sign in sign up
<<
Home , Book of Kells, Folio

Margins and the Frame of

by

Karen Ward

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

Dalhousie University

Halifax, Nova Scotia September, 1997

O Copyright by Karen Ward, 1997 National Bibliothèque nationale 191 of Canada du Canada Acquisitions and Acquisitions et Bibliographie Services seivices bibliographiques 395 Wellington Street 395, nie Wellington Ottawa ON KIA ON4 Ottawa ON KI A ON4 Canada Canada Yaur file Votre dferena,

Our Ne Notre refdrenee

The author has granted a non- L'auteur a accordé une licence non exclusive licence dowing the exclusive permettant à la National Library of Canada to Bibliothèque nationale du Canada de reproduce, loan, distribute or sell reproduire, prêter, distribuer ou copies of this thesis in microform, vendre des copies de cette thèse sous paper or electronic formats. la forme de microfiche/nlm, de reproduction sur papier ou sur format électronique.

The author retains ownership of the L'auteur conserve la propriété du copyright in this thesis. Neither the droit d'auteur qui protège cette thèse. thesis nor substantial extracts from it Ni la thèse ni des extraits substantiels may be printed or otherwise de celle-ci ne doivent être imprimés reproduced without the author's ou autrement reproduits sans son permission. autorisation. TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ...... v

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .....o...... viii

CHAPTER ONE In the beginning was the Margin ...... 6

CHAPTER TWO Blake's Margins: No Horizons ...... 31

CHAPTER THREE The Marginal Glas ...... AFTERWORD ...... a..

WORKS CITED AND CONSULTED ...... LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1. A world map from a psalter, c. 1260. Reprinted in Michael Camille, Image on the Edqe: The Margins of (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992) 15. Figure 2. Marginal detail from Lancelot Romance. Reprinted in Michael Camille, Image on the Edqe: The Margins of Medieval Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992) 30.

Figure 3. Marginal detail from a of Hours, c. 1300. Reprinted in Michael Camille, Imaqe on the Edge: The Marqins of Medieval Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992) 24. Figure 4. Marginal detial £rom a missal, 1323. Reprinted in Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Marqins of Medieval Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992) 25. Figure 5. 34r from the . Reprinted in Françoise Henry, The Book of Kells: Reproductions from the in Trinity College, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974) 29. Figure 6. Folio 292r from the Book of Kells. Reprinted Françoise Henry, The Book of Kells: Reproductions from the Manuscript in Trinity Colleae, Dublin (London: Thames and Hudso

Figure- 7. Detail of folio 292r from the Book of Kells. Reprinted in Françoise Henry, The Book of Kells: Reproductions £rom the Manuscript in Trinity College, Dublin (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974) 95.

Fiqure 8. Detail of folio 292r from the Book of Kells. Reprinted in Françoise Henry, The Book of Kells: Reproductions from the Manuscript in Trinity College, Dublin (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974) 95. Figure 9. Detail of folio 292r from the Book of Kells. Reprinted in Françoise Henry, The Book of Kells: Reproductions from the Manuscript in Trinity Colleqe, Dublin (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974) 95.

Figure 10. Detail of folio 292r from the Book of Kells. Reprinted in Françoise Henry, The Book of Kells: Reproductions £rom the Manuscript in Trinity Colleae, Dublin (London: Thames and Hudson,

Figure 11. Detail of folio 292r from the Book of Kells. Reprinted in Françoise Henry, The Book of Kells: Reproductions £rom the Manuscript in Trinity College, Dublin (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974) 95.

Figure 12. A from Gutenberg's 42-line . Reprinted in Albert Kapr, Johann Gutenberq: The Man and his Invention (Aldershot: Scolar, 1996) 168,

Figure 13. William Blake, "The Laocoon. " Reprinted in David Bindman, ed., The Complete Graphic Works of William Blake (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982) Plate 623.

Figure A page from Blake' s notebook. Reprinted in David Erdman, ed. , The Notebook of william Blake (Oxford: , 1973) N84 .

Figure 15. Detail of William Blake, "The Laocoon. " Reprinted in David Bindman, ed., The Complete Graphic Works of William Blake (London: Tharnes and Hudson, 1982) Plate 623.

Figure- 16. William Blake, "Elohim Creating Adam." Reprinted in Morton D. Paley, William ~lake(Oxford: Phaidon, 1978) plate 28.

Figure- 17. Detail of William Blake, "The Laocoon. " Reprinted in David Bindman, ed., The Comp Granhic Works of William Blake (London: T

Figure 18. William Blake, Milton a poem, plate 7. Reprinted in David Bindman, ed., The Complete Graphic Works of William Blake (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982) Plate 91.

Figure 19. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Kell, plate 10. Reprinted in David Binàrnan, ed., -The Conplete Graphic Works of William Blake (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982) Plate 422.

Figure 20. Jacques Derrida, Glas (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986) 44-45.

vii ABSTRACT

'Itrs just not the same," someone might Say upon encountering a text for the first tirne on a computer in hypertext format. Surely, the words are the same, and we read the same way. What is it about , or printed matter in general, that so defines the idea of reading? Upon closer investigation, it seems that the materiality of the book, and the materiality of even the printed page are integral to our notions of reading. This thesis is an investigation of the materiality of three pages: one from a medieval manuscript, one broadsheet by the artist and poet William Blake, and one from Jacques Derrida's book of experimental philosophy, Glas. In this thesis, 1 discuss and explore the ways in which our experience of reading is constructed--framed--by the page itself and its margins. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

1 would first of al1 like to thank Dr. Peter Schwenger.

His assistance, insight and good counsel has been invaluable throughout he preparation of this thesis. I'd also like to thank Dr. Dorota Glowacka and Dr. David McNeil for their comments and encouragement. Dr. Anne Higgins provided rnuch- needed advice for Chapter one, and Dr. David Clark of

McMaster University did the same for Chapter two. 1 should also thank the academy: the ongoing support of the Dalhousie English Department, faculty, staff, and

Graduate Fellowship. Then there's my colleagues and friends who are also finding their way through the graduate prograïe. Thanks to friends I've met here, Brian, Suzy,

Lyn, Trina, Nick, the Daves, Melanie and Sandra; to friends

Irve left in Hamilton, Ontario, Priti, Steve, and Margaret who warned me about this whole thing.

This stack of paper is dedicated to my lover Christine.

1'11 get you something better sornetirne, promise. PREAMBLE You are reading a thesis. Somewhere around the centre of the page, there is a block of words. Surrounding it, there is a margin, which is blank paper. It is interrupted only by a page number. The type style reminds you of a mechanical typewriter, recalling a time before computers became personal. It al1 looks rather formal, and even a little legislated. You could investigate the prelirninary material and find that it is legislated, that an administrative body decrees the appearance of these pages. What is the relation between the 'text' on a page and the white space that surrounds it on the margins? 1s a text only words, or does it construct its own physical and textual margins in that white space? This thesis will be an investigation of pages that threaten and destabilize their own edges, that underrnine their textuality (in the strict sense) by their visuality. Margins frame texts, and texts £rame margins: this reciprocal relationship creates the leglble. The concept of the frame is interrogated by Jacques Derrida in The Truth in Painting, a book of four essays considered Derrida's contribution to the deconstruction of art history. Described as a supplement, the frame or parergon (par-ergon: that which lies outside the work) is both inside and outside, and the line that separates 'art' from everything else. The frame creates the work,

delineating it for the viewerrs eye, yet the frame is not admitted as a part of the work. Literary works are framed

too (we cal1 this "context", usually) : the frame is the social environment, the reception, the intellectual climate and political systems that exist when the work was produced

and when it is read. As readers, we are always already

framed by who we are and what our relation is to our culture. Gérard Genette has, more recently, devoted an entire book, Paratexts, to the things that are physically

outside the \textr, like title-pages, dedications, indices--

as an external systern of control over the reader's interpretation of any given text.

My focus here, however, is more specific. 1 am looking

at three pages, two of which are pages of books, and am considering the relationship of the text to the margins.

The three pages are not intended to be representative in any way--on the contrary, al1 three are strange in their own right. Al1 three exhibit an awareness--a visual artistrs awareness-of the page as a medium. These pages enact

theory: ideas of the margins and the centre, of the frame, of the visual and the textual, of the very idea of reading

itself; they do so, 1 contend, in order to interrogate these ideas, essential as they are to book-culture. Books about books abound at this time. The reason may be a kind of rnillennial angst, abetted by the declarations

of futurists and devotees of information technology, who claim that the book will soon be extinct. George Landow has noted, and 1 think rightly, that those of us bent on protecting books from technology will fetishize them, and,

if it will Save books in general, treat any cheap

as though it were the cornerstone of western civilization.

It is certainly not my intent to deal with the book's nature

in al1 its complexityl. This study is an examination of a

few pages, and how they appear, in al1 their complexity, to

a reader. My approach is both materialist and phenomenological--an examination of shape, line, rnargin, centre, frame, and some words.

Inevitably, then, this thesis is also an extended riff on the themes of word and image; it is itself some

inexpensive paper filled with words and broken up with properly labeled pictures. The crucial space here, as it is in Blake's "Laocoon", is the blank space between image and text. For Foucault, '' [ilt is there, on these few millimeters of the white, the calm sand of the page, that

are established al1 the relations of designation, nomination, description, classification" (28) . Words and

1 For a look at a literary critic examining the image, see W. J. T. Mitchellgs Picture Theory. However, Mitchell tends not to read the conjunction of word and image--he rather reads the image as a cultural artefact and as a sort of text. images are separated by the page itself, and when we, as readers and writers, pretend that language has anything at al1 to do with the world of objects, or can Say anything satisfactory about it, we participate in an act of imposition upon the material and non-linguistic world. Books and pages are the material objects in question here, and it remains doubtful that even their textual contents are outside of the object world. Describing a painting inevitably changes a painting--it is a thing that does not exist in language. The three pages described here straddle the border uncomfortably between the disciplines of art and literature and do not fit comfortably in either mode of academic practice. These chapters are neither an attempt at a comprehensive history or even an explication of a historical progression in the building of texts. 1 am, after all, examining texts that fa11 outside of what is considered representative--these texts, too, are marginal. Rather, 1 will examine a corrosion of the \unityr of the text, or at least the unity of these pages. Valéry said that reading takes place on the margins of texts; this is why, he claims, we as readers over-write texts on their edges--we are always already pushed to them (Lipking 611) . These margins (and al1 margins) are full of play, counter play, continuous cacophony; they evade a totalitizing exegesis of the page. Although the dif ferences between them are, 1 think, more striking than their similarities, these three pages chip away--corrode--the most basic assumptions encoded in our idea of reading. CHAPTER ONE In the Beginning was the Margin

