University of Virginia Library

Textual Criticism at the Millennium

by
G. THOMAS TANSELLE

Textual criticism is one of the few scholarly fields that
can be talked about in terms of millennia, for it has been
practiced in an organized fashion for at least twenty-three
hundred years. A millennial year is a natural point for retrospection
and stock-taking, and the most recent one, marking the turn to
the twenty-first century, came at a moment fundamentally unlike any
other in the long history of the field. Although differing approaches to
perennial issues might have been in the ascendent at whatever past moments
one chooses to look at, all those moments—before the last decade
or two of the twentieth century— would have shared a dominant concern
for authorial intention as the basis for editing. During the last part of
the twentieth century, however, a focus on texts as social products came
to characterize the bulk of the discussion of textual theory, if not editions
themselves. For the first time, the majority of writings on textual matters
expressed a lack of interest in, and often active disapproval of, approaching
texts as the products of individual creators; and it promoted instead
the forms of texts that emerged from the social process leading to public
distribution, forms that were therefore accessible to readers.

This dramatic shift has produced some benefits, but it has not been
an unmixed blessing. Both the turn away from the author and the emphasis
on textual instability reflect trends in literary and cultural criticism
and thus are evidence of the growing interconnections between
fields that for too long had little influence on each other. Furthermore,
the attention that has now been directed toward the nonauthorial contributions
to textual constitution (and hence toward the effect of design
features on readers' responses) is long overdue. That authors do not
generally act alone to bring their works to the public has of course always
been understood, as has the fact that publicly available texts—however
much they may have departed from their authors' intentions—are the
texts that were historically influential. But far less had been written on
these matters than on the importance of what authors intended, and it
was high time that this imbalance be redressed.

These welcome developments, however, came at a price. One is that
the prose of many textual critics has been infiltrated with the fashionable
buzz-words of literary theory and with a style of writing that often substitutes
complexity of expression for careful thought. Another is the
notion that recognizing the importance of socially produced texts involves
rejecting the study of authorial intentions. Those who, quite correctly,
have called attention to the value of studying social texts have unfortunately
often undercut their accomplishment by denying the historical
significance of the earliest stages in the history of every text and by
persisting in the belief that labeling authorial intention "Romantic"
and "idealistic" effectively suggests its unworthiness. Still another problem
is that the emphasis on documentary texts has led to a considerable
amount of unfounded criticism of the activity of critical editing and the
"mediation" practiced by scholarly editors. I shall illustrate these points
here by examining in some detail many of the theoretical writings on
textual criticism and scholarly editing published in the English language
during the last five years or so of the twentieth century—writings that
form an index to the state of textual criticism at the millennium.[1]

There is no shortage of material to look at, for the quantity of books
and essays in this field has shown no decline from the high level it reached
during the preceding several decades. Books have of course appeared
from a variety of publishers, but one publishing effort worth singling
out is the University of Michigan Press series "Editorial Theory and
Literary Criticism," begun in 1993 under the general editorship of
George Bornstein. Now numbering more than a dozen volumes, it includes
some of the most important books in the field during this period,
such as Joseph Grigely's Textualterity (1995) and Peter L. Shillingsburg's
Resisting Texts (1997).[2] Essays on textual criticism also come out
regularly both in periodicals and, increasingly, in anthologies. As always,
the bibliographical-society journals are a more likely outlet than the
journals of literary criticism and theory; and since 1984 the annual
volume of the Society for Textual Scholarship, Text, has been a major
venue. Although it has usefully tried to be interdisciplinary from the

start, its importance increased markedly with the sixth volume (1994),
when a book-review section, edited by Peter L. Shillingsburg, was introduced.
Shillingsburg generally matches books and reviewers with skill
and allows reviewers to write substantial essays; the result is that Text
is now the premier English-language book-reviewing medium in the
textual field.[3]

There were probably, however, more essays published in anthologies
than in periodicals. The explosion of anthologies of original essays in
this field in the early 1990s did not abate in the later part of the decade,
with an average of about five appearing each year, some of them deriving
from conferences.[4] The Michigan series alone added six anthologies during
this period;[5] the long-running University of Toronto "Conference
on Editorial Problems" series was also augmented by six;[6] and the series
of Beihefte published by the German journal Editio included one anthology
entirely in English.[7] Another series was created by W. Speed
Hill's publication in 1998 of a second volume of papers delivered at the
Renaissance English Text Society meetings. Two other scholars who had
previously edited anthologies on textual matters, Philip Cohen and Paul
Eggert, brought out second ones, and D. C. Greetham was responsible
for two during this period.[8] A few volumes were focused on specific areas,

such as classics, Old and Middle English, Shakespeare, stemmatics, and
electronic editions.[9] But most had a vaguer kind of unity, with the contributions
being related more or less directly to a broad conceptual
title.[10] Several anthologies were published as special numbers of journals,[11]
and several others were mini-anthologies that formed designated
groupings within numbers of journals.[12]

It also happens that during the second half of the 1990s several contributions
were made to three basic genres of scholarly publication that
support textual scholarship. One introductory textbook was brought out
in a revised edition;[13] four cumulated specialized checklists of scholarship
were published;[14] and four guides to the transcription of manuscripts
appeared.[15] Another feature of this period was the mounting criticism
directed at librarians for their willingness to allow microfilms and
digitizations to be substituted for originals. This matter is vital to textual
scholars, who must have access to original physical evidence no matter

what approach to editing they take, since it is necessary for studying both
production and reception history. A wide audience became acquainted
with the problem when the novelist Nicholson Baker published an article
in The New Yorker detailing the British Library's disposal of the last
surviving great collection of post-1850 American newspapers ("Deadline,"
24 July 2000, pp. 42-61).[16] (One may note parenthetically that
textual criticism itself reached a larger audience than usual in the late
1990s through the staging and publication of Tom Stoppard's The
Invention of Love [1998], in which A. E. Housman appears as a character
and speaks some of the wittiest passages from his editorial prefaces.)[17]
Three of the recurring themes during this period were the application
of textual criticism to nonverbal works, the editorial traditions of nonEnglish-speaking
countries, and the role of the computer in editing. I
shall take up each of these before turning to some of the more general
studies of textual issues.

I

Although the bulk of the writing on textual criticism has historically
emerged from the fields of classics, religion, and literature, one characteristic
of the last years of the twentieth century was a broader awareness
of the textual problems that exist in other areas and a greater interchange
of ideas among textual scholars in different disciplines. This
trend began considerably earlier, for interest in critical editing of the
work of philosophers was reflected in the early development of the Center
for Editions of American Authors (with the first volume of the John
Dewey edition appearing in 1967), and the founding of the Association
for Documentary Editing in 1978 grew out of discussions between editors
of literary works and those of the papers of historical figures. More
recently, the establishment (in 1993) of the Association for Textual
Scholarship in Art History symbolized the growing recognition of the
importance of textual work in all fields that use verbal texts. And the
Toronto series of anthologies has made this point repeatedly over the
years by devoting volumes to the editing of writings on science, economics,
exploration, and music.[18]

Works from oral traditions are of course partly verbal, but they contain
many other elements, such as intonation, gesture, and setting; and
the attempt to recapture such works from tangible texts has been an
active field in the late twentieth century, owing much to the excellent
writings of John Miles Foley, whose subtle and comprehensive vision
links the scholarly efforts in diverse traditions.[19] In the textual study of

drama, another genre of partly verbal performance works, there has been
a similar trend to recognize the value of tangible texts that reflect performance.
In a field previously dominated by a literary emphasis and a
concern for authorial intention, this shift has been part of the larger
movement to understand cultural products as socially constructed;[20] but
students of drama have something to learn from the methodology of
oral-tradition scholars, who understand that having a performance text
on paper is only the beginning of the process of recovering the work,
which consists of much more than words.

The cinema, which has obvious similarities with the drama, nevertheless
offers a very different textual situation, since film records the
nonverbal as well as the verbal aspects of the work, which thus do not
have to be reconstructed from a script.[21] Partly for this reason, textual
criticism of cinematic works has not involved extensive debate (unlike
the field of drama) over whether the verbal parts should be treated as
literature. Yet literature and cinema do share many textual issues, and
one example of a (primarily literary) textual critic who has brought the
two together is Hershel Parker, who in 1995 contrasted the interest of
film critics in the search for directors' thwarted intentions with the prevailing
lack of interest by literary critics in going behind published texts
to authorial intentions.[22]
Music, though often without verbal elements,
is like literature in its use of notation on paper, and there has been a long
tradition of editorial work in music. A sign of the growing interchange
of ideas between the two fields was the election of Philip Gossett (in
charge of the Verdi editorial project) as president of the Society for
Textual Scholarship for 1993-95 and the publication of his presidential
address in Text.[23]

It is interesting to learn, from Rolf E. Du Rietz's autobiographical
account of the development (or "discovery," as he sees it) of his definition
of "text," that he was first inspired (some fifty years ago) to think
about textual matters by his love of music and cinema. Since then, as
his many publications attest, his thinking has encompassed all fields,
but his definition of "text" is restricted to works that use intangible
media: "A text is the sequence in a sequential work."[24] In his view, to
apply "text" to nonsequential, or "stationary," works like paintings
"makes the text concept next to meaningless or at any rate useless, turning
the concept of `textual criticism' into sheer mockery" (pp. 53-54). It
is not clear, however, why one should exclude from textual criticism
such activities as studying drafts or versions of paintings (including
those uncovered by X-ray) and deciding what the restoration of a fresco
should involve. One could of course think up a different term for this
purpose, but to do so would obscure the essential identity of these pursuits
and those of the scholars traditionally called textual critics. Acceptance
of this point is illustrated by the presence of James Beck (a
critic of the Sistine Chapel restoration) on the board of the Society for
Textual Scholarship in the 1990s and indeed by the Society's inclusion
of the field within its interdisciplinary mandate.[25]

As a way of representing the recent discussion of textual matters in
nonverbal works, I shall concentrate here on two books about music and
one on visual art. The earlier of the books on music, John Caldwell's
Editing Early Music, is devoted almost entirely to practical matters, such
as transcription and presentation. Its "second edition" of 1995 differs
from the original 1985 text only in the incorporation of some minor corrections,
the addition of an eight-page postscript, and the updating of
the "Select Bibliography." Although the advice on translating the notation
systems of earlier periods into a modern one will be helpful to
anyone undertaking such a task, the theoretical issues that underlie modernizing,
as well as all other aspects of editing, are given scant attention,
largely confined to the first five pages of the opening chapter (and not
significantly amplified in the postscript). In these pages, Caldwell offers
some sound advice, recognizing, for example, the dangers of microfilm
and the necessity for examining multiple copies of printed editions (p. 3);
and he understands, as many editors do not, that the presence of an editorial
emendation in one of the source documents "will not automatically
validate it, nor will its absence elsewhere automatically invalidate
it" (p. 5). Despite these encouraging glimmers, his discussion as a whole
has not been carefully thought out. Even on the relatively untheoretical
matter of modernizing notation, for instance, the basis for his position is
not clear. He insists on modernized notation ("There is no place for
`scholarly' editions which use barely legible forms of notation" [p. 1]),[26]
and yet he believes that the "requirements of performers and scholars
are—or should be—identical" (p. v). He focuses on what he calls a "scholarly
performing edition" (p. 2)—"performable as it stands" (p. 1)—but
admits a "bias" toward "forms of notation closer to the original than is
sometimes favoured" (p. 12); he presumably approves the "increasing
tendency to revert to original forms of notation," an approach justified,
he believes, by "the increasing literacy of performers" (p. 44). He never
gets to the heart of the matter. Nor does he—on the more central question
of the evaluation of variants—see the fallacy of the "best-text" approach.
When there is "insufficient evidence" to reconstruct an archetype
from stemmatic relationships, a preferable way is "to select a
single source and to emend it where necessary" (p. 4); this is "the most
objective method of presentation" (p. 5), avoiding "a haphazard conflation
based on pragmatic or subjective criteria" (p. 4). Of course, no one
would defend a "haphazard" approach; what is missing here is a recognition
of the role of informed judgment in reducing the haphazardness
of individual documentary texts.

The other book, James Grier's The Critical Editing of Music (1996),
is a more thoughtful work and is admirable in many respects. Among its
primary virtues is its recognition that a comprehensive introductory
guide requires thorough discussion of textual theory and the rationale
of editing and needs to be more than a compendium of suggestions about
the presentation of texts and textual evidence (though generally sensible
discussions of these matters are included). Grier understands that everything
depends on the quality of thought that goes into the definition of
a textual goal and the assessment of evidence. And he is to be applauded
for his emphasis on the centrality of interpretation and judgment to the
editorial enterprise. When one considers how many people in all fields
(by no means music alone) still think of editing as essentially a mechanical
task, one can hardly complain about Grier's insistent repetitions of
the point that it is a critical activity. He begins (p. xiii) and ends (p. 183)
the book with the statement that editing is "an act of criticism," and the
reader is never allowed to forget it.[27] Nor can a reader avoid confronting
the fact that editing is a form of historical study and that a prerequisite
for it is immersion in the historical context of the work to be edited.
Furthermore, Grier brings to his discussion a thorough knowledge of the
history of music editing (and of writing about it), and he has clearly
read widely in the textual criticism of verbal works.

