The Rationale of HyperText
Jerome McGann
Lofty reflections on the cultural significance of information
technology are commonplace now. Tedious as they can be, they serve
an important social function. Some distribute general knowledge to
society at large, some send it to particular groups whose
professional history makes information about information an
important and perhaps problematic issue.
Literary scholars comprise just this kind of group. If
certain features of the new information technologies have overtaken
us -- for instance, the recent and massive turn to word processing
-- more advanced developments generate suspicion. When one speaks
to colleagues about the emergence of the electronic library,
information networks, or about the need and usefulness of making
scholarly journals electronic, brows grow dark and troubled. And
yet it is clear to anyone who has looked carefully at our
postmodern condition that no real resistance to such developments
is possible, even if it were desirable.
In this essay I will focus primarily on a particular feature
of literary works -- their physical character, whether audial or
visible. I shall be pointing out why these features are important
in a literary point of view and also sketching certain practical
means for elucidating these textual features. This last matter --
the central subject of the essay -- is also the most difficult.
The methodology I shall be discussing requires the scholar to learn
to use a new set of scholarly tools.
One final introductory comment. My remarks here apply only to
textual works that are instruments of scientific knowledge. The
poet's view of text is necessarily very different. To the
imagination the materialities of text (oral, written, printed,
electronic) are incarnational not vehicular forms. But for the
scientist and scholar, the media of expression are primarily
conceptual utilities, means rather than ends; to the degree that an
expressive form hinders the conceptual goal (whether it be
theoretical or practical), to that extent one will seek to evade or
supercede it -- perhaps even, in critical times, to develop new
intellectual devices. But good poets do not really quarrel with
their tools. As William Morris famously observed, "You can't have
art without resistance in the materials".
The Book as a Machine of Knowledge.
This general context explains the need to give a clear answer
to the question "why": why take up these new editing methods,
especially when the methods make (as shall be clear later) such
demands upon us? At this point most scholars know about the
increased speed and analytic power that computerization gives, and
about the "information highway" and its scholarly possibilities.
Major changes in the forms of knowledge and information are taking
place. From a literary person's point of view, however, the
relevance of these changes can appear to be purely marginal: for
whatever happens in the future, whatever new electronic poetry or
fiction gets produced, the literature we inherit (to this date) is
and will always be bookish.
Which is true -- although that truth underscores what is
crucial in all these events from the scholar's point of view: we no
longer have to use books to analyze and study other books or texts.
That simple fact carries immense, even catastrophic, significance.
Until now the book or codex form has been one of our most powerful
tools for developing, storing, and disseminating information. In
literary studies, the book has evolved (over many centuries) a set
of scientific engines -- specific kinds of books and discursive
genres -- of great power and complexity. Critical and other
scholarly editions of our cultural inheritance are among the most
distinguished achievements of our profession.
When we use books to study books, or hard copy texts to
analyze other hard copy texts, the scale of the tools seriously
limits the possible results. In studying the physical world, for
example, it makes a great difference if the level of the analysis
is experiential (direct) or mathematical (abstract). In a similar
way, electronic tools in literary studies don't simply provide a
new point of view on the materials, they lift one's general level
of attention to a higher order. The difference between the codex
and the electronic _Oxford English Dictionary_ provides a simple but
eloquent illustration of this. The electronic OED is a meta-book,
i.e., it has consumed everything that the codex OED provides and
reorganized it at a higher level. It is a research tool with
greater powers of consciousness. As a result, the electronic OED
can be read as a book or it can be used electronically. In the
latter case it will generate readerly views of its information that
cannot be had in the codex OED without unacceptable expenditures of
time and labor.
Scholarly editions comprise the most fundamental tools in
literary studies. Their development came in response to the
complexity of literary works, especially those that had evolved
through a long historical process (as one sees in the bible,
Homer, the plays of Shakespeare). To deal with these works,
scholars invented an array of ingenious machines: facsimile
editions, critical editions, editions with elaborate notes and
contextual materials for clarifying a work's meaning. The limits
of the book determined the development of the structural forms of
these different mechanisms; those limits also necessitated the
periodic recreation of new editions as relevant materials appeared
or disappeared, or as new interests arose.
So far as editing and textual studies are concerned, codex
tools present serious difficulties. To make a new edition one has
to duplicate the entire productive process, and then add to or
modify the work as necessary. Furthermore, the historical process
of documentary descent generates an increasingly complex textual
network (the word "text" derives from a word that means "weaving").
Critical editions were developed to deal with exactly these
situations. A magnificent array of textual machinery evolved over
many centuries.
Brilliantly conceived, these works are nonetheless infamously
difficult to read and use. Their problems arise because they deploy
a book form to study another book form. This symmetry between the
tool and its subject forces the scholar to invent analytic
mechanisms that must be displayed and engaged at the primary
reading level -- e.g., apparatus structures, descriptive
bibliographies, calculi of variants, shorthand reference forms, and
so forth. The critical edition's apparatus, for example, exists
only because no single book or manageable set of books can
incorporate for analysis all of the relevant documents. In
standard critical editions, the primary materials come before the
reader in abbreviated and coded forms.
The problems grow more acute when readers want or need
something beyond the semantic content of the primary textual
materials -- when one wants to hear the performance of a song or
ballad, see a play, or look at the physical features of texts.
Facsimile editions answer to some of these requirements, but once
again the book form proves a stumbling block in many cases.
Because the facsimile edition stands in a one-to-one relation to
its original, it has minimal analytic power -- in sharp contrast to
the critical edition. Facsimile editions are most useful not as
analytic engines, but as tools for increasing access to rare works.
