To graduate that fall I needed to take a seminar class on a certain topic. My choice was between Emily Dickinson and a class called “Authors and Scribblers of the 18th Century.” I chose the latter, though I never really liked Alexander Pope or Jonathon Swift, figuring it would prove to be less restrictive than devoting myself to Emily Dickinson, and that it would have a discussion of writing and what makes someone more than a mere scribbler, and that I should know something of classical satire if I was seriously to conceive a work on Seinfeld. What ultimately happened was that I had my entire thinking on Seinfeld framed by what became my final paper for the class, with Alexander Pope as the 18th-century Larry David disgusted with the disintegrating print culture, and his Dunciad Variorum as Seinfeld, the work of, for, and against the vapidity and commercialism of the endless, dull stories that were flowing from the presses to the sellers to the public, or, in the case of Seinfeld, from Hollywood to the living rooms of this fine country.
David’s stand-up career has been mythologized as that of an unpredictable parade of confrontations and one-minute performances ended in disgust after an audience member ordered a drink as he was trying to tell a joke. His art was one defined by receiving no respect: one responded to by hecklers in noisy bars who attack at signs of weakness and failing self-confidence, defined by years and years of poverty and obscurity, and characterized by self-abasement and self-destruction, joking that you’re just a stand-up comedian—you’re not writing Ulysses, you’re not singing with USA for Africa, you’re not Al Pacino. You might have been cool in the sixties or seventies when you were listened to on records like rock stars, if you were Richard Pryor or Jerry Lewis or George Carlin, but by the eighties, in part thanks to Andy Kaufman, you had to make fun of stand-up comedy, expand beyond it, appear in movies, star in movies, make sitcoms, to be a stand-up comedian. In spite of all this Larry David would replace the microphone on the stand and leave the room, standing-up for his profession, unwilling to bestow these assholes with his genius.
Alexander Pope was also somewhat curmudgeonly with his two-liners and was horrified that his audience had so many other alternatives with whom to replace him, with whom he shared the shelves and shared the title “author”; that, in 1820, with a sudden spread of literacy, a printing boom in London, and the loosening of rules in both poetic form and content, he was surrounded by hacks. And not only were no talent amateurs making a joke of his profession, greedy publishers, the “powerful intermediaries”[1] that stood between the author and his publication, were making a killing from this very joke. They re-presented the works of well-known authors with their own criticisms and interpretations—many responses to Pope were very colorful in their depiction of Pope’s impotence and malformity—and they tainted literature with the words and ambitions of those hungry for money, not truth. But Pope’s relationship to these publishers, like that of Seinfeld and David to NBC, while it was repugnant to his “artistic integrity,” as George put it, was entirely necessary.
The 1729 second Variorum edition of the Dunciad reapropriates the criticisms of and responses to the Dunciad and through the invented editor Martinus Scriblerus (Latin for “Martin the Scribbler) tells the story of the dunciad of idiots that have the nerve to publish their insights on a work they feel doesn’t merit consideration because of the ghastly way it makes fun of them. This story begins and ends the work and occurs simultaneously, indeed at the very bottom of every page, with the first Dunciad, which at times only fits two lines on a page full of notes and criticisms, most written by Pope’s invented Scriblerus, a form of the work that invited critics and publishers to respond and contribute even more to this already comically annotated poem, continuing the story of the misguided who want to prove their interpretations right and make money off that correctness in pathetic condition of economic logocentrism.
Pope succeeded in creating a book that has no boundaries. Part of the power of the printed book is that it is bounded: it is separate from its readers. As I read I create meaning in collaboration with the inked marks on the page. But there is a myth of the book that tells me (deceivingly) that these marks are a boundary I cannot cross: I am on the outside of their meaning, and they are on the inside. And they are fixed, forever. Transgression of this magic boundary is only allowed to textual editors, who rather thrillingly have in their control the right to alter the fixed text. All of this is deconstructed in The Dunciad. The distinction between author and editor is mocked and subverted; the process of annotation, which attempts to control and specify meaning, is made impossible.[2]
This synthesis of the ever-evolving critical apparatus with the work of literature itself, that is the once-unadorned heroic couplets of the first edition of the Dunciad, acts as an effective deconstruction of the priority of the anterior creation of the work—or the sign of its origin—to the posterior criticism of it—the sign of that sign.
The Dunciad Variorum does not simply present a tension between the poem and its notes, it also presents one between Pope and the invented Scriblerus, and the extent to which their identities are inscribed in other identities complicates the distinction between them. It must be taken as an ironic comment on presence that in a work edited by Scriblerus—a fake person—we have the mystery “solved” of what persons in real life are attacked by having their names given in full. Initially, in the 1728 edition, as one 20th century editor put it, “the protagonists of this epic are not fixed individuals, but blank signifiers, whose referents were to be, as the (un)editor of the 1728 edition says, 'clapp'd in as they rose, fresh and fresh, and chang'd from day to day’.”[3] However, the Variorum, categorized by its obsession to annotate, asserts “that obscurities are in principle resolvable, and words, especially names, have a specific, fixed, and discoverable reference,” though they were originally intended to be “chang’d from day to day,” making “the business of editorial annotation absurd.” And, with the passage of time and the accumulation of attacks against the Dunciad, “Pope's mocking notes, in successive editions, add to the creative chaos, and further cast doubt on the whole business of annotation.”
Scriblerus’s presence is, in a sense, like purposely inserting spelling mistakes into a work in the way Derrida misspells the French word for difference with an a, providing it with something “silent, secret, and discreet as a tomb,” and allowing it to “bypass the order of apprehension,” for the “full understanding of the work” is at a non-existent end of deconstructed understanding.[4] Indeed, questions of spelling enter frequently into Scriblerus’s commentary. He even makes the decision to spell “Theobold” phonetically—that is, incorrectly—as “Tibbald.” He agrees with Theobold’s “preservation of this very Letter e,” with which Shakespear(e) and the Dunc(e)iad—and différence—should properly be spelled; though he ultimately chose to “follow the Manuscript, and print it without any E at all.”[5] The over-annotation has undone the very thing it attempted: in solving the phonetic mystery of “Theobold” as “Tibbald” he becomes different from the real-life figure that the Variorum is supposed to pinpoint him as.
[1] McLaverty, James. "The Mode of Existence of Literary Works of Art: the Case of the Dunciad Variorum." Pope. Hammond, B., ed. London: Longman, 1996, pp. 220-32.
[2] Davis, Tom, page 344 “The Epic of Bibliography: Alexander Pope and Textual Criticism.” Text: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Textual Studies, 9 (1996), pp. 342-52.
[3] Ibid
[4] Derrida, Jacques, page 120. “Différance.” Critical Theory Since 1965. Hazard Adams, ed. Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1986. 120-136.
[5] Pope, Alexander. The Dunciad Variorum. The Poems of Alexander Pope, vol. III. Rumbold, Valerie, ed. London: Pearson, 2007. 113-366.
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