 | |  |
Notes
The deficiencies of what is now the stock response to intentionalist editing have occasionally been pointed out. Tim William Machan, for instance, in his review of Paul Eggert's anthology Editing in Australia (1990; discussed below), gives examples of "the factual and logical imprecision" that often accompanies the exorcism of "the deadly, if amorphous, shade" called "Greg-Bowers"; he concludes that "critics ought to try to understand the Greg-Bowers line of thinking before they condemn it, and in the current climate it has become all too easy not to do so" (Text, 6 [1994], 383 — 386).
This is the fifth in a series of articles surveying the period since the middle of the century. The first three, which were originally published in Studies in Bibliography in 1975, 1981, and 1986, were collected in book form as Textual Criticism since Greg: A Chronicle, 1950 — 1985 (1987). (Any reference to these articles in the present piece provides the SB citation first, followed in brackets by the page reference to the 1987 book.) A fourth essay, "Textual Criticism and Literary Sociology," covering the last half of the 1980s, appeared in SB, 44 (1991), 83 — 143. The scope of these pieces is the same as that of the present one, focusing on writings of general theoretical significance in English. I have compiled a comprehensive list of such writings (including many from 1990 — 95 not referred to in the present article), distributed by the Modern Language Association's Committee on Scholarly Editions; the latest revision is A Sixth Interim Supplement (1995) to "The Center for Scholarly Editions: An Introductory Statement" (1977) (1995). (Some of my own writings have been a part of the current debates, but it is not my purpose here to comment on, or reply to, discussions of my work; how I would respond will be clear in any case from what I have said below about the writings of others. I have briefly described my own view of what I have tried to accomplish in footnote 3 of "Books, Canons, and the Nature of Dispute," Common Knowledge, 1.1 [Spring 1992], 78 — 91. A collection of my essays was published in 1990 as Textual Criticism and Scholarly Editing.)
This breadth is both a strength and a weakness: the inclusion of all these topics in a volume with the words "textual scholarship" in its title makes an important point in itself, by suggesting how interrelated with textual study are all aspects of the history of books; but the attempt to cover so much inevitably results at times in oversimplification and unevenness. For a favorable assessment of the book, see James Thorpe's review in Text, 7 (1994), 543 — 546; less favorable evaluations are offered by John Winter, Elizabeth Morrison, and B. J. McMullin in "Symposium on D. C. Greetham's Textual Scholarship: An Introduction," Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Bulletin, 19 (1995), 47 — 60.
It has been reviewed in Analytical & Enumerative Bibliography, n.s. 4 (1990), 129 — 133 (by Rodger L. Tarr); Review, 12 (1990), 69 — 79 (D. C. Greetham); Review of English Studies, n.s. 42 (1991), 431 — 432 (Peter Davison); and Text, 6 (1994), 359 — 365 (James L. W. West III).
This volume, edited by Joseph Gibaldi, is an entirely separate volume from the one with the same title edited by him in 1981. The contents of the two are completely distinct and by different authors; for the earlier volume, I wrote the essay on "Textual Scholarship."
This volume, scheduled for publication in the fall of 1995, is edited by D. C. Greetham and contains a series of essays describing the history of the editing of many national literatures, including ancient and non-Western writings. My essay incorporates a diagram that aims to show the relationships among the different kinds of editing that are possible. (A still shorter introductory essay of mine is the entry on "Textual Criticism" in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan [1993], pp. 1273 — 76.)
His death has occasioned some assessments both of his career and of the field during his time: see, for example, my The Life and Work of Fredson Bowers (1993), also printed in SB, 46 (1993), 1 — 154, and the "Fredson Bowers Commemorative Issue" (Second Quarter 1991) of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Bulletin (15: 45 — 104).
One of his last articles — "Authorial Intention and Editorial Problems," Text, 5 (1991), 49 — 61 — begins with the statement, "The purpose of this paper is to avoid generalizations on editorial theory." For his last two (posthumously published) articles, see notes 34 and 86 below.
A similarly exaggerated statement near the end of the book asserts that the "Greg-Bowers scheme . . . ought to have found room for at least some of the elements of collaborative creativity" (p. 199). Stillinger is not the only person who has recently given evidence of a failure to understand the complexity of the concept of authorial intention as ordinarily used by editors in the Greg-Bowers tradition. For example, Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass end their 1993 article on "The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text" (Shakespeare Quarterly, 44: 255 — 283) by saying that "solitary genius . . . is, after all, an impoverished, ghostly thing compared to the complex social practices that shaped, and still shape, the absorbent surface of the Shakespearean text." A concern with authorial intention can seem "impoverished" only if one fails to recognize in it the psychological subtleties (and, indeed, social relationships) inherent in all human events. (This article shows further striking confusion in its linking of "solitary and unitary authorship" with a rejection of multiple versions [see p. 276]. The authors' failure to sort out clearly the issues involved is perhaps foreshadowed on their first page in the tendentiousness of their remarkable choice of the word "resentment" in their description of recent editorial history: "One of the most evident results of the multiple-text issue has been mounting resentment toward the editorial tradition.") Another article that displays an extreme misunderstanding of the motivations and goals of intentionalist editing as usually practiced is Howard Marchitello's "(Dis)embodied Letters and The Merchant of Venice: Writing, Editing, History," ELH, 62 (1995), 237 — 265. Marchitello inaccurately associates intentionality with the "fiction of the wholly autonomous author" and the "production of texts outside or beyond both culture and history" (p. 237); the simplistic view of history implied here is also manifested in his repeated assertions to the effect that "unediting" (or "a theory of radical unediting" [p. 242]) is necessary to "return the text more fully to history" (p. 241; cf. pp. 259, 260).
Indeed, an ardent champion of the intentions of single authors, Donald H. Reiman, goes so far as to believe that what authors expected others to do is a part of their intention. In "Public and Private in the Study of Manuscripts," Text, 6 (1994), 49 — 62 (which is a summary of the book based on his 1989 Lyell Lectures, The Study of Modern Manuscripts: Public, Confidential, and Private [1993]), he unequivocally speaks of "the absurd view that the unitary author does not exist" (p. 52). At the same time, he thinks that the vexed distinction between authorial intention and social process will disappear if one recognizes that modern manuscripts were intended only as "way-stations" to published texts, thus sanctioning certain kinds of alterations made in the publication process. But his idea that the concept of "public" manuscripts (that is, manuscripts containing texts intended by their authors for public dissemination) entails the merging of expectation with intention oversimplifies a highly complex matter. It is surprising that Reiman, as a person interested in authors as individuals, would not wish to distinguish what authors personally preferred from what they expected and accepted; my point is not that one is necessarily of more interest than the other but that they are two separate interests, both important as history. When I refer, in the text above, to intentionalist editors recognizing collaborative intention, therefore, I am not thinking primarily of editors who take a position like Reiman's; for it is not necessary to blur the concept of intention, by including expectation, in order to recognize that authorial intention in the strict sense (meaning what an individual author wished to place in the text at each point) can be expected to include outside influences. (For a thoughtful discussion of Reiman's book, see D. C. Greetham, "Getting Personal/Going Public," Review, 17 [1995], 225 — 252.)
Parts of which had previously appeared in his article "Multiple Authorship and the Question of Authority," Text, 5 (1991), 282 — 293.
