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Textual and Literary Theory: Redrawing the
Matrix
by
D. C. Greetham
[*]
At a recent conference on "Shakespeare: Text and Deconstruction"[1] I suggested it was no accident that the current "revisionist" textual view of certain Shakespeare plays[2] had occurred during a period of post-structuralist unease with the fixed, determinate text of literary criticism, or, similarly, that the hegemony of New Criticism—despite its ostensible rejection of intention —had corresponded with the domination of the single, eclectic text reflecting auctorial intentionality.[3] I was not supposing that textual and literary critics had been in conscious emulation of each other, but rather that a specific intellectual climate made some critical and textual assumptions more likely or plausible at some times than at others.[4] In other words, that particular critical and textual practices were promoted and sustained by a general theoretical disposition.
Like it or not, we live in a period of theory. Courses taught in graduate schools, books published by young scholars, sessions held at professional conferences—all reflect the literary concentration on theory as something distinct from, (although perhaps dependent on), the empirical, evaluative, or historical criticism of earlier decades. Inevitably, there is resistance to this movement—from both literary critics and from textual critics. Among the literary folk are those "humanists" who regard structuralism, post-structuralism, marxism and the rest as arid, if not immoral,[5] and among the textuists Shakespearians who wish to retain the securities of a single text, mediaevalists who seek the one Chaucer among the many, modernists who want their Joyce clear not synoptic. And, equally inevitably, the quiet business of "traditional" literary criticism still goes on, as, of course, does the business of textual criticism and editing.
However, the textual-critical business has in recent years confronted
As we might have anticipated, the literary theorists have, in general, not returned the favour. Some "theoretical" journals have published articles by textual scholars,[11] and the more adventurous literary critics have, on occasion, included textual problems in their consideration of theory[12] or have taken part in the public debate. But for the most part, the literary theorists have continued their work as if there had been no advances in textual-critical theory in the last few decades,[13] and—on our side of the fence—the editing of texts has sometimes continued without a full or articulated investigation of the theoretical choices involved in each separate editorial task.[14]
But despite the general lack of territorial engagement, it is clear that textuists need a theory (or theories) of textuality as a medium for dialogue—with each other or with those from different disciplines. A purely empirical approach—a recital of the specific circumstances of specific texts and the story of the editorial resolution of the problems they engender—can perhaps have a useful role in the accountability of editors for what they have done, and will, of course, be cited in the textual introductions for any responsible textual edition. But some synthesis of various individual and exemplary experiences is necessary to make them comprehensive and comprehensible, and Tanselle's occasional encyclopaedic surveys of the field in Studies in Bibliography in part fulfill this function,[15] although they also illuminate textual argument at large and frequently tie this argument to the theoretical postures employed in other disciplines (as in the "Final Intentions" article). But local empiricism ("this is what we did and why we did it") has, because of its concentration upon experience, little to offer those who have not yet had, and are perhaps unlikely to have, the same or a similar experience.[16] What theory does offer is (in the words of W.J.T.
It is not, of course, that theory is better than empiricism (or vice versa), nor that empiricism (particularly in such items on the list as "small-scale certainty" and "traditional wisdom") is not necessary to the editorial task (most of the qualities in Mitchell's "empiricist" list are indeed justifiably prized by editors)—but rather that theory provides a matrix for the plotting of the "certainties", small or otherwise, since it delineates a schema for the measurement of editorial attitudes and "reflections".
And, of course, textual criticism has not been shy of theory. From Alexandrian "analogy" through to Lachmannian stemmatics, Greg-Bowers intentionalism, and McGann social textual criticism, theories of how authors work, (even of who or what authors are), how texts are generated and transmitted, and how they should be represented to an audience, have been used to define, defend, and proselytise a theoretical view of the nature of composition, production and transmission—an ontology of the text, if you will. Thus, when Lachmann declares that the archetype of the Lucretius can be reconstituted and shows how this is to be done by the charting of "truth" and "error" in a genealogical table of witnesses, extant and inferred, he is inevitably privileging that archetype as the major desideratum of the textual scholar, and incidentally but forcefully invalidating the significance of the codices descripti lower down the family tree. Within the matrix of possible privileged positions, he is endorsing the relative chronological "superiority" of the archetype (although, note, not the fair copy, which remains unplottable and therefore without privilege) against inferior "copy", scribal reinscription etc. This seems obvious enough—and quite proper—to most classically-trained textual scholars, but it needs saying for two reasons: first, because no dictum should be implicitly and permanently accepted without continual demonstration of its validity (and what might have worked as a model in the transmission of classical texts need not be immutably pertinent in other periods), and second, because the theoretical grounds for an empirical assertion should be understood as a part of its evidentiary status. In other words, there is no "natural" or "self-evident" ontology of the text, but rather a series of alternative "metaphysics" displaying "fundamental principles" (to return to Mitchell's terminology) which will involve some degree of "speculation", some "intuition" and
Why belabour all of this if it ought to be obvious to the practitioner? Well, the major reason for raising the issue now, for an audience of bibliographers old and new, is that the matrix I spoke of has been very largely redrawn by our neighbours in literary criticism, in history, philosophy, even sociology and mathematics, and if textual criticism is to remain one of the major intellectual disciplines of our culture, it must at the very least be aware of this redrawing, at those parts of the matrix that bisect the accepted or acceptable notions of "text" and "author". Developments in, say, structuralist linguistics and anthropology, or in the new science of "chaos",[19] no longer keep to their neat disciplinary boundaries, but on the contrary, they create new disciplines in the gaps left by the retreating older ones. This tendency (noted in the very recent history of chaos in particular) has broad institutional implications. As the work of legal scholars like Rawls or anthropologists like Clifford Geetz shows, there has been a movement towards finding the centre of the humanist and social science ethic in the "textual variance" of the "texts" studied.[20] Philosophers like Richard Rorty (and literary critics like Robert Scholes) have even suggested that the typical research university will eventually reformulate itself to contain "textual departments" (rather than departments of English, history, philosophy, sociology etc.).[21] Such a possible institutional redefinition—if it ever happens (and Scholes we should note heads not an English department but a Center for Culture and Media at Brown) will be a direct product of the redrawing of the map of the text and its author and reader, and on this new map textual scholarship—as we have traditionally understood that term—must find a place, indeed a central not a marginal place. It would be a lost opportunity, and a major intellectual tragedy, if textual scholarship were not to seek a role in future "departments of texts", but it cannot achieve this status if its practitioners remain resolutely unaware of, or even hostile to, the disciplinary and institutional changes which have caused the map to be redrawn.
