Peter Stoicheff

Writing

The Visual Display of Literary Complexity in a Hypertext Critical Edition of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury

by Peter Stoicheff and Joel Deshaye, 2001
Department of English, University of Saskatchewan

The issue of what identifies a useful and necessary critical edition of a literary text raised great scholarly debate through the 20th century and still does now. Critical editions in book form can be created for any literary text; not all literary texts warrant critical editions in book form. Canonical status, a tradition of scholarly attention, available archival and manuscript material -- all these and more help determine whether a work of literature warrants, or receives, publication as a critical edition in book form.

When the format of the critical edition is changed from the book to the electronic environment the issue becomes even more pressing. Electronic editions can be created for any literary text; not all literary texts, however, warrant them. One could go so far as to say that while some excellent electronic editions of literary texts do exist, there is no need for them to exist as electronic versions. Their usefulness lies in areas just as well, or sometimes even better, served by the format of the book with its unique reference apparatus and information access rituals. Similarly, electronic critical editions of texts that warrant the non-book format do exist, but their conceptualization has not exploited the environment in a way that makes them preferable to a book-form edition.

As interest in the possible advantages of the electronic environment for the critical edition has grown, therefore, the question that needs to accompany it is: "what identifies a good, and a necessary, electronic (or hypertext) critical edition?" It is a question that has increasing relevance for the scholarly literary community because the electronic medium is attracting a lot of attention as a potential platform for critical editions. In fact, the advent of the new medium has been so swift that it has outpaced the rate at which editors acquire an understanding of the issues involved in editing book-form critical editions, let alone electronic editions that require a knowledge of those traditional issues and a sensitivity to the editorial principles (as yet unarticulated) at work in the new medium.

A growing number of projects have asked, and answered, this question in many ways, ranging from regarding the computer as a method of enhancing indexing capabilities through SGML and XML, to visually re-engaging the reader with a text's material conditions, to providing an archive of related information of a geographical, historical or biographical nature. The list, lengthening considerably each year, includes the many at University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, the British Library Board's Electronic Beowulf and Canterbury Tales projects, University of Indiana's Victorian Women Writers project, and more. The motivations behind the creation of these digital projects varies. Some, such as the Walt Whitman Archive at the University of Virginia, exploit the platform's ability to include numerous manuscripts in order to show how the "range and scope of the [Calamus] imagined text is in fact too great, its 'standards' too broad in their simultaneity, to fit the reductive confines of print technology." Others, such as the Rossetti Archive at the University of Virginia, exploit the visual capabilities of the digital environment: "all texts deploy a more or less complex series of bibliographical codes, and page design -- if not page ornament and graphic illustration -- in a rich scene of textual expression. Computerized tools that deploy hypermedia networks and digitization have the means to study visual materials and the visibilities of language in ways that have not been possible before." The Canterbury Tales project has still another mandate. The Tales are in a state of textual disarray and present the reader with many questions concerning the composition history and the status of the manuscripts. Peter Robinson describes the project's origins as lying "in the perception that the advent of computer technology offers new methods, which might help us ask these questions in a new and more fruitful manner."

These projects imply that there are several answers to this question of what identifies a good, and a necessary, hypertext edition, and that the answers can vary depending on the literary text being considered. At the very least, a good hypertext edition will recognize what advantage there is to its existence; that is, it will be developed with a full understanding of what it provides that a book-format critical edition does not or cannot. It will not be developed simply because the opportunity is there to create a hypertext edition. Instead, it will be developed because something significant to our understanding of the text will be yielded. That means that not all literary texts warranting critical editions should be undertaken in the hypertext environment. And that means that the choice of text is crucial; it is not based solely on an editor's interest in the text but in the editor's clear understanding of what the objectives are for displaying the edition electronically. Other reasons for investigating the electronic option for a critical edition can include the fact that (i) the text has a history of composition, publication, transmission and reception that is intertwined and complicated; (ii) the text began within, or is intimately involved with, a conceptual frame not solely verbal (or "logopoeic" as Ezra Pound would put it) but visual and acoustic as well, such as William Blake's, for example, or "The Seafarer"; (iii) the text is highly intertextual; (iv) the text's complexity is such that its visual representation through a different medium - the electronic page - could reveal hitherto unrecognized aspects of it.

