 | |  |
Notes
Perhaps it "goes without saying" that a commitment to the first of these propositions prevents any attempt to "use" structuralism as a means of approaching objectivity. Post-structuralists' supposed rejection of structuralism is, I believe, a reaction against such attempts and not a denial of the fundamental concepts of structural linguistics.
Lost in the discussion, often, is the notion that these revelations are about meanings unintended by someone and that the text is being treated as witness to a designated historical event. In other words, the current political agenda of the modern critic attempts to derive strength from contrast to a supposed historical "actuality" about which the writers in question were supposedly unaware.
A particularly interesting new theory of a basic semantic unit is presented by Price Caldwell in "Molecular Sememics: A Progress Report," Meisei Review, 4 (1989), 65-86, in which meaning is seen as determined by the rhetorical "molecule' within which what is said is contrasted by speaker and listener alike to that which is not said within the limits of the molecule. This is a rejection of syntax as the primary meaning unit and acknowledges a context socially conventionalized and thus accessible to socialized speakers and listeners to insure reasonable success in communication. The structure of a molecule is similar to, but not identical with, Levi-Strauss's "bundle." One very attractive feature of molecular sememics is its ability to explore the richness of subtle usages such as irony, analogy, metaphor, and even rhyme and lies.
One asks what is being subverted when a text is described as self-subverting. Is it the author's apparent meaning or the text's apparent meaning that is subverted? In either case, how can a reader "know" that the text is subverting a meaning? What meaning is being subverted? How can the reader know that the subversion was not itself intended and, therefore, itself be the meaning of the text? Or is it that the reader's meaning is subverted by the text? The whole question of agency of meaning is, in spite of protestations to the contrary, central to deconstruction—one can hardly deconstruct what is not there.
These phrases are used by a variety of writers but were given currency, respectively, by W. W. Greg, Fredson Bowers, Hershel Parker, and Jerome McGann.
I note for example that in "From Work to Text" Roland Barthes wants to talk about the work "at the level of an object" and distinguishes between "Work" (by which he most of the time means "Book") and "Text" (by which he sometimes means an area of play, sometimes the players in that area, sometimes the way the area plays with readers, and sometimes an object located at the intersection of propositions—in short a variety of "things" more or less abstract). But in fact, Barthes does not discuss the physical object in any sophisticated way at all, treating the Book (Work) as a single unproblematic given. He is apparently not interested in Work and does not see its relevance to Text except as a something to be decanted. I should add that I have no quarrel with Barthes's useful exploration of his term Text—though I prefer to use several different terms for the various things he denotes by the term Text.
This map is adapted most immediately from two models by Paul Hernadi designed to illustrate the questions "What is a Work" and "What is Criticism," but the similarity to models of language by Roman Jakobson are apparent. (See Chart 2.)
G. Thomas Tanselle surveys a number of approaches to the problem of relating intention to texts in "The Editorial Problem of Final Intention," Selected Studies in Bibliography (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1979), 309-353, esp. 312-319; rptd. from Studies in Bibliography, 29 (1976), 167-211.
The degree to which textual criticism is breaking out of this narrow mold is probably not well known, for many edition users still look for a "standard" or "established" text to use uncritically, but there are new movements afoot. What I see as a problem is that proponents of the breakouts tend, unfortunately to view their new insights as new, replacement orthodoxies—Jerome McGann, for example, bringing in and then overvaluing book production as the milieu of meaning, Hershel Parker bringing in the psychology of creativity and turning it into a determiner of text. The common problem appears to be that though textual critics are very well aware of the distinction between the Work and the Book, they have been obsessed with the notion that the Work should be reducible to a Book. My focus, however, is not upon what is wrong with textual criticism or textual critics but what a taxonomy of texts reveals about the connections between textual criticism and its related fields of interest and what it can show about the nature of Works of Art that might change our view of the aim of textual criticism and the way we treat the copies of works we use in our study regardless of our position, East, West, North or South.
All communication, that is, must pass through a physical medium as sounds or as signs to be seen, heard, or touched. Communications of any other sort are called telepathy, about which I have nothing to say.
This is obviously not true of literary works held in the memory and that "live again" as they are remembered or recited without the aid of physical documents. I am perhaps being a bit literal when I define reading and writing in relation to physical documents, but textual criticism and scholarly editing seldom are able to concern themselves with memories and recitations. (See also note 29.)
