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Notes
The fundamental distinction between the texts of works and the texts of documents, which will emerge at various points in the following pages, I have elaborated most fully in A Rationale of Textual Criticism (1989). (Cf. also note 63 below and my "Textual Criticism and Deconstruction," Studies in Bibliography, 43 [1990], 1-33.)
This is the fourth in a series of surveys covering the period since mid-century. The three earlier essays, originally published in Studies in Bibliography in 1975, 1981, and 1986, have been brought together as Textual Criticism since Greg: A Chronicle, 1950-1985 (1987). (Any reference to these essays in the present piece provides the SB citation first, followed in brackets by the page reference to the 1987 book.) As in the earlier essays, I again focus on discussions of general theoretical significance in the English language and therefore do not mention many of the articles that concentrate on textual problems in particular authors' works and many of the reviews of specific editions. During the period surveyed here, a useful volume of essays containing reflections on editorial history appeared in the series of Toronto Conferences on Editorial Problems: Editing and Editors: A Retrospect, ed. Richard Landon (1988), including essays on medieval Latin texts (Leonard E. Boyle), the Greek New Testament (Bruce M. Metzger), eighteenth-and nineteenth-century writings (Donald H. Reiman), and American literature (David J. Nordloh). (The Toronto series has also recently included Editing Early English Drama, ed. A. F. Johnson [1987]; Editing Modern Economists, ed. D. E. Moggridge [1988]; and Editing Greek and Latin Texts, ed. John N. Grant [1989].) Three significant surveys of earlier editorial history are Richard W. F. Kroll, "Mise-en-Page, Biblical Criticism, and Inference during the Restoration," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 16 (1986), 3-40; Joseph A. Dane, "The Reception of Chaucer's Eighteenth-Century Editors," Text, 4 (1988), 217-234; and C. O. Brink, English Classical Scholarship: Historical Reflections on Bentley, Porson and Housman (1986). Some historical comments on the nineteenth- and twentieth-century editing of medieval manuscripts appear in J. A. Asher's "The Textual Criticism Connection," Te Reo: Journal of the Linguistic Society of New Zealand, 29 (1986), 305-311. And a surprisingly detailed narrative of the editing of American literature under the CEAA (with a glance at recent issues) occupies much of Guy Cardwell's "Author, Intention, Text: The California Mark Twain," Review, 11 (1989), 255-288. Another historical account of the development of modern editing appears as the first chapter (pp. 1-29) of Mary-Jo Kline's A Guide to Documentary Editing (1987), prepared for the Association for Documentary Editing (ADE). Her account understandably emphasizes the editing of the texts of documents and the different traditions followed by editors of literary and historical figures; although she has conscientiously informed herself about the field of literary editing, she obviously speaks as one who has given more thought to historical annotation than to textual matters. (The bulk of the book deals with the routines and procedures for managing editorial projects; I have criticized its treatment of photocopies on pp. 39-41 of "Reproductions and Scholarship," SB, 42 [1989], 25-54. For a firm, yet generous, review of this book, see T. H. Howard-Hill, "Documentary Editing: Critical, Noncritical, Uncritical," Review, 10 [1988], 149-154.) More recently, the ADE has sponsored another volume, Editing Documents and Texts: An Annotated Bibliography (1990), by Beth Luey with the assistance of Kathleen Gorman. Although its goal is to cover both literary and historical editing, this checklist of about 900 entries, which are annotated with brief unevaluative comments, is slanted toward the editing of historical documents, for it cites many pieces from Documentary Editing on individual editions and omits many similar discussions, especially of literary editions, published elsewhere. But it is of course useful for the large number of references that it does bring together. (Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., in a brief historical description of recent editorial debates published in the journal of the ADE, emphasizes the divergence between "literary" and "historical" editors—unfortunately called "LITs" and "HITs" throughout—as if that were the meaningful dividing line; see "Tradition and Innovation: Recent Developments in Literary Editing," Documentary Editing, 10, no. 4 [December 1988], 5-10. This paper forcefully illustrates that the distinctions urged in Jo Ann Boydston's admirable ADE presidential address in 1985 have not been heeded, and she properly criticized several aspects of this paper in a letter to the editor; see her "The Language of Scholarly Editing," Documentary Editing, 7, no. 4 [December 1985], 1-6, and her letter in 11, no. 1 [March 1989], 28.)
Three thoughtful reviews, which should be read by anyone interested in pursuing the implications of McKenzie's general position, are those by Hugh Amory (Book Collector, 36 [1987], 411-418), T. H. Howard-Hill (Library, 6th ser., 10 [1988], 151-158), and Jerome J. McGann (London Review of Books, 18 February 1988, pp. 20-21). I share with Amory and Howard-Hill a feeling that these lectures are seriously flawed, but each of us emphasizes somewhat different matters (and, indeed, we are not always in agreement). Some comments on Amory and Howard-Hill appear in notes 5, 6, 7, 10, and 11 below; I discuss McGann's review in more detail at the beginning of part II below. An instance of the publicity that McKenzie's lectures have received is Roger Chartier's article ("Meaningful Forms") in the first number of Liber (October 1989; distributed to English-speaking readers with the TLS for 6-12 October 1989), pp. 8-9. Chartier considers the lectures "a brilliant manifesto in favour of an ambitious new definition of bibliography" and uses them uncritically to introduce the subject of "the effects on meaning produced by material forms." Chartier also cites McKenzie (p. 162) in "Texts, Printing, Readings," in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (1989), pp. 154-175; in this essay Chartier locates his field (as his tripartite title suggests) at "the crossroads of textual criticism, the history of the book, and cultural sociology" (p. 175)—yet no text exists, he claims, "outside of the support that enables it to be read" (p. 161).
Howard-Hill, in his review (see note 3 above) provides a fuller analysis of Greg's essay and McKenzie's distortion of it (pp. 152-153). John Barnard, in "Bibliographical Context and the Critic," Text, 3 (1987), 27-46, quotes (p. 28) a passage from the same 1932 essay of Greg's, stating that a text is a "living organism," which at each stage of "its descent through the ages" is "in some sense a new creation, something different from what it was for an earlier generation"—a point of view strikingly similar to McKenzie's. Barnard specifically aligns himself with McKenzie and McGann, asserting that "bibliography needs to widen its aims" (p. 40). (Greg's essay, "Bibliography—An Apologia," is available in his Collected Papers, ed. J. C. Maxwell [1966], pp. 239-266.)
The line "Rare book rooms will simply become rarer" is not only a poor joke; it is an incoherent intrusion. The implied connection between rare-book rooms as institutions and bibliography as a professional discipline cannot be taken for granted and would be difficult to support by a rational argument. Amory, in his review (see note 3 above), comments on this line of McKenzie's with characteristic flippancy, suggesting in his own way that intellectual pursuits have a higher aim than institutional self-preservation: "the prospect has its charms. Many a rare book room rests on the ruins of another, and a thoroughly [sic] reshuffling of the deck might advance bibliography more effectively than years of supine institutional possession" (p. 415).
"Bibliography—A Retrospect," in The Bibliographical Society 1892-1942: Studies in Retrospect (1945), pp. 23-31 (quotations from pp. 27, 30). Both Amory and Howard-Hill, in their reviews of McKenzie (see note 3 above), seem to me to be overly concerned with the question of how "bibliography" is to be defined; and by returning to this matter at the ends of their reviews, they both conclude with passages that are far from their strongest.
Set forth most fully in "Printers of the Mind: Some Notes on Bibliographical Theories and Printing-House Practices," SB, 22 (1969), 1-75; see the responses by Peter Davison, in "Science, Method, and the Textual Critic," SB, 25 (1972), 1-28, and by me, in "Bibliography and Science," SB, 27 (1974), 55-89 (esp. pp. 73-78), reprinted in Selected Studies in Bibliography (1979), pp. 1-35 (esp. pp. 19-24). A recent brief assessment of the effect of McKenzie's essay appears in Robert Kean Turner, "Accidental Evils," in Play-Texts in Old Spelling, ed. G. B. Shand with Raymond C. Shady (1984), pp. 27-33 (see p. 33).
