III
When one understands Greg's theory and the CEAA's implementation
of it, one cannot help regarding many of the recent discussions (both
favorable and unfavorable) of this joint subject as naïve and parochial,
and frequently as uninformed or misinformed.[43] A few,
however, do raise important issues, and it is regrettable that a survey of
these discussions must begin with one of so little substance as that of
Edmund Wilson. In a two-part article entitled "The Fruits of the MLA,"
published in the
New York Review of Books on 26
September and 10 October 1968, Wilson offered what can only be called
an ill-tempered and incoherent attack on the CEAA editions, making
references to six volumes ostensibly under review;
[44] in December of that year the article, with
a postscript commenting on some of the correspondence provoked by
it,
[45] was published in pamphlet form
as "A New York Review Book," and in 1973 it was collected into the
posthumous volume
The Devils and Canon Barham (pp.
154-202), edited by Leon Edel.
[46]
Because of Wilson's stature, this article has received
a considerable amount of attention and will continue to have an audience in
the future as part of his collected essays; if it had been written by a lesser
figure, however, its obvious motivation and manifest confusion would have
prevented its being taken seriously. Wilson makes transparent his motive
for discrediting the CEAA editions by quoting, at the start, a letter he had
written to Jason Epstein in 1962 setting forth the idea of "bringing out in
a complete and compact form the principal American classics," based on
"the example of the Editions de la Pléiade" (pp. 155-156); this
undertaking he had hoped would be supported by the National Endowment
for the Humanities, but the MLA, he says, "had a project of its own for
reprinting the American classics and had apparently had ours suppressed"
(p. 159).
[47] Thus determined to find
fault with the results of the MLA project, Wilson never addresses himself
to the basic editorial rationale (that is, to
Greg's theory) but instead is content to ridicule such matters as the
laboriousness of the research involved, the extent of the apparatus, and the
physical size of the volumes. The article is, uncharacteristically, full of
confusions, if not inconsistencies,
[48]
the most egregious perhaps being his professed admiration for a "sound and
full text" (p. 157) combined with his view that collation is unrewarding if
it does not uncover "serious suppressions and distortions" (p. 161) or
interesting variants ("the scrutinizing of variants may, in some cases, be of
interest," p. 172). What Wilson is unwilling to acknowledge is that the
CEAA's concern extends beyond a scholarly audience to the general public:
the CEAA, he says, is "directing a republication of our classics which is
not only, for the most part, ill-judged and quite sterile in itself but even
obstructive to their republication in any other form" (p. 190). He fails to
note that the pages of text, unencumbered in most cases by editorial
intrusions, are suitable for photographic reproduction in volumes more
convenient to hold and that the apparatus (which, admittedly, helps to make
some of the volumes cumbersome), rather than being "sterile," may serve
to generate other editions, based on differing evaluations of the
evidence—or at least to encourage analysis of the editor's judgments.
Wilson's piece scarcely demands any reply, but the celebrity it achieved
caused the MLA to feel that some sort of
official notice was appropriate, and in March of 1969 the MLA published
a pamphlet entitled
Professional Standards and American Editions:
A Response to Edmund Wilson, containing two accounts of the
history and aims of the CEAA, by William M. Gibson and John H. Fisher,
along with letters from five scholars enumerating errors or confusions in
Wilson's remarks.
[49] Actually, all that
was necessary, if a reply was to be made, was Gordon Ray's brief comment
which stands as the epigraph to the pamphlet. Recognizing that "this attack
derives in part from the alarm of amateurs at seeing rigorous professional
standards applied to a subject in which they have a vested interest" (and
thus recognizing the attraction which Wilson's position had for a number
of people one might have expected to see through it),
[50] Ray observes, "As the American learned
world has come
to full maturity since the second World War, a similar animus has shown
itself and been discredited in field after field from botany to folklore. In the
long run professional standards always prevail."
In contrast to Wilson's article, which makes no reference to Greg's
theory, two brief essays which appeared soon after it—the work of Paul
Baender and Donald Pizer—do raise questions directly about the
applicability and usefulness of Greg's "Rationale." Although each of these
essays is weakened by a partial misunderstanding of Greg, they at least
raise issues the discussion of which may serve to clarify certain points in
some people's minds. Baender, an editor associated with a CEAA edition,
published in 1969 a note entitled "The Meaning of Copy-Text,"[51] which asserts that the term has become
"ambiguous and misleading," principally for two reasons: first, that it is a
"banner word" which "tends toward the superlative" and which thus implies
"authority beyond its denotation, as though the term itself ratified an
editor's choice of text"; second, that it is "not suited to the full range and
complexity of editorial problems" (p. 312). The first
point has nothing to do with the word "copy-text" or the concept but only
with unscholarly reactions to it—unscholarly because they depend on the
"prestige" (as Baender calls it) of the term rather than the arguments lying
behind it. The second is of more consequence but is based on an
oversimplification and distortion of Greg's position. If it were accurate to
say flatly that Greg's theory is eclectic with respect to substantives but
maintains "a single-text criterion" with respect to accidentals (p. 314), or
if it were fair to suggest that its application to situations involving
prepublication texts results in "another stage for a retrogressive pursuit of
copy-text" (p. 316), then one would have grounds for claiming that it is
"not suited to the full range and complexity of editorial problems." But
nothing in Greg's theory, as we have seen, prohibits the emendation of
accidentals in the copy-text when one has grounds for doing so; nor is it
consistent with his theory to assume
that a surviving manuscript must necessarily—regardless of its
nature—become copy-text, since he allowed for the possibility that in
some
cases a later, rather than an earlier, text is the appropriate choice. One of
Baender's illustrations
[52] rests on a
basic confusion (of which Baender is not alone guilty) between "copy-text"
and "printer's copy." Baender cites a situation in which the number of
authorial alterations in a later printing makes it more convenient for the
editor to use a reproduction of that later printing as the basis for his text,
entering onto it the readings of the first printing wherever the later readings
are not judged to be authorial. Such a procedure, of course, does not violate
Greg's theory (however risky it may be in practical terms, since one is
increasing the probability that nonauthorial readings may inadvertently be
allowed to remain in the text); but Baender's feeling that one follows the
procedure "despite this convention of copy-text" makes clear that he is not
focusing on the distinction between "text," meaning a particular
arrangement and formal
presentation of a group of words, and "printer's copy," meaning a specific
physical copy of a text furnished to the printer. Greg's "copy-text" is a
"text"—which can exist in more than one physical embodiment (for
example, the individual copies of an edition)—and Greg did not comment
on the manner in which that text should be reproduced for the use of the
compositor who is setting type for the editor's new edition. The CEAA
Statement does go on to recommend, for obvious practical
reasons, the use of a photographic reproduction of the copy-text as printer's
copy; but not to follow this course, whether for convincing or questionable
reasons, does not in itself contradict Greg's theory, since no theoretical
matter is at issue.
