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Notes
An earlier version of this essay was written in the spring of 1968 for the first volume of Bibliographia, a journal then proposed for publication by Oliver & Boyd of Edinburgh. The plans for that journal have now been canceled by Oliver & Boyd, who have ceased the publication of works of this nature; and I am publishing the essay here, considerably revised. I mention this background only because I have alluded in print to an article with this title as "forthcoming in Bibliographia"; such citations should now be taken to refer to the article printed here.
SB, 3 (1950-51), 19-36; reprinted, with a few revisions, in Greg's Collected Papers, ed. J. C. Maxwell (1966), pp. 374-391. Cf. Fredson Bowers, "Current Theories of Copy-Text," Modern Philology, 48 (1950-51), 12-20; and "McKerrow's Editorial Principles for Shakespeare Reconsidered," Shakespeare Quarterly, 6 (1955), 309-324. For a detailed examination of Greg's position and of the commentators upon it, see G. T. Tanselle, "Greg's Theory of Copy-Text and the Editing of American Literature," SB, 28 (1975), 167-229. The Center for Editions of American Authors of the Modern Language Association of America has published a manual based on Greg's approach, Statement of Editorial Principles and Procedures (rev. ed., 1972); an appended essay, "Relevant Textual Scholarship," pp. 17-25, conveniently draws together references to many of the discussions of Greg's theory or of editions based on it.
"Textual Criticism," in The Aims and Methods of Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures, ed. James Thorpe (rev. ed., 1970), p. 33. Cf. his Textual and Literary Criticism (1959), p. 120: a critical edition attempts "to approach as nearly as may be to the ideal of the authorial fair copy."
"Some Principles for Scholarly Editions of Nineteenth-Century American Authors," SB, 17 (1964), 227.
I have made further comments on the role of judgment in editing in "Textual Study and Literary Judgment," PBSA, 65 (1971), 109-122.
It is convenient to use the word "author" in such statements as this. But nothing said here or elsewhere in this essay is meant to imply that scholarly editing is not also appropriate for anonymous works or works which are the product of an oral tradition. One can infer an "author" who created a given work even if a particular name is not attached to him or if "author" has to be defined as encompassing a number of people; in such cases, it is still meaningful to set as a goal the historical reconstruction of the text which reflects the intention (as defined below) of its creator(s) at a particular time. Cf. note 68 below.
Sometimes the literary effectiveness of a variant reading is used as an argument that the revision is authorial; but it is fallacious to assume that an author's revisions will always result in improvements (as judged by the editor or present-day scholars) and that no one else was capable of making such improvements.
Many of the general philosophical discussions do not take up the specific case of intention in literature (or in art generally), but such discussions may nevertheless provide some useful background by showing ways of approaching the subject. Two well-known works of this kind are G. E. M. Anscombe, Intention (1957; 2nd ed., 1963); and Jack W. Meiland, The Nature of Intention (1970), which includes a checklist of related studies on pp. 131-134. A general treatment of the theoretical basis for connecting intention and art is provided in Anthony Savile's "The Place of Intention in the Concept of Art," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 69 (1968-69), 101-124.
Sewanee Review, 54 (1946), 468-488; reprinted in Wimsatt's The Verbal Icon (1954), pp. 3-18. They first set forth their position in the article on "Intention" in Dictionary of World Literature, ed. Joseph T. Shipley (1943), pp. 326-329; the criticism of this article by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy in "Intention," American Bookman, 1, no. 1 (Winter 1944), 41-48, was in part responsible for their elaborating their argument in the now famous essay. Since that time, each has restated and offered further comments upon the position. Beardsley began his Aesthetics (1958) with a section on "The Artist's Intention," pp. 17-29, 66-69; and more recently he has published The Possibility of Criticism (1970). And Wimsatt has made a "reentry into the debate" with "Genesis: A Fallacy Revisited," in The Disciplines of Criticism, ed. Peter Demetz, Thomas Greene, and Lowry Nelson, Jr. (1968), pp. 193-225. A great many discussions of the Wimsatt-Beardsley view have been published. Among the adverse criticisms, valuable essays are Eliseo Vivas's review of Verbal Icon, "Mr. Wimsatt on the Theory of Literature," Comparative Literature, 7 (1955), 344-361; William H. Capitan's examination of Beardsley's Aesthetics, "The Artist's Intention," Revue internationale de philosophie, 18 (1964), 323-334; and Michael Hancher's review of The Possibility of Criticism in Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism [JAAC], 30 (1971-72), 391-394. Leslie Fiedler's "Archetype and Signature: A Study of the Relationship between Biography and Poetry," Sewanee Review, 60 (1952), 253-273, which takes a view opposed to Wimsatt and Beardsley, led to the discussion of both essays by Emilio Roma III, "The Scope of the Intentional Fallacy," Monist, 50 (1966), 250-266; and Frank Cioffi's "Intention and Interpretation in Criticism," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 64 (1963-64) 84-106, brought a rejoinder from Beardsley in a review in JAAC, 26 (1967-68), 144-146. Generally favorable responses are R. Jack Smith, "Intention in an Organic Theory of Poetry," Sewanee Review, 56 (1948), 625-633; and Rosemarie Maier, "'The Intentional Fallacy' and the Logic of Literary Criticism," College English, 32 (1970-71), 135-145 (with comments by Michael Hancher and Maier in the following volume, pp. 343-348).
