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IV

Two years after Bowers's essay, I called attention to the inappropriateness of trying to employ in radiating-text situations the kind of apparatus that had become standard, under Bowers's influence, for use with linear genealogies. Although he recognized that Greg's "Rationale" did not apply to radiating texts, he apparently could not bring himself to accept fully the fact that an apparatus reflecting this rationale would not do so, either. It is noteworthy that when, in "Multiple Authority," he shrank from the notion of a "non-extant copy-text" his stated reason was not conceptual but the belief that "the problem of what form an apparatus

would take for such a non-extant copy-text is acute" (p. 471). Actually, as I tried to show, there is nothing complicated in simply listing all the variants (in both substantives and accidentals) in all the radiating texts and keying this single list to the newly constructed critical text.[26] Such a list emphasizes that the critical text has been built up from the evidence of all the radiating texts and was not produced by making alterations in one of them. The only sense in which the latter operation could be said to have occurred is that some form of reproduction (xerographic, say, or photographic) of one of the texts may have been marked to produce a document that could be handed to the printer of the new scholarly text. Bowers was of course well aware, in other discussions, of the significant difference between a copy-text in Greg's sense and a printer's copy for a scholarly edition.[27] Yet his recommendation to choose a single documentary text from a group of radiating texts, and call it a "copy-text," amounts to equating "copy-text" with "printer's copy"—while at the same time elevating it undeservedly to unique historical status by reporting its variants fully (and not those of any other text).

There is no escaping the fact that radiating texts equidistant from their common ancestor provide no text to serve as copy-text; and it is further true that this lack does not prevent an editor from constructing

a critical text—as Bowers did before he chose a copy-text—or from preparing an apparatus recording all the rejected variants. Once one accepts these points, one may begin to see that the thinking involved in radiating-text situations is applicable to all critical editing. Every choice made among variants in radiating texts is an active critical choice; no reading is settled on by default, for there is no text that offers a fall-back position. When the variants in radiating texts seem "indifferent," an editor may of course choose a reading from the text that supplies the largest number of other readings; but the decision is still an active one, in which one of the factors taken into account is the apparent general reliability of a particular text. The process remains one of building up a new text rather than making changes in an old one. If this idea—that critical editing is constructive rather than emendatory—were also applied to texts in linear genealogies, the role of judgment might more clearly be seen as dominant, and any practical guideline (such as Greg's rationale) might be better recognized as an aid to judgment, not a brake on it. An editor, for example, who is following Greg in according presumptive authority to the text closest to a lost manuscript, would—following this plan—speak not of "retaining" readings from that text but of "selecting" them. The notion that wisdom supports the idea of sticking to a copy-text when two readings are indifferent places the emphasis on the preservation of a documentary text; but the idea that a critical text emerges from active choices made among the variant readings (along with, of course, the editor's own inventions, when necessary) emphasizes editorial judgment.

The difference between the two may at first seem slight, a matter of labeling: in the former, one lets a copy-text reading stand if the variant is indifferent and there is thus no compelling argument for altering it; in the latter, two readings that might otherwise be indifferent are not actually so, for the fact that one of them comes from a text of superior genealogical standing provides a reason for choosing it. But the difference between these two justifications for the same decision is not superficial: it goes to the heart of what critical editing is. The key point is not whether an editor would make the same decision by following Greg's rationale or by designating no copy-text but still following Greg's argument for the presumptive authority of the text closest to an authorial manuscript. No two editors can be expected to make the same choices by following either of these systems in any case. The important point is that the former approach places a rule above reason (as any recourse to a fall-back position must do), whereas the latter restructures the problem so that the editor's decision (even if it is the same decision) results from the positive step of taking a reasoned action.

The controlling images of the two approaches are those of initially

full and initially empty sheets of paper. If one chooses a copy-text, then in effect one begins with filled sheets and proceeds to alter the text present on them; but if one has no copy-text, one begins with blank sheets, so to speak, and fills them by placing one word after another on them, drawing those readings from the relevant documents (and, on occasion, from one's own mind). I am not suggesting, of course, that an editor should actually write out a text in this way; but I do believe that an appropriate analogy for the critical editor to have in mind is the medieval scribe taking readings from various manuscripts as he prepared a new manuscript.[28] It is ironic that in classic Lachmannian textual criticism this scribal practice is called "contamination," for some such process (supplemented by the editor's own inventions) provides our only hope for rising above the limitations of individual documents. Although the followers of Lachmann may often have deluded themselves about the objectivity of their own methods, their process of "recension," with its aggregating impulse, in many cases avoided the pitfalls of the "best-text" family of approaches and therefore holds a lesson for editors of works in the modern languages.

