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Visualizing “Wandering Rocks”: Paper, Yarn, and Processing

August 24, 2010 in Digital Humanities, literature, modernism | 6 comments

Text Visualization with Paper and Yarn

“I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors and paste man for that seems to me a harsh but not unjust description.”—James Joyce

So, let’s say you took Gabler’s edition of Ulysses, photocopied each page of “Wandering Rocks” (episode 10) at 50% of its normal size, and then taped them all together. You now have one long piece of paper. Cut at the breaks between the nineteen sections of which the episode is composed and you have nineteen pieces of paper—one for each of the episode’s sections. The sizes of these pieces, of course, would vary; the first (describing Father Conmee’s walk and trip on the tram) would be the longest.

Next, grab some yarn and some paper clips (because they’re handy). Cut some short lengths of yarn. Tie a paper clip to each end. Now let’s have a look at the second sheet (“Text Interruptions”) in this Google Doc, containing a list of moments in “Wandering Rocks” where a recognizable line from one section intrudes in another. Take one end of your paper-clip/yarn device and clip to the line where a reference occurs; connected the other side to the area referenced (the Gabler edition has lines numbers; that is chiefly why we’re using).

When all is said and done, with some variability depending on how exactly you connect things, you might have something that looks like this:

Wandering Rocks, Visualized in Paper

(Check out this Flickr image for an annotated version of the same image.)

This is a sort of basic visualization of the connections between the sections of “Wandering Rocks.” Using scissors and some basic office supplies you can begin to get a grip on how, precisely, the various sections of the episode related to one another.

This only visualizes, however, one of the ways in which these sections are connected. Certain characters, for example, help synchronize the sections by appearing in more than one section: this is not visualized (perhaps we could highlight proper names which occur in more than one section; or connect them with a different colored thread). Location also helps synchronize the sections: Bloom, Stephen, and his sister all appear at the book stall, for instance. Maybe we could lay the nineteen pieces of paper out on a map (how would we handle the episodes where characters are moving?). You’ll notice that I haven’t even tried to make sense of the final, nineteenth section, where many of the characters see the cavalcade as it moves through Dublin (its movement appears in a number of other sections too). Have a look at the Google Doc to see my raw data; if you think you can improve it, email me (cforster @ virginia.edu) and I’ll happily add you as an editor for the document.

It is also worth remembering that the chief unit of analysis here is the “line” in the Gabler edition. But all “lines” within the narration are not equal in terms of the time narrated. So you can line up the sections based on the synchronizations within the sections; but these provide only a point of synchronization; you cannot extrapolate out beyond that point.

There isn’t too much to be learned from this very basic attempt to get a handle on the complexity of this episode. But it does seem interesting that sections tend to branch out—rather than, for instance, many sections all referring to one section (though this situation is precisely that of the final section, which I have ignored; and, in another, of Father Conmee’s walk which, through its geographical progression, may relate to other sections in ways I have ignored).

This yarn stuff is fun, but wouldn’t it be nice to have this digitally? Let’s take this and do it in processing. In trying to write up in code this same visualization, I think the chief lesson of playing with yarn is that there are essentially two key types of objects for this analysis: chunks of text (representable as a rectangle of length propotional to the amount of text they represent); and flexible connections between parts of the text (not necessarily between sections: a link could, theoretically, be within a single section).

These two types of things were instatiated as two basic classes in my code: textChunk and connection. A textChunk contains its starting line and ending line, its length (computed as the difference between those first two pieces of data; I keep it onboard rather than re-computing it constantly), and a quick description (stored as a String); each textChunk object also contains the coordinates of its current location on the screen. The connection objects similarly contain the points they link together (stored as simply two integers representing the two line numbers that are linked; we don’t even need x,y coordinates since we’re working with a basically one dimensional representation of the text here). There are also a handful of methods for these objects: constructors to load up the data (though the way the data is currently stored/loaded is an embarassment); some methods to draw the objects, etc.

