Cannot Be Digitized #3: G for Graffiti

In one of the more compelling scenes of Alan Moore and David Lloyd's V for Vendetta, Evey Hammond has been captured by security forces (who turn out to be V himself) and is tortured all in the name of her confessing her "coercion" at the hands of, as they say, the terrorist "Codename V."  Of course, V is the one responsible for her torture, and he does so in an attempt to "set her free" from what he sees as the prison of her daily life.  In her cell, Evey discovers the brief account of a woman named Valerie scrawled in pencil on a piece of rolled up toilet paper.  Valerie's story is just like so many other stories of victims in the comic: she is arbitrarily incarcerated for being homosexual and is executed because she refuses to admit that there is anything wrong with her psychologically.  The authenticity of the text is dubious; the only other text to play a prominent role in the narrative, the diary of Delia Surridge in which V's "history" is recounted, is called out by Detective Finch as a possible forgery on the part of V to disguise his true motives.  Of course, its authenticity does not matter.  What does matter is where Evey finds it and how: in her cell as she undergoes the very same torture and deprivation Valerie did.

Many years ago, when I was but a fresh, [not-so-]young graduate student, I tried to make the argument that there is something fundamentally unique about bathroom graffiti as a text in process, in constant process of production as well as erasure.  Suffice it to say, my argument, whatever its relative faults or merits may have been, did not impress a certain professor of media studies at our fine university, for which I received a rather disappointing B+ (which is Graduate-School-Grade for "what is this charlatan even doing here?").  She and I did not see eye to eye.

In that paper, I was trying to make a point about context, both about the context of the recent Supreme Court decision that had invalidated the university's admittance procedures and about the physical context of the bathroom stall in which the "texts" under analysis were found.  At the time I set up a (in hindsight) rather problematic dichotomy between public and private texts, the irony being that private texts were the print (and not quite print) materials you carry about and consume largely on your own and that public texts were something read while, ahem, in the privy.  I had wanted to argue that public texts transgress accepted norms of textuality by both inviting participation in the creation of said text--bathroom graffiti shows clear signs of having been written by numerous, distinct hands--and by locating this text in a peculiar space that is at once public (i.e. ideally accessible to all) and private (it segregates men from women, the defecating from the not, etc.).  But there was something missing in this argument that I would take myself to task for now and perhaps should have been by the aforementioned professor of media studies but was not.

I focused too much on that specific place, the ground floor men's bathroom in Mason Hall at the University of Michigan, and not enough on the larger problem of the unportability of a text.  What does it mean to "have to have been there" when it comes to reading?  Two years ago, I found the following quatrain written in a single long line along the far wall of the third stall on the left of the very same men's bathroom.

Je suis belle, ô mortels! comme un rêve de pierre,
Et mon sein, où chacun s'est meurtri tour à tour,
Est fait pour inspirer au poète un amour
Eternel et muet ainsi que la matière.

I am fair, O mortals! like a dream carved in stone,
And my breast where each one in turn has bruised himself
Is made to inspire in the poet a love
As eternal and silent as matter.

[Charles Baudelaire, "La Beauté," Les Fleurs du Mal, trans. William Aggeler]

I made a futile attempt to digitize this text for myself with the small digital camera I had with me in my bag when I was doing my, ahem, business.  I say futile, because given how the quatrain was written in a single line spanning the breadth of the wall, it was impossible to get far enough back within the stall to allow for sufficient focal distance as to capture the text in toto in one go.  In the end, I broke the text up into several images, which, ironically, do not survive outside my memory of them.  You could go there now, but some other text has taken its place, because the powers that be attempt regularly to cleanse bathrooms of any undesirable notions.  What I realize now is that there is a flip side to the rhetoric of digitization as preservation.  The extreme portability of digital documents (and likewise of their physical precursors) is precisely what makes them less subject to the caprices of environment.  This is likely obvious (and suspect) to anyone with half a brain.  However, what is less obvious is how this reflects on texts tied inextricably to a single place: while they may be subject to the whims of administrators and custodial staff who regularly efface them, even the most rehashed story, like "Valerie's" above, or poem can acquire what is meaningful about a particular place simply by being attached to it.  Then, even if it is erased (and it will be), our memories do something for it, to preserve it, just like Evey's above and mine below.