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II

The more interesting and potentially fruitful discussions of textual theory begin at the point where these unsophisticated complaints of historical

editors leave off. They start from an acceptance of the value of eclectic texts and consider the problem of historicism from a higher plane. The issue is not whether eclectic texts as a genre are defensible but how best to produce them: when to be eclectic, how much departure from a documentary form of a work is allowable and desirable, whether editors should introduce emendations of their own in addition to readings drawn from other texts, and what principles or standards should underlie alterations of either kind. Discussions of these matters are usually concerned with works of the kind normally intended for publication (usually, in fact, with works actually published, after the fashion of their times), for critical editing is more likely to be of service in connection with such works than with private writings. How one conceives of the nature of such works and what concept of authorship it entails are therefore crucial questions, the answers to which determine the goal one is aiming toward in making alterations to a documentary text of a work.

One family of answers to these questions proceeds outward from the author to the author's social context, tending to make authorship more a social than a private activity and sometimes expanding the concept of text. In some of his recent work, D. F. McKenzie has been moving in this direction, calling for a "sociology of the text." For instance, the paper he presented at a 1977 Wolfenbüttel symposium (the proceedings of which were published in 1981)[29] deals with "Typography and Meaning" and argues, as one illustration of the connection, that Congreve's altered treatment of scene divisions and stage directions in his collected Works of 1710 was inextricably tied up with their typographic presentation, which resulted from "a new and intimate form of teamwork" (p. 110) between Congreve and his publisher (and friend) Jacob Tonson. McKenzie is saying, in other words, that in this instance features of a printed book that are often regarded as nontextual cannot in fact be separated from the words and punctuation in considering the author's textual intentions. Congreve is a particularly interesting case, for the contrast between the original quarto editions of his plays and the Works of 1710 marks the transition between the seventeenth-century "disjunction of playwrights and printers" (p. 82), which resulted in printed forms "insensitive to the problems of mediating a theatrical experience" (p. 83), and the eighteenth-century effort to give "typography a voice in the hand-held theatre of the book," which made the printed form more than a

makeshift report of something that had its real existence elsewhere. Despite the special circumstances of the Congreve example, McKenzie intends it to be emblematic of a broader point, not limited to Congreve, the eighteenth century, or printed drama: that the book itself is "an expressive means," in which "the substance of the text" cannot be divorced from "the physical form of its presentation," for the book conveys "an aggregation of meanings both verbal and typographic" (p. 82). As he concisely puts it, "A book's total form is itself a significant historical statement" (p. 99). In support of this generalization he offers a wide-ranging survey, filled with characteristically acute observations.[30]

No one, I think, would dispute the view that every detail of a printed book carries historical meaning, though few critics have adequately integrated the evidence offered by format, paper, type design, and page layout into their readings of works, and McKenzie is quite right to stress the seriousness of this failing.[31] But we can all agree that readers' responses are affected by typography and book design without feeling that such features of books are necessarily inseparable from the works conveyed by the books. The issue turns on whether one is willing to admit the legitimacy of being interested in the artistic intentions of authors as private individuals rather than as social beings accommodating their intentions to various pressures emerging from the publishing process. On this fundamental question McKenzie wavers, and his imprecision weakens the foundation of an essay that is admirable in so many ways. A distinction has to be made between the books that were available to be read and reacted to at particular times in the past and the forms of works as intended by their authors. If one wishes to reconstruct how earlier readers reacted or to analyze their written reactions, there is no doubt that the physical features of the books they read are relevant and can in that

sense be considered part of the "texts." But if one is more concerned with assessing a writer's mind and ideas than in examining how they were perceived by the contemporary reading public, some or all of the elements of book design may be nontextual, if the writer was not interested in them or did not put any of them to special use. Even in these cases, a scholar should not ignore such features of original printings, for they are part of the historical setting;[32] but the physical arrangement of the scholar's critical text need not be affected. Situations will vary: there are writers, as Congreve apparently was, who are so intimately involved with the design of the printed presentation of their works that the design (or some parts of it) must be regarded as textual; for other writers, the design does not reflect authorial intention. Critical editors must judge which is true in each case, just as they must make judgments about words and punctuation.