My earlier essays in this series (see note 2 above) have repeatedly dealt with these questions, and the arguments need not be repeated here. As examples of Stillinger's simplistic summaries, one might note the following: "Adherents of the Greg-Bowers dogma sometimes appear overly rigid . . . settling the question by general rule rather than by an assessment of particular circumstances" (p. 197); "The wording of the first edition or manuscript could be emended . . . but the punctuation, spelling, capitalization, word-division, and paragraphing would remain those of the first edition or manuscript" (p. 196); "it is not clear to everybody's satisfaction why final versions or latest substantives, merely because they are latest, should be considered more authoritative than any other that carry the writer's authority" (p. 197). Stillinger is not alone, of course, in uttering such distortions. Similar points are made, for instance, by Allan C. Dooley in the final chapter ("Textual Change and Textual Criticism") of his Author and Printer in Victorian England (1992) — a chapter reprinted, in somewhat revised form, as "Varieties of Textual Change in the Victorian Era," Text, 6 (1994), 225 — 247. He asserts that the Greg-Bowers "school" is concerned with "an author's initial intentions": for this "camp," "earlier is always better, whether we are considering revisions of unknown origin or a genuine authorial second version" (p. 171). Not only does this position depend too much, he believes, on "chronology" (p. 173); it also rests on "the romantic concept of inspiration," in which the "artistic impulse can never be adequately realized in words" (p. 171), and it "tends to elevate the textual critic's judgment over the author's in matters of revision" (p. 173). Bizarre as this picture of Greg-Bowers editing is, Dooley goes even farther to compound the confusion. He describes a "rival position" ("which has no agreed-upon name") that favors "an author's final intentions about a text"; and then he sets forth his own view, urging editors to seek "that text which most fully embodies the author's best, most complete, most successful effort to get the work right" (p. 174). What this can possibly mean as a procedural directive (especially in the absence of any reference to emendation) is not clear, and the reader's puzzlement can only increase upon reading that "This approach properly respects an author's proprietary rights over a text, while not necessarily taking all authorial revisions as improvements" (p. 174). Dooley's subject did not require him to comment on editorial matters, and he says in a footnote, "I will forgo any attempt to integrate this chapter's generalizations into current textual theory" (p. 170); his book would have been stronger if he had followed this resolve. His book and Stillinger's are alike in at least one respect: neither calls for discussion of textual theory, and — given the way such discussions turned out — both would have been better off without them.
A similar statement appears in Stillinger's later book, Coleridge and Textual Instability: The Multiple Versions of the Major Poems (1994): "author's intentions are in general unrecoverable apart from the texts that authors produce" (p. 135). One should remember, however, that authors may well have produced texts not now extant.
The place of criticism in editing is not made clear here in any case. Stillinger continually refers to "interpretation and editing" as two activities (e.g., p. 183) and organizes his final chapter on the basis of this division. A fuller recognition that editing (like all historical scholarship) is itself criticism might have resulted in a less naïve concept of historical "availability."
He thinks he is making a valid criticism when he says, "The theorists do not treat facts as if they were speculation, but sometimes they treat speculations as if they were fact" (p. 201). The distinction between fact and speculation, however, is not self-evident; historical inquiry has no choice but to treat speculation as fact, because facts are speculations that informed observers agree to accept until they are persuaded by a contrary argument. (See my "Printing History and Other History," SB, 48 [1995], 269 — 289 [esp. pp. 283 — 286]. I have also commented on the historical nature of critical editing in Libraries, Museums, and Reading [1991], esp. pp. 29 — 31.) Earlier on the same page, Stillinger naïvely contrasts scientific theory with "interpretive and editorial theory" by claiming that the former "is, sooner or later, verifiable."
Even the chapters setting forth the case studies are at times marred by such intrusions as the following: at the end of the chapter called "Pound's Waste Land," we are told that "The Waste Land, if it were perceived to be a jointly authored poem, would inevitably become a lesser work than it is now taken to be" (p. 138). Similarly, the account of the textual history of Sister Carrie would be stronger if it were not tied to a shortsighted criticism of the Pennsylvania edition as "an essentially fanciful construct" (p. 161).
I have described and analyzed it in — among other places — SB, 39 (1986), 19 — 27 [127 — 135], and 44 (1991), 99 — 112. (Another of the best-known advocates of a social approach to bibliographical and textual study, D. F. McKenzie, also made a significant statement during the early 1990s: his centenary lecture for the Bibliographical Society, "What's Past Is Prologue": The Bibliographical Society and History of the Book [1993]. I have commented on it in "Printing History and Other History" [see note 15 above], pp. 282 — 283 [note 27], 287 — 288.)
It is strange, given McGann's emphasis on this point, that he begins his introduction this way: "Both the practice and the study of human culture comprise a network of symbolic exchanges. Because human beings are not angels, these exchanges always involve material negotiations" (p. 3).
McGann claims that the world reflected in his approach "comes into focus when we ask James McLaverty's provocative question: 'If the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre in Paris, where is Hamlet?' In this world, time, space, and physicality are not the emblem of a fall from grace, but the bounding conditions which turn gracefulness abounding" (p. 9). The question (which is not really McLaverty's, of course, but a cliché of ontological discussions in aesthetics) can be useful if it causes people to recognize that some arts use tangible materials and some do not; the realization that authors' intentions may not be adequately represented in existing physical documents follows as a logical corollary and has nothing to do with a view of the material world as fallen from grace.
Such as Fredson Bowers's statement, in his edition of William James, that the apparatus is of "equal ultimate importance" with the main text because it shows "the progress of James's thought from its earliest known beginnings to final publication in journal and book, and continuing to annotation in his private copies" (Pragmatism [1975], pp. 182 — 183). For further discussion of this point, as well as the way in which the printed forms of texts in pre-electronic days limited the flexibility editors had in presenting multiple texts, see the last pages of the present essay; see also my "Critical Editions, Hypertexts, and Genetic Criticism," forthcoming in a special issue of Romanic Review (86.3) deriving from an April 1994 conference, "From Manuscript to Text: Genetic Criticism and Literary Studies," sponsored by the Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, and the Department of French and Romance Philology, Columbia University.
At the end of the book McGann says that his "theory of the radical instability of the material and conceptual 'text'" allows one "to imagine the possibility of reliable knowledge," because knowledge emerges through the study of successive textual engagements, each of which "localizes human temporalities" (pp. 185 — 186). It is surprising that he does not recognize how intended texts fit into this historical process.
These essays are grouped in two sections. The first, entitled "The Garden of Forking Paths," consists of four essays: "Theory, Literary Pragmatics, and the Editorial Horizon," from Devils and Angels: Textual Editing and Literary Theory, ed. Philip Cohen (1991), pp. 1 — 21 (where the title is simply "Literary Pragmatics and the Editorial Horizon"); "What Is Critical Editing?", from Text, 5 (1991), 15 — 29; "The Socialization of Texts," from Documentary Editing, 12 (1990), 56 — 61; and "The Textual Condition," from Text, 4 (1988), 29 — 37 (which I have briefly commented on in my 1991 SB piece [see note 2 above], footnote 35). The second section of the book is an extensive case study of Ezra Pound ("Ezra Pound in the Sixth Chamber"), made up of three chapters, the first previously published — "How to Read a Book," Library Chronicle of the University of Texas at Austin, 20 (1990), 13 — 37 (this journal number was also published separately: see the text at note 40 below). Two of these chapters were the subject of commentary in the journal issues in which they originally appeared. Following the 1990 piece in Documentary Editing came Hershel Parker's "A Position Paper on Authorial Intention and the Socialization of Texts" (pp. 62 — 65), in which he laments the absence of what he calls "old-school history" in the social approach, which he feels has neglected "the aesthetic and commercial principles of the participants in the socialization process." And following the 1991 piece in Text came T. H. Howard-Hill's "Theory and Praxis in the Social Approach to Editing" (pp. 31 — 46), which includes a response that many people have felt when confronted with the idea that every edition is validated by history: "if this is true, . . . then it is no longer possible to edit works at all" (p. 41). Among Howard-Hill's concerns is doubt as to how the "bibliographical" (or physical) features of a documentary text (which McGann would not wish to separate from the "linguistic" text) can be "encoded" into an edition, unless facsimile reproduction is used. In "A Response to T. H. Howard-Hill" (pp. 47 — 48), McGann says that "technology is making it possible for us to see (theorize) more of the literary work's signifying dimensions" and to "translate such theoretical knowledge into practical editorial work." Although the question could have been more acutely framed, the response is decidely unhelpful in seeming to claim that technology makes theory possible. (For another criticism of McGann, see note 73 below.) McGann also commented on Rodger L. Tarr's review of The Textual Condition (Analytical & Enumerative Bibliography, n.s., 7 [1993], 3 — 12) on the two pages following that review. He properly points out that "the emergence of electronic text has provided scholars with a tool for overcoming the limits of the codex" (p. 14); but his opinion that "The theory of copytext editing is a function of the codex" (p. 13) fails to differentiate between the reporting of textual information (which is indeed restricted by the codex form) and the editorial theory brought to bear on the textual situation (which is not so restricted). "Copyright editing" does not prohibit the presentation in full of multiple texts (a point I comment on more fully in the last section of the present article).
