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III
In addition to the sizable body of writing that appeared in anthologies during the early 1990s, there are of course other noteworthy articles that were published in periodicals. One of them, Ann R. Meyer's 1994 contribution to Studies in Bibliography ("Shakespeare's Art and the Texts of King Lear," 47: 128 — 146), can serve to focus some of the issues raised by the current concentration on versions and the associated disparagement of eclectic texts. Indeed, it provides a rare model of open-mindedness on this subject. Meyer goes to the heart of recent debates by tackling King Lear, which in the past decade or so has become the classic ground for demonstrating the importance of preserving distinct authorial versions and of refraining from conflating them into eclectic texts. One of the best-known anthologies of the 1980s, The Division of the Kingdoms (edited by Gary Taylor and Michael J. Warren, 1983), set forth the arguments for two versions of Lear, which resulted in the presentation of two separate texts in the 1986 one-volume Oxford Shakespeare.[65] Meyer approaches her independent re-examination of the evidence with the sensible view that "conflation on the one hand and a presentation of different versions on the other are not mutually exclusive alternatives" (p. 130). She recognizes, in other words, that authorial versions cannot be equated with the texts of documents and that, if such versions are what one is interested in, they must be constructed through critical editing. (Early versions are in this respect no different from late or "final" versions.) Armed with this unbiased view of both textual instability and eclectic editing, she finds that — in connection with two key passages — a "judicious consolidation" (p. 145) of the first Quarto and Folio texts is necessary in order to approach an authorially intended text.
Her skillfully presented argument begins with two instances where the Quarto readings in the outer forme of sheet G exist in two states, and she shows in each instance that the "corrected state" (Qb) is simply erroneous and that the uncorrected state (Qa) and the Folio reading, though different, derive from a single version and do not reflect separate versions. Thus "crulentious" (Qa) was altered to "tempestious" (Qb) during the printing of the Quarto, but the Folio "contentious" is the word (as paleographical analysis shows) that was originally misread as "crulentious" (leaving "tempestious" as a compositor's guess at correcting
Having established this pattern, she then considers two major differences between the Quarto and Folio texts: the omission in the Folio of the 31-line mock-trial scene, and the considerable substantive variation in the final lines of the play. As to the first, she argues that the omission, without other accompanying changes, leaves many loose ends and thus is difficult to regard as authorial revision. In the second, the peculiarities in the Quarto text result from the compositor's need to compress the passage to make it fit on the recto of the last leaf, since the outer forme (containing the blank verso of that leaf) had already been printed. Even if there are two versions of Lear, therefore, both of them (according to Meyer and in opposition to the view of the 1986 Oxford editors) would have to contain the trial scene from the Quarto and the concluding scene from the Folio.
The broad importance of Meyer's article, beyond its significance for the Lear debate, is that it sets forth with great clarity several concrete illustrations of the necessity for eclecticism in intentionalist editing, whether or not distinct versions are involved. This point should be accepted as common sense even when stated in the abstract, without accompanying examples; but the persistence with which writers on textual criticism seem to regard eclecticism as antithetical to an understanding of textual instability suggests that articles like Meyer's are needed and need to be read widely. Although she finds no evidence of Shakespeare's revision in the passages she examines, she is open to the possibility that such evidence exists elsewhere in the play. "My argument," she says, "does not reinforce the concept of a 'definitive' or ideal authoritative text, nor does it contradict the concept of the text as a product of many influences, including the possibility of authorial revision" (p. 131). She simply recognizes that, if one is interested in authorially intended versions, one must be alert to "non-authorial influence" (p. 130) in any
The idea that versions cannot be identified with the texts of documents is of course based on a particular view of the ontology of literature (that literary works are intangible); and one should not be surprised that the recent interest in textual versions and instability should have been accompanied by attempts to define the nature of verbal works. The essays by McLaverty and Grigely commented on above are two significant instances. But the most ambitious (indeed, rather self-consciously ambitious) effort of this kind is Peter L. Shillingsburg's essay in the 1991 volume of Studies in Bibliography, "Text as Matter, Concept, and Action" (44: 31 — 82). Shillingsburg has been thinking about the relations among works, versions, and documents since the early 1980s and has published a number of illuminating discussions of them.[67] The long 1991 piece, effectively building on this foundation, offers a "taxonomy" or "anatomy" of texts, resulting in a "partial nomenclature" for textual criticism (p. 46). It tries to address the central problem of how intangible and material texts are linked, and it shows that one can recognize the historical existence of "Conceptual Texts" (texts held in the mind) and still be open to the whole range of possible emphases in the study of texts. (And a "Conceptual Text," Shillingsburg explicitly says, is "not a Platonic ideal" [p. 51].)
