 | |  |
III
The third new approach is sociological; it is both radically different from and blandly similar to traditional approaches. Its primary spokesmen are Jerome McGann and D. F. McKenzie, whose writings on the subject have generated a good deal of excitement and confusion. The idea that authors live, breathe and have artistic being in a social complex that includes more than the words surviving on pages of manuscripts and printed books is not new. Most editors consider themselves historical researchers—it goes with being a textual critic. It is the arguments of the social contract, not the new evidence, that make the theory worth considering. But the confusion of argument has been and may for some time continue to be a major block to its influence.
There are five and possibly six distinct arguments involved in the sociological approach. The first three are old and ultimately irrelevant if not contradictory; for years they have failed to influence the mainstream of scholarly editing. The fourth and fifth have grown out of critical theory and are sophisticated and well worth attention regardless of whether one adopts the conclusions of their present proponents. Most discussions of social texts, including the first three, have focused on the role of the production process in creating the work of art, but the concept is not limited to that subject, as the fourth and fifth arguments will demonstrate.
Earlier I mentioned attempts by Thorpe, Gaskell, and Pizer to legitimize the production process. It will help to begin with another look at the basic arguments they use, for the first three arguments are really theirs, though McGann occasionally uses them, too.
The first line of reason focuses on the idea that the production process is a necessary and desirable finishing or completion process in which the author turns to the publisher for help—and usually gets it. The argument is supported with examples of felicitous collaborations, all tending to show that the normal process of book production is a happy one.[24] I oversimplify somewhat, but the result of this argument is that, normally, the printed text is preferred as copy-text and, normally, the editor restores "pre-copy-text" forms only when demonstrable errors marred the process. Notice, however, that the justification in this argument is based on a critical assessment of the effect of changes. Regardless of whether the editor acknowledges it, such assessments depend on the aesthetic principles of the critic/editor. This is true even when the editor sets aside his own preferences and pursues what he takes to have been the author's. A basic premise of this argument is that the author's intention is only tentatively or provisionally recorded in the manuscript and that the collective experience and judgment of publishers and editors help the author fulfil his intentions—thus, authorial intention and editorial judgment combine for a better end product.
The counter argument, that editorial interference is detrimental introducing corruptions, is often laced with examples of the silly results of production errors or angry remarks by disgruntled authors.[25] It leads to Greg's rationale of copy-text, so that authorial forms will be more likely to survive without these "corruptions." Later printed forms are adopted only where they are demonstrably authorial or are more than plausible corrections of manuscript errors. Though many editors would want to deny it, the basis for this counter argument is also a critical assessment of the effect of production crews (proofreaders, editors, compositors, and/or any other persons who help or hinder in the production of the published work). Scholarly editors who recognize the critical bases for judgment tend to say that rules cannot be made and each textual situation should be judged on its own merits—after all, they say, what is critical editing if it is not critical?
A second argument for social texts, one used by both Donald Pizer and McGann, is very different because its logic denies the relevance of either authorial intention or critical judgment. The argument is that production and the resulting book is a part of history which has integrity of its own regardless of the author's or the readers' assessment of its success. Thus the fact that William Faulkner's Sartoris was published as it was becomes more important than might be the work that was to have been Flags in the Dust. In that particular case the enormous difference between the two versions, combined with the changed title, makes it easy to consider the two forms as completely different works for which it is silly to ask "which is the real X---." But when the difference is not so great and the name remains the same, as with Crane's Red Badge of Courage or Dreiser's Sister Carrie, the historical product, the first edition, has a validity or status that seems to some people to be threatened by editorial efforts to undo or redo the work of the original publication process. Hence the argument for the historical integrity of the first edition. In this argument many will recognize what has often been called documentary integrity. Historical integrity and documentary integrity need not, however, be the same thing. Tanselle, for example, describes the work of eclectic critical editors as historical, though they do not confine themselves to the readings of any single document. In addition, one might distinguish between the integrity of the document as it represents a historical event and its integrity as it is a physical unit connected to the author.[26] In the former the text of a document may be thought inviolable, while in the latter, the document itself is the important unit.
