There are still other versions to get hold of: the serialized version that appeared in the periodical The Egoist in 1916-17, the American Knopf edition of 1918, and the Methuen edition of 1951—each of which is which is substantially different from the two versions we now have. But the Egoist 1918 and the Chatto & Windus 1928—respectively the most “definitive” of the early versions and the version that Lewis himself wished to be preserved—are the most significant texts for our purposes.

So now the business of versioning begins. Initially our plan had been to mark up our texts in the TEI encoding language, identifying in advance significant features that we wanted to track. For instance, we might have tagged all the epithets used to designate the character Tarr in the different versions (his nicknames include Sorbet, from his middle name Sorbert), and then automatically compared all such tagged nominations. However, we have decided instead to compare un-tagged plain text. The idea is not to draw conclusions prematurely. Rather than deciding ahead of time what specific differences we’re looking for, we will simply aim to detect every difference, word-by-word, between the editions, and see what comes out. By comparing plain text files, we maximize our potential to be surprised by the results. Then our task becomes to interpret the differences that most surprise us.

Those who have studied closely the various versions of Tarr have, of course, already noticed certain differences. Some of the more general reflections belong to William H. Pritchard, who detected a “thicken[ing]” of description as Lewis becomes more willing “to tell us about his characters, what they look like, what they are comparable with” (Wyndham Lewis, 29). Far more specific variants are provided in Stephen Sturgeon’s introduction to his unpublished 2007 dissertation edition of Tarr, where he notes Lewis’s bizarre, almost pathological renaming of minor characters: Bertha’s roommate, named Clara Goenthner in the 1918 English edition, is Clare Vamber in the 1918 American edition, Clara Vamber in the manuscript revisions for the 1928 editions, Clara Lederer in the published 1928 version, and Clara Vamber once again in the 1951 version (Sturgeon 30).

Lewis liked to change things, clearly.

Because our approach to versioning is computational, we will turn up a great deal more differences than human readers have been able to detect so far. Human readers (because of our vanity, I imagine) are peculiarly attentive to things like character descriptions and character names—they are the things we tend to notice when they change, as Pritchard and Sturgeon demonstrate. There is much, however, that we don’t notice when it changes. I can’t say yet what this might be in Tarr, being a human reader myself. But we’re about to find out.

The differences I’m most curious about relate to the novel’s much-discussed (and in some quarters infamous) representations of female characters, politics, and violence. In a text so often described as misogynistic, how do representations of women change between versions? Where does Lewis respond to criticism—and when he does, does he soften his tone or dig in his heels? In a novel so centrally concerned with German characters, how do representations of German ideas, German politics, and German culture alter when the novel moves from a context dominated by the First World War to one dominated by the rise of Fascism? Which words change their meaning in these charged political contexts—which need to be removed, and which added? And in a novel whose plot turns on a rape and a duel, how do representations of violence change between versions? Does the novel become more violent or more pacific? Does the nature of its violence alter? Is this manifest in micro-level details like punctuation and word choice? If so, how?

A question I’m particularly interested in, given my interest in the problem of voice in modernist fiction, is whether Tarr becomes more or less “dialogic” in the 1928 version—whether the revisions introduce new perspectives and points of view, or whether they serve to unify and harden the ideological world of the novel. I don’t know the answers to these questions, and I don’t know if comparing plain text versions of the Egoist and Chatto & Windus editions will help to answer them—but I’m eager to find out.

I am, in short, ready to be surprised.

Post by Adam Hammond, attached to the ModVers project, with the versioning tag. Featured images for this post care of Adam Hammond, the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, and the Internet Archive.

By the mid-1920s each of these editions had gone out of print. In 1928, Lewis was offered the opportunity to reprint Tarr in an inexpensive edition for the Chatto and Windus “Phoenix Series.” Chatto and Windus allowed Lewis to make corrections to his notoriously unstable and various text, and Lewis took up the offer with his usual gusto. Using the 1918 American Knopf edition as his basis, he made significant revisions to the earlier version, which he had come to regard as “a hasty piece of workmanship” (Blasting and Bombardiering, [1937] 1967, 90). Lewis indeed did not leave a single piece of the 1918 edition untouched in his revisions. And while he did make certain deletions, Scott W. Klein describes Lewis’s changes as both “substantial” and “overwhelmingly additive” (“A Note on the Text,” Oxford World’s Classics Tarr, 2010).

Opinion remains divided, however, on which of the versions of Tarr is the “best.” John Xiros Cooper amusingly describes the diversity of opinion in Modernism and the Culture of Market Society, where he says, “Just ask any one of the two-dozen Lewis scholars in the world which of the versions of Tarr is the best of most complete text. Be prepared for a lively response” (215). Our interest in versioning Tarr for the MVP is [pullquote]not to settle which of the versions is best or most complete, however, but rather to examine the differences between them.

In my next post, I’ll begin to explore the form/content connections between Tarr’s textual case of “multiple personalities” and its thematic investigation of the many-sidedness of the modernist self.

Post by Adam Hammond, attached to the ModVers project, with the versioning tag. Featured images for this post by Wyndham Lewis and Tate Britain/EPA, at guardian.co.uk; and the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, care of the Internet Archive.

My postdoctoral project, “The Case Against Roots: Modernist Internationalism After Modernism” (supervised by Stephen Ross), follows three figures central to my dissertation—Lewis, Auerbach, and Auden—into the post-WWII period, when each moved to North America, and each became a passionate adherent of internationalism. My project focuses on the legacy of these writers’ idea of “rootless” internationalism, looking specifically at Lewis’s influence on Marshall McLuhan, Auerbach’s influence on Edward Said, and Auden’s influence on Owen Dodson and Robert Hayden.

I have previously worked with TEI in leading “He Do the Police in Different Voices”, a project for exploring voices in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land that I developed with the TAs and students of “The Digital Text”, the course I teach at the University of Toronto. I am currently working on a project entitled “The Brown Stocking,” which aims to explore the complexities of voice in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse by tagging its use of free indirect discourse.

In addition to writing on Lewis in my dissertation, I published an article on Lewis’s relationship with Canada in The Walrus in 2010. My chapter, “Excellent Internationalists: How Canada Influenced Wyndham Lewis, and How Marshall McLuhan and Sheila Watson Turned Wyndham Lewis Into an Influence,” forthcoming in the volume In Search of Annihilated Time (eds. Paul Hjartarson, Gregory Betts, and Kristine Smitka; University of Alberta Press, 2014), explores Lewis’s complex relationship with Canada in greater detail, arguing that Lewis exerted his influence on Canadian society only because writers like McLuhan and Watson so thoroughly adapted and reimagined his ideas.

In my next post, I will outline the aims and approach of the Tarr versioning project.

Post by Adam Hammond, attached to the ModVers project, with the versioning tag. Featured images for this post care of Adam Hammond and his hedothepolice.org and Digital Text projects.