Colleagues in North America have a lot to learn about the possibilities of the digital world from my colleagues down in the global south. Sometimes, when we feel we know a tool well, someone comes along and uses it in a strange and exciting new way. I have experienced this in my own work, where I have discovered some uses off the beaten path for the Juxta collation tool. Thinking about the different global approaches to new media, I was struck in particular by the way Dominican intellectuals and artist used Facebook as a full-blown publishing platform. I’ve been told that this might be a Caribbean-wide phenomenon. Sadly, Facebook limits you to a bubble of ‘friends’ that makes it difficult for me to survey too far afield. Of course, I am limited also because my approach to ‘friending’ is radically different than the one being used by those publishing work on Facebook. While I have to excuse each acceptance based on some personal narrative –which privileges the random acquaintance at the coffee shop over those interested in my work–, my counterparts amass followings based on interest.

I’m finally settling back into my C’ville routine. My last stop this winter break was the MLA convention in Seattle. Like many of my colleagues, I also felt that “the MLA’s heart (like a post-holiday Grinch) grew at least three sizes over the four days of the 2012 conference.” While last year echoed a prominent informer‘s assessment that DH was “the next big thing” with anxiety, this year felt more like “Hey, I like that. How do I do it?” This was especially a good year for those in the business of rethinking the future of graduate methods training (ahem, ahem) and of graduate futures in general. Needless to say, I felt really great about being part of the first cohort of Praxis.

Saturday evening I had a chance to catch up with one of my early undergraduate mentors. He had questions. He wanted to know what I knew about the DH world. I’m sure half of his curiosity came out of an earnest desire to hear the tale of my travels. The other half was a shrewd (and responsible) move to build a vocabulary for conversations his department will inevitably have this year with the dean, other departments, the library, etc: Can an isolated DHer work well with limited resources? Do you need a center? How do you get graduate students involved? Our conversation went on for a good three hours and it was very rewarding to offer a candid assessment of the field from where I’m standing.

I also realized that where I’m standing is what in battle we would call higher ground. I don’t mean the privilege of hobnobbing with the enormous DH talent we have on grounds. Nothing, of the sort. Although projects are a whole different affair, you could develop decent DH skills and ideas were you connected from Pie Town. I mean the privilege of seeing graduate methods transformation first-hand. I agree with Brooke that there is a continuum that links us to analog models in the department (at least at UVa). But the continuum does eventually lead to new ground.

What I’ve seen, of course, has been well recorded by all the Praxis bloggers. If this is your first time hearing about Praxis and you are interested in the fresh air blowing our way, I encourage you to read more…

Maps are texts, and texts are maps.

At the beginning of the movie The English Patient, as Márta Sebestyén’s “Szerelem, szerelem” overcomes our senses, a paintbrush traces the figure of human swimmers on a yellowing page. The black-ink soon gives way to a skin-colored desert landscape sifting beneath our aerial view, evoking hands moving over human curves. Skin, page, territory all united by the theme of lost love. I can’t think of a better image to describe how we are wedded to the n-dimensions of the textual condition.

As we get ready to think about design I wanted to outline a few of the ways we can abstract the material reality of print to a totality of 1′s and 0′s. In my own work I have been trying to create a digital edition of Aimé Césaire’s Et les chiens se taisaient that is both pleasant to read and that allows for some algorithmic manipulation of the textual territory. My goals lead me to seek the chimera of html forgeries as opposed to the classic images with texts beneath them. The experience taught me an enormous deal about the process of remediation.

There are many ways we can remap texts online. We can have a simple image. We can have text behind that image, like your typical PDF. We can map out the position of text and white space on that image by overlaying a basic Cartesian x and y grid on top (or is it below?). We can name areas on that grid like land-grabbers use contracts to justify their fences. We can query  the areas, we can query the points, we can query the text. We can overlap those areas, like the map of Aztlán tensely overlaps with the map of the United States, like our Prism diffracts difference. We can create replicas from scratch using HTML, using Canvas, and trade grain for the possibility of playful deformation and a digital audience born into cool media. We can standardize our geo-textual mark-up, make a TEI out of HTML/CSS, opening the door for large scale analysis  of page design in book-history. Heck, we can just put our UTF-8 txt’s out there and just sit back and wait for our computer overlords to tell us that the eternal present of spotless text was all we ever needed. Lord knows, most literary scholars haven’t done better than that. (I will rebel against that last possibility the way I rebel against propaganda, the way I rebel against the early Wittgenstein, who wanted to get rid of love because we couldn’t fit it in just one map).