In "Rationale for Hypertext" Jerome McGann argues that the examination or representation of a book through another book will yield only predictable results that are determined by the fact that the scale of subject and vehicle is the same:

"[W]e no longer have to use books to analyze and study other books or texts. That simple fact carries immense, even catastrophic, significance. Until now the book or codex form has been one of our most powerful tools for developing, storing, and disseminating information. . . . Brilliantly conceived, these works are nonetheless infamously difficult to read and use. Their problems arise because they deploy a book form to study another book form. . . . The problems grow more acute when readers want or need something beyond the semantic content of the primary textual materials -- when one wants to hear the performance of a song or ballad, see a play, or look at the physical features of texts." (McGann 1997: 20)

Yet as the MIT Media Lab designer David Small notes, "the display of information by computers does not often fulfill the promise of the computer as a visual information appliance". He has explored ways of transcending the two-dimensional, page-inspired tendencies of computerized texts:

The glowing glass screen of the computer is seen as a flat surface on which is pasted images that resemble sheets of paper. Window-like systems have advanced this emulation only to the extent that they allow for many rectangular planes of infinitely thin virtual paper to be stacked haphazardly around the glass surface of the computer display. The graphic power of computer workstations has now advanced to the point where we can begin to explore new ways of treating text and the computer display. By allowing the computer to do what it can do well, such as compute three-dimensional graphics and display moving images, we can develop a truly new design language for the medium. (Small 1)

As Small recognizes here, one of the ways in which the electronic environment can be exploited to exceed the limits of the book-format critical edition is through its ability to visualize textual complexity. Complexity itself is a tricky word -- it has specific meanings in scientific and mathematical disciplines and only a more vague set of connotations in literary ones. For his graduate work at MIT in the mid-'90s Small chose Shakespeare's plays as representative examples of the complexity that all literary texts display. He has explored ways of transcending the two-dimensional, page-inspired tendencies of computerized texts and has designed a navigational process that regards Shakespeare's plays as a landscape that can be entered, moved behind and rotated. The result is a three-dimensional text in the shape of a cube that "escap[es] the confines of the flat sheet of paper" and "arrange[s] information into meaningful landscapes that exhibit qualities of mystery, continuity, and visual delight."

The three-dimensional environment also enlarges possibilities for supplemental information display. For instance, glosses on the text can appear at right angles to it, so that when the text is read directly in front of the reader the 90-degree gloss disappears by becoming infinitely thin. When the cube is slightly rotated the gloss begins to appear, keeping the primary text in view simultaneously. The design has the added advantage of permitting a new sense of scale. A panoptic view of all Shakespeare's plays reveals certain structural patterns at a glance, such as the frequent brevity of the fourth act, and the relative length of the texts. Scrolling through incremental stages of proximity draws the reader into single plays, acts, scenes, speeches, lines and words, with commensurate 90-degree commentaries, glosses and so on.

Illustration 1: Three screens of David Small's computer visualization of Shakespeare's plays. On the left the plays are seen as an entire corpus, showing large-scale structural patterns such as the usual brevity of the fourth act. On the right, top, the scale has changed so that commentary on a single passage becomes visible "behind" the text. On the right, bottom, the text is visible as a cube to be rotated for critical commentary.

Smalls' work with re-envisioning a text as a three-dimensional space, coupled with work by Katherine Hayles and others on textual complexity, inspired a group of faculty and graduate students in the English department at the University of Saskatchewan to create several hypertext critical editions. One of them is an edition of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, a text that serves as a good example of literary complexity. In it, we have tried to visualize certain aspects of the novel's narrative structure. Textual visualization can reduce or falsely seem to dispel the inherent complexity of a text, in the process distorting its true function of multiple interpretations. John Bradley and Geoffrey Rockwell in their 1994 "What Scientific Visualization Teaches us about Text Analysis" offer some useful observations in this regard. They point out that the mandate of the humanities is different from that of the sciences that use visualization tools: "many issues in the humanities are always ready to be interpreted anew - viewed in the light of current culture and understanding of the meaning of the words." Following this and other similar cautions we designed the edition with the intention that visualizing some of the narrative aspects of Faulkner's novel would lead not to a reduction of its polysemic character but to a recognition of patterns that lay undetected within its apparent complexity.

