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When Keats in his sonnet on Chapman's Homer wrote of "stout Cortez," rather than Balboa, staring at the Pacific with eagle eyes, he created what has become the classic instance of a factual error in a work of imaginative literature. Yet few readers have been bothered by the error or felt that it detracts from the power of the sonnet, and editors have not regarded it as a crux calling for emendation. Amy Lowell, after mentioning the possibility that Keats was thinking of Titian's painting of Cortez, dismisses the matter: "at any rate he put Cortez, probably by accident. It is no matter."[1] Classroom editions of Keats have often included some similar comment, such as Clarence DeWitt Thorpe's note that begins, "Historically, 'Cortez' should be read 'Balboa,'" and ends, "Poetically, it does not matter; the poem is true and magnificent."[2] Scarcely anyone would dispute Thorpe's conclusion that the poem is "true and magnificent," as it stands, or would advocate the substitution of "Balboa" in it. But the consensus of opinion on the question does not mean that no significant issues are raised by it. The view that an historical error does not detract from the greatness of a poem is of course grounded on the argument that an imaginative work creates its own internal world for the communication of truth: the work can express a "truth" relevant to the outside world without being faithful to that world in the details out of which the work is constructed. No one is surprised by the expression of this principle, which is, after all, central to an understanding of literature as metaphorical statement. What is less often considered, however, is the complexity of its editorial implications.
Certainly a critical editor cannot take as a general rule Thorpe's comment that "Poetically, it does not matter." Whether or not a particular error matters depends on more than whether or not it occurs in a poem or a "creative" work: sometimes a factual error in a poem may indeed call for correction, while at other times it may not, and the editor
The editor of a critical text sets out to eliminate from a particular copy-text what can be regarded as errors in it; defining what constitutes an "error" is therefore basic to the editorial procedure. Any concept of error involves the recognition of a standard: an editor can label certain readings of a text erroneous only by finding that they fail to conform to a certain standard. Determining appropriate standards for editorial judgment must take into account the nature of the piece of writing as a whole and the nature of each individual passage in it as well as the nature of the edition that is to result, and it must recognize that errors may fall into discrete classes, each demanding different treatment. One may feel that errors of historical fact, for instance, should be corrected in some kinds of works (or passages) and not in other kinds, but that decision involves some consideration of authorial intention and will thus be affected by the attitude that the edition is to take toward questions of intention. If the goal of an edition—as with most scholarly critical editions—is to attempt to establish the text intended by the author at a particular time, one's decisions about what constitutes errors will be affected accordingly. Intention and error are inseparable concepts, because errors are by definition unintended deviations (unintended on a conscious level, that is, whatever unconscious motivation for them there may be). If a writer intentionally distorts historical fact for the purposes of a
An editor must distinguish, however, between accepting factual errors because they are intended features of a literary work and accepting them because they reveal the mental processes of the author. The latter interest is a legitimate and important one, but it may conflict with the aim of establishing the intended text of a work. Both interests can be accommodated through the use of textual notes, but one of those interests must be chosen as the rationale for the editor's treatment of the text itself. If one's aim is to reproduce the text of a particular document, then obviously one reproduces it errors and all, for the errors may be revealing characteristics of the author's direction of thought and in any case are part of the historical record to be preserved. But if one's aim is to offer a critical edition of that text as a finished literary work, one can no more follow a policy of retaining all factual errors than pursue a course of correcting all such errors. In a critical edition the treatment of factual errors can be no mechanical matter, covered by a blanket rule; instead, the editor must give serious thought to the circumstances surrounding each one, thought that will involve settling basic questions about the nature of the editing being undertaken.
Errors of external fact are of course only one category of the larger class of discrepancies in general. Many discrepancies in texts are internal: that is, certain readings are identifiable as errors not because they fail to agree with recognized facts but because they are inconsistent with points established elsewhere within the text. When, for example, Minnie Mavering is referred to as "Molly" in Howells's April Hopes or Tashtego is called "Daggoo" in Moby-Dick,[3] the discrepancies are matters of internal, rather than external, fact. The authors in these cases cannot have intended to refer to their characters by the wrong names, and the editor of a critical text will rectify such errors. Not all internal errors can be corrected by the simple substitution of a name, however. As alert readers have long noticed, the Pequod is described early in Moby-Dick (Chapter 16) as having a tiller ("Scorning a turnstile wheel at her reverend helm") but later in the book is given a wheel helm with spokes (Chapters 61, 118—in which the helmsman is said to "handle the spokes" and "ostentatiously handle his spokes"). Similarly, Pip is referred to as an "Alabama boy" (Chapter 27) and is told that a whale would sell for thirty times what he would in Alabama (Chapter 93); but there is also a reference to his "native Tolland County in Connecticut" (Chapter 93) and his father "in old Tolland county" (Chapter 99). Melville evidently did not intend
It should be clear, however, that the editor who allows such errors to remain does so only in the belief that nothing better can be done and not because they are regarded as part of the author's intended text. Internal errors resemble external errors in the sense that they are recognizable by reference to something outside the immediate context: a reading in one sentence (or phrase) is erroneous or discrepant because it fails to match what is said in another sentence (or phrase) elsewhere in the work. But the "external" facts in such instances are still within the limits of the piece of writing, and the author's intention with respect to the internal consistency of the work is made clear to the reader in the work itself. The editor is normally in a position to know, in other words, whether the world of the work is a realistic one, in which a person named Minnie cannot suddenly become Molly and a wheel cannot change into a tiller, or a surrealistic one, in which such "facts" are not stable. In the case of allusions that extend outside the limits of the work, however, the editor is in a more difficult position. Because the reference is to something with an independent existence, one is faced with the question whether the author is attempting to be accurate in citing an external fact or is adapting it so as to give it a new existence within the work. Errors of external fact, therefore, pose quite a different problem from internal discrepancies. They are worth investigating in their own right and because they lead one to consider the fundamental assumptions of editing.
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