Hirsch's argument had earlier appeared in "Objective Interpretation," PMLA, 75 (1960), 463-479, an essay included as an appendix in his book, pp. 209-244. The book, as an important and thoughtful statement of a position which has been unpopular since the advent of the New Criticism, has naturally been the subject of a great deal of discussion. Among the important reviews of the book are those by George Dickie, JAAC, 26 (1967-68), 550-552, and Robert Scholes, Philological Quarterly, 47 (1968), 280-283. The July 1968 number of Genre (1: 169-255) was devoted to "A Symposium" on the book, with contributions by Monroe C. Beardsley, George Dickie, Morse Peckham, Gale H. Carrithers, Jr., Leo Rockas, Arthur Efron, Merle E. Brown, and John Huntley. The following March Hirsch replied with "The Norms of Interpretation—A Brief Response," Genre, 2 (1969), 57-62; and he has recently offered a further elaboration of some of his ideas in "Three Dimensions of Hermeneutics," New Literary History, 3 (1971-72), 245-261. Morse Peckham discusses both the Wimsatt-Beardsley essay and Hirsch's book in "The Intentional? Fallacy?", New Orleans Review, 1 (1968-69), 116-124, reprinted in The Triumph of Romanticism (1970), pp. 421-444.
For instance, Wimsatt, recognizing that the contents of a work may be used to learn something about the author, says, "For whatever does get into a poem presumably is put there by the poet and reflects something in the poet's personality and life" ("Genesis: A Fallacy Revisited," p. 199). But the role of the editor is precisely to try to remove that "presumably" and to present a text consisting of what was in fact put there by the author. Similarly, Marcia Muelder Eaton, in "Good and Correct Interpretations of Literature," JAAC, 29 (1970-71), 227-233, remarks, "For purposes of simplicity I am assuming that the speaker uttered the words he meant to utter, i.e., that there were no slips of the tongue. This is certainly not too much to assume, since our main interest here is literature, and we certainly make such assumptions with respect to literary works" (p. 230). But slips of the author's pen or the compositor's hand, not later caught by the author, are the equivalent of "slips of the tongue" and certainly do occur in printed matter.
Throughout this essay I use "critical" in the common sense of "entailing judgment"—the sense which the word carries in the term "critical edition." I am not, that is to say, using "criticism" in the special sense which Hirsch (Validity in Interpretation, pp. 210-211) gives to it in his distinction between "interpretation" and "criticism," where the first means "the construction of textual meaning as such" ("the meaning of the text") and the second "builds on the results of interpretation," confronting "textual meaning not as such, but as a component within a larger context" ("the significance of the text"). I do not discuss here (except briefly near the end of section III) editions which are not critical—editions, that is, which present exact transcriptions of particular texts and which do not involve the editor's judgment in emending those texts.
This view is expressed by Rosemarie Maier (see note 8 above): "it is extremely unlikely that the determination of a text to criticize is actually literary criticism; textual decisions, unless they are the result of criticism of each version as an individual poem, are actually pre-critical decisions" (p. 144).
This influential treatment of meaning (edited by J. O. Urmson from Austin's notes for the 1955 William James Lectures) provides a useful terminology for discussing speech acts. A "locutionary" act involves only the "performance of an act of saying something"; an "illocutionary" act involves the "performance of an act in saying something" (p. 99); and a "perlocutionary" act involves "what we bring about or achieve by saying something" (p. 109). Another important account of meaning, taking an intentionalist approach (based on the idea that language consists of "nonnatural" signs which are given an "occasion-meaning" by a speaker), is H. P. Grice's "Meaning," Philosophical Review, 66 (1957), 377-388, supplemented by his "Utterer's Meaning and Intentions," Philosophical Review, 78 (1969), 147-177. There have been a considerable number of papers which build upon or analyze Austin's and Grice's contributions. Austin has been used by, among others, William P. Alston in Philosophy of Language (1964), esp. pp. 34-49 (cf. his "Linguistic Acts," American Philosophical Quarterly, 1 [1964], 138-146), and John R. Searle in Speech Acts (1969), esp. pp. 54-71; and Michael Hancher has illustrated the usefulness of the concept of illocutionary acts in analyzing literature in "Understanding Poetic Speech Acts," College English, 36 (1974-75), 632-639. A "largely destructive criticism" of Grice which is of particular interest to students of literature is Max Black's "Meaning and Intention: An Examination of Grice's Views," New Literary History, 4 (1972-73), 257-279 (which also contains a listing of many of the previous commentaries on Grice). Marcia Eaton has contributed a checklist of material on speech-act theory to Centrum, 2, no. 2 (Fall 1974).
