| ||
II
If the "Extracts" and the "Etymology" in Moby-Dick are unusual in providing such a concentrated array of editorial questions, the questions themselves are not at all extraordinary but are in fact the characteristic ones that arise whenever external references are involved. Sampling the thinking that goes into answering those questions in this particular instance should serve as preparation for considering the general problem in a larger framework. To begin with, determining what is "external" to a piece of writing—and what in it should therefore be expected to correspond with a standard outside itself—is a difficult task of definition. As soon as one starts to check quotations, titles of books, dates, and names of persons and places against external sources, one begins to ask how these elements differ from the spellings of all the ordinary words of the text and whether there is actually anything in the text that does not have to be measured against an external standard. On one level, of course, any communication has to be regarded as made up largely of external elements: a writer or speaker would not be able to communicate without utilizing a set of conventional symbols that are interpreted in the same way by other persons. The words and grammar of a language are external in this sense, for writers must in some degree conform to linguistic conventions that are a social product and are not their own personal inventions. Editors are concerned with such matters, and in attempting to establish unmodernized texts they take pains to see that the spelling and punctuation, for instance, conform to the standards of the writer's
In thinking about these matters, Ferdinand de Saussure's seminal distinction between langue and parole is basic, for it separates language, with its infinite possibilities for expression, from each particular act of speaking—it separates "what is social from what is individual." Langue is "a product that is passively assimilated by the individual," whereas parole, the individual act of execution, is "wilful and intellectual" and is "never carried out by the collectivity."[25] This distinction can, by extension, help to explain the editor's role. Editors, of course, deal with individual acts of expression, and their task, in reconstructing an author's intention, is to determine just what in the expression, as it has come down to them, is "wilful"; they constantly examine the characteristics of the preserved parole in the light of the langue, as it were. When a word is not spelled conventionally or a singular verb follows a plural subject, are these "wilful" deviations by the author or are they simply errors of transmission (including authorial slips) at points where the author was passively following (or intending to follow) the conventions of the language? An author may, for the purposes of the immediate act of expression, decide to violate the rules of the language, and that violation can become an effective part of the communication; but if such violation proceeds too far it can prevent communication and turn the utterance into a purely private one.[26] The act of critical editing is a constant weighing of the extent to which a work can be autonomous. At each point of possible deviation from the norm, the editor is called upon to adjudicate the claims of idiosyncrasy against those of convention. In most instances, all there is to go on is the intention manifested in the work itself; the editor's decisions are based on an understanding of the internal workings of a particular act of expression.[27] For this reason one can think of these
The difference at points where quotations, dates, and the like occur is that in these instances there is something external to be taken into account in addition to the potentialities of the language itself. These parts of the expression make external reference in a way that the rest of the words do not; they are second-hand elements, so to speak, because they are taken over from a previous parole, a previous specific use. The situation is most obvious in the case of quotations: words quoted (or even paraphrased) from a particular passage by another writer have lying behind them, when placed in a new context, an external standard of reference besides that of the words and grammar involved—namely, the specific configuration of words and syntax that constituted the other writer's communication. This additional standard poses for editors an additional problem: at such points they have to consider not only words, punctuation, and grammar—as they would anywhere—but also what relation the passage is meant to bear to the original (or some other earlier) occurrence of the same passage. Determining what makes it in fact the "same" passage (when the two are not identical) is analogous to deciding when authors' revisions of their own works produce new works and when they do not. Indeed, authors returning to work they have previously written stand in much the same relationship to it as they would to the work of other authors. The central question faced by editors whenever they are confronted with a piece of writing that contains within it fragments from earlier pieces of writing is the one formulated by E. D. Hirsch, Jr., in his summary of Saussure: "should we assume that sentences from varied provenances retain their original meanings or that these heterogeneous elements have become integral components of a new total meaning?" Put another way, "should we consider the text to represent a compilation of divers paroles or a new unitary parole 'respoken' by the new author or editor?" Hirsch replies that "there can be no definitive answer to the question, except in relation to a specific scholarly or aesthetic purpose."[28]
If quotations are perhaps the most immediately obvious examples of second-hand, or repeated, paroles, they are by no means the only elements of a discourse that can be so classified. References to actual geographical locations, specific historical figures, dates of real events, and so on are also instances where words are taken over from a prior use. Ordinary concrete nouns, like "chair" and "table," refer to any member of a given class and not to individual objects until employed by a writer or speaker to do so; spelling or pronouncing "chair" correctly is a function of the conventions of the language, not of the particular use in referring to one specific actual or imagined chair. The same can frequently be said of words like "Jefferson" and "1788": a writer can create an Oliver Jefferson, spell his name "Jeffarson," and have him participate in a fictitious battle at a fictitious location in 1788. To do this is to pin "Jefferson" (as well as "1788") down to one among the infinite possibilities of denotation it contains. But if the context shows that the reference is to Thomas Jefferson's whale memorial of 1788, the writer is using a "Jefferson" and a "1788" for which precise denotations have already been established. If indeed the reference is to the real Thomas Jefferson and to the whale memorial actually issued in 1788—and that is a crucial editorial question—the writer is not assigning the denotations to the words but is in effect quoting an earlier specific assignment, one that many readers may already be familiar with and will recognize without explanation. Although it is not customary in written material to place quotation marks around a proper name whenever a previous use of the name is meant, the similarity between such references and quoted passages of writing is obvious. In either case the writer is employing words over which there is an external control beyond the ordinary conventions of the language. These words, then, are the ones that can be said to involve "external fact" and to add thereby an additional dimension to the editorial problem.
