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External Fact as an Editorial Problem
by
G. Thomas Tanselle
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.
I
One of the most common situations involving external allusion occurs when a writer quotes from an earlier piece of writing. Insofar as the emphasis of the reference is on a verifiable independent source, the quotation should be exact. But insofar as the writer's intention is to adapt the quotation, it becomes a created element in the new work and cannot then be deemed incorrect merely because it fails to correspond with an external source. In many cases the motivation is mixed: the writer wishes to call on the authority of a previous author (expecting readers to recognize the author or the work cited) but at the same time wishes to alter the quotation to serve a particular purpose in the new context. Of course, a writer sometimes simply misquotes without intending to, and if no consequences follow from the misquotation, it is merely an error and
Many of the possible editorial problems involving quotations can be illustrated by a single famous instance, the section of "Extracts" prefixed to Moby-Dick. In this section Melville draws together eighty quotations, ranging from the Bible to mid-nineteenth-century fiction, constituting a massive epigraph to the book. One might at first feel that epigraphs are not part of the text they introduce and that there would thus be no legitimate reason for their not being accurate; but a moment's reflection reminds one that an author selects an epigraph in order to set up a relationship between its implications and those of the text to follow and that one should not be surprised, therefore, if the epigraph were intentionally slanted to make the relationship clearer. Epigraphs are as much a part of a text as the quotations embedded in it. In the case of Melville's "Extracts," the creative nature of epigraphs is evident: the sweep of the assembled material is intended to suggest the greatness and universality of the subject of whales and whaling.[5] Melville furthermore places his quotations in a dramatic framework: they are said to be "Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian," who has "gone through the long Vaticans and streetstalls of the earth" in search of them. The fact that supposedly they have been prepared by a created character does not, of course, mean that any errors in them must necessarily be accepted as contributing to the characterization, but it does strengthen the point that misquotations may at times be functional, and intentionally so. Whether misquotations are in fact intended as part of a characterization can only be determined by the context, and in this instance there is nothing to indicate that Melville wished the reader to regard any errors as lapses on the Sub-Sub-Librarian's part; on the other hand, he may well have wished to alter certain quotations to make them more appropriate as epigraphs to the work that follows, and misquotations in the "Extracts" must be judged critically with this possibility in mind.[6] A survey of some of the editorial
Perhaps the most straightforward situations are those in which misquotations result from obviously intended alterations by Melville. In the second extract, for example, from Job 41:32, the wording of the printed text[7] (the manuscript does not survive) exactly matches that of the King James Bible except that "Leviathan" is substituted for "He" in "Leviathan maketh a path to shine after him." Clearly no one, in the process of transmission from manuscript to print, could have misread Melville's "He" as "Leviathan"; furthermore, the indefinite reference of "He" calls for some explanation when the passage is quoted out of context. It seems certain that Melville wrote "Leviathan," intentionally altering the wording of his source. Similarly, the extract from Montaigne contains the clause "the sea-gudgeon retires into it in great security," whereas the passage in Hazlitt's Montaigne (Melville's source) reads "this little fish" instead of "the sea-gudgeon." Again, the change cannot have resulted from a misreading of handwriting. Although it is perhaps conceivable that Melville wrote "sea-gudgeon" as a result of losing his place momentarily—since "sea-gudgeon" occurs in an earlier (unquoted) part of Montaigne's sentence—it is much more likely that he wished not to lose this term and substituted it in what is otherwise essentially an accurate quotation. Even undistinctive words can sometimes be recognized as Melville's alterations: the extract from Waller consists of two couplets, separated by a row of asterisks indicating ellipsis; in the second couplet "his" (twice) and "he" appear, rather than Waller's "her" and "she"— substitutions obviously made so that the gender of the pronouns would match that in the first couplet, now that the two couplets are juxtaposed (in the original, forty lines separate them).[8] In instances of this kind the
Thinking about these examples leads one to see some of the conditions under which emendations in the "Extracts" would have to be made. Unintended slips—authorial, scribal, compositorial—can be present in the text of the "Extracts" just as in the body of the book, and a critical approach to the text demands that all "misquotations" be evaluated and not automatically accepted as intended alterations. When, in the quotation from Blackstone, "caught near the coast" appears instead of "caught near the coasts," and, in the extract from Frederick Debell Bennett, "these weapons" replaces "those weapons"—or when the passage from Uno von Troil contains "lime-stone" instead of "brim-stone"—the substituted word in each case could easily have resulted from a simple transmissional error (such as a memorial lapse or a misreading of handwriting), and in none of these cases does there seem to be any reason for an authorial change. A number of such examples occur in poetic quotations from prominent sources: in the second extract from Paradise Lost, Leviathan is said to be stretched like a promontory "in," rather than "on," the deep and to spout out a sea "at his breath," rather than "at his trunk"; and in the extract from Cowper we read that "rockets blew [rather than 'flew'] self driven, / To hang their momentary fire [not 'fires'] / Around [not 'Amid'] the vault of heaven." All these misquotations are conceivable misreadings of handwriting or slips in copying, and it is difficult to see why Melville (or anyone else) would wish to make them intentionally ("fire" for "fires" is a clear instance of error, because the word is supposed to rhyme with "spires" two lines earlier). Slips of this kind, which probably occurred in the process of transmission from authorial manuscript to printed book, call for emendation by the critical editor.
