INTRODUCTION

introduction to collected literary transcripts

INTRODUCTION

Why key-in to a personal computer certain literary classics or published writings? - Well, for a variety of reasons actually, not least the idealistic motive of transposing certain favourite works to electronic text, so that they can be read in a higher and more subjective medium than books, with their printerly shortcomings and all-too-phenomenal limitations, including a tendency to grow mouldy, to crumble, crease, smell, flake, fade, curl up, crumple, or what have you. The book that has been 'saved' to electronic text is, in some sense, lifted beyond the narrow confines of a broadly centrifugal, mundane medium and elevated to a new level that somehow towers above the world, like Eternity, and offers one a glimpse of otherworldly possibilities, including the use of coloured inks and a wide variety of typefaces in both printerly and, more subjectively, writerly presentations (though the italic-writerly type I utilize for my own disc- and internet-oriented works would not, I feel, be appropriate to texts which have already been published in book form and thus achieved a degree of worldly recognition traditionally commensurate with bourgeois or, at any rate, humanistic criteria).

For the book, considered as that rectilinear 'thing' publishers still find lucratively commercial in its materialistic elegance, almost invariably limits one to print, to the phenomenal objectivity, as it were, of a female mean, whereby greater justice is effectively done to strength or, more usually in these days of paperback publication, weakness than to either knowledge or truth, and one has a watery correlation which, when not falling back in fiery fashion on italics, lends itself, in all too conventionally Western vein, to spiritual hype, i.e. to an exaggeration of the significance of spirituality at the expense of both intellectuality and, more importantly, emotionality – the first of which properly requires a vegetative (earthy) correlation and the second an airy one, being germane to the soul. Anyone who wishes to do greater justice to knowledge or truth, even if only in relation to certain deeper classic publications, would not shirk the advantages that accrue to the use of a writerly typeface in connection with the transmutation of literature from book to electronic text via his personal computer.

Then, too, the transcription of published literature provides one with an opportunity to correct all those printers' mistakes and/or stratagems for achieving a right justification (margin) which undermine the integrity of printed texts and often detract from one's enjoyment or understanding of a significant literary work, be it fictional or philosophical, or whatever. Being able to correct errors and limitations inherent in the book medium itself, with its requirement of margins (for thumbs) and callous overriding of the polysyllabic integrity of complex words via hyphenated splitting, not to mention increasing commercially-oriented failure to do adequate justice to punctuation hierarchies, with due spacing distinctions between, for instance, commas and full-stops, would be in itself justification enough for keying-in an important work, even if the book one happened to be copying from wasn’t, materially considered, in an advanced state of dilapidation or especially worthy, in one's estimation, of being elevated to a higher medium or, indeed, didn't appear to be the victim of time's march beyond a variety of technical anachronisms, including recourse to hyphenation of certain words that no longer require to be hyphenated and can accordingly be updated to suit a contemporary reader, thereby removing it, in some degree, from the museum.

Some books – including one I was recently reading whose title and publisher I shall graciously refrain from mentioning – contain literally hundreds of print errors and printers' subterfuges, not to mention technical anachronisms, and are so constricted and compromised by the limitations of book production ... that one wonders how people could possibly continue reading them in the first place, never mind going along, as authors, with a procedure that can culminate in the most atrocious typographical errors! Obviously what I said at the beginning of this introduction about books being commercially viable in their conspicuous and even, in some cases, ostentatious bulkiness and garish presentation … has more than a little to do with the continuing willingness of people to spend hard-earned money on books even when other – and usually superior – media of literary presentation are if not to hand then technically and conceptually possible, and simply because 'the book', considered in phenomenal terms, appeals to their sense of materialistic possessiveness and fits-in to and enhances their library, whereas the same content on a compact-floppy disc, for example, would have virtually no commercial appeal whatsoever in a straight retail competition between books and discs. (In fact, so much must this be the case that one might be forgiven for believing that most people do not buy books simply or even primarily for content, but to satisfy a craving for materialistic elegance such that elevates both cover and bulk to a pre-eminent status.)

Be that as it may, there are many other reasons why someone might prefer, against the ever-rising commercial tide of literary production, to commit certain books to electronic transcription; like the difficulty or reluctance which many British or Irish people naturally have with regard to American texts, the spelling of which follows American practice and, whilst usually still intelligible, is not without its drawbacks and disadvantages from an English-speaking, European standpoint. What is there to stop anyone keying-in an American novel, say, from giving it British English in all but a few culturally significant words that somehow sound better or do more justice to the native context of the text in their original American-English? Theoretically there is nothing to stop one from amending the text to suit a British or an Irish reader, and this can be a further inducement to transposing works from book to screen via computer, so that one is not slavishly copying text but is all the time looking out for things to improve, correct, and/or render more intelligible both to oneself and, in the not-entirely inconceivable event of publishers' or copyright holders' backing at some future date, any prospective readership, if and where applicable.

But this can only really happen when one keys-in a literary work, not when it is scanned-in and scarcely looked at, never mind read, in one's haste to have it transcribed to disc. I do not possess a scanner and never have scanned-in any document, least of all a complex literary one. In fact, I would not consider it anything but a blatant concession to materialism – and possibly commercialism – to mechanically reduce oneself to scanning-in material that could be more profitably keyed-in and read or re-read, with a view to enhanced understanding and appreciation of its various elements.

No, it can be a real pleasure to key-in a good book, and provided one doesn't infringe copyright by seeking to have it commercially disseminated without the original publisher’s or copyright owner's permission, there can be no reasonable grounds – though unreasonable grounds would certainly abound – for publishers opposing such a procedure, and certainly no reasonable expectation on the part of vested interests that mature or exceptional adults will forgo both the pleasure and technical, not to mention moral, advantages of upgrading quality literature – so often undermined by printers' mistakes and economising measures – in this way simply to suit them. High-quality literature, of which there is, comparatively speaking, precious little anyway, should not be debased and cheapened by criteria having more to do with commercial instincts than respect for the noble tendency of higher and often godlike men – in short, genuine artists – to pursue knowledge and truth to their logical conclusions, irrespective of financial rewards.

No-one paid me to key-in the works – for the most part genuinely classic – which I have selected from amongst the hundreds of books in my private library, and the fact that, having once bought or received these books, I was willing to do so without financial reward is proof of a commitment to the advancement of literature, beyond the aforementioned limitations of 'books', which owes nothing to the marketplace and everything to personal conviction as to the rightness and desirability of elevating such works from the corporeal concreteness of worldly temporality to something approaching the ethereal abstraction – and perfectionism – of otherworldly eternality, if only for the benefit of posterity and the possibility, thereby, of a more enlightened readership in generations to come, a readership committed, in sensibly transvaluated fashion, to post-filmic electronic culture to an extent that would leave one in no doubt as to the culturally anachronistic nature of printed matter and of its irrelevance to an enlightened proletariat, a 're-born' proletariat who can even enjoy the literature of certain 'bourgeois intellectuals' when its presentation is no less electronic, if sensibly so, than their culture in general.