To see
a world in a grain of sand
And a
heaven in a wild flower,
Hold
infinity in the palm of your hand
And
eternity in an hour.
William
Blake, “Auguries of Innocence”
Or if
it indeed be so, that this other Space is really Thoughtland, then take me to
that blessed region where I in Thought shall see the insides of all solid
things. . . . In that blessed region of Four Dimensions, shall we linger on the
threshold of the Fifth, and not enter
therein? Ah, no! Let us rather resolve
that our ambition shall soar with our corporal ascent. (E. A. Abbott, Flatland. A Romance of
Many Dimensions)
Lofty
reflections on the cultural significance of information technology are
commonplace now. Tedious as they can be,
they serve an important social function.
Some distribute general knowledge to society at large, some send it to
particular groups whose professional history makes information about
information an important and perhaps problematic issue.[1]
Literary
scholars comprise just this kind of group.
If certain features of the new information technologies have overtaken
us -- for instance, the recent and massive turn to word processing -- more
advanced developments generate suspicion.
When one speaks to colleagues about the emergence of the electronic
library, information networks, or about the need and usefulness of making
scholarly journals electronic, brows grow dark and troubled. And yet it is clear to anyone who has looked
carefully at our postmodern condition that no real resistance to such
developments is possible, even if it were desirable.
In this chapter I focus primarily on a
particular feature of literary works -- their physical character, whether
audial or visible. I shall be pointing
out why these features are important in a literary point of view and also
sketching certain practical means for elucidating these textual features. This last matter is also the most
difficult. The methodology I shall be
discussing requires the scholar to learn to use a new set of scholarly tools.
One
final introductory comment. My remarks
here apply only to textual works that are instruments of scientific
knowledge. The poet's view of text is
necessarily very different. To the
imagination the materialities of text (oral, written, printed, electronic) are
incarnational not vehicular forms. But
for the scientist and scholar, the media of expression are primarily conceptual
utilities, means rather than ends.
Scholars often seek to evade or supercede an expressive form to the
extent that it hinders the conceptual goal (whether it be theoretical or
practical). But good poets do not
quarrel with their tools in this way, even when they are developing technical
innovations. As William Morris famously
observed, "You can't have art without resistance in the materials".
Here I
shall work entirely within the terms of this distinction between a
scholarly/scientific and an artistic/aesthetic point of view. Establishing the usefulness of the
distinction is important, of course, for the purposes of this chapter’s
argument. But the same move will prove
equally important in the later chapters of the book, where I shall be working
to explore the fault lines in this same distinction. As we shall see, efforts toward “rethinking textuality”
– traditional as well as digital – are impeded by the uncritical assumption of
the authority of this same distinction.
We will come at a later point to see how this distinction functions and
under what circumstances one might want either to assume it or to set it aside.
The
Book as a Machine of Knowledge.
Let us
begin with the question "why": Why take up these new digital
tools or seek new editing methods, especially when both tasks make such demands
upon us? At this point most scholars
know about the increased speed and analytic power that computerization gives
and about the "information highway" and its scholarly
possibilities. Major changes in the
forms of knowledge and information are taking place. From a literary person's point of view, however,
the relevance of these changes can appear to be purely marginal: for whatever
happens in the future, whatever new electronic poetry or fiction gets produced,
the literature we inherit (to this date) is and will always be bookish.
Which
is true -- although that truth underscores what is crucial in all these events
from the scholar's point of view: We no longer have to use books to
analyze and study other books or texts.
That simple fact carries immense, even catastrophic, significance. Until now the book or codex form has been one
of our most powerful tools for developing, storing, and disseminating
information. In literary studies, the
book has evolved (over many centuries) a set of scientific engines -- specific
kinds of books and discursive genres -- of great power and complexity. Critical and other scholarly editions of our
cultural inheritance are among the most distinguished achievements of our
profession.
When we
use books to study books, or hard copy texts to analyze other hard copy texts,
the scale of the tools seriously limits the possible results. In studying the physical world, for example,
it makes a great difference if the level of the analysis is experiential
(direct) or mathematical (abstract). In
a similar way, electronic tools in literary studies don't simply provide a new
point of view on the materials, they lift one's general level of attention to a
higher order. The difference between
the codex and the electronic Oxford English Dictionary provides a simple
but eloquent illustration of this. The
electronic OED is a metabook, that is, it has consumed everything that
the codex OED provides and reorganized it at a higher level. It is a research tool with greater powers of
consciousness. As a result, the
electronic OED can be read as a book or it can be used
electronically. In the latter case it
will generate readerly views of its information that cannot be had in the codex
OED without unacceptable expenditures of time and labor.
Scholarly
editions comprise the most fundamental tools in literary studies. Their development came in response to
the complexity of literary works,
especially those that had evolved through a long historical process (as one sees in the bible,
Homer, the plays of Shakespeare). To
deal with these works, scholars invented an array of ingenious tools: facsimile
editions, critical editions, editions with elaborate notes and contextual
materials for clarifying a work's meaning.
The limits of the book determined the development of the structural
forms of these different mechanisms; those limits also necessitated the
periodic recreation of new editions as relevant materials appeared or
disappeared, or as new interests arose.
So far
as editing and textual studies are concerned, codex tools present serious difficulties. To make a new edition one has to duplicate
the entire productive process and then add to or modify the work as
necessary. Furthermore, the historical
process of documentary descent generates an increasingly complex textual
network (the word "text" derives from a word that means
"weaving"). Critical editions were developed to deal with exactly
these situations. A magnificent array of
textual machinery evolved over many centuries.
Brilliantly
conceived, these works are nonetheless infamously difficult to read and use.
Their problems arise because they deploy a book form to study another book
form. This symmetry between the tool and
its subject forces the scholar to invent analytic mechanisms that must be
displayed and engaged at the primary reading level – for example, apparatus
structures, descriptive bibliographies, calculi of variants, shorthand
reference forms, and so forth. The
critical edition's apparatus, for example, exists only because no single book
or manageable set of books can incorporate for analysis all of the relevant
documents. In standard critical
editions, the primary materials come before the reader in abbreviated and coded
forms.
