Posts filed under 'narrative'
In searching for suitable work in progress for the IPRH seminar, I came across this beginning to a meditative essay that I composed nearly eight years ago. I thought I would include it here as an example of the kind of writing I intend to do in correlation to this digital humanities project. The visualization and mapping tools could be used to enhance some of the issues that come up regarding the frequency of certain themes with particular places or place names.
In the final pages of In Search of Lost Time the narrator says of his intended book that he would “build it up like a church” (VI.507). He would also stitch it simply like a dress, regroup his forces like a general conducting an offensive, endure it like a medical regime (VI.507-9). But the book that he has written over the six volumes leading to this point features the church motif more prominently than the others mentioned in these self reflexive pages. In fact, the connection between self reflection and churches is prefigured on page one, where the narrator begins the story by explaining his nightly shift between waking and sleep.
And half an hour later the thought that it was time to look for sleep would awaken me; I would make as if to put away the book which I imagined was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had gone on thinking, while I was asleep, about what I had just been reading, but these thoughts had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was the immediate subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V. (I.1)
The apparent blending of subject and object “did not offend [his] reason” (I.1) and, we later learn, became the major motivation for his search of lost time. One critical aspect of this passage is that it establishes the conflict between [illusory?] perception and imperceptible reality, of which the narrator’s other conflicts are types (for example the questions of Albertine’s sexuality and fidelity). The church and quartet are significant here in that they embody and document time itself. Time and harmonics are the essential elements of the art of music, the bringing to life of a continual emotional present that can be re-performed but never duplicated. An old church brings to life the presence of the past and is a supreme exemplar of the general in the particular. It also features many arts—architecture, sculpture, stained glass, painting, tapestry, music, narrative, fashion, even food and drink—that bring together their special effects to express the whole of human experience. It is therefore not surprising that the narrator concludes that books of the magnitude he will undertake are never complete: “How many great cathedrals remain unfinished!” (VI.508).
Defined briefly, a motif is a recurring thematic or structural element in any art, but especially in music, architecture, painting, and literature. In addition to manifestation through plot and character, motifs can be embodied in place or time. Churches in In Search of Lost Time comprise one motif among many. The recurring elements that unify Proust’s novel—the Madeleine, the Japanese paper game, the little phrase, the parish church at Combray, to name a few—allow for the modulation of themes and function like motifs in a piece of music, but also like the synaesthetic motifs of a church. Churches fulfill several functions in the novel ranging from an element of setting to the object of discourse. Churches are therefore highly appropriate as a motif because they embody both place and time. Considering the narrator’s comparison of his book to a great unfinished cathedral, the notion of a church motif, and possibly the motif itself, might be incomplete.
This paper will perform a meditation on the church motif of In Search of Lost Time, focusing on significant as well as seemingly insignificant moments. The goal is to define the import and function of the church motif, volume by volume, as a mean to developing a theory of narrative and further to illuminate Proust’s work. Questions raised along the way will be varied and speculative because this piece will attempt to discover the ground upon which a more formal study will be based. For that reason, the paper might seem in places to be disjointed, incomplete, incoherent, or sketchy. Since my orals lists will focus on modernism, realism/naturalism, and narrative theory, I will also attempt to begin fleshing out questions and issues to address while reading for the exam. This paper will also make use of and address issues pertaining to the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive, a beta version of which is at http://web.gc.cuny.edu/provost/apit/itech/proustarchive/search.asp.
I
Volume I features a lengthy meditation on the parish church of Combray along with numerous references to it and other churches. The meditation on Saint-Hilaire constitutes twelve pages of exquisite description of the parts of the church, its content, and what it meant to the narrator as a young boy. Saint-Hilaire is a shaping influence on Combray and its citizens’ activities. It is also an icon that represents their place, their essence. For the narrator, it is a point of origin and guidance in his geographical, temporal, and biological (biographical?) movement as well as in his vocation; it is later in this volume the setting for several formative events, notably his first observation of the Duchesse de Guermantes at the wedding of Dr. Percepied’s daughter. Other churches, visited or imagined, figure prominently in his walks along the Méséglise and Guermantes ways, which form the “deepest layer of [his] mental soil” (I.260). And Saint-Hilaire always manages to show itself from afar as he returns to Combray.
