University of Virginia Library

VI

Reading through the writing on textual criticism and scholarly editing
that has been published in the final years of the twentieth century
is a rather dispiriting experience, with few bright spots, because so much
of it is not only inexcusably jargon-filled but also needlessly scornful of
previous thinking. That a lot has been written would be a good sign only
if it translated into a substantial increase in understanding. But much
of the commentary has followed a pattern all too common in intellectual
discourse: it repeats points that are currently in vogue and attacks what
went before, without meeting counterarguments that have already been
expressed. It proceeds in a fashion aptly described by a marvelously compact
phrase of Adam Michnik's, "mantra rather than discourse."[109]

Thinking will not move forward unless counterarguments are addressed,
so that a more comprehensive, more broadly perceptive, statement can
be made. The reason that this process has not occurred more often is that
a great many people are not interested in conversation, in dialogue: they
wish to enforce their own points of view, and they simply do not listen to
possible objections to their arguments and go right on saying what they
said in the first place, as if no other observations had been made in the
meantime.

The most noticeable recent illustration of this phenomenon in textual
criticism involves some of the scholars who wish to be associated with
the idea that texts are socially constructed. They believe that they can
support their position by criticizing authorial intention as an editorial
goal (and analytical bibliography because it was developed by scholars
who held that goal); and they persist in making the same criticisms, even
though inaccuracies in those criticisms have been noted and—more importantly—even
though the logical fallacy of promoting one emphasis by
denigrating another has been pointed out.[110] Even if the criticisms of

authorial intention were sound, the validity of the social approach would
not thereby be confirmed. It should be obvious, however, that both approaches
are valid and that both are indeed necessary to understand the
entire history of works, from their initial creation to the unending sequence
of public responses to them. The recent attention to the postproduction
part of this history has indeed clarified and enriched the
study of documentary texts and their physical embodiments, and we
should be delighted by it. But there is no reason why such study must be
pursued at the expense of the other part of the story.

Those who have taken an either/or position, suggesting that an interest
in authorial intention is futile, unproductive, and outmoded, have
shown by their manner of proceeding that they are more concerned with
promoting a particular point of view than with welcoming all approaches
that can contribute to fuller understanding. They, like so many people
in all walks of life, think in terms of winning an argument rather than of
participating in a conversation. A wonderful phrase of Jeffrey M. Perl's
comes to mind in this connection: in the Winter 2002 number of his
journal Common Knowledge (8: 1-6), he entitled the opening piece
"Civilian Scholarship." If scholarship, or any other discourse, is civilian
rather than military, then it is founded on "metaphors of conversation
or friendship rather than on metaphors adopted from those of sports and
war, of `sides' that one must `take' " (p. 5). Referring to such common
beliefs as that "strife is productive" or that quarreling is a game, Perl
says, "The world deserves better of those employed to think and write
and educate." One of the best expressions of this general view comes
from an essay of Gordon N. Ray's called "Books as a Way of Life":

Understanding rather than victory: this is the motto for civilian scholarship.
It is a motto negated by a large number of recent writings on
textual and editorial theory.

We need not worry, however, as long as writers of the caliber of
Grigely and Shillingsburg come along. And as a way of identifying hopeful
signs for the twenty-first century, I shall mention two publications of
its earliest years. The first is a superb essay by Phillip Harth, written as
a review of the first two volumes of Paul Hammond's Longman edition
of Dryden.[112] This edition is partially modernized, and Harth devotes
most of his essay to demonstrating, with great patience and clarity, the
folly of spending time on a task that is not only impossible to carry out
satisfactorily but also counterproductive, since the results, far from assisting
the reader, form a barrier to understanding. After demolishing
the often-repeated notion that the spelling and punctuation of sixteenthand
seventeenth-century editions necessarily reflect compositorial practice
more than authorial preference, Harth shows how Hammond's
"concern to expunge all signs of the compositor's intervention results
inevitably in the omission of prosodic, figurative, and stylistic elements
for which the poet himself was responsible" (p. 241). Since Hammond
does not modernize any quotations (from Dryden or anyone else) in his
annotations, Harth is given the opportunity to make a basic point applicable
to all modernization: "readers will quickly adjust to the unfamiliar
appearance of those excerpts and experience little difficulty in reading
and understanding them. They will want to do so, in fact, as they find
themselves drawn more and more into observing the process of historical
recovery" (p. 244). These readers will then, of course, "come to wonder
why an exception was thought to be necessary" for the main text. Harth's
essay is one of the best discussions of modernization we have ever had; it
should be pondered not merely by all editors but by all readers.

