There is a moment in book two of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume autobiographical novel My Struggle (2009–11) when, to help pass the time he is meant to be writing a lecture about authorship, the protagonist instead finishes reading the first volume of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and begins the second. It is the kind of delay tactic many of us are familiar with – indeed, it was in order not to write this introduction that I picked up Knausgaard in the first place. I didn’t get very far in my reading. The most readily apparent feature of Knausgaard’s attempt to represent the world truthfully in these books is the way he builds it primarily out of commonplace details, recorded without adornment. Given the exactitude of his method, any aberration can be startling.
Such was the case when I recalled that some four hundred pages earlier, when the protagonist heads to a café with a book in hand, it is already volume two of The Brothers Karamazov. I initially assumed the oversight was mine, that I had simply forgotten or failed to register one of Knausgaard’s more subtle temporal shifts that would situate the second episode, when the narrator finishes volume one of Dostoevsky’s novel, at a point earlier in chronological time than the first, when he is already reading volume two. I even hoped this was the case: as a reader, I wanted Knausgaard’s relentlessly airtight world to remain one in which we don’t begin reading the second volume of a novel until we have finished the first. It mattered to me to know who was at fault, as it were, for this admittedly minor inconsistency – me or the author?
Yet even after confirming that the apparent slip-up was Knausgaard’s, I could not be sure that he did not intentionally introduce this imperfection into his text, that this rare instance of world breaking was not a deliberate commentary – on the fallibility of memory, perhaps, and its role in the autobiographical enterprise, or on the creative process more generally. This, too, seemed to matter. I knew who was ‘at fault’ for the ostensible blemish. Now I wanted to understand its nature or history, in order to integrate it more fully into my reading of the text. For it had become impossible to interpret the book without it. Whether or not this chronological rift was intentional, its effect was the same: the apparent coherence, consistency, and closedness of the published text had irrevocably come up against the discontinuities and ‘unfinishedness’ of its genesis. Within this apprehension of the text as the imperfect product of an imperfect process lay something like the reason I read at all, and a clue to the meaning of literature itself. As Knausgaard’s protagonist realises elsewhere in the book, ‘What all writing was about was writing. Therein lay all its value’ (2013, p. 71). Put differently, we might say that what all writing is about is imperfection.
Imperfect Itineraries: Literature and Literary Research in the Archives explores the multifaceted links between imperfection and writing through a series of archival-based literary studies. It is interested in how imperfection conditions both the work of the writers we investigate as well as our own methods as scholars for identifying, accessing, and exploiting the material traces these writers leave behind. In the opening essay of this volume, Daniel Ferrer argues that ‘because no work is done instantaneously, in one single moment, imperfections […] are built into the fabric of the text’. Thus, as another contributor, John Bryant, points out, the adjective ‘imperfect’ in this volume’s title ‘may be apt but it is also a knowing redundancy’. Writing, Bryant observes, ‘is a messy, searching, adventitious affair, often experimental, and necessarily “imperfect”, so that a “perfect itinerary” may be at best a dream perpetually deferred, until a work is surrendered to editors and publishers’. How we, as scholars or readers, approach the fact of textual imperfection will depend on what Dirk Van Hulle and Peter Shillingsburg (2015) have called our orientation to the text. An editor, for example, whose aim is to establish a corrected edition, will be guided by priorities, methods and principles quite different from those of a genetic critic, who seeks to understand and construct a narrative of the creative process itself.
Yet whether we wear the hat of the editor, geneticist, biographer, bibliographer, or even collector – and each of these perspectives is represented in this volume – most lines of inquiry into textual imperfection will sooner or later bring us all to the same place: the archive. In his book Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature, Jean-Christophe Cloutier (whose essay ‘“A Dozen Impossible Novels, Half Finished”: Reconstituting the French Manuscripts of Jack Kerouac’ appears here) defines the archival as ‘a pastness to come – un passé à venir’: ‘The word archival bespeaks an underlying notion that documents have an afterlife, that they can be put to new, unpredictable uses and form the basis for new interpretative and narrative acts’. The archive, Cloutier tells us, ‘is never an end in itself – otherwise we might as well call it a dumpster – but rather a speculative means to possible futures’ (2019, pp. 2–3).
