REMEMBER THE OLD PHONE COMPANY SLOGAN, “Reach out and touch someone”? It suggested you could make intimate contact with a loved one, even though you were physically separated from him or her. Of course, long before the sound of the voice could be transmitted over phone lines, people reached out across vast distances through writing. While letter writing lacked the immediacy of contact we’ve come to expect from our newest communications technologies, it had — and still has — certain benefits, not least that it leaves a tangible product, something that can be held, kept, reread, and treasured. In my own family, my father has for many years kept and cherished a small note written by my sister. Although outwardly simple, it points to some of the complexity of being in touch, and illustrates, to my continual amazement, how much skill and sophistication is available at a very young age.
The note consists of just one word — “DID” — written in shaky capital letters by my sister Elena when she was perhaps three years old. According to my father, this is what happened: He had come home from the office one evening to find something amiss. He no longer remembers the nature of the problem, but it was the sort of thing a child might well have done. He demanded to know who was responsible. (At the time I would have been five or six, and I may well have been a suspect too, but somehow I never made it into the official story.) My sister denied everything. But a short while later this note appeared on my father’s dresser or desk.
It would be easy to see this note as the mere substitution of a written response for an oral one, as if the two were equivalent. But this would miss the important psychological and social work the written version is doing. The note is precious not just because of the vulnerability of its confession, but because of the writing skills displayed by someone so young. Elena switched to writing exactly because of the advantages it offered her over direct verbal contact. With the note, she was able to make a confession at a distance. It’s as if, in the act of writing, she was separating out a part of herself — impressing the confessing self into the paper — and sending it off to do the work for her. Curiously, the scrap of paper was her and not her at the same time. Constructing it was both an act of vulnerability (a means of confessing to a misdeed and owning up to a lie) and an act of self-protection (hiding away). She was extending herself to her father — literally creating something that would travel beyond the boundaries of her physical body — and at the same time withdrawing from him. She was both present in the note and at a safe distance from it.
The note was neither psychologically nor socially the equivalent of a spoken confession. It gave Elena the extra distance she felt she needed. It gave my father the same. Had Elena confessed face-to-face, he might have first reacted out of anger. Finding the note, however, gave him extra time to grasp what was being said, to reflect on it, to appreciate it, and to respond constructively. Indeed, the use of a note where spoken words would have been expected (especially with someone so young) effectively communicated Elena’s embarrassment and fear. The little note with its delicate writing, too, conveyed her smallness and vulnerability. These qualities might well have been communicated in a face-to-face encounter, but the impact would have been different. It is impressive to see so much skill on display, and to realize at what an early age children immersed in a literate culture can begin to grasp and exploit some of the differences between speech and writing.
Elena’s note is in essence a personal letter in embryonic form. It lacks certain conventional trappings, to be sure: the date, the opening salutation, the closing. But it carries a message from one individual to another; it addresses a highly personal subject; and in its hand- produced marks it expresses some of the drama and the pathos of the situation in which it is embedded. While no one would confuse it with one of Mme. de Sévigné’s eighteenth-century literary missives or with a modern exemplar of the epistolary art, evaluated on its own terms it must surely count as both persuasive and beautiful.
Lately, a great deal of attention has been paid to the fate of the personal letter in the age of electronic communication. Does e-mail spell the death of the letter? Or does it perhaps signal a revival of the epistolary art, a resurrection in silicon? It depends whom you ask. In 1990, well before e-mail had become a mainstream phenomenon, the journal World Literature Today devoted most of one issue to the topic “The Letter: A Dying Art?” John L. Brown, referring to “computerized mail” as the latest in a series of letter-killers, sounded a pessimistic note:
The letter, it seems, is dying; but its deathbed is surrounded by an unprecedented number of specialists, who find the moribund of great clinical interest, and every one of them seems to have a diagnosis of his own. All agree, however, that the health of the letter has been undermined and finally dealt a fatal blow by the telephone, the telegram, the cassette, the fax, and other technical innovations that have deprived it of its raison d’etre. The written word has been vanquished by the audiovisual. The authentic “personal letter” . . . has been further devaluated by the rise of computerized mail. The public now receives masses of “letters,” addressed by name and making a pitch for everything imaginable, from political and charitable contributions to “special offers” and “gifts for you alone.” The flood of such patently phony missives, couched in terms of instant intimacy, is the “junk mail” which constitutes a major part of the correspondence most of us now receive.1
But Leslie B. Mittleman disagreed. In her contribution in the same issue, she claimed that “obsequies on the ‘death’ of the art of letter writing are premature.”2 She later put it even more emphatically: “the art of the letter is not dying.”3
Almost a decade (and many billions of e-mail messages) later, the same positions are being argued. Writing in The New York Times, Martin Arnold opened his column, “Pen in Hand? Maybe No More,”4 with an observation and a question. The literary letter “has survived the telephone and the typewriter and the personal computer. Will it survive E-mail?” After quoting various writers, including Joyce Carol Oates and John Updike, none of whom sees much literary potential in e-mail, he concludes with a reference to Samuel Johnson, the great eighteenth-century literary figure: “So the loss of letters on paper can be a serious thing indeed. And can anyone really imagine: sjohnson@therambler.com?”