[53]
Two years later Donald Pizer raised again,[54] but in broader terms, the question of the
applicability of Greg's theory to recent literature
by enumerating five ways "in which copy-text theory is unresponsive to the
distinctive qualities of [that is, the historical circumstances lying behind]
modern American texts" (p. 148).
[55]
Although Pizer calls attention to some issues that deserve careful
consideration, his article is ineffective as an argument against the general
usefulness of Greg's rationale because it fails to distinguish between
theoretical and practical concerns and to recognize fully the lack of
dogmatism in Greg's approach. The last three of his points are irrelevant
to an analysis of Greg's theory—what they are relevant to is a
consideration of the particular kind of edition (in the sense of text plus
apparatus or other commentary) appropriate for modern (nineteenth- and
twentieth-century) American literature. While this subject is of course a
legitimate matter for debate, the issue is only confused by the implication
that the adoption of Greg's theory determines the nature of
the apparatus (or whatever accompanies the text) as well as of the text
itself. Thus his third point—that the multiplicity of manuscripts,
typescripts, and proofs which survive for some modern works makes the
task of recording all variant readings excessively onerous
[56] —presupposes that something in that
theory of copy-text necessitates a complete record of variants, for he
concludes: "the theory of copy-text either hinders the preparation of critical
editions or encourages the production, at immense expense, of unusable
editions" (p. 151). But whether or not one wishes to follow the practice of
CEAA editions in recording variants (and the CEAA does not require as an
absolute rule that all pre-copy-text variants be noted in print) has nothing
to do with whether or not one edits a text in accordance with Greg's theory;
and naturally the job of editing a reliable text is complicated by the survival
of numerous documents, for the variants in them must
be examined carefully regardless of whether a listing is to be published.
Pizer's fifth point is a related one, dealing also with apparatus: he objects
to clear text in a "critical edition" because turning to the back of a book to
consult the apparatus is more difficult than looking at the foot of a page,
and he disapproves specifically of the sections of apparatus which the reader
of a CEAA edition must "juggle" (p. 152). The
possibility that a more efficient apparatus can be devised is always open;
but the plan of the apparatus does not alter the editorial procedure, and a
dislike of "the tendency toward clear-text publication" cannot through any
argument become an "objection to copy-text theory."
[57] The fourth of Pizer's observations
amounts to nothing more than the recognition that some editors may choose
to edit works which some readers deem unworthy of the effort expended.
He speaks of "the absolutism of copy-text procedures"—meaning the
uniform treatment of major and minor works—without acknowledging
that the decision to edit is a critical evaluation in itself. Not all the CEAA
editions are "complete" editions, and those that are reflect—rather than
any requirement of Greg's theory—the critical belief that the stature of
the authors involved demands full-scale investigation of even their lesser
pieces.
[58] Very few people (and
certainly not the CEAA) would dissent from the view that—since time
and money are not unlimited—"practical editions" must suffice for many
literary works; but there will never be complete agreement on exactly what
works those are.
Pizer's first two objections, in contrast, do raise questions about
theory, but not, as he implies, solely about Greg's theory; they are serious
questions which any editor must face, whether in the context of Greg's
rationale or not. It is Pizer's contention that Greg's theory, by leading an
editor normally to adopt the accidentals of a manuscript in preference to
those of a first printing, ignores the fact that modern authors sometimes
"rely on the taste" of particular publishing-house
editors, who thus "have increasingly participated in the creative process of
their authors." He argues, in other words, that an author who expects or
encourages certain kinds of alterations to be made in the publisher's offices
must be said to prefer or "intend" the resulting text. "If an author," as Pizer
concisely puts it, "within such a relationship and for whatever motives,
accepts an editorial change or suggestion, his acceptance is the equivalent
of a creative act, even though the act is the initial responsibility of an
editor" (p. 148). The aim of Greg's theory, with which no scholarly editor
would quarrel, is to establish the text which the author intended; and by
concentrating on unmodernized texts it aims to establish the author's
intended text in respect to accidentals as well as substantives. What
constitutes the author's "intention" is of course the crucial question, and in
answering it the editor must always depend, to a greater or lesser degree,
on his critical
insight. It is axiomatic that an author's own statements of his intention,
when they exist, do not, for a variety of reasons, necessarily coincide with
his actual intention—the only guide to which is the work itself. An author
may acquiesce in his publisher's decisions and then rationalize his behavior;
or he may genuinely be grateful for changes which make his work, in one
way or another, more acceptable (and salable) to the public; or he may
approve of alterations in many other kinds of situations—without truly
believing that the result quite represents his own style or approach. What
appears in a prepublication form of a text is normally a better representation
of the author's habits than what appears in a first printing, and the text of
a fair-copy manuscript or typescript reflects the author's intention, whether
or not it turns out to be his final intention in every respect. It is true, as
Pizer says, that choosing "an early copy-text encourages a frame of mind
which
requires later variants to 'prove themselves' as authorial rather than as
editorial or printer's variants" (p. 149); but such would seem to be the
safest course in most instances, since the author's responsibility for a later
reading—especially in accidentals—is normally less certain than his
responsibility for an early one.