As I have argued elsewhere, literary critics have all too often assumed that in the new textualism (or even in the old evaluative criticism) "any text will do".[22] No reader of Studies in Bibliography would accept such a dismissive retreat from textual responsibility, and it is thus our job to know where we stand, almost literally, in the redrawing of the terrain. The rest of this article, after this somewhat polemical introduction to the problem, addresses the question of the new matrix and the new
I begin with a (mis)quotation, which can be a brief exercise in critical attribution.
"I start then with the postulate that what the [critic] is concerned with is pieces of paper or parchment covered with certain written or printed signs. With these signs he is concerned merely as arbitrary marks; their meaning is no business of his." (emphases mine)
This sounds like one of the "hermeneutical mafia" pontificating again—perhaps Eco or Culler (given the concentration on signs), Derrida, de Man, Hillis Miller, or Hartman—we may all have our favourite candidates. But the misquotation is instructive in this case. The first sentence should read: "the bibliographer" [not critic] is concerned with . . . signs" etc. And the author of this espousal of the arbitrariness of signs and the impropriety of meaning? Not a refugee from the École Normale Superieur nor even from Geneva, Konstanz, or New Haven, but that stalwart of Anglo-American "strict" bibliography, W. W. Greg. If bibliographers disdain mere meaning, what chance for those toiling in both literary and textual fields? But the apparent coincidence of view (culled, I admit, from Greg's more polemical writings in defence of bibliography as a "science" of "forms")[23] can be valuable, as I have suggested: literary and textual critics and theorists may not have spoken to each other directly in the last half-century or so, but there may be parallel conceptual or methodological issues at stake in their attitudes to that mysterious immanence—the "text". The following brief survey attempts to construct a few possible models where such parallels may be observed in operation. We may find some strange bedfellows, and some of the supposed paradigms may look strained on first acquaintance, but I would hope that a general loosening of the strict territorial imperatives could be of benefit to both parties.
I would like to use a very familiar structure: the writer-, text- and reader-based theories of both literary and textual dispensations. The familiarity of this tripartite division of the textual spoils may modify the apparent heterodoxy of my other suggestions by framing them in a system that offers comparatively little contention.
From a critical point of view, one would expect to encounter, for example, intentionalist theories, phenomenological theories, historical-critical "objectivist" theories in the first (writer-based) division; formalist, New-Critical, textual-analytical, structuralist theories in the second (text-based) division; and reception, deconstructive, jouissance (or "readerly-play") theories in the third (reader-based) division. It is obviously an over-simplification, but it will do to give a rough orientation to the textual and critical dispensations to be covered.
Let us first admit that some of the possible theoretical filiations are more honestly (or perhaps more directly) stated than others. For example, Steven Mailloux's suggested revision of the Hancher-Tanselle line on intention in his Interpretive Conventions (1982)[24] acknowledges the presence of Stanley Fish in his title, his method, and his documentation. (Ultimately, I think his argument responds more to Poulet and a phenomenological reading of intention than a Fishian, but that is another question.)[25] On the other hand, Jerome McGann's assault—in his Critique of Modern Textual Criticism [26]—upon the Greg-Bowers definition of (and apparent need for) intention makes no such attempt to place itself in the general inheritance of critical speculation, and therefore has appeared more contentious (and revolutionary) to other textual critics than it really is. The Geneva and Konstanz schools, Fishian affective stylistics and interpretive communities, even the good old textus receptus—one of the hoariest of textual données—may all lie behind McGann's position in the Critique, but they are not an informing part of his argument as they have been in some of his other historical and critical works. And this is particularly important, given the sweeping political arguments that underlie McGann's book. Some textual critics would simply consign McGann's work to the demesne of "literary criticism" and therefore ignore it (interestingly, the Critique was reviewed in TLS [27] under the rubric of "literary theory", not "Textual Criticism" or "Bibliography"), but as the very rationale of this survey suggests, I believe that all textual or literary arguments, even the least valuable in practice, rest upon certain theoretical assumptions which must be questioned and made to give an account of themselves.
But on to the first stage: writer-based theories. As already suggested, the dominant phase of an intentionalist textual theoretical school in this last half-century has clearly been the Greg-Bowers-Tanselle promotion
In this speculative tour of paradigms, we move next to text-based theories, where the mid-century influence of Formalist/New-Critical decontextualisation of the text is well-attested. The orthodox Formalist concentration on defamiliarisation[38] (of which more anon) shows a predisposition to respond to particular types of inter- (or perhaps, more correctly, intra-) textual relationships (particularly multi-layered ironies), and this intra-textual layering, albeit under objective bibliographical principles) can be observed in the synoptic text of Gabler's Ulysses (and perhaps in any "texte génétique" as well—although that's a more problematical question).[39] I am not convinced that genetic editors—despite their generally phenomenological assertions—belong automatically in the intentionalist division; it depends on the use made of the genetically-derived material. Perhaps paradoxically, Gabler's "clear-text" reading page could be seen as a "New-Critical" resolution of the structuralist ironies present in the synoptic text (i.e., as the critic/editor's selection of readings which remove or explain or fulfil the layers of meaning in the text, in the manner of a formalist's objective codification of the linguistic tensions in the work); or, the clear text might represent auctorial "final" intention as well as, or in place of, a merely critically-resolved final structure. Stated bluntly, the problem in any joint synoptic/clear text edition is how far does the latter stage correspond to final intention, insofar as that can be delineated in any single, eclectic text? But with or without clear text, a synoptic text—where multiple authority exists, of course—is a sort of "scrambled" (but presumably decodable) version of the Lachmannian filiative system, except that the synoptic text may eschew the hierarchical format of variants on which the Lachmann method depends. (The distinction is not entirely apt, as I recognise, for even a synoptic text must have a "base" text on which the diacritics can map the dynamic of textual growth, but the formal arrangement of a synoptic text is not inevitably genealogical or stemmatic,
While McGann does acknowledge that there is an intellectual disjunct between Lachmannian stemmatics and twentieth-century intentionalism, it is, I think, a mischaracterisation of the history of textual theory to place the Lachmannian method and its aims (as he does) in a linear relationship with the Greg-Bowers school. The problem with McGann's "schematic history" is that, despite the noted disjunct, he fails properly to recognise the very limited status of the archetype in the Lachmannian system—an acknowledgedly corrupt state of textual transmission which does not respond to intention. Housman saw this weakness in the Lachmannian argument, when he accused the school of relying upon hope rather than judgement in their acquiescence to what amounted to a "best-text" theory,[46] although it was not so called. (There are, of course, several ironies in the terms of this conflict.)
A separate, and much fuller, study would be required to argue the problem of whether a filiative theory of textual criticism is analogous to the sort of geneticism practised by so many contemporary European textuists—Hay, Lebrave, Zeller—or whether Soviet textology, with its emphasis on the "unintentional", "non-authorial" remaniment, is similarly structuralist.[47] As my general tone would indicate, I believe they probably are.
