 | |  |
Textual Criticism at the Millennium
by
G. THOMAS TANSELLE
Textual criticism is one of the few scholarly fields that can be talked about in terms of millennia, for it has been practiced in an organized fashion for at least twenty-three hundred years. A millennial year is a natural point for retrospection and stock-taking, and the most recent one, marking the turn to the twenty-first century, came at a moment fundamentally unlike any other in the long history of the field. Although differing approaches to perennial issues might have been in the ascendent at whatever past moments one chooses to look at, all those moments—before the last decade or two of the twentieth century— would have shared a dominant concern for authorial intention as the basis for editing. During the last part of the twentieth century, however, a focus on texts as social products came to characterize the bulk of the discussion of textual theory, if not editions themselves. For the first time, the majority of writings on textual matters expressed a lack of interest in, and often active disapproval of, approaching texts as the products of individual creators; and it promoted instead the forms of texts that emerged from the social process leading to public distribution, forms that were therefore accessible to readers.
This dramatic shift has produced some benefits, but it has not been an unmixed blessing. Both the turn away from the author and the emphasis on textual instability reflect trends in literary and cultural criticism and thus are evidence of the growing interconnections between fields that for too long had little influence on each other. Furthermore, the attention that has now been directed toward the nonauthorial contributions to textual constitution (and hence toward the effect of design features on readers' responses) is long overdue. That authors do not generally act alone to bring their works to the public has of course always been understood, as has the fact that publicly available texts—however much they may have departed from their authors' intentions—are the texts that were historically influential. But far less had been written on these matters than on the importance of what authors intended, and it was high time that this imbalance be redressed.
These welcome developments, however, came at a price. One is that the prose of many textual critics has been infiltrated with the fashionable buzz-words of literary theory and with a style of writing that often substitutes complexity of expression for careful thought. Another is the notion that recognizing the importance of socially produced texts involves rejecting the study of authorial intentions. Those who, quite correctly, have called attention to the value of studying social texts have unfortunately often undercut their accomplishment by denying the historical significance of the earliest stages in the history of every text and by persisting in the belief that labeling authorial intention "Romantic" and "idealistic" effectively suggests its unworthiness. Still another problem is that the emphasis on documentary texts has led to a considerable amount of unfounded criticism of the activity of critical editing and the "mediation" practiced by scholarly editors. I shall illustrate these points here by examining in some detail many of the theoretical writings on textual criticism and scholarly editing published in the English language during the last five years or so of the twentieth century—writings that form an index to the state of textual criticism at the millennium.[1]
There is no shortage of material to look at, for the quantity of books and essays in this field has shown no decline from the high level it reached during the preceding several decades. Books have of course appeared from a variety of publishers, but one publishing effort worth singling out is the University of Michigan Press series "Editorial Theory and Literary Criticism," begun in 1993 under the general editorship of George Bornstein. Now numbering more than a dozen volumes, it includes some of the most important books in the field during this period, such as Joseph Grigely's Textualterity (1995) and Peter L. Shillingsburg's Resisting Texts (1997).[2] Essays on textual criticism also come out regularly both in periodicals and, increasingly, in anthologies. As always, the bibliographical-society journals are a more likely outlet than the journals of literary criticism and theory; and since 1984 the annual volume of the Society for Textual Scholarship, Text, has been a major venue. Although it has usefully tried to be interdisciplinary from the
There were probably, however, more essays published in anthologies than in periodicals. The explosion of anthologies of original essays in this field in the early 1990s did not abate in the later part of the decade, with an average of about five appearing each year, some of them deriving from conferences.[4] The Michigan series alone added six anthologies during this period;[5] the long-running University of Toronto "Conference on Editorial Problems" series was also augmented by six;[6] and the series of Beihefte published by the German journal Editio included one anthology entirely in English.[7] Another series was created by W. Speed Hill's publication in 1998 of a second volume of papers delivered at the Renaissance English Text Society meetings. Two other scholars who had previously edited anthologies on textual matters, Philip Cohen and Paul Eggert, brought out second ones, and D. C. Greetham was responsible for two during this period.[8] A few volumes were focused on specific areas,
It also happens that during the second half of the 1990s several contributions were made to three basic genres of scholarly publication that support textual scholarship. One introductory textbook was brought out in a revised edition;[13] four cumulated specialized checklists of scholarship were published;[14] and four guides to the transcription of manuscripts appeared.[15] Another feature of this period was the mounting criticism directed at librarians for their willingness to allow microfilms and digitizations to be substituted for originals. This matter is vital to textual scholars, who must have access to original physical evidence no matter
I
Although the bulk of the writing on textual criticism has historically emerged from the fields of classics, religion, and literature, one characteristic of the last years of the twentieth century was a broader awareness of the textual problems that exist in other areas and a greater interchange of ideas among textual scholars in different disciplines. This trend began considerably earlier, for interest in critical editing of the work of philosophers was reflected in the early development of the Center for Editions of American Authors (with the first volume of the John Dewey edition appearing in 1967), and the founding of the Association for Documentary Editing in 1978 grew out of discussions between editors of literary works and those of the papers of historical figures. More recently, the establishment (in 1993) of the Association for Textual Scholarship in Art History symbolized the growing recognition of the importance of textual work in all fields that use verbal texts. And the Toronto series of anthologies has made this point repeatedly over the years by devoting volumes to the editing of writings on science, economics, exploration, and music.[18]
Works from oral traditions are of course partly verbal, but they contain many other elements, such as intonation, gesture, and setting; and the attempt to recapture such works from tangible texts has been an active field in the late twentieth century, owing much to the excellent writings of John Miles Foley, whose subtle and comprehensive vision links the scholarly efforts in diverse traditions.[19] In the textual study of
The cinema, which has obvious similarities with the drama, nevertheless offers a very different textual situation, since film records the nonverbal as well as the verbal aspects of the work, which thus do not have to be reconstructed from a script.[21] Partly for this reason, textual criticism of cinematic works has not involved extensive debate (unlike the field of drama) over whether the verbal parts should be treated as literature. Yet literature and cinema do share many textual issues, and one example of a (primarily literary) textual critic who has brought the two together is Hershel Parker, who in 1995 contrasted the interest of film critics in the search for directors' thwarted intentions with the prevailing lack of interest by literary critics in going behind published texts to authorial intentions.[22] Music, though often without verbal elements, is like literature in its use of notation on paper, and there has been a long tradition of editorial work in music. A sign of the growing interchange of ideas between the two fields was the election of Philip Gossett (in charge of the Verdi editorial project) as president of the Society for Textual Scholarship for 1993-95 and the publication of his presidential address in Text. [23]
