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II
Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the publishing scene in the field of textual criticism during the early 1990s was the appearance of an extraordinary number of anthologies of essays — so many that this period may be thought of in the future as the Age of Anthologies in textual study. From 1990 through mid-1995, at least twenty-five anthologies in English (or largely in English) were published, in addition to the three volumes of Text (volumes 5, 6, and 7) brought out by the Society for Textual Scholarship during this time.[28] This figure can be put in perspective by noting that only about thirty-four were produced in the entire two decades preceding 1990 (plus four volumes of Text). Of those, nineteen were part of the series of annual volumes (in effect constituting a periodical) containing the papers delivered at the Toronto Conferences on Editorial Problems; since only three Toronto volumes appeared in the early 1990s, the dramatic nature of the recent increase in anthology production can more truly be shown by comparing the numbers of anthologies excluding the Toronto series (and volumes of Text) — some fifteen during 1970 — 89 and twenty-two during 1990 — 95.[29] For many years — through 1980 — there were essentially only three separately published anthologies (besides the Toronto volumes, which began in 1966), and they consisted almost entirely of previously published pieces;[30] the gathering of original essays did not begin in earnest until the 1980s, when several notable collections appeared.[31] But the real spurt occurred in the early 1990s and (since the number of periodicals available as outlets had
These recent anthologies have published a large amount of valuable textual commentary, but fewer than half contain the kind of general theoretical discussion that requires examination here. It is not necessary, for example, to comment on those collections that concentrate on a single author or edition, such as the New Oxford Shakespeare or the Gabler Ulysses.[33] Then there are those anthologies that deserve a mention in this context because of their significant treatment of bibliographical study at large but that are not primarily concerned with textual work — namely, Peter Davison's The Book Encompassed: Studies in Twentieth-Century Bibliography (1992) and Nicolas Barker's A Potencie of Life: Books in Society (1993).[34] Some of the anthologies dealing with a single period or country can also be passed by, though it is worth noting that they frequently allude to the recent theoretical debates and the growing interaction between literary and textual criticism. For example, the introduction to the collection of papers from a 1989 Odense symposium, significantly entitled The Medieval Text: Editors and Critics (1990), speaks in its second paragraph of "the intimately intellectual relationship between medieval as well as modern editors and critics" (p. 9).[35] In another volume with a similar title, Tim William Machan's Medieval
Of the 1990 anthologies, two — both based on conferences held in the spring of 1989 — include general theoretical papers by prominent commentators. New Directions in Textual Studies, edited by Dave Oliphant and Robin Bradford, results from a conference of the same title at the University of Texas in Austin (30 — 31 March, 1 April 1989) and deals — in the words of Larry Carver's introduction — with "the fate of the Greg-Bowers model" and "the place of the social setting in the editing of books and manuscripts" (p. 10).[40] Articles by Jerome McGann, Randall McLeod,
The other anthology, Editing in Australia, edited by Paul Eggert, emerges from an April 1989 conference at the Australian Defence Force
The other essay in Editing in Australia that requires comment here[44]
One is therefore surprised by his apparent belief that there is a choice to be made between "product" and "process," as when he declares himself in favor of the latter (p. 46) and notes approvingly that "editions which emphasise the importance of Process" are "gaining ground" (p. 62). The two concepts are complementary, for every "product" is one element in a "process": to think in terms of process entails thinking of a series of products. And every conceptualization of a text, as envisioned by Shillingsburg, results in a product. Critical editors in the past often "foregrounded" one such product as a result of the limitations of the codex form of their editions, but they generally intended their apparatus to situate that product in a process, any stage of which was worthy of attention.[45] Of course, some editors have undoubtedly made "extravagent claims for the correctness of the Product" (p. 62), and their attitude can properly be objected to; but one cannot assume that the presence in an edition of a "single-finished-product text" (p. 45) points to an editor who fails to understand the importance of studying textual process.[46] Nevertheless, Shillingsburg's essay contains more admirable than
