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Variants The Journal of the European Society for Textual Scholarship
12-13 | 2016 Varia
Wim Van Mierlo and Alexandre Fachard (dir.)
Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/variants/275 DOI: 10.4000/variants.275 ISSN: 1879-6095
Publisher European Society for Textual Scholarship
Printed version Date of publication: 31 December 2016 ISSN: 1573-3084
Electronic reference Wim Van Mierlo and Alexandre Fachard (dir.), Variants, 12-13 | 2016 [Online], Online since 01 May 2017, connection on 23 September 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/variants/275 ; DOI : https:// doi.org/10.4000/variants.275
This text was automatically generated on 23 September 2020.
The authors 1
This double issue of Variants: the Journal of the European Society for Textual Scholarship is the first to appear in Open Access on the Revues.org platform. In subject matter, this issue offers a wide scope covering the music manuscripts of the thirteenth-century French trouvère poet Thibaut de Champagne (expertly discussed by Christopher Callahan and Daniel E. O’Sullivan) to the digital genetic dossier of the twenty-first century Spanish experimental writer Robert Juan-Cantavella. The story of Juan- Cantavella’s “manuscripts” is an interesting: the dossier was handed on a USB stick to the scholar Bénédicte Vauthier for research; the files and their metadata became the subject of an extensive analysis of the writing history of his novel El Dorado (2008), proving that genetic criticism after the advent of the computer is still possible and necessary. In addition to Rüdiger Nutt-Kofoth’s detailed consideration of the concept of “variant” and “variation” in the German historical-critical tradition of scholarly editing, the current volume contains four more theoretical exploration of this topic, which formed the topic of the 2013 Annual Conference of the Society that was held in Paris in November 2013. Proposing a rapprochement between genetic criticism and scholarly editing, Dirk Van Hulle writes about how five key aspects of genetic study – exogenesis, endogenesis, epigenesist, microgenesis and macrogenesis – can be modelled to fit into an appropriate digital editorial infrastructure to make this type of research amenable and effective. Daniel Ferrer revisits the old distinction – and division -- between genetic and textual criticism to consider where the two fields are apt to meet, viz. at the point where variants are not just accidental, the result of the exigencies of textual transmission, but deliberate and creative. Hans Walter Gabler looks into the questions as to what happens when we edit manuscripts: what transformations take place when the document, ontologically conceived as autographic, as “materiality-and-writing”, is paired down so to speak into text. The only viable way, Gabler argues, to achieve a proper editorial presentation that does not simply signify a loss of the autographic, is via the digital medium. Hannah Sullivan, finally, asks a bold question: Why do authors revise, and keep revising, their texts? This question leads her into an interesting theoretical exposition on the differences between a text that is still in process and a text that is finished, the difference being one of what she calls “textual apprehension”. It’s all a matter of perspective, in other words. In addition, Luca Crispi delves into the “fictional” and “textual” world of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) to unearth, using the vast archive of manuscripts that Joyce produced during the work’s seven-year composition, a number of factual discrepancies in the novel, discrepancies which its writer lost track of. Gabriele Wix analyses the genesis of the Manhattan poems by the twentieth-century German poet Thomas Kling in an article that hones in on the poet’s archaeology of language and the deliberate forms of “sedimentation” and “stratigraphy” that characterize his composition method. Before closing off the volume with no less than 16 reviews of monographs, scholarly editions and digital editions, the section on “Work in Progress” reports on two on- going digital editorial projects: the LDoD Digital Archive, comprising the archival material for more than 500 hundred texts of Fernando Pessoa’s unfinished Livro do Desassossego, produced between 1913 and 1925, and CODEA, a digital primary corpus of Spanish historical documents. These projects represent some of the innovative, state- of-the-art thinking that is happening in scholarly editing in Europe at the moment.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Essays
Melodic Variance in the Songs of Thibaut de Champagne Christopher Callahan and Daniel E. O’Sullivan
Modelling a Digital Scholarly Edition for Genetic Criticism: A Rapprochement Dirk Van Hulle
Genetic Criticism with Textual Criticism: From Variant to Variation Daniel Ferrer
The Draft Manuscript as Material Foundation for Genetic Editing and Genetic Criticism Hans Walter Gabler
Why Do Authors Produce Textual Variation on Purpose? Or, Why Publish a Text That Is Still Unfolding? Hannah Sullivan
Some Textual and Factual Discrepancies in James Joyce's Ulysses: The Blooms’ Several “First Nights” Luca Crispi
Stratigraphic Soundings: A Genetic Approach to the German Poet Thomas Kling Gabriele Wix
Variations in Understanding Variants: (Hidden) Concepts of Text in German Critical Editions Rüdiger Nutt-Kofoth
Genetic Criticism Put to the Test by Digital Technology: Sounding out the (mainly) Digital Genetic File of El Dorado by Robert Juan-Cantavella Bénédicte Vauthier
Work in Progress
Encoding, Visualizing, and Generating Variation in Fernando Pessoa’s Livro do Desassossego Manuel Portela and António Rito Silva
CODEA: A “Primary” Corpus of Spanish Historical Documents Ruth Miguel Franco and Pedro Sánchez-Prieto Borja
Book Reviews
Johnny Kondrup, Editionsfilologi Adam Borch
James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities Geert Lernout
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David C. Parker, Textual Scholarship and the Making of the New Testament: The Lyell Lectures Oxford Trinity Term 2011 Geert Lernout
Luciano Gargan, Dante, la sua biblioteca e lo Studio di Bologna Alessandro Scafi
Luigi Ferreri, L’Italia degli Umanisti: Marco Musuro Alessio Assonitis
Ivo Castro, Editar Pessoa Simone Celani
Fernando Pessoa, Apreciações Literárias Carlota Pimenta
Joachim Maria Machado de Assis, Dom Casmurro Jessica Firmino
Catherine Rovera, Genèses d’une folie créole: Jean Rhys et Jane Eyre Christine Collière-Whiteside
The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition Matthew Creasy
James Joyce. Ulysses: Based on the 1939 Odyssey Press Edition William S. Brockman
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway Alice Wood
Dirk Van Hulle, Modern Manuscripts: The Extended Mind and Creative Undoing from Darwin to Beckett and Beyond Stefano Rosignoli
Daniel Apollon, Claire Bélisle and Philippe Régnier (eds.), Digital Critical Editions Ronan Crowley
Elena Pierazzo, Digital Scholarly Editing : Theories, Models and Methods Elli Bleeker correspSearch Frederike Neuber
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Essays
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Melodic Variance in the Songs of Thibaut de Champagne
Christopher Callahan and Daniel E. O’Sullivan
1 Scholars of Old French have long resisted the overly positivistic editorial policies associated with the nineteenth-century classical philologist Karl Lachmann, who sought to reveal an original text from extant, imperfect copies, scrubbed clean of scribal errors and contamination. Philologists subsequently turned to Joseph Bédier’s “best-text” approach as the most intellectually defensible policy: editors edit one witness for clarity and note all variants, regardless of their relative merit, in the apparatus. A few decades after Bédier’s passing, textual variants worked their way back to respectability as Paul Zumthor elucidated the fundamental notion of mouvance in Mediaeval textuality (1979, 610). Mediaeval texts are based, paradoxically, on instability.1 Manuscript witnesses preserve mere traces of ephemeral experience of Mediaeval texts that were read or performed aloud, heard by a public, transformed by subsequent performers, written down by someone, copied then by someone else, etc.2 As texts were constantly reworked, either consciously or otherwise through the stages of transmission, no single entity was responsible for what survives to this day. Editors must come to terms with this situation if they wish to convey the real conditions of the pre-print, oral culture that produced these works.
2 Editing trouvère lyric, the monophonic songs of Old French poets from roughly the second half of the twelfth to the early fourteenth centuries, poses several challenges, not least of which requires addressing variance on the level of text and melody. Thibaut IV, count of Brie and Champagne and king of Navarre, left aficionados of Mediaeval song a particularly large (more than sixty songs) and rich corpus in terms of generic breadth, registral subtlety, and melodic range. The first complete edition of Thibaut’s songs, published by Axel Wallensköld (1925), remains the standard reference work on Thibaut.3 Wallensköld takes an editorial position midway between Lachmann and Bédier, creating an ideal reading based on “[le] choix de la meilleure des variantes parmi celles que la filiation des manuscrits permet d’accepter” (1925, xcviii) (“the choice of the best variants that the manuscript filiations allow”) rather than recovering an urtext. The latter task proved impossible owing to the “contaminated” state of the
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manuscripts because “ils remontent directement ou indirectement à plusieurs sources utilisées en même temps” (1925, xcviii) (“they derive directly or indirectly from several sources used simultaneously”). His published version may thus be found directly in one manuscript or combined from more than one source under the cover of a uniform orthography (usually taken from trouvère MS K―Paris, Arsenal 5196), or it might be a hypothetical emendation when all manuscript readings are deemed to be faulty. Despite the obvious methodological faults in Wallensköld’s edition, no one has yet produced an updated textual edition of Thibaut’s songs. Perhaps more surprising, no one has edited Thibaut’s melodic corpus until now.4
3 Editors of trouvère lyric have recently made strides in bridging what was once a yawning chasm between the concerns of philologists and musicologists, yet equal attention paid to variance in both text and melody remains elusive. The present study lays out theoretical and practical considerations to redress that concern in editing trouvère song in general and Thibaut’s lyric in particular. After a brief history of editing trouvère music, we examine various sources of Thibaut’s melodies to confront the question of melodic variance. If recognizing the unstable foundation of Mediaeval textuality proves essential for understanding, say, Chrétien de Troyes or Froissart, confronting variance in trouvère melody, or so we contend, is equally crucial for appreciating the trouvère art. Such a confrontation must first address the largest collection of melodies that derive from chansonniers and that preserves melodies that vary only in minor ways among themselves. However, minor variance can pose major problems. Moving out from that central question, we look at two sources that offer entirely different melodies that sometimes utilize contemporary melodic structures and sometimes adopt seemingly older, even anachronistic conceptions of monody. Two other chanter sources preserve melodies that try to conform to new musical conceptions based on polyphonic forms. Finally, we explore the liminal cases of melodic variance — contrafacture and palimpsests — and examine the boundaries of the editorial enterprise.
Current state of trouvère editing
4 Early twentieth-century editions, steeped in Lachmannian textual ethics, not only obscured the inherent vagaries of manuscript transmission but also generally stripped the poetic text of its melody, altering its identity as an artifact rooted in performance. A notable exception to this practice was Joseph Bédier’s 1912 edition of the trouvère Colin Muset, which offered eight melodies but relegated them to the back of the volume. Regrettably, Bédier’s subsequent edition of Colin Muset (1938) contained no music, a norm which prevailed for the next four decades.5 Poetry being more accessible to musicologists than Gregorian notation to philologists, a scholar such as Friedrich Gennrich (1951, 1963), in his extensive publications on Mediaeval lyric, integrated music and poetry in ways that textual scholars did not feel qualified to do. But these were performance editions whose scholarly apparatus focused on the music, and they did not offer critical discussion of the texts.6
5 In the late 1970s philologists and musicologists, who had hitherto worked in isolation, each asking their own, discipline-specific questions of the manuscripts, began to collaborate. Samuel N. Rosenberg and Hans Tischler’s Chanter m’estuet (1981) proved to be a milestone in trouvère scholarship, closely followed by The Lyrics and Melodies of
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Gace Brulé (1985), in which Rosenberg collaborated with Samuel Danon (co-translator) and Hendrik van der Werf, and a re-edition of Chanter m’estuet in 1995. The latter two publications boast modern translations in either French (Chanter m’estuet) or English (Gace Brulé), which is also the case for Rosenberg’s next collaborative project, Songs of the Troubadours and Trouvères (1997), with musicologists Margaret Switten and Gérard Le Vot. The readability and concision of this last edition’s layout succeeds admirably in being at once a scholarly and a performance edition. Because these first collaborative efforts constituted a great leap forward from previous editions, only in retrospect are their shortcomings with regard to variance, in particular their attention only to textual and not to melodic variants, becoming apparent.
6 The earliest edition to address melodic variance is also the most accessible to the neophyte: Hendrik van der Werf’s Trouvère-Melodien (1977), an edition that put into practice much of what van der Werf outlined in his seminal work, The Chansons of the Troubadours and Trouvères (1972). It lays out all melodies synoptically, line by line, for each song.7 The completeness of van der Werf’s layout creates a curious shortcoming: its page-by-page presentation of each poetic line hinders the reader’s ability to grasp both the overall shape of the melodic contour and the role of repeated micro-gestures in constructing it (see O’Sullivan 2008, 66–67). Furthermore, readers lose sight of the distinction between major and minor variants, and variant melodies are not treated differently from those which are altogether different.8
7 These shortcomings were admirably addressed by Avner Bahat and Gérard Le Vot in an edition of Blondel de Nesle’s melodies (1996) that presents melodies synoptically but groups manuscripts by stemmata, thus facilitating the focus on variation. They employ a notational system in which below the base melody only variants are recorded as note heads, while completely concordant lines are differentiated with a system of forward and backward slashes, according to whether they occur within or across manuscripts (or both). Melodic isolates, finally, are presented separately from these concordant and semi-concordant layouts, avoiding the kind of visual overload that the reader of Trouvères-Melodien can fall prey to. Published to years after Yvan LePage’s textual edition of Blondel (1994), moreover, it is unclear whether LePage's and Bahat/Le Vot's editions were conceived as companiona volumes. Though the melodies are set over the first stanza of LePage’s edited texts, the text editor does not reference the melodic study in any way. Rather, the latter appears to have been designed after the fact in order to redress the imbalance inherent in yet another lyric edition without music, and as such was free to set its own course. Regrettably, it is the Mélodies volume’s very innovativeness and erudition which limit its accessibility to scholarly audiences without training in Mediaeval music, thus offsetting its benefits to a certain degree.
8 Lastly, Hans Tischler’s monumental Trouvère Lyrics with Melodies: Complete Comparative Edition (1997) presents serious issues of legibility. For it imposes a different rhythm on every single melody, though rhythm is systematically notated in only one late thirteenth-century trouvère chansonnier, Paris, BnF, fr. 846.9 As a result, the mostly identical melodic contours shared by numerous manuscripts are deftly obscured in a plethora of perceived subdivisions.10 The distinction between base melody and variants is thus difficult to determine, as every melody appears to be radically different from every other. Furthermore, although this opus is not organized artificially by genre, as was the case with single-author anthologies of the twentieth century, neither is it organized by poet, thereby enabling researchers to locate intact the corpus of
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individual trouvères. Rather, the entire body of trouvère song is organized alphabetically by incipit, as was Raynaud’s Bibliographie of 1884, rendering the study of individual poets more than arduous.
9 While the above survey is necessarily abbreviated and selective, it illustrates the earnest attempts of editors to convey trouvère song. Furthermore, because lacunæ have been progressively filled over time — editions with no music were replaced by collections with some music, which, in turn, gave way to anthologies that begin to address melodic variance ― it is only logical to suspect that other holes remain to be filled. As a means of conveying more concretely what these holes could consist of, we now address specific problems presented by the editing of Thibaut’s songs.
Small-scale variance among the major sources
10 The majority of musical sources that preserve Thibaut de Champagne’s melodies are formatted into large songbooks. Organization of chansonniers by genre, something that has been a common practice in modern editions, came into its own in Artois and in the decades after 1270, whereas lyric anthologies compiled in the two decades following Thibaut’s death (1253) juxtaposed, instead, a variety of song types, accentuating the permeability of intergeneric boundaries in trouvère song (Callahan 2012a). Significantly, in Thibaut’s case, his religious lai was placed near the center of MS Mt, the libellus devoted to his corpus which was inserted into Paris, BnF, fr. 844 (MS M) soon after the latter’s composition (Baumgartner 1987; Barbieri 1999; Haines 2002). As Wallensköld’s synoptic table at the end of his edition makes clear, this principle of chansonnier organization extended to most other early manuscripts, and by reproducing this order, an editor can offer the modern scholar / performer something of the Mediaeval experience of reading as intended by those responsible for these early collections, who may or may not have well included Thibaut’s works (Huot 1987; Formisano 1993; Haines 2004).
11 In editing the melodies of the grands chansonniers, the thorniest question may be micro- or minor variation, i.e. variation in segments shorter than one line. It is difficult because we believe that trouvères employed ornaments and cultivated performative styles that went beyond a melodic skeleton (see Table 1 for examples of both large- and small-scale variation). Most of Thibaut’s melodies, and this goes for most trouvères of his generation, used a bipartite structure that makes some of the work easier, because certain repetitions are predictable. In this structure, the stanzaic melody is divided between frons (or head) and cauda (or tail). It is the frons that proves the most regular in structure, and critics often schematize it as ABAB, where a melody A accompanies the first and third line of verse and melody B is set to the second and fourth. This symmetrical structure can help determine what musical gestures were part of the base melody and what might have been ornamental flourishes on the part of the performer from whom the scribe heard the melody or perhaps even on the part of the scribe himself. So if we see, for example, a two-note neume at the end of the second line and a three-note neume at the end of the fourth, as long as the final, structural tone is the same, it is safe to consider this variant as analagous to minor textual, perhaps orthographical, variants that need not encumber the apparatus.
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Table 1: Synoptic Transcription of stanza 1 of RS 324, MSS K, Mt, O.
12 Editing the frons of melodies is not always so straightforward. For example, if we take the melody accompanying RS 324 from just three of nine extant sources — Paris, Arsenal 5198 (MS K); Paris, BnF fr. 844 (MS Mt); and Paris, BnF fr. 846 (MS O) — significant melodic variance appears (Table 1).11
13 The melody in MS K begins on A, rises in conjunct (step-wise) fashion to D’, where it briefly recites, establishing D as a modal pole, and descends conjunctly to cadence on G. The next phrase takes this cadential pitch as its point of departure, again inscribing a rising-falling curve of a fourth before returning to the starting pitch, reinforcing the suggestion of transposed Dorian mode. The melody of MS Mt shows a similar rising- falling contour, but with a different starting pitch (G), and cadences via disjunct movement a third above its starting pitch. Unlike K, which cadences on the sub final, an unstable pitch which vigorously relaunches the second phrase, Mt’s cadential pitch invites suspension. The two melodies inscribe in effect, in the second phrase, a melodic curve of identical range, rising to C’ before falling, rising, and falling again to cadence on A. But as similarly as these melodies behave in the frons, their modal structure is quite different, and the cauda reveals them to be unrelated.
14 Examination of other manuscripts shows K to be the outlier, and Mt to be concordant with the other seven chansonniers that notate this song (three more do not record the music). Turning to the example of MS O, we see small-scale variation visible in the concordant melodies of manuscripts Mt and O. The differences between the two lie primarily in ornamentation: whether a given syllable is notated with one pitch or several. In phrases 1 and 3 of the frons, syllables 3 and 8 and ornamented now in O now in Mt, while in phrases 2 and 4, the last word is ornamented equally but differently in each. Again, while phrases 5 and 7 are identical, phrases 6 and 8 are ornamented differently, with each melody taking the lead in turn. The comparison to O also helps
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highlight places where Mt shows inconsistencies in the melodies of its pedes, which in theory are identical: phrases 1 and 3 cadence on different pitches while the eighth syllable in phrase 1 is ornamented and the same syllable in phrase 3 is not. Similarly, the step-wise curve of phrase 2 is leveled in phrase 4 to two series of identical pitches. Comparison of Mt with K thus reveals large-scale differences of the kind that require special treatment in the critical apparatus, and minor variation between Mt and O requires an even lighter hand.
15 No classic or standard structure as for the trouvère frons exists for the cauda, an absence that complicates the verifying of a melody’s internal structure. While repetitions occur in this part of the stanza at a level smaller than the entire phrase, they are often subtle. For example, in the cauda of K, the ends of phrases 5 and 7 are repeated exactly, which helps break the cauda into two parts, endowing it with some internal structure. Such is not the case in Mt and O. In those caudae, the melody over syllables 4‒8 in phrase 5 is repeated over the same passage in phrase 7, but it is pitched a third higher, thereby redistributing the sequencing of whole and half tones.12 When the melodies of the caudae of Mt and O are compared, we see, as we did in the frons, mostly variants in ornamentation. Nevertheless, the melodies in phrases 6 and 8 differ sufficiently between the sources to prompt an editor to ask if something more fundamental is going on here. For while the similarities in the frons might allow one to treat one manuscript’s melody as a variant of the other’s, the cauda does not, and the outlier should be presented so as to reveal these differences. In this case, there are enough similarities that K can be presented in a synoptic table, which will show its divergent cauda clearly. Furthermore, while more localized differences must also be noted, distinguishing ornamentation from more fundamental changes remains problematic.
16 How does one choose a base melody under such circumstances? This type of variation has been insightfully characterized as a snapshot of performance practice (van der Werf 1972, 29–34), and deserves to be fully notated in tables of variants, along with differences in pitch.13 There are nonetheless enough discrepancies even among concordant melodies that music editors are left with the same questions — concerning scribal intention, scribal inattention, and scribal attention to modal coherence ― that have troubled philologists since the eighteenth century. What constitutes a melodic variant? This question has rarely received an answer within the context of a critical edition, as variations in the music can alter the sense of the melodic line music in different ways than graphic and lexical variants change the sense of the poetic text. But just as text editors cannot record every graphic difference, music editors need to develop criteria that allow them to ignore insignificant differences in melody, though these may be more difficult to identify. While it is important, for the purposes of critical discussion, to distinguish between differences in ornamentation, which do not alter the mode, and differences in starting or cadential pitches or in interval content, which certainly can, it is our experience that small-scale variation in ornamentation constitutes valuable information about the performance practice of trouvère lyric. Thus, we favor a notational system that records variants to a maximum degree, highlighting these in such a way that the performer can easily construct alternate versions of the melody. At the same time, we will articulate a hierarchy of significance among variant types, which will be integrated into the critical discussion of the music. With as vast a corpus as editors face with a poet like Thibaut, the number and variety of
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whose sources perforce complicate the data, it is our goal to offer as complete a picture as possible of the reception of his œuvre across time and space.14
Unica in MSS R and V
17 Melodic unica are a relatively rare occurrence in Thibaut’s corpus. Four chansonniers contain a single non-concordant melody ― MSS Paris, Arsenal, 5198 (K), Paris, BnF, fr. 847 (P), Arras, BM, 657 (A), Berne, BM, 231 (B) ― and two more ― Paris, BnF, fr. 846 (O) et MS Rome, Vat., Reg. 1691 (a) ― feature two. The majority of melodies transmitted with Thibaut’s poems are thus concordant across manuscripts. Two chansonniers, however, Paris, BnF, fr. 1591 (R), and Paris, BnF, fr. 24406 (V), are notable for the significant number of melodies which are not associated with any other poem in the trouvère repertoire. Thirty percent (18 out of 60) of the Thibaut songs in MS V, and thirty-four percent (12 out of 35) of the Thibaut songs in MS R are notated with unique melodies; it is MS V’s unica in particular which are held in disregard by the musicological community. Two features of these melodies underscore the vagaries of their transmission and make their place in editions of the trouvères highly relevant.15 First of all, the question of concordance appears to be aligned with that of genre: love songs are twice as likely to have concordant melodies, and thus to be part of a shared network of transmission, than jeux-partis and devotional songs. When isolating the debate genre, the percentage of unique melodies rises to over ninety percent. As contrafacture, i.e. borrowing of melodies and metrics, is prescribed for jeux-partis in Mediaeval poetic treatises such as the late thirteenth century Doctrina de Compondre Dictatz (Marshall 1972), the source of these borrowed-yet-unique melodies becomes of paramount importance, and leads us to the second consideration. The dominant structure of both concordant and unique melodies is ABABx, as seen above: frons / cauda with the cauda (x) through-composed, i.e, without phrase-level repetition. A significant minority of unica, however, are entirely through-composed, or in oda continua, to use Dante’s terminology from his De vulgari eloquentia. In the case of non-love songs, the percentage of melodies in oda continua increases dramatically, reaching ninety percent for debate songs. The significance of these statistics lies in the fact that the oda continua was a structure that dominated lyric composition in the twelfth century, while the thirteenth century saw an increasing preference for the frons / cauda structure, such that troubadour melodies recorded in oda continua in the earliest chansonniers were rewritten in the frons / cauda pattern a century later, thus reflecting current compositional fashion (Aubrey 1996, 49–65). From what models then are these jeux-parti melodies borrowed? The possibility that the sources are troubadour songs whose melodies have not otherwise come down to us is supremely tantalizing, as it explains at one and the same time their outmoded structure and their flawed transmission.
18 But of more immediate concern is how we are to integrate these melodies into an edition that seeks to recognize variance. While variants of concordant melodies will be noted in the critical apparatus, unica will be granted a place in the body of the edition. They will be notated either directly underneath the base melody or immediately after the presentation of the edited songs, as they represent distinct, legitimate performance options. Issues of structural coherence will be raised as needed in the Remarques section of each song, as these melodies are decidedly not so systematically “lacking in the most elemental logic” (Karp 1964, 27) as to deserve the trash bin of editorial practice. Rather,
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our presentation will serve to highlight all filiations and all possible performative practices with regard to Thibaut’s songs.
Rhythmic interpretations
19 Owing to the existence of mensurated chansonniers such as MS O, and particularly in light of the contentious history of modal theory as it has affected scholarship on troubadour and trouvère monody, the question of modal rhythm in an edition committed to celebrating manuscript variants cannot be ignored. How are we to treat the nearly systematic rhythmic notation of a chansonnier like O, or of T (Paris, BnF, fr. 12416), whose reading of Thibaut’s “Por conforter mon corage” (RS 237) is measured while O’s is not? Do the measured melodies of MS O reflect a rhythm, analogous to that used by polyphonic motets, that was present in trouvère song from the beginning but which most musical scribes were not trained to record? Or is the non-rhythmic notation of the majority of chansonniers truly reflective of the kind of imprecisely measured, text-based style that is used in Gregorian chant performance? An enlightened answer was brought to the question nearly a century ago by Jean Beck, one of the founders of modal theory, in his 1927 edition of MS O. While the technical aspects of Beck’s methodology need not concern us here ― he effectively forged a compromise between the German text-based and the French mensural approaches (Haines 2004, 216) ― he significantly did not consider the proportional notation of MS O to reflect the original rhythm of the songs, but rather to be the interpretation of the copyist, working several generations after the fact (Beck 1927). His perspective on textual and melodic variance in fact adroitly supports the argument we are making here.16
20 An edition based on the sources as they survived around the time of Thibaut’s death, such as MS Mt, for its selections, textual readings, and ordering of context, would seek to interpret musical notation as consistent with contemporary practice. Beck advocated, and reasonably so, interpreting the measured rhythms of MS O as a rewriting after the fact, a paraphrase so to speak by a scribe contemporary with Adam de la Halle and practiced in the notating of polyphony. By extension, the music scribes of Mt and other chansonniers prior to 1270 did indeed reflect, with their notation, the preferred performance practice of their time for monophony, both sacred and secular. A chronological and thus historically informed argument for unmeasured neumes is at the same time an argument for unmeasured transcriptions, the method sanctioned by musicologists over the last forty years, for it recognizes real difficulties with the solutions to rhythmic interpretation of this notation, which have frustrated musicologists since Friedrich Ludwig. As Beck acknowledges (1927, 64), while in most cases a single rhythmic mode (usually mode 1 ― iambic) can be maintained throughout, this often results in mismatches, by the song’s end, between tonic accents in the poetic line and beats in the music. In other cases, duration and accent can vary from one pes to the next, although the melody in both pedes is supposed to be identical (see above). It is particularly because musicologists in the first third of the twentieth century could not agree on a consistent method for teasing out the latent rhythm of troubadour and trouvère monody that, as early as 1934, Carl Appel proposed the unmeasured system of transcription that is nearly universally accepted today.
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21 If in a critical edition of the trouvères MS O should be chosen as the base manuscript for the melody of a given song, the most widely accepted approach today is to transcribe O’s melodies in unmeasured notation but with the neumes accurately reproduced just above (Callahan and Rosenberg 2005, 120, 183‒84, 190, 194). This solution has much to recommend it, as it offers an accurate representation of the manuscript page without committing the editors to a transcription that perforce highlights the type of rhythmic inconsistencies mentioned above. In the case of the motets of MS T, there is no question that they should be transcribed accurately, reproducing the rhythm that permits accurate part singing even in its infancy.
Contrafacta and palimpsests
22 A comprehensive view of melodic variance in trouvère song must include minor variation, unica, and rhythmic interpretations but move beyond the confines of songs attributed to a particular trouvère to consider the wider tradition. Melodies often moved independently from the texts to which they were originally set. A redeeming feature of Tischler’s Trouvère Melodies (1997), despite the drawbacks detailed above and elsewhere, is that it constitutes an edition of melodies and their accompanying texts, not vice versa. However, Tischler’s focus is on melodies whose stanzaic settings vary little from one source to another. Parts of trouvère songs travelled throughout the wider world of Mediaeval music, and these vagaries will prompt editors to ponder the limits of melodic variance. For example, if a song’s melody is taken from other source, i.e. contrafacture, should an editor consider the original context as well as where it is reset to a trouvère’s new text? What of partial or even whole palimpsests, places where melodies and texts were scratched out and completely or, even more importantly, partially replaced with other songs?17
23 Mediaeval composers of all stripes, not just trouvères, practiced contrafacture. In Old French lyric, poets seemed more inclined to set new words to existing melodies in certain genres, especially religious lyric and debate songs, but examples in other contexts are not absent.18 Until now, trouvère scholars have been more than willing to include texts in varying contexts in editions. Should editors extend this logic to trouvère melodies when the latter survive in other contexts, i.e. when they are set to other texts? For example, Thibaut’s debate with Baudouin, “Rois Thiebaut, sire, en chantant responnez” (RS 943), shares its melody with a love song attributed to the Chastelain de Couci: “Merci clamans de mon fol errement” (RS 671=1823). Of the fourteen surviving witnesses of the Chastelain’s song, twelve preserve music. Thibaut may have selected the Chastelain’s melody because of its popularity and because it would have prompted connections in the mind of knowing audience members, thus adding to the message and furthering the discursive aims of the jeu-parti.19 When editing Thibaut’s music, should editors consult the melodies accompanying the Chastelain’s songs? After all, even if we are certain that the Chastelain belonged to the generation of trouvères before Thibaut, both of their songs survive in the same sources, transcribed by the same scribes.
24 Contrafacture can move readers beyond typical trouvère-song contexts, i.e. the chansonniers. Adam de la Bassée composed the Ludus Super Anticlaudianum in the late thirteenth century. It is a reworking of Adam de Lille’s Anticlaudianum of the late twelfth century, and throughout his work, Adam de la Bassée interpolates songs.20
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These songs often take their melodies from Latin hymns and sequences, but also from trouvère songs. One composition, Ave Gemma, a song in praise of Saint Agnes, uses the melody of Thibaut’s “Tant ai Amors servies longuement” (RS 711), and we know that Adam was aware of the melody’s source because he carefully noted the sources of his melodies in his text. Thibaut’s song survives in many sources, a testament to its popularity, which is undoubtedly why Adam de la Bassée chose it: by building upon collective memory of the song, Adam was better able to get across his religious message.21 Because we know that Adam was using Thibaut and not vice versa, as Adam was clearly composing well after Thibaut’s death, and in a monastery, editors might feel themselves absolved from having to consult Adam’s version when editing RS 711. But then again, there are witnesses to Thibaut’s songs that both predate and postdate the unica manuscript of the Ludus super Anticlaudianum that was produced in the north of France where many trouvère sources were compiled. It is therefore not beyond the pale to imagine that Adam’s work might have been known by those who worked on shaping the trouvère legacy.
25 A more material kind of recontextualization of trouvère songs occurs through palimpsests — texts that have been scratched out and replaced by new texts. Sometimes the process was total, and the original texts are entirely obscured and recoverable only with the help of aids like ultraviolet light or multispectral imaging. However, some palimpsests were partial: a scribe would erase what he could not use, and keep the rest, filling in around it. This is the case for one source transmitting three of Thibaut’s songs: British Library, Egerton 274. The manuscript has attracted mostly the attention of scholars interested in Philip the Chancellor’s works, as the first part of the manuscript is dedicated to his songs, mostly monophonic but also a few polyphonic (see Whitcomb 2000). The witness preserves three of Thibaut’s songs: RS 360, 711, and 2075. The first two are part of the chansonnier section of the manuscript, which Whitcomb, following Gennrich and Ludwig, have called Fascicle IV, though one could describe the codex’s construction otherwise (O’Sullivan 2013a, 2–4). The third, Thibaut’s famous unicorn song, is found appended to Fascicle V, a series of Latin poems. Attributions to poets were not entered when the manuscript was composed but added later.
26 The melodies of these songs have not always survived and, more often than not, were altered significantly, which makes their place within the melodic repertory somewhat enigmatic. Whereas the above examples of variance in Thibaut’s melodies have involved minor motivic variants or experimentation with mensural interpretation of otherwise concordant trouvère melodies, the melodies and much of the texts of the trouvères songs have become the fodder for palimpsests. A musical scribe has scratched away some neumes, added others, and kept still others intact. The works for initial stanzas, too, has been often scratched away and written over with Latin words that were meant to accompany the newly altered melodies. For example, “Tant ai amors servies longument” (RS 711), the song Adam used for Ave Gemma (see above), is preserved beginning on f. 104v of Egerton 274 in a highly altered state. The words of the first stanza are scratched out and replaced with a Latin text praising Christ, also found in the Salisbury breviary for the feast of St. Michael.22 Many musical notes are also scratched out and replaced — the ink of the interpolated music is clearly darker — sometimes with elaborate melismatic formulæ, as in the case of the second syllable of the phrase opening the third verse: “Te decet laus” (“You are worthy of praise”).23 In the other sources, this is a matter of a single note, but the musical interpolator of MS F
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inscribes a twelve-note melisma above that single syllable (“de”). A significant break in texture results, but in other lines, just as many original notes were left on the staves, and the Old French text from stanza two onwards also survives, potentially performable to the newly adapted music.24 The question that must be asked is whether or not these melodies have been altered to the point of being no longer recognizable as Thibaut’s music. Or does the listener still hear phantom traces, echoes of the trouvère king’s melodies?
Conclusion
27 Approaches to editing trouvère song that make both textual and melodic variance apparent have come a long way in the past 100 years, but the landscape remains only partially surveyed. A manuscript normally transmits one text and a melody, and some manuscripts may preserve readings that prove more typical than those in other witnesses. Basing editions on such sources may help readers gain insight into one concrete and tangible trace of the tradition, but editors still need to help them glean alternatives and variants in meaningful ways. If, for example, in the case of Thibaut de Champagne, we make only the melodies of the major chansonniers available to listeners and fail to elucidate the connections among the extant musical interpretations, we shut out the potential for a richer understanding of the trouvère tradition. We silence the micro-variation at discreet moments in the concordant melodies; we miss out on the unica melodies and the rhythmic interpretations that move Thibaut’s music a step closer to the conductus and motet; and we overlook the echoes between the trouvère king’s songs and the works of Philippe le Chancellier and Adam de la Bassée. It is true that trouvère song was monophonic, but if we attune our ears to melodic variance, it is almost like listening in stereo.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alla, Francesca and Brigitte Lesne. 2012. Thibaut de Champagne. Amour courtois et chevalerie au XIIIe siècle. Paris: Aeon (Outhere-Music-France).
Anglès, Higini. 1973. Las canciones del rey Teobaldo. Pamplona, Excma. Diputación Floral de Navarra.
Appel, Carl. 1934. Die Singweisen Bernarts von Ventadorn, nach den Handschriften mitgeteilt. Halle: Niemeyer.
Aubrey, Elizabeth. 1996. The Music of the Troubadours. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Bahat, Avner and Gérard Le Vot. 1996. L’œuvre lyrique de Blondel de Nesle: mélodies. Édition des mélodies et étude des variantes. Paris: Honoré Champion.
Barbieri, Luca. 1999. “Note sul Liederbuch di Thibaut de Champagne”. Medioevo Romanzo, 23, pp. 388–416.
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Barnard, Jennifer A. 2008. The Journey of the Soul: The Role of Music in the Ludus super Anticlaudianum of Adam de la Bassée. PhD, University of Bristol.
Baumgartner, Emmanuèle. 1987. “Présentation des chansons de Thibaut de Champagne dans les manuscrits de Paris". In Yvonne Bellenger et Danielle Quéruel (eds), Thibaut de Champagne: Prince et poète au xiiie siècle. Lyon: La Manufacture, pp. 35–44.
Bayart, Paul. 1930. Adam de la Bassée (d. 1286): Ludus Super Anticlaudianum d’après le manuscrit original conservé à la Bibliothèque municipale de Lille avec une introduction et des notes. Tourcoing: Georges Frères.
Beck, Jean. 1927. Le chansonnier Cangé. Corpus Cantilenum Mediae Aevi.
Bédier, Joseph and Jean Beck. 1912. Les chansons de Colin Muset. Paris: Honoré Champion.
Bédier, Joseph and Jean Beck. 1938. Les chansons de Colin Muset. 2nd ed. Paris: Honoré Champion.
Calin, William. 1986. “On the Nature of Christian Poetry: From the Courtly to the Sacred and the Functioning of Contrafactum in Gautier de Coinci”. In Jaume Vallcorba (ed.), Studia in honorem prof. M. de Riquier. Madrid: Quaderns Crema, pp. 385–94.
Callahan, Christopher and Samuel N. Rosenberg. 2005. Les chansons de Colin Muset. Textes et Mélodies. Paris: Honoré Champion.
Callahan, Christopher and Samuel N. Rosenberg. 2012a. “Pour une historique de la notion de genre dans le lyrisme de langue d’oïl: le témoignage des chansonniers”. In Marie-Geneviève Grossel (ed.), Registre, genres, formes dans la lyrique des trouvères. Valenciennes: Presses Universitaires de Valenciennes, pp. 43–55.
Callahan, Christopher and Samuel N. Rosenberg. 2012b. “Dame polyvalente, glissement registral et contrafacture chez Thibaut de Champagne.” Le Moyen Age, 3–4, pp. 581–94.
Callahan, Christopher and Samuel N. Rosenberg. 2013. “À la défense des mélodies ‘marginales’ chez les trouvères: le cas de Thibaut IV de Champagne”. Cahiers de Recherches Médiévales et Humanistes, 26(2), pp. 69–90.
Diabolus in Musica, Antoine Guerber. 2005. La douce acordance. Chansons de trouvères. Alpha & Fondation France Telecom.
Drzewicka, Anna. 1985. “La Fonction des emprunts à la poésie profane dans les chansons mariales de Gautier de Coinci”, Le Moyen Age, 91, pp. 33–51, 179–200.
Duys, Kathryn A. 1997. Books Shaped by Song: Early Literary Literacy in the Miracles de Nostre Dame of Gautier de Coinci. PhD, New York University.
Everist, Mark. 1994. French Motets in the Thirteenth Century: Music, Poetry and Genre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Formisano, Luciano. 1993. “Prospettive di ricerca sui canzioneri d’autore nella lirica d’oïl”. In Saverio Guida and Fortunata Latella (eds), La Filologia romanza e i codici: atti del convegno. Messina: Sicania, pp. 131–52.
Gennrich, Friedrich. 1953–56. Altfranzösische Lieder. Sammlung romanischer Übungstexte, Bd. 36.Tübingen: Halle M. Niemeyer.
Gennrich, Friedrich. 1963. Das altfranzösische Rondeau und Virelai im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert. Langen bei Frankfurt: Summa Musicae Medii Aevi, Bd. 10.
Haines, John. 1997. “The ‘Modal Theory’, Fencing, and the Death of Aubry”. Plainsong and Mediaeval Music, 6(2), pp. 143–50.
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Haines, John. 2002. “The Transformations of the ‘Manuscript du roi’”, Musica Disciplina, 52, pp. 5–43.
Haines, John. 2004. Eight Centuries of Troubadours and Trouvères: The Changing Identity of Mediaeval Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hughes, Andrew. 1970. “The Ludus super Anticlaudianum of Adam de la Bassée”. Journal of the American Musicological Society, 23, pp. 1-25.
Karp, Theodore. 1964. “The Trouvère Manuscript Tradition”. In Albert Mell (ed.), The Twenty-fifth- Anniversary Festschrift (1937–1962). New York: Queens College of the City University of New York Department of Music, pp. 25–52.
LePage, Yvan G, ed. 1994. L'Œuvre Lyrique de Blondel de Nesle: Textes. Paris: Honoré Champion.
Marshall, John H. 1980. “Pour l’étude des contrafacta dans la poésie des troubadours”, Romania, 101, pp. 289–335.
O’Sullivan, Daniel E. 2005. Marian Devotion in Thirteenth-Century French Lyric. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
O’Sullivan, Daniel E. 2008. “Editing Melodic Variance in Trouvère Song”. Textual Cultures, 3(2), pp. 54–70.
O’Sullivan, Daniel E. 2013a. “Stepping Back and Leaping Forward”. Textual Cultures, 8(1), pp. 1–5.
O’Sullivan, Daniel E. 2013b. “On connaît la chanson: la contrafacture des mélodies populaires dans le Ludus anticlaudianum d’Adam de la Bassée”. Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes, 26(2), pp. 109–28.
O’Sullivan, Daniel E. 2015. “Words with Friends, Courtly Edition: Thibaut’s de Champagne’s Jeux- Partis”. In Serina Patterson (ed.), Games and Gaming in Mediaeval Literature. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, pp. 61–78.
O’Sullivan, Daniel E. Forthcoming. “Contrafacture, Lyrical Exchange, and Self-Parody in Thibaut de Champagne’s Debate Poetry”. Parodies courtoises / Parodies de la courtoisie. Lisbon: Universidade de Lisboa.
Raynaud, Gaston. 1884. Bibliographie des chansonniers français des XIIIe et XIVe siècles, comprenant la description de tous les manuscrits, la table des chansons classées par ordre alphabétique de rimes et la liste des trouvères. Paris: F. Vieweg.
Rosenberg, Samuel N. and Hans Tischler. 1981. Chanter m’estuet: Songs of the Trouvères. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Rosenberg, Samuel N, Samuel Danon and Hendrik van der Werf. 1985. The Lyrics and Melodies of Gace Brulé. New York: Garland.
Rosenberg, Samuel N and Hans Tischler, with the collaboration of Marie-Geneviève Grossel. 1995. Chansons des trouvères. Paris: Librairie Générale Française.
Rosenberg, Samuel N, Margaret L. Switten and Gérard Le Vot. 1998. Songs of the Troubadours and Trouvères: an Anthology of Poems and Melodies. New York: Garland.
Tischler, Hans. 1997. Trouvère Lyrics with Melodies: Complete Comparative Edition. 15 vols. N.p.: American Institute of Musicology.
Van den Boogaard, Nico. 1969. Rondeaux et refrains : Du xiie siècle au début du xive. Paris: Klincksieck.
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Van der Werf, Hendrik. 1972. The Chansons of the Troubadours and Trouvères: A Study of the Melodies and Their Relation to the Poems. Utrecht: A. Oosthoek.
Van der Werf, Hendrik. 1977-1979. Trouveres-Melodien. Kassel: Bärenreiter. 2 vols.
Van der Werf, Hendrik. 1984. The Extant Troubadour Melodies: Transcriptions and Essays for Performers and Scholars. Rochester, NY: Published by the author.
Vidal, Raimon. 1972. “Doctrina de Compondre Dictats”. In John H. Marshall (ed.), The Razos de Trobar of Raimon Vidal and Associated Texts. London: Oxford University Press, p. 97.
Wallensköld, Axel. 1925. Les chansons de Thibaut de Champagne, roi de Navarre. Paris: Champion.
Zumthor, Paul. 1972. Essai de poétique médiévale. Paris: Seuil. Trans.Philip Bennet. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.
NOTES
1. The rise of genetic criticism in the years after the wane of positivism has perhaps facilitated its focus on process and evolution and freed it from the methodological baggage that Mediaeval textual criticism continues to carry. 2. “Le texte est la ‘trace’ de l’œuvre: trace orale, fuyante, déformable. L’érudition accumulée depuis un siècle a presque constamment méconnu le seul point digne d’intérêt: le fait même de cette dérivation langagière dont on observe les effets chez nos vieux poètes, inventeurs, au sein de langues nouveau-nées, d’une ‘écriture’, qui pour cette même raison, ne pouvait rien devoir à des traditions antérieures, sinon de façon externe et anecdotique. ‘Écriture’ du reste convient mal puisqu’il s’est longtemps agi de chant seul” (Zumthor 1972, 95) (“The text is a ‘trace’ of the work, an oral, fugitive trace, which is easily deformed. The last century of accumulated erudition has almost invariably misunderstood the only point of real interest: the very fact of the text’s basis in spoken language. This linguistic source, whose effects are observable in the works of our earliest poets, who invented a ‘written language’ in the midst of the emerging vernaculars, cannot for that very reason owe anything to earlier traditions, except in an anecdotal way exterior to the texts themselves. ‘Written language’ is, in any case, an inappropriate term, since song unsupported by a text for reading was for long the only mode of existence for these works.”) 3. The earliest melodic edition devoted to Thibaut, H. Anglès’s Canciones del rey Teobaldo (1973), was compiled posthumously from the author’s notebooks and is at best a work in progress. 4. With Marie-Geneviève Grossel, the authors are completing an edition of Thibaut’s texts and melodies to appear with Champion publishers in Paris. Although Hans Tischler includes Thibaut’s songs in his 1997 compendium of trouvère lyrics with melodies, the authors feel that his editorial enterprise was too broad to consider it equal to a bona fide edition of the king’s œuvre, for hints to Thibaut’s unique take on the trouvère art are utterly undetectable in Tischler’s massive opus. See below for further comments on Tischler’s editorial approach. 5. J.-B. Beck, the musicologist responsible for the melodic transcriptions in 1912, was living in the United States while the other obvious candidate, Pierre Aubry, had died in a fencing accident (Haines 1997), hence the dearth of skilled collaborators on the musical side of things. 6. Indeed, this situation continues to characterize even more recent compendia by musicologists working solo (Van der Werf 1977-79, 1984; Tischler 1997). 7. Because van der Werf’s edition only records love songs, for a poet like Thibaut nearly half of his poetic corpus — his debate songs, political and devotional songs, and pastourelles are regrettably omitted — is absent.
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8. These “marginal” melodies have traditionally been roundly disparaged by musicologists (Karp 1964; Bahat and Le Vot 1996), but their value has recently been reassessed (Callahan 2013). 9. Paris, BnF, fr. 12615 (MS T) contains a section of motets notated in modal rhythm, unlike those in Paris, BnF, fr. 844 (MS M). Mensurated melodies in a fourteenth-century hand were added, however, to the empty staves of a number of M’s monophonic songs between ff. 169 and 211. This same hand appears responsible for the instrumental dance tunes found on ff. 5r and 103r-104v. 10. These manuscripts include Paris, Arsenal 5198 (MS K); Paris, BnF, fr. 845 (MS N); Paris, BnF, fr. 847 (MS P); and Paris, BnF, n.a.f. 1050 (MS X). Similarly, Paris, BnF, fr. 844 (MS M) and Paris, BnF, fr. 12615 (MS T) also share similar melodic contours. 11. Readers can consult high-quality images of the manuscripts in question on http:// www.gallica.fr Specifically, images of RS 324 can be found at http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/ btv1b550063912/f78.item (MS K, p. 52), http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b550063912/ f79.item (MS K, p. 53), http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b84192440/f155.item (MS Mt, f. 69r), and http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b6000950p/f136.item (MS O, f. 53v). 12. This transposition explains why the scribe of MS O (who is the most consistent in noting accidentals) did not place a B flat in phrase 5, which the ear otherwise expects. 13. Where melodies are fully concordant, these passages can be left blank in synoptic tables, so as not to detract from variants by cluttering lines with identical pitches. 14. Recent recordings (Diabolus in Musica 2005; Alla Francesca 2012) feature a single manuscript, a practice that supports our preference for choosing, for the chansonnier portion of the edition, texts and melodies from a single source. 15. See Callahan 2013 for a detailed argumentation. 16. “Force nous est […] de prendre […] les chansons des divers chansonniers, telles que nous les trouvons, et de les traiter comme autant d’interprétations ou de réalisations des originaux à jamais perdus” (Beck 1927, 10) (“It is incumbent upon us to take the songs from various songbooks such as we find them, and treat them as so many interpretations or performances of originals that are forever lost to us”). 17. Because they are tangential in Thibaut’s corpus, refrains and motets are not treated here, but they may have important repercussions when editing other trouvère songs. Musicologist Ardis Butterfield points out the need to address both melody and text of refrains in her study of one particular refrain, “Hareu, li maus d’amer m’ochist!” (number 784 in Nico van den Boogaard’s index) where melody remains the same as the accompanying text differs markedly (Butterfield 1991, 17). Moreover, because refrains often made their way into motets, the upper-voices of Mediaeval motets, despite the texts that accompany them, must be examined anew in discussions of melodic variance in the wider trouvère tradition. On refrains and motets, see especially Everist 1994. 18. Fundamental studies of contrafacta are Gennrich 1965 and Marshall 1980. For studies concerned primarily with Old French religious lyrics, see Drzewicka 1985, Calin 1986, Duys 1997, O’Sullivan 2005 (especially chapter one on Gautier de Coinci), and Callahan 2012b. 19. O’Sullivan studies melody and memory extensively in Thibaut de Champagne’s jeux-partis and débats in a forthcoming article, “Contrafacture, Lyrical Exchange, and Parody in Thibaut de Champagne’s Debate Songs”. 20. The standard edition is Bayart (1930), and a thorough study of the work comes in J. Barnard’s 2008 PhD dissertation, supplementing the important article by Hughes (1970). 21. The most recent discussion of this contrafacture comes in O’Sullivan (2013b). 22. The Latin text and basic bibliography on where to find this text can be found in Wallensköld (1925), 26 n1. 23. Egerton 274 may be viewed online at http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx? ref=Egerton_MS_274
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24. The preservation of decorated initials may have prompted the choice of a song for a particular palimpsest.
ABSTRACTS
Editing monophonic songs of Old French poets from roughly the second half of the twelfth to the early fourteenth centuries, poses several challenges, not least of which requires addressing variance on the level of both text and melody. Thibaut IV, king of Navarre, left his public over sixty songs characterized by generic breadth, registral subtlety, and varying melodic range. While providing reliable versions for study and performance, editors still need to help readers glimpse musical alternatives and variants in meaningful ways; otherwise, they run the risk of diminishing readers’ understanding of the trouvère tradition. In this article, the authors examine micro-variation in concordant melodies as well as how information on non-concordant, unica melodies and rhythmic interpretations in later manuscripts fleshes out a musical aesthetic that appears, but is not, simple and straightforward.
INDEX
Keywords: philology, scholarly editing, music editing, mediaeval manuscripts, French literature
AUTHORS
CHRISTOPHER CALLAHAN
Christopher Callahan is Professor of French at Illinois Wesleyan University. His research, which combines philology and musicology, focuses on medieval lyric and lyric-narrative texts, particularly on questions of performance. He has collaborated with the Boston Camerata on a series of programs and is co-editor, with Samuel N. Rosenberg, of the songs of the trouvère Colin Muset (2005). He is currently completing an edition, with Daniel E. O’Sullivan and Marie- Geneviève Grossel, of the trouvère-king Thibaut IV de Champagne.
DANIEL E. O’SULLIVAN
Daniel E. O’Sullivan is Professor of French at the University of Mississippi. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of several volumes, most recently of Founding Feminisms in Medieval Studies: Essays in Honor of E. Jane Burns (forthcoming in 2016) with Laine Doggett. He serves as the editor- in-chief of both Textual Cultures and Medieval Perspectives and is currently completing an edition, with Christopher Callahan and Marie-Geneviève Grossel, of the trouvère-king Thibaut IV de Champagne.
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Modelling a Digital Scholarly Edition for Genetic Criticism: A Rapprochement
Dirk Van Hulle
1 The roles of the editor are changing rapidly in the digital paradigm.1 But there is one major role that does not change fundamentally: a scholarly editor does not “iron out” textual contingencies, but draws attention to them, thus enhancing a certain textual awareness. In this respect, scholarly editors and genetic critics have something in common. Their shared interest in the notion of “variance” is instrumental in the current convergence between these two disciplines, which manifested itself for instance at the tenth conference of the European Society for Textual Scholarship in Paris.2 For decades, genetic criticism and textual scholarship had been going their separate ways, and it looked as if never the twain would meet. During the last ten years, however, we have been working towards a rapprochement and the collaboration has proven to be mutually beneficial. Because genetic criticism duly objects to the subservient role of manuscript research in scholarly editing, the proposed model of a digital scholarly edition for genetic criticism suggests a reversal of these roles: instead of employing manuscript research in order to make an edition, digital editing can also serve as a tool for manuscript research and genetic criticism. My suggestion is not to turn the tables and reduce the function of the editor to a subservient role, but to come to a situation in which scholarly editors and genetic critics are willing to adopt ― to some extent ― each other’s roles. As this essay will argue, the digital paradigm can be instrumental in this rapprochement.
2 In spite of the convergences, there are of course divergences between genetic criticism and textual scholarship in approach, aims, outcomes and so forth. First of all, many textual scholars work with mediaeval or even older manuscripts, whereas genetic criticism usually works with “modern” manuscripts, the difference being that mediaeval manuscripts, insofar as they are produced for public dissemination, function as publications; modern manuscripts are generally of a more private nature. But, evidently, there are quite a few exceptions to this rule, and it is possible to apply
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genetic criticism to mediaeval manuscripts that do contain autograph deletions, additions and substitutions.
3 Then there is the difference between the focal points. According to Daniel Ferrer, textual criticism focuses more on “repetition”, whereas genetic criticism concentrates on “invention” (Ferrer 2010, 21). As a consequence, “variants” in textual criticism are more easily regarded as deviations that need to be corrected, whereas genetic criticism prefers to use the term “réécritures” (rewriting) ― to indicate that a change is not necessarily an error but may be part of the process of invention.
4 In the 1960s, when research on modern manuscripts was mainly done at the service of scholarly editing, it was necessary to make a stand against textual scholarship, and genetic criticism has the merit of having emancipated manuscript research in this respect. But now that textual scholarship fully recognizes this field of study as a discipline in its own right, this essay emphasizes what we can gain by working together with regard to several levels of variance, which will be addressed in two parts: first, exo-, endo- and epigenesis; second, micro- and macrogenesis. The essay explores a model of a digital scholarly edition that maps the interaction between these five aspects of genetic criticism, in such a way that it becomes a digital scholarly edition for genetic criticism.3 To this purpose I employ the term “modeling” in the sense of Willard McCarty, who follows Clifford Geertz’s analytic distinction between a denotative, descriptive “model of” (e.g. a grammar describing the features of a language) and an exemplary, prescriptive “model for” such as an architectural plan: “Since modeling is fundamentally relational, the same object may in different contexts play either role: thus, e.g., the grammar may function prescriptively, as a model for correct usage, the architectural plan descriptively, as a model of an existing style” (McCarty 2004, 255). The proposed model of a digital scholarly edition for genetic criticism is ― like any “model of” ― a consciously and purposeful simplification in order to model digital scholarly editing as a tool for genetic criticism, instead of using “genetic criticism” as a form of textual criticism at the service of the scholarly edition. This reversal of roles requires what McCarty calls “a process of coming to know”, in which models are only temporary states (2004. 256). Applying this to scholarly editions, Elena Pierazzo notes: “In order to be able to develop tools and software to support the editorial work, it is fundamentally important to produce a conceptual and functional model-of it. In this way the model-of the edition will enable the creation of a model-for the edition” (Pierazzo 2015, 39). The model proposed in this article is not intended as a prescriptive model-for; it simply tries purposefully to simplify the complex research object of genetic criticism to make it manageable and develop an editorial infrastructure that facilitates research into exo-, endo-, epigenesis and micro- and macrogenesis. I will try to argue that one of the main roles of the editor ― to enhance textual awareness ― is especially relevant at the intersections between each of these five aspects. The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (BDMP) (www.beckettarchive.org) serves as a case study, because “modeling grows out of practice, not out of theory” (McCarty 2008, 393) and because the BDMP is an example of a project that has benefited equally from the input from the theories and practices of both genetic criticism and textual scholarship. In the resulting hybrid model, the digital edition informs the genetic analysis in the form of a printed monograph; and the genetic analysis can also inform a critical edition (as discussed in the section on epigenesis below), illustrating a rationale of reversible roles.
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Exogenesis, endogenesis, epigenesis
Exogenesis
5 The digital medium opens up new possibilities for the integration of writers’ libraries in a scholarly or genetic edition. Perhaps such an incorporation brings the scholarly edition closer to what Peter Shillingsburg called a “knowledge site” (2006, 2). A writer’s creative process is often an interaction with books and notebooks. The marginalia in a book from the author’s library can sometimes be linked to one of her or his own writings. Creating these paths between exo- and endogenesis involves a fair amount of critical scholarship. For instance, in Beckett’s personal copy of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, several pages ― distributed over the numerous volumes ― are marked with the abbreviation “REV.” in the margin. It may not be immediately clear to all readers what this means, so it could be considered a task of the editor to explain the exogenetic relevance of the marginalia. In this case, “Rev. 1” (Proust 1928, 69) stands for Revelation 1, Beckett’s term for Proust’s “mémoires involontaires”, the moment when Marcel puts a Madeleine in his tea, which leads to an involuntary memory. Beckett counted all these revelations in the multi-volume novel and numbered them. In a digital infrastructure, an annotation could link these different instances from one revelation to the other, at a slow pace in the first volumes (from “Rev. 1” in volume one to “Rev. 6” in volume eight), until the reader reaches the last volume of the Recherche, which contains a series of revelations in short succession: “Rev. 7” on page 7, “Rev. 8” on page 9, “Rev. 9” on page 10; revelation 10 on page 18. Here, Beckett notes the rapid succession by calling it a “bombardment” of involuntary memories. Revelation 10 is followed by one other involuntary memory, revelation 11 (on page 30). By marking these moments, Beckett made a connection, which can be made explicit, by visualizing the marginal “REV.” marks as a string of revelations and by making the link with Beckett’s own work ― in this case his essay Proust, in which he enumerates the eleven revelations. As the marginalia indicate, Beckett did not read Proust passively; he invested time and effort in it and made connections between the various volumes. This form of intensive reading was an inherent part of his writing practice. To make an edition useful for genetic criticism, the digital infrastructure should therefore not only reconstruct the writer’s library, but also provide a simulation of this cultural and material environment as experienced by the writer (by visualizing the paths of connections s/he made during the process).
6 A fascinating example in the case of Beckett’s novels is the sentence “De nobis ipsis silemus, decidedly that should have been my motto” in the published text of The Unnamable (Beckett 2010b, 42). A digital genetic edition would preferably enable its users to find this sentence in all the versions, including the first manuscript in French, where the Latin quote also features on the inside of the back cover of the first notebook: “De nobis ipsis silemus / (Bacon, Intro. Novum Organon)” (Harry Ransom Center MS SB 3‒10).
7 From an exogenetic point of view, the editor’s role in the border zone between exo- and endogenesis could consist in pointing out the “creative undoing” of Immanuel Kant’s name in this parenthesis. Beckett almost certainly took this sentence from Volume XI of Kants Werke (preserved in the private library of Anne Atik), where this Latin sentence is marked. But in his note, Beckett did not mention Kant’s name, only Bacon’s. By
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means of an annotation, the editor can indicate that the quotation is originally from Bacon, but that Beckett actually found it in an introductory essay by Ernst Cassirer in the last volume of the complete works by Immanuel Kant. The digitized library contains the relevant volume in which this passage is marked in pencil: “Das Wort ‘De nobis ipsis silemus’, das er aus Bacon entnimmt, um es der ‘Kritik der reinen Vernunft’ als Motto voranzusetzen” (Cassirer 1921, 5) (“The phrase ‘De nobis ipsis silemus’ [of ourselves, we say nothing], which he takes from Bacon to serve as a motto for the Critique of Pure Reason”) (Cassirer 1981, 9). Beckett not only marked the passage in his capacity as a “marginalist” (Ferrer 2004); he also made a separate note on this passage as an “extractor”, translating/summarizing it as follows in his so-called “Whoroscope” Notebook: “Bacon’s ‘De xxx nobis ipsis silemus’ taken by Kant as epigraph to KRITIK der R. V.” (“Whoroscope” Notebook, University of Reading, UoR MS 3000, 44r). Compared to the note in the manuscript of L’Innommable (where the Latin line is attributed to Bacon rather than to Kant), this is a case of exogenetic variance. Examples of this type indicate how useful it can be to include an author’s library in a genetic edition, as they illustrate the dynamics between exo- and endogenesis. The sentence as it was incorporated in the manuscript reads: “De nobis ipsis silemus, décidément cela aurait dû être ma devise” (HRC MS SB 3‒10, 44v; Becket 2013).
8 From an endogenetic perspective, this is not a particularly interesting sentence in terms of variance. It remains unchanged in the subsequent versions. But there are plenty of instances of variance elsewhere in the manuscript, such as the following passage (L’Innommable, sentence no. 201): Quelle est Déplorable cette manie de savoir, dès qu’il se produit quelque chose, de vouloir savoir quoi? [Deplorable mania, when something happens, to want to know what.] (HRC MS SB 3‒10, 03v; Beckett 2013)
9 The integrated CollateX module enables readers to make a collation, which integrates cancellations and additions (Figure 1).4
Figure 1: Screenshot of the collation of the French manuscript and other versions, generated by CollateX as integrated in the genetic edition of L’Innommable/ The Unnamable (Beckett 2013).
Screenshot of the collation of the French manuscript and other versions, generated by CollateX as integrated in the genetic edition of L’Innommable/ The Unnamable (Beckett 2013).
10 As this collation output shows, it is possible ― to some extent ― to reconcile the notion of “réécritures” with “variants”, despite Pierre-Marc de Biasi’s objections against the latter term.5
Endogenesis
11 While Raymonde Debray Genette and Pierre-Marc de Biasi already suggested that it is hard to clearly separate exo- from endogenesis, Nicolas Cavaillès subsequently employed the metaphor of a river (endogenesis) and its (exogenetic) affluents.6 This metaphor corresponds to John Bryant’s concept of “the fluid text” (Bryant 2002). As indicated in the introduction, when “critique génétique” had to establish itself as a
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discipline in its own right in the 1960s and 1970s, it was important to distinguish itself from traditional philology and textual criticism.7 In the meantime, however, the relationship between textual scholars and genetic critics increasingly resembles that of the Beckettian notion of the “pseudo-couple”, which is also applicable to the characters Didi and Gogo in En attendant Godot / Waiting for Godot, who consider going separate ways at several moments, but turn out to be as inseparable as mind and body, or body and mind.