Whether or not they misquoted it unintentionally is not clear. It is true, as McKenzie says (p. 18), that the substitution of "wrote" for "wrought" occurs in the anthology edited by George H. Nettleton and Arthur E. Case, British Dramatists from Dryden to Sheridan (1939); but that fact alone does not seem sufficient evidence from which to conclude that Wimsatt and Beardsley used this anthology. Their quoted passage differs in punctuation at six points from the Nettleton-Case text, whereas it agrees perfectly with the punctuation in two other popular American anthologies of the time: Plays of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century, ed. Dugald MacMillan and Howard Mumford Jones (1931); and the Modern Library Twelve Famous Plays of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century, introd. Cecil A. Moore (1933). These two anthologies do have "wrought" (and one of them—the 1933—differs from Wimsatt-Beardsley in the spelling "dulness" rather than "dullness"). But the question remains open whether greater weight is to be given to the agreement in punctuation on the one hand or the agreement in the reading "wrote" on the other.
Further shortcomings of this illustration are perceptively noted by Howard-Hill on p. 155 of his review (see note 3 above).
It is therefore surprising to find Amory, in his review (see note 3 above), saying that the current critical climate, reflected by McKenzie, places on libraries the "burden" of preserving "decaying reprints that in theory are primary sources—of something or other, anyway, if the literary theorists could only spit it out" (p. 417). Bibliographers, long before the current critical theorists, have repeatedly recognized that all printed items are primary sources for the history of printing and publishing and that "reprints" are primary sources for the study of authors' reputations. Amory is perfectly well aware of these points; yet for some reason he is willing to make the foolish statement, "There is such a thing as too much evidence."
Writers are really concerned to write works, of course, not texts, though in order to transmit those works they must produce specific texts, which may or may not faithfully represent the works.
Bibliography, that is, in the broad sense. One of his earlier criticisms of analytical bibliography was its supposed exclusion of the human. Presumably one of the connections he sees between analytical bibliography and the New Criticism (cf. p. 7) is that the former "has obscured the role of human agents" by ignoring the "inevitable dependence upon interpretive structures" (p. 8), just as the latter has eliminated "a concern for the complexities of human agency in the production of texts" (p. 19). Analytical bibliographers and textual critics in the Greg-Bowers tradition, however, have by no means been unaware of the fact that they were dealing with the actions of human beings in the past: one of the best illustrations of this point is Greg's classification of variants into substantives and accidentals as a way of reflecting the attitudes of Renaissance compositors toward their copy. (On the New Criticism and analytical bibliography, see also note 22 below.)
New meanings, of course, can also occur without new forms, as earlier editions are read in new contexts.
See, for example, Vinton Dearing's opening statement in the preface to A Manual of Textual Analysis (1959): "The method of analysis described in the following pages may be applied to the transmission and embodiment in any form of any idea or complex of ideas" (p. vii). In his expanded work Principles and Practice of Textual Analysis (1974), he opens his first chapter with the more explicit statement, "Messages are not confined to words or even to sound, but may consist wholly of visual images"; hence, "There is no limitation whatsoever in textual analysis on the type or types of transmitters. Textual analysis is . . . a completely general discipline of very wide specific applicability in the arts and social sciences." Dearing has recently summarized his distinction between the "genealogy of texts" (the subject of "textual analysis") and the "genealogy of media," in "Textual Analysis: A Kind of Textual Criticism," Text, 2 (1985), 13-23.
But sometimes puzzlingly. When he mentions television weather maps, he raises this question: "Should we not at least be asking . . . at which point one stops a kinetic image to keep a record for posterity?" (p. 38) The answer is obviously no: a single still image (or a number of still images) would falsify the record, since the text consists of moving images. Two pages later, after discussing a comic-strip rendering of Shakespeare, he says, "I hasten to add that I am not endorsing the form as a suitable one for Shakespeare" (p. 40). What can this mean? The comic strip is of course not a theatrical performance; it is a work, inspired by Shakespeare, in another medium. Both these comments (like the treatment of landscape) suggest a reluctance on McKenzie's part to accept nonverbal texts on their own terms. I do not comment here on his brief account of drama (pp. 40-41) —which he begins by claiming, "The relation of textual criticism to the realities of theatrical production has always been one of embarrassed impotence"—because I take up the same issues (of the relation of play scripts to performance) in discussing Howard-Hill below (see note 63).
In his discussion of maps, he says that, "not as books but as texts, bibliographical principle embraces them [maps] too" (p. 37). What is "bibliographical principle"? If it is the "textual principle" that is central to bibliography, then the statement is merely a tautology.
The idea that a work of literature employs an intangible medium is not Platonic, as McKenzie seems to suggest in the second lecture (p. 24). One might more readily see as Platonic McKenzie's reference to "a kind of ideal-copy text, transcending all the versions and true to the essential intention of the 'work'" (p. 29), or his statement that "All the versions [performances of a play] imply an ideal form which is never fully realized but only partly perceived and expressed by any one" (p. 41). McKenzie does not seem to be grappling here with the intangible nature of the medium of verbal works, which makes the work itself always indeterminate. And he is certainly not suggesting that the ideal form is the one envisaged by the author. His argument does not require a concept of ideal form, and in the context of that argument these statements are incomprehensible.
I have discussed this book in SB, 39 (1986), 19-27 [127-135], along with several of his essays that have since been collected in The Beauty of Inflections (1985): "The Text, the Poem, and the Problem of Historical Method," "Shall These Bones Live?", and "The Monks and the Giants: Textual and Bibliographical Studies and the Interpretation of Literary Works." More recently, a linked pair of important criticisms of McGann's Critique has appeared: David J. Nordloh's "Socialization, Authority, and Evidence: Reflections on McGann's A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism," Analytical & Enumerative Bibliography, n.s., 1 (1987), 3-12; and Craig S. Abbott's "A Response to Nordloh's 'Socialization, Authority, and Evidence,'" ibid., 13-16. Nordloh provides an admirable summary of Greg's position to show how McGann misunderstands Greg and Bowers, and he then argues that McGann's "notion of socialization introduces a dangerous vagueness" into editing (p. 7), making it no longer a "serious intellectual endeavor, circumscribed by evidence and limited by coherent, identifiable premises" (p. 12). He is correct to point out that McGann "seems less interested in fully defining the concept [of socialized textual authority] than in employing it as a weapon against other editorial principles" (p. 5); but Nordloh, in turn, does not go very far toward imagining the uses of a socialized approach by insisting that, "for intelligibility and for coherence, authority must be defined as precisely as possible in terms of active authorial creation" (p. 11). Abbott reinforces Nordloh's criticisms by noting that McGann "exaggerates the intransigence of Bowersian editing" (p. 13); and he predicts that the result of the current debates will be "a wider variety of editorial approaches, not the replacement of one approach with another" (p. 16). (Although neither Nordloh nor Abbott refers to McKenzie, their articles are joined under the heading "The Sociology of the Text.")
In the preface to his latest book, Towards a Literature of Knowledge (1989), McGann repeats this three-part classification of the "levels" of "operation" at which one can study the "social text" (p. ix).
McGann, following McKenzie, pairs the New Criticism with analytical bibliography (the "New Bibliography"), calling them, respectively, "versions of hermeneutical idealism and textual positivism" (p. 20, col. 2). Analytical bibliography may be considered positivistic, but not textually so. Nevertheless, McGann's succinct characterizations are more reasonable than McKenzie's strained comparison of the two. Analytical bibliography and the New Criticism, McKenzie believes, share a "view of the self-sufficient nature of the work of art or text" and "showed great ingenuity in discerning patterns" without concern for "precedent or subsequent processes" (p. 7). It is true of neither the New Criticism nor analytical bibliography that they have no regard for "precedent" (that is, history). In the case of analytical bibliography, Bowers, for one, emphasized what he called the "postulate of normality" in interpreting bibliographical evidence: that is, one must examine the evidence from a given piece of printing in the light of what is presently accepted—on the basis of previous investigations—as the normal practice for the period or shop involved (see Bibliography and Textual Criticism [1964], pp. 64-77). As for the New Criticism, Cleanth Brooks says in the preface to The Well Wrought Urn (1947), a book often considered the epitome of the New Criticism, "If literary history has not been emphasized in the pages that follow, it is not because I discount its importance, or because I have failed to take it into account" (p. x); and in an appendix (after the body of the book has taken up a series of poems from Donne to Yeats in chronological order) he says, "I certainly have not meant to imply that the poet does not inherit his ideas, his literary concepts, his rhythms, his literary forms" (p. 197).