In Image on the Edge, Michael Camille develops a theory of the margin in medieval art. He sees the margins--of manuscript pages, of cathedrals, of monasteries--as a site for the interrogation of boundaries. The divisions he sees, following Bakhtin, are between the sacred and profane, text and non-text, and the soteriological and the scatological. He considers earlier theories--that, for example, marginal designs are a return of the repressed, or idle doodling, or a deliberate subversion of authority and authoritative texts, and goes on to postulate his own. On the margins of pages, like this world map (figure 1), he sees the medieval mind .- d .- *- . ---L *. z .-&q--a fig. 1. A 13th-centuxy world map. defining itself by what its world contained and also by what lay beyond it. Jerusalem is in the centre, and as we move towards the margins of the world, we see "blemyae and cynocephali (men with eyes in their chests and dog-headed perçons), giants,

pygmies and many others" (14), and outside of the world, a

Christ-figure encompassing all. Both Jerusalem and the monstrous figures exist on the same plane, without a clear line separating thern. The sacred and the profane are not divided, and there is a sort of interplay between them, which results in the division becoming

increasingly blurred. A marginal

detail such as this one from a book of hours, of a nun suckling a rnonkey

(figure 2), not only illustrates the

. ..- . a. _ -- .:-- .- ....;A - dialectic of mode1 and anti-mode1 - --

(that is, positive and negative moral figure 2. ~nunsuckling a monkey. examples) in the fom of a parody of the traditional virgin and child motif; it is also a criticism of convents and carries overtones of illicit

female sexuality. The monkey, which is (in French) singe

and always a signe, is never simply a monkey but rather a

degenerate human, usually pictured committing some inhuman sin. Camille concludes that marginal art flourished between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries only because it was allowed to, only because of the "absolute hegemony of the system it sought to subvert" (160). The margins are the liminal space in which a Bakhtinian carnival takes place. The \outsider (whether of a cathedral, tom, world map, or text) is always strange, somehow perverse, and often damned; yet the outside is necessary so that figure 3 Textual the inside can be distinguished. constxuction. A monk pushes a missing line of Thus, anything could be mocked in text back into the work. the margins, since the subversive and counter-hegemonic potential of the outside is always already contained sirnply by virtue of its being on the outside. For Camille, then, the -press did not so much end marginal art as did the successful questioning of this hegemonic system. It becarne somewhat easier to express dissent directly when written material became less exclusively religious.

figure 4 A group of monkeys mock a copyist. 1s the production of just monkey-work? If you locked a bunch of monkeys in a room with some paints, brushes, and , would they eventually produce the Book of Kells? In the margins of Image on the Edge, Camille touches on

the manuscript that 1 will focus on here: the late eighth- century Book of Kells. His theory of margins is built with

examples from a period several hundred years after the production of the Book of Kells, yet Camille does have

sornething to Say about it. He cites St Boniface, who complained in 745 of "ornaments shaped like

wonns, teeming on the borders of ecclesiastical vestments" which "announce Antichrist" (17) in the form of chaos and disorder. Camille notes

figure 5 The -Rho page (f34r) from that in the Book of Kells, the Book of Kells. "the Woxd of God itself

D 1 became a 'habitation of dragonsr'' (17). Looking at the Chi- Rho page (figure 5), he finds symbolic resonances of the resurrection worked into the page design. "[Tlhe Word and the world are sacrally interwoven" (18) in Kells, as they are not in the later manuscripts he looks at. In effect, the Book of Kells is the counter-example throughout Image on the Edqe. It is presented as a unified work of art that is the perfect text, doing exactly what it seems to daim to do: speak the voice of God through its illumination. Like

Plato, Camille sets up a narrative of the fall, a logocentric fantasy to explain the fissures he finds on the margins of later manuscripts. Books were perfect once; then (from the twelfth to the fifteenth century) they were filled with gaps and apparently meaningless images, and then society changed so dramatically that neither books nor the visual arts were the same again. In fact, this is not so.

The Book of Kells is no more the transcendental book than this thesis is. This is not to Say, however, that the Book of Kells does not claim al1 the prestige that may attach to the book as a cultural artifact. It represents, in the words of one critic, "the culminating work...of the Golden Age" (Laing

174) of Celtic Irish art before the Viking invasions of the ninth century, and is thus, in its surviving state, the object of much study and admiration2. In its own time, its cultural role was likely similar. The book is, after all, a massive object, lushly decorated and beautiful. Considering its 340 surviving pages (al1 but two of which are coloured), the arnount and kinds of colour used, and the size of its pages, Kells was an extremely expensive object to produce. The Book of Kells is a text of the four , with several pages of prelirninaries. It was most likely begun in

In the late twentieth century, of course, one can purchase jewelry, T- shirts or tea towels decorated with designs from the Book of Kells. , an large and important monastery off the coast of present-day , sornetime before the Viking raids of

795, and completed at Kells after the monks fled Iona for . It is related in kind to several other books produced in Ireland, and Gaul, known as Insular, al1 of which share certain stylistic features. Most critics agree that the Book of Kells is probably the most lately produced of this group, as well as the most elaborate. Irish culture before the Viking invasions is known only vaguely; yet what we do know certainly helps explain the bookfs style of illumination. Ireland was newly Christianized (by al1 accounts a peaceful transition), it was home to a thriving monastic culture, and Vikings were attempting invasion almost constantly. Much art-stone carvings and metalwork--has survived, bearing striking stylistic similarities to the designs of the Book of Kells. Few written records are extant, however. Otto Pacht, in Book Illumination in the , notes in passing that the knotwork and the designs in the Book of Kells are similar to "the tattooing of the body in primitive peoples" (65). Such a comment is itself illuminating: the are often considered a race still dominated by their primitive or tribal past. As a newly converted people, even their Christian artwork is considered more in tune with some unknown, pagan religious practice than with Christianity. The consistent othering of the Celts, even among their historians, is indicative of their status as a colonized race. Such a reading implies that these pagan roots erupt al1 over the pages of the Book of Kells and hence a resistance to Christianity that frames the Christian text. This is simplistic, however: much early Christian art is profoundly influenced by 'pagan' art. Christian iconographic tradition did not spring, fully- formed, out of someonefs head, but always relied on the modes of visual signification that preceded it. Representations of the virgin and child tended, for example, to recall earlier 'paganf representations of Cupid and Psyche (Steinberg 3). Narning as particularly pagan irnplies that other modes of Christian artistic expression are not, which is clearly not the case. Celtic art simply seems more foreign, strange, and pagan because its style did not become the dominant mode of expression in the later middle ages. The hypothesis of pagan influence also tends to overlook other influences in Kells: the portraiture throughout is clearly Byzantine, and it shares features (such as the evangelist symbols) with other illuminated from the continent. The Irish monasteries at Iona, , and Bobbio were centres of both Christian and classical learning, acting as magnets for al1 rnanner of influence, theological, literary, and artistic; and they influenced other practices as much as they were themselves infl~enced.~ The cultural significance of books in the early middle ages was very different from that of the Gutenberg era. In print, every copy of the same book, no rnatter how much our responses to them may differ, is the same. In a manuscript culture, each book was unique in its way: some would be collections of traditionally allied material, some would be a well-known text with a series of commentaries, others would be sacred texts. Monks in Ireland would copy everything--Latin poetry, biblical texts, commentaries, Irish folk tales--and often bind it al1 into a single (Cahill 162-163). After Gutenberg, print became the dominant mode of al1 discourse; in pre-print cultures books were rarities. Hoards of them could of course be found in the later medieval period, but only in places restricted from the general population like universities, monasteries, and churches. During the height of the Celtic civilization, during which Book of Kells was produced, Ireland was the only place in the Europe where books were being produced at al1 (Cahill 206). "Reading" an like the Book of Kells consequently involves a rather different set of

-- Information about Irish scriptoria and the influence of Irish monastic culture on the later middle ages is best found in Cahillrs How the Irish Saved Civilization. assumptions than those involved in reading a printed book. Since the vast majority of the population was illiterate, books functioned symbolically, primarily through ritual and through the place assigned to them in community life. For example, the book on display in the monastery church could easily be the only one that an ordinary person might ever see, and as such, that book, the Bible, functioned as a symbol of the authority of Godfs work, as well as of the authority of those who could read it. The book does not only function as a symbol of clerical power, however: when worshipping, St Benedict reminded Christians, they were in the presence of God (6 Carragain 399), and reading was a kind of worship. The Book of Kells, then, exists as a sacred object in a culture accustomed to a visual textuality, legible to the literate (priests and monks) and non-literate alike . Martin Werner, in 'Crucif ixi, Sepulti, Suscitati", argues from the basiç of the particular scenes illustrated in Book of Kells that the book was most likely used for services surrounding the feast of Easter, and thus would be associated with the highest of high days. Several of the great Insular books also have cases, known as book-shrines, and while Kellsr shrine was lost in 1007, it had one during the period of its regular use (OfSullivan19), indicating its status as a kind of . The book would be carried into the church and through the congregation as a part of a procession, as a treasured relic. It is, indeed, not meant to be read, but seen. In the specific case of Kells, this is only emphasized by the fact that the text, which is a mixture of an older Latin version of the Bible and the newer Gospels, is copied with "extraordinary carelessnessff (Henry 153) , and at some point in the Bookrs history, the last four chapters of John's gospel were lost. It is a book then, less concerned with its own legibility (at least as the term is generally understood) than with its status as a sacred, and hence illegible, object . Books used in public ritual were memory aids for a text already known; books used in private were read in an entirely different way. Those who could read always read aloud, in a simulation of eating and digesting the full meaning, a practice whose visionary implications are suggested in the biblical Apocalypse:

And 1 took the little book out of the angelrs hand, and ate it up; and it was in rny mouth sweet as honey: and as soon as 1 had eaten it, my belly was bitter. (Revelation 10:lO) The book acts as a hallucinogen for John, begetting fantastic visions. For a medieval reader, such an experience could be exemplary. Walter Ong describes a sirnilar experience with a later exarnple: [Chaucer] wrote The Parliament of Fowls, he explains, because after he had been reading about Scipio Africanus Major, the latter appeared to him in a drearn to converse with him and take him on some travels. (Ong 2) For Ong, such a reading experience reflects how reading was closer to oral exchange during the medieval period. He does not consider, however, the implications of calling the poem a "dream-vision conversation" (Ong 2) . Likely reading Scipio aloud, Chaucer would be \eatingf the words, entering into a mental state akin to meditation, and receptive to the voice of the author. The Parliament of Fowls can thus be seen as a sort of textual hallucination. Consider, by way of more direct illumination, this passage, written by Giraldus Cambrensis in 1185: This book contains the harmony of the according to , where for almost every page there are different designs, distinguished by varied colours. Here you may see the face of majesty, divinely drawn, here the mystic symbols of the Evangelists, each with wings, now six, now four, now two; here the Eagle, there the Calf, here the Man and there the Lion, and other forms almost infinite. Look at them superficially with the ordinary casual glance, and you would think it an erasure, and not tracery. Here Cambrensis describes the familiar iconography of illuminated Bibles. Most would involve portraits of the symbols for the evangelists, for example. These animal portraits were keys for an illiterate worshiper--he or she could thus be aware of what evangelist the priest was reading from. When Cambrensis looks at the forms casually, it seems 'an erasure and not tracery." The very idea of illumination, which McLuhan aligns with gothic architecture, is meant to allow readers to see through mere words to the voice of the text. McLuhan cites Origen, who claimed that "blessed are the eyes that see divine spirit through the lettersr veil" (qtd. in McLuhan 130). As sanctified light suffuses a cathedral, so it does too in a literally illuminated (and illuminating) manuscript. Cambrensis goes on, and it is this part of the description that has led some believe that Cambrensis was writing about the Book

