II. The Hole at the Center of Theory: Textual and
Literary
The weakness of much literary theory and textual criticism is that
practice is based on insights which have not had the advantage of a clear
taxonomy of texts. Textual critics have not had a clear enough vision of the
varieties of viable answers to questions about who has the ultimate authority
(or even the "functional authority") over what the text becomes, whether it
is possible for a work to have a variety of "correct forms," and the extent
to which the editor's decisions about the "authority" of textual variants is
a function of "reader response" rather than evidence. Likewise literary
critics have not had a clear enough vision of the problematic nature of
physical texts and their assumptions about textual stability (e.g., that a work
is a text and a text is a book and the book at hand is, therefore, the work
itself).[8]
It seems to me from this survey that the "structure of reality of
written works" implied by the three propositions with which I began places
the writer, the reader, the text, the world, and language in certain
relationships and locates the focus of experience of that reality in the
reader.
This relationship has been mapped by a number of theorists, some of whom
I shall discuss presently, but it seems to me that these maps reveal a gaping
hole in our thinking around which swirls a number of vague and sloppily
used terms that we pretend cover the situation. The lack of clear, focused
thinking on this question can be seen graphically if we locate the physical
materials of literary works of art in a center around which we visualize
scholarly interest in Works of Art. To the West of this physical center we
can place the scholarship of interest in creative acts, authorial intentions and
production strategies, biography and history as it impinges on and
influences authorial activities. To the East of the physical center we can
place the scholarship of interest in reading and understanding, interpretation
and appropriation, political and emotive uses of literature. To the North of
the physical center we can place the scholarship of interest in language and
speech acts, signs
and semantics. All three of these segments of our map tend to treat the
work of art as mental constructs or meaning units; the physical character
of the work is incidental and usually transparent.
[9] To the South we can place the
scholarship
of interest in physical materials: bibliography, book-collecting, and
librarianship. Only in this last area do we detect the appearance of special
attention on the Material Text, but because traditionally scholars in these
fields have made a sharp distinction between the Material and the Text and
because they have focused their attention on the Material as object, their
work has seemed tangential to the interests of the West, North, and
East.
In fact the "Southern" interest has traditionally been looked upon by
the others as dull and supportive—we must have libraries and
bibliographies—rather than as full-fledged fields of significant
interest.[10] Textual criticism has
tended to occupy itself with the concerns of the West (intention) and the
South (documents), but if it took seriously the propositions underlying
relativity and structuralism, it could be in the center of the "structure of
reality" depicted in this graph, drawing upon all sides and informing all
sides. It would not be self-defensive and apparently narrow-minded or
subservient, as it has often appeared, clinging to questionable notions of
objectivity and stability.[11]
It might be noted, by the way, that this particular "map" of textual
concerns leaves out entirely what might be called the "data world" or that
which in ordinary usage language is thought to refer to—the
objective
referents of language. It is because "knowledge" about that part of the
picture has been removed or relativized or made objectively inaccessible by
the perception gap and by the notion that knowledge of it is structured by
or constructed through language. This "world view" may not be the "true"
one, but it is the purpose of this paper to explore its implications to the
concept of texts or works as attested by or extant in physical
documents.
The specific questions I want now to raise for examination fall within
a narrow band at the center of the related and interesting questions implied
by this brief survey. I do not wish to be misunderstood as having raised
them all or to have attempted answers to any outside that band. I am not,
for example, raising any questions about what a particular text means, or
what the author or other issuer of the text might have meant
by it, or even what a reader might have understood it to mean. I am
supposing that the author and other purveyors of texts do mean something
or somethings by them, and I am assuming that texts are understood by
readers to mean certain things. The fact of these meanings is important but
the meanings themselves are not my concern here. The answers to such
questions lie to the West and East of my concerns. The questions I ask have
to do with the mental and physical acts and the material results of acts
attending the processes of composition, publication, and reception of written
texts. And the questions I ask are about what these acts and results can be,
not what they should be. Further, I assume that whether the author and
reader understand the same thing by a text is not ascertainable. Moreover,
I am not asking questions about whether an author's or publisher's "sense"
of the work is individual or culturally determined, nor am I asking if the
readers' reactions are culturally bound.
At the moment I believe that, at least to some extent, and mostly unawares,
they are. But I am not aware that any specific opinion about this notion
bears significantly on the proposed taxonomy. Nor am I asking how the
meanings of author and reader are generated and how they either succeed
or go astray. The answers to these questions lie North of my concerns. On
the other hand, I am not confining my interest to documents and books as
items for bibliographical description or cataloguing for shelving.
The questions I raise are essentially those of textual criticism, but
they involve all of these other fields at their margins, for texts—both
as
physical and mental constructs—lie at the center of any attempt to
record
or communicate any knowledge.[12] I
wish to propose corollaries for two of the propositions that I proposed to
entertain for their effects on textual theory: first, the perception gap that
holds that our "knowledge" of the "real" world is restricted to our mental,
inferred constructs, and, second, the view that language is the structuring
tool through which "knowledge" is constructed. The corollaries of these
propositions are: first, that the text of a work as found in a document (what
I will call the Material Text) is the locus and source of every reader's
experience of a written work of art and that regardless of what concepts of
works are inferred from the evidence of the Material Text, there is no
channel other than inference by
which a reader may "reach out" to the mental forms of works as they may
have been experienced by authors or other agents and originators of texts.
The second corollary is that the mental construct of
the work derived by a reader from the Material Text in the act of reading
(what I will call the Reception Text) is the only "thing" that a reader can
refer to when making comments about a work.
These two fundamentals—the physical documents and the
reading
experience of decoding them—are the irreducible core of literary
works.