That dimension can be illustrated by the treatment of the spelling of proper names as well as by the handling of quotations. When the editors
When Melville refers in the "Etymology" section to "Hackluyt,"[31] one can argue that the spelling is not simply an error for "Hakluyt," both on the grounds that greater latitude was permitted in spellings in Hakluyt's time and on the grounds that Melville was drawing on (or assumed he was drawing on) an established tradition represented by the occurrence of "Hackluyt" in Charles Richardson's Dictionary, his source at this point. But when George Bennet's name appears as "Bennett" at the end of the sixty-fifth extract, the likelihood that the spelling is a mere slip outweighs other possibilities, for the man is a nineteenth-century figure, there is no established tradition of referring to him as "Bennett," and there seems no plausible reason for Melville to have introduced such a change intentionally; the spelling should therefore be corrected. And Melville's repeated spelling of Owen Chase's name as "Chace" (in the "Extracts," in Chapter 45, and in other places outside of Moby-Dick) is also an error, no matter how consistently Melville used it, for he had Chase's 1821 book in front of him, he was clearly referring to that particular writer, and there is no other acceptable spelling for that writer's name. The same line of reasoning applies to geographical names as well as personal names, although the continuing existence of places means that traditions of "unofficial" spellings of place names may be stronger than in the case of personal names. When "Nuremburgh" turns up in Hawthorne's "Ethan Brand," the Centenary editors correct it, as an out-right error, to "Nuremberg."[32] But when "Heidelburgh" appears consistently in Moby-Dick (Chapter 77), one can argue that what is actually an incorrect spelling conveys for Melville a certain flavor and that in any case the presence of this spelling in one of Melville's important source books (John Harris's Navigantium atque Itinerantium Bibliotheca) suggests that Melville was aligning himself with whatever tradition that book represents in this matter. "Heidelburgh" remains an erroneous spelling, but the editor may decide, with good reason, that it is not an erroneous reading in this particular text. These arguments, of course, are based on the prior assumption that the references are to the "real" Hakluyt, Bennet, Chase, Nuremberg, and Heidelberg and not to invented people and places with similar names. But the question must always
The issues involved show themselves clearly when a fact is moved into a work of fiction. Within a fictional world, facts can be altered in any way the author sees fit; yet to the extent that the author wishes a fact to be recognized it retains some connection with the outside world. These proportions—and their implications, both in the immediate passage and in the novel or story as a whole—are what the editor has to think about in order to decide whether or not to correct an error of external fact. One of the most pervasive questions has to do with setting. If a novelist places the action in real locations at a particular time, how much accuracy is intended in the details referring to that setting? Or, put another way, if certain datable events are employed, do all the other details have to be consistent with the date thus suggested? In Howells's A Hazard of New Fortunes an adverbial variant in one sentence alters the time-setting of the entire novel. The Harper's Weekly text reads, in a reference to Washington Square, "The primo tenore statue of Garibaldi had not yet taken possession of the place"; in the other texts "not yet" is replaced with "already," shifting the action to some time between the erection of
More often a factual problem in a novel involves only a local context and does not affect the entire time-scheme or setting of the work. But even so, sensitivity to the nature of the whole, as well as to the local context, is necessary for deciding when factual accuracy is in order. Frequently an historical figure becomes a character in a novel and engages at times in events that actually took place and at other times in events that are fictitious; in assessing any particular "factual" error, therefore, the editor must consider both the historicity of the immediate context and the methods of weaving together fact and fiction used throughout the book. Even in a roman à clef, where the historical figures are given new names, the relation of the depicted characteristics and events to actual ones (or traditional ideas of the "actual" ones) cannot be ignored, for an editor may be able to decide among variants or detect corrupt readings by knowing those external facts. The elusive nature of fact in fiction[38] is a fascinating subject for speculation and has been much written about,