He does not add to the clarity of his discussion by using "linguistic" to label one of the two strands of an "event" that itself is called "linguistic."
This editorial tradition, it should be remembered, is the one that developed analytical bibliography and thus gave great attention to physical clues that reflect production history; but such uses of physical details are of course very different from the uses that McGann is talking about.
McGann has devoted a subsequent book to this subject: Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism (1993) develops the thesis that "twentieth-century poetry in English is a direct function and expression of the Renaissance of Printing that began in the late nineteenth century" (p. xi). A number of recent studies have explored, in various ways, the role of book design in the production and reception of literature; some examples are David Foxon's Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade (ed. James L. McLaverty, 1991), Tom Conley's The Graphic Unconscious in Early Modern French Writing (1992), Edward A. Levenston's The Stuff of Literature: Physical Aspects of Texts and Their Relation to Literary Meaning (1992), David McKitterick's "Old Faces and New Acquaintances" in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 87 (1993), 163 — 186, Evelyn B. Tribble's Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England (1993), and the anthology edited by Margaret J. M. Ezell and Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe (and commented on below), Cultural Artifacts and the Production of Meaning (1994). Joseph Viscomi, in his remarkable Blake and the Idea of the Book (1993), includes a substantial discussion of "Editing Illuminated Books" (pp. 151 — 183), which should not be overlooked by editors of other authors, since it presents a perceptive and reasonable approach to the problems posed by texts that combine the verbal and the visual. (See my review in Nineteenth-Century Literature, 49 [1995], 534 — 537.)
McGann uses these adjectives to describe both Fredson Bowers's work and "the formal and thematic hermeneutics that cut a parallel course in interpretive studies" (p. 22). It is a gross misconception of both the Greg-Bowers tradition and the New Criticism to regard them as "ahistorical."
These words occur in the description of the first of "three basic choices" for editing Rossetti's The House of Life. The second is to offer diplomatic texts of "a series of versions," and the third is "to construct a text which would represent that textual evolution" (pp. 29 — 30). It is important to recognize, however, that these three choices are really only two: constructing a critical text or recording documentary texts. Whether the latter is handled through the printing of separate texts or the production of a genetic text is a matter of reporting; they are both subcategories of the same basic approach.
Studies in Bibliography also takes the form of annual volumes, but they are not exclusively devoted to textual matters. (The German annual Editio is so devoted but rarely includes articles in English.)
These figures are based (with necessary adjustments for differences in scope) on the list of anthologies that I included in "A Concise Selection from the Literature of Textual Criticism," which appears as Supplement 4 to my Introduction to Bibliography: Seminar Syllabus (3rd ed., 1994) and as Appendix I to A Sixth Interim Supplement (1995) to "The Center for Scholarly Editions: An Introductory Statement" (1977) (1995). My list may of course not be complete. (For references to some of the French and German anthologies, see note 85 below.)
They were Bibliography and Textual Criticism, ed. O M Brack, Jr., and Warner Barnes (1969); Art and Error: Modern Textual Editing, ed. Ronald Gottesman and Scott Bennett (1970); and Medieval Manuscripts and Textual Criticism, ed. Christopher Kleinhenz (1976). During this time a collection of original essays on "Textual Studies in the Novel" appeared under the editorship of Warner Barnes and James T. Cox as a special issue of Studies in the Novel (7 [Fall 1975], 317 — 471).
Particularly Literary & Historical Editing, ed. George L. Vogt and John Bush Jones (1981); The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare's Two Versions of "King Lear", ed. Gary Taylor and Michael Warren (1983); and Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation, ed. Jerome J. McGann (1985).
In Germany and France it has increased, with the inauguration of Editio (1987 — ) and Genesis (1992 — ). Of new periodicals in English, I am aware only of New England Book and Text Studies (1994 — ), written by C. Deirdre Phelps.
Charles Rossman edited "A Special Issue on Editing Ulysses" for Studies in the Novel, 22 (Summer 1990), 113 — 269; and William P. Williams edited a "Special Issue on the New Oxford Shakespeare" for Analytical & Enumerative Bibliography, n.s. 4 (1990), 1 — 97.
The Davison volume (which celebrates the centenary of The Bibliographical Society in London) includes Sebastian P. Brock's "Developments in Editing Biblical Texts" (pp. 236 — 243), Fredson Bowers's "Notes on Theory and Practice in Editing Texts" (pp. 244 — 257), and John L. Flood and Conor Fahy's "Analytical and Textual Bibliography in Germany and Italy" (pp. 258 — 269), as well as my "Issues in Bibliographical Studies since 1942" (pp. 24 — 36), which contains a section dealing with textual questions. In the Barker volume, Barker himself provides an appendix surveying "Intentionality and Reception Theory" (pp. 195 — 201).
This volume is edited by Marianne Børch, Andreas Haarder, and Julia McGrew. Medieval texts were the subject of more entire anthologies in the early 1990s than were the texts of any other period. Others were The Editor and the Text, ed. Philip E. Bennett and Graham A. Runnalls (a 1990 festschrift for A. J. Holden), The Editing of Old English: Papers from the 1990 Manchester Conference, ed. D. G. Scragg and Paul E. Szarmach (1994), and the three named in the next three sentences of the text, plus the Faulhaber-Craddock collection commented on later. A common misunderstanding of recent editorial discussion is reflected in Szarmach's introduction to The Editing of Old English: "the dispute," he says, is "between those who see the possibility for the stable, the fixed, and the unchanging and those who see only process, continuing change, and varying relations of connections" (p. 2). A collection dealing with a different period is Victorian Authors and Their Works: Revision Motivations and Modes, ed. Judith Kennedy (1991).
In his fine review of this anthology — in Text, 6 (1994), 398 — 403 — David Yerkes understands that the equation of "textual" and "critical" is simply a manifestation of the role of human thought in constructing what we consider to be reality. "As Housman, following Aristotle, realized," he says, "to be alive is to want to know, even if 'knowing' cannot ever be anything more than mental exercise" (p. 399).
Machan, in "Middle English Text Production and Modern Textual Criticism" (pp. 1 — 18), expresses the need for "a more historically sensitive model" (p. 18) than intentionalist editors' concern (influenced by the New Criticism) for "a text to transcend time" p. 9). Hanna, in "Producing Manuscripts and Editions" (pp. 109 — 130), speaks of "the peculiar manner in which textual 'authority' is dispersed within medieval culture" (p. 120), resulting in a "plurality" of texts.
A third Toronto volume appeared during this period: Challenges, Projects, Texts: Canadian Editing, ed. John Lennox and Janet M. Patterson (1993).
Although I make no attempt below to cite the reviews that these anthologies have received, I do think it important to call attention to the substantial reviews of textual studies and editions that have been appearing in Text since its review section was inaugurated under Peter Shillingsburg in volume 6 (1994). That volume contains reviews of five of the anthologies taken up below (in addition to the review cited in note 36 above): the two 1990 anthologies, the Oliphant-Bradford and the Eggert, are reviewed by W. Speed Hill (pp. 370 — 382) and Tim William Machan (pp. 383 — 386), respectively; and three 1991 collections, edited by Cohen, Bornstein, and Barney, are reviewed by Michael Groden (pp. 366 — 369), Hugh Witemeyer (pp. 391 — 397), and Richard J. Finneran (pp. 387 — 390), respectively. The next volume of Text (volume 7, also dated 1994) contains D. C. Greetham's particularly thorough review (pp. 461 — 477) of another 1991 anthology, that edited by Small and Walsh.