The passage quoted in the initial paragraph of this essay (I/I.1) underscores the extent to which the narrator is as much a reader as the writer of his book—both the book held in childhood and the one we ourselves read—as much its subject as all the other themes. Likewise, its readers will be furnished with “the means of reading what lay inside themselves” (VI.508). One question raised here pertains to realism—whether reality lies in things themselves or in the experience or memory of them. The passage could possibly be linked to memory, for the narrator claims later that memories reside not in the mind but in things. However, since memory is not reality but a reproduction of it, the novel probably has more of a non-realist aesthetic despite the meticulous realism of external description. How can we relate these issues to modernist aesthetics such as surrealism? Whatever is happening aesthetically, Proust seems to be questioning traditional epistemologies based on the subject/object dichotomy, especially when the subject becomes its own object of inquiry. How does this fit with modernist trends? What are the relationships of reality and epistemology in (non-)realist aesthetics?
Epistemic and aesthetic issues also appear in the next church passage, which deals with layers of representation and authenticity. Similar to the first passage’s blending of reading and dreaming, this one occurs during bedtime reading, when the narrator’s grandmother gives him photographs of paintings to calm his nerves.
She attempted by a subterfuge, if not to eliminate altogether this commercial banality, at least to minimise it, to supplant it to a certain extent with what was still art, to introduce, as it were, several “thicknesses” of art: instead of photographs of Chartres Cathedral, of the Fountains of Saint-Cloud, or of Vesuvius, she would inquire of Swann whether some great painter had not depicted them, and preferred to give me photographs of “Chartres Cathedral” after Corot, of the “Fountains of Saint-Cloud” after Hubert Robert, and of “Vesuvius” after Turner, which were a stage higher in the scale of art. (I.I/53-4)
The narrator’s sardonic tone highlights the…
realism, different valuations of art object, layer of closeness not necessarily relevant to that of representation (photograph or painting of the original vs. photograph of a painting of the original). Proust archive images—digital simulacra of simulacra; what matter the color + lighting differences? For example the Corot Chartres Cathedral painting images: one is significantly darker than the other.
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Does the file manipulator/editor’s hand or intent matter? Relationship of narrator to grandmother—irony is she wants to give him something of a higher or better aesthetic value, whereas photographs themselves can be valuable aesthetic objects (not to mention the aesthetic value of the cathedral itself, which is the ultimate referent here). To her mind painting is the higher art, though is mediating the boy further from the original beauty of the cathedral. However, if you consider the painting itself is beautiful and an art object, you are still only a step away from the painting, which puts you two steps away from the original. It all depends on where you wish to stop/stand, which is part of the point of the novel. The narrator later comes to realize that mediation is all there is and that the truth, or reality, is always in it (page ref?). This scene also prefigures the repeating mediation of experience and memory through memories of both, with the church figuring as the point of origin. Church is appropriate because it surrounds entirely when you’re in it, and is always present outside the self when in its area/town. Church is itself a memory vault, the memory of history, providing experience of external and internal memories in all their dimensions. Photographs of paintings of churches help to convey/expose this epistemic structure/cycle and prefigure what narrator’s primary mission will be throughout the novel.
August 23rd, 2010
While reading Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History, it occurred to me that the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive should do the same within itself. The first step this Winter will be to complete a major information overhaul, marking up and encoding all passages and images rigorously in XML. Then, dynamic real-time visual tools can be used to illuminate the Recherche, narrative, and the manner in which archive users have been interacting with the novel.