12 The endogenesis of En attendant Godot is marked by a notable omission, which may serve as an example to illustrate how an editor can assume the role of a genetic critic. The manuscript, preserved at the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, contains a long passage that Beckett later cut.8 It was a slapstick conversation, ensuing after the moment when both Didi and Gogo are on the verge of asking each other the same question. They both start asking each other “Est-ce …?” and then stop. They are extremely polite and apologize along these lines: sorry, I interrupted you. ― No no, sorry, I interrupted you. And this goes on for quite a while, much longer than in the published version. It takes about two pages to find out that the next word was “que”: “Est-ce que …”; another two or three pages to find out they were going to say: “Est-ce que c’est …”; another two pages to find out the next word was “la”: “Est-ce que c’est la …” This slapstick passage would have taken several minutes on stage. In the manuscript it takes eight pages before they find out that they both wanted to ask exactly the same question: “Est-ce que c’est la peine?” (“Is it worthwhile?”). The point of the whole scene is that by the time they find out what they each wanted to ask, they no longer remember why they wanted to ask the question in the first place.
13 In the context of the play, which mentions the possibility of suicide at several instances, the question as to whether “it” is worthwhile may have all kinds of existential connotations, and indeed it probably refers to the opening paragraph of Albert Camus’s essay on the absurd, called Le Mythe de Sisyphe, published only six years before Beckett wrote his play.9 The opening sentences read: “Il n’y a qu’un problème philosophique vraiment sérieux: c’est le suicide. Juger que la vie vaut ou ne vaut pas la peine d’être vécue, c’est répondre à la question fondamentale de la philosophie” (Camus 2000, 17; emphasis added) (“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy”) (Camus 2005, 1‒2). But no matter how plausible this allusion may be, the intertextual trail is completely erased, for Beckett cut the whole passage. So whereas originally the writing strategy was to draw out the scene to such an extent that the occasion for the existential question was forgotten and the protagonists could live on, Beckett eventually decided to radically change his textual strategy. Instead of expanding the scene to the maximum, he reduced the question to the absolute minimum ― a minimum that provides only just enough grammatical information to indicate that it is a question, but leaves out everything else: Est-ce … (Beckett 1999, 106) Or in Beckett’s own English translation: Do you ― (Beckett 2010, 71) 14 After this question Didi and Gogo both apologize for having interrupted each other. The result of this creative undoing and reduction to the absolute minimum is a maximum of ambiguity: we know just enough to realize that it is a question, in other words, just
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enough to realize that we do not know anything else. In the period of Modernism, aposiopesis ― the figure of speech that works with unfinished sentences, originally to obtain a rhetorical effect ― was increasingly used for other purposes. 15 In rhetoric, the intentional use of unfinished sentences shows one’s eloquent mastery of the rules of rhetoric; in Modernism, the use of aposiopesis is more often used to unmask the self-deception of eloquence, to show one’s linguistic scepticism and draw attention to the crisis of language in the wake of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Chandos letter and Fritz Mauthner’s Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache. Take for instance the end of Katherine Mansfield’s short story “The Garden Party”. The protagonist has unwittingly gone through a double liminal ritual, transgressing the border between youth and adulthood and the social border between upper-middle class and working class. She seems to have understood intuitively how complex these social relations and existential transitions are, but cannot quite express this complexity. So towards the end of the story she says to her brother: “Isn’t life –”, without finishing the sentence. She cannot express in words what life is, but the grammatical construction implies a request for confirmation, which her brother is all too eager to give: “Isn’t it, darling?” (Mansfield 2002, 349). He thus provides his sister the consolation she is yearning for, but also smothers all the ambiguity of the unfinished part of the question. While Mansfield at least gave away that it was an existential question (“Isn’t life –”), Beckett’s aposiopesis is even more enigmatic. The original question “Est-ce que c’est la peine” only partially fills the gap of indeterminacy. If Estragon and Vladimir stand for the Cartesian dualism of body and mind, it is their interaction that prevents them from considering suicide. Each of them wants to ask the dreaded question, and each of them interrupts the other before he can finish it.
16 In terms of textual scholarship, the question is how to visualize the textual trail of this aposiopesis. A possible solution is to use a synoptic survey, which is the option suggested by the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project. To avoid that users get lost in the abundance of draft versions, they have the option to choose any sentence in any version and visualize the synoptic survey of all the versions of that sentence. In case there is a sentence (or more than one sentence) that appeared in the manuscript but did not make it into the published version, this sentence is included in the survey in bold, added to the first preceding sentence that did make it into the published version. For instance, in the opening paragraph of L’Innommable the sentences “Rien n’a changé. Rien n’a dû changer” never made it into the published version, but the preceding question “Qui maintenant?” did. So, the transcription of “Qui maintenant?” is accompanied by those two sentences, marked in bold, to indicate that they can only be found in this manuscript version (see Figure 2).
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Figure 2: Screenshot of the synoptic sentence view in L’Innommable / The Unnamable in the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (Beckett 2013)
17 The same method of marking variance could theoretically be applied to the eight-page omission in the genesis of En attendant Godot. The synoptic sentence view will then be completely dominated by the equivalent of eight pages of text in bold. As a result, this might defeat the purpose of giving users a synoptic survey, but it will draw attention the creative undoing. An alternative is to indicate that a major passage was cut, but instead of including the entire text, the edition can alert readers to this omission (with a note: “This is the start of a long, eight-page dialogue that did not make it into the published version”) and provide users with a link that takes them directly to the relevant passage in the transcription. This way the digital edition serves as a tool for genetic criticism.
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Figure 3: Passage from the trilingual edition of Beckett’s En attendant Godot / Waiting for Godot / Warten auf Godot (2003, 186).
VLADIMIR Je t'ai coupé. VLADIMIR I interrupted you. ESTRAGON Au contraire. ESTRAGON On the contrary. Ils se regardent avec colère. They glare at each other angrily. VLADIMIR Voyons, pas de cérémonie. VLADIMIR Ceremonious ape! ESTRAGON Ne sois pas têtu, voyons. ESTRAGON Punctilious pig VLADIMIR AVEC FORCE : Achève ta phrase, je te dis. VLADIMIR Finish your phrase, I tell you! ESTRAGON DE MÊME : Achève la tienne. ESTRAGON Finish your own! Silence. Ils vont l'un vers l'autre, s'arrêtent. SILENCE. They draw closer, halt. VLADIMIR Misérable ! VLADIMIR Moron! Échange d'injures. ESTRAGON That's the idea, let's abuse each other. They turn, move apart, turn again and face each other. VLADIMIR Moron! ESTRAGON Vermin! VLADIMIR Abortion! ESTRAGON Morpion! VLADIMIR Sewer-rat ERAGON Curate! VLADIMIR Cretin! ESTRAGON with finality: Crrritic! VLADIMIR Oh! He wilts, vainquished, and turns away. Silence. Maintenant raccomondons-nous. ESTRAGON Now let's make it up.
Epigenesis
18 From the perspective of genetic criticism, it may seem a technical detail to find solutions for this visualization, but at the same time finding ways to draw readers’ attention to the dead ends in the genesis is a crucial aspect of the study of writing processes. The question that was cut from the manuscript, “Est-ce que c’est la peine?”, when taken out of its context and applied to the theme of “variance”, sounds like a critical question that one could very well imagine textual scholars and genetic critics are asking one another: to study “variants” or “réécritures”, is that really worthwhile? The answer is clear: of course it is. Both of them will argue that their respective discipline is interested in what happened after Beckett made his cut. The original long passage was replaced by a shorter scene in which Didi and Gogo abuse each other. They call each other moron, vermin, abortion, morpion, sewer rat; and finally Gogo calls Didi a “Crritic!” After this final blow, Didi can only reply with an indignant “Oh!” Applied to the exchanges between genetic critics and textual critics the insult “Crritic!” works both ways, so it does not matter who plays Didi and who plays Gogo. The roles are interchangeable. Both of them will be interested to know that the English translation, made by Beckett himself, differs from the French original. The French stage direction simply reads: “Echange d’injures” (Figure 3). Typographically, in a parallel presentation, this results in a blank space in the French version ― allowing for free improvisation by
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the actors ― alongside a written-out version in English. This is an instance of variance that is of interest to textual and genetic critics alike.
19 One could object that these are not modern manuscripts and that the change took place after the first publication, after the “bon à tirer” moment, that it is not in other words strictly speaking part of the “avant-texte” or the genetic dossier. But on the other hand, since the English version is Beckett’s own translation, one could also argue that it is a continuation of the genesis after publication. Moreover, Beckett also adapted the French text. A copy that was offered for auction at Sotheby’s in 1990 shows how Beckett annotated his prompt copy of the first edition (now preserved at Trinity College, Dublin), adding the abusive terms “V. Andouille | E. Tordu | V. Crétin | E. Curé | V. Dégueulasse | E. Micheton | V. Ordure | E. Architecte” by hand (Sotheby’s 1990, 209).
20 Even though this is usually seen as the domain of textual scholars, this grey area of the “epigenesis” (the continuation of the genesis after the “bon à tirer” moment, the moment the author decided the text was ready to be printed) is an excellent space for textual criticism and genetic criticism to converge (see Figure 4).
21 In biology, epigenetics is a term denoting the discipline that studies the changes in the phenotype or the expression of the gene, caused by external circumstances, which nonetheless do not change the DNA sequence.10 The environment does not change the DNA but it does have an impact on the way the genes express themselves in the phenotype. For instance, it has been proven that famine in a certain generation of the population (say, generation 1) leads to an increased risk of diabetes in their grandchildren (generation 3).
Figure 4: Modelling a digital scholarly edition for genetic criticism, including exo-, endo- and epigenesis.
22 Similarly, when for instance On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, the criticism in Charles Darwin’s environment had such an impact on him that it changed the phenotype of his book on five subsequent occasions: he kept reacting to this criticism by rewriting his book. As a consequence, each edition published in his lifetime is different.
23 In literature, there are numerous examples of epigenetic variance. If a playwright not only writes but also directs his plays, he often uses the rehearsals to keep changing his text, even if it is already published. In the case of Waiting for Godot, Beckett first directed his own play in German in Berlin. During the rehearsals he made changes to the text, notably to the “Echange d’injures” between Didi and Gogo. The published version of the
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translation reads: “Schurke! Würstchen! Saftsack! Giftzwerg! Rotzlöffel! Rindsknochen! Mistbiene! Ober…forstinspektor!” In his own copy, Beckett manually changed this whole series into: “Streithammel | Querulant | Stinkstiefel | Giftnickel | Brechmittel | Pestbeule | Scheisskerl Parasit! (Pa .. Pa. Paläolithiker)” (Beckett 2006, 92).
24 Before critics can ask the question whether these changes should be treated as “réécritures”, as “variants”, or perhaps even as “variations on a theme”, they have to be aware of this kind of revision sites in the first place and need to have access to these textual instances as well as the means to discuss them. Providing the tools to enhance this textual awareness is an important role of the editor. In this case, the publishing house Suhrkamp not only published Beckett’s copy in a facsimile edition, but also adapted the text according to Beckett’s “réécritures” (incorporating his handwritten changes in subsequent editions) and produced a trilingual edition (1963). Still, when Beckett received the trilingual edition, he did not fail to remark that Suhrkamp had made use of the expurgated version of the English text. In 1965, Faber and Faber finally published the unexpurgated version, which Suhrkamp subsequently used in their paperback version of the trilingual edition (1971).
25 As these examples illustrate, there is an urgent need for a critical edition and my suggestion is that this critical edition should be both bilingual and informed by genetic criticism. Or, seen from another perspective and applying the rationale of reversible roles, these examples show that there is an urgent need for a genetic approach informed by a bilingual critical edition. Such a genetically informed bilingual edition is certainly feasible and can build on the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project to offer readers an insight into both the micro- and the macrogenesis.
Micro- and macrogenesis
Microgenesis
26 Hans Walter Gabler has argued that a distinction should be made between “text editions” and “manuscript editions” (see his contribution in this issue of Variants). If one tries to apply this division to concrete projects such as the case study at issue, the BDMP would have to be categorized ― at least in the first instance ― as a manuscript edition: one of its two main purposes is to reunite digitally the dispersed manuscripts of Samuel Beckett’s works. But the other purpose is to facilitate their examination. In addition to digital facsimiles and topographic transcriptions, it also includes linear transcriptions of all the versions (encoded in XML-TEI). The sentence generally serves as a functional unit of comparison. Readers can choose any sentence and study all the versions of this unit in the synoptic sentence view, and have the option to use this synoptic view as the basis for automatic collation with CollateX.11 The result comes very close to what Hans Walter Gabler terms a text edition.
27 Although it is necessary and useful to establish a typology in order to develop a theoretical framework for digital scholarly editions, the borders between the types or categories are not necessarily impermeable. The digital medium actually enables both genetic critics and textual critics to use the edition according to the nature of the research object they wish to study, focusing either on the manuscript or on the text, and in accordance with Daniel Ferrer’s distinction that a manuscript is not a text but a protocol for making a text (Ferrer 2011, 43). The digital genetic edition does not have to
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be either an archive edition or a text edition; it can be a continuum between the two. It is up to the reader or researcher to decide in which capacity it is used (Van Hulle 2009; see also Kenneth Price’s suggestion to use the term “arsenal” [Price 2009]).
28 The flexibility of the digital medium, which makes it so suitable for scholarly editing, complements the relative fixity of print editions. Print however continues to be an asset for readers’ editions, because the human brain maps the book’s topography while reading in a way that digital does not.12 The urgent need for a critical edition of Beckett’s works that I identified earlier could combine the qualities of both media for the respective purposes to which they are beneficial. The print version can take shape in a bilingual edition, offering the original and Beckett’s self-translation in parallel presentation. In addition to a critical apparatus, the system of “revision sites” and “revision narratives” introduced by John Bryant and Haskell Springer in their edition of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (2007) would be a suitable way of enhancing readers’ textual awareness by drawing attention to instances of significant textual variance and explaining the genetic importance of the “réécriture”, “variant” or “variation”. To combine the fixity of print with the flexibility of the digital genetic edition, the revision narrative can also be consulted online, enabling readers to study the manuscripts if they so desire. The print version does not need to be burdened with a critical apparatus either, as readers can always consult the BDMP’s synoptic survey online. Instead of turning the critical apparatus into the dullest part of a critical edition, the digital edition can offer automatic collation as a tool to help users discover complex and therefore interesting textual instances in the manuscripts and other textual versions.
Macrogenesis
29 This combination does not only work on the level of the microgenesis (the processing of a particular exogenetic source text; the revision history of one specific textual instance across endogenetic and/or epigenetic versions; the “réécritures” or revisions within one single version), but can also be applied to the macrogenesis (the genesis of the work in its entirety across multiple versions ― i.e. by combining large textual units along the syntagmatic axis with the development along the paradigmatic axis on a macrolevel; Figure 5).
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Figure 5: Modelling a digital scholarly edition for genetic criticism, including exo-, endo-, epigenesis, as well as microgenesis and macrogenesis.
30 For instance, when Beckett had completed the first two dozen of pages of the first notebook containing the manuscript of L’Innommable, he suddenly had an idea for the end of the novel. He wrote this idea on two separate sheets of paper and pasted them into the back of the first notebook. Eventually, he decided not to use this passage for the end (though he did use it for a passage towards the end of the novel). A macrogenetic approach maps the interaction between the topography of the notebook and the development of the narrative. In this particular case, this implies a visualization that shows how the two pages pasted into the back of the first L’Innommable notebook were actually written rather early in the writing process (after two dozen of pages), in spite of the impression the topography (the back of the notebook) may create.
Figure 6: Document-oriented, macrogenetic visualization of the writing process of the French manuscript of Beckett’s L’Innommable / The Unnamable
For a colour image, see http://www.becketarchive.org/writingsequenceofinnommable.jsp.
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31 To visualize this macrogenetic manoeuvre, the BDMP makes use of the same numbering system (in the XML encoding) that enables readers to compare sentences in the synoptic survey. The reader has the option between a document-oriented or a text- oriented visualization.
32 The document-oriented visualization (Figure 6) focuses on the order of sentences as they are arranged on the manuscript page. It presents each sentence as a bullet linked to its respective sentence number, based on the order of sentences in the base text, and colour-coded according to fourteen narrative sequences into which the novel has been divided (Van Hulle and Weller 2014, 95‒6).13 Sentences in the manuscript that have not made it into the published text are marked in grey in order to map the dead ends or culs-de-sac in the writing process.14
Figure 7: Text-oriented, macrogenetic visualization of the writing process of the French manuscript of Beckett’s L’Innommable / The Unnamable.
The screenshot is a still of what is presented as an animation online, see http:// www.beckettarchive.org/writingsequenceofinnommable.jsp.
33 The text-oriented approach (Figure 7) focuses on the order of sentences in the text of the manuscript (compared to the base text), not the order of sentences as arranged on the page. It takes into account loose jottings, related to a specific sentence; sentences that are crossed out in their entirety; and the movement of sentences in relation to the base text. Since the goal of genetic criticism is to study the dynamics of the writing process, it may be useful to visualize the macrogenesis in a dynamic way as an animated presentation (see http://www.beckettarchive.org/ writingsequenceofinnommable.jsp).
34 This way another level of variance can be visualized: the difference between the topology of the document and the chronology of the text.
Conclusion
35 These developments may raise (and have raised) the question whether this kind of schematic visualization or animation can “still” be called scholarly editing, as well as the question whether it is “already” part of scholarly editing.15 The tension between these two questions indicates not just how the digital medium has become the medium for scholarly editions, but also how this new medium constantly pushes the limits of what we regard as “scholarly editing” ― and how it facilitates the rapprochement
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between scholarly editing and genetic criticism. It allows us to look for new editorial ways to give shape to one of the most complex aspects in genetic criticism: how to visualize macrogenetic variance. Once one becomes more familiar with an author’s manuscripts, one’s attention tends to become absorbed by the tiniest details in the handwriting. Even digital collation is relatively “micro”-focused. To really help students and interested readers find their way in the labyrinth of the manuscripts, the proposed model tries to map not only the exo- and endogenesis, but also the epigenesis, not only the micro-, but also the macrogenesis as an intrinsic part of digital scholarly editing to enable and facilitate genetic criticism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Beckett, Samuel. 1984. Disjecta. Ed. Ruby Cohn. New York: Grove Press.
Beckett, Samuel. 1999. En attendant Godot. Paris: Éditions de Minuit.
Beckett, Samuel. 2003. En attendant Godot / Waiting for Godot / Warten auf Godot. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Beckett, Samuel. 2006. Warten auf Godot. Facsimile edition. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Beckett, Samuel. 2010a. Waiting for Godot. London: Faber and Faber.
Beckett, Samuel. 2010b. The Unnamable. Ed. Steven Connor. London: Faber and Faber.
Beckett, Samuel. 2013. L’Innommable / The Unnamable: A Digital Genetic Edition. Eds. Dirk Van Hulle, Shane Weller and Vincent Neyt. The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, Module 2. Brussels: University Press Antwerp (ASP/UPA), 2013,
Bryant, John. 2002. The Fluid Text: A Theory of Revision and Editing for Book and Screen. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Camus, Albert. 2000. Le Mythe de Sisyphe. Essai sur l’absurde. Paris: Gallimard.
Camus, Albert. 2005. The Myth of Sisyphus. Trans. Justin O’Brien. London: Penguin Books.
Cassirer, Ernst. 1921. Kants Leben und Lehre. Berlin: Bruno Cassirer.
Cassirer, Ernst. 1981. Kant’s Life and Thought. Trans. James Haden. New Haven and London; Yale University Press.
Cavaillès, Nicolas. 2007. “L’Exogenèse: Cas du Précis de decomposition de Cioran”. Revue Recto/Verso, 1,
De Biasi, Pierre-Marc. 1998. “Qu’est-ce qu’un brouillon? Le cas Flaubert: Essay de typologie fonctionnelle des documents de genèse”. In Michel Contat and Daniel Ferrer, eds. Pourquoi la critique génétique? Méthodes, théories. Paris: CNRS Editions, pp. 31‒60.
De Biasi, Pierre-Marc. 2000. La génétique des textes, Paris: Nathan.
Debray Genette, Raymonde. 1979. “Genèse et poétique: Le cas Flaubert”. In Louis Hay, ed. Essais de critique génétique. Paris: Flammarion, pp. 21‒67.
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D’Iorio, Paolo. 2010. “Qu’est-ce qu’un édition génétique numérique?” Génésis, 30, pp. 49‒53,
D’Iorio, Paolo and Daniel Ferrer, eds. 2001. Bibliothèques d’écrivains. Paris: CNRS Editions.
Ferrer, Daniel. 2004. “Towards a Marginalist Economy of Textual Genesis”. In Dirk Van Hulle and Wim Van Mierlo, eds. Reading Notes. Special issue of Variants, 2/3, pp. 7–18.
Ferrer, Daniel. 2010. “Critique génétique et philologie: Racine de la différence”. Genesis, 30, pp. 21‒ 23.
Ferrer, Daniel. 2011. Logiques du brouillon: Modèles pour une critique génétique. Paris: Seuil.
Ferrer, Daniel and Michael Groden. “Introduction”. In Jed Depman, Daniel Ferrer and Michael Groden, eds. Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-textes. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 1-16.
Gontarski, S. E. 2006. “Greying the Canon: Beckett in Performance.” In Beckett after Beckett. Edited by S. E. Gontarski and Anthony Uhlmann. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, pp. 141‒57.
Hay, Louis. 1979. “La Critique génétique: Origines et perspectives.” In Louis Hay, ed. Essais de critique génétique. Paris: Flammarion, pp. 227‒36.
Mansfield, Katherine. 2002. Selected Stories. Ed. by Angela Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McCarty, Willard. 2004. “Modeling: A Study in Words and Meanings”. In Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens and John Unsworth, eds. A Companion to Digital Humanities. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 254‒70,
McCarty, Willard. 2008. “Knowing … : Modeling in Literary Studies”. In Susan Schreibman and Ray Siemens, eds. A Companion to Digital Literary Studies. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 391‒404,
Melville, Herman. 2007. Moby-Dick. Eds. John Bryant and Haskell Springer. New York: Pearson / Longman.
Pierazzo, Eleno. 2015. Digital Scholarly Editing: Theories, Models and Methods. Farnham: Ashgate.
Price, Kenneth. 2009. “Edition, Project, Database, Archive, Thematic Research Collection: What’s in a Name?” Digital Humanities Quarterly, 3(3),
Proust, Marcel. 1928. À la recherche du temps perdu: Du Côté de chez Swann. Paris: Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue Française.
Shillingsburg, Peter. 2006. From Gutenberg to Google: Electronic Representations of Literary Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sotheby’s: English Literature and History (London, 13 December 1990). 1990. London: Sotheby’s.
Van Hulle, Dirk. 2009. “Editie en/of archief: Moderne manuscripten in een digitale architectuur.” Verslagen en mededelingen van de Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde, 119(2), pp. 163‒78.
Van Hulle, Dirk. 2014a. “Textual Scars: Beckett, Genetic Criticism and Textual Scholarship.” In S. E. Gontarski, ed. The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 306-19.
Van Hulle, Dirk. 2014b. Modern Manuscripts: The Extended Mind and Creative Undoing from Darwin to Beckett and Beyond. London: Bloomsbury.
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Van Hulle, Dirk and Wim Van Mierlo, eds. 2004. Reading Notes. Special issue of Variants, 2/3.
Van Hulle, Dirk and Shane Weller. 2014. The Making of Samuel Beckett’s L’Innommable/The Unnamable. The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project 2. London: Bloomsbury.
NOTES
1. The research leading to these results has received funding from the Leverhulme Trust (Visiting Professorship at the University of Kent’s School of European Culture and Languages) and the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007‒2013) / ERC grant agreement n° 313609. 2. In November 2013, ESTS held its tenth international conference in conjunction with the Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes (ITEM) and Textes, histoire et monuments, de l’Antiquité au Moyen Âge (THEMAM). This collaboration marked a historical moment in terms of the rapprochement between textual scholarship and genetic criticism. 3. These are five aspects of genetic criticism. They are not what Paolo D’Iorio (2010) dubbed the five constitutive parts of a digital genetic edition: (1) genetic dossiers; (2) catalogue and facsimile edition; (3) transcriptions; (4) classifications; and (5) representation of the genetic processes. The proposal is a model for a digital genetic edition’s infrastructure according to a work’s exo-, endo-, epi-, micro- and macrogenesis. 4. The notion of “version” is used in close connection with its material support. One could argue that there are two versions in HRC MS SB 3-10; but in longer sentences, not all additions are necessarily added at the same time. Since Beckett used the same ink for both the body of the text and for the additions, it is not always possible to distinguish different revision campaigns. For this reason, different writing layers within one version are not treated as separate versions in the BDMP, but the revisions within one version do feature prominently in the collation output (with strikethrough for cancellations and superscript for additions) and can be compared to the variants in the other versions. 5. According to de Biasi, “la critique génétique parlera de ‘réécritures’, d’états de rédaction’ ou d’opérations génétiques’: comment parler de ‘variantes’ en l’absence de tout invariant?” (2000, 20) (“genetic criticism speaks of ‘rewritings’, of ‘redactive stages’ or of ‘genetic operations’: how can one speak of ‘variants’ where the ‘invariant’ is completely absent?”) 6. “La rivière de l’exogenèse se jette dans le fleuve de l’endogenèse, tout élément exogénétique étant progressivement incorporé au texte en cours jusqu’à s’y fondre et y suivre un destin commun avec les éléments endogénétiques qui l’environnent” (Cavaillès 2007) (“The river of exogenesis flows into the stream of endogenesis as each exogenetic element is progressively incorporated in the work in progress until it is fully integrated and shares a common destiny with the endogenetic elements surrounding it”). 7. As Daniel Ferrer and Michael Groden note in their introduction to the collection of essays Genetic Criticism, “a decisive turning point in the history of genetic criticism was the Bibliothèque Nationale’s acquisition of an important collection of Heinrich Heine manuscripts in 1966. This purchase could have been just one more addition to the rich holdings of the Département des Manuscrits if it had not occurred in the climate of political turmoil, intellectual excitement, and critical renewal that characterized the late 1960s. On the occasion of this purchase, Louis Hay, who would soon be appointed head of a small team of young scholars charged with studying the archive, published in the national press a short article ― “Des manuscrits, pour quoi faire?” (“Manuscripts: So what?”) ― that was both defensive and programmatic. He wasted no time with traditional scholarly justifications but instead took a position relative to structuralism and the nouvelle critique. He argued that studying the final text is not the only legitimate approach and
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should be complemented by genetic analysis” (Ferrer and Groden 2004, 7). In this short position statement published in Le Monde on 8 Febuary 1967, Louis Hay already mentioned the notion of a text’s genetic structure, but it took another decade for the term “genetic criticism” to be generally adopted, and by 1979, the name of the discipline was fully established with the publication of Louis Hay’s article “La Critique génétique: origines et perspectives” (Hay 1979). 8. For a more detailed discussion of this cut, see Van Hulle 2014a. 9. Since no reading traces have been preserved, the degree of certainty in this case is lower than in the case of the Latin quote Beckett took from his reading of Kant (see above). But the lack of reading traces does not necessarily reduce the plausibility of Beckett reading Camus’s essay. Indirect endogenetic indications in the 1949 manuscript of L’Innommable corroborate the possibility that Beckett read the 1942 essay either during or shortly after the war (Van Hulle and Weller 2014, 119‒20; 159‒60; 165). 10. For a more detailed discussion of the correspondences between biological and textual epigenetics, see Van Hulle 2014b, 216-17. 11. This feature was incorporated and is still being optimalized in close collaboration with the developer of CollateX, Ronald Dekker (Huygens ING, The Hague). 12. A recent study at the University of Utrecht (led by Daniel Janssen) has shown that readers who read a story from a print edition are better at reconstructing the plot than readers who read it from an e-book (see “E-book of gewoon boek”,
ABSTRACTS
This essay proposes a model of genetic criticism's complex research object (writing processes) to make it manageable and develop an editorial infrastructure that facilitates research into five aspects of genetic criticism: exogenesis, endogenesis, epigenesis, microgenesis and macrogenesis. It argues that the digital paradigm can be instrumental in a rapprochement between textual scholarship and genetic criticism.
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INDEX
Keywords: genetic criticism, genetic edition, scholarly editing, digital edition, drafts, editorial traditions, variant, revision
AUTHOR
DIRK VAN HULLE
Dirk Van Hulle is Professor of English literature at the University of Antwerp and director of the Centre for Manuscript Genetics, recently edited the new Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett (2015). With Mark Nixon, he is co-director of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (www.beckettarchive.org) and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Beckett Studies. His publications include Textual Awareness (2004), Modern Manuscripts (2014), Samuel Beckett’s Library (2013, with Mark Nixon), James Joyce’s Work in Progress (2016) and several genetic editions in the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, including Krapp’s Last Tape/La Dernière Bande, L’Innommable/The Unnamable (with Shane Weller) and the Beckett Digital Library.
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Genetic Criticism with Textual Criticism: From Variant to Variation
Daniel Ferrer
1 Roland Barthes used to say that it was unfair that typists should not have the right to an unconscious: nobody cares about their parapraxes except to eliminate them (1975, 100). Most traditional textual critics would agree with this commonsensical approach to error: their goal has been to recover the authentic text from the distortions that corrupted it in transmission. From this point of view variant readings are annoying parasites that should be eliminated on the way towards the prelapsarian singularity of the text.
2 Yet if variants are theoretically despised, practically they are treasured, collated with the greatest care and subjected to a very sophisticated treatment. It is not as marks of authorial hesitancy but specifically as scribal departures that variants became an object of study.1 Errors have been classified with great subtlety, on the principle that you must understand your enemy to defeat him. It is obvious that traditional philology is absolutely fascinated by them (a kind of Stockholm syndrome). We could say that the unconscious of the typist has in fact become an object of study: perhaps not the personal unconscious that Barthes had in mind, but at least the linguistic and historical systems responsible for the copyist’s mistakes.
3 After some time, textual criticism realized that the appropriation of the text could also be interesting in itself, and perhaps as interesting as the retrieval of the original text. Textual scholars began to study variants not as mere deformations of an original but as the interaction of two systems, interfering with one another, as a super system or diasystem combining the two, or even ― I am referring specifically to Cesare Segre’s theory (1976; 1979) ― as a kind of creolization of the original system, i.e. the appropriation of the materials of a basic language in order to produce an autonomous language, ruled by its own grammar.2
4 When textual criticism reaches this point, the opposition between textual criticism and genetic criticism fades away and tends to disappear: I have written elsewhere that textual criticism is a science of repetition and genetic criticism a science of invention;
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that the aim of textual criticism is to establish the text (by eliminating its variants), whereas genetic criticism destabilizes the text by confronting it with its actual or potential versions (Ferrer 2002).3 This rough opposition needs to be considerably qualified, however.
5 When textual criticism adopts such a point of view ― treating variants as parts of an autonomous system that interferes with, and remodels, the original system ― it can become a source of inspiration for genetic criticism. A similar kind of interference between systems occurs in the course of writing: the point of view of the writer constantly changes during the creative process, so that what is already written must be reinterpreted from a ― marginally, in most cases, but sometimes radically, new ― perspective, somehow like Segre’s medieval scribe striving to assimilate the text he is copying into his own linguistic system. Variants are traces of this process of reinterpretation that sometimes amounts to a creolization: if the writer’s point of view did not change, there would be no modifications, no cancellations, no additions…
6 There is however, something that is lacking for this model to be entirely adequate for the needs of genetic criticism. I would like to suggest that we could supplement it by making use of the notion of variation.
7 The words “variant” and “variation” both designate elements that are at the same time similar and different, and they are often ― loosely ― used interchangeably. Generally, we speak of “variants” when there is a choice between elements regarded as equivalent, and of “variation” when similar elements are juxtaposed in space or in time (see Ferrer 2009). The prime example is of course musical variation, like the Goldberg or the Diabelli variations, but we can also speak of pictorial variations and textual variations.
8 The problem is that even musicologists find it difficult to define exactly what counts as a variation. It is something that is both similar and different, but we could say that about practically any two entities, so any piece could be a variation on another.
9 Roman Jakobson’s two linguistic axes are helpful here. Variants are to be found on the paradigmatic axis, the axis of selection between elements that are considered equivalent, whereas variations occur along the syntagmatic axis, the axis of combination, but they still have to do with equivalence. Variants represent a special manifestation of the poetic function as Jakobson famously describes it: “the projection of the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection on to the axis of combination” (1960, 358).
10 Jakobson’s analysis is particularly interesting because it shows that the poetic takes the form of a fundamentally genetic mechanism (the choice between different possibilities and the actualization of the virtual), but it does not really help us that much with our definition of variation, since he does not define what equivalence is. We can only infer that variation is not identity; otherwise, there would be no selection, no options to choose from.
11 The American philosopher Nelson Goodman offers the best explanation: a passage functions as a variation of another passage only when it refers to it in a certain way (1988, 68), by exemplifying some of its properties. Goodman’s favourite example is the tailor’s swatch of cloth: it has many properties ― shape, weight, being made on a certain day of the week, for instance; but these are considered irrelevant because the swatch is only meant to exemplify its colour and its weave.
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12 Goodman also emphasizes that differences have a referential value as well as similarities. Differences can exemplify contrastively some features of the theme. How can a variation exemplify a feature it does not have? Or how can it refer to the theme by exemplifying features that the theme does not have? How can an absent feature exemplify something? These are very important questions in our field. In the same way, Goodman says, as we refer ironically to a giant by calling him Tiny, or as we refer to the rain outside by calling it “our beautiful Parisian weather”.
13 Let us try to illustrate this. Take two sentences from the “Aeolus” chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses: “Grossbooted draymen rolled barrels dullthudding out of Prince’s stores and bumped them up on the brewery float. On the brewery float bumped dullthudding barrels rolled by grossbooted draymen out of Prince’s stores” (Joyce 1986, 96; 7. 21–24). These sentences can be likened to musical variations: the second sentence appears as a variation on the first one; it alludes to it by exemplifying some of its features. To be more specific, there is both a direct allusion, since the same words are repeated, and a contrastive allusion to the order of the words, since this order is conspicuously inverted.
14 An examination of the genesis of this passage yields significant variants, both scribal and authorial. On the fair copy (the Rosenbach manuscript), we can see that Joyce wrote only the first of the two sentences which was then positioned at the opening of the chapter (Joyce 1975, 1: 112–13); the sentence made its way unchanged into the typescript that was sent to the Little Review for serialization.
15 But here is the text as it appeared in the October 1918 issue of the magazine: “ Grossbooted draymen rolled barrels dullthudding out of Prince’s stores and bumped them up on the brewery float. Grossbooted draymen rolled barrels dullthudding out of Prince’s stores and bumped them up on the brewery float” (Joyce 1918, 26). The sentence was repeated, probably by mistake (Groden 1977, 70n). It is difficult to probe the unconscious of the printers here. Hans Walter Gabler suggests that the mistake may have been due to the printer’s accidental omission of the initial dropped capital and of the capitalized first word, oversights that prompted the compositor to reset the whole sentence, forgetting, in the process, to delete the earlier attempt.4 It is also possible that the typesetter was unconsciously affected by the text ― assuming that he read his copy before setting it ― because this is what appears on the next page: “The machines clanked in threefour time. Thump, thump, thump. Now if he got paralysed there and no one knew how to stop them they’d clank on and on the same, print it over and over and up and back. Monkeydoodle the whole thing. Want a cool head” (Joyce 1986, 74; U 7.101). This is exactly what has happened at The Little Review: the printing machine got out of hand and monkeydoodled the whole thing.
16 Be that as it may, this scribal, or rather mechanical, variant triggered an authorial variant. During correction, Joyce decided to keep the repetition of the words, but he introduced a variation on the word order in the repeated sentence. Since the chapter is devoted to rhetoric and is saturated with rhetorical figures, it afforded an occasion to further exhaust the paradigm by introducing one more figure (a chiasmus); with a single stroke it performed a double projection of the paradigm on the syntagm.
17 The great Joyce critic Hugh Kenner argued that the original single sentence “already seems to foresee the sentence he was later to insert after it” (1987, 63). I find this remark interesting and amusing, because the chapter (though not this particular sentence) actually predicted that the mechanics of printing would get out of hand and result in repetition. More importantly, Kenner’s remark is symptomatic of a very
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natural attitude that we have towards texts, particularly those texts that we consider masterpieces: we cannot accept that they have not, somehow, always been such as they are, and we feel that the labour of genesis only consists in revealing what was present as a germ that only needed to be developed. The repetition of “already” and the form “he was to” suggest a predestination of the text.
18 But the qualification (“seems to foresee”) shows that Kenner is not entirely the victim of this retrospective illusion. Retrospection is not only a naïve illusion; it is a fundamental genetic mechanism ― and using the model of the variation is an attempt to understand this mechanism.
19 Goodman insists that variations interpret the theme. We can say likewise that genetic variants interpret earlier versions. Variation exemplifies, directly or contrastively, qualities that were latent in the original form. This is what Kenner means when he says that the first sentence foresees the second (more accurately, it foresees the double sentence that constitutes the future variant). But this is a prediction a posteriori, what has been called, in another context, “backshadowing”, “a kind of retroactive foreshadowing” (Bernstein 1994, 16). The quaint choice of words of the early sentence, its alliterative rhythm and its tendency to fold upon itself are much more in evidence when seen in conjunction with the second. But we can say as well that the second sentence “remembers” the first one. It only exists in memory of the first (to use an ambiguous phrase well exploited by Jacques Derrida [2013]).
20 Of course, this is an easy thing to say here, where the variant consists of an addition, and where the variation occurs in presentia. But I would like to suggest that it is also true in cases of substitution, or even deletion, where the variation occurs in absentia.
21 Let us take the same example at a further stage of development. The passage was completely overhauled on page proofs. Joyce inserted new paragraphs at the beginning, so that the two sentences no longer opened the chapter. More importantly, he inserted, in accordance with the new aesthetics that he had developed while writing the subsequent chapters, newspaper headlines that completely changed the character of the episode.
22 In this context, it appears that the single sentence is not only a superseded variant of the double one. As a former incipit of the chapter, it is also a variant of the opening of the chapter in the final version of the text: a newspaper heading, right in the middle of a novel. A slightly quaint opening sentence has been replaced by a stunningly revolutionary beginning (for the time).
23 But this hyper-modernist beginning of the chapter in the book version “remembers” the more subdued stylistic audacity of the incipit as it was published in the Little Review. 5 It alludes to it by exemplifying, directly and contrastively, some of its properties.
24 Admittedly, for the ordinary reader who is not “genetically informed” (aware of the avant-texte), it is an imperceptible allusion; but this allusion is nevertheless present in the text as an active force. The idea that an allusion could be imperceptible may seem paradoxical; still, it is a common feature of Joyce’s works. Finnegans Wake is saturated with such allusions. Joyce’s readers know that they are there, that they play an important part in the book, and thus that it is worth chasing them up with reference books and glossaries. But no reader will be able to recognize all of them, for this would require the impossible: speaking dozens of languages and knowing by heart thousands of books and recondite sources.
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25 From the point of view of the author, in the course of writing, variations occur in presentia. When making a change and producing a variant, a writer is (usually) well aware of the version that it supersedes: the new variant is a deliberate exemplification, direct or contrastive, of the relevant properties in the discarded version. From the point of view of the critic, reading the variant as a variation clarifies the dynamic interaction of the versions that takes place during the creative process.
26 It is to be hoped that many readers will become genetically informed and transform variants (authorial variants and sometimes also variants of transmission, as we have seen that the two can be inextricably linked), into powerful means of interpreting the text, by treating them as variations.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barthes, Roland. 1975. Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes. Paris: Seuil.
Bernstein, Michael André. 1994. Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 2013. “Two Words for Joyce”. In Andrew J. Mitchell and Sam Slote (eds), Derrida and Joyce: Texts and Contexts. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Ferrer, Daniel. 1996. “Clementis’s Cap: Retroaction and Persistence in the Genetic Process”. Trans. Marlena G. Corcoran. In Michael Contat et al. (eds.), Drafts, special issue of Yale French Studies, 89, 223–36.
Ferrer, Daniel. 2002. “Production, Invention and Reproduction: Genetic Criticism vs. Textual Criticism”. In Neil Fraistat and Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux (eds), Reimagining Textuality: Textual Studies in the Late Age of Print. Madison, Wisconsin: Wisconsin University Press, 48–59.
Ferrer, Daniel. 2009. “Variant and Variation: Towards a Freudo-Bathmologico-Bakhtino- Goodmanian Genetic Model?” In J. E. Jones and W. Kinderman (eds), Genetic Criticism and the Creative Process: Essays from Music, Literature, and Theater. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 35–50.
Ferrer, Daniel. 2011. Logiques du brouillon: modèles pour une critique génétique. Paris: Seuil.
Goodman, Nelson. 1988. “Variations on Variation ― or Picasso back to Bach”. In Nelson Goodman and Catherine Elgin (eds), Reconceptions in Philosophy and Other Arts and Science. Indianapolis: Hackett, 66–82.
Groden, Michael. 1977. Ulysses in Progress. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Jakobson, Roman. 1960. “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics”. In T. Sebeok (ed.), Style in language. New York: Wiley, 350–77.
Joyce, James. 1918. “Ulysses: Episode VII”. The Little Review, October, 26–51.
Joyce, James. 1975. Ulysses: A Facsimile of the Manuscript. Ed. Clive Driver. New York and Philadelphia: Octagon.
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Joyce, James. 1986. Ulysses: The Corrected Text. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler et al. New York: Vintage Books.
Kenner, Hugh. 1987. Ulysses. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Pasquali, Giorgio. 1952. Storia della tradizione e critica del testo. Florence: Le Monnier.
Segre, Cesare. 1976. “Critique textuelle, théorie des ensembles et diasystème”. Bulletin de l’Académie Royale de Belgique, 62, pp. 276–92.
Segre, Cesare. 1979. “Les transcriptions en tant que diasystèmes”. In J. Irigoin and G. P. Zarri (eds), La pratique des ordinateurs dans la critique des textes. Paris: Colloques internationaux du CNRS, pp. 45–49.
NOTES
1. In some cases, we cannot be quite sure that some of the variants in the tradition are not scribal, but authorial. Giorgio Pasquali (1952) has suggested that it is probably the case in the works of Ovid, for instance. 2. The concept of de-creolization may help describe the effects of editorial emendations. Since creole languages rarely attain official status, the speakers often feel compelled to conform their speech to the parent language (which is usually a politically or culturally dominant language). Such de-creolization typically brings about a post-creole speech characterized by a mixture of fossil remains and hypercorrections. 3. For a more recent formulation of this position, see Ferrer 2011. 4. Private communication, 2013. 5. For the notion of “memory” of the genetic context, see Ferrer 1996 and 2011.
ABSTRACTS
It has been necessary to make a clear distinction between genetic criticism and textual criticism. I suggested that textual criticism is a science of repetition and genetic criticism a science of invention; that the aim of textual criticism is to establish the text (by eliminating its variants), whereas genetic criticism destabilizes the text by confronting it with its actual or potential versions. It now seems required to qualify this general opposition: because it is sometimes impossible to distinguish between creative variants and variants of transmission and also because it is not an adequate description of some of the more interesting work being done in the field of textual criticism. Some of the models that textual critics have put forward can be a source of inspiration for geneticists. Understanding variants as a form of variation can be a more useful way of approaching the question.
INDEX
Keywords: genetic criticism, textual criticism, revision, variant, composition history, transmission history, Joyce (James)
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AUTHOR
DANIEL FERRER
Daniel Ferrer is Director of research emeritus at ITEM (Ecole Normale Supérieure‒CNRS). He has written on Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Poe, Stendhal, Flaubert, Zola, Barthes, Hélène Cixous, painting, the genesis of film and critical theory. Recent books include Logiques du brouillon: modèles pour une critique génétique (Seuil, collection “Poétique“, 2011), Renascent Joyce (Gainesville, University Press of Florida, 2013) and Brouillons d’un baiser: premiers pas vers Finnegans Wake (Gallimard, collection “Du monde entier“, 2014), an edition of some of the early sketches for Finnegans Wake.
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The Draft Manuscript as Material Foundation for Genetic Editing and Genetic Criticism
Hans Walter Gabler
1 There is an essential distinction to be made between “genetic criticism” and “genetic editing”.1 Genetic criticism belongs to the range of discourses available to literary criticism. It is a mode of discourse to engage with a work of literature and the texts in which we meet the work, or the work meets us. The engagement always issues in discourse: commonly in the critic’s free discoursing. Genetic criticism is thus an extension of the traditional modes of articulating literary criticism. Genetic editing, by contrast, is a mode of scholarly editing. As such, it is the answer in the pragmatics of editing to an extension of the spectrum of concerns of textual criticism through an intensified observance of the traces of the conception and growth of writing and text itself in the materiality of documents.
2 Throughout the twentieth century, German textual criticism, for one, was at the fore- front of developing a genetic awareness of textual heritages, specifically such as could be traced back through authorial papers before publication of given works. From this grew a sub-genre of scholarly editions in print classed as Handschrifteneditionen (manuscript editions). Genetic criticism, by contrast, was an answer in France to the dominance of a structuralist approach in mid-century, and post-mid-century, in French literary criticism. Genetic critics of the French critical persuasion engage with the same categories of evidence of writing and the same classes of documents that preserve textual heritages as do the textual critics: with notes, prolegomena, drafts and their revisions, with proofs. But their analyses are not geared as were and are those of the traditional textual critic towards edited presentation of the textual materials. The genetic critic is all set, rather, on drawing critical conclusions from compositional, commonly pre-publication, material evidence.2 Engagement with such materials however is of a complexity far greater than is the reading of (and perhaps parallel note- taking from) texts in print. To order ― even just as aid to future re-call ― the thickets and snares of a draft manuscript, demands transcribing what one sees and believes to
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have recognized in and of its writing. Transcription became standard within French genetic criticism, but was at the same time understood as auxiliary to always also seeing (images of) the manuscript pages. Transcription and image in conjunction constituted, and constitute, together the genetic dossier. (The term gives the document perspective on what from the text perspective is named avant-texte.) They are requisite and suffice as reference base and working materials for the genetic critic. Seeing the French genetic critics relying on these working materials in what was for them their critical engagement with the genesis of text and work, the genetically aware scholarly editors from the German text-critical and editorial school, however, mistook the presentations supplementary to the genetically critical arguments for fully-fledged editions ― as did eventually, too, their Anglo-American peers. Yet this turned out to be a fruitful misperception, since it stimulated the conceptualization of what a genetic edition might be and how it could be realized. The process of realizing such editions is, as meanwhile we know, fully predicated on the digital medium: the type of genetic edition striven for today is the digital genetic edition. What is essential to note, moreover, is that owing to the greater recognition that genetic criticism has come to enjoy as a form of critical inquiry, the demands it places on editing are distinctly broader than has been habitually the case in traditional textual criticism. This is entirely due to the growing awareness of the critical significance of the genetics of writing and text that genetic criticism has generated. It is from this premise that I wish to discuss the (in my view) singular status of the draft manuscript and to argue that the draft manuscript is even ontologically distinct from all other forms and modes of “manuscript”.
The draft manuscript
3 Among the great variety of documents that materialize the texts of our cultures and civilizations, authorial draft manuscripts form a class of their own. What they carry and convey is never only text. Their significance lies equally in the tracing patterns of the writing they evidence. The materiality of their inscription finds expression not only in letters and numerals and their groupings into tokens of recognizable numbers, words, sentences ― or, simply: into intelligible language. Essential to the inscriptions is equally their relative positioning on the writing surface, are the changes in ink or hands, or even the extra-textual authorial alerts or doodles signalling moments of non- writing or non-texting. Moreover, what acts of writing produce in draft documents does not (yet) automatically result in, or achieve, “text” in continuous linear readability. Draft manuscript writing is but incipiently a mode of writing for reading; it is never comprehensively, let alone exclusively text. The total evidence of draft writing cannot be reduced to just text.
4 Text is the result of a writing-for-reading and is pre-conditioned by the rules and habits of reading: it advances linearly, two-dimensionally, from upper left-hand to bottom right-hand corner of a given material support, e.g. a page or sheet, and thence through a sequence of pages. But writing in draft documents is not so vectored. The prime function of draft documents, and the writing in them, is not to record text for reading, but to record, support and further engender composition. For the processes of composition, a writing space is not predetermined by expectations of linear text reading. What we encounter as writing in the pages of original draft documents,
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therefore, are the traces of how the document space was filled in the course of composition. Analysing and interpreting the traces, we gain a sense of how the writing gradually, that is in time, came into being in three visible dimensions as it spreads randomly over the document’s two-dimensional surface and in many instances “rises above” that surface. The latter is the case for instance when traces in differently coloured ink or pencil run across the original inscription. At its best, the “reading” of a draft inscription amounts to a process of deciphering. This requires both a spatial comprehension and a comprehension of the temporal succession, the diachrony, of the inscription.
5 In draft manuscripts, consequently, the writing and its material support form an inseparable unity. To understand draft documents fully one must understand the interdependence of all their dimensions, the visual apprehension and the analytical and interpretive perception must always interact. Therefore, they must also always be conjointly communicated. This interaction requires presenting the documents visually through digital facsimiles and establishing around them a research environment in the digital medium. Presenting digital facsimiles may indeed be considered the primary concern and duty of scholarly manuscript editing today. What this requires under the premise of scholarship, at the same time, is to stabilize the communication of the manuscript images by means of transcriptions of the highest professional precision, even while always strictly understanding these as supplementary to the visual perception.
6 Writing, then, is not just inscribed on, but inseparably grafted into its material support. It is visually traceable within (rather than merely from) the document. Its essence lies in its appearance bodied forth in its materiality. The documents thus, quite simply, do not host or harbour texts, or “text”, in the sense of linearly consecutive reading matter. Text as linear reading matter is always what is already copied off from the draft document, whether in acts of reading or acts of transcribing. In reproduction so initiated in reading or copying, and in subsequent potentially endless re-reproduction, text remains (or should ideally remain) essentially unaltered (in print or in digital files, say, or even in perfect, clean, manuscript fair copy). In Nelson Goodman’s terminology, text so reproducible is “allographic” (Goodman 1968).
7 But writing, and the as yet only seeming text, in original draft manuscripts cannot be subsumed under the “allographic” category. Admittedly, writing in drafts commonly coalesces into text formation and the disposition of incipiently linear text segments over the manuscript space: such “texting”, after all, is the main objective of drafting. Yet it is overridingly true that draft writing is thus grafted into, and hence consubstantial with, its material support. For original draft manuscripts it is true to say that document and inscription form an “autographic” unity. The term, again appropriated from Goodman (1968), refers not to the circumstance that drafts are produced ― performed, as it were ― in autograph, i.e. written in the author’s hand. That they are commonly autographs in the bibliographical sense is their accidental quality. What makes them “autographic” in essence is their encompassing materiality: it is because in drafting the writing is grafted into unity with its material support that drafts qualify as “autographic” according to the “allograph”/”autograph” pairing. On grounds of this unity, draft documents are originals (in the manner, say, of paintings) and, by strength of their materiality, unique. Whereas fair copies and books exist materially mainly to make possible the reading of text, which consequently is always
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“allographically” detachable from any given material support, the materiality of draft manuscripts is as essential as is what is inscribed into it. How writing by common conventions, i.e. inscription of text, as well as interspersed random graphics are found to be spread over the space of a manuscript page is as significant as is the draft’s readability. Hence, the textually intelligible content of manuscripts alone is never coequal to, and does not define, the manuscripts carrying it. Consequently, what is still persistently called “manuscript text” is not simply copyable, as text, out of the original manuscripts, the way text is always copyable from a fair copy into a typescript, or out of one book into the next, or from digital file to digital file. From drafts, rather, “text” can only be abstracted, which means it must be traced through the spatial and graphic patterning of the writing so as to separate it from its symbiotic unity with ink and paper. For this labour of extraction, it is necessary first visually to analyse the manuscript and then to correlate the resulting text to the document. In digital editions, the correlation will be self-evidently effected through linking the extracted transcription with a digital facsimile of the original.
8 Thus to make what ultimately amounts to an ontological distinction between, on the one hand, the material manifestation of writing in (“autographic”) draft manuscripts for texts and of text in (“allographic”) transmission through post-draft documents, on the other, is a fresh proposition that has only tentatively been gaining ground in recent years. What is helping to sharpen perceptions and focus definitions, as well as to stimulate the rethinking and reshaping of critical and editorial practice, is the exploration of original manuscripts by genetic criticism in France and elsewhere, as well as the migration of scholarly editing from the book medium to the digital medium. The draft manuscript provides the meeting ground for genetic editing and genetic criticism.
9 Writing, as I have argued, invades a draft’s writing area spatially, and the traces it leaves in a draft are doubly vectored. In one respect, the writing serves composition, whereby language is composed of words and syntax that proleptically tend towards the readability of text. We customarily disentangle from a draft what appears readable, and so extract from it a linearly successive, albeit a frequently fragmented and incipient, text. Copied out by author, scribe or editor, text so discerned transcends the document into which it was first inscribed and thereby acquires its allographic nature. But in another respect, the writing traces in a draft, insofar as they are not just text, are indicators of the engendering impulses of and behind the composition. The spatial arrangement of the writing as such, as well as its manifold graphic features, give ― or have the potential to give ― clues to the engendering impulses and thought processes that governed, or may have governed, the processes of text construction and composition. They form the core constituents of the draft as autograph, and its writing as autographic. The graphic and topographic features by which drafts, and only drafts, may be identified, never transcend the borders of the material document in which they reside; copying out the allographic text from the draft leaves them irretrievably behind. Thus, drafts feature a double reading order: the order of text and the order of material traces of text construction and composition. It is this singularity of the draft manuscript ― autograph in production and autographic in nature ― which, in its turn, categorizes manuscript editing (Handschriftenedition) as a mode of genetic scholarly editing of its own.
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The genetic trajectory of editing
10 The idea of editing manuscripts is thus freshly brought into focus. The “manuscript edition“ needs to be conceived anew with the aim of bringing out the “autographic” singularity of the draft manuscript. To define manuscript editing (Handschriftenedition) as indeed a distinct editorial mode, it is necessary, both in theory and in practice, to make a fundamental distinction between text editions and manuscript editions, as well as to take full measure of the difference between the book and the digital medium for organizing and presenting scholarly editions. Both “text” and “manuscript” modes of editing are familiar by name, and German Handschrifteneditionen in particular have in their practice attempted to convert the specificities of manuscripts into editorial presentation. Yet, if even just from technical necessity, these editions came out as books.3 However ingeniously they endeavoured to translate the processes of writing into symbolic coding, and (within affordable limits) provided facsimiles, they could only favour the text extracted from drafts, while under-representing, or eliding, the processual nature of the writing. Manuscript editions in book form basically assumed the guise and mode of text editions. Only today, as the digital medium is in the process of becoming ― or perhaps has already become ― the native medium for scholarly editions can text editions and manuscript editions be distinguished in kind and each realized specifically according to the nature of the object to be edited ― and of the objective(s) editorially pursued. We are no longer reduced to merely thinking the categorical distinction, but are in a position to realize, or at least on the verge of realizing, the difference via distinct modes of editorial approach under the auspices, today, of the digital medium. In this, what is fundamental to the mode of the manuscript edition are new forms and modes of “taking in” the manuscript materially as document, and also as inscription ― manu scriptum ― on that document.
Manuscript writing under text and document perspectives
11 It has been customary in editorial scholarship to record the physical properties of manuscripts ― the paper, the size, the watermarks and such-like of the document carrying the manu scriptum ― and to communicate all such observation in editorial prose. For the essential “editing of the manuscript”, the convention has been to transcribe what is predominantly (if not exclusively) discernible as text from out of all that is found inscribed on, and into, the document. Transcription has always implied the lifting-off of the manuscript all writing acknowledged as text and transferring it to a fresh support. With the shift to the digital medium, such lifting-off and re-inscribing is naturally still a part of the operational practice. However, digital editorial projects that focus on manuscript sources have increasingly found themselves grappling with the problem that the lifting-off does not cleanly yield text alone. To put it another way, these projects have become aware of the considerable varieties of written traces that are present in the draft manuscript. These traces, moreover, are increasingly coming to be seen to carry meaning, i.e. they are interpretable, and thus they elucidate not only the text drafted, but also the writing process that leads up to the final text that results from the drafting. Of course, such traces had not, or not wholly, been overlooked by editors in the pre-digital era, but they were not considered relevant in the editorial
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process. Hence, print editions would omit anything that in the source documents was not readable as text or would at most (selectively) footnote or otherwise comment on instances of inextricable symbiosis between text-readable and non-text-readable traces in the draft writing. Editions midwifed into the digital medium, by contrast, must and can convey such information by combining re-inscription with digital re-visualization and so render the writing traces in draft manuscripts interpretable in their full complexity of interaction.
12 Transcription into the digital medium is organized by way of mark-up; and it is at the same time indeed argued through mark-up. The mark-up we have hitherto been conditioned and trained to employ, championed by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), has been predominantly “text mark-up”. “Text”, by its original understanding, was seen as the result of writing processes, and therefore foreshortened as being purely synchronic. Only very recently has the encoding repertoire of the TEI acquired the added dimension of guidelines and rules for genetic mark-up ―a reorientation that finally acknowledges the essentially diachronic nature of writing and text.4 This has been, and is still being, designed to deal with all aspects of draft manuscripts, including those traces or patterns in the writing which cannot easily ― or not all ― be subsumed under the categories “texting” and text. It is the non-text-readable traces of the writing that constitute the image nature of the draft. If it is fundamental to the digital manuscript edition (as I said) to combine re-inscription with digital re-visualization, it is, over and above marked-up text transcription, equally essential to re-define the nature and function of the digitized manuscript image. The digital image in a digital edition is not merely illustrative (as was the facsimile image in a book). Just as the traces of text writing and non-text-writing interact in the material draft, so must they be rendered interactive in the digital edition. Hence, and in analogy to mark-up for the text writing, marking-up is required, too, for the digital image. This serves to identify and render retrievable the manuscript’s multiple trace patterns and critically establishes their interconnection, as well as their connection with the marked-up rendering of the manuscript’s text content. The marking-up in its entirety constitutes the codification of all critical activity that goes into the editorial enterprise. Consequently, it is into the mark-up systems encompassing text writing and image that all critical judgement and decision is distilled which goes to shape the digital manuscript edition. The mark-up is where the edition’s argument resides, so that from it may be extracted and visualized, for dynamically interactive communication at interface level, what the edition succeeds in offering.
13 The implementation of genetic mark-up in editorial projects is gaining ground. In Germany, it has been spear-headed by the genetic edition ― calling itself a “genetisch- kritische Hybrid-Edition” ― of J. W. Goethe’s Faust (2016). The editorial team’s intense engagement over more than five years has been ground-breaking, and has developed manifold templates for future digital genetic editions to use, adapt or emulate. At the fundamental level of transcription and encoding through mark-up, the Faust edition has introduced a redoubled approach. The draft manuscript materials are twice marked-up, once from a document perspective and once from a text perspective. This approach recognizes the twice redoubled nature of the draft manuscript as a document that is both material in itself and that is materially inscribed; and whose inscription, moreover, is the material record both of the processes of the writing as such and of the writing as texting, resulting in text.5
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14 For my argument here, the Faust edition’s double transcription practice has in turn a two-fold significance. The separation of a document perspective and a text perspective concurs, firstly, with our fresh definition of the draft manuscript as “autographic”, and thus a document type sui generis where materiality, writing and text symbiotically merge. This re-doubled view of the draft manuscript thus, secondly, allows (and indeed requires), engaging critically with processes of composition and revision not only in the dimensions of texting and text alone, but also in their interdependence with the document materiality. So stated, this circumscribes anew the compass of manuscript exploration through genetic criticism.
15 Genetic manuscript editing, by contrast, is only beginning to assert itself and has not yet developed tested ― let alone widely proven and accepted ― practices for bringing the tenets and objectives of genetic criticism to the interface level of the digital medium. Designing modes of genetic editing and editions in terms both of organization and structure as well as of visualization and ports for analytic access, involves significant modifications and extensions of received editorial methodology, and indeed of the very concept of the “edition” as a product of scholarship. The Frankfurt digital edition of Goethe’s Faust, remarkably high-powered in both scholarly expertise and in funding, has after close to six years of intense research and development only very recently managed to put its Beta version on the net. There, it joins, for instance, the Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bohnenkamp, Anna, et al. 2012. “Perspektiven auf Goethes >Faust<: Werkstattbericht der historisch-kritischen Hybridedition”. In Anna Bohnenkamp (ed.), Jahrbuch des Freien Deutschen Hochstifts. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, pp. 25‒67.
Gabler, Hans Walter. 2011. Review of Logiques de brouillon, by Daniel Ferrer. Ecdotica, 8, pp. 276‒80.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. 2016. Faust : Historisch-kritische Edition. Eds. Anna Bohnenkamp et al. Frankfurt : no publisher.
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Goodman, Nelson. 1968. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Brighton: Harvester Press; Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.
Hölderlin, Friedrich. 1975‒2007. Sämtliche Werke. 19 vols. Ed. Dieter Sattler. Frankfurt: Stroemfeld.
Meyer, Conrad Ferdinand. 1963‒96. Sämtliche Werke: Gedichte. 7 vols. Ed. Hans Zeller. Bern: Benteli.
