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Notes
This is a revised version of a paper given at the A. E. Housman Centenary Seminar, Monash University, Melbourne, 3 October 1992. I thank the readers of the paper for SB for their comments and suggestions.
For a recent, clarifying discussion of the differences, see G. Thomas Tanselle, A Rationale of Textual Criticism (1989). The present essay benefits from that discussion but reaches different conclusions (see note 3 and the last pages).
From personal notes made at a lecture given by Dott. Colalucci at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 3 May 1992. The Chapel was built in the 1480s, and the frescoes were painted 1508-12.
In his recent work, G. Thomas Tanselle seems to clear away many misconceptions associated with the traditional assumption of the singularity of the literary work (including allowing it multiple textual forms) only to reinstall something very like it. In A Rationale, he develops the traditional distinction between document and text by distinguishing between the texts of documents and the texts of works. He acknowledges disagreements about the source of a literary work—about the kinds of authorship editors nowadays subscribe to: whether as the expression of an individual; the collaborative expression of a publisher, printer and author; or just the impersonal expression of the language at a particular historical moment. He therefore allows that there can be several critically edited texts of a work. But—paradoxically—he also seems to see the work as essentially singular, whatever the editors' orientations about its source: intelligent readers of a printed or other document, he observes, seek the text of 'the work that lies behind' it (p. 18). Elsewhere, he gives the work an ideal (and again singular) status: it 'speaks to us across the generations' but 'will forever be a conjecture arising from those time-bound, vulnerable objects', the written and printed documents ('Textual Criticism and Deconstruction', Studies in Bibliography, 43 [1990], 1-33 [p. 22]). See also note 16, below. It should be possible to write a history of the concept of the 'work'. It would inevitably be interlinked with the history of the technology of the book and of the concept of authorship (and of the allied concepts of copyright, forgery and piracy). For copyright, see my 'Document and Text: The "Life" of the Literary Work and the Capacities of Editing', forth-coming in Text, vol. 7.
The conferences were: Ottawa, October 1989, Shared Responsibility: A Seminar for Curators and Conservators (proceedings edited by Barbara A. Ramsay-Joliceur and Ian N. M. Wainwright: Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1990); London, June 1990, Appearance, Opinion, Change: Evaluating the Look of Paintings (proceedings edited by Peter Booth et al.: London: United Kingdom Institute for Conservation, 1990); and Canberra, May 1992, The Articulate Surface: Dialogues on Paintings between Conservators, Curators and Art Historians (examples of conservations referred to without citation derive from these papers, so far unpublished).
E.g. the copy by a Miss Manton in 1874 of Petrus von Schendel's Poultry Vendor (1865) which was badly restored by chemists of the Victorian Railways, Melbourne. Both are in the National Gallery of Victoria collection. Copying was not only a training technique for students throughout the nineteenth century, it was recognised as a form of art in itself. Copies of Old Masters were respectable acquirements amongst the rich Australian farmers: they were tangible tokens of their owner's taste. When the collection was being formed in the late nineteenth century, in those days before colour photography, it was a real question, discussed in the newspapers of the day, whether copies of European masterpieces should be preferred over the collection of less culturally impressive originals. In the end, the latter view prevailed.
There is a painting by Vincent van Gogh in the Fogg Art Museum, Boston, Self-Portrait Dedicated to Paul Gauguin (1888). Van Gogh sent it as a gift to Gauguin who made some alterations to it, not very expertly: 'In this case, preserving acquired historical significance was preferred to returning the work closer to its original aesthetic significance' (Ian S. Hodkinson, 'Man's Effects on Paintings', in Shared Responsibility, p. 67). The decision could easily have gone the other way.
William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, ed. J. Burke (1955), quoted in Gerry Hedley, 'Long Lost Relations and New Found Relativities: Issues in the Cleaning of Paintings', in Shared Responsibility, p. 160.
From J. Hill Stoner, 'John Brealey's Trained and Sympathetic Eye', Museum News, 59, no. 7 (1981), p. 26. Quoted in Hedley, 'Long Lost Relations', p. 163. Hedley goes on: 'Paintings on dark grounds are the most prone to show very dark and very light contrasting regions. The intensity of the shadows and half-tones increases as medium darkens; and the paint becomes more transparent, so the influence of the dark ground is greater' (p. 166).
Stefan Michalski distinguishes between the physical attributes of paintings and the non-physical which reside in 'the thing as a whole': 'their creator, their history, their composition, imagery, symbolism, etc., even their market value' ('Time's Effects on Paintings' in Shared Responsibility, pp. 39-53 [p. 40]). Ian S. Hodkinson concurs: 'paintings are in a continual state of physical and metaphysical flux which changes their significance to the particular society that is interacting with them at any given moment in their history' ('Man's Effects on Paintings', in Shared Responsibility, p. 59).
Liz Magor, 'An Artist's Thoughts on Conservation and Curatorial Issues' in Shared Responsibilities, pp. 6-11 (p. 6). For Benjamin's essay, see his Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (1969).
See Brydon Smith, 'Shared Responsibility: Welcome and Introduction', in Shared Responsibility, pp. 1-5.
Will Vaughan, 'Hanging Fragments: The Case of Turner's Oeuvre', in Appearance, Opinion, Change, pp. 85-91 (p. 85).
The painting has grown away from him also in other ways: through water damage, through being cropped at one stage, and through the normal deterioration associated with aging.
Cf. Tanselle's recent advice that 'we must keep in mind the fundamental fact that the artifacts we work with [as readers and editors] cannot be the works themselves and thus that we must constantly distinguish the texts of documents from the texts of works' ('The Varieties of Scholarly Editing' in Scholarly Editing: A Research Guide, New York: MLA, 1994). The term 'texts', though used here in good faith, allows a nearly invisible slippage in the argument. 'Text' can be (and, as I have argued, on occasions needs to be) firmly distinguished from 'document'. The document is a physical object bearing traces of textual activity of author or compositor but is textually inert until a reader raises—essentially creates—text from what, inherently, is only ink on paper. (I do not argue the reader-response position that the reader creates the text in the full sense, for this leaves out the indispensable role of the document and the prior activity it testifies to.) Therefore to use the phrase as we all do out of convenience, 'the text of the document', is to run together two distinguishable elements: the physical object and the textual activity of the reader. A problem arises if the conflation is extended to the work—as in the phrase 'the text of the work'—when the existence of multiple documents offers no warranty at all for the belief that works exist in single texts if only we could reach them. The formulation leaves out the necessary participation of the reader in the textual activity. For an allied argument that the opportunities and accidents of compositional process in literary works defeat expectations that a single reading ('product') text can adequately represent the work, see my 'Textual Product or Textual Process: Procedures and Assumptions of Critical Editing' in Devils and Angels: Textual Editing and Literary Theory, ed. Philip Cohen (1991), pp. 57-77.
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