Digital Mediation of Modernist Literary Texts and their Documents

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.
1. SBDMP and the Digitised
Edition of the
Watt
Notebooks
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.
1
One reason for this oversight pertains directly to
the digitised manuscript project: the materials
extend to nearly a thousand pages of autograph
manuscript in Beckett’s notoriously difficult
hand. Few scholars have read any of the primary
materials, and only a very few have read
them completely. The well-known hermeneutic
difficulties presented by the published narrative
are thus in no way adequately understood in
relation to the primary materials, because they
themselves constitute a kind of
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

2
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.
2. Digital Technology and
Editorial Practice
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
2
or Versioning
Machine
3
alters rather profoundly the reader’s
apprehension of the textual matter at hand.
The text is digitally mediated and may be
represented by transposed digital reproductions
and transcriptions suitably marked up for digital
display. But this mediation can go to the very
heart of what is considered to be the text.
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