Let us move towards a geo-textual humanities conscious there are swimmers in the desert of the page.

(to be continued…)

“Computers are inherently dumb.” I hear this all the time, even from folks in computer science. I like to think of them as marionettes.

After Wagner called for a Gesamtkunstwerk, many European artists and thinkers reacted strongly to it (Nietzsche being the most famous case). This reaction eventually led to a modernist distrust of theater in general, and of human actors in particular. Think for example of Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt. Somewhere in between Wagner and Brecht, the English artist Edward Gordon Craig suggested that human actors should be replaced by marionettes. As you can imagine, this did not go well with the actor’s guild.

I hear echoes of those debates and cultural shifts in our moment, when computers are starting to resemble us more and more. Computers don’t replace us always in the way that machines replaced farmers or smiths, although there are still parallels between ours and the anxieties of the industrial and agricultural revolution. And just like machines then generated monstrous forms of mechanized human labor, computers do the same (If you don’t believe me, ask any of my students for Project Tango). However, there is another anxiety I see which is not necessarily that of the repetitive tasks of machines replacing familiar mechanical tasks with unforeseen ones. I’m talking about our fear of marionettes. Even more specific, the fear that we will confuse the marionettes for human beings.

Quixote fights the puppets

The true marionette is always controlled by a human, so are computers… ultimately. We ventriloquise through them, and they only talk back to us according to our ridiculously precise instructions. I’m not talking about Bina48. She’s kind of creepy. I’m talking about the ways in which a google search acts like an operator at the end of a 411 call; or the way that netflix suggests what we might like. There are two approaches to figuring out what counts as a title in a large repository: we can tag it, or we can write an algorithm that does it for us. Don’t worry, we’re not there yet completely. At some point that meta-data might pass the Turing test. When it does, by definition, users will think a human did the work… but wait a second.

Prism is not really interested in how humans might be fooled by the marionettes more than it is in how we can fool the marionettes to behave like us. Sometimes that line is blurred. The ‘text mining’ component, as I have understood it, seems like the bastard child of natural language processing and web crawling. The goal here is not to count words (although that is a time-honored human activity), but to abstract semantic relationships that can be used to query large data. When we Google something, we are doing something akin to that, except we never think Google is run by a million efficient munchkins. When we get results for our perhaps-to-be Prism queries, we use those results in public at our own risk. That there will always be Quixotes in the audience… well…

Take home tweet: Even if we replace actors with marionettes, the plot stays the same.

Prism is not many things, one of them is itself… for now. There is a history behind the identity crisis. As Bethany pointed out in her flagship post, Prism began as a Demon. Hearing McGann talk about it nowadays, you would think that we have found Richard Rorty’s ultimate intellectual ring, the one eye that encompasses all other. The pata-critical Demon owes its name in part to Alfred Jarry’s pataphysics, “the science of imaginary solutions,“ from which we also get Pablo Lopez’s pataphore, “an unusually extended metaphor.” When the folks at the SpecLab began playing around with markers and transparencies, they were in a sense blending science with play by making literal the idea that we all read differently. Although we all knew for centuries that there was room for interpretation, footnotes and marginalia safely occupied different places on the page, reinventing the author at the moment of its undoing. The Copernican move was to take the idea of difference seriously enough to overlap it. McGann, in most other cases a visionary, hesitated before the chasm. Today, he still wants to feed commentary to the Demon. Our prism ventures out on a different path.

Prism ray trace

Then there is the knack that some folks have to try to reduce it to the most mundane digital tools. Two in particular surface often: Diigo and NowComment. I hope I am clear when I say, Prism they are not, and they are not for the same reason: They are not focused. A prism refracts light according to a specific set of rules. Diigo and NowComment allow for a very diffuse set of comments and monotone highlights that cannot be wrangled easily for analysis. Both are helpful to provide feedback for one reader who has a vested interested in reading the comments. If we were to read interpretation as a social phenomenon, their usefulness runs its course. Our prism understands that we all wiggle under controlled vocabularies and that it is there that our differences thrive.