The
problems grow more acute when readers want or need something beyond the
semantic content of the primary textual materials -- when one wants to hear the
performance of a song or ballad, see a play, or look at the physical features
of texts. Facsimile editions answer to
some of these requirements, but once again the book form proves a stumbling block
in many cases. Because the facsimile
edition stands in a one-to-one relation to its original, it has minimal
analytic power -- in sharp contrast to the critical edition. Facsimile editions are most useful not as
analytic engines, but as tools for increasing access to rare works.
Editing
in codex forms generates an archive of books and related materials. This archive then develops its own
metastructures -- indexing and other study mechanisms -- to facilitate
navigation and analysis of the archive. Because the entire system develops through the
codex form, however, duplicate, near-duplicate, or differential archives appear
in different places. The crucial problem
here is simple: The logical structures of the "critical edition"
function at the same level as the material being analyzed. As a result, the full power of the logical
structures is checked and constrained by being compelled to operate in a
bookish format. If the coming of the
book vastly increased the spread of knowledge and information, history has
slowly revealed the formal limits of all hardcopy's informational and critical
powers. The archives are sinking in a
white sea of paper.
Computerization
allows us to read "hardcopy" documents in a nonreal or, as we now
say, a "virtual" space-time environment. This consequence follows whether the hardcopy
is being marked up for electronic search and analysis, or whether it is being
organized hypertextually. When a book
is translated into electronic form, the book's (heretofore distributed) semantic
and visual features can be made simultaneously present to each other. A book thus translated need not be read
within the time-and-space frames established by the material characteristics of
the book. If the hardcopy to be
translated comprises a large set of books and documents, the power of the
translational work appears even more dramatically, since all those separate
books and documents can also be made simultaneously present to each other, as
well as all the parts of the documents.
Of
course, the electronic text will be "read" in normal space-time, even
by its programmers: the mind that made (or that uses) both codex and computer
is "embodied." This means
that, from the user's point of view, computerization organizes (as it were)
sequential engagements with nonsequential forms of knowledge and experience --
immediate encounters with abstract or complexly mediated forms. If the limits of experience remain thus
untranscended through computerization's virtual enginery, however, the new
tools offer a much clearer and more capacious view of one particular class or
"order of things" -- in this case, the order of those things we call
texts, books, documents.
Hyperediting
and Hypermedia.
The
electronic environment of hyperediting frees one to a considerable extent from
these codex-based limits. Indeed,
computerization for the first time releases the logical categories of
traditional critical editing to function at more optimal levels. But
"editing" text through word processers is not, in the view being
taken here, "hyperediting" because wordprocessing engines are
structured only for expressive purposes.
On the other hand, the deployment of "hypertext" software
should not be judged a necessity of hyperediting. The electronic OED does not use
hypertext but it is certainly a hyperediting project. So too is the work initiated by Peter
Robinson and the COLLATE program he has developed. To function in a "hyper" mode, an
editing project must use computerization as a means to secure freedom from the
analytic limits of hardcopy text.[2]
Nonetheless,
hypertext programs provide the clearest model for hyperediting. Hypertexts allow one to navigate through
large masses of documents and to connect these documents, or parts of the
documents, in complex ways. The relationships
can be predefined (as in George Landow's various "webs," like The
Dickens Web) or they can be developed and pursued "on the fly"
(through the relationships created in the SGML mark-up of a work). They are called hypermedia programs when they
have the power to include audial and/or visual documents in the system. These documentary networks may or may not be
interactively organized (for input by the reader/user). They can be distributed
in self-contained forms (for example, on CD-ROM disks, like The Perseum
Project) or they can be structured for transmission through the
network. In this last case, the basic
hypertext structure is raised to a higher power (but not to a higher level): a
networked structure (say, W3) of local hypertexts opens out into a network of
networks.
I
rehearse these matters, which are familiar enough to increasing numbers of
scholars, to remind us that the different purposes of different scholars
determine the choice of an actual hyperediting procedure. The range of options also indicates that
hyperediting should be seen as a nested series of operational possibilities
(and problems). In my own view, for
example, a fully networked hypermedia archive would be an optimal goal. Because such an archive of archives is not yet
a practical achievement, however, one must make present design decisions in a
future perfect tense. What that means in
practice is the following: (1) that the hyperediting design for a specific
project be imagined in terms of the largest and most ambitious goals of the
project (rather than in terms of immediate hardware or software options); and
(2) that the design be structured in the most modular and flexible way, so that
inevitable and fast-breaking changes in hardware and software will have a minimal
effect on the work as it is being built.
In practice, then, one would not lock into a front-end hypertext system
prematurely or choose computer platforms or hardware because of current
accessibility. Similarly, one wants to
store data in the most complete forms possible (both as logically marked-up
etext and as high-resolution digitized images).
Obviously
this paper cannot deal with all these matters in any extended way. One topic will be paramount: the importance,
as I see it, of organizing a hyperediting project in hypermedia form. Hypereditions built of electronic text alone
are easier to construct, of course, but they can only manipulate the semantic
level of the original work. Hypermedia
editions that incoporate audial and/or visual elements are preferable since
literary works are themselves always more or less elaborate multimedia
forms. When Pound spoke of the three
expressive functions of poetry -- phanopoeia, melopoeia, and logopoeia -- he
defined the optimal expressive levels that all textual works possess by their
nature as texts. Texts are language
visible, auditional, and intellectual (gesture and (type)script, voice and
instrumentation, syntax and usage).
The
Necessity of Hypermedia.
The
most direct way to show this need is through a set of examples. In these illustrations I shall move from a
straightforward presentation of the elementary material demands raised by
texts, to the more complex interpretive issues that those demands create.
Example
A.
