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II
An editor who has given some attention to such preliminary questions has at least begun to reach an understanding of "authorial intention." But there are a number of further questions which arise as he attempts to make judgments in the light of this conception of intention. Perhaps the most common editorial situation is that in which the editor must decide whether a given variant reading is a revision by the author or an alteration (conscious or inadvertent) by someone else. In these cases, at least one intermediate stage of documentary evidence is lacking, and the editor is trying to determine from the surviving material those changes which the author made in that now missing document. He must also face the question whether it is ever possible to think of changes not made by the author as nevertheless fulfilling, or contributing to, the author's intention.
The basic situation can be illustrated by Sherwood Anderson's A Story Teller's Story (1924). The only surviving prepublication text of this work is the typescript printer's copy, which bears revisions by three people: Anderson himself, Paul Rosenfeld, and E. T. Booth, the publisher's editor. One has direct evidence, therefore, for assigning the responsibility for each of these alterations; but the first printing of the book (Huebsch, 1924) contains additional changes, not marked on the surviving typescript and presumably entered on the now lost proofs. Deciding which of these changes were made by Anderson is the central task in editing this book.[33] What the editor has to do is to familiarize himself with all the available relevant evidence—bibliographical, historical, biographical. He may then find that some of it is
The same observations can be made about situations involving variants between printed editions. In these cases the missing documents are the author's marked copy of the earlier edition (or its proofs, or whatever served as printer's copy for the edition set later) and the marked proofs of the later edition. If no document survives which antedates the proofs of the earliest setting of the text, then of course one is dealing with texts which have already been subjected to the routine of the printing- or publishing-house. Thus the essential difference between this situation and the one described above is that here the editor is working at a greater remove from the author's fair-copy manuscript or typescript; but his approach to the problem remains the same. For instance, neither the manuscript of The Rise of Silas Lapham nor the proofs set from it survive; and the history of the early printed texts, which vary from one another substantively at a number of points, is such that one text might contain the later readings in one part of the book and another the later readings in a different part. So for any given variant, the editor must first try to determine the order of the readings and then decide whether the later one could be an authorial revision or correction. At one point in Chapter 19 Irene's complexion is described as "snow-white" in the serialized magazine text and as "colourless" in the first book edition
Once the editor has made his judgments as to which variants are attributable to the author and which to someone else, he must consider the exact status of the latter group. Are all variants for which someone other than the author is responsible to be rejected outright, or is it conceivable that the author's intention may sometimes be fulfilled by other persons? It is not only conceivable but unquestionably true that others can and do sometimes correct an author's writing and in the process fulfill his intention. An author may write down one word but be thinking of a different one, or in reading proofs he may fail to notice a printer's error which creates a new word. When these erroneous words are plausible in their contexts, they may never be recognized by anyone as erroneous; but when one of them does not make sense, and when the correct word is obvious, anyone who makes the correction is carrying out the author's intention. Frequently an editor may believe that a particular word cannot have been intended but is not certain just what the intended word should be; only his critical assessment of the whole matter can determine whether it is preferable in that case to let the questionable word stand and call attention to the problem in a note or to substitute a word which catches the apparent intended sense (again, of course, with an explanation), even though that word may not be the exact one which the author had in mind. In the typescript of A Story Teller's Story, then, alterations in the hand of E. T. Booth cannot simply be dismissed; they must be inspected carefully, because Booth may have noticed places where the typescript reading certainly (or almost certainly) cannot have been Anderson's intended reading, and there is always the chance that an editor might otherwise fail to detect some of them.