So now that I’ve said my peace about what I think prism is not, let me leave you with a vision:

On one of those slow dry desert days where Saint Anthony receives his motley crew of visitors, he has a vision. He sees a man wearing a wig before a strange glass pyramid. He sees strange markings on several pages strewn about a table rife with even stranger machines. A ray of light flashes through the window and the wigged man fumbles for the triangle. He offers it to the light like a bishop offering the host. Miracle of miracles. The crystal gives birth to a rainbow which fills up the room with the brightest colors, like the garments of his demons.

On joining the Praxis Program, I knew I was in for something new. As part of the most recent generation of DH’ers at Uva, I’ve had time to develop a healthy dose of envy for the heroic age of SpecLab or the early years of NINES (not so long ago to be honest), when the DH demi-gods were said to roam the halls of Bryan. In the past couple of years, there have been informal attempts to revive the gall and vision of those who (just) came before us… without much success. Perhaps it was time to give up. After all, UVa continues to be a DH powerhouse without the shop-apprentice model of (not-so) yore. Perhaps the problem was that our impromptu efforts were tinged with nostalgia. When I was invited to become part of the Praxis Program, I knew this was something different, something new. Finally, we had a shop-apprentice model that I could make my own, that we could make our own.

To talk about ownership in the hour of open access and crowdsourcing may seem oxymoronic, but I beg to differ. Before I came to the academy I was a salaried worker for more companies than I would care to enumerate. Though the service-industry’s book of mantras includes a line or two on how the company belongs to everyone, no one really buys that. Once in the academy, I’ve had a chance to help several faculty members with their projects where all I got in return was a footnote of appreciation. Even the countless ENWR courses I’ve been deputized have felt alien. In the end, the only thing I felt belonged to me where my most solitary scribblings and my toothbrush. I realize now that what makes the difference is creative direction. I too want to own what I create, but in my previous brushes with collaboration, I’ve always felt the only ‘I’ came from the top. When I saw that the first assignment of the Praxis Program was for us to design our own charter, I knew I was in for something new, something that is already starting to feel like my own.

With that in mind, here are some of the things I would like to see in the final version of our charter:

• Credit should be non-hierarchical: Though the program that’s allowing us to build this project has a steward, the project itself should be credited to all of us.
• Detailing the contributions: Though we all get credit for the project, we should still publish a list of detailed contributions for audiences which require more details.
• One for all and all for one: Though we each can end up focusing more on those things suited to our individual calling, we should all be equal partners in the overall progress of the project.
• Departures: In the unlikely event that one of us leaves the project, that person should always receive credit by dates worked and contributions made, and have the right to reference the project on their vita.
• New Members: New participants should be given credit by date of arrival.
• License: I vote wholeheartedly that we offer everything we make open-access, open-source through a Creative Commons Attribution license. Bethany provides excellent rationale in “Why, of why, CC-BY?”.
• Taking ownership: I say we codify in the charter our commitment to promote the project publicly, to link it to our online personas, to make it truly our own. Each member should be allowed to list the project on their Vitas or Webpages under current projects or whatever appropriate equivalent
• Non-representative democracy: All major aspects of the project should be decided on a 2/3 vote with full quorum. This means we should also codify what we consider to be these major aspects.

I should perhaps disclose that I am not affiliated with the Central Virginia Writing Project, our local chapter of the NWP, based here in Charlottesville. What I AM though is a parent and a teacher. Even more to the point, I have taught the first-year writing requirement for students at the University of Virginia, on and off but mostly on, for the past 7 years. Since I cannot share any ‘personal’ experiences on NWP, I would like to blog instead on a more general vein about what it is that we teach when we teach writing (in the digital age).

