The Archeology of Texts
From Firenze University Press Journal: Journal of Early Modern Studies (JEMS)
Stephen Orgel, Stanford University
Books have been, for several millennia, the material embodiment of knowledge and culture − not the only embodiment (there are works of art, architecture, diagrams, maps), but for us, an essential one for any kind of knowledge involving texts. Texts, of course, do not need to be books − they do not even need to be written. The oldest poems were composed to be recited, only written down centuries later. Cicero composed his orations in his head, and wrote them down − or more probably dictated them to a scribe − only after he had delivered them, as a way of preserving them. Most of Montaigne’s essays were dictated.
Throughout history authors have never written books; they have created texts, not always by writing, which were turned into books by scribes, editors, printers, publishers. These then required a distribution system, the book trade, for the books to reach purchasers and readers − the finished book in the hands of a reader is actually quite distant from the author.When texts become books they are material objects, manufactured at a particular time and, however subsequently mediated by interpretation, embedded within that time. Literary interpretation, unless it disregards history entirely, is at least partly a form of archeology. This is the book’s historicity, the way it is situated in history. The History of the Book has become a separate discipline. It had to become a separate discipline because much of the time literary history has ignored it. My essay begins with an example of how it matters.
George Herbert’s The Templewas first published in 1633 in a slim duodecimo, a tiny volume of less than 200 pages, easily slipped into a pocket or purse − a true vademecum: you could always have it with you. It retained this format throughout its many seventeenth-century editions. The standard modern scholarly edition, however, the Oxford English Texts version of F.E. Hutchinson, is a massive volume of 680 pages weighing 3.3 pounds. Nowhere in the compendious commentary is it acknowledged that the work is misrepresented by the modern format, that the original book’s portability, modesty and discreetness were elements of its meaning and a factor in its reception.
But looking at it that way, it is not clear that we understand how to read it. If we turn the book so the text becomes legible, we see that what we assumed was the second stanza has become the first stanza. The poem makes sense this way; but do we even know that it is a two-stanza poem? Turning the book again, it looks like two separate poems, each titled Easter-Wings. There is no reason why this should not be the case: in the volume there are two poems called Jordan, three called Love, five called Affliction; and elsewhere in the book when a poem runs over onto the next page, the title is not repeated. Moreover, throughout the volume the pilcrows (the paragraph markers) are used to indicate new poems, not new stanzas.
In fact, Easter-Wingsmakes sense in either order or as two separate poems. There is, however, a manuscript of The Temple, a scribal copy with corrections and changes in Herbert’s own hand, which shows the poem − or poems − in progress, on facing pages, with many revisions: in the manuscript, it is clearly two poems with the same stanza form facing each other (Charles 1977, folia 27v, 28r). Our scholarly Oxford text’s typography ignores the poem’s history, and simply closes down all the options embedded in that history.How did we get from Herbert’s two poems to our single poem? Why, in the preparation of the standard modern scholarly edition, was it assumed that the format was irrelevant? Presumably the vertical typography of the printed text was too playful for this scholarly edition; but is the playful format not part of the meaning? Clearly it was in London in 1633, but had ceased to be in Oxford by the mid-twentieth century. What kind of information, what range of meaning, then, do books preserve? The answer will change according to the time and place. In this particular case, the issue would have been what had to be censored out of the poem’s presentation: censored is a strong word, but Easter-Wings has surely been deliberately misrepresented − devotional poetry is not supposed to be fun; neither is scholarship.
Hutchinson claimed he was basing his text on the manuscript (which does not have the vertical typography), but as we have seen even this is not true: in the manuscript Easter-Wings is two poems, not one. Still, books change from era to era, and any new edition necessarily involves a process of translation. Shakespeare in the original editions has for several centuries been, for most readers, basically unreadable, and not only because of the archaic spelling, but because so much needs to be explained: we have, culturally, forgotten so much that in Shakespeare’s time was common knowledge. The translation renders these ancient texts legible; but it also transforms them into something that speaks to us, not to a world 400 years in the past. Only by working with the original texts can we have a sense of what has also been lost − or, as in the case of Easter-Wings, suppressed. Books do certainly conserve the historicity of texts, but that historicity itself keeps changing: it changes as we do, as what we attend to does, as what we want it to account for and explain does, as what we acknowledge to constitute an explanation does, and most of all, as what we want out of Herbert or Shakespeare or literature itself does. All history, and all historicity, is constructed.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.13128/jems-2279-7149-13426
Read Full Text: https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/bsfm-jems/article/view/13426
