University of Virginia Library

III

McGann's interest in Gabler's approach to editing illustrates how the genetic aspects of textual study can be seen to reinforce, and be congruent with, a sociological view of literary history. How authors inscribe and revise their private manuscripts can reveal their attitudes to the public world of literary publishing. The pre-publication growth of a work through various textual stages reflects the same openness and instability that are seen in the post-publication vicissitudes of texts; and every text, whether in an author's manuscript or a published edition, is obviously the product of a set of sociohistorical forces. Gabler sees his own work as growing out of a German and French movement that emphasizes the study of authors' manuscripts and the process of composition. Several European textual critics of this general orientation are becoming better known in the English-speaking world through the recent publication of some of their papers in English translation (although an essay by Hans Zeller, editor [1958- ] of C. F. Meyer, has been available in English since 1975).[37] Through Gabler's efforts, this movement was well represented at a Charlottesville conference in April 1985 honoring Fredson Bowers on his eightieth birthday, and a few days later some of the same speakers participated in the biennial conference of the Society for Textual Scholarship in New York. As a result, eight papers by six French and German scholars appeared in the 1987 volume of Text and the 1988 volume of Studies in Bibliography (those from the

STS conference in the former, the Charlottesville conference in the latter).[38]

Gabler's own contribution[39] makes no advance over his 1981 paper that set forth the rationale for his synoptic text of Ulysses,[40] but it does contain some sentences that concisely capture the underlying tenets of this approach. For example: "A work revised in successive stages signals the author's free intentional choices at any given textual stage, and the aggregate of stages may justifiably be considered to embody his final intentions with regard to the work as a whole" (p. 110). Thus "authorial rejection cannot be equated with editorial rejection" (p. 110): "The text in the determinate record of its instability falls to the editor therefore not for the fulfillment of its real or assumed teleology, but for the description and analysis of its documentary existence" (p. 111). Any apparatus of variants, of course, provides an account of documentary evidence, and Gabler's essential complaint about what he calls "the conventional model of the critical edition" is that its apparatus subordinates the genetic record to a "stable reading text of unquestioned privilege" (p. 107). Although some editors have no doubt been so foolish as to think that their critical texts commanded "unquestioned privilege," most editors—having laboriously worked through all the documentary evidence—recognize that any clear reading text is only one of the texts that can be derived from the evidence. And surely, after going to great pains to record variant readings, their intention is not to "annihilate" them—though Gabler believes that "What is near-to-annihilated . . . in the established critical edition is the superseded authorial variant, relegated as it is to apparatus lists in footnotes or at the back of the book, together with the bulk of rejected transmissional errors" (pp. 109-110). As in his earlier piece, Gabler reduces an interesting conceptual question—the nature of texts as reflections of works in process—to the practical level of methodology for reporting evidence. Some forms of apparatus may be better than others in certain situations, but the decision to record variants in appended lists does not imply that genetic study is unimportant. A more basic flaw, however, is Gabler's failure to distinguish clearly between texts of extant documents and stages in the development of a work. He does recognize that authorial revisions "leave a record when, though only in so far as, committed to paper"—and, he should have added, not all such pieces of paper have survived. But he

still can say that textual instability is, for the editor, "determinate," being "confined within the complex, yet closed system of the words and signs on paper" (p. 111). This statement can mean nothing more than the obvious point that editors with a historical orientation are not free (as authors are) to put whatever words they like into a text. It does not illuminate the imaginative role of the historical scholar in reconstructing from fragmentary physical evidence the growth of a work in an intangible medium.

Somewhat more useful as an introduction to critique génétique (as this approach has come to be called in France) are two essays by Louis Hay, founder of l'Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes in Paris.[41] The one in Text sketches the history of modern editing in Germany and France, noting that "editing has always embodied the main ideological and cultural concerns of its day" (p. 117), and concentrates on the last half-century, when the attention has been on "a new kind of scholarly object: the text as it grows" (p. 118). Hay cites some illustrative editions, beginning with Friedrich Beissner's (1943-62) of Hölderlin, and describes a growing interest in the technology of examining manuscripts; but he leaves for his essay in Studies in Bibliography any real speculation about the nature of texts as implied by this work. That SB essay conveys some sense of the excitement experienced by this group of scholars as they began to explore the "avant-texte," the "pre-text"—that is, the versions preceding the published one.[42] But it is finally unsatisfactory in its attempt to explain the theoretical foundation of genetic criticism. Answering the question of his title, "Does 'Text' Exist?", obviously involves distinguishing various concepts of "text," and the question is of course meant to suggest that "text" as a fixed entity does not exist; but no clear concept of "text" emerges. Despite Hay's recognition (p. 69) that "The ink on the page is not the writing itself" (meaning, presumably, that texts of documents are not texts of works or versions of works), his discussion does not seem firmly grounded in this important distinction. "Pre-text," on which genetic critics focus, leads up to "text," which "is considered achieved when published," for "the author's intention . . . becomes manifest in the act of publication" (p. 71); even rough