The essays referred to are Gang, "Intention," Essays in Criticism, 7 (1957), 175-186; Kemp, "The Work of Art and the Artist's Intentions," British Journal of Aesthetics, 4 (1964), 146-154; Peckham, "Reflections on the Foundations of Modern Textual Editing," Proof, 1 (1971), 122-155 (see p. 152; Peckham discusses these matters at greater length, but does not use these particular terms, in "The Intentional? Fallacy?", cited in note 9 above); Skinner, "Motives, Intentions and the Interpretation of Texts," New Literary History, 3 (1971-72), 393-408. See also Richard Kuhns, "Criticism and the Problem of Intention," Journal of Philosophy, 57 (1960), 5-23, which distinguishes "intention as aiming at a result" from "intention as the conveying of a meaning." George Whalley prefers to use the term "intension" (which he defines as "the impulsive orientation of the person [author] in a moment of awareness"), because "intention" implies "a disguised attempt to explain the contemplative in terms of the technical" (Poetic Process [1953], p. xxvii).
Active intention thus corresponds to Austin's illocutionary act and to most of the locutionary act (Hancher, pp. 841-842).
His emphasis on "the" in several key statements (e.g., p. 851) implies that other definitions of meaning are possible; indeed, he goes on to make explicit the point that "we may entertain other meanings that seem valuable."
Richard Ohmann has attempted to draw such a line in "Speech Acts and the Definition of Literature," Philosophy and Rhetoric, 4 (1971), 1-19; and "Speech, Literature, and the Space Between," New Literary History, 4 (1972-73), 47-63. His definition of a literary work is "a discourse whose sentences lack the illocutionary forces that would normally attach to them. Its illocutionary force is mimetic" (1971, p. 14). He insists that his dividing line is a firm one, but the result is that some utterances not usually regarded as literature (jokes, "ironic rejoinders," "fables within political speeches") fall on the literature side. "Let me simply record my belief," he replies, "that the definition is not severely at fault in admitting the wrong discourses to the category of literature" (p. 16). Cf. his earlier "Speech, Action, and Style," in Literary Style: A Symposium, ed. Seymour Chatman (1971), pp. 241-259: "literature can be accurately defined as discourse in which the seeming acts are hypothetical" (p. 254). Beardsley takes a similar approach but seems to concede that his dividing line is more suggestive than precise. Literature, he says, is characterized by "its exploitation to a high degree of the illocutionary-act potential of its verbal ingredients"; it is "the complex imitation of a compound illocutionary act" (The Possibility of Criticism, p. 61). But he admits that what this amounts to is that a literary work has "richness and complexity of meaning"—or, earlier, that it "directs attention to itself as an object of rewarding scrutiny" (p. 60). More recently he has refined his definition, partly in response to Colin A. Lyas, who (in "The Semantic Definition of Literature," Journal of Philosophy, 66 [1969], 81-95) had criticized his previous definition of literature (Aesthetics, pp. 126-128) as "a discourse in which an important part of the meaning is implicit." Beardsley now defines "literary discourse" as "discourse that is either an imitation illocutionary act or distinctly above the norm in its ratio of implicit to explicit meaning" (both help to make a discourse "an object of attention in its own right")—see pp. 37-38 of "The Concept of Literature," in Literary Theory and Structure: Essays in Honor of William K. Wimsatt, ed. Frank Brady, John Palmer, and Martin Price (1973), pp. 23-39. This kind of definition, it seems to me, does not solve the problem but only shifts the terms in which it is expressed: one still has the problem of distinguishing between real illocutionary acts and imitations of illocutionary acts. Moreover, Marcia Muelder Eaton has shown that the author's intention has just as direct a bearing on such imitations of illocutionary acts as on illocutionary acts themselves; she proposes (in an extension of Austin's terminology) that these imitations be called "translocutionary" acts. See "Art, Artifacts, and Intentions," American Philosophical Quarterly, 6 (1969), 165-169; and "Good and Correct Interpretations of Literature" (see note 10 above). E. D. Hirsch, in "Some Aims of Criticism" (in the Wimsatt festschrift, pp. 41-62), argues that literature has "no independent essence": "It is an arbitrary classification of linguistic works which do not exhibit common distinctive traits, and which cannot be defined as an Aristotelian species. . . . The idea of literature is not an essentialistic idea" (p. 52). Cf. also College English, 36 (1974-75), 453.
