Undoing The Book

Undoing the Book
Author(s): PETER QUARTERMAIN

Source: Text, Vol. 9 (1996), pp. 119-132
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20698013
Accessed: 02-10-2019 00:31 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
Indiana University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access
to Text
This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Wed, 02 Oct 2019 00:31:24 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Undoing the Book
PETER QUARTERMAIN
THIS PAPER SEEKS TO RAISE PROBLEMS rather than to solve them. It is

directed at two general questions about bibliography: what is it? and
what good is it? Though I propose to raise both, my primary concern
is with deliberate challenges to the art of bibliography understood as
the study of the book as material object. I'm interested in the exploita
tion of meaningful systems-violations in the production of the written
and printed word.
The central passionate desire of the bibliographic enterprise, surely,
is, through complex acts of critical and physical description, to stabilize
the text and its provenance (including authorship and the means of
production), and by extension therefore to stabilize the visible and the
invisible, the material and the immaterial world, by rendering it subject
to description and thus to control: that is, as painlessly as possible to
absorb the work into the culture. Like all systems of control, bibliogra
phy is subject to opposition. It is, like science, economics, psychology,
and metaphysics, a fiction. It is not any the less useful or useable for
that, and like other fictions it has its characteristic forms.
Like other fictions, too, it has in the last twenty or more years
suffered challenges, importantly but by no means exclusively from
critical theorists. If the critical theorist asks what it is to read or to
write, surely the challenge now is What is it to bibliographe What
exactly are we doing when we describe a text as a material object? This
may or may not be related to Stanley Fish's famous question Is there
a text in this cUss?, but it does have, surely, a more than peripheral
connection to the confusion of text and world, image and text, in
popular culture and the media?books, after all, are also the media, or
izo ? PETER QU ARTERMAIN
one of them. It is no longer clear, that is to say, what a book is?or, if

it is, then whether books are what bibliography is all about. For we are
in a world, as Jerome McGann recently observed, that is "saying fare
well to the book as we know it" (xiii). But what, after all, is a book?
There is, first, the power of the book as an intellectual construct, as
an authority. If it's in a book it must be what? "True"? right? carefully
wrought? "good"? worthy our attention? of Value, at any rate?and we
still believe that, surely, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary
which clutters up the supermarket shelves. But what authority is it?
Historically, we seem to have associated the power of the printed word
with its authenticity, and the office of the bibliographer has been to
certify origins, to attest the genuine, and to distinguisn the true from
the counterfeit.
"'Space is a swarming in the eyes, and Time a singing in the ears,'
says John Shade, a modern poet, as quoted by an invented philosopher
('Martin Gardiner') in The Ambidextrous Universe, page So says
Ivan Veen, meditating on Time and Space, and we read his words in a
book called Ada or Ardor (542), a novel whose subtitle nicely mingles
fact and fiction by calling itself A Family Chronicle. But the invented
"Martin Gardiner" (whose name sounds suspiciously close to the
Martin Gardner who set puzzles in Scientific American) is misquoting
his source: in their original published version Shade's lines read
Space is a swarming in the eyes; and time,

A singing in the ears. (Canto 2, lines 215-16)
But John Shade is himself an invention, straying into Ada's pages from
another fiction by Nabokov (Pale Fire 40). So we have a fiction in
which an invented philosopher in his imaginary book misquotes lines
from a real poem by an invented poet in a real book which itself turns
out to be an invented fiction by a writer who published his earliest
books in Russian over the invented name V. Sirin but who as author of
this book claims really to be Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov. No
wonder the aim of bibliography is to stabilize the world. A persistent
theme of Nabokov's fiction is (as Simon Karlinsky puts it) that "life
may be converted into art by turning a given project or course of action
into a creative act" (5 57); a persistent pleasure that fiction affords is the
continued rhyme between his fictional-world-as-real and the real
world-as-fiction. No wonder the aim of bibliography is to stabilize the
world! By and large an archaeological enterprise seeking to establish as
well as preserve a sense of authentic origins for the written (published)
work, bibliography is but one of the many fictions by which we seek
to discipline the world in which we live when it is increasingly difficult
to do so. The challenge now facing bibliography is that it seems no
Undoing the Book ? 121
longer adequate, or even perhaps relevant, to the invented lives most of

