I was only able to attend a morning panel today but it was excellent: Futures of Scholarly Editing II, chaired by T.H. Howard-Hill. The papers synthesized and clarified a number of issues I’ve been pondering here and there.
Andrew Stauffer layed out the issues that must be tangled with in the future of digital editing. He began by identifying two aspects of the term edition that apply to print. An edition is (1) the textual product of the act of editing as well as (2) a print run of a limited number of copies of a book. In digital editions aspect (2) is lost, which leads to potentially dire consequences.
A limited print run of a book constitutes a relatively stable, known set of errors and variations. Since a digital edition can be silently emended on the fly, changes and corrections are no longer recorded. Errors and variations, which are important markers of the reception history of a work, disappear in the digital realm and prevent textual scholars from knowing the genealogy of a text. This means that certain questions we’re used to will no longer be answerable in the future.
I don’t think this assessment is completely accurate. After all, wikis automatically save version histories of all changes, so it shouldn’t be difficult to apply that principle rigorously in a digital edition. Besides, Karsten Kynde and Kim Ravn of the Soren Kierkegaard Research Center demonstrated a functionality in their digital archive of Kierkegaard’s papers that allows readers to see the version history of particular elements. The interface did not seem very intuitive (granted, I did not have a chance to play with it), but at least it allows access to the history of mistakes or to previous versions of the archive. That is helpful, of course, if you quote from it in a certain way and then need to go back to it later after it’s been revised. He made the very nice point that we owe future scholars our mistakes.
Andrew ended with a discussion of digital preservation that led naturally to the next talk, by Barbara Bordalejo. Andrew said that it is not possible to preserve all digital editions, archives, and other works. Since they’d have to be backed up on tape or redundant hard drives, access becomes a serious issue. This becomes worse as technologies become outdated and won’t be able to red the auto-archived material, meaning that we’d have to be selective about what gets archived. Much would be lost.
Barbara’s talk focused largely on preservation, too. She made the very good point that digital formats will eventually become outdated and unreadable by newer machines, so the old machines themselves need to be preserved. This will lead to a situation in which a rare digital book will become even less accessible than the rarest print book.
Peter Robinson gave a fascinating demonstration of an archive he’s developing with people at U Birmingham, Münster, St. Catherine’s Monastery in Egypt, and the British Museum. They’re digitizing all the leaves of the Codex Sinaiticus MS. I don’t have time to describe it in full, but they’ve made a beautiful AJAX-y interface that accounts for correction histories and does a number of wonderful things. Will write more on this later.
March 17th, 2007
Today was the first day of panels and plenaries at the conference of the Society for Textual Scholarship, held at NYU. I attended a plenary and a panel in the morning and demonstrated the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive in the afternoon. I’ll only summarize what happened here but will elaborate in more detail later on.
The plenary was titled, “Book History, Textual Criticism, and Bibliography: Relating and Distinguishing the Sub-Disciplines.” Since I entered late, I can’t really summarize it, but it seemed to be about defining the discplinarity of book history. Ezra Greenspan talked about how book histories tend to have a national focus — the history of the book in China, India, the nations of Latin America, etc. — and that there needs to be a transnational focus on geographic trends. He also mentioned that his journal was the first, during the early 90s, to use GIS to map trends in book readership and distribution.
David Greetham asked an astute question about why the term “book” in “book history” seemed to have been ignored. Given the contextualization of studying books as objects in their national, economic, political, and cultural contexts, does it matter whether the book has a substantive essence of its own? What could be the influence of the book itself on its own history?
There was also a palpable disdain of digital text and electronic editing. One audience member mentioned his project that seeks to digitize the papers, letters, notes, and other artifacts of a Canadian writer and make them accessable through a website. He raised the intensely interesting question of how his project relates to the sub-disciplines of book history. There was virtually no response from the panelists, though Katherine Harris, a digital archivist in the audience, made an attempt to further the conversation.
After the plenary I thoroughly enjoyed the panel “The Modernist Material Text: Gender, Politics, Versions,” composed of four grad students from U Michigan. Russell McDonald talked about D.H. Lawrence and cross-gender collaboration. Jenny Sorenson analyzed Virginia Woolf’s play on genre and material text in Flush (a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel). Olivia Bustion discussed gender and priority in versions of three early poems by Marianne Moore. And Jamie Olson focused on cosmopolitanism in Seamus Heaney. All the papers were very good, and I especially liked the Woolf one for its smart discussion of genre.
Questions of genre were prominent in the Q&A during my own panel in the afternoon. It was a fascinating mix. Karsten Kynde and Kim Ravn of the Soren Kierkegaard Research Center demonstrated their archive of Kierkegaard’s papers (http://sks.dk). Jennifer Stertzer, an archivist at UVA, addressed the issues faced during the digitization of George Washington’s papers. Those two presentations contrasted nicely with this site, which archives a motif of the Recherche as opposed to the disparate materials of writer.