There is one possibly valid methodological distinction which might
I would also hold that the earliest formal structuralism (even though occasionally intentionalist as well) is Third Century BC Alexandrian analogy, whereby an analysis of remaniement structures could be used to determine the nature and content of the phenomenological "gaps" in the documentation of intention. (If the reader will forgive the play, a very convenient modern analogy for analogy would be the non-analog digital method of a CD player, which can be programmed to eradicate transmissional "errors" and to leap over "gaps" in the surface of the CD.) The irony of this ancient Alexandrian system is that it begins to sound rather like the phenomenologist Ingarden's schemata,[54] used to fill "gaps" in the contextual "frame of reference" of the work, and similar to Wolfgang Iser's "strategies" or "repertoires" of themes and codes which again form phenomenological structures for the resolution of intentional cruxes.[55] The Alexandrians' promotion of an ideology of the "Homeric" (or "non-Homeric") line could lead either to a subjective play reminiscent of Barthian jouissance (under the "creative" textual emendations practised by Zenodotus of Ephesus) or (under the more austere
Concluding the triad, we encounter reader-based theories (which, as I have implicitly suggested, can derive very conveniently from apparently text-based theories, as the Kane/Donaldson edition demonstrates). The clearest statement in recent textual theory is, of course, in McGann's Critique—the endorsement, in nineteenth-century editing at least, of the so-called "social" school of textual criticism.[58] Intentionality evaporates in the historical continuum of interpretive communities, for, as in later Fish, there is a shifting of focus from the nature of auctorial consciousness through the nature of the text to the nature of the reading and reconstruction of books. As I have already noted, this position is related to the ancient doctrine of the textus receptus, the cumulative history of the text beyond auctorial control, and is nothing terribly new, even on the "textual" front. On the "critical" front, it is even less startling, for Heidegger's insistence on meanings as "situational" (i.e., fluent and relativistic)[59] and Gadamer's and Jauss' charting of the passage of meaning from one cultural context to another[60] can both be seen to anticipate McGann's position. Ironically, so could Hirsch's acceptance of the fluctuating "significance" of the work,[61] although I recognise that Hirsch is really talking about other than the formal features of the text in this case. Furthermore, I would hazard that Bakhtin's concept of the linguistic community as a battleground over meaning (where "ideological contention" may achieve resolution through such processional devices as the "carnival" of language),[62] might also be observed behind McGann's "new" position. Competing views over "continuity" versus "determinism" have been seen recently in our Attorney General's endorsement of "a jurisprudence of original intention", which Justice Brennan regards as the unfortunate result of minds having "no familiarity with the historical record."[63] Brennan's "relativistic" view of interpretation appears in, for example, Bruce Ackerman's affective theory of constitutionalism, which is frankly based on a Fishian method.[64] "Relativism"
The most notorious demonstration of the post-textual game is the Barthean and Derridean jeu,[65] the "play" on the elements of the text, the purpose of which is the gradual exposure of the inherent aporia, the "central knot of indeterminacy", which is the death-knell not only of auctorial intention and of structuralist system but of codifiable or historically consistent reading as well. Since both reading and writing are temporal media (processional, indeed), we should not be surprised that such indeterminacies are rampant, and some major authors (and critics) have been justifiably brought to book for them. Was Eve created together with Adam or from his rib? What sex was Robinson Crusoe's goat? Did Beowulf have a misspent youth or didn't he? Such textual indeterminacy may be a product of post-auctorial intervention (see, for example, Steven Urkowitz's and others' claims about the history of the conflated editing of Lear,[66] or the sectarian editing of the New Testament) or, it may result from a combination of internal and external (i.e., auctorial and editorial) "de-construction". Hershel Parker's recent textual career[67] has been dominated by a concern for such self-contradictions in American fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where the argument is that these texts cannot be read as if they were single creative entities. However, Parker's "knot of indeterminacy" could presumably be avoided with enough auctorial and editorial care and control, whereas (according to Hillis Miller at least),[68] the deconstructor merely demonstrates the native aporia of the text—he does not create it, and it is, in fact, inevitable. But Parker's and Derrida's concerns, while differently motivated, are not dissimilar in their application: both tend to take the specific image, scene, or fragmentary moment, and to work the implications and ambiguities of this moment in its reflective qualities throughout the text (back and forth), to allow it to accomplish the dismantling of the logic of the text as a whole.[69] Both are interested in the "traces" of meaning left in a text, and both are concerned with différance, the reader's continually having to "defer" a conclusive, closed interpretation of a text. To both critics, texts are embarrassments, embarrassments of narrative and of logic.
Where does this leave us? I had a neat and superficially plausible conclusion for this survey, full of tropes of balance and dialectic, historicism and relativism, but since this prolegomenon really offers only a descriptive challenge rather than a synthetic resolution, such a conclusion would probably be unjustifiable at this stage of the debate. So, instead, I have a specific, rather than a general assertion: it is not exactly
The Formalist Shklovsky proclaimed that "defamiliarisation" (estranje) was an essential function of literary language, and the implication of this assertion is that the intention of a truly "literary" author is to evoke a sense of the defamiliar.[71] As has often been observed, this emphasis on the defamiliarisation of language tends to promote a criticism of texts for their ironic qualities, and therefore tends to favour texts with linguistic or metaphorical tensions which may appear inaccessible or paradoxical but which can be resolved by the formalist critic's elucidation. Thus, the power of formalist criticism is to describe the auctorial defamiliarisation of language while ultimately rendering it accessible. I would hold that the "classical" textual theory of lectio difficilior probior/potior est (the more difficult reading is the more "correct" or "moral" or "powerful")[72] operates under the same assumption that auctorial intention will be embedded in the least "familiar" (to scribe and reader) of the variants available. In fact, the textual dogma may go further than this, and in the hands of conjecturalist critics it might suggest that a "difficult" reading representative of auctorial will must be created where documentary evidence yields only an accessible variant or variants. Used as a technical device in charting stemmatic filiations (i.e., the direction of "error"), the lectio difficilior is, like estranje, an endorsement of an ideology of literariness that shows itself primarily in its disjunctive nature (i.e., disjunctive from the norm, the expected, and the derivative). Both theories emphasise originality of mind and linguistic usage as the primary means of the recovery of auctorial intention, and both rest upon a definition of literariness that is assumed rather than tested. And both (ironically) claim to be purely formal, objective, analytical methods of approaching the text while in fact depending upon highly problematical evaluative positions.