Rehbein, Malte with Hans Walter Gabler. 2013. “On Reading Environments for Genetic Editions”. Scholarly and Research Communication 4(3), pp. 1‒21,
NOTES
1. A version of this article has appeared in Swedish (translated by Jon Viklund and Paula Henrikson from an earlier version of the underlying conference paper) under the title “Handskriften som en mötesplats för genetisk utgivning och genetisk kritik” in Kladd, utkast, avskrift. Studier av litterära tillkomstprocesser (Uppsala: Avdelningen för litteratursociologi, Uppsala universitet, 2015, pp.21‒32). 2. The current, portmanteau term for such material is avant-texte. To a non-French ear, it is a problematic term, since it suggests that what comes before the end of composition and before publication (“avant”) is not yet “texte”. This is correct only by a French understanding of texte, which is different (it seems) from the denotation of “text” in English or German. I have had occasion to discuss this slippage between denotations in my review of Daniel Ferrer, Logiques du brouillon. Modèles pour une critique génétique (Gabler 2011). Ferrer’s book is the most elegant explication of the essence of French genetic criticism imaginable. 3. In terms of a history of scholarly editing in the twentieth century, it may be said that the climactic end of the publication of Handschrifteneditionen in book form was reached with Hans Zeller’s edition of the poems of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer (1963‒1996) and Dieter Sattler’s editing of the works of Friedrich Hölderlin (1975‒2007). 4. See further the new TEI module for the encoding of Documents and Genetic Criticism at
ABSTRACTS
As its point of departure, this essay makes a clear distinction between genetic criticism and genetic editing. For both, the material as well as visual referent is the manuscript, specifically the draft manuscript. An argument is developed in detail that the draft manuscript is a document sui generis, is essentially “autographic” and thus ontologically distinct from all other forms and modes of “manuscript”. This brings into specific focus the editing of manuscripts. Defining
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manuscript editing (Handschriftenedition) as a distinct editorial mode leads to conceiving of the ”manuscript edition” anew under premises of the “autographic” singularity of draft manuscript writing. The editorial way to realize manuscript editing is to transform both the document (materiality-and-writing) dimension and the text dimension of the draft manuscript into editorial presentation and representation. This is also a way to bring manuscript editing into partnership with genetic criticism. Realization and use of the manuscript edition is conceivable in the digital medium only.
INDEX
Keywords: genetic edition, digital edition, genetic criticism, drafts, manuscripts, avant-texte, allographic text, textual transmission, editorial traditions, German literature
AUTHOR
HANS WALTER GABLER
Hans Walter Gabler is Professor (retired) of English Literature and Editorial Scholarship (retired) at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, Germany; and Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. In 2010, he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Literature, honoris causa, from the National University of Ireland, Maynooth He undertook, as editor-in-chief, the Critical and Synoptic Edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1984), and the critical editions of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners (both 1993). As Professor of English Literature at the University of Munich, Germany, he directed an interdisciplinary graduate programme from 1996 to 2002 on “Textual Criticism as Foundation and Method of the Historical Disciplines.” His present main research interests are the writing processes in authors’ draft manuscripts, their critical interpretation, and their representation in the electronic medium. From 2008‒2010, he chaired the ESF‒COST Action A32, “Open Scholarly Communities on the Web”.
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Why Do Authors Produce Textual Variation on Purpose? Or, Why Publish a Text That Is Still Unfolding?
Hannah Sullivan
1 A POET TAKES a new sheet of paper and writes in black ink, in a childish near print: “God’s lioness also, how one we grow | Crude mover whom I move & burn to love, | Pivot of heels & knees, and of my color”. Then she puts a line through the whole stanza, and through the two lines following it, and starts over. Sylvia Plath’s second opening to Ariel re-envelops and alters the first attempt: “Stasis in darkness, then the ^substanceless^ blue | Lead ^Pour^ of tor and distances. | God’s lioness, how one we grow!”1
2 A novelist rereads a piece of his own fiction after its magazine publication and develops, pulls out, the central metaphor more explicitly. This process of making more explicit involves two phonological slippages, as “dived” is substituted for “lived”, and “strange” for “great”. “He lived once more into his story and was drawn down, as by a siren’s hand, to where, in the dim underworld of fiction, great silent subjects loom”. This in 1893. In 1895, the first book edition has: “He dived . . .”.2
3 A poet goes into a bookshop and opens his own recently published book. “A crowd flowed under London Bridge, so many | I had not thought death had undone so many”. He changes “under” to “over” in every copy. Almost forty years later, now an old man, he is writing out the same poem by hand to raise money for the London Library. In the manuscript he adds in an unfamiliar line, “The ivory men make company between us”.3
4 An eighteenth-century editor is puzzled by Falstaff’s death in Henry V. Why, as evidence that he is about to die, would Mistress Quickly cite: “for his Nose was as sharpe as a Pen, and a Table of greene fields”? What could that mean? He changes “a Table” to “a’ babbled”. In the notes, he explains that the “nonsense” crept into the text “from the
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margin”, where a stage direction to bring in a table “(it being a scene in a Tavern where they drink at parting)” was confused with the words.4
5 In all of these cases we see someone deciding between two or more textual alternatives and selecting one. All, in the broadest sense, are examples of textual variance. But the cases themselves are constituted very differently. First, who gets to decide? The original “author” or an editor? How long after the first act of composition? How quickly is the revision or emendation made, and how is it marked up, if at all, on manuscript or printed pages? By what criterion ― aesthetic or veridical ― can one alternative be judged superior to the others? Plath’s manuscript revision happens quickly, perhaps within a few minutes or even seconds ; James’s post-publication revision after a two- year delay. Eliot’s insertion of “The ivory men. . .” takes forty years. Theobald’s famous conjectural emendation more than a hundred. Different analytic or typological groupings of the examples are possible. In the first three cases, a writer is altering his or her own work (work that was itself, in Eliot’s case, the product of collaboration); in the fourth, an editor is making the change. The first two examples are forward-looking revisions, improvements on what is there; in the second two, the intention is to regress to an original, correct, textual state, by getting rid of corruption. In Plath’s manuscript and the Hogarth Press edition of The Waste Land we can see the manuscript alteration and the crossed out, repudiated alternative; in the other cases, the difference between two textual states, the “variance”, is not instantiated visually on a single page.
6 Of my examples, only the first ― an example of pre-publication revision on a manuscript, offering apparently a kind of privileged glimpse into the psychology of creation ― is the stuff on which genetic criticism works. Where genetic critics agree with Paul Valéry that “nothing is more beautiful than a beautiful manuscript draft” (qtd in Deppman, Ferrer and Groden 2004, 1) and accordingly “valorize the point of departure” (Lejeune 2004, 210), studying the three-dimensional writing process itself rather than any fixed and final state, Anglo-American textual critics, who are often editors, have tended to agree with T. S. Eliot’s disavowal of genetic inquiry that “too much information about the origins of a poem” may prove fatal to one’s appreciation of the text itself (1957, 124). Only the last, an example of an editor trying to sort out transmissional corruption, is of straightforward relevance to Anglo-American editorial scholarship in the Greg-Bowers-Tanselle tradition. In fact, that editorial tradition grounded itself in the editing of Shakespeare, aiming to recover the last manuscript before book publication: “our ideal of an author’s fair copy of his work in its final state” (McKerrow 1939, 18). Whether its principles and procedures work for modern texts, where actual authorial manuscripts survive, has been a subject of debate since at least the early 1980s.5
7 This essay aims to draw attention to the plight of examples two and three, which should be of interest to geneticists and editors, but which have in fact tended to be neglected by both. Both are examples of authors returning to and altering their text after its publication, albeit for rather different reasons. This act of authorial return might variously be figured as harmless correction, the undoing of self-censorship, aesthetic improvement, or unnecessarily interventionist fiddling. If we think of all post-publication changes as liable to lead to textual corruption, then it is also problematic. Which text should be reprinted, the original book publication, which has the merit of being the historically received, “authentic” version, or the revise, whose claims to being “final” may seem undermined by not being the only final version? In
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the case of Henry James, the vast majority of reprints of the major, revised novels and tales, use the first book text, not the New York Edition text.6 Why would an author introduce variation into their own published work on purpose? Or, to put the question the other way round, why publish a text before its genesis is complete?
8 In the analytically “easy” examples, one and four, composition and transmission (via book publication) happen in the temporally expected order. Revision and authorial equivocation (if revision happens at all) is restricted to the private sphere of drafting; everything that happens to a text after first publication is the responsibility of an editor. If the reading “table” were incorrectly interpolated into Henry V from the margin, it was a printer’s doing. And because Plath committed suicide only a few months after drafting the poem “Ariel”, the poems in the Ariel collection were selected and ordered by her ex-husband, Ted Hughes. In his introduction to Plath’s Collected Poems, he explains that to produce his edition he had to turn away from the seductive manuscript pages ― “handwritten pages [. . .] aswarm with startling, beautiful phrases and lines, crowding all over the place” (1989, 17). There is a poignant blurring here between the poems’ content, their manifestation in manuscript, and their heightened status as a dead wife’s last speech act. Plath’s handwritten pages are crowded with life, “aswarm” like the bees she writes about.7 It is her death that closes down the possibility of further genesis, leading to publication and the congealing of fluidities into a “final form”.8
9 If all revision was performed in private, in manuscript, and if all post-publication changes were posthumous corruptions, then these two schools could account, between them, for all problems of textual variance. Genetic critics could tease out the significance of manuscript alternatives, while final-intentionalist editors posed and answered a practical question, “What reading should the editor print?” For the former, a “variant” might be an interesting path taken or not taken in successive versions; for the latter, a variant would be not much more than an error. Genetic criticism would be the study of authorial manuscripts and textual criticism would work with printed books. So far, so simple. But authors do not always manage the instant disappearing act that, Roland Barthes tells us, is the price of readerly reception: “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author” (1977, 148).9 The strategy of Barthes’ 1967 essay is to turn the “Author” into a kind of mayfly, “born simultaneously with the text” and expiring on the same day (1977, 145). His aim is to dismantle the old idea that an author is a text’s past, an authoritative parent who nourishes it, but, in so doing, he also excludes the author from the text’s future.
10 Barthes’ model of the evanescent scriptor works for both Shakespeare and Sylvia Plath. By the time Ariel and the First Folio of Henry V (a play with a “bad” quarto) were published, the original authors were dead. In focusing on the living authors in examples two and three, I aim to shed light on two fantasies ― really they are fallacies ― that both genetic critics and traditional editors are in danger of entertaining. 11 First, the idea that publication is a singular event, a complete transfer from author to reader. In emphasizing the distinction between what Louis Hay calls “a plurality of virtual texts” and a single “constituted text” (2004, 22), genetic critics invest the moment of publication with almost alchemical significance, as if it is there, in that single instant, that a text becomes public rather than private, fixed rather than fluid, single rather than plural, cooked rather than raw, après rather than avant. Anglo- American editing has the same fetish; once again, the first falling of the plates is the
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Fall from grace into error, as the hypostasized “ideal of an author’s fair copy of his work in its final state” (McKerrow 1939, 18) turns into a printed book made by someone else. In both cases, book publication is invested with a numinous importance and finality that is, at least sometimes, hardly warranted. What does it mean in oral culture for a poet to “publish” a poem? What does it mean to publish a novel digitally? Communally? The terminology of “bon à tirer”, like Greg’s rationale of copy-text, derives from a set of material practices (book publishing) specific to a period of about four hundred years, after Gutenberg had made mass reproduction of a text possible, but before the typewriter, personal computer, photocopier, and internet had made it cheap. Within this material culture, first book publication often corresponds to the moment that an author relinquishes interest in a project (thereby ceasing to revise it) and happens to be the mechanism by which transmission of the text begins. But this is by no means always the case. Shakespeare’s plays picked up variation in performance, before any text was printed; so too did Ulysses, in Joyce’s multiple sending of proof. Henry James, on the other hand, extended his story’s genesis past the point of publication. The more basic and useful meaning of publish is simply “to make public”. This needs neither to be a single event (e.g. something that happened on 2 February 1922) nor a visually transformative one (e.g. the rendering of handwriting into print). Publication is only as much of an event as the author makes it. Nor, under modern European and American intellectual property law, can it effect more than a material transfer. Even if a writer composes a letter and sends it “off” without retaining a copy, it is only the physical text that remains entirely in the reader’s possession, under the common law of personal property.10 The right to the text “itself”, including the right to alter or suppress it, remains with the original author; in French law this is expressed as the “incorporeal” right.11 And usually, pace Barthes, authors manage to survive the publication of their works. In a legal sense, then, “the birth of the reader” is achieved only some fixed number of years after the death of the author, when the work passes into the public domain.12
12 The second fallacy, related to the first, is the idea that composition and transmission are mutually exclusive activities, stranded on either side of publication. Of course, transmission and composition are not the same thing. But the difference is one of kind rather than precedence. My suggestion is that we distinguish rigorously between transmissional corruption and authorial revision, without making assumptions about the temporal order in which they happen or the way that they present visually. To make this distinction easier, I think it is helpful to retain the traditional Anglo- American term “variation” to refer to the process of corruption that happens after circulation has begun. Variance, by contrast, can be used to refer to textual alternatives that arise not by error, but from genuine undecidability (even if that undecidability is resolved in turn).
13 Anglo-American editing, which modelled itself after the higher prestige study of Classical and Biblical texts, began as an attempt to deal with variation consequent on post-authorial transmission. (“Post-authorial” is not a point of principle, merely the nature of the surviving documents, or witnesses.) In this tradition, a variant is regarded as a deviation or error from the original, invariant text. The task of the editor is to restore this original text by selecting the correct, intended reading from the ramifying set of alternatives. W. W. Greg’s alarmingly algebraic essay The Calculus of Variants: An Essay on Textual Criticism explains the problem clearly: “the process of transcription is characterized by variation, and it is only in the process of transcription that variant
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readings arise” (1927, 8). Sometimes ― particularly in the case of “creative” or strong conjectural emendation (like “a’ babbled” for “table”) ― the editor has the opportunity to display ingenuity and skill. But on the whole this tradition sees getting the text right as a matter of legal and ethical importance. Fredson Bowers explains: “As a principle, if we respect our authors we should have a passionate concern to see that their words are recovered and currently transmitted in as close a form to their intentions as we can contrive” (1975, 305). Most of the interventions it makes are quite simple, explicable by rules such as lectio difficilior potior. This is because variation is inevitable, no less ― but also no more ― than the outcome of transmitting information. It has nothing specifically to do with book publishing or print, or with the relinquishing of authorial control. Stagings, oral performances, and manuscript transcription also produce corruption (gabbled and omitted lines, slips of the pen quickly corrected, etc.).
14 Literary critics sometimes behave as if pre-modern texts show no evidence of revision but are inevitably corrupted, while modern texts have complex geneses but are transmitted perfectly. Neither of these things is true. The error introduced into a message is a function of the number of times it is transmitted, but frequent simultaneous transmission (e.g. a poem published on multiple separately managed webpages) may be more problematic than slow linear transmission (e.g. a poem reprinted in a new book edition every fifty years). There are many possible causes for transmissional variation in contemporary literature: premature death (David Foster Wallace is an important recent example); faulty typesetting and proofreading (The Waste Land); self-censorship; or, in computer-generated texts, from OCR errors in translating scanned images into text. At the same time, the fact that genetic criticism of Shakespeare is not possible (because no authorial documents survive) does not mean either that he never revised or that we have no evidence of his revisions. In the eighteenth century, Pope thought that the differences between the Bad Quarto of Henry V and the “extremely improved” First Folio were primarily evidence of revision (Pope 1751, 401).13 By the later eighteenth-century, the corruption theory predominated. In the 1980s, revisionism (now “new revisionism”) came back into favour, with the suggestion that Shakespeare “abridged” the Quarto for political reasons, in an act of “tactical retreat” (Patterson 1988, 41; on the new revisionism more generally, see Lesser 2004). We know that corruption must have occurred in the transmission of Shakespeare’s plays (because it is a law of information), but there is no a priori reason to assume that the significant differences between Folio and Quarto texts are a result of confusion and corruption and not purposive revision.
15 In my second and third examples, we see first Henry James and then T. S. Eliot returning to the scene of the crime, continuing to make meaning by interacting with their texts in published form. Eliot first writes on his already published book, and then writes out his almost forty-year old poem. In doing so, he produced a document which looks ironically like the authorial “fair copy” which Anglo-American editors have taken as their lodestar. How James made his revisions for the first book edition of “The Middle Years” is not certain. For its second post-publication revision in the New York Edition, we know that he wrote around the printed pages of his earlier fiction, which had been pasted up on to blank sheets of paper with extra-wide margins.14 In both cases, the material documents produced in the pursuit of continued genesis are rather peculiar. But the textual import of this rewriting on is quite different in the two cases, as a more detailed discussion will show.
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16 When Eliot slipped into a bookshop to correct a mistake in the Hogarth Press text of The Waste Land, he was making an alteration to a poem with a vast creative hinterland. The pre-publication manuscripts and typescripts of The Waste Land, published in facsimile in 1971, have now been thoroughly absorbed into critical discussion. As Christine Froula observes, critical readings “cross easily between the 1921 and 1922 texts” (1996, 313), and it is one of the few English texts where genetic work has become the norm. And, compared to the richness and strangeness of the manuscripts, this story of alteration is tiny. In fact, it is nothing more than a charming textual vignette about Eliot’s self-described “abominable proofreading” (2009b, 202‒203).15 The Criterion publication and first American edition did not contain the mistake, so there was never any doubt about what the correct reading should be. In a bibliographical sense, we have to record “under London Bridge” as a textual variant, but I would suggest that we exclude it from a discussion of variance in the poem.16
17 Eliot’s second alteration is also small, but it is, at least potentially, an example of meaningful variance ― a moment where someone has paused to decide. Until 1971, when the drafts of The Waste Land were published, Eliot’s insertion of the line “The ivory men make company between us” into the London Library manuscript must have seemed confusing. Was he expressing a new final intention for the poem in 1960? Had he decided that this mysterious reference to a game of chess was to be added to his text? Lawrence Rainey notes that the line is not in the 1962 Mardersteig edition and that Eliot referred to this edition as the standard text (see Eliot 2005, 51‒52). After 1971, however, a richer hermeneutic explanation was possible. Christopher Ricks says that “what makes the line so cutting is the dark double-edgedness of ‘between’” (1988, 212), but his explanation of the line’s cutting edge and its dark removal is based on another fact: the line was in the original manuscript but deleted at Vivienne Eliot’s insistence. This, at least, is Valerie Eliot’s claim in the notes to the facsimile. In the draft itself, Vivienne has written a very faint “Yes” next to the line, which is not crossed out (Eliot 1971, 12‒13, 126). Is it possible that only after the death of his first wife, Eliot felt able to reintroduce a line that she had deleted? C. J. Ackerley thinks the line a “too-obvious reference to Bertrand Russell, whose role in the Eliots’ early married life was insidious” (2007, 52). If Eliot was undoing a bit of censorship he resented, then our future editions of the poem should include the line, which also helps to make sense of “The Game of Chess” as a title.17 It would be part of the author’s final intention for his poem. But I think it is more likely that he added the line to make the copy more valuable, by allowing it to carry a little piece of hidden genetic information. The manuscript of The Waste Land had not, of course, yet been published and even Eliot himself would not have known that it was still in existence. In the age of mechanical reproduction, it may be that Eliot was increasing the value of the fair copy manuscript by making it not merely a copy, but a kind of limited edition or one-off.
18 Given the ferocious indecisiveness that marked the pre-1922 history of both The Waste Land and Ulysses, one might have expected that their authors would also have been avid post-publication revisers. But this was not really the case. Besides the restoration of this single line, made after Vivienne’s death, Eliot did not carry on working on his poem; by November 1922, it was already “a thing of the past so far as I am concerned” (Eliot 2009a, 786‒87). After the publication of Ulysses, Joyce ― not to put too fine a point on it ― lost interest in it. But other late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers ― Whitman, Yeats, Auden, Moore ― were extensive post-publication revisers.
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There is no necessary relationship between the amount of revision authors do during the earlier and later stages of composition. Where Joyce turned over the preparation of the 1932 Odyssey Press edition of Ulysses over to Stuart Gilbert, W. H. Auden made extensive changes, both corrections and revisions, on the material pages of his own copies.18 Nor is it always easy to differentiate between willed revisions and unwanted corruptions produced in transmission. It becomes even more complicated when we begin to suspect that a writer is colluding with and profiting from what Vicki Mahaffey terms “volitional error” (1991, 183). Ezra Pound’s “Homage to Sextus Propertius” gains its poignancy partly from Pound’s exploitation of a basic law of information theory: corruption is inevitable, and no such thing as a perfect translation or even a perfect copying is possible. Christine Froula has written well about Ezra Pound’s hospitality to transmissional error; his habit, in fact, of reprising it, reworking with it left in, and making it of genetic significance (see Froula 1984). We see a similar toying between intended and unintended (censored) meaning in Ginsberg’s line in Howl “with mother finally ******”, which he let stand in the poem despite its frank publication of other obscenities, and which he also read aloud as “mother finally asterisked”. The 1955 draft typescript has “with mother finally fucked”.19 The revision of “fucked” to “******” is not an act of self-censorship, so much as a knowing dig at a censorship culture.
19 A kind of magical thinking around publication ― the investment of this “far-off divine event” with properties it lacks ― leads to other analytical biases or problems. Both genetic critics and Anglo-American editorial traditions are apt to place an unwarranted degree of emphasis on the visual “look” of a document, as if the number of erasures or the variety of different coloured inks or the expense of the paper could tell us whether it is (a) finished or (b) public. Broad generalizations can certainly be made within historical periods but, like all generalizations, they exist to be contradicted. In the early twentieth century, for example, a typescript with handwritten marginalia often represents something close to “the author’s final intention”; the next stage, the galley proof with handwritten marginalia, will be the last document on which the original author can easily make changes. But take again as counter-examples the case of The Waste Land and Ulysses. For Joyce, typescript quickly became an exciting new surface for writing anew, and so what was intended as a document of transmission begins, in Gabler’s phrase, “to acquire the status of documents of composition”; from this “the question arises of how far the authorial presence affects, and penetrates, their basic level of transmissional transcription” (Gabler 1986, 1892).20 The Ulysses typescripts, we might say, are draftier than they look. For Eliot, by contrast, a major benefit of duplicate and triplicate typescript was circulation: it allowed him to communicate a poem on which he was stuck to a single, best reader ("il miglior fabbro") without losing his own copy of it. He told Conrad Aiken in the winter of 1921‒22 that he went home every evening with the hope of writing but “the sharpened pencil lay unused by the untouched sheet of paper” (Aiken 1967, 195). Most of the extensive writing on the typescript is Pound’s, not Eliot’s, and functions as instructions for strategic deletion rather than adding new material to the poem: it is more published, more public, than historical norms would lead us to expect. Eliot had got almost as far as he himself could get with the genesis of The Waste Land when he sent it to his friend to be “attacked” (see Eliot 1971, 54‒55).
20 Alternatively, consider the relative privacy of a handwritten poem enclosed in a letter. For most poets in the 1890s this would not be textually significant, but, for Gerard Manley Hopkins, enclosing a poem in a letter to Robert Bridges was publishing it, as he
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himself recognized. When Bridges criticized “The Wreck of the Deutschland”, Hopkins explained: “I cannot think of altering anything. Why shd. I? I do not write for the public. You are my public and I hope to convert you” (letter to Robert Bridges, 21 August 1877, qtd. in Roberts 1995, 51). The word “altering” registers that the text has become shared, even as it insists that intellectual property rights accrue to the original author. This handwritten poem is at a later genetic stage than the proofs of Ulysses. Sometimes appearance tells us nothing at all. When we read a text on a webpage or buy a book through Amazon Kindle, it is almost impossible to know how many “updates” there have been, or to predict how many more there might be. In an individual user’s Kindle Library, an innocuous information badge marks the arrival of a new version: “update available”. If the settings are correctly adjusted then “the previous version will be replaced with the corrected version” whenever possible.
21 The instant and costless substitution of a new version for an old was not possible for Henry James. But the writer-hero of “The Middle Years” fantasizes about doing precisely that. Dencombe was a passionate corrector, a fingerer of style; the last thing he ever arrived at was a form final for himself. His ideal would have been to publish secretly, and then, on the published text, treat himself to the terrified revise, sacrificing always a first edition and beginning for posterity and even for the collectors, poor dears, with a second. (James 1895, 181)
22 Given that Dencombe has no interest in being published for its own sake, no family to support (we are told that both his wife and child are dead), and no apparent economic necessity, we might wonder why he publishes his book at all. If his fantasy is endlessly to defer reception, and endlessly to revise then why, the genetic critic might wonder, does he not stick to manuscript?
23 The answer, which a close reading of the story affords, is important for understanding Henry James’s own process of post-publication revision. It also speaks more generally to the twin questions motivating this essay, by shedding light on the paradoxes and pleasures, especially the paradoxical pleasure of self-sacrifice, that post-publication revision affords. In particular, it draws attention to the role of the reader in constructing textual variance.
24 Many of us will have had the experience of “seeing” a mistake in a written submission only when it is too late (because the article is published) or nearly too late (because it is expensive to make changes in proof). Why do we not see the error earlier? Something about the visual estrangement into a different medium ― a different typeface or file format or onto a different type of paper ― provokes rethinking. Dencombe’s fantasy may seem, to begin with, as if it is the creative version of this; he wants to “publish secretly” and then revise on the (non-circulating) publication, pricking “lights” that, perhaps, he could not have seen before. But, besides being a “passionate corrector”, James tells us that he is also, more obscurely, “a fingerer of style”. What can this second phrase mean? Besides a vague penumbra of autoeroticism, there is, I think a more materially precise meaning. Isaac Pitman’s A Manual of the Typewriter, first published in the same year as James’s short story (1893), contains a long section on “The Method of Fingering”. It advises how many fingers to use while typewriting (three, preferably) and where to position them on a QWERTY keyboard for maximum efficiency. As this layout of this keyboard became familiar, the correct method of “fingering” it fell out of
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discussion. In 1893, however, at the beginning of the age of the typewriter, I think James’s unusual noun is carefully chosen.
25 For its earliest users, as Pitman’s manual explains, “typewritten matter compares with print, and it will always suggest that comparison to the reader. It requires, therefore, to be at least as free from errors and irregularities of all kinds as print usually is” (1893, 8). By typing up a short story oneself (or having a typist do it for a fee), the writer of the 1890s was able to translate the private space of the manuscript page into the visual iconography of print. This new possibility must have been very strange for authors who had grown up with a rigid divide between draft and book, manuscript and print. James’s coordination of the two activities ― correcting and fingering ― suggests that Dencombe is an avid reviser and a typist or perhaps, even, an avid reviser because a typist.
26 This gets a little further towards understanding the masochistic structure of Dencombe’s fantasy. What he wants is not “to publish secretly”, but to correct his already published texts in plain view. In other words, the problem is not his inability to render his texts into the form of a published book without circulating them, like a programmer who develops internet content without letting it go live. The embarrassment of publication, the very publicness of it, seems to be the point. From the beginning of “The Middle Years” James blurs the language of authorship with the idiom of social, even romantic, intercourse. The author’s interest in rereading and revising his novel doesn’t happen despite his book being abroad in the world: it comes about as a consequence of it. He receives his new volume in public, as he recovers at a health resort, and it is delivered by a “sociable country postman” (James 1895, 167). But because he is now middle-aged, he is unable, James tells us, to feel any intrinsic pleasure at being “just out” ― a phrase drawn from the debutante’s coming-out ceremony. Most blatantly of all, the book’s cover is “duly meretricious”, a self- prostituting “red” (170). He begins reading and then, of course, revising his work as he watches a “a group of three persons, two ladies and a young man” on the beach below him (173). The young man himself is also reading a novel. It will turn out to be the very same novel that Dencombe is revising. But, at first sight, he is unable to recognize his own book. Proving how completely his work has been commoditized in the marketplace, it turns out to have exactly the same “catchpenny” binding as other novels in “the circulating library” (169). It is only when Dencombe fails to recognize his own novel in another reader’s hands that it is transformed into an object of desire: “the gentleman had his head bent over a book and was occasionally brought to a stop by the charm of this volume, which, as Dencombe could perceive even at a distance, had a cover alluringly red” (168). It is from this set of mistaken identities, both personal and textual, that the story’s “death of the author” plot develops.
27 Dencombe’s fantasy is of continuing his book’s genesis after the point of initial publication. In an important sense, the ideal text that he dreams of creating remains resolutely private. He is not trying to garner feedback on the book he has published, and he in fact continues revising in the face of strong opposition from his rather ideal reader, Doctor Hugh. At the same time, the act of revision itself is structured socially. It is because his book has become a “public” object of circulation and social exchange that he interests himself in it once again. His motivations for revision are, in every sense, “impure”. He wants to be caught in the act of revising in print and, when he is, he
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stammers “ambiguously” and faints, “stretching out a hand to his visitor with a plaintive cry” (James 1895, 182).
28 In some ways, Dencombe’s desire to keep revising is an enjoyment of what James elsewhere, in the Preface to The Golden Bowl, called “the muffled majesty of authorship”: anyone, including the ardent young reader Doctor Hugh, can write about this novel but only he, as its original author, can continue to write on it (James 1984, 1323). In fact, before he realizes that Dencombe is a novelist, Doctor Hugh understand his markings on the page as a rather aggressive and strange act of editing, “I see you’ve been altering the text!” (James 1895, 181). On the other hand, inevitably, the reappropriation of textual control also leads to a diminution of it. If post-publication revision leads to a new text, then, instead of any single text exercising full authority, the reader is given a choice between two alternative versions. It becomes reasonable for someone else to produce a third text or variorum edition to account for the differences. This “third text” threatens the integrity of authorship, the ontological primacy of any single text.
29 In the everyday sense of the word, we might see an element of masochism in all forms of revision that take too long, are economically wasteful and threaten to produce something superfluous, or even something plain old worse. As Valéry observes, in his lovely comments on rereading his own work, no temptation is more fruitful than the self-denial that comes in denying one’s earlier intentions primacy.21 But the Jamesian version of revision is masochistic in Deleuze’s more precise sense of the word.22 Gratification is delayed endlessly, and the iterative process of reworking extends infinitely; in the end, the suspense itself becomes the primary form of pleasure. The act of communication between writer and reader, instead of being perfected, is endlessly deferred. Dencombe’s revisions cause problems for Doctor Hugh because he is unable to begin reviewing and responding to a book that won’t stay fixed. Henry James’s readers were, sometimes, equally irritated by his inability to leave alone. But when Edmund Gosse complained that James was achieving nothing more than the “dribbling of new wine into the old bottles” by revising for the New York Edition, the author’s response was violent in the extreme: “The only alternative would have been to put the vile thing [. . .] behind the fire and have done with it!” (Gosse 1922, 47).
30 By the time James came to put the New York Edition together he was in his sixties. But the language James uses to describe revision as an endless process of genesis leaves open the possibility, in principle, of another round. In the Prefaces, he represents his own process of post-publication revision variously as a matter of imaginative renewal, self-pleasure, anxiety, intense excitement and some shame. His former texts are described as intensely enjoyable to reread but also as objects of pity, even shame: Roderick Hudson calls to mind a painting “fatally faded”, “blackened or ‘sunk’” after the ravages of time and weather; The Tragic Muse a grotesque body barely contained by “the precious waistband or girdle” intended to give it form; The Golden Bowl an “uncanny brood” of prematurely aged children with “wizened faces” and “grizzled locks” (James 1984, 1045, 1108‒1109 and 1331). If rereading is accounted for in terms of pleasure (Dencombe’s “living”/“diving” back into his own tale), rewriting seems to be necessitated by the abject, aged state of these textual bodies. The sensual, tactile language of these descriptions is remarkable in a novelist often described as “cerebral rather than physical, passive rather than active” (Halperin 1996, 22). The images are drawn from a prodigal variety of semantic sets, but have in common a repeated fascination with neat (sometimes too neat) surfaces knitting over depths, and creation
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and recreation are both described as a form of puncture. Dencombe “pricked” (James 1895, 181) the text as he reread his already published book in “The Middle Years”. But the same word is also used in the New York Edition Prefaces to describe the very beginning of the genetic process, the initial “germ” of an idea. In the Preface to volume 10, James speaks of “the stray suggestion, the wandering word, the vague echo, at touch of which the novelist’s imagination winces as at the prick of some sharp point: its virtue is all in its needle-like quality, the power to penetrate as finely as possible” (1984, 1138). Throughout these descriptions, tenderness mixes with cruelty: it is not only post-publication revision on a printed page, but the whole cycle of production, that is described as a kind of puncture wound. In talking of revising “The Middle Years” itself, the language of masochism is more explicit still, the text both patient and victim: “I scarce perhaps recall another case [. . .] in which my struggle to keep compression rich, if not better still, to keep accretions compressed, betrayed for me such community with the anxious effort of some warden of the insane engaged at a critical moment in making fast a victim’s straitjacket” (James 1984, 1238).
31 The genetic critic who takes the moment of “bon à tirer” as an end and the Anglo- American editor who tries faithfully to reconstruct an author’s final intention are both operating as if writers were rational agents who always acted in their own (or their text’s) best interests. In the broadest terms, they assume that, however painful or protracted or confused the process of textual genesis is, it will eventually come to an end so that the text can circulate and be read in printed form, so that it can endure. But not all writers are rational about their own textual best interests all of the time. Sometimes their behaviour threatens to be self-defeating. Dencombe’s post-publication revision, like James’s, creates more problems than it solves. Not only does it take up a great deal of time that could be devoted to new composition, but it also threatens the very stability of the object it seeks to fix. Despite the self-proclaimed finish of the New York Edition, most contemporary editions of James’s texts are based on the first book printing, often with substantial lists of variants provided in notes or the appendix.
32 James’s most careful readers spend an inordinate amount of time not on reading the novels in their final form, but on teasing out the fissures between printings, as if these points of difference ― the elaborated metaphor, the modified gesture ― will produce a finer and fuller “reading”. And James is not the only modern writer whose work comes to us with an extensive and provocative list of authorially introduced variants. The Variorum Edition of W. B. Yeats’s poems (1957) gives us a “text” that is as uncertain ― if uncertainty is the measure of ramifying possibilities for reprinting ― as that of many pre-modern authors. Compared to the beautifully designed books that Yeats oversaw in his lifetime, it is also an ugly, unwieldy book, offering a scattered set of alternatives rather than a clear reading text. The editors of the Leaves of Grass variorum assert that their edition, a meticulous history of authorial changes of mind, “is Leaves of Grass as the serious student has long wanted to have it” (Bradley et al. 1980, ix). But it is, quite patently, not Leaves of Grass as Whitman wanted to have it. Sylvia Plath left the manuscript that became Ariel on her desk, but it is not quite, as Linda Wagner-Martin has it, a book of poems “ready for publication” (Wagner-Martin 1997, 7).23 Among other things, although the cover page of the typescript bears the neat legend ARIEL and Other Poems by Sylvia Plath, the next sheet (which could have been removed) bears witness to alternative intentions: “DADDY” is written by hand in large black capitals to replace the base layer of typescript, “THE RIVAL and Other Poems”. An intermediate intention
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has “A Birthday Present” (Plath 2004, 94‒95). The typescript that follows contains multiple small changes to accidentals of punctuation, as well as further uncertainty about titling (“The Courage of Quietness” or “Shutting Up”?) (Plath 2004, 97‒98). But these are equivocations compared to the more major problem. Despite making a careful list following the contents of where individual poems had been accepted for publication, Plath had not made plans for the publication of the whole. It would be hard to argue that she was complicit in the decisions Hughes made about the poems’ arrangement even if, in a legalistic sense, she “intended” him to be her executor by dying intestate and still married. His own letters organizing publication assume an editorial authority that in fact he lacked. The document she left behind led to Ariel but also, inevitably, to Ariel: The Restored Edition, which “exactly follows the arrangement of her last manuscript as she left it” (Frieda Hughes 2004, ix).
33 Because publication is not in fact a single event (like 2 February 1922) with a discrete before and after, material that was once archival and genetic does not always remain so. The dividing line between avant-texte and text is always subject to renegotiation. The publication in the second half of the twentieth century of so many of the draft materials of modernism shows not only that the private can be made public, but that the multiple can become singular. If a published text’s claim to “authority” evaporates in the face of subsequent authorial revision, a draft’s claim to be “multiple” and open, a perpetual site of genesis, may be foreclosed by publication. Valerie Eliot’s facsimile of The Waste Land drafts claims to be no more than membra disjecta, false starts, rough papers, loose ends. But it also circumscribes the possible size of the archive by making implicit claims to completeness: there may be many possible variants of The Waste Land within its covers, but there are none beyond it. It is troubling to imagine how a new scrap of material ― an object belonging to the flotsam and jetsam mode of the archive ― could be incorporated into its covers.24 Now that we are at the point where critics of The Waste Land cross easily and freely between the “final” 1922 version of the poem and the manuscript materials, both of which they have on their bookshelves or even on course syllabi, we may wonder whether mass reproduction has withered the archival, provisional, fluid quality that early scholars found in the drafts.25
34 Genetic material sitting unpublished in a distant archive retains its aura, remains in a sense “alive”. But, once published, it enters inevitably into the postlapsarian world of fixity. And yet this “fixity” is mutable in turn: authors can return to published texts and dissolve them back into the chaos of genesis; creative emendations allow editors to do the same thing. The creators of the Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project go some way to recognising this when they explain their work as “both a digital archive and as a genetic edition” (Van Hulle and Nixon 2015). The archive and the edition are, indeed, not opposites. But their characterization of the relationship between digital archive and genetic edition as a “continuum” is not quite right either: it suggests that at one end, like the colour yellow, we have “pure archive”, and at the other end, like blue, the “pure edition”, and, in between, in various hues of green, some slightly edited archive or some slightly messy variorum edition.
35 The figure of the continuum implies that textual variance exists only ”out there”, in objects. But variance is never found in any individual document or reading; it is a second-order measure of the difference between readings. In the same way, no individual piece of writing ― whether a burnt piece of paper full of many interlinings and crossings out, or an inscription in stone ― is, in itself, a draft or a final form. This
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is because the property of “being unfinished” or “being finished” is not a property of any single piece of paper or a stone slab, seen by itself, but a quality that can be attributed only relationally. Invoking Wittgenstein’s duck/rabbit, I want to suggest that the relationship between archive and edition is, rather, one of duality. We can choose to see any given textual document or archive under different aspects, just as the peculiar duck/rabbit drawing can be seen now as a duck, now as a rabbit (Wittgenstein 1953, 194e‒202e; II.xi ). The rabbit is not the opposite of the duck, but nor are the two at different ends of a continuum: the figures are congruent. To begin with, only a single perception will be available. One starts by seeing either a duck or a rabbit. But some observers will then come to a second perception, which is the possibility for alteration between the two things, or the ability to “see something as something”. We can also imagine someone without the imagination to “see something as something” who is stuck always with a picture of a rabbit.
36 To go back to my original four examples ― which could be expanded with countless others ― it should be clear that all of these examples can be viewed genetically or editorially, from the point of view of variance (and. . . and. . .) or in search of the invariant (or. . . or. . . ). One mode is combinatorial, the other is selective; one is diachronic and narrative, the other is synchronic and analytic. Henry James’s short story “The Middle Years” was finished in 1893. It remains finished for, say, a book historian writing about the intended audience of Scribner’s magazine in 1893, or for the first-time reader who reads a plain text online translated from this format. But in 1895, it was not finished for Henry James, and it remains unfinished, a first attempt, when placed alongside the later text(s) on a library table or in the comparative context of a variorum edition. Plath’s marked-up typescript was taken by Ted Hughes as a provisional draft towards the Ariel he published; for others, it is “a fair copy, made by the author herself, of the work as she finally intended it”. Eliot’s 1960 addition of the extra line to The Waste Land manuscript is both a story about repression and the removal of self-censorship and an opportunity for editorial decision-making.
37 Each documentary stage develops its meaning in relationship to the others, and the text as a whole is constructed from the sum of its stages. But the hermeneutic circle is not in practice closed, because new documentary evidence can always show up. “The ivory men make company between us” was added to The Waste Land that readers had in 1960; eleven years later, a whole lot of other discarded lines and genetic material became part of its history.
38 Wittgenstein describes as aspect-blindness the kinds of aesthetic conversations that insist on seeing one way only: “You have to see it like this, this is how it is meant” (1953, 202e). To commit oneself ahead of time to one method of textual interpretation (seeing “in terms of accuracy and error” or in terms of meaningful variation) is, I believe, to run the same risk of dogmatism. This is not to say that the genuine apprehension of a duality is very easy: to understand the rabbit/duck means not only seeing it now as a rabbit, now as a duck (it is never possible to see both at exactly the same time), but coming to the higher order understanding that both perceptions are possible, even as only one is available.26 When Henry James sat down to read his already published work with a view to revising it, he was viewing it under a different aspect than he had ten or twenty years earlier as he read the original proofs of newly finished novels and stories. This is the force behind the italics in The Golden Bowl Preface, where
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he described rereading as “an infinitely interesting and amusing act of re- appropriation” (James 1984, 1330).
39 My first contention in this essay was that we do away with the idea of publication as the one great event, the “Fall”, in the life of any text, before which it is private to the author, flexible, and full of compositional possibilities; after which it is public, fixed as a text (though liable to corruption), and open for hermeneutic interpretation. Anyone who doubts that we interpret early drafts in light of later ones, as surely as we accommodate roads not taken (e.g. Eliot’s initial title for The Waste Land, “He Do the Police in Different Voices”) in reading final versions, should take stock of the number of researchers in rare book rooms who bring a Penguin Classic or Loeb or variorum to the archive. My second aim was to advocate caution in judging the meaning or finishedness of a document from its visual appearance alone. Related to these principles is a modest appeal on behalf of the critical reader. To describe the fugitive possibilities in one manuscript, digitize a whole lot of manuscripts, or publish a reading text for college-level students are acts of re-appropriation. Variance is not something that lies inertly “out there”, in the library archive, the bad quarto, the annotated typescript, or the variorum edition, after the event of the brilliant revision or the posthumous re-publication: it is also a critical construction after the fact, a description of various paths that were entertained (even if only briefly) in making what we judge to be a single journey.
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Shakespeare, William. 1733. The Works of Shakespeare, Volume the Fourth. Ed. Lewis Theobald. London: A. Bettesworth et al.
Sullivan, Hannah. 2013. The Work of Revision. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
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Valéry, Paul.. 1972. “Note and Digression”. In Paul Valéry. Masters and Friends. Vol. 9 of The Collected Works of Paul Valéry. Malcolm Cowley and James R. Lawlor. London: Routledge Kegan Paul, pp. 64‒ 109.
Van Hulle, Dirk and Mark Nixon. 2015. “Editorial Principles and Practice”. In Dirk Van Hulle and Mak Nixon, eds. The Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscripts Project. Brussels: University Press Antwerp,
Wagner-Martin, Linda. 1997. “Introduction”. In Linda Wagner-Martin, ed. Sylvia Plath: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, pp. 1‒24.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell.
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Yeats, W. B. 1957. The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats. Eds. Peter Allt and Russell Alspach. New York: Macmillan.
NOTES
1. The first of four manuscript drafts of “Ariel”, reproduced in facsimile in Plath 2004, 175. 2. The first text was published in Scribner’s Magazine in April 1893 (James 1893, 611); the second in James’s collection of short stories Terminations (James 1895, 171). The tale was then republished with further revisions in the New York Edition of 1908‒9. See Sullivan 2013, especially chapter 2, for more details. 3. This manuscript is now in the Harry Ransom Center in Texas. The online finding aid describes it as “[a] handwritten copy of The Waste Land made by Eliot for an auction benefiting The London Library contains an extra line not present in its original publication”,
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17. After the publication of the drafts, Helen Gardner agreed that “the title has rather lost by Eliot’s excision at his wife’s request” (1972, 23). 18. Using the word “revision” in a rather old-fashioned sense, the Odyssey Press edition had “the bold statement on the verso of its title-page that ‘The present edition may be regarded as the definitive standard edition, as it has been specially revised, at the author’s request, by Stuart Gilbert’”. Evidence suggests, however, that Gilbert did not edit the text (see McCleery 2006). 19. The second draft, the first containing the phrase, has “and who returned later truly bald with [crossed out, unreadable] mother finally fucked”, and the third has the phrase pulled forward to the beginning of the strophe, “with mother finally fucked, and the last book thrown out of the attic” (Ginsberg 1987, 27, 31). 20. Hans Walter Gabler’s edition of Ulysses is suspicious of the legalistic primacy attributed to the 1922 edition (“the legal act of first publication did not validate the actual text thereby made public to the extent of lending authority to its high instance of corruption” [Gabler 1986, 1892]), although he retains the term publication for an event that happened on 2 February 1922. 21. “Il n’est pas de tentation plus cuisante, ni plus intime, ni de plus féconde, peut-être, que celle du reniement de soi-même” (Valéry 1919, 9‒10) (“No temptation is keener or closer to the heart, and none, perhaps, is more productive than that of denying oneself”) (Valéry 1972, 65). 22. “Waiting and suspense are essential characteristics of the masochistic experience” (Deleuze 1989, 70). 23. Linda Wagner-Martin draws attention to the alternative titles in a footnote, saying that “the collection earlier was titled The Rival, The Rabbit Catcher, A Birthday Present, and Daddy” (1997, 7). But if Plath left these scribbled-over sheets in the final packet on her desk, she was intending to communicate at least something ― perhaps nothing more than a more felicitous new choice of title ― by showing her own equivocation. 24. John Haffenden argues that an early version of the Fresca couplets “need to be instated alongside the bulk of the Berg drafts in any future edition of the Facsimile”, but this is highly unlikely to happen (2007, 23). 25. Linda K. Bundtzen describes Plath’s “textual body” as existing in a dusky limbo in the Smith College Library Rare Book Room (2001, 5). Did this end three years later when Faber published the original arrangement? 26. “Seeing as” is, in fact, “not part of perception” for Wittgenstein, and the “flashing of an aspect on us seems half visual experience, half thought” (1953, 197e).
ABSTRACTS
Post-publication revision causes problems for both an Anglo-American editorial tradition and genetic critics. Discussion of variance in Shakespeare, Henry James, T. S. Eliot, and Sylvia Plath shows that publication is only as much of an event as an author makes it. It need not entail a neat breach between genesis and transmission. Using Wittgenstein’s notion of “seeing as”, I propose that “in process” (still being composed) and “finished” (ready for transmission) are aspects of textual apprehension rather than descriptions of any individual documentary stage. Publishing a genetic dossier fixes its contour, just as post-publication revision unfixes a circulating work.
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INDEX
Keywords: genetic criticism, manuscripts, drafts, revision, variant, variorum edition, English literature, Eliot (T. S.), James (Henry), Plath (Sylvia), Shakespeare (William)
AUTHOR
HANNAH SULLIVAN
Hannah Sullivan is Associate Professor of English Literature at Oxford University and a Fellow of New College. The Work of Revision (Harvard, 2013) explores the relationship between textual revision and modernist style. She was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2013 to write a book on the prosody and politics of free verse.
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Some Textual and Factual Discrepancies in James Joyce's Ulysses: The Blooms’ Several “First Nights”
Luca Crispi
1 ONE OF THE ABIDING cruxes in Ulysses is a seemingly simple question: when and where did Leopold Bloom and Marion Tweedy first meet? When readers sum up the evidence in the book about their first night, it seems that there were indeed two (or possibly more) “first nights” ― different firsts on different evenings ― for the soon to be Blooms.1 It might be surprising that even careful readers could be confused about this happy occasion, but what may be considered a more critical fault in Ulysses is that it seems that Bloom himself is of two minds about the date and location of this momentous event. The textual history of these scenes indicates that it was James Joyce himself who was imprecise about these facts in the novel, and this narrative inconsistency will always be part of Ulysses. This kind of slip-up should not surprise readers about any author or any book; therefore, this essay investigates some of the reasons why this sort of discrepancy does unsettle our conceptions of Joyce and of Ulysses.
2 According to the various retellings of these stories, Leopold and Molly must first have met sometime between July 1886 and May 1887, but exactly when cannot be firmly established. Clearly, the slippage of almost a year marks quite a difference in the lives of the Blooms as fictional characters, and thus also in the reader’s understanding of them. Also, it seems that they could either first have met at the home of Luke Doyle in Dolphin’s Barn or at Mathew Dillon’s home in Roundtown.2 Although Leopold and Molly met often in the homes of both these friends while they were courting for over a year, the question of where they first met remains unresolved in the published work. On a minimialist chronological listing of some of the key events in Ulysses that Joyce prepared while finishing the book in Paris in 1921, he wrote in part “charades Dolphin’s Barn” for 1886, and simply noted “Matt Dillons” for 1887 (NLI MS 36,639/05B, p. [10v]). 3 This suggests that Joyce maintained that Leopold and Molly first met at a game of
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charades at Luke Doyle’s home in Dolphin’s Barn and continued to see one another there, and then they also met in Mat Dillon’s garden in suburban Roundtown the following year.4 But the facts as they are presented in the novel make a muddle of this clear chain of events. Like much of the preparatory material for Ulysses, even this late schematic list is not an accurate guide to the dating of some of the events in the published work. This is one of the many instances in Ulysses when the “facts” in the fiction ― as well as some of the seemingly analogous facts outside the novel ― do not cohere.
3 Among other things, a genetic study of precisely these kinds of temporal and spatial slippages in the book’s purportedly coherent texture challenges readers’ preconceptions about the fixity of the character’s life-stories in the narrative. Such a genetic approach also questions the stability of the characters’ subjective identities and intersubjective relationships as they are represented in Ulysses. Furthermore, delving into these stories uncovers some of the ways in which Joyce relied on the names and some facts derived from the lives of real people in a variety of often unexpected ways to create the life-stories of his fictional characters.
4 Close readings of how Joyce represents his characters in various manuscripts versions reveals that he often altered both when and where events happened. Unsurprisingly, the process by which he established the temporal and spatial coordinates of the events in the characters’ lives was a complex endeavour. On some occasions, elements of certain scenes remained fluid while, on other occasions, these elements became stabilized at least temporarily. Ultimately, there is the inevitable juncture when the elements became anchored in the text as readers recognize and remember them in the published work. Because each of these stages can be critically differentiated, an analysis of their variations opens up further contexts for critical interpretations. While various forms of historicist and post-structuralist readings have explored the textual and factual fluidity of Ulysses, only a genetic approach can provide the necessary evidence to substantiate either or both of these conceptual frameworks.
One or more games of charades
5 Whether we read the book from cover to cover or trace the evolutionary history of the stories in the manuscripts, we come across the initial account of Leopold and Molly’s so-called first night in “Calypso”, the fourth episode of Ulysses. This recollection of the pivotal scene occurs in one of the earliest surviving manuscripts that feature the Blooms: the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript, which Joyce wrote in Zurich in February 1918.5 While Joyce had certainly worked out some of the facts of the lovers’ stories before this manuscript, it is clear that they kept changing as he continued writing. Even though the contours of the scenario do not change significantly, when the precise textual and narrative evolution of this scene is uncovered, the resulting insights alter our understanding of Ulysses. On its earliest version on the Rosenbach “Calypso” manuscript, Bloom thinks to himself: “Young still. The same young eyes. The first night after the charades at Dolphin’s Barn” (f. 10; my italics; see U 4.344–5).6
6 There is another reference to what is presumably this same first night in the eighth episode, “Lestrygonians”, when Bloom runs into Josie Breen (née Powell) on Westmoreland Street. Although the facts of the event remained consistent, Joyce is less certain about who this character is in the scene on the episode’s Rosenbach
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manuscript, which he wrote from January to July 1918. There he has Bloom think to himself: “Floey Powell that was” (f. 7; see U 8.273). Throughout the writing and rewriting of Ulysses, Joyce reassigned events, actions, thoughts, and feelings to different characters in his work. For example, in this case he put together parts of the names of what became two different characters in Ulysses: Floey Dillon and Josie Powell. These characters share the basic fictional fact that they were Molly Tweedy’s young Dublin friends, but their names (if not their fictional identities) already had complex associations in the historical Dublin of Joyce’s youth.7 Therefore, a reader who expects to discover a more or less direct correlation between Joyce’s fiction and the factual context to which it possibly refers might presume that these characters would have ready-made, distinct histories in Ulysses. On the contrary, given the limited extent of their elaboration at this stage in the genesis of the stories about the Blooms, neither character was as fully differentiated as a reader of the published work might suppose.
7 The cumulative textual evidence suggests that Joyce did not simply make this transposition of characters’ names and identities through inadvertence, but rather that the issue of a character’s name (and therefore, as far as the reader is concerned, her history and identity) was often fundamentally adaptable for long periods of time until the first edition of the book was published on 2 February 1922. Nonetheless, as Joyce continued to write, Josie Powell Breen and Floey Dillon did become more fully determined, ultimately becoming the characters that readers of Ulysses confidently recognize as such. In this case, he simply changed Josie Breen’s maiden name to Powell on a missing typescript page before this section of the episode appeared in the Little Review in January 1919 (V.9, p. 34). With this transformation, Joyce stabilized her identity in the still evolving plot and, thereby, also left Floey Dillon aside, only to include her later in other stories that he would write for the book.
8 Typical of the way in which Joyce wrote Ulysses, whereas the lexical elements and most of the facts of the scene were relatively fixed, the names of the characters who participate in the scene remained malleable until some other specific advance in the narrative made it necessary for him to explicitly distinguish them. In general, at least initially Joyce was less concerned with assigning names to most of the minor characters than he was with elaborating other elements of a scene. Subsequently, as he consolidated the thoughts and actions with a specific character’s name, he provided a semblance of greater solidity and stability to the world of Ulysses as a whole. For example, two and half years after Joyce wrote the previous mention of “the first night” of charades in “Calypso”, he connected Bloom’s memory of the young Josie with the pleasant games at Luke Doyle’s home. On the second setting of “Lestrygonians” in proofs for Ulysses, he added these sentences to the already-established storyline: “Josie Powell that was. ^In Luke Doyle’s long ago. Dolphin’s Barn, the charades^” (Harvard Placard 16.ii; U 8.273–4; see JJA 18:102). 8 This enriches what Joyce had already written about the entertainments at Luke Doyle’s home in “Calypso”. While it is clear that something happened for the first time after a night of charades in Dolphin’s Barn, what that was may never become fully clear. Depending on our expectations as readers, what happened then and there may not matter, but let us try to untangle the rest of the information about the couple’s first night in Ulysses.
9 In the earliest known version of Molly’s story of that evening as recalled in the book’s final episode “Penelope”, she seems absolutely certain about one thing at least: “the first night we met in Dolphin’s barn when I was living in Rehoboth we stood staring at
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each other for about 10 minutes” (NLI MS 36,639/14, pp. [10r]–[11r]; my italics; see U 18.1182–3). By the time Joyce wrote the episode’s subsequent extant manuscript, he further specified that the fictional Tweedy’s home was on “Rehoboth ^terrace^” when Molly and Leopold were courting (see Rosenbach “Penelope” MS, p. 21). This road is also in the Dublin suburb of Dolphin’s Barn, which means that they lived near the home of the fictional Luke Doyle. With such refinements Joyce is thereby striving to establish a greater sense of cohesion to the stories in Ulysses. While this is often Joyce’s goal, as we will see, other, competing narrative and stylistic considerations often thwarted his efforts.
10 Joyce based various elements of the stories of the couple’s first encounters at least partially ― though just as often erroneously ― on the bedrock of personal and historical facts. In this case, Luke and Caroline Doyle, the Dubliners whose names Joyce appropriated for these characters, were Joyce family friends. Our understanding of Joyce’s practice of transforming and interweaving historical social facts in his fiction has not developed much in the past fifty years since Robert M. Adams wrote that [t]he liberal use Joyce made of “pilings” ― figures drawn from real life, upon whose more or less buried support he created the structures of his fiction ― gives us good occasion to appreciate the mingled subtlety and boldness with which he controlled his materials. No general rules seem to cover the complex transformations which he now and then imposed on his materials; sometimes we find him elaborately circumstantial about the surroundings of an imaginary character; sometimes he presents only those few elements of a real character which make it seem not only imaginary but, actually caricatured. He divides, he multiplies, he adds, he subtracts; he draws freely upon his resources of his encyclopedic memory, upon the memories of his friends and relations, and upon a vast, undirected store of miscellaneous reading. The unevenness of his practice in matters of fact is more likely to throw a reader off balance because he never explains, and because, in the matter of individuating detail he is remarkably sparing (Adams 1962, 50).
11 Making sense of the narrative facts in Ulysses is already a demanding process. Critical readers encounter further dilemmas when they try to bridge certain narrative inconsistencies with historical facts, and this is a good case in point. According to Peter Costello, though he does not provide the source(s) of his information: “The Doyles lived in Camac Place in Kimmage, then on the attractive rural side of the Grand Canal at Dolphin’s Barn. Later they moved to Mount Brown in Kilmainham. Much of the convincing background to the life of the Blooms was thus ready to hand for Joyce’s eventual use” (Costello 1992, 60). But the matter is not as simple as this. In fact, Ian Gunn and Clive Hart point out that “The charades in 1887 are doubly anachronistic: by 1883 the Doyles had moved to 4 Mountbrown [sic], Kilmainham, and not long afterwards Luke Doyle was dead” (Gunn and Hart 2004, 108, n. 168). Most if not all of which information Joyce presumably knew and recalled as he wrote his book. Therefore, it is quite unlikely that these historically factual Doyles are supposed to correspond to the ones in Ulysses. Nonetheless, Joyce found it expedient to use their names in his work while at the same time contorting their life histories to suit his creative purposes.
12 Since the referential parameters are always different in the various narrative contexts of the stories in the book, sweeping claims about Joyce’s overarching commitment to historically accurate detail in Ulysses are often unconvincing. This is a topic that requires more nuanced study as further textual and historical information is documented, correlated, and analysed. Regardless, these games of charades at the
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Doyles are fundamental moments in Leopold and Molly’s courtship. They are obviously the earliest instances of the couple’s shared memories in Ulysses, and this encourages readers to compare and contrast the various ways in which Joyce represents the lover’s first memories together. It is from this perspective that the stories of the Blooms’ “origin” as a couple may be considered paradigmatic of the complexity of the workings of the representation of textual and psychological memory in narratives, especially in the context of modernism.
13 For example, later in the day, Bloom remembers a particularly memorable game of charades that he specifically recalls took place in 1887, the year before they married (U 13.1107). The precise dating here is just the sort of detail in the stories ― which are otherwise quite vague and certainly fluid in their manuscript versions ― that gives the published book the semblance of facticity and unity for which it is often admired. Bloom’s memory of that night is recounted in “Nausicaa”, the thirteenth episode.9 After his clandestine erotic encounter with Gerty McDowell, the flashing of the Bailey lighthouse on Howth brings back memories of the couple’s courtship and of the momentous day when he proposed to Molly, in between which Bloom also thinks of his daughter’s flirtation with Alec. Bannon in Mullingar, as well as his own epistolary dalliance with Martha Clifford. In a complex whirl of associations, these thoughts also bring up the older memories of the Doyles, the Dillons, as well as Molly’s father, Major Brian Tweedy: Tired I feel now. Will I get up? O wait. Drained all the manhood out of me, little wretch. She kissed me. Never again. My youth. Only once it comes. Or hers. Take the train there tomorrow. No. Returning not the same. Like kids your second visit to a house. The new I want. Nothing new under the sun. Care of P. O. Dolphin’s Barn. Are you not happy in your? Naughty darling. At Dolphin’s barn charades in Luke Doyle’s house. Mat Dillon and his bevy of daughters: Tiny, Atty, Floey, Maimy, Louy, Hetty. Molly too. Eightyseven that was. Year before we. And the old major, partial to his drop of spirits. Curious she an only child, I an only child. So it returns. Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home. And just when he and she. Circus horse walking in a ring. Rip van Winkle we played. Rip: tear in Henny Doyle’s overcoat. Van: breadvan delivering. Winkle: cockles and periwinkles. Then I did Rip van Winkle coming back. She leaned on the sideboard watching. Moorish eyes. Twenty years asleep in Sleepy Hollow. All changed. Forgotten. The young are old. His gun rusty from the dew. (U 13.1096–116)
14 Looking out from Sandymount Strand as the light settles on Howth ― precisely when his wife and her lover, Hugh “Blazes” Boylan, are having their rendezvous — Bloom thinks about the various times when he and Molly were happy, distinctly happier than they are now, when they were single, and just starting to meet at the homes of the Doyles and Dillons. Then he thinks that the way life works reminds him of a circus horse walking in a ring, which is an apt metaphor for the cyclical working of the events in our lives (U 13.1111–2). In fact, the recurrence of events in our lives is a major theme of Ulysses. Bloom remembers the rhododendrons on Howth and thinks: “All that old hill has seen. Names change: that’s all” (U 13.1099), which is also an apt description of one of the ways in which Joyce constructed the nexus of characters in the stories.
15 As Bloom contrasts his early lovemaking on Howth with the state of his marriage more than fifteen years later, he briefly laments his youth. In response, he thinks: “The new I want”, but instantly he reconsiders the matter: “Nothing new under the sun” (U 13.1104–5). His thoughts continue to swerve between the past and the present. He thinks of his illicit correspondence with Martha Clifford that he is sending to the post
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office in Dolphin’s Barn Lane (see U 11.897–90), which brings up earlier erotic memories associated with Molly’s old neighbourhood. According to the version of this memory on the “Nausicaa” draft, the night of charades does indeed take place in Dolphin’s Barn, but it was in “Flanagan’s house” (Cornell MS 56B, p. 30; see JJA 13: 233). As far as we know, this Flanagan makes no other appearance in the textual record of Ulysses. This is an exemplary instance of how Joyce sometimes merely uses a character’s name as a prop ― a temporary placeholder in the story ― while he continues to construct the linguistic and thematic contours of the scene, and only subsequently turns his attention to the multi-faceted issue of establishing a character’s identity. Since Joyce usually strove to consolidate rather than expand the cast of characters in his work, the other, better-known Dolphin’s Barn resident, Luke Doyle, simply takes Flanagan’s place in the story on the episode’s next extant manuscript (Rosenbach “Nausicaa” MS, f. 52).
16 This was the night Bloom acted out “Rip Van Winkle”, which further reinforces the episode’s and the book’s themes of the interconnectedness of the present and the past, of the seemingly forward, progressive movement of time, and the compulsion to return, or as Joyce simply put it Ulysses: “History repeats itself” (U 13.1093). 10 In the published versions of that night’s games, the young Henny Doyle’s torn overcoat was instrumental in Bloom’s successful pantomime, but in the earliest draft version the article of clothing was a “waistcoat” and it belonged to another otherwise unknown character named “Daly” (Cornell MS 56B, p. 31; see JJA 13: 235; see U 13.1112). This Daly is yet another placeholder in the stories of Ulysses, and he too makes his exit before most readers catch a glimpse of him.
