Posts filed under 'digital'
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
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
While looking over some materials from one of the courses that sparked this project, I came across some notes on archive theory that seem especially relevant. There is a strong connection between the poetics of the archive and the activity of archiving.
In The Poetics of the Archive, Marta Werner and Paul Voss remind us that recent theories shift aspects of physical archives onto the conceptualization of texts and discursive practices. The archive’s dual function as a guardian of memory and a mechanism for controlling access to that memory make it indistinguishable from the process of knowledge production.
If the first archons originally conceived of the archive as a space of pure knowledge, then for those who came after, including oursleves, the archive has more often revealed itself as an ideologically-charged space. This space, inseparable from the ensemble of operations deployed within it, confers order on its contents and creates a system whereby an official record of the past may be preserved and transmitted instact. The archive may be, in effect, a political space, a genedered space, a memorial space. (ii)
“This space, inseparable from the complex of operations deployed within it”: The Ecclesiastical Proust Archive is the search engine, blog, forum, image galleries and the operations readers use to access its records. What does it record? The entire collection of passages forming the church motif; my readings of those passages — in the form of the associations and context notes that appear as search parameters (if selected) and as paratexts in the results (if selected); the images that contain (archive) my memories — as well as those of hundreds of other people alive and dead — of churches in France that are also archived in Proust’s novel; potentially the readings of other researchers in the comments field and the forum; the many thousands of pharmacological and pornographic offerings of comment spam quarantined by a plugin.
In making the church motif of Proust’s Recherche the controlling idea of this archive, I have, as archon, already imposed an order and a system on the rest of its content. In so doing, I have also preconditioned the readings that take place here, making the interpretive discourse both a result of the archival function and a part of that function. As David Greetham points out, via Derrida, in “‘Who’s In, Who’s Out’: The Cultural Poetics of Archival Exclusion,” the exergue or collection of citations before the beginning of a discursive piece sets the tone, meaning, and form of what follows. The collection of passages in this archive therefore functions similarly to the miscellaneous citations that perform as epigraphs in Greetham’s essay: “they have thus crossed several membranes (membranae or “leaves” of a book) to interrogate the integrity of the archives from which they have been drawn (and redrawn) and the one into which they are imported” (Werner and Voss 1).
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? This is where the reading of Proust alongside the relational attitude of the juxtaposed images generates much complexity. Some images depict an actual church named in the text (e.g. Chartres for “Chartres”) in a documentary attitude. Some depict a real church on which a fictional one was based (e.g. the église Saint-Jacques at Illiers-Combray for the “église Saint-Hilaire of Combray”) in a sort of demistifying, “source identification” attitude. [The hyphenation of that town's name in honor of Proust is another interesting example of archiving.] Because of the archontic rule I set myself for including an image for every passage, some images depict a real church for a fictional one that has no basis (or no single source) in reality (e.g. my ghostly black and white photos of Chartres porches for passages in which the narrator “dreams of meeting his love on the porch of some Gothic cathedral”), in which case the relationship is based on an analogue of architectural elements and/or an emotional affect held in common. While there are more combinations in the image/text relationships (and many more yet to be teased out), the question naturally arises of their effects upon other readers.
As the progenitor and editor of this archive, my readings are memorialized — inscribed in the very architecture — in a way that must necessarily hold greater sway over those who perform readings here later.
The history of the archive, on the one hand a history of conservation, is, on the other hand, a history of loss. The archives of antiquity have long since vanished; we receive their contents as fragments of only as citations in later works. (Werner and Voss i)
Much of recent theory considers archives compiled by single authors/editors, of which the present one is still an example. But what happens when the archive becomes collaborative, when the fragments of the original novel-archive are brought into new relationships with images or other texts by the editorial/authorial voices of other readers? How will the external forces of time, cultural and ideological shifts, and scholarly contribution alter its content and its meaning?
The complex relationship between the archive and memory is subject not only to external, historical forces, but also to its own interior dynamics: “the archive’s dream of perfect order is disturbed by the nightmare of its random, heterogeneous, and often unruly contents†that make it “always only partially decodeable†(ii). Hence, The Ecclesiastical Proust Archive deliberately embodies recent theories that question the archive’s teleological function: it self-consciously collects violently decontextualized citations and external heterogeneous images for the purpose of closely reading, and re-membering, a novel.
Its operation is thereby similar to Roland Barthes’ archive of Balzac’s novella Sarrasine, which will be addressed in the next post.
January 17th, 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