The border lines between external fact and fictional fact are constantly shifting, as Melville demonstrates when in Chapter 72 of Moby-Dick, after describing the "monkey-rope" tying together the harpooneer (on the whale's slippery back) and the bowsman (on deck), he appends a footnote beginning, "The monkey-rope is found in all whalers; but it was only in the Pequod that the monkey and his holder were ever tied together. This improvement upon the original usage was introduced by no less a man than Stubb." A fictional fact—a usage invented by a fictional character on a fictional ship—is here thrust out into the real world as the Pequod is compared with all other ships; or, rather, the real world is pulled into the novel, for the external truthfulness of the statement about all ships is irrelevant to the fictional world, in which it becomes a fact that the Pequod differs from all other ships in its use of the monkeyrope. Yet external facts may have to be called on when there is an internal discrepancy. In the American first edition of Moby-Dick, a passage discussing some famous whales (Chapter 45) refers to "Timor Tom" and "New Zealand Jack," but the next paragraph cites "New Zealand Tom"; in the English edition the discrepancy was evidently noted, for "Tom" in the third instance is changed to "Jack," thus producing consistency. It is clear that the American text must be emended, but the change selected in the English edition is not the only one that would make the names consistent, and the editor must decide which way to do it. Knowing that Melville's source, Thomas Beale's The Natural History
Many references to external facts in novels do not involve such internal discrepancies (or seeming ones) that call attention to themselves but rather are discrepant only when compared with an outside source. Moby-Dick, again, can conveniently illustrate how the treatment of these "errors" must vary with the immediate context. At one point (Chapter 101) the narrator presents some statistics about the stocks of food on a whaling ship, statistics said to be taken from a book called "Dan Coopman." A check of Melville's source for this passage, William Scoresby's An Account of the Arctic Regions (1820), shows that a double "error" is present: the book, according to Scoresby, is "Den Koopman," and he actually cites the statistics from a different work. But the playful nature of Melville's passage makes any "correction" out of the question. First of all, he takes "Dan Coopman" to be "the invaluable memoirs of some Amsterdam cooper in the fishery, as every whale ship must carry its cooper." This use of the name would in itself prevent an editor from altering the spelling or substituting another name. In addition, the spirit of the passage is suggested by the reference to "Dr. Snodhead, a very learned man, professor of Low Dutch and High German in the college of Santa Claus and St. Pott's, to whom I handed the work for translation." Within such a context the misattribution of the statistics is of no moment, for Melville is not expecting the reader to think of "Dan Coopman" as any more or less real than "Dr. Snodhead." An earlier passage, near the reference to "New Zealand Tom" (Chapter 45), offers a contrast. There the captains who insistently search for particular celebrated whales are said to have "heaved up their anchors with that express object as much
The editing of another of Melville's works has occasioned some debate over this principle, and the argument put forth can be instructive. Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr., in preparing their reading text (1962) of Billy Budd, Sailor, follow the reasoning just outlined and correct errors of fact when in their judgment the context shows that Melville was trying to be factually accurate.[40] Thus when Melville refers to the execution of "a midshipman and two petty officers" aboard the actual ship Somers, Hayford and Sealts alter "petty officers" to "sailors," since only one was in fact a petty officer. Peter Shaw has attacked this decision and, with a notable lack of restraint, calls it "Possibly the most stunning liberty with an author's text in the twentieth century."[41] Shaw's objection is based on the argument that errors are revealing. "Freud's doctrine in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life," he says, "offers the definitive argument against unconsidered editorial corrections." Naturally editorial emendations should never be "unconsidered," but he seems to be saying that corrections of factual error should probably never be undertaken in the first place: "Freud's book made it a matter of common
What Shaw fails to take into account in his discussion is the difference between working papers or private documents and finished literary products intended for an audience. When editors prepare private papers for publication, there is no doubt that they should not smooth out the text by eliminating factual errors, misspellings, deleted phrases, and the like.[42] All these features are part of the essential nature of such documents, and their psychological significance is one of the reasons for the importance of the documents. When Sir Walter Scott in his journal refers to an acquaintance whose real name was Durham Calderwood as "Calderwood Durham" or speaks of a marriage that actually took place in 1825 as occurring "in the beginning of 1826," these slips are integral parts of the text of the document, and one would be losing part of what the document has to offer if they were corrected; W. E. K. Anderson is right to leave them in the text in his Clarendon edition and merely to point out the errors in footnotes.[43] There is no question, in other words, that Shaw's point is correct in regard to the texts of private documents. Literary works and other works intended for publication, however, open up additional possibilities. They, too, can be treated as documents, and editors can prepare literatim transcriptions of any extant manuscripts, or facsimiles of particular copies of printed editions. Such work is valuable in making important evidence more widely available. But works intended for publication also demand to be edited in another way, which results in texts incorporating their authors' final intentions about what was to be placed before the public. Such works—by virtue of the fact they
