As my dissertation is once again gnashing its teeth at me -- these things turn on you if you don't feed them -- I thought I'd spend a minute luxuriating in yet another run-in of contemporary pop culture and my eighteenth-century literary interests.
For a more detailed and no doubt intelligent explication of what follows, I refer you to this article.
The item in my glib and unnecessarily condemnatory post title is (as those of you more versed in Harry Potter paratexts and fan fiction generally will know) more than a collection of the charms scattered throughout Rowling's series of books. I haven't been to the site whereat the document originated and frankly I can't be asked, but from what I've gathered it seems one Steven Vander Ark has compiled a collection of Potternalia and organized it into something of an online reference source (a "Harry Potter Lexicon"). It got accolades and commendations from Rowling herself and was generally well-thought of until someone got the bright idea of putting it on paper and making it available for sale, thus taking it out of the comfortably not-for-profit world of web-based mega-coterie circulation. Rowling et al. have (somewhat suddenly) labeled Vander Ark a thief and a plagiarist and are suing him for copyright violation.
The legal representative of the press behind the lexicon calls it a legal way "to organize and discuss the complicated and very elaborate world of Harry Potter."
Rowling says the lexicon "fails to include any of the commentary and discussion that enrich the Web site" and calls it 'nothing more than a rearrangement' of her own material."
The haphazard application of fair-use principles and the number of virtual violators of copyright law can render the web a sort of Knockturn Alley with respect to intellectual property. What's REALLY at stake is Rowling's not wanting someone horning in on her future profits--she plans to put out her own Potterpedia and is understandably, if jealously, guarding her market share. But it's more fun to consider the question from the perspective of originality, and the old problem of what it is precisely that an author owns. In terms of legal action, this question goes back at least to the early 18th century, when the passage of the Statute of Queen Anne in 1710 first established authorial ownership privileges. The author, as the act would have it, "owns" the arrangement of the words that constitute the text. This arrangement is unique and cannot be duplicated without the author's giving permission or receiving compensation, within a stipulated number of years.
That's all well and good, and though the act was scarcely enforced (hardly any authors presented cases before courts in the first ten years of the act's passing) it still set up something of a groundwork.
The issue, however, complex as it is, gets even more complicated with the case of encyclopedias, which is what the HP Lexicon purports to be. Throughout the eighteenth century, and particularly in its latter half and last quarter, encyclopedias pilfered from primary sources and each other with relative impunity. William Smellie, compiler of the first Encyclopedia Britannica, claimed to have put the thing together with a pair of scissors. Though he wrote a few entries himself, he touted his great contribution to the world of knowledge as having far more to do with the arrangement and organization of his materials than his role in producing the materials themselves.
One might also think of the quasiencyclopedic texts put out in the wake of Richardson's Clarissa, which are probably more in keeping with this case: a book or books the length of which make information organization difficult necessitate (and I think necessitate is a reasonable word to use, here) a kind of generic intercession. Something must help the reader to organize the information by deconstructing the system it constituted; the mind cannot hold it all at once, and must look elsewhere for assistance on those occasions when supplementary memory is required. The novels, because they are novels, and because the generic codes that delineate them from encyclopedias have nicely hardened up in the aftermath of Tristram Shandy, no longer have embedded encyclopedical (another neologism!) features. Novels scarcely ever have indexes (editions of Richardson's novels did), and some very few have glossaries (the articles refer to Vander Ark's text as an encyclopedia, he calls it a lexicon--there's a difference, but don't ask them what it is).
This is not to say that Vander Ark hasn't stepped over the line; his A-Z rearrangement of Rowling's texts may well constitute a violation of current US and/or UK copyright law. What I take immense pleasure in is the fact that this problem of copyright and encyclopedic reconstitution has been around for a couple of hundred years and we still haven't entirely sorted out precisely how to deal with it.
Showing posts with label encyclopedias. Show all posts
Showing posts with label encyclopedias. Show all posts
10.04.2007
Serving up a tasty Cavendish
Or, that's a fine how-to-ragoo!
I am, as ever, unable to resist doing that for which John Dennis would surely have condemned me. But Pope thought Dennis was a prat, so there's that.
In my futile but ongoing attempt to audit the encyclopedic texts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, I came across a word with which I unabashedly admit I had hitherto been utterly unfamiliar. Eliza Haywood, in Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751) -- a novel which like so many of its mid-century peers is thoroughly involved in encyclopedic discourse -- titles Chapter XVI of the second volume thus: "Is a kind of olio, a mixture of many things, all of them very much to the purpose, though less entertaining than some others."
As Christine Blouch's footnote tells us, an olio is "a hodgepodge of heterogeneous elements." The note is somewhat severally redundant; "hodgepodge" itself refers to a mixture of heterogeneous elements, so indeed the note in itself adds nothing to the chapter title by way of explanation. The interesting part occurs in the etymologies of both olio and hodgepodge. Each comes from the world of food---the former from Spain (ollo), the latter from French (hochepot). This discovery put me in mind of Henry Fielding, who offers up Tom Jones as a "ragoo" of human nature, seasoned with all "the affectation and vice which courts and cities can afford."
So the links between literary variegation and the culinary arts are several. Having left "olio" out of my ESTC searches of "dictionary," "encyclopedia," and the like, I decided to go round once more with "olio," and discovered (as many of you are already undoubtedly aware) that it is Margaret Cavendish who gives us the first recorded use of "olio" to mean a sort of miscellany, or collection of literary pieces. The OED confirms her The Worlds Olio of 1655 as the earliest instance.