The moderator, Peter Robinson, at one point challenged the notion of whether this is really an archive. I thought it was a great question because this site aims to do exactly that (among other things): apply the archival model in such a way that its nature becomes exposed and directly questioned. Can this site be considered an archive if what it collects and makes available are the instances of a narrative motif and images associated with it? I think the answer is yes, as did the audience, to my delight.
After the panel finished I had a really good conversation with a junior faculty memember at my alma mater, Providence College. William Hogan made some interesting points on how this site isn’t quite an archive, not quite an edition, but it’s somewhere in between and more Internet native than the other resources available.
I’ll have more to say on this soon. Time to get some sleep.
March 16th, 2007
Two Fridays ago I went out to celebrate my friend Terry’s dissertation defense. It was a night of great conversation, and among the new acquaintances I made was Marsha Fulton, an art historian currently teaching gothic and romanesque architecture (among other things) at SUNY New Paltz.
Our discussion caused me completely to reread a couple of major sections of the Recherche.
Apocalypse
Marsha explained that the flourishing of romanesque architecture in France during the 10th and 11th Centuries was characterized by two different climactic events. During the 10th Century there was widespread fear that the world would end, so romanesque churches were built in expectation of the apocalypse. When that didn’t happen, in order to thank God more and more churches were built during the 11th Century on a larger scale and with greater ornamentation. They began in the romanesque style and later evolved into the gothic.
The fact that churches were sites where people mapped apocalyptic associations reminded me of the same during the WWI section of the Recherche. At least that’s what I thought it reminded me of. But when I did a few searches in the archive to find some passages to write about, I discovered that Marcel the narrator and his contemporaries are somewhat indifferent to the destruction of cathedrals. They are more concerned with the destruction of what cathedrals represent, which differs for various constituencies.
A search on the War association brought up the best apocalyptic results.
Mme Verdurin had visited Venice during the war, butâ€â€like those people who cannot bear sad talk or display of personal feelingsâ€â€when she said that “it” was “marvellous” she was referring not to Venice, or St Mark’s, or the palaces, all that I had so loved and she thought so unimportant, but to the effect of the searchlights in the sky, of which searchlights she could give you a detailed account supported by statistics. So from age to age is reborn a certain realism which reacts against what the previous age has admired.) (6 1 1 51)
[Painting: Searchlights, WWI, Venice; by Giulio Aristide Sartorio; original here.]
This passage I remembered well for its expression of a modern(ist) attitude toward cathedrals and monuments of the past. The experience of Mme Verdurin, the avante-garde salon-keeper, is anaesthetic, much in contrast to the intoxication of Marcel’s reveries about St. Mark’s and the church of Combray. However, even the passages I thought would contain a more cataclysmic sense of what was lost with the destruction of great cathedrals are actually somewhat muted.
For example, during a conversation between Marcel and Charlus, the Baron compares the destruction of the church at Combray — which literally embodies his family history — with the destruction of Rheims and Amiens. He says that if the statue of St. Firmin at Amiens has been broken, then “the loftiest affirmation of faith and energy ever made has disappeared from this world.” Marcel quicky chastizes him for confusing real faith with a symbol of faith.
“And I adore certain symbols no less than you do. But it would be absurd to sacrifice to the symbol the reality that it symbolises. Cathedrals are to be adored until the day when, to preserve them, it would be necessary to deny the truths which they teach. The raised arm of St Firmin said, with an almost military gesture of command: ‘Let us be broken, if honour requires.’ Do not sacrifice men to stones whose beauty comes precisely from their having for a moment given fixed form to human truths.” (6 1 1 154)
[Photo: statue of St. Firmin, left porch, Cathédrale Notre-Dame d'Amiens; by Deborah Fulton, November 2003; original here.]
I’m struck here by the unease with which Marcel greets Charlus’ admiration of the art instead of the men who fought and died to preserve the French nation. The importance of the cathedral here is not its status as priceless art-object but the real people it “stands for”. In the archive, the passage is paired with the famous, iconic image of the woman with a sword, using the destruction of Rheims to rally the public. The emotional rendering of the burning cathedral and its protector is like the “loftiest affirmation of faith and energy” that Charlus admires in the statue of St. Firmin. Obviously the medieval statue and the early 20th Century poster are both propaganda. But what’s interesting is the repurposing of the iconic image for the new context.
Juxtaposing the government poster of Rheims with a documentary photograph of its porch during the same period can illustrate the cognitive divide between Marcel and aristocratic and upper-class characters like Mme Verdurin and Charlus. Both images here are from the Library of Congress online archive.