In the case of Billy Budd, the preserved papers are clearly a private document, a working draft; but they contain a work of fiction, a work of the kind normally intended for a public audience, and not a diary or notebook entries. Recognizing this dual interest in the papers, Hayford and Sealts have prepared two edited texts. One of them, a "genetic" text, attempts to provide an accurate transcription of the textual features of the document, showing in the process the order of Melville's deletions, insertions, and alterations; the other, a "reading" text, attempts to offer a critical text representing Melville's intentions for the work as discernible from the document. The former aims to do justice to the manuscript as a document of Melville's biography and of American literary history; the latter aims to do justice to its text as a work of fiction. In the former, Melville's phrase "a midshipman and two petty officers" naturally appears, for there is no question here of emending what Melville actually put on paper, even if it was not what he intended to write. But in the latter, critical judgment must be employed to decide whether that factual error is one that Melville intended to make for the purposes of his fiction; Hayford and Sealts conclude that it is not, and they correct it. To believe that in doing so they have exercised an unwarranted liberty is to fail to understand the nature and the value of critical editing. Obviously another critic may disagree with them and argue that there are reasons for thinking that Melville particularly wished to say "petty officers" here; the issue involves literary judgment, and differences of opinion about it are bound to exist. But criticizing Hayford and Sealts's decision
Shaw's criticism, on the other hand, in effect questions the validity of critical editing: Shaw disapproves of the Hayford-Sealts emendation because the original reading may provide psychological insight into Melville's motivation, and he is thus objecting to a critical text for not being a transcription. The confusion in his thinking is suggested by the two possible interpretations that he offers of "Any unconscious exaggeration by Melville of the rank of those executed": Melville may have exaggerated "to increase the importance of the parallel with the Somers" or "out of a vaguely shared guilt over his cousin's complicity in the matter." The first, which would not have been unconscious, has to do with the literary effect of the comparison and could presumably be a reason for retaining the original reading in a critical text; the second, insofar as it is conceivable, is a reason for being interested in the error but not a reason for leaving it in the critical text of a literary work.[45] When Shaw concludes that the Hayford-Sealts emendation is "as significant as a nineteenth-century editor's excision of an entire paragraph of sexually explicit or politically dangerous material," he reveals his failure to understand that editorial alteration of a text can ever be anything other than a kind of censorship, something standing in the way of the author's expression rather than promoting it. This episode illustrates in dramatic fashion how the discussion of a factual error in a work of fiction demands a clear understanding of the different editorial approaches that can productively be employed. The essential prerequisite to clear thinking on the matter is recognizing the difference between a transcription, in which the editor must faithfully reproduce the errors of a particular document, and a critical text, in which the editor is not bound to retain a factual error simply because it is present in an authoritative document. A critical editor may finally decide to retain such an error on critical grounds but not because the error is a revealing Freudian slip, suggestive of the author's state of mind at the time of the preparation of a given document. The two approaches are distinct, and neither can be carried out competently if considerations applicable to one are allowed to intrude into the other. Errors of external fact often seem to provide the test cases for determining how well an editor has learned that lesson.[46]
If factual errors in fiction need not always be corrected in a critical text, one might at first assume that the situation would be different with "nonfiction" writing—any writing that is expository in nature, attempting to deal with the real world directly, not through the creation of an imagined world. Surely, one might think, factual errors and misquotations cannot be a legitimate part of the intended texts of such works. Everyone senses the distinction that René Wellek speaks of when he says, "There is a central and important difference between a statement, even in a historical novel or a novel by Balzac which seems to convey 'information' about actual happenings, and the same information appearing in a book of history or sociology."