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B. Structuring Multiple Versions

"Post-Whig" ways of gauging the significance (i.e., meaning and effect, and thence importance) of revision involve a concept of Versions identified or delimited with reference to one or more of "four unities": Time, Content, Function, and Material. The main point here is that a concept of Versions requires a way to identify something that can be "perceived" only through potentially misleading physical representations of it. A concept of Version has to be able to identify Version by distinguishing it both from other Versions of the Work and from the physical manifestations of it, which might be corrupt or which might actually mix text from more than one Version. It must also be able to distinguish between texts which differ because they represent different Versions and texts which differ merely because one or both contain errors. Unlike any of the distinctions between terms referring to the forms of Texts (Conceptual, Linguistic, Semiotic, Material, and Reception Texts), decisions about what constitutes a Version are matters of judgment

and will depend entirely on the relative weight that the judge places on one or more of "four unities" in making that judgment.

(1) Utterances

Before discussing the "four unities" and how they have been used to identify Versions, we need to look again at the concept of Utterance, a term borrowed from speech act theory and literary theory.[43] The term is a problem, however, because it has been defined in several ways and applied to the acts of persons other than the author. Utterance can be the act of formulating the conception of the Work we call a Version into a Linguistic Text. If we define it so, however, we come very close to saying that each Utterance is a work of art and we might hesitate to accept this idea. Utterance can also be defined as the act of making a Version available or making it public. Here again, several acts can be referred to by the term. Making a Version available might be done by writing it down, or by giving it to a typist, or by submitting it to a publisher, or by reading and approving final proofs, or by publishing the printed book. Each of these acts might be thought of as a moment of Utterance which gives the Linguistic Text involved status as representing a distinct Version. Further, Utterance can be defined as what the author said or wrote, what the production process produced and published, or what the reader heard or read.

In order for Utterance to be a useful term we must not only distinguish it from Version and our other terms but show how it is helpful in describing or organizing them. We might say that Version is the aim of Utterance but that an Utterance might not succeed or might only partially succeed in its aim. But Utterance is not merely the production of a Material Text that might or might not accurately represent a Version. Utterance not only refers to the Performances of Works but to the circumstances, the contexts of those actions which influence and contain (i.e., keep from running wild) the meaning and help indicate what meanings are operable. This is a relatively simple concept in speech, as I have already noted, where the speaker and listener and circumstance are all together interacting at the moment of speech. But with written or recorded language, the Utterance of the author, of the various members of the production crew, and of the reader are each separated in time and circumstances so that meaning at every stage in the life of the written word is influenced by different milieux. It is not absurd, therefore, to

conceive not only of Creative Versions resulting from authorial acts (which has been the focus thus far) but of Production Versions (publication utterances), and Reception Versions (reader utterances). Now this would be complicated enough if the Work were one thing which could be rationalized into one universal text out of this proliferation of "versions" (which would not be true versions but simple imperfections). But, in fact, there is no agreement among scholars or artists about what one thing the Work is or ought to be (i.e., there is no universal definition of authority). Each person has a notion about what it ought to be, but the possibilities are quite numerous. Some concept of authority (to identify the authentic elements of the Work) and the four unities (to distinguish Versions of the Work) are the means by which readers impose order on this cacophony of utterances. That is, how an individual student of the Work understands Versions and how he reacts to Material Text X in his hand will depend on the specific Utterance selected and defined for use. And that selection and definition depends on the values given to the "four unities": Content, Time, Function, and Material. Needless to say, these values are usually selected and applied without conscious thought—in which case the Material Text becomes transparent and the only "text" that matters is purely and simply the Reception Text in the reader's Performance Field.

