Modern Manuscripts: The Extended Mind and Creative Undoing from Darwin to Beckett and Beyond 9781472543714, 9781441133168

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Contents Acknowledgements Note on Transcriptions Abbreviations List of Figures Introduction: Marginalia, Manuscripts and the Modernist Mind Part I  The Preservation of Unfavoured Traces 1

Prologue: The Avant-texte of On the Origin of Species

viii x xi xiii

1 17 19

2 Exogenesis: Darwin’s Books and Notes

23

3 Endogenesis: Drafting the Origin of Species

63

4 Epigenesis: The Paper Fossils of Publishing

99

5 Epilogue: Narrativizations of the Genesis and Dysteleology

111

Part II  Combining ‘Source’-oriented and ‘Discourse’-oriented Research 127 6 Prologue: Beyond the ‘Inward Turn’

129

7 Exogenesis: Writers’ Libraries and the Extended Mind

151

8 Endogenesis: Creative Undoing, Doubt and Decision Making

183

9 Epigenesis: The Sense of ‘Unending’

213

10 Epilogue: Digital Manuscripts

231

Conclusion: Manuscript Research and Enactive Cognition

243

Bibliography Index

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Note on Transcriptions The transcription method applied in this study tries to represent the quoted passages from manuscripts with as few diacritical signs as possible, crossing out deletions and using superscript for additions. Uncertain readings are in grey, and words I have not been able to decipher are marked with three xxx (only one x or two xx if the word is shorter than three letters). The transcriptions respect the author’s sometimes ungrammatical, paratactic formulation and idiosyncratic punctuation, which is especially relevant to the case of Darwin’s notes and drafts. Boldface is used to highlight certain words in the discussion of the manuscripts. Open variants are marked by means of subscript followed by superscript to indicate the two terms between which the writer was hesitating. The manuscripts’ catalogue number is followed by the folio number, ‘r’ or ‘v’ indicating the recto or verso side.

Illustrations Digital facsimile images of several manuscripts discussed in this book have been made available in digital archives and online editions. Instead of printed facsimiles, therefore, a boxed title ‘Facsimile Available Online’ and the uniform resource locator (URL) underneath the transcription of the passages under discussion indicate the online location of the digital image.

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Abbreviations 3P

Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman, London: HarperCollins/ Flamingo, 1993.

BD

Charles Darwin’s Beagle Diary, (ed.) Richard Keynes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

BDMP1

Samuel Beckett, Stirrings Still/Soubresauts and Comment dire/ what is the word: a digital genetic edition (Series ‘The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project’, module 1), (eds) Dirk Van Hulle and Vincent Neyt. Brussels: University Press Antwerp (ASP/UPA), 2011, http://www.beckettarchive.org

BDMP2

Samuel Beckett, L’Innommable / The Unnamable: a digital genetic edition (Series ‘The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project’, module 2), (eds) Dirk Van Hulle, Shane Weller and Vincent Neyt. Brussels: University Press Antwerp (ASP/UPA), 2013, http:// www.beckettarchive.org

CCD

Charles Darwin, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

CUL DAR Cambridge University Library, Darwin collection. Apart from the marginalia in the books in Darwin’s personal library, all the notes and drafts, referred to in this book are accessible online at www. darwin-online.org.uk FW

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, London: Faber and Faber, 1939.

HRC

Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

JJA

James Joyce, The James Joyce Archive, (eds) Michael Groden et al., New York: Garland, 1978–9.

LSB I

The Letters of Samuel Beckett, vol. I, 1929–1940, (eds) Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

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xii Abbreviations

LSB II

The Letters of Samuel Beckett, vol. II, 1941–1956, (eds) George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

U

James Joyce, Ulysses, (eds) Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior, London: The Bodley Head, 1986.

Un

Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, (ed.) Steven Connor, London: Faber & Faber, 2010.

UoR

Beckett International Foundation, The University of Reading.

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List of Figures Figure 8.1: Place of the inserted pages in the narrative (arrow) and in the physical space of the notebooks of Beckett’s L’Innommable 193 Figure 8.2: Echoes on the narrative level (arrow) and chronology of the writing process of Beckett’s L’Innommable 196

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Conclusion: Manuscript Research and Enactive Cognition In The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode suggested that ‘organizing the moment in terms of the end’ is a way of ‘giving meaning to the interval between tick and tock because we humanly do not want it to be an indeterminate interval’ (Kermode 1968: 57–8; see Chapter 5). Perhaps the tick and the tock of Parts I and II may have created the sense of an ending, but this sense seems somehow inappropriate, given the topic and title of this book. For modern manuscripts usually bring about a sense of ‘unending’ rather than of an ending, a sense of ‘work in progress’ or even of ‘continuous incompletion’ (Abbott 1999: 20) rather than of completion. The sense of incompletion is perhaps the most important conclusion to be drawn from the study of modern manuscripts, also because this research object is typically marked by what Charles Darwin called ‘the imperfections of the fossil record’. On the one hand, modern manuscripts are material traces and in that capacity they are empirical evidence of a process of thinking and writing. But on the other hand, more often than not, the genetic dossier shows lacunae and gaps, Leerstellen and indeterminacies. Charles Darwin already drew attention to this characteristic, by referring, not to his own manuscripts, but to his research object: fossils. He devoted an entire chapter to the ‘Imperfection of the Geological Record’, in which he suggested that ‘long periods elapsed’ before the Silurian age, and that ‘during these vast, yet quite unknown, periods of time, the world swarmed with living creatures’ (Darwin 1859: 307). The problem, however, was that there were almost no traces of these forms of life. Darwin therefore simply admitted his ignorance: ‘To the question why we do not find records of these vast primordial periods, I can give no satisfactory answer ... We should not forget that only a small portion of the world is known with accuracy’ (Darwin 1859: 307).1 At several instances in the Origin, Darwin admits that he does not know the answer, consistent with what he wrote in his This is part of one of the passages marked by a large dog-ear in Beckett’s copy of Darwin’s Origin of Species. It is remarkable that several other pages in Beckett’s copy marked by dog-ears feature similar instances of admitted ignorance (Van Hulle and Nixon 2013: 203).

1

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pencil sketch: ‘the known so small to the unknown –’ (CUL DAR 6, 26v). I have chosen this line as an epigraph to this book because, given that hundreds of unexplored manuscripts are being kept in public archives, I think it serves as a suitable motto for the study of modern manuscripts. As to the relation between the study of texts and the study of manuscripts, Daniel Ferrer distinguishes between the ‘textual space’ (‘espace textuelle’) and the ‘space of textual invention’ (‘espace de l’invention textuelle’; Ferrer 2011: 40–1). The space of invention is usually not a first aid to interpretation (105) and the genesis of a text cannot be expected to determine ‘the’ meaning of a text.2 The relationship between the two spaces is not symmetrical: one needs to know the text in order to study manuscripts, but one does not need to know the manuscripts in order to study the text (108). Nonetheless, studying the space of invention can certainly enrich a reading of the text. This book’s starting hypothesis was that writers’ interaction with their manuscripts as part of the ‘extended mind’ may inform their methods of evoking fictional minds, and that such a genetically informed reading may contribute to a reassessment of the so-called ‘inward turn’ of literary modernism. Building on David Herman’s narratological suggestion that modernist writers can be regarded as ‘Umwelt researchers’ (2011c: 266) and on Daniel Ferrer’s definition of genetic criticism as ‘the science of written invention’ (‘la science de l’invention écrite’) (2011: 184), the initial research hypothesis can now be reformulated in their terms: in order to present a world as a world-as-perceived, writers need to be keen observers of the way intelligent agents experience the world. If writers (not only modernist writers) can be regarded as ‘Umwelt researchers’, they also construe their own Umwelt and work on their written invention by means of a manuscript or another ‘environmental vehicle’ (Menary 2010a: 21), which is part of the extended mind. Their experience with, and awareness of, the workings of the extended mind is often instrumental in the strategies they use in order to evoke the workings of the fictional mind. To the extent that the interaction with modern manuscripts serves as a model of the extended mind, genetic criticism can therefore be made operational in post-Cartesian approaches to storytelling and cognition, or what David Herman terms the ‘nexus of narrative and mind’ (2009: 137–60). This nexus is being recognized by both theorists of narrative and theorists of mind, building on the common idea that narratives are actively construed. Daniel C. Dennett suggested that the ‘self ’ is ‘the center of narrative gravity’ ‘la genèse ne permettra jamais de fixer le sens d’un texte’ (Ferrer 2011: 105).

2

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Conclusion: Manuscript Research and Enactive Cognition

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(Dennett 1991: 418), and at the same time that the nature of consciousness is ‘gappy’ (366). As the discussions of Leerstellen, gaps and cuts in chapters 5, 6, 7 and 9 have shown, there is a direct relation between this gappy nature and narratives. Both cognitive philosophers and cognitive narratologists are profoundly aware ‘that the construction and interpretation of narratives as coherent wholes paradoxically require gaps, empty spaces, and hidden information’ (Bernaerts et al. 2013: 3) and it is therefore not surprising that ‘The inquiry into minds and narrative has often taken the shape of pinpointing these gaps and describing how we fill them’ (3). Given this focus on the ‘construction’ of narratives, it might be interesting to extend the narratological examination of fictional minds and of the reader’s mind with inquiries into writers’ construction of narratives. Especially now that the ‘second wave’ (9) of cognitive approaches to narrative is increasingly aware that the interdisciplinary exchange between cognitive sciences and the study of narratives is not unidirectional, the time seems propitious to include the study of modern manuscripts in this exchange. If our minds are the ‘product’ of narratives, ‘not their source’ (Dennett 1991: 418), it may be useful to draw upon the expertise of genetic critics to study the production of such products. Two aspects of modern manuscripts seem particularly relevant to the nexus of narrative and mind: the generative roles of (1) the manuscript as an environmental vehicle that is part of the ‘extended mind’ and of (2) the act of creative undoing – the two aspects reflected in this book’s subtitle. The study of modern manuscripts is particularly interested in invention as an interaction between composition and decomposition, which inevitably involves the question of what to do with what has been undone. Within the broader field of literary studies, ‘undoings’ – no matter how creative – are forms of ‘failing’, and ‘failure’ is still usually considered a waste of time. But an increased interest in what Samuel Beckett called ‘failing better’ is also an inherent part of modernism and late modernism. This change of outlook implies a revaluation of modern manuscripts as an object of research. The ‘status’ of this research object is not fixed in terms of its relation to the published text. The more passages from notes, diary entries and drafts are being quoted in scholarly articles, the more they contribute to an author’s ‘grey canon’ (Gontarski 2006), which can also take shape in the form of online initiatives such as the electronic edition of Les manuscrits de Madame Bovary (www.bovary.fr), the Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts Digital Edition (www.janeausten.ac.uk), the manuscripts of Robert Pinget (http://www.robert-pinget.com/brouillons-et-manuscrits/), the digital facsimile edition of Friedrich Nietzsche’s manuscripts (http://www.

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nietzschesource.org/), the digital archive of Darwin Online (darwin-online.org. uk/), the Whitman Archive (www.whitmanarchive.org) and the manuscripts of the chapter ‘Time Passes’ from Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse (www. woolfonline.com). Initiatives such as these make the genesis of texts more accessible and present the written work not only as a single published text, but as a complex interplay between completion and incompletion, which may be interesting for literary studies. By making available a hitherto hidden side of literary works, they have the potential to change the way a new generation of readers looks at literature.

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1

Prologue: The Avant-texte of On the Origin of Species

This book tries to make a case for a closer cooperation between what Meir Sternberg calls ‘source’ and ‘discourse’ (see Introduction). Against this background, Darwin is a good example to show the advantages of combining disciplines. Manuscript research evidently relies heavily on the preservation of rough drafts or other traces of reading and writing processes (such as marginalia, reading traces and notes). But that does not necessarily imply an exclusively empirical approach, foreclosing any form of hermeneutics or theory. That the cooperation between ‘source’- and ‘discourse’-oriented research can be mutually beneficial is evident from other scientific disciplines such as the history of science. Darwin studies are a suitable test case to explore this interdisciplinary exchange of ideas and methods. Three types of research within Darwin studies are particularly relevant to genetic criticism: (1) studies into Darwin’s reading habits; (2) narrative reconstructions of the genesis of On the Origin of Species, ranging from biographical and autobiographical sketches to more theoretical reflections on the relevance of Darwin’s process of writing and thinking to the development of science in general; and (3) transcriptions of notebooks and drafts. (1) In March 1960, Sydney Smith examined Darwin’s personal library and his notebooks in ‘The Origin of The Origin’ (Smith 1960). He suggested that Darwin’s reading of the fifth edition of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology in March 1837 corresponds with what Darwin wrote in his journal under the heading ‘1837’: ‘In July opened first notebook on “Transmutation of Species” – Had been greatly struck from about month of previous March on character of S. American fossils – & species on Galápagos Archipelago. These facts origin (especially latter) of all my views.’1 The singular ‘origin’ in the title of Smith’s CUL DAR 158; qtd in Smith 1960: 393.

1

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article seems to reflect the effects of positivist ‘critique des sources’ or source research as it was practised especially during the first half of the twentieth century, and from which French ‘critique génétique’ took a distance. The search for ‘the origin’ presupposes an ‘upstream’ or ‘counterclockwise’ approach, which is often confused with a kind of detective work, whereas genetic criticism explicitly endeavours not only to approach the genesis ‘upstream’ (in search for the sources of the ‘river’), but especially to study the ‘downstream’ movements (including the ways in which source materials are being processed in the drafts). Only rarely does ‘the origin’ turn out to be singular. After Smith’s pioneering work, research into Darwin’s reading notes became more systematic when Peter Vorzimmer made ‘The Darwin Reading Notebooks (1838–1860)’, accessible in the Journal of the History of Biology (Vorzimmer 1977). The subsequent years showed an increasing awareness of the importance of the cultural context in which Charles Darwin, the scientist as a young man, developed his theory of evolution, as is evidenced in studies by for instance Edward Manier (The Young Darwin and His Cultural Circle, 1978), Marilyn Gaull (‘From Wordsworth to Darwin’, 1978), Gillian Beer (Darwin’s Plots, 2000 (1983); ‘Darwin’s Reading and the Fictions of Development’, 1985; Open Fields, 1996; ‘Lineal Descendants: The Origin’s Literary Progeny’, 2009) and Keith Thomson (Before Darwin, 2005; The Young Charles Darwin, 2009). In 1990, Mario Di Gregorio and his team made an inventory of Charles Darwin’s Marginalia (1990). In the meantime, digital media offer new possibilities to make authors’ libraries and marginalia accessible (Kohn 2006; Van Hulle 2009a; 2009b). With regard to bibliographical research in the broader context of Darwin’s readings, James A. Secord deserves a special mention. His Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of ‘Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation’ (Secord 2000) is a profound study of the book that convinced Darwin in 1844 that the Victorian public was not yet ready for his theory of evolution. (2) The first researcher who attempted a narrative reconstruction of the genesis of On the Origin of Species was Charles Darwin himself. Understandably, his autobiography shows the familiar effects of retroactive patterning and after-the-fact construction of ‘Eureka’ moments, common to memoirs and autobiographies (see Chapter 5). As early as 1909, Darwin’s son Francis made a pioneering attempt to get a sharper image of the genesis, notably by means of a first transcription of the 1842 ‘pencil sketch’ and the 1844 essay (Francis Darwin 1909). When, 50 years later, Sir Gavin de Beer published a revised transcription,

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The Avant-texte of On the Origin of Species

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he duly judged that Francis Darwin’s original 1909 introduction was still worth including in the new edition. One of the first systematic attempts to study the creative process from a psychological perspective was Darwin on Man by Howard Gruber (1974), who based his findings on transcriptions of the transmutation notebooks, for which he cooperated with biologist Paul Barrett (Gruber 1974). One year later, Peter Vorzimmer published a theory on the first 13 pages of the 1842 pencil sketch, suggesting that they constituted an earlier version, presenting it as an 1839 draft: ‘An Early Darwin Manuscript: The “Outline and Draft of 1839”’ (Vorzimmer 1975). Seven years later, this theory was enervated by David Kohn, Sydney Smith and Robert C. Stauffer (1982), who made – what Pierre-Marc de Biasi would denote as – a ‘genetic’ classification of the same material. What the three authors called ‘A Reconstruction of the Archival Record’ corresponds to what genetic criticism refers to as a ‘genetic dossier’ (Grésillon 1994; de Biasi 2004). The beginning of the 1980s saw the publication of several analyses of the Origin’s composition process. Focusing mainly on the content, Dov Ospovat examined The Development of Darwin’s Theory: Natural History, Natural Theology, and Natural Selection, 1838–1859 (Ospovat 1981). And in 1982, two articles by Frank Sulloway were published in the Journal of the History of Biology relating to aspects of Darwin’s thought process: ‘Darwin and his Finches: The Evolution of a Legend’ and ‘Darwin’s Conversion: The Beagle Voyage and Its Aftermath’ (Sulloway 1982a; 1982b). As the titles of these articles indicate, the interest in the genesis of Darwin’s work is mainly prompted by the content of the theory of evolution. Quite often, biologists and geologists play the role of philologists for the occasion. Also in the twenty-first century, scientists continue to be interested in the textual history, as evidenced for instance in the way Niles Eldredge analyzes the elliptical style of Darwin’s notes (Eldredge 2005). Also within the ‘History and Philosophy of Science’ there has always been an interest in the genesis of Darwin’s theory of evolution, including the notebooks (Hodge 2009). But the majority of all the reconstructions of the genesis of On the Origin of Species is of a biographical nature (Desmond and Moore 1992; 2009; Browne 2003a; 2003b; 2006; Quammen 2006; Keynes 2007; Aydon 2008; Thomson 2009). (3) Much of the early philological work has been done by descendants of Charles Darwin. His son Francis started with the so-called Foundations of the Origin of Species: Two Essays Written in 1842 and 1844 (1909) and 50 years later granddaughter Nora Barlow edited The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809–1882

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(Darwin 1958). She also made a transcription of ‘Darwin’s Ornithological Notes’ (1963), shortly after D. R. Stoddart transcribed Darwin’s early essay on ‘Coral Islands’ (Stoddart 1962). Great-grandson Richard Keynes annotated and edited Charles Darwin’s Beagle Diary (1988) and Charles Darwin’s Zoology Notes & Specimen Lists from H.M.S. Beagle (2005). From the perspective of scholarly editing, a most ambitious feat was Morse Peckham’s 1959 variorum edition. Peter Shillingsburg, a former student of Peckham’s, has recently drawn attention to a few erroneous presuppositions (Shillingsburg 2006), which will be discussed in Chapter 4. In the meantime, Barbara Bordalejo has made an electronic variorum edition of On the Origin of Species (http://darwin-online.org.uk/Variorum/index.html). Darwin’s letters are available online (http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/) and the books from his personal library are being digitized (http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/ collection/darwinlibrary). As for the texts of the notes, pioneering work was done by biologist Paul Barrett and his colleagues David Kohn, Peter J. Gautrey, Sandra Herbert and Sydney Smith, who published a complete transcription of Charles Darwin’s Notebooks 1836–1844 in 1987. The transcriptions of the so-called Field Notebooks by Gordon Chancellor and John van Wyhe were published in 2009 as Charles Darwin’s Notebooks from the Voyage of the ‘Beagle’. These transcriptions and numerous other documents pertaining to the genesis of Darwin’s works were also made available online by John van Wyhe (The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online [http://darwin-online.org.uk/]). Thanks to both the content and the sheer quantity of this openly accessible material, with representative specimens of all categories of genetic documentation (de Biasi 1996a), this resource is a goldmine for researchers and students interested in genetic criticism.

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2

Exogenesis: Darwin’s Books and Notes

In literary history, the period of modernism is often presented as a response to cultural crisis, to a changed world as it was reinterpreted by such thinkers as Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and Darwin. To a large extent, literature does indeed respond to cultural changes, but it often contributes to those changes as well. Before Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was able to make the stir it did, it first had to be written. Literature played a modest, but not unimportant, role in this process. The main reason why this role is not so visible is that it took place in the preparatory stages of the work in progress. This chapter tries to examine some of these literary traces in the early notes and drafts of On the Origin of Species. Darwin admitted to his sister Caroline that he found it extremely hard to formulate original ideas. He gradually became more skilled, partly by reading a remarkable amount of works by the English Romantics. The impact of this reading is not easily recognizable in the published version of his scientific theory, but it did leave its traces in the writing process. This Romantic aspect is touched upon by David J. Depew in a footnote to his study on the rhetoric of On the Origin of Species: ‘Whether Darwin was the last of the natural theologians or their materialist gravedigger is a disputed question. Darwin’s Romanticism is a third, increasingly compelling view’ (Depew 2009: 251). To investigate this third view from the perspective of manuscript studies, the starting point is explicitly material. Given that genetic criticism has to work with the materialized remnants of a thought process, Darwin is a fortunate case. Siegfried Scheibe (1998) makes a distinction between Kopfarbeiter and Papierarbeiter – that is, on the one hand writers who invent the whole text in their ‘head’ before they put pen to paper, and on the other hand writers who think on paper, or use their pen to think. As a so-called ‘paper worker’, Darwin also preserved the traces of his cognitive process, which will be discussed in the following sections.

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2.1. Darwin’s field notebooks The iconic picture of Charles Darwin as an eminent Victorian with a huge beard has had an undeniable impact on our present perception of his works. Yet Queen Victoria had scarcely ascended the throne when Darwin discovered the mechanism of evolution in 1838, and she was just a young princess when Darwin made his important observations on the Galápagos Islands, constituting the ‘origin … of all my views’ according to his journal (CUL DAR 158, 13r). That the predominant image of the Victorian Darwin has overshadowed the Romantic Darwin is due in part to the secrecy of his early work on ‘transmutation’ in his private notebooks, marginalia and drafts. During the voyage of the Beagle, especially when he went on an expedition, Darwin wrote down short jottings in his Field Notebooks,1 and towards the end of the voyage he started making more abstract notes in the so-called Red Notebook and the ‘Santiago’ Field Notebook. The Field Notebooks are bound in red, brown or black leather. In terms of size, there are about a half dozen formats, the largest of which is 17 x 13 cm. Six of them are almost square-sized, ranging from 90 x 75 mm to 120 x 100 mm, easily ‘pocketable’. The so-called ‘Galápagos’ Field Notebook belongs to this type. Each of the notebooks carries a label, inscribed by Darwin, referring to the main places to which its observations relate. The following chronology is only indicative of the year in which Darwin started writing each notebook, because instead of filling a complete notebook before opening a new one, Darwin often used several notebooks in parallel during a particular period:2 1832 Cape de verds (Cape Verde; Fernando de Noronha; Bahia; Rio) Rio (Rio de Janeiro; Monte Video; Bahia Blanca; Tierra del Fuego) Buenos Ayres (Buenos Aires; Tierra del Fuego; Port Desire) 1833  Falklands (Tierra del Fuego; Falklands; Maldonado; from Rio Negro to Bahia Blanca) B. Blanca (from Bahia Blanca to Buenos Aires; Santa Cruz; Tierra del Fuego; Chili) St. Fe (Buenos Aires; Santa Fe; Valparaiso – Mendoza – Valparaiso) Banda Oriental (Banda Oriental; Rio Santa Cruz; Tierra del Fuego)

For a full transcription of the field notebooks, see Charles Darwin’s Notebooks from the Voyage of the ‘Beagle’, (ed.) Gordon Chancellor and John van Wyhe with the assistance of Kees Rookmaaker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 2 A more detailed scheme of usage is provided by Gordon Chancellor and John van Wyhe in their edition (2009: iii). 1

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1834  Port Desire (Port St Julian; Tierra del Fuego; Falklands; Chiloe; Chonos archipelago) Valparaiso (Valparaiso – Jahue – Santiago) Santiago (Santiago de Chile – San Fernando – Valparaiso) 1835 Galápagos (Chile; Lima; Galápagos; Tahiti) Coquimbo (from Valparaiso to Coquimbo; Rio Claro) Copiapò (from Coquimbo to Copiapò) Despoblado (Despoblado; Iquique; Callao; Cape of Good Hope; St Helena; Pernambuco; Cape Verde) 1836 Sydney (Sydney; Mauritius)

The short jottings in these Field Notebooks are seldom full sentences and the lack of syntactical context makes them sometimes hard to interpret. Luckily, these are not the only traces of Darwin’s observations during the voyage of the Beagle. To reconstruct the thought process related to these paratactic notes, we can make use of the Beagle Diary, the Zoological Notes, the Geological Notes, the Ornithological Notes and Darwin’s letters.

2.2. ‘Beagle’ Diary and letters As he had mentioned to his sister Caroline, Darwin gradually realized how difficult it was to formulate his thoughts. The diary and the letters play an especially important role in the successive stages of Darwin’s development as a writer. The following example may illustrate this slow, difficult and gradual process. On 18 April 1835, in a letter to his Cambridge professor John Stevens Henslow, Darwin gave an account of his trip to Mendoza. He had crossed the Andes from Valparaiso to Mendoza and back: ‘My dear Henslow.– I have just returned from Mendoza, having crossed the Cordilleras by two passes. This trip has added much to my knowledge of the geology of the country. Some of the facts, of the truth of which I in my own mind feel fully convinced, will appear to you quite absurd & incredible’ (Darwin 2008: 331). The geological notes (CUL DAR 36) contain more detailed descriptions of the journey in the Andes. One of these ‘incredible’ phenomena is also mentioned in the Field Notebook Darwin carried along in the Andes: ‘11 silicified trees & 50 or 60 columns, (Lots wife) of Sulph: of Barytes’ (Sata Fe Notebook 178a–179a). Especially the parenthesis ‘(Lots wife)’ is enigmatic. In the letter to

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Henslow, written in an excited hurry immediately after the expedition arrived in Valparaiso, Darwin wrote: In an escarpment of compact greenish Sandstone I found a small world of petrified trees in a vertical position, or rather the strata were inclined about 20–30 to one point & the trees 70° to the opposite one.– That is they were before the tilt truly vertical. The Sandstone consists of many layers & is marked by the concentric lines of the bark (I have specimens) 11 are perfectly silicified.

And he added the original simile to describe the trees: ‘they consist of snow white columns Like Lots wife of coarsely crystall. Carb. of Lime’ (Darwin 2008: 334). Again ‘Lots wife’ is mentioned without further explanation, but by the time Darwin wrote his geological notes, he had a broader audience in mind and sensed the need to explain the reference: ‘In a low broken escarpment // of green compact fine grained sandstone gritstone I found 11 silicified trees & about 40 columns of crystallized Carb. of Lime … The cylindrical columns of snow white crystallized Carb. of Lime were very conspicuous & reminded me of Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of Salt’ (CUL DAR 36, 517r–518r). According to the Book of Genesis (Gen. 19.26), this happened when God was on the verge of destroying the city of Sodom and two angels advised Lot and his family to leave the city without looking back, which Lot’s wife did nonetheless, with tragic consequences. The geological diary constitutes the version in which the image of the pillar of salt appears for the last time. After that, there was no more room for this personal association. In The Voyage of the Beagle, the 11 silicified trees are mentioned as well, but without the reference to Lot’s wife. And the reference is also omitted in the Geological Observations on South America (published in 1846), based on the geological diary. At the same time, it is clear that the more he told and retold the same story, the more his writing skills improved. The short line in his Field Notebook – ‘I could see at least 5 grand alternations’ – became this exotic description in The Voyage of the Beagle: It required little geological practice to interpret the marvelous story, which this scene at once unfolded; though I confess I was at first so much astonished that I could scarcely believe the plainest evidence of it. I saw the spot where a cluster of fine trees had once waved their branches on the shores of the Atlantic, when that ocean (now driven back 700 miles) approached the base of the Andes. I saw that they had sprung from a volcanic soil which had been raised above the level of the sea, and that this dry land, with its upright trees, had subsequently been

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let down to the depths of the ocean. There it was covered by sedimentary matter, and this again by enormous streams of submarine lava – one such mass alone attaining the thickness of a thousand feet; and these deluges of melted stone and aqueous deposits had been five times spread out alternately.3

The history of these 11 trees had indeed been quite eventful, judging from the several layers of earth. These layers are an adequate analogue to the layers of writing reflecting the development of Darwin’s writing technique. From the direct impression in the Field Notebook, via the letter to Henslow, the more composed, but still personal impression in the geological diary and the more elaborate narrative in The Voyage of the Beagle, Darwin eventually achieved the most concise formulation in the Geological Observations on South America (1846): ‘[W]hat an enormous amount of subsidence is thus indicated! Nevertheless, had it not been for the trees, there was no appearance which would have led any one even to have conjectured that these strata had subsided.’4 In the light of the theory of evolution, this is a tiny detail, and yet the trouble Darwin took to carefully refine his skills to recount it, characterizes him, not just as a scientist, but also as a writer, determined to develop his skill and technique.

2.3. From the Field Notebooks to the Red Notebook While he was writing down his observations in his Field Notebooks, he did not care about an audience yet. A good example is the notebook he carried with him while he was making his observations on the Galápagos Islands. Unfortunately, it was stolen in the 1980s, but thanks to a microfilm made in 1969, the content is still accessible. It contains notes taken between January 1832 and November 1835 in Chile, Peru, the Galápagos archipelago and Tahiti, but the notes were written primarily between August and November 1835. The notes on the Galápagos Islands take up less than 35 pages, merely one fourth of the notebook (pages 18b–51b, plus a few notes on the inside of the cover and on pages 29a and 31a). The first island he explored was the most south-eastern

Charles Darwin, Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of His Majesty’s Ships Adventure and Beagle between the Years 1826 and 1836, Describing their Examination of the Southern Shores of South America, and the Beagle’s Circumnavigation of the Globe. Journal and Remarks. 1832–1836 (London: Henry Colburn, 1839), 406. 4 Charles Darwin, Geological Observations on South America. Being the Third Part of the Geology of the Voyage of the Beagle, under the Command of Capt. Fitzroy, R.N. during the Years 1832 to 1836 (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1846), 203. 3

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one, called Chatham (present-day Isla San Cristóbal).5 On page 31b, Darwin wrote that ‘¾ of Plants [were] in flower’ and that the ‘age of freshest Lava [was] not great’. Darwin was not impressed. The fauna was more impressive: ‘Met a 2 immense Turpin: […] took little notice of me,’ he noted (20b). In his paratactic jotting, Darwin omits the personal pronouns ‘I’ and ‘they’, which emphasizes the ease with which he changes perspectives in one single line: Darwin meets two tortoises; they meet a representative of the human species. He is impressed by their size; they barely notice him. It is remarkable how easily the young Darwin (in his notes) puts himself in other species’ place. Yet, instead of noticing the physical differences between the tortoises of the various islands, Darwin ate them with relish (BD 362). Darwin later frankly admitted in his Journal of Researches (The Voyage of the Beagle) that he had failed to notice many of these differences while he was still on the islands.6 The variance in the beaks of finches from various islands is probably the most famous example. The finches are only mentioned in passing in the Galápagos Field Notebook (‘Gross-beakes’, page 34b), but he did not neglect them entirely. He kept track of the specimens he had caught in his ‘Specimen lists’, which mention a series of finches. In the corresponding Zoology Notes he wrote that the specimens caught by the assistant surgeon, by Captain FitzRoy and by himself formed ‘a nearly perfect series of the birds’.7 Frank Sulloway has shown that, especially in this case, Darwin did not proceed with his customary precision. Later on he even had to borrow specimens from FitzRoy and others (Sulloway 1982a). He seems to have been distracted by the remarkable phenomenon of their being so tame. ‘Little birds can be almost caught by the hand,’ he wrote in his Zoology Notes (343).8 As for the tortoises, Darwin did not completely disregard their mutual differences either. On large loose leaves, like the ones on which he wrote his Beagle diary, he made his Zoology Notes. The second island Darwin explored was Charles (Isla Santa María, Floreana), and on 28 September 1835 they moved to Albemarle (Isla Isabela). The islands reminded him of ‘Robinson Crusoe’, as he noted on page 34b. He observed more fauna: ‘Dry sand – lizards’, he noted on page 34b, and in his Beagle Diary he compared them to ‘imps of darkness’ (359). On 8 October they arrived at James Island (Isla San Salvador, Santiago). It was scorching hot. On Friday 16 October he measured the temperature ‘in Tent. 93° / on sand above 137°’ (45b). That night (16–17 October) he saw Halley’s comet. He barely mentions it on page 50b as an incidental circumstance, only worth a short parenthesis: ‘(comet)’. 6 Charles Darwin, Journal of Researches in to the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries Visited by H.M.S. Beagle (London: Henry Colburn, 1839), 454. 7 Zoology Notes 340; transcription Keynes 2005: 297. 8 On the verso, he noted that they simply alighted on his shoulders and drank water from a bowl in his hands. Darwin was convinced at the time that he proceeded strictly according to the method of Francis Bacon, limiting himself strictly to observation, without prejudices. But when he made this observation he could not help asking himself the question: ‘Must this not arise from the entire absence of all Cats & other similar animals & those hawks which pursue small birds?’ (Zoology Notes: 343v; transcription, Keynes 2005: 300). 5

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2.4. Zoology Notes and Specimen Lists, Geological and Ornithological Notes One of the first animals he discusses in these notes is the turtle. In the margin, he wrote ‘Tortoise’ and next to it he noted that ‘It is said that slight variations in the form of the shell are constant according to the Island which they inhabit’ (Zoology Notes, 328; Keynes 2005: 291). He referred explicitly to Nicholas Lawson, the Governor of the Galápagos Islands, who claimed that for every tortoise presented to him he could ‘pronounce with certainty from which island it has been brought’ (Zoology Notes, 328; Keynes 2005: 291). A few pages further, under the heading ‘Ornithology’, Darwin made a note on different varieties of mockingbirds. It opens as follows: ‘This birds which is so closely allied to the Thenca of Chili (Callandra of B. Ayres) is singular from existing as varieties or distinct species in the different Isds. – I have four specimens from as many Isds. – These will be found to be 2 or 3 varieties. – Each variety is constant in its own Island … This is a parallel fact to the one mentioned about the Tortoises’ (Zoology Notes, 341–2; Keynes 2005: 298). The grammatical confusion between singular and plural in the opening line (‘This birds which is …’) mirrors the content of the issue: were the specimens mere varieties of ‘This bird’ (singular) or was each of ‘These birds’ (plural) a specimen of a separate species? Even though this note seems to indicate that Darwin had not completely disregarded Lawson’s suggestion about the differences between the various islands, his observation regarding the mockingbirds certainly did not give rise to any immediate ‘Eureka’ moment. While making observations and taking notes, Darwin also continued reading. Having read the first two volumes of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, he continued with the third volume. Darwin was looking for plausible explanations for some of the fossils he had found in South America, notably his so-called ‘mastodon’. He had found these fossils of an extinct species in Puerto San Julián, Patagonia. There were no indications of a rapid change in the living conditions to explain the species’ extinction. Darwin started doubting Lyell’s theory that species became extinct by a change in circumstances that went too fast for the species to adapt.9 In February 1835, Darwin had already drafted a short essay about this mastodon, which starts as follows: ‘Feb. 1835 – The position of the bones of Mastodon (?) at Port St Julian is of interest, in as much as being subsequent to the remodelling into step of what at first most especially appears the grand (so called) diluvial covering of Patagonia.– ... I am strongly inclined to reject the action of any sudden debacle. – Indeed the very numbers of the remains render it to me more probable that

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Thanks to Lyell, Darwin started looking not only at geological, but also at biological phenomena on a grander time scale. Apart from this ‘deep time’, there were also a few spatial phenomena that kept haunting him, such as the different rheas in South America. As early as October 1832, he already wrote the name ‘Struthio rhea’ in the left margin of his Zoology Notes (page 112), and next to it he noted down whatever he could report on these animals. Later he added an ‘(a)’ and a ‘(b)’, referring to two extra elaborations: (a) was added partly in the summer of 1833 and partly in December of the same year; (b) was also added in December. The latter addition mentions an observation Darwin actually only knew from hearsay when he wrote it down: When at the R. Negro, I heard much concerning the ‘Avestruz petises’, a species of ostrich ½ the size of the common one. – The following I believe to be a tolerably accurate description, colour mottled, shape of head, neck, body same as in ostrich. – legs rather shorter, feathered to the claws … cannot fly, is taken more easily than other ostrich with the balls’ (Zoology Notes 112; Keynes 2005: 101–02).

By ‘the balls’, Darwin meant the bolas, one of the weapons used by the gauchos on the pampas. On one of the first days of January 1834, at Port Desire in Patagonia, Conrad Martens (landscape painter aboard the Beagle) shot a small ostrich, which was ‘skinned and cooked’ before Darwin realized that, instead of a young ostrich, this was actually a specimen of the other variety, referred to as ‘Avestruz petise’, later named Rhea darwinii by John Gould. To Darwin’s relief the head, neck, legs, wings, many of the larger feathers and a large part of the skin had not yet been thrown away, as he noted in a later addition: in addition (b) relating to the rheas in his Zoology Notes, Darwin noted more details, such as the size and colour of the eggs of the smaller variety; later on, Darwin added with another writing tool: ‘V[ide] 212 more particulars’ (Zoology Notes 112; Keynes 2005: 102). On page 212, note (b) indeed continues, next to the heading ‘Avestruz Petises’ in the margin and a reference to the first part of the note, 100 pages earlier: Page 112 (b) there is some notice about a second species of Rhea. – which is very rarely found N of the R. Negro. – Mr Martens shot one at Port Desire, which I looking slightly at it pronounced to be a young one of the common sort.– that is it appeared to be 2/3 in size of the common one.– I also [saw] some live ones

they are owing to a succession of deaths, after the ordinary course of nature. – as Mr Lyell supposed Species may perish as well as individuals’ (CUL DAR 42, 97–9).

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of same size, but entirely forgot the Petises. – I have since reclaimed the Head, Legs & several feathers. 1832 … 1836.–’ (Zoology Notes 212; Keynes 2005: 188).

The numbers ‘1832 … 1836’ refer to the items described in the so-called ‘specimen lists’. The note opposite the first item number seems to suggest that researchers interested in the feathers should contact him for more details (‘Ask me’): 1832 B XX 1834 B 1835 B

1833. Feathers of Ostrich Head of do (P Desire) 1836. Legs of do

V 212 Ask me V do See account of V do small species (Specimen Lists, Keynes 2005: 397)

A ‘semi-Indian’ among the Patagonians at Gregory Bay told Darwin that in the southern part of South America only the smaller species of rhea was found: ‘With the Patagonians at Gregory Bay there was a semi-Indian, who had lived with them for four years. – He tells me there are no others, excepting the Petises in the Southern parts.’ And this statement was confirmed by gauchos, as Darwin noted in the margin: ‘Agrees with Gauchos stating them to be many in San José’ (Zoology Notes 213; Keynes 2005: 189). Darwin concluded that he had more faith in the local inhabitants than in his colleagues: ‘Whatever Naturalists may say, I shall be convinced from such testimony as Indians & Gauchos that there are two species of Rhea in S. America’ (Zoology Notes 213; Keynes 2005: 189). With a different pen, he later added that he had bought some feathers and a skin, noting in the margin: ‘1837./1838’. According to Richard Keynes’ annotation, ‘this date suggests that the line must have been added to the text much later’ (Keynes 2005: 190), but this seems unlikely. My suggestion is that the marginal note ‘1837./1838’ is not a date, but that the numbers refer to the Specimen Lists: 1837 B Feather.   Gregory Bay   V do [p.212]   of Ostrich 1838 B Hide       do     V do

That Richard Keynes interpreted the numbers as dates is understandable as they happen to correspond to the years immediately following the voyage of the Beagle, the years of Darwin’s intensive research on transmutation, which he needed in order to confirm his suspicion that the two rheas were two separate species and to fully realize the theoretical impact of this insight. As Nora Barlow shows in her edition of Darwin’s Ornithological Notes, this identification was a long process (1963: 217–18). In this sense, the discovery of the small rhea is emblematic of Darwin’s process of thinking and writing in general. The

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small rhea raised the more fundamental question of why – if all species had been ‘created’ – their creator had deemed it necessary to replace a particular species of rhea by a smaller one in another part of South America. This and related issues prompted Darwin to start thinking creatively on the basis of his specimens and observations. Niles Eldredge, curator of the American Museum of Natural History, suggests a working definition of scientific creativity, ‘the trick of creativity’: ‘to get the observations organized sufficiently at the subconscious level, and then to be able to bring them out, sort them out, write them down consciously’ (Eldredge 2005: 65). This working definition is also partially applicable to literary creativity or written invention (Ferrer 2011: 184). In both scientific and literary processes of thinking and writing, however, the acts of observing, ordering and formulating are usually not neatly divisible into successive phases. Very often there seems to be an interplay of what Eldredge refers to as the conscious and subconscious levels, and the categories of organizing observations and writing them down constantly interact. As a result, the pattern that emerges in Darwin’s notes (from the Field Notebooks to the Transmutation Notebooks) resembles a continuum rather than a succession of separate categories. The Santiago Field Notebook and the so-called ‘Red Notebook’ illustrate the gradual transitions on this continuum.

2.5. The Red Notebook and the Santiago Field Notebook The Red Notebook (RN) consists of two parts. The first 113 pages are written in pencil. Sandra Herbert has shown that they date from late May to the end of September 1836 (Herbert in Barrett et al. 1987: 17), corresponding to the places visited by the Beagle in this period: from South Africa (where Darwin paid a visit to the renowned scientist John Herschel) to the islands of Saint Helena and Ascension, then a detour to Bahia de los Santos in Brazil, and finally via Cape Verde and the Azores back to England. The notes in the second part of the Red Notebook, from page 113 to the end, are alternately written in ink and pencil. They probably date from after the voyage of the Beagle, possibly from the first half of 1837 (Herbert in Barrett et al. 1987: 17). On the back cover, Darwin has written ‘Nothing For any Purpose’ (Barrett et al. 1987: 81). This was added later, when Darwin had a clearer view of the actual ‘Purpose’ of the notes, but all the same, that does not alter the fact that, at the moment he wrote them down, Darwin most probably did think

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they had the potential of serving a purpose. Thus, for instance, he wonders on page 153: ‘When we see Avestruz two species. certainly different. not insensible change. – Yet one is urged to look to common parent? Why should two of the most closely allied species occur in same country?’ (Barrett et al. 1987: 70). Gradually, Darwin was developing from a field researcher pur sang into a more theoretical thinker, and this transition left its traces in the Red Notebook and the Santiago Field Notebook. Pages 90 to 124 of the Santiago Field Notebook are not dated, but Darwin has numbered them (from 1 to 34), which suggests that they may have had a different status to him than the surrounding field notes. On page 118 he wrote this note to himself: ‘Ought I not to state that my metamorphic ideas obtained from Lyell. III Vol. might be put in a note?’ In the third volume of the Principles of Geology, Lyell discusses the gradual extinction and introduction of species. One of the subheadings reads ‘Change of Species Everywhere in Progress’.10 Lyell tried to make a connection between the ‘introduction’ of new species and geological phenomena: ‘The immense lapse of time required for the development of so great a series of subterranean movements, has in these cases allowed the species also throughout the globe to vary, and hence the two phenomena are usually concomitant’ (Lyell 1833: III.33). Darwin was not only an attentive reader of Lyell, but also came to know him personally. On 2 January 1837, shortly after his voyage on the Beagle, he had dinner with Lyell and two days later he gave a lecture at the Geological Society. While Darwin and Lyell got on very well, there were a few points on which they had different opinions. No matter how glad Darwin was to be admitted to Lyell’s circle of friends, there were certain ideas on evolution (or ‘transmutation’ as Darwin called it at the time) about which he could not openly exchange ideas. For these ideas, he had to create a mental refuge. The second part of the Red Notebook (RN) served as such a free space. For want of a sounding board, and instead of devising his theory ‘in his head’ according to Siegfried Scheibe’s category of the ‘Kopfarbeiter’, Darwin increasingly became a ‘Papierarbeiter’, using his notebooks as part of what Clark and Chalmers have called the ‘extended mind’ (see Introduction). The Red Notebook contains some of his earliest ideas on transmutation (RN 127–33). On page 129, for instance, he noted: ‘Tempted to believe animals created for a definite time: – not extinguished by change of circumstances’ (Barrett et al. 1987: 62). This tentatively formulated idea differed from Lyell’s Lyell 1833: III.30; http://www.esp.org/books/lyell/principles/facsimile/

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view that species became extinct if they could not adapt rapidly enough to changed circumstances. In that case they were replaced by new species, according to Lyell. Darwin, however, noted: ‘Should urge that extinct Llama owed its death not to change of circumstances’ (RN 129; Barrett et al. 1987: 62). And then he made an important link between variation in space and variation in time. He realized there was a similar relationship between, on the one hand, the common rhea and the smaller rhea, and on the other hand the extinct llama and the living variant: ‘The same kind of relation that common ostrich bears to (Petisse. & diff kinds of Fourmillier): extinct Guanaco to recent: in former case position, in latter time’ (62–3). In both cases, a similar ‘inosculation’11 was at work: ‘As in first cases distinct species inosculate, so must we believe ancient ones’ (RN 130; Barrett et al. 1987: 63).

2.6. Transmutation notebooks The real ‘species work’ – as Darwin tended to call his note-taking on the transmutation of species – took place shortly after his return to England. In his journal he wrote under the heading 1837: ‘In July opened first note book on “transmutation of species”’ (CUL DAR 158, 13r, notebook B). As Paul Barrett, David Kohn, Peter J. Gautrey, Sandra Herbert and Sydney Smith have shown in their admirable edition, notebook A was devoted mainly to geology and it took Darwin much longer to fill than notebooks B, C, D and E on transmutation,

The word ‘inosculation’, derived from the Latin ‘osculari’, ‘to kiss’, denotes a fleeting connection between two species. Darwin was familiar with the term from William Sharp Macleay’s so-called ‘Quinarian System’ of zoological classification. In a letter of 26 October 1832, Darwin wrote to Professor Henslow about a bird he had been observing: ‘a happy mixture of a lark pigeon & snipe. – Mr Mac Leay himself never imagined such an inosculating creature’ (CCD 1.280). According to Loren Eiseley, however, Darwin would have picked up the verb ‘inosculate’ while reading an 1836 article by Edward Blyth (‘Observations on the Various Seasonal and Other External Changes Which Regularly Take Place in Birds’, Magazine of Natural History, Vol. 9, 1836), as well as an earlier article by Blyth from 1835. This hypothesis was later also put forward by Roy Davies, the author of The Darwin Conspiracy: Origins of a Scientific Crime (2008). On page 18 of the first edition of On the Origin of Species, Darwin already refers to ‘Mr. Blyth, whose opinion, from his large and varied stores of knowledge, I should value more than that of almost any one’. Blyth’s 1835 article discusses variation, but he approaches the subject from the opposite direction. While Darwin saw variation as the potential occasion for the origin of a new species, Blyth treated variations from the viewpoint of natural theology (‘they are among those striking instances of design, which so clearly and forcibly attest the existence of an omniscient great First Cause’), attempting to prove the stability of species in spite of the existence of deviations: ‘The original form of a species is unquestionably better adapted to its natural habits than any modification of that form’ (Edward Blyth, ‘An Attempt to Classify the “Varieties” of Animals with Observations on the Marked Seasonal and Other Changes Which Naturally Take Place in Various British Species, and Which Do Not Constitute Varieties’, Magazine of Natural History, Vol. 8, No. 1 (January 1835): 40–53.)

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which preoccupied him between July 1837 and the end of 1839. Notebook C contains some jottings on subjects that did not strictly speaking pertain to the subject of transmutation. ‘By the end of the C notebook Darwin must have realized,’ according to Howard Gruber, ‘that it would be more convenient to separate these entries as representing a distinct line of thought’ (Gruber 1974: xix). On 15 July 1838 he therefore started two new notebooks on the same day: notebooks D and M. D was about transmutation, M about what Darwin referred to as ‘Metaphysics’. D and M were followed respectively by E and N. Howard Gruber refers to the content of M and N as ‘Man, Mind and Matter’; Darwin’s own description on the inside of the front cover of notebook M reads: ‘This Book full of Metaphysics on Morals & Speculations on Expression’ (Barrett et al. 1987: 520).12 From Darwin’s point of view, these notes must have seemed to belong to another culture. In terms of C. P. Snow’s 1959 Rede Lecture on ‘The Two Cultures’, the notes in notebook M pertained to the realm of the humanities, rather than to the sciences. If anyone ever needs a symbolic date to mark the separation of the ‘two cultures’, 15 July 1838 would be a suitable Darwinian candidate, that is, the moment when he simultaneously opened two new notebooks, D and M: Geology A (June 1837–end 1839)

Transmutation ‘Metaphysics’ B (July 1837–March 1838) C (March–July 1838) D (15 July–Oct. 1838) M (15 July–Oct. 1838) E (Oct. 1838–July 1839) N (Oct. 1838–end 1839)

The first entry in transmutation notebook B was ‘Zoonomia’, the title of the most important scientific work by Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin. Apart from taking notes, Charles also wrote several marginalia in his copy of the book (preserved at Cambridge University Library). On page 505 of the first volume, his grandfather wonders: [W]ould it be too bold to imagine, that in the great length of time, since the earth began to exist, perhaps millions of ages before the commencement of the history of mankind, would it be too bold to imagine, that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which the great first cause endued with animality, with the power of acquiring new parts, attended with new propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions, and associations; and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent The Cambridge University Library catalogue numbers of these notebooks are CUL DAR, 121–7.

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activity, and of delivering down those improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end! (Erasmus Darwin 1794–96: I.505)

Erasmus Darwin’s rhetorical question, presented as an exclamation, provoked his grandson to exclaim in his turn: ‘what an assumption!!!’ (I.507). At the same time, he tried to formulate the difference with his own scientific endeavours: ‘I attempt to show means’ (I.506). This search for the means or the mechanism of evolution took shape in the transmutation notebooks. Even before Darwin had found this mechanism, he was fully aware that the mutability of species entailed the possibility that the idea of the human being’s privileged position in the natural world was a prejudice: ‘difficult for man to be unprejudiced about self ’, he noted (notebook B, 49). The notes show Darwin as an increasingly outspoken opponent of anthropocentrism. The idea that man would be a special case was a fabrication: ‘Study geographical distribution, study relation of fossil with recent. the fabric falls!’ He anticipated the protests and imagined critics objecting: ‘But Man – wonderful Man. ‘divino ore versus coelum attentus’ is an exception’ – to which he laconically retorted: ‘He is Mammalian’ (notebook C, 76–7). The Latin reference to Ovid’s Metamorphoses13 and the way Prometheus made man, proudly looking upward as opposed to all other creatures, is important in the context of the Romantic period. In 1816, Lord Byron had sung the praises of the mythological fire-bringer: ‘Thy Godlike crime was to be kind, / To render with thy precepts less / The sum of human wretchedness, / And strengthen Man with his own mind.’14 This glorification of Prometheus, who – especially in his capacity as a personification of Enlightenment – had been a role model for many of the Romantics, may have been useful and necessary in the development of mankind and the sapere aude mentality, but Darwin considered the accompanying anthropocentric pride out of place, as he noted in notebook C: ‘Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work. worthy the interposition of a deity, more humble & I believe true to consider him created from animals’ (notebook C, 196–97). Darwin’s Latin paraphrase corresponds to these lines in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: ‘Cumque caetera animalia, prona, spectent terram, dedit homini sublime os, jussitque tueri coelum, et tollere erectos vultus ad sidera. Sic tellus, quae fuerat modo rudis et sine imagine, conversa induit ignotas figuras hominum.’ Book I, lines 111–16: ‘Thus, while the mute creation downward bend / Their sight, and to their earthly mother tend, / Man looks aloft; and with erected eyes / Beholds his own hereditary skies. / From such rude principles our form began; / And earth was metamorphos’d into Man.’ Trans. John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison, William Congreve et al. under the direction of Sir Samuel Garth. http://www.english.upenn.edu/Projects/knarf/EtAlia/ovidmeta.html 14 Lord Byron, ‘Prometheus’, in The Major Works, (ed.) Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 265. 13

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After filling transmutation notebook D, he wrote on the inside of its front cover: ‘Towards close I first thought of selection owing to struggle.’15 This happened around 28 September 1838, after reading Thomas Robert Malthus’s essay on population.16 Gillian Beer notes that many critics have stressed the importance of Darwin’s reading of Malthus, and that ‘In doing so, they follow Darwin himself ’ (Beer 1985: 553). Darwin referred to Malthus on several occasions, notably in his autobiography (Darwin 1993 (1958): 120). The essay on population is also mentioned as ‘Malthus on Population’ at the back of notebook C, in Darwin’s list of works consulted (notebook C, 270; Barrett et al. 1987: 322). In Darwin’s personal library at Cambridge University, there are two copies of the sixth edition. One of the copies was Charles Darwin’s, the first volume of which shows the inscription ‘C. Darwin April 1841’. It contains many marginalia, but if these were made only in 1841 or later, they are not immediately relevant as material for comparison with his excerpts from 1838 in notebook D. The other copy shows the inscription ‘Erasmus Darwin 1830’. ‘Erasmus’ does not refer to Charles’s grandfather (who died in 1802), but to his brother, who lived close by in Great Marlborough Street, London. The marks in this copy may not be Charles’s; still, it is most probably the copy Charles Darwin read in 1838, according to Howard Gruber (1974: 7n4; 21). Again, Darwin employed the verb ‘to strike’ when he retrospectively presented the Malthusian moment as an insight that ‘at once struck’ him (Darwin 1993 (1958): 120), though most researchers now agree that the discovery did not come as a sudden ‘Eureka’ moment.17 Howard Gruber notes that ‘the crucial passage does not even contain a single exclamation point, although in other transported moments he [Darwin] used quite a few, sometimes in triplets’ (Gruber 1974: 170). The transmutation notes suggest that it only gradually dawned on him how important this Malthusian insight was. The excitement followed more than two months later, when he read that John Herschel referred to the appearance of new species as the mystery of mysteries. When Darwin Notebook D, inside front cover. Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population; or, a View of Its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness with an Inquiry into Our Prospects Respecting the Future Removal or Mitigation of the Evils Which It Occasions, 2 vols, 6th edition (London: Murray, 1826). Cf. notebook D, 134–35. 17 See, for instance, Johan Braeckman, Darwins moordbekentenis: de ontwikkeling van het denken van Charles Darwin (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Nieuwezijds, 2001); Niles Eldredge, Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005); Dov Ospovat, The Development of Darwin’s Theory: Natural History, Natural Theology, and Natural Selection, 1838–1859 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 15 16

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realized that this was the mystery he had solved, he wrote a big exclamation mark, followed by a spontaneous ‘! Hurrah.’: Babbage 2d Edit, p. 226 – Herschel calls the appearance of new species the mystery of mysteries & has grand passage upon problem.! Hurrah.– intermediate causes’ (notebook E, 59; Barrett et al. 1987: 411; Darwin’s punctuation)

Facsimile Available Online darwin-online.org.uk → Manuscripts → DAR124 → page 59

The reference is to a quotation from Herschel’s letter to Charles Lyell of 20 February 1836, as quoted in Charles Babbage, The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise: A Fragment (2nd edition, London, 1838, 225–7): ‘Of course I allude to that mystery of mysteries, the replacement of extinct species by others.’ Herschel suggested that ‘the Creator … operates through a series of intermediate causes, and that in consequence the origination of fresh species, could it ever come under our cognizance, would be found to be a natural in contradistinction to a miraculous process – although we perceive no indications of any process actually in progress which is likely to issue in such a result’ (Herschel, qtd in Barrett et al. 1987: 413). After the exclamation, Darwin added ‘intermediate causes’, which he read more about in Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (see section 2.9).

2.7. Darwin’s Library Darwin’s reading of Malthus was not only followed by a delayed enthusiasm, but was also accompanied by alternating moments of overconfidence and doubt, exaltation and hesitation. When Darwin retrospectively presented the Malthusian insight as a sudden realization, he did admit that this was only possible because he had been prepared by means of ‘long-continued observation’, yet the breakthrough moment was instigated by a book which he ‘happened to read for amusement’ (Darwin 1993 [1958]: 120). The context of this passage suggests that the ‘long-continued observation’ applies to his fieldwork, but another, equally important form of ‘observation’ was Darwin’s avid reading, ranging from scientific papers to works of poetry and aesthetics.

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In his Autobiography, Darwin emphasized that Malthus’s essay on population was the single most important work through which his ideas on transmutation crystallized. But the spotlight on this one work has cast a shadow on numerous other books, which nonetheless also contributed in various ways to the genesis of On the Origin of Species. ‘Useful’ marginalia and notes (which eventually made it into On the Origin of Species) and what Darwin called ‘useless’ jottings are jumbled up in the margins and notebooks, forming a somewhat chaotic amalgam of impressions and ideas. What may seem slightly chaotic in a chronological reconstruction of Darwin’s process of reading and writing is the inevitable result of the attempt to give an account of the interaction between ‘useful’ and ‘useless’ ideas at the moment of writing, when Darwin could not yet assess their usefulness. In Darwin on Man, Howard Gruber examines the genesis of Darwin’s theory of evolution from a psychological perspective, arguing that the formation of a new synthesis has to be seen as a creative process, rather than as a sudden creative act (Gruber 1974: 6). Not only the word ‘process’, but also ‘synthesis’ is a key term here. The analysis of the observed phenomena largely took place during and shortly after the voyage of the Beagle. In order to synthesize all the observations into a coherent theory, he made use of the most divergent books and articles. In his Autobiography, Darwin mentions that up to the age of 30 he took great pleasure in reading poetry (he mentions Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Shakespeare), but then something changed: ‘I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me’ (Darwin 1993 (1958): 138). Although he could ‘not endure to read a line of poetry’ (138), he did delight in reading novels, especially novels with a happy ending and a sympathetic protagonist – ‘and if it be a pretty woman all the better’ (139).

2.8. Reading lists 2.8.1. ‘Books to be Read’ At the back of notebook C, Darwin wrote the titles of books he had read, followed by a list of books ‘to be read’. In June 1839 he asked an amanuensis to copy these lists in a separate notebook according to a particular pattern: on the left-hand page the author’s name and the title of the book; on the opposite page Darwin’s comments, which were usually brief. For instance, next to ‘Turner’s

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Embassy to Thibet’, he wrote ‘perhaps worth reading[,] quoted by Malthus.–’18 Judging from the handwriting, Darwin took over from the amanuensis after just over four pages. Page 9v is dated ‘1839. Decemb.’ And from page 13 onwards, also the right-hand side is filled with titles and authors, such as: ‘Coleridge. Literary Remains’, ‘Inconsistency of Human Wishes’ (possibly referring to The Vanity of Human Wishes by Samuel Johnson) and ‘Bacons Essays’. When Darwin had read a book, he crossed out the title. Or he added ‘read’, for example on page 15: ‘Carlyles Oliver Cromwell (read)’. Further on, he noted among many other titles: ‘Vestiges of Nat. Hist. of creation[,] Churchill: 184419 ... in which species are shown to be not immutable’ (*19v; see Chapter 2). The asterisk indicates that the book is mentioned in the first sequence of titles (‘Books to be Read’). The notebook (CUL DAR 119; 1838–51) was written in two sequences from both ends. The first sequence ends on page *24r.

2.8.2. ‘Books to be Read’ The second sequence starts at the back and lists the books that Darwin had read (‘Books to be Read’). For instance, the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation by Robert Chambers (mentioned above) was soon to have a direct effect on Darwin (albeit per negativum, as it made him realize that his theory was not ready yet to be confronted with the public opinion). So, when he had read the book in late November 1844, Darwin again noted, ‘Vestiges of the Nat. History of Creation’, this time on page 15v counting from the back inward. The back cover reads, ‘Books to be Read’ (with the words ‘to be’ crossed out), and the first 4.5 pages starting from the back are also written by the amanuensis (copying the ‘Books examined: with ref: to Species’ from notebook C, 276ff. (Barrett et al. 1987: 320)), again according to the same pattern: titles on the left, comments on the right (starting with a ‘nota bene’: ‘N.B. These books have been read since I thought of my transmutation theory’). Once in a while, Darwin passed judgement on a book, such as ‘skimmed stupid’ next to ‘Evelyn’s Sylva’ (a book about trees by John Evelyn from 1670, the first to appear under the auspices of the Royal Society for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge). Darwin was sparing in his praise. He did find Sartor Resartus by Thomas Carlyle ‘excellent’, but with regard to On Heroes and Hero CUL DAR 119, 3v. In 1977, Peter Vorzimmer made a transcription of these reading lists (Peter J. Vorzimmer, ‘The Darwin Reading Notebooks (1838–1860)’, Journal of the History of Biology, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Spring 1977): 107–53). A complete transcription is included in CCD 4.435–573. 19 Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (London: John Churchill, 1844). 18

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Worship and the Heroic in History by the same author his enthusiasm was only ‘moderate’.20 The four volumes of James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, mentioned in the list of books ‘to be read’, could – according to the second list – be considered ‘Read’ on 14 February 1839 (notebook C, 269; Barrett et al. 1987: 323). The last note made by the amanuensis was ‘King & FitzRoy’s Voyages’ (on 1 June 1839); from the next item onwards (the life of William Cowper, read on 25 June), Darwin took over, initially following the same pattern. But he soon disrupted it. After seven pages of notes, using only the left-hand page for titles and the right-hand page for comments, Darwin started adding a few titles among the comments on the right-hand page 8r: ‘Coleridge Table Talk. Campbell’s Poems. Some of Shelley’s Poems.’ This is the first time (around March 1840) that he made a difference between scientific and literary works. From the next pages onwards, the left was usually reserved for scientific writings, the right for other (philosophical, historical, literary) works.

2.9. Reading notes As noted above, Darwin started two new notebooks on 15 July 1838 – ‘D’ on transmutation, and ‘M’ on what he regarded as metaphysical subjects. Because of this simultaneous start, the process of filling these two notebooks came to resemble a race between ‘transmutation’ and ‘metaphysics’. By means of the reading lists and the corresponding reading notes in ‘D’ and ‘M’, it is possible to reconstruct this ‘race’.21 By early September 1838, ‘D’ (‘transmutation’) had the lead, but ‘M’ (‘metaphysics’) was close on its heels: Mitchell’s Australia22 Walter Scott’s Life 1st, 2nd & 7th vols.

