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Notes
See the Indiana edition of April Hopes, ed. Don L. Cook et al. (1974), pp. 221-222; and Moby-Dick, Chapter 61.
The two-paragraph prefatory note to the "Extracts" warns the reader not to take the "whale statements, however authentic, in these extracts, for veritable gospel cetology" and claims for them only that they provide "a glancing bird's eye view of what has been promiscuously said, thought, fancied, and sung of Leviathan, by many nations and generations, including our own."
Some critics, such as Viola Sachs in La Contre-Bible de Melville (1975), assume that all readings of the American first edition were intended by Melville, and they erect their interpretations on that assumption. This approach is uncritical and unrealistic in that it does not admit the possibility that the American text might contain transmissional errors or other unintended readings. But it does draw attention to the fact that the critical editor, in deciding what constitutes an error in the text, may be called upon to assess the soundness of various critics' commentaries.
References such as this to the text of Moby-Dick are to the text of the original American edition (Harper & Brothers, 1851), which was set from the manuscript furnished by Melville and which must serve (in the absence of that manuscript) as the copy-text for a scholarly critical edition. The attention only to wording—and generally not to punctuation and spelling—is commented on below. In the examples to follow, I draw on information turned up by various members of the editorial staff of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of Melville. The problems in the "Extracts" will be more fully and systematically dealt with in the forthcoming Moby-Dick volume in that edition. For valuable comments on an earlier version of this essay—both the part on Melville and the more general part—I am indebted to Fredson Bowers, Harrison Hayford, and Richard Colles Johnson.
In the passage from William Tooke's edition of Lucian (1820), Melville's alterations seem clearly to result from his wishing to change the diction: "sea" replaces "deep" and "monstrous" replaces "enormous" (though this second change could involve a misreading of handwriting). In the extract from William Scoresby, the distance at which one can hear the shaking of the whale's tail is said to be "three or four miles" rather than the "two or three miles" of the original, an obvious change for exaggeration. And in the quotation from Thomas Beale "Sperm Whale" is substituted for "sea beast," a change making more explicit the reference to whales.
Some evidence suggesting that Melville intended to quote accurately in certain instances is available at those points where the original English edition (set from Melville's revised proofs of the American edition) corrects the American, since no one other than Melville would have been likely to bother making such changes. One example is the correction in the English edition of the reading "stuffed with hoops" to "stiff with hoops" in a line from The Rape of the Lock; for other examples, see note 10 and the discussion of the Bunyan citation below. (Of course, some literate person in the English printing- or publishing-house could conceivably have been responsible for certain corrections of this kind; but the pattern of the corrections and the nature of some of the sources involved suggest a greater likelihood that the corrections are Melville's.)
Another example possibly involving an idiom could result in a different decision, because of differing circumstances. The quotation from Charles Wilkes's Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition (1844) contains the phrase "with look-outs at the mastheads," although Wilkes uses the singular "mast-head." To employ the plural when more look-outs than one are involved is an idiom Melville uses repeatedly (as in "the business of standing mast-heads," "the earliest standers of mast-heads," and "modern standers-of-mast-heads" in Chapter 35); furthermore, he apparently gave close attention to this extract in preparing the proofs to send to England, because the reading "her near appearance" in the American edition is altered to the correct one, "her mere appearance," in the English, and it is unlikely that anyone other than Melville would have made such a correction from this kind of source. Under these circumstances, then, there seems stronger reason to leave "mast-heads" than to change it, even though the possibility always remains that it results from a slip or a misreading of handwriting.
The possibility that Melville used either a revised or a corrupt text and misquoted from it in such a way as to produce the reading of the first edition is hardly worth the editor's while to think about in most instances. It is conceivable, however, that such a situation could occasionally be of some importance, if an author were attempting to reproduce a passage from a revised edition of a work and through an unlucky slip managed to recreate the reading of the unrevised text; but this occurrence would of course depend on an extreme coincidence.
In some cases another extract may provide a clue to the source. The quotation from John Hunter is a paraphrase of the original wording in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society for 1787; but it matches exactly (except for the omission of "an") the wording quoted by William Paley in his Natural Theology (1802)—which is the work Melville cites for the immediately following extract.