(2) Unities as Structural Glue

The unity of Content is the place to begin.[44] It is because the content, particularly the Linguistic Texts, of copy X and copy Y were not identical that this discussion began. If they had been identical there would appear to be no problem. The idea that one copy is accurate and the other inaccurate does not explain cases of revision. The idea that one copy represents an early incomplete stage of the work and the other represents a completed or improved stage does not explain cases where the revisions appear to mean contradictory things or to have palpably different but individually satisfying effects. But the problem here is to calculate first whether the content had a sufficient stability as an "entity" to be called a Version, and next to calculate how much of a change or what kind of change in content is required before a different Version, rather than an improved Version, results. The most radical answer to this question was offered by Hans Zeller, when he described the work as a network of relationships between its parts. He reasoned that any change

in any part would change the nature of the network; and so, every textual change produces, logically, a changed work.[45] There is an empirical attractiveness in this view because it equates the work with the copy of the work; each variant copy is a new work, but there is an unsatisfying or disturbing implication in this view because it makes editing a work a nearly impossible task. A scholarly edition would have to incorporate whole texts of every authoritative source. G. Thomas Tanselle offers a compromise through his distinction between "horizontal and vertical" revision. Horizontal changes merely improve a presentation or intention already achieved more or less well in the original text; vertical changes alter the intention by changing the meaning or direction of the work.[46] In order to gauge the type of change, Tanselle uses also the unity of Function, so that not all changes in Content signal changes in Version. He suggests also that differences in the Time of revision might be a useful factor, but he does not anticipate the case of an accumulation of "horizontal" improvements having a "vertical" effect.[47]

The unity of Time derives from the idea that the person changes with time so that if an effort of creation is separated from an effort of revision it is likely or at least possible that the revision effort will reflect changes in the person and thus follow its own line of inspiration rather than that which informed the first. But the problem here is how to calculate how much time must elapse between engagements with the text for the lapse of time to be deemed significant and the resulting effort to be seen as a separate Version.[48] Among modern textual critics, the most radical view of Version that depends on the unity of Time is the one presented by Hershel Parker in Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons where he argues from a phychological model of creativity that authors lose their authority over a work after a certain period and that revision often not only violates the creativity of the original effort but can end in confusion which might make a text unreadable.[49] A good deal of my own 1984 recommendation concerning identification of Versions depends on the

unity of Time. I would no longer rely so heavily on this one aspect. Even for an editor who is concerned with presenting only one somehow "best" version of the work, the unity of time is sometimes used to reject undesirable authorial revisions made later in time on the grounds that the passage of time had deprived the author of the inspiration (or at least continuity of thought or purpose) that informed the work now being revised without inspiration.

The unity of Function relates to the purpose for which the work is designed. Is it for a magazine; is it a chapter in a book; is it a play adaptation, a translation, a revised edition aimed at a new market? Each new function constitutes the potential for a new version. Revisions undertaken to adapt the work to a new function should not, according to this unity, be confused with revisions undertaken to enhance the success of the same function served by the unrevised text. This criterion requires that the revision be for a different purpose, not just a better fulfillment of an old purpose. Fredson Bowers has written considerably about this aspect of the identity of Versions, but in practice Bowers has tended to see new functions as superseding old functions (as long as they are authorial); so that, while he admits that the previous Versions have "authority" he tends to see new Versions as having "superior authority."[50] This is an example of what McLaverty calls the Whig interpretation of revision, the idea that revisions are better because it is absurd to think that an author would deliberately revise his work to make it worse.

The unity of Material relates to production efforts. In this concept the word Material means the physical object or document that bears the Linguistic Text. It equates, in effect, the concept of Version of the Work with the Material Text. The Material Text is, after all, the place where all the Performances and all the component aspects of a Work are brought together. The Creative Performance resulting in a Linguistic Text is united to the Production Performance resulting in a Material Text, which is where the Reception Performance must begin. The Material Text can be seen then as a social, economic and artistic unit and is the entity necessary for the full functioning of literary art. The primary proponents of this point of view are Jerome McGann and D. F. McKenzie.[51] The most obvious shortcoming of this position seems to be

its rigidity, its rather helpless acceptance of determinacy in the Material Text. There is a grand sense of coalescence in the view, but the Linguistic Text involved in many cases will strike some readers as having been over-determined or perhaps over-packaged. Production processes notoriously tamper with a Linguistic Text in ways both beneficial and detrimental to it as a representation of the Essayed Version. And it does not sit well with some people that the economic necessities and accidents of Production Performances should be allowed to shape (sometimes to shape out of existence) the subtleties of the Creative Performance.