How to do Things with Words (1962), pp. 99-130. Illocution, the way an utterance is used—as warning, advice, etc.—and perlocution, the effect aimed at by the utterance—as persuading one to respond appropriately—are just two of a number of possible ways to categorize the "intentions" that might constitute the thoughts and feelings preceding and leading to utterance, locution, or creation of a delivered text. See Appendix A for further analysis. The concept of "intention" is slippery and has been discussed in connection with literary texts by me and others elsewhere; see works cited below by Bowers, Tanselle, McGann, and McLaverty.
Paul Hernadi, "Literary Theory," in Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures, Joseph Gibaldi, ed. (1981), pp. 103-105.
This is not really a taxonomy, for I am not classifying kinds of literary works; rather it is an anatomy, but only of a narrow band of what a literary work is. It is more accurately an ontology of texts, but a suggestive and tentative one. Most definitely it is a proposal for a partial nomenclature of textual criticism.
Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age, Occasional Paper #3 (English Department, Royal Military College, Duntroon, 1984); revised edition (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986). (An earlier, less developed presentation is in my "Key Issues in Editorial Theory," Analytical & Enumerative Bibliography, 6 (1982), 1-16.) Additional comments focused particularly on what might be called production texts or the sociology of texts are in my "An Inquiry into the Social Status of Texts and Modes of Textual Criticism," Studies in Bibliography, 40 (1988), 55-79.
Jerome McGann began elaborating his ideas about production versions of works in A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (1984), but makes a clearer statement of them in "Theory of Texts," London Review of Books, 16 Feb. 1988, pp. 20-21. D. F. McKenzie explains his view of works as cultural artifacts with specific spatial and temporal appropriations and functions in the Panizzi lectures, A Sociology of Texts (British Library, 1987). In "The Textual Event," a paper for the Society for Textual Scholarship (STS) conference, New York, April 1989, Joseph Grigely presented his ideas of texts as occupying literal, historical and mental spaces and suggested a distinction between text and performance, which he did not elaborate. James McLaverty published two informative articles in 1984 ("The Concept of Authorial Intention in Textual Criticism," The Library, 6, 121-138; and "The Mode of Existence of Literary Works of Art," Studies in Bibliography, 37, 82-105) on concepts of authorial intention, and at the STS conference in New York, 1989, he presented "Identity and Utterance in Textual Criticism," in which he suggested several concepts that might be used in identifying different forms of a work; these include identity, survival, function, and utterance. I am especially indebted to McLaverty for sparking off the ideas elaborated in this essay. I should add that conversations with my colleagues Paul Eggert and Jeff Doyle (at University College, Australian Defence Force Academy) have been influential in this paper in ways too numerous to point out.
The question has fascinated me since I first encountered it in James McLaverty's "The Mode of Existence of Literary Works of Art."
This is probably not always true for the author who might consider "the work in his head" to be better than and independent from any of its physical inscriptions. As Marlowe notes of dreams in "Heart of Darkness," "no relation of a dream can convey the dream's sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment and a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being corrupted by the incredible. . . ." It might also be untrue of readers who, having appropriated a work, rewrite it according to their own inspiration either as adaptations, abridgements, or retellings with augmentations. Most people would hesitate to include in their concept of the Work either what remains in the author's head or the lucubrations of others, but it is astonishing where some folks draw the line.
There are, of course, many other reasons why X and Y disagree, many of which are explored quite revealingly in works on reader response. I am here concerned with those disagreements arising from differences in the physical manifestations of works. (See also Chart 4.)
I do not think that textual criticism is a "science" if by that term one implies something objective, but there is a pleasing similarity between the scientist operating as though photons and quarks exist, though he cannot see them, and a textual critic operating as though works exist, though he only has signs for them. I would distinguish in this way the relations between the concept of a work and sign for a work from the relation between Platonic ideals and realities, which seems more whimsical and better represented by, I believe, Christopher Morley's fiction about a limbo of lost works, a place where works continue to exist after all physical copies have been destroyed and forgotten.
It is theoretically possible with this concept to imagine that a work represented by only one physical copy in the whole world might be misrepresented by that copy. That is an important problem. We can imagine further that other Versions of the Work might have existed, but if we stick to our original proviso—that if the work is a mental construct it can be known only through its physical manifestations—we will spend little time with this possibility.
I have discussed them elsewhere (Scholarly Editing chaps. 1 and 3, and "An Inquiry into the Social Status of Texts"), but I will return to these problems below, also.
See Fredson Bowers, Bibliography and Textual Criticism (1964) and Essays in Bibliography, Text and Editing (1975) for fuller discussions of means to detect and correct textual error.