These different kinds of intention are discussed in more detail in G. T. Tanselle, "The Editorial Problem of Final Authorial Intention," Studies in Bibliography, 29 (1976), 167-211 (which includes references to many other treatments of the subject). An important and still more recent discussion, containing some useful criticism of that essay, is Steven Mailloux's "Authorial Intention and Conventional Reader Response," Chapter 7 (pp. 171-206) of his University of Southern California dissertation, "Interpretive Conventions and Recent Anglo-American Literary Theory" (1977).
Melvyn New has encountered a situation in which he believes that an editor should employ as the copy-text for a long quotation the first edition of the work quoted from. In Tristram Shandy Sterne quotes the entire "Memoire" from Heinrich van Deventer's Observations importantes sur le Manuel des accouchemens (1734); New argues that "Much of the wit of the 'Memoire's' inclusion in Tristram lies in the fact that Sterne could use it verbatim," that "it is not a fiction but an historical record of an actual deliberation." One can guess, New says, that "had Sterne had photoreproductive processes available to him, he would have used them for providing a printer's copy of the 'Memoire'" and that one "comes closest to Sterne's intention" by using the 1734 Deventer text. New recognizes, however, that this text would have to be emended with what seem to be Sterne's intended alterations and that punctuation "remains a difficult problem, whichever text is used as copy text"—thus in fact reopening the question of how much is gained by adopting the earlier copy-text. Whether or not one is persuaded by New that presumptive authority here should be given to the 1734 text, one can agree that the problem is to separate Sterne's "function as copyist" from his "function as artist" (due allowance, of course, being made for contemporary conventions of "copying") and that "in the text underlying any borrowed material there is the possibility of a wealth of bibliographical and critical information." See "Tristram Shandy and Heinrich van Deventer's Observations," PBSA, 69 (1975), 84-90; and "The Sterne Edition: The Text of Tristram Shandy," in Editing Eighteenth Century Novels, ed. G. E. Bentley, Jr. (1975), pp. 86-87.
The extract from Darwin in fact illustrates two practices: the insertion of "(whales)" occurs within the quotation, whereas the quotation is interrupted—by the use of closing and then opening quotation marks—for the insertion of "(Terra Del Fuego)" after "the shore."
The same situation occurs in the quotation from Margaret Fuller's translation of Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe, where Melville has silently omitted "and seamonsters" following "whales."
Transitional words in source passages form another obviously intended class of omissions. The omission of "other" from "what other thing" in the extract from Philemon Holland's edition of Plutarch and of "on the other hand" from a quotation from Frederick Debell Bennett are necessary adjustments when the passages are taken out of context.
Knowledge of the range of variant spellings recorded in the DAE for the Indian evil deity—including "Hobomoko," "Abamacho," and "Hobbamock"—might cause one to argue that "Hobomack" falls within the range of permissible deviation, but presumably such a range did not exist for the ship's name. A different kind of argument against emending the spelling would be to say that the correction does not make the citation fit the extract better than it did before and that under the circumstances the Hobomack becomes in effect a fictitious ship of Melville's invention. The great similarity between "Hobomack" and "Hobomok," however, makes it difficult to believe that Melville did not have the real ship in mind. And an editor's intervention to correct Melville's intended reference in the citation carries no implication that the extract and the citation are being brought into closer agreement: there is no reason why Melville cannot be allowed to place on board a real ship events that never occurred there, and no reason why an editor cannot make a local correction of a spelling error without being obligated to produce factual accuracy in the larger context.
A related kind of approximate citation occurs in the reference to "Opening sentence of Hobbes's Leviathan." The sentence quoted is actually the fifth, but "Opening" should not therefore be called an error: "Opening sentence" is apparently what Melville wrote, meaning "a sentence that is part of the opening," "an early sentence."
A third error in the Montgomery extract, "instincts" for "instinct," should be corrected because the word is correct in Cheever and because the misreading could easily have resulted from a slip.
On another occasion, a date in a citation identifies the actual edition used. The citation "Captain Cowley's Voyage around the Globe. A.D. 1729" is not an error, even though Cowley's voyage took place in 1683—86 and an account of it appeared in William Hacke's A Collection of Voyages in 1699, because another edition of Hacke appeared in 1729. Melville's date, therefore, refers to his source and not to the actual voyage.
