The Invention of Rewriting Revision?

I’m looking at successive drafts of the Declaration of Independence while considering Craig Fehrman’s Boston Globe essay on revision in writing.

Fehrman says that Hannah Sullivan’s The Work of Revision posits that “revision as we now understand it—where authors, before they publish anything, will spend weeks tearing it down and putting it back together again—is a creation of the 20th century.”

More specifically, she argues that approach to rewriting is a product of the typewriter, cheaper typesetting, and word-processing programs. In days when paper and printing were rarer resources, authors didn’t see so many versions of their work and therefore took fewer opportunities to rewrite.

Yet the article omits some counterexamples. It cites John Milton’s “Lycidas” as an example of a writer making “local tweaks instead of significantly recasting.” It doesn’t mention that Milton issued Paradise Lost in two forms, the first divided into ten books and the second into twelve, as he revised his work. Alexander Pope published three versions of The Rape of the Lock within a decade.

Fehrman says Sullivan cites the Romantics as a school that “made resisting revision a virtue. The best literature, they believed, flowed from spontaneous and organic creative acts.” Yet no great English poem was more fussed over and rewritten (not always to good effect) than William Wordsworth’s verse autobiography, posthumously published as The Prelude.

The Work of Revision doesn’t appear to go deep into English literary history, or to find the same trends in the literature of other languages where the same typesetting technologies applied. The catalog copy names only Modernist authors, contrasted with a nameless swarm of “Romantics,” and the earliest name in the table of contents is Henry James.

It might be more accurate to say that the Modernists, in contrast to their immediate literary predecessors, talked a lot more about revision, and about what hard work it was. And that would be significant in how they, and we, think about art. But are writers really driven more to revise now, or do we just see and hear about it more often?

Pullman Panel Promotion

Following breadcrumbs laid through the woods at Educating Alice, I found Saestina's report on a panel in Oxford where Philip Pullman participated in promoting the upcoming film adaptation of his novel Northern Lights/The Golden Compass.

The most interesting tidbits, I thought, had to do with Pullman's creative process while writing the books, lo those few years ago. He's mentioned the inspiration for the trilogy title before:

His initial inspiration for the book was the landscape of hell that Milton describes in the first two books of Paradise Lost, which is also where the title His Dark Materials comes from. The original working title for the trilogy was The Golden Compasses, also from a quotation from Paradise Lost.

That would be from Book VII:

Then staid the fervid wheels, and in his hand
He took the golden compasses, prepared
In God's eternal store, to circumscribe
This universe, and all created things:
One foot he centered, and the other turned
Round through the vast profundity obscure;
And said, Thus far extend, thus far thy bounds,
This be thy just circumference, O World!

Saestina's description of Pullman's remarks continues:

When Northern Lights went to the US editor, he thought the [original series] title was a reference to the alethiometer, changed it to a singular compass and made it the title of the first book instead of the trilogy as a whole. This is, apparently, the same editor who changed the name of the first Harry Potter book from Philosopher's Stone to Sorceror's Stone, which Pullman said, "obviously makes no sense."

Not to quibble, but the US publishers of the Harry Potter series and Pullman's retitled (and soon to be renumbered) trilogy are different companies. In fact, to confuse matters beyond easy meaning, the UK publisher of Northern Lights is the same multinational firm as the US publisher of Harry Potter.

It may also be worth acknowledging that a stone which conveys magical immortality makes much more sense--in modern usage--as a "sorcerer's stone" than as a "philosopher's stone." Yes, I support educating fourth-graders in the history of Renaissance scientific nomenclature as much as the next guy, but let's face it--until that happens, there's a case for "sorcerer's stone."

And it definitely seems noteworthy that while J. K. Rowling's Philosopher's Stone title survives in the UK and around the world, for both book and movie, Pullman accepted the US title for his first volume even though that meant he had to find a new series title. Such is the power of US sales.

An item of more interest to story creators:

Pullman really struggled with the first chapter of Northern Lights. On his sixteenth draft (according to him, I think this may have been hyperbole) he was hit with the idea of daemons and it all came together.

What, at least from this hind perspective, seems like a fundamental element of the His Dark Materials universe, and even of some of the books' plotting, wasn't part of Pullman's original planning.

Fuse #8 provides a link to another Golden Compass movie promotion, an advance trailer spotlighting the half-finished special effects.