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Notes
Lindenberger lacks precision in making this point. His complete sentence is, "Given the suspicion we have developed in recent years toward authorial authority, even an author's authorized text need have no more authority than we choose to give it." However, it is not necessary to question the authority of authors over their texts in order to be wary of "authorized texts," which for many reasons may not fully reflect their authors' intentions. The long tradition of critical editing has involved questioning authorized texts but not normally doubting the authority of authors.
The previous two brought the story from the time of W. W. Greg's "The Rationale of Copy-Text" (SB, 3 [1950-51], 19-36) to the late 1970s: "Greg's Theory of Copy-Text and the Editing of American Literature," Studies in Bibliography, 28 (1975), 167-229 (reprinted in Selected Studies in Bibliography [1979], pp. 245-307); and "Recent Editorial Discussion and the Central Questions of Editing," SB, 34 (1981), 23-65. As in those pieces, I am again concentrating on general theoretical discussions and normally exclude essays on textual problems in particular authors' works and reviews of individual editions. During the period under review several useful checklists appeared that do include such material: T. H. Howard-Hill, British Bibliography and Textual Criticism: A Bibliography (2 vols., 1979, continuing the series that also contains Shakespearian Bibliography and Textual Criticism: A Bibliography [1971]); Ross W. Beales, Jr., "Documentary Editing: A Bibliography," Newsletter of the Association for Documentary Editing, 2, no. 4 (December 1980), 10-16; Laurel N. Braswell, Western Manuscripts from Classical Antiquity to the Renaissance: A Handbook (1981); and David Madden and Richard Powers, Writers' Revisions: An Annotated Bibliography of Articles and Books about Writers' Revisions and Their Comments on the Creative Process (1981). There were also several anthologies of essays on editorial matters (other than those mentioned later in this essay), such as N. John Hall's collection on editing the Victorians (volume 9 of Browning Institute Studies, 1981) and recent volumes in the Toronto Editorial Conference series: e.g., William Blissett (ed.), Editing Illustrated Books (1980); A. H. de Quehen (ed.), Editing Poetry from Spenser to Dryden (1981); Trevor H. Levere (ed.), Editing Texts in the History of Science and Medicine (1982). Also during this period Donald H. Reiman published two perceptive accounts of editorial history: "The Four Ages of Editing and the English Romantics," Text 1 (1981), 231-255; and "Romantic Bards and Historical Editors," Studies in Romanticism, 21 (1982), 477-496. And two general introductory treatments of textual and editorial scholarship came out in Modern Language Association publications: my essay on "Textual Scholarship" in Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures, ed. Joseph Gibaldi (1981), pp. 29-52; and William Proctor Williams and Craig S. Abbott's chapter on "Textual Criticism" in An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies (1985), pp. 52-90.
A "documentary text" can of course be the text of either a manuscript or a printed item: in either case the text is documentary in that it is what has been preserved in the historical record.
Editors of literary works are historians, too; but for convenience I use "historians" to refer to editors of the documentary texts largely used by students of history.
I do not mean to suggest that all historical editors think alike: I am aware that there are many who do understand what the literary editors have been discussing in recent years. But the most vocal historical editors, and those who publish their views, have not generally come from this group. An exception is John Y. Simon, who showed his open-mindedness in his ADE Presidential address, "Editors and Critics," Newsletter of the Association for Documentary Editing, 3, no. 4 (December 1981), 1-4. Jon Kukla, in his review of the Kansas conference volume (see below), recognized the irony that "as the so-called literary editors push for more thoughtful handling of textual evidence, they are forcing all scholars to confront the fundamentals of historical method" (Newsletter, 4, no. 1 [February 1982], 5-7).
Other lines, within the field of literary studies, need to be opened as well: see Conor Fahy, "The View from Another Planet: Textual Bibliography and the Editing of Sixteenth-Century Italian Texts," Italian Studies, 34 (1979), 71-92. On the need for interdisciplinary discussion, see also my comments in Text, 1 (1981), 1-9.
This shorthand use of "literary" encompasses works in other genres as well. Much of the recent scholarly editing of philosophical works, for example, is in the tradition of "literary" editing. See Fredson Bowers, "Editing a Philosopher: The Works of William James," Analytical & Enumerative Bibliography, 4 (1980), 3-36.
Recent discussions of letters include J. A. Dainard (ed.), Editing Correspondence (1979); Robert Stephen Becker, "Challenges in Editing Modern Literary Correspondence," Text, 1 (1981), 257-270; A. R. Braunmuller, "Editing Elizabethan Letters," Text, 1 (1981), 185-199; Norman Fruman, "Some Principles of Epistolary Interpretation," Centrum, n.s., 1 (1981), 75-94; and Ernest W. Sullivan II, "The Problem of Text in Familiar Letters," PBSA, 75 (1981), 115-126.
He begins by saying that the literary editor "usually works with materials quite different from those with which the historical editor works, for the latter is interested in manuscripts" (p. 23). Literary editors do frequently deal with works that have been printed; but, if manuscripts survive, these editors not only are "interested" in them but often make them the basis for a new edition. Not realizing this fact, Rogers proceeds to assert, "Literary editors now agree that the first printed version has the best claim to be the copy-text." There is no hint here of the extensive debate, then and now, over this point, and no suggestion that individual situations might affect the choice of copy-text. Literary editors, he claims, make "no attempt to present a facsimile version" (in fact, of course, they often do). instead preferring critical editions, in which "the editors take liberties with the copy-text in order to obtain what the editors consider a text closer to the authorial intention" (p. 24)— a statement that would have been fair enough if the process of emendation had not been misunderstood and trivialized as "taking liberties." In the collation of texts that provides some of the evidence for emendation, we are told, substantives "receive more attention than accidentals" (the naivete of expressing this view without further elaboration clearly goes unrecognized). "In this scheme of editing," Rogers adds, "there tend to be no silent changes" —as if the mechanical reporting of emendations is a part of a theory of editing. There is no point continuing this recital: nearly every statement he makes about the work of literary editors is incorrect or seriously askew. Similar misunderstandings crop up elsewhere in the conference volume: in one of the two introductions, George L. Vogt says, "Most historical editors probably still balk at the literary editors' idea of a completely 'recoverable' text, with all the back-of-the-book baggage that that implies" (pp. 4-5); but no one would claim that every feature of a manuscript text can be recovered from any edition, and the most detailed transcription imaginable need not have any appended apparatus, either at the back of a volume or at the foot of a page.
