On Consigning Manuscripts to Floppy Discs and Archives to Oblivion 汉译

Willis E. McNelly

Manuscripts, those vital records of an author’s creative process, are an endangered species. The advent of word processors, and their relatively low cost together with increasing simplicity, means that even impoverished, unpublished, would-be writers (as well as the Names who top the best-seller list) have turned to their Wangs, IBMs and Apples, inserted Wordstar, Scriptsit or Apple writer programs and busily began writing, editing and revising their creative efforts. The result? A floppy disc!

We should deplore the disappearance of manuscripts. How can anyone, students or scholar, learn anything about the creative process from a floppy disc? Can this wobbly plastic reveal the hours, the endless hours, where beauty was born out of its own despair (as William Butler Yeats puts it) and blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil? Manuscripts are these records of creative agony, often sweat-stained, coffee-splattered or cigarette-charred. Manuscripts tell us what went on in a writer’s soul, how he or she felt during the agony of creation. Edna St. Vicent Millay may have burned the candle at both ends and wondered at its lovely light, but her first drafts are treasures for future generations.

Imagine if Yeats had written those magnificent lyrics celebrating his futile love for Maud Gonne on a word processor! No floppy disc can possibly reveal the depth of his sorrow. Almost a century later his manuscripts in the National Library in Dublin still glow with the power of his passion. They tell young, wan poets of either sex that that faded tear stains are not new, that their feelings, hopes, despairs, loves and losses are actually eternal. Suppose Ray Bradbury had written “Fahrenheit 451” on a Wang. How appropriate, even ironic, it might have been had his various drafts gone the way of the burning books that he deplores and disappeared into a memory bank.

Fortunately, any student of writing can inspect those same drafts in the Special Collections Library of California State University, Fullerton. Novices and professionals alike can examine how a brief story, “The Fireman,” grew into an unpublished novelette, “Fire Burn, Fire Burn!” and then developed into another longer version, the “The Hearth and the Salamander,” also unpublished. The final copy (complete with an occasional typo, since it was typed by the author himself) is available for inspection. On these pages Bradbury’s own bold handwriting has substituted a vivid verb for a flabby one, switched a sentence or two around, sharpened or sometimes eliminated an adjective, substituted a better noun. The manuscript provides a perfect example of the artist at work. We would never see that kind of development or final polishing on any number of floppy discs.

Moreover, put a lot of manuscripts together and you have an archive. Memoranda, diaries, journals, jottings, first, second and third drafts—these archives are important to all of us. The archives of a city are often musty collection of scribbled scraps of paper, meaningful doodles about boundary lines or endless handwritten records of marriages, divorces, deeds, births and deaths. Our country’s archives of all kinds are a priceless heritage. The National Archives is jammed with ragged papers, preserved for the scrutiny of historians.

Manuscripts tell us how Thomas Jefferson’s mind worked as he drafted the Declaration of Independence. A famous letter to the president of Yale informs us of Benjamin Franklin’s true feelings about religion. We’ve learned volumes from the diaries, papers, letters and exhortations of those who put our Constitution together. Would we know as much if they had done it all on a new floppy disc? Unthinkable!

Similarly, would letters from famous men and women spewed out on a dot-matrix printer have the same fascination as an original holograph? Would a machine-signed, mass-produced letter generated in some White House basement have the same emotional impact—or the same value, for that matter—as a envelope and canceled 5-cent handwritten letter mailed by Citizen Ronald Reagan in 1965, complete with hand-addressed stamp? Hardly.

James Joyce once wrote that the errors of an artist are the portals of discovery. Unfortunately, we’ll never know of those errors if clean, neat, immaculate but errorless floppy discs replace tattered, pen-scratched, scissored, taped, yellowed, rewritten, retyped manuscripts. Libraries preserve them, students learn from them, auctioneers cry them at fabulous prices, owners cherish them. And word processors totally eliminate them. Our loss would be incalculable.

Manuscripts are our gift to our heritage, and we have no right to deprive future generations of learning how we think and feel, simply because we find word processing more convenient. Patiently corrected manuscripts, not floppy discs, can tell any novice writer or future historian that writing is hard work, that it takes vision and revision alike—and that it should be done on paper, not with electrons on a screen.