us willy-nilly lead: the challenge for the bibliographer is to describe his
own fiction in the course of telling the bibliographic story. New
elements have entered this narrative.
Now, high-school and freshman-English texts talk of fiction in terms
of headings: Character, Plot, Setting, Style, Theme. A bibliographic
parody might run: Author, Title, Place, Publisher, Date?these are the
terms which we teach, at any rate, the acolyte. The modern biblio
graphic narrative relies on notions of authority and reliability, of fact
and of value, closely tied to its origins in the early history of printing,
and is by and large ill-equipped to deal with a view of the world as
multiple, polyvalent, and shifting.1 In its devotion to balance, stability,
prediction, and hence above all to the sort of clarity which comes with
completeness, the bibliographic narrative is engaged in the Promethean
task of bringing order to the world, and its text follows an essentially
diachronic model; it is sequentially chronological, couching its tale and
presenting its facts as features of a discourse whose special terms
constitute a significant vocabulary: manuscript, primary text, original,
proof, first edition, copy text, impression, signature, etc., etc. The
major shift facing the bibliographer, the describer and historian of the
book as material object, is that the customary bibliographic story is
being deliberately undone by both writers and publishers, who subvert
the diachronic time-bound model of the bibliographic narrative.
Technology, too, of course, in the shape of desk-top and electronic
publishing, is playing its part in rescripting or even dismantling the
customary bibliographic plot, whether by accident or by design, so that
even the very materiality of the book is now under question. Increas
ingly, we read texts which defy description and works which disguise
and indeed renounce origin.
In her meticulous bibliography of Guy Davenport's work, Joan St.
C. Crane distinguishes two states of the first edition, second issue, of
Trois Caprices (1982). The title panel of the first state is "slightly less
than 17mm from the top edge measured at the spine"; that of the
second state 15.5 mm from the top edge; if on the copy you've got,
however, the title panel is 18-19 mm from the top edge measured at the
spine, then you're looking at the second printing (personal communi
cation). Crane's bibliographic description is a model of investigation
and clarity. But how can you achieve an accurate description of the sort
of books produced by say Rebis Press, whose Half Off (stories by
1 There are of course exceptions to that "by and large"; one need only think, for example,
of the Tudor and later English practice of circulating verse in manuscript, with its
concomitant bibliographic complexities.
122 ? PETER QUARTERMAIN
Mimi Pond) has nylon net endpapers and shower-cap binding? "Like
many Rebis books, this one is difficult to describe, but memorable to
see, read, and touch," proclaimed the publisher in a promotional flyer.
You would have to demolish the book in order to describe it, which
immediately confounds the bibliographic purpose of authenticating as
genuine the fetishized book as art-object.
But in looking at the unclassifiable and even indescribable (as mate
rial object) book I do not in fact have in mind the book as objet-d'art,
but the book (or periodical) which is produced with more down
market objectives: the literary-critical journal, the little magazine, the
book designed to be read rather than the book designed to be admired
and cherished as object. If we are interested in tracing the chronology
of publication or the frequency of reprint, the plan of a magazine like
Barry Alpert's Vort (1972- c. 1975) poses problems, since Alpert pro
posed to reprint early issues on demand. Later in that same decade
Coach House Press in Toronto produced a series of Manuscript
Editions which, and I quote from the prospectus,
are computer line-printer copies of works in progress?long poems,

poetry collections, etc. They are run off and bound up as orders are
received at the press. The compositional date and number of the partic
ular draft is clearly marked and as die manuscript is revised by the author
these revisions are fed into the computer and the compositional date and
draft number altered accordingly. It is our hope with these editions to
allow readers and writers more access to each other during the composi
tional process/
Thus the "first draft" of Fred Wah, Breathin ' My Name with a Sigh (a
book whose third draft was eventually published by Talonbooks in
Vancouver in October 1981), appeared in January 1978 (with the
second in January 1979), but Eli Mandel's Mary Midnight (announced
in the second draft of Wah) is identified simply as "new draft." My
1 The final sentence quoted suggests that Manuscript Editions are the immediate antecedent
of the e-mail journal Swift Current, which encouraged readers to respond to and if need be
amend texts so published. The final typescript page of the Second Draft of Fred Wah,
Breathin' My Name with a Sigh (January 1978) repeats this statement and lists "some
Manuscript Editions currently or soon available." All are poetry unless otherwise specified:
Frank Davey. The War Poems. 3rd Draft