With so much that is praiseworthy about Grier's general approach,
it is regrettable that his book contains some lapses that will exasperate
careful readers. Perhaps the key one is the way in which he rejects a focus
on authorial intention in favor of Jerome McGann's social approach,
which is, he says, "the one theory that I believe holds promise for editing
either literature or music" (p. 108). His argument simply repeats what
are by now standard points, without examining them critically enough
to expose their fallaciousness. He says, for example, that by "rejecting
the concept of final authorial intention, and replacing it with his theory
of the social nature of the work of art, McGann transforms the process of
editing from a psychological endeavour . . . into a historical undertaking"
(p. 17). The trouble with this kind of statement is that it tries to
make pairings out of overlapping concepts. In the first pair ("authorial
intention"/"social nature"), intention is common to both elements,

since a socially constructed text can contain unintended errors just as
easily as can a text constructed by one person. Unless one wishes to refrain
from all emendation of documentary texts, one is admitting the
concept of intention. The real distinction here has nothing to do with
intention: it is simply whether the focus is on the product of a single
author or on a collaboratively constructed product. The second pair
("psychological endeavour"/"historical undertaking") displays the same
problem: is human thinking not a part of history? The attempt to recover
what one person thought in the past is no different from the effort
to know what a group of people thought. Mental states are historical
facts, which may be more, or less, recoverable in different situations.
Lurking behind Grier's sentence is the unsupportable idea that a text
surviving on paper is more "historical" than one that must be reconstructed.
But the concept of critical editing in the first place arises from
the recognition that surviving physical evidence is random and potentially
misleading and that historical knowledge requires extrapolation
from it. That intentions (of authors or diplomats, or anyone else) are
never fully knowable does not distinguish them from the other historical
facts that we wish to pursue.

It is strange that Grier does not make this point himself, since he
certainly understands the indeterminacy of historical reconstruction
and makes some excellent comments on it. Near the end, for instance,
he says that sometimes "the truth is simply not ascertainable" but that
nevertheless a hypothetical reconstruction by a person who can draw on
"intensive and extensive study of the work and its historical context" is
valuable (p. 182). If, instead, he had seen that his own thinking does not
support the rejection of intention, he would also have understood that
an interest in the social construction of art is not incompatible with an
interest in the initial creators of artworks, for the latter simply represent
the earliest of the successive individuals involved in the evolution of a
work. Grier's concern for accommodating changing performance practices
leads him to say, rightly, that "for many works, each source is a
viable record of one form of the work" (p. 109). The authorially intended
text or texts are other such forms, and the job of reconstructing
them is not different in kind from the task (recognized by Grier in the
same passage) of locating errors in the surviving texts of socially produced
forms.

The fact that music is a performing art understandably causes Grier
to be interested in textual variations that result from the conventions of
performance at different times, just as students of drama properly have
the same concern. But he is on shaky ground when he tries to place a firm
line between music and nondramatic verbal works. He argues that, in

contrast to literature, "the written text of a [musical] work, its score, is
not self-sufficient" and "that text and work, therefore, are not synonymous"
(p. 21). What he means by "text and work" is of course "text of
a document and text of a work"; but even with that clarification, one
cannot agree that the two are synonymous in literature. Since both literature
and music use intangible media, tangible texts in both cases are
sets of instructions for the recreation of works. Readers of verbal works
are necessarily performers, and clues to some of their performances are
preserved in the form of new editions or critical commentary. The fact
that listeners to music may be further removed from a written text does
not alter the fundamental situation, even if it does complicate the act of
recreating the works, by making it a combination of the responses of the
so-called performer and the so-called listener. Actually the listener is
also a performer; and the performance traditions reflected in musical
scores are not merely the product of "performers" but of performers-aslisteners
and of audience members whose performances are communicated
in essays and conversation. (An edition, which sets forth a text,
and an essay, which—by responding to a text—implies a somewhat different
one, are not so distinct as is often thought.) It does not serve
Grier's purpose well to attempt to separate music from literature: a fuller
elaboration of their essential similarity could have led to a subtler detailing
of what differences there are.[28]

Another example of confused thinking is Grier's repeated assertion
that readings can be assigned to one of three categories: "good readings,
reasonable competing readings, and clear errors" (e.g., p. 30; cf. p. 98).
The third is appropriately defined as readings that are "deemed impossible
within the stylistic boundaries of the piece" (p. 31)—a definition
that makes clear (as do the variations on it throughout the book) the dependence
of the concept on the judgment of individual editors. But
the other two are at best inappropriately named and at worst misconceived.
The choice of the two words "good" and "reasonable" suggests
that a distinction is being made, and "good" would seem to convey a
higher level of certainty than "reasonable." But a plausible reading that
does not have a plausible (or "reasonable") competing variant in the
extant documents is not necessarily a more certain reading than one that
does have, as Housman never tired of pointing out. Indeed, two plausible
competing variants could both be right (for example, each could
have been the author's at a different time), and the plausible uncontested

reading could be unauthentic (and could perhaps be corrected or improved
through shrewd emendation). In what sense, then, is it "good"?
The construction of stemmata based on shared errors may indeed sometimes
help to decide between competing plausible readings (the "express
purpose" for which the stemmatic method exists, he asserts on
p. 36); and the division of plausible readings into two categories, according
to whether or not they are contested within the documents, has some
relevance for this limited purpose. But to maintain the distinction in
broader contexts, not explicitly focused on stemmatic analysis, is in effect
to downgrade the role of editorial emendation; for when one takes into
account any plausible readings thought of by the editor (that is, nondocumentary
readings), some of the "good" readings may be just as
seriously contested as any in the other category. To call them "good" is
not only illogical in itself but also potentially inhibiting to further
thought. However, despite the various problems I have mentioned, and
others like them,[29] there is enough sound advice in Grier's book to make
it capable of having a beneficial influence on music editing.

When we turn to visual art, we encounter Joseph Grigely's remarkable
book Textualterity: Art, Theory, and Textual Criticism (1995), and
we are on a very different level. This book does not simply try to apply
literary textual criticism to visual art but rather builds on what has been
said in the literary field in order to take textual criticism a step forward,
and thus to make a contribution to thinking about all cultural productions,
not just visual art and literature. Two chapters had been previously
published, and readers of those essays would have been prepared
for the intelligence and clarity of the book, which affords the rare pleasure
of sustained argument that constantly illuminates its subject—partly
through its wonderful array of examples and partly through its sensitivity
to language.[30] One might think that any book with a title like
Textualterity could not reflect much linguistic taste, and I must admit
that the title is one of Grigely's mistakes, for it suggests a flashiness and
trendiness that I do not find in the work itself. To be sure, some fashionable
jargon does occur in the book, but generally it is employed in a
matter-of-fact way, as a precise means of saying something: he uses it

when he needs it. One never feels that he is trying to show off or link
himself with certain other critics. In short, he knows how to write.[31]

His coinage textualterity does not mean what one might have expected
it to mean. One might think that it refers to the otherness of
texts, to the fact that texts are not (at least literally) living organisms.
But it actually means almost the opposite, referring to the ways in which
texts participate in life, changing over time both in themselves and in
the roles they are made to play. The opening sentence of the introduction
is a straightforward announcement of the subject: "This book is
about the transmission of cultural texts, and about how individual works
of art undergo change as part of the process of being disseminated in
culture." Textualterity encompasses "textual transformations and textual
difference." His "underlying premise" is that "the uniqueness of
the unique art object or literary text is constantly undergoing continuous
and discontinuous transience as it ages, is altered by editors and conservators,
and is resituated or reterritorialized in different publications and
exhibition spaces." It is inevitable that an investigation of the textual
criticism of visual art should focus on changing appearances: the work,
being physical, changes as it ages whether human beings do anything
to it or not, and when they do intervene in the text their action is irreversible.
Those dealing with literature do not face quite the same conditions,
since in most cases the aging of a book does not alter the verbal
text within it and since an editor who alters a verbal text by producing
a new edition does not thereby prevent anyone from experiencing the
previous text. If this essential difference between literature and visual
art dictates the direction of the book, Grigely makes clear that he does
not regard it in any sense as a burden or a liability. Of course we have
to accept impermanence in visual art whether we like it or not, but
Grigely shows why we should relish and celebrate it, and he turns this
attitude back on literature. To Grigely, works of verbal and visual art
are alike in being affected by their physical contexts (a particular book
design or exhibition gallery) and in being disseminated in variant texts
(editions or artbooks and postcards).

That he regards a postcard of a painting, for example, as one of the
texts of that painting shows the extent to which he bypasses traditional
ontological conceptions of art in order to illuminate texts as they make

their way in society—to show "how the meanings we create for a work
of art or literature are (to a large extent) a product of the textual spaces
we enter and engage in" (p. 3). An especially admirable aspect of his
conception is its inclusiveness: he is interested both in the "very particular
text" that someone is encountering (or has encountered) and in "the
conditions under which this text has transpired to acquire the form" it
now displays (or once displayed). What is important to him is "not the
historical context of the work alone, or the social context of the critic
alone, but the way these contexts overlap with the contexts of textual
reproduction" (p. 4). Although it is not strictly accurate to call the histories
of authorship and readership "synchronic," one understands that
he is contrasting their relatively limited purviews with the diachronic
"histories of textual transformation." Textual criticism, he recognizes,
is a form of historical study, uncovering relationships among texts; and
he wishes to emphasize that the examination of multiple texts "takes us
closer not just to the process of composition, or the work's meanings,
but closer to the vicissitudes of cultural activity" that brought these
texts about (p. 7). Contemplating all these interactions gives one "textual
consciousness"—which amounts to bringing everything one can learn
about the history of a work into the context for experiencing the work in
the present. Grigely claims no novelty for this approach, asserting that
the "one enduring goal of textual criticism" has traditionally been "to
make textual consciousness . . . a part of all critical activity" (p. 8). His
contribution is to extend this approach to works of visual art, and by implication
to works in all media, and his brief (ten-page) introduction is
a masterly and eloquent expression of this vision.

Anyone who reads through Grigely's introduction will be in a position
to make two observations. One is that Grigely's focus is on textual
criticism rather than editing, on understanding textual situations rather
than on taking particular actions based on that understanding. Second,
authorial intention has no favored status in his thinking since it is not
more important than many other factors in the production of culturally
influential textual transformations. That Grigely does not explicitly
make these two points is a strength of his essay: he is not, in other words,
against something but is expressing the reasons for taking a particular
approach. One of the few false steps in these early pages is his statement
that art "does not depend on maintaining a certain intention or condition"
(p. 1). Readers familiar with recent textual debates will hear this
as a response to an adversary behind the scenes—though the advocates
of authorial intention would not in fact claim that works "depend" on
intention, since we are all surrounded by instances of the power of unintended
forms. This use of "depend" is a minor—a very minor—flaw, and

it is worth calling attention to only because it helps to make clear how
remarkably unpartisan Grigely's attitude is. He has his eye on something
higher than critical infighting.

All of this book exemplifies this point except for one chapter—the
first, immediately following his admirable introduction. He had the
notion—not unreasonably but not necessarily correctly—that he should
offer some account of traditional, literature-based textual criticism as
the "groundwork" for his discussion of visual art in the later chapters.
Having set himself this task, it is not surprising that he would do it in
an original way; what is surprising is that his treatment, fascinating
though it is, serves his purpose so poorly. The chapter, entitled "Textual
Eugenics," first provides a succinct, and intensely interesting, history of
the Anglo-American eugenics movement and then examines twentiethcentury
textual criticism and editing in terms of "parallels between
eugenic ideology and editorial practices" (p. 11). Even when his argument
involves a comparison between Hitler and Fredson Bowers, it is
not objectionable in the way one might think. There are, however, two
objections that I would lodge against it. First, the analogy between eugenics
and the kind of editing that aims to purify texts (in the name of
authorial intention) is insufficiently exact to be carried out productively
to the length it is here. Grigely recognizes that texts are not people
(pp. 30-31), but he maintains that the relation between people and the
actions they take toward texts (the products of other people) validates
his analogy. Nevertheless, it is hard to get around the fact that eugenicists
would like to eradicate the impure, whereas literary editors who wish to
construct pure texts do not try to destroy the impure texts that formed
the basis of their historical research, or indeed to prohibit anyone from
reading them. The analogy that Grigely attempts to elaborate is not
ultimately illuminating; and if its purpose is to promote disdain for intentionalist
editing, it is unworthy of Grigely.

My other objection to the eugenics analogy is that, as executed here,
it encourages a blurring of the important distinction between textual
criticism and editing. Grigely fully understands the distinction. And yet
he makes statements like this: "Textual criticism is not, as some would
have it, about utopias; it is about real texts in a real world" (p. 32). There
have of course been many scholars who engaged in textual criticism in
order to use the results as the basis for eliminating nonauthorial readings
from texts, but they recognized that this editorial activity was not
the only action that could be based on the prior research—that their investigation
of "real texts" did not dictate the kind of editing they chose
to engage in. (The fact that textual criticism involves criticism—judgment—does
not distinguish it from all other forms of historical research.)

Near the end of the chapter, Grigely says that "Textual criticism and
bibliography could therefore be redefined as disciplines that study manifestations
of difference in cultural texts, wherein `difference' does not
presuppose a genre or a system of values." And two sentences later, he
urges the abandonment of the "either/or paradigms upon which critical
editing has based itself" (p. 48). But textual criticism and bibliography
are already conceived of as history, and therefore as the study of the
eternal panorama of difference; the either/or paradigms, when they
exist, come from editors, not from the textual criticism that underlies
their work. Critical editors do sometimes follow an either/or approach
in making emendations, but the best of them never believe that the texts
they construct are the only responsible ones. It is hard to understand why
Grigely should want to suggest that textual criticism (which, after all,
offers essentially the outlook he advocates) is somehow causally linked
with a style of editing he deems undesirable.

Indeed, it is a puzzle that he should regard intentionalist editing as
undersirable in the first place. His general attitude, as expressed elsewhere
in the book, is an openness to whatever happens to texts, recognizing
that all textual transformations reflect a particular set of cultural
forces operating at a given moment. Yet here he complains about "textual
critics" (i.e., critical editors), who—he says—have "historically stigmatized
this inevitable transience" (p. 28) instead of understanding that
the "plurality of readings" is a "normative condition" (p. 29). He seems
willfully to ignore the fact that a desire for fixity is also a normative condition
and that the intentionalist urge is just as natural as the various
other motivations for textual alteration. Why does he not regard intentionalist
editing by professional scholars as an inevitable, and understandable,
cultural manifestation, and thus as a phenomenon that can
be productively studied? He complains that the "elisions concomitant
with eclectic editing, while making hypothetical texts real, also make
real texts hypothetical by effacing their presence and, by default, their
historical drift" (p. 30). This statement is of course not literally true,
but the more important point to be made about it is that intentionalist
eclecticism is itself a manifestation of the historical drift of texts. (How
could it fail to be? It is not outside of history.) Grigely, quite properly,
does not deplore the Reader's Digest condensed version of Tom Sawyer,
for example, but rather examines it for its cultural implications (pp.
39-46). To criticize intentionalist scholarly activity as "institutionally
sanctioned forgetting" (p. 30) simply does not fit with the point of
view of the rest of the book. Every textual transformation effaces the
past in its own way and is sanctioned by one institution or another.
Although Grigely's chapter on textual eugenics contains many valuable

points, its tone and orientation inject a jarring note into the book.

