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Notes
G. Thomas Tanselle, "Textual Criticism and Deconstruction," Studies in Bibliography, 43 (1990), 1-33. All subsequent references to Tanselle are, unless otherwise noted, to this article.
J. Hillis Miller, "The Critic as Host," in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Geoffrey Hartman (1979), p. 229. All subsequent references to Bloom, de Man, Derrida, Hartman, and Miller are, unless otherwise noted, to this volume.
Eugene Vinaver, "Principles of Textual Emendation," Studies in French Language and Medieval Literature Presented to Professor M. K. Pope (1939), pp. 351-369.
W. W. Greg, "The Rationale of Copy-Text," Studies in Bibliography, 3 (1950-51), 19-36, reprinted in The Collected Papers of Sir Walter Greg, ed. J. C. Maxwell (1966), 374-391.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (1983).
See Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (1983), pp. 167-175 for a discussion of this component of feminist theory.
Examples include Toril Moi's Sexual/Textual Politics, George E. Haggerty's Gothic Fiction/Gothic Form, Arthur C. Danto's "Philosophy as/and/of Literature," in Literature and the Question of Philosophy (1987), Michel Foucault's Power/Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon (1980), and J.-F. Lyotard's Discours/Figure. Other experiments in titles on the phonemic difference created by typography include the journal Sub-Stance and The [M]other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytical Interpretation, ed. M. Sprengnether S. N. Garner, and C. Kahane (1985).
E. Talbot Donaldson, "The Psychology of Editors of Middle English Texts," in Speaking of Chaucer (1970), pp. 102-118.
For a discussion of the "master-slave" relationship in titles involving two disciplines (and for an examination of the "and" joining—or separating—them), see Shoshana Felman, "To Open the Question," in Literature and Psychoanalysis (1982), pp. 5-10.
Tanselle is quite open about his plan. He announces that his analysis will "look at the use of the word 'text' in the five essays of Deconstruction and Criticism . . . and consider the implications of that usage for the arguments they make" (p. 2). It is, however, his own terminological opposition between "text" and "work" that will be the operative one. It would not be difficult to demonstrate, on purely philological grounds, that this opposition is not the only one that common usage allows, and that "text" by itself need not always have the specific narrow meaning Tanselle endorses. Thus, while "text" has, from its first appearances in the language, always had a possible reference to the actual language of a document—sometimes in a very concrete sense (e.g., "Fyrst telle me þe tyxte of þe tede lettres")—it has also had, from these very early times, the sense of the "meaning" of a passage, as in "For to telle of þis teuelyng of his trwe knyʒtes / Hit is the tytelet, token, & tyxt of her werkkez." Similarly, while the word has always been applicable to a book or document as a physical artifact (and sometimes distinct from the language contained in that artifact), e.g., "Iesus Crist apperede to Patrik, and took hym a staf, and þe text of þe gospel þat beþ in þe contray in þe erchebisshops ward," it has also been more narrowly applicable only to a part of the document, in such oppositions as "text" and "gloss," e.g., "Þis was þe tixte trewly / þe glose was gloriously writen" or "And alle the wallys with colouris fyne / Were peynted, bothe texte and glose." The word has also had the more figurative meaning of a saying, extract, an axiom or proverb, derived no doubt from its association with the textus of biblical authority, or received wisdom (e.g., "Ich theologie the tixte know" or "He yaf nat of that texte a pulled hen / That seith that hunters beth nat hooly men" or "What must be shall be / That's a certain text"). This sense of "authority" (as opposed to criticism or glossing) is often used from the earliest times as an appeal to truth, e.g., "But truly I telle as þe text sais" or "It be-tid on a tyme þe text me recordis." And, complementary to this sense of authority was the implication that texts might need commentary and criticism in order to be fully understood, e.g., "This texte is playner than that it needeth to be expounded"—implying that most texts will need such expounding—or "The art of opening, or rather of undoing a Text of Scripture (as the phrase is now) was usurped by all." My listing of such examples is not, of course, intended to assert that the opposition used by Tanselle—based on a specific meaning of "text"—is in some way invalid, but rather that, from the very earliest employment of "text" in the language, there have been several such oppositions possible, not all of which would completely parallel Tanselle's distinction in all regards. And while not endorsing the deconstructors' extension of "text" to mean "work" in the idealist sense Tanselle reserves for that term, I would contend that the range of historical meanings—from physical writing to import or meaning to motto or axiom to actual book—already encompasses a wider reach than that now suggested in such criticism by the use of "text" to mean "work."
