Welty's Digital Future: Some New Directions

Michael Pickard's "Welty's Digital Future: Some New Directions" spotlights his work with students in the Digital Welty Lab at Millsaps College, an incubator of undergraduate research, "on projects that leverage web technologies to enhance our understanding of Welty's work." It details how this approach provides spaces to fill in historically specific contextual and cultural information gaps that present barriers to 21^st century readers and reveal Welty's intertextual engagement with (and often transformation of) that material. Finally, it argues that by inviting students into Welty's imaginary via more interactive technologies familiar to them that we can foster new generations of Welty readers that will continue to invest in her work.

Eudora Welty described reading as "a sweet devouring" ("A Sweet Devouring" 798). Her own readers know the pleasure she took in this species of consumption. This pleasure extended to the physical object. "I was in love with books," she wrote, "at least partly for what they looked like; I loved the printed page" (799). Here is how she describes a series of books called "The Camp Fire Girls":

I believe they were ten cents each and I had a dollar. But they weren't all that easy to buy, because the series stuck, and to buy some of it was like breaking into a loaf of French bread. Then after you got home, each single book was as hard to open as a box stuck in its varnish, and when it gave way it popped like a firecracker. The covers once prized apart would never close; those books once open stayed open and lay on their backs helplessly fluttering their leaves like a turned-over June bug. They were as light as a matchbox. They were printed on yellowed paper with corners that crumbled, if you pinched on them too hard, like old graham crackers, and they smelled like attic trunks, caramelized glue, their own confinement with one another and, over all, the Kress's smell—bandannas, peanuts and sandalwood from the incense counter. Even without reading them I loved them.

(800–801)

Note the profusion of similes: "like breaking into a loaf of French bread," "as hard to open as a box stuck in its varnish"; books popping "like a firecracker" when opened, "fluttering their leaves like a turned-over June bug," "light as a matchbox." Corners that crumble "like graham crackers." Books that smell "like attic trunks, caramelized glue," and, above all, like Kress. Welty seems to have had almost as much fun writing about these dime-store novels as she did all those years earlier, opening them for the first time. She remained in love with books, both story and vessel, all her life.

Imagine a writer to be born on Welty's centennial: April 13, 2009. This writer, let us suppose, loves reading just as much as Welty did. Probably, she has already devoured many books, from her earliest childhood. Probably, she has also spent her share of hours online. Some of the time, when a story takes hold of her, she finds herself turning page after page with breathless joy. Other times, caught in that same bliss, she will scroll down, consuming each line of text as it appears on her screen. When she begins to write—sometime, say, in the 2030s—she will almost certainly create a digital document and do her work there.

"In the next fifty years," Jerome McGann has argued, "the entirety of our inherited archive of cultural works will have to be re-edited within a network of digital storage, access, and dissemination. This system, which is already under development, is transnational and transcultural" ("Literary Scholarship in the Digital Future"). McGann made this claim in 2002, before the Kindle, the iPhone, or the IPO of Google. More than twenty years later, we read between two worlds, print and digital. Dual citizens—most of us, anyway—we use both technologies. For centuries, printed books dominated the market for information storage. But how many businesses still rely on paper for record-keeping, billing, or scheduling? As a technology for accessing information, the codex still has legs. Print may no longer be, as Leah Price writes, "the workhorse of our daily information gathering," but, as Price also notes, people still buy more printed books than their electronic counterparts (20, 3). Even so, few texts that end up in print these days begin that way. Writers type them up on laptops and email them to their publishers. They proof pdfs instead of those unwieldy galleys.

As Price observes, "competition among media is [not] new, for even at its height, print never clawed out more than a niche in a crowded landscape" (11). Indeed, we do not have to use the metaphor of competition at all. The rise of digital media does not have to mean the death of print. The new medium, as Walter Ong thought, may "reinforce the old while at the same time transforming it" (150). Price observes that "Readers can . . . learn when to read in print and when to opt for digital, when to read quickly and when to read slowly, when to search an encyclopedia and when to have their souls searched by a poem" (116–17). Any rigorous approach to Welty has to comprehend the historical conditions, including the medium, in which she published. But if McGann is right, and I suspect he is, scholars interested in Welty's survival may want to begin planning her digital future now.

To this end, I am working with students in the Digital Welty Lab at Millsaps College on various projects that leverage web technologies to enhance our understanding of Welty's work without infringing copyright. Collectively, these projects share at least three aims. They try to make it easier to resolve what George Steiner once called "contingent difficulties," or difficulties created by a lack of historical information (267). They try to reveal Welty's transformation of historical materials. And they try to foster new ways of interacting with her fiction. In the paragraphs that follow, I will discuss each aim using a project underway in the Welty Lab as an example. We collect our work at weltylab.org (see Fig. 1).