Gerry Gilbert. The '79 Spring Tour of the Canadas, ist Draft.
Liz Lochhead. The Grimm Sisters, ist Draft.
Eli Mandel. Mary Midnight. Drama, an Oratory. New draft.
bpNichol. The Martyrology Book V, Chain 8. 2nd Draft.
D. Ann Taylor. The Patty ReHearst Story. Drama, ist Draft.
Fred Wah. Breathin' My Name with a Sigh. 2nd Draft
copy of George Bowering's Uncle Louis (1980) is neither bound, nor

precisely dated, but nevertheless is clearly a computer dot-matrix print
out and claims to be a Manuscript Edition. I do not know if it is
possible to order an earlier draft of a subsequently published book, but
without access to an authenticated "original" computer print-out it
would be difficult if not impossible to determine the exact status and
even provenance of the text so produced. Perhaps such publications
might be said accidentally to subvert the notion of book.
Alternatively, there are magazines like Open Space (San Francisco,
1964-196$), edited by Stan Persky,3 with its fifteen irregularly num
bered issues; like Curtains, a looseleaf magazine edited by Paul Buck
in 1970s England, which changed its name every issue {Bald Curtain;
Curtain le prochain step, and so forth); and like Aspen: The Magazine
in a Box, of which volume 1 number 2 (1966) contains records,
pamphlets, folders with cards in them, and single printed sheets. There
is mischief here, of course, as there is perhaps in the Vancouver
magazine Yuth, whose three issues to date (December 1993) bear
neither a date nor an editorial name and address; as there is mischief too
in a current English little magazine which appears irregularly but with
no date of issue, whose title and editorial address appears to change
each time it comes out, which may or may not be for sale (if you can
ever find a copy), and whose editor may or may not be Talbot
Rothwell, or Tony Baker, or Ken Edwards.4 Such bibliographic intran
sigence can perhaps be ascribed to political or mischievous rather than
aesthetic or philosophic motives, as can the cataloguing dilemma posed
by Michael McClure's book of poems, published in 1966, with a
typographical oddity as its title: ? (usually catalogued as [Black Dot]).
Other works, however, are perhaps best described as programmatic
in their subversion. Witness the two panels of Steve McCaffery's
Carnival (1973, 1975)5 a book of typewriter art which is also a poem,
and which has to be demolished in order to be read. Each book consists
3 So far as I know, there were fourteen issues of Open Space as follows:
#o (January 30,1964), declaring itself a "prospectus" but in fact a complete issue

of the magazine; #1; "Valentine" issue; #2; #3; #4 "White Hope"; #4 "Taurus"; #5;
#6; #7; #8; #9; #10 "Setting to the Blues His Foolish Hopes"; #11 "The Penguin
Book of Modern American Verse edited by Donald M Allen" [a ghost title]; and
#12. Not all issues were dated, and the final issue seems to have been issued in
1965.
4 Yuth is a xeroxed satirical literary magazine, edited by Michele Fogai and Karen Stankunas,
undergraduates at the University of British Columbia. Copies are produced at cost on
demand. Two issues of the English magazine (so far as I know) are Language Issue and
Solicited Material?both appeared in 1992 or 1993.1 am indebted to Harry Gilonis for
informed speculation regarding the editorship.
124 ? PETER QU ARTERMAIN
of 20 (21, in the case of the second panel) pages (top edge stapled)
accompanied by an instruction card with a miniature of the assembled
panel; the first panel has an errata sheet. The instructions for the first
panel read: "In order to destroy this book please tear each page
carefully along the perforation. The panel is assembled by laying out
pages in a square of four." The final assemblage is presumably framed
and hung. There's a long history in this century of publishers, editors
and writers deliberately violating bibliographic decorum, or indifferent
to it. When the English poet Thomas A. Clarke (who runs Moschatel
Press) carefully sews a single sheet of paper, a poem printed on one side
only, between stiff card covers, do we call this a book? How many
pages are there in Raymond Queneau's Cent Mille Milliards de Po?mes
(1961), in which the pages have been cut evenly into horizontal strips,
each strip bearing one line of a poem? What is the title of Steve
McCaffery's Evoba (1987)? Above Backwards} or (as a note on the
cover seems obliged to tell us) Vubba} There are countless little
magazines like King Ida s Watch Chain, Hanging Loose, and Orange
Bear Reader consisting of a packet or envelope or box of loose sheets
of different sizes which may or may not have had a table of contents
which in any event sometimes got lost. There seems to be a tradition of
such folio publications among fine art magazines, like Art Now
(published in the 1970s), and Wallace Berman's Semina (1960s), and the
model for such publications might well be Marcel Duchamp's Bo?te
Verte: (1934), 93 documents relating to La Mari?e mise ? nu par ces
c?libataires, m?me (some dated, some not, but all from the period
1911-1915), boxed but with no inventory, in no particular order and
itself, therefore (though issued in a deluxe edition of only twenty
copies), a bibliographic nightmare which had to wait until 1986 to be
adequately described by Ecke Bonk. There have been in the last fifty
years countless books like Robert Grenier's Sentences (1978), Michael
McClure's Poem Cards (1966), or bpNichol's Still Water (1970).5
These, like shuffleable decks of cards with writing on them, or
consisting of loose sheets with perhaps only one word on each placed
in a box, in their deliberate violations of book-making protocols resist
and even undo the idea of completeness. They thus?like Allen Fisher's
later Place and Gravity as a Consequence of Shape (works of a quite
different order)?argue not only against the text as a totality, but
against the notion that even the "culture" can complete the text (since
the text undergoes constant recontextualization and rescription), and
* A lineal descendant might be David Bromige's Tight Corners & What's Around Them
(being the brief & endless adventures of some pronouns in the sentences of 1972-197$): Prose
and Poems, Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1974. The text is derived from note cards
which, though originally in flexible order, are here constrained by the bound book.
Undoing the Book -125
thus show kinship with work like that of Olson and Pound, which I
have elsewhere called variorum texts (Quartermain, 63-65). The
bibliographic enterprise, by implication, is yet another version of
Enlightenment, Romantic, and Encyclopaedist anxiety over missing the
total. Obliged to settle for what it sees as the partial and the incomplete,
it fails to recognise the partiality of its own encyclopaedism.
"I detest the world" says the English poet Peter Riley in his poem
"What Is":
I detest the world