[D.71, 75, 99, 112]   [M.132] [M.126; 129]

The next page in notebook M (M.130) is dated 3 September. Shortly before this date, then, Darwin apparently jumped from volume 2 to volume 7 (the last part) of John Gibson Lockhart’s Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, where he was struck by one of Scott’s diary entries: 28 May [From diary] – Another day of uninterrupted study; two such would cul dar 119.11r: ‘Feb. 7th Sartor Resartus – excellent … /March 25 Carlyle Hero Worship – moderate’. 21 Sydney Smith compared a part of the reading list with the notes (Smith 1960). 22 Thomas Livingstone Mitchell, Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, 2 vols (London, 1838). 20

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finish the work with a murrain. What shall I have to think of when I lie down at night and awake in the morning? What will be my plague and my pastime – my curse and my blessing – as ideas come and the pulse rises, or as they flag and something like a snow-haze covers my whole imagination?23

Darwin excerpted the latter part in notebook M,24 and on the next page he wondered why the image we have of something when we think of it is not as vivid as in our sleep; ‘is it because one then has no immediate comparison with perceptions, & that on[e] fancies the image more vivid?’ (M.130; Barrett et al. 1987: 552). As this passage indicates, Darwin’s notes (especially in notebooks ‘M’ and ‘N’) are imbued with concepts such as ‘fancy’ and ‘imagination’, which preoccupied many of the Romantic poets. This is the nature of the thoughts Darwin jotted down in ‘This Book full of Metaphysics’ (notebook M, inside front cover). In the meantime, he made notes in notebook D on John Hunter’s Observations on Certain Parts of the Animal Oeconomy with Notes by Richard Owen (1837; D.158–61): ‘Hunter shows almost all animals subject to Hermaphroditism’, and Darwin made a link with the mystery of male nipples: … those organs which perform nearly same function in both sexes.– are never double, only modified. Those which perform very different, are both present in every shade of perfection – How came it nipples are though abortive, are so plain in Man, & yet no trace of abortive womb, or ovarium.– or testicles in female. (D.158)

When Darwin was making these reading notes, he was clearly developing narrative strategies for the future publication or presentation of his ideas. On the next page he wrote this note to himself: ‘In my theory I must allude to separtion [sic] of sexes as very great difficulty, then give speculation to show that it is not overwhelming’ (D.159e). In On the Origin of Species, Darwin applied this strategy especially in Chapter 6, ‘Difficulties on the Theory’. He developed his ideas on the separation of sexes in the 1856 manuscript of his ‘Big Book’ on Natural Selection,25 Chapter VIII, ‘Difficulties on the Theory’ (CUL DAR 11.2, 50r–51r), which became Chapter 6 in the first edition of On the Origin of Species (see Chapter 3). The Origin was conceived by Darwin as just an abstract of a longer manuscript, John Gibson Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, 7 vols (Edinburgh, 1837–8), Vol. 7: 35–36 (qtd in Barrett et al. 1987: 551). 24 ‘Lockarts life of W. Scott Vol VII p. 35 “as ideas come & the pulse rises, or as they flag & something like a snow-haze. covers my whole imagination”’ (M.129; Barrett et al. 1987: 551). 25 R. C. Stauffer (ed.), Charles Darwin’s Natural Selection; being the second part of his big species book written from 1856 to 1858 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). 23

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transcribed by R. C. Stauffer and published in 1975 as Charles Darwin’s Natural Selection; being the second part of his big species book written from 1856 to 1858. In this manuscript, Darwin also mentioned the topic of ‘separated sexes’ in Chapter III (‘On the Possibility of all Organic Beings Occasionally Crossing and on the Remarkable Susceptibility of the Reproductive System to External Agencies’),26 which was not included in On the Origin of Species. Darwin’s reading notes on Hunter run on to page D.161. At that moment, there were still about 20 blank pages to be filled in notebook D. Notebook M is a slimmer notebook and on 1 October it was completely filled. Darwin immediately started writing in notebook N. On 2 October, he opened notebook N with reading notes on Charles Waterton’s Essays on Natural History (1838) – which corresponds with his reading list. In the meantime, however, Darwin was reading Malthus’s essay on population and the last 20 pages of notebook D were filled so quickly that he soon needed a new notebook (‘E’), which opens with more than a dozen pages of notes on the same subject. A comparison of the reading list with the reading notes (CUL DAR 119, 3v–4v) shows how the reading notes in M–N keep pace with the ones in D–E : Mayo Philosophy of Art of Living27 [D.49] [M.126] Chapter VIII, 50–51 (Stauffer 1975: 362). For bibliographical details, see ‘Bibliography’ in Barrett et al. 1987: 653ff.: Browne, Thomas, Sir Thomas Browne’s Works, Including His Life and Correspondence, edited by Simon Wilkins, 4 vols. (London, 1835–6). Browne, William George. Travels in Africa, Egypt and Syria (London, 1799). Cleghorn, James. ‘The History of an Ovarium, Wherein Were Found Teeth, Hair, and Bones.’ Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy I (1787):73–89. Darwin, Robert Waring. Principia Botanica; or, a Concise and Easy Introduction to the Sexual Botany of Linneus (s.l., 1787). Earl, George Windsor. The Eastern Seas; or, Voyages and Adventures in the Indian Archipelago, in 1832, 1833, 1834 (London, 1837). Evelyn, John. Sylva, or a Discourse of Forest-Trees, and the Propagation of Timber. To which is annexed Pomona; or, an Appendix Concerning Fruit-Trees in Relation to Cider. Also Kalendarium Hortense; or, Gard’ners Almanac (London, 1664). Herschel, John Frederick William. A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (London, 1831). Kotzebue, Otto von. Entdeckungs-Reise in die Süd-See und nach der Berings-Strasse zur Erforschung einer nordöstlichen Durchfahrt. Unternommen in den Jahren 1815, 1816, 1817 und 1818. 3 vols. (Weimar, 1821). Kotzebue, Otto von. Neue Reise um die Welt, in den Jahren 1823–1826. 2 vols. (Weimar, 1830). Landor, Walter Savage. Imaginary Conversations of Literary Men and Statesmen, 5 vols. (London, 1824–29). Lavater, Johann Caspar. L’art de connaître les hommes par la physionomie. 10 vols. 2nd ed. (Paris, 1820 [1806–7]). Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laocoon; or, the Limits of Poetry and Painting. Translated by William Ross (London, 1836). Lockhart, John Gibson. Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott. 7 vols. (Edinburgh and London, 1837–8). Lütke, Fedor Petrovich. Voyage autour du monde, exécuté par ordre de Sa Majesté l’empereur Nicolas 26 27

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several of W. S. Landors Imaginary Conversations28 Sir T Browne’s Religio Medici [D.54] [M.126] th 29 Lyell’s Book III 5 Edit [D.60, 104, 134] [M.128] Mitchells Australia [D.71, 75, 99, 112] [M.132] Walter Scott’s life 1st 2nd & 7th vols. | [M.126; 129] Abercrombie on the Intellectual Powers30 [D.56] [M.114–15, 141] Hunters animal economy edited by [D.57, 67, [M.147]    Owen, read several papers all that 112–16, 127,    bear on any of my subjects 152–75] Elie de Beaumonts 2 vol of memoirs    on Geology of France & C Prévost | |    on l’Ile Julie31 Oct. 2nd   Waterton’s Essays on Natural History [D.147–48] [N.1–4] do  [Cleghorn] Trans. of Royal Irish Academy [D.164] | rd Oct. 3   Lavater’s Physignomy [D.164–65] [N.6–1032] Malthus on Population [D.134–35] [N.1033] [E.3] th Oct. 12   W. Earl’s Eastern Seas [E.18] |

1er, sur la corvette le Séniavine, dans les années 1826, 1827, 1828 et 1829. 4 vols. (Paris: Firmin Didot frères, 1835–6. Lyell, Charles. Principles of Geology: Being an Inquiry How Far the Former Changes of the Earth’s Surface are Referable to Causes Now in Operation, 5th ed., 4 vols. (London, 1837). Malthus, Thomas Robert. An Essay on the Principle of Population. 6th ed. 2 vols. (London, 1826). Mayo, Herbert. The Philosophy of Living (London, 1837). Mayo, Thomas. Elements of the Pathology of the Human Mind (London, 1838). Mitchell, Thomas Livingstone. Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia. 2 vols. (London, 1838). Reynolds, Joshua. Seven Discourses Delivered in the Royal Academy by the President (London, 1778). (see ‘Old & Useless Notes’, cul dar 91.10–11). Staunton, George Leonard. An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China. 2 vols. (London, 1797). [See ‘Old & Useless Notes’, cul dar 91.12]. Whewell, William. History of the Inductive Sciences, from the Earliest to the Present Time. 3 vols. (London, 1837). 28 Darwin’s comment on the facing page: ‘very poor’ (CUL DAR 119.4r). 29 Darwin’s comment on the facing page: ‘There are many marginal notes’ (CUL DAR 119, 4r). 30 Darwin’s comment on the facing page: ‘References at end’ (CUL DAR 119, 4r). 31 On these geological subjects Darwin took notes in his geological notebook ‘A’. The sources are Ours Pierre Armand Petit Dufrénoy and Jean Baptiste Elie de Beaumont, Mémoires pour servir à une description géologique de la France, 4 vols (Paris, 1830–38) (A.127); Constant Prévost, Notes sur l’île Julia, pour servir à l’histoire de la formation des montagnes volcaniques. Mém. Soc. Géol. Fr. 2:91–124. 32 ‘I must be very cautious. Remember how Lavater ran away with new Lavaters, – Ye Gods!: – says fleshy lips denote sensuality (p 192 Vol. III Octav. Edit) – certainly neither a Minerva or Apollo would have them because not beautiful – is there – anything in these absurd ideas.– do they indicate mind & body retrograding to ancestral type of consciousness &c &c.’ (N.10; Barrett et al. 1987: 565–66). 33 ‘Malthus on Pop. p. 32, origin of Chastity in women.– rationally explained’ (N.10; Barrett et al. 1987: 566).

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12th Sir G. Stauntons Embassy to China34 Kotzebue’s two voyages35 [E.20–1] Lutke’s voyage36 [N.22] Reynold’s Discourses37 [N.26, 32] Lessings Laocoon38 | | 39 Whewell inductive History [E.57ff.] [N.14] Herschel’s Introd to Nat. Philosophy40 [N.49, 60] 41 R. W. Darwin’s Botany. | | Mayo Pathology of Human mind42 | | Evelyn’s Sylva43 | | Browne’s travel’s in Africa44 | | 1839 Jan 10  All life of W. Scott except 5th vol. | [N.19]45

As this sample shows, the list gives a rough indication of what Darwin was reading, but it may also give too neat an impression of Darwin as a reader who finished reading a book before he started reading another one. This was not always the case. As the page references to the notes indicate, he read several books simultaneously. The entries next to the dates of 2 and 3 October suggest that he successively read Waterton, Cleghorn, Lavater and Malthus, but his reading of Malthus on 3 October was a revisit; he had already been reading Malthus on 28 September (D.134–5). Moreover, the list has quite a few Darwin made notes on George Leonard Staunton’s An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China, 2 vols (London, 1797) on separate sheets, which he later called ‘Old & Useless Notes’ (CUL DAR 91):   ‘Staunton Embassy Vol II p. 405  Speculates on origin of sacrifices common to many races thinks action toward a king man changed into is carried on toward deity– & as king might like cruel pleasure, so sacrifices cruel.–   Something wrong here. – Origin is certainly curious. –’ (CUL DAR 91, 12r) 35 Darwin’s comment on the facing page: ‘skimmed well’ (CUL DAR 119, 4r). 36 Darwin’s comment on the facing page: ‘carefully read’ (CUL DAR 119, 4r). 37 A reading note in notebook N suggests that Darwin was reading Reynolds on 27 October 1838: ‘October 27th / Consult the VII discourse by Sir J. Reynolds’ (N.26; Barrett et al. 1987: 570). 38 Darwin made notes on Lessing’s Laocoon; or the Limits of Poetry and Painting (London, 1836), but on separate sheets, which he later called ‘Old & Useless Notes’ (CUL DAR 91, 17r). For a discussion of these notes on Lessing, see Chapter 3. 39 Darwin’s comment on the facing page: ‘References at end’ (CUL DAR 119, 5r). 40 Darwin’s comment on the facing page: ‘do [= References at end] 2nd time of Reading’ (CUL DAR 119, 5r). 41 Darwin’s comment on the facing page: ‘References at end’ (CUL DAR 119, 5r). 42 The ‘Old & Useless Notes’ contain a jotting in which Darwin expresses his disappointment about Mayo’s book: ‘T. Mayo – Pathology of the Human Mind. Poor. – on insanity. – Prevailing idea. owing to loss of will. – chiefly excited by passive emotions. – Cannot quite perceive drift of Book’ (CUL DAR 91, 17r). 43 Darwin’s comment on the facing page: ‘skimmed stupid’ (CUL DAR 119, 5r). 44 Darwin’s comment on the facing page: ‘well skimmed’ (CUL DAR 119, 5r). 45 Darwin’s reading list suggests that he had read all of the volumes of Lockhart’s Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott except Volume 5, but on N.19 he did jot down an anecdote from Volume 5 (page 396). 34

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lacunae. Judging from his reading notes, Darwin read several other books in the period under consideration. For instance, on 28 September 1838, when he read Malthus, he also read and made a note (D.136) on Alcide Charles Victor Dessalines d’Orbigny’s essay ‘L’homme américain (de l’Amérique méridionale), considéré sous ses rapports physiologiques et moraux’ (1838). Darwin was well aware of the state of the art of his profession and read several essays as soon as they were published, such as Carl Eduard von Eichwald’s ‘Remarks on the Caspian Sea’ which appeared in the Annals of Natural History No. 8, October 1838 (see Barrett et al. 1987: 379), noting with a sceptical question mark what Eichwald wrote about ‘Fresh Water Fish!! adapted to salt water?’ (D.151). The place of the note (D.151) suggests he read Eichwald between Waterton and Cleghorn, while in the meantime he was continuing his reading of Hunter. Keith Thomson suggests that Darwin’s claim in his Autobiography (72) that he ‘happened to read [Malthus] for amusement’ is perhaps not to be taken at face value. He suspects that Darwin ‘might have been revisiting old reading’ (Thomson 2009: 263n34) – not unlike his rereading of John Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse during the same autumn of 1838. The book is mentioned in the list (4v) as ‘Herschel’s Introd to Nat. Philosophy’ with the corresponding comment: ‘2nd time of Reading’ (5r). No such comment is added to ‘Malthus on Population’, but apart from his reading of a few days earlier (28 September 1838, D.134–5), Darwin had already been acquainted with Malthus’s ideas through his reading of William Paley’s Natural Theology, about which he later wrote in a letter to John Lubbock (15 November 1859): ‘I do not think I hardly ever admired a book more than Paley’s ‘Natural Theology.’ I could almost formerly have said it by heart.’46 Both Paley and Herschel (sometimes not so much the content of their works, but the structure of their arguments), as well as William Whewell, were to become important aids for Darwin in his attempts to give shape to his ideas inspired by Malthus.

2.10. Reading up on scientific methods Paley’s Natural Theology opens with the famous watchmaker analogy,47 which CCD 7.388. ‘In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer I had before given, that for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there ... There must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other,

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was to inspire the Earl of Bridgewater to commission the so-called Bridgewater Treatises, a series of essays on natural theology, illustrating God’s omniscience and the beauty of his creation. The metaphor is still the standard example to illustrate the teleological argument for the existence of God, based on apparent design and purpose in the universe (also referred to as the argument from design). In contrast, Darwin’s theory of evolution suggests a groping process that does not seem to be moving towards a ‘telos’, but simply goes ‘on’. In that sense it could be called a dysteleological argument (see Introduction). And yet, Darwin seems to have learnt some important argumentative strategies from Paley, even the mere idea of starting his theory with an analogy – the analogy between ‘Variation under Domestication’ and ‘Variation under Nature’, that is, artificial and natural selection. Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy was an essay on scientific method, which helped Darwin structure his arguments. In line with Francis Bacon’s and Isaac Newton’s methods, Herschel advocated the so-called vera causa method. A cause had to meet three criteria to be ‘true’: (1) it needed to really exist independently from the observed phenomenon; (2) the causal process needed to be competent to bring forth the observed effect; (3) one had to demonstrate that this cause was in fact responsible for the observed effect.48 In his 1842 ‘pencil sketch’ (CUL DAR 6), Darwin would try and present natural selection as the vera causa of evolution. Whether or not he read Malthus’s essay by chance (‘I happened to read …’), and whether the insight ‘struck’ him ‘at once’ or gradually dawned on him, Darwin was in any case quite professional and immediately put this intellectual breakthrough to the test according to a formal scientific method, for which he reread Herschel in December 1838, shortly after his exclamation ‘! Hurrah’ (E.59; 2 December 1838). In notebook N (N.49), between the dated entries of 27 November (N.45) and 29 December 1838 (N.56), Darwin notes that ‘man is not a cause like deity … it is (I pesume – see p. 188 of Herschel’s Treatise) a “travelling instance” a – “frontier instance”.–’ (N.49). On page 188 of his Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1831), Herschel argues that Bacon’s ‘travelling instances’ are those in which the nature or quality under investigation ‘travels,’ or varies in degree; and thus … afford an indication of an artificer or artificers, who formed [the watch] for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use’ (Paley 1814). For a discussion of the vera causa approach in nineteenth-century science, see Hull 2009: 180ff.; Thomson 2009: 125.

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a cause by a gradation of intensity in the effect … The travelling instances, as well as what Bacon terms ‘frontier instances,’ are cases in which we are enabled to trace that general law which seems to pervade all nature – the law, as it is termed, of continuity … ‘Natura non agit per saltum.’ (Herschel, qtd in Barrett et al. 1987: 577)

This law of continuity tallies with the ‘intermediate causes’ which Darwin added to his exclamation in notebook ‘E’: ‘.! Hurrah.– intermediate causes’ (E.59; see above). Notebook E also contains a series of notes on William Whewell’s History of the Inductive Sciences, from the Earliest to the Present Time (3 vols, London, 1837), starting two pages before the ‘Hurrah’ moment (E.57, 60, 69, 70).49 The ‘travelling instances’ and ‘intermediate causes’ he encountered in Herschel seem to have been at the back of his mind while he was reading Whewell, to whose ‘progressive tendency law’ Darwin refers in notebook E (E.70). In his copy of Whewell’s History of the Inductive Sciences, Darwin scored a few passages in the relevant section (vol. 3, 576ff., ‘Sect. 4. – Hypothesis of Progressive Tendencies’), which opens as follows: ‘Within certain limits … external circumstances produce changes in the forms of organized beings. The cause of change, and the laws and limits of their effects … are in the highest degree interesting’ (576). The following passage is scored: … the knowledge thus obtained, has been applied with a view to explain the origin of the existing population of the world, and the succession of its past conditions. But those who have attempted such an explanation, have found it necessary to assume certain additional laws, in order to enable themselves to deduce, from the tenet of the transmutability of the species of organized beings, such a state of things as we see about us … it is found that these additional positive laws are still more inadmissible than the primary assumption of indefinite capacity of change. (577)

To illustrate this inadmissible nature, Whewell gives the examples of the swiftness of the antelope, the trunk of the elephant or the long neck of the giraffe. He implicitly refers to Lamarck and others who maintained that ‘the most striking attributes of animals, those which apparently imply most clearly the providing skill of their Creator, have been brought forth by the long-repeated efforts of the creatures to attain the object of their desires … thus man himself, with One methodological reflection in Whewell’s History of the Inductive Sciences seemed more suitable for the ‘metaphysical’ notebook N than for the transmutation notebook E: ‘All Science is reason acting systematizing on principles, which even animals practically know art precedes science – art is experience & observation.–’ (N.14).

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all his intellectual and moral, as well as physical privileges, has been derived from some creature of the ape of baboon tribe, urged by a constant tendency to improve, or at least to alter his condition’ (577–8). Instead of just negating this approach, Whewell at least tries to figure out the methodological requirements to come to this conclusion: ‘in order to arrive, even hypothetically, at this result, it is necessary to assume, besides a mere capacity for change, other positive and active principles’ (578); he discerns four such principles, the first of which is compared metaphorically to a ‘rough draft’: (1) ‘certain monads or rough draughts, the primary rudiments of plants and animals’; (2) ‘a constant tendency to progressive improvement’; (3) ‘the force of external circumstances’; and finally (4) ‘we must suppose that nature is compelled to be constantly producing those elementary beings, from which all animals are successively developed’ (578). Darwin underlined the word ‘constantly’ and wrote a question mark in the margin, disagreeing with Whewell’s scepticism vis à vis this ‘scheme’: ‘I need not stay to point out how extremely arbitrary every part of this scheme is; and how complex its machinery would be, even if it did account for the facts.’ Not only is ‘the doctrine of the transmutation of species in itself ’ disproved, according to Whewell, but ‘the additional assumptions which are requisite, to enable its advocates to apply it to the explanation of the geological and other phenomena of the earth, are altogether gratuitous and fantastical’ (579). Darwin underlined ‘the additional assumptions’ and against Whewell’s harsh judgement, he protested in the bottom margin: ‘These are not assumptions, but consequences of my theory, & not all are necessary’ (579).50 As the marginalia and reading notes suggest, Darwin read up on methology and philosophy of science immediately after having come up with a terrific idea through his ‘accidental’ reading of an economist’s essay. The Malthusian insight served as a research hypothesis to be examined. According to Niles Eldredge, Darwin did not follow Whewell’s inductive method, but was already making use of the hypothetico-deductive method (Eldredge 2005: 56). Darwin may have sensed that his approach deviated from the inductive method. After the ‘Hurrah’ moment, he level-headedly subjected his hypothesis to a formal analysis of his scientific method to see if it conformed at least to the principle of vera causa. With hindsight, he wrote in his Autobiography that he had ‘steadily endeavoured to keep [his] mind free, so as to give up any hypothesis, however much beloved

Darwin seems to have finished reading Whewell on 16 December 1838, since he wrote a note (E.69) to remind himself that he jotted down ‘many most valuable references’ (the numbers of pages with his marginalia) at the end of each volume of Whewell’s History of the Inductive Sciences.

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… as soon as facts are shown to be opposed to it’.51 According to Darwin, this led him to ‘distrust greatly deductive reasoning in the mixed sciences’ (Darwin 1993 (1958): 141). But Niles Eldredge draws another conclusion. Darwin’s willingness to give up any hypothesis as soon as the facts contradicted it suggests, according to him, that Darwin was actually already applying Popper’s principle of falsifiability: ‘One can falsify a hypothesis but one can never prove it. The best that can be done is to make more and more predictions, and find them confirmed over and over again. One then sees that the proposition has been so highly confirmed that it has, as Darwin himself would have said, itself become a fact – though in principle it is still falsifiable’ (Eldredge 2005: 56). And this method was partially inspired simply by the special situation of Darwin’s impossibility of communicating with anyone about his theory. He therefore used his ‘secret’ notebooks to test his hypotheses, for in case his theory did not agree with the facts, he wanted to be the first to notice it – ‘better to find out for yourself than to have someone else point it out’ (Eldredge 2005: 56).

2.11. Reading up on Aesthetics While he was studying the scientific methods of Whewell and Herschel, he was also reading essays that belonged to the realm of the humanities, such as Laocoon; or, The Limits of Poetry and Painting, the 1766 essay on aesthetics by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, which had been translated in 1836 by William Ross (London: J. M. Dent, 1836). In his list of books ‘to be read’ in notebook C, he not only mentioned the title, but also added that his brother thought that Charles would like it.52 In the list of ‘Books Read’ he did not leave any comment on the book, so it is hard to find out if he liked it or not, but he apparently did find it interesting enough to write three pages of notes on ‘From my early youth I have had the strongest desire to understand or explain whatever I observed,– that is, to group all facts under some general laws. These causes combined have given me the patience to reflect or ponder for any number of years over any unexplained problem. As far as I can judge, I am not apt to follow blindly the lead of other men. I have steadily endeavoured to keep my mind free, so as to give up any hypothesis, however much beloved (and I cannot resist forming one on every subject), as soon as facts are shown to be opposed to it. Indeed I have had no choice but to act in this manner, for with the exception of the Coral Reefs, I cannot remember a single first-formed hypothesis which had not after a time to be given up or greatly modified. This has naturally led me to distrust greatly deductive reasoning in the mixed sciences’ (Darwin 1958: 141). 52 C.266: ‘Lessings. Laoccaon [sic].– (translated in 1837) on limits of painting & poetry.– Erasmus thinks I should lik [sic] it.’ 51

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Lessing. Later on, he catalogued the pages as part of his ‘Old & useless notes about the moral sense & some metaphysical points written about the year 1837 & Earlier’ (CUL DAR 91). Lessing’s essay is famous for the distinction between the ‘nebeneinander’ and the ‘nacheinander’, characterizing respectively the arts of painting and poetry, but Darwin was interested in the ‘object of art’ as explained by Lessing, and more specifically in the question ‘What is beauty?’: Lessing’s Laocoon 2d Lect – The object of art, sculpture & painting, is beauty – which he thinks is a better definition than Winkleman’s,53 who says it is simplicity with grandeur of character. – Hence Lessing shows expression of pain cannot be respected. But what is beauty? – it is an ideal standard, by which real objects are judged: & how obtained – implanted in our bosoms – how comes it there? (CUL DAR 91, 22r)

The reading note takes the form of a catechism, with questions and answers. After a short preface, Lessing immediately opens the first chapter of his aesthetic with a polemic against the art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann: ‘The general distinguishing excellence of the Greek masterpieces in painting and sculpture Herr Winkelmann places in a noble simplicity.’ In Chapter II (which Darwin refers to by means of ‘2d Lect’), Lessing notes that the law of the Thebans forced the artist to use imitation as a means of arriving at ideal beauty54 and that among the ancients ‘beauty’ was the highest law of the plastic arts.55 Lessing then applies this to Laocoon (the marble Laocoon and His Sons, attributed by Pliny the Elder to the Rhodian sculptors Agesander, Athenodoros and Polydorus, held at the Vatican Museums, Rome). The marble depicts Laocoon’s fight with two serpents, which were sent to him as a punishment for his defiance of Poseidon’s rules (by marrying and having sons). The difficulty for the artists was to aim at ‘the highest beauty’ that was still compatible with the bodily pain the marble is supposed to express. The disfiguring violence of the actual pain was irreconcilable with the highest beauty, which is why the disfiguring pain had to be ‘reduced’, according to Lessing. By reducing Laocoon’s shrieks to sighs, avoiding the depiction of hideous contortions, the artists managed to display beauty and pain at once. The sight of pain incites annoyance, unless the Darwin is referring to the German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, one of the founders of scientific archaeology, whose views on harmony and expression in the visual arts are being referred to by Lessing. 54 ‘Das Gesetz der Thebaner, welches ihm die Nachahmung ins Schönere befahl und die Nachahmung ins Hässlichere bei Strafe verbot, ist bekannt’ (Lessing 1998: 14). 55 ‘Ich wollte bloβ festsetzen, dass bei den Alten die Schönheit das höchste Gesetz der bildenden Künste gewesen sei’ (Lessing 1998: 16). 53

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beauty of the work of art can change that annoyance into a feeling of compassion.56 But what interested Darwin mainly was the notion of ‘ideal beauty’ or ‘highest beauty’. Darwin presents it as ‘an ideal standard, by which real objects are judged’. To the question of how this standard is obtained, he replies that it is ‘implanted in our bosoms’. But that leaves him with the unresolved question of ‘how comes it there’ (CUL DAR 91, 22r). The next page contains an excerpt with a short comment: ‘Laocoon p. 75 / “The beauties developed in a work of art are not approved by the eye itself, but by the imagination through the medium of the eye;” he [Lessing] will allow the secondary pleasure of harmonious colours &c &c surely to be added’ (CUL DAR 91, 23r). This remark on harmonious colours corresponds with a note in notebook ‘M’: ‘There is absolute pleasure independent of imagination, (as in hearing music), this probably arises from … harmony of colours, whi & their absolute beauty’ (M.36; Barrett et al. 1987: 528). On the subject of aesthetics, Darwin also made a few notes relating to the work mentioned just before Lessing in Darwin’s reading list, Joshua Reynolds’ Discourses: ‘October 27th [1838] / Consult the VII discourse by Sir J. Reynolds. – Is our idea of beauty, that which we have been most generally accustomed to’ (N.26). And on the next page: ‘The existence of taste57 in human mind. is to me clear evidence, of the general ideas of our ancestors being impressed on us. – Surely we have taste naturally all has not been acquired by education. else why do some children acquire it soon. & why do all men. agree ultimately?58 – We acquire many notions unconsciously, without abstracting them & reasoning on them’ (N.27–8). ‘Der Meister arbeitete auf die höchste Schönheit, unter den angenommenen Umständen des körperlichen Schmerzes. Dieser, in aller seiner entstellenden Heftigkeit, war mit jener nicht zu verbinden. Er musste ihn also herabsetzen; er musste Schreien in Seufzen mildern ... Es war eine Bildung, die Mitleid einflöβte, weil sie Schönheit und Schmerz zugleich zeigte’ (Lessing 1998: 20). 57 Darwin read Dugald Stewart’s essay ‘On Taste’ in Volume 4 of The Works of Dugald Stewart, 7 vols (Cambridge: Hilliard and Brown, 1829), and he summarized it as follows: ‘D. Stewart on taste / The object of this essay is to show how taste is gained how it originates, & by what means it becomes an almost instantaneous perception,– Taste has been supposed by some to consist of “an exquisite susceptibility from receiving pleasures from beauties of nature & art” But as we often see people who are susceptible of pleasures from these causes who are not men of taste & the reverse of this, taste evidently does not consist of this, but rather in the power of discriminating & respect good from bad. And it is manifestly from this fact & the instantaneousness of the result, that the term taste is metaphorically applied to this mental power. Although taste must necessarily be acquired by a long series of experiments & observations, & yet, like in vision, it becomes so instantaneous, that we cannot ever perceive the various operations which the mind undergoes in gaining the result’ (CUL DAR 91, 20r, 20v, 21r). 58 On this universal agreement, Darwin made some notes, now preserved among the so-called ‘Old & useless notes’: ‘Edinburgh Review Vol 18 (1st article) on Taste EXCELLENT Deficient in not explaining the possibility of handsome ugly healthy young women, with good expression– statues not painted– music very good article– why flower beautiful?’ (CUL DAR 91, 14r). The article on which the notes are based is a review of Archibald Alison’s ‘Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste,’ 2 vols, (Edinburgh, 1811), 830 pp. in The Edinburgh Review, or Critical Journal, Vol. 18:1–46 (1811), 10. 56

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The third and last page of notes on Lessing elaborates further on the notion of ‘ideal beauty’ or a ‘beau ideal’, which Darwin prefers to call an ‘instinctive impression’: Lessings Laocoon p. 125 – says new subjects are not fit for painter or sculpture, but rather subjects which we know, it is therefore the embodying of a floating idea,– as statue of beauty, is of the ‘beau ideal’,59 my instinctive impression (CUL DAR 91, 24r)

The passage referred to (‘p. 125’, in Lessing’s Laocoon, Chapter XI), deals with two kinds of invention. Lessing claims that, as a consequence of a natural readiness in us to dispense with the merit of invention, the artist ‘directs his inventive faculty merely to changes in the already known and to new combinations of old subjects. That, too, is actually the idea which the manuals of painting connect with the word Invention’ (125). These manuals, according to Lessing, divide the notion of ‘invention’ into the artistic and the poetical. The latter does not extend to the creation of objects themselves, but is confined to arrangement and expression. This kind of invention pertains, not to the whole, but only to parts and to their position in respect to each other.60 Why Darwin was interested in this aesthetic theory and how it became relevant to the drafting of his theory of evolution will be discussed in Chapter 3 on the Origin’s endogenesis.

2.12. Mixed reading: From Carlyle to Cattle to Coleridge To examine the complexity of the exogenesis, it is necessary to try and retrace all the paths and dead ends in the maze of Darwin’s reading traces. Again, mapping the labyrinth gives the false impression of a chaotic mind at work, but it is clear that the creation of this mess was an integral part of, perhaps This notion recurs in notebook N: ‘Ernest W[edgwood]. playing with Snow. when 2 ½ years old. was frightened when Snow put a guaze over her head. & came near him, although knowing it was Snow.– Is this part of same feeling which make us think anything ugly – a beau-ideal feeling. Same effect as acting on us –’ (N.121). 60 ‘So natürlich aber die Bereitwilligkeit ist, dem Künstler das Verdienst der Erfindung zu erlassen, ebenso natürlich hat daraus die Lauigkeit gegen dasselbe bei ihm entspringen müssen ... [Er] lieβ seine ganze Erfindsamkeit auf die bloβe Veränderung in dem Bekannten gehen, auf neue Zusammensetzungen alter Gegenstände. Das ist auch wirklich die Idee, welche die Lehrbücher der Malerei mit dem Worte Erfindung verbinden. Denn ob sie dieselbe schon sogar in malerische und dichterische einteilen, so gehet doch auch die dichterische nicht auf die Hervorbringung des Vorwurfs selbst, sondern lediglich auf die Anordnung oder den Ausdruck. Es ist Erfindung, aber nicht Erfindung des Ganzen, sondern einzelner Teile, und ihrer Lage untereinander’ (Lessing 1998: 94–95). 59

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even a precondition for, the written invention which resulted in On the Origin of Species. In January 1839, during a dinner at his brother Erasmus’s place, Darwin met with Thomas Carlyle. Impressed by what he had to tell,61 Darwin started reading the three volumes of The French Revolution: A History. By 20 March he had read them (C.269) and by 22 October he had also read the first part of Carlyle’s Miscellaneous Works, which he recommended to his elder sister Caroline: ‘I have become quite nauseated with his mysticism, his intentional obscurity & affectation.– nevertheless it is very curious to discover what different kinds of minds there are in the world, viz T. Carlyle’s & any common Englishman’s at the opposite end of the scale.’62 In December, in between his scientific readings, he read ‘Several more of Carlyle’s Essays’ (CUL DAR 119, 6v). On 23 January 1840, he studied Carlyle’s views on industrial society and the 1838 ‘People’s Charter’ in his recently published Chartism. On each occasion, Darwin was fascinated by Carlyle while at the same time having objections and even ‘abusing him’.63 On the same day, he read The Life of Lord Byron by Thomas Moore, commenting dryly that he found it ‘poor’. But Byron’s own writings did manage to charm Darwin. Less than a month later (16 February), he read Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Manfred and Cain. He also browsed through the poetry of Robert Burns (7 March), Alexander Pope and John Dryden (15 March), and concluded: ‘need not try them again’. Whenever he did not like a book, he could always fall back on the Library of Useful Knowledge, the series in which – among other books – William Youatt’s Cattle: Their Breeds, Management, and Diseases (1834) was published. ‘References at end’, Darwin noted in his list that he had read it on 26 March 1840. These marginalia are important, because according to Camille Limoges it was in the margins of this book that Darwin made the link between the words ‘selection’ and ‘natural’. On page 230 he wrote in the margin: ‘This makes cases very like selection from small varieties … naturally produced.’64 CCD 2.155 (2 January 1839). CCD 2.236 (27 October 1839). ‘On his sick bed Charles too kept on “reading and abusing him”’ (Desmond and Moore 1992: 288). 64 Di Gregorio et al., Darwin’s Marginalia 888; see also Limoges 1970  : 104–5. The marginalia are written next to the following passage regarding the breeding of cattle: ‘He was much favoured by circumstances in promoting his object, which was to take one cross, and then breed back to the short-horn, – the only course, by the way, in which crossing can be successfully adopted. To breed from the produce of a cross directly among themselves will lead to the results which have induced many persons, without due consideration, to believe conclusive against crossing; but to take one cross, and then return and adhere to one breed, will, in the course of a few generations, be found to stamp a variety with sufficient certainty’ (Youatt 1834: 230); http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/ item/105763#page/241/mode/1up 61 62 63

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In 1840 he also read Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, ‘Part of Dante’, Shakespeare’s sonnets and several of his plays (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, Othello, Richard II, Henry IV), Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story and a few novels by Jane Austen (Mansfield Park, Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey). Regarding his reading in general, Darwin wrote in his Autobiography that he ‘took much delight in Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s poetry’ (Darwin 1993 [1958]: 84–5) in the first years after the voyage with the Beagle. The favourite poem of so many Romantics, Milton’s Paradise Lost, had also been his favourite when he was young. Later in life he claimed to have lost the ability to enjoy poetry (44), but ‘[u]p to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave [him] great pleasure’ (Darwin 1993 [1958]: 138; cf. supra). He even read lesser works by Coleridge, such as the play Zapolya (1817), from which he excerpted a line in notebook M. Apparently Darwin was extra alert when Coleridge included elements of nature in his metaphors. For instance, Coleridge’s discussion of the inexperienced Sarolta’s sharp intuition to discern treason is introduced by the question: ‘Whence learn’d she this?’ – immediately followed by this answer: – O she was innocent! / And to be innocent is nature’s wisdom! / The fledgedove knows the prowlers of the air, / Fear’d soon as seen, and flutters back to shelter. / And the young steed recoils upon his haunches, / The never-yet-seen adder’s hiss first heard. / O surer than Suspicion’s hundred eyes / Is that fine sense, which to the pure in heart, / By mere oppugnancy of their own goodness, / Reveals the approach of evil.65

In notebook M, Darwin excerpted the line: ‘“The fledge-dove knows the prowlers of the air” &c &c &c so is conscience &c &c Coleridge,– Zapoyla [sic] p. 117, Galignani Edition’ (M.88). With five etceteras, Darwin concealed rather than noted what he read between the lines, but it is clear that he was interested in Coleridge’s suggestion of a link between moral sense and intuition based on instincts.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Zapolya, in The Poetical Works of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats (Paris: Galignani, 1829), 117.

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2.13. Reading the romantics: An excursion Darwin’s reading takes more labyrinthine turns, but again it appears that this seemingly chaotic, exogenetic amalgamation of notes was a necessary step in the writing process, and gradually a pattern of interest emerges. As Gillian Beer points out, ‘The miscegenation of texts is a powerful and uncontrollable force’ (1985: 548). Mapping this exogenesis with hindsight could be compared to the attempt to clean up someone else’s desk, especially if that desk is as cluttered as, say, Albert Einstein’s. Then again, it is useful to bear in mind the line attributed to Einstein, who after being called to account for his messy desk is said to have replied: ‘If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, then what are we to think of an empty desk?’ The following ‘excursion’ through Darwin’s reading notes leads us from William Wordsworth to Edmund Burke and back to Erasmus Darwin.

William Wordsworth–Edmund Burke–Erasmus Darwin With reference to William Wordsworth, Darwin explicitly mentioned The Excursion, which he read twice through (Darwin 1993 [1958]: 85). In the 1830s, when The Prelude was not yet published, The Excursion was regarded by many as Wordsworth’s masterpiece. It tended to be read as a long argument against pessimism in a modest narrative guise.66 The first-person narrator (the Author) meets with a friend, referred to as ‘the Wanderer’, who grew up among the hills of Athol. Tending a flock on the hills as a young boy, he had no one to share his impressions with. In that environment, ‘not from terror free’ (I.133), he had perceived the power of ‘greatness’ (I.136). He thus ‘attained / An active power to fasten images / Upon his brain’ (I.144–6), with which he appeased his ‘yearning’, nourished his Imagination and attained ‘that apprehensive power / By which she is made quick to recognize / The moral properties and scope of things’ (I.166–9). This Romantic idea of an apprehensive power was the quality Darwin also discerned in Coleridge’s Zapolya as a kind of instinctive moral consciousness, for which he was trying to find a scientific explanation. In Book Second, the Solitary, yet another – albeit more pessimistic – alter ego of Wordsworth’s, invites the Author and the Wanderer into his cabin, which he loves better than a snail its house (II.652). After giving the Solitary ample opportunity to lament, Wordsworth employs the Wanderer as an William Wordsworth, ‘The Excursion’, in Poems, Vol. II, (ed.) John O. Hayden (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977). The in-text references mention the number of the relevant Book (in Roman numerals), followed by the line numbers.

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eloquent spokesperson to counteract the Solitary’s pessimism in Book Fourth, ‘Despondency Corrected’. He appeals to the ‘imaginative faculty’ (IV.707), comparable to what Percy Bysshe Shelley was to call the ‘creative’ or ‘poetical faculty’ in A Defence of Poetry (1821).67 Both Wordsworth and Shelley saw the ‘poetical faculty’ as a necessary supplement to science’s ‘accumulation of facts and calculating processes’ (Shelley 2002: 530). In The Excursion, the Solitary ridicules the ‘wandering Herbalist’ who narrow-mindedly ‘peeps round / For some rare floweret’ (III.166), and ‘his Fellow-wanderer’, the geologist with his pocket-hammer, absorbed by the tiniest detail in a chip or splinter of rock (III.182). The Wanderer agrees that science can be ‘[d]ull and inanimate’ and ‘[c]hained to its object in brute slavery’ (IV. 1255–6), unless it is supplemented with a ‘faculty’ that abides within the soul (IV.1058): science’s most noble use, according to the Wanderer, consists in furnishing clear guidance to what he calls the mind’s ‘excursive power’ (IV.1263; Wordsworth’s emphasis). Edward Manier interprets this power as ‘the imaginative liberation (the “excursive power”) of the mind itself ’ (Manier 1978: 95) and suggests that ‘the young Darwin would have been sympathetic to the critique of science in The Excursion’ (95–6). This seems to be confirmed by an interesting jotting in notebook M, combining science and poetry with a reference to Wordsworth: ‘I a geologist have ill defined notion of land covered with ocean, former animals, slow force cracking surface &c truly poetical. (V. Wordsworth about science being sufficiently habitual to become poetical)’ (M.40). In notebook M, this note may seem just one of the numerous moments of hesitation in the constant wavering between self-doubt and exaltation in the 1838 notes, but with hindsight the note on the ‘truly poetical’ aspect of nature may also offer an explanation for the special effort Darwin made in 1841 and early 1842 to read the complete, six-volume Poetical Works by William Wordsworth.68 It also further corroborates a suggestion made by Marilyn Gaull in The Wordsworth Circle in 1979: ‘Charles Darwin brought the “poetical faculty” to science’ (Gaull 1979: 34).69 The note ‘V[ide] Wordsworth about science being ‘We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life; our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can digest. The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave’ (Shelley 2002: 530). 68 William Wordsworth, The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, 6 vols (London: Edward Moxon, 1840). 69 In a note, Gaull further suggests ‘that Darwin’s thesis became a useful critical tool for analyzing the 67

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sufficiently habitual to become poetical’ is a reference to the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, more specifically to the following passage: If the time should ever come when what is now called Science, thus familiarized to men, shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the Poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the Being thus produced, as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man.70

Knowledge, according to Wordsworth, does not consist of particulars, but of general principles drawn from the contemplation of particular facts. And this kind of knowledge ‘exists in us by pleasure alone’, which any scientist knows and feels (xxxiv). Subsequently, Wordsworth duly wonders: ‘What then does the Poet?’ His answer prefigures the opening of The Excursion,71 only formulated somewhat more prosaically: ‘He considers man and nature as essentially adapted to each other, and the mind of man as naturally the mirror of the fairest and most interesting qualities of nature’ (Wordsworth 1802: xxxvi). Wordsworth’s conclusion is that both the Poet and the Man of Science are prompted by ‘pleasure’.72 Against this background, the notion of ‘pleasure’ stands out as a keyword in another note, written on the inside of the back cover in Darwin’s copy of Edmund Burke’s essay on the sublime73 – which Darwin linked to Wordsworth’s Preface: … conclusions from mathematics sublime – Gravitation sublime – thinking on subject if pleasure from a source not well understood, sooner look to yourself & hence sublime – (Burke 1823, inside back cover; cf. N.57)

origins and forms of Romantic art because it shares the same creative assumptions as the poetry, because it is an expression of Romanticism’ (Gaull 1979: 47n. 4). 70 William Wordsworth, ‘Preface’, Lyrical Ballads (London: Longman and Rees, 1802), I: xxxvii– xxxviii; electronic scholarly edition, (ed.) Bruce Graver and Ron Tetreault, http://www.rc.umd.edu/ editions/LB/html/Lb02-1.html 71 ‘How exquisitely the individual Mind / (And the progressive powers perhaps no less / Of the whole species) to the external World / Is fitted: – and how exquisitely, too – / Theme this but little heard of among men – / The external World is fitted to the Mind’ (The Excursion, lines 63–8). 72 ‘And thus the Poet, prompted by this feeling of pleasure which accompanies him through the whole course of his studies, converses with general nature with affections akin to those, which, through labour and length of time, the Man of Science has raised up in himself, by conversing with those particular parts of nature which are the objects of his studies’ (xxxvi). 73 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, with an Introductory Discourse concerning Taste, and Several Other Additions (London: Thomas M’Lean, 1823). Darwin’s copy is preserved at Cambridge University Library; CUL.1900.

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William Wordsworth–Edmund Burke–Erasmus Darwin Darwin had received a copy of Burke’s essay in April 1828, when he was studying at Christ College in Cambridge.74 A few titles in the Table of Contents are marked in pencil: Chapter I   14. The Effects of Sympathy in the Distresses of Others   15. Of the Effects of Tragedy Chapter III   13. Beautiful Objects Small

In Chapter I, sections 14 and 15, Burke zooms in on ‘Sympathy’. In Darwin’s copy, these paragraphs contain the majority of his pencil marks, starting with the last sentences of §13 ‘Sympathy’. Darwin had a special interest in the ability not to remain indifferent to others’ anxieties, which – according to Burke – was a basis of the faculty that enables human beings to appreciate tragedies and to derive a strange kind of pleasure from staged misery. Burke even calls it a ‘very high species of pleasure’, and the nearer it approaches reality, ‘the more perfect is its power’ (I.§15). The passages in Burke’s essay that are marked by Darwin make a link between ethics and aesthetics, based on the notion of sympathy. Burke defined this phenomenon as ‘a sort of substitution’ by means of which man is ‘put into the place of another man’ (I.§13) – and according to Burke it is by this principle that poetry, painting and other arts ‘transfuse their passions from one breast to another’ (I.§13). In and of themselves, these observations may be rather trivial, but Darwin read them from a very specific scientific point of view, as he was looking for texts that confirmed his assumption that even moral consciousness could develop through evolution and that it was linked to instincts rather than to the power of reason. He found the confirmation he was looking for in the final (marked) sentences of §13, where Burke suggests that feelings and passions do not arise from reason but from ‘the mechanical structure of our bodies’ (I.§13). Here it becomes clear why Darwin’s attention was drawn to this particular part of the essay, for Burke emphasizes that this behaviour is based on instincts: ‘and all this antecedent to any reasoning, by an instinct that works us to its own purposes without our concurrence’ (I.§14). In notebook M, Darwin linked this assumption to the phenomenon that people can be moved to tears by ‘Fine poetry, or a strain of music’, and that this is accompanied with sensations of sorrowful delight, The dedication on the flyleaf reads: ‘G.V. Jackson / To / Charles Darwin / Christ [Coll] / April 1828’.

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‘very like best feeling of sympathy. – Mem: Burke’s idea of Sympathy. being real pleasure at pain of others, with rational desire to assist them, otherwise as he remarks sympathy could be barren. & lead people from scenes of distress. – see how a crowd collects at an accident, – children with other children naughty. – Why does person cry for joy?’ (M.88–9). On 27 December 1838, Darwin had asked himself this question again in notebook N (N.57). This unresolved question is immediately followed by a reference to Burke, confirming the link between Burke and Wordsworth (from Darwin’s point of view): ‘At end of Burke’s essay on the sublime & Beautiful there are some notes. & likewise on Wordsworth’s dissertation on Poetry’ (N.57). Without this note, it would be hard to recognize a reference to Wordsworth’s ‘Preface’ to the Lyrical Ballads in Darwin’s reading notes at the back of his copy of Burke’s Philosophical Inquiry, where Darwin links the notion of the sublime75 to the feeling of ‘pleasure’, mentioned in Wordsworth’s Preface. In Burke’s Inquiry, the thesis that beautiful objects are small follows from the fundamental distinction between the beautiful and the sublime he makes early on in the first chapter. Burke had devoted a separate paragraph to Beauty, which he remarkably opened with a discussion of reproduction: ‘The passion which belongs to generation, merely as such, is lust only. This is evident in brutes, whose passions are more unmixed, and which pursue their purposes more directly than ours’ (I.§10). Darwin noted the link with Beauty on the inside of the back cover: ‘He [Burke] can see reason why instincts (sexual) of animals stronger than in man – because not having any notions of beauty to keep them in right line.’76 This may seem a large mental leap, but Burke had bridged that gap between Beauty and Ambition. Without ambition, Burke claimed, ‘[m]en must remain as brutes do, the same at the end that they are at this day, and that they were in the beginning of the world. To prevent this, God has planted in man a sense of ambition, and a satisfaction arising from the contemplation of his excelling his fellows in something deemed valuable amongst them’ (I.§17). Burke employed the agency of God to ‘plant’ ambition in the human being, but Darwin evaluated this passage in the light of his ‘species work’. Even though Darwin had also read Dugald Stewart’s essay ‘On the Sublime’ toward the end of September or early in October 1838 (see also M.155). His summary, preserved among the ‘Old & useless notes’ (CUL DAR 91, 18r, 19r, 19v; transcription P. H. Barrett), opens with the remark: ‘The literal meaning of Sublimity is height, & with the idea of ascension we associate something extraordinary & of great power.’ The reference to this meaning of the word ‘sublime’ recurs in a note in notebook N in connection with Herbert Mayo’s ideas on the relationship between nature and architecture (N.30–1). 76 See also Mario Di Gregorio and N. W. Gill, eds, Charles Darwin’s Marginalia (New York: Garland Press, 1990), 102. 75

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Burke was chiefly interested in this phenomenon from an aesthetic viewpoint, related to the sublime, Darwin read it from a scientific point of view: ‘whatever, either on good or upon bad grounds, tends to raise a man in his own opinion, produces a sort of swelling and triumph, that is extremely grateful to the human mind’ (I.§17). This ‘swelling’ was not essentially different from animal instincts, according to Darwin: ‘these involve feeling [of] triumph The feeling of Sublimity akin to feeling of pure (1) gratified ambition’, he concluded in the same note on the inside of the back cover. The ‘pure (1)’ in Darwin’s note refers to a list on the facing page (the flyleaf at the back of his copy of Burke’s essay), which reads as a kind of lexicon of ambition: Simple Ambition instinct of excellence over other men satisfied (1) Pride. ditto. with comparison to other men so as to undervalue them (2) Fame. desire that (1) should be generally known. & acknowledged (3) Vanity, [do] (3) with undervaluation of others, or overvaluation of yourself (4) Arrogance a determination to show pride without real pride having been attained Conceit – pride without foundation and on trifling subjects?

Reading on aesthetics could apparently prompt Darwin to reflections on ethics, just as easily as poetry could inspire his scientific work. He continued reading Wordsworth and finished reading the six volumes of the Poetical Works on 17 February 1842, according to his reading list.77 Three days later, he read Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden and The Temple of Nature, adding to his reading list that the latter contained notes and ‘References at end.’78

William Wordsworth–Edmund Burke–Erasmus Darwin Charles Darwin was interested in his grandfather’s poetry, but he focused on the footnotes, as the pencil marks in his copy of The Temple of Nature (preserved at Cambridge University Library) indicate. One of these is a footnote79 on a special form of sympathy, the love of one’s neighbour: The famous sentence of Socrates ‘Know thyself,’ so celebrated by writers of antiquity, and said by them to have descended from Heaven, however wise CUL DAR 119, 12r: ‘17th … Finished Wordsworth 6 vols.’ CUL DAR 119, 12v: ‘20th Botanic Garden & Temple of Nature – References at end.’ 79 The footnote relates to Canto III, lines 485–88: ‘High on yon scroll, inscribed o’er Nature’s shrine, / Live in bright characters the words divine. / IN LIFE’S DISASTROUS SCENES TO OTHERS DO, / WHAT YOU WOULD WISH BY OTHERS DONE TO YOU’ (Erasmus Darwin 1803: 124). 77 78

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it may be, seems to be rather of a selfish nature; and the author of it might have added ‘Know also other people.’ But the sacred maxims of the author of Christianity, ‘Do as you would be done by,’ and ‘Love your neighbour as yourself,’ include all our duties of benevolence and morality; and, if sincerely obeyed by all nations, would a thousand-fold multiply the present happiness of mankind.

The notions of sympathy, solidarity and the love of one’s fellow-man were of special interest to Darwin, given the cruelty of nature. Erasmus Darwin drew attention to this cruelty. Indeed, the only passage his grandson marked in the body of the text was the description of the ‘warring world’ in Canto IV, half a century before Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850) depicted nature as a bloodthirsty entity, ‘red in tooth and claw’: Air, earth, and ocean, to astonish’d day One scene of blood, one mighty tomb display! From Hunger’s arm the shafts of Death are hurl’d, And one great Slaughter-house the warring world!80

On the inside of the back cover, Darwin jotted a note to remind himself of the important footnote on page 124. In the catalogue of Charles Darwin’s Marginalia, Mario Di Gregorio and N. W. Gill have transcribed this note as ‘124 Love your mother as yourself ’ (De Gregorio 1990: 185); it actually reads, ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ The same idea recurs in Darwin’s notebooks, for instance in notebook M, where he wondered whether our moral sense could derive from ‘instinctive ... instincts’ – he could not emphasize their instinctiveness enough: ‘strong instinctive sexual, parental & social instincts, giving rise [to] “do unto others as yourself ”, “love thy neighbour as thyself ”’. He merely presented it as a hypothesis, and added a note to himself: ‘Analyse this out’ (M.150). This note indicates that the external stimuli that prompted him to elaborate his own theory on the matter were not always purely scientific in nature. This note – ‘Analyse this out’ – marks a moment of transition between ‘exogenesis’ and ‘endogenesis’.

Erasmus Darwin, The Temple of Nature (London: J. Johnson, 1803), 134; Canto IV, lines 63–6; preserved at Cambridge University Library, CUL.1900.

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Endogenesis: Drafting the Origin of Species

Three months after Darwin finished reading Wordsworth and his grandfather’s The Temple of Nature, he finally attempted to formulate his theory of evolution in a continuous narrative, rather than in paratactic jottings. In the meantime, three years had passed since the last jottings in his notebooks E and N. To try and answer the question why he needed these three years of apparent idleness between the notes of the 1830s (1831–9) and the 1842 sketch, Peter Vorzimmer suggested in 1975 that there was an even earlier version of On the Origin of Species than the ‘1842 pencil sketch’ (Vorzimmer 1975). He called it the ‘Outline and Draft of 1839’, consisting of the first 13 folios in folder CUL DAR 6, preserved at Cambridge University Library. In 1982, however, David Kohn, Sydney Smith and Robert C. Stauffer convincingly argued that these 13 pages are of a later date than the ‘1842 pencil sketch’. They also indicated that Darwin kept writing notes in the period between 1839 and 1842, but removed all the pages of interest, so that the notebook had to be reconstructed. As a result, ‘there was no three-year gap between Notebooks and Essays’ (1982: 420). Nonetheless, the character of these notes and the frequency of the entries indicate that the note-taking in this period was less intensive than in 1837–9. Darwin seems to have used the period between 1839 and 1842 to find a way to make a transition from loose note-taking to writing a coherent essay.

3.1. A Wordsworthian way of writing The years between 1839 and 1842 are the period in which Darwin read the six volumes of Wordsworth’s poetical works. To gain an insight into the relatively sparsely documented period of contemplation, Wordsworth’s poetics can be of help. Darwin’s composition method shows a pattern that is comparable to Wordsworth’s description of the way ‘successful composition generally begins’:

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(a) It takes its origin from emotion. This first phase is followed by (b) a period of recollection in tranquility. To arrive at (c) the third and final phase, the emotion needs to be contemplated until the tranquillity disappears ‘and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind’.1 This description is part of Wordsworth famous definition of poetry and therefore mainly concerns poetical composition. Nonetheless, the composition of Darwin’s scientific work shows a similar pattern, which could be schematically divided into three phases: (a) 1837–39; (b) 1839–42; (c) 1842–4. (a) With hindsight, Darwin presented his scientific breakthrough as a succession of moments of powerful feelings, first in March 1837, when he (retroactively recognized he) was ‘greatly struck’ by the importance of his Galápagos observations, and in October 1838, when he was ‘at once struck’ by what he read in Malthus’s essay on population in late September and early October 1838. (b) In Wordsworth’s schema, this initial emotion is followed by a period of recollection in tranquility, which corresponds to the period of comparatively less intensive note-taking in the Torn-Apart Notebook (1839–41). This ‘recollection in tranquillity’ was applied quite literally by Darwin. In his Journal, he wrote under ‘1841’ that he ‘Was idle & unwell’, but this is immediately followed by an indication that he was ‘re-collecting’ his notes on transmutation: ‘sorted papers on Species theory’ (CUL DAR 158, 20v). The transmutation notes (B, C, D, E) ended on 10 July 1839, but this end was less definitive than the word ‘Finished’ next to that date on the inside of the cover suggests.2 Darwin cut several pages from these notebooks and put them in envelopes, which have been found in a box, the so-called ‘Box B’. This portfolio system with envelopes was part of the preparatory phase of the writing process when he was working on the manuscript of his ‘Big Book’ (see below). He made these cuts on 7, 13, 14 and 15 December 1856 (Barrett et al. 1987: 5). The envelopes contained not only pages that were cut (by means of which the researchers could reconstruct notebooks B, C, D and E), but also pages that were ‘torn apart’. On the basis of these pages, Sydney Smith, David Kohn and Robert C. Stauffer were able to partially reconstruct a fifth transmutation notebook, which they called the ‘Torn Apart Notebook’ (Kohn, Smith, Stauffer 1982; see also Barrett et al. 1987: 457). William Wordsworth, ‘Preface’, Lyrical Ballads (London: Longman and Rees, 1802), I: l–li; electronic scholarly edition, ed. Bruce Graver and Ron Tetreault, http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/ LB/html/Lb02-1.html 2 Notebook E, inside front cover: ‘Finished July 10th 1839.–’ (Barrett et al. 1987: 397). 1

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This ‘Torn Apart Notebook’ proves that after July 1839, Darwin was not exactly as ‘idle’ as he suggests in his Journal. Based on their investigation, Kohn, Smith and Stauffer conclude that the pages of this notebook have been torn apart in three phases: (1) between July 1839 and May 1840 (pages 1–89); (2) in July and August 1840, during a holiday at his wife’s family home in Maer (pages 176–8); (3) during the next summer in Maer, in June and July 1841 (pages 91–153). Darwin’s perspective on the interaction between aesthetics and ethics shows in his reading notes on Burke’s essay on the sublime and beautiful. They indicate a special interest in the way Burke linked the aesthetic notions of the sublime and the beautiful to sympathy, which Darwin recognized as one of the nicer results of the mechanism of natural selection and as a quality Erasmus Darwin had already identified as a counterforce to the warring world’s cruelty. Darwin read his grandfather’s reflections on the love of one’s neighbour towards the end of the Wordsworthian period of ‘recollection in tranquillity’. (c) Three months after he finished reading Wordsworth’s Poetical Works and his grandfather’s The Temple of Nature, Darwin started writing his pencil sketch and coined the term ‘natural selection’. Apart from its obvious scientific importance, the sketch shows an equally important narrative concern with the presentation of his view. He personified nature and presented her as a sympathetic being. The ensuing skillful composition according to the last phase of Wordsworth’s poetics not only involved narrative strategies, but also a mental movement, marked by the gradual subsidence of ‘the tranquillity’ and the emergence of ‘an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation’. This renewed intensity shows in the 1842 pencil sketch.

3.2. The 1842 pencil sketch The pencil sketch is a ‘manuscript’, defined in contradistinction with a ‘text’ according to Daniel Ferrer’s distinction: a manuscript is not a text but a protocol for making a text (Ferrer 1998; see also Introduction, ‘Working Definitions’). Darwin’s pencil sketch is such a protocol. It is his first attempt to write a continuous draft after several years of jotting down paratactic notes on transmutation, but it is also a document full of cancellations and insertion signs to indicate to his future self (in his capacity as his first reader and scribe) where a particular passage belonged in case he was going to make a fair copy. In 1844, he wrote an expanded version, known as the 1844 essay. So, the pencil sketch is to be situated between the notes and the essay of 1844. In other words, it can be

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looked at from two perspectives: a prospective and a retrospective view. Daniel Ferrer defined the manuscript by referring to its afterlife (a protocol for a next version), but it is also still connected with the preceding stages, as will be shown by means of a link with the notes on Lessing. Starting with the prospective view, the pencil sketch can be analyzed as a protocol for making a text. Charles Darwin’s son, Francis Darwin, took this prospective view, but he already turned the protocol into a text when he published it in 1909 as the first part of a book called The Foundations of the Origin of Species. As the subtitle indicates, the book contains ‘Two essays written in 1842 and 1844’. Francis Darwin made an admirable effort to turn the pencil sketch into a ‘text’, in order to be able to present it as an ‘essay’. But from a genetic point of view, it is important to present this manuscript as what it is: a pencil sketch.

3.2.1. Pencil sketch, Part 1 Francis Darwin, in his introduction to The Foundations of the Origin of Species, mentions the ‘hurried and condensed manner’ and the ‘elliptical style’ in which it is written (Darwin 1909: xxi). The 35-page pencil sketch is an attempt to bring together several of the loose jottings from the transmutation notebooks. It is preceded by a sort of abstract or outline, consisting of three parts: I. The Principles of Var. in domestic organisms II. The possible & probable application of these same principles to wild animals & the consequently the possible & probable foundation of wild races. Analogous to the domestic ones of plants & animals III. The proofs reasons for & against believing that such races have really been produced, forming what are called species. (CUL DAR 6, 14r)

Francis Darwin readily admits that, in his transcription of the pencil sketch, he has omitted some of the near-illegible additions or deletions in the manuscript, which he refers to as ‘hopelessly obscure and incomprehensible fragments’ or ‘repellently crabbed sentences’. The problem was that Darwin’s manuscript often reverts to the elliptical style of his notes. It was difficult for Francis Darwin to turn this into an ‘essay’, making use of only a minimal amount of diacritical signs: [ ] Means that the words so enclosed are erased in the original MS. < > Indicates an insertion by the Editor.

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For instance, on the first page, Francis Darwin inserted a subtitle, and indicated between square brackets that the word ‘[often]’ was deleted and replaced by the word ‘sometimes’ in the first sentence: ‘An individual organism placed under new conditions [often] sometimes varies in a small degree’ (Darwin 1909: 1). And indeed, that is what happens in the manuscript. But the manuscript also shows numerous other writing traces, which are not mentioned by Francis Darwin. So, one could argue that by indicating only a selection of writing traces, Francis Darwin creates a false impression, the illusion of an almost finished product – or to use Ferrer’s terms, a text instead of a protocol for making a text. Francis Darwin’s pioneering transcription has been an enormous help in the past century to make this sketch accessible. The disturbing interruptions, however, are also worth deciphering as they mark moments of hesitation. The elliptical style indicates that the sketch was written rapidly, but Darwin did allow himself the time to hesitate and to nuance. The pencil sketch is not a finished product, which makes it such a vivid document.

3.2.1.1. Pencil sketch, Chapter I In its entirety, the first sentence in Francis Darwin’s transcription reads: ‘An individual organism placed under new conditions [often] sometimes varies in a small degree and in very trifling respects such as stature, fatness, sometimes colour, health, habits in animals and probably disposition.’ But this is not the first sentence on this manuscript page (CUL DAR 6, 16r), which reads: Every organism, as far as our experience goes, when tak bred for some generations under conditions different from those in which it was placed by nature varies.

The whole sentence is crossed out. And even this deleted sentence seems to have had a partial predecessor. The other side of the page shows a fragment that is written aslant in the bottom right corner and there is a fold in the middle of the leaf. So most probably Darwin first took the piece of paper in landscape orientation and folded it to start writing the opening sentence: Every organism, as far as our experience (CUL DAR 6, 16v)

Facsimile Available Online darwin-online.org.uk → Manuscripts → DAR6 → Browse → image 22

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But he did not even finish his first sentence in this landscape-oriented version. He changed his mind and decided he needed the full space of the original leaf. He turned the leaf and started writing on the other side (CUL DAR 6, 16r), this time holding the page in portrait orientation.

Facsimile Available Online darwin-online.org.uk → Manuscripts → DAR6 → Browse → image 21

These may seem just a few material traces of a false start, but they do indicate how hesitantly Darwin began. What in Francis Darwin’s transcription seems like a self-confident opening sentence was actually a somewhat wavering incipit. Darwin first wrote ‘Every organism’, but immediately toned down this bold, all-encompassing phrase, and nuanced it with ‘as far as our experience goes’. After rereading the sentence he decided to change his approach and to reduce the all-inclusive ‘every’ to the specific: ‘An organism’, further specifying it as ‘An individual organism’. The original opening (in the folded landscape orientation) was even less of a real ‘incipit’. Just above the first, interrupted version of the opening sentence, Darwin has written a parenthesis: (introduce tendency to revert to parent form)

It took a while before Darwin acted upon this note to himself. On the second page of the pencil sketch he wrote: Therefore if in any one country, or district all animals of species be allowed freely to cross, if there be any small tendency for in them to vary, such tendency will be constantly counteracted. – (17r)

What Francis Darwin has transcribed is often only the ‘top layer’ of the manuscript, that is, the revised version of an ealier ‘layer’, which David Kohn, Sydney Smith and Robert C. Stauffer have called the ‘initial’ draft (‘Draft A’) on top of which the ‘final draft version (Draft B)’ is ‘superimposed’ (1982: 421). According to the French terminology of ‘critique génétique’ the ‘top layer’ of pages 16r, 16v and 17r is the result of a thorough ‘campagne de révision’ [‘revision campaign’]. The first writing layer (Kohn, Smith and Stauffer’s ‘initial draft’) is a relatively straightforward explanation of the basic principles of variation under domestication. It consists of five paragraphs, separated from each other by means of two short lines:

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Every organism, as far as our experience goes, when tak bred for some generations under conditions different from those in which it was placed by nature varies. An individual organism placed under new conditions often sometimes varies in a small degree, but in very trifling respects, such as stature, fatness, sometimes colour, health & probably disposition. Most of these slight variations tend to become hereditary. = When the individual is multiplied by buds for long period this variation yet small, seems greater & occasionally a single bud or individual departs widely from its type (example) & continues steadily to propagate the kind of buds. = When the organism is bred for several generations under new or varying conditions the variation is much greater in amount & endless in kind – (especially holds good when individual has long been exposed to new conditions) as plant propagated by. There seems to be no part of body or mind or habit which does not vary. All such Variations being congenital of all kind decidedly evince a tendency to become hereditary. = Each parent transmits its peculiarities, therefore if varieties allowed freely to cross, except inby the chance of two characterized by same peculiarity happening to marry, such varieties will be constantly be demolished. – All bisexual animals must cross – hermaphrodite plants do cross – it seems very possible that hermaphrodite animals do cross = Conclusion strengthened by ill-effect of breeding in & in, good effects of crossing, possibly analogous to good effect of change in co[nd] Therefore if in any country, or district all animals of one species be allowed freely to cross, if there be any small tendency for in them to vary, such tendency will be constantly counteracted. – But if man selects; then new races rapidly formed – of late years systematically followed – in most ancient times often practically followed – In such selected races, if not removed to new conditions & preserved from all cross after several generations cobecome ‘very true’ like each other & not varying – But man selects only what is useful & curious – has bad judgment, is capricious, grudges to destroy those wh do not come up to his patterns – has no knowledge power of selecting according to internal variations – can hardly

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keep his conditions uniform, cannot doesn’t does not select those best adapted to the conditions, under which form lives, but those most useful to him – (CUL DAR 6, 16r–17r)

Towards the end, Darwin reverts to the paratactic style of his notes. But apart from that, it is a fairly clear text, with only a few cancellations. When Darwin reread it, however, he started revising it thoroughly. The second writing layer is the result of this so-called campagne de révision. The French notion has connotations of a military campaign, suggesting an intimate battle between the armies of the original Darwin and the later Darwin who was of the opinion that he could do better. The result is indeed a battlefield of deletions and additions. But the number of casualties eventually turns out to be relatively limited. For instance, in the first paragraph, Darwin only crossed out the last sentence (‘Most of these slight variations tend to become hereditary.’), replacing it by: ‘Also habits of life develope [sic] alter or injure certain parts (disuse atrophies)’ (CUL DAR 6, 16r). It is possible that the ‘top layer’ (as presented by Francis Darwin) is the result of not just one, but several ‘revision campaigns’ or writing stages. ‘Stage’ is the term used by the Text Encoding Initiative’s (TEI) Special Interest Group (SIG) on genetic editions. Different stages can be discerned, for instance, when the author and/or other agents involved have used a different writing tool at each different stage of the revision process. Quite often, however, this is not the case. For example, in the case of the pencil sketch, Darwin simply used a pencil for all the ‘stages’, ‘layers’ or ‘revision campaigns’. A transcription that includes all of these stages reflects the complex nature of this manuscript: Every organism, as far as our experience goes, when tak bred for some generations under conditions different from those in which it was placed by nature varies. An individual organism placed under new conditions often sometimes varies in a small degree, but & in very trifling respects, such as stature, fatness, sometimes colour, health & habits in animals probably disposition. Most of these slight variations tend to become hereditary. Also habits of life develope alter or injure certain parts (disuse atrophies) = = When the individual is multiplied for long period by buds3 the variation is yet small, seems though greater & occasionally a single bud or individual departs The original ‘by buds for long period’ is marked by Darwin to indicate changed word order.

3

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When the organism is bred for several generations under new & varying conditions ... the variation is much greater in amount & endless in kind. – (especially holds good when individual has long been exposed to new conditions) as plants propagated There seems to be no part Beau ideal of liver of internal or external body or mind or habit or mind or habits, or instincts which does not vary in some small degree & of the or even to a great amount. [16v]5 The nature of the external conditions tend [sic] to effect some definite change in all or greater part of offspring – little food small size – certain foods hairless & & organ affected or diseases – extent unknown when there are. A certain degree of variation (Müller twins) seem inevitable effects of process of reproduction. – But more important is that single generation, especially under new conditions, when no crossing. infinite variation & not direct effect of external conditions, but only in as much as it effect the reproductive functions. (CUL DAR 6,16r–16v)

One of the elliptical additions that interrupt the smooth surface of the body of this text is an insertion on the first page. While Darwin is discussing the principles of variation in domestic organisms in the short first chapter, he writes that there seems to be no part of the organism which does not vary to some extent. Between the lines he added: ‘Beau ideal of liver’: When the organism is bred for several generations under new & varying conditions ... the variation is much greater in amount & endless in kind. – (especially holds good when individual has long been exposed to new conditions) as plants propagated There seems to be no part Beau ideal of liver of internal or external body or mind or habit or mind or habits, or instincts which does not vary in some small degree & of the or even to a great amount . (CUL DAR 6, 16r)

By taking the ‘prospective view’, regarding the manuscript as a protocol for making a text (Ferrer 1998), this rather obscure insertion becomes clearer in the fair copy of this passage (for a more detailed discussion of this fair copy, see below): When an organism is propagated for many generations in domesticity ... the variation is greater in amount & almost endless in kinds. There seems no part of the body outside or inside which does not vary in some small degree; anatomists dispute what is the ‘beau ideal’ form of the liver, as painters do of the nose or lips. (CUL DAR 6, 2r) Originally, Darwin wrote ‘to propagate the kind by buds’; he then changed this into ‘to propagate by buds such new the kind’. The following addition (on page 16v) is marked by two AAs indicating the place where Darwin wanted it to be inserted into the body of the text on page 16r.