As Quentin Skinner puts it, "an understanding of conventions, however implicit, must remain a necessary condition for an understanding of all types of speech act." See p. 135 of his "Conventions and the Understanding of Speech Acts," Philosophical Quarterly, 20 (1970), 118-138. He later (in the article cited in note 14 above) makes a focus on conventions one of his two rules (along with focus on "the writer's mental world") for recovering intention (pp. 406-407). The role of conventions in understanding is one of the concerns of Karl Aschenbrenner, in "Intention and Understanding," University of California Publications in Philosophy, 25 (1950), 229-270. Saussure's distinction between "langue" and "parole," summarized by Hirsch in Validity in Interpretation, pp. 231-235 (cf. pp. 69-71, leading into his discussion of "genre"), offers an approach to the relation between the "system of linguistic possibilities" which a language provides ("langue") and an individual utterance made in that language ("parole"). Theories of language are discussed by Morris Weitz in connection with multiple interpretations of a literary work in Hamlet and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism (1964), pp. 215-227. See also P. F. Strawson, "Intention and Convention in Speech Acts," Philosophical Review, 73 (1964), 439-460, and other discussions of Grice alluded to in note 13 above.
Geoffrey Payzant expresses this idea in broader terms: "Of the shapes that are imposed through skill upon stuff . . . some are devised by the maker and some are not." See p. 157 of "Intention and the Achievement of the Artist," Dialogue, 3 (1964-65), 153-159.
"The Intentional? Fallacy?" (see note 9 above), p. 441. Cf. Sidney Gendin, "The Artist's Intentions," JAAC, 23 (1964-65), 193-196: "We do expect, much of the time, that authorship or discovery will carry with it expert knowledge. But in such cases it is the knowledge itself which becomes the ground for being the authority; the authorship is not the ground. . . . If an artist has some peculiar knowledge of his work, it is not obvious that this is so merely because he is its creator. We must have some independent means of establishing his expertness" (p. 194). René Wellek says that an author's statements "might not even represent an accurate commentary on his work, and at their best are not more than such a commentary," in his and Austin Warren's Theory of Literature (2nd ed., 1956), p. 137.
"Motives, Intentions . . ." (see note 14 above), p. 405. Of course, authors' statements may be deliberately deceiving rather than "self-deceiving." Beardsley points out that artists "are often inclined to the most whimsical and bizarre statements [about their work], and seem to enjoy being deliberately misleading"; see p. 292 of his "On the Creation of Art," JAAC, 23 (1964-65), 291-304.
Such as that supporting the idea offered by Beardsley in The Possibility of Criticism, pp. 16-37; or those opposing it presented by Hirsch in Validity in Interpretation, pp. 10-14, by Peckham in "The Intentional? Fallacy?" (see note 9 above), and by Hancher in "Three Kinds of Intention" (see note 15 above).
Coomaraswamy (see note 8 above) makes a similar point: "one can so identify oneself with a subject and point of view that one can foresee what will be said next. . . . If, in fact, one cannot do this, textual emendation would be possible only on grammatical or metrical grounds" (p. 46). Isabel C. Hungerland, too, comments on this matter: "The way in which we interpret (explain and see) a whole literary work may determine our understanding of words (e.g., where there are ambiguous words), of sentences (e.g., where ironic meanings are possible), or allusions"; see p. 742 of "The Concept of Intention in Art Criticism," Journal of Philosophy, 52 (1955), 733-742. Hans Zeller, in "A New Approach to the Critical Constitution of Literary Texts," SB, 28 (1975), 231-264, takes the "predictability" of a text as an argument against the use of the text as a key to its author's intention: "To edit the text according to the intention of the author, when the singularities of his intention are known to us only through this text, can be achieved only if the text is in a certain sense redundant, that is to say, predictable. But this condition is fulfilled, as experiments have shown, only in the case of utilitarian texts (e.g., newspaper articles), and not in the case of poetic texts" (p. 259). But this position surely takes "predictability" in too narrow a sense: the fact that "artistic structures . . . themselves transgress the rules or codes which they have set up in the text" does not mean that the critical editor is prevented from seeing when such a transgression is taking place.