Apparently someone can. Adam Gopnik, writing in The New Yorker, thinks the Internet is “sublimely reactionary.” “It doesn’t just look back,” he says, in a commentary entitled “The Return of the Word,” “it looks way back, to around 1730. Swift and Pope and Lord Chesterfield, with a Web page apiece, would have been merrily scribbling short essays, anonymous accusations, flames, and billets-doux. Dr. Johnson would have loved the medium and Boswell would have fancied it so much that he might yet spring back to life for a chance to log on.”5 He concludes on a happy note: “That the triumph of numbers — that is, the digital age — should lead to the return of letters is as happy an irony as will warm this cold millennium.”6
Writing in an online magazine called Island Scene, Bill Harby is equally optimistic. “There’s nothing new about global communication at the speed of light,” he says. “We’ve been able to phone Timbuktu for a long time. But email has revitalized and redefined the art and science of letter writing in ways that air mail (mere ‘snail mail’ by e-standards) and even the fax machine could never do.”7 According to U.S. News and World Report, however, James Atlas, critic and biographer, has doubts about the quality of reflection found in e-mail. “When you sit down to write a letter,” Atlas believes, “you are making a more serious commitment.” In the same article, the novelist Reynolds Price offers a more mixed assessment. At least young people are writing more these days. Besides, it’s not as though the art of writing has fallen “from some great recent height.”8
This last observation seems particularly on point. Our age isn’t particularly known for its epistolary triumphs, and it seems unlikely that it ever will be. Why are we even discussing the eighteenth century — surely a very different era from our own — other than as a journalistic hook, or perhaps as a reference point from which to measure our sorry state? The eighteenth century would hardly seem to be a model for our own. It is an era that scholars have called “the great age of the personal letter” and “the golden age of the familiar letter,” a period recognized for its great literary correspondences among a social elite. Letter writing, for practitioners of this high art, was “an informed, entertaining exchange carried on between persons belonging to a circle of familiar acquaintances, who shared a common knowledge of literature, history, and . . . social institutions.”9 If they aimed for a certain naturalness associated with speech, this wasn’t the naturalness of the speech of the streets, but of “people who take particular care to speak well. Their talk makes incomparably better use of language than does that of the uncultivated.”10
What’s going on, it seems to me, is this: letter writing has come to symbolize the possibility of intimate contact at a distance. For as long as people have written to one another, and with whatever technologies, letters have served a wide range of purposes. Measured quantitatively, personal letters have almost certainly been in the minority. Some of the earliest and most common uses of letters were administrative, commercial, and political, rather than personal. Ancient postal systems, such as those of the Persian and Roman empires, were created to effect control through communication: carrying the messages of the powerful — the military, the administrators, the ruling class — as a means of maintaining political and economic control over a wide area. Yet the letters that have been most carefully preserved, analyzed, and emulated through the centuries are those of a more personal and literary nature, like this one from Seneca to Lucilius:
I thank you for writing to me so often; for you are revealing your real self to me in the only way you can. I never receive a letter from you without being in your company forthwith. If the pictures of our absent friends are pleasing to us, though they only refresh the memory and lighten our longing by a solace that is unreal and unsubstantial, how much more pleasant is a letter, which brings us real traces, real evidences, of an absent friend! For that which is sweetest when we meet face to face is afforded by the impress of a friend’s hand upon his letter — recognition.11
Today we are still collecting and publishing exemplary letters. (Recent collections include Letters of a Nation12 and Letters of the Century.)13 We are also still publishing books that offer to teach us how to write letters, and that explain why we should still write them. “The pleasure of sharing ourselves,” says Jennifer Williams in The Pleasures of Staying in Touch, “is no less important now than it ever was. A letter that takes only ten minutes to write can have tremendous immediacy and give the person who receives it an exhilarating sense of ‘being there,’ next to you, living in the same moment with you.”14 She concludes her introduction with these inspiring words:
In the end, writing a letter is an adventure to be embarked upon with a happy, expectant heart. It will give your life more joy and meaning than you can imagine. So, go quickly! Write a letter now, even if it’s just a few lines to propose a picnic, relate a dream, or share a sudden thought, joke, inspiration, or memory Write to say hello, and I’m thinking of you. Write to say I hope you’re feeling better. Write to say it’s raining and cozy by the lamplight and I miss you. Just write, and wait: An enchanting letter will soon be on its way to you. . . .15
But, realistically, who has time to write letters today? (Brief notes and e-mail messages, yes, but long, reflective letters? Hardly any of us, I would venture to say.) If personal letters were as vital a part of our culture today as they once were, we wouldn’t need books like Jennifer Williams’s exhorting us to write them. If we want to examine the pleasure of staying in touch — as it is actually practiced today, in great volume and to great effect — I suggest we look to a different form. It is one without the literary pretensions or the cultural history of the letter. But it is nonetheless a rich, important, and abundant form, with much to show us about how intimate contact is maintained today through writing. I’m referring to greeting cards.