Actually, let’s start by those things I don’t teach when I teach writing: 1) I don’t teach handwriting or typing. I couldn’t care less about your score on Typing of the Dead. When we say we teach writing, we are talking about another kind of writing; 2) I don’t teach expression. I think folks do that just fine by themselves without my help. Putting down just any old words on paper or Blogger, recording your voice, etc., that’s not it at all either. So what is this thing? The honest answer can fill volumes so I will just offer the blog version as an abstract of what those volumes would consist of if I wrote them.

In brief, we teach the ethos of argument and the rhetorics of media.

The ethos of argument: Argument, when formulated well and supported rigorously can serve as one of the best defenses against the most destructive tendencies of the political animal. Argument has never been the sole guarantee of cultural sanity, nor the all-in-one solution on the quest for the golden balance between freedom and social justice. In fact, one could argue that argument and democracy share the distinction of remaining the best two unfulfilled promises of history. And yet those of us who teach continue to hope, because we know that the good argument, the one that supports its claims with tight-knit reasons, solid evidence, well-linked warrants, and a healthy dose of humility in the face of dissension, THAT argument makes myth, ideology, propaganda, slogans, and the whole lot of the rhetorical vices quake at the core. As a teacher of argument, one of the most radical things that I can do in class is leave overt discussion of my political ideas out of the equation and focus on the principles of good argumentation (many of my students still wonder where I fall on the spectrum). No wonder the enemies of argument are legion.

The rhetorics of media: Still a new idea to some, and bears repeating: Words do not exist outside of some embodiment. That body can be a piece of paper, a book, a series of 1′s and 0′s that processed the right way convert into meaningful glyphs on our blogs. Voices roll from our tongues, our record players, to the beat of a tune, or not. You get the point. Interestingly enough, each of these media change words, or text as we like to say around here. That difference can be reverse-engineered. We can know what each medium adds and detracts from the other, what specific effects we can create here and there, and much more. The writing teacher teaches transparency, and in her whistle-blowing mission, she reveals the cogs and sprockets behind texts. The writing teacher campaigns against the blind act of faith that trusts words to x or y medium pell-mell without reflection. He knows that those who are aware of the techne can refine their arguments, add layers of meaning, throw a dash of beauty into the mix for good measure, in short, take ownership of their discourse. This engagement with the mechanics of our media seems to me more of a responsibility than a right when I see first-hand how it deters the alibis of ignorance and guards us against those who continue to use this knowledge to deceive.

So there it is in industrial strength concentration: I do not teach writing because it can lead to prosperity (although argument tells you that blessed is the society that can live in shared prosperity), nor because it makes you more creative (a great side-effect which has been observed in some of our clients!). No, I teach writing because I believe it is the closest we get to a medium for hope.

I join my voice to the NWP. Their networked model and their engagement with the network are a blueprint for the kind of writing that I would like my sons to learn. Their success and practice speak the volumes that this small abstract clumsily aspires to. Please support them by sending an open letter to posterous, or do as I did, and #blog4nwp. Government is on off tonight. Let’s do this before their switch turns back on and we find the room to be emptier.

Here’s why I ask: Working with the support of NINES and Nick Laiacona, we are considering a series of grant proposals to transform Juxta from an analytical tool to a representational tool (i.e. an online scholarly edition maker) and yes, follow along to a more open environment. So, as my initial gesture of openness, I want to invite you to do one of two things:

• Leave a comment below. Knowing what we now know, what would you like the ideal online scholarly edition to be?
• Comment, tweak, critique, add to, step on this collaborative brainstorm.

:

Hardly anyone will argue that a paradigm shift is upon us following the advent of digital editions. Perhaps one of the most vaunted changes is the seemingly unlimited space that computers provide, so that the old restrictions of the print edition (ex., one book, one text), disappear when we make the transition to the cloud. Now that we have these possibilities, it is difficult to look back at the proliferation of critical editions in the 20th century, which aimed to establish an authoritative text that would fit the bill, without questioning all the theoretical industry that went into rationalizing them.

