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Victorian Poetry 41.4 (2003) 531-536



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A Note Upon the "Liquid Crystal Screen" and Victorian Poetry

Ana Parejo Vadillo


In an attempt to discuss the implications that advanced computer technology will have on future research on Victorian Poetry, it might be worthwhile re-visiting Freud's 1925 essay "A Note Upon the 'Mystic Writing-Pad.'" 1 In this influential piece, Freud offered an examination of memory and perceptual-conscious systems, using as examples two writing materials —paper and slate—and a toy, the "Mystic Writing-Pad." He began the essay by noting that the subject is "able to supplement and guarantee" the workings of memory "by making a note in writing" (p. 429). This note is for Freud "a materialized portion of [the] mnemic apparatus" which we "carry about with [us] invisible" (p. 429). This technique keeps "intact" the memory, "unaltered" by the subject's actual memory. By keeping in mind where the note is, the subject can easily recover and reproduce the memory at any time. [End Page 531]

To improve the subject's "mnemic function," this technique could be used in two ways: by writing either on a sheet of paper or on a slate. The advantage of using a sheet of paper is that it will preserve the memory intact permanently, but this procedure has two important disadvantages. First, it provides the subject with a "permanent trace" even after the subject no longer wants to keep that memory, and, secondly, the writing space is limited and finite. The slate keeps its capacity for an unlimited time, and the notes can be destroyed as soon as they are of no interest to the subject. But it cannot leave a permanent trace.

The appearance in the market of the "Magic Writing-Pad" gave Freud the opportunity to offer a much closer and more successful approximation to the workings of memory, and to suggest, one might add, a more efficient way of supplementing it. The "Mystic Writing-Pad" is a child's toy which allows its user to write on the transparent film, beneath which is a thicker layer of wax, which retains permanently the traces of the indentations from the pressure applied onto the transparent film via a writing implement. The mystical aspect of this toy is that the writing vanishes upon lifting the film. In other words, the "Magic Writing-Pad," unlike paper or slate, is an "ever-ready receptive surface," which nonetheless leaves on the wax "traces of the notes that have been made upon it" (p. 431). It is easy to see why Freud was so attracted to this toy, because it was an inspiring metaphor with which to explain how the mind's perceptual apparatus registers the material world.

Recent scholarship on information technology has often used Freud's suggestive essay to establish an analogy between the "Mystic Writing-Pad" and computer technology, since the computer's capacity to both receive and store bytes of information is, at least in theory, potentially astronomical. One could argue that computer technology can be used as a mechanical perceptual apparatus with which to "guarantee" and "supplement" the workings of what we might call very generally "our" "cultural memory." There is no doubt that the increasing growth in computer-based information technology and computer programming (electronic texts and databases, electronic libraries, information networks, discussion groups, hypertexts, etc.) offers radical ways to record documents of any kind (textual and/or visual and/or aural). It is also providing us with new ways to recover such documentation, because in this new environment, words and images truly function as arcades (in the Benjaminian sense) that virtually link the user with a myriad of interwoven traces. If, as Friedrich Kittler has suggested, the discourse networks of the year 1900 were situated in the newly available media (the typewriter, the film, and the photograph), today, I would strongly argue, computer technology is the foundational configuration of our discourse networks. 2 [End Page 532]

The issue that Victorian scholars must address now, it seems to me, is not just what kinds of changes...

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