The constructive approach I am outlining subsumes all the various points of view that can be taken toward the goal of editing. There is no reason, for example, why an editor interested in uninfluenced authorial final intention could not still follow Greg's rationale—which has proved itself effective for this purpose. But instead of treating one text as a copy-text, an editor would use the genealogical position—and thus the presumed authority—of that text as a factor in weighing each variant reading. Sometimes this factor would be decisive; sometimes other factors would be. The difference between this procedure and the conventional one is subtle but crucially significant. Genealogy is taken into account, but with judgment clearly in the dominant position. If, instead of uninfluenced authorial intention, one preferred to emphasize, say, the text that was the joint product of the author and the publisher's staff, one would then have a different attitude toward some of the first-edition readings that vary from manuscript readings (those, for instance, that seem to reflect house-styling). Or if one wished to focus on a stage that preceded a final version, the bulk of the text might be drawn from the document that provides the best evidence of the existence of such a stage,

but not without a serious weighing of the claims of variants in other documents (since versions of works cannot be equated with the texts of particular documents). What I am suggesting is not a supplement or an alternative to Greg's rationale but an overarching framework that encompasses its goal and that of other rationales as well. Obviously one could rewrite Greg so as to focus on goals other than authorial intention; but the resulting series of copy-text rationales, each aiming at a different end-product, would still not avoid the restriction on editorial judgment inherent in Greg's rationale. What is needed instead is a framework that liberates editorial judgment from the concept of copy-text while being neutral in itself as to the goal toward which that judgment should be directed.[29]

Despite the salutary emphasis of Greg and Bowers on editorial freedom, many editors are still—as Greg and Bowers were—in thrall to the notion, now about two centuries old, that responsibility in scholarly editing is, at least to some degree, incompatible with freedom of judgment. A passage in Bowers's "Multiple Authority" illustrates how inhibiting this attitude can sometimes be. Bowers claims that the evidence of the radiating newspaper texts of a Crane story enables one to attempt reconstructing the syndicate master proofs but offers no justification for pushing on back to Crane's manuscript. It is not the editor's concern, he says, "whether in their recovered form these proofs agree or disagree with Crane's habits of punctuation, spelling, and so on"; and he continues, more emphatically, to say that "it is not an editor's business to print what he may be morally certain the manuscript reading would have been when the evidence indicates strongly that the recovered proof read otherwise" (p. 473).[30] There may be good reason, of course, to be satisfied with having the text of the syndicate proofs; but if one is really interested in what Crane wrote in his manuscript, and if one's knowledge and judgment make one "morally certain" of being able to reconstruct it, why should one be prevented from doing so by the fact that one is going back two or more steps behind the preserved documents rather than just a single step? The "law" of "documentary evidence," to which Bowers appeals, is surely misapplied if it outlaws the responsible use of the historical imagination. The very existence of critical editing depends on recognizing that documentary texts may legitimately be overruled by

informed judgment. Whether an editor is justified in attempting to reconstruct any given stage in a text's history depends on how the task is approached, on how the editor proposes to overcome the limitations of the documents; no a priori ruling can decree one stage to be a valid goal for the exercise of historical judgment and another to be inappropriate.

On many other occasions, however, Bowers not only granted, but openly welcomed, the dominance of judgment—as when, in his edition of Tom Jones (1975), after saying that the textual situation was one in which "Greg's classic theory of copy-text must hold" (p. lxx), he declared that the operation of emendation "is a critical process almost exclusively" and that in such a process "the editor shoulders his proper responsibility" (p. lxxi). In a 1985 address he described Greg's rationale as "a discretionary principle, to be applied flexibly," and as a "liberation" from "mechanical conservatism," complaining that in America it was often used to justify "avoiding the unknown terrors of eclecticism."[31] Both Greg and Bowers unquestionably believed in the liberty of editorial judgment, but in their procedural statements they yoked this belief to a strategy that sprang ultimately from a contrary view, for they obviously carried with them just enough of an inherited distrust of judgment to make them not quite prepared for completing the long historical movement toward the full reinstatement of critical judgment in editing.

What I am proposing here is a way to take that step without abandoning the responsibilities of scholarship. It might be called "constructive critical editing" to distinguish it from an approach that emphasizes emendation. To see critical editing as an activity of rebuilding rather than repairing forces the judgment to play its central role in recovering the past. All historical reconstruction requires judgment to enable one to decide what can be accepted as facts and what can reasonably be inferred from them by an informed imagination. Experiencing verbal works as communications from the past entails this kind of reconstruction not only because they are past events but also because they employ an intangible medium, language. Reading necessarily involves the use of judgment in the extracting of a work from a document. If editors' readings, enshrined in editions, are to be exemplary, they must arise from an active embracing of judgment—which is, after all, the only thing we have to rely on.