On George Bornstein's "How To Read a Page: Modernism and Material Textuality"

George Bornstein’s “How to Read a Page: Modernism and Material Textuality” opens with a question that counterposes visual and literary artworks in basic terms of space and site: “If the ‘Mona Lisa’ is in Paris at the Louvre, where is King Lear?” (303) The opposition jars the sense of an artwork’s authenticity by foregrounding the problem of “code” unique to a text. The Mona Lisa may abound in endless reproductions, but there is only one real version—the oil-on-poplar original enshrined in the French museum. It is a primarily spatial object, visible and materially singular so that “reproductions of it are copies that lack one or more features of the original” (303). King Lear presents an inverse possibility: that the early versions that exist, like the First Folio, are perhaps only approximations of “a lost manuscript or of an ideal print version, and themselves full of deficiencies.” Later copies, which synthesize or select from previous versions, and which appear in specific—and diverse—ways on pages in various editions, may in fact be preferable versions of the text. “In our age of relentless demystification,” Bornstein writes, “the text itself often remains the last mystified object, with critics naively assuming that the paperback texts that they pull from their local bookstore somehow ‘are’ King Lear, or Pride and Prejudice, or The Souls of Black Folk” (303). But the plurality that scenario implies—of identical paperback copies of King Lear, pulled together from the shelves—signals the difficulty of assigning a unique locus to a text, except in its secondary role as artifact.

If I were to be Bornsteinian about things, I would note that the opening question appeared at the beginning of James MacLaverty’s article “The Mode of Existence of Literary Works of Art” (1984), with Hamlet and Lycidas in place of King Lear, which itself paraphrased F. W. Bateson’s original question in Essays in Critical Dissent (1978), with Hamlet alone providing the counterexample to the Mona Lisa [Note 1 points to these sources]. These are of course only versions of a sentence appearing in different essays by different authors, but the progression hints at Bornstein’s methodology. For Bornstein, textual plurality is not a sequence of artifact-versions but a constellation of material instantiations that suggest meaning through their interplay: “Tracking the poem back through its earlier sites reveals alternate material components of meaning. Those meanings are carried by bibliographic codes as well as by linguistic ones, which is why paying attention only to the words in reprintings erases other meanings” (328). Bornstein draws this distinction from McGann’s argument, in The Textual Condition, for the bibliographic code as a crucially signifying dimension—the “physical medium through which (or rather as which) the linguistic text is embodied” (306). And he connects it to Benjamin’s concept of the “aura,” first elaborated in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Benjamin imagines the aura as the original artwork’s “presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be” (305); it is the aura that therefore suffers, or shrinks, from the disembodiment of reproduction. Bornstein revises that concept by arguing that even mechanical reproductions create their own auras, so that a text is not so much disembodied as re-embodied, or multiply embodied, through time and space. This revision underscores the text’s continued and inevitable physicality.

Bornstein’s focus is on historicizing the text through its material instantiations. To this end, he traces four sonnets through various salient permutations in print, manuscript, and elsewhere. He treats the political aspect of Keats’ “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer” through its appearance in a left-leaning periodical; the racial and ethnic implications of Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus” through its manuscript edition, its inscription on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, and the sanitized version found in JFK Airport; the social critique of Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan” through its publication in a nationalist and female-run press, which included elements of a medieval manuscript in its layout; and the personal and historical implications of Gwendolyn Brooks’ “my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell” through its publication alongside other poems dealing with the experience of black soldiers in World War II. He is especially wary of the anthology, that great “dehistoricizing field that obscures the social embedding of its own contents” (313). These seem important points to make, and the essay as a whole offers a strong case for the de-erasure of historical and political contexts through examinations of a text’s materiality. But I found Bornstein’s dismissal of a text’s “merely” aesthetic meaning unsatisfying. The constellation of a text’s visible and palpable manifestations is as interesting for its connection to the language’s formal aspects as is it for a revelation of its historical content. Why couldn’t aesthetic considerations, too, work into the schema Bornstein has constructed?