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IV

The pervasive presence of textual and literary sociology (with its related challenges to authorial intention) in the current climate is indicated by the attention it receives in general assessments of the present state of textual studies. For example, Fredson Bowers, in his presidential address to the Society for Textual Scholarship at its biennial conference in 1985,[67] devoted half his time to a critical examination of McGann's approach, voicing his suspicions of "any overall theory that denigrates an author's intentions by sharing them with social milieu as a central fact" (p. 10) and concluding that "Critics who mistrust our developed conventional editorial theory do not seem to be fully aware of its flexibility when properly applied, its consciousness of the shift in the nature of problems and of the methods for dealing with them as the centuries pass" (p. 11). Two years earlier, Paul Oskar Kristeller's presidential address[68]—not published until 1987—had considered "traditional" textual scholarship to be on the defensive and argued that, although "economic, social, and political developments are necessary conditions for many or even all cultural or intellectual developments of the past," they are not "sufficient causes that would adequately explain the concrete texts and documents with which we are concerned, or their specific form and content" (p. 6). Both scholars affirm traditional approaches, not because they are unwilling to consider alternatives but because the recent challenges seem (as Bowers says) to be based on a misunderstanding of the traditional approaches and attempt (as Kristeller says) not only "to supplement traditional scholarship (which would be quite acceptable) but to discredit it and to replace it" (p. 2). Nevertheless, they both see the challenges as a central fact of the present moment.

The founder of the Society for Textual Scholarship, D. C. Greetham, has constructed a characteristically wide-ranging description of the situation at present by setting out a series of "ideological pairings" between

textual and literary theories, showing that the various literary approaches emphasizing authors or texts or readers have their counterparts in textual theory.[69] Social textual criticism of course receives its due in this scheme as one of the reader-based theories, and Greetham says that it has become "a major focus for debate" (p. 23) as a result of McGann's Critique, which provides its "clearest statement in recent textual theory" (p. 11). In Greetham's earlier account of the state of editing medieval materials (which is in fact a lively treatment of issues involved in any editing),[70] McGann's approach and the related emphasis on versions are linked to "current critical positions—the death of the author, the primacy of the fragment, the deconstruction and aporia of the work as a consistent framing of one person's intention" (pp. 61-62). Greetham, in essays such as these, has been actively promoting greater understanding of the connections between textual and literary theory, and he was given a useful opportunity for furthering the cause when he was asked to serve as commentator on the papers delivered at a "Symposium on Textual Scholarship and Literary Theory," organized by the Society for Critical Exchange and held at Miami University (Ohio) in March 1987.[71] His even-handed remarks are firmly critical of literary theorists who see textual criticism as a static field intellectually unrelated to literary theory (a view represented at the conference); at the same time he takes for granted that the period when authorial intention had its "greatest practical influence" in textual criticism has passed.

Another textual conference, "New Directions in Textual Studies," was held in March—April 1989 at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin. On this occasion Ian Willison attempted a general survey of the connections between editorial theory and the history of the book, stating at the outset that as a historian of the book and authorship he is "obliged" to favor the social approach to textual matters represented by McGann and McKenzie.[72] It is surprising that a historian of books and authorship would see a necessity to choose between the social and the authorial approaches to editing, when each concentrates on a different aspect of the total picture and the two taken together might be thought to produce a more rounded view.[73] An earlier conference, one on "textual hermeneutics" held at Canberra in May 1982, produced some controversy that appeared in print over the next several years.[74] At the conference Stephen Knight attacked "old-fashioned positivist, text-and-author centered editing" (p. 44) and indicated that his own aim in editing Chaucer is to produce a text "with the fullest socioliterary

potency" and that he chooses between "equally possible variants" the one with "the maximum possible historical tension, the reading which loads the text most strongly with ideology" (p. 49). Harold Love later responded, with some sarcasm, on behalf of intentionalist editing;[75] and Stephanie Trigg then noted some of the deficiencies of both Knight's and Love's papers, accepting Knight's point that (in her words) "any edited text is an ideologically loaded construct" (p 20) but preferring to stress the reading audience as the locus for the production of meaning.[76]