Editing in codex forms generates an archive of books and
related materials. This archive then develops its own meta-
structures -- indexing and other study mechanisms -- to facilitate
navigation and analysis of the archive. Because the entire system
develops through the codex form, however, duplicate, near-
duplicate, or differential archives appear in different places.
The crucial problem here is simple: the logical structures of the
"critical edition" function at the same level as the material being
analyzed. As a result, the full power of the logical structures is
checked and constrained by being compelled to operate in a bookish
format. If the coming of the book vastly increased the spread of
knowledge and information, history has slowly revealed the formal
limits of all hardcopy's informational and critical powers. The
archives are sinking in a white sea of paper.
Computerization allows us to read "hardcopy" documents in a
nonreal, or as we now say a "virtual", space-time environment.
This consequence follows whether the hardcopy is being marked up
for electronic search and analysis, or whether it is being
organized hypertextually. When a book is translated into
electronic form, the book's (heretofore distributed) semantic and
visual features can be made simultaneously present to each other.
A book thus translated need not be read within the time-and-space
frames established by the material characteristics of the book. If
the hardcopy to be translated comprises a large set of books and
documents, the power of the translational work appears even more
dramatically, since all those separate books and documents can also
be made simultaneously present to each other, as well as all the
parts of the documents.
Of course, the electronic text will be "read" in normal space-
time, even by its programmers: the mind that made (or that uses)
both codex and computer is "embodied". This means that, from the
user's point of view, computerization organizes (as it were)
sequential engagements with nonsequential forms of knowledge and
experience -- immediate encounters with abstract or complexly
mediated forms. If the limits of experience remain thus
untranscended through computerization's virtual enginery, however,
the new tools offer a much clearer and more capacious view of one
particular class or "order of things" -- in this case, the order of
those things we call texts, books, documents.
HyperEditing and Hypermedia.
The electronic environment of hyperEditing frees one to a
considerable extent from these codex-based limits. Indeed,
computerization for the first time releases the logical categories
of traditional critical editing to function at more optimal levels.
But "editing" text through wordprocessors is not, in the view being
taken here, "HyperEditing" because wordprocessing engines are
structured only for expressive purposes. On the other hand, the
deployment of "hypertext" software should not be judged a necessity
of HyperEditing. The electronic OED does not use hypertext but it
is certainly a HyperEditing project. So too is the work initiated
by Peter Robinson and the COLLATE program he has developed. To
function in a "hyper" mode, an editing project must use
computerization as a means to secure freedom from the analytic
limits of hardcopy text.[1]
Nonetheless, hypertext programs provide the clearest model for
HyperEditing. Hypertexts allow one to navigate through large
masses of documents and to connect these documents, or parts of the
documents, in complex ways. The relationships can be predefined
(as in George Landow's various "webs", like the Dickens Web) or
they can be developed and pursued "on the fly" (through the
relationships created in the SGML mark-up of a work). They are
called hypermedia programs when they have the power to include
audial and/or visual documents in the system. These documentary
networks may or may not be interactively organized (for input by
the reader/user). They can be distributed in self-contained forms
(e.g., on CD-ROM disks, like the Perseus Project) or they can be
structured for transmission through the Network. In this last
case, the basic hypertext structure is raised to a higher power
(but not to a higher level): a networked structure (say,
WorldWideWeb) of local hypertexts opens out into a network of
networks.
I rehearse these matters, which are familiar enough to
increasing numbers of scholars, to remind us that the different
purposes of different scholars determine the choice of an actual
HyperEditing procedure. The range of options also indicates that
HyperEditing should be seen as a nested series of operational
possibilities (and problems). In my own view, for example, a fully
networked hypermedia archive would be an optimal goal. Because
such an archive of archives is not yet a practical achievement,
however, one must make present design decisions in a future perfect
tense. What that means in practise is the following: (1) that the
HyperEditing design for a specific project be imagined in terms of
the largest and most ambitious goals of the project (rather than in
terms of immediate hardware or software options); and (2) that the
design be structured in the most modular and flexible way, so that
inevitable and fast-breaking changes in hardware and software will
have a minimal effect on the work as it is being built. In
practice, then, one would not lock into a front-end hypertext
system prematurely, or choose computer platforms or hardware
because of current accessibility. Similarly, one wants to store
data in the most complete forms possible (both as logically marked-
up etext and as high-resolution digitized images).
Obviously this paper cannot deal with all these matters in any
extended way. One topic will be paramount: the importance, as I
see it, of organizing a HyperEditing project in hypermedia form.
Hypereditions built of electronic text alone are easier to
construct, of course, but they can only manipulate the semantic
level of the original work. Hypermedia editions that incorporate
audial and/or visual elements are preferable since literary works
are themselves always more or less elaborate multimedia forms.
When Pound spoke of the three expressive functions of poetry --
phanopoeia, melopoeia, and logopoeia -- he defined the optimal
expressive levels that all textual works possess by their nature as
texts. Texts are language visible, auditional, and intellectual
(gesture and (type)script; voice and instrumentation; syntax and
usage).
The Necessity of Hypermedia.
The most direct way to show this need is through a set of
examples. In these illustrations I shall move from a
straightforward presentation of the elementary material demands
raised by texts, to more complex interpretive issues that those
demands create.
EXAMPLE A.
First, then, think about songs and ballads -- think in
particular about Robert Burns's ballad "Tam Glen". For a text we
might turn to what is now widely regarded as the definitive (so-
called) edition of Burns, the Kinsley/Clarendon Press edition,
where it is printed from a manuscript text sent by Burns to James
Johnson, who first published the ballad in his collection the Scots
Musical Museum in 1790. Kinsley's (like Burns's and Johnson's) is
a text for the eyes, and because the text of this essay is also
typographical, I could easily reproduce it here.[2]
Yet the ballad interested Burns exactly because it was an
auditional text. Under different circumstances I could give a
reasonable reproduction of that ballad. I could play for you a
audio version of, say, Jean Redpath singing the ballad to a score
imitating the ballad as Burns might have heard it sung. Or I could
play for you Andy Stewart's "version" of the ballad, or others as
well.