It is interesting to learn, from Rolf E. Du Rietz's autobiographical account of the development (or "discovery," as he sees it) of his definition of "text," that he was first inspired (some fifty years ago) to think about textual matters by his love of music and cinema. Since then, as his many publications attest, his thinking has encompassed all fields, but his definition of "text" is restricted to works that use intangible media: "A text is the sequence in a sequential work."[24] In his view, to apply "text" to nonsequential, or "stationary," works like paintings "makes the text concept next to meaningless or at any rate useless, turning the concept of `textual criticism' into sheer mockery" (pp. 53-54). It is not clear, however, why one should exclude from textual criticism such activities as studying drafts or versions of paintings (including those uncovered by X-ray) and deciding what the restoration of a fresco should involve. One could of course think up a different term for this purpose, but to do so would obscure the essential identity of these pursuits and those of the scholars traditionally called textual critics. Acceptance of this point is illustrated by the presence of James Beck (a critic of the Sistine Chapel restoration) on the board of the Society for Textual Scholarship in the 1990s and indeed by the Society's inclusion of the field within its interdisciplinary mandate.[25]
As a way of representing the recent discussion of textual matters in nonverbal works, I shall concentrate here on two books about music and one on visual art. The earlier of the books on music, John Caldwell's Editing Early Music, is devoted almost entirely to practical matters, such as transcription and presentation. Its "second edition" of 1995 differs from the original 1985 text only in the incorporation of some minor corrections, the addition of an eight-page postscript, and the updating of the "Select Bibliography." Although the advice on translating the notation systems of earlier periods into a modern one will be helpful to anyone undertaking such a task, the theoretical issues that underlie modernizing, as well as all other aspects of editing, are given scant attention, largely confined to the first five pages of the opening chapter (and not significantly amplified in the postscript). In these pages, Caldwell offers some sound advice, recognizing, for example, the dangers of microfilm and the necessity for examining multiple copies of printed editions (p. 3); and he understands, as many editors do not, that the presence of an editorial emendation in one of the source documents "will not automatically validate it, nor will its absence elsewhere automatically invalidate it" (p. 5). Despite these encouraging glimmers, his discussion as a whole has not been carefully thought out. Even on the relatively untheoretical matter of modernizing notation, for instance, the basis for his position is not clear. He insists on modernized notation ("There is no place for `scholarly' editions which use barely legible forms of notation" [p. 1]),[26] and yet he believes that the "requirements of performers and scholars are—or should be—identical" (p. v). He focuses on what he calls a "scholarly performing edition" (p. 2)—"performable as it stands" (p. 1)—but admits a "bias" toward "forms of notation closer to the original than is sometimes favoured" (p. 12); he presumably approves the "increasing tendency to revert to original forms of notation," an approach justified, he believes, by "the increasing literacy of performers" (p. 44). He never gets to the heart of the matter. Nor does he—on the more central question of the evaluation of variants—see the fallacy of the "best-text" approach. When there is "insufficient evidence" to reconstruct an archetype from stemmatic relationships, a preferable way is "to select a single source and to emend it where necessary" (p. 4); this is "the most objective method of presentation" (p. 5), avoiding "a haphazard conflation based on pragmatic or subjective criteria" (p. 4). Of course, no one would defend a "haphazard" approach; what is missing here is a recognition of the role of informed judgment in reducing the haphazardness of individual documentary texts.
The other book, James Grier's The Critical Editing of Music (1996), is a more thoughtful work and is admirable in many respects. Among its primary virtues is its recognition that a comprehensive introductory guide requires thorough discussion of textual theory and the rationale of editing and needs to be more than a compendium of suggestions about the presentation of texts and textual evidence (though generally sensible discussions of these matters are included). Grier understands that everything depends on the quality of thought that goes into the definition of a textual goal and the assessment of evidence. And he is to be applauded for his emphasis on the centrality of interpretation and judgment to the editorial enterprise. When one considers how many people in all fields (by no means music alone) still think of editing as essentially a mechanical task, one can hardly complain about Grier's insistent repetitions of the point that it is a critical activity. He begins (p. xiii) and ends (p. 183) the book with the statement that editing is "an act of criticism," and the reader is never allowed to forget it.[27] Nor can a reader avoid confronting the fact that editing is a form of historical study and that a prerequisite for it is immersion in the historical context of the work to be edited. Furthermore, Grier brings to his discussion a thorough knowledge of the history of music editing (and of writing about it), and he has clearly read widely in the textual criticism of verbal works.
With so much that is praiseworthy about Grier's general approach, it is regrettable that his book contains some lapses that will exasperate careful readers. Perhaps the key one is the way in which he rejects a focus on authorial intention in favor of Jerome McGann's social approach, which is, he says, "the one theory that I believe holds promise for editing either literature or music" (p. 108). His argument simply repeats what are by now standard points, without examining them critically enough to expose their fallaciousness. He says, for example, that by "rejecting the concept of final authorial intention, and replacing it with his theory of the social nature of the work of art, McGann transforms the process of editing from a psychological endeavour . . . into a historical undertaking" (p. 17). The trouble with this kind of statement is that it tries to make pairings out of overlapping concepts. In the first pair ("authorial intention"/"social nature"), intention is common to both elements,
It is strange that Grier does not make this point himself, since he certainly understands the indeterminacy of historical reconstruction and makes some excellent comments on it. Near the end, for instance, he says that sometimes "the truth is simply not ascertainable" but that nevertheless a hypothetical reconstruction by a person who can draw on "intensive and extensive study of the work and its historical context" is valuable (p. 182). If, instead, he had seen that his own thinking does not support the rejection of intention, he would also have understood that an interest in the social construction of art is not incompatible with an interest in the initial creators of artworks, for the latter simply represent the earliest of the successive individuals involved in the evolution of a work. Grier's concern for accommodating changing performance practices leads him to say, rightly, that "for many works, each source is a viable record of one form of the work" (p. 109). The authorially intended text or texts are other such forms, and the job of reconstructing them is not different in kind from the task (recognized by Grier in the same passage) of locating errors in the surviving texts of socially produced forms.
