4. Paper

Why do we think that written documents connote greater security of information?

The main lesson to take from Kilito's book, The Author and His Doubles, seems to be that written documents are anything but secure. What is to stop an author from affixing his name to a work he did not compose? If the true author, the person who actually wrote the work, is still alive, he can denounce the plagiarism. Or, opposite, what is to stop an author from attributing his own writing to someone else altogether? If the someone else is alive, they can again say that they did not write this. But if the someone else is dead, then who is to say that they did not write it themselves.

But overall, why does it matter who really and truly wrote something? Kilito cannot remember the reason his French teacher gave to that question, yet he does believe that to know the author is a worthwhile endeavor. For what, then? In fiction writing, it cannot be necessary, because anyone can determine if a story is entertaining or worthwhile to read. In that case, the only useful thing in knowing the author is to obtain their other works, so the name is merely a reference to a certain category of books, namely those books that are written by X. The actual name and biography are inconsequential, because the only relevant information is that this person is good at writing stories.

In non-fiction writing, however, the author becomes more important, because the information contained within the book is no longer simply a story, and its purpose is no longer entertainment. Non-fiction writing purports to be true, and therefore opens up the possibility that it is lying. As such, the information in non-fiction writing needs to be judged as correct and useful, or not.

To judge information, it is necessary to know who the author is, simply because to judge the information on its own merit would require that every person have the ability to do so. Since this essentially means that every person would have to already know whether the information given was true or not, then the purpose of writing it down would be useless. Everything would be common knowledge, except that the human brain is probably not capable of containing such a vast amount of knowledge.

Authors become useful, then, when we need to judge a text's information without having the ability to judge it ourselves. We look to the author as an information guide, and so, instead of judging the information itself, we judge the author. If they were writing about physics, for example, we as readers would expect that the author was knowledgeable in physics, and so to know that this person was a tenured professor at a well-known and prestigious university would bolster their claims to knowledge and encourage the reader to judge them favorably. If judged favorably, the information is accepted; if judged to be unlearned, then the information the author transmits is rejected as well.

But again, what if one is not able to judge the authors? If one does not know their pedigree or their schooling, one can hardly be expected to know whether they are reliable in their information. This is where the Fihrist comes in. Of one poet , al-Nadim writes, "al-Khalidiyan edited his poetry at al-Mawsil, making it excellent: about three hundred leaves" (p. 373).

But if a book is put forth under a false author, then one does not have the correct biography with which to judge the contents. And so, the whole system is stopped, because if one author is attributed falsely, then who is to say that others are not also falsely attributed. There is no real mechanism to stop misattribution to or from an author who is not stil alive to protest. Just because it is printed does not mean it is true; falsehoods are still false when set in type. Nothing makes written words any more secure from fraud than speech. Absolutely nothing.

What it comes down to is trust in memory and trust in caretakers. With a work memorized by someone trustworthy, the work is only as secure as the person's memory. Should they forget any part, then the work is no longer secure. Even better would be to have the work memorized by two trustworthy individuals, who can check their memories against one another to ensure that neither is misrepresenting the work when recited. However, there could still arise an instance wherein neither one is certain about a particular passage.

In a written work, once the written text is verified, it can be stored. Written text cannot mutate itself and so it will preserve itself as long as environmental conditions allow. Of course there is always the possibility of a person editing it or changing it, but with proper care and subsequent storage, a copy can be made with no words changed and no confusion. The classic example of this is scriptures, which have been passed down in written form quite unchanged for centuries now. Unfortunately, both the Hebrew and Arabic scripts are not sufficient to fully express which words are meant in any given sentence, and it seems that this has caused problems in reading the Qur'an, at least, although any further analysis of this phenomenon is beyond my knowledge. Any discontinuity in scriptural transmission orally, before they were written down, is also beyond my knowledge.