 | Studies in bibliography |  |
IV
There were of course many writings on textual matters in the last five
or six years of the twentieth century that did not focus on nonverbal arts,
or foreign traditions of editing, or computers. What these more general
works did treat, however, was often not so different in essentials, for such
questions as the ontology of verbal works, the role of authorial intention
in editorial thinking, and the relative desirability of documentary and
emended texts are basic to all textual discussion. Among the broader
are also many pieces that accomplish little more than to repeat currently
fashionable points in an uncritical way.
A prime example of the latter category is W. Speed Hill's "Where
Are the Bibliographers of Yesteryear?", which argues that analytical
bibliography has become irrelevant to editing both because it cannot
uncover printers' copy and because editors' attention has turned away
from authorial intention. But the article's texture of unexamined clichés[74]
disintegrates entirely when one remembers that the effort to learn
as much as one can about the documents that transmit texts is a prima
facie prerequisite to editing, regardless of the degree of certainty it attains
in specific instances and regardless of the editorial goal one is
working toward. Hill is one of several people who in recent years have
attacked the so-called New Bibliography of Pollard, McKerrow, and
Greg. What has put analytical bibliography out of favor (in spite of its
focus on the materiality of documents) is that much of the earlier
work was performed by scholars who believed (in the words of Joseph
Loewenstein's essay mentioned below) that "textuality is . . . regulated
by originative personhood."[75]
One of the most critical treatments is
Laurie E. Maguire's "The Rise of the New Bibliography," the second
chapter (pp. 21-71) of her Shakespearean Suspect Texts: The "Bad"
Quartos and Their Contexts (1996). She claims that "Sentimental, lateVictorian,
land-owning imperialism influences much New Bibliographic
analysis, leading to conclusions which are as outmoded as the historical
circumstances which created them" (p. 59). But the "conclusions" she
refers to are textual, and she does not show how physical analysis necessarily
leads to those particular conclusions and thus does not present a
criticism of "New Bibliographic analysis" itself. Maguire is also the coeditor
(with Thomas L. Berger) of Textual Formations and Reformations
(1998), an anthology that (in the words of her introduction) "stems
from a reaction to the New Bibliography."[76]
In its opening essay, "Authentic
(pp. 23-44), Joseph F. Loewenstein strains to show that "determining"
factors for the "project" of the New Bibliography were "avarice, envy,
perhaps anti-Semitism, certainly chauvinism, forgery, the hoarding instinct,
and sound recording" (p. 23).[77]
Analytical bibliography is also thoughtlessly criticized by several contributors
to a "forum" organized by Susan Zimmerman for the 1996
volume of Shakespeare Studies ("Editing Early Modern Texts," 24: 1978).
contains a single paragraph (the third one) that is perhaps the
densest concentration of misstatements about analytical bibliography
that I have ever seen. He claims one of the "traditional assumptions of
modern bibliography" to be the "idea that spelling and punctuation
have no rules in the period, and are a function of the whim of the compositor"
(an opinion that no analytical bibliographer has ever uttered)
and that "there are elements of a text that are inessential or merely conventional,"
which "don't affect the meaning and we can therefore safely
change them" (an interpretation of Greg's "accidentals" that not only is
incorrect but has nothing whatever to do with bibliography). A "subtext,"
he says, is that "the printing process is transparent," so that we can
see what lay behind it; and "a still deeper assumption" is that "the text
itself is somehow independent of its material embodiment" (two unthinkable
assertions for an analytical bibliographer to make). It is hard
to believe that Orgel is so uninformed, and equally hard to believe that
he is intentionally slanting his argument. Another of these brief essays,
W. Speed Hill's "Where We Are and How We Got Here: Editing after
Poststructuralism" (pp. 38-46), is full of his familiar bywords: he is
content, for example, to repeat the nonsensical point that "the underlying
idealism of authorial intention as an editorial goal was never wholly
compatible with the rigorous materialism of the analytical bibliographer"
(pp. 41-42)—a point I shall comment on later, if any comment
is needed. In Zimmerman's "Afterword" (pp. 71-74), her reference to
"the New Bibliographer's presumption that Shakespeare's intentions
can be recuperated" and to "the idealism of the New Bibliography"
(p. 72) point to a basic flaw in recent discussions: the failure to distinguish
analytical bibliography from a particular editorial theory.[78] Although
the New Bibliographers were interested in authorial intention,
the essential insight they publicized (but did not fully originate) was that
printing processes affect texts; attempting to find out what happened
the study of book design and the post-production history of books.