For Shillingsburg, a work is a "literary entity" that is "manifested in and implied by the material and linguistic forms" of all the texts that can be thought of as its versions (p. 81); "the Material Text," in other words, "is not equivalent with the Work but is instead merely a coded representation or sign of the Work" (p. 56). Versions, in turn, are not "facts to be discovered" but rather "concepts created . . . by readers [including editors] as a means of ordering (or as justification for valuing) textual variants" (p. 73).[68] In Shillingsburg's terminology, the text of an
Shillingsburg's thoughtful performance is not without its flaws, however. A basic one, in my view, is its fuzziness about how readers' responses relate to the concept of "work." When he says, "it is not the Work itself that is known through the Material Text but the reader's reconstruction of the Work that is known" (p. 58), the idea of "the Work itself" is apparently something associated with the creators or producers of it and inaccessible to its audience. Later, when he says, "the reader becomes the 'functional authority' for the Work and its Versions" (p. 74), the word "functional" perhaps makes this statement consistent with the earlier one; but it occurs in a section entitled "The Reader as Author" (pp. 72 — 74), which also contains this sentence: "The concept of Work and, even more so, the concept of Version depend on Reception Performance just as much as on Creative Performance" (p. 74). And another statement one page later, in the concluding section, goes farther: "the crucial act in relation to a Work of literary art is not writing, or publishing, or editing it, but reading it" (p. 75). There appears to be some indecision reflected in these statements, though the end of the article leaves the impression — quite properly — that "the Work itself" encompasses the reader's, as well as the author's and the publisher's (and other producers'), conceptions of the work.
Even so, the matter is not left entirely clear, for the point about the reader having "functional authority" is followed by the opinion that "ideally the reader should have ready access to the evidence that would fully inform his or her decisions," as in "scholarly editions that foreground rather than submerge the evidence for Versions" (p. 74). But to suggest that readers need historical evidence in the exercise of their authority is to assume that they have historical interests and that their function is to "decode a Work" (p. 75) — that is, to solve a puzzle by finding a pre-existing answer. This approach limits the range of "Reception Performances" and thus restricts readers' authority. I think it would be more profitable to state the authority of the reader somewhat differently. To say that readers' authority is "functional" is in fact to say that it is absolute; and it is indeed absolute, in two senses. First, texts, like everything else, can be known only through the perception of observers. Since it is a given of human existence that what seems to be external to the individual can be apprehended only by subjective consciousness, any discussion of readers' responses should take this point for granted and move on from there. Thus a second kind of authority that readers have is that they are free to decide what kind of interest they wish to have in any text, and their interest may or may not be historical. They can respond to a text and its physical setting as an independent entity, or they can experience it in the context of its relation to other texts and
Another example or two of disappointing features in Shillingsburg's essay may be mentioned. One is his superficial comparison (as it seems to me) of speech acts with what he calls "Write Acts." Usually he finds them so different that "conclusions about speech seem simply inapplicable to writing" (p. 44); but by not referring to oral renditions of literature as speech acts, he neglects some of their similarities (as on pp. 43 — 44, 60 — 61). There are also several false notes in the fifteen pages of introductory comment (devoted in part to characterizing the temper of the times and the recent focus on textual instability and a social approach to texts), such as defining textual criticism in the first paragraph as an activity that concentrates on "removing" error and "purifying" texts,[70] or implying that textual critics have traditionally indulged in "a nostalgic reactionary hope to 're-establish' or 'restore'" texts (p. 35). It is particularly unfortunate that the following sentence appears on the second page, where it can cast a shadow over all that follows: "If textual criticism and scholarly editing are to provide texts and insights that are valuable to literary criticism, they must be conducted in the light of what literary critics find valuable to do." This statement seems to reinforce the old notion that literary criticism and textual criticism are distinct and that the latter is a servant of the former. Shillingsburg himself, both in this essay and in earlier ones, has made clear that he understands editing to be a critical activity; yet he persists here in separating the formulation from the criticism of texts, as when he says that the act of reading has two parts, "the construction of a Reception Text" and "the interpretation of and response to it" (p. 62).[71] In fact the general drift
Another scholar who has been turning his attention to "the boundaries and modes of existence of the literary work" (p. 3) is Paul Eggert, who delivered papers relevant to this subject in August and October 1992. The first of them — published second, in the seventh volume of Text (1994) — is "Document and Text: The 'Life' of the Literary Work and the Capacities of Editing" (pp. 1 — 24), which acknowledges the helpfulness of Shillingsburg's essay. And he is like Shillingsburg in the comprehensiveness of his outlook, in the open-mindedness of his recognition that all moments in the history of a work are worth studying as part of the whole. He emphasizes "the readership's participation in the work" (p. 7) and the corollary of that concept, the idea that the "reception of a work is recognized as part of its constitution" (p. 10) and therefore that the boundary of a work encompasses its "continuing life" as successive generations of readers make it over. But he also recognizes that "the initiating inscriptional acts will always be of crucial interest" and that "to ridicule the link between author and work as mystical is making less and less sense" (p. 14). Indeed, he questions "whether the attempts in recent years to clarify editorial principles by polarizing the authorial