Numerous other essays deal with these matters in one way or another. Peter Shillingsburg, for example, provides an exposition of the obvious considerations involved in the "social contract" approach to editing, sensibly affirming editorial pluralism;[77] James L. W. West III focuses on the "act of submission" as a key moment in the textual history of a work, a moment that serves to illuminate the contrasting attitudes of editors following authorial and social theories;[78] Leonard N. Neufeldt describes

editorial work as the product of a specific time and place, influenced by particular critical theories and all the other "forces of institutionalization in the field of literature";[79] Hugh Amory criticizes an introductory bibliographical and textual manual for its emphasis on the "obsolescent" Greg-Bowers tradition and its neglect of McKenzie and McGann;[80] and many studies of particular authors or fields explicitly confront (however effectively) the competing claims of the authorial and the social.[81] I have cited all these essays to suggest how insistently the issue of social textual criticism has arisen in recent discussions and how frequently it has been linked with developments in literary theory. The connections between textual and literary theory have not as often been seen, however, from the other direction: writers who think of themselves primarily as literary theorists or critics have not been very cogizant of the related debates taking place among textual critics. McGann is of course an exception to this generalization, and so is David Gorman, whose essay "The Worldly Text" is a remarkable survey of current directions in literary and cultural theory, directions that are "worldly" because they go beyond the purely linguistic.[82] Gorman includes "textual studies" as one of three areas for detailed discussion, the others being "the theory of social action" and "the philosophical questions raised by historicism," each chosen because he believes it "suggests important new avenues of research in cultural history" (p. 183). The essay, which is well-informed and judicious, may possibly be the first survey from a literary theorist, addressed to an audience interested in literary theory, that takes adequate account of developments in textual criticism. He ends his section on textual critics by saying that "The level on which their theoretical debate is taking place is very high indeed, and one that should put many theorists of interpretive criticism to shame" (p. 198).

Nearly all of the essays I have mentioned, here and earlier in this survey, have touched—in more or less detail—on the matter of textual apparatus, on how textual evidence is to be reported in an edition; and some other essays, dealing exclusively with apparatus, have recently appeared. Although apparatus may seem a less intellectually interesting subject than theories about the nature of verbal texts, one can readily see why the form of apparatus has become a central concern at a time of challenge to traditional intentionalist editing, for the standard presentation

of a clear text with appended apparatus (on the same page or elsewhere) has been interpreted as reinforcing the concept of a single, closed, definitive text. There are two levels on which discussions of apparatus can take place, and they should be carefully distinguished, for they are often intertwined in the same arguments. One level, the lower one, has to do with readers' convenience, or the "usability" of an apparatus. Objecting to an apparatus solely because it seems cumbersome, or because it can be expected to discourage readers from using it, expresses a concern at the practical level of clerical procedure, not at the conceptual level of theory. All of us would like the books that we read and study to be convenient to use, but we put up with inconvenient ones all the time, because we have no choice but to use them as they are. It is unquestionably a flaw in an edition to have an unnecessarily awkward apparatus, but not nearly so severe a flaw as to have left out an essential category of information; at least the information is on record, even if it is less easy to retrieve than one might wish. But objections to an apparatus can also be raised on a more serious level, when arguments are made that a particular presentation of material is substantively misleading, incompatible with the historical situation being depicted or with the scholarly goals of the editor. Although such arguments do necessarily involve a questioning of formal conventions, their real concern is with the communication of meaning through the modes of expression classified as apparatus.

Two recent articles illustrate these levels. Don L. Cook[83] surprisingly challenges the assumption that "the more information we can give the user of a critical edition about the genesis and evolution of a written work, the more useful our volume will be" (p. 82). Certainly he is moving against the current trend represented by the European proponents of genetic criticism. Few would disagree with his point that the publication of revisions in prepublication documents "should result only from the thoughtful consideration of the service they can provide to the serious scholars who will be using the volumes, not from considerations of respectability or continued funding" (p. 89)—or from the mechanical following of some rule. But it is hard to see how such information would ever be useless to scholars, and Cook recognizes that editors themselves must always be aware of pre-copy-text alterations. The reason not to publish the information, then, is on the practical level: such lists are likely to be long, and therefore expensive (pp. 83, 87); they are also