My contention for this occasion is simply that the conceptual and methodological premises of such ideological pairings of literary and textual theory could benefit from a simultaneous investigation. Much work needs to be done to suggest how differing theoretical perceptions would result in differing texts, and I have elsewhere sketched some of the evidence that might be used to determine whether an edition is "formalist" or "structuralist" or "deconstructive".[73] But, as the various and several appearances in this survey of such complex editions as Gabler's Ulysses and Kane/Donaldson's Piers Plowman demonstrate, two or more competing theoretical dispensations might lie behind the practice of
And Greg? Are we to place him among the prescient post-structuralists rather than among the strict and pure bibliographers? Probably not, for his insistence on the inaccessibility of inherent meaning can be accounted for historically by a dogmatic bibliographical reliance on the technology of textual analysis, where intended meaning as an aesthetic predisposition on the part of the textual critic (see Bentley and Kane/ Donaldson) might indeed be seen as a liability to the practising historian of technology or to the "objective" textual critic. Greg provides the provocation for this paper, but I do not regard him as a forerunner of Jacques Derrida.
Notes
A preliminary version of this article was presented in Atlanta, Georgia, at a SAMLA convention (1985) in a session on "Editing and Recent Literary Theory".
"Shakespeare: Text and Deconstruction" (December, 1985), CUNY Graduate Center. The paper was an attempt to draw together recent developments in Shakespeare studies as described in conference papers by both textual critics (Steven Urkowitz and T. H. Howard-Hill, and literary critics (Annabel Patterson and Jean Howard).
I.e., the growing insistence that the variant states of such plays as Hamlet (1603, 1605, 1623), King Lear (1608, 1623), Romeo and Juliet (1597, 1599), and Merry Wives of Windsor (1600, 1623) demonstrate the hand of Shakespeare the "reviser", rather than a single "authoritative" version with corrupt variant states, created, for example, by "memorial reconstruction" or inept piracy.
The influence of the New Criticism and eclectic, single-intention texts is, of course, not perfectly co-terminous, for the principles of the eclectic text were formed over several centuries of experimentation and of a gradual increase in the early twentieth-century knowledge of the technical circumstances of the transmission of Elizabethan drama, whereas New Criticism was a much more recent (and local) phenomenon. However, each achieved a dominant academic position in the first few decades after the Second World War, with New Criticism ceding to structuralism and other theoretical persuasions and eclecticism being challenged by revisionism in the early and mid-1970's.
There is inevitably some irony in the New Critics' having rejected intention as a motivating force for their analysis (indeed, in having disdained it as a "Fallacy"), while using the concept of the single, informing, consciousness as a unifying and
Perhaps the most unsavoury event (for both sides) in this moral conflict was the recent revelation that one of the founders of deconstruction, Paul de Man, had contributed to a fascist journal during the war years. To the "humanist" critics of post-structuralism, such an historical discovery seemed to vindicate their charge that deconstruction was at best an amoral, anti-humanist enterprise, and at worst, a socially pernicious one. To the deconstructors, this "history" was just another example of the figurative ineluctability of language and perhaps of the basic contradictions that underlie all utterances—including the life of the critic. The debate has not rested, but for a long and measured estimation of the problem, see Jacques Derrida, "Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man's War," Critical Inquiry, 14 (Spring, 1988), 590-652.
Based on his Sandars lectures at Cambridge University (1958), this collection of essays placed the onus for self-education and change clearly on the shoulders of the literary critics. Noting that "We should be seriously disturbed by the lack of contact between literary critics and textual critics" (p. 4), Bowers cites what have become famous examples (by, for example, Matthiessen and Empson) of textual errors—even outright textual misrepresentations—being used by literary critics to promote aesthetic theories which an accurate text would not support. Unfortunately, Bowers' assertion (thirty years ago) that "it is still a current oddity that many a literary critic has investigated the past ownership of and mechanical condition of his second-hand automobile, or the pedigree and training of his dog, more thoroughly than he has looked into the qualifications of the text on which his critical theories rest" (p. 5) is perhaps even more relevant in these post-structuralist days, when an active "misprision" of texts is encouraged by such critics as Harold Bloom.
G. Thomas Tanselle, "The Editorial Problem of Final Authorial Intention," Studies in Bibliography, 29 (1976), 167-211, reprinted in his Selected Studies in Bibliography (1979), pp. 309-353.
James McLaverty, "The Concept of Authorial Intention in Textual Criticism," The Library, 6th Ser. VI (June 1984), 121-138. Another pertinent essay by McLaverty, again dealing with theoretical matters, even alludes directly to a key document of literary criticism in its title—"The Mode of Existence of Literary Works of Art," (Studies in Bibliography, 37 [1984], 82-105)—referring to chapter 12 of Wellek and Warren's Theory of Literature 3rd. ed. (1949, rprt. 1963).
Peter L. Shillingsburg, Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Lectures in Theory and Practice (1984), University of New South Wales Department of English Occasional Papers, No. 3. See especially the chapters on "Ontology", "Intention", and "Expectation". See also his "Key Issues in Editorial Theory," (an attempt to define the major terms—work, version, text etc.— of the debate), Analytical & Enumerative Bibliography, 6 (1982), 1, 3-16; Hershel Parker, Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons: Literary Authority in American Fiction (1984), "'The Text Itself'—Whatever That Is," TEXT, 3 (1986), 47-54; Jerome J. McGann, "Shall These Bones Live?", TEXT, 1 (1981), 21-40, "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, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (1983), and "Interpretation, Meaning, and Textual Criticism," TEXT, 3 (1986), 55-62; Louis Hay, "Genetic Editing, Past and Future: A Few Reflections by a User," TEXT, 3 (1986), 117-134; "Does 'Text' Exist?," Studies in Bibliography,
See, for example, the three-day "Symposium on Textual Scholarship and Literary Theory" (27-29 March, 1987), sponsored by the Society for Critical Exchange, at Miami University, Ohio. The proceedings (with essays by, for example, Shillingsburg, James L. W. West, Steven Mailloux, Gerald Graff, and response by Greetham) will appear in a special issue of Critical Exchange (1988). The 1987 conference of the Society for Textual Scholarship (9-11 April) included a special session on textual and literary theory ("Where Worlds Collide: The Contact Between Literary Theory and Literary Artifacts"). The 1989 conference of STS (April 6-8) includes three sessions on textual and literary theory—a plenary session with McGann and Jonathan Goldberg, and two member-organized special sessions.