The words of "Tam Glen" were in fact written by Burns, though
the air for it is traditional. Many of the texts in Kinsley's
edition of Burns, however, are hybrid works fashioned by Burns from
Scots songs he collected and then modified, more or less
drastically.[3] He did not hesitate to make his own changes in
these works because in collecting his Scots songs he heard many
versions. The ones he himself published, and the texts that come
down to us through an edition like Kinsley's, do not represent the
kinds of variety Burns would have known.
Besides, contemporary performances probably stand far removed
from what Burns must have originally heard. In this sense, the
Kinsley/Clarendon Press printed text is perhaps truer to its
(printed) textual tradition than contemporary performances could be
to their oral traditions. Nonetheless, if our primary care is
toward preserving the original materials in a living way, could
anyone prefer a paper text of such a work to an audial text?
"But that question compares apples and oranges", you will say.
"The tape is the equivalent of a popular, a modernized, an
`uncritical' text. It is good for what it does, of course, but it
cannot be imagined as a model for replacing what one gets in a
complete critical edition like Kinsley/Clarendon."
Then let us go further: would anyone who had it to choose
prefer the Kinsley/Clarendon edition of Burns's complete works to
an equivalent edition based primarily on audial texts?
Burns's work is grounded in an oral and song tradition. Paper
editions are incompetent to render that most basic feature of his
verse. (The same might be said, incidentally, of much of the work
of Thomas Moore -- a lesser writer than Burns altogether, of
course, but a central romantic figure nonetheless, and one who has
suffered badly from the inability of scholarship to preserve the
memory of his work in living forms.)
The point is not to denigrate the Kinsley/Clarendon edition,
which is in fact a model of scholarship. It gives us not only good
reading texts, it supplies us with an apparatus, a glossary,
excellent notes, and -- a very nice feature -- a few bars of sheet
music for each text, so that we can hum up in our minds the memory
of the original tunes. And all this in three volumes.
"Yes. And to have the equivalent in an oral form would take
many tapes or disks. Besides, those musical documents wouldn't be
able to organize and interrelate the audial materials the way the
Kinsley/Clarendon edition has done with its textual materials --
the way any good critical edition will do."
But what if one could do that? What if one could have a
critical edition of Burns's work in audial forms that allowed one
to engage the songs in the same kind of scholarly environment that
we know and value in works like the Kinsley/Clarendon edition? An
environment allowing one to navigate between versions, to compare
variants, an environment able to supply the central documents with
a thick network of related critical and contextual information that
helps to elucidate the works?
What if one could do that? The point is, we can.
EXAMPLE B.
When I was asked to edit the _New Oxford Book of Romantic
Period Verse_ I wanted to print texts that stayed as close to the
original ones as possible. I also wanted to print a good deal of
the most characteristic and popular work of the period, as well as
work (for example, Blake's) that only came into prominence at a
much later time.
So I wanted color facsimiles of Blake, and color facsimiles of
a poem like William Roscoe's "The Butterfly's Ball and the
Grasshopper's Feast". And I wanted to print one of the most
popular and important satires of the day, William Hone's "The
Political House that Jack Built", with the original (and closely
integrated) Cruickshank illustrations. And I had other similar
ideas. As it turned out, various commercial and institutional
circumstances shot down most of these plans. All that remains of
them is a facsimile of the wonderful Hone/Cruickshank satire.
The _New Oxford Book_ is a reader's edition, not a critical
edition. Nonetheless, it is a reader's edition sieved through a
scholarly conscience. To give adequate reading texts of Blake,
then, it ought to have given us colour facsimiles. The edition
doesn't do that, and it is less than I had hoped as a result. Of
course the edition does many other things, and does them (I hope)
well. Its unusual organization is something not every press would
have permitted, especially in such a well-established series. But
in the matter of visual materials, the edition's limits are clear.
I give this example partly to foreground the technical,
commercial, and institutional realities that determine what
scholars can do in book forms. We have already glimpsed such
determinants in the example from Burns. The present example
reminds us how poetical texts frequently use the visual features of
their media as part of their imaginative field. Just as Burns's
poetry almost always exploits the language's auditional forms and
materials, Blake's almost always exploits the print medium for
expressive effects. A text of Blake's "Songs", for example --
whether critical or otherwise -- that does not at a minimum give us
a colour facsimile, is simply an inadequate text.
These two examples may stand as paradigms for a whole range of
textual materials that scholarly editing to this point in time has
not dealt with very well. We have had many fine editions of
ballads and songs since the late eighteenth-century, but none has
been able to accommodate, except in minimal ways, the auditional
features of the texts. Similarly, expressive typography and other
visually significant features of book design have been handled to
date in facsimile editions, which rarely -- and never adequately --
incorporate critical and scholarly apparatuses into their
structure. The failure to meet the latter needs is especially
apparent in the work produced during the periods I have been most
involved with. The renaissance of printing that took place in the
late nineteenth-century utterly transformed the way poetry was
conceived and written. In England, William Morris and D. G.
Rossetti stand at the beginning of a poetical history that to this
day shows no signs of abatement. The evolution of the modernist
movement could (and at some point should) be written as a history
of book production and text design.
