Posts filed under 'novel'
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
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
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
