University of Virginia Library

III

A convenient pairing was brought about the following year by the publication of Hershel Parker's Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons: Literary Authority in American Fiction (1984),[54] for that book locates the other pole of the debate over authorial intention and its place in the historical study of texts. Parker takes the position, with a vengeance, that authorial intention is central: he believes that the important intention is what authors manifest during the creation of works and that even authors' own later revisions often have no more right to become part of those works than the alterations initiated by others. His and McGann's books, therefore, serve to define the limits of the area under discussion. What they share is a sense of urgency about the need for a renewed historical orientation in literary studies and a conviction that textual criticism is central to literary criticism. From there on, of course, they are in contrast, and in more ways than one might anticipate. For McGann's book, despite its incoherence, calls attention to a fundamental theoretical issue, whereas Parker's book, though far better written and organized, is principally of interest for its detailed case histories, not because its basic thesis is of theoretical significance.

Parker begins with the assumption that "All valid meaning is authorial meaning" (p. ix);[55] he is concerned not with arguing this general point but only with proceeding from it to a more precise definition of authorial meaning. Drawing especially on John Dewey's Art as Experience (1934) and Albert Rothenberg's The Emerging Goddess (1979), he describes the creative process as one that "begins, continues (as clinical

observation records, with varying admixtures and sequences of excitement, arousal, boredom, anxiety, and determination), then ends—ends with stubborn finality" (p. 34). Because this process is "by nature determinate, revising authors very often betray or otherwise blur their original achievements in ways they seldom intend and seldom become aware of" (p. ix). He therefore concludes that Greg's rationale of copy-text is not an appropriate guide to the establishment of texts reflecting their authors' intentions because it assumes that authors' later revisions are, as a general rule, to be accepted in preference to the earlier readings.[56] According to Parker, "all empirical evidence should tell us that Greg is wrong, that in any mature human being, writers included, a state of indefinitely sustained arousal toward one object is unnatural" (p. 35). Thus authors' later revisions—as illustrated by a number of examples, particularly Henry James, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, and Norman Mailer—may introduce inconsistencies (of detail, characterization, tone, or theme) and produce "maimed" texts. Critical editors, he believes, should not assume that "every author retains full authority over anything he has written for as long as he lives" (p. ix); they should instead reject later revisions that result in "unreadable texts" (p. x).

This argument, as set forth by Parker, is not a helpful or clarifying one. The key to the problem is the fact that even if the creative process is granted to be "determinate," in the sense that it comes to an end, one is not provided by Parker with any historically oriented guideline for defining that ending point. It does not make sense, as he recognizes, to fix any quantitative limit: obviously one cannot say that any revision made within twenty-four hours, or three days, or six weeks, of the writing of the last sentence of a work emerges from the heat of the creative process, and that later revisions do not.[57] Even during what seems a

single period of creative intensity, writers going back to an earlier paragraph may not be fully in tune with its context and may make revisions that seem to weaken or confuse the passage. Furthermore, as Parker admits, it is possible for some revisions to appear successful even though they were made at a time when one would assume the creative process to have ended. "No hard and fast limits can be drawn," he says, and he offers a few of the obvious reasons: "some writers have better memories than others" or refresh their memories with more rereadings of their works, and "a great deal always depends on how prolonged and overwhelming the creative process had been and how thoroughly the author is compelled to put it behind him and go on with a new work" (p. 40). The creative process is as various as are the temperaments of creators. Therefore none of Parker's generalizations about late revisions can be unqualified (he says that writers "very often"—but not always—"blur their original achievements"), for some late revisions are not inappropriate. If satisfactory revisions do sometimes occur after the creative process has ended, then clearly some factor other than the heat of sustained creativity is responsible for their success. Alternatively, one could define the creative process so as to include all satisfactory revisions; thus one could say that the existence of such revisions shows that the creative process had not yet ended at the time they were made. Either way, how has the introduction of the idea of a "determinate" creative process been of assistance? The focus of attention has been placed on distinguishing revisions that are satisfactory, or not inappropriate (or however one wishes to describe them), from those that are the opposite; and, it turns out, the concept of the creative process is not the analytical element that enables these distinctions to be made.

What does underlie them is the editor's aesthetic judgment. Deciding whether a revision is successful (or satisfactory, or simply makes sense rather than nonsense) depends on individual judgment. Some revisions that produce clear inconsistencies are indubitably blemishes (when one can be sure that no authorial purpose is served by them), but many of the revisions that Parker discusses can be (and have been) the subject of disagreement as to their worth or effectiveness. The fact that he is asking editors to make literary value judgments is not in itself a problem, for