McKenzie's essay suffers from not being built on this distinction.[33] His insistence on the necessity of eclectic texts, for example, is confusing in the context of a concern with the "sociology" of the text. In discussing Congreve's revisions for the 1710 Works, he says that an editor "must seek to serve the play at its fullest and best[34] by restoring a reading when he believes its suppression to reflect a narrow moral, rather than a literary, judgement on Congreve's part": "Conflation is inevitable" (p. 109). Although his defense of eclectic editing is well stated, it is likely to leave readers puzzled. Congreve's self-censorship, he believes, resulted sufficiently from "external pressures" (p. 107)—legal constraints on coarse language and Tonson's attitude toward it—to justify an editorial decision to restore the canceled language; but such a decision emphasizes the author's own wishes over the product that emerged from the social process of publishing. Of course McKenzie is right to assert that responsible textual decisions must be based on an understanding of the "complex of attitudes—personal, social and trade—" (p. 109) that lie behind variant readings; presumably he is referring to the same broad range of considerations later when he says that variants should be "interpreted in the context of book trade history" (p. 117). Editors must naturally be as informed as possible about all aspects of the historical context; but

being so informed does not determine what view of authorship they should take as a basis for textual decisions. For in many—no doubt in most—instances one cannot accommodate both the private wishes of the author and the collaborative product of the publishing process simultaneously.[35] If McKenzie can speak of interpreting variants in the light of book-trade history and still opt in the case of Congreve (who worked closely with his publisher) for restoring readings that the author deleted under the publisher's influence, then he is not claiming that one must necessarily give preference to the historical product of the book trade (the "historical statement" conveyed by a "book's total form").[36] He is saying only that editors' knowledge should include book-trade and typographical matters, and he does not go on to confront the fact that more than one responsible approach to critical editing can be followed by editors who have this knowledge.

What he recommends for Congreve is the same, in the end, as what many of the editors who are considered followers of Greg would have done in this situation. All McKenzie is really saying is that editors have frequently had insufficient historical knowledge to recognize the textual role that typography can play. It may be fair to call this lack a "failure of historical imagination," but it is an overstatement to assert that "most recent work in textual bibliography" (p. 105) is guilty of it, for editors routinely consider which (if any) typographical features of the printings of an author's work must be defined as textual; and a decision not to classify them as textual, in an edition focusing on authorial intention, does not necessarily signify that the editor has failed to take the whole book, or the whole historical context, into account. McKenzie's misunderstanding of Greg's rationale[37] has led him to think that "current

theories of textual criticism" are "quite inadequate to cope" with the connections between typography and meaning; actually there is no theoretical problem on this score at all, and the value of McKenzie's piece is rather to have provided us with some illuminating examples of these connections and to have reminded us forcefully how essential a knowledge of typographic and book-trade history is to editors (not to mention other things they must know). He makes no case in this piece for the necessity of what he grandiosely calls "a new and comprehensive sociology of the text" (p. 118). But in his impressive Presidential address to the Bibliographical Society five years later, he more calmly and more stimulatingly defines the "sociology of texts," not in relation to a supposed crisis that it can rescue us from but as the "substance of bibliography" (p. 365), thus expanding bibliography to include the study of orality, literacy, and "the recording function of memory" (p. 333).[38] His encompassing view enables him to offer one of the most eloquent testimonies we have to the indispensability of textual eclecticism in reaching some understanding of the past, showing that it in no way violates "historicity" (p. 334).[39] Even those bibliographers who feel uncomfortable with the idea of becoming anthropologists (as well as sociologists) will come away from McKenzie's humane manifesto with an enriched understanding of their role as textual historian-critics.[40]

Although McKenzie's position emphasizes the social settings in which authors work, it does not deny the primacy of unconstrained authorial intention as a guide for critical editing. Others who focus on the social side of authorship go farther and believe that the collaborative nature of the publishing process makes artificial any attempt to isolate an author's uninfluenced intentions. Jerome J. McGann has become the most prominent advocate of this point of view, particularly as a result of A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (1983).[41] He attacks the approach developed by Bowers (and derived from Greg) for editing works of the last two centuries because it emphasizes authorial intention; he believes that it has "tended to suffocate textual studies" by limiting them to a narrow "psychological and biographical context" (pp. 119-120). In its place he calls for an editorial theory that would recognize literary works to be "fundamentally social rather than personal" productions (p. 8). Locating authority in authorial intentions, he says, causes works

to be seen in "the most personal and individual way," and "the identity of the author with respect to the work is critically simplified through this process of individualization": This passage sets forth, as effectively as any in the book, the view that "words do not by themselves constitute a system of communication" and that "literary works are not produced without arrangements of some sort." Thus, for him, the very existence of works (and not merely their publication) depends on collaborative effort: "the authority for the value of literary productions does not rest in the author's hands alone" (pp. 47-48).

