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IV
These proposals to treat literature either as a social product or as the outcome of a private creative process are marred by various flaws of argument, but the weakness they share is their assumption that only one approach is valid. Editorial theorists who recognize (as most of them do) that a critical text is based on critical judgment should also see that no one critical text can be the best one from everyone's point of view or for all purposes. If there is a legitimate interest both in a writer's process of creation and in the vicissitudes that writings undergo in the process of initial and subsequent publication—as there obviously is for any historically minded person, since both are historical processes—then various approaches to textual criticism, emphasizing one or the other of these interests, must be acknowledged to be acceptable, depending on their own internal logic. Thoughtful editors have long recognized this point, and even if they have become advocates of a particular approach they have not denied the usefulness of multiple editions reflecting different approaches.[67] Yet the lure of the single text is so strong[68] that it has made many, perhaps most, editorial debates less fruitful than they might have been. Among recent writers on editorial matters, two—Hans Walter Gabler and Peter L. Shillingsburg—have particularly addressed themselves
Gabler's position, far less well thought out than Shillingsburg's, serves to focus some of the issues. In a paper for the 1981 Society for Textual Scholarship conference,[70] Gabler argues that we take too limited a view when we concentrate on the "synchrony" of a particular version of a work and that we ought to be alert to the "diachrony" of the evolutionary stages through which a work develops. We must distinguish, he says (and few would contradict him), between transmissional variants (which are deviations from what the author intended) and authorial variants (some of which are too often regarded as further deviations from an ideal text). The former should be corrected through emendation, but all of the latter, he believes, have a place in the literary work, which "may be said to comprise all its authorial textual states." What Gabler calls "a natural condition of the literary work" is "the manifest existence of discrete authorial versions of a text." In his pretentious language, the "total text" of a work "presents itself as a diachronous structure correlating the discrete synchronous structures discernible." The variant is not an "extraneous irritant" but an "integral textual element of pivotal significance in the textual totality of the work" (p. 309). One sees what he is getting at here, despite the expression and despite two serious conceptual flaws: first, he continually refers to transmissional errors in such a way as to suggest that it is no problem to separate them from authorial revisions, when of course making that distinction is in many instances a central editorial activity;[71] second, he repeatedly speaks of "discrete textual states" (even claiming that "there
Having set forth this view of the nature of literary works, Gabler proceeds to outline a method for presenting the evidence, for he believes that the traditional apparatus is at odds with that view. Since "revisional variation" is "meaningful only in its contextual relations," we need to "devise modes of apparatus presentation which leave the contextuality intact": "Lemmatised fragmentation is categorically not suitable for the purpose" (p. 311). Instead, what "would seem an absolute necessity" is "some manner of 'integral apparatus' for the visualisation of revisional variance in invariant contexts, which in this case should display the work's entire shape, or sequence of variant shapes, in apparatus form before the critic's eye." Whatever form is chosen, it must not lose sight of "essential tenets, such as those of the situatedness in context of the revisional variant and its integrity to the work's total text" (p. 313). The point that emerges from this verbiage is that authorial variants, being part of the literary work, are more appropriately reported in the running text than in an appended list. He illustrates some of the possibilities, such as texts in parallel columns and the "synoptic" text he has adopted for Ulysses. However much Gabler wishes to make the presentation of variants a matter of theory, it remains a practical issue. All editors, whatever their theory of literature, recognize that variant readings, to be understood, must be placed in context; and when editors decide that the most suitable form of report under the circumstances is an appended list, they are not suggesting that the variants are somehow less significant than those that other editors choose to print (marked with various symbols) in the text. Readers who have used texts with integrated apparatuses (such, indeed, as the Ulysses) know that they are not necessarily easier to follow than appended lists.[72] Gabler implicitly recognizes the difficulty
Peter Shillingsburg handles these issues with far greater sensitivity. His book, Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Lectures in Theory and Practice (1984),[74] is so thoughtful and refreshing that one hesitates to mention its problems, for they (as opposed to the flaws in so many more limited efforts) do not stand in the way of the salutary effect it can, and should, have. Like Gabler, Shillingsburg believes that "literary works of art, unlike some other forms of art cannot safely be treated as single end-products" and that variants resulting from authorial revision form "an important part of a reader's experience of the work" (p. 31);[75] thus he, too, considers the handling of apparatus crucial to the reader's understanding. In contrast to Gabler, however, Shillingsburg bases his conclusions on a thorough reexamination of all the concepts that underlie textual and editorial work, and he does not limit his recommendations to a single approach. His rethinking of the whole process of editing gives weight to his recognition that the various approaches to
