i. Arrangement
The first decision to be made about the arrangement of apparatus is
its location. Are variant readings or editorial symbols to appear within the
text itself? Or is the annotation to be provided at the foot of each page? Or
at the end of the text? Or in some combination of these places? The
tendency in recent years has been toward "clear text" — that is, no
editorial intrusions of any kind on the pages of the text itself — and
there
are at least two important reasons for encouraging this practice. In the first
place, an editor's primary responsibility is to establish a text; whether his
goal is to reconstruct that form of the text which represents the author's
final intention or some other form of the text, his essential task is to
produce a reliable text according to some set of principles. Relegating all
editorial matter to an appendix and allowing the text to stand by itself
serves to emphasize the primacy of the text and permits the reader to
confront the literary work
without the distraction of editorial comment and to read the work with ease.
A second advantage of a clear text is that it is easier to quote from or to
reprint. Although no device can insure accuracy of quotation, the insertion
of symbols (or even footnote numbers) into a text places additional
difficulties in the way of the quoter. Furthermore, most quotations appear
in contexts where symbols are inappropriate; thus when it is necessary to
quote from a text which has not been kept clear of apparatus, the burden of
producing a clear text of
the passage is placed on the quoter. Even footnotes at the bottom of the text
pages are open to the same objection, when the question of a photographic
reprint arises. Once a scholarly text of a work has been established, every
effort should be made to encourage publishers who plan to issue classroom
or other practical
[5] editions of the
work to lease that text and reproduce it photographically, thus assuring
wider circulation of a reliable text.
[6]
But in such cases it is the text which is leased, not the apparatus; and while
the apparatus, like any other published research, is available for all to draw
upon, it would not necessarily be appropriate for inclusion in such leased
editions, which might more usefully carry an apparatus emphasizing
explanatory rather than textual annotation. The presence of any apparatus
on the pages of the text, therefore, may prove in the long run a hindrance
to the dissemination of a
responsible text.
Arguments can of course be advanced for inserting editorial apparatus
into a text, and it is true that on certain occasions this arrangement is
desirable. For instance, the nature of such materials as letters, notebooks,
and journals — works never intended for publication — may
not
always be accurately reflected in clear text, which requires a choice among
alternative readings that is often alien to the spirit of a private document.
In these cases a text which includes editorial insertions and symbols
recognizes that canceled readings and uncanceled variants are in fact
integral parts of such works and comes as close as possible (short of a
facsimile) to reproducing their essential character.[7] In
addition, manuscripts of works which conform to genres ordinarily intended
for publication — whether or not they were so prepared —
may be of
interest in their own right as revealing steps in the author's creative
process. Such manuscripts may appropriately be edited in the form of a
"genetic text," which through symbols (often, necessarily, elaborate ones)
makes clear the various stages of alteration and revision. The document
being edited is still a private one (like letters and journals), even though it
happens to embody a text intended for eventual publication. An outstanding
example of a genetic text is the one prepared by Harrison Hayford and
Merton M. Sealts, Jr., from Melville's
Billy Budd manuscript
(1962); because a genetic text is not easily readable, however, and because
Billy Budd is a work of fiction rather than a private journal,
the
editors have also established a "reading text," free of all apparatus on the
pages of the text. (Another method of
dealing with this sort of manuscript — footnotes describing the
revisions
— is discussed below.) Thus it can be said that clear text may often
be
inappropriate when the material to be edited is a working document of a
private nature; but when a work of the kind normally intended for
publication is being edited as a finished piece of writing
[8] rather than as a semifinal
document, any
intrusion into the text works against the editor's ultimate goal of presenting
a text as the author intended (or would have intended) it to be
presented.
[9]
Notes at the foot of pages of text also can be defended at times.
There is no denying the argument that the location is more convenient for
reference than the end of the text, and editors may wish to place the most
important apparatus there, even when they reserve the bulk of it for the
end. Fredson Bowers, in his move to make apparatus less cumbersome,
took the view that scholarly editions "should be made more attractive to the
general user, first by removing all but the most immediately pertinent of the
apparatus to appendices in the rear, thus freeing the text page from all
information that is only of reference value and so of no immediate concern
to the reader."[10] In his edition
of Dekker, only substantive emendations are given at the foot of the page,
and other editions have followed a similar plan — the California
Works of John Dryden (first volume, 1956), for example,
which
records only the emendations (substantive and accidental) in footnotes. Once
the decision has been made, however, not to clutter the text pages with the
entire apparatus, it is a difficult question to decide just how much of the
apparatus is of such immediate importance that it should be retained on
those pages, separated from the rest of the apparatus. What the issue comes
to in the end is whether the advantages of having some data available
without turning any pages outweigh the decided disadvantages of having the
text pages encumbered with visible signs of the editorial process. And the
advantages of the former are less strong when related information must be
turned to at the back anyway, while the disadvantages of the latter are
strong enough to have dictated this shift of
at least some of the material in the first place.
