Adam Smyth’s “‘Shreds of holinesse’: George Herbert, Little Gidding, and
Cutting Up Texts in Early Modern England” on cutting up early modern English
texts got me thinking about authorship, reading, and writing. How does the idea
of cutting threaten the authority of the text? Is this tied to the
commodification and dissemination of literature/books as printing improves and
becomes more streamlined into the 1700s? To put it another way, does the
individualization of the text undermine capitalist production of the book as
homogenous product, approved by author and editor? Would Barthes’s idea of
readerly and writerly texts help us explain this phenomenon? When readers would
cut out “commonplaces and aphorisms” to put into their own texts or homes, are
they simply showing us that reading and writing are in fact the same action
(Smyth 461)? The practice of reading and (re)writing seems to deeply overlap in
these acts.
The question of voice and speaker also is important in
Smyth’s analysis of cutting. He discusses how Herbert’s verse asks the reader
“to observe how a biblical passage may simultaneously remain a biblical
passage, but also be at the center of an individual’s voice” (471). So these
reworkings, whether physical cutting and pasting or quoting and refashioning in
verse – are they a form of fan fiction? In a similar vein, how does Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure change
when viewed as fan fiction that rewrites Samuel Richardson’s Pamela? The parallels between Pamela and
Fanny, from age to clothes to innocent country virtue, are just the tip of the
iceberg. There’s also structural reworkings at play in Cleland’s text. Fanny
lays out the project of recalling the “scandalous stages” of her life as a
letter to a friend, then goes on to take a stab at how awful “long unnecessary
prefaces” are and jumps right to “Truth! stark naked truth” as the center of
her letter (1). This text has Fanny telling her story directly, no editor involved,
raising curious questions about voice and power in who gets to tell their story
directly.
If reworking the text is an early act of fan fiction, then
what does this do to the reader’s perception of author/God and sanctity? Jesus,
remember, wrote nothing in the Bible; it’s all retold years after the fact to
those gospel writing folks. So this flips what I just said about telling story
directly on its head. As Derrida talks about in Plato’s
Pharmacy, “God the king does not know how to write, but that ignorance
or incapacity only testifies to his sovereign independence. He has no need to
write. He speaks, he says, he dictates, and his word suffices.” Does the
practice by the Ferrars in Little Gidding threaten or undermine the supposed
authority of the text they are physically reworking? Or is the cutting and
pasting, reworking of the text, just showing the authority of these religious
works in a whole new way?
(There’s also the fact that fan fiction encodes a hierarchy in
the terms. It’s derivative and probably not as good. But perhaps there’s more
work out there on fan fiction that performs clever rhetorical moves you all
know about?)
Cutting also parallels censorship. Cleland cut out all the
dirty bits of Memoirs of a Woman of
Pleasure to create The Memoirs of
Fanny Hill in 1750. It didn’t sell very well, but the title was used on
unexpurgated copies of the novel so it could continue to be sold. The dual
title is one reason people still often refer to the novel as Fanny Hill.
So why is cutting the text seemingly more threatening than
writing in the margins? When annotating, critics/readers graph themselves onto
the text instead of cutting it apart, taking the text out of context. The
practice of miscellany and commonplace book fade away as printing becomes more
regularized. Scrapbooks remain important artifacts well into the twentieth
century, however; clearly cutting out texts does not disappear with the
Ferrars. I want to tie this into our conversation about annotating last week…
thoughts?
Bethany, I was struck by your questions: "Does the practice by the Ferrars in Little Gidding threaten or undermine the supposed authority of the text they are physically reworking? Or is the cutting and pasting, reworking of the text, just showing the authority of these religious works in a whole new way?" I wondered the same. But I think that the service Little Gidding provided was a unique one, particularly, as Smyth mentions, their ability to re-structure the same biblical story as told from multiple viewpoints in the four New Testament gospels. Juxtaposing the different verses against each other in a concordance provides an opportunity for the viewer to appreciate and contemplate the similarities as well as the differences in the stories. I imagine that such concordances were created in hand-copied tedium by monks employed in biblical writings but, for the layperson (and for Charles I, to whom Little Gidding's most ambitious work was apparently gifted), it must have seemed miraculous to be able to manipulate their own bibles (or buy one of Gidding's productions)--not to 'manipulate' them in a negative sense, but to manipulate them in the positive, to easily see the scriptures played out in different visual representations for new or renewed spiritual contemplation. Particularly for those persons whose religions demanded individual biblical interpretation, the ability to cut-and-paste their scriptures might have seemed a form of prayer rather than a threat to their God.