17 More fundamentally, this is an example of the more persistent question of whether or not Joyce’s characters, and the traits attributed to them, are actually integral to the stories being told in Ulysses. When Joyce wrote the next version of the scene, he simply assigned the story to the younger Doyle, just as it was, without altering any other aspect of the scene (Rosenbach “Nausicaa” MS, f. 52). While much of the story remains stable, these are just some of the examples of the more fluid elements before they became fixed in the published book. Especially in their earlier versions, Joyce appears to be more concerned with establishing the precise linguistic and thematic elements, rather than such seemingly incidental details like a character’s name or where and when an event took place. These later aspects of the story are all subsidiary to another primary concern in Ulysses: the storytelling process.11
18 In this scene Bloom also recalls all the elements of his winning performance, Molly’s pose, and her Eastern look. He then thinks more about what Rip Van Winkle must have experienced waking up after two decades: “All changed. Forgotten. The young are old” (U 13.1115), which is how Bloom must feel when he lets himself think about the current state of his life and what his wife and her lover are doing just then in their home in 7 Eccles Street. About a year after Joyce wrote Bloom’s memory of the charades at the Doyles in “Nausicaa”, he added to Molly’s memories of that seemingly same night in “Penelope”. In Molly’s memory, the young man is firmly established as Henny Doyle. In an addition on the episode’s typescript, Joyce has Molly think to herself: “he [Bloom] had a few brains not like that other fool Henny Doyle he was always breaking or tearing something in the charades I hate an unlucky man” (Huntington TS, p. 10; see JJA 16: 308; U 18.321–3).12
19 Readers are implicitly encouraged to think that these are all the same night of charades, but there simply is not enough contextual information in Ulysses to
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determine if this is the case. For whatever reason, Joyce did not clarify the relationships between these stories. While this lack of consistency among the stories and memories may not be particularly significant for our reading of Ulysses, it does indicate the kinds of narrative slippages that go unmarked in the book. Readers must interpret for themselves the consequences of these slippages in the fictional biographies, whether from narratological or thematic perspectives.
20 From the fair copy version of Bloom’s memory of the charades in “Nausicaa” onwards (Rosenbach f. 52), Joyce has Mat Dillon and his daughters in attendance at this memorable night of charades at the Doyles. Readers can account for this fact by the simple proposition that the Doyles and Dillons (and their children, who appear to be the same age as Leopold and Molly) were part of the same circle of friends, and so they all met regularly at one another’s homes. But it is also quite likely that Joyce never fully differentiated between the two families, or between what he may have planned as separate events in their respective homes. Therefore, in very basic ways, these (possibly differing) encounters become intertwined in the text, and thereby in Bloom’s mind, and so in the reader’s understanding of Ulysses as well. Nonetheless, some readers tend to attach an unwarranted degree of specificity to the characters, locations, and chronological sequences in such narrative scenes (and correspondingly to the varying ways in which textual memory is supposed to work), whereas close genetic readings of the many versions leading up to and including the published work put such specificity into question.
21 In the early hours of 17 June 1904, as Bloom looks up at the heavens in their back garden in the seventeenth episode, “Ithaca”, we read about another memorable morning when he saw the sunrise seated on a garden wall after a particular night of charades: What prospect of what phenomena inclined him to remain? The disparition of three final stars, the diffusion of daybreak, the apparition of a new solar disk. Had he ever been a spectator of those phenomena? Once, in 1887, after a protracted performance of charades in the house of Luke Doyle, Kimmage, he had awaited with patience the apparition of the diurnal phenomenon, seated on a wall, his gaze turned in the direction of Mizrach, the east. (U 17.1259–63; my italics)
22 It is impossible to know whether this passage refers to the same evening of charades recounted in “Nausicaa”, which may also be reprised in “Penelope”, and whether they are all refer to that “first night” mentioned in “Calypso”, because the “facts” as they are presented in “Ithaca” contradict those other versions of the stories as well as the geographical and historical reality towards which they may be supposed to gesture outside the covers of the book. Whereas the Doyle’s home is firmly established in Dolphin’s Barn in all the other stories about them in Ulysses, Joyce has relocated them to Kimmage in this rendering of Bloom’s memory. In this case, it seems clear that this is not an obvious error on Joyce’s part, but rather a purposeful misstatement by the episode’s “arranger”.13 While the arranger pointedly confirms that this scene took place at Luke Doyle’s in 1887, a date that conforms to the fictional chronology of the book, it moves the family about two kilometres over the Grand Canal from Dolphin’s Barn to Kimmage, which disrupts the fictional geography of the narrative. Besides the textual evidence, there is no historical evidence that the real-life Doyles ever lived in Kimmage. For example, the Thom’s Official Directory of the United Kingdom of Great Britain
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and Ireland for the year Joyce was born lists Luke Doyle residence at “8 Camac Place, Dolphin’s Barn” (Thom’s 1882, 1649). These facts highlight a telling slip in Costello’s account of the historical Doyles that I cited above. By situating the real Luke Doyle in Kimmage, Costello is following in the tradition established by Richard Ellmann in his canonical biography of Joyce. He confounds the fictional and historical facts in the “life stories” of the characters and their real-life namesakes.
23 Earlier in “Ithaca”, the arranger increasingly confuses addresses and further comingles the stories about the Dillons and the Doyles. It appears that the Dillon clan have also moved and now seem to reside in “Medina villa, Kimmage road, Roundtown” (U 17.467– 8). There was no such address in Dublin, which is an obvious fact Joyce would have known (or could have discovered) if this sort of misstatement by the arranger were not part of the point Joyce was trying to make in this episode. These examples show that understanding the facts as they are represented in Ulysses often also requires that readers judge the effect of the episode’s specific style, which sometimes trumps narrative coherence and the consistency of the work ― let alone its extra-textual factual veracity ― when that is not important to the fiction. Rather than trying to resolve the conundrums involved in disentangling the locations of the families’ respective homes in the world of Ulysses or in Dublin, it seems sufficient to assign the contradictions to an overarching stylistic device, especially since Joyce never changed either of the Kimmage-related addresses after he first included them in the text about six months before the book appeared.
24 Regardless, an evening of charades marked a turning point in young Leopold Bloom’s life.14 As is often the case, Joyce began with a story that was concerned with specific conceptual, thematic, and aesthetic concerns that were pertinent to the particular episode he was working on. Given the emphasis on science in “Ithaca”, at first the scene here was focused on making an astronomical point. Later Joyce managed to subsume a romantic memory of an evening with Bloom's soon to be wife within this framework. Specifically, it initially takes up the fact that at least once in his life Bloom had witnessed the sunrise. From this tangential starting point, Joyce found a way to interconnect this storyline with other events in Bloom’s life as he kept adding to this scene. This is one of many examples that show how Joyce tended to combine and intertwine the relatively few stories that are told in Ulysses, and thereby strove to establish the semblance of unity and totality that readers and critics often consider as one of the book’s hallmarks.
25 Finally, what may or may not be the same night of charades is reprised in “Circe”, the fifteenth episode, and it first appears on its Rosenbach manuscript (ff. 51d–e).15 This version of the story further complicates the attempts to differentiate between what took place at the homes of the Doyles and that of the Dillons. Presumably, the context is meant to suggest precisely that same night of charades at Luke Doyle’s when Bloom acted out “Rip van Winkle”, but predictably enough it is not as clear as that.16 In “Circe”, Bloom repeats the fact that this was indeed the “first night”, but now it does not take place at Luke Doyle’s home. In fact, as Bloom’s memory of that night returns he exclaims: “I see her! It’s she! The first night at Mat Dillon’s!’ (U 15.3162–3; my italics). It is difficult to account for this significant change in the setting: it could simply be an error on Joyce’s part, though that seems unlikely at this late stage in the evolution of the story; or it could be an intervention by the arranger in this complex episode, but, if so, no satisfactory account for its relevance has been detected so far; and so the reader
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is left with an unresolved conundrum about the origin of the Blooms’ love affair in Ulysses.
Another “First Night”
26 That is all we know about that first night (or nights) of charades at the home of the Doyles (or was it at the Dillons after all?). Nonetheless, Joyce wrote a distinctly different version of Leopold and Molly’s so-called first night for “Sirens” at the start of 1919. He finished this draft of the book’s eleventh episode about a year after he had written the other “first night” scene in “Calypso”. There is no evidence that Joyce had written this other first night scenario before, and it is important to bear in mind that he continued to expand and refine it substantially on several of the episode’s subsequent manuscripts. The physical disposition of the text on the page suggests that it was a new idea and for a long time it clearly remained relatively adaptable.
27 The episode’s dramatic focus is Bloom’s compulsion to be near Boylan as he stops into the Ormond Hotel before setting off for his rendezvous with Molly. Bloom’s poignant thoughts oscillate between his troubling current marital dilemma and the passion and love he felt the “first night” he saw his life mate. Music structures the episode’s style and themes, and the arranger describes Father Cowley’s rendition of Lionel’s sorrowful memories of lost love in M’appari from Friedrich Von Flotow’s opera Martha: The voice returned. Weaker but unwearied it sang again how first it saw that form endearing, how sorrow then departed, how look and form and word charmed him and won his heart (NLI MS 36,639/09, p. [10r]; see U 11.716–20).
28 Moved by the emotions that the music has stirred in him, Bloom recalls his own past and thinks to himself: “First night at Mat Dillon’s I saw her” (p. [10r]; my italics; see U 11.725). Then he recalls the summery dress Molly wore that night. He remembers her full voice as she sang Waiting while he turned the music for her. More particularly, Bloom recalls her ample bosom and Spanish eyes, which are recurrent motifs. This pointedly sexualized memory of Molly, as usual both erotic and exotic, exemplifies how the other men in the Ormond (and generally in Ulysses) think of her. Precisely this sort of formulaic depiction of Molly is essential to how Joyce represents her as a character. Furthermore, here Bloom associates Molly’s voice with the Dillon’s garden flowers, which is also typical of both their memories of pleasant times at Mat Dillon’s even after so many years have passed. This shared memory of that time and place remains an idyllic setting and moment in their lives.
29 Joyce initially wrote that the scene took place in June, presumably in 1886, though he never specifies the year, but then he also crossed out the month as well, rendering it a timeless event in the couple’s lives. This exemplifies a prototypical narratological pattern in Ulysses: almost all of Leopold and Molly’s memories of their early courtship revolve around the theme of the repeating cycles of time in their lives. Whereas in “Calypso” Leopold Bloom figures the cyclical pattern of his life in terms of “Ponchielli’s dance of the hours” (U 4.526), in “Sirens” his conception of life is figured in the game of musical chairs the couple played. Joyce added this as an introduction to the scene all at one go in lead pencil in the bottom corner of the page, wrapping it around what he had already written in ink: Then musical chairs we too the last after her. Round and round. Slow. Quick. And round. Halt. She sat. Her legs (NLI MS 36,639/09, p. [10r])
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30 Six months later, in July 1919, this became: Musical chairs. We two the last. Fate. Fate. After her. Round and round. Slow. Quick. Round. We. All looked. Halt. She sat. Yellow knees. (Rosenbach “Sirens” MS, f. 25)
31 Then, after Joyce revised this memory several more times, it finally appeared in Ulysses on 2 February 1922 as: Musical chairs. We two the last. Fate. After her. Fate. Round and round slow. Quick round. We two. All looked. Halt. Down she sat. All ousted looked. Lips laughing. Yellow knees. (U 11.726–8)
32 Besides showing that Joyce’s writing method was almost always accretive, this is an exemplary instance of his meticulous and persistent revision of the syntactical structure of even the shortest bit of text in “Sirens”, and Ulysses more generally. The same motifs were present from the start, though Joyce kept striving to refine their presentation. Here Bloom recalls that he and Molly were the last to find their seats in the parlour game. He thinks about how this seemingly trivial entertainment may have sealed their fates and then ponders the ways in which the past must necessarily determine the future. The further revised version also adds the significant nuance that the others (presumably men) who “[a]ll looked” at Molly had been “ousted” by Bloom’s successful efforts in the game and so in life, and he thinks how this must have been preordained.
33 By the time Joyce rewrote the scene on the episode’s Rosenbach manuscript, he had changed the start of the paragraph from “First night at Mat Dillon’s I saw her” to “First night I met her at Mat Dillon’s in Roundtown” (f. 25). Joyce presumably noticed that this version of the couple’s “first night” in effect contradicts the other “first night” scene in “Calypso” that had by then already appeared in print. Rather than radically altering what he had already written, Joyce merely changed the location and phrasing on a (now missing) manuscript that was used to set up the episode for the August 1919 issue of the Little Review to read: “First night when first I saw her at Mat Dillon’s in Terenure” (see Buffalo TS 9, p [13r]; JJA 13: 70; Little Review, VI.4, p. 59; U 11.725). This shows how, as he often did, Joyce tried to redress a textual discrepancy caused by his evolving narrative by smoothing over it as simply as possible. Nonetheless, if these changes were supposed to be clarifications, they obviously do not diminish the confusion about when and where these several “first nights” take place. Still, that is how the various stories stand in Ulysses and in the manuscript versions that lead to the version in the published book. This is how Joyce created several textual, biographical, temporal, and topographical discrepancies at the narrative origin of Leopold Bloom and Molly Tweedy’s life together in Ulysses for readers to puzzle over.
The Dillons of Roundtown (Terenure)
34 Much like Luke and Caroline Doyle, the character of Mathew Dillon in Ulysses has the same name as one of the Joyce family friends and neighbours in Dublin. Vivien Igoe has uncovered a good deal of historical information about the real Mathew Dillon at the turn of the twentieth century, particularly that he and his eight daughters lived in Brighton House, Brighton Road, Rathgar, from 1866 to 1894, close by 41 Brighton Square, where Joyce himself was born in 1882. She also suggests that the Joyce family attended a party in “its lovely garden” sometime between 1887 and 1891 (Igoe 2016, 83-84).
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35 Beyond the biographical connections, Joyce’s interest in locating the fictional Dillons in what was then a relatively rural setting is founded on the premise that the Blooms always associate their meetings at the Dillons with their lush pastoral — even Edenic — garden. Nonetheless, the connection between the fictional Dillons and Leopold and Molly is apparently more substantial and fundamental to the narrative history of Ulysses than the night (or nights) of charades at the Doyles. The gatherings at Mat Dillon’s home assumed greater significance as Joyce continued to expand the fictional biographical narrative of the soon-to-be Blooms.
36 In “Nausicaa” Bloom recalls a particularly romantic encounter in the Dillon’s garden in May (in what must have been 1887), where he kissed Molly surrounded by its nightstock and other flowers (U 13.1090–1). There is no mention of the kiss in the garden on the episode’s draft. There he simply “wooed her” (Cornell MS 56B, p. 30; see JJA 13: 233), but on its subsequent manuscript the kiss has become an integral part of the story (Rosenbach “Nausicaa” MS, f. 51). Throughout Ulysses Bloom’s thoughts centre on a desire to capture (or else recapture) the past, and so evoke a time when he was happier than he is in 1904. For example, Joyce continued to add elements to this idyllic scene. Around 25 October 1921, when Joyce reread Bloom’s memory of Molly in the garden on the episode’s second setting in proof for Ulysses, he added the touching idea that after more than fifteen years of marriage Bloom regrets not having “had an oilpainting made of her [Molly] then” (Harvard Placard 41.ii; see JJA 19: 301). A month later, on the next setting of this same scene in proof, he amplified Bloom’s wish by having Bloom wish that it had been “a fulllength” portrait of his wife when they first met (Texas Page Proofs 23.3; see JJA 25: 279; see U 13.1091–2),17 thereby emphasizing her physical allure then to her suitor and still now to her husband.
37 Oddly, besides the momentous kiss on Howth the day she encouraged him to propose,18 the only other one of Leopold’s kisses that Molly remembers in Ulysses was actually at Luke Doyle’s, thereby further entangling the two families and what happened at their homes in the Blooms’ memories. In Molly’s corresponding memory of that kiss in “Penelope” she thinks: “I wrote the night he kissed my heart at Dolphins barn I couldnt describe it simply it makes you feel like nothing on earth” (U 18.330–1), most of which was already on the episode’s draft (see NLI MS 36,639/14, p. [4r]). In Bloom’s version of the kiss in “Nausicaa”, he (more precisely and somewhat awkwardly) remembers kissing Molly’s shoulder, whilst she (more romantically) thinks that he kissed her heart. While maintaining a basic consistency between the versions of the story, the nuanced differences between the couple’s shared loving memories serve to determine our understanding of the characters in Ulysses. Furthermore, once again, the events at the homes of the Dillons and the Doyles have presumably merged in Joyce’s descriptions. Could Joyce have meant to describe the same scene here and did he simply conflate the homes where such a memorable kiss took place yet again?
38 If one accepts the view that Joyce’s characters are less significant to the narrative and the meaning of Ulysses than the stories being recalled, or else told by and about them, then in this case it is not so much that Joyce decided that the Dillons would occupy a relatively central space in the early life histories of the Blooms. Rather, as he continued to write the book, Joyce only progressively attributed greater significance to the Dillons, specifically to the pleasant times the young couple spent at their home and garden. Thereby, he only slowly concentrated the possibilities of coincidence that this creative nexus of scenes and constructed memories afford the narrative and the
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experience of reading the book. While some readers may believe that Joyce’s aim was to diversify his cast of characters and the scenes of the action in the book as he made his work a seemingly ever more all-encompassing canvas, the manuscripts demonstrate a different trajectory. They document the ways in which Joyce tried to hang as many divergent themes, events, and details around a relatively limited number of characters and incidents, and thereby he strove to construct the semblance of a unified totality that readers are encouraged to connect and complete in their imaginations. Although there are obvious exceptions, it is not so much that Joyce invested a pre-established significance in many of these people or places, events or incidents. Instead, more obviously, these elements continued to accrue meaning as the writer explored the narrative possibilities and established connections that readers are meant to recognize.
39 It might be interesting to find one or more basic, structural (presumably autobiographical) reasons why Joyce attached particular importance to certain pivotal encounters in Leopold and Molly’s courtship happening at the Dillon’s home while others are supposed to happen at the Doyle’s. But based on what we know of Joyce’s writing strategies, it was not the Dillons or Doyles themselves (fictional or real) who are fundamental to the stories in Ulysses. Instead of being inherently relevant and essential, these fictionalized families and their homes accumulated thematic meaning and narratological significance as Joyce kept amalgamating and unifying his stories at the same as he was elaborating and complicating them.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adams, Robert M. 1962. Surface and Symbol. New York: Oxford University Press.
Costello, Peter. 1992. James Joyce: Years of Growth, 1882-1915: A Biography. New York: Pantheon Books.
Crispi, Luca. 2010. The UB James Joyce Catalog. Buffalo: The University at Buffalo, The Poetry Collection,
Crispi, Luca. 2011. “A First Foray into the National Library of Ireland’s Joyce Manuscripts: Bloomsday 2011”, Genetic Joyce Studies 11,
Crispi, Luca. 2013. “Joyce at Work on Ulysses: 1917–1922”, Genetic Joyce Studies 13,
Crispi, Luca. 2015. James Joyce’s Creative Process and the Construction of Characters in Ulysses: Becoming the Blooms. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ellmann, Richard. 1982. James Joyce. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press.
Gunn, Ian and Clive Hart. 2004. James Joyce’s Dublin. London: Thames and Hudson.
Hayman, David. 1982. “Ulysses”: The Mechanics of Meaning. Rev. ed. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
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Igoe, Vivien. 2016. The Characters in James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Biographical Dictionary. Dublin: University College Dublin Press.
Joyce, James. March 1918-December 1920. “Ulysses” [23-part serial], The Little Review, V.11–VII.3.
Joyce, James. 1922. Ulysses. Paris: Shakespeare and Company.
Joyce, James. 1966. Vol. 1 of Letters of James Joyce. Ed. Stuart Gilbert. New. ed. New York: Viking Press.
Joyce, James. 1974. Ulysses: A Facsimile of the Manuscript. Ed. Harry Levin and Clive Driver. London: Faber and Faber; Philadelphia: Philip H. & A.S.W. Rosenbach Foundation.
Joyce, James. 1977–78. The James Joyce Archive. Eds. Michael Groden et al. New York: Garland.
Joyce, James. 1986. Ulysses. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler et al. New York: Garland.
Kenny, Peter. 2002. The Joyce Papers 2002: Collection List No. 68. Dublin: The National Library of Ireland.
Niemeyer, Carl. 1976. “A Ulysses Calendar”. James Joyce Quarterly, 13, pp. 163–93.
Scholes, Robert E. [1961]. The Cornell Joyce Collection: A Catalogue. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
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NOTES
1. Carl Niemeyer notes this discrepancy, but as far as I know it has not been discussed elsewhere (Niemeyer 1976, 178). 2. Adding to the topographical fluidity, Joyce names the suburb just outside Dublin city centre where the Dillons are supposed to live as Roundtown in the “Hades”, “Aeolus”, “Oxen of the Sun” and “Ithaca” episodes, but calls it Terenure in “Aeolus” and “Sirens”. It is now called Terenure. 3. This notebook is one of almost two-dozen Joyce manuscripts acquired by the National Library of Ireland (NLI MSS 36,639/01–19) that are catalogued as the “Joyce Papers 2002” (see Kenny 2002 and http://catalogue.nli.ie/Record/vtls000194606). Unless indicated by square brackets as here, all manuscript citations follow Joyce’s pagination of the document. For further information about these manuscripts, see Crispi 2011 and 2013. 4. Although Joyce abbreviates Mathew Dillon’s first name as both Mat and Matt in his notes and manuscripts, he is Mat Dillon in Ulysses. 5. This mixed fair copy manuscript has been reproduced in colour as Ulysses: A Facsimile of the Manuscript (Joyce 1974). The Rosenbach manuscript is cited throughout by episode and folio number, except for the “Ithaca” and “Penelope” episodes, which are cited by Joyce’s pagination. 6. References to Ulysses are abbreviated as U and cited in the standard format by the episode and line number(s) of the Gabler edition (Joyce 1986). Joyce further revised these sentences twice on the same (now missing) typescript page; first, from February to May 1918, for its appearance in the Little Review (issue V.2: June 1918), and then again at the start of 1921 for Ulysses (Paris: Shakespeare and Company, 1922). 7. For example, Joyce revealed the complex connections between the various characters in his work and the real life Powell family in a 21 December 1922 letter to his aunt Josephine Murray:
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“Major Powell ― in my book Major Tweedy, Mrs Bloom’s father” (Joyce 1957, 198). For further information on Sergeant-Major Powell, see Ellmann 1982, 46 and 519, as well as Tierney 2013. 8. The placard proofs of Ulysses are also known as the book’s earlier galley proofs. They are reproduced in black and white, high contrast photofacsimile in the James Joyce Archive (Joyce 1977‒78), which hereafter is abbreviated as JJA + volume and page number). Throughout this essay, Joyce’s additions are signalled with matched sets of nested caret marks as follows: “text ^added text^ text”. Placards are cited by the location of the original, the number and setting of text, as well as by the volume and page number in Joyce 1977‒78. 9. Joyce had already written a version of this scene on the episode’s earliest extant draft when he returned to Trieste at the end of 1919 (Cornell MS 56B, pp. 30–1; see JJA 13: 233 and 235). For a description of this manuscript, see Scholes 1961, 25. 10. Joyce added this line to introduce this particular memory on the episode’s typescript just before Ulysses was published (Buffalo MS 11.a.i, p. [18r]; see JJA 13: 290). For further information about the Buffalo Joyce manuscripts, see Crispi 2010. 11. I elaborate these ideas more fully in Crispi 2015. 12. For further information about this “Penelope” manuscript, see JJA 16: xi. 13. David Hayman writes: “I use the term ‘arranger’ to designate a figure or a presence that can be identified neither with the author nor with his narrators, but exercises an increasing degree of overt control over increasingly challenging material” (Hayman 1982, 84). 14. Joyce sketched a rudimentary telling of this scene at dawn on the proto-draft of “Ithaca” (NLI MS 36,639/13, p. [3v]), but by the episode’s next extant version (written less than a month later) the special daybreak event had taken place after a particular evening of charades at Luke Doyle’s home, wherever he may live in the world of Ulysses (Rosenbach “Ithaca” Blue MS, p. 17). 15. This means that Joyce wrote the scene in “Circe” after all the descriptions of the one or more nights of charades at Luke Doyle’s house, except the one in “Ithaca” I discussed above. 16. Furthermore, as he did in “Nausicaa”, Joyce conflates “Rip Van Winkle” with Washington Irving’s other well-known story “Sleepy Hollow”. 17. Generally, the Ulysses page proofs are a later setting of the text and they are also cited by the location of the original, the number and setting of text, and the volume and page number in the James Joyce Archive (Joyce 1977-78). 18. For Leopold’s foundational memory of this scene, see U 8.899–916, and for Molly’s recollection of the same scene, see U 18.1571–83.
ABSTRACTS
This essay investigates how in Ulysses James Joyce created several textual, biographical, temporal, and topographical discrepancies at the narrative origin of Leopold Bloom and Molly Tweedy’s life together. The textual and contextual evidence indicates that there were two (or possibly more) “first nights” ― different firsts on different evenings ― for the soon to be Blooms. This is one of the many instances in the book when the “facts” in the fiction ― as well as some of the seemingly analogous facts outside the novel ― do not cohere. The genetic study of this kind of temporal and spatial slippage in the book’s purportedly coherent texture challenges readers’ preconceptions about the fixity of the character’s life-stories in the narrative and uncovers some
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of the ways in which Joyce relied on the names and some facts derived from the lives of real people in a variety of often unexpected ways to create the life-stories of his fictional characters.
INDEX
Keywords: genetic criticism, composition history, characterization, topography (Dublin), Joyce (James)
AUTHOR
LUCA CRISPI
Luca Crispi is Lecturer in James Joyce Studies and Modernism in the UCD James Joyce Research Centre, School of English, Drama and Film. His monograph – Joyce’s Creative Process and the Construction of Characters in ‘Ulysses’: Becoming the Blooms – was published by Oxford University Press in 2015. He is a founding co-editor with Anne Fogarty of the Dublin James Joyce Journal and was the co-editor with Sam Slote of How Joyce Wrote ‘Finnegans Wake’: A Chapter-by-Chapter Genetic Guide (Wisconsin UP, 2007). His recent articles have appeared in the Journal of Modern Literature, James Joyce Quarterly, Joyce Studies Annual and Genetic Joyce Studies. He is currently working on a monograph entitled Revising the Modernist Aesthetic of ‘Ulysses’.
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Stratigraphic Soundings: A Genetic Approach to the German Poet Thomas Kling
Gabriele Wix
I would like to thank Ute Langanky and Ricarda Dick (Thomas Kling Archiv, Stiftung Insel Hombroich) for permission to reproduce documents from the archive as well as for their kind support in answering my inquiries. Things Themselves on top of other things on top of something else now & then ― Lawrence Weiner
The author and his archive
1 AT THE TIME OF his death in 2005, aged 47, Thomas Kling was already said to be “more influential and formative in terms of style than almost any other poet of his generation” (Gumz 2005). Indeed, Kling’s engagement in the German literary poetry world had no equal at that time.
2 The poetry which he published from 1977 to 2005 make up the core of his work. But he was also a performer of his own poetry, an essayist, a translator, and on top of that the editor of an outstanding anthology of poetry in the German language consisting of 200 poems from the Middle Ages to the present which he simply called Sprachspeicher (Language Storage) (see Kling 2001b).1 The title may be considered programmatic for his own poetry: as much as Kling pointed to his interest in history and contemporary culture, what he was deeply concerned with was the multi-layered nature of language which preserves memory, whether spoken or written, whether contemporary or from the past, whether dialect, poetic language, professional jargon or slang. Kling was the
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intertextual writer per se or, as he put it himself, a “Spracharchäologe” (Kling 1996, blurb) (language archaeologist) (see also Kling 2001a, 206).
3 Kling’s archive and personal library survive complete intact in the place where he lived and worked during the last ten years of his life, the Raketenstation Hombroich on the Lower Rhine, a former missile base and silent witness of the Cold War. The Thomas Kling Archiv is now part of the Stiftung Insel Hombroich to which it was left by his wife, the artist Ute Langanky. Most of the documents in the archive were catalogued by the Heinrich-Heine-Institut in Düsseldorf between November 2008 and June 2011 (see Scharfschwert 2012, 383). In preparation for an exhibition on Thomas Kling, Kerstin Stüssel and I were the first to explore the archive with a view to publishing a facsimile edition with diplomatic transcription showing the genesis of Kling’s iconic Manhattan poems (see Kling 2013).
4 The poems are entitled “Manhattan Mundraum” ("Manhattan Mouthspace") and “Manhattan Mundraum Zwei” ("Manhattan Mouthspace Two").2 Both poems open two of his poetry books: the first is morsch (rotten) (Kling 1996), which is the first volume Kling published after he had moved from Cologne to the Lower Rhine; the second is Sondagen (Test Trenches / Stratigraphic Soundings) (Kling 2002), and not only due to this prominent position can it be assumed that they play a pivotal role in his poetry.
“supersedimented textuality” and “bottomless stratigraphy”: Preliminary poetological considerations
5 Kling’s concept of a multilayered language, and accordingly, a multilayered writing becomes obvious in the material traces of the writing process of the first poem. It is worked out in four different documents: a notebook containing 36 pages that the author took with him to New York City in 1995 and used there from 13 to 23 November; a writing pad of nine sheets, dating from 23 February to 4 March 1966; a single sheet with a watermark; and a note from a waiter’s notepad; the last mentioned documents are not dated.3 What makes the subject matter particularly attractive from the editorial point of view is the fact that all manuscripts are joined manuscripts; they consist of many layers of drafts and notes for many different poems.
6 There is an interesting parallel to a group of Georg Trakl’s manuscripts from the collection of his sister Maria Geipel, which consists of folded sheets with many drafts for different poems. Both historical-critical editions of Georg Trakl’s work separate the single drafts for each poem in question to present the material in a correct archival order (see Georg Trakl 1969 and 1995‒2014). At least, the new edition publishes facsimiles of the double sheets, but it goes only half way because it does not pay attention to the consequences of this writing process for the presentation of the genesis of Trakl’s poems (see Wix 2015). As to Kling, separating the different drafts from the writing pad or the notebook equally means destroying the characteristics of the author’s writing process. That is why the whole notebook and the whole writing pad are presented in a material-based edition that document Kling’s actual manner of working (see Kling 2013, 6‒41).4
7 Looking at the archival documents in toto and considering the current academic discourse on the question of what constitutes a variation and on the notion of variant in relation to réécriture or rewriting, I would like to start with the end result: As far as
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the autographs are concerned, there are almost no variants, no stages of revisions as we are used to in studying the genesis of literature, but what we do encounter are inserts of test trenches from the sedimentation of language, which generates a text of multiple writings. With regard to the methods of critique génétique, Louis Hay uses the term ”quasi-archäologische Verfahren“ (Hay 1984, 307) (“quasi-archaeological methods”). Reconstructing the genesis of Kling’s poems, I would argue that the concept of stratigraphy in modern archaeology might serve as a metaphor for characterizing both Kling’s writing process and the genetic approach.5
8 Strictly speaking, stratigraphic metaphors are not new to describe language and writing. In particular, Derrida’s essay on Bernard Tschumi’s deconstructive conception of Parc de la Villette in Paris must be mentioned, in which Derrida is playing upon the words folie, feuille and folio, and thereby talking about writing when talking about architecture. La masse de pierre inamovible, la verticale station de verre ou de métal que nous tenions pour la chose même de l’architecture (‘die Sache selbst’ ou ‘the real thing’), son effectivité indéplaçable, nous l’appréhendons maintenant dans le texte volumineux d’écritures multiples: surimpression d’un Wunderblock […], trame du palimpseste, textualité sursédimentée, stratigraphie sans fond, mobile, légère et abyssale, feuilletée, foliiforme. (Derrida 1986, 12) [The immovable mass of stone, the vertical glass or metal plane that we had taken to be the very object of architecture (die Sache selbst or the real thing), its indisplaceable effectivity, is apprehended maintenant in the voluminous text of multiple writings: superimposition of a Wunderblock [. . .], palimpsest grid, supersedimented textuality, bottomless stratigraphy that is mobile, light and abyssal, foliated, foliiform.] (Derrida 1986, 13)
9 Not surprisingly, the archaeological term “Sondage” [test trench / stratigraphic soundings] works as the title of the poetry volume by Thomas Kling from 2002: Sondagen, where he published the second poem about Manhattan. And it is again the poet himself who uses geological metaphors writing about “textus” and “granit” (“granite”), see the beginning of the first and the last stanza of his poem “Manhattan Mundraum” (“Manhattan Mouthspace”) to which we shall turn our attention now: die stadt ist der mund raum. die zunge, textus; stadtzunge der granit: geschmolzener und wieder aufgeschmo- lzner text. [. . .] (Kling 1996, 7) [the city is the mouth space. the tongue [lingua], textus; city tongue the granite: melted and reme- lted text. [. . .]] die stadt ist der mundraum. die zunge, textus. die namen, blicknamenzerfall. geschmo- lzene, bewegte, schwarz- glühende suppe. steinbrei, der dickt. [. . .] (Kling 1996, 12) [the city is the mouth space. the tongue [lingua], textus. the names, decay of glance of names. me- lted, moved, black-
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glowing soup. mash of stones, thickening. [. . .] ]
10 These melting and remelting processes have been shaping the space of the city as well as the language that makes up the “mouth space” of Manhattan. But at the same time it is our mouth space of which the author makes us aware by the use of language in his poem: Violating the spelling rules, the word “aufgeschmolzener” (remelted) is separated by the line break into: “aufgeschmo- | lzner text” (“reme- | lted text”). The reader’s attention is thus drawn to the physical reading process, which especially in German is extremely difficult because of the sequence of three consonants ― conforming with oral speech, the vowel “e” is cancelled by Kling. Feeling the tongue moving in his mouth, the reader cannot but become aware of his own mouth space. The physical space of the city, the mouth space of all the languages used in Manhattan and the reader’s mouth space are melted down and reflect the author’s notion of a multilayered text. Thus, the thesis on the relationship between, on the one hand, Kling’s writing process and its reconstruction in the genetic approach and the concept of stratigraphy, on the other hand, should be based first of all on poetological reflections, which are very important for genetic criticism and textual scholarship, and crucial also for understanding Kling’s notion of authorship. Before analysing the material traces of the writing process, it is therefore useful to take a closer look at Kling’s poetics in relation to the genesis of the Manhattan poems.
11 The first poem on Manhattan refers to Kling’s stay in New York City from 13 to 23 November 1995, following an invitation by the Goethe House to participate at the Nuyorican Poetry Festival. Initially, the poem seems to be about the author’s impressions of the city he visited for the first and only time in his life. However, the title of the poem arouses suspicion. Because of the inversion of apposition and name, the title “Manhattan Mundraum” does not comply with standard usage in the German language, but it does well in English. In fact, the title evokes the American novel Manhattan Transfer, an assumption verified in the notebook: “titel: DOS PASSOS- Variante” (“title: variant of DOS PASSOS”) (Kling 1995, 30; see also Kling 2013, 16). First of all, this note by the author shows the need to take into account that there are intertextual layers originating from foreign languages: ”In principle, we have to assume that any textual element has intertextual relatives and very often they speak foreign languages“ (Dedner 2012, 130). Secondly, it demonstrates that the notebook should not only be considered a draft for the poems, but also a commentary on them. The objective of John Dos Passos’ 1925 novel to which Kling is referring in the title of the Manhattan poems is similar to the one Kling is pursuing in his poetological program: melting language and techniques from the most different contexts and media, as for example from literature, film, newspaper, and oral speech. Hence the title of the poem applies not only to New York City, but also to poetry itself in a self- referential discourse.
12 Hardly coincidentally, the postmodern architect Bernard Tschumi ― the subject of Derrida’s essay cited above ― also refers to Dos Passos’ novel in his exhibitions entitled The Manhattan Transcripts and his book of the same title. Tschumi’s introduction to his book could equally apply to Kling’s poetry, see his descriptions of his own way of isolating “frozen bits of action” (Tschumi 1994, 10), developing spaces “from shot to shot” (Tschumi 1994, 11), and his emphatic insistence on referring to reality: The Transcripts always presuppose a reality already in existence, a reality waiting to be deconstructed ― and eventually transformed. They isolate, frame, ‘take’
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elements from the city. Yet the role of the Transcripts is never to represent; they are not mimetic. (Tschumi 1994, 8)
13 As to both of Kling’s Manhattan poems, this reality “already in existence” is on the one hand the author’s first visit to Manhattan and all the references to the historical traces. On the other hand, it consists of the reports on the planes crashing into the Twin Towers in 2001, especially the medial representation in TV as infinite loops, combined with the author’s eye and ear witness of Manhattan in 1995. Equally in line with Tschumi, Kling points out that the role of poetry is never to represent, that poetry is not mimetic. The key word in his poetics is “translating the realities”, whereby for him “realities” comprise also the use of language both past and present: Wir haben es mit der Schwierigkeit des Übersetzens zu tun, des Übersetzens von Wirklichkeiten, von Realien; von geschichtlichen, kultur- und zeitgeschichtlichen Realien. Wir haben es mit den Realien der gesprochenen und der toten Sprachen zu tun. Das Durchtauchen all der vorhandenen, seienden Sprachräume. (Kling 1993, 11) [We are dealing with the difficulty of translating, translating the realities, the real- life facts of historical, cultural and contemporary realities. We are dealing with the realities, the real-life facts of spoken and dead languages. Diving through all existing languages.]
“Manhattan Mouthspace”: Material traces of the writing process
14 To substantiate the thesis that the reconstruction of the writing process of “Manhattan Mouthspace” can be characterized as stratigraphic soundings and that the writing process itself is based on the installation of test trenches, I will concentrate on just one stanza: the 11th and second to last stanza from the first poem which is mainly about Penn Station on 34th Street and the dilapidated state of the subway stations, rust flaking from the iron pipes, water running down the walls. A translation of this stanza is extremely difficult because of King’s playing upon the etymology of words. The word “‒ blattern” refers to “Blattern”, the name of the disease “small pox”, but there is an etymological affinity with “Blatt”, which in German means “leaf“ as well as “sheet”. Furthermore, “‒blattern” refers to “blättern”, which means “to browse”. Consequently, we can say that alone with the use of a single word like “‒blattern”, Kling unveils multiple layers of language, an etymological, “archaeological” process that in this case cannot be very adequately translated into English. gingkos. geriffelter slang, der die bödn bedeckt. eins tiefer (dautendey: “der bühnenraum ist ein gehirn“) trieft wa- sser, unablässig aus den rostschrundn, 34th, pennsylvania station, von vonne subwaywände; rostplackn, -blattern, vermorschtes rohrsystem; ein drippeln, schneller, aus di deckn. die zunge g- kürzt, ein tag unter tags, unter vielen (Kling, 1996, 12) [gingkos. checkered slang, covering the floors. one below (dautenday: “the stage is a brain“) there is wa- ter dripping, ceaselessly out of the cracks of rust, 34th, pennsylvania station, off of the subway walls; lumps of rust, flakes of rust,
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rotten system of pipes; a trickling, faster, from the ceilings. the tongue shortened, a day underground, among many others]
15 Looking at the drafts it becomes obvious that the stanza is formed on the basis of test trenches, which are taken from wide-ranging contexts. All the expressions that Kling transferred from the handwritten notes (see Figures 1‒5) into his poem are marked up in bold type so that the reader can follow the genesis, but only with the reservation that the exact chronology of the writing process itself cannot be reconstructed. There are too many missing links that we possibly might find by a forensic analysis of the digital material. On the basis of the autographs, we can only reconstruct the “installation” of the sources from their contexts.6 Anyway, it is exciting enough to see in the course of the “installation” that there are only very few words that could not be traced in the documents at hand.7 gingkos. geriffelter slang, der die bödn bedeckt. eins tiefer (dautendey: “der bühnenraum ist ein gehirn“) trieft wa- sser, unablässig aus den rostschrundn, 34th, pennsylvania station, von vonne subwaywände; rostplackn, -blattern, vermorschtes rohrsystem; ein drippeln, schneller, aus di deckn. die zunge g- kürzt, ein tag unter tags, unter vielen (Notebook, p. 1, compare Figure 1) gingkos. geriffelter slang, der die bödn bedeckt. eins tiefer (dautendey: “der bühnenraum ist ein gehirn“) trieft wa- sser, unablässig aus den rostschrundn, 34th, pennsylvania station, von vonne subwaywände; rostplackn, -blattern, vermorschtes rohrsystem; ein drippeln, schneller, aus di deckn. die zunge g- kürzt, ein tag unter tags, unter vielen (Notebook, p. 3, compare Figure 2) gingkos. geriffelter slang, der die bödn bedeckt. eins tiefer (dautendey: “der bühnenraum ist ein gehirn“) trieft wa- sser, unablässig aus den rostschrundn, 34th, pennsylvania station, von vonne subwaywände; rostplackn, -blattern, vermorschtes rohrsystem; ein drippeln, schneller, aus di deckn. die zunge g- kürzt, ein tag unter tags, unter vielen (Notebook, p. 7, compare Kling 2013, 8) gingkos. geriffelter slang, der die bödn bedeckt. eins tiefer (dautendey: “der bühnenraum ist ein gehirn“) trieft wa- sser, unablässig aus den rostschrundn, 34th, pennsylvania station, von vonne subwaywände; rostplackn, -blattern, vermorschtes rohrsystem; ein drippeln, schneller, aus di deckn. die zunge g- kürzt, ein tag unter tags, unter vielen (Notebook, p. 9, compare Figure 3)
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gingkos. geriffelter slang, der die bödn bedeckt. eins tiefer (dautendey: “der bühnenraum ist ein gehirn“) trieft wa- sser, unablässig aus den rostschrundn, 34th, pennsylvania station, von vonne subwaywände; rostplackn, -blattern, vermorschtes rohrsystem; ein drippeln, schneller, aus di deckn. die zunge g- kürzt, ein tag unter tags, unter vielen (Notebook, p. 25, compare Figure 5) gingkos. geriffelter slang, der die bödn bedeckt. eins tiefer (dautendey: “der bühnenraum ist ein gehirn“) trieft wa- sser, unablässig aus den rostschrundn, 34th, pennsylvania station, von vonne subwaywände; rostplackn, -blattern, vermorschtes rohrsystem; ein drippeln, schneller, aus di deckn. die zunge g- kürzt, ein tag unter tags, unter vielen (Writing pad, p. 9, compare Figure 4)
Figure 1: Thomas Kling, AUGN ZEUGN. NYC. Manhattan.
Notebook, p. 1. Thomas Kling Archiv, Stiftung Insel Hombroich (uncatalogued).
Figure 2: Thomas Kling, AUGN ZEUGN. NYC. Manhattan.
Notebook, pp. 2 and 3. Thomas Kling Archiv, Stiftung Insel Hombroich (uncatalogued).
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Figure 3: Thomas Kling, AUGN ZEUGN. NYC. Manhattan.
Notebook, pp.8 and 9. Thomas Kling Archiv, Stiftung Insel Hombroich (uncatalogued).
16 To comment on some of the verses. On the first page of the notebook (see Figure 1) there is a quotation from the German Impressionist poet Max Dauthendey saying that the stage is a brain, which Kling must have found in a book by Albert Soergel. At least, there is a link “SOERGEL” in Kling’s notebook, and the nineteenth edition of Soergel’s book, Dichter und Dichtung der Zeit, is present in Kling’s library. Harshly disrupting the third phrase and destroying all ideas of traditional poetry, the quotation, which looks like a note for a lecture or an essay, is inserted into the poem between brackets and enclosed within quotation marks.
17 Kling said that he got the idea for the title of his new poetry volume in Manhattan (see Kling 1997 and 2001a, 167). And indeed, on page 25 of the notebook we find the evidence. Kling even noted the exact date: 18 November 1995 (see Figure 5). In the poem, however, the title “morsch” (“rotten”) is mentioned in form of the adjective “vermorschtes”, emphasizing the result of the process of rotting. There is no equivalent in the English language. The word “SUBWAY” is noted in a context (see Figure 2), which is the subject of stanzas seven and eight. That is why the word “subway” in the eleventh stanza refers rather to the use of the word in the poem itself; but these in-depth relationships would go beyond the scope of this paper. What is most significant for Kling’s writing process is the observation that a simple note like “34th Penn. Station” is not only a tourist’s note for a meeting point or a tourist feature as it seems to be at first glance (see Kling 2013, 8). Right from the beginning, it is a sound ― it is material which he uses so to speak as a quarry and which is noted to be transferred into a poem, someday. In this case, it is the eleventh stanza of the Manhattan poem.
18 But the relevance of this archival material goes far beyond the Manhattan poems, representing a writing process that Almuth Grésillon describes in her study on the genesis of Francis Ponge’s poem “L’Ardoise”:8 Ce qui ne fait pas l’objet de publication, ce qui demeure dans l’atelier de l’écrivain, n’est pas obsolète. Les “matériaux rejetés“ de Ponge sont à entendre au contraire comme des éléments mis au jour, sélectionnés dans l’amas des possibles, mis en réserve et prêts à rejaillir un jour ou l’autre. (Grésillon 2007, 167). [What has not been published yet, what rests in the writer’s studio, is not obsolete. On the contrary, Ponge’s “rejected materials” are to be understood as elements which are brought to light, chosen within a bunch of possibilities, kept on standby, ready to flare up one day.]
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Figure 4: Thomas Kling. Writing pad, untitled.
Sheet 9 Thomas Kling Archiv, Stiftung Insel Hombroich (HHI.2008.D.KLING.2964)
Figure 5: Thomas Kling, AUGN ZEUGN. NYC. Manhattan.
Notebook, pp. 24 and 25. Thomas Kling Archiv, Stiftung Insel Hombroich (uncatalogued).
19 This observation applies equally to Kling.9 Just some examples. The interrelation between forging and speaking (see “THE BLACKSMITHES”, Figure 5) is subject in the artists’ book GELÄNDE. camouflage (TERRAIN. camouflage) (Kling and Langanky 1998; see also Beyer 2014, 125). The word “paläolaryngologie” (”palaeolaryngology”) on page 9 of the writing pad (see Figure 4) is used four years later as the title of a poem in Kling’s poetry book Fernhandel (Long-distance Trade) (Kling 2000). And finally, a quote from the New York Post of 23 November 1995, which Kling wrote down in his notebook in New York City on page 34 (see Kling 2013, 18), is transferred into the poem “s. caecilia
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(keyb.)” in a chapter about Rome in his poetry volume morsch, the one which opens “Manhattan Mundraum”.10 Surprisingly, the insert appears in capital letters and in the original English. was sagt der obduktionsbe- richt I’AM GOING TO GET THEM FOR THIS / SOME- BODY DID THIS TO MY DAUGHTER / SOMEBODY DID VOODOO AND WITCH- CRAFT TO HER / (Kling 1996, 102) [what does the autopsy re- | port say [. . .] ]
20 The quotation from the New York Post is slightly modified, but the slashes explicitly refer to the line breaks in Kling’s original note in his notebook as if it were another poem that he is referring to. By indicating the original line breaks, Kling adds a layer of scholarly practice in a literary genre which is considered to be rather subjective.11 A similar point is the quote from the poet Dauthendey (see the beginning of the 11th stanza) as well as the use of different fonts in the 7th stanza. “poeta en nueva york” in the first line of the 7th stanza refers to the title of a book of poetry by García Lorca. It is set in italics as is the usual practice in literary studies. A few lines further down, the title reappears, but this time it is set in roman, signalling that it has now become part of Kling’s own language in the poem and the poem now talks about him as a poet in New York City. As a visitor to the city, Kling is always fully aware of being a poet at work like García Lorca, Stefan Toller and all the others he is referring to.
The author and his library
21 This reference to other poets in “Manhattan Mundraum” outlines another characteristic feature in Kling’s poetry and leads to the second part of my paper touching questions on the relationship between writers and their libraries as well as the large field of research on marginalia (see Jackson 2002). Kling explicitly refers to his library as a source of his writing, and on top of that, as a source of his authorship.12 Accordingly, as mentioned before, his way of writing has to be characterized as intertextual more than in regard to any other poet. When Alexander Gumz points out that ― [a] well-grounded knowledge of history, literature, geology, and art history fuses in his poetry by way of harsh treatment with writing techniques from the media age [. . .] to form sensual ‘language installations’, as Kling called them, which remain gripping despite all the rich knowledge injected to them.” (Gumz 1995)
22 ― it has to be stated that this “rich knowledge” was gained by taking great pains studying. Kling was a very attentive reader. This becomes obvious at first glance in his library. He not only used to mark the pages in the books with a pencil, on top of that he marked them with yellow post-it-notes on which he noted the catch words.
23 I focus on only one intertextual reference, that to Paul Celan in the second Manhattan poem, for which we need the personal library to understand it. In the shelf containing the books by and about Celan in Kling’s library, volume 2 of the Suhrkamp edition is missing. But Kling had two separate bookshelves next to his writing desk where he kept the main books of reference, and here you find the missing second volume. In “Manhattan Mundraum Zwei”, the poem about 9/11, Kling quotes Celan twice, but I
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only want to mention Kling’s reference to the famous lines “wir schaufeln ein Grab in den Lüften da liegt man nicht eng“ (Celan 1971, 28 ) (“we are digging a grave in the air there is room for all of us”) (Celan 1971, 29) from Celan’s poem “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue”) about people dying in the Nazi concentration camps. Kling writes: “und siedelten in der luft” (“and we settled in the air“) (8th stanza) “und siedelten so in der luft” (“and we just settled in the air“) (9th stanza) about the people dying in the twin towers (Kling 2002, 13).13 Research in the library revealed that in Celan’s poetry volume, these quotes are not marked, and we learnt that most of the marginal notes do not refer to the content, but to the language used in Celan’s poems, “Judenwelsch” or “Gauklergösch”. Referring to the reflections on the notion of “variant”, the question arises: Could a library be considered to be a stock of variants?
24 In the process of self-staging, it is in particular Kling’s library that is crucial. This can easily be proved by the extensive use of mottos in his poetry books where he used to refer to many other poets, but ― remarkably enough ― to his own verses as well. There are two mottos preceding “Manhattan Mundraum Zwei”. One is by Jacob Balde ― Kling was very proud to have a first issue of his medical satires from 1660 in his library (see Kling 2004a). The other one is by himself, a quote from the first stanza of the first Manhattan poem. …die / ruinen, nicht hier, die / die zähnung zählung der / stadt!, zu bergn, zu verbergn! MANHATTAN MUNDRAUM (Kling 2002, 9) […the / ruins, not here, the / the serration census of the / city!, to hold, to hide! MANHATTAN MOUTHSPACE]
25 As mentioned before, in “Manhattan Mundraum Zwei”, the poet combines the media reception of 9/11 with his own eye and ear witness of Manhattan in the 1990s. The motto taken from his first Manhattan poem shapes a vision of ruins that ― written down in 1995 ― actually turned into reality in 2001. Thanks to Marcel Beyer’s meticulous analysis of the facsimile edition (Beyer 2014) we know that these “ruins, not here” refer to the destruction in Cologne during the Second World War, or even more precisely to images of the bombing of Cologne in Lars Trier’s film Epidemic, which Kling apparently saw during his stay in New York City; at least he kept the ticket for this film in the notebook (see Kling 2013, 9).14 Against this background, the motto incorporates and interrelates more than sixty years of German and American history; it fuses the author’s reception of reality, film and TV, the annihilation of people and cities in the wake of dictatorial and terroristic acts ― a reading which is based on stratigraphic soundings, on revealing the archeaeology in the underlying layers and the contexts they came from.
26 By way of conclusion, I would like to bring various lines of argument together as well as the different aspects of the main topic in the Manhattan poems. It is for this reason that I focus on a unique archival document, the threads of which converge in the overarching motif of the two poems; the documents also bridge the gap with the author’s reflections in another publication of that time about the place where he had moved. But above all, this thrilling find in Kling’s archive again testifies to the poet’s role as an archaeologist of language, which formed for Kling the basis for his language installations; and to the editor’s role, who in his endeavour to discover what contexts exist and how they were created can only take test drillings into a poetry of “supersedimented textuality” and “bottomless stratigraphy”.
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Figure 6: Thomas Kling, Notes on a waiter’s notepad
Undated loose sheet Thomas Kling Archiv, Stiftung Insel Hombroich (HHI.2008.D.KLING,2964)
27 The document in question consists of no more than a single sheet taken from a waiter’s notepad that bears the imprint “GAULOISES BLONDES. Liberté, toujours” (see Figure 6). Along with inter alia the writing pad containing the notes for the first Manhattan poem, the document was found in a drawer whose contents were labelled with the letter “W” at the top of the slip by the archivist. The few notes that Kling wrote on the waiter’s notepad, which he used in landscape format, are carefully laid down one below the other, reading: “botnstoff” (“messnger”), “todesbotnstoff” (“messnger of death”), “schlamm” (“mud”), “bis zum sprachzerfall” (“until the decay of language”) and “das ist voraussetzung” (“this is a prerequisite”). Another word in smaller letters on the top of the sheet, obviously added subsequently, reads “todesengel” (“angel of death”), and the word “schlamm” (“mud”) has been moved next to it with an elegantly curved line ending in an arrow. Contrary to the promises of the advertisement, Kling’s notes are about ruin and death, the leitmotifs of both Manhattan poems.
28 Certainly, the term “Botenstoff” (“messenger” or “semiochemical”) plays an important role in Kling’s poetics. Originally used in chemical ecology as a generic term for all chemical substances that are able to transfer a signal (see Greek semeon, “signal”) into an organism or between individuals of the same species ― and even of different species ― for the purpose of communication, it works as a metaphor for the function of language and particularly for poetry in Kling’s poetics. In 2001, he titled an anthology of his essays Botenstoffe (Messengers) referring to a paper from the 1990s. 15 Kling also used the term in his collaboration with Ute Langanky, GELÄNDE. camouflage, which was published only in 1998, but originated from 1995/96, when they had moved to the Raketenstation Hombroich. Langanky’s photos were taken against the low sun giving an impression of the ambiguous, strained atmosphere of this former missile base which was to become a place for artists to live and to work. A line in Kling’s poem from this book reads “botnstoff licht” (Kling and Langanky 1998, n.p.) (“messnger light”), which alludes to the function of light, as the condition by which human eye as well as the camera can register things, and also to the danger of fire and the explosion of missiles, which refers in turn to the notes on the waiter’s notepad: “botnstoff”, “todesbotnstoff”, “sprachzerfall”. The latter, however, was modified and reads “blicknamenzerfall” in the final stanza of the first Manhattan poem, a neologism composed of glance, name
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and decay, which illustrates the volatility of the (language) perception in a cosmopolitan city. Just a few notes thus generate the semantic field of light and language as messengers giving access to seeing and naming on the one hand, but on the other hand requiring the decay of language to create a new writing process, a new vibration of language and thereby a new poetry: “das ist voraussetzung” ― this is the prerequisite.
29 In our exhibition on Kling’s writing process, an entire display case was devoted to this artefact from the archive. Is it necessary to add that, of course, the discovery of this slip of paper was not a matter of chance? On the contrary, this “discovery” may clarify the correlation between the writing process and the archive. It is evidence of a poet’s way of working, a poet who deliberately collected and stored documents with regard to his archive, be it a waiter’s notepad or a cinema ticket.16 To all intents and purposes, this implies that the place where Kling had been writing did not become an archive posthumously. It had always been one.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Beyer, Marcel. 2012. “Thomas Kling: Herz”. In Norbert Wehr and Ute Langanky (eds.), Thomas Kling: Das brennende Archiv. Berlin: Suhrkamp, pp. 175‒87.
Beyer, Marcel. 2014. “Thomas Kling. New York State of Mind”. In Sprache im technischen Zeitalter 209, pp. 123‒35.
Celan, Paul. 1971. Speech-Grille and Selected Poems. Trans. Joachim Neugroschl. New York: E. P. Dutton.
Dedner, Burghard. 2012. “Intertextual Layers in Translations. Methods of research and Editorial Presentation”. In Wout Dillen, Caroline Macé and Dirk Van Hulle (eds.), Texts beyond Borders: Multilingualism and Textual Scholarship. Special issue of Variants 9, pp. 115‒31.
Derrida, Jacques. 1986. “Point de folie: Maintenant l’architecture” / “Point de folie: Maintenant l’architecture ― Essay accompanying the portfolio”. Trans. Kate Linker. In Bernard Tschumi. La case vide: La Villette 1985. London: Architectural Association, pp. 4‒19.
Grésillon, Almuth. 2007. “Francis Ponge, L’Ardoise dans tous ses états’”. In La Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet: archive de la modernité. Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle. Les Editions des Cendres, pp. 149‒74.
Gumz, Alexander. 2005. “Thomas Kling”. In Poetry International Rotterdam, 1 July 2005.
Harris, Edward. 1997. Principles of Archaeological Stratigraphy. (3rd printing. First published 1979). London et al.: Academic Press.
Hay, Louis. 1984. “Die dritte Dimension der Literatur: Notizen zu einer ‘critique génétique’”. In Poetica: Zeitschrift für Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft, 16, pp. 307‒323.
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Jackson, Heather J. 2002. Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Kling, Thomas. 1977. Der Zustand vor dem Untergang. Düsseldorf: Kunstverlag Schell und Scherenberg.
Kling, Thomas. 1993. “Sprachinstallation Lyon”. In Frieder von Ammon, Peer Trilcke and Alena Scharfschwert (eds.). Das Gellen der Tinte: Zum Werk Thomas Klings. Göttingen: V&R unipress, pp. 11‒12.
Kling, Thomas. 1996. morsch. Gedichte. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp.
Kling, Thomas. 1997. Dankrede. Peter-Huchel-Preis, 3rd April 1997.
Kling, Thomas. 2000. Fernhandel. Gedichte. Köln: DuMont.
Kling, Thomas. 2001a. Botenstoffe. Köln: DuMont.
Kling, Thomas. 2001b. Sprachspeicher. 200 Gedichte auf deutsch vom achten bis zum zwanzigsten Jahrhundert. Köln: DuMont.
Kling, Thomas. 2002. Sondagen. Gedichte. Köln: DuMont.
Kling, Thomas. 2004a. E-Mail to the Swedish translator Lars-Inge Nilsson. 25 January. Thomas Kling Archiv, Stiftung Insel Hombroich. HHI.2008.D.KLING.507.
Kling, Thomas. 2004b. Translation of Thomas Kling, “Manhattan Mouthspace Two”. Trans. Michael Hofmann. In Thomas Wohlfahrt and Tobias Lehmkuhl (eds.). Mouth to Mouth: Contemporary German Poetry in Translation. Newcastle, Australia: Giramondo Publishing Company.
Kling, Thomas. 2005. Auswertung der Flugdaten. Köln: DuMont.
Kling, Thomas. 2006. “Sprachinstallation 1” / “Sprachinstallation 2” (1997). In Itinerar. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, pp. 9‒13 and 15‒26.
Kling, Thomas. 2013 Zur Leitcodierung: Manhattan Schreibszene. Eds. Kerstin Stüssel and Gabriele Wix. Göttingen: Wallstein.
Kling, Thomas and Marcel Beyer. 1991. “Das Eingemachte: Marcel Beyer und Thomas Kling beim Smalltalk ― Auszüge”. In Thomas Kling: Das brennende Archiv. Eds. Norbert Wehr and Ute Langanky 2012. Berlin: Suhrkamp, pp. 43‒49.
Kling, Thomas and Ute Langanky. 1998. GELÄNDE. camouflage. Münster: Kleinheinrich.
Scharfschwert, Alina. 2012. “Das eingepflegte Archiv”. In Frieder von Ammon, Peer Trilcke and Alena Scharfschwert (eds.), Das Gellen der Tinte: Zum Werk Thomas Klings. Göttingen: V&R unipress, pp. 383‒89.
Schwitters, Kurt. 1998. Das literarische Werk. 5 vols. Ed. Friedhelm Lach. Köln: DuMont.
Schwitters, Kurt. 2014. Die Sammelkladden 1919‒1923. Vol. 3. of Alle Texte. Eds. Ursula Kocher and Isabel Schulz. Berlin: de Gruyter
Trakl, Georg. 1969. Dichtungen und Briefe: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe. Eds. Walther Killy and Hans Szklenar. Otto Müller: Salzburg.
Trakl, Georg. 1995‒2014. Sämtliche Werke und Briefwechsel: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe mit Faksimiles der Handschriften Trakls. Eds. Eberhard Sauermann and Hermann Zwerschina. Basel: Stroemfeld.
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Trilcke, Peer. 2012. “Klings Zeilen: Philologische Betrachtungen.” In Frieder von Ammon, Peer Trilcke and Alena Scharfschwert (eds.), Das Gellen der Tinte: Zum Werk Thomas Klings. Göttingen: V&R unipress, pp. 293‒325.
Tschumi, Bernard. 1994. The Manhattan Transcripts. New ed. London: Academy Edition.
Wix, Gabriele. 2015. “‘Am Abend, wenn’, Georg Trakl: Vom Nutzen konkurrierender Editionen: Salzburger und Innsbrucker Trakl-Ausgabe“. In Thomas Bein (ed.), Vom Nutzen der Editionen. Beihefte zu editio 39. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 397‒411.
NOTES
1. There are only very few English translations of Kling’s poems and statements. Unless specified differently, all suggestions for possible translation are my own, adhering as closely as possible to the source text 2. As far as I know “Manhattan Mundraum“ has not been translated yet. The translation of the title refers to “Manhattan Mouthspace Two”, Michael Hofmann’s translation of “Manhattan Mundraum Zwei” (see Kling 2004b). 3. The notebook has not been catalogued yet. The other documents were given the archive number HHI.2008.D.Kling.2964 (Thomas Kling Archiv, Stiftung Insel Hombroich). 4. Interestingly enough, a new edition of Kurt Schwitters’ writings also applies a media- and material-based way of editing in contrast to an earlier edition which was work- and author- centred (compare Schwitters 1998 and 2014). 5. See Harris 1997, 7 and ff. Edward Harris was the first to point out clearly the special needs of an archaeological stratigraphy in contrast to a geological one and thus created the new discipline (the first edition was published in 1979). 6. The author himself calls his poems “Sprachinstallationen” (“language installations”) (see Kling 2006). This term leads to a very particular aspect of Kling’s poetry. Peer Trilcke shows that the length of Kling’s lines often corresponds to a fixed amount of signs and blanks, which he characterizes as “grafikpoetische Praxis” or “Schriftbildnerei” (Trilcke 2012, 295) (“graphic- poetic practice” or “shaping by printing”). I would rather suggest the term sculptural or architectural writing practice. In “Manhattan Mouthspace”, many stanzas are written in the form of a rectangle, alluding to the form of a skyscraper or a column. Other verses have the form of a tetrahedron. The genesis of such an architectural writing process can only be proved by a forensic analysis of Kling’s hard drives because it depends on a writing process using typefaces, be it a typewriter in earlier times or a computer nowadays. Giving an outline of genetic criticism and textual scholarship in the digital age on the basis of the first genetic approach to Kling’s poetry, it can be noted that genetic criticism of contemporary literature has moved, not to say been catapulted, away from traditional philological tools and methods to the needs of a digital analysis demanding software which is not yet at the disposal for general use. 7. For facsimiles and transcriptions, see Kling 2013, pp. 6‒41. 8. Quite significantly, the semantic content of the title of Ponge’s poem is ambiguous, referring to the mineralogical term “shale” as well as to the text media “slate”, a medium which can easily be wiped and rewritten. Here we meet again with Derrida’s description of language and writing as “superimposition of a Wunderblock [. . .], palimpsest grid, supersedimented textuality, bottomless stratigraphy” (Derrida 1986, 13). 9. In 1991, talking with Beyer, Kling said that he used to note everything down which drew his attention. The scraps would lie around until he knew what to do with them (see Kling 2012, 44).
