The secret lives of texts.

• Author: Jamison, Stephanie W.

In contemplating what to say here I have had to fight against my worst nature, and our location for this meeting brought my moral dilemma into relief. I have been to many AOS meetings, most of them extremely pleasant, smooth-running, and successful--and as I remember all these pleasant meetings, they tend to merge a bit into each other. The ones that don't, that stand out in memory, are the ones where things didn't go smoothly, and chief of those in my institutional memory is the last one in St. Louis, in a hotel that was crumbling about our ears. I think everyone who was here then also recalls the meeting in detail, and those of you who weren't may well have heard about it from the attendees.

Similarly, I have heard many eloquent, elegant, and inspiring Presidential Addresses, many of which I remember quite well. But, again, the ones that are really etched into my mind are the appalling ones--the ones that never ended, that assumed the audience's deep fascination with the most technical and obscure facets of the speaker's work, that rode that hobby horse until the members were about to grab the reins and wrestle the speaker, however distinguished, to the ground. I name no names, and indeed no topics, but many of you will know some of those I mean.

So my temptation: if I really want my address to be remembered, if I aim for the "imperishable fame" that all Indo-Europeanists seek, to be handed down in the Society's oral tradition long after my death, then I really need to bore you monumentally, spectacularly, and at length. And unfortunately for you I can easily conceive of multiple ways in which I could do so. But you can rest easy--I am a modest woman and I seek no outsize portion of fame, and so, though I may end up boring you anyway, it will not be a deliberate bid for institutional immortality.

I will begin at the beginning. It is my belief that our philological impulse goes back to earliest childhood--the sense that children have, or I at least had, that characters in books have a full reality that is only partly glimpsed in the lines written about them; my childhood fantasy that Jo March in Little Women, or Dorothy and Toto in the Wizard of Oz, or, for that matter, Peter Rabbit might join me in my own life, and we could have further adventures not covered by the book; that (later on in my life) Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice had said many further wise witticisms that happened, alas, not to have made it to print. That they all had a life after the book ended and before it began--a secret life, if you will, because it's unobservable to the readers, what is known in Los Angeles, the city I now inhabit, as the "backstory." This also leads to our annoyance when an author presumes to manipulate characters in ways that run counter to our sense of their "reality": why did Tolstoy make the vibrant Natasha into a dreary housewife at the end of War and Peace? how dare the detective story writer Elizabeth George kill off the appealing and inoffensive Helen for no good reason? We feel, I think, that though authors create the characters, they doesn't own them--fiction is not slavery--and we become indignant when authors presume to behave arbitrarily to their creations. This sense of the reality of texts makes it something of a wonder to me that more children don't grow up to be philologists though, given the job market, it's just as well.

As an aside, it seems to me that this is the reason that the post-modern, post-structural view that a text is just a text hasn't gained much traction outside the academy: it contravenes people's deep and instinctive reactions to the "reality" of narrative, of stories.

In what way is this belief in the reality of fiction philological? We who work on ancient or medieval texts take them as two-dimensional pieces of evidence for a three-dimensional, fully real and realized world, and our job is to use the scant evidence to project three dimensions out of two. What I've elsewhere called (too often) reading between the lines. This is what I think every single person in this room does--if not with texts, then with artifacts. Even the most austere among us, the linguists (among whom I count myself, at least by origin), are engaged in this process; in fact, linguistics is perhaps the most explicit about the enterprise, for even linguists who work on modern spoken languages know that their program is to take the fragmentary and imperfect data that is living speech and construct the grammar by which these scattered utterances are generated, the mental grammar for which we have no direct evidence. This is, of course, the distinction between "parole" (the speech produced) and "langue" (the grammatical system that produces it) that goes back at least to de Saussure at the beginning of the last century. And in the same way our quarry as philological linguists working on ancient texts is to create from the written utterances in the text what was the living grammar for the speakers of the language in question and the composers of the texts.

But tonight 1 want to talk about an even more secret life, the "secret secret life of texts," as it were. And to do so in part as a response to people who are, probably, not in this room. As we all know, academic...