For example, the "theoretical" journal Critical Inquiry first published part of chapter 1 of Parker's Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons under the title "Lost Authority: Non-Sense, Skewed Meanings, and Intentionless Meanings," reprinted in Against Theory, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (1985), pp. 72-79. This collection, which is used later in this essay to provide some of the terms for the theory/empiricism debate, included, appropriately enough, contributions by Hirsch, Mailloux, Fish, and Rorty. Another recent article is John Sutherland's account of "Publishing History: A Hole at the Centre of Literary Sociology," Critical Inquiry, 14 (Spring, 1988), 574-589, a reading of the careers of Robert Darnton, Jerome McGann, and D. F. McKenzie. While the estimation might be salutary for 'critical' readers unused to confronting 'textual' problems, several of Sutherland's assertions (e.g., that McGann is essentially a Marxist) obviously need a fuller debate than is given. In general, 'critical' readers seem concerned with textual issues only when they provoke controversy or contention (e.g., John Kidd's attack on the Gabler Ulysses in The New York Review of Books, 30 June 1988, 32-39).
For example, Steven Mailloux, Interpretive Conventions: The Reader in the Study of American Fiction (1982), includes a chapter on "Textual Scholarship and 'Author's Final Intention.'" The example is rare, however, of a critic who is primarily a theorist being concerned about "textual" matters (none of the contributors to Against Theory, for example—with the exception of Parker—raise textual problems). It was, typically, Mailloux who convened the SAMLA session on "Editing and Recent Literary Theory" that occasioned the first version of this present article.
See the previous note and the following anecdotal illustration of the problem. At a 1987 Minnesota conference (sponsored by the Modern Language Association and the Ford Foundation) called to determine "the Future of Doctoral Programs in English", Richard Lanham gave what he considered to be a cautionary paper, warning literature departments that new kinds of texts not necessarily reflecting a simple, uniform intention might one day be produced. He (and the other literary theorists on the panel and in the audience—e.g., Wayne Booth, Jonathan Culler) were unaware that such "multiple" texts either already existed or had already been conceived by textual critics. Lanham simply assumed (as Bowers sadly noted of literary critics in 1958) that there had been no advances in textual criticism in the last few decades. During the question period, he conceded that the minatory moment was riper than he had imagined.
In the editing of mediaeval texts, for example, there is often the tacit (or expressed) suggestion that recension is the first and major order of business. Alfred Foulet's and Mary B. Speer's On Editing Old French Texts (1979) poses the typical situation: "If the text to be edited has been preserved in three or more manuscripts, the editor should attempt to classify these manuscripts and diagram their relationships by means of a stemma (genealogical tree). The purpose of the stemma is to depict, in graphic form, the affinities of the various manuscripts and their kinship with their lost common ancestor, the archetype" (p. 49). This spare statement assumes
Two particularly striking recent examples of Tanselle's synthesing coverage include "Historicism and Critical Editing," Studies in Bibliography, 39 (1986), 1-46 (reprinted in his Textual Criticism Since Greg [1987], pp. 109-154), and "Bibliographical History as a Field of Study," Studies in Bibliography, 41 (1988), 33-63, the first a thematic and historical survey of recent textual scholarship and the second a history of a history; together they exemplify the role of scholiast and commentator which Tanselle has assumed for the discipline.
An exemplary, if anecdotal, illustration of the problem: at the 1987 convention of the Association for Documentary Editing (Boston, 5-7 November), a session on "The Presentation of Manuscript Texts" produced three papers of the "what we did" type (James Buchanan on the Documentary History of the Supreme Court, Peter Drummey on "A Librarian's Point of View", and Ralph Carlson on "Manuscript Facsimiles"—the latter from the publisher's perspective). All were solid, scholarly, and well-documented, and offered in their very variety a series of different professional attitudes to the question of manuscript presentation. But because they had no theoretical underpinning—they were practical "hands-on" accounts—their implications extended only marginally beyond the projects they described. However, Albert von Frank's paper "Genetic Versus Clear Texts" (subsequently published in Documentary Editing, 9, No. 4 [December 1987], 5-9), while it selected its examples from a specific author (Emerson), explored the principles at stake in the decision to produce a genetic or clear text, asserting (for example) that literary critics might be better persuaded of the "poetics of editing" from having to confront a genetic text edition. It is, I believe, something like the Frank approach which Tanselle was describing in his call for a discussion of "the basic issues that we should consider from an interdisciplinary perspective" instead of the presentation of "watered-down versions of what we are already doing in our individual fields", "Presidential Address," TEXT, 1 (1981), 5.
In his various writings, Tanselle has repeatedly insisted on the role of critical judgement; perhaps the most direct statement occurs in his short essay on "Textual Scholarship" for the MLA's Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures, ed. Joseph Gibaldi (1981), where he argues that [editors'] "work is a
The interdisciplinary science of chaos, developing first in mathematics, but then moving into physics, geology, astronomy, sociology, art history, and economics, has begun to predict new types of constant, new patterns of order, beneath the apparent unpredictability of, for example, the weather, the stock market, and the formation of snow-flakes. Its applicability to textual problems is potentially enormous (e.g., in stylometrics, auctorial accidence, collation and filiation), but, to my knowledge, no textual critics have yet taken advantage of its interdisciplinary implications (see James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science [1987]).
Geetz suggests that the function of anthropology is "to unpack the layers of meaning in the conceptual world". John Rawls regards the entire body of the law—written and unwritten—as a "text" for moral and epistemological interpretation, with "variants" having significant ethical, cultural, and semiotic value. For a discussion of the interdisciplinary importance of such textual establishment, recording, and interpretation, see W. J. Winkler, "Interdisciplinary Research: How Big a Challenge to Traditional Fields?" in Chronicle of Higher Education, 7 Oct. 1987, 1, 14-15.
Rorty's "textualism"—the investigation of any text, legal document, historical paper, or literary work for differential or variant "meaning"—would be one of the studies contained in Scholes's vision of the new university. "I think that the humanities and some of the social sciences are shrinking into one large department. . . . Divisions between, for example, literature and philosophy are not as great as they used to be. It would be very easy, if you didn't have all the traditional department names, to put together a single department—call it a textual department" (cited in Winkler, p. 14).
This problem—of our academic colleagues being unfamiliar with, and disdainful of, textual scholarship—is addressed briefly in my article "A Suspicion of Texts," THESIS, 2 (Fall, 1987), 18-25.