4

5

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It may seem remarkable that Darwin ventures onto the field of aesthetics, but he did read quite a few treatises on this subject, as his reading lists indicate (see Chapter 2). When Daniel Ferrer defined the manuscript as a protocol for making a text, he did so by looking forward to its subsequent textual history. But the manuscript also has a prehistory. ‘useless’ notes ← 1842 pencil sketch → ‘beauty ... is ‘Beau ideal of liver’ an ideal standard’

fair copy ‘beau ideal’ form of liver

The ‘retrospective view’ relates the ‘beau ideal’ to the reading notes on Lessing among the ‘Old and useless notes’ and to Darwin’s remarkably straightforward definition in response to the question ‘What is beauty?’: ‘– it is an ideal standard, by which real objects are judged’ (CUL DAR 91, 22r). When Darwin tried to explain in his pencil sketch that every part of an organism shows variations, he could fall back on this definition. Not just noses and lips, but even a liver could have an ‘ideal standard’. With hindsight, Darwin may have deemed his notes on Lessing’s aesthetics ‘old and useless’, but they did make a modest contribution to On the Origin of Species.

3.2.1.2. Pencil sketch, Chapter II The short first chapter on the principles of variation in domestic organisms was followed by the ‘application of these same principles to wild animals’. In notebook E, Darwin had already noted this analogy, which was to become such a crucial pivot in the narrative strategy of On the Origin of Species: ‘It is a beautiful part of my theory, that domesticated races of organics are made by precisely same means as species – but latter far more perfectly & infinitely slower’ (E.71). On the second page of the pencil sketch, Darwin already suggested that if man selects, new races are more rapidly formed. ‘But man selects only what is useful & curious – has bad judgment, is capricious’ (CUL DAR 6, 17r). Four pages further, this behaviour would be contrasted with the infinitely more refined selection by nature: ‘Natures [sic] variation far less, but such selection far more rigid & scrutinizing … Nature lets the animal live, till on actual proof it is found less able to do the required work to serve the desired end, man judges solely by his eye, knows not whether nerves, muscles, arteries are developed in proportion to the change of external form.–’ (21r). Against the background of Darwin’s sustained reading of Wordsworth’s poetical works, this personification can be read as a rather literal application of

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the poet’s advice in The Excursion, where (after his caricature of the geologist) Wordsworth suggested that ‘Science then / Shall be a precious visitant; and then, / And only then, be worthy of her name’ when ‘her dull eye, / Dull and inanimate, no more shall hang / Chained to its object in brute slavery’ (The Excursion, Book IV, lines 1251–6). By animating an inanimate scientific concept, Darwin practised science with so-called ‘excursive power’ (IV.1263; Wordsworth’s emphasis). Just before he introduced the concept of natural selection, Darwin reinforced the analogy between artificial and natural selection by personifying nature and introducing her not as an aggressive force, but as a sort of sagacious ‘being’, which selected in a much less egotistical way than man: ‘a being infinitely more sagacious than man (not an omniscient creator)’, according to Francis Darwin’s transcription. The manuscript shows that this is actually an addition, substituting a deletion. Because it is crossed out, the deleted text is hard to decipher, but it seems to read: ‘a being, an extreme being’ (19r). No matter how uncertain this reading is, it is worth noting that this key metaphor and pivotal narrative device (the personification of Nature) was not introduced off the cuff. Darwin seems to have been clear about the introduction of a ‘being’, but its description was less evident. Darwin suggested that ‘if a being, an extreme being being infinitely more sagacious than man (not an omniscient creator) , during thousands & thousands of years were to select all the variations which tended towards a certain ends’ (19r), it would be able to form certain species. Without paying much attention to syntax and grammatical rules, Darwin immediately tried to illustrate his hypothesis: ‘for instance if he foresaw a canine animal would be better off, owing to the country producing more hares, if he were longer legged & keener sight – greyhound produced’ (19r). With the personification of an abstract concept, Darwin had found a way to make the transition from artificial to natural selection. The principle of natural selection could be presented by comparing it to an intelligent selector, who nevertheless was not an omniscient creator. Darwin seems to have been pleased with this personification, since he kept it in the 1844 essay: Let us now suppose a Being with penetration sufficient to perceive differences in the outer and innermost organization quite imperceptible to man, and with forethought extending over future centuries to watch with unerring care and select for any object the offspring of an organism produced under the foregoing circumstances; I can see no conceivable reason why he could not form a new race (or several were he to separate the stock of the original organism and work on several islands) adapted to new ends. (Darwin 1909: 85)

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And 15 years later, this passage still remained a crucial part of On the Origin of Species. The development of the passage is representative as it has the tendency to grow. Darwin’s writing method is generally expansive in nature. In this respect it resembles some famous modernist writers’ writing practices, such as Proust’s and Joyce’s: As man can produce and certainly has produced a great result by his methodical and unconscious means of selection, what may not nature effect? Man can act only on external and visible characters: nature cares nothing for appearances, except in so far as they may be useful to any being. She can act on every internal organ, on every shade of constitutional difference, on the whole machinery of life. Man selects only for his own good; Nature only for that of the being which she tends. … Under nature, the slightest difference of structure or constitution may well turn the nicely-balanced scale in the struggle for life, and so be preserved. How fleeting are the wishes and efforts of man! how short his time! and consequently how poor will his products be, compared with those accumulated by nature during whole geological periods. Can we wonder, then, that nature’s productions should be far ‘truer’ in character than man’s productions; that they should be infinitely better adapted to the most complex conditions of life, and should plainly bear the stamp of far higher workmanship? It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest. (Darwin 1859: 83–4)

In On the Origin of Species, at the beginning of Chapter IV (‘Natural Selection’), Darwin personified nature by presenting her as a sort of super benevolent and extremely skilled pigeon breeder, ‘rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life’ (Darwin 1859: 84; emphasis added). This ‘improvement’ was less explicit in the 1842 pencil sketch. From the pencil sketch onwards, narrative strategies start playing an important role in the writing process. The sentence structures may not always be syntactically correct, but unlike the paratactic notes (especially in the transmutation notebooks) the pencil sketch has a first-person narrator whose role is more complex than that of the ‘I’ in the notes. The ‘I’ in the notes could still fairly unproblematically be equated with the scientist Charles Darwin. In the pencil sketch, the ‘I’ is a narrator who knows that the personification of nature in all her benevolence is rhetorically effective, partly because as a metaphor it is ambiguous and is open to many interpretations.

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Darwin’s metaphorical way of characterizing natural selection as a ‘moral and intelligent agent’ is interpreted by Robert J. Richards as one of Darwin’s means of offering resistance against the mechanistic view on natural selection as a ruthless process (Richards 2009: 64). According to Richards, ‘Darwin’s vision of the process of natural selection was anything but mechanical and brutal’ (66). He suggests that, from Darwin’s point of view, ‘Nature’ may have sacrificed a multitude of creatures, but it did so for the greater purpose of ‘creating beings with a moral spine’. Whether it follows that ‘We humans, Darwin believed, were the goal of evolution by natural selection’ (66) is perhaps another matter. The notes certainly contain many passages that suggest that the human species does not have a privileged position among other species. But the passage on this personified, selecting nature did have a special rhetorical effect. In ‘The Rhetoric of the Origin of Species’, David J. Depew refers to the same passage and points out its effect: Darwin tried to turn nature into such a benevolent (hypothetical) being that it became ‘a creative power rivaling in goodness the God of Britain’s cultural grammar’ (Depew 2009: 249). As discussed in Chapter 2, Darwin made a marginal note on page 230 of William Youatt’s Cattle, Their Breeds, Management, and Diseases, which Camille Limoges (1970: 104–5) has identified as the first step towards the concept of natural selection: ‘This makes cases very like selection from small varieties naturally produced’ (Darwin in Youatt 1834: 230). Darwin now employed the term ‘natural selection’ in the pencil sketch (CUL DAR 6, 20r).

Facsimile Available Online darwin-online.org.uk → Manuscripts → DAR6 → Browse → image 28

Underneath the heading ‘Natural Selection’, Darwin introduces Malthus. He refers to the ‘war of nature’ and ‘the enormous geometrical power of increase in every organism’ – which leads him directly to ‘Malthus on man – in animals no moral check restraint – they breed in time of year when provision most abundant, or season most favourable’ (CUL DAR 6, 20r). Darwin employs the Malthusian term ‘check’, but replaces it immediately by ‘restraint’. He was clearly making use of his notebooks6 to write this sketch. ‘[A] thousand wedges are being forced into the œconomy of nature’ (CUL DAR 6, 20r), he wrote in The image of a ‘war’ among species (‘the warring of the species as inference from Malthus’) had already been mentioned in notebook D.134.

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the pencil sketch, corresponding to what he had already noted in notebook D: ‘One may say there is a force like a hundred thousand wedges trying force into every kind of adapted structure into the gaps of in the oeconomy of nature, or rather forming gaps by thrusting out weaker ones.–’ (D.135). After the analogy between artificial and natural selection, Darwin made the distinction between natural and sexual selection. While sexual selection has a relatively direct purpose, natural selection happens because particular variations turn out to have more chances to survive, not only in the short term, but also in the long run.

3.2.1.3. Pencil sketch, Chapter III The chapter on natural selection is followed by the third chapter, with arguments7 for and against his research hypothesis. The wording keeps wavering between parataxis and syntaxis. But Darwin was clearly sharpening his pen in order to present his narrative in a rhetorically well-considered way. He was quite conscious of the narrative strategies he was applying. On page 26r he openly dealt with the ‘Difficulties on theory of selection’: ‘It may be objected, such perfect organs as eye & ear could never be formed.’ This was a difficult issue and Darwin needed the back of the paper to prepare his argumentation. Most of the notes on page 26v are not included in Francis Darwin’s transcript because they interrupt the flow of the text, but they do shed more light on the dynamics of Darwin’s writing process and narrative strategy. The first note reads: ‘To effect a complicated organ, – perfect gradation required’ (26v). The problem was that such a perfect gradation was not always easy to reconstruct. Towards the end of the page, Darwin’s style became increasingly elliptical. The notes were mainly intended as memos to himself. The last one is an exceptionally explicit reference: This is method of Bridgewater Treatises – the known so small to the unknown – (CUL DAR 6, 26v)

According to the predominant scientific approach of the day, natural theology’s task was to find evidence of the omniscient Creator and his design, the underlying idea being that man’s knowledge was only an infinitesimal trifle compared to what he did not know. This attitude was expressed most prominently in the Bridgewater Treatises, a series of essays on natural theology, sponsored by the Earl of Bridgewater with the explicit purpose of emphasizing God’s omniscience (see Chapter 2.10). The best way to highlight this infinite wisdom was For discussions of Darwin’s arguments in the later versions, see Hodge 1977 and Waters 2009.

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to contrast it with man’s relative ignorance.8 Darwin concisely summarized this method as ‘the known so small to the unknown’. This elliptical note offers a rare insight into Darwin’s strategy. With reference to the difficult case of the formation of the eye, Darwin decided to apply the same strategy, but with a twist. The perfect gradation of variations that would eventually lead to the formation of the eye was not completely charted yet. But that did not necessarily mean this formation through variation was impossible. The contemporary state of science was simply not sufficiently advanced: The gradation by which each individual organs have arrived at its present state, & each individual animal with its aggregate of organs has arrived, probably never will could be known & all present great difficulties. I merely wish to show, that the proposition is not so monstrous as it at first appears, & that if good reasons can be advanced for believing the species have varied descended from common parents, the difficulty of imagining intermediate forms of structure not sufficient to make one at once reject the theory. (26r)

So Darwin asked for some respite and openness of mind, so as not to reject the theory immediately. And he summarized his rhetorical strategy based on a twist to the Bridgewater method: I conclude it is impossible to say we know the limit of variation & therefore with the adapting selecting power of nature infinitely wise compared to those of man, that it is impossible to say we know the limit of races. (30r)

He thus applied the Bridgewater method, only to an evidently different end. This clear awareness of his writing method is also expressed in the application of metaphors.9 On the same page (26v), while he was looking for the best way to discuss the problem of the formation of the eye, he wrote: ‘Amusing, to compare eye to a ship’ (CUL DAR 6, 26v). It is just a loose end, because he did Darwin had read several of the Bridgewater Treatises, according to his reading lists: in May 1839 ‘Bell on the Hand’ (Charles Bell, The hand: Its Mechanism and Vital Endowments as Evincing Design (Bridgewater Treatise No. 4), London, 1833); on 24 February 1840 ‘Whewell’s Bridgewater Treatise’ – ‘Well Skimmed (for second time)’ (William Whewell, Astronomy and General Physics Considered with Reference to Natural Theology (Bridgewater Treatise No. 3), London 1833); ‘Rogets Bridgewater Treatise: very good, abortive organs read’ (CUL DAR 119, *16v) (Peter Mark Roget, Animal and Vegetable Physiology Considered with Reference to Natural Theology, 2 vols (Bridgewater Treatise No. 5), London, 1834). Later on (May 1848), he also read ‘Bucklands Bridgewater Treatise’ (William Buckland, Geology and Mineralogy Considered with Reference to Natural Theology (Bridgewater Treatise No. 6.), 2 vols, London, 1836 (Abstract in CUL DAR 71: 125–7)). 9 For instance, he introduces the ‘metaphor of net’ (CUL DAR 6, 32v) and borrows Lyell’s metaphor of the pages in a history in several volumes, most of which are lost: ‘if geology presents us with mere pages in chapters towards end of the history – formed by tearing out bundles of leaves – & each page illustrates merely a small portion of the animals organisms of that time – thesee facts accord perfectly with my theory. –’ (CUL DAR 6, 35r). 8

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not elaborate on it at this point in the text, but it had a function nonetheless. Toward the end of the pencil sketch, in the conclusion, he returns to the image of the ship: We no longer look [at] an animal as a savage does at a ship or other great work of art, as a thing wholly beyond comprehension, but we must feel far more interest in examining it. How interesting is every instinct, when we speculate on their origin as an hereditary or congenital habit or trick? or produced by the selection of individuals differing slightly from their parents. We must look at every complicated mechanism and instinct as every a the summary of a long history, of useful contrivances, much like a work of art. (CUL DAR 6, 48r–49r)

Darwin partially kept this passage in On the Origin of Species: When we no longer look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyond his comprehension … when we regard every production of nature as one which has had a history; when we contemplate every complex structure and instinct as the summing up of many contrivances … how far more interesting, I speak from experience, will the study of natural history become!’ (Darwin 1859: 485–6)

The argument remains the same and still follows the twisted Bridgewater method – ‘the known so small to the unknown’. Our knowledge of nature is limited, but we no longer look at an organism as at something that is completely beyond us, which Darwin enthusiastically presents as a promising prospect, followed by an exclamation mark and a passage in which he does not curb his enthusiasm: ‘A grand and almost untrodden field of inquiry will be opened’ (486). In spite of this enthusiasm, there is a distance between the younger Darwin and his older self, comparable to the distance between Joseph Conrad’s characters Stein and Marlow. The Romantic character Stein in Lord Jim, who waxes lyrical about butterflies, compares Nature to an artist: ‘This wonder; this masterpiece of Nature – the great artist’ (qtd in O’Hanlon 1984: 125). In unguarded moments, Darwin’s Romanticism shines through in the pencil sketch. Whereas in the pencil sketch the contrivances of a complex mechanism or instinct are compared to a work of art (in bold face in the passage quoted above), it is striking that Darwin leaves out art in the corresponding passage in On the Origin of Species. The ‘contrivances’ remain the same, but art – and all things artificial, as Darwin repeatedly emphasizes – is much less ingenious, inventive and resourceful than Nature: ‘Selection, as we shall hereafter see, is a power incessantly ready for action, and is as immeasurably superior to man’s feeble efforts, as the works of Nature are to those of Art’ (Darwin 1859: 61).

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3.2.1.4. Pencil sketch, ‘Summary’ Part 1 At the end of the third chapter, Darwin closed the first part with a summary: Summing up this Division. – If variation be admitted to occur occasionally in some wild animals, & how can we doubt it, when we see all thousands organisms, for whatever use taken by man, do vary – if we admit such variations tend to be hereditary & how can we doubt it, when we []10 resemblances of features & character, disease & monstrosities inherited – & endless races produced (1200 ! cabbages) – (CUL DAR 6, 29r)

The repetition of the phrase ‘and how can we doubt it’ indicates to what extent this first draft was an exercise in rhetoric. And this was only the first part of the argumentation, which continues as follows: if we admit selection is steadily at work & who will doubt it, when he considers amount of food on an average fixed & reproductive powers act in geometrical ratio, then races occasionally ad

For a moment, Darwin thought he had already reached the end of the conditional construction, and wrote ‘then races occasionally ad’, but he crossed out the latter part and added another condition: … then races occasionally ad if we admit that external conditions vary, as all geology proclaims they have done & are now doing – then, as far as our reason goes if no law of nature be opposed, there must occasionally xxx be variation formed races, slightly differing from the parent races. (CUL DAR 6, 29r)

With its typical, conditional structure, this final argument already shows the same structure as the summary of Chapter IV (‘Natural Selection’) in On the Origin of Species, which also contains the recurrent rhetorical phrase ‘and I think this cannot be disputed’: Summary of Chapter.–If during the long course of ages and under varying conditions of life, organic beings vary at all in the several parts of their organisation, and I think this cannot be disputed; if there be, owing to the high geometrical powers of increase of each species, at some age, season, or year, a severe struggle for life, and this certainly cannot be disputed; then, considering the infinite complexity of the relations of all organic beings to each other and to their conditions of existence, causing an infinite diversity in structure, constitution, and habits, to be advantageous to them, I think it would be a most extraordinary fact if no variation ever had occurred useful to each being’s own Sic; Francis Darwin suggests the forgotten word is ‘remember’.

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welfare, in the same way as so many variations have occurred useful to man. But if variations useful to any organic being do occur, assuredly individuals thus characterised will have the best chance of being preserved in the struggle for life; and from the strong principle of inheritance they will tend to produce offspring similarly characterised. This principle of preservation, I have called, for the sake of brevity, Natural Selection. (Darwin 1859: 126–7)

In On the Origin of Species, this summary is followed by a transition to the rest of the book: ‘Whether natural selection has really thus acted in nature, in modifying and adapting the various forms of life to their several conditions and stations, must be judged of by the general tenour and balance of evidence given in the following chapters’ (127). Also, this transition was already present in the first pencil sketch: ‘But are have is there any evidence Species been thus produced, this is a question wholly independent of all previous points, & which an examination of the kingdom of nature surely will ought to answer some one way or another’ (CUL DAR 6, 30r). And that is what Darwin tries to do in the second part, which starts on page 31r of the pencil sketch.

3.2.2. Pencil sketch, Part 2 In Francis Darwin’s 1909 transcription, he presented Part 1 as constisting of three chapters (I–III),11 and Part 2 containing seven chapters (IV–X). Francis Darwin provided them with a title, summarizing their content: §§ iv. and v. On the evidence from Geology. § vi. Geographical distribution § vii. Affinities and classification § viii. Unity of type in the great classes § ix. Abortive organs § x. Recapitulation and conclusion (Darwin 1909: vii)

In the manuscript, this second part confusingly starts with the title ‘Part III’. Francis Darwin suggests this is an error (‘Part II. is clearly intended’; Darwin 1909: 22n1), but in the Introduction he also suggests that it may be a remnant of Darwin’s original structural plan, consisting of three parts (CUL DAR 6, 14r). In that plan, the third part (‘III. The proofs reasons for & against believing that such races have really been produced, forming what are called species’) corresponds 11 § i. On variation under domestication, and on the principles of selection; § ii. On variation in a state of nature and on the natural means of selection; § iii. On variation in instincts and other mental attributes (Darwin 1909: xi).

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to what Francis Darwin has subdivided into sections §§iv–x, constituting Part 2. It starts with a reference to the communis opinio that all organisms on earth were the result of separate acts of creation, with a comparison to cosmogony and astrology. The old cosmogonists claimed that fossils were created the way we see them and that the resemblance to living beings was merely an illusion: ‘the what would the Astronomer might say to the doctrine that the planets moved [not] according to the law of gravitation … but from the Creator having willed each separate planet to move in its particular orbit –’ (CUL DAR 6, 31r). Earlier on, Darwin had already made a similar comparison in notebook C. At that moment, it was still phrased in the form of a strategic advice to himself: ‘Mention persecution of early astronomers, then add chief good of individual scientific men is to push their science a few years in advance only of their age, (differently from literary men)’ (C.123). In the pencil sketch, Darwin left out the persecution, but the contrast between cosmogonists and astronomers is telling enough. At the very end of the sketch, he opens his summary (Chapter X) with the three kinds of rhinoceros in Java, Sumatra and India, differing scarcely more from each other than the mutual differences among certain breeds of cattle. And yet the Creationist believes that each of these three kinds of rhinoceros has been created separately – ‘as well can I believe the planets revolve in their present courses not from one law of gravity but from distinct volition of Creator’ (CUL DAR 6, 46r). Darwin did take care to wrap this thought in a protective casement of mild prose so that the sharpest edges did not protrude too conspicuously. In comparison, the directness and the elliptical style of the notes appear all the more poignant. In notebook B, he had employed the same rhinoceros to explain the origin of species: ‘Species formed by subsidence: Java & Sumatra Rhinoceros: Elevate & join, keep distinct, two species made’ (B.82). And less than 20 pages further, the notebook features a variation on the astronomical theme: ‘Astronomers might formerly have said that God ordered each planet to move in its particular destiny. – In same manner God orders each animal created with certain form in certain country, but how much more simple & sublime powers let attraction act according to certain law such are inevitable consequen[ces]’ (B.101). In his note on the astronomers in notebook C, Darwin placed the ‘scientific men’ in opposition to the ‘literary men’, with an unambiguous emphasis on the heroism of the scientist who is ahead of his time. But the jotting in notebook B shows what he learned from the ‘literary men’, especially Romantic and pre-Romantic thinkers. Thanks to Edmund Burke, he had learned to appreciate

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natural selection as a ‘sublime power’, and thanks to poets such as William Wordsworth, he was now welding all his separate observations together into a comprehensive view of life, a view with grandeur. The core of the conclusion and of the last sentence of the pencil sketch was phrased in such a satisfactory way that Darwin kept it (with relatively small variants) in all the versions of On the Origin of Species: There is a simple grandeur in the view of life with its powers of growth, assimilation & reproduction being originally breathed into matter under one or a few forms & that whilst this one planet has gone circling on according to fixed laws, & land & water in a cycle of change have gone on replacing each other, x & that from this so simple an origin, through the process of gradual selection of infinitesimal changes, endless forms most beautiful & wonderful have been evolved.–’ (CUL DAR 6, 50r)

In a later version (fair copy of the 1844 essay; see Chapter 4.2), Darwin would leave out the word ‘simple’. With this adjective, however, the pencil sketch sheds some semantic light on the meaning the term ‘grandeur’ may have had for Darwin in this particular context. The mechanism of evolution, which was at the basis of such an overwhelming diversity, was of a simplicity that was as grand as that of an elegantly demonstrated mathematical theorem.

3.2.3. ‘thought of as introduction’ The ending was more or less ready, but the beginning was harder. Page 14v, the verso of the outline, shows a short paragraph, followed by the addition: ‘This page was thought of as introduction. ’ The paragraph reads as follows: Geology shows us that vast succession of organisms have inhabited this earth. They appear to have come & disappeared suddenly in groups – But in later periods we have reason to believe they have come on & disappeared from the scene one by one; & we must believe that some have disappeared within late periods. We are thus led to ask whether their appearance be not rather due to some regular cause or law of nature & not to infinitely numerous separate miracles.– Looking further we see that fossils of any one country are more particularly related to the living organisms of that country than to any other; we ask can they recent [sic] be descended from these fossils? – We see in near continent & different parts of the continent, whether separated by space, change of temp, great rivers or mountains inhabited by different species wh. have evident relationships – affinity – unity of type – fœtal state abortive organs – hybrids like mongrels – difficulty of testing species from varieties – if species given up, genera must.

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– We know that variation within certain limits is possible, we ask for limits of this variation who can answer? –

Towards the end, the text becomes less syntactical again, losing much of its clarity. Apparently, Darwin soon judged this paragraph inadequate as an introduction. In the top margin, he added ‘Maer May 1842’, and next to it, without mercy, ‘useless’.

3.2.4. ‘Memoranda’ During and after the writing process of the pencil sketch, Darwin added ‘memoranda’ underneath the short outline (14r), a list of things he definitely needed to add when he would elaborate the sketch into a full-length essay. These ‘memoranda’ indicate that Darwin considered his pencil sketch to be rather incomplete. One of the things he had forgotten to mention, was this: Vis medicatrix is a form of hereditriness, acting on individual as when nails have grown in stumps of fingers. (CUL DAR 6, 14r)

After having written this memorandum, Darwin then added the idea of the healing power (‘vis medicatrix’) of nature to the first writing layer of the pencil sketch, immediately after the first sentence on the second page: Therefore if in any one country, or district all animals of one species be allowed freely to cross, if there be any small tendency for in them to vary, such tendency will be constantly counteracted. – – Secondly reversion to parent form – analogue of vis medicatrix. (17r)

Darwin then gives a few examples: man breeds pigeons that can hardly breed themselves; he breeds cattle with such large hind quarters that cows almost certainly die when they give birth to their calves. That is why in Nature these variations tend not to be perpetuated, but the variation returns to the ancestral form. This is one of the ways in which Darwin drew a parallel and simultaneously pointed out a difference between artificial selection and natural selection, to make clear that on the one hand it is the same mechanism of selection, but that on the other hand it takes so much longer in nature, for good reasons. Among the ‘memoranda’, he also noted that he had to make clear that the scope of his theory was limited, for it had ‘nothing to do with first origin of life, grow multiplication – mind. the & (or with any attempt to find out whether descended from one form & what that form was.–’ (CUL DAR 6, 14r). The 1842 pencil sketch is a 35-page document, but what is being preserved under this title and its catalogue number CUL DAR 6 at Cambridge University

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Library amounts to much more than that. The 35 pages of the pencil sketch range from 16r to 50r. They are preceded by the outline with memoranda (CUL DAR 6, 14r) and, on its verso, the text that was originally meant to serve as an introduction but deemed ‘useless’ (CUL DAR 6, 14v). This leaf is preceded by yet another 13 leaves. And the entire set is described on a separate cover page as: First Pencil Sketch of Species Theory ____________ Written at Maer & Shrewsbury during May & June 1842.

3.3. Fair copy CUL DAR 6, 1r–13r The enigma of these first 13 pages of the so-called ‘pencil sketch’ is that the text they contain is not written in pencil but in ink. Peter Vorzimmer therefore speculated that the first 13 pages and the 14th with the outline and memoranda were written as early as 1839 (Vorzimmer 1975). But this is not a commonly accepted hypothesis. The case can be regarded as a schoolbook example of what Pierre-Marc de Biasi calls the difference between the so-called ‘static’ and the ‘genetic’ classification (de Biasi 2004: 51–2). The static classification starts from ‘the official numbering’ (51) as suggested by the archive. Peter Vorzimmer based his chronology on this static classification. The genetic classification, on the other hand, tries to reflect the chronological order of the writing process. Without this theoretical background of ‘critique génétique’, David Kohn, Sydney Smith and Robert C. Stauffer did exactly what de Biasi describes. They suggested a genetic classification in their article ‘New Light on The Foundations of the Origin of Species: A Reconstruction of the Archival Record’ (1982). Their starting point is Francis Darwin’s transcription of the ‘1842 pencil sketch’ and the 1844 essay in The Foundations of the Origin of Species. Francis Darwin had access to the archive before it was catalogued by the Cambridge University Library archivists. A year after his mother Emma Darwin died, the children found some papers in a closet underneath the stairs. Kohn, Smith and Stauffer suggest that Darwin collected all the preparatory material for the 1844 essay. Since the the 35-page pencil sketch (pages 16r to 50r) were clearly the most important document, he took the rest (the 13-page ink draft plus the outline and introduction on pages 14r and 14v) as a protecting cover for the more fragile

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pencil sketch. He bound all the leaves together and that is – according to Kohn, Smith and Stauffer – how it must have been lying under the stairs for years. A note (‘1st sketch of Species Theory/1842/35 pp’; CUL DAR 6, 15r) was inserted between page 14r and the beginning of the actual pencil sketch (16r), to separate the actual ‘pencil sketch’ from the preceding drafts. So far, the ‘genetic dossier’ therefore looks as follows: CUL DAR 6, 16r–17r CUL DAR 6, 16r, 16v, 17r CUL DAR 6, 18r–26r CUL DAR 6, 16r–30r CUL DAR 6, 31r–50r CUL DAR 6,14v CUL DAR 6,14r

Part 1, Chapter I, version 1.1 (writing stage 1) Part 1, Chapter I, version 1.2 (writing stage 2) Part 1, Chapter II Part 1, Chapter III Part 2 Introduction Outline, followed by ‘memoranda’

Only then do the 13 pages (CUL DAR 6, 1r–13r) follow in the chronology of the writing process. CUL DAR 6, 1r–13r

Part 1, Chapter I, version 2

In the top margin, above the outline (14v), Darwin had also made a note to remind himself that he should ‘Number each paragraph’. That is indeed what he did on the 13-page fair copy in ink, which constitutes Part 1, Chapter I, version 2. The elliptically formulated ideas of version 1.2 (added between the lines of version 1.1) have in almost all cases been elaborated in version 2 (the 13-page fair copy). The very first paragraph already illustrates this expansion (the passages that remained unchanged are in bold typeface): Version 1.2 (fair copy in ink): An individual organism placed under new conditions often sometimes varies in a small degree, but & in very trifling respects, such as stature, fatness, sometimes colour, health & habits in animals probably disposition. Most of these slight variations tend to become hereditary. Also habits of life develope alter or injure certain parts (disuse atrophies) (16r) Version 2: [1/] . An organism placed under conditions, different from those to which it has been adapted by nature, sometimes varies during its individual life in an extremely small degree & in trifling respects; for instance in size, fatness, colour (as birds from peculiar foods & certain flowers) quality of covering (cats & sheep (?) transported to hot countries) the some habits of mind as tameness & temper. These changes are only sometimes to be distinguished in individual lives & are only chiefly

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to be inferred from what takes place when an organism is exposed for several generations to the proper influences. In individuals animals, however, habits seem to effect the body in the development of the muscular system of the whole or of particular parts of the body & together with the circulatory & nervous systems attached to such muscles. Disuse on the other hand causes similar parts to become less & in extreme cases (when use from an accident is prevented)12 to become atrophied & shrivelled.– (CUL DAR 6, 1v–2r)

In version 2 (the 13-page fair copy in ink), Darwin – in his capacity of interpreter of his own ‘protocol for making the text’ – copied almost all the elements from version 1.2, but seems to have tried to find an example for every new element. This was a pattern that was to characterize the rest of the genesis, even after publication: every abstract statement had to be corroborated by means of at least one example. As discussed in section 3.2.4, Darwin had written a ‘memorandum’ (14r) about ‘vis medicatrix’ (‘Vis medicatrix is a form of hereditriness, acting on individual as when nails have grown in stumps of fingers’; CUL DAR 6, 14r). Then, he had executed this memorandum by inserting a paratactic addition in version 1.2 (‘Secondly reversion to parent form – analogue of vis medicatrix’; 17r). This was still very elliptical, but it was a protocol for making the text of the next version. To write this next version (version 2), he interpreted the protocol and expanded on it, though not by adding more scientific and Latin terms. On the contrary, he even omitted the Latin term ‘vis medicatrix’ and gave an example instead: Version 1.2: Secondly reversion to parent form – analogue of vis medicatrix

(CUL DAR 6, 17r)

Version 2: The most marked tendency in variation, is to return to parental ancestral forms. – (20 years) Even when man meets with the primary variation to select from, he must be limited by the health & life of the organism.– he has already made pigeons which feed with difficulty & do not reare their own young. & sheep with so strong a tendency to inflammation (from their tendency to early maturity & powers of fattening) that they cannot live in mos some localities – (CUL DAR 6, 12r)

Between the lines, Darwin added yet another example in brackets – ‘(Early vegetables)’ – but he did not elaborate on it. Instead he stuck to animal examples: In the bottom margin, a note is added by Darwin in pencil: ‘If I might adduce plants because I know of no change except planting in soil dug same summer & the succeeding flower buds may partly be considered as another individual.’ (‘If I might’ is an addition, replacing the crossed out opening words ‘I do not’.)

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He [man] attempted to succeeded in makeing breed a family of oxen with such large bo hinder quarter, that he but was cheecked [sic] by the x frequent deaths of the cows, when bringing forth calves of this structure. (12r)

The 13 pages of version 2 are numbered according to their order in the archive: CUL DAR 1r–13r. But this numbering differs from Darwin’s own numbering: CUL DAR 6 Darwin’s numbering Paragraph numbers 1r 1 [1] 2r 2 [2] 13 3r 3 [3] 4r 3 [3] > [4] 5r 4 6r 5 [5] 7r 6 [6] 8r 7 [7] 9r 8 [8] 10r 9 11r 10 * [*] 12r 13 > 12 [11] 13r 12 > 13 [10]

Darwin’s numbering kept pace with the paragraphs, the manuscript featuring a new paragraph on (more or less) each new page. Only paragraphs [4], [7] and especially [8] exceeded the length of a page. Paragraph [10] (CUL DAR 6, 12r), starting with ‘To sum up’, was apparently meant as a closing paragraph of Chapter I. Darwin therefore decided that it would fit better after the content of paragraph [11] (CUL DAR 6, 13r), so above paragraph [10], he wrote in the top margin: ‘Page 13 ought to come before this’ (CUL DAR 6, 12r). And he adapted his numbering of the pages (13 became 12, and vice versa). But that still did not explain why there is a page * (and a paragraph [*]) missing between pages 10 and 12 in Darwin’s numbering. This page turned up among the manuscript pages of the so-called 1844 essay. It was the only page/paragraph of version 2 that was deemed good enough to be included (without copying) in the next version, the ‘1844 Essay’. This page was probably added somewhat later. The paragraph on the original page ‘3’ (now CUL DAR 6, 4r) was originally number [3], but this [3] was subsequently crossed out and replaced by [4].

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3.4. The 1844 essay According to Darwin’s personal Journal (CUL DAR 158, 22v), he finished correcting the proofs of the Geological Observations on the Volcanic Islands Visited during the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle on 13 February 1844. Around this time and in the preceding months he had ‘copied slowly enlarged & improved pencil sketch’, according to his personal Journal.14 The word ‘copied’ is rightly cancelled, for everything – apart from paragraph [9] (see above) – was ‘slowly enlarged’. The page originally numbered ‘11’ containing paragraph [9] is incorporated in the manuscript of the 1844 essay and renumbered (CUL DAR 7, 10r). In this phase, the genetic dossier looked (schematically) as follows:    ‘1842 Pencil Sketch’    >     >     >     >     ‘1844 Essay’ Part I Chapter I Version 1.1 Version 1.2 Version 2 Version 3 (DAR 6, 16r–17r) (DAR 6, 16r–v, 17r) (DAR 6, 1r–13r) ( DAR 7, 1r–23) Chapter II Version 1 Version 2 (DAR 6, 18r–26r) (DAR 7, 14–39f) Chapter III Version 1 Version 2 (DAR 6, 26r–30r) (DAR 7, 40–64) Part 2 Version 1 Version 2 (DAR 6, 31r–50r) (DAR 7, 65–189)

Version 2 of Chapter I ranged from paragraphs [1] to [11], followed by ‘Chap. II On the variation of organic beings in a wild state’ (CUL DAR 7, 23) and the next paragraph, ‘[12] Organismsc beings in a state of nature vary exceedingly little’. This and the following paragraphs until [38] are the basis of chapters II and III. Chapter II contains the important paragraph [17] about natural selection and Malthus. In the pencil sketch, this passage was written in an elliptical style: Malthus on man – in animals no moral check restraint – they breed in time of year when provision most abundant, or season most favourable, every country has its climate seasons – oscillating calculate Robins. (CUL DAR 6, 20r)

By 1844, Darwin had made the calculation and the passage expanded considerably: It is the doctrine of Malthus applied in most cases with ten-fold force. As in every climate there are seasons for each of its inhabitants of greater & less abundance, so all annually breed & the moral restraint, which in some small degree checks the ‘Feb. 13th. finished correcting. In intervals & previously copied slowly enlarged & improved pencil sketch in 35 pages (written in midsummer of 1842) of Species Theory’ (CUL DAR 158, 22v).

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increase of mankind is entirely lost. Even slow-breeding man-kind has doubled in 25 years, and if he could increase his food with greater ease, he would double in less time. But for animals, without arts, on an average, the amount of food for each species must be constant; whereas the increase of all organisms xxx xxx tends to be geometrical & in a vast majority of cases at an enormous ratio. Suppose in a certain spot there are ten eight pairs of Robins, & that only five four pairs of them annually rear (including double hatches) rear say five only four young, & that these go on rearing their young at the same rate; then at the end of eight seven years (a short life xxx excluding violent deaths for a Robin) there will [be] 2048 robins instead of the original sixteen; as this increase is quite impossible, so we must conclude either that Robins do not rear nearly half their young or that the average life of a Robin when reared is from accidents not nearly eight seven years. Both checks probably concur. (CUL DAR 7, 32, paragraph [17])

In On the Origin of Species, Darwin replaced the robins by a more impressive animal: The elephant is reckoned to be the slowest breeder of all known animals, and I have taken some pains to estimate its probable minimum rate of natural increase: it will be under the mark to assume that it breeds when thirty years old, and goes on breeding till ninety years old, bringing forth three pair of young in this interval; if this be so, at the end of the fifth century there would be alive fifteen million elephants, descended from the first pair. (Darwin 1859: 64)

Compared to the 15 pages constituting Part 1 in the 1842 pencil sketch, the 1844 essay shows a rather spectacular expansion. Here, Part 1 takes up more than 60 pages, closing with the summary. Darwin did keep the if-then structure and the formula ‘& how can we doubt it’ of this summary as in the pencil sketch (see above),15 but the wording needed more fine-tuning in the 1844 essay: Let us sum up this second Part Chapter of my work. If slight variations in instinct & structure & instincts do occasionally occur, If changes of condition do produce effects xx to domestication under the necessarily varying conditions of nature, in some (very (exceedingly few at any one period of the earth’s history) wild animals & plants;– ;16 and how can we doubt it … (CUL DAR 7, 39d)

In this phase of the writing, Darwin worked with parentheses to nuance or explain particular words, even if the insertion of such a parenthesis was detrimental to the stylistic smoothness or readability of the passage. In this respect, the version of the pencil sketch was more fluent as it simply mentioned ‘some ‘Summing up this Division. – If variation be admitted to occur occasionally in some wild animals, & how can we doubt it …’ (CUL DAR 6, 29r). 16 Sic (Darwin starts a new line with a semicolon). 15

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wild animals’. In the 1844 essay, it is remarkable how much information Darwin tried to insert between ‘some’ and ‘wild animals’. The brackets seem to function as wedges, indicating where he wanted to expand the text, as a temporary measure, or in Daniel Ferrer’s terminology, a protocol in view of the next version. While writing that next version, he then tried to find a syntactically more suitable place for the parenthetical information. To this purpose, he used a small strip of paper, only for these opening lines of the summary. And when the syntactically more fluent version was ready, he pasted the piece of paper over the original version of the summary’s opening lines: Let us sum up this second Chapter. If slight variations do occur in organic beings in a state of nature; if changes of condition from geological causes do produce any in the course of ages, effects, analogous to those of domestication, on any, however few, organisms; & ; and how can we doubt it, from what is actually known, & from what may be presumed, since thousands of organisms, taken by man for sundry uses & placed in new conditions do vary have varied. If such variations tend to be hereditary, & how can we doubt it, when we see shades of pecul expression, peculiar manners, monstrosities of the strangest kinds, diseases, even xxxed ones & a multitude of dif other peculiarities, which characterise & form the endless races (there are 1200 kinds of cabbages) of our domestic plants & animals (there are 1200 cabbages that can be raised from seed) and animals. If we admit that every organism maintains its place by an almost periodically recurrent struggle; & how can we doubt it, when we know that all tend to increase in a geometrical ratio (as is instantly seen, when the conditions become for a time more favourable) whereas on an average the amount of food must remain constant; then there will be a natural means of selection preserv tending to preserve those individuals with any slight deviations of structure more favourable to the then existing conditions & tending to destroy any with an deviations of an opposite tendency. If this be so, & there be no law of nature opposed to xxx limiting the possible amount of variation, new races of beings will,– perhaps only rarely & only in some few districts,– be formed. (CUL DAR 7, 39d–39e)

3.4.1. Interim survey In his Field Notebooks, Darwin had written down what he observed, as closely as possible to concrete reality. He took these notebooks with him to the Beagle,

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where he processed his notes and impressions in his Beagle Diary, his Specimen Lists and his Zoological, Geological, and Ornithological Notes. Gradually, he started noting down more abstract ideas in his ‘Santiago’ Field Notebook and the Red Notebook, and after his return to England, he continued this thought process in his Transmutation Notebooks (B–E), his notebooks on what he called ‘Metaphysics’ (M–N) and the so-called ‘Torn Apart Notebook’. The most abstract version of the theory of evolution, mainly written in an elliptical style, was the 1842 pencil sketch, whose first chapter was written in two stages (see Kohn, Smith and Stauffer). Its second version (pages 1r–13r) became a little more concrete again as Darwin added more examples. The 1844 essay contained even more examples. An interim survey of the notes and manuscripts therefore shows a pattern from concrete to abstract and back again: ConcreteAbstract Field Notebooks Beagle Diary, Zoological Notes, Specimen Lists Santiago Field Nb, Red Notebook Notebooks B–E; M–N; Torn Apart Nb 1842 pencil sketch, version 1 1842 pencil sketch, version 2 1844 essay (MS; Fair Copy) ‘Big Species Book’ (1856) On the Origin of Species (1859)

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The latter two rows show, first a continuation of the tendency towards the inclusion of more concrete examples, and then a return to more abstraction. After the 1844 essay, Darwin kept looking for more evidence of this theory, which he wanted to develop in his ‘Big Book’ (see below). Because of various circumstances, however, he was urged to write and publish his theory more quickly than he had foreseen, resulting in the publication of On the Origin of Species (1859), which he considered a mere ‘abstract’. As the interim survey shows, it is not just an ‘abstract’ in the sense of a summary, but also in the sense of a more abstract text than what he had in mind for his ‘Big Book’, because it contained fewer examples and concrete pieces of evidence to corroborate the theory. But this is a flash-forward of 15 years. In early July 1844, Darwin actually felt he had finally finished his work on transmutation and completed his theory.

3.5. Fair copy of the 1844 essay ‘Finished,’ Darwin must have thought, or: ‘it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished’, as Clov puts it at the beginning of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. The ‘endgame’ of the theory of evolution took much longer than the writing of Waiting for Godot and Endgame together, and can be said to have started in 1844. By the beginning of July, Darwin had finished the manuscript of the 1844 essay and he asked the local schoolmaster Fletcher in Down to make a fair copy. On 5 July, he wrote a kind of will for his theory. In a letter to Emma, he asked her if – ‘in case of my sudden death’ – she would spend £400 on the publication of his essay (Darwin qtd in Browne 2003a: 446). He still referred to it as ‘my sketch’ (446), and if she would be able to find a ‘competent person’ to copy-edit it, she was to give that person ‘all my books on Natural History, which are either scored or have references at end’ and ‘all those scraps roughly divided in eight or ten brown paper portfolios: the scraps with copied quotations from various works’ (446). The schoolmaster copied the essay in a nice, curly handwriting, and Darwin allowed his wife Emma to read the 231-page document (CUL DAR 113). As Darwin had predicted, the formation of complex organs such as the eye remained the issue most likely to elicit comments. Regarding the eye, the text reads: ‘if the eye from its most complicated form can be shown to graduate into an exceedingly simple state it is clear (for in this work we have nothing to do with the first origin of organs in their simplest forms) that it may possibly have been acquired by gradual selection of slight, but in each case useful, deviations’.

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In the left margin, Emma wrote: ‘A great assumption/E.D.’ Possibly it was her marginal comment that prompted Darwin to add between the lines: ‘through the animal Kingdom & that each eye is not only most useful, but perfect for its possessor’ (CUL DAR 113, 89r–90r).

3.6. More books The notions of ‘exo-’ and ‘endogenesis’ are useful categories to structure the avant-texte, but they are neither completely separate nor strictly consecutive phases of the genesis. The consultation of external source texts usually continues throughout the process of composition. The case of the Origin’s avant-texte is no exception. Darwin continued reading various kinds of books, including a few novels by Frederika Bremer. In April 1844, he had been reading Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers and The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (26 April 1844). But the book that had arguably the largest impact on Darwin was Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, published anonymously in October 1844. In the list of ‘Books to be read’, Darwin added the price and publisher (Churchill, 1844) next to the title, with the annotation: ‘in which species are shown to be not immutable’ (CUL DAR 119, *19v; see Chapter 2). In November, he already mentioned the title among the ‘Books read’ (CUL DAR 119, 15v). Although the author chose to publish the book anonymously, Darwin knew fairly quickly that the writer was the Scottish publisher Robert Chambers. ‘Mr Vestiges’, as Darwin sometimes called him, suggested in his book that everything that existed at the present moment had been evolved from previous forms – the solar system, the earth, rocks, plants, fishes, reptiles, birds, mammals, and therefore also human beings. The book caused such an upheaval (Desmond and Moore 1992: 322) that it confirmed Darwin’s conviction that the Victorian audience was not ready for his theory. In Vestiges, indeed, ‘species [were] shown to be not immutable’, but whether Chambers had proven this thesis was another matter. In Victorian Sensation, James A. Secord has – as the subtitle indicates – fully mapped The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of ‘Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation’, including Darwin’s reaction. Chambers had stolen a march on Darwin in many respects: ‘here was a book advocating a natural origin for species in a framework of material causation and universal law ... Another author had brought transmutation onto the public

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stage – and, what was worse, had drawn out all the religious and moral implications’ (Secord 2000: 429). From now on, ‘transmutation’ was a notion that was immediately and generally associated with Vestiges, which undoubtedly put a damper on Darwin’s joy of having finished his 1844 essay. But perhaps the damage was not as huge as he initially feared. Chambers’ approach came close to Part 2 of Darwin’s essay, but Part 1 described a mechanism of evolution based on natural selection, and that was not the way Chambers had approached the mutability of species. Secord notes that Darwin ‘never paid down hard cash for Vestiges’: ‘He may have planned to buy a copy, as he marked the price in his list of books to be read, but it was temporarily unavailable when he went up to London, and he obviously decided it was not worth the money’ (Secord 2000: 430). Darwin had to be in London for a meeting of the Geological Society. Instead of buying the book, he read it in the British Museum Reading Room and made the following notes on a piece of paper: Nov. 44. After the ‘Vestiges of Nat Hist Creation’, I see it will be necessary to advert to Quinary system, because he brings it in to show that Lamarck’s willing (& consequently my selection) must be erroneous – I had better rest my defence on few English, sound anatomical naturalists assenting & hardly any foreign. – Advert to this subject after chapter on classification, & then show, from our ignorance of comparative value of groups, source of error. (CUL DAR 205.5, 108)

The quinary system refers to a system of classification based on the hypothesis that each taxonomic group consisted of five subgroups. William Sharp Macleay had developed this system in his Horae Entomologicae (1819–21).17 In 1839, Macleay had moved to Australia, which may partially explain the strange, xenophobic note ‘hardly any foreign’. The note is not exactly the most inspired of Darwin’s writings, but it does show that only a few months after having finished the 1844 essay, he was already willing to further elaborate on his theory. Again, the ‘Bridgewater method’-with-a-twist was the first strategy he thought of (‘then show, from our ignorance of comparative value of groups, source of error’), and he already knew where to begin (‘after chapter on classification’). Nonetheless, it took Darwin almost a decade to actually start working on the further elaboration of his theory after the publication of Chambers’ book and the stir it caused. For a discussion of Darwin’s attitude towards ‘quinarianism’, see Ospovat 1981: 101–3.

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3.7. The ‘big book’ On 26 March 1854, Darwin still feared that if he would manage to assemble his notes on transmutation, ‘the whole thing’ might turn out to be ‘an empty puff-ball’ (Darwin to Hooker, qtd in Stauffer 1975: 7). His personal journal mentions that on 9 September 1854, he ‘Began sorting notes for Species theory,’ but in 1855, he indicated that he did not have ‘any confidence what [his] work would turn out’ and still referred to the Vestiges as the bad example: ‘Sometimes I think it will be good; at other times I really feel as much ashamed of myself as the author of the Vestiges ought to be of himself ’ (Darwin to Hooker, qtd in Stauffer 1975: 7). He started with the first chapter (on variation under domestication), left it unfinished, and continued with the second, which he did complete, as he noted in his Journal on 13 October 1856. The next month, he wrote to Charles Lyell that he was ‘working very steadily’ at what he called ‘my big book’ (qtd in Stauffer 1975: 9), and in December, he started cutting relevant notes from his notebooks (see above). On the inside of the front cover of notebook B, he wrote: ‘All useful pages cut out. Dec. 7/1856’; and in notebook C: ‘All good References selected Dec 13 1856.’ He carefully noted the date in his Journal whenever he had completed a new chapter. These dates appear at the beginning of the chapters in Robert Stauffer’s edition of what is referred to as Natural Selection – the ‘big book’, minus the first two chapters, which were published separately during Darwin’s lifetime as the two-volume Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868). Natural Selection consists of: Chapter 3, ‘On the Possibility of all Organic Beings Occasionally Crossing and on the Remarkable Susceptibility of the Reproductive System to External Agencies’ (CUL DAR 8; partly in Chapter 4 in Origin 1859); Chapter 4, ‘Variation under Nature’ (CUL DAR 9, corresponding to Chapter 2 in Origin 1859, ‘Variations under Nature’ + CUL DAR 15.1, fair copy of CUL DAR 9, 1–87, ‘Common and Large Genera Presenting Most Varieties’); Chapter 5, ‘Struggle for Existence’ (CUL DAR 10.1, corresponding to Chapter 3 in Origin 1859, ‘The Struggle for Existence as Bearing on Natural Selection’); Chapter 6, ‘Natural Selection’ (CUL DAR 10.2, corresponding to Chapter 4 in Origin 1859, ‘On Natural Selection’);

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Chapter 7, ‘Laws of Variation’ (CUL DAR 11.1, corresponding to Chapter 5 in Origin 1859, ‘Laws of Variation. Varieties and Species Compared’); Chapter 8, ‘Difficulties in Transitions’ (CUL DAR 11.2, corresponding to Chapter 6 in Origin 1859, ‘Difficulties in the Theory of Natural Selection in Relation to Passages from Form to Form’); Chapter 9, ‘Hybridism & Mongrelism’ (CUL DAR 12, corresponding to Chapter 8 in Origin 1859, ‘Hybridism’); Chapter 10, ‘Instinct’ (CUL DAR 13, corresponding to Chapter 7 in Origin 1859, ‘Mental Powers and Instincts in Animals’); Chapter 11, ‘Geographical Distribution’ (CUL DAR 14, original and copy of chapters 11 and 12 in Origin 1859 on ‘Geographical Distribution’). These eight and a half unpublished chapters, edited by Robert Stauffer, were presented as Natural Selection because that is the title Darwin gave to his work in the letter to Asa Gray of 5 September 1857, included in the preliminary announcement made at the 1 July 1858 meeting of the Linnean Society, shortly after the writing had been interrupted on 18 June 1858 by the famous letter from Alfred Russel Wallace. Enclosed with Wallace’s letter was his essay (‘On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type’) in which he sketched his independently devised theory of natural selection. By that time, Darwin’s long manuscript had covered about ‘two thirds of the topics later presented in the Origin of Species’, according to Robert Stauffer: ‘If we estimate the length of the surviving eight and a half chapters of Natural Selection at 225,000 words, and project to the 14 chapters as in the Origin, this would indicate a length of about 375,000 words if the work had been completed’ (Stauffer 1975: 10). Starting from the paper that was presented at the meeting of the Linnean Society, Darwin quickly wrote an article which, by March 1859, had taken the shape of a full-length book. But for Darwin, it was merely ‘An Abstract of an Essay on the Origin of Species and Varieties through Natural Selection’. This was the title he originally proposed to his publisher, John Murray, for what would eventually be published as On the Origin of Species. Even before the work was published, ‘Charles Darwin was his own first assiduous editor’, according to Peter Shillingsburg (2006: 224). First of all, he gave his own manuscript to copyists before sending the text to the publisher, writing to his publisher John Murray: ‘I defy anyone, not familiar with my handwriting & odd arrangements to make out my M.S. till fairly copied’ (CCD 7.273). The manuscript Darwin gave to copyists has not been located, nor has

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the copyists’ fair copy, revised by Darwin and submitted to John Murray, and subsequently to the compositors and printers at William Clowes. Upon receiving the first proofs, Darwin felt embarrassed and found it ‘quite inconceivable’ that he had been able to ‘write so badly’: ‘I find the style incredibly bad, & most difficult to make clear & smooth’, he wrote to Murray (7.303). Morse Peckham mentions two sets of proofs that are still preserved: one set of proofs in the Berg Collection, New York Public Library, and another set which Peckham consulted in a London bookseller’s shop (Peckham in Darwin 1959: 25). Apart from these two, Peter Shillingsburg (2006: 225n6) has described a third set. These proofs, preserved at the Cambridge University Library (DAR 213.9) were for the sixth edition (1872), which is part of the ‘epigenesis’ – the continuation of the genesis after the first publication.

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4

Epigenesis: The Paper Fossils of Publishing

In Resisting Texts, Peter Shillingsburg makes a distinction between ‘material text’ and ‘reception text’, referring to Roland Barthes: ‘Barthes’s work (my material text) cannot be experienced until it becomes Barthes’s text (my reception text). Since Barthes is interested only in the experience, or play, of text, he would, of course, define the real aspect of the work of art as the experience of it. That experience of it (Barthes’s play) begins with decoding or dematerializing the material text (Barthes says ‘decanting the work’)’ (1997: 76). Even the ‘reception text’ can be part of the avant-texte, because usually the writer is his own first reader. ‘Schreiben heiβt: sich selber lesen’ [‘To write means: to read oneself ’], as Max Frisch suggested (Frisch 1979: 76)1, and after publication this self-reading can continue. Sometimes, a rereading by the author is inspired by other readers, as the example of On the Origin of Species illustrates.

4.1. Six editions Morse Peckham’s variorum edition (1959) and the electronic variorum edition by Barbara Bordalejo (2009) show that Darwin’s theory is not a monolithic work, but that it has changed several times, with each new edition.

First edition (1859) Both Peckham and Bordalejo estimate the number of changes at word level between the different editions, as well as the added sentences and the number of

See also the collection of essays ‘Schreiben heisst : sich selber lesen’. Schreibszenen als Selbstlektüren, ed. Davide Giuriato, Martin Stingelin and Sandro Zanetti (München: Wilhelm Fink, 2008).

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sentences dropped. For instance, between the editions of 1859 and 1860, ‘1,479 changes at word level’ were counted, ‘267 sentences added and 54 dropped’.2

Second edition (1860) Probably the most famous variant between all of the editions of the Origin, published during Darwin’s lifetime, took place between the first and the second edition, when Darwin added the words ‘by the Creator’ in the final sentence (see below).

Third edition (1861) Between the second (1860) and the third (1861) edition, Darwin added ‘An Historical Sketch of the Recent Progress of Opinion on the Origin of Species’.

Fourth edition (1866) The number of revisions tends to increase in each edition, as the variants between the third (1861) and fourth (1866) editions confirm. According to Helen P. Liepman, ‘The 4th edition of the Origin of Species was the most extensively revised up until that time (1866). An important structural change (p. 21) involved the addition of a number of new subheadings within the chapters’ (Liepman 1981: 203). In some of these revisions, Darwin openly admits that he has to correct his previous opinion. Liepman refers for instance to the issue of hybrid sterility and Darwin’s original thought that this is a result of natural selection. In the fourth edition, Darwin adds a passage in which he writes that, in this particular case, ‘we must give up the belief that natural selection has come into play’ (VIII p. 443, 159.1–3:d in Peckham’s variorum edition).

Fifth edition (1869) The fifth edition (1869) is the one in which Darwin introduced Herbert Spencer’s expression ‘Survival of the Fittest’ as a synonym for natural selection (III p. 145, 15.1:e in Peckham’s variorum edition). Chapter 4 contains a good example of Darwin as a rereader of his own work. Liepman refers to Fleeming Charles Darwin, Online Variorum of Darwin’s ‘Origin of Species’, ed. Barbara Bordalejo, 2009; http:// darwin-online.org.uk/Variorum/index.html

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Jenkin, who had suggested in a 1867 review3 that individual variations – the basis of natural selection – would only very rarely manage to be perpetuated, because inbreeding has a ‘swamping effect’ (Liepman 1981: 204). Darwin took this remark seriously (IV p. 178, 95.5:e) and formulated extra arguments to explain why some variations might be able to overcome this swamping effect: sometimes a number of offspring within the same population could have the same slight variation and isolation would enable a variation4 to establish itself, even if only a small number of individuals had the variation (IV p. 179, 95.17–19e). From the point of view of textual scholarship, Peter Shillingsburg has shown that – contrary to what Morse Peckham’s variorum edition mistakenly asserts – each of the first five editions of On the Origin of Species was ‘completely reset, albeit line for line’ (Shillingsburg 2006: 226) and that consequently most of the changes in accidentals5 were probably due to the compositors at William Clowes in London, rather than to Darwin. In the Introduction to her electronic variorum edition, Barbara Bordalejo refers to Shillingsburg’s conclusion that ‘each edition was completely reset, albeit line for line’ (226), immediately adding that ‘The Online Variorum should help to evaluate Peckham’s work, as well as to better understand the textual history of the Origin.’6

Sixth edition (1872) The sixth edition (1872) is characterized by ‘a more definite form of language’, according to Liepman (207). This tendency corresponds with one type (‘reinforcement’) of the six types of variants discerned by Bordalejo: depersonalization (suppressing the use of the first person and changing from personal to impersonal constructions); reinforcement (Liepman gives the example of the change from the more hesitant modal ‘may’ to ‘will’ (II p. 131, 45.0.15:f in Peckham’s variorum edition)); objectivization (suppressing colloquial elements); clarification (making the language less obscure); updating Published in the North British Review 46 (1867): 277–318. ‘The conditions might indeed act in so energetic and definite a manner as to lead to the same modification in all the individuals of the species without the aid of selection’ (IV p. 179, 95.14:e). 5 In the context of textual scholarship, the term ‘accidentals’ was coined by W. W. Greg. In ‘The Rationale of Copy-Text’, Greg made a ‘distinction between the significant, or as I shall call them “substantive”, readings of the text, those namely that affect the author’s meaning or the essence of his expression, and others, such in general as spelling, punctuation, word-division, and the like, affecting mainly its formal presentation, which may be regarded as the accidents, or as I shall call them “accidentals”, of the text’ (Greg 1950: 21). 6 Barbara Bordalejo, ‘Introduction to the Online Variorum of Darwin’s Origin of Species’ (http:// darwin-online.org.uk/Variorum/Introduction.html). 3 4

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(referring to new advances in science); and semantic changes (Bordalejo in Darwin 2009). The epigenetic evolution of this work is presented in a graphically attractive and intuitive way by Ben Fry, who introduces his dynamic ‘apparatus’ as follows: ‘We often think of scientific ideas, such as Darwin’s theory of evolution, as fixed notions that are accepted as finished. In fact, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species evolved over the course of several editions he wrote, edited, and updated during his lifetime.’7 Nonetheless, Fry presents his dynamic visualization under the heading ‘The Preservation of Favoured Traces’. The pun and the innovative method of presentation of variants certainly add colour to the study of variants. From the perspective of French ‘critique génétique’, however, its emphasis on preservation of favoured traces inclines towards ‘philologie’ (with the connotations of the French term), which according to Daniel Ferrer insists on ‘repetition’, as opposed to genetic criticism’s emphasis on ‘invention’ (Ferrer 2002: 54; 2010: 21). This raises two questions: whether ‘invention’ applies at all with reference to a work of science, rather than a work of fiction; and whether philologie (textual criticism) is perhaps interested in ‘invention’ too. As to the first question, I agree with Gillian Beer, who clearly states that Darwin ‘did not invent laws. He described them. Indeed, it was essential to his project that it should be accepted not as invention, but description’ (Beer 2000: 46). With regard to the narrative organization and rhetorical presentation of his theory, however, the analysis of Darwin’s manuscripts does show that the textual genesis involved a considerable amount of ‘invention’ in Ferrer’s genetic sense of ‘l’invention écrite’ (2011: 184) and what Niles Eldredge referred to as scientific creativity (see Chapter 2; Eldredge 2005: 65). As for the second question, the dichotomy between ‘invention’ and ‘repetition’ may be a bit too black-and-white. Morse Peckham wrote in the Introduction to his variorum edition: ‘Without a variorum text it is impossible to speak with accuracy on what Darwin said in the Origin at any given time’ (Peckham in Darwin 1959: 9). This awareness of the temporal dimension (‘at any given time’) implies an interest, not only in accurate repetition, but also in the creative development of this work. It has led at least one textual scholar or ‘philologist’ to write: ‘What in the end we are interested in is not a simple single text that best represents Darwin’s most considered statements on his theory; but, rather, two other things: firstly, the state and causes of Darwin’s thinking at Ben Fry, On the Origin of Species: The Preservation of Favoured Traces, 2009; http://benfry.com/ traces.

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each given point in the succession of printed texts … and, secondly, the processes of textuality, the details of which will help us to watch the author think his way through to forms of text he is willing to release to the public and the processes by which the social complex of book production helped and hindered that flow of thought and text’ (Shillingsburg 2006: 228; emphasis added). Three times does Shillingsburg refer to a cognitive process, which can partially be reconstructed by means of the successive editions, serving as snapshots of this thought process ‘at the time’ (Shillingsburg’s emphasis): When one looks at the materials for Darwin’s On the Origin and sees the major revisions made in the text of the second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth editions within thirteen years of its original publication in 1859, one is not looking at the results of a simple or single track process towards an ever-improving text getting closer and closer to some ideal goal, towards an ideal text. Perhaps one can say that each authoritative manifestation of the text moves in some ways closer to what the author wanted at the time. (Shillingsburg 2006, 230)

The most extreme ‘variant’ in the sixth edition vis-à-vis the previous editions is the addition of a separate chapter, entirely devoted to objections to the theory. Darwin rearranged parts of the fourth chapter of previous editions to form this new Chapter 7, ‘Miscellaneous Objections to the Theory of Natural Selection ’. St George Jackson Mivart is one of the most important critics who prompted Darwin to reformulate his position even more clearly. In On the Genesis of Species (1871) and earlier articles,8 Mivart had not only suggested that Darwin’s theory was inadequate to account for the origin of all species and that in particular cases natural selection was not at work at all, he had also noticed that in the course of the successive editions, in several passages, Darwin had retracted some of his earlier assertions and had gradually qualified or ‘weakened’ the position of natural selection as the mechanism of evolution (Liepman 1981: 208). Darwin used his new seventh chapter to neutralize notably two of Mivart’s comments. Mivart suggested that new species can appear by saltations, to which Darwin replied: ‘This conclusion, which implies great breaks or discontinuity in the series, appears to me improbable in the highest degree.’9 And against Mivart’s objection that natural selection was inadequate to explain speciation and that some ‘internal force or tendency’ – which Liepman paraphrases as ‘the hand of God’ (209) – was the agent of evolution, Darwin objected that ‘there is no need, as seems to me, to invoke any internal force beyond the tendency to ordinary The Month 11 (1869): 35–53, 134–53, 274–89. IV p. 264, (VII) 382.65.0.50.330:f in Peckham’s variorum edition.

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variability, which through the aid of selection by man has given rise to many well-adapted domestic races, and which through the aid of natural selection would equally well give rise by graduated steps to natural races or species.’10 Nonetheless, although Darwin had clearly stated that no agent or ‘internal force’ needed to be invoked, he did add the words ‘by the Creator’ to the last sentence in the second edition. This has become a famous textual variant, wellknown beyond the field of scholarly editing. But it has seldom been studied in the light of the whole avant-texte of On the Origin of Species. Retracing its genesis also allows us to recapitulate by revisiting all the stages of exo-, endoand epigenesis.

4.2. ‘There is grandeur in this view’ Morse Peckham indicates the variant between the first and the second edition as follows: Ch. XIV 270 There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; (…) 270:b breathed by the Creator into a few

From the perspective of textual scholarship, Barbara Bordalejo’s electronic variorum edition has a great advantage over the print edition in that it presents the variants in their syntactical context. From the perspective of genetic criticism, this public history of the text can also be linked to the very private or even secret history of the Transmutation Notes and the pencil sketch. The Field Notebooks suggest that this sentence does not only have a history, but also a prehistory that may reach further back in time than previously assumed. In 1909 Francis Darwin pointed out that ‘the ancestry of this eloquent passage’ may be traced to a passage in notebook B, which he chose as a motto for his transcription of the 1842 pencil sketch and the 1844 essay: Astronomers might formerly have said that God ordered each planet to move in its particular destiny. In same manner God orders each animal created with certain form in certain country. But how much more simple and sublime power, – let attraction act according to certain law, such are inevitable consequences,

IV p. 264, (VII) 382.65.0.50.325:f in Peckham’s variorum edition.

