Blake’s Illuminated Manuscripts and the Importance of Collaboration as a Multi-media Design Skill
![blake-god[1]](http://ryantrauman.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/blakegod1.jpg "blake-god[1]")
Short: Blake was a sort of Renaissance-Savant. His manuscripts would have sucked if he hadn’t been. Collaboration Example: Architects/Clients. Call to Work on Your Collaboration Skills.
In a recent entry, I offered a working definition of a "book" as: "an historically situated, paginated object that represents and has emerged from a recursive negotiation between socially produced ideas, materials, and tools." Yeah, not great. But it’s got some important elements that are relevant to my discussion of Erdman’s discussion of Blake’s illuminated manuscripts. Something akin to the illuminated manuscripts being purely Blake’s original vision because he had so much control over the whole process.
The first idea I want to talk about is the idea of control and process. (I also want to make it clear that I’m not trying to directly engage Erdman or Blake in this post. Just working through some ideas in response to the two writers.) From what I know of Blake’s process, experience, and skill he did, actually, have almost complete control over his process. And I would guess that it’s part of the reason the manuscripts are so damn stunning. But control has limits, and I want to think about how control cannot be taken for granted as resulting in texts resembling what the writer actually wants. Control is actually pretty useless, even potentially destructive, when it’s not accompanied by competence…
Your Nostalgia for Print Books is Nostalgia. But I Share it.
Max McGee, over at The Millions (blog) has an interesting post about “the deckled edge” as proof of people’s fetishizing “dead-tree” books. (Or nostalgia-ing, what’s this word, folks?) I especially like his characterization of how physical, paper-print books might be perceived someday (especially, I think, by a born-digital generation):
In a sleek, shiny, distant future, books may feel old and impossibly large, with too much physical mass and all these fussy pages put to use for the simple task of storing a tiny amount of data, data that is not searchable or copy and pasteable or malleable and interactive in the ways we expect of our data. These devices, one imagines, might seem incredibly blunt to our future selves, unitaskers in world where our gadgets and machines can do all.
I love how he captures an attitude simultaneously quaint, like you’d think of your grandmother trying to learn the Wii, and impatient, like… well… like trying to explain the Wii to your grandmother.
Here’s the thing, this is pretty much already how I feel about physical books. I’m starting to lose patience with them. Well, sorta. Read the rest of this entry »
Blake’s Illuminated Manuscripts… What Can New Media Scholars Learn?
Working through some readings about “the history of the book” this afternoon. Stumbled across a fascinating selection from David Erman about William Blake’s Illuminated manuscripts. Obviously, it’s awfully reductive to suggest that Blake was a precursor to contemporary new media authors or even bloggers, but the following passage is rich with some interesting ideas:
“The fact that William Blake wrote, printed, illustrated, and published his own poems by ‘a method of Printing which combines the Painter and the Poet’–with no assistance but that of his wife Catherine–guaranteed the direct communication of the author’s original and final ‘invention’ and ‘illumination’ to the fortunate reader and spectator of each original copy of his ‘Illuminated Books.’ No other English poet has had the power to invite his audience so fully into the particular shapes and colors of his images of wonder.” (Erdman, 107)
What I find most interesting about this passage isn’t the jack-of-all-trades-and-songs that Erdman projects onto Blake. Instead, I’m interested in that last sentence: “the particular shapes and colors of his images of wonder.” This phrasing gets me thinking about two related ideas. The first is a traditional (albeit waning) Western tendency toward privileging the subject. And by subject I mean a thinking entity separate from its context, and in some thinking, separate from the body (also waning). This passage reveals an assumption that somewhere inside Blake these crazy and beautiful and genius visions resided. Not necessarily AS Blake, but at least belonging to Blake. In this sense, the tools of typography and printing that Blake had at his disposal were merely mechanisms in the service of somehow prying these images/ideas out of Blake with as much veracity as possible. The ideas, then, must come before their instantiation in a medium. The medium and processes are evaluated in terms of how little they distort the original images in Blake’s head. Those ideas seem a little dated now, sure, but I think Erdman is opening up an interesting discussion about what happens when one person (or at least the fewer the better) has control over large, continuous portions of the production process. Read the rest of this entry »
