On December 14, 2014, I published my OEN article about Jung titled "Jung's Successful Vision Quest."
Now, in 2012, W. W. Norton and Company published Sonu Shamdasani's profusely illustrated oversized 225-page book titled C. G. Jung: A Biography in Books.
In it, Sonu Shamdasani (born in 1962 in Singapore, grew up in England; Ph.D. in the History of Medicine, University College London's Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine) discusses print culture (pp. 110, 127, 130, and 217n.105) in order to explain that Jung constructed an illuminated manuscript to hearken back to medieval illuminated manuscripts - the production of which eventually ended after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in Europe in the mid-1450s and started the printing of books - and print culture in our Western cultural history.
For information about Sonu Shamdasani, see the Wikipedia entry "Sonu Shamdasani" (2024).
Now, in Sonu Shamdasani's 2012 book titled C. G. Jung: A Biography in Books, he says, "In the 1950s [in 1958], the French historian Lucien Febvre noted that 'the book is a relative newcomer in Western society. It began its career in the mid-fifteenth century and its future is no longer certain, threatened as it is by new inventions based on different principles'" (Shamdasani, 2012, p. 110).
On page 218 in note 206, of Sonu Shamdasani's 2012 book, he gives the source as "Lucien Febvre, Foreword, in Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800, trans. David Gerard (London: Verso, 1990), 10."
Ong refers to the 1958 book in French by Febvre and Martin in the "Bibliographic Note" at the end of his 1967 encyclopedia entry titled "Literature, Written Transmission of." Ong's 1967 encyclopedia entry is reprinted as "Written Transmission of Literature" in the anthology An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (2002, pp. 331-344).
In any event, subsequently, Shamdasani says, "From the monastic age, from the fall of Rome to the twelfth century, monasteries held a monopoly on book production and book culture. The monastic orders described the number of hours assigned for intellectual work, and copying took place in those hours. The majority of works that have survived are religious. In the early thirteenth century, the rise of universities generated a new reading public, still chiefly clerical. Guilds of scriveners or stationers formed to copy manuscripts. During this period the separation of scribes and illuminators took place. One group copied manuscripts while the other illustrated and illuminated them. One of the books most copied was Dante's Commedia. No manuscript of the work has survived, but over six hundred copies survive, some illustrated. It was works such as these that were rendered extinct by the coming of the [printed] book. As Febvre wrote:
"'[The book was] one of the most potent agents at the disposal of Western civilization in bringing together the scattered ideas of representative thinkers. It rendered vital service to research by immediately transmitting results from one researcher to another. . . . It assembled permanently the works of the most sublime creative spirits in all fields. . . . The book created new habits of thought not only within the small circle of the learned, but far beyond. . . . the printed book was one of the most effective means of mastery over the whole world.'
"As historians have noted, the book played a vital role in the development of the scientific revolution and Protestantism, and in ushering in the era of modernity. However, what was left behind were illuminated manuscripts in the form of illuminated printing. The copyists were rendered unemployed, presumably seeking work as printers" (p. 110; square brackets and ellipses here are Shamdasani's, not mine).
So let's hear it for the printed book: Bravo! Bravo! Bravo!
OK. Subsequently, Shamdasani says, "In 1924, Jung had Cary Baynes recopy this calligraphic version of [his Liber Novus manuscript] and retype it. This suggests that it [i.e., a certain specific portion of the Liber Novus manuscript] was not sufficient for him to leave it as a unique [separable] object, to be shared with a select few, but that he wished to get it [the entire Liber Novus manuscript as a whole] to a wider audience. This articulated a critical tension in the work as a whole: between, on the one hand, a desire to recover his own soul, for himself alone [remember that he was constructing the various aspects of the Liber Novus manuscript as a way to process and contain his dangerous self-experiments], and, on the other, the desire to convey something to his public. Addressed to 'my friends,' it was a book written to be read. This tension within the work is also then replicated in Jung's deliberations as to what to do with it. We see here enacted a tension between the illuminated book and the printed book that takes one to the heart of one of the prime developmental schisms within Western culture" (p. 127).
Oh my, "one of the prime schisms within Western culture." Put differently, Shamdasani is here characterizing a difference between ancient and medieval manuscript culture, on the one hand, and, on the other, print culture in our Western cultural history. For Ong, this so-called "schism within Western culture" can be understood in terms of sense ratios in the human sensorium.
For Ong's discussion of the human sensorium, see his seminal 1967 book The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (for specific page references, see the entry on the sensorium in the "Index" [p. 356]).
Now, subsequently, Shamdasani says, "What, then, was the function of calligraphy for Jung [in Liber Novus]? The calligraphic manuscript of Liber Novus enacts a return to a pre-Reformation period. Jung was attempting to recover something lost in Western culture since before printing, prior to the age of the printed book - before the split of science and religion, prior to the rise of modern rationality and the triumph of the 'spirit of the times.' As Jung expressed in his text: 'I must catch up with a piece of the Middle Ages - within myself. We have only finished the Middle Ages of - others.' The calligraphic volume of Liber Novus not only presents certain themes, such as a critique of modernity and rationality, an attempt to recover symbol, an attempt to find fitting expression for the things of the soul, and so forth: it also attempts to embody these themes of recovery in its very form, articulating a critique of what the printed book made possible through returning to the illuminated manuscript. Hence Jung's hesitation concerning the question of publication arises within this tension and its oscillation. The house had become the threshold to the book therefore also became a vessel for holding the book's still inseparable links back to both visual amplification and the soul's oral authority" (p. 130).
With regard to Jung's critique of modernity and rationality, I would call your attention her to the words "the of Reason" - as in the Age of Reason and its understanding of rationality -- in the subtitle of Ong's massively researched 1958 book.
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