The fact that music is a performing art understandably causes Grier to be interested in textual variations that result from the conventions of performance at different times, just as students of drama properly have the same concern. But he is on shaky ground when he tries to place a firm line between music and nondramatic verbal works. He argues that, in
Another example of confused thinking is Grier's repeated assertion that readings can be assigned to one of three categories: "good readings, reasonable competing readings, and clear errors" (e.g., p. 30; cf. p. 98). The third is appropriately defined as readings that are "deemed impossible within the stylistic boundaries of the piece" (p. 31)—a definition that makes clear (as do the variations on it throughout the book) the dependence of the concept on the judgment of individual editors. But the other two are at best inappropriately named and at worst misconceived. The choice of the two words "good" and "reasonable" suggests that a distinction is being made, and "good" would seem to convey a higher level of certainty than "reasonable." But a plausible reading that does not have a plausible (or "reasonable") competing variant in the extant documents is not necessarily a more certain reading than one that does have, as Housman never tired of pointing out. Indeed, two plausible competing variants could both be right (for example, each could have been the author's at a different time), and the plausible uncontested
When we turn to visual art, we encounter Joseph Grigely's remarkable book Textualterity: Art, Theory, and Textual Criticism (1995), and we are on a very different level. This book does not simply try to apply literary textual criticism to visual art but rather builds on what has been said in the literary field in order to take textual criticism a step forward, and thus to make a contribution to thinking about all cultural productions, not just visual art and literature. Two chapters had been previously published, and readers of those essays would have been prepared for the intelligence and clarity of the book, which affords the rare pleasure of sustained argument that constantly illuminates its subject—partly through its wonderful array of examples and partly through its sensitivity to language.[30] One might think that any book with a title like Textualterity could not reflect much linguistic taste, and I must admit that the title is one of Grigely's mistakes, for it suggests a flashiness and trendiness that I do not find in the work itself. To be sure, some fashionable jargon does occur in the book, but generally it is employed in a matter-of-fact way, as a precise means of saying something: he uses it
His coinage textualterity does not mean what one might have expected it to mean. One might think that it refers to the otherness of texts, to the fact that texts are not (at least literally) living organisms. But it actually means almost the opposite, referring to the ways in which texts participate in life, changing over time both in themselves and in the roles they are made to play. The opening sentence of the introduction is a straightforward announcement of the subject: "This book is about the transmission of cultural texts, and about how individual works of art undergo change as part of the process of being disseminated in culture." Textualterity encompasses "textual transformations and textual difference." His "underlying premise" is that "the uniqueness of the unique art object or literary text is constantly undergoing continuous and discontinuous transience as it ages, is altered by editors and conservators, and is resituated or reterritorialized in different publications and exhibition spaces." It is inevitable that an investigation of the textual criticism of visual art should focus on changing appearances: the work, being physical, changes as it ages whether human beings do anything to it or not, and when they do intervene in the text their action is irreversible. Those dealing with literature do not face quite the same conditions, since in most cases the aging of a book does not alter the verbal text within it and since an editor who alters a verbal text by producing a new edition does not thereby prevent anyone from experiencing the previous text. If this essential difference between literature and visual art dictates the direction of the book, Grigely makes clear that he does not regard it in any sense as a burden or a liability. Of course we have to accept impermanence in visual art whether we like it or not, but Grigely shows why we should relish and celebrate it, and he turns this attitude back on literature. To Grigely, works of verbal and visual art are alike in being affected by their physical contexts (a particular book design or exhibition gallery) and in being disseminated in variant texts (editions or artbooks and postcards).
That he regards a postcard of a painting, for example, as one of the texts of that painting shows the extent to which he bypasses traditional ontological conceptions of art in order to illuminate texts as they make
Anyone who reads through Grigely's introduction will be in a position to make two observations. One is that Grigely's focus is on textual criticism rather than editing, on understanding textual situations rather than on taking particular actions based on that understanding. Second, authorial intention has no favored status in his thinking since it is not more important than many other factors in the production of culturally influential textual transformations. That Grigely does not explicitly make these two points is a strength of his essay: he is not, in other words, against something but is expressing the reasons for taking a particular approach. One of the few false steps in these early pages is his statement that art "does not depend on maintaining a certain intention or condition" (p. 1). Readers familiar with recent textual debates will hear this as a response to an adversary behind the scenes—though the advocates of authorial intention would not in fact claim that works "depend" on intention, since we are all surrounded by instances of the power of unintended forms. This use of "depend" is a minor—a very minor—flaw, and
All of this book exemplifies this point except for one chapter—the first, immediately following his admirable introduction. He had the notion—not unreasonably but not necessarily correctly—that he should offer some account of traditional, literature-based textual criticism as the "groundwork" for his discussion of visual art in the later chapters. Having set himself this task, it is not surprising that he would do it in an original way; what is surprising is that his treatment, fascinating though it is, serves his purpose so poorly. The chapter, entitled "Textual Eugenics," first provides a succinct, and intensely interesting, history of the Anglo-American eugenics movement and then examines twentiethcentury textual criticism and editing in terms of "parallels between eugenic ideology and editorial practices" (p. 11). Even when his argument involves a comparison between Hitler and Fredson Bowers, it is not objectionable in the way one might think. There are, however, two objections that I would lodge against it. First, the analogy between eugenics and the kind of editing that aims to purify texts (in the name of authorial intention) is insufficiently exact to be carried out productively to the length it is here. Grigely recognizes that texts are not people (pp. 30-31), but he maintains that the relation between people and the actions they take toward texts (the products of other people) validates his analogy. Nevertheless, it is hard to get around the fact that eugenicists would like to eradicate the impure, whereas literary editors who wish to construct pure texts do not try to destroy the impure texts that formed the basis of their historical research, or indeed to prohibit anyone from reading them. The analogy that Grigely attempts to elaborate is not ultimately illuminating; and if its purpose is to promote disdain for intentionalist editing, it is unworthy of Grigely.
My other objection to the eugenics analogy is that, as executed here, it encourages a blurring of the important distinction between textual criticism and editing. Grigely fully understands the distinction. And yet he makes statements like this: "Textual criticism is not, as some would have it, about utopias; it is about real texts in a real world" (p. 32). There have of course been many scholars who engaged in textual criticism in order to use the results as the basis for eliminating nonauthorial readings from texts, but they recognized that this editorial activity was not the only action that could be based on the prior research—that their investigation of "real texts" did not dictate the kind of editing they chose to engage in. (The fact that textual criticism involves criticism—judgment—does not distinguish it from all other forms of historical research.)