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Consequently, a lot of “rejected materials” for which he had not been able to find any use still remained in Kling’s studio. 10. The collage technique Kling uses here could be considered an homage to Dos Passos, who applied it as early as 1925, prior to Alfred Döblin. See Beyer 2014, 126. 11. Nevertheless, “Manhattan Mundraum” is about existential threats in a large city like New York City; see for example: “di ungezählte angst” (Kling 1996, 9) (the uncounted angst). 12. See “Das Schibboleth hieß immer schon GROSSVATERS BÜCHERSCHRANK“ (Kling 1993, 12) (“The shibboleth has always been called GRANDFATHER’S BOOKCASE”). 13. Michael Hofmann’s translation of Kling’s second Manhattan poem (see Kling 2004b) does not differentiate between the line “und siedelten in der luft” and its repetition “und siedelten so in der luft”. The mottos are not translated by him though they are explicitly part of the poem. In Sondagen, the title of the poem, “Manhattan Mundraum Zwei”, can be found on page 9, the mottos on page 10, and the poem begins on page 11 (see Kling 2002). 14. On the misspelling of “Epedemic” on the ticket from New York City, see Beyer 2014, 130. 15. As seen before, Kling used to write in lowercase letters and to imitate oral speech in a kind of phonetic transcription, e.g. by omitting unstressed vocals. Like “geschmo- | lzner text” (correctly,“geschmolzener Text”), the word “Botenstoff” reads “botnstoff” in his poem and notes, whereas the title of his essay volume reads “Botenstoffe” according to the Duden spelling rules. 16. Even his friends did not know what a wealth of material Kling had collected and stored, especially since Kling had always been rather critical of literary archives. See Beyer 2012, 177.
ABSTRACTS
Using the genesis of the Manhattan poems by the German poet Thomas Kling (1957-2005) as a case study, this article uses the metaphor “stratigraphic soundings” as a means to characterize a writing process which is not based on variants or “réécriture”, but on language installations. Findings in Kling’s archive testify to the poet’s role as an archaeologist of language; they also shape the role of the editor who likewise undertakes test drillings into a poetry of “supersedimented textuality” and “bottomless stratigraphy” (Jacques Derrida).
INDEX
Keywords: language installation, variant, writing process, self-archiving, poststructuralism, German poetry
AUTHOR
GABRIELE WIX
Gabriele Wix wrote a PhD on Max Ernst as a writer. She teaches at the University of Bonn with a focus on the interface between contemporary literature and art. She has curated exhibitions on the writing process in contemporary literature and on the artist’s book, and participates in the
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international GRF network “The Book as an Enhanced Space of Concept and Communication”. She has published inter alia on Marcel Beyer, Max Ernst, Eugen Gomringer, Thomas Kling, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Ed Ruscha, Stefan Steiner, Georg Trakl, Lawrence Weiner and Christopher Williams.
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Variations in Understanding Variants: (Hidden) Concepts of Text in German Critical Editions
Rüdiger Nutt-Kofoth
1 THE ONGOING DEBATES about text- versus document-based editions, prominently represented for instance by Hans Walter Gabler or Peter Robinson, are based upon discussions on materiality and mediality that were held in literary studies in the last few decades (Gabler 2007 and 2010, Robinson 2013).1 There is no doubt that these discussions were intensified by the increasingly accelerated development of the digital medium. Especially for scholarly editors, the digital medium changed its character more and more from a tool preparing the print edition to the final editorial product itself. It is, therefore, no coincidence that the Arbeitsgemeinschaft für germanistische Edition (Association for the Editing of German Texts) held its conferences 2008 and 2010 on the subject of “materiality” and “mediality” respectively. Since textual scholars like Jerome McGann, Peter Shillingsburg, David Greetham, George Bornstein and others have shown that “text” and the editorial object in which that “text” appears have different characteristics (McGann 1991, Shillingsburg 1996 and 2006, Greetham 1999, Bornstein 2001), the digital medium seems to force us to rethink the whole agenda of textuality even further. Hence, Wim Van Mierlo is right when he argues in a recent Variants article on “Textual Editing in the Time of the History of the Book“: “New technological possibilities are creating new ways of understanding what text is“. And he adds: “The most radical change, however, is coming from the digital humanities.” But he also gives a subtle hint that scholarly editing did not begin with digital editions so that scholarly editors of digital editions should “respectfully [keep] an eye on the traditions that they inherited from printed scholarly editions” (Van Mierlo 2013, 137).
2 In this essay I would like to look more closely at German editions of modern authors and I hope to make clear that print editions are not merely the obsolete ancestors of digital editions; print editions already apply a variety of different concepts of text, albeit at times implicitly; nonetheless these concepts have far-reaching consequences for the appearance of text in the edition. Discussions about the characteristics of digital
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editions would do well therefore to keep in mind earlier debates about text and editing. The test that brings to the fore such different concepts of text is the manner in which an edition deals with variants. The difficulty is, however, that editors do not always justify their treatment of variants, and where they do connect their way of presenting variants with specific editorial concepts they do not usually have in mind all conceptions of text that we are interested in today. Hence, to gain an insight into those hidden or at least not always obvious concepts of text we should approach those ideas with a dual interest: firstly uncovering systematically the concepts of text represented by the editorial presentation of variants, and secondly considering those presentations and concepts in a historically appropriate manner.
3 To start almost at the very beginning, about 150 years ago Karl Goedeke’s edition of Friedrich Schiller’s Sämmtliche Schriften (1867‒1876) called itself “historisch-kritisch” on its title page. If one wants to characterize this edition and its treatment of the variants as an example of many of the older, traditional scholarly editions one has to accept a superior category that can be called “immaterial, abstract text”. That means that these editions are interested in a textual representation of the text of the transmitted documents but they do not deal with the specific nature or medium of documents (for instance as manuscript or printed volume) nor with the spatial dimension of the text on these documents, the characteristics of the handwriting, or the typeface. The notion of ‘text’ in such editions is comprehended in an abstract, immaterial and unmediated manner. In other words, in this understanding the characters of the writing system can be transformed without any loss from the author’s handwriting or the types of the authorised print to the different types and layout of a printed scholarly edition. In respect of the variants it can be observed that they are represented hierarchically. The first level of this hierarchy is the edited text that means the readable, the base text of an edition which in most German editions represents an historical version emended from textual faults, not an eclectic ideal text constructed from the transmission. Linearity is its main characteristic, regardless of whether, for example, the underlying manuscripts are linear or not. Variants are not differentiated. The critical apparatus treats all corrections and revisions in manuscripts, and all variant readings from other authorized editions, equally by putting them in a lemmatized word list. This apparatus is subordinated to the edited base text, first by spatial means because it is positioned below or behind the base text, and second by hierarchic means because the variant’s textual position is indicated by its inevitable relation to, and therefore dependence, on the base text. The consequence is that the user of the edition cannot understand the variants on their own but only in their reference to another element of the edition.
4 Goedeke’s Schiller edition shows such an hierarchic order: it places the variants at a level subordinate to the base text. The variants therefore look like textual scraps. Still, Goedeke placed the variants near the base text, in footnotes at the bottom of the page, and thus they are not completely separated from the base text. To do justice to Goedeke, it has to be mentioned that he was aware of the problems of such an editorial representation, particularly in respect of manuscript variants. In volume 15(2), which contains Schiller’s dramatic fragments (1876), Goedeke pointed to a problem that would be solved only a hundred years later: Nur eine photographische Wiedergabe könnte einen Begriff gewähren, was dem Dichter während der Arbeit der Aufzeichnung bedürftig erschien. Aber auch nur in der Photographie würde die Art seines eigentlichen Schaffens deutlich werden.
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Dazu reichen gestrichne Lettern und Schriftsorten verschiedenster Art nicht aus. (Schiller 1875, vi; reprinted in Nutt-Kofoth 2005, 31) [Only a photographic reproduction could convey an idea of what the poet deemed necessary to record as he was working. And only photography could give a distinct impression of the nature of his essential creation. Cancelled letters and all sorts of typefaces cannot serve this purpose.]
5 The system of sigla that Goedeke introduces to represent the author’s working process is a minimal first step towards a spatial and genetic presentation (see Schiller 1876, 333).
6 The next step in the historical development of the editorial position of text and variants appears in the Weimar Goethe edition, the most voluminous edition of a German author to date (Goethe 1887‒1919). Its edited text is based on another concept, namely on the author’s last version, and the edition is organized by genre, whereas Goedeke’s Schiller edition uses an early version as base text and is organized chronologically. These differences are methodologically important for the history of German editions; they indeed can be regarded as opposite editorial concepts striking for supremacy in the early history of German literary studies (see for instance Nutt- Kofoth 2006). But with regard to an interest in the textuality of the variants’ presentation you see there is no conceptual difference between Goedeke’s Schiller edition and the Weimar Goethe edition. Both represent the author’s text as an immaterial, abstract text, and like the Schiller edition the Weimar Goethe edition classifies text and variants in two different levels, making the variants dependent on the base text. However, the Weimar Goethe edition makes the separation of these two levels more apparent. Base text and apparatus are not put in a visual relation, as happens in the Schiller edition, but are placed in different parts of the volume or sometimes even in different volumes. Although the apparatus of the Weimar Goethe edition is much more comprehensive and detailed than that in the Schiller edition, it is at the same time much more difficult for the users of the edition to bring text and variants together. Indeed the variants in the Weimar Goethe edition bear more intensively the character of textual scraps than in Goedeke’s Schiller edition. However, we can also observe that the apparatus of the Weimar Goethe edition implies certain information about spatial references, like “Word B after Word A” or “Word B above Word A”. That said, this does not mean that the apparatus of the Weimar Goethe edition is really interested in the position of the variants on the manuscript. Actually, these spatial descriptions are nothing more than a workaround for genetic descriptions for which acceptable solutions did not exist at that time. All in all we have to recognize that those nineteenth-century editions of modern German authors understand text as an abstract matter that is unproblematically transferrable from one materialized appearance into another. Both of these appearances share the same general writing system; in other words, the edition is only interested in representing the abstract type and not the concrete token. In this context only the base text bears the character of text. The presentation of fragmented variants illustrates that the apparatus has not yet found its new genetic task: to represent the textual deviations not for reason of text constitution but for making visible the author’s working process. The variants in the Schiller and Goethe editions look like non-functionalized archival fragments.
7 The next systematically important stage in handling variants did not arrive until the 1930s when Friedrich Beißner developed his “stepped” apparatus that allowed him to render complex alterations in the author’s writing process. The form was first tested in
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his edition of the writings of Christoph Martin Wieland in 1938 and was then used in the Friedrich Hölderlin edition, which appeared from 1943 onwards (Beißner 1938, extracted in Nutt-Kofoth 2005, 142‒46; Hölderlin 1943‒1985). On the one hand, text and apparatus are still separate in the Hölderlin edition; Beißner consolidated this nineteenth-century practice because the text and apparatus are now regularly placed in different volumes. The result is that the status of the edited text as a representation of the work becomes more self-sufficient than in either the Schiller or the Goethe edition. The step-like apparatus however is better suited to designate complex alterations and revisions, and indicates the growing independence of such passages. For the first time we encounter a form that takes the textual character of variants seriously. For the user of the edition, this means that he or she is no longer confronted with fragmented deviations but can read the internal genetic relationship between variants as connected text, or to be more precise as, connected text passages. Due to the alphanumeric numbering the editor does not need verbal descriptions for genetic information anymore. Nevertheless Beißner sometimes uses such descriptions. giving the genetic information within a lemmatized presentation. This is no more than a relic of former editorial methods as found in the Weimar Goethe edition for example.
8 Beißner is not really interested in the spatial dimension of the manuscript text; we can go as far as to say that he is not interested in any material aspect of the manuscript at all. For that reason, he did not indicate which elements of the genetic variants the author crossed out in his manuscript, which he wrote repeatedly, which are substitutions and which are alternative readings. One can say that these omissions characterize Beißner’s editorial concept as imprecise with regard to the manuscript record. Beißner, however, was not interested in details of genetics, but in the “ideale Wachstum” (“ideal growth”) of the author’s work that he abstracted from the manuscript record (Beißner 1961, 260 and 1964b, 81, reprinted in Nutt-Kofoth 2005, 260). He aimed to produce “lesbare Varianten” (“readable variants”), an aim nobody had attempted before (Beißner 1964a). Beißner ― so much is clear ― thus still adheres to the editorial paradigm that understands text only in its immaterial, abstract form; he was not at all, or at least not systematically, interested in the material aspects of text. Despite giving a new status to variants as more autonomous, like the editors that went before him he still organized text and variants in a hierarchic manner.
9 Aiming to make the apparatus more readable, Beißner gave a new prominence to variants as text to be read. The result however was that this genetic system was not only an imprecise reflection of the manuscript record but also a genetically inadequate one, since the system was oriented towards the last genetic step that make all intermediate steps look like discontinued and immediately corrected text pieces. It was Hans Zeller who tried to remedy these deficiencies with his synoptic apparatus for the Conrad Ferdinand Meyer edition (Meyer 1958‒1996; Zeller edited vols. 1‒7 containing the poems of Meyer). Beißner and Zeller’s models have been described many times, and many times they have been labelled controversial (see Nutt-Kofoth 2008), but this is not the focus of this article. With regard to textuality the differences between the model provided by Beißner and that by Zeller are in fact smaller than they appeared to earlier commentators. Both editions refer to the immaterial, abstract understanding of text; both separate the base text from the apparatus by placing them in different volumes (albeit that in the Meyer edition the apparatus volumes outnumber the base text volumes at about five to one). Zeller’s edition again has two levels of presentation, but now ― and that is the first remarkable point ― the genetic presentation gains further
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independence from the base text: the synoptic system does not need the base text as a reference text since the synopsis allows for a complete representation of all genetic stages of the work. Nevertheless Zeller retained the traditional distinction between text and apparatus still placing them in separate volumes. The second point that is really new is the spatial orientation of the apparatus, reflecting the spatial aspect of record. Zeller indicates all variants with position markers that inform the user where a variant is located in the manuscript: above, below, in front of or behind another word or group of words, or in the margin at the top, the bottom, the left-hand or the right-hand side of a page. These markers are indicated in the synoptic genetic presentation by small letters in italics and diacritics. When Zeller presented his enriched genetic system for the first time in 1958 he justified his procedure with reference to the reader deciphering and reconstructing the textual layers in the manuscript. In Zeller’s own words the procedure ensures clarity, so that “sich der Leser von der H[and]s[chrift] ein Bild machen kann. Mir wenigstens ist ein Bedürfnis, die gedruckte Wiedergabe in die H[and]s[chrift] zurückzuübersetzen” (Zeller 1958, 362; reprinted in Nutt-Kofoth 2005, 200) (“it is possible for the reader to get a sense of the manuscript. It is my desire at least to retranslate the printed representation into the manuscript”). At first Zeller had his detractors who believed that this aim was simply unachievable, but Zeller countered this criticism by concentrating on another effect of his method, i.e. by precisely marking, and distinguishing between, the record-related and interpretation- related results of the editorial process in his edition. Though referring to the interest in editorial textuality Zeller’s earlier argument ― as strange as the result seemed to be ― is a stronger one, because it includes spatial elements of the text and thus tries to transcend the boundary of the immaterial, abstract text towards the unique concrete realized material text. However, Zeller’s Meyer edition suggests that this transition to the material text happens within an editorial method that still employs abstract, immaterial means of text representation. As a result, the edition looks too much like a hybrid; it is likely for this reason that hardly any historical-critical edition picked up on this material-oriented aspect of Zeller’s synoptic model even though with regard to its genetic base the model was to become very successful in the following decades.
10 Although the synoptic apparatus has the ability to make all genetic stages of a work readable without reference to a base text, it was an edition in the Beißnerian tradition that realized this idea of mixing text and apparatus or correctly said that presents the apparatus as text. The two volumes of dramatic fragments of the Schiller- Nationalausgabe (National Schiller Edition, 1943‒), published in 1971 and 1982, no longer distinguished between text and apparatus but understood the variants as part of the base text itself. By incorporating the Beißnerian genetic steps directly in the edited base text Herbert Kraft’s edition of Schiller’s dramatic fragments crossed the boundary between text and apparatus but not that between abstract and material text. Although the edition is based on the theoretical idea of the “Räumlichkeit als ein Theorem der Fragmentedition” (Kraft 2001, 132) (“spatiality as a theorem of the fragment edition”), the editorial representation of that space ― e.g. the manner in which Schiller divided the page into two columns ― is not completely equivalent to the manuscript record itself (see also Kraft 1975). Kraft’s editorial concept is founded on the idea of structural spatiality. In his opinion the edition has to distinguish between accidental and structural spatiality. Structural spatiality represents the author’s conceptual use of the writing space on the page. But when the author uses another part of the page for his corrections or alterations, he does so only because that is where there was still some
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space left; the placing of these revisions is nothing more than accidental. Kraft is of the opinion that such accidental spatiality is not worth representing in the edition.
11 It must be pointed out, however, that Kraft’s editorial concept of spatiality only refers to the editing of fragments. In his view a fragment cannot be divided in genetic stages because the fragment itself is a preliminary stage of the as-yet-to-be accomplished work and therefore it does not contain any preliminary stages in itself. Still, the implications for the editorial concept of text that flow from Kraft’s editions of Schiller’s dramatic fragments are significant, for even if only for fragmentary texts the editions signalled the end of the separation between text and variants as well as their presentation in hierarchic levels. Variants became part of the edition’s base text itself. Concurrently a part of the material record ― its spatiality ― served as an argument for the textual presentation of the base text. That in itself was a further step towards a material understanding of text, or in the very least case a step beyond Zeller’s position markers, when spatiality shifted from the apparatus to the text. Despite this shift, Kraft’s textual concept was still primarily based on an immaterial, abstract understanding of text, as it was in all older editorial understandings of text. The materiality of the physical manuscript still remained editorially invisible.
12 This abstract notion of text also remained at the heart of another edition that broke ground for the conceptual transformation from variants to text: the edition of Georg Heym’s poems, published in 1993, prepared by Günter Dammann, Gunter Martens and Karl Ludwig Schneider (Heym 1993). This edition had been originally planned as an apparatus volume for the Heym edition of the 1960s. Its text volumes appeared, but the intended apparatus volume was never realized. It was the extensive study of Heym’s manuscripts that led the editors to new theoretical considerations. When in 1971, the same year that Kraft’s first volume of Schiller’s dramatic fragments came out, Gunter Martens published their findings, he introduced a new theoretical understanding of text with his theory of “Textdynamik” (“textual dynamic”). Its main idea is that “die über variante Stadien verlaufende Entwicklung eines Werkes” can be understood “als eine wichtige textspezifische Aussage, ja sogar als spezifische Qualität von Text schlechthin” (Martens 1971, 167) (“the variant stages in the development of the work” can be understood “as an important text-specific statement, even as a specific quality of text per se”). Consequently, the traditional apparatus was no longer simply a part, but the "Kernstuck" (“core”) of the edition, with the base text being no more than a "Superadditum zur Variantendokumentation" (Martens 1971, 171) (“special addition to the documentation of variants”). This concept was realized in the Heym edition of 1993 where the synoptic apparatus ― or rather the text in the form of a synoptic apparatus ― is the only text given in the edition, which deliberately omitted a supplementary base text presentation. The edition abolished for good the hierarchical order of text and variants by giving the variants ― now understood as a textual unity ― independent status as appropriate and necessary to present the textual genesis. Unlike Kraft’s edition of Schiller’s dramatic fragments, the Heym edition amalgamates variants and text for all types of text, not just for fragments. But at last the Heym edition remains in the realm of the immaterial, abstract text.
13 In 1975, four years after Martens’ presentation of his theory of “Textdynamik”, the Frankfurt Hölderlin edition took the first step towards material textuality by integrating a synoptic genetic text and a reading text with manuscript facsimiles accompanied by spatially oriented transcriptions (Hölderlin 1975‒2008). Although the
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concept of the Frankfurt Hölderlin edition represents heralds a turning point in the history of German editing, it is important to point out that the inclusion of facsimiles was not done for its own sake, i.e. the presentation of the author’s text as writing performed in a concrete spatial form and with particular writing instruments and material. Instead, the facsimiles and transcriptions serve as a tool for the reader to check to a certain degree the editor’s work (Hölderlin 1975‒2008 and Hölderlin 1975, 18; see also Groddeck and Sattler 1977, 7).2 While this means that the reader can use the edition to explore the material aspects of Hölderlin’s texts, the edition nevertheless remains wedded to disclosing the abstract, immaterial text in the synoptic and reading texts.
14 Not until the Kafka edition of Roland Reuß and Peter Staengle, which started publication in 1995, was the border with the material text finally crossed (Kafka 1995‒). And it did it so categorically that ― concerning the manuscripts ― any opportunity to return to the immaterial text was curtailed by the editors. Reuß and Staengle’s Kafka edition only presents facsimiles and spatial transcriptions with some material-based genetic indications. The two traditional main tasks of editing modern authors, the exhaustive representation of the textual genesis and the establishment of a reading text, are programmatically excluded from the edition. Reuß justifies the edition’s approach by declaring that a draft is not a text because of the draft’s non-linear character. Since the editorially constituted text can refer only to linguistic objects that are (or contain) a text, such as a fair copy or a first print edition, the editor cannot create a reading text from a draft but can only present facsimiles and transcriptions (Reuß 2005, 7). As a consequence of this concept of text an editor cannot constitute a reading text from a draft. The Kafka edition in other words takes the material manifestation of textuality in the archival record very seriously; the facsimile is thus the core of the edition, while the transcription serves as a tool to read the handwriting. The edition arranges these facsimiles and transcriptions in the order of the manuscripts’ physical creation. In the case of the novel fragment ”Der Process” ( ”The Trial”) for example the page-by-page representation of Kafka’s copybooks and ― for imitating the materiality of the copybooks each of which usually contains a single chapter ― the separated bound and unnumbered editorial units show that Kafka neglected to sort the chapters (Kafka 1995‒ and 1997). Since the edition is essentially orientated towards an archival dimension of editing, its concept of textuality is accordingly material based, even if Reuß avoids the use of the term “text”.
15 After this short overview of the changes in how German scholarly editions understand base text and textual variants, I want to focus briefly on a further aspect of textuality within the context of variants and textual genesis: the inclusion of an author’s textual sources in the Marburg Georg Büchner edition (Büchner 2000‒2013). Furthermore, the edition reproduces these sources in extenso and links those that Büchner adopted and integrated in his work for a second edited reading text, using typographical means to indicate the intensity of these adoptions (see Dedner 1997). This method crosses another boundary, viz. that between the author’s text and the text of other authors. Although the Büchner edition is an author-centred edition, it brings not only the aspect of intertextuality to the fore but it makes it visible within the editorial text and not ― as is usual ― in the commentary. In treating source texts in this manner, the edition highlights the intertextual nature of the work. As the source text becomes part of the textual genesis, it expresses a kind of intertextual variance to the text.
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16 On balance, this brief review of textual peculiarities and differences in understanding text and variants in editions of German-speaking authors of the last 150 years should illustrate nothing more than a spectrum of textuality of which one element or another was taken as a basis for the respective editorial concept. This spectrum ranges across editions that impose an hierarchical order between text and variant to editions that bestow increasing independence to variants, which are considered to be text in their own right. The spectrum also ranges from editions that represent text immaterially and abstractly to editions that incorporate certain spatial representations in the edited text and to editions that achieve a full, spatially oriented and archivally constructed text that subordinate ― or even eschew ― the reading text altogether in favour of a representation of textual genesis or the manuscript record.
17 We have to remember, though, that all of these conceptual innovations to represent the textual record were developed for print editions. It is obvious that the recent turn towards digital scholarly editing, and the obvious advantages the digital medium offers for integrating complex textual and documentary manifestations in the edition, will drive further innovation. Some of the areas where we will expect interesting developments are in visualization as a way of accessing the editorial object and in the possibilities of user-controlled management. What we will have to discuss however is which elements in a digital edition are truly conceptually new and which derive from print editions but can perhaps be more fruitfully implemented in digital editions. That means we should try to distinguish more strictly qualitative from quantitative improvements of the digital edition. Therefore the meaning of the terms ”text” and ”variant” and its application within different concepts of textuality could serve as a test case. Understanding editorial representations of variants helps us to understand editions conceptually, print-based and digital editions alike.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Beißner, Friedrich, ed. 1938. Neue Wieland-Handschriften. Berlin: Verlag der Akademie der Wissenschaften.
Beißner, Friedrich. 1961. “Aus der Werkstatt der Stuttgarter Hölderlin-Ausgabe”. In Friedrich Beißner, Hölderlin: Reden und Aufsätze. Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, pp. 251‒65.
Beißner, Friedrich. 1964a. “Lesbare Varianten: Die Entstehung einiger Verse in Heines ‘Atta Troll’”. In Hugo Moser, Rudolf Schützeichel and Karl Stackmann, eds. Festschrift Josef Quint anläßlich seines 65. Geburtstages überreicht. Bonn: Emil Semmel, pp. 15‒23.
Beißner, Friedrich. 1964b. “Editionsmethoden der neueren deutschen Philologie”. Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 83, pp. 72‒95.
Bornstein, George. 2001. Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Büchner, Georg. 2000‒2013. Sämtliche Werke und Schriften: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe mit Quellendokumentation und Kommentar (Marburger Ausgabe). 10 vols. Eds. Burghard Dedner and Thomas Michael Mayer. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.
Dedner, Burghard. 1997. “Die Darstellung von Quellenabhängigkeiten anhand von Beispielen”. editio, 11, pp. 97‒115.
Gabler, Hans Walter. 2007. “The Primacy of the Document in Editing”. Ecdotica, 4, pp. 197‒207.
Gabler, Hans Walter.. 2010. “Theorizing the Digital Scholarly Edition”. Literature Compass, 7, pp. 43‒56.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. 1887―1919. Goethes Werke: Herausgegeben im Auftrage der Großherzogin Sophie von Sachsen. 133 vols. in 143. Weimar: Hermann Böhlau / Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger.
Greetham, D.C. 1999. Theories of the Text. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
Groddeck, Wolfram and D. E. Sattler. 1977. “Frankfurter Hölderlin-Ausgabe: Vorläufiger Editionsbericht”. Le pauvre Holterling, 2, pp. 5‒19.
Heym, Georg. 1993. Gedichte 1910‒1912: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe aller Texte in genetischer Darstellung. Eds. Günter Dammann, Gunter Martens and Karl Ludwig Schneider. 2 vols. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Hölderlin, Friedrich. 1943‒1985. Sämtliche Werke: Große Stuttgarter Ausgabe. Eds. Friedrich Beißner and Adolf Beck. 8 vols. in 15. Stuttgart: J.G. Cottasche Buchhandlung Nachfolger and W. Kohlhammer.
Hölderlin, Friedrich. 1975‒2008. Sämtliche Werke,“Frankfurter Ausgabe”: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe. Ed. D. E. Sattler. Frankfurt am Main and Basel: Stroemfeld and Roter Stern.
Hölderlin, Friedrich. 1975. Einleitung. Unnumbered vol. of Sämtliche Werke, “Frankfurter Ausgabe”: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe. Ed. D. E. Sattler. Frankfurt am Main: Roter Stern.
Kafka, Franz. 1995‒. Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe sämtlicher Handschriften, Drucke und Typoskripte. Eds. Roland Reuß and Peter Staengle. Basel and Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld.
Kafka, Franz. 1997. Der Process: Faksimile-Edition. Eds. Roland Reuß and Peter Staengle. Basel and Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld.
Kraft, Herbert. 1975. “Die Edition fragmentarischer Werke”. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, 5 (19‒20), pp. 142‒46.
Kraft, Herbert. 2001. Editionsphilologie. 2nd ed. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang,.
Martens, Gunter. 1971. “Textdynamik und Edition. Überlegungen zur Bedeutung und Darstellung variierender Textstufen”. In Gunter Martens and Hans Zeller, eds. Texte und Varianten: Probleme ihrer Edition und Interpretation. München: C.H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, pp. 165‒201.
McGann, Jerome J. 1991. The Textual Condition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Meyer, Conrad Ferdinand. 1958‒1996. Sämtliche Werke: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe. Eds. Hans Zeller and Alfred Zäch. 15 vols. in 16. Bern: Benteli, 1958‒1996.
Nutt-Kofoth, Rüdiger, ed. 2005. Dokumente zur Geschichte der neugermanistischen Edition. Bausteine zur Geschichte der Edition 1. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Nutt-Kofoth, Rüdiger. 2006. “Two Paradigms in 19th Century German Editing. Goedeke’s Schiller Edition and the Weimar Goethe Edition as Different Steps towards a Particular Concept of Editing
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Modern Authors”. In Luigi Giuliani et al. (eds.), Texts in Multiple Versions / Histories of Editions. Special issue of Variants, 5, pp. 315‒30.
Nutt-Kofoth, Rüdiger. 2008. “The Beißnerian Mode, the Zellerian Mode, and the Canonical Way of Modern Editing: Upheavals and Deviations in German Editorial Methodology ― and its Historiography”. In Hans Walter Gabler, Peter Robinson and Paulius V. Subačius (eds.), Textual Scholarship and the Canon. Special issue of Variants, 7, pp. 95‒106.
Robinson, Peter. 2013. “Towards a Theory of Digital Editions”. Variants, 10, pp. 105‒131.
Schiller, Friedrich. 1867‒1876. Schillers Sämmtliche Schriften: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe. Eds. A. Ellissen, R. Köhler, W. Müldener, H. Oesterley, H. Sauppe and W. Vollmer. 15 vols. in 16. Stuttgart: Verlag der J.G. Cotta’schen Buchhandlung.
Schiller, Friedrich. 1876. Nachlaß (Demetrius). Ed. Karl Goedeke. Vol. 15(2) of Sämmtliche Schriften: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe. Eds. A. Ellissen, R. Köhler, W. Müldener, H. Oesterley, H. Sauppe and W. Vollmer. Stuttgart: Verlag der J.G. Cotta’schen Buchhandlung, 1876.
Schiller, Friedrich. 1943‒. Schillers Werke: Nationalausgabe. 43 vols. in 55. Weimar: Verlag Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger.
Schiller, Friedrich. 1971. Demetrius. Ed. Herbert Kraft. Vol. 11 of Schillers Werke: Nationalausgabe. 43 vols. in 55. Weimar: Verlag Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger.
Schiller, Friedrich. 1982. Dramatische Fragmente. Eds. Herbert Krat, Klaus Harro Hilzinger and Karl-Heinz Hucke. Vol. 12 of Schillers Werke: Nationalausgabe. 43 vols. in 55. Weimar: Verlag Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger.
Shillingsburg, Peter L. 1996. Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Theory and Practice. 3rd ed. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Shillingsburg, Peter L. 2006. From Gutenberg to Google: Electronic Representations of Literary Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Van Mierlo, Wim. 2013. “Reflections on Textual Editing in the Time of the History of the Book”. Variants 10, pp. 133‒61.
Zeller, Hans. 1958. “Zur gegenwärtigen Aufgabe der Editionstechnik: Ein Versuch, komplizierte Handschriften darzustellen”. Euphorion, 52, pp. 356‒77.
NOTES
1. I am grateful to Helen Swetlik for her editorial improvements in this article. 2. “Die Wiedergabe der problematischen Handschriften im Faksimile ermöglicht die Überprüfung des Wortlauts, der Textentstehung und des Textzusammenhangs” (Holderin 1975, 18) (“The representation of the problematic manuscripts by facsimiles allows the verification of the wording, the textual genesis and the textual connection”).
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ABSTRACTS
German textual scholarship developed different models of genetic presentations. While each genetic model requires a special concept of text, this concept is not always obvious at first glance. This article examines for what reason, for example, editors omit remarking on the precise variation process in the manuscript, why (and how) they indicate the position of the variants on the manuscript, why they abstain from presenting a reading text but opt to present the textual genesis only, why they add facsimiles and transcriptions to the genetic and the reading text presentation, or why they provide only facsimiles and transcription, but no reading text.
INDEX
Keywords: text, scholarly editing, methodology, editorial traditions, critical apparatus, historical-critical edition, genetic edition, German literature
AUTHOR
RÜDIGER NUTT-KOFOTH
Rüdiger Nutt-Kofoth teaches German literature and scholarly editing at the University of Wuppertal (Germany) and works at the “Goethe-Wörterbuch” in Hamburg (Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities). He has written and edited books and articles on German literature and on editorial theory and practice. He is the co-editor of editio: Internationales Jahrbuch für Editionswissenschaft/International Yearbook of Scholarly Editing and of the series “Bausteine zur Geschichte der Edition”. Furthermore he is the secretary of the “Arbeitsgemeinschaft für germanistische Edition”.
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Genetic Criticism Put to the Test by Digital Technology: Sounding out the (mainly) Digital Genetic File of El Dorado by Robert Juan-Cantavella
Bénédicte Vauthier
To Jean-Louis Lebrave, for his unequalled lessons in the subject
L’urgence serait plutôt de mobiliser les énergies pour aborder deux questions cruciales pour l’avenir de la critique génétique. Pour la première, il s’agit de savoir vraiment comment les écrivains s’approprient l’ordinateur, et quels sont les effets de cette appropriation sur l’écriture. Quant à la seconde, elle concerne la manière dont nous généticiens serons capables de construire de véritables objets scientifiques à partir des données d’un nouveau type stockées dans la mémoire des ordinateurs. (Lebrave 2010, 155) [It would be a much greater matter of urgency to mobilize the energy for approaching two crucial questions for the future of genetic criticism. First, it is about really knowing how the writers appropriate the computer, and which are the effects of this appropriation on writing. The second concerns the way in which geneticists will be able to construct real scientific objects based on data of a new type stored on computer memories.]
1 This twofold diagnosis ― realistic and final ― is nothing less than the friendly “post- scriptum” of an open letter jointly sent by Louis Hay and Jean-Louis Lebrave (master and disciple, pioneers in French genetic criticism) to Pierre-Marc de Biasi (at the time director of the Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes) in reply to a eulogistic and too optimistic article titled “Pour une génétique généralisée: l’approche des processus à l’âge numérique” (2010). It was published in an issue of Genesis which, after a two year hiatus, drew up a status quaestionis of the theory of genetic criticism. De Biasi advocated the use of digital technology: the digital permits to solve quantitative problems of huge volumes unpublishable on paper. It adds the logical and dynamic capacities of a
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medium that, thanks to the hypertext, allows to go beyond the sequential character of the page and the book.
2 In the digital era, these two fields are, of course, not the only ones to witness the revolution that has taken place in the Humanities since the 1980s. As the initial quotation by Lebrave clearly indicates, the hubs of creation on the one hand and of criticism and interpretation on the other, have equally been affected with full force by these changes. The position defended by de Biasi is somewhat surprising. In fact, ignoring the generalized pessimism among critics, especially the geneticists or the philologists (see Ries 2010, 151‒52), de Biasi considers the apocalyptic fears of the doomsayers who had declared: “Plus de manuscrits, plus de brouillons? C’est donc la fin de la génétique!” (de Biasi 2010, 171) (“No more manuscripts, no more rough drafts? It is thus the end of genetics!”) unfounded and futile. For him, “c’est même le contraire. L’ordinateur conserve spontanément la trace de toutes les commandes que vous lui avez adressées, toutes intégralement, d’un bout à l’autre de chaque session de travail, aussi longtemps que vous ne procéderez pas à un écrasement délibéré de sa mémoire” (“the opposite is the case. The computer spontaneously keeps track of all commands given from start to finish of each work session, as long as you do not proceed to deliberately overwrite its memory”) (de Biasi 2010, 171). Thus, against all odds, the computer proves to be the geneticist’s best ally.
3 From the outset, we ought to note, however, that his enthusiasm for the computer ignores the (human and technological) difficulties that come with the adopting digital tools and methods (from the analysis and establishment of a model to the visualization and publication by way of transcription and encoding, for example in TEI). What the study of digital genetic files is concerned, it simply disregards the competencies in computer technology with which the philologist or geneticist of the twenty-first century certainly has to equip himself.1
4 The issue is underlined in another article by Lebrave in which he echoed studies in English and German regarding “les méthodes et outils de l’informatique légale appliquée à l’écriture numérique” (“the legal information technology methods and tools applied to digital writing”) (2011, 137), especially those by the scholar of German studies, Thorsten Ries (2010). Ries seeks to lay the foundations of a “philologie numérique des sources” (“digital philology of sources”) (Lebrave 2011, 137) based on the joint contributions of computer forensics and French genetic criticism. Lebrave knows what he is talking about. He is a pioneer in genetic criticism, and also in “génétique électronique” (“electronic genetics”): he was among the first to participate in the creation of tools to be used with electronic corpora (Philectre, EDITE, MEDITE, etc.) (Lebrave 2008 and 2012). In these highly instructive early articles he has shown how the computer is not simply an “outil d’aide à la recherche” (“support tool for research”), but is instead an unparalleled “outil éditorial” (“editorial tool”) which allows not only for the online release of voluminous genetic files, but also for the interactive use of these files (Lebrave 1994, 2009). Finally, he shows the route that the geneticists could take by drawing attention to the encouraging results stemming from Ries’ analysis of the experimental corpus of Michael Speier’s poem ausfahrt st. nazaire (Ries 2010) and coins the neologism génétique inforensique to denote this type of investigation.2 The benefits notwithstanding, he is aware that there are significant challenges as well. The use of the computer in literary studies requires “des “compétences très étendues” (“wide-ranging expertise”) in a “branche hautement
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spécialisée de l’informatique” (“highly specialized field of informatics”) (Lebrave 2011, 146); such expertise may well be beyond the means of the individual researcher, and available only to collaborative, externally funded collaborative projects.
5 My presuppositions and conclusions are generally in accordance with those of Thorsten Ries (2010): critical genetics has not lost its function, but it urgently needs to develop a technique for tackling digital media. However, I deliberately apply myself to a more modest challenge than Ries’s: to analyse the (for the most part) digital genetic dossier of Robert Juan-Cantavella’s third novel, El Dorado (2008). A more modest challenge, indeed, because it has never been a question for me to resort to the author’s hard disk, nor to try transposing the methods or tools of legal information technology to a genetic study, as Ries has successfully done. I do not have the requisite, nor do intend to acquire them.
6 It cannot be denied ― and this is the main difficulty ― that word processing flattens out, even crushes the two-dimensionality of the page, and thereby hides the abundant writing operations which manuscripts genetics seeks to unravel. Moreover, the concealment of basic data with which the geneticist is used to working seems to challenge the creation and reading process of the genetic file, the main stages of which are summarized by Almuth Grésillon in Éléments de critique génétique. In fact, does anything remain of the conception developed by the French school of genetic criticism whose objective was to study “les manuscrits de travail des écrivains en tant que support matériel, espace d’inscription et lieu de mémoire des œuvres in statu nascendi” (“the writers’ drafts insofar as it is material object, inscription space and memory place of the work in statu nascendi”) (Grésillon 1994, 1)? What can the genetic critic do in terms of positioning, dating, classification operations and particularly the decoding of a digital draft? Despite the disappearance of the traces of inscription, there is more to digital genetic criticism than just that. Something else happens entirely when the researcher receives a USB stick out of the author’s hands or an access key to a virtual storage service such as Dropbox. The digital files that she finds there set ajar the door to the twenty-first century writer’s studio.
7 In other words, traces remain, reduced and blurry maybe, but traces nonetheless. “La trace, toute la trace et rien que la trace” (“The trace, the whole trace and nothing but the trace”), this is the founding principle of genetic criticism, as Louis Hay puts it (Hay 2010, 154). Therefore, we can reply to Claire Doquet-Lacoste, who fears that “[l]es traces de la troisième dimension de l’écriture, sa temporalité, [. . .] sont atténuées ― voire disparaissent ― avec l’ordinateur” (Doquet-Lacoste 2007, 37) (“the traces of the third dimension of writing, its temporality, [. . .] are attenuated ― they even disappear ― with the computer”), that the traces do not disappear. On the contrary, they increase in number, but they look different. It may therefore seem that “le traitement de texte semble faire tomber dans l’oubli les essais successifs pour ne conserver de chaque énoncé que sa version la plus récente” (2007, 37) (“the treatment of the text seems to make the successive attempts sink into oblivion by solely preserving the most recent version of each utterance”), but the digital dossier offers other means to retrieve those temporalities. As a result, there is no reason for questioning “la pérennité de l’approche génétique, ancrée dans la recherche d’une production singulière” (2007, 39) (“the sustainability of the genetic approach, anchored in the research of a singular production”) in order to defend again the use of software such as Genèse du Texte, Scriptlog or Inputlog. If these programs allow us to analyse (real or even
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film) time in a minute way, they will also suffocate the researcher in the abundance of data.
8 To overcome these obstacles, geneticists should learn to make use of a systematic collation of superficially similar versions, but different in essence, a method already familiar to philologists, just as Lebrave admits, when he affirms that à partir du moment où on appréhende les données de la génétique sous forme de données de langue, il est vain de prétendre [. . .] à une originalité absolue du matériau génétique. Il n’y a pas de différence radicale entre des états textuels variants et la variation qu’on peut observer dans les brouillons. [. . .] On peut donc réconcilier la philologie et la génétique et unifier le panorama de la variation textuelle. (Lebrave 2009, 18) [from the moment one understands the genetic data as a form of language data, it becomes pointless to pretend [. . .] that the genetic material is absolutely unique. There is no radical difference between the textual variants and the variation that we can observe in the rough drafts. [. . .] We can, thus, reconcile philology and genetics and unify the overview of textual variation.]
9 Therefore, it is no surprise that only two years later he admits that “[l]a génétique inforensique risque donc de devoir définitivement renoncer à être une poétique des processus pour se contenter d’être une poétique des transitions entre états” (Lebrave 2011, 145) (“the inforensic genetics thus risks having to give up definitely on being a poetics of processes in order to settle for being a poetics of transitions between stages”). As Lebrave recognizes, the collation could be done with software, e.g. using tools like MEDITE, Juxta, or manually.
10 In line with the empirical epistemology defended by Louis Hay (1985), the inductive analysis of Robert Juan-Cantavella’s genetic file, which I undertook without resorting to any software, unexpectedly turned out to be quite rich in temporal information. In the following section I will continue to explain how I proceeded and which are the results of the search.
Geneticists face the digital challenge
The genetic file
11 Robert Juan-Cantavella, a Spanish writer who belongs to the Nueva narrativa española (Kunz and Gómez, 2014), handed me the “sketches” and “drafts” of El Dorado in Bern on Friday, 18 November 2011. Despite their considerable number they all fitted on a USB stick. They were arranged by the author in four folders named [ED 27 (FINAL)], [ED fotos], [ED materiales], [ED versions anteriors]. Each of these folders contained one or more subfolders, which, in turn, contained other subsubfolders with hundreds of files (text, photo, audio, video, links). All together the files on the stick comprised twentyseven versions of the novel. In the folder [ED materiales], a true hotchpotch of digital writing, we found among other things, the subfolders “on” and “off” ― sometimes followed by the title of one of the parts of the novel. The USB drive is thus at the same time a “virtual library” (on) which preserves a great variety of integrated documents and “virtual bin” (off) in which the rejected material is located. Both folders facilitate access to numerous intermedial and textual sources that the author used in constructing his work. Once they are related to one or other version of the novel, they allow us to see how exogenesis becomes endogenesis (de Biasi, 1998).
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Figure 1: Screenshots of the tree structure of the digital archives of El Dorado
Figure 2: Screenshots of the tree structure of the digital archives of El Dorado
This first delivery was followed by another transfer of materials in Paris on 16 December of the same year. This time it was a backpack carrying the logo of the “V encuentro mundial de familias” (“5th World Meeting of Families”) which was held in Valencia in 2006. In this backpack, the author had gathered the extant pre-textual material ― some newspapers and magazines, some promotional brochures, a printout
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of one of the versions of the novel with handwritten corrections, and last but not least a black rubber notebook (measuring 15 x 9 cm) with around a hundred pages of handwritten notes written on both sides.3 The survival of this material is sufficient material to refute the cliché that young digital native writers only write on computers. The analysis of the digital folders shows that these notes were quickly, but neatly written out, almost without any rewriting ― a fact that is confirmed by the author's autofictional alter ego, Trebor Escargot. Sigo escribiendo en la libreta, sí señor, tomo notas, ya sabes… el ordenador viene después, cuando llego a la habitación […] justo allí donde antes me las veía con mi máquina de escribir. En lugar de ordenar mis notas como hacía antes, ahora las transcribo en el ordenador de tal forma que, sin darme demasiada cuenta, voy escribiendo la historia, le doy forma a mi aportaje. Y cuando te digo que las cosas han cambiado lo digo muy en serio, antes, como sabes, yo escribía de forma consecutiva y apasionada, y ahora el tema es diferente, ahora escribo por capas, como hacen los diseñadores con sus programas de tratamiento de imagen… aunque qué voy a contarle a un troglodita como tú . . . (Juan-Cantavella 2008, 170) [I keep writing in the notebook, yeah, I take notes, you know . . . the computer comes later, when I get to my room [. . .] just there where before I could be seen writing on a typewriter. Instead of ordering my notes like I did before, now I transcribe them on the computer in a way that without realising, I am writing the story, I give form to my unreport. And when I tell you that things have changed I tell you that very seriously, before, as you know, I wrote in a consecutive and passionate way, and now the matter is different, now I write layer-by-layer, as the designers do with their image processing software . . . though what am I going to tell a caveman like you. . .]
12 As we will see in the second part of this article (II), which focuses on the new modalities of creation, a web page created by the author has to be added to this already hybrid genetic file. The back cover of the published novel refers the reader to this web page to find out more detail about Trebor Escargot’s work.4
The digital tree structures and a new temporariness
13 An attentive study of the constituent tree structure of the twenty seven archived versions of the novel, contained in the files [ED 27 (FINAL)] and [ED versions anteriors], can address many concerns about the process of composition of the work, in particular of the macrostructural changes. In order to understand some of these, I have to specify that El Dorado belongs to the aesthetics of the Punk ― or Pulp ― Journalism, “a bastard form” (2008, 189) or “failed experiment” of Gonzo Journalism or New Journalism. More precisely, El Dorado can be read as a Spanish rereading of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream by the American founder of the genre, Hunter S. Thompson, as well as of the movie Las Vegas Parano directed by Terry Gilliam.
14 Juan-Cantavella’s novel consists of four parts that are to varying degrees different from one another. The fourth and last part is the shortest; it consists of only three pages (pp. 345-347) whose story takes places on a single day, 1 May 2007, in Berlin’s Kreuzberg. It is in other words set much later than the other parts of the novel (which take place between 1 and 8 July 2006) and in a different locale (Berlin rather than Valencia).
15 The first part (pp. 17‒147), or first gonzo unreport,5 consists of four chapters, subdivided, in turn, into several subsections. The chapters cover the first four days of July ( Saturday the 1st to Tuesday the 4th) that Trebor Escargot spends alone in Marina
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d’Or. This is a “paraíso a orillas del Mediterráneo” (“paradise on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea”) (p. 17) “para escribir un aportaje sobre la realidad y las cosas que verdaderamente suceden ahí fuera” (“to write an unreport about reality and the things that really happen out there”) (p. 26). The reality in which the protagonist immerses himself is particularly difficult to relate because Trebor Escargot knows that, in order to reach it, relying on the body, the observation and drugs ― all present in Gonzo Journalism ― are not enough; nor does he believe in the Malinowskian anthropological empathy. After Hunter S. Thompson, this is the second intertextual counterpoint in the novel, a decisive counterpoint to understand the structural changes. This first part is archived in the digital files under the initials MD, for Marina d’Or.
16 The second part, of roughly sixty pages (pp. 151‒216), takes place in just one day, Wednesday, 5th July. The protagonist picks up his friend Brona who leaves the “Modelo” prison, which becomes the name of the archives, and is subdivided into three sections: “Película hacia el sur. Sin Bromas” (“ Movie towards the south. Without jokes”), “El aportaje y el Punk Journalism” (“ The unreport and Punk Journalism”) and “Película hacia el sur. Con Brona” (”Movie towards the south. With Brona”), with the second being something like the fictionalized poetics of the novel.
17 The third part, or second gonzo unreport, of some hundred and twenty pages (pp. 219‒ 342), similar in extent in other words to the first one, takes place in three days (Thursday 6, Friday 7 and Saturday 8 July), corresponding to three chapters which are subdivided into subsections without numbering. This part is archived under the name “Papa” (Pope). Escargot investigates the time he spent in the company of his friend Brona in Valencia. These three days in July apparently coincide with Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to the area to attend the “V encuentro mundial de familias” (“5th World Meeting of Families”). The use of dates and historical facts creates a sense of reality.
18 From the digital archive we can see, however, that the first visit did not take place in early July, but in mid-May, and that it consisted of not three but four days, i.e. Wednesday 17th, Thursday 18th, Friday 19th and Saturday 20th. They were adjusted to fit the fictional calendar. In fact, it is of little importance that the actual stay in the resort happened at a certain moment of the year. The actual dates figure first, in isolation, in the file names of four short documents (of some 10-12 pages each) that were created on 13 June 2006. They are named: [10.-17_05_06 [4].doc], [20.-18_05_06 [4].doc], [30.-19_05_06 [4].doc] and [40.-20_05_06 [4].doc], i.e. 17 May 2006, 18 May 2006, and so on. In addition, there is an explicit record of the change of dates of the stay (July instead of May) in other documents created between 27 August and 1 September 2006. These notes, located in a folder at the second level [ED 03 (paris 08_06) < ED versions anteriors], received new file names in accordance with the days of the novel: [01 MD 1 julio sábado.doc], [01 MD 2 julio domingo.doc], [01 MD 3 julio lunes.doc], and [01 MD 4 julio martes.doc]. In each of the four documents we also find a footnote that is almost identical to a note that features in the first of a series of documents named [notas NOVELA] containing notes of a mainly metascriptural character. In the first notebook, dated December 2006, the entry reads as follows:
Novel day Chapter Real Day
Sat 01/07/06 MD 17/05/16 (Wednesday
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Sun 02/07/06 MD 18/05/06
Mon 03/07/06 MD 19/05/06
Tue 04/07/06 MD 20/05/06 (Saturday)
Wed 05/07/06 Modelo 0
Thu 06/07/06 PPA =
Fri 07/07/06 PPA =
Sat 08/07/06 PPA =
19 The first column of this schema lists the dates of the diegesis (1 to 8 July). These eight days correspond to the eight chapters of the novel. The abreviations MD and PPA and the word “Modelo” denote the thematic core of the three parts: Marina d’Or (MD), Modelo prison and Pope (PPA). In the third column, the author points to which day of the real calendar (July 2006) each of the chapters and ficticious episodes is linked. The 6th, 7th and 8th July in fiction are identical (=) to the real days. The chapter “Modelo” (future second part) does not refer to any real day (0). In other words, the first three days in July actually took taken place in May 2006.
20 In the same document, Juan-Cantavella mentions, also for the first time, the first three parts of his book: 01 MD, 02 MODELO, 03 PAPA, which permits to affirm that he thought early on of a novel in three parts. However, this decision must have been called into question halfway into writing, since of the versions seven to eleven (that is, from 30 January to 20 April 2007) only the folders [Marina d’Or] and [Papa] are preserved. The only Word document that is part of the folder [Modelo] became part of the folder [Papa] but regained autonomy from the twelfth version onwards, dated 26 May 2007, maintaining the three-fold structure almost to the end.
21 The fourth and last part was written quite late, that is to say, in January 2008, and only a partial sketch of it is preserved in the folder [ED 25 (04_01_08)]. The document is named [Último capitulo.doc]. In it coexist textual fragments, schematic notes which articulate the sequence ― e.g. “DÓNDE: Escrito desde un tejado de esa calle de Berlín que una noche al año destruyen entre los grupos anarquistas y la policía. CUÁNDO: Escrito esa noche” (“WHERE: Written on a roof of that street in Berlin which one night per year is destroyed by groups of anarchists and the police. WHEN: Written that night”); and finally, metascriptural instructions of the type “Enlazar este último cap con las entradillas del Índice” (“Connect this last chapt to the lead-ins of the table of contents”).
22 Juan-Cantavella told me that he had decided to add this part only when he got to the end of the relating the facts about the trip to Valencia to give the account a “novelistic” touch. On the other hand, and slightly paradoxical, he underlined the veracious character of the confrontation between police and punks described in this section, a confrontation that takes place annually in Berlin around 1 May. Furthermore, he specified for me where on the site punkjournalism.com I could find the photos of his friend Juan Ferrer that illustrate these events. This example serves to show the
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importance of the web page, which, in this case, offers material not included on the USB stick.
23 That said, I would like to emphasize that if the information displayed so far comes from an examination of the tree-structure of the textual folders, all of them are also corroborated in an implicit way by the more than two hundred photographs of Marina d’Or, with creation dates between 19 and 20 May and uploaded to the folder [ED fotos]. The photos of the Pope’s visit, however, are all dated 9 July 2006. Thus, we see that, even without the need to access the hard disc, a digital genetic file can provide a larger amount of chronological information than we are used to finding in handwritten manuscripts. In Juan-Cantavella’s, the information permits us to follow closely the process of fictionalizing reality, as we see how the author, despite his affiliation with Punk Journalism, adapted the real material to his fictional needs. So although the dossier does not contain the normal traces of writing ― cancellations, additions, shifts ― whose absence as I mentioned earlier would appear to make our analysis practically impossible, collating and comparing the digital documents and files gives us more than an sound basis to allow an meaningful genetic investigation. I will illustrate this with a small example.
24 To begin with, one ought to assume that not everything was preserved. At some point the author must have deleted some of his digital files, just as he (as he told me) had discarded paper notebooks. The absence in certain files of any time indication makes it impossible to reconstruct an exact chronology. Furthermore, the earliest surviving documents date from 13 June 2006, almost a month after the actual stay, which seems to contradict the author who declared to me me that he used to transcribe the notes taken in Marina d’Or at night.
25 A good example of a pre-writing stage document is the file [00.-notas [4].doc] which together with the [esquema materials 4 dies.doc] presents the least advanced stage of textualization. It is nonetheless a key document in the genetic file. The file contains pretextual (lists of people, possible scenes, diagrams) and metascriptural notes. Among the second of these is an early mention of the novel’s final title, El Dorado, although in the course of writing Juan-Cantavella thought of many alternatives as well. The notes also contain information about the possible genre of the text, which is not intended to be a new example of Gonzo Journalism, but “un experimento fallido de Periodismo Gonzo” (“a failed experiment of Gonzo Journalism”), a nuance that is further explained in the displaced prologue, “El aportaje y el Punk Journalism” (“The unreport and Punk Journalism”) (Juan-Cantavella 2008, 189), to which I will return in a moment. The notes, finally, also provide Juan-Cantavella’s objectives: “El objetivo es desviar la atención de mi verdadera investigación, que es buscar el Dorado” (“The aim is to divert the attention from my real investigation, which is search for the Dorado”); and the method that is to be followed: “Para poder investigar tranquilamente el requisito imprescindible es ocultarse entre la gente del lugar en el que se investiga, desaparecer entre la masa, convertirse en uno de ellos [comentario sobre Malinowski, la empatía, los argonautas y los diarios . . .]” (“In order to be able to calmly research the indispensable requirement is to hide among the people of the research location, disappear in the masses, turn into one of them (comment about Malinowski, empathy, the argonauts and the dairies. . .)]”.
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Figure 3: Clipping from Hunter S. Thompson’s clippings from Robert Juan-Cantavella’s archive.
As with the text files, only a part of files that illustrate the documentation stage of the writing before the investigation is preserved. In general, these are documents about Marina d’Or (press notice, bills, chats, newspaper clippings, advertisements, etc.). There are also two extracts, without bibliographical reference, about Gonzo Journalism (in .jpg format). They were archived in a folder with remants [Off MD] stored in the folder [ED materiales], a folder that contains a diverse range of materials and is difficult to explore. The fragments are two quotations from Hunter S. Thompson in which he comments on his novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Although the source was not referenced, I was able to deduce it from another document, named [01.-intro aportaje [4].doc], with creation date 23 July 2006, where the quotations were used.
26 In actual fact no less than four versions exist of the document [01.-intro aportaje [4].doc] stored in as many folders at level two in the tree structure. In the first 4 versions retained from the novel, the “introducción” is an autonomous piece that functions as the prologue to the three parts of the novel that are then in existence. When the fifth version of the novel is created, this prologue lost its autonomy and became a subsection of the second part of the novel when it was integrated with the four documents created after 23 July 2006. The fourth version of the novel in progress [ED 04 (Belgrado 09_06)] bears witness to this disappearance: folder [02 Modelo] contains a detailed outline of the second part of the novel named [02 Modelo 5 julio miercoles.doc], with creation date 5 November 2006, the same date as the first version of the document saved in folder [ED 04]. ESQUEMA 1‒llegada a Barcelona 2‒encuentro en la puerta de la Modelo y salimos de la ciudad (escrito) 3‒habla Escargot, Brona en silencio 4‒episodio con los Auster (escrito) 5‒Brona lee partes del aportaje MD en el ordenador 6‒Brona lee el aportaje 7‒Brona le cuenta a Escargot el Diario de Malinowski 8‒se cuenta el tema de los mails y los sms 9‒Ir a Mediamarket X‒El problema de adicción de Brona al deporte OUTLINE 1‒arrival in Barcelona 2‒meeting at the door of Modelo and leaving the city (written)
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3‒Escargot speaking, Brona silent 4‒episode with the Austers (written) 5‒Brona reads parts of the unreport MD on the computer 6‒Brona reads the unreport 7‒Brona tells Escargot Malinowski’s dairy 8‒the story of the emails and SMS 9‒Going to Mediamarket X‒The problem of Brona’s sport addiction
27 What happened next? Let us see from the protagonist’s hand: Mi querido Caracolillo, siempre tan ordenado: día1sábado.doc, estallido de la apoteosis vacacional, día2domingo.doc, ¿qué es esto?, joder, Caracolillo, otra vez haciendo periodismo de barra y dándole bola a los camareros . . . día3lunes.doc, día4martes.doc . . . Hoy es miércoles.doc, Caracolillo, día cinco, ¿qué tenemos en el menú?, ¿qué pasará hoy?, ¿ya lo tienes previsto? . . . Y esto. . . ¿qué es esto? –¿Qué es qué? –Este archivo, aportaje_Punk-Journalism.doc. –Es el prólogo ― responde Escargot ―, lo escribí el viernes, cuando decidí aceptar el encargo. Pero al final no lo voy a meter. –¿Cómo que no lo vas a meter? –Pues eso, que el prólogo no lo voy a incluir en el aportaje. –¿Por qué? No tiene mala pinta, es decir, es largo ¿no?, déjame ver . . . sí, seis páginas, seguro que sacas algo. Ay, Caracolillo, siempre con tus gilipolleces. . . aunque yo tengo algo mucho mejor, verás cuando te cuente lo que encontré allí dentro. . . Pero espera, déjame leerlo: (186) [My beloved Caracolillo, always so organized: day1Saturday.doc, burst of the holiday climax, day2Sunday.doc, what’s this?, shit, Caracolillo, again doing bar journalism and paying attention to the waiters… day3Monday.doc, day4Tuesday.doc . . . Today is Wednesday.doc, Caracolillo, day five, what’s on the menu?, what will happen today?, have you already planned it? . . . And that . . . what’s that? –What is what? –This archive, aportaje_Punk-Journalism.doc. – It’s the prologue ― answers Escargot ―, I wrote it on Friday, when I decided to accept the order. But in the end I won’t put it. – How is it that you are not going to put it? – Well that, I’m not going to include the prologue in the unreport. – Why? It doesn’t look bad, well, it’s lengthy, isn’t it?, let me see. . . yes, six pages, you can certainly take something out. Oh, Caracolillo, you always with your stupid comments . . . even though I have something much better, you’ll see when I tell you what I found in here . . . But wait, let me read it: (186)]
28 After the colon, we ― Brona and the readers ― can proceed to reading “EL APORTAJE Y EL PUNK JOURNALISM” (‘THE UNREPORT AND PUNK JOURNALISM’), the poetics of the novel, which corresponds to point 6 of the outline. Taking another look, we see that the author alludes to the second and the fourth items, which are highlighted in yellow in the archive and which correspond to the second part of the handwritten notes of the logbook transcribed in August 2006.
29 Curiously, if this essay now serves as an interval between the two “Película(s) hacia el sur” (“Movie[s] towards the south”) that comprise the second part of the novel (the items 1-5 and 7-10 in the outline respectively), it becomes in turn a hinge for the two Gonzo unreports. The genetic documents seem to corroborate the idea put into Escargot’s mouth, that is to say, that the essay was first thought of as a prologue, and then as “prólogo descartado” (“dismissed prologue”), a subtitle which figures as such in
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document [prologo aportaje [02].doc] of folder [ED 04], dated before the end of November. With the exception of the title, this document was almost identical to the other four, whose titles also underwent slight modification, the most significant being “ EL APORTAJE Y EL PULP JOURNALISM. PRÓLOGO DESCARTADO” (“THE UNREPORT AND PULP JOURNALISM. DISMISSED PROLOGUE”) and the substitution of “Pulp“ by “Punk“ in the twenty-second version of the novel, in a document named [2.5 julio miércoles.doc], with creation date 18 December 2007. In the published novel no trace exists of this last minute change. Pulp and Punk journalism are not, however, synonyms and represent two options of writing, as Juan-Cantavella explained to me.6 This document [2.5 julio miércoles.doc] reveals, furthermore, that in December 2007 the author had not yet joined together the eight documents that correspond to the eight days of the novel, which does not happen until version twenty-four, dated two days later. Likewise, the subtitle “Tras el Punk Journalism” (“After Punk Journalism”) and the generic term “Novela” (“Novel”), which figures in versions twenty-four, twenty-five and twenty-six (with creation dates between December 2007 and March 2008), are not used in the published version. Neither figure they in version twenty-seven [El Dorado.27.EDITADO.doc].