[11] Of course, footnote apparatus is
not
objectionable in editions of manuscript drafts or journals, for the same
reason that genetic texts are appropriate there. Sometimes footnotes, rather
than symbols in the text, are used in such editions to record manuscript
alterations: a good example is Bowers's parallel-text edition
[12] of
Whitman's
Manuscripts
(1955), in which footnotes to the manuscript texts describe in words rather
than symbols the exact nature of the manuscript alterations (footnotes, that
is, without reference symbols in the text, so that the text remains clear). At
other times footnotes are used in addition to symbols in the text, as
in the Harvard edition of Emerson's journals, where the footnotes (keyed
to numbers in the text) provide both textual and historical information in
discursive form. In neither case are the footnotes intrusions as they would
be on the pages of the finished text of a novel or poem. But whenever
footnotes do appear on any kind of text pages, the proximity of note to text
should not lead an editor into thinking that his decisions about the readings
of the text itself are less important. H. H. Furness, in the first volume of
his Variorum Shakespeare, declared that, "in such an edition as the present,
it makes very little difference what text is printed
in extenso,
since every other text is also printed with it on the same page" (p. viii). To
take such a point of view is practically to abandon editing a text in favor of
constructing an apparatus, for the text then exists largely as a frame of
reference for the apparatus. A record of variants presented as a work of
scholarship in its
own right can be useful,
[13] but there
should be no illusion about its being an edition.
[14] In the end, a decision to use or not
to use
footnotes reflects an editor's critical judgment about the nature of the text
he is editing combined with his evaluation of the relative importance, in
terms of psychological effect on the reader, of clear text as opposed to text
with simultaneously visible apparatus.
[15]
If an editor decides to place his apparatus at the end rather than on
the text pages, several questions of arrangement still remain. One of the
first is whether, if a volume contains more than one work, the apparatus
pertaining to a given work should come immediately after the text of that
work or whether the entire apparatus should be gathered at the end of the
volume. Practice has varied in the CEAA editions: the Ohio State
Hawthorne and some volumes of the Virginia Crane have apparatus
following each work, whereas the Southern Illinois Dewey has apparatus at
the back of each volume. Of course,
the number of separate works involved has some bearing on the decision:
the first volume of the Dewey edition contains many individual essays never
before collected, whereas the first volume of the Crane edition and the third
of the Hawthorne each contain the texts of only two separately published
books. In the case of the Dewey, therefore, apparatus after each work
would have produced a cumbersome volume in which editorial material
continually alternated with the text and in which reference to the apparatus
was inconvenient since the reader would never know just which pages
contained the apparatus to any given work; in the case of volumes made up
of only two or three works, on the other hand, it could be argued that the
proximity of the apparatus following each work is an advantage and further
that this arrangement emphasizes the discreteness of the texts which happen
to be published in the same volume. Nevertheless, even when the number
of separate works is small, the act of
consulting the apparatus seems more difficult when the apparatus is placed
at the ends of the works rather than all together at the end of the
volume;
[16] in addition, the occurrence
of apparatus at scattered points throughout a volume, though it does not
violate the idea of clear text, is undeniably a greater editorial intrusion than
would exist if all the editor's data were collected at one location. Essentially
the difficulty arises out of the fact that, from the textual point of view, one
is concerned with two or more "books," while from the point of view of
design one is dealing with a single physical volume. Since the placement of
apparatus does not affect an editor's principles for establishing a text but
does affect the design of the finished volume, and since the volume, as the
smallest separate physical unit in an edition — and not the literary
work
or "book" — is the unit which the reader must manipulate, it seems
reasonable to suggest that
the apparatus (once the decision has been reached to place it at the "end"
rather than on text pages) should probably in most circumstances be
gathered in one section at the end of each physical volume.
[17]
A related question is the precise arrangement of the material at the
end of the volume. Just as it seems easier to turn to the apparatus if it is all
at one location, so is it simpler to refer to the information about a particular
work if it is presented at one spot within that section of apparatus.
