I
In 1985 the inaugural series of Panizzi Lectures at the British Library
was delivered by D. F. McKenzie; published as Bibliography and the
Sociology of Texts (1986), these lectures have reverberated through
many of the subsequent discussions of textual matters.[3] Those familiar with McKenzie's
writings
of the previous ten years will recognize the ideas developed here; but
unfortunately these lectures are often as confused in argument as his
Wolfenbüttel piece on Congreve and lack the eloquence and power of
his Bibliographical Society address.[4]
The reason for the influence of these lectures is that their angle of approach
is in tune with the intellectual temper of the times, not that particular ideas
are offered with such rigor that the sheer force of the argument carries the
day. Many of the principal points, when abstracted from their presentation,
are in fact sound, and not particularly new. One can readily agree, for
example, that bibliographical studies are historical studies (p. 3); that
textual criticism encompasses the examination of texts transmitted in any
form, not just in ink on paper or parchment (p. 4); that it is important to
study "the social, economic and political motivations of publishing, the
reasons why texts were written and read as they were, why they were
rewritten and redesigned, or allowed to die" (p. 5); and that "the material
forms of books, the non-verbal elements of the typographic notations within
them, the very disposition of the space itself, have an expressive function
in conveying meaning" (p. 8). None of these points is startling, and none,
it seems to me, can be denied. Any cogent exposition of these matters
would always be welcome and could
provide a constructive point of reference for further discussion; McKenzie's
lectures do not serve this function because the central points are not argued
coherently and indeed are sometimes trivialized.
The opening pages of the first lecture ("The Book as an Expressive
Form") reveal these weaknesses. McKenzie takes his first task to be a new
definition of the scope of bibliography, and he begins by examining W. W.
Greg's 1932 statement that bibliographers are concerned with printed texts
as inked type-impressions on paper, as "arbitrary marks," not as groupings
of words with meanings. McKenzie's style of thinking is represented by his
first observation on this statement: "it remains in essence the basis of any
claim that the procedures of bibliography are scientific" (p. 1). But surely
what makes a procedure "scientific" (in the usual definitions of the term)
is the method followed, not the exclusion (or inclusion) of a particular body
of evidence (in this case the inked impressions as symbols for letters, which
form words of a language). In any event, McKenzie finds Greg's statement
"no longer adequate as a definition of what bibliography is and does" (p.
2). Because McKenzie is
particularly interested in books as "expressive form," in book design as a
purveyor of meaning to readers, he asserts that "bibliography cannot
exclude from its own proper concerns the relation between form, function
and symbolic meaning" (p. 2). But then he recognizes, a few paragraphs
later, that bibliography has "consistently studied" book design, production,
distribution, and collecting, as well as textual transmission: "no part of that
series of human and institutional interactions is alien to bibliography as we
have, traditionally, practised it" (p. 4). He further understands that
"Physical bibliography—the study of the signs which constitute texts
and
the materials on which they are recorded—is of course the starting
point." And then he adds, "But it cannot define
the discipline" (p. 8). By this time the reader will wonder what the point
of his criticism of Greg is. Greg obviously understood the interconnections
among all these various "bibliographical" activities (as other parts of his
essay show), and he practiced many of them himself; as an editor he took
the meanings of words into account, but he felt, just as McKenzie does, that
the physical evidence must be thoroughly investigated first. When he said
that bibliographers regard letter forms as arbitrary marks, he was of course
describing what McKenzie calls "physical bibliography" and not attempting
to characterize the whole interrelated congeries of bibliographical studies.
Greg and McKenzie would seem not to be at odds after all.
[5]
What, then, is the basis for McKenzie's repeated worry about Greg's
statement? Why, at the end of the lecture, does he say that "Greg's
definition of what bibliography is would have it entirely hermetic" (p. 19)?
One cannot believe that McKenzie is so literal-minded that he objects to
Greg's use of "bibliography," in a context that makes clear what he meant,
instead of "physical bibliography." Suppose, for the sake of argument, that
Greg did wish only physical bibliography to be called "bibliography": what
difference would that have made, since he plainly grasped the relationship
between it and all the other aspects of textual study? If, as McKenzie
acknowledges, the entire textual cycle, from composition by an author to
response by a reader, has generally been understood to be linked together
and deserving of integrated study, what does it matter whether it is called
"bibliography" or something else? What difference does it make whether we
think of that integrated study as a
single field or as a group of related fields? Why is the label important if the
substantive connections have been made? As it turns out, there is a
reason—an embarrassing reason: "As long as we continue to think
if it
[bibliography] as confined to the study of the non-symbolic function of
signs, the risk it runs is relegation. Rare book rooms will simply become
rarer. The politics of survival, if nothing else, require a more
comprehensive justification of the discipline's function in promoting new
knowledge" (pp. 3-4). The phrase "if nothing else" does not accomplish its
mission of making the point seem casual and subordinate.