Moretti’s use of graphs to illustrate the publishing data about the novel in different times and locations throughout history shows fascinating patterns about its system of subgenres, its rises and falls, and the relationships it bears with politics and economics. Such models could be applied to the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive, but for purpose of illuminating its internal relationships. Graphs could be used to show various aspects of the church motif and how they are patterned throughout the work. Would, say, the rises and falls of particular associations tell us anything about the novel’s exploration of memory or subjectivity, especially anything that might not be obvious in Proust scholarship hitherto? If so, what do these patterns tell us about narrative itself, and of the motif as an element of narrative?
The mapping techniques that Moretti applies to certain English novels reveal interesting patterns in their plot elements, such as the consistency in which certain types of plots form distinct rings around the geographical center of the action. What would we learn from maps of churches in the Recherche, and how they relate to its exploration of subjective memory, national memory, local memory, memorialization through architecture, archives, and narrative? Would the regions of France, their churches, and how the churches signify within the narrative tell us anything new about the Recherche?
Perhaps even trees dealing with associations, categories, or motifs could tell us a lot about the church motif and its operation within the whole narrative.
As well, these kinds of tools could be used to illuminate the relationships between critical discussion on the blog and the text and images in the archive. Which passages get the most attention? The least? Which associations and image properties are most or least discussed? How do these change over time?
A unified, dynamic, and interactive visualization section of the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive could potentially show so much about the Recherche and narrative that has not yet been seen. It could prove to be a new method of inquiry into the novel, Proust, narrative, literary scholarship, and more.
Here are some basic relationships that a visualization application could explore:
Graphs
- Association by pagination location in the novel.
- Association by chronological location in the narrative.
- Association by chronology of composition (would require extensive textual scholarship).
- Association by church.
- Blog categories by association, and/or by image property, and/or by church.
- Real, fictional, and hybrid churches by location in the novel, in the narrative, by image type, etc.
Maps
- Geographical locations of churches.
- Geographical locations of associations and churches.
- Geographical locations of associations by churches, broken down by real, fictional, and hybrid churches.
- Character by geographical location, church, associations, and image properties.
- Any of the above by critical categories in the blog.
Trees
- Breakdown schema of how real and hybrid churches are used in particular associations (say, romantic love or the subject/object distinction).
- Schema of how blog categories explore certain associations or image properties.
- Schema of an image property and the kinds of associations it tends to appear with.
As a note for a future post, in order to make the data more effective in visual applications, a rigorous categorization of the associations (which are non-categorized) will probably be necessary.
November 17th, 2008
(Continued from this post and this post.)
This project began as a spreadsheet documenting the church passages for a term paper in a Proust seminar. It was subsequently compared by someone else in a textual scholarship seminar to Roland Barthes’ S/Z. The comparison holds on two counts: the arranging of passages in a cross-referenced grid system and the inclusion of interpretive keys as paratexts.
Barthes’ method in S/Z, a narratological analysis of Balzac’s novella Sarrasine, breaks down the entire story into passages (which he calls “lexia”), beneath which appear his analyses according to five semiotic codes: the hermeneutic (HER), semantic (SEM), symbolic (SYM), proairetic [or actional] (ACT), and referential (REF). This enables him to perform a step-by-step reading that remains attentive to the plural of the text. This method,
through its very slowness and dispersion, avoids penetrating, reversing the tutor text, giving an internal image of it: it is never anything but the decomposition (in the cinematographic sense) of the work of reading: a slow motion, so to speak, neither wholly image nor wholly analysis; it is, finally, in the very writing of the commentary, a systematic use of digression (a form ill-accommodated by the discourse of knowledge) and thereby a way of observing the reversibility of the structures from which the text is woven; of course, the classic text is incompletely reversible (it is modestly plural): the reading of this text occurs within a necessary order, which the gradual analysis will make precisely its order of writing; but the step-by-step commentary is of necessity a renewal of the entrances to the text, it avoids structuring the text excessively, avoids giving it that additional structure which would come from a dissertation and would close it: it stars the text, instead of assembling it. (12-13; Barthes’ emphases)
To a contemporary reader, Barthes’ digressions take a form remarkably similar to blog posts with category tags and commentary. Each segment of the book is anywhere from one to about five pages in length and begins with a number, a title, a passage from Sarrasine, and then commentary that incorporates any of the five semiotic codes that might be present. And they progress rigidly in chronological order according to the tutor text — as we sometimes say of the seriality of blogs under the “tyranny of the timestamp” (but which can be “adjusted”). He uses the codes as a system for both teasing out the plural of the tutor text in the act of reading and for referring to other passages containing the same types of signifiers, which is like tagging in Web 2.0.
