FeatureAre manuscripts an endangered species in a digital age? Has the advent of computers and word processing affected the way writers approach their work? Arminta Wallace explores the conundrums thrown up in an increasingly technological age
The ongoing wonders of the Yeats exhibition at the National Library have reminded us how much value we place on getting up close and personal with the nitty-gritty of writing. No matter how many times you've read it, or even recited it, nothing can match the frisson of seeing the opening line of The Lake Isle of Innisfree written in Yeats's own meticulous hand. But is our highly romantic view of the writing process appropriate in an age of computers?
For most of us, the default image of a writer at work is that of a wooden desk at which the author composes in exquisite longhand. Some writers still do just that - Edna O'Brien, for instance, who meticulously places each finished chapter, together with all its drafts, into a separate box. In the digital age, however, fewer and fewer writers actually work in this way. While researching a feature article about forthcoming publications two years ago, I e-mailed John Banville to ask what his new novel was about. I received a characteristically mischievous reply: the entire manuscript of The Sea by return e-mail.
But does a Microsoft Word file, however beautiful and accomplished the contents, count as a manuscript?
"What I've been saying to my colleagues for a long time is that manuscripts are an endangered species," says Gerard Lyne, keeper of manuscripts at the National Library of Ireland. "In the older manuscripts, you get these wonderful pages covered in erasure, additions and second thoughts. Nowadays you tend to get fair copies with all the creative process erased."
The National Library, which holds the papers of many of our national literary luminaries - among them James Joyce, Patrick Kavanagh, John Montague, Tom MacIntyre and Bernard MacLaverty - is still, of course, acquiring literary collections. It recently acquired the papers of Colm Tóibín, who writes largely in his own hand; which in itself is a rarity these days.
"There's an immediacy and a character about seeing something scribbled on a manuscript in longhand," Lyne says. "I'm thinking in particular of those stunning Joyce manuscripts we had on exhibition a couple of years ago."
The practice of editing versions of a literary work on-screen also raises questions about the creative process itself. For novelists, the trade-off of working at a screen seems obvious. At every stage, from planning to revision, a 500-page novel must - surely - be easier to keep track of by computer than on scraps of paper. But what about poets, who in the main deal with much shorter pieces of work?
"People always assume that you're working with a pen and a pencil and drafting things out in the traditional way, and so on - and that's all true," says Bernard O'Donoghue. "But there's an interesting point at which the computer is positively helpful - where you can move material around within the poem, move things to the end of the line and so forth. Which, of course, affects the final shape of the poem."
Eavan Boland remembers talking to the short story writer, Mary Lavin, about her writing methods many years ago. "She told me she had never used a typewriter. So she drafted and re-drafted her stories by hand. It was how she actually got to know and understand her characters - through the intensive, physical writing and rewriting. That's an example of how a writing methodology (a pre-technology technology) actually influenced a creative process. What's harder to know is how it does that now, with complex technologies in a computer age."
BOTH BOLAND AND O'Donoghue are based at universities - O'Donoghue as graduate tutor at Wadham College, Oxford, and Boland as a director of creative writing at Stanford in the States - where this subject is a hot topic. At Stanford, says Boland, a course on new media is currently asking whether technology has affected creativity or just the method of executing it.
"Probably we'll get no answers," she says. "But there are some very big questions. If the writer's draft disappears, what exactly is lost? Variants of revision only? Or a much larger and more subtle landscape of expression?"
Boland admits that technology is changing the "old, passionate, arduous relation" between a writer and a page. But it's also creating some new and exciting relationships.
"Often it's now a relation between a writer and a screen," she says. "I think that does two things. It makes revision simple and instant: the old lingering choice as to whether to leave the word there, cross it out, do it again, is now changed. A sentence can vanish and be replaced in a trice. Revision was not writing; it was never actual creation. But in the old system of labour-intensive changes it could feel like it. Now writing is writing. Revision is built in. There's no excuse. But there are also new products. A lot of the young writers in our programme are talking about the graphic novel, a fascinating new form that I think owes a lot to the speed and ease of new technology."
O'Donoghue, for his part, wonders if we can get too hung up on completism with regard to the creative process.