The Shillingsburg and Eggert essays were reprinted the following year in Philip Cohen's anthology Devils and Angels: Textual Editing and Literary Theory, which aims to promote dialogue between editors and literary theorists by exploring the ways that recent developments in literary theory have "problematized" (p. x) traditional editing and set in motion what may be "a paradigm shift in textual criticism" (p. xiv).[47] The essays are organized into three groups, each ending with an article of response to the essays in that group. In the first such response, T. H. Howard-Hill displays a useful skepticism regarding the essays by Shillingsburg and McGann (the McGann piece discussed above as the first chapter of The Textual Condition) and offers some needed reminders that the basic points currently being debated are not "fresh issues" (p. 48) — indeed, he says, Greg recognized the instability of texts "before McGann, Shillingsburg, and I were born" (p. 49).[48] Steven Mailloux, in the second response-article, discusses the Eggert piece, an essay by D. C. Greetham, and one written jointly by Philip Cohen and David H. Jackson.[49]
As for the essays thus commented upon, the most important (and best-written), in my view, is McLaverty's — indeed, I would place it among the four or five best essays on textual theory in recent years. He suggests thinking about textual instability in terms of two questions, which indeed go to the heart of the matter: what are "versions," and what texts should editors present to readers? He defines a version as an "utterance" (the "social act" [p. 144] of "making outer or external" [p. 140]) that is linked to one or more other utterances through "material, structure, and function" (p. 137). The history of a work, extending through time, is likely to comprise numerous utterances, all of which are obviously relevant to understanding that history. But, as McLaverty perceptively argues, the history of the work is to be distinguished from the text of the work, which is not the sum of all the utterances but the text of every utterance individually considered. What an edition should present, he recommends, is one or more of "the author's intended utterance(s)," with an apparatus enabling the reader "to construct the relation of each
The essay of Grigely's has many links with McLaverty's, but Grigely — drawing even more widely on recent literary theory and philosophy — emphasizes the unrepeatability of utterances, since every utterance is an event; even if the words can sometimes be accurately repeated, the context cannot. With wit and intelligence (and a good dose of jargon), he sketches here what he hopes is "the beginning of a philosophy of textuality" (p. 192); but it also may seem to imply an end of editing. Yet editors, like other historians, have always known that they cannot fully recapture the past; and Grigley's comprehensive concept of utterances can in fact help clarify for them what their efforts do, and will continue to, accomplish.[52] Of the other essays, Greetham's energetically explores "the ideology embedded in form and method" (p. 81),[53] Gabler's scolds
The other anthologies of 1991 contain fewer general theoretical essays. Representing Modernist Texts: Editing as Interpretation, edited by George Bornstein, largely consists of pieces on the texts of "modernist writers" (Yeats, Pound, Joyce, and Woolf, among others); but it does contain an introduction by Bornstein entitled "Why Editing Matters" (pp. 1 — 16) and a concluding essay by Michael Groden entitled "Contemporary Textual and Literary Theory" (pp. 259 — 286). Bornstein states that the volume aims "to explore the implications for literary critics and theorists of the recent revolution in editorial theory" (p. 5); and though he sometimes exaggerates the contrast between "traditional" theories (which "postulate the notion of an ideal 'correct' text" [p. 5]) and newer approaches (which "dislodge the notion of one privileged form for a text exercising authority over all other forms" [p. 7]), he usefully emphasizes "a firm belief in the potential of contemporary literary criticism and theory and of contemporary textual scholarship and theory to enrich each other" (p. 9). A volume exemplifying this belief is certainly to be welcomed, as is Groden's contribution, which perceptively and thoughtfully examines recent textual theories. In contrast to many of the historical surveys that now exist, his does not oversimplify the positions discussed, and it offers the best account I have seen of the relations between intentionalist editing and the New Criticism.[55]
Another 1991 collection that focuses on the literature of a single period is the special issue of Romance Philology on medieval textual criticism (45.1, August 1991), edited by Charles B. Faulhaber and Jerry R. Craddock (and containing one of the most extensive checklists of writings on textual criticism and on the use of computers in textual criticism [pp. 206 — 236]). Of the overviews of the French, Italian, and Spanish fields, only the one on Old French is in English, and it is distinguished: Mary B. Speer's "Editing Old French Texts in the Eighties: Theory and Practice" (pp. 7 — 43). Speer lucidly and sensibly summarizes the twentieth-century history of the field (following from Bédier's advocacy of the best-text approach), offers a shrewd analysis (pp. 15 — 22) of Bernard Cerquiglini's Eloge de la variante (1989), and examines a number of recent editions, recognizing that editions always reflect "an interpretive conception" (p. 25). She finds the "intensity" of recent debates "a healthy sign" (p. 24), and her balanced way of dealing with them merits the attention of scholars outside, as well as within, her field.