as it is known. I couldn't
Get out of that quick enough. The world

as it is seen
Is my bed forever.
Be there too. ([18])
As a rule, however, works like those I've enumerated undermine the

bibliographic act piecemeal, by challenging our notion of title, pagi
nation, edition, or even the provenance of the text. Peter Riley's poem,
and indeed Reader, the book from which it comes, points in a more
radical direction. The major challenge to bibliography arises from the
current practices of the indeterminate text, for the indeterminate text
necessarily enjoins a concomitant indeterminacy of the book. Here we
move into a consideration of the book as politics?the deliberate
attempt to undermine the notion of book. I want to look briefly at
three examples, each of which seeks to undo a particular sort of knowl
edge?of what is to be known, and what it is to know.
. If we include books, pamphlets, drawings, paintings, videos, music
and taped readings, the English poet and painter Allen Fisher (some of
his work is in the Tate Gallery) has published over seventy works since
1966, all of them interlinked as part of an overall as yet undefined and
possibly undefinable project, each at the same time independent, the
large project itself divided into a series of what he calls "processual"
works. "I do not base my proposals on a belief structure?nor upon
certainty of any substance," he has said. "On the contrary I expect a
multiple virtuality which cannot be stabilised or made definitive"
(quoted Edwards, 72). His work is extremely unstable, defying
bibliographic description as it defies formal description. One of his
books, Bavuska or the Rub: The Rubber or Greta's Bust (1969)
consists, the title page tells us, of "random selections from Allen
Fisher's simultaneous novels"; those selections (otherwise unpublished
so far as I know) are titled Busk 1, Ava, and Busk 2, and texts appear
to be interchangeable. His first major project to be published and