He quotes McKenzie's statement that the new edition could not "represent the physical form of Ulysses as it was first published." Then, after summarizing McKenzie's presentation of information provided by John Kidd, he observes, "This limitation turns out to be an important one, because Joyce appears to have used the page sequences and lay-out of the 1922 edition as part of the work's semiotic system" (p. 21, col. 3). According to McGann's theory of reading, however, would not such a limitation be important in any historical study, whether or not the author is known to have made use of the physical details of bookmaking?
Criticism, 27 (1985), 283-305; reprinted, with slight revisions and a new title ("Ulysses as a Postmodern Work"), in his Social Values and Poetic Acts: The Historical Judgment of Literary Work (1988), pp. 173-194. The latter text is cited here. My comments below on the Gabler edition are limited to points raised by McGann. For a detailed criticism of the Gabler edition, see John Kidd, "An Inquiry into Ulysses: The Corrected Text," PBSA, 82 (1988), 411-584. And for accounts of the much-publicized controversy over the Gabler edition, initiated by Kidd, see Robin Bates's "Reflections on the Kidd Era," Studies in the Novel, 22 (1990), 119-141, and two essays by Charles Rossman, also in Studies in the Novel, "The Critical Reception of the 'Gabler Ulysses': Or, Gabler's Ulysses Kiddnapped" (21 [1989], 154-181), and a sequel to be published in the fall 1990 number. Examples of the way in which the Gabler edition (as well as McGann's view of it) has prompted discussion of textual theory in general are Ira B. Nadel's "Textual Criticism, Literary Theory and the New Ulysses," in Assessing the 1984 "Ulysses", ed. C. George Sandulescu and Clive Hart (1986), pp. 122-139; Patrick McGee's "Is There a Class for This Text? The New Ulysses, Jerome McGann and the Issue of Textual Authority," Works and Days, 5, no. 2 (1987), 27-44; and McGee's "The Error of Theory," Studies in the Novel, 22 (1990), 148-162.
McGann also says that "Gabler's edition calls attention to a peculiar generic quality of modernist [postmodernist?] writing: that its subject is often the act and process of writing itself" (p. 182). But all editions with apparatus recording authorial revisions call attention to "the act and process of writing."
His switch to "literary works" here—when he had been talking about an edition of a work—is perhaps meant to suggest that the "work" is inseparable from the apparatus in which it is "enmeshed" in a given edition, the two becoming a single new entity.
And, he says, the availability of many documents in published facsimile (such as The James Joyce Archive and the Rosenbach facsimile) "has made it possible for any student anywhere in the world to follow Gabler's work in the most minute and exacting detail" (p. 174). That no facsimile can ever be trusted to this extent is set forth in my "Reproductions and Scholarship," SB, 42 (1989), 25-54, which includes some comment on the deficiencies of the Joyce facsimiles and on Gabler's excessive reliance on those facsimiles (p. 32). John Kidd (see note 24 above) has discussed this matter in detail (pp. 433-448); and Gabler's admission that he did not fully collate his transcription against the Rosenbach original appears in Robin Bates's article (also cited in note 24 above).
As he also does elsewhere. For example: "Since by their autograph overlay the typescripts and proofs partially acquire the status of documents of composition, the question arises of how far the authorial presence affects, and penetrates, their basic level of transmissional transcription" (p. 1893). This statement describes an issue that editors have always dealt with; Gabler's classification of typewritten and printed documents as essentially transmissional, however, proves to be an impediment to a clear exposition of the issue.
A primary instance is McGann's contradictory description, within the space of one page (p. 176), of the authority of the 1922 first edition. He first notes that Gabler places the 1922 readings in the historical collation, not in the synoptic text, because "the first edition is prima facie a part of the 'full record of corruption'"; half a page later he calls the first edition "the 'ultimate stage of compositional development.'" The latter phrase is quoted out of context from Gabler and produces an inconsistency that was not present in Gabler's discussion: Gabler said, "The first edition admittedly represents the closest approximation to be found in one document of the work at its ultimate stage of compositional development" (p. 1894). Another misleading statement of McGann's is the following: "Because Gabler wants to assemble a text of the work's compositional development . . . and because he regards the act of composition as an entirely isolated and personal affair, he always sets a privilege on autograph manuscript texts. The typescripts, the proofs, and the first edition involve the intervention of other, purely transmissive authorities, and hence they fall outside the process of compositional development" (p. 177). This way of summarizing Gabler's procedure does not allow, as Gabler does, for the use of such documents as proofs and published editions as evidence of authorial revision in lost documents.
McGann's explanation of the "usual understanding" never mentions the distinction between substantives and accidentals and defines copy-text simply as "what an editor chooses to take as the text of highest presumptive authority" (p. 177); he thus ignores, in what he calls "the post-Greg context," Greg's primary contribution, the suggestion that one text may serve as the primary source for accidentals, another for substantives. Gabler's understanding of copy-text is similarly skewed: "By common consent, an editor chooses as the copytext for a critical edition a document text of highest overall authority" (p. 184). Greg's point was that no single document might have "overall authority."
A few pages earlier, McGann had described Gabler's text as "the work of Ulysses as Joyce actually produced it in a continuous act of writing and rewriting" (p. 175). The word "actually" does not allow for the role of judgment and conjecture involved in producing "an imagination of Joyce's work" (or in imagining "a continuous act of writing and rewriting")—or, indeed, in preparing any critical edition. Furthermore, McGann should have questioned whether it is proper to imagine all intended readings as having appeared in Joyce's hand—that is, whether it is proper to imagine lost documents that present Joyce's intended readings without error. It is always possible that some intended readings may never have appeared in the author's hand (such as a typist's or printer's correction of an author's slip of the pen). Gabler is therefore holding an untenable position when he says that "the final state of the text's development is considered reached when it is last fully and correctly written out in the author's hand" (p. 1901). Given Gabler's focus on intended texts abstracted from documents, he is free to emend errors in extant documents and to imagine the intended texts of inferred documents; but he cannot claim that such intended texts were always "fully and correctly written out in the author's hand." His tying of intended readings to handwriting, and thus to documents (whether extant or inferred), is a central weakness of his whole approach.
In the case of Billy Budd, Sailor there is only one manuscript to report, but it is a complicated manuscript showing many revisions that reflect several stages of composition. On the differing significance of inclusive apparatus in a transcription of one document and a consolidated record of multiple documents, see note 91 below.
More recently still, McGann has advocated a form of edition consisting of a printed reading text accompanied by a computer disk containing "the electronic hypertext"—that is, a record of all variants, accessible "through hypertext programs which would enable the reader to reconstruct any state of any particular text, and to organize those particular texts into any form or order within themselves or in relation to each other" ("Which Yeats Edition?", TLS, 11-17 May 1990, pp. 493-494). Although he does not use the term "redial reading" in this review, a computerized apparatus would clearly facilitate such reading.
I am not claiming that McGann does not understand this point but that his prose fails to convey it.
Such as two slight pieces for the Society for Textual Scholarship. The first, "Interpretation, Meaning, and Textual Criticism: A Homily," sums up his "socio-historical" approach to textual scholarship in terms of a "schematic outline" moving from the "originary textual moment" to the "immediate moment of textual criticism," via a series of "secondary moments of textual production and reproduction" (Text,, 3 [1987], 55-62). The second, "The Textual Condition," restates his plea for "bringing about an end to the schism in literary studies" between textual and literary criticism (Text, 4 [1988], 29-37). One of his main points in the latter piece cannot be too often emphasized: "Scholarship is interpretation, whether it is carried out as a bibliocritical discourse or a literary exegesis" (p. 37).
