughn his senior year. Around that same time I was always in the English department library reading from Renaissance-era books: Barbara Lewalski, whose Milton class I was then in, always insisted we read from the original 17th century books, never modern editions. My classmate Rikita T. and I became library partners: we requested the same book and sat side by side, the book on a small cradle before us, turning over page after page of that week’s readings. I’m not much of a cultural materialist, but in those days I still felt great apprehension and low-level delirium all the time I was reading: “This is an actual 1649 Eikon Basilike I’m holding, and they let me sit here with my grubby 21st century paws on it like a paperback Penguin! An English person in the 17th century held this very book once! (Down, girl, down!)If that sounds naive, well, perhaps it is. But I often wonder whether, if Europeans react differently from us to old books, old manuscripts, old languages, it is simply that they come at the issue from a privileged position. There, I just said ‘us’. I, who am not even American, think of America as “we” whenever I think about Europe, the New World against the Old. For in America I am always profoundly aware of living in the New World — even as America, to my Singaporean eyes, is already “old.” Every American scholar I know returning from a summer of archival research in Europe always comes home wistful about the relative nonchalance of European librarians. Katy P told this story: “I was taking notes in [some French or Italian library] and a librarian pulled up short beside me. “Is something wrong? Why do you use a pencil?!” She could not even understand the question at first: every major rare book library in America bans pens. (In that sense, manuscript digitalisation was one of the most equalising technologies for the American humanities scholar — you did not have to beg for grants and travel to Europe anymore — you could access manuscripts right there on your laptop, do your transcriptions, zoom for details (I had to buy a damn magnifying glass when I first started grad school), annotate and scribble wherever you like — when I first started school databases like EEBO and ECCO had been established, but was still a work-in-progress I did not take for granted.
And maybe living in Boston (you only have to look at the collection of Isabella Gardner!) remids you of that too: this mix of envy and resentment, the ambivalence about our own cultural construct of Europeaness (out-of-date, romanticised, coloured by residual-insecurity). Because I have felt the same twinge of New World jealousy. Many years ago Vaughn and I went to spend Christmas break at York with Su-Lin and Choonping, and in deference to Su-Lin we attended Christmas service at the York Minster, after which I quite saw the point of Gothic cathedrals. Concentrated religious impression reinforced by terrifying scale and light and colour — translating into awe that sledgehammers you straight in the gut. If I were a peasant 600 years ago what would I think? But all the time I was emotionally overwhelmed I also felt resentment — about the architecture’s insistence, about its complicity in mastering us by force of awe alone, and to call that battering-ram emotion (oh Donne!) religious experience.
I think that is exactly why I so dislike the epidemic of Gothic Revival architecture on so many American college campuses. What in the world does an American university built in the 20th century want to pretend to look like a European university for, except to try to appropriate that brute power in the service of their own image? A few have escaped the infection: Virginia, with its cool whites and greens and neoclassical colonnades, looking to a different kind of European order; Stanford, with its expansive Romanesque arches and warm sandy colours ( when I first saw Stanford after a semester at Virginia I thought, why this is the difference between Shakespeare’s Octavia and Cleopatra); even MIT’s unkempt collection of ultra-modern buildings — which divides people, I suppose– but which I like for its daring and experimental mishmash flavour.) The early American university had hardly any choice, did it? We weren’t Oxford, Bologna, Prague. Two possibilities, and of the two I far prefer Harvard’s way. Jim Nohrnberg once said that Harvard’s early developmental history was all about making the best of limited space in the colonial backwater, haphazard expansion, suvivalist indifference, whereas Yale’s response, of course, is to use architecture like a stage set, to act out a false narrative of pedigree and age. Not merely the decision, between the 1930s-70s, to remake the campus in Gothic style (for they all did that) but the deliberate attempt to create the veneer of age –- deliberate splashing of acid on the walls of the Sterling library, smashing and repairing glass to create flaws. I can despise that (and I do) but I know where that need comes from.
But even without the manuscripts, without the buildings, I always feel defensive about America, for I do think of contemporary America as “we” — and not merely because it was a country in which I came of age, in which I lived both before and after 9/11. For I would never think of America as ‘we’ in relation to Asia, but often I think of America as “we” when I think of Europe. It’s embarrassing how easily my feathers are ruffled against the casual condescension and often condescending incomprehension of (usually Western) Europeans, and especially in this era of frequent America-bashing. But it isn’t just me — a few months ago I was at a house party in Singapore at which I knew only the host and at the table of strangers there was an instant bond when towards the end of the evening someone exclaimed: “It’s so nice to be in a room of people who didn’t hate Americans, not to have to try and explain.” Only two people in the room were, in fact, Americans, everyone else was from all over Asia — India, Korea, Hong Kong — who had lived for some considerable time on the American East Coast. Yes yes, agreement all round, a relief, so nice, so nice. (And I thought, that’s true, I didn’t notice, it’s the first time I’m in mixed company and didn’t have to be defensive either about Singapore or America (because I would have to have lived in and loved two of the most disliked or misunderstood countries in the world.) It’s not that I subscribe to American particularism especially (nor yet Singaporean particularism), but I do think that Europeans often make many fundamental mistake about the US. One of them, for instance, is that they don’t intuitively understand its geography and its scale. Singaporeans don’t have that trouble: I’m from a tiny country, everywhere else is big to me. First year of college I learnt to tell people: my country is 3.5 times the size of your District of Columbia. They gasp: so small? But European nations are small too. You can fit the whole of France or Spain or the Ukraine into the state of Texas alone. The whole of Finland or Germany would fit into Montana. You can fit Poland or Italy into New Mexico and still have room left over. You can very nearly fit Sweden into the state of California. There are at least 12 US states big enough to swallow up the UK comfortably. Virginia is larger than Bulgaria or Greece. And it’s too easy to ask “Why”? or “Why not?” without considering geopolitical context.
[tbc]
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