Henry David Aiken puts the matter this way: "The aesthetic relevance of a particular interpretation . . . can be established only with respect to a certain mode of appreciation, a certain way of approaching and handling the work of art." See p. 748 of "The Aesthetic Relevance of Artists' Intentions," Journal of Philosophy, 52 (1955), 742-753.
Hirsch admits, "The text sometimes seems so much better if we ignore the author's probable intention or what he probably wrote. Every interpreter has a touch of the medieval commentator looking for the best meaning, and every editor has a drop of Bentley's blood. It is not rare that anachronistic meaning on some ground or other is undoubtedly the best meaning" ("Three Dimensions of Hermeneutics" [see note 9 above], p. 259).
As Cioffi (see note 8 above) says, "biographical facts act as a kind of sieve which exclude certain possibilities" (p. 90); "They can serve the eliminative function of showing that certain interpretations of a work are based on mistaken beliefs about the author's state of knowledge" (p. 92). Similarly, Huw Morris Jones, in "The Relevance of the Artist's Intentions," British Journal of Aesthetics, 4 (1964), 138-145, comments, "We can eliminate some interpretations as being such that an artist at a certain period in a certain society could never have intended such meanings" (p. 140).
"The Science of Interpretation and the Art of Interpretation," Modern Language Notes, 85 (1970), 791-802. The first, he says, involves questions of validity, the second questions of value. A similar distinction is made by Eaton in "Good and Correct Interpretations of Literature" (see note 10 above).
"Intention" (see note 14 above), pp. 184-186. Hirsch's principal discussion of "Unconscious and Symptomatic Meanings," on pp. 51-57 of Validity in Interpretation, tries to distinguish between those unconscious meanings that are "coherent with the consciously willed type which defines the meaning as a whole" (p. 54) and those that are "symptomatic" of the author's personality, attitudes, and the like. The latter, while interesting and even important, are not part of the "verbal meaning" of a work, whereas the former are a part of it, since they are locatable in a specific "linguistic sign." This dichotomy is of course an application of Hirsch's larger distinction between meaning and significance, but it also serves to illustrate that one cannot escape the primacy of the text itself as a guide to intended meaning. Some criticism of this part of Hirsch's discussion occurs in Beardsley's The Possibility of Criticism, pp. 20-21.
Theodore Redpath is making roughly the same point when he says that "the probable intention of the poet does at least sometimes afford a criterion by which to judge whether a certain meaning which is attributed to a poem is probably correct or not." See p. 366 of "Some Problems of Modern Aesthetics," in British Philosophy in the Mid-Century, ed. C. A. Mace (1957), pp. 361-390. In other words, the primary emphasis is on what one finds in the poem; one can then try to determine whether it is a possible, and even a probable, meaning for the author, given the circumstances he was in at the time, to have intended. Similarly, Savile (see note 7 above) remarks, "At least in the context of art we know that the temporal and geographical point of origin of the text, the documents accessible to the artist, and the cultural climate of his time are all of first importance in assessing what interpretation of his text is the best in the circumstances of its production. . . . With the aid of hindsight we may get closer to the best possible contemporary reading than any contemporary did. We may be helped in this by later works, or by theories of behaviour that make explicit to us what the artist only dimly intuited" (pp. 122-123).
Ray Lewis White's edition (1968), though it is called a "critical text," fails to make these decisions, for it includes in brackets in the text both the passages marked for deletion on the typescript and the further passages deleted in the printed text. I have commented on the shortcomings of this volume and the other volumes in this edition in "The Case Western Reserve Edition of Sherwood Anderson: A Review Article," Proof, 4 (1974), 183-209.
See Walter B. Rideout's review of White's edition of A Story Teller's Story in English Language Notes, 7 (1969-70), 70-73.
For further details, see The Rise of Silas Lapham, ed. Walter J. Meserve and David J. Nordloh (Selected Edition of William Dean Howells, 1971), pp. 373-388.
The relationship between the readings of the American and English editions is explored in detail in the "Note on the Text" to the forthcoming Moby-Dick volume in the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of The Writings of Herman Melville.
"Textual Introduction," in Miscellanies by Henry Fielding, Esq; Volume One, ed. Henry Knight Miller (Wesleyan Edition, 1972), pp. lii-liii.
Most of these techniques of bibliographical analysis are conveniently illustrated in Charlton Hinman's The Printing and Proof-Reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare (1963); the principles underlying the use of the techniques are explored in Fredson Bowers's Bibliography and Textual Criticism (1964).