In Europe, no discipline has theorised and exploited the instrumental potential of literary archives as rigorously as genetic criticism, which sprang up in France in the 1970s. It will therefore come as no surprise that genetic critics are well represented in this volume. As Daniel Ferrer and Michael Groden explain in their introduction to Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-textes, ‘like old-fashioned philology or textual criticism, [genetic criticism] examines tangible documents such as writers’ notes, drafts, and proof corrections, but its real object is something much more abstract – not the existing documents but the movement of writing that must be inferred from them’ (2004, p. 2). I have already invoked the geneticist Ferrer’s opening contribution to suggest that imperfection is a necessary component of every writing process. In ‘Editorial Consistency and Genetic Agrammaticality’, Ferrer reflects on the different kinds of inconsistencies that can accompany literary production and how editors have tried to cope with them. Drawing primarily from William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and James Joyce’s Ulysses (1920), Ferrer uses prepublication documents – what genetic critics call the ‘avant-texte’ or genetic dossier1 – to shine a light on how even the most seemingly straightforward editorial interventions can have far-reaching reverberations.
As Ferrer implies, the deeper we are able to dig into a work’s ‘avant-texte’, the more we are compelled to recognise its ‘radical incompleteness’, its ‘genetic imperfection’. This points to one of the primary challenges of performing genetic criticism: the sheer volume of archival material that is often at one’s disposal, and the extraordinary amount of pre-labour that geneticists must invest in identifying, locating, deciphering, transcribing, and chronologically arranging this material before any interpretive work can begin. Is it any wonder that we so often find geneticists preoccupied with single authors or even texts over the course of a whole career? Yet this has not stopped some scholars, notably Van Hulle, from developing ‘the fairly unexplored field of comparative genetic criticism’ (Van Hulle, 2008, p. 5).2
In ‘Imperfections of the Paper Fossil Record and Creative Concurrence: Samuel Beckett’s Sous-Oeuvre’, Van Hulle brings his insights from comparative studies back to bear on single authors – but not on single works. The limitations of the print medium, Van Hulle argues, have to some extent conditioned how scholars apply the concepts of genetic dossier and ‘avant-texte’; namely, to separate works of literature, such as individual novels, plays, or collections of stories or poems. In reality, authors often tackle several writing projects at the same time. Taking Samuel Beckett’s writing desk in the late 1970s as a case study, Van Hulle demonstrates the need to enlarge the concept of the genetic dossier to account for what he calls ‘creative concurrence’ – the mutual impact or ‘cross-cutting relationships’ between an author’s various concurrent writing projects. This synchronic approach has its diachronic corollary in Van Hulle’s suggestion that scholars also try to place the genesis of a given work in the context of the writer’s total artistic output, including all preparatory textual material – what he calls the ‘sous-oeuvre’.
For some practitioners of genetic criticism, Van Hulle’s expanded critical vocabulary may go down like a bitter (but necessary) medicine: the old, single-work notion of the genetic dossier has already provided them with more than enough archival material to process and interpret. Sometimes, however, a writer’s archive challenges us by its absences. Not all scholars are ‘lucky’ enough to have an abundance of genetic material to exploit. And Van Hulle’s reorientation toward an entire oeuvre’s ‘underground connections’ stems in part from the need to cope with such cases where the material traces of a writing process have been imperfectly preserved. Yet as the authors of the next two pieces in this volume demonstrate, the problem of genetic paucity can still bear much fruit.
In the United States, John Bryant has drawn on European genetic editorial theory to develop his own theory of the ‘fluid text’, perhaps the most robust theoretical, critical, and editorial approach to the study of revision that side of the Atlantic.3 What is remarkable is that he did so primarily around a single and incomplete document: a three-chapter manuscript of Herman Melville’s first novel, Typee (1846), that was discovered in 1983. From this manuscript fragment, Bryant found that he could ‘offer a narrative of Melville’s revision that was in fact not only a history of the composition of the entire work but of the young writer’s growth as an artist’ (2002, p. 15).
In ‘Biography, Revision and Herman Melville’s Aesthetics of Incompletion: Pip and Billy as Fluid Texts’, Bryant extends this biographical approach to revision to Melville’s middle and late career, offering an alternative take on what this volume has called the ‘imperfection’ of writing processes. Fluid texts, Bryant tells us, ‘are not “imperfect” in their stages of development; rather, they are aspirational, experimental, self-probing, perpetually tentative, and radically incomplete’. He argues that Melville perceived such incompletion as a condition not just of textuality, but of self, and that the author translated his ‘own sense of his perpetually unfolding, always growing and changing, identity’ into a broader aesthetics of incompletion, which he deployed ‘through differing rhetorical strategies’ throughout his work. Drawing on internal textual inconsistencies, external biographical documents and manuscript revisions, Bryant constructs a moving and persuasive account of how ‘eruptions’ of personal memory during the composition of Moby-Dick (1851) and Billy Budd (1924; composed 1888–91) urged Melville on to more complicated depictions of race and class, and of how these textual transformations embodied the author’s underlying aesthetics of incompletion.
