University of Virginia Library

V

In a field where there is so much turgid writing that mindlessly repeats
fashionable views, one gratefully turns to Peter L. Shillingsburg's
Resisting Texts: Authorship and Submission in Constructions of Meaning
(1997), a book of subtlety, insight, and balance, written in lucid,
jargon-free, and often forceful prose. No one who knows his earlier writings
will be surprised by the quality of this book, for with Scholarly
Editing in the Computer Age and numerous essays he has established
himself as a force for coherence and good sense in the discordant world
of textual criticism. Indeed, some of those earlier essays—including one
of the best known, "Text as Matter, Concept, and Action"—are reused,
in revised form, in the book. Out of nine chapters, six had previously
appeared, between 1989 and 1996, and their collection here is welcome,
not only because they deserve to be available in this convenient form
but also because they contribute effectively to the point of view that the
book as a whole maintains.[93]

That position is made clear in the (previously unpublished) introduction,
indicatively entitled "Is There Anything to `Get Straight'?" He
begins with an exemplary discussion of the role of history in literary
criticism, of the reasons for being interested in both "historically intended
meanings and present operative meanings" (p. 8), keeping in
mind the impossibility of certitude in recovering the past. Then he
turns to the real underpinning of the book, reflected in his statement,
"Frankly, I do not hold that there is a superior view of textuality"
(p. 10). Unlike so many writers in the field, he is not a partisan of one
theory, hoping to discredit other approaches. Rather, he wishes "to
understand and describe the principles governing the workings of a
range of textual engagements" (p. 9). The word "understand" occurs
several times in his declarations of the goal of the book: he is open to all
our dealings with texts ("why and how we resist texts and why and how
they resist us" [p. 10]) and simply wants to understand all "textual engagements."
Only one theory ultimately matters to him—a theory that
encompasses all our interactions with written (that is, material) texts.
What he sets out to construct is a "theory of script acts," a term he coins
for its parallelism with "speech-act theory." It may not be the best term
for his purpose, however, because "script act" suggests an exclusive concern
with production (by author, publisher, and so on)—or, if readers'
responses are included, the implication would seem to be that readers
are concerned only as parties to a communicative transaction. Shillingsburg
acknowledges that most of his book relates to "communicative acts,"
but he adds that "readers might with perfect right refuse to care what
communicative intention an author might have actually had or professed
to have had" (p. 12). Since it was "a desire to understand how these reactions
[the one just mentioned among others] come about that impelled
this work," an emphasis on communication may not form a sufficiently
broad base for what Shillingsburg has in mind.[94] That this question
arises is a slight defect in the introduction, but it is overshadowed by the
laudable general attitude set forth toward textual study.

The first chapter, one of the three previously unpublished ones, deals

(as its title, "The Hand from the Grave," suggests) with authorial intention,
especially the editorial problem of reporting multiple or successive
intentions. The opening and closing of the chapter provide worthwhile
reading on this vexed subject, but the middle part is less satisfactory.
After proclaiming it "a condition of the print medium that one text be
in the foreground and alternatives be in some permanently subordinate
position," he declares, "If no one has already announced the death of
the editor as the conceptual authority over what the text says, I announce
it here" (p. 18). The half-page that separates these two statements
does not explain how one moves from the first (which places the
blame on "the print medium") to the second (where the editor is responsible:
Shillingsburg even adds, "The fact the print medium gives us no
choice but to act as we do is no excuse"). One might conceivably say that
the limitations of the codex form have given the editor a de facto authority
(though even this is too strong, as we shall see in a moment),
but certainly not "conceptual authority."[95] There is of course nothing
wrong with an editor's carrying some authority, by virtue of being an
expert on the author's writing habits and style and on the textual history
of the work. But such experts do not usually believe that they have "conceptual
authority over what the text says": it is hard to imagine an editor
of a codex edition with apparatus who does not hope that readers will
examine the variants and evaluate the readings present in the main text.
That few readers will actually do so is hardly the editor's fault—a point
that Shillingsburg (rather confusingly in the context) seems to agree
with, for he proceeds to say, "As a matter of fact, however, my quarrel
is not with editors but with users of scholarly editions" (p. 19). He speaks
of their "naive reliance on editors," their "blind faith": thus perhaps
editors have had their authority thrust upon them. One must infer, if
readers can be considered remiss in their use of codex editions, that such
editions are usable—that it is possible for readers not to be so awed by the
full presentation of one text that they fail to consider the readings from
other texts recorded in the apparatus. What, then, is Shillingsburg finally
saying?[96]