Given the way the chapter is written, readers would do better to skip
over it and move from the introduction to the chapter entitled "Textualterity,"
and on to the end of the book. If they do so, they will find a
wise and penetrating account of how textual consciousness enriches cultural
experience. His focus on visual art, with its physical basis, leads
him to emphasize the relevance, as we experience a work, of the variant
images of it that we have in our minds (arising from reproductions or
previous viewings, perhaps in different settings). On this basis he can
plausibly claim that the alteration or destruction of a painting does not
really efface the text that existed prior to those actions because the "memorial
text" will have a continuing existence (p. 64). He is obviously
breaking down the boundaries between works of art and the rest of life.
Indeed, his extended, and fascinating, discussion (pp. 157-177) of Jackson
Pollock's Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist) is entitled "Outside yet
Inside" and examines how the National Gallery space where it is displayed,
the adjacent paintings, the moving crowds of observers, the title
on the museum label, the label itself, and the bug caught in the paint
(with the S-shaped path it left) are related to, or become part of, the
work.[32]

In the course of his commentary, when pointing out that Clement
Greenberg contributed the title Lavender Mist, Grigely recognizes that
intention is a part of history: "textual differences need to be understood
in relation to their sources," for otherwise one "would be unmaking
cultural history" (p. 173). He is trying to make the recovery of historical
stages in the text of an artwork comparable to that of a literary work, and
his approach to art can in turn be applied to literature. In both, "intentions
are inevitably shared and contested" (p. 174), and the "inside" of

a work, whether visual or verbal, is "always realigning itself and being
realigned" (p. 179), according to the verbal and nonverbal information
(such as museum labels or bookbindings) used by those experiencing the
work. All textual transformations are to be respected as expressions of
culture, which "depends on remaking texts in order to exist" (p. 179);
and textual criticism therefore enables us to discover that "the history
of cultural objects . . . is not linear but discursive" (p. 180). Grigely's
brilliant account of the social construction of texts surpasses in insight
and eloquence the more famous treatments that are generally cited.

II

Another characteristic of writing on textual criticism in English in
the last years of the twentieth century was an increase in awareness of
editorial traditions in non-English-speaking countries. Within those
countries—especially France, Germany, and Italy—editorial theory has
been a flourishing area of discussion, and numerous books, anthologies,
and articles, as well as editions, have resulted. But knowledge of the positions
taken in these voluminous publications has been slow in coming
to English-speaking scholars. Studies in Bibliography took the lead in
1975 by publishing an essay by Hans Zeller explaining the German interest
in versions; but then a dozen years passed before English-speaking
readers were given much more information. The 1987 volume of Text
and the 1988 volume of Studies in Bibliography each contained four
essays in English by prominent French and German textual theorists.[33]
And it was also in 1987 that the German journal Editio began publication,
carrying the word "Internationales" in its subtitle; although most
of its contents have been in German, it has also published articles in English
and has even included in its series of Beihefte a large anthology of
essays in English on problems encountered by "editors or critical users
of English editions" (Problems of Editing, edited by Christa Jansohn,
1999). The elaborately produced French journal Génésis (1992- ), being
the organ of a single school of editing, critique génétique, has
been more parochial; but English-speaking readers can gain an idea of
its aims from Graham Falconer's assessment of the first six numbers.[34]

During the 1995-2000 period, several concise (and generally excellent)
accounts of foreign traditions were published in English, both in Scholarly
Editing: A Guide to Research (edited by D. C. Greetham in 1995)
and, the same year, in a collection of pieces on the influence of Fredson
Bowers abroad.[35] For more expansive treatments during these years, one
must turn to three large American anthologies (one on the dominant
German emphasis and two—one of them not primarily in English—on
the French), along with several articles in Text and Editio.[36]

The anthology on German editing—Contemporary German Editorial
Theory (1995), edited by Hans Walter Gabler, George Bornstein,
and Gillian Borland Pierce—contains translations, published for the first
time, of ten essays originally published in German from 1971 to 1991.
Three (by Hans Zeller, Miroslav Červenka, and Elisabeth HöpkerHersberg)
are from the historic 1971 anthology Texte und Varianten
and three (by Zeller, Gunter Martens, and Henning Boetius) from a
special 1975 number of LiLi, and the final four are essays by Siegfried
Scheibe (1982, 1990-91), Martens (1989), and Gerhard Seidel (1982).
Thus the three major figures—Martens, Scheibe, and Zeller—are represented
by two essays apiece, and the whole selection serves well enough
to give English-speaking readers some sense of the development of German

textual theory in the 1970s and 1980s. But whether the volume is
useful in any other way seems doubtful. If the editors expected these
essays to have a current value, they should at least have attempted to answer
the criticisms that have since been made of the position set forth in
the essays. But Gabler's introduction does not even recognize those criticisms;
instead, it simply sums up the position, repeating the logical flaws
inherent in it without seeming to notice them. The result is not conducive
to winning over new admirers of the approach.

Near the beginning of his introduction, for example, Gabler says
that the "salient points" of current Anglo-American textual criticism
were anticipated by German theory, which "radically holds . . . that
eclecticism is unsound as a method, and that authorial intention is unknowable
or unstable as a guiding principle for critical editing" (p. 2).
A value of the newly translated essays, he believes, is to show these positions
"argued in their original intellectual environment." That is a
historical aim, but if the essays are to be relevant in the present state of
the discussion, Gabler cannot ignore the replies that have been made to
criticisms of eclecticism and intention; he does not of course have to
accept those replies, but he must bring them into the discussion and, if
he rejects them, show why they are faulty. Thus the two adjectives that
he applies to intention, "unknowable" and "unstable," raise questions
that cannot be avoided. To call intention "unknowable" usually means
that it cannot be found concretely expressed in a document and that it
is therefore "ahistoric" (a word Gabler applies to "the ideality of the
author" [p. 4]). But historical scholarship in other areas is not limited to
the "knowable" in this sense; most historical events, like intended texts,
must be reconstructed, and we can never be certain about all their details.
To attempt such reconstructions is not to be ahistorical, unhistorical,
or anti-historical. It is hard to imagine any historian, outside of the
field of textual studies, who would wish to claim that every extrapolation
from tangible evidence is unsound. And the point about intention being
"unstable" is inappropriate in two ways: the implication that intentionalist
editors do not recognize the shifting nature of authors' intentions
is incorrect; and the instability of intentions, which is a primary
reason for the variation among textual versions, is in fact at the heart of
the approach Gabler advocates.

His belief that eclecticism is "unsound" stems from the same illogical
notion that the only historical texts are those that exist in surviving
documents.[37] And the German focus on those tangible texts leads him to

maintain, "Where the Anglo-American endeavor has tended to edit the
author, the central German concern over the past decades has increasingly
become to edit the text" (p. 2). What renders this statement nonsensical
is of course the lack of parallelism between "author" and "text."
One cannot edit an author but only the text of an author, and thus both
groups of editors, not merely the German, are editing texts. His statement
obviously means to place in opposition "texts of authors" and
"texts of documents." A few pages later, surprisingly, he admits that the
former has a value: a sentence begins, "Without denying the legitimacy
of editing what the author intended" (p. 6). (How this is consistent with
his earlier denigration of intention is difficult to understand.) If a critically
emended text aimed at reconstructing one stage of the author's
intention is legitimate, after all, then what is wrong with printing such
a text in an edition, with an appended record of the variants in the surviving
documents, just as intentionalist editors have regularly done?
Gabler, and those holding the point of view he advocates, would answer
that such an edition emphasizes, or "privileges," the critically reconstructed
text over the documentary texts by offering the latter only in
the compressed form of an apparatus subordinated to the fully presented
critical text. Yet Gabler's description of German editions does not make
them seem very different. The "aim of a German edition," he says, is to
provide "a segment or slice from the text's history"—"an historically
defined version of the work"—around which "the edition organizes the
entire textual history in apparatus form" (p. 3). If this were the full story,
one could say that the German approach, like the intentionalist, results
in editions that present the bulk of the textual history of a work in apparatus
form; the only difference between the two would then be that the
text presented in full is in one case a critically reconstructed text and in
the other a documentary text.

But Gabler says more: he refers to the text presented in full as an
"edited text," with "emendation functioning exclusively to remove the
textual error." How can he not see that this acceptance of emendation
undercuts his whole position? The text presented in full is no longer the
text of a material document, and the difference between it and an intentionalist
editor's critical text is not a difference in kind: any correction
of "error" involves intention, and the fallacy of limiting oneself to only
one kind of error (however defined, which is of course a difficult problem
in itself) has been exposed many times. Underlying this whole jumble,
as with most complaints about eclecticism, is an untenable equation
of "version" and "document": when an editor emends the text of an
earlier document with certain variants present in a later one, the result

is not necessarily a mixing of versions, because some variants in the later
document may be merely corrections of errors in the earlier document,
not evidence of a new version.

Gabler's acceptance of corrections is in fact an acceptance of eclecticism.
Why he is willing to countenance any alteration of documentary
texts is incomprehensible, since he views an edition strictly as a compendium
of documentary information. The "German scholarly edition,"
he claims, "is aimed less at the reader than at the user of the
edition"; the test of its success is "how well it encodes the text in the
history of its material writing and transmission by an appropriate and
adequate apparatus format" (p. 7). The shocking distinction between
"reader" and "user" suggests that reading and textual study are separate
activities, whereas in truth they are inextricable: textual scholarship depends
on close reading, and the richest kind of reading grows out of a
knowledge of a work's textual history and variation. Scholarly editions
in the intentionalist tradition recognize this connection by including
critically reconstructed reading texts (the results of the editors' reading)
in the same volumes as the historical data needed for the informed critical
reading of those texts. The difference between these editions and the
German editions described by Gabler is simply that the latter do not take
this additional step; both are in agreement on the importance of the
historical record. Gabler's incoherent discussion, with its eagerness to
find fault with the so-called Anglo-American approach, gives no sense
of the real relationship between these two traditions.

Since Gabler's summary of the essays in the volume is accurate, the
essays themselves are unfortunately as full of problems as Gabler's introduction
is. For example, Zeller's 1971 essay is translated as saying that
authorial intention "should be replaced by the concept of authorization";
the "editor's duty is to determine and reproduce authorized versions"
(p. 25). Yet the rule that "authorization is binding" can be relaxed
"in the case of certain instances termed textual faults," which
"entitle and oblige the editor to textual intervention (emendation)"
(p. 28). This concession recognizes that authorized texts as they stand in
documents do not always reflect what the authors meant to authorize
(that is, they do not always reflect the authors' intentions); but if an
editor is allowed to make any emendations for the purpose of restoring
the author's intention, there would seem to be no logical way of arguing
that only obvious errors can be corrected or of saying, in effect, that one
should take only a first step toward reconstructing an intended text and
not go as far as one can to bring it about. Certainly the text Zeller sanctions
is no longer a "reproduction" of a documentary text. In Zeller's

1975 essay, the same point is made, and in a manner that sounds like an
"Anglo-American" editor: "one must edit versions, and must edit every
version either in extenso or by recording its variants"; and passages with
"textual faults" not only "allow" but "demand an intervention by the
critical editor" (p. 107).[38] Zeller, unaware that he has thus abolished the
equation of versions with documentary texts, fails to see that intentionalist
editors have carried to its logical conclusion the insight that he has
falteringly introduced into his argument against intention as an editorial
goal.

That this anthology has its limitations was pointed out by Bodo
Plachta (author of Editionswissenschaft, 1997) in an essay for the 1999
volume of Text:[39] he says that the collection gives a "one-sided impression
of a discussion in Germany that is in fact of a much broader and
more flexible nature" (p. 36). To help fill out the picture, he examines
several editions that illustrate how the selection of a "base-text" varies
according to the textual history of each work. He also comments on the
increasing production of facsimiles of manuscripts and usefully points
out that critical editions "based on the principles of textual criticism"—
what he calls " `classical' editions"—are "still the main characteristic of
German editorial practice" (p. 43). But if his essay suggests the variety
of German editing, it does nothing to further understanding of the issues
involved. It exhibits the common confusion between theoretical and
practical matters and does not recognize the pointlessness of discussing
whether facsimiles can stand on their own.[40] Throughout he emphasizes
that German editors focus on the "historically authentic" text (e.g., pp.
35, 40); but he never questions the equation of that term with something
like "present in a single surviving document," nor does he ask why an
interest in socially constructed texts requires one not to be interested
in authorially intended texts.

A far more penetrating response to the German anthology came from
Peter L. Shillingsburg at about the same time, in the 1998 volume of

Editio.[41] After an overly concessive start, his essay reaches an outspoken
conclusion. He identifies "the main issue of difference between AngloAmerican
and Germanic editing" as "the role of individual judgment
and of emendation in scholarly editing" (p. 138). Another way of putting
the point, as the last part of the essay makes clear, is to say that the central
question concerns the "stage" of textual work to be presented to the
public: the German approach "cuts off the exercise of interpretation at
an early stage" (p. 148), whereas the Anglo-American adds a "critically
edited, eclectic text" to "the archival record" (p. 149). Using two examples,
one from Goethe and the other from Thackeray, he shows that
such "non-extant texts" sometimes provide "the only way to see a work
as the product of the authorial trajectory of textual development," for
"authorized" texts often contain revisions that do not reflect the author's
intention ("miscarriages of delegated authority"). He is not saying that
any one text is adequate by itself but that taking "a step beyond the
documentary edition," adding one or more emended texts, is important
for showing a historical stage not available (or easily extractable) from
an exclusively documentary apparatus. The essay could have made even
clearer a contradiction in the German approach: that its emphasis on
existing texts suggests an interest in the social production and reception
of texts, whereas its concern with authorization reflects an interest in
authors, which is not served well by a prohibition against most emendations
of documentary texts.[42] As Shillingsburg says at the end, "when the
inhibitions [surrounding individual judgment] become so draconian
that the only allowable behavior is to publish undigested and undifferentiated
data, it is time for a revolution" (p. 149). One would be well
advised to skip the German anthology altogether and read Shillingsburg's
essay instead.