Basic to such a theory, according to Eggert, is "the distinction between text and document" (p. 17), and thus ontological considerations are integral to the practical task of editing.[74] In contrast to Shillingsburg's elaborate scheme for dealing with the relation of the tangible and the intangible, Eggert's approach is refreshingly simple — but is, I fear, overly simple. For him, it can be "a powerful source of clarification" to distinguish the "document" (or "material object") from the "text" (or "textual meaning"); he thinks of them as two "levels," with the text "raised" from a documentary base. "'Text,' under this dispensation," he says, "requires the socialized reader's engagement in the raising of meaning from the document" (p. 2). This statement turns out to signify less than it first appears to, after one reads the footnote attached to it: Eggert says he is leaving aside the meanings conveyed by type design, layout, paper, binding, and so on and is focusing on "the document considered as the physical inscriptions it bears."
Is he therefore only making the commonplace observation that strings of letterforms do not mean anything in themselves and that their linguistic meaning depends on a social convention? The point is of course correct, but how far does it get us? It does not seem to touch the more interesting question of the way in which different readers, all of whom understand how to translate the physical marks into words of a language, attach different meanings to the same documentary text and form different opinions as to which variants (or emendations) are more appropriate. This behavior of readers (including not only editors but authors reading their own work) exists a step beyond the level of recognizing a language. The result of Eggert's "dispensation" is to collapse two stages into the single concept of "text," to no advantage that I can see, and with the disadvantage of being less precise. Eggert complains that McGann's "linguistic text" is "not just there on the page for all to recognize" (p. 2); but in an important sense it is — the page displays a physical "text" made up of inked marks that conform to the notation scheme for a particular language. If we wish to talk about the "recognition" of those marks, we are talking about something very different from the act of reading that builds on the knowledge of what those marks signify.[75] When Eggert — in line with his admirable aim of seeing production and reception as a whole — says that the document is "the tangible link between writer and reader" (p. 11), he is actually presupposing that the marks put there by the writer (or scribe or compositor) follow a system that can be identified by a reader. Eggert is perhaps right to believe (along with many others) that the most fundamental problem in textual criticism is to understand clearly the connection between texts in the mind (whether the writer's or the reader's) and texts on paper; but the way he differentiates them in his concepts of "text" and "document" does not seem likely to promote such clarity.[76]
Eggert's other paper (which uses "text" and "document" in the same way) attempts to clarify the nature of literary works by comparing and contrasting them with paintings ("Editing Paintings/Conserving Literature: The Nature of the 'Work,'" Studies in Bibliography, 47 [1994], 65 — 78). It pursues, intelligently but unremarkably, the connections between verbal and visual works, showing that in both cases the work is "a creature of our own conventions" (p. 67), with "no unchanging existential anchor," and that "conservation and scholarly editing must be understood as interpretive rather than scientific or technical activities" (p. 76). Eggert also recognizes the "significant difference" in the two situations: that literary editors, unlike conservators of paintings, need not alter surviving artifacts in the course of carrying out their work. None of this is surprising or questionable; nor is the conclusion (for which the analogy with painting is not actually needed) that scholars editing a literary work are not engaged in "releasing" it but are "participating in its ongoing life" (p. 77). The last paragraph of the piece, however, will raise a question in many readers' minds — an epistemological question that is inherent in much recent theorizing about texts but one that is brought up more explicitly than usual by Eggert's wording. His "phenomenological view of the work" (which "would abandon any belief in the work as an ideal thing") causes one to realize, he says, that theoretical debates are "about our conventions for understanding the work, not something inherent in it — for there is no it, as work of art, independent of our understandings" (p. 77). The last clause (following the dash) is incontestable, and yet it undercuts the rest of the sentence, for it describes a universal condition, applicable to everything. Any reader might be excused for assuming that this point could be taken for
A more probing treatment of the relation of visual arts to literature (though it ends with a similar quandary) is Joseph Grigely's "Textual Criticism and the Arts: The Problem of Textual Space" (Text, 7 [1995], 25 — 60). As usual, Grigely is stimulating and well-informed and is refreshing in his choice of illustrations.[77] His account of the visual arts provocatively asserts that one should not equate "the artwork and the art object" (p. 43) and that so-called reproductions of paintings are like editions of verbal texts in extending the "space" occupied by the works: "To speak of the original as being privileged in art has some of the same overtones as championing the author's intention in literature" (pp. 45 — 46). This opinion is inherent in his general position that all texts are "caught in a field of cultural forces" (p. 58) and that "there is no detachable space in which texts manifest themselves" (p. 59); works have no boundaries, for "our perception of the 'work' is an extension of the historical and physical space inhabited by a specific text of that work" (p. 44). Trying to fix boundaries is like "drawing circles in water" (p. 34).