These developments in England and America trace themselves
back to William Blake, whose work was put into circulation and made
historically significant largely through the efforts of the Pre-
Raphaelities, especially Rossetti. Blake's work thus forecasts the
massive opening of the textual field that took place in the
nineteenth-century, when image and word began to discover new and
significant bibliographical relations. Technological breakthroughs
like lithography and steel engraving are more than causes
accelerating these events. They are the signs of a culture-wide
effort for the technical means to raise the expressive power of the
book through visual design.
An adequate critical representation of such work has to this
point been seriously hampered by the limits of the book as a
critical tool. To date, for example, it has been impossible to
produce a true critical edition of the works of Blake. Because
Blake's texts operate simultaneously in two media, an adequate
critical edition would have to marry a complete facsimile edition
of all copies of Blake within the structure of a critical edition.
One needs in such a case not a critical edition of Blake's work,
but a critical archive. This archive, moreover, must be able to
accommodate the collation of pictures and the parts of pictures
with each other as well as with all kinds of purely textual
materials. Hypermedia structures for the first time make this kind
of archive possible; indeed, work toward the development of such a
Blake archive is now underway.
The problem of editing Blake's work in a thoroughly critical
way is not peculiar to Blake's idiosyncratic genius, however, it is
symptomatic and widespread. To show how and why this is the case
I offer three further examples, all from the nineteenth-century.
The first and third involve authors as famous as Blake, Emily
Dickinson and William Wordsworth. The second will also be brought
forward under an authorial sign, the once celebrated but now
forgotten poet Laetitia Elizabeth Landon. The examples of
Dickinson and Landon will show the structure and extent of the
editing problems already glimpsed through the example of Blake's
work. We conclude with a discussion of the historical significance
of the most recent critical editions of Wordsworth.
EXAMPLE C.
It has taken one hundred years for scholars to realize that a
typographical edition of Dickinson's writings -- whether of her
poetry or even her letters -- fundamentally misrepresents her
literary work. A wholesale editorial revaluation of Dickinson is
now well under way. A particularly telling example appeared
recently in an article by Jeanne Holland on the Dickinson poem
"Alone and in a Circumstance" (J 1167). Holland's facsimile
reprint of the poem shows a work structured in a close, even a
dialectical, relation to its physical materials.[4]
Dickinson set up a kind of gravitational field for her writing
when she fixed an uncancelled three-cent stamp (with a locomotive
design) to a sheet of paper and then wrote her poem in the space
she had thus imaginatively created. Whatever this poem "means",
the meaning has been visually designed -- more in the manner of a
painter or a graphic artist than in the manner of writers who are
thinking of their language in semantic or -- more generously --
linguistic terms.
One could easily multiply instances of this kind of text
construction in Dickinson's work. As we know, she refused what she
called "the auction" of print publication. All of her poetry --
including those few things put into print during her lifetime
without her permission -- was produced as handicraft work. This
means that her textual medium is treated in the writing process as
an end in itself -- ultimately, as part of the aesthetic field of
the writing. Again and again in Dickinson's work we observe her
using the physique of the page and her scripts as expressive
vehicles of art. In an age of print publication, manuscripts of
writers tend to stand in medias res, for they anticipate a final
translation into that "better world" conceived as the printed word.
In Dickinson's case, however, the genres that determine the
aspirations of her work are scriptural rather than bibliographical:
commonplace book writing, on one hand, and letter writing on the
other.
To edit her work adequately, then, one needs to integrate the
mechanisms of critical editing into a facsimile edition -- which is
precisely the kind of thing that codex-based editing finds
exceedingly difficult to do.
EXAMPLE D.
Here I shall turn to another kind of text -- apparitionally
very different, but finally closely related to Dickinson's work.
Before we look at it, however, some preliminary comments may be
useful.
The nineteenth-century is famously the age of the novel.
Quantities of verse continued to be written and read, of course,
and the period has more than its share of poets who were either
very important or very successful or both. Nonetheless, it is a
commonplace that the period approximately defined by the deaths of
Byron on one end, Tennyson on the other, was a great age of
fictional prose.
This decline in the cultural fortunes of poetry, if in fact
such occurred, has often been connected to the explosion of late
romantic sentimental verse, a kind of writing typically associated
with women or a feminized imagination. Dickinson, we know, became
a great poet by exploiting and modifying the sentimental tradition
that so evidently supports her work. In the version of this tale
told by the ideologues of modernism, Dickinson did not simply
exploit and modify the tradition, she exploded it altogether, and
escaped thereby into greatness.
Like most such tales, this last inscribes a highly moralized
fiction on a body of evident fact. For example, probably the most
important venue for nineteenth-century poetry were the gift books
and annuals that began to appear in the early 1820s and that
dominated the market until late in the century. Scores of these works
were produced, though now we remember them, if at all, in terms of a very
few: _The Keepsake_, _Bijou_, _Forget-Me-Not_. Literary
history pigeonholed them years ago. They became a synonym for bad
and sentimental writing, and to this day remain -- properly too --
an index to the feminization of culture.[5]
An equivalent textual condition develops in the world of
nineteenth-century fiction. The genre of the novel underwent a
great transformation as a consequence of new methods of producing
and distributing these works. This story is now well-known.
Suffice it to say here that serialization (in its many forms) and
the three-decker format had a decisive impact on the character of
fiction writing. These and other new transmissional mechanisms not
only gave authors fresh opportunities to change and revise their
works, they complicated the fictional options in other ways as
well. The illustrated novels of Dickens and Thackeray are simply
the most outstanding examples of the generic changes being brought
about through new methods of book production.