First,
then, think about songs and ballads -- think in particular about Robert Burns's
ballad "Tam Glen." For a text
we might turn to what is now widely regarded as the definitive (so-called)
edition of Burns, the Kinsley/Clarendon Press edition, where the ballad is
printed from a manuscript text sent by Burns to James Johnson, who first
published it in his collection the Scots Musical Museum in 1790. Kinsley's (like Burns's and Johnson's) is a
text for the eyes, and because the text of this essay is also typographical, I
could easily reproduce it here.[3]
Yet the
ballad interested Burns exactly because it was an auditional text. Under different circumstances I could give a
reasonable reproduction of that ballad.
I could play for you a audio version of, say, Jean Redpath singing the
ballad to a score imitating the ballad as Burns might have heard it sung. Or I could play for you Andy Stewart's
"version" of the ballad, or others as well.
The
words of "Tam Glen" were in fact written by Burns, though the air for
it is traditional. Many of the texts in
Kinsley's edition of Burns, however, are hybrid works fashioned by Burns from
Scots songs he collected and then modified, more or less drastically.4
Burns did not hesitate to make his own changes in these works because in
collecting his Scots songs he heard many versions. The ones he himself published, and the texts
that come down to us through an edition like Kinsley's, do not represent the
kinds of variety Burns would have known.
Besides,
contemporary performances probably stand far removed from what Burns must have
originally heard. In this sense, the
Kinsley/Clarendon Press printed text is perhaps truer to its (printed) textual
tradition than contemporary performances could be to their oral traditions. Nonetheless, if our primary care is toward
preserving the original materials in a living way, could anyone prefer a paper
text of such a work to an audial text?
"But
that question compares apples and oranges," you will say. "The tape is the equivalent of a
popular, a modernized, an `uncritical' text.
It is good for what it does, of course, but it cannot be imagined as a
model for replacing what one gets in a complete critical edition like
Kinsley/Clarendon."
Then
let us go further: Would anyone who had it to choose prefer the Kinsley/Clarendon
edition of Burns's complete works to an equivalent edition based primarily on
audial texts?
Burns's
work is grounded in an oral and song tradition.
Paper editions are incompetent to render that most basic feature of his
verse. (The same might be said,
incidentally, of much of the work of Thomas Moore -- a lesser writer than Burns
altogether, of course, but a central romantic figure nonetheless, and one who
has suffered badly from the inability of scholarship to preserve the memory of
his work in living forms.)
The
point is not to denigrate the Kinsley/Clarendon edition, which is in fact a
model of scholarship. It gives us not
only good reading texts, it supplies us with an apparatus, a glossary, excellent notes, and -- a very nice feature
-- a few bars of sheet music for each text, so that we can hum up in our minds
the memory of the original tunes. And
all this in three volumes.
"Yes. And to have the equivalent in an oral form
would take many tapes or disks. Besides,
those musical documents wouldn't be able to organize and interrelate the audial
materials the way the Kinsley/Clarendon edition has done with its textual
materials -- the way any good critical edition will do."
But
what if one could do that? What if one
could have a critical edition of Burns's work in audial forms that allowed one
to engage the songs in the same kind of scholarly environment that we know and
value in works like the Kinsley/Clarendon edition? An environment allowing one to navigate
between versions, to compare variants, an environment able to supply the
central documents with a thick network of related critical and contextual
information that helps to elucidate the works?
What if
one could do that? The point is, we can.
Example
B.
When I
was asked to edit the New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse I wanted
to print texts that stayed as close to the original ones as possible. I also wanted to print a good deal of the
most characteristic and popular work of the period, as well as work (for
example, Blake's) that only came into prominence at a much later time.
So I
wanted color facsimiles of Blake and color facsimiles of a poem like William
Roscoe's "The Butterfly's Ball and the Grasshopper's Feast." And I wanted to print one of the most popular
and important satires of the day, William Hone's "The Political House that
Jack Built," with the original (and closely integrated) Cruickshank
illustrations. And I had other similar
ideas. As it turned out, various
commercial and institutional circumstances shot down most of these plans. All that remains of them is a facsimile of
the wonderful Hone/Cruickshank satire.
The New
Oxford Book is a reader's edition, not a critical edition. Nonetheless, it is a reader's edition sieved
through a scholarly conscience. To give
adequate reading texts of Blake, then, it ought to have given us color
facsimiles. The edition doesn't do that,
and it is less than I had hoped as a result.
Of course the edition does many other things, and does them (I hope)
well. Its unusual organization is
something not every press would have permitted, especially in such a
well-established series. But in the
matter of visual materials, the edition's limits are clear.
I give
this example partly to foreground the technical, commercial, and institutional
realities that determine what scholars can do in book forms. We have already glimpsed such determinants in
the example from Burns. The present
example reminds us how poetical texts frequently use the visual features of
their media as part of their imaginative field.
Just as Burns's poetry almost always exploits the language's auditional
forms and materials, Blake's almost always exploits the print medium for
expressive effects. A text of Blake's Songs,
for example -- whether critical or otherwise -- that does not at a minimum give
us a colour facsimile, is simply an inadequate text.
These
two examples may stand as paradigms for a whole range of textual materials that
scholarly editing to this point in time has not dealt with very well. We have had many fine editions of ballads and
songs since the late eighteenth-century, but none has been able to accomodate,
except in minimal ways, the auditional features of the texts. Similarly, expressive typography and other visually
significant features of book design have been handled to date in facsimile
editions, which rarely -- and never adequately -- incorporate critical and
scholarly apparatuses into their structure.
The failure to meet the latter needs is especially apparent in the work
produced during the periods I have been most involved with. The renaissance of printing that took place
in the late nineteenth-century utterly transformed the way poetry was conceived
and written. In England, William Morris
and D. G. Rossetti stand at the beginning of a poetical history that to this
day shows no signs of abatement. The
evolution of the modernist movement could (and at some point should) be written
as a history of book production and text design.
These
developments in England and America trace themselves back to William Blake,
whose work was put into circulation and made historically significant largely
through the efforts of the re-Raphaelities, especially Rossetti. Blake's work thus forecasts the massive
opening of the textual field that took place in the nineteenth century, when
image and word began to discover new and significant bibliographical
relations. Technological breakthroughs
like lithography and steel engraving are more than causes accelerating these
events. They are the signs of a
culture-wide effort for the technical means to raise the expressive power of
the book through visual design.
