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III
A convenient pairing was brought about the following year by the publication of Hershel Parker's Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons: Literary Authority in American Fiction (1984),[54] for that book locates the other pole of the debate over authorial intention and its place in the historical study of texts. Parker takes the position, with a vengeance, that authorial intention is central: he believes that the important intention is what authors manifest during the creation of works and that even authors' own later revisions often have no more right to become part of those works than the alterations initiated by others. His and McGann's books, therefore, serve to define the limits of the area under discussion. What they share is a sense of urgency about the need for a renewed historical orientation in literary studies and a conviction that textual criticism is central to literary criticism. From there on, of course, they are in contrast, and in more ways than one might anticipate. For McGann's book, despite its incoherence, calls attention to a fundamental theoretical issue, whereas Parker's book, though far better written and organized, is principally of interest for its detailed case histories, not because its basic thesis is of theoretical significance.
Parker begins with the assumption that "All valid meaning is authorial meaning" (p. ix);[55] he is concerned not with arguing this general point but only with proceeding from it to a more precise definition of authorial meaning. Drawing especially on John Dewey's Art as Experience (1934) and Albert Rothenberg's The Emerging Goddess (1979), he describes the creative process as one that "begins, continues (as clinical
This argument, as set forth by Parker, is not a helpful or clarifying one. The key to the problem is the fact that even if the creative process is granted to be "determinate," in the sense that it comes to an end, one is not provided by Parker with any historically oriented guideline for defining that ending point. It does not make sense, as he recognizes, to fix any quantitative limit: obviously one cannot say that any revision made within twenty-four hours, or three days, or six weeks, of the writing of the last sentence of a work emerges from the heat of the creative process, and that later revisions do not.[57] Even during what seems a
What does underlie them is the editor's aesthetic judgment. Deciding whether a revision is successful (or satisfactory, or simply makes sense rather than nonsense) depends on individual judgment. Some revisions that produce clear inconsistencies are indubitably blemishes (when one can be sure that no authorial purpose is served by them), but many of the revisions that Parker discusses can be (and have been) the subject of disagreement as to their worth or effectiveness. The fact that he is asking editors to make literary value judgments is not in itself a problem, for
This position is not necessarily untenable, but we are not likely to be persuaded of its cogency by an argument enveloped in an irrelevant discussion of the creative process (interesting concept though it is). The more direct way to justify such an approach is to say that, if one is producing a critical text (in which the choice among variants involves the editor's judgment in any case), one should present the work in the most successful of the various forms dictated by the author's shifting intentions. (If the goal is to remain historically oriented, the editor must be
The role of subjectivity in Parker's plan is thus fundamentally different from its place in the approach that requires—to justify the absence of late revisions from a critical text—a demonstration that they actually produced a new work (or an independent version, whichever one wishes to call it). Parker's rejection of that approach is characteristic of his reasoning. In discussing the 1907 text of James's The American, he asks whether a work can be "new" when "a good many lines at a stretch, occasionally, are wholly unrevised, while some other revisions respect the structure of a long paragraph while altering it stylistically sentence by sentence" (p. 107)—as if the presence of unrevised passages, or passages with unrevised structure, are incompatible with the existence of a different work. He later ridicules critics who seem to think that an author "confers meaning on a completed text with the wave of a hand or by ripping a book apart and reordering a hunk of it" (p. 218). When "hunks are re-used, unaltered or only slightly altered," he asserts, "what goes unrevised to a greater or lesser extent goes unrethought, unrestructured, carrying its original intentionality in a new context where that intentionality is more or less at war with the different intentionality in the altered or newly written passages" (pp. 228-229). These comments suggest a quantitative test, implying that a new work must be largely constructed of new sentences: "If unaltered or scarcely altered hunks of the original text remain in the later text, that later text is not truly a 'separate' one" (p. 229). Of course unaltered passages do sometimes clash with their new contexts, but at other times they do not. A writer