New Deal for the Academic Shuffle

It is well known that current scholarly writing requires the use of note cards, which are blank in their original state and can be purchased in three different sizes. A prospective author buys a quantity of these cards, the size being left to personal taste, and as he reads books in his field of interest, he transfers the contents of these books onto the note cards. As the collection of note cards grows, he shuffles and sorts them out into convenient classifications by means of index cards. These divisions are further subdivided, appropriate titles and subtitles are chosen, and from the chaos of ink and cardboard with which one began an orderly-looking table of contents starts to emerge, complete with parts, chapters, sections, and subsections. Further toil is required to blend the note cards in each microdivision into a more or less continuous text, and then the rest is up to the publisher.

So a new book comes into existence. The book is read by scholars and students who are engaged in producing papers, books, articles of their own. These scholars and students, of course, also possess clean note cards of one size or another. By use of these cards, the book is dismantled and reduced once again to its elements. The cards, now carefully inscribed, are shuffled together with those gleaned from other documents, are annotated and indexed, and new scholarly writings are under way.

The waste involved in this process is obvious, and also shocking in a land whose people pride themselves on efficiency. It is evident that scholarship would be enormously facilitated and accelerated by the elimination of one step in the process described above, a step for which no rational defense can be made. I mean, of course, the blending of the notes into the appearance of a continuous text — the production of the book or article as such. This step not only involves the writer in such tedious business as constructing transitions and copying his notes into the text, but also obliges the reader to copy it all out again on his own note cards. The solution is clear. Instead of collecting their material into books and articles, scholars should simply publish their note-card collections.

Traditionalists will doubtless object that such a streamlining of scholarly publication, however sensible it may be, would remove the originality from the scholar’s task. But each author would be free to organize and index his collection in such fashion as to indicate what he takes to be its rationale, in case anyone is interested. In fact, the cards could be arranged and rearranged in all manner of clever ways. Witty titles and marginal notations could be added, and the author could even include special cards, indexed under “Grand Design" or something of the sort, which would suggest the generalizations which he supposes he has established by a particular card arrangement. Readers opposed to metaphysical pretension could simply drop these cards out of their sets. On the other hand, a suitable substitute for the textbook could be created by publishing collections composed entirely of these generalization cards.

Documentation would be both simplified and exquisitely refined, since each card would bear the name of the person who originally wrote it up, and perhaps also the collection in which it first appeared. Of course, a card bearing some particularly seminal material would keep turning up in any number of the published collections. Scholars could exchange such duplicates among themselves and vie with one another in accumulating complete collections of the most popular cards, as youngsters do with the pictures of baseball heroes cut from cereal and bubble-gum wrappers. Card games could be devised beyond the wildest dreams of present practitioners of solitaire and bridge. A player might, for example, lead Freud on the Oedipus Complex, only to be trumped by a Jungian Archetype.

Creative writing could be similarly revolutionized, to the great benefit of critics, reviewers, and other serious students of literature. Imagine the toil and needless speculation which these busy people would have been spared if, say, Mann had simply published a collection of leitmotiv cards, and perhaps another on Obstacles to the Bourgeois Prussian as Artist; or if Melville had produced a collection on Religious Symbols from Nautical Life; or if a committee of recent American writers had collaborated on Forms of Decadence in the Southern Part of the Uniited States.

Other committee projects come to mind, such as an Existentialist Encyclopedia from “Anguish” to “Zarathustra,” or a collection on Sexuality, subdivided into all those interesting hyphenated forms. Writers need no longer labor coquettishly to obscure their insights under a cloud of rhetoric. Let them actually lay their cards on the table, so that critics, reviewers, and other serious students of literature can see at a glance what it is they wish to say.

Revolutionary as this new departure in publishing may seem, it can be seen to be a natural development if viewed in large enough historical perspective. The movement toward greater flexibility in the handling of written material had already begun when the contents of stone tablets and wall inscriptions were transferred to scrolls, and still a more decisive step was taken when the scrolls were cut into pages and bound into books. The further transition to cards may seem strange to the older generations; after all, traditionalists no doubt held on to scrolls long after books were in existence. But the new form will seem natural enough to a new generation being nurtured on teaching machines and machine-graded tests. The wave of the future is constituted by droplets.

The next step beyond the notecard form will be considerably less drastic. The proper pattern of nicks and holes can very easily be punched in the cards, and the whole scholarly enterprise turned over to IBM machines. Homo sapiens can then devote himself to television — or card games of the old-fashioned sort — with a good conscience, confident that the production and assimilation of written matter, so necessary to civilization, is being carried on with the highest possible efficiency.