The novel is in four sections each headed with a date. The first, the subject of this paper, is "April Seventh, 1928". The novel focuses on a white family, the Compsons, comprised of two parents and four children. Each of the first three of the four sections is narrated by a different Compson child; the last section is narrated omnisciently. "Narrated" is not an accurate word here: the first three sections are in what is sometimes called "stream of consciousness" -- we read the thoughts of the character in the form of words, but the character himself is unaware that his thoughts are being communicated beyond himself. The mind whose unconscious thoughts we have access to in the first section is Benjamin Compson's -- he is the youngest of the Compson children (April 7th 1928 is his thirty-third birthday) and he cannot speak out loud. His thoughts work in an uncommon manner that has consequences for the difficulty in reading his section. Essentially, Benjamin does not apprehend his world in terms of cause and effect, and as a result his thoughts move in an apparently random and disordered fashion over his past. Most of the section involves his recollection of events in his past -- eighteen different episodes from eighteen different times in his past, to be specific. His recollections are not chronological; he recalls many of the eighteen episodes more than once (some as many as eighteen times) and the sequence in which these recollections fall in the narrative is without apparent meaning. He doesn't remember something from the earliest part of his life first, for instance, and then politely go on to the next most recent episode and so on to the present. Instead, a small occurrence within, or aspect of, any particular memory will trigger another memory whose time can be entirely unconnected with the memory before. All this is complicated by the fact that he registers some of what is happening in the present as he has these memories -- and so the present intrudes continually, and aspects of the present can themselves trigger other seemingly random memories to previous events. This restless temporal motion is what gives the first section a very complex narrative structure. It is also one of the main reasons why the novel can be very difficult to read. It was this complexity that initially attracted us to the idea of placing The Sound and the Fury within an electronic environment, and to using basic HTML and Javascript codes so as to re-envision the chaos of the novel's first, and chronologically most difficult, section in a manner that is academically sound and editorially informed, and that maintains the novel's textual integrity.

One of the more intriguing findings we made was that through a simple process of visualizing the first section -- and indeed the whole text -- in numerous ways, the apparent complexity was more ordered than previously assumed. The insight is reminiscent of some aspects of chaos theory of the 1980s: within apparent disorder there is replicating and observable order; within apparent randomness there is reiterating pattern. The Sound and the Fury's chaotic narrative chronology can be untangled, but only by analysing the unconscious narratives of the characters.

When this project began, the question was: How can we use hypertext to make Benjamin's disordered narrative sequence of flashbacks more understandable? In fact, Faulkner had already supplied part of the answer. He proposed publishing The Sound and the Fury with colour-coded text. Each colour would correspond to a particular event in the chronology. However, when the novel was published in 1929, at the start of the Great Depression, this was an impossible expense, and still is. No print version, or any version until now, has had colour-coded text.

Much scholarly work has been done in the last four decades to establish a chronology of remembered events in the novel's first section. Drawing upon this work, the events in the chronology were numbered (the number one was given to the earliest of Benjamin's recollections, and eighteen to the most recent; nineteen was given to the present). Then a colour was assigned for each event. These colours and associated numbers were placed to the left of Faulkner's text, situating for the reader the event Benjamin is remembering. A list of the events' numbers remains visible to the reader to consult on the right side of the screen (illustration 2). The number within each coloured bar to the left of the text has two functions. The number before the decimal indicates which of the eighteen events Benjamin is recalling. However, each recalled event spanned some amount of time in Benjamin's life (from a few minutes to more than a day) and so he would return in his section to some of the events many times and "narrate" different parts of them. Therefore, it became necessary not only to indicate which of the eighteen events he was recalling but also which part of each event. For example, one of the events he recalls is his sister's wedding, which took place in 1910, eighteen years earlier. He returns to this event several times in his narrative.

Illustration 2: Faulkner's text of The Sound and the Fury, section one, showing the color-coded display of remembered events, their numbering system, and the index relating numbers to events.

The number to the right of the decimal designates which of the recollections of that particular event is being narrated. That wedding is chronologically the tenth event Benjamin recalls (the earliest recollection being the first he recalls; the most recent being the eighteenth) signified by the number ten to the left of the decimal. He returns to thinking of the wedding five times in his section, signified by a number from one to five to the right of the decimal.

The narrative's ordering of the events in Faulkner's text seems random. So too does Benjamin's frequent return to the same events. The visual display, however, reveals a previously invisible logic to those returns: they exist in the narrative chronologically. That is, Benjamin recalls the earliest part of his sister's wedding first, and much later the second part, and so on, chronologically to the fifth and last return to it. Illustration 3 displays the entire first section in its colour-coded form on the left. In the middle the beige bars show that the section narrates the present chronologically from the morning of Benjamin's day to his bedtime. To the right of the present are the five instances when Benjamin recalls his sister's wedding, showing how they are spread out across his narrative. The illustration also reveals that they lie in his narrative in chronological order; the first recollection of the wedding is of an earlier point in it and the recollections then continue in a temporally linear manner through the wedding to its conclusion. Within a larger narrative chaos, that is, smaller patterns of chronological narrative order exist.

Illustration 3: the entire color-coded narrative of section 1 appears at left. Events in the present, and recollections of a previous event, are derived from it. The display reveals that present and past events are recalled in chronological sequence within the larger non-chronological sequence of the section.