The third argument asserts that the published texts have become culturally validated by the decades or centuries of readers who have known the work in that form. Readers and critics have come to know and in many cases love the work in this socialized form. If an editor changes the text so that the work means something new or different, these people and their sense of the cultural heritage will be confused, if not absolutely violated. This is true even though the changes are "restorations" of previously unpublished authoritative forms, which perhaps should have been a part of the original work save for the interference of "unauthoritative" influences.[27]
Although, to my knowledge, literary editors do not use the second and third arguments (about the historicity and the cultural validation of texts) to support the idea that NO emendation should be undertaken, that is, strictly, the logical conclusion of both arguments. That a first edition is a historical document, that it was the basis for the work's first readers' acquaintance, and that it can still so serve new readers are unquestionable propositions. That an emended edition would misrepresent the integrity of the historical document is also true—though not necessarily important. It would be ludicrous, however, to expect all students of a text to read only the first edition or some other "authoritative" edition that had comparable legitimacy—such as "the author's revised edition." One could, with the argument concerning cultural validation, opt for editions that were straight reprints (unedited) with the idea that the linguistic text, more or less as it was first published, is what has been validated. But as soon as emendations are introduced, the center of this argument for "historical integrity" is weakened and, in fact, some other notion of integrity has replaced it.
Social contract theorists, or editorial theorists inclined to accept a social validation for texts, such as Thorpe, Pizer, McGann, and McKenzie, may have tended to attack the "Greg/Bowers" or authorial intention editorial theories in order to make room for their own. In a sense, editors are in competition for the attention of readers—each wants readers, scholars, and critics to think his edition is the "standard" edition. Sometimes, therefore, arguments are used against other propositions instead of for an alternative proposition. The idea of historical integrity and cultural validation may be primarily arguments against the authority of authorial intention rather than for a social theory of texts. It is unfortunate that these arguments are used in this way for it confuses the issue to argue that the production process is good because it helps (i.e., authors need help and textual critics can judge when that has happened) and that the production process freezes and or validates whatever came out (i.e., authors get what they get, sorry, judgment has nothing to do with it).
The fourth and fifth arguments for social texts are much more interesting and sophisticated and provide the proper ground for serious consideration of a social contract theory. The fourth argument focuses again on the production process. But rather than saying that editors and publishers help authors to implement their intentions in a physical book, or that there is an antiquarian integrity to the document containing the text, this approach sees the production process as a cultural phenomenon without which books do not exist. The influence of production on the book does not begin when the author hands a completed manuscript to the publisher; it begins when the author raises his pen for the first word of a work intended for publication, because of a consciousness of the way books gets published. Publishers, too, are only part of an even larger phenomenon that includes language and usage and everything that forms the sociological context within which authors are enabled to write and can hope to be understood. Any legal contract which the author signs with a publisher is, in this view, merely a confirmation of a
There is a fundamental shift in the concept of authority involved in this argument. Rather than judging the effect of publication on the author's words, this argument simply vests authority for the text in a socio-economic environment which "contains" the author's initiating creative activity and the publisher's ongoing process of moving composition into production. The textual changes introduced by the production process are accepted by the editor, not because they are better, not because they are historical, not because they are sacred, but because they are social—representing a necessary bio-socioeconomic relationship between author, publisher, and audience (including the editor). The result of this argument is that the printed text is preferred as copy-text, emendation is discouraged but allowed to complete or correct the socializing process, and the critical apparatus is seen as an important record of social/cultural dynamics.[28]
Intrinsic to this argument, with its redefinition of textual authority, is a concept of transferring authority from the author to the publisher. Different theorists would argue in different ways about how this transfer takes place; it is different, perhaps, for every author and work and, therefore, looks different to each editor. The evidence of transfer is not new, though the conclusion that the author transfers authority over the text to the publisher when he "submits" the manuscript is, perhaps, new in editorial theory. It is, of course, a quite old idea in commercial practice. Editors who use this argument are, however, usually comfortable with it only as long as the production process changed insignificant details or "improved" the work. When actual damage resulted from the publication process, the theory ceases to be appealing and recourse is taken to another.
