University of Virginia Library

II

Jerome J. McGann's prominence as a spokesman for the social approach to texts is largely due to A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (1983),[19] though he has written a number of essays on editing, and his view of the nature of texts is of course evident in his many other writings. A basic statement of his position in the period under consideration here can be found in his review of McKenzie's lectures.[20] His general approach is substantially the same as McKenzie's, and perhaps for that reason he overlooks some of the flaws of those lectures. In any case, he serves McKenzie well, sometimes summarizing McKenzie's points more

effectively than McKenzie himself had done (despite his excessive reliance on fashionable jargon). There are two particularly valuable emphases in McGann's review. One is his insistence on the inseparability of the activities traditionally called "textual criticism" and "literary criticism." The other emerges from his understanding of the process of reading a good critical edition with apparatus: "a process by which the entire socio-history of the work—from its originary moments of production through all its subsequent reproductive adventures—is postulated as the ultimate goal of critical self-consciousness" (p. 21, col. 3).

There are some loose ends, however, that prevent his argument from being satisfying. He defines language to be "more properly conceived as an event than a medium," as "an extended field of communicative action"; one therefore "has to take the entirety of the language event as the object of interpretation" (p. 20, cols. 3-4). It follows that the same "text" will wear "different faces" in different situations (p. 21, col. 1). The problem arises in his accounting for these faces:

This tripartite classification (of what?) into "text," "version," and "work" is too imprecise to be helpful. If we agree to consider "text" the name for the "purely linguistic event," we have to shift our definition from the one McGann proposed a few paragraphs earlier, where the "text" (almost always in quotation marks) is declared not to be a linguistic event ("'The text' will not be located as the words on the page immediately before one's eyes"). Furthermore, why should "text," the linguistic event, be distinguished from "version," in McGann's sense of the physical object, if the point of the whole argument is that they are inseparable? "Text" and "version" are not two of the "faces" that a "text" (in a different sense) can wear; either the combination of "text" and "version" together (the words and their physical presentation) turns a different face to us under different circumstances, or else the "version" is the "face" that a "text" wears. In the latter case, the "text" (linguistic event) has an independent existence and would seem to be incongruent with the earlier definition of language as "an extended field of communicative action" (the extended field surely including the physical presentation). Even more surprising is the inclusion in this classification scheme of "work" as a "more global constitution of the poem." Presumably this vague phrase means that there is, after all, some meaningful sense in which a poem has an existence apart from its individual occurrences. If the "global" work "supervenes its many texts and its many versions" (note the "its"), how is it to be defined without conceiving of language as an intangible medium and depriving material texts of their postulated primary status? That to each of us "the work we call Paradise Lost can be, will be, reconstituted once again" suggests, as textual critics have traditionally thought, that the physical presentation of verbal texts offers us not the works themselves but the evidence out of which we "reconstitute" the works. This view does not contradict the idea that a document is "meaning-constitutive . . . in every dimension of its material existence" (p. 20, col. 2); but it subordinates that process of deriving meaning to the reconstitution of a work that has no tangible existence. McGann's concept of "the work" thus undercuts his larger argument and aligns him with an approach to texts that he seems at other times to find defective.[21]

This indecision is apparent in another passage as well. McGann identifies three kinds of reading, "linear" correlated with "text," "spatial" with "version," and "radial" with "work" (p. 21, cols. 2-3). But asserting that critical editions are "typically structured so as to enforce spatial and radial reading processes along with the linear process" once again paradoxically raises questions about the role of physical form in the creation of meaning. A critical edition has its own physical form; and the readings of other editions, reported in its apparatus, are a part of that form. If such an arrangement permits "radial" reading—that is, reading texts with the knowledge of other texts in one's mind—it can only do so on the "linear," not the "spatial," level, even if the physical features of the earlier editions are described, because no verbal description of visual effects (nor even a facsimile) can substitute for the actual visual presentation. It follows either that physical form is dispensable as an element in reading or that "radial" reading is not being posited as a full engagement with multiple texts.

