ENGL 4310

What happens when a chapter, page, paragraph or even an entire story get lost in the ether? In her letter to James F. Powers on pages 572-573, Katherine Anne Porter addresses this issue. She writes, “It is terrible to think of your losing tow chapters of the novel, there is a loss just next to death itself.” What a poignant and yet very profound way of looking at the situation. If an author loses her work and is forced to begin again there are two out comes. The first is that that the story is never finished. Porter writes, “I wrote the first two pages of a story once, and lost or misplaced them; after outrageous search and despair, I tried to remember them and write them again, but I could never finish the story, have not to this day.” The other potential outcome is that the story can be salvaged from the inner recesses of the author’s brain and be rewritten. Porter acknowledges that “it is the same story, but told quite a different tone from the first.”
This brings up an interesting thing to consider: how many of our great literary works ended up being vastly different than how they were originally envisioned simply because some pages were lost? Certainly many scholars still argue today if crucial elements of Shakespeare’s work went by the by. For example, how would The Taming of the Shrew be altered if the Christopher Sly induction was actually completed? Still perhaps more disturbing to contemplate is how many short stories that would’ve changed our literary landscape never came to be because they were lost and their authors never managed to rewrite them. Think of how many emails have been lost in Webland, how many reports have been eaten by the Windows Blue Screen of Death, and that is only within the last 15 or 20 years. When you really think about it, it is mind-blowing.