The French movement called critique génétique has been treated in
substantial special numbers of two American journals, Romanic Review
and Word & Image. The first of these, the May 1995 number of Romanic
Review (86.3, edited by Michael Riffaterre and Antoine Compagnon),
prints most of the papers from an April 1994 symposium organized
by Compagnon, Almuth Grésillon, and Henri Mitterand with the purpose
of bringing together representatives of the Anglo-American and
the French approaches to textual study. The volume is largely in French,

however, the only English contributions being part of Compagnon's introduction
(the part on genetic criticism), a paper of mine called "Critical
Editions, Hypertexts, and Genetic Criticism" (pp. 581-593), and four
case studies on the manuscripts of English and American authors.[43] Although
this publication will therefore not serve as a basic source for
English-speaking readers, Compagnon's introduction (pp. 393-401) is
well worth their attention, not only for its concise account of critique
génétique but also for the penetrating questions that it asks about this
approach.

It begins by noting that the approach "claims to be criticism, because
it gives primacy to interpretation over editing, and genetic, because its
ultimate goal is . . . to elucidate the stages of the creative process" (p.
394), and he proceeds to probe these claims. He wonders whether critique
génétique is actually a new paradigm for criticism or "just helpful advice"
(p. 395) that calls our attention to the importance of manuscript
variants. He asks whether the avant-texte (the text of the drafts preceding
publication, which are the object of these critics' study) is a "new
object," not simply the "old manuscript" (p. 396), and finds some justification
for the idea that French genetic criticism does focus on a newly
conceived class of objects, since it does not see textual states in terms of
a hierarchical or teleological relationship. (One has to be careful when
making this point, since genetic study does involve an ordering; but the
order is chronological, and chronology—it is important to remember—is
not synonymous with progress.)

Compagnon also explains that French genetic critics are generally
opposed to the construction of editions, on the grounds that an apparatus
of variants, derived from the classical model in which variants are
departures from an author's final text, is inappropriate for an authorial
avant-texte and implies a subordination of it. He properly points out
that this attitude is partly conditioned by the fact that traditional French
editions have focused on authors' final texts, and he asks whether genetic
critics would have felt the same way if they had been responding to
Anglo-American editions that followed Greg's rationale. Since such
editions have often used early copy-texts, it is true that their apparatuses
of post-copy-text variants may be thought to have a similarity to those of
classical editions when they largely record nonauthorial departures from
authors' finished texts. But Compagnon might have been more explicit
in noting that nonauthorial readings are just as rife in the lifetime texts
of modern authors (scribes' and typists' alterations, publishers' revisions,

compositors' errors) as they are in the posthumous texts of ancient authors;
genetic criticism must deal with such variations, both before and
after the point of publication, if it is truly to delineate authors' revisional
processes. And Compagnon might also have noted that an interest in
discussing revisions does not rule out listing them in apparatus form and
that the Anglo-American tradition has certainly not been inimical to
discursive treatments of variants, both within editions and as separate
articles and books.

It is hard to see critique génétique as a distinctive approach, and perhaps
Compagnon is right to ask whether it may be only "the institutional
definition and legitimation of a research group [ITEM, the Institut des
Textes et Manuscrits Modernes] at the CNRS [Centre National de la
Recherche Scientifique]" (p. 394). As with the German emphasis on
versions, it seems to reflect a limited focus that is in fact subsumed under
the more comprehensive Anglo-American approach. Indeed, in my contribution
to the collection, I point out that critically edited texts focusing
on authorial intention fit perfectly with the aims of critique génétique,
for genetic critics, in their analyses of the creative process, are concerned
with what authors intended at each stage. A series of critical texts
(whether offered in full or in apparatus form, or in a combination of the
two approaches) would seem the natural accompaniment to essays discussing
the evidence for what authors were attempting at particular moments.
That evidence, as Compagnon recognizes, is never as ample as
one would wish, and the full story of any act of creativity will never be
told. But self-styled genetic critics have no monopoly on being interested
in making the attempt to tell the story as thoroughly as possible.

The other special number, the April-June 1997 number of Word &
Image (13.2), entitled "Genetic Criticism," is almost entirely in English,
but it contains no contribution that displays the critical independence
of Compagnon's introduction. Nevertheless, the fact that it offers translations
of essays by prominent members of the ITEM group—Almuth
Grésillon, Pierre-Marc de Biasi, Jacques Neefs, and Claire Bustarret
(the guest editor)—means that it gives English-speaking readers a fuller
introduction to the ITEM point of view than the other collection does.
Indeed, the opening piece, by Grésillon (former director of ITEM and
author of Éléments de critique génétique, 1994), is a convenient summary
of the basic position. Entitled "Slow—Work in Progress" (pp. 106123)
it makes the claim that "genetic criticism established a new perspective
on literature," with its "vision" of literature "as an activity" (p. 106),
a vision that "goes hand in hand with a desire to de-sacralize and demythify
the so-called `definitive' text" (p. 107). As this comment suggests,
the article repeats the superficial points about scholarly editions regularly

made by exponents of critique génétique: the "pre-text," Grésillon
says, plays a role "different . . . from the role of appendix that `variations'
often play in critical editions, where they are removed from their genetic
context, simply added on at the end of the book as a critical afterthought"
(p. 117). The misunderstanding here almost seems willful, and it is certainly
counterproductive. The most substantial other general essay in
the collection is Pierre-Marc de Biasi's "Horizons for Genetic Studies"
(pp. 124-134; translated by Jennifer A. Jones), which systematically goes
through all the arts, verbal and nonverbal, pointing out how the "model
for genetic analysis that emerges from the study of modern literary
manuscripts can, without any possible doubt, be extended to other fields
of creation" (p. 124). That "the archives of creation" in all fields are
worth studying is an important point, though its recognition has hardly
depended on critique génétique.

In an article in the 1999 volume of Text, de Biasi attempts, less successfully,
a "typology" of French genetic editions, using the image of
"layers" that make up a chronologically ordered "stack" of documents,
constituting the entirety of the archive for a particular work.[44] He divides
genetic editions into two types, the "horizontal," which concentrate
on one layer or "phase," and the "vertical," which attempt as far
as possible to "reconstitute the writing process from the beginning to
the end" (p. 26); the "horizontal" category is subdivided according to
whether or not the work was finally published, the "vertical" according
to whether the edition is "unabridged" or "partial." Because he gives
examples of actual editions that illustrate these categories, some readers
will find his article useful as an introductory guide to the variety of
genetic scholarship that has been undertaken. On the theoretical level,
however, his article leaves much to be desired. For example, it does not
deal satisfactorily with the distinction between physical document and
stage of revision (more than one of which may occupy a single document,
as de Biasi recognizes); the problem begins with the layer/stack metaphor,
which emphasizes physical objects and which is therefore not conducive
to thinking about entities that may share a single object.[45] His
classification scheme also suffers from lack of parallelism in its construction,
illogically mixing the conceptual and the practical (as in the subdivisions

mentioned above). And when, among his various attempts to
accommodate the infinity of possible situations, he says that "the layer
is itself a stack" (placed within a larger stack), one begins to wonder how
real the distinctions are: how different is a horizontal edition of such a
stacked layer from a "partial vertical edition"? This pretentious and verbose
article is not an effective introduction to its subject.

Another overblown effort, Klaus Hurlebusch's long essay in the 2000
volume of Text, has the worthy aim of providing "a more comprehensive
understanding of literary production" through a combination of
the German emphasis on authorship with the French emphasis on the
writing itself.[46] It begins with what would seem an unnecessary question
and provides an unsurprising answer: the question asks what relevance
drafts have to literary study as opposed to psychology, and the answer
(an obvious one, if not worded in an obvious way) is that they are relevant
if "regarded as witness documents distinguished only materially
from other witness documents—such as printings of a work—and if they
are accorded a mediate hermeneutic significance as `preliminary' or `developmental
stages' of the achieved, valid text" (p. 67). More than thirty
pages of such prose later, Hurlebusch concludes by arguing that genetic
representation should serve "to cull not only the document contents from
the `witnesses,' but to recover from the documents' iconicity their paratextual
nature" (p. 99). In other words, one should study all the physical
evidence in the documents. This point is of course correct and important,
but what is alarming here is the failure to recognize adequately not
only that the distinction between the textual and the "paratextual" is
not a simple one but also that the transcription of the "contents" depends
on the analysis of every detail of the document. If Hurlebusch
had fully understood analytical bibliography (or codicology, or paleography,
or whatever one wishes to call it), his discussion would have been
very different, and some of the problems he labors over would have been
clarified.

Some glimpses of the activity in other countries, especially Italy,
Spain, and the Netherlands, are offered by several additional articles in
Text. The 1998 piece by Paola Pugliatti[47] not only surveys the development

of variantistica in Italy but also compares that approach, which
studies variants in their developmental context ("a set of steps aiming at
some form of finality"), with critique génétique, which looks at drafts
as separate entities (without "any idea of progressive esthetic `achievement'
"). But she quite properly observes that they are linked by a similar
"aporia" or "contradiction," for both—in spite of their avowed focus—
have to deal "with the transition from synchrony to diachrony, from
structure to process, from the event to its history" (p. 186). She is in fact
recognizing the artificiality of the limitation that each approach insists
on. A less comprehensive article by Alberto Varvaro in the next volume
of Text[48] finds a connection between the great prestige of textual criticism
in Italy and its long tradition of dealing with modern literature.
Varvaro generalizes rather too broadly at times, as in saying that American
textual critics, unlike the Italians, have been "blinded by deconstructionism"
(p. 57); but he (speaking for "we Italians") is wise in the
general direction of his remarks, which hold that the study of variants
need not lead one to regard "data banks" of documentary texts as the
principal goal of editorial activity.

Four essays in Text on Spanish and Dutch editing show a less clearly
defined situation.[49] Of the two essays on Spanish, both in the 1995 volume,
David R. Whitesell's has greater depth than Carol Bingham Kirby's,
but both make many of the same points. Although the stemmatic method
(of which Kirby is an active proponent) has been much used for editing
Golden Age drama, a variety of kinds of editions has in fact appeared
since the 1960s—reflecting the same issues concerning performance versions
and authorial intentions that have underlain the debates among
editors of English Renaissance drama. Despite this congruence of concerns,
Whitesell observes that "Hispanists have responded slowly to advances
in textual criticism made in other fields" (p. 84). The Dutch
picture, similar in some ways, is characterized by two contributors to the
2000 volume of Text, largely through case studies. H. T. M. van Vliet,
then the director of the Constantijn Huygens Instituut (founded in 1983
as a government bureau for editing Dutch literature), sketches the history

of Dutch editing: its great Renaissance accomplishment and its failure
before the mid-1970s to think about methods for dealing with vernacular
literature. The resulting need to catch up with developments in
other countries caused post-1975 Dutch editors to draw as needed on
different traditions, especially the Anglo-American and the German.
Both van Vliet and Annemarie Kets-Vree, the other author (another
editor at the Huygens Instituut), comment on the "methodological
eclecticism" (to use Kets-Vree's phrase) of Dutch editing. This eclecticism
suggests what thoughtful readers of all these essays must conclude:
that each of these approaches—the German, the French, and the Italian,
to the extent that it is fair to identify national traditions—has important
observations to contribute but that each one by itself deals only with a
limited aspect of textual history. We should be grateful that accounts of
these national approaches are increasingly being made available in English,
but they serve to underscore the dangers of all positions that lack
comprehensiveness.

III

It is not surprising that a considerable body of writing in the last
years of the twentieth century was devoted to electronic editions, just as
the role and effect of computers in other areas of life have been the subject
of ubiquitous discussion. The first book that comes to mind when
one thinks of the use of computers in editing is Peter L. Shillingsburg's
Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age, a third edition of which appeared
in 1996. This book, since its first appearance in 1984,[50] has become
established as a basic guide, and it deserves its success not only
because it is well-informed and sensible but also because it deals with the
complexities of electronic publication in the context of the issues that
inform all scholarly editing. As the title suggests, the book is essentially
an introduction to scholarly editing, one that takes into particular account
the advantages of electronic presentation; it recognizes that editors
who wish to make the most effective use of electronic capabilities must
be thoroughly cognizant of the various goals of scholarly editing and of
the divergent but complementary views of literature that underlie them.
Electronic publication, in other words, is only a means to the ends that
scholarly editions have always had.

For the 1996 edition of his book, Shillingsburg (besides making local
revisions throughout)[51] has added two new chapters: "Critical Editions,"

coming at the end of the first section of the book ("Theory"), and "Electronic
Editions," placed at the end of the final section ("Practicalities").
Both are excellent basic statements, concise and lucid, and constitute a
good reason for readers already familiar with this book to look at it
again. "Critical Editions" skillfully outlines the bases for authorial and
sociological editing and explains why both are necessary and why arguments
denigrating one or the other are not productive.[52] As Shillingsburg
says, we can gain more insights into authors and works "with a variety
of tools than with just one" (p. 100). His chapter on "Electronic Editions"
is important for stating emphatically that scholarly editors "bring
to electronic publishing all the concerns of textual criticism that occupied
us in the first part of this book" (p. 163). In other words, an electronic
edition is a form of presentation and, as such, does not pose a different
set of theoretical issues from the one faced by editors who present
their work in a different form. Note that Shillingsburg uses the phrase
"electronic publishing" here, just as he does in the opening of the first
sentence of this chapter, immediately below the title "Electronic Editions."
Despite the false parallelism of the two new chapter titles, reinforced
by the symmetry of their placement, the one on "Electronic Editions"
does come in the section called "Practicalities," and Shillingsburg
clearly understands that an electronic edition can also be a critical
edition.