In a review of the conference volume in the Bulletin of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand (7 [1983], 188-190), Harold Love agrees that the faithful reproduction of manuscript texts is desirable but adds that "the overriding considerations must always be the kind of use such documents are to be put to by historians"; it is hard to believe, however, that any serious use of the texts of documents is well served by the elimination of evidence that could play a role in their interpretation. Gordon S. Wood has concisely said, "For historians, convenience of use apparently overrides their concern for literal accuracy" (p. 875 in "Historians and Documentary Editing," Journal of American History, 67 [1980-81], 871-877).
I am not in any sense denigrating annotation, which is one of the kinds of commentary that an edition should set in motion (whether within the covers of the edition or elsewhere). Textual and other kinds of historical annotation are not, in any case, easily separable entities, since textual questions cannot be handled sensitively apart from the historical context.
Rogers, as a historian, is surely going out of his way to be hostile when he claims not to understand that the value of research is not determined by how dramatic the results are: he asks (irrelevantly, but with an implied answer that is incorrect), "Have the editors of nineteenth-century texts come up with any earth-shaking discoveries?" (p 25).
"Editorial Practices—An Historian's View," Newsletter of the Association for Documentary Editing, 3, no. 1 (February 1981), 4-8. The counterargument was provided by Don L. Cook, in "The Short Happy Thesis of G. Thomas Tanselle," pp. 1-4 (the reference being to my piece on "The Editing of Historical Documents," SB, 31 [1978], 1-56—reprinted in Selected Studies in Bibliography [1979], pp. 451-506).
It is no defense of editorial interference to take the line (implied by Taylor on p. 5) that such alterations do not affect the meaning. As I have previously pointed out (SB, 34 [1981], 58), why then go to the trouble of making the changes at all?
Literary historians will be surprised to hear that "No one feels the need to study the poems of mediocre poets or to run through their letters, unless they made better friends than they did poems" (p. 6). A number of historians have made statements similar to Rogers's and Taylor's. Fredrika J. Teute, in "Views in Review: A Historiographical Perspective on Historical Editing," American Archivist, 43 (1980), 43-56, says that "the historical editor treats the document as a fact. While perhaps slighting the nuances which literary editors appreciate, he does not produce bowdlerized versions claiming to represent the author's true, though unexpressed, intent" (p. 49). And Nathan Reingold, in "Reflections of an Unrepentant Editor," American Archivist, 46 (1983), 14-21, states that "the literary editors have a sense of the sacredness of the words they process. The historical editors, even those imbued with origins and essences, have a belief in the importance of the purport of the words" (p. 18). In the first number of the Newsletter of the Association for Documentary Editing (March 1979), William B. Willcox had referred to the "high priests of ipsissima verba, who bemoan our textual impurities" (p. 5).
"The 'Authentic' Witness: The Editor Speaks for the Document," Newsletter of the Association for Documentary Editing, 4, no. 1 (February 1982), 8-9. Cutler's piece was written in reply to David J. Nordloh's 1979 conference paper, "The 'Perfect' Text: The Editor Speaks for the Author," printed in the Newsletter, 2, no. 2 (May 1980), 1-3.
"The Editor and the Question of Value: Proposal," Text, 1 (1981), 41-43. Although the paper she actually delivered at the conference was different from the one foreshadowed by this proposal, the proposal is printed in Text because Fredson Bowers based his commentary for the conference ("The Editor and the Question of Value: Another View," pp. 45-73) on it.
Bowers properly objects to the solecism "textual editor" and points out that a "documentary editor" must also be concerned with texts (e.g., p. 50).
Or, as he puts the point more explicitly, alterations occurring within the text of a document "are as much an integral part of the document as the final form of its inscription" (p. 49). By neglecting such alterations, and variants between separate drafts, historians have not learned as much as they might have from "the writer's veerings of thought" and "changes of mind" (p. 48).
"On Native Ground: From the History of Printing to the History of the Book," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 93 (1983), 313-336 (and reprinted as a pamphlet, 1984). I have made some further comments on Hall's views in "The Bibliography and Textual Study of American Books," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 95 (1985), 291-329. Hall once described Charles Francis Adams's 1894 "literal reproduction of the texts" of some antinomian documents and then observed, "Scholarship no longer rests upon such antiquarian exactness" (The Antinomian Controversy, 1636-1638: A Documentary History [1968], p. 21).
He states that American printers and readers of the past "were quite indifferent" to the question of authorial intention. But that observation, however true it may be, has no bearing on our legitimate interest in discovering what a particular author meant to say at a given time in the past.
Though of course present reactions are only the latest stage in the history of the reception of various texts of a work.
I have tried to set forth this point in my Hanes Lecture, The History of Books as a Field Study (1981)—also printed in the Times Literary Supplement, 5 June 1981, pp. 647-649.
As much as possible, that is, within the limits imposed by typography and photography. Some evidence, of course, cannot be reproduced.
Stephen E. Wiberly, Jr., in discussing the interesting question of the editing of maps does recognize critical editions; indeed, he asserts—without qualification—that "edited maps are superior to facsimiles" (p. 509). But although he refers to the debates over the editing of verbal historical documents, he seems not to have grasped some of the issues involved in them. It does not seem promising, for example, to distinguish maps from personal papers on the grounds that "a map purports to tell us something about a reality outside the mind of its creators" and to conclude that it is therefore "logical to correct the contents of old maps" but "not logical to change the contents of personal papers" (p. 502). What he advocates is to "take an old map, accept some of its data without reservation, verify and correct other of its data, and then include both types of data in the edited map" (pp. 501-502). See "Editing Maps: A Method for Historical Cartography," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 10 (1980), 499-510.
