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In 1984 I made an attempt to delineate the gradations of concepts from the ideal to the concrete, which I thought clarified the editorial materials and goals sufficiently so that disagreements among scholarly editors about editorial policies could be understood clearly and not result from vagueness or confusion.[17] Disagreements could thus be resolved or brought to a truce in which the parties at least knew why they disagreed. I have been gratified by the response to this effort from editors who expressed feelings of relief and release from conflicts between what their common sense inclined them to think was a desirable editorial solution and what standard editorial practice and principles seemed to dictate.

Now it seems profitable to raise the question again because the arguments about what constitutes the work of art rages not merely among textual critics, but among literary critics generally. I have found inspiration to continue my 1984 attempt in the writings of Jerome McGann, D. F. McKenzie, Joseph Grigely and James McLaverty.[18] My discussion

will take the form primarily of definitions. The distinctions between concepts, and the relations I will try to show existing between them, are designed first to provide a system for describing the range of materials that are commonly referred to vaguely as books or works of literary art, and second, to provide a ground for discussing the various sorts of acts (often characterized by confusion and conflict) undertaken in response to these materials. My purpose is to enable the conflicts to be focused more clearly on substantive differences of opinion and judgment rather than on confusions about what is being said. Although taxonomies are by definition logocentric and tend to pin down concepts or objects in a conventional way, the result of the taxonomy I propose is to suggest that the drive towards arresting and codifying Works of Art is futile. Instead, it suggests that the work is partially inherent in all "copies" of it. One might say the Work is neither this, nor that, but both and none. The Work is partially in the copy of the work but is not the copy. Works are known through proliferations of texts, not through their refinement or concentration. Nearly all experiences of works are, therefore, partial. This taxonomy helps reveal what parts remain unknown or unexperienced. I have adopted the convention of capitalizing the terms I have appropriated for definition. Since I use some of these terms before I have had a chance to define them, their capitalization is an indication that I will eventually define them.

A. Methods of Classification

It is customary to speak of a Work of literary art, such as Moby-Dick or Dombey and Son, as though such titles designated something definite. That they do not is easily demonstrated by asking, "If the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre in Paris, where is Hamlet?"[19] The term Work is used to classify certain objects, so that we can say "This is a copy of Moby-Dick, but this over here is a copy of Dombey and Son." The term Work and the title Moby-Dick do not refer to a thing, an object, but rather to a class of objects. We can see this by saying, "This is a copy of Moby-Dick, and this, too, is a copy of Moby-Dick." We might try to push the limits of

this insight by defining Work of literary art as that which is implied by and bounded by its physical manifestations.[20] This statement suggests both that a Work can have forms other than that of one of its physical manifestations, and that its potential forms are limited by the forms of its physical manifestations. It suggests, further, that a Work is in important ways both plural and fragmented. These are not simple or comfortable suggestions, and the reaction of some critics and editors is to limit their attention pragmatically to the physical manifestations of works, the book in hand, as if the Book and the Work were coeval and congruent. They are not interested in abstract notions of "intention" or in fragmentary forms of the work, which they would label "pre-utterance forms" or "pre-copy-text forms" or "shavings on the workshop floor." For them, the work is the book in hand. It is simple, it is practical; it is achieved by willfully ignoring certain sets of questions about the work.

But for those who stop to think that not all copies of a work are identical (which is particularly true of well-known, often reprinted, works), and that what person X says is the work (because he holds copy X in his hand) is different from what person Y says is the work (because she holds copy Y), there is a problem worth resolving, because what person X says about the work, referring to copy X, might be nonsense to person Y, checking the references in copy Y.[21] A fruitful approach to this problem is to examine the concept that the work is implied by and limited by its physical manifestations, rather than being identical with them. This examination requires that we contemplate, if only for argument, the idea that the work is an ideal or mental construct (or constructs) separate from but represented by physical forms. We can do this without arguing that the work is either the mental construct or that it is the physical form, and we need not argue that one or the other has a greater claim. Instead we might pursue the implications of defining the work as a mental construct that can be known only through its physical forms and the

effects they create or allow.[22] Note carefully that I do not mean, by this distinction, the difference between a sign and its meaning or referent. I mean instead the difference between the physical sign sequence as recorded in copies of a work and the sign sequence a user of the copy of the work takes to be the work. The latter sign sequence is a mental construction deriving from the former with the added proviso that the user may consider the physical copy of the work to be marred by error or abridgement or to be partial by reason of revisions not recorded in that copy or even by reason of inappropriate packaging.

When two or more of these physical forms of a work disagree, it is patently obvious that, if the Work is a single ideal entity, they cannot both accurately represent it. Two possible explanations for differences between two physical manifestations of the work can be suggested. The first is that one is corrupt and thus misrepresents the Work (or both copies could be corrupt in different ways). The second is that the Work exists in two (or more) Versions each represented more or less well by one of the physical copies.[23] We can think of the Work, then, as existing in more than one Version and yet be one Work. This does not, however, help to resolve the problem of whether the Work or a Version of it is accurately represented by the physical copy held by person X or person Y.