Of course, some of these erroneous readings may have been present in Melville's manuscript, but as long as they can be argued to be unintentional slips the case for emendation is not altered.[9] When the printed
An additional example or two may serve further to clarify the role of arguments based on possible slips or misreadings of handwriting. In the Smith quotation, four lines after "in the shrouds," there is the clause "it floundered in the sea," where "it" refers to "whale"; in the original the subject is "he," not "it," but here the conservative editor is likely to feel that the possibility of an intentional change is enough stronger to warrant
The process of locating those external sources, however, raises some important questions of editorial procedure. First is the problem of deciding what particular edition of a source text is the proper one to use for comparison. If the text of a quotation in the "Extracts" matches the text of the corresponding passage in the first edition of the work quoted from, the problem does not exist, for it does not matter whether Melville used the first edition or some other edition, as long as the resulting quotation is accurate.[11] But when the text in the "Extracts" does not correspond with that of the first edition, one cannot assume that the difference necessarily results from a transmissional error in the process of writing and printing Moby-Dick or from a deliberate change on Melville's part; it may be that Melville copied accurately, but from a different edition. If
The question that all this leads to is how the editor should handle errors or alterations that were already present in the immediate source of the quotations. If Melville quotes a corrupt text under the impression that he is providing the reader with another author's words, is it part of an editor's duty to replace that corrupt text with an accurate text? Answering this question goes to the heart of the concept of scholarly critical editing. Expecting editors to make such "corrections" of quotations is in effect asking them to establish the text of each quoted passage so as to fulfill its author's intentions. Such a procedure would mean treating each quotation as if it were an individual item in an anthology, not a part of a context created by another writer. The reader comes to Melville's "Extracts" not to seek established texts of Waller and Bunyan but
Thus the extract from Thomas Fuller's The Holy State, and the Profane State reads "mighty whales which swim" at a point where the first edition of 1642 and the "second edition enlarged" of 1648 read "mighty whales who swim"; but because "which" is the reading of the London 1841 edition—the edition borrowed by Melville, according to Merton M. Sealts's Melville's Reading (1966)—there would seem to be no reason
A related element in considering a writer's intentions in making a quotation is an understanding of the contemporary conventions of quoting. Generally before the twentieth century (and in some cases even into the century) quotations were not thought of as "inaccurate" or "incorrect" if they occasionally departed from the wording—to say nothing of the punctuation and spelling—of the source, as long as they did not distort the gist of its meaning. It was not considered wrong, even in expository writing (that is to say, writing not usually classed as "imaginative" or belletristic), to place between quotation marks what we would now think of as a paraphrase or an adaptation. For an editor to make such "quotations" conform to modern standards of accuracy, therefore, would be to modernize (that is, to employ a modern approach—for the corrected quotation would often be less "modern" in form); and the scholarly editor will not wish to engage in modernizing here any more than with the punctuation and spelling of the rest of the text. In checking Melville's extracts against their sources, then, an editor need not be concerned with spelling, punctuation, capitalization, or other formal matters except to the extent that discrepancies markedly affect meaning (or obviously result from slips or nonauthorial styling) or that agreements point to Melville's immediate sources. It clearly never occurred to Melville to be troubled about taking a twenty-word middle section out of a long sentence of Davenant's and beginning it with a capital letter; or juxtaposing, without ellipsis marks (and actually in reverse order), two sentences from Bacon's History Naturall and Experimentall of Life and Death (1638) that are in fact separated by six of Bacon's "Items"; or running together two lines of verse without indicating the line break, as in the extracts from Bacon's version of Psalm 104 and from I Henry IV. When Melville inserts "Fife" in parentheses after "this coast" in his quotation from Robert Sibbald and "whales" in parentheses after "these monsters" in his extract from Darwin, he is using parentheses to mark explanatory insertions in the way that we would now use square brackets.[15] An editor who injects ellipsis dots, virgules, and brackets into these quotations is modernizing, by requiring Melville's quotations—and each of the extracts is in fact printed in quotation marks—to conform to present-day standards. The place for showing these relationships between the
This custom of allusive quotation is represented among Melville's extracts by a wide diversity of situations, which thus help further to define the nature of the accuracy that is attempted. In addition to substitutions, which often could be the result of a slip of the pen or a misreading of handwriting, there are instances of insertion, omission, and paraphrase that cannot reasonably be considered inadvertent. For example, the extract from the account of Schouten's sixth circumnavigation in John Harris's Navigantium atque Itinerantium Bibliotheca (1705) begins, "Here they saw such huge shoals of whales," whereas the passage in Harris reads "saw an incredible number of Penguins, and such huge shoals of whales." Obviously Melville wished to omit the six words after "saw" as irrelevant to his purpose; deleting the reference to penguins focuses more attention on the whales, but Melville saw no reason to note his ellipsis.[16] Similarly, in the quotation from Jefferson there is an unmarked omission of fifty-one words between the subject and the verb; the sentence from Daniel Tyerman and George Bennet's Journal (1831) silently omits eleven words; and five are left out of the sentence from James Colnett's Voyage (1798).[17] Sometimes omissions and substitutions occur together, as when four words are omitted and four other alterations are made in the sentence from Richard Stafford, causing it to refer only to one man and one whale instead of to a group of each. The motivation for some of these changes is not always as obvious as in the omission of the reference to penguins or the insertion of "Whale-" in "The Whale-ship Globe" (the extract from William Lay and Cyrus Hussey), but there can be no doubt that such alterations are intentional and that they did not, in Melville's view, prevent the results from being regarded as "extracts" from the works named. Indeed, passages placed in quotation marks could depart even further from the originals and consist entirely of paraphrase: the sentences from Stowe, Boswell, and James Cook are far enough from the original wording that they have to be considered paraphrases made by Melville (unless he was following secondary sources
Melville's twisting of quotations for his own purposes—beyond any customary casualness in quoting—does, however, play a significant role in producing the wording found in the "Extracts." When Melville paraphrases a passage, places the result in quotation marks, and labels the source, he is engaging in allusive quotation but is approaching the border line—even by nineteenth-century standards—between quotation and fresh composition. He apparently crosses that line in the passage that purports to be from Antonio de Ulloa, describing the breath of the whale "attended with such an insupportable smell, as to bring on a disorder of the brain"; these words seem in fact to be Melville's own elaboration of the three-word phrase "an insupportable smell," which refers in Ulloa to a fish called "cope." The next step is to create an entirely new passage and provide it with a fictitious source: the extract following the one from John Ramsay McCulloch is labeled "From 'Something' unpublished" and is presumably Melville's own extension of a point raised by the McCulloch quotation, for it is clearly designed to follow McCulloch's statement but does not occur there in the original. Melville does not engage in this practice often, but the presence of one or two examples further strengthens the view of the "Extracts" section as a creative work and not a mere anthology.
