University of Virginia Library

IV

Geoffrey H. Hartman's essay ("Words, Wish, Worth: Wordsworth," pp. 177-216), the next one in the volume, makes more reference than the others to specific variants between one text of a poem and another. Hartman appends to the essay a section headed "Text of Poem and Bibliographical Note," in which he prints (with two trivial differences) the text of "'A LITTLE onward . . .'" as it appears in Ernest de Selincourt

and Helen Darbishire's edition (Vol. 4 of The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth [1947], pp. 92-94). His headnote to the text is "bibliographical" only in the sense of "reference bibliography," for it cites several other critical writings either about this poem or about matters taken up in the essay; there is no discussion of such bibliographical concerns as the publication history of the poem or physical details that might bear on textual decisions. He does mention one textual variant, the allusion to Antigone rather than Dora (line 11) in editions before 1850; and in the body of his essay he mentions such other variants as some of those between the 1805 and the 1850 texts of The Prelude (e.g., pp. 198, 211). Hartman clearly takes the poem under discussion as an utterance of a particular person at a particular time in the past, and he refers to other works by the same person and recognizes the value of textual variants as evidence of a writer's developing thought.[24]

It is odd, therefore, that he does not report all the textual variants in the poem, as recorded in de Selincourt and Darbishire, or comment on the textual policy of that edition. He was not obligated, of course, to present the entire text of the poem at all; but since he chose to do so for the reader's convenience, it is misleading not to have present the variants noted in the edition cited, especially when he refers to one of them. Readers might naturally conclude that there were no other variants.[25] In any case, as long as a "bibliographical note" is provided, it is strange not to have some commentary on the principles that governed the construction of the text that is being accepted. In her preface, Darbishire says, "In following Wordsworth's final text I have made a few corrections, in most cases supported by the manuscripts."[26] Although it does not appear, from the variants recorded in the 1947 edition, that any "corrections" from manuscript are incorporated into the 1947 text of the poem Hartman is discussing, there is one variant passage, identified in 1947 as "MS. corr. to text," that raises a question about the meaning of "final text." It was incumbent on Hartman, in any event, to think about the implications for his argument of following a "final text" incorporating revisions first printed in 1820, 1827, and 1850; but no illumination on this question is afforded by the "bibliographical note."

These matters bear on the primary concerns of the essay. Hartman is exploring Wordsworth's "intertextuality," the presence in his work of passages and ways of thinking influenced by his predecessors, by the "effaced or absorbed memory of other great poems" (p. 179). Going further, Hartman suggests that among the poet's "precursor text(s)" is a "primordial speech act," that indeed the "primordial wish" and the "primordial speech act . . . converge in the vision" (p. 197), that "Creation and response merge" (p. 199). Hartman is seeking the roots of poetic inspiration,

in terms—growing out of the poem—that link light and sound, seeing and hearing: Wordsworth "brings the speaking darkness to light" (p. 195). The enterprise Hartman is engaged in necessitates thinking about the state of being of literary works. Any meditation on the shift "from visionary voice to visionary text" (p. 202)—a shift that is "part of a vast metaphoric activity identifiable with creative power itself"—must reflect some attitude regarding the mode of existence of verbal works and postulate some relationship between those works and the texts whereby we approach them. Hartman is trying to understand the act of reading in the broadest sense, the "reading" that poets perform and our own "reading" of those poets: "Wordsworth's poem suggests that we must read the writer as a reader" (p. 187). The immediate object of "reading" is "texts" (whether verbal or nonverbal), but how we define "texts" is the crux of the matter and will in turn affect how we conceive of "reading." Hartman's seeming lack of inquisitiveness about the production and status of the de Selincourt-Darbishire text—about how those two editors had read Wordsworth—is indicative of his broader failure to come to grips with the relation of texts to works in his own reading of Wordsworth, which is to say in his interpretation of Wordsworth's reading.