Fine craftsmanship is al1 about you, but you might not notice it. Look more keenly at it, and you will penetrate to the very shrine of art. You ni11 make out intricacies, so delicate and subtle, so exact and compact, so full of knots and links, with colours so fresh and vivid, that you might Say that this was the work of an angel, and not of a man. For my part the oftener I see the book, and the more carefully 1 study it, the more 1 am lost in ever fresh amazement, and 1 see more and more wonders in the book. (qtd. in Brown 83) What this monk is describing is a process not of reading but of seeing. He is familiar with the words of the text and does not bother with them; his concern is rather with the strange art of the book, while continuing to be aware of its sacredness. This activity, unlike reading, could be done silently, in contrast to the spoken, eaten reading that would usually be done. Such silent acts were also acts of illiterate (that is, non-latin) reading. The designs of Kells are non-representational and consist mainly of knots, spirals and lines. Pacht complains that 'the eye is caught in a labyrinth and distracted from firmly aligned reading"

(65), but Kells encourages the reader to trace these patterns visually, become lost in them, while contemplating the Word that is God, which is non-representational except in its human incarnation. Michael Camille sees distraction as the necessary component in later medieval manuscripts in the play of centre and periphery, the margins of the page becoming "the site of reading and the edge of distraction" (18). In the Book of Kells, reading is subsumed into distraction, words and design both recognized in moments of surprise, as metaphors only gradually signifying. The Book's unreadability is a common criticisrn. For ~t-ienneRynne, this is understood as another instance of the

Celts' horror vacui, the compulsion to fil1 space perceived as empty with meaningless visual jokes and doodles (317). Thus, the final product is a of pages, unconnected (except by the binding) and meaningless. The designs of the Book of Kells thus become filler, extraneous to a text that is already known. The margins-+rames, letters--grow and consume the pages, amoebae-like. Critics cornplain that the knotwork and the strange, spiraling designs within the frame serve only to distract £rom the 'realf text. For Pacht, the curvilinear ornament that fil1 the large initial letters "contributes a blurring of forms and an impression of flux" (65). These qualities-- the horror vacui, the non-representational designs--are then attributed by such critics to the Irish. The attitudes of critics noted above obviously smack of colonialism. Celtic art is treated as a kind of folk art, or as a sort of miracle, like the singing of deaf children. It is true, for example, that some groups of indigenous people are tattooed, and that the marking of a human body is rarely without some meaning, but these sets of meaning are, quite literally, culturally inscribed, and so the body remains closed to those outside of the culture. Kells, too, is in this sense a closed book4, and yet the very exuberance of its designs serves to proclaim its status as a signifying object.

The Book of Kells thus exists as object, as fetish, as an image to be worshipped. The sacred book is integral to book-culture, as a work of divine art and as a manifestation of the Logos. This principle eventually became part of church doctrine: God was the author of the Bible and the Book of Nature, and the writer of human history. The Bible, if properly understood, could explain and justify everything. The sacred book became understood as 'a receptacle of Revelation and privileged bearer of the

By which I mean that although, for example, a certain kind of animal in a certain position may have rneant something very particular to the makers of the book and to the culture for which they made it, these possible meanings are lost to us. messianic kerygma", and al1 books, as Régis Debray argues in "The Book as Symbolic Obj ectfr, "benefited over the long run from the contentsr sacredness" (141) . The Bible, which in codex form replaced the scrolls of the Torah, was the origin of many of the connotations books still have. Reading is thus always a virtuous activity, and a means to revelation.

One need not so much believe in God as believe in the Book, whicn is God made legible. The word is thus made flesh, or rather, the word is made vellum. Yet, in the beginning was the Word, and the book implodes in its ocm deconstruction, since in the beginning, inevitably, is the initial letter. figure 6 The Book of Kells, folio 292r. The page of Kellsf incomplete reads 'in principio erat verbum et verba." As an opening, the page is dominated by the initial, the large 'Inr . Overdetermined and fraught with anxiety and chaotic energy only barely contained by the outlines of the letters themselves, the text begins - itself, yet does not clearly delineate the boundary between text and non-text. The page enacts a paradox: "In the beginning was the figure 7 Detail of knotwork Word", and the Word is God. But God is without beginning and beyond the limitations of small-w words . The knotwork exemplifies this . Looking closer, as Cambrensis did, lines tangle into knots, become snakes, and then lines again. The page becomes a beginning to a text that cannot have a beginning. The knotwork gestures off the page, sending the reader, the viewer into an endless system of lines that become one line, ever encircling itself.

For Pacht, the incipit pages of Kells represent one of the extremes of manuscript illumination. Incipit- were originally meant, he daims, to assist the reader by drawing the readerfs eyes toward the beginning of a text or paragraph. Over time, the initial "reversed its own impetus and unleashed a flood of indecipherable decorations, engulfing its natural alphabetical foms" (Pacht 51). The Book of Kells breaks one of the assumptions deeply embedded in book-culture: a book must be legible. Pacht describes each letter as being (or rather, he desires each letter to be) 'an unambiguous element8' (SI), that is, a sign that designates one thing and not another. According to

Derrida' s interpretation of Ferdinand de Saussure, a sign represents the logocentric deçire for fusion between the sign and its referent. The signifiers in Kells strain in the opposite direction, destabilizing both the individual letter and the aim of book-culture by rendering itself unreadable.

The page does, contrary to Camille's claim, enact a complex interrogation of margin and centre. The large initial letters form a frame, hidden within which are the smaller, more legible letters of the phrase. The frame thus constitutes a sort of beginning, a part of the \centref that remains a frame. Such a mise-en-page evokes Derrida's parergon. On this page, the frame--the large initial letters--seems to spiral inward, toward a centre. In effect, the entire page is a single, diminishing frame, that, like al1 frames, begins nowhere and never ends. These, of course, are attributes of God: yet, 'in the beginning was the Word", and the word is nowhere to be found, except by tracing the path of the endless frame. In some later medieval manuscripts, the text is much more clearly framed. Harginalia and representational images surround the words on four sideç. Perhaps expecting to find this in Kells, we see a text that is practically eaten by design. The initial letters, the 1,ln' and 'pf, are themselves the frame for the rest of the phrase. This anxious beginning, so typical of medieval manuscripts, is a deeply overdetermined enactment of the caesura or abyss between text and non-text, and this anxiety dominates this page (among others) in Kells. "When we begin to write, either we are not beginning or we are not writing," (386) Maurice Blanchot daims, and on this page, there is no beginning and no writing. The word (and the Word) is stripped of its signifieds and does not even seem to claim it has any. At the same time that these lines create the space for text, there is always the chance, especially to the non-literate eye, that the page will veer back into non- textf and become again a border, non-representational knotwork. The discornfort some critics feel at this lack of delineation between margin and centre may be intended. Accustomed to seeing a text inside of a frame, we see instead a frame that is itself part of the text. The 'IN P" are initial letters that attempt to enclose the rest of the phrase, just as a beginning should gesture towards its end.

So, this page represents the paradox of its text by being 25

without a distinguishable beginning or end, and the actual words are the most difficult elements to discern. Again, Kells enacts the in on itself: despite the character of the initial letter, initially designed to point

the reader to the beginning of a paragraph, here the initial letters threaten to take over the entire page and turn into

monstrous things at their endings--or beginnings.

If we consider the six words only as the Yextf, the

rest--the majority of the page, that is--is margin. Here, the rnargin is also frame, a system of knotwork, and coiling

animals. Yet this frame does not bring out the words. Rather, the words are hidden, disguised, and become only

lines in a sea of lines; the words are almost effaced. This is characteristic of medieval manuscripts-the \textf seems secondary to the total mise-en-page. Thus, on a page that

is concerned with the manifestation of the logos, the literal words are almost obliterated.

Looking closer, we see human and animal forms. For George Henderson, in From Durrow to

Kells, the larger human figure embedded

within the initials is likely a representation of God the Father (176) . Seated in flames and holding a book, he is coloured in the same way that the encircling frame-figure is on the figure 8 God, perhaps. mons ter. considered to be (Henry 204) because of an apocryphal legend in which John is forced to drink from a poisoned chalice and rniraculously survives. The chalice was one of several for John throughout the middle ages. Henderçon disagrees, however: he sees it as an image of Christ*s sufiering, an illustration of John 18:ll, "This cup, which the Father has given me, shall I not drink it?" The presence of the rnonstrous head to the right of the small figure can aid either of these interpretations. For Henderson the monster is clearly a representation of evil, an "assault of upon Christ" (178) ; for Henry it is simply a decorative dragon or lion (204) . Within frames, interlocking animals enact a "nightmare of teeming animal life", the constricted struggle of al1 against al1 (figure 10). The letters 'rinci" of "principioff

figure 10. 'rinci', detail. are dogs or weasels, their bodies intertwined, with an unhappy monk (as the 5' ) wrestling the 'cf , although it looks, on first glance, that he is playing a harp. The figures become frame, frame becornes letter, in an enactment, perhaps, of the pre-Christian Celtic belief in shape-

shifting, where 'godsf druids, poets and others in touch with the magical worldff could, quite simply, become

something else (Cahill 128). This belief was clearly amenable to the mystical aspects of Christianity. The self

could become the other, the human could become animal, the animal divine. The belief in instability-that nothing and

no one was fixed in any sense-may somewhat explain the

chaotic quality of Irish manuscripts, when compared to the more austere compositions of Europe. The spirals and

interlacing designs of Kells are thus an illustration of the Gospelsf ability to literally change a culture, as the Irish were ne11 aware.

On this page in particular, the mixture of

representations--God the Father, Christ or John, dogs , snakes, and monks-is not presented in a hierarchical way.

Everything is a part of design, and hence, a part of the

words of the text. The figure of God bridges the 'in" and

the "p", while a lowly Irish monk is the 'kt' in "principioff. Even the monster that is the right-hand border is also part

of the letter 'nu. This page of the Book of Kells is, then, NOTE TO USERS

Page(s) not included in the original manuscript are unavailable from the author or university. The manuscript was microfilmed as received. mixture of its already-known text and its unique materiality and design. This is, perhaps, a clue to how it can be best read: as a visual representation of a textual paradox and as an aid for the contemplation of that paradox.

Such a reading practice of such a book is a lesser, human version of the revelation of the Word of God. Other forms of medieval religious art work in this way; they are designed to give the audience the experience of the Bible on the scale of one lifetime, or even contracted into one day, as do the cycles of Corpus Christi, or guild drama, popular in England during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The dramas of that period gave way to commercial playhouses, while illuminated bibles and manuscript culture were somewhat superseded by the printing press. rose, at least among men, and -produced books and pamphlets were available in any large city. Books , produced artfully and with figure 12 A page from Gutenberg's 42-line Bible. an awareness of the possibilities inherent in a piece of non-text--be it paper or vellum--were rare. For Christopher Collinsr pre-print manuscripts, by their uniqueness and individual peculiarities, would retain a kind of status as ob j ect . In the Gutenberg era, however, the standardized print page tends to recede towards self-annihilation. Readers \seet not words but images, figures generated by the text (Collins 9) . A page from the (figure 12) does not enact the dialectics of margin, centre, and frame in a way at al1 similar to the page from the Book of Kells. Legibility has replaced colour, line and image under the guise of a text that is unmediated by illumination.