To speak at all of the "politics of survival" trivializes the discussion beyond
redemption. A "discipline" does not exist for the purpose of
self-perpetuation; if it requires "justification" as a political strategy for
survival, it had better be allowed to die.
[6] McKenzie's politicizing of
scholarship
crops up again when he says that Greg's "confinement of bibliography to
non-symbolic meaning, in an attempt to give it some kind of objective or
'scientific' status, has seriously impeded its development as a discipline" (p.
8). It is a misreading of history, as a strategy of "survival," to claim that
Greg's statement, or the view it represents, impeded progress in any way.
Bibliography, in the broad sense, has benefited immensely from the
recognition of the role physical evidence plays in the study of textual
transmission, and Greg was one of the scholars who established that field
of study; it is understandable that, in addressing the Bibliographical
Society in 1932 on its fortieth anniversary, he would emphasize physical
bibliography, for the relation of physical evidence to literary study was the
most far-reaching insight that had emerged under the aegis of the Society.
Ten years later, in a fiftieth-anniversary paper, he stated that "the object of
bibliographical study is . . . to reconstruct for each particular book the
history of its life, to make it reveal in its most intimate detail the story of
its birth and adventures as the material vehicle of the living word." Greg
was thinking along the same lines as McKenzie—but thinking much
more
clearly: after pointing out that bibliographical and textual criticism were so
interlocked that it was difficult to regard them as separate fields, Greg
added, "This is not a matter on which I desire to lay stress, for it is largely
a question of terms and therefore of relatively minor importance."
[7]
What is of much more importance than deciding which activities we
wish the term "bibliography" to cover is examining the attitudes we bring
to our work. There can be no objection to thinking of bibliography as "a
sociology of texts" (p. 8) if by that is meant an openness to all
the kinds of research that bear on the history and influence of textual
transmission. But McKenzie, despite his inclusive view of bibliography, has
a curiously limited approach to historical investigation. His well-known
skepticism about analytical bibliography
[8] emerges here, as when he says that
compositor studies have displayed "virtuosity in discerning patterns in
evidence which is entirely internal, if not wholly fictional" (p. 7). If a
pattern—or, more precisely, a conclusion based on a perceived
pattern—is "entirely internal" (that is, unsupported by information
in a
document external to the book under examination), is it necessarily false or
unworthy of serious consideration by historians? How does he think that
facts (i.e., what we take to be facts until they are shown to be
unsatisfactory) get established in the first place? Do we not search for
patterns in external evidence, too, as part of the process of attempting to
make sense out of a
welter of data? He had earlier noted that bibliographical analysis "depends
absolutely upon antecedent historical knowledge" (p. 2). But how is a body
of "knowledge" built up if not by examining all kinds of evidence, and does
not "antecedent" knowledge continually have to be revised as new pieces
of evidence, or new interpretations of evidence, emerge? Analysis does not
depend "absolutely" on antecedent knowledge, for the possibility must
remain open that the results of analysis will overturn previously accepted
views. When McKenzie later admits that physical bibliography is "the
starting point" (p. 8), one has to wonder how sound a start it is if it
excludes the kinds of analysis of physical evidence that are generally
grouped under the term "analytical bibliography." More fundamentally, one
has to worry about an approach to history that bans a basic category of
evidence. Bibliography, he insists, is "the historical study of the making
and the use of books and other documents" (p.
3). But his history, as it emerges, has a program, which is not hospitable
to analytical bibliography; and by rejecting a large body of bibliographical
evidence, he makes it impossible for readers to respect his approach as an
openminded search.
A major part of his program is to understand the physical book as "an
expressive form"—and therefore to look at physical details not as
evidence of the book-production process but as indicators of the cultural
values surrounding that production and as determinants of readers'
responses.