An examination of Booth's revisions, however, leads to a more difficult question. Since Booth was the editor for the publisher, can one
The importance, for editorial practice, of settling this question in general terms is evident. When an editor faces a choice for copy-text between a fair-copy manuscript (or printer's copy) and a first impression, he needs to have—in the absence of convincing evidence—a general policy to fall back on, a policy based on the inherent probabilities in such situations. Of course, if the editor has convincing evidence— not merely the author's statements but detailed information about the author's methods of going over proofs—he can make his decision on that basis. But, as is more likely to be the case, if the evidence is not sufficient for making a competent decision, the editor must have further guidance. Greg's rationale, pointing out the usual deterioration of a text (particularly its accidentals) from one manuscript or edition to another, leads the editor back to the fair-copy manuscript or the earliest extant text which follows it. There has been some disagreement with this position, however, based on the view that the author's intention encompasses the activities which take place in the step from manuscript (or typescript) to print and that the intention is not "final" until the text conforms to the standards which will make it publishable. Philip Gaskell concludes that "in most cases the editor will choose as copy-text an early printed edition, not the manuscript"; the accidentals of the manuscript, he says, "the author would himself have been prepared—or might have preferred—to discard."[41] James Thorpe agrees:
Such arguments for preferring the first edition to the manuscript seem to me misguided. While it is true that most authors have the intention of getting published, such an intention is of a different order from their intention to have certain words and punctuation, resulting in a certain meaning, in their text. The intention of writing something publishable is what Hancher would call a "programmatic intention"; what the editor is properly concerned with, as we have seen, is the author's "active intention" manifested in the work. There is no reason why in some instances an author's active intention might not conflict with his programmatic intention. That an author may submit to various publishing-house alterations as a routine procedure in the process of publication does not amount to his changing his active intention about what his writing is to consist of. To say that he "expects" or is prepared to have certain changes made by the printer or publisher is not the same as to say that he prefers or wishes to have them made; to take his implicit approval of these changes on the proofs (or the printer's copy) as a sign that he is now more satisfied with his text is to ignore the many external factors (Melville's "Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience") which at this stage might prevent him from restoring readings that he actively desired. It is of little help to survey what writers in the past have said on the subject of publishers' alterations of their spelling and punctuation, even if there were a valid statistical basis for concluding, as Thorpe does, that most are "of the indifferent persuasion" (p. 151). Indifference is far from suggesting intention; and the motivation for the indifference would in each case have to be examined in order to know how to interpret the statements. But if the attitudes of writers toward this question cannot be fairly generalized about, the views and practices of printers and publishers can. Printers' manuals, after all, are normative and instructional statements, offering a far more trustworthy basis for generalization than individual authors' expressions of their own attitudes. Thorpe himself, after quoting from various manuals, recognizes that, for most of the period with which he is concerned, "it has been the printers (particularly the compositors and proofreaders) who have
Whether there is sufficient evidence in a given case to justify taking the first edition rather than the manuscript as copy-text is a matter of judgment. What the editor must attempt to assess is whether the author genuinely preferred the changes made by the publisher's reader or whether he merely acquiesced in them. The idea that an author can actively intend in his work a revision made by someone else depends in effect on the extent to which the two can be regarded as voluntary collaborators. Since collaboration implies shared responsibility, the "author's intention" in a collaborative effort results from a merging of the separate intentions of the individual authors; the final result is thus intended by each of the authors. A work need not be signed with more than one name, of course, for it to be a collaboration. Nor is it necessary for the authors involved to perform equal shares of the work; indeed, two people may collaborate only on certain aspects of a work, and their joint intention would apply only to the words or elements involved. The facsimile edition of the revised manuscript-typescript of The Waste Land offers a rare opportunity to observe some of the collaboration which can underlie a great work. In certain passages Pound's revisions (such as "demobbed" in line 139) or deletions (as in "Death by Water") actually constitute collaboration, though there are other places where Eliot rejects Pound's suggestions (as in the lines on Saint Mary Woolnoth, lines 67-68). That the work is to some extent collaborative is implied by Valerie Eliot's comment, in her description of "Editorial Policy," that "It has been difficult to decide who cancelled certain lines, especially when both Eliot and Pound have worked on them together."[44] A study of this facsimile does not suggest that an editor should incorporate into the text of the poem the lines which Pound rejected and Eliot did not restore; one can argue that at those points Eliot's intention merged
The question, posed earlier, of whether it makes sense to believe that an author can ask someone else to carry out his intention in some respect may now be answered in the negative. By definition, an author's active intention cannot include projected activity and cannot include activity of which he is not in control. The ultimate example of delegated intention in writing would be for a person to ask someone else to write an entire work for him; if he then announced that it represented his "intention," he could only mean his intention to write a certain kind of work (his programmatic intention), for his active intention would not be involved. The same is true regardless of what portion or aspect of a work is at issue, as long as the element contributed by someone other than the author must be described with such expressions as "It is what the author expected to have done" or "It is what the author would have done if he had found time." However, if an author accepts what someone else has done not in a spirit of acquiescence but of active collaboration, the result does represent his active intention. Since the scholarly editor, in establishing a text, is concerned with an author's active intention in that text, he can accept into the text what he knows (or strongly believes) to be initially the work of someone else only when it can be regarded as having been accepted by the primary author as a true collaboration. This approach does not alter the crucial role which the editor's judgment plays in evaluating evidence, but it may provide a useful framework into which that evidence can be placed. It also suggests the relative infrequency with which publishers' alterations can be taken to supersede an author's known practice in a prepublication stage of his work.
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