Ed’s post got me thinking of the valences that these various sites put on different elements of the text -- visuals, words, plot, and so forth. Because some of these sites leave out various elements, or at least abstract them from other elements, they make the user more aware of the multiplicity of the text.
With Blake, words and pictures are unusually inextricable in the original; with most illustrated works, even ones with canonical illustrations like Alice in Wonderland, I wouldn’t find myself wondering whether it was the same text without the pictures, but in Blake’s work of course the pictures and words are fundamentally intertwined. So the TextArc version, which eliminates the pictures, is even more interesting for Blake than it is for other works. Ed addressed this nicely in his post –- TextArc treats the text as simply a bunch of words, and this is more evident with an author like Blake for whom the most obvious non-texual elements of a book (pictures) are so prevalent. Comparing the word jumble of TextArc with the list of image search terms on the Blake Archive raises the question: Which is more indicative of Blake’s intentions for his work? Is it more significant that "love" is one of his most frequently-used words, or that "corpse-plant" and "self-flagellant" are possible image searches? Or, to fully appreciate and analyze the work, is it crucial that we have access to both? When we are shown textual elements and visual elements in these stark lists, abstracted from the sense of the work, it increases our awareness that words and pictures are only factors in the work, and that it is the alchemy among them that constitutes the work itself.
The MOO goes at least a step further, removing most of the words and almost all of the pictures from its version of Milton and offering only a stripped-down rendering of the plot. I would argue that this is in fact a step too far, distancing this version too much from the original work for it to offer any sort of illumination. Still, though it fails (in my estimation) to offer something with a working relationship to Blake, MiltonMOO does help us answer the question "how many elements can be changed or removed before a text’s identity is compromised?" Okay, so maybe it doesn’t help answer the question per se, but it does provide another data point, one that is beyond the boundary, wherever that is. With TextArc or the Blake Archive image search, we see representations of the discrete elements that make up the text, and in TextArc we see some of those elements (words) but ignore others (plot, pictures). MiltonMOO alters or removes even more of those elements, and concisely shows that there exists a critical level of alteration where the new version loses the sense of the original.
Even an extremely thorough and faithful portrayal of the work like the Blake Archive versions can raise questions about the myriad elements of a text and their differential importance. In the case of the Blake Archive, it is an issue not of restriction but of superabundance. Graced with the ability to compare multiple versions of each plate -– to access not only visual and verbal elements, but temporal variation -– the online reader can actually see a very different work than would the reader of any physical edition of Blake. This forces her to consider the possibility that the physical version, failing to incorporate the element of change-over-time, is itself not the "real" text -– or at least that the text is inherently multiple, containing multiple elements but also existing in multiple iterations. TextArc foregrounds the text’s multipartite nature by isolating certain elements, whereas the Blake Archive, in its super-completeness, does so by drawing the reader’s attention to an element that is often invisible to all but textual scholars.
The restrictions, expansions, and extractions of these digital representations of Blake’s work are significant in multiple ways. For one thing, they cause the reader to rethink her categories -– what is considered a text, part of a text, integral to a text. She must acknowledge that the works she knows are made up of multiple elements, and consider whether any different assortment or concentration of those elements constitutes the same work. Furthermore, though, I think that this dissection of the text can serve as a rubric for digital versions of texts. At this point, it is unclear that digital media are able to produce faithful versions of older works that are improvements over the codex version -– most people find the act of reading a codex to be more enjoyable and easier for studying, unless they have particular need of searchability, and for good reason (available hardware just doesn’t allow for a digital text that’s comfortable to read). However, sites like TextArc, which isolate a few elements and allow for manipulation of only those elements, represent a functionality of digital media that is completely unique. For Blake, editions of whose works are so unique that scholars cannot perform effective comparisons without online access, the archive function (intending to be as complete as possible) is particularly necessary, but many works will derive more benefit from being dismembered. The ability to break a text down to its component elements and analyze them individually should be one of the most interesting applications of digital technology.
". . . in Blake’s work of course the pictures and words are fundamentally intertwined." This, of course, is the premise behind sites like the WBA and others, not to mention much recent Blake scholarship. Nonetheless, there is the pragmatic dimension to the arguemnt: Blake was posthumously canonized as a poet in no small part due to the technologies of print publishing, which made it easy to reproduce the words but much harder to reproduce the pictures. Thus "The Tyger" becomes the most anthologized poem in the language, yet relatively few of its readers have also seen the plate. Nonetheless, the shelves groan with reams of Blake interpretation of the work as poetry, text--in what sense, then can we argue that the words and images are truly "inextricabke"?
Just playing a little devil's advocate . . .
William J. Mitchell, in an influential book entitled _Blake's Composite Art_--one of the very first to devote significant attention to the images--advances the argument that Blake's art is "composed" jointly of words and images, but the mutual interdependence of the two is overplayed.
Posted by: Matt at May 9, 2004 04:06 PM