Jeff Drouin

While reading Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History, it occurred to me that the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive should do the same within itself. The first step this Winter will be to complete a major information overhaul, marking up and encoding all passages and images rigorously in XML. Then, dynamic real-time visual tools can be used to illuminate the Recherche, narrative, and the manner in which archive users have been interacting with the novel.

Moretti’s use of graphs to illustrate the publishing data about the novel in different times and locations throughout history shows fascinating patterns about its system of subgenres, its rises and falls, and the relationships it bears with politics and economics. Such models could be applied to the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive, but for purpose of illuminating its internal relationships. Graphs could be used to show various aspects of the church motif and how they are patterned throughout the work. Would, say, the rises and falls of particular associations tell us anything about the novel’s exploration of memory or subjectivity, especially anything that might not be obvious in Proust scholarship hitherto? If so, what do these patterns tell us about narrative itself, and of the motif as an element of narrative?

The mapping techniques that Moretti applies to certain English novels reveal interesting patterns in their plot elements, such as the consistency in which certain types of plots form distinct rings around the geographical center of the action. What would we learn from maps of churches in the Recherche, and how they relate to its exploration of subjective memory, national memory, local memory, memorialization through architecture, archives, and narrative? Would the regions of France, their churches, and how the churches signify within the narrative tell us anything new about the Recherche?

Perhaps even trees dealing with associations, categories, or motifs could tell us a lot about the church motif and its operation within the whole narrative.

As well, these kinds of tools could be used to illuminate the relationships between critical discussion on the blog and the text and images in the archive. Which passages get the most attention? The least? Which associations and image properties are most or least discussed? How do these change over time?

A unified, dynamic, and interactive visualization section of the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive could potentially show so much about the Recherche and narrative that has not yet been seen. It could prove to be a new method of inquiry into the novel, Proust, narrative, literary scholarship, and more.

Here are some basic relationships that a visualization application could explore:

Graphs

• Association by pagination location in the novel.
• Association by chronological location in the narrative.
• Association by chronology of composition (would require extensive textual scholarship).
• Association by church.
• Blog categories by association, and/or by image property, and/or by church.
• Real, fictional, and hybrid churches by location in the novel, in the narrative, by image type, etc.

Maps

• Geographical locations of churches.
• Geographical locations of associations and churches.
• Geographical locations of associations by churches, broken down by real, fictional, and hybrid churches.
• Character by geographical location, church, associations, and image properties.
• Any of the above by critical categories in the blog.

Trees

• Breakdown schema of how real and hybrid churches are used in particular associations (say, romantic love or the subject/object distinction).
• Schema of how blog categories explore certain associations or image properties.
• Schema of an image property and the kinds of associations it tends to appear with.

As a note for a future post, in order to make the data more effective in visual applications, a rigorous categorization of the associations (which are non-categorized) will probably be necessary.

(Continued from this post and this post.)

This project began as a spreadsheet documenting the church passages for a term paper in a Proust seminar. It was subsequently compared by someone else in a textual scholarship seminar to Roland Barthes’ S/Z. The comparison holds on two counts: the arranging of passages in a cross-referenced grid system and the inclusion of interpretive keys as paratexts.

Barthes’ method in S/Z, a narratological analysis of Balzac’s novella Sarrasine, breaks down the entire story into passages (which he calls “lexia”), beneath which appear his analyses according to five semiotic codes: the hermeneutic (HER), semantic (SEM), symbolic (SYM), proairetic [or actional] (ACT), and referential (REF). This enables him to perform a step-by-step reading that remains attentive to the plural of the text. This method,

through its very slowness and dispersion, avoids penetrating, reversing the tutor text, giving an internal image of it: it is never anything but the decomposition (in the cinematographic sense) of the work of reading: a slow motion, so to speak, neither wholly image nor wholly analysis; it is, finally, in the very writing of the commentary, a systematic use of digression (a form ill-accommodated by the discourse of knowledge) and thereby a way of observing the reversibility of the structures from which the text is woven; of course, the classic text is incompletely reversible (it is modestly plural): the reading of this text occurs within a necessary order, which the gradual analysis will make precisely its order of writing; but the step-by-step commentary is of necessity a renewal of the entrances to the text, it avoids structuring the text excessively, avoids giving it that additional structure which would come from a dissertation and would close it: it stars the text, instead of assembling it. (12-13; Barthes’ emphases)

To a contemporary reader, Barthes’ digressions take a form remarkably similar to blog posts with category tags and commentary. Each segment of the book is anywhere from one to about five pages in length and begins with a number, a title, a passage from Sarrasine, and then commentary that incorporates any of the five semiotic codes that might be present. And they progress rigidly in chronological order according to the tutor text — as we sometimes say of the seriality of blogs under the “tyranny of the timestamp” (but which can be “adjusted”). He uses the codes as a system for both teasing out the plural of the tutor text in the act of reading and for referring to other passages containing the same types of signifiers, which is like tagging in Web 2.0.

