When we talk about digital archives and the grand potential of digital media, a part of me cries out in protest. I love books. I love reading books. And I love buying books. There is something about the materiality of books that speaks to me. Two Christmases ago, my family purchased a Kindle for me, expecting that this device would allow me to continue my voracious reading without spending as much money or taking up as much space. Instead, I gave the Kindle to my Mother for Christmas this past year, having finally admitted that I could not abide by its digital demands.
I keep coming back to Walter Benjamin’s essay “Unpacking My Library.” It’s a beautiful work by a true bibliophile. In it, he writes, “Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories.” When I hold a printed book, I am reminded of my younger self (if I have read it before) or am tempted to dream about the potential owners and path this item has taken to reach me. I own several books that are more than 100 years old, and I treasure them, less because of their contents (there are easier ways to access Kipling’s The Jungle Book, for instance) but because of the material history involved. How many hands have held this book? How many owners have lent it to friends or relatives? I know this all sounds a bit idealistic, but this is the mindset I had when class began a few weeks ago. A digital archive was a last resort, a place to find information you could not find in your well-worn copy of whatever volume you were investigating.
Now, after having some experience with archives — The William Blake Archive, the archival function of Romantic Circles, and a short exploration of the Shelley-Godwin Archive — my opinion has changed, albeit only slightly. The William Blake archive, in particular, serves one of the more important functions I envision for any digital trove: that of aggregation. As Neil pointed out, it was rare for Blake scholars to be able to view more than one print of Marriage of Heaven and Hell or The Book of Urizen in a lifetime. With this website, they can view nine extant copies of the same page. There are improvements to be made, of course. The aesthetic of the site, for instance, seems ill-suited to honor a man who so thoroughly combined his artistic and poetic abilities. The prints, or at least how we see them on the website, are flattened. The involved process that Blake employed (and invented) created plates with depth and, ultimately, prints with varying textures and thickness. This flatness robs the prints of some of their beauty and seems to simplify them. We are left with JPEGs of scans of books, several steps removed from the “true” article, as I see it. The Shelley-Godwin Archive then is an improvement on this method. By providing the manuscripts (of Mary Shelley, for example) and then matching those with clearer digital transcriptions, allows us to view the “true” article, the piece that most bears the imprint of a human touch. And, perhaps, that is what I most fear losing as we transition into digital archives.

Jumping from our presentation on the Blake Archive a couple weeks ago, I would like to dedicate this blog post to one particular issue raised by digitizing Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell – and, generally speaking, by the process of digital remediation – that is the question of the materiality of the print book and its implications.

What do you lose by getting rid of the book? What does the print book offer that the digital one does not? Does the change of frame affect our reception of Blake’s work? According to Andrew Piper in Dreaming in Books, in the 19^th century, “it was precisely the materiality of the book that provided the contours to such imagining, indeed to the imagination itself.” But what about TMHH? Blake himself experimented with the concept of the book by combining textual and visual elements in order to unsettle the reader’s reception; eventually contributing to the redefinition of literature. Blake already complicated the traditional signification of the book. With the development of digital technology, the role of the print book is no longer evident.

 Is literature contained within the print book? According to Piper, it was during the 19^th century that this idea started to spread with “the emergence of this nexus between the book and literature”. Yet, the growing popularity of devices like Kindles and e-books seem to disprove it. Indeed, digitizing a book amounts to separating literature and print book by transposing literature onto another platform, another space removed from the physical book. According to Piper, it leads us to “reimagine a literary work as residing not in a single book but as part if an interrelated bibliographic network.” Matthew Kirschenbaum in his article entitled “Bookscapes: Modeling Books in Electronic Space” enriches this discussion by explaining that “books on the screen are not books, they are models of books.” What is literature then? For Katherine N. Hayles in “Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis”, literature is to be met as “the interplay between form and medium.” Following this statement, we may wonder: what does a book do? To answer this question, Kirshenbaum identifies for instance what he calls five affordances of the book: “books are simultaneously sequential and random access”, “books are volumetric objects”, “books are finite”, “books offer a fundamentally comparative space”, and finally “books are writeable”.

As Piper explains about in the 19^th century: “Adapting to books… was not something that just happened. It necessitated significant reorganizations of both social and individual identities.” The apparition of a new cultural media affected individual identities. The same can be said today about the development of digital culture. As a result of remediation, literature becomes a social experience, a collective process. It no long constitutes a private, intimate experience, but a public and interconnected one, shared across the WWW.

