Genesis de Texte.

As its name implies, textual genetics is oriented towards the genesis of literary works. It does not aim to reconstitute the optimal text or a work but, rather, to reconstitute the writing process which resulted in the work. "In effect," writes Laurent Jenny, "genetic criticism can keep as its privileged object either an open form that is witness to a process of genesis,. . .or the articulation of the relations between this open form and the closed form that is the text.. In the first case, genetic criticism is not interested in the text, but in 'writing,' which can be considered on its own, without any teleological relation to the final text" (YFS, 14). In "Document Constellations" I take up, very briefly, the articulation of the relations between avant- and apres-texts and "finished" texts. Here, however, my focus will be on "writing" as such; that is to say, on the active, fluid process that is the textual production of the writer in the very grips of writing. On the surfaces of her manuscripts--both her fair and rough copies--Dickinson expressed herself in a series of legible signs and illegible marks--in letters, dashes, ink blots and blurs, pen tests, strike-outs, hand shifts, etc. Some of these marks, especially the alphabetic symbols, we know how to decipher and interpret; others, such as Dickinson's angled dashes, we recognize but interpret uncertainly; still others, apparently aimless signals or subsemiotic marks, we see but cannot interpret at all, though we sense that they, too, are signifiers in/of the compositional process. This complex, ambiguous, and charged interplay of "intentional" and "accidental" traces make us strongly aware of the writer--of her desires, choices, decisions, or, at least of the material traces of those desires, choices, and decisions. Genetic criticism enables us to envision and revision the event of writing itself, to witness the "emergence, not of the [wo]man not the author, but of an inextricably vital and mental instance, the '[wo]man-as-pen.'"

The following library of codes represents my initial attempt to create an archive of Dickinson's scribal practices. Based almost entirely on a review of Dickinson's late manuscripts, this library is necessarily incomplete, and I welcome all suggestions for additional codes.

In addition to considering individual microgenetic details, we might also study the narrative of Dickinson's hands. This narrative is indeed a fascinating one--as fascinating to me as the narrative of her life, more fascinating, perhaps, since while the narratives of her life are necessarily reconstructions of that life, the narrative of her hands was composed by Dickinson herself, giving us an "autography" rather than an "autobiography." "Kinetic melody" is the phrase Luria used to describe our normal habit of writing, the metamorphosis of the mechanical movement of the hand into the infinite variety which constitutes letters, words, sentences. Dickinson's aesthetic liberation is, like a painter's, literally traced on the paper where she transforms the restricting or dead letters of type into the living letter of script.

In her work, two broad scriptive styles--two hands--persist throughout her writing life and translate not only two different composition moments, but also to different attitudes towards writing. The small, often scribbled hand Dickinson used when first jotting down rough drafts of poems, messages, and fragments remained constant from the 1850s through 1886. It resembles the hand of the automatic writer who writes in a state of rapt attention, never taking the pen or pencil off of the paper, never exiting the drive of writing. The hand--or, rather, the trace of the hand, is characterized by a breakdown in letter forms, a lack of control, visual aphasia--all of which have their parallels in the poems' or other writings' grammatical/syntactical breakdown and parataxis.

Unlike the rough-copy hand, Dickinson's fair-copy hand changed significantly over the course of her writing life. In the manuscripts of the 1850s, Dickinson's handwriting is relatively small and flowing, upper- and lower-case letters are readily distinguishable, and most letters within words are linked. The legibility of the early script suggests that Dickinson was modeling her fair-copy hand after the exemplary hands featured in penmanship manuals or, perhaps, imitating the exactness of print. In the 1860s, a period of profound poetic experimentation, Dickinson's calligraphy ceased to be simply recursive: the fixed alphabetic forms characteristic of the 1850s were abandoned, the alignment of words on the page grew irregular, and the extreme slant of the pen strokes gives the impression of a writer working under intense pressure. Finally, in the 1870s, the handwriting of the fair-copy drafts evolved again. Dickinson's writing reached its maximum size in the mid-1870s, when the unlinking of letters, begun in the 1860s, was also nearly complete, giving the manuscripts a new feeling of spaciousness. At this point, Dickinson's wavy dashes, the streaming ascenders and descenders of her d's and y's and especially the dramatic crossing of her T's/t's, as well as the open forms of her U's and W's, seem to be part of an enigmatically open code. The letters of the alphabet lose their shape as calligraphy transcends the need to render them as fixed forms and becomes expressive. "On the spectrum from pure picture to pure letter this writing is at both ends at once": the fair-copy drafts continually re-open the field of verbal/visual exchange in order to explore the links between inscription, accident, and revisioning.

Look closely at the microgenetic details and macrogenetic patterns in these manuscripts and/or clusters of manuscripts:

(Note: The manuscripts are featured in Radical Scatters: An Electronic Archive of Dickinson's Late Fragments and Related Texts, ed. Marta L. Werner. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1999. Please consult the archive for additional textual examples. See Index of Fragments and Index of Document Constellations.)