This example is discussed by Fredson Bowers in his edition of Crane's Tales of Adventure (University of Virginia Edition of The Works of Stephen Crane, 1970), p. 198. He takes up the general problem of "radiating texts"—the situation in which two or more extant texts are equally close to the lost manuscript, with no intervening texts surviving—in "Multiple Authority: New Problems and Concepts of Copy-Text," Library, 5th ser., 27 (1972), 81-115.
Anderson's editor, Ray Lewis White, seems to take both sides of the question. In his edition of Tar (1969), he says that "Anderson's loose punctuation, meant to reproduce for the reader a flowing, simple style, was standardized and 'stiffened' by the Boni and Liveright editors" (p. xvii); in Marching Men (1972), he reports that Anderson "learned to apologize for his untutored prose" and "continued all his life entrusting to his publishers final preparation of his writing" (pp. xxiv-xxv). Cf. note 33 above. For the view of a publisher's editor, defending publishing-house alterations as part of an author's intention, see Albert Erskine, "Authors and Editors: William Faulkner at Random House," in The William Faulkner Collection at West Point and the Faulkner Concordances, ed. Jack L. Capps (1974), pp. 14-19. Simon Nowell-Smith has provided a survey of author-publisher relations in respect both to punctuation and to censorship in "Authors, Editors, and Publishers," in Editor, Author, and Publisher, ed. William J. Howard (1969), esp. pp. 8-16.
Principles of Textual Criticism (1972), p. 165. Paul Baender similarly believes that the Center for Editions of American Authors (following Greg's principles) "has not sufficiently recognized that a writer's acquiescence in his publisher's alterations may also be construed as self-expression"; see p. 141 of "Reflections upon the CEAA by a Departing Editor," Resources for American Literary Study, 4 (1974), 131-144. Zeller (see note 26 above) goes farther and says that whatever an author passes in preparing the copy for an edition (with the exception of a strictly defined category of "faults") should be regarded as authorized, regardless of its source, for the author in passing it is reacting to a different version of his work in which it plays a role: "it does not matter whether the variants are original or extraneous, misprints (as we shall see, there are misprints and misprints) or variants introduced by a publisher's editor. . . . The necessary condition for our establishment of text is only that he [the author] should have registered the readings in question" (p. 256). Examining the author's motivation in passing certain readings which did not originate with him is futile, Zeller argues, because "the magnetic needle of the author's wishes is quivering in the field of non-aesthetic forces" (p. 245; see also note 52 below).
I have offered a more detailed and direct criticism of Thorpe's and Gaskell's position in SB, 28 (1975), 222-227.
The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, ed. Valerie Eliot (1971), p. xxxii.
One must use such qualifiers as "in effect" when calling this kind of version a "new work," since obviously there must be something similar about the two versions or they would not be regarded as "versions of a work" in the first place. At the same time, there is the implication that not every difference produces, for the practical purposes of editing, a "new work." Cf. note 54 below.
Bowers, in his essay "Textual Criticism" in the Thorpe pamphlet (see note 2 above), briefly refers to such cases in which "the rewriting is so extensive as to make ridiculous any attempt at synthesis of the two forms in one critical text" (p. 47; see also his footnote 32).
Of course, a revision which does not actually implement the aim of, say, simplification may have been made by the author in the belief that it does. It may be impossible for an editor to distinguish between such revisions and those which genuinely were unconnected with the motive of simplification. All he can do is to judge, on the basis of the texts in front of him and his knowledge of the author, which revisions the author can reasonably be thought to have considered simplifications (whether or not they seem such to the editor himself).
For a more detailed discussion of these revisions and the editorial problems they pose, see Typee, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Northwestern-Newberry Edition, 1968), pp. 288-291, 315-318.
Whether or not one might wish to produce a separate text incorporating vertical revisions generally depends on how much historical or aesthetic interest such a text would have. In the case of revisions made because of outside pressure to expurgate, there would presumably be little interest in having a separately edited text of such a version.
Further examples of Melville's revisions of Typee, along with a discussion of the possibility of editorial rejection of authorial revisions in this and other works of Melville, are given by Hershel Parker in "Melville and the Concept of 'Author's Final Intentions,'" Proof, 1 (1971), 156-168.
Charles Vandersee, "James's 'Pandora': The Mixed Consequences of Revision," SB, 21 (1968), 93-108 (see p. 107). The same kind of comment can be made in regard to revisions in a lyric poem. Thomas Clayton, for instance, writing on "Some Versions, Texts, and Readings of 'To Althea, from Prison,'" in PBSA, 68 (1974), 225-235, says of two readings that "it is pointless to argue which is 'better'; the readings are different, and the versions of the poem are significantly different depending upon the presence of 'birds' or 'gods,' respectively: the dialectic of the whole depends upon the part" (p. 234).