This approach equates works with all other events that can have mental repercussions: "the problems of textual space in literature . . . appear in most human contexts — not just the arts, but as a part of human relations in general" (p. 42). One begins to wonder whether such all-inclusiveness is not self-defeating for the essay. Practically everyone understands that the experience of a text, like all other experiences, is colored by one's entire previous life and that it will continue to reverberate in one's mind, affecting all experiences afterward. An essay that says something like this does not mark any advance in thinking, though perhaps to reiterate the point as engagingly as this essay does is its own justification. Yet one cannot help feeling that analytic discourse involves making distinctions; we know that everything is part of human experience, but it may be enlightening to attempt to set boundaries between one kind of experience and another. It is not merely "nominalist" (to use a favorite term of Grigely's) to believe that discriminations can be helpful in developing
One might think that philosophers could help literary scholars with these matters, but in general their treatments of such topics as artifacts and texts do not bear directly on the concerns of textual critics, frequently because of their unfamiliarity with the point to which textual critics have already carried the discussion. Mark Heller's The Ontology of Physical Objects: Four-Dimensional Hunks of Matter (1990) takes up a subject that should be of intense interest to all who are concerned with any of the arts (tangible or intangible), for they all make use of physical objects. It is not Heller's purpose to apply his findings to the arts, and the details of his argument will be of limited use to textual scholars; but his general thesis should be borne in mind by all who deal with artifacts. His main point (concisely expressed in his subtitle) is that objects have a fourth dimension, time, and that a physical object should be defined as "the material content of a region of spacetime" (p. 4).[79] The role of time in defining objects has not been absent from textual criticism (the best recent example being McLaverty's essay discussed above), but Heller offers a careful restatement of the point.
Less helpful, despite the potential of its topic to be more so, is Gregory Currie's "Work and Text" (Mind, 100 [1991], 325 — 340). It may be reassuring to learn that a philosopher's technical arguments support the position that works and texts are very different things, but many of Currie's points will sound naïve to textual scholars. His equation of a "definitive text" with the text intended by the author (p. 326) is not in itself the problem (since the particular agent selected is not crucial to the argument); what is more troublesome is his simplistic separation of language and interpretation, as in his concluding discussion, where interpreting a text is stating "the meaning of its constituent words and sentences as they are given by the conventions of the language," and interpreting a work involves "the explication of plot, the limning of
Another group of writings that contribute little to conceptual thinking about textual criticism consists of those dealing with the "politics" or "rhetoric" of editing. One might at first assume that there is no reason why they should; yet the frequent use of these terms to refer to the subjectivity or the attitudes embedded in editions (as in two anthologies with "Politics" in their titles, the Spadaccini-Talens The Politics of Editing [1992] and Roberta Frank's The Politics of Editing Medieval Texts [1993]) is directly connected with the theoretical emphasis on the social construction of texts, and in this sense the "politics" of editing cannot be seriously discussed without pursuing theoretical matters. But even the most substantial of these pieces, D. C. Greetham's "Politics and Ideology in Current Anglo-American Textual Scholarship" (Editio, 4 [1990], 1 — 20) does not (and does not attempt to) make a substantive contribution to textual theory; instead it is historical and descriptive, first outlining the professional organization of the field ("the organisational manifestation of ideology" [p. 11]) and then the "challenges" to the "Greg-Bowers ideology" (p. 19). At least it has the value of a convenient overview,[83] but most of the writings on "politics" are much slighter: witness the contributions to a panel discussion, at the 1991 Society for Textual Scholarship conference, on "The Politics of Editing," which dealt with matters of funding, attracting talented scholars to the field, and finding receptive publishers.[84] Anyone who wishes to follow the
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