The interview, effectively conducted by David Gorman in the fall of 1986, was published the next year as "An Interview with Jerome McGann on Textual Scholarship as Literary History and Ideology Critique," Social Epistemology, 1 (1987), 163-173 (see p. 165). His point here has a different emphasis (as he recognizes) from his statement in the Critique that author's intentions are "only one of many factors to be taken into account" and that they may sometimes "determine the final decision" (p. 128); cf. my discussion of this statement in SB, 39 (1986), 22-25 [130-133]. (McGann's awareness, in the interview, of "the possibility of different kinds of editions for different works and authors" is welcome, but how it "moves against certain currently dominant views and procedures in editorial method" is unclear.) Later, in the preface to Towards a Literature of Knowledge (1989), McGann speaks of "the network of intentionalities which constitute the field of the social text," a "field of intentions" made up of various "intentional structures or agents," none of which "will ever be equal to the entire set" (p. x); but he does not in this context comment on the editorial possibilities of focusing on particular intentional agents.
"A New Approach to the Critical Constitution of Literary Texts," SB, 28 (1975), 231-264. Zeller's emphasis on the integrity of every "version" of a work is linked with a social view of literary production: he believes that "uninfluenced artistic intentions" (p. 248) cannot be separated from the "play of forces from all sides" on the author (p. 244)—"the magnetic needle of the author's wishes is quivering in the field of non-aesthetic forces" (p. 245). I have commented on Zeller's article in "Problems and Accomplishments in the Editing of the Novel," Studies in the Novel, 7 (1975), 323-360 (see pp. 329-331) and more briefly in SB, 34 (1981), 30-31 [72-73].
For the literature of this general movement, see (in addition to the editions referred to below) the documentation to Hurlebusch's SB essay (note 43 below).
"The Synchrony and Diachrony of Texts: Practice and Theory in the Critical Edition of James Joyce's Ulysses," Text, 1 (1984 for 1981), 305-326; I have commented on this essay in SB, 39 (1986), 37-39 [145-147].
"Does 'Text' Exist?", SB, 41 (1988), 64-76; "Genetic Editing, Past and Future: A Few Reflections by a User," Text, 3 (1987), 117-133.
After mentioning the varieties of apparatus employed by these scholars to show both "the genesis in its process and the final state of the text," Hay makes an odd observation: "they all mark their distance from the traditional apparatus of variants, abandoning the viewpoint of pure erudition for the problematic of the pre-text" (p. 70). The original French does say "l'érudition pure"; apparently "érudition" here carries the sense not of learning but of established and incontrovertible fact. See p. 152 of "'Le texte n'éxiste pas': Réflexions sur la critique génétique," Poétique, 62 (April 1985), 147-158.
"Conceptualisations for Procedures of Authorship," SB, 41 (1988), 100-135; "'Relic' and 'Tradition': Some Aspects of Editing Diaries," Text, 3 (1987), 143-153.
He offers two very different examples of the former category. Unquestionably the selective recording of variants in the Weimar Goethe edition (1887-1919) reflects a lack of concern for genetic study. But Friedrich Beissner's edition (1943-62) of Hölderlin contains detailed records of manuscript variants, and Hurlebusch places it in this category because "the author is still granted the decision how his works are to be read" (p. 111), with a final alteration "not seen as the last of several textual options, but as the 'only possible form' or the 'consummate form' of expression" (p. 113). Hurlebusch regards Beissner's presentation of a text representing the author's final intention as a sign of his subordination of genetic process, despite the thorough genetic record. Karl Goedeke's edition of Schiller (1867-76), on the other hand, is considered a "production-oriented" edition, even though its apparatus (like Beissner's) presents manuscript variants "according to the pattern of the apparatus criticus in classical philology" (p. 115), because the main text in each instance is the earliest one and the aim of the edition is to provide "a history of Schiller's mind" (p. 114). Hurlebusch sensibly does not make the form of the apparatus the determining characteristic here; but he might have noted that Beissner was not slighting the composition process simply because he wished to offer readers a text reflecting the author's final intention, for his edition illustrates how a study of the genetic record is essential to the construction (and critical reading) of such a text.
For example, he concludes his section on "reception-oriented" editions in this way: "As long as there are authors who sufficiently clearly lay down their decisions on the versions in which they wish their texts to be read, and as long as there are readers willing to submit their souls to authorial guidance, this editorial concept cannot be considered outdated" (p. 114). But an editor's decision to aim at an authorially intended text is independent of the degree to which the author has made the task easier—and, in any case, critical editors must evaluate for themselves every purported authorial decision (as must critical readers, even if they ultimately wish to "submit their souls to authorial guidance"). An "editorial concept" is valid or invalid (not "outdated") according to its own logic and coherence; it may fall out of favor (and seem "outdated"), however, as fashions in critical approaches to literature shift.
He invents an unnecessary dilemma when he asks, "Are they ['the writers' working procedures'] of interest merely by their workshop handling of texts and variants, and not also as the author's medium of expression?" (p. 124). That he sees these two as separable is shown by his answering the question affirmatively in regard to alterations that can be classified as "revision" (rather than "production" or creation).
He asserts, for example, that diaries "must be edited in a way which preserves their individuality and uniqueness as documents of non-intended transmission while maintaining as far as possible the conventions of text rendering and readability which belong to the area of 'tradition' documents" (p. 146). (A "tradition" document, in his terminology, contains a text intended for publication; a "relic" document contains a text not intended for publication.) Or again: "the task of the editor is twofold: on the one hand, he has to preserve the nature of the document and, on the other, he must present a readable text" (p. 148). The quite proper emphasis in the SB essay on the importance of the physical features and idiosyncrasies of private documents would seem to make the "conventions of text rendering and readability" irrelevant.
"Script, Work and Published Form: Franz Kafka's Incomplete Text," SB, 41 (1988), 77-99. The other two essays are Jean-Louis Lebrave's "Rough Drafts: A Challenge to Uniformity in Editing," Text, 3 (1987), 135-142; and Siegfried Scheibe's "Some Notes on Letter Editions: With Special Reference to German Writers," SB, 41 (1988), 136-148. Lebrave, who is working on computer systems for analyzing manuscript variants in Heine, believes that standard approaches to recording variants do not facilitate the analysis of the "genetic memory" (p. 135) embedded in rough drafts and other avant-textes. Scheibe, an editor of Goethe, Georg Forster, and Christian Gellert, discusses general guidelines for determining the contents of editions of letters.
See the paragraph containing the statement, "Cancellations in pre-copy-text forms will normally be fully reported" (Statement of Editorial Principles, p. 8). Robert Murray Davis has recently suggested that students of textual genesis and the creative process should draw on what composition teachers have learned about "recursion," a nonlinear, looping pattern characterized by pausing, moving backward, rewriting, and so on: see his "Writing as Process: Beyond Hershel Parker," Literary Research, 12 (1987), 179-186. His title of course implies that this understanding of composition is an advance over the concept of the determinate period of creativity presented in Hershel Parker's Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons (1984)—on which I commented in my previous survey (SB, 39 [1986], 27-34 [135-142]). (For two additional views of Parker, see James McLaverty in Review, 8 [1986], 119-138, and Don L. Cook in Documentary Editing, 9, no. 1 [March 1987], 5-8.) Parker has presented a summary of his position in "'The Text Itself'—Whatever That Is," Text, 3 (1987), 47-54.