Suggesting that something created on the spot has an independent existence outside the work tends to break down any rigid boundary between what is external and what is internal, and references to "real" sources can sometimes partake more of the internal world of the work
Discussion of "Hobomack," which occurs in a citation rather than an extract, calls attention to the fact that problems of external reference are just as likely to occur in the citations. Some of the questions they raise are the same as those connected with quotations in general. Thus the citations of Darwin's "Voyage of a Naturalist" and Lay and Hussey's "Narrative of the Globe Mutiny" should not be considered errors simply because these are not the actual titles of the two books; the works alluded to are easily identifiable from such references, which are examples of the widespread nineteenth-century custom of allusive citation.[20] And when Robert P. Gillies's Tales of a Voyager to the Arctic Ocean (1826) is reported as "Tales of a Whale Voyager to the Arctic Ocean," one knows that the inaccurate citation, with "Whale" inserted, is intended by Melville. Or when "Most Extraordinary and Distressing" is omitted and "Spermaceti-Whale" becomes "Sperm Whale" in the long title of Owen Chase's Narrative (1821), one can allow the altered wording to stand on the grounds that it seems more likely to have resulted from intentional alteration than inadvertent slip. But another long title, for Henry T. Cheever's The Whale and His Captors (1849), is transcribed so precisely as to suggest that exact quotation is intended, and the one slight omission —an "as" introducing the last phrase—should therefore probably be rectified.
Citation of an altogether wrong title raises a more interesting issue. The extract from James Montgomery is credited to "World before the Flood" but actually comes from his "The Pelican Island"; the error is one that Melville takes from a secondary source, because Cheever's book quotes the same lines from Montgomery and provides the same citation. The question, raised earlier, whether an editor is called upon to correct the errors of a secondary source, requires further thought in a case of this kind. Misquotations in the text derived from a secondary source—and there are two in the Montgomery passage deriving from Cheever—generally do not require emendation because they constitute part of the passages as the quoter knew them.[21] But allowing an erroneous citation of this sort to stand is a different matter. It is true that Melville was equally
Another, much shorter, preliminary section precedes the "Extracts" at the front of Moby-Dick, and it raises similar problems because it, too, is made up of material having an existence outside the work and is assigned a fictional compiler, a "Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School." Called "Etymology," this section consists of three quotations, followed by a list of the words for "whale" in thirteen languages. Such a list would appear to be purely a factual matter, but the critical editor, interested in Melville's intention, will find that it raises some intricate questions. One of them can serve as a kind of conspectus of the considerations involved in dealing with external fact in a literary work. Just before the English word "WHALE" in the list appears the entry for the Icelandic, and the word given in the original edition is "WHALE," identical with the English. Because this is not the Icelandic for "whale"
II
If the "Extracts" and the "Etymology" in Moby-Dick are unusual in providing such a concentrated array of editorial questions, the questions themselves are not at all extraordinary but are in fact the characteristic ones that arise whenever external references are involved. Sampling the thinking that goes into answering those questions in this particular instance should serve as preparation for considering the general problem in a larger framework. To begin with, determining what is "external" to a piece of writing—and what in it should therefore be expected to correspond with a standard outside itself—is a difficult task of definition. As soon as one starts to check quotations, titles of books, dates, and names of persons and places against external sources, one begins to ask how these elements differ from the spellings of all the ordinary words of the text and whether there is actually anything in the text that does not have to be measured against an external standard. On one level, of course, any communication has to be regarded as made up largely of external elements: a writer or speaker would not be able to communicate without utilizing a set of conventional symbols that are interpreted in the same way by other persons. The words and grammar of a language are external in this sense, for writers must in some degree conform to linguistic conventions that are a social product and are not their own personal inventions. Editors are concerned with such matters, and in attempting to establish unmodernized texts they take pains to see that the spelling and punctuation, for instance, conform to the standards of the writer's
In thinking about these matters, Ferdinand de Saussure's seminal distinction between langue and parole is basic, for it separates language, with its infinite possibilities for expression, from each particular act of speaking—it separates "what is social from what is individual." Langue is "a product that is passively assimilated by the individual," whereas parole, the individual act of execution, is "wilful and intellectual" and is "never carried out by the collectivity."[25] This distinction can, by extension, help to explain the editor's role. Editors, of course, deal with individual acts of expression, and their task, in reconstructing an author's intention, is to determine just what in the expression, as it has come down to them, is "wilful"; they constantly examine the characteristics of the preserved parole in the light of the langue, as it were. When a word is not spelled conventionally or a singular verb follows a plural subject, are these "wilful" deviations by the author or are they simply errors of transmission (including authorial slips) at points where the author was passively following (or intending to follow) the conventions of the language? An author may, for the purposes of the immediate act of expression, decide to violate the rules of the language, and that violation can become an effective part of the communication; but if such violation proceeds too far it can prevent communication and turn the utterance into a purely private one.[26] The act of critical editing is a constant weighing of the extent to which a work can be autonomous. At each point of possible deviation from the norm, the editor is called upon to adjudicate the claims of idiosyncrasy against those of convention. In most instances, all there is to go on is the intention manifested in the work itself; the editor's decisions are based on an understanding of the internal workings of a particular act of expression.[27] For this reason one can think of these
