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I
The title that Jack Stillinger chose for his 1991 book — Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius — reflects a strain of thinking that is one of the most characteristic features of recent textual criticism and reveals Stillinger's polemic stance. The first half of the title refers in a straightforward way to the collaborative aspects of all verbal works (indeed, all human creations); the second suggests that the discussion of this topic is meant to expose a common misconception, a "myth," which is then expressed in slanted terms as a belief in "solitary genius." Whether the idea of single authorship (to use a more neutral phrase) is a myth depends of course on how it is defined. Certainly it can be defined in such a way that it is not a myth, and I would argue that its commonly understood sense, among general readers and textual scholars alike, is far more realistic and sophisticated than the label "solitary genius" implies. Stillinger has not avoided the argumentative trap of treating the object of his attack in a reductive way. The bulk of his book presents a number of case histories of multiple authorship, and the work
Signs of Stillinger's reductivism are evident in the opening chapter, "What Is an Author?" He recounts the textual history of Keats's "Sonnet to Sleep" in order to demonstrate that "actually Keats wrote only most of the words — not all of them — and in the course of revision, transcription, and publication, the sonnet underwent numerous changes" at the hands of several other persons (p. 17), whom he also denominates "authors." Thus the text of the sonnet in Richard Monckton Milnes's Life of 1848 "has at least three authors" (p. 19), and the version in H. W. Garrod's Oxford edition "has at least four authors" (p. 20). Indeed, Stillinger adds, "I am myself part-author of the text of the sonnet," because in his 1978 edition he made some further alterations to the text. The subject of his book can therefore be stated as "situations where someone other than the nominal author is essentially and inextricably a part of the authorship" (p. 20); and he asserts, as if it were a startling thesis, "I wish to claim that such multiple authorship — the collaborative authorship of writings that we routinely consider the work of a single author — is quite common" (p. 22).
There is no question that one can define authorship in this way if one wishes, using "author" to refer to anyone who plays any role at any time in the constitution of a text. But virtually no one would be surprised to learn that, under this definition, all texts have a multiple authorship. The concept of "single author" that most people "routinely" employ is not at odds with this point, for scarcely anyone is so simple-minded as to believe that a work by a single author does not incorporate any element that originated outside that author. What should bother any thoughtful reader of this chapter is that the most challenging and ultimately significant aspects of defining authorship are bypassed. To contrast multiple authorship, in Stillinger's inclusive sense, with the theoretical opposite extreme, a totally uninfluenced person, is not very fruitful. A far more intriguing pursuit would be to try to distinguish the kinds of collaborative influence that are realistically integral to the idea of an individual author from those that are at odds with it. Stillinger includes in his enumeration of "standard modes of composite creativity" not only the influence of friends but also "the author revising earlier versions of himself" and "the author interacting collaboratively
Instead of offering a lucid framework for thinking about the varieties of collaborative action, this introductory chapter is bound to confuse readers. After ostensibly suggesting that each version of a text should be accepted on its own historical terms (with its authorship cumulatively incorporating all who have affected its makeup), Stillinger at another point seems to imply that authenticity lies with the originating single author: when Keats approved of a change made by Woodhouse, the new reading, we are told, "becomes an integral, rather than a corrupt, element of the text" (p. 21). But even without Keats's approval, it would have been an authentic (or "integral") part of the Woodhouse version, in which one can legitimately be interested. What is missing in the discussion is any clear outline of the range of interests that historically minded readers can have. One might wish to focus only on the originating author's intention (which cannot realistically exclude influences willingly and actively incorporated into it by that author); or one might choose to examine the form or forms of the text that emerged from the process of publication (forms that might include features not sanctioned, or even actively disapproved, by the originating author); or one might study any posthumous version as a way of understanding the responses of its readers. The second and third of these approaches concentrate, almost inevitably, on collaboratively produced texts that have survived in documents; the first necessitates the effort to reconstruct what the originating author intended, even if those intentions have been subverted by the documentary texts. Such a reconstruction, as traditionally undertaken by intentionalist editors, involves the interesting question of how to judge the spirit in which an author responded to various external stimuli. As in all matters of judgment, no single answer will satisfy everyone; but the range of serious answers reflects the struggle to locate the boundaries of individual creative activity. An authorially intended text, as normally conceived, includes readings that result from willing collaboration and excludes those produced under duress.