The other twenty-first-century publication that I want to mention is
David Scott Kastan's Shakespeare and the Book (2001), which illustrates

not only the lingering power of certain clichés but also, more importantly,
the way in which an open-minded intelligence will see through
and beyond them. The book is an engagingly written and perceptive account
of Shakespeare in print—the literary Shakespeare that emerged
through the editions of his work over the centuries rather than the
Shakespeare of the theater (which is apparently all he aspired to be).
Although the book is not, in one sense, primarily about textual theory,
the basic issues that textual criticism must come to terms with pervade
the book and are, from time to time, its explicit subject. If one were to
read only the introduction, one would think that Kastan is another of
those writers who repeat trendy clichés unquestioningly. Beginning with
the assertion that he is dealing with a "hot topic,"[113] he states that he is
"deeply suspicious" of the brand of editorial theory that "posits as its
object of desire a work that never was, an ideal text of an author's intentions
that no materialization does (or can) bear witness to" (p. 3).
He believes that a concept of the work as intangible denies the work of
"any effective principle of realization," and he adds, "Only as texts are
realized materially are they accessible" (p. 4). The familiar arguments
about the role of the physical in reading and about the collaborative
nature of drama are repeated, but they lead him to a point not commonly
made: that the printed text of a play, even one based on performance,
has "its own compelling logic," and thus offers a different work from
that of the performance. The point is valuable, though it takes him to
treacherous ground: "Text and performance are, then, not partial and
congruent aspects of some unity that we think of as the play, but are two
discrete modes of production" (p. 9). Giving the printed play-text autonomy
from the stage as well as from authorial intention obviously
serves to justify his focus on the book as a social product.

His introduction unfortunately does not do justice to the more
thoughtful view that emerges in the chapters that follow (although there
is a slight hint in his unexplained admission that the concept of work as
the author's "unrealized intentions" is "not without value" [p. 4]). In
the final chapter he recognizes the value of all kinds of editions. A goal
of reconstructing an "authorial text," he says, is "a reasonable but by
no means necessary grant of authority to the intended text over the
actual textual forms in which it is encountered"; "the author's intentions
are of course a worthy, if elusive, object of study," and to pursue

them "the conventional understanding and practices of editing are appropriate."
But "there must be alternative ways to conceive of the goals
of editorial activity, ways in which the processes of materialization would
not be understood as unwanted obstacles" (p. 122). These comments
reflect an admirably comprehensive view of editing, a recognition that
no one approach can adequately accommodate the differing kinds of
interest we may have in every work. One may wonder how Kastan can
end on a note so different from the way he started: the introduction, not
the conclusion, is in fact the anomaly, for the book as a whole displays
a broader understanding than his willingness to repeat stock phrases
(and not only in the introduction) suggests. For example, the cliché
that we are "heirs of a romantic conception of writing as individual
and originary" (p. 48), is immediately followed by the recognition
that some of Shakespeare's contemporaries held the same conception;
and Kastan's treatment of Shakespeare's eighteenth-century editors,
who strove to produce intended texts, is not condemnatory but rather
accepting of their efforts as a manifestation of one of the interests that
people do have.[114]

I should like to use these contradictory elements in Kastan's work as
a way of summarizing two basic points about the nature of texts and of
editing. First is his idea that "literature exists, in any useful sense, only
and always in its materializations." The phrase "in any useful sense" is
there because Kastan understands that "the work of the imagination"
precedes its materialization in "a medium that is incommensurate with
its refinement." Presumably for this reason he calls the concept of immaterial
works "not logically impossible" (p. 4). But it cannot then be
ignored on the grounds that a work, so conceived, depends on "physical
supports" if readers are to experience it. Obviously an intangible verbal
work can be transmitted only in oral or visible form, and every attempt
to recover the author's original and later intentions must itself be given
one of these two forms if it is to be communicated; but the attempt to
reconstruct intentions, however mediated by editorial judgment and its
presentation, is no different in kind from all other efforts to recover past
events that are not directly available in living oral traditions or surviving
physical objects.