Out of this cultural context emerged one of the most
distinctive minor genres of the period: the poem on the subject of
a painting or picture. The form would be elaborated in remarkable
ways by the Pre-Raphaelites, and in particular by Rossetti, but it
began much earlier. Good examples can be found throughout the
early nineteenth-century, but it was not extensively developed
until the advent of the period of gift books and annuals. At that
point the form undergoes a distinct mutation, as one can see by
comparing (say) a poem like Wordsworth's "Peele Castle" elegy with
the picture-poems of Laetitia Elizabeth Landon. In Landon's work,
Wordsworth's psychologically dynamic form passes beyond (perhaps
also through) the Keatsian and Shelleyan process of
aestheticization so brilliantly analyzed in Hallam's essay on
Tennyson's early poetry.[6] What is dynamic and psychological in
Wordsworth becomes formal and literal in Landon and, after Landon,
in Tennyson, whose early poetry is clearly written out of the same
kind of sensibility.
The queen of the annuals, Landon was obliged to write a great
many poems for pictures, and her work nicely illustrates the two
dominant stylistic procedures encouraged by the genre. First is
the poem that tries to render, more or less faithfully, the details
of the picture's imagery. To this is added, or interwoven with it,
an interpretive element. Some of Landon's best known works are of
this kind: for example, "A Child Screening a Dove from a Hawk",
after Stewardson, and "The Enchanted Island", after Danby.
Both of these poems are from Landon's 1825 series "Poetical
Sketches for Modern Pictures" (published in the volume _The
Troubador, and Other Poems_). Because the texts were originally
printed without accompanying engravings, we might think that a
scholarly edition now could suitably forego reproducing their
related pictures. The opposite, it seems to me, is true.
Wordsworth's Peele Castle poem, for instance, does not absolutely
need its picture, is not integrated into its visual materials the
way Landon's poems are. For her part, Landon has not just written
poems after pictures that have moved her, she has written picture
poems for an audience whom she expects to be familiar with the
pictures. In each case we are dealing with a very different
"picture of the mind" ("Tintern Abbey" 61). Wordsworth takes his
picture from an imagination of the individual person -- ultimately,
from the figure Wordsworth made of himself in his verse. By
contrast, Landon's individual -- her figure of herself -- is
everywhere represented in her work as a function of social codes
and attitudes. In this respect her work recalls Burns's: though
many of his songs were printed without (sheet) music, they
nonetheless bear their music in their heart, like the original
solitary reaper, and they expect their audience to be familiar with
it. (On the other hand, Burns stands closer to Wordsworth to the
extent that his audience has forgotten or lost touch with those
songs.)
Many -- perhaps even most -- of Landon's picture-poems were
printed with engravings of the pictures. This happens because of
the generic character of the gift book, which was primarily
organized around its visual materials. Texts, both prose and
verse, were written in relation to pictures rather than (as in
illustrated editions of Scott or Dickens) the other way round. A
typical example comes in _The Keepsake_ for 1829: Landon's untitled
piece written after Landseer's portrait of Georgiana, the Duchess
of Bedford ("Lady, thy face is very beautiful"). [See Illustration
I for the text and the engraving]
As with much of Landon's best work, these lines evolve a kind
of antipoem that selfconsciously exploits its own factitiousness.
Much could be said about its mannered poeticality, the work's false
elegancies that startle and disturb the reader from the outset --
as the word "very" in the first line emphasizes. But I leave such
readings for another more appropriate time. Here it is sufficient
to see, and to say, that the poem properly exists in the closest
kind of relation with the actual picture, as Landon's socio-
economic treatment of her subject emphasizes. Furthermore, in this
case art's relation to the economics of class, so central to
Landseer's original painting, receives a full bourgeois
reinscription.
The textual situation here is subtle and complex. Proceeding
from the semantic wordplay in line ("But thou art of the
Present"), we begin to observe the relationship that this work is
fashioning, in every sense, between text and picture. For
instance, at the semantic level the poem simultaneously reflects
upon its nominal subject, the Duchess, and addresses its real
subject, the "art of the Present". For Landon's poem is not
written on the duchess or painting so much as on the relation of
the two. As such, the most important subject of all is neither
duchess nor painting, it is _The Keepsake_ itself and its
(reproduced) engraving.
Here one wants to recall the fact that Landseer's fame as an
artist was largely secured through the engravings that broadcast
his work rather than through the original oils. The "Georgiana,
the Duchess of Bedford" is "of the Present" in several senses, all
of which are important to Landon. But most important are the
contemporary artistic representations of the Duchess -- the
painting, the engraving, and now Landon's poem, the last two being
framed and represented in _The Keepsake_ for MDCCCXXIX, which is how
the title page reads. Signifiers of Beauty, each comes forward
here in a selfconscious, perhaps even a shameless, state of
artistic exhaustion. Completely integrated, the engraving, the
poem, and the book correspond precisely to what Marx would shortly
call "the soul of the commodity".
The picture-poem was a characteristic form in gift books and
annuals, which often constructed themselves around sets or groups
of pictures rather than collections of texts. Contributors were
asked to write poems to specific pictures, just as novelists of the
period were asked to write novels in three volumes, or in a
sequence of episodes of a certain number and size. Under such
circumstances, the poets all but completely abandoned the usual
romantic conventions of sincerity. If the conventions appear at
all, as they often do in Landon, they tend to come like ghosts,
conscious of their afterlife. _In Memoriam_ is the epic of all such
writing.
In this example from Landon I have allowed myself to range
beyond bibliographical issues into interpretive commentary. I have
done this because literary-history has long invisibilized Landon
and the gift book traditions she used. And yet it is an historical
fact that for fifty years and more that tradition was a dominating
influence on imaginative writing that exploited relatively brief
forms (like lyric and short story). Indeed, it could easily be
argued that Landon wrote in and through the single most important
(and institutionally based) poetic genre of the period. Even more
interesting, this genre was not a conceptual form (like epic,
sonnet, or the novel) but a material one: the gift book and
literary annual. As we know, "serious" people long ago stopped
reading writers like Landon and Felicia Hemans. But their work
will perforce become difficult to understand if we do not receive
it in forms that at least approximate its original imaginative
condition. In Landon's case, the pictorial and ornamental context
of gift book production can be torn away from her work only at the
cost of its destruction.