W. W. Greg, "Bibliography—An Apologia," The Library, 4th. Series, 13 (1932), 121-122. The quotation is, of course, used here as a partial misrepresentation of Greg's position on theories of meaning and the critical interpretation of intention. However, the same article might be instructive to both formalists and deconstructors, for Greg notes that theoretically "the study of textual transmission involves no knowledge of the sense of a document but only of its form; the document may theoretically be devoid of meaning or the critic ignorant of its language" (p. 122), concluding, therefore, that it might be "a very interesting exercise . . . to edit a text that had no meaning" (p. 123). This sounds like the precepts of extreme defamiliarisation and deconstruction having been anticipated by bibliography, and one might note that the algorithmic mapping employed by Vinton A. Dearing, one of Greg's more ardent "scientific" adherents, uses symbolic logic and a somewhat dense rhetoric in the establishment of the argument for the "principles of parsimony" and "rings" which are to be the vehicles for an essentially non-verbal "textual analysis", displayed with great mathematical rigour but little substantive content. Dearing's Principles and Practice of Textual Analysis (1974) is highly dependent on Greg's algebraic argument, especially his Calculus of Variants.
Mailloux, for example, suggests that Hancher-Tanselle's definition of "active intentions" ("active intentions characterize the actions that the author, at the time he finishes the text, understands himself to be performing in that text"—Michael Hancher, "Three Kinds of Intention," MLN, 87 [1972], 830; Tanselle, "Final Intentions," 175) should be redefined to "active intentions characterize the actions that the author, as he writes the text, understands himself to be performing in that text"
While Mailloux aligns himself with the "interpretive community" school (and therefore with a reader-response ethic in the text), his analysis of, for example, the rationale given by the editors of the Northwestern-Newberry Melville for having emended nations to matrons (Mailloux, pp. 114-115) relies upon the reader-critic's mind having been subsumed into the consciousness of the author, and is therefore closer to Poulet's suggestion that the reader becomes the author/narrator, than it is to Fish's insistence that the reader creates the author. On Poulet, see below, fn. 49.
See especially chapter 3 of the Critique ("The Ideology of Final Intentions"), where McGann claims that the Greg-Bowers-Tanselle line of final intentions is founded on a "Romantic ideology of the relations between an author, his works, his institutional affiliations, and his audience" (p. 42), and cites, in its stead, the position of James Thorpe (Principles of Textual Criticism [1972], p. 48), that "The work of art is . . . always tending toward a collaborative status." McGann extrapolates from this to declare that "literary works are fundamentally social rather than personal or psychological products . . . . [they] must be produced within some appropriate set of social institutions" (pp. 43-44).
Indeed, Tanselle ("Textual Scholarship" p. 40 and elsewhere) regards Greg's very choice of terms, especially "accidentals", as "misleading" and "unfortunate" (largely because the division suggests—inaccurately—that accidentals do not contribute to "meaning"). However, the terms have stuck and have, at least in popular usage, come to embody the divided—and differing—authority I cite here.
McLaverty, "Intention," esp. p. 124, "Hirsch is much the most important figure [among literary theorists] as far as textual criticism is concerned"—a statement I would question given the wider-ranging compass of my survey. Note, further, that McLaverty suggests that textual critics (who use the word "intention" in its first OED sense—"a volition which one is minded to carry out") may have misappropriated Hirsch, who generally uses "intention" in the second OED sense—"the direction or application of the mind to an object" (122-123).
G. Thomas Tanselle, "The Achievement of Fredson Bowers," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 79 (1985), 3-18, esp. p. 13 (of Bibliography and Textual Criticism), "One might perhaps take from it (once again) the conclusion that bibliographers are historians, confronting the same problem that all historians face: how to weigh the preserved evidence in order to reconstruct past events."
See, for example, Hershel Parker, "The 'New Scholarship': Textual Evidence and Its Implications for Criticism, Literary Theory, and Aesthetics," Studies in American Fiction, 9 (1981), 181-197.
The slogan of Husserl's phenomenology, "Back to the Things Themselves!" suggests the concrete, historical, value of this stage of the theory. As a science of consciousness, early phenomenology seemed to provide for the mind the objectivity which historical critics sought in the event—hence its importance to the theoretical discussion of textual intentionality and historicism. See Edmund Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology (1964).
While Gadamer uses Heidegger's rejection of Husserl's "objectivist" view in the study of literary theory (Truth and Method [1960]), he does allow that the varying levels of intention are just as much a part of the "historical" situation as is interpretation. Different aspects of both Gadamer's and Heidegger's reflexive stance between Historie (objective "events") and Geschichte (meaning-full narrative) can, of course, be employed to place them on a linear development from "historicity" to "reception".
See Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, tr. T. Bahti (1982) and especially "Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory," in Ralph Cohen, ed., New Directions in Literary History (1974), pp. 11-41.
Jauss, "The Alterity and Modernity of Medieval Literature," New Literary History, 10 (1979), 181-227.
For example, in rejecting (Critique, p. 112) Tanselle's claim that regularizing and modernizing are "ahistorical" ("Every literary production is ahistorical in the sense of Tanselle's usage"), McGann asserts that Tanselle's limited view of an immediate historicity "does not recognize the historical dimension of all literary productions, including modernized editions, and so forth" (p. 112). Like Gadamer, McGann sees history not as specifically local to the author, but as a continuum on which later (even modernized) editions, even editions showing the collaboration of later hands, can be plotted in a linear extrapolation of "authority" and "meaning". Tanselle and McGann both appeal to history, but their appeal reflects two very different ideological assumptions.
See Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (1972), esp. 339-340, for the argument that "[m]ost authors even today expect the printer to normalize their spelling and capitalization", that "the actual writing of the manuscript . . . is a means of composition, not an end", and that, unless the work was not intended for publication at all (e.g., letters, diaries) or unless the editor can prove that the "author disapproved of the printer's normalization", then the first edition will normally best represent "the text the author wanted to . . . be read". Thus, Thorpe, with his support of the "collaborative" nature of literary composition (see fn. 26), and Gaskell, with his removal of intention from manuscript to print, can both be invoked by textual and literary critics desirous of diluting the authority of author and original intention. But Thorpe and Gaskell are still basically historicists.
For a wide-ranging consideration of the literary and linguistic nature of defamiliarisation, see R. H. Stacy, Defamiliarization in Language and Literature (1977).
James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior, 3v. (1984). Tanselle ("Historicism and Critical Editing," Studies in Bibliography, 39 [1986]) argues that there is a methodological distinction to be made between genetic and synoptic texts: "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 and recorded 'in the type of subsidiary apparatus best suited to the purpose, i.e., an appended lemmatised emendation list'" (fn. 72, 38-39). Tanselle draws an important practical distinction here for the specific problems of the Gabler edition, but it is a distinction which is not automatically inherent to synoptic and genetic texts. For example, it is surely possible to envisage a so-called "genetic" text which does cite variants from several documents, and to imagine a "synoptic" text without editorial emendation, or one in which non-auctorial historical collation were also included (this latter question has, indeed, been one of the main contentions between Gabler and some of his critics—see fn. 50). Louis Hay, in his study of genetic texts in general (see fn. 9), describes works (including the Gabler Ulysses) which are extant in more than one document. The important point for the present discussion is that both synoptic and/or genetic texts represent structural "layers" of text, document, and "meaning": as Hay puts it—"the stress is no longer on the author's intentions but on the structure of the text; the whole set of permutations of variants is taken into account with all its potential for textual filiation and convergence; and synoptic display assumes its position alongside lemmatized listings, or 'steps'" p. 119).
