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IX. Conclusions
This exercise in naming leads, I believe, to a number of conclusions about literary works of art.
One is that the word Work conveys both a singular and a plural meaning. A work is one thing: all the Versions of Henry James's Roderick Hudson are subsumed under this one title. Simultaneously a work is a thing of internal diversity. It exists wherever a copy of the work exists. Each copy is a more or less accurate representation of one Version of the Work.[56]
Another conclusion is that attempts to repair or restore original or pure texts of a work or to revise and improve them tend to proliferate texts rather than to refine them. If one thinks of proliferating refined copies, one must remember not only that the "unrefined" copies have not been changed but that, by the unities of Material, Time, and perhaps Function, the refined copies represent new and therefore different Material Texts, complete with all that that entails.
A further conclusion is that the crucial act in relation to a Work of literary art is not writing, or publishing, or editing it, but reading it. Of course, without the first of these there will be no reading, but without reading the first seems incomplete or lacks fulfillment. Several observations about reading arise from this taxonomy. First, to read Material Text X is to decode a Work (i.e., that which is implied by its various Versions) from interaction with only one of its many static forms. Reading, therefore, is almost always a partial interaction with the Work. Second, if Material Text X is taken as a transparent window on the Work, there is no question asked about Versions or about errors. Third, if Material Text X is taken as the result of a single, prolonged production effort, subject only to human error, there is no question asked about Versions, just about accuracy. Fourth, if Material Text X is taken "for what it is"—one of many representations of a version of a work—there are questions of both accuracy and Version. Questions of Version include questions about the agents of change (author, editor, etc.), and about time, function or motive, and material. Material Texts are not, in other words, transparent.
Since editing and publishing tend to increase the number of copies of a work, not just in numbers but in variant forms, it seems useful to devise a graphic system to identify and categorize the Material Texts which represent the work (see Chart 3). Thus when person X reads and remarks upon Material Text X and person Y evaluates those remarks in
For example, in the disputes between those who say the work of art is a social product finding its "true" form in the Material Text and those who consider the production process as unfortunately corrupting—but why be abstract? In the disparate views represented by Jerome McGann and Hershel Parker about the moment of coalescence for a work, McGann placing it in the Material Text and Parker placing it in the Linguistic Text at the moment of greatest creative control by the author, we have, I think, a disagreement that becomes clarified and a bit nonsensical. While many people have a gut feeling that "authorial authority" or Creative Performance is more interesting than "production authority" or Production Performance, the plain facts are that authors do some things badly and production does some things well.[57] If we take the view that the inscription which the author is finally satisfied to relinquish to a publisher is the closest representation of a Version, we are likely to take it as the basis for a new edition. But authors often show or relinquish manuscripts they know will be or must be changed. Would we be willing to say that the Essayed Version as embodied in the printer's copy (author's fair copy) is a form of the work which the critic can use as the basis for a "reading" of the work? Does the scholarly editor have a Production Performance task parallel to that given the work by its original publisher? It has seemed wise to say that the materials of the editorial project will dictate which answer is the most appropriate, but if that were true there would be no disputes. Disputes arise not only because, for example, McGann worked on Byron (who gratefully left the details of punctuation to those who cared and knew about such things)
Another conclusion that might be drawn, tentatively at least, is that the idea of "conveying meaning" might be a misleading way to think about how texts function. The processes of encoding meaning (by authoring) and repackaging the coding (by publishing) and decoding (by reading) are perhaps too complex and fraught with "noise" to allow for "conveying," and our experience is rife with instances of meaning being apparently misconveyed (misconstrued is a more accurate and more frequent term, as it should be) either by accident or by deliberate appropriation. This taxonomy suggests that texts influence, rather than control, Reception Performance. All the work of Creative Performance and Production Performance is ostensibly geared toward influencing Reception Performance.[58] The only chance that an author has to influence the Reception Performance is so to arrange the Linguistic Text that he will have the best chance possible of influencing the reading and thus be said to have been understood rather than to have been misconstrued. The Reception Performance is, however, influenced not only by the Linguistic Text but by a great deal besides, much of which is subconscious and fortuitous. When the Reader has produced a Reception Text, its coherence is usually considered satisfactory proof that the performance has succeeded. Dissatisfaction with that coherence can only come when a second reading or someone else's description of a reading appears more satisfyingly coherent. There is, of course, no way to verify any correspondence between Reception Performance and Creative Performance.
All of this seems to confirm a conclusion bruited among some literary theorists: that the community of scholarship (or any community of
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