Even a nonauthorial variant, of course, produces a separate work which could be made the subject of critical analysis, but the scholarly editor's aim, as it has been defined, is to reconstruct the text (or texts) in conformity with the author's intention. As to whether his aim should be so defined, see below in section IV. Zeller (see note 26 above) does hold the position that "a new version comes into existence through a single variant," because "a text, as text, does not in fact consist of elements but of the relationships between them" and therefore "variation at one point has an effect on invariant sections of the text" (p. 241). He believes that each authorized text has an integrity of its own and that the editor's duty is to intervene in a text only to correct "textual faults" (readings which contradict "the internal text structure" [p. 260] and which are confirmed as corrupt by bibliographical analysis). To judge variants individually and to emend one text with authorial variants from another is, in his view, to produce a "contaminated" text. Zeller has focused clearly on the problem, and certain parts of his discussion are similar to what I am saying here. The central difference between his position and the one I set forth below is that for him a "new version implies a new intention" (p. 241), whereas I believe that a critical distinction can be made between versions resulting from different intentions for the work as a whole and those resulting from the same intention. Furthermore, Zeller does not think that intention can be defined to exclude the nonliterary forces which affect authorial decisions: "What is termed the intention of the author is an undetachable part of these forces. . . . Only the textual history is within the editor's reach" (p. 244). But if it makes sense to speak of artistic and nonartistic elements in intention (that is, to speak of active intention and certain programmatic intentions), then there is surely a dividing line between them (however concealed) which critical intelligence can attempt to discover. Zeller's procedure does produce what can be called a critical text, because errors are corrected; but emendations of authorial variants are ruled out, and the issue finally becomes the question of the value of a critical approach to editing.
If they considered the variants singly rather than in groups, even a relatively small number of variants would result in an astronomical number of separate works; it is true, however, that any group of authorial revisions may contain some which seem to move in a different direction from the others and which thus demand separate consideration.
From here on I use "separate work"—as I trust the context indicates—in the practical sense of "a work to be edited separately."
Richard Kuhns (see note 14 above) is getting at this same question when he says, "Within limits changes can be made without altering the basic organization and fundamental meaning of the work; but if we go outside those limits the work is seriously affected. . . . There is a difference between the values of the parts of a work which if changed would not alter the over-all effect of the work, and the values of the elements of a work which if changed would alter the over-all effect of the work" (p. 18). The key, in his terms, is whether or not the "style" is affected, "style" being defined as "a kind of organization of elements capable of sustaining a constant 'focal effect.'"
For a fuller discussion of this document and its editorial implications, see Typee (cited in note 48 above), pp. 312-313.
I have discussed this case in connection with Greg's theory, on pp. 221-223 of "The New Editions of Hawthorne and Crane," Book Collector, 23 (1974), 214-229.
Bowers has made further comments on the relationships between editions offering "eclectic" texts and those offering texts of particular stages of revision, in "Remarks on Eclectic Texts," Proof, 4 (1974), 31-76.
Some of the earlier versions have been edited separately: see, for example, Whitman's Manuscripts: Leaves of Grass (1860), ed. Fredson Bowers (1955), which prints as parallel texts the manuscript versions of certain poems and their first published versions (in 1860); and Leaves of Grass: The First (1855) Edition, ed. Malcolm Cowley (1959). Cf. Bowers, "The Walt Whitman Manuscripts of 'Leaves of Grass' (1860)," in his Textual and Literary Criticism (1959), pp. 35-65.
As John Kemp (see note 14 above) says, "a published work of art has been, as it were, detached from the artist, and he has sent it out into the world, with the result that later versions do not necessarily cancel earlier published ones as later cancel earlier in the working-out stage before publication" (p. 152).
If finality is defined in terms of publication, one could say that the latter case involves multiple intentions. The whole pattern of revisions in such a case, however, separates it from the usual instances of continual revision and suggests that the author had not really come to a decision when he was forced to select one reading or the other for publication at a particular time.
For a fuller discussion of these problems (with somewhat different conclusions), see Robert Halsband, "Editing the Letters of Letter-Writers," SB, 11 (1958), 25-37; and Simon Nowell-Smith (see note 40 above), esp. pp. 16-27.