________

In the two decades since McGann's remark about re-editing the cultural inheritance, scholars have produced compelling digital archives: among others, The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Hypermedia Archive (rossettiarchive.org), The Willa Cather Archive (cather.unl.edu), The Walt Whitman Archive (whitmanarchive.org), and the William Blake Archive (blakearchive.org). Modeled on these projects, "Powerhouse" Annotated is a digital edition of a story Welty wrote after attending a concert that Fats Waller gave in Jackson, Mississippi, in May 1940—just three years before his death from pneumonia at age thirty-nine. "Powerhouse" Annotated

Fig. 1.

Fig. 2.

presents a reading text of the story augmented by annotations. These annotations include links to digital media that can help readers understand and to some extent re-enter the original context of publication. The edition also offers a textual history of "Powerhouse," a brief discussion of key moments from the story's reception history, and a selected bibliography (see Figs. 2, 3, and 4).¹

Collected in Welty's first book, A Curtain of Green (1941), "Powerhouse" is fundamentally about the transposition of art between media. Welty captures the brilliance of Waller's improvised performances well as the mindset of the White audience that tries to contain him within its own narrow bounds. Over the years, many critics have added to our understanding of this story: Alfred Appel, Sarah Ford, Rebecca Mark, Suzanne Marrs, Tom McHaney, Harriet Pollack, Peter Schmidt, among others.

Fig. 3.

Fig. 4.

Still, several details in the text pertinent to the interpretation of "Powerhouse" have yet to find their way into critical narratives. Here, for example, is a paragraph from the beginning of the story.

This is a white dance. Powerhouse is not a show-off like the Harlem boys, not drunk, not crazy—he's in a trance; he's a person of joy, a fanatic. He listens as much as he performs, a look of hideous, powerful rapture on his face. Big arched eyebrows that never stop traveling, like a Jew's—wandering-Jew eyebrows. When he plays he beats down piano and seat and wears them away. He is in motion every moment—what could be more obscene? There he is with his great head, fat stomach, and little round piston legs, and long yellow-sectioned strong big fingers, at rest about the size of bananas. Of course you know how he sounds—you've heard him on records—but still you need to see him. He's going all the time, like skating around the skating rink or rowing a boat. It makes everybody crowd around, here in this shadowless steel-trussed hall with the rose-like posters of Nelson Eddy and the testimonial for the mind-reading horse in handwriting magnified five hundred times.

(158)

The voice speaking to us, Welty later said, is that of the White audience watching Powerhouse play: not one person so much as an atmosphere of perception (Marrs, One Writer's Imagination 25). The story exposes the casual racism of the crowd. Powerhouse overawes the provincial Mississippi concertgoers. To them, he is famous, exotic, "obscene," a cultural Other they consume as entertainment. Focused on Powerhouse, just as the audience is, readers might pass right by the "rose-like posters of Nelson Eddy and the testimonial for the mind-reading horse in handwriting magnified five hundred times." These images may seem like mere window dressing, Welty setting a scene. In fact, they are what Ezra Pound called "luminous details" (130).

Eddy, the actor and singer, first visited Jackson in 1932. At the time, he was not yet famous. Only a small crowd turned out to see him perform ("Nelson Eddy Coming Back Here" 20). Welty might not have known it as she worked on "Powerhouse," but Eddy would return in March of 1941.² By that time, he had paused his career in opera for a far more lucrative one in Hollywood. He was every bit the celebrity. His rose-like poster marks the dance hall not just as a White space, but a middlebrow space as well. After all, Welty's imaginary concertgoers likely would have known him best not for his work on stage but as the male lead in films such as Rose Marie (1936) and New Moon (1940). How different would this concert hall feel, for example, if the poster were of Marian Anderson, the contralto whose star was also rising at this time?

In March of 1920, Essie Fay, "America's representative horsewoman," brought her famous mind-reading horse Arabia to Jackson as part of the Con T. Kennedy Carnival Shows ("Kennedy Shows Here, Despite Rail Wreck" 3). This is the way a newspaper from Nebraska described Arabia's act in 1915. The horse "will spell your name for you, add, subtract, multiply and divide, goes to bed in a huge four-poster and finally rescues a baby from a burning building, fighting the flames, which pour from the edifice" ("The Moose Carnival" 8). Evidently, Arabia was also clairvoyant. We do not know, at present, whether Welty, going on eleven at the time, attended Fay's show. Perhaps she did and retained the memory all those years later. Perhaps she was only recalling a poster she saw at the time or somewhere else on her travels. Perhaps her "testimonial for the mind-reading horse" is pure imagination and Fay's trip to Jackson coincidence and nothing more.

