Graphograph

chronograph
phonograph
photograph
chirograph

A list of words, all containing the suffix -graph, to set in relation to this from Shirley Neuman in Gertrude Stein: Autobiography and the Problem of Narration.

What interested Stein [...] was [the] potential for replacing the linearity of the graph in autobiography (with its implications of cause and effect) by a multi-dimensional spatial configuration. [...] In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, the "space of time" which replaces chronological progression in narrative provides a multiplicity of vantage points from which to perceive the persons and events of a given moment of narrative.

Neuman begins her study with Stein's experiments with the relation between the time being written and the time of writing. As she moves to the later works such as Paris, France and Wars I Have Seen she factors into account the time of readings. She concludes her book thus:

She transforms the genre into a profoundly impersonal one, a manifestation of the process of writing rather than an artifact of life. Her audience can no longer read as though it were standing invisibly "behind the scenes," part "objective" observer with his "delicate shade of superiority," part voyeur, part vicarious participant. Her readers must be her equals; their glimpses into the autobiography cannot be privileged but must be earned by the creative effort of their own minds recreating the process of Writing as they read.

This reminds one of Kaja Silverman's exposition of the three subjectivies (the speaking subject, the subject of speech, the spoken subject). See Trapdoor.

chirograph
photograph
phonograph
chronograph

And so for day 923
23.06.2009