In Chapter 4 ("Texts, Cultures, Mediums, and Performances: The
French Lieutenant's Woman," pp. 105-119), the next of the new chapters,

there is no doubt about what he is saying. He uses the Fowles novel
to illustrate the complexity of the act of communication set in motion
by a literary work, focusing on "the temporal, history-bound `eventness'
of text production and text reception as communicative acts" (p. 112);
and he concludes (in the final sentence) that "having off the past as irrelevant
or unnecessary because it is inaccessible represents a radical `presentism,'
which is reductive and intellectually impoverishing." The
main point here is unambiguous and important—so important as to
deserve a better expression, not encumbered with an illogical summary
of the opposing position. Some people do indeed feel that the past is
irrelevant or unnecessary, but that feeling is independent of whether or
not the past is inaccessible; others believe that the inaccessibility of the
past is reason enough not to bother with it. But its inaccessibility cannot
logically cause one to find it irrelevant or unnecessary. And of course
there is an element of circularity in the conclusion, since one could say
that a neglect of the past is impoverishing to those who find a knowledge
of the past enriching in the first place. My own way of paraphrasing what
I take to be his point would be as follows: if we assume as axiomatic that
any increase in awareness is enriching, then a knowledge of historical
contexts—as part of the mental framework one brings to a literary work—
enlarges one's sense of possessing the work in the present, whether or not
one is interested in the past for its own sake; and the fact that the past is
not fully available to us provides no reason for declining to push our
understanding of it as far as we can, just as we do with every other intellectual
pursuit (none of which can ever be completed). This point of
view is of course not new, but Shillingsburg's effective use of the Fowles
novel to illustrate it gives it added force.

The third of the previously unpublished chapters, "Individual and
Collective Voices: Agency in Texts" (Chapter 6, pp. 151-164), is central
to Shillingsburg's position, for it focuses on how "to integrate insights of
the intentionalist and materialist `schools of editing' " (p. 157). He rightly
deplores the "combative spirit" with which champions of the latter have
insisted on "the `new' at the expense of the `old' " (p. 153), resulting in
polarized thinking that lacks the subtlety required by the subject; indeed,
the potential contribution of the new insight is undermined by simply
supplanting "the authorial voice with the production voice" (p. 154).
Instead, Shillingsburg stresses the importance of paying attention to the
"multiple voices" present in every work. Each voice reflects agency or
intentionality, and Shillingsburg repeatedly makes a point not often
enough recognized: that "the social contract as a `school of editing' has
not done away with agency for authority, it has not done away with
personal responsibility for textual variation, it has not done away with

intentionality, and it has not done away with the author" (pp. 163-164).
This welcome emphasis on multiple agency nevertheless slights one
matter: the legitimate interest people may have in the product that
readers of the past had in front of them, however full it was of features
not intended by anyone. Shillingsburg's lack of attention to this matter
makes the end of his chapter less precise than it should have been. When
he says that editorial theory of thirty years ago "defined the problem
too narrowly," he apparently means that it did not take the social construction
of texts into account. I believe, however, that the narrowness
of earlier theory is to be defined somewhat differently: its limitation lay
not in ignoring the social side of text production altogether but in assuming
that facsimiles took sufficient account of it, thus neglecting the
intentions of publishers and other involved persons aside from the author.
And these intentions are still generally neglected—which brings
me to the same conclusion as Shillingsburg's, though by a different route.
Recognizing that the social approach to literature involves two foci,
production and reception (the first involving intention, the second concentrating
on whatever the artifact displays), would make Shillingsburg's
discussion even more effective than it already is.[97]