Whatever the case, like the Eddy poster, this testimonial expands our appreciation of "Powerhouse." A mind-reading horse is a curiosity. Few would take it seriously, just as few in Welty's dance hall take Powerhouse seriously. He is pure spectacle to them. For this White audience in Jim Crow Mississippi, watching a Black musician is in some sense like watching an animal perform—or so, at any rate, the image suggests. Later in the story, the crowd condescends to Powerhouse, supposing he is "giving [them] all [he's] got" (160). In fact, he is giving them the same show, in all likelihood, that he will give to any number of White audiences across the country. On the same tour that brought him to Jackson, for example, the historical Waller stopped at Fort Lauderdale and St. Petersburg, Florida; Opelousas, Louisiana; Carlsbad, New Mexico; El Paso, Texas; Oakland, California; and Salt Lake City, Utah. Put another way, the White audience in Welty's story misunderstands Powerhouse's intensity, the joy he takes in performance. "When somebody, no matter who, gives everything, it makes people feel ashamed for him," they conclude (160). This musician, like the author who brought him to life, does give everything out of love for his art. If the provincials in attendance feel ashamed for Powerhouse, however, the joke's on them.

At intermission, Powerhouse sets out with his bandmates to find a place where they can grab a beer. In this time and place, they have to find a Black-owned business. Once they do and settle in, Powerhouse sends Scoot and Valentine to the juke box with a handful of change.

"Here's a million nickels," says Powerhouse, pulling his hand out of his pocket and sprinkling coins out, all but the last one, which he makes vanish like a magician.

Valentine and Scoot take the money over to the nickelodeon, which looks as battered as a slot machine, and read all the names of the records out loud.

"Whose 'Tuxedo Junction'?" asks Powerhouse.

"You know whose."

"Nickelodeon, I request you please to play 'Empty Bed Blues' and let Bessie Smith sing."

Silence: they hold it like a measure.

"Bring me all those nickels on back here," says Powerhouse.

(164)

We may not think of Welty as an audiophile, but she was. She had more than a passing interest in the music of the 1930s and 1940s, and it shows. We have to learn more about this music, too, if we hope to follow this banter. Powerhouse asks whether the juke box has the original recording of "Tuxedo Junction," the one Ernest Hawkins and his Orchestra released in 1939. Before publishing the song, Hawkins used it in shows at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. Instead, to no one's surprise, the juke box has the Glenn Miller Orchestra's more popular (and more lucrative) cover, which came out a year later, in 1940. As one historian puts it, the Hawkins version "sold very well, but when the all-white Glenn Miller Orchestra recorded a version of the song, white audiences bought that instead" (Wanser).

Welty began sending out "Powerhouse" in July of 1940 (Polk 368). In other words, she has her finger on the pulse. Her Black bandleader has no interest in Miller's "Tuxedo Junction." Why help him profit off of Hawkins's creativity? Like his historical counterpart, Fats Waller, Powerhouse makes his living performing for White audiences. He knows how the business works, but that does not mean, of course, that he has to play along. When the juke box cannot serve up his next request—Bessie Smith's "Empty Bed Blues"—he calls for his nickels back. Even in Black establishments, the juke boxes play White music. Tellingly, Welty calls this spot, where Powerhouse and his crew enjoy their intermission beer, the World Cafe.

The critical discussion of "Powerhouse" contains many such glosses. To find them, one has to go into and out of a dozen different books. Pragmatically, this means having access to a research library or hunting down used copies on eBay or Amazon. Readers benefit from this work, of course, but there is also value in giving them an edition that contains what they need to understand the story. In this respect, the current print editions of "Powerhouse" do not offer much help. The best of these, the Library of America volumes edited by Richard Ford and Michael Kreyling, contain comparatively few notes and only one on "Powerhouse" (971). The editors gloss neither the posters nor the brief exchange about "Tuxedo Junction." Their edition lists none of the textual variants that Michael A. Benzel identified in the version of the story that appeared in the June, 1941 issue of The Atlantic Monthly or those in the 1980 volume of Welty's Collected Stories.

