University of Virginia Library

IV

Some of the implications of the Dickinson problem for editorial theory are discussed by R. W. Franklin at the end of his important book The Editing of Emily Dickinson: A Reconsideration (1967). Franklin correctly asserts that "from the variant fair copies of a single poem we should choose its best" (p. 133), and he objects to any nonliterary or mechanical basis of selection among alternatives in unfinished manuscripts as resulting merely in "a worksheet without all the work" (p. 134). Since an uncompleted manuscript obviously lacks finality, he concludes, "The principle of editing that a text exactly represent the author's intention is inadequate." He therefore calls for "a new editorial procedure for material unprepared by the author for publication"—a procedure which would be "a compromise between the demands of authorial intention and the demands of the poems" (pp. 142-143). One might carry the argument a step further, however, and note that since authorial intention is ultimately ascertainable only through the poems, no compromise is necessary except in the sense that two kinds of edition, rather than a single one, may be desirable: a complete transcription, faithful to the demands of the document, and a reading text (or more than one), faithful to the demands of the work of art.

Generalizing upon the specific situation, Franklin points to the "conflicting bases of criticism and editing"—conflicting because the modern critical position upholds "criticism divorced from authorial intention." Is there an inconsistency, he is asking, within the discipline of literary study, if a text, presented to the literary critic for analysis in the light of one set of principles, is prepared for him by the editor under a different set of principles? An author's final intention, he believes,

Readers of literature, he says, are not accustomed to dealing with multiple wordings in a final text nor with composite authorship. Yet one Dickinson "poem," "Those fair—fictitious People," has twenty-six variants that fit eleven places, amounting to 7680 possible poems; and other poems, as traditionally printed and studied, would have to be called "Dickinson-Todd-Higginson's," since editors were responsible for some of the words. In the end, Franklin observes, "the fact that we are not organized to talk about an altered poem as a poem shows how little the subject of our pursuit is poetry" (p. 141).

Two issues are involved in these considerations, and they are basic to all kinds of editing, whether the copy-text is an uncompleted manuscript or a printed edition: (1) What does "intention" signify, and when is it final? (2) Does it matter whether the author's wording is recovered, particularly when emendations by others are improvements? These questions ask for definitions of the three words "final authorial intention" and for justification of them as an expression of the goal of editing. I hope that what I have said up to now has provided some answers to them and will serve as background for the following brief replies, specifically directed at Franklin's conclusions.

The second of the questions is easier to answer than the first. No one presumably would deny that any alteration in a literary work could be regarded as producing a different work and that the new work could be made the subject of critical analysis. Neither would anyone deny that nonauthorial revisions could produce a work superior to the original and more rewarding for study.[67] Nevertheless, if an editor sets out to edit the works of a particular writer, he has undertaken

a task of historical research, and his goal must necessarily be the recovery of the words which the author actually wrote. That the bulk of scholarly editorial work has been of this sort does not imply that all critics will find this kind of edition appropriate for their purposes or that no other approach to editing is legitimate. A critic may choose to discuss a series of poems on death, say, rather than a series of poems by Milton, Shelley, Tennyson, and Dickinson; so long as he operates outside of a historical framework and makes no references to the authors or their times, he need not be concerned with whether he has the precise words of a particular author but only with whether he has the "best" version of each poem from an aesthetic point of view. Similarly, an editor could edit a collection of poems on death, letting his own aesthetic judgments guide him in improving upon any previously known version of each poem; the editor would become a self-invited collaborator of the original author, and the editorial process would be creatively, rather than historically, oriented. This kind of editing occurs regularly in publishing houses, and many books normally attributed to a single author are already the work of more than one person by the time of their first publication (one thinks immediately of the editorial labors of Maxwell Perkins at Scribner's).[68] The crucial point is that once a critic refers to two poems because they are by the same author, he has introduced a consideration extrinsic to the poems, and he must thereafter be concerned with the words which the author wrote. Studying poems by particular authors or representative of particular historical periods, therefore, requires a knowledge of what the authors themselves wrote; studying poems by theme or type, without regard for biographical and historical contexts, requires only poems, and the number of hands through which a poem has passed to reach its present state of excellence is irrelevant. Academic departments are usually organized to study the historical development of literature, and it is not surprising that scholars in those departments produce editions which attempt to recover authorial wording. That they do so, however, is not indicative of a split between editorial and critical theory.

The other question—the meaning of "intention"—is too complicated a philosophical issue to be settled here; but we can at least agree that authorial intention in literature cannot simply be equated with an explicit statement by the author explaining his motives, purposes, aims, wishes, or meaning, for intention must surely exist even if no such statements were made or are extant, and any available statements may be inadequate or misleading. The only direct evidence one has for what was in the author's mind is not what he says was there but what one finds in his work. An editor, only through his analysis and understanding of the meaning of the work in the light of his knowledge of the author and the times, will be in a position to use authorial active intention as a basis for editorial choice. That is to say, of the meanings which the editor sees in the work, he will determine, through a weighing of all the information at his command, the one which he regards as most likely to have been the author's; and that determination will influence his decisions regarding variant readings. Recognizing "finality" of intention, in turn, depends on his ability to distinguish revisions which develop an intention in the same direction from those which push it in another direction: the former represent final intentions, the latter new intentions. Whether the editor rejects such "new" intentions or edits a separate text embodying them will vary with the particular situation. But so long as he is producing an edition of an author's writings, he must choose among the author's uncanceled

variants or published revisions in the light of his total understanding of the work and its author.

If it is objected that this conception of the editorial process gives an editor excessive freedom and substitutes subjectivism for rigorous discipline, two answers may be made. In the first place, a scholarly editor (as opposed to a creative one) is still pledged to print only the author's words. He may select readings on the basis of his own literary judgment only when the alternatives are authorial variants; when he chooses an authorial reading previous to the author's last one (or what he judges to be the last one), his justification is that the reading is "final" in terms of his view of the work as an organic whole and that the later reading either creates a new work or is an isolated alteration at odds with the spirit of the work. Beyond that, one may observe that critical perception is necessarily crucial to any act of historical reconstruction, any evaluation of evidence, and thus any edition labeled "critical"; therefore, as Greg says, "it would be disastrous to curb the liberty of competent editors in the hope of preventing fools from behaving after their kind." Perhaps the principal source of difficulty lies in thinking of the editorial and the critical functions as essentially distinct. When one recognizes that justice can be done to an author only by doing justice to his text, one also understands that the editor and the critic must be inseparable.