Has genetic criticism not also been caught in this carnal sin? One of the cornerstones of genetic criticism, for example, continues to be the conceptual demarcation of pre- and post-publication texts. This jealously policed border severing the chronology of a work coincides with the need during the early years of genetic criticism to carve out a niche in the world of editorial projects where manuscripts (and their study) could be disseminated in a way deserving of the power of the press. At the time, geneticists were under heavy attack from those zealous souls who revered authors’ final wishes. While critical editors of the past were happy to borrow from working papers to bolster their claims about an author’s wishes —even if they kept only glimpses of the manuscripts tucked away in their apparati— genetic critics stopped cross-border traffic all together. After all, the early genetic critics were not medieval Irish monks, and the development of more efficient photographic techniques in print, together with increased access to modern archives, had made manuscript dissemination feasible once more —territorial claims had to be made.

Now a new material reality and reader practice bears upon scholars. As a result, we are starting to see a push in many different quarters for a marriage between genetic and textual criticism, a blur between the epochal pre- and post-publication divide—yes, simply because we believe we can have our cake and eat it too. Several grand online editions have sprouted all over the digital landscape with a diverse set of editorial philosophies and uneven degrees of quality. Perhaps the famous Rosetti Archive’s proof-of-concept still provides one of the best examples of what has been done so far to take advantage of an ample digital space. The Archive not only brings print versions in dialogue with Rosetti’s manuscripts, it also brings both of these in dialogue with Rosetti’s visual art. Jerome McGann, the lead investigator of the RA, would be the first to admit the archive was a “failure,” but only in so far as it points our lamps to the dark road ahead for digital editing.

Not surprisingly, alongside this growing number of editorial projects, we are seeing a new batch of theories that justify the translation of objects which erstwhile enjoyed a different ontological status into a common medium. We are, I would say, in the midst of a theory rush. Though we are all sinners here, moved to think by our machines, as we relocate to this brave new world, those with critical, editorial and digital masteries should strive for theoretical work that does not come as gratuitous alibi for our new toys. Even more important perhaps, we should endeavor to protect the hard-earned lessons of the past that connect editorial practices to larger questions about literary texts. I would like to begin some of my own observations in this direction via a strong critique of one of the most visible textual theories to come out of American textual studies in recent years: John Bryant’s theory of “The Fluid Text.” Bryant provides an excellent starting point for several reasons: He only arrives to digital editing after flirting with print editions; his claims about texts transcend the pre- and post-publication divide; he tries to reconcile the eclectic, social-text and genetic camps; and, his digital edition of Herman Melville’s “Typee” has many features which make it a model work of electronic editing.

All texts that show variance, whether pre- or post-publication, are fluid-texts, argues Bryant, and the task of the fluid-text’s historian/editor is to focus

on the interpretation of private and public pasts in order to make the evidence of literary versions, revision, and adaptation accessible to readers for critical and cultural analysis. (61)

So far, so good. Such a spirit of inclusiveness and public generosity effectively allows for these grand editions stepping only on the toes of those invested in definitive editions. In order to arrive at this exhortation, though, he manages to undermine a few crucial distinctions along the way. He begins his book, The Fluid Text: A Theory of Revision and Editing for Book and Screen, by pitting G.T. Tanselle’s “intentionalism” against a straw-man of Jerome McGann’s “social-text.” In order to carve out a space for his own fluid-text, he misreads McGann to be only concerned with the post-publication life of texts. In his haste, he misses one of McGann’s most important insights: what makes a text social is already rigged into the textual condition itself in as much as all texts, at any given stage of their career, participate in an “editorial horizon (the horizon of their production and reproduction).” (McGann 21)

The misreading becomes important when we try to understand why Bryant felt he had to add a new category to McGann’s distinction between a linguistic code and a bibliographic code. For a digital edition which could take in pages in the order of gygabytes, which showcased a hypertextual apparatus plus side-by-side comparisons, he needed a category which could be operative anywhere the author made a revision, (manuscript, print, proof, a napkin, you name it), and he sort of found it there in a pocket of his own sewing. He calls this new category the revision code, “a bibliographic encoding of an authorially intended revision strategy.” (Bryant 55) This unfortunate hybrid comes from the failure to acknowledge that McGann’s insistence on the bibliographic code already implicated the documentary realm. In other words, a revision in a manuscript can be easily understood within that already strange marriage between the linguistic and the extra-linguistic (read bibliographic) which characterizes the textual condition, without recourse to a mystifying third. The difference, if any is to be made, lies in the distinction between public and private. That working papers were not meant to be distributed widely, does not mean their non-linguistic codes are not imbricated with the graphemes in meaning-production.