apparently completed is the extensive work Place, but it is extremely
difficult to sort out. ? note in the final volume (Unpolished Mirrors
[1985 printing]) identifies nine volumes covering Books I through V/
but the text omits some forty pages of "works which moved out from
Unpolished Mirrors" notes, and "tentative work" which "would be out
of tone with this edition." Fisher distinguishes between the "serial"
(1979?) and the "collated" (1981) editions of the poem, whose text in
any case overlaps with other texts. One version of Unpolished Mirrors
(1979? 1981 ?) carried the notation "beingplace book II informed by
place book V." A note in the second printing (1976) of Place
I-XXXVII remarks that publication of the work is "not expected
before 1980, that is after its abandonment" and calls itself a "preview of
Book I being the main parts of the First Movement" (my emphasis);
interleaved in this edition however are parts of another work "Lakes,"
in which is interleaved a portion of Place XXXII, a section which itself
"appears elsewhere" as Blood Bone Brain (prefatory note, unpaged).
But in 1980 Fisher published Hooks place 32 being taken out of place;
it prints work not found in the 32nd section of Place Book I and seems
indeed to have been written after that book was published. Place Book
I, meanwhile, itself weaves back and forth, some pages being parts of
the second, fifth and eleventh sections of Place at the same time. A long
note at the end of Unpolished Mirrors Serial H (the final section,
perhaps, of Place) offers the reader advice on how to read the book, in
the form of six versions of "a map of approaches." The fourth ap
proach, "considered void," consists of
simply reading place through from page one in book one to the last page
in Becoming, or in Unpolished Mirrors, dropping out "cut-in" material
6 Place Book I place I-XXXVII appeared (with omissions) in 1974 with a complex index
mapping the interleaving repeats and shuffles of the text, and was reprinted in 1976 with
revisions. Book II, which is to say parts 38,39, and 40, was split and recombined in a variety
of ways. Part 38 appeared in note form as Unpolished Mirrors (1977) which also included a
portion of Book V; part 39 appeared as Eros: Father: Pattern (1977); Part 4? was '*taken out
of place together with parts of place 32" and published in part as a section of another work,
Convergences, published in part combined with bits of part 32, the preface being published
separately as Hook (1980) with additional material (and the index); Book III, Stane, covers
places 45-81; Books IUI and V appeared in 1978 as Becoming, which omits the 'place'
numbers from the text. Other works of somewhat indistinct but actual relationship to Place
are Fire-phce (published with Hearth-work by Pierre Joris as Fire-Work (1977), Splashed
Ponds (leading from Unpolished Mirrors) (1979), Docking (leading into part of Stane) and
William Rufus (which Fisher listed in December 1978 as "in progress"). Stane, Book III, is
also the Second movement; Book "Two" comprises the second movement. Place 32, which
is itself part of Book I, is preface to place 40, which is in turn the close of both Book "Two"
and of the third movement.
like Grampians, Lakes, Eclipse, William Rufus or Birds Locked In The

Roof en route. (99)
So far as I know, William Rufus has yet to be published. The note adds
that one purpose of the "cut-ins" was "to ensure breakage of chrono
logic or developmental apparency offered in works of process; as well
as to suggest to the reader a different set of simultaneous activities that
were impinging on and leading from Place" (99)?to read any "set,"
section, or book as an entity, Fisher says, "misreads the work" (100).
More recent work shows more complex overlapping, interference, and
interweaving, since Stepping Out seems simultaneously to be a part of
both Gravity as a Consequence of Shape and of his long gloss on Bach
and optics, The Art of Flight. Overall, Fisher's writing presents itself
as an immense synchronie seriality, and its method of publication
seems designed to present the work as not subject to the constraints of
linear time.7 "A multiple virtuality which cannot be stabilised" indeed,
his is a text without bounds.
2. My second instance of a writer deliberately undermining the
notion of book is Susan Howe, who in 1989 published a book-length
poem with a title long familiar to bibliographers and historians of the
book: A Bibliography of the King '$ Book; or Eikon Basilike (Provi
dence: Paradigm, 1989). The book is not paginated and, as Kent Lewis
has shown, it stringently resists all attempts to standardize its text:
sixteen pages into the book, after such preliminaries as the half-title and
an inaccurate bibliography of books "Also by Susan Howe,"8 after five
pages of prose text and a poem, we get the copyright notice. And then
we get the full title page. The prose introduction and poem, fore
grounded as they are among the preliminaries, disrupt the publication
proceedings, the work and its frame blending into such continuity (or
pervaded by insistent discontinuity) that even the detachable dust
jacket becomes (or might be) part of the text. The poem thus problema
tizes bibliographic identification and description of the book's parts,
destabilizing the boundary line between text and bibliographic matter,
rendering the conventional bibliographic narrative an irrelevant fiction,
and even dissolving the distinctions between author, printer, and
7 "Not subject to" is not the same as "free of." But Fisher is building a temporally variable
text, in that he refuses to correlate the sequential position of the poem with its temporal. That
is to say, parts written early in the serial may refer structurally backwards to parts as yet
unwritten and even unplanned.
8 The list omits Cabbage Gardens (a .: Fathom P, 1979) and The Liberties (Guilford, CT:
Loon, 1980), and includes a ghost title, Scattering as Behavior Toward Risk, as forthcoming
from Wesleyan University Press. This work appeared as a section of Howe's Singularities
(Hanover and London: UP of New England for Wesleyan UP, 1990).
publisher, since the design of the dust-jacket, presumably the work of