Indeed, it will be more useful if it contains critical as well as documentary
texts. An electronic "archive"—as an electronic collection of
documentary texts, both in transcribed (searchable) form and in image
form, is often called—is likely to seem "an undigested chaos of material
in which everyone must become an editor before proceeding" (p. 165).
It should at least be "webbed or networked with cross-references connecting
variant texts, explanatory notes, contextual materials, and parallel
texts," along with introductions and variorum commentary. But
beyond that, "authorial editors . . . will, in the electronic edition as in
the print edition, provide an edited, critical, eclectic text representing
their notion of what the text should have been—the new text webbed

and cross-referenced into the archive" (p. 166). Such a text is unquestionably
an appropriate part of an electronic edition—though Shillingsburg
might have made clearer the desirability of multiple critical texts, reflecting
different stages of authorial intention as well as one or more
stages of collaborative intention (since scribal or printed texts do not
necessarily reflect their makers' intentions fully). After all, the space
available for presenting multiple texts in full is the basis for the many
advantages that electronic editions offer; and just as a wide array of documentary
texts should be made available, so should a series of critical
texts.

Although Shillingsburg's treatment of electronic matters as "practicalities"
is one of the most valuable aspects of his discussion, he does
sometimes verge on asserting the kind of excessive conceptual claims for
electronic texts that less thoughtful writers often make. For example, he
says that the electronic medium gives scholarly editors "opportunities
to extend their notions of what constitutes the work of art and how it
can be read" (p. 163). Or again: "The electronic medium has extended
the textual world; . . . it has added dimensions and ease of mobility to
our concepts of textuality" (p. 164). Ease of mobility, yes, for the most
part; but "dimensions" added to our "concepts of textuality"? Our
"notions of what constitutes the work of art" are not limited or impoverished
by the codex form; what is often hampered by that form is
the facility with which we can read variants in context and move back
and forth between corresponding passages of different texts. We could
always do these things, but often it took a great deal of effort to do so.
When Shillingsburg says that "students of a text will more readily than
was ever the case in print editions be able to confront textual cruxes for
themselves" (p. 166), he comes nearer the point, since students could
confront cruxes in printed editions also; but I would delete "be able to"
from his sentence, because one is able to study cruxes "readily" in either
case, and the real point is that in many instances one can probably study
them "more readily" in electronic texts.[53]

Shillingsburg thinks that the electronic edition is "a tool for students
of a work" and "not primarily . . . a place to sit [sic] and read through a
novel or poem for a first-time experience of the work or for the pleasure
of a good read" (p. 165). The same could be said for scholarly editions in
printed form, which are often read in nonlinear fashion. But of course
the main text in a printed edition, especially if it is free of symbols, can
be read for pleasure, simply because it is in the familiar codex form.
And we may confidently say that ebooks, which are improving rapidly,

will eventually be accepted as a pleasant form in which to read the texts
of an electronic edition. They may even help to break down the distinction
between "a tool for students" and a vehicle for "a good read," bringing
to more people the pleasures of textual awareness. Even though
Shillingsburg's chapter would have benefited from greater attention to
such points, it remains a fine introduction, manifesting a sensible outlook
and offering in concise and readable form a considerable amount
of advice on technical matters.

Shillingsburg has written about electronic editions in other places
as well, such as his short article entitled "Principles for Electronic Archives,
Scholarly Editions, and Tutorials" (on pages 23-35 of the Finneran
anthology to be discussed below). Although he gives far more attention
to the "archives" of his title than to the "editions," his phrase
"archive of editions" (p. 24) shows that his concept of the archive is
broad enough to encompass critical editions. (Critical editions, after all,
even those newly produced, are documents in the history of a work.)
Shillingburg's piece is essentially an outline of desirable "industry standards"
for editions (capability of handling multimedia and accessibility
on different hardware platforms) and of "ideal goals" (including searchable
texts along with images, linkages among texts, and appropriate encoding);
it ends with a list of "general principles" regarding usability,
transportability, archive specifications, security, integrity, expandability,
printability, and convenience (largely reprinted from a document of his
that was distributed at the 1993 meeting of the Modern Language Association
of America, one that became part of the background for the draft
guidelines issued in 1997 by the MLA's Committee on Scholarly Editions).
He is concerned here with technical, not editorial, considerations;
and although the points he makes are elementary, there is clearly a value
in having a concise statement of basic points from a person with Shillingsburg's
extensive experience with electronic editions.

After Shillingsburg, the most prominent writer on electronic editing
is Jerome McGann, whose "The Rationale of HyperText" has been
made available in several places.[54] That title, with its definite article, is

an obvious allusion to Greg's "The Rationale of Copy-Text," and McGann
explicitly states that he wrote the piece "in a conscious revisionary
relation to W. W. Greg's great essay" (p. 32). McGann's reputation and
the portentousness of his title arouse great expectations, which the piece
itself unfortunately does not fulfill. Although he is well aware of the
plethora of "Lofty reflections on the cultural significance of information
technology" (p. 11), he comes close to supplying another one, for he tries
to endow a simple practical point with unwarranted philosophical significance.[55]
The simple point is this: electronic texts and hypermedia
archives often allow one to do many desirable things more easily than
one could accomplish them using the codex form. Linkages between
texts are obviously facilitated by the electronic medium, and it is clearly
better to have oral texts (when they are relevant) embedded in the same
framework as visible texts, rather than furnished in the form of recordings
slipped into a pocket at the back of a book. No one needs a "rationale"
to understand why a more efficient tool should replace a less efficient
one.

When he concentrates on practical advice, which is what the essay is
really about, he makes good sense. For example, he wisely distinguishes
between a word-processed text and a hyperedited one, for the former is
not greatly different from what is encountered in a printed book, whereas
hyperediting uses "computerization as a means to secure freedom from
the analytic limits of hard copy text" (p. 15). And his advice to use a
hypermedia program in a hyperediting project, in order to accommodate
auditory and visible documents, is obviously sound, since doing so takes
fullest advantage of what the electronic medium offers. As he repeatedly
asks, in one form or another, "Why would anyone wish to do without it?"
Two other pieces of advice are to design a project in terms of its "largest
and most ambitious goals," not in terms of "immediate hardware or
software options," and to structure the program in the "most modular
and flexible way," so that technical advances can be imported into it with
as little disruption as possible (p. 16). This is just common sense, and
not part of a "rationale," but I would not wish to object to the uttering
of common sense.

What I do find objectionable, and indeed unnecessary, is the philosophical
framework into which his sensible advice is set. He begins by
distinguishing between works of the literary imagination and "textual
works that are instruments of scientific knowledge" (p. 12). It is surprising
that anyone would still take this notion seriously. The construction
of every work made of words (as of other media) involves rhetorical

choices, and thus artistry; and the presentation of every such work,
whether in oral or tangible form, affects its meaning as taken in by
listeners or readers. To draw a fixed line between works of the imagination
and works of scientific knowledge is impossible because all works
are combinations of both kinds of understanding (if indeed they really
are two kinds). Yet McGann is willing to say flatly, "To the imagination
the materialities of text (oral, written, printed, electronic) are incarnational
not vehicular forms. But for the scientist and scholar, the media
of expression are primarily conceptual utilities, means rather than ends"
(p. 12). Literary critics, however, as McGann well knows, do not exclude
from their investigative domain works of expository prose, even when
the authors are scholars and scientists. In any case, debating the point
(which has itself been the subject of a considerable literature) is irrelevant
to a discussion of scholarly editing, for all verbal works, regardless
of how one classifies them, are equally in need of the application of
textual scholarship.[56]

It is nevertheless easy to see why McGann felt it necessary to go into
this matter. Since the position for which he is well known holds that the
texts of literary works include their visible (and oral) presentations, he
has to regard scholarly editions as being treatises about the texts of literary
works, not presentations of those texts, in order to justify the use,
in an edition, of a different physical medium (such as the electronic,
which it is the purpose of the essay to advocate) from the one in which
the work first appeared. Therefore he says at the outset, "My remarks
here apply only to textual works that are instruments of scientific knowledge"
(p. 12). (This caveat would logically have been required, of course,
even if he were writing about scholarly printed editions, since those
editions cannot ever be the equivalent of the original printings of the
works concerned.) The price he pays for trying to maintain his position
in this fashion is an illogical wavering between a focus on authorial intention
and a focus on collaborative social results. For if material media
are "incarnational" (in the sense of being the opposite of "vehicular")
to creators of literary works, then the claim that scholarly editions, with
their different physical incarnation, are scientific works (no longer the
original imaginative works) reflects an emphasis on authorial intention.
Yet McGann's interest in the visible (or oral) product is in other respects

an attempt to place intention within a social context, where nonauthorial
intentions in particular areas often outweigh the authorial ones.
And in that case, later editions (including scholarly ones) ought also to
be renditions of the work as it emerges from different social settings.

This tangle could have been avoided if McGann had been willing to
accept one simple point: that authors of verbal works do not always
consider the physical presentation of their words (or some aspects of it)
to be a part of the works themselves, even though it always (1) reflects
to some extent the intentions of those responsible for the presentation
and (2) affects the responses of those who experience the presentation.
From the point of view of authorial intention, therefore, the physical
forms of some verbal works are indeed only "vehicular," and scholarly
editions using different vehicles (whether different typefaces and paper,
or a computer terminal instead of paper) can in those cases reproduce
the texts of the works. This point in no way lessens the importance of
studying the social forms of texts, which necessarily include physical
components; but it eliminates the necessity for claiming that scholarly
editions cannot transmit the texts of works but only information about
those texts.

After this unfortunate beginning, McGann weakens his essay further
with another fallacious piece of theorizing. As a reason for preferring
hyperediting to the editing that was presented in codex form, he asserts
that there is something problematical about using "books to study books,
or hard copy texts to analyze other hard copy texts" (p. 12). At first one
may think he is saying something analogous to the often-made point that
we end up analyzing works of all media in the medium of language; but
that point never carried the implication that there was an inherent problem
in analyzing like with like—that, for instance, an effective criticism
of a piece of music could not be a musical parody. McGann, however,
believes that when one uses "books to analyze and study other books,"
"the scale of the tools seriously limits the possible results" (p. 12). He
goes so far as to say that the problems with codex editions "arise because
they deploy a book form to study another book form" (p. 13). Because?
How does the similarity in form cause the problems? (One might even
think it an advantage, to the extent that the codex edition can reproduce
more of the physical features of the original codex publication.) His
point is pretentious because it seems to adduce a theoretical principle,[57]
when in fact no principle is required, other than the self-evident desirability

of increased efficiency—and certainly not a principle, like this
one, without substance. The limitations of the codex form are limitations
regardless of whether one is dealing with another codex. And that
is all McGann is talking about: the increased maneuverability afforded
by electronic presentation.[58] Whether electronic conveniences can be
said to "lift one's general level of attention to a higher order" (p. 12)
is really a matter of how inflated one is willing to let one's rhetoric become
in order to register one's enthusiasm for hypertext. The "level of
attention" displayed by the best scholars of the past is not likely to be
surpassed, but hypertext unquestionably reduces the drudgery involved
in carrying out some kinds of investigation.[59]

If McGann's efforts to provide a theoretical depth to his advocacy of
hypertext are unsuccessful, the five brief case studies that constitute the
heart of his essay are informative,[60] and he ends with an important point
about the "decentered text." This term does not mean what one might
expect: it simply refers to the idea that in hypertext there is no need for
one central text as an organizing focus. McGann suggests that this point
has aroused debate, but I do not see how anyone could maintain the
contrary position. Hypertext, as McGann says, does have a structure
"organized for directed searches and analytic operations" (p. 29), but
because one is free to browse among numerous full texts, assisted by links,

no one text is required to serve as a base, as is generally the situation in
codex editions, where lack of space usually necessitates representing
some texts in apparatus form. McGann's comparison of the organization
of hypertext with that of a library is essentially right in that "every documentary
moment" in both cases "is absolute with respect to the archive
as a whole" (p. 31).[61] But because his focus is primarily on the archival
function of hypertext, he says little about the various helps that one
might reasonably expect a hyperedition to provide. These helps, resulting
from the editor's research, would provide much more information
about the relationships among the texts than a library does; but—and
this is the crucial point here—such guidance, however extensive, would
not affect the independence of the texts and would leave readers free
to choose whatever points of entry and subsequent paths they wished.

Another consequence of his concentration on archives is that he does
not distinguish two kinds of decentering that are worth differentiating.
The decentering he deals with is on the mechanical level: the mechanics
of the electronic medium, in contrast to that of the codex, does not lead
to an apparent emphasis by default on one text over another. A second
kind of decentering applies to the construction of critical texts. In my
essay on "Editing without a Copy-Text" (commented on at the end of
part V below), I recommend a procedure for critical editing in which
one does not give any text the centrality of a copy-text. Instead of thinking
of a critical text as an emended form of a copy-text, one conceives it
as a new text in which each word or punctuation mark derives from
whatever source (including the editor's mind) is judged to give the best
reading in terms of the goal chosen (author's first—or last, or some other—
intention, publisher's intention, and so on). If this approach were used
for an edition published as a codex, the newly constructed critical text
would still (in most cases) be a centered text in the mechanical sense,
with the other relevant texts provided as an apparatus keyed to it; but
it would have been formed by an editorial process that did not center
any one text. The process can obviously be used for an edition in electronic
form as well, with the result that one or more critical texts produced
by this decentered method would be a part of the mechanically
decentered collection of texts forming a portion of a hyperedition.