McGann's book serves a useful purpose in asserting the importance of seeing one's own scholarly endeavors against the background of the historical evolution of the field and in focusing renewed attention on the social context of literary production. The treatment of the latter is disappointing, however; the book does not achieve its aim of developing "a fully elaborated argument for a socialized concept of authorship and textual authority" (p. 8). Such a book would be valuable, for—despite increased interest in the historical study of the profession of authorship—scarcely any careful and thoughtful analysis has been made of the implications, for textual criticism, of the social structure of authorship. McGann does provide several interesting examples, often drawn from the writings of English Romantic poets, to illustrate some of the ways in which works become collaborative enterprises, and he offers from time to time variations on his fundamental observation that "an author's work possesses autonomy only when it remains an unheard melody" (p. 51); but he expends much of his energy on a criticism of the position of Bowers and those who, in one way or another, have followed his lead. Even if this criticism were well-founded,[42] it is hard to see how the discrediting

of one approach amounts to a "fully elaborated argument" for another. The underlying assumption, of course, is that there are only two alternatives and that only one of them is valid. A far more productive way to proceed would be to recognize that a variety of approaches is justifiable and then to concentrate, with positive arguments, on the merits of the one under discussion.

McGann obviously believes that the structure of modern publishing does not admit of any approach to authorship that stresses individual artistic creation and that to take such an approach would be a falsification of history. But surely it is a legitimate (and natural) historical pursuit to be interested in the minds of particular persons from the past, particularly if their writings (or other accomplishments) have any reason to command our attention. However much those writings as published and read were a collaborative effort, we are not being unhistorical in wanting to know just what the initiating mind contributed to that effort. The initiator, by virtue of being the initiator, is forever set apart from those who follow, however necessary they may have been for the completion of the act of communication (and, indeed, however beneficial we judge their ministrations to have been); and if we are concerned with more than one work "by" the same person because we feel that they may illuminate one another, the creating mind is the link between them. The attempt to establish what an author thought and wrote when not making concessions to pressure from others is an essential activity for understanding history.[43] But those who engage in it are not thereby

denying the value of examining as well the forms of works that came off the presses and went into readers' hands. No one can reasonably claim (and I am not aware that anyone has tried to claim) that the texts of works as they in fact appeared in successive printings and editions over the years are not important for historical study or that publication is not a social process. The opposite in each case is a truism, and McGann in these respects is stating the obvious (which is not a bad thing to do). But it is equally a truism to say that intellectual (and thus literary) history is concerned with the private as well as the public, with the minds and ideas of individuals as well as with the transmutations of those ideas in their passage through the world. The two approaches are complementary and both are necessary, though one may be more appropriate than the other for certain purposes.

These observations, I believe, provide the proper context for reading McGann's book; with them in mind, one immediately recognizes the fallaciousness or narrowness of many of his statements. It is ironic, given his emphasis on breadth and on the need to free textual study from constricting ideas, that his own position is narrow-minded in limiting the acceptable approaches to a single one. Studying literature as a social product is only superficially more inclusive than studying it as the product of a single creator, since one must explore all the same areas of concern in either case; but one is clearly taking a restricted view if one is not open to the values of both approaches. There is nothing wrong, of course, with being an advocate of one position, so long as one is not blinded to the contribution of the other. Insofar as McGann is committed to denying the usefulness of an author-centered conception of editing, his argument is doomed to failure; and his advocacy of a society-oriented one is weakened by his lack of balance.

It also suffers from a lack of clarity. The role of authorial intention is central to the whole discussion, and yet at the end one does not quite know what McGann is suggesting about its place in editing. In an appendix called "A Possible Objection," he reports that a reader of his manuscript objected to his generalization that a first edition "can be expected to contain what author and publishing institution together worked to put before the public" (p. 125), by citing instances in which D. H. Lawrence was "an unwilling partner in a downright repressive process." One might well wonder how this is a "possible objection" to

McGann's general line, for if a work achieves its existence through the interaction of author and publisher, then an expurgated work must be accepted as readily as one we might regard as improved, for both can be the result of the particular chain of historical events that constitute the publishing process.[44] But McGann surprisingly replies that the collaboration of author and publisher does not always turn out well and that "the editor must examine carefully the early publishing history in order to arrive at a reasonable decision" regarding the choice of a "textual version" (p. 127).[45] He adds that authorial intention is "only one of many factors to be taken into account, and while in some cases it may and will determine the final decision, in many others it cannot and must not be forced to perform that function" (p. 128). Similarly, he had earlier stated that "Shelley's manuscripts frequently assert a strong demand to be adopted as copy-text, whereas Byron's rarely do": despite the fact that Shelley "published in a fashion that was normal for his period," it would be "a disservice to Shelley's work . . . if a critical edition today neglected to consider, in the matter of copy-text, the sincerity and integrity of Shelley's manuscripts" (pp. 108-109). If McGann's point is that we should accept the results of the publishing process only when we feel that the work has benefited from it, we are then being asked to engage in a very different kind of editing, in which our choices are dictated by our personal preferences; the results may be admirable artistically but are not designed to increase readers' understanding of the past.[46] If he is saying that we are to follow a published text only when (or at those points where) the author can be thought to have sincerely approved of and desired it, then the focus is on authorial intention after all, and the procedure is not really different from the one that editors in the Bowers tradition have been using. They have habitually made judgments to distinguish which revisions made or suggested by others (whether publishers or other acquaintances) were fully accepted by the author in the spirit of active and welcome collaboration, and they have rejected only those revisions that the author appears to have accepted grudgingly or been forced into accepting. These editors have normally recognized the social side of authorship by acknowledging that an author's intentions can sometimes include the results of collaboration.