Whether variant readings and emendations are noted within the body of an edited text or in appended lists is a mechanical matter—not unimportant, but certainly not of the same order as the considerations just mentioned.
Bowers says of documentary texts: "Students of history may read these texts to gain a firsthand acquaintance with the undigested material, but at higher reaches these documents provide professional scholars with the necessary data from which formal eclectic interpretation can be made in written histories and biographies" (p. 46). The essential role of subjective judgment in the historical enterprise of reconstructing past texts out of the documentary texts that happen to have survived is affirmed (with somewhat different emphases) by two recent essays on the textual study of early manuscripts: my attempt to show that recension is no less conjectural than "conjectural emendation," in "Classical, Biblical, and Medieval Textual Criticism and Modern Editing," SB, 36 (1983), 21-68; and Lee Patterson's demonstration that the standard dichotomy between external and internal evidence does not coincide with the distinction between objective facts and interpretations, in "The Logic of Textual Criticism and the Way of Genius," in Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation, ed. Jerome J. McGann (1985), pp. 55-91. (For a more traditional summary of some of the flaws in the stemmatic approach, see Paul Oskar Kristeller, "The Lachmann Method: Merits and Limitations," Text, 1 [1981], 11-20.)
Buch und Buchhandel in Europa im achtzehnten Jahrhundert, ed. Giles Barber and Bernhard Fabian (1981), pp. 81-125. McKenzie's paper, as he states, "extends the argument" of the third of his unpublished Sandars Lectures for 1975-76 ("The London Book Trade in the Later Seventeenth Century").
James McLaverty, who acknowledges the influence of McKenzie, has also found the early eighteenth century to be the time "when authors first became conscious of the anomalous nature of literature and of the importance of printing" (p. 95). He examines the Dunciad Variorum as Pope's "exploitation of the medium" of the scholarly edition, as "an imitation not of spoken discourse but of written discourse" (p. 96). Like McKenzie, he argues that the visual presentation of a text "can carry special associations, and that a richer understanding of the relation of author, book trade, and public may lead to better interpretation of literary works" (p. 105). See "The Mode of Existence of Literary Works of Art: The Case of the Dunciad Variorum," SB, 37 (1984), 82-105. Another writer who is concerned with the effect of typographic layout, especially lineation, on the "reader experiencing the play in the 'theater of the mind'" (p. 69) is Paul Bertram, in White Spaces in Shakespeare (1981).
Analytical bibliographers, of course, have used physical evidence in an attempt to uncover facts about the printing history of individual editions (and this activity can be regarded as one kind of "reading"—see Ross Atkinson, "An Application of Semiotics to the Definition of Bibliography," SB, 33 [1980], 54-73). But the concern here is with the way in which the physical characteristics of a book play a role in the reader's reaction to the piece of writing contained in it.
Scholars should, after all, be aware of the shifting conventions in the use of particular formats and page layouts.
It is implicit in his reference to decisions that authors and booksellers "take, or impose on one another" (p. 103), but the point is not developed.
The word "best" is troubling here and recalls his earlier statement, "Every variant must of course be scrutinized for what it adds or loses in vitality of character and acuity of language" (p. 108). One has to wonder whether this way of stating the matter sufficiently distinguishes editors' own preferences from their judgments regarding what authors preferred.
McKenzie does not acknowledge this point when he refers to "an historic and contextual accuracy in the recovery of every possible element of meaning as intended by the author and perceived by an intelligent and sensitive reader of his time" (p. 92).
Though it may seem that he is at other times, as when he speaks of "the most important one [concern] of all—what, exactly, an author in his own age did say to his readers and how he and his printers directed them to respond" (p. 123). What the author did say and what the author wanted to say are not always the same.
McKenzie devotes the first section (pp. 83-92) of his paper, rather irrelevantly, to a critique of Greg and three commentators on him (Morse Peckham, Hans Zeller, and Tom Davis). The ostensible relevance is that Greg dealt with the drama of a period in which typographical care was not bestowed on printed plays; and the argument is that recent editorial theory, greatly influenced by Greg, is therefore not equipped to handle situations in which text and presentation are integrated. McKenzie gets off the track in emphasizing the distinction between substantives and accidentals and treating it as a distinction between meaningful and formal elements, which (at least in its use by Greg's followers) "has been utterly divisive, shattering any concept of the integrity of the book as an organic form, a material statement in which all its elements participate" (p. 84). Although he is right to find the criticisms of Peckham, Zeller, and Davis deficient, his own analysis fails to recognize that the distinction between substantives and accidentals is actually based not on meaning but on a generalization about human behavior in the past, that it comes into play only when one has no other means of reaching a textual decision, and that accidentals are in fact treated as extremely important elements in texts. There is nothing in Greg's approach, even as extended and followed by others, that prevents one from regarding typography as a textual matter or from preserving the integrity of particular texts (late or early), if one believes the typography or integrity to have resulted from authorial intention; Greg's rationale is no more divisive than any other plan for critical editing, because it recommends eclecticism only when a unity of elements does not exist and only to bring about greater unity. It perfectly well accommodates McKenzie's demands for a textual theory, and there is thus some irony in his charge that the tradition deriving from Greg suffers from "intellectual timidity" (p. 92).
"The Sociology of a Text: Orality, Literacy and Print in Early New Zealand," Library, 6th ser., 6 (1984), 333-365. Another sensitive treatment of oral texts—of "the pleasures and advantages of preliteracy"—is John Miles Foley's "Editing Oral Epic Texts: Theory and Practice," Text, 1 (1981), 75-94.
Indeed, it moves outside books and for him becomes a pattern in life. There is, he believes, "a principle of textual criticism operative in the real world which implies the concept of an ideal text that the versions have failed fully to express": "The physical versions and their fortuitous forms are not the only testimonies to intent: implicit in the accidents of history is an ideal text which history has begun to discover, a reconciliation of readings which is also a meeting of minds. The concept of an ideal text as a cultural and political imperative is not imposed on history but derives from it and from an understanding of the dynamics of bibliography as a study of the meanings 'books' make" (p. 364).