[59] Of
course, such editorial caution may occasionally produce a text reflecting "an
author's discarded
rather than final intentions," but at least it reflects his, rather than someone
else's, intentions. The editor's critical judgment—his literary taste
exercised in the light of his intimate knowledge of the author and all known
relevant external evidence—must finally determine the case; and there is
nothing in Greg's theory to prevent him, on this basis, from deciding that
the later variants have indeed "proved themselves." If, however, he starts
from the assumption that the author and the publisher's editor are creative
collaborators, he will, to be sure, produce an unmodernized text—in the
sense that it reflects the author's period—but it may be far from the text
which the author wished (finally, or at any other time).
[60]
This question leads to a consideration of eclecticism, and Pizer's
second point is that an eclectic text, incorporating later substantive readings
into an earlier copy-text, violates the integrity (or "imaginative 'feel,'" as
he calls it) of individual stages of an author's work. The result, which "may
incorporate changes made by the author over many years," is, he says, "a
text which never existed and which has little or no critical interest" (p.
150). Certainly it never existed, for a critical text by definition differs from
any single extant documentary form of the text; but whether it is of critical
interest depends on how well the editor has performed his task, for his aim
is to produce a text which accords with the author's intention more fully
than that of any given extant document or printing. The fact that an author
may make alterations in a work over a long period of years does not
necessarily mean that they reflect different conceptions of that work; when
they do, then
of course each version should be edited separately as a work in its own
right (following the theory of copy-text with regard to each). But surely it
blurs a critical distinction to insist that every revision "constitutes a
distinctive work with its own aesthetic individuality and character" (p.
149).[61] What this argument leads
toward, obviously, is the abandonment of the editor's critical function and
the restriction of editing to the production of accurate facsimiles. It is
somewhat puzzling that Pizer is reluctant to allow the scholarly editor to
attempt
a historical reconstruction of the author's intended text, when he is quite
ready to believe that contributions of the original publisher's editor were
accepted by the author as furthering his intentions. And it is paradoxical
that a person who objects to the uniform editing of major and minor works
for its failure to make "critical distinctions" ("which is what the study of
literature is all about for most scholars and students") should disapprove of
texts that involve an editor's critical judgment and should hesitate to offer
to the public clear-text editions without apparatus, since they constitute
"only the editor's beliefs about the author's final intentions" (p. 152). If,
as he recognizes, editing is "in varying degrees an aesthetic enterprise," the
"editor's beliefs" command respect to the extent that the editor is at once
a careful historian and a sensitive critic; and the existence of insensitive
editors casts no more doubt on the undertaking as a whole than the
existence of
obtuse literary critics does on the activity of literary analysis. When Pizer
calls Greg's theory of copy-text "'scientific' in its central impulse" because
it "establishes a principle (albeit a flexible one) that is supposed to work in
every instance" (p. 153), he disregards the fact that the principle is
"flexible" for the very reason that it places no restriction on the operation
of informed judgment.
In the months following the appearance of Pizer's article, several
communications stimulated by it were published in the pages of the same
journal. Norman Grabo, in April 1971, and Hershel Parker, at greater
length in October, criticized Pizer's position.[62] Then in November John Freehafer,
applauding Pizer, set forth what he considered to be three additional "major
deficiencies of the CEAA editions."[63]
It is significant that the deficiencies are said to be "of the CEAA editions"
and not of Greg's theory, for what Freehafer objects to is not Greg's
approach but the way it has been put into practice in CEAA editions, along
with the decisions reflected in those editions about the kinds of material to
be presented. His first two points are patently argumentative: the CEAA
editions, he believes, exhibit "a failure to learn from the best editorial
practice of the past," because the history of Shakespearean scholarship has
shown that the "empty boasts" of an editor like Theobald prove in the long
run to be of little substance
(whereas critical discussions, like Johnson's, are often of lasting value); and
they demonstrate "a failure to present literary works as such" by not
providing critical analyses
[64] and
explanatory notes, by being "almost totally concerned with bibliographical
questions." The first point springs from the CEAA use of the word
"definitive." As I have said before, this word was an ill-advised choice and
has been too freely used; nevertheless, it should be clear to any reader of
a CEAA apparatus, from its discussion of various problematical points, that
CEAA editors are not claiming (nor did Greg expect editors following his
rationale to be able to claim) that they have made all the right decisions and
thus produced a "definitive" text; all they can aim for as a goal is to
provide a definitive apparatus, recognizing that it is at least possible
sometimes to establish facts. The decision to emphasize the history of the
text (including the history of critical
reaction to it) in CEAA introductions and afterwords is obviously related
to this point, for those essays constitute another part of the apparatus,
directed toward laying out what historical facts can be established.
[65] That these editions are historically
oriented, however, does not mean that they fail "to present literary works
as such" but simply that they do not present literary works accompanied by
any one critical interpretation.
[66]
Freehafer's third point, however, raises an issue which deserves to
be commented upon, even though what must be said is implicit in Greg's
theory and will therefore seem redundant to some readers. He
complains that the CEAA editions have failed "to use Greg's theory of
copy-text with sufficient boldness and imagination to reconstruct ideal
authorial texts of many of the works being edited" (p. 419). In support of
this proposition he cites the differences in the texture of accidentals between
The Scarlet Letter and
The House of the Seven
Gables in the Ohio State edition, resulting from the fact that
copy-text for the former is a first printing (the manuscript not having
survived) and for the latter is a manuscript; these differences, he says, can
be regarded as "valid reconstructions of the author's intentions . . . only on
the incredible supposition that within a year Hawthorne turned from a
passionate devotion to house-styling to a passionate rejection of it" (p. 422).
What this argument fails to notice is that Greg's theory, as a scholarly
procedure, must operate on the basis of the available materials for a given
text and aims at reconstructing the author's
intention insofar as surviving evidence permits. One can well believe, with
Freehafer, that Hawthorne's preferences did not shift so drastically within
a year. But can one therefore say that the features of one known manuscript
would also have been those of another, now missing, manuscript from
approximately the same time, and that an editor would on that basis know
how to set about inserting those features into the text for which no
manuscript survives? Answering No could perhaps be called unimaginative,
but one should then add that to be more "imaginative" would be
inconsistent with the scholarly goal of exercising critical judgment within
the bounds set by ascertainable fact and documentary evidence. The belief
that the accidentals in one CEAA text should be identical to those in
another contemporary text by the same author stems from an assumption
that the CEAA goal is to reconstruct the author's "intention" in an absolute
sense, rather than in the more realistic sense of that
intention for which there is documentary evidence for a particular work.
