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B. Texts: Conceptual, Semiotic, and Physical

Although I have deferred discussion of some of the problems with the term Version, I need here to imagine the writer composing a Version of the Work in order to pursue the taxonomy through various concepts that are too often hidden in the use of terms such as Work or Version. One should note, then, that an Essayed Version is a conceptual entity not a physical entity; it is not equivalent with the physical embodiment of it, because its embodiment can be and usually is an imperfect representation of the Version. The contortions of that last sentence bear witness to the fact that Version is being used in two ways: it is a classification system for those texts that represent Version X as opposed to those that represent Version Y, and it is a Conceptual Text which copies of Version X or Y represent. This latter notion, the Conceptual Text, is not a system of classification but more like an ideal form of the Work. But it is not a Platonic ideal, for it develops and changes, and probably does not

"pre-exist" as an ideal, and it probably does not last very long either. The imperfections of physical texts are of various origins, including failures of creative imagination, failures of inscriptional skill or care, use of elisions and abbreviations to be filled in later, or unhappy interventions by scribal assistants. The Essayed Conceptual Text is always manifested in a physical form, but it is not a physical or Material Text, for the Conceptual Text that is Essayed remains (as the author's mental concept) invisible and probably not stable; but the embodiment of the Conceptual Text is visible and fixed in a material medium. The concept of "fixing" suggests another reason the Material Text may misrepresent or at least only suggest the work: Version (Potential, Developing, and Essayed) is fluid conceptual process, but the material text is physically static, fixed. However, since the Essayed Conceptual Text cannot be known except through a Material Text, people tend to equate them for practical purposes. But the Material Text can misrepresent the Essayed Conceptual Text and hence that equation is not exact. The ways in which the Material Text can misrepresent the Conceptual Text are many and often are indeterminate but some might be revealed in the drafts or by violations of syntax, grammar or orthography that cannot be justified as accurate representations of the ideal Version.[25]

It is common, at least among textual critics, to think of a text as consisting of words and punctuation in a particular order. I would like to call this concept of texts the Linguistic Text.[26] It refers to the semiotic dimension of Texts—the specific signs for words and word markers that stand for the Work (or the Version of the work). Linguistic Texts have three forms: Conceptual, Semiotic, and Material. The author's Conceptual Linguistic Text consisted of the signs he "intended to inscribe." A Semiotic Text consists of the signs found recorded in a physical form of the work. If a Version represents the conception or aim of the Work at a point of Utterance, the Linguistic Text is the execution or achievement of that Version, first as a Conceptual Text (thought) then as a Semiotic Text (sign), and then as a Material Text (paper and ink or some other physical inscription or production), at that point of Utterance. The Material Text is the evidence that a Conceptual Text was

formed and Uttered as a representation of a Version of the Work—in short, if there is no Material Text there is no Linguistic Text and hence no Version available to a reader. The Conceptual Text can be Materialized in spoken or written form, and it can be recorded in a mechanical or electronic way. It follows that the Linguistic Text can have more than one Semiotic form—spoken, written, electronic, and Braille, for instance. The Linguistic Text is not, therefore, physical; it is a sequence of words and word markers, conceived before spoken or written, and taking its semiotic form, when written, from the sign system used to indicate the language in which it is composed. We must also distinguish between the Linguistic Text and the Documents that preserve them, for as long as the sequence of words and markers is the same, the Linguistic Text is one, regardless of the number of copies or number of forms it is manifested in. All accurate copies, whether facsimiles, transcriptions, or encodings are the same single Linguistic Text. An inaccurate copy, however, is a different Linguistic Text for it is a different sequence of words and word markers, though it might still represent the same Version. The new Linguistic Text might represent the Essayed Conceptual Text more faithfully or less faithfully.

It should be noted that the Linguistic Texts representing an Essayed Version (the ideal aim of Utterance) run the risk of error at each transformation in production both through a failure of articulation (we've heard authors complain that they just couldn't put what they wanted into words) and because the author or a scribe failed to inscribe it accurately or completely. The Linguistic Text, therefore, corresponds to the Essayed Version only to the extent that its production was perfect. Editors (particularly "authorial intention" editors) have understood their job to be the production of a newly edited Linguistic Text that accurately represents the author's intentions for the final Version. Put in the terms defined here, the traditional "intention" of scholarly editing has been to create a new Material Text, the Linguistic Text of which coincides with the Essayed Conceptual Text. But because the author's Essayed Text is available to the editor only through material evidence for it, the editor can do no more than construct a new conceptualization of it (i.e., the editor does not in fact "recover" the author's Conceptual Text). The resulting edition is then a forward construction rather than a "backward" restoration.

To speak of the Linguistic Text as a sequence of words and word markers is to emphasize a distinction already made but that is of primary importance: that the Linguistic Text, being composed of signs, is a representation of the work and is not the work itself. It represents a Version, it is not the Version itself. It is the result of an encoding process

undertaken by the author or the author and his assistants. The Linguistic Text is, therefore, a sign and not an object, though it is always manifested in an object. To speak this way about the Linguistic Text is also to emphasize the act of decoding which is necessary before another person can be said to have seen or experienced the work of art. It should be equally evident that such a decoding experience cannot take place without a physical manifestation of the text as a starting point.[27]

The word Document can be used to refer to the physical "container" of the Linguistic Text. It might be paper and ink or a recording of some sort, including for example a Braille transcript which can be just paper. Records, tape recordings, microforms, and computer disks are also documents, though decoding such documents requires mechanical or electronic equipment. Documents are physical, material objects that can be held in the hand. Each new copy of the Linguistic Text is in a new document. Two documents containing the same Linguistic Text are still two separate entities but only one Linguistic Text. This physical form not only provides a "fixing medium" (to borrow a concept from photography) but it inevitably provides an immediate context and texture for the Linguistic Text. It will be useful therefore to have a term for the union of Linguistic Text and Document. I call it the Material Text. It seems clear that a reader reacts not just to the Linguistic Text when reading but to the Material Text, though it be subconsciously, taking in impressions about paper and ink quality, typographic design, size, weight, and length of document, and style and quality of binding, and perhaps from all these together some sense of authority or integrity (or lack thereof) for the text. These aspects of the Material Text carry indications of date and origin, and social and economic provenance and status, which can influence the reader's understanding of and reaction to the Linguistic Text.[28] (See Chart 3.)

We should pause again for a moment, this time with our feet firmly planted in the material realm. A Material Text, any Material Text, is

the reader's only access route to the Work. A Linguistic Text cannot exist for anyone (who does not already hold it in memory) without a material medium;[29] the Linguistic Text and its medium are the Material Text with all the implications of that union. Material Texts are the production of Utterance. The first Material Text (says the manuscript) is the first attempted union of the Essayed Version and a Document. There might be a problem in distinguishing that first Material Text from draft fragments, and it might be possible to "reconstruct" archaeologically a Version buried in drafts in early manuscripts or in the cancelled and altered passages in a manuscript or typescript whose final revisions represent Essayed Version one. Material Texts numbers 2-n are transcriptions made by anyone including the author. These Material Texts might incorporate the results of revisions, editorial interventions, or errors, or they might be accurate transcripts.

It would appear from the concept of Material Texts that when an editor has extracted or edited the Linguistic Text which he believes best represents the Version he is editing, he must embody that Linguistic Text in a new document which will be a new Material Text with implications all its own. He cannot reincorporate a new Linguistic Text into an old Document to present a "restored" Material Text. The force of this idea came to me while reading Jerome McGann's explanation of the work as a product of social contract in which the production process was described as an integral and inevitable aspect of the concept of the work of art.[30]