Drown before Reading Liquidating Books in The Tempest

4 Drown before Reading: Liquidating Books in The Tempest What does it mean that Prospero says he will drown his books? Why does he say “drown” rather than burn them? This question arises not only because “drown” is usnual and even enigmatic but because Caliban has told Stefano and Trinculo “burn but his books” and, along with driving a nail through Prospero’s head, they be the sovereign rulers of the island The question concerning drowning books is our point of departure for reading the Arden three edition of The Tempest and Juliet Taymor’s Tempest and Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books in this chapter We first engage the Arden’s notes on Prospero’s books and then examine both the sequence showing Prospero drowning his books in Prospero’s Books and to books “drowning” in the end title sequence Taymor’s film not by comparing these films to the “original” text but by considering each films as yet another edition of the play, editors and directors being comparable in rendering more or less readable the play’s cruxes regarding books These cruxes include the contradictory references to Prospero’s “book” in the singular and his “books” in the plural and the a between references to Prospero’s cloak and staff as props but not to his book or books For us, the interest of both films lies in their response to a less familiar crux regarding the preservation contradictory modes of the destruction of Prospero’s library Despite Caliban’s instruction to “burn” Prospero’s books, Prospero says he will “drown” them The endings of both films indirectly return us to a question about media raised in “original and true copie,” or first edition of The Tempest, a question about what Derrida calls the end of the book (Grammatology) and the survivance of the book: how does a book to die? how does its biographical destruction differ from the destruction of bios, of a human corpse? What does it mean to drown books that are divisible, singular plural, and have no referents on stage? What happens when books are no material, not props? What kind of library contains books that have no paratexts, no titles and authors? What does it mean that Prospero effectively promises to drown his books at some indefinite time in the future, to promise destruction without delivering it? And what does it mean that The Tempest, a play in which the main character says he prizes his books above his dukedom, does not include a scene of reading or of writing, as does a play to which it is often compared, namely, Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus? Why books and libraries go missing in The Tempest? New Historicist and New New Historicist criticism of the play missing these questions and alternately tries to fill in the missing book with a hallucinated prop somewhere present off-stage or with a copy of an early modern book stored now in a research library, say, the grimgoire, and thereby close off the singular plural of book(s) in the play Prospero has a book, not books, even though the book is a composite of pages taken from multiple grimgoires, or it tries to imagine the destruction of the books exclusively in Caliban’s terms, as burning, skipping over the oddity of Prospero’s destruction by drowning and displaced by a more general, characterological question about Prospero: why does he abjure his rough magic? Our formulation of drowning books as a crux will orient our reading of The Tempest: the island is more of an archive about to come to an end that it is a utopian space, and archive management involves what Michel Foucault calls biopower, about the management of life and death The question of what counts as life The Tempest cannot be reduced to human life, however, as Foucault does Shakespeare floats, so to speak, questions about life as questions of biobiblio(autothanato)graphy and questions about species of life, about the indeterminacy of the borders between spirits, humans, animals, and monsters In short, questions about life are raised as questions of what Derrida calls sur-vivance, not so much survival or living on or even as living death but as living on in a way that cannot be thought in terms of life and death Sur-vivance is a resistance to reading, as we saw earlier The Tempest radicalizes unreadability by linking sur-vivance to a past that never becomes fully textual, that can only become paratextual, a prologue, and thereby prolonged (or infinitely “prolougened”) If, as Derrida says, the archive is oriented to the future and hence always incomplete, it follows that the condition of the archive, as we will show more fully in the next chapter, is “incompletemess”; that is to say, the archive is always something of a disaster, a wreck even before it is wrecked, a wrecking of reckoning and recognition In The Tempest, books are fauxsimiles, blanks waiting for a reading that can never arrive One last signpost before we move on to the Arden Three Tempest and the Taymor and Greenaway