University of Virginia Library

I

The roots of modern textual criticism lie in classical and biblical textual scholarship which generally speaking assumes an ur-text, most often no longer extant. The editorial task in such situations is to reconstruct this ur-text, which is usually conceived to have been single and completed. If variant readings occur in competing modern editions of classical or biblical works, they usually reflect the difficulty editors have in sifting the evidence of extant derivative source texts and their differing assessments of the importance of

specific problems. The differences seldom represent disagreements about the aim or purpose of editing, which is to recover or reconstruct the archetype or ur-text.

When editors turned to textual criticism of modern works for which authorized texts were extant and for which even authorial materials such as manuscripts survived, the idea of an archetype or ideal text was not easily discarded. The comparative richness and authenticity of materials merely made it seem more likely that success could be achieved in editorial work. The concept of definitive texts seemed plausible.

Generally speaking, the evolving editorial principles in the mid-twentieth century all assume that the literary work was the product of an author whose wishes concerning the text were to be paramount, and that the work should be edited in such a way as to produce the "established" text. The purpose of critical apparatuses was to show what the editor had done to produce the "established" text and to show what historical authorial forms of the text had been used as a basis for establishing the new text.[4]

The editorial discussions of the twenty years preceding 1980 did not seriously question these assumptions, concentrating instead on issues related to "final intentions" (exploring distinctions between artistic and commercial intentions and debating whether the terms "final intentions" and "last intentions" were synonymous),[5] and on issues related to the treatment of accidentals (exploring distinctions between purely formal elements and "semi-substantives"[6]).

Some potentially interesting questions were raised about fulfilling authorial expectations (as opposed to authorial intentions), but even these did not clearly challenge the underlying assumption that the work belonged to the author and that the task of the editor was to serve the author. Most of the arguments on the side of serving the reader (objections to "barbed wire" editions, encouragement of modernized editions)[7] were dismissed as corrupting influences that pandered to popular audiences. Only one "reader service" principle has found general acceptance in American scholarly editing—the clear reading text, uninterrupted by footnotes or note indicators in the text. It is probable that this principle reflects more than anything else the result of belief in the established definitive text, the recovery of Pure Virgin Text.[8]

A few relatively serious but largely unsuccessful attempts were made in that period to legitimize the role of publishing and production crews in the eyes of scholarly editors. That is, there were some attempts to show that secretaries, editors, compositors, and advisors often enough gave "good" advice and that sometimes their good effects had to be carried out in spite of the author's wishes or, in the case of absent or dead authors, without any indication of the author's wishes. One of the first such efforts, by James Thorpe, defined the work of art as merely "potential" until it was published.[9] The effect of this definition was to acknowledge the production process both as an aid to the author in finalizing the work and as a necessary fact of life enabling works of art to be known to readers. To support the first of these propositions, Thorpe argued from specific cases in which the author

received needed help for which he was grateful.[10] The second proposition received its best support from Donald Pizer in a series of objections to the editing of texts (particularly Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage by Henry Binder and the Pennsylvania Edition of Dreiser's Sister Carrie) in which the pursuit of purely authorial forms produced a text so different from the "cultural" artifact that had been known so long that, Pizer thought, serious confusion resulted about what the "real" text was and what it meant.[11] Philip Gaskell generated a considerable amount of press for Thorpe's basic premise in the editorial advice appended to his New Introduction to Bibliography and in his discussion of textual problems in Writer to Reader. Nevertheless, these editorial arguments remained author-centric, for they argue from the belief that the production process was an extension of authorial intention and merely fulfilled expectations for improvement of the work.

Discussion of the "critical" nature of editing did, however, dethrone the concept of definitive texts. Its most visible manifestation was in the emblem of approval designed for CEAA sponsored editions, which reads "An Approved Text." The point was made that the emblem did not say "The Approved Text." To emphasize the point, the Committee on Scholarly Editions, the Modern Language Association's replacement for the CEAA, redesigned the emblem to say "An Approved Edition," a label meant to indicate that the editorial work was definitive, though the text itself was not necessarily so. However, the arguments about critical editions and about what part of them was or was not definitive did not go beyond an acknowledgement that different editors attempting to produce a text that best represented the author's intentions were confronted from time to time with inconclusive evidence and might exercise their judgment differently in those instances.[12] Whatever else they might disagree about, G. Thomas Tanselle wrote, scholarly editors were in general agreement that the aim of editing "is to discover exactly what an author wrote and to determine what form of his work he wished his public to have."[13]

Most editors are well aware of the difficulties the idea of intention represents. Much of editorial debate, as well as the generation of new approaches to editing, is fueled by the problem of identifying intention and of using the concept responsibly in practical ways. Some editors are attracted by theories which attempt to avoid the problem of intention altogether.[14] It is not my purpose to rehearse any of these arguments. Nor do I mean to imply, in quoting Tanselle's remark about the general agreement among editors about the aim of editing (that it is to recover the author's intentions), that he was unaware of the underlying problem; indeed, he has written the most detailed discussion of it.[15]