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– let animals be created, then by the fixed laws of generation, such will be their successors. (Darwin 1909: xxviii)

The passage is excerpted from page 101 in notebook B (CUL DAR 121). It does contain some of the elements of the last sentence of On the Origin of Species, but it lacks the ‘grandeur of this view’. To employ Francis Darwin’s genealogical metaphor, the ‘ancestry’ of the final sentence can be traced further back, to the pre-Victorian year 1835. In March of that year, some six months before the famous visit to the Galápagos archipelago, Darwin was on an expedition from Santiago de Chile to Mendoza, crossing the Andes. Most of Darwin’s adventures are chronicled in his ‘Beagle diary’ (transcribed by Richard Keynes; see Chapter 2.2), which was the basis of Darwin’s Journal of Researches, first published in 1839 and better known under the title Voyage of the Beagle. For the publication of the Voyage of the Beagle Darwin had to cut several passages from his Beagle Diary. In the published text of the Voyage of the Beagle, these instances are marked by three asterisks (***). Sometimes quite remarkable passages disappeared in these ellipses. One of these three-star omissions is the story of what Darwin experienced in the Andes on 21 March 1835, as reported in his Beagle Diary: When we reached the crest & looked backwards, a glorious view was presented ... the bright coloured rocks, contrasted with the quiet mountains of Snow, together produced a scene I never could have imagined. Neither plant nor bird, excepting a few condors wheeling around the higher pinnacles, distracted the attention from the inanimate mass. – I felt glad I was by myself, it was like watching a thunderstorm, or hearing in the full Orchestra a Chorus of the Messiah. (Darwin 1988: 309)

However, the reference to Händel was merely an inept comparison, applied with hindsight, to describe the overwhelming ‘hallelujah’ moment – comparable to the delayed ‘hurrah’ in notebook D, two months after Darwin’s reading of Malthus. The most direct evidence of this experience can be found in the ‘Santa Fe’ Field Notebook11: ‘(view from the 1st ridge) something inexpressibly grand: would not speak’ (129a). And two pages further on, he stressed again how deep an impression the ‘grandeur’ of this ‘view’ had made on him: ‘Never shall forget the grandeur of the view from first pass’ (131a). The connection between this double note and the last sentence of On the Origin of Species is not a philological link in the sense of an early textual version, but it does constitute ‘Santa Fe’ Field Notebook, EH1.13 (English Heritage 88202333, Down House, Downe, Kent, UK).

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a compositional relationship between the phases A and C in Wordsworth’s description of ‘successful composition’: a powerful emotion (phase A), caused by the grandeur of the vista, and a kindred emotion (phase C), expressed in the closing lines of a composition that certainly deserves to be called successful. The important difference between the first and the second ‘view’ is the concreteness of the vista. This was to develop into a much more abstract view of life, but the grandeur remained the same and the evolution of Darwin’s mental process from this moment in 1835 to the elaboration of his view is intimately connected to the broadness of his outlook, to which not only the voyage of the Beagle, but also his reading (from Lyell to Lessing, from Burke to Wordsworth) contributed. Not unlike the herbalist and the geologist in The Excursion, Darwin could be fully absorbed by a tiny detail, like a splinter of rock, but he also had the ‘excursive’ power to zoom out, see the bigger picture and contextualize the detail in a panoramic whole. The view from the pass in the Andes was so impressive that he could hardly grasp it and was unable to utter a single word (‘something inexpressibly grand: would not speak’). It forced Darwin to acknowledge his limits and by extension the insignificance of humanity in the light of eternity, but it did not prevent him from forming an idea of this infinity. On the contrary, his very inadequacy was an incentive to start thinking in more abstract terms about this inadequacy and to develop a view of the place of the human species within evolution as a whole. The development from a concrete view in the Andes to the abstract ‘view of life’ in the pencil sketch is prepared in the Transmutation Notebooks. On 16 August 1838 he wrote: What a magnificent view one can take of the world … peopled with myriads of distinct forms from a period short of eternity to the present time, to the future. – How far grander than idea from cramped imagination that God created (warring against those very laws he established in all organic nature) the Rhinoceros of Java & Sumatra, that since the time of the Silurian he has made a long succession of vile molluscous animals. How beneath the dignity of him, who is supposed to have said let there be light & there was light.12

Darwin immediately made a correction, reprimanding himself that the phrasing of the latter part was ‘bad taste’. Originally he had written more neutrally: ‘who said …’ instead of ‘who is supposed to have said …’ He was well aware of the rhetoric by which he had been carried away and corrected himself, adding this Notebook D, 36–37; emphasis added.

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alternative phrasing: ‘– [of] whom it has been declared “he said let there be light & there was light”’ (D.37). But the rest of the entry remained unchanged and was to become the core of the final sentence of On the Origin of Species. Again, the connection between this note and the phrasing of the last sentence is not (yet) a link in the philological sense of an early version and its published form. In terms of a traditional apparatus, there is almost nothing that corresponds between this note and the first edition. But the crucial notions are all present: the grandeur, the view of the world, the distinct forms and the idea that the mechanism of evolution was a law of nature. In the published version, especially in the second edition, Darwin presented life as a creation by God to make his view more acceptable, but he silently implied that the book of Genesis was only the petty result of a ‘cramped imagination’ in comparison with the ‘grandeur’ of his view of life. Darwin stood in awe of the sublime complexity of evolution, even though at that moment he had not quite discovered its mechanism yet. That discovery took place a few months later and was followed by the period of recollection in tranquillity (phase B), after which the tranquillity gradually disappeared and ‘an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, [wa]s gradually produced’ in the 1842 pencil sketch and the 1844 essay. From the start, the core of the concluding last sentence of the 1842 pencil sketch was so strong that it remained almost unchanged and made it into the published versions of On the Origin of Species. Morse Peckham only gave the variants between the different editions, but if one compares this sentence to the 1842 pencil sketch and the 1844 essay, it is striking that the basic structure of this important sentence was already in place more than 15 years before the first edition came out (see section 3.2.2.): 1842 pencil sketch: There is a simple grandeur in the view of life with its | powers of growth, assimilation and reproduction, being originally breathed into matter under one or a few forms, & that whilst this our planet has gone circling on according to | fixed laws |, & land and water, in a cycle of change, have gone on replacing each other, that from this so simple an origin, through the process of gradual selection of infinitesimal changes, endless forms most beautiful & most wonderful have been | evolved.

This structure remained largely intact in the 1844 essay: 1844 essay (draft) There is a simple grandeur in this view of life, with its powers of assimilation

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& of reproduction, having been originally breathed into matter under a few forms; & that, whilst this planet has gone cycling onwards according to the fixed laws of gravity & land & water have entered in endless changes xxx xxx have gone on replacing each other,– that from so simple an origin, through the process of gradual selection of infinitesimal changes & varieties varieties in the first created & xxx being beings endowed with life endless endless forms most beautiful & most wonderful have been evolved. (CUL DAR 7, 189r) 1844 essay (fair copy): There is a simple grandeur in this view of life with its [several] powers of assimilation growth, reproduction and of sensation, having been originally breathed into matter under a few forms, perhaps into only one, & that whilst this planet has gone cycling onwards according to the fixed laws of gravity which the xxx sustains, & whilst land and water have gone on replacing each other,– that from so simple an origin, through the selection of infinitesimal varieties, endless forms most beautiful & most wonderful have been & are being evolved. (CUL DAR 113, 231r)

From the earliest versions of this last line onwards, the text read ‘have been evolved’ rather than ‘have evolved’. The passive construction was inelegant but functional in that it enabled Darwin to imply a form of agency without having to make the agent explicit. He eventually did introduce an agent (‘by the Creator’), but only after the first publication, during the work’s epigenesis. The variorum edition offers everything one can expect from the point of view of textual scholarship. Traditional textual scholarship would certainly not consider the Field Notebook entry ‘I’ll never forget the grandeur of this view’ as textually related to the last sentence of On the Origin of Species, because it is evidently not a ‘version’ of this sentence. And yet there may be a connection, which genetic criticism can bring to light. This does not fit easily into traditional models of scholarly editing, but the genetic approach is a legitimate ‘orientation to text’. For research into the dynamics of the writing process it seems important to also draw attention to the early notes and drafts (such as the pencil sketch). In terms of a traditional apparatus, even the sentence as it appears in the pencil sketch may be still too far removed from the published texts to be considered a ‘version’ of the last sentence of On the Origin of Species, although quite a few of its core notions are already present. In contrast, genetic criticism is not in the first place interested in the repetition of such invariants (as highlighted in bold face in the quotations above), but mainly in the inventive rewritings in the successive versions. Combining genetic criticism with textual criticism (philologie, textual scholarship) implies that we see the ‘variants’ between the different editons published during Darwin’s lifetime as

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‘rewritings’ (‘réécritures’) or ‘stages of revision’ (‘états de rédaction’; de Biasi 2000: 20), that is, as part of the genesis – the ‘epigenesis’ – of On the Origin of Species. When Barbara Bordalejo wrote that ‘The Online Variorum should help … to better understand the textual history of the Origin’ (see above, section 4.1), what is meant by ‘textual history’ is the history of the editions published in Darwin’s lifetime. This period has traditionally been the main focus, not just of textual scholarship concerned with modern texts, but also of the public at large. As indicated above (chapter 2.1), the eminent Victorian with the respectable white beard is the Darwin we are most familiar with. But when On the Origin of Species was first published, Darwin did not yet have a beard, and when he discovered the mechanism of evolution, he could not yet be called a Victorian, or hardly, for Queen Victoria had only just ascended the throne. The point is that the scientist as a young man, when he visited the Galápagos Islands in 1835 and took notes on transmutation between 1837 and 1839, was still under the sway of Romanticism. The notes and manuscripts show this other Darwin, historicizing the thought process of the Origin of Species. But this does not necessarily imply a retrospective viewpoint. The combination of genetic and textual criticism allows us to examine the development of the theory of evolution from the Romantic period to its epigenetic development in the Victorian age, already announcing aspects of the crisis of modernity that was to characterize modernism. In this way, the avant-texte of On the Origin of Species (including its epigenesis) is a particularly interesting case study to ‘historicize Modernism’.

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5

Epilogue: Narrativizations of the Genesis and Dysteleology

In retrospect, Darwin narrativized the complex genesis of On the Origin of Species in his autobiography by presenting it as a story with a dramatic structure in which his reading of Malthus was the climax: In October 1838, that is, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic enquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work. (Darwin 1958: 120)

With hindsight, it is always tempting to reduce the genesis of an idea to a single origin. As the analysis of the textual genesis has shown, the origins of Darwin’s theory are multiple. Darwin’s reading list includes not only numerous scientific works, but several works of literature as well. The latter also had an impact on the writing process. If, as indicated above, the story of the genesis sometimes seems to jumble up important breakthrough moments with ‘unimportant’ hesitations about ‘irrelevant’ topics, the reason is precisely that a work’s genesis in se is not a story, but a process with its own dynamics, which do not always accord with well-considered narrative strategies. In this respect the reconstruction of a work’s genesis reflects a similar form of retrospective patterning that potentially marks any form of history. Sometimes the more mature author’s own retrospective patterning hinders later readers’ attempts to understand his or her younger self at the time s/he did not yet know precisely in which direction the work would proceed. When the old Goethe prepared his collected works he erased some of the ‘Sturm und Drang’ characteristics of his younger self by revising for instance Die Leiden des jungen Werther. In Darwin’s case,

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not just the image of the white-bearded Darwin, but also his own retrospective self-image has had an impact on our perception of his works. Retrospective patterning is a common phenomenon; at the end of one’s life, every human being has the tendency to turn his or her life or career into a linear story with climaxes and catastrophes. In retrospect, Darwin privileged his reading of Malthus and his realization of the importance of the Galápagos species. This retrospective way of presenting the genesis as ‘the origin of all [his] views’ tends to reduce the writing process to a ‘common ancestor’, as in the image of the tree of life, all the twigs of which have their origin in the same stem. But this stem did not have a single root. As the Field Notebooks, the reading lists and the Transmutation Notebooks indicate, numerous source texts have contributed to Darwin’s theory. My suggestion is that, although Darwin retrospectively called many of his notes ‘useless’, they did have a function in the development of his theory, even if merely per negativum in the sense that even a ‘dead end’ in the process of composition can be an impulse to find an alternative route. In this context, Darwin’s retrospective patterning in his autobiography contrasts sharply with the way he visualized evolution. His famous drawing of the ‘tree of life’ in notebook B (page 36) not only indicates the ‘gap’ between certain species (‘Thus between A. & B. immense gap of relation’), but also suggests that this ‘requires extinction’: Thus genera would be formed. – bearing relation to ancient types. – with several extinct forms (notebook B, 36–7; Barrett et al. 1987: 180)

Facsimile Available Online darwin-online.org.uk → Manuscripts → DAR121 → Image → page 36

In a similar way, one can argue that the development of his own theory ‘required’ the ‘extinction’ of certain ‘dead end’ ideas, but the mere notion of ‘requirement’ already implies that they were therefore not ‘useless’.

5.1. Gaps and ‘Leerstellen’ Darwin had to account, not only for the ‘gaps’ between species (on a synchronic level), but also for the ‘gaps’ in time (on a diachronic axis). A dozen pages after

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the diagram in On the Origin of Species (between pages 116 and 117), Darwin compared the diagram to a tree: The affinities of all the beings of the same class have sometimes been represented by a great tree. I believe this simile largely speaks the truth. The green and budding twigs may represent existing species; and those produced during each former year may represent the long succession of extinct species. At each period of growth all the growing twigs have tried to branch out on all sides, and to overtop and kill the surrounding twigs and branches, in the same manner as species and groups of species have tried to overmaster other species in the great battle for life. (Darwin 1859: 129)

And after the chapter ‘On the Imperfection of the Geological Record’, he made a comparison with ‘a genealogical tree’, suggesting that both the diagram and the genealogical tree may not be perfect to visualize the full complexity of evolution, but that, at the same time, it would be almost impossible to show this complexity without the aid of such an image or metaphor.1 From the author’s perspective, the usefulness of this aid already became evident in the discussion of transmutation in notebook B. After having used the image of ‘branches’ on page 19 (‘every successive animal is branching upwards’), he formulated the key metaphor two pages further on (in contrast with the Lamarckian viewpoint – ‘Changes not result of will of animal’): Organized beings represent a tree irregularly branched some branches far more branched – Hence Genera. – As many terminal buds dying as new ones generated (B.21; Barrett et al. 1987: 176)

Shortly thereafter, on page 25, he temporarily considered replacing the tree metaphor by the image of a coral: ‘The tree of life should perhaps be called the coral of life, base of branches dead; so that passages cannot be seen’ (B.25). Horst Bredekamp has pointed out the hesitation between the diagram and the

‘On the principle of the multiplication and gradual divergence in character of the species descended from a common parent, together with their retention by inheritance of some characters in common, we can understand the excessively complex and radiating affinities by which all the members of the same family or higher group are connected together. For the common parent of a whole family of species, now broken up by extinction into distinct groups and sub-groups, will have transmitted some of its characters, modified in various ways and degrees, to all; and the several species will consequently be related to each other by circuitous lines of affinity of various lengths (as may be seen in the diagram so often referred to), mounting up through many predecessors. As it is difficult to show the blood-relationship between the numerous kindred of any ancient and noble family, even by the aid of a genealogical tree, and almost impossible to do this without this aid, we can understand the extraordinary difficulty which naturalists have experienced in describing, without the aid of a diagram, the various affinities which they perceive between the many living and extinct members of the same great natural class’ (Darwin 1859: 430–31).

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tree metaphor in On the Origin of Species, which he connects to what he calls a similar ‘inner conflict’ (‘inneren Konflikt’) in notebook B, that is, the hesitation between a ‘tree of life’ and a ‘coral of life’ (Bredekamp 2004: 869).2 Bredekamp refers to this ‘inner conflict’ in terms of ‘Leerstellen’ (literally, ‘empty spaces’). Within the context of literary criticism, the notion of Leerstelle was coined by Wolfgang Iser (building on Roman Ingarden’s concept of ‘Unbestimmtheit’ or indeterminacy; Voigts-Virchow 2009: 100) as part of reception aesthetics, focusing on the reader’s viewpoint. From readers’ perspectives, the usefulness of a metaphor may be different and Darwin took this into account as well. Shortly after having considered replacing the tree metaphor by a ‘coral of life’ and having made a drawing of a coral in notebook B (page 26), he retracted his own idea by means of this addition in the top margin: ‘no only makes it excessively complicated’ (B.26; Barrett et al. 1987: 177). It cannot be excluded that one of Darwin’s motivations for retracting his coral metaphor was the pragmatic reader-oriented consideration that many British readers in 1837 may not have been as familiar with the shape of a coral as he was, and would more easily relate to that of a tree. So, ten pages further on, he drew his famous image of the ‘tree of life’, preceded by the words ‘I think’. In both cases (from the author’s and from the readers’ perspectives), the considerations regarding the metaphors and drawings of the coral and the tree are interesting in cognitive terms. In at least two BBC documentaries on Darwin (one by David Attenborough and one by Andrew Marr), the drawing of this image is discussed, and in both cases the commentators suggest that Darwin first drew the tree, and then added a hesitant ‘I think’. But it is worthwhile taking another scenario into account: he may have started writing ‘I think’ first and then felt that it was easier to express what he was thinking by means of a drawing rather than with words. Both scenarios seem equally plausible, so this is an instance that indicates a border between empirical data and interpretation or speculation. With regard to this border, Louis Hay has clearly indicated that the approach of genetic criticism should be distinguished from what he calls ‘reading in someone’s soul’ or ‘reliving the writer’s inner experience’: ‘après avoir renoncé à “lire dans les âmes”, à revivre l’expérience intérieure de l’écrivain, la génétique a pu se donner une position critique autonome: elle vise les processus d’écriture dans la réalité de leur exécution, dans l’attestation d’une trace scripturaire’ (Hay 1994: Bredekamp also refers to a ‘seeweed’ model, referring to Howard Gruber, who mentions – without giving bibliographic references – the following note: ‘Tree no good simile’, ‘endless piece of seeweed dividing’ (Gruber qtd in Bredekamp 2004: 873).

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19; emphasis added). So, the question as to what Darwin was thinking when he wrote ‘I think’ would thus be beyond the genetic critic’s field of research. The question, however, is to what extent this cognitive interest concerns a strictly ‘inner’ experience. After all, the words ‘I think’ indicate that at least part of the experience was its ‘externalization’ by committing these words to paper and juxtaposing them to a drawing. This juxtaposition of words and image creates a gap, or in Iser’s terms: a Leerstelle (Iser 1971: 15). The attempt to make sense of this gap (and this juxtaposition) is not a form of ‘reading in someone’s soul’ – it is a form of reading what is on the page. Perhaps Iser’s notion of ‘Leerstelle’ can therefore be useful for genetic criticism (which deals with the production of texts), even though it was originally conceived within the context of reader-response theory (dealing with the reception of texts). Iser’s starting point is that the main characteristic of (especially literary) texts is their ‘peculiar halfway position between the external world of objects and the reader’s own world of experience’ (Iser 1989: 8). He then describes a set of ‘formal conditions that give rise to indeterminacy in the text itself ’ (8). According to Roman Ingarden, such places of indeterminacy or ‘Unbestimmtheitsstellen’ are to be removed during the ‘act of composition’ (Iser 1989: 285n8). But instead of seeing the task of the writer in terms of diminishing the occurrence of places of indeterminacy, Iser suggests that these gaps ‘are vital for eliciting the reader’s response and are consequently an important factor for the effect exercised by a work of art’ (285n8). In the context of Darwin’s non-literary, scientific notebook B, the Leerstelle between the note (‘I think’) and the drawing on page 36 is an involuntary gap of indeterminacy. The note was not meant to be shown to anyone; it was for Charles Darwin’s eyes only. And yet, the effect of the Leerstelle on the genetic critic is the same as the one described by Iser: even if the gap is involuntary, it is a form of indeterminacy, and ‘indeterminacy is the fundamental precondition for reader participation’ (10). Since the indeterminacy is much higher in the notes and the drafts (such as the 1842 pencil sketch) than in the published versions of On the Origin of Species, they make for more fascinating reading. This may account for the remarkable phenomenon that sketches of paintings (even Old Masters’ sketches) often make a more ‘modern’ impression on viewers than the finished painting, for sketches usually have more gaps of indeterminacy that elicit readers’ and viewers’ responses than the ‘finished product’. Still, the note and drawing on page 36 of notebook B are not just interesting because they are a ‘good read’ for genetic critics. They mark a pivot between (a) Darwin’s own ‘reading’ of his collected data and observations on the one hand,

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and (b) the reading experience he was creating for his future readers (of the Origin) on the other hand. (a) Darwin’s own reading of the data was marked by gaps in the fossil record. The most difficult issue he had to deal with was another form of Leerstellen: the ‘imperfections’ in the geological record, for which he used the word ‘gaps’ in the 1842 pencil sketch: ‘Geology loses in its glory from the imperfection of its archives, but how immensely does it gain in the immensity of its the periods of its formations & of the gaps separating their formations’ (CUL DAR 6, 49r). In order to enervate criticism of the type ‘It may be objected, such perfect organs as eye & ear could never be formed’ (CUL DAR 6, 26r), it was necessary to suggest the possibility that a ‘perfect gradation’ (26r) from a primitive light-sensitive spot to such a complex organ as the eye might have existed. And in order to make this hypothesis plausible, it was necessary to find as many ‘transitional forms’ (CUL DAR 6, 38r) as possible. But as long as science had not yet been able to find enough intermediary steps, he realized many people would remain sceptical: ‘Why do we feel induced to reject – simply because we do not perceive steps’ (47v). Because not all of the intermediary steps or ‘passages’ could be perceived, Darwin drew the ‘coral of life’ with a dotted line at the base, with the comment: ‘base of branches dead; so that passages cannot be seen’ (notebook B.26). (b) As to the reading experience Darwin was creating for his future readers, the same gaps in the ‘perfect gradation’ were equally relevant. Against the scepticism that preferred to reject the hypothesis because of the geological Leerstellen, Darwin advanced his ‘acknowledged ignorance’ (47v), fully aware that he was thus applying the Bridgewater method (see Chapter 3 – ‘the known so small to the unknown’). But the twist he gave to this method is crucial, and indicates why Darwin is duly regarded as one of the intellectual precursors of modernism. Instead of referring to man’s ignorance to advocate the existence of a God, instead of filling the gaps by invoking an ‘internal force’ (in Mivart’s terms), Darwin had the courage to leave the gaps open, and, what is more, he explicitly invited his readers to have the same patience and openness to the indeterminacy of the gaps until further evidence was found. He consistently applied this rhetorical and narrative strategy in all the successive versions of the text. In this respect, the many references to the ‘imperfections of the geological record’ (to which he devoted an entire chapter) are Leerstellen which he consciously introduced in his theory, and even though On the Origin of Species is not a literary text, these gaps of indeterminacy have a similar effect on readers. Paraphrasing Iser, one could say that ‘In this way, [this scientific] text invites some form of participation on the part of the reader’ (cf. Iser 1989: 10). This

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implies an appeal to readers’ willingness to engage with gaps, a cognitive appeal that would be enhanced considerably in modernist literature. In conclusion, in Darwin’s case, the act of reading the data implied a refusal to invoke any ‘internal force’ as a stopgap to fill the Leerstellen. The act of writing was geared towards a similar stopgapless act of reading that was open to the possibility of ‘transitional forms’ as well as to ‘dead ends’ in the transmutation of species.

5.2. Dead ends and teleology Against this background, it is remarkable that Darwin’s autobiography is so much less open to the ‘dead ends’ in his career. On the other hand, this kind of retrospective narrativization is only human, perhaps all too human. As Frank Kermode notes in The Sense of an Ending, ‘we use fictions to enable the end to confer organization and form on the temporal structure’ (45). Being aware of this phenomenon is evidently important for anyone who tries to reconstruct the genesis of a creative process. Kermode uses the example of the ticking of a clock, by means of which human beings tend to ‘make it talk our language’ (44). By agreeing that the clock ‘says’ tick-tock, we create a fiction to ‘humanize it’ (44): ‘Of course, it is we who provide the fictional difference between the two sounds; tick is our word for a physical beginning, tock our word for an end … We can perceive a duration only when it is organized’ (44–5). According to this mechanism, ‘our past’ is ‘organized by our desire for satisfaction’ (50). The story of the Book of Genesis is perhaps a good example. As genetic critic Almuth Grésillon points out, the biblical account of Genesis is an example of teleology par excellence. It presents the formation of the world and its many species as a straight story leading directly to the satisfaction of God, who saw that it was good. That is why, according to Grésillon, the adjective ‘genetic’ in ‘genetic criticism’ is not to be understood in the biblical sense. For this teleological perspective, Grésillon argues, affects or even ‘perverts’ the interpretation by making it blind to all the dead ends in the writing process.3 Still, the notion of teleology cannot be completely ignored either, according to Daniel Ferrer, because teleology is not so much a critical construct but an inherent part of ‘genetic mechanisms’.4 Writing usually implies a project, however vague. And Grésillon argues that the teleological perspective ‘pervertit l’interprétation, la rend aveugle à l’accident, à la perte, à l’état de suspension, à l’alternative ouverte, bref à toutes ces formes d’écriture qui s’écartent de la ligne droite’ (Grésillon 1994 : 138). 4 ‘c’est en vain que la critique génétique s’exhorte régulièrement à renoncer à une vision téléologique. 3

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even if its objective keeps shifting, a ‘project’ etymologically implies a form of ‘throwing forward’. Ferrer also suggests that the genesis of a work implies the constant rewriting of its own history. In some cases, this rewriting becomes explicit when the author writes the story of the genesis of his own work, as in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Philosophy of Composition’, Willem Elsschot’s Achter de Schermen, or Thomas Mann’s Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus. When Poe reconstructs the genesis of his poem ‘The Raven’ and reluctantly admits that he briefly considered choosing a parrot rather than a raven to utter the pivotal word ‘Nevermore’, this in itself already implies a moment of rewriting with important consequences. Just imagine the difference in tone if this poem had had the title The Parrot instead of The Raven. Poe claims he rejected the idea almost as soon as it presented itself to him: ‘very naturally, a parrot, in the first instance, suggested itself, but was superseded forthwith by a Raven as equally capable of speech, and infinitely more in keeping with the intended tone’.5 However, even (or precisely) as a ‘dead end’, the parrot episode is an interesting moment in the genesis. And while the replacement of the parrot by a raven is a first rewriting, Poe’s minimizing account of the composition process is a rewriting of this rewriting, for Poe takes care not to spend too much time on this episode, claiming it was superseded ‘forthwith’. In Die Entstehung eines Gedichts, Hans Magnus Enzensberger discerns two methods to study a work’s genesis: (a) from within (an analysis by the author her/himself) and (b) from without (an examination by someone else).6 (a) In the case of the approach ‘from within’, when the author investigates the genesis retrospectively, it is almost impossible to avoid any teleology. This procedure is probably the rule rather than the exception, as Enzensberger suggests: it is possible that the author created the genetic process only a ­posteriori and, without realizing it, only then invented the genesis of the poem in question.7 In this connection and in the context of ‘the sense of an ending’, it is worth noting Frank Kermode’s reference to Vaihinger’s straightforward analysis: ‘the mind is invention’ (40). A writer’s account of his or her work’s genesis is a way of ‘organizing the moment in terms of the end, giving meaning La téléologie n’est pas un artefact critique – elle est inhérente aux mécanismes génétiques’ (Ferrer 1994 : 100). 5 Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Philosophy of Composition’; http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/poe/ composition.html. 6 ‘von aussen, an Hand eines fremden; von innen, an Hand eines eigenen Textes’ (Enzensberger 1962: 62). 7 ‘Möglich wäre es, dass er [the author] den Entstehungsvorgang erst a posteriori erschaffte und womöglich, ohne es zu wissen, zu dem vorliegenden Gedicht dessen Genese erst erfände’ (Enzensberger 1962: 63).

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to the interval between tick and tock because we humanly do not want it to be an indeterminate interval’ (Kermode 1968: 57–8). (b) But an awareness of this sense-of-an-ending mechanism may also be relevant to the approach ‘from without’ (according to Enzensberger’s categories). This approach often involves the analysis of recalcitrant narrative structures of sometimes unfinished versions of a text. The more accessible manuscripts become (for instance online), the more the question presents itself as to how this material is to be read. Take, for example, the various readings of the James Joyce Archive, the facsimile edition of Joyce’s manuscripts. With regard to the writing process of Finnegans Wake (1939), David Hayman tried to narrativize Joyce’s paratactic notes. In one of the Finnegans Wake notebooks,8 Hayman deciphers a cluster of notes, which he interprets as a thematic unit: ‘Is9 has a dream – it is interpreted by Jung / Uncle John presented to me [a version of] Jackdaw of Reims / Mop spat in WC / letterman (Holohan’s cake) / emergency man / She drank an orange / SD wrote themes for Leo Wilkins, Willy Fallon’ (VI.B.3, 63–4). As part of the narrativization, Hayman regards, for instance, the reference to Stephen Dedalus (‘SD’) as a prefiguration of the counterfeiter motif that was to take shape in Chapter 7 of Finnegans Wake (Hayman 1990: 123). In the middle of the 1990s, this example was referred to in the debate concerning the various ways to read these kinds of notes. A group of genetic critics, working within a mainly post-structuralist paradigm, had a different approach from another group of genetic critics, who tended to start by looking for the exogenetic source texts from which these notes derived, before narrativizing the notes. As an advocate of the second approach, Geert Lernout objected to the way ‘the notebooks are read as a literary text’ (Lernout 1995: 33) and the way notably David Hayman was looking for what he called ‘epiphanoids’, ‘nodes’ or clusters of meaning. The danger of such a reading, Lernout argued, is that we read the genesis counterclockwise. As a result, he wrote, ‘we will create context and coherence where there is none’ (34). From a narratological perspective, this debate was mainly about schemes, scripts and other ways of understanding a new experience (the confrontation with Joyce’s paratactic notes) by comparing it to a familiar model (in this case the published text of Finnegans Wake). Since the second task of critique génétique (after the first task, ‘donner à voir’) consists in studying the dynamics of the writing process on the basis of the textual fossils that have been preserved, Notebook VI.B.3, preserved at the Poetry/Rare Books Collection at the University of Buffalo. In Joyce’s notes, ‘Is’ stands for ‘Issy’, the daughter of HCE (‘Here Comes Everybody’) and ALP (‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’), sister of the twin brothers Shem and Shaun.

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this reconstruction inevitably entails a form of narrativization. In this regard, what Hayden White called ‘emplotment’ with reference to historiography is to a certain extent applicable to genetic criticism as well. Each reconstruction of a genesis, each avant-texte, tends to create coherence in the historical raw materials. This coherence is often based on a critical hypothesis. The narrative of the genetic reconstruction is not necessarily inherent to the genesis, but may to a large extent be a quality the researcher attributes to it.

5.3. Dysteleology and Umwelt research The tendency to retrospectively ‘construct’ a genesis with clearly identifiable ‘Eureka’ moments and a straightforward teleology is only human, as we discussed above. This tendency may also partially explain why the resistance against Darwin’s theory of evolution was so tenacious. As opposed to the retrospective, teleological narrative that presented the human species as the pinnacle of creation, Darwin’s theory was dysteleological in this respect. His theory was also a narrative, but it presented evolution as a process that does not go anywhere in particular. If it can be said to go at all, it simply goes ‘on’. As Gillian Beer notes in her Introduction to Darwin’s Plots: ‘It is a theory which does not privilege the present, which sees it as a moving instant in an endless process of change. Yet it has persistently been recast to make it seem that all the past has been yearning towards the present moment and is satisfied now’ (Beer 2000: 10). With the advantage of hindsight, one can create a teleological story because one knows the outcome. A dysteleological story is unsettling because it implies an unknown outcome. Gillian Beer argues that ‘Evolutionary ideas proved crucial to the novel … not only at the level of theme but at the level of organisation’: ‘At first evolutionism tended to offer a new authority to orderings of narrative which emphasized cause and effect, then, descent and kin. Later again, its eschewing of fore-ordained design (its dysteleology) allowed chance to figure as the only sure determinant’ (Beer 2000: 6). By not presenting the present as an evolutionary goal and by not privileging the human species in the bigger picture of evolution, the dysteleological aspect of Darwin’s narrative may have contributed to more perspectivism in literature, to new forms of literary empathy and to innovative ways of evoking fictional minds, including other species’ minds. Methods of working with multiple perspectives or focalizers became a characteristic of many modernist novels,

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and biology seems to have played a role in this aspect of the transition to modernism in more than one way. David Herman suggests considering ‘storyworlds’ as a staging ground for ‘procedures of Umwelt construction’ and modernist writers as ‘Umwelt researchers in [Jakob] von Uexküll’s sense – explorers of the lived, phenomenal worlds that emerge from, or are enacted through, the interplay between intelligent agents and their cultural as well as material circumstances’ (Herman 2011c: 266). This raises the questions, ‘What is an Umwelt and who is von Uexküll?’ The Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944) was not yet born when Darwin’s On the Origin of Species first appeared. But his generation was clearly influenced by the theory of evolution and von Uexküll also said so explicitly in the Introduction to one of his first publications, Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere, which was published in 1909, exactly 50 years after the first edition of On the Origin of Species.10 In this biological context, the term Umwelt stands for an organism’s model of the world, consisting of those aspects of the world that are meaningful for that particular organism (such as food, shelter, water, reference points for navigation). As early as 1909, von Uexküll suggested that, to human observers, it may seem as if all sea organisms live in a world that is similar and common to all of them, but closer inspection shows that each of these various life forms has its own Umwelt, which is determined in interaction with the organism’s ‘building plan’.11 Since each organism has a unique history and a unique ‘building plan’, each organism has a different Umwelt. Under the subheading ‘Die Umwelt’, von Uexküll gives the example of a sea urchin to illustrate the difference between the organism’s environment (‘Umgebung’) and its Umwelt.12 From our human perspective, the sea urchin’s environment consists of elements such as water, the bottom of the sea, rocks, light, shadow, lobsters and worms. But these objects do not exist for the sea ‘In der Biologie stehen wir noch unter dem frischen Eindruck, den der Sturz des Darwinismus in uns allen hervorgerufen hat’ (von Uexküll 1909: 2). 11 ‘Nur dem oberflächlichen Blick mag es erscheinen, als lebten alle Seetiere in einer allen gemeinsamen gleichartigen Welt. Das nähere Studium lehrt uns, daβ jede dieser tausendfach verschiedenen Lebensformen eine ihm eigentümliche Umwelt besitzt, die sich mit dem Bauplan des Tieres wechselseitig bedingt’ (von Uexküll 1909: 5). 12 ‘Die Umgebung der Seeigel, wie sie sich unserem Auge darstellt, ist leicht aufgezählt: Wasser, Felsboden, kleine Steine, Algen, Licht, für einzelne Arten auch Schatten, ferner Beutetiere, wie Krebse und Würmer, und endlich als Feinde Seesterne und Nacktschnecken. Diese Gegenstände existieren für das Nervensystem der Seeigel samt und sonders nicht. Für die Seeigel gibt es nur schwache und starke Reize, die schwache und starke Erregungen auslösen, hin und wieder eine Kombination von schwachen und starken Reizen, die aber nicht weiter unterschieden wird ... Selbst wenn wir uns das Vergnügen machen wollen, und ganz bewuβt unsere Seele dem Zentralnervensystem der Seeigel zugrunde legen ... so können wir doch von einem solchen Nervensystem nie etwas anderes erfahren als einzelne Empfindungen’ (von Uexküll 1909: 117–18). 10

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urchin’s nerve system, which only registers weak and strong impulses, with which it shapes its Umwelt. An organism constantly creates and reshapes its own Umwelt when it interacts with the world, which explains why this notion is interesting for cognitive scientists working with an enactive model of the mind. An enactive approach to the ‘extended mind’ focuses on ‘how the manipulation of environmental vehicles constitutes cognitive processes’ (Menary 2010a: 21). A link between von Uexküll’s work and ‘postcognitivist’ approaches to the modernist preoccupation with consciousness is provided by the concept of ‘enaction’ in the sense that every organism enacts the world in which it exists (Stewart 2011: 3). Jakob von Uexküll applied the term Umwelt to such organisms as the tick (1934: 3) in an essay called Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen (1934), which was translated as A Stroll through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds. The tick is von Uexküll’s first example. A tick has neither eyes nor ears, but its skin is sensitive to light. It uses this light sensitivity and its sense of smell and touch to create its own Umwelt, sensing the approach of a potential prey through the odor of butyric acid, which emanates from warm-blooded mammals. If it manages to let itself fall onto the animal, it can embed itself up to its head into the animal’s skin to suck the blood it needs to survive. Von Uexküll also tried to visualize what the Umwelt must look like for different organisms. He took one specific village scene, starting from a black-and-white photograph. He then presented the same scene, as seen through a screen; then the same scene, as seen by a fly (based on our information of the fly’s senses); then the same scene, as seen by a mollusc. As another example, he took a more domestic scene: a room as seen in terms of the ‘functional tones’ connected with its objects. In the human Umwelt, the functional tones of the objects in a room can be represented by a ‘sitting tone’ for a chair, a ‘meal tone’ for the table, and an ‘eating and drinking tone’ for plates and glasses. These meaningful aspects for the organism ‘man’ constitute its Umwelt. The floor has a ‘walking tone’ while the bookscase displays a ‘reading tone’ and the desk a ‘writing tone’. The wall has an ‘obstacle tone’ and the lamp a ‘light tone’. In the dog’s Umwelt, only feeding, sitting, running and light tones are left. Everything else displays an obstacle tone. The second, revised edition of von Uexküll’s Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere (1921) came out one year before James Joyce’s Ulysses was published. Following David Herman’s suggestion to regard modernist writers as ‘Umwelt researchers’, I propose to read a scene from Ulysses as a form of Umwelt research in von

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Uexküll’s sense, which is relevant to the ‘post-Cartesian’, enactive approach to modern manuscripts that will be explored in Part II of this book.

5.4. A modernist Umwelt: Bloom and the cat In ‘Post-Cartesian Approaches to Narrative and Mind’, David Herman situates Ulysses on a ‘post-Cartesian continuum’, and he refers to authorial narration such as Fielding’s as another, less fine-grained example on the continuum, representing ‘agent-environment interactions on a grosser scale or more global level of detail’ (Herman 2011b: 270). To appreciate the level of detail in the agent-environment interactions evoked in Ulysses, I would like to zoom in on the opening page of the first chapter devoted to Leopold Bloom, taking into account that this passage was created in multiple drafts. The way Bloom interacts with his environment while preparing breakfast (Joyce 1986: 45) was initially13 limited to noticing his cat and suggesting that humans understand less about these animals’ minds than vice versa. The cat walked stiffly round a leg of the table with tail on high. – Mkgnao! – O, there you are, Mr Bloom said, turning from the fire. The cat mewed in answer and stalked again stiffly round a leg of the table, mewing. Mr. Bloom watched curiously, kindly the lithe black form. Clean to see: the gloss of her sleek hide, the white button under the butt of her tail, the green flashing eyes. He bent down to her, his hands on his knees. – Milk for the pussens, he said. – Mrkgnao! the cat cried. They call them stupid. They understand what we say better than we understand them. She understands all she wants to. (JJA14 12.261)

Bloom’s empathetic ability to put himself in the position of other sentient beings is the accumulated result of the multiple drafts with which Joyce, in his capacity as the author of Ulysses, interacted. Bloom’s rather general speculation about cats’ ability to understand humans better than humans understand cats became gradually more concrete thanks to Joyce’s more precise ‘Umwelt research’ in the successive versions of the text. First, Bloom is made to observe the cat more ‘Calypso’ Typescript, MS Buffalo V.B.3.a. James Joyce, The James Joyce Archive, 63 vols, ed. Michael Groden et al. (New York: Garland, 1978–79; hereafter abbreviated as JJA).

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carefully by the addition (at page proof stage)15 of the following line (after the word ‘mewing’): Just how she stalks over my writing table. Prr. Scratch my head. Prr. (JJA 22.173)

Only gradually, by means of a process of sustained interaction with successive manuscript versions and proofs, did Joyce extend Bloom’s mind and add the crucial lines reflecting Bloom’s mental research into the cat’s Umwelt. At the stage of the page proofs, he added the following handwritten lines in the bottom margin, in two subsequent writing stages, marked by means of the letters A and B: She understands all she wants to. A … A Vindictive too. B Wonder what I look like to her. Height of a tower? No, she can jump me. B Cruel. Her nature. Curious mice never squeal. Seem to like it. (JJA 22.173)

So, Joyce’s Umwelt research into the way his character perceives his environment leads him to investigate the world-view of the character’s cat and even the way its nature is, in its turn, perceived by mice. In a notebook (II.i.2) among the ‘Preparatory and Ancillary Materials’ of the ‘Joyce Papers 2002’ preserved at the National Library of Ireland, Joyce noted under the heading ‘Calypso’: ‘cat sees invisible things’.16 This similar empathetic view would have fitted in with Bloom’s Umwelt research in Chapter 4 (the ‘Calypso’ episode), but Joyce eventually decided to use it in the final chapter (the ‘Penelope’ episode), thus establishing a link with his wife Molly, who shows a similar form of empathy with felines: I love to hear him falling up the stairs of a morning with the cups rattling on the tray and then play with the cat she rubs up against you for her own sake I wonder has she fleas shes as bad as a woman always licking and lecking but I hate their claws I wonder do they see anything that we cant staring like that when she sits at the top of the stairs. (Joyce 1986: 628–9; emphasis added)

The evocations of the minds of Molly and Leopold Bloom almost read like some of von Uexküll’s investigations into the world as perceived by a tick or as seen by

Page proofs for Episodes 1–6, gathering 4. The digital facsimiles of this material were recently made available online; http://137.191.242.61/ Collection/vtls000194606.

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a fly (1934: 39). From a biologist’s point of view, von Uexküll’s project advocated an anti-anthropocentric world-view.17 From a literary perspective, applying the notion of Umwelt to organisms, including humans, is an exercise in empathy. Literary attempts to describe what is going on in a character’s mind can be read (according to the ‘Uexküllian’ method) as endeavors to find out what its Umwelt must look like. The advantage of approaching this exercise in empathy in terms of Umwelt research is that it adds a defamiliarizing dimension to the endeavor, for the ‘effet de dépaysement’ [‘defamiliarizing effect’] that Giorgio Agamben (2002: 69) appreciated in von Uexküll’s description of the tick’s Umwelt can be equally defamiliarizing when it is applied to the human animal. Von Uexküll’s approach suggests a rudiment of poetics (in the basic, etymological sense of ‘poiein’, to make). The Umwelt researcher’s first assignment, according to the Estonian biologist, is to distinguish the animal’s features from the features of its surroundings and to employ them to construct the animal’s Umwelt.18 If one regards modernist writers as Umwelt researchers, this research implies an equally gradual approach. Any writer is her or his own first reader, and in this capacity s/he interacts with her/his manuscripts by interpreting and reinterpreting what s/he has already written in terms of action possibilities to further develop her/his fictional world. The writer’s successive mental states are constantly evaluating the possibilities of action and interaction that help constitute the mind in the first place. The author’s mind is not a pre-given, nor is that of his characters. A writer’s experience with manuscripts as an instrumental extension of her/his own mind during the creative process serves as a model for evoking the workings of her/his characters’ minds. The narratological suggestion to consider modernist authors as Umwelt researchers can thus be enriched with a genetic dimension. During the process of literary composition, many writers either intuitively or consciously exploit the interaction with their manuscripts as an activating part of the creative cognitive process. In this sense, writing is a form of thinking. The experience with this mechanism often has a direct impact on the evocation of fictional minds in literary writings. From this perspective, manuscript studies may be of help in narrative analyses. Part II investigates how this genetic perspective may be combined with cognitive narratology to explore the ‘extended mind’ in literary modernism. ‘Nur allzu leicht wiegen wir uns in dem Wahne, dass die Beziehungen des fremden Subjektes zu seinen Umweltdingen sich im gleichen Raume und in der gleichen Zeit abspielen wie die Beziehungen, die uns mit den Dingen unserer Menschenwelt verknüpfen’ (von Uexküll 1934: 31). 18 ‘Die erste Aufgabe der Umweltforschung besteht darin, die Merkmale des Tieres aus den Merkmalen seiner Umgebung herauszusuchen und mit ihnen die Umwelt des Tieres aufzubauen’ (von Uexküll 1934: 31). 17

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6

Prologue: Beyond the ‘Inward Turn’

In the conclusion to On the Origin of Species, Darwin wrote that his theory would open up new areas of inquiry, notably the inquiry into the human mind: In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history. (Darwin 1859: 488)

Referring to this passage and to the idea that from now on people had to get accustomed to seeing themselves as ‘Godless primates sharing ancestors with other ‘savage’ animals’, Peter Childs suggests that ‘the world was ripe for Freud and for therapy’ (Childs 2008: 56). As indicated in the Introduction, Freud presented his own psychoanalytic approach as a third major blow mankind had suffered. Copernicus had unchained a cosmological revolution by showing that the earth was not the centre of the universe and Darwin had demonstrated that mankind was not the ‘telos’ of evolution. ‘But,’ Freud claimed, ‘human megalomania will have suffered its third and most wounding blow from the psychological research of the present time which seeks to prove to the ego that it is not even master in its own house, but must content itself with scanty information of what is going on unconsciously in the mind.’ As a psychoanalyst, he therefore made a ‘call to introspection’ (Freud 1966 [1917]: 353).1 ‘In the course of centuries the naïve self-love of men has had to submit to two major blows at the hands of science. The first was when they learnt that our earth was not the centre of the universe but only a tiny fragment of a cosmic system of scarcely imaginable vastness. This is associated in our minds with the name of Copernicus, though something similar had already been asserted by Alexandrian science. The second blow fell when biological research destroyed man’s supposedly privileged place in creation and proved his descent from the animal kingdom and his ineradicable animal nature. This revaluation has been accomplished in our own days by Darwin, Wallace and their predecessors, though not without the most violent contemporary opposition, but human megalomania will have suffered its third and most wounding blow from the psychological research of the present time which seeks to prove to the ego that it is not even master in its own house, but must content itself with scanty information of what is going on unconsciously in its minds. We psychoanalysts were not the first and not the only ones to utter this call to introspection; but it seems to be our fate to give it its most forcible expression and to support it with empirical material which affects every individual’ (Freud 1966: 353).

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Against the background of this call to introspection, it does not come as a surprise that literary modernism has often been characterized in terms of an ‘inward turn’. As indicated in the Introduction, however, according to a recent paradigm in cognitive sciences, cognitive processes do not exclusively take place ‘in’ the head, but in constant interaction with an external environment. This two-way interaction is regarded as a cognitive system in its own right, usually referred to as the ‘extended mind’ (Clark and Chalmers 1998; Menary 2010). This notion is currently being made operational in narrative theory, especially in the analysis of literary evocations of the mind. This chapter investigates how a cooperation between genetic criticism and narratology can be mutually beneficial in this process. The starting point is a twofold research hypothesis: (1) If cognitive processes do not exclusively take place ‘in’ the head, but in constant interaction with an external environment, and if this two-way interaction is regarded as a cognitive system in its own right, then literary manuscripts can be considered part and parcel of an author’s ‘extended mind’. In ‘Writing as Thinking’, Richard Menary argues that the creation of ‘written vehicles’ is part of our cognitive processing and that ‘writing transforms our cognitive abilities’ (2007: 621). This insight accords with the theories of genetic criticism, the ‘science of written invention’, as Daniel Ferrer defines it in his monograph, Logiques du brouillon: Modèles pour une critique génétique (2011: 184). (2) If literary manuscripts are part of an author’s extended mind, the interaction with the manuscript as an ‘environmental vehicle’ (Menary 2010a: 21) not only informs her or his methods for evoking the workings of the fictional mind, but may even have a direct impact on this evocation of a character’s thought process. The relation between the level of the author (1) and the level of characters (2) is a delicate subject because of the critical heritage of the ‘intentional fallacy’. The following investigation of the relationship between levels (1) and (2) does not imply a conflation of author and character. Nor does it necessarily imply a search for the author’s intentions. What this investigation does require, however, is an openness to the production side of literature, in which the author evidently plays a crucial role. Due caution with regard to the role of the author in literary studies is necessary, but it does not need to result in what John Bryant has dubbed the doctrine of ‘the Intentional Fallacy Fallacy’ (2002: 8), which comes down to the idea that because intentions have no

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hermeneutic relevance they are not even discussable. In the context of genetic criticism, the concepts of ‘invention’ and ‘intention’ are inevitably related to the notion of a creative agent. The revaluation of the reader and the focus on reception studies in literary criticism in the past few decades are highly commendable, but as Louis Hay emphasized in La Littérature des écrivains (2002), they do not alter the fact that literature is also a matter of writers. One of the aims of this book is to reassess the so-called ‘inward turn’ of literary modernism by showing how the modernist interest in the workings of the mind often prefigures the post-Cartesian model of the ‘extended’ mind. As indicated in the Introduction, the most challenging aspect of this enterprise is to show how an analysis of the workings of the ‘extended’ mind on the level of the writer (1) can inform the analysis of the workings of the ‘extended’ mind on the level of the characters (2). To analyze the ‘how’ of this relation, it may be useful to move from levels (2) to (1) and back to (2) in David Herman’s categorization, that is, ‘counterclockwise’ and ‘clockwise’ in the chronology of the writing process: (2) -> (1): Starting from level (2) (for instance a passage in the published text where the mind of a character is being evoked), we can subsequently examine the connection with level (1) through an analysis of the manuscripts. (1) -> (2): Once the link between (2) and (1) has been established, the relevant reading traces and drafts can be analyzed in chronological order to examine how knowledge of the manuscripts (level 1) can inform the interpretation of level (2) in terms of the ‘extended’ mind.

To illustrate how this relation between levels (1) and (2) functions, Leopold Bloom’s exercise in empathy, mentioned in the previous chapter, can be reanalyzed, divided into successive cognitive steps and reformulated in terms of this back-and-forth movement between levels (2) and (1): Level 2: On the opening page of chapter four in James Joyce’s Ulysses, Bloom is preparing breakfast. He notices the cat in the kitchen and this suddenly makes him wonder what he looks like to her. His thoughts move from a. a few general observations about human prejudices and attitudes towards another species (‘They call them stupid.’) b. to a slightly more concrete characterization (‘Vindictive too.’) and an exercise in empathy, which involves Bloom’s effort to put himself in the cat’s place; c. and finally to a more elaborate exercise, involving Bloom’s attempt to put himself in the place of yet another species: mice.

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Level 1: These three steps in the cognitive process of this character correspond to three steps in the writing process: a. The first writing layer on the relevant typescript (‘Calypso’ Typescript, MS Buffalo V.B.3.a) reads: ‘They call them stupid. They understand what we say better than we understand them. She understands all she wants to.’ b. In a subsequent writing stage, Joyce wrote the following addition in the bottom margin: ‘Vindictive too.’ And he makes his character start wondering what he looks like from the cat’s perspective: ‘Wonder what I look like to her. Height of a tower? No, she can jump me.’ Whereas the first writing layer was a traditional ‘interior monologue’, in which the thoughts are expressed in full sentences, the additions are more experimental forms of ‘stream of consciousness’ and are not necessarily grammatically complete sentences (e.g., ‘Height of a tower?’). c. The ‘text produced so far’ (usually abbreviated as TPSF) has a stimulating effect on the writing process, which is a well-known phenomenon in writing research (Flower and Hayes 1981: 370; Leijten, de Maeyer, van Waes 2011: 331). This effect on the writing process has a direct impact on the evocation of Bloom’s thought process. His effort to put himself in the cat’s place triggers further exercises in empathy. In an extra handwritten addition, Joyce extended the empathetic exercise to mice: ‘Cruel. Her nature. Curious mice never squeal. Seem to like it’ (‘Calypso’ Typescript, MS Buffalo V.B.3.a).

This example only involves a few writing layers on a single draft page. In the following chapters, I will examine more complex instances involving not only multiple drafts, but also marginalia and reading notes, making use of a combination of genetic criticism and cognitive narratology. The combination of genetic and narratological methods is not necessarily limited to the period of modernism. But since the beginning of the twentieth century has been dubbed the ‘golden age’ of the modern manuscript (see Introduction; Callu 1993: 65), it is a suitable starting point for the purposes of this chapter.

6.1. Joseph Conrad and ‘The Journey Within’ In his essay ‘Re-Minding Modernism’, David Herman calls the ‘inward turn’ a critical commonplace (2011c: 249). As indicated in the Introduction, the tendency in modernism studies to see literary modernism in terms of an ‘inward turn’ is due in part to the rhetoric of modernist manifestoes and position statements, which seems to have been adopted by the critics. To Herman’s list of examples of this kind of criticism (such as Kahler 1973; Kaplan 1975: 1–2;

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Matz 2004: 15–19), I would like to add a few author-specific critical studies such as Theodore Spencer’s description of James Joyce’s work as an attempt ‘to place his centre of action as much as possible inside the consciousness of his hero’ (Spencer in Joyce 1969: 17); or the notion of ‘skullscapes’ (Hansford 1983), so prominent in Beckett studies; or the chapter ‘The Journey Within’, from Albert J. Guerard’s book Conrad the Novelist (published in 1958). Guerard interprets Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as a ‘journey into self ’, a ‘journey into the consciousness’, and a ‘confrontation of an entity within the self ’ (Guerard 2006 (1958): 326; 329).2 To some extent, of course, the metaphor of the journey within is inspired by Conrad himself, more precisely by his narrator Marlow. The narrative of this ‘introspective voyager’ (330) is explicitly structured by means of the chronotope or ‘psychic geography’ (331) of the journey upstream, divided into three stages: the outer station, the central station and eventually the ‘inner station’, where he finds Kurtz. Before one can criticize this ‘inward turn’, it is necessary to study it more closely in order to determine to what extent it is inspired by the modernists themselves. In the case of Conrad’s ‘journey within’, ‘Kurtz’ seems to be short for self-deception and for idealism falling short of its expectations. ‘The inner truth is hidden,’ Marlow says. ‘But I felt it all the same; I felt often its mysterious stillness watching me at my monkey tricks’ (137). The word ‘monkey’ is used in close proximity to a suggestion of a common ancestor and possibly of atavism: ‘Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world’ (136). ‘We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness’ (136), Marlow says. ‘The word “ivory” would ring in the air for a while – and on we went again into the silence’ (136), until they heard and saw ‘a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs’ (139). The way Conrad makes his narrator describe the situation is by suggesting something and immediately negating it again by means of the prefix ‘un-’: The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there – there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were – No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it – this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled, and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their Another interesting instance of an ‘inward turn’ that is contrasted with an outside is Otto Weininger’s statement: ‘Das Leben ist eine Art Reise durch den Raum des inneren Ich, eine Reise vom engsten Binnenlande freilich zur umfassendsten, freiesten Überschau des Alls’ (Weininger 1912: 108). The words in bold were excerpted by Joyce in his Subject Notebook (see Van Mierlo 2007).

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humanity – like yours – the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you – you so remote from the night of first ages – could comprehend. And why not? The mind of man is capable of anything – because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. (137; emphasis added)

The manuscript version of this passage was longer. The writing seems to have proceeded relatively smoothly and later on Conrad cut quite a few passages. But what he did not cut was, for instance, the figure of speech by means of which Marlow emphatically corrects himself when he is about to say that the men were inhuman. By cutting so many other passages, this epanorthosis becomes an even more prominent feature of Marlow’s paradoxical rhetoric of ineffability: The earth seemed unearthly. You fellows We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a subdued conquered monster, but there – there you saw could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly and the men were … No they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it. This suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come to one. They howled and leaped and spun and made horrid faces. You know [106] how it is when we hear a the band of a regiment. A martial noise – and you pacific father, mild guardian of a domestic hearthstone suddenly find yourself thinking of carnage. The joy of killing – hey? Or did you never, when listening to some another kind of music, did you never dream yourself capable of becoming a saint – if – if. Aha! Another noise, another appeal, another response. All true. All true true there – in you. Not for you tho’ the joy of killing – or the felicity of being a saint. Too many things in the way, business, houses, omnibuses, police[,] the man next door. You don’t know ho my repectable friends how much you owe to the man next door. He is a great fact. There[’]s very few places on earth where you haven’t a man next door, to you xx or something of him, the merest trace, his footprint – that’s enough. You heard the yells and saw the dance and there was no man next door to call you names if you felt an impulse to yell and dance yourself. Another kind of appeal too, and by Jove, if you did not watch yourself, if you had no faxx weak spot in you where you could take refuge, you would would perceive a [107] a responsive stir. Why not! Especially if you had a brain. There’s all the past as well as all the future in a man’s brain mind. (Yale MS 105–07; emphasis added)

Facsimile Available Online http://brbl-zoom.library.yale.edu/viewer/1058565

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The ‘brain’ is crossed out and replaced by the mind, and all the past and all the future are located ‘in’ it. But Marlow’s attempt to find out what exactly it is that one can find ‘inside’ founders on generalities (‘all the past’ and ‘all the future’). Whereas Darwin tried to find an answer to the remarkable human capacity to sympathize or empathize (marking the phrase ‘Love your neighbour as yourself ’ in his copy of his grandfather’s The Temple of Nature), Conrad wondered what happened when a human being does not have a neighbour, not just a neighbour to love, but also a neighbour to be kept in check by, forcing one to behave in a ‘civilized’ way and show ‘restraint’, to use a word which Conrad employs repeatedly and which Darwin had already used in his pencil sketch, in a similar context: ‘Malthus on man – in animals no moral check restraint –’ (CUL DAR 6, 20r). This ‘restraint’ is what Kurtz is said to lack: ‘I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint’ (174): ‘Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself ’ (174). Here, Marlow’s words already prefigure Virginia Woolf ’s appeal to ‘Look within’ (Woolf 1972: 106). What Kurtz seems to have encountered ‘within’ was unknown to him: ‘But the wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know’ (164).3 This ‘not knowing’ is contrasted sharply, on the one hand, with the knowledge of ‘common sense’ as expressed for instance in ‘An Outpost of Progress’ in the parenthesis ‘(since we know that civilization follows trade)’ (25), and on the other hand, with the ignorance of Kurtz’s intended wife, when Marlow tells her that the last words of her husband-to-be were her name. Her reaction is ‘I knew it – I was sure’, which is followed by the mere repetition of her words in the third person: ‘She knew. She was sure’ (186). Conrad thus allows his narrator to suggest rather than utter his criticism of the self-deception characterizing the hypocritical, philanthropic ‘civilization’, symbolized by the ‘sepulchral’ city of Brussels. The power of the criticism is precisely in what is left unspoken. Throughout the narrative, Marlow does not find the words to describe what he sees and feels during his journey upstream. In many ways, the language of this story, published in 1899 (in Blackwood’s Magazine), prefigures Fritz Mauthner’s Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache or the linguistic scepticism of Hofmannsthal’s Ein Brief (published on 18–19 October 1902). From the The ignorance was already suggested in the earlier story ‘An Outpost of Progress’: ‘we know nothing real beyond the words’ (17). In Heart of Darkness, the ‘Outpost of Progress’ becomes a ‘dust-bin of progress’ (155).

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perspective of linguistic scepticism, ‘Kurtz’ also seems to be short for the inability to express, that is, eloquence running out of hollow phrases, ‘short of ’ idle talk.4 The ‘eloquence’ recurs frequently, and is mentioned for the first time with reference to his report: ‘All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz; and by-and-by I learned that, most appropriately, the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs had intrusted him with the making of a report,5 for its future guidance. And he had written it too. I’ve seen it. I’ve read it. It was eloquent, vibrating with eloquence … This was the unbounded power of eloquence – of words – of burning noble words’ (Conrad 1990: 155). This eloquence is thematized again when Kurtz utters his famous words ‘The horror! The horror!’, which is phrased as follows in the manuscript: – ‘Oh! The horror!’ I blew the candle out and left the cabin. Never before in his life had he been so eloquent such a master of expression as his magnificent gift as in this his last speech on earth. The eloquence of it. The pilgrims were dining in the mess cabin. (MS 206)

Facsimile Available Online http://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/3436993 http://brbl-zoom.library.yale.edu/viewer/1058666

In the published version, the whole reference to eloquence is omitted. Instead, the narrator refrains from any comment and leaves his listeners with the burden of sense-making. ‘The horror! The horror!’ is simply followed by descriptive passages:

See, for instance, Navarette 1993: ‘In particular, ellipses and dashes – evidence of a man struggling with a language that he fears will fail him and with ideas that he fears will elude him – dominate Marlow’s narrative, documenting his hesitations and his confused search for appropriate modes of expression’ (302). For a fascinating study of Conrad’s revisions and the ‘self ’, see Fordham 2010. 5 In Conrad’s ‘An Outpost of Progress’, the two ‘pioneers of trade and progress’, Kayerts and Carlier, also find ‘some old copies of a home paper’: ‘That print discussed what it was pleased to call “Our Colonial Expansion” in high-flown language. It spoke much of the rights and duties of civilization, of the sacredness of the civilising work, and extolled the merits of those who went about bringing light, and faith, and commerce to the dark places of the earth’ (Conrad 1990: 9). 4

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The horror! The horror! I blew the candle out and left the cabin. The pilgrims were dining in the messcabin. (Conrad 1990: 178)

The double ‘horror’ of Heart of Darkness has prompted several critics to relate it to Gothic fiction.6 If Virginia Woolf ’s motto ‘Look within’ really served to distinguish ‘Modern Fiction’ from what came before, this link with Gothic fiction may suggest that the ‘inward turn’ was perhaps not such a distinguishing feature of modernism after all. One of the earliest Gothic novels, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), already draws attention to the architecture of the mind by means of its title. The idea of linking the dark, gloomy, labyrinthine location to the recesses of the ‘mind’ is a recurring topos. The opening paragraph of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ famously makes a direct link between the eponymous House and a skull, with its ‘vacant eye-like windows’ (Poe 1986: 138).7 The double meaning of House, in the sense of both the building and the dynasty, reinforces the link between the early Gothic novel (for instance the obsessive fixation on the genealogical tree in The Castle of Otranto) and the idea of common ancestry (as visualized in Darwin’s ‘tree of life’) that sparked a suspicion of man’s ‘inner’ nature. This suspicion of the animal ‘within’ was thematized both in literary works such as Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and in psychological treatises such as Freud’s Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalyis (1916–17). In these lectures, he also describes the third (‘and most wounding’) blow to humankind’s self-love as the realization that the ego ‘is not even master in its own house’ (Freud 1966 (1917): 353; emphasis added). Freud’s essay on the uncanny, in which he draws attention to the semantic similarities between ‘das Heimliche’ and its grammatical opposite ‘das Unheimliche’ and concludes that unheimlich is

According to G. R. Thompson, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ ‘bears a number of surprising similarities in theme, imagery, and structure to Heart of Darkness’ (G. R. Thompson, ‘Explained Gothic’, in Eric W. Carlson (ed.), Critical Essays on Edgar Allan Poe (Boston: G. J. Hall, 1987): 151n1). Referring to Patrick Brantlinger, who suggests that Heart of Darkness appropriates the conventions of Gothic Romance, Susan J. Navarette examines Conrad’s indebtedness to the Gothic Romance (Navarette 1993: 282). 7 Not unlike Conrad in Heart of Darkness, Poe works with the impossibility of knowing and formulating in order to create an uncanny atmosphere: ‘There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart – an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it – I paused to think – what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth’ (1986: 138). 6

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in some way or other a sub-species of heimlich (‘belonging to the home’),8 may have contributed to the commonplace assumption that the modernist preoccupation with the workings of the mind was a matter of interior architecture.

6.2. Kafka’s ‘Innenraum’ and the ‘engste Bühne’ In 1916–17, chronologically coinciding with Freud’s Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalyis, Franz Kafka wrote a rare theatrical fragment, posthumously published by Max Brod as Der Gruftwächter (The Warden of the Tomb), about a duke (Herzog Leo, referred to as ‘Fürst’) who wishes to place an extra guard in the tomb of his ancestors, in addition to the old warden of the park (Friedrichspark) in which the tomb is located. When the warden is called in, he explains to Duke Leo that he has no trouble keeping people from entering the park. On the contrary, every night he has to struggle with the ghost of an ancestor, Duke Frederic (Herzog Friedrich), to prevent him from leaving the park. He also has to resist the temptations of another ghost, Comtesse Isabella, who uses a more seductive strategy to accomplish the same goal – to be let out (‘aber mich, aber mich lass hinaus’; 8°Ox1, 28r).9 When the name ‘Isabella’ is first mentioned, the ‘Fürst’ draws attention to its foreign nature, calling it ‘an unknown name’ (‘F[ürst].: Isabella,Ein unbekannter Name, Isabella’; 8°Ox1, 28v). It may be a coincidence that Kafka chose the names of some of the protagonists (Princess Isabella and her father Frederic) of The Castle of Otranto, which has in turn been connected to Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the ghostly apparition of Hamlet’s father (Hamm 2009). Still, a passage in Kafka’s draft, which is deleted and therefore does not appear in Max Brod’s edition, corroborates the hypothesis of an intertextual reference to Walpole. The passage mentions another character, called Princess Matilde (‘Prinzessin Matilde’), possibly recalling Matilda, the

Freud starts from the common-sense idea that the German word unheimlich is obviously the opposite of heimlich, heimisch, meaning ‘familiar’, ‘native’, ‘belonging to the home’; but he concludes that the meaning of heimlich develops towards an ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich: ‘Das deutsche Wort unheimlich ist offenbar der Gegensatz zu heimlich, heimisch, vertraut und der Schluß liegt nahe, es sei etwas eben darum schreckhaft, weil es nicht bekannt und vertraut ist. Natürlich ist aber nicht alles schreckhaft, was neu und nicht vertraut ist; die Beziehung ist nicht umkehrbar. Man kann nur sagen, was neuartig ist, wird leicht schreckhaft und unheimlich; einiges Neuartige ist schreckhaft, durchaus nicht alles. Zum Neuen und Nichtvertrauten muß erst etwas hinzukommen, was es zum Unheimlichen macht ... Also heimlich ist ein Wort, das seine Bedeutung nach einer Ambivalenz hin entwickelt, bis es endlich mit seinem Gegensatz unheimlich zusammenfällt’ (Freud 1919: 298–300). 9 The ‘Oktavheft’, preserved in Oxford, is referred to as 8°Ox1. It is published in facsimile in Kafka 2004. 8

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other major female protagonist in The Castle of Otranto (daughter of the oppressive Manfred). In Kafka’s deleted passage, Prinzessin Matilde calls out to Herzog Friedrich, who has managed to take the key of the park gate and is being chased by the old warden, to quickly throw the key to her: ‘und Prinzessin Matilde … ruft: “Schnell Fritz, der Alte kommt, schon wirf mir den Schlüssel zu”’ (8°Ox1, 9v). Whether or not this is a conscious, explicit reference to the Gothic novel, the suggestion of a link with a literary tradition gives an interesting extra dimension to the dramatic fragment and its setting, a small office with a window showing the crown of a bare tree: engste Bühne frei nach oben

F Kleines Arbeitzimmer, ein hohes Fenster, davor ein kahler Baumwipfel. (2r)

The editor of the facsimile edition, Roland Reuβ, points out that the adjective ‘engste’ is a rather unusual expression. The stage is described as being, not just narrow (‘eng’), but ‘narrowest’. Reuβ suggests that the linguistic limit (the superlative) implies the question of whether it is possible at all to ‘realistically’ stage this ‘narrowest’ setting,10 and he makes a connection between the adjective ‘engste’ and the noun ‘Ängste’, plural of a Kafkaesque ‘Angst’. The ‘Arbeit’ in the duke’s office (‘Arbeitzimmer’) could be the workings of the mind, but Reuβ suggests a more morbid connection: he connects the ‘interior space’ (‘Innenraum’) with the tomb the warden is supposed to guard; even the outside view (‘ein kahler Baumwipfel’, a bare tree crown) could be read as a ‘memento mori’ (Reuβ 2004: 24). If the spatial description raises questions as to what is actually being staged here, time is an equally problematic notion in this fragment. The duke’s opening word is ‘Nun?’ (2r). Out of context, this could be read as a reference to the emphatic ‘Now’ in the opening line of Shakespeare’s Richard III: ‘Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York’ – yet another reference to the fall of a House (the end of the Plantagenet dynasty with Richard’s death in 1485 in the Battle of Bosworth Field). But in Kafka’s play, the opening ‘Nun?’ is a question, to be translated as ‘Well?’, because the duke is interested in his adjutant’s opinion regarding his plan to add an extra guard to the tomb. The uncertainty implied by the request for advice is telling in and ‘Die äuβerste Grenze, die er sprachlich beansprucht, stellt zugleich in Frage, daβ das, was hier beansprucht wird, auf irgendeiner “realen” Bühne überhaupt in Szene zu setzen sei: Wie hat man sich eine nicht nur “enge”, sondern “engste” Bühne vorzustellen?’ (Reuβ 2004: 24).