One of the places where McGann's essay has been reprinted is
Kathryn Sutherland's anthology Electronic Text: Investigations in

Method and Theory (1997), which is based in part on a 1993 Oxford
conference and which contains some other essays worth noting. Sutherland's
introduction aims, as she says (in characteristic prose) at the end
of it, to link "technological fashioning and change to the cultural developments
that technology models and, in modelling, further validates
as culturally significant" (p. 17). The case for such linkage, in her hands,
is highly dubious, as one or two of her points may serve to suggest. She
claims, for example, that electronic technology reinforces the ideas of
Barthes and Kristeva and that editors are therefore in an environment
of "permeable boundaries, of fluid text" where the "traditional assumptions"
of scholarly editing "no longer appear to hold true." (One may
pause to reflect that textual instability is what editors have always confronted,
and recognized they were confronting; textual fluidity does not
depend on the computer for its existence.)

Of those "traditional assumptions," the "first to go is the work/text
distinction," for "if the work is not confined to the historically contingent
and the particular, it is nevertheless only in its expressive textual form
that we encounter it, and material conditions determine meanings" (p.
5). But the "if" clause (followed by "nevertheless") concedes the necessity
of recognizing that texts of works can be abstractions (sequences of
words) as well as physical renderings; and her discussion of Barthes
points out that he, too, made such a distinction.[62] She does not really
mean that the distinction itself has been eliminated, and there is no
necessity for eliminating it in order to make the point that "material
conditions determine meanings." All she is trying to say is that many
people (she among them, presumably) now prefer to read documentary
texts rather than critically emended texts (though she does not confront
the fact that every text put into physical form by an editor is also a
"situated act or event" [p. 6]). Perhaps that is why she says that an edition
is "more properly described in its electronic assemblage" as an "archive,"
which contains "the disassembled `texts' but not the reassembled `work' "
(p. 9). To imply that editorially emended texts (the products of specialists'
reading) are not valuable is simply not to believe in scholarship.
Her tendency to accept unthinkingly the exaggerated claims made for
electronic editions is perfectly illustrated by her comment that "in making
certain things easier" electronic presentation "makes the outcome

different" (p. 9). We all welcome greater ease, but serious scholars have
never allowed the labor involved in a task to prevent their carrying it
out.

Sutherland's introduction does not lead one to look forward to the
essays that follow, and they do often display the same love of jargon and
exaggeration (and sometimes even the same fuzziness of argument).
Allen Renear, for instance, outlines three theories of textuality that
have emerged from the text-encoding community without recognizing
that their philosophical coherence is affected by the fact that they all developed
in subordination to a program requiring belief that texts can be
reproduced. And Julia Flanders's piece is weakened throughout by its
initial assumption of the "electronic text's lack of, or freedom from, a
body." But some useful points do get made. Peter M. W. Robinson (who
claims to be talking about "new directions" in editing, when he is of
course referring to new methods for helping us move in the directions
we have always followed) explains, with examples, the importance of
supplementing archival collections of texts with editorial aids, as do
Patrick W. Conner and Peter S. Donaldson—the latter concluding with
the valuable (if rarely expressed) observation that the "digital research
environment" might be designed "so that the passage from text to document
extends from the computer screen to the library"—to the original
physical documents (p. 195). Possibly the best essay is Claire Lamont's
discussion of annotation, which ably shows the interrelations of editing
and annotation and which recognizes that the theoretical questions
raised by annotation "are not removed in hypertext" (p. 61)—indeed,
hypertext has simply "produced another arena in which the debate may
continue" (p. 63).[63]

The year before the Sutherland anthology, a more substantial and
worthwhile anthology had appeared in the University of Michigan Press
series on editorial theory—The Literary Text in the Digital Age (1996),
edited by Richard J. Finneran. It begins with useful essays by Susan
Hockey and Peter Shillingsburg. Hockey's surveys the history of using
the computer for editing and summarizes basic information about text
encoding and the delivery of electronic editions; Shillingsburg's is the
piece on goals of scholarly editing that I have already commented on.

The volume ends with an essay by John Unsworth that places "electronic
scholarship in its larger cultural context" (p. 233), offering an intelligent
criticism of those who are resistant to change (here epitomized by Sven
Birkerts). Although the essay is not primarily about scholarly editing, it
does suggest that the existence of electronic editions will increase the
broader scholarly interest in editing and bibliographical scholarship because
"the new technology opens up the possibility of re-creating the
basic resources of all our activities and providing us with revolutionary
tools for working with those resources" (p. 240). If he proves to be right,
it will be because the tools are indeed revolutionary, not because technology
has created a new "possibility," since the old tools also allowed
for the recreation of basic resources (in the form of facsimiles and new
editions).[64] Although he does not always manage to eschew hyperbole in
speaking of new technology, his essay is ultimately balanced and sensible,
concluding that the issues we have to deal with will not change.[65]

In between these opening and closing essays, there are several technical
articles and accounts of specific projects, along with some additional
general pieces. The diversity of content can be illustrated by the essays
of Charles L. Ross and Phillip E. Doss.[66] For Ross, "Recent trends in
editing have signaled the demise of the Anglo-American critical edition
and the imminent birth of electronic editing" (p. 227). Because this
sentence confuses technical and theoretical matters, it is hard to know
how to read it. Ross includes "codex book" (p. 225) in his definition of
a critical edition, and one might think at first that he is simply predicting

the triumph of one technology (electronic) over another (the codex).
But "Anglo-American" brings in the idea of an emended text supplemented
with an apparatus, a concept that is not tied to any one technology.
The "birth of electronic editing," in other words, does not spell
the death of critical editing, whether or not one feels that it dooms the
codex form of presentation. No one would argue with his belief that
readers should be able to "choose among variants, and thus create a
(never the) text" (p. 230), but he does not acknowledge that most editors
of critical codex editions have held the same belief or that codex editions
offer the same options for readers. It is certainly wrong to claim that the
functions of editor and reader were "hitherto distinct": critical editions
have always made clear that the act of reading involves making textual
decisions. The Doss article, in contrast, despite its occasional repetition
of standard exaggerations,[67] makes some valuable points, and makes
them well. Doss is concerned, for example, that in the electronic environment
"we remain aware of continuities, not only in regard to the telos of
intellectual endeavor generally, but specifically in regard to the way in
which the textual editor might employ electronic media in the tasks before
him or her" (p. 215). He also urges that "editorial invisibility" be
recognized as a pretense and that electronic editors should be "straightforward"
in declaring the assumptions embedded in the linking structures
they have created (p. 218).[68]

This advice is of course equally valid for editors of electronic and of
codex editions. Indeed, writings about electronic editing are generally

successful to the extent that they recognize continuities (to use Doss's
word): the computer, though it creates strong breaks with the past in
our methods for doing things, does not alter the things that need to be
done, or the concerns that cause us to want to do them. This point is well
understood by John Lavagnino, who on more than one occasion has explained
why such traditional activities of scholarly editors as annotation
and emendation are just as important in electronic editions as they were
before.[69] He calls it a professional "provinciality" to believe that "if we
could only remove the editorial presence from the transmission of texts,
readers would then have a true and complete perception of texts" (p.
121).[70] The fallacy of this view is forcefully set out:

The more basic problem, he rightly believes, is that many literary scholars
and other readers are not interested in textual history and therefore
do not use the information provided in editions. For those who do,
scholarly codex editions have not seemed officious or unusable (though
many such readers will no doubt find electronic editions easier to use for
some purposes); but the majority of readers still need to learn that the
most rewarding reading requires (in Lavagnino's words) "a knowledge of
textual matters, not just unmediated access to the originals (or rather to
facsimiles of them)" (p. 122).

It is encouraging to note that a recent special number of Literary &
Linguistic Computing (15.1, 2000), on "Making Texts for the Next Century,"

opens with an essay in which Peter Robinson (its co-editor with
Hans Walter Gabler) affirms that "a single, reconstructed, and eclectic
text" may be the best "route" for the reader to take into the documents:
"Through the one text," he says, "we can best understand the many."[71]
Kelvin Everest, in another essay of 2000, has made a particularly eloquent
and critically sophisticated statement of this position. Electronic
archiving of a work's various documentary texts overlooks the need of
readers to have guidance into the "constant core identity" of the work.
This task requires the "editorial function," which is "an effort of scholarship"
that "brings the history of a textual transmission to a specific
textual focus for its period, and of its period." It "cannot abnegate the
responsibility to shape an image of a body of texts. This editorial image
is, indeed, at the heart of a living contemporary literary culture, because
it is the coherent form in which a literary culture renews its understanding
of the past."[72] A similar recognition of the need for critical texts was
expressed the same year by Michael F. Suarez in one of the most balanced
and effective essays[73] written in resistance to the "hype about hypertext"
(p. 170). In pointing out the limitations of text-encoding as well as
archiving, he brings us back—as good writing about electronic editions
ought to bring us back—to the problems we have always had.

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

theoretical writings, there are some outstanding contributions, but there
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

Reproductions: The Material Origins of the New Bibliography"
(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).

The opening piece, Stephen Orgel's "What Is an Editor?" (pp. 2329),
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
does not imply a particular editorial rationale or a disparagement of
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

promisingly titled but disappointingly superficial as an overview of the
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

project to fruition required great effort on Greetham's part. He should
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-

sions: Essays toward the Construction of a Biobibliography (1998), contains
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

its empirical independence from theory, is, in fact, empowered by a
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

those persons with knowledge of the substantive content of a field (or
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

all such instances of dealings with texts. By looking only at
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

merely glib and not in fact meaningful. Thus he finds a "dangerous
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,

on both sides. To find an irony in McGann's efforts to clarify his intended
meanings is to trivialize his whole approach. One more pointless "irony":

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

criticism signify. But that cannot be the explanation. Instead, his use of
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:

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,

citing "classical decorum, a style suited to its subject": "there are many
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.

V

In a field where there is so much turgid writing that mindlessly repeats
fashionable views, one gratefully turns to Peter L. Shillingsburg's
Resisting Texts: Authorship and Submission in Constructions of Meaning
(1997), a book of subtlety, insight, and balance, written in lucid,
jargon-free, and often forceful prose. No one who knows his earlier writings
will be surprised by the quality of this book, for with Scholarly
Editing in the Computer Age and numerous essays he has established
himself as a force for coherence and good sense in the discordant world
of textual criticism. Indeed, some of those earlier essays—including one
of the best known, "Text as Matter, Concept, and Action"—are reused,
in revised form, in the book. Out of nine chapters, six had previously
appeared, between 1989 and 1996, and their collection here is welcome,
not only because they deserve to be available in this convenient form
but also because they contribute effectively to the point of view that the
book as a whole maintains.[93]

That position is made clear in the (previously unpublished) introduction,
indicatively entitled "Is There Anything to `Get Straight'?" He
begins with an exemplary discussion of the role of history in literary
criticism, of the reasons for being interested in both "historically intended
meanings and present operative meanings" (p. 8), keeping in
mind the impossibility of certitude in recovering the past. Then he
turns to the real underpinning of the book, reflected in his statement,
"Frankly, I do not hold that there is a superior view of textuality"
(p. 10). Unlike so many writers in the field, he is not a partisan of one
theory, hoping to discredit other approaches. Rather, he wishes "to
understand and describe the principles governing the workings of a
range of textual engagements" (p. 9). The word "understand" occurs
several times in his declarations of the goal of the book: he is open to all
our dealings with texts ("why and how we resist texts and why and how
they resist us" [p. 10]) and simply wants to understand all "textual engagements."
Only one theory ultimately matters to him—a theory that
encompasses all our interactions with written (that is, material) texts.
What he sets out to construct is a "theory of script acts," a term he coins
for its parallelism with "speech-act theory." It may not be the best term
for his purpose, however, because "script act" suggests an exclusive concern
with production (by author, publisher, and so on)—or, if readers'
responses are included, the implication would seem to be that readers
are concerned only as parties to a communicative transaction. Shillingsburg
acknowledges that most of his book relates to "communicative acts,"
but he adds that "readers might with perfect right refuse to care what
communicative intention an author might have actually had or professed
to have had" (p. 12). Since it was "a desire to understand how these reactions
[the one just mentioned among others] come about that impelled
this work," an emphasis on communication may not form a sufficiently
broad base for what Shillingsburg has in mind.[94] That this question
arises is a slight defect in the introduction, but it is overshadowed by the
laudable general attitude set forth toward textual study.

The first chapter, one of the three previously unpublished ones, deals

(as its title, "The Hand from the Grave," suggests) with authorial intention,
especially the editorial problem of reporting multiple or successive
intentions. The opening and closing of the chapter provide worthwhile
reading on this vexed subject, but the middle part is less satisfactory.
After proclaiming it "a condition of the print medium that one text be
in the foreground and alternatives be in some permanently subordinate
position," he declares, "If no one has already announced the death of
the editor as the conceptual authority over what the text says, I announce
it here" (p. 18). The half-page that separates these two statements
does not explain how one moves from the first (which places the
blame on "the print medium") to the second (where the editor is responsible:
Shillingsburg even adds, "The fact the print medium gives us no
choice but to act as we do is no excuse"). One might conceivably say that
the limitations of the codex form have given the editor a de facto authority
(though even this is too strong, as we shall see in a moment),
but certainly not "conceptual authority."[95] There is of course nothing
wrong with an editor's carrying some authority, by virtue of being an
expert on the author's writing habits and style and on the textual history
of the work. But such experts do not usually believe that they have "conceptual
authority over what the text says": it is hard to imagine an editor
of a codex edition with apparatus who does not hope that readers will
examine the variants and evaluate the readings present in the main text.
That few readers will actually do so is hardly the editor's fault—a point
that Shillingsburg (rather confusingly in the context) seems to agree
with, for he proceeds to say, "As a matter of fact, however, my quarrel
is not with editors but with users of scholarly editions" (p. 19). He speaks
of their "naive reliance on editors," their "blind faith": thus perhaps
editors have had their authority thrust upon them. One must infer, if
readers can be considered remiss in their use of codex editions, that such
editions are usable—that it is possible for readers not to be so awed by the
full presentation of one text that they fail to consider the readings from
other texts recorded in the apparatus. What, then, is Shillingsburg finally
saying?[96]

In Chapter 4 ("Texts, Cultures, Mediums, and Performances: The
French Lieutenant's Woman," pp. 105-119), the next of the new chapters,

there is no doubt about what he is saying. He uses the Fowles novel
to illustrate the complexity of the act of communication set in motion
by a literary work, focusing on "the temporal, history-bound `eventness'
of text production and text reception as communicative acts" (p. 112);
and he concludes (in the final sentence) that "having off the past as irrelevant
or unnecessary because it is inaccessible represents a radical `presentism,'
which is reductive and intellectually impoverishing." The
main point here is unambiguous and important—so important as to
deserve a better expression, not encumbered with an illogical summary
of the opposing position. Some people do indeed feel that the past is
irrelevant or unnecessary, but that feeling is independent of whether or
not the past is inaccessible; others believe that the inaccessibility of the
past is reason enough not to bother with it. But its inaccessibility cannot
logically cause one to find it irrelevant or unnecessary. And of course
there is an element of circularity in the conclusion, since one could say
that a neglect of the past is impoverishing to those who find a knowledge
of the past enriching in the first place. My own way of paraphrasing what
I take to be his point would be as follows: if we assume as axiomatic that
any increase in awareness is enriching, then a knowledge of historical
contexts—as part of the mental framework one brings to a literary work—
enlarges one's sense of possessing the work in the present, whether or not
one is interested in the past for its own sake; and the fact that the past is
not fully available to us provides no reason for declining to push our
understanding of it as far as we can, just as we do with every other intellectual
pursuit (none of which can ever be completed). This point of
view is of course not new, but Shillingsburg's effective use of the Fowles
novel to illustrate it gives it added force.

