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In recent years there has been an increasing tendency for literary critics to refer to literary works as "texts." In consequence, the term "textual criticism" has become ambiguous, some people regarding it as a synonym for "literary criticism."[1] Traditionally, of course, "textual criticism" has meant the scholarly activity of studying the textual histories of verbal works in an effort to propose reliable texts of those works (according to one or another definition of correctness). This activity has commonly been though of as preparatory to literary criticism—as if it were mechanical or objective, and as if its results were to be unquestioningly accepted as the starting point for interpretive discussion. The products of textual criticism, however, like all historical reconstructions, incorporate judgments and assumptions. Textual critics must try to understand the works they are editing (however one defines "understand") in order to make choices among variant readings and decisions about emendations; they inevitably engage in literary criticism. So-called literary critics, for their part, should recognize—though they rarely do—that they must evaluate the makeup of particular texts in the process of analyzing literary works. Any development that brings "textual critics" and "literary critics" closer together is to be welcomed. The problem with the recent equation of the words "texts" and "works" is that, while it brings the two terms together, it completely ignores the issues that textual criticism has always dealt with.
The distinction between the texts of documents (handwritten or printed, private or published) and the texts of works is basic to textual criticism. The effort to "reconstruct" or "establish" the texts of works presupposes that the texts we find in documents cannot automatically be equated with the texts of the works that those documents claim to be conveying. Literary critics who neglect, or are oblivious to, this point are not commenting on works but on the arrangements of words and punctuation that happen to have come their way in particular documents.[2] The critical movement widely known as "deconstruction" provides an interesting illustration. Those who have written from this point
Geoffrey Hartman, in the preface to Deconstruction and Criticism (1979), a collection of essays often thought of as a manifesto of deconstruction, continually uses the word "text" to mean "work." When at the outset, for example, he refers to "the great texts of our culture," he is not thinking of great documents—that is, landmarks in the transmission of historically important works—but of the works themselves. He identifies a central concern of the volume to be the "priority of language to meaning"; but he does not acknowledge the failure of the volume to consider an equally fundamental matter—the logic of accepting any sequence of words as it comes to us. Such acceptance implies a reverence for artifacts; otherwise the words or their arrangement could be freely altered. Yet even an interest in verbal artifacts as historical statements requires a questioning of documents, given the variability, from one document to another, of the texts—the arrangements of words—that purport to represent the same work. In the process of examining how a given word functions in a particular context, those interested in history and those not interested in history must alike ask whether it is the word that ought to be there.
In what follows I shall look at the use of the word "text" in the five essays of Deconstruction and Criticism (with a glance or two at some related writings)[3] and consider the implications of that usage for the arguments they make. Although Hartman says that the book is not "a manifesto in the ordinary sense" and although the five authors do not hold identical positions, they were willing to be published together under the title Deconstruction and Criticism, and we may therefore regard the essays as indicative of the "shared set of problems" (in Hartman's words) that characterizes the deconstructive approach.
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