According to industry sources, more than six billion greeting cards were purchased in 1998.16 You don’t have to travel far to find them on sale: in pharmacies, gift shops, gas stations, bookstores, and shops devoted exclusively to pens, papers, and cards. Walk into any greeting-card store and you will find them neatly displayed row upon row, categorized by the occasion for which they are intended. One large group is concerned with life-cycle events: birth, confirmation, bar mitzvah and bat mitzvah, engagement, marriage, and bereavement. Another set marks events in the cycle of the year: New Year’s, Valentine’s Day, Easter, Passover, Chanukah, and Christmas, as well as birthdays. Yet another expresses basic sentiments and wishes: I love you, I miss you, Get well soon, Thank you, I’m sorry Still others are blank: the buyer creates the message for the appropriate occasion.
You might think of greeting cards as prefabricated letters, ready to send. With the exception of the blank cards, they’ve already been specialized for particular occasions. Of course, letters have long been categorized by function and occasion. Greek and Roman rhetoricians recognized different types of letters: letters of congratulation, letters of thanks, letters of praise and blame, and so on. They wrote the equivalent of how-to manuals, providing models of the different types of letters and offering instruction on how to write them. Following in their footsteps, we still classify letters by function, and books like Jennifer Williams’s still coach us in the writing of love letters and valentines, invitations, thank-you notes, letters of sympathy and condolence, and more. What’s different today is that you have a choice: you can pen a note from scratch, or you can buy a card that’s been prepared in advance. It’s the difference between preparing a homemade meal and heating up a prepackaged serving.
If greeting cards are like letters, they also bear a resemblance to business cards and postcards. The connection to business cards is perhaps not so immediately obvious, but there is a strong historical link. The precursor to today’s business card was the visiting card or calling card. (You’ve probably seen them in the movies when a gentleman hands his card to the servant opening the door of the home he’s just entering.) Such cards came into popular use in the eighteenth century. They often contained an engraved scene as well as the name of the caller. The less expensive ones left room for the visitor to sign his or her name; people in positions of higher rank had their names engraved on them. Cards came in two sizes, the smaller ones for gentlemen, the larger for ladies. In the nineteenth century the cards became more elaborate, with fancy borders and hand painting. It also became the custom to include a seasonal message on the card, e.g., Christmas greetings. The first Christmas cards (greeting cards, that is), produced in the mid-nineteenth century, were the same size as women’s calling cards. And so it appears that the practice of identifying oneself through calling cards subtly shifted into a practice of sending seasonal greetings. Meanwhile, calling cards — which had in fact been used for business purposes too — eventually dropped the seasonal acknowledgment to become the no-nonsense business cards we have today.
The postcard seems to have developed in parallel with the greeting card. No doubt each influenced the other in multiple ways. Certainly, in order to establish themselves as acceptable vehicles of communication, they had to address — and in a sense do battle with — some of the same social obstacles. Like the memo, the postcard put a premium on conciseness and brevity, only more so. Of course, it had always been possible to write short letters. Yet for much of the recent history of personal letters, the norm seems to have been to write long and substantial ones. British letter writers in the eighteenth century, Howard Anderson and Irvin Ehrenpreis suggest in their essay on “The Familiar Letter,” “were perhaps the more likely to take care that their letters should be long and worth reading because throughout the century the recipient had to pay the post, and might be inclined to judge rather critically what he had paid for.”17
And if the advice offered letter writers can be taken as a clue to habits of the time, letters were still expected to be lengthy well into the next century. The author of Cradock’s Art of Letter Writing Simplified, published in 1844, felt the need to explain that proper letters could be written in “not more than six or eight lines.” Having entertained guests the night before, for example, the hostess could write them the following morning: “Mrs. Thompson’s compliments to Mrs. Bennett and the young ladies, hope they got safe home and are perfectly recovered from the fatigues of last night.” And the guests’ reply could be brief as well: “Mrs. and the Misses Bennett return thanks to Mrs. Thompson for her kind enquiries; they reached home in perfect safety, and are all well, except Julia who has taken a slight cold.”18
The invention of the postcard, however, created a form where brevity would be the rule rather than the exception. After a short period of experimentation in the private sector, the first postcards used on a mass scale were created by national governments: by Austria in 1869, by Britain in 1870, and by the United States in 1873. At the international postal congress the following year, it was agreed that cards, although varying in size from country to country, could cross national borders without being restamped.