[47] The difference is undeniable, and yet there seem to be intermediate shadings. One reads a "book of history" like Gibbon or Macaulay as a work of literary creativity, and not merely because it is from the past and limited in its information by what was known at the time. Or one reads an essay of sociological or philosophical analysis for its mastery of exposition, recognizing that some of its points may be half-truths or distortions employed to advance a particular argument. Of course, the truth or falsity of the information conveyed does not alter the fact that in such works the author is speaking directly to the reader, not through a fictional persona or a created world. Any author, whether producing novels and poems or writing essays, may undertake to alter facts for the purposes of the work, and what we think of as "creative literature" does not exclude so-called "nonfiction."[48] Many attempts have been made to distinguish writing that is "literature" from writing that is not,[49] but no satisfactory dividing line has ever been established. The implication of all this for the editor of a critical text is to suggest that a blanket rule regarding the correction of factual errors in nonfiction would be just as shortsighted as such a rule for more obviously "literary" works. Since deciding whether a given work can be regarded as "literature" is itself an act of critical judgment, no such classification
Perhaps even more than with fiction, a common situation in nonfiction is the occurrence of quotations from other works. Several philosophers have now been accorded careful critical editions, and the problem of quotations has been confronted in them. In the first volume (1969) of Jo Ann Boydston's edition of The Early Works of John Dewey, Fredson Bowers contributes a statement of textual policy that records a central point: "In Dewey's texts," he says, "all quotations have been retained just as he wrote them even though not always strictly accurate, since that was the form on which he was founding his ideas" (p. xvii). A basic reason for allowing inaccurate quotations to stand, in fiction as well as nonfiction, is that the quotations in that form may have ramifications that are unemendable—they may be the subject of a discussion in the text or may have influenced the author's thinking. Retaining Dewey's quotations "just as he wrote them," however, raises another problem, for it is conceivable that what he wrote at times contained mere slips and did not always reflect what he intended to write (whether or not what he intended to write was accurate), and it is also possible that some errors in quotations in printed texts or in nonauthorial manuscripts or typescripts are slips by people other than Dewey. Bowers does not go into this question because no emendations in quotations are in fact made in this volume; but the relevance of the issue is clearly recognized by Jo Ann Boydston, who, in her introduction to the appendix that prints the correct wording of the inaccurate quotations,[50] says, "It should be noted that specific changes, both in substantives and in accidentals, may have been instituted in the transmission rather than by Dewey himself. The variable form of quoting does suggest that Dewey, like many scholars of the period, was not overly concerned about precision in accidentals, but many of the changes in cited materials may well have arisen in the printing process" (p. lxxxix). Recognition of that fact underscores the necessity for a critical approach to each quotation, an attempt to judge on the
In later volumes of the Dewey edition some emendations in quotations are made, and the critical approach implicit in Boydston's comments in the first volume is more explicitly remarked upon. Bowers adds to his essay the point that sometimes "special circumstances in a specific text require the correction of quotations within the text itself" (IV, xlix; V, cxxviii); and Boydston notes that some house-styling of Dewey's periodical pieces encompassed the quotations as well, giving the editor a reason for restoring certain punctuation to those quotations (V, clxxvi). Sometimes an internal contradiction calls attention to what was intended in the quotation: Dewey quotes a sentence from Paul Bourget, but the text omits a clause on Stendhal, leaving four writers mentioned; because Dewey refers to the "five" writers in the quotation, it is clear that he intended for that clause to be present, and it is of course restored (III, 37). In other cases, the internal contradiction may be less mechanical but no less forceful: when a quotation from Alexander Bain reads, "a mental association is rapidly formed between his [the child's] obedience and apprehended pain," it is clear that Dewey could not have intended to substitute "obedience" for the "disobedience" of the original and could not have believed that the original read that way, and an emendation is rightly made (IV, 330). Generally, however, misquotations pose more debatable questions for an editor. The Dewey edition does not emend a misquotation from F. H. Bradley that reads "it is here the intellect alone which is [instead of "has"] to be satisfied" (Middle Works, IV [1977], 58) or one from F. J. E. Woodbridge that reads "by insisting that by [instead of "from"] the nature of mind" (p. 224). It is unlikely that Dewey made these changes intentionally, but one could argue that they are so insignificant as to be allowable in the tradition of approximate quotation;[51] on the other hand one could argue that the "is" and "by" are slips induced in each case by the presence of the same word earlier in the line and that they are simply mistakes that ought to be corrected. Even though approximate quotation is justifiable as a contemporary convention, any