This anthology was also made available in 1990 as a special number of the Library Chronicle of the University of Texas (20.1 / 2). The opening paragraph of Carver's introduction asserts that Bowers applied Greg's theory "in ways that seemed to the critic increasingly complex, even arcane" and thereby reinforced the split between the "establishment" and the "interpretation" of texts — a surprising claim in light of Bowers's insistence on the place of critical judgment in editing. Carver also repeats the canard that "the orthodox editorial theory of eclecticism developed under the sign of the New Criticism" (p. 8).
McGann's piece, "How to Read a Book" (pp. 13 — 37), was reprinted in his The Textual Condition (1991) and is mentioned in note 22 above; the concept of "radial reading," discussed in that essay, is commented on in my "Textual Criticism and Literary Sociology" (see note 2 above), pp. 137 — 138. McLeod's article is "from 'Tranceformations in the Text of Orlando Furioso'" (pp. 61 — 85), and McKenzie's is "Speech-Manuscript-Print" (pp. 87 — 109). Ian Willison's "Editorial Theory and Practice and the History of the Book" (pp. 111 — 125) — which contains the unperceptive remark that as an historian he is "obliged to favor" the socialized view of authorship (p. 113) — is briefly discussed (on the basis of an advance copy) in my "Textual Criticism and Literary Sociology" (see note 2 above), p. 130.
The titles of these three essays are as follows: Hellinga, "Editing Texts in the First Fifteen Years of Printing" (pp. 127 — 149); Warren, "The Theatricalization of Text: Beckett, Jonson, Shakespeare" (pp. 39 — 59); Gabler, "Textual Studies and Criticism" (pp. 151 — 165). Gabler's essay is also printed as the opening essay (pp. 1 — 17) of Editing in Australia, the anthology to be discussed in the next paragraph.
But to repeat: "historical existence" cannot be equated with what survives (or was once present) in physical form; and an eclectic text, though it may draw readings from documents widely separated in time, does not aim at synchrony but instead at the reconstruction of a given moment's intention (one of the successive "products" that make up a "process" — see my discussion of Shillingsburg below). (The title of the essay is "Textual Product or Textual Process: Procedures and Assumptions of Critical Editing" [pp. 19 — 40].) It is also inaccurate to suggest that critical editors have thought of their work as objective (p. 24); they have repeatedly noted that critical editions are products of judgment. (I certainly agree with Eggert's doubts about "the factualness of 'facts'" [p. 26]; see my "Printing History and Other History" [see note 15 above].) I do not wish to detract from the well-deserved praise Eggert accords to Peter Shillingsburg ("Shillingsburg's work has crystallised for a lot of people" an understanding that "the critical edition is indeed critical" [p. 34]) when I say that this point was being made in the 1960s.
The volume also includes — among others — a piece by Harold Love on "The Editing of Restoration Scriptorial Satire" (pp. 65 — 84), which should be read by all those interested in genealogical method (see also his 1993 book, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England); one by Stephanie Trigg ("Speaking with the Dead," pp. 137 — 149), on the "narrative subjectivity" (p. 139), or "editorial voice" (p. 148), in editions; and one by Jeff Doyle ("McLeoding the Issue: The Printshop and Heywood's Iron Ages," pp. 150 — 168), which draws on Randall McLeod's bibliographical work to show how "the process of typesetting is . . . a critical reading of the text" p. 165). (Gabler's is briefly discussed above as part of the Oliphant-Bradford collection, in which it also appears.)
Later in the volume, Jeff Doyle (see note 44 above) says, "There is no need for the process and production models to be separate" (p. 163). In his case, the point refers specifically to products (like printed editions of the Renaissance) that are not uniform but embody "the layerings of process" in jumbled form. (One could add that his point reinforces the need for historical reconstructions to supplement surviving documents.)
Another weakness of the essay (besides its unfortunate title) is its opening paragraph, which is full of questionable statements or implications. To take one of them: the familiar suggestion is made that a goal (such as "establishing what the author wrote") is undesirable because it is "beyond definitive reach"; a person might, Shillingsburg seems to imply, prefer a goal that is "perhaps more attainable." The attainability of a goal has nothing to do with the desirability of pursuing it; and most of the essay, I believe, attests to this point, for the idea of "definitive reach" is similar to that of "stability," and being "beyond definitive reach" is like instability in reflecting the nature of historical complexity. Shillingsburg's essay, in other words, is far more thoughtful and sophisticated than his introductory comments suggest. Occasional remarks scattered through the essay are also disappointing, as when he says that "one of the nice things about scorning historical reconstructions is that there is less work involved" (p. 49). This is an incomprehensible joke in the context, for Shillingsburg's comprehensive approach does not banish historical reconstructions, since it allows for emendations and an interest in intention.
The title, Cohen explains in his introduction (p. xvi), is derived from an essay of McGann's that speaks of "the angels of hermeneutics" avoiding the editors who "hurl defiance at the heavens of the interpreters." Those "devils," however, are the ones who have searched for "ideal" texts: Cohen continues the tradition of characterizing the dominant aim of Anglo-American editors as an "ideal text" (p. xi) and of linking their approach with the New Criticism — though the weakness of this association is actually revealed in the process (see the discussion on p. x). One of the reviews this book received — Howard Horwitz's in American Literature, 65 (1993), 198 — 200 — shows how extreme are some of the distorted views of the Greg-Bowers tradition: "This model of editing assumes that a work is an absolutely determinate and determinable object embodying an author's final intention."
Howard-Hill, "Variety in Editing and Reading: A Response to McGann and Shillingsburg," pp. 44 — 56.
Mailloux, "The Rhetorical Politics of Editing: A Response to Eggert, Greetham, and Cohen and Jackson," pp. 124 — 133; Greetham, "The Manifestation and Accommodation of Theory in Textual Editing," pp. 78 — 102; Cohen and Jackson, "Notes on Emerging Paradigms in Editorial Theory," pp. 103 — 123.
Cain, "Making Texts New: A Response to Gabler, McLaverty, and Grigely," pp. 195 — 203; McLaverty, "Issues of Identity and Utterance: An Intentionalist Response to 'Textual Instability,'" pp. 134 — 151; Gabler, "Unsought Encounters," pp. 152 — 166; Grigely, "The Textual Event," pp. 167 — 194.
The word "others" here represents a significant (and welcome) addition to the conventional concept of an apparatus; normally an apparatus records only "actual [i.e., documentary] utterances," but the scope is here enlarged to include the emendations that would need to be made in order to produce other intended utterances than the one(s) presented in the reading text(s).
Grigely correctly sees the need to distinguish "work" from "text," but there are two problems with his discussion. First, in defining a work (following McGann) as "an ongoing — and infinite — manifestation of textual appearances" (p. 176), he does not sufficiently account for intended texts as part of the sequential process. (He later recognizes performed as well as inscribed texts but still does not relate them to intended texts.) Otherwise the concept of a work as a succession of texts seems appropriate enough; but (and this is the second problem) Grigely does not follow his definition in his ensuing discussion, as when he calls the work of The Tempest "a Platonic form or idea" (p. 176). When, on the next page, he more formally defines a work as "a nontangible idea represented by a sequential series of texts," he has substantially departed from the earlier definition: to call a work an "idea" is very different from (and much less useful than) calling it a succession of texts.
Greetham chooses to pursue this interesting topic by a "rereading" of textual criticism "against the grain" of other "theoretical dispensations," specifically in this instance psychoanalytical criticism. This ingenious excursus does not, however, connect directly with what I would see as one of the basic aspects of the topic: how the "ideology" of an edition, as reflected in its apparent patterns of emphasis and subordination, relates to the editor's outlook toward other ideologies. An editor's choice of one approach does not necessarily imply a disapproval of others (and, indeed, an editor may say this explicitly) — a point that needs to be accounted for in any treatment of the "manifestation" of theory in editions.
