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I
One of the most common situations involving external allusion occurs when a writer quotes from an earlier piece of writing. Insofar as the emphasis of the reference is on a verifiable independent source, the quotation should be exact. But insofar as the writer's intention is to adapt the quotation, it becomes a created element in the new work and cannot then be deemed incorrect merely because it fails to correspond with an external source. In many cases the motivation is mixed: the writer wishes to call on the authority of a previous author (expecting readers to recognize the author or the work cited) but at the same time wishes to alter the quotation to serve a particular purpose in the new context. Of course, a writer sometimes simply misquotes without intending to, and if no consequences follow from the misquotation, it is merely an error and
Many of the possible editorial problems involving quotations can be illustrated by a single famous instance, the section of "Extracts" prefixed to Moby-Dick. In this section Melville draws together eighty quotations, ranging from the Bible to mid-nineteenth-century fiction, constituting a massive epigraph to the book. One might at first feel that epigraphs are not part of the text they introduce and that there would thus be no legitimate reason for their not being accurate; but a moment's reflection reminds one that an author selects an epigraph in order to set up a relationship between its implications and those of the text to follow and that one should not be surprised, therefore, if the epigraph were intentionally slanted to make the relationship clearer. Epigraphs are as much a part of a text as the quotations embedded in it. In the case of Melville's "Extracts," the creative nature of epigraphs is evident: the sweep of the assembled material is intended to suggest the greatness and universality of the subject of whales and whaling.[5] Melville furthermore places his quotations in a dramatic framework: they are said to be "Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian," who has "gone through the long Vaticans and streetstalls of the earth" in search of them. The fact that supposedly they have been prepared by a created character does not, of course, mean that any errors in them must necessarily be accepted as contributing to the characterization, but it does strengthen the point that misquotations may at times be functional, and intentionally so. Whether misquotations are in fact intended as part of a characterization can only be determined by the context, and in this instance there is nothing to indicate that Melville wished the reader to regard any errors as lapses on the Sub-Sub-Librarian's part; on the other hand, he may well have wished to alter certain quotations to make them more appropriate as epigraphs to the work that follows, and misquotations in the "Extracts" must be judged critically with this possibility in mind.[6] A survey of some of the editorial
Perhaps the most straightforward situations are those in which misquotations result from obviously intended alterations by Melville. In the second extract, for example, from Job 41:32, the wording of the printed text[7] (the manuscript does not survive) exactly matches that of the King James Bible except that "Leviathan" is substituted for "He" in "Leviathan maketh a path to shine after him." Clearly no one, in the process of transmission from manuscript to print, could have misread Melville's "He" as "Leviathan"; furthermore, the indefinite reference of "He" calls for some explanation when the passage is quoted out of context. It seems certain that Melville wrote "Leviathan," intentionally altering the wording of his source. Similarly, the extract from Montaigne contains the clause "the sea-gudgeon retires into it in great security," whereas the passage in Hazlitt's Montaigne (Melville's source) reads "this little fish" instead of "the sea-gudgeon." Again, the change cannot have resulted from a misreading of handwriting. Although it is perhaps conceivable that Melville wrote "sea-gudgeon" as a result of losing his place momentarily—since "sea-gudgeon" occurs in an earlier (unquoted) part of Montaigne's sentence—it is much more likely that he wished not to lose this term and substituted it in what is otherwise essentially an accurate quotation. Even undistinctive words can sometimes be recognized as Melville's alterations: the extract from Waller consists of two couplets, separated by a row of asterisks indicating ellipsis; in the second couplet "his" (twice) and "he" appear, rather than Waller's "her" and "she"— substitutions obviously made so that the gender of the pronouns would match that in the first couplet, now that the two couplets are juxtaposed (in the original, forty lines separate them).[8] In instances of this kind the
Thinking about these examples leads one to see some of the conditions under which emendations in the "Extracts" would have to be made. Unintended slips—authorial, scribal, compositorial—can be present in the text of the "Extracts" just as in the body of the book, and a critical approach to the text demands that all "misquotations" be evaluated and not automatically accepted as intended alterations. When, in the quotation from Blackstone, "caught near the coast" appears instead of "caught near the coasts," and, in the extract from Frederick Debell Bennett, "these weapons" replaces "those weapons"—or when the passage from Uno von Troil contains "lime-stone" instead of "brim-stone"—the substituted word in each case could easily have resulted from a simple transmissional error (such as a memorial lapse or a misreading of handwriting), and in none of these cases does there seem to be any reason for an authorial change. A number of such examples occur in poetic quotations from prominent sources: in the second extract from Paradise Lost, Leviathan is said to be stretched like a promontory "in," rather than "on," the deep and to spout out a sea "at his breath," rather than "at his trunk"; and in the extract from Cowper we read that "rockets blew [rather than 'flew'] self driven, / To hang their momentary fire [not 'fires'] / Around [not 'Amid'] the vault of heaven." All these misquotations are conceivable misreadings of handwriting or slips in copying, and it is difficult to see why Melville (or anyone else) would wish to make them intentionally ("fire" for "fires" is a clear instance of error, because the word is supposed to rhyme with "spires" two lines earlier). Slips of this kind, which probably occurred in the process of transmission from authorial manuscript to printed book, call for emendation by the critical editor.
