TY - JOUR AU - Kalisch, Michael AB - ‘I’ve gone back to longhand’, Colm Tóibín tells fellow Irish novelist Collum McCann, in a television interview from 1999.1 Returning to pen and paper has provided ‘a particular control over the sentences’, Tóibín explains, and he has discovered that he is ‘enjoying the almost, sort of physical presence of the words on the page’: I realised that one of the problems with using a word processor is how easy it is to correct, and therefore you tend to feel that, ‘Oh, I’ve corrected that’, when in fact all you’ve done is read it over and changed bits. Tóibín goes on to state his preference for a ‘smudgy biro’ over a computer, rubbing his fingers to his thumb as he talks. And he describes the pleasure he derives from writing out the names of the characters in the novel he is just finishing: ‘the “L” for Lily … and the “P” for Paul. All my “P’s” are quite seriously made.’2 But at the end of his answer, Tóibín counterbalances his effusiveness. Working by hand, he tells McCann, ‘is probably exactly the same as working on a word processor’. The kinds of difference the invention of word processors did and didn’t make to the way writers work is the subject of Matthew Kirschenbaum’s new book. Heidegger hated the typewriter, and ‘would have really detested the “word processor”’, J. Hillis Miller notes.3 Believing that ‘the hand holds the essence of man’, Heidegger – whose own ‘hands and posture’ made him ‘the perfect penman’, according to David Krell4 – insisted that Handschrift, handwriting, was a crucial concomitant to thought itself. As such it was central, Sarah Jackson observes in Tactile Poetics, to his ‘metaphysics of presence and immediacy’.5 ‘The typewriter tears writing from the essential realm of the hand, i.e. the realm of the word’, Heidegger suggests in Parmenides, and thus renders ‘the word itself something “typed”’.6 It’s a view that was pervasive for a time among historians of communication technology.7 Most influentially, perhaps, Friedrich Kittler followed Heidegger’s lead in his landmark work of literary sociology, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, with which Kirschenbaum’s excellent study is in dialogue. The typewriter ‘unlinks hand, eye, and letter’, Kittler writes, thus disrupting ‘the play between Man the sign-setter and the writing surface’.8 But of course this ‘play’ was never entirely unmediated; a pen or pencil also amounts, Hillis Miller points out, to a kind of ‘technical prosthesis’, as much as a typewriter or a computer.9 As Derrida suggests in ‘Word Processing’, all writing takes place within this ‘theatre of the prosthesis’, and ‘when one writes “by hand” … instrumentality has not been postponed’; rather, one is already encountering, as he puts it elsewhere, ‘the ageless intrusion of technics’.10 The advent of word processing represents another iteration of this ‘intrusion’, one akin to, but also distinct from, that of the typewriter. As Kirschenbaum sees it, ‘word processing hovers uneasily between the comfortably familiar and the encroachingly alien’; rather than simply a ‘reimplementation or remediation of typewriting’, word processing is part of ‘an ongoing negotiation of what the act of writing means’ (p. 23). Central to this is what Kirschenbaum, following Daniel Chandler, characterises as the word processor’s unique method of ‘suspended inscription’, in which ‘the stored record of the text is separate from whatever the medium or surface on which it is ultimately printed’ (p. 46).11 This suspension, ‘both temporal and locative in nature’ (p. 47), raises the prospect of a new kind of open-ended, always provisional textuality: ‘One is led to believe’, as Derrida puts it, ‘that revision could go on indefinitely. An interminable revision.’12 Derrida captures something of the double-edged quality to the word processor’s promise of limitless and instantaneous adjustment and refinement – the sense that, as Tóibín suggests, the computer makes changing your mind a little too easy. Tóibín also intimates that the kinds of ‘correction’ the word processor leads one to make are not ‘real’ corrections, of the kind he was used to making by hand; which is to say that word processing didn’t simply make revision easier, but changed the nature of revision itself. It is wrong to assume that revision ‘works in the same way for all writers at all points in time, regardless of medium’, Hannah Sullivan notes in The Work of Revision; rather, ‘the possibility of revision is premised on the possibility of both textual flux and textual fixity’, a dialectic, Kirschenbaum suggests, which was fundamentally recalibrated by the new imaginative space opened up by suspended inscription.13 This raises challenges for the scholar looking to recover and analyse the compositional history of a digital-born text; ‘writing done with a word processor’, as Chandler suggests, ‘obscures its own evolution’.14 Kirschenbaum does point to some of the ways in which word processors now record alterations – not least through the ‘Track Changes’ function that gives his book its title. But of course Track Changes only works if you switch it on, and tends, anyway, to be used only when a third party is involved in the editorial process, not during the initial stages of composition. Inevitably, stuff gets lost. ‘I don’t have a single early draft of any novel or story’, Zadie Smith admits, ‘I just “saved” over the originals until I reached the final version.’15 Philip Roth, who began using MS-DOS in the early 1990s (and continued to do so for the next twenty years), similarly observes that ‘I’m doing so much changing as I go along that the drafts disappear, as it were, into the rewrites.’16 A chapter of my Ph.D. is on Roth, and having visited the Library of Congress’s vast collection of his papers, dating from the 1960s