One of the true innovations of Barthes’ approach in S/Z is the simplicity of the overall structure. In using only the basic procedures of analysis, labeling, and cross-reference, without the inhibiting burden of organizing them around large themes or an articulation of the whole text, he is able to use the digressive episodes to mine each lexia for its plurality. Each segment becomes a self-contained discourse on the lexia it falls under, making connections as it pleases. Or as he says:

If we want to remain attentive to the plural of the text (however limited it may be), we must renounce structuring this text in large masses, as was done by classical rhetoric and by secondary-school education: no construction of the text: everything signifies ceaselessly and several times, but without being delegated to a great final ensemble, to an ultimate structure. Whence the idea, and so to speak the necessity, of a gradual analysis of a single text. Whence, it would seem, several implications and several advantages. The commentary on a single text is not a contingent activity, assigned the reassuring alibi of the “concrete”: the single text is valid for all the texts of literature, not in that it represents them (abstracts and equalizes them), but in that literature itself is never anything but a single text: the one text is not an (inductive) access to a Model, but entrance into a network with a thousand entrances; to take this entrance is to aim, ultimately, not at a legal structure of norms and departures, a narrative or poetic Law, but at a perspective (of fragments, of voices from other texts, other codes), whose vanishing point is nonetheless ceaselsessly pushed back, mysteriously opened: each (single) text is the very theory (and not the mere example) of this vanishing, of this difference which indefinitely returns, insubmissive. (11-12; Barthes’ emphasis)

The notion of Literature as a single hypertext of voices, “a network with a thousand entrances,” is where the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive begins its own construction (though I hadn’t studied S/Z until long after the search engine was built). It singles out one strain of the narrative in order to examine up close the multiple voices and “entrances” and “vanishing points” of the Recherche. The purpose is to read Proust in a way that hasn’t been done before, and also to further the study of narrative by using new tools (search engine, blog, taxonomic and folksonomic organization, hypertext) that were foreshadowed but unavailable to narratologists during the 1970s:

to take up the structural analysis of narrative where it has been left till now: at the major structures; it is to assume the power (the time, the elbow room) of working back along the threads of meanins, of abandoning no site of the signifier without endeavoring to ascertain the code or codes of which this site is perhaps the starting point (or the goal)…. (S/Z 12)

In more selectively culling its lexia but less selectively organizing its interpretive codes (the uncategorized associations), the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive highlights both the entrances and vanishings of the text — where each instance of the church motif begins and ends and the voices and codes that weave therein, that channel them from other parts of the narrative but are amplified and cut off. (In much the same way, the church is for Proust’s narrator both the origin and the end, the orienting post.) And for the sake of recalling these instances it uses the advantages of the digital medium to archive and reorganize the text(s), to build itself accretively on its voices, just as a church or a book embodies those voices (of history, of love, of war, of strife and hope).

In the last post I asked a question related to David Greetham’s metaphor of membranous transmission between archives.

In conceiving of a text as an archive (of knowledge, voices, attitudes, values) consisting of inter-membranous citations, this text interrogates its tutor text, and also itself. How must Proust be read here through the collect of its church motif (citations) and through the heterogeneous images (also citations) that supplement it?

In the ensuing discussion I neglected to consider the obvious question of genre. What makes the membrane metaphor so rich is its basis in the notion of leaves — of a book. The Proust passages constituting the church motif have “crossed several membranes (membranae or ‘leaves’ of a book) to interrogate the integrity of the archives from which they have been drawn” (Werner and Voss 1). They have, first, been translated and revised (Enright revision of the Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation) from an original (to them) printed version in French, itself an edited variant of whatever beginnings it had in manuscript; second, been singled out through my acts of reading and interepretation; third, been transcribed into a spreadsheet by myself and the woman whom I subsequently married; fourth, been imported into a database that operates upon them in response to searches of their words and phrases, as well as the paratexts (associations, context notes, image properties, pagination) that form relations with them.

Hence, each fragment of the collect constituting the core text of this archive has passed through several leaves or membranes before arriving in its place here. Only one of those leaves surviving in the present constellation is in print; the other three are digital. In that way, the digital archive-text provides several functions that allow for an interaction of digital and print membranes through its multi-layered memorializing of readings. The digital text is a deliberately partial trace of the whole print text, and its native ability to be reorganized allows for a non-sequential reading of its component parts. Thus the fascicles (OED — “A bunch, bundle. Now only in scientific use. Formerly also fig.“; “A part, number, ‘livraison’ (of a work published by instalments)” — demarcate the points of loss in the original, allowing readers to reconstitute, to re-member the original narrative in meaningful ways by means of the pupil text.

Membrane — OED — “classical Latin membrna a membrane (in animal bodies), parchment < membrum“

Memory — OED — “classical Latin memoria < memor mindful, remembering (a reduplicated formation)”

Memory as the act of preservation through reduplication (of the original, through writing), of committing to archival parchment, to a node in the database. Re-membering — collecting and reassembling the membranes, the planes of memory in the novel’s signifiers and (here) signifieds, the pieces of a motif extrapolated from an organic text. Proust’s churches as the archives of both personal and collective memory; his book as the same; this archive as… ?