The example of Landon therefore culminates my answer to the
question of "why" one would want to exploit hypermedia environments
in scholarly work. I submit that no edition aspiring to represent
the kinds of textual situation we have been examining would be
happy with the removal of any of the materials, or -- what often
happens -- with the translation of concrete textual features into
those thin, abstract presences: a bibliograpical notation or a
scholar's narrativized description. I submit further that every
critical and scholarly edition will be -- has been -- forced into
such abstractions when it aspires, within the physical constraints
of a traditional book format, to a comprehensive treatment of its
materials. The more complex the materials, the more abstract
and/or cumbersome the edition becomes.
EXAMPLE E.
In this case I ask you to recall the Cornell Wordsworth, in
particular the 3 volumes devoted to _The Prelude_: Stephen Parrish's
edition of the "Two Book Prelude (1977), W. J. B. Owen's edition of
the "Fourteen Book" Prelude (1985), and Mark Reed's edition of the
"Thirteen Book" Prelude (1993). All three are models of their
kind, meticulous and thorough. Nonetheless, in their heroic
efforts to represent that original complex and unstable scene of
writing, these editions -- coming at just the historical moment
that they do -- have put a period to codex-based scholarly editing.
Here is a true story that may help to explain my meaning.
Several years ago I wrote to Mark Reed to ask who was going to edit
the "Five Book" Prelude. He wrote back and said there would be no
such edition since (a) that particular form of the work only
attained a fleeting existence, and (b) the Prelude project was
already dauntingly large and, from the publisher's point of view,
textually repetitive. Instead, his edition would provide a
narrative description and textual history of the "Five Book"
Prelude. He sent me a copy of this narrative, which eventually
appeared as part of his edition.
Mark Reed narrativized the "Five Book" Prelude for one reason
only: the book format (including the commercial factors governing
that format) did not lend itself to printing yet another Prelude
volume in the Cornell series. Too much of the material was
viewable in the other volumes. Indeed, the limits of the codex
imposed all kinds of constraints on the editors of Wordsworth's
great uncompleted work, so that one will find it difficult to use:
on one hand full of scholar's codes, on the other cumbersome when
one wishes to compare different documents and texts.
As I have already pointed out, these problems inhere in the
codex form itself, which constrain the user of the critical edition
to manipulate difficult systems of abbreviation, and to read texts
that have (typically) transformed the original documents in radical
ways. In an electronic edition, however, both of these hindrances
can be removed. Precisely because an electronic edition is not
itself a book, it is able to establish itself in a theoretical
position that supervenes the (textual and bookish) materials it
wishes to study. The operations carried out by the traditional
book-based abbreviation systems continue to be performed in the
electronic edition, of course, for they are central to the whole
idea of the scholar's critical edition. In the computerized
edition, however, the reader does not have to learn or even
encounter the codes in order to execute critical operations (e.g.,
moving back and forth across different parts of books or separate
volumes, carrying out analytic searches and comparisons). These
operations are performed on command but out of sight. In addition,
of course, the computerized structure allows the reader to
undertake searches and analyses of the material that would have
been impossible, even unimaginable, in a codex environment.
Conclusion: The Rossetti Hypermedia Archive.
HyperEditing is what scholars will be doing for a long time.
Many difficult problems will have to be dealt with, of course,
including major problems hardly touched on here: questions of
copyright, for instance, or the whole array of problems posed by
the emergence of the vast electronic information network that is
even now coming into being. In the immediate context, multimedia
HyperEditing poses its own special difficulties.
For instance, hypermedia projects (like Perseus, for instance)
are notably constrained by a structural feature of the digitized
images they employ. When these images are introduced into a
hypermedia structure, they have had to serve as simple
illustrations; for the (bitmapped) information in the digitized
image cannot be searched and analyzed as electronic texts can be.
How to incorporate digitized images into the computational
field is not simply a problem that HyperEditing must solve, it is
a problem created by the very arrival of the possibilities of
HyperEditing. In my own case, the Rossetti Hypermedia Archive was
begun exactly because the project forced an engagement with this
problem. Those of us who were involved with the Rossetti Archive
from the beginning spent virtually the entire first year working at
this problem. In the end we arrived at a double approach: first,
to design a structure of SGML markup tags for the physical features
of all the types of documents contained in the Rossetti Archive
(textual as well as pictorial); and second, to develop an image
tool that permits one to attach anchors to specific features of
digitized images. Both of these tools effectively open visual (and
potentially audial) materials to the full computational power of
the HyperEditing environment. At this writing the DTDs (Document
Type Definitions) for all textual materials, including digitized
materials, are fully operational. The image tool is currently in
its first release.
It is important to realize that the Rossetti project is an
archive rather than an edition. When a book is produced it
literally closes its covers on itself. If its work is continued,
a new edition, or other related books, have to be (similarly)
produced. A work like the Rossetti Hypermedia Archive has escaped
that bibliographical limitation. It has been built so that its
contents and its webwork of relations (both internal and external)
can be indefinitely expanded and developed.
The "hyper" organization has also permitted the Archive to
escape another bookish horizon which has profoundly affected
editorial theory and textual scholarship. A major aspect of this
scholarship has been the investigation of ancient texts -- in
particular, the scholarly reconstruction of such works from textual
remains that have been seriously broken over time. Such work
encouraged scholars to focus on a single text, the ideal goal of
their reconstructive operations.