films Our reading of The Tempest differs from avowedly neoFoucauldian historicist readings and new new historicist readings primarily in not psychologizing and not being Prospero-centric The survivance of the archive involves an economy of repeated destructions, loss, mourning, repair, storage, and restoration Prospero-centric readings of the play lead to a series of dead end questions we take to be ruses that provide an alibi for the play’s excessive economy of archival repetition and re-enactment: why doesn’t Prospero not recover his dukedom immediately? Why does he abjure his kingdom? Why does he want to leave the island? At the risk of being somewhat dogmatic, we think these are the wrong questions Our focus on film adaptations of the play and on media in the play asks a series of new questions about The Tempest, the archive, editing, and the book, but we will not provide the reader with the kinds of hallucinogenic hits and convenient comforts of elisions on offer in historicist criticism and book history Attention to drowning books in The Tempest foregrounds a tension in the kind of book history scholars of early modern culture write, a tension between the so-called material book and the book as medium When does the history of “material” books become a question about the book as a medium, as a textual support and an impression? We maintain that book history and the any history of the book (or of books) cannot be written without being haunted by spectrality and eschatological or messianic time, by deconstructive questions raised by Maurice Blanchot and Derrida about the end of the book and the book to come Consider The French title of Henri Lefebrve’s L’apparition du livre, translated as The Coming of the Book The French word “apparition” means “appearance” and “ghost” (an “apparition” in the English sense of a ghost derives, of course, from “appearance”) The English title as The Coming of the Book has clearly messianic connotations, even if those connotations are not intended And of course books not serve as media for the dead, just as the occasion for humanist pathos and sometimes irreverent piety, whereas for Derrida the survivance of a text leaves open the question of telepathy, of the last word, in a variety of media and technology because technology cannot, as we have maintained, properly be opposed to organic human life (as an inorganic prosthetic tool or equipment for living).3 Undrowning the Book We wish turn now to the Arden Three Tempest as one edition among others that constitute the history of the play’s reception history of its cruxes concerning Prospero’s books To our knowledge, The Tempest is unique in the history of literature in destroying books by drowning them All other literature and drama in which manuscripts or books are destroyed involve burning Oddly, enough, Prospero’s use of the “drown” to destroy his books does not invite editorial commentary The Arden edition does not comment on the phrase, though it does comment extensively on roughs in the famous speech that ends with Prospero’s announcement.5 Destroying books by drowning them is all the more remarkable that their destruction is different from Prospero’s plans for his staff: “I’ll break my staff, /
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth.” Prospero’s burial of his staff provides the second most common form of destruction: inhumation and cremation These are the only two forms of the preservation and destruction of corpses, according to Derrida in Beast and the Sovereign vol But burial in Prospero’s phrasing also anticipates drowning in that “fathoms” measure depth of water (as in in “full fathom five”), not earth We want to consider its future tense, a dramatic economy (the actor never has to show the books being destroyed just as the actors who have been shipwrecked not have to appear in we clothing because Ariel has dry-cleaned them) but this invisibility is itself worth comment Editors Vaugns in their introduction to te Arden observe that the Tempest has fewer cruxes than the other plays in the First Folio, and the section of their Introduction devoted to “Cruxes,” they include only two, leaving the rest to the notes Strictly speaking, the first crux they include regarding the assignment of lines in 1.2 to Prospero or Miranda is not a crux at all but an aspect of the play’s performance and editing history Restoration dramatists like Dryden and editors like Theobald had no textual evidence to reassign Prospero’s lines We read the Arden 3’s classification of this reassignment as a symptom, however, not simply an error of classification The number of cruxes is less important than the way cruxes in the play or not become visible and the way editors and critics efface them “Book” versus “books” is one The shift from burning to drowning might be another Is Prosper rather than Prospero a crux? Is it related to Caliban’s inverse self-naming “ban ban Ca Caliban.” Under what conditions does something become a crux rather than a general critical