Best left unsaid

Rather like becoming conscious of one’s breathing while someone explains its mechanics, there is something disconcerting about reading a description of how the eyes skip across the page. Instead of snailing across the page word by word, we leap like frogs between lily pads. Reading is more a process of filling in the blanks than of confronting what’s “really” there on the page.

Words we don’t read are only one species of blank in Jonathan Sawday’s new book, which takes us from unfinished symphonies to censored texts to Freudian moments of forgetting. Writing about a concept as broad as “the blank” means shifting between all these different media, and raises the question of how we convey one kind of blankness in another. How can we, for example, represent silence on the page? The pause in one of King Lear’s lines is represented, in the 1608 printed version of Shakespeare’s play, by a comma; by 1619 that comma has become a long dash: “That all the world shall — I shall do such things”. The presence of extra ink on the page draws heightened attention to the gaps in Lear’s speech. More print is less voice.

This Shakespearean example is characteristic of the book’s focus. Sawday is an early modernist by training, and he remains in pursuit of what he calls “the foundational early modern blank”. Yet about half of the ten chapters lead off with a contemporary poet, novelist, or theorist (Karen Blixen’s short story about a bride’s unstained bedsheets; William Golding’s novel The Paper Men, which breaks off when the narrator is killed with what he only has time to describe as a “gu-”). The result is that even when a chapter is trained on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, what we end up with is a larger conceptual sense of what blank spaces mean across time periods and artistic genres.

Blanks, Print, Space, and Void in English Renaissance Literature is divided in two. The first five chapters – “Landscapes” – explore colonial and social spaces as well as the philosophical or cultural themes through which we might think about voids and gaps. The second five, “Excavations”, close in on textual case studies: blank forms, authorial censorship, unfinished poems. To juxtapose “Excavations” and “Landscapes” invites the reader to think about blankness as both a kind of depth (the dizzying infinity of the void) and a surface (the resistant stark white page that refuses to offer up meaning). That paradox of the blank – as an open-ended invitation, but also as a rebuff – ties together many of the threads in this book.

Alongside grand theoretical frameworks there are many nuggets of archival research. Sawday brings to life the subject of waste paper – the term we would use to describe damaged or torn sheets, but which to early moderns more frequently meant blank pages – with an appealing vignette about storage issues. To print 1,250 copies of his 300-page Geography Delineated (1625), the early modern writer Nathaniel Carpenter ordered 100,000 sheets of paper in seventy large boxes, weighing well over half a ton. He costed in an extra 5,000 sheets to allow for waste paper in the making of his book – but where to put all that paper before printing started?

Early modern pages were crisscrossed with the traces of their production. Supposedly blank pages often bear chain lines from the mould on which they were made, or bits of plant matter that weren’t fully pulped during the manufacturing process. Other versions of “nothing to see here” break down too: white light isn’t the absence of colour, but is what happens when blue, red and green light stimulate the cone cells in the eye equally and all at once. These physical realities point to a larger philosophical point that hums along quietly throughout: the impossibility of blanks, absences and voids remaining as they are for long. Gaps get filled in when we start thinking about them, but that isn’t to say they don’t matter. Blankness is a way to think with and beyond early modern literature into some of today’s most urgent political questions. One of the strengths of this book is the attention that it pays to the racialized stakes of blankness, including the word’s possible slippage into Blackness.

Shakespeare’s Othello seems like an obvious place to look for this kind of thing. “Was this fair paper, this most godly book / Made to write ‘whore’ upon?”, asks Othello, self-destructively articulating the kinds of racialized and gendered tropes increasingly discussed by people interested in the history of the book. Sawday doesn’t stop there, however, and turns instead to Desdemona’s spotted handkerchief. This significant prop is traditionally understood as another white surface decorated with flowers that symbolize the spotting of Desdemona’s purity. Citing the work of Ian Smith, Sawday reiterates the recent suggestion that Desdemona’s handkerchief, “dyed in mummy”, is a square of black cloth. To over-write that blackness as whiteness – as stage and literary history have done – is to show how Blackness has been blanked out. In one of the conceptual swerves that characterize this book, the same chapter moves from early modern tragedy to another kind of blanking out: the history of colonization and the renaming of already inhabited places. The US Board on Geographic Names has recently started creating name-free zones in an effort to counteract colonial-minded practices and restore “elemental wildness”. But, as Sawday points out, this doesn’t solve the problem. Insisting on a place’s “blankness” is to deny nominal agency to those Indigenous peoples for whom the place is, or was, a home.

Writing about blankness means writing about power, and this book shifts from global paradigms of race-making to the question of exactly how much empty space the Countess of Shrewsbury, Bess Hardwick, should leave on the page in a letter to Elizabeth I. Sawday is interested in the minutiae of margins and indents, though to suggest that “the left hand of the page is where texts, in a literal sense, are born” is to account only for certain kinds of language and ways of perceiving the empty page. While the space of the page is a way of articulating social dynamics between letter writers, blank forms construct hierarchical relations between individual and state. Tax forms, letters of indulgence and trading bills all invite participation – sign here, date here – but only within a restricted format.

The penultimate chapter on “Censored Space” shows how the blank sometimes offers the reader a particular meaning. Satirists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had a habit of replacing the names of their targets with asterisks or dashes. Hence John Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe (1678) mocks the would-be mysterious “Shad—”, a blanking out that left no room for doubt that it meant Dryden’s arch enemy Thomas Shadwell. To redact “Shad—” to “Sh—”, when the text was reprinted six years later, might look like a concession to greater anonymity – but not when the result is a line about bad writing clogging up the streets with “loads of Sh—”.

Dryden’s poem takes us back to King Lear’s silences, in which the same mark of absence is used to wildly different effect. Jonathan Sawday’s book is at once an essay on the complexity and vivacity of “the blank”, and a paean to the ways in which early modern texts conveyed the idea of nothingness. Asterisks, printed ornaments, whitewashing of images and partial crossings-out: the moments of interest to the historian of the blank are those that return us to marks made on the page.

Georgina Wilson is an Early Career Research Fellow at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge

Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS here

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