No source: created in electronic format.
This paper will demonstrate an advanced work in progress, the digitised manuscript
and transcription of Samuel Beckett’s novel Watt (composed in
1941-45 and first published in 1953). Discussion of the project will centre upon the
digital resources buttressing the presentation of manuscript material and a range of
related analytic features, and will outline some of the more significant ways in
which specifically digital treatment of the material opens up new lines of literary
and textual analysis. Indeed, some foundational concepts of textuality come into
sharp focus by virtue of digital treatment of textual materials. Some of these
concerns will be illustrated by way of examples taken from the Watt project, and by a fuller view of the complex relationship between
text and manuscript arising from the project.
The digital and scholarly resources required to produce a digitised literary transcription are not trivial. Two related questions must frame any such project: what scholarly need is being met by the production of such an edition? What specific innovations are made available by virtue of its digital delivery?
The digital transcription of Beckett’s Watt is an
instalment of a larger international project – the Samuel Beckett Digital
Manuscript Project – which aims to have all of Beckett’s literary manuscripts
transcribed and represented in digital form. This initiative responds to a
profound deepening of scholarly interest in modernist manuscripts as potential
sources of literary hermeneutic attention, and in concert with this focal shift,
a renewed interest in theories of textuality and textual criticism. The specific
(and heightened) relevance to this particular text in Beckett’s oeuvre is
immediately apparent on viewing the complex series of heavily revised and
illustrated notebooks that constitute the manuscript of Watt. The primary materials do not lend themselves easily to
conventional print publication, and indeed several dominant textual features
would be lost or deeply submerged within any codex structure. For example, the
relationships between dispersed narrative episodes and fragments within the
manuscripts cannot be represented adequately in the linear structure of the
codex, nor the complex patterns of transmitted, dispersed and submerged material
between the manuscript and the published editions of Watt.
Of all of Beckett’s major texts, Watt has received the
least critical attention, despite significant scholarly curiosity regarding the
deep ambiguity of the published narrative and the baroque nature of its
manuscript archive.Watt
manuscript material and hypothesised its stages of composition in his PhD
dissertation over thirty years ago at the University of Texas at Austin. An
epitome of this description and analysis was published in his essay,
"The Manuscript Revisions of Beckett's Watt," JML 2.4 (1972): 472-480. Other
discussions include: Sighle Kennedy, "‘Astride of the Grave and a
Difficult Birth’: Samuel Beckett’s Watt Struggles to
Life," Dalhousie French Studies 42 (1998):
115-147; David Hayman, "Beckett's Watt – the
Graphic Accompaniment: Marginalia in the Manuscripts," Word & Image 13.2 (1997): 172-182 and "Nor
Do My Doodles More Sagaciously: Beckett Illustrating Watt," in Lois Oppenheim, ed., Samuel
Beckett and the Arts: Music, Visual Arts, and Non-Print Media (New
York and London: Garland, 1999), pp. 199-215; and John Pilling,
"Beckett’s English Fiction," in Pilling, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Beckett (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1994), pp. 17-42.terra nullius. By representing and transcribing the
manuscript archive of this pivotal text in digital form, such relations between
the archive and publication can begin to proceed in an informed way, and more
adequate editorial and hermeneutic strategies can be brought to bear on this
most inscrutable of Beckett’s texts.
The difficulties of reading Beckett’s manuscript and text are, in part, aesthetic. The manuscript was composed during the Second World War, when its author was displaced in the south of France, at a time when reflections upon the efficacy of literary expression were most acute. In addition, the fragments, riddles, and non sequiturs in the published novel (first published in 1953) strongly imply a process of archivisation of fuller manuscript material, or more accurately, providing keys by which to unlock abundant manuscript contents. By providing coherent and searchable access to such a large and complex document, the digitised manuscript project provides the grounds for extensive investigation into hitherto inscrutable textual features in the published text, and provides space for reflection on variant narrative structures and the evolution of literary works more generally.
The presence of digital technology in scholarship has become increasingly prominent in recent years. Digital aides to scholarship (online library catalogues, concordances, etc.) provide extensions to existing scholarly tools and practices, facilitating certain kinds of scholarship. Primary sources can be identified by means of web-based archive catalogues, and online digital representations of manuscripts allow scholars to conduct particular kinds of work at geographical distance. Whilst access to the physical document may be desirable or even critical in the final event, several stages of a research project can be accomplished prior to such access. Digital extensions of traditional analogue research tools are perfectly commonplace in most disciplines, and (in theory) are not particularly difficult to integrate into a disciplinary mentality.
Recent innovative approaches to scholarly editing tend to imply or assert the
relevance of a wider array of documentary sources: genetic editions seek to
incorporate all manuscript material and published versions of a text, as well as
a rationale of any stemmatic relationship between them, in an attempt to provide
a "total" text; social text methods seek to integrate erstwhile
secondary documents and materials into the very conceptual fabric of a text, as
constituent parts of a text’s identity. These more aggregative models of text
identity, and more specifically the texts to which they pertain, are clearly
conducive to presentation as digital scholarly editions. Conversely, digital
modes of representing literary texts can bring questions of a text’s identity
into sharp focus. For example, the representation of multiple textual witnesses
in collation software such as Juxta
Digital scholarly editions can do two things that seem fundamentally new:
firstly, a potentially large corpus of material can be represented in one space,
and manipulated in ways simply not possible in the world of physical manuscripts
and codex editions: a basic premise of the digitised manuscript of Watt. Secondly, digital collations allow for
manipulations of the text material that are visually straightforward and
intuitively intelligible, whilst bearing profound implications for the text’s
identity and the authority of textual evidence. The digital manuscript of Watt deploys an interface powered by the Apache Tomcat
servlet container, which represents files marked up in XML, in a streamlined
version of the TEI5 protocols. A high-resolution digital image of the manuscript
page appears alongside the marked-up transcription and attendant tools for
analysing the transcribed document. In the case of this particular project, the
use of Juxta collation software is not a straightforward choice, given that the
manuscripts accord very closely to the published text in many places but diverge
almost absolutely in many others. The relationship between text and archive is
by no means self-evident, or even chronologically linear, witnessed by the
density of cryptic allusions and riddles in the published narrative: many of
these may only be understood following a close reading of the more expansive
manuscripts episodes from which they are sedimented.
The application of the Juxta software to such an editorial project as the digital
variorum edition of Ezra Pound’s Cantos offers an
instructive counterpoint, providing a view of the way in which a well-developed
and intuitively graspable digital aid offers new opportunities for new
documentary and analytic research. These two examples provide one aspect by
which to view the question of digital tools for literary research: does each
project in the field of digital humanities require custom digital tools, or are
there ways to engineer convergences that continue to provide each project with
the specific resources it needs? This remains an open question, inspiring in
equal parts an anxiety of resource-intense customisation, on the one hand, and
the very exciting prospect of powerful convergences of digital tools in literary
research on the other. One critical implication for literary studies is that
wherever this question may lead, the nature and status of text identity will
demand radical investigation.
Recent advances in digital scholarly tools present exciting possibilities for scholarship and for reconsiderations of the paradigms of scholarship. They also present a basic challenge to the work undertaken in literary studies, by calling into question some of the most fundamental conceptual paradigms. The opportunity exists for significant developments in the theory of textual criticism. Whilst it is critical not to overstate the kinds of change made possible by digital scholarship – some apparent paradigm shifts are simply incremental changes to concepts and methods that remain integral to literary scholarship – it seems clear that we are only beginning to understand just what may be possible in the digital domain.