The concluding chapter, largely published in a periodical in 1996,[98]
sums up Shillingsburg's inclusive position under the rubric "A Whirlwind
of Possibilities" (a rather odd choice of title, since it suggests chaos
rather than the order that Shillingsburg has in fact brought to the subject).
After discussing briefly the two basic approaches to editing (accepting
documentary texts and reconstructing intended texts), he gives
a succinct historical account of twentieth-century editorial theory. It has
the great merit (despite some imprecise, even erroneous, statements)[99] of

calling particular attention to the fallacy inherent in the idea of promoting
a new view by discrediting earlier ones; as he sarcastically adds,
"when the task is to make room for a new paradigm, it is, of course,
counterproductive to be fair" (p. 213). Then he explains his own position:
that there is "a significant distinction to be made between [verbal]
works and physical representations of them," but that there is no "essential
or `extant' conceptual or performance work that is the real work";
rather, "physical copies . . . point to and result from" the "human existential
condition" to which works are intricately connected (p. 219).
Documentary texts are "potluck texts," and most readers prefer to approach
texts as "agent dependent" (p. 221). Thus critical editing is essential
(along with the publishing of documentary texts), and multiple
critical texts of a work are required to reflect the voices of different
"authorizing agents" (p. 222). He ends with a tribute to the "courage,
criticism, intelligence, and humility" of editors who alter documentary
texts in order to produce texts that represent "integrity of voice or
agency"—each such product being "only another recipe for the work"
(pp. 224-225). None of this is new (and Shillingsburg would not claim
otherwise), but it is a point of view often drowned out in contemporary
debate. Having it set forth so ably is therefore a great benefit—and all the
more so because it offers, I believe, the most constructive direction for
editorial theory to take. Shillingsburg's book can be enthusiastically admitted
to the small shelf of essential works in this field.

Since the publication of his book, he has continued to drive home his
position in forceful essays. In the 1999 Editio anthology,[100] for example,
he meditates on "losses"—especially the losses involved in accepting only
one editorial approach and rejecting alternative ones. Those who "ride
the cusp of the newest enthusiasm" (p. 2) often "attack the old in order
to make room for the new" (p. 4); but earlier editions that did well what
they set out to do should not be considered failures "just because the
purpose for which they were designed is no longer the ruling fad" (p. 6).
And in another piece the same year, called "Editing Determinate Material
Texts" (Text, 12: 59-71), he criticizes Norman Feltes's belief in
a Marxist "determinate material practice" to explain Victorian book
production, pointing out that its reduction of authors and publishers to
"simple, practically helpless, operatives in a determinate world" (p. 65) is
analogous to the position of the social-contract textual critics. From there
on, we are in familiar territory, though the piece contains some of Shillingsburg's

most emphatic statements. Reflecting on the continuing
relevance of "individual action, desire, and intention," he declares, "I
do not find persuasive or helpful the notion that publication grants
viability to works which, as long as they remain in manuscript, are unfinished
or unborn," and he vows that he "will go on harping on that
string till times change" (p. 68). Times will indeed change, as they always
do, and it will then seem strange that his harping was needed; but
in the present he is a welcome presence, persistently showing the rationality
of accepting multiple approaches.

Another frequent commentator on textual matters, Paul Eggert,
shares certain ideas with Shillingsburg, such as the permanent value of
the concept of authorship and the recognition that different viewpoints
can be complementary, not mutually exclusive. In a 1993 conference
paper that he included, in revised form, in the 1998 anthology that he
and Margaret Sankey edited, he proposes a way of "bridging the divide"
between "social discourse" and "authorial agency."[101] He suggests that
we distinguish between "the level of document" (the "level of physical
inscription") and "the level of text" ("the meaning" created by both the
producers and the receivers of documents [pp. 103-104]). This formulation,
in his view, bridges the gap by recognizing, first, that "the historicity
of the document records both the authorial agency and other
contributing agencies" and, second, that "their textual work [their creation
of meaning] will inevitably have been moulded by, even as to
varying degrees it moulded, the discursive pressures of their period"
(p. 111).