Failure to make this distinction vitiates numerous other discussions,
such as Leah S. Marcus's in Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare,
Marlowe, and Milton (1996). When Marcus says, for instance, that "Proponents
of the New Bibliography . . . have tended to locate the `reality'
of a given literary creation outside its extant material embodiments"
(p. 29), or when she speaks (p. 30) of "the New Bibliography's insistence
on ideal text and ideal copy" (whatever the latter is supposed to mean),
she conflates under the term "New Bibliography" two distinct activities—analyzing
physical evidence and deciding on an approach to editing.
The harm resulting from this confusion is that analytical bibliography
is effectively ignored, whereas it should be recognized as an
essential tool for everyone, following any theory of literature, to employ
in examining documents. Similarly, David Holdeman, in the opening
pages of the introduction to his Much Laboring: The Texts and Authors
of Yeats's First Modernist Books (1997), sees nothing wrong with saying
that "much current editorial and bibliographical theory" challenges "the
primacy of authorial intentions" as well as "the equally fundamental
and traditional ontological assumptions that written texts are constituted
only by language" (p. 4). But these ideas were not part of a previous
"bibliographical theory," nor does current analytical bibliography challenge
them (to say nothing of the fact that this summary does not do justice
to the subtlety of the "editorial" theory it purports to describe).
Holdeman repeats, without embarrassment, the notion that the "GregBowers
editorial theory . . . registers prevailing Romantic, modernist,
and New Critical premises about the organic unity of literary works"
(p. 2).[79]
Philip Cohen has also been willing to recite certain familiar charges
against what he sees as the Anglo-American tradition of "stabilizing the
text" without examining them carefully. His "Textual Instability, Literary
Studies, and Recent Developments in Textual Scholarship"[80]
is
recent "paradigm shift in textual scholarship" (p. xiii). Intentionalist
editing is linked with "the modernist quest for pure form" (p. xxiii),
"the dream of a pure and organically unified form divorced from context
or meaning," which has had "an especially seductive appeal for artists
and critics alike ever since the Romantic period" (p. xxii). No thoughtful
writer could utter these fallacious points so unabashedly, or could
imagine that "traditional" editors ever believed in "the objective recuperability
of authorial intention" (p. xxiii). The level of the piece is
symbolized by its reference to the outmoded convention-paper topics of
the past that are "duly recorded in the dusty volumes deposited in one's
campus library" (p. xix). Although the theme of the essay—that textual
instability affects literary interpretation—is important, it is not well
served by being treated as a revelation antithetical to earlier editorial
thinking.[81]
Among the other writers who have often repeated such clichés without
reflecting the scrutiny that those clichés had previously received is
D. C. Greetham, one of the more prolific commentators on textual matters
at the end of the twentieth century. In the eight years from 1992
through 1999, he published five books—an introductory textbook, a
treatise on theory, a collection of his own essays, and two anthologies of
essays by others. The most valuable of these is one of the anthologies,
Scholarly Editing: A Guide to Research (1995), a 740-page book in which
specialists in various literatures summarize the history of editing in their
fields. Nothing of the kind had been attempted before, and bringing this
be warmly thanked for his devotion to the cause; the result is extremely
useful.[82] His other anthology, The Margins of the Text (1997), stems
from his suspicion (expressed in his introduction) that there may have
been "something patriarchal, elitist, even racist, about the very construction
of the traditional scholarly edition." The book consists of
fourteen essays, half devoted to "the function of discourses not previously
recognized as significant to scholarly editing" (given certain attitudes
toward "class, race, gender, and so on")[83] and half dealing with the significance
of what appears in "the margins of the book" ("marginalia,
commentary, and apparatus"). Greetham's own contribution, "The
Resistance to Philology" (pp. 9-24), discusses, rather unproductively,
"the current marginalized condition of textual study in the academy"
(p. 10).[84]
His textbook, Textual Scholarship: An Introduction (1992; reprinted
with corrections and an expanded "Selected Bibliography" in 1994),
heroically attempts to treat, in considerable detail, physical bibliography,
codicology, and book-production history as well as the history and theory
of editing works from all periods. He has generally done a creditable job
of restating what is known, though one may quarrel with the relative
allocation of space to various topics, given the introductory function of
the book; and a charitable reader will be willing to excuse, in a work of
such scope, the presence of passages that exhibit the author's lack of
intimate knowledge of particular areas. (One of the problems posed by
textbooks, of course, is that beginners will not know when they come
across such passages.)[85]
The collection of his essays, Textual Transgres-
twenty-one pieces from a twenty-year period (1977-97), four of
which had not previously been published.[86] In keeping with his subtitle,
there is a biographical introduction, and each of the essays is placed in
biographical context by prefatory remarks. These "interweaves," as he
calls them, along with the introduction, may ultimately be regarded as
the most useful parts of the book, for they form a substantial account
(totaling 151 pages) of the professional world of textual criticism in the
last quarter of the twentieth century, in the form of a memoir by an
active participant.