The difference at points where quotations, dates, and the like occur is that in these instances there is something external to be taken into account in addition to the potentialities of the language itself. These parts of the expression make external reference in a way that the rest of the words do not; they are second-hand elements, so to speak, because they are taken over from a previous parole, a previous specific use. The situation is most obvious in the case of quotations: words quoted (or even paraphrased) from a particular passage by another writer have lying behind them, when placed in a new context, an external standard of reference besides that of the words and grammar involved—namely, the specific configuration of words and syntax that constituted the other writer's communication. This additional standard poses for editors an additional problem: at such points they have to consider not only words, punctuation, and grammar—as they would anywhere—but also what relation the passage is meant to bear to the original (or some other earlier) occurrence of the same passage. Determining what makes it in fact the "same" passage (when the two are not identical) is analogous to deciding when authors' revisions of their own works produce new works and when they do not. Indeed, authors returning to work they have previously written stand in much the same relationship to it as they would to the work of other authors. The central question faced by editors whenever they are confronted with a piece of writing that contains within it fragments from earlier pieces of writing is the one formulated by E. D. Hirsch, Jr., in his summary of Saussure: "should we assume that sentences from varied provenances retain their original meanings or that these heterogeneous elements have become integral components of a new total meaning?" Put another way, "should we consider the text to represent a compilation of divers paroles or a new unitary parole 'respoken' by the new author or editor?" Hirsch replies that "there can be no definitive answer to the question, except in relation to a specific scholarly or aesthetic purpose."[28]
If quotations are perhaps the most immediately obvious examples of second-hand, or repeated, paroles, they are by no means the only elements of a discourse that can be so classified. References to actual geographical locations, specific historical figures, dates of real events, and so on are also instances where words are taken over from a prior use. Ordinary concrete nouns, like "chair" and "table," refer to any member of a given class and not to individual objects until employed by a writer or speaker to do so; spelling or pronouncing "chair" correctly is a function of the conventions of the language, not of the particular use in referring to one specific actual or imagined chair. The same can frequently be said of words like "Jefferson" and "1788": a writer can create an Oliver Jefferson, spell his name "Jeffarson," and have him participate in a fictitious battle at a fictitious location in 1788. To do this is to pin "Jefferson" (as well as "1788") down to one among the infinite possibilities of denotation it contains. But if the context shows that the reference is to Thomas Jefferson's whale memorial of 1788, the writer is using a "Jefferson" and a "1788" for which precise denotations have already been established. If indeed the reference is to the real Thomas Jefferson and to the whale memorial actually issued in 1788—and that is a crucial editorial question—the writer is not assigning the denotations to the words but is in effect quoting an earlier specific assignment, one that many readers may already be familiar with and will recognize without explanation. Although it is not customary in written material to place quotation marks around a proper name whenever a previous use of the name is meant, the similarity between such references and quoted passages of writing is obvious. In either case the writer is employing words over which there is an external control beyond the ordinary conventions of the language. These words, then, are the ones that can be said to involve "external fact" and to add thereby an additional dimension to the editorial problem.
That dimension can be illustrated by the treatment of the spelling of proper names as well as by the handling of quotations. When the editors
When Melville refers in the "Etymology" section to "Hackluyt,"[31] one can argue that the spelling is not simply an error for "Hakluyt," both on the grounds that greater latitude was permitted in spellings in Hakluyt's time and on the grounds that Melville was drawing on (or assumed he was drawing on) an established tradition represented by the occurrence of "Hackluyt" in Charles Richardson's Dictionary, his source at this point. But when George Bennet's name appears as "Bennett" at the end of the sixty-fifth extract, the likelihood that the spelling is a mere slip outweighs other possibilities, for the man is a nineteenth-century figure, there is no established tradition of referring to him as "Bennett," and there seems no plausible reason for Melville to have introduced such a change intentionally; the spelling should therefore be corrected. And Melville's repeated spelling of Owen Chase's name as "Chace" (in the "Extracts," in Chapter 45, and in other places outside of Moby-Dick) is also an error, no matter how consistently Melville used it, for he had Chase's 1821 book in front of him, he was clearly referring to that particular writer, and there is no other acceptable spelling for that writer's name. The same line of reasoning applies to geographical names as well as personal names, although the continuing existence of places means that traditions of "unofficial" spellings of place names may be stronger than in the case of personal names. When "Nuremburgh" turns up in Hawthorne's "Ethan Brand," the Centenary editors correct it, as an out-right error, to "Nuremberg."[32] But when "Heidelburgh" appears consistently in Moby-Dick (Chapter 77), one can argue that what is actually an incorrect spelling conveys for Melville a certain flavor and that in any case the presence of this spelling in one of Melville's important source books (John Harris's Navigantium atque Itinerantium Bibliotheca) suggests that Melville was aligning himself with whatever tradition that book represents in this matter. "Heidelburgh" remains an erroneous spelling, but the editor may decide, with good reason, that it is not an erroneous reading in this particular text. These arguments, of course, are based on the prior assumption that the references are to the "real" Hakluyt, Bennet, Chase, Nuremberg, and Heidelberg and not to invented people and places with similar names. But the question must always
The issues involved show themselves clearly when a fact is moved into a work of fiction. Within a fictional world, facts can be altered in any way the author sees fit; yet to the extent that the author wishes a fact to be recognized it retains some connection with the outside world. These proportions—and their implications, both in the immediate passage and in the novel or story as a whole—are what the editor has to think about in order to decide whether or not to correct an error of external fact. One of the most pervasive questions has to do with setting. If a novelist places the action in real locations at a particular time, how much accuracy is intended in the details referring to that setting? Or, put another way, if certain datable events are employed, do all the other details have to be consistent with the date thus suggested? In Howells's A Hazard of New Fortunes an adverbial variant in one sentence alters the time-setting of the entire novel. The Harper's Weekly text reads, in a reference to Washington Square, "The primo tenore statue of Garibaldi had not yet taken possession of the place"; in the other texts "not yet" is replaced with "already," shifting the action to some time between the erection of