drafts can be promoted from "pre-text" to "text" by being published (p. 72). This distinction seems superficial, for the act of publication does not change the ontological status of physical texts; the texts of all documents, unpublished or published, may equally fail to reflect accurately the intangible works of language that they purport to represent. In analyzing two versions of Paul Éluard's poem that became "Libertḗ," he says that the "first, distinct work was one of the possibilities of the text, though it was neither integrated nor subsumed in the second work. . . . Perhaps we should consider the text as a necessary possibility, as one manifestation of a process which is always virtually present in the background" (p. 75, italics his). The shifting meanings of "text" here (and its unclear relation to "work") are symptomatic of the lack of sharp focus throughout.

A similar slipperiness in the handling of concepts mars the two essays by Klaus Hurlebusch, coeditor of the Hamburg Klopstock edition (1974- ).[43] The far more substantial piece, in Studies in Bibliography, attempts to contrast two "editorial concepts" that reflect two opposing views of authorship, growing out of "the fundamental conflict between an individual and a social identity" (p. 102). One concept, "reception-oriented," regards the author as a "community being" (p. 125), primarily concerned with a finished, public product to be received by readers; it results in editions that emphasize an established text over an apparatus of variants. The other, "production-oriented," sees the author as principally engaged in personal expression, developing ideas "as independently as possible of considerations for others, of readers' expectations" (p. 124); it results in editions that emphasize genetic process. In the former, "what the author ultimately intends is an imagined and affirmable idea of himself as a person, in relation to which his creative ability of expression is secondary"; in the latter, "the identity of the author whose perceptions continually change finds expression not so much in the work as in the process of perception, i.e., the author's working procedure" (pp. 122-123).[44] Hurlebusch is struggling here with a dichotomy

that all editors must give thought to, but his formulation of it is not helpful. For one thing, it assumes a sharp and recognizable distinction between "the productive function of writing" and "the revisional one" (p. 123), as if the operation of a "writer activating his powers" (p. 122) is separate from that of a writer engaging in the "redaction and revision of his own texts" (p. 125)—and as if revision is to be equated with a move towards conventional expression. Furthermore, it assumes that, after authors are classified according to this distinction (Hölderlin, for example, being "a primarily text-producing author" [p. 123]), the editorial emphasis to be accorded them follow naturally.[45] There is no recognition that every author may legitimately and usefully be provided both with critical editions (containing critically constructed texts, with records, however presented, of variant readings) and with reproductions of documents. Hurlebusch makes a strong case for the importance of some authors' manuscripts as visual objects, every detail of which is reflective of the creative process; but he does not indicate that all manuscripts can be approached in this way, even those by "reception-oriented" authors.[46] In addition, his comments on intention, like Hay's, fail to make careful discriminations. Authorial intention sometimes seems to mean intention to publish: "If the author has actually . . . released the contents and textual composition from his control and submitted it to . . . a publisher's, . . . it is true to say that this version is intended by the author" (p. 109). But then we are told that "every state of a text . . . only represents the intended state as a whole, and not in every detail" (p. 110). It is hard to see how such a distinction can be productive, since textual intention must always be concerned with textual details and since any "state of a text" is given its character, "as a whole," by those same details. His other essay, an insignificant piece in Text on editing diaries, furthers the reader's puzzlement by observations that seem out of line with this essay.[47] One has to conclude that Hurlebusch, though clearly of a conceptualizing turn of mind, has been presented to English-speaking readers in essays that do not demonstrate clarity of thought and do not advance editorial theory regarding the nature of authorship.