One of the true innovations of Barthes’ approach in S/Z is the simplicity of the overall structure. In using only the basic procedures of analysis, labeling, and cross-reference, without the inhibiting burden of organizing them around large themes or an articulation of the whole text, he is able to use the digressive episodes to mine each lexia for its plurality. Each segment becomes a self-contained discourse on the lexia it falls under, making connections as it pleases. Or as he says:
If we want to remain attentive to the plural of the text (however limited it may be), we must renounce structuring this text in large masses, as was done by classical rhetoric and by secondary-school education: no construction of the text: everything signifies ceaselessly and several times, but without being delegated to a great final ensemble, to an ultimate structure. Whence the idea, and so to speak the necessity, of a gradual analysis of a single text. Whence, it would seem, several implications and several advantages. The commentary on a single text is not a contingent activity, assigned the reassuring alibi of the “concrete”: the single text is valid for all the texts of literature, not in that it represents them (abstracts and equalizes them), but in that literature itself is never anything but a single text: the one text is not an (inductive) access to a Model, but entrance into a network with a thousand entrances; to take this entrance is to aim, ultimately, not at a legal structure of norms and departures, a narrative or poetic Law, but at a perspective (of fragments, of voices from other texts, other codes), whose vanishing point is nonetheless ceaselsessly pushed back, mysteriously opened: each (single) text is the very theory (and not the mere example) of this vanishing, of this difference which indefinitely returns, insubmissive. (11-12; Barthes’ emphasis)
The notion of Literature as a single hypertext of voices, “a network with a thousand entrances,” is where the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive begins its own construction (though I hadn’t studied S/Z until long after the search engine was built). It singles out one strain of the narrative in order to examine up close the multiple voices and “entrances” and “vanishing points” of the Recherche. The purpose is to read Proust in a way that hasn’t been done before, and also to further the study of narrative by using new tools (search engine, blog, taxonomic and folksonomic organization, hypertext) that were foreshadowed but unavailable to narratologists during the 1970s:
to take up the structural analysis of narrative where it has been left till now: at the major structures; it is to assume the power (the time, the elbow room) of working back along the threads of meanins, of abandoning no site of the signifier without endeavoring to ascertain the code or codes of which this site is perhaps the starting point (or the goal)…. (S/Z 12)
In more selectively culling its lexia but less selectively organizing its interpretive codes (the uncategorized associations), the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive highlights both the entrances and vanishings of the text — where each instance of the church motif begins and ends and the voices and codes that weave therein, that channel them from other parts of the narrative but are amplified and cut off. (In much the same way, the church is for Proust’s narrator both the origin and the end, the orienting post.) And for the sake of recalling these instances it uses the advantages of the digital medium to archive and reorganize the text(s), to build itself accretively on its voices, just as a church or a book embodies those voices (of history, of love, of war, of strife and hope).
March 12th, 2008
In the last post I asked a question related to David Greetham’s metaphor of membranous transmission between archives.
In conceiving of a text as an archive (of knowledge, voices, attitudes, values) consisting of inter-membranous citations, this text interrogates its tutor text, and also itself. How must Proust be read here through the collect of its church motif (citations) and through the heterogeneous images (also citations) that supplement it?