His principal illustration of this point, occupying the entire latter half of the
first lecture, is the epigraph to W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., and M. C. Beardsley's
famous 1946 essay "The Intentional Fallacy." Noting that the four lines
quoted from Congreve's prologue to
The Way of the World
differ from the "authorized version" of 1710 in wording at one place, in
punctuation at four places, and in capitalization at six, McKenzie argues
that the 1946 readings alter the meaning of the passage to one that better
suits Wimsatt and Beardsley's purpose. Whereas Congreve was asserting
the rights of authors to establish their own meanings, he says, the 1946
quotation reverses the sense, encouraging "audience and readers to discount
the author's meaning" (p. 14). This example of textual variation is not an
apt illustration of all the points that McKenzie wishes it to demonstrate, and
one wonders why he was content to offer it at length (unless for the
amusing coincidence between the apparent
content of the passage and the phenomenon it is cited to illustrate). It is in
fact a much more conventional illustration than McKenzie seems to think,
for what it demonstrates are the dangers of modernizing and of accepting
any text that comes to hand. As McKenzie admits late in his discussion,
Wimsatt and Beardsley in all likelihood took their quotation from a popular
anthology, not from the 1710 edition; and although they presumably
selected the passage because it seemed to support their argument, they were
apparently not responsible for misquoting it to give it that meaning.
[9] Furthermore, the changes in
punctuation
and in capitalization were no doubt made by the anthologists in an effort to
modernize the text for students. The problems that unauthorized variants
and modernized texts create for unwary critics have often been commented
on; and it is no revelation to be shown that variant wording, punctuation,
and capitalization are textual matters,
for they are regularly regarded as such. What McKenzie's argument calls
for is an illustration of the way in which format, type design, and layout
can
convey meanings and are thus "textual." In his earlier Congreve essay he
did cite such elements of design as integral parts of Congreve's intended
texts, and it is puzzling that he does not do so here. He claims to have dealt
with the signification of "the fine detail of typography and layout" (p. 16);
but his discussion of Wimsatt and Beardsley scarcely touches on those
matters, and the lecture therefore does not really engage its avowed topic,
"the book as an expressive form."
[10]
Despite the failure of the Congreve example to serve its requisite
function, readers of the lecture are presumably willing in any case to agree
in theory to many of McKenzie's conclusions, for there can be no question
that the physical forms in which texts are presented to the public are the
products of printers and publishers (and sometimes authors as well), that
these forms reflect cultural influences, and that they in turn affect the
interpretations of readers. One accepts these points as matters of common
sense, not because McKenzie has provided any new insights into
them.[11] Indeed, he confuses the
issues because he does not coherently distinguish the procedure for locating
authorial intention from that for assessing works as communal products.
After pointing out that in reading contemporary editions of Congreve we
must consider the contributions of the printer and the publisher to the
"interpretation of Congreve's meaning" (p. 17), he asks,
"Who, in short, 'authored' Congreve?" But this question (surprisingly)
implies a single "Congreve," a single text, and does not recognize the
distinction between the text of the printed artifact and the text of the literary
work as intended by Congreve (or others). Yet earlier he had enumerated
some of the issues in the history of the book as "What writers thought they
were doing in writing texts,[12] or
printers and booksellers in designing and publishing them, or readers in
making sense of them" (p. 10). No single text can accommodate both the
first (the authorially intended text) and the second (the text as published).
Instead of asking who
"authored" Congreve's works, we have to ask whether we are interested in
what Congreve himself "authored" or what he "authored" in collaboration
with printers and publishers. There is of course a legitimate interest in both,
as well as in the meanings that readers have derived at different times from
the texts available to them. But McKenzie sums up this variety in a
troublesome way: "My argument," he says, "therefore runs full circle from
a defence of authorial meaning, on the grounds that it is in some measure
recoverable, to a recognition that, for better or worse, readers inevitably
make their own meanings" (p. 10). The sequence is hardly a "full circle,"
for readers' meanings can arise from any public text and do not necessarily
derive from one intended by the author, if indeed such a text has ever been
"recovered." And to justify the search for authorial meaning "on the
grounds that it is in some measure recoverable" misstates the basis for
historical research. We never know
whether anything is recoverable, nor do we know when we have in fact
recovered something; all we can do is attempt to move in the direction of
recovering whatever we have decided is worth recovering.