The kind of fluid text analysis Bryant carries out here is part of a larger editorial project whose aim is ‘to familiarise crabbed, messy, indecipherable, otherwise alienating revision texts by making them visible, accessible, trackable, and easily read’, thereby ‘[extending] the discussion of revision to broader interpretive communities’. To this end, the Melville Electronic Library (MEL), of which Bryant is the project director and general editor, is home to a series of digital scholarly ‘fluid text’ editions that enable users to create their own revision sequences and narratives. The MEL’s inclusive approach to editing and reading revision embraces the necessarily incomplete and tentative quality of any single scholar’s interpretation of revision data. It is a prudent approach, insofar as a collaborative community of readers will be more easily able to integrate new archival discoveries. In his latest book, Genetic Joyce: Manuscripts and the Dynamics of Creation (2023), Ferrer describes ‘one of the joys – and one of the dangers – of the geneticist’s trade: as opposed to critics who work with a finite text, the genetic critic has to live with the fact that no archive is definitely circumscribed. We live in the hope that new material will be discovered but also under the constant threat that this new material will destroy the hypotheses that we have made on the basis of the existing materials’ (2023, p. 6).
One can imagine, for example, the admixture of emotion with which Luc Herman and John M. Krafft received The Huntington Library’s announcement in December 2022 that it had acquired the American author Thomas Pynchon’s archive, and that the collection would be made available for research within the next year, as soon as processing was complete (as of this writing the archive is still not open): ‘Comprising 70 linear feet of materials created between the late 1950s and the 2020s – including typescripts and drafts of each of his novels, handwritten notes, correspondence, and research – Pynchon’s literary archive offers an unprecedented look into the working methods of one of America’s most important writers’ (The Huntington, 2022). The announcement came just a few months ahead of the publication of Becoming Pynchon: Genetic Narratology and ‘V.’ (2023), Herman and Krafft’s pioneering study of the genesis of Pynchon’s first novel. Their study is built around one of the only genetic Pynchon documents then available, a typescript draft of V. (1963) that was acquired by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre in 2001, alongside copies of some of Pynchon’s editorial correspondence. ‘Pynchon and Gender: Cancelling the Sitcom in a Typescript of V.’ is a version of one of that study’s chapters. In it, Herman and Krafft pursue an analysis grounded in the nascent field of genetic narratology to show, through the deletion of a pastiche of a 1950s television sitcom, how Pynchon struggled to address issues of gender in his debut novel.
Happily, not all living writers are as private as Pynchon. When Vanessa Guignery embarked on her study of the genesis of eight novels by the British writer Julian Barnes, Julian Barnes from the Margins: Exploring the Writer’s Archives (2020), Barnes answered her questions, gave her access to unarchived material, provided additional information about his working methods, and even read and annotated a near-final draft of Guignery’s book. In ‘False Trails and Imperfect Itineraries: Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro and Ben Okri’, Guignery brings her insights into Barnes’s writing processes into conversation with those of two other contemporary writers, Kazuo Ishiguro and Ben Okri, to compare all three as readers and critics of imperfection in their own work, and to explore what actions each writer takes in response to these perceived faults. Guignery considers these authors’ judgments of imperfection at two junctures in the life of their written work: post-publication, when revision is no longer possible, but a sense of dissatisfaction may affect future writing projects; and during the writing phase, when the ‘necessary and intrinsic imperfections of the creative process’ can still trigger a variety of major and minor revisions.
When it comes to artistic dissatisfaction, the medium of song is somewhat more forgiving than pure text, granted one has the chance to continue experimenting with a lyric through performance. Yet this possibility did not seem to ease the burden felt by the Canadian poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen. Readers may be familiar with the oft-told story of Cohen’s meeting with Bob Dylan in Paris in the mid‑1980s. As Cohen tells it in a 1992 interview, ‘Dylan and I were having coffee the day after his concert in Paris a few years ago […] and he asked me how long it took to write [“Hallelujah”]. And I told him a couple of years. I lied, actually. It was more than a couple of years. Then I praised a song of his, “I and I”, and asked him how long it had taken and he said, “Fifteen minutes”’ (Light, 2012, p. 2). At the heart of Cohen’s self-deprecating humour is his lifelong struggle to accept and celebrate imperfection. He made a kind of mantra out of it, in one of his best-remembered lyrics: ‘Ring the bells that still can ring. / Forget your perfect offering. / There is a crack in everything. / That’s how the light gets in’ (Cohen, 1993, p. 373). When Cohen died in 2016, he left behind him a voluminous personal archive, including 243 notebooks. In ‘Leonard Cohen’s Archival Mountain and the Volcanic Eruptions of “Thousand Kisses Deep”’, the Leonard Cohen Family Trust’s former audio and video archivist Robert de Young provides a privileged first look at some of this material – recorded in notebooks, floppy disks and CD-Rs – to shed light on the decades-long evolution of Cohen’s poem, song and performance piece ‘Thousand Kisses Deep’.