likely to be complex, and users may thus "become exhausted and finally disillusioned" in attempting to use them (p. 84).[84] To condone the withholding of avowedly important information on these grounds seems a counsel of despair.[85] Another article, by Ted-Larry Pebworth and Ernest W. Sullivan, II,[86] recommends that versions of works representing "markedly different semiotic entities" or independent textual traditions (p. 44) be presented as separate texts, each with its own apparatus. Although the authors do complain that some information may not be "easily discoverable or recoverable from the traditional lengthy and complex apparatus format" (p. 44) or that "some bibliographical training and considerable industry" is required to retrieve it (p. 47), this kind of problem is not their primary point—which is rather that a consolidated apparatus may in some cases misrepresent the textual history of a work by merging the histories of independent traditions and suggesting that the version printed as the text is more authoritative than the other independent versions (p. 46). They may have exaggerated the degree to which "traditional" editions are guilty of this practice; in any case one can say that there is another established tradition as well, in which separate editions are prepared for versions that are so different as to be judged distinct works.[87] Pebworth and Sullivan's proposal is a refinement on this tradition, most valuable in its suggestions for handling versions of which only certain lines or passages require printing in full. One should not, however, draw from their article the conclusion that independent versions are printed separately for the purpose of clarifying the apparatus; they are printed separately because the editor judges them to be independent versions (or works) demanding such treatment, and separate apparatuses follow as a matter of course. The essential problem with a consolidated apparatus for independent versions is not that it is inconvenient but that it is a reflection of an inappropriate treatment of the texts.

These essays do not question the use of apparatus as an accompaniment to clear texts; but theorists who stress the indeterminacy of texts often object to the "privileging" of any one selection of variant readings, regarding a clear text with an appended apparatus as an inappropriate elevation of certain readings and subordination of others. Many such editors in recent years have argued strenuously for inclusive texts—texts, that is, in which variant readings, or some categories of them, are inserted directly into the linear text, accompanied by any necessary sigla or diacritics. The essence of Gabler's rationale for his presentation of the text of Ulysses is that he wishes to show the "diachrony" of the revisional stages of the work by placing each authorial variant in its "contextual relations" within the text; apparatus is the central concern, for the traditional apparatus, he feels, results in "fragmentation" of the text as a whole, the text conceived as the totality of all the author's revisions.[88] A common theme among scholars of the genetic school, however different their actual handling of variants, is that the traditional apparatus falsifies the historical situation by minimizing the significance of certain variants, subordinating them to an editorial construct, instead of giving them their due as equal partners in an inexorable chronological procession. A clash of editorial theories finds its battleground in the lists of apparatus.

An awareness of the two levels of discussion about apparatus can

help one analyze these arguments. One might at first assume that the objections of the genetic critics to traditional apparatus are on the more significant of the levels: they may seem to be saying that the traditional apparatus distorts the story they have to tell, that it reflects a misleading presentation, or fragmentation, of the text. But further reflection casts serious doubt on this assumption. The kinds of variants that genetic critics usually deal with are not the kinds Pebworth and Sullivan discuss: that is, students of textual genetics normally confront revisions made in a linear series, not variants that produce, or result from, independent traditions of transmission. Revisions that form a single sequence (and do not produce versions to be regarded as discrete works) lend themselves perfectly well to consolidated presentation; unlike variants that cluster into distinct groups, each telling a separate story, they form a continuous narrative.[89] If, then, a consolidated treatment of such revisions does not falsify (but rather clarifies) the picture of how the text developed, one must conclude that the choice between the two forms of consolidated treatment—texts with inclusive apparatus and texts with appended apparatus—is a decision on the level of efficiency and convenience for the user. Both forms bring together the evidence from separate documents to produce the editor's reconstruction of a historical process; neither one is inherently incompatible with that goal. The form the apparatus takes in these instances is not an unimportant matter, but it raises practical, not theoretical, issues.