More often a factual problem in a novel involves only a local context and does not affect the entire time-scheme or setting of the work. But even so, sensitivity to the nature of the whole, as well as to the local context, is necessary for deciding when factual accuracy is in order. Frequently an historical figure becomes a character in a novel and engages at times in events that actually took place and at other times in events that are fictitious; in assessing any particular "factual" error, therefore, the editor must consider both the historicity of the immediate context and the methods of weaving together fact and fiction used throughout the book. Even in a roman à clef, where the historical figures are given new names, the relation of the depicted characteristics and events to actual ones (or traditional ideas of the "actual" ones) cannot be ignored, for an editor may be able to decide among variants or detect corrupt readings by knowing those external facts. The elusive nature of fact in fiction[38] is a fascinating subject for speculation and has been much written about,
The border lines between external fact and fictional fact are constantly shifting, as Melville demonstrates when in Chapter 72 of Moby-Dick, after describing the "monkey-rope" tying together the harpooneer (on the whale's slippery back) and the bowsman (on deck), he appends a footnote beginning, "The monkey-rope is found in all whalers; but it was only in the Pequod that the monkey and his holder were ever tied together. This improvement upon the original usage was introduced by no less a man than Stubb." A fictional fact—a usage invented by a fictional character on a fictional ship—is here thrust out into the real world as the Pequod is compared with all other ships; or, rather, the real world is pulled into the novel, for the external truthfulness of the statement about all ships is irrelevant to the fictional world, in which it becomes a fact that the Pequod differs from all other ships in its use of the monkeyrope. Yet external facts may have to be called on when there is an internal discrepancy. In the American first edition of Moby-Dick, a passage discussing some famous whales (Chapter 45) refers to "Timor Tom" and "New Zealand Jack," but the next paragraph cites "New Zealand Tom"; in the English edition the discrepancy was evidently noted, for "Tom" in the third instance is changed to "Jack," thus producing consistency. It is clear that the American text must be emended, but the change selected in the English edition is not the only one that would make the names consistent, and the editor must decide which way to do it. Knowing that Melville's source, Thomas Beale's The Natural History
Many references to external facts in novels do not involve such internal discrepancies (or seeming ones) that call attention to themselves but rather are discrepant only when compared with an outside source. Moby-Dick, again, can conveniently illustrate how the treatment of these "errors" must vary with the immediate context. At one point (Chapter 101) the narrator presents some statistics about the stocks of food on a whaling ship, statistics said to be taken from a book called "Dan Coopman." A check of Melville's source for this passage, William Scoresby's An Account of the Arctic Regions (1820), shows that a double "error" is present: the book, according to Scoresby, is "Den Koopman," and he actually cites the statistics from a different work. But the playful nature of Melville's passage makes any "correction" out of the question. First of all, he takes "Dan Coopman" to be "the invaluable memoirs of some Amsterdam cooper in the fishery, as every whale ship must carry its cooper." This use of the name would in itself prevent an editor from altering the spelling or substituting another name. In addition, the spirit of the passage is suggested by the reference to "Dr. Snodhead, a very learned man, professor of Low Dutch and High German in the college of Santa Claus and St. Pott's, to whom I handed the work for translation." Within such a context the misattribution of the statistics is of no moment, for Melville is not expecting the reader to think of "Dan Coopman" as any more or less real than "Dr. Snodhead." An earlier passage, near the reference to "New Zealand Tom" (Chapter 45), offers a contrast. There the captains who insistently search for particular celebrated whales are said to have "heaved up their anchors with that express object as much
The editing of another of Melville's works has occasioned some debate over this principle, and the argument put forth can be instructive. Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr., in preparing their reading text (1962) of Billy Budd, Sailor, follow the reasoning just outlined and correct errors of fact when in their judgment the context shows that Melville was trying to be factually accurate.[40] Thus when Melville refers to the execution of "a midshipman and two petty officers" aboard the actual ship Somers, Hayford and Sealts alter "petty officers" to "sailors," since only one was in fact a petty officer. Peter Shaw has attacked this decision and, with a notable lack of restraint, calls it "Possibly the most stunning liberty with an author's text in the twentieth century."[41] Shaw's objection is based on the argument that errors are revealing. "Freud's doctrine in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life," he says, "offers the definitive argument against unconsidered editorial corrections." Naturally editorial emendations should never be "unconsidered," but he seems to be saying that corrections of factual error should probably never be undertaken in the first place: "Freud's book made it a matter of common
What Shaw fails to take into account in his discussion is the difference between working papers or private documents and finished literary products intended for an audience. When editors prepare private papers for publication, there is no doubt that they should not smooth out the text by eliminating factual errors, misspellings, deleted phrases, and the like.[42] All these features are part of the essential nature of such documents, and their psychological significance is one of the reasons for the importance of the documents. When Sir Walter Scott in his journal refers to an acquaintance whose real name was Durham Calderwood as "Calderwood Durham" or speaks of a marriage that actually took place in 1825 as occurring "in the beginning of 1826," these slips are integral parts of the text of the document, and one would be losing part of what the document has to offer if they were corrected; W. E. K. Anderson is right to leave them in the text in his Clarendon edition and merely to point out the errors in footnotes.[43] There is no question, in other words, that Shaw's point is correct in regard to the texts of private documents. Literary works and other works intended for publication, however, open up additional possibilities. They, too, can be treated as documents, and editors can prepare literatim transcriptions of any extant manuscripts, or facsimiles of particular copies of printed editions. Such work is valuable in making important evidence more widely available. But works intended for publication also demand to be edited in another way, which results in texts incorporating their authors' final intentions about what was to be placed before the public. Such works—by virtue of the fact they