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No image is free of political influence or effect, but the more realistic photograph on the right is a matter-of-fact presentation of the same familiar ediface that represents France. Marcel’s patriotism seems a little less grounded in idealism and more in realism. When reflecting on the character of different social groups during the War, he excoriates the “vile shirkers like the arrogant young man in a dinner-jacket” he saw at Jupien’s brothel, who are “redeemed by the innumerable throng of all the Frenchmen of Saint-André-des-Champs, by all the sublime soldiers and by those whom I rank as their equals, the Larivières,” Françoise’s rich but low-class cousins (6 1 1 226). There is a profound — almost apocalyptic — sense of the failure of the governing classes, of “the sky falling”.
An even more “truly” apocalyptic effect is conveyed by a photograph of Rheims that, rather than focusing on the iconic cathedral, presents a panorama of the town that includes the ruined towers. The photo is also from the Library of Congress.
Pilgrimage
Marsha also explained to me that the flourishing of romanesque architecture in the 11th century coincided with a boom in pilgrimages. A vibrant tourist industry brought travelers on long walking trips where the effect of visiting churches in towns along the way reached a crescendo at the large cathedral that was the end point. This was done (as far as I can remember) largely to thank God for not destroying the world at the turn of the century, but also for a host of other reasons. She made me want to reread the Canterbury Tales.
As she talked about this, I was immediately reminded of the scenes at Balbec in which Marcel and Albertine cruise the Normandy roads in his new car visiting (and painting) old romanesque churches (roughly 4 2 3 535-70). This series of events is a kind of pilgrimage that stops at churches but is really about exploring the mysteries of love, absence, Albertine, beauty, technology, modernity, and other motifs.
As often as not I went no further than the great plain which overlooks Gourville, and as it resembles slightly the plain that begins above Combray, in the direction of Méséglise, even at a considerable distance from Albertine I had the joy of thinking that, even if my eyes could not reach her, the powerful, soft sea breeze that was flowing past me, carrying further than they, must sweep down, with nothing to arrest it, as far as Quetteholme, until it stirred the branches of the trees that bury Saint-Jean-de-la-Haise in their foliage, caressing my beloved’s face, and thus create a double link between us in this retreat indefinitely enlarged but free of dangers, as in those games in which two children find themselves momentarily out of sight and earshot of one another, and yet while far apart remain together. I returned by those roads from which there is a view of the sea, and where in the past, before it appeared among the branches, I used to shut my eyes to reflect that what I was about to see was indeed the plaintive ancestress of the earth, pursuing, as in the days when no living creature yet existed, her insane and immemorial agitation. (4 2 3 558-9)
The new experience of automobile travel is a search for origin and purity, though marked by the apparent aimlessness and whimsy of modernity. Interestingly, the only direct references pilgrimage (in the archive) come from aristocratic characters, Orianne and Charlus. They speak impatiently of making pilgrimages to Paray-le-Monial and other tourist destinations. The impression they give is that visiting old churches is done for bland relaxation and art appreciation.
Contrasted with the profane attitude of the modern elite, however, is that of intellectual/creative characters like Marcel, Swann, and Elstir. It is Swann who in the appropriately titled Swann’s Way sets Marcel’s imagination on the path toward the Persian-influenced church at Balbec and St. Mark’s in Venice. Those two churches, mixed with his early reveries in the église Saint-Hilaire and his contemplation-in-motion of the twin steeples of Martinville, awaken his vocation as a writer and set the reference points that shape his life and the changing modality of his meditations (and re-meditations). Observations of churches at different points of the narrative form a network of events that bear a synecdochic relationship to the Recherche as a whole. The pilgrimage ends on the final page when he sees the eighty-three-year-old Duc de Guermantes as one of those men who “never cease to grow until sometimes they become taller than church steeples, making it in the end both difficult and perilous for them to walk and raising them to an eminence from which suddenly they fall” (6 1 1 532).
Thus the plot-device of the pilgrimage, alternately implicit and explicit, has a wide-ranging valence within the narrative. It bears upon it the church motif, which acts as a lightning rod to highlight disparate characters’ reponses to the Great War, to modernity, to homosexuality and decadence, to the cognitive faculties as they negotiate subject and object, and much more. It is also one of the main reflexive metaphors of the Recherche. It embodies the journey with its endpoints in the past and future, and changes as the nature of the journey changes at its different stages.
And it ends, as the West ends, with an apocalypse. The images presented here attest to the great “cataclysm from above”: the search-lights over WWI Venice, St. Firmin’s upraised arm, the government-produced fire and brimstone above Rheims, the artillery-produced fire and brimstone around and below it. The end of Marcel’s journey, however, is not a revelation of ultimate or divine purpose — far from it — but of the processes of history and human purpose.
March 8th, 2007
