III
The difficulties confronting the "bibliographical" editor who insists
on trying to determine the relationship of manuscripts as opposed to texts
have been eloquently summarised by Dearing:
Finally, the bibliographer, seeking to relate means (transmitters)
genealogically, can never fully answer the antinomian objection that he may
be wrong by rule. A record whose immediate independent descendants do
not record different states of its text can vanish without a trace. Agreements
can result from normal copying, from conflation, from emendation, from
independent errors (as for instance making the same eyeskip twice), or just
by accident. Who is to say what combination of circumstances produced the
agreements or failed to produce the differences the bibliographer analyzes?
What check is there on his estimate of the most probable circumstances?
The best reply he can make is that his procedure is rational and that the
objection is fundamentally antirational and subversive of good order.
[27]
There is much weight to these objections, as there was in the advice given
to Columbus on the quayside that he must expect to endure hunger, thirst,
hardship, mutiny, shipwreck, disorientation and an ever present risk of
toppling over the edge of the world. But Columbus, being unfashionable
enough to believe that truth might be sought through the study of the
physically and historically actual as well as from speculative symmetries,
proceeded with his voyage, and editors are, in my view, best equipped to
deal with problems arising from irregular agreement when they consider
them not merely as logical anomalies (though this is also their duty) but as
a challenge to understand the operations of a particular human mind
engaged in the act of copying at a particular moment in history. For, as
Vieth has pointedly stated, "the bases of textual criticism are just
sufficiently mathematical to tempt the critic to set up for a scientist, and just
sufficiently nonmathematical to make this
temptation an insidious trap."
[28] The
method of ranking variants which has just been proposed is designed to
admit a bibliographical perspective into the preparatory stage of
stemma-building by proposing criteria for selecting those variants most
likely to have remained stable in transmission and for eliminating those
which are likely to be unreliable as evidence for the descent of manuscripts.
The criteria in their present form are admittedly crude and may in some
instances still produce misleading data—which would be all the more
misleading for its having been selected "by rule." They certainly do not
relieve the editor of the need for an unceasing alertness towards all the
possibilities inherent in all his evidence and the obligation to test all
available techniques for making sense of it. It must also be conceded that
the method can only be effective when variants are relatively abundant:
there would be no point in restricting one's attention
to a selection of the more "reliable" variations when this would not provide
sufficient evidence to permit the full determination of the stemma.
The first step towards the construction of a stemma is to distinguish
between those variants which stand at the conclusion of lines of
relationship, and which are called terminal, and those which lie on lines or
at
the intersection of lines and which are known as intermediaries. Terminal
texts are revealed by their possessing unique readings which show in the
form of what Greg called type-1 variations, e.g. ACDEF:B. The final
determination of intermediary status rests on more subtle tests, but a text
which contains no unique readings is at least a possible intermediary. There
are, however, two situations in which the editor may be misled. The first
is where a text is in fact terminal but does not reveal this through the
possession of an unique reading. The second is where a text which is
genealogically speaking an intermediary possesses unique readings which
were not transmitted to its descendant or descendants and which therefore
show as type-1 variations. A simple situation in which this might happen
would be when a carelessly written manuscript introduced errors of an
obvious kind, some of which were removed conjecturally by the scribe of
a copy. It is therefore clear that readings of a kind
that would be prone to such reversal (and especially those in categories E
and V) are of lower value as evidence for either terminal or intermediary
status than more inherently stable readings. The issues are simpler in this
case than in the later stages of stemma construction in that the editor is only
concerned with the question of whether the scribe of one of the manuscripts
containing the majority reading could have had the odd-manuscript-out in
front of him as his exemplar but felt impelled to emend, either because of
familiarity with the alternative reading or because the reading as it stood
was obviously unsatisfactory. When anything in the nature of the minority
variant suggests that such a reaction might have been possible
(obtrusiveness in the first case, suspiciousness or outright badness in the
second), the editor should be cautious about relying on its unsupported
evidence in determining terminal status.
A simple way of handling this problem when considering a large
number of sources is to give each unique reading a reliability rating on a
scale from nought to two, where 2 indicates a variant, which, in the light
of the criteria suggested earlier, would seem to be exceptionally reliable as
an indication of terminal status, 1 a variant which is reasonably plausible
and not too obtrusive, but no doubt, like all unique or at least rare readings
(for it is possible that the singleton variant may have existed in a number
of now lost manuscripts), must have been in some measure of danger from
memorial contamination, and o a variant that must be considered to have
run a real danger of reversal at the hands of an alert scribe. The precise
setting of these values will need to be a matter for the editor concerned;
however the aim should be a situation in which a single 2-class variant with
support from one other of lower status, three 1-class variants or five or
more o-class variants should
provide acceptable evidence for terminal status and any text
with less support be reserved for reconsideration when evidence is available
from the larger groupings.