Indeed, it is a puzzle that he should regard intentionalist editing as undersirable in the first place. His general attitude, as expressed elsewhere in the book, is an openness to whatever happens to texts, recognizing that all textual transformations reflect a particular set of cultural forces operating at a given moment. Yet here he complains about "textual critics" (i.e., critical editors), who—he says—have "historically stigmatized this inevitable transience" (p. 28) instead of understanding that the "plurality of readings" is a "normative condition" (p. 29). He seems willfully to ignore the fact that a desire for fixity is also a normative condition and that the intentionalist urge is just as natural as the various other motivations for textual alteration. Why does he not regard intentionalist editing by professional scholars as an inevitable, and understandable, cultural manifestation, and thus as a phenomenon that can be productively studied? He complains that the "elisions concomitant with eclectic editing, while making hypothetical texts real, also make real texts hypothetical by effacing their presence and, by default, their historical drift" (p. 30). This statement is of course not literally true, but the more important point to be made about it is that intentionalist eclecticism is itself a manifestation of the historical drift of texts. (How could it fail to be? It is not outside of history.) Grigely, quite properly, does not deplore the Reader's Digest condensed version of Tom Sawyer, for example, but rather examines it for its cultural implications (pp. 39-46). To criticize intentionalist scholarly activity as "institutionally sanctioned forgetting" (p. 30) simply does not fit with the point of view of the rest of the book. Every textual transformation effaces the past in its own way and is sanctioned by one institution or another. Although Grigely's chapter on textual eugenics contains many valuable
Given the way the chapter is written, readers would do better to skip over it and move from the introduction to the chapter entitled "Textualterity," and on to the end of the book. If they do so, they will find a wise and penetrating account of how textual consciousness enriches cultural experience. His focus on visual art, with its physical basis, leads him to emphasize the relevance, as we experience a work, of the variant images of it that we have in our minds (arising from reproductions or previous viewings, perhaps in different settings). On this basis he can plausibly claim that the alteration or destruction of a painting does not really efface the text that existed prior to those actions because the "memorial text" will have a continuing existence (p. 64). He is obviously breaking down the boundaries between works of art and the rest of life. Indeed, his extended, and fascinating, discussion (pp. 157-177) of Jackson Pollock's Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist) is entitled "Outside yet Inside" and examines how the National Gallery space where it is displayed, the adjacent paintings, the moving crowds of observers, the title on the museum label, the label itself, and the bug caught in the paint (with the S-shaped path it left) are related to, or become part of, the work.[32]
In the course of his commentary, when pointing out that Clement Greenberg contributed the title Lavender Mist, Grigely recognizes that intention is a part of history: "textual differences need to be understood in relation to their sources," for otherwise one "would be unmaking cultural history" (p. 173). He is trying to make the recovery of historical stages in the text of an artwork comparable to that of a literary work, and his approach to art can in turn be applied to literature. In both, "intentions are inevitably shared and contested" (p. 174), and the "inside" of
II
Another characteristic of writing on textual criticism in English in the last years of the twentieth century was an increase in awareness of editorial traditions in non-English-speaking countries. Within those countries—especially France, Germany, and Italy—editorial theory has been a flourishing area of discussion, and numerous books, anthologies, and articles, as well as editions, have resulted. But knowledge of the positions taken in these voluminous publications has been slow in coming to English-speaking scholars. Studies in Bibliography took the lead in 1975 by publishing an essay by Hans Zeller explaining the German interest in versions; but then a dozen years passed before English-speaking readers were given much more information. The 1987 volume of Text and the 1988 volume of Studies in Bibliography each contained four essays in English by prominent French and German textual theorists.[33] And it was also in 1987 that the German journal Editio began publication, carrying the word "Internationales" in its subtitle; although most of its contents have been in German, it has also published articles in English and has even included in its series of Beihefte a large anthology of essays in English on problems encountered by "editors or critical users of English editions" (Problems of Editing, edited by Christa Jansohn, 1999). The elaborately produced French journal Génésis (1992- ), being the organ of a single school of editing, critique génétique, has been more parochial; but English-speaking readers can gain an idea of its aims from Graham Falconer's assessment of the first six numbers.[34]
The anthology on German editing—Contemporary German Editorial Theory (1995), edited by Hans Walter Gabler, George Bornstein, and Gillian Borland Pierce—contains translations, published for the first time, of ten essays originally published in German from 1971 to 1991. Three (by Hans Zeller, Miroslav Červenka, and Elisabeth HöpkerHersberg) are from the historic 1971 anthology Texte und Varianten and three (by Zeller, Gunter Martens, and Henning Boetius) from a special 1975 number of LiLi, and the final four are essays by Siegfried Scheibe (1982, 1990-91), Martens (1989), and Gerhard Seidel (1982). Thus the three major figures—Martens, Scheibe, and Zeller—are represented by two essays apiece, and the whole selection serves well enough to give English-speaking readers some sense of the development of German
Near the beginning of his introduction, for example, Gabler says that the "salient points" of current Anglo-American textual criticism were anticipated by German theory, which "radically holds . . . that eclecticism is unsound as a method, and that authorial intention is unknowable or unstable as a guiding principle for critical editing" (p. 2). A value of the newly translated essays, he believes, is to show these positions "argued in their original intellectual environment." That is a historical aim, but if the essays are to be relevant in the present state of the discussion, Gabler cannot ignore the replies that have been made to criticisms of eclecticism and intention; he does not of course have to accept those replies, but he must bring them into the discussion and, if he rejects them, show why they are faulty. Thus the two adjectives that he applies to intention, "unknowable" and "unstable," raise questions that cannot be avoided. To call intention "unknowable" usually means that it cannot be found concretely expressed in a document and that it is therefore "ahistoric" (a word Gabler applies to "the ideality of the author" [p. 4]). But historical scholarship in other areas is not limited to the "knowable" in this sense; most historical events, like intended texts, must be reconstructed, and we can never be certain about all their details. To attempt such reconstructions is not to be ahistorical, unhistorical, or anti-historical. It is hard to imagine any historian, outside of the field of textual studies, who would wish to claim that every extrapolation from tangible evidence is unsound. And the point about intention being "unstable" is inappropriate in two ways: the implication that intentionalist editors do not recognize the shifting nature of authors' intentions is incorrect; and the instability of intentions, which is a primary reason for the variation among textual versions, is in fact at the heart of the approach Gabler advocates.
His belief that eclecticism is "unsound" stems from the same illogical notion that the only historical texts are those that exist in surviving documents.[37] And the German focus on those tangible texts leads him to
But Gabler says more: he refers to the text presented in full as an "edited text," with "emendation functioning exclusively to remove the textual error." How can he not see that this acceptance of emendation undercuts his whole position? The text presented in full is no longer the text of a material document, and the difference between it and an intentionalist editor's critical text is not a difference in kind: any correction of "error" involves intention, and the fallacy of limiting oneself to only one kind of error (however defined, which is of course a difficult problem in itself) has been exposed many times. Underlying this whole jumble, as with most complaints about eclecticism, is an untenable equation of "version" and "document": when an editor emends the text of an earlier document with certain variants present in a later one, the result
Gabler's acceptance of corrections is in fact an acceptance of eclecticism. Why he is willing to countenance any alteration of documentary texts is incomprehensible, since he views an edition strictly as a compendium of documentary information. The "German scholarly edition," he claims, "is aimed less at the reader than at the user of the edition"; the test of its success is "how well it encodes the text in the history of its material writing and transmission by an appropriate and adequate apparatus format" (p. 7). The shocking distinction between "reader" and "user" suggests that reading and textual study are separate activities, whereas in truth they are inextricable: textual scholarship depends on close reading, and the richest kind of reading grows out of a knowledge of a work's textual history and variation. Scholarly editions in the intentionalist tradition recognize this connection by including critically reconstructed reading texts (the results of the editors' reading) in the same volumes as the historical data needed for the informed critical reading of those texts. The difference between these editions and the German editions described by Gabler is simply that the latter do not take this additional step; both are in agreement on the importance of the historical record. Gabler's incoherent discussion, with its eagerness to find fault with the so-called Anglo-American approach, gives no sense of the real relationship between these two traditions.