The editors have their reasons. The Library of America Welty was never intended to be a scholarly edition, in the sense defined by the MLA's "Guidelines for Editors of Scholarly Editions." In keeping with the Library of America's editorial policy, the editors have produced a reading edition of great exactitude. They present Welty's stories as they first appeared in her own collections (as opposed to periodicals or the 1980 Collected Stories) through a mis-en-page free of editorial distractions. Moreover, all annotations to one degree or another interpret the text. Many scholarly editors feel understandable concern about intervening between author and reader. A full textual apparatus also means more pages, driving up cost.³

This approach, though sensible, has tradeoffs. When Welty published "Powerhouse," Nelson Eddy was widely known. So was "Tuxedo Junction." She might have expected her readers to get even oblique references such as these. But time of course passes, and stars fade: how many under forty will know either one? Factual annotations help close the widening gap. An edition without such annotations risks its own editorial intervention. Parts of the story not intended to be opaque seem that way for lack of historical context. The case is even clearer when one thinks about all the music in "Powerhouse." "Tuxedo Junction" is only one of many songs Welty mentions by name. She knew what these songs sounded like, and she would have expected her readers to know as well. Without an effort to bring these songs to life, they live in the story like broken hyperlinks, markers emptied of meaning for everyone but students of early-twentieth-century music history.

Hence "Powerhouse" Annotated. Like the other projects in the Welty Lab, this site remains a work in progress and will evolve. We tried out several models for displaying the annotations before settling, for now, on sidenotes that float to the right of the main text block. We have made these notes static (they do not open and close), and we use a template modeled on Edward Tufte's style (see Figs. 2, 3, and 4).⁴ This model has the advantage of simplicity, both at the level of code and on the screen. In the notes themselves, we have aimed for restraint. We do not want to interpret for readers but rather to create the conditions for interpretation. We make it possible to hear the music while observing copyright by linking to videos already available on YouTube.⁵

Our edition also takes a first step toward a comprehensive scholarly commentary on the story. At completion, this commentary will include both a popular and a critical reception history of "Powerhouse."⁶ Readers might read Welty's story in a new light, for example, if they consider such distinct contexts as the "unsympathetic" response it received at Bread Loaf in 1940 or Welty's decision to read it in 1963 to an integrated audience at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi (Marrs, Eudora Welty 66; Marrs, One Writer's 173). Future readers may also want to trace the story's appearances in various collections and anthologies or look at the changes that Welty made to "Powerhouse" for the 1980 Collected Stories. Among other things, studying these versions can help us better understand the social and cultural contexts that Welty navigated in bringing "Powerhouse" into print as well as her own evolving understanding of the story.

________

In the 1940s, Welty looked to Mississippi history for inspiration. She wrote several stories collected in The Wide Net—as well as a novella, The Robber Bridegroom—that fictionalized people, places, and episodes from the history of her state. These texts range across different times, but most have the Natchez Trace in common. Tracing Welty uses Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technologies to map references to the Trace in Welty's fiction. Our models here include Digital Yoknapatawpha (DY). Developed by an international team of Faulkner scholars led by Stephen Railton, Professor Emeritus, University of Virginia, DY focuses on Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fictions. The scholars have correlated extensive metadata with digital representations of Faulkner's own maps of Yoknapatawpha. They refrain from interpretation, except in the sense that they have selected and organized the data (Burgers). But the maps and other visualizations they have constructed from this data enable users to see relationships between character, place, plot, and time that are difficult to comprehend without visual aids of these kinds.

By contrast, Tracing Welty is a startup operating in the distinct context of a small, private liberal arts college. We want to learn from DY even as we chart our own course. Our use of GIS remains rudimentary, but our surface scratchings have produced new insights. In the case of Welty's Natchez Trace fictions, at least two spatial relationships of note—doubtless more—exist. The first are relationships between locations in and among Welty's stories, and the second are relationships between Welty's mental map of the Natchez Trace, as reflected in her fictions, and other cartographic and historical representations of this historic route. Plotting these relationships on a map has the advantage of collecting visual and textual data into a single interface. Because the map presents data about the stories in an array, as opposed to a linear narrative, Tracing Welty can empower readers to discover their own connections between the stories and historical materials (see Fig. 5).⁷

Here, I want to focus on an example of the second kind of relationship—between Welty's references to episodes on the Trace and other historical

Fig. 5.

representations of those same episodes—in "A Still Moment." This oft-discussed story imagines a meeting between Lorenzo Dow, the controversial itinerant minister; John Murrell (whom Welty renames James), a notorious outlaw; and John James Audubon, the artist and ornithologist. Nineteenth-century documents place these men in proximity to each other on the Natchez Trace, sometimes mere years apart. Studying those materials, Welty decided to create a fictional encounter between them, though they never met. As the story opens, Dow, who evangelizes with a fury, speeds on horseback down the Trace toward his next speaking engagement. As he rides, he reflects on the providence that has enabled him to pass through dangerous lands unharmed. He recalls a tense situation:

Just then he rode into a thicket of Indians taking aim with their new guns. One stepped out and took the horse by the bridle, it stopped at the touch, and the rest made a closing circle. The guns pointed.

