THE ADDITIONAL DIMENSION: DAVID GERARD ON SOUND, VISION AND THE LOST CREATIVITY OF THE LIBRARIAN

Abstract

TO librarians the above comment, appearing as it does in a work offering new ways of looking at literature, is yet another warning from the world outside that other forms of record than traditional print now need to be taken seriously as evidence of the world about us. Print is inert, anonymous, impersonal, distancing. To be sure the printed word moves, instructs, enlarges, recreates us—but after its own fashion. The introduction of audio and video recording into public and private discourse amplifies messages which have hitherto had to lie on a page, in new and revealing ways, to such an extent that we may ask if the rebirth of oral communication doesn't take us back to pre‐print society? The Greeks, who enlarged the frontiers of culture to its limits, were always hostile to writing as record; their habit was to learn and perceive orally, and only in the sunset of that civilisation, the Hellenistic Age, did silent record, the signature of things, become important. The Phaedrus reads almost enigmatically to us of the late twentieth century: it is the final summary of a tradition just before its decay. The first librarians of the New Order of Alexandria seem to us the saviours of Greek culture. Yet they were not mere preservers but also contributors—poets, historians, biographers. The librarian as a maker, a participant in the process of transmission, not passive collaborator: this is a role denied to him ever since Alexandria. The instruments now available to us could change things as radically again if their potential be understood.

Citation

(1981), "THE ADDITIONAL DIMENSION: DAVID GERARD ON SOUND, VISION AND THE LOST CREATIVITY OF THE LIBRARIAN", Library Review, Vol. 30 No. 2, pp. 87-88. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb012718