Of the remaining three papers in this group of translations from European textual critics, the one by Gerhard Neumann, one of the editors of the Kafka edition (1982- ), should be touched on here, for its concluding paragraphs serve to epitomize some of the conceptual problems common to the whole group.[48] After explaining how Kafka was a writer torn between the desire for intimate self-expression and the desire for public recognition, he sets forth "three fundamental concepts which all bear on what we have to understand by 'text' in the modern situation" (p. 98): "script," "work," and "a 'fluid composite' which is never wholly the one nor the other." "Script" (or "writing") reflects "the flow of creativity"; "work" reflects "the area of 'authorship' as an institution and the communicative function of literature as a social phenomenon"; and the "fluid composite" reflects the "intertextuality" that results from placing particular "textual units" in different arrangements and collections. It seems unwise to use the word "work" to refer to published texts (imputing to what an author publishes an unwarranted degree of textual

authority); but Neumann's usage stems from the same tendency observed in the other writers to exaggerate the finality conferred by authorized publication and to compartmentalize creativity in the prepublication stages—a tendency to stress the author's search for identity at the expense of sufficient consideration of the practical realities of the publishing world. Neumann's need to create a "fluid composite" category, however, shows that he sees, at least in some respects, how the private and public categories overlap. For Kafka, he says, "one has little choice but to bring out all three aspects in an edition." Once again there is the concern with how an edition can, through its formal arrangement, emphasize one or another characteristic of authorship and a seeming lack of understanding that—far from having "little choice"—an editor of any author might positively desire to "bring out" these conflicting aspects of authorship, recognizing their relevance in all cases. He is right, of course, to conclude that editing involves interpretation (being, he unfortunately adds, "no longer a mechanical task of unquestioning reproduction"); but when he says that interpretation is necessary "to do justice to modern concepts of author, work and text" (p. 99), one must wonder how this triad relates to the earlier one, where "work" was one of three categories of "text." This whole group of papers regrettably lacks rigor and thus makes no significant theoretical contribution to editorial thinking. But the attention now being given to prepublication material by European literary and textual critics is welcome in any case, for the importance of such material is unquestionable—as editors in English-speaking countries have also long recognized (witness the original manual of the Center for Editions of American Authors in 1967).[49]

An interest in textual genesis is inseparable from an interest in "versions" of works, and a number of English-speaking textual scholars have in recent years focused on "versions"—most conspicuously a group of Shakespeareans including Steven Urkowitz, Gary Taylor, Michael Warren,

and E. A. J. Honigmann.[50] One result of this movement has been the inclusion of two versions of King Lear in the new one-volume Oxford Shakespeare (1986) on the grounds that conflating the first quarto and the Folio texts (as customary in the past) mixes two discrete stages of Shakespeare's work on the play.[51] Such arguments for maintaining the identity of versions—whether by scholars writing in French, German, or English—often founder on the question of what role critical editing can play in the production of editions of versions. No defense is needed for reproducing or transcribing the texts of documents (handwritten and printed) exactly as they stand: such texts are historical facts, and it is useful to have them made available. But some editors wish to purge those texts of readings—such as typographical errors—that were not intended. In departing from the texts of documents, they must face the question of defining what kinds of emendations are to be allowed; and no matter what categories are named (even if only typographical errors, which are of course not always obvious), there is the possibility that some instances will be detected only by noting the variants in other documents and deciding that some of them were the intended readings all along. One is not mixing versions simply by drawing readings from different documents, since the texts of documents cannot be equated with the texts of versions—a fact recognized in the original decision to present a critical text. After all, traditional critical editors interested in authors' final intentions are not trying to mix versions but to recreate one—one that is not present in satisfactory form in any surviving document. But recent discussions of the importance of versions have too often been guilty of a double fallacy: believing that eclecticism (drawing readings from different documents) necessarily involves the mixing of versions, and believing that critical editing can ever be other than eclectic.[52]

Donald H. Reiman published in 1987 a spirited defense of the production of scholarly editions containing versions,[53] but it does not entirely avoid these confusions. Reiman advocates what he calls "versioning" rather than "editing" (p. 169): "there are good reasons to redirect our energies away from the attempt to produce 'definitive' or 'ideal' critical editions and, instead, to encourage the production of editions of discrete versions of works" (p. 179).[54] This summary statement suggests