Yet, as 1 will argue, what margins remain on the printed page are the most imposing of all. The white space that surrounds and trames a text in order to designate a rnass of typographical signs as signs became culturally accepted as normative. In the following chapter we will see how William Blake, who reacted against al1 foms of institutionalized oppression, reacted against the tyranny of the printed page. CHAPTER TWO

Blakef s Margins : No Horizons

Blakers "Laocoonff (as it has been titled by editors) is a large, single page design that consists of two distinguishable parts: image and text. The central figure is a line-engraving of the statue which was originally done for John Flaxmanf s article on sculpture in Abraham Reesf

Cyclopaedia in late 1814 or early 1815. The engraving was made from a life-size cast in the Royal Academy. The "Laocoon" plate that is examined here was done sometime between 1824 and Blake's death in 1827. Only two copies are known to e~ist.~The plate, or rather, the text around the plate's centre is, as Tayler notes in her "Blake's Laocoon,"

'clearly a kind of summary index to Blake's later thought," while also addressing 'the problem of vision and the language of vision" (72). The plate is often simply used as a collection of disconnected aphorisms to illuminate Blake's other works, and rarely examined as a work itself.

The plate is not merely an index, of course. The text,

Blake's apparently random thoughts, did not sirnply and

This factual detail on the production of "The Laocoon" is found in The Final Illuminated Works, edited by Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi. There is some controversy surrounding the date of the plate, but it is largely irrelevant to my-discussion. Suffice to Say that the Laocoon engraving was printed significantly later than Milton and Jerusalem, and near the end of Blake's life. He would have been in his sixties. figure 13. "The Laocoon." accidentally fa11 ont0 a copper plate on which the Laocoon

also happened to be engraved. It is clearly a very deliberate work. David James, for exarnple, clairns that the

plate is structured by the material conditions of art at the

end of Blake's life. He had failed to attract a wide audience for his great works-though it is debatable, of

course, if he ever wanted or expected one. His work, especially the Continental Prophecies, and the even more

elaborate Milton and Jerusalem, were collecter's items,

ironically not ownable by persons of Blake's own economic

status. He knew most of his audience personally and could assume a sort of readerly ability on their part. Thus, for James, the "Laocoon" is "an illustrative if extreme example

of Blake's production as a whole" (226), except for the fact that the plate was apparently never offered for sale. The plate interrogates money and its way of commodifying art

into an object (the Laocoon object, for example) stripped of context, imagination, and the ultimately spiritual meaning that Blake divines in true art, which for him is always an expression of the eternal. Herrstrom, in "Blake's Redemption of God and the Marriage of Picture and Text," posits a way to 'read'

Laocoon. While it is certainly true that the text is not arranged randomly, "wherever there was room" (Keynes 56, qtd. in Herrstrom 39) , Herrstrorn' s elaborate theory of the plate as a "prophetic tablet" (39) of Jehovah-Laocoonrs redemption (literally) through the text is somewhat strained. He uses, for example, the "Milton's Track" plate of Milton as a paradigm or a map of reading (left to right, then top to bottom) -- unfortunately, this map is nonsense even within the Figure 14. A page from Blake's Noteboak. poemO6 Blake is never the linear and symmetrical artist that Herrstrom suggests, as this page from Blakers notebook illustrates (figure 14) . For Blake, the conventional linearity of text is never simply a given. The loosely horizontal orientation of the written line breaks dom, and bends, twisting itself around the page.

On Milton plate 36, the illustration is a map of four egg-shaped regions, with Milton's progress represented as a line intersecting them. Such a journey never takes place in the poem. And although it is true that Blake wrote "the genitals [are] beauty" in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he never gives the phallus the live-giving, restorative and ultimately signifying powers that Herrstrom attributes to it . Indeed, Herrstromfs reading is literally phallogocentric, claiming that as readers, we rnust pivot on the penis of the central figure in order to read properly (62). This is nonsense: Blakefs work can be well described as an interrogation of the law of the father and its signifying phallus, whether that father is Jehovah, Elohim, Urizen, Milton or Blake himself. Never was he an artist given to the mystification of the phallus as a transcendental signified (his relationship to the logos is

sornewhat more conflicted, as we will see), and his work is never simply a matter of reading through the phallus.

This illustrates well, 1 think, some of the many problems of reading Blake. His thought (and this is nowhere evinced more powerfully than in the "Laocoon", unless perhaps in the subsequent use of it by critics) is never exhaustively systematic and complete; it is always evolving and resisting a Urizenic reading while it resists becoming Urizenic itself . Urizen, "your reason", is the literal apotheosis of eighteenth-century enlightenment thought that attempts to fix, name, and tarne the complexities of life; tellingly, he is self-divided, wailing in a vegetative earth that is, for both Blake and his mortal readers, a kind of hell. Urizen is the figure who sets law in books, in graven images, creating the abstract thought that constrains human thought--not unlike the Greeks, for whom gods, once personifications of the divine imagination, became, in the words of the Laocoon plate, "mathematical diagrams." Paul Mann, writing on books in The Book of Urizen, finds that in order to exist in the world, Urizen must first exist in books. As in the case of the Bible, nothing exists until it is written (Mann 50-51). Blake saw laws and abstractions, and even, in a sense, book-culture as impositions of an unnecessary horizon (another possibility for the origin of

Urizenrs name) upon art and God, which were, for Blake, the same thing.

The "Laocoon" does have much to Say in its margins, as James attests, about art and rnoney, and is a somewhat coherent (insofar as any aspect of anyonef s thought is coherent) collection of texts, or a single text itself. The "Laocoon" is generally not, however, considered as such a text-object in itself, as a work perfect and complete, each

\partr of the text relying upon each other, and each upon the central image of the Laocoon group. Indeed, the words literally bend around the figure. Or the figures, in their own violent contortions, bend around and push through the words, which are Blake's analysis and condemnation of his culture' s dependence on money, and not the Christ/God, for its art. "Art Degraded Imagination Denied War Governed the

Nations" is the line at the bottom of the plate. It foms a

sort of subtitle, itself a kind of gloss on the "[Jah] & his

two Sonsff re-title. Art is degraded, imagination is denied,

and hence war governs the nations, here Greece, Rome, and England. The idea of war passes into the left side of the page, which is readable as

Spiritual War is Art deliverd Israel deliverd £rom Egypt> from Nature & Imitation Both terms, the general and the specific, are brought

together and celebrated as examples of deliverance, of a

sort of artistic freedom. "Nature & Imitation", both varieties of mirnesis, seem undesirable here. Yet the statue

itself is declared to be "copied from the Cherubim of

Solomon's TempleFf, seen by Blake as an example of Hebrew art

after its deliverance. The Laocoon statue, in its Roman version, is the colonization of art and hence, its re- naming . As the text arches around and about the centre of the plate, individual words and sentences, initially delineated by differences in size and type style, begin to blend

together into a sort of coherence. The line beginning "The

Eternal Body of Man" has three dif ferent endings. "God himself" is paralleled with "The Divine Body", and both are

made to equal \' [Jeshua] Jesus we are his Members". Sirnultaneously, the line also reads "The Eternal Body of Man is The Imagination. It manifests itself in his Works of Art." The emphasis on this side of the plate is on

Figure 15. The Laocoon, detail. words notable for their size, darkness, and elaborate detail. This strategy, of showing the reader multiple ways to read--or rather to see--at once is radically explored throughout the rest of the plate. Nonetheless, the left side of the page remains more immediately coherent than the others: al1 the lines run vertically up the page, and al1 the lines can be read as mediations between Christianity and art. Indeed, these are general themes, but the physical presentation of these words-of these obviously graven images--calls attention to the chaos, the randomness that seems to govern the rest of the page. Around the arms of the figures encoiled by the serpents, words also begin to bend. The serpents are namedr

"Good" and "Evil", and "Good & Evil are Riches & Poverty & a

Tree of Misery propagating Generation & Death." Good and evil, united as they are by what Blake would cal1 their contrary natures, are one system of thought, or one large serpent that poisons. They are a binarism that, even as

early as The Marriaqe of Heaven and Hell, had begotten

something akin to "Riches & Poverty", that is, illusory moral divisions that create political oppressions. The text, beginning at the engraved statue, is a series

of re-definitions and re-namings . " [ Jah] " looks up, into

"4i0vXq"~ that is, Ophiucus, the serpent-holder . This is, in a sense, a literal description of what [Jah] is doing, but the word also refers (and especially in its Greek) to lark 16:18, in which Jesus tells the disciples that "they

shall cast out devils; they shall speak with new tonpes;

they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them." Thus, the serpent7 which, in the Aeneid, killed Laocoon, here is a more ambivalent beast: it is both biting and being held. The father is Jehovah, the serpent-holder, a follower of Jesus, which re-

casts the statue yet again. And accepting that it is Jah and his two sons, whom the Three Rhodians only copied from a

Hebrew Temple, the point becomes clear: Christianity, or

Art, became re-named and commodif ied into a museum-piece, no matter how exalted a rnuseum the Vatican (where the statue was, and is still displayed) may be. The Hebrew characters

7 The serpents also, as always, refer to the fa11 and to Satan's role in it. In Blake's set of illustrations to Paradise Lost, he depicts the fa11 by showing Eve, with the serpent coiling around her, eating the fruit directly out of the serpentf s mouth. She, too, se- to be holding the sexpentrs head aloft with her left hand. above signify the tetragrammaton, Jehovahr and \'messengerf' or "Angel". Above this is yet another gloss, "The Angel of the Divine Presence", a phrase that recurs often in Blake, usually signifying Elohim, the Old Testament version of God as a vengeful king. These three re-namings, corresponding to the three titles at the bottom of the page, act both to re-name the centre, and then to problematize it. "The Ange1 of the Divine Presence" or Elohim is a terrifying figure, Urizenic and strange. In his earlier set of paintings on biblical themes, Blake utilizes the figure of Elohim to illustrate the often contradictory God(s) that created the world and its inhabitants. At times, Blake asserted that the act of creation may also be an act of mercy (J 13:45), but it is mercy tainted by the creator's foreknowledge,

Urizen's terrible "books formd of metals" (E 72) that contain the fallen world.

Figure 16. Elohim creating Adam. Here (figure 16), the Elohim (in Hebrew it is a plural noun) creates Adam by, it seems, pushing him further into the earth. Adam's expression is agonized, yet strangely lifeless, and he is already circled by a serpent. The Elohim, similarly, seems shocked, perhaps realizing what he has just done. "He repented that he had made Adam", the Laocoon plate reads, and so the representation of [Jah] acknowledgesf looking up in some sort of repentance. But even Adam is only The Natural Man & not the Sou1 or Imagination which is to Say that he is earth, as in the painting, or as much an en-graved line, brought to life only to die, as anything else. Reading the text, as I have been, clockwise fails at this point. The text begins to bend, becomes indifferently horizontal or vertical, and goes where it seems to best fit. The strategy that Blake engraves here is the same described earlier, exemplified by the multiple sentences beginning "The Eternal Body of Man". Blake engraves a reader as he engraves the plate. It is necessary, as Tayler notes, to approach the text as one would a physical statuef by walking around it (72), or by turning the plate so that a coherent line, left to right, can be read. Yet there is more. The reader is aware, as she turns the plate in her hands, that the ordinary, normal way of reading is useless when confronted with an object such as this. There is "No Secre

/ cy in Art", of course, and nothing is hidden here: [Jah] , the Elohim, Laocoon, is a Urizen-figure, as I've argued, and here, he breaks through the lines of his own making, but bending them nonetheless to fit him. Urizen, like the other creating gods, is the maker of horizons, lines and limits; here, Blake invites a reader to literally see how arbitrary and limiting they are. Indeed, there is an infinite margin here: a rnargin of endless recombinations of words. Such a margin is, as I've described it, profoundly intertextual. It expands into other languages, contexts, and types, which themselves invoke other books and places. Most obviously, the citation of other texts ('Platof s

Works", the Aeneid and the Bible) and the visual citation of the Laocoon group itself point to a textual world that is off the page and yet exists in a re-written (or perhaps re- engraved) Eorm within its margins. The figure itself, the most obvious quotation on the plate, was best known as an exernplar of classical art. The statue of Laocoon had been the mode1 for discussions of classical beauty since the figure was re-discovered in 1506.