problem We suggest that the issue of books is related to a wider, recurrent structure in the play related to survival and safety In our view, the play does not present a choice between an authoritarian, colonialist reading or the critique of same or mix; rather, it shows that Foucault’s account of the prison is on a continuum with his later accounts of pastoral care Shipwrecks give rise to philosophical reflection, according to Lucretius in De Rerum Naturum But in The Tempest, the ship wreck operates only as a supposition What looks like a wreck, we quickly learn, is not a wreck at all Propsero consoles Miranda But oddly, Prospero asks Ariel for similarly assuring answers Ariel gives both a fuller account of the shipwreck than what we have gather from the boatswain scene in 1.1 and a fuller account of its repair The same potentially traumatic vision is repeated, as it were traumatic even though it never happened Dialogue about Ferdinand being drowned or undrowned occurs twice Dialogue about Caliban and Tricunclo being “dead or alive?” varies the same pattern, in this case based on a mistakenly supposed monster (Trinculo and Caliban onder a cloth) Fredinand hears that his father lies full fahtm five below—sea change and all —but Antonio imagines Ferdinand buried: Although this lord of wak remembrance – this Who shall be of little memory When it is earthed 2.1 232-34 The King’s son’s alive, “’Tis as impossible that he’s undrowned As he that sleeps swims 236-38 Antonio: Will you grant me that Ferdinand is drowned? Sebastion: He’s gone 233-34 Alonso: O thou mine heir Of Naples and Milan, what strange fish Hath made his meal on htee? Francisco: Sir, he may live I saw him beat the surges under him And rid upon their backs He trod the water The surge most swoll’n I doubt not He came alive to land Sebastian: We have lost your son, I fear, for ever Alonso: No, no, he’s gone 2.1 112-34 Stephano: I took him to be killed with a thunder stroke But art thou not drowned? 2.2.107 Stephano: Here, kiss the book.” [Trinculo drinks] Come swear to that Kiss the book I will furnish it anon with new contents Swear! 2.2 127; 139 Wlt thou detroy htem then? 3.2 113 Alonso uses same phrase as Prospero does Thereofre my son I’th’ooze is bedded, and I’ll seek him deeper than ever plummet sounded, And with him lie there mudded 3.3 100-02 And deeper than did ever plummet sound I’ll drown my book 5.1.55 Calbian’s sleep and sleep again “isle is full of noises’ picked up Prospero’s dreams made on rounded with a little sleep after he recalls the plot and beraks off the masque 3.2.140; 4.2 155-57 cloudy, 2.1 143 Dead or alive? 2.2 25—another scene of “traumatic mirecgnition—Trinculo of Caliban I have not ‘scaped drowning to be afeared nw of your four legs, 58-59 The Tempest is of interest to us, however, The film does not show the beginning of the book or the end of the book No paratexts at any point, so there’s a precursive and recusrsive elippsis of the book that keeps it by drowning it Taymor makes explicit a pre-cursive economy of the book that differs from other economies of drowning in the play; drowning by the numbers—characters seem to drown but not This is a cycle of reassurance; lots of scenes of reassurance that more or les repeat each other Prospero even lies about the drowning of his daughter to Alonso to manufacture a symmetry between Prospero’s loss and Alonso’s, as if Alonso’s repeated Prospero’s Melting sand castle between the opening title for The Tempest, rain begins, camera dollies back and pans right as we se it begin to melt in a hand that belongs to Miranda (use of the words “melt,” “dissolve pace,” and so on in the play) There’s a storm before the storm Even before the shipwreck she sees, there is a sandcastle wreck Miranda first when she enters the play after the boatswain scene 1.1 Melting sand, dissolving sand anticipates Prospero’s The book’s irreconcilable singular and plural forms in The Tempest marks a certain exception with regard to the book that bears on its survival: it is both singular and divisible And this exception is sustained by a larger suspension between two moments in he play, one near the beginning Prospero’s tells Miranda of the undrowning of his books when he is put with Miranda on a boat and the other when Prospero promises to drown his book That promise is never fulfilled in the play (something Mowat does not comment on) In short the book /
 books are never destroyed in the play; they appear to be as indestructible as they are non-existent The “book” /
