Textual Dimensions: Space and Time

To quote an old favourite, 'a text is not a line of words releasing a single "theological" meaning (the "message of the Author-God") but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash' (Roland Barthes, 'The Death of the Author', Image, Music Text, p. 146 [here: www.tbook.constantvzw.org/wp-content/death_authorbarthes.pdf]). Barthes' article, and a great deal of subsequent agonizing by critics, places the author in the background and the onus on the reader. I don't agree with Barthes's view, but this quotation alone provides us with a theory that can work well for determining the nature of every text, including those where authorship is the key element of textness (such as Dickinson, Shakespeare, and even Kurt Cobain's Journal); the theory is that of Text as 'multi-dimensional space'. We already know a text 'is not a line of words'; it is anything where there is an intention of meaningful communication. Within the space of Text, conceived of as cogently as possible, all components of Text exist simultaneously.

3-D Wireframe Image

The multi-dimensional space of textual fulfilment is a literal and metaphorical space: literal, in the sense that one might gather up every instantiation of an individual set of text (all editions, all performances, all the epitextual material belonging, for example, to Moby Dick) into one space; metaphorical, because this space can incorporate all of a text's potential for interpretation, including the tricky issue of what we've been--rather dead-endingly--calling 'aura' (after Benjamin). Perhaps if we imagined this space as a pyramid

3D reflected pyramid

we'd be able to hierarchise our textual components, too, so that the dominant textual element could rise to the pinnacle. For some magazines, it might be their ephemeral nature; their lack of authorship per se; their time-boundedness. For oral text, it would be the transience or paratextuality or immediacy. For Dickinson, it would be 'AUTHORity'. 

What Barthes's 'multi-dimensional space' permits, even though this wasn't his intention, presumably, is the conceptualisation of textual fulfilment. Hovering within this space is Benjamin's (impossible?) aura, though this is negligible in some texts' case, and absolutely dominant in others. Perhaps 'aura' can be replaced with 'textual celebrity', 'textual notoriety': simply another element of textness, appended to Context or Epitext?

Textual Sifting

Textual Fulfilment. Using most of Peter Barry's textual categories--cotext, context, multitext, epitext, peritext, and so on (see Barry, 'Rethinking Textuality in Literary Studies Today', Literature Compass 7. 11 [November 2010], pp. 999-1008 [DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2010.00758.x])--it is possible to analyse TEXT as the superordinate of a semantic field. Barry's terms, like the branches of a family tree, emerge from the superordinate and create a set of methods for approaching textual fulfilment. But, like further offspring, categories of 'textness'--the written word, the spoken word, the image-text, the digital text--can either be grouped together under each of Barry's sets, or, can form whole new branches of their own. In an act of Divergent Thinking, my students have been engaged in designing mind-maps for text that permit a glance into the potential for interpreting text in all its fullness.  Here's a snippet of one:

Textual Priorities. What is also becoming clear through detailed analysis is that different authors+text can be allied, because of particular shared elements of 'textness' that emerge from close study of them. It's probably obvious, but Shakespeare and Walt Whitman (apparently sometimes called 'America's Shakespeare', which is a bit sad: why can't he just be America's Whitman?) share the numinous textual element of 'authorial fetishization'. This might, perhaps, be akin to visceral 'aura', something that we have been trying, unsuccessfully, to pin down, though Kendall O'Brien's 'experience' is an astute attempt at definition.

Textual Sifting. Of most significance with these authors, and others who are similarly a permanent part of the canon, it is their being THE author that, in a sense, surpasses even their literary oeuvres: oeuvres with all the attendant problems of 'what is the text' of Leaves of Grass or The Merchant of Venice? In these case, and others like them--Beowulf, Chaucer, Milton perhaps, Dickinson--the overwhelming priority in terms of 'textness' is the cult of the author. Clearly, in the case of Beowulf, the cult of the author means the cult of 'Anonymous', and I think that while we'd all like to know the date of that poem, no one wants to know who might feasibly be called the author/s, because part of its cult is its unknowability, its lack of compositional and authorial context. Not all works share the priority of Authorship (or Intentionality), though: more of those next time.