"Incline!" The inner voice spoke sternly and with its customary lightning-quickness.

Lorenzo inclined all the way forward and put his head to the horse's silky mane, his body to its body, until a bullet meant for him would endanger the horse and make his death of no value. Prone he rode out through the circle of Indians, his obedience to the voice leaving him almost fearless, almost careless with joy.

(229)

The real Lorenzo earned and seemed to relish the nickname "Crazy Dow" (Dow 48). He was known for homiletic antics. In one (possibly apocryphal) story, he planted a trumpet player behind the stage while he preached. When he called upon Gabriel's trumpet, it sounded, much to the crowd's amazement (Shellman 14). Whether or not any such thing happened, the story underscores Dow's flair for self-promotion. He writes about his "providential escape" from the Natchez in History of a Cosmopolite; or the Four Volumes of Lorenzo's Journal, Concentrated in One. Published in 1814, the book went through many editions.

Scholars have known for years that Welty used sources like History of a Cosmopolite and Audubon's journals in writing "A Still Moment." Albert Devlin, Suzanne Marrs, Pearl McHaney, Peggy Prenshaw, Victor Thompson, and others have elucidated these sources.⁸ To do this work, they had to locate print copies and travel to consult them. In 2022, anyone with an internet connection can find digitized versions of these historical documents online. Tracing Welty collects relevant passages from these documents into a single interface, opening a study of Welty's transformations. To accomplish this goal, we use a GIS technique called georeferencing. In layman's terms, we have correlated Samuel Augustus Mitchell's 1834 Reference and Distance Map of the United States with a contemporary digital street map of the U.S. Next, we plotted sample points on the map: blue for Dow, red for Audubon, and black for Murrell. Each point marks a place mentioned in nineteenth-century books by or about each man. Click on a point, and it opens a pop-up window with the corresponding source text (see Fig. 6).

As with "Powerhouse" Annotated, Tracing Welty intends to prompt new interpretations of well-known stories. Here, to continue with "A Still Moment," is how Dow himself describes the "providential escape":

I set off alone, and rode the best part of twenty miles, when I saw a party of Indians within about a hundred feet of me: I was in hopes they would pass me, but in vain, for the first Indian seized my horse by the bridle, and the others surrounded me. At first, I thought it was a gone case with me, then I concluded to get off my horse and give up all, in order to save my life; but it turned in my mind, that if I do, I must return to the settlements, in order to get equipped for another start, and then it will be too late for my appointments. Again it turned in my mind, how when I was in Ireland, somebody would frequently be robbed or murdered one day, and I would travel the same way the day before or the day after, and yet was preserved and brought back in peace; and the same God is as able to preserve me here and deliver me now as then--immediately I felt the power of faith to put my confidence in God; at the same time I observed the Indians had ramrods in the muzzles of their guns as well as in their stock, so it would take some time to pull out the ramrods, and get the gun cocked and prepared up to their faces, ready to shoot; at this moment, my horse started and jumped sideways, which would have laid the Indian to the ground, who held the bridle, had it not slipped out of his hands; at the same time, the Indian on the other side, jumped seemingly like a streak to keep from under the horse's feet, so that there was a vacancy in the circle; at the same time, I gave my horse the switch, and leaned down in the saddle, so that if they shot I would give them as narrow a chance as I could to hit me, as I supposed they would wish to spare and get my horse. I did not look back until I had gone out of sight and hearing of the Indians.

(Dow 177–178)

Fig. 6.

In his own account, Dow does speak of faith, but he also thinks about logistics. He could offer up his horse and hope his assailants spare his life, but then he would have to "get equipped" all over again. The whole thing would throw his schedule off. When he considers this unimaginable outcome, belief intervenes. But even as he recalls earlier moments when, as he supposes, God has kept him safe, Dow also depends upon observation: the ramrods are still in the guns, which buys him time. There is, moreover, the fortuitous accident of his horse "jumping sideways," which gives him an opening to escape.