Rosmarie Waldrop, who set the cover and title-page, seems an integral
part of the poem.9 The margins of the book are blurred, and title,
layout, and physical substance of the book all further the plurality of
the text itself, which ambiguates authority and authorship. "A First
didn't write it," says one line of this strangely collaborative poem, filled
as it is with multiplicities and contradictions. It calls into question the
very notion of "corrupt" text, and even quite possibly entices the reader
into making authorial intervention.
3. My third instance is a book in its own way as cheeky and subver
sively mischievous as any book about sex by Madonna falling to pieces
the moment you open it. It is William Gibson's Agrippa. Priced at
$1,500, and illustrated with "etchings," this book is an electronic text
which automatically self-destructs by erasing itself as you read (appar
ently, by means of an encryption process possibly hacked from an
unnamed U.S. government agency, perhaps the CIA or the FBI). It can,
then, only be read once. It is, of course, a hacker's dream, and if you
have access to Internet or belong to CompuServe you can download
the whole thing (minus the illustrations) for about $2.00 or even free.
"AGRIPPA (A Book of The Dead) Text by William Gibson. Etchings
by Dennis Ashbaugh (Q1992 Kevin Begos Publishing All Rights
Reserved Hacked & Cracked by Templar, Rosehammer & Pseudo
phred," is roughly 1800 words long, the text apparently approved by
Gibson himself. For self-apparent reasons, I cannot in what follows
document my references to this work.
It is a very interesting text, for two principal reasons: first, because
in the electronic form as downloaded from CompuServe it is virtually
impossible to tell where the introduction by Templar ends and
Gibson's text begins. The reader cannot tell where these lines belong:
I hesitated
before untying the bow
that bound this book together.
Second, the downloaded text is possibly and even probably corrupt?

section numbering is inconsistent (section IV lacks a period), and a line
towards the end of section V, "moving as though contours of hot iron,"
is surely in error?context demands that it read "moving as through
contours of hot iron." These are utterly trivial points of course, but
9 As Lewis points out, such ambiguation extends even to the binding: the spine bears the title
"a bibliography of the king's book; or, eikon basilike"?a variation of the front cover and half
tide, which omits the semi-colon, and of the full title, which mixes upper and lower case and
omits the punctuation: "A Bibliography of The King's Book or Eikon Basilike."
they point to interesting features of the electronic text. Not least of

these features is my inability, faced with "Templar's" version of
Gibson's text, to verify the authenticity and hence accuracy of that text;
closely allied to this is my inability to describe the text at all, except as
hard copy. I cannot produce the text itself, for "the text itself has no
material existence that I can personally detect; similarly, one is led to
wonder whether the "etchings" ever had an actual material existence. I
am obliged to produce a machine which (we trust) will decode impulse
into text. The text, that is to say (like the etchings), exists outside the
range of the sensorium.
That we nowadays understand this observation to apply to all texts
is only part of my point, for an electronic text like Gibson's Agrippa
constitutes a radical change in our relations with the literary text,
whether we are authors or readers. This is a new kind of book indeed,
which can only be read through the mediation of the machine. As
Barrett Watten has pointed out,
text is entered on a keyboard into a small memory bank and is displayed