Cavendish has in the last few years started to get the attention she deserves, but even Paper Bodies (2000), the excellent Broadview Cavendish reader only offers the preface, and unless one happened to read the thing cover-to-cover one would likely pass over the Olio in favor of the better-known and complete The Blazing World. The entire Olio is available through EEBO, and those of you interested in aesthetics (pre-Romantic), genre studies, or indeed almost any subject under the sun might want to take a look at Cavendish's quasi-encyclopedic treatment. The organization leaves a great deal to be desired in an ease-of-use way, to be sure, but I think through no fault of their own the good people at OED reinforce a mischaracterization of the text. Miscellany an olio may be, and certainly the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were full of magazine-miscellanies that didn't shy away from advertising themselves as "universal," "compleat," or what have you. But a World's Olio--that to me suggests the foundation of a system, the suggestion that these heterogeneous elements are only heterogeneous in presentation. They are meant to cohere, or at least reflect and reinforce the possibility of coherence. It's a far cry from the encyclopedias of the eighteenth, but I think if they listened closely they might hear Cavendish shouting.
Somewhat unsurprisingly, Cavendish's first entries are on fame, and why men write books (a subject to which she gave some attention in The Blazing World. Books, she hopes, will be the paper bodies that extend her life beyond the death of flesh). Here are perhaps my favorite of her words on the subject:
"Fame makes a difference between man and Beast."
"Next, the being born to the glory of God, Man is born to produce a Fame by some particular acts to prove himself a man, unlesse we shall say there is no difference in Nature, between man and beast; For beasts when they are dead, the rest of the beasts retain not their memory from one posterity to another, as we can perceive, and we study the natures of Beasts, and their way so subtilly, as surely we should discover some-what: but the difference betwixt man and beast, to speak naturally, and onely according to her works without any Divine influence, is, that dead men live in living men, where beasts die without Record of beasts; So that those men that die in oblivion, are beasts by nature, for the rational Soul in man is a work of nature, as well as the body, and therefore ought to be taught by nature to be as industrious to get a Fame to live to after Ages, as the body to get food for present life, for as natures principles are created to produced some effects, so the Soul to produce Fame."
Heady stuff. Does this go in my introduction, or my chapter on encyclopedias?
I am, as ever, unable to resist doing that for which John Dennis would surely have condemned me. But Pope thought Dennis was a prat, so there's that.
In my futile but ongoing attempt to audit the encyclopedic texts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, I came across a word with which I unabashedly admit I had hitherto been utterly unfamiliar. Eliza Haywood, in Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751) -- a novel which like so many of its mid-century peers is thoroughly involved in encyclopedic discourse -- titles Chapter XVI of the second volume thus: "Is a kind of olio, a mixture of many things, all of them very much to the purpose, though less entertaining than some others."
As Christine Blouch's footnote tells us, an olio is "a hodgepodge of heterogeneous elements." The note is somewhat severally redundant; "hodgepodge" itself refers to a mixture of heterogeneous elements, so indeed the note in itself adds nothing to the chapter title by way of explanation. The interesting part occurs in the etymologies of both olio and hodgepodge. Each comes from the world of food---the former from Spain (ollo), the latter from French (hochepot). This discovery put me in mind of Henry Fielding, who offers up Tom Jones as a "ragoo" of human nature, seasoned with all "the affectation and vice which courts and cities can afford."
So the links between literary variegation and the culinary arts are several. Having left "olio" out of my ESTC searches of "dictionary," "encyclopedia," and the like, I decided to go round once more with "olio," and discovered (as many of you are already undoubtedly aware) that it is Margaret Cavendish who gives us the first recorded use of "olio" to mean a sort of miscellany, or collection of literary pieces. The OED confirms her The Worlds Olio of 1655 as the earliest instance.
Cavendish has in the last few years started to get the attention she deserves, but even Paper Bodies (2000), the excellent Broadview Cavendish reader only offers the preface, and unless one happened to read the thing cover-to-cover one would likely pass over the Olio in favor of the better-known and complete The Blazing World. The entire Olio is available through EEBO, and those of you interested in aesthetics (pre-Romantic), genre studies, or indeed almost any subject under the sun might want to take a look at Cavendish's quasi-encyclopedic treatment. The organization leaves a great deal to be desired in an ease-of-use way, to be sure, but I think through no fault of their own the good people at OED reinforce a mischaracterization of the text. Miscellany an olio may be, and certainly the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were full of magazine-miscellanies that didn't shy away from advertising themselves as "universal," "compleat," or what have you. But a World's Olio--that to me suggests the foundation of a system, the suggestion that these heterogeneous elements are only heterogeneous in presentation. They are meant to cohere, or at least reflect and reinforce the possibility of coherence. It's a far cry from the encyclopedias of the eighteenth, but I think if they listened closely they might hear Cavendish shouting.
Somewhat unsurprisingly, Cavendish's first entries are on fame, and why men write books (a subject to which she gave some attention in The Blazing World. Books, she hopes, will be the paper bodies that extend her life beyond the death of flesh). Here are perhaps my favorite of her words on the subject:
"Fame makes a difference between man and Beast."
"Next, the being born to the glory of God, Man is born to produce a Fame by some particular acts to prove himself a man, unlesse we shall say there is no difference in Nature, between man and beast; For beasts when they are dead, the rest of the beasts retain not their memory from one posterity to another, as we can perceive, and we study the natures of Beasts, and their way so subtilly, as surely we should discover some-what: but the difference betwixt man and beast, to speak naturally, and onely according to her works without any Divine influence, is, that dead men live in living men, where beasts die without Record of beasts; So that those men that die in oblivion, are beasts by nature, for the rational Soul in man is a work of nature, as well as the body, and therefore ought to be taught by nature to be as industrious to get a Fame to live to after Ages, as the body to get food for present life, for as natures principles are created to produced some effects, so the Soul to produce Fame."
Heady stuff. Does this go in my introduction, or my chapter on encyclopedias?
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