This is Jerome McGann's term and corresponds to his distinction between Linguistic Texts and Production Texts. I prefer Material Texts to Production Texts, for it identifies an entity without regard to the agency responsible for its production. McGann, if I understand him, defines Production Text as the product of non-authorial book production procedures, but a Material Text is any union of a Linguistic Text with a physical medium which "fixes" it, whether it is a manuscript or a printed book.
It is interesting to note that the mistake of equating literary art with the printed representation of it is never made in music: a score is never confused with the sounds it signals nor is a record or tape ever thought of as the music; every one knows it "must be played." However, recordings and scores share nearly all the textual problems which literary works have. The relationship between "playing it" for music and "reading it" for literature is very close.
The importance of the Material Text has been the special theme of much of Jerome McGann's and D. F. McKenzie's discussions of textual criticism and bibliography. McGann, by calling them "production texts," emphasizes the agents of production rather than the mere materiality of the texts. I believe he does so to help validate his contention that nonauthorial agents of textual change and non-authorial creators of textual contexts have a legitimate role in making the Work of Art. The taxonomy presented here remains neutral on this point and is useful as a description of process and phenomenon regardless of what one thinks is "legitimately" the Work.
This is true even if one hears a recitation produced by someone else's recollection of the text, though the physical medium in such a case is air molecules vibrating in sound waves rather than printed signs. One might add that any recitation, whether from memory or from a written text, is a new production of the text susceptible to "transmission error" or embellishment.
Barthes says "the Text is not the decomposition of the work" ("From Work to Text," p. 56), which sounds like a contradiction of what I just said, but in fact we are saying the same thing. Barthes's "work" (my "Material Text") cannot be experienced until it becomes Barthes's "text" (my "Reception Text"). Since Barthes is interested only in the experience or play of Text, he would of course define the "real" aspect of the work of art as the experience of it. That experience of it (Barthes's Play begins with decoding or dematerializing the Material Text (Barthes says "decanting the work").
Joseph Grigely in "The Textual Event" uses the word "performance" to apply to those things people do when they engage with a copy or text of the work. He did not elaborate what he meant by the term. I will use the term to apply to authors and production crews, as well as to readers.
By the term "creative" I do not mean to imply that authors make something out of nothing. They may be manipulating givens or they may be manipulated by forces over which they have no control. The "nature of creativity" is not the issue here; rather, I am distinguishing acts of authority over linguistic texts (determining what words and punctuation and the order for them that will constitute the linguistic text) from other acts such as determining the format and design of productions or acts of interpretation or appropriation of meanings.
This formulation does not apply to letters from one specific writer to one specific reader (addressee) in which, at least for the first reading of the letter, the event of writing and the event of reading are just two events.
Of course the reader may conjure up a number of mental representations including what he thinks was authorial intention, what should have been intended, what could have been intended, and what new uses or representations it could be made into. These might be whimsical or serious attempts to see the implications of differences.
T. H. Howard-Hill develops the implications of these differences in "Modern Textual Theories and the Editing of Plays," The Library, 6th ser., 11 (June 1989), 89-115. After cogently arguing through the distinctions in aim and function of various possible versions and after justifying the critic's interest in works of shared authority, he concludes that, with renaissance plays, the theatrical version, completed where necessary by the editor into a theatrically satisfying work of art, is the (apparently one) legitimate goal of scholarly editing, for "to assign paramount importance to the existence of uncertainty is not a useful editorial principle. Least of all should an editor transfer to the reader the responsibility of adjudicating imperfect or conflicting evidence of authorial intentions, and never should he present the reader with a critical edition which he knows does not incorporate the author's intentions for the work" (pp. 114-115). Howard-Hill justifies this goal by defining the "writing of a book" as "a synecdoche: the full authorial intention is to write a work, a novel, a play, a poem" which he sees as very different from the intention to write an edition of a work—but this is to slough over the distinctions in the meaning and effects of intention by conflating the term into a single rather vague meaning. Howard-Hill is committed to the implications of his statement that "the product of a theory that interprets authorial intention primarily on the level of the document rather than on the level of the work is unacceptable for drama and perhaps, if it were my charge to examine the proposition here, unacceptable for poems and novels also" (p. 90). See section VII.B(2) for comments on the way the "four unities" are used to determine Versions—here Howard-Hill uses them to determine the Work. One can, of course, use with gratitude Howard-Hill's "theatrical" text for what it is (a representation of the theatrical version) without necessarily agreeing either that it is The Work or even that it is the best version of the work.
See particularly Miller's "Presidential Address 1986. The Triumph of Theory, the Resistance to Reading, and the Question of the Material Base," PMLA, 102 (1987), 281-291.