In the ensuing discussion I neglected to consider the obvious question of genre. What makes the membrane metaphor so rich is its basis in the notion of leaves — of a book. The Proust passages constituting the church motif have “crossed several membranes (membranae or ‘leaves’ of a book) to interrogate the integrity of the archives from which they have been drawn” (Werner and Voss 1). They have, first, been translated and revised (Enright revision of the Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation) from an original (to them) printed version in French, itself an edited variant of whatever beginnings it had in manuscript; second, been singled out through my acts of reading and interepretation; third, been transcribed into a spreadsheet by myself and the woman whom I subsequently married; fourth, been imported into a database that operates upon them in response to searches of their words and phrases, as well as the paratexts (associations, context notes, image properties, pagination) that form relations with them.
Hence, each fragment of the collect constituting the core text of this archive has passed through several leaves or membranes before arriving in its place here. Only one of those leaves surviving in the present constellation is in print; the other three are digital. In that way, the digital archive-text provides several functions that allow for an interaction of digital and print membranes through its multi-layered memorializing of readings. The digital text is a deliberately partial trace of the whole print text, and its native ability to be reorganized allows for a non-sequential reading of its component parts. Thus the fascicles (OED — “A bunch, bundle. Now only in scientific use. Formerly also fig.“; “A part, number, ‘livraison’ (of a work published by instalments)” — demarcate the points of loss in the original, allowing readers to reconstitute, to re-member the original narrative in meaningful ways by means of the pupil text.
Membrane — OED — “classical Latin membr
na a membrane (in animal bodies), parchment < membrum“
Memory — OED — “classical Latin memoria < memor mindful, remembering (a reduplicated formation)”
Memory as the act of preservation through reduplication (of the original, through writing), of committing to archival parchment, to a node in the database. Re-membering — collecting and reassembling the membranes, the planes of memory in the novel’s signifiers and (here) signifieds, the pieces of a motif extrapolated from an organic text. Proust’s churches as the archives of both personal and collective memory; his book as the same; this archive as… ?
Before addressing Barthes’ S/Z, I felt it necessary to broach this subject of the membranous layers between print book and digital archive. S/Z deliberately fragments (or “stars”) the text of Sarrasine in order to tease out the full ambiguity of its signifiers, to get as close as possible to the writerly text by operating methodically upon the minutiae of the readerly one. Barthes ultimately concludes that a full articulation of the text’s signifying structures is impossible because the text itself is not a closed system. This archive begins with that conclusion as an assumption, limiting its selection of citations but using the mobility of the digital medium to approach the writerly text of a narrative strain running through the original. The digital medium is perfectly suited to interrogate the valences of the print text by spontaneously realigning its parts to match the reader’s intent.
What can the digital archive see in the book from which it derives?
February 2nd, 2008
It occurred to me as I lay awake last night that Drupal could actually do much of what came out in our discussions at if:book a year ago. Dan Visel suggested allowing users to add their own images and their own passages (permissions nightmares), or to comment on searches, which is interesting. Drupal wouldn’t be able to do a search comment. However, entering each passage as a page or story would enable:
- More images to be attached to passages.
- Commenting on the passages and, perhaps with a module, the images.
- Integration of Proust passages and commentary with services like del.icio.us, twitter, technorati.
- Use of modules to serendipitously or randomly highlight passages, images, and critical content.
The Drupal search tool would recall all of these. However, the downsides would be:
- Less immediate access to the search results, since they’d show up as headlines and teasers instead of displaying all info in a neat table as at present.
- There would be no way to conduct a pagination search for in-depth study of a particular segment of the novel.
Again, as I wrote in the previous post, the archival structure of this site must be “respectful” of the organicity of the novel genre. A Drupal or Drupal-like integrated search engine and Web 2.0 tool would open up possibilities inherent in the digital archive genre, but might go too far in doing violence to the novel genre.