Writing, Writing, & Re-writing:

"Emily Dickinson Writing a Poem." The section of Martha Nell Smith's Dickinson Electronic Archives entitled "Emily Dickinson Writing a Poem" is the perfect point of departure for the textual geneticist. In addition to opening up for our consideration a series of microgenetic questions about the marks Dickinson (and others) made on the manuscript pages of "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers," the site "Emily Dickinson Writing a Poem" also opens up a series of important macrogenetic questions. By the nineteenth century manuscripts had, by and large, lost their communicating and circulating functions to become "the personal trace of an individual creation." In general, the manuscript appears as a space of creation rather than communication. In the case of "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers," however, Dickinson insists on both functions of the manuscript--that is, it functions both as a "private" space of creation and as a space of communication--in this case, an intimate communication/ collaboration with Susan Dickinson. Here, for example, in Dickinson's compulsive reworkings and repetitions in response to SHGD's criticism, authorial intention is revealed as a fluctuating, time-bound transaction between a series of writing events and a series of external suggestions. And in her letter beginning "I am not suited dear Emily with the second verse. . .Strange things always go alone," SHGD reminds us of the mystery of the writing event that has been brought to an end, terminated, closed out--a writing act that cannot be repeated. The question concerning the "identity" of the poem we know as "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers" remains open. The analysis of the manuscripts of even a single poem brings to light a series of possible poems/fragments each of which requires that we revise our conception of what constitutes a "poem." Finally, in Smith's site we see versions of the "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers" bound and unbound, finished and under revision (again); we may follow it as it seeks out different recipients, and we may follow it into print. Thus the contests between autonomy and intertextuality, between binding and unbinding, between choosing and not choosing central to Dickinson's poetics of writing become visible to us even as they underscore the instability of textual production.

The Textual Universe: Document Constellations

Constellation. 1. +Astrol. a. The configuration or position of 'stars' (i.e. planets) to one another, as supposed to have 'influence' on terrestrial things. . . .3. A number of fixed stars grouped together within the outline of an imaginary figure traced on the face of the sky. . . .5. Psychol. A group of ideas or personality factors, usually formed by association.

A major advantage of the representation of Dickinson's writings in a hypermedia archive is the ability for the viewer to compare several different documents--facsimiles, diplomatic transcriptions, e.text transcriptions, printed sources--at the same time by opening multiple, "floating" windows.

The presentation of documents--poems, letters, drafts, fragments--both as related to each other (i.e., as a "constellation") and as numerically distinct from the other documents in the constellation encourages viewers to respond to the texts quite differently than a hierarchical display of the documents. For example, while conventional displays of document constellations imply that we will find fragments interesting only because we have found the "finished" poems or letters in which they reappear of value, the dehierarchized display illuminates the both poems and letters and fragments as freestanding texts. In addition to encouraging speculation about inter- and transtextual connections among documents, the display of document constellations encourages viewers to formulate alternative narratives of textual production.

Taking as your point of departure one of the following documents, research the multiple relations between the chosen document and other documents in Dickinson's oeuvre. Build a supplementary file, with links to Web 3, in which you explore--visually--and analyze--graphically and verbally--the play of autonomy and intertextuality in a rich document constellation. Note that the governing law of the document constellation--the textual universe--is the law of expansion: no constellation is ever closed. Consider the ways in which texts act not as discrete nodes in a network, but as multiple nodes in multiple discourses, the trajectories of which may be oblique with respect to one another.

(Note: The manuscripts are featured in Radical Scatters: An Electronic Archive of Dickinson's Late Fragments and Related Texts, ed. Marta L. Werner. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1999. Please consult the archive for additional textual examples. See Index of Document Constellations.)

For each document and/or document constellation:

1. Define the principle of organization governing the constellation. (The constellations below focus on relations of autonomy and intertextuality in a given set of texts. Yet all of the documents in the constellations below "belong" to a number of other constellations focused by other concerns--original file location, paper type, handwriting style, composition date, addressee, etc.)

2. Make a preliminary list of documents with links to the document chosen as the point of departure and locate facsimiles of these documents. (*I am assuming, for the purposes of this workshop, that a hyper media archive of Dickinson's complete writings already exists, but I am drawing examples from the fragment archive Radical Scatters.) Create a supplementary file for the constellation with links to the hypermedia archive of Dickinson's complete writings. Experiment with different ways of representing document constellations and different ways of representing both links and broken connections within document constellations. Which documents within a given constellation seem most remote or estranged from the others? Which documents--or which whole constellations--resist all narratives?

3. Compose rich bibliographical descriptions for all of the documents in the constellation. Consider in your notes the relationship between Dickinson's messages and her medium. (*I am assuming that some basic bibliographical information on the documents in the hyper media archive will be available in the archive's files--in one of its paratexts. It should, however, be possible to add to these basic bibliographical descriptions. Indeed, hyper media archives offering students and scholars high-quality images of documents may not only teach students at all levels the principles of bibliography but inspire them to engage in a poetics of bibliography.)

4. Add where appropriate (con)textual notes to the bibliographical descriptions.

5. Report (when known) the transmission histories of the documents. Although the transmission histories of the documents are to a large degree speculative, what questions do the narratives of transmission raise about the logic of Dickinson's original filing system (i.e., bound papers, unbound papers, etc.) and about the distribution of her manuscripts both during her life and after her death?

6. Record the publication histories for the documents in the constellation. Link the documents with their printed sources. Report all differences in punctuation, wording, line breaks, and the representation of variants between the version of the text on Dickinson's original manuscript and each of its printed sources. Do they reflect poetic conventions of the 19th century? Of the 20th century? What differences do you note between 19th- and 20th-century representations of Dickinson's writings? (*I am assuming that the hyper media archive will be equipped with a relatively sophisticated system for collating texts--e.texts, printed texts, etc. For a fascinating introduction to the optics of collation, see Randall McLeod, "The McCleod Collator.")

7. Compose a series of discussion and/or research questions for the constellation(s). Add the questions and answers to the (con)textual notes accompanying the document.

8. Vary the point of departure and see if the variation produces changes in the constellation.