The role of physical form is a central issue not only for literary sociology but also for traditional analytical bibliography, which McKenzie and McGann find too restrictive. McGann, seemingly with approval, summarizes McKenzie's "initial, critical remarks on theory of bibliography,"

particularly his criticism of Fredson Bowers for saying that "historical bibliography is not, properly speaking, bibliography at all" (p. 20, col. 1). McGann, like McKenzie, does not take into account the shifting usages of the word "bibliography" illustrated by such a quotation or seek to find a stable concept linking apparently divergent views of bibliography. The context of Bowers's statement (in his Encyclopaedia Britannica article on "Bibliography" in 1960) makes clear that he was distinguishing "analytical bibliography," the examination of physical evidence in books for clues to their production history, from historical studies of book-related topics, like type, paper, binding, printing, and publishing. He was certainly not implying that bibliography (i.e., analytical bibliography) was not a tool of historical research or that it did not draw on and contribute to historical studies of book production. Just how much of the whole realm of book history is to be called "bibliography" is unimportant, a mere matter of labeling. What is fascinating in this concern with the definition of bibliography is the downplaying of one kind of physical evidence and the elevating of another. Analytical bibliographers look at the physical evidence that can reveal information about production history; literary sociologists are concerned with the physical details that may have affected readers' responses (or that publishers—and sometimes authors—believed would affect those responses). The work of the analytical bibliographers is seen by the literary sociologists as feeding into an intentionalist view of literature, and as authorial intention loses favor, so must analytical bibliography do so. Although analytical bibliography was largely developed by editors interested in establishing authorially intended texts, it uncovers facts of printing history that are obviously not tied to any one editorial theory. What happens in the printing shop is part of the social process by which texts of works are disseminated and is of direct relevance to literary sociology. But McGann, like McKenzie, chooses to regard analytical bibliography as somehow inimical to history, as something now superseded by the "return to history" that has resulted from the sociological approach.[22]

In the course of his comments on critical editions, McGann cites "the excellent recent edition of Ulysses edited by Hans Gabler";[23] he had earlier written at length about this edition in an essay entitled "Ulysses as a Postmodern Text: The Gabler Edition,"[24] which offers further opportunity for examining his position on textual matters. The title under which he later collected the essay, "Ulysses as a Postmodern Work," is misleading, for it is not Ulysses but Gabler's edition of Ulysses (1984) that he sees as a "postmodern" work. The 1922 first edition is the "appropriate modernist Ulysses," whereas Gabler's Ulysses explains the work to us in "a peculiarly appropriate postmodern form" (p. 192). What makes it "postmodern" is its "synoptic text" (Gabler's term), full of variant readings and symbols aimed at showing the compositional development of the work. According to McGann this text is "distinctly postmodern" because "the style is impersonal and maintained in a surface mode ('languaged'); the procedure is intertextual and self-referencing; the form of order is stochastic" (p. 189). To the extent that this

characterization is accurate, it can be applied to any editorial apparatus (a point to which I shall return).[25] However "postmodern" the edition may be, one may wonder why it interests McGann, for Gabler's aim is to trace the history of the composition of the work, and thus the focus is on Joyce as author, not on the collaborative forces of the production process. But McGann does look at the edition itself as the product of a particular set of social forces: Joyce's text, he says, is "enmeshed within an editorial network" that reflects two sets of "determinants"—the viewpoint of "an internationally mobile scholar," with training at Virginia and access to computer facilities at Tübingen, and "the institutional history of Joyce scholarship up to the present time." The form of the edition "replicates the conditions of its production," and its details are "no less than a coded set of interpretive clues for understanding, and using, the work" (p. 188). This observation does not, however, provide a reason for singling out Gabler's edition, since any edition can be approached in this way. McGann himself immediately says, "The same is of course true for other literary works, whose meanings are a function of their material, institutional, and social histories."[26]

