3. Temporal Orientation
The temporal point of view abandons "documentary
integrity" as the prime or essential element of text, opening a space
between "document" and "temporal stage of development" for the idea that
the "text of the work" and the "text of the document" might not be the
same at any particular moment in the development of the work; the
document can thus mis-represent the moment of its inscription.
The temporal approach is often less interested in the agent of change
than in the cultural moment or stage of development. In the case of
classical and medieval works, where the surviving evidence often
post-dates composition of the work by decades or centuries, the
concepts of "period of origination" or "period of inscription" enters
more plausibly than "moment in time"—editors are often keenly
aware of anachronisms in scribal copies. And yet for works surviving in
an array of authorial or authorized versions a sense of the moment in
time could give way to ideas about duration through time, where instead
of asking why a change was introduced one could focus on the question
why some text was replicated without change? For works represented by
compositional and revision materials, the temporal view might locate the
work in a developmental path from inception to final or last form of the
work either (a) as a series of production endpoints or (b) as a
continuous scale of genetic development.
(a) The productive approach sees the work as a
series of static or snapshot efforts to capture the work to be studied
synchronically at specified moments in time, usually as fixed, more or
less well, in some document.
(b) A diachronic alternative sees the work as a
creative development through time always progressively approaching (not
necessarily reaching) a final endgame so that stages along the way are
just provisional. Since for both of these views the "moment in time" or
"sequence of development"—not the document itself—is the
central issue, it follows that the record of that temporality, as
captured in the document, is potentially faulty and therefore liable to
correction or emendation. Here Pietro
Beltrami's notion of the "witness text" enters to suggest
that for any given time, the nearest document might be flawed.8 Here, too, Tanselle's distinction between the text of the work and the
text of the document performs the same
office.
9 The temporal
orientation, like the documentary, is depersonalized—does not
discriminate primarily among those persons responsible for the text. The
primary question is what was the text supposed by its producers to be at
some moment in time?