For an account of the Lachmann system, see S. Timpanaro, Die Entstehung der Lachmannschen Methode (1971), rev. transl. of La genesi del metodo del Lachmann
McGann's "schematic history" (chapter 1 of the Critique) of modern textual criticism draws a direct line of descent from Lachmannism to Greg-Bowers intentionalism: [of Bowers' treatment of Hawthorne]—"though the textual problems are far removed from those faced by Lachmann, the influence of the classical approach is clear" (p. 20); [of Bowers' "theory of a critical edition"]: "Bowers's views, then, continue to show the influence of the textual criticism developed in the field of classical studies" (p. 21). McGann does note that the usual "monogenous" textual history of, e.g., Shakespeare versus the "polygenous" transmission of classical literature required "some adjustments of the Lachmann Method by Shakespearean scholars" (p. 17), and that the problem of final intention was a "third area" added by modern textual critics to the two "classical" problems of the critical edition and the copy-text (p. 23); but McGann's enlistment of Lachmannism as a precursor of "Greg-Bowersism" stresses a continuity which is, in my view, chimerical, and does not delineate between classical and modern (Greg-Bowers) textual criticism in the appropriate theoretical terms. The distinction between, on the one hand, the Lachmannians' (and especially the post-Lachmannians') acceptance of the corrupt arche-type and consequent avoidance of intention as a theoretical issue and, on the other, the Bowers-Tanselle concentration on "intention" as a motivating force for textual criticism is a distinction between a structuralist and a "writer-based" theory. Editors of classical authors may have talked a good deal about "stripping away" the "corruptions" of textual transmission (see Kenney, p. 25 for some account of the prevalent metaphor of emaculare in classical textual scholarship), but stemmatic theory—because of its fundamental text-based structuralism—never achieved the relative writer-based certitude of the modern intentionalists. Housman (see fn. 46, and his prefaces to Manilius) saw the conceptual limitations of the post-Lachmannian archetype, which effectively placed him closer to the intentionalists than to the structuralists).
It is the difference which creates the opposition, so that "on" is "on" precisely because it is not "off". This is a directly comparable operation to the Lachmannians' conceptual—and methodological—distinction of difference between "text" and "variant", "truth" and "error", and creates, like structuralist anthropology, linguistics, and poetics, a "grammar" of meaning, all produced by the wide applicability of the relationships discovered as a result of these oppositions. See, e.g., Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957), Elements of Semiology (1967), Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (tr. 1974), Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (1975), Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structuralist Anthropology (tr. 1968).
See Joseph Bédier, "La Tradition manuscrite du Lai de l'Ombre: reflexions sur l'art d'editer les anciens textes," Romania, 54 (1928), 161-196, 321-356, repr. as pamphlet, 1970.
See esp. "textual criticism is not a branch of mathematics, nor indeed an exact science at all," "The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism," in Selected Prose, ed. John Carter (1961), 132.
In addition to the references cited in fn. 42 see Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, eds., The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man (1970).
On textology, see John L. I. Fennell, "Textology as a Key to the Study of Old Russian Literature and History," TEXT 1 (1981), 157-166; on geneticism see Hay (fn. 9 and 39), Jean-Louis Lebrave, "Rough Drafts: A Challenge to Uniformity in Editing," TEXT, 3 (1986), 135-142, and Hans Zeller, "A New Approach to the Critical Constitution of Literary Texts," Studies in Bibliography, 28 (1975), 231-263 and Zeller and Gunter Martens' Texte und Variationen. Probleme ihrer Edition und Interpretation (1971).
That is, a clear text can be thought of as embodying "final intentions" only, and the synoptic text similarly looked on as showing the "growth" of an artist's mind. Such a relationship would suggest that phenomenology can lead (methodologically, at least) to intentionalism, rather than vice versa. Tanselle ("Historicism" p. 39) asks the pertinent question (of Gabler's synoptic and clear texts): "But why, one is bound to ask, should there be a separate 'reading' text if all the variants are an essential part of the work? Why should 'the object of scholarly and critical analysis and study' (which is the 'totality of the Work in Progress') be seen as 'opposed' to 'a general public's reading matter'?" I share Tanselle's unease, but I offer in this paper two different theoretical grounds for looking at synoptic and clear texts which might provide an answer to the question.
That is, Poulet's insistence that the phenomenologist is "thinking the thoughts of another" might seem to be exemplified textually by the reversals, changes of mind, ellipses, and intellectual detours charted by the genetic text. But this is so only if the genetic text is used to recover intention (e.g., in a clear text)—a somewhat problematic assertion, as Hay and Zeller note (see fn. 39). Georges Poulet, "Criticism and the Experience of Interiority," tr. Catherine Macksey, in Reader-Response Criticism, ed. Jane P. Tompkins (1980), p. 44.
That is, the synoptic apparatus becomes the focus of the reading, not the clear text, which is seen as a mere "concession" to readability. The function of the synoptic apparatus (and in fact any critical apparatus sufficiently dense and clear) is to display a series of "on/off" or "truth/error" switches: each time a variant is cited, it can be cited precisely because it is not a different one. The structuralist analysis (i.e., x ≠ y) of multiple-witness texts would, of course, be an enormously complex enterprise, since each variant would need to be charted independently and in every possible relationship with every other, but it is not dissimilar to the principle of distributional analysis championed by Dom Henri Quentin and others. If the synoptic apparatus does contain all variants (with no separate historical collation for non-auctorial variants), then it could indeed represent that "universe of the text" which the structuralists sought. In the case of the Gabler Ulysses, there is apparently some question whether the distinction between auctorial and non-auctorial variants, and their respective placing in the synoptic apparatus or the historical collation, has been perfectly observed. John Kidd's New York Review article (fn. 11) asserts (as only a part of his general attack on the methodology, scholarship, and ideology of the Gabler edition) that the division of authority between authorial and non-authorial variants is imperfect or blurred in the synoptic edition (and that there is at times a conflation, or a confusion, of intention and structuralism—although he does not use those precise terms). The case awaits further debate, with a fuller account of Kidd's findings in PBSA.
