University of Virginia Library

VI

To what in our agonised society should the textual critic now be responding? It occurs to me that McKenzie, in his concern to import into bibliographic studies an approach appropriate to science and Thorpe, in his desire to dissociate bibliography from science, have in mind a kind of science which is only partially relevant to our world as it is now understood. One can see the same sort of thing in one of the most interesting critical studies of the last decade, George Steiner's The Death of Tragedy.[41] In part of his argument he suggests that: "When the new world picture of reason usurped the place of the old tradition in the course of the seventeenth century, the English theatre entered its long decline." Later on he argues: "The myths which have prevailed since Descartes and Newton are myths of reason, no truer perhaps than those which preceded them, but less responsive to the claims of art."

My concern here is not whether the conclusions which Steiner

draws are sound (though I believe these do not necessarily follow from his analysis, brilliant though that analysis is), but of the change since Einstein, Heisenberg, and Gödel pronounced The Special Theory of Relativity, The Principle of Uncertainty, and the Theory of Incompleteness, respectively. No longer is the world within the atom to be understood in terms of the laws of cause and effect, nor that universe beyond our world as ruled by time as marked at Greenwich. If within the limits of atom and universe our world works well enough according to Newtonian physics it is only with an awareness that this is only a partial explanation of physical being.

Whether directly or not, creative writers have responded, since Strindberg wrote The Dream Play a year or two before Einstein published his theory, to this new understanding of the nature of our world. It is surely not mere coincidence that those in the forefront of physics and mathematics, and those in the avantgarde in the arts, are concerned in their very different ways and to very different purposes, with uncertainty, incompleteness and irrationality? In this at least, and most excitingly, science and art are related. If we do sense that we are at a point of crisis in bibliographic studies — that our paradigm is inadequate to cope with the anomalies with which it is faced — then perhaps it might repay us to take note of these changes in the physical explanation of our world and the response of creative writers thereto.

What we could find is that the more precise techniques developed by 'the school of Bowers and Hinman' (if I may use such an expression) are to us not unlike what Newtonian physics is to scientists, but that outside the usefulness of these methods (which are, after all, rather extensive) we ought not to be afraid of irrationality and infinite

coincidence. Or, to put it more conventionally, imagination and taste. Thus might we still be able to respond to the question Erasmus asked of Martin van Dorp: "What are we to say when we see that the exemplars of this edition do not agree?"[43] and we may, in Ben Jonson's words, in an aptly named work, "doe a welcome worke yet to helpe posterity to judge rightly of the old.",[44]