Since Gabler's summary of the essays in the volume is accurate, the essays themselves are unfortunately as full of problems as Gabler's introduction is. For example, Zeller's 1971 essay is translated as saying that authorial intention "should be replaced by the concept of authorization"; the "editor's duty is to determine and reproduce authorized versions" (p. 25). Yet the rule that "authorization is binding" can be relaxed "in the case of certain instances termed textual faults," which "entitle and oblige the editor to textual intervention (emendation)" (p. 28). This concession recognizes that authorized texts as they stand in documents do not always reflect what the authors meant to authorize (that is, they do not always reflect the authors' intentions); but if an editor is allowed to make any emendations for the purpose of restoring the author's intention, there would seem to be no logical way of arguing that only obvious errors can be corrected or of saying, in effect, that one should take only a first step toward reconstructing an intended text and not go as far as one can to bring it about. Certainly the text Zeller sanctions is no longer a "reproduction" of a documentary text. In Zeller's
That this anthology has its limitations was pointed out by Bodo Plachta (author of Editionswissenschaft, 1997) in an essay for the 1999 volume of Text: [39] he says that the collection gives a "one-sided impression of a discussion in Germany that is in fact of a much broader and more flexible nature" (p. 36). To help fill out the picture, he examines several editions that illustrate how the selection of a "base-text" varies according to the textual history of each work. He also comments on the increasing production of facsimiles of manuscripts and usefully points out that critical editions "based on the principles of textual criticism"— what he calls " `classical' editions"—are "still the main characteristic of German editorial practice" (p. 43). But if his essay suggests the variety of German editing, it does nothing to further understanding of the issues involved. It exhibits the common confusion between theoretical and practical matters and does not recognize the pointlessness of discussing whether facsimiles can stand on their own.[40] Throughout he emphasizes that German editors focus on the "historically authentic" text (e.g., pp. 35, 40); but he never questions the equation of that term with something like "present in a single surviving document," nor does he ask why an interest in socially constructed texts requires one not to be interested in authorially intended texts.
A far more penetrating response to the German anthology came from Peter L. Shillingsburg at about the same time, in the 1998 volume of
The French movement called critique génétique has been treated in substantial special numbers of two American journals, Romanic Review and Word & Image. The first of these, the May 1995 number of Romanic Review (86.3, edited by Michael Riffaterre and Antoine Compagnon), prints most of the papers from an April 1994 symposium organized by Compagnon, Almuth Grésillon, and Henri Mitterand with the purpose of bringing together representatives of the Anglo-American and the French approaches to textual study. The volume is largely in French,
It begins by noting that the approach "claims to be criticism, because it gives primacy to interpretation over editing, and genetic, because its ultimate goal is . . . to elucidate the stages of the creative process" (p. 394), and he proceeds to probe these claims. He wonders whether critique génétique is actually a new paradigm for criticism or "just helpful advice" (p. 395) that calls our attention to the importance of manuscript variants. He asks whether the avant-texte (the text of the drafts preceding publication, which are the object of these critics' study) is a "new object," not simply the "old manuscript" (p. 396), and finds some justification for the idea that French genetic criticism does focus on a newly conceived class of objects, since it does not see textual states in terms of a hierarchical or teleological relationship. (One has to be careful when making this point, since genetic study does involve an ordering; but the order is chronological, and chronology—it is important to remember—is not synonymous with progress.)
Compagnon also explains that French genetic critics are generally opposed to the construction of editions, on the grounds that an apparatus of variants, derived from the classical model in which variants are departures from an author's final text, is inappropriate for an authorial avant-texte and implies a subordination of it. He properly points out that this attitude is partly conditioned by the fact that traditional French editions have focused on authors' final texts, and he asks whether genetic critics would have felt the same way if they had been responding to Anglo-American editions that followed Greg's rationale. Since such editions have often used early copy-texts, it is true that their apparatuses of post-copy-text variants may be thought to have a similarity to those of classical editions when they largely record nonauthorial departures from authors' finished texts. But Compagnon might have been more explicit in noting that nonauthorial readings are just as rife in the lifetime texts of modern authors (scribes' and typists' alterations, publishers' revisions,
It is hard to see critique génétique as a distinctive approach, and perhaps Compagnon is right to ask whether it may be only "the institutional definition and legitimation of a research group [ITEM, the Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes] at the CNRS [Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique]" (p. 394). As with the German emphasis on versions, it seems to reflect a limited focus that is in fact subsumed under the more comprehensive Anglo-American approach. Indeed, in my contribution to the collection, I point out that critically edited texts focusing on authorial intention fit perfectly with the aims of critique génétique, for genetic critics, in their analyses of the creative process, are concerned with what authors intended at each stage. A series of critical texts (whether offered in full or in apparatus form, or in a combination of the two approaches) would seem the natural accompaniment to essays discussing the evidence for what authors were attempting at particular moments. That evidence, as Compagnon recognizes, is never as ample as one would wish, and the full story of any act of creativity will never be told. But self-styled genetic critics have no monopoly on being interested in making the attempt to tell the story as thoroughly as possible.
The other special number, the April-June 1997 number of Word & Image (13.2), entitled "Genetic Criticism," is almost entirely in English, but it contains no contribution that displays the critical independence of Compagnon's introduction. Nevertheless, the fact that it offers translations of essays by prominent members of the ITEM group—Almuth Grésillon, Pierre-Marc de Biasi, Jacques Neefs, and Claire Bustarret (the guest editor)—means that it gives English-speaking readers a fuller introduction to the ITEM point of view than the other collection does. Indeed, the opening piece, by Grésillon (former director of ITEM and author of Éléments de critique génétique, 1994), is a convenient summary of the basic position. Entitled "Slow—Work in Progress" (pp. 106123) it makes the claim that "genetic criticism established a new perspective on literature," with its "vision" of literature "as an activity" (p. 106), a vision that "goes hand in hand with a desire to de-sacralize and demythify the so-called `definitive' text" (p. 107). As this comment suggests, the article repeats the superficial points about scholarly editions regularly
In an article in the 1999 volume of Text, de Biasi attempts, less successfully, a "typology" of French genetic editions, using the image of "layers" that make up a chronologically ordered "stack" of documents, constituting the entirety of the archive for a particular work.[44] He divides genetic editions into two types, the "horizontal," which concentrate on one layer or "phase," and the "vertical," which attempt as far as possible to "reconstitute the writing process from the beginning to the end" (p. 26); the "horizontal" category is subdivided according to whether or not the work was finally published, the "vertical" according to whether the edition is "unabridged" or "partial." Because he gives examples of actual editions that illustrate these categories, some readers will find his article useful as an introductory guide to the variety of genetic scholarship that has been undertaken. On the theoretical level, however, his article leaves much to be desired. For example, it does not deal satisfactorily with the distinction between physical document and stage of revision (more than one of which may occupy a single document, as de Biasi recognizes); the problem begins with the layer/stack metaphor, which emphasizes physical objects and which is therefore not conducive to thinking about entities that may share a single object.[45] His classification scheme also suffers from lack of parallelism in its construction, illogically mixing the conceptual and the practical (as in the subdivisions
Another overblown effort, Klaus Hurlebusch's long essay in the 2000 volume of Text, has the worthy aim of providing "a more comprehensive understanding of literary production" through a combination of the German emphasis on authorship with the French emphasis on the writing itself.[46] It begins with what would seem an unnecessary question and provides an unsurprising answer: the question asks what relevance drafts have to literary study as opposed to psychology, and the answer (an obvious one, if not worded in an obvious way) is that they are relevant if "regarded as witness documents distinguished only materially from other witness documents—such as printings of a work—and if they are accorded a mediate hermeneutic significance as `preliminary' or `developmental stages' of the achieved, valid text" (p. 67). More than thirty pages of such prose later, Hurlebusch concludes by arguing that genetic representation should serve "to cull not only the document contents from the `witnesses,' but to recover from the documents' iconicity their paratextual nature" (p. 99). In other words, one should study all the physical evidence in the documents. This point is of course correct and important, but what is alarming here is the failure to recognize adequately not only that the distinction between the textual and the "paratextual" is not a simple one but also that the transcription of the "contents" depends on the analysis of every detail of the document. If Hurlebusch had fully understood analytical bibliography (or codicology, or paleography, or whatever one wishes to call it), his discussion would have been very different, and some of the problems he labors over would have been clarified.