The last two words in the list differ by one letter: "pekee-nuee-nuee" for Fegee, and "pehee-nuee-nuee" for Erromangoan. Whereas "pehee" is an acceptable rendering of the word for "fish" usually transcribed as "pihi," "pekee" is not; yet an editor must be cautious about emending it, for Melville's desire to show different words may have taken precedence here over any desire to offer precisely accurate information. (Using this argument here would not prevent an editor from correcting a factual error elsewhere in the list where the circumstances were different.)
Assuming that Melville would not have intended to give the Old Icelandic "hvalr." (If "whalr" were a variant of "hvalr," it might be a tempting possibility, differing from "whale" by only one letter; but it is a highly improbable form.) The Northwestern-Newberry editors are grateful to Richard N. Ringler for help with this problem.
Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally, Albert Sechehaye, and Albert Reidlinger, and trans. Wade Baskin (1959), pp. 13-14.
No distinct line separates the two. What may seem nonsense in one context may become concrete poetry in another.
Archibald A. Hill, in "The Locus of the Literary Work," English Studies Today, 3rd ser. (1964), pp. 41-50, after discussing the bearing of Saussure's distinction on literary study, defines "intention" as a "structural hypothesis derived from analysis of the text" (p. 50). A fuller discussion of this point occurs in G. T. Tanselle's "The Editorial Problem of Final Authorial Intention" (see note 13 above).
Validity in Interpretation (1967), p. 233. The role of literary sensitivity in determining the function of misquotation in an author's writing is well illustrated by Christopher Ricks in "Pater, Arnold and Misquotation," Times Literary Supplement, 25 Nov. 1977, pp. 1383—85. Ricks concludes that Pater reads "what he wishes to have been said": he creates a "'world within' . . . only by a violation of a world without, another man's 'world within' as it had become embodied . . . in the inter-subjective world which is the words of a poem." Whereas "Pater's misquotations are the rewriting of his authors so that they say special Paterian things," Arnold's "are the rewriting of his authors so that they say unspecial things," reducing "something individual to something commonplace." Another discussion of the creative use of quotations, pointing a parallel with the developing text of a ballad through oral tradition, is M. J. C. Hodgart's "Misquotation as Re-creation," Essays in Criticism, 3 (1953), 28-38. Misquotations that become integral parts of the works in which they occur are to be distinguished, of course, from incidental slips, even when those slips may have some kind of psychological significance (this point is discussed further below).
Twice-Told Tales, ed. J. Donald Crowley, Fredson Bowers, et al. (1974), pp. 169-170; The Snow-Image and Uncollected Tales (1974), p. 142; The Blithedale Romance and Fanshawe, ed. Fredson Bowers et al. (1964), p. 408.
Within a given language, that is, for the spelling is sometimes altered for representation in other languages.
For some additional comment on this point, see G. T. Tanselle, "Textual Study and Literary Judgment," PBSA, 65 (1971), 120-121.
This is what I take to be the meaning of the sentence reading "Howells' choice of detail seems to place the fiction at roughly the same time as the historical events upon which it draws." See A Hazard of New Fortunes, ed. David J. Nordloh et al. (1976), pp. 55, 537-538.
As Harold H. Kolb, Jr., points out in his review of this volume of the Howells edition in American Literary Realism 1870-1910, 10 (1977), 314-317. Another possible detail suggesting a pre-1888 date for the early part of the novel is the streetcar strike described late in the book, if it is to be identified with the New York strike of early 1889 (certainly it was inspired by that strike.
Of course, if "tventy years ago" can be taken to mean "roughly twenty years ago," there would be no inconsistency with either version of the other sentence. But the theoretical question remains, even if the present illustration, in that case, were not particularly apt; and there would still be the problem, in this illustration, of choosing between "not yet" and "already," even though one difficulty in making the choice would have been removed. (Determining how exact the reference to twenty years was intended to be involves some consideration of linguistic customs and traditions: the vagueness about round numbers prevalent in Elizabethan times, for instance, seems to be of a different order from the attitude toward such figures in Howells's time.)