Of course these matters require subjective judgments, based on historical evidence, but so do most decisions in critical editing. In the Bowers tradition, however, those judgments are made in a clear conceptual framework, with authorial intention at its center; but McGann offers no equally clear alternative, for he seems to waver in regard to what is at the center. It is not very helpful to be told that authorial intention is one of "many factors" to be taken into account and that sometimes it will be the "determining one": when the author's intentions and the publisher's actions are in conflict, what does one do? Naturally, one can go either way, but these are two different approaches to editing. McGann believes that "to see 'author's intentions' as the basis for a 'rationale of copy-text' is to confuse the issues involved" (p. 128); one should rather say that confusion is promoted by maintaining that an undefined mixture of two distinct approaches constitutes a useful rationale.[47] Clear thinking is better served by recognizing at the outset that individual desires and social pressures, though they may in specific instances be in harmony, are conceptually irreconcilable and that an editor's guiding principle in textual decisions must favor one or the other. It is understandable that many editors have regarded authorial intention as the more sensible choice for a scholarly critical edition, since one can argue that to represent the historical results of the publishing process a diplomatic edition or photographic facsimile would be preferable.

But I do not mean to suggest that there are no possibilities in between: one could decide, for example, to accept all the publisher's alterations but to correct typographical errors, thus producing a critical text representing the publisher's intention; or one could decide to remove from the text of a single printing the textual features imposed on it against the author's wishes, thus producing a critical text reflecting the author's intentions at that particular time (regardless of any later authorial revisions). Such alternatives, however, have clear aims, giving priority either to the author's intentions or to outside influences. McGann's account contains no hint of this rational structure of possibilities within which critical judgment can operate purposefully.[48]

The issue here is not subjectivity, for all critical editors—in the Bowers line or any other—make judgments (which are inevitably subjective) at every turn. It is difficult to understand why McGann thinks that "Giving up the rule of final intentions" will "introduce a subjective factor into the critical process" or that his proposal involves "the re-emergence of a 'subjectivity'" (p. 107), as if subjectivity had not always played a central role.[49] Because one of the factors influencing subjective decisions in a given instance is, he believes, the history of the previous editing of the work and what needs the present audience for the work has, it is not surprising that he welcomes modernizing as a legitimate scholarly activity.[50] He accuses those who reject modernizing of not understanding that all editions, even unmodernized ones, are—like all other literary efforts—time-bound, reflecting the concerns and attitudes of the age in which they were produced. All thoughtful people, including many

scholarly editors, are perfectly well aware of this fact, but it is irrelevant. If one engages in historical scholarship, one is attempting, through an informed imaginative effort, to escape into the thinking of another time, even though one knows that the escape is never complete and that it will have to be reattempted by others in the future. Scholarly editors of critical editions do not really imagine that they are packaging up textual history for all time or preventing the further alteration of the text (see p. 93). But these realizations do not invalidate the effort of historical reconstruction. Modernized texts, like some kinds of critical essays, are attempts at elucidation, which may be more or less helpful to the readers of a given time; but those readers (even the "nonspecialist" ones)[51] who are interested in a work as testimony from the past will need to have the best results that historical scholarship has achieved in the recovery or imaginative reconstruction of particular texts and versions of that work.[52] McGann considers his discussion of modernized editions to be "the final phase of the argument" (p. 94), and it does epitomize his dual conviction that literary production is "not an autonomous and self-reflexive activity" (p. 100) and that critical editions, like all other works, are "always produced under the pressure of contemporary demands" (p. 96). But it also perpetuates the blurring of essential distinctions that permeates the book. One must deeply regret that a book offering the hope of a systematic exposition of a social view of authorship and its editorial implications must finally be judged to have left the issues more confused than clarified.[53]