Some glimpses of the activity in other countries, especially Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands, are offered by several additional articles in Text. The 1998 piece by Paola Pugliatti[47] not only surveys the development
Four essays in Text on Spanish and Dutch editing show a less clearly defined situation.[49] Of the two essays on Spanish, both in the 1995 volume, David R. Whitesell's has greater depth than Carol Bingham Kirby's, but both make many of the same points. Although the stemmatic method (of which Kirby is an active proponent) has been much used for editing Golden Age drama, a variety of kinds of editions has in fact appeared since the 1960s—reflecting the same issues concerning performance versions and authorial intentions that have underlain the debates among editors of English Renaissance drama. Despite this congruence of concerns, Whitesell observes that "Hispanists have responded slowly to advances in textual criticism made in other fields" (p. 84). The Dutch picture, similar in some ways, is characterized by two contributors to the 2000 volume of Text, largely through case studies. H. T. M. van Vliet, then the director of the Constantijn Huygens Instituut (founded in 1983 as a government bureau for editing Dutch literature), sketches the history
III
It is not surprising that a considerable body of writing in the last years of the twentieth century was devoted to electronic editions, just as the role and effect of computers in other areas of life have been the subject of ubiquitous discussion. The first book that comes to mind when one thinks of the use of computers in editing is Peter L. Shillingsburg's Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age, a third edition of which appeared in 1996. This book, since its first appearance in 1984,[50] has become established as a basic guide, and it deserves its success not only because it is well-informed and sensible but also because it deals with the complexities of electronic publication in the context of the issues that inform all scholarly editing. As the title suggests, the book is essentially an introduction to scholarly editing, one that takes into particular account the advantages of electronic presentation; it recognizes that editors who wish to make the most effective use of electronic capabilities must be thoroughly cognizant of the various goals of scholarly editing and of the divergent but complementary views of literature that underlie them. Electronic publication, in other words, is only a means to the ends that scholarly editions have always had.
For the 1996 edition of his book, Shillingsburg (besides making local revisions throughout)[51] has added two new chapters: "Critical Editions,"
Indeed, it will be more useful if it contains critical as well as documentary texts. An electronic "archive"—as an electronic collection of documentary texts, both in transcribed (searchable) form and in image form, is often called—is likely to seem "an undigested chaos of material in which everyone must become an editor before proceeding" (p. 165). It should at least be "webbed or networked with cross-references connecting variant texts, explanatory notes, contextual materials, and parallel texts," along with introductions and variorum commentary. But beyond that, "authorial editors . . . will, in the electronic edition as in the print edition, provide an edited, critical, eclectic text representing their notion of what the text should have been—the new text webbed
Although Shillingsburg's treatment of electronic matters as "practicalities" is one of the most valuable aspects of his discussion, he does sometimes verge on asserting the kind of excessive conceptual claims for electronic texts that less thoughtful writers often make. For example, he says that the electronic medium gives scholarly editors "opportunities to extend their notions of what constitutes the work of art and how it can be read" (p. 163). Or again: "The electronic medium has extended the textual world; . . . it has added dimensions and ease of mobility to our concepts of textuality" (p. 164). Ease of mobility, yes, for the most part; but "dimensions" added to our "concepts of textuality"? Our "notions of what constitutes the work of art" are not limited or impoverished by the codex form; what is often hampered by that form is the facility with which we can read variants in context and move back and forth between corresponding passages of different texts. We could always do these things, but often it took a great deal of effort to do so. When Shillingsburg says that "students of a text will more readily than was ever the case in print editions be able to confront textual cruxes for themselves" (p. 166), he comes nearer the point, since students could confront cruxes in printed editions also; but I would delete "be able to" from his sentence, because one is able to study cruxes "readily" in either case, and the real point is that in many instances one can probably study them "more readily" in electronic texts.[53]
Shillingsburg thinks that the electronic edition is "a tool for students of a work" and "not primarily . . . a place to sit [sic] and read through a novel or poem for a first-time experience of the work or for the pleasure of a good read" (p. 165). The same could be said for scholarly editions in printed form, which are often read in nonlinear fashion. But of course the main text in a printed edition, especially if it is free of symbols, can be read for pleasure, simply because it is in the familiar codex form. And we may confidently say that ebooks, which are improving rapidly,
Shillingsburg has written about electronic editions in other places as well, such as his short article entitled "Principles for Electronic Archives, Scholarly Editions, and Tutorials" (on pages 23-35 of the Finneran anthology to be discussed below). Although he gives far more attention to the "archives" of his title than to the "editions," his phrase "archive of editions" (p. 24) shows that his concept of the archive is broad enough to encompass critical editions. (Critical editions, after all, even those newly produced, are documents in the history of a work.) Shillingburg's piece is essentially an outline of desirable "industry standards" for editions (capability of handling multimedia and accessibility on different hardware platforms) and of "ideal goals" (including searchable texts along with images, linkages among texts, and appropriate encoding); it ends with a list of "general principles" regarding usability, transportability, archive specifications, security, integrity, expandability, printability, and convenience (largely reprinted from a document of his that was distributed at the 1993 meeting of the Modern Language Association of America, one that became part of the background for the draft guidelines issued in 1997 by the MLA's Committee on Scholarly Editions). He is concerned here with technical, not editorial, considerations; and although the points he makes are elementary, there is clearly a value in having a concise statement of basic points from a person with Shillingsburg's extensive experience with electronic editions.
After Shillingsburg, the most prominent writer on electronic editing is Jerome McGann, whose "The Rationale of HyperText" has been made available in several places.[54] That title, with its definite article, is
When he concentrates on practical advice, which is what the essay is really about, he makes good sense. For example, he wisely distinguishes between a word-processed text and a hyperedited one, for the former is not greatly different from what is encountered in a printed book, whereas hyperediting uses "computerization as a means to secure freedom from the analytic limits of hard copy text" (p. 15). And his advice to use a hypermedia program in a hyperediting project, in order to accommodate auditory and visible documents, is obviously sound, since doing so takes fullest advantage of what the electronic medium offers. As he repeatedly asks, in one form or another, "Why would anyone wish to do without it?" Two other pieces of advice are to design a project in terms of its "largest and most ambitious goals," not in terms of "immediate hardware or software options," and to structure the program in the "most modular and flexible way," so that technical advances can be imported into it with as little disruption as possible (p. 16). This is just common sense, and not part of a "rationale," but I would not wish to object to the uttering of common sense.