Before addressing Barthes’ S/Z, I felt it necessary to broach this subject of the membranous layers between print book and digital archive. S/Z deliberately fragments (or “stars”) the text of Sarrasine in order to tease out the full ambiguity of its signifiers, to get as close as possible to the writerly text by operating methodically upon the minutiae of the readerly one. Barthes ultimately concludes that a full articulation of the text’s signifying structures is impossible because the text itself is not a closed system. This archive begins with that conclusion as an assumption, limiting its selection of citations but using the mobility of the digital medium to approach the writerly text of a narrative strain running through the original. The digital medium is perfectly suited to interrogate the valences of the print text by spontaneously realigning its parts to match the reader’s intent.

What can the digital archive see in the book from which it derives?

It occurred to me as I lay awake last night that Drupal could actually do much of what came out in our discussions at if:book a year ago. Dan Visel suggested allowing users to add their own images and their own passages (permissions nightmares), or to comment on searches, which is interesting. Drupal wouldn’t be able to do a search comment. However, entering each passage as a page or story would enable:

• More images to be attached to passages.
• Commenting on the passages and, perhaps with a module, the images.
• Integration of Proust passages and commentary with services like del.icio.us, twitter, technorati.
• Use of modules to serendipitously or randomly highlight passages, images, and critical content.

The Drupal search tool would recall all of these. However, the downsides would be:

• Less immediate access to the search results, since they’d show up as headlines and teasers instead of displaying all info in a neat table as at present.
• There would be no way to conduct a pagination search for in-depth study of a particular segment of the novel.

Again, as I wrote in the previous post, the archival structure of this site must be “respectful” of the organicity of the novel genre. A Drupal or Drupal-like integrated search engine and Web 2.0 tool would open up possibilities inherent in the digital archive genre, but might go too far in doing violence to the novel genre.

With Web 2.0 (user-produced content), institutional considerations would have to address the topical specificity of the archive, lest it become an encyclopedic, directionless, Proustian wiki. That could mean instituting an archive staff committed to study of the church motif and narrative, which would require a grant or some other financial backing. At the very least it would mean vetting the readers who are allowed to post content (i.e. students, faculty, researches demonstrably focusing on Proust, etc.). But that too is inseparable from what an archive is — a container of information, whose information is controlled, selected, interpreted, and presented by the archon and both the intra- and inter-institutional politics of its time and place.

Developing another site using Drupal has gotten me thinking about how the sophisticated integration systems of all kinds of content could be put to use in the Proust archive. Image galleries that can be searched by caption or tagged content, or sorted by different categories. Dynamic flash slideshows based on user input or browsing behavior, or that pull images externally based on these. Searches that mix text — say passages, comments, forum topics — with images in unforseen yet meaningful ways (as opposed to the relatively static array currently in place). It would be very easy to do, and like most new technology the impulse is to try it all out to see what happens.

But what new ways of understanding “Proust” or narrative or “church” or motif would emerge from that? In what ways does the Machine’s reading of the archive’s content intersect with my own? Where does the Machine end and the archive begin?

While questions like these can be asked of the new media without blinking, it’s important to remember that this digital resource is a supplement to a book, a novel. Without an archival methodology that makes its end in the understanding of the novel’s properties, it will spin into a form more germane to contemporary media. Therefore, one major area of the study of the Recherche will have to consider the question of genre. To what extent is this archive really a reading of a book? Even in its current relatively static form, this archive is probably “about” itself more than anything else, though Proust’s novel is ultimately the generating influence. The trick is to figure out how.

While considering a taxonomic versus a folksonomic labeling of passages in the archive, it occurred to me that there are benefits to having both in the search engine and search results.

The taxonomic approach would be a codified and rigorous — and therefore arbitrarily limited — categorization of narrative elements a priori. As a search functionality it would constrain the method in such a way that the selection of narrative elements would form a cohesive set of criteria on which to assess the passages. As a results parameter it would allow the researcher to view the other narrative elements with which a given one coincides and, using analytical tools, to articulate the large- and small-scale patterns in which the church motif operates.

In that respect the archive would function like a moving S/Z, staking the narrative grounds on which to assess the operation of the narrative and following them to their fullest conclusion.

However, what is valuable in the Associations as they currently stand is their haphazard, a posteriori formulation, generated during the act of reading. The richness of threads that continually and unexpectedly enter the mind during reading should definitely be archived as part of the critical response to the text, as an adjunct to the blog and forum.

The folksonomic approach, therefore, would incorporate a tool that enables readers of the archive to annotate passages with their own Associations, contributing another dimension to the architecture of the search engine, the richness of results, and the quality of critical discourse. The folksonomic approach would hybridize the narratological method with a sort of reader-response mechanism, allowing a comparison of both as part of the long-term evolution of the study of the Recherche.

Ideally the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive would become a micro institution, functioning like a cross between an academic periodical and a book with multiple contributors. What form(s) will the full-length study(ies) ultimately take?

I was originally going to post a handful of videos derived somehow from Proust’s work but ended up finding much more — and of better quality — than expected. For now, I’ll post a few musical interpretations. What’s interesting is that almost all of them involve a prominent visual component that constitutes its own narrative. Much of the video out there either parodies, idolizes, or has nothing to do with Proust.