In the treatise on aesthetics of the same name, G. E. Lessing uses the statue and the story from Virgil (aeneid Book II) as an example of the interaction between the fine arts and poetry. Blake's plate is then a re-presentation of a very familiar image. The difference between the "Laocoon" plate and the commercial engraving made a decade earlier lies in the frame of words that surrounds the central figures. Read through Derridars discussion of frames or parerga, the text which here is a frame of language, should efface itself, since in looking at (or perhaps rather, for) art, we do not look at frames. In "Parergon," the first essay in The Truth in Painting, Derrida explains how such frames never disappear; they bound, separating art from not-art. Thus, a frame constructs its centre as 'artf, or the Beautiful that Kant describes. At an odd moment in the "Critique of Judgment" (the text that Derrida is here reading), Kant discusses the "free beauties," which do not belong to any object determined in respect of its purpose by concepts, but please freely and in themselves. So also delineations à la grecque, foliage for borders or wall papers, mean nothing in themselves; they represent nothing--no object under a definite concept--and are free beauties. (Kant 257) Derrida makes much of this anomaly in "Parergon." In this appropriately deconstructive moment, the Beautiful is found in literal frames, not inside them.' The familiar post-

e This movement is similaz to Derridafs reading of Kant, in which he iinds that Kant's arguments turn in on themselves not in the main text, but in the footnotes and prefaces to each section. structuralist topos of the relationship of the margins to the centre seems, in a certain way, to be in the process of breaking dom in the workings of the "Laocoon" plate. If the irame itself, in its non-representationality, is the beautiful, what of the 'artt it apparently is meant to contain? The parergon, or frame, is a supplement to the word, and therefore unnecessary, but the parergon is always already there. It is "neither simply outside nor simply inside" (Derrida 54), and neither art nor non-art. When Kant looks at the non-representational designs on a frame and not at the art it encloses, the frame has invaded the work, obscuring art with the nundane and functional objects that surround it. Obviously, the status of art is in question here: Blake's use of an inconsistent and shifting frame of words to enclose an acknowledged work of art, read through the Derridean reading of Kant, puts radically into question the notions of image and text that are usually read into ~lake'. Hence, even though "the foliation on frames" represents leaves and is beautiful only when such leaves may well be representations of anything at all, or preferably, by representing nothing so much as, perhaps, Celtic

That is, that the images are simply a representation of text--as though Blake's works are, in effect, illustrated. An understanding of the works as illuminated, however, is perhaps more helpful. Bearing in mind the connotations of that word, its use in descrfbing medieval manuscripts such as the Book of Kells, Blake's poems are surrounded with commentary and self-contradiction and in fact do not exist as separable, textual entities. knotwork, the frame for Derrida becomes a deconstructive by its very character, having "the form of finality, but without endff (Derrida 97) . We rnay expect, then, that Blake's literally textual frame should displace its centre, while paradoxically effacing itself. Hence, only the frame exists, yet it does not exist at all. The "Laocoonf' is not, however, a painting in a gallery, and framing a sculpture is tricky business. In his engraving of the statue, Blake creates an illusion of three-dirnensionality and frames it in two-dimensional words . Blake scholars, of course, can merely note that the piece of paper is a competent enough representation of the Laocoon group, but the really interesting part is the text, the "index to Blake's later thought." By appropriating and re-writing Laocoon, by placing the familiar in the centre and the strange at its margins, the plate demands that the margins be read while the centre is in danger of disappearing. For if the Laocoon is the art of this plate, and the words constitute a sort of frame, these two distinct parts collapse, each into the other. Or, the frame encroaches on the engraved figure, literally enveloping it in words. The engraving exists in words; the immense complexity of the engraving rnay itself be described (quite Urizenically) in a narne. Laocoon is, properly speaking, the large, central figure-a priest of Troy. For Blake, the figure is named "[Jah] and his two sons, Satan and Adam." The engraving has several titles, al1 in seeming conflict (al1 these words and phrases can be read as titles) . 1s the plate itself a frame of titles, threatening to upset the fragile hierarchy of margin and centre? Frames, after all, construct art for the viewer; culturally, frames signify art more so than the art itself does. The text of the Laocoon tends to interrogate art, that is, its apparent centre, as it is constructed and seen through the lenses of classical aesthetics, eighteenth- century rationalism, and religion.

For Derrida, the frame marks off the work, the ergon.

The frame is a supplement, the unnecessary yet necessary extra that presents the irame's inside as a complete work of art. The outside constitutes the inside, while the inside presents itself as perfect unto itself. Thus, the parergon implies both an emptiness and a kind of excess (Schwenger,

"Blake's Boxes" 102), an unmediated aesthetic experience that simultaneously consumes the art in its own aesthetic excessiveness. The frame also contains art by providing an arbitrary delineation of boundaries that keeps art within the frame, and not al1 over the wall of a gallery. If this is the case, the frame interrogates 'art', or rather, in

Blaker s case, the copy of a copy of a copy of 'art.' Blake copied the Laocoon group from a cast of the original group that was on display at the Royal Academy. The Laocoon plate examined here is a copy of that engraving. In this sense, the text manifests itself as a series of marginal glosses, commentary on the statue. The engraving / sculpture (both arts were closely allied for Blake) is then a starting point for Blake' s pro ject here, which crudely put is to f il1 space, but also, as in Lawrence Lipkingrs reading of Valéry, a vision of "the infinite extension of thought" into this "profound white space, forever waiting to be filled" (610). Blake's glosses here (his glossolalia indeed) are not on the Laocoon per se. They are around it, never touching it directly; rather they are glosses both on the Laocoon-as- Jehovah and on the Bible, the book of books. "Christianity is art and not money" is one of the dominant themes here: that 'a man or a woman who is not an artist can be no Christian.'' Here, Blake is talking about reading, about textual interpretation of the "Great Code", the Bible, and more significantly, its bookness and its status as the mode1 for al1 books. The Book begins with the Bible, in which the logos is inscribed as law. Here the book achieves its unsurpassable meaning, including what extends beyond it everywhere and cannot be surpassed. The Bible takes language back to its origin: whether this language is written or spoken, it is always the theological era that opens with this language and lasts as long as biblical space and time. (Blanchot 387 ) This unsurpassability of the Bible is something of a problem for Blake; he insists on excess, and on his excessive, idiosyncratic of the Bible, which are translated into Blake' s strange universe of ~ternals". For Maurice Blanchot the Bible is the very idea of a book: it claims a perfect unity, a perfect correspondence between signifier and signified. Hence, the world is less created than written, less understood than read, and in the fallen world it is given, as Blake 1 cal1 Blaker s text (s) not marginalia but a series of does here, a series of marginal glosses, using Lipkingrs distinctions : marginalia is glosses, which in turn fragmentary thought out of context while the marginal gloss signifies point off the page to "the need to spell everything out" (612). The white space, the margin, is "not a vacuum but a other books, plenum" (613), but it tends to become the terrifying whiteness, At the centre of the blankness: the world-as-book requiring infinite explication. plate is the group, surrounded by text. The figures are darkly line-engraved and possessed of a sort of violence while the texts that surround the figure, in their spatial arrangement, are both marginal and a frame or outline. This "equivocal region of the parerga" (Clark 176) is "in the Outline, / In the

Circumference" (Jerusalem 69.41-42, E 223), yet even more specifically in the Une. Earlier in his career, Blake asked his public "[hlow do we distinguish the oak from the beech, the horse from the ox, but by the bounding outline?. .. [l]eave out this line and you leave out life itself" ("A Descriptive Catalogue", E 550). In some sense,

- 'O Then again, the "strange univesse of Eternalsff is, in effect, a strange universe of books: The Book of Urizen, the ... al1 works of art are parerga, based on lines. Indeed, these lines and lines of text surround the figure entirely, even in its corners, around the limbs as they coi1 in pain:

Figure 17. "The Laocoon", detail. The figure thus becomes less a centre than an object, a human forxn threatened with a text that seeks to overwhelm it. The human fom, which may indeed be read as a "Human form Divine" is less human than it is an almost stereotypical representation or an art history cliché of the human in the process of being extinguished. But of course, this plate does not represent a statue, which is itself a representation and is surrounded by words; this is rather a piece of paper with lines on it; lines were engraved into a block of copper and then preçsed ont0 the page. Descriptive phrases like the delicacy and detail of the line-engraving, banal as it is, could easily apply to any area on the page at all. Literary scholars have always put their attentions towards the text, of course, and art historians to the visual image and the specifically 'artisticf aspects of Blake's work. Readers of Blake have tended in recent years to recognize (asf albeit, literary scholars) the status of Blakefs 'textsr as always a mixture of illumination and text. In Literal Imagination, Nelson Hilton seems to be hinting at a more radical and holistic understanding by calling attention to the text as an engraved, sculpted ob j ect : Blake participated in, and manifested, a vision of the word as object, as other, and as divine, that stretches Our imagination to its limits. The word becomes more than the mark of an idea; it becomes an eternal living form with its own personality, family, and destiny. (3) For surely among the finest details of Blake's work are the individual letters. Every word (not merely "at times", as

Hilton suggests), is a graphic signifier. The sorts of engraved letters we find on the Laocoon plate are rare in Blake's work. His ordinary cursive is here replaced with a very linear and serifed typography, often looking strikingly similar to ordinary block-printing. As in al1 Blakers work, everything is literally made by his own hand, and it is a whole wcrk, not divisible (except by some theoretical violence) into categories of 'illustrationr and 'text' . If the "Laocoon" could be divided into such categories, the \illustrationr would certainly bear an uneasy relationship to the 'textr , as it often does in Blakers works . It seems, however (given the parerga of this essay) that this division of 'illustrationr and 'textr is, at the very least, a highly artificial one, and crumbles quickly under scrutiny. Where, specifically, does illustration end and text begin, in a page such as this one Erom Milton:

The text is no less

stylized than the marginal forms on the right-hand column,

which flow out of and into the text. It is

uncertain if the fxame or rnargin is merely filling space, or if the text is designed around it. The figure in the bottorn-right lfigure 18. Milton a poem, plate 7. corner is a familiar one: the bard or piper from The Songs of Innocence and Experience. Hilton notes that Blake's fibres and plant-bits turn themselves into words, trees, and human forms in an almost aleatoric way, as they do in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

