“Handwritten Letters Sketches Drawings I” by Frida Kahlo, courtesy of Vancouver Fine Art Gallery.

Introduction

In my accordion folder, next to a tab of identification documents and another of printed photographs, I store handwritten letters from friends and family. Specifically, I have kept every letter received– whether in a flashy card or on a plain piece of lined paper– since the summer before I left home for university. I do this because I feel bad letting go of them, but also because they bring comfort to me. When I take out the letters and read the thoughts of people I know (or have known) crystallized into deeply personal messages, I better understand those people. A lot of the time, people are more comfortable writing something than they might be saying it in-person. In this post I will attempt to explain how my sentimentality around these letters is evoked through their materiality, and the thoughts of others contained in them are mediated by writing.

Letters and Materiality

Bill Brown opens his essay on materiality in Critical Terms for Media Studies by questioning the material difference between a thought and a thorn that’s stuck in your finger. The thorn is obviously made up of matter; it is atoms arranged in a way that shapes the thorn. It is the shape of the thorn colliding with the atoms in your finger that causes pain and draws your attention to the urgent material nature of the thorn. It can be argued that thoughts are also material if you choose to look at them as “the effect of synapses within a neural network”, Brown says (49). However, the debate as to whether or not thoughts are material represents the kind of question that is secondary to a discussion of materiality. 

Describing the materiality of something is not an assessment of yes/no on its concreteness. As Brown put it, “When you admire the materiality of a sweater, you’re acknowledging something about its look and feel, not simply its existence as a physical object” (49). So materiality then is a qualitative assessment of something that’s based in the senses. In the case of the sweater, the sense of touch is evoked because of how a sweater makes contact with the body. The sense of sight is also involved, because the clothing we wear is often a signal of personal aesthetics and identity.

Now I’m going to tell you what I like about the materiality of birthday cards, best wishes cards, nice-to-have-gotten-to-know-you cards, and letters of admiration. 

1. Handwriting. I like that with my grandparents’ handwriting, I have to decipher their cursive almost like I’m reading in a second language. My roommate recently told me that he can not read in cursive, as he was never taught to do so in primary school. There’s something almost antique by now about handwriting which is produced in cursive by default. Reading cursive teaches me patience, and feels like a way of adjusting to a communication practice of my grandparents’ day– even if on the smallest of scales. It reminds me that when I send my grandpa a hasty text message with zero punctuation, he is the one who must adjust to my communication style. Empathy and critical thinking– both ways of looking at the bigger picture– are evoked in me through working to comprehend handwriting.
2. Voice. Just as people’s writing reflects their inner thoughts and perceptions, the way they communicate in a letter often maps easily to their personality. When I re-read letters from my dad, the voice reading it in my head belongs to him. That a choice of words, tone, or even the content of a message could evoke someone’s speaking voice in the mind I find incredible. Some people are more formal when they write than they are in conversation. In that case, my imagination goes as far as to conjure an image of that person giving a speech that they wrote, in order to find their voice within the writing. Most of the time though, in the context of a hand-written card, someone close to you will write in a way that makes their voice ring clearly through the noise of form.
3. Persistence. Through the collection of paper– an often ephemeral and disposable material– I feel as though I have trapped in time a series of intimate pieces that any one given letter-writer may never have expected to be a part of. This is the part of the practice of saving letters that is self-serving. The record which was assembled from one-to-one messages becomes an archive of many unrelated notes with one commonality; they are directed towards a single recipient. Is the point of my keeping these notes only for the sake of using them on a rainy day? Another benefit of letter-keeping is that the archive offers a timeline of my personal history, experiences, and milestones by evoking memory. Just as flipping through printed photos facilitates my recollection of events, situations, and time periods, the letters facilitate a process of looking back upon a former time. The notes were written in now-time– yet as I read them today they influence and re-assemble my memory, which mediates the past. The “concreteness” of letters from a bygone time feels paradoxical– almost like they are relics which have survived through time.

Writing as a Medium Today

Each of these aspects of a letter’s materiality can be connected to theoretical frameworks, from language and communication to time and space. However, since their overarching medium is writing, I’ll describe what hand-written letters mediate by extending Lydia Liu’s scholarship on “Writing” in Critical Terms for Media Studies.

When thinking about why we even call non-cursive handwriting “print”, I was introduced to the idea of Print English in Liu’s essay. With the invention of the printing press, the English alphabet was transformed from a 26 character system, to a 27 character system (the new character being a space).  “Printed English is an ideographical alphabet with a definable statistical structure. As a post-phonetic system, it functions as a conceptual interface between natural language and machine language”, Liu explains (318). “The centrality of printed symbols for technology has something to do with the fact that, to use Friedrich A. Kittler’s words, ‘in contrast to the flow of handwriting, we now have discrete elements separated by spaces’” (320). I think there’s something really fascinating about how, if we call non-fluid “print” handwriting an effect of the printing press, people’s handwriting with each generation is coming to resemble (or following) the way that our technologies produce language.

In terms of both the “voice” found in handwritten letters and their persistence as a record through time, the following quote from Lydia Liu applies: 

“In the age of informatics and computer technology, writing increasingly penetrates the biomechanics of human speech to the extent that sound, including speech, is now being turned into an artifact, a notable example being text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. The colossal amount of written and printed record and electronic information stored in data banks, libraries, museums, archival centers, and global communication networks further indicates how much the technologies of writing and print have evolved to shape modern life and the future of humanity” (310).

The first sentence here seems to say that writing is by now such a dominant form of communication that there are tools for converting it back into a “vocalized” form. Of course, text-to-speech has a voice that is de-personalised because it is a machine which speaks through a complex algorithm. This idea can be expanded to include artificial intelligence, which produces extremely generalized writing, to the point that we get an uncanny feeling when a real person delivers an AI-generated speech. Needless to say, the specific way a person we know puts together a sentence– especially given the statistically infinite possibilities– creates the “sound” of their writing. This sensory quality (I’ll extrapolate from Liu) is increasingly the “artifact” in the writing.

Lastly, the sheer amount of communications records we have globally today is a critical infrastructure of daily life. There would be no way to do research, return a package, or quote an old text sent to your grandpa without the storage of data. However, with digitization, physical records are created less and less frequently. Many of the physical documents and artifacts stored within our institutions of record-keeping are only material because of their age. To collect writing done on paper is to maintain a kind of archive of interpersonal connections throughout one’s life. Even the letters from people who are not in my life any longer, or the letter I wrote to myself two years ago during Jumpstart are valuable to me. Their material aspects evoke the people who wrote them, making those people feel real. The letters mediate my knowing people, and their knowing me.

Works Cited

Brown, Bill. “Materiality.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois, 2010, pp. 49–63.

Liu, Lydia. “Writing.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois, 2010, pp. 310–326. 

Blog post written by Naomi Brown