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of itself, but what immediately precedes this opening question is even more so. Before any word has been spoken and before any action has taken place, the play starts with a short pause (‘Kleine Pause’). In other words, the play opens with an ellipsis. Instead of a play with dialogues, interrupted once in a while by pauses, this seems to be a pause, interrupted by dialogue. The pause is the primal situation, to which everything eventually returns. According to Reuβ, the progression of the dialogues (‘der Fortgang aller Rede’) is a regression to the primal situation (‘ein Rückgang in den Grund’) – to which Reuβ immediately adds that, with Kafka, this does not imply any increase in certainty or resolution.11 This tendency towards indeterminacy (‘Unbestimmtheit’) is not simply a passive lack of decisiveness, but an effect that is actively aimed at, as the manuscript indicates. The play’s very first page (2r) already contains several expressions of uncertainty and miscommunication (‘Ich kann … nicht genau formulieren’; ‘Es ist … nicht alles, was ich sagen will’; ‘Dann habe ich es nicht richtig verstanden’). And further on, this tendency only increases (‘Was sagst Du?’, ‘Das verstehe ich nicht’ (19r); ‘Ich weiβ nicht’ (19v)). The whole play turns around an ellipsis in more than one way: around the ‘Kleine Pause’; around the subject of a tomb; and around the absence of the actual subject, because it takes two pages of dialogue before the audience or the reader is given the opportunity to find out what this dialogue is about.12 Katharina Meinel uses Iser’s notion of the Leerstelle (see Chapter 5) to describe the indeterminacy characterizing the opening scene,13 and she refers to Hans-Thies Lehmann to describe a process of ‘disclarification’ (‘Verundeutlichung’), emptying out (‘Entleerung’) and retraction or undoing (‘Entzug des Gegebenen’) as a ‘law’ of Kafka’s writing.14 Because the subject always seems slightly out of focus,15 the content of Kafka’s texts shifts from the enunciation (‘Aussage’) to the process

‘Par excellence ist der Fortgang aller Rede hier, in genauer Anlehnung an eine berühmte Hegelsche Figur, nur ein Rückgang in den Grund – met dem spezifischen Unterschied, daβ bei Kafka keine Bestimmtheit eintritt, sondern alles im Offenen gehalten bleibt’ (Reuβ 2004: 25). 12 ‘F. Also nochmals. Bisher wurde das Mausoleum im Friedrichspark von einem Wächter bewacht’ (8°Ox1, 2v); ‘Nun habe ich aber gefunden, der Wächter oben im Park genügt nicht, es muss vielmehr auch ein Wächter unten in der Gruft wachen’ (3r). 13 ‘Die Rede der Figuren kreist um eine Leerstelle’ (Meinel 1995: 361). 14 ‘Hans-Thies Lehmann erkennt im Entzug der Referenz geradezu ein Gesetz kafkaschen Schreibens: “Nach einer einführenden Geste, mit der gleichsam ein Minimum von Inhalt hingestellt wird, ein Etwas, ‘ce peu de réalité’, folgt die Bahn des Schreibens dem Zug einer Verundeutlichung, Entleerung, ja eines Entzugs des Gegebenen”’ (Meinel 1995: 360); the reference is to Hans-Thies Lehmann, ‘Der buschstäbliche Körper. Zur Selbstinszenierung der Literatur bei Franz Kafka’, in Gerhard Kurz (ed.), Der junge Kafka (Frankfurt am Main, 1984), 213–41, 213. 15 Meinel speaks of a ‘Unschärferelation alles Gesagten’ (Meinel 1995: 360). 11

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of enunciating (‘den Vorgang des Aussagens selbst’; Meinel 1995: 360), which could be seen as another form of linguistic scepticism.16 In a different context, Reuβ notes a similar shift from the enunciation to the process of enunciation and he relates it to the materiality of this process of enunciation: the notebook preserved in Oxford. The dramatic fragment (The Warden of the Tomb) is preceded (on pages 1r and 1v of Oktavheft 8°Ox1) by a short piece of prose, which is thematically related to the play. Unlike the play, however, the prose fragment opens with a direct statement of the subject under the title Zerissener Traum. The whim (‘Laune’) of a sovereign ordained that the mausoleum needed a guard. To the mausoleum, Kafka added the specification ‘in immediate proximity of the sarcophagi’ (‘unmittelbar bei den Sarkophagen’; 8°Ox1, 1r). This close connection with death and the fact that in the second sentence the sovereign is described as ‘den sonst vielfach beengten Fürsten’, is emphasized by Roland Reuβ, who regards the increasing constriction or narrowing (‘Engerwerden’) as yet another representation of Angst (Reuβ 2004: 15). A disabled war veteran gets the job and is being led to the mausoleum by a functionary. He cannot keep pace and starts rubbing his left leg. The functionary asks him what is wrong and the old man replies by asking for a moment’s patience, assuring the functionary that this usually stops right away: ‘“nur einen Augenblick Geduld, das pflegt gleich aufzuhören’ (8°Ox1, 1v). The quotation marks are opened, but not closed, and the last word ‘aufzuhören’ (‘to stop’) is where Kafka actually stops writing. This was the end of the short piece of prose, after which Kafka started writing the dramatic fragment (The Warden of the Tomb). The coincidence of the enunciation (‘aufzuhören’) and the process of enunciating (Kafka stopping right there) draws attention to the materiality of the notebook as an element that potentially plays a role in the act of creation. Reuβ refers to Nietzsche’s statement that writing tools assist in one’s thought process (see also Chapter 10).17 Toward the end of 1916, Kafka got the opportunity to make use of his sister Ottla’s small house (Alchimistengasse 22) to write in the evening, which led to a more mobile way of writing and, consequently, different Meinel does not use the notions ‘Sprachskepsis’ or ‘Sprachkritik’, but the sense of her analysis suggests a form of linguistic scepticism on the part of Kafka: ‘Die Referenz der Worte erscheint immer unsicher, und ihr Sinn ist nie eindeutig, weil die Sprache nichts unmittelbar bezeichnen oder meinen kann’ (Meinel 1995: 360). 17 ‘Sie haben Recht – unser Schreibzeug arbeitet mit an unseren Gedanken. Wann werde ich es ueber meine Finger bringen, einen langen Satz zu drucken! –’, Friedrich Nietzsche, letter to Heinrich Köselitz (late February 1882), in Giorgio Coli and Mazzino Montinari (eds), Sämtliche Briefe. Kritische Studienausgabe in 8 Bänden (München, Berlin and New York:dtv/De Gruyter, 1986), VI 17 2. See Reuβ 2004: 3. 16

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writing tools. Instead of quarto notebooks, he started using the ‘Oktavhefte’, and instead of a pen he began to write with a pencil. According to Roland Reuβ, this switch had an influence on Kafka’s writing style as it enabled him to free himself from the large-scale, ambitious plans for novels. The smaller format of his notebook and the more volatile, provisional character of his pencil drafts also prompted him to write in a more experimental way (Reuβ 2004: 5) in increasingly short texts, which often radically question the performative powers of literature (6). It is this nexus between an intelligent agent and his environment that characterizes the so-called ‘extended mind’ according to recent cognitive scientists. If this interaction really plays the role Nietzsche suggested, it seems strange that a generation of writers who were so interested in evoking the workings of the mind would insist that this involved introspection, according to Virginia Woolf ’s phrase ‘Look within’. And it is even more remarkable that for such a long time, literary criticism has propagated this introspective or ‘internalist’ view. It is not a coincidence that Guerard’s chapter on ‘The Journey Within’ is included as the first essay in the section ‘Essays in Criticism’ of the appendix to the Norton critical edition of Heart of Darkness (2006), for it is still a valuable interpretation. But it is more than 50 years old (originally published in 1958) and in the meantime cognitive science has developed the theory of enactivism, which nuances this metaphorical representation of the mind as an interior space. In ‘Re-Minding Modernism’, David Herman has convincingly argued that this metaphor should be replaced by a more ‘enactive’ conception of the workings of the fictional mind, using Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) as his main examples. Woolf ’s case is particularly striking because of the marked discrepancy (noted in the Introduction) between what she did and what she said she did. The rhetoric of her argument is characterized by the imperative ‘Look within’ (Woolf 1972: 106), but what she did often deviates from this motto, as the following discussion of her story ‘The Mark on the Wall’ tries to show.

6.3. Woolf and ‘The Mark on the Wall’ Woolf ’s story was published in 1917 in Two Stories and reprinted in 1921 as part of the collection Monday or Tuesday. The title of the latter collection of stories was inspired by her celebrated essay ‘Modern Fiction’, notably the following passage from the paragraph that opens with the imperative ‘Look within’:

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Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being ‘like this’. Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old. (Woolf 1972: 106; emphasis added)

Against this background, it is remarkable that in the opening sentence of ‘The Mark on the Wall’, the protagonist does not look ‘within’ but looks ‘up’: ‘Perhaps it was the middle of January in the present that I first looked up and saw the mark on the wall.’ Three times, the first-person narrator says she looked up, before the ‘innumerable atoms’ start ‘falling’: ‘I first looked up and saw the mark on the wall … I was smoking a cigarette when I looked up and saw the mark on the wall for the first time. I looked up through the smoke of my cigarette and my eye lodged for a moment upon the burning coals.’ At this moment, ‘that old fancy of the crimson flag flapping from the castle tower came into my mind’ (Woolf 2000: 53). It came ‘into’ the narrator’s mind, but ‘the mark interrupted the fancy’. The inclusion of ‘The Mark on the Wall’ in Monday or Tuesday may be interpreted as a gesture on the part of Virginia Woolf to exemplify by means of this story what she meant by the aesthetic programme described in ‘Modern Fiction’. The story plays an important role in Julia Briggs’s Preface to her biography Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life (2005): ‘Her first short story written for the Hogarth Press takes place inside the head of a woman sitting by a fire and looking at ‘The Mark on the Wall’ (as the story is called), while she meditates on the elusive and fragmented nature of experience. Her train of thought is interrupted by a man with a newspaper who identifies the mark, thus extinguishing the rich imaginative potential of uncertainty’ (Briggs 2005: x; emphasis added). The word ‘inner’ that features prominently in the title of the biography, does not only refer to Virginia Woolf ’s own ‘interiority’; according to Julia Briggs, the author’s ‘interiority’ inevitably also informed the way she ‘acknowledge[d] the interiority, the subjectivity of other human beings’: In re-creating the interiority of others, Woolf drew, as she had to, on what she knew of her own. She remained a fascinated observer of her own thoughts and also of her own creative process, recording both in her diaries and letters; her late, unfinished autobiographical ‘Sketch of the Past’ takes a closer look within. My account is inspired by Woolf ’s own interest in the process of writing. (Briggs 2005: x; emphasis added)

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I agree with Julia Briggs that in order to re-create the mind of her characters, Woolf – like any other writer – had to draw on what she knew of her own, and that this experience was evidently mainly the experience of creative writing. This is the crucial link between level (1) and level (2) in David Herman’s survey of cognitive narratology, the transition between the level of the author’s cognition to the level of the evocation of the fictional mind. Only the word ‘interiority’ in the passage quoted above is somewhat problematic. If the writer’s experience of her own process of writing (involving interaction with exo- and endogenetic material) can serve as a model for re-creating the mind of others, this ‘mind’ is not an interior space, but an enactive complex. While the inclusion of ‘The Mark on the Wall’ in Monday or Tuesday can be interpreted as an illustration of Woolf ’s aesthetic programme described in ‘Modern Fiction’, the methodological part of this programme also needs to be taken into account . The way she proposes to examine an ordinary mind on an ordinary day is described as follows: ‘Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness’ (107–7). Woolf presents ‘the mind’ and ‘the consciousness’ as a surface upon which ‘the atoms’ can fall, upon which sights or incidents can score a pattern, to be traced by the modern writer. The question is whether that really is what Woolf and her narrator are doing in ‘The Mark on the Wall’. The story’s second paragraph opens with ‘How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object’. Ariane Mildenberg’s phenomenological interpretation of this story focuses on the ‘swarming’ mind of Woolf ’s narrator. Mildenberg first summarizes Edmund Husserl’s ‘General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology’, entitled Ideen (1913), as a method aimed at exposing Western man’s unquestioning trust in preconceived notions, which had ‘made him lose sight of the fact that consciousness itself was the source of the meaning of the world’: ‘The goal of [Husserl’s] phenomenological method or reduction was to get “back to the things themselves [zu den Sachen selbst]”, that is to say, to recover how the world was “first” experienced and constituted through consciousness’ (Mildenberg 2010: 42). The method of reduction is usually referred to as ‘bracketing’ or Epokhè, putting preconceived assumptions about the external world into parentheses. This practice of ‘bracketing’ is meant to suspend our common-sense notions of the world, and this is what Woolf is doing according to Mildenberg, as she ‘seeks to cut through the many layers of signification that common usage has accumulated’ (53): ‘The “swarming” mind of Woolf ’s narrator proceeds by attempting ... a flow of imaginary possibilities as to what the mark might be’ (54).

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The successive paragraphs indeed suggest several hypotheses – the head of a gigantic old nail, a hole made by a nail (but ‘it’s too big, too round, for that’), a rose-leaf, a crack in the wood. Using the imagery suggested by the text (‘I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts’), Mildenberg describes the readers’ experience as follows: ‘In “The Mark on the Wall”, we sink with the swarming mind deeper and deeper into a state of primordial perception until the mind thinks not merely of how “Wood is a pleasant thing to think about”, but of being wood’ (54). This is how Virginia Woolf describes the transition from ‘thinking about’ to ‘being’ wood: Wood is a pleasant thing to think about. It comes from a tree; and trees grow, and we don’t know how they grow. For years and years they grow, without paying any attention to us, in meadows, in forests, and by the side of rivers – all things one likes to think about. The cows swish their tails beneath them on hot afternoons; they paint rivers so green that when a moorhen dives one expects to see its feathers all green when it comes up again. I like to think of the fish balanced against the stream like flags blown out; and of water-beetles slowly raiding domes of mud upon the bed of the river. I like to think of the tree itself: – first the close dry sensation of being wood; then the grinding of the storm; then the slow, delicious ooze of sap. I like to think of it, too, on winter’s nights standing in the empty field with all leaves close-furled, nothing tender exposed to the iron bullets of the moon, a naked mast upon an earth that goes tumbling, tumbling, all night long. The song of birds must sound very loud and strange in June; and how cold the feet of insects must feel upon it, as they make laborious progresses up the creases of the bark, or sun themselves upon the thin green awning of the leaves, and look straight in front of them with diamondcut red eyes ... One by one the fibres snap beneath the immense cold pressure of the earth, then the last storm comes and, falling, the highest branches drive deep into the ground again. Even so, life isn’t done with; there are a million patient, watchful lives still for a tree, all over the world, in bedrooms, in ships, on the pavement, lining rooms, where men and women sit after tea, smoking cigarettes. It is full of peaceful thoughts, happy thoughts, this tree.

The end of the story is the deliberately blunt explanation of the mark on the wall: ‘It was a snail.’ But, as Mildenberg points out, this remark is less conclusive than it seems, for ‘having offered various possibilities as to what the mark could be, the finality of this last remark cannot but be doubtful’ (Mildenberg 2010: 55). It is thus only appropriate that the story opens with the word ‘Perhaps’: ‘the attempt to doubt any object of awareness in respect of its being actually there necessarily conditions a certain suspension [Aufhebung] of the thesis’

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(Mildenberg 2010: 55). Moreover, this doubt is also applicable to the linguistic scepticism we already encountered in the discussions of Conrad and Kafka: ‘Woolf ’s story never offers closure, making us doubt what the mark really is, and mirroring the writer’s own fundamental doubts about expressing on paper the direct experience of the visible world’ (56). In spite of these ‘fundamental doubts’, Woolf herself seemed rather pleased with the format she had found to express her experiences, and she actually pinpointed the very day that she wrote ‘The Mark on the Wall’ as the moment she made this discovery: I shall never forget the day I wrote ‘The Mark on the Wall’ – all in a flash, as if flying, after being kept stone breaking for months. ‘The Unwritten Novel’ was the great discovery, however. That – again in one second – showed me how I could embody all my deposit of experience in a shape that fitted it – not that I have ever reached that end; but anyhow I saw, branching out of the tunnel I made, when I discovered that method of approach, Jacob’s Room, Mrs Dalloway etc – How I trembled with excitement. (Woolf 1975–80: 4.231)

Woolf ’s choice of words (‘embody all my deposit of experience in a shape that fitted’) is interesting against the background of recent cognitive theories on the ‘embodied’ mind. While Woolf ’s method can be understood from a phenomenological perspective, as demonstrated by Mildenberg, the connection between phenomenology and the ‘extended mind’ is explained by Véronique Havelange. Husserl’s method of ‘bracketing’ was necessary in order to ‘focus attention on the mode of appearance of objects’ (Havelange 2011: 337). This phenomenological reduction leads to the discovery of the intentional structure of consciousness (337). By regarding consciousness as consisting of dynamic acts, phenomenology introduced a double epistemological shift, away from Descartes and away from Kant, the then predominant approaches to the question of knowledge: (1) Unlike Descartes, for whom both consciousness and its objects were substances (res cogitans and res extensa), Husserl did not try to account for the object that appears, but ‘to describe the way in which the object appears’ (338). This implies, on the one hand, that experience exists for a subject of consciousness, and that, on the other hand, consciousness is always consciousness of something. (2) Unlike Kant, for whom the a priori categories of understanding (such as space and time) were merely formal, Husserl tried ‘to grasp the conditions of lived

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experience’ (338). This lived experience (‘Erlebnis’) implies that ‘consciousness and knowledge are not possible without a grounding in embodiment’ (338). As for this embodiment, Husserl distinguishes between the body as a physical object (‘Körper’) and the body as it exists in first-person experience (‘Leib’; Havelange 2011: 339). This distinction helps explain the constitution of ‘the Other’, according to Havelange: ‘I start by apprehending the Other as external, as a Körper; however, because I myself have an intimate experience of the intrication between Leib and Körper, I can imagine that because the Other is a Körper, he is also a Leib. While perceiving the Other’s objective body, I invest it with the qualities and powers of my own lived-body, by a process of analogy (Analogisierung) that pertains to empathy (Einfühlung)’ (341). This empathy is the kind of Einfühlung evidenced in Darwin’s note on the tortoises he saw on the Galápagos Islands, and that is evoked by Joyce in the fictional mind of Leopold Bloom when he tries to figure out what he must look like from his cat’s perspective. Similarly, Virginia Woolf ’s empathetic attempt, not just to write about, but to imaginatively ‘be’ a tree can be read as a phenomenological exercise in the sense of the early Husserl. But this early phenomenology of the 1913 Ideen is ‘an egological approach that Husserl will later call the “Cartesian way” of phenomenology: it rests on the premise that the ego benefits from an immediate, primordial apperception of itself. If this is accepted, then it follows that “the Other” can only be found secondarily, in a mediate mode by analogy’ (Havelange 2011: 341). In the 1920s, Husserl himself questioned this ‘Cartesian’ approach. Instead of apprehending the ‘Other’ only as a result of one’s own perceptive systheses, it was necessary to apprehend him as a subject in his own right: ‘can he not discover himself as absolute subjectivity and apprehend me as his “alter ego”, just as well as I apprehend him in my own life? Just as I exist for myself, just as I am not merely an intentional event in the life of the Other, so conversely the Other naturally exists for himself and is not a simple event in my life of consciousness’ (Husserl (1923–4) in Havelange 2011: 342). The recognition that the theme of phenomenology is ‘not the experience of a singular ego, but rather pure intersubjectivity’ (342) eventually led Husserl (in Ideen II) to no longer frame the shared world in terms of intersubjectivity based on empathy, but to invoke ‘the living body and cultural objects … that are pregiven for the individual consciousness’ (343–4). These objects can be simply tools or instruments of daily life, but from this perspective they are also ‘mind-laden’ (‘begeistet’). Havelange shows how Husserl eventually also considered ‘an externalization of reason in the techniques of writing’ (345) and thus ‘opened the way to a thematization of

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technical artifacts as not only constituted, but as constitutive of (inter)subjectivization and socialization’ (346), and consequently to a connection between phenomenology and enactive cognitive science. This enactive cognitive approach is analyzed by David Herman and made operational for narrative theory. Paraphrasing his analysis (Herman 2011c: 258), one could apply his argument to Woolf ’s story ‘The Mark on the Wall’ and the different hypotheses suggested by its first-person narrator: the successive mental states are constantly in circulation with the possibilities of action and interaction that help constitute the mind in the first place. My suggestion is that this is a more accurate description of the evocation of the fictional mind in Woolf ’s story than Woolf ’s own description of her method in ‘Modern Fiction’. Instead of conceiving of the mind as a pregiven surface on which ‘atoms’ fall and upon which sights or incidents can score a pattern, to be traced by the modern writer, the mind as she describes it in ‘The Mark on the Wall’ is not pregiven, but is being constituted by the hypotheses and the possibilities of action and interaction. Again and again the mind ‘swarms’ in divergent directions, but every so often the text returns to the mark on the wall, and a new hypothesis about what the mark might be sets off a new string of thoughts. The structure of the text mimics this interactive way in which an intelligent agent negotiates opportunities for action and interaction with an environment. It seems important, therefore, as David Herman proposes, to regard modernist writers as ‘explorers of the lived, phenomenal worlds that emerge from, or are enacted through, the interplay between intelligent agents and their cultural as well as material circumstances’ (2011c: 266). These material circumstances in the environment can be anything. In the case of a writer, for instance, this environment can simply be a notebook, like the one that features in the essay ‘The Extended Mind’ by Clark and Chalmers: Now consider Otto. Otto suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, and like many Alzheimer’s patients, he relies on information in the environment to help structure his life. Otto carries a notebook around with him everywhere he goes. When he learns new information, he writes it down. When he needs some old information, he looks it up. For Otto, his notebook plays the role usually played by a biological memory … The information in the notebook functions just like the information constituting an ordinary non-occurrent belief; it just happens that this information lies beyond the skin. (Clark and Chalmers 2010: 33–4)

Richard Menary has developed this idea in his essay called ‘Writing as Thinking’,

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in which he argues that ‘the creation and manipulation of written vehicles is part of our cognitive processing and, therefore, that writing transforms our cognitive abilities’ (Menary 2007: 621). If a writer’s mind – like any other mind – consists of the interaction between an intelligent agent and his/her cultural as well as material circumstances (Herman 2011c: 266), this cultural and material environment can also be, for instance, a book by another author. Very often the marginalia in authors’ libraries show the traces of an interaction with the body of the text. As indicated in the Introduction, my suggestion is that this interaction is not just an illustration of the writer’s ‘extended’ or ‘extensive’ mind, but that it also served as a model for the way many modernist writers evoked the workings of fictional minds. To further explore this hypothesis in the next chapters, the notion of the extended mind will be related to the exogenesis, the endogenesis and the epigenesis of several modernist authors, starting with James Joyce.

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7

Exogenesis: Writers’ Libraries and the Extended Mind

7.1. Writers and their libraries Virginia Woolf did not approve of annotating books. In her essay ‘How Should One Read a Book?’ she notes that ‘our relation with the poets and novelists is so intimate that we find the presence of another person intolerable’ (Woolf 1972: 9). Heather Jackson points out that this ‘presence of another person’ can also be that of a previous reader who has left his or her reading traces in the margin. In an unpublished essay, called ‘Writing in the Margin’, Woolf compared this form of annotating to carving into someone’s flesh: ‘this anonymous commentator must scrawl his O, or his Pooh, or his Beautiful upon the unresisting sheet, as though the author received this mark upon his flesh’ (Woolf in Jackson 2001: 239). The wounds thus afflicted on the author are at the same time scars encountered by subsequent readers. This kind of marginal reading trace is the ‘centre’ of attention in an art project by Kajsa Dahlberg, with the title A Room of One’s Own/A Thousand Libraries (2006), ironically based on a text by a marginalia hater. The starting point of Dahlberg’s work of art is Woolf ’s essay A Room of One’s Own, in which the first-person narrator is stunned by the ways in which women have been portrayed mainly by men throughout history and by the relative scarcity of portraits by female writers. Woolf ’s essay is framed by marginal comments on all sides, or in Dahlberg’s own words: it is ‘reframed within a collective script of responses’.1 The work of art is a compilation of marginalia, which Dahlberg encountered in the various copies of the Swedish translation of Woolf ’s essay in Swedish public libraries. The result consists of a copy of the text with – in the margins and between the lines – numerous layers of comments, http://kajsadahlberg.com/archiveworks/a-room-of-ones-own--a-thousand-libraries/

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exclamation marks and other reactions by various readers. Originally, the title of the work of art as it was presented online was A Room of Ones’s[sic] Own/A Thousand Libraries. Although it has been corrected in the meantime, this accidental misspelling was paradoxically quite appropriate. The privacy evoked by the notion of a room of one’s own contrasted with an unconventional plural of the typically Woolfian pronoun ‘one’. Dahlberg’s work of art shows how a plurality of ‘ones’ ‘own’ the text – how they appropriate it, mark it, personalize it – how much energy they are willing to invest in it, and consequently how intense the impact of a text can be. According to Dahlberg, one of the most heavily marked sentences is the following: For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

Facsimile Available Online http://kajsadahlberg.com/archiveworks/a-room-of-ones-own--a-thousandlibraries/

This may seem appropriate, but at the same time it is perhaps for the best that Virginia Woolf did not live long enough to see how over the years her text has been pawed and fingered. It is not hard to imagine how traumatic this sight might have been to someone who experienced each marginal pencil stroke as a mark upon the author’s flesh. At the same time, Dahlberg’s concentrate of reading traces is a powerful statement, distilled from the interaction between a text and its readers. To characterize this interaction, two models are prevalent2 in studies on the history of reading and the history of the book – the ‘conversation’ model and the ‘communication’ model (Jackson 2001: 85). The ‘conversation model’ is concisely summarized by Descartes, as quoted by Marcel Proust in the Introduction to his translation of John Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies (Sésame et les Lys): ‘the reading of all good books is like a conversation with the worthiest individuals of past centuries who were their authors’ (Descartes, qtd in Proust 2008: 65–66). In These are evidently not the only two models. William Sherman notes that the word ‘marginalia’ only became the standard term for marginal annotations in the nineteenth century, thanks to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Sherman’s enumeration of terms that were more common in the Renaissance, such as ‘adversaria’ or ‘animadversion’ (2008: 22–23), suggests more antagonistic, combative or belligerent models.

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his essay ‘Marginalia’,3 however, Edgar Allan Poe suggests that ‘marginalia are deliberately pencilled, because the mind of the reader wishes to unburthen itself of a thought’ (Poe 1965: 2). Poe opens his essay with the surprising confession that, when he buys a book, he often pays as much attention to the amount of white space on the pages as to the printed text. He prefers to purchase books with a wide margin in order to allow his ‘mind’ to ‘unburden itself ’ of thoughts, which are not to be confused with ‘memoranda’: ‘if you wish to forget anything upon the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered’. In terms of the conversation model, the reader writing in the margins is not particularly conversational. According to Poe, he is merely talking to himself: ‘In the marginalia, too, we talk only to ourselves’ (Poe 1965: 2). Still, this is not necessarily a defect, according to Poe, for when we write in the margins, we ‘talk freshly – boldly – originally – with abandonnement – without conceit’ (2). At first sight, this description of marginalia may resemble the Renaissance practice of highlighting a passage by drawing a ‘manicule’ (Sherman 2008: 25) in the margin, representing a pointing hand, which according to William Diconson was ‘the truest copie of the Minde’.4 But marginalia are not so much a copy of the mind, but rather – as this chapter will try to argue – a part of the mind, as Poe’s model of the mind seems to imply when he speaks of ‘the mind of the reader’ in terms of a sort of metabolism, eating, absorbing, digesting, defecating, ‘unburdening itself ’ of thoughts in the margin as a form of cognitive excrement. Poe stretches the ‘conversation model’ to such a degree that it prefigures what Heather Jackson calls the ‘communication model’ (Jackson 2001: 85), which was suggested by Marcel Proust, who argued that reading ‘cannot be assimilated ... to a conversation, even with the wisest of men’ (Proust 2008: 67).5 Proust emphasizes the ‘inciting’ aspect of reading, due to its being ‘effected in solitude’ (67).6 Originally published in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review in November 1844, the essay served as introduction to a series of Poe’s ‘marginalia’, which appeared in instalments in subsequent issues of the journal (and of other journals), separated from their marginal context of the books in which they were originally jotted down. 4 William Sherman quotes this passage from John Bulwer’s Chirologia: or the Natural Language of the Hand (1644) in Used Books (Sherman 2008: 49). 5 The difference between a book and a friend, Proust argues, lies in ‘the manner in which we communicate with them, reading being the reverse of conversation, consisting as it does for each one of us in receiving the communication of another’s thought while still being on our own, that is, continuing to enjoy the intellectual sway which we have in solitude and which conversation dispels instantly, and continuing to be open to inspiration, with our minds still at work hard and fruitfully on themselves’ (Proust 2008: 67). 6 In his essay ‘Sur la lecture’, Roland Barthes also emphasizes the procedure by means of which the consumption of the text turns this product into a desire to produce: ‘la lecture est véritablement une production: non plus d’images intérieures, de projections, de fantasmes, mais, à la lettre, de travail: le produit (consommé) est retourné en production, en promesse, en désir de production’ (Barthes 1984: 45). 3

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The metaphor he employs for this inciting effect is that of ‘l’optique des esprits’7 or cognitive optics, suggesting that the author of a book does not provide his readers with a truth, but with a sort of magnifying glass to discover their own truth. This metaphor recurs in the last part of À la recherche du temps perdu, where Samuel Beckett commented upon it by means of the curt marginal jotting: ‘Balls’.8 But also Beckett would have to admit that by thus unburdening himself of this ‘thought’, he paradoxically confirmed Proust’s point about the inciting and generative quality of reading. Neuroscientific studies such as Stanislas Dehaene’s Reading in the Brain (2009) and Maryanne Wolf ’s Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (2008) confirm this generative quality of reading.9 ‘Reading is a neuronally and intellectually circuitous act’, Maryanne Wolf notes, arguing that the phenomenon of readers tending to stray while reading does not need to be regarded as a defect: ‘Far from being negative, this associative dimension is part of the generative quality at the heart of reading’ (Wolf 2008: 16). Not unlike the tendency to stray while reading, the tendency to make associations and inferences incite us to develop autonomous ideas10 and to go beyond the particular text at hand. As a consequence, Maryanne Wolf argues, ‘the experience of reading is not so much an end in itself as it is our best vehicle to a transformed mind’ (Wolf 2008: 18). It does not come as a surprise, therefore, that this generative nature of reading is employed in a special way by readers who are, in their turn, writers. It may be impossible to look ‘inside a reader’s head’ or ‘enter the author’s mind’ with hindsight, yet if the mind is not an interior space but ‘extended’ by definition, it is perhaps not something that needs to be ‘entered’. If reading is ‘our best vehicle to a transformed mind’, these transformations are partially retraceable on the basis of reading notes. This chapter examines reading traces of three writers – James Joyce, Flann O’Brien and Samuel Beckett, sometimes called the ‘trinity of great Irish writers’11 – in order to try to map, first Proust also suggests the metaphor of a mental space: ‘reading is for us the instigator whose magic keys have opened the door to those dwelling-places deep within us that we would not have known how to enter’ (75). 8 Next to the line ‘mon livre n’étant qu’une sorte de ces verres grossissants … mon livre grâce auquel je leur fournirais le moyen de lire en eux-mêmes’ (Proust 1919–27: 16.240; see Van Hulle and Nixon 2013: 71). 9 At the 2013 conference of the Society for Textual Scholarship (Loyola University, Chicago, 6–8 March 2013), Paul Armstrong made a connection between these neurologically underpinned observations and phenomenology, which he is developing in his book How Literature Plays with the Brain: The Neuroscience of Reading and Art (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming). 10 ‘In this sense, reading both reflects and re-enacts the brain’s capacity for cognitive breakthroughs’ (Wolf 2008: 17). 11 Edna O’Brien in Mark O’Connell’s ‘The Flann O’Brien Centenary’: ‘Edna O’Brien (no relation, 7

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of all, these authors’ processes of cognitive transformation and, second, the way they employ the experience of this cognitive enaction to give a literary shape to the process of cognition in their fiction.

7.2. Authors’ libraries and the extended mind: Three case studies 7.2.1. The case of Joyce’s books Stephen Dedalus’s ‘epiphanies’, representing a particular model of the mind, were part of an early stage in James Joyce’s developing poetics. Later on, the notion of epiphany seems to have become more peripheral in his work. My research hypothesis is that Joyce gradually developed other literary methods for evoking the workings of the fictional mind, methods that prefigure a post-Cartesian approach. A notebook plays an important role in Andy Clark and David J. Chalmers’s article ‘The Extended Mind’ as an illustration of the extended mind (see Chapter 6). Notebooks – and more specifically reading notes – will therefore serve as a starting point for this section, in which I would like to examine (1) to what extent Joyce’s evocations of the fictional mind can be understood from the perspective of this post-Cartesian paradigm; and (2) how his reading notes may have been instrumental in the gradual transition from the ‘epiphany’ model to a model that prefigures the extended mind.

Bloom’s books On Leopold Bloom’s ‘two bookshelves’ in Ulysses (1922), among the ‘several inverted volumes improperly arranged’ (Joyce 1986: 581; U 17.1358), there is a book called ‘The Story of the Heavens by Sir Robert Ball (blue cloth)’ (Joyce 1986: 581; U 17.1373). Bloom associates the book with one word that is explained by Sir Robert Ball: the word ‘parallax’ (cf. infra). Joyce uses parallax to make a connection between Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom. They both see the same cloud from a different perspective. In both cases, the cloud has a similar function as Woolf ’s mark on the wall, in that obviously) once wrote that “along with Joyce and Beckett, Flann O’Brien constitutes our trinity of great Irish writers”, and even if there’s something glib about that notion, there’s something attractive about it too. It’s tempting to picture Joyce as the inscrutable and dominant Father of Irish authors, Beckett as the suffering, ascetic, visionary Son, and Flann O’Brien as the shape-shifting Holy Comic Spirit’ (The New Yorker, 23 September 2011; www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2011/09/ the-flann-obrien-centenary-1.html).

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it serves as an environmental stimulus that sets off a ‘swarm’ (Woolf 2000: 53) of thoughts in the fictional minds of the two protagonists. Stephen’s thoughts wander off to his mother’s deathbed, but only after seeing the cloud: A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, shadowing the bay in deeper green. It lay behind him, a bowl of bitter waters. Fergus’ song: I sang it alone in the house, holding down the long dark chords. Her door was open: she wanted to hear my music. Silent with awe and pity I went to her bedside. She was crying in her wretched bed. For those words, Stephen: love’s bitter mystery. (Joyce 1986: 8; U 1.248–53; emphasis added)

When Bloom sees the cloud covering the sun, this environmental circumstance immediately results in equally gloomy thoughts, but his stream of consciousness is additionally marked by an extra environmental impulse, ‘a bent hag’ whom he sees crossing the street: A cloud began to cover the sun wholly slowly wholly. Grey. Far. No, not like that. A barren land, bare waste. Vulcanic lake, the dead sea: no fish, weedless, sunk deep in the earth. No wind would lift those waves, grey metal, poisonous foggy waters. Brimstone they called it raining down: the cities of the plain: Sodom, Gomorrah, Edom. All dead names. A dead sea in a dead land, grey and old. Old now. It bore the oldest, the first race. A bent hag crossed from Cassidy’s clutching a naggin bottle by the neck. The oldest people. Wandered far away over all the earth, captivity to captivity, multiplying, dying, being born everywhere. It lay there now. Now it could bear no more. Dead: an old woman’s: the grey sunken cunt of the world. (Joyce 1986: 50; 4.218–28; emphasis added)

The same cloud conjures up different memories and connotations in the two protagonists’ minds. The question is whether these two different perceptions of the same cloud also mark a change in Joyce’s model of the mind. Stephen sees the cloud as a ‘trivial incident’ (Joyce 1991: 216) followed by an epiphany, connected to a memorable phase of the mind, as he defined the notion of epiphany in Chapter XXV of Stephen Hero, a ‘sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself ’ (216). Bloom’s perception of the cloud sets off a train of thought that interacts more readily with the cultural and material circumstances – in this case not only with the meteorological circumstances but also with the concrete situation of a bent hag crossing the street. Stephen and Bloom’s separate perceptions could be regarded as representing two different models of the mind. Stephen’s (especially the younger Stephen’s) perception is mainly associated with

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Model 1: epiphanies; Bloom’s perception generally shows more characteristics of Model 2: the extended mind.

Model 1: epiphanies In Stephen Hero, Stephen’s definition of the epiphany, quoted above, is immediately followed by an example: He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments. He told Cranly that the clock of the Ballast Office was capable of an epiphany. Cranly questioned the inscrutable dial of the Ballast Office with his no less inscrutable countenance: – Yes, said Stephen. I will pass it time after time, allude to it, refer to it, catch a glimpse of it. It is only an item in the catalogue of Dublin’s street furniture. Then all at once I see it and I know at once what it is: epiphany. – What? – Imagine my glimpses at that clock as the gropings of a spiritual eye which seeks to adjust its vision to an exact focus. The moment the focus is reached the object is epiphanised. It is just in this epiphany that I find the third, the supreme quality of beauty. (Joyce 1991: 216–17; emphasis added)

As in the case of the discrepancy between what Woolf did and what she said she did, there seems to be a discrepancy between Stephen’s abstract definition of the epiphany and his concrete example. In the definition, the epiphany is reduced to the sudden spiritual manifestation. The word ‘sudden’ has prominence of place as the first word of the definition. In the example, the same suddenness is expressed by means of the repetition of ‘at once’: ‘Then all at once I see it and I know at once what it is: epiphany.’ But to some extent the suddenness is also undermined by the repetition of ‘at once’ and by the long process that precedes it: ‘I will pass it time after time, allude to it, refer to it, catch a glimpse of it. It is only an item in the catalogue of Dublin’s street furniture.’ This street furniture can be considered part of what David Herman refers to as the cultural and material circumstances. According to Scott Berkun, the effect of the epiphany is comparable to the completion of a jigsaw puzzle. The last piece of the puzzle may seem more significant than the others, because it marks the epiphanic moment, but this effect is only due to the pieces that have been put into place before. Instead of the magic moment, Berkun emphasizes ‘the work before and after’ (2010: 8). Before Stephen’s description of how he has the epiphany (‘all at once ... at once’), there is an intermediate explanation that seems to do more justice to

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‘the work before and after’: ‘Imagine my glimpses at that clock as the gropings of a spiritual eye which seeks to adjust its vision to an exact focus’ (Joyce 1991: 216). The mind is presented here as a ‘groping’ process. This comes much closer, for instance, to what Daniel C. Dennett has termed the ‘multiple drafts model’. Dennett compares the workings of the conscious mind to a process of editorial revision: ‘These editorial processes occur over large fractions of a second, during which time various additions, incorporations, emendations, and overwritings of content can occur, in various orders’ (Dennett 1991: 112). Observations or feature discriminations are spatially and temporally distributed over various specialized parts of the brain and combine into narrative sequences that are subject to continuous editing. The result is that ‘at any point in time there are multiple “drafts” of narrative fragments at various stages of editing in various places in the brain’ (113) and there is ‘no single narrative that counts as the canonical version, the “first edition” in which are laid down, for all time, the events that happened in the stream of consciousness of the subject, all deviations from which must be corruptions of the text’ (136). Instead of an epiphanic moment, the process or ‘the work before and after’ becomes more prominent in this multiple drafts model. By confronting what Stephen says he does with what he actually does, applying his definition of the epiphany to his own actions, the text suggests that the epiphanic model of the mind is untenable, even while Stephen is explaining it. For instance, after Stephen’s exposition of his aesthetic theory, Cranly seems to be baffled: Having finished his argument Stephen walked on in silence. He felt Cranly’s hostility and he accused himself of having cheapened the eternal images of beauty. For the first time, too, he felt slightly awkward in his friend’s company and to restore a mood of flippant familiarity he glanced up at the clock of the Ballast Office and smiled: – It has not epiphanised yet, he said. (Joyce 1991: 218)

Stephen’s witticism ‘It has not epiphanised yet’ strangely works against him and paradoxically undermines his theory. The line is what according to his own theory would be ‘a trivial incident’, and in the ‘vulgarity of speech’ it is not a sudden ephiphany, but a gradual process that manifests itself in the words ‘not ... yet’.

Model 2: the extended mind In Epiphany in the Modern Novel, after quoting Stephen’s example of the Ballast Office, Morris Beja draws attention to the external circumstances

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that trigger the epiphany: ‘Although such an epiphany would arise from the perception of something external, Joyce’s emphasis is generally on the perceiving consciousness, the subject who actively adjusts his “spiritual” vision to focus on the object, which in turn “is epiphanised”’ (Beja 1971: 77). The emphasis on the perceiver increases in Ulysses, to such an extent even that the magic moment of the epiphany becomes less prominent than the mental work before and after. Ever since Stephen employed it as an example, the Ballast Office can no longer be entirely dissociated from the notion of ‘epiphany’. When Joyce refers to the Ballast Office in the Lestrygonians episode of Ulysses, however, he denies Leopold Bloom an epiphany: Mr Bloom moved forward, raising his troubled eyes. Think no more about that. After one. Timeball on the ballastoffice is down. Dunsink time. Fascinating little book that is of sir Robert Ball’s. Parallax. I never exactly understood. There’s a priest. Could ask him. Par it’s Greek: parallel, parallax. Met him pike hoses she called it till I told her about the transmigration. O rocks! (Joyce 1986: 126; U 8.108–13; emphasis added)

Here, the interplay or negotiation between the intelligent agent Leopold Bloom and his cultural and material circumstances is triggered by the word ‘ball’. The ‘ball’ in timeball reminds him of the copy of the book by Sir Robert Ball that he has on his bookshelves. But this does not lead to an epiphany, on the contrary. Robert Ball’s popularizing explanation of parallax apparently failed to enlighten Bloom. Instead of having an epiphany, Bloom admits: ‘I never exactly understood.’ By now, the example that once served to illustrate the notion of epiphany (the Ballast Office) is employed to illustrate the mental ‘work before and after’, and with regard to evoking these workings of the fictional mind Joyce seems to have intuited or prefigured the recent insights of cognitive science in terms of the ‘extended mind’. What is especially interesting in this context of the extended mind is that Joyce introduces a book in this nexus between the intelligent agent Bloom and the environments he navigates. Bloom’s thoughts do not jump immediately from the timeball to parallax; the transition is made by the explicit mention of the book and the name of its author. Another instance where a concept is linked explicitly to an author is Stephen’s line ‘Moment before the next Lessing says’ (U 15.3609). Lessing is also mentioned in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), when Donovan interrupts Stephen’s exposition of his aesthetics: ‘Goethe and Lessing, said Donovan, have written a lot on that subject, the classical school and the romantic school and all that. The Laocoon interested me very much when I read it. Of course it is

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idealistic, German, ultraprofound’ (Joyce 2000: 229). Usually Lessing’s Laocoon is seen as the reference that was missing in Stephen’s memorable reflection during his walk on Sandymount strand.12 After the exposition of his high-flown aesthetic theories, Stephen has not managed to flee from Dublin like a Daedalus, but has fallen back down like an Icarus and is now walking on the beach, reflecting on the ‘ineluctable modality’ of the visible and the audible: You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the Nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o’er his base, fell through the Nebeneinander ineluctably. I am getting on nicely in the dark. (U 3.11–15)

As in the case of Bloom’s mental process in reaction to seeing the timeball at the Ballast Office, Stephen’s stream of consciousness is not an epiphany but a groping thought process. Unlike Bloom and the word parallax, Stephen does seem to grasp the German notions of Nacheinander and Nebeneinander, which have been linked to Lessing’s Laocoon. However, in his study of the Subject Notebook (NLI 36,639/3), Wim Van Mierlo convincingly argues that the words most probably derive from Otto Weininger’s Über die letzten Dinge (Van Mierlo 2007). Joyce made notes on Weininger in his Subject Notebook (the passages in bold are excerpted by Joyce in his notebook): Die Bewegung ist es, die hierauf Antwort gibt … Die Zeit ist die Art, in welcher der Raum einzig durchmessen werden kann; es gibt keine Fernwirkung. Sie ist aber auch die einzige Form, in welcher das Ich (Gott im Menschen) sich findet. Der Raum ist also eine Projektion des Ich (aus dem Reich der Freiheit ins Reich der Notwendigkeit). Er enthält im Nebeneinander, was nur im zeitlichen Nacheinander erlebt werden kann. Der Raum ist symbolisch für das vollendete, die Zeit für das sich wollende Ich. (Weininger 1912: 107)

Wim Van Mierlo not only provides a plausible source for the opening page of the Proteus episode, but also argues that the reference to Lessing is improbable: ‘Despite the accepted orthodoxy of the allusion, the Laokoön as a source never rang completely true for a passage that does not really treat of poetry and art anyway (although Stephen in “Circe” remembers Lessing rather than Weininger: Fritz Senn, ‘Esthetic Theories’, JJQ 2 (1965): 135. In the endnotes to the Penguin edition of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Seamus Deane also refers to the third chapter of Ulysses: ‘Laocoon: in this essay of 1766, Lessing developed a theory of the essential differences between poetry and the plastic arts. The work was left unfinished. More substantial reference is made to this essay in the Proteus episode of Ulysses’ (Deane in Joyce 2000: 319).

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“Moment before the next Lessing says” [U 15.3609])’ (Van Mierlo 2007). But the argument that ‘Lessing … does not use the word “Nacheinander”’ is slightly less convincing, for Lessing – even though he may not have substantivized the words – did employ the words ‘nebeneinander’ and ‘nacheinander’ as each other’s opposite in a crucial section of Laocoon. In Chapter XX, Lessing notes: Körperliche Schönheit entspringt aus der übereinstimmenden Wirkung mannigfaltiger Teile, die sich auf einmal übersehen lassen. Sie erfo[r]dert also, dass diese Teile nebeneinander liegen müssen; und da Dinge, deren Teile nebeneinander liegen, der eigentliche Gegenstand der Malerei sind; so kann sie, und nur sie allein, körperliche Schönheit nachahmen. Der Dichter, der die Elemente der Schönheit nur nacheinander zeigen könnte, enthält sich daher der Schilderung körperlicher Schönheit, als Schönheit, gänzlich. Er fühlt es, dass diese Elemente, nacheinander geordnet, unmöglich die Wirkung haben können, die sie, nebeneinander geordnet, haben. (Lessing 1987: 145; emphasis added)

The point is simply that one source does not necessarily exclude the other and that the study of the interaction between sources in literary writing processes may be relevant to a combined cognitive-genetic approach to literature sciences. Even if Joyce only used his note on Weininger to compose the opening paragraphs of the Proteus episode, and even if Joyce may have known Lessing only through a summary or another intermediary textbook, one cannot exclude the possibility that his knowledge of Lessing’s distinction between painting (Nebeneinander) and poetry (Nacheinander) somehow played a role as well. For instance, even if Joyce had had only the slightest notion of Lessing’s aesthetic theory, it may have played a role in drawing his attention to Weininger’s use of the terms Nebeneinander and Nacheinander, that is, it may have had an impact on Joyce’s decision to excerpt that particular passage (quoted above) in his notebook in the first place. My suggestion is that this kind of interaction that characterizes the ‘writing-as-thinking’ process served as a model of the mind for Joyce when he tried to evoke the workings of a fictional mind, in this case Stephen’s. In the National Library of Ireland’s copybook II.ii.1.a, with partial drafts of the Proteus episode, there is a passage that contains a sentence based on the Weininger notes: The dog ambled about, trotting, sniffing on all sides. Looking for something he lost here in a past life. Suddenly he made off like a bounding hare, ears flung back, chasing a bird’s on the sand the shadow of a lowflying gull.13 NLI, II.ii.1.a (p. 1); http://catalogue.nli.ie/Record/vtls000357771/HierarchyTree#page/1/mode/1up

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The sentence in bold typeface derives from the following passage in Otto Weininger’s Über die letzten Dinge, excerpted by Joyce in his Subject Notebook: Das Auge des Hundes ruft underwiderstehlich den Eindruck hervor, daß der Hund etwas verloren habe: es spricht aus ihm (wie übrigens aus dem ganzen Wesen des Hundes) eine gewisse rätselhafte Beziehung zur Vergangenheit. Was er verloren hat, ist das Ich, der Eigenwert, die Freiheit. (121–22; see Van Mierlo 2007)

The passage is further elaborated in the next draft stage, a manuscript preserved in Buffalo: ‘The dog ambled about a bank of dwindling sand, trotting, sniffing on all sides. Looking for something he lost here in a past life. Suddenly he made off like a bounding hare, ears flung back, chasing the shadow of a lowflying gull’ (V.A.3, f. 7r (p. 13); cf. U 3:331–3). Stephen’s attempt to interpret a dog’s view of the world (based on Weininger) is only a feeble foretaste of Bloom’s empathetic endeavour to understand the way his cat sees the world (in Chapter 4 of Ulysses). But what is noteworthy in the context of Dennett’s multiple drafts model is that Weininger’s speculative interpretation of dogs’ eyes in relation to a lost past is the only Weininger excerpt that found its way into the Proteus episode apart from the Nach- and Nebeneinander note: ‘Five, six : the nNacheinander one after the other. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a precipice cliff that beetles o’er his base now. Fell through the Nebeneinander. Ineluctably. I am getting on very nicely in the dark. My two feet in Mulligan’s boots are at the ends of my two legs: nebeneinander’ (V.A.3, f. 1r (p. 1)). Joyce’s selection of only two of his Weininger notes illustrates the mechanism of ‘editing choices’ and ‘value-stamped selections’ that also characterize the workings of cognition according to Antonio Damasio (Damasio 2012: 72). If Joyce’s reading notes can be regarded as ‘observations’, Dennett’s description of the workings of consciousness do not only apply to Joyce’s multiple drafts (the author’s mind), but also to Joyce’s method of evoking the workings of Stephen’s consciousness (a fictional character’s mind). Paraphrasing Dennett, the observations are spatially and temporally distributed over the different specialized portions of the brain and combine into narrative sequences that are subject to continuous editing by various processes at various instances in the brain (Dennett 1991: 113). In these opening paragraphs of the Proteus episode, Stephen is explicitly thinking through his senses (‘thought through my eyes’; U 3. 1–2). Regarding

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the ‘ineluctable modality’ of the visible and the audible, Antonio Damasio notes, from a neuroscientific perspective, that ‘Perception, in whatever sensory modality, is the result of the brain’s cartographic skill’ (2012: 70). This form of mental cartography is summarized as follows: ‘Signals sent by sensors located throughout the body construct neural patterns that map the organism’s interaction with the object’ (72; Damasio’s emphasis), and these patterns are also referred to as ‘patterns of interconnectivity’.14 Damasio presents this mapping process in terms of images, ‘a subtle, flowing combination of actual images and recalled images, in ever-changing proportions’15 (71). These ever-changing proportions suggest a similar model as Dennett’s multiple drafts model, and Damasio also employs the metaphor of editing, applied to cinema.16 This pattern of connectivity marks Stephen’s consciousness, as it is being evoked by Joyce, connecting Jakob Boehme to Aristotle to Dante (referring to Aristotle as the ‘maestro di color che sanno’, the master of those that know) to George Berkeley and Samuel Johnson’s refutation of Berkeley’s idealism, to Otto Weininger and – possibly – Lessing. Moreover, this method of evoking the workings of a fictional mind is partially modelled after the patterns of interconnectivity in the multiple drafts preceding the published version of the text.

Conclusion: the ‘Miteinander’ model After the publication of Ulysses, Joyce kept refining the model of the extended mind and its patterns of interconnectivity. And in order to do so, he kept using more and more notebooks, even reusing his old notebooks. His practice was to cancel a note as soon as he incorporated it in a draft. Many notes, however, were left unused for several years, until Joyce gave his old notebooks, including the Subject Notebook, to France Raphael in 1933 with the instruction to copy all the uncancelled, that is, unused, notes into a new notebook. She tried but often failed to decipher the German words in Joyce’s handwriting. For instance: ‘Die Geburt ist eine Feigheit’ (Weininger 1912: 62) becomes ‘Wie gebut ist eine Feigheid’ (VI.C.7:265); and ‘Unethisch ist es, die Vergangenheit ändern zu wollen’ is changed into ‘Muthisch ist es die Vergangenheit zu ändern’ – which ‘All regions involved in mind-making have highly differentiated patterns of interconnectivity, suggestive of very complex signal integration’ (Damasio 2012: 86). 15 ‘The process of mind is a continuous flow of such images, some of which correspond to actual, ongoing business outside the brain, while some are being reconstituted from memory in the process of recall. Minds are a subtle, flowing combination of actual images and recalled images, in everchanging proportions’ (Damasio 2012: 71). 16 ‘… minds are not just about images entering their procession naturally. They are about the cinemalike editing choices that our pervasive system of biological value has promoted’ (Damasio 2012: 72). 14

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inadvertently suggests that changing the past is courageous (‘mutig’) rather than unethical (‘unethisch’). The irony is that this procedure of transcription and the inevitable distortion it entails correspond with mechanisms that characterize the workings of cognition according to Jonah Lehrer: Our vision begins with photons, but this is only the beginning. Whenever we open our eyes, the brain engages in an act of astonishing imagination, as it transforms the residues of light into a world of form and space that we can understand. By probing inside the skull, scientists can see how our sensations are created, how the cells of the visual cortex silently construct sight. Reality is not out there waiting to be witnessed; reality is made by the mind. (Lehrer 2008: 97)

Similarly, our remembrance of past images is also mutable: ‘No longer can we imagine memory as a perfect mirror of life. As Proust insisted, the remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were’ (2007: 95). How the combination of actual images and recalled images, ‘in everchanging proportions’ (Damasio 2012: 71), works can be illustrated by the only cancelled note in France Raphael’s transcription, ‘Nur ideale Gegenwart kann zu realen Zukunft führen’ (VI.C.7:266). Whenever Joyce used a note in his drafts, he cancelled it with a colour crayon. In this case, the note may have served as the basis for the following line in Finnegans Wake, where it is combined with ‘scenic artist’, a term derived from Fay’s A Short Glossary of Theatrical Terms (p. 21; see notebook VI.B.44:181): ‘What scenic artist! It is ideal residence for realtar’ (FW 560.13). Apart from the words ‘altar’ and the Irish word ‘realta’ (‘star’), the ‘portmanteau’ word ‘realtar’ also suggests a combination of the ‘real’ and the verb to ‘alter’, or even ‘re-alter’. With these portmanteau words, Joyce moved one step beyond the description of the extended mind. Here, his text no longer describes but performs the combination of actual and recalled images. This is neither a Nebeneinander nor a Nacheinander, but a Miteinander, as Samuel Beckett suggested in his German Diaries in March 1937, when he realized ‘how Work in Progress is the only possible development from Ulysses, the heroic attempt to [erasure] make literature accomplish what belongs to music –the miteinander + the simultaneous’ (26/3/37, Munich; Knowlson 1996: 258). To accomplish this Miteinander effect, Joyce made extensive use of books and reading notes. By treating his notebooks the way Otto’s notebook functions (in Clark and Chalmers’ article), Joyce not only found a useful way to process information, but also discovered a model of the mind that served as the

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basis for the literary evocation of his characters’ consciousness in terms of the ‘extended mind’. If one regards the project of literary modernism as an endeavour to explore ‘the interplay between intelligent agents and their cultural as well as material circumstances’ (Herman 2011b: 266), and if one regards literary studies as a balancing act of cultural negotiation between the reader, the author’s self-presentation, the text and the context (Herman and Vervaeck 2011: 19), the study of authors’ libraries may usefully contribute to a cognitive approach to modernists’ writings and constitute a valuable part of this negotiation.

7.2.2. Flann O’Brien’s Ulysses The description of ‘parallax’ in Robert Ball’s The Story of the Heavens follows after the introduction of Edmond Halley (1656–1742) as the astronomer who drew attention to the importance of the transit of Venus as a method of finding the distance to the sun. To understand the method, Robert Ball needs to explain the notion of ‘parallax’ first: We must first explain clearly the conception which is known to astronomers by the name of parallax; for it is by parallax that the distance of the sun, or, indeed, the distance of any other celestial body, must be determined. Let us take a simple illustration. Stand near a window from whence you can look at buildings, or the trees, the clouds, or any distant objects. Place on the glass a thin strip of paper vertically in the middle of one of the panes. Close the right eye, and note with the left eye the position of the strip of paper relatively to the objects in the background. Then, while still remaining in the same position, close the left eye and again observe the position of the strip of paper with the right eye. You will find that the position of the paper on the background has changed … This apparent displacement of the strip of paper, relatively to the distant background, is what is called parallax. Move closer to the window, and repeat the observation and you find that the apparent displacement of the strip increases. Move away from the window, and the displacement decreases … We thus see that the change in the apparent place of the strip of paper, as viewed with the right eye or the left eye, varies in amount as the distance changes; but it varies in the opposite way to the distance, for as either becomes greater the other becomes less. We can thus associate with each particular distance a corresponding particular displacement. (151–2)

This description shows some resemblances with the passage in Chapter 2 of Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman (1967 [1939–40]), where the narrator

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enters Old Mather’s house and observes: ‘When I reached the floor and jumped noisily down upon it, the open window seemed very far away and much too small to have admitted me’ (3P 22). In ‘Beyond the Zone of Middle Dimensions: A Relativistic Reading of The Third Policeman’, Charles Kemnitz reads this passage as an instruction ‘in the most basic concept of relativity: Parallax’ (1985: 60). Kemnitz discusses this notion in the context of Einstein’s theory of relativity, interpreting the novel as ‘a literary appropriation of the language and conceptual models of relativity current during the nineteen-thirties’ (56). Keith Hopper, however, argues that the link with Einstein reduces the complexity of ‘the polyphonic composition of the post-modernist intertext’ (1995: 230). According to Hopper, ‘it seems clear that O’Brien garnered his scientific knowledge of parallax from the more populist work An Experiment with Time, by J. W. Dunne’ (1995: 232). Hopper refers to the passage ‘Nothing stays fixed to be looked at. Everything is in a state of flux … that you enter houses without passing through walls is, of course, one of the most commonplace of happenings in a four-dimensional world’ (Dunne 1934: 170–1; qtd in Hopper 1995: 232). James Joyce, too, read Dunne’s Experiment with Time, and the ‘fourdimmansions’ found their way into Finnegans Wake (FW 367.27). The word ‘parallax’, however, is not mentioned in Dunne’s Experiment with Time. Of course, this does not imply that Dunne’s Experiment with Time cannot have played a role; if anything, it implies that the intertextual composition is perhaps even more polyphonic. My suggestion is that Joyce’s Ulysses may have played a part as well. The personal library of Flann O’Brien (Brian O’Nolan), preserved at the manuscripts and rare books collection of the Burns Library at Boston College, contains a copy of the two-volume ‘Odyssey Press’ (Hamburg–Paris–Bologna) edition of Joyce’s Ulysses (1932). The first volume is signed on the front flyleaf (‘Brian Nolan’ in blue ink, the dot on the i and the o in black ink); in blue ink on the faux titre page (‘Brian O Nolan / 1937’); and on the title page, it also shows a full address in black ink: ‘Brian O’Nolan / 21 Watersland Road / Stillorgan, / Co. Dublin’. This first volume contains very few marginalia, and only ‘non-verbal codes’ (Jackson 2001: 14), for instance, a pencil mark (short horizontal line) next to ‘The way of all our old industries. Liverpool ring which jockeyed the Galway harbour scheme’ (1932: 36) and a pencil mark next to Mr Deasy’s words ‘Now I’m going to try publicity. I am surrounded by difficulties, by … intrigues, by … backstairs influence, by …’ (1932: 37). A vertical line is drawn next to ‘He’s coming in the afternoon. Her songs. Plasto’s. Sir Philip Crampton’s memorial fountain bust. Who was he?’ – just before Blazes Boylan’s name is mentioned.

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(1932: 95). And a slanting pencil line marks the line ‘Fleet was his foot on the bracken: Patrick of the beamy brow’ (1932: 313). The second volume is more heavily annotated, but it is not certain whether the annotations are Brian O’Nolan’s. Again, the same full address features on the title page of this second volume. A reproduction of ‘M. Jacques Blanche’s portrait of Mr. James Joyce’, torn from a newspaper, is pasted onto the facing verso page. The front flyleaf (recto) shows the inscription ‘B. ONolan 1942’ in black ink, but also (at the top of the page) another inscription: ‘MacD[onagh] / 1934’ in blue black ink. Most of the annotations in this second volume are in green ink. For instance, the word Lacus Mortis in the following passage is underlined in green ink: Huuh! Hark! Huuh! Parallax stalks behind and goads them, the lancinating lightnings of whose brow are scorpions. Elk and yak, the bulls of Bashan and of Babylon, mammoth and mastodon, they come trooping to the sunken sea, Lacus Mortis. (‘Oxen of the Sun’ episode; Joyce 1932: 434; emphasis added)

And an annotation in green ink in the bottom margin reads ‘Great grey sunken cunt of the world’, quoting Bloom’s thought when he sees the cloud covering the sun in the ‘Calypso’ episode (see above). Most of the annotations in green ink are intratextual references (often just page numbers), indicating internal correspondences and echoes in the book, as well as identifications of characters.17 There is one annotation in black ink, possibly corresponding to the black ink of the inscription ‘B. O’Nolan 1942’: in the ‘Circe’ episode, the word ‘Parallax!’ in Virag’s intervention on page 523 is underscored with an undulating line in black ink, and the marginalia in the right margin read: ‘Show this gentleman out.’ The reference is to the ‘Lestrygonians’ episode, where the question ‘what’s parallax?’ is followed by the sentence ‘Show this gentleman the door.’ The paragraph from which it derives opens with a reference to the ball at the Ballast Office: Now that I come to think of it, that ball falls at Greenwich time. It’s the clock is worked by an electric wire from Dunsink. Must go out there some first For instance, the name of ‘Lynch’ is written in green ink next to the line ‘I wish you could have seen my queen today, Vincent said, how young she was and radiant’ (436); ‘Milly’ is written next to the lines ‘Bold bad girl from the town of Mullingar’ (447; underlined in green ink) and ‘Photo’s papli, by all that’s gorgeous’ (448; underlined in green ink). The name ‘Penrose’ (mentioned in an intervention by Virag in the ‘Circe’ episode, page 529) is underlined in green ink, with a reference in the bottom margin (also in green ink): ‘See Molly’s lovers p 735’. There is one page on which a fuchsia colour pencil was used to make two corrections in the ‘Circe’ episode. On page 538, ‘Kellet’s’ (first line) is partially underscored and marked with the comment ‘spelt wrong’ in the top margin; and seven lines further down, in Bloom’s intervention opening with ‘(Murmurs lovingly.) To be a shoefitter in Mansfield’s was my love’s young dream’, the word ‘Mansfield’ is partially underlined and corrected: ‘recte Manfield’s’.

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Saturday of the month. If I could get an introduction to professor Joly or learn up something about his family. That would do to: man always feels complimented. Flattery where least expected. Nobleman proud to be descended from some king’s mistress. His foremother. Lay it on with a trowel. Cap in hand goes through the land. Not go in and blurt out what you know you’re not to: what’s parallax? Show this gentleman the door. (‘Lestrygonians’ episode; Joyce 1986: 137; U 8.571–8; emphasis added)

It was the homophony of the Ballast Office’s ball and the name of the author of The Story of the Heavens that triggered Bloom’s mind to make the connection between the timeball, Robert Ball and the notion of parallax (earlier in the same chapter; see 7.2.1): Mr Bloom moved forward, raising his troubled eyes. Think no more about that. After one. Timeball on the ballastoffice is down. Dunsink time. Fascinating little book that is of sir Robert Ball’s. Parallax. I never exactly understood. There’s a priest. Could ask him. Par it’s Greek: parallel, parallax. Met him pike hoses she called it till I told her about the transmigration. O rocks! (Joyce 1986: 126; U 8.108–13; emphasis added)

In the ‘Eumaeus’ episode, a vertical line (green ink) is drawn in the left margin next to Stephen’s words: ‘But I suspect, Stephen interrupted, that Ireland must be important because it belongs to me’ (640), which follows after his retort to Bloom: ‘You suspect … that I may be important because I belong to the faubourg Saint-Patrice called Ireland for short.’ The reversal resembles Samuel Beckett’s evocation of the ‘Molloy country’, Bally. In the manuscript of L’Innommable18 Bally is originally referred to with the Irish name for Dublin, ‘Baile atha cliath’ (followed by the narrator’s disclaimer that he cannot guarantee the correctness of the spelling; FN1, 5v). The fact that this place recurs in both Molloy and The Unnamable raises not only the question (as in Ulysses) of whether the character/narrator belongs to Dublin or the other way round, but also the question as to who this character/narrator actually is. The ‘unnamedness’ of the narrator is something he shares with the narrator of The Third Policeman. The first-person narrator of The Third Policeman is perhaps not unnamable, but he has ‘no name’ (64) and ‘no pronoun’ (58) – even though he employs the first-person pronoun to say so: ‘I have no pronoun’ (58). Since characters such as Molloy, Malone, Mahood, Murphy and Mercier

The manuscript of L’Innommable is preserved in two notebooks, held at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas; they will be referred to by means of the abbreviations FN1 and FN2.

