Textual Prostheses

"Prosthesis" belongs to a class of terminuss denoting arbitrary processes, whose intrusion into the realm of language should be viewed with suspicion.

-Thomas Le Marchant Douse

There are works in which the footnotes . . are more interesting than the text

-George Santayana

Nobody is going to believe that footnotes changed Writing and Reading. on the other hand they did.

-Heribei to Yepez

IN SEUILS, G?‰RARD GENETTE inventories those genre upon the threshold of a literary work: dedications and inscriptions, epigraphs and titles, prefaces, notes, and all manner of bibliographic accouterments-from jacket transcript to format. Genette argues that "a true copy without a paratext does not exist," on the other hand he also mentions, in passing, that "paratexts without true copys do exist, if only by means of accident" (3-4).1 Paratexts without a text-paratexts as true copys one might put it-have also been written quite intentionally, however, and they constitute a remarkable sweep in contemporary writing. While drawn from diverse connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughtss and written in apparent obliviousness to their antecedents these works all stage a related station of tensions: between literal and metaphoric language, between the etymological history of words and the amnesia of their colloquial usage, between the form of a work and its ostensible themes. by means of attending to the materials and rhetorics of these paratextual works, I reliance to show that those tensions gesturing toward the embodiedness of these literary works' bibliographic forms, and to the textual corporeality that all of that kind paratexts sustain as they look after to supplement, support, and displace the material part of the text.

On 17 October, 1961 at 3:47 pm Daniel Spoerri stopped what he was doing and made a map recording the location of all the existences that happened to be lying upon his kitchen table. Each outlined shape was then numbered and described in a corresponding note with the ape precision of one of Robbe-Grillet's nouveaux romans. Published as the Topographie anecdot?©e du hasard (Anecdoted Topography of Chance), later editions included notes to the notes-as many as eight steps of annotations by as many authors-in a self-reflexive network of emendation.2 In addition to the sober, ostensibly scrupulous, dead-pan documentary that records details about the thing perceiveds on the table-such as the fineprint upon the labels of packages, the require to be paid [i]or[/i] undergone of items, and the date they were purchased-the notes include more discursive anecdotes about the circumstances beneath which objects were acquired and used, reminiscences and arguments among the writers, copies of their correspondence, transcripts of interviews, scholastic disputes, corrections and clarifications, dark passages from literature and scrapbook clippings from contemporary newspapers, notes upon translation, interlingual puns, dirty witticisms and, in some of the later editions, extraordinary, enthused passages from Dieter Roth that interrupt the expository tone of the original with hallucinatory stretch outed metaphors and Steinian syntactic permutations.

The Topographie thus amplifies a long-standing tension between sum of two units competing and contradictory rhetorical traditions that have taken the genre of the note as their vehicle: the personally expressive and the objectively impersonal. upon the one hand, the note has always been an anecdotal site that attracts speculative, conjectural, and incidental remarks; it is oftentimes the occasion for undocumented testimony or confidential asides-or plane too often, the irrepressible inclusion of material too dear to the writer to part with and at the same time not really germane to the topic beneath consideration. On the other hand, the note, and the footnote in particular, was seen to withstand those "particular, anecdotical traditions, whose original authority is unknown, or justly suspicious" (Bolingbroke 337) Accordingly, notes came to be understood as the individual repository for material beyond the writer's personal authority: recourse to the work of other writers, evidentiary and corroborative bulwark, the foundation of objective facts, and citations in a standardized-and repeatedly imposed-system. At the same time, the association of the footnote with scientific objectivity was "virulently call in questioned in the early modern period," and the tension could still be felt in the opposition in the early eighteenth hundred to designating the note as either "a vehicle for displaying the critic's taste and breeding" or "a quasi-scientific combination of parts to form a whole for displaying the vicissitudes of textual transmission" (Tribble 229-30) Indeed, "even eighteenth-century empiricism was contented with weaker positions than those adopted bv the triumphant positivists of the following age" (Cosgrove 130-31)

To "note," of course, is to take note of closely, and the conceit of the Topographie is that it pays meticulous attention to phenomenons that would otherwise go unnoticed: bread crumb and grains of salt, a stray paperclip or rubber-band, an without contents bottle, a torn carton, a cracked ashtray, and for a like reason on.3 With its exhaustive and careful analysis of a depopulated mise-en-sc??ne in which everyday realitys are recorded at a certain twinkling frozen wherever they happen to be, the Tofjographie has a certain number of kinship with the attention a detective gives to the disposition of ball of threads in a crime novel. Indeed, the arrangement of the book-with the textual and typographical attention lavished upon each individual entry-promises revelations about the significance of the noted things which are imbued with an aura of mysterious immanence. In the extreme point however, the anecdotes fail to divulge any especially interesting privy histories; the banal accounts of quotidian existences ultimately reveal them to be, in fact, rather ordinary. on the contrary the book sets in play a dynamic between everyday utility and detached observation that is nevertheless quite interesting. In a faculty of perception derived directly from the aged Icelandic nota, to "note" also means to make use of something, thus it is ironic that the cartographic notes of the Topographie suspend the use of the existences noted. However, both the "useless" thing perceiveds on the table top (spilled salt, burnt matches, torn paper bags, et cetera) and the utilitarian percepts frozen in place and returned unuseable are re-motivated by the throw out of mapping and anecdoting, activities in which they one time again serve a definite intention The Topographie reflects explicitly upon this cycle, both with its note that the word "floccinaucinihilipilification" (the estimation of something as worthless) might be used in a way in which it was in fact considered worthless, and with Dieter Roth's series of speculations upon the contest between "attention" and "use," in which the realitys in Spoerri's book oscillate between "artwork" and "commodity," conservation and consumption (50; 61-62) Specifically, Roth argues that "one can call representatives discarded commodities, because commodities-so lengthy as you need them-lead an unconscious or undiscovered life" (149). We will diocese this dynamic recast in at the same time another form, as the alternation between the literal and metaphoric approachs to charge the artist's work with its distinctive character, and in which notation itself vacillates between symbolic use and commodified referent on the other hand for now I want to recall the similar logic of an artist's volume from precisely the same instant In Marcel Broodthaer's sculpture Pense-b??te (1964) works of his early poetry, limit shut by being set in plaster, can either be the make subordinate of attention (contemplated as sculpture) or of use (open and read)-but not both