The same transition – from private to collective – goes for the print book itself. When we read a book online, it seems that the question of possession comes into account. We cannot possess anything online because we, as users, are separated from the object in question. And few people know better than students/lovers of literature that a book constitutes a valuable possession. Yet, considering that possessions sometimes work as a way to complete a person, it seems that when we are online, we are losing that sense of possession, and by extension, that sense of completeness. In this sense, reading a book online may, in a way, amount to losing or at least to dispense with a part of ourselves. Moreover, the remediation from print book to the web implies moving the text from a stable and monolithic structure to one that is ever changing. The digital space thrives on evolution; it guarantees interconnection, universal access, and no virtual limits, which in theory sounds like an ideal accomplishment. Yet, as a fluid form of communication, it also constitutes a space of constant mobility and updating, a tool that escapes control and with which the individual can never keep up and can even potentially lose him/herself.

Could a system based on universal access and inclusion turn out to be alienating? Are books bound to undergo re-edition, re-appropriation, transformation, and maybe eventually, disintegration? It sounds like a dreadful prospect – maybe something to think about…

Hayles, N K. “Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: the Importance of Media-Specific Analysis.” Music Educators Journal. 90 (2004): 67-90. Print.

Kirschenbaum, Matthew. “Bookscapes: Modeling Books in Electronic Space”. Human-Computer Interaction Lab 25th Annual Symposium. May 29, 2008.

Piper, A. “Dreaming in Books: the Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age.” Literature & History. 20.2 (2011): 97. Print.

http://www.tei-c.org/About/Archive_new/ETE/Preview/eaves.xml

 

Frankenstein embodies the act of creation, thus reflecting and complicating the creation of Man by God, the creation of Child by Mother, and the creation of Art by Artist. Mary Shelley herself can attest to the roles of Man, Child, Mother, and Artist; this fails to account for the other aspects – God and Art – neither of which can have an active voice as they don’t actually speak in the real world. However, her inclusion of all of these aspects within the act of creation – around which she centers the novel – serves to comment on the power and responsibility of creator over the created, thereby commenting on and comparing the three different creation models simultaneously.

In class we discussed the likely possibility that Shelley intended Frankenstein as a feminist novel due to the consequences of men attempting to eliminate women in the act of creation (in the novel, at least). Although we discussed the lack of (surviving) women, I would like to take this aspect of “failed” creation even further. The fact that Victor fails to unconsciously differentiate between Elizabeth and his mother, as shown in the dream, reveals that Victor’s perception of procreation is skewed. He cannot get over his own mother’s death – the lack of his own mother – so he attempts the act of creation as such. The Being attempts to remedy this in his asking of Victor for a female version of himself. Couldn’t one say that our parents are like ourselves, and, to an extent,  from where we get our sense of identity? This, alongside the Being’s search for identity, supports a reading of this as a failed act of creation due to the Being’s lack of a mother.

At the same time, Victor himself labels the relationship between him and the Being as more than that of Parent/Child. He says, “A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs” (36). This indicates that Victor attempts to take on the role of God in the act of creation. He creates something like but not altogether human in the hope that this Being will look to him the way humans look to God. While many have written or spoken of Victor as acting upon pride, in this case, I would argue instead that Victor is attempting to create a being for the sake of companionship and affection. It is clear that Victor does not act in order to better science or to understand something new, but that he is acting in response to the loss of his mother and, arguably, to the loss of the friends and family he leaves behind in order to attend school. Altogether, I believe Victor makes his creation not to have a being to worship him, but to simply create one that cannot leave him. Despite Victor’s motives (whatever they may truly be), Shelley directly connects Victor’s act of creation with God’s. The fact that Victor does this and incurs misery from it indicates that Man can and should only go so far; that certain acts of creation are not meant for man, but left to a higher power.

Indeed, Shelley attributes Victor’s failure in the act of creation to his lack of ability to take on the role that act was designed for: Victor has never been nor could ever be a Mother or God. Thus, Shelley reserves certain acts of creation for certain individuals least he/she that attempts to do so suffer for it through negative consequences. Yet, Shelley also implies the act of creation by an Artist on a work of Art. It seems clear, then, that Shelley implies that the creator may only do so much in characterizing the final creation – then the creation continues to act (either actively or passively) on its own. When one applies this take on the act of creation to the Parent/Child and God/Man models, it alleviates a bit of Victor’s guilt: the negative behaviors of a child or by humans are not automatically attributed to the parent or to God. Not all the time anyway.

So what does this mean for Victor’s act of creation? Ultimately, Victor put his soul into his work in creating the Being, only to be horrified by it. This is the key aspect of Victor’s act – God isn’t horrified by man, neither is the Mother usually horrified by her child. The artist, though, is frequently horrified by his/her work, especially as he/she finishes it. Therefore, Victor fails as God to or Mother of his creation, and survives as the artist. Shelley, then, seems to comment on the Artist’s act of creation in that the piece of art leaves the hands of the artist to be interpreted, or even changed, by the society in which it resides.  I’m not entirely sure the other implications of this, other than the responsibility of the Artist to maintain the integrity of his/her work – if Victor had kept tabs on the Being, everything could have been different. This could be said of Mary’s own work with Frankenstein, as she released it into the world in 1818 to have it changed by others – through literal edits and figurative interpretations – only to have her take responsibility for the work and the changes within it in 1831.