Some of the editors who have opposed the appended style of apparatus have argued that it subordinates the readings thus recorded, taking them out of the context of the text as a whole, and complicates the reader's effort to see a continuous narrative. This position is often regarded as advanced or "radical," challenging the conservatism of an established tradition. In fact it is a traditional position, assuming the primacy of linear reading; the argument, on the other hand, that an appended apparatus does not subordinate material recognizes the more complex ways in which serious reading is performed. When we think of readers extractng all they can from books, reading intensely and productively, we do not picture them moving dutifully from one line to the next, but rather we see them jumping forward and backward, comparing one statement with another, bringing one point into the context of another—precisely the process McGann has effectively described as

"radial reading."[90] Editors who construct "traditional" appended apparatuses expect serious readers to behave in this way. The form of the text that they choose to present in linear style no doubt reflects their priorities (as, indeed, does the form other editors choose for ordering the readings of inclusive apparatuses), but they are not trying to suggest, by placing the apparatus at the foot of the page or the end of the text, that it is not to be read in the process of trying to understand the text. The Introductory Statement (1977) of the Center for Scholarly Editions, rightly regarded as an endorsement of intentionalist editing, described the importance of having variant readings present within the same volume that contains the rest of the text: The case could be put still more strongly, but even here there is the recognition that apparatuses are to be used actively in reading. Whether one decides to insert variants into a running text or to record them in appended lists properly turns on the details of the individual situation, not on the preconceived notion that one or the other is necessarily easier for the reader to use. Each involves a set of conventions, and in general one can as readily become accustomed to the one system as the other. Some people have found Gabler's inclusive record of Joyce's revisions usable and effective, and others have not; some have been appreciative of Bowers's appended record of William James's revisions, and others have not. Readers, like editors, may disagree about which system should be used in particular cases; but it is not logical to regard one or the other system as inherently more practical or convenient or informative for the consolidated presentation of readings from different documents.[91]

If both appended and inclusive apparatus can alternatively serve to present a conflated record of prepublication authorial revisions in a meaningful fashion, both can also be used effectively in presenting nonauthorial alterations that emerge from the initial and later publication process. The idea that an apparatus gives readers access to differing texts of a work (while at the same time showing the evidence underlying editorial decisions) is of course the traditional reason for providing apparatus; and it may yet offer a means for reconciling the social and the authorial approaches to editing. In the presidential address mentioned earlier, Fredson Bowers, speaking as one who favors authorial intention, remarked, "If he makes proper use of the apparatus, a cultural historian may find what he needs to know from a thoroughly edited work" (p. 8).[92] An editor approaching texts from the other direction

could say that students of authorial intention can find what they need in the apparatus. As long as it is not realistic to imagine that many works can routinely be the subject of alternative critical editions, some means must exist for accommodating different critical approaches within the same volumes. Apparatus (both inclusive and appended) has obviously been the standard device for accomplishing this goal, and the recent dissatisfaction with traditional intentionalist editions has often been directed at an assumed subordination of the readings in apparatus (particularly appended apparatus). All critical editors, like all other critics, bring points of view to their work, and in that sense an emphasis is placed on one approach in each instance. There is no reason why editors cannot, when they choose, take the social instead of the authorial point of view and represent the other in the apparatus. The key is the recognition that apparatus (whether inclusive or appended) presents alternative texts that can be read without difficulty, once the conventions are understood. In a thorough edition, the editor's own point of view does not deprive readers of reading alternative texts. Surely serious readers are not thwarted by the practical necessity (which everyone faces all the time) of accommodating themselves to specific (and sometimes unfamiliar) conventions and routines. Jo Ann Boydston, who shrewdly chose "In Praise of Apparatus" as the title of her 1989 presidential address to the Society for Textual Scholarship, emphasizes how apparatus, far from being a form of subordination, is "the history of a text," recreating "everything that happened to a text, from the author's conception of it throughout its life"—"a story of suspense and discovery, a true textual drama." What one can find in an apparatus, she concludes, is "a stimulating and highly productive intellectual adventure."[93] When apparatus is viewed in this spirit, most of the quarrels over formal arrangements shrink into insignificance, and a fruitful understanding of the validity of alternative textual theories can prevail.

These considerations lead to the question of what a critical text constructed according to a social textual theory would amount to. One would select as copy-text the text that best reflects the intentions of those persons responsible for the public presentation of a work at a given time, and one would emend that text to correct readings not intended by them. Presumably the resulting text would not be very different

from the text of a published edition (or, for earlier periods, a scribal manuscript) that actually circulated, for the emendations in most cases would consist entirely of the correction of so-called typographical errors (or slips of a scribe's pen).[94] Theoretically, of course, one might choose to be interested in the intentions of one, rather than all, of the persons involved in the production process—focusing on the intentions of a publisher's editor, for example, and attempting to eliminate the alterations made by compositors and copy-editors. But it seems unlikely (except perhaps in the case of certain well-known editors, like Maxwell Perkins) that the interest in any one of these persons would outweigh the interest in the joint product of all of them. The question then arises as to whether an editorially constructed critical text has any advantage over facsimiles and transcriptions for the student of literary sociology. The critical text would weed out certain slips (such as typographical errors) that could not have been an intended contribution of the production process; but those slips, after all, were in fact one of the results of that process and were a part of the texts that were presented to the public. One wonders, therefore, whether it is worth while to prepare critical texts reflecting the collaborative process of publication, when facsimiles and transcriptions can come closer to showing what the readers of a given time actually had at their disposal.