An
adequate critical representation of such work has to this point been seriously
hampered by the limits of the book as a critical tool. To date, for example, it has been impossible
to produce a true critical edition of the works of Blake. Because Blake's texts operate simultaneously
in two media, an adequate critical edition would have to marry a complete
facsimile edition of all copies of Blake within the structure of a critical
edition. One needs in such a case not a
critical edition of Blake's work but a critical archive. This archive, moreover, must be able to
accommodate the collation of pictures and the parts of pictures with each other
as well as with all kinds of purely textual materials. Hypermedia structures for the first time make
this kind of archive possible; indeed, work toward the development of such a
Blake archive is now underway.
The
problem of editing Blake's work in a thoroughly critical way is not peculiar to
Blake's idiosyncratic genius, however, it is symptomatic and widespread. To show how and why this is the case I offer
three further examples, all from the nineteenth century. The first and third involve authors as famous
as Blake, Emily Dickinson, and William Wordsworth. The second will also be brought forward under
an authorial sign, the once celebrated poet Laetitia Elizabeth Landon. The examples of Dickinson and Landon will
show the structure and extent of the editing problems already glimpsed through
the example of Blake's work. We conclude
with a discussion of the historical significance of the most recent critical
editions of Wordsworth.
Example
C.
It has
taken 100 years for scholars to realize that a typographical edition of
Dickinson's writings -- whether of her poetry or even her letters --
fundamentally misrepresents her literary work.
A wholesale editorial revaluation of Dickinson is now well under way. A particularly telling example appeared
recently in an article by Jeanne Holland on the Dickinson poem "Alone and
in a Circumstance.” Holland's facsimile
reprint of the poem shows a work structured in a close, even a dialectical,
relation to its physical materials.5
Dickinson
set up a kind of gravitational field for her writing when she fixed an
uncancelled three-cent stamp (with a locomotive design) to a sheet of paper and
then wrote her poem in the space she had thus imaginatively created. Whatever this poem "means," the
meaning has been visually designed -- more in the manner of a painter or a
graphic artist than in the manner of writers who are thinking of their language
in semantic or -- more generously -- linguistic terms.
One
could easily multiply instances of this kind of text construction in
Dickinson's work. As we know, she
refused what she called "the auction" of print publication. All of her poetry -- including those few
things put into print during her lifetime without her permission -- was
produced as handicraft work. This means
that her textual medium is treated in the writing process as an end in itself
-- ultimately, as part of the aesthetic field of the writing. Again and again in Dickinson's work we
observe her using the physique of the page and her scripts as expressive
vehicles of art. In an age of print
publication, manuscripts of writers tend to stand in medias res, for
they anticipate a final translation into that "better world"
conceived as the printed word. In
Dickinson's case, however, the genres that determine the aspirations of her
work are scriptural rather than bibliographical: commonplace book writing, on
one hand, and letter writing, on the other.
To edit
her work adequately, then, one needs to integrate the mechanisms of critical
editing into a facsimile edition -- which is precisely the kind of thing that
codex-based editing finds exceedingly difficult to do.
Example
D.
Here I
shall turn to another kind of text -- apparitionally very different, but
finally closely related to Dickinson's work.
Before we look at it, however, some preliminary comments may be useful.
The
nineteenth century is famously the age of the novel. Quantities of verse continued to be written
and read, of course, and the period has more than its share of poets who were
either very important or very successful or both. Nonetheless, it is a commonplace that the
period approximately defined by the deaths of Byron on one end and Tennyson on
the other, was a great age of fictional prose.
This
decline in the cultural fortunes of poetry, if in fact such occurred, has often
been connected to the explosion of late romantic sentimental verse, a kind of
writing typically associated with women or a feminized imagination. Dickinson, we know, became a great poet by
exploiting and modifying the sentimental tradition that so evidently supports
her work. In the version of this tale
told by the ideologues of modernism, Dickinson did not simply exploit and
modify the tradition, she exploded it altogether and escaped thereby into greatness.
Like
most such tales, this last inscribes a highly moralized fiction on a body of
evident fact. For example, probably the
most important venue for nineteenth-century poetry were the gift books and
annuals that began to appear in the early 1820s and that dominated the market
until late in the century. Scores of
these works were produced, though now we remember them, if at all, in terms of
a very few: The Keepsake, Bijou, Forget-Me-Not. Literary history pigeonholed them years
ago. They became a synonym for bad and
sentimental writing and to this day remain -- properly too -- an index to the
feminization of culture.6
An
equivalent textual condition develops in the world of nineteenth-century
fiction. The genre of the novel
underwent a great transformation as a consequence of new methods of producing
and distributing these works. This story
is now well-known. Suffice it to say
here that serialization (in its many forms) and the three-decker format had a
decisive impact on the character of fiction writing. These and other new transmissional mechanisms
not only gave authors fresh opportunities to change and revise their works,
they complicated the fictional options in other ways as well. The illustrated novels of Dickens and
Thackeray are simply the most outstanding examples of the generic changes being
brought about through new methods of book production.
Out of
this cultural context emerged one of the most distinctive minor genres of the
period: the poem on the subject of a painting or picture. The form would be elaborated in remarkable
ways by the pre-Raphaelites, and in particular by Rossetti, but it began much
earlier. Good examples can be found
throughout the early nineteenth century, but it was not extensively developed
until the advent of the period of gift books and annuals. At that point the form undergoes a distinct
mutation, as one can see by comparing (say) a poem like Wordsworth's
"Peele Castle" elegy with the picture-poems of Laetitia Elizabeth
Landon. In Landon's work, Wordsworth's
psychologically dynamic form passes beyond (perhaps also through) the Keatsian
and Shelleyan process of aestheticization so brilliantly analyzed in Arthur
Hallam's essay on Tennyson's early poetry.7 What is dynamic and psychological in
Wordsworth becomes formal and literal in Landon and, after Landon, in Tennyson,
whose early poetry is clearly written out of the same kind of sensibility.