The third of the previously unpublished chapters, "Individual and
Collective Voices: Agency in Texts" (Chapter 6, pp. 151-164), is central
to Shillingsburg's position, for it focuses on how "to integrate insights of
the intentionalist and materialist `schools of editing' " (p. 157). He rightly
deplores the "combative spirit" with which champions of the latter have
insisted on "the `new' at the expense of the `old' " (p. 153), resulting in
polarized thinking that lacks the subtlety required by the subject; indeed,
the potential contribution of the new insight is undermined by simply
supplanting "the authorial voice with the production voice" (p. 154).
Instead, Shillingsburg stresses the importance of paying attention to the
"multiple voices" present in every work. Each voice reflects agency or
intentionality, and Shillingsburg repeatedly makes a point not often
enough recognized: that "the social contract as a `school of editing' has
not done away with agency for authority, it has not done away with
personal responsibility for textual variation, it has not done away with

intentionality, and it has not done away with the author" (pp. 163-164).
This welcome emphasis on multiple agency nevertheless slights one
matter: the legitimate interest people may have in the product that
readers of the past had in front of them, however full it was of features
not intended by anyone. Shillingsburg's lack of attention to this matter
makes the end of his chapter less precise than it should have been. When
he says that editorial theory of thirty years ago "defined the problem
too narrowly," he apparently means that it did not take the social construction
of texts into account. I believe, however, that the narrowness
of earlier theory is to be defined somewhat differently: its limitation lay
not in ignoring the social side of text production altogether but in assuming
that facsimiles took sufficient account of it, thus neglecting the
intentions of publishers and other involved persons aside from the author.
And these intentions are still generally neglected—which brings
me to the same conclusion as Shillingsburg's, though by a different route.
Recognizing that the social approach to literature involves two foci,
production and reception (the first involving intention, the second concentrating
on whatever the artifact displays), would make Shillingsburg's
discussion even more effective than it already is.[97]

The concluding chapter, largely published in a periodical in 1996,[98]
sums up Shillingsburg's inclusive position under the rubric "A Whirlwind
of Possibilities" (a rather odd choice of title, since it suggests chaos
rather than the order that Shillingsburg has in fact brought to the subject).
After discussing briefly the two basic approaches to editing (accepting
documentary texts and reconstructing intended texts), he gives
a succinct historical account of twentieth-century editorial theory. It has
the great merit (despite some imprecise, even erroneous, statements)[99] of

calling particular attention to the fallacy inherent in the idea of promoting
a new view by discrediting earlier ones; as he sarcastically adds,
"when the task is to make room for a new paradigm, it is, of course,
counterproductive to be fair" (p. 213). Then he explains his own position:
that there is "a significant distinction to be made between [verbal]
works and physical representations of them," but that there is no "essential
or `extant' conceptual or performance work that is the real work";
rather, "physical copies . . . point to and result from" the "human existential
condition" to which works are intricately connected (p. 219).
Documentary texts are "potluck texts," and most readers prefer to approach
texts as "agent dependent" (p. 221). Thus critical editing is essential
(along with the publishing of documentary texts), and multiple
critical texts of a work are required to reflect the voices of different
"authorizing agents" (p. 222). He ends with a tribute to the "courage,
criticism, intelligence, and humility" of editors who alter documentary
texts in order to produce texts that represent "integrity of voice or
agency"—each such product being "only another recipe for the work"
(pp. 224-225). None of this is new (and Shillingsburg would not claim
otherwise), but it is a point of view often drowned out in contemporary
debate. Having it set forth so ably is therefore a great benefit—and all the
more so because it offers, I believe, the most constructive direction for
editorial theory to take. Shillingsburg's book can be enthusiastically admitted
to the small shelf of essential works in this field.

Since the publication of his book, he has continued to drive home his
position in forceful essays. In the 1999 Editio anthology,[100] for example,
he meditates on "losses"—especially the losses involved in accepting only
one editorial approach and rejecting alternative ones. Those who "ride
the cusp of the newest enthusiasm" (p. 2) often "attack the old in order
to make room for the new" (p. 4); but earlier editions that did well what
they set out to do should not be considered failures "just because the
purpose for which they were designed is no longer the ruling fad" (p. 6).
And in another piece the same year, called "Editing Determinate Material
Texts" (Text, 12: 59-71), he criticizes Norman Feltes's belief in
a Marxist "determinate material practice" to explain Victorian book
production, pointing out that its reduction of authors and publishers to
"simple, practically helpless, operatives in a determinate world" (p. 65) is
analogous to the position of the social-contract textual critics. From there
on, we are in familiar territory, though the piece contains some of Shillingsburg's

most emphatic statements. Reflecting on the continuing
relevance of "individual action, desire, and intention," he declares, "I
do not find persuasive or helpful the notion that publication grants
viability to works which, as long as they remain in manuscript, are unfinished
or unborn," and he vows that he "will go on harping on that
string till times change" (p. 68). Times will indeed change, as they always
do, and it will then seem strange that his harping was needed; but
in the present he is a welcome presence, persistently showing the rationality
of accepting multiple approaches.

Another frequent commentator on textual matters, Paul Eggert,
shares certain ideas with Shillingsburg, such as the permanent value of
the concept of authorship and the recognition that different viewpoints
can be complementary, not mutually exclusive. In a 1993 conference
paper that he included, in revised form, in the 1998 anthology that he
and Margaret Sankey edited, he proposes a way of "bridging the divide"
between "social discourse" and "authorial agency."[101] He suggests that
we distinguish between "the level of document" (the "level of physical
inscription") and "the level of text" ("the meaning" created by both the
producers and the receivers of documents [pp. 103-104]). This formulation,
in his view, bridges the gap by recognizing, first, that "the historicity
of the document records both the authorial agency and other
contributing agencies" and, second, that "their textual work [their creation
of meaning] will inevitably have been moulded by, even as to
varying degrees it moulded, the discursive pressures of their period"
(p. 111).

Thinking in this way is indeed helpful, though it is not as different
as Eggert may believe from the more traditional distinction between the
tangible "texts of documents" and the intangible "texts of works" (indeed,
I think he could have avoided some awkwardness by using the
word "work" instead of "text" for his second level). His central point,
as I see it, could be summarized this way: just as the physical features of
documents (including arrangements of words and punctuation) bear
testimony both to authorial striving and to social conditions, so the
works that can be created from documents run the gamut from those
created by authors and other participants in the process of documentary
production to those created by readers and editors (with their varying
temperaments and backgrounds). The slight shift in emphasis here (as I

would express it) from the more conventional approach is a welcome
one: that all editorial work, including that devoted to documentary
editions, is—like all other acts of reading—a construction of meaning,
which may or may not have a historical orientation; when editors publish
their work, they are simply offering new documents that can serve
in their turn as the grounding for further creations of meaning. Eggert's
essay, besides providing a shrewd criticism of Foucault and Derrida,[102]
cogently shows the fallacy of believing that the "real story starts . . . at
the reader-discursive level" rather than at "the initiating point of the
production of meaning which is indisputably witnessed by the documents"
(p. 111), by "the documentary record's having taken the particular
form it did and no other" and thus testifying to the work of particular
human agents (p. 112).

This point is at the heart of another paper of his written for a conference
one year later than the one just discussed, and published in revised
form in anthologies of 1995 and 1999.[103] Its title includes a pair
of phrases—"historical version" and "authorial agency"—that are nearly
identical with those in the earlier piece, and he sets as his task the formulation
of "editing principles capable of holding [these] two strands in
complementary balance" (p. 51). The key, as we know from the previous
essay, is recognizing acts of individual agency in the physical features of
documents: "what is irrefutable is that the physical inscriber—the individual
textual agent—enters into the business of textuality" (p. 57).
Examination of the drama physically enshrined in documents leads

to the observation that "documentary texts [are] inherently unstable"
(p. 55)—an unexceptionable point relevant to his argument, though he
improperly and unnecessarily makes it a criticism of the traditional
intentionalist approach.[104] As editor of the Academy Editions of Australian
Literature (on which he draws in this essay), Eggert puts into
practice his principle of respecting both document and agent by allowing
the specific rationale for dealing with each work to grow out of its
particular textual history. This openness to alternatives is admirable,
but there is inevitably a compromise involved if one approach is given
precedence in each case—which is why he suggests the usefulness of supplementing
the printed volumes of the Academy Editions with electronic
texts (p. 56). Even if his conclusion remains vague on a practical
level, he has made a contribution to theoretical discussion by emphasizing,
in a distinctive way, how documents link us as much to personal
agents as to social forces.[105]

T. H. Howard-Hill has also challenged some of the ideas of the adherents
of the social approach to textual criticism.[106] Although he claims
only to offer "general characterizations" of their attitudes, not rebuttals
of them or reassertions of "the values of the `traditional' editing" (p. 58),
he concludes that "their arguments lead nowhere any editor should wish
to follow" (p. 62); and the force of his observations is weakened by what
appears at times to be a lack of open-mindedness. Nevertheless, he makes
some arresting points worth noting, beginning with his view of the social
theorists' work "less as innovative than reactionary" (p. 51). These adjectives
are of course not necessarily opposites, and I would rather say
that this body of thought is both innovative and reactionary. In any case,
its reactionary aspects are rarely remarked on; yet it clearly is a variety
of the general tendency regarded as conservative in editorial tradition:
the distrust of editorial intervention in documentary texts. To call the
social theorists conservative is not to criticize them, however, but only
to recognize where their thought falls in the cyclical movements that
constitute the history of editorial theory.

Similarly, Howard-Hill's three "characterizations" of their thinking
are valid, but one cannot feel very satisfied with the associated discussion
unless some adjustments are made. First, he remarks on these scholars'

"antiquarianism" (a term that I do not consider pejorative, and I
assume Howard-Hill does not, either); all this means is that they respect
historical evidence. But when he says that these scholars believe documentary
texts to be relatively "unmediated witnesses to the creative
processes and achievements of their originators" (p. 58), he ignores a
major reason for the interest in "unmediated" texts: their value as a
record of what readers had in front of them. And then when he says that
the "vehemence" of these scholars' arguments "establishes original or
facsimile editions as the only kind of edition that they value," he misses
the opportunity to point out that such editions are in fact most appropriate
for accommodating that unstated reason for valuing documents,
not for appreciating "creative processes and achievements," which are
best approached through critical texts. The second characteristic of the
social theorists, he says, is that they are "all hostile to the New Bibliography";
but to add (correctly) that the New Bibliography is "the single
most important advance in the development of Anglo-American editing"
(p. 59) is hardly to the point, since that fact accounts in large part for
their hostility in the first place. The point that needs to be made here
is that analytical bibliography supports every approach to editing and
indeed, with its focus on physical details, should be seen as a corollary
to "antiquarianism." The third characteristic named by Howard-Hill
is that "these scholars reject interpretation as part of the editorial function."
Although it is relevant to note that such resistance is futile ("editors
can scarcely refrain from an activity so pervasively human"), the
more constructive point is that interpretation emerging out of specialist
knowledge is essential to the growth of human understanding.