Naturally the editor's knowledge of the author's practice in other works, for
which a different range of documents exists, ought to play a role in any
decision he makes; but it would be a rare instance indeed in which such
knowledge was so certain and comprehensive that the editor could feel
confident in his ability to repunctuate or respell for the author without
introducing far more readings that never existed than those that did. Anyone
who wishes to take a more "imaginative" approach and to interpolate the
habits of one manuscript or a group of manuscripts into the texts of other
works would of course be able to examine and utilize the evidence present
in the texts and apparatuses of the relevant CEAA volumes. A second
illustration of Freehafer's is again
indicative of a fundamental misunderstanding of what kind of text the
CEAA is attempting to provide. Turning to a different period, he cites two
recent editions of Dryden's
The Indian Emperour (one in the
University of California Press
Works, 1966, and the other in
the University of Chicago
Four Tragedies, 1967) and
observes that, by selecting two different copy-texts, these editions present,
even after editing, two very different texts. Since both attempt to
reconstruct the author's intention, both should theoretically, he says, "have
arrived at identical texts" which "agree word for word, letter for letter,
comma for comma" (p. 422); that they do not so agree he attributes to an
unimaginative use of Greg's theory, to "tyranny of the copy-text." But
Greg, precisely because he recognized the role of imagination and
judgment, would never have expected two editors to make all the same
choices and emerge with identical texts. What the scholarly editor is
striving to
do is to put his critical judgment at the service of recognizing what the
author intended, and no one, including the CEAA editors, would claim that
any one attempt at this is the final or "definitive" one. Freehafer's urging
of a more imaginative use of Greg's rationale to produce an "author's ideal
text" seems rather at odds with his criticism of the Ohio State Hawthorne,
both here and in an earlier detailed discussion of
The Marble
Faun,
[67] for making too many
emendations; the existence of arguable emendations and variants suggests
the impossibility of universal agreement on critical issues, and a more
imaginative approach would not be likely to lessen the range of
disagreement. Several times Freehafer speaks of "definitive texts"—not
"definitive editions"—and in that earlier essay says that how definitive the
Hawthorne edition is "largely depends upon how the editors
have used their collations, concordances, and other data in establishing
Hawthorne's texts" (p. 487); however, the distinction between a "critical"
text and a "definitive"
edition (which embodies
such a text along with other information) cannot be overlooked if debates
about these matters are to get anywhere. Pizer, too, in his response in
December 1971 to Grabo and Parker,
[68] reiterated the need for "flexibility" and for
resistance to "the tidy and neat," apparently without recognizing that CEAA
critical texts and their apparatuses reflect those qualities.
The same month saw the appearance of the first volume of
Proof, which contained a long essay by Morse Peckham,
"Reflections on the Foundations of Modern Textual Editing."[69] Peckham is the only critic of Greg's
theory thus far to explain his criticisms in the context of a thoughtfully
developed analysis of the nature of human communication. Most of the
previous comments, as we have noticed, either arose from a
misunderstanding of Greg or dealt with largely superficial matters;
Peckham, on the other hand, attacks Greg's central assumptions by setting
forth a view of human behavior incompatible with them. Although I shall
try to show why his argument does not seem
to me to invalidate Greg's rationale, I hope it will be clear, at the same
time, that Peckham is raising the kind of fundamental questions that have
been too little discussed. His essay—aside from its examination of
whether analytical bibliography can be regarded as "scientific"
[70] —attacks Greg's theory in two respects:
(1) it denies that substantives and accidentals can be meaningfully
segregated; (2) it denies that the reconstruction of a text representing the
author's intention is a meaningful (or attainable) goal. Although the
argument supporting the first can be seen as consistent with and deriving
from the larger propositions underlying the second, the first point can be
taken up separately and is discussed first by Peckham.
The distinction between substantives and accidentals, Peckham says,
was necessary to Greg because of the nature of the material he was dealing
with: "the sparse and inconsistent punctuation in [Renaissance] dramatic
manuscripts that have survived" (p. 124).[71] But, he adds, the distinction "is useless
outside of his very special class of texts" (p. 125), because most later
authors (and some Elizabethans as well) were aware that punctuation affects
meaning and were not helpless victims of a house-style imposed by their
publishers. Punctuation, he argues, does more than affect meaning, for,
without punctuation, "it is frequently impossible to decide on that
meaning":
Punctuation is not a form or dress of substantives, something different
from words. It is part of speech. Juncture, pitch, and stress are inseparable
components in the semantic continuum of the spoken language. Their signs
are punctuation. (p. 124)
Thus "an educated author produces his punctuation as he produces his
words; together they make up an unbroken semantic continuum." Clearly
Peckham is correct in believing that no fixed line separates punctuation (or
other "accidentals") from wording in the expression of meaning; and I am
not aware of any editor who accepts Greg that would take issue with this
point. But it does not therefore follow that
no practical distinction can be made between them. Greg, of course,
insisted that he was concerned with a "practical," not a "philosophic,"
distinction; but Peckham finds illogical (because it does seem to claim a
"philosophic" basis for the distinction) Greg's footnote in the "Rationale"
which asserts that punctuation "remains properly a matter of presentation,"
despite the fact that it can affect meaning. Now that footnote, it must be
admitted, is not written with Greg's characteristic clarity, but the point he
was getting at (as the drift of his whole essay suggests) is not, in my
opinion, illogical. A paraphrase might go something like this: "Although
punctuation and spelling are, from a theoretical (or 'philosophic') point of
view, inseparable from words in the written expression of meaning, in
practice people (i.e., scribes, compositors, and even authors at times) do
react to them as if they were somehow less significant." What Greg meant
by a "practical" distinction is one
which, however mistaken it may be, has in fact operated to govern human
behavior; and, since the editor is concerned with analyzing the behavior of
certain individuals, such a distinction may be useful to him. It is certainly
true, as Peckham later points out (p. 145), that Elizabethan compositors felt
freer to depart from the punctuation and spelling of their copy than later
compositors. But does not a modern publisher's editor generally feel less
compunction about inserting a comma than altering a word? Does not the
author who acquiesces to a suggested change of punctuation more readily
than to one of wording, or who believes that his punctuation but not his
diction actually demands revision, feel that there is some sort of distinction?