Here is what is looks like, comparing my yarn visualization with my version in processing (not too bad, huh?):

Two Visualizations Compared: One Paper, One Digital

(In mapping things out, I got some of the inspiration here from my friend & colleague Jean Bauer‘s much more sophisticated tool for visualizing relational databases, Davila, also written in processing; originally I was simply going to gut her code and repurpose it here; but her code is far more elegant than mine, and is designed for situations far more complex. It made sense to just start from scratch.)

Each object bridges the gap between what it represents (which remains basically static) and the current state of its representation (which can be moved around and interacted with).

Wandering Rocks Visualized

The interactions are basic. You can grab each textChunk and move it around manually. Hovering over a block will produce a little description of that block in the white section near the bottom of the window. You can hit ‘a’ and the blocks will automatically align. That function isn’t working entirely perfectly yet, so I had to do manually massage things a bit to get them to look as these do above.

But as you move the blocks around, the connections stretch and keep the links between the sections evident. The blocks lined up on the right hand side are those without connections. (Oh yeah, those curved white lines; they’re my beginning of an attempt to mark the skiff’s progress.)

There would be other ways to begin visualizing “Wandering Rocks” (and I’d love to hear suggestions). And there are certainly ways to improve this one. One could attach the entire text (its available through Project Gutenberg y’know) of each section; though I’m not sure what the advantage would be of doing that would be. The colors just alternate now (for odd and even sections), to avoid sheer monochromatism. But the color of the textChunk could be tied to location or character; similarly the color of the connection could be made meaningful in some way.

I may post the code if I can get it cleaned up enough; if you’d like to see it in its current state, just email me, and I’ll chuck you a tar ball with everything as it stands.

What we’re playing with here is the tension between narrated time and narrative time. This neglects the entire dimension of space, which is central to the text of “Wandering Rocks” itself. In the comments of my previous post, crazymonk pointed to these maps from the wonderful Robot Wisdom site which is full of interesting Joyce material. The next step on this odd little project will be to continue to improve this visualization with an eye to moving towards a mapped visualization of the action of the episode. The simultaneity I’ve trying to visualize here is directly connected to the way the episode attempts to unify diverse locations. Bringing together a basic geographical representation of the episode’s action (and the action of the novel) with the concerns I’m tinkering with here, would allow this visualization to move from merely playing to something else I think… Of which, more anon (or, anonish).

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On Joyce’s “Wandering Rocks” & Simultaneity

August 16, 2010 in Digital Humanities, literature, modernism | 2 comments

This is the first of (at least) two posts on Joyce, Ulysses, and simultaneity.

Throughout Ulysses, moments of synchronization occur which allow the reader to align the narrated events within the sequence of narrative time. Perhaps the first of these is the cloud which passes over Stephen Dedalus in the first episode, which reappears in fourth episode, allowing us to synchronize the events in the Stephen narrative with those in the Bloom narrative (references are to the Gabler edition, episode & line numbers):

  • A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, wholly, shadowing the bay in deeper green. (1.248 – 49)
  • A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, wholly. Grey. Far. (4.218)

The “Wandering Rocks” episode, however, is surely the most extreme of such instance. Its nineteen sections follow different characters around Dublin during a single period of time. (The time covered in each of the sections, however, is surely not equal or isomorphic.) Certain figures move through the episode allowing one to place the events in one section in relation to other sections: the wanderings of the “mad” (quick, someone, grab Madness and Civilization) Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell, or the progress of the crumpled piece of paper stating “Elijah is coming” wending its way down the Liffey, or the blind stripling (who will continue to play this synchronizing role in the next episode as well). These characters movements provide some anchors. Places also help the reader begin to make sense of moving set of characters. Both Bloom and Stephen, for instance, end up at the same book stall (Stephen arriving after Bloom has departed). And if you knew the geography of Dublin’s streets, one imagines, one could locate the characters in relation to one another even more precisely (about which more in my next post). The most radical and disorienting technique of synchronization, however, are the small pieces of one section which intrude into another, allowing the reader a sort of anchor or bookmark (or even link) which indicates that these two events are occurring simultaneously.