What I do find objectionable, and indeed unnecessary, is the philosophical framework into which his sensible advice is set. He begins by distinguishing between works of the literary imagination and "textual works that are instruments of scientific knowledge" (p. 12). It is surprising that anyone would still take this notion seriously. The construction of every work made of words (as of other media) involves rhetorical
It is nevertheless easy to see why McGann felt it necessary to go into this matter. Since the position for which he is well known holds that the texts of literary works include their visible (and oral) presentations, he has to regard scholarly editions as being treatises about the texts of literary works, not presentations of those texts, in order to justify the use, in an edition, of a different physical medium (such as the electronic, which it is the purpose of the essay to advocate) from the one in which the work first appeared. Therefore he says at the outset, "My remarks here apply only to textual works that are instruments of scientific knowledge" (p. 12). (This caveat would logically have been required, of course, even if he were writing about scholarly printed editions, since those editions cannot ever be the equivalent of the original printings of the works concerned.) The price he pays for trying to maintain his position in this fashion is an illogical wavering between a focus on authorial intention and a focus on collaborative social results. For if material media are "incarnational" (in the sense of being the opposite of "vehicular") to creators of literary works, then the claim that scholarly editions, with their different physical incarnation, are scientific works (no longer the original imaginative works) reflects an emphasis on authorial intention. Yet McGann's interest in the visible (or oral) product is in other respects
This tangle could have been avoided if McGann had been willing to accept one simple point: that authors of verbal works do not always consider the physical presentation of their words (or some aspects of it) to be a part of the works themselves, even though it always (1) reflects to some extent the intentions of those responsible for the presentation and (2) affects the responses of those who experience the presentation. From the point of view of authorial intention, therefore, the physical forms of some verbal works are indeed only "vehicular," and scholarly editions using different vehicles (whether different typefaces and paper, or a computer terminal instead of paper) can in those cases reproduce the texts of the works. This point in no way lessens the importance of studying the social forms of texts, which necessarily include physical components; but it eliminates the necessity for claiming that scholarly editions cannot transmit the texts of works but only information about those texts.
After this unfortunate beginning, McGann weakens his essay further with another fallacious piece of theorizing. As a reason for preferring hyperediting to the editing that was presented in codex form, he asserts that there is something problematical about using "books to study books, or hard copy texts to analyze other hard copy texts" (p. 12). At first one may think he is saying something analogous to the often-made point that we end up analyzing works of all media in the medium of language; but that point never carried the implication that there was an inherent problem in analyzing like with like—that, for instance, an effective criticism of a piece of music could not be a musical parody. McGann, however, believes that when one uses "books to analyze and study other books," "the scale of the tools seriously limits the possible results" (p. 12). He goes so far as to say that the problems with codex editions "arise because they deploy a book form to study another book form" (p. 13). Because? How does the similarity in form cause the problems? (One might even think it an advantage, to the extent that the codex edition can reproduce more of the physical features of the original codex publication.) His point is pretentious because it seems to adduce a theoretical principle,[57] when in fact no principle is required, other than the self-evident desirability
If McGann's efforts to provide a theoretical depth to his advocacy of hypertext are unsuccessful, the five brief case studies that constitute the heart of his essay are informative,[60] and he ends with an important point about the "decentered text." This term does not mean what one might expect: it simply refers to the idea that in hypertext there is no need for one central text as an organizing focus. McGann suggests that this point has aroused debate, but I do not see how anyone could maintain the contrary position. Hypertext, as McGann says, does have a structure "organized for directed searches and analytic operations" (p. 29), but because one is free to browse among numerous full texts, assisted by links,
Another consequence of his concentration on archives is that he does not distinguish two kinds of decentering that are worth differentiating. The decentering he deals with is on the mechanical level: the mechanics of the electronic medium, in contrast to that of the codex, does not lead to an apparent emphasis by default on one text over another. A second kind of decentering applies to the construction of critical texts. In my essay on "Editing without a Copy-Text" (commented on at the end of part V below), I recommend a procedure for critical editing in which one does not give any text the centrality of a copy-text. Instead of thinking of a critical text as an emended form of a copy-text, one conceives it as a new text in which each word or punctuation mark derives from whatever source (including the editor's mind) is judged to give the best reading in terms of the goal chosen (author's first—or last, or some other— intention, publisher's intention, and so on). If this approach were used for an edition published as a codex, the newly constructed critical text would still (in most cases) be a centered text in the mechanical sense, with the other relevant texts provided as an apparatus keyed to it; but it would have been formed by an editorial process that did not center any one text. The process can obviously be used for an edition in electronic form as well, with the result that one or more critical texts produced by this decentered method would be a part of the mechanically decentered collection of texts forming a portion of a hyperedition.
One of the places where McGann's essay has been reprinted is Kathryn Sutherland's anthology Electronic Text: Investigations in
Of those "traditional assumptions," the "first to go is the work/text distinction," for "if the work is not confined to the historically contingent and the particular, it is nevertheless only in its expressive textual form that we encounter it, and material conditions determine meanings" (p. 5). But the "if" clause (followed by "nevertheless") concedes the necessity of recognizing that texts of works can be abstractions (sequences of words) as well as physical renderings; and her discussion of Barthes points out that he, too, made such a distinction.[62] She does not really mean that the distinction itself has been eliminated, and there is no necessity for eliminating it in order to make the point that "material conditions determine meanings." All she is trying to say is that many people (she among them, presumably) now prefer to read documentary texts rather than critically emended texts (though she does not confront the fact that every text put into physical form by an editor is also a "situated act or event" [p. 6]). Perhaps that is why she says that an edition is "more properly described in its electronic assemblage" as an "archive," which contains "the disassembled `texts' but not the reassembled `work' " (p. 9). To imply that editorially emended texts (the products of specialists' reading) are not valuable is simply not to believe in scholarship. Her tendency to accept unthinkingly the exaggerated claims made for electronic editions is perfectly illustrated by her comment that "in making certain things easier" electronic presentation "makes the outcome
Sutherland's introduction does not lead one to look forward to the essays that follow, and they do often display the same love of jargon and exaggeration (and sometimes even the same fuzziness of argument). Allen Renear, for instance, outlines three theories of textuality that have emerged from the text-encoding community without recognizing that their philosophical coherence is affected by the fact that they all developed in subordination to a program requiring belief that texts can be reproduced. And Julia Flanders's piece is weakened throughout by its initial assumption of the "electronic text's lack of, or freedom from, a body." But some useful points do get made. Peter M. W. Robinson (who claims to be talking about "new directions" in editing, when he is of course referring to new methods for helping us move in the directions we have always followed) explains, with examples, the importance of supplementing archival collections of texts with editorial aids, as do Patrick W. Conner and Peter S. Donaldson—the latter concluding with the valuable (if rarely expressed) observation that the "digital research environment" might be designed "so that the passage from text to document extends from the computer screen to the library"—to the original physical documents (p. 195). Possibly the best essay is Claire Lamont's discussion of annotation, which ably shows the interrelations of editing and annotation and which recognizes that the theoretical questions raised by annotation "are not removed in hypertext" (p. 61)—indeed, hypertext has simply "produced another arena in which the debate may continue" (p. 63).[63]
The year before the Sutherland anthology, a more substantial and worthwhile anthology had appeared in the University of Michigan Press series on editorial theory—The Literary Text in the Digital Age (1996), edited by Richard J. Finneran. It begins with useful essays by Susan Hockey and Peter Shillingsburg. Hockey's surveys the history of using the computer for editing and summarizes basic information about text encoding and the delivery of electronic editions; Shillingsburg's is the piece on goals of scholarly editing that I have already commented on.