Without the reader, the physical documents are inert and inoperative;
without the physical documents there is no reading.[13]
For most practical purposes the words "work of literary art," "book,"
and "text" are thought to be vaguely synonymous. But in fact there is a
great deal of confusion about these words; whenever anyone means
something specific by them, qualifications become necessary. So we talk
about classroom texts, standard texts, established texts, inscriptions, or
revised editions; and we add other concepts relative to production
economics or reader response theory. It strikes me that even with these
qualifications we do not have enough distinct terms for the concepts we use
the words "text" and "work" for. Arguments about how to edit works are
fueled by our confusions about what are or are not textual corruptions and
about what aspects of book production are or are not legitimate
"enhancements" of the work. And these confusions and controversies
become heated to the extent that one or more parties believe there is a
correct or optimum definition of "text" which is a guide to the desired
good,
correct, standard, or scholarly edition.
It has long seemed to me that the difficulty which we were not
handling well was bridging the distance between concepts of works of art
that are abstract, ideal, or mental with the material manifestations of or
records of these concepts in paper and ink documents and books. One could
try to put this in terms familiar to textual critics as an attempt to draw more
clearly the relationship between intended texts and achieved texts, but that
puts the question too narrowly (and too Westerly on my map). Or one could
try to put it in the language of the English philosopher and linguist J. L.
Austin as an exploration of the relationship between perlocution, illocution,
and locution, but that tends to emphasize the Westerly and Northerly aspect
at the expense of the physical center.[14] Most of the work upon the mental
and
abstract aspects of works
of art is marred by vague or coarse notions of what the material texts are.
And most of the work upon the physical materials of works of art has been
marred by a parochial focus of attention or adherence to notions about
objective reality.
Ferdinand de Saussure did explore the relation between mental
concept and physical sound-image in speech, and a good deal of thought has
been applied to that relation in linguistics; so what I am proposing to do for
literary works is not entirely new. But confusion arises for at least two
reasons when applying Saussure's model of speech to written works. First
a speech act takes place in the presence of speaker and listener as a single
event in time and in a shared space and physical context. Written works do
not. Second, written works, contrary to folk tradition, are not stable,
singular, verbal texts. They tend to change in "transmission" (to use one of
textual criticism's least elegant terms) either by revision, by editorial
intervention, or by accident. I will develop the implications of these two
differences between speech acts and "write acts" in due course. For the
moment, however, I would like to emphasize that the alleged similarity
between the two has led many
practitioners of literary and textual criticism and linguistics to treat the
physicalness of the written text as unitary and unproblematic.
Theorists are, of course, greatly concerned with the complexities and
problematics of "intention" and "interpretation," which precede and succeed
the text, but the supposedly stable, unproblematic physical signifier between
them, the written text, is simply missing from most diagrams of the
problem. Paul Hernadi's adaptation of J. L. Austin's speech act theory is
one of the most useful and enlightening of such diagrams. (See Chart 2.)
He elaborates both ends of the author-work-reader equation and indicates
relevant concerns about language as a communication system and its
function in the "world as representable by verbal signs," but the center of
Hernadi's chart identifies the "Work as verbal construct and locutionary
act." As such it is the work of the author and a field of reader response and
is described as verbal, not as physical. The
paper and ink Work, as a repository of signs for the verbal
construct and locutionary act, untethered from its origins does
not exist on the chart.[15]
This physical absence (or transparency) is typical of speech act and literary
critical formulations of the communication process. See for example Roman
Jakobson's model:
What should, perhaps, be the physical text is apparently a straight
line. That line, like Dr. Who's Tardis, may look small and ordinary from
outside, but it is spacious and complex inside. From the outside, so to
speak, written communication looks like spoken communication, but the
differences are so startling as to make conclusions about speech seem
simply inapplicable to writing. The problems can be easily
demonstrated.
I was spring cleaning the family deepfreeze and came to three jars of
frozen grape juice. The labels said: "This year's juice." When the person
who canned and labelled the juice wrote the label, it was natural and
perfectly unambiguous to say "This is this year's juice." Considered as a
"speech act" rooted in time and place, the labelling had a "speaker," a
"hearer," a place of utterance (the kitchen), a time (the year and moment
of placing the juice in the freezer), a richness of social and physical context
that identified the relevant "bundle" (Levi-Strauss's term) or molecule
(Caldwell's term) that prevented any misunderstanding or sense of
inappropriateness or inadequacy in the phrase, "This year's juice." Only
when seen as a written message, a "write act," untethered from speaker,
from moment and place of utterance, and from designated hearer, do we
find it risible, inadequate, or frustrating to imagine this label as capable of
signifying something specific at any time it
happens to be read.
Another example: I was reading excerpts from some articles that had
been photocopied and bound together for student use. One of the sources
photocopied was itself a compilation of essays. At one point a
cross-reference said: "See p. 33 of this book." When it was first written
and printed "this book" was a phrase probably meant to distinguish the
compilation from the original works being excerpted ("those books"). Now,
in the photocopy for student use, the reference was inadequate and
frustrating. The statement "This office will be closed until tomorrow" is
perfectly
clear when announced to a waiting crowd, but totally ambiguous when
posted on a locked door and read in the early morning. The "bundle" or
"molecule" changes with reference to written material in ways never
experienced in a speech act. The difference and ambiguity can be
consciously
exploited—as in the pub sign announcing "free beer all day
tomorrow."
Thus, an exploration of the relation between mental concepts (signifieds)
and physical texts (signifiers) for literary works leads to problems Saussure
never discussed (that I know of) and will lead to descriptions of writing and
reading acts in ways that clarify some of our disagreements about what they
are and how they are. Perhaps it can also defuse some of the vehemence of
our disagreements about what and how they ought to be.