30 If we compare the five initial versions of the prologue to the text as it was eventually published in the novel, we see that its global structure was kept quite stable, even though many passages were subject to successive expansions ― as happened for instance with the treatment of the invented etymology of the unreport and with the veracity pact (the understanding between writer and reader that everything in the novel is documented) of the new journalism, etc. The order in which several of these passages appeared was changed too, as was the case with comparisons between Old, New and Punk Journalism; its relationship to North American realism, to photography, and to literature as a whole. One important element that disappeared altogether was the comment that framed Hunter S. Thompson’s fragment, “única persona autorizada en este particular” (“the only person authorized in this matter”); it is made more explicit because “un aportaje no es Periodismo Gonzo” (“an unreport is not Gonzo Journalism”), but "un experimento fallido de Periodismo gonzo" (“a failed experiment of Gonzo Journalism”. The reason why resides in a difference in intention: “Se me ocurrió que lo que en el caso de Miedo y asco en Las Vegas: Un viaje salvaje al corazón del sueño americano había sido una desviación en la escritura o una anomalía en la percepción u otra especie de error decisivo, podría convertirse en el propósito, en el único objetivo de El Dorado: Un experimento fallido de Periodismo Gonzo” (“It came to my mind that in the case of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream it was a deviation in writing or an anomaly in perception or another type of crucial error, could turn into a purpose, into the only goal of El Dorado: a failed experiment of Gonzo Journalism ”).
31 The difference in intention affects, of course, the resources and explains why “en el caso del Punk Journalism no sólo se importan las elegantes trampas de la narración realista sino también otras menos respetables que tienen que ver con la pura fabulación, la parodia maliciosa, la mentira sincera, la especulación camicace, el despropósito gratuito, la irresponsabilidad meditada, etc. . . .” (”in the case of Punk Journalism not only the elegant traps of realist narration are imported, but also less respectable traps which have to do with pure invention, malicious parody, sincere lie, kamikaze speculations, gratuitous nonsense, meditated irresponsibility, etc. . . .) (Juan- Cantavella 2008, 189).
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Figure 4: A page from the El Dorado notebook
© Robert Juan-Cantavella
32 That said, the forty years that separate us from the Old Journalism and the digital revolution explain why the objective could no longer be “photographic”.
33 Now then, it is not explained why Hunter S. Thompson is quoted explicitly in the working papers, why even he remained somewhat in the shadow despite the fact that his work broadly conditioned the topic and the writing process of the Gonzo reports. In my opinion, the answer could be related to the importance acquired by Malinowski’s field notes, which could explain why the second part of the novel does not respond to the writing norms of the two unreports. The notebook reveals that this counterpoint work by the Polish anthropologist projects itself towards the thresholds of writing and is equated to Gonzo Journalism as Juan-Cantavella practises it.
34 The difference that exists between the ideal conditions of “gonzo writing” and the writing of non-referential or non-documentary fiction is reflected in the difficulties that Juan-Cantavella skilfully experiences and overcomes at the moment of devising that second part of El Dorado. The conditions of the Gonzo writing are those displayed by Thompson in the following statement: “comprar un cuaderno gordo y registrarlo todo, tal y como viene, y luego mandar el cuaderno para que lo publicaran sin correcciones” (“buy a thick notebook and record everything, such as it comes, and then send the notebook to be published without any corrections”); Juan-Cantavella puts this, as far as possible, into practice in the two unreports. Whereas the writing of non- referential or non-documentary fiction has to be related to the second part of the novel, which though not pure invention does not correspond to any real day and mixes autofiction and poetics. In the novel, the poetics of Gonzo Journalism are revisited and merged with a playful rereading of Malinowski . This allows us to read El Dorado not
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only as a novel, but also as an example of “anthropology of the proximity”, of which Marc Augé speaks in Non-Lieux: Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité (1992). It is true that for this we also need to have in mind what differentiates Juan- Cantavella’s research from Malinowski’s anthropology, and that it is merely a poetic mise en abyme. Even if it respects the guidelines of Thompson’s Gonzo Journalism, the Punk Journalism surpasses and vindicates its character of “artificio textual” (“textual artefice”) (Juan-Cantavella 2008, 191).
Writers face the digital challenge
35 Up to this point, I have set out how the geneticist can try to take control of this new scientific object that constitutes the digital corpus. However, the exploration of a digital corpus also shows us another question mark regarding the first one set by Lebrave. That is, about how the writers appropriate the computer. In the present case, I am highlighting two aspects: one, the part of creation; the other, the part of editing; two aspects which, in a not too distant future, might allow for a reconciliation of the genetic study and edition.
36 Referring to the new forms of creation, the study of the genetic file, in particular of the folders [ED materiales] and [ED fotos], documents new forms of intermediality, which by far overcome traditional intertextuality and interdicursivity. In the folder [ED fotos], we find, for example, the photographs that allow us to read the humorous pages in El Dorado dedicated to the super grandmothers, Lilith, Striga and Baba Yaga, as ekphrasis of images that are buried in the author’s archive out of respect for their personal integrity. They illuminate and render concrete what should be mentally reconstructed when reading the novel, i.e. the “agria expression” (“bitter expression”), the “ceño fruncido” (“furrowed brow”), the painted brow “a juego con el tinte de la cabellera” (“matching the hair dye”), or the “mueca despreocupada” (“carefree expression face”) of the protagonists (pp. 35-36).
37 The [ED materiales folder] also contains links to web pages. These links corroborate what Jean-Louis Lebrave foresaw: that the creator’s future paradise comes “du côté des outils de fouille de données dont nous disposons avec internet” (Lebrave 2010, 158) (“from the side of data mining tools which we have at disposal with the Internet’). And by saying this, Lebrave thought of a Flaubert of the twenty-first century searching topographical information about Palestine on Google or Google Maps. In the present case, it can be seen how Juan-Cantavella consulted various web pages to acquaint himself with a broad panoply of drugs, whose packaging, forms, colours and effects he is infusing into the novel, in no less hallucinatory scenes than those of the movie Las Vegas Parano.
38 If these examples allow us to examine some effects of the impact of the visual or digital culture in the act of creation, the author’s web page obliges us to look to the area of the so-called narratives across Media. When presenting the genetic dossier, I have mentioned that on the back cover of the novel readers were invited to consult the author’s web page, Punkjournalism.net. The website consists of six sections: “Punk Journalism. Ensayo breve”, “Mai Tai. El cóctel”, “Artículos de Trebor Escargot (2002-2008)”, “Perfil y contacto”, “El libro” and “Materiales de El dorado página por página”. “Punk Journalism” comprises a digital version of the poetics of the novel from the dismissed prologue that I discussed earlier. “Mai Tai” offers the recipe of a cocktail
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of drugs that the protagonist savours at various moments in the account. “Artículos de Trebor Escargot” brings together some twenty articles which were published under Escargot’s name in reviews and magazines, which forms another instance of the blurring of the boundary between reality and fiction, though this time it is the fiction that intervenes in the real world. This device provides depth to the novel and draws the attention to the journalistic duplicity, a feature of Punk Journalism that the book defends. “Perfil y contacto” reproduces two interviews with Trebor Escargot that were published previously ― the first in Quimera (287, October 1987), the second on Vicente Luis Mora’s blog (February 2006). The first interview also features in the novel almost in its entirety (pp. 176-180). It deals with the “honour complaint” that the Sociedad General de Autores y Editores had lodged against Escargot after he had called them a horde of “pirates” in “La horda de los gestores”, an article also published in Quimera (282, May 2007). In other words, elements of the extradiegetic reality have been incorporated into the narrative work, which result in an effect of derealization and metaleptic transgression. Finally, in the section “Materiales”, we see how the writer turns potential editor, not to say geneticist, of his own novel. In fact, as with the materials contained on the USB stick, we find here broad “crude or derived” materials from the novel. A headnote explains that this section “funciona como una especie de aparato virtual de notas” (“functions like a type of virtual note device”), and that the documents are indexed and linked using the page numbers in the book to which reference is made. While these materials are not needed for a reading of the novel, they open the door to the writer’s studio. The reproduction of various press clippings (the originals of which were in the backpack that the author handed to me) allow us to see how the author appropriates reported speech with a view to developing a literary discourse with a “reality effect”. The presence of different markers of reported speech (quotation marks, explicit references to the newspaper quoted, reporting verbs, etc.) in the novel and a list of sources included at the end of the novel prevent us to speak of “a poetics of plagiarism”, but of a generalized practice of détournement as described by Guy Debord (2006).
Conclusion
39 First, I examined how geneticists can approach the new forms of digital writing ― for example, from the examination of a digital tree-structure and the evolution of its files. Second, some specific examples were given to illustrate how a younger generation of writers appropriate digital writing on the level of creation (intermediality) and the dissemination or expansion of their work (web page). With this we have at our disposal some first data that allows for a concrete assessment of the future of genetic criticism. If the use of word processing becomes widespread in the creative process, it is very probable that we will lose what is beyond writing. Let us call it the non-verbal, the visible, the graphic, that is, an object which contemplates the manuscript as a “réseau de signes qui instaure une page en image” (Crasson and Hay 2013) (“network of signs which establishes a page as an image”) and which justifies an alliance between genetics and semiotics. After all, any possible loss is balanced out by other techniques of semiotic character and justifies the term “design novel” which Vicente Luis Mora (2013) advocates in order to describe some creations of the Pangaea era.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Augé, Marc. 1992. Non-Lieux: Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité. Paris: Seuil.
Crasson, Aurèle and Louis Hay. 2013. “Scripto-Graphies”. In Verbal/Non verbal. Ed. by Aurèle Crasson and Louis Hay. Special issue of Genesis, 37, 7–9. de Biasi, Pierre-Marc. 1998. “Qu’est-ce qu’un brouillon? Le cas Flaubert”. In Michel Contat and Daniel Ferrer (eds.), Pourquoi la critique génétique? Méthodes et théories. Paris: CNRS Éditions, pp. 31– 60. de Biasi, Pierre-Marc. 2010. “Pour une génétique généralisée: L’approche des processus à l’âge numérique”. Genesis, 30, pp. 163–75.
Debord, Guy. 2011. Génétique des textes. Paris: CNRS. Debord, Guy. 2006. “Modes d’emploi du détournement”. In Oeuvres. Ed. by Jean-Louis Rançon and Alice Debord. Paris: Gallimard, pp. 221– 29.
Doquet-Lacoste, Claire. 2007. “L’objet insaisissable: l’écriture sur le traitement de texte”. Genesis, 27, pp. 35–44.
Ganascia, Gabriel and Jean-Louis Lebrave. 2009. “Trente ans de traitements informatiques des manuscrits de genèse”. In Olga Anokhina and Sabine Pétillon (eds.), Critique génétique: concepts, méthodes, outils. Caen: IMEC, pp. 68–82.
Grésillon, Almuth. 1994. Éléments de critique génétique: Lire les manuscrits modernes. Paris: PUF.
Hay, Louis. 1985. “‘Le texte n’existe pas’. Réflexions sur la critique génétique”. Poétique, 62, pp. 147-58.
Hay, Louis. 2010. “Une génétique sans rivages?”. Genesis, 31, pp. 153–55.
Juan-Cantavella, Robert. 2008. El Dorado. Barcelona: Mondadori.
Kunz, Marco and Gómez Sonia. 2014. Nueva narrativa española. Barcelona: Linkgua.
Kirschenbaum, Matthew. 2008. Mechanism, New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press.
Lebrave, Jean-Louis. 1994. “Hypertextes ― mémoires ― écritures”. Genesis, 5, pp. 9–24. Lebrave, Jean-Louis. 2008. “De l’édition informatisée à l’édition électronique”. In Aurèle Crasson (ed.), L’édition du manuscrit: De l’archive de création au scriptorium électronique. Louvain-la-Neuve: Academia-Bruylant, pp.169–87.
Lebrave, Jean-Louis. 2009. “Manuscrits de travail et linguistique de la production écrite”. Modèles linguistiques, 59, pp. 13–21.
Lebrave, Jean-Louis. 2010. “L’ordinateur, Olympe de l’écriture?”. Genesis, 31, pp. 159-61.
Lebrave, Jean-Louis. 2011. “Computer forensics: La critique génétique et l’écriture numérique”. Genesis. 33, pp. 137–47.
Lebrave, Jean-Louis. 2012. “Génétique électronique”. In Bénédicte Vauthier and Gimena Gamba Corradine, (eds.) Crítica genética y edición de manuscritos hispánicos contemporáneos. Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad Salamanca, pp. 283–294.
Mora, Vicente Luis. 2013. El lectospectador. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 2013.
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Ries, Thorsten. 2010. “‘die geräte klüger als ihre besitzer’: Philologische Durchblicke hinter die Schreibszene des Graphical User Interface”. Editio, 24, pp. 149–99.
Vauthier, Bénédicte. 2014. “Tanteos, calas y pesquisas en el dossier genético digital de El Dorado de Robert Juan-Cantavella”. In Marco Kunz and Sonia Gómez (eds.), Nueva narrativa española. Barcelona: Linkgua, pp. 311–45.
NOTES
1. See, for example, the technical documentation and the preliminaries which accompany the digital Beckett or Juan Goytisolo projects (see http://www.beckettarchive.org and http:// www.goytisolo.unibe.ch). 2. Ries has extended the study of literary genesis following Kirschenbaum’s proposals regarding the intersection between material bibliography, digital archiving and critical edition (see Kirschenbaum 2008). 3. For a detailed discussion of the material, see Vauthier 2014, 314–31. 4. See http://www.punkjournalism.net. 5. The term unreport was created by analogy with the Spanish aportaje, which consists of a the negative prefix a– + a clipped form of reportaje (portaje). In addition it is also a word play made of the etymology of portaje. Thus, for this translation unreport is used that takes up the idea of a negative prefix un– in combination with report. 6. For more information regarding the vacillations between “pulp” and “punk journalism, see my article cited before (2014: 339).
ABSTRACTS
The opportunity to analyse the digital files used in the composition of Robert Juan-Cantavella's El Dorado (2008), the Spanish propagator of Gonzo Journalism, presents a fascinating test case to test the limits and opportunities of genetic criticism. Far from showing that the age of the computer ends all access to the genetic material, this study carefully lays out the wealth of material available to manuscript students. The data preserved on the author's USB stick ― file structures, file names, date stamps, etc. ― and the relation between these proves to be crucial to the reconstruction of the genetic sequence, the writing methods, and an understanding of the creation of Juan-Cantavella's poetics of fictionalizing reality.
INDEX
Keywords: authorship, digital archive, composition history, genetic criticism, methodology, Spanish literature, Juan-Cantavelle (Robert)
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AUTHOR
BÉNÉDICTE VAUTHIER
Bénédicte Vauthier is Professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Bern (Switzerland). Her fields of interest are contemporary Spanish Literature, Literary Theory, editing, and the study of contemporary texts and drafts. Her edition of Juan Goytisolo’s Paisajes después de la batalla was awarded with “Premio Nacional de Edición Universitaria” (2013). With Margarita Santos Zas, she has published a critical study and genetic edition of La media noche: Visión estelar de un momento de guerra by Ramón del Valle-Inclán in three volumes.
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Work in Progress
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Encoding, Visualizing, and Generating Variation in Fernando Pessoa’s Livro do Desassossego
Manuel Portela and António Rito Silva
1 FERNANDO PESSOA’S Livro do Desassossego (Book of Disquiet) is an unfinished book project.1 Pessoa wrote more than five hundred texts meant for this work between 1913 and 1935, the year of his death.2 The first edition of this book was published only in 1982, 3 and another three major versions have been published since then (1990 [7th revised edition, 2013], 1998 [11th revised edition, 2014], 2010 [3 rd revised edition, 2014]). As it exists today, the Livro do Desassossego may be characterized as (1) a set of autograph (manuscript and typescript) fragments, (2) mostly unpublished at the time of Pessoa’s death, which have been (3) transcribed, selected, and organized into four different editions, implying (4) various critical and genetic interpretations of what constitutes this book. Editions show four major types of variation: variation in readings of particular passages, in selection of fragments, in their ordering, and also in heteronym attribution.4
2 Those editorial instantiations have given material expression to four different models of constructing the Livro. We could summarize this history as follows: the first model orders fragments according to a combination of thematic and chronological proximity (Pessoa 1982; edited by Jacinto do Prado Coelho); the second model distinguishes between two periods of composition and their respective heteronyms (Vicente Guedes and Bernardo Soares), while strengthening the discursive unity of the fragments within each part, for example, by removing text numbering and by rearranging the internal structure of a certain number of more fragmentary texts (1990‒2013; edited by Teresa Sobral Cunha); the third model considers the production of Bernardo Soares as the main axis of the work and anchors the remaining fragments so that Soares’s voice becomes predominant, relegating the set of early large texts by Guedes to a final section (1998‒2014; edited by Richard Zenith); finally, the fourth model produces a critical and genetic reconstruction based on the inferred chronology of the fragments,
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thus bringing the order of the Livro closer to its archival order (2010‒2014; edited by Jerónimo Pizarro).5
3 One of the goals of the Livro do Desassossego (LdoD) Digital Archive, which is being developed at the Centre for Portuguese Literature (CLP) at the University of Coimbra, is to show Pessoa’s book as a network of potential authorial intentions and a conjectural construction of its successive editors (Portela 2013). Our digital representation of the dynamics of textual and bibliographical variation depends on both XML encoding of variation sites (deletions, additions, substitutions, etc.) and metatextual information concerning authorial and editorial witnesses (date, order, heteronym attribution, etc.). While TEI-XML markup may be considered as a particular kind of critical apparatus on its own, it is through visualization tools and graphical interfaces that users will be able to engage critically with the dynamics of variation in authorial and editorial witnesses. Besides navigating through the archive’s materials, users will be able to generate further textual and bibliographical variations by assuming the role of editors or even writers. This article discusses the theoretical and technical aspects of the various strategies adopted for encoding, visualizing and generating variation in the LdoD Digital Archive. Before presenting examples of those strategies, we will briefly explain the project rationale in its genetic, social and virtual dimensions.
From author’s text to editor’s text to reader’s text
4 One of the goals of the LdoD research project is to produce a comprehensive digital archive that integrates a genetic with a textual scholarship approach by treating both authorial witnesses and published editorial versions as elements in the work’s textual and social history. Published versions are understood as variations, at both micro and macro-levels, on Pessoa’s unfinished book project. A full integration of authorial and editorial witnesses is achieved by treating all of them as actual versions of a number of possible versions of the Book of Disquiet. Thus authorial and editorial textual forms can be compared against each other at different scales ― from the micro-level of word to the macro-level of book structure. This particular combination of transcription of authorial and editorial text enables readers and scholars not only to construct narratives of composition and narratives of editing and publication, but also to place each of those narratives in the context of the others. Our model for electronic encoding of textual fragments supports radial configurations that allow users to engage the work through three different facets: the genetic dimension; the social dimension; and the virtual dimension (Figure 1).
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Figure 1: XML encoding and algorithmic processing of Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet.
XML encoding and algorithmic processing of Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet attempts to integrate a digital representation of autograph materials (genetic dimension) with a digital representation of editorial materials (social dimension), and both those levels with a digital simulation of writing and editing processes (virtual dimension).
5 The virtual dimension enables readers to generate further variations by means of editing and writing acts. We propose to extend social editing theories to include the collaborative capabilities of the digital medium, suggesting that its participatory affordance can be used for generating new variations on the work’s textual and bibliographical form (Silva and Portela 2013 and 2015). Thus “social editing” is conceived of in two different but related senses: one is derived from the theory of social editing, which describes the socialization of texts embodied in particular bibliographical codes in the historical archive; the other refers to social editing as a collaborative practice in web environments. This second sense may be understood as an extension of the first in digital media environments where literary processes can become a continuous process of production. The socialization of editing through Web 2.0 tools has specific implications, such as the possibility of continuous reediting ― unlike the print medium, where the production of a new edition only happens when an earlier edition is no longer available or when there is enough market demand for several editions to compete amongst themselves.6
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Figure 2: Virtual roles in the archive ecology
Readers can interact within the archive ecology according to four virtual roles.
6 This programmatic virtualization of the Book of Disquiet is a performative intervention in the work’s archive that takes place also at the level of editing and writing. Our model for electronic encoding of textual fragments is based on established principles in genetic criticism and textual scholarship informed by a desire to engage the fluidity and flexibility of our current media environment (Bryant 2002; Benel and Lejeune 2009; Fraistat and Jones 2009; Siemens et al. 2012). This model of the reconfigurative iterability of the work’s authorial and editorial archive will enable users to virtualize Pessoa’s book project according to four functions: reader-function, editor-function, book-function, and author-function (Figure 2; see also Portela and Silva 2014). The changing roles of users within the archive ecology enhance the dynamic character of our digital simulation of textuality as an ongoing material and interpretive process of textual transformation. By means of interaction between textual representation and textual transformation the LdoD Archive becomes an experimental engine for the simulation of literary processes.
The textual dynamics of the archive: Document, text, book, work
7 In a recent article on theory of digital editions, Peter Robinson shows how printed editions have traditionally focused on the relationship of text to work, while digital editions have been more focused on the relationship of text to document. He suggests that “a scholarly edition must, so far as it can, illuminate both aspects of the text, both text-as-work and text-as-document” (Robinson 2013, 123). The LdoD Archive embodies a
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similar understanding of the nature of textual semiosis as process involving self and object in a continuous and co-dependent process of meaning production through acts of reading. Editing Pessoa’s centrifugal and reticular body of unpublished work is an especially acute experience of the productive function of reading in activating the force fields that allow you to move back and forth from document to text to book to work.
8 By placing digital facsimiles in the context of topographic transcriptions, the LdoD Archive enables users to experiment with the transit from document to text and from text to document. Situating both facsimile and topographic transcription in the context of the experts’ editions, the LdoD Archive shows four possible transitions from text to book and from book to text. To the extent that each text of each edition is contextualizable in an archive of authorial and editorial witnesses, it is the very process of construction of text from document and book from text that the genetic and social dimensions of the LdoD Archive place in evidence. The construction of the book ― as the product either of a self-editing authorial act, or a series of posthumous editorial acts ― becomes an instantiation of the conceptual and material process of identity and difference that enables text and book to emerge from a series of inscriptional marks and from the acts of reading and interpreting those marks.
9 The electronic edition of modern manuscripts that are unfinished book projects can be conceived according to different principles. The principle used by the editors of the LdoD Archive is based on the unit “trecho” (passage; or, literally, stretch, i.e. a continuous piece of completed writing) or fragment (a continuous piece of writing in progress), understood as a certain textual extension with thematic or material evidence of textual unity, which can be further marked (or not) by graphical markers: for example, a larger space or a larger number of blank lines between two handwritten textual sequences suggests an interruption; or by genetic and editorial events, for example, a piece that has been typed or published in a magazine.7 The units of composition included in the LdoD Archive are based on either the set of four critical editions, or the ensemble of digital facsimiles of authorial witnesses that correspond to that set.8 On the other hand, it is possible to think of the act of writing as a speech act, that is, as a certain temporal unit of writing that does not always coincide with the documentary material unit (recto and verso of a loose leaf, or a set of contiguous pages in a notebook, for example) or with units of written discourse, such as the paragraph, or other units of bibliographical structure, such as the chapter. Pessoa’s writing practice for the Livro seems to emphasize this act of scripting as a unit of composition of the work itself.9
10 The existence of very short fragments, almost aphoristic in scale, along with fragments of varying length (one paragraph to one page to a few pages), written at very different moments in time, suggests precisely this noncoincidence between the temporal unit of writing and the cumulative and retrospective process of accretion and rewriting that produces semantic coherence and syntactic cohesion. Each moment of writing (which is also a moment of self-consciousness of writing) originates a new self-contained thematic and stylistic unit. These units proliferate as fragments of a book in progress but they resist the material order of the book. Edward Vanhoutte (2006) characterizes the modern manuscript as a complex network of those temporal units of writing. Marta L. Werner (2011), in her turn, describes the modern manuscript as a record of the dynamics of text in the process of creating itself. She places it in a liminal space of
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private inscription which becomes physically reflected in its undisciplined textual condition.
11 By using the notion of “trecho” [brief textual section] to refer to the units of composition of LdoD, Fernando Pessoa is aware of this dimension of aggregation and sequencing of small textual units as one of the compositional principles of LdoD. The revision process that he imagines toward the bibliographical horizon seems to imply the simultaneous production of psychological coherence and stylistic consistency: L. do D. (nota) A organização do livro deve basear-se numa escolha, rigida quanto possível, dos trechos variadamente existentes, adaptando, porém, os mais antigos, que falhem á psychologia de Bernardo Soares, tal como agora surge, a essa vera psychologia. Aparte isso, ha que fazer uma revisão geral do próprio estylo, sem que ele perca, na expressão intima, o devaneio e o desconnexo lógico que o caracterizam. Ha que estudar o caso de que se devem inserir trechos grandes, classificaveis sob titulos grandiosos, como a Marcha Funebre do Rei Luiz Segundo da Baviera, ou a Symphonia de uma Noite Inquieta. Ha a hypothese de deixar como está o trecho da Marcha Funebre, e ha a hypothese de a transferir para outro livro, em que ficassem os Grandes Trechos juntos. (Pessoa 1982, 8) [L. do D. (Note) The organization of the book should be based on a choice, as rigid as possible, from the existing varying texts [“trechos”], adapting, however, the older ones, which may fail the psychology of Bernardo Soares, as it now appears, this true psychology. Apart from this, a general revision of his own style, without letting it lose, in its intimate expression, the reverie and disjointed logic that define him. We must study the case whether to include the large texts, classifiable under grandiose titles such as The Funeral March for King Ludwig the Second of Bavaria, or Symphony of a Restless Night. There is the possibility of leaving the Funeral March as it stands, and there is the possibility of transferring it to another book, in which the Large Texts would stay together.]
12 Fernando Pessoa is thinking about submitting the fragments of the Livro to the conceptual and material coherence of the book form. He is recognizing both the disjointed dreamlike introspective style of Bernardo Soares, and also textual affinities among the large texts.10 Bibliographical coherence seems to depend simultaneously on two separate logics: an external logic of organization that sequences and articulates its elements according to the syntactic structure and the horizon of codex totalization, which creates unity through its discrete and finite character; and an internal logic of organization that selects and associates fragments because of semantic and stylistic affinities, producing bibliographical unity through the cumulative effect of discursive coherence between associated brief and lengthy pieces. The difficulty in matching the material and discursive space of writing to the material and conceptual space of the book results in a process of incompleteness and deferment, and in a variable and open conformation between writing space and book space.
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Figure 3: Encoding of authorial and editorial texts
Authorial and editorial texts are encoded as a network of variations, both at the micro-scale of the scripting acts that constitute each fragment and at the macro-scale of codex sequence. Through algorithmic processing, the prototype interface gives readers the ability to visualize authorial and editorial variations in terms of both textual form and book structure.
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Figure 4: Excerpt from the XML-TEI encoding of the fragment ‘Todos os dias acontecem no mundo’ (BNP/E3, 5‒23r)
Authorial and editorial textual versions are treated as variants and variations for encoding purposes. The
13 Thus, Pessoa’s heteronymic split is not only the result of a retroactive effect of subjectivity produced by a given writing mode. It results also from the non-coincidence between the order of writing and the order of the book, which unfolds in an authorial self-consciousness as a product of the rules of writing and in an authorial self- consciousness as a product of the rules of the book. “Bernardo Soares” appears as a psychological entity that manifests itself in a given style and as the name of the potential author of a book, an author who is recursively a product of the book that he wants to produce, and that not only by the psychography of his writing mode. The implication is that the writing rules that define him as a heteronymic author are also a device for the production of a bibliographical coherence through which the heteronym edits himself as an author, thus determining the texts that are part of his book in progress and, through this joint production of writing and codex, the subject of writing produces its self as the author of the book.
Encoding and Visualizing Variation
14 As mentioned above, representation of the dynamics of variation in the LdoD Archive involves the consideration of two distinct levels. One is the level of micro-variations, i.e. variations that are internal to the fragments, such as authorial revisions, editorial readings of particular passages or orthographic variants that resulted from reforms in spelling conventions.11 The other is the level of macro-variations, i.e. variations that
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are external to the fragments, such as inclusion and sequencing of fragments, as well as heteronym attribution. In other words, the first type of variations results in a given textual form for each fragment or piece of writing, while the second type results in a given book structure for the entire corpus (Figure 3). How are these micro- and macro- variations represented in the LdoD Archive? How are authorial revisions and editorial variants marked and visualized in ways that enable readers to understand the writing and editorial processes at the scale of both textual form and book structure?
15 We may say that the representation of the genetic dimension takes place in the context of the work’s socialized dimension, while the work’s editorial forms can be perceived in the context of its genetic history. Revision processes in the autograph materials as well as variants and variations in editorial readings are encoded in the same XML file in a way that allows for both a single view of each autograph or editorial witness and comparative views of multiple witnesses (Figure 4). At the level of the header each TEI file contains the metatextual information required for comparing bibliographical features, such as “L. do D.” markers in Pessoa’s papers, numerical sequence of fragments in each edition, date of composition, or other metatextual attributes.
Figure 5: Screenshot of the prototype interface
A topographic transcription of authorial witness is shown against the corresponding digital facsimile of autograph manuscript (BNP/E3, 5‒23r). Revision sites are XML encoded: deletions, additions and substitutions can be shown in the transcription. These micro-variations in each textual fragment are also mapped onto the macro-variations of codex structure in each edition: the right hand-side menu allows readers to navigate to the corresponding page in four different “Expert Editions”: Pessoa 1982, 2012, 2008, 2010. This menu further identifies the “Authorial Sources”, and also those “Virtual Editions” that the users of the archive have decided to make public.
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Figure 6: Screenshot of the prototype interface.
Comparison between the archive’s transcription of authorial witness and its corresponding form in the first published edition (Pessoa 1982). Textual variation sites are highlighted, which means the archive’s transcription is in itself a new editorial representation.
16 In our prototype of the LdoD Archive, visualization of variations takes place at the general level of the graphical user interface and within textual transcriptions. The user is allowed to move within each (authorial or editorial) textual witness and across different textual witnesses. This navigational strategy allows readers to see revision sites within authorial witnesses but also to generate comparisons between any 2, 3, 4, or N witnesses, when N>5 means that there are several authorial sources for the same fragments, comparing any given authorial witness against its editorial versions, and also editorial witnesses amongst themselves. This ability of examining the micro- variations in the textual form of each fragment across the database of witnesses is further contextualized, at the level of macro-variations, by the possibility of navigating within the bibliographical sequence offered by each scholarly edition (Figure 5). Buttons for showing revision sites (deletions, additions, and substitutions) and buttons for comparing transcriptions against the digital facsimiles of authorial witnesses allow users to move across all layers of variation from within a single screen. The right-hand menu provides immediate visualization of the relative position of each fragment within any given expert book edition of the Livro, while the bottom of the page note provides other metatextual information concerning heteronym attribution or “L. do D.” mark (Figure 6). One-to-one or one-to-many comparisons between the archive’s transcription and the four editions are also supported. This principle also applies to each and all expert editions.
Generating Variation
17 Our scholarly digital representation of authorial sources and expert editions as described in section 4 will provide the database materials for user-generated variations. Those user-generated variations on the Livro can result from either the editor-function or the author-function, both of which are explicit roles programmed in our virtual model of Livro. In this section we briefly explain the virtual editing and the
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virtual authoring modes, and the ways in which those new variations on Livro are visualized in the prototype interface.
Figure 7: Screenshot of the prototype interface.
The fragment is the number 1 of the EdTax virtual edition, and uses the Richard Zenith transcription where it is fragment number 424. A user, who is a member of the virtual edition, is currently adding an annotation to a part of the fragment. She can, eventually, also add a tag.
18 Virtual editing results in the creation of a persistent virtual edition (Figure 7). A group of users can create and work together in a virtual edition; they are the virtual edition members. Virtual editions can be either private or public, where private virtual editions can only be visualized by their members. A virtual edition contains a set of fragments which are selected and ordered by its members. Virtual edition fragments use the archive’s topographic transcription and/or the expert’s editorial transcription and they can be enriched by annotations made by virtual edition members. An annotation can contain a comment and one or more tags, and it is associated to a part of the fragment transcription, the quote. The system also allows a virtual edition fragment to use annotations from another virtual edition fragment. The use of annotations and tags preserves the authorship of the original contributions. Therefore, when a virtual edition is built on top of another virtual edition, the source tags and annotations are inherited but cannot be changed in the context of the new virtual edition. This means that an inherited tag can be used in the new virtual edition to categorize a fragment or a part of a fragment but if it is changed or deleted in the source edition the change is reflected in the new virtual edition by, respectively, changing it or deleting all its uses. Obviously, inherited tags and annotations cannot be changed or deleted in the context of the new virtual edition though it is possible to create new tags and annotations.
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Figure 8: Screenshot of the prototype interface
Comparing a fragment in two virtual editions, YetAnotherEd and EdTax, their quotes, comments, tags and contributors.
19 In the context of a virtual edition, any of its members can associate annotations to parts of the fragments transcriptions. When visualizing a fragment of a virtual edition all the tags and contributors are highlighted. Since a fragment can be annotated in the context of different virtual editions it is possible to compare these contributions, as shown in Figure 8.
20 The author-function provides another role within the archive for generating variations. Variation is understood here as a mode of literary production that is self- conscious about its intertextual dimension, and takes fragments or passages from the Livro de Desassossego for further textual production. Since the author-function is not implemented in the prototype yet, we will simply list a series of different techniques for writing variations on Livro fragments contemplated by our virtual model. The virtual writing functions should satisfy the following conditions: selecting sources (selecting transcriptions according to a particular edition); defining source elements at different levels of granularity (from single word to phrase to sentence to entire fragment); defining various degrees of human-machine collaboration (from blog-like pieces of human-authored text to entirely computer-authored permutations); defining anchors and links; defining order; and defining heteronym attribution.
21 User-generated editions and user-authored texts will become part of the virtual layer of the LdoD Archive, available for further reading and manipulation. The fully dynamic nature of LdoD Archive as a Web 2.0 experimental project results from this particular integration of the scholarly encoding of the work’s authorial and editorial archive with the algorithmic and collaborative simulation of the literary processes of reading, editing, and writing.
Discussion
22 For a fuller understanding of the potentialities of this approach we illustrate in Figure 9 how the different graphical interfaces map the interrelations among representations of Document, Text, and Book, at the level of both micro- and macro-variations. Through these interfaces it is possible to visualize Text<—>Document relations when the
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facsimile is seen side-by-side with its topographic transcription. From this visualization it is possible to navigate to an interface where the Document’s textual transcription is compared to the Book’s expert editorial transcriptions. Each expert editorial transcription is situated within a bibliographical sequence in its respective edition. It is also possible to navigate to Book and Virtual interfaces for the same fragment.
Figure 9: Relations at the micro- and macro-variation levels.
Book of Disquiet
23 When looking at the macro-variation level it is possible to visualize different aggregations of fragments at several levels, including Book, Document, Virtual, Contributor, and Classification. These visualizations enable large-scale comparisons across tables of contents and lists of texts that will give readers a sense of bibliographical structure, textual sequence and semantic classifications of various versions of the Book of Disquiet, in both expert and virtual editions.
24 Micro-variations across textual transcriptions and macro-variations across bibliographical structures in the work’s genetic and editorial archive are displayed through a network of shifting perspectives. This network of shifting perspectives allow users of the archive to see Pessoa’s writing process and his changing and variable plans for the Livro. At the same time, readers will become aware of the conjectural nature of the editorial solutions of the expert critical editions for producing a structured textual and bibliographical form out of a half-finished and fragmentary work. Further micro- and macro-variations will result from the archive’s socialization of editorial and authorial acts of production at the virtual level, opening up the work’s existing archive to future appropriations and transformations.
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Conclusion
25 Our attempt at creating a constellated archive of authorial and editorial witnesses follows from our rationale for integrating the work’s authorial and editorial history. It is also motivated by a model for virtualizing the Livro de Desassossego in ways that take advantage of the collaborative affordances of the medium to explore both the nature of writing and the nature of the book. Visualization of variation in the LdoD Archive takes places at three related levels: first, authorial witnesses are represented as digital image facsimiles (manuscripts, typescripts, printed states), according to a documentary editing approach; secondly, authorial witnesses and expert editions are transcribed and TEI encoded using XML tags for representing textual features, including revision sites and variants; thirdly, the user interface is designed for enabling readers to navigate between micro and macro-level variations in ways that enhance their understanding of both the work’s writing process and its bibliographical structures in various editorial instantiations.
26 Generation of further variation in the LdoD Archive implies that readers are given the possibility of performing bibliographical and textual interventions according to editor- function and author-function. This open use of authorial and editorial witnesses contained in the scholarly level of the archive takes place at the virtual level, where readers will be able to select, order, annotate and comment on particular fragments. They can also transition from an editorial to an authorial role and write variations and extensions based on particular passages or fragments. Editing and writing take place at this virtual dimension as actual practice and simulation of literary processes. The work’s genetic and editorial history is recontextualized in the cooperative networked textual environment maintained by our database and algorithmic model of literary performance. Through XML encoding and programmability the digital environment is experimentally designed for a critical engagement with textual variation, transmission and production in ways that allow us to experiment with writing, editing and meta- editing beyond the bibliographical horizon.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bénel, Aurélien and Christophe Lejeune. 2009. “Humanities 2.0: Documents, Interpretation and Intersubjectivity in the Digital Age”. International Journal on Web Based Communities, 5, pp. 562‒76.
Bryant, John. 2012. The Fluid Text: A Theory of Revision and Editing for Book and Screen. Ann Arbour: The University of Michigan Press.
Fraistat, Neil and Steven Jones. 2009. “Editing Environments: The Architecture of Electronic Texts”. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 24(1), pp. 9‒18.
Pessoa, Fernando. 1982. Livro do Desassossego. 2 vols. Ed. Jacinto do Prado Coelho. Lisboa: Ática.
Pessoa, Fernando. 2012. Livro do Desassossego. Ed. Richard Zenith. Lisboa: Assírio & Alvim.
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Pessoa, Fernando. 2008. Livro do Desassossego. Ed. Teresa Sobral Cunha. Lisboa: Relógio d’Água.
Pessoa, Fernando. 2010. Livro do Desassossego. 2 vols. Ed. Jerónimo Pizarro. Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda.
Pessoa, Fernando. 2013a. Livro do Desassossego. Ed. Teresa Sobral Cunha. Lisboa: Relógio d’Água.
Pessoa, Fernando. 2013b. Livro do Desassossego. Ed. Jerónimo Pizarro. Lisboa: Tinta da China.
Pizarro, Jerónimo. 2012. La Mediación Editorial: Sobre la Vida Póstuma de lo Escrito. Madrid: Iberoamericana / Vervuert.
Pizarro, Jerónimo. 2013. “Os Muitos Desassossegos”. In Comunicações do III Congresso Internacional Fernando Pessoa, Lisboa: Casa Fernando Pessoa, pp. 1‒15,
Portela, Manuel. 2013. “Nenhum Problema Tem Solução: Um Arquivo Digital do Livro do Desassossego”. MatLit, 1(1), pp. 9‒33,
Portela, Manuel and António Rito Silva. 2014. “A Model for a Virtual LdoD”. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 30, pp. 354‒70.
Robinson, Peter. 2013. “Towards a Theory of Digital Editions”. Variants, 10, pp. 105‒131.
Sepúlveda, Pedro. 2013. “Listas do Desassossego”. MatLit, 1(1): 35‒55,
Shillingsburg, Peter L. 2006. From Gutenberg to Google: Electronic Representations of Literary Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Siemens, Ray, Meagan Timney, Cara Leitch, Corina Koolen, and Alex Garnett, with the ETCL, INKE, and PKP Research Group. 2012. “Toward Modeling the Social Edition: An Approach to Understanding the Electronic Scholarly Edition in the Context of New and Emerging Social Media”. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 27, pp. 445‒61.
Silva, António Rito and Manuel Portela. 2013. “Social Edition 4 The Book of Disquiet: The Disquiet of Experts with Common Users”. In Matthias Korn, Tommaso Colombino, and Myriam Lewkowicz (eds.), ECSCW 2013: Adjunct Proceedings The 13th European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University, pp. 45‒50,
Silva, António Rito and Manuel Portela. 2015. “TEI4LdoD: Textual Encoding and Social Editing in Web 2.0 Environments”, Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative, 8,
Silvestre, Osvaldo Manuel. 2014. “O Que Nos Ensinam os Novos Meios sobre o Livro no Livro do Desassossego”. MatLit, 2 (1), pp. 79‒98,
Vanhoutte, Edward. 2006. “Prose Fiction and Modern Manuscripts: Limitations and Possibilities of Text-Encoding for Electronic Editions”. In Lou Burnard, Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe and John Unsworth (eds.), Electronic Textual Editing. New York: Modern Language Association of America, pp. 161‒80.
Werner, Marta L. 2011. “‘Reportless Places’: Facing the Modern Manuscript”. Textual Cultures, 6 (2), pp. 60‒83.
Zenith, Richard. 2013. “Livro do Desassossego: o romance possível (var.: impossível)”. In Comunicações do III Congresso Internacional Fernando Pessoa, Lisboa: Casa Fernando Pessoa, pp. 1‒12,
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NOTES
1. “Nenhum Problema Tem Solução: Um Arquivo Digital do Livro do Desassossego” [No Problem Has a Solution: A Digital Archive of the Book of Disquiet] is a research project of the Centre for Portuguese Literature at the University of Coimbra (2012‒2015), funded by FCT (Foundation for Science and Technology). Principal investigator: Manuel Portela. Reference: PTDC/CLE-LLI/ 118713/2010. Co-funded by FEDER (European Regional Development Fund), through Axis 1 of the Operational Competitiveness Program (POFC) of the National Strategic Framework (QREN). COMPETE: FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-019715. 2. Currently, the Portuguese National Library has catalogued 722 sheets as belonging to the Livro do Desassossego, of which 374 are typescripts, while 348 are manuscripts. Some of them are written on recto and verso. Only 12 texts from the Livro were published by Pessoa. Texts explicitly assigned by Pessoa to Livro do Desassossego contain the annotation “L. do D.” However, there are more than two hundred texts without the “L. do D.” annotation that also belong (or have been ascribed by editors as belonging) to the Livro. The total set of fragments in each edition has varied either because new texts have been discovered in Pessoa’s Archive, or because editors have decided to include or exclude particular texts. Another reason for variation originates in the fact that some documents have been interpreted as one single text or as more than one text. The number of fragments in the editions that we have encoded for the LdoD Archive is as follows: the edition by Jacinto do Prado Coelho (Pessoa 1982), 520 fragments; by Teresa Sobral Cunha (Pessoa 2008), 748 fragments; by Richard Zenith (Pessoa 2012), 514 fragments; and by Jerónimo Pizarro (Pessoa 2010), 586 fragments. 3. This first edition, published in 1982, was edited by Jacinto do Prado Coelho and transcribed by Maria Aliete Galhoz and Teresa Sobral Cunha. Jorge de Sena had also started working on the preparation of an edition of the Livro in the 1960s. This work was never finished, although Sena wrote an introduction for the Livro in 1964. For a detailed editorial history of all the works by Fernando Pessoa, see Pizarro 2012, 29‒90. For current views on Livro do Desassossego, see Pizarro 2013 and Zenith 2013. 4. The first authorial persona for the Livro was Vicente Guedes, but the work was later reassigned by Pessoa to Bernardo Soares, a persona described by Pessoa as a “semi-heteronym”. Although the authorial personae behind Livro do Desassossego tend not to be viewed as full heteronyms, heteronym attribution has been an important function in structuring the work. See also footnote 10 below. 5. For a recent analysis of the editions of Livro do Desassossego, see Silvestre 2014. Pessoa’s editorial plans for the Livro have been closely examined by Sepúlveda 2013. 6. Users of the archive will be able to register in the system and collaborate in the creation of virtual editions. This collaboration can take place informally but also in institutional contexts, particularly within schools and universities. We intend to set up several virtual communities of students and teachers who work with the Book of Disquiet at different locations, and support their use of the dynamic features of the Archive. Usability tests are being made to assist us in graphical interface design, and also for developing guidelines and tutorials that will explain the collaborative functions to future users. A second stage of project development (2016‒2018) will be specifically concerned with optimizing the collaborative affordances that we are programming. 7. The LdoD Archive uses the notion “fragment” to refer to all texts from the Livro. Although many texts can be considered fragmentary because they may have not been finished or revised, there are also many texts that are finished and revised pieces (“trechos”). Pessoa seems to have conceived the book as a particular arrangement of “trechos”. Regardless of their stage of completion and revision, all textual pieces may be considered textual fragments of the projected book.
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8. Although only Pizarro’s 2010 edition contains a detailed and extensive critical apparatus, we consider that Coelho’s, Sobral Cunha’s and Zenith’s minimal critical apparatus also qualifies them as critical editions (Pessoa 1982, 2012 and 2013a). The texts selected for transcription in the LdoD Archive are the total sum of all texts of those four scholarly editions, including those that have only been transcribed in appendices. There will be also a special section in the LdoD Archive with Pessoa’s notes and plans for the Book of Disquiet. 9. This notion can be related to Peter Shillingsburg’s “script act” (2006), although what we want to emphasize here is the fact that most textual units in the Livro seem to coincide with one temporal unit of writing, i.e. one sustained period of continuous writing. 10. One of the difficulties alluded to by Pessoa in the quoted passage derives from the fact that in the first stage of composition (1913‒1920), he assigned the Livro to Vicente Guedes, whose style and psychology are significantly different from the book’s later heteronym, Bernardo Soares, responsible for the second stage of composition (1928‒1935). Vicente Guedes authored most of the “large texts” in the Livro. Editors have tried to solve the dilemma arising from those compositional differences in four different ways: Coelho (Pessoa 1982) arranges the texts according to a combination of chronology and thematic affinities, assigning the whole book to Bernardo Soares; Sobral Cunha (Pessoa 2013a) divides the texts into two groups and assigns each of them to Vicente Guedes and Bernardo Soares, while defining an internal textual order for each part based on thematic proximity; Zenith (Pessoa 2012) makes Bernardo Soares’s pieces the structural axis of the book and relegates all the earlier large texts by Vicente Guedes to a final section in his edition; finally, after determining a likely date for all undated fragments, Pizarro (Pessoa 2013b) decides to follow a strictly chronological and genetic sequence, assigning all texts to Fernando Pessoa. 11. A reformed orthography was introduced in Portugal in 1911, but Pessoa continued to write according to the earlier spelling conventions. In their editions of the Livro, Coelho (Pessoa 1982) and Pizarro (Pessoa 2010) follow Pessoa’s orthography, while Sobral Cunha (Pessoa 2008) and Zenith (Pessoa 2012) have modernized Pessoa’s spelling according to contemporary Portuguese orthography, i.e. the spelling agreement of the 1970s (the convention that has been used until now). We are currently (2010‒2015) in a period of transition to a newly reformed orthography of the Portuguese language, which means that further spelling variations will be added to forthcoming editions of the Livro. In the LdoD Archive all spelling variations in both authorial sources and editorial transcriptions have been marked up.
ABSTRACTS
One of the goals of the LdoD Digital Archive is to show Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet as a network of potential authorial intentions and a conjectural construction of its successive editors. Our digital representation of the dynamics of textual and bibliographical variation depends on both XML encoding of variation sites (deletions, additions, substitutions, etc.) and metatextual information concerning authorial and editorial witnesses (date, order, heteronym, etc.). While TEI-XML markup may be considered as a particular kind of critical apparatus on its own, it is through visualization tools and graphical interface that users will be able to engage critically with the dynamics of variation in authorial and editorial witnesses. Besides representation of textual and bibliographical variation in the work’s genetic and editorial history, the LdoD Digital Archive will enable readers to generate new virtual forms of the work, assuming the roles of editor and/or
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author. Our paper discusses the theoretical and technical aspects of the various strategies adopted for encoding, visualizing, and generating variation in the LdoD Digital Archive. These issues are discussed with the support of a prototype currently under development.
INDEX
Keywords: Pessoa (Fernando), digital archive, social edition, TEI-encoding, visualization, variant, variation
AUTHORS
MANUEL PORTELA
Manuel Portela is Assistant Professor with Habilitation in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, University of Coimbra, where he directs the Doctoral Program on Advanced Studies in the Materialities of Literature. He is also a researcher in the Centre for Portuguese Literature at the University of Coimbra. He collaborated on the research project “ PO- EX ’70-’80: A Digital Archive of Portuguese Experimental Literature” ( CECLICO , University Fernando Pessoa, 2010-2013), and he is the principal investigator of the project “No Problem Has a Solution: A Digital Archive of the Book of Disquiet” (University of Coimbra, 2012-2015). His latest book is Scripting Reading Motions: The Codex and the Computer as Self-Reflexive Machines (MIT Press, 2013).
ANTÓNIO RITO SILVA
António Rito Silva is Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon, and researcher at INESC-ID (National Institute for Computers and Systems Engineering ‒ Research and Development). He has worked in the field of collaborative systems and social software, particularly in the domain of Business Management Processes Tools that blend the roles of producer and consumer in the design of business processes.
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CODEA: A “Primary” Corpus of Spanish Historical Documents
Ruth Miguel Franco and Pedro Sánchez-Prieto Borja
1 TEXTUAL CORPORA have undergone an extraordinary development since the 1980s (Lüdeling, Kytö and Kytö 2008; Renouf and Kehoe 2009), as one can see from projects such as PILEI, a macrocorpus directed by José Antonio Samper Padilla aimed to measure dialectal variation or PRESEEA, directed by Francisco Moreno, centred around sociolinguistic variation, or VARILEX project (Ueda and Ruiz Tinoco 2007‒2008).1 Nowadays it is virtually impossible to imagine historical linguistics without corpus linguistics; according to Enrique-Arias (2009, 11), we could say that corpus linguistics is not just a tool for diachronic studies, but a specific methodological approach. Developments in diachronic corpora have a great deal to do with improvements in tools for corpus exploitation, but also with corpus design, especially in the initial phase of selection of materials. Spanish diachronic corpora have taken advantage, for instance, of the resources offered by on line archives such as PARES (Portal de Archivos Españoles en Red)
2 Within this context the aim of this contribution is to contextualize and describe CODEA, Corpus de Documentos Españoles Anteriores a 1700, (
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The CODEA corpus
3 CODEA is an on line corpus containing editions and images of 1500 historical Spanish documentary texts, ranging from the elevent to the seventeenth centuries (exactly, from 1097 to 1696) and kept in different archives all throughout Spain (León, Asturias, Cantabria, Castille, Basque Country, Navarre, Aragón, La Rioja, Castilla‒La Mancha, Extremadura, Murcia and Andalusia). The CODEA corpus has been developed by GITHE, acronym of “Grupo de investigación de Textos para la Historia del Español”. GITHE is based in the University of Alcalá, but it has a much wider geographical span as it works within the CHARTA Network, an international group focusing mainly on old documentary texts and sharing a methodological approach as well as research interests. It is worth mentioning that one of CHARTA’s main concerns is the establishment of standards for edition of documentary texts that could be used by every researcher in the network. The aim of this effort is not only to improve our editions in general, but to be able to create over the years a great corpus of texts edited in a similar way by many different research groups all over the word. In this corpus, Spanish documents from Latin American archives are included, which are very interesting texts that nevertheless pose particular problems.
4 CODEA offers a triple view of the document: a facsimile of the original document, a palaeographical transcription and a critical presentation, carried out according to the CHARTA Network’s editorial criteria for historical texts, which will be commented on later. Up till now, CODEA has proved useful for linguistic research, mainly because of the reliable edition of the texts, conducted according to sound scientific standards. CODEA was born around 1998, but it was not planned as an on line, independent corpus: originally, it was only a collection of documentary texts to be included in the CORDE, Diachronic Corpus of Spanish Language (http://corpus.rae.es/CORDEnet.html) of the Real Academia Española. Later on, a team of former diachronic linguistics students of the Universidad de Alcalá prepared some editions of documents. These editions became the first volume of Textos para la Historia del Español, which became a series, with nine volumes published to date (Sánchez-Prieto Borja 1991‒2014). As years have passed, other philologists and linguists, as well as researchers in different fields ― such as experts in computer science ― joined the group. 5 At present, the CODEA team keeps working on new documents and reviewing the old ones. We believe that some of the outcome of this effort can be shared, so that different researchers that face the challenges of editing historical materials can benefit from them.
Theoretical and practical requirements for historical corpora
6 The foundations of the work with historical corpora rest on the idea that studies in diachronic linguistics (as well as other historical studies, like palaeography) must always be grounded in a corpus of dated texts, which must include legal and administrative documents. Documentary texts provide a number of advantages over literary texts: we usually know the date and place when and where they were written; they are written in a non-literary style and include fragments that could be close to the
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common language and, last but not least, they have not been altered, neither linguistically nor in their redaction, by centuries of manuscript transmission.
7 But such a corpus must meet certain requirements. In the first place, it must be a primary corpus: with primary corpus we intend a corpus made up from texts directly edited by the corpus researchers, not former editions by other authors. This is, a same research group takes care of searching for the texts, selecting and editing them. We arrive thus to the second requirement for a quality corpus: the corpus texts have to be transcribed and edited according to previously set scientific criteria. This means that all the text included is homogeneous and do not show any differences due to the editor’s decisions. Also, the corpus must contain a large number of texts in order to have a representative sample. Finally, the corpus must include not only texts and search engines, but also quantitative and qualitative analysis about topics such as the space-time distribution of linguistic variants.
8 To sum it up, we assume that only a corpus produced out of documentary texts directly selected from archives and transcribed and edited by scholars within the same corpus can fulfil the requirements of representativeness, reliability, quotability and retrievability. In this respect, we would like to underline that textual scholarship and corpus linguistics, specially when dealing with diachronic corpora, are closely linked, since the quality of the corpus is based on the quality of the editions that compose it. We have taken into account these requirements when designing CODEA, so that the corpus could be said to meet the aforementioned standards.
9 In the first place, in its actual state, CODEA can be said to be a representative sample, because it comprises a wide geographical, chronological and sociolinguistic range of texts. Also, it is reliable, because these texts are purpose built editions, carried out according to scientific and philological criteria. Texts in CODEA follow the editorial criteria of the International CHARTA Network and have been widely applied and amply recognized as useful; nevertheless, they are not static but develop progressively to meet the new challenges that editors face when working with different texts. Therefore, these editing standards, based on decades of research (Sánchez-Prieto Borja, 1998), have just been published in a new and improved version (Sanchez-Prieto Borja 2011a). The new criteria of CHARTA are more precise in aspects that were formerly left at the discretion of editors. For instance, now these criteria provide editors with guidelines to face material accidents in the texts, such as deletions or corrections or to indicate different hands in the copy of the documents.2 These norms are particularly useful to correct, in the critical presentation, minor copy mistakes, such as syllable repetition (for instance, cartarta for carta in a document from the Royal Chancery).
10 Furthermore, the accuracy of these editions can be easily checked, since a facsimile of the original document is also available within the same corpus. Finally, one can see the quotability and retrievability of CODEA in the fact that it provides free and universal access to all of its contents, which can also be downloaded.
Selection and edition of CODEA documents
11 Let us now take a closer look at some of these concepts. As for representativeness, a much larger number of texts and documents are easily available nowadays than it was in the past, thanks to the digitalization and on line availability of some archives. But this fact make us face the need of selecting materials for our corpora. There are two
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main methodological approaches. On one hand, we have the model of macrocorpus, like Corpus del Español by M. Davis, the aforementioned CORDE, CHICA, Digital Corpus of Old Catalan for Catalan or TMILG, Digital Medieval Treasure of Galician Language,for Galician. On the other, there are corpus that focus on a specific textual genre like Camoes for Portuguese theater, Medieval Bible by Enrique-Arias for translations of the Bible into Spanish or the The Anglo-Normand On-line Hub, which displays searchable Anglo-Norman texts. These two models, the macro-corpus and the specific corpus, are complementary, but lately, the tendency in Europe is to follow the specific model, which can reach both a better definition of the focal point of research and a higher quality in displayed materials.
12 Corpora can be specific regarding their contents, but also in their aims. Most diachronic corpora are planned for linguistic study, even for a very specific purpose, like CHICA, which is the first step towards a historical grammar of Catalan, or CORDE, which will provide data for the new historical dictionary of Spanish language (Pascual and Domínguez, 2009). Unfortunately, corpora built by historians are rather rare, but we could mention the excellent Codice Diplomatico della Lombardia Medievale, by the Università di Pavia.
13 In this respect, we should note that large corpora are very often “secondary”, this is, built up from available editions of each text, most of the times of uneven quality and based on different editorial criteria. But even specific corpora are sometimes constructed used previous editions, like the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse, which includes editions from the nineteenth century.
14 Most of these corpora are different as well because of the way in which texts are displayed, this is, the final aspect of the edition on the screen; the choices have an impact on their reliability and use for study. Broadly speaking we could say that there are not noticeable tendencies in this respect in English, French or Italian philology. In general, on line editions are less palaeographical and do not mark the resolving of abbreviations (like the Anglo-Norman on-line Hub). But sometimes on line text can be reproduced almost exactly the original script, like Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse, which keeps both þ (thorn) and th. So, different corpora choose to show different bits of the information contained in the texts.
15 Since it is by all means impossible to enclose all the information in the original document in just one edition, the CODEA team, following the CHARTA standards, has decided to draft and display multiple editions of documents. Aware of the actual prospects of CODEA, we have made some sensible choices among the different options that the multi-edition furnishes us with: the documents are presented on line in a triple visualization. First, a palaeographical transcription which is both accurate and manageable, since it does not include any special characters, as we can see, for example, in document 259, Archivo Histórico National, Clero, Palencia, folder 1657, number 13 (dated in 1257): Esta es la pesquisa que mando fazer don ferrant gonçalez de Sojas merjno mayor de Castiella. a pelay diaz de forna alcalde del Rey & a gutier yuan nes de fresno pesquiridor del Rey por demanda 2 que demandaua el concejo de aguilar alos de valuereçoso que son solariegos del abbat de aguilar
16 Secondly, a critical presentation edited according to the before mentioned criteria: graphical features with no phonetic relevance are standardized and the text presents
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the necessary accents, as well as punctuation conforming to the document’s syntax. In the case of the aforementioned document 259, it would be as follows: Esta es la pesquisa que mandó fazer don Ferrant Gonçález de Sojas, merino mayor de Castiella, a Pelay Díaz de Forna, alcalde del rey, e a Gutier Ivañes de Fresno, pesquiridor del rey, por demanda 2 que demandava el concejo de Aguilar a los de Valvereçoso que son solariegos del abbat de Aguilar. [This is the enquiry that sir Ferrant González de Sojas, main judge of Castille, ordered Pelay Díaz de Forna, royal judge, and Gutier Ivañes de Fresno, royal detective, to do, through a demand by which the village of Aguilar demanded the men of Valvereçoso that life and work in the lands of the abbot of Aguilar]
17 Lastly, as we have already mentioned, the CODEA web displays a facsimile of the original document. The CODEA team has recently signed an agreement with the National Office for Archives and Libraries in Spain, which allows us to use digitalized images of document in national archives and upload them into the CODEA web. Up to date, images of documents from the Archivo Municipal de Toledo and Archivo Municipal de Guadalajara are displayed in our website, and soon the uploading of facsimiles from the Archivo General de Simancas y Archivo Histórico Nacional will be completed.
18 This is an example of the visualization of a document in the CODEA corpus; both palaeographical transcription and critical edition are displayed in parallel columns; the image opens in a new window that can be moved around the screen (Figure 1). Each one of the displays of the document in the CODEA web provides data for different kinds of research. The facsimiles of the documents can be used for palaeographical studies. Palaeographical transcriptions of documents are useful for graphic and phonetic studies. Finally, critical presentations provide materials for syntactic and lexical studies, as well as for historical studies in general.
Future developments of CODEA
19 As for CODEA’s future developments, we are committed to bringing the corpus to a new phase, with funding from the Ministry of Economics of Spain. First, the corpus’ size will be increased, with a thousand new documents added in order to reach a total amount of 2500 by 2015. Secondly, also the chronological and geographical span of the corpus will be expanded.
20 The corpus will be extended chronologically, to reach from the origins of Spanish to the eighteenth century. Up to 2% of documents in Latin will be included, since it is very difficult to set boundaries between Latin and Romance in the Early Middle Ages. On the other hand, the eighteenth-century documents will be a novelty, since this century is very scarcely represented in corpora (although archives are plenty of documentary materials from this period), and also very little studied.
21 From a geographical point of view, CODEA will include Castilian documents from bilingual areas of the Iberian Peninsula: Galicia, Valencia and the Basque Country. The difficulties that these documents pose have been the cause for them to be excluded from CODEA until the present date, although there are some other corpora within the CHARTA network that do work with this sort of texts; for instance, Enrique-Arias 2012 deals with problems of edition and study of Catalan-Spanish bilingual letters.
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22 Also the sociolinguistic levels represented in the corpus will be extended. Currently, documents given by private individuals were less than 30% of the total amount and these were predominantly conveyances3. Previous experience shows that lexical and syntactic efficiency increases as the percentage of private documents increase. We believe that next versions of CODEA should reach at least a 43% of private citizen documentary texts, in order to get closer to real usage of language4.
23 Nevertheless, the importance of legal and official documents can not be disregarded, since administrative language has played a crucial role in the shaping of modern Spanish. For instance, some textual connectors such as en consecuencia, por tanto, por consiguiente (having all of them meanings close to consecutive “so”), very common nowadays in spoken Spanish, sprung in administrative language and moved downwards in the sociolinguistic scale. In consequence, it is possible and productive to study the influence of the official language in diachronic change of the Spanish language, in the context of multi-causality in linguistic change.
24 As for the sociolinguistic side of the project, there are two very important items that will be included. On one hand, women’s writing, as eighteenth century feminine epistolaries are common and available. On the other, documents written by historically socially deprived people, like travellers or Spanish gitanos (gypsies). We would also like to mention that the Spanish Institute of Gypsy Culture is supporting this project.
25 In order to identify and edit all these documents, the CODEA team will visit and explore national and city archives. Unfortunately, not all the archives in which we are interested have detailed, web-compliant catalogues, so on-site work has proved necessary. It is worth mentioning the relevance of close collaboration with staff in archives, since their knowledge of the funds can point out important documents not described or poorly described in the archive inventories. This has been the case in the Archivo Municipal de Toledo, which participates in the CODEA project.
26 Documents from the following archives will be examined and incorporated into the corpus: 1. Archivo Histórico Nacional, specially its rich Inquisition collection 2. Archivo General de Simancas, which keeps many remarkable epistolary collections, written by kings (p. ej., Fernando II el Católico), women or even some common citizens whose cultural level was quite low 3. City archives from Andalusian capitals
27 For bilingual communities, we will examine the Archivo de la Corona de Aragón (Barcelona), as well as the great documentary stock of Valencia and Balearic Islands, Galicia and the Basque Country for Castilian and bilingual texts.
