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Coda: Brief Thoughts on Future Directions for Codicological Analysis in the Interpretation of Texts
As the analysis of MS HM140 shows, it is impossible to ascertain the scribe's or editor's "intention," especially when external documentary evidence is lacking as is often the case with texts that have been transmitted to us from early in our tradition. But while the editor's specific "intentions" are not recuperable, I think a codicological analysis of a manuscript can provide us with information which we can use in interpreting its texts. I would like to briefly suggest the direction such an approach might be developed.
In addition to analyzing the transcription of texts, this approach would consider the presentational features, such as page layout and decoration, as well as the larger organizing concepts, compilatio and ordinatio, that A. I. Doyle and M. B. Parkes have shown are important for the interpretation of texts (186). It would also take into account Jerome McGann's argument that the bibliographic text is crucial for interpreting the linguistic text (57). Most importantly, it would have recourse to Bakhtin's general theory of dialogic discourse, which ties together the analysis of presentational features with the social and collaborative aspects of textual transmission. For Bakhtin, who understood discourse as fundamentally social, the formal features of a verbal work of art are a constitutive part of its meaning (259).[24]
Such an approach will give us a way of construing an interpretative model that has the virtue of utilizing the precise information generated from an analysis of the manuscript, the material residue of the text's construction site, to help construct an "intentional structure" for reading the texts it contains. Yet it also takes into account the overdetermined, social aspects of textual transmission. While this may make us more aware of the problematic nature of that transmission, it also gives us a more nuanced way of imagining the historical world(s) presented in those texts dispatched to us.
Finally, I think the most important issue that HM140's problematic archaeology helps us to confront is that manuscripts are the leftovers of construction sites whose traces and marks have to be interpreted. The manufacture of information about their compositional process constitutes an interpretation, and hence does not stand outside the hermeneutic circle to be used as "evidence." They are not self-explanatory compositions with autonomous set(s) of meaning(s), but residues of communicative structures that we must reconstruct so that they can speak to us. This reconstruction is an on-going, event-ual constituting of their "truth."[25]
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