Posthumography: The Boundaries of Literature and the Digital Trace

Abstract

Posthumous publication, with the editor inevitably performing the dead person's imagined identity and wishes, delicately balances between invention or hoax and channeling of the departed's spirit. Once we recognize these issues, those types of publication open on to an entire field of study. The neologism in the title of this essay, and of the planned issue of Rhizomes that never came to pass, names the neglected genre of posthumously published texts (i.e., papers, letters, incomplete monographs, etc.). The announcement of this genre arrives in an era when scholars, archives, libraries, and even fans posthumously publish papers, documents, ephemera, letters, and confessions online and in other digital forms. In fact, much of the focus in the emerging area of digital humanities concerns editorial practices and theories to make these, otherwise inaccessible, posthumous texts widely available. The first two epigraphs suggest a rather mundane situation where future performers or editors will reproduce the artist's work. The third hints at a more nefarious affair. Derbyshire waited until Gardner had died to publish the private correspondence, and, in a twist, he confesses that the work attributed to Gardner was actually written by Derbyshire. Gardner cannot object to this scenario from the grave. Gardner's identity was always already actually Derbyshire, and that extreme case hints that the posthumously published text has more than a little of the editor's identity.