For me, reading Leon Wieseltier’s “Among the Disrupted” was a series of alternating encounters with the familiar, comforting arguments I’ve used myself to defend the humanities and the study of literature and less comforting glimpses into a mirror that reflects more of the unspoken reasoning lurking behind those arguments than a literature student might like to see (1). Wieseltier’s exaggerated claims about the negative consequences of technology, his refusal to grant artistic possibility or philosophical value to anything that processes data or thinks without flesh, and his tendency to collapse the boundaries between some terms while placing others, such as culture and commerce, in opposition are all mistakes, regardless of whether one agrees with his argument.

Rather than responding argumentatively to or analyzing Wieseltier’s article as a whole, however, I’d like to reflect on what appeared to me as the least generous and most grievous of his omissions. Though Wieseltier considers the progress of technology and emphasizes its power, he does not consider the potential positive effects of technology, even to refute them or claim that they are outweighed by other faults. Most of all, he is unwilling to entertain the possibility that technology could augment, rather than exclude, the human substance that he is so eager to preserve. His argument that technology will change us may be sound, but the basis for his claim that the change will be negative seems grounded in an assumption that one way of knowing, experiencing, and being human is inherently superior, not only to other known methods, but also to any possible methods that might emerge in the future. The crux of this argument rests most unfortunately on a weak association of duration with value, in which Wieseltier writes, “The persistence of humanism through the centuries, in the face of formidable intellectual and social obstacles, has been owed to the truth of its representations of our complexly beating hearts, and to the guidance that it has offered, in its variegated and conflicting versions, for a soulful and sensitive existence.”

I want to agree with Wieseltier’s ideas about the value of the humanities and the lessons that can be learned through study of the arts, but not at the expense of rejecting the imaginative possibilities of technology. When Wieseltier laments that “the nonmaterial dimensions of life must be explained in terms of the material dimensions,” I agree with him that there is a complexity of interior experience that material explanations seem unequal to — as those explanations are presently figured and accessed. I do not agree that we cannot revitalize our understanding of physical meaning through the advances of technology, nor that such advances cannot produce experience of the same beauty and spiritual sophistication that Wieseltier associates with a humanistic interpretation of life. More probably, in fact, such experiences are already existent, and I (and perhaps Wieseltier as well) lack sufficient understanding of the processes disparaged in this article to recognize the revelations and relations contemporary technology might offer toward a “soulful and sensitive existence.”

Most notably, I was struck by Wieseltier’s use of the word “tyranny” to describe technology’s role in human experience. Thinking about Wieseltier’s tyranny of technology immediately led me to recall the phrase thing theorist Bill Brown used to describe modern America’s fascination with objects as shapers, markers, and vessels of human identity: the tyranny of things. I found the comparison apt as Brown’s account of things becoming more human and human thought becoming “more thing-like” in A Sense of Things illustrates well the constructive possibilities of “being possessed by possessions” (2). We are fixated on and to an extent ruled by our things, Brown acknowledges, but it seems to me that his work also demonstrates quite clearly that we are extended through them, our identities conforming to objective limits but also reaching frontiers of meaning that, while outside the human, are certainly not insignificant to our understanding of ourselves. As with the earlier technology of things that Brown describes, so might today’s technology offer expansive possibilities beyond Wieseltier’s notion of “theories and practices that flatten and shrink and chill the human subject.” While Wieseltier advocates for limiting our understanding of humanity to the organic resources of humans, it seems foolish to impose such restrictions, particularly given that the technology he rejects is as natural a product of human actions as language, things, or books.

Though Wieseltier makes claims about the significance of the humanities that I do agree with, I find his exclusions too sharp and poorly meditated to feel allied with the author in support of traditional methods of human contemplation, however fond I may be of such methods. Wieseltier’s distaste for technology and his moral prioritization of the humanities over technology, embedded in his assertion, “The character of our society cannot be determined by engineers,” is hardly constructive. As a humanities-based scholar and thinker, I believe wholeheartedly in the power of our work to illuminate inward truths and make meaning most compellingly, but I am also excited by the potential for technology to teach us its own, assuredly different (and thus all the more valuable), lessons about ourselves. If technology offers access to meaning distinct from or in conversation with that of the humanities, I see little reason to fear that meaning as Wieseltier seems to. In his insistence that technology lacks substance and his attempt to differentiate technological knowledge as unnatural or unwholesome in comparison to that of humanism, Wieseltier repeats the singularly human error of fearing that which we do not (yet) understand.

1. Wieseltier, Leon. “Among the Disrupted.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 17 Jan. 2015. Web. 04 Feb. 2015.
2. Brown, Bill. A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. (Chicago: U of Chicago, 2003), 5.