Another writer who has stressed the importance of original typography is Randall McLeod, but his point is different from McKenzie's. His concern is not primarily with the way typographic layout carries historical meaning or with the possibility that it is an integral part of a literary work; rather, he has shown in a series of articles how typographic evidence can be essential in making textual decisions (as when a particular spelling was caused by the necessity of inserting a type between two kerned types that would not fit together) and how scholarly editions that fail to report such evidence deprive readers of information they need for evaluating editorial judgments. Unmodernized (or "old-spelling") scholarly editions, in other words, do not go far enough toward providing historical evidence, for they separate spelling and punctuation from typography. Facsimile editions are desirable, in this view, not specifically because the original typography is part of the text or is what emerged from the original process of publication but because they make available to readers the evidence present in the original typography (that is, all of it that is reproducible). Whereas McKenzie is concerned with determining what details constitute a literary work, McLeod is talking about the presentation of evidence. If we are to have critical editions at all, we must resign ourselves to the fact that their apparatuses will not contain every piece of evidence used by their editors; but we have a right to expect that editors will recognize, take into account, and comment on the kind of evidence McLeod discusses, and his articles are valuable in calling attention to uses of typographic evidence often neglected. His criticism of the practices of some editors is well taken, but it does not in fact invalidate the concept of critical editions in modern typography. See his "Spellbound: Typography and the Concept of Old-Spelling Editions," Renaissance and Reformation, n.s., 3 (1979), 50-65; "Editing Shak-speare," Sub-Stance, no. 33/34 (1982), 26-55; and "Gon. No more, the text is foolish.", in The Division of the Kingdoms (see note 68 below), pp. 153-193.
He had earlier expressed some of the same ideas in essays, as in "The Text, the Poem, and the Problem of Historical Method," New Literary History, 12 (1980-81), 269-288, where he says that "every work of art is the product of an interaction between an artist, on the one hand, and a variety of social determinants on the other" (p. 275). In two other papers presented at textual conferences in 1981 and 1982 (but not published until after his book) he explores the "social nexus" of literary works and the relations between "historicist textual criticism" and literary criticism: "Shall These Bones Live?", Text, 1 (1981 [published in 1984]), 21-40; and "The Monks and the Giants: Textual and Bibliographical Studies and the Interpretation of Literary Works," in Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation, ed. McGann (1985), pp. 180-199. The latter piece presents a useful (if rather melodramatic) statement of the role of textual criticism in literary study, depicting textual criticism as a broad field of historical scholarship, in which the production of editions is only one of many agenda (a view I agree with, though McGann believes I do not).
It is not, however. But the fact that his criticism of this school of editing is often superficial or incorrect is a secondary point; the more fundamental matter to be examined is his general attack on an author-based approach to editing (whether or not he has the details of the Bowers line right). I shall simply note here three of the deficiencies in his treatment of the Bowers position. The most serious flaw is his failure to acknowledge its flexibility, for it does not demand that a manuscript be used as copy-text in preference to a first edition, or a first in preference to a later edition, when the circumstances suggest otherwise, and it is capable of handling the examples he cites. A prime instance of this flexibility is Bowers's own practice in his William James edition and his own theoretical statement in "Greg's 'Rationale of Copy-Text' Revisited," SB, 31 (1978), 90-161—an essay cited once by McGann but not really used in his analysis. It is thus incorrect to state flatly, without qualification, that "the Bowers position is that the author's manuscript is a higher authority" than the first edition (p. 55). McGann also stresses the word "final" in "final intention" in an extremely literal way that I think the editors following Greg have not normally done; in practice the term has excluded the intentions reflected in unfinished drafts but it has not been taken to rule out the possibility of different intentions manifested in different completed versions. And several times he speaks of "the rule of final intentions" governing "the choice of copy-text" (as on p. 55), without recognizing that an early copy-text chosen for its accidentals may be very far indeed from the author's "final intentions" with respect to substantives.
McGann's unwillingness to accept this point underlies his belief that the Bowers system, based on a classical model (derived, via Greg, from Lachmann), is inappropriate for dealing with modern materials: because the textual critic of modern works "actually possesses the 'lost originals' which the classical critic is forced to hypothesize, his concept of an ideal text reveals itself to be—paradoxically—a pure abstraction, whereas the classical critic's ideal text remains, if 'lost,' historically actual" (p. 57). The force of this observation as a criticism is not clear, for a "pure abstraction" can be a valid goal; and textual critics of classical works (or works of any other period) have the option of attempting to construct texts reflecting their authors' intentions, as well as attempting to recreate lost documents. The concept of "final intention" is not merely a device to help guide editors of modern materials through "the mass of documentary evidence" that often confronts them (p. 56); it leads to a goal worth working toward, regardless of the simplicity or complexity of the surviving documents, a goal that is historical whether or not the text being sought ever existed in written form. (Cf. McKenzie's point in note 39 above.)
Even to summarize McGann's position, as McGann himself does, in terms of an author and publisher working together to put something before the public does not, one would think, catch the spirit of McGann's argument, if what is implied here is that they necessarily worked together harmoniously and cooperatively. To think of the production of literature as a social or collaborative process is, one supposes, only to say that a number of people are involved and that any of them may influence the published text—not that they are never in conflict with one another.
He says that instances of the kind under discussion "go to the issue of textual versions rather than to the rationale of copy-text," but he is in fact talking about the choice of copy-text, and his summarizing paragraph speaks of "the decision on copy-text." At another point he distinguishes, without explanation, between "copy-text" and "version of a text we choose to work from" (p. 56).
They are thus not the product of historical scholarship, in the usual sense that it attempts to reconstruct past events. Of course any activity in the present is historical in the sense that it in some degree reflects its own time (as I shall note further below).