To be sure, Dow would attribute his deliverance to his "confidence in God." But he does not invoke the "inner voice" that Welty gives to her character. In "A Still Moment," she condenses and dramatizes this close encounter. She uses figurative language, like "the guns pointed," to build tension, and she adds stylizing details. She gives the horse, which in Dow's text is just a horse, a "silky mane." Above all, she diminishes the minister's agency. His "fearless, almost careless . . . joy" follows from blind obedience. Chance ramrods do not factor in Welty's telling, which in effect turns history into myth ("A Still Moment" 229).

Tracing Welty, as of this writing, is still nascent. Digital Yoknapatawpha points the way forward. We are not (yet) experimenting with computational narrative analysis and visualization, but we see how much DY has to teach us. A digital project takes, as the saying goes, a village. Astoundingly, the international team behind DY has encoded "five thousand character records, over two thousand locations, and more than eight thousand events, each with their own individual attributes. Aggregated," Johannes Burgers writes, "these data tables represent around a quarter million data points across several dozen different fields." Aspiring to a similar scope, we envision Tracing Welty as a site that, for example, places Audubon's journals alongside nineteenth-century accounts of the Burr conspiracy ("First Love"); early depictions of Rodney, Mississippi ("At the Landing") and the Windsor Ruins ("Asphodel") alongside materials attesting to Chautauquas like the one that so excites Josie in "The Winds." Among other things, such a site would help students and experts alike better understand Welty's transformation of historical materials as well as place her fictions within a nexus of historical representations of the Natchez Trace.

________

The Digital Welty Lab began as and remains an incubator of undergraduate scholarship on Welty. The Millsaps students who work in the Lab learn the procedures of academic research as well as the fundamentals of digital humanities. They pose interpretations both critical and creative in nature through electronic media. Free to experiment with the form those interpretations take, they produce sites like Camp Moon Lake: a digital companion to Welty's story, "Moon Lake" (see Fig. 7).

A story about a girls' summer camp experience that takes a wild turn, "Moon Lake" explores tensions and connections between small-town tweens from Morgana, Mississippi, and campers of about the same age from a local orphanage. Rae Switzer, Millsaps class of 2021, created Camp Moon Lake as a faux website for an imaginary organization that runs the camp. Visitors to the site can meet counselors and returning campers, browse a list of events and activities, and keep up with news from the current camp session. Under the guise of this marketing effort, Switzer has in fact created a digital companion to Welty's story.

Camp Moon Lake addresses contingent difficulties like the ones I discussed in "Powerhouse." For example, Welty has Easter, "dominant among the orphans" (417), teach some of the Morgana girls a game that, in lives more sheltered than daring, they have never played.

"All right, what do you want to play?"

"All right, I'll play you mumblety-peg."

"I don't know how you play that!" cried Nina.

"Who would ever want to know?" asked Jinny Love, closing the circle.

Easter flipped out a jack-knife and with her sawed fingernail shot out three blades.

"Do you carry that in the orphan asylum?" Jinny Love asked with some respect.

Easter dropped to her scarred and coral-colored knees. They saw the dirt [ring on the back of her neck]. "Get down if you want to play me mumblety-peg," was all she said, "and watch out for your hands and faces."

(418)

Mumblety-peg exists in several variants, most of which involve tossing a knife and hoping it lands where you want it to. It is not the kind of game the good citizens of Morgana want their girls to play at summer camp. When Jinny Love rats Easter out, the staff takes away her knife.

Most students these days (most of my students, anyway), have never heard of mumblety-peg. Switzer found a clever way to clue readers in about the game, while keeping up appearances. Officially, Camp Moon Lake bans mumblety-peg in two places, on the Events & Activities page and in the News section. The camp administration wants to make sure

Fig. 7.

no one gets any ideas. But they have also invited featured campers to share their own social media feeds during their time at camp, presumably so that prospective campers and their families can see how much good clean fun one can have at Camp Moon Lake. Alas, they have neglected to monitor those accounts.

On Tumblr, Switzer's Nina shares an excited post about mumblety-peg (see Fig. 8). In a departure from "Moon Lake" that marks Switzer's creative intervention, Nina also posts a link to a video of the game that she has found in one of the old movies that Mrs. Gruenwald shows, ostensibly to keep the campers entertained. For her part, Easter takes to Instagram to flaunt the spoils of victory, but also, in other posts, to express the loneliness she feels at camp as well as her outrage at (what she does not name as) Mr. Nesbitt's sexual harassment (418). Elsewhere, Switzer recreates—in a twenty-first century idiom—the scene in which Nina puzzles over and tries to correct Easter's spelling of her own name, while Jinny Love looks on and sneers (430). One can imagine a camper-to-be—savvier about social media, let us suppose, than her parents—finding these accounts and getting the scoop on life at this camp.