For references to their work, see my comments in the preceding survey, SB, 39 (1986), 36 [144], note 68. More recently, Steven Urkowitz has said that "today we confuse bibliographical expertise with textual omniscience," in "'Well-sayd olde Mole': Burying Three Hamlets in Modern Editions," in Shakespeare Study Today, ed. Georgianna Ziegler (1986), pp. 37-70 (see p. 68). And Stanley Wells, in "Revision in Shakespeare's Plays," in Editing and Editors: A Retrospect, ed. Richard Landon (1988), pp. 67-97, advises editors to "get out of the strait-jacket of attempting to provide texts that aspire to definitiveness and aim rather at a reasoned plurality" (p. 97). See also Grace Ioppolo, "'Old' and 'New' Revisionists: Shakespeare's Eighteenth-Century Editors," Huntington Library Quarterly, 52 (1989), 347-361. Other scholars, reflecting experiences in other fields, have also taken up this matter. S. M. Parrish, for instance, thinks of each version as "a vertical slice cut through the continuum of text" (p. 346) and defends "the autonomy and the validity of each steady state of the text" (p. 349); see his "The Whig Interpretation of Literature," Text, 4 (1988), 343-350 (in which the "Whig" view disregards early versions as superseded by "an inner logic of inexorable growth" toward a final form [p. 349]). Another recent proposal for separate editions of versions comes from John T. Shawcross, in "Scholarly Editions: Composite Editorial Principles of Single Copy-Texts, Multiple Copy-Texts, Edited Copy-Texts," Text, 4 (1988), 297-317: "for certain works, particularly where multiple authoritative texts exist, a single version of the text is not sufficient for a scholarly edition; rather, significant texts should be offered as the disparate texts that they are" (p. 301). Edward Mendelson, in a piece entitled "The Fading Coal vs. The Gothic Cathedral or What to Do about an Author Both Forgetful and Deceased" (Text, 3 [1987], 409-416), distinguishes an interest in early versions from an interest in late versions by the two images of his title (but the "cathedral," despite its suggestiveness, is apparently not meant to imply collaborative effort). On the fundamental question of how to distinguish between versions to be presented separately and those (if any) to be incorporated into an eclectic text, see the references recorded in note 87 below.
See the editors' commentary volume, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion, by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor with John Jowett and William Montgomery (1987), pp. 16-19 (a general argument for Shakespearean revision) and p. 509 (an explanation of the "radical departure from traditional editorial practice" for Lear). (For assessments of this notable volume, see Peter Davison's review in the Library, 6th ser., 10 [1988], 255-267, and MacDonald P. Jackson's review in Shakespeare Survey, 41 [1989], 228-241.) Some of Taylor's statements in the general introduction—such as "Editorial controversy, like all other forms of discourse, is an instrument of power. . . . Editors are the pimps of discourse" (p. 7)— resemble those in his paper on "The Rhetoric of Textual Criticism" in Text, 4 (1988), 39-57, in which he links the "revisionist revolution in the editing of Shakespeare" to "a change in the rhetoric of textual criticism" (p. 53) and describes the "rhetorical strategy" that elevated the idea of two Lears from the status of an "iconoclastic heresy" to the position of being supported by an apparent "mass movement" (p. 46). He sets forth the revisionist position in "Revising Shakespeare," Text, 3 (1987), 285-304—where he sees it as "the new revisionist onslaught" against "the entrenched conflationist orthodoxy" (p. 302). A recent example of the revision theory in operation is John Jowett and Gary Taylor's "The Three Texts of 2 Henry IV," SB, 40 (1987), 31-50.
I have made these points about versions in SB, 34 (1981), 62-63 [104-105], note 75; SB, 39 (1986), 44 [152], note 85; and A Rationale of Textual Criticism (1989), pp. 79-82.
"'Versioning': The Presentation of Multiple Texts," in his Romantic Texts and Contexts (1987), pp. 167-180. The first part of this book, entitled "Romantic Texts" (pp. 15-180), brings together (along with the first appearance of "'Versioning'") nine pieces that had previously appeared elsewhere, seven of them reviews and essays relating to specific editions of nineteenth-century poets and the other two being the valuable two-part historical survey of the editing of the Romantics that he published in 1982 (Studies in Romanticism) and 1984 (Text). See also "Textual Criticism in Nineteenth-Century Studies," Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 11 (1987), 9-21; and "Gentlemen Authors and Professional Writers: Notes on the History of Editing Texts of the 18th and 19th Centuries," in Editing and Editors: A Retrospect, ed. Richard Landon (1988), pp. 99-136. Another recent piece of his is "Gender and Documentary Editing: A Diachronic Perspective," Text, 4 (1988), 351-359—where he confusingly links "slips of the pen" with "indifferent educational opportunities" as two causes of unintended readings in the texts of documents (p. 352).
Whether his preference for single-version editions is a matter of principle or convenience is not entirely clear. At several points he complains about the difficulty of using lists, and once he even says that a critic could "learn more" from comparing discrete versions than "by trying to unravel a conflated eclectic edition" (p. 173). (One can disregard, however, his statement in his prefatory note that he has found some eclectic editions to be "untrustworthy" [p. 167]: there are no doubt scholars capable of producing untrustworthy editions of single-version texts also.)
"The surviving pertinent materials would be before the reader and critic, the teacher and student, who could participate in the debate over issues that really matter until a new consensus emerged, rather than wait passively for a new canonical text to be imposed from 'above'" (p. 177).
Yet he seems to believe that the great volume of writing about critical editing has led to "some prejudice against the 'uncritical' presentation of primary manuscripts or early published versions" (p. 176).
One of his suggestions should be heeded: the publication of photofacsimiles of printed texts emended with paste-over alterations in an appropriate type face (pp. 178-179). In fact, this procedure is not limited to single-version editions; many eclectic texts produced by full critical editing would not incorporate emendations of such quantity or kind that a resetting of the copy-text would be necessary.
Library, 6th ser., 11 (1989), 89-115. A related brief essay of his, "Playwrights' Intentions and the Editing of Plays," Text, 4 (1988), 269-278, covers much of the same ground as the latter half of the Library essay. In a somewhat earlier article—"The Author as Scribe or Reviser? Middleton's Intentions in A Game at Chess," Text, 3 (1987), 305-318-he made some of the same points, but it was evidently written before he had developed the position on indifferent variants taken in the Library essay (cf. p. 318, note 18, of the 1987 piece with the comments on indifferent variants discussed below).
A few sentences later he says that it may also be unacceptable for other genres. One fault he finds with it is that it "interprets authorial intention primarily on the level of the document rather than on the level of the work" (p. 90). How can one locate the work except through the evidence of the texts of documents?
Howard-Hill obviously wishes Greg had decreed in such situations that the later text carries presumptive authority for indifferent variants (which would have left him closer to McKerrow). (I am using "indifferent variants" to mean those variants that seem equally balanced to an editor, taking everything into account. Howard-Hill distinguishes two uses of the term, one—"the usual interpretation"—referring to the "significance or aesthetic value" of the readings themselves (p. 98), the other referring to the authority of the sources of the readings. The two must ultimately coalesce, however, for any inference regarding the source of a reading, or inability to infer one, is influenced by a critical evaluation of the reading itself, in the light of what is known of the author's habits of expression.) Howard-Hill accepts at face value Greg's statement that "there can be no logical reason for giving preference to the copy-text" in the choice between indifferent variants, and he proceeds several times to call the practice illogical (as on pp. 97, 99, 100). Actually, the whole drift of Greg's argument provides the reasoning: the copy-text is chosen for its genealogical proximity to the text of the author's manuscript, on the grounds that texts deteriorate as they are recopied or reset in type; thus those readings (substantives and accidentals) in later texts that differ from copy-text readings may be presumed to be non-authorial, except when a case can be made that the variants result from authorial alteration or from repair (by someone) of the kind that the editor would have had to undertake anyway. One may disagree with this entire line of reasoning, but one cannot label as illogical the idea of retaining the copy-text readings in cases of indifferent variants, for it is a consistent part of the whole. In practice, one can decide in a given instance that the circumstances demand the conferring of presumptive authority on all the substantive variants of a later text (or certain categories of them); I am only trying to suggest why it is understandable that Greg did not state this position as a general rule. As for Greg's position leading—in the hands of some editors—to a "new 'tyranny of copy-text'" (p. 90), one can never hope to eliminate this danger (of which Greg was well aware), whatever one's approach. The art of critical editing has always centered on the delicate process of guarding against, on the one hand, excessive reliance on a favored text and, on the other, overconfidence in one's ability to improve it.