The remaining book is the one that I imagine Greetham regards as
his most ambitious: Theories of the Text (1999), a very long work that
has the broad aim of analyzing the various theoretical approaches that
have been taken to texts in all genres and media. "My theories of the
text," he says in the first paragraph of his introduction, "are thus theories
of writing and of reading, theories of intention and of reception,
theories of transmission and of corruption, and theories of originary conception
and of social consumption and variation." The book, he adds,
is "an account of the dialogics, pluralities, and contradictions that these
multiple processes engender." One is willing to overlook the foreboding
tinge of jargon here in order to welcome with enthusiasm the premise
of an open-minded vade mecum to a complex set of interconnected attitudes.
Any reader of the second page will have high expectations upon
encountering Greetham's enlightened "contention that only by seeing
the field whole can one begin to perceive the theory that is embedded in
practice, those generally unacknowledged (because unseen) principles
that drive both editorial and critical decisions."[87]
I have always stated
to my classes in textual criticism—as I assume other teachers of such
classes have also done—that every editorial action implies a theoretical
position, even though many editors have not consciously thought through
their rationales. Therefore I was delighted to see Greetham say, "I will
maintain throughout this book that all practice, even that which asserts
theory or theories."[88]
The book, however, does not measure up to the expectations thus
aroused, and many indications of the basic problems are already evident
in its introduction, which is entitled "Textual Theory and the Territorial
Metaphor." The prevalence of territorial boundaries in intellectual
discussion is a relevant matter for Greetham to address because his
goal is to show the implications, for textual criticism, of literary theories
that have primarily been discussed by critics with no interest in or
knowledge of textual criticism. He quite properly wishes to break down
what he calls the "territorial fallacy": "the assumption that certain
activities, even certain foundational concepts, were inherently `natural'
or proper in certain parts of the academic or scholarly map" and not in
others (p. 4). The barrier between what have usually been called "textual
criticism" and "literary criticism" has of course developed some cracks
in recent years, and anything that will cause it to crumble at a faster pace
is to be encouraged. Greetham's book, however, turns out not to be such
a thing, for in two extremely unfortunate ways he eschews the openness
that one had supposed he was aiming for.
One of the ways is symbolized by his insistence that he does not wish
to help effect a marriage between fields as presently conceived; rather,
his aim is to "co-opt" (a word he uses often) the language and approaches
of literary theory, bringing them into "our own textual camp" (p. 5). In
itself, the idea of showing that "theory" is not foreign to textual criticism
is valuable; but to do so in a way that stresses only a one-way movement
(a "co-option of the other disciplines" for use in "textual practice"),
envisioning the relationship between "fields" as "cohabitation" rather
than marriage (p. 6), only serves to reinforce boundaries. Should not
those "other disciplines" import (if not co-opt) an understanding of
textual transmission and its consequences? Are not the relationships
reciprocal? What is wrong with the idea of a marriage? Greetham speaks
of "the field of `text' " but it is "field," not "text," that I would put in
quotation marks, for the study of texts—that is, "textual criticism," or
the analysis of textual makeup and relationships—is not a field in the
usual sense. If we think of fields as disciplinary units (such as sociology,
philosophy, engineering, literature, and so on), they all use texts and
therefore would benefit from approaching their texts with the insights
and procedures that textual criticism, as well as literary criticism, have
provided. Textual criticism is properly a part of every field, and only
subfield) are truly equipped to engage in the textual criticism of that
field's (or subfield's) texts. One of the serious territorial problems in
need of correction is the idea that textual criticism is an independent
pursuit and that persons wishing to read the "content" of a work can
simply leave the question of what the text ought to be (if they think of it
at all) to textual scholars. Whereas Greetham recognizes that "theory"
should not be considered to reside in one area rather than another, he
fails to point out that "textual criticism" is an analogous activity in that
it supports every field and finds its natural home in all of them. His concentration
on taking "theory" from such places as literary criticism,
psychology, and anthropology and putting it into textual criticism is
actually a mixing—or at least a confusing—of his "territorial metaphor."