A good example of this method is the Harvard University Press edition of The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. William H. Gilman et al. (1960- ). The volumes of detailed transcription currently in progress are to be followed by selections in clear text. Whenever a text is likely to be quoted or reprinted frequently in standard typographical contexts where symbols and multiple readings seem (by tradition) out of place, it becomes particularly important to provide such additional clear texts, despite the theoretical difficulties they entail. For a discussion of some of the problems of editing journals, see William H. Gilman, "How Should Journals Be Edited?", Early American Literature, 6 (1971), 73-83. Cf. also G. T. Tanselle, "Some Principles for Editorial Apparatus," SB, 25 (1972), 41-88 (esp. pp. 46-47); and Eleanor D. Kewer, "Case Histories in the Craft of the Publisher's Editor, Culminating in a Justification of Barbed Wire," in Editor, Author, and Publisher, ed. William J. Howard (1969), pp. 65-73.
E. A. J. Honigmann, in The Stability of Shakespeare's Text (1965), argues that Shakespeare perhaps made revisions in the process of copying, so that some of the variants we now have may represent authorial "second thoughts." The editor, therefore, must "screw his courage to the sticking place and choose between each pair of variants"; what he is doing is "to attempt a feat left undone by Shakespeare, to finalise an unfinalised text" (p. 168).
Thomas H. Johnson's Harvard edition of Emily Dickinson's poems (1955) presents a clear text, with variant readings in notes; but the decisions as to which readings were to be included in the main text were not generally made on the basis of literary judgment. Cf. Johnson's "Establishing a Text: The Emily Dickinson Papers," SB, 5 (1952-53), 21-32.
James Thorpe, however, does not seem to me to give adequate recognition to this possibility in the opening chapter ("The Aesthetics of Textual Criticism," originally published in PMLA, 80 [1965], 465-482) of his Principles of Textual Criticism (1972). He grants that "status as a work of art is not affected by whether [the work's] intentions all belong to the titular author"; but he immediately adds that "the integrity of the work of art depends very much on the work being limited to those intentions which are the author's," and he then insists that it is this "final integrity which should be the object of the critic's chief attention" (p. 31). Of course, his book is concerned with editing which seeks to establish what the author wrote; but the nature of that activity might have been more helpfully defined in relation to other possible editorial goals. Instead, there is the implication (which contradicts the first statement quoted above) that the work of art can only be preserved through the efforts of editors who purge it of the nonauthorial features that it continually attracts. We are told that "forces are always at work thwarting or modifying the author's intentions" and that the work "is thus always tending toward a collaborative status" (p. 48); therefore, "aesthetic objects . . . must be protected in order to preserve the work from becoming a collaborative enterprise" (p. 49). The scholarly editor is not so much "protecting" the work as restoring a particular form of it which has historical (and perhaps also aesthetic) interest; purely as an aesthetic object the work might well be better off without protection.
See A. Walton Litz, "Maxwell Perkins: The Editor as Critic," in Editor, Author, and Publisher, ed. William J. Howard (1969), pp. 96-112. The author's attitude toward such changes is of course a separate matter, taken up in section II above. Morse Peckham has questioned whether it is meaningful to think of the "author" as distinguishable from others who work on the same text, and thus whether the recovery of authorial intention is a possible goal, in "Reflections on the Foundations of Modern Textual Editing" (see note 14 above). Whenever an author revises his work, Peckham argues, he is looking at something already created and is no longer in the position of the creator (or the "initiator" of the "discourse"); he may be the first to revise the work, but his activity is no different from that of publishers' readers or editors who come along later. Peckham's point is similar to the one I am making here, because it recognizes that the activity of "editing" need not have any connection with a concept of "author." I would go on, however, as Peckham does not, and claim that the initiator of a discourse can be identified as a historical figure (whether or not his name is known —cf. note 5 above), distinct from others because he is the initiator; that an interest may attach to this initiator; and that the task of attempting to segregate his contributions to the discourse from those of others is therefore one legitimate scholarly pursuit. I have commented in somewhat more detail on this argument of Peckham's in SB, 28 (1975), 215-219. Cf. also the remark by Anthony Savile (see note 7 above): "If art conveys value through intentional means it is entirely natural that we should single out for attention the agent whose intentions these are" (p. 106). Zeller's position (see notes 26, 42, and 52 above) is similar to Peckham's in stressing "the difficulty, indeed the impossibility, of obtaining a text attributable exclusively to the author" (p. 249). But, unlike Peckham, he does not reach the point of questioning the individuality of the "author"; indeed, he distinguishes between the attitude of the author toward his text and the attitude of "the reader, the exegete or the editor" (p. 258). Baender (see note 42 above) also agrees with some parts of Peckham's discussion; but he is opposing Peckham when he affirms his belief "that human beings are discrete, that an individual has the power and privilege of self-expression and of changing his mind, and that other individuals do not have the privilege of altering that self-expression or of forcing that change of mind" (p. 141).
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