Deciding that the past can be of interest or relevance is the crucial
matter, not how recoverable it is; and McKenzie's naïve view of this
question undercuts the peroration of his first lecture, as it has weakened all
that went before. He says that critical movements from "New Critical
formalism" to deconstruction "share the same scepticism about recovering
the past" (p. 19). Of course they do—and they share it with all
thinking
individuals. What distinctively characterizes those movements is—in
varying degrees—a lack of interest in the past, a rejection of the past
as
a useful concept. Whether a rejection of the past is a rejection of "human
agency" is another question, and not one obviously to be answered in the
affirmative, as McKenzie does. After all, the "critical self-absorption" that
he sees in these approaches is also an example of the human effort to come
to terms with the verbal artifacts that surround us. Our studies cannot so
easily be robbed of humanity as
McKenzie imagines, nor can bibliography so easily reinstate the human
element by dealing with "discoveries as distinct from invented meanings"
(p. 19). It would be far more understanding of humanity to recognize that
discoveries are invented meanings, for they are known only
through the exercise of human judgment. McKenzie has become so
convinced of the idea that recent criticism is anti-humanistic that he reserves
his last line for proclaiming that bibliography can correct this direction by
showing "the human presence in any recorded text" (p. 20).[13] Leaving aside his assessment of
contemporary criticism, one may question his vision in its own terms,
for—despite his earlier inclusion of authorial intention among the
concerns of bibliography—he now seems to exclude it. The emphasis
on
successive texts as recorded forms, he says, "testifies to the fact that new
readers of course make new texts, and that their new meanings are a
function of their new forms";
[14] as a
consequence, one approaches these texts "no longer for their truth as one
might seek to define that by authorial intention, but for their testimony, as
defined by their historical use" (p. 20). Why authorial intention is not one
instance of human agency in the past is left unclear. McKenzie is waging
an unnecessary battle if he thinks it will be difficult to convince anyone that
texts as they change through time provide evidence for readers' changing
responses; but the incoherence of his remarks about authorial intention and
its place in historical study will
nevertheless set up a barrier between him and his audience.
These problems persist through the second and third lectures: there
is scarcely a paragraph not weakened by them. The second lecture, "The
Broken Phial: Non-Book Texts," begins with several pages that continue the
emphasis on expressive textual forms as "less an embodiment of past
meaning than a pretext for present meaning" (p. 25). In other words,
"Meaning is not what is meant, but what we now agree to infer" (p. 26).
But one of the present meanings or inferences—though anyone is free
not
to be interested in it—is what we believe we can conclude about the
meanings of a work at a given time in the past. Among those past meanings
are the authorially intended ones; and a concern with authorial intention
does not, as McKenzie seems to believe, contradict the idea of textual
instability (p. 28), for authors' intentions shift with time, and our
reconstructions of their intended texts can never be definitive. To say that
the concept of the authorially intended text "has largely
collapsed" (p. 28) is merely (and ineffectively) provocative (and indeed is
at odds with the calmer—and true—statement, a few lines
later, that it
"no longer compels universal assent"). The ensuing statement that "The
only remaining rule seems to be that we must not conflate any one version
with any other" (p. 29) is simply incorrect. This "rule" is not in fact the
only one—or the only respectable one—now being followed.
And the
implied connection between a declining interest in authorial intention and
a rising distaste for eclecticism is not made clear; a connection can be
made, but theoretically, of course, the arguments for and against eclecticism
are relevant to any editorial goal.
The core of the second lecture is an examination of "non-book texts,"
and McKenzie takes up, in turn, landscape, maps, photographs and film,
and theater. That texts in all media pose textual problems and that "textual
criticism" encompasses all such problems are not new ideas.[15] Perhaps McKenzie is not claiming
that
they are, but he does seem to think he is exhorting "bibliographers" to
broaden their outlook. What he is calling them to is unclear, however. His
first illustration—the significance of landscape for the Arunta
tribe—is
meant to show how "the land itself" can be "a text" (p. 31), how
topographical features can have "a textual function" (p. 32).