To straighten it out would require that attention be given to moving
textual criticism (with theory all compact, to be sure) into the multiplicity
of disciplinary fields.
The other way in which Greetham has failed to encourage the elimination
of inhibiting boundaries is through limiting his purview to scholars
rather than all readers, and indeed to textual scholars rather than all
scholars. On his first page, he says he is dealing with theories that "encompass
many of the current concerns of critical or literary theorists"
but "always with a special focus on the force and meaning of text as it has
been made phenomenologically available to use through the scholarly
work of a long line of textual disseminators." On the next page he notes,
"For well over two millennia, scholarly editors have been producing
physical manifestations of various types of textuality." Near the end of
his introduction, he states that his aim is "to illuminate the history and
practice of textual scholarship" (p. 23). Why only "scholarly work" or
"textual scholarship"? If, as Greetham believes and as is undoubtedly
true, there is a theory or theories implicit in the practice of all scholarly
editors, whether they recognize it or not, the same must perforce apply
to all scholarly noneditors as well, and to all other editors and readers,
however unscholarly they may be. It is by no means only scholarly editors
who "have been producing physical manifestations of various types
of textuality"; so have all the nonscholarly producers of anthologies,
for example, or all the essayists who have ever quoted from or commented
on other works. And why should we be concerned only with "physical
manifestations"? All readers, whether or not they write anything down,
struggle (sometimes consciously, sometimes not) with the competing
and complementary concepts of textual significance that can be brought
to every text. One might expect a book with the title Theories of the
Text, a book aiming "to look at the field of `text' whole," to have encompassed
applications of theory to textual scholarship and at the controversies
among scholarly editors, it cuts itself off from the ultimate purpose that
all this activity is presumably directed toward, the fuller understanding
of the meanings of texts.
Unfortunately the sense that theory is a game, to be played for its
own sake for the enjoyment of the thrusting and parrying, permeates the
book. Greetham proceeds in a roughly chronological way to show "a
cultural development from earlier formal and/or historical methods
of analysis, via the language-based theories of structuralism and poststructuralism,
and on to current considerations of society and gender"
(p. 23), though he rightly insists that the book is not "either a history or
a manual of practice." Instead it is a series of engagements with different
concepts of human communication, in which each one is read "against
the grain"—a favorite phrase that presumably means "critically" or
"analytically" but which is revealing of Greetham's game-centered approach
by suggesting confrontation and the hope of tripping up an opponent.
These discussions do contain some astute observations on individual
points, but they often contain questionable statements that undermine
confidence in Greetham as a guide through the thickets of critical
theory (despite his obvious acquaintance with a vast amount of material).
For example, he sometimes seems to accept theorists' assertions without
commenting on criticisms that have already been made of those assertions,
and thus his account at such points lacks depth. One instance is his
attribution to Jerome McGann of the idea (expressed in Greetham's
words) that "the critical edition primarily empowers the linguistic not
the bibliographical text" (p. 97). Even if we substitute "represents" for
"empowers," the statement is still accusatory, and the ensuing discussion
shows it was meant to be. Yet the criticism would carry greater weight if
it took into account the reasons why the statement is not precisely accurate
(facsimile editions can be critical) and why one might legitimately
wish to focus on the "linguistic" text. Another instance is Greetham's
assertion, following a discussion of "the essentialist and the physical positions"
regarding textual ontology, that "literature cannot demonstrably
be placed in one, and only one, of these classes" (p. 51). Why does he not
comment on the concept of mixed media, which has been adduced to define
combinations of language and visual effects in literature? Even if he
does not find the concept helpful, his account is deficient if he does not
bring specific arguments up to their present point and then try to move
forward.
