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At Harvard’s Houghton Library, you can examine a telegraph Marcel Proust sent to one of his friends during the Dreyfus Affair. Dozens of words, several lines, all of it one convoluted sentence forced to a halt at the bottom right margin of the blue form. All capitals, the lines typed up crookedly, it seems to shout at you with clumsy, irate long-windedness: the perfect parody and the perfect antithesis of Proust’s easily ignited, well-worded sensitivity. A draft of Thomas Hardy’s Two on a Tower scribbled in a rapid, nervous hand, then overwritten with corrections. On one of the first pages, Hardy describes the novel’s eponymous tower. In the initial draft, the tower affords the protagonist a glorious view of five neighboring counties. Looking closer, we note that the first half-line has been crossed out in reconsideration—the number five replaced by a more modest three. In another one of Houghton’s indigo carrier boxes are several notebooks of drafts and sketches by E. E. Cummings, replete with joyous doodles and happy faces.

Textual artifacts writers leave behind can all too easily become unconscious parodies of the very qualities whose more controlled, artistic form we have come to admire. Proust’s unforgivingly complex syntax, Hardy’s sensory enthusiasm, Cummings’ delighted pantheism, assume a comic quality as soon as we start treating their quotidian expressions with the interpretive sincerity and high standards with which we approach their masterworks.

Though it affords some guilty pleasure, there is something wrongheaded in this deadpan parodic approach towards archival materials; not simply because it is mean to authors we want to love, but because it misrepresents the aesthetic qualities which draw us towards such drafts or sketches in the first place, the kind of artistic object they constitute. That the difference between a manuscript and a published work might be one of aesthetic category, rather than degree of perfection, was signaled in recent debates around the publication of Elizabeth Bishop’s drafts. When they were posthumously anthologized a few years ago (as Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke-Box), many of her critics and friends protested.  They were not appalled by the fact that the drafts were being made available to the public: many of them had already found their way into scholarly articles. It does not take away from Bishop’s talent that she wrote poems arguably inferior to the ones she published, or that her first stab at “One Art” bears little resemblance to the polished version achieved after a painstaking series of rewrites. The publication of her drafts was most shocking as a violation of the limit the poet had set between her personal space and her public image, the things that surrounded her and the voices she heralded her audience with. What the poet intended to remain a crossed-out, half-intelligible scribble on a crumpled piece of paper should not be given the communicative transparency of a clearly typeset composition. An object should not be made into a text.

Walter Benjamin has long alerted us to the difference in the way we respond to a reproducible and a non-reproducible work of art. We admire in a work of art which cannot be reproduced its aura of uniqueness, the fact that its beauty can only be accessed in one physical location. Disseminated widely, a work loses this aura and begins to draw its power from other sources. Transient and less intimidating in each of its many manifestations, it gains in status through the persistency with which its copies keep being spread, the rapidity with which its many versions infect the minds of societies.

Conventionally, we treat masterpieces of writing as belonging to the latter category. A writer’s canonical work is not the collection of the pieces of paper whose content she personally penned or dictated, but the nebula of multiply copied texts which she decided to release into the cycle of printing and reprinting. The effect of their works does not depend on any single, however authentically manuscripted copy.