More on this subject is in my Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age. See also G. Thomas Tanselle's Textual Criticism since Greg, A Chronicle, 1950-1985 (1987), which provides a sensible evaluative guide to much theoretical and practical writing on editing; and Fredson Bowers, "Regularization and Normalization in Modern Critical Texts," Studies in Bibliography, 42 (1989), 79-102. Differing rather sharply with Bowers and Tanselle is Jerome McGann's A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (1984).
A variant form of Whiggism is identified as "primitivism" by Jack Stillinger in "Textual Primitivism and the Editing of Wordsworth," Studies in Romanticism, 28 (Spring 1989), 4-28, where he mounts considerable evidence to debunk the prevailing editorial attitude that every revision post-dating Wordsworth's first complete version is an evidence of the poet's deterioration and growing heterodoxy. Unlike T. H. Howard-Hill (see note 36), who opts for a logically superior text as the aim of editing, Stillinger concludes that Words-worth's poems should be produced in editions of every version. He does not, however, offer a guide for such a proliferation of texts, since his focus is on the Whiggery (my word, not his) of current reductive editions and the determining and limiting effect they have on our experience of Wordsworth's works.
Authority can be authorial, documentary, sociological, or aesthetic depending on whether greater value was placed on the author, the document, the "social contract" of production, or the "aesthetic integrity of the work itself" (Scholarly Editing, pp. 18-30).
The appropriation of this term by textual criticism was first placed in its larger context, I believe, by G. Thomas Tanselle in "The Editorial Problem of Final Intentions," 309-353. McLaverty used it to good effect in "Identity and Utterance."
Content here refers to the make-up of the Linguistic Text. The word Content might suggest to some the substantive existence of the book or printed document. That concept will be taken up under the unity of Material.
Hans Zeller, "A New Approach to the Critical Constitution of Literary Texts," Studies in Bibliography, 28 (1975), 231-264.
A particular case is Samuel Richardson's Pamela where subsequent editions steadily improved Pamela's grammar till by 1800 she had lost most of the lexical roots of her rural past. See T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben Kimpel, "Richardson's Revisions of 'Pamela,'" Studies in Bibliography, 20 (1967), 61-88.
A significant lapse of time may be the duration of a "lightning flash of inspiration" that alters a whole concept, or the time it takes for the "burning coal of inspiration to flame, flicker, and die," or the time it takes to "build the cathedral of art from foundation to capstone." The metaphors one uses for art often reflect, or perhaps even determine, what value one places on the "unities."
See his "Multiple Authority: New Problems and Concepts of Copy-Text," The Library, 5th ser., 27 (1972), 81-115; and "Remarks on Eclectic Texts," Proof, 4 (1974), 13-58. Bowers is not wedded to this tendency, as he shows in his treatment of two versions of William James's reminiscences of Thomas Davidson (paper presented at the SAMLA convention, Washington, DC, November 1988).
See works by McGann and McKenzie cited above. I have reviewed the historical development and arguments for this view in "An Inquiry into the Social Status of Texts," also cited above.
The most obvious difference between Theseus' original ship and the reconstructed ship made from the identical materials is not one of time but of production; the original ship was not a reconstruction or restoration and the restored ship is not an original construction. This difference can be seen as one in function, or it may point to the need to expand the four unities by adding other useful criteria.
A single copy might represent a mixture of readings from more than one Version. Such a copy is said to be eclectic or sophisticated, depending on whether one approves or disapproves of the mixture.
Actually, these "facts" are no plainer than any other. The judgment of many people is that authors do some things badly and therefore need typists, editors and publishers to help them; likewise the judgment of many people is that these helpers do sometimes overstep their functions or perform them badly.
That statement should be qualified by the possibility that some—and unfortunately perhaps all—production performance is geared toward influencing the consumer to buy rather than the reader to comprehend. But the surface intention of copy-editing, type design, proof reading, format and binding design is to "help the reader" apprehend the work. That the covert intention of production actually works is verified in every book purchased and shelved unread.
Richard Ohmann, "Speech Acts and the Definition of Literature," Philosophy and Rhetoric, 4 (1971), 1-19, and "Speech, Literature, and the Space Between," New Literary History, 4 (1972-73), 47-63; John R. Searle, Expression and Meaning (1979); and Quentin Skinner, "Conventions and the Understanding of Speech Acts," Philosophical Quarterly, 20 (1970), 118-138. Skinner's distinctions, or very similar ones, have made their way into Wendell Harris's very useful book Interpretive Acts: In Search of Meaning (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), though Skinner is not mentioned.
| | |