In more modern periods, however, the textual remains are often
very numerous. The history of the texts of Wordsworth and Blake
and Dickinson is not seriously fractured. Indeed, the scholarly
problem in such cases is how to sort out the relations of the
documents and put all those relationships on display. However, the
goals of classical scholarship and the material formalities of the
book encouraged scholars to imagine and produce single-focus works
-- editions that organized themselves around what used to be called
a "definitive" text, the source and end and test of all the others.
Whatever the virtues of this kind of focus -- there are many
-- one would like to be free to choose it or not, as one needs. In
most cases scholars confront a vast, even a bewildering, array of
documents. Determining a single focus can be analytically useful,
even imperative for certain purposes. On the other hand, one can
easily imagine situations where a single determining focus hinders
critical study. Besides, in many other cases one would like the
possibility to make ad hoc or provisional choices among the full
array of textual alternatives -- to shift the point of focus at
will and need. One cannot perform such operations within the
horizon of the book. A hypermedia project like the Rossetti
Archive offers just these kinds of possibilities, for the data in
the Archive is not organized hierarchically. It resembles more
that fabulous circle whose center is everywhere and whose
circumference is nowhere.
The change from paper-based text to electronic text is one of
those elementary shifts -- like the change from manuscript to print
-- that is so revolutionary we can only glimpse at this point what
it entails. Nonetheless, certain essential things are clear even
now. The computerized edition can store vastly greater quantities
of documentary materials, and it can be built to organize, access,
and analyze those materials not only more quickly and easily, but
at depths no paper-based edition could hope to achieve. At the
moment these works cannot be made as cheaply or s easily as books.
But very soon, I am talking about a few years, these electronic
tools will not only be far cheaper, they will also be commonplace.
Already scholars are creating electronic editions in many fields
and languages, and are thereby establishing the conventions for the
practise of HyperEditing. The Rossetti Archive is one project of
this kind.
Coda. A Note on the Decentered Text.
Editors and textual theorists interested in computerized texts
appear to differ on a significant point: whether or not
HyperEditing requires (even if it be at some deep and invisible
level) a central "text" for organizing the hypertext of documents.
My judgment is that it doesn't.
First of all, consider an important historical fact: that the
Internet, which is an archive of archives, was originally designed
precisely as a decentered, nonhierarchical structure. The point
was to have an information network that could be destroyed or cut
at any point, at any number of points, and still remain intact as
a structured informational network. The modern theory of hypertext
flows directly from this way of imagining a noncentralized
structure of complex relationships. With hypertext, as with the
Net, the separate parts of the ensemble (nodes on the Net, files in
a hypertext) are independently structured units. That kind of
organization ensures that relationships and connections can be
established and developed in arbitrary and stochastic patterns.
This kind of organizational form resembles our oldest extant
hypertextual structure, the library, which is also an archive (or
in many cases an archive of archives). As with the Internet and
hypertext, a library is organized for indefinite expansion. Its
logical organization (e.g., the LC system) can be accommodated to
any kind of physical environment, and it is neutral with respect to
user demands and navigation. Moreover, the library is logically
"complete" no matter how many volumes it contains -- no matter how
many are lost or added.
The noncentralized character of such an ordering scheme is
very clear if one reflects even briefly on the experience of
library browsing. You are interested in, say, Dante Gabriel
Rossetti's writings. So you move to that LC location in the
library (any library). You stand before a set of books and other
documents, which may be more or less extensive. Nothing in that
body of materials tells you where to begin or what volume to pull
down. It is up to you to make such a decision.
You can only find your way to that point in the library if you
can negotiate its logical structure; and further browsing (or
directed research) requires an even greater self-conscious
understanding of the organization. Neophyte library users are
often intimidated by a library precisely because they can't
immediately tell how to use it. Guides to a library will explain
its logical structure as well as the physical implementation of
that structure. Even so, they are conceived in the same spirit as
the Internet and hypertext.
Subnets (or substructures) of these kinds of organization may
be more or less hierarchically organized than other substructures.
In a library, for example, historical orderings of various kinds
appear everywhere. Nevertheless, these local basins of order are
arbitrary with respect to the total archive. This result obtains
because each unit of the organization (each document and also each
set of documents), like each node on the Internet, is logically
defined as an independent item.
In a hypertext, each document (or part of a document) can
therefore be connected to every other document (or document part)
in any way one chooses to define a connection. Relationships do
not have to be organized in terms of a measure or standard (though
subgroups of organization can be arbitrarily defined as
nonarbitrary forms). From a scholarly editor's point of view, this
structure means that every text or even every portion of a text
(i.e., every logical unit in the hypertext) has an absolute value
within the structure as a whole unless its absolute character is
specifically modified.
The Rossetti Archive organizes its texts, pictures, and other
documents in this kind of noncentralized form. So when you go to
read a poetical work, no documentary state of the work is
privileged over the others. All options are presented for the
reader's choice. Among those options are arbitrary constraints that
can be placed on the choices available. These constraints, which
can be defined at any level of the organization, can be invoked or
revoked at will. The point is that the structure preserves the
independence of every document because the organization, like the
Net, is "divided into packets, [with] each packet separately
addressed". Since each of these packets has "its own authority to
originate, pass, and receive messages", each is free to "wind its
way through the [archive] on an individual basis".[7] Of course that
is a metaphoric way of putting the matter: files in a hypertext,
like documents in a library, are not active agents. It is the user
who moves through the hypertext. Nevertheless, the ordering of the
hypertext materials is, by default, arbitrary and discrete. If the
archive contains any more centralized or hierarchical structures,
these have to be (arbitrarily) introduced. Furthermore, if they
are introduced, the extent of their authority over the user has to
be (arbitrarily) defined as well.