Stillinger's gross oversimplification of these issues is clear in his claim that the ubiquity of multiple authorship is "rather strikingly at odds with the interpretive and editorial theorists' almost universal concern
In his final chapter ("Implications for Theory"),[11] he returns to a consideration of editorial theory and devotes the closing pages of the book to a criticism of the "Greg-Bowers school" (p. 200). Whereas readers unacquainted with editorial debates of the past half-century will nevertheless see the flaws of the opening chapter, they will not be in a position to recognize the distortions in his presentation of the Greg-Bowers approach in the last chapter. He repeats the hackneyed claims that this approach rigidly applies the same rule to all situations, that it always combines early accidentals with late substantives, and that it is inhospitable to the idea of independent versions (see pp. 196 — 198) — claims that cannot be substantiated.[12] But even those readers (untutored
The key to the problem surfaces in an earlier comment: "authors' intentions are no more available to editors than they are to interpreters" (p. 195).[13] If collaborative intentions are considered to be "available" because the texts that have come down to us in physical objects are likely to be collaborative, and if only such "available" texts are proper subjects for historical study, then two fallacies of historical methodology are implicit here. One is that artifacts speak clearly for themselves; the other is that surviving materials are necessarily more instructive than speculations about those now lost. As to the first, a documentary text does not make the collaborative intention behind it "available" without analysis and interpretation (since the problem of distinguishing intended from unintended aspects of physical texts is equally acute no matter how many "authors" there are). As to the second, other texts, besides those now surviving in physical form, once existed (on paper, perhaps, and in people's minds, certainly), and some of them may be of enough interest to be worth attempting to reconstruct; the process requires judgment, but no more so (and no less so) than the use of documentary texts.[14]
To say that intentionalist editors produce "texts that never previously existed" is not a criticism (if it means, as I assume it does, "never previously existed on paper"), for there is no reason to suppose that intended texts have always appeared in physical form — nor is there any reason to banish from historical inquiry the use of informed judgment to reconstruct past events. The claim that reconstructed texts realize "editors' rather than authors' intentions" would, if taken literally, be a valid objection (so long, that is, as the concern is with historical reconstruction rather than the unending process of textual collaboration). But what such texts normally incorporate is editors' judgments about past intentions rather than editors' own intentions. Editors' own temperaments are naturally involved, but only in the same way that all historians' personalities play a role in the attempted recreation of the past. Stillinger seems, surprisingly, to have adopted here an extremely restrictive concept of what constitutes proper historical scholarship.[15] He was of course under no obligation to deal with these matters, and it is unfortunate that he chose to do so. His studies of specific instances of "multiple authorship" are informative and valuable in their own right; by deciding to frame them within an attack on intentionalist editing, and then conducting the argument illogically, he weakened his book.[16] But the urge to narrow the range of legitimate editorial goals was obviously hard to resist at the time he wrote.
The name of Jerome J. McGann comes up in Stillinger's book as the exponent of a "socialized concept of literary production," with which "the facts of multiple authorship are most compatible" (p. 199). A collection of McGann's essays, entitled The Textual Condition, appeared the same year as Stillinger's book (1991) and offers a far more effective statement of the position. Although McGann claims that his book provides "case studies" and not "a theory" (p. 16), readers are likely to feel
All this is unexceptionable in itself. Where McGann falters, as his earlier writings have already demonstrated, is in his linking of these ideas to a rejection of authorial intention as a goal of textual study. In this instance, he claims that Paul De Man and I "come together as textual idealists," for we both (despite other pronounced differences) are caught — as he sees it — between a concept of artistic creation as "a transcendence of the human" and a realization "that the terms of such a demand can never be met" (p. 7). He contrasts his own approach as "another way of thinking about texts" (p. 8) — an alternative that he apparently sees as incompatible. The exposition is confrontational: "One breaks the spell of romantic hermeneutics by socializing the study of texts" (p. 12). Any point of view that holds a spell over a field no doubt deserves to be challenged, and questioning authorial intention as the dominant concern of textual criticism has been a salutary phenomenon. But the questioning is less helpful than it might be if it fails to recognize how the intentionalist and the socialized emphases fit together — if, in other words, it simply replaces one spell with another, for to do so continues to restrict artificially the areas of investigation that can profitably be pursued. I think one can see how McGann distorts the study of authorial intention if one looks at two matters: his associating it with "textual idealism," and his seeming rejection of intended texts as stages in the history of textual instability.
As to the first, McGann confuses "idealism" with a notion of perfection as well as with a concern for "idea" rather than execution. His "other way" of looking at texts, he explains, rejects any sense that texts are less perfect as a result of being embodied physically; embodied texts are examples of "perfect limitation," their "perfectness" being "located within the sociological particulars which the perfection defines" (p. 9).[18] To believe otherwise — to hold that texts in physical form are debased versions of "ideal" texts — is to believe, he says (quoting Shelley's famous words), that "the most glorious poetry . . . communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conception of the poet" (p. 8). Or, as McGann argues at the end of the book, if "text" has "no material existence" and "comprises an abstraction," then "text" is being taken to mean "the idea of textuality" (p. 178, italics his).