28 Markup or tagging of corpora is nowadays standard practice; it allows quick and detailed information retrieval (Isasi 2010; Spence, Isasi, Pierazzo and Vicente, 2012). Markup of external features of texts is most common, since it broadens the perspectives of studies conducted on them, like the Nouveau Corpus d’Amsterdam, for instance. Tagging of linguistic features is also usual, as one can see in the projects on European Dialect Syntax. Most corpora use TEI markup, although many textual and linguistic features are not included in the standard. Nevertheless, some centres, like the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London, apply the TEI standard consistently to their corpora, like EPIDOC, Epigraphic Documents in TEI XML or The Gascon Rolls Project. In CODEA+ 2015, the following information will be displayed in the header
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of each document and encoded for future research. This header is different from the ones currently used in CODEA, which are simpler and include less external data:
GITHE (research group)
CODEA (corpus)
0274 (number of document within the corpus)
AMTO A.S. 602, cajón 8, legajo 1, nº 37 (shelf mark)
1515 julio 20 (Burgos, España) (date and place)
Castellano (language) Cancilleresco (type of document according to issuer) Pragmática (type of document according to contents) Gótica cursiva (hand) Autor: hombre (gender of author)
Pragmática de la reina doña Juana en la que prohíbe vestir telas de seda, plata y oro a excepción de las personas de la realeza (resumée)
Pedro de Quintana (la fize escrevir) (author) Papel (material) 265 x 160 aprox. (measures) Buen estado de conservación (information about conservation, particularities, etc)
Mª Jesús Torrens Álvarez (transcriber)
Carlos Martín Sánchez (reviewer 1)
Cristina Castillo Martínez (reviewer 2)
29 Development of complex search engines is essential for discovering the benefits of the corpus and the new search tools will play a very important role in CODEA. Search engines will include functionalities such as search by lemma (for instance, when searching one verb the search results will include all forms, regular and irregular, including old morphological variants), form, high or low frequencies and lexical bundles within the document. These engines will also be able to search the information included in the head: chancery, archive, date and place and so on. Users of CODEA will be able to visualize the results of these searches built into maps, tables or statistical graphics.
30 The functionality of these engines greatly improves when searching a completely lemmatized text. It will be the critical presentation the one to be lemmatized, since edition criteria have been devised to disambiguate homographies (en/én; al/ál; y/ý). Since automatic lemmatization usually does not go beyond 95% of text forms, we will go for interactive lemmatization of the whole text to reach 100% of forms, with a
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methodology already successfully carried out by Horcajada (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) and Ueda (University of Tokyo; Ueda and Perea 2010).
CODEA for research and study
31 To date, the 1500 documents of CODEA have been the basis of several studies, conferences and scientific articles, and their results are a great feedback for the corpus, since they contribute to chart future decisions and develop further applications. We will shortly comment on only two of these works; a complete bibliographical list of the research that has been carried out up till now is available in the GITHE website (e.g. Pato and Felíu Arquiona 2005 or Ueda, in press).
32 First, CODEA allows to carry on studies on historical geographical linguistics, meaning the mapping of graphical, graphic-phonetic, morphological, lexical and syntactic forms in different time periods. In this line, Sánchez-Prieto Borja (2011b) has studied the geographical distribution of words meaning “plot of land” in the Iberian Peninsula the from thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. Geographic data are crucial for research in historical linguistics; CODEA+ 2015 will provide us with the graphical distribution onto a map of the search engine results for a certain linguistic feature. Such maps enable the researcher to see the different areas in the development of Spanish language, and to place different phenomena ― which in traditional studies were thought to be general ― within their original areas. For instance, the documents show that indefinite pronoun algún-alguno, generally considered to be common to all the Castilian area, seems instead to have its roots in the Leonese area, in North West Spain, and to have spread Eastward and Southward.
33 Secondly, a very innovative research concept is the use of CODEA for automatic dating of undated documents (they represented up to 6% of the CODEA collection in 2012). Our research team, together with the University of Tokyo, is currently developing a computer tool for interactive dating of undated documents. Researchers Ueda and Kawasaki, from University of Tokyo have written a complex program to date these documentary pieces with a very small margin of error (Kawasaki 2014). In the first phase of the work, it was necessary to establish a large number of linguistic and non linguistic parameters, which range from hands or seals to syntax or notarial formulae. The tests conducted so far show that not only noticeable phonetic of morphosyntactic features are relevant for dating a text, but also small graphical variation, like saber / ssaber, aver / auer. Once the parameters were fixed, they statistically measured the chronological co-occurrence of certain linguistic features in the dated documents (Díaz Moreno, Martínez Sánchez, Ramírez Luengo and Sánchez-Prieto Borja, 2015; different resources for dating undated texts are commented on in Gervers 2000).
34 In order to check the reliability of this method, several tests have been conducted on dated documents. For instance, when applying this dating methodology to documents such as CODEA 2011 nº 468 (León, 1464), a date ranging from 1451 to 1475 is inferred, which is perfectly coherent with the document’s real writing date. In CODEA 2015 this technique will be applied to all the undated pieces of the corpus, and its results will be available for study.
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Conclusion
35 We have tried to show how scholarly edition of texts in all its phases, from the identification and reading of exemplars to the very last graphic choices, is of the outmost importance for historical corpus linguistics. Edition of documentary texts for research and study should be based on a deep knowledge of historical linguistics and carried out according to previously set editorial criteria. Creation of primary corpora, this is, corpora built from ad hoc editions, is crucial for historical research and study and it is clear that information retrieval heavily depends on the way in which the texts are published. Therefore, a corpus is not only a tool for different studies, but a methodological approach to edition that be taken into account in textual scholarship. CODEA, with its triple presentation, together with accurate and sound editorial criteria, aims to provide resources for many different studies, from graphematics to general history, which is impossible with a single edition.
36 And, last but not least, collaboration among textual scholars is crucial to enrich and broaden any editorial project. CODEA aims to promote, within the bounds of the International CHARTA Network, scientific exchange among research groups on Hispanic documents from many different countries, as well as to stimulate methodological transfer among groups committed to editing and studying documents in different languages.
37 As a conclusion, we hope that CODEA will contribute to give the Spanish research on corpus linguistics a prominent position in the international scene and hopefully contribute to improve electronic edition of documentary texts also in other languages.
Addenda
38 The time elapsed between the writing and the publication of the following article has been enough for the initial perspectives to come true and, for once, even before the planned deadline. The results of each search are now quantified as graphics, according to four parameters. First, a time axis; the dates of emission of the documents build a linear graphic which, at the same time, displays the distribution along the centuries of the form searched for. Second, a geographical axis, where the search results are displayed according to countries, provinces and villages. Third, a typological axis shows the number of occurrences in each documentary and diplomatic typology, context of emission and, specially, women’s writing. Finally, a codicological axis indicates the distribution of the results by archive and type of writing.
39 A list of key words (up to ten) has been added to the heading of each document. A full list of key word for the 1,500 documents currently included in CODEA is available, so it is possible for the user to select the required key word and search for it in the whole corpus. Thus, we have created a true semantic map (or referential map) of the corpus.
40 However, the most interesting new feature is the extensive incorporation of tools which display on a map the location of writing of each document in which the results of a given search are found. This tool allows to search for several forms at the same time and to visualize them with different icons on the map. In this way, CODEA+ 2015 becomes a true linguistic and diachronic atlas of Spanish (Atlas Lingüístico Diacrónico y Dinámico del Español, ALDIDI). In addition, it is interactive, as the user can set different
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parameters for each search, selecting time limits, regions, documentary type, context of emission (chancellery, ecclesiastical, private), participation of women, scribe, etc.
41 The advanced view of results gives an immediate and detailed idea of the weight of geographical factors in linguistic variation in the Iberian Peninsula from the first Spanish texts to the nineteenth century. The linguistic variation located and quantified in the CODEA graphics and maps not only lexical, but also phonetic, morphologic and syntactic: users can search variants such as cosa/ cossa, otro/otri/otre/otrie, the geographical distribution of venta/vención/vendición/vendimiento, or collocations like no ... ning*/no ... alg*)
42 In conclusion, CODEA+ 2015 is fully working with multi factor analysis, since the diatopic data can be combined with sociolinguistic and diplomatic data. But the CODEA team will carry on working and very soon new developments will be included, for instance, a link to the LETRAS y NÚMEROS programmes, established by Hiroto Ueda of the University of Tokyo.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Biblia Medieval,
CHARTA: Corpus Hispánico y Americano en la Red: Textos Antiguos,
CHICA: Corpus Informatitzat del Català Antic.
CODEA+ 2015: Corpus de Documentos Españoles Anteriores a 1800,
Codice Diplomatico della Lombardia Medievale,
CORDE: Corpus Diacrónico del Español,
Corpus del Español,
Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse,
Díaz Moreno, Rocío et al. 2015. “Hacia una cronología evolutiva del español”. In Francisco Javier de Cos Ruiz and Mariano Franco Figueroa (eds.), Vol. 1 of Actas del IX Congreso Internacional de Historia de la Lengua Española. Madrid and Frankfurt: Iberoamericana Vervuert, pp. 435‒49.
Enrique-Arias, Andrés, ed. 2009. Diacronía de las lenguas iberorrománicas: Nuevas aportaciones desde la lingüística de corpus. Madrid and Frankfurt: Iberoamericana Vervuert.
Enrique-Arias, Andrés. 2012. “Retos del estudio sociohistórico del contacto de lenguas a través de un corpus documental. El caso del castellano en contacto con el catalán en Mallorca”. Revista de Investigación Lingüística, 15, pp. 23‒46.
EPIDOC: Epigraphic Documents in TEI XML,
European Dialect Syntax.
Gervers, Michael, ed. 2000. Dating Undated Medieval Charters. Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer.
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GITHE: Grupo de Investigación de Textos para la Historia del Español.
Isasi, Carmen. 2010. “Edición digital: retos nuevos en los nuevos recursos.” In Mariña Arbor Aldea and Antonio F. Guiadanes (eds.), Estudos de edición crítica e lírica galego-portuguesa. Special issue of Verba: Annuario Galego de Filoloxía, 67, pp. 353‒38.
Kawasaki, Yoshifumi. 2014. “Datación crono-geográfica de documentos medievales españoles.” Scriptum digital, 3, pp. 29‒63.
Lüdeling, Anke, Anne Kytö and Merja Kytö, eds. 2008. Corpus Linguistics: An International Handbook. Amsterdam: Walter de Gruyter.
Nouveau Corpus d’Amsterdam,
PARES: Portal de Archivos Españoles.
Pascual, José Antonio and Carlos Domínguez. 2009. “Un corpus para un nuevo diccionario histórico del español.” In Andrés Enrique-Arias (ed.), Diacronía de las lenguas iberorrománicas. Nuevas aportaciones desde la lingüística de corpus. Madrid and Frankfurt: Iberoamericana Verbuert, pp. 79‒93.
Pato, Enrique and Elena Felíu Arquiola. 2005. “Alternancia de formas, nivelación e inferencia semántica: El caso de los participios en -udo del español medieval.” Revue de Linguistique Romane, 69, pp. 437‒63.
PRESEEA: Proyecto para el Estudio Sociolingüístico del Español de España y América,
Renouf, Antoinete and Andrew Kehoe, eds. 2009. Corpus Linguistics: Refinements and Reassessments. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Sánchez-Prieto Borja, Pedro, ed. 1991‒2014. Textos para la historia del español I. 9 vols. Alcalá de Henares: Universidad de Alcalá.
Sánchez-Prieto Borja, Pedro. 1998. Cómo editar los textos medievales. Criterios para su presentación gráfica. Madrid: Arco/Libros.
Sánchez-Prieto Borja, Pedro. 2011a. La edición de textos españoles medievales y clásicos. San Millán de La Cogolla: Cilengua.
Sánchez-Prieto Borja, Pedro. 2011b. “Ensayo de geografía lingüística histórica: términos para ‘parcela de terreno agrícola’ en las fuentes documentales de la Edad Media.” In Sara Gómez Seibane and José L. Ramírez Luengo (eds.), Maestra en mucho. Estudios filológicos en Homenaje a Carmen Isasi Martínez. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Voces del Sur, pp. 271‒302.
Spence, Paul et al. 2012. “Cruzando la brecha: la marcación digital con criterios filológicos”. Mª Jesús Torrens and Pedro Sánchez-Prieto Borja (eds.), Nuevas perspectivas para la edición y el estudi tiguos. Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 465‒84.
The Anglo-Normand On-line Hub,
TMILG: Tesouro Medieval Informatizado da Lingua Galega,
Ueda, Hiroto. In press. “La apócope extrema medieval en la fonética castellana y en la escritura a la francesa: Observaciones en el Corpus de Documentos Españoles Anteriores a 1700 (CODEA).” In Juan Sánchez Méndez and Mariela de la Torre (eds.), Problemas y métodos en la edición y el estudio de documentos hispánicos antiguos. Valencia: Tirant Lo Blanch.
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Ueda, Hiroto and Antonio Ruiz Tinoco. 2007‒2008. “The Varilex Project: Spanish lexical variation.” Linguistica Atlantica. Journal of the Atlantic Provinces Linguistic Association (Canada), 27‒28, pp. 117‒21.
Ueda, Hiroto and María Pilar Perea. 2010. “Método general de lematización con una gramática mínima y un diccionario óptimo. Aplicación a un corpus dialectal escrito.” In Isabel Moskowich- Spiegel Fandiño et al. (eds.), Visualización del lenguaje a través de corpus. A Coruña: Universidade da Coruña, pp. 919‒32.
Ueda, Hiroto and María Pilar Perea. 2011. “Applying quantitative analysis techniques to La flexió verbal en els dialectes catalans”. Dialectologia et Geolinguistica: Journal of the International Society for Dialectology and Geolinguistics, 18, pp. 99‒114.
NOTES
1. This work has been supported by national research funds “Edition and study of documents from Toledo (XVI-XVII centuries)” (FF12009‒10877, sub FILO) MICINN and “Corpus of Spanish documents before 1800: CODEA+ 2015” (FFI2012 ‒33,646) MINECO. 2. When some letters or characters are illegible or have been lost in a damaged area of the document (stained, broken or bent parchment, for instance), the editor will include in the palaeographical transcription one asterisk for each of the missing characters, for instance: “d** vez*nos” (two neighbours). If they do not know the exact number of characters missing, they may use three spaced asterisks in brackets, for instance: “dos v[* * *]”. Additionally, the cause of damage will be stated in the palaeographical transcription, in italics and in brackets, like: [roto] ‘broken’, [doblez] ‘folded’, [mancha] ‘stain’. On the critical presentation, any fragments reconstructed by the editor will be displayed in angle brackets, for instance: “d
ABSTRACTS
The aim of this article is to describe CODEA, Corpus de Documentos Españoles Anteriores a 1700, an online corpus containing 1,500 documents dating from the eleventh to the seventeenth centuries and to present a new development, CODEA+ 2015. These corpora have been created by GITHE (Grupo de Investigación de Textos para la Historia del Español). CODEA is a primary corpus, meaning that the GITHE is responsible both for the edition of the documents and the construction of the corpus. Also, the editing of the documents is carried out using scientific criteria which have been defined by Red CHARTA on the basis of extensive research. Finally, the usability of the corpus is increased by tools such as research engines and an advanced display of the results on graphics and maps, which turn the corpus into a powerful research tool on linguistic variation, both diachronic and geographic.
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INDEX
Keywords: corpus, documentary editing, historical edition, palaeography, Spanish history, linguistic variation
AUTHORS
RUTH MIGUEL FRANCO
Ruth Miguel Franco is a lecturer of Spanish Language at the Universitat de les Illes Balears. She studied Classical Philology and Romance Philology at the Universidad de Salamanca, where she also did her PhD in Latin Philology. She was a research fellow at the Universidad de Alcalá and a language assistant at the Università degli Studi di Padova. Her research focuses on textual criticism and linguistic analysis, in a wide range of texts and periods, from the seventh century Latin epistolary of Braulio of Saragosse to the Elegatie Lingue Latine by Lorenzo Valla or documentary texts both in Latin and Spanish, such as medieval cartularies from Toledo or eighteenth century documents from Majorcan archives.
PEDRO SÁNCHEZ-PRIETO BORJA
Pedro Sánchez-Prieto Borja is a professor of Spanish Language at the Universidad de Alcalá. He did his PhD in the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, on the edition and study of a Spanish translation of the Vulgata. He was a language assistant at the Università degli Studi di Padova; he also taught as a senior lecturer at the Universidad de Alcalá and was a professor at the University of Zaragoza. He coordinates the research group GITHE (Grupo de Investigación de Textos para la Historia del Español) and the Red Internacional CHARTA. He is the director of the CODEA project, series editor of Textos para la historia del español and also general editor of the General estoria by Alfonso X (Madrid 2009, 10 vols.) and the Lapidario. Among his several publications are Cómo editar los textos medievales (1998) and La edición de textos medievales y clásicos (2011), as well as works about the “castellano alfonsí”, the Spanish language in Toledo, the rhyme in Auto de los Reyes Mago or the distributive repetition of numerals.
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Book Reviews
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Johnny Kondrup, Editionsfilologi
Adam Borch
REFERENCES
Johnny Kondrup. Editionsfilologi. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanums Forlag. 2011. 553 pp. ISBN 978‒87‒635‒3743‒8.
1 What one is likely first to notice about Johnny Kondrup’s Editionsfilologi is probably the title. In Danish (the book’s language), the term is hardly common currency. It does not occur in standard dictionaries (e.g. Den Danske Ordbog) and Kondrup himself reckons it was only first used officially in 1995 when “Nordisk Netværk for Editionsfilologer” was established. It might have its closest relative in the German “Editionsphilologie”, but, as he explains, it is also related to “Editionswissenschaft”. In an Anglo-American tradition, the definition “videnskaben om udgivelse eller genudgivelse af litterære værker (ofte såkaldte klassiske eller kanoniske tekster), manuskripter, breve og andre skriftlige dokumenter” (2011, 15) (“the science of the publication or republication of literary works (often so-called classical or canonical texts), manuscripts, letters and other written documents”) suggests that “scholarly editing” and “textual criticism” are related fields.
2 What precisely falls under the umbrella of “editionsfilologi” is still an open question. Kondrup stresses that “tekstkritikken” (“textual criticism”) is the pivotal element, but that in his definition it has a broader scope than one might find elsewhere, extending to include “tekstkritik, variantsapparater, dokumentbeskrivelse (bibliografi og manuskriptbeskrivelse), kommentering og elektronisk udgivelse” (17) (“textual criticism, apparatuses of variant states, document description [bibliography and palaeography], annotation and digital publication”). In addition, it is also concerned with scholarly editions that might not always be considered “critical”, but are still aimed at a specialized academic audience (e.g. facsimile and variorum editions).
3 Editionsfilologi is essentially a practical and technical handbook for scholars, publishers, students and others involved or merely interested in the publication of scholarly editions of literary works. It is not a comprehensive guide, but focuses on the main
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areas within its theoretical scope. It has two chapters on textual criticism (Chapters 3 and 4), two on how to deal with variant states (Chapters 5 and 6), two on document description (Chapters 7 and 8), one on annotation and commentary (Chapter 9) and one on digital publications (Chapter 10). These are preceded by an introduction (Chapter 1) and a typological discussion of scientific editions (Chapter 2). Editionsfilologi is intended as a “dialogpartner” (18) (“dialogue partner”) for its readers and as such it works very well. Overall, the approach is descriptive rather than normative and authoritative. The discussions are lucid and succinct, and, despite the book’s length, it is also easy to find specific information. A detailed table of contents, including all subheadings, allows for a quick overview of each chapter and the inclusion of both a topical and a personal index is a useful feature. One could perhaps have wished it also included a glossary of selected terminology (and not merely the discussion found in Chapter 1), but Kondrup and his publisher have, generally, produced a handbook that is well organized and simple to navigate.
4 Within the field of modern textual scholarship, Editionsfilologi is most directly associated with strands focusing on the study of the sociology of texts (“det tekstsociologiske synspunkt”). Kondrup is, for example, critical of the strong focus on authorial intentions underlying both the Germanic principle of Ausgabe letzter Hand and Anglo-American copy-text theory (2011, 26‒29 and 89‒112). He argues that a literary work is not synonymous with one of its versions, but rather the aggregate of all its variant states, while stressing the importance of considering all aspects of the publication process that could have influenced a given version of a work (e.g. printers and editors). Equally central to the book’s framework is the connection with hermeneutics which is seen not only as a way for “editionsfilologi” to reconnect with traditional literary criticism but also as a source of important self-reflection within the field (2011, 21‒24). Kondrup dispels the idea of a “definitive” scholarly edition as well as the opinion that “editionsfilologi” is an objective science, a craft alone. Instead, he presents us with a timely reminder of the limits and consequences of scholarly editing. The process of editing literary texts for publication is always a matter of interpretative choices made from specific temporal, spatial and even ideological positions and these choices all have a concrete impact on how literary texts are interpreted by readers.
5 Editionsfilologi addresses itself to a relatively small academic community. As mentioned, it is written in Danish. It is also meant to fill a distinct gap in Danish scholarship and it draws most of its examples from Scandinavian literature and scholarship.1 It is, in other words, situated squarely within a Danish and Scandinavian critical tradition. This might suggest that its primary justification somehow hinge\s on its potential readership. But personally, I do not think this is the case. Editionsfilologi contains much that would be of interest to a broader international academic community. The chapter on digital publications, for example, gives an interesting and detailed perspective on a rapidly developing field while the chapter on scholarly annotation and commentary provides a thought-provoking discussion of an aspect of scholarly work which still calls for thorough theoretical and methodological treatment. More generally, Kondrup’s focus on scholarly and editorial practices in Scandinavian could help to throw new light on practices in other scholarly communities. It is to be hoped that, in the future, Kondrup will find more time to share his views with a broader international audience.
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NOTES
1. The last work of a similar kind was Paul V. Rubow’s Den kritiske Kunst (1938).
AUTHORS
ADAM BORCH
Adam Borch is a PhD Student at Åbo Akademi University, Finland. His doctoral dissertation is a communicational reading of Alexander Pope's satirical poem The Dunciad, with special focus on the poem's addressivity.
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James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities
Geert Lernout
REFERENCES
James Turner. Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. 576 pp. ISBN 978‒069‒114564‒8.
1 Before I can review a book with this title, a disclaimer is in order: I may well be one of the few officially accredited philologists left in the world. After my graduation in what in Belgium we still called “Germanic Philology”, I was so proud that I had it registered on my new identity card to replace my previous occupation (student). When the official at the Antwerp city hall expressed her doubt that such a word as “philologist” existed and that she could only officially enter it if it was included in her pocket dictionary, I told her, with all my new graduate confidence, “Don’t worry, my dear: we make those dictionaries”.
2 Since then both the word and what it stands for seem to have disappeared from the face of the earth; most of the philology departments have been renamed and the degrees we still issue are now in “language and literature”. Although the word and its derivatives survive in the name of some of the older scholarly journals, the term does not seem to describe a single endeavor. I can only hope that Turner’s book will help change that.
3 Whatever else it is, philology is historical and as such it has always had a not always healthy interest in its own history: in the seventies we even had a first year course on the history of the discipline but in recent years the noun and the adjective seem to have had a bad press since, despite attempts to salvage the term by literary theorists such as Paul de Man and Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, these tended to redefine the discipline into something that few of its older practitioners would have been able to
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recognize. Yet de Man’s title “The Return of Philology” (1982) has turned out to have been prophetic: all of a sudden, philology is all over the place.
4 In fact, and this is a second disclaimer: I have been guilty of introducing a term that was later given a decidedly different meaning when I playfully tried to distinguish my own rather old-fashioned work in modern Joyce manuscripts from the more theoretically refined genetic criticism. I was surprised ten years later to see that my term “radical philology” had been adopted in classical studies by Sean Alexander Gurd in order to denote a theoretically sophisticated form of classical scholarship. Since then there are many different compounds, the most recent being “pataphilologist”.
5 In the book under review, James Turner makes large claims for philology as the historical basis for our modern idea of the humanities, which all, with the exception of philosophy, derive from the single discipline that philology still was in the early part of the nineteenth century. Despite the fact that he opens with the statement that the earliest roots of what he also calls “systematic erudition” lie in China and India, this study is restricted to “Western” scholarship, with the story predictably beginning at the library in Alexandria where Eratosthenes of Cyrene was the first person we know who called himself philólogos. This first chapter, ending with the Dark Ages, relies on the standard histories by John Edwin Sandys and Rudolf Pfeiffer, among many others,. Turner’s claims are the same as theirs: the Alexandrian critics were pioneers of textual scholarship, creating the first scholarly editions, commentaries, glossaries.
6 But what he fails to acknowledge is that in a manuscript culture, an “edition” of a Homeric epic, even when it was based on the study of several copies of the text, could only result in the creation of a single document, kept in a single location and as soon as the first copy had been made, the process of variation had started again. In such a context, our current ideas of a standard text are misplaced.
7 Interesting in any case is that Turner devotes more attention to the scholarly study of the bible among Jews and Christians than on the Roman adoption of Greek scholarship, because that is of course where, in and beyond the dark ages, erudition survived, at least in the Christian West. Turner then moves quickly through humanism and the reformation, discussing the contributions of pioneers of philology: Petrarch, Valla, Poliziano, Erasmus, Le Clerc and Bentley, continuing to pay special attention to biblical scholarship, which had a much more active role in this story than historians of classical scholarship usually make room for.
8 The volume’s first part had laid the historical foundations for the discussion in the part II of what the author sees as the fertile ground for the development of the modern humanities in the period between 1800 and the middle of the nineteenth century: the birth of a recognizable form of linguistics, the serious study of literature in the European vernaculars, a new approach to historical studies and, once again, biblical philology. In the third and final part humanist scholarship which until then had been seen as a single endeavor, split up into different disciplines, studied and taught at different departments in the new German-style universities of the second half of the nineteenth century. In the final third part Turner discusses the transformation of these studies into scholarly professions, ending his story roughly with the First World War, more than a century ago.
9 Needless to say, there were many different ways to tell this story, but Turner has chosen the sensible solution of concentrating on the contributions of a limited number of major figures, merely sketching the more general development of intellectual and
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institutional climate. Despite the bad press that philology has been having, at least since George Eliot’s Mr. Casaubon, this long book (nearly four hundred pages in a smallish print) is never boring for anybody with an interest in the ways we can discover and uncover the ways in which our fellow human beings have used and are using language. Every page of this book contains something new and every one of the fifty pages of the book’s bibliography contains several items that I had never heard of and, third and final disclaimer, I have been working on an admittedly much less ambitious history of philology for about ten years now that has been preempted by this book.
10 Turner’s story may not end well, but the book makes a strong case for a Whig version of the history of textual scholarship in its widest definition, where the important ingredient is the adjective in what Jean Le Clerc called Ars critica, not criticism, but the critical study of written utterances in the light of everything we know about the writers, their language, historical contexts and the audience they were writing for. Some reviewers have deplored that in this context, it is strange that Turner purposefully excludes philosophy from the humanities: in his epilogue he claims that their presence in humanities at American universities is due to “administrative convenience and accident of timing” (380). Earlier, he had distinguished between the two in terms of philosophy aiming for general truths, whereas philology tries to understand particular utterances.
11 In fact, Turner is quite correct in excluding philosophy, not only for the reasons that he offers in this book. Our current departments of philosophy are the heirs of the theology departments that stood at the core of most universities until the reform in the second half of the nineteenth century. As Turner shows throughout this book, scholars such as Baruch Spinoza and Richard Simon in their study of the bible decided to distinguish between the supposedly general and eternal truths contained in these books and the way these texts could be read critically (“de novo et libero animo”, in the words of the former).
12 Although a general survey like this is useful, what I miss is a sense of the nitty-gritty of philological work, which is all over a rival book project, World Philology, edited by Sheldon Pollock, Benjamin A. Elman and Ku-ming Kevin Chang, published by another prominent university press (Harvard University Press, 2015). Part of the difference has to do with the latter editors’ ambition to include non-Western traditions of scholarship, but the editors have allowed their contributors to go into detail and to demonstrate in practice the kind of scrutiny that used to be called philological. But this is a small quibble: the different contributions to World Philology only confirm the accuracy of Turner’s survey, which is based on an enormous body of materials (fifty pages of bibliography, over twelve hundred titles).
13 Where does all of this leave philology as a generalist discipline, when the teaching of languages has almost ceased to exist and at a time where there is hardly any time left to learn, let alone practice a discipline of which Nietzsche said it could only be done lento? But maybe Turner does not need to be such a pessimist. As an author of a book on Charles Eliot Norton, he writes that such generalists as the Harvard history professor and social reformer, who translated Dante, edited John Donne’s poems and studied medieval church architecture the work of Holbein, would find themselves “in the line at your local unemployment office”. His own books, and those of quite a few of the contemporary titles in his bibliography (Anthony Grafton, Frank M. Turner) are proof that the academy still has room for a catholicity of diverse and diverging interests. In
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fact, this summer I read a very long book by the classicist Alan Cameron on the supposed last stand of the pagans against Christianity in late fourth century Rome and this book by the Charles Anthon professor at Columbia University does exactly the kind of wide-ranging critical work on an enormous variety of different kinds of historical and textual materials that Turner discusses in his book. So, despite the fact that I now have to go look for another book project, there is still hope for philology.
AUTHORS
GEERT LERNOUT
Geert Lernout teaches English and comparative literature at the University of Antwerp. He has published several books in English on the work of James Joyce and Friedrich Hölderlin and in Dutch on the history of the book, on Bach’s Goldberg Variations, on the bible and on the role of religion in the United States.
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David C. Parker, Textual Scholarship and the Making of the New Testament: The Lyell Lectures Oxford Trinity Term 2011
Geert Lernout
REFERENCES
David C. Parker. Textual Scholarship and the Making of the New Testament: The Lyell Lectures Oxford Trinity Term 2011. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 208 pp. ISBN 978‒0‒19‒ 965781‒0.
1 Despite the enormous importance of the Bible and more specifically the New Testament in Western culture, scholarship on the text has always been theologically suspect, as Erasmus found out when in 1516 he published his edition of the Greek text under the title Novum Instrumentum. At the same time, an edition of the New Testament was always been the ambition of the greatest textual scholars. Richard Bentley planned but never finished an edition of the text as it was at the time of the Council of Nicea; a century later Karl Lachmann published a new text in two slightly different editions. Both of these scholars worked with a limited number of manuscripts, but the world has changed since then.
2 In the Trinity Term 2011 the bible scholar and editor of a critical edition of the Gospel of John and of Paul’s letters, David C. Parker gave the five Lyell lectures at Oxford under the title “Describing the New Testament”. The title was a fair description. As he explains in the introduction to the published version of the lectures, he wanted to use the verb in another more punning meaning than the obvious one. Most people who think or write about the Christian part of the Bible tend to ignore or deny that scribes were involved in the text’s production: “the concept of the modern printed book has become so prevalent that for most users it has driven out other, better informed
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understandings of the way it came into being and survived” (1). Parker wants to “re- scribe” the holy book by reversing this denial of its manuscript tradition: “The New Testament is a collection of books which has come into being as a result of technological developments and the new ideas which both prompted and were inspired by them” (3).
3 In the first chapter/lecture he opens his discussion of the “general procedures” by deploring the fact that for some reason the term “bibliography” is not applied in studies of the bible, so he replaces the term by the general name of textual scholarship. He then distinguishes work, text and document as different objects, of interest to different groups of bible scholars. One of the special problems confronting the textual scholar of the New Testament is the enormous number of textual variants in an enormously large number of manuscripts. Parker gives the example of a single chapter (18) of the Gospel of John, contained in no less than 1500 manuscripts:
4 There are 1,186 readings which are supported by a minority of manuscripts. This amounts to about thirty in every verse. As many as 555 are found in a single manuscript, 163 have the support of two manuscripts, and 91 are attested by three manuscripts. Only twenty readings have the support of more than one hundred manuscripts (15‒16).
5 Apart from the sheer magnitude of the manuscript record, we should also question our modern expectations about what to expect in texts that were first written down at a time when no two identical copies did or could exist and when the relationship between oral and written forms of language was different than it is today. The twenty- seven books of the Greek New Testament only rarely appeared together in a single manuscript: to some extent we can say that it was the invention of printing in the Latin West that really established the New Testament canon in its present order.
6 Parker is a textual scholar in a field where this is a minority field and where textual issues are often totally unknown: he tells us that when he showed a high resolution image of a Greek manuscript to a New Testament scholar, his colleague thought it was “a badly written modern student exercise” (13). As he also explains, in recent decades New Testament scholarship has gone through a series of transformations with reader response theory as one of its latest incarnations. The trouble with this approach is that it is based on interaction with a text that is never questioned: these scholars may believe that in this text they are interacting with the apostle Paul or with the evangelists, but in reality “they are in debate with the result of two thousand years of development” (19). Parker does not advocate a return to the nineteenth century optimism of ever reaching an original or authorial text, but he suggests a reappraisal of what it is that textual scholars do and a redefinition of the nature of a written work (as a process and not an object). In the case of the New Testament, what Parker wants to establish in the Münster-Birmingham edition is an “Initial Text” for each of the books of the New Testament, “the form of the text from which the surviving copies are descended” (25) and this is definitely not an authorial text.
7 The second lecture addresses the question: what is a New Testament manuscript? First of all, there are very many of them, as we have seen. As of May 2011 there were 5,606 manuscripts that are numbered because they are included in the authoritative Gregory-Aland list. Parker describes the different kinds in this list: the papyri, the majuscules (on parchment), the minuscules (parchment and paper) and the lectionaries.
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8 In each of these cases Parker shows the complexities of the situation facing an editor of the text: in the case of the papyri he mentions the Bodmer Miscellaneous Codex which contains a few canonical texts amid a selection of decidedly unorthodox writings. The list of majuscules is also eclectic: Parker mentions an ostracon with the text about the adulterous woman in Sahidic, a passage that is missing in the Sahidic manuscripts of the Gospel of John, making it our only witness of that contentious passage in this language. In the largest groups of minuscule manuscripts, Parker discusses the problem of including bible commentaries in this list, each with their own sometimes very distinctive formats, such as the catena, which is a compilation of commentaries on passages in the text by different authorities, mostly church fathers. Parker also points out that quite a few of these catena manuscripts have not even been included in the list. In the case of one family of catenas on the Fourth Gospel consisting of twenty-two manuscripts, only five have been given a Gregory-Aland number.
9 In the conclusion to this chapter Parker sums up the problems involved in answering the question “when is a manuscript a copy of the New Testament?” and he shows that only a digital database of the kind that is being developed in Münster and in Birmingham allows us to address the question in new and more productive ways, especially when it concerns the early period when clearly the idea of a canon of the New Testament did not yet exist.
10 This leads to a discussion in the third lecture on the relationship between these manuscripts. Starting from the idea that these manuscripts offer us only one aspect of the lives of the early Christians, Parker considers the narratives that textual scholars create solely on the basis of the written documents. In this chapter too we begin by looking at concrete examples of the work by identified scribes and on the art work in biblical manuscripts, but Parker quickly moves to textual analysis and more specifically to the division of manuscripts into often geographical “families” and to the theoretical concept of Lachmann’s stemmatics (Parker reminds us that Sebastiano Timpanaro demonstrated that the idea predated Lachmann).
11 The trouble with the Lachmannian approach is that no other text suffered so much from contamination than that of the New Testament and contamination is exactly what stemmatics cannot deal with, especially in the context of a tradition with so many surviving copies. Parker does a good job in showing that the traditional late-nineteenth century view of the history of the text (as in Westcott and Hort) was based on very little evidence in very few manuscripts but that continues to be taught today. The digital tools that we have now allow scholars to replace it with a digital version that is far more accurate: “We are at last able to make Lachmannian stemmatics workable in complex textual traditions” (84). Parker devotes the better part of this chapter to explaining what the “Münster Method” of digital comparison between manuscripts consists of. This method, which Parker later calls a Coherence-Based Genealogical Application and that had already been used in the edition of the Catholic epistles in the Novum Testamentum Graecum: Editio critica maior, is no more than an attempt to make Lachmannian stemmatology do what it was supposed to do.
12 The fourth lecture focuses on editing the New Testament, an endeavor that is remarkably rare, considering the enormous importance that Christian churches give to at least some of the statements that the books of the New Testament contain, sometimes on the basis of theological opinions that have little to do with textual matters, a theme that Parker had explored in an earlier book.1 The question remains:
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what is it that editors do? Is the work really the text that they produce and of which we can only say that never existed in precisely this form? For Parker, a critical edition is not the work, but “a description of the work in its different forms. It is a tool for understanding the work” (105). As a result, he believes that we do not yet have a truly critical edition of the New Testament and he is convinced that the Editio critica maior will be the first such initiative.
13 In his description of the procedures of this edition, Parker covers roughly the same terrain that he explored in the earlier chapters, beginning with a description of the manuscripts that have been taken into account, with as many of the Greek manuscripts as could be collected, digitalized and then encoded according to the TEI conventions, which enables the use in all kinds of contexts. With justified pride, Parker notes that the transcriptions of the Codex Sinaiticus have been used on four different websites, in four different formats. In addition to this database Parker sketches the difficulties in collecting quotations from the New Testament in the works of the Greek church fathers (which have not always been critically edited) and of the ancient versions, most urgently the Latin, Syriac and Coptic translations of the New Testament, sometimes based on versions that predate our oldest extant Greek manuscripts.
14 Parker gives four reasons why such a critical edition is useful and necessary. The work on such a project is an important impetus for concerted study: “Well over one hundred people are participating at any one time” (120). Secondly, the editing of the New Testament creates international cooperation and, thirdly, the resulting text will not only replace the existing standard editions, The Greek New Testament of the United Bible Societies and the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece, but it will also affect the translations that are now based on them. Finally, the intense and innovative work on the Greek New Testament will develop new methodologies and, more concretely, its digital format may revolutionize editing in general: “The Editio critica maior is therefore not the completion of an era in scholarship, but the beginning of a new one” (124).
15 What this future of scholarship could look like is discussed in the final and fifth lecture and is of great interest to textual scholars working on other texts and to the readers of Variants. Parker makes a strong case for the revolution that is just beyond the horizon and that can be compared to Gutenberg’s invention. We still edit on computers as though our screens are pages in a codex, while it is the very nature of what we call the New Testament (or any other work) that is changing in ways that we cannot fully comprehend yet.
16 In short sections Parker discusses the different aspects of this revolution. The mass digitization of texts is called the “most important event in humanities research today” (129) because it has made manuscripts available to more scholars than ever before. This is illustrated beautifully in the Virtual Manuscript Room, hosted by Birmingham and Münster, and of course in the British Library’s efforts to digitalize the famous early bible pandects Codex Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus and many other of its sacred books. Parker discusses Sinaiticus as the “furthest we have gone so far with digitizing a manuscript” (134) and his description certainly supports that statement. Even more exciting are the New Testament digital transcriptions that make possible a new kind of edition, which Parker had called “baseless” in his fourth lecture: an apparatus without a base text, which will allow readers to take any witness as the base text. This is part of what the scholars involved in the Editio critica maior have developed as the Workspace for Collaborative Editing. Since this online editing tool was created for one of the most
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complex and difficult of texts, it will be useful for most other texts too. At the end of this chapter, Parker sums up the new way of thinking: “once the critical edition was the database, now it is the interface” (142). The conclusion sums up the major findings in the five lectures and the five discoveries he himself made in preparing and giving the lectures. The final one of these is a suitably general conclusion of the whole book and deserves to be quoted in full:
17 Finally, having started with the concept of text as a process, and with the distinction between documents, texts, and work, I believe that I have made some progress towards the goal of understanding the New Testament writings as a set of works containing many forms of text and no single definitive form, which may be described solely by the examination of the manuscripts in which those forms of text are found. (147)
18 This is a most lucid account of the ambitions of the Editio critica maior, but it is also a wonderfully clear survey of all the different dimensions of Greek bible criticism by one of the most important scholars in the field of New Testament studies.
19 PS: It was a genuine joy to find a beautiful sentence that I will cherish for a long time: “Paul is beginning in Birmingham and work on the Apocalypse has started in Wuppertal” (112).
NOTES
1. David C. Parker. The Living Text of the Gospels. Cambridge University Press, 1997. Ironically, the archive.org digital version of that book is now accompanied by a barely coherent rant from a supporter of Gail Riplinger, one of the leaders of the King James Only movement, which believes that textual scholars are all homosexual worshippers of the devil.
AUTHORS
GEERT LERNOUT
Geert Lernout teaches English and comparative literature at the University of Antwerp. He has published several books in English on the work of James Joyce and Friedrich Hölderlin and in Dutch on the history of the book, on Bach’s Goldberg Variations, on the bible and on the role of religion in the United States.
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Luciano Gargan, Dante, la sua biblioteca e lo Studio di Bologna
Alessandro Scafi
REFERENCES
Luciano Gargan. Dante, la sua biblioteca e lo Studio di Bologna. Rome and Padua: Antenore, 2014. 156 pp. ISBN 978‒88‒8455‒684‒4.
1 Dante’s Christian epic was not created out of nothing; nor did he write his didactic prose without reference to the work of others. This is not despite the poet’s genius but because of it. Dante was a wordsmith, who worked with the materials he had at his disposal, melting them down in the furnace of his mind and recasting them in new forms. But what kind of materials was he dealing with? Is it possible to reconstruct the medieval network of knowledge that the poet drew upon to shape his vision? What specific texts formed the tradition that inspired him? A lack of direct evidence ensures that this question continues to be the subject of lively scholarly debate. This Quellenforschung (the pursuit of sources) is a familiar practice to Dante’s scholars and commentators.
2 In his Dante, la sua biblioteca e lo Studio di Bologna, the late Italian Professor Luciano Gargan tries to establish the background of Dante’s learning by virtually rebuilding his library. For that purpose, the author assembles five essays that have previously appeared elsewhere. Gargan reminds us of the relevance to the discussion of two works by Dante that unquestionably make abundant use of other books: the Convivio, a ‘banquet’ offering the intellectual food of true knowledge and celebrating Lady Philosophy, and De vulgari eloquentia, where Dante discusses the origin, dignity, and literary genres of the vernacular. To reconstruct the contents of Dante’s library, Gargan also notes the way Dante acknowledges his sources dramatically by turning his predecessors into characters in the Divine Comedy, where pagan poets and philosophers dwell in Limbo, while Christian mystics, scholars and theologians dance in the heaven of the Sun.
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3 The main focus in Gargan’s study, however, is on the works that Dante could have found on the shelves of Bologna’s libraries. Gargan includes an edition of four early inventories, listing the books owned by significant Bolognese intellectuals: the physician Tommaso d’Arezzo (whose collection was catalogued in 1286), a friar Ugolino (1312), an anonymous Master of Arts (c. 1340) and the grammarian Filippo di Giacomo Cristiani (1341). These libraries include works on a very wide variety of subjects in fields including philosophy, logic, medicine and theology.
4 Gargan’s aim is to allow the modern reader see with his or her eyes the very books that Dante himself could have perused. Could is the key word, however, because Gargan remains aware that he is not in a position to say with certainty which libraries Dante actually visited (if any) and which manuscripts he might actually have held in his hands. The only hard fact is found in the Convivio, where Dante recalls how he was converted to the study of philosophy after Beatrice’s death, spending ‘some thirty months’ frequenting ‘the schools of the religious orders and the disputations of the philosophers’ (II.12.7). The accuracy and frequency of references to Bologna in Dante’s work make it likely that the poet spent time in the city, but we don’t know when or for how long. Also problematic is the fact that some scholars have questioned Boccaccio’s report that Dante studied in Bologna as this is the foundation on which Gargan’s conjectures are built. The first and most obvious alternative suggestion is that Dante might have attended the Florentine Studia (medieval universities) run by the Franciscans and Dominicans and associated with the convents of Santa Croce and Santa Maria Novella, respectively. Another possibility is that, before and after his exile from Florence, he might have attended educational institutions or had access to libraries in the other cities he visited, notably Verona and perhaps Paris. Nevertheless, despite the lack of robust evidence linking Dante’s name with the libraries of Bologna, Gargan provides a valuable study of book circulation in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italy.
5 Gargan’s most interesting (and controversial) suggestion concerns the list, compiled in 1312 and now kept in the Archivio di Stato di Bologna, of the books donated to the Bolognese convent of San Domenico by Friar Ugolino. This was first published in 1961 by Venturino Alce and Alfonso D’Amato, but Gargan emphasizes the possibility that Dante may have read books from this collection in the library of the convent in Bologna. Only fourteen books are itemized in Ugolino’s inventory, including the Bible and works by Augustine, Boethius and Hugh of St Victor. The most intriguing title is a copy of the Liber Scalae, the medieval Latin version of the Kitab al Miraj or Book of the Ladder, an Arabic text describing Mohammed’s ascension to the heavens. Gargan’s claim that Dante could (italics here is a must) have read this Latin translation was advanced in 1949 by Enrico Cerulli and José Muñoz Sendino, who presented their evidence showing Dante’s indebtedness to the Muslim world. That the tradition available to Dante included Muslim lore about the afterlife, and that Muslim sources contributed to the structure of Dante’s Hell, was suggested in 1919 by the Spanish Arabist Miguel Asín Palacios. Demonstrating the debt that Dante owes to Muslim thinkers, Asín Palacios pointed out various parallelisms between the Commedia and accounts of the netherworld in Arabic literature. In his view, the complex moral structure of the Inferno follows the general lines of hell as described in the wealth of Muslim beliefs about the afterlife built up around the Qur’an and elaborated upon by Muslim theologians including Ibn Arabi of Murcia (1165–1240).
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6 The thesis that Islamic depictions of the afterlife are a major influence on Dante’s Commedia has caused great controversy over the years, both because it points to an Islamic component in one of the greatest Christian epics and because it casts doubt on Dante’s originality. Asín Palacios’s thesis has been generally rejected by Italian Dantists (with the important exception of Maria Corti), and the matter has provoked passionate responses on both sides of a debate that remains unresolved. The nature of the controversy has too often been overshadowed by nationalist and ideological concerns: Asín Palacios, for instance, stressed Dante’s intellectual links with Moorish Spain in order to bolster Spain’s national pride and offer a measure of support to its pro-Arab foreign policy. Comparably, current interest in the relationship between Dante and Muslim thought has been revived in the context of dialogue between world cultures and a radical questioning of Western mono-culturalism. In spite of any political bias that might underpin contemporary interest in the cultural influence of Islam on Western society, scholars in the West have done important work in reassessing the role Islam played in shaping their culture. While it has generally been taken for granted that European thinking was formed from a combination of classical and Judeao- Christian cultures, the Islamic component also needs to be taken into account.
AUTHORS
ALESSANDRO SCAFI
Alessandro Scafi is Lecturer in Medieval and Renaissance Cultural history at the Warburg Institute, School of Advanced Study, University of London. He is the author of Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth (London: British Library; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). In addition to essays on various aspects of the history of cartography and the history of pilgrimage, he has published several articles on Aby Warburg, the relationship between the Italian and Hungarian Renaissances and on Italian art and literature, in particular on Dante and Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini.
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Luigi Ferreri, L’Italia degli Umanisti: Marco Musuro
Alessio Assonitis
REFERENCES
Luigi Ferreri. L’Italia degli Umanisti: Marco Musuro. Turnhout: Brepols, 2014. XXX + 695 pp. ISBN 978‒2‒503‒55483‒9.
1 Luigi Ferreri’s study on Marcus Musurus is certainly not intended for students broaching the topic of Renaissance Humanism for the first time. The breadth and depth of this project ― not to speak of the toil and accuracy with which it was put together ― make this an impeccable piece of scholarship: one that exhaustively sheds light on the complex mechanisms of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century humanist discourse and that establishes the scholarly coordinates of this understudied editor, copyist, translator, educator, book collector, and poet.
2 In his introduction, Ferreri spells out the methodological framework that characterized his research. The author immediately delineates the philological and historical cruces that have hitherto plagued scholarship on Musurus and on the humanist milieus in which he operated. Much emphasis is placed on Musurus’ modus operandi, particularly on the editing, annotation, and translation of manuscript texts, and their curation and transformation into printed products. Most importantly, he charts the extent to which Musurus contributed to the dissemination of Greek culture in Italy (and, in turn, in Europe) and the trajectories of his cultural legacy. In order to do so, he reassess Musurus’ known production and, on the basis of such careful scrutiny, proposes new attributions or debunks old ones, which he painstakingly backs up, whenever possible, with direct and indirect documentary evidence. Such philological, historical and historiographical constructs are complemented by his connoisseurship and by a deep understanding of Musurus’ complete oeuvre.
3 Ferreri’s vita of Musurus (33‒73) builds upon and improves Annaclara Cataldi Palau’s 2004 biographical account (Italia medioevale e umanistica, XLV, 2004, pp. 295‒369) and
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Paolo Pellegrini’s 2012 entry in the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (vol. 77, 2012, pp. 576‒83). Though not delving thoroughly in archival sources (perhaps this is the only lacuna of this study), Ferreri establishes a chronology of this Greek humanist also on the basis of indications found in manuscripts and edited texts (see 655‒56). By doing so, he questions and, in some cases, revises, crucial dates in Musurus’ life and career, especially the ones that were not supported by the necessary factual evidence. Born around 1470 in Candia ― Crete, at the time, was under Venetian rule ― Musurus arrived to Italy in 1492 with his teacher Janus Lascaris, who was sent off to the Levant by Lorenzo de’ Medici in search of Greek manuscripts and scholars to bring back to Florence. Shortly after Piero de’ Medici’s exile in 1494, Musurus relocated to Venice where he collaborated with Aldo Manuzio until his death in 1515. This period was marked not only by an extensive production of Greek editions published by the Aldine press, but also by intense research and teaching. From 1503 to 1509, Musurus lectured at the Studio in Padua and, from 1512 to 1516, at Scuola di San Marco in Venice. Impressive, as Ferreri points out (pp. 48‒50), was the roster of prominent students that worked under his tutorship. In 1516, he moved to Rome where he was involved in the creation the Gymnasium at Monte Cavallo, founded under the auspices of Leo X, in the house of Angelo Colocci. This Greek college formed a formidable humanist axis with the nearby Dominican convent of San Silvestro al Quirinale, which not only featured Lascaris and Zacharias Calliergi, but also scholars, reformers and poets such as Paolo Giustiniani, Zanobi Acciauoli, Sante Pagnini, Niccolo Schömberg, and Pietro Bembo. One of the great merits of Ferreri’s volume is the mapping of scholarly networks in Medici Florence, Republican Venice and Papal Rome, and the pivotal role that Musurus played between these centers. It is in this fervid intellectual environment that Musurus met an untimely death in October 1517.
4 The premises that the author establishes in the introduction and biographical account are substantiated in the final three chapters, which constitute the bulk of this book. In the first section ― “Edizioni” ― Ferreri meticulously presents Musurus’ catalogue raisonné of printed volumes, of safely attributed works, of secure and probable collaborations on book projects, and of works that have falsely been attributed to him. The author describes and annotates each of these volumes; tackles the most pressing philological questions; and provides Italian translations for Greek and Latin frontispieces, colophons, dedicatory letters and poems, prefaces, etc. The quantity and quality of information for each entry ― particularly for those volumes whose authorship is uncertain ― are especially useful for philologist and book historians, but also for scholars working on Lascaris and Manuzio. In the second chapter ― “Musuro Insegnante” ― Ferreri reconstructs Musurus’ courses during his tenure at Padua and, to lesser degree, Venice, from recollectae and snippets of comments, transcriptions, and letters written by his students. Though the amount of documentary evidence discussed in this chapter is certainly scanty (scholars on Musurus may want to pick up from where Ferreri left off and begin to explore archival collections, much in the tradition of Armando Verde’s seminal work on the Studio Fiorentino), this section will prove useful to scholars working on Renaissance studia and on the formation of intellectual contubernia in Italy. The final chapter, “La Biblioteca di Musuro”, examines manuscripts copied (in full or in part) by Musurus; manuscripts and printed volumes that he annotated; his Latin translations of Johannes Philoponus, housed at the Vatican Library; and manuscripts that ended up in other collections. Particularly illuminating is Ferreri’s introductory essay to this section (457‒69), in which he engages in a detailed
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discussion of bibliographic and codicological matters and reviews David Speranzi’s Marco Musuro. Libri e scrittura (Rome, 2013), which touches upon many aspects featured this chapter.
5 Ferreri’s Marco Musuro ― the first volume in the Brepols series “Europa Umanistica: L’Italia degli Umanisti” ― is a work that will be appreciated by Greek philologists. Historians of the Renaissance, on the other hand, may find it too deeply immersed in the thick of Humanist discourse. The amount of technical information recorded therein may seem overwhelming at first, but allows the author to ensure that Musurus retain the role of key protagonist of that generation of Greek scholars that made Italy the center of Greek studies in the first part of the Cinquecento.
AUTHORS
ALESSIO ASSONITIS
Alessio Assonitis received his doctoral degree in Renaissance art history from Columbia University in 2003. He has taught at Columbia University, Barnard College, Herron School of Art, and the Christian Theological Seminary. In 2003-4, he served as Allen Whitehill Clowes Curatorial Fellow at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. He arrived at the Medici Archive Project in the autumn of 2004 on a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. He became MAP Research Director in 2009 and Director in 2011.
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Ivo Castro, Editar Pessoa
Simone Celani
REFERENCES
Ivo Castro. Editar Pessoa. 2nd ed. Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional ― Casa da Moeda, Lisboa, 2013. 384 pp.
1 Twenty-five years ago, a national project began for the publication of the critical edition of Fernando Pessoa’s works, commonly known as the Equipa Pessoa. Two works inaugurated the project: the critical edition of the poems of Álvaro de Campos, edited by Cleonice Berardinelli, and a volume which was to serve as the introduction to the entire project, a collection of essays by the coordinator of the Equipa, Ivo Castro. In 2013, over two decades later and after the publication of numerous volumes, a new edition of the latter book ― greatly expanded and updated ― was published. The original volume contained nine essays, divided into two sections. Eight of these have been republished in the new edition, along with seventeen additional, more or less recent contributions all of which but one had been previously published, in a scattered fashion, in various magazines and books. The essays of the first edition dealt mainly with the initial Equipa project and the editorial model adopted (in the first part of the volume), as well as the preparation of the critical edition of O Guardador de Rebanhos by Alberto Caeiro (in the second part). The latter subject matter in particular was included in the first, larger section of the book, entitled Poesia de Pessoa: editar e ler, which has been supplemented by material of various origin but continues for the most part to be prevalently dedicated to methodological considerations connected to the work on Guardador. The additional contributions, however, broaden the field in the direction of increasingly more general considerations of greater methodological interest, not exclusively Pessoan. At the same time, the essays belonging to the first part of the original edition have been included in the second section of the book, entitled simply Equipa Pessoa and also supplemented by new contributions which enlarge on the original themes. The third part, Polêmicas pessoanas, is on the other hand completely new and contains two essays written collaboratively by
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several authors. The first deals with the controversy arising in Italy from the publication of Eliezer, an alleged novel by Pessoa which subsequently turned out to be simply a translation in English of a text by someone else, while the second essay deals with the controversy deriving from the publication of the above-mentioned critical edition of the poems of Álvaro de Campos. Despite the division into sections, the book is very cohesive and the more important issues reappear in different parts of the volume. In this sense, it is possible to read the book as a single unified manual of Pessoan philology ― despite being filtered through essays written at different times and not always completely organic ― and at the same time as a kind of stock-taking of the work of the Equipa and, more generally, of the last twenty-five years of critical editions of Pessoa’s work. Within the former perspective can be read in particular the contributions that contain indications on the process of putting together the editions or on the critical results that can be obtained with the application of a rigorous ecdotic method (as shown in the pages dedicated to the documents revealing the true facts behind the myth of the dia triunfal, the triumphal day). Essays like “Para uma edição de O Guardador de Rebanhos [O G. de R.]”, “O corpus de O G. de R”., “O manuscrito de O G. de R.”, “A edição crítica de O G. de R.”, “A casa a meio do outeiro” e “Modelo editorial adoptado”, along with the “Metodologia do aparato genético”, “Verdades pessoanas”, “Filologia pessoana” and “From Print to Script”, furnish sufficient examples and considerations for a very clear idea of the difficulties involved in the work on the Pessoa papers and of the method to be followed in order to produce reliable editions. The method is founded in particular on the model of French genetic criticism and on the textual criticism of the North American school, but is also open to suggestions from Italian critica delle varianti. The modus operandi is based on a careful study of the originals, aimed at reconstructing the chronology of the textual variants present in the manuscripts and based on choice of the last in chronological order as the variant to be included in the established text. The decision proceeds from theoretical premises, but it also relies on a statistical study of the decisions effectively taken by the author in the (relatively few) cases in which he managed to publish his writing during his lifetime. Such a model does present one weakness, in my opinion, which lies in the editorial treatment of the alternative variants, which are placed in appendices alongside all the other typologies. I still believe, following Dante Isella, as well as Giuseppe Tavani, that a separate position, of greater importance, would in this case have been desirable, given that the alternative variants offer considerable value in that they foster textual “openness”, or an “unravelling” of the text itself. I do not believe that it is true, as Ivo Castro claims, that we can always rely on “derradeira lição em relação à qual o autor não teve dúvidas transmitidas ao papel” (99) (“the last lesson in which the author left no evidence of doubt on the paper”), because, in the case of the alternative variants, the failure to eliminate the prior variant is an evident sign of doubt. This would also help to give emphasis to the critical worth of the editions in comparison with their purely genetical value. Turning to the assessment of the last quarter century of ecdotic studies applied to Pessoa, today’s re-reading of the essays already published in the first edition of the book, such as the Projecto inicial of 1988, makes it possible to easily compare aims and actual achievements. On p. 157 in particular there is a brief five- point list which represents the ambitious initial mission of the Equipa: it should be said that, while most of the aims have been achieved, two in particular and of no small importance have been disregarded: the publication of all the support tools used in the study of the Papers ― “inventários, catálogos de documentos datados, concordâncias
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lexicais, etc” (“inventories, catalogues of dated documents, lexical concordances, etc”.) ― and the publication of a series of popularizing editions, in order to fulfil the need for the new versions of Pessoa’s work to reach the general public (this project came to a standstill with the first and only published volume). In this direction, the use of new computer tools and the preparation of digital editions, suggested more than once by Castro himself, could in the future represent a useful compromise solution between documentary completeness, synoptic interpretation of the various textual stages and accessibility. Apart from this, as is clearly evident to those who have eyes to see, the results do not after all fall so far short of the aims, thanks to the publication of critical editions of almost the entire poetic production, to which have been added important editions taken from the great mass of prose writing: in particular the Livro do Desasocego, the works of António Mora and the reflections relating to Sensacionismo e outros ismos. Objective problems not related to the work of the Equipa have, however, recently led to a slow-down in the work, in particular the discovery of the existence of the so-called Espólio II, dealt with partially or completely by several of the more recent essays in the book, such as Decifrar Pessoa, From Print to Script and A classificação do Espólio Pessoa como bem de interesse nacional, as well as an essay of overall synthesis, which also constitutes a passionate defence of the role of libraries, entitled A casa fechada. The recent discovery of original material by Pessoa still in the hands of the family which had never been handed over to the Biblioteca Nacional of Lisbon, despite the agreement stipulated when the archive was sold to the Portuguese State, and the even more objectionable decision to auction them off have marked a deep and partly irreparable fracture in the history of Pessoan studies. A situation almost unique in the field of ecdotics of a contemporary manuscript where it was presumed that the author’s material in its entirety was collected in a public institution and made available to scholars has instead turned into a situation of dispersion, without doubt relating to a minor portion of the papers (about 2000 documents out of the c. 27,000 held in the Biblioteca Nacional collection) but which are nevertheless of scholarly importance. The belated definition of the archive as a national treasure, which occurred in 2009, accompanied by the prohibition of taking any material which could be related to Pessoa out of the country, failed to resolve the issue, which continues to have its obscure points and above all casts doubt on the completeness of any genetic dossier present in past or future editions. In the face of this situation the Pessoan controversies referred to in the last part of the volume, rich as they are with precious methodological teachings and sharp ecdotic skirmishes, can now be read, almost nostalgically, as testimony to a past time when the author’s manuscripts could create even strong disagreements, but were always functional to the overall increase of knowledge. In conclusion, the new edition of Editar Pessoa offers a necessary and useful update, and a work which, despite its partially fragmentary and repetitive nature (defects which could have been avoided by carrying out a task of harmonization and re-organization, aimed at a more cohesive and complete text), contains the essence of broad scientific knowledge, technique and methodology, filtered through constant and prolonged contact with the original papers, a contact that represents the one and only premise for any attempt to approach that incredible and complex legacy of human knowledge which is the work of Fernando Pessoa.
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AUTHORS
SIMONE CELANI
Simone Celani is Associate Professor of Portuguese Studies at the University of Rome "La Sapienza". Among other things, he worked on Portuguese Philology (Fernando Pessoa, José Cardoso Pires, António Vieira), grammatical treatises of the Sixteenth Century, African Literature, Translation Studies.
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Fernando Pessoa, Apreciações Literárias
Carlota Pimenta
REFERENCES
Fernando Pessoa, Apreciações Literárias. Ed. Pauly Ellen Bothe, Lisbon, Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, 2013.
1 The critical edition of the works of Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) is an editorial project which has carried out its mission to bring out scholarly editions of the Portuguese modernist author since 1988. The outputs of the project have appeared two series, “Edição da Obra Completa de Fernando Pessoa” (The Edition of the Complete Work of Fernando Pessoa) and “Estudos sobre o Espólio Pessoano” (Studies on Pessoa’s Archive). The former, in its (so-called) “Major Series”, contains the critical editions of Pessoa’s writings: here the text is accompanied by a philologically-oriented introduction, notes and two critical apparatuses with (rich) genetic information and with reading variants. In addition to this series (mainly intended for a scholarly audience), of which nineteen volumes have already been put into print, the project also contemplates the publication of a “Minor Series”, which is directed to the common reader and only includes an introductory essay and the unannotated critical text.
2 The “Estudos” series, which was created to publish essays on Pessoa’s work, has to date issued four volumes, of which Apreciações Literárias de Fernando Pessoa (Fernando Pessoa’s Literary Appreciations) edited by Pauly Ellen Bothe is a recent volume. The texts that Bothe has brought together were never published by Pessoa as a collection; the title of the volume, Apreciações Literárias, refers to the section of Pessoa archive at the National Library of Portugal (E3) where most of them can be found.