A similar instance, involving the dating of the narration of a novel, occurs in Moby-Dick. A speculative passage in Chapter 85 refers to "this blessed minute" and then defines it (in the first American edition) as "fifteen and a quarter minutes past one o'clock P.M. of this sixteenth day of December, A.D. 1851." Because the book was published in London in October 1851 and in New York in November 1851, the year in this passage is probably a compositorial error for "1850" (the reading in the first English edition, set from proofs of the first American). As far as internal consistency is concerned, of course, "1851" would cause a problem only if there is another historical reference in the book with which it would come in conflict. But it seems most likely that Melville's intention at this point was to make the internal world of the book and the external world of reality coincide and to refer to a date that was realistically conceivable as the actual date of composition of this passage (if not in fact the actual date). John Harmon McElroy, in "The Dating of the Action in Moby Dick," Papers on Language & Literature, 13 (1977), 420-423, comments on the 1850 date of narration and on other historical references that date the Pequod's voyage in 1840-41.
I am not suggesting that fact is ever anything but elusive, even outside of fiction; but this is not the place to raise the philosophical question of what is real. By "fact" here, as I have tried to define it earlier, I mean specific people, places, things, and events with an existence independent of the work under consideration. Saul Bellow has interestingly discussed the role of facts in fiction in "Facts That Put Fancy to Flight," New York Times Book Review, 11 Feb. 1962, pp. 1, 28. Many readers, he says, are concerned with the accuracy of the realistic surface, and publishers' editors will therefore wish to check on such questions as "How many stories does the Ansonia Hotel really have; and can one see its television antennae from the corner of West End Avenue and Seventy-second Street?" He proceeds to contrast writers who are "satisfied with an art of externals" (and who produce "a journalistic sort of novel") with those "masters of realism" in whose work "the realistic externals were intended to lead inward."
See, for instance, the comments on "Washington: Behind Closed Doors" in Time, 19 Sept. 1977, pp. 92-93, and in Michael J. Arlen's "The Air" department in The New Yorker, 3 Oct. 1977, pp. 115-124.
"The American Heritage and Its Guardians," American Scholar, 45 (1975-76), 733-751 [i.e., 37-55]; quotation from p. 742.
The rationale for this position is set forth by G. T. Tanselle in "The Editing of Historical Documents," SB, 31 (1978), 1-56.
This is not to suggest that a critical text cannot be undertaken to represent any particular stage in the history of a work, for the same point can be made about the relation of the surviving documents to the author's final intention at any specific time. Producing a critical text of some version of a work that was later revised further by the author is not the same thing as editing a transcription of one document.
In a footnote, Shaw gives another, and more far-fetched, example of a slip "useful to the critic": the appearance of F. R. Leavis's name as "F. L. Leavis" in an essay of Fredson Bowers. Shaw believes that "Leavis evidently has been confused with the older English critic F. L. Lucas" and that this slip reveals a "slightly old-fashioned" cast of mind. Surely such tenuous speculation offers no real grounds for preserving what is clearly an unintended reading, very likely a compositor's error.
Another Hayford-Sealts emendation in Billy Budd has been questioned by another critic in a different way. In his Bobbs-Merrill edition (1975), Milton Stern differs from Hayford and Sealts on the necessity of correcting Nelson's rank, from "Vice Admiral" (as it appears on leaf 70 of the manuscript) to "Rear Admiral" (as Hayford and Sealts correct it). Stern does not rule out all corrections of fact and believes in making critical distinctions between one situation and another. His argument in this case is that Melville "makes a point of Nelson's rank more than once"; therefore "he might have attached significance to the ranks he assigned" (p. 165). This argument, however, is not critical: the fact that the error appears more than once is no guarantee that it was intended; the crucial question, not taken up, is whether there is reason to believe that Melville did attach significance to "Vice Admiral."
See, for instance, Stanley Edgar Hyman's The Tangled Bank: Darwin, Marx, Frazer and Freud as Imaginative Writers (1962).
Bowers suggests that one of the uses of this appendix is to help the reader decide "whether Dewey had the source open before him or was relying on his memory" (p. xvii)—a problem the editor will already have thought about in determining whether any emendations are justifiable, for certain kinds of slips are more common when one is copying (intending to copy accurately) than when one is remembering (intending perhaps only to paraphrase).
