Every work springs out of the potential for that work to be written, but the potential for that work to have been written differently, and for it to yet be written differently (perhaps quite differently), does not perish with the realisation of the work: it persists within the work, dormant, unseen, unrealised. Under strict laboratory conditions a group of literary researchers have subjected the first chapter of
GREAT EXPECTATIONS to a range of conditions, constraints, reframings and exogenous forces in order to extract a sample few of the countless other Expectations that Charles Dickens made possible without realising.
Just because the number of possible works concealed within an actual work may be infinite does not mean that extracting one in a pure and useful form is an easy task. To extract new a new literary work hitherto hidden 'in potentia' within the old is a task of disciplined radical re-editing, and the twin literary pitfalls of 'creative writing' and 'self-expression' must be assiduously avoided. Beyond choosing the constraint or editing principle to be applied to the text, the operant must attempt to withhold any personal literary inclinations in order not to distort the result of the experiment. Devotion to the original text is of paramount importance, for Charles Dickens remains the author of the resultant works, however surprising they may be.
The editorial constraints applied so far to Chapter One of
Great Expectations have yielded very various results, including a version (edited by Dr Cornelius Milk) in which all words and phrases have been replaced by their opposites to produce a sort of antitext (Little Resignations perhaps) with a narrative seemingly unrelated to the original, and another by poet Helmina Milk in which the bulk of 'excess words' from the original text have been edited away to exhume a disturbing subtext. For those who seek greater precision and understanding I have provided a version in which all words have been replaced by their definitions from
The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary to produce a work of strange and tedious beauty. Fiction writer Thomas Pors Koed has rewritten the work as if Pip's eye were the narrator and Pip merely its steed, an exercise he regards as an extension of such primary school writing assignments as 'My Life as a Bottle of Milk'. Other versions, by Rufus Gutz and Thomas Pors Koed again, reveal and challenge assumptions about an author's over-intimate relation to their text or to its reader. Isabella Beeton provides an explication of ritual practices by splicing a segment of Dickens' text with that of a contemporary cookbook.
Begun in New Zealand by a group of writers and unwriters, the project is published in the ostensible form of a blog and invites submissions. The Ur-text by Dickens is provided for comparison and further re-editing.
Visit
http://radicalediting.blogspot.com/
