Revising Truth with One Click of the Mouse

Few pleasures compare to reading early iterations of a famous book or musical composition. When Beethoven's long-lost piano rendition for four hands of his Grosse Fuge (pictured here) was discovered and displayed at Sotheby's, I lost myself gazing at it until impatient visitors elbowed me away from the glass case. Not only were there numerous changes and emendations but on one passage the composer had scratched out the score so violently he tore the script and had to apply a paper patch over it. With similar fascination we pore over drafts of the Declaration of Independence ("We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable") or Beatles lyrics (Paul McCartney wrote something called, "Baby, You Can Wear My Diamond Ring" which John Lennon rewrote as "Baby, You Can Drive My Car") or the Gettysburg Address, which flowed almost fully polished from Abraham Lincoln's hand.

Since the dawn of computerized word processing scholars have rightfully expressed alarm that such drafts of works in progress will be completely expunged by technology. Andrew Motion, in an essay entitled Saving writers' manuscripts for the nation published in the online edition of the Times Literary Supplement, writes,

"A manuscript can show the cancellations, the substitutions, the shifting towards the ultimate form and the final meaning. A notebook, simply by being a fixed sequence of pages, can supply evidence of chronology. Unpublished work, unfinished work, even notes towards unwritten work all contribute to our knowledge of a writer’s intentions; his letters and diaries add to what we know of his life and the circumstances in which he wrote.”

And poet Kevin Stein, in a Kenyon Review article called Death by 0s and 1s, says,

"What eventually finds its way into literary archives may well be altered over time. Today it's the poet's worksheets, manuscripts, drafts, and letters - maybe even her notebooks and scribbled back-of-the-envelope verses. Given the above, however, one wonders if soon computer diskettes and flash drives will become germane to the notion of literary "papers." Those media carry new poems and drafts that never made their way onto paper, so they carry invaluable digital cargo. Sure, hard copy drafts may be printed from each for storing in special collections, but what does it mean to take the original and present it in form the author never felt comfortable enough to give it? Maybe the poem as digital object must be retained as such.

Happily, revision control software exists enabling authors, editors, scholars and students to track iterations and save them for future analysts. Though not nearly as thrilling as standing inside of Walt Whitman's mind as he constructs, deconstructs and reconstructs "Song of Myself", at least the process will not be lost to us entirely, as it was in danger of doing in the early years of word processing.

But now there's something just as ominous to worry about. "Consider", we read in Amazon Kindle = Privacy FAIL by a blogger named Stephanie, "what might happen if a scholar releases a book on radical Islam exclusively in a digital format.

The US government, after reviewing the work, determines that certain passages amount to national security threat, and sends Amazon and the publisher national security letters demanding the offending passages be removed. Now not only will anyone who purchases the book get the new, censored copy, but anyone who had bought the book previously and then syncs their Kindle with Amazon...will, probably unknowingly, have the old version replaced by the new, “cleaned up” version on their device. The original version was never printed, and now it’s like it didn’t even exist. What’s more, the government now has a list of everyone who downloaded both the old and new versions of the book."

"I hope," says the blogger, "this comes off as a crazy conspiracy theory spun by a troubled mind with an overactive imagination."

We hope so, too. But Nicholas Carr, writing about the automatically updatable book in his "Rough Type" blog, has elected to worry this bone. "One of the things that happens when books and other writings start to be distributed digitally through web-connected devices like the Kindle is that their text becomes provisional. Automatic updates can be sent through the network to edit the words stored in your machine - similar to the way that, say, software on your PC can be updated automatically today." "Does history begin to become as provisional as the text in the books?" Carr frets.

It's definitely a fretworthy issue. Given the state of our technology, censorship, rewriting of history, and mind control are only a few clicks away. As blogger Stephanie says, "Censorship in the age of the Kindle will be more subtle, and much more dangerous."

Ernest Hemingway said, "The first draft of anything is shit." Maybe. But is anything more fundamentally honest than shit?

Richard Curtis