Since decisions on such matters must grow out of the immediate context of the passage and the larger context of the author's times and general practice, they will vary from situation to situation; they will also
If those conventions even in scholarly writing in the late nieteenth and early twentieth centuries allowed more flexibility than we are now accustomed to, it hardly needs to be stated that the situation was still freer in earlier periods. The point has been well put in the Yale edition
If quotations in nonfiction works should be treated in a critical spirit, it is equally true that bibliographical citations and other references to external facts in them must also be so treated. In Bowers's edition of James's Essays in Radical Empiricism (1976), James's citation of A. S. Pringle-Pattison's book as "Man and the Cosmos" instead of Man's Place in the Cosmos (p. 53) is not emended (though of course the correct title is recorded in the notes), for there is no question about what James wrote, which is a characteristic example of nineteenth-century allusive citation. On the other hand, when Washington Irving, in Mahomet and His Successors, begins a sentence with "The Arabs, says Lane," and ends the paragraph with a correct reference to "Sale's Koran," it is clear that "Lane" is merely a slip for "Sale," and Henry A. Pochmann and E. N. Feltskog make the emendation (p. 374) in their Wisconsin edition (1970). Joseph J. Moldenhauer and Edwin Moser, in their volume of Early Essays and Miscellanies (1975) in the Princeton edition of Thoreau, attempt to distinguish between erroneous information and typographical errors in Thoreau's sources: when Thoreau gives James Hogg's birthdate as 1772 instead of 1770, they do not correct it, because his source also gives 1772 as the year; but when he follows that source in citing "Madoc of the Moor," they emend "Madoc" to "Mador" on the grounds that the source reading was merely a typographical error. Other editors might disagree with this distinction and argue the case differently; but one cannot quarrel with the Thoreau editors' recognition of the necessity for applying critical judgment to each factual error and not handling all errors by a ready-made rule. In some cases, as the Thoreau edition illustrates, the basis for correcting a factual error in a copy-text may be provided by an author's earlier draft. In Thoreau's fair-copy manuscript of his early essay on "Sir Walter Raleigh," the year 1592 is said to be eight years before Raleigh's imprisonment, but the correct year, 1595, is present in two previous drafts (p. 188); and in The Maine Woods (ed. Moldenhauer, 1972) the copy-text statement that "our party of three paid two dollars" (p. 160) can be corrected by reference to the first draft, where the fare is recorded as three dollars per person (Thoreau's "2" and "9" resemble one another). Factual errors can of course be corrected without such documents, but their existence helps to confirm the author's intention.
These considerations call attention to the fine line that an editor must draw between correcting in the sense of emending a text in the light of the author's intention and correcting in the sense of revising. Henry Pochmann, in the Mahomet edition, is well aware of the problem when he notes that he cannot correct Irving's grammar or syntax "short of making the transition from editing to revising Irving's text" (p. 602). After he describes Irving's methods of constructing approximate quotations, he adds, "Because the primary concern is to reproduce what Irving wrote, or intended to write, the editor has concentrated on what Irving's text shows and has noted or corrected Irving's alterations [of quotations] only when it can be shown that his modifications are erroneous or unintentional, or both." Although the inclusion of the word "erroneous" makes the sentence less clear (since from the editor's point of view the only things that can be erroneous within the text are those that are unintended), this statement is useful both because it sets forth a sensible point of view for handling quotations (and, by extension, other matters involving external fact) and because its seeming ambiguity forces one to focus on the vexing problems of intention. To say that an editor reproduces what an author "wrote, or intended to write" is obviously meant to allow the editor to correct the author's slips of the pen. It is not meant to imply that all factual errors are necessarily slips and are to be corrected by the editor; but the difficulty of constructing a sentence making that distinction explicit suggests the difficulties of the distinction itself. A factual error is not a slip, of course, if an author intentionally alters the facts; but neither is it a slip if the author has copied accurately from an inaccurate source. That the author in the latter case intended to get the facts right does not give the editor license to correct them if there is a reasonable possibility that the erroneous facts have had some influence on the author's thinking and thus have ramifications elsewhere in the text. One is dealing, in other words, with the author's immediate intention in the act of writing; basing editorial decisions on some more programmatic intention to be "accurate" would frequently mean becoming a collaborator of the author and undertaking a new stage of revision which that author never got around to.
