When I was a kid, I read the dictionary.
I had one of those “weird” childhoods without a television. Or computer, or video games, or really anything that embraced either technology or that there were kids in the house. But we did have a 1968 collection of World Book Encyclopedias, with their ponderous matching dictionaries: two tomes, gray-and-green covers gilded in gold with little crescents carved into the pages to demarcate each letter of the alphabet (Volume I- A through K- had a broken spine). I remember gingerly turning each tissue thin page, three columns per page, with tiny, tiny print.
But this dictionary was fun: you could find silly words that were already out of use in 1968 and whose definitions were preceded by the note archaic. Or entries of unique biblical characters or Greek gods or goddesses. Sometimes there was even a tiny black-and-white picture! Too cool! (You can weep for me now.)
Okay, so it probably wasn’t fun. But there was something that made me so assiduous about it, and I think now perhaps it may have been the excitement that comes from ingesting a comprehensive, all-inclusive archive, and connecting all the dots to some bigger, more immersive picture.
The Bedford also fulfills this need by how much it interacts with everything else around it. Everything in The Bedford is listed alphabetically, but no definition goes without the use of other words defined throughout the book. All literary tools, genres and methods build off and interact with each other. They are responses to what has already been written- “hey, I like what that guy’s doing! Let me try that!” or “God, this is rubbish. This is what real literature should be like!” (or, of course, somewhere in between). The fact that we have all these techniques and styles can sometimes be overwhelming, but in fact their very existence is proof of the importance of intertextuality and “conversations” between texts. It is like Derrida believed according to Moran’s Interdisciplinarity: “writing will always generate more writing” (Moran 80) because all works are in a way critiques of other, trying to get it right.
The Bedford also goes to lengths connecting to other disciplines. Entries don’t just define words, but they also tell the history of the word and how its usages and associations have changed over time. They discuss how the outside time period may have influenced certain styles and themes in writing. Examples are not just literary, but also refer to movies, music, and art to enhance understanding. It talks about William Shakespeare but also Immanuel Kant, Salvador Dali and Marilyn Manson.
The Bedford is an archive that implements multiple disciplines in order to more fully understand its own. It’s funny because at first glance it would appear to be a tool of New Formal Criticism (I mean, it’s a glossary of literary terms) it actually is quite the opposite. It aims to help the reader better understand literature, but also can help them gain further connections outside the discipline. The most complete definition of a concept must pull from all sources to give the fullest, more accurate picture possible.