CRAIG DWORKIN

TEXTUAL PROSTHESES

IN SEUILS, GÉRARD GENETTE inventories those genres on the threshold of a literary work: dedications and inscriptions, epigraphs and titles, prefaces, notes, and all manner of bibliographic accouterments—from jacket copy to format. Genette argues that “a text without a paratext does not exist,” but he also mentions, in passing, that “paratexts without texts do exist, if only by accident.” Paratexts without a text—paratexts as texts, one might put it—have also been written quite intentionally, however, and they constitute a remarkable trend in contemporary writing. While drawn from diverse contexts and written in apparent obliviousness to their precedents, these works all stage a related set of tensions: between literal and metaphoric language, between the etymological history of words and the amnesia of their colloquial usage, between the form of a work and its ostensible themes. By attending to the materials and rhetorics of these paratextual works, I hope to show that those tensions gesture toward the embodiedness of these literary works’ bibliographic forms, and to the textual corporeality that all such paratexts sustain as they seek to supplement, support, and displace the body of the text.

On 17 October, 1961, at 3:47 p.m., Daniel Spoerri stopped what he was doing and made a map recording the location of all the objects that happened to be lying on his kitchen table. Each outlined shape was then numbered and described in a corresponding note with the mock precision of one of Robbe-Grillet’s nouveaux romans. Published as the Topographie anecdotée du hasard (Anecdoted Topography of Chance), subsequent editions included notes to the notes—as many as eight degrees of annotations by as many authors—in a self-reflexive network of emendation. In addition to the sober, ostensibly scrupulous, dead-pan documentary that records details about the objects on the table—such as the fine-print on the labels of packages, the cost of items, and the date they were purchased—the notes include more discursive anecdotes about the circumstances under which objects were acquired and used, reminiscences and arguments among the writers, copies of their correspondence, transcripts of interviews, scholastic disputes, corrections and clarifications, obscure passages from literature and scrapbook clippings from contemporary newspapers, notes on translation, interlingual puns, dirty jokes, and, in some of the later editions, extraordinary, enthused passages from Dieter Roth that interrupt the expository tone of the original with hallucinatory extended metaphors and Steinian syntactic permutations.

The Topographie thus amplifies a long-standing tension between two competing and contradictory rhetorical traditions that have taken the genre of the note as their vehicle: the personally expressive and the objectively impersonal. On the one hand, the note has always been an anecdotal site that attracts speculative, conjectural, and incidental remarks; it is often the occasion for undocumented testimony or confidential asides—or even, too often, the irrepressible inclusion of material too dear to the writer to part with and yet not really germane to the topic under consideration. On the other hand, the note, and the footnote in particular, was seen to oppose those “particular, anecdotical traditions, whose original authority is unknown, or justly suspicious.” Accordingly, notes came to be understood as the proper repository for material beyond the writer’s personal authority: recourse to the work of other writers, evidentiary and corroborative bulwark, the foundation of objective facts, and citations in a standardized—and often imposed—system. At the same time, the association of the footnote with scientific objectivity was “virulently contested in the early modern period,” and the tension could still be felt in the opposition in the early eighteenth century to designating the note as either “a vehicle for displaying the critic’s taste and breeding” or “a quasi-scientific system for displaying the vicissitudes of textual transmission.” Indeed, “even eighteenth-century empiricism was content with weaker positions than those adopted by the triumphant positivists of the following age.”

To “note,” of course, is to observe closely, and the conceit of the Topographie is that it pays meticulous attention to objects that would otherwise go unnoticed: bread crumbs and grains of salt, a stray paperclip or rubber-band, an empty bottle, a torn carton, a cracked ashtray, and so on. With its exhaustive and careful analysis of a depopulated mise-en-scène in which everyday objects are recorded at a certain moment, frozen wherever they happen to be, the Topographie has some kinship with the attention a detective gives to the disposition of clues in a crime novel. Indeed, the structure of the book—with the textual and typographical attention lavished on each individual entry—promises revelations about the significance of the noted objects, which are imbued with an aura of mysterious immanence. In the end, however, the anecdotes fail to divulge any especially interesting secret histories; the banal accounts of quotidian objects ultimately reveal them to be, in fact, rather ordinary. But the book sets in play a dynamic between everyday utility and detached observation that is nevertheless quite interesting. In a sense derived directly from the Old Icelandic nota, to “note” also means to make use of something, so it is ironic that the cartographic notes of the Topographie suspend the use of the objects noted. However, both the “useless” objects on the table top (spilled salt, burnt matches, torn paper bags, et cetera) and the utilitarian objects frozen in place and rendered unuseable are re-motivated by the project of mapping and anecdoting, activities in which they once again serve a definite purpose. The Topographie reflects explicitly on this cycle, both with its note that the word “floccinaucinihilipilification” (the estimation of something as worthless) might be used in a way in which it was in fact considered worthless, and with Dieter Roth’s series of speculations on the contest between “attention” and “use,” in which the objects in Spoerri’s book oscillate between “artwork” and “commodity,” conservation and consumption. Specifically, Roth argues that “one can call symbols discarded commodities, because commodities—so long as you need them—lead an unconscious or unseen life.” We will see this dynamic recast in yet another form, as the alternation between the literal and metaphoric comes to charge the artist’s book with its distinctive character, and in which notation itself vacillates between symbolic use and commodified referent, but for now I want to recall the similar logic of an artist’s book from precisely the same moment. In Marcel Broodthaer’s sculpture Pense-bête (1964), books of his early poetry, bound shut by being set in plaster, can either be the subject of attention (contemplated as sculpture) or of use (opened and read)—but not both.

The Topographie belongs to what Johanna Drucker has identified as a documentary tradition of artist’s books, but it can also be read in a broader literary context that includes both the ancient trope of the epic catalogue and the much more recent lists and inventories of conceptual writing. The Topographie has a place in the tradition of “literary” footnotes originating in Edmund Spenser’s self-glossing apparatuses in the Shepherd’s Calendar and stretching from eighteenth-century examples in the works of Pope, Swift, Fielding, and Sterne to the modernist notes of Eliot, Joyce, and Beckett, and later to books by Vladimir Nabakov, bp Nichol, Manuel Puig, Nicholson Baker, and Mark Danielewski, among many others.