The editing of Thoreau's college papers, though rather a special case, illustrates the point. Thoreau made some revisions in his papers before submitting them to Edward T. Channing; when Channing
This point of view, particularly when applied to "nonfiction," is bound to raise a question in many readers' minds. Surely, they would say, writers of "nonfiction" set out to be informative, and if one does not correct all their errors one is caring more about the writers as individuals of interest in their own right than about the subjects they are discussing. Where, in other words, do we draw the line between an interest in a piece of writing for the information it conveys and an interest in it as the expression of a particular individual at a specific time? Irving's historical works were intended to be informative, but today we turn to them more to experience Irving's prose and to observe his handling of the material; if we wish to learn the "facts" about the historical events he dealt with, we feel that more recent accounts, based on further research, have superseded his treatments. Similarly, we are not indignant over James's and Dewey's misquotations, because we are interested in the versions that influenced their thought; but if we read current scholarly
If a publisher's editor had informed F. O. Matthiessen that he was quoting a corrupt text of White-Jacket with the reading "soiled fish" for "coiled fish," he would have revised his discussion accordingly, for it was not his aim to analyze a phrase Melville never wrote. But if a scholarly editor were to prepare an edition of Matthiessen's book, nothing could be done about rectifying the erroneous "soiled," which forms the basis for an analysis of "the unexpected linking of the medium of cleanliness with filth."[57] Even if Matthiessen had not made a point of the word "soiled," the scholarly editor would have to think very carefully before correcting it in the quotation, for Matthiessen quoted accurately the Constable text, assuming it to be correct, and that text is the one lying behind his commentary. The critical activity of the scholarly editor is directed toward recovering what an author intended at a particular time, whether that time was yesterday, four decades ago, or four centuries ago.[58] This principle applies to matters of external fact just as much as to any other feature of the work, although editors sometimes seem more tempted to abandon their historical orientation when dealing with those matters.
Reference to Matthiessen's discussion of "soiled" is a reminder that on many occasions an author's elaboration of an erroneous point makes any emendation out of the question: it is fruitless to consider—except as an exercise—whether or not one would emend "soiled" if Matthiessen
There are thus two considerations that need to be kept in mind in dealing with factual errors. First one must consider whether a correction can realistically be undertaken. If a correction involves only a simple substitution, then it can be seriously considered; but if the erroneous information has been referred to repeatedly or been made the basis of further comment, there is no way to make the correction, short of more extensive rewriting and alteration than a scholarly editor can contemplate. This consideration is purely a practical one and has nothing to do with authorial intention: some errors can be considered for correction, others cannot. In the latter case, there is no point debating what the author intended, for no alteration can be attempted; besides, the use to which the error has been put makes it in effect an intended part of the
The reasons for leaving Keats's "Cortez" alone are therefore somewhat more complicated than those Amy Lowell seems to imply when she says that Keats used the name "probably by accident" but that "It is no matter." To say that what an author puts into a text "by accident" is "no matter" suggests an uncritical approach to the text; it implies an acceptance of whatever is present in a particular text, as if one were approaching the text of a working document, where one is interested in preserving false starts and errors for their psychological significance. But the sonnet is a finished work of art, not merely a literary document, and it demands to be edited critically, with attention to possible emendations to restore the author's intention. Whether Keats intended to disregard historical fact or confused the historical Balboa with Cortez, however, need not be pondered, for there is no question that "Cortez" is the word he put into the poem at this point, and the role which that word plays in the patterns of sound and rhythm in the poem makes it an integral element of the work. Furthermore, the connotations of "Cortez" are such that it is able to serve as a vehicle to carry the intended tenor of the figure. This is one of those situations where an "error" is unemendable because the use made of it within the work rules out any editorial attempt to rectify it. "Cortez" must remain, not because author's accidents do not matter, but because it—accident or not in origin—became, as Keats wrote, an inextricable part of the work. Probably Amy Lowell had such points in mind, but her elliptical statement does not make them clear and even seems to encourage the view that the accuracy of external references in literary works need not be seriously investigated.
References to external fact, as in this instance, raise textual questions because they call attention to a second "text" (the historical fact) with which the text under consideration can be compared. Editorial attention
| ||