Thinking in this way is indeed helpful, though it is not as different
as Eggert may believe from the more traditional distinction between the
tangible "texts of documents" and the intangible "texts of works" (indeed,
I think he could have avoided some awkwardness by using the
word "work" instead of "text" for his second level). His central point,
as I see it, could be summarized this way: just as the physical features of
documents (including arrangements of words and punctuation) bear
testimony both to authorial striving and to social conditions, so the
works that can be created from documents run the gamut from those
created by authors and other participants in the process of documentary
production to those created by readers and editors (with their varying
temperaments and backgrounds). The slight shift in emphasis here (as I

would express it) from the more conventional approach is a welcome
one: that all editorial work, including that devoted to documentary
editions, is—like all other acts of reading—a construction of meaning,
which may or may not have a historical orientation; when editors publish
their work, they are simply offering new documents that can serve
in their turn as the grounding for further creations of meaning. Eggert's
essay, besides providing a shrewd criticism of Foucault and Derrida,[102]
cogently shows the fallacy of believing that the "real story starts . . . at
the reader-discursive level" rather than at "the initiating point of the
production of meaning which is indisputably witnessed by the documents"
(p. 111), by "the documentary record's having taken the particular
form it did and no other" and thus testifying to the work of particular
human agents (p. 112).

This point is at the heart of another paper of his written for a conference
one year later than the one just discussed, and published in revised
form in anthologies of 1995 and 1999.[103] Its title includes a pair
of phrases—"historical version" and "authorial agency"—that are nearly
identical with those in the earlier piece, and he sets as his task the formulation
of "editing principles capable of holding [these] two strands in
complementary balance" (p. 51). The key, as we know from the previous
essay, is recognizing acts of individual agency in the physical features of
documents: "what is irrefutable is that the physical inscriber—the individual
textual agent—enters into the business of textuality" (p. 57).
Examination of the drama physically enshrined in documents leads

to the observation that "documentary texts [are] inherently unstable"
(p. 55)—an unexceptionable point relevant to his argument, though he
improperly and unnecessarily makes it a criticism of the traditional
intentionalist approach.[104] As editor of the Academy Editions of Australian
Literature (on which he draws in this essay), Eggert puts into
practice his principle of respecting both document and agent by allowing
the specific rationale for dealing with each work to grow out of its
particular textual history. This openness to alternatives is admirable,
but there is inevitably a compromise involved if one approach is given
precedence in each case—which is why he suggests the usefulness of supplementing
the printed volumes of the Academy Editions with electronic
texts (p. 56). Even if his conclusion remains vague on a practical
level, he has made a contribution to theoretical discussion by emphasizing,
in a distinctive way, how documents link us as much to personal
agents as to social forces.[105]

T. H. Howard-Hill has also challenged some of the ideas of the adherents
of the social approach to textual criticism.[106] Although he claims
only to offer "general characterizations" of their attitudes, not rebuttals
of them or reassertions of "the values of the `traditional' editing" (p. 58),
he concludes that "their arguments lead nowhere any editor should wish
to follow" (p. 62); and the force of his observations is weakened by what
appears at times to be a lack of open-mindedness. Nevertheless, he makes
some arresting points worth noting, beginning with his view of the social
theorists' work "less as innovative than reactionary" (p. 51). These adjectives
are of course not necessarily opposites, and I would rather say
that this body of thought is both innovative and reactionary. In any case,
its reactionary aspects are rarely remarked on; yet it clearly is a variety
of the general tendency regarded as conservative in editorial tradition:
the distrust of editorial intervention in documentary texts. To call the
social theorists conservative is not to criticize them, however, but only
to recognize where their thought falls in the cyclical movements that
constitute the history of editorial theory.