Although the postcard quickly found a public eager to use them — seventy-six million of them were sold in Britain the first year — how exactly, or even whether, they were to be used in polite society was not immediately apparent. The author of Don’t: A Manual of Mistakes and Improprieties, writing in 1890, warned his readers that “[i]t is questionable whether a note on a postal card is entitled to the courtesy of a response.”19 What was the problem? There was barely enough room to say anything, and certainly no room for the wordy, formal openings and closings that a polite writer would be expected to use. “For the purposes of correspondence,” one man observed, “they are practically useless. There is . . . barely room for you to write your name. . . . They are utterly destructive of style, and give absolutely no play to the emotions.”20 Then, too, since a postcard had no envelope, privacy couldn’t be guaranteed. “My grudge against the postal card,” one writer observed in a letter to The Atlantic Monthly in 1877, “is the tendency to read, against your own will, postal cards not addressed to yourself. There is a fascination about the thing which is very like kleptomania.”21
Postcards also seemed impolite because their use suggested that the writer wasn’t prepared to take the time to write a proper letter. Yet this was also their attraction. In 1903 the Lincolnshire Echo called the postcard “the spirit of the age — brevity and speed.” Three years earlier a Miss Margaret Meadows had observed that the postcard was “a sign of the times” and suited to “a period peopled by a hurried generation that has not many minutes to spare for writing to friends, what with express trains going at the rate of a mile a minute, telegrams and telephones.”22 By the turn of the century the opinion of polite society was turning. “Postcards are no longer considered vulgar,” wrote the Daily Express in 1902. The postcard, like the memo a product of the new spirit of bureaucratic efficiency, had achieved respectability.
Today the letter, the postcard, and the greeting card each inhabit their own social niche. Much as my sister’s note wasn’t the exact social equivalent of face-to-face conversation, neither are these three written genres completely interchangeable. There is overlap, to be sure, in the social territories they cover, and this means we can sometimes choose which to use. You can send someone a letter, a postcard, or a greeting card to acknowledge his birthday But you will be saying something different with each one — they are not exactly equivalent. Just what significance your choice has, though, will depend on any number of factors. In some circles greeting cards are considered lowbrow — especially the most traditional of them, with their quaint rhyming verse and sweet sentimentality. But in other circles these very same cards are a much-cherished vehicle of intimate contact. Regardless, they are a popular form, standing at quite a distance from the literary letter with all its lofty pretension.
It is perhaps for this reason that I have been unable to find much scholarly work on greeting cards. While there is a rich scholarly literature on the history and function of the letter and similarly of the book, there is remarkably little written about the lowly greeting card. The main source book I have located is Ernest Dudley Chase’s The Romance of Greeting Cards, a book first issued in 1926 and edited and reissued in 1956. Chase was a greeting-card designer whom the book jacket describes as a “propagandist for the greeting card.” Indeed, his tone is more often celebratory and promotional than scholarly. “The story of the Greeting Card,” he begins, “is truly a romance. The record of a vital, fast-growing industry, it is a picture of many times and different eras; and it is the story of many men and many women. In carrying messages of love and friendship, the Greeting Card has ever brought people closer together. In these days when continents are but hours apart and soon may be only minutes apart, the importance of one more personal bond between people the world over is self-evident.”23
Searching for other entry points into the subject matter, I was fortunate to find a source in a rather unexpected place. In the American Anthropological Association’s newsletter, I discovered that an anthropologist named Ken Erickson had testified before the Postal Rate Commission on the cultural significance of greeting cards.24
The Postal Rate Commission (PRC) was created in 1970 in conjunction with the formation of the United States Postal Service (USPS). In that year the Post Office Department was dissolved and replaced by the USPS, a self-supporting postal corporation wholly owned by the federal government. The mission of this new organization would be “to bind the Nation together through the personal, educational, literary, and business correspondence of the people” by providing “prompt, reliable, and efficient service to patrons in all areas.” Authority for the new postal system was transferred from Congress to the postal corporation’s management and to a newly created board of governors. And a five-member, independent Postal Rate Commission was established to rule on Postal Service requests for postal rate increases.