I.e., a reduction of literary genre to its inherent structural form—a series of relationships deriving from absolute or invariable models outside the work. One of the inevitable criticisms of such an approach is that the imposition of a universal system, often inherited from folklorists like Propp, does not allow for a distinction between, say, Verdi's Otello, Shakespeare's Othello, or the Italian sources (Cinthio/Ariosto), since they all display similar "syntagms" (narrative segments) yielding similar structural features even though they are in different genres. Despite its concentration on "difference", structuralism is paradoxically often more concerned with similitudes, especially formal ones. For a critique of the major North American proto-structuralist of literary genre, Northrop Frye, and his The Anatomy of Criticism (1957), see Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (1980), pp. 3-26.
See the post-structuralist style of Barthes' work (represented comparatively early by the dissolution of structuralist system in S/Z [1970]), where Balzac's novel Sarrasine is first reduced (according to structuralist linguistics) into its basic titular phoneme s/z (unvoiced/voiced sibilant), and then into 561 lexias (or reading units), whereby the realistic novel is dismembered into a series of elemental, ambivalent
Derek Pearsall, for example, grants a particular privilege to this variety in composition, when he accords special value to those Chaucerian manuscripts "where scribal editors have participated most fully in the activity of a poem, often at a high level of intellectual and even creative engagement." "Editing Medieval Texts," in Jerome J. McGann, ed., Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation (1985), p. 105.
See Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art (1931), where it is argued that all texts display "indeterminacies" or "gaps" which can be filled, to form a completed "harmony" for the work, by the reader's active employment of "schemata" —the patterns of understanding derived from a careful critical engagement with the authority of the work. The same argument—of a gradually acquired "familiarity" with textual and auctorial usage being the editorial determinant for successful emendation and filling of lacunae—has, of course, often sustained a critical, eclectic, edition.
Wolfgang Iser, The Art of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (1978) allows the reader to make use of the "strategies" or "repertoires" redolent but not immediate in a work, and by continuous negotiation with the resultant "networks" or matrixes, to achieve a phenomenological wholeness of understanding. It was just such a wholeness of understanding which the Alexandrians sought, and by roughly similar intellectual processes.
For an account of analogy and the Alexandrians, see J. E. Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship, 3v. (1908, repr. 1958), and Rudolph Pfeiffer, The History of Classical Scholarship, 2v. (1968-76).
Kane-Donaldson's desire for a "perfect" line (criticised in David C. Fowler's review-essay "A New Edition of the B Text of Piers Plowman," The Yearbook of English Studies, 7 [1977], 23-42, a review of Piers Plowman: The B Version. . . . An Edition in the Form of Trinity College MS B. 15. 17 . . . . ed. George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson [1975]) could perhaps be regarded as a phenomenological "completion" of the auctorial consciousness. However, Fowler's strictures (and Kane/ Donaldson's clear awareness of the un-documentary license they were taking) lead me to place this important—and highly contentious—edition on a cusp leading into a post-structuralist dispensation, where "meaning" is not simply a matter of the completion, but (where it exists consistently at all) is ephemeral, local, and negotiated most productively in a text which, like Piers Plowman, is overtly scriptible (that is, a text which is not closed or final or "readerly"—lisible—but open-ended, productive, and elusive). In fact, this latter description of the inherent characteristics of Piers Plowman would seem, from its textual history, to have been shared by the extremely creative, and inventive, scribes who participated in its transmission. The ambivalence over the placing of this text and this particular edition in our matrix simply confirms that the divisions of current literary and textual theory are not absolute, and that one dispensation may gradually slide into another. The careers of such protean theorists as J. Hillis Miller and Jonathan Culler exemplify this tendency.
I am aware that Professor McGann might reject the idea that he founded a "school" of textual criticism with the Critique (and he has continually to struggle against literary and textual critics' having erroneously co-opted or misappropriated his ideas), but there can be little denying the wide influence of his slim book. Like it or not, "social textual criticism"—after McGann's enunciation of its principles—is now a major focus for debate, some of it contentious.
E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (1976). As noted above, Hirsch distinguishes between "significance", which can vary in history, and "meaning", which
Bakhtin's insistence on "polyphony"—multiple and subjective voices in the battle over meaning, together with his rejection of the univocal, organic, and integrated meaning of the Formalists, accords well with McGann's similar rejection of a monodic intentionalism and an espousal of historical multiplicity. See Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (tr. 1973), and (with P. N. Medvedev) The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (tr. 1978).
"Administration Trolling for Constitutional Debate," The New York Times (28 October, 1985), p. A12.
Ackerman began his investigation of Fish's method as an analog for constitutional history while a professor in the Yale Law School. Later moving to Columbia (and now back to Yale), his collaboration with Fish was more direct (particularly since Fish himself had begun to publish in law journals, and was beginning to read legal history from an "affective" point of view). Ackerman's study of constitutional history through reception theory is (I believe) still forthcoming.
The reader's "play" in the text is best exemplified in Barthes' The Pleasures of the Text (1975), where jouissance is whatever exceeds a simple, unambiguous meaning. The Derridean jeu—punning, figurative, non-denotative play in and on language—can be seen in his critical terms as well as in the substance of his writing (e.g., différance—from "differ" and "defer", a "resultant difference" which can not be heard in French, but only read). As a perfect example of his "play" in argument, see his reduction of his rival the Speech Act theoretician Searle to SARL ("Société à responsibilité limitée) in Limited Inc abc (1977).
See Steven Urkowitz, Shakespeare's Revision of King Lear (1980), E. A. J. Honigmann's The Stability of Shakespeare's Text (1965), and Michael Warren and Gary Taylor, eds., The Division of the Kingdoms (1983).
Parker produces examples of "maimed" texts in Norman Mailer, Henry James, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, and others, claiming that the typical circumstances of composition, censorship, publication and revision in American fiction of the period created texts which are inconsistent and "unreadable".
"Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself." J. Hillis Miller, "Steven's Rock and Criticism as Cure, II", Georgia Review, 30 (1976).
Examples of the reflexive (and irreconcilable) contradictions introduced into the revised versions of American fiction include, according to Parker, the excision of the encounter with the huge fat man in Crane's Maggie, the "unjoined" twins in Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson, and the change in the character of Stephen Richards Rojack in Mailer's An American Dream. Parker's general position is that such indeterminacies are so widespread that they can collectively be brought together as a theory of fiction (or at least American fiction of the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries). Tanselle ("Historicism", pp. 27-36) finds the generalisation implausible, and notes that, despite Parker's apparent endorsement of auctorial intention, he has in effect moved the aesthetic prerogative to the editor, or (as I would hold, claiming Parker as a deconstructor) to the reader.
Tanselle: "I am always impatient with persons who ask, upon hearing a theoretical statement which is clearly undeniable, how often it proves to be relevant in practice—as if the quantity of such occurrences has anything to do with the validity of the statement." "Presidential Address," TEXT (1981), 4.
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