BERNEVAL

After Forethought contained musings about a poem “Afterward” by James Schuyler. In a wry fashion, I indicated without undue bibliographic precision that the poem in question was to be found in the corpus. When my friend Fadi Abou-Rihan mentioned the blog post, I went to rekindle my acquaintance with the poem by picking up the Collected Poems and was puzzled to see that the ending (“This room needs flowers.”) that had caught my attention was gone. Truncated, I believed. But the whole feel of the poem was off. It turns out that there are two poems entitled “Afterward”; one appears in The Morning of the Poem [That’s the one I singled out for its smart ending to a poem about getting out of hospital.]; the other is in Hymn to Life [It is about snow and its effects; contrasts city and country.] The newly discovered for me (reading all out of chronological order) is the ending to the “Afterword” poem in Hymn to Life which also has a botanical desideratum in its conclusion.

Dreaming of a white
Vermont, scratched
By alders and firs.

Of course, both poems are in the Collected Poems which I did not have at hand. However, I am reminded by this little surprise of the advice to note bibliographic details meticulously when you have the object at hand. A piece of advice also iterated by Willard McCarty on the Humanist discussion list:

By far the most helpful course I took as an MA student — and the only one I remember — was dedicated to research methods. The professor (who had done his PhD before photocopiers) told us that whenever we had a book in our hands we should write down everything bibliographic about it that we could, as well as take very thorough notes, because we might never again be able to obtain the book. [And he goes on to confess.] Sloppy brevity does catch me occasionally — as it did yesterday, when I mistook my own comments in a note on a book for the words of the author.

: )

And so for day 1721
30.08.2011

Sven Birkerts. “Hypertext of Mouse and Man” in The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (1994).

Writing on the computer promotes process over product and favors the whole over the execution of the part. […] The expectation is no longer that there should be a single best way to say something; the writer accepts variability and is more inclined to view the work as a version. […] The printed page was an objective, immutable thing; the book was an artifact. With the divestment of the creator’s authority and the attenuation of the stylistic ideal, the emphasis in writing has naturally moved from product to process. The work is not intended to be absolute, nor is it received as such. Writing tends to be seen not so much as an objective realization as an expressive instance. A version. Looking from the larger historical vantage, it almost appears as if we are returning to the verbal orientation that preceded the triumph of print.

The arc of history here is inaccurate. No matter how tempting the narrative of reversion to pre-print modalities in the electronic era, it is false on two fronts: orality was never totally superseded by the the arrival of print nor is electronic communication devoid of aspects of print.

Variants occur in printing. They are not a phenomenon isolated to manuscript culture.

“Book” is indeed but one instance of “text”. Why should this be an occasion for lamentation? Take for instance this ecumenical and optimistic approach to text as described by D.F. McKenzie “Forward” to Bibliography and The Sociology of Texts (1999 reprinting the 1986 printing of the 1985 Panizzi Lectures)

The familiar historical processes by which, over the centuries, texts have changed their form and content have now accelerated to a degree which makes the definition and location of textual authority barely possible in the old style. Professional librarians, under pressure from irresistible technological and social changes, are redefining their discipline in order to describe, house, and access sounds, static and moving images with or without words, and a flow of computer-stored information. By contrast, academic bibliography has only recently begun to find fresh stimulus in those developments and to tap the new experience and interest of students for whom books represent only one form of text.

Birkerts offers in a sense a “print elitism”. He is haunted by the spectre of democratic textualism.

And so for day 1717
26.08.2011

Sven Birkerts (again).

We can expect that curricula will be further streamlined, and difficult texts in the humanities will be pruned and glossed. One need only compare a college textbook from twenty years ago to its contemporary version. A poem by Milton, a play by Shakespeare — one can hardly find the text among the explanatory notes nowadays. Fewer and fewer people will be able to contend with so-called masterworks of literature or ideas.

Hmmm. Mr. Birkerts in this essay (“Into the Electronic Millennium”) in The Gutenberg Elegies equates the presence of a critical apparatus with a reader needing guidance and by implication that the lack of a critical apparatus with a reader or readers without need for guidance. Twenty years before his writing (1994) was also the era of Coles Notes still available 20 years after Birkerts’s book appeared. Evidently there are other factors at work in the proliferation of texts with notes. For one as costs of producing annotated editions goes down we get more of them.

Fear not the call for unadorned text has been heard.

Enter Exhibit A

A lightly annotated version of Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour” (you can turn the annotations off)
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/core-poems/detail/47694

And so for day 1715
24.08.2011