So long as one can say, "I think my quotation is accurate, though it may
differ in a mark of punctuation here and there," and not be regarded by
most people as uttering nonsense, one can believe that a "practical"
distinction between the two does
widely exist in people's minds. To the extent that punctuation and spelling
are popularly regarded as distinct from what is being said—and it
scarcely requires demonstration that they are, and have been, so
regarded—the transmission of texts is correspondingly affected. However
much an editor may deplore the confusion behind this attitude (analogous
to the popular oversimplification of the relation between form and content),
it is his business to take into account, as realistically as he can, the factors
that influence textual transmission. (Of course, some accidentals do have
less effect upon meaning than others: a comma marking a phrase-ending
that would be recognized even without the comma serves less purpose than
one which marks the beginning of a nonrestrictive clause. But no definite
line separates this second type
of accidental, sometimes called "semi-substantives," from the first, which
also, though more subtly, may affect the sense.) What I take Greg to be
saying, then, is that the editor distinguishes substantives and accidentals not
because he believes that he is making a valid conceptual distinction between
two elements in written language but because the distinction is one which
is likely to have been made by the persons who have been involved in the
transmission of any given text (and which therefore may be useful in
segregating different features of that text which may have been accorded
different treatment).
Obviously Greg does not expect an editor to be bound by this
distinction in his own thinking, for he makes no requirement that the editor
always accept the accidentals of a first edition or that he always accept all
the accidentals of whatever text he selects as copy-text. He merely observes
that, given the popular tendency to be less careful with accidentals than
with substantives, more of the author's accidentals are likely to be present
in a first edition than in later editions. And, of course, the whole point of
attempting to recover the author's accidentals is that they do indeed
constitute an important part of his expression. The distinction between
substantives and accidentals has no influence on what an editor decides to
do when he believes that he has convincing reasons for doing a particular
thing,[72] but when he does not have
such reasons, the distinction enables him to make a decision in accord with
what common experience shows to be a
widespread attitude (one which is thus likely to have been operative in any
given instance).[73] Although English
spelling has become more fixed over the centuries and styles of punctuation
have altered, I see no evidence that the popular conception of spelling and
punctuation as the accouterments of words has shifted[74] —or any reason, therefore, not to find
Greg's approach applicable to later writings. Greg's choice of the terms
"substantive" and "accidental" was, as I have said before, unfortunate, and
the fun which Peckham has with them, calling them "strangely medieval,"
is deserved; there would have been fewer misunderstandings (and certainly
fewer complaints about unnecessary jargon) if, as Peckham suggests, plain
terms like "words," "punctuation," and "spelling" had been employed. But
surely the point Greg was getting at is not completely hidden behind the
terms he chose.
[75]
Peckham's principal argument, however, deals not with accidentals
but with the concepts of "text" and "author." He believes that many literary
scholars—including Greg and his followers, who attempt to establish the
author's intended text—are guilty of literary hagiolatry, exalting the ideas
of "author" and "work of art" in ways not consistent with the nature of
human communication. An author, he says, is simply an organism which
produces utterances, not as a result of any special inspiration but as a result
of being human:
A writer produces utterances because he is a human being. It is a
condition of being human. We do not know why human beings produce
utterances, nor even how. It is a primitive, or surd, with which we begin
and, to make matters worse, within which we must operate. To talk about
self-expression, or projections, or mental ideas being expressed in language,
is at worst to cover up our ignorance with pseudo-explanations, and at best
to use a
verbal category to subsume the production of language and the production
of nonverbal behavior. (p. 139)
But the author is different from other utterers in that he assembles a series
of utterances into what "he judges to be a discourse" and makes this series
available to others, proposing "that they too judge it to be a discourse" (p.
138). The development of the discourse up to that point has involved a
combination of producing utterances and changing (or revising) them;
[76] thus the author, even before his work
becomes public, has already been in the position of looking back over
something previously written, reacting to it as a reader, since he is not at
that moment the producer. This process, Peckham argues, continues
indefinitely: sometimes other human beings (such as publishers' editors)
react to and change the discourse, and sometimes the author continues to
change it. Each is responding to a particular version, and each "can make
a change acceptable to the author or to anyone else involved" (p. 141). The
"textual editor" is but one more human
organism in this sequence, producing one more version of "a
postulated work, that is, of a construct" (p. 128). Whether a
valid distinction can be made between changes by the author and by others,
therefore, turns on
the question of whether the author is an organism engaged in the
production of utterances, an activity which as a human organism he cannot
avoid, even when alone and engaged in covert utterance, or whether he is
an individual. So far there have appeared no grounds, save linguistic
hypostatization and literary hagiolatry, for considering him an individual.
The notion to be understood here is that he is but an organism and not an
individual or monad or entity which can be differentiated from other similar
entities. (p. 143)
As a result, one cannot speak meaningfully of a single ideal "text" of a
work; if the development of the concept of individuality ("self-mediated
divergence from a cultural norm") had not caused the editor to confer
"sainthood" on the supposed "author" and exalt certain works as canonical
(p. 149), he would realize that he is "simply continuing an activity initiated
by the author" (p. 144).
Although this is a greatly simplified summary of Peckham's analysis,
I think that it does not distort the main outlines of his position. But one
does not have to disagree with this general position in order to
believe that such editors as those of the CEAA volumes are pursuing a
sensible, meaningful, and useful goal. The "textual editor" whom Peckham
describes—he defines the term as subsuming "both analytical
bibliographer and textual critic" (p. 141) —is naturally, in Peckham's
general terms, just another person making changes in a text; but it would
seem to be more illuminating to go on and note how he is to be
distinguished from others who do that. For persons who make changes in
pieces of writing—and are admittedly engaging in basically similar
actions—fall into two groups, those performing scholarly editing and
those performing what may be called "creative editing."
