All scholarly editors must decide to what extent the texts they present
in their editions can be permitted to depart from the documentary texts that
have come down to them; no more basic theme runs through the history of
scholarly editing than the perennial debates over the role of editorial
judgment (necessarily subjective, to a greater or lesser degree) in the
production of responsible texts. Even those who acknowledge the value,
under certain circumstances, of critical texts (that is, texts incorporating the
results of critical judgments as to whether alterations are required)
sometimes wish to restrict as much as possible the operation of individual
judgment. They may say, for instance, that emendations should be limited
to the correction of what are thought to be printers' errors in a given text
and should not be drawn from the variant readings of other texts, which
represent different stages in the history of the work. Critical editing by
definition moves one away from
documentary texts, because it admits the possibility of emending those texts.
This process need not be unhistorical, for the scholarly goal of emendation
is to recreate texts that once existed, even if in some details they existed
only in their authors' minds. But the fact remains that critical texts (if
emendations have actually been made in them) do depart from the particular
texts that have survived from the past; and any recreation of something that
does not exist is conjectural and inevitably reflects, to some degree, later
attitudes. These issues—which, taken together, might be called the
question of historicism—have been discussed at length by generations
of
editors, and they will always be discussed. It comes as no surprise,
therefore, to recognize that they have been prominent in editorial debate in
the early 1980s; but they have, I think, been approached in these years
from some neglected directions, offering new twists to old dilemmas.
This trend in editorial theorizing is not unrelated to what has been
happening in scholarly literary criticism. Although recognition of the
interdependence of textual scholarship and literary criticism has not
advanced as far as one could wish, there is no doubt that recent writers
have increasingly explored the connection. Editors have always known
implicitly that any actions they took as editors reflected particular
assumptions about the nature of literature and of verbal communication; but
over the years they have not been inclined to confront this fact very
explicitly. An age of criticism that has emphasized theory, however, has
naturally provided a setting in which editorial discussion becomes more
self-conscious regarding the theory of literature underlying it. That editors
must be critics and that critics must understand textual history are truisms
just beginning to be understood beyond a small circle of scholar-critics. The
elements of a new historicism emerging in literary study have recently been
usefully surveyed by Herbert Lindenberger,
[1] who contrasts the "suspiciousness
and
self-conscious playfulness" of the new history with the "detachment and
self-effacement" of the old, pre-New Criticism, variety. One of the
reasons for this shift of tone, he suggests, is directly connected with textual
scholarship: the theoretical questioning of the organic unity of individual
works has been supported by some of the evidence produced by editors,
evidence showing (as he says the Cornell edition of
The
Prelude
of 1798-99 shows) that a literary work "consists essentially of layers of
text—often, in fact, unfinished layers—none of which
necessarily
commands more authority than the others." This line of thinking leads to
suspicion of "authorial authority" (p. 17)
[2] and in turn to rejection of
"objectivity"
and "permanence" as attributes of historical scholarship (p. 22). Another
link between critical and textual work is the recent critical interest in
reading (that is, in readers' "responses"), which encourages a concern with
the texts available to readers in the past and the reception accorded them (p.
20). Although Lindenberger's account does not emphasize textual
matters, it does illustrate some of the ways in which developments in
critical and in editorial theory and practice have begun to feed each
other.
The new historicism in textual matters that I wish to examine has a
somewhat different emphasis, however. After all, the "new history"
Lindenberger describes is new in part because it recognizes the importance
of historical context in literary analysis and comes after a period in which
historical considerations were slighted. But textual study has always been,
and is in conception, historical. The recent concern with
historicism among editorial theorists does not result from a rediscovery of
the value of historical research (which was never lost) but from new
approaches to the nature of literature that dictate new limitations on an
editor's freedom to be eclectic. In the pages that follow, I propose to
examine the literature of editorial theory of the late 1970s and the first half
of the 1980s from this point of view. This report is conceived as a
continuation of my previous surveys of recent editorial discussion.
[3] That its focus is on historicism
reflects the
way the field has developed, for the most significant discussions of the last
five or six years can profitably be examined in terms of their stance on this
issue. I begin with some discussions (largely by historians) that cannot be
considered to have advanced editorial thinking but that are representative
of an unsophisticated attitude toward historicism still often encountered. I
shall then turn to the two
extreme positions that define the recent debates: the view that literature is
social and collaborative in nature and therefore that the historical forms in
which a work was presented to the public are of primary significance; and,
at the other end of the spectrum, the view that literary works are the
products of discrete private acts of creation and therefore that their essential
forms do not include alterations by
others nor even later revisions by the authors themselves. Finally I shall
look at some efforts to assert the validity of multiple texts, recognizing that
different historical interests may require different approaches to
editing.