In the case of Billy Budd, the preserved papers are clearly a private document, a working draft; but they contain a work of fiction, a work of the kind normally intended for a public audience, and not a diary or notebook entries. Recognizing this dual interest in the papers, Hayford and Sealts have prepared two edited texts. One of them, a "genetic" text, attempts to provide an accurate transcription of the textual features of the document, showing in the process the order of Melville's deletions, insertions, and alterations; the other, a "reading" text, attempts to offer a critical text representing Melville's intentions for the work as discernible from the document. The former aims to do justice to the manuscript as a document of Melville's biography and of American literary history; the latter aims to do justice to its text as a work of fiction. In the former, Melville's phrase "a midshipman and two petty officers" naturally appears, for there is no question here of emending what Melville actually put on paper, even if it was not what he intended to write. But in the latter, critical judgment must be employed to decide whether that factual error is one that Melville intended to make for the purposes of his fiction; Hayford and Sealts conclude that it is not, and they correct it. To believe that in doing so they have exercised an unwarranted liberty is to fail to understand the nature and the value of critical editing. Obviously another critic may disagree with them and argue that there are reasons for thinking that Melville particularly wished to say "petty officers" here; the issue involves literary judgment, and differences of opinion about it are bound to exist. But criticizing Hayford and Sealts's decision
Shaw's criticism, on the other hand, in effect questions the validity of critical editing: Shaw disapproves of the Hayford-Sealts emendation because the original reading may provide psychological insight into Melville's motivation, and he is thus objecting to a critical text for not being a transcription. The confusion in his thinking is suggested by the two possible interpretations that he offers of "Any unconscious exaggeration by Melville of the rank of those executed": Melville may have exaggerated "to increase the importance of the parallel with the Somers" or "out of a vaguely shared guilt over his cousin's complicity in the matter." The first, which would not have been unconscious, has to do with the literary effect of the comparison and could presumably be a reason for retaining the original reading in a critical text; the second, insofar as it is conceivable, is a reason for being interested in the error but not a reason for leaving it in the critical text of a literary work.[45] When Shaw concludes that the Hayford-Sealts emendation is "as significant as a nineteenth-century editor's excision of an entire paragraph of sexually explicit or politically dangerous material," he reveals his failure to understand that editorial alteration of a text can ever be anything other than a kind of censorship, something standing in the way of the author's expression rather than promoting it. This episode illustrates in dramatic fashion how the discussion of a factual error in a work of fiction demands a clear understanding of the different editorial approaches that can productively be employed. The essential prerequisite to clear thinking on the matter is recognizing the difference between a transcription, in which the editor must faithfully reproduce the errors of a particular document, and a critical text, in which the editor is not bound to retain a factual error simply because it is present in an authoritative document. A critical editor may finally decide to retain such an error on critical grounds but not because the error is a revealing Freudian slip, suggestive of the author's state of mind at the time of the preparation of a given document. The two approaches are distinct, and neither can be carried out competently if considerations applicable to one are allowed to intrude into the other. Errors of external fact often seem to provide the test cases for determining how well an editor has learned that lesson.[46]
If factual errors in fiction need not always be corrected in a critical text, one might at first assume that the situation would be different with "nonfiction" writing—any writing that is expository in nature, attempting to deal with the real world directly, not through the creation of an imagined world. Surely, one might think, factual errors and misquotations cannot be a legitimate part of the intended texts of such works. Everyone senses the distinction that René Wellek speaks of when he says, "There is a central and important difference between a statement, even in a historical novel or a novel by Balzac which seems to convey 'information' about actual happenings, and the same information appearing in a book of history or sociology."[47] The difference is undeniable, and yet there seem to be intermediate shadings. One reads a "book of history" like Gibbon or Macaulay as a work of literary creativity, and not merely because it is from the past and limited in its information by what was known at the time. Or one reads an essay of sociological or philosophical analysis for its mastery of exposition, recognizing that some of its points may be half-truths or distortions employed to advance a particular argument. Of course, the truth or falsity of the information conveyed does not alter the fact that in such works the author is speaking directly to the reader, not through a fictional persona or a created world. Any author, whether producing novels and poems or writing essays, may undertake to alter facts for the purposes of the work, and what we think of as "creative literature" does not exclude so-called "nonfiction."[48] Many attempts have been made to distinguish writing that is "literature" from writing that is not,[49] but no satisfactory dividing line has ever been established. The implication of all this for the editor of a critical text is to suggest that a blanket rule regarding the correction of factual errors in nonfiction would be just as shortsighted as such a rule for more obviously "literary" works. Since deciding whether a given work can be regarded as "literature" is itself an act of critical judgment, no such classification