on a video field. Once this is done, the text is transferred to a magnetic
disc which in turn causes the text to be produced. The text here is being
treated as a material mass as a whole?it is not broken down into
keystrokes signifying direct action through the machine. (34)
This means not only that the operator of the machine is obliged to go
into the machine (via keyboard, VDT, software, etc) in order to discern
the text, but that the operator of the machine can "go into the machine
in order to straighten things out" only by means of the language of the
machine, a language that the operator usually cannot read, in the
process changing the very workings of the machine itself and hence the
very nature of the text. As Watten puts it, "he can deform, replace, or
eradicate letters altogether" (34), but we must once again remember that
in the world of the sensorium these letters have only an invisible,
directly indiscernible and hence indefinite or even equivocal existence.
Under this scheme of things Alice B. Toklas?or Gertrude Stein
herself, of course!?reading through the drafts of Stein's Stanzas in
Meditation, could effect a global Search and Replace, eliminating all
instances of "may" and substituting "can," with only nine keystrokes.10
Bibliographers, I believe, will be hard pressed to meet the challenge
of such apparently authorless work unless and until they recognise the
10 For the sake of illustration I am oversimplifying the complex history of Stein's text,
though it is clear that (for whatever reason) Toklas did indeed, as Ulla Dydo thoroughly
documents, substitute alternatives for many of the "m-words" like may and May, and Stein
accepted some of her substitutions.
13o ? PETER QUARTERMAIN
partiality that lies at the core of their own desire for complete and
definitive authority. We need a more flexible fiction.
A truncated version of this paper was delivered at the session "'But It's Not a
BookV; The Status of Bibliography in the Profession," arranged by the Division on
Methods of Literary Research, at the MLA Convention in Toronto, December
1993.1 am grateful to Charles Watts, Special Collections, Simon Fraser University
Library, for bibliographic information about several of the little magazines listed
in this paper.
Works Cited
BONK, ECKE. Marcel Duchamp: The Box in a Valise de oh par Marcel Duchamp
oh Rrose S?lavy. Inventory of an Edition. David Britt, trans. New York: Rizzoli,
1989.
BROMIGE, DAVID. Tight Corners & What's Around Them (being the brief &
endless adventures of some pronouns in the sentences of 1972-1973): Prose &
Poems. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1974.
CLARK, THOMAS A. A Moth Glade. [Nailsworth, Glos.:] Moschatel, 1981.
Coach House Press Manuscript Editions as follows:
OWERING, GEORGE. Uncle Louis: A Poem. First draft. Manuscript Editions.
Toronto: Coach House Press, January 1980.
DaVEY, FRANK. War Poems. First draft. Toronto: Coach House Press, May
1979?
WaH, FRED. Breath in ' My Name with a Sigh. First Draft. Toronto: Coach
House Press, January 1978.
-,-. Second Draft. MS. Editions. Toronto: Coach House Press, January
1979?
CRANE, JOAN ST. C. Letter to Peter Quartermain. 2 August 1985.
DAVENPORT, GUY. Trois Caprices. Louisville: Pace Trust, 1982.
DUCHAMP, MARCEL. Boke Verte: La Mari?e mise ? nu par ces c?libataires, m?me.
Paris: Editions Rrose S?lavy, 1934 (Deluxe edition, 20 copies; standard edition
300 copies).
DYDO, ULLA. "How to Read Gertrude Stein: The Manuscript of 'Stanzas in
Meditation'." TEXT 1 (1981): 271-303; and "Stanzas in Meditation'. The Other
Autobiography." Chicago Review 35.2 (Winter 1985): 4-20.
edwards, ken. "Bloom in the Plain Acoustic: Allen Fisher: Stepping Out''
Fragmente 5 (1993): 72-75.
FISH, STANLEY. Is There a Text In This Class? The Authority of Interpretive
Communities. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980.
[FISHER, ALLEN. Note: Some of the following may be ghost titles, reported by
Fisher in varying guises in several publications; those I have not actually seen are
marked with an asterisk *]
-. Bavuska, or the Rub; The Rubber or Greta's Bust: the
mbbk/mbato/mbbrng/rubbish/rubicund/rubric. Random selections from Allen
Fisher's simultaneous novels. London: Big Venus, 1969.
-. Becoming, Place Books IUI and V. London: Aloes, 1978.
Undoing the Book '131
. Convergences, in place, of the play, stage eight; place 40. London: Spanner,
1978.
*-. Docking; which led to parts of place 66 shown in that work and here.
Bishop's Storford: Great Works, 1978.
-. Eros: Father: Pattern; place 39. Warehorne, Near Ashford, Kent: Secret
Books, 1980.
*-, "Fire-place; being the full version of place 76/50 & 78." With Pierre Joris,
"Hearth-work," as Fire-works. Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire: Hatch Books,
1977?
-. Hooks; being those parts ofplace 32, 'taken out of place * from Book II to act
asan opening into 'Convergences, in place, of the play \ pUce 40. Baltimore: Pod
Books, 1980.
. Pit Stop, which led out of Grampians interweaving place 4 published as
follows:
^Played Against Drum Beats. Cambridge: Perfect Bound
* Enclosed Delight. Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire: Curtains.
* Cleopatra's Sononty. Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire: Curtains.
Gripping the Rail. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Pig, 1976.
-. Place typescript drafted 22.4.73 comprising most of book I place one to thirty
seven First Movement. London: Aloes, 1974.
-. Place Book I drafted 22.4.73 comprising most of Book I place one to thirty
seven. Carboro, NC: Truck Books, 1976.
-. Prologue and Intonation to the Vespers of the Revolution: Unpolished Mirrors
Serial G. London: Spanner, 1981.
-. Splashed Ponds: Unpolished Mirrors Serial F. London: Spanner, 1981.
-. Stane, drafted 31.12.7s comprising most of place Book III place forty-five to
eighty-one Second Movement. London: Aloes Books, 1977.
-. Stepping Out. Durham: Pig, 1989.
-. Unpolished Mirrors Serial . London: Spanner, 1981.
-. Unpolished Mirrors ["Collated form"]. London: Spanner, 1981.
-. Unpolished Mirrors. London: Reality Studios, 1985.
GIBSON, WILLIAM. Agrippa, [n.p.] Kevin Bogos, 1992. [Electronic text.]
GRENIER, ROBERT. Sentences. Boston: Whale Cloth Press, 1978.
Hanging Loose. Issued as loose sheets in an envelope; most issues undated, from the
middle 1960s until the final issue (#50-51) in the late 1980s.
HOWE, SUSAN. A Bibliography of the King's Book; or Eikon Basilike. Providence:
Paradigm, 1989.
KARLINSKY, SIMON. "Nabokov." Columbia Dictionary of Modern European
Literature. J-A. B?d?, ed. 2nd ed. New York: Columbia UP, 1980, 557.
King Ida's Watch Chain. 1 issue only. Edited by Tom Pickard. Newcastle-upon
Tyne, 1968.
Language Issue. "Number One." [Ashley Hales, ed.?] Battersea, London, n.d.
[1992?]
LEWIS, KENT. "Susan Howe's Poetics of the Bibliography." West Coast Line 10
(27.1) (Spring 1993): 118-27.
McCAFFERY, STEVE. Carnival the first panel: 1967-70. Toronto: Coach House,
1973?
-. Carnival the second panel: 1970-75. Toronto: Coach House, 1975.
132 ? PETER QUARTERMAIN
-. Evoba: The Investigations Meditations 1976-78. Toronto: Coach House,