Normally when a reader consults the apparatus he is studying a single
work, and he finds the apparatus more convenient if all the lists pertaining
to that work occur together, so that he does not have to turn back and forth
from the relevant part of a long list of emendations for the whole volume
to the relevant part of a full historical collation, and so on. One might
argue, of course, that to have only one list of each type for the whole
volume — as in the Dewey edition — consolidates the
information
more economically and is in conformity with the view of the volume as a
single physical entity. The difficulty, however, is that the volume is still
composed of individual works,
each with its own textual history and each requiring separate editorial
consideration; any apparatus which does not segregate the material relating
to each work is likely to obscure the variations in copy-texts and in
numbers of authoritative editions involved and to suggest a greater
uniformity than in fact exists. Obviously this is not to say that the true
situation cannot be perceived by a careful reader — after all, neither
system, in the hands of responsible editors, conceals relevant information.
The whole point is whether one system is clearer and easier to use than the
other, and the advantage in this regard would seem to lie with the system
which presents separate blocks of data for each individual work. The
greater ease with which, under this system, one can move from one
category of data to another and gain an overview of the kinds of editorial
decisions involved (even without remembering which pages the work
covers) surely outweighs the slightly greater expenditure of
space entailed.[18]
Whether or not a volume contains more than one work or has
apparatus arranged by work, another question which an editor must decide
is the order in which the various parts of the apparatus are to be presented.
Although the record of emendations in the copy-text generally precedes the
historical collation, there is otherwise little consensus on this matter. Some
editions place the discursive textual notes after the list of emendations,
while others give them first; some put the list of line-end hyphenation last,
while others insert it immediately after the record of emendations. The issue
is not one of major importance: what is important is that these kinds of
information be present, not that they be present in a particular order. Still,
they have to appear in some order; and the editor, if he does not settle the
question by flipping a coin, must have some rationale for selecting one
order over another. If an advantage, however slight, does exist favoring one
arrangement, that
arrangement is preferable to a purely random order hit upon by an
individual editor — preferable not only because there is some reason
for
it but also because its adoption would result in greater uniformity among
editions. At any rate, the editor should be aware of the various
considerations involved in the ordering of the lists.
One common arrangement is to place the list of emendations first (if
it does not appear as footnotes), since it could be considered of most
immediate importance, recording as it does the editorial alterations in the
copy-text. Generally this list is followed (as in the Ohio State Scarlet
Letter, the California Mark Twain, and the Dewey edition) by the
discursive textual notes; because a common practice now (following
Bowers's Dekker) is to mark with an asterisk those emendations which are
discussed in the notes, the section of notes can in a sense be regarded as an
appendage to the list of emendations. On the other hand, most editors find
it necessary occasionally to comment on readings they have not emended,
giving their reasons for not altering what might at first seem to be
incorrect. Notes of this kind obviously do not relate to the list of
emendations, since no emendations are recorded at these points. One way
of solving this awkwardness is to insert asterisked entries
in the list of emendations calling attention to
these notes, simply by citing the reading involved and adding
"
stet" to show that the reading was the same in the
copy-text.
[19] The result is that every
discursive note can be located by means of the asterisks in the list of
emendations; but the price paid for this convenience is that the list of
emendations is no longer, strictly speaking, a list of emendations, because
it also contains certain instances where emendations have not been made.
This list is then less easy to use for surveying the emendations as a whole
or compiling statistics about them, since one would have to be alert for
those items which are not emendations at all. The function of such a list
would be less clear-cut and less easy for the reader to comprehend; and the
convenience of having asterisk references to all the notes (if, indeed, it
really is a convenience) is probably not worth so high a price. An
alternative, and more satisfactory, solution is simply to reverse the
order of the two sections, placing the textual notes before the list of
emendations. One effect of this change is to remove any implication that the
notes are tied to the list of emendations; asterisks can still be used in the list
of emendations to call attention to notes, but no awkwardness results from
the fact that some of the notes take up readings not entered in the list. This
arrangement emphasizes the real function of the notes: to comment on any
readings — whether emendations or not — which raise some
problem
from a textual point of view and which thus require some explanation.
Many readers not interested in rejected variants will be reading carefully
enough to wonder about certain peculiar expressions and will turn directly
to the textual notes to see what explanation is offered for the adoption
(whether through emendation or retention) of these expressions. Placing
these notes nearest the text is both suggestive and convenient: suggestive of
the fact that the notes
make direct comments on readings in the established text, and convenient
because it allows all the sections of the apparatus in tabular, rather than
discursive, form to fall together.
