The Visual Display of Literary Complexity

in a Hypertext Critical Edition of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury

Peter Stoicheff and Joel Deshaye

The proposed talk examines the visual display of textual information in the digital environment. In the case of appropriately chosen and designed texts, textual information can be visually displayed to reveal aspects that would otherwise remain unrecognized. In this talk we would like to discuss some more recent developments in the visual display of literary texts, including the work done by Antonio Gonzales-Walker with the Cornell Theory Group and David Small at the M.I.T. Media Lab, and then describe related work done within our hypertext edition of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury.

In "Rationale for Hypertext" Jerome McGann argues that the examination or representation of a book through another book will yield only predictable results that are determined by the fact that the scale of subject and vehicle is the same:

"[W]e no longer have to use books to analyze and study other books or texts. That simple fact carries immense, even catastrophic, significance. Until now the book or codex form has been one of our most powerful tools for developing, storing, and disseminating information. . . . Brilliantly conceived, these works are nonetheless infamously difficult to read and use. Their problems arise because they deploy a book form to study another book form. . . . The problems grow more acute when readers want or need something beyond the semantic content of the primary textual materials -- when one wants to hear the performance of a song or ballad, see a play, or look at the physical features of texts."

In the past decade, scholars have also begun to investigate the merits and possible shortcomings of digital literary editions and archives in a number of projects. These projects have ranged from regarding the computer as a way of enhancing indexing capabilities through SGML, to visually re-engaging the reader with a text's material conditions, to providing an archive of related information of a geographical, historical or biographical nature. The list of scholarly digital projects has lengthened considerably in recent years. It includes the many at University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, the British Library Board’s Electronic Beowulf and Canterbury Tales projects, University of Indiana’s Victorian Women Writers project, and more. The motivations behind the creation of these digital projects vary. Some, such as the Walt Whitman Archive at the University of Virginia, exploit the platform’s ability to include numerous manuscripts in order to show how the “range and scope of the [Calamus] imagined text is in fact too great, its ‘standards’ too broad in their simultaneity, to fit the reductive confines of print technology.” Others, such as the Rossetti Archive by McGann at the University of Virginia, exploit the visual capabilities of the digital environment: “all texts deploy a more or less complex series of bibliographical codes, and page design -- if not page ornament and graphic illustration -- in a rich scene of textual expression. Computerized tools that deploy hypermedia networks and digitization have the means to study visual materials and the visibilities of language in ways that have not been possible before.” Peter Robinson's Canterbury Tales project has still another mandate. The Tales are in a state of textual disarray and present the reader with many questions concerning the composition history and the status of the manuscripts. Robinson describes the project’s origins as lying “in the perception that the advent of computer technology offers new methods, which might help us ask these questions in a new and more fruitful manner.”

Yet as the MIT designer David Small notes, "the display of information by computers does not often fulfill the promise of the computer as a visual information appliance." Arguably the computer screen has in some sense brought us full circle, back from the codex to the roll. The change, however, does not seem to have challenged prevailing assumptions about what we might call the text's architectonic structure, the basic shape we give to the general idea of text. Texts, both printed and digitalized, are usually still conceived of as stable, static and finite, with clearly defined borders, that remain the same from one visit to another. They are also conceived of as collections of two-dimensional surfaces. Just a glance at Small's work on presenting texts as three-dimensional structures indicates a range of possibilities that have rarely been considered. We will discuss some recent examples of digital work that visually reconceives the information of a literary text. David Small's work, as described in his IBM Systems Journal article, is one example; another is Antonio Gonzalez-Walker's, which studies "language/discourse phenomena in three-dimensional space."

We will then discuss and present the development of a particular, recently completed, critical hypertext edition of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury that exploits the potential for visually displaying complex textual information. The novel's narrative structure is highly complex; its frequent use of stream of consciousness creates great narrative density; it is highly allusive and intertextual throughout; and its chronologically restless first section is difficult to understand for most readers. It was this complexity that initially attracted the editors of this edition to the idea of placing The Sound and the Fury within a digital environment. The possibilities for visually displaying a text’s information and structures in a hypertext format are rich and productive, and the edition's intention is to exploit those possibilities to display the novel’s first two, chronologically most difficult, sections in a manner that is academically sound and editorially informed, and that maintains their textual integrity.

Several issues emerge from and are addressed within the talk and presentation. (1) The digital environment requires reconceptualizing previous, non-digital, editorial practices and theory. (2) Some texts are better suited to a critical presentation within the digital platform than others. (3) Degrees of narrative (and other) complexity such as is found in The Sound and the Fury are capable of visual display that has a rich and learned tradition available to other disciplines in the social sciences and sciences but usually overlooked in literary studies.

Works Cited

Small, David. "Navigating Large Bodies of Text." IBM Systems Journal, Vol. 35, No. 3&4, 1996.

Gonzales-Walker, Antonio. "Language Visualization and Multi-Layer Text Analysis."
http://www.tc.cornell.edu/Visualization/contrib/cs490-95to96/tonyg/Language.Viz1.html

British Library Board. The Electronic Beowulf Project.
http://www.ukyedu/~kiernan/BL/kporticot

------------. The Canterbury Tales Project.
http://www.shf.ac.uk/uni/projects/ctp/index.html

McGann, Jerome. “The Rationale of Hypertext.”

http://www.village.virginia.edu/public/jjm2f/rationale.html

---------. The Rossetti Archive. http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/rossetti/rossetti.html

Price, Kenneth M. and E. Folsom, eds. The Walt Whitman Hypertext Archive.
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/whitman

Stoicheff, Peter, Joel Deshaye and Allison Muri. “A Hypertext Edition of William
Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.” http://www.usask.ca/english/faulkner/

Willett, Perry, ed. The Victorian Women Writer’s Project.
http://www.indiana.edu/~letrs/vwwp/