Steinmann: on "Authority and Authenticity: Scribbling Autors and the genius of print in Eighteenth-Century England"

Marlin B. Ross presents an interesting case of liminality: the space between scribbling and author in several cases. Interestingly, his history starts with handwriting, and his claim that “handwriting is a technology invented to stabilize meaning” (232). Those who knew how to write, then, were captors of their moment. By the end of the essay, this changes: those who “scribble” are not capturing the moment, but living in a liminal space, as defined by Pope, et al. The corruption of the manuscript and the distancing by the printing press and the sanctioned authorities made those who just wrote for themselves fall to the ranks of “temporary madness…[scribbling] represents yielding to the temptation of individual whims at the expense of commonplace understanding” (237). Good poets (published poets) must battle the “phantoms” (244) of the scribblers who would take away their authority, those that “occupy a taboo-laden space between the topographical boundaries which mark off the discrete sites of high and low culture” (ibid, emphasis in original).

Though this essay is located in a fixed position in time, it brings to mind those who self-publish today. Academia, and in general, the public, do not see these publications as valid or as validating. Thus Ross’s claim that “when print becomes the case of authority rather than merely its effect, what results is the compulsiveness of print” still stands; despite or perhaps because of technology, scribblers continue to exist in a liminal space.