Perhaps even more than with fiction, a common situation in nonfiction is the occurrence of quotations from other works. Several philosophers have now been accorded careful critical editions, and the problem of quotations has been confronted in them. In the first volume (1969) of Jo Ann Boydston's edition of The Early Works of John Dewey, Fredson Bowers contributes a statement of textual policy that records a central point: "In Dewey's texts," he says, "all quotations have been retained just as he wrote them even though not always strictly accurate, since that was the form on which he was founding his ideas" (p. xvii). A basic reason for allowing inaccurate quotations to stand, in fiction as well as nonfiction, is that the quotations in that form may have ramifications that are unemendable—they may be the subject of a discussion in the text or may have influenced the author's thinking. Retaining Dewey's quotations "just as he wrote them," however, raises another problem, for it is conceivable that what he wrote at times contained mere slips and did not always reflect what he intended to write (whether or not what he intended to write was accurate), and it is also possible that some errors in quotations in printed texts or in nonauthorial manuscripts or typescripts are slips by people other than Dewey. Bowers does not go into this question because no emendations in quotations are in fact made in this volume; but the relevance of the issue is clearly recognized by Jo Ann Boydston, who, in her introduction to the appendix that prints the correct wording of the inaccurate quotations,[50] says, "It should be noted that specific changes, both in substantives and in accidentals, may have been instituted in the transmission rather than by Dewey himself. The variable form of quoting does suggest that Dewey, like many scholars of the period, was not overly concerned about precision in accidentals, but many of the changes in cited materials may well have arisen in the printing process" (p. lxxxix). Recognition of that fact underscores the necessity for a critical approach to each quotation, an attempt to judge on the
In later volumes of the Dewey edition some emendations in quotations are made, and the critical approach implicit in Boydston's comments in the first volume is more explicitly remarked upon. Bowers adds to his essay the point that sometimes "special circumstances in a specific text require the correction of quotations within the text itself" (IV, xlix; V, cxxviii); and Boydston notes that some house-styling of Dewey's periodical pieces encompassed the quotations as well, giving the editor a reason for restoring certain punctuation to those quotations (V, clxxvi). Sometimes an internal contradiction calls attention to what was intended in the quotation: Dewey quotes a sentence from Paul Bourget, but the text omits a clause on Stendhal, leaving four writers mentioned; because Dewey refers to the "five" writers in the quotation, it is clear that he intended for that clause to be present, and it is of course restored (III, 37). In other cases, the internal contradiction may be less mechanical but no less forceful: when a quotation from Alexander Bain reads, "a mental association is rapidly formed between his [the child's] obedience and apprehended pain," it is clear that Dewey could not have intended to substitute "obedience" for the "disobedience" of the original and could not have believed that the original read that way, and an emendation is rightly made (IV, 330). Generally, however, misquotations pose more debatable questions for an editor. The Dewey edition does not emend a misquotation from F. H. Bradley that reads "it is here the intellect alone which is [instead of "has"] to be satisfied" (Middle Works, IV [1977], 58) or one from F. J. E. Woodbridge that reads "by insisting that by [instead of "from"] the nature of mind" (p. 224). It is unlikely that Dewey made these changes intentionally, but one could argue that they are so insignificant as to be allowable in the tradition of approximate quotation;[51] on the other hand one could argue that the "is" and "by" are slips induced in each case by the presence of the same word earlier in the line and that they are simply mistakes that ought to be corrected. Even though approximate quotation is justifiable as a contemporary convention, any
Since decisions on such matters must grow out of the immediate context of the passage and the larger context of the author's times and general practice, they will vary from situation to situation; they will also
If those conventions even in scholarly writing in the late nieteenth and early twentieth centuries allowed more flexibility than we are now accustomed to, it hardly needs to be stated that the situation was still freer in earlier periods. The point has been well put in the Yale edition
If quotations in nonfiction works should be treated in a critical spirit, it is equally true that bibliographical citations and other references to external facts in them must also be so treated. In Bowers's edition of James's Essays in Radical Empiricism (1976), James's citation of A. S. Pringle-Pattison's book as "Man and the Cosmos" instead of Man's Place in the Cosmos (p. 53) is not emended (though of course the correct title is recorded in the notes), for there is no question about what James wrote, which is a characteristic example of nineteenth-century allusive citation. On the other hand, when Washington Irving, in Mahomet and His Successors, begins a sentence with "The Arabs, says Lane," and ends the paragraph with a correct reference to "Sale's Koran," it is clear that "Lane" is merely a slip for "Sale," and Henry A. Pochmann and E. N. Feltskog make the emendation (p. 374) in their Wisconsin edition (1970). Joseph J. Moldenhauer and Edwin Moser, in their volume of Early Essays and Miscellanies (1975) in the Princeton edition of Thoreau, attempt to distinguish between erroneous information and typographical errors in Thoreau's sources: when Thoreau gives James Hogg's birthdate as 1772 instead of 1770, they do not correct it, because his source also gives 1772 as the year; but when he follows that source in citing "Madoc of the Moor," they emend "Madoc" to "Mador" on the grounds that the source reading was merely a typographical error. Other editors might disagree with this distinction and argue the case differently; but one cannot quarrel with the Thoreau editors' recognition of the necessity for applying critical judgment to each factual error and not handling all errors by a ready-made rule. In some cases, as the Thoreau edition illustrates, the basis for correcting a factual error in a copy-text may be provided by an author's earlier draft. In Thoreau's fair-copy manuscript of his early essay on "Sir Walter Raleigh," the year 1592 is said to be eight years before Raleigh's imprisonment, but the correct year, 1595, is present in two previous drafts (p. 188); and in The Maine Woods (ed. Moldenhauer, 1972) the copy-text statement that "our party of three paid two dollars" (p. 160) can be corrected by reference to the first draft, where the fare is recorded as three dollars per person (Thoreau's "2" and "9" resemble one another). Factual errors can of course be corrected without such documents, but their existence helps to confirm the author's intention.