The
queen of the annuals, Landon was obliged to write a great many poems for
pictures, and her work nicely illustrates the two dominant stylistic procedures
encouraged by the genre. First is the
poem that tries to render, more or less faithfully, the details of the
picture's imagery. To this is added, or
interwoven with it, an interpretive element.
Some of Landon's best known works are of this kind: for example, "A
Child Screening a Dove from a Hawk," after Stewardson, and "The
Enchanted Island," after Danby.
Both of
these poems are from Landon's 1825 series "Poetical Sketches for Modern
Pictures" (published in the volume The Troubador, and Other Poems). Because the texts were originally printed
without accompanying engravings, we might think that a scholarly edition now
could suitably forego reproducing their related pictures. The opposite, it seems to me, is true. Wordsworth's Peele Castle poem, for instance,
does not absolutely need its picture, is not integrated into its visual
materials the way Landon's poems are.
For her part, Landon has not just written poems after pictures that have
moved her, she has written picture poems for an audience whom she expects to be
familiar with the pictures. In each case
we are dealing with something very different from Wordsworth’s "picture of the mind"
("Tintern Abbey" 61).
Wordsworth takes his picture from an imagination of the individual
person -- ultimately, from the figure Wordsworth made of himself in his
verse. By contrast, Landon's individual
-- her figure of herself -- is everywhere represented in her work as a function
of social codes and attitudes. In this
respect her work recalls Burns's: though many of his songs were printed without
(sheet) music, they nonetheless bear their music in their heart, like the
original solitary reaper, and they expect their audience to be familiar with
that music. (On the other hand, Burns
stands closer to Wordsworth to the extent that his audience has forgotten or
lost touch with those songs.)
Many --
perhaps even most -- of Landon's picture-poems were printed with engravings of
the pictures. This happens because of
the generic character of the gift book, which was primarily organized around
its visual materials. Texts, both prose
and verse, were written in relation to pictures rather than (as in illustrated
editions of Scott or Dickens) the other way round. A typical example comes in The Keepsake
for 1829: Landon's untitled piece
written after Landseer's portrait of Georgiana, the Duchess of Bedford
("Lady, thy face is very beautiful").
As with much of Landon's best work, these lines evolve a
kind of antipoem that selfconsciously exploits its own factitiousness. Much could be said about its mannered poeticality, the work's
false elegancies that startle and disturb the reader from the outset -- as the
word "very" in the first line emphasizes. But I leave such readings for another more
appropriate time. Here it is sufficient
to see, and to say, that the poem properly exists in the closest kind of
relation with the actual picture, as Landon's socioeconomic treatment of her
subject emphasizes. Furthermore, in this
case art's relation to the economics of class, so central to Landseer's
original painting, receives a full bourgeois reinscription.
The
textual situation here is subtle and complex.
Proceeding from the semantic wordplay in the line "But thou art of
the Present", we begin to observe the relationship that this work is
fashioning, in every sense, between text and picture. For instance, at the semantic level the poem
simultaneously reflects upon its nominal subject, the Duchess, and addresses
its real subject, the "art of the Present". For Landon's poem is not written on the
duchess or painting so much as on the relation of the two. As such, the most important subject of all is
neither duchess nor painting, it is The Keepsake itself and its
(reproduced) engraving.
Here
one wants to recall the fact that Landseer's fame as an artist was largely
secured through the engravings that broadcast his work rather than through the
original oils. Georgiana, the Duchess
of Bedford is "of the
Present" in several senses, all of which are important to Landon. But most important are the contemporary
artistic representations of the Duchess -- the painting, the engraving, and now
Landon's poem, the last two being framed and represented in The Keepsake for
MDCCCXXIX, which is how the title page reads. Signifiers of Beauty come forward here in a
selfconscious, perhaps even a shameless, state of artistic exhaustion. Completely integrated, the engraving, the
poem, and the book correspond precisely to what Marx would shortly call
"the soul of the commodity."
The
picture-poem was a characteristic form in gift books and annuals, which often
constructed themselves around sets or groups of pictures rather than
collections of texts. Contributors were
asked to write poems to specific pictures, just as novelists of the
period were asked to write novels in three volumes, or in a sequence of
episodes of a certain number and size.
Under such circumstances, the poets all but completely abandoned the
usual romantic conventions of sincerity.
If the conventions appear at all, as they often do in Landon, they tend
to come like ghosts, conscious of their afterlife. Tennyson’s In Memoriam is the epic of
all such writing.
In this
example from Landon I have allowed myself to range beyond bibliographical
issues into interpretive commentary. I
have done this because literary history has long invisibilized Landon and the
gift book traditions she used. And yet
it is an historical fact that for 50 years and more that tradition was a
dominating influence on imaginative writing that exploited relatively brief
forms (like lyric and short story).
Indeed, it could easily be argued that Landon wrote in and through the
single most important (and institutionally based) poetic genre of the period. Even more interesting, this genre was not a
conceptual form (like epic, sonnet, or the novel) but a material one: the gift
book and literary annual. As we know,
"serious" people long ago stopped reading writers like Landon and
Felicia Hemans. But their work will
perforce become difficult to understand if we do not receive it in forms that
at least approximate its original imaginative condition. In Landon's case, the pictorial and
ornamental context of gift book production can be torn away from her work only
at the cost of its destruction.
The
example of Landon therefore culminates my answer to the question of
"why" one would want to exploit hypermedia environments in scholarly work. I submit that no edition aspiring to represent
the kinds of textual situation we have been examining would be happy with the
removal of any of the materials, or -- what often happens -- with the
translation of concrete textual features into those thin, abstract presences: a
bibliograpical notation or a scholar's narrativized description. I submit further that every critical and
scholarly edition will be -- has been -- forced into such abstractions when it
aspires, within the physical constraints of a tradititional book format,
to a comprehensive treatment of its materials.
The more complex the materials, the more abstract and/or cumbersome the
edition becomes.
Example
E.