Similarly, Howard-Hill's three "characterizations" of their thinking
are valid, but one cannot feel very satisfied with the associated discussion
unless some adjustments are made. First, he remarks on these scholars'

"antiquarianism" (a term that I do not consider pejorative, and I
assume Howard-Hill does not, either); all this means is that they respect
historical evidence. But when he says that these scholars believe documentary
texts to be relatively "unmediated witnesses to the creative
processes and achievements of their originators" (p. 58), he ignores a
major reason for the interest in "unmediated" texts: their value as a
record of what readers had in front of them. And then when he says that
the "vehemence" of these scholars' arguments "establishes original or
facsimile editions as the only kind of edition that they value," he misses
the opportunity to point out that such editions are in fact most appropriate
for accommodating that unstated reason for valuing documents,
not for appreciating "creative processes and achievements," which are
best approached through critical texts. The second characteristic of the
social theorists, he says, is that they are "all hostile to the New Bibliography";
but to add (correctly) that the New Bibliography is "the single
most important advance in the development of Anglo-American editing"
(p. 59) is hardly to the point, since that fact accounts in large part for
their hostility in the first place. The point that needs to be made here
is that analytical bibliography supports every approach to editing and
indeed, with its focus on physical details, should be seen as a corollary
to "antiquarianism." The third characteristic named by Howard-Hill
is that "these scholars reject interpretation as part of the editorial function."
Although it is relevant to note that such resistance is futile ("editors
can scarcely refrain from an activity so pervasively human"), the
more constructive point is that interpretation emerging out of specialist
knowledge is essential to the growth of human understanding.

Howard-Hill's essay makes many useful points about the nature of
the social theorists' position; what it lacks is a clear indication that their
thinking is an important contribution to a comprehensive view of the
range of editorial approaches necessary for the study of every work. When
he says that their emphasis on facsimiles is a "dead end" (p. 61), his overly
negative tone masks what I believe is his real meaning: that the reproduction
of documentary texts is a dead end only if editing is limited to
that activity and nothing else. This is the basic point that should have
surfaced in his piece much more than it does: the social theorists' position
is objectionable only to the extent that it denies the validity of other
approaches. Howard-Hill is perhaps reaching toward this point when he
says, quite correctly, that Greg, McKerrow, and Bowers "were pluralists
to an extent that some more modern editors and theorists are not prepared
either to acknowledge or to emulate" (p. 62). If the implications
of this statement had been amplified through the essay, which would
then have shown more clearly how critical and documentary editions are

complementary, Howard-Hill would still have accomplished his purpose
of characterizing the social approach, but in a more helpful way.[107]

I should like to mention here, at the end of this survey, my 1998 collection,
Literature and Artifacts—not because it is by me, but because it
includes my 1994 essay "Editing without a Copy-Text" (pp. 236-257),
which forms an appropriate pairing with Greg's "The Rationale of
Copy-Text," published at the beginning of the half-century. Indeed, I
conceived of the essay as a replacement for Greg-not in a spirit of rejection
but of completion. Greg's essay does not carry to a logical conclusion
the idea that critical editing relies on editors' judgments, for by
recommending the adoption of a copy-texst with presumptive authority
it retains an element of the best-text approach (which Greg was attempting
to move away from). It was my object to show, first, that editions
offering critical texts will always be of value, alongside documentary
editions, and, second, that a critical text should be a constructed text
rather than an emended one. In other words, editors should not be thinking
in terms of altering a particular existing text but of building up a
new text, word by word and punctuation mark by punctuation mark,
evaluating all available evidence at each step. The text that one would
otherwise have chosen as copy-text would no doubt still often carry the
most evidentiary weight as one decides on individual readings (so long,
of course, as one had the same goal in mind). But the psychology of editing
would be different because every element of the critical text would
be the result of a positive action (in support of some goal, not necessarily
final authorial intention); none would be the product of the passive
notion of "retaining" something. Whether I made this case effectively
is not for me to say, but I believe this shift in thinking is necessary to
fulfill the underlying logic of critical editing. Greg's mid-century essay
reverberated in many ways through the ensuing half-century, but only
at the end of that period was it seen as a stepping-stone to a coherent
concept of the role of judgment in critical editing.[108]