Jeg er ved at læse Jerome McGanns Black Riders, som i første omgang handler om William Morris og om hvordan digtekunsten hos ham bliver til bogkunst. "You can't have art without resistance in the materials" citerer McGann Morris for, hvilket jo er en fin pointe. Det fører ham frem til den lidt pudsige påstand, at Gertrude Stein og (fx.) Stanzas im Meditation ikke kunne være skrevet uden bogtrykkerkunstens renaissance i England i anden halvdel af det nittende århundrede:

Don't misread the aesthetic significance of the Renaissance of Printing. Brecht's epic theater and Stein's writing are both part of its legacy. Selfconscious text production like that of Kelmscott and Bodley Head put a frame around romantic writing (as Brecht threw a frame around realistic drama) and thereby brought important constructivist and reflexive elements to the scene of textuality. As a consequence, the (stylistic) conventions of romanticism were sharply modified. Writing lost both its fate and its faith in personal geography-that affective dialogue of spontaneous overflow, on one hand, with internal colloquy and recollection on the other. In a selfconsciously constructed book, the romantic scene discloses itself as a rhetorical display: not the dialogue of the mind with itself, but the theatrical presentation of such a dialogue.

Litteraturen overskred en grænse, da den begyndte at se sig selv som et tekstligt teater. Foucault placerer denne grænse ved Flaubert, McGann altså ved Morris, i det han dog samtidigt gør meget ud af at vise, at osse Emily Dickinsons digte forholder sig meget selvbevidst til deres ikke-typografiske, ikke-trykte natur.
Morris' digte er ligesom Poes eller Baudelaires artificielle og præget mere af kunstfærdighed end af inspiration. Hos Morris løber dette så imidlertid fra det retoriske niveau over i det materielle, i den fysiske præsentation og digtekunst bliver bogkunst. Dermed har Morris overskredet tærsklen til en særlig semiotisk erfaring i det tyvende århundrede - en, der læser bøger ikonisk snarere end symbolsk vel sagtens.
Derefter går McGann videre med at hævde at osse Pounds første Cantos er inderligt forbundne med ovennævnte renaissance (men overbeviser nu ikke mig om andet end, at Pound var optaget af hvordan hans bøger tog sig ud) og med at gennemgå en række senere forfatterskaber og deres forhold til bogens materialitet. Bob Brown udtrykker vel egentlig den semiotiske erfaring (men er den særlig for det tyvende århundrede?) når han siger: "I'm for new methods of reading and writing and I believe the up-to-date reader deserves an eye-ful when he buys something to read." Men pointen med denne "eye-ful" er så ikke at læseren skal fortabe sig i dens skønhed:

We observe here a diverse set of Brechtian texts that emphasize their physicality and constructedness. All (in their different ways) highly materialized and reflexive, these works turn back upon themselves, urging the reader - like the audience of Brecht's epic theatre - toward a correspondent reflexive posture toward the scene of writing. One of postmodern poetry's characteristic gestures is to label itself, to place its texts in quotation marks. In Barrett Watten's useful, epigrammatic formulation: "Distance, rather than absorption, is the intended effect.""

Men hvad vil det så sige?

When the physical aspects of writing - its signifying mechanisms - are made a conscious part of the imagination's activities, writing opens up the subject (and even to a limited extent the possibility) of unalienated work. This was, it seems to me, Morris's greatest artistic insight. As a consequence, writing carried out in this tradition (or frame of reference) is engaged - and often consciously preoccupied - with the question of the social function of writing and the imagination. The "composition" of poetry is not completed - indeed, it has scarcely begun - when the writer scripts words on a page; and even at this initial moment of the imagination's work the scene is a social one. What kind of instrument is the writer using, what kind of paper? And in what social or institutional context is the writing being carried out? It is merely ignorance to think that such questions are peripheral to the work. They are central questions, and entangled with every textual network of meaning.