With the “revision code” in his toolkit, in a chapter with an aptly pop-Buddhist title, “Work as Energy,” Bryant finally arrives at his “ontology of process.” This he associates with genetic criticism, but because he must transcend the pre-publication camp as well, he will define texts as the “manifestations of a culture over time.” (62) No longer the author, nor particular social contexts, but a flow of energy over “a culture” unbinds the literary work and in turn justifies the fluid-text edition. But how can we speak of a culture in these terms? In Césaire’s case, we know his texts operated in many different cultural spaces (read here editorial horizons): surrealist, anti-colonialist, Marxist, etc. Without looking it up, I bet the same could be said for Melville.

Finally, the need to corner the market on the revision code, his foundation for the grand digital edition that a dash of PHP and CSS stirred in a pot of HTML makes possible, requires him to oppose revision to genesis (defined by him as non-revised text) —territorial claims are being made. This move leads Bryant to offer a very troubling statement: “What can one say about genesis except that it is everything and nothing to speak of? Words happen. They seem to come from nowhere. Ab nihilo. Boom. What can you say?” (94) My friends, if indeed one cannot say anything about non-revised text or genesis, our business model is in trouble; so, before we have to declare Chapter 11 on our intellectual inheritance, let me answer Bryant’s question and get down to business:

There are only additions, deletions and transpositions. Everything else is superstition.

Works Cited

Bryant, John. The Fluid Text: A Theory of Revision and Editing for Book and Screen. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Print.

McGann, Jerome J. The Textual Condition. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991. Print.

In 1944 and 1945, two poems by Césaire with the title “Poème” appeared in the Martinique journal Tropiques. Both of these were presented as part of an upcoming play, “Et les chiens se taisaient.” Both of these eventually did become part of the Oratorio lyrique that was published under the name “Et les chiens se taisaient” in 1946 as part of the poetry collection Les Armes miraculeuses. The “Poème” published in Buenos Aires, on the 15th of April of 1945, issue N°16 of Lettres françaises, turns out to be an almost exact replica of the first of these, published almost a year earlier in May of 1944, issue N°11 of Tropiques. There are a few differences in line breaks, namely in the second and third line, but the substantials and accidentals remain the same. The most striking difference is the absence of the note at the end of the poem which in Tropiques declares it to be part of “(Et les chiens se taisaient. ACTE I.)” effectively transforming the piece from a fragment to a stand-alone poem. Despite this recasting, the substantial overlap makes it seem likely that the text was taken directly from a physical copy of the Tropiques issue where it first appeared and not from a manuscript.

“Poème” is a brief poem of 35 lines. In the context of the ur-text of “Et les chiens se taisaient” where we find these lines for the first time, they belong to the beginning of the play, more specifically to Toussaint Louverture’s forceful response to the ominous refrains of the ‘Recitants,’ who foretell war and death : “Hé bien, je périrai. Mais nu. Intact. Ma main dans ma main [...]” Within the play, the lines reflect Toussaint’s dismissal of death in the face of a violent opening unto nature, a merger of sorts with the unbound. A series of images follow of the speaker standing naked, on the welcoming end of rapid-fire lacerations:

nu comme l’eau
nu comme le regard unicorne de midi
comme le cri et la morsure
[...]
je suis nu dans les pierres
Approchez donc les flammes effilées, paquets de frisson.
Que la senteur des feux jette son javelot autour de ma tête.

Outside of its former context, the “Poème” of Tropiques and Lettres françaises ceases to respond to fate. What was once the threat of history, doubling the sense of these lines, now boils down to nature/words, the ambivalent enemy engulfing the naked man.

After the poem is published as a fragment, it will become part of the first published version of the work, the oratorio lyrique. In this new context the lines migrate to the end of the play, moments before Le Rebelle will indeed be tortured to death. Foreboding, no doubt, but not much of a prelude. In this new context then, locked in a gray cell, besieged by gray temptations, the cascade of luscious images creates a new contrast that could not belong to the previous two. Again, it is only in the “Poème” fragment where we can read the lines in such a way that man is confronted solely with nature, where the lines are blurred between the two. Despite all other important differences that a comparison of the versions reveals, it is this reading which is the most curious when we consider where the fragment was published (and by where I mean by whom).