One must therefore look elsewhere for the distinctiveness of the Gabler edition, for the reason to discuss it in the context of those scholarly works that "immediately establish themselves as epochal events" or in relation to the "few seminal works" of modern textual study (p. 173). To say that the Gabler edition ought to be "a required object of study for every scholar working in English literature" (p. 174)[27] necessitates noting those features that set it appart from other editions. McGann's aim, accordingly, is "an exploration of the general methodological significance of the edition in its immediate historical context." The significances he points out can be summarized under four heads: (1) Gabler's focus on the composition process; (2) his handling of copy-text; (3) his

deployment of apparatus; and (4) the implications of the edition for critical analysis. In each of these areas McGann's reasoning is faulty, and in none of them does he succeed in showing how Gabler's edition is distinctive. His analysis does not finally serve to clarify the details of his "sociohistorical empiric" (p. 186).

As for the first matter—the focus on Joyce's composition—McGann appears to imply that Gabler's emphasis on distinguishing evidence of composition from evidence of transmission is a distinctive feature of the edition and thus is somehow different from what intentionalist editors have traditionally done. But there is nothing new, for example, in saying that "Joyce is sometimes merely his own scribe, a textual transmitter and not a textual maker" (p. 177); this statement is simply another way of saying that editors must be critical even of texts in the author's hand, since the author, like anyone else, can make mistakes in writing. McGann quotes, evidently with approval, Gabler's operational distinction between "documents of composition," in which "'the text is held to possess full authority, unless it can be shown to be faulty,'" and "documents of transmission," in which "'the text is held to be potentially faulty, unless it can be proved to possess authority'" (pp. 176-177). Gabler recognizes here that the texts of individual documents are often unlikely to be either exclusively compositional or exclusively transmissional.[28] But the lack of parallelism in the two parts of the statement ("to possess full authority, unless . . ." versus "to be potentially faulty, unless . . .") leads one to see that in fact the texts of both categories of document are potentially faulty and must be questioned at every point. The two-part classification of documents is more a hindrance than a help, since the texts of extant documents are unlikely to correspond exactly to stages of textual development: a single extant document may contain the only surviving clues to several compositional and transmissional stages of the text. In order to associate such stages with discrete documents, Gabler is sometimes led to citing hypothetical lost documents, containing in Joyce's hand the authoritative revisions that appear in extant transmissional documents (not in his hand). But having admitted that Joyce himself can be at times only a transmitter rather than a creator, Gabler cannot by this maneuver realistically postulate lost documents that are entirely compositional—and therefore it is hard to see how this approach is more than a confused way of stating

what editors have always understood. They have always assumed, of necessity, that some of the readings in extant documents first appeared in documents now lost. What else could editors focusing on authorial intention have done but to extract from extant documents the evidence for understanding the compositional history of a work? McGann's discussion actually adds some confusion not present in Gabler;[29] but what is more significant is that it fails to show how Gabler has made any new contribution to textual theory or practice in his concept of compositional and transmissional documents.

Regarding copy-text, McGann says that "the problem of copytext in this edition focuses attention upon everything in the edition which is most interesting and important" (p. 178). Despite his own misunderstanding of the concept as conventionally used,[30] McGann does see that Gabler's usage is unconventional, since in the Ulysses edition "copytext" means the eclectic text that Gabler has constructed, not the documentary text (or texts) serving as the basis for that construction. This pointless shift in definition cannot be what is important, however. Presumably what is claimed to be significant is the way in which Gabler has gone about constructing his "continuous manuscript text." McGann seems to think that the existence of a plethora of prepublication documents—a common situation for twentieth-century authors—necessitates a new editorial goal: "Whereas critical editors of earlier works tried to reconstitute some (now lost) state of the text—ideally, the earliest