A very interesting discussion of the various attitudes toward the author's "submission" to the publisher and the relationships that they represent was presented by James L. W. West at the Society for Critical Exchange.[29] He made a potentially useful distinction between attempts by the production crew to enhance the author's "active" intentions and its attempts to enhance the "programmatic" intentions, terms borrowed from Michael Hancher.[30] West's position was that only limited transfers of authority may occur and that it is part of the scholarly editor's duty to determine which were legitimate
The fifth argument adds several new dimensions. Rather than focusing on the production process and its socializing influence, this argument focuses on the physical artifact that results. It does not argue that the "known" text is part of our cultural heritage to which we have become accustomed and which has influenced so much critical debate in the form it was produced. Rather it says that the physical object is a version of the work that itself generates meaning. It argues that the linguistic text generates only a part of the meaning of a book; its production, its price, its cover, its margins, its type font all carry meaning that can be documented.[32] In short, the physical book, of which the linguistic text is but a part, is important not because we have become accustomed to it, and not merely because it is a part of history, but because its form and historical entry into the culture determined the cultural acceptance it received. For example, the elegant first edition of Byron's Don Juan was received as a witty and spirited performance, but reviewers of the cheap pirated editions called it an immoral travesty. The same verbal text in differing physical formats meant different things.[33] When the fact that the pirated cheap "immoral" texts were the ones that most people read and that made Byron's "literary reputation and popularity," is added, we have a very complex textual situation. The implications of this phenomenon to the social contract editorial school is that the physical books, as products of the social context and contract, are physically the works of art.
There is a basic validity to this argument that I think few persons would deny. One's reaction to a work is conditioned by his knowledge of a variety of factors having little if anything to do with the linguistic text itself. Book designers know this well; cheap literature in small type and double columns is printed on newsprint or other inexpensive paper. Lurid covers indicate something about how the publisher hopes readers will react to the text and may also indicate what kind of reader is being addressed. Likewise, hard covers, ample margins, generous leading, and heavy paper often imply the social status of the publisher and of the readers. They may also imply the literary value or durability of the "work of art" thus produced. N. N. Feltes, in a recent discussion of W. M. Thackeray's Henry Esmond pursues this line of investigation. He argues that, by its physical format (a Victorian three decker), its price (36 shillings—out of the reach of most ordinary book buyers), its genre (historical fiction), and its publisher (George Smith, an executive
This is a very interesting approach to the meaning of Esmond, bringing into serious question the effect of reprinting the novel in modern dress (one volume, modern type font) and obscuring by that process these meaningful elements of the first edition. This is true even though Feltes' conclusion, that Thackeray's hand was limited by these "establishment" forces and that the meaning of Esmond is "determined" by the social contract over which Thackeray had no control, is not convincing.[35]
It is one thing to recognize the implications of the physical embodiment of a linguistic text, quite another to identify the text in its physical format as the work of art, and still another to say that the social and economic context within which the work was published determined what the author would or could do. There may be some truth in all of these propositions, but it would be very hard to make a rule out of them that would apply well to many texts. In some ways this argument sounds rather familiar; in 1952, for example, Gordon Ray made much the same case in "The Importance of Original Editions" but drew a different conclusion, since Ray saw the cultural history of books as external to authorial intention and as an added, rather than substitute, interest.[36]
The concept that physical books have integrity and meaning in themselves bears more thinking about. The meanings referred to can be not only in addition to the linguistic text, but separate from or unified with that text. They can be meanings of which the author was unconscious or meanings the author consciously exploits or manipulates. There are many well-known instances of authors consciously seeking to enhance their text by controlling the physical form of the works: the green cover of Leaves of Grass, the shaped lines of George Herbert's "Easter Wings," the private limited printing in 1926 of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Blake's lithographed combinations of text and illustration. Other cases are known of authors manipulating or taking advantage of reader reactions to physical formats: Thackeray's references to the jaundiced yellow covers and Trollope's remarks about the third volume of the novel. But for the most part authors do not control these matters and the "meanings" or implications of the physical text, if anything, reveal unconsciously things about the author or publisher—rather like dramatic irony where the physical book is the situational context of the linguistic text, though sometimes the implications may not be ironic.
Readers, by and large, of classic texts in new editions are taught to ignore the extra-linguistic contexts of the physical books in the same way that theatre goers are taught to ignore the stage relation to the audience through a willing suspension of disbelief. Thus we read Tennyson's In Memoriam in the cut version in the Norton Anthology and "understand" the poem as if its placement had nothing to do with how we read the poem or what the poem
Before proceeding, let us summarize for convenience the five arguments:
- 1. Production crews improve works of art—the editor and critic recognize this improvement by judging the results.
- 2. Publication is a historical fact—emendation would violate the historical event represented by the published text.
- 3. Years of use have validated the familiar text, it has been appropriated by the cultural heritage—emendation would confuse people.
- 4. Publication is an integral and necessary part of the social act of producing works of art; production influences pervade composition from its inception and should be accepted as a social fact—part of the definition of "literary work of art."
- 5. The physically produced work is the work of art, its physical form reflects social contexts revealing the true character of the work.