These considerations call attention to the fine line that an editor must draw between correcting in the sense of emending a text in the light of the author's intention and correcting in the sense of revising. Henry Pochmann, in the Mahomet edition, is well aware of the problem when he notes that he cannot correct Irving's grammar or syntax "short of making the transition from editing to revising Irving's text" (p. 602). After he describes Irving's methods of constructing approximate quotations, he adds, "Because the primary concern is to reproduce what Irving wrote, or intended to write, the editor has concentrated on what Irving's text shows and has noted or corrected Irving's alterations [of quotations] only when it can be shown that his modifications are erroneous or unintentional, or both." Although the inclusion of the word "erroneous" makes the sentence less clear (since from the editor's point of view the only things that can be erroneous within the text are those that are unintended), this statement is useful both because it sets forth a sensible point of view for handling quotations (and, by extension, other matters involving external fact) and because its seeming ambiguity forces one to focus on the vexing problems of intention. To say that an editor reproduces what an author "wrote, or intended to write" is obviously meant to allow the editor to correct the author's slips of the pen. It is not meant to imply that all factual errors are necessarily slips and are to be corrected by the editor; but the difficulty of constructing a sentence making that distinction explicit suggests the difficulties of the distinction itself. A factual error is not a slip, of course, if an author intentionally alters the facts; but neither is it a slip if the author has copied accurately from an inaccurate source. That the author in the latter case intended to get the facts right does not give the editor license to correct them if there is a reasonable possibility that the erroneous facts have had some influence on the author's thinking and thus have ramifications elsewhere in the text. One is dealing, in other words, with the author's immediate intention in the act of writing; basing editorial decisions on some more programmatic intention to be "accurate" would frequently mean becoming a collaborator of the author and undertaking a new stage of revision which that author never got around to.
The editing of Thoreau's college papers, though rather a special case, illustrates the point. Thoreau made some revisions in his papers before submitting them to Edward T. Channing; when Channing
This point of view, particularly when applied to "nonfiction," is bound to raise a question in many readers' minds. Surely, they would say, writers of "nonfiction" set out to be informative, and if one does not correct all their errors one is caring more about the writers as individuals of interest in their own right than about the subjects they are discussing. Where, in other words, do we draw the line between an interest in a piece of writing for the information it conveys and an interest in it as the expression of a particular individual at a specific time? Irving's historical works were intended to be informative, but today we turn to them more to experience Irving's prose and to observe his handling of the material; if we wish to learn the "facts" about the historical events he dealt with, we feel that more recent accounts, based on further research, have superseded his treatments. Similarly, we are not indignant over James's and Dewey's misquotations, because we are interested in the versions that influenced their thought; but if we read current scholarly
If a publisher's editor had informed F. O. Matthiessen that he was quoting a corrupt text of White-Jacket with the reading "soiled fish" for "coiled fish," he would have revised his discussion accordingly, for it was not his aim to analyze a phrase Melville never wrote. But if a scholarly editor were to prepare an edition of Matthiessen's book, nothing could be done about rectifying the erroneous "soiled," which forms the basis for an analysis of "the unexpected linking of the medium of cleanliness with filth."[57] Even if Matthiessen had not made a point of the word "soiled," the scholarly editor would have to think very carefully before correcting it in the quotation, for Matthiessen quoted accurately the Constable text, assuming it to be correct, and that text is the one lying behind his commentary. The critical activity of the scholarly editor is directed toward recovering what an author intended at a particular time, whether that time was yesterday, four decades ago, or four centuries ago.[58] This principle applies to matters of external fact just as much as to any other feature of the work, although editors sometimes seem more tempted to abandon their historical orientation when dealing with those matters.
Reference to Matthiessen's discussion of "soiled" is a reminder that on many occasions an author's elaboration of an erroneous point makes any emendation out of the question: it is fruitless to consider—except as an exercise—whether or not one would emend "soiled" if Matthiessen
There are thus two considerations that need to be kept in mind in dealing with factual errors. First one must consider whether a correction can realistically be undertaken. If a correction involves only a simple substitution, then it can be seriously considered; but if the erroneous information has been referred to repeatedly or been made the basis of further comment, there is no way to make the correction, short of more extensive rewriting and alteration than a scholarly editor can contemplate. This consideration is purely a practical one and has nothing to do with authorial intention: some errors can be considered for correction, others cannot. In the latter case, there is no point debating what the author intended, for no alteration can be attempted; besides, the use to which the error has been put makes it in effect an intended part of the
The reasons for leaving Keats's "Cortez" alone are therefore somewhat more complicated than those Amy Lowell seems to imply when she says that Keats used the name "probably by accident" but that "It is no matter." To say that what an author puts into a text "by accident" is "no matter" suggests an uncritical approach to the text; it implies an acceptance of whatever is present in a particular text, as if one were approaching the text of a working document, where one is interested in preserving false starts and errors for their psychological significance. But the sonnet is a finished work of art, not merely a literary document, and it demands to be edited critically, with attention to possible emendations to restore the author's intention. Whether Keats intended to disregard historical fact or confused the historical Balboa with Cortez, however, need not be pondered, for there is no question that "Cortez" is the word he put into the poem at this point, and the role which that word plays in the patterns of sound and rhythm in the poem makes it an integral element of the work. Furthermore, the connotations of "Cortez" are such that it is able to serve as a vehicle to carry the intended tenor of the figure. This is one of those situations where an "error" is unemendable because the use made of it within the work rules out any editorial attempt to rectify it. "Cortez" must remain, not because author's accidents do not matter, but because it—accident or not in origin—became, as Keats wrote, an inextricable part of the work. Probably Amy Lowell had such points in mind, but her elliptical statement does not make them clear and even seems to encourage the view that the accuracy of external references in literary works need not be seriously investigated.
References to external fact, as in this instance, raise textual questions because they call attention to a second "text" (the historical fact) with which the text under consideration can be compared. Editorial attention
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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