AN ARTURIAN TAPESTRY

“Text," the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, came into English usage as a signifier for the Gospels. It is related to texture and textile, establishing the written and the woven as related pursuits that join the useful and the comely. Thus wrote the fourteenth-century poet William Langland in Piers Plowman: "Dilige deum & proximum tuum, &c. [Th]is was [th]e tixte trewly..; [the] glose was gloriousely writen.

The "gloriousely writen" text doesn't seem to be the bailiwick of linguists. If there's an offense that unites scientists and post-structuralists against a common foe, it's belle-lettrism. Yet the concern with text as texture--what we've come to call its style--is fundamental not only to the pleasure of reading but to the understanding of what is written, which at its best is a fabric: composed of many strands. Discerning those strands requires knowledge--and judgment. Style is an apotheosis: it is the revelation of any author's "construction of reality. http://www.thenation.com/article/155247/pleasures-tixte

Isn't this comment just delightful? Ange Mlinko wrote this essay at The Nation and her perspective grabbed my interest.

A few years ago, when I began to play on the net (nets and webs-think about it) I was struck by the constant reference in the blogs to 'threads'.

One thread that runs throughout your post...someone might write.

And of course, I had always been cognizant of the comparison of a piece of writing to a tapestry.

So 'text' has an etymology related to texture and textiles!

I always thought of the etymology for the term Bible, which means to drink. We are given to consider that to read from a Bible would be like drinking one's fill at a stream thereby quenching one's thirst. In a religious context, this would be quenching one's thirst for truth; Langland's underlying message.

The author of the two paragraphs duplicated here is discussing style as providing a texture to a piece of literature. As if one could hold a piece of literature in one's hands and actually receive a three dimensional feel from mere cyphers on a piece of paper. Maybe learning to read in Braille would not be that bad an experience!

And in the context of this article from the Nation, Langland lingered long in alliteration; the style of the day.

Ange Mlinko goes on to discuss the influence of the King James Bible upon American Literature; a subject that would surely have put me to sleep four and five decades ago:

I should like to try to see how the language of the King James Version is worked into the texture of the writing, making possible a kind of strong prose that would not have existed otherwise, and I shall seek to understand how this prose serves as the vehicle for certain distinctively American constructions of reality.

Abraham Lincoln used locutions from the King James Version in his Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural to lend theological resonance to his vision of justice and reconciliation. Herman Melville's biblicisms, particularly his references to Job, invoke the Bible in order to subvert the standard Christian interpretation of it ("Christ's redeeming love of mankind...is antithetical to the truth about the world"). William Faulkner's "thematic lexicon" of blood, seed, birthright and curse links the blasted dynasties of the Old Testament to the American South's "catastrophically perverted" dream of a New Eden, a dream that originated with the first English settlers. Bellow's biblical parataxis presents "the narrative data in ways that allow them to speak for themselves," without literary distractions--distractions being, in Bellow's view, "a pervasive malady of contemporary American society." As for Hemingway, whose debt to Ecclesiastes is stamped on The Sun Also Rises, a refusal of stylistic ornamentation upends the entire tradition of what Alter calls English "standard-novelistic." The King James Version pointed him toward "a fundamental repackaging of English prose," which matched the aspirations of America in the twentieth century.

Ange, as you can see, is not only well read but knows how to write!

This is what a legal text might describe as a doctrine of relation back. Great writers will make references to lines from prior works that would be known to the reader and add an affect to their message. That is Lincoln or Faulkner would be adding an emotional component to their message by referring back to a Biblical line in a Biblical context thereby evoking an emotion from the reader/listener.

People with the aid of scanners and computer software take this type of analysis to the extreme so that every line from the Bible is cross referenced into every 'great' piece of literature. Thus critiquing literature becomes a matter of statistical analysis. Hahaha

What the hell fun is that?

But back to metaphors.

Metaphors are tools.

We are not the only animals on this planet who enjoy the use of the metaphor as a practical tool.

Individual bees and ants, discovering a new source of food, will go back to their hives and hills and perform a dance in front of their comrades. The dance to the little buggers is a type of map making, indicating to the drones where sustenance might be found in the wild. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/video/2009/apr/05/dancing-bees-show-direction-distance

And what are maps but metaphors after all?

Text as deriving from the word textile has me looking at a piece of writing as a piece of cloth or tapestry allowing me to follow the course of a thread that holds that piece together.

And threads provide the structure for a piece of writing.

An analysis of a piece of literature like Joyce's Ulysses provides so many different threads that one could spend a lifetime attempting to 'translate' the piece.

One thread would involve Homer's Ulysses. The plot unwinds with references to the plot of the original Ulysses.

Another thread would involve the Catholic Mass. The mass is divided into segments and you could find each of these segments referenced as Joyce's plot progresses.

Another thread would involve the Passion of the Christ.

And so on.

So that the better read you are, the more your emotions might be tweaked by this one book that some have called the greatest piece of English Literature ever produced.

Well that's all I got.

Except I think I found a new understanding as to where the term text arose.

Etymology can be a fun exercise!