E-initiatives
Development of anything like a "complete" Henry James hypermedia
archive would be a massive undertaking requiring a long-term commitment
from the James studies community.
The production of e-resources is extremely labour-intensive. The
Electronic Text Centre at the University of Virginia Library, which
supports McGann's project among others, is exceptional in the resources
and expertise it can draw upon - such as a large school of literature
graduates trained in e-text markup.
Designers of a James archive could take advantage of the skills and
resources developed in the production of other archives to date, but
there is no off-the-shelf shell that can be quickly and easily customised.
(1) The volume of potential material for inclusion is huge. (2) James
scholars need to learn about James through the difficult process of
designing an archive that works for his particular case - for example,
by finding ways to register the subtle nuance and referential range
of his writing.
A hypermedia archive is a sound pragmatic response to the digitisation
of Western culture within the framework developed in Humanities Computing
in the 1990s.
Such an archive is not automatically the best choice for James studies,
however. The horizon of Humanities Computing has arguably moved on,
illustrated by McGann's move from the Rossetti Archive to his latest
project, the "Ivanhoe Game," outlined in Radiant Textuality.
Rather than respond reactively to the main developments of Humanities
Computing, how might James studies take the initiative by contributing
to the imagination of new kinds of digital system, adding to our existing
matrix of critical and pedagogical tools? What might Henry James e-resources
look like, beyond the model of the hypermedia archive, for twenty-first
century students growing up in an increasingly digitised culture?
Debate over the future direction of e-initiatives is not currently
at the heart of James studies.
Perhaps there is some resistance to the exploration of computer-aided
critical practice among the community of James scholars. This would
not be unusual among Humanities scholars generally. James can also
be taken to be an especial representative of values attached to print
culture and subtle representation of consciousness - resisting vulgar
commodification and mechanisation, such as computer applications might
imply. The idea of a monumental "complete" James archive
may be repugnant, as well as risible, to many Jamesians.
By contrast, James Joyce scholars have made hypertextuality a central
aspect of Joyce studies.
Derrida indicated this possible direction in a paper to the 1984
James Joyce Symposium. Since then, critics such as Donald Theall have
read the encyclopedic, intertextual and glossollaliac qualities of
Joyce's writing as anticipating the hypertextuality materialised differently
in computer hypertext. There are ongoing developments of hypertextual
editions of Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake and a well established
Hypermedia Joyce Studies journal.
Might hypertext offer a model for analysing James's writing, for example
its narrative strategies or the complexity of his late style?
James's narratives are fundamentally linear. Could they be presented
in a hypertext form where the reader would jump backwards and forwards
across the narrative? Could such an edition/adaptation change pagination
or paragraphing? James's long sentences and paragraphs don't offer
any easy points for interruption. The transition from the solid materiality
of the printed page to the flickering insubstantiality of text on
a computer screen can be very unsettling - may have its own lessons
to teach about James's writing.
A reader of one of James's late novels or tales does carry out internal
and intertextual cross-referencing, but of an extremely subtle and
tenuous kind. How could such referencing be represented using hotlinks?
Hypertextualisation beyond hot-footnoting would be either a means
of textual analysis in its own right, or a means of presenting a guided
reading.
Hypertext also challenges the conventions of linear argument and presentation
in printed form that dominate academic discourse, including James studies.
The online version of this paper uses a very simple hypertext format
made familiar by thousands of online academic essays and teaching
resources. Hotlinks to World Wide Web sites, graphics, and hot-linking
to footnotes are obvious advantages of the form. More subtly, the
form also enables an argument to circle round a central theme or concept
instead of developing a linear argument towards a conclusion.
As the philosopher David Kolb argues in Socrates in the Labyrinth
(1994), the non-linearity of hypertext constitutes a challenge to
assumptions about rationality that are central to Western culture.
My online paper does no more than gesture towards such large stakes.
What new arguments about James might the very form of hypertext enable
students of James to advance?