may make only a few crucial changes in a work, leaving the rest unrevised, and yet the import of the whole may be changed; the unaltered passages will have taken on altered significance, and the fact that they are unaltered does not necessarily mean that they are "unrethought." Parker's firm belief that "textual meaning is not something living in a text" as an autonomous entity (p. 219) should be seen to argue against, not for, his view: a passage, not being autonomous, will not necessarily carry its original meaning into a new context. If it seems to fit successfully into the new context, are we to say it has been rethought and that the result is a new work? And if it does not, that it is unrethought and the result not a new work? Parker is really saying that a new work can come only from successful revision, making "new work" an evaluative term referring to a successful work. His argument seems to run as follows: writers infuse meaning into works in the process of composition; moving passages around is not a part of the composition process unless the shifted passages are thoroughly rethought; we can tell that they have been
Parker's main thesis is built on a patent inconsistency. He repeatedly insists that the only meaning we should be interested in is what the author put into the text: we must think of the author as "a human being who worked meaning into the text line by line and page by page," for "authorial power is the only literary power there is" (p, 219). Nevertheless we are also told that authors frequently do not know when to stop revising their work and that what some of their revisions produce is nonsense rather than valid meaning: "the creative process, like any other process, has bounds, beyond which no author, however fine a craftsman, is apt to intervene with impunity" (p. 51). There is apparently a higher authority than the author, after all. Because Parker believes that unrevised passages in new contexts, not having been built up word by word anew, exemplify the doomed effort to prolong the creative process and are thus unlikely to succeed, he is scornful of authors and critics who claim—as in the instance of Tender Is the Night—that a rearrangement of sections has resulted in dramatic improvement. "It is," he says, "as if the right order were latent in what Fitzgerald wrote, awaiting only a magic touch to restore it to a platonic ideal which had had no reality during the years of composition" (p. 219). But Parker, too, has his platonic ideal, for he states that "the working assumption of any student of the creative process is that the direction of any developing aesthetic object is toward unity" (p. 217). The creative process has an end, and the work is then at its most unified, though authors do not always realize that they have reached this point and may try to make further improvements. Parker professes to put the author back into literary criticism: he deplores the tendency to see a work as "a verbal icon, a unique, perfect, and essentially authorless entity" (p. ix). But he also attacks the idea "that an author had the right to do whatever he wanted to do to his text" (p. 60),[61] and he believes that allegiance to the unity of the created work (whether or not we call it an "icon") finally takes precedence over a concern with what the author in fact did to the work.
Parker surely senses the trap he has set for himself, for at one point he says that we often "revere" the creator and the icon at the wrong times, the creator "after he has gone from creator of his own work to merchandiser or promoter of it" and the icon "not in the form it had when the artist was most in control of it" (p. 49)—a statement that epitomizes all the inconsistencies of the argument, even while it almost acknowledges them. The theoretical scaffolding collapses; but we are left with a series of incisive discussions of individual works, showing how a knowledge of their compositional and publishing histories (including what can be inferred about them through close reading) brings one in touch with basic critical questions about each work. These analyses, along with similar ones that Parker has published separately,[62] stand on their own, and it is regrettable that he tried to erect a theory around them. He thinks of himself as promoting a new movement and wishes he had found a name for it, recognizing that his earlier term, "the New Scholarship," was not right (p. 241).[63] In fact his achievement is to have provided some telling examples of the connections between good textual scholarship and good criticism; no label is needed to dignify that accomplishment, and his awkward attempt at a unifying theory of the creative process only detracts from it.
Once we see that Parker's approach actually moves away from the author, we should not be surprised to find that a reader-response critic takes the same general line.[64] Steven Mailloux is a rarity among such critics in feeling the need to discuss "Textual Scholarship and 'Author's Final Intention'"—as he entitles one chapter (pp. 93-125) of his book Interpretive Conventions: The Reader in the Study of American Fiction (1982).[65] He sees himself as offering a "third alternative" for the editor
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