The unstable text

In an interview widely reported today, the American novelist, Jonathan Franzen, reveals his preference for the pbook (the physical book) as opposed to the ebook. He comments: "Maybe nobody will care about printed books 50 years from now, but I do. When I read a book, I’m handling a specific object in a specific time and place. The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing - that’s reassuring. Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it’s just not permanent enough” (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/hay-festival/9047981/Jonathan-Franzen-e-books-are-damaging-society.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter). Here, Franzen seems to suggest that the literary afficionado functions best through the printed book, particularly because of its place in time and place (close to how Walter Benjamin describes 'aura'). But, contrary to Franzen's belief in the fragility and impermanence of the digital medium, Matt Kirschenbaum, and others, have concluded that the digital--in each individual instantiation of a 'text'--is as permanent or 'fixed', as 'fixable', as anything printed (see Kirschenbaum's Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination [MIT Press, 2007]).

This may well, at the level of the byte, say, be true, but it is also to assume, as Franzen does here, that print itself is unchanging, irrevocably the same each time the printed book is encountered. This cannot be true, particularly with regard to a book's materiality which inevitably degrades, or is altered through being handled, or collects dust. For the 'text' itself (which I would regard as inseparable from the artefact's materiality)--widely understood as the words or images on the page--these change, of course. They change from imprint to imprint and from edition to edition, even if only through an updated paratext, a newly designed cover, the emendation of an earlier error, or, on a grander scale, multiple editorial interventions.

The distinction between the digital and the physical artefact ('analogue') as a distinction between the transient and the fixed, the impermanent and the stable, the immaterial and the material is not a useful one. And, just a reminder for all the post-1500 readers: it is through a detailed understanding of manuscript culture that one might better understand the nature of TEXT in its broadest sense. It is there that the idea of the eventful text is most easily investigated and analysed and there that the efforts to make human endeavour permanent can most clearly and poignantly be seen.

Text beyond price

An examination of heterotextuality proves that not all texts are born equal. Looking at all manner of texts--from 'Exit' signs to chalk graffiti, a sorority house to a bulletin board--it's clear that what links these texts is the intention to communicate; other attributes are variable. The building, the sorority house with its colonial architecture and Greek identifier, is replete with institutional authority, its academic credentials emblazoned across its facade; but it also shares a larger, national and ideological function, allied to all other sorority houses of its type (and, every sorority house, of course). The bulletin board, outside a room housing a writing centre, is also institutionally authorised, both reflecting and contributing to the university's identity and purpose. It also shares an important feature in common with the chalk graffiti (wittily and exclusively referencing the BBC Sherlock Holmes series); namely, its transience and ephemeral nature. In this, even though the bulletin board functions as an institutional sign like the 'Exit' notice screwed into the ceiling, the latter is made different through its permanence and legal mandate. All of these texts can be examined through their intentionality, materiality and functionality (as I've just done), but it's the extra (literally 'outside') variable--their value, 'aura', authenticity--that adds the essential feature of Text. How are these examples to be valued? Clearly very different values come into play: the financial (real estate prices), the legal (how to get out of the building in the case of a fire), the aesthetic (the graffiti, the sorority house. For some, the aesthetic appeal of graffiti is non-existent.). What about the ineffability of value, though? So-called 'sentimental value'? The visceral response to a worn-out old notebook? This becomes Text-beyond-price. This is the core of Text that can never be reproduced in any other medium.

The Invisible Aspect of Text

Walter Benjamin's 'Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' is, rightly, one of the most important articles in the modern era, particularly for its aesthetic approach to Text. If Text is interpretable through its intentionality, materiality and functionality (more capacious descriptions than the alternative triad--'production, transmission and reception'), the missing element, and often the most significant element, is 'aura'. 'Aura' is notoriously difficult to pin down, but might, variously, be thought of as 'authenticity', 'originality', 'value', 'appeal', 'authority'. For Benjamin, loss of 'aura' emerges from reproduction, though the democratisation of art, for him, had great benefits. The essence of Text, then, is its irremovable intent, material, and function, but always weighted by the variable of 'aura'.