'Anonymity is Authenticity'

Attributed to the founder of the 'vile' website, 4Chan, 'Anonymity is Authenticity' is a thought-provoking soundbite, worth considering in relation to text technologies, broadly speaking. I was first introduced to the phrase through a BBC Radio 3 podcast of 'Arts and Ideas' (http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio3/r3arts/r3arts_20110627-1834a.mp3) in the summer, and was struck by the conversation in that discussion, where one of the participants talked about her multiple personae on various websites, and how these permitted her degrees of reality that depended on the nature and audience of the website. It suggested that anonymity permits a 'real' opinion to be given: a genuineness of critique; a 'truth' that the openness of authorship can erode (as if we all hide behind our names, afraid to own up to what we think). Anonymity is common in specific scholarly areas, particularly for reviews of book proposals to publishers; sometimes, this ability to remain anonymous leads to criticisms being made that the writers would baulk at stating publicly. Does this make the statements more authentic? Open-review policies now being trialled by some journals seek to ensure that any criticism is attached to the name of the writer. Will this make such criticism somehow less authentic (http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mcpress/ShakespeareQuarterly_NewMedia/)?

On the internet, one might argue that anonymity preserves identity such that unpalatable truths can be made public. Here, the Wikileaks site, with its apparent attempts to reveal particular truths about government actions, seems an obvious contender for the accolade of 'authenticity', but, whose truth do these anonymous reporters tell? No utterance was ever uttered unfiltered; no information is objective, mediated by an author without an agenda.

In past technologies, authenticity might indeed depend on anonymity, though, in the sense that particular authors, or kinds of publications, were frowned upon and censored. There are the obvious and very famous examples of the Bronte sisters, publishing under male pseudonyms to bypass public disapproval of female authors. Pseudonymous publication is a form of anonymity or, more usefully, disguise. Anonymity was often de rigeur in the eighteenth century, as in Hannah Glasse's case. In the twentieth century, it was discovered that she was the author of The Art of Cookery made plain and easy, published in 1747 by 'a LADY' (http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=xJdAAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false). Anonymity in this case might have been essential to ensuring the publication of the book, but it also led her being uncredited, which seriously disadvantaged her subsequent reputation and well-being.

In the case of Shakespeare's Bad Quarto and its variants, the anonymity of the title-pages (in comparison with the, literally, 'authorised' First Folio of 1623) has ensured these versions' derogation by textual scholars. In the case of some medieval authors, however, their elision within the text and total anonymity might have meant their works became authenticated by the authorities responsible for the dissemination of sequences of religious texts. One is mindful here of the anonymous homilies circulating in the Anglo-Saxon period, where the authorship of the homily in its multiple instantiations is supressed in order to highlight the major sources used (the likes of Augustine, Gregory, Jerome and Bede, who are explicitly named in the text as those whose writings are employed). In these texts, authenticity is not about the authorship of the original text, or that of the subsequent versions in successive manuscripts, but of the ultimate validity of the text through its use of Church fathers and scriptural quotation.

So, in text technologies, the issue of 'anonymity' being (or 'insisting on' or 'confirming' or 'enhancing') 'authenticity' is not remotely straightforward. It's certainly timely, though, to think through this virtual truism in its more general application to texts and their production.

Present in Absence

In protest at 'Anonymous', the film just released that suggests Shakespeare is not the author of the plays we associate with him, local people in Warwickshire (Shakespeare's birth county in Britain) are protesting by unmemorialising him; that is, they are removing his name from signs: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-coventry-warwickshire-15440882. This rather odd reaction is the antithesis of putting up a name plaque or commemorative monument, presumably, though it's hardly a convincing erasure--the same as might be said for the film, in fact.
The attempt to erase Shakespeare or a well known figure from history, more generally, is attested to in the titlepage of the Great Bible, commissioned by Henry VIII in the 1530s and published in 1539, with subsequent editions within the following couple of years. Thomas Cromwell, Henry's Chancellor, appears in the first edition on the left hand of Henry (in the top register) and his coat of arms appears to the right of the title text. After Henry had Cromwell executed in July 1540, the coat of arms was removed from the titlepage, leaving a circular emptiness that is arguably more noticeable than the coats of arms would have been. In removing the heraldic device of Cromwell, his entire legacy seems to be rubbed out. Similarly, the striking out of Shakespeare's name on roadsigns today ironically draws attention to the presence of the name, and to the obvious significance of William Shakespeare to Warwickshire's history and its tourism industry.

And on titlepages and the way in which they developed over time, a great exhibition (outlined here http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2010/title/slideshow/index.shtm) was held last year which shows the ways in which this most important, but overlooked, information retrieval tool changed up to the early twentieth century. From the fabulous, authorless, propaganda of the Great Bible titlepage to William Morris's elegant, Roman, titles, this part of a book's history tells us, in a nutshell, the content and agenda behind a book's production, yet we seldom spend time looking at this part of the book in our hurry to get to the 'text'.