possible or 'original' text—critical editors of modern works are already in possession of the kind of 'original' text which those other editors were trying to recover" (p. 179). Critical editors of earlier works, however, do not necessarily focus on "the earliest possible or 'original' text"; critical editors of later works, even when they have the author's fair-copy manuscript, still have to determine how it relates in every detail to the author's intention, if that is what they are interested in; and critical editors of all works seek to reconstruct the texts of works as they stood at particular past moments, texts that can never be assumed to coincide with those of any surviving documents. McGann is nevertheless correct in pointing out that the text Gabler arrives at by building up a text from a succession of prepublication documents is different from "a fully and systematically corrected edition of 1922" (p. 180): whenever any variants are regarded as indifferent, the choice of copy-text (in the conventional sense) determines some features of the critical text. But McGann's distinction between these two approaches to the choice of copy-text is puzzling: In the first place, critical editors—by definition—always produce an "imagination" or a "reconstruction" of a past text. Furthermore, is not the distinction between "Joyce the writer" and "Joyce the author" a way of talking about two kinds of intention? Editors have regularly distinguished between an author's prepublication or private or artistic intention and an author's more inclusive intention that incorporates various ways of accommodating the expectations or demands of others in the publication process. The two kinds of intention may indeed imply different choices of copy-text, but not necessarily; only the editor's judgment in assessing the nature of the surviving materials and the author's working habits can lead to a decision about copy-text (which may of course be a decision to choose different copy-texts for different parts of a work). McGann has not demonstrated that Gabler's treatment of copy-text is "interesting and important," if by that he means that it pushes forward our thinking about the concept.

McGann makes even higher claims for Gabler's presentation of textual evidence in the form of a "synoptic text" that incorporates the compositional variants, coded with diacritical marks and symbols. Gabler himself declared, "As a form of apparatus to be read and used as a text, the synoptic presentation of Ulysses in progress from manuscript to print is the innovative feature of this edition" (p. 1901). McGann goes further and says that Gabler's synoptic text "completely overhauls the way we might think about the text as a whole" (p. 181, italics his): by giving "priority of importance" to the synoptic text as a text for "seriatim reading" (p. 175), Gabler shows what is "entailed in the idea of textual instability" and allows a "number of different Ulysses . . . to occupy the space of critical possibility" (p. 181). There are no grounds for regarding Gabler's edition as pioneering in this respect, since an "inclusive" apparatus (incorporated in a running text) has been used by many editors to show manuscript revisions; the 1962 edition of Billy Budd, Sailor, edited by Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr., is a famous earlier example of a genetic text accompanied by a reading text.[32] Whether Gabler's approach to apparatus is innovative is less significant in any case than the general question of what this kind of apparatus accomplishes. McGann's view at the time of this essay was apparently that the placement of superseded variants in a running text gives them greater prominence and offers the reader a better sense of the instability of texts. But everything that he says about Gabler's synoptic text could be applied as well to the kind of apparatus in which variants are listed at the foot of a page or the end of a text. Gabler's diacritics he calls "a grammar of an artificial language" (p. 181), and he believes that, when we have mastered it, "we shall have gone a long way toward understanding the nature of texts in general" (p. 182). The "surrounding diacritics"

emphasize the "fragility" of the text, in which "one reading is marginalized by another"; we are "made conscious that this text is to be fundamentally characterized as a thing of many real and concrete details which are, at the same time, extremely fragile, and put together in strange, stochastic orderings" (p. 191). The alternative system of reporting variants in footnotes or lists is also a "language," and when its conventions are mastered it tells us the same things. Variants placed in a running text are not necessarily more prominent, or easier to read in context, than those placed elsewhere: it is all a matter of becoming familiar with a set of conventions. That McGann may have come to this opinion is suggested in his review of McKenzie when he includes critical editions among the productions that encourage "radial" reading, the reading of several versions of a work simultaneously. It is clear that he is not thinking only of editions with genetic texts because he describes how "one moves around the edition, jumping from the reading text to the apparatus, perhaps from one of these to the notes or to an appendix, perhaps then back to some part of the front matter which may be relevant, and so forth" (p. 21).[33] This positive description of how a critical edition "allows one to imagine many possible states of the text" makes admirably clear the way in which an appended apparatus can be just as stimulating and productive an aid to reading as an inclusive apparatus is. Gabler's Ulysses, then, is not particularly significant for its handling of apparatus.