Here, from sixty minutes' hard work, are the two classroom boards with tweetable reductions of Benjamin's fundamental message, completed by the teams of my 'What is (a) Text' Senior Seminar.

Edifice of Letters

Is it possible to conceive of Text holistically? By 'Text' I mean the textual artefact, the thing requiring interpretation. If we can conceive of a house as a whole entity, despite its many components and multiple rooms, is it not reasonable to think of a textual artefact as a single edifice of interpretability: an edifice of letters/symbols/readings? Through various optical illusions, Matej Krén has created a building made out of books (http://freshbump.com/matej-kr-n-s-building-of-books/); extending that sculpture into a metaphor to envisage a single edifice constructed from a Text's component parts might allow us to investigate the full potential of individual textness. A case in point would be the well-known St Alban's Psalter, which is digitally available here (http://www.abdn.ac.uk/~lib399/), but only in a dismembered, folio-by-folio, click-by click viewing. This presentation is much better than no images, of course, but it encourages the breaking apart of the volume into its constituent parts--either the page-at-a-time technique (and no physical book ever functioned a page at a time) or through the verbal text or through the illustrative text (which in the case of this Psalter are often inseparable). The book becomes the patchy reconstitution of its parts and not the sum of its parts: its materiality, its textual history, its paradigmatic and syntagmatic relationships, its context of production, and so forth. If a book were a building, a unified whole understood as such, one would enter and walk through it, seeing all elements as part of the singular textual object replete with its own history and intertextuality, made more complex by the intellectual information of its particular inhabitant. Could such a thing ever work? If it could, we would have a new Text: the whole Text, and, I might argue, the only genuinely interpretful Text.

Text Text Text

What is (a) Text? TEXT is a semantic field of extraordinary range; boundariless; exceptionally difficult to define. The OED provides a narrow initial definition as its 1a) 'The wording of anything written or printed; the structure formed by the words in their order; the very words, phrases, and sentences as written'. Multiple other definitions refine this, particularly with regard to semantic specialisation: 'text' as 'scripture', the 'very words' of 'holy scripture', but it's clear that none of these definitions is sufficient to account for textness in a holistic sense. By this, I mean contemplating 'text' as a whole, without subdividing it into components like 'word', 'image', 'margin'. How can we talk about The Ellesmere Chaucer as a text (an object replete with intentionality, materiality and functionality) using the narrowness of this definition? How can we discuss the codex's meaning, including its value as a contemporary witness to Chaucer's work? ('Meaning' itself is circuitously defined by the OED (2.) as 'The sense or signification of a word, sentence, etc. a. Of language, a sentence, word, text, etc.: signification, sense.') 

TEXT might most usefully include all of the areas of investigation incorporated into Peter Barry's Literature in Contexts (http://us.macmillan.com/literatureincontexts/PeterBarry). For Barry, these integral elements of textuality include epitextuality, peritextuality, metatextuality, cotextuality, and so forth, all of which, combined provide 'total textuality'. We might think, then, of the Ellesmere Chaucer, of the Beatles' 'A Day in the Life', of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass as 'pantexts' or 'omnitext' (a term coined by Taylor Field), each a rich repository of interpretative potential yielded by its creation, transmission and reception and enhanced by its value in the larger world.

Twit Twit To Who?

What an interesting and perplexing medium Twitter is. For the everyday humdrum tweets (few of which I subscribe to), I'm sure it's random and sporadically amusing; for celebrity updates, no doubt it feeds the frenzy of interest in mundane comings and goings (frequently screenshotted into newspaper articles); for news reports, it's a useful tool, but much of what's reported barely merits attention.