In his concluding paragraph, he states his "most important" recommendation in this way: "authorial intentions relinquished to the theatre by design and custom should be completed by an editor in accordance with his understanding of the author's intentions as reflected in surviving documents, and of the theatrical milieu in which the playwright wrote" (p. 115). This statement does not clearly distinguish two possibilities. Aspects of a play "relinquished to the theatre" were sometimes completed in ways that were not in accord with the playwright's intention; but in that form they became part of the performance text actually used. Howard-Hill earlier stressed the importance of the editorial adoption of such texts (as from promptbooks), because plays are collaborative products and playwrights expect changes to be made in their work. The emphasis in this statement, however, is on the editor's own emendations designed to produce a performance text in line with what can be known of the playwright's intention. A text reflecting the playwright's intention for performance is a very different editorial goal from a text reflecting the handling by theater personnel of details relinquished by the playwright.
A playwright who wishes to have a different text for the reading audience from one followed on the stage is of course creating two works, the one in print being like a novel (or a "closet drama") in employing only language as its medium. Even when the texts are the same, there may be features of the text, as in stage directions, that seem written primarily for the benefit of a reading audience; but as long as the text intended for the reading audience is the same as the text intended for performers, it is difficult to conclude that certain non-dialogue features of the text were meant to create a distinct work for the reading audience, since they also influence the performance of actors. The relations of reading text to performance are productively explored by Randall McLeod (writing as "Random Cloud") in "The Psychopathology of Everyday Art," The Elizabethan Theatre, 9 (1986), 100-168, which makes a similar point: McLeod argues against normalizing the irregular naming of characters in speech prefixes, for he believes that it (like punctuation) affects not only readers' responses but also actors' interpretations. (Cf. Philip Brett's discussion of the way in which the modernizing of musical notation affects performance, in "Text, Context, and the Early Music Editor," in Authenticity and Early Music: A Symposium, ed. Nicholas Kenyon [1988], pp. 83-114.)
Howard-Hill's argument is not helped by an eccentric use of the word "work," which does not in his definition encompass a play. He speaks of "the essential distinction between authors of works and playwrights" and explains, "The distinction I make is between an intention to publish by performance ('play'), and one to publish in print ('work')" (p. 108). My comments in this paragraph, and the definitions of "work" and "text" implicit in them, are derived from my A Rationale of Textual Criticism (1989), passim (on drama, see p. 85). (This paragraph and the next can also serve as my response to McKenzie's discussion of drama in his Panizzi Lectures, where he says, rather obscurely, that "the sociological dimension of production and reception . . . confirm[s] the textual nature of each element in a play" [p. 41].) My distinction between works and documents is entirely misunderstood by Margreta de Grazia in "What Is a Work? What Is a Document?", in The New Historicism and the Editing of English Renaissance Texts (photocopied papers, separately paginated, from the Renaissance English Text Society MLA panel organized by Thomas L. Berger, 1989): she believes that the traditional view (and mine) can be represented by such statements as "A work has an author, a document does not. A work is subject to critical interpretation, a document is not" (p. 1). It is no wonder that "this distinction is approaching collapse"—the "claim" of her paper, though a more challenging claim to prove would be that it ever existed. She somehow finds that attention to Shakespeare's plays as performed, along with the printing of multiple versions, shows an "indifference to a distinction ['the work/document distinction'] that was once basic" (p. 8); she does not see that every physical text is a documentary text and that every one of them is also an attempt to transmit a work. Another article, besides Howard-Hill's, that in my view fails to see the similarities between the texts of plays on paper and the tangible texts of works in other intangible media is John Glavin's "Bulgakov's Lizard and the Problem of the Playwright's Authority," Text, 4 (1988), 385-406. Glavin asserts that "the fusion of text and theatre . . . subverts the inscription that evokes it," and this "subversion radically fractures the relation between drama and other major literary genres" (p. 387)—as if fiction and poetry reach the public without intermediaries. Indeed, his statement that "The novel or poem is printed, read, and studied as written" seems oblivious to the fact that private and public texts of such works are so frequently different as to have given rise to the debate between intentionalist and social textual critics.
Even though a play exists as a work only in performance, historical research into the texts of plays—like playwrights' own composition—must rely on documents (i.e., on instructions for performance). Thus an editor seeking to reconstruct the text of a play as intended by its author for performance need not be bothered by the fact (or possibility) that the play was never actually performed in that version. The play (as a work) may not have existed, but plans for it existed in the playwright's mind and, in greater or lesser degree, in the form of text on paper. Those plans or instructions (in the form of text) are the reality that such an editor is attempting to recover.
For my own comments, see SB, 29 (1976), 183-191 (reprinted in Selected Studies in Bibliography [1979], pp. 325-333), and A Rationale of Textual Criticism (1989), pp. 77-78.
The idea that an interest in the autonomy of the author is "romantic" (which has become fairly common in anti-intentionalist writing on textual criticism) is challenged by Tilottama Rajan in "Is There a Romantic Ideology? Some Thoughts on Schleiermacher's Hermeneutic and Textual Criticism," Text, 4 (1988), 59-77: "My own contention is that not only is the ideology of the author as sovereign subject that subtends much textual criticism a modern reconstruction that finds only partial authority in the Romantic period but that the origins of the contemporary questioning of this authority initiated by McGann are also to be found in the Romantic period" (pp. 59-60).
"Unfinished Business," Text, 4 (1988), 1-11. During the period under review here, Bowers has given particular attention in print to the complex issues of regularization: "Readability and Regularization in Old-Spelling Texts of Shakespeare," Huntington Library Quarterly, 50 (1987), 199-227; "Regularization and Normalization in Modern Critical Texts," SB, 42 (1989), 79-102; "The Problem of Semi-Substantive Variants: An Example from the Shakespeare-Fletcher Henry VIII," SB, 43 (1990), 80-95.
"Textual and Literary Theory: Redrawing the Matrix," SB, 42 (1989), 1-24. This essay can in some respects be supplemented by Greetham's "A Suspicion of Texts," a provocative introductory essay for the general reader published in Thesis: The Magazine of the Graduate School and University Center (City University of New York), 2, no. 1 (Fall 1987), 18-25. Near the end of the essay he suggests some of the ways that theoretical orientations reveal themselves in published editions, and his final line is that "a suspicion of texts is in fact one of the fundamental requirements of the critical mind."
"The Place of Fredson Bowers in Mediaeval Editing," PBSA, 82 (1988), 53-69. Greetham's interest in placing medieval textual problems in the context of current debates in textual criticism is also illustrated in "Challenges of Theory and Practice in the Editing of Hoccleve's Regement of Princes," in Manuscripts and Texts: Editorial Problems in Later Middle English Literature, ed. Derek Pearsall (1987), pp. 60-86. He offers here a descriptive list of seven "theoretical options . . . available to the editor," ordered in "declining degrees of 'fidelity' to the documentary state and history of the work" (p. 62). The list begins with "the photographic facsimile" and ends with (in sixth place) "the Slavic textological model, with its emphasis on the potentially equal status of all remaniements as textual witnesses" and (in seventh place) "a 'social' textual theory such as that envisaged by Jerome McGann" (p. 68). (One may wonder whether these last two are in fact at the farthest extreme from photographic facsimiles in terms of "'fidelity' to the documentary state and history of the work," for they both could be well—perhaps best—accommodated by the use of facsimiles. They are both at the opposite extreme from final authorial intention, but facsimiles do not necessarily represent authorial intention.) In the course of the essay he makes a statement that explains the form of a number of recent textual essays: "The conservative turned radical always seems to feel that his earlier conservative credentials need a greater demonstration of their frailty than do his new radical precepts, which can be regarded as articles of the revealed truth" (p. 70). Greetham here concludes that "a 'social' school of textual criticism is invalid where intention is recoverable" (p. 80); a detailed account of his method of reconstructing Hoccleve's intended text of Regement of Princes by incorporating into it Hoccleve's practice in accidentals, as established by analysis of holographs of other works, is provided in "Normalisation of Accidentals in Middle English Texts: The Paradox of Thomas Hoccleve," SB, 38 (1985), 121-150 (see p. 127, note 10, for his criticism of McGann's treatment of the relation between Lachmannian genealogical analysis and Gregian copy-text theory).