With Web 2.0 (user-produced content), institutional considerations would have to address the topical specificity of the archive, lest it become an encyclopedic, directionless, Proustian wiki. That could mean instituting an archive staff committed to study of the church motif and narrative, which would require a grant or some other financial backing. At the very least it would mean vetting the readers who are allowed to post content (i.e. students, faculty, researches demonstrably focusing on Proust, etc.). But that too is inseparable from what an archive is — a container of information, whose information is controlled, selected, interpreted, and presented by the archon and both the intra- and inter-institutional politics of its time and place.
December 31st, 2007
Developing another site using Drupal has gotten me thinking about how the sophisticated integration systems of all kinds of content could be put to use in the Proust archive. Image galleries that can be searched by caption or tagged content, or sorted by different categories. Dynamic flash slideshows based on user input or browsing behavior, or that pull images externally based on these. Searches that mix text — say passages, comments, forum topics — with images in unforseen yet meaningful ways (as opposed to the relatively static array currently in place). It would be very easy to do, and like most new technology the impulse is to try it all out to see what happens.
But what new ways of understanding “Proust” or narrative or “church” or motif would emerge from that? In what ways does the Machine’s reading of the archive’s content intersect with my own? Where does the Machine end and the archive begin?
While questions like these can be asked of the new media without blinking, it’s important to remember that this digital resource is a supplement to a book, a novel. Without an archival methodology that makes its end in the understanding of the novel’s properties, it will spin into a form more germane to contemporary media. Therefore, one major area of the study of the Recherche will have to consider the question of genre. To what extent is this archive really a reading of a book? Even in its current relatively static form, this archive is probably “about” itself more than anything else, though Proust’s novel is ultimately the generating influence. The trick is to figure out how.
November 29th, 2007
While considering a taxonomic versus a folksonomic labeling of passages in the archive, it occurred to me that there are benefits to having both in the search engine and search results.
The taxonomic approach would be a codified and rigorous — and therefore arbitrarily limited — categorization of narrative elements a priori. As a search functionality it would constrain the method in such a way that the selection of narrative elements would form a cohesive set of criteria on which to assess the passages. As a results parameter it would allow the researcher to view the other narrative elements with which a given one coincides and, using analytical tools, to articulate the large- and small-scale patterns in which the church motif operates.
In that respect the archive would function like a moving S/Z, staking the narrative grounds on which to assess the operation of the narrative and following them to their fullest conclusion.
However, what is valuable in the Associations as they currently stand is their haphazard, a posteriori formulation, generated during the act of reading. The richness of threads that continually and unexpectedly enter the mind during reading should definitely be archived as part of the critical response to the text, as an adjunct to the blog and forum.
The folksonomic approach, therefore, would incorporate a tool that enables readers of the archive to annotate passages with their own Associations, contributing another dimension to the architecture of the search engine, the richness of results, and the quality of critical discourse. The folksonomic approach would hybridize the narratological method with a sort of reader-response mechanism, allowing a comparison of both as part of the long-term evolution of the study of the Recherche.
Ideally the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive would become a micro institution, functioning like a cross between an academic periodical and a book with multiple contributors. What form(s) will the full-length study(ies) ultimately take?
September 20th, 2007
I was originally going to post a handful of videos derived somehow from Proust’s work but ended up finding much more — and of better quality — than expected. For now, I’ll post a few musical interpretations. What’s interesting is that almost all of them involve a prominent visual component that constitutes its own narrative. Much of the video out there either parodies, idolizes, or has nothing to do with Proust.
