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I. Literary Theory and the Work
In literary criticism the indeterminacy of meaning was long seen as the problem; and, until acceptance of relativity changed the aim of criticism, it was the goal of historical criticism to develop means to interpret texts so that they would be understood as they were intended. When structural linguistics began affecting the practice of literary criticism, faith in recovering intended meanings through strenuous biographical, historical and philological study began to erode. The word no longer could be used as a stable semantic unit or as access to "reality," since the word (signifier and its component phonemes and morphemes) bore an arbitrary, not "natural," relation to the signified, which was itself a concept, not the "object in reality." Attempts to link the phonemic elements of language to physiology or neurology so as to demonstrate that they were not entirely arbitrary have not proven very fruitful. Structural relations between words (syntax) was seen to govern their meaning, and the structuring aspect of language governed what could be meant. The Author as Authority for meaning lost ground to "the text itself."
Rumblings about intentional and affective fallacies focused attention on the text's meaning as opposed to the author's meaning, for the latter was both inaccessible and perhaps subverted by a failure to achieve that which was intended, though the text might well witness the success of other perhaps unintended meanings.[2] Literary theorists abandoned the author by defining texts as acquiring "determinate meaning through the interactions of the words without the intervention of an authorial will."[3] The phrase or sentence replaced the word as the irreducible semantic unit, and the intentional fallacy became something to avoid or disguise carefully. However, faith in syntax as a reliable semantic unit continued, as is evident in Beardsley's definition, and "the text itself" seemed a stable and concrete object amenable to disciplined analysis, though authorial intention seemed remote and problematic. The idea that meaning is created by the relations between the words and by the perceived choices among words that could, grammatically, have been used instead
With post-structuralism, and particularly with focus being placed on the creative act of reading, came a second wave of reaction against the author that exceeded the new critics' distrust of the intentional fallacy. The author was proclaimed dead because meaning was seen as located and created in the readers' interaction with the text, making any meaning the text "has" or "is witness to" functional only in reading acts —the intending acts of authors having receded, so to speak, into the inaccessible past. Thus, scholars' attempts to recreate the moment of authorship were seen as futile; historical criticism had beached itself like a disoriented whale. Furthermore, faith in the semantic stability of syntax became as problematic as the meaning of the word had become with the advent of structuralism.
A strong undercurrent of thought accompanying the wave of post-structuralism and deconstruction indicated that because the past was unknowable and because speech acts, writing acts, and reading and listening acts have (or create) their meaning now in a cultural or social setting fraught with power struggles, hegemonic structures, and political agendas—including very local, perhaps even domestic ones—therefore (A) the meanings we create for a text now matter more than the supposed original or historical meanings and (B) the way in which meanings are generated and the uses to which meanings are put are a more interesting study than are the texts or the authors or the meanings they may originally have tried to produce. Overtly political forms of literary criticism, particularly marxist and feminist criticism, have received a boost of energy from this line of reasoning. Such criticism focuses on the economic power structures at work in diction and syntax, the patriarchal and class assumptions and structures—both linguistic and social—that can be seen imbedded in texts. To some literary theorists it seemed logical to conclude that this line of thought totally set aside the major concerns of textual criticism and scholarly editing as they had been understood and defended traditionally, since the most interesting aspects of texts are not
In very recent years new historicism, while profiting from the insights of structuralism and relativity theory, has resurrected some of the interests of historical criticism. The result is radically different from the old historicism, for in developing accounts of the past, the new historicist is very conscious of the absence of any means to validate the correspondence between the past (whatever it was) and the historian's account of it. Further, new historicists are often very much concerned with the structuring influences of language and the political, social, and mythological "realities" it framed. New historicism, though subject to abuses and unconvincing practice, provides several fruitful means of investigation. One is that the understanding of a text derived from even indeterminate historical investigations is often palpably different from "readings" that relate the text only to the present reader's experience. It suggests that the richness and complexity of a text (and of language) is more fully experienced by contrasting the text as a product of a partially known (that is, constructed) past with the text as free-floating in the present or as it seems to have been experienced at significant moments in intermediate times.