Another example of the attempt to mix these approaches is Donald Pizer's "Self-Censorship and Textual Editing," in Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation, ed. McGann (1985), pp. 144-161. Pizer's four "'tests' for accepting the belief that self-censorship has occurred and that restoration of an earlier state of the text is required" are: evaluating evidence regarding the composition and publication history of a work, evaluating evidence bearing on the author's motives in making revisions, deciding through critical analysis whether one version is "better" than others, and considering whether "the first published version of a major work" is "a historical artifact that should continue to occupy the role of general reading text even if it has been subject to self-censorship" (pp. 150-151). The latter two are not in fact relevant to "accepting the belief that self-censorship has occurred"; they do represent two possible approaches to making textual decisions, but neither can be combined with the first two to provide a coherent rationale for choosing a single text. Pizer recognizes the value of publishing editions of alternative texts, but he still thinks ultimately in terms of a single text that he would like to see "generally read" (p. 155). (In itself, his account of "the interaction between self and world, which is inseparable from the expressive process" [p. 154], and of the "historical resonance" [p. 156] of long-established texts, is well stated.)
The "set of interconnected guidelines" he refers to at one point (p. 107) is not the same thing: it consists of considerations to be taken into account in choosing a copy-text, considerations that include "the character of the audience of the edition," "the early printing history" of the work, and "the current state of textual criticism" (p. 106).
He seems to think that he has opened up a wider range of options and thereby increased the area in which subjectivity can operate, but editors have always faced the same options, for there have always been valid alternatives to critical texts reflecting authorial intention (which in themselves present many alternatives).
The opening sentence of his chapter on modernizing betrays some confusion in terminology, if nothing else. He says that a "sharp distinction" is usually made "between the scholarly or critical edition on the one hand, and modernized or noncritical editions on the other" (p. 95). Generally the term "critical edition" is used to mean an edition containing a critical text, which is a text that does not agree precisely with a single documentary source because it incorporates alterations reflecting the editor's critical judgment (exercised to make the text more nearly conform with some desired goal). Thus an edition can be scholarly without being critical, and all modernized editions contain critical texts. Of course one can define these terms anew if one wishes, but it seems inappropriate to associate the word "noncritical," which already seems to refer to the absence of critical judgment, as in a facsimile, with "modernized," which involves a great deal of judgment and refers to editions that are at the opposite extreme from facsimiles.
McGann continually refers in this discussion to "nonspecialist editions," by which he means "nonspecialist texts," for he is referring to the adjustment of the text, not just the apparatus, for different classes of readers.
Arguments for modernizing are always doomed to failure, just as the practice of modernizing is bound to be inconsistent. Yet defenses of it continue to appear. Stanley Wells, in Modernizing Shakespeare's Spelling (1979), believes that modernizing "removes unnecessary barriers to understanding, making it possible for the reader to concentrate on the text itself, undistracted by obsolete and archaic accidentals of presentation" (p. vi). This view of "the text itself" links Wells with generations of compositors and publishers' editors that preceded him in feeling free to alter spelling and punctuation but less free to alter words (the behavior Greg described in his "Rationale"). But after going through Wells's discussion of the problems with which modernizing is fraught, readers are likely to be convinced that the real barrier between them and the text is being erected by the modernizer. Wells ends by explaining that modernizing editors have to give "hard thought" to the meaning of each word, and their choice of a form in each case "communicates the results of such thought." Modernization, he concludes, "may thus be seen not, as some would have it, as a work of popularization, even of vulgarization, but as a means of exploring Shakespeare's text that can make a real contribution to scholarship" (p. 34). It is difficult to see how the case for modernization is strengthened by saying that it forces editors to think hard about every word, for responsible editors of unmodernized critical editions must do the same thing. Editors who modernize, Wells says, "may be surprised to find how much that is of interest in Shakespeare's language has gone unnoticed." But modernizing seems too high a price to pay for a promise that editors have done the work we expect them to do anyway. (Other unconvincing arguments for modernizing have recently come from R. M. Flores in "The Need for a Scholarly, Modernized Edition of Cervantes' Work," Cervantes, 2 [1982], 69-87.)
In "Shall These Bones Live?" (see note 41 above), McGann has shown how powerfully he can write about the role of history in literary understanding. I believe that what I have suggested here regarding the validity of two fundamentally opposed emphases in textual criticism is analogous to his acceptance of the necessity for two approaches to literature ("two classes of men [scholars and critics] are always upon the earth of humane letters, and whoever seeks to reconcile them seeks to destroy the existence of their shared world" [p. 25])—and indeed seems to me more in the spirit of his comments than his own Critique is. But he also notes that a productive symbiosis, rather than a sterile co-existence, requires constant prodding from each side. His Critique—and, I hope, my remarks here—can be seen as part of this constructive process.
Some parts of the book had been published earlier, as in (among other places) "The Determinacy of the Creative Process and the 'Authority' of the Author's Textual Decisions," College Literature, 10 (1983), 99-125.
His criticism of Greg, the Center for Editions of American Authors, and Bowers is often unfair, so much so that it is self-defeating: for example, he speaks of editors who were moved "to stake their reputations on the validity of the rationale of copy-text set forth by W. W. Greg" (p. 59), as if reputations were the dominant concern; he says that "no editorial formula, even one as appealing as Greg's, can substitute for the expertise which comes only from years of conscientious (and preferably loving) biographical and critical study of the author whom one presumes to edit" (p. 67), as if editors who follow Greg substitute a formula for knowledge; he complains about certain critical judgments by CEAA editors "with well-nigh limitless federal funds" (p. 82), as if the magnitude of funds (which he knows he is exaggerating) were relevant to this issue; and he refers to the "hubris of the Newest Bibliography which at its worst barricaded editing within a mad-scientist laboratory more isolated from the author than any critic or theorist had yet been" (p. 240).
Of course one cannot limit the discussion exclusively to whole works, because the process of original composition may be spread out over a long period, or may be interrupted, with the result that the earlier and the later parts of a work may be the products of separate bursts of creative activity and may conflict with each other in various ways. (John McClelland, in "Critical Editing in the Modern Languages," Text, 1 [1981], 201-216, takes a position somewhat akin to Parker's in advocating as copy-text a text representing the point "where the work has acquired its definitive structure, either as the result of the accumulation of variants or by a dramatic revision" [p. 206], for "we are probably being more faithful to the text itself by presenting it in the state at which it was receiving the author's closest attention," since "extensive revision requires as much concentration as does composition" [p. 207]. McClelland, however, is more optimistic than Parker about the possibility of coherent later revision and thus would approve later copy-texts more readily than Parker. In a dubious argument, McClelland also claims that the variants would be "easier to handle" if the copy-text were "the text that will actually be read" [p. 204].)