In 1997, when the Postal Service requested a $2.4 billion increase, which would include an increase in first-class postage from 32 to 33 cents, the PRC initiated a series of hearings at which the different constituencies affected by the rate hike could air their views.25 Initial briefs were filed by more than forty special-interest groups, including the American Library Association, the Association of American Publishers, and the Newspaper Association of America. Most of them claimed that the increased cost of mailing personal letters, advertisements, bills and statements, newspapers and magazines, mail-order catalogs, and the like would be harmful to their businesses and, of course, to the consumer. Among those making such an argument was the Greeting Card Association (GCA), a trade association of greeting-card publishers whose members produce ninety percent of the cards in the United States.26
The GCA took a novel approach, arguing that the rate increase would do harm to American cultural life. The Postal Service had based its argument for the proposed rate hike on a classical economic analysis of supply and demand, cost and benefit. But the GCA pointed to section 3622(b) of the Postal Reorganization Act, which states that when the Postal Rate Commission is considering a request to change postal rates, it must take into account “the educational, cultural, scientific, and informational value to the recipient of mail matter.” An economist, James A. Clifton, testified before the PRC that the rate increase would have negative consequences for American cultural life, regardless of its effect on economic life, if it diminished the number of greeting cards sent and received. The members of the PRC seemed to appreciate this novel angle, one based on cultural rather than economic value, but they questioned whether Clifton had the professional expertise to make it. “Are you a socio-cultural anthropologist?” one of the commissioners asked. Clearly the answer was no, but the door was now open to exploring the cultural angle.
Ken Erickson was called to testify before the PRC on the cultural significance of greeting cards. A professor of anthropology at the University of Missouri, he had previously been asked by Hallmark to do a study of Mother’s Day cards, which included observing and interviewing people as they shopped for cards in shops. In his testimony, Erickson explained the anthropological notion of gift exchange, and asserted that greeting cards exist simultaneously in a market economy and a gift economy. Greeting-card publishers manufacture them, customers buy them, and for the price of postage the postal service will deliver them. But these money-based transactions, while undeniably a part of the life cycle of greeting cards, don’t really get at what they are about. For their primary value is cultural, not economic. They “embody as well as mediate social relationships,” Erickson said. “They communicate meanings and intentions about relationships and, in so doing, they signal their cultural value. . . . Greeting cards are a way to signal (and sometimes reshape) the cultural value attached to relationships over time.”
A greeting card makes the transition from commodity to gift at the point at which you select it. Choosing the right card is serious business. When you enter the card shop, you often already have a person in mind and the occasion you want to acknowledge in sending the card.27 The hard part is finding a card that properly acknowledges the occasion, the person you’re sending the card to, and the relationship you have with that person. The card, says Erickson, has to “match the present state of the relationship with reference to past relationships, relationships that are shaped by the presence (or absence) of other people. A card for a family member with whom you have had a warm and affectionate relationship in the past but do not have such a close relationship now is different from a card for someone with a different interpersonal connection with you.”28 Getting this right means taking all the design elements into account: the printed message, the illustrations (or lack of them), the colors, the card stock. You may not be conscious of all these elements as you choose, but still they will combine to produce an overall feel or mood, and that’s what you’re after.
Standing there in the card shop, what is foremost isn’t the cost of the card (although that may be a factor) but the significance, the value or worth, of the relationship. No wonder that when you watch people selecting a card you’ll often see them lingering reflectively — standing there, feeling, remembering, assessing. It’s one of those moments, not normally acknowledged in the culture, when we take time to meditate on the meaning, with all their complexities, of our intimate relationships. Erickson suggests that each greeting card stands “between memory and hope.” It arises out of an existing relationship with its prior history (memory) and points to an uncertain, but wished-for future (hope). Days, weeks, or months before the card has been received, the relationship is already being invoked by the sender: the giving has already begun.
It’s strange, in a way, that the selection of a mass-produced artifact can carry so much meaning. The greeting-card company may have produced thousands or even tens of thousands of copies of this very card and distributed them in every card shop in the country, but the number of outstanding copies has no bearing on the impact this particular card will have on my intended recipient. He or she will receive this card, this physical object, and will interpret it in terms of its overall message, its gestalt. In this respect, choosing a card is a lot like choosing a book as a present, or an article of mass-produced clothing. In making your choice, how well have you communicated something of significance about your relationship with that person?