to the early 2000s, I can say it is hard not to feel disappointed by the material record of his later work compared to what came before: the great mess of hand-annotated, partial drafts, variously cut up and rearranged, with post-it notes and newspaper clippings stapled to sections, is replaced by two or three clean and complete word-processed manuscripts that all but match the final published version. But Kirschenbaum is keen to challenge the ‘techno-fatalism’ (p. 210) that limns many an elegy for the archive. In his first book, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, and in earlier essays, he challenged the commonplace of electronic media’s ‘supposed ephemerality’, noting that digital data, and in particular magnetic disk storage, is ‘one of the most persistent and indelible forms of inscription we have yet devised’, storing data that is ‘routinely recovered through multiple generations of overwrites’.17 If, on the one hand, the textual malleability and fluidity of word processing’s suspended inscription threaten to ‘overwrite’ the intricacies of a text’s compositional history then, on the other, Kirschenbaum also suggests that a forensic approach to the digital archive presents ‘potentially unprecedented opportunities for scholarship’, offering a new ‘granularity in our literary histories’ (p. 229) that builds upon the traditions of genetic criticism, philology, and analytic bibliography that already inform much work in the digital humanities. Mechanisms took Kirschenbaum down to the ‘nanoscale’ of digital inscription in his effort to counter the trend within new media studies of discussing the conceptual and phenomenological issues surrounding electronic texts rather than their materiality. Track Changes zooms out to tell a much broader history of how ‘word processing changed the face of literary culture and our imagination of literary authorship’ (p. 243); but it does so with a similar attention to material detail. The main chapters of the book trace the word processor’s early genealogy, from 1964, when the IBM Magnetic Tape/Selectric Typewriter first went on the market, to 1984, when Apple’s Macintosh popularised graphical user interfaces of the kind we use today. The general outline of this history is not surprising. It’s no great shock to learn, for example, that for many writers, word processing was burdened with associations of ‘mechanisation, automation, and repetition; bureaucracy, productivity, and office work’ (p. 16), or that early adopters tended to be (male) science fiction writers. Nor, perhaps, are the responses of these first users to the new technology unexpected: seduced by the allure of perfectly typed, easily revisable texts, writers were also wary of entrusting their drafts to a floppy disk (which, at 5¼ inches, really were floppy back then). But Kirschenbaum’s way of telling this history does recover a sense of just how strange the experience of using these early machines must have been. By structuring his narrative around a series of case histories and anecdotes, and by focusing on the work patterns of individual writers and the precise configuration of their hardware and software, Kirschenbaum reveals the variety and peculiarity – not to mention the fragility – of these early technologies, such that Track Changes not only captures the complex materiality of late twentieth-century writing but defamiliarises the whole process of writing on a screen. One vignette gives a flavour of this. Kirschenbaum details the genesis of The Talisman (1984), a horror novel written by Stephen King and Peter Straub. King lived in Maine and Straub a six-hour drive away in Connecticut. In ‘a leap of faith’, both hoped that new word processor and computer technology would ‘somehow facilitate the long-distance collaboration’ (p. 60). Straub, after being assured by a salesman that ‘he and King, despite their different word processing systems, would be able to send electronic files back and forth using something called a modem’, acquired an IBM DisplayWriter 6580: The system had no hard drive. Using it required first ‘booting’ it with a program stored externally on an 8-inch disk. (Despite the elephantine dimensions, each of the disks stored only about 280 kilobytes, nowhere near enough for a full novel). The actual word processing program was known as Textpack. After a minute or so of clicking and clacking from the boot disk, the IBM logo would appear in phosphorescent green in the lower right-hand corner. The screen itself was 80 by 20 characters. A user would begin a document by selecting a ‘typing task’ from the main menu. The DisplayWriter was compatible with several good-quality IBM printers … transmission rates would have been between 300 and 1,200 baud, or between 30 and 120 characters per second – so no more than around 1,000 words a minute even under the best of circumstances. Still, it was faster than driving back and forth between Bangor and Westport … ‘Steve could actually see the lines going across his screen,’ Straub recalls. ‘I couldn’t on mine. I had to call it up later, after it was all in. But Steve could see things as they came in, which I thought was something.’ Indeed it must have been: watching text scrolling down a video screen in one’s home office as it was being transmitted over a telephone line. (pp. 60–1) There’s a certain fetishising of antiquated technology going on here, to be sure; but it is through this careful delineation of the ‘material particulars of various technologies of writing’ (p. 243) that Kirschenbaum builds up a picture of the ways in which word processors changed the kinds of ‘authorial labour’ that contributed to literary production. Indeed, he shows that if word processors were a labour-saving tool for authors in some respects, they also created – or, more accurately, redistributed – other kinds of work. The last thing John Updike wrote on his typewriter was addressed to his soon to be ex-typist: ‘Why don’t you charge me $1.25 per page?’, he suggests, ‘I have a word processor now and won’t be needing too much more typing’ (p. 91). Kirschenbaum’s focus throughout is on the work of literature rather than works of literature, and Track Changes is a deeply researched literary sociology, not a ‘stylistic study’ (p. xii). But he does discuss a handful of texts that explicitly reflect upon their status as ‘word-processed’ literary objects. Some of the earlier examples of these are little more than curios which seem as dated as the operating systems upon which they were written – Stephen King’s story ‘The Word Processor’, for example, in which the protagonist finds that he can edit and revise his real life by way of the machine’s INSERT, DELETE, and EXECUTE keys (pp. 77–83). The New Yorker rejected Updike’s rather terrible attempt at a poem about his word processor, ‘INVALID. KEYSTROKE’: the problem with ‘the idea of the poem and the way it’s done’, an editor wrote to him, is ‘that after the first few lines, you’ve got it’ (p. 88). But Kirschenbaum also points to more recent, more substantial examples of the ways in which word processing has entered our metaphorics. Joan Didion begins The Year of Magical Thinking by describing the Word document containing the first words she wrote after her husband’s death: Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity. Those were the first words I wrote after it happened. The computer dating on the Microsoft Word file (‘Notes on change.doc’) reads ‘May 20, 2002. 11:11 p.m.,’ but that would have been a case of my opening the file and reflexively pressing save when I closed it. I had made no changes to that file in May. I had made no changes to that file since I wrote the words, in January 2002 a day or two or three after the fact.18 ‘Reflexively’ here indicates the extent to which word processing has become an instinctive part of how a contemporary writer works; but Didion is also alluding to the way in which the text ‘reflexively’ comments upon its own composition. While the word processor claims a kind of intimate knowledge of the text, recording its exact moment of late-night revision, Didion not only observes that the machine is inaccurate, but intimates that its precision is a kind of useless knowledge. The word processor’s promise of total recall and perfect recovery becomes a means to reflect upon the memoir’s own effort to record and process change, and to reconstruct a very different kind of personal history. This ambivalence, Kirschenbaum shows us, is paradigmatic of the scene of writing in the age of the word processor, a period when not only the daily work patterns of writers but the wider networks making up the various sites of literary production changed dramatically. His account reveals this history in all its whirring, clanking materiality, while also reconstituting a sense of how, when authors looked into what Updike called the ‘delicate opacity’ of the computer screen, they began to see their work differently. Footnotes 1 ‘Colm Tóibín: Losing Himself in Writing’, . Thanks to Freddy Foks for drawing my attention to this interview. 2 The novel to which Tóibín refers is The Blackwater Lightship (London 1999). A character called Lily runs a small company selling ‘training courses in computers and word processors’ to ‘businesses and individuals’ wishing to ‘computerise’ (p. 92). 3 J. Hillis Miller, For Derrida (New York 2009) p. 261. 4 David Farrell Krell, ‘Work Sessions with Martin Heidegger’, Philosophy Today, 26/2 (Summer 1982) pp. 126–38: 137. 5 Sarah Jackson, Tactile Poetics: Touch and Contemporary Writing (Edinburgh 2015) p. 136. 6 Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington 1992) p. 81. 7 For an overview, see Steven Connor, ‘Modernism and the Writing Hand’ (1999), . 8 Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens (Stanford 1990) p. 195. 9 Miller, For Derrida, p. 261. 10 Jacques Derrida, ‘Word Processing’, Oxford Literary Review, 21 (1999) pp. 3–17: 3, 4; Derrida, On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford 2005) p. 113. See also Derrida, ‘Heidegger’s Hand (Geschlecht II)’, trans. John P. Leavey Jr., in John Sallis (ed.), Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida (Chicago 1987) pp. 161–96. 11 Daniel Chandler, ‘The Phenomenology of Writing by Hand’, Intelligent Tutoring Media, 3/2–3 (1992) pp. 65–77. 12 Derrida, ‘Word Processing’, p. 8. 13 Hannah Sullivan, The Work of Revision (Cambridge, Mass. 2013) pp. 8–9. For Kirschenbaum and Sullivan discussing the links between their work, see ‘On Instruments of Composition’, . 14 Chandler, ‘The Phenomenology of Writing by Hand’, p. 68. 15 Rachel Donadio, ‘Literary Letters, Lost in Cyberspace’, New York Times (4 Sept. 2005), quoted in Kirschenbaum, Track Changes, p. 226. 16 See ‘Philip Roth Talks to David L. Ulin’, LA Times (1 Oct. 2010), , quoted in Kirschenbaum, Track Changes, p. 226. 17 Matthew Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge, Mass. 2008) pp. 19, 17. See also Matthew Kirschenbaum and Doug Reside, ‘Tracking the Changes: Textual Scholarship and the Challenge of the Born Digital’, in Neil Fraistat and Julia Flanders (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship (Cambridge 2013). 18 Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (New York 2005) p. 3. © The Author, 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Cambridge Quarterly. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com TI - Cutting and Pasting JF - The Cambridge Quarterly DO - 10.1093/camqtly/bfx013 DA - 2017-09-01 UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/cutting-and-pasting-LAe7YibzzT SP - 274 EP - 281 VL - 46 IS - 3 DP - DeepDyve ER -