Basic to the German approach, according to Gabler, is the idea of "authorization" that is "document-related" (p. 163). The editor "must present with historical faithfulness" a documentary text and yet can emend "indubitable textual errors" (p. 164). (I am assuming that the spelling "induitable" in this text is such an error and have corrected it in my quotation here.) The incoherence of this approach has been repeatedly pointed out in connection with the "best-text" editing of medieval writings: if one is to undertake critical editing, one cannot be selective in applying critical thinking to a documentary text. Cf. my review of Gabler's edition of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in Common Knowledge, 3.3 (Winter 1994), 164 — 169.
It does contain, to my view, occasional lapses, however. For example, there is the implication (pp. 270 — 271) that author-centered theories are more vulnerable to logical criticism than socialized theories because they place the literary work in the author's mind. But the real distinction here is between approaches that focus on documentary texts and those that focus on works; the latter have to posit the mind as the source of authority, but it need not be an author's mind (for authority could also be seen as residing in the minds of a collaborative group or in a reader's mind). Another problem is raised by the statement that "Psychoanalysis, Marxism, and feminism offer three theoretical positions from which human agency and autonomy are strenuously questioned" (p. 276). The implication that intentionalist editing presupposes greater human autonomy than would be consistent with these theories is a misconception; a writer's intention to place certain words in a text is not seen by intentionalist editors as totally isolated from life.
Walsh, "Bentley Our Contemporary; or, Editors, Ancient and Modern," pp. 157 — 185; Small, "The Editor as Annotator as Ideal Reader," pp. 186 — 209. Walsh's essay ends with an admonition not "to privilege the critic's quest for significance to himself over the interpreter's quest for author's meaning"; Small's ends by stating that "a concept of authorial intention . . . is more useful — in the sense that it does more work — than any other theory." That these are well-considered conclusions is evident from the knowledgeable discussions that precede them. (The other essays in the volume deal with particular authors but frequently engage theoretical issues sufficiently to make them of interest to scholars in different areas.)
Most university press directors would be surprised to hear that "their presses may in the act of constructing and disseminating authoritative texts also legitimate themselves as the places where such texts are constructed and disseminated" (p. 2).
Ian Small, in his review of this anthology in English Literature in Transition, 38 (1995), 195 — 203, takes the occasion of Shillingsburg's essay to note that "there is a logical contradiction waiting to ambush the postmodernist editor": if "'works' are constructed by the values and prejudices of the editor" and "'versions' are simply there to be revealed," then there is "no necessary relationship between versions and works," and thus "it is difficult to see why we need to know about versions" and indeed why we should "bother with editions of any kind." He proceeds to make the important point, frequently overlooked, that versions "are not simply 'there' to be revealed" but, like works, "have to be identified" — in a process that "willy-nilly involves values and prejudices."
The essays referred to in this paragraph are Greetham's "Editorial and Critical Theory: From Modernism to Postmodernism" (pp. 9 — 28), Shillingsburg's "Polymorphic, Polysemic, Protean, Reliable, Electronic Texts" (pp. 29 — 43), and Williams's "I Shall Be Spoken: Textual Boundaries, Authors, and Intent" (pp. 45 — 66). These essays are drawn from the first section of the volume, entitled "Editorial Theory Today"; Parts 2 and 3, with more specialized essays, are entitled "Editing Literature" and "Editing in Other Disciplines."
Hill's essay is a revised version of his contribution to Greetham's Textual Scholarship (see note 6 above), which had not been published at the time. As for the RETS programs of the years mentioned in the subtitle, the one for 1987 is represented by a single lecture instead of the usual program of three or four papers; but the papers from the other years were originally distributed to the Society's members in the form of annual pamphlets made up of photocopies. One of them has been commented on in my "Textual Criticism and Literary Sociology" (see note 2 above), footnote 63.
The either/or approach emerges at many points, as when Hill says that "genealogical editions betray their origins in early nineteenth-century romantic ideology of the autonomous author/artist whose work derives its value from its unique authorial origins, not its subsequent social distribution" (p. 8). What this sentence betrays (through the "not") is both a belief that these interests cannot be held simultaneously and an unfair attribution of the same rigidity to editors who have produced genealogical editions.
This collection, entitled "Textual Scholarship and American Literature," was published as a special issue (20.2) of Resources for American Literary Study. Cohen indicates, in a note to his introduction ("Textual Instability, Literary Studies, and Recent Developments in Textual Scholarship," pp. 133 — 148), that this collection will be incorporated, along with additional essays, into an anthology to be entitled Texts and Textuality.
His essay, entitled "'Why Don't They Leave It Alone?': Speculations on the Authority of the Audience in Editorial Theory" (pp. 85 — 99), gets off to a misleading start, for the opening paragraph notes a recent shift "away from the hidebound assumptions and defensive postures that had characterized a small but entrenched Anglo-American editorial establishment"; but, with this gesture out of the way, the essay builds on Eaves's obvious understanding that his position can stand on its own. The same even-handedness that Eaves displays is also apparent in the editors' introduction, where they say, "The material artifact is always resistant to critical appropriation; however, this does not mean that the act of seeking a glimpse of the historical past is without value" (p. 3). Not all the essays in the volume deal with inscribed texts, but some that do are contributed by J. Paul Hunter (on Sterne and Pope), Hamlin Hill (on Mark Twain), Jerome J. McGann (on Pound and other "modern and postmodern poetries"), and Jeanne Holland (on Dickinson). The essays were originally written for a conference on "Textual Technologies: Text, Image, and History" at Texas A & M University on 26 — 29 March 1992.
The one on German work, to be part of the Michigan series, is Contemporary German Editorial Theory, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, George Bornstein, and Gillian Borland Pierce; the one on the French approach is the special issue of Romanic Review mentioned in note 20 above; and the Greetham volume is described in note 6 above.
The same general argument would hold, of course, for an interest in any kind of intention, whether authorial or not. Intended versions (regardless of whose intention is being focused on) cannot be equated with documentary texts and therefore must be critically constructed by an eclectic process. A more recent article on the Lear question also concludes that a "refusal to countenance conflation, with reference especially to F's major omissions, is to risk a blinkered and naive reinforcement of changes that may originally have been made to the play for very questionable reasons" (such as the embellishment of Edgar's role for a star performer); see Robert Clare, "'Who is it that can tell me who I am?': The Theory of Authorial Revision between the Quarto and Folio Texts of King Lear," Library, 6th ser., 17 (1995), 34 — 59 (quotation from p. 59). Another article (though not on Lear) that defends eclecticism is James L. W. West III, "Fair Copy, Authorial Intention, and 'Versioning,'" Text, 6 (1994), 81 — 89: he believes that editing versions is feasible for short works but not for long ones, and thus for the latter it is necessary to "apply one's critical intelligence to the surviving drafts, with or without an existing fair copy, and attempt to create an eclectic ideal" (p. 88). Leaving aside the inappropriateness of the word "ideal," this statement does not appear to acknowledge that even a single eclectic text represents a version (a particular moment in the history of a work) and that multiple critical texts of different versions would all be, in principle, just as eclectic as that of the (presumably) final authorial version suggested by West. It is a sign of the insidiousness of the tendency to equate versions with documentary texts that even West's article seems to have a trace of it. He distinguishes situations where there is an authorial fair copy from those where there is not; yet operationally there is no difference, since in either case (as West knows) one must use "critical intelligence" and not simply accept a single documentary text. And when he says that the idea of presenting versions assumes "that each embodiment of the text chosen for reproduction possess some measure of finality" (p. 87), there is a hint that the "embodiments" are the versions, whereas versions actually require critical (eclectic) activity for their construction. One of the many examples of failure to accommodate this point is Grace Ioppolo's Revising Shakespeare (1991), in which the chapter on "Revising King Lear and Revising 'Theory'" (pp. 161 — 187) treats as "apparent" the idea that "the conflated physical text is fraudulent because it synthesizes and reduces the multiple versions produced by the author in the process of revision" (p. 162). She asserts unequivocally, "Any edition of King Lear which conflates the Quarto and Folio texts . . . produces . . . a counterfeit and non-Shakespearian foundation upon which only the most limited literary interpretation and meaning can be built" (p. 181). Like a number of the revisionists, she gives the impression that editors who engage in conflation are motivated by the desire to maintain an image of Shakespeare as a writer who never blotted a line; but whether or not he revised is a separate question from whether conflation is necessary to produce what he intended at any given time. Another egregious instance of the problems created by the equation of versions and documentary texts is the section of Jack Stillinger's Coleridge and Textual Instability (1994; see note 13 above) entitled "A Practical Theory of Versions" (pp. 118 — 140). In the "five-point scheme" (p. 132) of his "practical theory," the first point is that "A version of a work is a physically embodied text of the work"; yet the third point is that it is an arbitrary matter to determine how much difference between texts is necessary in order to regard them as separate versions. The two points are at odds: if versions are the texts of documents, then obviously different documents contain different versions. His "practical" approach means that he has "cheerfully ignored" the fact that texts are "physically embodied," believing that words and punctuation can readily be transferred to other embodiments — even though he is thereby ignoring the "knottiest problem in textual theory" (p. 133). Whether or not one wishes to call this a "theory," one can hardly call it "practical," since it is not carefully thought through and is therefore not usable.