 “books” contradiction or crux is exceptional in respect to survival Scenes of destruction by shipwreck are resolved into scenes of reported recovery occur in multiple ways and multiple times But even the norm established by the shipwreck, about which he have more to say, is exceptional For the ship is not actually not wrecked And no one dies in Indeed, no one dies in the play (Not even the witch Sycorax is killed; she is exiled.) Prospero is potentially vulnerable (“destroy him”; “drive a nail into his head”), as are Alonso and Gonzalo during a brief sleep from which Ariel awakens Gonzalo who in turn awakens Alonso But the play’s shipwreck differs from the book undrowning in that the promise to drown my books implies their destruction but muddies its exact nature In shipwreck scenes, characters are let to imagine the fate of corpses, which may or may not be destroyed Ferdinand imagines his father’s dead body—turned to coral Something artificial and unburied Other corpses suffer other kinds of 10 McLeod wants to separate narratives even though in a sense he does not produce a narrative, or only a narrative loop End in the begin At the same time a delinearization-one or two poems? 3D perspective or not? Constant derailings made possible through the photograph and the diagram And yet a narrative of production—from fetus or fetal production / gestation to birth (but no after birth Not so much into breaking things and walking away but into shape (no reshaping) You want to stay with the shape Not geneticist, not a textual eugenics A secular Creationism (hidden text gets revealed as literature—but it is not readable-“uninked type.” Found lost text that is not word of God (or the author) It’s a surplus, not a supplement, but it lacks meaning It’s an image, not text The reistance you provide editors lies in the way you refuse to read images What about the stake in the posthumous? Keats and Herbert So your kind of like Saint Peter but as a mortician 25 Similarly Freud draws an analogy between psychic organization and filing systems Freud first adopts the bureaucratic metaphors of file and dossier in Studies in Hysteria the running through a series of similes for the case study’s (dis)organization It was as though we were examining a dossier that had been kept in good order That analysis of my patient Emmy von N contained similar files of memories though they were not so fully enumerated and described These files form a quite general feature of every analysis and their contents always emerge in a chronological order which is as infallibly trustworthy as the succession of days of the week or names of the month in a mentally normal person They make the work of analysis more difficult by the peculiarity that, in reproducing these memories, they reverse the order in which these originated The freshest and newest experience appears first in the file first, as an outer cover, and last of all comes the experience with which the series in fact began.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol 2, 288Freud’s succession of similes testifies both to a problem of describing the topography of the psyche as “concentric strata” (289) and to a problem of narrating (from the beginning) Acknowledging in a parenthetical paragraph that he is making use of a number of similes that are “incompatible with one another” (291), Freud adds that he will continue to so in order to throw light on “highly complicated topic which has never yet been represented” (291) Freud inadvertently politicizes resistance to his treatment in the process of describing it through various conspiratorial and medical similes (resistance is a kind of viral politics that deconstructs distinction normal and pathogenic groups, nucleus and foreign body), but politics in Freud’s hands turn out to be a problem of representation and narration, of organized agencies that don’t have bodies and that cannot be visualized In The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Pres, 2008), 35-50, Sven Spieker includes a chapter entitled “Freud’s Files” but he not does not cite or mention this passage in which Freud uses the file simile 26 What Mowat misses in divides the magic book form spirits is that the book is itself spectral, it is off stage, never seen, an invisible proper She insists on regarding as a prop on stage like the cloak and staff But here is no stage direction for it Her reading is not in the least bit philological She argues by authority -people have thought this way Well, people thought Coredlia shouldn't die either Or Hamlet Or Romeo and Juliet It’s anti-philoloigcal historicism “The film’s final moments involve a curious recuperation of Caliban, when the character who once defecated and vomited on Prospero’s books suddenly saves one—Shakespeare’s First Folio—after his master makes good on a pledge to “drown [his] books.” The strangeness of Caliban’s final gesture has elicited quizzical comments from many critics, who ask whether the film’s “meaningless Caliban” deserves such a prominent role in the salvation of the First Folio: “Why Caliban?” asks Coursen.62 These final moments, after Prospero abjures the power of his books, Caliban’s Books: The Hybrid Text in Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books by James Tweedie Cinema Journal 40, No 1, Fall 2000, 104-26 Kind of Lacanian, but the transfer for me is a missing inside and between that proliferates actings out rather than an objet petit a which functions as a blind spot and