The choice of the card (or of the book or the shirt) is therefore a personal act — made by one person for and in acknowledgment of another. But in the case of the card in particular, convention requires that you do more to personalize it. You must address the card (“Dear So-and-so”) and sign your name. And in many instances you will add an additional line or two, or more, in your own words. Through these extra touches you personalize a mass-produced item and make it unique. As a sign of its new status, it can’t be returned to the shop once you’ve written on it.
Because personalization is such an important part of the process, receiving a card that shows little attempt to personalize it specifically for the recipient — to reach out and touch him or her — may do little to strengthen the relationship, and may actually undermine it. Or it may serve as a tangible and painful reminder of a broken connection. Some cards just feel hollow, either because they haven’t been annotated or because the annotations feel strained or perfunctory.
Annotation is, of course, one of the most basic and important ways we have to tailor a document to particular circumstances of use. Medieval books, with their Bible passages at the center of the page and their surrounding rings of commentary, are perhaps our most magnificent examples of annotational practices. But all around us are examples of annotation that are no less important for being less beautifully executed. We may write on a memo or a printed copy of an e-mail message, then fax the annotated copy to someone else. Or we may write in the margins of a book we’re reading, or highlight the text with a colored marker. Catherine Marshall, a researcher formerly at Xerox PARC, now at Microsoft, has observed that undergraduates will search out used copies of textbooks in a college bookstore, looking for those with the most useful annotations.29
In inscribing a greeting card, you add a great deal of meaning through the actual words you choose. Do you say “Dear So-and-so,” or “My dearest” — or do you write the person’s name without further adornment? Do you close with “Love,” or “Warmly,” or “With best wishes”? Or do you simply sign your name without any further closing? What additional message do you add, and how long is it overall? Is it all contained on the right-hand side of the card? Does it spill over onto the left-hand side? Or do you need additional sheets of paper, so that the card becomes a vehicle for a full-scale letter? Personalization, however, comes not just through the words, the new content you’ve added, but by the very fact that you have chosen to handwrite anything at all.
Indeed, handwriting very much carries the mark of the personal. It means something to us today when we receive a handwritten card or letter, or even a hand-addressed envelope. The writer is signaling some sort of personal relationship with us (or an advertiser is trying to trick us into thinking this). But this “reading” of handwriting as being personal is a relatively recent cultural development. Until the printing press was invented, there simply was no alternative to handwriting. Books, letters, and accounting records were written by hand. Printing, as first conceived, was a mechanical alternative to the handiwork of the scribe. The products of the hand and of the press were largely undifferentiated. But over the course of several centuries, whether or not something was written by hand came to acquire cultural significance. Printed — that is, mechanically produced — works came to be understood as public and impersonal expressions. The work of the hand, by contrast, came to be understood as a form of personal expression. Drawing on the work of Michael Warner (in his book The Letters of the Republic),30 Tamara Plakins Thornton, in Handwriting in America, explains this divergence of function:
[S]ometime in the eighteenth century the cultural trajectories of print and script were set by their respective relations to the hand, and from that time they did diverge. Print lost any association with the hand just as pointedly as script [handwriting] retained it. This association of script with the physical executor of the script endowed handwriting with a unique set of cultural meanings and functions. For if print was defined by its dissociation from the hand, the body, and the corporeal individual that created it, then handwritten matter necessarily referred back to the hand, the body, and the individual in new ways. . . . Words transmitted their authors’ ideas; scripts, the authors themselves.31
This is very much the point of a greeting card, isn’t it: to send something of yourself. Through a combination of prefabricated object and specially tailored annotation, you put into material form not only an abstract message but a portion of yourself. In his classic work on the gift, Marcel Mauss suggested that “to give something is to give a part of oneself. . . . [0]ne gives away what is in reality a part of one’s nature and substance, while to receive something is to receive a part of someone’s spiritual essence.”32 (He was referring to one specific non-Western culture, the Maori.) This turns out to have been one of the more controversial statements in Mauss’s treatment. It was attacked by other anthropologists as a form of mysticism and mystification. “Are we not faced here,” said Levi-Strauss, “with one of those instances (not altogether rare) in which the ethnologist allows himself to be mystified by the native?”33
Perhaps. But what Mauss claims makes sense to me about our culture. All artifacts, after all, are the materialization of some dimension, some portion, of human life. All documents, then, as the materialized voice or breath of their creators, carry aspects of their creators’ “essence.” This is as true of an IRS 1040 tax form (which carries a trace of the essence of a massive bureaucratic entity, not a person) as it is of my sister’s one-word note. Greeting cards are a highly ritualized form of such transfer.