Howard-Hill's essay makes many useful points about the nature of
the social theorists' position; what it lacks is a clear indication that their
thinking is an important contribution to a comprehensive view of the
range of editorial approaches necessary for the study of every work. When
he says that their emphasis on facsimiles is a "dead end" (p. 61), his overly
negative tone masks what I believe is his real meaning: that the reproduction
of documentary texts is a dead end only if editing is limited to
that activity and nothing else. This is the basic point that should have
surfaced in his piece much more than it does: the social theorists' position
is objectionable only to the extent that it denies the validity of other
approaches. Howard-Hill is perhaps reaching toward this point when he
says, quite correctly, that Greg, McKerrow, and Bowers "were pluralists
to an extent that some more modern editors and theorists are not prepared
either to acknowledge or to emulate" (p. 62). If the implications
of this statement had been amplified through the essay, which would
then have shown more clearly how critical and documentary editions are

complementary, Howard-Hill would still have accomplished his purpose
of characterizing the social approach, but in a more helpful way.[107]

I should like to mention here, at the end of this survey, my 1998 collection,
Literature and Artifacts—not because it is by me, but because it
includes my 1994 essay "Editing without a Copy-Text" (pp. 236-257),
which forms an appropriate pairing with Greg's "The Rationale of
Copy-Text," published at the beginning of the half-century. Indeed, I
conceived of the essay as a replacement for Greg-not in a spirit of rejection
but of completion. Greg's essay does not carry to a logical conclusion
the idea that critical editing relies on editors' judgments, for by
recommending the adoption of a copy-texst with presumptive authority
it retains an element of the best-text approach (which Greg was attempting
to move away from). It was my object to show, first, that editions
offering critical texts will always be of value, alongside documentary
editions, and, second, that a critical text should be a constructed text
rather than an emended one. In other words, editors should not be thinking
in terms of altering a particular existing text but of building up a
new text, word by word and punctuation mark by punctuation mark,
evaluating all available evidence at each step. The text that one would
otherwise have chosen as copy-text would no doubt still often carry the
most evidentiary weight as one decides on individual readings (so long,
of course, as one had the same goal in mind). But the psychology of editing
would be different because every element of the critical text would
be the result of a positive action (in support of some goal, not necessarily
final authorial intention); none would be the product of the passive
notion of "retaining" something. Whether I made this case effectively
is not for me to say, but I believe this shift in thinking is necessary to
fulfill the underlying logic of critical editing. Greg's mid-century essay
reverberated in many ways through the ensuing half-century, but only
at the end of that period was it seen as a stepping-stone to a coherent
concept of the role of judgment in critical editing.[108]

VI

Reading through the writing on textual criticism and scholarly editing
that has been published in the final years of the twentieth century
is a rather dispiriting experience, with few bright spots, because so much
of it is not only inexcusably jargon-filled but also needlessly scornful of
previous thinking. That a lot has been written would be a good sign only
if it translated into a substantial increase in understanding. But much
of the commentary has followed a pattern all too common in intellectual
discourse: it repeats points that are currently in vogue and attacks what
went before, without meeting counterarguments that have already been
expressed. It proceeds in a fashion aptly described by a marvelously compact
phrase of Adam Michnik's, "mantra rather than discourse."[109]

Thinking will not move forward unless counterarguments are addressed,
so that a more comprehensive, more broadly perceptive, statement can
be made. The reason that this process has not occurred more often is that
a great many people are not interested in conversation, in dialogue: they
wish to enforce their own points of view, and they simply do not listen to
possible objections to their arguments and go right on saying what they
said in the first place, as if no other observations had been made in the
meantime.

The most noticeable recent illustration of this phenomenon in textual
criticism involves some of the scholars who wish to be associated with
the idea that texts are socially constructed. They believe that they can
support their position by criticizing authorial intention as an editorial
goal (and analytical bibliography because it was developed by scholars
who held that goal); and they persist in making the same criticisms, even
though inaccuracies in those criticisms have been noted and—more importantly—even
though the logical fallacy of promoting one emphasis by
denigrating another has been pointed out.[110] Even if the criticisms of

authorial intention were sound, the validity of the social approach would
not thereby be confirmed. It should be obvious, however, that both approaches
are valid and that both are indeed necessary to understand the
entire history of works, from their initial creation to the unending sequence
of public responses to them. The recent attention to the postproduction
part of this history has indeed clarified and enriched the
study of documentary texts and their physical embodiments, and we
should be delighted by it. But there is no reason why such study must be
pursued at the expense of the other part of the story.

Those who have taken an either/or position, suggesting that an interest
in authorial intention is futile, unproductive, and outmoded, have
shown by their manner of proceeding that they are more concerned with
promoting a particular point of view than with welcoming all approaches
that can contribute to fuller understanding. They, like so many people
in all walks of life, think in terms of winning an argument rather than of
participating in a conversation. A wonderful phrase of Jeffrey M. Perl's
comes to mind in this connection: in the Winter 2002 number of his
journal Common Knowledge (8: 1-6), he entitled the opening piece
"Civilian Scholarship." If scholarship, or any other discourse, is civilian
rather than military, then it is founded on "metaphors of conversation
or friendship rather than on metaphors adopted from those of sports and
war, of `sides' that one must `take' " (p. 5). Referring to such common
beliefs as that "strife is productive" or that quarreling is a game, Perl
says, "The world deserves better of those employed to think and write
and educate." One of the best expressions of this general view comes
from an essay of Gordon N. Ray's called "Books as a Way of Life":

Understanding rather than victory: this is the motto for civilian scholarship.
It is a motto negated by a large number of recent writings on
textual and editorial theory.

We need not worry, however, as long as writers of the caliber of
Grigely and Shillingsburg come along. And as a way of identifying hopeful
signs for the twenty-first century, I shall mention two publications of
its earliest years. The first is a superb essay by Phillip Harth, written as
a review of the first two volumes of Paul Hammond's Longman edition
of Dryden.[112] This edition is partially modernized, and Harth devotes
most of his essay to demonstrating, with great patience and clarity, the
folly of spending time on a task that is not only impossible to carry out
satisfactorily but also counterproductive, since the results, far from assisting
the reader, form a barrier to understanding. After demolishing
the often-repeated notion that the spelling and punctuation of sixteenthand
seventeenth-century editions necessarily reflect compositorial practice
more than authorial preference, Harth shows how Hammond's
"concern to expunge all signs of the compositor's intervention results
inevitably in the omission of prosodic, figurative, and stylistic elements
for which the poet himself was responsible" (p. 241). Since Hammond
does not modernize any quotations (from Dryden or anyone else) in his
annotations, Harth is given the opportunity to make a basic point applicable
to all modernization: "readers will quickly adjust to the unfamiliar
appearance of those excerpts and experience little difficulty in reading
and understanding them. They will want to do so, in fact, as they find
themselves drawn more and more into observing the process of historical
recovery" (p. 244). These readers will then, of course, "come to wonder
why an exception was thought to be necessary" for the main text. Harth's
essay is one of the best discussions of modernization we have ever had; it
should be pondered not merely by all editors but by all readers.

The other twenty-first-century publication that I want to mention is
David Scott Kastan's Shakespeare and the Book (2001), which illustrates

not only the lingering power of certain clichés but also, more importantly,
the way in which an open-minded intelligence will see through
and beyond them. The book is an engagingly written and perceptive account
of Shakespeare in print—the literary Shakespeare that emerged
through the editions of his work over the centuries rather than the
Shakespeare of the theater (which is apparently all he aspired to be).
Although the book is not, in one sense, primarily about textual theory,
the basic issues that textual criticism must come to terms with pervade
the book and are, from time to time, its explicit subject. If one were to
read only the introduction, one would think that Kastan is another of
those writers who repeat trendy clichés unquestioningly. Beginning with
the assertion that he is dealing with a "hot topic,"[113] he states that he is
"deeply suspicious" of the brand of editorial theory that "posits as its
object of desire a work that never was, an ideal text of an author's intentions
that no materialization does (or can) bear witness to" (p. 3).
He believes that a concept of the work as intangible denies the work of
"any effective principle of realization," and he adds, "Only as texts are
realized materially are they accessible" (p. 4). The familiar arguments
about the role of the physical in reading and about the collaborative
nature of drama are repeated, but they lead him to a point not commonly
made: that the printed text of a play, even one based on performance,
has "its own compelling logic," and thus offers a different work from
that of the performance. The point is valuable, though it takes him to
treacherous ground: "Text and performance are, then, not partial and
congruent aspects of some unity that we think of as the play, but are two
discrete modes of production" (p. 9). Giving the printed play-text autonomy
from the stage as well as from authorial intention obviously
serves to justify his focus on the book as a social product.

His introduction unfortunately does not do justice to the more
thoughtful view that emerges in the chapters that follow (although there
is a slight hint in his unexplained admission that the concept of work as
the author's "unrealized intentions" is "not without value" [p. 4]). In
the final chapter he recognizes the value of all kinds of editions. A goal
of reconstructing an "authorial text," he says, is "a reasonable but by
no means necessary grant of authority to the intended text over the
actual textual forms in which it is encountered"; "the author's intentions
are of course a worthy, if elusive, object of study," and to pursue

them "the conventional understanding and practices of editing are appropriate."
But "there must be alternative ways to conceive of the goals
of editorial activity, ways in which the processes of materialization would
not be understood as unwanted obstacles" (p. 122). These comments
reflect an admirably comprehensive view of editing, a recognition that
no one approach can adequately accommodate the differing kinds of
interest we may have in every work. One may wonder how Kastan can
end on a note so different from the way he started: the introduction, not
the conclusion, is in fact the anomaly, for the book as a whole displays
a broader understanding than his willingness to repeat stock phrases
(and not only in the introduction) suggests. For example, the cliché
that we are "heirs of a romantic conception of writing as individual
and originary" (p. 48), is immediately followed by the recognition
that some of Shakespeare's contemporaries held the same conception;
and Kastan's treatment of Shakespeare's eighteenth-century editors,
who strove to produce intended texts, is not condemnatory but rather
accepting of their efforts as a manifestation of one of the interests that
people do have.[114]

I should like to use these contradictory elements in Kastan's work as
a way of summarizing two basic points about the nature of texts and of
editing. First is his idea that "literature exists, in any useful sense, only
and always in its materializations." The phrase "in any useful sense" is
there because Kastan understands that "the work of the imagination"
precedes its materialization in "a medium that is incommensurate with
its refinement." Presumably for this reason he calls the concept of immaterial
works "not logically impossible" (p. 4). But it cannot then be
ignored on the grounds that a work, so conceived, depends on "physical
supports" if readers are to experience it. Obviously an intangible verbal
work can be transmitted only in oral or visible form, and every attempt
to recover the author's original and later intentions must itself be given
one of these two forms if it is to be communicated; but the attempt to
reconstruct intentions, however mediated by editorial judgment and its
presentation, is no different in kind from all other efforts to recover past
events that are not directly available in living oral traditions or surviving
physical objects.

Clearly every oral rendition and every printed text of what purports
to be the same work produces a discrete experience, and each one is
deserving of our serious attention. That an intangible intended work or
series of works (versions) underlies such manifestations is also evident,
as Kastan implicitly recognizes at various points. He notes, for instance,
"the difference in the material relation of painters to their paintings and
authors to the books that bear their names" (pp. 115-116). And despite
his having complained at the beginning of his book about the idea that
works "have a reality independent of the physical [or, one might add,
oral] texts in which we engage them" (p. 3), he says at the end that Hamlet
is "the name for what allows us comfortably to consider as some
metaphysical unity the various instantiations of the play" (p. 133). This
unity need not be a single text, of course, and he is right to say immediately
that he is not referring to "some pre-representational original."
Although he is speaking of a pattern that somehow connects all versions,
he has nevertheless shown that we cannot do without the concept of
intangible media (otherwise texts and performances would not be "instantiations"
of something else)—and thus there must also be intended
texts that antedate their instantiations.

The other point I wish to take up is what implications for editing
follow from an acceptance of the importance of all texts—intended, recited,
and tangible. The first question is whether there should be any
editing whatever (in the sense of critical editing, which is what Kastan
generally means by "editing"). Most discussions that propose as an editorial
goal "the location of the text within the network of social and institutional
practices" (p. 122)—and Kastan's is no exception—suggest that
"arguably it becomes more difficult to justify editing at all." What is
usually not made clear is that facsimiles serve only one aspect of the
social approach to texts: they show what actually emerged from the publication
process. An interest in the publisher's intention (or that of other
collaborators with the author), however, requires a critically emended
text, just as an interest in the author's intention does.[115] Although Kastan
does not make this point explicitly, he understands some of the reasons
for having "many kinds of editions," those that "attempt to restore the
play he [Shakespeare] wrote before it was subjected to the demands of
production in both the playhouse and the printing house"[116] as well as

those that "take the theatrical auspices [and presumably the printinghouse
demands] of the plays seriously" (p. 123), including facsimiles. But
this laudable inclusiveness is marred by his statement that, although
there are "good reasons . . . for many kinds of editions," there are "probably
not very good reasons for as many of the same kinds of editions as
indeed we have." This statement can make sense only if one takes it as
flippant, in the same way one would regard the observation that there
are too many books about Hamlet. It is only a way of expressing a personal
preference for one approach, or one set of judgments, over another.
There can never be too many editions of any work because each one is
part of the unending process of responding to the work. Kastan actually
does understand this point:

I hope my comments show how Kastan's book stands apart from the usual
arguments for equating literature with material texts. Kastan seems on
one level to want to accept the standard clichés, but his basic good sense
forces its way to the surface and will not allow that to happen unequivocally.
This struggle results in some contradictions, but it strengthens his
account and is a hopeful sign for the future.

That there will never be an end to the re-editing of texts and the
publication of new editions, no matter how many times those texts have
been edited before, is a fact of life that Tom Davis, for one, would perfectly
understand. In his refreshing, clear-headed, and witty piece called
"The Monsters and the Textual Critics"[118] —an essay that ought to be

known by everyone who takes reading seriously—he recognizes that
textual criticism is in fact something practiced by everyone all the time.
Textual criticism, whether of verbal texts or of any other part of our
surroundings, is "impossible" in the sense that it can rarely result in
certain answers; but it is "necessary" and therefore "universal." Those
who edit texts should not lose sight of the combination of science and art
involved. Like scientists who "run up all the time against the intransigence
of nature" (p. 110), editors will come to dead ends in their
research but still—by other means, those of literary criticism—must offer
possible solutions to problems that are basically insoluble. If editors
openly accept, and clearly express, the limitations inherent in their
work, then textual criticism is "a perfectly possible and satisfactory activity:
after all, we do it every day."

The nature of the world, dependent as it is on our perception, is
such that no task, even those we may regard as purely scientific, is ever
fully completed. We live, as Davis says, "from compromise to compromise."
We may feel satisfied at one moment with what we have accomplished,
but soon we will find it in need of redoing, just as others will
have to do it in their own ways, and then do it again. In the ninety-eighth
chapter of Moby-Dick, Melville describes the process of scrubbing down
the decks after the oil has been extracted from a whale; but no sooner is
this activity finished than another whale is sighted, and the whole sequence,
from killing the whale to cleaning up the ship afterward, must
be performed again:

In the face of this ineluctable cycle, we are better advised to embrace and
cherish it than to lament it. Every editor who edits or re-edits a work is
participating in an invigorating, if unending, struggle—the same one that
literary critics are engaged in, though the less perceptive members of
both groups fail to recognize their common pursuit. Textual critics, instead
of being removed from direct engagement with literature—as many
people imagine—are partaking of it fully. Their multifarious, unceasing
efforts, which can never be more than tentative, exemplify the richest
kind of experience that readers can have.