While device of these fragments from one section appearing in another, divorced from their proper context, may be a bit disorienting, effect itself feels quite familiar. Though unusual in prose narrative, this sort of thing is quite familiar in film and television. What better way to wrap up a one hour crime drama than to cut in sequence from the criminal doing his perp-walk, the detective crossing his/her arms over his/her chest in satisfaction, and the victim doing some everyday activity which suggests the closure they now feel. (I am thinking here, primarily, of shows like The Mentalist or Cold Case, rather than, for instance, the Law and Order franchise.) A related example too complicated to really fold into this discussion is the infamous scene in Magnolia which plays with these conventions by offering a comparable survey of characters in a moment of time, complicated by the fact that the characters break the film’s diegesis in order sing along to Aimee Mann’s “Wise Up.

In film & television we understand intuitively the meaning and purpose of this device. “Ah, we’re seeing all these characters while they play this pop song so that I know the episode is ending, and all is right with the world again.” But what is its function in Ulysses and in “Wandering Rocks”? Nabokov, in passing, compares “Wandering Rocks” to the famous “agricultural fair” scene in Madame Bovary where Flaubert juxtaposes the fair with Rodolphe’s wooing of Emma. That sort of juxtaposition, however, feels (to continue my tenuous film analogies) seems more like the crosscuts between the baptism and the murders in The Godfather (the link is to the Spike TV page—the only place I could find this scene online).

Temporal simultaneity is not really the object of these contrasts though; instead they contrast the content of what is juxtaposed: Rodolphe’s lofty Romantic rhetoric and the crude materiality of the fair; the high ceremony of the baptism with the violence of Michael Corleone’s power grab. The 19 mini-narratives of “Wandering Rocks” do not serve to highlight some relationship between what happens in each of them.

Nor are these “Nineteen Ways of Looking at a City,” but one attempt to bring a single massive object with reach of apprehension. In some novels (an epistolary novel like The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker or in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying or even The Sound and the Fury), one sees the same event from different perspectives; the effect can be comic or tragic. But the focus is ultimately on character and interpretation. This is not the case, however, in “Wandering Rocks.”

Instead, there is a sort of brute empiricism to the audacity of “Wandering Rocks.” It tries to occupy a sort of God’s eye view and simply report everything that is happening. In my reading, trying to keep track of where each character is located and what they are doing (and when) is like trying to troubleshoot a complex mechanism. You try to hold within your understanding the many different states of the mechanism, in order to follow its logic and diagnose some problem.

And maybe this “mechanical” feeling isn’t totally ungrounded or irrelevant. One source for Joyce’s interest in trying to capture simultaneous actions (perhaps) lies in technological developments. Consider a far less radical instance of Joyce’s interest in simultaneity: the close of “The Dead.” As Gabriel Conroy looks out the window after hearing his wife’s recollection of Michael Furey, Joyce writes in the story’s concluding paragraph (quoted in part):

It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark . . . Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried.

Here too what Joyce is interested in simultanaeity—in using a single moment to bring together different locations. Here, of course, the snow which falls alike on the “living and the dead,” brings together Gabriel Conroy with the memory of Michael Furey, upsetting Gabriel’s sense of himself and his marriage in the process. But Gabriel’s ability to experience this connection to Michael Furey’s grave is mediated by the newspapers which forecast “snow… general all over Ireland.” Weather forecasts were themselves a product of the use telegraph communications to pass observations about weather conditions elsewhere. It has been suggested (I think; no reference ready to hand) that the telegram offers one source for the modernist fragment. Equally important, however, is the recognition of the changed spatio-temporal awareness introduced by telegraph—a phenomenon the manifestations of which may not always be obvious. (Are such concerns, we might ask, registered in “Proteus” where Stephen wonders about “space[s] of time” and “times of space,” trying to reconcile Kant’s two forms of pure intuition). In “Wandering Rocks” the effects of spatio-temporal collapse effected by the telegraph become the object of the prose itself, which in its dislocated fragments telegraphs points of synchronization between the nineteen sections.