August 31st, 2007
A post by Valter at a blog called Surreal Documents: Doctrines, Fine Arts, Ethnography, Variety got me thinking about Proust in the context of modernist novels in general:
[Proust] thus likened the work of a writer to a architect, organizing the least parts of the text into an interdependent whole. Both Proust’s text and the cathedral are the products of a synthetic spirit, binding together diverse domains of knowledge into a coherent edifice. Panofsky: “The classical cathedral, in its imagery, seeks to embody the totality of Christian knowledge, theological, natural, and historical, by putting everything in its place and by suppressing whatever no longer found a place“. For Proust, the cathedrals of France were not only the most beautiful monuments of French art, but also the only works of art which still lived a life of completeness (”…leur vie intégrale…“).
What Proust’s novel shares with many others of its generation is precisely what Valter calls a “synthetic spirit.” Modernist prose is often fragmentary in style, which might give the surface impression of an analytic spirit. But the poetic structuring of those fragments forms a new kind of synthesis that many modernist writers were trying to discover.
Interestingly, so many novels of the early 20th Century, especially during and after the Great War, contain Edenic imagery as a cry for unity and integrity in the face of the anxieties and upheavals of the time. Virginia Woolf’s The Waves features the house at Elvedon where the children grow up, disperse into the world, and to which they long to return. William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury tells the tragic history of the Compson family after the downfall of the Old South; only their African-American maid, Dilsey, is able to transcend the vanity of modernity through singing at church, an activity that connects her to the Old South. Many similar elements can be pointed out in Joyce, namely the close relationship of the Eden and Einstein motif clusters (i.e. the synthesis of time/space in the eventual unity of Shaun/Shem, tree/stone) of Finnegans Wake.
Proust’s composing the Recherche like a cathedral fits with the general conception of the novel genre as a synthetic whole — one whose poetic structure connects disparate parts such as personal/historical past/present in one experience. And it uses all the media available to the novelistic imagination to do so, which correspond to those presented in churches: pictorial images, sculptural images, narrative, music, interior and exterior emplacements, even food.
A search in the archive on the Novel association recalls a passage that metaphorically compares the notions of architecture, churches, the novel, and the sources of modern European life.
It was, this “Guermantes,” like the setting of a novel, an imaginary landscape which I could with difficulty picture to myself and longed all the more to discover, set in the midst of real lands and roads which all of a sudden would become alive with heraldic details, within a few miles of a railway station; I recalled the names of the places round it as if they had been situated at the foot of Parnassus or of Helicon, and they seemed precious to me as the physical conditionsâ€â€in the realm of topographical scienceâ€â€required for the production of an unaccountable phenomenon. I saw again the escutcheons blazoned beneath the windows of Combray church; their quarters filled, century after century, with all the fiefs which, by marriage or conquest, this illustrious house had appropriated to itself from all the corners of Germany, Italy and France; vast territories in the North, powerful cities in the South, assembled there to group themselves in Guermantes, and, losing their material quality, to inscribe allegorically their sinople keep or castle triple-towered argent upon its azure field. (3 1 1 7-8)
Unfortunately, I don’t have time to expand on this further so I will have to return to it soon.
July 31st, 2007
On Saturday March 17th I attended two afternoon panels, Text Work in the Digital Age, Part 2 and the Pedagogy and Textual Studies Round Table. In Text Work in the Digital Age, Part 2, Alice Gambrell, Sandy Baldwin, and Rita Raley all gave presentations that focused somewhat on the future of textual works. I was struck by the fact that most of these forward-looking textual projects were artistic in nature.
Alice Gambrell gave a fascinating presentation on the textuality of workplace media and its subversive uses by artists. A prominent example was David Byrne’s PowerPoint piece (2001-3). But she also referred to a collaborative project she had done a couple of years ago, the Stolen Time Archive, which shows that an archive is an argument that achieves certain effects. In that way, the role of the archivist is to use the archive as a tool for passing information along to others who will use it in unanticipated — and subversive — ways.