that what he favors are unaltered documentary texts (facsimiles and transcriptions), as indeed he does for some purposes. But he also includes within the concept of "versioning" the presentation of texts in which the editor has corrected "any typographical errors" and perhaps some other errors: pointing and orthography may be emended, but not "in any wholesale way, lest what results is some version other than the one being advertised" (p. 178, italics his). He is thus not opposed to the critical editing of versions; but he does not address the question of how the process of editorial judgment entailed in recreating pre-final versions is different from the one required for recreating a finally intended version. He is in fact sanctioning for pre-final versions what he calls "'definitive' or 'ideal' critical editions" when devoted to finally intended versions. Apparently it is not the judgment involved in critical editing that bothers him, but rather what he sees as its excessive concentration on final intention. Such a conclusion is surprising, however, in view of his sarcastic remarks about editorial judgment—as when he says that an editor who engages in "versioning" may not require "the preternatural power to divine the unstated moods or preferences of dead authors" (p. 178). He fills most of a page detailing how editing would be different in a world where "versioning" were standard. Among the points enumerated: "Editing might not always then require the detective skills to root out all the surviving evidence about the author's involvement . . . in a work throughout its entire textual history"; "there would be less need for the editor to hypothesize events and attitudes where the crucial evidence concerning the author's involvement in the text is lacking"; there would be no need to decide which variants "resulted from the author's grateful acceptance of the publisher's or compositor's suggestions and corrections and which ones resulted from reluctant acquiescence in, or unawareness of, each particular change" (p. 177). What is particularly troubling about this litany is the implication that non-"versioning" editors have engaged in a great deal of unnecessary work and idle speculation. On the contrary, the topics listed are relevant to any study of a work's textual history; and informed speculation is an essential ingredient in all historical reconstruction. Reiman seems to feel, paradoxically, that eclectic texts with full apparatus inhibit debate, whereas separate texts of individual versions encourage it.[55] It was not necessary in any case for him to attempt to denigrate eclectic texts as he promoted single-version texts: the value of the latter has never been in question, as his interesting survey of examples indicates.[56] But single-version editing has no doubt received less discussion, and Reiman's vigorous championing of it may serve to bring it further attention.[57]

A consideration of authorial versions in the context of the social or collaborative status of authorship eventually leads one to think of the theater, for the preproduction version of a play is likely to be different from the one that emerges from the production process, and the collaborative character of theatrical production raises in extreme form the question of how authorial intention in a work of language is to be conceived. Recently T. H. Howard-Hill has turned his attention to the implications for play-editing of the nature of drama as a genre, and the resulting essay, as one would expect, is impressive in its scholarship, its sharpness of insight, and its style of argument (although one may question some of its assumptions). "Modern Textual Theories and the Editing of Plays"[58] provides, first, a searching criticism of Greg's rationale of copy-text, and, second, a forceful statement of the view that playwrights' intentions can be fulfilled only in performance. The two matters are separable (and the second is the one directly relevant here), but the connection is clear: Greg's rationale leads toward the choice for copy-text of the text closest to the playwright's manuscript; but the text of a (later) document associated with the theater, which is likely to contain the playwright's revisions made during the course of production, may seem to reflect the playwright's intentions better than a preproduction text. Thus, for Howard-Hill, Greg's rationale "applies least successfully

to the genre that brought about its conception" (p. 89).[59] Since under Greg's procedure the alterations judged authorial from a later text could in any case be emended into an early text, the heart of Howard-Hill's criticism of Greg is the treatment of so-called indifferent variants (although the value of preserving an early copy-text's accidentals is also questioned). Howard-Hill's position is that, if some variants in a later text seem clearly authorial, then some (or all) of the indifferent variants in that text might be authorial, too, and they should not automatically have to yield to the readings of the (early) copy-text. Discussing this question does not seem very productive, however, since everything depends on how an editor in a particular situation decides which variants are to be called "indifferent."[60] What is of greater interest is the concept of dramatic authorship implicit in Greg's rationale. The choice of a copy-text close to the manuscript and the goal of reconstructing an inferential authorial fair copy show that Greg was interested in the form of plays as conceived by their authors working alone and that he wished to exclude from critical texts the alterations introduced in the process of staging. The appropriateness of this approach is indeed an important subject for debate.