A related class of problem involves the "paradoxes" and "ironies"
that Greetham likes to point out—ones that sometimes prove to be
paradox" in Betty T. Bennett's "Feminism and Editing Mary Wollstonecraft
Shelley," an admirable essay that focuses (in Bennett's words) on
"feminist criticism and its relationship to developing a theory of feminist
editing."[89] "Such a distinction," Bennett sensibly says near the end, "is
useful for purposes of inquiry, but is not meant to suggest that there
should be a separate category of feminist editorial theory" (p. 90). Greetham
believes that Bennett is thereby placed "in the awkward position of
having to deny the validity of the very category in which her account of
editing is produced" (p. 439); the resulting "paradox" is "the rejection
of a category that informs the entire essay" (p. 440). The clauses that
modify "category" in these two comments are remarkably imprecise. One
could say that the possibility of a theory of feminist editing is the subject
of Bennett's essay; but that of course means that feminist editing does
not "inform" her essay in the sense of being a body of thought "in which"
her essay is "produced." There is nothing more awkward or paradoxical
in Bennett's essay than in any other instance where a writer examines a
concept or position and raises doubts about it.[90]
Greetham similarly (and as pointlessly) finds an "irony" reflected in
many of Jerome McGann's writings that follow his A Critique of Modern
Textual Criticism (1983), for in them (according to Greetham) McGann
"paradoxically" discusses misinterpretations of his social theory. What
is supposedly paradoxical is that "McGann has to rescue his own authoriality
and to disempower the reality of socialized reading in order to assert
the Critique as a document disempowering authoriality and rescuing
socialization" (p. 376). But it is absurd to suppose that McGann's
theory requires authors either to accept the interpretations of their work
put forward by others or else to keep quiet. McGann has never denied
that authors have intentions and may wish on occasion to reassert them.
Debates between writers and their critics are, after all, part of the social
process, with intentions being expressed, and perhaps misunderstood,
meanings is to trivialize his whole approach. One more pointless "irony":
There is some irony in this confluence of ontological idealism with a
suspicion of physical nature, for while eclecticism appeals to authorial presence
as the authority for textual reconstruction, it works with only the
"traces" of this authority in concrete forms that are inevitably corrupt.
If there is an irony here, then all efforts to reconstruct the past are ironic.
We constantly use tangible clues, found in documents and other physical
objects, as sources for attempting to recover past occurrences and states
of mind. Greetham's pretentious statement (or, one could argue, misstatement)
tries to manufacture an irony where none exists.
These are only a few examples, but I think revealing ones, of the
tone and effects produced by the book's gamesmanship.[91]
I shall look at
one more passage, even though it deals with an essay of mine. (It is not
my business here to comment on Greetham's many observations regarding
my writings; but this passage is worth examining anyway for what
it indicates about his approach.) Greetham believes that, in my "Textual
Criticism and Literary Sociology" (Studies in Bibliography, 1991), my
"questioning their [the social textual critics'] intellectual and rhetorical
ability to carry out their own project" is a "deft manœuvre" (p. 399).
Although I have never regarded anything I have done in an essay as a
"manœuvre," my assertion on this score is irrelevant. The point is that,
if a commentator on an essay (by anyone) assumes that the author is
merely engaged in a tactical campaign to win a skirmish, the commentator
is revealing a very superficial view of the nature of intellectual exchange.
There are serious matters of substance to be talked about, but one would
never know it from this way of proceeding. Greetham then goes on to
say that my attempt "to `salvage' by co-option" (referring to my belief
that the intentionalist and the social approaches are complementary,
focusing on different parts of the full picture) is "a near-perfect example
of the Kuhnian paradigm shift in operation," comparable to the "accommodations"
made by the "Ptolemaic paradigm" when confronted with
the "Copernican account of a heliocentric solar system" (p. 401). If
Greetham really believed that this were an apt analogy, he would be revealing
a failure to understand what movements and trends in literary
this comparison seems to be an indication of how unwilling he is to
present the intentionalist approach in an open-minded way. Despite the
seeming balance of his ensuing discussion, where he does not question
"the competence or comprehensiveness of either theory,"[92] this sentence
has the effect of planting in his readers' minds the notion that the intentionalist
approach is (or will be) as dead as an earth-centered view of the
universe. I am not charging him with a "manœuvre" but simply noting
how his language appears to reveal a less than open frame of mind.
A word must be said about the style in which the book is written, if
only because Greetham makes an issue of it at the end of his introduction,
where he notes that his prose has been described as " `not for the
faint-hearted.' " This point will strike a chord with his readers, who
will have read the following sentence a few pages earlier:
Danto's depiction of a "fertile" vocabulary from philosophy ("dialogues,
lecture notes, fragments, poems, examinations, essays, aphorisms, meditations,
discourses", etc. (7)) having constructed the very generic identities through
which literature is discussed would seem to counter Rorty's and Eagleton's
rhetorical histories, except that, writing from within the concerns of analytical
philosophy (and thus regarding the Referential Fallacy of literature as a
real liability rather than as simply a necessary pose to ensure that there is
"nothing outside the text" (see below, 359)), Danto's assumption that he has
uniformly separated the tenor and vehicle in his list of "philosophical" genremarkers
and that he can determine the direction of the influence in "what
looks like a metaphor" must remain simply that—an assumption.