Thus it is no objection to his line of reasoning to say that in rejecting late revisions the editor may not see what the author was getting at. Undoubtedly it does happen that editors find revisions thoughtless or damaging because they fail to follow an author's changed, and perhaps unconventional, mode of expression. But all critical editors take the risk of misunderstanding the authors they hope to serve well. (And they are not to be blamed—as Parker suggests on p. 12 and elsewhere—for trying to make sense of the texts they encounter: literature can be hard to make sense of.)
See G. T. Tanselle, "The Editorial Problem of Final Authorial Intention," SB, 29 (1976), 167-211; reprinted in Selected Studies, pp. 309-353.
An interest in such last intentions does not of course mean that there is no legitimate historical interest in earlier stages of a work.
He also attacks—a different matter—"the superstition that the author is infallible" (p. 51). Whether very many people have ever taken the position that the author could make no mistakes in revision is a real question, but is beside the point here. (Parker does understand that a "maimed text" can still retain power: see p. 8.)
Such as "Evidences for 'Late Insertions' in Melville's Works," Studies in the Novel, 7 (1975), 407-424; "Aesthetic Implications of Authorial Excisions: Examples from Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, and Stephen Crane," in Editing Nineteenth-Century Fiction, ed. Jane Millgate (1978), pp. 99-119; and three articles by him and Brian Higgins: "Sober Second Thoughts: Fitzgerald's 'Final Version' of Tender is the Night," Proof, 4 (1975), 129-152; "Maggie's 'Last Night': Authorial Design and Editorial Patching," Studies in the Novel, 10 (1978), 64-75; "The Flawed Grandeur of Melville's Pierre," in New Perspectives on Melville, ed. Faith Pullin (1978), pp. 162-196.
See "The 'New Scholarship': Textual Evidence and Its Implications for Criticism, Literary Theory, and Aesthetics," Studies in American Fiction, 9 (1981), 181-197; and Brian Higgins and Parker, "The Chaotic Legacy of the New Criticism and the Fair Augury of the New Scholarship," in Ruined Eden of the Present, ed. G. R. Thompson and Virgil L. Lokke (1981), pp. 27-45.
He admits that this discussion "will temporarily submerge the issue of reader response" (p. 94), but he believes that reader-response theory can finally contribute to the concept of authorial intention. Not surprisingly, he characterizes the kind of intention editors are primarily concerned with as "operative intentions," encompassing not only "the actions that the author, as he writes the text, understands himself to be performing in the text" (or "active intentions") but also "the immediate effects he understands these actions will achieve in his projected reader" (p. 99). (He unnecessarily elaborates his set of definitions by introducing "inferred intention" to "characterize the critic's description" of what the author is aiming to achieve, even though he recognizes that "operative intentions" are also necessarily inferred. "I am trying," he says, "to emphasize the inferential process an editor uses to posit a specific authorial intention." Surely this process need not be called an "intention" or brought into the definition of authorial intention at all. Mailloux's confusion is shown by his illustration of how the term is useful: it allows him, he says, "to talk about the operative intention an author claimed he had and a perhaps differing inferred intention an editor arrives at after evaluating all the relevant evidence." But the first of these is simply an author's "stated intention," which editors are always wary of, and the latter is the "operative intention" that the editor infers on the basis of all evidence, including the author's claims.) The upshot of his discussion hardly seems a revelation, because editors have regularly been able to understand, without being schooled by reader-response theorists, that authors use language conventions and therefore have expected their readers to react in certain ways to certain locutions. Explicitly defining the concept of authorial intention so as to include the "immediate effects" to be produced in the reader during the reading process is, perhaps, unobjectionable, but it is also unnecessary; it represents no shift in what has always been meant by the concept of the author's intention to convey a meaning through writing down particular words and punctuation. (Why a concept of authorial intention should imply a "specific rationale for critical interpretation"—a point made several times, as on pp. 108, 110, 112, 113—is puzzling.)
Or, perhaps more straightforwardly: "it is possible to reject some authorial revisions because they deface the text after it was finished" (p. 112).
Certainly those editors responsible for the wording of the CEAA emblem ("An Approved Text," not "The Approved Text") felt this way; but this gesture has not been taken as seriously as it deserves to be. Tom Davis, in a thoughtful review of the Lawrence and Hardy editions ("Textual Criticism: Philosophy and Practice," Library, 6th ser., 6 [1984], 386-397)—which begins with promise and descends to anticlimax—describes two models of "a text and its history": one emphasizes growing deterioration and corruption, the other a positive process of collaboration. Both, he says, are "equally 'true'" (p. 389).
As Randall McLeod puts it, "our tradition is unwilling to allow multiple textual authorities to rest as a simultaneous set of existential entities to be encountered absurdly by the reader" (p. 422 of "The Marriage of Good and Bad Quartos," Shakespeare Quarterly, 33 [1982], 421-431). He goes on to speak of "the infinitive text, which we may define as a polymorphous set of all versions, some part of each of which has a claim to substantive status." The recent controversy over the text of King Lear calls attention to the perennial competition between the attractions of a single text and the messier possibilities of independent versions. Although those who believe that the Lear variants provide evidence of Shakespeare's revision have overdramatized their case, there is no doubt that the possibility of authorial revision must always be in the editor's mind in evaluating variant readings. See Steven Urkowitz, Shakespeare's Revision of "King Lear" (1980); Gary Taylor and Michael Warren (eds.), The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare's Two Versions of "King Lear" (1983); and Ernest A. J. Honigmann, "Shakespeare as a Reviser," in Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation, ed. McGann (1985), pp. 1-22.