The papers from this conference and Greetham's response are to form a special issue of Critical Exchange (which, as of this writing, is not yet available). I am grateful to Professor Greetham for providing me with a copy of his commentary.
He adds that he finds support for his view from authors' statements of their own intentions—ignoring not only the difference between intention and expectation but also the historian's task of analyzing critically the motivations underlying statements made by individuals in the past. Willison's paper does in fact show the ubiquity, from medieval times to the present, of the split between authors of works and disseminators of texts. The papers from the Texas conference will be published in a special number of the Library Chronicle of the University of Texas (the collection is not yet available, as of this writing). I am grateful to Mr. Willison for giving me a copy of his paper.
Another historian of books and publishing, John Sutherland, has ridiculed the intentionalist approach and depicted those advocating the social approach as adversaries of a repressive establishment. See "Publishing History: A Hole at the Centre of Literary Sociology," Critical Inquiry, 14 (1988), 574-589; reprinted in Literature and Social Practice, ed. Philippe Desan, Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, and Wendy Griswold (1989), pp. 267-282. My response to this slight piece, which trivializes its subject by approaching the careers of McGann, McKenzie, and Robert Darnton in terms of academic politics, appears in Literature and Social Practice, pp. 283-287 ("Response to John Sutherland").
See Stephen Knight, "Textual Variants: Textual Variance," Southern Review [Adelaide], 16 (1983), 44-54; Harold Love, "Sir Walter Greg and the Chaucerian Force Field," Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Bulletin, 8 (1984), 73-81; Stephanie Trigg, "The Politics of Editing Medieval Texts: Knight's Quest and Love's Complaint," ibid., 9 (1985), 15-22.
He describes Knight's "distortions of Greg" as "a classical example of a Bloomian tessera—a 'strong misreading' of an anxiety-causing precursor designed to create imaginative space for the textual ephebe" (p. 76). More usefully, he points out that a social goal for textual criticism is "a matter of editorial philosophy which can be applied to any work of literature whatsoever" and is "not necessarily dependent on the work being the product of collective composition" (p. 79). But he muddles this point by asserting that, in choosing between indifferent variants, "Knight's principle is certainly no less logical than the idea that one should follow the reading of the 'best manuscript' or Greg's recommendation that one should accept the reading of the copy-text" (p. 80). If one can apply social textual criticism to any work, as of course one can, then one's method of handling indifferent variants must be consistent with it, and Knight's is more appropriate for this purpose than Greg's. No doubt Love had this point in mind, but what he says does not make entirely clear that social and authorial emphases cannot sensibly be mixed in a single edited text—and thus he does not elucidate as much as he might the very real problem, in Knight's piece, of allowing authorial intention to guide some, but not all, editorial decisions. Love weakens his argument even further by suggesting at the end that an edition following Knight's rationale would be "a twentieth-century artefact, not a medieval one" (p. 80). Although he understands that all editors, including "traditional" ones, bring their own "ideologies" to their work, he does not proceed to recognize that texts constructed to reflect authors' intentions and those constructed to recreate the "dialectical tensions of the period of origin" are equally the products of the historical imagination of scholars living and working at particular times and inescapably imbued with the sensibility of those times.
She believes that "medieval texts, far from being the innocent victims of superimposed critical theories, or coloured by different editorial practices, are only produced as we read them" (p. 21).
"An Inquiry into the Social Status of Texts and Modes of Textual Criticism, SB, 42 (1989), 55-79. Shillingsburg says that "this survey of competing views of editing has convinced me even more that editing is a critical enterprise that not only involves criticism but is in fact a form of literary criticism." Like others before him who have made this discovery, he adds, "I believe no theorist should say that his method is the only responsible one, though I think it is possible to discover that some methods are irresponsible" (p. 74).
"Editorial Theory and the Act of Submission," PBSA, 83 (1989), 169-185. West concludes that an intentionalist editor can accept some of the alterations made in a text by persons other than the author if those alterations seem to reflect fulfillment of the author's active intentions (and the resulting edition is both "an act of literary criticism and of biography" [p. 185]). He regards this position as intermediate between the strict intentionalist view, which would not allow any alterations not made by the author, and the social view, which would favor the reproduction of the received text accompanied by notes of "who did what during the compositional process" (p. 185). In this scheme, West believes that the two extremes are "rigid," whereas his recommended intermediate approach "increases the element of critical thinking in the creation of a scholarly text" (pp. 184-185). Some "rigid" intentionalist editors probably do exist, but being strictly intentionalist requires judgment, not rigidity. Any attempt to construct an authorially intended text demands "critical thinking," and the decision to accord a delegated authority to some of the changes made by authors' personal editors or publishers' editors does not necessitate a greater infusion of it, but rather an application of it toward somewhat differently defined ends. West has not proposed a new approach to critical editing but only another perspective on where the line between intention and expectation falls.
"Neopragmatism and Convention in Textual Editing, with Examples from the Editing of Thoreau's Autograph Journal," Analytical & Enumerative Bibliography, n.s., 1 (1987), 227-236 (quotation from p. 230). Neufeldt speaks for many other editors when he says, "Recent and current speculation about literary theory, theory of language, theory of discourse . . . has threatened a number of models that formerly offered a satisfactory starting point, modus operandi, and conceptual focus for editing texts. . . . Our eyes—including our editorial eyes—are being retrained" (p. 227).
"New, Old, Anglo-American, Textual Criticism," PBSA, 80 (1986), 243-253 (quotation from p. 245)—a review of William Proctor Williams and Craig S. Abbott's An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies (1985). This often acute review misleadingly depicts the "Anglo-American tradition of textual criticism" as an "immoveable orthodoxy" resulting in "institutional and theoretical certainties" (p. 244)—ignoring, among other things, the emphasis by many (perhaps most) of its practitioners on the lack of definitiveness of its products. In contrast, he argues, "McKenzie's call for a deeper attention to the materiality of the text and McGann's appeal over the heads of Greg-Bowers to the precedents of classical scholarship both entail a welcome return from the tyranny of method to ratio et res ipsa" (p. 250).
See, for example, Gerald M. Maclean, "What Is a Restoration Poem? Editing a Discourse, Not an Author," Text, 3 (1987), 319-346; David S. Hewitt, "Scott and Textual Multiplepoinding," Text, 4 (1988), 361-373; Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr., "Final Intentions, Social Context, and Santayana's Autobiography," Text, 4 (1988), 93-108; and two essays by Arthur F. Marotti, "Malleable and Fixed Texts: Manuscript and Printed Miscellanies and the Tranmission of Lyric Poetry in the English Renaissance," in Is the Typography Textual? (photocopied papers, separately paginated, from the Renaissance English Text Society MLA panel organized by Carolyn Kent, 1988), and "Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric," in The New Historicism and the Editing of English Renaissance Texts (see note 63 above). Each of these essays refers to McGann on its first page and gives considerable attention to a socialized theory of textual criticism; none of the writers, however, makes the point that both the authorial and the social approaches are independently applicable to every work. (Marotti comes close to doing so in the second paper but wishes—as he says in the first—to "dissociate" his work from "the usual textual and bibliographical program . . . that is informed by a textual 'idealism' that effectively eradicates those interesting socioliterary processes in which texts are historically embedded" [p. 1]. Saatkamp appends to his essay the naïve recommendation that "critical authorial editions" of living authors be undertaken, allowing the authors to determine their intended texts—as if the existence of such editions would alter in any way the scholar's task of assessing authorial motivation and reconstructing the texts intended at particular past moments.) These issues have also become prominent in the study of other arts. In music, for example, attention has been given to "authenticity," meaning fidelity not to composers' intentions but to the details of contemporary performance; see Authenticity and Early Music, which includes Philip Brett's excellent essay (see note 62 above) surveying the history and issues of music editing in the context of the theoretical debates among literary editors.
"The Worldly Text: Writing as Social Action, Reading as Historical Reconstruction," in Literary Theory's Future(s), ed. Joseph Natoli (1989), pp. 181-220. The section on textual criticism, "Beginning with a Text" (pp. 190-198), deals largely with Hershel Parker, Jerome McGann, and me.