Once the card is ready, the next stage of its existence is its delivery. Ken Erickson naturally focuses on the delivery of the card by mail, since he is testifying before the Postal Rate Commission. Sixty to seventy percent of cards arrive by post in the United States, the rest being delivered by the writer or some other intermediary34 The addressing of the envelope, the choice of a stamp and the delivery method (first class, priority, express, etc.) may all have social significance. How much (or little) do we think about the recipient when addressing the envelope? Does our handwriting in some way reflect our feelings about him or her? Do we make a special trip to the post office, or to a particular branch, in order to see the card off more speedily, or to have it postmarked from one town rather than another?
Finally, the moment arrives when card and recipient meet. It is typically a physical joining as the recipient grasps the envelope and undertakes the delicate work of opening it. (A whole chapter could be written on this alone.) The card is read. The length of time this takes is likely to be small relative to the amount of time it took to choose the card and send it. You might think of this as the whole point of the preceding efforts, but this isn’t quite right. For, as we have seen, the time preceding this is equally a part of the ritual, and is equally important. Yet there is no denying that the instant of reception is a crucial moment as the recipient absorbs the printed message, the inscription, the design, and takes in a first impression.
With some greeting cards, first impressions are all we ever get. The Happy Birthday card accompanying the gift is quickly opened in front of the giver as a preliminary part of the ritual, a necessary politeness before tearing into the main event. But with many cards, their work is hardly done at this point. It isn’t uncommon for them to be put on display: on the mantel, or the refrigerator, or on a table. In his research, Erickson found that for certain classes of cards — Mother’s Day cards in particular — people take future display into account when buying them.
Why is display important? “Changing — or enduring — relationships among family members and friends,” says Erickson, “are made visible in the display of cards; the selection and receipt of cards is laden with emotional and cultural baggage.” Making the card visible keeps the sender present for the recipient. But equally important, it makes the relationship visible to others. Look at the lovely card my son has sent me. See how my daughter is thinking of me. Like the display of another kind of document, the photograph, or like flowers sent to someone’s workplace, the card on display is a concrete and public manifestation of connection.
And there may well be yet another stage in a greeting card’s life: when it is put away for safekeeping. Many of us hold on to objects having special personal significance, tucking them away in our sock drawer, or in shoeboxes in the closet or the attic. In an informal and possibly unselfconscious way, we maintain a personal archive, a treasure chest of cherished artifacts and the memories they hold for us. This is a very old practice. The word “archive” comes from the Latin arca, originally meaning a place to store things, a box or chest. (In English, we still find ark used in this way, in phrases like “Noah’s Ark” and “the Ark of the Covenant”) In the Middle Ages, Ivan Illich reports, each monastery had an area, which was “kept in the sacristy to store the treasures: chalices and vestments for the liturgy; relics, mainly the assorted skulls and bones of saints enclosed in precious boxes; and, besides these objects, also books.”35 Kings in twelfth- and thirteenth-century England, according to M. T. Clanchy, also had archives in this sense, but rather than being kept in a fixed place, they would be moved around, as the king moved from place to place.36 The Latin word for their contents, thesaurus, has also come down to us as a document-related term; its original meaning is “treasure.”
In the privacy of our own homes we are likely to hold on to any number of treasures: cards, letters, and notes written long ago, photographs, scrapbooks filled with mementoes from an earlier era. We can’t throw them out, even if we can’t say why. We may look at them rarely or not at all, yet still it is somehow comforting to know they are there. It’s as if something of importance is embedded in their very substance. This has less to do with their information content per se than with the emotions they evoke and the personal relationships they signify and embody. Of course, not all these items are documents. And not all those that are documents started out with personal significance. Bureaucratic and mass-produced items — theater tickets and programs, newspaper clippings, even cash register receipts — may acquire a special status if they’ve come to stand for some significant person or event.
My sister’s note became an archival item in my father’s care. Initially, it lay in my father’s drawer for thirty years or so, passively performing its memory function. During that time he may have come upon it now and then among the pencils and paper clips, the scissors and other artifacts that so commonly inhabit people’s desk drawers. In one of these encounters he noticed that the note was fraying, and took steps to preserve it. He mounted it and annotated it, and in this process it was further transformed. For by taking these steps, he was declaring the note to be something worthy of preservation, description, and display. The note suddenly became something akin to a mounted butterfly, a framed photograph, or an artifact in the custody of a museum or archive. In much the same way, greeting cards end up in drawers, or in scrapbooks alongside memorable photographs.