In this
case I ask you to recall the Cornell Wordsworth, in particular the 3 volumes
devoted to The Prelude: Stephen Parrish's edition of the "Two Book”
Prelude (1977), W. J. B. Owen's edition of the "Fourteen Book"
Prelude (1985), and Mark Reed's edition of the "Thirteen Book"
Prelude (1993). All three are
models of their kind, meticulous and thorough.
Nonetheless, in their heroic efforts to represent that original complex
and unstable scene of writing, these editions -- coming at just the
historical moment that they do -- have put a period to codex-based
scholarly editing.
Here is
a true story that may help to explain my meaning. Several years ago I wrote to Mark Reed to ask
who was going to edit the "Five Book" Prelude. He wrote back and said there would be no such
edition since (a) that particular form of the work only attained a fleeting
existence, and (b) the Prelude project was already dauntingly large and,
from the publisher's point of view, textually repetitive. Instead, his edition would provide a
narrative description and textual history of the "Five Book" Prelude. He sent me a copy of this narrative, which
eventually appeared as part of his edition.
Mark
Reed narrativized the "Five Book" Prelude for one reason only:
The book format (including the commercial factors governing that format) did
not lend itself to printing yet another Prelude volume in the Cornell
series. Too much of the material was
viewable in the other volumes. Indeed,
the limits of the codex imposed all kinds of constraints on the editors of
Wordsworth's great uncompleted work, so that one will find it difficult to use:
on one hand full of scholar's codes, on the other cumbersome when one wishes to
compare different documents and texts.
As I
have already pointed out, these problems inhere in the codex form itself, which
constrains the user of the critical edition to manipulate difficult systems of
abbreviation and to read texts that have (typically) transformed the original
documents in radical ways. In an
electronic edition, however, both of these hindrances can be removed. Precisely because an electronic edition is
not itself a book, it is able to establish itself in a theoretical position
that supervenes the (textual and bookish) materials it wishes to study. The operations carried out by the traditional
book-based abbreviation systems continue to be performed in the electronic
edition, of course, for they are central to the whole idea of the scholar's
critical edition. In the computerized
edition, however, the reader does not have to learn or even encounter the codes
in order to execute critical operations (e.g., moving back and forth across
different parts of books or separate volumes, carrying out analytic searches
and comparisons). These operations are
performed on command but out of sight.
In addition, of course, the computerized structure allows the reader to
undertake searches and analyses of the material that would have been
impossible, even unimaginable, in a codex environment.
Conclusion:
The Rossetti Hypermedia Archive.
Hyperediting
is what scholars will be doing for a long time.
Many difficult problems will have to be dealt with, of course, including
major problems hardly touched on here: questions of copyright, for instance, or
the whole array of problems posed by the emergence of the vast electronic
information network that is even now coming into being. In the immediate context, multimedia
hyperediting poses its own special difficulties.
For
instance, hypermedia projects (like The Perseus Project, for instance)
are notably constrained by a structural feature of the digitized images they
employ. When these images are introduced
into a hypermedia structure, they have had to serve as simple illustrations;
for the (bitmapped) information in the digitized image cannot be searched and
analyzed as electronic texts can be.
How to
incorporate digitized images into the computational field is not simply a
problem that hyperediting must solve; it is a problem created by the very
arrival of the possibilities of hyperediting.
In my own case, the Rossetti hypermedia archive was begun exactly
because the project forced an engagement with this problem. Those of us who were involved with the
Rossetti Archive from the beginning spent virtually the entire first year
working at this problem. In the end we
arrived at a double approach: first, to design a structure of SGML markup tags
for the physical features of all the types of documents contained in The
Rossetti Archive (textual as well as pictorial); and second, to
develop an image tool that permits one to attach anchors to specific features
of digitized images. Both of these tools
effectively open visual (and potentially audial) materials to the full
computational power of the hyperediting environment. At this writing the DTDs (Document Type
Definitions) for all textual materials, including digitized materials, are
fully operational. The image tool is currently
in its first release.
It is
important to realize that the Rossetti project is an archive rather than an
edition. When a book is produced it
literally closes its covers on itself.
If its work is continued, a new edition, or other related books, have to
be (similarly) produced. A work like the
Rossetti hypermedia archive has escaped that bibliographical limitation. It has been built so that its contents and
its webwork of relations (both internal and external) can be indefinitely
expanded and developed.
The
"hyper" organization has also permitted the archive to escape another
bookish horizon that has profoundly affected editorial theory and textual
scholarship. A major aspect of this
scholarship has been the investigation of ancient texts -- in particular, the
scholarly reconstruction of such works from textual remains that have been
seriously broken over time. Such work
encouraged scholars to focus on a single text, the ideal goal of their
recostructive operations.
In more
modern periods, however, the textual remains are often very numerous. The history of the texts of Wordsworth and
Blake and Dickinson is not seriously fractured.
Indeed, the scholarly problem in such cases is how to sort out the
relations of the documents and put all those relationships on display. However, the goals of classical scholarship
and the material formalities of the book encouraged scholars to imagine and
produce single-focus works -- editions that organized themselves around what
used to be called a "definitive" text, the source and end and test of
all the others.
Whatever
the virtues of this kind of focus -- there are many -- one would like to be
free to choose it or not, as one needs.
In most cases scholars confront a vast, even a bewildering, array of
documents. Determining a single focus
can be analytically useful, even imperative for certain purposes. On the other hand, one can easily imagine
situations where a single determining focus hinders critical study. Besides, in many other cases one would like
the possibility to make ad hoc or provisional choices among the full array of
textual alternatives -- to shift the point of focus at will and need. One cannot perform such operations within the
horizon of the book. A hypermedia
project like The Rossetti Archive offers just these kinds
of possibilities, for the data in the Archive is not organized
hierarchically. It resembles more that
fabulous circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.
The
change from paper-based text to electronic text is one of those elementary
shifts -- like the change from manuscript to print -- that is so revolutionary
we can only glimpse at this point what it entails. Nonetheless, certain essential things are
clear even now. The computerized edition
can store vastly greater quantities of documentary materials, and it can be
built to organize, access, and analyze those materials not only more quickly
and easily, but at depths no paper-based edition could hope to achieve. At the moment these works cannot be made as
cheaply or as easily as books. But very
soon, I am talking about a few years, these electronic tools will not only be
far cheaper, they will also be commonplace.
