:: :: University of Virginia Library

Earlier, I passed rather quickly over two crucial but complicated issues to which I promised to return. The first was the question of how one determines whether an inscribed text accurately reflects the work it was meant to represent. The second, even more complex, had to do with determining, first, when a version had coalesced as a finished form and, second, when another version, differing from the first, can be distinguished as a separate entity.

Textual criticism from earliest times has been primarily concerned with the first of these problems; one might say its history has been one of obsession with the problem of textual corruption. I am not going to try to provide a primer on the subject here. What I said was that when two copies of a work, both bearing the same title and purporting to be the same work, contain variant Linguistic Texts, one explanation could be that one or both texts misrepresented the work. And, if the work was a single thing, then at least one of the variant texts had to be wrong. The point was that a work could be misrepresented by a copy of it. And it follows, therefore, that the work might be misrepresented by every copy of it. From this observation we must conclude that the work and the copies of the work are separate entities. It has been the business of textual criticism to do what it could about such misrepresentations. I will say no more here about how that can be done except to note that the textual critic's concept of Authority for the work is central to his task.[38]

The other explanation offered for textual variation between copies of a work was that the work might exist in two versions each represented by one of the variant copies each of which could be correct. Now it is a commonplace that authors revise their works, and mere revision has seldom been taken as proof that a separate version of the work exists. But if variant forms of the work are legitimate (i.e., not the result of corruption or inattention), and if reader X disagrees with reader Y because they are not reading identical texts, then something significant has occurred,

which impels us to think the concept of Versions of a Work might be useful.

But for several reasons, the problem of Versions is not simple. Literary works of art come in Material Texts which are linear and single in form. Variant texts, therefore, are difficult to present and assimilate; they are not easily experienced simultaneously or side by side. Thus most reading experiences are restricted to interaction with one Material Text representing better or worse one Version of the Work. Publishers are committed to perpetuating this form of experience and resist multiple text editions. Perhaps that is why there has been a tendency to consider revisions as a single continuum of creative efforts made to improve the work. The process is said to be over only when the last revision is made—and even then the process might have just stopped unfinished. This is a fundamental principle for "final intention" editions. James McLaverty calls this a Whig interpretation of revision, which often disregards meaning and effect in favor of a predisposition to credit revision with improvement.[39] The "Whig" view is convenient, for it maintains that the Work is singular and revisions are all part of a grand design toward which the author works from beginning to end. Variant texts, according to this view, either contain errors or represent incomplete revision. With this view it would be considered a reading Utopia if all Material Texts in circulation were accurate renditions of the "final intention text"—a Utopia of logo-centrism.[40]

It is tempting to dismiss such views of the Work as oversimplifications, but not only do such views characterize most readers' habitual attitudes towards the texts they use, there are powerful influences in our culture, at least in the present, to accept and even to enforce such a view. The alternatives might be more honest or more sophisticated or more intellectually rigorous, but is it art? Is it the real thing? These are questions about authority and authenticity. In painting, the questions are, Is it a copy? Is it a fake? In literature one hardly ever thinks of a fake novel. But we can say of a poem that it is "only a copy, and not a very good one at that," by which we probably mean that its "authority" has been

compromised through textual variation from "unauthorized" sources. I have discussed the question of authority elsewhere, and so will not develop the idea here.[41] Suffice it to say that authority is not found in works but is attributed to them according to how the user defines authority. There are currently four common definitions of authority, some with a marvelous variety of subdivisions which feed astonishing controversies about which is the proper work of art and what is the proper goal of editing. Authority is a system of valuations relating to the Work for the purpose of distinguishing between what is the Work and what is not the Work.[42] In the hands of Whigs—those who want the Work to be one identifiable, real thing—authority is used to discountenance all Versions but the "true one." Exceptions are sometimes made for Works that have two or even more "true versions" such as Wordsworth's Prelude or Marianne Moore's "Poetry," but these are quite exceptional cases. Anyone who admits the possibility of more than one version, however, needs concepts other than "authority" to distinguish them. It stands to reason that if two people disagree on the definition or application of the concept of Authority, they will not be able to agree about Version. As we shall see, I think Version, like Authority, is not so much found in the textual material as it is put there. The ways in which Versions are identified, then, become an important matter to discover.