Howard-Hill believes that editors who follow Greg "reject the playwright for the author, the dramatic script for the literary manuscript" (p. 103). Playwrights understand, he says, that their manuscripts are "the raw material in a process of shaping a play for performance that requires the collaboration of many contributors: theatre personnel, actors, directors, and the author himself" (p. 105). Thus the author writes a manuscript "expecting (to various degrees) that the script will be modified in the theatre" (p. 105). It follows that "a playwright's intentions are represented best (if perhaps not completely) in a manuscript associated with the theatre" (p. 112), and any editor whose goal is to reconstruct a preproduction manuscript "averts his face from the theatre for which the dramatist wrote, and presses boldly backwards into the primitive jungle of the author's drafts" (p. 108). That "jungle" has its own interest, of course, as we have been reminded by the critics just discussed, among others; and Howard-Hill would presumably agree that there is always a value in editions that focus on preliminary versions. But his particular concern is with works as finally intended by their authors, and from his vantage point a rationale for play-editing that purports to stress final intention and emphasizes preproduction documents is "textually-regressive" (p. 90), or "editorially regressive" (p. 101). Part of this argument would be accepted by anyone: that a play does not exist in its intended medium except in performance, and performance is necessarily collaborative. No one can object to editions that attempt to record the text followed in a play's initial (or some other) production, for the versions that reached the public in performance are obviously of historical interest. What is objectionable in Howard-Hill's presentation is his insistence that the only legitimate critical texts for representing playwrights' final intentions are those based on performance texts (or such textual evidence as there is of what actually occurred in performance). His account is notably unbalanced in not sufficiently recognizing that alterations made for performance (even if agreed to by the playwright) do not always please the playwright.[61]

It is indicative of a fundamental misconception underlying Howard-Hill's argument that he sees a meaningful opposition in "the dramatic script" versus "the literary manuscript," "the playwright" versus "the author." Presumably he means that the "author" of a "literary" piece like a novel or poem works alone, whereas the "playwright" of a "dramatic" piece must engage in the collaborative activity of production, and therefore an editor who uses a preproduction manuscript of a play as copy-text is behaving as if the work being edited were of a "literary" rather a "dramatic" genre. "Literary" authors, however, must participate in the collaborative (and altering) process of publication if their work is to reach the public, and thus the real opposition is not between "drama" and "literature" but between versions of works (of whatever genre) as intended by their authors alone and versions of works (of whatever genre) as they emerged from the collaborative efforts required to bring them to the public. The analogy between production and publication (of which Howard-Hill approves [p. 104]) is worth exploring further. There is an obvious way in which the analogy is inexact, for what a performance of a play offers is an actual work of drama, whereas what a book provides is not a work of literature (the medium of which is not paper and ink) but a set of instructions, a script, whereby one can recreate a work of literature through the act of reading. The publication of a play in print is directly comparable to the publication of a novel or poem: in both instances the printed text is the means by which works in intangible media can be transmitted. In the one instance, the work involves actors and props on a stage (and is thus a mixed-media work, using sound, movement, and visual effects as well as language); in the other, the work consists of language alone, and the recreation of the work can take place within the mind or in private recitation.[62] A more exact comparison

is with music: the first performance of a symphony constitutes its publication as a work of music (that is, publication in the medium in which it was meant to be experienced); the publication of its score on paper simply makes more widely available the instructions for recreating the work.[63]

Thus critical editors of drama are in a position no different from the editors of other works in intangible media (including literature): they all must rely on surviving documents (which are not the works themselves) and strive to reconstruct from them the texts that were intended by particular persons (whether authors alone, or authors in collaboration with others) at particular points in the past.[64] One of the basic

choices any editor has is whether to concentrate solely on an author's intention or to focus on the combined intention of the group (including the author) overseeing public dissemination—for the two interests can almost never be satisfied by a single clear text. An editor who chooses as copy-text the fair-copy manuscript of a novel rather than the first edition set from it is doing the same thing as the editor of a play who selects the final preproduction manuscript as copy-text. In both cases emendations can be made from later texts if there are variants that seem to reflect the author's uninfluenced intention—which is, after all, the aim of these editors. The choice between authorial and collaborative intention and the crucial distinction between intention and expectation have been much discussed,[65] and it is in the context of those issues that the editing of plays should be viewed, for plays do not present a unique situation. Howard-Hill apparently wishes to be understood as believing that there is no historical validity to the concern for authors' (at least early play-wrights') uninfluenced intentions: "To postulate amongst professional playwrights of the early period the romantic author pouring his inspiration into his early drafts which alone conveyed his intentions, having been afterwards corrupted by grubby theatre professionals, is the worst kind of historical error" (p. 106).[66] Even if it had been couched in less slanted language, this statement would have been unacceptable. Writers of all periods, as human beings with feelings and opinions, have had their own personal preferences regarding the form and content of their work, even if their status as professionals sometimes required them to accept or initiate alterations that seemed to them less desirable. And as long as anyone is interested in understanding the workings and accomplishments of minds of the past, the task of attempting to determine authors' own intentions and to reconstruct texts reflecting them is a valid activity of historical recovery. Howard-Hill's contrary position is weakened by his presenting it as the only defensible approach rather than as one alternative, as one of several paths to the past, each of which gives us a different perspective.