quilting point The failure of medial transfer and linguistic translation and psychological transference all part of a dialectic of the closed and open book to books, the contact zone being a space of proliferation, on the one hand, but also of retrospective collection, labor (logs) and mourning) The unreadability of the book is linked to the impossibility of mourning My reading is hyperphilological in that the adaptations are a form of criticism generated by The Tempest, by its first place and its missing—wise and wife It’s a philogy the science of which knows that the missing cannot be restored, only replayed, acted out in a blocked mourning that can never be stopped The book to books calls forth their mourning even as they are collected and remembered in a posthumous memorial volume Missing mother Book(fri)Ends from edition to reader’s annotations means re-stored Shakespeare, a relation of concealment in revealment, a truth that is revealed in the work of art, beauty, indirectly, and slowly Grenaway’s film is regarded as a typicalpostco film, except for Caibran getting the books Missing the twofold moment of Caliban—first rescue of Folio, then destruction—this alternating logic of the book runs throughout the film., bound, and collected Claiban’s destruction is out of sequence since The Tempest has just been written and written down, but not bound with Folilio copy Pericles is missing form it recent scholarship about medieval and early modern ritual magic is rapidly changing the state of knowledge about manuscript magic books At the same time, however,Prospero’s book is not a grimoire—or at least so it seems today While further research by historians of magic may alter this conclusion, the contents of Prospero’s book, as reflected in his language and actions, must be imagined as departing in significant ways from extant grimoires Prospero’s book, then, seems to be simultaneously a grimoire and a stage-prop (or romance-prop) grimoire, just as Prospero himself is simultaneously (or perhaps alternately) a serious master of spirits and a stage-or-romance wizard who also reminds us (as I’ve argued elsewhere) of a Renaissance magus and a Jacobean street magician.80 But just as The Tempest is more than a play about a magician, so Prospero’s book, within the play’s larger context of epic sea journeys and contemporary Mediterranean/
Atlantic voyages, has an additional resonance that at first seems quite other than that carried by the grimoires That resonance attaches to it in terms of the larger power of the book per se The book of magic that I suggest Shakespeare provides for Prospero carries with it, as book per se, a long and difficult colonial and postcolonial history, especially since it is represented as the source of Prospero’s control over the spirits who torment Caliban and who make possible Prospero’s rule over his island kingdom As a grimoire—and even more so as a stage-prop grimoire—its historical moment seems much further in the past and its baggage strangely lighter.But it opens up a host of questions about Prospero and his magic, many of which must remain unanswered until we know more about manuscript conjuring books As Nicholas Watson points out, we cannot, for example, fully grasp who Prospero is as a magician or why his book appears to differ from extant grimoires until our knowledge of the field is greater.96We know enough, however, to see that awareness of the existence of grimoires forces us to look again at all the early modern wizard and sorcerer plays and their magic books, beginning with the commedia dell’arte and ending with, or soon after, The Tempest itself And even a glimpse into the world of grimoire masters, of Oberion and Storax, of the Lemegeton and the Clavicle of Solomon brings us the salutary reminder that there is much yet to learn and understand not only about The Tempest but also about the world that is supposedly our own scholarly bailiwick While in other kinds of magic manuscripts—books of image magic, for example—scribes were rather meticulous in their transcriptions and were proud to cite their sources, with the conjuring books scribes freely altered, combined, added, and deleted material As Klaassen writes, these books “have a fluid, largely anonymous content, the lineage of which would be very difficult to trace.” 