It is hard to say whether the text ended in R. Caillois’ hand without Césaire’s knowledge, perhaps through the intermediary hand of A. Breton, or whether Césaire was collaborating with Caillois directly. Around this time, a decade before Césaire famously crushes Caillois’ racist ideology in Discours sur le colonialisme, Césaire was already wary of Caillois, to say the least. In the correspondence between Césaire and Breton during the war years, Césaire comes out swinging against his fellow normalien several times.[3] After reading Caillois’ short essay “Les arbres de Lapa” published in New York in issue N°4 of Hémisphères (January 1944), Césaire complains to Breton in a letter dated January 17, 1944 about Caillois’s anti-poetic tendencies. In the following letter, dated April 4, 1944, in case Breton missed the point, Césaire comments to Breton, apropos of the same text, that Caillois is certainly intelligent, BUT —he suggests in no uncertain terms— also old, boring and stiff.[4]

The essay by Caillois that so ruffled Césaire’s feathers argues, rather poetically, that the artist must guard against using nature as a justification for his own chaotic impulses. Always the social theorist, he repeats here in terms of the ideal artist his early idea that sentient beings have a tendency to mimic or become absorbed by what they see in nature, what he calls elsewhere psychasthénie légendaire.[5] Towards the end of the essay he prescribes restraint in a manner that, at least for me, augurs some of Derek Walcott‘s relationship to poetic form:

Mais une mystérieuse discipline commande à l’inverse d’apaiser avec rigueur ces insolents remous pour qu’une grande paix leur succède et que, de leur turbulence, ne subsiste que la force d’âme qui s’est trempée en les domptant et qui, pour en avoir triomphé, sait emplir et gonfler la ligne d´un noble style [...] (64, 66)

I understand why Césaire might have taken issue with this argument. In the same letter where he chastises Caillois, Césaire declares his allegiance to the surrealist movement in terms of a freedom from rules, prosodic or otherwise. This is also the same letter where he asks Breton to downgrade the manuscript version of “Et les chiens se taisaient” to the status of a canvas because its historicity was an uncomfortable rem(a)inder of the unbearable weight of what the surrealists would call the thesis or theme. At this juncture, freedom was THE master signifier for Césaire, and to him it was linked directly to poetry and surrealism.

It is curious then that one of Césaire’s poems appears the next year in issue N° 16 of Caillois’ journal, Lettres françaises. Did something change during the span of a year? So far, I can’t tell with certainty whether Césaire was in direct communication with Caillois, but it is certainly possible. For all I know they knew each other from the haunts around Rue d’Ulm or the Rue Saint Jacques in the 30s. They were both the same age and they were both in hypokhâgne class at Louis-le-Grand (1931-1932), then in khâgne (1932-1933). Caillois was admitted to the ENS first, and it is possible that the seeds of resentment were planted around that time. We do know with certainty that Césaire is aware of the existence of the Buenos Aires journal. He complains in a very brief letter to Breton posted from Haiti on October 28, 1944 that Caillois has taken him to task in Lettres françaises following an article by Breton. [6] Although it shows that Césaire is indeed aware of LF, it remains a rather mysterious comment to me. As far as I could see while I had the LF volumes in my hands there were only a few mentions of Césaire before his own poem was published there, but nothing that fits what he describes.