Colour-coding Faulkner's text had the added advantage of permitting Faulkner's narrative to be dismantled and reassembled chronologically. Clicking on the clock icon to the left of any passage in Benjamin's section takes the reader to that passage in the chronologically re-ordered narrative (illustration 4). This re-ordering of the narrative into a linear form was initially intended to provide the reader with a temporal context for the passage. However, it immediately revealed several aspects of the narrative that had otherwise remained obscured. One was that the first word of Benjamin's earliest recollection is "and"; Ezra Pound's Cantos has the same beginning, suggesting the additive and continual process that characterizes modernist narratives. In a modernist text such as Joyce's Finnegans Wake, and in fact at the end of The Sound and the Fury, this narrative continuum is represented as a circle, suggesting a time that is endless and, in its absence of resolution, without significance. (The intertext of Macbeth's speech that provides the novel's title begins with a similar gesture: "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow/ creeps in this petty pace from day to day . . . / . . . It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury / Signifying nothing.").

Illustration 4: A chronological re-ordering of Faulkner's text of The Sound and the Fury, section one.

Several other visualizations of Benjamin's narrative reveal distinct patterns that are otherwise obscured by the section's complexity. One graph (illustration 5) shows the relative "time" Benjamin spends in his section recalling each event (a "time" measured, in this case, in numbers of pages). Each colour in the graph relates to the colours we assigned to the events in the left margin of Benjamin's narrative. For example, the large grey portion corresponds to Benjamin's earliest memory, the death of his grandmother. Benjamin relives this memory for 19% of his narrative. The dark olive green corresponds to the present. Benjamin spends proportionally more textual "time" in the present than in any of his individual memories -- a total of 27% of his entire narrative -- but the remaining 73% that is devoted to the eighteen recollected events shows that he spends most of his narrative "time" in the past.

Illustration 5: A display of the relative amounts of text devoted to the eighteen events recalled in section one.

Such an analysis done across the entire novel reveals that the three remaining sections are increasingly devoted to the present and less to the past; by the final section the past has virtually disappeared from the novel (illustration 6). This, too, indicates a hidden logic to the novel's complex narrative structure. As with more traditional narratives, The Sound and the Fury divulges information about the past in its earliest stages (Benjamin's section, in this case) and then moves inexorably toward the present.

Illustration 6: The proportion of each section of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury devoted to the past. The novel's apparently complex handling of time, once visualized, is seen to contain a very traditional narrative movement from the past to the present.

In The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner controls drama by controlling disclosure. The novel is most exciting and intense when Faulkner discloses details that allow us to solve the mysteries of the narrative. More disclosure usually means more text. Faulkner engages the reader's curiosity by leaving a trail of details that leads to a reward, which is often a moment of disclosure that makes the story understandable. Therefore, we should be able to associate the amount of verbal textual "time" devoted to a memory with the importance of that memory. For example, Benjamin's grandmother's death occupies 19% of Benjamin's narrative and it is certainly one of the formative events of his life. His name change is also very important to our understanding of him. This event, too, occupies a proportionally large amount of his narrative: 11%. However, these numbers cannot be literally compared and subtracted one from the other; Benjamin's grandmother's death is not, as it were, 8% more important than his name change. The quantities are indicators but they do not alleviate the responsibility of qualitative interpretation and comparison. Graphs like these give us more data for interpretation, but they do not explain the novel on their own.

Another graph, when used in conjunction with the pie graph, helps to further understand how Benjamin's mind functions and to reveal simple patterns in Benjamin's otherwise complex narrative (illustration 7). The most obvious connections on this sequential zigzagging graph are between the major flashbacks identified previously by the pie graph. Benjamin's time in the present is determined by the number of mnemonic cues or reminders that instigate a flashback. For example, he will hear golfers calling for their "caddies" and be reminded of his sister, whose nickname is "Caddy." The graph displays patterns within such associated memories. Unlike the chronological re-ordering, such visualization does not change the complexity of the novel. Rather, it displays in many otherwise unobserved cases the persistence of narrative pattern within a text famous for its complexity and disorder.

Illustration 7: The rapid oscillation among past events in the first section of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, showing patterns within the otherwise apparently random sequence of transitions.

It is possible to argue that "the 'hyper'media powers of the book . . . [still] far outstrip the available resources of digital instruments" as Jerome McGann has done in a recent paper (McGann 2001: 284) and to argue also that "the book is as yet a more efficient Random Access Device (RAD) than any electronic hypertext" as Joseph Tabbi has done in a forthcoming book on American autopoesis. (Tabbi 2001). Given the strength of such observations, editors of the electronic critical edition need to be aware of how it can differ profitably from the already immaculate resource of the book, and how it can stand alongside it as a scholarly tool for textual display, representing "another stage in cultural transmission rather than an ultimate stage replacing its antecedents." (Bornstein and Tinkle 3) Employing some basic possibilities for visualizing complex textual information is one such way of reconceiving the literary critical edition.