Boydston points out in the first volume of The Early Works that "Dewey used source material in the whole range of possible ways, from paraphrase recall to verbatim copying out. . . . quotation marks do not necessarily signal a direct, precise quotation" (p. lxxxix).
The same cannot necessarily be said about accidentals: because it is more difficult to reason about which discrepancies in accidentals are intentional and which inadvertent, the decision whether or not to correct the accidentals of a quotation falls back more heavily on a consideration of contemporary attitudes toward accuracy in quotations. (For works in which some looseness of quotation is tolerated, there is the companion question of the extent to which readers need to be informed about the accidentals of the original; whereas discrepancies in substantives between copy-text and source should always be reported in the apparatus, one can argue that the desirability of reporting such discrepancies in accidentals varies with the situation—perhaps, for instance, being more important for some expository works or passages than for some "creative" ones.)
Some debate over editing quotations in such works has recently occurred in connection with the omission of a "not" in a quotation from Joseph Spence as it appears in the first edition of Johnson's Life of Pope (1781). Colin J. Horne's proposal that the word be restored ("An Emendation to Johnson's Life of Pope," Library, 5th ser., 28 [1973], 156-157) has been objected to by J. P. Hardy, who argues that "surely the modern editor's prime duty is to reproduce the most authoritative text that can, on all available evidence, be attributed to Johnson" (29 [1974], 226). Horne's reply (30 [1975], 249-250) tries to clarify the nature of critical editing, especially in regard to quotations: such an editor, Horne recognizes, does not simply reproduce an authoritative text but corrects it so that it can be printed "as the author intended it to be and not as what, by some oversight, he actually wrote in error"; and this principle, he makes clear, must apply to the entire text, quotations and all (he underscores the illogic of holding "that one principle should apply to quotations and quite another to the main body of the text"). That certain misquotations in "nonfiction" or expository works must, however, be allowed to stand is effectively stated by Horne: "No editor, I think, would correct the habitual misquotations in Hazlitt's writings because, it may fairly be claimed, they are, in that form, what Hazlitt intended. They are authentic as being precisely how he remembered them and as such they are evidence of his adaptive memory of his extensive reading and his partly deliberate adaptation of the quotation to what he was himself writing."
The list of emendations in this edition is designed as the place to record all differences in the texts of quotations, even those that are not emended. The principle of providing readers with this information (handled in the Dewey by the section called "Correction of Quotations") is important, for without it readers are not in a position adequately to evaluate the editors' treatment of quotations; readers need to know where misquotations have been allowed to stand as well as where they have been emended.
James's preface to The Meaning of Truth illustrates the delicacy of judgment involved, because James there quotes from his own earlier Pragmatism. The editor is faced not only with the usual questions that quotations raise but with the additional consideration that James may be taking this occasion to revise what he had previously written. Bowers's text (1975) allows James to make unmarked omissions but generally restores the punctuation and italicization of the original.
And this edition, it should be added, is not one that excludes all editorial emendation; in fact, it is a modernized edition. (Ramsey's point that the text is not "put forth in completely modern form" refers only to the fact that idioms and other matters of wording are not modernized.) But the inappropriateness of modernization for a scholarly edition of this kind is an entirely different point from the one I am concerned with here.
American Renaissance (1941), p. 392. The error was originally pointed out by John W. Nichol in "Melville's '"Soiled" Fish of the Sea,'" American Literature, 21 (1949-50), 338-339.
The result may be a "new" version in the sense that the text never existed physically in this form before, but the aim is still historical reconstruction, not the application of critical ability to the further "revision" or "improvement" of the work beyond the point where the author left it.
This example, and other similar ones, are discussed in Hodgart's "Misquotation as Re-creation" (see note 28 above), pp. 36-37. The creative nature of Yeats's misquotations is also taken up in Jon Lanham's "Some Further Textual Problems in Yeats: Ideas of Good and Evil," PBSA, 71 (1977), esp. 455-457, 467.
The situation is somewhat more complicated, since the first reference has not been found in Purchas, and it may be erroneous also. But neither has it been located in Hakluyt, so there is no basis for switching the two names. These difficulties may support the view that Melville was more concerned here with rhetorical effect than with factual accuracy.
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