"Moon Lake," as so many critics over the years have observed, stages a dynamic of transgression and containment. Easter does not conform to the social codes that the Morgana girls have internalized. Her independence piques Nina's curiosity. By contrast, Jinny Love reacts with scorn, in what amounts to an effort to contain Easter's transgressiveness by appealing to the authority of class. We see this dynamic in the exchange about Easter's name, which Jinny Love calls "tacky." Her own name, by contrast, carries a patina. It derives from her "maternal grandmother" and "couldn't be anything else. Or anything better" (430). Here, Jinny Love aims to wound. She invokes a maternal inheritance that Easter does not have and must, Jinny Love seems to presume, desperately want. But Jinny Love is also signaling that her identity is anchored in class and social tradition. It has come down to her as a family inheritance. Easter, who has named herself, to some extent floats free of that anchor. This is of course a source of her appeal to Nina: Easter does not follow the rules, and she does not seem overly concerned about family names. Jinny Love's jab does not land, and she knows it. Easter doesn't care what she thinks. A loner, she risks adventures. As other stories in The Golden Apples suggest, Jinny Love will stay close to the harbor of class all her life. If "The Wanderers" is any indication, Nina, who might have gone on adventures of her own, will moor there with her.

Fig. 8.

Camp Moon Lake echoes and extends the dialogic richness of Welty's story. Pitting the social media accounts against the main site, Switzer transposes the dynamic of containment and transgression into the clash of representations about what goes on at camp. "Moon Lake" builds toward the catastrophe of Easter's near drowning. Visitors to Camp Moon Lake will discover that the camp administration has already attempted to get ahead of this PR nightmare. The indomitable Mrs. Gruenwald minimizes the emergency and offers the expected reassurances (see Fig. 9). Throughout, the main site reflects the cheerful, corporate messaging one expects to see. What has really happened and how it impacts the campers, however, slips out through the social media accounts. They do not play along with the official narrative. On Tumblr, Switzer's Nina expresses shock, sadness, and more than a little disillusionment at the way everyone seems to move on so quickly after Easter's close call, "like she deserved it, almost." Jinny Love humble-brags on Instagram about her role in Easter's rescue, eliciting a sarcastic retort (sans punctuation, as some kids these days write) from Loch.

Because users can themselves respond to the social media accounts, Camp Moon Lake could also spur a multiplayer interpretive exchange focused on Welty's story. In such a game, readers could leave reactions or pose questions on Instagram, for example, for Easter, Nina, or Jinny Love. Working from their own interpretations of the characters, Switzer or other authorized users of these accounts could come up with and post responses to the questions. One could take the game a step farther and have the readers

Fig. 9.

themselves adopt personae, historical or imaginary. Using "masks and roles to constrain the players' interpretive engagements," as Jerome McGann puts it, might prompt them to have different responses and ask different questions about the story than they would in their own person ("Literary Scholarship in the Digital Future").⁹ The back and forth would be mutually illumining to all involved and would, in a sense, constitute a collaborative reading of Welty's story.

To be clear, Camp Moon Lake does not try to replace or even adapt "Moon Lake." It never could, not least because the story remains in copyright. Switzer's site makes little sense unless one has read Welty first. It presents a 4,000-word essay on the critical reception of "Moon Lake," but it is not, of course, a peer-reviewed publication. The site began as an experiment in transmedia storytelling. Henry Jenkins theorizes this approach in his 2006 book Convergence Culture. "A transmedia story," he writes, "unfolds across multiple media platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole" (95–96). Jenkins is chiefly interested in how this idea plays out at scale, in media franchises like The Matrix. In the "ideal" case, "a story might be introduced in a film, expanded through television, novels, and comics; its world might be explored through game play or experienced as an amusement park attraction" (96). Camp Moon Lake does not aim to realize Jenkins's ideal case. It regrettably includes no plans for sitcoms or roller coasters. Lacking a Hollywood budget and her own production team, Switzer has scaled back her implementation of transmedia storytelling. Still, her site creates new opportunities for users, perhaps especially users of the born-digital generation, to learn about and engage "Moon Lake."

