Palimpsest

I am by no means the first person to employ the figure of the palimpsest in a discussion of "Christabel" or of hypertext. Richard Rand, for example, in his 1981 deconstructive reading of Geraldine, views Bard Bracy's description of his snake/dove dream in Part II as a "palimpsest that says no truth or falsehood."(1) Similarly, in a study of the relationship between "Christabel" and Wordsworth's "Michael," Susan Eilenberg suggests that the story of family financial difficulty in "Michael" figures as a palimpsest, emerging to disrupt the poem's earlier portrait of pastoral repose and stability.(2) Both Rand and Eilenberg employ "palimpsest" in their discussions of the internal logic of events in "Christabel" and "Michael."

In a discussion of his editorial procedure for the forthcoming edition of Coleridge's poetry and plays for the Collected Coleridge series, J.C.C. Mays describes "Christabel" as a textual palimpsest. Rather than placing all of the variants between the versions of "Christabel" in a traditional system of notes and textual apparatus at the foot of the page, Mays' edition inter-lineates all of the versions in a "variorum edition." The resulting variorum text is, as Mays notes, a "palimpsest" of multiple textual layers.(3) My use of the palimpsest figure incorporates and extends the above three examples, but I am also indebted to George Bornstein's application of the word to editorial theory and the study of textual transmission:

we have entitled the present volume Palimpsest to stress both the multilayered character of major monuments of our culture and the broader process of their cultural transmission.(4)

"Palimpsest" has also been applied to information technology. For Sven Birkerts's in The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, the palimpsest figure is used to trope the experience of living in a world of accelerated technological change. Birkerts suggests that Western society lives with the "palimpsest" of "...book, video monitor, and any of the various interactive hypertext technologies now popping up in the marketplace."(5) Michael Joyce offers a more positive use of palimpsest in Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics. For Joyce, in hypertext "the text becomes a present tense palimpsest where what shines through are not past versions but potential alternative views."(6)

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Notes

1. "Geraldine"Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, ed. Robert Young (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981) 288. (back)
2. Strange Power of Speech: Wordsworth, Coleridge and Literary Possession (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992) 95. (back)
3. "Reflections on Having Edited Coleridge's Poems" Romantic Revisions, ed. Robert Brinkley and Keith Hanley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) 148. (back)
4. "Introduction" Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities, ed. George Bornstein and Ralph G. Williams (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993) 1. See also Gerard Genette Palimpsestes (Paris: Seuil, 1981). (back)
5. Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1994) 16-17. (back)
6. Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1995) 3.(back)