It has been nine years since Cohen passed, and still his multimedia archive has not been fully processed. Yet even when that phase of work is complete, we will not have anything like a complete understanding of how the different pieces of the Cohen archive relate to one another. Every finding aid necessarily has its cracks, and the notion of a perfectly described archive is as chimerical (and as lifeless) as that of a perfectly executed literary text. As Cloutier writes in ‘“A Dozen Impossible Novels, Half Finished”: Reconstituting the French Manuscripts of Jack Kerouac’, ‘to imagine a “complete” finding aid would amount to something like a Borgesian “Pierre Menard”-like duplication, in full, of every single listed item – as such, it would cease to be a finding “aid” and become an impractical facsimile of the thing itself. The map is not the territory, as they say’. Each writer’s archive, whether consolidated under one roof or dispersed across geographically disparate sites, contains its own unique complexities whose grammar one must learn firsthand. And no amount of preparation before an on-site visit can fully prepare a scholar for the alternating moments of exhilaration and boredom, revelation and bewilderment, sure-footed advance and dead-end defeat, that are scattered upon the path of archival exploration.
The final three pieces in this volume represent a shift in focus from the theoretical and interpretive to the methodological. As Cloutier has written elsewhere, ‘these distinct forms of scholarship […] demand different kinds of intellectual and physical labour yet nevertheless mutually inform and reinforce each other’ (2019, pp. 13–14). ‘A Dozen Impossible Novels, Half Finished’ is Cloutier’s account of the complex path he undertook to reconstitute Kerouac’s longest French writing, the novel Sur le chemin.4 This led to both the unexpected discovery of additional French texts as well as a deeper understanding of the bilingual and cross-cultural frontiers of Kerouac’s compositional practices and literary project as a whole. In this way, Cloutier’s essay is part of his ongoing effort to answer Lisa Stead’s call to literary scholars in her introduction to the volume The Boundaries of the Literary Archive: Reclamation and Representation: ‘The story of what we do in the archive – physical or virtual – must be positioned alongside (and in dialogue with) the conclusions, revelations and formulations we take out of the archive’ (2013, pp. 1–2, quoted in Cloutier, 2019, p. 14).
A crucial player in Cloutier’s story is Declan Kiely, the archivist responsible for arranging the New York Public Library’s Jack Kerouac Papers and composing its finding aid. Cloutier pays extensive homage to Kiely’s ‘masterful handling of the materials’ as well as to his finding aid, ‘an exemplar of meticulous description and clarity’ which enabled Cloutier to locate many of Kerouac’s French manuscripts. In their contributions to this volume, Ferrer and Bryant each remind us that ‘our interpretation of a literary work depends upon how the work is edited’. Similarly, our ability to identify and interpret archival material depends upon how that material has been arranged and described. The map may not be the territory, but we would surely be lost without it. Unfortunately, an institutional repository’s time and budgetary constraints, as well as the relative importance assigned to a particular collection, mean that not all maps are created equal. In ‘“These Scattered Idioms”: Thoughts and Reflections on the Tennessee Williams Archive’, John S. Bak picks up Cloutier’s thread to lay out a practical guide to navigating the idiosyncratic arrangements of different Williams collections, and to explore the logic and ethics behind the posthumous publication of a writer’s archival material. Out of the specific dilemmas faced by a Williams scholar emerges a portrait of the ‘reconnaissance work’ that undergirds all successful archival research.
Imperfect Itineraries ends on a somewhat unorthodox note, with an abridged reprint of A Bibliographer’s Tale (1996) by the publisher and Henry Miller bibliographer Roger Jackson. A Bibliographer’s Tale is the turbulent story of how Jackson’s seminal Henry Miller: A Bibliography of Primary Sources came to be and of how, in the process, Jackson transformed himself from a Miller collector into a bibliographer and fine press publisher. As such, it is an important reminder of the kind of groundbreaking scholarly work that goes on outside of academic institutions, and of the need for literary scholars to repeatedly look beyond their own imperfect communities.