[77] There is no reason why one cannot regard
a piece of writing as the common product of all beings who have come in
contact with it and reacted to it; when it is viewed in this way, any change,
made at any time, whether by the original publisher's editor, by the author,
or by a later
"editor," has the same status and may be judged to have improved the
work, harmed it, or left it the same. From this point of view a critic is not
performing his function conscientiously if he does not alter the work to
make it, according to his standards, more satisfying than it has ever been
before. There is, as I say, no objection to this procedure—so long as
one's goal is critically rather than historically oriented. But the scholar sets
a goal of historical reconstruction.
[78]
That the "author" has some individuality is suggested, even in Peckham's
approach, by the recognition that he
initiated the discourse,
which is then operated upon by himself and others. If that discourse is of
sufficient interest, a historical interest may also attach to the initiator; and
if the same being initiates a number of such discourses, the interest may be
correspondingly greater. What the scholarly editor attempts—recognizing
the difficulty of the task and
even the impossibility of its absolute achievement—is to remove from the
discourse those features for which the initiator was not responsible.
[79] The result is not necessarily
what the editor himself prefers but what he believes to be the author's
contribution to a given discourse. The scholarly editor is thus a different
kind of responder from the others in the chain Peckham is talking about; it
may be that the editor, if he lives in the mid-twentieth century, cannot
avoid reacting in part in mid-twentieth-century terms, but his aim is to use
his critical faculties
[80] to place himself
in the frame of reference of the author and the author's environment. That
such an aim is impossible of full attainment does not invalidate it as a
guideline for a direction in which to move, despite Peckham's labeling of
this attitude as "pure hagiolatry" (p. 138).
[81]
The difficulty with accepting Peckham's statement of the case is
evident when he remarks that the concepts of "text" and "author" require
the "textual editor" to "produce a definitive edition, which he cannot do,
instead of producing a new version more satisfactory for some specific
purpose than any existing version, which he can do" (p. 151). What
Peckham says the editor can do is in fact what CEAA editors do (and
realize they are doing): they produce a critical (not definitive) text which
they believe to be more satisfactory for the purpose of the historical study
of literature than any previous text,
and they regard the edition embodying that text as "definitive" only in its
recording of certain classes of data. Part of the problem, throughout the
essay, is Peckham's interchangeable use of "text" and "edition" and his
belief that CEAA editors really think they are producing definitive
texts.
[82] Perhaps,
indeed, this is the fundamental problem, for his concluding section (pp.
153-155), recognizing that the "textual editor" may decide to produce a text
representing any given stage in the history of a work, goes on to assert,
"No misplaced confidence in inadequately based theory can justify his
evasion of the problems of an empirical situation." But when one observes
that Greg's approach is an attempt to confront the empirical realities
involved in the reconstruction of a particular stage in the history of a work
and that it does not proclaim the result to be the only useful text of the
work (even for historical study), the issue Peckham raises
is no longer an issue. It seems to me that Peckham's final description of
"the task of the textual editor" is—after one has penetrated the
vocabulary—accurate:
to produce a new version from a series of a postulated text by a
postulated author by making up for the policing, validating, and changing
deficiencies in the long, complex, and interlocking series of behaviors the
consequence of which was the production of that series. (p. 155)
But when he proceeds to say that there is no definitive version to be arrived
at and "no one set of instructions" to follow, he is responding to a
nonexistent argument. Much of Peckham's essay helpfully focuses on the
nature of written language, and his suggestion that editors ought to be
aware of the nonliterary uses to which their apparatuses can be put (as in
a study of human behavior) is worth serious consideration; but as a critique
of Greg's "Rationale" and the CEAA editions, it misses the mark.
During the following year (1972) there appeared two books with
general-sounding, but somewhat misleading, titles, James Thorpe's
Principles of Textual Criticism and Philip Gaskell's A
New Introduction to Bibliography. Each raises some questions,
either explicitly or implicitly, about the validity of CEAA
procedures—questions which, by this time, seem very familar. Thorpe's
most direct comment on the CEAA—a brief discussion of its
Statement—is related to his underlying belief that textual
criticism has become too bibliographical in approach and that bibliographers
are trying to make textual criticism
a "science." Despite his assemblage of quotations intended to serve as
background, these issues are in fact illusory: for the leading bibliographers
over the years have recognized that textual criticism can never be
mechanical and that bibliography is simply one tool among several useful
in dealing with textual problems.
[83]
Thorpe paints a picture of bibliographers greedy to annex the whole
"province of textual criticism," as he calls it; but whether the present
emphasis of textual criticism is excessively bibliographical is a question that
cannot be approached in general or theoretical terms but only in relation to
the details of specific situations. After all, if bibliography offers one kind
of evidence to the textual critic, he cannot sensibly say that he desires only
so much, and no more, of that kind of evidence; but if his attention to those
details causes him in a particular case to neglect his search for letters or
documents or other kinds of
external evidence, then obviously he can be criticized in that instance for
undue concentration on one type of evidence. What Thorpe tries to argue,
however, is that the CEAA
Statement, by requiring attention
to bibliographical details, implies such attention to be "the efficient cause
of an ideal edition" (p. 72).
[84] The
Statement, he believes, reflects "the view of a text as a
system of infinitely perfectible details, by which scrupulous attention to all
details will ultimately yield ideal results" (p. 57). Although he does not
wish "to suggest that meticulous care is pedantry" (p. 76), he does suggest
that close analysis of what seem to be unimportant variants is a waste of
time (e.g., p. 74). He does not acknowledge the fact that laborious collation
of texts
[85] and analysis
of variants accomplish just as much when they demonstrate the absence of
significant variants—or the presence of variants only in "the relatively
trivial matters of spelling, punctuation, and capitalization" (p. 51)
[86] —as when they show the existence of
dramatically different readings. And no editor that I have heard of ever
claimed that "scrupulous attention" to details and "meticulous care" are "a
complete substitute for intelligence and common sense" (p. 78).