Fredson Bowers has recently summarized his views on apparatus in "Notes on Editorial Apparatus," in Historical & Editorial Studies in Medieval & Early Modern English, for Johan Gerritsen, ed. Mary-Jo Arn and Hanneke Wirtjes, with Hans Jensen (1985), pp. 147-162. (He and Paul Werstine have also had an exchange on historical collations that include readings from posthumous editions: Werstine, "Modern Editions and Historical Collation in Old-Spelling Editions of Shakespeare," Analytical & Enumerative Bibliography, 4 [1980], 95-106; Bowers, "The Historical Collation in an Old-Spelling Shakespeare Edition: Another View," SB, 35 [1982], 234-258.)
"The Synchrony and Diachrony of Texts: Practice and Theory of the Critical Edition of James Joyce's Ulysses," Text, 1 (1981), 305-326. As the title makes clear, this paper is intended to provide the rationale for the plan followed in Gabler's edition of Ulysses (1984); but it also includes illustrations from Faulkner and Milton and is meant to be a theoretical statement of wide applicability.
At one point, for example, he distinguishes between "the authoritative text free of corruption" and "the critically constituted text of final authorial intention established by bibliographically controlled editorial eclecticism" (pp. 310-311; see also p. 318).
A distinction should be made between a "genetic" text and the kind of "synoptic" text that Gabler is recommending. A genetic text aims to show the development of the text or texts present in a single document by providing a running text that indicates cancellations, interlineations, and other alterations. Gabler's synoptic text, on the other hand, aims to bring together in a single running text the authorial readings from all relevant documents. The symbols in the synoptic text, therefore, have to serve two functions: to indicate (as in a genetic text) the status of alterations within documents and also (as the sigla in a list do) to identify the various source documents and show their sequence. Furthermore, the synoptic text contains editorial emendations, for it is concerned only with authorial revisions, not with "corruptions"—which are therefore to be corrected in the synoptic text and recorded "in the type of subsidiary apparatus best suited to the purpose, i.e., an appended lemmatised emendation list" (p. 318).
In his edition of Ulysses he calls his "reading text" a "new, critically established text," consisting of "the emended continuous manuscript text at its ultimate level of compositional development" (p. 1903).
Issued as Occasional Paper No. 3 by the English Department of the Faculty of Military Studies, Royal Military College, University of New South Wales. A revised version will be published by the University of Georgia Press in 1986.
As he states this point elsewhere, "reading a single text of a work of art as if it adequately represented the work or was in fact the work may limit the reader's access to the whole work of art" (p. 71).
He does not, however, always give adequate recognition to the fact that critical editing is a form of literary criticism—as when he says that "textual critics tried to provide texts that would deserve the new scrutiny" of the New Critics (p. 7), as if the providing of a text is a pre-critical activity.
Shillingsburg forsakes his usual even-handedness here by calling lists that include nonauthorial variants "trivialized"; to the person interested more in the text that emerged from the publishing process than one reflecting authorial intention, these variants are not trivial.
Often it is not possible to identify the agent more precisely than "publisher's editor or compositor" or "someone other than the author."
Or, as he puts it elsewhere, editors should shift their "emphasis from 'the right text' to 'the whole work'" (p. 42).
If there were as little doubt about this kind of intention as Shillingsburg suggests, those editors whose aim is to establish authorial wording would not disagree as often as they do. Since manuscripts, as Shillingsburg recognizes, may contain "scribal error, Freudian slip, or shorthand elision" (p. 27), one must use critical judgment, based on an interpretation of intended meaning, to determine where these flaws occur.
Editors who talk about authorial intention do in fact generally mean an intended sequence of words and punctuation, but it is understandable that their discussions often contain references to intended meaning: the one is inextricable from the other. Recognizing this point in no way leads editors away from the active authorial intention they should properly focus on and toward such other levels of intention as "an intention to be brilliant or successful, or to write a novel or poem." But Shillingsburg oversimplifies the issue when he adds to this series: "or to convey an idea or emotion or attitude" (p. 26). Of course he is right to say that "several alternative texts of more or less satisfaction to the author" might convey the same meaning; nevertheless, the intention to convey a particular idea is not irrelevant to the intention to write down a particular sequence of words. Shillingsburg (p. 28)—like Mailloux (pp. 96-97) and Parker (p. 22)—complains that my concept of active intention in my 1976 essay (see note 59 above) does not encompass the author's intention in the process of composition. All I can say is that I meant for it to: when I spoke, for example, of "the intention of the author to have particular words and marks of punctuation constitute his text" (p. 182 [324]), I was assuming that such intention manifests itself continuously throughout the writing of a work (and often shifts, producing revisions—a problem I took up in the later parts of the essay). (I am aware of the irony: this situation illustrates the fact that a writer's statement of intention does not always match what readers find in the work.) Shillingsburg himself, though he emphasizes the composition process, is inclined to think in terms of "stages" (as on p. 24) rather than—more realistically—a continuous process, in which any pronounced points of stability that do exist grow out of numerous subordinate stages. Another writer who defines the intention relevant to editors as what the author "intended to write or what he intended to constitute his text" (p. 127) is James McLaverty, whose article on "The Concept of Authorial Intention in Textual Criticism," Library, 6th ser., 6 (1984), 121-138, is an unusually intelligent, if occasionally mistaken, treatment of the subject. McLaverty believes that every published version of a work reflects a different intention and that an editor must choose one version (not necessarily the "final" one) to edit (p. 130); but he does not understand that the editor can draw emendations from the texts of other versions without necessarily mixing versions, for in many cases the only documentary evidence of corrections in one version is the report of them embedded in the documentary text of the next version (cf. note 85 below). His reluctance to allow such eclecticism springs from a general tendency to wish to restrict the area in which editorial judgment operates. Thus he finds a way to argue against any correction of errors of external fact: an author's intention to be correct, he feels, is outside the scope of the kind of intention (to have a certain sequence of words and punctuation) with which the editor is concerned (p. 129). Critical editors, however, if their approach is to be truly critical, cannot eliminate any part of a text—such as references to external fact—from critical scrutiny, even though there will be no universal agreement as to which factual errors are, and which are not, expressed in words that the author intended to write. (See also my comments on "External Fact as an Editorial Problem," SB, 32 [1979], 1-47; reprinted in Selected Studies, pp. 355-401.) His complaint that no principle has been established for determining which versions of a work are so different as to require separate editions similarly represents a desire for rules that would replace judgments. In another interesting essay on intention, James E. May ("Determining Final Authorial Intention in Revised Satires: The Case of Edward Young," SB, 38 [1985], 276-289) attempts to identify those revisions in satires that "presuppose an audience and state of affairs different from those for which the work was originally intended" (p. 277) and to show that they (unlike the ones "compatible with the work's original conception" [p. 289]) should "be denied final authority," thus "preserving the historicity of the earlier version" (p. 277). Despite the repeated emphasis on "final authority," his work appears to recognize that both the original and the revised versions are of independent value as satiric works.