For academic goings-on, it's a weird new world, pertinently discussed by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen in his blog today: http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/ What's fascinating is how much of a driver Twitter is, or might become, rather than being a reporting or proclamatory tool. The debate I've been having with Jeffrey concerns issues of intellectual property and Twitter. Is it ethical to tweet almost point-by-point a conference paper that you're listening to? It would be, if you've asked permission of the speaker, presumably. And while you wouldn't ask permission to take notes in a notebook or a MacBook, you would ask for permission to record digitally or to video. So tweeting is like recording, rather than note-taking? And it's like recording because it's a public or publishable form, infinitely replicable through endless repeating or retweeting? If that's the case--that speakers can expect to be published even as they speak--surely that might change the nature of a conference paper? Jeffrey's blog discusses the utility of tweeting, particularly as his conference papers might be almost ready to be published. Mine seldom are: they are usually highly speculative, sometimes deliberately polemical to garner response, often quite embryonic and seeking feedback. Should I cease that type of early research presentation? Such work is not ready for (written, permanent) publication--nowhere near, in fact. If it isn't ready for that, then is it really a viable tweet-hoard?

Elizabeth Dacre hidden in a book

The benefits of looking at books holistically, whether they are manuscript or print books, is borne out by my discovery in March 2010 of a Latin love poem written in the sixteenth century. While I was visiting West Virginia University to give a lecture at the invitation of Professor Pat Conner, I dropped into the university's Special Collections to examine some early books with an undergraduate class. The librarian, Harold Forbes, had kindly got out a sixteenth-century edition of Chaucer's Works to show me. I have always been interested in writing outside of the main text-block--marginalia, annotations, ex libris ownership inscriptions, and bits of paper stuck into books--and to my delight, there was a handwritten text pasted into the back board of the Chaucer edition. I could tell from the writing that this was a sixteenth century work, and astonishingly, a name 'Elizabeth Dacre' appeared pasted beneath the main text. I asked what it was, but no one knew, so I transcribed five or six lines to look up when I had finished lecturing. When I looked up the lines, they appeared nowhere. This poem, then, had never been seen since its rebinding into the book cover, never been published, and probably never been read in recent centuries. 

As it turns out, the poem was written by Lady Elizabeth Dacre, an English aristocratic woman (c. 1536-1567), to Sir Anthony Cooke, tutor to Edward VI, and father of the Cooke sisters--famous scholars in their day. The poem is full of love and longing, a personal lament for the 'tristis amor', the 'sad love', which seems to have been Cooke and Dacre's secret. The Latin poem is fourteen lines long and full of classical references to those who shared deep and silent passion, and it ends with a scurrilous Martial epigram. Evidently, Elizabeth took great care to preserve a fair copy, by putting it safely in the book of Chaucer's Works that she herself owned. 

Despite her apparent love for Cooke--whether real or imagined--Elizabeth Dacre never married him and there is no record of their relationship. Instead, she was twice married: to the fourth Baron Dacre first; and then shortly after his death in 1566, to the fourth Duke of Norfolk, the most powerful of all the English aristocrats. Norfolk was ostensibly a Protestant, while Elizabeth was an ardent Catholic. She died in childbirth within months of marrying Norfolk, and during her dying moments while in labour, he refused to allow her access to her priest for the last rites. Her sad death at the age of only about thirty resulted in her subsequent loss to history--remembered only by and through her noble daughters Anne and Elizabeth. Since the late sixteenth century, then, she has been consigned to the footnotes of history, without even a tomb marking her passing. Now, however, with the emergence of this wonderful and personal piece of writing, and the sure knowledge of her classical education and her ownership of Chaucer's Works, something of this extraordinary woman has been brought to life. It goes to show that while we usually focus on the main contents of books, there can often be a great deal to be discovered hiding elsewhere between the covers.

For full details, see my article '"Tristis amor": An unpublished love letter from Lady Elizabeth Dacre Howard to Sir Anthony Cooke’, Renaissance Studies (Print-ahead-of-Publication, 2011), DOI 10.1111/j.1477-4658.2011.00765.x. For recent news coverage, see http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45675395/ns/technology_and_science-science/