(So, yeah; that last paragraph was some pretty reductive, technological determinism. You can figure our your own caveats, right?)

Outside prose, of course, the representation of simultaneous relationships that Joyce attempts in “Wandering Rocks” is much easier. In the next post (promised, dear reader, before week’s end) I’ll share my bumbling attempt to do precisely that in processing. Until then, two screenshots of my still-in-progress attempt.

Visualization 1 of "Wandering Rocks"

A first visualization.


Visualization 2 of "Wandering Rocks"

A second visualization; this one interactive!

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The Epistemology of Stephen’s Hamlet Reading

August 2, 2010 in literature, modernism | 1 comment

I’ve been enjoying the collective Ulysses read organized at Infinite Zombies (and here’s a great write-up about Infinite Zombies at knoxnews.com). My comments over there tend to swell to a length that is very possibly obnoxious, so I thought I’d share this, still relatively brief, question here.

(Another interesting set of questions worthy of consideration surrounds the very idea of online collective readings—I’m loathe to call them online “book clubs,” though exactly why I’m not sure; perhaps a lingering sense of indignity b/c of Oprah’s Book Club? But that would be silly and unfair to an incredibly influential institution that promoted reading the work of writers like Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, etc… is this Shandyesque sort of digression why my comments are so long?)

Stephen’s long discourse on Shakespeare and Hamlet, anticipated since Mulligan’s comment to Haines (“He proves by algebra that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father” Gabler 1.555-57), occupies most of episode nine (the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode). There is plenty to be said here about literary critical approaches (Stephen’s biographical reading vs. Russell’s appeal to “ideas, formless spiritual essences…eternal wisdom, Plato’s world of ideas” [9.49ff]). At Infinite Zombies there has been some mention of the metafictional shell game Joyce seems to be playing here, as Stephen (so often read through the lens of Joyce’s biography) offers a biographical reading Shakespeare.

At the heart of Stephen’s argument is the suggestion that Hamlet is somehow based on Shakespeare’s own son, Hamnet; that his wife may have had an affair with his brother, à la Gertrude, etc. etc. But by the end Stephen offers something like an epistemology, of which the biographical reading of Hamlet operates in service. What I take to be the peroration of Stephen’s argument:

Maeterlinck says: If Socrates leaves his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend. Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves. The playwright who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it badly (He gaves us light first and sun two days later), the lord of things as they are whom the most Roman of catholics call dio boia, hangman god, is doubtless all in all in all of us, ostler and butcher, and would be bawd and cuckold too but that in the economy of heaven, foretold by Hamlet, there are no more marriages, glorified man, an androgynous angel, being a wife unto himself.

The reading of Hamlet ultimately leads up to this, I think, much broader epistemological claim about how we know the world. But in this novel of a single day, are the characters walking through Dublin always meeting only themselves? That seems a very solipsistic vision for a novel that at all points seems interested in multiple viewpoints and perspective. Or, as Mulligan realizes, Stephen’s is a fundamentally masturbatory view of the world where, indeed, “there are no more marriages” (cf. Hamlet “We will have no more marriages”), but where “Everyman [is] His Own Wife” (9.1171).

I used to be charmed by this peroration; but now I find it a rather depressing view of the world.

And, like Stephen’s aesthetic theory, elaborated towards the end of Portrait, I am strongly inclined to take Stephen’s reading of Hamlet as a sort of object lesson in how not to read Ulysses. Is that too simple?