1987.
mcclure, michael. ? [Black Dot]. San Francisco: Dave Haslewood, 1966.
-. "Poem Cards." Fuck You (A Magazine of the Arts) 8.5 (March 1966): 12-15.
McGaNN, JEROME J. Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993.
nabokov, vladimir. Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. New York: McGraw
Hill, 1969.
-. Pale Fire: A Novel. New York: Putnam's, 1962.
NlCHOL, BP. Still Water. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1970.
Open Space. 14 issues, irregularly numbered. Edited by Stan Persky, 1964-1965.
pond, mimi. Half Off. Berkeley: Rebis, 1981.
quartermain, peter. Disjunctive Poetics: from Gertrude Stein and Louis
Zukofsky to Susan Howe. New York: Cambridge UP, 1992.
queneau, raymond. Cent MiUe Milliards de Po?mes. Afterword by Fran?ois Le
Lionnais. Paris: Gallimard, 1961.
REBIS PRESS. New Books & A 19S1 Checklist. Berkeley: Rebis, 1981.
RlLEY, PETER. Reader. London: n.p., 1992. [Unpaginated; I start the page-count at
the title-page.]
Solidted Material. Tewkesbury, Glos. .d. [1992?].
stein, gertrude. Stanzas in Meditation. New Haven: Yale UP, 1956. Vol. 6 of
The Yale Edition of the Unpublished Works of Gertrude Stein. Ed. Carl Van
Vechten. 8 vols. 1951-58.
Swift Current. Edited by Frank Davey, and later by Fred Wah. Available only on
line 1983-1989.
Vort. 9 issues, 1972-C.1976. Edited by Barry Alpert. Silver Spring, MD.
wah, fred. Breathin ' My Name with a Sigh. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1981.
watten, barrett. Conduit. San Francisco: Gaz, 1988.
Yuth. 3 undated (1993) issues to date. Edited by Michele Fogai and Karen
Stankunas. Vancouver, BC.

Undoing The Book

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Undoing The Book

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Undoing the Book

Author(s): PETER QUARTERMAIN

THIS PAPER SEEKS TO RAISE PROBLEMS rather than to solve them. It is

one of them. It is no longer clear, that is to say, what a book is?or, if

Space is a swarming in the eyes; and time,

longer adequate, or even perhaps relevant, to the invented lives most of

are computer line-printer copies of works in progress?long poems,

Frank Davey. The War Poems. 3rd Draft

copy of George Bowering's Uncle Louis (1980) is neither bound, nor

3 So far as I know, there were fourteen issues of Open Space as follows:

#o (January 30,1964), declaring itself a "prospectus" but in fact a complete issue

I detest the world

Get out of that quick enough. The world

As a rule, however, works like those I've enumerated undermine the

to be interchangeable. His first major project to be published and

like Grampians, Lakes, Eclipse, William Rufus or Birds Locked In The

publisher, since the design of the dust-jacket, presumably the work of

Second, the downloaded text is possibly and even probably corrupt?

they point to interesting features of the electronic text. Not least of

text is entered on a keyboard into a small memory bank and is displayed

-. Evoba: The Investigations Meditations 1976-78. Toronto: Coach House,

You might also like