Clearly every oral rendition and every printed text of what purports
to be the same work produces a discrete experience, and each one is
deserving of our serious attention. That an intangible intended work or
series of works (versions) underlies such manifestations is also evident,
as Kastan implicitly recognizes at various points. He notes, for instance,
"the difference in the material relation of painters to their paintings and
authors to the books that bear their names" (pp. 115-116). And despite
his having complained at the beginning of his book about the idea that
works "have a reality independent of the physical [or, one might add,
oral] texts in which we engage them" (p. 3), he says at the end that Hamlet
is "the name for what allows us comfortably to consider as some
metaphysical unity the various instantiations of the play" (p. 133). This
unity need not be a single text, of course, and he is right to say immediately
that he is not referring to "some pre-representational original."
Although he is speaking of a pattern that somehow connects all versions,
he has nevertheless shown that we cannot do without the concept of
intangible media (otherwise texts and performances would not be "instantiations"
of something else)—and thus there must also be intended
texts that antedate their instantiations.

The other point I wish to take up is what implications for editing
follow from an acceptance of the importance of all texts—intended, recited,
and tangible. The first question is whether there should be any
editing whatever (in the sense of critical editing, which is what Kastan
generally means by "editing"). Most discussions that propose as an editorial
goal "the location of the text within the network of social and institutional
practices" (p. 122)—and Kastan's is no exception—suggest that
"arguably it becomes more difficult to justify editing at all." What is
usually not made clear is that facsimiles serve only one aspect of the
social approach to texts: they show what actually emerged from the publication
process. An interest in the publisher's intention (or that of other
collaborators with the author), however, requires a critically emended
text, just as an interest in the author's intention does.[115] Although Kastan
does not make this point explicitly, he understands some of the reasons
for having "many kinds of editions," those that "attempt to restore the
play he [Shakespeare] wrote before it was subjected to the demands of
production in both the playhouse and the printing house"[116] as well as

those that "take the theatrical auspices [and presumably the printinghouse
demands] of the plays seriously" (p. 123), including facsimiles. But
this laudable inclusiveness is marred by his statement that, although
there are "good reasons . . . for many kinds of editions," there are "probably
not very good reasons for as many of the same kinds of editions as
indeed we have." This statement can make sense only if one takes it as
flippant, in the same way one would regard the observation that there
are too many books about Hamlet. It is only a way of expressing a personal
preference for one approach, or one set of judgments, over another.
There can never be too many editions of any work because each one is
part of the unending process of responding to the work. Kastan actually
does understand this point:

I hope my comments show how Kastan's book stands apart from the usual
arguments for equating literature with material texts. Kastan seems on
one level to want to accept the standard clichés, but his basic good sense
forces its way to the surface and will not allow that to happen unequivocally.
This struggle results in some contradictions, but it strengthens his
account and is a hopeful sign for the future.

That there will never be an end to the re-editing of texts and the
publication of new editions, no matter how many times those texts have
been edited before, is a fact of life that Tom Davis, for one, would perfectly
understand. In his refreshing, clear-headed, and witty piece called
"The Monsters and the Textual Critics"[118] —an essay that ought to be

known by everyone who takes reading seriously—he recognizes that
textual criticism is in fact something practiced by everyone all the time.
Textual criticism, whether of verbal texts or of any other part of our
surroundings, is "impossible" in the sense that it can rarely result in
certain answers; but it is "necessary" and therefore "universal." Those
who edit texts should not lose sight of the combination of science and art
involved. Like scientists who "run up all the time against the intransigence
of nature" (p. 110), editors will come to dead ends in their
research but still—by other means, those of literary criticism—must offer
possible solutions to problems that are basically insoluble. If editors
openly accept, and clearly express, the limitations inherent in their
work, then textual criticism is "a perfectly possible and satisfactory activity:
after all, we do it every day."

The nature of the world, dependent as it is on our perception, is
such that no task, even those we may regard as purely scientific, is ever
fully completed. We live, as Davis says, "from compromise to compromise."
We may feel satisfied at one moment with what we have accomplished,
but soon we will find it in need of redoing, just as others will
have to do it in their own ways, and then do it again. In the ninety-eighth
chapter of Moby-Dick, Melville describes the process of scrubbing down
the decks after the oil has been extracted from a whale; but no sooner is
this activity finished than another whale is sighted, and the whole sequence,
from killing the whale to cleaning up the ship afterward, must
be performed again:

In the face of this ineluctable cycle, we are better advised to embrace and
cherish it than to lament it. Every editor who edits or re-edits a work is
participating in an invigorating, if unending, struggle—the same one that
literary critics are engaged in, though the less perceptive members of
both groups fail to recognize their common pursuit. Textual critics, instead
of being removed from direct engagement with literature—as many
people imagine—are partaking of it fully. Their multifarious, unceasing
efforts, which can never be more than tentative, exemplify the richest
kind of experience that readers can have.