Already scholars are creating electronic editions in many fields and
languages and are thereby establishing the conventions for the practice of
hyperediting. The Rossetti Archive is
one project of this kind.
Coda. A
Note on the Decentered Text.
Editors
and textual theorists interested in computerized texts appear to differ on a
significant point: whether or not hyperediting requires (even if it be at some
deep and invisible level) a central "text" for organizing the
hypertext of documents. My judgment is
that it doesn't.
The
question here can and often does get quite muddled. Enthusiasts for hypertext sometimes make
extravagant philosophical claims, and skeptics are then drawn toward sardonic
reactions. hypertext is no more a sign
of the Last Days than was moveable type five centuries ago.
To say
that a hypertext is not centrally organized does not mean -- at least does not
mean to me -- that the hypertext structure has no governing order(s), even at a
theoretical level. Clearly such a
structure has many ordered parts and sections, and the entirety of the
structure is organized for directed searches and analytic operations. In these respects the hypertext is always
structured according to some initial set of design plans that are keyed to the
specific materials in the hypertext, and to the imagined needs of the users of
those materials.
Two
matters are crucial to remember here, however.
First, the specific material design of a hypertext is theoretically open
to alterations of its contents and its organizational elements at all points
and at any time. Unlike a traditional
book or set of books, the hypertext need never be "complete" --
though of course one could choose to shut the structure down if one wanted,
close its covers as it were. But the
hypertextual order contains an inertia that moves against such a shutdown. So, for example, if one were to create a
hypertext of (say) King Lear, the "edition" as it is a
hypertext can pass forward in time indefinitely. Someone will have to manage it, but if it
remains hypertextual it will incorporate and then go beyond its initial design
and management. It will evolve and
change over time, it will gather new bodies of material, and its organizational
substructures will get modified, perhaps quite drastically.
The
second point goes to the matter of the conceptual form of hypertext as such (as
opposed to the specific implementation of that form for certain materials and
purposes). Unlike a traditional edition,
a hypertext is not organized to focus attention on one particular text or set
of texts. It is ordered to disperse
attention as broadly as possible. Of
course it is true that every particular hypertext at any particular
point in time will have established preferred sets of arrangements and
orderings, and these could be less, or more, decentralized. The point is that the hypertext, unlike the
book, encourages greater decentralization of design. Hypertext provides the means for establishing
an indefinite number of "centers", and for expanding their number as
well as altering their relationships.
One is encouraged not so much to find as to make order -- and then to
make it again and again, as established orderings expose their limits.
An
important historical fact might be usefully recalled: that the Internet, which
is an archive of archives, was originally designed precisely as a decentered,
nonhierarchical structure. The point was
to have an information network that could be destroyed or cut at any point, at
any number of points, and still remain intact as a structured informational
network. The theory of hypertext flows
directly from this way of imagining a noncentralized structure of complex
relationships. With hypertext, as with
the Net, the separate parts of the ensemble (nodes on the Net, files in a
hypertext) are independently structured units.
That kind of organization ensures that relationships and connections can
be established and developed in arbitrary and stochastic patterns.
This
kind of organizational form resembles our oldest extant hypertextual structure,
the library, which is also an archive (or in many cases an archive of
archives). As with the Internet and
hypertext, a library is organized for indefinite expansion. Its logical organization (for example, the
Library of Congress system) can be accommodated to any kind of physical
environment, and it is neutral with respect to user demands and navigation. Moreover, the library is logically "complete"
no matter how many volumes it contains -- no matter how many are lost or
added.
The
noncentralized character of such an ordering scheme is very clear if one
reflects even briefly on the experience of library browsing. You are interested in, say, Dante Gabriel
Rossetti's writings. So you move to that
LC location in the library (any library).
You stand before a set of books and other documents, which may be more
or less extensive. Nothing in that
body of materials tells you where to begin or what volume to pull down. It is up to you to make such a decision.
You can
only find your way to that point in the library if you can negotiate its
logical structure; and further browsing (or directed research) requires an even
greater self-conscious understanding of the organization. Neophite library users are often intimidated
by a library precisely because they can't immediately tell how to use it. Guides to a library will explain its logical
structure as well as the physical implementation of that structure. Even so, they are conceived in the same
spirit as the Internet and hypertext.
Subnets
(or substructures) of these kinds of organization may be more or less
hierarchically organized than other substructures. In a library, for example, historical
orderings of various kinds appear everywhere.
Nevertheless, these local basins of order are arbitrary with respect to
the total archive. This result obtains
because each unit of the organization (each document and also each set of
documents), like each node on the Internet, is logically defined as an
independent item.
In a
hypertext, each document (or part of a document) can therefore be connected to
every other document (or document part) in any way one chooses to define a
connection. Relationships do not have to
be organized in terms of a measure or standard (though subgroups of
organization can be arbitrarily defined as nonarbitrary forms). From a scholarly editor's point of view, this
structure means that every text or even every portion of a text (i.e., every
logical unit in the hypertext) has an absolute value within the structure as a
whole unless its absolute character is specifically modified.
The
Rossetti Archive imagines an organization of its texts,
pictures, and other documents in this kind of noncentralized form. So when one goes to read a poetical work, no
documentary state of the work is privileged over the others. All options are presented for the reader's
choice. Among those options are
arbitrary constraints that can be placed on the choices available. These constraints, which can be defined at
any level of the organization, can be invoked or revoked at will. The point
is that the structure preserves the independence of every document
because the organization, like the Net, is "divided into packets, [with]
each packet separately addressed."
Since each of these packets has "its own authority to originate,
pass, and receive messages," each is free to "wind its way through
the [archive] on an individual basis."8 Of course that is a metaphoric way of
putting the matter: Files in a hypertext, like documents in a library, are not
active agents. It is the user who moves
through the hypertext. Neverthless, the
ordering of the hypertext materials is, by default, arbitrary and discrete. If the archive contains any more centralized
or hierarchical structures, these have to be (arbitrarily) introduced. Furthermore, if they are introduced, the
extent of their authority over the user has to be (arbitrarily) defined as
well.