[20]
In recent years this position for the textual notes has
been gaining favor and has been employed in the Crane, Howells, Irving,
and Melville editions and in the Hawthorne edition beginning with the
second volume.
[21]
Once it is decided to make the textual notes the first of the four main
divisions of the apparatus,[22] it is not
difficult to settle on the list of emendations as the second. Of the standard
lists, it is the one most directly connected with the edited text, since it
records the editorial changes which that text embodies and enables the
reader to reconstruct the basic document, the copy-text. The question that
remains, then, is the order of the other two basic lists — the
historical
collation and the record of line-end hyphenation. The hyphenation list is
often put in last position (as in the Dewey, Howells, and Irving editions, in
certain volumes of The Mark Twain Papers, and in the first
volume of the Hawthorne edition); apparently the reason is that hyphenation
seems in some intangible sense less "significant" than the instances of
substantive variation in the authorized editions. Yet if one of the reasons for
giving precedence, among the
lists, to the record of emendations is that it is concerned with editorial
decisions, consistency would suggest that the hyphenation list should follow
immediately, since it too records editorial decisions — that is, one
half
of it does, the half that lists line-end hyphens in the copy-text. And the
other half — noting the established forms of compounds divided at
line-ends in the edited text — is of direct use to any reader who
wishes
to make a quotation from the text. The historical collation, on the other
hand, is simply a factual register of the variations (usually only the
substantive ones) present in a given group of editions; although it is
valuable in setting forth much of the textual evidence at the editor's
disposal, its purpose is not primarily
to list editorial decisions,
[23] and it is
thus set apart from the other main sections of the apparatus in this regard.
If the principle of arrangement is to be — as seems sensible
— a
movement from what is most directly associated with the final edited text
to what is least directly connected with it, there is little doubt that the
hyphenation list should precede the historical collation (as it does in the
Crane, Fielding, and Melville editions and in the Hawthorne beginning with
the second volume).
A suggested standard order, therefore, for the four basic parts of the
apparatus is as follows: (1) textual notes; (2) emendations; (3) line-end
hyphenation; and (4) historical collation. Another essential part of the
editorial matter is an essay describing the editorial principles followed in
the edition, the textual history of the individual work, and any special
problems emerging from the application of those principles to that particular
historical situation. This kind of essay is frequently labeled as an
"introduction" and placed at the beginning of the volume, preceding the
text. Although such a location does not contradict the notion of clear text
(since it obviously does not affect what appears on the text pages), it does
result in the editor intruding himself at a very prominent place in the
volume; what is probably more in keeping with the spirit of the clear-text
principle and with the decision to place apparatus at the end is to think of
the textual essay not as an
introduction to the entire volume but only as an introduction to the
apparatus — and thus to be placed at the end, though preceding the
other
parts of the editorial matter dealing with textual concerns (a plan followed
by a number of editions, such as the Howells, Irving, Melville, and
Simms).[24] In cases where related
documents of textual interest exist (a manuscript fragment from an early
draft, a published preface differing from the one in the copy-text edition,
a map or other nontextual appurtenance of the copy-text edition, and the
like), they can properly be printed or discussed as another section of the
editorial apparatus — a section which should probably come last,
since
such material often is not keyed directly to the established text and in any
case is only peripherally related to it. Finally, the editorial apparatus
in some instances may include explanatory, as opposed to textual,
annotation: many editions provide a historical essay on the background,
composition, publication, and reception of the work, and
some—especially those of nonfiction — also offer notes
identifying
allusions and an index. The historical essay is sometimes placed at the
beginning of the volume, even when the textual essay follows the text (as
in the Howells and Simms editions), and at other times it is put in the end
matter, preceding the textual essay (as in the Irving and Melville editions);
the argument for the latter position is the same as in the case of the textual
essay — to allow the edited work to have the opening place in the
volume. The explanatory notes — if they are not treated as
footnotes
[25] — might
reasonably be
the first section to follow the text, preceding any of the textual apparatus
(as in the Howells edition), though they might logically follow the historical
essay, if that essay were in the end matter; and an index, whether or not it
covers the editorial contributions, should retain its conventional position at
the very end of the physical volume (as in the Dewey edition). Since the
nontextual annotation is discursive in form or is set up in forms (such as
indexes) about which much has already been written, and since the related
documents by their nature usually present special situations which must be
treated on an individual basis, the remarks on form in the pages which
follow will be limited to the strictly textual apparatus.
