The Maxims in the Age of Electronic Reproduction: A Manifesto
Beyond the Codex
Printed editions, although immensely valuable, have a number of notable shortcomings. One fundamental issue is the manner in which they handle variation: the reader is provided with a base text and a series of variants, but there is no mechanism for incorporating variants so as to recover alternate versions of the text in their integrity. By virtue of being the only version that is readable, the base text thus acquires an authority that is not always warranted. The alternative, of course, is a synoptic edition that reproduces several versions of the text side by side. This solution, however, comes with its own set of dilemmas: what do we do, for example, when the witnesses present material in different orders? Printed editions, in sum, are ill-suited to capturing the changes that texts undergo over time while at the same time conveying the unique coherence of each version.
The larger issue, as Jerome McGann has pointed out, is that printed editions use the form of the codex to study other codices. To quote McGann, "This symmetry between the tool and its subject forces the scholar to invent analytic mechanisms that must be displayed and engaged at the primary reading level" (56). Since the codex does not allow for information to be "turned off" or reorganized, there is an inevitable trade-off between richness and intelligibility. To the extent that an editor accounts for the genesis of the text, the possible variants, the reception (and all the other elements that make for good textual editing), the base text is overwhelmed by the critical apparatus.
Finally, modern printing has different tactile, visual, and formal qualities from older textual forms such as the medieval manuscript. Modern print imposes uniformity, whereas the manuscript admits of (indeed revels in) variation. As George Landow has written, "Presenting the history and relation of texts created within a manuscript culture in terms of the unitary text of modern scholarship certainly fictionalizes--and falsifies--their intertextual relations" (67). Nor is the case of the early print as different as is often supposed: until the nineteenth century, it was not unusual for a printer to interrupt a printing to correct a signature. The result of binding a number of such signatures together can be seen in the Shakespeare's folios: virtually no two copies of the same early-modern book are exactly alike.
The paradox of computer technology is that a relatively recent invention--the personal computer--can be an invaluable tool for understanding older textual practices, such as the medieval manuscript, or the early-modern book. Its flexibility allows us to look at a text from multiple angles without fragmenting it into a cubist jumble. To mention a few of the obvious possibilities: we can put different manuscripts or original editions side by side on a single screen; we can include facsimiles of the original manuscripts or editions; and we can examine, in their integrity, "minor" editions that otherwise would have been relegated to the variants. To quote George Landow, again:
The emergence of the digital word has the major cultural effect of permitting us, for the first time in centuries, easily to perceive the degree to which we have become so accustomed to the qualities and cultural effects of the book that we unconsciously transfer them to the productions of oral and manuscript cultures. (58)
The point is not to have the computer do our thinking for us, but rather to use it as a critical prosthesis that allows readers to perceive and manipulate texts in different ways from a codex. This insight grows out of the awareness that the printed edition is itself a prosthesis of sorts--one that has served scholarship well, but that had its limitations.
The five major editions published during the life of La Rochefoucauld, display a relatively high degree of variability: individual Maxims come and go, are split into two or combined, and there are variations in ordering and grouping. This variation is partly attributable to the fact that the maxim was social form, a product of the conversational culture of the seventeenth century. As the correspondence between La Rochefoucauld, Jacques Esprit, and Mme de Sablé illustrates, Maxims were constantly being critiqued, revised, and rewritten. Contrary to widespread myth, the maxim (and the fragmentary writing of the moralists in general) was not a dogmatic form, but rather a polemical, dialogical, and fluid one. The effect of a modern printed edition, however, is to fix the Maxims in stone, to stay their movement (much as printed editions arrest the mouvance of medieval textuality).
Maxim and Hypertext
The maxim has close affinities with the notion of hypertext. Hypertext is typically characterized as a set of discrete nodes connected by "links," but without any explicit hierarchy or subordination. This is remarkably similar to how Louis van Delft describes the fragmentary writing of the seventeenth-century moralists:
[...] les unités formelles (pensées, «caractères», fables...) que les moralistes assemblent pour composer, non plus un discours lié, mais une collection, demeurent des éléments indépendants. Thématiquement, une interdépendance peut bien s'établir, et les différentes Maximes d'un recueil, par exemple, seront solidaires; mais formellement, il s'agit d'unités [...] solitaires
It would be hard to find a better characterization for hypertext (or the Maxims) than this solitary solidarity, this network of independent yet interdependent elements. Only a scholar would read the Maxims linearly, from cover to cover; it is more natural to pick up the book, look at a maxim, ponder its meaning, play with it a little, compare it to another maxim on a related--or perhaps completely unrelated--topic, and gradually tease meaning out of the text. Early editions, as a matter of fact, often included thematic indexes that facilitated this kind of "associative" reading. In a sense, therefore, we might say that a hypertext edition of the Maxims merely facilitates a mode of reading that the text already invites.
