Illegible texts can be found in archives as well as in everyday life: from scribbles on a notepad to the jumbled data of an outdated text file, from encrypted texts to fantasy scripts and calligraphy. The 55th issue of the Swiss Literary Archives' magazine Quarto presents such borderline cases of legibility from the archives' holdings and explains the contexts and circumstances in which even the illegible can gain significance.
The latest issue of Quarto presents a topic that is unusual for a literary magazine: illegibility. Texts and documents from the Swiss Literary Archives are presented that, due to their nature, are difficult to read, can hardly be deciphered or are difficult to decipher, but precisely because of this, they are also fascinating and inspire deciphering and contextualisation processes that give them their own meaning, as the articles collected in the magazine show.
The phenomenon is more complex and widespread than one might think at first glance, as a glance at the contents of the issue reveals:
- In her overview article, Andrea Polaschegg outlines a cultural history of the unreadable, which is always linked to the cryptic and enigmatic.
- Fabien Dubosson examines a fantasy text by the author Jean-Marc Lovay as an example.
- Christian Driesen delves into the thicket of doodles and explains how pure graphology without meaning can be interpreted, if not read.
- Irmgard M. Wirtz presents Erica Pedretti's palimpsest-like collage texts as an aesthetic play with the legible and the illegible. Magnus Wieland shows how the technique of overtyping on a typewriter produces illegibility but also opens up new poetic possibilities.
- Reto Sorg situates Robert Walser's famous micrograms in the cultural history of small writing and shows that they are by no means an isolated phenomenon.
- Philipp Hegel provides a historical and methodological insight into shorthand, which is hardly legible today.
- Anna Stüssi examines how Ludwig Hohl often plays with ways of writing that conceal, puzzle and leave things unsaid.
- Denis Bussard and Fabien Dubosson explain the use of a cryptic secret code in William Ritter's Journaux intimes.
- Stefan Zweifel reveals the hidden Sadean subtext in works of Swiss literature, thereby making it legible.
- Lucas Marco Gisi discusses the connection between illegible and infinite texts using Franz Dodel's endless poem as an example.
- Daniela Kohler analyses linguistic magic and cryptological references in Otto Nebel's runic poetry.
- Finally, Annette Gilbert discusses artistic methods of steganography in the age of machine readability.
Three literary contributions complement the issue: in her evocative opening essay, Birgit Kempker explores the question: ‘But what does legible mean?’ Rudolf Bussmann presents his paper chaos and explains why he tends towards small print that is sometimes barely legible; and Franz Dodel gives a sample from his potentially illegible, because endless, haiku poem Nicht bei Trost (Not in Good Spirits).