This sentence is somewhat longer than average, but the effect it creates is
the same as that found in many passages where the individual sentences
happen to be shorter. Greetham explains that "much of the terminology
and argument of recent critical discourse does demand a denseness of
reference and a reach into obscure (that is, `new and strange') speaking."
A benefit, in his view, is "that the reader must slow down, must be
given pause and reflection." There is a difference, of course, between
having to slow down in order to reflect on profound ideas and having to
pause just to disentangle the prose. But leaving that point aside, one must
ask why the "obscure speaking" of theorists needs to be replicated in a
discussion of those theorists.
Greetham seems to take for granted that such imitation is desirable,
subjects and thus [note the connective] many styles included in the wide
coverage of this book" (p. 25). The most extreme example is his chapter
on deconstruction, which consists of a series of "Notes" to an "absent"
text (an essay of his in the 1991 Studies in Bibliography), followed by a
section of "Notes to Notes," which are themselves heavily footnoted. He
admits that the result is "probably somewhere between imitation and
parody" (p. 327). Although parody can, in skillful hands, be an incisive
form of criticism, it more often (as here) seems self-indulgently sophomoric.
Greetham labels his method in the "absent" text "a playful teasing
out," a "Derridean jeu" (p. 326), and the same could be said of this
chapter—and indeed, in one degree or another, of all the other chapters.
They all seem to be the playing out of a game, though the cumulative
effect of the constant allusions (to writers who have said something related
to whatever point is at hand) is comic rather than playful. In reading
this book, one scarcely gets a sense that texts exist for any reason
other than to provide material for contentious theorists to argue about.
It is regrettable that a book on such an important subject, written by a
person with such broad knowledge of critical theory, should turn out
this way.
Such as calling the search for authorial intention "romantic" (pp. 126, 127) and
peaking of "the latent idealism of copy-text editing" (p. 130). The article appears in Pilgri-
age for Love: Essays in Early Modern Literature in Honor of Josephine A. Roberts, ed.
igrid King (1999), pp. 115-132 (the text cited here), and also in Problems of Editing (see
ote 7 above), pp. 96-112.
Another unfounded complaint is that analytical bibliographers refuse to consider
vidence external to the books under investigation. The irresponsible repetition of this
riticism is symbolized by the fact that Hugh Amory, in the opening chapter of the first
olume of A History of the Book in America (The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, ed.
mory and David D. Hall, 2000), refers to "what bibliographers casually dismiss as `external
idence' " (p. 43). Amory knew better, and it is regrettable that he allowed such a major
ork to be marred by his eagerness to criticize analytical bibliography.
The volume, she believes, not only "tackles textual issues in a new light" but also
as a "readability" absent from the work of the New Bibliographers, whose writing she
criticizes for being "prosaic and straightforward" and eschewing "extended metaphor or
creative play" (p. 13). (Anyone familiar with, for example, Pollard's style will find this a
strange assertion.) Even Barbara A. Mowat, in her contribution to the anthology, assumes "a
post-New Bibliography world" (p. 144), though the New Bibliography remains crucial for
her focus on the documentary texts rather than on the attempt to reconstruct authorial
manuscripts ("The Problem of Shakespeare's Text(s)," pp. 131-148—an earlier version
of which appeared in Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 132 [1996], 26-43). (I should add that the
Maguire-Berger anthology, despite its introduction and opening essay, contains more essays
of significance than most anthologies, and some of them are commented on below, notably
a fine piece by Tom Davis.) Maguire was perhaps hoping to promote the kind of writing
that appeared a few years earlier in an essay by Graham Holderness, Bryan Loughrey, and
Andrew Murphy, " `What's the Matter?' Shakespeare and Textual Theory," Textual Practice,
9 (1995), 93-119: it contains a particularly extravagant passage in which the New Bibliography
is said to involve not only the mixture of the "mechanistic language of materialism"
and "an efflux of Platonic idealism" (p. 96) but also "a patriarchal sexualization of the
text," in which "the manuscript is a version of the female body" and the "printed text interposes
an opaque and obstructive `veil' . . . between the male desire and its object" (p. 97).
(Later on the same page the New Bibliographers are found participating in a "re-enactment
of the Christian myth," since they arranged for the "incarnated text" to be assumed into
"the heaven of authorial intention." Later still: "that virtually all-male club the New Bibliographers
evidently cherished beneath their respectable tweed jackets a perverse desire to
ravish the printed text in order to release the perfect female body enclosed within it"
p. 101].)