3 The volume opens with an introduction which gives a brief account of the editorial criteria. Although Bothe follows the guidelines used for the Major series, a reader not familiar with the other editions might perhaps welcome a more detailed description of the editorial goals in this volume and of the methods used, which combine the identification of the genetic stages in the writing process with the selection of the last stage to serve as the basis for the reading text.
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4 After the introduction, the reader finds the critically edited text of 372 documents– most of which were hitherto unpublished – containing Pessoa’s reflections on the writings of 98 authors from various periods and different nationalities (including, among others, Charles Baudelaire, William Blake, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Victor Hugo, James Joyce, John Keats, John Milton, Molière, Edgar Allan Poe, Jean Jacques Rousseau, William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, Oscar Wilde and Émile Zola). Organized, as it were, as a dictionary of literary opinion, the texts are alphabetically ordered by author name and, to facilitate consultation, the volume closes with a topographical and an onomastic index.
5 The edition of these critical reviews is the result of painstaking work of collecting, organizing and laboriously transcribing Pessoa’s texts on these writers. All the works Pessoa referred to and commented on, including those of which he owned a copy in his personal library, are identified in the footnotes of the critical text. Therefore, the reader has the possibility of checking the bibliographical background of Pessoa’s reflections.
6 Because the genetic and critical apparatuses are so bulky, owing to the amount of corrections and revisions and difficulties with deciphering the handwriting, they have been placed separately in the second part of the volume. The genetic apparatus describes historically how the text reached its last known state; the apparatus of reading variants highlights the differences between the reading text of the edition and the ones conveyed by previous editions. Under the title or incipit of each text, Bothe offers a description of the materials used by Pessoa, which is followed by the genetic apparatus, the apparatus of reading variants and an appendix with additional archival information regarding the text.
7 While the apparatus is a rich resource with detailed information about how the genesis and transmission of Pessoa’s texts, it might have been useful to include references to Páginas de Doutrina Estética (edited by Jorge de Sena [Lisbon: Inquérito, 1946]) and to Apreciações Literárias: Bosquejos e Esquemas Críticos (Porto: Arcádia, 1951) which contain other texts in which Pessoa gives his literary opinions.
8 Pauly Ellen Bothe’s efforts to decipher Pessoa’s texts are quite impressive and as a rule overcome the immense challenge associated with Pessoa’s often impenetrable handwriting: her transcriptions offers quite a few improvements from previous editions. Her edition thus represents a significant step forward in the scholarship dedicated to this part of Pessoa’s work. A few lapses -- such as “sono” (sleep) for “sonho” (dream) (38) or “admiravel” (admirable / remarkable) for “adoravel” (adorable) (492) do not mar the impression that the edition of Apreciações Literárias is a relevant work of textual scholarship and constitutes an immensely useful instrument for the reader who wishes to study these texts from a literary, philological or linguistic perspective.
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AUTHORS
CARLOTA PIMENTA Carlota Pimenta is a researcher at the Centre for Linguistics of the University of Lisbon (CLUL). She is currently working on her PhD project in the field of Textual Criticism. Carlota is member of the team which is preparing the critical and genetic editions of the great nineteenth-century novelist Camilo Castelo Branco as well as of the team who is working on the critical edition of Crónica de D. João I, by the great chronicler Fernão Lopes.
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Joachim Maria Machado de Assis, Dom Casmurro
Jessica Firmino
REFERENCES
Joachim Maria Machado de Assis. Dom Casmurro. Ed. Maximiano de Carvalho e Silva: Niterói: Editora da UFF/FAPERJ, 2014. 480 pp. ISBN 978‒85‒228‒0967‒7.
1 The critical edition of the writings of Machado de Assis (1839-1908) began in the late 1950s when the work of this Brazilian writer fell in the public domain. The uncertain reliability of Machado’s texts published until 1958 was at the origin of the decision of the then President of Brazil, Kubitschek de Oliveira, to recommend the creation of a Committee responsible for the critical establishment of his oeuvre and, afterwards, of the works of other authors deserving of similar treatment.
2 The novel Dom Casmurro ― a masterpiece in the view of many ― stages, as K. David Jackson puts it in an article in the New York Times, “a retrospective memoir” written from the main character’s point of view “for the single self-serving purpose of proving, or justifying, an obsessive belief. He is certain that the beautiful Capitu […] had betrayed him with their best friend, Escobar, the real father of their son Ezequiel” (22 February 1998). The critical edition of this beautifully built novel was first published in 1966 (reprinted in 1968 and 1975). Now, almost 50 years after the original publication, Maximiano de Carvalho e Silva has produced a revised, updated and expanded edition. A collaborator of Celso Cunha, the general editor of the Machado de Assis edition, Carvalho e Siva had been responsible for the collation and textual analysis of the 1966 edition.
3 Although there was a later printing issued during Machado’s lifetime, the base text of this critical edition is still the one which was published in 1899, the last one known to have been revised by the author. This choice is supported by the identification and correction of seemingly textual errors, which were divided into two groups. The first contains the errors of the 1899 edition (siglum A), including those shared with the first
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unrevised printing (siglum B); the second contains only the exclusive errors of the latter. The reading text is presented without editorial interruptions apart from the use of asterisks and paragraph numbering which allow cross-referencing to the critical annotation placed at the end of the text. Although not many errors were present in the base text, leaving the reading text largely unencumbered with editorial marks was a deliberate strategy to reconcile the needs of textual scholars with those of general readers.
4 The critical text is preceded by a note introducing the Editorial Committee and what may be called the Rio de Janeiro philological school. This is followed by a brief critical- philological introduction extracted from the 1966 edition that sets out the editorial rationale and the foreword to the 1975 edition (a single page that sets out the changes with the previous edition). This in turn is followed by a new section providing information about the texts that have been collated, the editorial interventions and the textual organization. Following the critical text there is a transcription (and proposed correction) of suspected textual errors, which was published in 1896 as “Um Agregado” in the newspaper República and used for the writing of some chapters of Dom Casmurro. The transcription is accompanied by a comparative analysis of this text with the corresponding passages in Machado’s novel. Then comes the critical apparatus containing all the identified textual errors and the scholarly annotations (including matters of transcription and allusions to other authors not included in the previous edition), as well as a number of tables dealing with orthography and linguistic traits unique to the author’s style. The volume closes with a substantial essay on the life and work of Machado de Assis, covering the historical-cultural context and some early reviews of Dom Casmurro.
5 Although this is not a new edition of Dom Casmurro, it is an important piece of scholarship. Textual errors that were overlook in the 1966 edition are corrected here and documented separately in the apparatus. Not only this, the care Carvalho e Silva has taken in explaining the lapses in his earlier work is certainly commendable.
AUTHORS
JESSICA FIRMINO
Jessica Firmino received a BA in Literature and Linguistics from the University of São Paulo (Brazil) and an MA in Textual Criticism from the University of Lisbon. She has mainly worked in the fields of Portuguese Language and of Portuguese Linguistics. She is a member of the Centre for Linguistics of the University of Lisbon, where she is editing texts by the Portuguese 19th- century novelist Camilo Castelo Branco.
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Catherine Rovera, Genèses d’une folie créole: Jean Rhys et Jane Eyre
Christine Collière-Whiteside
REFERENCES
Catherine Rovera. Genèses d’une folie créole: Jean Rhys et Jane Eyre. Paris: Hermann Éditeurs, 2015. 159 pp. ISBN‒13 978‒2705690465.
1 In Genèses d’une folie créole:Jean Rhys et Jane Eyre, Catherine Rovera does not offer yet another intertextual study of Jean Rhys’s rewriting of Jane Eyre, as the title of her book might suggest; instead, she succeeds in shedding new light on Wide Sargasso Sea, drawing from works published earlier by Rhys, unpublished letters, various drafts for Wide Sargasso Sea as well as working documents of other texts such as Voyage in the Dark, or the poem “Obeah Night”, for instance. She skillfully combines different approaches, using close text analysis, genetic study of the drafts and research into the historical background of both novels and into the circumstances of their writing, thus going beyond previous postcolonial, feminist or postmodernist readings of the novel. In particular, she draws from numerous letters, personal papers and drafts from the Jean Rhys Archive in the McFarlin Library at the university of Tulsa (Oklahoma) and from the genetic documents kept at the British Library.
2 In this short book, Rovera pieces together a very dense, in-depth analysis, leaving no loose ends, and she constantly manages to draw connections between all the different tracks she explores, making for a fascinating read. The first part of the book mainly concentrates on the West Indies and on the beginnings of the genesis of the book, while the second part addresses more specifically the relationship with the Victorian subtext and the final stages of the writing of the novel.
3 In the first part, she shows how Wide Sargasso Sea, a novel that was thirty years in the making, is a reworking of some of Rhys’s own previous fictional and semi- autobiographical texts before being a rewriting of Charlotte Brontë’s novel: she goes back to the lost manuscript of “Creole”, to the earliest remaining document linked to
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Wide Sargasso Sea, dated 1938 and entitled “Mr Howard’s House” and to the “Black Exercise Book”, as well as drawing on several other manuscripts, such as the lost story “Le revenant” or the novel Voyage in the Dark, to understand the intricate relationship between the text, its “avant-textes” and its hypotext, Jane Eyre. The drafts for Wide Sargasso Sea proper, kept at the British Library, mainly concern Part II of the novel and the last stages of its writing (1961‒64), so that Rhys’s correspondence proves particularly useful. It provides information on the writing of part I and III, and testifies to Rhys’s desire to write a historical novel and to the extensive research work she conducted on the history and legends of the West Indies, thus allowing Catherine Rovera to unveil echoes of texts other than Jane Eyre in Rhys’s text. She thus describes an “écriture à processus”, in which the author appears not to be in control of her creation, which takes her to places she had not planned to go.
4 Working on the sources of Wide Sargasso Sea allows Rovera to explore the complex meanings of the word “creole”, its successive definitions and uses throughout the history of the West Indies, and the consequences of that troubled history on the heroine’s racial and social status. She demonstrates how the figure of the creole woman is inextricably mixed with that of the Haitian myth of the zombie, of African origin, and its European variant, the vampire, but also with the stories of the rebel slaves, and how this character is best defined, in short, as defying any attempt at labeling or categorizing her. Rovera unravels the complex mesh of voices that the text is made of and allows us to hear the echoes of the historical source texts Rhys read. She shows how they shape Rochester’s discovery of the West Indies as a conqueror or as an explorer, which parallels his relationship with Antoinette as he sets on a quest for the truth about both the island and his wife’s past and origins. She studies the status of the creole language in the novel, the importance of orality, characterized by the use of different languages —English, French, patois ― and the role it plays in the development of the themes of manipulation, contamination, mimicry and alienation, purity and hybridity, plagiarism and pastiche. This leads her to show the intricacy of the interplay of voices and points of views, and in particular the power of the voices of Christophine and Daniel, possessing Rochester through music, songs, poetry and voodoo magic.
5 In the second part of the book, the author explores the influence of the Victorian stage and art as well as the Gothic novel on the visual aesthetics of Jane Eyre and how much Brontë’s novel owes to Victorian melodrama, peep shows, freak shows, magic and orientalism. Rhys’s correspondence sheds light on the process which led her to give flesh and voice to the character of Bertha Mason and how this process was both deeply rooted in her reading of Jane Eyre and departing from it. It allows one to understand how the author was drawn to attempt to explain the origins of Bertha’s madness, creating a background of traumatic childhood experiences for her heroine, using interior monologue to convey dreams, memories and predictions or hallucinations which turn the novel into a clinical and psychoanalytical study of Antoinette’s supposed folly. Rovera explains how Rhys gradually introduces madness into the novel and relates it to a crisis of identity linked to the loss of a place. The correspondence bears evidence to Rhys’s search for the right technique to create Bertha’s voice, a voice coming from nowhere and no one, a ghost or zombie voice that finally contaminates Rochester. It allows Rovera to establish the crucial role played by the writing of the poem “Obeah night” and by Rhys’s return to Caribbean oral literature in shaping the character of Rochester, from a cold and calculating villain to a more romantic, wounded character, the victim of a poetic trance that echoes that of Othello, thus
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allowing Rhys to feel that the book had finally found its proper shape. Looking at the drafts enables Rovera to have a fresh take on the relationship between Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea, to show how Jean Rhys kept going back to Jane Eyre and immersed herself in it to the extent that her writing became haunted by Brontë’s text as phrases from Jane Eyre kept creeping into it unawares, while constantly distancing herself from it at the same time.
6 It is a pity no facsimiles of Rhys’s manuscript drafts could be included in the book, as they both allow Catherine Rovera to reconstitute the chronological story of the writing of the book while giving us a glimpse of the simultaneous potential paths the text could have taken at every step. The gorgeous 16th century map of the West Indies that is reproduced on the cover aptly mirrors the richly-detailed study it contains and reminds the reader that this study maps out a wider territory than the merely textual genesis of a novel.
AUTHORS
CHRISTINE COLLIÈRE-WHITESIDE
Christine Collière-Whiteside holds a PhD in English literature from the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris and is a lecturer at the Université de Bourgogne. She worked on the genesis of the Sylvie and Bruno books and the collaboration between Carroll and Furniss, and is currently working on the manuscripts of George MacDonald’s Lilith and the Roald Dahl papers. She’s a member of the Centre Interlangues‒TIL lab and an associate researcher with the ITEM–CNRS Joyce team on the Finnegans Wake notebooks. Her research interests include critique génétique, children’s literature and the didactics of foreign languages.
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The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition
Matthew Creasy
REFERENCES
The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition. Vol. 1: Apprentice Years, 1905‒1918. Eds. Jewel Spears Brooker and Ronald Schuchard. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2014. 896 pp. ISBN 9781421406756. The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition. Vol. 2: The Perfect Critic, 1919‒1926. Eds. Anthony Cuda and Ronald Schuchard. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2014. 992 pp. ISBN 9781421406770.
1 As a critic, T. S. Eliot was fond of recommending that readers engage with the complete works of favoured writers. “To understand Baudelaire”, he wrote in 1927, “you must read the whole of Baudelaire”, repeating similar instructions from eight years earlier: When we say that [Ben] Jonson requires study, we do not mean study of his classical scholarship or of seventeenth-century manners. We mean intelligent saturation in his work as a whole; we mean that in order to enjoy him at all, we must get to the centre of his work and his temperament, and that we must see him unbiased by time, as a contemporary. And to see him as a contemporary does not so much require the power of putting ourselves into seventeenth-century London as it requires the power of setting Jonson in our London. (II, 51)
2 Eliot’s reference to “intelligent saturation” suggests an engagement with his material that goes beyond a conscientious critic’s attempt to read as much on a given subject as possible. In this passage, it comes to connote the operation of something like the paradoxical “historical sense” he describes in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” where he urges poets to acquire “a sense of the timeless as well as the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together” (II,106). It becomes hard not to think of the juxtaposition in The Waste Land of older voices from literature and myth with “contemporary” scenes.
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3 This passage, then, exemplifies the interest of Eliot’s Collected Prose as it is now being assembled in eight volumes under the editorial direction of Ronald Schuchard. Not only is he a compelling critic and thinker, but Eliot’s critical views shed important light upon his practice as a poet. This is clear from the broader resonance of “saturation” across his writings. Five months before he published this account of Jonson in the Times Literary Supplement during November 1919, Eliot used the same word in the Egoist to describe the influence of Seneca upon George Chapman, citing an allusion to “the cunning axeltree” in Bussy D’Ambois as an example of “the saturation which sometimes bursts spontaneously into originality” (II, 67) ― the emphasis is Eliot’s. Seven years later, writing about Lancelot Andrewes, he observed: “It is only when we have saturated in ourselves in his prose, followed the movement of his thought, that we find his examination of words terminating in the ecstasy of assent” (II, 822). In these passages, “saturation” evokes a dynamic force, linked to a sense of creative transformation. In this context, Eliot’s misquotation from Chapman has a rich textual history. As his editors note, the phrase should read “burning axel-tree”, but was misprinted in the Mermaid edition he owned. Eliot’s own saturation in this image was such that Chapman’s adaptation of Seneca re-echoes in “Gerontion”, “Marina” and Four Quartets. Likewise, when Eliot republished the essay on Andrewes in the collection For Lancelot Andrewes (1928), it became inseparable from his public declaration of assent there, in the announcement that he was “classicist in literature, royalist in politics and anglo- catholic in religion”. In each instance, “saturation” conveys the intensity of Eliot’s experiences as a reader and the impact of those experiences upon his poetry, thought and belief.
4 Although only two volumes (covering his life up to 1926) have been published so far, the scope of the Complete Prose is admirably broad, offering readers the chance to begin the kind of comprehensive engagement Eliot himself favoured. Drawing heavily upon the bibliographical work of Donald Gallup it brings together for the first time a great number of essays and reviews that Eliot did not see fit to republish during his lifetime, including important works such as Eeldrop and Appleplex, the only prose fiction he published as an adult. But these volumes go beyond Gallup in tracking down unsigned or unacknowledged items and by reproducing transcriptions of previously unpublished documents, from stories written as a schoolboy to the essays on philosophy Eliot wrote during his studies at Harvard and Oxford. The editors anticipate the inclusion of two hundred items that were not listed by Gallup by the time this project is completed. This bibliographical achievement is supplemented by extensive and scrupulous annotations, as well as lucid and thoughtful introductions to each phase of Eliot’s career.
5 The format of these volumes encourages a historically sensitive approach, carefully reproducing texts in the chronological sequence of their composition. Accordingly, his doctoral thesis on F. H. Bradley is now reproduced alongside his other early student writings, although Eliot didn’t publish it until 1964. His public career as a poet and literary critic emerges here from his philosophical background, not least through the reviewing he undertook for philosophical journals, such as the International Journal of Ethics. Similarly, the Clarke lectures on metaphysical poetry Eliot gave in 1926 ― previously edited by Schuchard within Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry (1996) ― appear here amongst his other critical writings from the 1920s. His Cambridge thoughts on Donne and Laforgue are found developing from the renewed interest in Elizabethan and Jacobean writers that Eliot took after the First World War.
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6 Whilst this presentation has clear benefits, other textual decisions produce more mixed results. In most cases, the editors reproduce the latest versions of essays that Eliot chose to revise for inclusion in collections such as The Sacred Wood. In the Times Literary Supplement, for example, Eliot described “the power of setting Jonson in our London” as “a more difficult triumph of divination”. Although he kept these final words when he combined this article with another review from the Athenaeum to form the single essay “Ben Jonson” for The Sacred Wood (1920), Eliot cut them from the Selected Essays (1932). The latter text is given in the Complete Prose so that items such as this are reproduced in the sequence of their first publication, but derived from asynchronous textual sources.
7 Notes accompanying each essay clarify the difference between these versions, which vary in amplitude and significance. They also reproduce passages Eliot cut from articles and reviews, so it is possible to reconstruct the original versions using this apparatus. Whilst The Sacred Wood is still in print, however, the historical and bibliographical interest lies more strongly in the original periodical versions of these texts, which have until now only been available through archival research and some digital repositories. Indeed, anyone interested in The Sacred Wood will still need to consult that volume separately for a fuller sense of Eliot’s intentions for the collection because its contents now are dispersed across the Collected Prose.
8 Whilst this editorial decision seems flawed to me, it does not detract from the overall scholarly achievement in these volumes. Perhaps more imaginative use of the edition’s present digital format would have helped here (a print version is envisaged only after completion of the final volumes). Indeed, the editors announce their eventual intention to create a website of supplementary material including juvenilia, interviews, blurbs and endorsements and personal notes by Eliot. There’s a purposive comprehensiveness about this project that will ensure it becomes an outstanding resource for scholars, literary historians and readers of all kinds.
AUTHORS
MATTHEW CREASY
Matthew Creasy is a Lecturer in English Literature at the Universityof Glasgow. He has published essays and articles on James Joyce and William Empson, and his edition of Arthur Symons’ The Symbolist Movement in Literature was published by Carcanet‒Fyfield in 2014.
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James Joyce. Ulysses: Based on the 1939 Odyssey Press Edition
William S. Brockman
REFERENCES
James Joyce. Ulysses: Based on the 1939 Odyssey Press Edition. Revised and corrected edition. Annotated by Sam Slote, Marc A. Mamigonian and John Turner. Richmond: Alma Classics, 2015. xiv, 878 pp. ISBN 978‒1‒84749‒399‒6
1 For the last couple of decades, readers of Ulysses seeking an annotated edition have had two choices: The Oxford “World’s Classics” facsimile reprint of the first 1922 edition with annotations by Jeri Johnson (1993), and the Penguin “Annotated Students’ Edition” based on the 1960 Bodley Head text with annotations by Declan Kiberd (1992). Supplementing these has been Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated, a stand-alone and widely- respected guide. The Alma Press edition (first published in 2012, now out in paperback) offers an option, both in terms of choice of text and philosophy of annotation. Though lacking the wide-ranging introduction of Kiberd and the supplementary textual history of Johnson, it outlines its methodology clearly and holds to it in focusing on annotation in a style that minimizes interpretation but factually and historically situates the novel in the Dublin of 1904.
2 The text is an unexpected choice ― the 1939 printing of the Odyssey Press edition of 1932. The move of Joyce’s published works into the public domain throughout much of Europe in 2012 made available most English-language versions without regard to copyright restrictions. Thus, Alma Press was able to take advantage of Ulysses’s change in status to issue a newly-revived version that otherwise could be found, and only rarely, in used book venues. An offshoot of the Albatross Press, the Odyssey Press was created for the sole purpose of publishing an edition of Ulysses on the continent at a time when British and American publishers, fearing prosecution for obscenity, were reluctant to take it on. The text was set from a later printing of a Shakespeare and Company edition, one which had seen some corrections to the admittedly error-ridden
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first edition of 1922. Alma has reset the original text and made some minor changes in the process, such as using the bold, large-type newspaper style headings in the “Aeolus” episode that appeared in the Shakespeare and Company editions, but were printed as normal text by Odyssey. While this resetting would have been an opportunity to include episode numbers as guideposts through the novel’s 552 pages, the lack of these can foster disorientation in a novice reader.
3 For decades the Odyssey Press Ulysses carried the reputation of being “definitive”, which derived from the smug statement carried on its initial pages: “The present edition may be regarded as the definitive standard edition, as it has been specially revised, at the author’s request, by Stuart Gilbert”. Gilbert’s involvement was, however, minimal, as he himself was later to acknowledge. Though one could justify the choice of text as being the one issued latest in the author’s life, Joyce, in the 1930s involved with the potentially much more profitable American publication of Ulysses, immersed in the completion of Finnegans Wake, and troubled by his daughter’s mental health, took no interest in corrections to the Odyssey edition. While the Gabler edition produced a reliable text for the 1980s, the infamous assaults of John Kidd on the edition ensured the continued availability of other more established versions. The Alma text is a valid choice, since it is (with the exception of the Gabler edition now as “standard” as any version of Ulysses could be said to be) probably as or more accurate than other versions of Ulysses sold for years in the English-language markets.
4 This “revised and corrected” edition of 2015 differs from the 2012 in several ways. First, it adds to Sam Slote’s name on the title page the names of Marc A. Mamigonian and John Turner as annotators. The reason for this change is not given, but seems to relate to their involvement as well as Slote’s in John Kidd’s unfruitful editing of Ulysses in the 1990s; apparently much of that editorial work was carried into the Alma edition of 2012. The text itself has been revised little if at all from 2012, though it has been photographically reduced somewhat. The annotations themselves have been slightly revised and updated.
5 Keyed to unobtrusive marginal numbers in the pages of the text, notes at the end occupy more than a third of the book. What characterizes them and differentiates them from other annotations is that they are “limited to strictly factual as opposed to interpretive material [. . .]. The goal here has been consistently to provide ‘too little’: the rationale being that the annotations should not overwhelm the reader’s own initiative” (555). An unexpected ― and unmentioned ― benefit is the inclusion of page and line number references to Hans Walter Gabler’s 1986 edition, allowing the Alma Press edition to serve fully as an annotated resource to that version. A notable addition that this 2015 edition makes to the 2012 is the inclusion of material from James Joyce Online Notes, the ongoing venue for annotative research on Joyce, which adds a substantial amount of newly-discovered detail. So, for example, readers of the “Ithaca” episode in the 2015 edition can now enjoy, at least vicariously, the benefits of the “Wonderworker”, a previously obscure reference from a flyer in Bloom’s drawer (849). The introduction to the 2015 notes includes a paragraph on monetary terminology.
6 The notes do indeed stick to the facts. So, for example, the notes give the address of butcher Dlugacz in “Calypso” but avoid pointing out the irony of a Zionist pork butcher, as do Kiberd, Johnson, and Gifford. Still, the identification of facts can lead the reader astray. For instance, the word “Oot” in “Hades” is not “a call to horses to go forward”, as Alma notes, but a visual representation of what the men riding in the
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funeral carriage see before they hear the man on the side of the street calling out his solicitation to sell bootlaces. (599) Alma seems to have omitted some purely factual notes. For instance, Gifford explains “golliwog curls” in “Nausicaa”; the racially prejudicial tone of this hairstyle’s name deserves to be seen historically, but isn’t noted in Alma. On a more positive note, Alma offers important corrections to Gifford. “Which end is the head”, Bloom wonders in “Hades” in regard to the coffin’s placement in the funeral ceremony. Alma gets it right: the feet are placed nearest to the altar (although the reverse is true in the case of a priest’s funeral). Alma resolves Gifford’s hopelessly convoluted explanations of the message on the postcard sent to Dennis Breen, “U. p.: up”, with a reference to the Oxford English Dictionary’s simple definition of the pronounced spelling of the adverb as meaning something that is over or finished (625).
7 The Notes also flag some prominent misprints in the edition that were corrected by Gabler. For instance, “frilled beefsteaks” are corrected to “grilled beefsteaks” (604). The unintelligible “sidevalue”, seeming to be an obscure horseracing term, is corrected to “side. Value” (824). Yet the 2015 paperback edition introduces an unexplained inconsistency: following Gabler, the 2012 edition noted that the correct reading for “you’re a goner” was “you’re a doner”, substantiated by James Joyce Online Notes, yet the 2015 edition eliminates the correction, instead only offering an unneeded gloss on “goner” (604).
8 This practice of sticking to facts avoids inserting a number of “spoilers”. Ulysses typically offers seemingly confusing or incomplete information whose significance becomes apparent to the reader only much later in the book. So, for example, the identity of, and joke upon the racehorse “Throwaway”, initially in “Lotus Eaters”, is never divulged in Alma as it is by Kiberd; the edition provides ample information about the Gold Cup race but leaves it up to the reader to wait for further information in the “Cyclops” and “Eumaeus” episodes. Similarly, while Gifford identifies Gerty’s “one shortcoming” early in the “Nausicaa” episode as her limp, Alma does not, allowing the reader to discover it along with Bloom later in the episode. Though Gifford, Kiberd, and Johnson warn about the veracity of the list of Molly’s “lovers” in the “Ithaca” episode, the Alma edition meticulously cross-references the identification of each but avoids any evaluation of the list’s veracity.
9 Alma’s bibliographically detailed glosses to the titles of books in Bloom’s library are a tour de force and exemplify the extraordinarily well-researched approach that the annotators have devoted to Ulysses. This is a text of choice for first-time and established readers alike.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gifford, Don, and Robert Seidman. 1988. Ulysses Annotated: Notes for Joyce’s Ulysses. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Joyce, James. 1986. Ulysses: The Corrected Text. Eds. Hans Walter Gabler, Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior. New York: Random House.
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Joyce, James. 1992. Ulysses. Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics. London: Penguin.
Joyce, James. 1993. Ulysses. Ed. Jeri Johnson. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
AUTHORS
WILLIAM S. BROCKMAN
William S. Brockman is Paterno Family Librarian for Literature at Pennsylvania State University. Bibliographer for the James Joyce Quarterly since 1990, he has published articles and essays on Joyce and modernist publishing and has lectured on these topics at national and international conferences, workshops, and seminars. Presently he is one of the co-editors of a forthcoming edition of Joyce’s unpublished letters. Brockman is a Trustee of the International James Joyce Foundation.
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Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
Alice Wood
REFERENCES
Virginia Woolf. Mrs. Dalloway. Ed. Anne E. Fernald. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 482 pp. ISBN‒13 978‒1107028784.
1 “So, how should we edit the writings of Virginia Woolf?” ask Jane Goldman and Susan Sellers in their General Editors’ Preface to the new Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf (xii). Woolf’s oeuvre certainly poses plenty of challenges to her editors. Her major works appear in variant first British and first American editions ― in several cases, including Mrs. Dalloway, published simultaneously on either side of the Atlantic ― while her surviving letters, diaries, reading notebooks, manuscript and typescript drafts and proofs offer an abundant and exhilarating resource. Woolf was a compulsive writer and reviser and left a substantial corpus interwoven with genetic links and oblique textual resonances. She was also a voracious reader and prolific reviewer and literary journalist whose fiction is littered with allusions to canonical, contemporary and sometimes downright obscure literary and historical works. Any editor of a Woolf novel must decide, firstly, which text we should read, and, secondly, where the boundaries of that work ― and the scope of the diligent collator and annotator ― might be deemed to end. In addition, any scholar familiar with Woolf’s distaste for institutional authorities and delight in the freedom and flexibility of an independent reader or an incomplete text has cause to pause at the prospect of developing a methodology for imposing stability on and establishing authoritative texts of her works.
2 The eagerly-awaited Cambridge edition tackles these challenges by adopting transparency as its editorial ideal. It is the first edition of Woolf’s works to supply a coherent and explicit general editorial policy and, importantly, to do away with silent emendation. Though marketed as the definitive edition of Woolf, its general editors acknowledge that “no edition can ever give all” and fittingly conceive of this series as “continuing, and not capping, the ongoing processes of reading and rereading her
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work” (xvi-xvii). Its volumes normally take as copy text the first British edition with a notable exception; Mark Hussey’s 2011 Cambridge edition of Between the Acts returns to Woolf’s typescript as the final authorial text of this posthumously published novel with insightful results. Variants are supplied in a separate Textual Apparatus and debated in Textual Notes to produce a clean, reading text. Annotations in the Cambridge edition aim “to be more thorough than in any previous edition, with regard to historical, factual, cultural and literary allusions, in long overdue homage to the remarkable density and breath of reference in Woolf’s work” (xiv).
3 Anne E. Fernald’s edition of Mrs. Dalloway is the fourth work to be published in this series. Following its general editorial policy, she adopts the first British edition as copy text and maps against it variants from extant proofs and all editions published in Woolf’s lifetime. The most striking result of this editorial process is her restoration of the novel’s original section breaks. The Cambridge edition of Mrs. Dalloway presents the text once again in twelve sections, which, as Fernald notes, must be deemed “a neglected and deeply significant aspect of this modernist novel’s form”, especially when we recall that it was in draft titled The Hours (lxxxvi). Fernald charts Woolf’s addition of six section breaks at proof stage to produce twelve sections in the first British edition, the omission of two section breaks in the first American edition and the history of the loss of the original section breaks in most subsequent editions. As well as opening up this important aspect of the novel’s form to critical enquiry, Fernald’s 51- page introduction carefully details the broader composition and publication history of Mrs. Dalloway and her editorial strategies. The Textual Apparatus records over 300 differences between the first British and first American editions (around half are changes in punctuation) and variants from three further published texts and the two surviving sets of page proofs. These variants are discussed in the Textual Notes, which also explore significant changes and allusions recorded in the manuscript of The Hours and other draft documents. The volume benefits, too, from chronologies of Woolf’s life and the composition of Mrs. Dalloway and a list of archival sources for the manuscript, typescript and proof materials that evidence the novel’s production.
4 One of the great strengths of the Cambridge edition of Mrs. Dalloway is its copious Explanatory Notes. These mine Woolf’s letters, diaries, reading notebooks, essays and reviews for biographical and cultural references and for clues about her reading. Fernald is an expert in Woolf as reader and has meticulously traced allusions in the novel to works that Woolf was reading or writing about alongside producing Mrs. Dalloway. Guided by the general editors’ policy, her notes also address the novel’s many references to “a historical period and cultural context now becoming distant enough from many of today’s readers to require elucidation” (xvii). This drive for comprehensiveness does result in voluminous annotations and the occasional inclusion of seemingly extraneous information. One wonders, for example, how useful it is to document that the name Elizabeth, given to Clarissa Dalloway’s daughter, “has been recorded in England since medieval times” (188). On the other hand, a lengthy note exploring the etymology of and potential literary sources for Septimus Warren Smith as well as soldiers of Woolf’s acquaintance who may have served as a model for this character is exceedingly pertinent for both student and scholarly readers (205‒206). Locating the annotations after rather than alongside the text ensures they are unobtrusive and gives the reader autonomy to choose when and how to consult this material. Fernald’s notes seek to “present information, suggesting, but not developing, avenues for interpretation” (xc). The Cambridge edition does not attempt to have the
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last word on Woolf’s writings, but instead offers a commentary “in dialogue with the work of past and present readers and scholars of Woolf, with the hope of enabling and continuing the dialogues of the future” (xvi). It is an approach which Woolf would surely have approved.
AUTHORS
ALICE WOOD
Alice Wood is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at De Montfort University, Leicester (UK). She is the author of Virginia Woolf’s Late Cultural Criticism: The Genesis of The Years, Three Guineas and Between the Acts (Bloomsbury, 2013).
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Dirk Van Hulle, Modern Manuscripts: The Extended Mind and Creative Undoing from Darwin to Beckett and Beyond
Stefano Rosignoli
REFERENCES
Dirk Van Hulle. Modern Manuscripts: The Extended Mind and Creative Undoing from Darwin to Beckett and Beyond. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. 274 pp. ISBN 978‒1‒4411‒ 3316‒8.
1 Dirk Van Hulle’s rapidly growing body of work is always informed by a comparative and genetic approach that highlights the interconnections within modern literature and grounds critical statements on textual evidence. For both reasons, it would be hard to praise fully Van Hulle’s laudable efforts in his field. As he makes clear in the introduction, Modern Manuscripts is imbued with the same approach, showing the ambition to establish a link between source- and discourse-oriented research (see Sternberg 1985, 14), and in particular among narrative theory and genetic criticism. Van Hulle here welcomes Andy Clark and David J. Chalmers’ thesis of the “extended mind”, based on a post-Cartesian model of cognitive interaction between mind and external environment (see Clark and Chalmers 1998, 10‒23), to question the “inside/ outside model of the mind” implied by the “inward turn” ascribed to literary modernism (see von Kahler 1957, 501–46; 1959, 177‒220). A strict separation between Modernism and Realism, resulting from such premises, could easily conceal the modernist attempts to overcome the dichotomy between interiority and exteriority. Van Hulle advances instead “a method that combines genetic criticism and cognitive narratology in order to study […] the production of narratives and the literary evocation of fictional minds” (3). Following on from this double aim, the book is
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structured in two sections, each centered on textual exogenesis, endogenesis and epigenesis, and expounding two key ideas (4): (1) From a post-Cartesian perspective, manuscripts are part and parcel of the ‘extended mind’. Many modernists either intuitively or consciously exploited the interaction with their notebooks and manuscripts to stimulate creative cognitive processes (Menary 2007). (2) Modernist writers’ awareness of this mechanism, based on their own experience as “thinkers on paper”, is part of their view on the human mind, and plays a considerable role in their methods of evoking the workings of characters’ minds in their writings.
2 The first section of Modern Manuscripts, dedicated to point 1, focuses on the case-study of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, drawing on the vast amount of sources now available on-line. Van Hulle’s interest is stimulated not only by the exceptionally well- documented genesis of the Origin or by Darwin’s role of precursor of modernism, but also by the author’s dysteleological notion of evolution (see Beer 1983): a process lacking any preordained direction, as with the writing of several twentieth-century literary masterpieces. Or indeed of the Origin itself, despite Darwin’s later attempts to present its genesis as linear. Within this section, it is perhaps Van Hulle’s chapter on exogenesis that is the most striking, as it treats the role played by Darwin’s readings on his meditations on, and consequent objections to, creationism and anthropocentrism. Van Hulle dwells in particular on the influence of Charles Lyell, Thomas Robert Malthus, William Paley, John Herschel and William Whewell, but also on Darwin’s interest in the humanities, attested by his reading of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Joshua Reynolds, as well as of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth and Edmund Burke. With the “Preface” to the Lyrical Ballads in mind, Van Hulle’s chapter on endogenesis describes the progression of Darwin’s writing, from the springing from emotion, through recollection in tranquillity, to the production of a new emotion in the mind (see Wordsworth 1802), all phases that Van Hulle dates back to the years 1837‒39, 1839‒42 and 1842‒44 respectively. In the chapter on the epigenesis of the Origin, a perusal of its six editions (1859–72) reveals its multiple identity, and a reference to the famous variant “by the Creator”, added to the closing sentence of the second edition, offers an opportunity to retrace the entire avant-texte of Darwin’s work.
3 The second section of Modern Manuscripts, which explores the interaction between points 1 and 2, supports an enactivist approach in textual scholarship, taking the lead from reflections on Joseph Conrad, Franz Kafka and Virginia Woolf, as well as from Edmund Husserl’s notions of analogy (Analogisierung) and empathy (Einfühlung) (see Husserl 1913). The sheer amount of textual references leaps out at the reader here, contrasting the trend in the first half of the book. Three examples are discussed in the chapter on exogenesis, which moves from an opposition between conversation- and communication-oriented forms of reading (see Jackson 2001). In James Joyce’s Ulysses, Bloom’s and Stephen’s different angles on the cloud that “began to cover the sun”, in “Telemachus” and “Calypso”, seem to be an expression of contrasting poetics grounded in separate perceptive and mind models (epiphanies vs. extended mind). In Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, a reference to the notion of “parallax” might conceal the influence of passages from “Lestrygonians” and “Circe” in Joyce’s Ulysses, as suggested by O’Brien’s own notes in his copy of the Odyssey Press edition of the novel (1932). In Samuel Beckett’s “Whoroscope” Notebook (UoR MS 3000), jottings on Immanuel Kant (through Ernst Cassirer) and Fritz Mauthner could imply a “cognitive turn” in Beckett’s
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work, which, at least since Watt, produced lacunae (an equivalent of Wolfgang Iser’s Leerstellen; see Iser 1970) in order to convey the unspeakable, pointing to the act of writing itself. A following chapter on endogenesis begins with an examination of doubt and decision making in the drafting of the United States Declaration of Independence, to discuss the notorious omission of the paragraph on abolishment of slavery and Thomas Jefferson’s hesitation between the words “subjects” and “citizens”. Several paragraphs expand on the notion of “creative undoing” with reference mostly to the composition of Beckett’s L’Innommable, whose initial teleological development, founded on a Cartesian model of the mind, was replaced by a dysteleological narration permeated by a rhetoric of “epanorthosis” (correction) (see Linnington 1833), where an end could be imposed only by the materiality of the notebooks. The chapter on textual epigenesis makes a case of Beckett’s self-translation and self-staging to prove how even contemporary texts retain a transient state after their bon à tirer, how this process of revision is expression of a tradition of linguistic scepticism, and how it is incorporated in a “poetics of process”. Van Hulle also notices how Krapp’s Last Tape prefigured a post- Cartesian model of the mind in making a tape recorder and a dictionary an integral part of Krapp’s mental activity and of the narrative of the play. There is also space, at the end of the section, to introduce the concept of allogenesis, brilliantly exemplified by Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes: a cutout experiment with Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles, which is also a visual example of creative undoing.
4 Following an epilogue that illustrates how the genesis of texts leaves material traces even in the digital age, Van Hulle reformulates his hypothesis in the light of the many cases discussed in the course of the book (see Ferrer 2011, Herman 2009 and 2011, Menary 2010): If writers (not only modernist writers) can be regarded as “Umwelt researchers”, they also construe their own Umwelt and work on their written invention by means of a manuscript or another “environmental vehicle” (Menary 2010a: 21), which is part of the extended mind. Their experience with, and awareness of, the workings of the extended mind is often instrumental in the strategies they use in order to evoke the workings of the fictional mind. To the extent that the interaction with modern manuscripts serves as a model of the extended mind, genetic criticism can therefore be made operational in post-Cartesian approaches to storytelling and cognition, or what David Herman terms the “nexus of narrative and mind” (2009: 137–60). (244)
5 As he emphasizes later on in the conclusion and in the title itself, Van Hulle relates to manuscripts as evidence of both a mind at work and of failure as a driving force of artistic invention. It is especially the second of the two aspects that proves most clearly the influence of Beckett’s legacy on Van Hulle’s entire book. The web of references in Modern Manuscripts is rich, but Beckett’s influence is stronger, not only in the paragraphs specifically dedicated to him or in the reiterated references to Descartes’ dualism, but, for example, in the description of the genesis of literary works as an endless “going on”, or in the suggested pertinence of linguistic scepticism to the narratives of Joseph Conrad and Franz Kafka. Moving from this Beckettian starting point, Van Hulle’s effort to avoid “an exclusively empirical approach, foreclosing any form of hermeneutics or theory” (19) aims at a multidisciplinary approach with the desire to avoid mere description and excessive specialization. In fact, Modern Manuscripts leaves theory for the most part to the introduction and the preambles to each of the two sections, with further references to binary oppositions that support Van Hulle’s meticulous genetic enquiries: critique génétique vs. philology (see Ferrer
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2011), Kopfarbeiter vs. Papierarbeiter (see Scheibe 1998), epanorthosis vs. epizeuxis (see Linnington 1833), etc. Rather than articulating a theory with the support of scattered examples, therefore, Modern Manuscripts presents a working hypothesis and examines at length how it works at textual level.
6 On the one hand, the predominance of source-oriented over discourse-oriented research, which I have just noticed, is consistent with Van Hulle’s training and his outstanding results in the field of genetic criticism. On the other, the book raises questions concerning mind functioning that might deserve further treatment. The opening page of the conclusion, on the sense of incompletion as a result of manuscript study, testifies to the incorporation of a sense of “unending” in the book itself. As a matter of fact, Van Hulle’s monograph does not lack in references to theory, all particularly meaningful. If the most quoted are probably Pierre-Marc de Biasi and Daniel Ferrer (on the genetic side), and David Herman and Richard Menary (on the cognitive-narratological side), there is still space for vital allusions to Roman Ingarden and Jakob von Uexküll. A step forward could be to integrate binary oppositions into a more definite structure. An ambitious target could be to make use of the contributions to a theory of consciousness published, for example, by Gerald Edelmann, Giulio Tononi or Antonio Damasio ― the last of whom Van Hulle mentions in discussing Joyce and Beckett. Neurosciences would certainly be useful in broadening Van Hulle’s questioning of Descartes as well as in his interpretation of Darwin. In which case, the second and more varied half of Van Hulle’s monograph might reveal more clearly what I consider to be its most distinctive feature: the desire to link separate research projects, in support of an enactivist approach in genetic criticism. In other words, the book suggests a connection between separate experiences, which stimulates further enquiries that would explore the territories shared by cognitive narratology and genetic criticism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Beer, Gillian. 1983. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth- Century Fiction. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Clark, Andy and David J. Chalmers. 1998. “The Extended Mind”. Analysis, 58, pp. 10‒23.
Ferrer, Daniel. 2011. Logiques du brouillon: Modèles pour un critique génétique. Paris: Seuil.
Herman, David. 2009. Basic Elements of Narrative. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.
Herman, David. 2011. “Re-Minding Modernism”. In David Herman (ed.), The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English. Lincoln, Ne.: University of Nebraska Press, pp. 243–71.
Husserl, Edmund. 1913. “Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch, Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie”. In Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, 1(1), pp. 1–323.
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Iser, Wolfgang. 1970. Die Appellstruktur der Texte: Unbestimmtheit als Wirkungsbedingung literarischer Prosa. Konstanz: Universitätsverlag.
Jackson, Heather J. 2001. Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Kahler, Erich von. 1957 and 1959. “Die Verinnerlichung des Erzählens”. Die Neue Rundschau, 68, pp. 501–46, and 70, pp. 177‒220.
Linnington, R. T. 1833. The Rhetorical Speaker and Poetical Class Book. London: J. Souter.
Menary, Richard. 2007. “Writing as Thinking”. Language Sciences, 5, pp. 621‒32.
Menary, Richard. 2010. “Introduction”. In Richard Menary (ed.), The Extended Mind. Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, pp. 1‒25.
Scheibe, Siegfried. 1998. “Variantendarstellung in Abhängigkeit von der Arbeitsweise des Autors und von der Überlieferung seiner Werke”. In Hans Zeller and Gunter Martens (eds.), Textgenetische Edition. Beihefte zu editio, 10. Tübingen: Niemeyer, pp. 168–76.
Sternberg, Meir. 1985. The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Wordsworth, William. 1802. “Preface”. In Lyrical Ballads. London: Longman and Rees, pp. I–Lxiv.
AUTHORS
STEFANO ROSIGNOLI
Stefano Rosignoli holds degrees in Modern Literature and Publishing, and is a PhD candidate at Trinity College Dublin. His current research project focuses on a comparative textual analysis of the ethics of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Together with Mark Byron, he has edited a dossier on Beckett and the Middle Ages for inclusion in a celebratory issue marking the 40 th anniversary of the Journal of Beckett Studies (25[1]). He has also contributed to a collection of essays on Beckett and BBC Radio, which will be published by Palgrave Macmillan.
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Daniel Apollon, Claire Bélisle and Philippe Régnier (eds.), Digital Critical Editions
Ronan Crowley
REFERENCES
Daniel Apollon, Claire Bélisle and Philippe Régnier, eds. Digital Critical Editions. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014. 368 pp. ISBN 978‒0252‒03840‒2.
1 Born of the French-Norwegian collaborative network “Digital Publishing and Reading”, Digital Critical Editions offers nine original and thought-provoking essays (and a valuable bibliography of online resources) to address the ongoing transition from print-based critical editing to its digital counterpart. Eschewing any epochal model that insists on decisive breaks, the emphasis instead is on the uneven, gradual nature of this development: on what the editors describe, in an elegant formulation, as “[t]he slow intrusion of digital architectures into traditional editorial territories” (3). In her contribution, Sarah Mombert identifies this broad trend as constituting “a genuine editorial regime change” (247) in which the outward signs of media revolution belie more profound implications for the practice and protocols of editing. Accordingly, alongside the expected migration from paper-based to digital editing, the contributors also tackle such issues as the shift from paper-based presentation to the creation of digital research environments; the enrichment of scholarly practice made possible by new digital tools and technologies; the “Digital Fate” of the critical apparatus (the focus of chapter three); and new reading practices and editorial constructs concomitant with the digital turn.
2 The editors’ introduction, “As Texts Become Digital”, emphasizes a practical and practice-centred approach. More theoretical or epistemology-driven considerations are examined, but these are largely bracketed in favour of a fourfold matrix in which digital critical editing is located. The introduction canvases, in turn, the explosive
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growth in the production and accessibility of documents; the emergence of new tools and digital networks; the broader historical, cultural, and institutional framework in which editing is inscribed; and the coming to prominence of the reader or user in the consumption of the digital critical edition. Fully half of the chapters that follow are multi-authored. Coupled with repeat contributors, this collaborative spirit makes for a focused collection that circles and re-circles around a dominant set of preoccupations, arranged in three thematic clusters.
3 The first of these, “History, Challenges, and Emerging Contexts”, opens with a chapter by Odd Einar Haugen and Daniel Apollon on the digital turn in textual scholarship. Beginning with a broad overview of the field’s development since the nineteenth century, the authors identify three directions of inquiry ― “editors may choose to look backward, outward, or inward” (35) ― that correspond, respectively, with a transmission-centred focus on the development of text over time, with the situating of a text in its socio-historical context, and with unpacking the layers of meaning immanent in the literary work. All three directions have been subject to a dramatic shake-up in the wake of digital enhancement, assuredly, but the authors argue that the digital turn has not yet lead to a major upheaval in how we conceive of text per se.
4 In chapter two, Philippe Régnier strikes a similarly clearheaded note in his treatment of the major challenges and opportunities created for critical editing by digital technology. Instancing instructive examples from antiquity through the present day, he descries a “moral obligation” (58) for philology to remain true to its fundamental values as it responds to the manifold options that proliferating technologies make possible. His tone is cautionary, but he articulates an intriguing projection of a maximalist, pluralist “non-dogmatic philology” in step with the “boundless textuality” (77) of our time.
5 Apollon and Claire Bélisle temper this invocation of possibility in chapter three by addressing the afterlife of the print edition’s conventions in the digital age. They contend that new tools for analysis and presentation return us to a state in which fluctuation and variance ― “a generalized textual variability” (82) ― are once again the norm. As the critical edition goes digital, the editor’s challenge is to accommodate new readerships, to address changing expectations for the editorial apparatus, and to respond to the new frontier represented by the digital environment. The authors plump, reasonably enough, for Cerquiglinian variance. Gone is the singular, definitive edition; in its place, versions, paralipomena, and user-selected visualizations proliferate and constitute new ways of interacting with an expanded editorial object.
6 Chapter four on digital remediation and new reading practices rounds out the first part of the volume. Terje Hillesund and Bélisle look to the example of an earlier media shift, the transition from manuscript to the printed codex, to contextualize the transformations effected by the digital. A run-through of the long editorial engagement with Chaucer, which culminates in an analysis of the Canterbury Tales Project, paves the way for the authors’ investigation of how remediation engenders new reading practices. Against widely circulating predictions of the demise of reading, they remind us that “the paper paradigm” (140) has its own history, and they advocate instead a model of reading irreducible to a solitary, silent practice.
7 Part two, “Text Technologies”, comprises chapters five and six. In the first of these, Claus Huitfeldt provides a useful overview of markup languages, aimed primarily at textual scholars new to the intricacies of encoding. Recovering a history that runs from
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Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) through Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and on to EXtensible Markup Language (XML), he sets out the case for some of generalized markup’s most earnest shibboleths: standardization, sustainability, and the promise of longevity prominent among them. The introductory nature of the chapter hinders in no way valuable reflections on the theoretical underpinnings of markup and on the institutional considerations that are ensuring a future for XML even as the latest standardization struggles play themselves out.
8 With markup as something of a given, the focus of chapter six is on the affordances of the digital for critical editing. Taking wing from the principle of “separating transcription from presentation issues” (179), Alois Pichler and Tone Merete Bruvik draw on their respective experiences of working in the Wittgenstein Archives and for the Henrik Ibsen’s Writings project. The chapter traces the implications of disambiguating transcription from presentation, a nuance underdeveloped in the paper-based scholarly edition, but which comes to the fore in the digital environment, enabling what the authors term “interactive dynamic editing” (181). The potential of the latter is for an altogether more democratic, more transparent process of edition making, one that positions the user as a picker and chooser from among the varieties of presentation options enabled by source transcriptions and metadata.
9 Opening part three on “New Practices, New Contexts, New Policies”, Haugen surveys the historical development of textual editing from Alexandrian philology to the moment of the computer’s intervention. His focus is exclusively on the editing of pre- digital texts, but it culminates in the application of computational phylogenetic analysis borrowed from the life sciences. The chapter addresses the interplay between qualitative and quantitative methods in modern editorial practice to articulate a typology of editing that extends along three dimensions: how a text should be reproduced; the degree to which an edition should reflect the growth of the text; and the question of which versions or states of a text should be prioritized.
10 In her contribution, Mombert explores the critical editing of “heterogeneous documents” (246). To broaden the object of inquiry to include audio and visual material, for example, or to look beyond the canon to the also-rans of the nineteenth century is also to invite a correspondingly broadened set of methodologies. The author delineates a changeover from the book regime, with its attendant editorial framework, to what she terms “the digital collection regime” (247). The digital collection, as yet undertheorized and typically equated with the “corpus” or “archive”, represents a genuine novelty in the editorial landscape. Accordingly, Mombert offers valuable insights into how best the editor might establish the boundaries of a collection, impose organizational principles on its contents, or link its constituent documents.
11 The final chapter uses the frame of political economy to address commercial, political, and intellectual-property aspects of textual scholarship, first as a nineteenth century phenomenon, and subsequently in relation to the big text data being captured by Large-scale Digitization Initiatives like Google Books. Régnier describes in fascinating detail the “Livre à la carte” scheme of the late 1990s, which attempted to broaden access to public domain works held by major French libraries through digitization and limited print on demand. This leads him to make an impassioned case for the role of the editor in the current culture of mass scanning and remediation, and he argues forcibly that at stake is nothing less than thwarting a ring fence of the cultural commons.
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12 The spectre of obsolescence or supersession (for the current state of digital editing as for its print forebear) hangs over much of the volume. On the other hand, some of the emancipatory rhetoric might grate: that underexamined term “dynamic”, for example, recurs with suspicious frequency as though a denotation for server-side scripting has been lent the vigorousness of its more everyday acceptation (as one might speak of a “dynamic speaker”, for example). It is a testament to the essayists’ long perspective on textual scholarship and its shifting locus of inquiry, however, that the contributions are united not by anxiety or technological determinism but by thoughtful appraisal and a sober mixture of caution and optimism.
AUTHORS
RONAN CROWLEY
Ronan Crowley is Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Universität Passau. He took the PhD in English from the University at Buffalo in 2014 for a dissertation on transatlantic copyright regimes and Irish modernism. His research interests are in genetic criticism and the Irish Literary Revival.
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Elena Pierazzo, Digital Scholarly Editing : Theories, Models and Methods
Elli Bleeker
REFERENCES
Elena Pierazzo. Digital Scholarly Editing: Theories, Models and Methods. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2015. x, 242 p., ill. ISBN 978-1472412119.
1 What textual scholarship needs now are practical reports “from the editorial trenches”, concludes Paul Eggert in his review of David Greetham’s Theories of the Text (Eggert 2005, 90). Elena Pierazzo’s Digital Scholarly Editing: Theories, Models and Methods, the first comprehensive analysis of the field as it has developed in the past decades, can be considered an answer to that call. However, Pierazzo has much more to report than intelligence from the battlefield. She places numerous accounts of the practice within a broader framework of editorial theories and their historical and social contexts. As such, she continues and expands on notable studies like those of Jerome McGann (1991), Peter Shillingsburg (1996; 2006) and Eggert himself (2009). Her work demonstrates once again how scholarly editing intertwines with various cultural practices, and thus how it affects the current and future conditions of humanities research.
2 The book is structured according to the standard workflow of creating a digital edition. Of course, the word “standard” here raises a red flag: there is not one established approach toward digital editing, and this is exactly the topic of the book. Over the course of nine chapters, Pierazzo describes each step a present-day editor can take. The first part of the book (Chapters 1, 3 and 4) focuses mainly on “elements of continuity” (5) within editing, be it print or digital. It discusses for instance the debate on objectivity and provides conclusive definitions for concepts like text, work and document. This is a necessary exertion and Pierazzo dutifully discusses the main
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theoretical positions, but she implicitly makes clear that it is time to move beyond such debates. In the second part of the book, Pierazzo goes on to discuss the issues more specifically related to digital editing in a similar brisk manner. Stand-off markup might offer a solution to overlapping XML hierarchies, but it is not free of interpretation (Chapter 5); the main users of scholarly editions are scholars, even when the literary work may have a larger reading public (Chapter 7); and it is incredibly difficult to name and define the product of digital editing (Chapter 9). Taken together, her conclusive statements deliver a clear message: now that we know the history of the field, now that we fully grasp the concepts and understand the different approaches towards them, let’s get to work.
3 In order to work optimally with the computer, digital editors need a model of the text and preferably also of the complete editorial practice (38). Consequentially, modelling is one of the central themes of this book (Chapters 2 and 3). Following the arguments of Willard McCarty (2004; 2005), Pierazzo emphasizes that the making of a model can be as constructive as the model itself. The repetitive process of modelling, testing, (possibly failing) and reconceptualizing has intrinsic intellectual value (63). Through an analysis of the merits and shortcomings of existing models (e.g. DeRose et al. 1990; Sahle 2013), Pierazzo presents a conceptual model that forms the implicit foundation for the rest of the book. It is important to note that here, and elsewhere throughout the book, she remains constructive in her critique. Failure is, after all, an essential part of modelling. Perhaps difficult to accept for scholars who usually strive for nothing less than perfection, but Pierazzo considers it a prerequisite for “sustainable innovation” (204).
4 Her mastery of the topic ― and her enthusiasm for it ― is evident when she writes about the various aspects of digital editing. Some footnotes constitute amusing short stories on their own, such as the anecdotes about the title of McLuhan’s famous work (67) or the sixteenth-century editor/publisher Francesco Domi (127). Each chapter presents practical examples, often taken from her own experience as philologist and digital editor, are neatly wrapped in an introductory status quaestionis and a conclusive statement suggesting a number of directions in which the field might develop. Some of these explorations are relatively short, but the chapter s are so entwined with references and citations that the interested reader has enough starting points for further reading. Pierazzo also acknowledges that for many of the issues she brings up there is no clear-cut solution, the answer often being “it depends” (76 and 120) or “in need of further work” (157). This is not necessarily a flaw of the book, nor an easy “time will tell”-answer: it merely illustrates the versatility of a field in full development.
5 As expected, the author identifies challenges in the areas of publication and sustainability, the notorious Achilles’ heels of digital scholarly editing. Possible solutions can be found along the lines of a revision of the partnership with the publishing world (see chapter 6). Additionally, Pierazzo suggests that scholarly editors produce both simplified reading editions for a larger audience as well as scholarly editions for study purposes. Another, more original concern is the continuation of innovative research, currently threatened by a guarded mentality of both editors and funding bodies. She proposes to distinguish two parallel strands of digital editing: one that concentrates on the production of digital editions, and another, more experimental or “daring” digital editing. As a proper research activity, the latter would on principle allow for innovative experimentation (and failure!): editions as “laboratories of textual scholarship” (204).
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6 It is true that, due to the rapid developments over the past thirty years, the present editorial discourse is laced with catchphrases such as “we are only at the beginning”. Yet, when reading Digital Scholarly Editing, one has indeed the exhilarating feeling of being at the outset of exciting times, of having an actual chance at witnessing those sweeping changes in the near future. The book’s central objective is simple yet effective: examine the present-day digital editions vis-à-vis their history and future potential. In other words, where do we come from, where do we want to go, and how do we get there? Pierazzo has clear ideas about the directions in which to move and backs her arguments by a thorough study of changing editorial concepts. One can read this book without having a solid background in textual scholarship and still understand the concepts she discusses. As a consequence, this work is engaging not only for practitioners of digital editing, but for a much wider audience as well.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
DeRose, Stephen J. et al. 1990. “What is Text, Really”, Journal of Computing in Higher Education, I (2), pp. 3‒26.
Eggert, Paul. 2005. “These Post-Philological Days”. Ecdotica, 2, pp. 80‒98.
Eggert, Paul. 2009. Securing the Past: Conservation in Art, Architecture and Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McCarty, Willard. 2004. “Modeling. A Study in Words and Meanings”. In Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens and John Unsworth (eds.), A Companion to Digital Humanities. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 254‒ 270.
McCarty, Willard. 2005. Humanities Computing. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
McGann, Jerome J. 1991. The Textual Condition. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Sahle, Patrick. 2013. Digitale Editionsformen: Zum Umgang mit der Überlieferung unter den Bedingungen des Medienwandels. 3 vols. Norderstedt: Books on Demand.
Shillingsburg, Peter. 1996. Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Theory and Practice. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Shillingsburg, Peter. 2006. From Gutenberg to Google: Electronic Representations of Literary Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
AUTHORS
ELLI BLEEKER
Elli Bleeker is a research fellow for the Marie Curie-funded "Digital Scholarly Editions Initial Training Network" (DiXiT). She is also a PhD candidate at the Centre of Manuscript Genetics of the University of Antwerp, investigating the textual genesis of a modern literary work and how this can be embedded in the infrastructure of a digital edition.
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correspSearch
Frederike Neuber
REFERENCES
correspSearch (http://correspsearch.bbaw.de). Released September 2014 by TELOTA, the Digital Humanities initiative of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
1 Numerous scholarly editions are constituted around the medium “letter“ which is a valuable source for historical and cultural research. The vast amount of scholarly editions of letters, in print and digital, makes it difficult to get an overview of edited letters in general and time-consuming to search for specific letters in particular. Problems of identifying correspondences may for example arise while searching for letters from a specific person, who is just one of many correspondents in an edition and not its central character. It can be even more complicated to retrace correspondence networks of cultural and intellectual movements such as Romanticism or a general collection of letters around a particular historical event such as the French Revolution. A first step to systematize editions of letters and to meet scholars’ needs is correspSearch (Correspondence Search), a web service that allows users to search for correspondence in various scholarly editions of letters, by sender, addressee, as well as place and time of origin.
2 correspSearch is developed and hosted by the TELOTA initiative at the Berlin- Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities in cooperation with the TEI Special Interest Group for the edition of correspondences (http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/ SIG/Correspondence/index.xml) and other scholars.1 The content of correspSearch is user generated, which means hosts of scholarly editions of letters can provide metadata of correspondences via the Correspondence Metadata Interchanger Format (CMIF).2. The structure and content of the interchange format is based on the TEI P5 element correspDesc (correspondence Description).3 As such it involves standardized Identifiers for persons (i.e. VIAF) and places (geonames) as well as a standardized format for dates.4 To participate in correspSearch, any printed or digital scholarly edition of letters may
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provide indexes of letters in a CMIF file via an URL. On the correspSearch website a template is provided to simplify the creation of such a file for those unfamiliar with XML/TEI.
3 Almost three years after the release of correspSearch, approximately 23,000 records of letters of more than 90 editions and publications have been integrated into the database. Even if the numbers are promising, the long-term success of the web-service depends heavily on the continuous participation of editing projects. It is currently promoted mostly throughout German speaking countries. However it seems essential that correspSearch should become known throughout the whole international editing community. Another important factor for success will be the adoption of its procedure for creating and providing the indexes of letters as CMIF-file by the users. For those who are not familiar with XML/TEI, this method of data provision might be deterrent at first glance, even if such an interchange format is necessary to standardize the metadata as well as to guarantee synchronization if the content of an edition changes.
4 All in all correspSearch is a successful attempt to systematize the large amount of scholarly editions of correspondences via metadata, creating a common registry for the research community. It could be expected that if and when correspSearch succeeds in continuously attracting editing projects to participate, it will be of great use to scholars by facilitating complex research queries and will help guide their way through the abundance of scholarly editions of letters both in print and digital form.
NOTES
1. The Electronic Life of the Academy,
AUTHORS
FREDERIKE NEUBER
Frederike Neuber is a doctoral student, affiliated to the Centre for Information Modelling at the University of Graz and involved in the Digital Scholarly Editions Initial Training Network DiXiT (Marie Curie Actions).
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