Especially his Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age (1984; revised, 1986). I have commented on this book in SB, 39 (1986), 39 — 45 [147 — 153]. Another related article of his that appeared in the same year as the one to be discussed below (and can be thought of as a pendant to it) is "Textual Variants, Performance Variants, and the Concept of Work," Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Bulletin, 15 (1991), 60 — 72 (reprinted in Editio, 7 [1993], 221 — 234). He has also, more recently, provided a useful historical sketch and summary of the current theoretical debates, reaching the sensible conclusion that the "anxiety of text is a good and normal anxiety," which is "best relieved, but never cured, by open investigation by critical minds"; see "Textual Angst," LiNQ [Literature in North Queensland], 21 (1994), 71 — 93.
I have not quoted the definition of "version" from Shillingsburg's appendix of definitions (which provides the definition of "work" quoted in the first half of the preceding sentence) because I do not find the definition there to be stated in a way that is consistent with the discussion in the body of the article. In the appendix, "version" is formally defined as "a concept by which Material Texts . . . are classified as representative" of what he calls "Potential," "Developing," or "Essayed" versions; although the intangibility of versions is recognized here to some extent, this definition does not seem to me to make sufficiently clear that any material text might reflect more than one version and that it is not the material texts as entities that are being classified. Indeed, the definition should, I think, be parallel to that of "work," in order to show the parallelism in the concepts and to make clear that versions are subsets of works.
I find some of Shillingsburg's explanations of his terms puzzling, however — indeed, so much so as to constitute a serious weakness in his presentation. For example, he says, "The Essayed Conceptual Text is always manifested in a physical form, but it is not a physical or Material Text, for the Conceptual Text that is Essayed remains (as the author's mental concept) invisible and probably not stable; but the embodiment of the Conceptual Text is visible and fixed in a material medium" (p. 52). If Shillingsburg had written "often" instead of "always" as the sixth word of this sentence, I would see no problem; but as it is, he seems to be claiming that all finished texts in authors' minds get written down or otherwise placed in physical form. Clearly this is not true. Whether or not there is any point in trying to recover a mental text that was not (however imperfectly) "embodied" is a separate matter, and one that should not affect the definition of an "Essayed Conceptual Text." If the definitions of these terms are to promote rigorous thinking, they must cover all theoretical possibilities. The same problem reappears in the appendix of definitions, where "Essayed" is defined as "finished (at least temporarily) versions as evidenced by completed manuscripts or revised texts" (p. 81). But the existence of such versions does not depend on their being "evidenced" in this way. Furthermore, such physical evidence as there is may be a mixture of versions, and Shillingsburg's definition does not guard against the inference that documents preserve versions (something he is generally careful to avoid). (There is further laxity here: the plural "versions" falls under the singular heading "Version," and "manuscripts" is used to mean "manuscript texts," obviously an important distinction in this context.) The related definition of "Conceptual Text" is "Any text that is 'held' in the mind or contemplated by a person. Conceptual texts are the only kind that can be experienced, though Material Texts are where they begin." What Shillingsburg has done here is to limit the definition to the readers' perspective: texts in readers' minds "begin" with the physical texts they read. But if the definition is to cover authors as well (as it should, since "person" includes all persons), it is wrong to say that mental texts "begin" in physical form. A similar tangle lies behind the ambiguous definition of "Linguistic Text": "A Sign Sequence for an Essayed Version displayed in a Document." If the documentary display is essential to the existence of a "Linguistic Text," then the definition would seem to be at odds with that of "Material Text": "The union of Linguistic Text and Document: A Sign Sequence held in a medium of display" — where the "Linguistic Text" is not in itself physical. Yet in the body of the essay we are told (p. 53) that "if there is no Material Text there is no Linguistic Text"; and just before that (p. 52), a "Linguistic Text" is said to exist "first as a Conceptual Text (thought) then as a Semiotic Text (sign), and then as a Material Text (paper and ink or some other physical inscription or production)." But it is not clear why a "Linguistic Text" must be physical if a "Semiotic Text" can be mental. Of course, Shillingsburg can define "Linguistic Text" this way if he wishes, but he seems to have defined it in two different ways. Such elementary blunders are disturbing, especially in a piece that seems in many respects to have been carefully thought out.
The full statement is that textual criticism is "the science or art of detecting and removing textual error, the discipline of establishing what the author wrote or final authorial intention, the work of purifying and preserving our cultural heritage." This definition actually limits itself to editing, describing the activities that editors have generally (before the past half-century) thought of themselves as engaging in; but "textual criticism" has usually been regarded as a much broader field — the critical examination of textual histories, whether or not an edited text was the result. Thus one could disapprove of, or not be interested in, the activities enumerated in Shillingsburg's definition and still respect, or have an interest in, the field of textual criticism.
In the passage that follows this statement, Shillingsburg pursues — mistakenly, I believe — an analogy with music. Whereas the reader of literature both constructs the "Reception Text" and engages in its interpretation, in the case of music, he says, the orchestra constructs the "Reception Text" and the listener responds to it. But this view oversimplifies the situation. To use Shillingsburg's terms, what the orchestra creates is indeed a "Reception Text," as far as the orchestra is concerned, for that text is the orchestra's interpretation of the printed score. But from the audience's point of view, the orchestra has engaged in a "Production Performance," providing a text to be responded to; what the audience makes of it is then a full-fledged "Reception Performance," involving the construction of both a "Reception Text" and a response.
Paul Morgan — in "Text and Authenticity: Examining the Terminology," Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Bulletin, 16 (1992), 141 — 147 — says that Shillingsburg's essay "certainly seems the right direction to take" and suggests the establishment of a standards committee to formulate "a common bibliographic terminology" (p. 147). Another attempt — very brief, in contrast to Shillingsburg's — to define basic terms is Rolf E. Du Rietz's "'Work,' 'Text,' and 'Document' as Bibliographical Concepts: A Short Note," in Mercurius in Trivio: Studi di Bibliografia e di Biblioteconomia per Alfredo Serrai, ed. Maria Cochetti (1993), pp. 65 — 70. Although he does not, unfortunately, deal with the relation of versions to works, he does tackle the immateriality of sequential works by distinguishing (on p. 66) an "ideal text" ("the sequence in a sequential work") from a "natural text" ("the sequence resulting from any attempt to record, reproduce, reconstruct, perform, or communicate a sequential work"). The latter, however, is still, in his view, an abstraction, since the sequence can exist apart from a physical embodiment; and he therefore feels that he must further distinguish (on p. 68) the "text of the document" (the "natural text," a sequence) from the "documentary text" (the "part of a document which consists of the 'material' text"). Since he has previously said that inked letterforms are not part of the text, but rather are part of the document, it is not clear what the "material text" consists of. One understands that he wishes to exclude typography as an intended element of the work; but since it is used to record the intangible sequence of words, I do not see how one can define the "material" text without reference to it. (His use of "ideal" seems to me to raise another problem, since he believes the fact that ideal texts "may be known to us only indirectly" makes them "like Plato's ideas.")
