Text as Space: Some Ramblings

In at least two of today's readings, I was struck by how texts function, or are imagined to function, as spaces. Edward Young, writing on the joys of composition, conceptualizes the text as "a sweet Refuge," "a delicious Garden of Moral and Intellectual fruits and flowers," and "a letter'd recess" (Young 5). Through composition, the author can carve out a private space, the "Key of which is denied to the rest of mankind" (5). The text serves as the author's retreat away from the "bustle" of "the thronged walks of Public life" (6).

However, once disseminated to a reading audience, texts become public spaces. In one of the more remarkable passages in his "Conjectures on Original Composition," Young conceives of public texts as creating between them a vast cityscape: "So few are our Originals, that, if all other books were to be burnt, the letter'd World would resemble some Metropolis in flames, where a few incombustible buildings, a Fortress, Temple, or Tower, lift their Heads, in melancholy Grandeur, amid the mighty ruin." For me, this image forcibly evoked the famous photograph of London during the blitzkrieg with St. Paul's rising unscathed out of the conflagration like a beacon of British indomitability.

Though anachronistic, I believe my connection of Young's vision with the iconic photograph of St. Paul's is telling, for in constructing the most original literary productions as fortresses, temples, and towers, Young is establishing texts as national institutions. This is fascinating, particularly in light of Mark Rose's discussion of 18th-century attempts to negotiate the text as simultaneously private and public property at a time when "the paradigm of property (...) was land" (Rose 7). Even prior to this point in his argument, the paradigm of landed property was already present for me because of Rose's earlier assertion that "texts permeate and enable one another, and so the notion of distinct boundaries between texts becomes difficult to sustain" (Rose 3). Thinking about the reality of permeability versus the illusion of distinct boundaries brought to my mind readings and conversations about the nation and the process of nation-building. It seems to me that scholars are talking about texts and nations in similar ways, asking, for instance, how we can treat the text or the nation as a definite entity even as we realize that doing so means the imposition of artificial boundaries and borders. What can we make of this, especially in light of the crucial role Benedict Anderson, for one, assigns print in the creation of nations? Can we posit a symbiotic relationship between nation and text whereby they can be seen to make each other?