But
he confuses his point by explaining that these natural features "form the
ingredients of what is in fact a verbal text, for each one is embedded in
story . . . and supports . . . the symbolic import of a narration." In that
case, he is talking about landscape as a visual supplement
to, or embodiment of, a verbal text; but it is not the verbal narrative that
makes the landscape a text, for the landscape is a text in its own right, a
nonverbal text made up of physical objects, a text that can be read in the
way sculpture can. McKenzie, here and later, does not clearly distinguish
between, on the one hand, the nonverbal media in which communication
can take place (as in painting, music, and dance) and, on the other, the
various nonbook vehicles that are used to transmit works in the medium of
language. He does, in some examples, deal with visual and kinetic
texts;[16] but he never makes clear that
the relation of photographs, for example, to printed and manuscript books
is of a different order from the relations among sound recordings, computer
disks, and books as conveyors of verbal texts. His discussion is meant to
argue for "the centrality of a textual principle in bibliography" (p. 43); but
that principle is obscured by his failure to make these
discriminations.
[17] And would it not
be more constructive to emphasize the centrality of textual criticism to all
fields? Whether we define "bibliography" as essentially textual is less
important than whether we understand the basic role that bibliographical
and textual investigation plays in every field. Whether "bibliography"
subsumes all such investigation is of less moment (except in academic
politics) than whether the work gets done, and gets done by those who in
each instance bring to it a knowledge of the field concerned.
The third lecture, "The Dialectics of Bibliography Now," showing
little sense of progression, offers two more examples of the book as
expressive form (drawing on Locke and Joyce) and one extended example
of the textual study of a film (Citizen Kane). It is something
of
a letdown to find out that a principal point of the latter discussion is to
demonstrate that films, like books, have "texts" and that "the word now has
a meaning which comprehends them all" (p. 56). Obviously films and books
(and all other physical objects) display patterns of details that we can agree
to call "texts"—though whether we actually do call them that is a
trivial
matter, further trivialized by the insistent restatement that "the discipline
[bibliography] comprehends them both [films and books]" (p. 59). As
before, the more meaningful point is passed over: that films provide
examples of textual problems in a different medium from literature, not just
in a different form of transmission. Film is a
different art from literature, whereas literature stored in a computer and
literature stored in a book are not two different arts.[18] When McKenzie
says that bibliography is "committed to the description of all recorded texts"
(p. 51), the term "recorded texts" glosses over an important question:
whether it refers only to the concrete forms through which works in
intangible media are primarily transmitted (that is, books, sound recordings,
motion picture films, and so on) or whether it also includes works that exist
in physical form (that is, paintings, sculptures, buildings, and so on). His
imprecision in thinking about this question is illustrated by the observation
that "Whereas libraries have held books and documents as physical objects,
computer systems have been mainly concerned to retrieve content" (p. 60).
But computer systems also inevitably hold their "content" in physical
objects (tapes and disks); and librarians have generally been more
concerned with "content" than with the preservation of objects, as their
practice of replacing one edition of a work with a "reprint" (or microfilm)
of it, or with another edition,
shows. The two parts of the sentence are not parallel in focus, and the
statement thus obscures, rather than illuminates, the relationship between
books and computers.
The weaknesses of these lectures are epitomized in the opening
sentences of this third lecture, when McKenzie summarizes his two
contrasted "concepts of 'text'" in this way: "One is the text as authorially
sanctioned, contained, and historically definable. The other is the text as
always incomplete, and therefore open, unstable, subject to a perpetual
re-making by its readers, performers, or audience" (p. 45). These two sets
of attributes do not in fact distinguish the concept of the authorially
intended text from that of the collaborative text (produced by publishers,
readers, actors, and so forth, both contemporary with the author and later).
What they actually describe is a very different dichotomy, that between
texts of documents and texts of works. The text of a surviving document is
"contained" and "historically definable"— though how it relates to
the
author's, or anyone else's, intention is a debatable question. The texts of
works in intangible media must always be
reconstructed from whatever physical and oral evidence comes to hand and
inevitably reflect the predispositions of those doing the reconstructing; thus
the texts of works—both authors' intended texts and the texts
preferred
by others—are "unstable" and "subject to a perpetual re-making."
One
of the summarizing statements in this lecture is the
assertion that "bibliography is of its nature . . . concerned specifically with
texts as social products" (pp. 51-52); but McKenzie apparently fails to see
that the attempt to reconstruct authorially intended texts is one of the many
activities that readers can engage in as they evaluate the socially produced
evidence that survives for their examination. These lectures would scarcely
have warranted the space I have devoted to them here if they had not been
written by McKenzie and had not, as a result, been given considerable
attention by others. They do have some significance as an indication of a
current direction in editorial thought, and it is disappointing that they cannot
be greeted as an effective manifesto; but their laxity of argument makes
them an unstable foundation on which to build.