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are referred to in the novel as the narrator’s replacements or ‘homunculi’,19 the Chinese boxes effect of narrators ‘within’ narrators touches upon a matter that is also suggested in The Third Policeman: A body with another body inside it in turn, thousands of such bodies within each other like the skins of an onion, receding to some unimaginable ultimatum? Was I in turn merely a link in a vast sequence of imponderable beings, the world I knew merely the interior of the being whose inner voice I myself was? (O’Brien 1993: 118)

This passage was most probably inspired by Dunne’s An Experiment with Time: How would you define rationally a ‘self-conscious’ observer – define him so as to distinguish him from a non-self-conscious recorder such as a camera? You would begin, I imagine, by enunciating the truism that the individual in question must be aware that something which he calls ‘himself ’ is observing. Putting this into other words, the assertion is that this ‘self ’ and its observations are observed by the self-conscious person. But it is essential that he should observe his objective entity as something pertaining to him – he must be able to say: This is my-‘self ’. And that means that he must be aware of a ‘self ’ owning the ‘self ’ first considered. Recognition of this second ‘self ’ involves, for similar reasons, knowledge of a third ‘self ’ – and so on ad infinitum. (Dunne 1958 (1934): 160)

In The Third Policeman, this Chinese boxes effect is described very literally in terms of boxes within boxes: (1) It was a brown chest like those owned by seafaring men or lascars from Singapore, but it was diminutive in a very perfect way (72) (2) the only sole correct thing to contain in the chest was another chest of the same make but littler in cubic dimension … a smaller chest but one resembling its mother-chest in every particular of appearance and dimension (73–4) (3) something that seemed to me remarkably like another chest … the same identical wrinkles, the same proportions and the same completely perfect brasswork on a smaller scale (74) (4–12) He opened this one and took another one out with the assistance of two knives. He worked knives, small knives and smaller knives, till he had twelve little chests on the table, the last of them an article half the size of a matchbox (74–5)

See below, Chapter 8.2; ‘derrière mes remplaçants homuncules, je n’ai pas toujours été triste’; L’Innommable, FN 1, 16v.

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(13) He opened the smallest of them all … and worked with the pin till he had another little chest on the table, thirteen in all arranged in a row upon the table. Queerly enough they looked to me as if they were all the same size but invested with some crazy perspective. (75) (14–28) He was manipulating and prodding with his pin till he had twenty-eight little chests on the table (75) (29)When I looked at it again I saw another thing beside it like something you would take out of a red eye on a windy dry day and I knew then that the strict computation was then twenty-nine. (75) (30–31) through the agency of the [magnifying] glass I was in a position to report that he had two more out beside the last ones, the smallest of all being nearly half a size smaller than ordinary invisibility. (76) (32–…) Nobody has ever seen the last five I made because no glass is strong enough to make them big enough to be regarded truly as the smallest things ever made … The one I am making now is nearly as small as nothing. (76)

After this introduction to the ineluctable modality of the (in)visible, the chapter closes with the word ‘acatalectic’, which Flann O’Brien may have encountered in Ulysses. After the exhibition of his chests, MacCruiskeen demonstrates his ‘personal musical instrument’, whose tones are so high that the average human ear cannot hear its frequencies. ‘Now what do you think of that?’, he asks the first-person narrator, who answers, ‘I think it is extremely acatalectic’ (77). In the opening paragraphs of the ‘Proteus’ episode of Ulysses, immediately after Stephen has mentioned the Nacheinander and the Nebeneinander, he analyzes the line ‘Won’t you come to Sandymount’ as an ‘acatalectic tetrameter of iambs’: Sounds solid: made by the mallet of Los demiurgos. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand? Crush, crack, crick, crick. Wild sea money. Dominie Deasy kens them a’. Won’t you come to Sandymount, Madeline the mare? Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. Acatalectic tetrameter of iambs marching. No, agallop: deline the mare. (Joyce 1986: 31; U 3.17–24)

Not all editions give the reading ‘Acatalectic’, though. The 2012 Alma Classics edition with annotations by Sam Slote, based on the 1939 Odyssey Press Edition, reads ‘A catalectic tetrameter’ – which makes more sense. ‘A catalectic line has an incomplete final foot’ (Slote in Joyce 2012: 568) – the ‘-mount’ in Sandymount.20 The adjective ‘acatalectic’ is a double negative describing a line with a ‘not-incomplete’ foot. By telling MacCruiskeen that his tricks are But Slote also notes that, although ‘Won’t you come to Sandymount’ is a catalectic tetrameter, it is not a tetrameter of iambs but of trochees.

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‘extremely acatalectic’, the first-person narrator thus seems to admire their infinitesimal quality, or the fact that they are ‘not-incomplete’ to the extreme. In general, Flann O’Brien’s use of the Joycean reference at the end of Chapter 5 is quite appropriate since it concerns the ‘ineluctable modality’ of the (in) audible music from MacCruiskeen’s instrument. On the opening page of Chapter 6, MacCruiskeen is called ‘a menace to the mind’ (78). Flann O’Brien seems to poke fun at the internalist model of the mind when he makes the Sergeant ask MacCruiskeen for the readings in order for him to ‘make mental comparisons inside the interior of [his] inner head’ (106; emphasis added). The same Sergeant later on tells the narrator that one should ‘widen out’ the mind: ‘“It does a man no harm”, the Sergeant remarked pleasantly, “to move around a bit and see things. It is a great thing for widening out the mind. A wide mind is a grand thing, it nearly always leads to farseeing inventions”’ (134). This ‘widening out’ of the mind (typographically illustrated by the narrator’s numerous extensive footnotes on De Selby) arguably prefigures the philosophical suggestion that the mind is extended (Clark and Chalmers 1998; Menary 2010b) or even extensive (Hutto and Myin 2013).21 It illustrates the thesis suggested by Julia Briggs (2005: x) that in order to evoke the mind of the protagonist (in the case of The Third Policeman, the ‘post mortem’ mind of the first-person narrator), the author had to draw on what he knew of his own mind at work, and that this experience was mainly the experience of creative writing – how it is a constant enactive interplay of composition and decomposition, reading, writing, rereading and rewriting. This exo- and endogenetic interplay also characterizes Samuel Beckett’s reading and writing method, which will be illustrated by means of his marginalia and reading notes on Immanuel Kant.

7.2.3. Beckett, Kant and cognition: ‘Kritik des reinen Quatsches’ Samuel Beckett’s approach to the notoriously difficult works of Immanuel Kant22 was gradual and characterized by what could be termed a slow movement of Hutto and Myin argue that ‘a surprising amount of mental life (including some canonical forms of it, such as human visual experience) may well be inherently contentless … We argue that – at least, with respect to their intentional aspects – basic minds are extensive and not merely extended if they are contentless … We show that it is possible that basic minds might be transformed, through engaging in wider practices, to become contentful scaffolded minds’ (Hutto and Myin 2013: xviii–xix). They also devote a separate chapter to ‘Extensive Minds’, with a subsection called ‘From Extended to Extensive’ (135). 22 In Samuel Beckett’s Library (2013), Mark Nixon and I give a survey of what is still extant in Beckett’s apartment in Paris and elsewhere. A particularly fascinating case is Beckett’s copy of Immanuel Kants Werke (1921–22). 21

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circumvention. In the past two decades, various studies23 have contributed to a mapping of this process of gradual circumvention. In this section, Beckett’s fascination with Kant’s notion of ‘Vernunft’ will be linked to recent developments in cognitive science and Beckett’s interest in the workings of the mind, making use of reading notes and marginalia in Beckett’s copy of Immanuel Kants Werke, and starting from his note ‘Kritik des reinen Quatsches’.

Charting Kantian territory The jotting ‘Kritik des reinen Quatsches’ in Beckett’s ‘Whoroscope’ Notebook (UoR MS 3000, 22r) may be anything from a prospective literary project to simply a jocular reaction to Kant’s philosophy. At the moment Beckett wrote it, he most probably had not yet read Kant’s critiques themselves, only summaries in general histories of philosophy, such as Wilhelm Windelband’s.24 Thirteen pages further on in the notebook, another note distorts Kant’s first Kritik in a similar way: ‘der Krit[z]el der reinen Vernunft [etc]’ (35r). This second note relating to Kant was probably written while Beckett was in Germany. It is the first entry on page 35r, written in the same blue ink as the entries on the latter half of the previous page (34r), next to which Beckett has written the date ‘Germany, 2/10/36’ (33v). These Kantian ‘scribbles’ may indicate a critical distance, which would correspond to what P. J. Murphy has called a ‘post-Kantian’ approach: Beckett read Kant in two distinct ways: the first might be termed ‘post-Kantian’ insofar as it pursues a historic-contextualist approach that goes against Kant’s own fundamental principle of philosophy as a supratemporal activity … The second way in which Beckett read Kant might be termed ‘neo-Kantian’ in that it is predicated upon a careful study of Kantian principles and proceeds toward a series of innovative and imaginative speculations of Beckett’s own devising. (Murphy 2011: 207)

In spite of Beckett’s critical distance, his early notes in the ‘Whoroscope’ Notebook also indicate a certain fascination for this challenging philosophical work and in a way they announce the arrival of the 11 volumes of Kant’s works in the aftermath of his trip to Germany. Compared to other books Beckett read, the context of his reading of Kant is relatively well-documented.25 On 5 See Pilling 1992; Murphy 1994; Feldman 2006; Murphy 2011; Rabaté 2011. For a discussion of Beckett’s notes on Kant, taken from Windelband’s A History of Philosophy in the British Museum in 1933, see Feldman 2006 and Rabaté 2011. 25 For more information on Beckett’s reading of Kants Werke, see Pilling 2005; Van Hulle and Nixon 2013. 23 24

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January 1938, Beckett told Thomas MacGreevy that the ‘entire works of Kant arrived from Munich’, the 11 volumes of Immanuel Kants Werke, edited by Ernst Cassirer and published by Bruno Cassirer in Berlin (1921–2), packed in two immense parcels (LSB I 581).26 Only the last volume shows traces of a sustained effort to read from cover to cover. This eleventh volume is not Kant’s own work, but the Introduction to ‘Kants Leben und Lehre’ by Ernst Cassirer. Beckett not only marked passages in the margins of the volume, but also made a few reading notes in his ‘Whoroscope’ Notebook. For instance: ‘Bacon’s “De nobis nobis ipsis silemus” taken by Kant as epigraph to KRITIK der R.V.’ (UoR MS 3000, 44r). On page 49r of the ‘Whoroscope’ Notebook (after the first excerpts from Fritz Mauthner’s Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, III. 615–16; UoR MS 3000, 46r; 47r–48r), Beckett continued making notes on Cassirer. On page 140 of Cassirer’s analysis, Beckett wrote in the left margin: ‘The what of object [&] the how of judgment’, corresponding to the passage ‘Wenn alle vorhergehende Metaphysik mit dem “Was” des Gegenstandes begonnen hatte, so beginnt Kant mit dem “Wie” des Gegenstandsurteils’ (XI.140). In this connection, Cassirer quotes a passage from the Kritik der reinen Vernunft: Ich nenne alle Erkenntnis transzendental, die sich nicht sowohl mit Gegenständen, sondern mit unserer Erkenntnisart von Gegenständen, sofern diese a priori möglich sein soll, überhaupt beschäftigt. (Kant 1921–22: XI.140; emphasis added)

The corresponding footnote refers to volume III, page 49, where the same passage is marked in the margin and underlined. Beckett excerpted this passage twice in his ‘Whoroscope’ Notebook (on pages 65r and 133v). This repeated marking and careful copying of the same passage indicates Beckett’s interest in Kant’s insistence on the ‘Erkenntnisart’, which is closely linked to the notion of ‘Selbstbewusstsein’ and ‘Erfahrung’ in a few other passages that clearly drew his attention. Beckett seems to have intended to study Kant’s works thoroughly and he started copying long excerpts from the ‘Einleitung’ of volume III, the Kritik der reinen Vernunft. The quotation above is the third, and last, of these excerpts on pages 133v to 135r of the ‘Whoroscope’ Notebook,

On 12 May 1938, Beckett told Arland Ussher, ‘I read nothing and write nothing, unless it is Kant (de nobis ipsis silemus) and French anacreontics’ (LSB I 622). The Latin phrase in parentheses is the first passage Beckett marked in Volume XI: ‘Das Wort “De nobis ipsis silemus”, das er aus Bacon entnimmt, um es der “Kritik der reinen Vernunft” als Motto voranzusetzen, tritt nun mehr und mehr in Kraft’ (Cassirer in Kant 1921–22: XI. 5). Beckett also jotted down the same motto at the back of the first of two notebooks, containing the manuscript of L’Innommable (HRC SB, Box 3, Folder 10), and integrated it in the text of L’Innommable on page 44v of the same notebook.

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corresponding respectively to pages 40, 45–6 and 49 of the ‘Einleitung’. Beckett did venture further into the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, though not very far, marking one single passage,27 under the heading ‘§18 Was objective Einheit des Selbstbewusstseins sei’, dealing with the notions of perception and experience, which also feature prominently in Cassirer’s text. On page 97, Beckett marked a passage on the ‘depth of experience’ which corresponds to his excerpt at the bottom of page 51v in the ‘Whoroscope’ Notebook: ‘das fruchtbare Bathos der Erfahrung (Kant)’ and the note that ‘Bathos = deep (Gr.)!’ (UoR MS 3000, 51v; qtd in Pilling 2005: 45). In and of itself, it may not matter so much that the 31st of the Addenda to Watt (‘das fruchtbare Bathos der Erfahrung’) probably did not derive directly from Kant’s Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten können (Ackerley 2005: 215), but only indirectly, through the mediation of Ernst Cassirer. What does make a difference is the immediate context of the passage in Cassirer’s text, from which it derives. Cassirer not only makes the meaning of ‘Bathos’ in the sense of ‘depth’ explicit, but also explains that Kant increasingly realizes that this ‘depth of experience’ is based on a moment that cannot be rooted in sensory experience.28 Kant’s sharper understanding of the notion of experience or perception (‘die schärfere Erfassung des Erfahrungsbegriffs’) is also further elaborated in Cassirer’s remark concerning Kant’s suggestion ‘dass die Bedingungen der Möglichkeit der Erfahrung zugleich Bedingungen der Möglichkeit der Gegenstände der Erfahrung sind’ (XI.208). Beckett marked this passage in the margin with an exclamation mark, translated it in his ‘Whoroscope’ Notebook, and added three exclamation marks: ‘Kant’s [proof] that the conditions of the possibility of experience can also [be] the conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience!!!’ (UoR MS 3000, 59r).29 ‘Die transszendentale Einheit der Apperzeption ist diejenige, durch welche alles in einer Anschauung gegebene Mannigfaltige in einen Begriff vom Objekt vereinigt wird. Sie heisst darum objektiv und muss von der subjektiven Einheit des Bewusstseins unterschieden werden, die eine Bestimmung des inneren Sinnes ist ...’ (Kant 1921–22: III.119). 28 ‘So nimmt auch dort, wo Kant sich durch Hume zum Kampfe gegen die Metaphysik und zur Bestreitung jeglicher “Transszendenz” angeregt fühlt, sein Gedanke alsbald Hume gegenüber eine neue und selbständige Wendung; denn je reiner er sich nunmehr bestrebt, sich ausschliesslich innerhalb des “fruchtbaren Bathos der Erfahrung” zu halten, um so deutlicher wird ihm zugleich, dass diese Tiefe der Erfahrung selbst in einem Moment gegründet ist, das nicht in der sinnlichen Empfindung als solcher, sondern im mathematischen Begriff wurzelt. So führt gerade die schärfere Erfassung des Erfahrungsbegriffs selbst dazu hin, die verschiedenen Bedingungen, auf denen er beruht, genauer zu unterscheiden und sie ihrer spezifischen Geltung nach gegeneinander abzugrenzen’ (XI.97; underlining by Beckett). 29 P. J. Murphy draws attention to this important note as an indication of Beckett’s ‘neo-Kantian’ reading (cf. supra; Murphy 2011: 203). 27

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Kant and cognition There is a cognitive aspect to the passages that drew Beckett’s attention, such as the one he marked ten pages further on in Cassirer’s text with the marginalia: ‘Vernunft / Verstand’ (Kant 1921–22: XI.218). Cassirer quotes a passage from the Kritik der reinen Vernunft (III.250), where Kant distinguishes ‘Vernunft’ from ‘Verstand’.30 Cassirer subsequently paraphrases, relating ‘Verstand’ to experience and concrete objects, and ‘Vernunft’ to a more abstract level.31 At least part of Beckett’s interest in Kant relates to the cognitive element that is involved in his philosophy. ‘Vernunft’ is the element that is replaced by ‘Quatsch’ in Beckett’s note ‘Kritik des reinen Quatsches’. Further on in the ‘Whoroscope’ Notebook, ‘Quatsch’ serves as the opposite of ‘Art’: Art: ‘Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck’ / (Kant) Quatsch: ‘Zweck ohne Zweckmässigkeit’ / (?) (UoR MS 3000, 60r)

The first line is based on Cassirer’s analysis of Kant’s important concept.32 Towards the end of Cassirer’s text, some of Beckett’s marks show an increasing enthusiasm with reference to Kant’s aesthetic reflections. To prepare his explanation of the notion of subjective universality (‘subjektive Allgemeinheit’; XI.340; underlined by Beckett), Cassirer first quotes a long passage from Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft, §7 (V.281–2), next to which two large exclamation marks have been penciled in the margin. Beckett’s interest in this passage33 on how to judge art is no surprise, given his preoccupation with the arts during his trip ‘Der Verstand mag ein Vermögen der Einheit der Erscheinungen vermittelst der Regeln sein, so ist die Vernunft das Vermögen der Einheit der Verstandesregeln unter Prinzipien. Sie geht also niemals zunächst auf Erfahrung oder auf irgendeinen Gegenstand, sondern auf den Verstand, um den mannigfaltigen Erkenntnissen desselben Einheit a priori durch Begriffe zu geben, welche Vernunfteinheit heissen mag und von ganz anderer Art ist als sie von dem Verstand geleistet werden kann’ (XI.218). 31 ‘Die Kategorien des Verstandes sind sämtlich nur Mittel, uns von einem Bedingten zum anderen zu führen, während der transszendentale Vernunftbegriff jederzeit auf die absolute Totalität in der Synthesis der Bedingungen geht’ (XI.218). 32 ‘Auch der Gedanke der “Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck”, durch den Kant das Gesamtgebiet des Ästhetischen bezeichnet und umgrenzt, ist jetzt der letzten Paradoxie, die ihm etwa noch anhaftete, entkleidet. Denn Zweckmässigkeit bedeutet, wie sich gezeigt hat, nichts anderes, als die individuelle Formung, die eine Gesamtgestalt in sich selbst und ihrem Aufbau aufweist, während der Zweck die äusserliche Bestimmung meint, die ihr zugewiesen wird. Ein zweckmässiges Gebilde hat seinen Schwerpunkt in sich, ein zweckhaftes hat ihn ausser sich; der Wert des einen ruht in seinem Bestand, der des anderen in seinen Folgen’ (Cassirer in Kant 1921–22: XI.334). 33 ‘Es wäre lächerlich, wenn jemand, der sich auf seinen Geschmack etwas einbildete, sich damit zu rechtfertigen gedächte: dieser Gegenstand … ist für mich schön. Denn er muss es nicht schön nennen, wenn es bloss ihm gefällt. Reiz und Annehmlichkeit mag für ihn vieles haben, darum bekümmert sich niemand; wenn er aber etwas für schön ausgibt, so mutet er andern eben dasselbe Wohlgefallen zu: er urteilt nicht bloss für sich, sondern für jedermann und spricht alsdann von der Schönheit, als wäre sie eine Eigenschaft der Dinge’ (XI:339). 30

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to Germany in 1936–7, and even before. His view on Cézanne’s paintings is particularly telling in this regard. On 8 September 1934 he wrote to Thomas MacGreevy: ‘Cézanne seems to have been the first to see landscape & state it as material of a strictly peculiar order, incommensurable with all human expressions whatsoever. Atomistic landscape with no velleities of vitalism, landscape with personality à la rigueur, but personality in its own terms, not in Pelman’s, landscapality’ (LSB I 222). The phrase ‘landscape with no velleities’, which Beckett opposes to the ‘anthropomorphized landscape’ of so many other painters, seems to prefigure an aspect of Kant’s philosophy that Beckett may not yet have fully appreciated in 1934, but certainly seems to have discovered while reading Cassirer. According to Kant, one should regard the work of art as ‘not completely determined by human intention’, as Bjorn K. Myskja notes (Myskja 2002: 237). Art is intentionally produced and to that extent it is possible to study the creative process, but there are also non-intentional elements, which Kant relates to the notion of ‘genius’. One of the characteristics of ‘genius’, according to Kant, is that the products of genius cannot be planned.34 Since the creative element cannot be ‘planned’ by the artist, Myskja paraphrases, ‘we have to judge the creative element of a work of art as a purposive product of nature while recognizing that this judgement is only valid for human judgement; it does not have objective validity. In this sense, the judgement of art is part of our judgement of nature, and accounts for the claim to subjective universality for our feeling when cognising the object’ (242; emphasis added). Cognition is a crucial element in this view, which helps explain the seeming paradox in Beckett’s appreciation of Cézanne. On the one hand, Cézanne is commended for his non-anthropomorphizing approach; on the other, he is presented as different from the impressionists because ‘he could understand the dynamic intrusion to be himself ’ (LSB I 223). This only seemingly paradoxical insight is the core of Cézanne’s revolutionary approach when he started painting the subjectivity of sight. When Beckett notes that Cézanne understood ‘the dynamic intrusion to be himself ’, his analysis corresponds with Jonah Lehrer’s neurologically inspired discussion of Paul Cézanne’s ‘Process of Sight’: ‘“The eye is not enough,” he declared. ‘… der Urheber eines Produkts, welches er seinem Genie verdankt, selbst nicht weiss, wie sich in ihm die Ideen dazu herbei finden, auch es nicht in seiner Gewalt hat, dergleichen nach Belieben oder planmässig auszudenken’ (Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft §46; qtd in Myskja 2002: 242). Some relevant passages concerning the notion of ‘genius’ in Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft (Kant 1921, Volume V) are marked in Beckett’s copy (on pages 384–85, 417 and 420), but with Avigdor Arikha’s and Anne Atik’s initials ‘AA’.

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“One needs to think as well.” Cézanne’s epiphany was that our impressions require interpretation; to look is to create what you see … Reality is not out there waiting to be witnessed; reality is made by the mind’ (Lehrer 2008: 97). Lehrer suggests that what Cézanne showed was not so much what, but how we see (104). Cézanne’s ‘atomistic landscape’ (LSB I 222), notably his paintings of the Mont Sainte Victoire, gradually became characterized by more patches of naked canvas, which Cézanne referred to as ‘nonfinito’. To explain why these ‘nonfinito’ paintings appear less vacant than they actually are, Lehrer refers to the Gestalt psychologists and ‘Immanuel Kant, their philosophical precursor’, both of whom Beckett was familiar with. More than a century before Gestalt psychology, Kant had indeed stressed that the imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself.35 Recent neuroscientific research confirms this. For instance, Antonio Damasio notes that ‘minds are not just about images entering their procession naturally. They are about the cinemalike editing choices that our pervasive system of biological value has promoted’ (Damasio 2012: 72). Damasio sees the ‘mind’ as a consequence of the brain’s constant mapping (70; see 7.2.1). This ability to create maps is a distinctive feature of brains such as that of the human being, and ‘when brains make maps, they are also creating images, the main currency of our minds’ (63). Some images correspond to what is going on outside the brain, some are reconstitutions of images recalled from memory.36 The visual cortex consists of five distinct areas, the first of which is the neural area where information for the retina first appears. In the second area, neurons respond not only to actual but also to illusory imagery.37 ‘From this point on,’ Lehrer concludes, ‘we can’t separate our own mental inventions from what really exists. The exact same neurons respond when we actually see a mountain and when we just imagine a mountain. There is no such thing as immaculate perception’ (117). It turns out that this non-immaculate perception is a necessary instinct for human beings, since our vision would be full of ‘holes’ ‘Daß die Einbildungskraft ein notwendiges Ingrediens der Wahrnehmung selbst sei, daran hat wohl noch kein Psychologe gedacht’ (Kant 1993: 898; A121). 36 ‘The process of mind is a continuous flow of such images, some of which correspond to actual, ongoing business outside the brain, while some are being reconstituted from memory in the process of recall. Minds are a subtle, flowing combination of actual images and recalled images, in everchanging proportions’ (Damasio 2012: 71; see also chapter 7.2.1). 37 Lehrer summarizes the process as follows: ‘The visual cortex is divided into distinct areas, neatly numbered 1 through 5. If you trace the echoes of light from the V1, the neural area where information from the retina first appears as a collection of lines, to the V5, you can watch the visual scene acquire its unconcscious creativity. Reality is continually refined, until the original sensation – that incomplete canvas – is swallowed by our subjectivity. The first area in the visual cortex where neurons respond to both illusory and actual imagery is the V2. It is here that the top part of the mind begins altering the lower levels of sight. As a result, we begin to see a mountain where there is only a thin black line’ (117). 35

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if the mind did not fill in the blanks. The most well-known example is the blind spot we all have due to the lack of light-sensitive cones where the optic nerve connects to the retina. Thanks to the brain’s constant imaging process, the void of this blind spot is constantly filled by the mind. With the blanks on his ‘nonfinito’ paintings, Cézanne drew attention to the human mind’s capacity to fill these blanks, and to the fact that imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception. Beckett had already been fascinated by a musical equivalent of these ‘blanks’ in Beethoven’s seventh symphony, which he presented as a key element in Belacqua’s programme for a book project. But even when he deployed the same reference to Beethoven to formulate his developing poetics in a letter to Axel Kaun in July 1937, the function of the ‘holes’ was not yet related to the workings of the mind. My suggestion is that, although an interest in the mind was present from the very start of Beckett’s career, his reading of Kant and Mauthner in 1938 did mark a ‘cognitive turn’ in his poetics: whereas his early novel Murphy (especially Chapter 6) was explicitly about the mind, Beckett gradually developed more subtle ways to give shape to a literature that made a link between the ‘blanks’ and the mind. The lacunae such as the ‘hiatus in MS’ in Watt are a first manifestation of these blanks; later on Beckett refined his ‘nonfinito’ technique to less conspicuous, more abstract equivalents of Cézanne’s patches of naked canvas, such as the narrative lacunae which Wolfgang Iser called Leerstellen. Iser developed this concept from the point of view of literary reception, indicating lacunae that provoke the reader into activity (see Chapter 5.1). From the perspective of literary production, these Leerstellen can be deliberate omissions or results of Beckett’s intention to ‘vaguen’, as he called it in the margin of one of his manuscripts of Happy Days (Pountney 1988: 149), but they can also indicate moments when Beckett hits the limit of what is utterable and ‘what has so happily been called the unutterable or ineffable’ (Beckett 2009g: 52). From this genetic perspective, the Leerstellen raise the question of whether they have a particular cognitive function in the creative process (apart from their receptive function38 of provoking the reader into mental activity), and which conditions or situations caused the author to create a Leerstelle in the first place. If mapping is one of the distinctive features of the human mind, the Leerstellen in Beckett’s evocations of the workings of the mind are the equivalent of the uncharted areas, I wish to thank Axel Gellhaus and Karin Herrmann for the intellectually stimulating conversations, meeting at the workshops in Aachen and Antwerp (2010–11), on this topic of the cognitive functions of writing.

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which the medieval cartographers so happily called ‘Here be dragons’ or ‘Hic sunt leones’ – ‘Here are lions’.

‘Here are lines’ With hindsight, the practice of the old cartographers may seem unscientific, but when it comes to charting the brain or mapping the mind, we probably still live in the neurological Middle Ages. Moreover, even leaving the blanks uncharted – as the medieval cartographers did – can have a cognitive function in and of itself. According to Antonio Damasio, mapping is a continuous process: ‘Maps are constructed when we interact with objects, such as a person, a machine, a place, from the outside of the brain toward its interior. I cannot emphasize the word interaction enough. It reminds us that making maps, which is essential for improving actions as noted above, often occurs in a setting of action to begin with. Action and maps, movements and mind, are part of an unending cycle’ (Damasio 2012: 63–4). This notion of a process without end is expressed with deliberate ambiguity in Molloy, where Beckett employs the phrase ‘finalité sans fin’ (Beckett 1951: 173). Here, Kant’s phrase ‘Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck’ itself is turned into a Leerstelle. By translating it not as the unambiguous ‘purposiveness without purpose’, but as the deliberately ambiguous lines ‘finalité sans fin’ (Beckett 1951: 173) and ‘finality without end’ (Beckett 2009d: 115), Beckett maps unknown territory. On the one hand, the line allows for a reading such as Badiou’s, who sees Beckett’s work in the light of ‘l’élément de la beauté’ (Badiou 1995: 80).39 On the other hand, by presenting Kant’s phrase as an aporia, leaving open the other meaning of ‘sans fin’/‘without end’, Beckett is also a twentieth-century cartographer, indicating uncharted areas with ‘Here are lines’. This writerly equivalent of the cartographers’ ‘Here are lions’ is more complex than the pun may seem to suggest. The drawing of lines, the act of writing itself, is a form of cognition or ratiocination. Richard Menary also regards ‘Writing as Thinking’ in his article of that title, and in Supersizing the Mind, Andy Clark considers language as a prosthetic device40 or ‘cognitive scaffolding’ (Clark 2008: 43). This Kant’s ‘Zweckmässigkeit ohe Zweck’ is indeed ‘the main principle by which Beauty is known to man’, as Jean-Michel Rabaté points out, but not without adding: ‘We should not downplay the ironic ring given to the formulation of a principle that basically asserts that there is meaning in the world … What the phrase means, ultimately, is that a reflective judgment (a judgment based on the perception of any beautiful object in nature) leads one to deduce that the world has the form of a teleology, even if that object itself is not necessarily teleological’ (Rabaté 2011: 715). 40 Beckett often makes his protagonists take recourse to a prosthetic device in order to illustrate the workings of the (extended) mind. In the famous passage of Molloy’s sucking stones, for instance, his pockets can be interpreted as a prosthetic memory, according to what Andy Clark calls the 39

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view on language in terms of cognitive extension is in line with some of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophical investigations and ideas in his Zettel, such as: ‘255. Wie kann man durch Denken die Wahrheit lernen? Wie man ein Gesicht besser sehen lernt, wenn man es zeichnet’ (‘255. How can one learn the truth by thinking? As one learns to see a face better if one draws it’; Wittgenstein 1967: 48–48e). David Blair interprets this note as follows: For Wittgenstein, we formulate our thoughts using the tools of language, in the same way that we might say that an artist (e.g., a painter) formulates her images through the tools of her trade – paints, brushes, canvases. The artist need not develop a mental image of what she wants to paint in any detail before she paints – or even while she paints. She creates the artistic image through the use of her artistic tools. It is even the case that painting or drawing can help us to see things better. (Blair 2006: 32–3)

Similarly, Beckett seems to have attempted – throughout his career – to learn to see the mind better by sketching or drafting its uncharted territory line after line. In this sense there is a crucial difference with the medieval cartographers’ label ‘Here are lions’ and Beckett’s procedure, which can be summarized as ‘Here are lines’, drawing attention to the materiality of the act of writing. For instance, the incessant production of lines and lines of text in L’Innommable is not an easy way out, not a trick to leave dangerous territory unexplored; the lines are its very exploration. Beckett’s model of the mind was ‘enactive’ or ‘extended’ avant la lettre. Whether or not Beckett already had these cognitive aspects of the ‘reinen Vernunft’ in mind when he wrote the notes ‘Kritik des reinen Quatsches’ and ‘Art: ‘Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck’ / (Kant) / Quatsch: ‘Zweck ohne Zweckmässigkeit’ / (?)’ (UoR MS 3000, 60r) is impossible to know with any certainty, but with hindsight the latter note becomes more ambiguous if one translates the note ‘Zweck ohne Zweckmässigkeit’ not as ‘purpose without purposiveness’ but as ‘fin sans finalité’ or ‘end without finality’ according to Beckett’s translation in Molloy. As discussed above, by translating Kant’s original phrase ‘Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck’ as ‘finalité sans fin’, Beckett managed to turn it into a Leerstelle. Kant’s original, German phrase is less ambiguous: ‘What the phrase means, ultimately, is that a reflective judgment (a judgment based on the perception of any beautiful object in nature) leads one to deduce ‘Principle of Ecological Assembly’: ‘The canny cognizer tends to recruit, on the spot, whatever mix of problem-solving resources will yield an acceptable result with a minimum of effort’ (Clark 2008: 13; italics in original).

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that the world has the form of a teleology, even if that object itself is not necessarily teleological. If I can perceive beauty, then I will sense that the world is not absurd even if it is full of absurd people, absurd tasks, absurd commands, absurd objects’ (Rabaté 2011: 715). By turning the phrase around, as Beckett did in his notebook, one is presented with a world or a life that has the form of a dysteleology, even though this life is inevitably teleological – ‘Alles hat ein Ende, nur die Wurst hat zwei’, as Beckett noted in his notebook UoR MS 5006 (qtd in Nixon 2011: 87). Whereas Kant suggested that imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself, Beckett experimented with the idea of imagining what perception would be like without imagination (Imagination Dead Imagine). In that case, the ‘absurd objects’ (Rabaté 2011: 715) would simply be objects, stripped of all ‘anthropomorphisation of the inhuman necessities that provoke the chaos’, as Beckett put it in his German Diaries.41 The ‘absurd objects’ would not be absurd because there would not be any tension between what Camus called the unreasonable silence of nature and the human ‘appétit d’absolu’ (Camus 1942: 32) or his ‘soif de savoir’ (35), for it is this tension that causes the absurd, according to Camus: ‘L’absurde naît de cette confrontation entre l’appel humain et le silence déraisonnable du monde’ (44). If one were a tree among the trees, there would be no such tension and thus no absurdity: ‘Si j’étais arbre parmi les arbres, chat parmi les animaux, cette vie aurait un sens ou plutôt ce problème n’en aurait point car je ferais partie de ce monde. Je serais ce monde auquel je m’oppose maintenant par toute ma conscience’ (74; Camus’ emphasis). In that case, the world would have no purpose, no sense; it would be pure ‘non-sense’, in German ‘reiner Unsinn’, ‘reiner Quatsch’. In that ‘sense’, one can read, for instance, En attendant Godot as a ‘Kritik des reinen Quatsches’, the real hero of the play being the dysteleological tree, the Baum ohne Zweckmässigkeit, which does not go anywhere, but simply goes ‘on’ growing. When the ‘échange d’injures’ of Didi and Gogo (Beckett 2003: 186) becomes more than just a stage direction in the English version, it culminates in the most terrible term of abuse, ‘crritic’ (Beckett 2003: 186). And when this term is in its turn translated into ‘Oberforstinspektor’ (forester in chief) in the German version (Beckett 2003: 187), the context of the tree makes clear why this is such a terrible term of abuse, for if anyone is not a tree among the trees (Camus 1942: 74), it is the Forstinspektor (forester), let alone the Oberforstinspektor (forester Beckett wrote this in connection with the more famous sentence from the same passage: ‘What I want is the straws, flotsam, etc., names, dates, births & deaths, because that is all I can know’ (qtd in Nixon 2011: 178).

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in chief), the incarnation of what Beckett called ‘the modern animism that consists in rationalizing [the straws, flotsam, etc.]’. For according to Beckett, ‘Rationalism is the last form of animism. Whereas the pure incoherence of times & men & places is at least amusing. Schicksal = Zufall, for all human purposes’ (qtd in Nixon 2011: 178). Against the background of these human purposes, Beckett’s attention to the ‘pure incoherence’ of the ‘demented particulars’ can be interpreted as a ‘Kritik des reinen Quatsches’. This movement from the Kantian, late eighteenth-century to the latemodernist interpretation of the Enlightenment project can also be delineated from an endogenetic perspective. Such an endogenetic approach will be undertaken in the next chapter.

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8

Endogenesis: Creative Undoing, Doubt and Decision Making

‘Sapere aude’ was Kant’s motto at the core of his definition of Enlightenment. To some extent, this is still the motto of the scientific attitude in general, and if genetic criticism can be said to be a ‘science of literature’ (de Biasi 2004), it also applies to the study of modern manuscripts. It is remarkable that the revolutionary period of Enlightenment more or less coincides with a moment in time, which according to Pierre-Marc de Biasi is marked by a change of mentality that may partially explain why the conscious act of preserving manuscripts became a systematic pattern ‘between the end of the eighteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth century’ (de Biasi 2000: 12). As indicated in the Introduction, there are examples of much older manuscripts, which testify to the act of writing and could be regarded as working documents. But these examples are usually exceptions to the rule that working documents were seldom preserved and that the majority of older manuscripts were produced with the intention to lead a public life. The belief in the sacrosanct nature of the published text may to a large extent be based on the model of the Bible. In spite of the fact that there are multiple versions of this work, the idea of a single text containing the word of God was a crucial element in Christianity. Once this model started being questioned, the work of literature was also increasingly being conceived of as a fluid process rather than a stable product. And this is not only the case in literature. Just think of the American Declaration of Independence.

8.1. Doubt and Decision Making: Drafting the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson wrote the draft of the Declaration and in his autobiography he describes the reactions to it when he presented it to Congress. On 28 June

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1776, a Friday, the draft was read out to the members of Congress. They had a weekend to think about it and the next week they discussed it. Jefferson includes a transcription of the original draft in his autobiography, with the following justification: ‘As the sentiments of men are known not only by what they receive, but what they reject also, I will state the form of the Declaration as originally reported. The parts struck out by Congress shall be distinguished by a black line drawn under them, and those inserted by them shall be placed in the margin, or in a concurrent column’ (Jefferson 2003: 337). One of the passages that remained unchanged was ‘the pursuit of happiness’. Only one man stood in the way of this pursuit of happiness, the King of Great Britain. As part of the rhetorical strategy of the Declaration, all the King’s misdeeds were enumerated, for several pages. One of his cruelest outrages was to allow the slave trade and ‘to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold’ (Jefferson 2003: 340). This important paragraph on slavery was famously cut by Congress. As a collective, the members of Congress weighed the options – should they abolish slavery or not. They eventually decided to omit the paragraph. This omission constitutes one of the most striking ‘what ifs’ of American history. What if this paragraph had not been omitted, could it have avoided the Civil War? This draft is therefore a historically valuable, material remnant of democratic decision making, and perhaps even more importantly, a material trace of democratic hesitation, if hesitation can be collective. For decision making often implies hesitation, both public and private decision making. This document is also a material vestige of a more private process of hesitation and decision making. The notorious slavery passage was preceded by a shorter one that was cut in one go. It starts as follows: ‘He has incited treasonable insurrections of our fellow citizens, with the allurements of forfeiture and confiscation of our property’ (Jefferson 2003: 340; emphasis added). With a team of preservation researchers at the Library of Congress, Dr Fenella France discovered in 2010 that the word ‘citizens’ was written on top of another word, which Jefferson had carefully scraped away. The scraping is significant in itself, because elsewhere he merely cancelled passages by crossing them out. With a technique called ‘hyperspectral imaging’ the team managed to decipher the word. Jefferson had first written ‘our fellow subjects’. The difference between ‘fellow subjects’ and ‘fellow citizens’ is huge. After centuries of being ruled by kings who claimed to have received their mandate directly from God, a people now decided that this was no longer the case: a leader receives his mandate from the people, and therefore has to earn it. And yet, it turned out to be hard to put this into words. Even while he was corroborating this tyrannical king’s

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incompetence with numerous pieces of evidence, he kept referring to the people as a group of ‘subjects’. The decision to write ‘subjects’ may have been prompted by what neuroscientist Jan Lauwereyns calls ‘bias’. Investigating the neural underpinnings of decision making, he emphasizes the crucial role of ‘the prior’ in the assessment of probablilities and the way ‘neural circuits weigh the options’ (Lauwereyns 2010: 14). After having written ‘subjects’, Jefferson apparently noticed the ‘bias’. He caught himself lapsing into this prior, default formulation, scraped it away as thoroughly as he could, and replaced the word by ‘citizens’. This may have been a one-off lapse, but a little further on in the document one notices that, even for the most eloquent revolutionary, it took some time to become fully aware of, and come to terms with, the idea of freedom. Jefferson still thought it necessary to present the citizens as ‘a people who mean to be free ... a people fostered and fixed in principles of freedom’ – hesitantly wrapping the idea of freedom in a cloud of words instead of unwrapping it completely: A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant is unfit to be the ruler of a people who mean to be free. Future ages will scarcely believe that the hardiness of one man adventured, within the short compass of twelve years only, to lay a foundation so broad and so undisguised for tyranny over a people fostered and fixed in principles of freedom.

Only as part of a collective, together with all the members of Congress, did he decide to replace the long, hesitant description (Jefferson’s underlining) by one powerful adjective: ‘free’ – a free people: A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

But it was the hesitation itself that served as the catalyst for the decision making. And this process of hesitation, creative undoing and decision making has left its material traces on a document. Perhaps the expression ‘to leave traces’ is not precise enough as a metaphor; perhaps this metaphor may give the impression that hesitation takes place ‘inside’ people’s heads and that the paper traces are merely a record of this cognitive process, whereas the paper traces are part and parcel of the ‘extended mind’ according to the enactivist paradigm. That is why the word ‘subjects’ as an instance of creative undoing is a privileged site to study the ‘extended mind’. The following section therefore focuses on similar sites of creative undoing and revision as instances of enactive cognition in modernist and late modernist texts.

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8.2. Creative undoing and ‘denarration’ in Samuel Beckett’s manuscripts 8.2.1. From Descartes to Dennett Such a site of creative undoing can be found in the first draft of Samuel Beckett’s L’Innommable: the omission of the word ‘enthymème’, derived from a text that is almost contemporaneous with the Declaration of Independence. The first notebook of the manuscript of Beckett’s novel The Unnamable1 contains mainly endogenetic, but also exogenetic materials. As a bilingual writer, Beckett wrote the original version of this work in French. The ‘unnamable’ narrator has created two homunculi or avatars, as he calls them. Their names are ‘Worm’ and ‘Mahood’. On page 55 of the manuscript, the unnamed narrator suggests that he may be the same person as ‘Mahood’, but that if this is the case, he would be Worm as well, concluding: ‘Mais achevons notre enthymème pensée, avant de chier dessus’ (‘But let’s finish our enthymeme thought before we shit upon it’; FN1, 55v; see Van Hulle and Weller 2013: 145). The word ‘enthymème’ is the only cancelled word in this passage, which is a nice example of creative exogenetic undoing. My suggestion is that the word derives from the Introduction to Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (published in 1764) by the Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid, a contemporary of David Hume and the founder of the so-called Scottish School of Common Sense. In this Introduction, Reid constantly questions the so-called enlightenment of Reason. His prime example is Descartes, who resolved not to believe in his own existence until he could give a good ‘reason’ for it. Reid’s commonsensical remark is that if Descartes could have actually done what he resolved to do, if he could have become genuinely unsure that he existed, his case would have been deplorable. Reid then makes the following comparison: ‘A man that disbelieves his own existence is surely as unfit to be reasoned with as a man that believes he is made of glass’ (Reid 1863: I.100). This comparison was copied by Beckett in his manuscript of L’Innommable, on the inside of the back cover of his first notebook, just underneath the reference to Bacon, ‘De nobis ipsis silemus’, which Beckett had found in Ernst Cassirer’s Introduction to the complete works of Immanuel Kant (see Chapter 7.2.3). As to why Beckett The notebooks containing the manuscript of L’Innommable (referred to as French notebooks FN1 and FN2) are kept at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (HRC) at Austin, Texas. For a more extensive genetic analysis, see Van Hulle and Weller 2013. This chapter builds on the genetic edition and develops an argument I started exploring in Littérature and Samuel Beckett Today/ Aujourd’hui 24 and 26.

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chose this particular passage on the man who believes he is made of glass, my hypothesis is that there may be a connection with the passage above – another loose jotting on the same inside of the back cover: ‘Et puis assez de moi aussi, assez de moi, de me, de je’ – which corresponds with the passage ‘Puis assez de je et de me,cette putain de 1ère personne … Bah, peu importe le pronom qu’on emploie, du moment qu’on n’en est pas dupe’ (FN1, 61v; Van Hulle and Weller 2013: 150). Beckett translated this as: ‘Bah, any old pronoun will do, provided one sees through it’ (Un 57; emphasis added) – which conjures up the same image of transparency as the ‘man that believes he is made of glass’. More generally, Beckett’s reading of the Inquiry into the Human Mind while he was working on L’Innommable is important because of Reid’s antiCartesian perspective on consciousness and cognition. In his Introduction, Reid continues explaining that Descartes’ cogito ergo sum is an argument in which one or more premises are left unstated. ‘Descartes’s argument is an enthymeme’, he writes, arguing that Descartes jumps from ‘je pense’ to ‘je suis’, and that he leaves two premises unstated. Repudiating Enlightenment philosophy, which Reid claims to ‘despise’, he chooses to ‘dwell with common sense’ and to simply take consciousness and existence on trust. According to Reid, these two items, consciousness and existence, are precisely the two premises – premises (2) and (3) – which are needed to move from ‘je pense’ to ‘je suis’, for it is built on the silent assumptions that this ‘je’ is conscious and that there cannot be thought unless there is something that has it. So, to show that ‘je pense donc je suis’ is an enthymeme, he enumerates all the premises of the argument: (1) I think; (2) I am conscious; (3) everything that thinks exists; (4) I exist. By using the word ‘enthymème’, Beckett first introduces Descartes as mediated by Reid. He then deletes the word, and replaces it by ‘pensée’, thus making the connection with Descartes’ ‘Je pense donc je suis’ more direct, only to immediately suggest its rejection again: ‘Mais achevons notre pensée avant de chier dessus’ (‘But let’s finish our enthymeme thought before shitting upon it’). So, the narrator first finishes his thought. If this ‘pensée’ leads to ‘je suis’, it is still not clear who this ‘je’ is. ‘Car si je suis Mahood, je suis Worm aussi’ (‘For if I am Mahood, I am Worm as well’). In other words, he thinks so he is both of his most recent ‘remplaçants’ or ‘homunculi’, Mahood and Worm. And to conclude, he shits on his pensée: ‘Plof ’ (55v). Now that he has shat upon the Cartesian model of the mind, what is his alternative? Descartes explained the workings of vision and the formation of the retinal image in a rather dramatic way, with a small man in a dark room looking through a giant eye, so that readers could easily be misled into thinking that all

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incoming sensory data were processed by a little man or homunculus inside the pineal gland (Wolf-Devine 2000). Daniel C. Dennett presented Descartes’ dualism of body and mind by employing the metaphor of a theatre, the so-called ‘Cartesian theatre’. This model of consciousness is ‘a metaphorical picture of how conscious experience must sit in the brain’ (Dennett 1991: 107). The model postulates a homunculus, ‘sitting’ in the pineal gland, which according to Descartes was the ‘place where “it all comes together” and consciousness happens’ (Dennett 1991: 39). There are several problems with this image: (i) it presupposes that consciousness ‘happens’ and that there is a clear boundary between unconsciousness and consciousness, suggesting a sudden transition between the two; (ii) the homunculus, interpreting incoming sensory data in its theatre, would in its turn need a consciousness with another homunculus, whose consciousness would in its turn contain a smaller homunculus, and so on. The danger of this ‘homunculus’ model of the mind is infinite regress.2 This is the model Beckett seems to be pushing to extremes. This homunculus model, with its regression ad infinitum (see also the description of self-consciousness in Dunne’s An Experiment with Time in Chapter 7.2.2) accords with the narrative model of the M characters and narrators in Beckett’s novels, starting with Murphy. My suggestion is that, in 1949, Beckett already intuited and prefigured much of what cognitive philosophy has confirmed only in the last two decades. Beckett was undoubtedly fascinated by Descartes, who is the subject of one of his earliest published poems (‘Whoroscope’), but as Matthew Feldman has convincingly argued (2006), during the first decades of Beckett criticism this fascination was unduly taken to be a fairly unproblematic fascination. Thanks notably to recent studies into Beckett’s notes on Descartes’ critical disciple Arnold Geulincx (Feldman 2006; Uhlmann 2006; Frost 2012; Tucker 2012), Beckett’s attitude towards Descartes was probably more parodic than early coinages such as Hugh Kenner’s ‘Cartesian Centaur’ suggest.3 His novel Murphy famously contains a chapter that is completely and explicitly devoted to the analysis of the eponymous hero’s mind, which is described as follows: ‘Murphy’s mind pictured itself as a large hollow sphere, hermetically closed to the universe without’ (69). The chapter can be read as a parody of a Cartesian model of the ‘The obvious risk of this conception is to fall in infinite regress, which recalls the story of the homunculus: the subject looks at an object, but the projected image needs another inner subject that looks at it … and so on, in a never-ending recursive process’ (Bussola 2011: 20–21). 3 ‘If we would admire a body worthy of the human reason, we shall have to create it, as the Greeks did when they united the noblest functions of rational and animal being, man with horse’ (Kenner 1973: 121). 2

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mind as an interior space (Herman 2011c: 267n8). The opening scene sets the tone. Murphy is sitting naked in his rocking-chair with scarves fastening his limbs to the piece of furniture. Only by thus appeasing his body, can he come alive in his mind, and life in his mind gives him pleasure, ‘such pleasure that pleasure was not the word’ (Beckett 2009e: 4). However, the parody does not immediately imply an explicit alternative to the Cartesian, internalist approach to the mind. Beckett’s subsequent novels can be read as attempts to find an alternative by driving the Cartesian model of the mind to extremes. As note above, the Chinese-boxes effect of the homunculus model, with its infinite mise-en-abyme structure, also aligns with the model of the M characters and narrators in Beckett’s post-war novels, notably Mercier et Camier, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable. The last paragraph of the preamble in The Unnamable opens with the enumeration of the first-person narrator’s predecessors: ‘All these Murphys, Molloys and Malones do not fool me’ (14). The narrator then devises a few stories and characters that are referred to as ‘avatars’, with names like Basil, Mahood and Worm. In the manuscripts of the original French version, these avatars were first called substitutes (‘remplaçants’). The word ‘remplaçants’ was then crossed out and replaced by ‘homuncules’.4 The use of the word ‘homuncules’ (already in the preceding novel, Malone meurt / Malone Dies) reinforces the hypothesis that – five novels after Murphy – Beckett was still struggling with the Cartesian model. For instance, the first-person narrator in Malone Dies refers to himself as ‘Malone (since that is what I am called now)’ (Beckett 2010a: 49).5 In the manuscript, he originally did not have a name yet, only an initial: ‘M – ?’6 In his capacity as narrator, he starts telling stories about a character called Sapo, until he decides to rename Sapo. This decision is marked by an epanorthosis: ‘For Sapo – no, I can’t call him that any more, and I even wonder how I was able to stomach such a name till now. So then for, let me see, for Macmann, that’s not much better but there is no time to lose, for Macmann might be stark staring naked under this surtout for all anyone would be any the wiser’ (56).7 In the Manuscript preserved at the Harry Ransom Center at Austin, Texas, Samuel Beckett Collection, Box 3, Folder 10, page 16v. See BDMP2 (www.beckettarchive.org). 5 ‘Malone (c’est en effet ainsi que je m’appelle à présent)’ (Beckett 1995b: 79). 6 Manuscript kept at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at Austin, Texas, Samuel Beckett Collection, Box 7, Folder 4 (aka Watt notebook 7), 18r–19r. 7 ‘Car Sapo – non, je ne peux plus l’appeler ainsi, et même je me demande comment j’ai pu supporter ce nom jusqu’à présent. Alors car, voyons, car Macmann, ça ne vaut guère mieux mais il n’y a pas de temps à perdre, car Macmann serait nu comme [un] ver sous ce, cette houppelande, qu’il n’en paraîtrait rien à la surface’ (Beckett 1995b: 90). The naked worm [‘nu comme un ver’] already prefigures Worm in L’Innommable. 4

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manuscript of Malone meurt, the replacement of Sapo by Macmann is marked by a gap. Sapo’s name is replaced by another one, but Beckett did not yet have a name in mind, only its initial: ‘M …’ In between these two passages, the narrator indicates that he is narrating himself (‘me’) and then the other (‘l’autre’), whom he refers to as a homunculus. The ‘me’ in the French original can be read as a direct object in the sense that the ‘me’ is continuously being narrated,8 whereas in the English version the narrator is telling ‘of ’ me: ‘And if I tell of me and of that other who is my little one, it is as always for want of love, well I’ll be buggered, I wasn’t expecting that, want of a homuncule, I can’t stop’ (52). If the ‘I’ can narrate himself (‘me’ or ‘M – ?’ or ‘M …’), this implies that the narrated self can also just as easily be undone or ‘denarrated’ again. This is what Brian Richardson refers to as ‘the performative aspect of world making in narrative fiction’ and ‘the ontological destabilization always possible in fiction’ (Richardson 2006: 94). This ‘play between narrative creation and destruction’ draws attention to the ‘ontological fragility of the status of much fictional discourse – at any point, the narrator can contradict what has been written, and thereby transform the entire relation between events as well as the way they are interpreted’ (94). What in traditional fiction may be a narrative situation to be avoided at all costs becomes a strategy to ‘denarrate’ the Cartesian model of the human mind, referred to by Dennett as the homunculus model or the ‘Cartesian theatre’. Analogous to this model, the ‘I’ narrates a ‘me’ [‘je me raconte’], this ‘me’ in his turn narrates another ‘M’ into being, and so on. This work in regress eventually leads to L’Innommable. The manuscript of L’Innommable also features a character who is initially referred to by means of an ‘M …’. Only later does he become ‘Mahood’. Not unlike Macmann, Mahood has been read in terms of ‘manhood’ (Cohn 2001: 188). As I will try to argue in the following section, L’Innommable can be read as an attempt (not necessarily successful) to find an alternative model of the mind.

8.2.2. Beckett’s L’Innommable: A mingling of inside and outside The manuscript of L’Innommable can serve as a case study to explore ‘enaction’ at work, which also transpires in the published text, especially in the conspicuous use of ‘epanorthosis’. This figure of speech also features among the rhetorical terms listed in one of Joyce’s manuscripts with ‘Preparatory and ‘Et si je me raconte, et puis l’autre qui est mon petit, et que je mangerai comme j’ai mangé les autres, c’est comme toujours, par besoin d’amour, merde alors, je ne m’attendais pas à ça, d’homuncule, je ne peux m’arrêter’ (Beckett 1995b: 84).

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ancillary materials’, preserved at the National Library of Ireland. Among these materials, there is a notebook (II.i.1) that contains a page with the heading ‘Rhetoric’. It shows two columns of rhetorical terms, each of which is followed by an example, most probably derived from a handbook on rhetoric such as the popular The Rhetorical Speaker and Poetical Class Book (1833) by R. T. Linnington. For instance, for Epizeuxis ‘or Repetition’, Linnington gives the example of Dryden’s ‘Happy, happy, happy pair’ and he defines epanorthosis ‘or Correction’ as ‘a figure by which the speaker retracts something before alleged, as not sufficiently forcible, and adds something more conformable to the subject, and nature of his feelings, as, “I labored more abundantly than they all; yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me,” 1 Cor. Xv.10’ (Linnington 1833: 29–30). These are also the examples in Joyce’s list (NLI II.i.1, 14r). Beckett, too, was aware of this figure of speech and made frequent use of it in L’Innommable, as Bruno Clément has shown in his study of rhetoric in Beckett’s works, L’Œuvre sans qualités (1989). Starting from Linnington’s working definition (‘a figure by which the speaker retracts something before alleged’), this rhetorical concept directly tallies with its narratological equivalent, described by Richardson as, … the phenomenon of ‘denarration’, voices that erase the texts that they have been creating, such as found in the sentences, ‘Yesterday it was raining. Yesterday it was not raining.’ The last, which I call the ‘permeable narrator’, slips (or is collapsed) into other minds and discourses and speaks what should be impossible for it to know; this is a favorite strategy of Beckett, especially in the trilogy. (Richardson 2006: xi)

In the section devoted to ‘Denarration’ in his book Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction (2006), Richardson describes the effect of denarration as ‘nearly always arresting, and to many readers it can be quite disconcerting’ (87). Richardson analyzes some of the potential causes of this effect, notably the impossibility in denarration of separating ‘story’ from ‘discourse’, and he chooses Beckett’s Molloy as an example. If ‘story’ designates the narrated events, reconstructed in their chronological order, abstracted from the ‘discourse’, that is, their disposition in the text, then ‘how are we to reconstruct any story when the discourse, as it unfolds, works to deny, negate, and erase the events recounted earlier?’ (94). He concludes that there will be hardly any recoverable story at all, only an amalgamation of past events that may or may not have happened: ‘All that is left for the narratologist to work with is the

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discourse since all we know is the sequence in which the dubious events are presented or negated’ (94). ‘All that is left for the narratologist to work with …’ does sound rather absolute and makes the invasion of discourse seem as total as the occupation of Gaul by the Romans, as presented on the opening page of every Astérix album: ‘50 B.C. All Gaul is occupied by the Romans. All? No! … One small village of indomitable Gauls still holds out against the invaders.’9 Translated to literary studies, such a small village of ‘indomitable Gauls’ could be genetic criticism. If the invader is the pervasive discourse, this is perhaps not ‘all’ that is left for the narratologist, for discourse-oriented criticism can always be combined with source-oriented research (Sternberg 1985: 14), even – or especially – in forms of ‘extreme narration’, such as denarration. Beckett’s writing method can be described in terms of what Louis Hay has called ‘écriture à processus’. As opposed to the ‘écriture à programme’ (‘programmatic writing’) of writers such as Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola or Thomas Mann, Beckett did not start with a fully elaborated programme that only had to be executed once it had been set in motion. In fact, his écriture à processus seems to coincide to a high degree with his narrator’s method, as described – in the form of two questions – in the very first paragraph of The Unnamable: ‘By aporia pure and simple? Or by affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered, or sooner or later?’ (Un 1). Especially the expression ‘invalidated as uttered’ is a fair description of both the figure of epanorthosis (on the micro-level of words and phrases) and denarration (on the macro-level of the narration). Later on, Beckett described this work, not so much as an effort to ‘express the nothing’, but as ‘a journey, irreversible, in gathering thinglessness, towards it’ (letter to Aidan Higgins, 8 February 1952; LSB II 319). He also presented this project as a form of submitting himself to his subject matter: ‘It was always submission with me, until I overdid it, with L’Innommable, I mean beyond the joke’ (letter to Aidan Higgins, 30 August 1955; LSB II 544). A good example is the moment one of the ‘homuncules’ becomes more important and the narrator decides to give him a new name, but he – and Beckett – have not found a name yet, only an initial, followed by a blank space: ‘Décidément Basile prend de l’importance. Je vais donc l’appeler M ’ (FN1, 20v). The manuscript of L’Innommable is indeed remarkable in that it shows how this ‘submission’ works, and how the diachrony of the genesis almost coincides with the novel’s synchronic structure. ‘Nous sommes en 50 avant Jésus-Christ. Toute la Gaule est occupée par les Romains … Toute? Non! Un village peuplé d’irréductibles Gaulois résiste encore et toujours à l’envahisseur.’

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Figure 8.1  Place of the inserted pages in the narrative (arrow) and in the physical space of the notebooks

But there is one notable exception, a peculiarity in the manuscript of L’Innommable, to which Chris Ackerley has drawn attention. As noted above, the manuscript is preserved in two notebooks (FN1 and FN2). In the first notebook, ‘there are two additional leaves inserted and pasted in between the last ruled page (p. 152) and the flyleaf ’ (Ackerley 1993: 53). The passage on these two inserted pages, starting with ‘Ma voix. La voix’, was eventually used, but much later in the novel (on pages 218–20 in the first edition).10 In the manuscript, this is the place where the narrator says: ‘I can’t go on in any case. But I must go on. So I’ll go on’ (Un 111) (‘Je ne vais pas pouvoir continuer, mais je dois continuer. Je vais donc continuer’ (FN2, 52v)). Although these lines prefigure the book’s famous last lines (‘you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on’; 134)11, this finale is still several dozens of pages away. Here, after playing with the modalities of (in)ability and obligation – I can’t go on, I must go on – the narrator says ‘I’ll go silent, for want of air, then the voice will come back and I’ll begin again’ (Un 111). This is where the passage on the pasted pages (‘Ma voix. La voix …’) is inserted, between ‘je recommencerai’ and ‘Maintenant il n’y a plus personne12’, or – in Beckett’s English translation – between ‘I’ll begin again’ and ‘Now there is no one left’: This corresponds to pages 177–9 in the second edition of L’Innommable (1971). The first and second editions of the French text differ at this point (see Chapter 9.2.1). 12 From the word ‘Maintenant’ onwards, the text is written in a slightly darker ink than the previous passage, which ends with ‘et je recommencerai’. Apart from this slight difference in shades of ink, the manuscript does not show any mark to indicate the insertion that was to be made (at a later stage) at this point in the text (see Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (www.beckettarchive.org), module 2, French Notebook 2, 53v). 10 11

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I’ll go silent, for want of air, then the voice will come back and I’ll begin again. My voice. The voice. I hardly hear it any more. I’m going silent … Then it will flare up, like a kindling fire, a gying fire, Mahood explained that to me, and I’ll emerge from silence … As if it were I! … Unless this time it’s the real silence at last. Perhaps I’ve said the thing that had to be said, that gives me the right to be done with speech, done with listening, done with hearing, without my knowing it. I’m listening already, I’m going silent. The next time I won’t go to such pains, I’ll tell one of Mahood’s old tales … Unless I try once more, just once more, one last time, to say what has to be said, about me, I feel it’s about me, perhaps that’s the mistake I make, perhaps that’s my sin, so as to have nothing more to say, nothing more to hear, till I die. It’s coming back. I’m glad. I’ll try again, quick before it goes again. Try what? I don’t know. To continue. Now there is no one left. That’s a good continuation. (Un 111–12; emphasis added)

The insertion could be incorporated almost without adaptations. To make it connect with ‘Now there is no one left’, Beckett had to write only a very short transition (‘It’s coming back. I’m glad. I’ll try again, quick before it goes again. Try what? I don’t know. To continue.’) In the inserted passage, the name of Mahood is mentioned twice. On the pasted pages in the manuscript, however, he did not have a name yet; he was still referred to only by his initial, ‘M …’, as in the early pages of the manuscript (see above). His name is mentioned for the first time on page 27v of the first notebook. The preceding page is dated ‘Paris, 8.6.49’. Chris Ackerley therefore rightly concluded that the pasted pages were most probably written before this date. He suggested that ‘we can reasonably assume that it predates anything in the Notebooks, and may even be the original “germ” from which the story grew’ (57). This assumption, as Ackerley admits, is indeed ‘slightly speculative’, and I think it is possible to determine more precisely what happens in the manuscript, thanks to a letter Beckett wrote to Georges Duthuit on 1 June 1949: I have done a little work. Each time I get down to it, it comes fairly easily, but I am reluctant to get down to it, more than ever. I have done one thing that I had never happened to do before: I wrote the last page of the book I am working on, whereas I am only on my 30th. I am not proud of myself. But the outcome is already so little in doubt, whatever the writhings that lie between me and it, of which I have only the vaguest of ideas. (LSB II 162; emphasis added)13 The French original reads as follows: ‘J’ai travaillé un peu. Chaque fois que je m’y mets, ça vient assez facilement, mais je répugne à m’y mettre, plus que jamais. J’ai fait une chose qu’il ne m’était jamais

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One of the reasons why Beckett explicitly mentions that he is not particularly proud of himself for having written the end at the beginning of the writing process can be found in his first (only posthumously published) novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women, in which Balzac is castigated precisely because of his ability to write the end of his novels before he has written the first paragraph: ‘To read Balzac is to receive the impression of a chloroformed world. He is absolute master of his material, he can do what he likes with it, he can foresee and calculate its least vicissitude, he can write the end of the book before he has finished the first paragraph’ (Beckett 1992b: 119–20). This teleological writing method was most probably what Beckett was ‘not proud’ of when he caught himself writing ‘the last page of the book’ at such an early stage in the ­composition process. However, the phrase ‘the last page of the book’, mentioned in the letter to Duthuit, cannot refer to the last page of the manuscript (the back flyleaf of FN2), for this end is marked by the date ‘janvier 1950’. What Beckett called ‘the last page’ on 1 June 1949 was more likely written on separate sheets, such as the two sheets of paper he glued into the back of the first notebook of the French manuscript, the text that starts with ‘Ma voix. La voix’ and ends with ‘avant d’être mort’ (FN1, 77r–78v). The content of these two inserted pages is quite dense, full of hypotheses. The passage suggests that the voice is going silent: ‘I hardly hear it any more. I’m going silent.’ But then it will ‘flare up’ again, like a ‘dying fire’ – ‘Mahood explained that to me,’ the narrator adds – and ‘I’ll emerge from silence.’ This ‘I’ is immediately questioned again: ‘As if it were I!’ But the narrator keeps making assumptions: ‘Unless this time it’s the real silence at last’ (Un 111; emphasis added). He considers the possibility that he has actually said the thing that had to be said, the thing that gives him the right to be silent, simply ‘without my knowing it’ (Un 112). He makes the resolution that, next time, he will not go to such pains again, that he ‘won’t bother any more about me’ and that he will simply ‘tell one of Mahood’s old tales’ (Un 112). But then he comes up with another alternative, again introduced by the word ‘Unless’: ‘Unless I try once more, just once more, one last time, to say what has to be said, about me, I feel it’s about me, perhaps that’s the mistake I make, perhaps that’s my sin, so as to have nothing more to say, nothing more to hear, till I die’ (112). That is the end of the passage. In the original French manuscript, it ends with the word ‘mort’ arrivé de faire, j’ai écrit la dernière page du livre en cours, alors que je n’en suis encore qu’à la 30me. Je n’en suis pas fier. Mais l’issue déjà fait si peu de doute, quels que soient les tortillements, ce dont je n’ai qu’une idée des plus vagues, qui m’en séparent’ (LSB II 160).