An argument can be made that this is a demonstration of a fundamental unity in Blaker s pages, word and image constantly becoming each other. In Blakers case, a case not nearly as unique as it may seem (or is represented as), the text and the image are dependent on each other so that they are indivisible. It is not a matter, however, of nothing being outside of the text, but rather a matter of al1 text (that is, al1 that is legible) figure 19. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 10. necessarily having a visual quality. For texts are objects, material and produced. Post- structuralist work has emphasized that texts are not manifestations of a disembodied authorial voice. Books are not just containers for something called literature, or words or language. Books are not manifestations of an originary logos but physical, readable, and tactile objects, whether as a collection of almost identical pages (this thesis, for example) or a single page ("Laocoon") . On the "Laocoon" page, words frame, contain, and bring out the art--but the words render the art secondary to itself and to the whole plate. Jah is contained; for Blake, Jah is a figure that is both Divine, good, the creating, originary artist, and also Urizen, the figure that divides and oppresses with "One King, One God, one Law" (The Book of

Urizen 4 :40 E 72) . Here, he and his sons, al1 dying, exist in language, hemmed in and interrogated by words and references to other texts and other worlds. How can Jah,

Satan 4 Adam exist, or insist on their material existence, evident here by the three-dimensionality of their forms, in such a world? The God-figure does not transcend his 'selfhood," as Herrstrorn argues, but is literally envisioned, or made visible to the reader as a being strangled in words, in language, as much as by snakes. Yet the central figure, called the serpent-holder, holds as well the possibility of redemption. Jehovah and the younger son (presumably Adam) are being bitten, poisoned: this image might be allied with the phamakon, Plato's word for written language, which Derrida reads as both poison and cure. The

like their reader (s) , live in language too; they die in language, or may die and in a moment be redeemed into the world of the outline where this margin does go on forever, without a horizon, and hence without the still, yet centre. CHAPTER THREE The Marginal Glas

In Black Riders, a study of modernism and the printed page, Jerome McGann concludes that presentation, that isr the authorrs design for the poem, is integral to a better interpretation of modernism. The roots of modernism-- William Morris's Kelsmcott press, Emily Dickinson's stitched collections of poems, Blakers books--are integral to the notions of avant-garde and experimentalism as practised in our own century. Whether the case may be, as some have hypothesized in different contexts, one of critical practice only catching up with artistic practice after the fact, postmodern theory has begun to experiment with its own form. The concluding section of McGannrs book, an unruly dialogue between McGannrs pseudonyms, is such an experimentation. Despite such exceptions, books, and especially academic books in the twentieth century tend to ber beyond their covers, alrnost identical: page after page consists of a regular column of print. The rnargin is rendered invisible by sheer repetitiveness; nothing tumbles into the blank space. Through years of convention shared by printers and readers alike, the individual page, as well as the overall design of a book, should never be a distraction from reading the words printed upon it. Yet the white space that surrounds a text seerns to exist only to be filled. In "The Marginal Gloss," Lawrence Lipking examines the history of this space, from Coleridgers revised "Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner" through Valéryrs of Poe' s marginalia to

Finnegans Wake and "the plight of modern criticisrn. "

Lipking's article itself enacts a self-commentary. Jokes, citations, translations and further explication are al1 found within the right-hand rnargin of the page. The relationship, as Lipking explains it, is clear: the gloss and the footnote, for example, are set off from the main text because they are not considered part of the text. He distinguishes between the marginal gloss and marginalia: the gloss is explication, inherited frorn Biblical commentary as practised in the late middle ages, which assumes that language and the world it represents is inherently explicable; while rnarginalia is considered the readerf s reaction to a text. He quotes Valéry's commznt on Poe's marginalia: One might observe on this subject that the attentive reading of a book is nothing but a continuous commentary, a succession of notes escaping from the inner voice. Marginal notes are part of the notes of pure thought. (Lipking 610) For Poe himself, however, marginal notes are like a true pun, the goodness of which is 'in the direct ratio of its intolerability, so is nonsense the essential sense of the Marginal Note'' (qtd. in Lipking 609) . Whether their airn is to unite a text or wltie it, notes are always marginal, and are usually understood as supplementary, as an extension of the original text. For Lipking, the "plight of modern criticism" (a part of his subtitle) may be neatly emblematized by the marginal gloss. In the modernist period, Lipking claims, T. S. Eliot's work suggests that it is "the gloss itself that matters. If the world could no longer be read like a book, a book could yet expand into a world" (631). If the world were a book, al1 could be explained by an endlessly revising gloss. Yet, Borges'

"Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" and the book-world it describes is fantasy, or rather fiction. The book/world correspondence has broken dom, however--a genuine postmodern encyclopedia could only claim to be made up of words, that is, signifiers without a signified. "Books are seldorn worlds" (651) Lipking notes, and critics no longer need the rnargin to show how much they know, but "for evidence that they exist" (651) . In one of his marginal notes, Lipking describes Jacques Derrida's Glas and its two columns, "whose indifference to each other creates sometimes a wild cacophony ...and more often a 'double solitude'" (650). No doubt, much of the richest experimentation on the margin is that by the author of Margins of Philosophy, whose body of work strains the notions of what philosophy and books should be. Derridafs work has always been profoundly involved with the margins, both literal and metaphorical. By his own admission he has always been preoccupied with the minute particulars of texts and "interested in footnotes or minor texts in philosophy (parerga, hors d' oeuvres, exergues.. .) " ("Not an Oral Footnote" 204) . In 'This is not an Oral Footnote", Derrida considers the ways in which texts, especially philosophical texts are literally constructed, in terms of a main text and the glosses, notes and apparatuses that support it. Along the bottom of a typical page, a footnote is found, divided from the main text by a line and distinguished by its small type. It literally supports a text; it is the foundation of both the argument and the actual page." A footnote "implies a normalized, legalized legitimized distribution of the space, a spacing that assigns hierarchical relationships" (193). To this philosophical reasoning, we can add Gérard Genette's notion of the paratext, made up of al1 the framing devices that participate in our reading of a book. These can include editorial footnotes, the bookrs cover design, even the colour and consistency of the paper. A footnoted text demonstrates intertextuality, and is always speaking (as it

- - -- Il Like this. were) in multiple voices. Footnoted texts always situate themselves in a context made up of other books. In a way, they always include their own library. For Derridar the very system of footnotes in the text of philosophy is indicative of the entire system of logocentrism: to prove oners argument with a reference to another book is always questionable then, since al1 texts can be deconstructed and read in a way that betrays their apparent purpose. Another of Derridafs texts, "Living On/Border Lines" enacts a similar interrogation of the printed page. The article is ostensibly a discussion of Shelleyfs "The Triumph of Life." Unlike "This is not an Oral Footnote," however,

Derrida's piece does not resemble traditional academic criticisrn at all. A single footnote stretches along the bottom of the page for the length of the article. This border line breaks the text into philosophy and autobiography, and yet conflates the two. The page becomes a medium, and the separate texts each compete for the readerfs attention. Without doubt, though, Derrida's richest revision of the footnote is the text cited by Lipking, Glas. The bookfs title is built on a play on words. A glas is a passing bell, a gloss, the sound of Hegel's name, among other things. Glas (1974; translated 1986) is part of the philosopher's attempt to open, or to re-make the book. In Of Grammatoloqy the book is described and one of the foundational metaphors, and hence problems, of western philosophy. A book, signed by its author, sets itself up as a descendent of the Book, that is, the Bible, written by God. Its linearity is a symbol of totality, unity. For Maurice Blanchot, al1 books share these features with the Bible: they are "in essence theological" (388) because they share the idea of self-presence. In the Bible God is God, yet God "does not become divine except as He speaks through the book" (388). The book is not the physical container of thought or knowledge or wisdom, a direct transmission of the authorial or divine voice--it literally is an object, with words printed in it, and in Derrida's Glas, the way these words are printed matters. In Glas, we are confronted by two columns. In a way, each is entirely self-contained. One is an essay on Hegel and the other an essay on Genet; they are divided from each other by an interior margin (or gutter, in terms). There is no main text; theoretically, we could cover one side of each page and read one of the essays as if the other did not exist. There is a more complex equation at work here; it is as if each column were a gloss for the other, or perhaps a gloss for a text that no longer exists. In Glas, as in several of Derridars other works, the margin is necessary for his text to work. The delineation that margins always enact in texts and between texts is here employed so that it may be deconstructed. Glasr in its plethora of marginal glosses and marginalia, seems to match Lipkingr s description: it is both "a commentary and a new text" (651) . Derrida writes Glas only a few years after his famous pronouncement that 'il nf y a pas de hors-texte" (o Grammatology 158), understood here in the tradition from which we may cite Mallarmé, Joyce and perhaps Blake, that the world is a book, or as Mallarmé said, "the world exists to be put into a book.'' Inevitably, 1 read Glas as a book- world that is in the process of re-makings its own margins, both philosophical and pictorial margins. Its structure is inspired, formally, by Genetfs "What Rernained of a Rembrandt," a summary of which begins the column on Genet.

The book opens, after page one, into four CO~WS~ each facing the other, each column (those on each page and the great column between pages) seeming to mirror the other.

At first glance, Derrida leaves the margins of his text relatively unassailed. In Glas there is a clear division between text and non-text (there is a constant margin on the edges of each page), but there is also an abundance of rnargin-like spaces. On these two facing pages (44-45), there is an exterior margin, the interior margin that divides the two pages, the gutters that divide the Hegel columns from the Genet columns, the spaces surrounding the Figure 21 . Pages 44 and 45 of Glas. grafts of text, and the unusually large spaces that separate sentences (on 45b, for exmple) . Lipkingf s description, quoted earlier, seems to fit: he sees two colurnns, 'whose indifference to each other creates sometimes a wild cacophony.. .and more often a \double solitudef" (650). But in this deconstruction of the rnargin, which we may see even on these two pages, the double columns and the additional margins are necessary. The space between the two columns, which for Lipking apparently acts as a barrier between the two 'separate' texts, is given many names throughout Glas. It is the hymen, a tympanic membrane strêtched across the inner ear, perhaps even the silent a of differance. For Derrida, the hymen is neither inside or outside: in Glas, it is the image of the Mother that is "verily the hymen that burst (is bursting with) itself" (117b). The sound of a surname "bursts your tympanum with its tocsin" (9b). The dividing space is something like a membrane stretched between these two texts. It is seen and not heard: as in the silent a of differance, the graphic appearance of the page keeps the two columns in perpetual flux. It creates the tension between the two columns and allows Derrida to un- write Hegelfs law.

And with these margins, 1 would argue, Derrida knows exactly what he is doing. At the end of 'This 1s Not an Oral Footnote," Derrida gives us "some final notesffon Glas. He claims that it 'comments on itself," that "there is nothing but annotations, and no possibility for annotation," that it has 'no hierarchy," that it is 'an absolutely secondary text, twice secondary, " and that while "the two columns face each other and annotate each other ...they are both equally principal texts without any relation to each other" (204-05). Indeed, on these two facing. pages (figure 20) , the columns are immediately visible, and are clearly distinguishable from each other by virtue of their differing type sizes. The left side of each page is part of an ongoirig discussion of Hegel's mode1 of the fmily, while the right side discusses Genet's "What Remained of a Rembrandt". The section I am looking at begins on the previous page: "X, an almost perfect chiasm(us), more than perfect, of two texts, each one set facing [en regard] the other: a gallery and a graphy that guard one another.. ." (Glas 43b). This is one of many parts of Glas which is self-cornmentary: the "twofold anatomy lesson in the margins" is also an anatomy of margins in general, of the space, intellectual and physical, that remains after philosophy and the book. On these pages, the two columns run on, as they do throughout the book, utterly indifferent to each other. Even the colurnn here is not merely a printer's convention, it is a idea that is mentioned by Hegel and played with by

Derrida; and it is this concept, arbitrary as it necessarily is, that binds the two columns together. Even binding is central to Glas--as in "the double bind", or "to band erect." For Glas is hardly a work of literary criticism, philosophy, or postmodern autobiography; its true subj ects are theory and books, and what happens when these two collide. "Hegelr8 and "Genet" are, in this sense, used as instruments for Derrida to play this extended riff upon.