Of course, some of these erroneous readings may have been present in Melville's manuscript, but as long as they can be argued to be unintentional slips the case for emendation is not altered.[9] When the printed
An additional example or two may serve further to clarify the role of arguments based on possible slips or misreadings of handwriting. In the Smith quotation, four lines after "in the shrouds," there is the clause "it floundered in the sea," where "it" refers to "whale"; in the original the subject is "he," not "it," but here the conservative editor is likely to feel that the possibility of an intentional change is enough stronger to warrant
The process of locating those external sources, however, raises some important questions of editorial procedure. First is the problem of deciding what particular edition of a source text is the proper one to use for comparison. If the text of a quotation in the "Extracts" matches the text of the corresponding passage in the first edition of the work quoted from, the problem does not exist, for it does not matter whether Melville used the first edition or some other edition, as long as the resulting quotation is accurate.[11] But when the text in the "Extracts" does not correspond with that of the first edition, one cannot assume that the difference necessarily results from a transmissional error in the process of writing and printing Moby-Dick or from a deliberate change on Melville's part; it may be that Melville copied accurately, but from a different edition. If
The question that all this leads to is how the editor should handle errors or alterations that were already present in the immediate source of the quotations. If Melville quotes a corrupt text under the impression that he is providing the reader with another author's words, is it part of an editor's duty to replace that corrupt text with an accurate text? Answering this question goes to the heart of the concept of scholarly critical editing. Expecting editors to make such "corrections" of quotations is in effect asking them to establish the text of each quoted passage so as to fulfill its author's intentions. Such a procedure would mean treating each quotation as if it were an individual item in an anthology, not a part of a context created by another writer. The reader comes to Melville's "Extracts" not to seek established texts of Waller and Bunyan but
Thus the extract from Thomas Fuller's The Holy State, and the Profane State reads "mighty whales which swim" at a point where the first edition of 1642 and the "second edition enlarged" of 1648 read "mighty whales who swim"; but because "which" is the reading of the London 1841 edition—the edition borrowed by Melville, according to Merton M. Sealts's Melville's Reading (1966)—there would seem to be no reason
A related element in considering a writer's intentions in making a quotation is an understanding of the contemporary conventions of quoting. Generally before the twentieth century (and in some cases even into the century) quotations were not thought of as "inaccurate" or "incorrect" if they occasionally departed from the wording—to say nothing of the punctuation and spelling—of the source, as long as they did not distort the gist of its meaning. It was not considered wrong, even in expository writing (that is to say, writing not usually classed as "imaginative" or belletristic), to place between quotation marks what we would now think of as a paraphrase or an adaptation. For an editor to make such "quotations" conform to modern standards of accuracy, therefore, would be to modernize (that is, to employ a modern approach—for the corrected quotation would often be less "modern" in form); and the scholarly editor will not wish to engage in modernizing here any more than with the punctuation and spelling of the rest of the text. In checking Melville's extracts against their sources, then, an editor need not be concerned with spelling, punctuation, capitalization, or other formal matters except to the extent that discrepancies markedly affect meaning (or obviously result from slips or nonauthorial styling) or that agreements point to Melville's immediate sources. It clearly never occurred to Melville to be troubled about taking a twenty-word middle section out of a long sentence of Davenant's and beginning it with a capital letter; or juxtaposing, without ellipsis marks (and actually in reverse order), two sentences from Bacon's History Naturall and Experimentall of Life and Death (1638) that are in fact separated by six of Bacon's "Items"; or running together two lines of verse without indicating the line break, as in the extracts from Bacon's version of Psalm 104 and from I Henry IV. When Melville inserts "Fife" in parentheses after "this coast" in his quotation from Robert Sibbald and "whales" in parentheses after "these monsters" in his extract from Darwin, he is using parentheses to mark explanatory insertions in the way that we would now use square brackets.[15] An editor who injects ellipsis dots, virgules, and brackets into these quotations is modernizing, by requiring Melville's quotations—and each of the extracts is in fact printed in quotation marks—to conform to present-day standards. The place for showing these relationships between the