One can imagine even larger applications for this work. Jenkins sees affinities with earlier, literary experiments in world building, such as Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fictions. "Most often," he observes, "transmedia stories are based not on individual characters or specific plots but rather complex fictional worlds which can sustain multiple interrelated characters and their stories." In consequence, "There is no one single source or ur-text where one can turn to gain all of the information needed to comprehend" transmedia stories ("Transmedia Storytelling 101"). Each text stands on its own but also brings a part of this universe into focus. The Matrix is Jenkins's exemplar, but he could as easily be describing The Golden Apples, which Welty set around the fictional town of Morgana.

Because of these structural similarities, Morgana seems ripe for digital expansion using a model adapted from transmedia storytelling. The goal would not be to develop The Golden Apples into a property for the entertainment industry, of course. (Copyright would in any case prevent any such use.) Rather, it would be to put print and digital media in conversation for the purposes of creating new scholarship on Welty's collection, much as Switzer has done with "Moon Lake." Just as each of Welty's stories presents a portion of Morgana, so Camp Moon Lake could serve as one facet of an open-ended, evolving digital interpretation, co-created by readers. Such a digital archive might collect (only with permission, of course) extant resources such as J. Matthew Huculak's "Map of Eugene MacLean's San Francisco," as well as artifacts that testify to the cultural afterlives of The Golden Apples: for example, Sam Jones's "The Trumpet of the Swan"—an "extended fantasia for chorus and orchestra . . . based on excerpts from . . . 'The Wanderers' " (Jones). It would also present new ones: timelines, concordances, guides to music, other responses still to be dreamed. Over time, with buy-in from the community of Welty scholars, the archive might bring all the opposites of Morgana close together: its recitals and trespasses, gossip and epiphanies, wanderers and homebodies. In this way, we might understand better a place Welty imagined and loved.

In The Writing Life, Annie Dillard reminds us that the great artists of the past—her examples are "Rembrandt and Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Gauguin"—"learned their fields and then loved them. They worked, respectfully, out of their love and knowledge, and they produced complex bodies of work that endure" (70–71). Welty, we know, also learned and loved her field: the fiction of Chekhov, Woolf, Austen, Forster, and so many others. She produced complex bodies of work out of that love. What of our suppositional twenty-first-century writer, maven of screens and wizard of composing gadgets? Will Welty have a place in her field?

One might draw a cautionary tale from Sherwood Bonner, a Mississippi writer who died too young of cancer in 1883. During her thirty-four years, she wrote stories, novels, and essays that earned her a national reputation. Had she lived longer, Harper's Weekly proclaimed, she would have earned "a fixed and distinguished place in the hierarchy of American letters" (503). In 2022, only a handful of specialists read Bonner. Three years ago, Kathryn McKee, a professor at the University of Mississippi, published a study of Bonner and the literature of the Reconstruction. A biography is said to be in the offing. How many new readers will these books inspire to hunt out a copy of Dialect Tales (1883) on Google Books or the Internet Archive?

Welty is a different case. She lived a long and productive life, writing books of the highest distinction and earning the "fixed and distinguished place in . . . American letters" that Bonner did not have a chance to claim. Moreover, she has able champions in the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, the Eudora Welty Foundation, the Eudora Welty Review, and the Eudora Welty Society, among other organizations. Secure as she now seems, however, those of us who care about the survival of her work err if we take that survival for granted. Literary history demonstrates time and again that an author's endurance depends on those readers who take care of the field, both the scholars who transmit her writings from generation to generation as well as interpret it anew for their own time, and the writers who learn, love, and build on the complexities of her work.

The Digital Welty Lab began as a way to invite readers of the next generation to invest in Welty's future, so that, in a sense, it becomes theirs to share with her. To grow beyond this initial remit, we need to enlist other scholars, both to develop existing projects and start new ones. With this end in mind, I would like to see and would help organize an international conference on electronically informed approaches to Welty. In my view, such a conference should not only include scholars working on Welty or even on American literature. Instead, to the extent possible, the organizers should solicit participation by digital humanists from diverse parts of the literary field and with distinct interests (data visualization, text mining, digital editing, etc.); experts in digital curation, storage, and preservation, as well as in academic publishing; and specialists at the cutting edge of digital aesthetics and web design in the context of scholarly archives. Convening such a group would help us bring Welty into digital circulation in a way that learns from and innovates on existing approaches. From these conversations, moreover, we could identify the steps that we need to take if we want to create a sustainable digital infrastructure that works alongside of, and not against, the continuing stewardship of Welty's books and other materials in her paper archive. That we must take these steps if we want to ensure that the fire of her imagination, to borrow her metaphor, "never goes out," seems clearer now than it did before the Covid-19 pandemic ("Some Notes" 760). My students and I look forward to working on Welty's digital future together.