The columns on Hegel are generally on the topic of the family: both Hegel's own and the biblical families he uses to construct his arguments. The movement is telescopic: the single, divine family is treated as a synecdoche for the state. The law of the father that is operative here is based on the authority of Godts word. Derrida treats this as symptornatic of Hegelr s own project for absolute knowledge (savoir absolu, abbreviated as SA in las") . Absolute knowledge would mean the end of philosophy--in effect, absolute knowledge is another mode1 for the metaphor of the world as a book. On these particular pages, Derrida is examining Hegel's work on the Bible as it relates to the family. Hegel sets up an opposition between "the Jewish idea of God as their Lord and Governorff and 'a relationship

l2 SA is homnymous with ça, the deictic article (this, that). Referring in writing to \thisf, as though we were pointing at it, is a kind of attempt at absolute knowledge. The pun highlights the abyss between the written sign and its referent. of God to men like that of a father to his children" (qtd. in Glas 36a). Hegel "resorts to a kind of theoretical

fiction" (37a); he reads the Bible like a medieval theologian, treating the as an improved gloss

on the Old. Christ, by "substituting love for mastery" (36a) creates the \naturalf family. Thus, for Hegel, the Jewish people resist nature and are cut off from the earth- hence, symbolically, circumcised and circumcising. Derrida

traces Hegelf s anti-Semitic argument: Jews destroy everything, they are a "materialist and warlike people with

Medusaring power" (44a), turning everything into stone, into forbidden graven images. Derrida notes that Freud associated the Medusa with the castration complex: on seeing

the Medusa? the victim becomes stiff, erect, a "stony pillaru (46a) . The right hand columns, devoted to Genetr are an alrnost perfect rnetacommentary. Genet's text describes how pictures in a museum seem to resist his viewing of them. "What (one)

writes (oneself) is seen regarded by the painter" (44b), Derrida notes. Derrida describes how a picture (by Rembrandt) "oversees and informs against you, sketches and

denounces you." This is hardly a pleasant moment in the gallery-rather, it is a description of a painting that paints its viewer. Language, whether it is the language of visual art, spoken or written language, exists before us, and as viewers and readers, we exist within its webs of signification. In Genet' s text, the painterrs finger

"\shows . . . what? An infinite, an infernal transparency. '" The viewer himself becomes non-existent before the painting.

Later, Genet's narrative claims that " 'you have to place yourself diagonally, at an angle' " in order to really see. Derrida notes (using the deictic article he describes both Genetrs text and his own) that "this double theory .. .describes the text, describes itself as it feigns to recount some pictures"; what he sees it as describing is the "suspense of the verily. " What, then, remains of Rembrandt after Genetfs recounting is "beyond the true and the false, neither entirely true nor entirely false.'" For Genet's left side claims that al1 this writing "'has importance only if you accept that everything was almost falser" (45b). It is not, note, without rneaning, but without truth-value. At the same time, it is only "'almost false. '" Genet's two columns are "absolutely independent in their distress but nonetheless interlaced" (44b). Each, it seems, undoes whatever claims the other makes towards unity, while nonetheless achieving a kind of "sensef' (45b). As well, Genet's text is determined to leave remains, to point out that there are always already remains--"'under the painter's extravagant robe0"--of (a) Rembrandt. Into the Hegel columns, as already noted, Derrida has placed or inserted quotations from Hegel's texts. These blocks of text disrupt the column and occasionally threaten to take over the page. They chip away at the column, which

is both a typographical term and represents the phallic columns that Hegel celebrates and Derrida describes as enormous formations, pillars, towers, larger at the base than at the top. Now at the outset-but as a setting out that already departed from itself-these columns were intact, unbreached, srnooth. And only later (erst spater) are notches, excavations r openings (~ffnungenund Aushohl ungen) made in the columns, in the flank, if such can be said. These hollowings, holes, these lateral marks in depth would be like accidents coming over the phallic at first unperforated or apparently unperforatable. (Glas 3a)

The textual blocks that break up Derrida's own columns mime this process. As well, these blocks are a marginal gloss: 'the nonacademic or non-Western gloss (Rabbinical, Talmudic,

Islamic; but these are also thernes)" ("This is not an Oral

Footnote" 205). The gloss is yet another glas in the text; another passing bell, another play on the glottal phoneme in the second syllable of Hegel's name, another reference to Genet's mother Gabrielle, to other things too. Yet these glosses eat into the text, and are not set off from it, as they are for example in Lipkingfs article, or in the examples he cites. These "notches, excavations, openings" in the phallic columns are also emblematic of the work of Glas. Perforating the apparently unperforatable phallocentrisrn of Hegel's system is Derrida's purpose in Glas, and to do it he sets up a double: Genet. The " [t]wofold anatomy lesson in the margins, and in the rnargin of margins" (45b) is how these two pages conclude, in the bottom right column. This anatomy lesson is a dissection: a cutting apart. The text itself is always already bisected dom the middle, and each of the columns is perforated or tattooed by smaller blocks of text or by white spaces. If we consider the textual columns to be analogous to Hegelfs stone pillars, there are in the stone of each column a variety of inlaid judas holes, crenels, Venetian shutters [jalousies], loopholes, to see to it not to be imprisoned in the colossus, tattoos in the folded flesh of a phallic body that is never legible except in banding erect. (Glas Sb-3b) This brings us to another of Derrida's playfields. In the chiasmatic structure of Glas, placing Hegel against Genet creates a tension between two kinds of phallicism, Hegel's law of the father and Genet's homosexuality. 'To band erect' or se bander is, in this quote, the state of the legible body. It is also a slang word for an erection. As seen by Jane Marie Todd, Glas only mocks Hegel as the father "by practising a textual perversion" (304). In effect, Derrida's play with the double columns is fetishistic, each text acting as a substitute for what does not exist. For Glas to succeed, Hegel must be buried, and for Hegel, the tasks of burial and mourning are proper to woman. Thus, Derrida's play in the double columris (the method borrowed from Genet) is seen as a kind of textual transvestism, writing as a woman in order to escape the phallogocentric logic of truth-castration. Yet, Todd's reading haves ne uneasy: the rnany texts in Glas are al1 written by men, and unless we believe the heterosexist logic that makes homosexual males into heterosexual women, the distinctions that are drawn between Genet-Hegel-Derrida are patently false. Todd sets Hegel and Genet in stark opposition to each other (heterosexual versus homosexual), and sees Derrida operating on an entirely different level, that of woman. Differences certainly abound between Hegel and Genet, but between Derrida writing on Hegel and Derrida writing on Genet, differences begin to dissolve. Besides being bound together by the title Glas, the texts are, to some extent, images of each other. And as images, the two columns also rely on images, just as Glas relies on Genet's "What Remained of a Rembrandt." Both the appearance and allusiveness of Genet's text, along with its modes of escape from binary logic, become for Derrida a sort of emblem. In The Post-Card, Derrida clairns that

Everything 1 write is legendary, a more or less elliptical, redundant, or untranslatable legend, caption, of the picture. Of the icon which is found of the back of the text and watches over it. (The Post-Card 122) In a sense, this statement is to be taken literally. There is a picture on the back of a text when the text is a postcard. These sentences point in another direction, however: in imagining the icon that hovers over a text, is the text inevitably a caption--or a gloss--for that picture? Blake's "Laocoonfrcertainly fits into this category. In that case, the icon threatens to dominate--and even pushes apart--the text that annotates it. On these two pages of Glas, icons proliferate: there is Genetfs Rembrandt, Hegelfs image of the Medusa, and Derridafs image of Genetrs columns and Hegelfs colurnns. Yet, this statement also pushes a reading of Derrida's practice in a different direction. From a theorist who has emphasized the textuality of written material the claim that al1 texts are annotating an absent picture is a little odd. In reading a text, we invariably write, and in writing, there is no satisfactory language for pictures. In art criticisrn, for example, a critic knows that no amount of description can substitute for a photographe

This, 1 would argue, is the limit of post- structuralism. When the signifier and its signified are severed, it becomes impossible to write without a kind of non-linguistic sign hovering over the text. The icon is neither phonocentric or logocentric, Pictures are non- linguistic signs, and saying that al1 writing (or at least al1 Derridafs own writing) is an annotation or a caption to an extra-linguistic image would assign an intent to signify on the part of the image. When writing is understood as trapped in the prison-house of post-structuralist textuality, the non-linguistic (and hence unnamable) takes the place of the signified. It is reminiscent, again, of Jewish scholars re-writing the Torah, re-placing the letters in different arrangements on the page in order to find the true name of God. Derridafs pro j ect, dependent as it is on being a picture, is not a 'newf kind of textuality. As noted, Glas plays on the gloss--"Rabbinical Talmudic, Islamic" ("This is not an Oral Footnote" 205) . Indeed, the modes of annotation in Glas, although strange to the eye accustomed to clean pages of endless, typographically consistent text, are ancient. At the advent of print, citations would ordinarily be placed outside of the main text, the site of the present-day margin; footnotes only originated in the eighteenth century. Coleridge, for example, used marginal glosses rather than footnotes in "The Rhyrne of the Ancient Mariner" to give the poem the feel of a text far older. Just as the exuberance of a initial letter in an illuminated manuscript can place the word itself under a kind of erasure, the danger is that the gloss may supersede the text that (apparently) preceded it. The difference between a text and its commentary is a matter of rnaintaining hierarchies, as Foucault has it: "the relations of designations, nomination, description [and] classification" are established on the "few millirnetres of white" (Foucault

28) that construct difference on a page. In his book,

Derrida is challenging the way that books are read. It is through these dividing blank spaces that one can decide what to read and what to ignore. You can ski? the footnotes or read the footnotes exclusively only when you know which part of the text can be called \footnoter. Glas is without a clear main text. It enacts an endless, double gloss, which together annotate nothing, or it is an annotation of the interior margin or gutter. This divide, as discussed, is hardly void of significance: it is the abyss, the tympan, the hymen, or even more alarming to the glossornaniac, white space. Lipking notes that as Valéry wrote his glosses to Poe's marginalia, Valéry went on writing even when there was nothing leit to gloss . "The profound white space, forever waiting to be filled" (Lipking 610) is a kind of illusion. Texts make their own margins, often only to strain against them. Just as glas, the word that gives the book its title, describes a sound--a death-knell--the concept of the interior margin depends on an idea of sound: in this case, the sound of the two columns reverberating off each other, or the sound of a word being distorted as it passes through a permeable membrane, which is ouexperience of hearing. wrote earlier that Derrida uses Hegel and Genet like instruments: this is quite literally true. Glas, with its endless puns (or not puns, according to Derrida in his introduction to Glassary, the book-length annotation to Glas), plays upon words both as they are heard and as they are seen. The gloss itself is derived from the Latin word for tongue, as Derrida reminds us, and so too Glas is built upon deliberate slips of the tongue able to cross the divide. "You will,..have to work the word tongue like an organist," (3b) Derrida warns the reader at the outset, and it is this mixture of voice, music, anb textuality that creates the 'writerly' effects of Glas. The experience of reading Hegel/Genet is often contrapuntal: as Derrida reads Hegel on the farnily on the left, he reads Genet on homosexuality on the right. Hegel's practice is that of the classical philosopher on a quest for absolute knowledge; in Genet's plays and journals, concepts of true and false are laxgely irrelevant and "the words donrt give a fuck" (qtd. in Leavey 183). For Gayatri Spivak, Derrida's biases in this project are clear: he is on Genet's side (as it were), and his own writing style is somewhat comparable to Genet's (39). At times serious, and more often punning, the style of Glas is in the mode of alea ('This is not an Oral

Footnote" 204). This is not strictly true, of course: if Glas were aleatory, it would resemble the chaotic and random result of (say) a cat walking across a keyboard, and not an extensive and philosophically rigorous reading of Hegel. Rather, with its odd reverberations and marginal and often dissonant notes, the text is comparable to twentieth-century post-tonal and post-harmonic music. Its reliance on sound and music is, like its reliance on the image, a step towards writing the unwritable. Derridars marginal notes strain to become musical notes as the text sounds "GL" in different registers.

