Machine Writing Modernism: A literary history of computation and media, 1897-1953 by Alex Christie Master of Arts, Loyola University of Chicago, 2012 Bachelor of Arts, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2010 A dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTORATE OF PHILOSOPHY in the Department of English © Alex Christie, 2016 University of Victoria All rights reserved. This thesis may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopy or other means, without the permission of the author. ii Supervisory Committee Machine Writing Modernism: A literary history of computation and media, 1897-1953 by Alex Christie Master of Arts, Loyola University of Chicago, 2012 Bachelor of Arts, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2010 Supervisory Committee Stephen Ross, Department of English Co-Supervisor Raymond G. Siemens, Department of English Co-Supervisor Emile Fromet de Rosnay, Department of French Departmental Member iii Abstract Supervisory Committee Stephen Ross, Department of English Co-Supervisor Raymond G. Siemens, Department of English Co-Supervisor Emile Fromet De Rosnay, Department of French Departmental Member Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Department of English Outside Member In response to early technologies of seeing, hearing, and moving at the turn of the twentieth century, modernist authors, poets, and artists experimented with forms of textual production enmeshed in mechanical technologies of the time. Unfolding a literary history of such mechanical forms, this dissertation sees modern manuscripts as blueprints for literary production, whose specific rules of assembly model historical mechanisms of cultural production in practice during their period of composition. Central to this analysis is the concept of the inscriptive procedure, defined as a systematic series of strategies for composing, revising, and arranging a literary text that emerge in the context of that text’s specific political and technological environment; in so doing, inscriptive procedures use composition as a material act that works through a set of political circumstances by incorporating them into the signifying process of the physical text. As such, procedurally authored texts do not neatly instantiate in the form of the print book. Reading modern manuscripts instead as media objects, this dissertation applies the physical operation of a given old media mechanism as a hermeneutic strategy for interpreting an author’s inscriptive procedure. It unspools the spectacular vignettes of Raymond Roussel, plays back the celluloid fragments of Marcel Proust, decrypts the concordances of Samuel Beckett, and processes a digital history of Djuna Barnes’s editorial collaboration with T.S. Eliot. Rather than plotting a positivist literary genealogy, this dissertation instead traces an ouroboros mode of literary critique that emerges in its own wake, as digital experiments with textual manipulation reveal analog bibliographic arrangement procedures. Using the methods of contemporary scholarly editing to undertake a procedural archaeology of experimental literature, this dissertation unearths an analog prehistory of digital humanities practice, one that evolves alongside the mechanisms of old media as they lead to the advent of the digital age. In so doing, it unfolds a historicity of cultural form, one whose mechanical and ideological apparatuses participate in the development of early methods in humanities computing. iv Table of Contents Supervisory Committee ...................................................................................................... ii Abstract .............................................................................................................................. iii Table of Contents ............................................................................................................... iv Introduction: Machine Writing the Modernist Experiment ................................................ 1 Unspooling Roussel’s Spectacle: Mass media and the manuscript .................................. 27 Playing Proust Backwards: The manuscript as film ......................................................... 82 Decrypting Beckett’s Code: A Trilogy of memex manuscripts ...................................... 143 Processing Modernism: The Textual Politics of Nightwood .......................................... 206 Conclusion: Revision Histories....................................................................................... 237 1 Introduction: Machine Writing the Modernist Experiment MANUSCRIPT INSCRIPTION AS MECHANICAL TRANSDUCTION In response to early technologies of seeing, hearing, and moving at the turn of the twentieth century, modernist authors, poets, and artists experimented with forms of textual production enmeshed in mechanical technologies of the time. In 1899, Marcel Proust abandoned his late nineteenth-century manuscript, writing: "shall I call this book a novel?" ("puis-je appeler ce livre un roman?"). (181) Applying his understanding of the magic lantern and early film technology as a compositional technique, Proust had written his book in paper fragments that he strategically arranged to produce a chronological narrative. Edited like the transparent slides of the magic lantern, or frames on a film reel, Proust's manuscript fragments present, as Luc Fraisse writes, "multiple possibilities for composition, for decomposition or even recomposition...as if the novel we read were but one among many other versions of an original text, infinitely transformable or, moreover, transmutable" (les multiples possibilités de composition, de dé-composition ou de recomposition qu’offre le texte même de la Recherche, comme si le roman, tel que nous le lisons, n’était qu’une version parmi beaucoup d’autres d’un texte original indéfiniment transformable ou plutôt transmutable) (96). One can extend Fraisse’s description of “many other versions of an original text” to argue that there is no original text, no textual center to Proust’s manuscript, but that the manuscript instead constitutes a dynamic and reconfigurable textual system. This system models the mechanics of early film as Proust understood them. 2 At the same time as Proust was composing a book whose rules for assembly model the seeing technologies of his day, Stephane Mallarmé experimented with poetry that mirrors a roll of the dice. One of the first instances of typographic poetry, "A Throw of the Dice" ("Un Coup de Dés"), arranges fixed words on the page such that they can be moved and reordered to form multiple written and spoken permutations. These experiments participate in a medial ecology (Hayles 2002) in which representative techniques develop across multiple media: filmic composition moves from the magic lantern and early film to Proust’s manuscript, and montage, in turn, moves from Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Joyce’s “Wandering Rocks” back into film. Or, perhaps more precisely, the montage form develops through the use of multiple representative materials (paper, film, etc.), each of which bring that form into physical contact with diverse environments for cultural production. The convergence of literary technique and mechanical technologies demonstrates Brian McHale's claim that "On the margins of mainstream modernism there were alternative machines, 'bachelor machines' as they have been called (Deleuze and Guattari 1983; de Certeau 1986), such as those of Alfred Jarry, Marcel Duchamp, Franz Kafka, and Raymond Roussel." (3) Following the turn of the century experiments of Proust and Mallarmé, Wyndham Lewis and F.T. Marinetti used algebraic symbols as grammatical operations, exploring the written work "as a system which is fundamentally mechanical, and capable of being atomized into elements available for recombination." (115) Through these and related Futurist and Vorticist experiments, the experimental constitution of text as machine responded to World War I through motile and machine-like poetry that expressed the war-torn city as a radical break from nineteenth-century experience. Later Dadaist and Surrealist cut-up techniques 3 rearranged artistic materials as a method for resisting the mechanical reproduction of the art object, extending artistic engagements with modern machines through the interwar period. From the early experiments of Roussel, Mallarmé, and Proust, through the artistic movements surrounding World War I and later Surrealist developments, modernist practice demonstrates a bibliographic engagement of text and machine that precedes digital computing. Following the line of reasoning that modernist authors used writing as an experimental process of working through political and technological changes of their day, this dissertation, through close readings of where, how, and why modernist texts change over time, charts an analog prehistory of the machine writing and reading of literary texts in the twentieth-century. In this dissertation, I refer to literary objects that blend textual representation with mechanical assembly as machine texts. Modernist machine texts serve as experimental tools for critical insight, which are assembled and constructed to produce literary critiques through the physical and cognitive labor of an editor, as she builds the book according to its rules for assembly. Reading the content of such machine texts in concert with the editorial operations undertaken by their authors, this dissertation turns its hermeneutic attention to such authors’ physical production techniques.While