This custom of allusive quotation is represented among Melville's extracts by a wide diversity of situations, which thus help further to define the nature of the accuracy that is attempted. In addition to substitutions, which often could be the result of a slip of the pen or a misreading of handwriting, there are instances of insertion, omission, and paraphrase that cannot reasonably be considered inadvertent. For example, the extract from the account of Schouten's sixth circumnavigation in John Harris's Navigantium atque Itinerantium Bibliotheca (1705) begins, "Here they saw such huge shoals of whales," whereas the passage in Harris reads "saw an incredible number of Penguins, and such huge shoals of whales." Obviously Melville wished to omit the six words after "saw" as irrelevant to his purpose; deleting the reference to penguins focuses more attention on the whales, but Melville saw no reason to note his ellipsis.[16] Similarly, in the quotation from Jefferson there is an unmarked omission of fifty-one words between the subject and the verb; the sentence from Daniel Tyerman and George Bennet's Journal (1831) silently omits eleven words; and five are left out of the sentence from James Colnett's Voyage (1798).[17] Sometimes omissions and substitutions occur together, as when four words are omitted and four other alterations are made in the sentence from Richard Stafford, causing it to refer only to one man and one whale instead of to a group of each. The motivation for some of these changes is not always as obvious as in the omission of the reference to penguins or the insertion of "Whale-" in "The Whale-ship Globe" (the extract from William Lay and Cyrus Hussey), but there can be no doubt that such alterations are intentional and that they did not, in Melville's view, prevent the results from being regarded as "extracts" from the works named. Indeed, passages placed in quotation marks could depart even further from the originals and consist entirely of paraphrase: the sentences from Stowe, Boswell, and James Cook are far enough from the original wording that they have to be considered paraphrases made by Melville (unless he was following secondary sources
Melville's twisting of quotations for his own purposes—beyond any customary casualness in quoting—does, however, play a significant role in producing the wording found in the "Extracts." When Melville paraphrases a passage, places the result in quotation marks, and labels the source, he is engaging in allusive quotation but is approaching the border line—even by nineteenth-century standards—between quotation and fresh composition. He apparently crosses that line in the passage that purports to be from Antonio de Ulloa, describing the breath of the whale "attended with such an insupportable smell, as to bring on a disorder of the brain"; these words seem in fact to be Melville's own elaboration of the three-word phrase "an insupportable smell," which refers in Ulloa to a fish called "cope." The next step is to create an entirely new passage and provide it with a fictitious source: the extract following the one from John Ramsay McCulloch is labeled "From 'Something' unpublished" and is presumably Melville's own extension of a point raised by the McCulloch quotation, for it is clearly designed to follow McCulloch's statement but does not occur there in the original. Melville does not engage in this practice often, but the presence of one or two examples further strengthens the view of the "Extracts" section as a creative work and not a mere anthology.
Suggesting that something created on the spot has an independent existence outside the work tends to break down any rigid boundary between what is external and what is internal, and references to "real" sources can sometimes partake more of the internal world of the work
Discussion of "Hobomack," which occurs in a citation rather than an extract, calls attention to the fact that problems of external reference are just as likely to occur in the citations. Some of the questions they raise are the same as those connected with quotations in general. Thus the citations of Darwin's "Voyage of a Naturalist" and Lay and Hussey's "Narrative of the Globe Mutiny" should not be considered errors simply because these are not the actual titles of the two books; the works alluded to are easily identifiable from such references, which are examples of the widespread nineteenth-century custom of allusive citation.[20] And when Robert P. Gillies's Tales of a Voyager to the Arctic Ocean (1826) is reported as "Tales of a Whale Voyager to the Arctic Ocean," one knows that the inaccurate citation, with "Whale" inserted, is intended by Melville. Or when "Most Extraordinary and Distressing" is omitted and "Spermaceti-Whale" becomes "Sperm Whale" in the long title of Owen Chase's Narrative (1821), one can allow the altered wording to stand on the grounds that it seems more likely to have resulted from intentional alteration than inadvertent slip. But another long title, for Henry T. Cheever's The Whale and His Captors (1849), is transcribed so precisely as to suggest that exact quotation is intended, and the one slight omission —an "as" introducing the last phrase—should therefore probably be rectified.
Citation of an altogether wrong title raises a more interesting issue. The extract from James Montgomery is credited to "World before the Flood" but actually comes from his "The Pelican Island"; the error is one that Melville takes from a secondary source, because Cheever's book quotes the same lines from Montgomery and provides the same citation. The question, raised earlier, whether an editor is called upon to correct the errors of a secondary source, requires further thought in a case of this kind. Misquotations in the text derived from a secondary source—and there are two in the Montgomery passage deriving from Cheever—generally do not require emendation because they constitute part of the passages as the quoter knew them.[21] But allowing an erroneous citation of this sort to stand is a different matter. It is true that Melville was equally
Another, much shorter, preliminary section precedes the "Extracts" at the front of Moby-Dick, and it raises similar problems because it, too, is made up of material having an existence outside the work and is assigned a fictional compiler, a "Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School." Called "Etymology," this section consists of three quotations, followed by a list of the words for "whale" in thirteen languages. Such a list would appear to be purely a factual matter, but the critical editor, interested in Melville's intention, will find that it raises some intricate questions. One of them can serve as a kind of conspectus of the considerations involved in dealing with external fact in a literary work. Just before the English word "WHALE" in the list appears the entry for the Icelandic, and the word given in the original edition is "WHALE," identical with the English. Because this is not the Icelandic for "whale"
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