The French phrase srendtendre parler, meaning to 'hear- oneself-speakr is described by Derrida as the project of deconstruction. Glas is a result of writing (in Derrida's specific sense) this: in effect, it is a kind of reading- oneself-write. And in a reading of such a text, necessarily autobiographical as it is, the reader becomes another writer. Reading, as Valéry reminds us, is always a marginal activity. In fact, it doesnft even seem to matter to Valéry what kind of book is being read: the aim of reading is really for the mind to explore itself (Lipking 610). The book is meant to act as a kind of stimulant13, as it was, for example, for Giraldus Cambrensis when he encountered the

Book of Kells in the twelfth century.

l3 Itrs interesting that in the headnote to "Kubla Khan", Coleridge describes his hallucination as a result of the combination of "an anodyne" and a sentence from Purchas His Pilgrimage. For Foucault, reading may be a kind of visionary experience that 'arises from the black and white surface of printed signs, from the closed and dusty that opens with a

flight of forgotten words" ("Fantasia of the Library" 91). Most books, however, are not "closed and dusty volumes", but clean, rnass-produced , or sheaves of photocopies. It is hardly an overstatement to describe the mainstream book industry as conservative. Indeed, a well-designed page Ys quiet and demands no visual or intellectual effort to absorb the text" (Dair, qtd. in Amert 108). This has not been true throughout this thesis, nor, 1 would argue, is it true in general. Our reading habits are governed by the conventions of publishing, which only seem "quiet" and natural. But the more one looks at sornething, the less natural it seems. The margins of a book have, on average, shrunk considerably since the nineteenth century. Nearly everything about the publishing industry has changed, and one could argue that the twentieth-century, mass-produced book is hardly an occasion for a visionary experience.14 But the experience of reading rernains visual in itself:

14 Apparently, certain chemicals found in paper made in the nineteenth- century react with each other and their surroundings over time, creating a mild hallucinogen. This may explain a great deal. there is a mass of signs pressed on a page (or sornetimes burnt with lasers) in black, surrounded by a sea of whiteness. To paraphrase Michael Camille, reading is distraction. In reading, we annotate, and whether we do so, as Valèry would have it, so that we may read ourselves, or to re-erect a Borgesian library of Our own, the activity of reading remains the same. Literary critics may themselves be in the grip of a textual horror vacui, unable to leave any book unannotated. Inevitably, however, the book we read seems to dissolve under the weight of its notes, like a manuscript page that is scrubbed clean and written over again, leaving only traces of the text that first covered it. "The book" may seem to disappear, like William Gibsonrs Agrippa, which erases itself when it is read. The desire for self- presence, whether of books or marginal notes, is only realized through their absence (Schwenger, "The Apocalyptic Book" 62). The distraction that Camille sees on the margins of pages is always a desire for self-presence, since margins are almost always used to bring the text into the reader's present (and if they are not, and reader can use thern to the same end herself). This distraction is distraction because it is never self-presence we find, but always more text, more to see and therefore more to gloss. As readers, we are always already pushed to the edges of the page, grunting assent and dissent, sounding marginal notes. WORKS CITED AND CONSULTED

Amert, Kay. "Book Typography and the Contract of Literacy." Books at Iowa 60 (1994) : 19-24.

Blake, William. The Complete Graphic Works of William Blake. Ed. David Bindman. London: Thames and Hudson, 197 8.

The Complete Prose and Poetry of William Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman. Commentary by Harold Bloom. Revised Edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.

Milton: A Poem and The Final Illuminated Works: The Ghost of Abel, On Homer's Poetry and On Virgil, Laocoon. Eds. Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscorni. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993.

The Notebook of William Blake: A Photographie and Typographie Facsimile. Ed. David V. Erdman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973.

Blanchot, Maurice. 'The Absence of the Book. " Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy. Ed. Mark C. Taylor. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1986. 382-295.

The Book of Kells: Reproductions from the Manuscript in Trinity Colleqe, Dublin. Ed. Françoise Henry. London: Thames and Hudson, 1974.

Borges, Jorge Luis. "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. " Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writinqs. Trans. James E. Irby. London: Penguin, 1970. 27-

Cahill, Thomas. How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe. New York: Nan A. Talese, 1995.

Camille, Michael. Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Clark, David L. "Against Theological Technology: Blake's 'Equivocal Worlds . " New Romanticisms: Theory and Critical Practice. Eds. David L. Clark and Donald C. Goellnicht. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. 164-222.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. "Kubla Khan. " The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Third Edition. Eds. Alexander W. Allison et al. Hew York; London: W. W. Norton, 1983. 564-565.

Collins, Christopher. "Writing and the Nature of the Supernatural Image, or Why Ghosts Float. " Lanquaqe and Visuality: Crossings Between Science, Art, Politics and Literature. Ed. B. Ailert. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996. 8-31.

Corrgin, Donnchadh 6. "The Historical and Cultural Background of The Book of Kells." The Book of Kells: Proceedings of a conference at 6-9 September 1992. Ed. Felicity O'Mahony. England: Scolar Press, 1994. 1-32.

Debray,- Regis. "The book as symbolic object." The Future of the Book. Ed. Geoffrey Nunberg. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. 139-151.

Derrida, Jacques. Glas. Trans. John P. Leavey Jr. and Richard Rand. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. ------Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore; London: Johns Hopkins University Press,

------"Living On/Border Lines." Deconstruction and Criticism. Ed. Harold Bloorn. New York: Seabury Press, 1979. 75-176.

------The Truth in Painting. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

-----O "This is not an Oral Footnote", in Annotation and Its Texts. Ed. Stephen A. Barney. New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. 192-205.

Farr, Carol A. "Textual Structure, Decoration and Interpretive Images in The Book of Kells." The Book of Kells: Proceedings of a conference at Trinity Colleqe Dublin 6-9 September 1992. Ed. Felicity O'Mahony. England: Scolar Press, 1994. 437-449. Foucault, Michel. "Fantasia of the Library. " Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca: Corne11 University Press, 1977. 87-109.

--dm--- This 1s Not a Pipe. Trans. James Narkness. Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983.

Genet, Jean. "What remained of a Rembrandt. " Reflections on the Theatre and other writings. Trans. Richard Seaver. London: Faber and Faber, 1972. 75-91. Genette, Gérard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Trans. Richard Macksey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres, 1997. Henderson, George. From Durrow to Kells: The Insular Gospel-books 650-800. London: Thames and Hudson, 1987. Henry, Françoise. "The Book and its Decoration." The Book of Kells: Reproductions from the manuscript in Trinity College Dublin. Ed. Françoise Henry. London: Thames and Hudson, 1974. 148-226. Herrstrom, David Sten. "Blake's Redemption of God in the Laocoon: Literal Incarnation and the Marriage Picture and Text." Bucknell Review: A Scholarly Journal of Letters, Arts and Sciences 30.1 (1986)

Hilton, Nelson. Literal Imagination: Blake8s Vision of Words. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University California Press, 1983. James, David E. "Blake's Laocoon: A Degree Zero of Literary Production. " PMLA 98 (1983): 226-236.

Immanuel. "Cri tique of Judgement" (Excerpts) . The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Ed . David H. Richter. New York: St. Martinfs Press, 1989. 248-271. Aibert. Johann Gutenberg: The Man and his Invention. Trans. Douglas Martin. Aldershot: Scoiar Press, 1996. Landow, George P. "Twenty Minutes into the Future, or How are we moving Beyond the Book?" Riture of the Book. Ed. Geof frey Nunberg. Berkeley; Los Angeles : University of California Press, 1996. 209-237. Laing, Jennifer and Lloyd. Art of the Celts . London: Thames and Hudson, 1992. Leavey, John P., Jr., ed. Glassary. Lincoln; London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. Lipking, Lawrence. "The Marginal Gloss: Notes and Asides on Poe, Valéry, 'The Ancient Mariner,' Storiella as She is Syunq, Versions of Leonardo, and the Plight of Modern Criticism. " Critical Inquiry 3 (1977): 609-

Mann, Paul. "The Book of Urizen and the Horizon of the Book." Unnamrd Foms: Blake and Textuality. Eds. Nelson Hilton and Thomas A. Volger. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. 49-68. McGann, Jerome. Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. 1, W.J.T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

6 Carrasain,- Éamonn. ''Tradito evangeliorumr and 'sustentatior: the relevance of liturgical cermonies to the Book of Kells." The Book of Kells: Proceedings of a conference at Trinity College Dublin 6-9 September 1992. Ed. Felicity OrMahony. England: Scolar Press, 1994. 398-436. Pacht, Otto. Book Illumination in the Middle Ages: An Introduction. London: Harvey Miller; Oxford UP,

Etienne. "Drolleries in The Book of Kells", in -The Book of Kells: Proceedings of a conference -at Trinity College Dublin 6-9 September 1992. Ed. Felicity Of Mahony. England: Scolar Press, 1994 .

Schwenger, Peter . "Blakefs Boxes, Coleridgers Circles, and the Frame of Romantic Vision." Studies in Romanticism 25 (1996): 98-117. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Glas-Piece: A Compte rendu." Diacritics: A Review of Contem~orarvCriticism 7.3

Steinberg, Leo. The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Ai-t and Modern Oblivion. New York: Pantheon, 1983.

Tayler, Irene. "Blake's Laocoon." Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 10 (1976): 72-81.

Todd, Jane Marie. "The Philosopher as Transvestite: Textual Revision in -Glas. " ~iteratureas Philosophy/ Philosophy as Literature. Edo Donald G. Marsh Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1987. 29 Werner, Martin. 'Crucifixi, Septulti, Suscitati: Remarks on the Decoration of The Book of Kells." The Book of Kells: Proceedings of a conference at Trinity College Dublin 6-9 September 1992. Ed. Felicity OrMahony. England: Scolar Press, 1994. 450-488. IMAGE EVALUATION TEST TARGET (QA-3)

APPLIED IMAGE. lnc 1653 East Main Street -*- --, - Rochester. NY 14609 USA ------Phone: 7161482-0300 --Fax: 7161288-5989

O 1993. Applied Image. Inc.. AI1 Rights ~esewed