[87] One must agree with Thorpe's later
insistence (pp. 179-183) on the importance of a thorough knowledge of the
author's works and period and of a diligent search for external evidence.
But there is nothing inherent in the attention to bibliographical detail which
prevents an editor from giving attention to other essential matters. The
CEAA
Statement does set forth the importance of accuracy
in collating and proofreading, but it also points out the
necessity for knowing the author's works and for searching out all relevant
documents bearing on the history of a text
[88] —and the CEAA editions have
repeatedly been responsible for the uncovering of new documents and the
assembling of comprehensive collections of reference material. An editor
who neglects any part of his duty is open to criticism, and Thorpe's
conclusion that editors should exploit "every kind of relevant evidence" (p.
79) is unexceptionable; but his belief that the "strongly bibliographical cast"
(p. 103) of the CEAA
Statement leads to a "glorification of
method" (p. 79) rests on the fallacious assumption that attention to one kind
of detail necessarily involves the neglect of other kinds. Some editors may
of course be guilty of neglecting evidence, but it seems perverse to search
for the cause of their incompetence in their careful attention to one kind of
relevant detail.
A more consequential matter which Thorpe takes up is the treatment
of accidentals (pp. 131-170).[89] After
providing a sampling of statements from authors of various periods,
stressing their indifference to accidentals, and a historical survey of
printers' manuals, suggesting that printers over the years have felt an
obligation to "correct" accidentals, Thorpe concludes that "probably in most
cases" the author "expected the printer to perfect his accidentals" and that
therefore "the changes introduced by the printer can be properly thought of
as fulfilling the writer's intentions" (p. 165). It seems to me that there are
two basic difficulties with Thorpe's position. The first is that quotations
from authors and from printers' manuals are not comparable, because the
former are statements of personal opinion (often prompted by specific
situations), while the latter are public announcements of recommended
general practice. Thus Thorpe's evidence from the
printers' manuals[90] is sufficient to
show that printers have widely regarded the alteration of accidentals in copy
as part of their function; but his evidence from individual writers by no
means can be generalized upon to suggest that in any given instance the
chances favor an author's having been indifferent to the handling of
accidentals. The conclusion would seem to follow—contrary to
Thorpe—that, without convincing evidence on the other side, an author's
manuscript stands a better chance of reflecting his wishes in accidentals than
does a printed text. Here the second difficulty arises—in Thorpe's
conception of an author's "intention." In his opening chapter—his
well-known essay on "The Aesthetics of Textual Criticism"[91] —he asserts, "While the author cannot
dictate the meaning of the text, he certainly has final authority over which
words constitute the text of his literary work" (p. 10). As a result of this
distinction between "meaning" and "words," Thorpe tends to accept at face
value an author's statement about wording, without focusing on the fact that
the motivations influencing such a statement may be just as complex as
those lying behind a statement of intended "meaning." Although he
recognizes that, in the absence of an authorial statement, the intended
wording must be arrived at through a critical analysis of all available
evidence (p. 193),
at various points he implies that the existence of a statement settles the
matter—as when he says that "the personal testimony by the author as to
his intentions is plainly the most primary textual evidence that there can be"
(p. 109).
[92] This point of view leads
to an uncritical acceptance of an author's remarks about his indifference to
accidentals (or his preference for those in the printed text). The upshot of
Thorpe's discussion is his astonishing recommendation that "the editor will
do best to spend only a modest amount of his time on
accidentals—mainly a losing cause—and devote himself to matters of
substance" (p. 168). It is difficult to reconcile Thorpe's readiness to believe
that an author preferred the printer's accidentals with his strict view of "the
integrity of the work of art" (pp. 14-32); and it is hard to see how an editor
whose aim is to establish the author's intended text, in accidentals as well
as in substantives,
[93] can justify the decision in advance
to spend a "modest" amount of time on the accidentals. Like the earlier
discussion of bibliographical detail, this chapter on accidentals reflects a
peculiar view of scholarly endeavor: it suggests, in effect, that a scholar's
sense of perspective is shown less by his ability to evaluate and integrate
data than by his prior decision to limit his consideration of certain clearly
relevant areas.
[94]
If Thorpe's book, weakened by such contradictions, does not manage
to serve the useful function of fairly surveying "the basic principles which
underlie the practice of textual criticism" (p. vii), neither does Philip
Gaskell's chapter on "Textual Bibliography" (pp. 336-360) in A New
Introduction to Bibliography provide the kind of basic summary of
current thinking which one might expect of an "introduction." Although his
exposition of "Copy-Text" (pp. 338-343) does not specifically mention
Greg's rationale, he does provide an accurate statement of its general
application, with one important exception.[95] He is unwilling to push that rationale to
its logical conclusion and recognize that a fair-copy manuscript, when it
survives, becomes the copy-text, except when there is convincing evidence
pointing toward the first (or some later) edition as the proper choice.[96] His argument rests on the same
assumption as
Thorpe's:
Most authors, in fact, expect their spelling, capitalization, and
punctuation to be corrected or supplied by the printer, relying on the
process to dress
the text suitably for publication, implicitly endorsing it (with or without
further amendment) when correcting proofs. (p. 339)
He concludes that it "would normally be wrong, therefore, rigidly
[97] to follow the accidentals of the
manuscript, which the author would himself have been prepared—or
might have preferred—to discard" and asserts that "in most cases the
editor will choose as copy-text an early printed edition, not the manuscript"
(p. 340). Later, he reiterates that "the manuscript if it survives, will be
consulted but will not be followed in accidentals unless the compositor
appears to have misrepresented the author's intentions" (p. 358). Although
he allows for situations in which the manuscript is the proper choice, he
places the presumption of authority with the first printed text. I have
already commented on the difficulties of maintaining such a position, but
I should perhaps call attention to the way in which Gaskell's wording itself
reveals some of them. To say that an author is "implicitly endorsing" the
accidentals of the proofs when he lets them stand is not
at all the same as to say that he prefers them, and it ignores the economic
(and other) factors which may have influenced his decision; similarly, to
believe that an author "would himself have been prepared . . . to discard"
the accidentals of his manuscript is not the same as to believe that he
wished to discard them, and it surely does not give an editor license to
carry out that discarding. Gaskell asserts that the accidentals of a first
edition, despite "the process of normalization carried out in the printing
house," will "still be closer both to the text that the author wanted, and to
the reading of his manuscript, than the altered accidentals of the second and
third editions" (p. 340). This statement is true, but the reference to
manuscript readings undermines the general argument: if there is any
desirability in having the accidentals resemble those of the manuscript, then
the manuscript ought to be chosen for copy-text in the first place; on the
other hand, if the author's
preference is for the first-edition readings, then the manuscript is irrelevant
in this context. Gaskell raises further doubts in the reader's mind by citing
the example of Thomas Hardy, who, "in revising his printed texts for new
editions, appears to have changed the normalized accidentals back to the
forms of the original manuscript" (p. 342). Even though Hardy may not be
a typical case, his revision illustrates the point that a writer may acquiesce
in printing- or publishing-house styling without preferring it. Is not the
more reasonable approach,
then, to presume, until contrary evidence is adduced, that a manuscript
reflects the author's intentions in accidentals, rather than to begin with the
presumption that it does not?