Another rationale for new historicism considers that structuralism's undermining of authorial autonomy and post-structural emphasis on the death, absence, or self-subverting of the author has taken the reaction against belief in objectivity about as far as it seems likely to go. Furthermore, by concentrating its efforts on the creative act of reading, deconstructive criticism provides a methodology that concerns itself with only half of the picture. A returned interest in the idea of texts "conveying meaning" from an "originator of discourse" and belief in the possibility of "fiduciary trust" between author and reader has been defended in several ways. First, it is a demonstration of interest in the workings of culture and tradition—an interest that does not necessarily entail belief in the objectivity of their reconstructions nor a nostalgic reactionary hope to "re-establish" or "restore" anything, but a genuine interest in roots and differences and a fascination with the malleability and tensile strength of histories and ideologies. Curiously, this approach considers both "history" and "the present" as current constructs, which are nevertheless useful as a means of exploring the sense of continuity and change
Deconstruction has exploited the implications of relativity by recognizing the futility of regaining or understanding intention and has focused on the independent life of the text as it is confronted by actual readers (who might, in spite of themselves be trying to conform to the roles of implied readers). To this, deconstruction adds the concept of ideological influences (structured "realities")—mostly subconscious—which make texts self-subverting in ways probably contrary to authorial intention but nevertheless very important to the reader. One should note that this way of putting it suggests that deconstruction "reinstates" authorial intention as something that can and must be inferred in order that it might be "decentered"—i.e. authorial intention is identified but not treated as an authority for meaning.[6] It should further be noted that "decentered" meanings are not dislodged by nothing, but rather by other provisionally centered meanings, each of which must be justified before it can in turn be "decentered." Some marxist and feminist critics have capitalized on these two principles to read texts politically and to value or discard texts according to the ideologies revealed in the "subtexts." As we shall see, however, release from the bondage of an impossible objectivity is not an escape from the physical object, the
The full impact of relativity, structuralism, and reader oriented theory has, as I averred, not affected textual criticism, but it has begun to rock the boat. Textual criticism and its "handmaidens," bibliography and paleography, have had a strong positivist tradition, which manifests itself from time to time in phrases like "the calculus of variants" and "definitive editions," and more recently as "determinate meanings" and "social contracts."[7] The fact is, however, that the discipline has made some accommodations to the "truths" of relativism: the concepts of "critical editions" and "eclectic texts" as Fredson Bowers and G. Thomas Tanselle have developed them are such accommodations, diminishing the positivist force of "solid historical research" which supposedly resulted in "established texts that will not have to be edited again." Likewise, recent discussions of multiple texts and problematic texts, which refer specifically to indeterminacy of the words and punctuation constituting the work of art in addition to acknowledging the indeterminacy of the meaning of the text, are accommodations of relativity. One could even say that the recent emphasis on "process texts" and "versioning," which Michael Warren, Donald Reiman, and Paul Eggert to name only a few have undertaken, is an accommodation of structuralism—though to my knowledge none of them has characterized it as such. The result has been a slight shift (to some editors it seems a great shift, perhaps even a sellout) in the aim of textual criticism from considering the text as an established (or establishable) locus of authoritative stability to a concentration on text as process.
What this means in practice is that the editor or critic declares an interest in multiple texts for each work rather than just in the one true or final text. It means authorial revision and production influences on texts are seen as having potential "integrity" as representations of the work at various stages in the process of composition, revision, and production. It has meant, moreover, that for some works the editor posits two or even more texts to be read and studied in tandem. It has also, however, meant that the concept of textual purity has been rescued by making it necessary to "edit" correctly each stage of the process or to make the process visible by some means that distinguishes between the various agents of change and evaluates the changes, not only according to the perceived effect made by the change but according to the "authority" of the agent of change. In short, "process editing" has not embraced deconstruction
I would suggest, incidentally, that though a great deal has been published on these subjects, and although they have radically altered the way some post-modernist works are produced, scholarly publishing itself as a technical practice seems to have resisted any influence at all that these ideas about communication might have on the nature of publishing and on the notions that publishers have about what a book is and how it should be printed. Editions continue to be published (and read) as if written works were stable, achievable, objective, tangible substances, though these are the very concepts about "reality" that have been challenged by the propositions with which I began.
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