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What You Can Learn from a Pirate Edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover

July 25, 2010 in intellectual property, literature, modernism, obscenity

All images here are taken of from a copy Lady Chatterley’s Lover, owned and housed by Special Collections, University of Virginia Library. The images here presented in no way infringe on the copyright of the work and are consistent with the “Use, Reproduction, and Publication of Materials” guidelines outlined by the Special Collection Library.

Rare Book School

I was recently fortunate enough to attend a course during the first session of UVA’s Rare Book School on Printed Books Since 1800. The course was great and I highly recommend it; the particular advantage of the course (and, from what I understand, of all RBS courses) is the hands-on experience with a broad variety of materials. Most of the material covered in the course is presented with greater thoroughness in Philip Gaskell’s monumental A New Introduction to Bibliography. But what even the most attentive reading of Gaskell can’t get you is the experience of handling type, or of seeing a variety of different items arranged all in one place for comparison and handling: different bindings, different illustration processes, et cetera. This is the great strength of RBS. The diversity of the audience was also a virtue of the class; scholars, librarians, and book-sellers are all in attendance, and their different attitudes proved genuinely surprising.

The hands-on nature of RBS makes it difficult to pass the experience along (in tweets, for example, or a blog post). Part of the week, though, is spent on an independent bibliography project, attending to the bibliographic detail of a single book object. I used the opportunity afforded by the RBS class to have a look at a pirate edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The result, I think, helped deepen my understanding of Lawrence’s fascinating appeal to the materiality of printed books in his essay A Propos of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” and also provided an interesting insight into the intersection between the history of obscenity and the history of reading.

A Funereal Volume

Book piracy is a fascinating topic in general and it is crucially important to any understanding of the history of obscenity. While many works were pirated with great frequency (Sherlock Holmes stories, the Oxford Edition of the Bible, etc; major British works were ripe for American piracy throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though an informal courtesy system among publishers kept this from growing out of control), book piracy and obscenity thrived together in the early twentieth century. In part this is because they both used the same semi-legitimate channels of distribution and sale. It was also a peculiar effect of Anglo-American copyright law which offered no protection for “obscene” works.

No individual case better illustrates this confluence of obscenity law and copyright than that of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The market in pirate editions of Lawrence’s novel which emerged immediately after the first, 1928 Florentine edition of the novel was printed, prompted Lawrence to authorize a “popular edition” of the novel, printed in Paris and selling for (the relatively cheap) 60 francs. (The political geography of censorship in the early twentieth century is itself a topic worthy of analysis.) This cheap edition, bound in paper wrappers, vied (mostly unsuccessfully) with pirate editions for readers in England and America where, technically, none of the editions could be legally sold.

The popular edition was printed from a photographic copy of the Florentine edition (ironic given the way Lawrence picks out photographic reproduction for particular scorn in his discussion of piracies). To the photographically reproduced text of the novel, Lawrence prepended an essay, “My Skirmish with Jolly Roger: Written Especially as an Introduction to this Popular Edition.” This essay, in turn, would form the basis for Lawrence’s much longer reflection on Lady Chatterley, A Propos of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”. (This fact alone is worthy of greater comment; but I’ll abstain here so I can get to the pictures). In the essay Lawrence explains how the emergence of piracies necessitated the release of the Popular Edition. The essay offers a uniquely fascinating historical moment where literary history and book history (and, I’d insist, the history of obscenity) crucially inform one another.

The essay is fascinating for the degree of engagement Lawrence has with the materiality of the different volumes he discusses. Because most of these piracies were reproduced photographically from the Florentine edition, their text is identical to that of the Florentine and popular editions (they are all, in Gaskell’s terms, the same “edition,” a fact recognized in Gertzman’s truly impressive bibliography). And so, in distinguishing them, Lawrence appeals to the physical properties of the book itself, drawing distinctions between the various states and issues (though Lawrence doesn’t use these terms) based on the quality of printing and the physical experience of holding the volume.