I do not believe, however, that any of these points has been held by the editors who have concentrated on authorial intention: their goal is not to reconstruct the "idea" that lies behind a work but to recover an actual text — a specific set of words — that is not adequately represented in any known physical document. My phrase "the intractability of the physical," which McGann takes as a sign of my "romantic" position (pp. 7 — 8), has — in its context in A Rationale of Textual Criticism — a less exalted meaning. It simply refers to the difficulty of getting words transferred accurately to a physical surface. Authors do formulate texts, not just ideas for texts, at the moment of composition; but they may make mistakes in writing down the words. An authorially intended text is a text that once existed, though it may not have existed in physical form. Such a situation can occur because language is intangible, and a verbal text can therefore exist apart from being made physical. Although literary works may frequently fail to live up to their authors' ideas for the works, this point is irrelevant to what intentionalist editors do, for they are concerned with the works, whether or not those works are pale shadows of grand conceptions. The only sense in which intentionalist editors construct "ideal" texts is that those texts may not have existed in physical form before the editors produced them; but such editors do not think of their texts as "perfect" in any sense, nor do these editors believe that they are uncovering the "idea of a text" underlying any particular executed text. Intentionalist editors are not idealists in a philosophical sense (or, at least, are not revealing in their work where they stand on this matter), because their activities do not imply a belief that truth lies
We thus come to the second of McGann's misconceptions about the study of intentions: his failure to consider intentions as historical events. The history of a text begins before the social encounter in which a reader engages a pre-existing text (pre-existing only in the sense that the reader is interacting with something and not in any sense that attributes passivity to reading). One can, if one chooses, define the condition of textuality so that it is limited to collaborative interchange, but doing so excludes part of the story. Surely the "textual condition" must include what authors face when they are working at their desks; and the texts they form in their minds have a place in any encompassing view of textual metamorphosis. The instability of texts is beyond dispute, and editors who produce critical texts aimed at representing authors' intentions have never claimed otherwise — as their repeated comments on the importance of an apparatus of variants shows.[20] They construct such texts not because they believe that no other texts are valid but because intended texts are not available in documents and therefore cannot be studied without the exercise of critical judgment, leading to attempted reconstructions. The most fundamental point underlying this activity is a recognition that historical inquiry cannot be limited to what happens to exist in physical form. Any kind of history — not merely textual but also military, economic, political, social, and so on — depends on the effort to fill the gaps in, and indeed to correct, the physical record, which is inevitably incomplete and potentially misleading. Intentionalist editors are not, through their work, declaring that an ideal (and unchanging)
In between the "Introduction" and the "Conclusion," on which these comments are based, there are seven essays (five of them previously published, some in shorter form) that similarly illustrate the limitations of McGann's argument.[22] His considerable strengths are shown, too, largely
The difference between the two approaches can be further clarified by using the terms of Chapter 2, "What Is Critical Editing?", where one of the main defects of Greg-Bowers critical editing (in his view) is defined as its failure to deal with the "bibliographical" (or physical) characteristics of textual artifacts. "The weakness of the theory," he says, referring to copy-text theory, "is that it largely ignores the transmissive or communicative aspects of linguistic events" — for "'Copy-text,' in modern editorial theory, is always a linguistic text" (p. 57). By regarding textuality as the condition emerging from an intertwining of linguistic and bibliographical "codes,"[23] and by recommending an emphasis on the comparative analysis of variants rather than on the production of eclectic texts, McGann believes that he is offering "a more comprehensive imagination of the fields of textual criticism and critical editing" (p. 50, italics mine). Just above I objected that his approach lacks the "comprehensiveness" of the one he is criticizing. How these cross-claims of comprehensiveness arose is not difficult to explain and defines the central issue of the debate. If critical editing in the Greg-Bowers tradition — or "eclectic" editing, to use McGann's term — were really dismissive of, or oblivious to, the textual significance of physical presentation,[24]
A brief comment should perhaps be added here about the first chapter, entitled "Theory, Literary Pragmatics, and the Editorial Horizon," because it shows how readily the intentionalist approach actually fits within McGann's overall scheme. After making his usual point that "texts are produced and reproduced under specific social and institutional conditions," he concludes that "every text, including those that may appear to be purely private, is a social text" — an "event" or "point in time" (p. 21). Those who focus on authorial intention (and are thus interested in texts that may, at first thought, "appear to be purely private") are in fact attempting to reconstruct particular events that occurred at particular times, events that are inevitably social, since intention is itself socially formed (as I pointed out in discussing Stillinger above). But instead of giving intentionalist editing its niche within his
An editor who emends an early documentary text with some readings from a late document is not attempting to construct a single, final, ideal, ahistorical text but to reconstruct what was intended at a specific time — either an early time (if the argument is that those emendations represent what had been intended but not executed in the early text) or a late time (if the argument is that, with the exception of the late readings chosen as emendations, the text of the late document does not reflect the author's late intention as satisfactorily as does the text of the early document). And the process, though perhaps "technical" and "specialized" in some respects, is certainly not mechanical, since it involves critical judgment throughout. The result is therefore undeniably a product of the present, but it is a present effort to recapture the past, which is all that any historical scholarship can be, as McGann well understands. When he says at the end, "To edit a text is to be situated in a historical relation to the work's transmissions, but it is also to be placed in an immediate relation to contemporary cultural and conceptual goals" (p. 47), one can scarcely disagree with him. And I am glad that he labels as "deeply mistaken" the idea of the "editor-as-technical-functionary." But it is regrettable (and puzzling) that he encumbers his basically sensible point of view with an unreasoned exclusion of one whole area of textual history, thereby turning his book into a symbol of the recent fixation on intentionalist editing as supposedly based on unrealistic notions of literary production and textual stability.
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