Editorial subjectivity again receives considerable attention in Ian Small and Marcus Walsh's collection, The Theory and Practice of Text-Editing: Essays in Honour of James T. Boulton (1991). The introduction, by both editors, and the concluding two essays — Walsh's on Richard Bentley and Small's on annotation — deal with some of the ways that judgment permeates the editorial enterprise and effectively illustrate how any aspect of editing that one examines can lead to a consideration of basic questions about the nature of literature.[56] Annotation is the entire subject of another 1991 anthology (based on an April 1988 Irvine conference), Annotation and Its Texts, edited by Stephen A. Barney. Although the essays cover all forms of scholarly commentary (or "secondary discourse," to use the term in Jacques Derrida's concluding essay), not just the apparatus for editions, the relevance of the topic to the study of editorial subjectivity is obvious. Barney's brief introduction repeatedly speaks of "a politics of annotation" and "the rhetoric of annotation," reflecting the same interest as recent writers on textual criticism, who
In 1993, George Bornstein and Ralph G. Williams edited Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities (based on a November 1991 Ann Arbor conference) as the first volume of a series called "Editorial Theory and Literary Criticism" to be published by the University of Michigan Press (publisher of Bornstein's 1991 anthology). Bornstein explains the choice of the layering metaphor of the palimpsest for the title as a way of emphasizing the recent focus on works as "contingent and constructed rather than unitary and received" (p. 2). In order to link the Greg-Bowers "consensus" inflexibly with the latter, however, he grossly exaggerates its "absolutist claims." The concept of authority, he believes, is basic to the distinction, for authority "seems to recognize a stable, unitary text rather than an unstable, multiple one." But his examples of textual authority involve the perceived need on the part of religious, political, and social institutions to promulgate "authorized" texts or to "legitimate" themselves by so doing;[57] and in limiting "authority" to this sense, he ignores its primary meanings for textual scholars. Documentary texts are usually said to possess authority when they provide relevant evidence for a given purpose: thus for editors concerned with authorial intention, any documentary text that can serve as the most direct source of an authorial reading is a text carrying authority. There is no suggestion here of a "unitary" text of authority (because many texts with authority may exist), and there is no reason for "authority" in this sense to be of use only to intentionalist editors. Furthermore, when critical editors apply "authority" or "authoritative" to their own constructed texts, they do not usually mean that those texts are the only ones required, for every purpose now and in the future; what they generally mean is that the critical texts result from the systematic effort to identify and evaluate
This introduction sets the tone for much of the volume. In the opening essay, for example, D. C. Greetham attempts, with characteristic playfulness, to distinguish editorial modernism from postmodernism — but at the price of distorting "twentieth-century eclecticism" by equating it with an "attempted reconstruction of the 'text that never was,'" or with a "courting of the ideal authorial form" (p. 18). Eclectic editors, however, explicitly seek to construct what once existed and do not think of the result as "ideal" (whatever that means) — nor do they believe that their efforts "will produce a final 'understanding' of the text." Greetham's contrast — between the modernist editor striving for a stable, authoritative text and the postmodernist editor emphasizing the open-endedness and contingency of texts — is unrealistically neat and compartmentalized. In the next essay Peter Shillingsburg makes generally helpful observations about electronic texts, but not without first claiming — incorrectly — that scholarly editors have traditionally believed a literary work of art to be "equivalent" both to "the linguistic text" and to "the ideal or best version of it" (p. 31).[58] But Palimpsest does contain a counter-balance in the form of Ralph G. Williams's reasonable and unpolemical meditation: in concluding that textual boundaries and meanings are indeterminate and that no philosophical basis exists for believing in the identifiability of intentions, he does not oversimplify the positions held by intentionalist editors. Indeed, he recognizes that the inability to determine intentions with certainty does not make the search "uninteresting, illegitimate, and passé": "We have protocols of considerable subtlety for evaluating intent, and that game seems not only a persistent