This is not to say that there are no organizational principles at work in the Maxims. There is undoubtedly an order behind the madness and a structure to each of the editions of the Maxims, governed by principles such as thematic grouping, paradox, irony, and surprise. And yet here, again, the computer can help us, by finding groupings in the text, or allowing us to see how a maxim on love on one page responds to another 30 pages earlier. Hypertext, in summary, allows us to capture the dialectical movement of the Maxims that van Delft has described so aptly: between the centrifugal forces of dispersion and the centripetal forces of order:
A caveat is in order, here. Much has been written about hypertext in the last fifteen years, and many extravagant claims have been made about "decentering narrative" and "non-linear paradigms." The purpose of this experiment is much more modest and pragmatic: to explore how certain reading interfaces can change the way we look at older textual technologies. Hypertext does not necessarily "disperse" the reader's attention. If anything, the global effect of hypertext, as envisioned here, is to concentrate the attention rather than disperse it. Since each maxim appears as an autonomous entity, its stylistic, thematic, & linguistic specificity is put into sharp relief. At the same time, the multiple connections between Maxims bring unexpected ironies, paradoxes, and ambiguities, deepening our understanding.
The Continuing Conversation
Aphorisms are generally characterized by a relatively high degree of formal structure: they employ a restricted vocabulary and a limited number of rhetorical and stylistic formulae--most notably identity ("La clémence des princes n' est souvent qu' une politique pour gagner l' affection des peuples. "), antithesis ("Si on juge de l' amour par la plupart de ses effets, il ressemble plus a la haine qu' à l' amitié. "), and parallelism ("La bonne grâce est au corps ce que le bon sens est à l' esprit.."). As Marcel Bénabou has remarked, this relative simplicity makes the aphorism susceptible not only to rigorous analysis, but also to textual transformation, whether by machines or humans: "on a souvent constaté que les formules aphoristiques ont une propriété remarquable: du fait de la rigidité de leur structure syntaxique, elles se prêtent aisément aux renversements, aux permutations, aux subsitutions (253). Indeed Bénabou, a member of Oulipo (the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) has experimented with generating random aphorisms by distorting familiar ones. Although some of the results remind one of surrealist poetry, others could easily have been written in the seventeenth century:
266 "Les petits honneurs font les grands bonheurs"
267 "On renonce plus aisément à la liberté qu'à l'ignorance"
269 "L'humour réunit les hommes l'amour les sépare."
By exploring the potentialities and limitations of aphoristic form, Bénabou's experiments open up intriguing avenues for the study of the Maxims. Lest anyone be shocked by such an irreverent treatment of a canonical text, it is worth recalling that readers were rewriting the Maxims as early as the seventeenth century. Indeed a large part of the appeal of the form was that no "special skills" or literary expertise was required: anyone could play. Most famously, Madame de Grignan (Sévigné's daughter) rewrote La Rochefoucauld's "Nous n'avons pas assez de force pour employer toute notre raison." as «Nous n'avons pas assez de raison pour employer toute notre force». "Deforming" a text such as La Rochefoucauld's Maxims thus brings us closer to how seventeenth-century contemporaries, who were much more playful and less reverent than modern scholars, read them. To borrow a term from Roland Barthes, the Maxims are "scriptible": that is, they invite the active participation of the reader.
Such exercises (as Jerome McGann has pointed out) remind us that all scholarship and criticism involves "deformation" (or what McGann calls "deformance"): as we read and interpret, we select, edit, and reorder--resolving ambiguity at times, cultivating it at others. Obviously not all of these deformation-interpretations are equal, and only a well-trained human mind can discriminate between them. What computer technology offers is a framework for transparent, self-aware deformation. With a workstation in from of him/her, the reader can retrace the editor's steps, immediately confronting each of his/her "deforming" choices with other options. The critical edition thus becomes a critical conversation.
Brief Bibliography
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Bénabou, Marcel. "Un aphorisme peut en cache un autre." La Bibliothèque Oulipienne. Ed. Noël Arnaud. Vol. 1. Paris: Seghers, 1990. 251-69.
Greco, Gina, and Peter Shoemaker. "The Charrette Project: Manipulating Text and Image in an Electronic Archive of a Medieval Manuscript Tradition." Computers and the Humanities.30 (1997): 405-15.
Lafond, Jean. "Les formes brèves de la prose et le discours discontinu." Ed. JEan Lafond. Paris: Vrin, 1984. 100-22.
---. "Mme de Sablé et son salon." Images de La Rochefoucauld: actes du tricentenaire: 1680-1980. Eds. Jean Lafond and Jean Mesnard. Paris: P.U.F, 1984. 201-16.
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Landow, George. Hypertext 2.0. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997.
Laufer, Roger. "Edition critique synoptique sur écran: l'exemple des Maximes de La Rochefoucauld." Les éditions critiques: Problèmes techniques et éditoriaux. Ed. N. Catach. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1988. 115-25.
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McGann, Jerome J. Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
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Sévigné, Madame de. Correspondance. Ed. Roger Duchêne. Paris: Gallimard, 1974.
van Delft, Louis. Le Moraliste classique. Essai de
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