Jerome J. McGann, "You quote this [distinction between concrete 'text' and ideal 'work'] as if it were a fact about Textual Scholarship that everyone working in the field, whatever their other differences, would assent to. In fact, it articulates one of the key points of the controversy: far from representing an 'alien' condition for messages, it seems to me that 'the physical' (whether oral or written) is their only condition. And of course much of consequence follows from those fundamentally different ways people have of imagining and thinking about texts." Correspondence, 20 December, 1989. Thus, even within the field of textual scholarship, the meaning and function of the ideal and the concrete, the work and the text, are sources of contention.
D. C. Greetham, "Textual Scholarship," in Introduction to Scholarship in the Modern Languages and Literatures, ed. Joseph Gibaldi, 2nd ed. (forthcoming).
Anne Middleton, "Life in the Margins: Or, What's An Annotator to do?" New Directions in Textual Studies Conference, 1 April, 1989, University of Texas, Austin. Forthcoming in Library Chronicle of the University of Texas at Austin.
Archibald Hill, "Some Postulates for Distributional Study of Texts," Studies in Bibliography, 3 (1950-51), 63-95.
See Elaine Fantham, "The Growth of Literature and Criticism at Rome," in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. I. Classical Criticism, ed. George A. Kennedy (1989), p. 242.
The finest statement of this contingency and the challenge it presents occurs in the conclusion to Tanselle's Rationale: "Our cultural heritage consists, in Yeats's phrase, of 'Monuments of unageing intellect'; but those monuments come to us housed in containers that—far from being unageing—are, like the rest of what we take to be the physical world, constantly changing. Verbal works, being immaterial, cannot be damaged as a painting or a sculpture can; but we shall never know with certainty what their undamaged forms consist of, for in their passage to us they are subjected to the hazards of the physical. Even though our reconstructions become the texts of the new documents that will have to be evaluated and altered in their turn by succeeding generations, we have reason to persist in the effort to define the flowerings of previous human thought, which in their inhuman tranquillity have overcome the torture of their birth. Textual criticism cannot enable us to construct final answers to textual questions, but it can teach us how to ask the questions in a way that does justice to the capabilities of mind. It puts us on the trail of one class of our monuments and helps us to see the process by which humanity attempts, sometimes successfully, to step outside itself" (93).
A better example of the formal relationship between text and commentary in contemporary literary theory occurs in the joint essay by Gerhard Joseph (Host Text—on plagiarism in Dickens) and Jay Fellows (Guest Text—on cannibalism in Pater), "Mixed Messages in Mr. Pecksniff's Grammar School . . . or The Rift in Pater's Lute," in Perspectives on Perception: Philosophy, Art, and Literature, ed. Mary Ann Caws (1989), pp. 225-259, where the upper, "host" essay by Joseph is gradually subverted, overwhelmed, and digested by the lower, "guest" essay by Fellows. Joseph's "text" becomes smaller and smaller as the essay(s) progress, until eventually Fellows' guest essay has bibliographically consumed Joseph's, much in the manner that the textual apparatus and commentary of a scholarly edition may appear to consume the host text. The Joseph-Fellows essay is particularly apposite because its form (text and commentary) portrays the substance of Hillis Miller's essay on the osmosis between host and guest.
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