The problem becomes evident as we follow the word "text" through his argument. It first occurs in the opening paragraph, where Hartman discusses the initial image of the poem, the link between Wordsworth walking with Dora and the blind Oedipus being led by Antigone. The poet, Hartman says, is surprised by this association, "the usurpation of that text on his voice, and the anticipatory, proleptic nature of the thought." This linking of "text" and "thought" is revealing, for "text" here is similar to a thought that has been influenced by a reading of a text in the past. The referent of "text" is literally the quotation that constitutes the first two lines of the poem, but the intended meaning is evidently not a specific documentary text but any text of Samson Agonistes—or, perhaps more accurately, the experience of having read these lines of Samson Agonistes (and, in turn, Sophocles) in some text. Shortly thereafter he associates the word "quotation" with "voice" and an echo: imagination, he says, has risen "in the form of a voice, the quotation from Samson Agonistes—echoing back to Oedipus at Colonus" (p. 178). The "quotation," like the "text," refers to a passage in a work, not the words that happen to be in one or another specific text of the work. The question of how we find our way to the work from the signals available to us, of the problematic nature of the connections between texts and works, is not broached.

At least we think we have learned from the opening paragraphs how

"text" is being used, even if a fundamental question is being overlooked at the same time. And our observation is confirmed by the immediately ensuing occurrences of the word: "a text surfacing in his [Wordsworth's] mind" (p. 180), "a well-known text flashing on the poet's mind" (p. 181), even "a famous text from Wordsworth's own poetry" (p. 183). In all these instances "text" means a passage from a work. But whether it can still mean the same thing in Hartman's conclusion to his third section is arguable: "An unmediated psychic event," he says, "turns out to be a mediated text: words made of stronger words, of the Classics and the Bible" (p. 186). Inner feelings or responses become "texts" to be read, and in the process they turn into actual verbal texts, arrangements of words, which are influenced by previous verbal works that have entered one's repertory of thought patterns. This description of a particular succession of mental events conceives of "text" in at least three ways: as something nonverbal to be interpreted, or "read"; as a passage from a verbal work of the past; and as a specific sequence of words and pauses (or punctuation) that one constructs from the other two kinds of text. The first involves—continuing the metaphor—"documentary" evidence, for one must accept as a given the particular combination of elements one is faced with. The second, though it is recalled as an individual series of words, is not perceived as the text of a specific document, with its own idiosyncrasies, but as the text of a linguistic work, which has its existence in some realm apart from the mundane realities of paper and ink or even of sound waves. The third, the new composition, is—what? Not really a third conceptual type, for how could it be something other than the text of a document or the text of a work abstracted from one or more documents? But which is it? Hartman's vagueness here will be noted only by those who have thought about the difference between texts of documents and texts of works. It is regrettable that Hartman does not appear to be among those, since his interest is in the nature of verbal works and their mediating role in our perceptions: his account, for all its richness, appears naïve as a result of being divorced from this basic distinction.

Recognizing how documents and works differ is essential to an understanding of reading, and much of his essay is concerned with the process of reading. He begins his fourth section by asserting, "The relation of 'text' and 'soul' is the province of a theory of reading" (p. 186). This statement takes on different meanings depending on whether "text" refers to the text of a document or the text of a work. The former connects us to "soul" by showing us the humanity of the producer or producers of the document, whether it is a manuscript in the hand of the author (or scribe) or a printed book set in type by a compositor. Documents always contain evidences of the striving of their producers; but

the human dramas preserved in them may be a number of steps removed from the minds underlying the works that are reflected (however accurately or inaccurately) in the texts of the documents. The text of a work, on the other hand, links us directly to the "soul" of the author, and presumably it is the reading of texts of works that Hartman has in mind. But where do we find such texts? We can never know when we have found them; all we can do is approach them through the texts of the documents that seem intended to convey them. We will therefore be constantly questioning those documentary texts, for at any point they may be misleading guides. The process of reading leads us along an intricate path in which at each point we must confront the mysteries of physical objects before we can hope to recover the messages they seem to offer us. "Text" and "soul" are indeed connected, but Hartman's account is grossly oversimplified through its failure to address the relation of physical texts and verbal messages.