"My experience is that there's a lot of stuff hanging around in the back of drawers which should have been thrown out years ago, but survives in a kind of spontaneous archive," he says. "Clearly, some of the stages of composition disappear, but I'm not sure how much of a serious loss that is, really. I mean, obviously for a writer like Yeats to see something like the Cornell editions and to see all the drafts is tremendously interesting. But they're not the final poem.
"They're scholarly aids for people studying Yeats. For more ephemeral things, I suspect it's not as important - I've certainly got lots of versions of things that are completely pointless, really."
It's doubtful whether even this kind of bottom-drawer archive will survive much longer in the digital age. As Gerard Lyne points out, "paper" archives are now mostly composed of anything but paper.
"One of the things we find," he says, "is the increasing number of formats in a literary collection. You'll get some manuscripts from a word processor; some of the material will be on memory sticks; and you'll also get tapes and electronic data of various kinds.
"There might, for example, be some recorded interviews. These are perfectly valid - but they do raise problems in terms of how you store them and how you make them accessible. Do you keep them with the manuscript portion of the collection, or do you house them in a separate area?"
It's a dilemma familiar to anyone who has agonised over the best way to store digital photographs at home. And for libraries all over the world, it has become a very real issue. Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, houses the largest collection of Irish literary papers outside Ireland. including some important WB Yeats holdings as well as the papers of - among others - Edna O'Brien, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Ciaran Carson, Paul Muldoon, Tom Kinsella and Seamus Heaney.
"In the late 1970s the late Richard Ellmann was on the faculty here," explains Emory's head librarian, Stephen Ennis, "and we began building a collection largely in his area of interest, which was the Irish Revival."
AS ONE OF six university libraries in the south-eastern United States engaged in a joint project with the US Library of Congress, the National Digital Preservation Programme, to develop a secure archiving process called MetaArchive, Emory's librarians are well up to speed with the implications of the topic. But not just in the abstract, or even the future - the library's recent acquisition of Salman Rushdie's papers is giving the whole question a new urgency. Rushdie relied heavily on e-mail during the years he spent in hiding as a result of the fatwa placed on him by the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini.
Which, as the director of digital programmes and systems at Emory, Martin Halbert, explains, presents digital experts with two immediate challenges. First, there's the preservation of the computers themselves. Digital materials are surprisingly fragile; some of Rushdie's computers are 12 years old already, and elderly computers - as anyone who has one is well aware - need to be treated with tender loving care.
"We know these computers aren't going to last for ever," Halbert says. "We're hoping they last long enough for us to even get the data off of these things - so it's a bit of a race in some ways."
The folks at Emory intend to make Rushdie's material accessible to scholars - and, eventually the public - in as immediate a form as possible. A complicating factor, however, is that the archive contains some highly sensitive information. Rushdie was in contact with all sorts of people when he was in hiding, and there's a lot of addresses and phone numbers which can't be publicly accessible, but still have to be preserved.
"We're really in the year zero of this new era of information and knowledge, of how we store it, acquire it, organise it," says Halbert. "All of the practices that have accumulated over such a long period of time are having to be reinvented. We have to regard this as the time when we can take forward the best of old practices and observations, and try to apply them in the new era."
Librarians also need to develop visionary qualities to try to predict what scholars of the future will want to know. Rushdie scholars will, in 150 years' time, be able to sit at one of his computers, or something like it, and boldly go into his hard drive. But will they search his address book, study his file-naming system, or try to figure out who sent him the cheeriest e-mails during his period of exile?
"Well, this is something I'm very interested in watching," says Stephen Ennis. "One of the key questions in my mind is how will researchers use this type of material - my hunch is that alternate drafts of a literary work, even in electronic form, will be of literary interest, as will e-mail communications. But I want to see that borne out by the researchers who are coming to work here. I'll be very interested in whether this type of resource is embraced by the research community in the same way the traditional print archive has been."
For Eavan Boland, the bottom line is that the romance of the single page has given way to the brutal facts of packet switching.
"There was something very romantic about that single page. But there is something practical about this new relation with power," she says. "There is a subtle shift there too, although I can't quite describe it. And maybe we won't know it for a century when - finally - all those ink drawings of poets hesitating over the page will finally be incomprehensible to a new generation of writers. Like a picture of a steam engine."