Finally, McGann stresses one particular critical implication that he finds in the Gabler edition. He argues that those critics who see textual meaning as the product of readers are not inclined to be concerned with the kind of textual indeterminacy that arises from the existence of variant documents. They see texts as "angelic rather than human" (p. 185), as having an ideal existence apart from physical embodiments. If we view them as human products, however,

McGann is making a valuable point if he is saying that reader-response critics overlook an important factor in readers' production of meaning when they do not take into account the physical features of documents. But how he wishes to link this observation, or some such observation, to the Gabler edition is not clear. "Gabler's edition," he says, "helps one to see the formal limits which always constrain the generation of texts" (p. 182). These "formal limits," this "sociohistory of the documents," cannot have much to do with the formal arrangement of text on pages or with the physical appearance of the documents, for the amount of information on such matters to be derived from the Gabler edition is not extensive (nor is it from any edition without facsimiles). We are left, then, with the text itself, encompassing alterations within individual documents and variants between one document and another; and if McGann is merely saying that the Gabler edition reports such alterations and variants, he is not distinguishing it from hundreds of other editions. "What Gabler's edition shows," he tries to explain, "is that unstable 'texts'—texts that are 'in process' or 'indeterminate'—always appear in material forms that are as determinate as the most 'stable' text one might want to imagine" (p. 186). But it is not true that texts "always appear in material forms": some texts exist only in the mind, and others have a public existence only in oral recitation. Furthermore, documents that no longer exist did have determinate texts when they existed, but their texts can now only be conjectured—and are therefore indeterminate, since no reconstruction can be certain. It is thus hard to see how McGann is stating anything more than the obvious fact that the texts of extant documents are determinate. His aim of incorporating the study of those documents within the process of literary criticism is laudable; but curiously his way of pursuing the point seems to reinforce the old separation of textual from literary criticism by suggesting that textual criticism and analytical bibliography set limits to be followed subsequently by literary criticism. Bibliographical analysis of a given document can indeed set limits on conjectures about the production of that document and hence sometimes about how the text of the document came to be what it is; but such analysis cannot operate on nonexistent documents, and any facts it seems to have established regarding extant documents cannot limit the emendations that may be proposed for reconstructing a text that does not at present exist. This limit is set by the informed judgment of the individual doing the reconstructing, and interpretation is thus tied to textual criticism in a more basic way than McGann's essay manages to make clear.[34] Gabler's edition is in any case no more appropriate for illustrating this line of argument than any other edition that records variant readings; indeed, it may be particularly inappropriate, for its citation of inferred documents as sources of readings de-emphasizes the distinction between existent and conjectured texts as underpinnings for critical editing.

McGann's discussions of Gabler and McKenzie offered two natural opportunities for him to clarify what was left confused in the Critique. But neither essay makes matters clearer, except possibly at one point: in the Gabler piece, he says that "'genetic' texts . . . may be conceived either as mirrors of composition or mirrors of production" (p. 182). If this statement indicates a recognition that authorial intention and the results of the collaborative process of production are two independent (and in most instances mutually exclusive) goals of critical editing, it would mark a significant advance over the thinking reflected in the Critique. The statement in fact still displays some confusion by making "'genetic' texts" rather than so-called reading texts its subject: the choices entailed in producing a clear (i.e., "reading") text cannot normally accommodate both goals simultaneously, but a "genetic" apparatus can be constructed to do so. Possibly McGann would have made this point if he had written the Gabler essay after the McKenzie review, where his account of apparatus seems more in line with it. But no further clarifications, so far as I am aware, have appeared in his other recent pieces on textual criticism,[35] although in a 1986 interview he explicitly amplified the Critique by accepting authorial intention as one of the editorial goals that can emerge from a study of the full compositional and production history of a work.[36] This development in his thinking

is welcome because it will make more coherent his argument for an inclusive conception of textual criticism. Up to now, his effectiveness has been seriously undercut by a lack of rigorous thought, at least as reflected in his often careless prose. He has nevertheless played an important role in recent years by causing more textual critics than ever before to pay attention to other goals for critical editing than the construction of authorially intended texts and thus to define their activities in relation to a broad range of critical endeavor.