The next and most challenging stage in stemma-building is the
determination of the distributional relationships implied by the type-2 and
complex variants. Here the problem is to ensure that the variants chosen as
the basis for analysis are, as far as can be determined by purely notional
methods, those most likely to give an accurate indication of the underlying
genetic groups.[29] In order to ensure
this, the following procedure is suggested. To begin with, the editor works
through each of his variant readings, studies it carefully in relationship to
its context and then assigns it to one or another of the suggested
classifications (PIO, SBU, E etc.). In doing so he is in the position of a
bidder submitting sealed bids in advance of an auction at which he is also
to be the auctioneer, and there may at a later stage be a strong temptation
to change the terms of the bid in order to accommodate an emerging pattern
of
agreement.[30] This, however, would
be to defeat one major advantage of the method which is to remove the
danger of rationalisation after the event by demanding an assessment of
variants at a stage before an overall pattern of relationship has begun to
suggest itself. So that the method can be used with as much integrity as
possible, and so that evidence can be assembled to permit an assessment of
its validity as a method, it is suggested that the judgments should be made
first independently and then in consultation by at least two scholars, and
that later reassessments should only be made with the agreement of both.
It is, of course, possible at this stage that agreement over the precise status
of a variant might not be possible. In particular, there are situations where
a PIU-type variant, which would theoretically have the highest reliability
ranking, may be hard to distinguish from a slightly firmer-than-normal
V-type variant. In this case, the
variant could be given a double ranking and classified initially either at the
higher or the lower ranking depending on whether variants were in short
supply or not. If it was necessary to use it for the first stage of calculation,
it should be watched carefully, and could be reclassified if it was observed
to be setting up otherwise insoluble patterns.
In other cases, however, editors should be prepared to stand by their
preliminary evaluation except in situations when a reclassification would be
justified by clear considerations which had previously been overlooked, or
when a process of reasoning back from an emerging stemma to prior
classifications could be justified in Humphrey Palmer's
terms as being spiral rather than merely circular.
[31] Fundamental to the use of
qualitative
methods in textual criticism is the recognition of the point at which, in each
particular case, they cease to yield valid answers. To attempt to apply them
beyond that point is to devalue not only the editorial enterprise but also the
methods. It must also be recognised that the use of such methods is not a
substitute for the disciplined and intricate logical procedures described by
theorists such as Palmer and Dearing (assuming, of course, that the editor
is convinced of their validity as procedures) but a way of supplementing,
sharpening, and, where necessary, correcting them.
The selection of which classes of variants to use in the construction
of the hypothetical non-directional stemma will depend on the numbers of
variations available within each class. The ideal situation would be one in
which PIU variants only required to be considered; but, as it is also vital
that the variants selected should permit as full as possible a determination
of the stemma, it will often be necessary to content oneself with eliminating
those classes most likely to contain positively misleading evidence about the
composition of genetic whole groups, namely E and V (though E-variations
will still, as explained earlier, provide a valuable control on assessments of
the truth of groups). If a shortage of higher-ranking variants means that all
except the lowest-ranking groups have to be included, the number of
inconsistent agreements requiring to be located by formal means may be
dauntingly high. However, if some formal technique of
resolving inconsistencies, such as
Dearing 'ring-breaking' routine, is employed, it should be regarded as
absolutely essential that its determinations should be checked at every stage
against the qualitative judgements established during the initial process of
classification, and, in cases where there was any conflict between the two,
a fresh assessment of the contextual evidence undertaken. As an additional
guide, I would recommend that every textual scholar should adorn his study
with two historical illustrations —the first of the Charge of the Light
Brigade as a reminder of the fatal consequences of entry into the wrong
branch of a multi-branched fork, and the second of the last stand of the Old
Guard at Waterloo as a testimony to the inadvisability of breaking rings
without the very best of reasons. At the third stage of stemma-building,
when directional evidence is required, it will of course be sought for
through the entire body
of variations, bearing in mind that those classified as indifferent under the
present terminology may still be directional.
The danger in eliminating variants from consideration because they
are of a type that may lead to irregular agreement is that one
can easily at the same time suppress variations containing valid and unique
evidence of some particular aspect of the genetic relationship. In order to
compensate for this, the establishment of a hypothetical stemma should be
followed by a testing of its power to make sense of the whole body of
variations, including those rejected from the original investigation because
of their possible unreliability. A precise methodology for this cannot at
present be proposed, but the general rule that should be borne in mind is
that, if we have determined the actual pattern of descent, the predominant
body of agreements should be in accordance with it and those that are not
should be explicable by means of one or other of the principles considered
earlier. The presence of a certain level of completely unaccountable
variation in a "living" text (as Quentin
has used the term)[32] has perhaps to
be allowed for, at least among the lower-grade variants; but for a stemma
proposed for a tradition of any complexity to receive assent, it must, at the
very least, explain.
The assumption behind the present study has been that in dealing with
moderately contaminated traditions it should be possible to determine
bibliographical genealogies by applying Greg's methods of analysis to
variants selected on a prima facie basis as unlikely by their
nature to be involved in irregular agreements. The criteria proposed are in
some ways a refinement on Greg's own words of advice for dealing with
what he terms "correctional conflation":
What usually happens is that collation and "correction" are confined
to some of the more striking variants. This will show itself on analysis
either by the sporadic appearance of anomalous groupings, or by those
involving the more important variants consistently pointing in one direction,
and those involving the minor variants consistently in another. . . . It may
be added that, where conflation is suspected, the value of variants as an
indication of ancestry is in inverse proportion to their intrinsic importance.
To the herd of dull commonplace readings we must look for the genetic
source of the text, to the more interesting and striking for the source of the
contamination (p. 57).
It is necessary to bear in mind, however, that the efficacy of the method
will decline as the number of irregular agreements rises and that, for the
radically conflated traditions with which Dearing and Okken are principally
concerned, such a stemma, even if determinable, might not be of much help
in restoring the readings of the archetype.