The problem here returns us once again to the fundamental
issue of the relation of (hard copy) text to (electronic)
hypertext. The decentralized forms of hypertextual archives
clearly possess logical structure. That structure is designed to
facilitate navigation through the archived materials irrespective
of the purposes of the navigation.[8] When the hypertext is used to
manage study of and navigation through complex bodies of (hardcopy)
documentary materials -- the kinds that traditional scholarly
editors deal with -- a special type of "decentralism" appears. The
exigencies of the book form forced editorial scholars to develop
fixed points of relation -- the "definitive text", "copy text",
"ideal text", "Ur text", "standard text", and so forth -- in order
to conduct a book-bound navigation (by coded forms) through large
bodies of documentary materials. Such fixed points no longer have
to govern the ordering of the documents. As with the nodes on the
Internet, every documentary moment in the hypertext is absolute
with respect to the archive as a whole, or with respect to any
subarchive that may have been (arbitrarily) defined within the
archive. In this sense, computerized environments have established
the new "Rationale of HyperText".[9]
Endnotes
1. The simplest definition of hypertext is Theodore Nelson's,
"nonsequential writing" (_Literary Machines_ [Mindful: Sausalito, CA,
1990], 5.2). Nelson's book is a classic introduction to hypertext.
For other introductory information about hypertext and hypermedia,
and about the projects mentioned in this and the next paragraphs,
see _Hypertext/Hypermedia Handbook_, ed. Emily Berk and joseph Devlin
(Internet Publications, McGraw Hill: New York, 1991; _The Digital
Word. Text-Based Computing in the Humanities_, ed. George P. Landow
and Paul Delany (The MIT Press: Cambridge MA, 1993); _Hypertext. The
Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology_ (Johns
Hopkins UP: Baltimore, 1992); _Hypermedia and Literary Studies_, ed.
George P. Landow and Paul Delany (MIT Press: Cambridge MA, 1991);
Jay David Bolter, _Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the
History of Writing_ (Laurence Erlbaum: Hillsdale, 1991).
2. See _The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns_, ed. James Kinsley
(Clarendon Press, Oxford UP: Oxford, 1968) I. 435-6.
3. See for example the ballad "Tam Lin" (Kinsley no. 558,
II. 836-41).
4. This revaluation of Dickinson studies was sparked by the great
facsimile edition of the poet's original fascicles, edited by R. W.
Franklin, _The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson_ 2 vols. (Belknap
Press, Harvard UP: Cambridge, MA, 1981). Since then the work of
Susan Howe and her students has been only slightly less
significant, especially the soon to be published edition of
Dickinson's fragments edited by Marta Werner (U. of Michigan Press:
Ann Arbor, 199 ) and the essay by Jeanne Holland, "Scraps, Stamps,
and Cutouts," in Cultural Artifacts and the Production of
Meaning, ed. Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe and Margaret J. M. Ezell
(Princeton UP: Princeton, 1993), forthcoming. Howe's seminal essay is
indispensable: "These Flames and Generosities of the Heart: Emily
Dickinson and the Illogic of Sumptuary Values", _Sulfur_ 28 (spring,
1991), 134-55. See also Paula Bennett, "By a Mouth that Cannot
Speak: Spectral Presence in Emily Dickinson's Letters", _The Emily
Dickinson Journal_ 1 (1992), 76-99 and my own "Emily Dickinson's
Visible Language", _ibid._ 2 (1993), 40-57. Martha Nell Smith is
currently the head of the Emily Dickinson Editorial Collective, a
group of scholars committed to seeing Dickinson's work re-edited so
as to expose its "sumptuary values", i.e, the scripts and visible
designs that are such an important feature of the writing.
5. See Andrew Boyle, _An Index to the Annuals_, vol. I (vol. II
never printed), (Privately Printed by Andrew Boyle: London, 1967);
F. W. Faxon, _Literary Annuals and Gift Books: a bibliography 1823-
1903_ (originally printed 1912, reprinted Pinner, Private Libraries
Assoc: Boston, 1973); Anne Renier, _Friendship's Offering. An Essay
on the Annuals and Gift Books of the 19th Century_ (Private
Libraries Assoc.: London, 1964); Alison Adburgham, _Silver Fork
Society. Fashionable Life and Literature from 1814 to 1840_
(Constable: London, 1983).
6. Arthur Henry Hallam, "On Some of the Characteristics of Modern
Poetry, and on the Lyrical Poems of Alfred Tennyson", reprinted
from the Englishman's Magazine (August, 1931) in T. H. Vail Motter,
ed., _The Writings of Arthur Hallam_ (Modern Language Assoc. of
America: New York and London, 1943), 182-197.
7. Quoted from Bruce Sterling, "Internet", _The Magazine of Fantasy
and Science Fiction_, Science Column no. 5 (February, 1993). I
quote here from the text of the column that was made available
through a Network mailing list.
8. For discussion of the structure of hypertext (and a critique of
rather loose representations of its decentralized form) see Ross
Atkinson, "Networks, Hypertext, and Academic Information Services:
Some Longer Range Implications," _College & Research Libraries_ 54
no. 3 (May 1993), 199-215.
9. Textual scholars will understand that this essay has been
written in a conscious revisionary relation to W. W. Greg's great
essay "The Rationale Of Copy-Text", which had such a profound
influence on twentieth-century textual scholarship. For Greg's
essay see _Studies in Bibliography_ 3 (1950-51), 19-36.
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Comments
Jerome McGann: jjm2f@lizzie.engl.virginia.edu [Note: comments, as well as
comments on the comments, will be appended to the essay as received and
placed in the Comments section after the endnotes.]