Even a text, which is "the actual order of words and punctuation as contained in any one physical form," is immaterial because the text "can exist simultaneously in the memory, in more than one copy or in more than one form" (p. 38). Shillingsburg's point is correct, if awkwardly stated—for if a single text can exist in more than one form (as it can), then it should not be defined as being "contained in any one physical form." A text is simply one particular sequence of words and punctuation (which may or may not accurately represent a version or a draft). James McLaverty has also recently explored the ontological status of literary works—with more sophistication than Shillingsburg—in "The Mode of Existence of Literary Works of Art" (see note 30 above), an essay that helpfully summarizes the debate over whether printed texts of literary works are scores (notational systems) or instances of the work. In his essay on intention (see note 81 above), he makes use of the idea that the printed text is a score (p. 127).
I think he is unwise, here and elsewhere, to contrast literary art with pottery, suggesting that a vase does not undergo revision in the process of its creation. ("There is a pleasing simplicity in the notion that texts grow or develop or are shaped toward a final form—rather like a potter shaping a vase on a wheel. But the analogy is misleading. A book does not come in final shape directly from the artist's hands like a vase" [p. 36]). All created works, however, are subject to revision during their creation. The reason we sometimes have versions and drafts of literary works is that the physical forms in which they are recorded are separate from the work itself, whereas the earlier versions of a vase are necessarily destroyed in the process of shaping the final version. If earlier versions are part of the total work, then in many cases the full work cannot survive, and the extent of what does survive is fortuitous. Some versions of literary works never existed on paper but only in the minds of their creators; and often writers who use word processors destroy all trace of earlier versions or drafts as they create new ones. The total work, inclusive of all versions and drafts, is probably never fully recoverable; but in the case of literary works (and other works of which versions are recorded on paper) there is the chance that some of the documents containing versions and drafts have survived. This point has not been adequately dealt with by those who hold that variants are integral parts of works.
As Shillingsburg concisely puts it, "Texts may contain non-authorial parts; versions do not" (p. 39).
A single set of revisions, for instance, could be spread over two documents, with the result that the text of neither document would reflect the entirety of a particular version or draft. When Shillingsburg describes an eclectic text as one that "mixes material from two or more versions" (p. 40), one wonders whether he is rejecting the usual definition of "eclectic" as referring to the mixing of material from two or more documentary texts or whether he is equating versions with the (sometimes defective) texts of individual documents. A further hint of this problem occurs in his inaccurate description of the "historical orientation," when he speaks of "points in creation when the text reaches stasis in a document" (p. 61). The stasis conferred by a physical document does not necessarily represent a point of stasis in the development of a work. (I call the description inaccurate because the value of reproducing the text of a document does not depend on whether a "documentary form is a complete record of the work at some stage in its development"; no justification is needed other than the fact that the document survives and is therefore a piece of historical evidence.) In his "Key Issues" article (see note 90 below), Shillingsburg deals more incisively with this matter, making clear that he does indeed wish to define "eclectic" as referring to the mixing of versions, not merely of documentary texts. But in doing so he is moving beyond what scholarly editing normally encompasses and into "creative" or "aesthetic" editing: "Eclecticism," he writes, "does not attempt to conform to a single ascertainable version ever existing at one time even in the author's intention (or conception)" (pp. 7-8). If the term "eclectic" is to be applied to scholarly editing at all, it must refer to the mixing of documentary texts to produce a postulated version. Shillingsburg does recognize in his article that the integrity of a version—being an abstraction—is not tied to an individual documentary text; but that recognition should also have caused him to see that an editor who mixes readings from different texts in an effort to produce a text conforming to the author's intentions at a given time (and not to produce simply what the editor likes better) is not mixing versions but rather is reconstructing one.
It is rather puzzlingly called "Forms." The opening of the chapter suggests that forms are "details of presentation" as opposed to "substance" (p. 13). But the subject matter treated is certainly not limited to "accidentals."
Shillingsburg admits that "all violations of documentary historical forms (including Bowers' and McGann's) are supported by appeals to one or more competing formal orientation which is seen to take priority over the historical, even if only in some limited way" (p. 15). In that case, if the "orientations" are meant to represent the basic positions that are often mixed in practice, why not define the "historical" approach as simply the diplomatic (or noncritical) reproduction of documentary texts?
Despite the fact that Shillingsburg says in his introduction that he is dropping "from further consideration" what he calls "commercial editing and copy-editing" (p. 4).
Shillingsburg says that "an editorial concern for the 'best' text is always an appeal to an aesthetic orientation" (p. 16) and at another point refers to "readings from several versions selected on the basis of the editor's aesthetic values in his attempt to present the author's 'best' text" (p. 10). But these statements are not helpful because they do not make clear that the best text for each of various historical purposes requires the editor's aesthetic judgment to be put to the service of deciding what someone in the past would have preferred.
Because Shillingsburg's book represents a fuller working out of the ideas he had earlier set forth in "Key Issues in Editorial Theory," Analytical & Enumerative Bibliography, 6 (1982), 3-16, it is not necessary here to discuss that generally less satisfactory essay. Some passages in it, however, are clearer than corresponding ones in the book (see note 85 above).
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