"““Reportless Places"””: Facing the Modern Manuscript

Where does the "““modern manuscript"”” come from, and why does it appear when it does, then depart again after the passage of only a few centuries? What distinguishes it from those manuscripts belonging to earlier moments as well as to later ones? This essay examines the modern manuscript as an object that exists in an in-between space, as an object, that is, that has shed the adamant materiality of its medieval predecessor, but that has not yet metamorphosed into the immaterial traces common in a post-print culture. Further, it proposes that despite its propensity for circulation, the modern manuscript belongs most essentially to the realm of the private, where it offers a living record of the writer at work and the dynamics of text in the process of creating itself. After a preliminary examination of some of the cultural forces that prepared for the modern manuscript's appearance, the essay considers the manuscripts of Emily Dickinson, approaching them as at once a special and representative case of the unruly textual condition of the modern manuscript. In its final turn, the essay glances at a few works at outermost limits of the modern manuscript's domain: John Clare's asylum poems, Antonin Artaud's spells, and Aaron Williamson's body-writing.