In addition to his fieldwork — observing and talking to shoppers as they bought cards — Erickson conducted a phone survey. These results further confirmed the significance of greeting cards in American cultural life. A strong majority of those questioned, for example, felt that greeting cards helped them to celebrate holidays and special occasions, and to know that they were cared about at times of illness and bereavement. What is perhaps more interesting is that differences in patterns of use exist among different social groups. Generally speaking, African-Americans and those with lower incomes seem to value the exchange of cards more. Just as cards are differentiated by occasion (birthday, Christmas, graduation, etc.) and by mood (humorous, sentimental, uplifting, etc.), so too is their value treated differently within different groups.
The picture that emerges is of a vast web of exchanges taking place around the country billions of cards being exchanged every year. Each exchange is unique: the pairing of a specific sender with a specific recipient. Each card, ultimately, is unique — purchased, annotated, and sent — and is the material acknowledgment of one specific, ongoing relationship. Yet taken together, Erickson argues, these activities help to “bind the nation together.”
In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson suggests that the idea of a nation as a collection of citizens united through common views and practices was partly achieved by the daily newspaper.37 As millions of readers received their morning newspaper and read it over breakfast, they could feel that they were part of an extended community: reading the same news stories, and thereby participating in the life of a common culture. Greeting cards would seem to have a similar function — not because everyone is receiving the same cards, but because so many of us are participating in these common rituals of gift exchange.
Today, of course, these very rituals are beginning to shift. E-mail and the Web provide new opportunities for personal communication. Instead of sending your grandmother a handwritten letter, you can send her e-mail. Instead of shopping for a birthday card at the shop down the street, you can send someone a digital card. (There are any number of services on the Web now that will let you choose cards from traditional categories, or even create your own, and will deliver them via e-mail.) You can do the same with digital postcards. What difference does it make whether we choose the traditional forms or the new digital ones?
As far as I can see, it comes down to a few basic differences in how we manage space and time, and to the social significance of these differences. Traditional letters and cards, like my childhood copy of Leaves of Grass, are tangible, continuously existing objects. This means that the card I receive in the mail from you is the very one you picked out and handled. There can be great emotional significance in this — not only because I can now hold the tangible evidence of my connection with you, but because I can hold on to it in the future as well. Your handwriting makes it all the more personal.
For the moment at least, digital cards and letters (e-mail) don’t have these physical properties. But they do offer certain temporal advantages. The most notable, of course, is speed: the selection and transmission of an online card can take place in a matter of minutes, as compared with the effort needed to purchase a card and mail it, and the time needed for the post office to deliver it. The speed of e-mail, in fact, has already produced a novel communicative behavior: some people chat with friends and family throughout the day over e-mail, sending short messages back and forth. Interestingly, there is some precedent for this in a prior era. During the eighteenth century, there were as many as a dozen mail deliveries a day within London, which meant that people could participate in multiple literary round-trips in a single day Today’s e-mail is different, however, not only because it allows so many more round-trips, but because the messages being exchanged are (or can be) more informal — nearly conversational in style.
The difference seems to come down to this: You can have a physical object, possibly handwritten, but it will be slow to arrive. Or you can have a digital transmission, lightning fast, without a unique object. So which is better? It depends, of course. It depends on the particular circumstances under which you are reaching out to someone, what you are wanting to say, what the nature of your relationship is, and what resources are available to you. How important is the creation of a tangible surrogate? How important is the possibility of saving it away? How important is the act of writing with pen on paper, the look and feel of the hand as it glides and hesitates? When is time a hindrance, and when does a slower rhythm of creation and transmission nurture the relationship between sender and receiver? If there are no general answers to this question, it doesn’t mean that the choices are without significance. Far from it.
I opened this chapter with a question: What will happen to the letter in the age of e-mail? Many questions are contained here: the future of handwriting, of paper, of the postal service, of literary correspondence, and, of course, of the possibility of real human contact at a distance. It is the last of these that I think is ultimately the most important. All communication is communication at a distance, an attempt to bridge the mysterious gap between sentient beings. Letter writing, now perhaps more in the cultural imagination than in actual practice, symbolizes the possibility of a graced, perhaps even a transcendent, communion between souls. (If the letter is the supreme form of personal, written communication, then surely the love letter is the supreme form of the letter, for just this reason.)
It makes me wonder if the real question being asked isn’t about the letter or about e-mail, but about a mode of life. Many of us feel that our lives are speeding up, becoming more fragmented and dislocated. Under such circumstances, what are the possibilities for deep human contact and communion? Will e-mail help us or hurt us? Is it possible that e-mail will enable a true correspondence of souls, or will it prove to be a technology of alienation? This is what I hear us asking, at any rate, even when the words are not spoken as such, even when we seem to be speaking most directly about properties of the new technologies.