28 Despite this fluidity, however, the grimgroires share many recognizable characteristics All of those that I have examined are, first of all, uniformly religious in tone, with the “master,” as he is called, summoning spirits only after supplicating God, enlisting God’s aid, and using God’s holy names as the major source of his power to conjure This new interest in conjuring books raises the next question about Prospero’s book—namely, if we grant the likelihood that Prospero has some version of a manuscript magic book, what are we to imagine that the book contains? We can move toward a tentative answer by looking first at the contents of actual magic books, though we will see later that Prospero’s putative book departs significantly from them This image of Prospero as a Renaissance magus (or, as he is sometimes problematically called, a “white magician” 14), coupled with the tendency to think in terms of printed books, have combined to encourage even those curious about Prospero’s magic to ignore (or fail to look for) the only books of any use to a conjuror—namely, manuscript books of magic I begin with an assumption about The Tempest that opens onto a set of related questions The assumption is that among the highly valued books that Prospero brought with him into exile is one book essential to his magic, the one that he goes offstage to consult before the series of spirit spectacles begins in Act 3, the same one that near the end of the play he promises to drown as he abjures his magic [actually, he promises to drown his books, not his book] Though Peter Greenaway, in his film Prospero’s Books, did not include such a book among the twenty-four he decided were necessary for Prospero’s survival, the text indicates that Prospero not only has a magic robe and a magic staff (both of which are explicitly called for2), but, like Friar Bacon and Doctor Faustus and other stage magicians before him, he also has a magic book Further, the play presents Prospero’s always-offstage book as crucial to his rule over the island, the magical instrument that enables him to control the spirits who come from their confines when Prospero calls, who torment Caliban and keep him obedient, and who assume as needed the shapes of Greek mythological figures or vicious hunting dogs Rateher crude dsitncitonbeteen manuscripts and printed booksas media l Media, Mourning, and the Incomplete Works of Material Culture  See Barbara Mowat, “Prospero’s Book,” Shakespeare Quarterly 52.1 (2001), 1-33 The 27 Tempest refers, Mowat notes, both to a singular book (“I'll to my book”; “I'll drown my book”) and to plural books (“books I priz'd above my dukedom”; “burn but his books”) Mowat insists that Prospero’s book is present even though there is no stage direction for it in the text: “Prospero's always-offstage book” is the “one book essential to his magic, the one that he goes offstage to consult before the series of spirit spectacles begins in Act 3, the same one that near the end of the play he promises to drown as he abjures his magic.” Prospero’s strangely singular and clearly spectral singular plural book/s “appear” only as phantom referents in the printed script of the play It makes no sense at all to make a prop for the actor playing Prospero to consult off-stage (Prospero and the actor playing him are somewhat psychotically conflated through a psychologistic reading of the play as literature and performance equated) What are we to make of a phantom prop that is referenced both in the singular and the plural without ever be shown on stage? What is the relation between the book/s and the spirits Prospero commands? Greenaway and Taymor address these questions in very different ways by materializing what is missing 28 Julie Taymor, The Tempest, Adapted From the Play by William Shakespeare (New York: Abrams, 2010) Peter Greenaway’s tie-in book, Prospero's Books: A Film of the Shakespeare's The Tempest (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1991) serves as a paratextual commentary on the film, providing information about the sources of each the twenty-seven books shown in the films and giving their titles once again as they are drowned (see p 161-62) The Secret of Kells blu-ray edition includes a comic booklet version of the film 29 Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art (2002) Latour and Wiebel write: “Iconoclasm is when we know what is happening in the act of breaking and what the motivations are for what appears as a clear project of destruction of art; iconoclash, on the other hand, is when one does not know, one hesitates, one is troubled by an action for which there is no way to now, without further inquiry, whether it is destructive or constructive” (14) 30 In the screenplay, the film’s ending loops back to the beginning: “A series of ever decreasing splashes drip and plop into the black water thus the beginning of the film is reprised A final splash plops all water-movement ceases and the screen is a black velvet void” (Prospero's Books: A Film of the Shakespeare's The Tempest, 164)  The edited world is not going to disappear just because it is revealed to be wrong.  31 Indeed, which of our abiding wrlds is no innocent as not to be edited already?  