Since a single critical text can represent only one approach, it falls to the apparatus to show that potential. Shillingsburg does not object to appended lists, but he strongly believes that variants should be identified more fully than they normally are in lists, associating each one not only with a "source document" but also with a "source agent (author, editor, compositor)" and a "source time" (p. 32). He argues that lists in which all variants, authorial and nonauthorial alike, are indistinguishably mixed do not encourage readers who are interested in a different approach to explore the evidence: "trivialized tables confirm critics in the habit of not using the apparatuses of critical editions because they cannot imagine what to use them for" (p. 75).[77] Shillingsburg's view here is analogous to Gabler's, both in its emphasis on the separation of authorial and nonauthorial variants and in its feeling that lists can sometimes make information seem less important than it is. Everyone naturally is in favor of making apparatuses as useful and convenient as possible, but whether the segregation of authorial from nonauthorial variants will always help readers is far from obvious: because the distinction between the two is by no means clear-cut and thus depends on critical judgment, readers will have to examine both categories in any case to determine whether their own judgment agrees with the editor's. And even when, as usual, only the documentary source of variants is identified in the apparatus, readers normally know—from the explanation of textual policy for the edition—the agent (or class of agent)[78] to whom the editor has attributed each type of variant in each document. I would not deny that in some instances dividing a long list of variants into categories could be helpful, but the gain does not seem as dramatic as Shillingsburg suggests;
One can accept Shillingsburg's advice on apparatus or not, as one chooses: the issue is one of convenience, not substance. His significant point is simply his emphatic reaffirmation of the essential function of apparatuses as supplements to reading texts. Justifying a reading text without interpolated variants poses less theoretical difficulty for Shillingsburg's position than for Gabler's. Although Shillingsburg does not deal directly with this matter, the rationale would be, I think, that in order to accommodate all approaches one has to recognize that for some of them alternative readings cannot be considered part of the text. Apparatuses, then, must be looked at in two ways, as Shillingsburg's varying manner of speaking about them suggests: they may be seen as recording "utterances that were or remain a part of the work"[79] or else as presenting "significant information about the work" (p. 75). Some readers will see them one way, and some the other. What Shillingsburg is saying could be reduced to the standard point that editors normally profess: apparatuses are crucial because they enable readers to take different approaches and make different judgments from the editors'. But this point has not always been made in a spirit of tolerance. Shillingsburg's contribution lies not in his advice on constructing apparatuses but in his restatement of an old truth in an uncommon context, one that stresses genuine openness to alternative approaches.
He also makes a contribution in his sane review of the fundamental theoretical issues that all editors must take a position on. Even when they cannot fully agree with him, editors and other readers will benefit from working through his intelligent analyses of such matters as intention, ontology, and what he regards as the four basic approaches to editing. His discussion of intention, for example, is helpful in its emphasis on a writer's "intention to do" (that is, to write "a specific sequence of words and punctuation") rather than an "intention to mean" (pp. 27-29); but in the process Shillingsburg overstates the recoverability of the intended sequence of words and punctuation (he says it is "almost completely
It may seem that nothing new has been said by these various writers, and in many ways that is true. The basic issues that confront textual critics and scholarly editors are unchanging, and the attitudes that may be taken toward those issues, though occasionally appearing in altered guises, remain the same. There will be no end to debates over these issues, because they are genuinely debatable; and the process of debate is the way in which each generation of editors thinks through the questions for itself. Some recent editors have claimed that the field is at present in a state of crisis. But the fact that different people hold different opinions about basic issues is not a sign of crisis; it points to the perennial situation in any challenging and lively field. The repeated advocacy of particular viewpoints is not wasteful, except when the advocates do not mend the internal flaws of their predecessors' arguments. Advocates of differing positions need not give up their positions if sound arguments can be made for them; but we do have reason to be discouraged when the arguments continue to suffer from the same defects. There is a prima facie case for the legitimacy of more than one approach to the editorial treatment of historical evidence: editors can produce diplomatic or facsimile editions of individual documentary texts; or they can through emendation create new texts that attempt to be historically faithful either to authors' or to publishers' intentions at particular times. Acceptance of this multiplicity does not, and should not, end debate, for one still has to decide which approach is to be followed in a given situation, and many factors bearing on that decision can usefully be discussed. But the debate thereby moves to a different, and
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