ReplyDeleteI really like that you are tying this back into our conversation about annotating and, similarly, would like to extrapolate this idea to ask if we as writers might be inadvertently performing acts of 'cutting' when we lift quotes out of articles to reappropriate them for our own purposes? Once an author publishes a book, is s/he giving us as scholars trying to discuss that work and add to the field, the right to reinterpret ideas as they perhaps were not originally intended to be interpreted? Annotating, then, is the first act of this reinterpretation as we attempt to make sense of a text by leaving ourselves notes that will help us remember why that quote or paragraph seemed important. Just because it is more rare that we take scissors to our books and paste our favorite quotes into a journal, are we not similarly guilty of de-sanctifying a text when we use the 'copy-paste' function? I think this is a really fascinating question. Thanks for bringing this up, Bethany!
ReplyDeleteWhew. Is there ever any end? What you're saying about cutting makes me think about context more -- what context _really_matters? What context can we ignore?
DeleteI think perhaps there is a difference between fan fiction and adaptations? (Beyond the fact that, as you mention, fan fiction is not often considered "good" or "serious" writing.) Fan fiction often continues a story or fills in empty spaces in a story, while adaptations retell the story, keeping something and changing others. So sometimes fan fiction can be an adaptation--but I think you are primarily interested in adaptations?
ReplyDeleteTo answer your final question, though, I think cutting is more "threatening" because it's harder for someone else to see what information you are starting with, or what you are responding to. It's less of a conversation with the text than annotating is and more of a rewriting for your own purposes.
I like Jessica's point about mining quotes from texts to use in essays, though. I sometimes isolate quotes I want and put them in a Word document, but I usually go back and read the paragraph surrounding the quote before I put it in an essay, just to check if I'm trying to use it out of context. Giving citations allows other people to go check and see if THEY think I used it out of context. So it's a form of cutting, but less aggressive since it's still possible for a second party to see the full original source.
I'm interested in what Briana and Jess have discussed about the cut and paste function on a keyboard. It reminds me of what Desiree said last week in regards to how to be a better reader and how to take notes on articles. If I remember correctly, she said that sometimes when she comes across a particularly insightful passage, she will use the copy and paste function to take the quote from its context and place it in a separate document. This is much like a common-place book.
ReplyDeleteHowever, the big difference is that we rarely *cut* and paste digital text, unless we are editing our own work. Usually we *copy* and paste, that is to say, when we take text from an online source and paste it elsewhere, it rarely means that we have actually removed that text from the internet entirely. We are not cutting, we are only copying, which is a small but important distinction to make. How might your digital cut/copy and pasting practices change if you knew that once you cut the digital quote from its digital text, it would be gone from that text forever? This is the atmosphere of cutting and pasting in the early modern.
I also think that as much as we focus on the text that is removed and placed elsewhere, we also ought to think about the text that is left behind. What happened to all the bibles that the Ferrars cut up? Were they still useful? At what point did they become kindling? How much of a text can be removed before it is no longer literary? And is it possible that such a text can still stand by itself, even with so many parts removed? (This reminds me of the Jefferson bible, which comes across as a distillation of the New Testament rather than the hacked remains of scripture.)
What happens if we take this a step further beyond the cutting of authoring and editing, too? How much of what goes on in marketing texts to an audience can be considered as "cutting"? It certainly has the form of cutting, given that it presents a different ideological claim than the original "intent" (if I can pretend for a minute that word is uncomplicated). For example, I once saw the entire set of Bibles in a Barnes and Noble placed in the "self-help" section, despite the fact that they generally have a "spirituality" section. The "cutting" decision to market a text differently can alter an inexperienced perception of said text, or even limit access (for those who can't locate their text and assume the stock is out).
ReplyDeleteMy follow-up question is whether there even is such a thing as an unmediated text? Aren't all texts "cut" and spliced in some way, if we broaden the conception of those terms?
I like Averyl's point about copy/paste vs. cut/paste. I think that goes a long way toward accounting for the difference in anxiety. I wonder, too, whether physical cutting for the purpose of reaffixing elsewhere provokes less anxiety than censorship, which functions to cut and obscure rather than move and reify elsewhere. Is reticence to cut a book connected to anxieties about the possibility of erasure?
ReplyDeleteTo add on to Jessica's question, I agree that physically cutting a book likely brings with it anxieties about erasure, but isn't it strange that now, when books are so easily and widely printed — and the individual book we hold in our hands is just one of many, many copies — we are more reticent to cut them up?
ReplyDelete