Textual  criticism is important to imp on editorial practice . . not as deliverance form its mistakes,  but because it an vivid shapes to the problematic, mythy errors that we shall contiue to fly  by  “emboss the paper with the unlinked type renaissance books routinely contain 32 hidden text where the innocent eye draws a blank In other words, there exists a literature not yet registered on the maps of early printing The Corteginao is just one of many books with such terra incognita—terrain unknown until now, that is (190) uninked type” (189) But even in merely ambient light you would be able to see several lines of dirty traces below it.” “The angelic (the missionary) direction of narrative (152) As we are learning to differentiate the stages of the printing schedule from those of the literary narrative” (159) Overleaf is another copy of the same page—a remarkable one, for the paper remembers its ordeal at the press (159)Consider the photograph, opposite (168) With this image, I want to remind you of what lies behind the term ‘forme’, meaning on one side of a printed sheet of paper (169)Bleed through of the diagrams in McLeod’s essay Book splits right where the two hands hold the text partly open to see a shape of Easter Wings that is not its shape and to read The Church across the title as well as Easter Wings Textual critics and editors are irreducibly conflicted in some sense, but only to an always already redited to default Or some dialectic—Hegelian—improved editions Fewer errors Both produce genetic narratives—transmission and production, both invested in the same “thing” and both adopt the same model of textual forensics McLeod’s investment isn’t in gazing but reading is see something (metaphorically) I didn’t see that I see your point (Understand comprehends letters and images) It is always possible that the change from a comma to a period could have occurred through damage to the comma during the print-run, rather than by deliberate substitution of one type for the other But that such discriminate damage would have not only enhanced the system of punctuation, but also left no destructive traces is highly improbable N.20, 156 Photo-facsimiles of the entire manuscripts are “ n 23,156 “textual tree” 124 (botanist, naturalist) p 124—return to the same place the reader was at the beginning of the essay (124) Textual critics and editors both act like prosecutors, call up experts Vocabulary of theology “restored” text Serial order of the editions numbered Like Prospero’s Books “death bed manuscript” (84) “The Easter Wings gallery” A museum tour Greek technopaegnia (142) Photography does not lie, of course You can trust it, because it just gazes, like a silly goose (the two words are cognate).27 It does not lie It does not lie because it does not analyze It surfaces while, instantaneously But the underlying type-facsimile is not facsimile is not a gestalt [sic]; its coming into being was atomistic, sequential and linear It is all these because it is a reading, because reading rationalizes (these two words also cognate), because reading is abstract and analytical In short, reading is to deep – it is not sufficiently superficial to report the evidence, which lies, after all, on the surface “Shape” as a form (printing) A stroll through the Easter Wings Gallery shows appropriation drifting inappropriately according to fashion; this drift forestalls literary criticism’s approach to a science (148) One wonders if there is not something non-linear—even anti-linear—Herbert’s poetic Enter Reader, 41 Czech cop and CIA agents in Jon Savage movie The Amateur Well, if mutation of messages is the way of this world, how are to react to Herbert’s editors? Does their inexhaustible fertility issue in sublime adaptation or merely befuddled degeneration? (14) Is it really an exaggeration to say that these poems are invisible in the edited texts of the last century and a half before form (reading) McLeod wants to separate narratives even though in a sense he does not produce a narrative, or only a narrative loop End in the begin At the same time a delinearization-one or two poems? 3D perspective or not? Constant derailings made possible through the photograph and the diagram And yet a narrative of production—from fetus or fetal production / gestation to birth (but no after birth Not so much into breaking things and walking away but into shape (no reshaping) You want to stay with the shape Not geneticist, not a textual eugenics A secular Creationism (hidden text gets revealed as literature—but it is not readable-“uninked type.” Found lost text that is not word of God (or the author) It’s a surplus, not a supplement, but it lacks meaning It’s an image, not text The reistance you provide editors lies in the way you refuse to read images What about the stake in the posthumous? Keats and Herbert So your kind of like Saint Peter but as a mortician ... concerning Prospero’s books To our knowledge, The Tempest is unique in the history of literature in destroying books by drowning them All other literature and drama in which manuscripts or books. .. of the characters have survived The spacing of book into book and books does not allow us to imagine the end or the beginning of the book The real issue is not what the book or books are (their... Vaugns in their introduction to te Arden observe that the Tempest has fewer cruxes than the other plays in the First Folio, and the section of their Introduction devoted to “Cruxes,” they include