Before pursuing that problem, there are some difficulties with the concept of Version to try to clarify. First, like the term Work, the term Version does not designate an object; it, too, is a means of classifying objects. In the same way that the Work Dombey and Son is not Moby-Dick, so too a first version is not a second, or a magazine version is not a chapter in a book, or a printed version is not a version for oral presentation. The term Version in these formulations is a means of classifying copies of a Work according to one or more concepts that help account for the variant texts or variant formats that characterize them. Second, it is not just the existence of different texts of the same Work which

leads us to imagine multiple Versions of a Work. What we know about composition also suggests Versions. And to help distinguish various concepts relating to version, I would suggest the sub-categories Potential Version, Developing Version, and Essayed Version. These categories correspond to ideas we have about composition and revision. Potential Version refers to the abstract incipient ideas about the Work as it grows in the consciousness of the author. The Potential Version has no physical manifestation, but we judge from our own experience in composing that such a version exists at least in outline and we imagine this version capable of being developed, abandoned, or changed. The Potential Version is unavailable to us except as an idea. Developing Version refers to a process that does have physical outcomes. The Potential Version processed by thought and inscription produces, in the case of many authors, drafts or notes, which when added to more thought, more inscription, and perhaps some revision results in additional drafts. When the Developing Version has progressed sufficiently and been consolidated into an inscription of the whole, we have a physical representation of what I would call an Essayed Version.

The point at which the developing version reaches sufficient wholeness to be thought of as representing the first Essayed Version is, of course, a matter of opinion and, therefore, of dispute. This problem is another demonstration of the fact that the term "Version" refers to a means of classification, not to an actual stable object. The first Essayed Version can be thought about and revised and used as a basis for producing a second Version, etc. It might also be thought of as a provisional version or a finished version, but it is a version of the work in that it represents the work. Though the Essayed Version has physical embodiment in a text, it is not the physical text. We can imagine the Essayed Version in the author's imagination as more perfect than his or her ability to record it in signs which require compromise and are liable to inscription error. Even if there is only one physical copy of the Work, one could not say that the Version it embodied was the Work, for as soon as a new Version appeared the distinction between Version and Work would become necessary again.

We should pause for a moment here, suspended in the ethereal realm of ideal forms, to observe that the idea that "a Work is implied by a series of Versions" is based on ideas about composition, revision, and editorial interventions. That is, I have developed these ideas by imagining the processes of composition, not by starting with finished copies of the Work and inferring the processes "backward" from them. To think in this way about a work entails also believing that each new version has integrity or "entity" as an Utterance of the Work. If two copies of a work

differ in ways that are explained by "infelicities in transmission" then one does not need a concept of Version to explain the differences. But if each is thought to be desirable or "authoritative" in its own way, then the concept of Version is useful for classification. One could think of a Version, then, as the conception or aim of the Work at a point of Utterance. But Version is a very complex and slippery concept I will define and discuss in detail later. Where there is a well-established convention for using the term Work to distinguish between Vanity Fair and Jane Eyre, there is not an established convention for distinguishing Versions of Vanity Fair.

Of the problems concerning the concept of Versions which must be discussed in detail later there are two which should be mentioned before moving on to definitions of Text and making clearer the connections between ideal concepts of works and their physical manifestations. The first is the problem of determining when the Essayed Version has stopped being the Developing Version so that it can be thought of as coalesced into a Version that can be identified and read as such. The second is the problem of determining if and when a second version has coalesced that should be considered as separate from the first. To discuss these problems we need several related concepts I will develop later: Time, Content, Function, and Material. One should also note that concepts of Intention and Authority are crucial to the idea of Versions; neither of these concepts is simple.[24] Needless to say, I think the idea of Versions is a very useful one, in spite of its problems.

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]

C. Texts Again: Physical, Semiotic, and Conceptual

The terms Version, Text, and Document have brought us in the life of a literary work of art only through the down-swing of the pendulum from the "mind of the author" to the concrete manifestations of the work in Material Texts (i.e., books). And it should perhaps be emphasized once again that a Work may be "implied" by more than one Version and by more than one swing of the pendulum. But now we must face the Material Text in the absence of the Author and with a realization that as we approach the Material Text we are not before a verbal construct and that we cannot see prelocution, perlocution or illocution, or even intention or meaning. What we have before us is molecules compounded in paper and ink. Everything else must be inferred from that, beginning with the recognition of the sign shapes, which the ink shapes materially represent. I have mentioned that the Material Text is the starting point for further processes, the up-swing, necessary before the Work can be perceived, for the Material Text is not equivalent with the Work but is instead merely a coded representation or sign of the Work. Furthermore, the Material Text before us is only a single instance of many possible manifestations of the Work. Not all Material Texts are necessarily representative of the same Version of the Work, nor are they all equally accurate representatives of the Work. Nevertheless, a Material Text is where the reader begins the process of perceiving or experiencing the work of art. This process is one of decoding or dematerializing the Material Text into some mental construct of it. It is in this decoding process that the Work can be said to function.[31]