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Figure 8.2  Echoes on the narrative level (arrow) and chronology of the writing process

(‘avant de mourir d’être mort’) – a suitable ending for what Beckett called ‘the last page of the book’ at the time he wrote the passage. The question is whether Beckett knew exactly where he was heading, that is, whether the writing was really teleological. On the one hand, according to his letter to Duthuit, he seems to have had a clear idea of the ending at an early stage of the writing process. That would make him a twentieth-century Balzac, the kind of writer he explicitly did not want to be. On the other hand, he wrote at least 20 pages before he wrote this (preliminary) ‘last page’. This procedure comes closer to the writing process of À la recherche du temps perdu. Proust first wrote the beginning and the end; only then did he write the in-between parts. These parts kept expanding and Proust died before he could finish his book, which has led researchers to describe this procedure as ‘écrire sans fin’ (Milly and Warning 1996). This description is not entirely correct, though, for Proust, in order to be able to ‘write without end’, paradoxically needed an end to write toward. At first sight, Beckett seems to have proceeded in a similar way. At an early stage in the composition process he wrote an end to write towards, which he called ‘the last page of the book’, and all the rest was referred to as ‘writhings’ (‘tortillements’; LSB II 162). The difference between the approaches of Proust and Beckett, however, is that Proust did not fundamentally change the ending, whereas Beckett’s ending did not remain the ending. He did not cut it, but he undid its function as an ending. On 1 June 1949, he claimed he had only the vaguest of ideas with regard to the so-called ‘tortillements’, the ‘writhings’ between beginning and ending, while ‘the outcome’ was ‘already so little in doubt’. Eventually, however, Beckett decided not to end with this outcome. He just incorporated it in the text and

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wrote a new ending. This also changed the status of the inserted passage. What in June 1949 was announced as ‘the last page of the book’ thus turned into just another ‘writhing’. To investigate the nature of this ‘writhing’, it may be useful to zoom in on the part of the manuscript Beckett was writing at the beginning of June 1949, that is, the passage he was writing contemporaneously with the two loose sheets, pasted into the back of the notebook. Pages 20v, 21v and 22v were written between 20 May 194914 (as indicated at the top of page 21r) and 2 June 1949 (23r). These pages contain the passage where Basil is said to become more important, which is presented as a reason to rename him, even though the narrator does not have a name for him yet (FN1 20v; see above). ‘M’ is just called ‘M’ (followed by a blank space), not yet ‘Mahood’. The narrator then starts talking about M’s voice, noting that it has often been mingled with his own voice,15 and that M’s voice is ‘in’ the narrator’s.16 This passage is echoed at several instances in the inserted passage (on the two loose sheets glued into the back of the notebook).17 One of the echoes is the suggestion that without realizing it he may have said what needed to be said, that is, what gives him the right to keep silent.18 This suggestion on the first inserted page seems to be commented on in a jotting on page 22r: ‘Whence did I get the idea that if I ... I could keep silent?’19 These jottings are characteristic of Beckett’s writing method: he quickly jots down what comes to his mind, and usually the jotting is elaborated in the text with a slight delay. And indeed, the next page mentions the ‘curious idea’ of a task to be accomplished (‘une tâche à accomplir’),20 written after a short break The date at the top of page 21r (‘Ussy 20.5.49’) is written next to the lines ‘Je reprends, après des années. C’est donc que je me suis tu, que je peux me taire’ (FN1, 20v ; emphasis added) on the facing page. 15 ‘C’est sa voix qui s’est souvent mêlée à la mienne’ (FN1, 20v). 16 The last words of page 20v are ‘sa voix est là, dans la mienne’, continuing on the next page with ‘mais moins’. The narrator suggests that his voice will one day disappear, but he is well aware that it can always come back, and then disappear again, and reappear yet again. Then he would have to start all over again. This recommencement is described as follows: ‘Alors ma voix dirait, Tiens, je vais raconter une histoire de M … pour me reposer’ (BDMP2). This is exactly what he also suggests in the inserted passage: ‘je raconterai les xx une vieille histoire de M ...’ (BDMP2, FN1, inserted pages). 17 For instance, the suggestion that ‘sa voix est là, dans la mienne, mais moins’ is echoed at the beginning of the inserted passage: ‘Ma voix. La voix. Mais voilà que je l’entends moins bien. Je connais ça. Elle va cesser. Je ne l’entendrai plus. Je vais me taire.’ But then, the narrator has to start all over again: ‘Puis je recom je me recommencerai’ (BDMP2, FN1, first inserted page). 18 ‘J’ai peut-être dit ce qu’il fallait, ce qui me donne le droit de me taire’ (BDMP2, FN1, first inserted page). 19 ‘D’où me vient cette idée que si je … je pourrais me taire?’ (FN1, 22r; BDMP2). This note seems to question the line ‘ce qui me donne le droit de me taire’ (on the first inserted page), which suggests that there is a direct link between Beckett’s ‘paralipomena’ or loose jottings on the recto pages in the first part of the notebook (FN1, 22r) and the inserted pages. 20 ‘Curieuse idée, d’ailleurs, et fort sujette à caution, que celle d’une tâche à accomplir, pour avant de pouvoir être tranquille’ (FN1, 22v; BDMP2). 14

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(judging from the difference in shades of ink). The break is marked by the date mentioned on the opposite page: 2 June 1949, that is, one day after the letter to Duthuit, announcing that he had written the so-called ‘last page’.21 The narrator then suggests to himself that he may have almost reached his goal. But immediately he questions this suggestion again: ‘After ten thousand words?’22 Against the background of the letter to Duthuit, this ‘goal’ could refer to the so-called ‘last page’, that is, the inserted pages. In other words, the narrator thematizes Beckett’s announcement of the end when he had only written about 24 pages or – roughly – 10,000 words (the first 22 pages plus the two inserted leaves amount to over 9,700 words). In a similar way as the movement of the epanorthosis, Beckett undermines his ending almost as soon as he has written it. No sooner has he announced the so-called ‘last page of the book’ to Duthuit, than he already questions it. While the echoes mentioned above suggest that M’s voice is ‘inside’ the firstperson narrator’s, another jotting suggests that the ‘I’ is inside Mahood, not the other way round: ‘Pas Mahood dans moi: moi dans Mahood’ (FN1, 37r). This raises the question of who is who in Beckett’s Matryoshka-like doodle illustrating the idea of a homunculus inside a head on page 21r of the second notebook.23 The doodle can be interpreted as an illustration of the ‘homunculus’ model or what Dennett called the ‘Cartesian theatre’. One of Dennett’s alternatives is the so-called ‘multiple drafts model’. This model tallies with what Beckett is gropingly suggesting in L’Innommable. And again the so-called ‘last page of the book’ can serve as an illustration.

8.2.3. The multiple drafts model at work: variants and variations In the letter to Duthuit, Beckett claims that he has written the ‘last page of the book’. In other words, he claims that he knows what he is writing towards. Eventually, however, he ‘undoes’ the ending, not by cancelling it, but by taking away its status as an ending. He incorporates it in the body of the text in the second half of the novel. We have seen that it is full of echoes of the passage in the first half of the novel that was written around the same time, 1 June What the text elaborates on between the jotting ‘D’où me vient cette idée que si je … je pourrais me taire?’ and the passage ‘Curieuse idée … que celle d’une tâche à accomplir’ is precisely this notion of a ‘task’ (‘une tâche à accomplir’), which is first called a ‘leçon’ and then a ‘pensum’: ‘Oui, j’ai un pensum à faire, avant d’être libre … libre de me taire’ (FN1, 21v ; BDMP2). 22 ‘Tu touches peut-être au but. Après 10.000 mots? Mon pauvre ami. Me parler, je ne me suis pas assez parlé’ (FN1, 22v; BDMP2); in Beckett’s own translation: ‘This is perhaps about you, and your goal at hand. After ten thousand words?’ (Un 21). 23 See also the remark ‘je suis dans une tête’ (BDMP 2, FN2, 24v). 21

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1949. Unless new evidence shows up, there is only one extant manuscript of L’Innommable, written in two notebooks with the two loose sheets pasted into the first notebook. With their many echoes or alternative phrasings, these two inserted pages eventually performed the function of multiple drafts, rather than of the ending of the book. They have been reshuffled, not unlike the way Dennett sees the workings of the conscious mind, that is, as a process of editorial revision, in the absence of a single narrative that counts as the canonical version (Dennett 1991: 112–13, 136; see Chapter 7.2.1). According to this model of the mind, the cognitive process is a constant dialectics of composition and decomposition, narration and denarration. Beckett seems to have applied such a multi-version model to the text as it is published. Both the multiple drafts model and the text of L’Innommable have a diachronic dimension, but there is a difference. If – reducing the complexity for the sake of clarity – the notion of the avant-texte (the multiple versions preceding the published text) can be presented as a vertical succession of horizontal layers,24 and if the published text thus appears as one of these horizontal layers, say the ‘top layer’, the project of L’Innommable seems to be a translation of the vertical to the horizontal. Instead of a ‘vertical’ succession of multiple versions of one text, the one text is conceived of as a ‘horizontal’ succession of multiple versions, the way the individual is a succession of individuals, as Beckett had already suggested in his essay Proust: ‘Life is habit. Or rather life is a succession of habits, since the individual is a succession of individuals’ (Beckett 1965: 19). That is why ‘epanorthosis’ is such an important figure of speech in L’Innommable, since it performs Dennett’s cognitive ‘editorial process’ within the ‘horizontal’ structure of the text (the structure that used to be the main focus of structuralist narratology). Epanorthosis is a figure of speech that could be seen as a way of ‘horizontally’ writing out what in manuscripts presents itself as a deletion replaced by an addition to substitute it, as in ‘an army of 10,000 100,000 soldiers’. In the metaphor of vertical vs horizontal structures, the substitution in the manuscript is a ‘vertical’ succession of different stages – (1) a statement, (2) a deletion, (3) a substitution: (1) an army of 10,000 soldiers (2) an army of 10,000 soldiers (3) an army of 100,000 soldiers

Pierre-Marc de Biasi speaks of the avant-texte as an ‘object structured by time’ (2004: 42) and contrasts this diachronic structure with the object of research of structuralism, which used to be ‘dominated by a synchronic obsession with form’ (41).

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Whereas a published text usually presents only the third stage, the epanorthosis makes stages (1) and (2) explicit. The equivalent of the cancellation (2) is the ‘no’, functioning as the retraction or negating pivot of the epanorthosis, in which this ‘vertical’ structure is translated ‘horizontally’: ‘an army of 10,000 – no, 100,000 soldiers’. An interesting modernist example is the ending of Joyce’s Ulysses. The earliest draft, preserved at the National Library of Ireland, contains a remarkable variant, first signalled by Michael Groden in his keynote address at the 2002 James Joyce Symposium in Trieste. Molly Bloom’s famous last words ‘I will yes’ were originally ‘I would yes’.25 The word ‘would’ is cancelled and was instantly revised, ‘currente calamo’ (the substituting word ‘will’ is not a supralinear addition but an inline correction: ‘I would will yes’). Against the background of the creative undoing discussed with reference to the Declaration of Independence, Joyce’s cancellation of ‘would’ is remarkable. Molly’s closing line is probably the most famous affirmative sentence in the history of literature, and yet, in order to write it, even Joyce seems to have proceeded – not unlike the Unnamable – ‘by affirmations … invalidated as uttered’ (Beckett 2010b: 1), and the decision to write ‘I will yes’ was preceded by a moment of hesitation. With a Beckettian twist, the manuscript version of Molly’s final words therefore reads as an epanorthosis: ‘I would, no, I will yes’. In rare cases, Beckett’s manuscripts show a direct translation of a deletion (or series of deletions) into an epanorthosis, for instance in the case of this fragment: ‘comme elle, elle ce que ça peut être, la le bruit ce que j’entends non, pas comme elle, comme moi’ (FN2, 44v). In vertical presentation, the sequence of deletions could be rendered as a series of versions: comme elle, elle comme elle, elle comme elle, ce que ça peut être, comme elle, ce que ça peut être, comme elle, la comme elle, la comme elle, le bruit comme elle, le bruit comme elle, ce que j’entends …

NLI, The Joyce Papers 2002, II.ii.8, ‘Partial draft “Penelope”’; http://catalogue.nli.ie/Collection/ vtls000194606/HierarchyTree?lookfor=#tabnav

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Only after several trials and errors (the failed attempts to formulate the comparison) did Beckett decide to retract the word ‘elle’. But this time he decided not to delete it and substitute it by ‘moi’, which would have resulted in the following vertical presentation: (1) comme elle (2) comme elle (3) comme moi

Instead, he translated this substitution on the ‘horizontal’ plane in the form of an epanorthosis: ‘(1) comme elle, (2) non, pas comme elle, (3) comme moi’. What ‘epanorthosis’ performs on the micro-level of words and phrases, is performed on a larger scale by ‘denarration’. The passage between pages 21 and 23 (passage A), and the passage on the loose sheets (passage B), both written around 1 June 1949, could be regarded as two drafts (as in Dennett’s multiple drafts model), containing several echoes and variations, but not ‘variants’ in the strict sense of the word. A variant is a different reading in one version compared to another version, that is (using the same vertical/ horizontal metaphor), a different reading between two ‘horizontal’ layers in the vertical presentation. One could present (A) and (B) as versions of each other and treat them as multiple drafts, in which ‘mais moins’ in (A) is a variant of the more elaborate variant ‘Mais voilà que je l’entends moins bien’ in (B): (A) ‘sa voix est là, dans la mienne, mais moins’ (FN1, 20v–21v; cf. Beckett 1953: 45) (B) ‘Ma voix. La voix. Mais voilà que je l’entends moins bien’ (FN1, first inserted page; cf. Beckett 1953: 218)

Daniel Ferrer has discussed the difficulty of defining the difference between ‘variants’ and ‘variations’. His example is the opening line of Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway: ‘Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.’ In earlier versions, Woolf had considered other consumables: first the silk, then the gloves (Ferrer 2011: 132). Or in a vertical presentation: Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the silk herself. Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the gloves herself. Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

The three different readings in the three different versions are clearly ‘variants’.

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Ferrer suggests, however, that perhaps one could also regard them as ‘variations’ when one sees the three variants as ‘variations’ on a theme, according to Nelson Goodman’s definition that in order for a passage to be considered a variation on a theme, it has to refer or allude to this theme (Ferrer 2011: 132). In this case, the theme could be summarized as the futility of luxury goods (Ferrer 2011: 137). Or in sociological terms, the three commodities could be regarded as variations on the theme of ‘the upper middle class’. But this transformation of variants into variations on a theme can normally only be accomplished by ‘the genetically informed reader’ (‘le lecteur génétiquement informé’; Ferrer 2011: 138), who knows about the early drafts (the ‘vertical’ dimension). By translating the ‘vertical’ dimension into the ‘horizontal’ dimension of the running text, Beckett could be said to invite his readers to apply the variations-on-a-theme method on the textual level: instead of treating ‘mais moins’ and ‘Mais voilà que je l’entends moins bien’ as variants, he turns them into variations spread out ‘horizontally’ over the narrative sequence of L’Innommable. Similarly, the common element in these two variations between (A) and (B) is ‘me taire’ – the theme of the variations being the possibility or impossibility of keeping silent: (A) ‘Oui, j’ai un pensum à faire, avant d’être libre … libre de me taire’ (21v; cf. Beckett 1953: 46) / (B) ‘ce qui me donne le droit de me taire’ (inserted passage; cf. Beckett 1953: 219). Beckett has composed his work in such a way that there is an interval of more than 170 pages between these variations in the published text. The second variation was part of what was originally conceived of as ‘the last page of the book’, the passage which ended with ‘being dead’ [‘être mort’]. The temporary teleology created by writing this end was immediately undermined, by means of the metafictional comment on the 10,000 words. And when Beckett eventually inserted this ‘end’ in the narrative, he made a point of denarrating it by means of the real end of the book. Instead of ending with ‘être mort’, the book closes with the word ‘continuer’. In other words, ‘Tomorrow I won’t go on. Tomorrow I’ll go on’, to sharpen the contrast as in Richardson’s example of denarration (inspired by Molloy): ‘Yesterday it was raining. Yesterday it was not raining.’ Denarrating is a form of narrating, proceeding ‘by affirmations or negations invalidated as uttered’ (Un 1). And in the particular case of L’Innommable, Beckett seems to have taken this technique one step further by suggesting a direct link between the cancellations in his manuscripts and the epanorthoses in his text, between the ‘self ’ as a form of continuous narration and the narration as continuous incompletion (Abbott 1999: 20); between the ‘repudiation’ of selfhood (Levy 2007: 101) and the technique of denarration or

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‘narrative self-erasure’;26 between the ‘I’ as a succession of individuals and the narrative as a series of multiple drafts, as in Dennett’s multiple drafts model. One could even argue that L’Innommable prefigures the more recent cognitive paradigm of ‘enaction’, which sees the mind, not as something that takes place exclusively inside a head, but as something that consists of a constant interaction between the brain and the environment.

8.2.4. Inside and outside: the ‘manipulation of environmental vehicles’ During the 1940s and 1950s, Beckett explored an alternative model of the mind in terms of a mingling of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ (LSB II 140; see below). This alternative to the Cartesian mind–body split is preceded by a complex thought process, which is partially recorded in the margins of his books and in his early reviews. In terms of exogenesis, Beckett’s reading traces in his copy of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu show a remarkable preoccupation with the relationship between inside and outside. Since Proust is one of the major modernists, he would – according to the critical commonplace – be an exponent of the so-called ‘inward turn’. But Beckett’s marginalia, made in the early 1930s, already qualify this internalist interpretation, as the following discussion may illustrate. In the first volume, Beckett marked several passages that thematize the act of reading (Van Hulle and Nixon 2013: 70). When the narrator describes his reading experience, he employs the image of a zone of evaporation as a metaphor for the way in which ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, the subject and the surrounding objects, are separated by his consciousness: When I saw an external object, my consciousness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it, surrounding it with a thin spiritual border that prevented me from ever touching its substance directly; for it would somehow evaporate before I could make contact with it, just as an incandescent body that is brought into proximity with something wet never actually touches its moisture, since it is always preceded by a zone of evaporation.27 Brian McHale quotes this sentence from The Unnamable to illustrate the technique of ‘narrative self-erasure’: ‘The slopes are gentle that meet where he lies, they flatten out under him, it is not a meeting, it is not a pit, that didn’t take long, soon we’ll have him perched on an eminence.’ McHale’s analysis stresses the immediate self-revision that also characterizes ‘epanorthosis’: ‘Here the voice of Beckett’s Unnamable projects a “sliding” state of affairs, one that revises itself before our eyes from a pit to a level enclosure, and which, as the voice ironically observes, might just as easily continue sliding until the pit had been revised into an ad hoc hill!’ (McHale 1991: 101). 27 ‘Quand je voyais un objet extérieur, la conscience que je le voyais restait entre moi et lui, le bordait d’un mince liséré spiritual qui m’empêchait de jamais toucher directement sa matière ; 26

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In Dream of Fair to Middling Women,28 Beckett referred to this ‘zone of evaporation’ and shortly before he started writing L’Innommable, he mentioned it again in a letter to Georges Duthuit (2 March 1949; LSB II 131).29 A week later, under the guise of analyzing Bram van Velde’s paintings, Beckett further developed his poetics with regard to the interaction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, claiming that they are ‘one and the same’: We have waited a long time for an artist who is brave enough, is at ease enough with the great tornadoes of intuition, to grasp that the break with the outside world entails the break with the inside world, that there are no replacement relations for naïve relations, that what are called outside and inside are one and the same. (LSB II 140; emphasis added)30

This is the background against which Beckett is writing L’Innommable, in which the first-person narrator thematizes this interplay between inside and outside by means of the metaphor of a tympanum. While Proust compared consciousness to a zone of evaporation between the subject and the world of objects, the narrating ‘I’ seems to occupy the place of consciousness in this in-between zone, suggesting that consciousness is the ‘unnamable’: ... perhaps that’s what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in the middle, perhaps that’s what I am, the thing that divides the world in two, on the one side the outside, on the other the inside, that can be as thin as foil, I’m neither one side nor the other, I’m in the middle, I’m the partition, I’ve two surfaces and

elle se volatilisait en quelque sorte avant que je prisse contact avec elle, comme un corps incandescent qu’on approche d’un objet mouillé ne touche pas son humidité parce qu’il se fait toujours précéder d’une zone d’évaporation’ (Proust 1928–9, I.124; trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1989), 90; emphasis added). 28 Beckett applied this image to Belacqua and the Alba, more precisely to the ‘expression of themselves at odds’ – ‘the profound antagonism latent in the neutral space that between victims of real needs is as irreducible as the zone of evaporation between damp and incandescence’ (Beckett 1992b: 191–92; emphasis added). Here, he marked the borrowed image explicitly as a theft: ‘(We stole that one. Guess where)’ (192). In his essay ‘Recent Irish Poetry’, published in The Bookman (August 1934) under the pseudonym Andrew Belis, Beckett applied a similar idea to ‘the younger Irish poets [who] evince awareness of … the breakdown of the object’. Without referring explicitly to Proust, he presented the space that intervenes between the artist and the world of objects as a no-man’s land (Beckett 1984b: 70). 29 In this letter to Georges Duthuit (2 March 1949; LSB II 131), Beckett made a direct link between this ‘no-man’s land’ and the ‘zone of evaporation’, this time without mentioning that he had ‘stolen’ this metaphor from Proust. 30 In the opening paragraph of L’Innommable, notably the paradoxical line ‘J’ai l’air de parler, ce n’est pas moi, de moi, ce n’est pas de moi’, the ‘non-moi’ of his programmatic letter to Duthuit of 9 March still reverberates: ‘peut-on concevoir une expression en l’absence de rapports quelles qu’ils soient, aussi bien entre le moi et le non-moi qu’à l’intérieur de celui-là?’ (LSB II 135) (‘can one conceive of expression in the absence of relations of whatever kind, whether those between “I” and “non-I” or those within the former?’ [139]).

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no thickness, perhaps that’s what I feel, myself vibrating, I’m the tympanum, on the one hand the mind, on the other the world, I don’t belong to either. (100)

In the French version the tympanum is located between on the one hand ‘le crâne’ (‘the skull’) and on the other ‘le monde’ (‘the world’) (Beckett 1953: 160). Next to this line, Theodor Adorno wrote in the margin of his copy of L’Innommable: ‘das Ich als Indifferenz’ (‘the I as indifference’), using the same word with which he also described Endgame: ‘The play takes place in a no man’s land, a zone of indifference between inner and outer’ (Adorno 2010: 168). What the narrator of The Unnamable describes is not a ‘skullscape’ (Hansford 1983; see Chapter 5.1), the landscape of the inside of a skull; instead, it emphasizes the interaction or vibration between neural and environmental elements, which is a continuous process. Hence the word ‘on’, which becomes increasingly prominent in Beckett’s works, from the last line of The Unnamable (‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’; 134) to the first and last word of Worstward Ho (‘On. Say on ... Said nohow on’; Beckett 2009i: 81, 103). This interactive model of the extended mind is suggested by the writing process as an example of enaction at work. From this enactive perspective, modern manuscripts serve as a testing ground to investigate ‘how the manipulation of environmental vehicles constitutes cognitive processes’ (Menary 2010a: 21; see Chapter 5.3). Beckett treats his own manuscripts as an Umwelt and he studies this familiar terrain to rethink the Cartesian view on the mind. In the case of a writer’s mind, like Beckett’s, the most direct ‘Umwelt’ or ‘outside’ environment is his notebook and the tabletop. That this environment was important to Beckett is evidenced by the place indication next to the date of 2 June 1949 in the manuscript of L’Innommable: ‘sur la tablette en orme’ – ‘on the elm tree tabletop’ (FN1, 23r). But the materiality of the notebook itself is even more important as part of the extended mind, to such a degree that I think Beckett consciously decided to end his novel on the very last page of his second notebook. The words ‘il faut continuer, je vais continuer’, followed by ‘FIN’ and the place and date (‘Ussy janvier 1950’) are written on the very last page (the verso of the back flyleaf) of the second notebook, so there was no space left to continue. For a novel of more than 260 pages (Beckett 1953), this is either an extraordinary coincidence, or – more likely – part of Beckett’s dysteleological approach. After having caught himself in the act of writing the ending before he had written 10,000 words, he decided not to cut his so-called ‘last page of the book’, but to denarrate it. Instead of ending his book with ‘être mort’, he ended

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with the opposite, ‘je vais continuer’. And he allowed his narrator to go on until the limited material space prevented him from going on. In short, Beckett first wrote 22 pages. Then, if we can rely on the information in his letter to Duthuit, he wrote the ‘last page of the book’, probably on the loose sheets pasted into the back of the first notebook. This would have been his Balzac-like composition, with the ending written before the rest – a narration about the workings of a mind full of homunculi, in the matryoshka-doll style of the Cartesian model of the mind. But then he decided to ‘denarrate’ this ‘narrative selfhood’ (Dennett 1991: 418) by taking away the privileged status of the original ending, resulting in an ‘unending’ succession of multiple drafts integrated into the ‘horizontal’ structure of the running text according to the model of ‘epanorthosis’. The only ‘thing’ that could put an end to this unending narration was the physicality or materiality of this enactive process: the final page of the notebook.

8.2.5. ‘Ceiling’: enactive consciousness at work After L’Innommable, Beckett perfected his method of translating the ‘vertical’ diachrony of multiple drafts into the structure of the text, thus illustrating the multiple drafts model and the ‘extended mind’ at work. A good example is Beckett’s late text ‘Ceiling’. This short piece of prose is about the slow process of regaining consciousness, or ‘coming to’ as it is called in the text. The narrative situation is that of a man lying in a bed, opening his eyes. The first thing he sees is the white ceiling: ‘On coming to his first sight was of white’ (Beckett 2009b: 129).31 The text implicitly suggests a non-Cartesian model of consciousness. The second paragraph contrasts the situation of having ‘come to’ with the action of having ‘gone from’: ‘No knowledge of where gone from. Nor of how. Nor of whom. None of whence come to. Partly to. Nor of how. Nor of whom’ (Beckett 2009b: 129). The ‘to and fro’ suggests a gradual transition from an unconscious condition to a state of consciousness. This dimly conscious state is described as a step-by-step development: several paragraphs that slightly differ from each other, but also show several corresponding elements, thus resembling consecutive versions or ‘multiple drafts’ as in Dennett’s model. The difference with Dennett’s model, however, is that Beckett ‘extends’ the mind by making neural processes interact with an external element. The first three paragraphs contain the words ‘dim consciousness’; the first four paragraphs all contain the In the first draft ‘On coming to’ is still ‘On coming to himself ’ (HRC 17.1, 1r).

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words ‘dull white’; in the fifth and final paragraph the dullness is connected to recognition of something that seems familiar: On coming to the first sight is of white ... Dim consciousness ... dull white. Further one cannot. On. No knowledge of where gone from. Nor of how ... Dim consciousness alone ... dull white. Further one cannot. On. Dim consciousness first alone. Of mind alone ... Then worse come of body too ... dull white. Further one – On. Something of one come to. Somewhere to. Somehow to ... dull white. Further – On. Dull with breath. Endless breath. Endless ending breath. Dread darling sight. (Beckett 2009b: 130)

It is remarkable that, in this patient study of the dimly conscious mind, Beckett describes its workings by means of the interaction with an external object, the white ceiling. Not unlike the interaction between the intelligent agent and the wall in Woolf ’s story ‘The Mark on the Wall’ (see Chapter 6), the mind is implicitly extended to an external environment. Although this environment is deliberately reduced to just a ceiling, it does play an active role in driving the cognitive process of coming to. The content of the text postulates ignorance (‘no knowledge’) of the how defining the relationship between the mind and the physical environment, but the form of the texts enacts it. Beckett’s text about regaining consciousness performs this gradual cognitive process, modelled after the writing process. From a post-cognitivist perspective, the mind is not some ‘inside’ separated from an ‘outside’, but an interaction between – for instance – a bedridden organism and the ceiling above, or a writer and the paper on which s/he writes. The mind engenders itself continuously. Hence the word ‘on’, marking the constant process and serving as a marker to separate the multiple ‘drafts’. The dull white of the ceiling is easily translated into the dull white of the paper. The interaction with the paper is part of a writer’s cognitive processing, according to Richard Menary, who argues that ‘writing transforms our cognitive abilities’ (2007: 621). The nexus between the mind and the manuscript is a constant process of interaction that helps constitute the mind in the first place. In this context, Beckett’s last work, ‘Comment dire’ / ‘what is the word’, is one of the most remarkable experiments.

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8.2.6. A dysteleological, enactive ‘what is the word’ Beckett consciously decided to end his oeuvre with an unfinished work that evokes the workings of a mind, precisely by showing the interaction with the paper during the writing process. This last work, ‘Comment dire’ (translated by Beckett himself as ‘what is the word’), looks like a poem, but it can be read as both an attempt to write one single sentence and the failure to complete it. This process is scrutinized meticulously. At regular intervals the text is interrupted by the phrase ‘comment dire’, or in the English version: ‘what is the word –’ (Beckett 2009h: 133–5). Against the background of the drafts,32 this text illustrates how Beckett’s experience with his manuscripts as part and parcel of the extended mind served as a model to devise a method of evoking the workings of a fictional mind. The fictional mind at work in ‘Comment dire’ is constantly switching roles between writing and reading. The question ‘comment dire’ is the engine of this cognitive process. It corresponds with the creative undoing (in the form of deletions and substitutions), which in the manuscripts constitutes the engine of invention. The manuscripts of ‘Comment dire’ can be seen as a continuation of the writing process of Beckett’s previous work, Stirrings Still. The first sentence of the first draft of this work ends abruptly with the words ‘comment dire’: ‘Tout tout le temps Toujours à la même distance comme c’est comment dire?’33 The phrase ‘comment dire’ indicates a failure to utter, but at the same time it serves as a driving force of the cognitive process of invention that led to several abandoned passages and, eventually, to Beckett’s penultimate text, Stirrings Still / Soubresauts. His next work, ‘Comment dire’, was written after an accident. In July 1988, Beckett fell in his kitchen and was discovered unconscious. The diagnosis was inconclusive. He had a neurological illness, but the cause was uncertain. The effect, however, was clear enough. He temporarily suffered from aphasia. Laura Salisbury has drawn attention to this circumstance and suggests a reading of this final work as ‘the expression of a disabled author’ (Salisbury 2008: 78). Beckett seems to have proceeded the way neuroscientists tend to do: ‘In neuroscience, one of the classic ways of investigating how the brain works has been to study people in whom an injury or disease has damaged a specific part of the brain’ (Greenfield 2000: 19). Analogous to the way neurodegenerative

The drafts of ‘Comment dire’ / ‘what is the word’ were recently made available online as part of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project; www.beckettarchive.org Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, module 1 (BDMP1, www.beckettarchive.org); UoR MS 2933/1, 1r.

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disorders suggest new lines of enquiry, Beckett seems to have taken advantage of this disability due to old age. A few years earlier, when he was in his seventies, he admitted to Lawrence Shainberg that he ‘always thought old age would be a writer’s best chance’: It’s a paradox, but with old age, the more the possibilities diminish, the better chance you have. With diminished concentration, loss of memory, obscured intelligence – what you, for example, might call ‘brain damage’ – the more chance there is for saying something closest to what one really is. Even though everything seems inexpressible, there remains the need to express. A child needs to make a sand castle even though it makes no sense. (Beckett in Shainberg 1987: 103)

Shainberg suggests that on the subject of his age and the deterioration of both mind and body, Beckett was ‘not only unintimidated but challenged’ (Shainberg 1987: 103). Beckett’s temporary aphasia indeed seems to have incited him to write ‘Comment dire’, a text about a particular moment (comparable to the ‘comment dire’ moment in the manuscripts of Stirrings Still), when one is stuck and cannot find the right words to proceed; and more generally about any form of thinking on paper. While he was recovering, he wrote ‘Comment dire’, first in the Hôpital Pasteur and subsequently in the nursing home Tiers Temps, as indicated on the first page of his first draft.34 In the earliest French version, the interrupting phrase is ‘quel est le mot’ (‘what is the word’), not the more idiomatic French expression ‘comment dire’. The cognitive process that is evoked in the published version should not be confused with the cognitive process of the writer Samuel Beckett, as for instance the first word already indicates. The fictional cognitive process starts with the word ‘folie’ whereas Beckett’s cognitive process (insofar as it left its trace on the pages of his notebook) started with the word ‘mal’: mal de ce – depuis – mal depuis ce – ce – que ce – quel est le mot – le mot pour ce – ce ceci – ce ceci-ci – il n’y a pas de mot –

What ‘this this here’ is –‘ce ceci-ci’ – is never made explicit in any of the drafts, BDMP1; the original manuscript is preserved at the University of Reading (UoR), MS 3316, 2r.

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nor is it explained in the published French and English versions. In this first version it is even suggested that there is no word (‘il n’y a pas de mot’), but the very utterance of this failure to utter seems to serve as an impulse to keep searching. On the next recto page, the manuscript bifurcates in the middle of the text. After the line ‘comment dire du mal folie donc vu ce ceci-ci à –’ the text proceeds in two parallel columns. comment dire du mal folie donc vu ce ceci-ci à – à voir – à– croire – comment dire – à croire voir – à voir – quoi – croire voir – ... quoi – ...  (BDMP1, UoR MS 3316, 3r)

Facsimile Available Online www.beckettarchive.org > Comment dire > UoR MS 3316 > page 3r

While the first column starts with the verb ‘to see’, the alternative in the second column suggests that even the verb ‘voir’ was preceded by a moment of hesitation. This is more than a hesitation in the manuscript. Beckett may have been in doubt as to how he was going to proceed; at the same time, this doubt has left its traces on the manuscript in the form of a draft that splits into two alternatives. In his last text, Beckett is giving shape to what, in his first published text, he said about James Joyce’s ‘Work in Progress’ (before it was called Finnegans Wake): ‘Here form is content, content is form … His writing is not about something; it is that something itself’ (Beckett 1984a: 27). To illustrate his point, Beckett chose the word ‘doubt’. The English language, according to Beckett, was ‘abstracted to death’ and Joyce brought it back to life, by developing a new expression of the abstract concept ‘doubt’: ‘in twosome twiminds’ (28). This is an apt description of what happens in the manuscript of ‘Comment dire’: the text is constantly ‘in twosome twiminds’ and the process of thinking and writing is driven by a dialectic of composition and decomposition. What he wrote in his first text can be applied to his last work: here, form is content, content is form; the text is not about a cognitive process, it is that cognitive process itself. Even though the text never makes explicit what ‘this this here’ is, the insistent deixis draws its readers’ attention to the materiality of the process of cognition, the interaction between neural processes and the writing surface.

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In the English translation, Beckett seems to pay extra tribute to James Joyce, by referring to the closing/opening sentence of Finnegans Wake, ‘Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the / riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s’ (FW 628; 3). Not only did Beckett give a prominent place to the word ‘given’ (‘given – / folly given all this –’), he also allowed his text to echo the rhythm of Joyce’s last line. The word that is being looked for is out of reach: ‘afaint afar away over there’ (Beckett 2009a: 134). In the meantime, the sentence does not even manage to attain completion. Its longest version is: ‘folly for to need to seem to glimpse afaint afar away over there what –’ (134). The fact that the final line is the only one that is not followed by a hyphen suggests the (grammatical) possibility that the final ‘what is the word’ might not be a question, but an affirmative statement: ‘what’ is indeed the word. This word has a long history in Beckett’s work, going back at least to the novel Watt, with its textual surface that is interrupted by blanks to indicate that there is a ‘Hiatus in MS’ (Beckett 2009g: 207) or that the manuscript is illegible (209). In his dramatic work, the play Not I is marked by more than 20 moments when the protagonist (‘Mouth’) says ‘what?’ In the only surviving page with Beckett’s production notes for this play, he emphasized that an extra pause was needed before each utterance of ‘what?’ (Van Hulle 2009c: 51), suggesting that Mouth is listening and reacting to a prompt. From a Woolfian perspective, and within the context of modernism, this prompt could be called an ‘internal voice’. In Beckett’s last text, however, it becomes clear that the ‘what –’ is prompted, not so much by an internal voice, but by the Umwelt of the manuscript. If ‘what’ is the word, it would only be so because it always restarts the cognitive process of the ‘extended mind’. From a post-Cartesian perspective, ‘what’ is the word that indicates the negotiation of opportunities for action and interaction between inquisitive, intelligent agents and their environment, even if the environment is reduced to a Beckettian minimum, the ‘dull white’ (Beckett 2009a: 129) of a ceiling or of a notebook page. In ‘Comment dire’ / ‘what is the word’, the attempt to write a sentence founders midway. And since this is Beckett’s last text, his entire oeuvre ends in mid-sentence. This was a conscious decision. On the first page of his notebook, we find the late addition: ‘Keep! for end’ (BDMP1, UoR MS 3316, 2r). Beckett thus deliberately ‘closed’ his entire oeuvre in the middle of a sentence, openly showing his model of the mind as an interactive process: the mind as a constant dialectic of deletions and additions, composition and decomposition. He drew attention to the enactive interplay with the ‘text produced so far’ as one of the

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‘ways of worldmaking’, as they were called by Nelson Goodman (1975). Daniel Ferrer (2011: 180) refers to this process of ‘worldmaking’, and especially to Goodman’s keen observation that in creative processes decomposition is just as crucial as composition. The dialectic of composition and decomposition can be found in every genetic dossier that consists of multiple drafts. As a late modernist, Beckett made this process transparent in the structure of his published texts, thus showing that the modernist interest in the workings of the mind is not an internalist preoccupation or ‘inward turn’ but an early sensitivity to enaction and ‘Umwelt’ research, prefiguring much of what cognitive sciences confirm today.

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9

Epigenesis: The Sense of ‘Unending’

The limits of the avant-texte are notoriously difficult to determine. The zone between exogenesis and endogenesis is often characterized by gradual transitions, and in many cases the genesis continues in the editorial phase (which in Pierre-Marc de Biasi’s typology corresponds to the stage of the ‘text’, no longer to the stage of the avant-texte; de Biasi 1996a: 34–5; see Introduction). To try to define this ‘epigenetic’ zone, it may be useful to start from the metaphors that are often associated with it.

9.1. Montaigne’s marginalia: Metaphors and models When, in 1979, Raymonde Debray Genette coined the terms exogenesis and endogenesis in her ‘Genèse et poétique: le cas Flaubert’, she already pointed out that it is difficult to clearly distinguish between the two categories. Pierre-Marc de Biasi subsequently tried to define the two terms,1 and later on, Nicolas Cavaillès employed the metaphor of a river (endogenesis) and its (exogenetic) affluents.2 This metaphor corresponds to John Bryant’s concept of ‘the fluid text’ (Bryant 2002) and to Pierre-Marc de Biasi’s presentation of the ‘bon à tirer’ (‘pass for press’) moment as a transition from a ‘liquid’ to a ‘frozen’ state: ‘the decisive moment when what had been in a pliable and mobile manuscript state up to that point becomes fixed in the frozen shape of a published text’ (de Biasi 1996a: 37). The presentation of the bon à tirer moment as a freezing point may create the impression that the genesis stops at this moment, but as Pierre-Marc de Pierre-Marc de Biasi’s definitions are: ‘L’exogenèse désigne tout procès d’écriture consacré à un travail de recherche, de sélection et d’intégration qui porte sur des informations émanant d’une source extérieure à l’écriture’; ‘l’endogenèse …  désigne tout procès scripturaire centré sur l’élaboration de l’écriture par elle-même’ (de Biasi 1998: 45–46). 2 ‘La rivière de l’exogenèse se jette dans le fleuve de l’endogenèse, tout élément exogénétique étant progressivement incorporé au texte en cours jusqu’à s’y fondre et y suivre un destin commun avec les éléments endogénétiques qui l’environnent’ (Cavaillès 2007). 1

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Biasi indicates, the text keeps transforming after this point. The difference with the avant-texte, however, is that these transformations after the ‘pass for press’ moment take place in a public environment, rather than in the relatively private atmosphere of the writing process. According to de Biasi, the modifications can be considerable, but the relations between multiple published versions do not correspond to the ‘logic of a process comparable to that of the avant-texte’.3 De Biasi does nuance this thesis, but only in a footnote. The content of this note is more important than its ‘underground’ status or its location below the body of the text suggests. De Biasi draws attention to the literary production of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a period from which only few working manuscripts have been preserved and in which writers often used the successive annotated editions of their works as stages of revision. In these cases, it would be appropriate to speak of a form of genetics of the printed text (‘une véritable génétique du texte imprimé’).4 My suggestion is that this phenomenon is not necessarily limited to these two centuries and that this form of textual genesis after the ‘pass for press’ moment could be called ‘epigenesis’. To explore this phenomenon, the example mentioned in de Biasi’s footnote is an excellent starting point: Michel de Montaigne’s Essays. After the editions of 1580, 1582, 1587 and the edition of 1588, containing the third book of essays, more additions continued to fill the margins of Montaigne’s copy of that edition, the famous ‘Bordeaux copy’ (‘exemplaire de Bordeaux’). The relationship between the textual aspect of the essays and Montaigne’s persistent attempt to present his ‘self ’ as a continuous process resulted in a work that is paradigmatic of ‘epigenesis’. While Gérard Genette, in Palimpsestes (1982), suggested that the avanttexte can function as a paratext,5 the case of Montaigne shows that this genetic paratext is not limited to the avant-texte. The sceptical humanist had started writing his essays around 1571 and the first (two-volume) edition was published in 1580, followed by two slightly revised editions in 1582 and 1587. Perfectly in line with his continuous efforts to study the human being – notably himself – his text, like his self, kept changing. It is probably one of the greatest merits of ‘… la logique d’un processus comparable à celui de l’avant-texte’ (de Biasi 1998: 43). ‘… une grande partie de la production littéraire des XVIe et XVIIe siècles (pour laquelle on ne dispose en général d’aucun manuscrit de travail) semble démontrer que les écrivains ont utilisé les éditions successives de leurs œuvres comme des étapes de réécriture, phénomène qui autorise à poser l’exigence d’une véritable génétique du texte imprimé’ (de Biasi 1998: 43). 5 ‘l’“avant-texte” des brouillons, esquisses et projets divers, peut lui aussi fonctionner comme un paratexte’ (Genette 1982: 11; see also Introduction, ‘Working Definitions’). 3 4

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Montaigne that he recognized precisely this human mutability as man’s most characteristic quality. The 1587 edition was followed by a new one in 1588, no longer in two but in three volumes, with more than 600 additions. Montaigne was 55 years old at the time, but far from ‘settled’ intellectually, so neither was his text. In his own copy of this 1588 edition, he kept adding ideas to the text. In this ‘Bordeaux copy’, the epigenesis manifests itself as peritext, defined by Genette (1982) as a category of the paratext, located within the same volume as the printed text. For instance, in Book III of the Bordeaux copy, on page 37,6 Montaigne added a description of his personal library in the margins of the printed text, thus forming a peritextual epidermis that constitutes the border between the previous version of his self (the printed text of the 1588 edition) and the outside world. What constitutes this outside world, however, becomes ambiguous because of the content of this epigenetic addition, describing Montaigne’s library. The printed text describes the location of the library: ‘At home I slip off to my library a little more often; it is easy for me to oversee my household from there. I am above my gateway and have a view of my garden, my chicken-run, my backyard and most parts of my house. There I can turn over the leaves of this book or that, a bit at a time without order or design’ (Montaigne 2003: 933). In the margins, Montaigne added more detailed descriptions: It is on the third story of a tower … It was formerly the most useless place in my house: I spend most days of my life there, and most hours of each day … My library is round in shape, squared off only for the needs of my table and chair; as it curves round it offers me at a glance every one of my books ranged on five shelves all the way along. It has three splendid and unhampered views and a circle of free space sixteen yards in diameter. (933; cf. ‘Bordeaux Copy’, Book 3, page 362)

Facsimile Available Online http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Montaigne_-_Essais,_%C3%89d_de_ Bordeaux,_3.djvu/37

Michel de Montaigne, Essais, Livre III, ‘exemplaire de Bordeaux’; http://commons.wikimedia. org/w/index.php?title=File%3AMontaigne_-_Essais%2C_%C3%89d_de_Bordeaux%2C_3.djvu/37

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On the one hand, the epigenetic peritext constitutes a border with the outside world of potential readers; on the other hand, it evokes an intertextual world of books which served as potential exogenetic sources for the continuous transformations of the textual self. Thanks to the library’s round shape, Montaigne could easily walk around in it, for as he added in the margins, ‘My wit will not budge if my legs are not moving’ (933). Evidently, what set his mind in motion was not just his own pair of legs, but the intellectual legwork done by great minds before him, whose books were in his library for him to consult in order to work on his personal project: ‘My aim is to reveal my own self, which may well be different tomorrow’ (167). The case of Montaigne’s marginalia shows that the ‘pass for press’ moment is not only the moment when the changing condition of the avant-texte is ‘frozen’ into the rigid shape of a published text, but also the moment when the multiple shapes the text takes after publication start to have an impact on the text. This epigenetic impact corresponds to the biological usage of the adjective ‘epigenetic’ (denoting the discipline that studies the changes in the phenotype or the expression of the gene, caused by external circumstances, which nonetheless do not change the DNA sequence). In Anglo-American literary studies, the notion of genetic criticism (‘critique génétique’) continues to encounter some resistance because of the adjective ‘genetic’, and the adjective ‘epigenetic’ might add to this resistance against the metaphorical use of scientific notions. But then again, the word ‘genesis’ and its linguistic derivatives are not always used metaphorically and the sciences obviously do not have a monopoly on these terms. As to the metaphorical use of notions from other disciplines, this happens in both directions. Sometimes these metaphors function as valuable models, the way for instance the ‘multiple drafts model’ serves as a model of consciousness within cognitive philosophy. Biological epigenetics frequently employ metaphors based on the fields of expertise of literary criticism, philology and critique génétique. For instance, Thomas Jenuwein, director of the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and one of the members of the Epigenome ‘Network of Excellence’, elaborates on the metaphor comparing DNA to editorial processes and book production, which Richard Dawkins had already employed in The Selfish Gene (1976). Jenuwein compares the genome to a library, containing the instructions that are necessary to develop a living organism. In this library, the letters correspond to the base pairs of the genetic code, the chapters to the genes, and the books to the chromosomes. Even though the sequence of three billion letters of the human genome are known, their organization in chapters and books

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is not fully examined yet.7 According to Jenuwein, the distinction between genetics and epigenetics is comparable to the difference between writing and reading a book: Once a book is written, the text (the genes or DNA: stored information) will be the same in all the copies distributed to the interested audience. However, each individual reader of a given book may interpret the story slightly differently, with varying emotions and projections as they continue to unfold the chapters. In a very similar manner, epigenetics would allow different interpretations of a fixed template (the book or genetic code) and result in different read-outs, dependent upon the variable conditions under which this template is interrogated.8

Genetic criticism can help nuance and fine-tune this presentation of the transmission of texts. The French version of this short introductory text contains an interesting grammatical error (‘le texte … seront les mêmes [sic]’9). The plural ‘les mêmes’ does not accord with the singular ‘le texte’, which may be seen as a symptom of the way other disciplines often tend to reduce the complexity of the textual epigenesis. What remains more or less stable is not the ‘text’, but the ‘work’, defined by Peter Shillingsburg as the ‘message or experience implied by the authoritative versions of a literary writing’ (Shillingsburg 1996: 176). This ‘work’ remains the ‘work’ even when the textual versions by which it is implied keep changing. The problem with Jenuwein’s comparison is that, in contrast with DNA, which marks an absolute identity, the identity of a work of literature is not absolute. It is ‘implied’ by multiple versions. Shillingburg continues his definition by noting: ‘Usually the variant forms have the same name. Sometimes there will be disagreement over whether a variant form is in fact a variant version or a separate work’ (Shillingsburg 1996: 176). A draft version can ‘Thomas compare le génome à une bibliothèque contenant les instructions nécessaires au développement d’un organisme vivant. Dans cette bibliothèque, les lettres symbolisent les paires de bases du code génétique, les chapitres des livres les gènes, et les livres les chromosomes. Bien que la séquence des 3 milliards de lettres du génome humain soit connue, leur organisation en chapitres et en livres est encore mal comprise’. http://epigenome.eu/fr/4,14,166 (accessed 28 April 2013). 8 Thomas Jenuwein et al., ‘What Is Epigenetics?’. http://epigenome.eu/en/1,1,0 (accessed 28 April 2013). 9 ‘Une fois que le livre est écrit, le texte (les gènes ou l’information stockée sous forme d’ADN) seront les mêmes [sic] dans tous les exemplaires distribués au public. Cependant, chaque lecteur d’un livre donné aura une interprétation légèrement différente de l’histoire, qui suscitera en lui des émotions et des projections personnelles au fil des chapitres. D’une manière très comparable, l’épigénétique permettrait plusieurs lectures d’une matrice fixe (le livre ou le code génétique), donnant lieu à diverses interprétations, selon les conditions dans lesquelles on interroge cette matrice’ (Thomas Jenuwein et al., ‘Qu’est-ce que l’épigénétique’. http://epigenome.eu/fr/1,1,0 (accessed 28 April 2013). 7

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easily lead to several different works. For instance, the draft of Beckett’s ‘Brief Dream’ has not only resulted in the publication of a poem with this title, but has also contributed to the genesis of the third part of the piece of prose called Stirrings Still / Soubresauts.10

9.2. Epigenetic transformations 9.2.1. Self-translation as continuation of the genesis In the case of Samuel Beckett, Montaigne’s idea of changing while/by writing is concisely summarized by H. Porter Abbott in the term ‘autography’. In contrast with literary autobiography, autography is not a way of ‘fictionalizing … the past’  but ‘a mode of action taken in the moment of writing’ (1999: x). Even after the ‘pass for press’ moment, this ‘autography’ can continue in a multilingual fashion. In 1987, Raymond Federman suggested in Beckett Translating / Translating Beckett that ‘an urgent need exists for a solid, thorough, definitive study of Beckett’s bilingualism and his activity as a self-translator. But not merely to compare passages in the twin-texts, not merely to note differences or variants’ (9). Still, such a bilingual study cannot but start from a comparison and this comparison is facilitated by means of bilingual editions such as the ones produced by Charles Krance and Magessa O’Reilly (Beckett 2001: xli). A comparison between an ‘original’ and a  ‘translation’ may create the impression that the status of the translation (or ‘self-translation’) needs to be regarded as derivative. But Brian Fitch has made a strong case against this implicit hierarchy. In Beckett and Babel (1988), he refers to the example of Beckett’s bilingual piece of prose Company / Compagnie to suggest a relationship of interdependence: Whereas a translation offers a possible perspective upon the original which does not affect the status of the latter in any way … with the coming into being of Compagnie, Company has somehow become subject to modification: what was initially complete in itself and autonomous (Company) is now rendered retroactively incomplete. In this sense the first version is paradoxically dependent upon the second, and the classic situation of the translation’s relationship to its original has been turned upside-down … This means that the dependence of the translation upon the original has been replaced by an interdependence between the two versions of Beckett’s work. (Fitch 1988: 106–07) See the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, Module 1 (BDMP1, www.beckettarchive.org).

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Still, the latter part of this quotation indicates a perspective that is limited to ‘two versions’. An epigenetic perspective suggests the possibility of studying the self-translation as a form of continuation of the writing process,11 in that, on the one hand, the notion of ‘versions’ does not denote the work in ‘the’ French and ‘the’ English version, but the sum total of versions, which are all part of a long genesis; and, on the other hand, the instances of discordance between the English and French texts can be considered as rewritings or ‘réécritures’,12 that is, as instances of ‘written invention’ (Ferrer 2011: 184) rather than as ‘deviations’ from the text ne varietur. In this way, self-translation becomes a form of writing, which (i) constitutes a continuous interrogation of the possibilities and limits of verbal expression in the tradition of linguistic scepticism or ‘Sprachkritik’, such as Fritz Mauthner’s Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache (1901–3);13 and (ii) is at the same time an integral part of a poetics of process, characterized by the change-while/by-writing, comparable to the project of Montaigne’s Essays. (i) The multilingual nature of Beckett’s reading is directly relevant for an appreciation of his works’ bilingualism (Sardin 2002; Montini 2007; Mooney 2011; Slote 2011) and the linguistic scepticism that informs them. The role of language was central in many critical interpretations towards the end of the twentieth century, such as the chapter on self-translation in Steven Connor’s Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text. This role has been reassessed in the past decade, notably by Steven Connor himself in the preface to his edition of The Unnamable, referring to Alain Badiou’s urge to move beyond ‘languagecentred post-structuralist criticism’ (Connor 2010: xx). (ii) The idea of a link between textual and existential change, as expressed in Montaigne’s Essays, can be emphasized by means of self-translation. For instance, the French version of the novel Molloy (originally written in French) reads: Cette fois-ci, puis encore une je pense, puis c’en sera fini je pense, de ce monde-là aussi. C’est le sens de l’avant-dernier. Tout s’estompe. Un peu plus et on sera aveugle. C’est dans la tête. Elle ne marche plus, elle dit, Je ne marche plus. On devient muet aussi et les bruits s’affaiblissent. A peine le seuil franchi c’est This perspective can have consequences for bilingual scholarly editing: ‘the publication of an authorial translation is not regarded as the end of a genesis, but rather as the continuation of the writing process after publication’ (Van Hulle 2006, 160; www.tei-c.org/Activities/ETE/Preview/ vanhulle.xml). 12 ‘la critique génétique parlera de “réécritures”, d’ “états de rédaction” ou d’ “opérations génétiques”: comment parler de “variantes” en l’absence de tout invariant ?’ (de Biasi 2000: 20). 13 This work has had an impact on, for instance, Samuel Beckett’s bilingual works. Beckett’s correspondence contains a very open statement about his reading of Fritz Mauthner’s Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, which greatly impressed him (‘qui m’a très fortement impressionné’; LSB II 462). 11

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ainsi. C’est la tête qui doit en avoir assez. De sorte qu’on se dit, J’arriverai bien cette fois-ci, puis encore une autre peut-être, puis ce sera tout. (Beckett 1996: 9; emphasis added)

The text thus, in a metafictional fashion, suggests that this novel will be followed by another one (‘puis encore une autre’). Molloy was indeed followed by Malone meurt / Malone Dies. But after this second novel, Beckett also wrote a third one, forming a ‘trilogy’ (even though Beckett did not quite like this term, introduced by his publishers). Whereas the French text only suggests a succession of two novels, the English version adds an extra ‘last time’ after ‘once more’: This time, then once more I think, then perhaps a last time, then I think it’ll be over, with that world too. Premonition of the last but one but one. All grows dim. A little more and you’ll go blind. It’s in the head. It doesn’t work any more, it says, I don’t work any more. You go dumb as well and sounds fade. The threshold scarcely crossed that’s how it is. It’s the head. It must have had enough. So that you say, I’ll manage this time, then perhaps once more, then perhaps a last time, then nothing more. (Beckett 2009d: 4; emphasis added)

Even though Beckett had the chance to revise the French text when it was reset for a new edition in 1971 (after he had received the Nobel Prize in 1969), he decided not to change the discordance between the French and the English version. His other texts frequently show similar ‘textual scars’. In Malone meurt, for instance, the eponymous character-narrator tells a story of Saposcat and the Louis family. In his English self-translation, the family is called Lambert – thus creating an intertextual reference to Balzac’s novel Louis Lambert. But in the English version there is one instance where the Lambert family is called Louis. Rather than a ‘mistake’ or an erroneous relapse, this name constitutes a textual scar that serves as a reminder of the bilingual and multi-versional character of Beckett’s works. The third novel in the so-called trilogy, L’Innommable / The Unnamable, closes with a line that expresses the tension between the end of a genesis and the epigenetic continuation of the composition process after publication. (1) The first edition of 1953 closes with the words: ‘il faut continuer, je vais continuer’ (1953: 262). (2) The last line of the English self-translation, The Unnamable, contains a ‘rewriting’ or ‘réécriture’ (the addition of ‘I can’t go on’), which emphasizes the aporia it expresses: ‘you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on’ (Un 134; emphasis added). (3) Subsequently, when he had the chance to revise the text in 1971 (and as opposed to his decision in the same year not to change the text of Molloy), Beckett retroactively introduced the change in the French text:

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‘il faut continuer, je ne peux pas continuer, je vais continuer’ (Beckett 1971: 213; emphasis added). Beckett also thematized this kind of bilingual, ‘autographic’ continuation in his prose text Comment c’est. In the sixth paragraph, the narrator speaks of ‘ma vie dernier état’; in Beckett’s English version, How It Is, he has rewritten this ‘état’, calling it ‘my life last state last version’ (Beckett 2001: 2–3; emphasis added).

9.2.2. Editing Krapp: production notebooks and revised texts The tension between repetition and invention also makes itself felt when a playwright directs one of his own plays. Samuel Beckett’s case is particularly interesting because – especially toward the end of his life – Beckett was known as an author who insisted on a strict adherence to his texts and stage directions. This insistence on what (in Daniel Ferrer’s suggested dichotomy between ‘repetition’ and ‘invention’) comes under the label ‘repetition’ contrasts sharply with the author’s own practices in his capacity as a stage director, for whom the rehearsals (as a form of ‘répétitions’) were also an opportunity for more ‘inventions’. These inventions have resulted in a series of editions of ‘revised texts’. In the 1990s, Faber and Faber and Grove Press published four volumes called The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett. They contain facsimiles and transcriptions of the production notebooks Beckett used during the rehearsals of the plays he directed. Apart from the facsimiles and transcriptions of the production notes, the editions also comprise a revised text, based on Beckett’s changes and instructions. One of these instructions in Krapp’s Last Tape / La dernière bande was a specific movement of the actor (Martin Held in the production by the Schiller Theater Werkstatt, Berlin). Also later, in the performances by the Royal Court Theatre in London (1973) and the Petite Orsay in April 1975, Beckett asked the actor to look behind, to see if death was coming to get him. During the rehearsals in Berlin (1969), Beckett explained to Martin Held: ‘Old Nick’s there. Death is standing behind him and unconsciously he’s looking for it’ (Knowlson 1976: 64). James Knowlson notes that in the copies of the text, annotated by Beckett, this movement is indicatd by means of the word ‘Hain’.14 The personification ‘In the Grove Press annotated copy (A1), a marginal note on p. 13 reads “Action interrupted by first look over his shoulder left into darkness backstage”; the note in the Faber and Faber annotated copy (A2) is “Action interrupted by Hain 1” (p. 11). In A1, p. 27, a marginal note reads “Action interrupted by second look into darkness as before”; in A2, p. 19, the note is “interrupted by Hain 2.” After the first drink backstage, there is in both copies the query “Faint Hain here?”, A1, p. 17, A2, p. 14’ (Knowlson 1976: 64).

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of death as ‘Hain’ features prominently in the works of Matthias Claudius, the author of the poem ‘Der Tod und das Mädchen’, the lyrics of Beckett’s favourite Lied by Schubert. Beckett’s library in his apartment in Paris still contains a copy of Matthias Claudius’s complete works.15 Claudius dedicated his works to ‘Freund Hain’, and a facsimile of the title page of the 1774 edition shows an image of ‘Freund Hain’ (the skeleton with his scythe). This ‘Hain’ most probably prompted Beckett to add Krapp’s movement to his play, after the publication of the text, thus illustrating how the exogenesis of a work can have a direct impact on its epigenesis. Because of Beckett’s extra instructions, the edition of the revised text contains a few additions, such as the following stage direction: ‘He closes the ledger, turns to the tape-recorder, makes to switch on, arrests gesture, turns slowly to look over his shoulder into the darkness backstage left, long look, then slowly back front’ (4). The editorial project of the revised texts tried to present a stable text, which explicitly aimed to take the author’s intentions into account. In Daniel Ferrer’s dichotomy between ‘critique génétique’ and ‘philologie’, this was a ‘philological’ project to the extent that the editors tried to establish the revised text by making it emerge from the bulk of its accidental incarnations (‘établir le texte en le faisant émerger de la foule de ses incarnations accidentelles’; Ferrer 2010: 21). In the ‘General editor’s note’, James Knowlson wrote: ‘The texts are now as close as possible to how Beckett wanted them to be’ (Knowlson in Beckett 1994: v). From a genetic point of view, this editorial statement raises the question as to which Beckett wanted his texts to be presented in this way? This question has ramifications beyond the theory and practice of scholarly editing. It is as fundamental as the idea underlying the notion of changing-while/by-writing and of the poetics of process of a project like Montaigne’s Essays, or like the ‘succession of individuals’ evoked in Beckett’s essay Proust and in his play Krapp’s Last Tape / La dernière bande.

9.2.3. Staging the extended mind The introduction of an epigenetic addition suggesting that death (‘Freund Hain’) is behind you implies that the setting on stage is not necessarily to be interpreted in a realistic manner, but may be a way of staging Krapp’s mind. This would not be the first time Beckett used the stage to suggest a cognitive setting. Matthias Claudius, Sämtliche Werke (Berlin and Darmstadt: Tempel Verlag, 1958; see Van Hulle and Nixon 2013: 86).

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The setting of Endgame, for instance, has been interpreted as the inside of a skull: ‘The interior of a skull, owner unknown, is a recurrent locale in Beckett’s fiction’ (Cohn 1969: 50). The stage directions explicitly emphasize the ‘interior’ aspect of the setting: ‘Bare interior. Grey Light. Left and right back, high up, two small windows, curtains drawn’ (Beckett 2009b: 5). If this setting is interpreted in terms of a ‘Cartesian theatre’, the central character or ‘homunculus’ Hamm (who cannot stand) is dependent on incoming sensory data, provided by his servant Clov (who cannot sit and who looks through the window with the help of a telescope). Hamm also constantly sends out commands, making use of the neural services of Clov, who regularly disappears into his kitchen. Beckett, however, did not only parody the Cartesian model of the mind, he also tried out other models. For instance, the model of the mind implied in Krapp’s Last Tape prefigures aspects of Dennett’s ‘multiple drafts model’ (111) and perhaps even of the more recent enactive paradigm of the ‘extended mind’. Not only is the individual (Krapp) presented as consisting of a succession of individuals (the 69-year-old Krapp on stage, listening to the taped voice of the 39-year-old Krapp, who in his turn has been listening to a 10- or 12-yearyounger version of himself), but the cognitive processes characterizing his consciousness also appear to consist of successive versions. These stages are based upon, and to some extent modelled after, the manuscript versions. An interesting example is the moment when the 69-year-old Krapp hears the taped voice of his 30-year-younger self speak about his mother’s long widowhood. Manuscript: ‘Widowhood’ was the word Beckett originally employed in the manuscript version of the play (when it was still called ‘Magee Monologue’, written in the so-called ‘Eté 56’ notebook).16 Typescript 1: The first typescript also simply read ‘widowhood’: ‘there is of course the house on the canal where mother lay dying, in the early autumn, after her long widowhood, and the bench by the weir from where I could see her window’ (HRC MS SB, Box 4, Folder 2.1, page 2r).17 But the word was changed into ‘viduity’ at the next stage in the series of multiple drafts that constitute the genesis of Krapp’s Last Tape. More than just a variant, this change constitutes a moment of invention that would eventually lead to the gradual development of an extra scene. Typescript 2: (1) In a first attempt on the second typescript, after hearing the Manuscript preserved at the University of Reading (UoR) as MS 1227/7/7/1. Manuscript preserved at the Harry Ransom Center (HRC), Austin, TX, Samuel Beckett Collection.

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word ‘viduity’, Krapp gives a start, switches off the tape recorder, gets up, goes backstage and returns with a dictionary (HRC MS SB, Box 4, Folder 2.2, page 3r). (2) Beckett immediately cancelled this passage, not to discard it, but to develop it. (3) In this more elaborate version, Krapp not only gives a start and switches off the tape recorder, but also winds back the tape a little, bends his ear closer to the machine and hears the word ‘viduity’ again; he switches off the machine, looks puzzled, asks himself ‘Viduity?’, pauses, gets up, goes backstage, returns with a large dictionary, lays it on the table, sits down, looks up the word ‘viduity’, reads, nods, closes the dictionary, switches on the recorder again, and resumes his listening pose. The ‘large dictionary’ was crossed out and replaced by the more concrete ‘volume of the Concise Oxford’. This was an instant substitution (currente calamo), made while Beckett was typing the text. To this typed layer of the text he later added a few holograph corrections and marginal passages in ink. Thus, to the ‘volume of the Concise Oxford’ he added ‘or Johnson’s dictionary and quotes example’ (HRC MS SB Box 4, Folder 2.2, page 3r). Before he could make this addition, Beckett first had to reread his typed text. The above description can be analyzed in terms of interactions with the manuscript as an ‘environmental vehicle’. Beckett first served as scribe or typist, copying the preceding version; he then acted as his own first reader; in this capacity, he reacted to his own typescript by adding a few words in the margin. The interaction with the typescript thus triggered a small, but nonetheless decisive step in the process of invention. Typescript 3: In the next version, the idea that Krapp should quote an example is turned into the stage direction ‘(quotes definition if possible)’ (HRC MS SB Box 4, Folder 2.3, page 3r). Typescript 4: And in the next version, Beckett – again after reading his own typescript – carried out his own suggestion by taking the dictionary and adding the marginalia in ink that would complete the whole dictionary scene as it can be read in the published versions of the play: ... after her long viduity, and the – [Krapp switches off, raises his head, stares blankly before him. His lips move in the syllables of ‘viduity’. No sound. He gets up, goes backstage into darkness, comes back with an enormous dictionary, lays it on table, sits down and looks up the word.] Krapp: [Reading from dictionary.] State – or condition – of being – or

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remaining – a widow – or widower. [Looks up. Puzzled.] Being – or remaining? ... [Pause. He peers again at dictionary. Reading.] ‘Deep weeds of viduity.’ ... Also of an animal, especially a bird ... the vidua or weaver-bird ... Black plumage of male ... [He looks up. With relish.] The vidua-bird! [Pause. He closes dictionary, switches on, resumes listening posture.] (Beckett 2009c: 7)

Beckett’s interaction with his own manuscripts and typescripts served as a model for evoking the workings of a fictional mind, more specifically the character Krapp’s cognitive processing of the notion ‘viduity’: he hears the word ‘viduity’ and doubts whether he has heard correctly; he rewinds, listens to the word again and has to conclude that he does not know its meaning; he looks up the word in a dictionary and assimilates its meaning; he is puzzled by the locution ‘Being or remaining’; he is confronted with the word’s wider lexical context, notably the word ‘vidua-bird’; he relishes the sound of the word ‘vidua-bird’ with the same stem (vid-), emphasizing the notion of emptiness. The pleasure only makes the realization of the emptiness more painful, for Krapp’s lexical discovery is a laborious rediscovery. He has forgotten a word he used to know and employ when he was 30 years younger. Or, in cognitive terms, his present vocabulary shows a semantic lacuna and he needs all the ‘environmental vehicles’ he has at his disposal to patch up his mind. Beckett explicitly externalized something that used to be part of Krapp’s vocabulary; it is thanks to an external element (the tape recorder) that Krapp’s 69-year-old mind is reminded of this lexical particle, whose meaning he recovers with the aid of another environmental vehicle (the dictionary). At the same time, the character’s relish in the pronunciation of the word ‘vidua-bird’ is itself another expression of the workings of the extended mind. By providing more context and referring to the black plumage of the vidua-bird, the dictionary also introduces a new element that fits in with the clair-obscur of the play. The stark contrast between black and white is commented upon by Beckett in his notes for the production of his play when in 1969 he directed it at the Werkstatt Theater in Berlin. His notebook for that production contains three pages of notes under the heading ‘MANI’ (Beckett 1992a: 131). They relate to an article in the Encyclopedia Britannica. In 1958, during the first stages of the play’s composition process, Beckett had received a copy of the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica from Jake Schwartz. One of the traces of Beckett’s reading is a large dog-ear on the page of the entry on ‘Manichaeism’.18 The remarkably large size of the dog-ear corresponds with that of other dog-ears in Beckett’s books (Van Hulle and Nixon 2013: 8).