This point of view is by no means novel: it is, indeed, a traditional one, and it brings us back to the most basic decision that all editors must make. Every editor must decide whether to present the texts of documents (and thus use a noncritical presentation, such as photographic facsimiles or literal—"diplomatic"—transcriptions) or whether to go beyond the documents and attempt to construct the texts of works as they were intended by one or more persons in the past (and thus use a critical presentation, in which documentary texts are emended to bring them closer to the intended forms as conjecturally established). Both approaches have long histories. When editors of the past chose facsimiles and transcriptions, they were no doubt thinking primarily of the value of making documentary evidence widely available; they naturally understood that the texts present in medieval manuscripts and later printed editions were the texts that had emerged from the publication process

and had been given to readers, but they did not always announce this point because (aside from its being obvious) it had not been made a prominent issue for discussion. Nevertheless, facsimiles and transcriptions do serve the interests of literary sociology and cultural history, and students of those fields do already have a great mass of editions appropriate to their needs. It is true that editors who have decided to produce critical texts have concentrated almost exclusively on authorial intention; but even those who gave little thought to other approaches were obviously aware of the existence of noncritical or documentary editions, serving other purposes, and realized that they had chosen one editorial path rather than another. There has always been an implicit understanding that the reconstruction of authorially intended texts is not the only possible approach to textual study, even if the alternatives were not so precisely delineated or so insistently advocated as they have been in recent years. And can one, in retrospect, blame critical editors for focusing on authorial intention? They may not have considered alternatives; but we, looking back, can see that any other goal for a critical edition generally makes less practical sense. If one is making the critical effort of constructing a text that recreates some moment in the textual history of a work, there is usually little to be gained by choosing any goal other than an authorially intended text—for authorially intended texts are rarely, if ever, to be found perfectly embodied in surviving documents, and their attempted recovery requires acts of informed critical judgment, whereas socially produced texts are available intact in documents that survive and are normally (at least in the era of printing) in no need of reconstruction.[95]

Textual and literary theorists can, and will, continue to debate the nature of texts, but editors have to face the practical question of how their procedures are affected by the theoretical positions they hold. When they examine the choices before them, they will see that their alternatives have not been changed by the debates. There is no escape from the eternal dilemma posed by works in the medium of language (or in any other intangible medium): do we accept the texts of artifacts,

which are primary evidence of the forms of works that were disseminated at particular times, or do we create new texts from that evidence, hoping through the trained historical imagination to come closer to what the authors (or other producers) of the works intended? Editors who have contemplated the conflicting demands of the social and the authorial theories of the production of texts are still confronted with the old choice between documentary and critical editions; and as a practical solution they may well decide, as editors before them have generally decided, to prepare critical texts if their primary interest is in authorial intention and to produce facsimiles or transcriptions if their primary interest is in surviving documents, either as records of the genetic history of texts or as the collaborative products of the publication process. If editing thus goes on as before, it nevertheless will not go unchanged, for the framework of thought within which editorial choices are made will have been more fully articulated as a result of the discussions of social textual criticism. The study of the past inevitably involves thinking about the role of individuals in history as against the role of social process. Both must be investigated: the intentions of individual creative minds will always be a valid subject for textual critics to pursue, as will the forms of texts that reached the public, shaped by the social forces of a given moment. The two are complementary, and any claims that one supersedes the other are obviously naïve. Partisanship is a natural element in attempts to revitalize what is perceived as a neglected concern, and exaggerated claims are a part of the process. But the lasting legacy of the recent debates, after the partisan controversy has taken its place as an episode in the history of scholarship, will be a greater awareness of the theoretical alternatives for textual study and a wider understanding of the position of textual criticism in intellectual life.