A more valuable way of critically examining the actual work of the New Bibliographers,
and one of more direct usefulness to textual criticism, is offered by the two excellent
essays that follow, by Paul Werstine and Michael Warren, which show the lack of
foundation for Pollard's and Greg's arguments supporting the idea that certain quarto
texts derived from abridgments for provincial use or from memorial reconstruction (Werstine,
"Touring and the Construction of Shakespeare Textual Criticism," pp. 45-66; Warren,
"Greene's Orlando: W. W. Greg Furioso," pp. 67-91). Werstine, indeed, always writes cogently
and intelligently on the history of editorial thinking about Shakespeare; for another
admirable example, see his "Editing Shakespeare and Editing without Shakespeare: Wilson,
McKerrow, Greg, Bowers, Tanselle, and Copy-Text Editing," Text, 13 (2000), 27-53, which
focuses on the disagreements among Wilson, McKerrow, and Greg and thus demonstrates
"the enormously diverse principles for editing Shakespeare on offer in the early part of this
century" (p. 46). (A somewhat less successful effort is his "Post-Theory Problems in Shakespeare
Editing," Yearbook of English Studies (see note 11 above), 29 (1999), 103-117: although
his point that play manuscripts took many more varied forms than simply "foul
papers" and "prompt-book" is unquestionably worth making, his argument is less effective
than it might be, owing to what comes across as an eagerness to criticize Greg and his followers,
reflected in continual reference to their "grand narrative" and in reductive summaries
of their position.)
Despite a number of unfortunate comments such as these in Zimmerman's "Afterword,"
it is for the most part a remarkable statement of points that are not usually made:
see note 110 below. Paul Werstine, another contributor to the forum, certainly knows that
analytical bibliography is independent of editing. However, his contribution, "Editing after
the End of Editing" (pp. 47-54), is not up to his usual standard, though he is always worth
reading. Here he seems to think one can criticize the effort to segregate compositorial and
authorial characteristics by saying that it offers "no way to break the hermeneutic circle"
(p. 49). There is nothing objectionable about searching printed texts for clues to the characteristics
of an author's manuscript, even when the characteristics of such manuscripts are
unknown: the process reflects the nature of the world, the condition (in one degree or another)
of all research. What would be objectionable would be not to attempt the search at
all. Of course, one may evaluate the care with which it is conducted; but if that was what
Werstine was doing, there was no need to invoke the "hermeneutic circle."
The shallowness of much of his discussion is epitomized by his statement that "editors
must prepare a text, but interpreters and theorists need only articulate an argument"
(p. 11). To his credit, however, he also says (rather inconsistently) that "most cultural critics
have not become aware that ontological assumptions underlie any attempt to constitute—
and therefore to read or theorize—the text of a work" (p. 6). Still another example of a discussion
guilty of merging New Bibliography and final authorial intention is Andrew Murphy's
" `Came errour here by mysse of man': Editing and the Metaphysics of Presence,"
Yearbook of English Studies (see note 11 above), 29 (1999), 118-137 (see pp. 131-135), an
essay that in many respects is a thoughtful meditation on the "desire for direct individual
connection with the author" (p. 133)—though he goes too far in suggesting that intentionalist
editors seek a "source of true, irrevocable, unitary meaning" (p. 135).
This essay serves as the introduction to his 1997 anthology, Texts and Textuality
(see note 8 above), pp. xi-xxxiv, and is a revised version of his introduction to a special
1994 number of Resources for American Literary Study (see note 11 above), pp. 133-18.
Cohen even makes it appear that one of McGann's contributions is to show "that
the physical form containing a linguistic text is also a text" (p. xvi). McGann would not wish
to make this claim, worded in this way, for he knows that analytical bibliographers have
long shown how one reads physical evidence to extract a narrative. But their narratives deal
with printing history, whereas McGann's involve book design. Cohen compounds the problem:
"Such a textualizing of what has traditionally been treated as the physical form containing
a text renders analytical bibliography an even more interpretive discipline than it
has been heretofore." How can it (or anything) be "more interpretive"? What he presumably
means is that its scope is enlarged—which would be true if one calls the analysis of
readers' responses to book design "analytical bibliography" (an extension I find unobjectionable).
But the traditional kind of analytical bibliography still has its role to play, and
the implication that intentionalist editors ignored design features is not true—for they
(quite properly, given their goal) paid attention to design whenever it seemed to be an
authorially intended part of a work. (The ubiquity of this inaccurate notion is suggested
by Karen Bjelland's offhand and nonsensical remark that "even the bibliographical community
has been slow to explore the meaning of its own codes given the continuing influence of
Greg"; see "The Editor as Theologian, Historian, and Archaeologist: Shifting Paradigms
within Editorial Theory and Their Sociocultural Ramifications," Analytical & Enumerative
Bibliography, n.s., 11 [2000], 1-43 [quotation from p. 20].)