I spend quite a bit of time with this interesting argument in my dissertation. At RBS, though, I wanted to focus on just one of these piracies; the one of which Lawrence writes:

I have had in my hand a very funereal volume, bound in black and elongated to look like a Bible or long hymn-book, gloomy . . . it is a sinister volume―like Captain Kidd with his face blackened, reading a sermon to those about to walk the plank. Why the pirate should have elongated the page, by adding a false page-heading, I don’t know. The effect is peculiarly depressing, high-brow. (305)

UVA’s Special Collections owns a number of pirate editions of Lady Chatterley including the “Faro” edition published by Samuel Roth (which has a reasonable claim to being the chief way in which the novel reached the American reading public during the period between 1928 and 1959). They are also in possession of the New York piracy which Lawrence describes as “Funereal.”

In discussing piracies, Lawrence at no point appeals to the discourse of intellectual property. This may be simply tactical: because the work was obscene, US and British copyright law offered no real avenue for Lawrence to assert his rights (additionally, the work was not printed in the US as required by US copyright law at the time making any such claim moot… but these are tertiary issues I think). In my dissertation I argue that Lawrence’s focus on the book’s materiality is not simply a tactical response to piracy. But whatever the undergirding logic of Lawrence’s appeal to the materiality of these volumes, it is fascinating to see the “Priest of Love” suddenly turn bibliographer (without losing any of the vehemence of his convictions).

Lady Chatterley's Lover (PR6023 .A93 L28 1928e). Special Collections, University of Virginia.

Here, for instance, are the running heads which the New York piracy has added to the text (note the lack of alignment between the pages; an instance of the shoddiness of work Lawrence complains of elsewhere in “My Skirmish”). Lawrence celebrates the simple craftsmanship of the Florentine edition. The running heads adulterate that simplicity by unnecessarily complicating the page. While I haven’t been able to do a side by side comparison with the Florentine edition (the UVA library does not own this rare item), the “Funereal” edition does expand the size of the pages slightly (Gertzman measures the leaves of the piracy at 9 5/8″ x 6 1/4″ while Roberts measures the Florentine editions at 8 15/16″ x 6 3/8″, a discrepancy of nearly three quarters of an inch in page height; I think one would need direct examination to compare whether the type-size was at all affected by the process of reproduction.)

Title Page of New York Piracy of Lady Chatterley's Lover

Lady Chatterley's Lover (PR6023 .A93 L28 1928e). Special Collections, University of Virginia.

The title page features a truly bizarre eagle vignette which seems to oddly echo Lawrence’s own phoenix. It seems more appropriate to an elementary school American History textbook than to Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Smeary Printing in New York Pirate Edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover

Lady Chatterley's Lover (PR6023 .A93 L28 1928e). Special Collections, University of Virginia.

And as Lawrence complains elsewhere in the essay, the printing is rather shabbily done, resulting in a smeary text. It is these differences (rather than any difference in the text itself) which for Lawrence mark the piracy as “gloomy” and “high brow.”

How to Read Obscenely

I spent some time with this volume largely because of the ire it elicited from Lawrence. But this particular copy proved interesting for some other reasons. Folded and placed between pages 200 and 201 is a newspaper clipping from the Washington Herald (Dec. 24, 1929) with the headline “Smoot to Read Racy Books in Plea for Ban: Senate to Conduct Secret Session When He Takes the Floor” and a penciled list made on the rear end-paper.

The clipping details Senator Reed Smoot’s plan to read selections from a number of books books to a private session of the Senate. Smoot was interested in reversing an amedment to US Tariff passed the previous year which effectively removed the censorship authority of Customs agents. The change had been advocated by Senator Bronson Cutting of New Mexico (who corresponded with Ezra Pound on precisely this issue). (Further details about the debate can be found in this article from Time). Smoot hoped this reading would senators of the perniciousness of works that had previously been “excluded by the customs authorities” (chief among them a work the clipping describes as “Lady Chatterton’s Lover”). Echoing James Douglas’s infamous statement two years earlier (that he would rather give a child prussic acid than a copy of The Well of Loneliness), Smoot claimed that he would “rather have a child of mine use opium than read these books.”