A further confusion is introduced by the argument that an author's
accidentals may stand in need of correction. Gaskell doubts "whether it is
worth preserving thoroughly bad punctuation just because it is the author's"
(p. 358) and later advises, "Let us carry out the author's intentions
wherever we can, but not to the extent of taking pride in reproducing the
manifest inadequacies of his accidentals" (p. 359). But punctuation which
seems "bad" to the editor may have seemed appropriate to the author; and
if the editor's aim is to preserve what the author wrote, rather than his own
"improvements" upon it, he cannot very well say that he will pursue the
author's intention only up to a point, and no farther. Gaskell's belief that
"an editor may reasonably aim at consistency in his final version" (p. 358)
suggests that he is thinking of a modernized text,[98] although most of his comments seem to
be concerned with editions that aim to recover the author's
intentions. At any rate, it is true that his discussion never focuses on the
differences in purpose between modernized and unmodernized texts:
Printed accidentals are unlikely to have had more than the general
approval of the author, and if they seem to be both unsatisfactory and in
contravention of the author's usual practice, the editor will have to emend
them. (Whether he will emend them according to the conventions of the
author's period or to those of his own is something else which he will have
to decide.) (p. 360)
The illogic of this passage results from the fact that two kinds of editions
are being talked about simultaneously. Since "unsatisfactory" accidentals
may not be "in contravention of the author's usual practice," the editor is
being instructed here to emend only those "unsatisfactory" accidentals
which are not characteristic of the author, thus producing a partially
regularized, but not modernized, text. But when he has done that, he does
not still have open to him the option of
emending "according to the conventions . . . of his own" period—that is,
of modernizing. After all, there would be no point in selecting the readings
in need of emendation on the basis of whether they are uncharacteristic of
the author and then to emend them on the basis of present-day practice.
Either the editor decides to establish, as accurately as he can, the author's
own accidentals; or he decides to make all the accidentals conform to the
practice of his own time. The fact that the former approach is necessary for
scholarly (that is, historical) study does not, of course, mean that there may
not be occasions on which the latter is more appropriate. But the failure to
distinguish carefully between the two cannot lead to clear thinking about
editorial problems. It is unfortunate that Gaskell's discussion gives the
impression of describing (as one would expect an "introduction" to
describe) current generally accepted practice; beginners who turn to it for
guidance will be
puzzled and misled.
[99]
This account of the CEAA's application of Greg's rationale to
American literature and of the critical reaction to it suggests several
observations. To begin with, one must recognize that, when Wilson
expressed surprise at the "violence and venom" of the correspondence
aroused by his article, he was calling attention to characteristics which have
unfortunately been manifested by a number of persons in this debate, on
both sides. It may be gratifying to some editors to find that people care
enough about editing to become emotionally involved in theoretical
discussions, but scholarship is not advanced by arguments which rest on
preconceptions or vested interests or clashes of personality. There can be
no doubt that some of this debate has sunk to that level, and the opponents
of CEAA policy are not the only ones at fault. What is particularly
unfortunate is that so much time and energy has been poured into arguments
about superficial or nonexistent issues, when there are so many issues of
importance that remain to be considered. The belief that bibliographical and
textual work is not humanistic simply because it tries to establish facts or
utilizes mechanical aids—and that those engaged in it therefore do not
really care about literature—is
obviously an emotional rallying cry, not a proposition to be seriously
entertained. Similarly, the view that editors who follow Greg are engaged
in a mysterious, complex procedure with an elaborate, arcane terminology
can only be regarded as an invention of those who are temperamentally
disinclined to perform editorial work, for it would be uncharitable to
believe that they actually find these concepts and terms a strain on the
intelligence. As emotional reactions, these attitudes are understandable, and
proponents of Greg's theory have sometimes done their part to provoke
them; but as intellectual arguments, there is simply nothing to them.
I am not suggesting that the entire controversy has been frivolous; but
even the more serious arguments have so often resulted from a
misunderstanding of what is really an uncomplicated approach that one is
puzzled to account for them in any but emotional terms. Neither am I
saying that Greg's theory and the CEAA application of it ought not to be
criticized and analyzed, for any serious intellectual position can only benefit
from thoughtful constructive criticism. The point, indeed, is that there has
been too little—scarcely any—of this kind of criticism. Yet much of
fundamental importance remains to be thought about. The question of what
is meant by authorial intention, of how that intention affects the treatment
of punctuation, of what differences may be required in working with a
typescript rather than a holograph manuscript—such matters as these,
when disentangled from self-serving attacks on or defenses of particular
editions, need more discussion. Now that a
considerable interest in editorial matters has been aroused, a great deal can
be accomplished if the collective effort of those interested is expended
constructively. No one pretends to have solved all
the problems, but solutions can best be approached by a positive effort to
understand what accomplishments have so far been achieved and to build
on them. Presumably all readers are interested in seeing reliable texts of
American literary works made widely available; it would be unfortunate if
those who share a common goal allowed themselves to be diverted by
controversy from keeping that goal at the center of their attention and
working together to attain it.
[100]