all critical editing requires editorial judgments, which involve literary sensitivity.[58] Nor can one accuse him of simply telling editors to choose whatever variants happen to please them, for he explicitly couches his proposal in historical terms, with its goal the establishment of the author's—not the editor's—intended wording and punctuation. Yet on a more sophisticated level there is a sense in which this accusation is justified. One must remember that Parker is concerned only with revisions that authors made of their own free will; naturally those they were forced into making do not reflect their uninfluenced intention. The essential issue, then, is whether revisions that seem to the editor to introduce inconsistency or incoherence can be considered to represent the author's intention. Normally one is safe in assuming that authors do not intend to make their works incoherent or to make revisions that damage their works. But the kind of intention Parker is rightly concerned with is the intention in the act of writing, the intention to place a certain word or mark of punctuation next, not the intention to produce a particular effect. By definition, then, authors who make revisions of their own free will are producing intended texts (which may of course contain slips), even if those revisions, in the opinion of some or all critics, were executed with insufficient thought and are damaging in their effect. Everyone agrees that authors can make mistakes. But their revisions, however mistaken, are historical facts, and we cannot deny that unsatisfying versions of works are what authors have sometimes left to us as their finally intended texts. Parker believes that in such cases we should be concerned with the earlier intentions that produced better results. In effect, therefore, he is saying that—even as scholarly editors, who inform ourselves with historical facts—we should reject authorial revisions that do not strike us as successful.

This position is not necessarily untenable, but we are not likely to be persuaded of its cogency by an argument enveloped in an irrelevant discussion of the creative process (interesting concept though it is). The more direct way to justify such an approach is to say that, if one is producing a critical text (in which the choice among variants involves the editor's judgment in any case), one should present the work in the most successful of the various forms dictated by the author's shifting intentions. (If the goal is to remain historically oriented, the editor must be

limited by what the author wanted at some point, whether at the last stage of revision or not.) One way this decision has previously been approached[59] is in terms of whether a set of revisions can be judged to have turned a work into a different work (or an independent version): if grounds do exist for believing that particular revisions (regardless of their extent) affect a work so profoundly that the result ought to be thought of as a separate work, then one is free, if one chooses, to edit the earlier work rather than the later. This approach gives editors considerable scope for exercising their literary judgment—first, in making the subjective decision that the revisions produce a new work and, second, in valuing the earlier work more highly. But there is a great difference between this line of thought and Parker's, even though both rely on editors' aesthetic judgments. This one places those judgments squarely within a historical framework (admittedly, and necessarily, a subjective historical construct): one can reject later revisions if they appear to represent a new departure and turn a work in a new direction, for the result is being postulated as a historically separate entity requiring independent editing. If, however, one cannot make such a case, one must then consider the revisions as attempts to perfect or complete the work along the general lines already manifested in it, and one cannot reject some of them, simply because they seem misguided, if one's historical aim is the author's last intentions for each work (or aesthetically independent version).[60] Parker's approach, on the other hand, reverses the priorities and places the editor's aesthetic judgments above the historical succession of authorial revisions: those revisions considered by the editor to damage the work are not, in Parker's plan, allowed a place in a critical text meant to show the author's intentions. This way of proceeding involves shifting "final intention" in one of two ways: either the term means artistically final intention (however early or late such intention revealed itself) rather than the chronologically final intention of each independent version, or else it refers to the intended results, thus excluding revisions that do not, as they turned out, promote the intention of improving the work. In either case editors are asked to determine when authors' free-willed revisions were not in the best interests of their works and to construct their critical texts accordingly. It is not uncommon for critical editors to have to decide what authors "really" wanted, as opposed to what they actually did, in situations where their freedom of choice is suspect; but to protect authors from the literary consequences of their unconstrained textual decisions, as Parker recommends, is in fact to remove the author from the center of attention.

The role of subjectivity in Parker's plan is thus fundamentally different from its place in the approach that requires—to justify the absence of late revisions from a critical text—a demonstration that they actually produced a new work (or an independent version, whichever one wishes to call it). Parker's rejection of that approach is characteristic of his reasoning. In discussing the 1907 text of James's The American, he asks whether a work can be "new" when "a good many lines at a stretch, occasionally, are wholly unrevised, while some other revisions respect the structure of a long paragraph while altering it stylistically sentence by sentence" (p. 107)—as if the presence of unrevised passages, or passages with unrevised structure, are incompatible with the existence of a different work. He later ridicules critics who seem to think that an author "confers meaning on a completed text with the wave of a hand or by ripping a book apart and reordering a hunk of it" (p. 218). When "hunks are re-used, unaltered or only slightly altered," he asserts, "what goes unrevised to a greater or lesser extent goes unrethought, unrestructured, carrying its original intentionality in a new context where that intentionality is more or less at war with the different intentionality in the altered or newly written passages" (pp. 228-229). These comments suggest a quantitative test, implying that a new work must be largely constructed of new sentences: "If unaltered or scarcely altered hunks of the original text remain in the later text, that later text is not truly a 'separate' one" (p. 229). Of course unaltered passages do sometimes clash with their new contexts, but at other times they do not. A writer may make only a few crucial changes in a work, leaving the rest unrevised, and yet the import of the whole may be changed; the unaltered passages will have taken on altered significance, and the fact that they are unaltered does not necessarily mean that they are "unrethought." Parker's firm belief that "textual meaning is not something living in a text" as an autonomous entity (p. 219) should be seen to argue against, not for, his view: a passage, not being autonomous, will not necessarily carry its original meaning into a new context. If it seems to fit successfully into the new context, are we to say it has been rethought and that the result is a new work? And if it does not, that it is unrethought and the result not a new work? Parker is really saying that a new work can come only from successful revision, making "new work" an evaluative term referring to a successful work. His argument seems to run as follows: writers infuse meaning into works in the process of composition; moving passages around is not a part of the composition process unless the shifted passages are thoroughly rethought; we can tell that they have been

thoroughly rethought if they function well in their new contexts; if they do not function well, we cannot consider the new versions to be new works, regardless of the nature of the revisions that were made, but only botched versions of the original work. Ironically, if he could accept the idea that revisions can produce unsuccessful new works, he would have a stronger argument for offering—what he favors—a critical text containing unrevised readings.