I should mention that an essay of mine, "The Varieties of Scholarly Editing," appears
in this volume (pp. 9-32). Because my piece is introductory, it is unlike all the other
essays, which focus on specific fields; and those other essays are what make the volume valuable.
(The fields covered, and the scholars responsible for the coverage, are mentioned in
note 35 above.)
A particularly detailed examination of gender in editing occurs in a different anthology,
Textual Formations and Reformations (see note 10 above), where Valerie Wayne
discusses, with effective examples, "the ways in which male compositors and editors have
created texts that debase and efface women and members of other marginalized groups"
("The Sexual Politics of Textual Transmission," pp. 179-210 [quotation from p. 179]).
He concludes (in a fashion typical of his writing) that "if a combination of the
[Supreme Court's] Feist decision [on copyright], personalist criticism, local knowledge, and
the posthermeneutic dispensation can make us textually dangerous again, then perhaps the
loss of philological face will have been worth it." To end with a comment about "losing
face" trivializes the whole discussion. (For a perceptive and witty review of this anthology,
see T. H. Howard-Hill's in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 92 [1998], 351357.)
If beginning students only knew, there are passages not worth their time, since the
matters treated in them are handled more clearly and authoritatively elsewhere. A particularly
vulnerable area is analytical bibliography: Figure 18, for instance, is useless and possibly
misleading, and Figures 24 and 27 could certainly be improved as teaching devices (for
they do not make clear that two inner and two outer formes are involved in each case); and
the account of setting by formes for a folio in sixes (p. 285) is imprecise and would, I believe,
puzzle a beginner. These instances, and others like them, are minor blemishes, to be
sure, in relation to the whole work; yet in a textbook such blemishes are not trivial. (See also
the third footnote in my 1996 essay in this series [see note 1 above].)
I have commented on some of the previously published ones in two earlier essays
in this series (see note 1 above): my 1991 essay, pp. 128-130 (commenting on the pieces now
prefaced by Interweaves 4-7; and my 1996 essay, p. 26 (Interweave 12), p. 30 (Interweave
17), and p. 48 (Interweave 9).
This admirable statement is unfortunately weakened by the phrase "both editorial
and critical," which suggests that editorial decisions are not critical.
Greetham here chooses the fashionable verb "empowered" despite its inappropriateness
for the point he is making; a less assertive expression (such as "reflective of") would
convey the meaning better.
Bennett's essay (with the subtitle "The Editor And?/Or? the Text") appears in
Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities, ed. George Bornstein and Ralph G. Williams
(1993), pp. 67-96 (quotation from p. 90).
Greetham's discussion is rendered particularly unclear by his mixing of a separate
point into the "paradox." Bennett says, in the passage already quoted from, "To isolate the
editing of works of and by females . . . would defeat the very purpose that inspired `Classical'
feminism itself." Greetham points out, correctly, that "the editing of works of and by
females" is not the only form that feminist editing might take; and he suggests that if Bennett
had tried to relate editing to a different kind of feminism, she might not have had the
same doubts about feminist editorial theory and therefore might not have found herself in
an "awkward position." It is of course legitimate to raise the question of whether her doubts
are well founded; but the answer to that question has nothing whatever to do with the
claim that her doubts (however they were formed) produce a paradox or place her "into a
corner" (p. 440).
Many other problematical points could be cited, such as the repeated use of "the
text that never was" (as on p. 367) to refer to the product of critical editing, or the related
claim that "the result of eclecticism . . . is manifestly unhistorical" (p. 53)—with no new
arguments offered to justify the continual assertion of these questionable ideas. There is
even the claim that "The appeal of Reagan and Bush on the one hand and textual idealism
on the other was both Edenic and teleological" (p. 372). There are also outright errors, such
as saying that "New Bibliography" is a term "used to designate the technical research of
analytical and descriptive bibliography" (p. 87).
This phraseology is itself off the mark, because no one has been arguing about the
comprehensiveness of the intentionalist or the social approaches within themselves; the
relevant point is whether the two fit together to form a more comprehensive overview. If
a perceived "intentionalist" scholar argues that the two are indeed complementary, that
does not make the intentionalist approach itself more comprehensive.
| Studies in bibliography | |