Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017. xiv, 481 pp. (Tables, graphs, figures, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$34.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-262-03636-8.
Thomas S. Mullaney has written a book that is encyclopaedic, engaging, and erudite. This is the first time that I have conjoined these three adjectives, for this is an academic book like no other. There is something for everyone in The Chinese Typewriter. The book has attracted reviews in not only peer-reviewed journals but magazines and newspapers such as (to list a few alphabetically) The London Review of Books, The South China Morning Post, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal and Wired. The book’s back-cover endorsements are by Ai Weiwei, Maxine Hong Kingston, Xu Bing, Lisa Gitelman, and Wang Hui. All of this is indicative of the interest it has elicited from readers across disciplines and fields as diverse as anthropology, art and design, cultural, literary and media studies, historical studies of modern China, and science and technology studies.
On one level, Mullaney has produced a detailed developmental narrative of the Chinese typewriter, including a riveting history of retrieval and search methods for Chinese characters and their subsequent development into the range of Chinese input systems or IMEs (input method editors) installed on the smart machines we use today. On another level, he has required us to read this narrative against the early global dominance of the “single-shift keyboard” English-language typewriter and the formidable challenges that this normative QWERTY technology has presented for non-alphabetic typewriting throughout the twentieth century and since. On yet a third level, Mullaney has insisted that we heed the physicality of the technology that we use to pursue our ends. Across the seven chapters of his book, he argues persuasively that because the technology of typewriting has habituated people to and even locked us into certain modes of communication, it has shaped our lives in ways we cannot get at, let alone analyze. In many ways, The Chinese Typewriter evocatively illustrates Ludwig Wittgenstein’s insight: “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably” (Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986, 48).
These three levels of inquiry are deftly interwoven in the book. Take for instance the methodological explanation provided on page 30, in which Mullaney states that “the posture” he has adopted
…can best be described as agonistic: a posture in which our ultimate goal is not to arrive at a singular, harmonic, conflict-free and final description of the history in question, but one that makes ample space for, and even embraces, dissonance, contradictions, and even impossibilities that are understood to be productive, positive, and ultimately more faithful to the way human history actually takes shape (emphasis in original).
The very next sentence invites us “to hear the Chinese typewriter” with Mullaney, to “interrogate and deconstruct our own longstanding assumptions about technolinguistic modernity … and to eschew all expectations that the act of critical reflexivity has the power to liberate us from these assumptions” (30). To highlight these critical (as conscious cognitive) limitations, Mullaney then tells us that “no matter how intently” he has “sought to denaturalize the cadences of the Remington machine and the QWERTY keyboard that play on perpetual loop in the recesses of my mind, there has never been a point … when I could hear the Chinese typewriter all by itself” (30).
These remarks got me thinking about the neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga’s widely cited statement in The Mind’s Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000, 21) that “ninety-eight percent of what the brain does is outside of conscious awareness.” In fact, Gazzaniga illustrated this point by saying, “As I sit here and type this sentence, I have no idea how my brain directs my fingers to the correct keys on the keyboard.” Mullaney wants us to be always mindful of our non-conscious habitual attitude to typewriting and keyboard use. He succeeds in doing so by asking us to hear what we have not been wired up to hear as we visit/revisit with him some two centuries of experimentation and invention in technolinguistics. The historical events explored in this book include, inter alia, nineteenth-century frequency counting and analysis of Chinese characters and their typographical ordering according to patterns of “divisibility” and “indivisibility”; early twentieth-century code books for Chinese telegraphy and “radical machines” for typing Chinese characters using rival common usage and combinatorial models; and Chinese character retrieval systems of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s and the lianchuanzi or chain-like typesetting methods of the Maoist 1950s and 1960s, based on typists arranging Chinese-character trays around sequences of two or more characters for frequently used words such as “revolution” (geming) or “socialism” (shehui zhuyi). Mullaney alerts us to this last example as a precursor of the “predictive text” feature in Chinese search and input methods today (286).
The prodigious range of sources from which Mullaney has cited reflects a work that is very much of its time. Academics can now access hitherto unimaginable quantities and varieties of digitized information through not only search engines but global networks of researchers, archivists, and librarians. This has significantly altered how we conduct and write up our research. However, if insights are to be gained, these on- and offline riches require a masterful reader. Mullaney is demonstrably such a reader yet one who also warns us with writerly verve of the limits of interpretation. For instance, he writes that foreign observers of China in the 1920s, incapable of thinking non-alphabetically, were “much like Vladimir and Estragon waiting endlessly for Godot” in their unwavering anticipation of phonetic Chinese typewriters (186).
I cannot do justice to The Chinese Typewriter in a short review. This fine book repays close reading and re-reading: its stories of the ingenious individuals in and outside China who sought to make Chinese characters as technolinguistically “typeable” as alphabetic letters provide a crucial material context against which we can better grasp the urgency with which language reform was advocated in Republican-era China. Thanks to Mullaney, I now hear the gada gada gada of the Chinese typewriter when I read writings of that period by Lu Xun and other advocates of modern written baihuawen. Above all, this book narrates the highly productive resistance of Chinese script to alphabetic typewriting. It shows how, over time, “a transnational cast” of inventive humans obsessed with Chinese typewriting were led away from “the collapsing imaginary of the alphabetic world” toward keyboard-mediated input, in which “one accepts as one’s starting point a condition of nonidentity between keys and screens—and then begins to play” (317). Mullaney has announced in the book’s conclusion a forthcoming sequel on the history of Chinese computing. This reader eagerly awaits its publication.
Gloria Davies
Monash University, Clayton, Australia