Parker's main thesis is built on a patent inconsistency. He repeatedly insists that the only meaning we should be interested in is what the author put into the text: we must think of the author as "a human being who worked meaning into the text line by line and page by page," for "authorial power is the only literary power there is" (p, 219). Nevertheless we are also told that authors frequently do not know when to stop revising their work and that what some of their revisions produce is nonsense rather than valid meaning: "the creative process, like any other process, has bounds, beyond which no author, however fine a craftsman, is apt to intervene with impunity" (p. 51). There is apparently a higher authority than the author, after all. Because Parker believes that unrevised passages in new contexts, not having been built up word by word anew, exemplify the doomed effort to prolong the creative process and are thus unlikely to succeed, he is scornful of authors and critics who claim—as in the instance of Tender Is the Night—that a rearrangement of sections has resulted in dramatic improvement. "It is," he says, "as if the right order were latent in what Fitzgerald wrote, awaiting only a magic touch to restore it to a platonic ideal which had had no reality during the years of composition" (p. 219). But Parker, too, has his platonic ideal, for he states that "the working assumption of any student of the creative process is that the direction of any developing aesthetic object is toward unity" (p. 217). The creative process has an end, and the work is then at its most unified, though authors do not always realize that they have reached this point and may try to make further improvements. Parker professes to put the author back into literary criticism: he deplores the tendency to see a work as "a verbal icon, a unique, perfect, and essentially authorless entity" (p. ix). But he also attacks the idea "that an author had the right to do whatever he wanted to do to his text" (p. 60),[61] and he believes that allegiance to the unity of the created work (whether or not we call it an "icon") finally takes precedence over a concern with what the author in fact did to the work.

Parker surely senses the trap he has set for himself, for at one point he says that we often "revere" the creator and the icon at the wrong times, the creator "after he has gone from creator of his own work to merchandiser or promoter of it" and the icon "not in the form it had when the artist was most in control of it" (p. 49)—a statement that epitomizes all the inconsistencies of the argument, even while it almost acknowledges them. The theoretical scaffolding collapses; but we are left with a series of incisive discussions of individual works, showing how a knowledge of their compositional and publishing histories (including what can be inferred about them through close reading) brings one in touch with basic critical questions about each work. These analyses, along with similar ones that Parker has published separately,[62] stand on their own, and it is regrettable that he tried to erect a theory around them. He thinks of himself as promoting a new movement and wishes he had found a name for it, recognizing that his earlier term, "the New Scholarship," was not right (p. 241).[63] In fact his achievement is to have provided some telling examples of the connections between good textual scholarship and good criticism; no label is needed to dignify that accomplishment, and his awkward attempt at a unifying theory of the creative process only detracts from it.

Once we see that Parker's approach actually moves away from the author, we should not be surprised to find that a reader-response critic takes the same general line.[64] Steven Mailloux is a rarity among such critics in feeling the need to discuss "Textual Scholarship and 'Author's Final Intention'"—as he entitles one chapter (pp. 93-125) of his book Interpretive Conventions: The Reader in the Study of American Fiction (1982).[65] He sees himself as offering a "third alternative" for the editor

between the "originating view" of the author as an "isolated figure freely expressing his uniquely individual and privileged intention" and the "collaborative view of the writer as merely one among many text-producers": the "convention-based" view, in which authorship is a "convention-governed role" (and thus "socially constituted") but one that "individuals can take on" (p. 107). Although this approach combines some aspects of the other two, he considers one "advantage" of it to be that "it preserves scholarly editing's traditional emphasis on the 'author's intention'" (p. 108). There is no question that he takes the author's side when external pressure is involved; changes made under such pressure are invalid, he says, and editors are "fully justified" in rejecting them (p. 118). From there on he gets himself into the same predicament as Parker. Some revisions freely made by the author result in an "illogical or inconsistent restructuring of reader response" (p. 117), which "provides an aesthetic reason for giving the original version priority" (p. 120). In other words, "editors can take control of the intended text out of the author's hands if justified by an examination of historical evidence and the intended structure of the reader's response" (p. 121).[66] This approach "preserves" the "traditional emphasis" on authorial intention in a strange way, by shifting textual authority from author to editor (who is also a reader). Mailloux, in the end, makes editorial decisions the same way that Parker does, but he does not begin from the same premise, since he believes that "literary authorship is socially constituted" (p. 107). Here we have a social view of authorship that nevertheless sanctions editorial interventions on the supposed grounds of authorial intention. And thus have we come full circle.