We may readily agree that authors bring "an inner light" to the "texts" they read and that their reading is "a form of life" (p. 187). But when we are told that the "inner voice also proves to be a text"—in this case "the textual voice of Milton" (p. 188)—are we not bound to aks for a more precise account of where that particular arrangement of words, now in the poet's mind, came from? Must we not confront the process by which one or more texts on paper become transmuted into a text in the mind, a text that is perhaps identical with one of those on paper, perhaps a conflation of them, and perhaps different in various respects from all of them? And what relation do all these texts have to the work as intended by its author? If poetry is "the working through of voices," if a poet experiences a "latent pressure of voices or texts" (p. 191), if "the usurping voice is referred to a specific text" (p. 193), we had better inquire into this process. Even though Hartman uses the phrase "a specific text," he clearly means "a specific work," not "a specific text of a work." When he speaks of "the relation between textuality and referentiality" (p. 193) and says that poetry "textualizes a phantom voice" (p. 194), that it is "echo humanized" (p. 195), and that the poet "brings the speaking darkness to light" (p. 195), he is concerning himself with the creation of a verbal work out of experiences that have themselves been affected by prior verbal works; but he is not even touching the equally profound mystery of where verbal communications have their being, of the ontology of works made of words.[27]

One could argue that it does not matter whether different people are influenced by different texts of Milton (texts as previously read or as created in the mind through the unconscious, but perhaps willful, tricks of memory); all that matters, one might say, is that their responses to the

world are affected by prior groupings of words.[28] This approach could certainly be defended, but "Milton" would then not be a biographical reference, and the use of the term "Milton" would raise anew the question of the relation between ideas and each separate grouping of words employed to express them—that is, the relation between "referentiality" and "textuality," the very question that Hartman is attempting to explore. A coherent discussion of this question cannot escape the requirement of facing the problems inherent in defining "textuality," in segregating the two strands that make it up. If we are to understand how Wordsworth's experience on Snowdon "includes the poet as reader of a prior and sacred text" (p. 196) and how Wordsworth "has created his own text by a verbal geometry that extends the lines of force in a prior scripture" (p. 197), we have to explore how "lines of force" emanate from specific sequences of words and how varying sequences of words can be related to each other in such a way as to be encompassed by the singular term "scripture."

Hartman apparently uses "text" to mean written, as opposed to spoken, words, for he takes a stand in the debate over which are primary by saying that critics should understand "how texts eclipse voice and speak silence" (p. 207). Yet he seems to see no awkwardness in letting "texts" also mean the "scriptures" or "poems" that transcend the limitation of particular documents. In a key passage of his peroration he asserts that the work of Wordsworth's under discussion is "both a minor poem and a considerable text" (p. 213); but this statement does not mean that he has come around, however belatedly, to distinguishing texts of documents from texts of works. (What would a "considerable" text, in that sense, be?) He is saying that this poem does not conform to his criteria for great art but that it is an interesting example of intertextuality as an "undersong" to intratextuality. The "considerable text" here is a poem treated as a biographical document, without reference to the physical documents that provide our evidence for reconstructing it. Hartman, however, equates the two levels: "There is no authentically temporal discourse, no timely utterance, except by resolute acts of writing. . . . Writing . . . defers utterance of the definitive parole or password—from generation to generation" (p. 207). The actual situation is more poignant: the preparation of written or printed texts gives a verbal work its best chance of surviving; but what survives on pieces of paper consists of the accidents of particular historical moments, and the work that speaks to us across the generations will forever be a conjecture arising from those time-bound, vulnerable objects. Hartman's account of the creative process, and of the relation of literary works to sound and to time, cannot

but seem thin compared to what it would have been if these fundamental considerations had been a part of it.