Eggert elaborates his thoughtful criticism of McGann in a "Coda" appended to the essay ("A Commentary on The Textual Condition by Jerome McGann," pp. 17 — 24). The heart of the criticism is that McGann, in his emphasis on texts as social events, neglects the role of individuals within that process (and the research that would lead to the determination of individual responsibility). "I fail to see," Eggert says, how McGann can insist on "the necessity of retrieving what he repeatedly calls the 'determinate circumstances'" of textual production, "while edging away from, or blurring with generalities, the most focused form of it — individual agency" (p. 23).
I concentrate on this element in Eggert's article because it is the most basic one. The question that he calls the "subject" of the last third of the essay — whether "textual bibliography" "can or should alter its methods to deal with this expanded conception of the work" (p. 10) — is a non-issue. Given the usual definition of "bibliography" to mean the study of physical evidence, it is perhaps not surprising that he should consider "textual bibliography" (if this unfortunate term can really be thought to designate a field that exists) to be "best equipped to deal with the work at the level of documentary inscription" (p. 11). But the evidence of the continuing life of a work and of readers' responses (constituting the "expanded conception of the work") would normally be in physical form also, and bibliography could handle it just as well as it can deal with initial inscription. But textual scholars have to do whatever work is necessary in any case, and it does not matter whether or not the work is called "bibliography."
I am not suggesting that Eggert is unaware of this point. He comes close to it in a footnote at the end of his "Coda," where he says, "The persistence of a language held largely in common allows a reading of the document, but the different contexts of writing and reading mean inevitably that the two 'readings' (writer's and reader's) will differ" (p. 24). Even here the act of recognizing a language is not clearly differentiated from the "readings" that follow, and I do not find that he explores the implications of this distinction for his approach.
I have tried to emphasize the place where — given only two terms — Eggert has chosen to put the dividing line between them, rather than to criticize the terms themselves, since there can be no "right" way to define the particular words "text" and "document." But I must add that his usage, if adopted, would surely produce further confusion, since "document" is so regularly used to refer to an entire physical object that limiting it to one part of an object, a physical text, forces readers constantly to make a mental adjustment when they come across the word. Besides, all the other features of the object need to be covered by some term; although Eggert is not concerned with them here, they figure prominently in many essays in textual theory, since (as Eggert understands) all of them can play a role in readers' responses. For these reasons, I have preferred to use the phrase "text of a document" (or "linguistic text of a document," when required by the context) to refer to the part of an object that Eggert calls simply "document," so that the word "document" is still available for the object as a whole. Then I would say "text of a work [or version]" to refer to the mental construct in an author's or reader's mind (rather than simply "text"), showing through the parallelism of the phrases that a linguistic sequence can exist both tangibly and intangibly. Not everyone will find these phrases satisfying, of course, but Eggert's terms are less satisfactory. The imprecision of his terms is shown several times in his own essay. In one sentence, for example, he says "material object — or what I prefer to call document" (p. 2), as if "document" stands for the whole object; but in the next sentence the word "document" is followed by the footnote I mentioned earlier, in which he says, "For the purposes of the present discussion I am primarily interested in the document considered as the physical inscriptions it bears." The word "primarily" adds another confusion, since the next sentence begins, without qualification, "I leave aside the other kinds of meaning encoded in the physical nature of the document." And that sentence ends by saying that — when one does wish to pay attention to these other physical features — "the document itself must be 'read' textually" (where "document itself" is the whole object, as again in his footnote 21). Furthermore, to speak of reading physical features "textually" is awkward in light of the special meaning given to "text" (which is itself awkwardly equated on the same page with "textual meaning").
And he rarely engages in reductive dismissals of earlier work. But an exception is this sentence near the end: "The sort of stability editorial theory aspires to is thus undercut by its own activities: it seeks to maintain an author-centered status quo, whereas the author-centered moment never existed as a real event, nor can it" (p. 58). This sentence may set a record for the density of its distortions. But to take up only the most consequential one: the moment when an author is producing a text that seems — at that moment — to be finished is certainly an "author-centered moment" (regardless of the influences on the author's thought) and is certainly "a real event."
His definition of textual criticism early in the essay is an appealing proleptic glimpse of his final vision: "a means and a process by which careful observation of textual variations and textual contexts will lead us towards a better understanding of why those variations should exist and what they might mean both for ourselves and for others" (p. 32). But "textual variations and textual contexts" implies a more delimited sense of "text" than is ultimately offered.
This formulation of course accommodates instability, since all objects change over time. As Heller notes, it is "only by convention" that we can think of whole stable objects at all (p. 22); an object is not "an enduring spatial hunk of matter" but "a spatiotemporal hunk of matter," the parts of which are constantly changing (p. 4).
This division is effectively undercut by the word "usually" in another of his sentences: the meaning of a text, he says, "is not usually got by any act of interpretation" (p. 339). His justification for "usually" is the situation in which one employs "contextual clues" to discover the meaning of a text in an unknown language. But there is slippage here in what "meaning" signifies; this use of context to determine textual meaning is not unlike the resolution of ambiguity, which Currie places within the interpretation of works. His whole analysis would have been helped by a concept of "text of the work," which would allow him to show the role of meaning in constituting wording at the level of work. Early in the article he says that an author's intention to spell correctly leads us to correct the text (p. 326), and this would have been a natural place to introduce the idea of "text of the work," but he does not do so, leaving open the question of the status of the corrected text (and the relation of "texts" to tangible objects).
For example, in his discussion of literary works on pages 167 — 171, he does recognize that authors sometimes pay attention to the details of physical production and that readers are not always interested in authorial intention; but he does not develop either point or explore what role physical features can play in studying a literary work. When he says that "one copy of a novel provides as good an access to the artifact/art work as any other" (p. 167), he is not making quite so incautious a statement as one might at first think, if one takes the context into account; what he means is that if the text is as the author intended it to be, then one copy is as good as another. Even so, all the statement accomplishes is to say that literary works are intangible entities (or, in his terms, "abstract artifacts"), and the ensuing discussion does not proceed very far in examining the relation of the "idealized artifact" to the "physical exemplar" (p. 170).
This is not the only problem with Gracia's distinction between "text" and "work." He defines "work" as "the meaning of certain texts for which society has developed rules so they fulfill a specific cultural function that renders them works" (p. 68). In defining works as meanings, he does not always avoid the danger of undervaluing the role of form in contributing to the meaning of verbal works. Although he cites the rules for the sonnet form as an example of the socially determined rules that are essential to his definition of "work" ("The meaning of a sonnet is a work because the text adheres to certain rules that are supposed to apply to sonnets" [p. 67]), he then claims that such formal considerations do not apply to "works devoid of artistic and literary quality" (p. 69). He is therefore reduced to claiming that "textual works are the meanings of texts, except in cases where the texts have an artistic dimension, for then the works are the meanings plus whatever elements are essential for the identity of the works in question" (p. 69) — a statement that untenably separates meaning from form and presupposes a firm distinction between literary and nonliterary works. (This may be an appropriate place to call attention to a pair of essays that — although written by a lecturer in English — deal with philosophical concepts: John Winter's "Textual Criticism and Ethics: An Inquiry" and "The Application of Ethics to Textual Criticism," Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Bulletin, 18 [1994], 187 — 198, and 19 [1995], 31 — 46. Winter's aim, as stated in the second piece, is "to recognize the human qualities of the conditions in which textual critics deal" [p. 42].)