On issue N°3, January 1, 1942, LF publishes Breton’s and Masson’s “Le Dialogue Créole,” which would later become part of Martinique, charmeuse de serpents, but no direct mention of Césaire occurs in this early piece. By the time he is mentioned in LF later that year, it is true that he is taken to task… sort of. In issue N°6, November 1st, 1942, in a review of the different articles of the 1st issue of VVV (June 1942), we find a review of “Conquête de l’Aube” right after a review of Breton’s “Prolègomènes to a Third Manifest of Surrealism or Else” (which does not mention Césaire). The review of “Conquête de l’Aube” was short and to the point, so much so that we feel we can quote it here whole:

Aimé Césaire: Conquête de l’Aube. Poème d’une notable puissance lyrique malheureusement affaiblie par l’emploi de nombreaux adjectifs trop automatiquement poétiques, du genre: extatique, merveilleux, somnambule, convulsif, incendiaire, etc. (56)

In issue N° 15 of LF, Césaire’s name appears again next to Breton’s, this time in a review of issue N° 35 of Fontaine. In that issue of Fontaine, Césaire’s “Batouque” appears right after Breton’s “Un grand poète noir.” A series of confusing notes in LF send us from Césaire “(voir note précedent)” to Breton “(voir la note à propos de la conférence de Bernanos)” to a note on G. Bernanos’ “Sur le cas de conscience français” where it becomes clear that Caillois is not happy with a notice on the verso of the cover of that issue of Fontaine which claims that “La revue ne publie que de l’inédit.” All three of the texts to which the interconnected notes belonged were reprints. “C’est trop abuser le lecteur,” gripes Caillois. None of the notes give us any commentary on the texts themselves.

Besides the poem itself, this is the extent of Césaire’s presence in LF as far as I was able to see. If indeed I didn’t miss a thing, it means that Césaire just heard about his name being mentioned from a third party, that somehow it was linked to Breton and that he never saw an issue directly. The wording of the comment to Breton in the Haiti letter also suggests to me that what he heard about LF did not come from Breton, although I’m open for alternative readings.

We also know that Caillois at some point had Césaire’s address. In a letter dated April 2, 1945 Césaire informs Breton that he was surprised to receive a copy of Les impostures de la poèsie from Caillois (although Césaire doesn’t refer to him by his proper name). This arrival by post comes days before the publication of “Poème” in LF. It is indeed possible that the two had established a correspondence, but why the surprise on Césaire’s part to receive the text? Why also continue the vituperations if they are collaborating? I think we may only answer these questions if a correspondence between the two comes to light. In the meantime, we do have evidence that Breton is collaborating with Caillois in LF early, that Caillois reads “Un grand poète noir” before he decides to publish a poem by the young poet from Martinique and that it was not the first time that Breton shared a text of Césaire with those in a position to publish them without informing him —after all, the reason why the early typescript of “Et les chiens se taisaient” ended up in Saint-Dié des Vosges was because Breton passed the loose sheets to Yvan Goll with God knows what purpose.

I can’t say either way. Thus far, I’m tempted to agree with my colleague and friend Kora Veron Leblé when she quips that “Césaire ne met jamais tous ses oeufs dans le même panier.” (Alas, some idiomatic phrases translate just fine). This begs the question of course, are they the same eggs in different baskets? I will try to answer this question and more in the near future.

[1] Lettres françaises was published under the imprint of Sur with the help of Victoria Ocampo, “la mujer mas Argentina,” as Borges would call her. Borges himself appears in the journal on a few occasions. Besides Césaire and Borges, many other important writers of the time left their imprint on its pages, making it one of the most important French language journals of the war period.

[2] This will be the subject of an upcoming post on Césaire and the culture of reprint that fueled the internationalization of surrealism. Stay tuned.

[3] My gratitude to René Henane for allowing me to consult his transcriptions of the correspondence housed at the Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet in Paris and for his friendship. Because of their unfortunate policies regarding citations, during the course of this post I am forced to use paraphrase when I refer to the correspondence. Let those few bless’d souls who have graced the hollowed grounds of Doucet judge whether I do justice to the texts or not.

[4] Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet, fonds André Breton (BRT.C.448 and BRT.C.449).

[5] See “Mimétisme et psychasthénie légendaire,” Minotaure, 7, 1935. On an interesting note, Lacan will borrow this concept from Caillois as one of the building blocks of his theory of the mirror stage.

[6] Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet, fonds André Breton (BRT.C.455). [Enveloppe. Cachet postal : 30 octobre 1944. Monsieur André Breton / 45 W 56th St / New York / N.Y. / États-Unis. Exp. : A. Césaire. c/o Légation de France. Port-au-Prince / Haïti.]