In the end Smoot never read his selections to a closed Senate committee. Instead a compromise was reached, by which customs officers could turn books over to district courts who could pursue censorship through existing obscene statutes.

The clipping however notes the following: “The tall, austere, Mormon elder will read to the Senate—in secret session—passages he has culled from the racy and spicy books…” (my emphasis).

This strategy, of culling particularly “racy” and “spicy” passages from books in order to prove that they are “obscene” was a common among those who wished to censor books. The larger tendency throughout the twentieth century was in the opposite direction. The gradual process by which controversial works (from Ulysses to Lolita and Naked Lunch) were admitted into the domain of “literature” proceeded first by insisting on the unity of the work as a whole. Judge Woolsey, deciding that Ulysses is not obscene in 1933, writes: “reading ‘Ulysses’ in its entirety, as a book must be read on such a test as this, did not tend to excite sexual impulses or lustful thoughts” (xiii, my emphasis). (One wonders, could any novel of 800 pages manage to so excite “in its entirety”?). The process of art/literature and pornography becoming antithetical by definition (to be obscene a work must, in the language of Miller v. California “lack[] serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value”) proceeds by first insisting that (again, the language of the Miller test) be “taken as a whole.”

What, of course, this suggests is that the question of obscenity is less a question about a work than it is about a way of reading. To ask, therefore, whether or not a particular work is obscene reifies a question which is really about how a work was read. The question of obscenity is not chiefly a matter of gauging the sexual explicitness of a text, but of understanding the uses to which literature is put and the types of reading that are recognized as literary (and those which are a priori non-literary). At least one hallmark of obscene reading is its disregard for the whole.

Pencil List on Rear End-Paper of Pirate Copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover

Lady Chatterley's Lover (PR6023 .A93 L28 1928e). Special Collections, University of Virginia.

And, turning to the rear end papers of this particular copy of Lawrence’s novel, one finds evidence of exactly this sort of reading: a list of penciled in numbers which, a casual perusal suggests, correspond to the “spicier” moments in the novel.

The tantalizing question is who made this list and to what end? In their style of reading, at least, the reader looking simply for pornographic enjoyment and the antivice crusader share a similar disregard for regarding the work “in its entirety.” This penciled list of passages culled from this edition, together with the clipping describing Sen. Smoot’s own culling, suggests a practice of reading at odds with that which would be recieve the blessing of judicial authority first, three years later, by Judge Woolsey and later enshrined in U. S. obscenity law.

Works Cited

  • Gertzman, Jay. A Descriptive Bibliography of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”: With Essays Toward A Publishing History of the Novel. NY: Greenwood P, 1989.
  • Lawrence, D. H. Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Apropos of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.” Edited by Michael Squires. Cambridge Edition of the Letters and Works of D. H. Lawrence. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003.
  • Roberts, Warren and Paul Poplawski. A Bibliography of the D. H. Lawrence. 3rd Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
  • Woolsey, John M. Decision in United States v. One Book called “Ulysses.” In Ulysses by James Joyce. New York: Vintage International, 1990. ix – xiv.

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Anthony Comstock, “Morals Versus Art”

April 27, 2010 in literature, modernism, obscenity, public domain | 1 comment

Anthony Comstock is one of the figures who orbits just slightly beyond the primary concerns of my dissertation, alongside other fascinating, but lesser known, figures of literary history, like Samuel Roth (book pirate), Jack Kahane (founder of Obelisk Press), or Norman Douglas (whose book on the obscene limerick is considered the first). Comstock (1844 – 1915) was the founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and US Postal Inspector, and one of the most notorious figures of turn of the century America.