Though it is not without its share of questionable statements, such as the anachronistic idea that the "New Bibliography" was named in reaction to the "New Criticism" (p. 2), or the notion that until recently the established bibliographical journals were inhospitable to theory (p. 9), or the suggestion that Gabler's edition of Ulysses is important because "for the first time it subjected a major work of literature written in English to the sort of genetic examination that had hitherto been primarily used on European texts" (p. 16) — a claim that can hardly be defended in view of Hayford and Sealts's 1962 edition of Billy Budd, Sailor (to name an edition with a running genetic text; but one must remember that texts presented in other ways can still reflect "genetic examination").
These contributions, by W. Speed Hill, Mary-Jo Kline, Joel Myerson, David J. Nordloh, and Donald H. Reiman, are gathered under the heading "The Politics of Editing" in Text, 6 (1994), 91 — 132. Myerson's piece ("Editing and Politics") is a revised version of his 1990 presidential address to the Association for Documentary Editing, published as "The Politics of Editing" in Documentary Editing, 13 (1991), 1 — 3. Another paper in this genre delivered at an ADE meeting is W. Speed Hill's "The Editor on the Iceberg: or, Just How Far South Is the Gulf Stream?", Documentary Editing, 12 (1990), 18 — 21. And Gary Taylor spoke on "The Rhetorics of Reaction" at the 1988 Toronto conference (his extended paper was not published until 1994, in Randall McLeod's anthology Crisis in Editing, pp. 19 — 59), where he described textual criticism as "an apology for, or a prolegomenon to, the exercise of power": "Editing exercises power, and it can only be understood by an analysis of power" (p. 19). (Some of the recent detailed studies in the history of editing deal more effectively with the cultural and ideological contexts of specific editions; see, for example, Peter Seary's Lewis Theobald and the Editing of Shakespeare [1990] and Neil Fraistat's "Illegitimate Shelley: Radical Piracy and the Textual Edition as Cultural Performance," PMLA, 109 [1994], 409 — 423.)
For some background on the German and French developments, their relation to textual criticism in English, and the few pre-1990 discussions in English, see my "Textual Criticism and Literary Sociology" (see note 1 above), pp. 112 — 118. There has been a great deal of activity in textual study in Germany and France during the early 1990s but little discussion of it in English (aside from the forthcoming anthology on German work mentioned in note 64 above). The fullest treatment of the French school is Almuth Grésillon's Éléments de critique génétique: Lire les manuscrits modernes (1994). In addition to the German and French periodicals Editio: Internationales Jahrbuch für Editionswissenschaft (1987 — ) and Genesis: Revue internationale de critique génétique (1992 — ), there have been several anthologies in recent years: Sur la génétique textuelle, ed. D. G. Bevan and P. M. Wetherill (1990); L'Écriture et ses doubles; genèse et variation textuelle, ed. Daniel Ferrer and Jean-Louis Lebrave (1991); Zu Werk und Text: Beiträge zur Textologie, ed. Siegfried Scheibe and Christel Laufer (1991); and Les manuscrits des écrivains, ed. Louis Hay (1993). (Hay was responsible for several earlier anthologies: Avant-texte, texte, aprèstexte [edited with Péter Nagy, 1982], La manuscrit inachevé: écriture, création, communication [1986], La naissance du texte [1989].)
Such as Jo Ann Boydston's address quoted in the next paragraph (from Text, 5 [1991], 1 — 13); Clayton J. Delery's "The Subject Presumed to Know: Implied Authority and Editorial Apparatus," Text, 5 (1991), 63 — 80; and Fredson Bowers's "Why Apparatus?", Text, 6 (1994), 11 — 19. (The insistent nature of the subject of apparatus is suggested by the fact that it was on Bowers's mind to the end; his article in the 1994 Text was a paper he had been scheduled to read before the Society for Textual Scholarship on 11 April 1991, the day he died.) Annotation is the subject of such articles as Ann Middleton, "Life in the Margins, or, What's an Annotator to Do?", in New Directions in Textual Studies (see note 40 above), pp. 167 — 183; Patrick S. White, "Black and White and Read All Over: A Meditation on Footnotes," Text, 5 (1991), 81 — 90; Richard Knowles, "Variorum Commentary," Text, 6 (1994), 35 — 47; Ronald Schuchard, "Yeats's Letters, Eliot's Lectures: Toward a New Focus on Annotation," Text, 6 (1994), 287 — 306; and James Woolley, "Annotation: Some Guiding Considerations," East-Central Intelligencer [East-Central/American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies], n.s. 8.1 (January 1994), 11 — 16 (as well as Stephen A. Barney's 1991 anthology, Annotation and Its Texts, commented on above). An example of a theoretical article that includes a discussion of apparatus is D. C. Greetham's "Editorial and Critical Theory: From Modernism to Postmodernism" (see note 59 above), which attempts to defend, in its opening pages, the notion that forms of apparatus are implied by theoretical positions. (For a somewhat different approach, as well as a fuller discussion of apparatus than I have included in the present article, see my "Textual Criticism and Literary Sociology" [see note 2 above], pp. 133 — 140.) Greetham's discussion of the "postmodernist advantages" of "computer hypertext and its myriad permutations" (p. 16) does not keep in focus the distinction between using editions for historical study and using them for nonhistorical reading.
This article, from Romance Philology, 45 (1991), 123 — 148, is part of the special issue on the textual criticism of medieval literature that is briefly discussed as an anthology above. Jerome McGann has been an active advocate of hypertext — indeed hypermedia — editions. For a recent outline of his approach, see his "The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rosetti: A Hypermedia Research Archive," Text, 7 (1994), 95 — 105. Many of his discussions of the implications of hypermedia have also appeared on the Internet. See also Hypermedia and Literary Studies, ed. Paul Delany and George P. Landow (1991).
Including every variant page within an edition, resulting from stop-press alteration or the cancellation and substitution of leaves or gatherings.
Although linking is an enormous advance over what had previously been available for locating variants and assessing them in context, there is still a need in electronic editions for lists of variants. The ability immediately to locate a variant in a different text from the one being read at a given moment does not obviate a record that provides an overview of all the differences in all the texts (which can of course be usefully subdivided into categories — that is, coded so that the variants can be retrieved according to various classifications).
These ideas about electronic editions — along with the point that genetic study, which regularly limits itself to documentary texts, is in fact usually interested in intended versions — are set forth more fully in my "Critical Editions, Hypertexts, and Genetic Criticism" (see note 20 above).
The wording of this sentence rests on my definition of "primary record": "a physical object produced or used at the past moment that is the subject of one's inquiry." This definition appears in my "The Future of Primary Records," forthcoming in volume 58 (1996) of the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science, ed. Allen Kent. It also underlies the "Statement on the Significance of Primary Records" adopted by the Modern Language Association of America and forthcoming in Profession 95.
All three of these facsimiles have recently been discussed in detailed examinations of the nature of facsimiles: Hinman's and Warren's in Joseph A. Dane's "'Ideal Copy' versus 'Ideal Texts': The Application of Bibliographical Description to Facsimiles," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada, 33.1 (1995), 31 — 50; Vander Meulen's in James McLaverty's "Facsimiles and the Bibliographer: Pope's Dunciad," Review, 15 (1993), 1 — 15. Dane's piece, as its title suggests, is particularly relevant here, since it links the idea of eclectic editing (said by some to result in "ideal texts") with the production of composite facsimiles (said by some to result in "ideal copies") and thus raises the whole issue of the historical value of eclecticism.
In "Editing without a Copy-Text," SB, 47 (1994), 1 — 22, I tried to outline an approach for focusing on whatever set or sets of circumstances one prefers when preparing critical texts. Its rationale was offered as a replacement for Greg's, in two senses: the essay pushes editorial reliance on judgment to its logical conclusion (which Greg — and, indeed, Bowers as well — did not quite reach) by dispensing with the idea of a "copy-text"; and the approach is equally applicable to any editorial emphasis, not simply that of final authorial intention.
| | |