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The three pages of notes under the heading ‘MANI’ in Beckett’s production notebook contain excerpts from this encyclopedia article (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition, vol. 17, page 574). The article explains, for instance, that according to Manichaeism, it was man’s duty to separate light from darkness in his existence (Beckett noted: ‘Separation of light from darkness’) and that, by the so-called seal of the bosom (‘signaculum sinus’), ‘every gratification of sexual desire, and hence also marriage, [was] forbidden’ (574). Beckett noted: ‘Ascetic ethics, particularly abstinence from sensual enjoyment. Sexual desire, marriage, forbidden (signaculum sinus)’ (Beckett 1992: 137). The third and last page of notes on Manichaeism (139), however, is one of the rare documents recording Beckett’s analysis of his own work. With regard to the scene where Krapp gives a black ball to a white dog, he wrote: ‘Note that if the giving of the black ball to the white dog represents the sacrifice of sense to spirit the form here too is that of a mingling’ (139). In other words, Beckett consciously employed the Manichaean separation of light and darkness, corresponding to the Cartesian dualism of mind and body, in order to undermine this dichotomy by means of a ‘mingling’. What is particularly interesting in the context of the post-Cartesian paradigm is the way Beckett linked this mingling to the notions of ‘mind’ and ‘anti-mind’: Note that Krapp decrees physical (ethical) incompatibility of light (spiritual) and dark (sensual) only when he intuits possibility of their reconciliation intellectually as rational-irrational. He turns from fact of anti-mind alien to mind to thought of anti-mind constituent of mind. He is thus ethically correct (signaculum sinus) through intellectual transgression, the duty of reason being not to join but to separate. (139; emphasis added)

The idea that ‘anti-mind’ is ‘constituent of mind’ prefigures the notion of the ‘extended mind’ and the post-Cartesian view that the mind is not a pre-given. The interaction with the environment does not necessarily result in additions (as in the case of the ‘Hain’); it can also consist in creative undoing. And this undoing is not necessarily applicable to the genesis of an author’s own work; it can also apply to the continuation of the genesis by someone else, for instance after the author’s death. An example of this kind of ‘allogenetic’ transformation is the epigenetic restructuring of Beckett’s experimental text Sans / Lessness (1969), consisting of 120 (2 times 60) sentences, ordered and reordered on the basis of random selection (possibly inspired by John Cage’s experiments with chance as a structuring element). The randomness is very carefully orchestrated and contained within a rigid framework, composed according to a ‘Key’, provided by Beckett

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and preserved at the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Beckett explained the procedure to Ruby Cohn (Cohn 1973; 2001), and Rosemary Pountney applied the technique to restructure the text, following the instructions of the ‘Key’ (Pountney 1988). This ‘allogenetic’ restructuring can now be done automatically by means of a digital randomizing tool (www.random.org/lessness/). But a more spectacular ‘allogenesis’, including a most palpable form of creative undoing, is Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes (2010).

9.2.4. Epigenetic undoing: Jonathan Safran Foer, Tree of Codes Tree of Codes is a die-cut book, whose content is exhumed from the story The Street of Crocodiles, by the Polish writer Bruno Schulz, killed by the whims of a Gestapo officer in Drohobycz during the Second World War. Jonathan Safran Foer compares Schulz’s work to the prayers left in the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, which ‘form a kind of magical, unbound book, conjuring the enormity of the desperation of the world, the needs we haven’t defeated’ (Foer 2010: 137). In 1941, Schulz had given his artwork and papers, including manuscripts, to friends for safekeeping, but nothing has survived. They constitute ‘the work lost to history’, which is ‘in many ways, the story of the century’ (137): ‘Like the Wailing Wall, Schulz’s surviving work evokes all that was destroyed in the War: Schulz’s lost books, drawings and painting; those that he would have made had he survived; the millions of other victims, and within them the infinite expressions of infinite thoughts and feelings taking infinite forms’ (138). Jonathan Safran Foer does not attempt to reconstruct these infinite thoughts and feelings, the way attempts have been made to complete for instance Schubert’s ‘Unvollendete’. Instead, he created a die-cut book, omitting major parts of the story, including one of the protagonists: the name of the housemaid Adela is systematically cut. As a consequence, the female pronouns (even the ones that originally referred to Adela) now all refer to the narrator’s mother, whose personality evidently changes accordingly. On a smaller scale, this effect is already noticeable in the title Tree of Codes, exhumed from The Street of Crocodiles. According to Safran Foer, he chose The Street of Crocodiles because its ‘erasure would somehow be a continuation of its creation’ (138). Since this creation is someone else’s, this is an ‘allogenesis’; and since (thanks to the die-cut pages design by Sara De Bondt) the cuts are literally cut out of a copy of the published text of Schulz’s story, this ‘continuation of its creation’ after publication is a form of ‘epigenesis’.

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The way Foer makes the cuts palpable is comparable to Jefferson’s act of scraping away the word ‘subjects’ (see Chapter 8). Even the most thorough forms of erasure often still leave traces, as Almuth Grésillon notes19 in her studies of cancellations (1994, 1996, 2008). Foer deploys the full potential of the erasure’s paradoxical status, its lost presence combined with its underhand survival. What is cut away in Foer’s reading of Schulz is the bulk of an intensely imaginative narrative. The final pages of Schulz’s story may serve as an illustration. They are preceded by the announcement (by the narrator’s brother) of ‘the imminent end of the world’ (105): What was there to save us? While the mob scattered in the open, losing itself under the starry lights and celestial phenomena, my father remained stealthily at home. He was the only one who knew a secret escape from our trap, the back door of cosmology … Father silently put his head into the chimney shaft of the stove. It was black and quiet there. It smelled of warm air, of soot, of silence, of stillness. Father made himself comfortable and sat blissfully, his eyes closed. Into that black carapace of the house, emerging over the roof into the starry night, there entered the frail light of a star and breaking as if in the glass of a telescope lit a spark in the hearth, a tiny seed in the dark retort of the chimney. Father was slowly turning the screw of a microscope and the fatal creation … moved into the field of vision. It was slightly scrofulous, somewhat pockmarked … My father moved it closer to his protruding eye: it was like a slice of Gruyère cheese riddled with holes, pale yellow, sharply lit, covered with white, leprous spots. His hand on the screw of the microscope, his gaze blinded by the light of the oculars, my father moved his cold eyes on the limestone globe, he saw on its surface the complicated print of the disease gnawing at it from inside, the curved channels of the bookworm, burrowing under the cheesy, unhealthy surface. Father shivered and saw his mistake: no, this was not Gruyère cheese, this was obviously a human brain, an anatomical crosscut preparation of the brain in all its complicated structure … The brain seemed to have been chloroformed, deeply asleep, and blissfully smiling in its sleep. (Schulz 2008: 109–10; the words in italics are used in Tree of Codes)

Without the empty spaces left by the cuts, this passage is reduced in Tree of Codes to the following lines: What was there to save us? my father was the only one who knew a secret escape. his eyes closed. his gaze moved. ‘Traces perdues qui néanmoins persistent, surcharges qui ne sauront éliminer ce qui gît en-dessous, survivance en sous-main, co-présence de l’avant et de l’après, voilà le statut paradoxal de la rature’ (Grésillon 1996: 54). See also Pierre-Marc de Biasi’s essay ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une rature ?’ (1996).

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One of the elements that were cut in the above passage is something between epanorthosis and denarration: ‘it was like a slice of Gruyère cheese … no, this was not Gruyère cheese’. As in Beckett’s L’Innommable, the epanorthosis invalidates the affirmation as soon as it is uttered, mimicking the movement of stating, retracting and substituting, characterizing both the writing process and the cognitive process. The father’s act of looking at a small human brain through the microscope cunningly involves the reader, who is forced into the role of a neuroscientist looking at a human mind at work, the amazing process (rather than product) of Schulzian imagination: ‘There is no telling what one can discover in one’s own familiar chimney, black like tobacco ash. Through the coils of grey substance, through the minute granulations, Father saw the clearly visible contours of an embryo in a characteristic head-over-heels position’ (110). Jonathan Safran Foer skilfully reduced the ending to a few lines, which do exactly what he said about the small notes in the cracks in the Wailing Wall, ‘conjuring the enormity of the desperation of the world, the needs we haven’t defeated’: Father saw no comet, leaving the comet behind. Left to itself, it withered away amid indifference. richer by one more disappointment, life returned to its normal course. my father alone was awake, wandering silently through the rooms. (Foer 2010: 133–4)

One of the things he thus undid was the ‘homunculus’. Schulz’s ending reads as follows: In the dark apartment my father alone was awake, wandering silently through the rooms filled with the singsong of sleep. Sometimes he opened the door of the flue and looked grinning into its dark abyss, where a smiling homunculus slept forever its luminous sleep, enclosed in a glass capsule, bathed in fluorescent light, already adjudged, erased, filed away, another record card in the immense archives of the sky. (111; emphasis added)

If in The Street of Crocodiles, this indeterminate ending is already quite an impressive Leerstelle, the excision of all its imaginative elements in Tree of Codes creates an even more formidable site of indeterminacy. After the discussion of the Cartesian ‘homunculus model’ and its Chinese-boxes effect (see Chapters 7 and 8), Jonathan Safran Foer’s decision to cut this ‘homunculus’ can be read as a post-Cartesian statement: the creative undoing of the ‘homunculus model’ and its replacement by a shorter version full of Leerstellen reads like a draft, created by means of enactive interaction with a previous version, the ‘text produced so far’. Safran Foer’s book gives a palpable shape to ‘creative undoing’. It draws

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attention to the inventive power of omission, in this case as part of an epigenetic process. In conclusion, epigenesis comprises more than a series of deviations from a text ne varietur. As in the cases of Montaigne and Beckett, the textual variability can reflect and express existential mutability. By regarding the variants of the après-texte as epigenetic transformations, genetic criticism can benefit from recognizing the epigenesis – next to exo- and endogenesis – as a third area of research, which deserves to be further explored.

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10

Epilogue: Digital Manuscripts

What has been the impact of the computer on the genesis of literary texts? This question inevitably raises another one, regarding the impact of two older writing cultures – manuscripts and typescripts. And equally inevitable is the question of whether the object of genetic research is not slowly disappearing now that most authors write on laptops. Can we speak of ‘digiscripts’ in addition to manuscripts and typescripts? Or did the advent of the computer mean the definitive end of the so-called ‘golden age of the contemporary manuscript’ (Callu 1993: 65)? And does this new medium have any influence on the creative process of writing? To examine this matter, it may be useful to first investigate what has been the impact of other writing tools in the recent past, during the transition from pen to typewriter to word processor to speech recognition and other technologies.

10.1. Manuscript/typescript In 1844, Edgar Allan Poe wrote a short piece on ‘Anastatic Printing’, in which he suggests the possibility of publishing manuscripts as such. During the Middle Ages, when manuscripts were the only form of publication, they were produced so carefully that no book has ever surpassed this level of accuracy and beauty, according to Poe. The new invention of ‘anastatic printing’ enabled writers to instantly reproduce a drawing or a handwritten text, without the expensive intervention of a compositor or typesetter, and without the often disastrous interferences of a publisher. Thanks to anastatic printing, a writer would finally rest assured that his audience would see his work with the freshness of the original design. And even for publishers it would be advantageous: ‘A publisher has only to print as many copies as are immediately demanded’ (Poe 1902: X.166–7). In this way, Poe introduced the concept of ‘printing on demand’,

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albeit only to reproduce and distribute handwritten texts. From his point of view, there was nothing old-fashioned about writing with a pen, and publishing manuscripts was anything but medieval. He embraced the newest technologies precisely to do justice to the close relationship between the simple writing tool and the process of cognition. His essay was not about an aversion to machines, but about the way they were brought into action. Two decades later, in 1863, Samuel Butler suggested that although machines did not partake in the struggle for life directly, they did play a role in the survival of the fittest. In his essay ‘Darwin and the Machines’ (later incorporated as ‘The Book of the Machines’ in his satire Erewhon) the suggestion is that machines did not busy themselves with mere survival. Instead, they cunningly delegated this chore to the human being, who thus came to serve as reproductive organ to the machine. Butler even went one step further: as long as man performed his duty as reproductive organ properly, all went well – at least according to man’s own perception. But as soon as he no longer performed his task as it should be, he lagged behind in the survival of the fittest. In short, the machine would only serve if it was being served, and on its own conditions (Butler 1965: 148). The short period of time between the publication of ‘Darwin and the Machines’ and its incorporation in Erewhon, published in 1872, was the origin of yet another new ‘species’ of machines. The Danish clergyman Hans Rasmus Johan Malling Hansen had patented his so-called writing ball or ‘Skrivekugle’, with which he won prizes at the world fairs of Vienna in 1873 and Paris in 1878. The then nearly blind Friedrich Nietzsche purchased such an appliance. On 11 February 1882 he wrote a postcard from Genoa to Elisabeth Nietzsche with the exclamation ‘Hurrah!’ because ‘the machine’ had just been delivered. The first extant typescript written with this device dates from 17 February and was addressed to his secretary Peter Gast (aka Heinrich Köselitz). It features a few short poems and proverbs, such as ‘NICHT ZU FREIGEBIG! NUR HUNDE / SCHEISSEN ZU JEDER STUNDE’ (‘Don’t spread yourself too thin’, or more literally: ‘Don’t be too generous! Only dogs shit at every occasion’). In his delighted reply, Peter Gast wondered how one had to manipulate such a tool and whether it required a lot of practice. He also suggested that the instrument might even have an influence on Nietzsche’s way of writing, since he himself had experienced that his thoughts often depended on the quality of the paper or the pen with which he was writing. Toward the end of February, Nietzsche replied with a typed letter, fully agreeing with this observation: ‘Sie haben Recht – unser Schreibzeug arbeitet mit an unseren Gedanken. Wann werde ich es ueber meine

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Finger bringen, einen langen Satz zu drucken!’ (Nietzsche 2003: 18; see also above, Chapter 6).1 In the meantime, Nietzsche’s statement that our writing tools assist in, but also affect, our cognitive processes, has become a fairly well-known one-liner, especially since Friedrich Kittler’s reference to it in Grammophone, Film, Typewriter (1986). One of the effects of Malling Hansen’s ‘Skrivekugle’ and its mechanical limitations on Nietzsche’s writing was that he became increasingly laconic. According to Kittler, Nietzsche’s use of this new tool resulted in a shift from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from an elaborate rhetoric to an elliptical style (Kittler 1999: 203). In Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900, Kittler speaks of a sort of typing ‘cult’ around 1900 (Kittler 1987: 257). This cult is satirized in a witty column by Alfred Polgar, called ‘Die Schreibmaschine’. In a similar way to Samuel Butler, Polgar treats the machine as a living organism, ‘for the typewriter is alive’.2 His neighbour, he writes, has become one with his machine, like a cavalryman with his horse. Twenty-five hours per day he sits behind its keyboard and cannot keep up with its productivity. In terms of textual production and reproduction, every hour is equally fertile – a rate of fertility that would put the most active rabbit to shame. The rattling of the letter levers and the metallic tinkling sound at the end of the line constitute the rhythm to which his brain vibrates. One word brings forth the next. And all of this, his neighbour claims, he owes to his typewriter, which is said to take over no less than 50 per cent of his creative labour. Polgar’s piece appeared in the Prager Tagblatt in 1922, the annus mirabilis of modernism, the year in which – among many other masterpieces – T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land was published. The long poem notably features a typist, who is expecting a guest. ‘The young man carbuncular’ arrives, At the violet hour, when the eyes and back

Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits Like a taxi throbbing waiting. (Eliot 1971: 140)

On the typescript Eliot gave to Ezra Pound, ‘il miglior fabbro’ famously cut hundreds of lines. The description of ‘the violet hour’, for instance, was originally a traditional stanza with an ABAB rhyme pattern: At the violet hour, the hour when eyes and back and hand Turn upward from the desk, the human engine waits – See also http://www.stephan-guenzel.de/Texte/Guenzel_Nietzsche-SM.pdf. Prager Tagblatt, 1. 10. 1922. See also http://www.gingko.ch/cdrom/Utz/schreibmaschine.html and the work by Martin Stingelin, Davide Giuriato and Sandro Zanetti on the project ‘Zur Genealogie des Schreibens’ (http://www.schreibszenen.net/).

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Like a taxi throbbing waiting at a stand – To spring to pleasure through the horn or ivory gates. (Eliot 1971: 30, 42)

Ezra Pound cancelled the entire fourth line (30) and marked the whole stanza with three wavy lines in the left margin on a second typescript (42). Eliot did not object to cutting the fourth line, and he was also willing to cut the words ‘and hand’ and ‘at a stand’, whose only function in the original seemed to have been to rhyme with each other. The ‘heap of broken images’ that was eventually published as The Waste Land was the result of an intense, and by now famous, interaction between typed text and handwritten annotations. There is not necessarily a direct link between the introduction of the typewriter and literary innovation in modernism. The same year, 1922, also saw the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, one of the most innovative novels ever written. But Joyce was unable to type. Toward the end of 1917, the opportunity was created (again thanks to Ezra Pound’s agency) to publish chapters of Ulysses as instalments in The Little Review in the US, and in The Egoist in Great Britain. Luca Crispi suggests that this new prospect prompted Joyce to have his manuscripts typed out (Crispi 2011). He gave his typists precise instructions to leave a broad blank margin so as to be able to add more text later on. Most of the 14 chapters that appear in these magazines have been typed in triplicate. Joyce usually corrected two of them (simultaneously) and sent one corrected copy to Pound, who then forwarded it to The Little Review. When Joyce told Frank Budgen that he had been working on Ulysses for five years and Budgen noted that some of his colleagues regarded two books per year to be a good average, Joyce replied: ‘Yes. But how do they do it? They talk them into a typewriter. I feel quite capable of doing that if I wanted to do it. But what’s the use? It isn’t worth doing’ (Joyce in Budgen 1972: 20).

10.2. Talking books into machines Whatever Joyce may have thought of ‘talking books into’ a typewriter, the next generation actually made a point of writing as fast and spontaneously as possible, often with a typewriter. The typescript of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) has been preserved in the form of a scroll. When the text of this scroll was published in 2007 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the novel’s publication, the paratext confirmed the myth: according to the blurb, the scroll ‘represents the first full expression of Kerouac’s revolutionary aesthetic,

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the identifiable point at which this thematic vision and narrative voice came together in a sustained burst of creative energy’. This ‘original version’ of On the Road is presented as being ‘rougher, wilder, and more sexually explicit than the published novel’. But the editor, Howard Cunnell, immediately nuances this image in his introduction. The scroll and the story of how Kerouac wrote On the Road quickly became legendary. The romantic version of the legend makes Kerouac sit in front of his typewriter in a New York apartment in Chelsea, West Twentieth Street, where he finished the text on the scroll in three weeks’ time, in April 1951. On 22 May 1951, he sent a letter to Neal Cassady in San Francisco, describing the scroll – ‘whole thing on strip of paper 120 foot long ... just rolled it through typewriter and in fact no paragraphs … rolled it out on floor and it looks like a road’ (Kerouac, qtd in Cunnell 2007: 1). Cunnell’s level-headed version specifies that, by that time, Kerouac had already been collecting notes and writing drafts at least since 1947, in a style that was still far removed from the Beat style of On the Road. The early version did not even have a first-person narrator. Only thanks to a letter Kerouac received on 27 December 1950, in which Neal Cassady recounted his sexual misfortunes in fast, plain, spontaneous terms, did Kerouac find ‘his’ own voice. Kerouac then had the idea of ‘talking’ that voice ‘into’ his typewriter as if it were a barrel organ, which seems to confirm Nietzsche’s early intuition regarding the function of writing tools in the composition process and the role they can play as catalysts in giving shape, not just to a text, but even to an entire aesthetic programme. Still, Kerouac’s scroll was a merely metaphorical interpretation of what Joyce had called ‘talking books into’ a typewriter. Some contemporary writers apply this principle in a more literal sense. Richard Powers, for example, often makes use of recent technologies of speech recognition to write his novels. This is not just a preference, but a well-considered and deliberate choice: ‘My readers hear phrases and higher-level ebbs and flows; that’s what I, too, want to hear while writing. Speech recognition helps me to live and write at the level of the phrase rather than the level of batches of keystrokes.’3 Apart from stylistic advantages, cognitive considerations play a role as well: ‘the speed and supple fluidity of speech make it possible for me, in the moment of composition, to stay more fully in the unmediated moment, at “the speed of thought,” as it were, without Richard Powers; email correspondence (23 February 2009) with Dimitri Alderweireldt in preparation of an MA thesis called ‘Tekstgenetica en keystroke logging: de beweging van het elektronisch schrijven vastleggen’, University of Antwerp, 2008–9.

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having to place more cognitive load on short term memory and motor areas of the brain, risking interference with the processes of verbal imagination’.4 With reference to this cognitive link, Matthew Fuller notes that software is usually regarded as a mere instrument, simply something you do something with (Fuller 2008: 3), but according to him it does have an impact on the cognitive process, because software does not only help us capture thoughts, but also structures the process of thinking to a certain degree. People working with computers are barely aware of this impact. In this sense, digital writing tools resemble established metaphors, which we hardly notice or recognize as metaphors anymore, but which do have a similar effect on cognition, as Lakoff and Johnson already argued in Metaphors We Live By (1980). If writing tools have an impact on the cognitive process, there should be a difference between writing with a pen, with a typewriter or with a computer. As early as 1989, Christina Haas therefore raised the question, ‘Does the Medium Change the Message?’ To find an answer, she compared the efficiency and quality of 15 letters, written by 15 experienced letter writers under three different circumstances: with pen and paper, with a simple pc and with a more advanced computer model. In general, they wrote longer letters with the most advanced tools. The results suggested that writing with the pen requires more planning, or at least tends to incite more prior planning than writing with a computer (Haas 1989). Also in literary studies, pleas are being made for ‘media-specific analysis’ (see, for instance, Hayles 2004). Richard Powers’s comments on his writing with speech recognition technology confirm the importance of the medium in the creative process. But do these new media leave traces that allow genetic critics to retrace stylistic, narrative and structural decisions, which constitute the dynamics of the writing process?

10.3. Digital documents What used to be the most material aspect of textual criticism – the document, containing (a version of) a text – is not such an unequivocal matter in the case of digital versions. If a document consists of paper and ink in the case of a handwritten manuscript, then what is the document in the case of a digital manuscript? In his 1998 essay ‘What Is a Digital Document?’, Michael Buckland Richard Powers, ibid.

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started from definitions by Paul Otlet, who in his 1934 Traité de documentation already suggested a functional definition of a document, including the possibility of treating for instance museum pieces or living animals as ‘documents’. Building on these definitions, the French librarian Suzanne Briet regarded a document as a (concrete or symbolical) index (‘indice’) to represent, restore or prove physical or intellectual phenomena.5 Consequently, an okapi in the Antwerp zoo would be a document whereas a wild okapi would not. But what is the document of the earliest version of a text that is written on a computer? What is the ‘authentic’ original? And can a digital manuscript have an ‘aura’, as Walter Benjamin called it in his essay Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit? If an archive holds, for instance, Salman Rushdie’s pc, then what exactly is being preserved in its collection – the hardware or rather the binary data it contains? Graham Barwell (carefully) suggests that works of literature have an immaterial existence, implying that all its instantiations are ‘copies’ (Barwell 2005). Others, such as Matthew G. Kirschenbaum and Doug Reside, resolutely advocate the recognition of ‘Digital Materiality’. When dealing with digitally born works, it is important for archives to not only preserve for instance old floppy disks (as, for example, in the case of some of Christine Brooke-Rose and David Foster Wallace’s ‘manuscripts’ at the Harry Ransom Center), but also the hardware of the pc on which the works were written. This kind of archival material can be used for ‘file carving’ or other forensic techniques to recover data from a writer’s computer (Kirschenbaum et al. 2009). Whether writers think this is a good idea is another matter. The average life span of a floppy, a hard disk or a memory stick is about five years. According to an article by Pierre Assouline in the French newspaper Le Monde, Pierre-Marc de Biasi sounded the alarm in April 2011, noticing a huge hiatus in the most recent history of manuscript genetics: because we were suddenly able to ‘save’ everything on computers, we assumed that we were preserving it. The suggestion was that short-term thinking might have undermined our concern with durability, and that genetic criticism would lose its object of study: ‘The era of parchment was that of the palimpsest, the age of paper was that of the cancellation, this is the era of the medium without remorse.’6 But de Biasi was certainly not the first to make this observation. Suzanne Briet, Qu’est-ce que la ducumentation (Paris: EDIT, 1951). See Buckland 1998. ‘L’ère du parchemin avait été celui du palimpseste, l’âge du papier celui de la rature, voici venue l’ère du support sans repentir.’ Pierre-Marc de Biasi in Pierre Assouline, ‘La mémoire vide des temps informatisés’, Le Monde des livres, 21 April 2011.

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In 1993, Roger Laufer already drew attention to digital manuscripts, which according to him would be documented in a more sophisticated manner than conventional manuscripts by ‘the end of the decade’, the end of the twentieth century, on condition – he did add – ‘that the machines and the programmes are being preserved’ (Laufer 1993: 237). A few years earlier, Wolfgang Hagen sounded more pessimistic. According to him, it had always been one of the most important tasks of textual analysis to reconstruct the genesis of a text by means of early versions, but alas, ‘The computer does not give any information on earlier versions. Nor on the effort of writing.’7 In the meantime, several keystroke logging programmes are able to register every singly keystroke. Every added comma, every deleted letter can be retraced. With programmes such as Inputlog, all kinds of writing processes – usually non-literary geneses – are being examined, including writing methods that make use of speech recognition technology.8 In archival terms, the period of floppy disks and CD-ROMS is regarded as the digital Middle Ages. Quite some information from this period may no longer be recoverable. But now that it is possible to save not just every version, but every singly keystroke of each version, the question arises whether the reverse is not actually the bigger problem, an overabundance of data. In 2010, for the first time in history, the human species generated more than a zettabyte (a billion gigabytes) of digital data. Kari Kraus therefore made a plea in the New York Times (5 August 2011) for a different archival practice with regard to digital files.9 Digital data cannot endlessly migrate from an older computer to a more recent model. Newer software can act ‘retro’ to some degree, as if it were installed in an old Tandy computer for instance, but this so-called emulation also has its limits. Instead of waiting to preserve a document until it is no longer being used, the process of preservation should ideally already start during the creation of the document. Kari Kraus refers to fans of games such as ‘Super Mario Bros.’ and ‘Pac-Man’, who spontaneously came up with their own solutions to make an evolving archive of their games. The idea is to start thinking less in terms of preservation, more in terms of data managament. An archivist of digital data would become a curator. This model does not regard ‘Von früheren Fassungen gibt ein Computertext keine Kenntnis. Auch von der Mühe des Schreibens nicht ...’ (Hagen 1989: 228). See, for instance, the research done by Luuk Van Waes and Mariëlle Leijten (2007, 2009). 9 Kari Kraus, ‘When Data Disappears’, New York Times Sunday Review, 5 August 2011; http://www. nytimes.com/2011/08/07/opinion/sunday/when-data-disappears.html?_r=2&ref=opinion As the digital version mentions, the paper version of this text was published two days later: ‘A version of this op-ed appeared in print on August 7, 2011, on page SR12 of the New York edition with the headline: When Data Disappears.’ 7

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digital heritage as a static product that needs to be protected against change. Change cannot be prevented, but it can be curated. This does imply that the tough decisions about what does and what does not need to be saved would have to be made at a very early stage. Many contempory writers curate their own manuscripts and even share this ‘archive’ with their audience. Jean-Philippe Toussaint, for instance, made available several early versions of his book Fuir, as well as notes and other preparatory material, which he presents in four categories: A. ‘stages of the manuscript’; B. ‘plans, variants, debris’; C. ‘drafts, manuscripts’; D. ‘corrected proofs’.10 By way of an experiment, the poet Paul Bogaert took on the role of auto-curator in 2002 by keeping track of the genesis of his poem ‘Iets refreinerigs’ in the form of a PowerPoint presentation. He saved 225 versions of the poem, carefully registering the exact time of preservation. In and of itself this may seem the ideal research object for genetic criticism, but the problem of this auto-curation is the writer’s inevitably enhanced self-consciousness. The process of registration can have a paralysing effect on the process of composition, or influence it otherwise, which raises the question as to what exactly is being registered in this way: the process of writing or the process of registration. Paul Bogaert is well aware of this enhanced consciousness and mentions it explicitly at the beginning of the presentation: ‘During the process of writing, I was constantly thinking: “I have to save versions”. As a result, the recorded writing process differs from the normal writing process: I have typed out more things than I usually do.’11 Thorsten Ries describes a similar genetic experiment, which he carried out together with the poet Michael Speier by means of the digital versions of his poem ‘ausfahrt st. nazaire’, preserved by the author himself (Ries 2010). For the experiment, Ries made use of Microsoft Word 97 (8.0), noting that from Microsoft Word 6.0 (1993) to Word 8.0 (Word 97) the option ‘fast save’ was switched on in the default setting; in Word 2000 it was no longer switched on as 10 See http://www.jptoussaint.com/fuir.html (accessed 17 April 2013): A. États du manuscrit: Mars 2002; Fin janvier 2003; Fin juin 2003; Mai 2004; B. Plans, variantes, débris: ‘Mars 2002 ; Décembre 2002; Fin janvier 2003; Mars 2003 ; Fin juin 2003; Fin janvier 2004; Mai 2004’; C. Brouillons, manuscrits: Notes manuscrites, plan d’ensemble (parties I et II); Notes manuscrites, visite temple; Notes manuscrites, fuite à moto  ; Brouillons avec corrections manuscrites, fuite à moto; Notes manuscrites, troisième partie (île d’Elbe); Notes manuscrites, troisième partie (île d’Elbe); D. Correction des épreuves: 21 février 2005; 30 mars 2005;18 avril 2005; 29 avril 2005; 4 juillet 2005. 11 ‘Tijdens het schrijven zat ik voortdurend te denken: “ik moet versies bewaren”. Daardoor verschilt het vastgelegde schrijfproces van het normale schrijfproces: ik heb veel meer dingen ingetikt dan gewoonlijk’ (Bogaert 2006: 138).

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a standard accessory and from Office 2007 onwards, the ‘fast save’ option was no longer available. Meanwhile, however, Microsoft’s competitor Apple invested in new versions of AutoSave, and Versions in its Mac OS X Lion, which was launched on 20 July 2011. Whenever a user opens a file, and while s/he works on it, a version is automatically saved every hour. To view an earlier version, a survey of all versions enables the user to access any version to see what the document looked like at a particular stage and to what extent it differed from preceding and following versions. The genesis of texts has seldom been recognized as explicitly as an integral and self-evident part of both the writing process and the writing tool. The opening sentence of the promotional text for Versions read: ‘It’s only natural that a document goes through many changes as it’s being created.’12 The tool’s functionality was summarized in the subheading ‘See every step you took’ and the last sentence of the promotional text ended with ‘all the hard work it took to get there’ – which implies a recognition of digital drafts. The research object of genetic criticism therefore does not seem to be vanishing in the computer age, but rather the contrary. As opposed to what prophets of doom in the 1980s tended to claim, the use of word processors and speech recognition technology has not led to the neglect or extinction of early versions. If anything, it seems to have enhanced textual awareness – the awareness that a text is usually only one among several versions or instantiations of a work. Writers and researchers increasingly post versions of their texts on their personal or departmental websites. Digital editions and digital archives such as the Walt Whitman Archive (www.whitmanarchive.org/) or Les manuscrits de Madame Bovary (www.bovary.fr/) enhance the awareness that literary works have always existed in various versions, notably during that so-called ‘golden age’ of the modern manuscript. Throughout the years, due to auctions and other circumstances, the manuscripts of a work can easily get dispersed and end up in different holding libraries and private collections. The manuscripts of Samuel Beckett, for instance, are held at more than a dozen different archives in France, Ireland, the UK, the US and Canada. In order to study all the versions of, say, Krapp’s Last Tape, a researcher has to travel at least to the UK (the University of Reading) and the US (the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas). The Beckett Digital Manuscript Archive (www.beckettarchive. org) tries to (digitally) reconstitute the genetic dossiers of these dispersed manuscripts – a textual form of family reunification with digital facsimiles and http://www.apple.com/macosx/whats-new/auto-save.html (accessed 1 August 2011).

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transcriptions. Probably, a new generation’s encounters with literature will take place online, not only through texts but also through images, such as digital facsimiles of authors’ personal libraries and manuscripts. Digital imaging and scan technologies may be totally different from anastatic printing, but perhaps the result is not that dissimilar. In that sense, Edgar Allan Poe eventually does get his way.

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Index Abbott, H. Porter 202, 218, 243 Abercrombie, John 44 Ackerley, Chris 174, 193–4 Adorno, Theodor W. 205 Agamben, Giorgio 125 Alison, Archibald 52 Aristotle 163 Armstrong, Paul 154 Assouline, Pierre 237 Attenborough, David 114 Austen, Jane 55, 245 Aydon, Cyril 21 Babbage, Charles 38 Bacon, Francis 28, 40, 47–8, 173, 186 Badiou, Alain 179, 219 Ball, Robert 155, 159, 165, 168 Balzac, Honoré de 192, 195–6, 206 Banfield, Ann 5 Barlow, Nora 21, 31 Barrett, Paul 21–2, 32–5, 37–8, 40–6, 48, 52, 60, 64, 112–14 Barthes, Roland 99, 153 Barwell, Graham 237 Baudelaire, Charles 7–8 Beaumont, Jean Baptiste Elie de 44 Beckett, Samuel 5, 10, 13, 16, 92, 133, 154–5, 164, 168, 171–82, 186–212, 218–27, 229–30, 240, 243, 245 Beer, Gillian 12–13, 20, 37, 56, 102, 120 Beethoven, Ludwig von 178 Beja, Morris 158–9 Bell, Charles 77 Bellemin-Noël, Jean 8 Benjamin, Walter 237 Berkeley, George 163 Berkun, Scott 157 Bernaerts, Lars 3, 5, 11, 245 Biasi, Pierre-Marc de 6, 8–9, 11–12, 21–2, 84, 109, 183, 199, 213–14, 219, 228, 237 Blair, David 180

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Blanche, Jacques 167 Blyth, Edward 34 Boehme, Jakob 163 Bogaert, Paul 239 Bordalejo, Barbara 22, 99–102, 104, 109 Boswell, James 41 Bradbury, Malcolm 12 Braeckman, Johan 37 Bredekamp, Horst 113–14 Bremer, Frederika 93 Bridgewater, Francis Henry, Earl of 38, 47, 76–8, 94, 116 Briet, Suzanne 237 Briggs, Julia 143–4, 171 Brod, Max 138 Brooke-Rose, Christine 237 Browne, Janet 21, 44, 92 Browne, Thomas 43–4 Browne, William George 43, 45 Bryant, John 130, 213 Buckland, Michael 236–7 Buckland, William 77 Budgen, Frank 234 Bulwer, John 153 Burke, Edmund 56, 58–61, 65, 81, 106 Burns, Robert 54 Bussola, Ernesto 188 Butler, Samuel 232–3 Byron, George Gordon Lord 36, 39, 54–5 Calinescu, Matei 7 Callu, Florence 4, 12, 132, 231 Campbell, Thomas 41 Camus, Albert 181 Carlyle, Thomas 40–1, 53–4 Cassady, Neal 235 Cassirer, Bruno 173–6, 186 Cassirer, Ernst 173 Cavaillès, Nicolas 213 Cézanne, Paul 176–8 Chalmers, David J. 1, 33, 130, 148, 155, 164, 171

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268 Index Chambers, Robert 40, 93–4 Chancellor, Gordon 22, 24 Childs, Peter 12, 129 Clark, Andy 1–2, 33, 130, 148, 155, 164, 171, 179–80 Claudius, Matthias 222 Cleghorn, James 43–6 Clément, Bruno 191 Clowes, William 97, 101 Cohn, Dorrit 5 Cohn, Ruby 10, 190, 223, 227 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 39–41, 53, 55–6, 152 Connor, Steven 219 Conrad, Joseph 5, 15, 78, 132–8, 146 Copernicus, Nicolaus 15, 129 Cowper, William 41 Crispi, Luca 234 Cromwell, Oliver 40 Cunnell, Howard 235 Dahlberg, Kajsa 151–2 Damasio, Antonio 162–4, 177, 179 Dante Alighieri 55, 163 Darwin, Caroline 23, 25, 54 Darwin, Charles v, 8, 11–15, 19–22, 23–62, 63–97, 99–109, 111–17, 121, 129, 135, 137, 147, 232, 243, 246 Darwin, Emma 84, 92–3 Darwin, Erasmus (grandfather) 35–7, 56, 59, 61–2, 65 Darwin, Erasmus (brother) 37, 50, 54 Darwin, Francis 20–1, 66–8, 70, 73, 76, 79–81, 84, 104–5 Darwin, Robert Waring 43, 45 Davies, Roy 34 Dawkins, Richard 216 Deane, Seamus 160 De Beer, Gavin 20 De Bondt, Sara 227 Debray Genette, Raymonde 14, 213 De Geest, Dirk 3 Dehaene, Stanislas 154 Dennett, Daniel C. 3, 158, 162–3, 186, 188, 190, 198–9, 201, 203, 206, 223, 244–5 Depew, David J. 23, 75 Descartes, René 1, 3, 4, 5, 123, 131, 146–7, 152, 155, 186–90, 198, 203, 205–6, 211, 223, 226, 229, 244

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Desmond, Adrian 21, 54, 93 Dickens, Charles 93 Diconson, William 153 Di Gregorio, Mario 20, 54, 60, 62 D’Iorio, Paolo 8 Dryden, John 36, 54, 191 Dunne, J. W. 166, 169, 188 Duthuit, Georges 194–6, 198, 204, 206 Earl, George Windsor 43–4 Eichwald, C. E. von 46 Einstein, Albert 56, 166 Eiseley, Loren 34, Eldredge, Niles 21, 32, 37, 49–50, 201 Eliot, T. S. 233–4 Elsschot, Willem 118 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus 118–19 Evelyn, John 40, 43, 45 Federman, Raymond 218 Feldman, Matthew 172, 188 Ferrer, Daniel 8–9, 11, 32, 65–7, 71–2, 90, 102, 117–18, 130, 201–2, 212, 219, 221–2, 244 Feynman, Richard 1–2 Fielding, Henry 123 Fitch, Brian T. 218 FitzRoy, Robert 27–8, 41 Flaubert, Gustave 240, 245 Flower, Linda 132 Fludernik, Monika 5 Foer, Jonathan Safran 5, 16, 227–9 Fordham, Finn 12, 136 France, Fenella 184 Freud, Sigmund 11, 15, 23, 129, 137–8 Frisch, Max 99 Frost, Everett 188 Fry, Ben 102 Fuller, Matthew 236 Gaull, Marilyn 20, 57–8 Gautrey, Peter J. 22, 34 Gellhaus, Axel 178 Genette, Gérard 11, 214–15 Geulincx, Arnold 188 Gill, N. W. 60, 62 Giuriato, Davide 99, 233 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 10, 111, 159 Goldsmith, Oliver 55

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Index Goodman, Nelson 202, 212 Gould, John 30 Graver, Bruce 58, 64 Gray, Asa 96 Gray, Thomas 39, 55 Greenfield, Susan 208 Greg, W. W. 101 Grésillon, Almuth 8, 21, 117, 228 Groden, Michael 123, 200 Gruber, Howard 21, 35, 37, 39, 114 Guerard, Albert J. 133, 142 Haas, Christina 236 Hagen, Wolfgang 238 Halley, Edmond 28, 165 Händel, Georg Friedrich 105 Hansford, James 133, 205 Havelange, Véronique 146–7 Hay, Louis 9, 114, 131, 192 Hayes, John R. 132 Hayles, N. Katherine 236 Hayman, David 119 Henslow, John Stevens 25–7, 34 Herbert, Sandra 22, 32, 34 Herman, David 3, 5, 15, 121–3, 131–2, 142, 144, 148–9, 157, 165, 189, 244 Herman, Luc 3, 5, 165 Herrmann, Karin 178 Herschel, John 32, 37–8, 43, 45–8, 50 Higgins, Aidan 192 Hodge, Jonathan 21, 76 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 135 Hooker, Joseph 95 Hopper, Keith 166 Houthuys, Astrid 7 Hull, David L. 47 Hume, David 174, 186 Hunter, John 42–4, 46 Husserl, Edmund 144, 146–7 Hutto, Daniel D. 3, 171 Inchbald, Elizabeth 55 Ingarden, Roman 114–15 Iser, Wolfgang 114–16, 140, 178 Jackson, Heather J. 8, 151–3, 166 Jackson, Tony E. 3 Jefferson, Thomas 183–5, 228 Jenkin, Fleeming 100–1

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Jenuwein, Thomas 216–17 Johnson, Mark 236 Johnson, Samuel 40–1, 163, 224 Joyce, James 5, 13–14, 16, 74, 119, 122–4, 131–3, 142, 147, 149, 154–65, 166–8, 170–1, 190–1, 200, 210–11, 234–5 Kafka, Franz 5, 15, 138–42, 146 Kafka, Ottla 141 Kahler, Erich von 2, 132 Kant, Immanuel 6–7, 146, 171–83, 186 Kaun, Axel 178 Kemnitz, Charles 166 Kenner, Hugh 188 Kermode, Frank 15, 117–19, 243 Kerouac, Jack 5, 234–5 Keynes, Richard 21–2, 28–31, 105 Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. 237 Kittler, Friedrich 233 Knowlson, James 164, 221–2 Kohn, David 20–2, 34, 63–5, 68, 84–5, 91 Köselitz, Heinrich v, 141, 232 Kotzebue, Otto von 43, 45 Krance, Charles 218 Kraus, Kari 238 Lakoff, George 236 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste de 48, 94, 113 Landor, Walter Savage 43–4 Laufer, Roger 238 Lauwereyns, Jan 185 Lavater, Johann Caspar 43–5 Lawson, Nicholas 29 Lebrave, Jean-Louis 9 Lehmann, Hans-Thies 140 Lehrer, Jonah 164, 176–7 Leijten, Mariëlle 132, 238 Lernout, Geert 119 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 43, 45, 50–3, 66, 72, 106, 159–61, 163, 259 Levy, Eric P. 202 Liepman, Helen P. 100–1, 103 Limoges, Camille 54, 75 Linnington, R. T. 191 Lockhart, John Gibson 41–3, 45 Lubbock, John 46 Lütke, Fedor Petrovich 43, 45

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270 Index Lyell, Charles 19, 29–30, 33–4, 38, 44, 77, 95, 106 Maas, Paul 9 MacGreevy, Thomas 173, 176 Macleay, William Sharp 34, 94 Maeyer, Sven de 132 Malling Hansen, Hans Rasmus 232 Malthus, Thomas Robert 37–40, 43–7, 49, 64, 75, 88, 105, 111–12, 135 Manier, Edward 20, 57 Mann, Thomas 118, 192 Marr, Andrew 114 Martens, Conrad 30 Marx, Karl 11, 23 Mauthner, Fritz 135, 173, 178, 219 Mayo, Herbert 43–4, 60 Mayo, Thomas 44–5 McFarlane, James 12 McGann, Jerome J. 5–6, 36 McHale, Brian 203 Meinel, Katharina 140–1 Menary, Richard 4, 122, 130, 148–9, 171, 179, 205, 207, 244 Michiels, Ivo 13 Mildenberg, Ariane 144–6 Milly, Jean 196 Milton, John 39, 55 Mitchell, Thomas Livingstone 41, 44 Mivart, St George Jackson 103, 116 Montaigne, Michel de 213–16, 218–19, 222, 230 Montini, Chiara 219 Mooney, Sinéad 219 Moore, James 21, 54, 93 Moore, Thomas 54 Murphy, P. J. 172, 174 Murray, John 37, 96–7 Musil, Robert 13 Myin, Erik 3, 171 Myskja, Bjorn K. 176 Navarette, Susan J. 136–7 Newton, Isaac 47 Nietzsche, Friedrich v, 11, 16, 23, 141, 232–3, 235, 245–6 Nietzsche, Elisabeth 232 Nixon, Mark 154, 171–2, 181–2, 203, 222, 225, 243

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O’Brien, Edna 154 O’Brien, Flann (Brian O’Nolan) 5, 16, 154–5, 165–71 O’Connell, Mark 154 O’Hanlon, Redmond 78 O’Nolan, Brian see O’Brien, Flann Orbigny, Alcide d’ 46 O’Reilly, Édouard Magessa 218 Ospovat, Dov 21, 37, 94 Otlet, Paul 237 Ovid 36 Owen, Richard 42, 44 Paley, William 46–7 Palmer, Alan 1, 3, 5 Peckham, Morse 22, 97, 99–104, 107 Pilling, John 172, 174 Pinget, Robert 245 Pliny the Elder 51 Poe, Edgar Allan 118, 137, 153, 231, 241 Polgar, Alfred 233 Ponge, Francis 13 Pope, Alexander 36, 54 Popper, Karl 50 Pound, Ezra 233–4 Pountney, Rosemary 178, 227 Powers, Richard 235–6 Prévost, Constant 44 Proust, Marcel 8, 13, 74, 152–4, 164, 196, 199, 203–4, 222 Quammen, David 21 Rabaté, Jean-Michel 172, 179, 181 Raphael, France 163–4 Reid, Thomas 186–7 Reside, Doug 237 Reuβ, Roland 139–42 Reynolds, Joshua 44–5, 52 Richards, Robert J. 75 Richardson, Brian 190–1, 202 Ries, Thorsten 239 Rimbaud, Arthur 7 Roget, Peter Mark 77 Ross, William 50 Rushdie, Salman 237 Ruskin, John 152 Ryan, Marie-Laure 3

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Index Salisbury, Laura 208 Sardin, Pascale 219 Saussure, Ferdinand de 11 Scheibe, Siegfried 23, 33 Schubert, Franz 222, 227 Schulz, Bruno 5, 16, 227–9 Schwarz, Daniel R. 12 Schwartz, Jake 225 Scott, Walter 41–5 Secord, James A. 20, 93–4 Senn, Fritz 160 Shainberg, Lawrence 209 Shakespeare, William 8, 10, 39, 55, 138–9 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 39, 41, 55, 57 Sherman, William 152–3 Shillingsburg, Peter 10, 22, 96–7, 99, 101, 103, 217 Slote, Sam 170, 219 Smith, Sydney 19–22, 34, 41, 63–5, 68, 84–5, 91 Snow, C. P. 35 Speier, Michael 239 Spencer, Herbert 100 Spencer, Theodore 133 Stauffer, Robert C. 21, 42–3, 63–5, 68, 84–5, 91, 95–6 Staunton, George Leonard 44–5 Sternberg, Meir 4, 8, 19, 206 Stevenson, Robert Louis 137 Stewart, Dugald 52, 60 Stewart, John 122 Stingelin, Martin 99, 233 Stockwell, Peter 3 Stoddart, D. R. 22 Sulloway, Frank 21, 28 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord 62 Tetreault, Ron 58, 64 Thompson, G. R. 137 Thomson, Keith S. 20–1, 46–7 Toussaint, Jean-Philippe 239 Tucker, David 188 Turner, Samuel 39

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Uexküll, Jakob von 121–5 Uhlmann, Anthony 188 Ussher, Arland 173 Van Mierlo, Wim 8, 133, 160–2 Van Waes, Luuk 132, 238 Vervaeck, Bart 3, 5, 165 Victoria, Queen 24, 109 Voigts-Virchow, Eckart 114 Vorzimmer, Peter 20–1, 40, 63, 84 Wallace, Alfred Russel 96, 126 Wallace, David Foster 237 Walpole, Horace 137–8 Warning, Rainer 196 Waters, Kenneth C. 76 Waterton, Charles 43–6 Wedgwood, Ernest 53 Weiner, Charles 1 Weininger, Otto 133, 160–3 Weller, Shane 186–7 Whewell, William 44–6, 48–50, 77 White, Hayden 120 Whitman, Walt 240, 246 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 51 Windelband, Wilhelm 172 Wittgenstein, Ludwig v, 180 Wolf, Maryanne 154 Wolf-Devine, Celia 188 Woolf, Virginia 2, 5, 15, 135, 137, 142–8, 151–2, 155–7, 201, 207, 211, 246 Wordsworth, William 20, 39, 55–61, 63–5, 72–3, 82, 106 Wyhe, John van 22, 24 Youatt, William 54, 75 Young, Edward 7 Zanetti, Sandro 99, 233 Zola, Émile 192 Zunshine, Lisa 3

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Index Abbott, H. Porter 202, 218, 243 Abercrombie, John 44 Ackerley, Chris 174, 193–4 Adorno, Theodor W. 205 Agamben, Giorgio 125 Alison, Archibald 52 Aristotle 163 Armstrong, Paul 154 Assouline, Pierre 237 Attenborough, David 114 Austen, Jane 55, 245 Aydon, Cyril 21 Babbage, Charles 38 Bacon, Francis 28, 40, 47–8, 173, 186 Badiou, Alain 179, 219 Ball, Robert 155, 159, 165, 168 Balzac, Honoré de 192, 195–6, 206 Banfield, Ann 5 Barlow, Nora 21, 31 Barrett, Paul 21–2, 32–5, 37–8, 40–6, 48, 52, 60, 64, 112–14 Barthes, Roland 99, 153 Barwell, Graham 237 Baudelaire, Charles 7–8 Beaumont, Jean Baptiste Elie de 44 Beckett, Samuel 5, 10, 13, 16, 92, 133, 154–5, 164, 168, 171–82, 186–212, 218–27, 229–30, 240, 243, 245 Beer, Gillian 12–13, 20, 37, 56, 102, 120 Beethoven, Ludwig von 178 Beja, Morris 158–9 Bell, Charles 77 Bellemin-Noël, Jean 8 Benjamin, Walter 237 Berkeley, George 163 Berkun, Scott 157 Bernaerts, Lars 3, 5, 11, 245 Biasi, Pierre-Marc de 6, 8–9, 11–12, 21–2, 84, 109, 183, 199, 213–14, 219, 228, 237 Blair, David 180

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Blanche, Jacques 167 Blyth, Edward 34 Boehme, Jakob 163 Bogaert, Paul 239 Bordalejo, Barbara 22, 99–102, 104, 109 Boswell, James 41 Bradbury, Malcolm 12 Braeckman, Johan 37 Bredekamp, Horst 113–14 Bremer, Frederika 93 Bridgewater, Francis Henry, Earl of 38, 47, 76–8, 94, 116 Briet, Suzanne 237 Briggs, Julia 143–4, 171 Brod, Max 138 Brooke-Rose, Christine 237 Browne, Janet 21, 44, 92 Browne, Thomas 43–4 Browne, William George 43, 45 Bryant, John 130, 213 Buckland, Michael 236–7 Buckland, William 77 Budgen, Frank 234 Bulwer, John 153 Burke, Edmund 56, 58–61, 65, 81, 106 Burns, Robert 54 Bussola, Ernesto 188 Butler, Samuel 232–3 Byron, George Gordon Lord 36, 39, 54–5 Calinescu, Matei 7 Callu, Florence 4, 12, 132, 231 Campbell, Thomas 41 Camus, Albert 181 Carlyle, Thomas 40–1, 53–4 Cassady, Neal 235 Cassirer, Bruno 173–6, 186 Cassirer, Ernst 173 Cavaillès, Nicolas 213 Cézanne, Paul 176–8 Chalmers, David J. 1, 33, 130, 148, 155, 164, 171

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268 Index Chambers, Robert 40, 93–4 Chancellor, Gordon 22, 24 Childs, Peter 12, 129 Clark, Andy 1–2, 33, 130, 148, 155, 164, 171, 179–80 Claudius, Matthias 222 Cleghorn, James 43–6 Clément, Bruno 191 Clowes, William 97, 101 Cohn, Dorrit 5 Cohn, Ruby 10, 190, 223, 227 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 39–41, 53, 55–6, 152 Connor, Steven 219 Conrad, Joseph 5, 15, 78, 132–8, 146 Copernicus, Nicolaus 15, 129 Cowper, William 41 Crispi, Luca 234 Cromwell, Oliver 40 Cunnell, Howard 235 Dahlberg, Kajsa 151–2 Damasio, Antonio 162–4, 177, 179 Dante Alighieri 55, 163 Darwin, Caroline 23, 25, 54 Darwin, Charles v, 8, 11–15, 19–22, 23–62, 63–97, 99–109, 111–17, 121, 129, 135, 137, 147, 232, 243, 246 Darwin, Emma 84, 92–3 Darwin, Erasmus (grandfather) 35–7, 56, 59, 61–2, 65 Darwin, Erasmus (brother) 37, 50, 54 Darwin, Francis 20–1, 66–8, 70, 73, 76, 79–81, 84, 104–5 Darwin, Robert Waring 43, 45 Davies, Roy 34 Dawkins, Richard 216 Deane, Seamus 160 De Beer, Gavin 20 De Bondt, Sara 227 Debray Genette, Raymonde 14, 213 De Geest, Dirk 3 Dehaene, Stanislas 154 Dennett, Daniel C. 3, 158, 162–3, 186, 188, 190, 198–9, 201, 203, 206, 223, 244–5 Depew, David J. 23, 75 Descartes, René 1, 3, 4, 5, 123, 131, 146–7, 152, 155, 186–90, 198, 203, 205–6, 211, 223, 226, 229, 244

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Desmond, Adrian 21, 54, 93 Dickens, Charles 93 Diconson, William 153 Di Gregorio, Mario 20, 54, 60, 62 D’Iorio, Paolo 8 Dryden, John 36, 54, 191 Dunne, J. W. 166, 169, 188 Duthuit, Georges 194–6, 198, 204, 206 Earl, George Windsor 43–4 Eichwald, C. E. von 46 Einstein, Albert 56, 166 Eiseley, Loren 34, Eldredge, Niles 21, 32, 37, 49–50, 201 Eliot, T. S. 233–4 Elsschot, Willem 118 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus 118–19 Evelyn, John 40, 43, 45 Federman, Raymond 218 Feldman, Matthew 172, 188 Ferrer, Daniel 8–9, 11, 32, 65–7, 71–2, 90, 102, 117–18, 130, 201–2, 212, 219, 221–2, 244 Feynman, Richard 1–2 Fielding, Henry 123 Fitch, Brian T. 218 FitzRoy, Robert 27–8, 41 Flaubert, Gustave 240, 245 Flower, Linda 132 Fludernik, Monika 5 Foer, Jonathan Safran 5, 16, 227–9 Fordham, Finn 12, 136 France, Fenella 184 Freud, Sigmund 11, 15, 23, 129, 137–8 Frisch, Max 99 Frost, Everett 188 Fry, Ben 102 Fuller, Matthew 236 Gaull, Marilyn 20, 57–8 Gautrey, Peter J. 22, 34 Gellhaus, Axel 178 Genette, Gérard 11, 214–15 Geulincx, Arnold 188 Gill, N. W. 60, 62 Giuriato, Davide 99, 233 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 10, 111, 159 Goldsmith, Oliver 55

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Index Goodman, Nelson 202, 212 Gould, John 30 Graver, Bruce 58, 64 Gray, Asa 96 Gray, Thomas 39, 55 Greenfield, Susan 208 Greg, W. W. 101 Grésillon, Almuth 8, 21, 117, 228 Groden, Michael 123, 200 Gruber, Howard 21, 35, 37, 39, 114 Guerard, Albert J. 133, 142 Haas, Christina 236 Hagen, Wolfgang 238 Halley, Edmond 28, 165 Händel, Georg Friedrich 105 Hansford, James 133, 205 Havelange, Véronique 146–7 Hay, Louis 9, 114, 131, 192 Hayes, John R. 132 Hayles, N. Katherine 236 Hayman, David 119 Henslow, John Stevens 25–7, 34 Herbert, Sandra 22, 32, 34 Herman, David 3, 5, 15, 121–3, 131–2, 142, 144, 148–9, 157, 165, 189, 244 Herman, Luc 3, 5, 165 Herrmann, Karin 178 Herschel, John 32, 37–8, 43, 45–8, 50 Higgins, Aidan 192 Hodge, Jonathan 21, 76 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 135 Hooker, Joseph 95 Hopper, Keith 166 Houthuys, Astrid 7 Hull, David L. 47 Hume, David 174, 186 Hunter, John 42–4, 46 Husserl, Edmund 144, 146–7 Hutto, Daniel D. 3, 171 Inchbald, Elizabeth 55 Ingarden, Roman 114–15 Iser, Wolfgang 114–16, 140, 178 Jackson, Heather J. 8, 151–3, 166 Jackson, Tony E. 3 Jefferson, Thomas 183–5, 228 Jenkin, Fleeming 100–1

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Jenuwein, Thomas 216–17 Johnson, Mark 236 Johnson, Samuel 40–1, 163, 224 Joyce, James 5, 13–14, 16, 74, 119, 122–4, 131–3, 142, 147, 149, 154–65, 166–8, 170–1, 190–1, 200, 210–11, 234–5 Kafka, Franz 5, 15, 138–42, 146 Kafka, Ottla 141 Kahler, Erich von 2, 132 Kant, Immanuel 6–7, 146, 171–83, 186 Kaun, Axel 178 Kemnitz, Charles 166 Kenner, Hugh 188 Kermode, Frank 15, 117–19, 243 Kerouac, Jack 5, 234–5 Keynes, Richard 21–2, 28–31, 105 Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. 237 Kittler, Friedrich 233 Knowlson, James 164, 221–2 Kohn, David 20–2, 34, 63–5, 68, 84–5, 91 Köselitz, Heinrich v, 141, 232 Kotzebue, Otto von 43, 45 Krance, Charles 218 Kraus, Kari 238 Lakoff, George 236 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste de 48, 94, 113 Landor, Walter Savage 43–4 Laufer, Roger 238 Lauwereyns, Jan 185 Lavater, Johann Caspar 43–5 Lawson, Nicholas 29 Lebrave, Jean-Louis 9 Lehmann, Hans-Thies 140 Lehrer, Jonah 164, 176–7 Leijten, Mariëlle 132, 238 Lernout, Geert 119 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 43, 45, 50–3, 66, 72, 106, 159–61, 163, 259 Levy, Eric P. 202 Liepman, Helen P. 100–1, 103 Limoges, Camille 54, 75 Linnington, R. T. 191 Lockhart, John Gibson 41–3, 45 Lubbock, John 46 Lütke, Fedor Petrovich 43, 45

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270 Index Lyell, Charles 19, 29–30, 33–4, 38, 44, 77, 95, 106 Maas, Paul 9 MacGreevy, Thomas 173, 176 Macleay, William Sharp 34, 94 Maeyer, Sven de 132 Malling Hansen, Hans Rasmus 232 Malthus, Thomas Robert 37–40, 43–7, 49, 64, 75, 88, 105, 111–12, 135 Manier, Edward 20, 57 Mann, Thomas 118, 192 Marr, Andrew 114 Martens, Conrad 30 Marx, Karl 11, 23 Mauthner, Fritz 135, 173, 178, 219 Mayo, Herbert 43–4, 60 Mayo, Thomas 44–5 McFarlane, James 12 McGann, Jerome J. 5–6, 36 McHale, Brian 203 Meinel, Katharina 140–1 Menary, Richard 4, 122, 130, 148–9, 171, 179, 205, 207, 244 Michiels, Ivo 13 Mildenberg, Ariane 144–6 Milly, Jean 196 Milton, John 39, 55 Mitchell, Thomas Livingstone 41, 44 Mivart, St George Jackson 103, 116 Montaigne, Michel de 213–16, 218–19, 222, 230 Montini, Chiara 219 Mooney, Sinéad 219 Moore, James 21, 54, 93 Moore, Thomas 54 Murphy, P. J. 172, 174 Murray, John 37, 96–7 Musil, Robert 13 Myin, Erik 3, 171 Myskja, Bjorn K. 176 Navarette, Susan J. 136–7 Newton, Isaac 47 Nietzsche, Friedrich v, 11, 16, 23, 141, 232–3, 235, 245–6 Nietzsche, Elisabeth 232 Nixon, Mark 154, 171–2, 181–2, 203, 222, 225, 243

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O’Brien, Edna 154 O’Brien, Flann (Brian O’Nolan) 5, 16, 154–5, 165–71 O’Connell, Mark 154 O’Hanlon, Redmond 78 O’Nolan, Brian see O’Brien, Flann Orbigny, Alcide d’ 46 O’Reilly, Édouard Magessa 218 Ospovat, Dov 21, 37, 94 Otlet, Paul 237 Ovid 36 Owen, Richard 42, 44 Paley, William 46–7 Palmer, Alan 1, 3, 5 Peckham, Morse 22, 97, 99–104, 107 Pilling, John 172, 174 Pinget, Robert 245 Pliny the Elder 51 Poe, Edgar Allan 118, 137, 153, 231, 241 Polgar, Alfred 233 Ponge, Francis 13 Pope, Alexander 36, 54 Popper, Karl 50 Pound, Ezra 233–4 Pountney, Rosemary 178, 227 Powers, Richard 235–6 Prévost, Constant 44 Proust, Marcel 8, 13, 74, 152–4, 164, 196, 199, 203–4, 222 Quammen, David 21 Rabaté, Jean-Michel 172, 179, 181 Raphael, France 163–4 Reid, Thomas 186–7 Reside, Doug 237 Reuβ, Roland 139–42 Reynolds, Joshua 44–5, 52 Richards, Robert J. 75 Richardson, Brian 190–1, 202 Ries, Thorsten 239 Rimbaud, Arthur 7 Roget, Peter Mark 77 Ross, William 50 Rushdie, Salman 237 Ruskin, John 152 Ryan, Marie-Laure 3

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Index Salisbury, Laura 208 Sardin, Pascale 219 Saussure, Ferdinand de 11 Scheibe, Siegfried 23, 33 Schubert, Franz 222, 227 Schulz, Bruno 5, 16, 227–9 Schwarz, Daniel R. 12 Schwartz, Jake 225 Scott, Walter 41–5 Secord, James A. 20, 93–4 Senn, Fritz 160 Shainberg, Lawrence 209 Shakespeare, William 8, 10, 39, 55, 138–9 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 39, 41, 55, 57 Sherman, William 152–3 Shillingsburg, Peter 10, 22, 96–7, 99, 101, 103, 217 Slote, Sam 170, 219 Smith, Sydney 19–22, 34, 41, 63–5, 68, 84–5, 91 Snow, C. P. 35 Speier, Michael 239 Spencer, Herbert 100 Spencer, Theodore 133 Stauffer, Robert C. 21, 42–3, 63–5, 68, 84–5, 91, 95–6 Staunton, George Leonard 44–5 Sternberg, Meir 4, 8, 19, 206 Stevenson, Robert Louis 137 Stewart, Dugald 52, 60 Stewart, John 122 Stingelin, Martin 99, 233 Stockwell, Peter 3 Stoddart, D. R. 22 Sulloway, Frank 21, 28 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord 62 Tetreault, Ron 58, 64 Thompson, G. R. 137 Thomson, Keith S. 20–1, 46–7 Toussaint, Jean-Philippe 239 Tucker, David 188 Turner, Samuel 39

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Uexküll, Jakob von 121–5 Uhlmann, Anthony 188 Ussher, Arland 173 Van Mierlo, Wim 8, 133, 160–2 Van Waes, Luuk 132, 238 Vervaeck, Bart 3, 5, 165 Victoria, Queen 24, 109 Voigts-Virchow, Eckart 114 Vorzimmer, Peter 20–1, 40, 63, 84 Wallace, Alfred Russel 96, 126 Wallace, David Foster 237 Walpole, Horace 137–8 Warning, Rainer 196 Waters, Kenneth C. 76 Waterton, Charles 43–6 Wedgwood, Ernest 53 Weiner, Charles 1 Weininger, Otto 133, 160–3 Weller, Shane 186–7 Whewell, William 44–6, 48–50, 77 White, Hayden 120 Whitman, Walt 240, 246 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 51 Windelband, Wilhelm 172 Wittgenstein, Ludwig v, 180 Wolf, Maryanne 154 Wolf-Devine, Celia 188 Woolf, Virginia 2, 5, 15, 135, 137, 142–8, 151–2, 155–7, 201, 207, 211, 246 Wordsworth, William 20, 39, 55–61, 63–5, 72–3, 82, 106 Wyhe, John van 22, 24 Youatt, William 54, 75 Young, Edward 7 Zanetti, Sandro 99, 233 Zola, Émile 192 Zunshine, Lisa 3

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