Sandy Baldwin had an interesting take on spam, noting that much of it tends toward the literary — an eliteness (i.e. 1337, or leet / “elite”) and a uniqueness that achieves its own erasure as spam. He was referring, as best I can remember, to the kinds of “nonsense” stories and poems that enter our inboxes randomly (or seemingly so) and the pleasure he derives from them. I was pleased to hear someone talking about this experience of textuality at such an important conference because some spam appeals to my sensibility as well as that of others. I think that particular experience of textuality — the randomness with which it goes to the reader (as opposed to vice versa), the mystery of its apparently automatic origin — in large part defines our time. One of the most beautiful haiku (sort of) that I’ve ever read came from a spammer who apparently put something through babelfish several times before disseminating it to probably thousands of individuals:
modern animal
walk appreciate key hoping article
myself black
Rita Raley brought to our attention several new media art projects that seek to improve online reading, develop new reading interfaces, experiment with translation (by machine), and can help us flesh out more fully the history of reading. Her assessment of the projects addressed the following elements.
- Textual visualization
- Codex / digital hybrids
- Alternative interfaces and screens (i.e. cell phones for reading novels)
- Immersive text environments (i.e. room installations, 3D simulations, the CAVE at Brown University, the allosphere for textual composition)
- 3D textual environments (projected)
I don’t seem to have notes on all the artists she discussed, so I’ll do my best to recount the more interesting ones.
William Gillespie’s Word Museum is a 3D environment and interface for creating word objects and sculptures. It’s about the transition between legibility and illegibility, looking at text as a sculptural object and reading it — or processing it — from all sides and angles.
jodi.org — a site (reminds me of absurd.org) that subversively expresses the hidden structures of a text. In commandeering the physical behavior of the browser, the site calls attention to the binaries of code/surface, source/interface, and depth/surface. The reader is made aware that code is a deep structure that substantiates a surface. Rita also remarked that works which include code with human language in the same space isolate the screen as a surface.
Ted Warnell’s code poem Lascaux.Symbol.ic similarly lays bare the conditions of textual production. The background horse from Lascaux (circa 15,000 BCE) calls our attention to the “writing on the wall” and the communicative, expressive, semiotic systems that reside in art. The hand evokes tactility, the interface, and presence/absence. It also looks mounted, meaning the cave wall is not the mounting of the painting/poem, as traditionally, but the background of the picture — thereby destabilizing the notions of foreground/background (reminds me of Cubism).
She also discussed several pieces by John Cayley, a London-based poet, translator, and book dealer who also works at Royal Holloway College, University of London, and has directed research at Brown University and UC San Diego.
- “Overboard” - an animated display of a stable text dissembled by algorithms over time. The effect of this contemporary writing experiment is to create a continually moving “language painting” in which the base text occasionally comes into full legibility. Since aspects like word shape are largely preserved as the text changes, the word becomes a lens, a visual threshold.
- “Translation” - a selection of passages from Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past — both the original French and the English translation by Moncrieff and Kilmartin — that rotate in 3D movements. This piece, like many others described above, is about the rising and sinking of the surface, though here it is viewed through the lens of Proust and memory. It’s basically a narrated video in non-Euclidean geometry and a virtual 3D space.
- “Imposition” - was a collaborative, networked, textual/multimedia performance. The room featured a main screen with a primary movie. Twelve laptops were distributed to visitors, who were invited to to interact with text. The ensemble then moves to multiple screens to become a networked performance. The driving question of the project is to see how text competes with other types of media in a multimedia ecology.
The overarching theme of these experimental projects is legibility. They approach text as something to be contemplated rather than read. In that way, they’re more about processing text in non-traditional, unfamiliar ways.
This was a particularly stimulating panel that precipitated a lively Q&A session. The three presentations had in common a forward-looking attitude that implied — if it didn’t directly address — the future of reading and textual production. They all focused on issues pertinent to the projects and discussion that happen at the Institute for the Future of the Book, so I suggested that anyone who didn’t already know about it should check it out.
In the next post I will review the Pedagogy round table that also proved highly stimulating.
April 9th, 2007
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