The most important difference between the social contract approaches to textual problems and previous editorial principles lies in the radically altered definition of textual authority that they offer. Whereas earlier principles for critical editing accepted without question the authority of the author, differing primarily in determining what the authorial intention was, the social contract principle denies the author the pride of place and substitutes the social event that produced the book as the authority. In that complex, the author is merely one of several authorizing forces; authorial intention may still have relevance to editorial practice but it is no longer the central focus; other "larger" issues enter the equation.
At first, looking primarily at the first three arguments for "social texts," it would appear that the principle of social contract would eschew critical editing because those arguments identify the work of art with the commodity offered for sale, the socialized product. Perhaps some of its adherents would make that identification. In its most rigid form, this principle would require that printed texts should be chosen as copy-texts and that emendations should not be allowed. But if those two arguments are disposed of, as perhaps they should be, and the last two arguments assessed critically, we can see that a concern for authorial meaning is merely different from the concerns emphasized here, not a concern denied by them.
There is, perhaps, a sixth argument relevant to a social theory of texts, though in some ways it may be merely the extrapolation of the fourth. Its summary for the chart above would be: 6. The social determinism of texts.
It may be that this concept has nothing to do with a social contract theory of editing, but it does seem to underlie a good deal of the thinking behind the other five arguments I have been trying to sort out. I try to approach it merely from the point of view of a scholar wanting to know everything I can about the work, its author, and its historical and linguistic context in an attempt to understand it as a whole.
This idea concerns the importance of the entire bio-socio-economic context in determining the work of art. If we do not understand this idea thoroughly, it may appear to have unqualified power or authority over texts, leaving us to conclude simply that whatever text was produced by the publishing contract is the right text. That conclusion appears contrary to any editorial principle in which authority is defined as author-centric. This idea is alluded to by McGann when, in reviewing McKenzie's 1985 Panizzi Lectures, he speaks of "the people who belong to the text."[37] The usual approach is to see things the other way round: the text that belongs to the author or to the publisher or to the reader. That has been the conventional way of seeing "authority." That is the "old" way of shaping editorial policy—by reference to those persons who authorize or determine what the text should be. McGann and McKenzie seem to make the text and the social forces it represents larger than any person. They include the text itself as a part of the "contract" or the complex of social, political, and economic forces that determine life. Social determinism becomes literary determinism. The language speaks the author; the social complex makes the book. The book is not "a container or transmitter of meaning"; it is "a meaningful agent itself."[38] And what it has come to mean is not within the author's or any other person's control. N. N. Feltes, in the discussion of Esmond mentioned above, concludes from his study of the "establishment" elements in the book that Thackeray was forced into uncharacteristic, reactionary meanings—that authorship is largely determined by economic forces and that these forces reduce or replace the play of individual judgment.[39]
The idea of socially determined texts may best be understood by asking several related questions designed to clarify the way in which a definition of authority controls editorial decisions and to highlight the difference between author-centric and socio-centric approaches.
What happens when the contracted socializing process violates the confidence or trust which the author unwittingly placed in it? Is the social contract or the author's wishes of greater authority? Similarly, what is the status of the "contract" when the socializing process takes place without the author's consent, as in posthumous publications? Is there to be a presumption that the socializing process is proper, legitimate and good unless something can be shown to be wrong with it? If the answer to this last question is yes, it follows that publisher's punctuation would be preferred to author punctuation. One could ask why that must be so—what is the applicable rationale for copy-text and what distinction is made in that rationale between accidentals and substantives. None of the theorists proposing arguments on behalf of the social contract seem to have a well-developed or convincing rationale for dealing with accidentals.
What happens when the succession of reprints that perpetuates and validates the cultural heritage perpetuates demonstrable flaws?[40] Is a restoration of text which creates an unfamiliar version disallowed because it violates the cultural artifact?
What happens when the authorial intention is weak or flawed but is
What happens when a text considered as a cultural object with meaning and significance derived from its physical form becomes re-objectified in new editions? Is each re-objectification a new version of the work worth editorial attention? No one, I think, would deny that each is worth attention as a fact of cultural history, but does that make each publication a part of what the work of art is from a critical point of view? If the answer is yes, how does it affect editorial policy?
Listing out these questions and contemplating their possible answers suggests that the "social contract theory" is just as complex and variable as the author-centric approaches have been. It would therefore, I think, be short-sighted and narrow-minded to try to persuade editors that a social theory of texts with a definition of authority marginalizing the author is the only responsible way to edit.
| | |