Another anthology of 1993, W. Speed Hill's New Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1985 — 1991, collects — as the subtitle indicates — the papers that were read at seven annual meetings of RETS and prefaces them with a substantial essay of Hill's entitled "Editing Nondramatic Texts of the English Renaissance: A Field Guide with Illustrations" (pp. 1 — 24).[60] The essay is an extremely useful survey of the field despite its bias against the Greg-Bowers tradition (shown in such language as the "holy grail of authorial inscription" [p. 12]). Unfortunately the essay does not allow for the coexistence (to say nothing of the mutual enrichment) of multiple historical interests; it therefore ends with the prediction that "the day of the critical, or eclectic, edition . . . has passed or is passing" (p. 23), rather than with a recognition of what such editions can contribute to an understanding of the past.[61] The following year Philip Cohen (who had edited Devils and Angels in 1991) brought out another collection of essays,[62] prefaced by an "updated homily on textual instability" (p. 146); and this piece, even more than Hill's, is a repository of the phrases that have become standard in criticisms of intentionalist editing. He says, for example, that eclectic editing "privileges from the start a final authorial and single-text orientation" (p. 134); that there has been "a
In contrast to the many essays that restate in the same clichés the differences between the old and the new textual theories, Morris Eaves has produced a piece that rejoices in textual instability in a genuinely fresh way. His essay for a 1994 anthology entitled Cultural Artifacts and the Production of Meaning: The Page, the Image, and the Body (edited by Margaret J. M. Ezell and Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe) does not mimic the many recent papers on a socialized approach to texts but instead offers an eloquent argument for the dignity that texts acquire in their public reappearances and reshapings over time.[63] His line of reasoning is linked to Joshua Reynolds's respect for the forms of works that evolve through consensus, for (in Eaves's words) "the process of history, including, at least potentially, the public powers of invention that are only temporarily vested in individual artists" (p. 89). He is thus able to defend the proposition that (in contrast to an editorial view of texts as corrupt) "everything that is, is already right" (p. 85) — or, as he later restates it, "whatever is may be, if not right, then on its way to becoming right" (p. 945). His position rests on "the granting of legitimacy to the audience, and hence to its editorial decisions" (p. 97), which include, in his comprehensive vision, all possible editorial stances. Intentionalist editing by scholars, like every other act of handling a text, fits into the framework, for it is a response by one segment of the audience (which can,
One additional point that Eaves's discussion naturally leads to (though he does not deal with it) is the puzzle of determining what "whatever is" consists of, and the relevance of determining it for anyone interested in history. Reynolds's sanguine belief that what survives is what people wish to survive may possibly be true in the short run, but the long history of textual transmission is full of instances in which lost texts would be eagerly seized and revered in another era. Even in less extreme situations, chance plays its role along with deliberate choice in affecting the forms of texts that are passed along. Nothing can alter what happened, whether or not it was for the best, but readers interested in history (as some scholarly editors are) must recognize the relevance of texts that were no longer extant in physical form at a particular time, as well as those that never existed in physical form. These considerations certainly fit within Eaves's scheme, for they reflect the interests of a portion of an audience, and the products of that interest, which are attempts at reconstructed texts, become available to influence what happens in succeeding generations. Thus when Eaves says that "whatever is may be . . . on its way to becoming right," he recognizes that change may be necessary to produce rightness for a given audience; and his title question, "Why Don't They Leave It Alone?", can only imply a criticism (rather imprecisely) of certain attitudes with which changes are made and does not call into question the activity of making changes, which has always been part of the public accommodation of texts. I mention these points only to clarify the way in which intentionalist editing is encompassed within the ongoing process and to emphasize the fact that the materials of history are not exclusively physical objects. But Eaves cannot be expected to comment on every intricacy of a complex subject, and his argument as it stands is a subtle and sensitive exposition of "the shaping influence of socialization, collaboration, and historical processes" (p. 88). It provides a fitting climax to this survey of anthologies, for it is one of the few pieces in all of them that truly mark an advance in thinking. But the anthology in which it appears will not be the last anthology on textual matters: at least three more are scheduled to appear during the second half of 1995 — one on German and one on French approaches, and one that may well be more important than all the previous ones, D. C. Greetham's Scholarly Editing: A Guide to Research, containing surveys of the textual traditions in some thirty literary fields.[64]
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