In "Some Considerations in the Concept of Pre-Copy-Text," Text, 4 (1988), 79-91. Cook has also written, during the period under review here, a skillful account of "Preparing Scholarly Editions" for a general audience: see Humanities [National Endowment for the Humanities], 9, no. 3 (May/June 1988), 14-17. (His comment on apparatus in this piece is simply that an editor should record "fully the evidence on which the editorial decisions are made, including all the variant readings.")
Another reason, which Cook cites from the Indiana edition of Howells, is that serious scholars will wish to examine the manuscripts themselves; but this argument ignores both the usefulness of genetic information to a wide variety of readers and the scholarly contribution made by editors (experts in their authors' handwriting and working habits) in deciphering documentary texts, which are often complex or unclear.
Another scholar critical of standard apparatus is Barry Gaines, though the specific target of his attack is very different: in "Textual Apparatus—Rationale and Audience," in Play-Texts in Old Spelling, ed. G. B. Shand with Raymond C. Shady (1984), pp. 65-71, he contends that "no one is really interested in reconstructing the copy-text from the apparatus which accompanies a critical edition" and that, indeed, anyone would be foolish to try to do so when microfilm and other facsimile copies are available (p. 68); and the historical collation, he feels, is "simply a record of what the editor has endured to earn the right to proceed with the edition" (p. 69). The ineffectiveness of his argument is suggested by this false analogy: "When scientists publish their conclusions, they are not asked to include as an appendix all their worksheets" (p. 69).
See, for example, my "The Editorial Problem of Final Authorial Intention," SB, 29 (1976), 167-211 (reprinted in Selected Studies in Bibliography [1979], pp. 309-353), especially the third section and the references cited there. An essentially similar approach to the one I proposed in some detail has been sketched in broad terms by Giovanni Aquilecchia in "Trilemma of Textual Criticism (Author's Alterations, Different Versions, Autonomous Works): An Italian View," in Book Production and Letters in the Western European Renaissance: Essays in Honour of Conor Fahy, ed. Anna Laura Lepschy, John Took, and Dennis E. Rhodes (1986), pp. 1-6: "I would maintain," he says, "that it is part of the critical editor's task to distinguish . . . between mere alterations which do not affect the structure of the work or a part of it on the one hand (to be recorded in the apparatus of a critical edition) and different versions of the work or part of it, sometimes amounting to different works altogether on the other" (p. 4). Fredson Bowers pursues this question further in "Mixed Texts and Multiple Authority," Text, 3 (1987), 63-90. After distinguishing "mixed authority" in a single-text tradition (produced by authorial revision) from "discrete multiple authority" (produced by thorough rewriting), the former amenable to eclectic editing and the latter not, he examines situations with "radiating multiple authority" (p. 74), compatible with eclectic editing but posing special problems because of the multiple "sets of independent documentary evidence," often of equal authority (p. 75). This essay supplements his landmark essay on "Multiple Authority: New Problems and Concepts of Copy-Text," Library, 5th ser., 27 (1972), 81-118 (reprinted in Essays in Bibliography, Text, and Editing [1975], pp. 447-487). On authority, see also his "Authority, Copy, and Transmission in Shakespeare's Texts," in Shakespeare Study Today, ed. Georgianna Ziegler (1986), pp. 7-36.
Some genetic critics may wish to present facsimiles and transcriptions of any or all of the documents that preserve such revisions, simply because any text as it stands in a document is of interest, for it is what exists in physical form. But in these cases a consolidated presentation, showing the development of the text as reflected in a series of documents, is also always in order.
And that theorists of reading and writing call "recursion," as Robert Murray Davis has pointed out (see note 49 above). This view of reading does not in itself make the contents of books a visual art, despite the similarity of the process to the way our eyes roam over a painting or a sculpture. The way in which we study the physical object containing a verbal text does not alter the status of the text: it may be a set of instructions for the recreation of a work of language, or it may be a visual work as well; but its classification in this regard is not determined by readers' techniques for perusing it.
An argument can be made, for example, that appended apparatuses have a particular advantage for texts intended for publication in that they allow for clear texts, and published texts are characteristically clear. The texts of private documents, on the other hand, are typically rough, with canceled and alternative readings; and one can argue that editions of individual private documents are especially well served by inclusive apparatuses, which retain the roughness in the linear text. This theoretical consideration no longer applies, however, when (as in Gabler's Ulysses) the readings of more than one private document are brought together in a single record. In such cases an inclusive apparatus produces a composite text, not a literal rendering of an individual documentary text; its primary purpose is thus to serve as a record, not to present a particular physical arrangement of words and punctuation, and the decision to use an inclusive rather than an appended apparatus to accomplish this purpose is a practical, not a theoretical, one. (I have made the argument to use appended apparatus for the texts of works intended for publication and inclusive apparatus for the texts of individual documents not intended for publication in, among other places, "Some Principles for Editorial Apparatus," SB, 25 [1972], 41-88 [esp. pp. 46-47]; reprinted in Selected Studies in Bibliography [1979], pp. 403-450 [see pp. 408-409]. I have also suggested, more than once, that practical considerations in certain situations may alter this recommendation, as in "Literary Editing," in Literary & Historical Editing, ed. George L. Vogt and John Bush Jones [1981], pp. 35-56 [esp. pp. 44-45].) Albert J. von Frank, in "Genetic versus Clear Texts: Reading and Writing Emerson," Documentary Editing, 9, no. 4 (December 1987), 5-9, takes a practical point of view in examining these alternatives for individual documents and advocates the production, on the computer, of both forms of apparatus. Robert H. Hirst, in Mark Twain's Letters, ed. Edgar Marquess Branch et al. (1988- ), has developed a "plain text" system in which inclusive apparatus is used for some details and appended apparatus for others "in order to make the text as complete and informative as possible without destroying its legibility" (1, xlvi). Peter L. Shillingsburg (who believes, with Gabler, that authorial variants are part of the totality of a work but who does not object to appended apparatus) has addressed the separate question of indicating (or, perhaps one should say, nominating) the agent responsible for each variant: see his Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Theory and Practice (1986), pp. 111-113, which I have discussed (in its 1984 edition) in SB, 39 (1986), 40-41 [148-149].
See note 67 above. Bowers's basic statement of the requirements for an apparatus is "Notes on Editorial Apparatus," in Historical & Editorial Studies in Medieval & Early Modern English, for Johann Gerritsen, ed. Mary-Jo Arn and Hanneke Wirtjes, with Hans Jensen (1985), pp. 147-162—cited in my previous survey along with his earlier exchange with Paul Werstine (SB, 39 [1986], 37 [145], note 69). Bowers's most detailed examination of the apparatus for recording manuscript variants is "Transcription of Manuscripts: The Record of Variants," SB, 29 (1976), 212-264, which emphasizes clear text with appended apparatus but proposes a system of transcription equally applicable to inclusive apparatus.
This address is to be published in the fifth volume of Text. I am grateful to Professor Boydston for allowing me to have a copy of the paper as delivered.
Such texts are precisely what the Library of America series is producing in those instances in which the text of an already existing scholarly critical edition is not used; but the aim in so doing is not an emphasis on publishers over authors. The series is committed to texts that already exist (critically edited only to the extent of correcting typographical errors); but within that constraint it tries to choose the texts that best (if, inevitably, not fully) represent the auhors' intentions. Correcting typographical errors (which are always listed in the Library volumes) does bring published texts closer to their publishers' intentions—but of course to their authors' intentions as well.
Every surviving manuscript book from the pre-print period is a social product, but many manuscript books that contained significant texts no longer survive. A standard procedure among editors of early manuscripts, when faced with multiple texts of particular works, is to attempt the reconstruction of the common ancestor of the surviving texts. The result of this process is a critical text recreating a social product, not an authorially intended text (though the editors of such texts have assumed that they were moving in the direction of an authorial text, as some of their critical judgments in the process of recension make clear). For works primarily transmitted in printed form, there is less occasion for reconstructing socially produced texts; but when no copies of a particular edition are known, it might sometimes be feasible, from the evidence of earlier or later editions or manuscripts, to attempt reconstructing it.
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