Comstock is hardly the only turn-of-the-century vice crusader; Boston’s Watch and Ward Society, headed by John Chase was, if anything more “successful” in suppressing works than Comstock’s organization (the list of works that the Watch and Ward Society managed to have suppressed is truly stunning; it is through their efforts that “Banned in Boston” achieved popularity—that, and its lovely alliteration). Comstock’s successor in the Society for the Suppression of Vice, John Sumner (the key figure in the banning of many modernist texts), was widely discussed in the press (and was a key figure in the suppression of the Little Review and works by D. H. Lawrence). And Britain certainly didn’t lack its own anti-obscenity crusaders from James Buchanan (author of “The Fleshly School of Poetry”) to James Douglas (who compared The Well of Loneliness to prussic acid, to the benefit of the latter) and William Joynson-Hicks.

But Comstock is the figure who best captured the Puritanical spirit of Victorian vice societies. The obscenity statutes of the United States, which prohibit the mailing or importation of “obscene” material (I’m papering over some complexities here) were called the “Comstock laws” (though Pound, apparently, wasn’t aware of this nomenclature, referring to the laws as “Section 211″ when he commented on them in essays). George Bernard Shaw famously decried “Comstockery” as the “the world’s standing joke at the expense of the United States” (see OED definition of “Comstockery”). (Shaw here draws on an implicit geography of censorship standards, with Paris as the frequently decried source of all obscenity, America as awash in puritanism and Comstockery, and England standing firm between them. While there is some truth to this image, it is worth insisting that some works which were banned in England were, in fact, published in the United States—The Well of Loneliness and Sleeveless Errand come to mind immediately. British law held not only the publisher, but the printer, open to prosecution for obscenity, with the predictably chilling effect.)

It is, however, Comstock’s pugnacity that makes him stand head and shoulders above Sumner, Jix, or his other fellow vice crusaders. Like his contemporary, Carrie Nation, Comstock was not simply opposed to vice or offended by it; he was militantly attacking it.

My own interest in Comstock comes primarily from his role in the history of September Morn (which I am still working on recording at the September Morn Archive; will be adding more stuff there in coming weeks actually). The immediate popularity of the painting was implicitly a reaction against the excesses of Comstockery; a way of rejecting such censorship by laughing at it. Indeed, the entire history of Chabas’s academic nude has far more to do with Comstock than it does with Chabas.

For this reason it is unfortunate that Comstock’s short 1887 pamphlet Art Versus Morals is so rare. I have been unable to locate a copy through online booksellers. WorldCat lists only 10 copies of the work (and of those 6 are either photocopies or microfillm copies of the original work). I imagine that so few copies of the work have survived because it appears to have been a pamphlet; it is only 39 pages long, in a rather small format.

But the indefatigable folks in UVA’s interlibrary loan department were able to get me one of the photocopies, which I in turn copied and scanned.

The work is fascinating. Comstock in particular (and, to a lesser extent the anti-Vice crusaders as a whole) was far more sensitive to the changes on a work’s reception wreaked by mechanical reproduction. As early as 1887 (more than 25 years before September Morn came to his, and everyone else’s, attention), Comstock was noting the importance of context on reception; the painting “exhibited to cultured minds in an art gallery, where it legitimately belongs, is a very different thing from what it appears to be to the common mind upon the public street in the shape of a photograph” (Morals Versus Art 9). He even asks us to “note the throngs about windows where nude or partly nude figures are exposed” (Morals Versus Art 9 – 10). The sharp distinction between the “common” and the “cultured mind” is what likely leaps out at us here. But I’d like to stress that Comstock was decades ahead of his opponents in his attention the effects of mechanical reproduction on art.

I am currently checking the OCR on the document and marking it up. Once it is all set I’ll post a nice clean copy of this fascinating document, with some annotation and introductory material. Along the way I may post some more about Comstock here. But if there is (heaven help you) another person fascinated by Comstock out there in the world, I hope google has somehow led you here; the raw, ugly, hideous PDF is yours for the taking.

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