The
problem here returns us once again to the fundamental issue of the relation of
(hard copy) text to (electronic) hypertext.
The decentralized forms of hypertextual archives clearly possess logical
structure. That structure is designed to
facilitate navigation through the archived materials irrespective of the
purposes of the navigation.9 When the hypertext is used to manage study
of and navigation through complex bodies of (hardcopy) documentary materials --
the kinds that traditional scholarly editors deal with -- a special type of
"decentralism" appears. The
exigencies of the book form forced editorial scholars to develop fixed points
of relation -- the "definitive text", "copy text", "ideal
text," "Ur text," "standard text," and so forth -- in
order to conduct a book-bound navigation (by coded forms) through large bodies
of documentary materials. Such fixed
points no longer have to govern the ordering of the documents. As with the nodes on the Internet, every
documentary moment in the hypertext is absolute with respect to the archive as
a whole, or with respect to any subarchive that may have been (arbitrarily)
defined within the archive. In this
sense, computerized environments have established the new "rationale of
hypertext."10
But we
have to add one word more on this matter because this discussion of the
decentered text has left out of account the actual implementation of the
theoretical design. It has left out of
the account the user interface that
organizes and delivers the logical design of the archive to specific
persons. The interface one encounters in
the actual Rossetti archive is, in fact, anything but decentered. In this respect it is quite like every other
scholarly and educational hypertext work known to me -- The Perseus Project, say, or any of George Landow’s “webs.” All are quite “centered” and even quite
nondynamical in their presentational structure.
We want to be aware of this since a major part of our future work with
these new electronic environments will be the search for ways to implement, at
the interface level, the full dynamic --
and decentering – capabilities of these new tools.
[1]. An
earlier publication of this chapter, in The Electronic Text: Investigations
in the Method and Theory of Computerized Textuality, ed. Marilyn Deegan and
Kathryn Sutherland (Oxford UP, 1997)., 19-46 contained a series of graphical
illustrations of The Rossetti Archive.
[2]. The simplest definition of hypertext is
Theodore Nelson's, "nonsequential writing" (Literary Machines
[Mindful: Sausalito, CA, 1990], 5.2).
Nelson's book is a classic introduction to hypertext. For other introductory information about
hypertext and hypermedia, and about the projects mentioned in this and the next
paragraphs, see Hypertext/Hypermedia Handbook, ed. Emily Berk and joseph
Devlin (Internet Publications, McGraw Hill: New York, 1991; The Digital
Word. Text-Based Computing in the Humanities, ed. George P. Landow and Paul
Delany (The MIT Press: Cambridge MA, 1993); Hypertext. The Convergence of Contemporary
Critical Theory and Technology (Johns Hopkins UP: Baltimore, 1992); Hypermedia
and Literary Studies, ed. George P. Landow and Paul Delany (MIT Press:
Cambridge MA, 1991); Jay David Bolter, Writing Space: The Computer,
Hypertext, and the History of Writing (Laurence Erlbaum: Hillsdale, 1991).
[3]. See The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns,
ed. James Kinsley (Clarendon Press, Oxford UP: Oxford, 1968) I. 435-6.
5 This revaluation
of Dickinson studies was sparked by the great facsimile edition of the poet's
original fascicles, edited by R. W. Franklin, The Manuscript Books of Emily
Dickinson 2 vols. (Belknap Press, Harvard UP: Cambridge, MA, 1981). Since then the work of Susan Howe and her
students has been only slightly less significant, especially the edition of
Dickinson's fragments edited by Marta Werner (U. of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor,
2000) and the essay by Jeanne Holland, "Scraps, Stamps, and Cutouts,"
in Cultural Artifacts and the Production of Meaning, ed. Katherine
O'Brien O'Keeffe and Margaret J. M. Ezell (Princeton UP: Princeton, 1993). Howe's seminal essay is indispensable:
"These Flames and Generosities of the Heart: Emily Dickinson and the
Illogic of Sumptuary Values", Sulfur 28 (spring, 1991),
134-55. See also Paula Bennett, "By
a Mouth that Cannot Speak: Spectral Presence in Emily Dickinson's
Letters", The Emily Dickinson Journal 1 (1992), 76-99 and my own
"Emily Dickinson's Visible Language", ibid. 2 (1993),
40-57. Martha Nell Smith is currently
the head of the Emily Dickinson Editorial Collective, a group of scholars
committed to seeing Dickinson's work re-edited so as to expose its
"sumptuary values", i.e, the scripts and visible designs that are
such an important feature of the writing.
6 See Andrew Boyle, An Index to the Annuals, vol. I (vol. II never printed), (Privately Printed by Andrew Boyle: London, 1967); F. W. Faxon, Literary Annuals and Gift Books: a bibliography 1823-1903 (originally printed 1912, reprinted Pinner, Private Libraries Assoc: Boston, 1973); Anne Renier, Friendship's Offering. An Essay on the Annuals and Gift Books of the 19th Century (Private Libraries Assoc.: London, 1964); Alison Adburgham, Silver Fork Society. Fashionable Life and Literature from 1814 to 1840 (Constable: London, 1983).
7 Arthur
Henry Hallam, "On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry, and on the
Lyrical Poems of Alfred Tennyson", reprinted from the Englishman's
Magazine (August, 1931) in T. H. Vail Motter, ed., The Writings of
Arthur Hallam (Modern Language Assoc. of America: New York and London,
1943), 182-197.
8 Quoted from Bruce Sterling, "Internet", The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Science Column no. 5 (February, 1993). I quote here from the text of the column that was made available through a Network mailing list.
9 For discussion of the structure of hypertext (and a critique of rather loose representations of its decentralized form) see Ross Atkinson, "Networks, Hypertext, and Academic Information Services: Some Longer Range Implications," College & Research Libraries 54 no. 3 (May 1993), 199-215.