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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.