In between these opening and closing essays, there are several technical articles and accounts of specific projects, along with some additional general pieces. The diversity of content can be illustrated by the essays of Charles L. Ross and Phillip E. Doss.[66] For Ross, "Recent trends in editing have signaled the demise of the Anglo-American critical edition and the imminent birth of electronic editing" (p. 227). Because this sentence confuses technical and theoretical matters, it is hard to know how to read it. Ross includes "codex book" (p. 225) in his definition of a critical edition, and one might think at first that he is simply predicting
This advice is of course equally valid for editors of electronic and of codex editions. Indeed, writings about electronic editing are generally
This idea, that we require no form of help with original documents, is not really very different from the idea that literary criticism is unnecessary because our untutored reactions to literary works are more authentic, and those reactions are likely to be repressed or distorted if we hear any discussion of what the texts mean. To refrain from editing is an easy way to alleviate our nagging professional worries about being wrong; but it also means that we lose the opportunity to be right about anything, and to give other readers the benefit of our perceptions.
(p. 120)The more basic problem, he rightly believes, is that many literary scholars and other readers are not interested in textual history and therefore do not use the information provided in editions. For those who do, scholarly codex editions have not seemed officious or unusable (though many such readers will no doubt find electronic editions easier to use for some purposes); but the majority of readers still need to learn that the most rewarding reading requires (in Lavagnino's words) "a knowledge of textual matters, not just unmediated access to the originals (or rather to facsimiles of them)" (p. 122).
It is encouraging to note that a recent special number of Literary & Linguistic Computing (15.1, 2000), on "Making Texts for the Next Century,"
IV
There were of course many writings on textual matters in the last five or six years of the twentieth century that did not focus on nonverbal arts, or foreign traditions of editing, or computers. What these more general works did treat, however, was often not so different in essentials, for such questions as the ontology of verbal works, the role of authorial intention in editorial thinking, and the relative desirability of documentary and emended texts are basic to all textual discussion. Among the broader
A prime example of the latter category is W. Speed Hill's "Where Are the Bibliographers of Yesteryear?", which argues that analytical bibliography has become irrelevant to editing both because it cannot uncover printers' copy and because editors' attention has turned away from authorial intention. But the article's texture of unexamined clichés [74] disintegrates entirely when one remembers that the effort to learn as much as one can about the documents that transmit texts is a prima facie prerequisite to editing, regardless of the degree of certainty it attains in specific instances and regardless of the editorial goal one is working toward. Hill is one of several people who in recent years have attacked the so-called New Bibliography of Pollard, McKerrow, and Greg. What has put analytical bibliography out of favor (in spite of its focus on the materiality of documents) is that much of the earlier work was performed by scholars who believed (in the words of Joseph Loewenstein's essay mentioned below) that "textuality is . . . regulated by originative personhood."[75] One of the most critical treatments is Laurie E. Maguire's "The Rise of the New Bibliography," the second chapter (pp. 21-71) of her Shakespearean Suspect Texts: The "Bad" Quartos and Their Contexts (1996). She claims that "Sentimental, late-Victorian, land-owning imperialism influences much New Bibliographic analysis, leading to conclusions which are as outmoded as the historical circumstances which created them" (p. 59). But the "conclusions" she refers to are textual, and she does not show how physical analysis necessarily leads to those particular conclusions and thus does not present a criticism of "New Bibliographic analysis" itself. Maguire is also the coeditor (with Thomas L. Berger) of Textual Formations and Reformations (1998), an anthology that (in the words of her introduction) "stems from a reaction to the New Bibliography."[76] In its opening essay, "Authentic
Analytical bibliography is also thoughtlessly criticized by several contributors to a "forum" organized by Susan Zimmerman for the 1996 volume of Shakespeare Studies ("Editing Early Modern Texts," 24: 1978).
Failure to make this distinction vitiates numerous other discussions, such as Leah S. Marcus's in Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Milton (1996). When Marcus says, for instance, that "Proponents of the New Bibliography . . . have tended to locate the `reality' of a given literary creation outside its extant material embodiments" (p. 29), or when she speaks (p. 30) of "the New Bibliography's insistence on ideal text and ideal copy" (whatever the latter is supposed to mean), she conflates under the term "New Bibliography" two distinct activities—analyzing physical evidence and deciding on an approach to editing. The harm resulting from this confusion is that analytical bibliography is effectively ignored, whereas it should be recognized as an essential tool for everyone, following any theory of literature, to employ in examining documents. Similarly, David Holdeman, in the opening pages of the introduction to his Much Laboring: The Texts and Authors of Yeats's First Modernist Books (1997), sees nothing wrong with saying that "much current editorial and bibliographical theory" challenges "the primacy of authorial intentions" as well as "the equally fundamental and traditional ontological assumptions that written texts are constituted only by language" (p. 4). But these ideas were not part of a previous "bibliographical theory," nor does current analytical bibliography challenge them (to say nothing of the fact that this summary does not do justice to the subtlety of the "editorial" theory it purports to describe). Holdeman repeats, without embarrassment, the notion that the "Greg-Bowers editorial theory . . . registers prevailing Romantic, modernist, and New Critical premises about the organic unity of literary works" (p. 2).[79]
Philip Cohen has also been willing to recite certain familiar charges against what he sees as the Anglo-American tradition of "stabilizing the text" without examining them carefully. His "Textual Instability, Literary Studies, and Recent Developments in Textual Scholarship"[80] is
Among the other writers who have often repeated such clichés without reflecting the scrutiny that those clichés had previously received is D. C. Greetham, one of the more prolific commentators on textual matters at the end of the twentieth century. In the eight years from 1992 through 1999, he published five books—an introductory textbook, a treatise on theory, a collection of his own essays, and two anthologies of essays by others. The most valuable of these is one of the anthologies, Scholarly Editing: A Guide to Research (1995), a 740-page book in which specialists in various literatures summarize the history of editing in their fields. Nothing of the kind had been attempted before, and bringing this
His textbook, Textual Scholarship: An Introduction (1992; reprinted with corrections and an expanded "Selected Bibliography" in 1994), heroically attempts to treat, in considerable detail, physical bibliography, codicology, and book-production history as well as the history and theory of editing works from all periods. He has generally done a creditable job of restating what is known, though one may quarrel with the relative allocation of space to various topics, given the introductory function of the book; and a charitable reader will be willing to excuse, in a work of such scope, the presence of passages that exhibit the author's lack of intimate knowledge of particular areas. (One of the problems posed by textbooks, of course, is that beginners will not know when they come across such passages.)[85] The collection of his essays, Textual Transgres-
The remaining book is the one that I imagine Greetham regards as his most ambitious: Theories of the Text (1999), a very long work that has the broad aim of analyzing the various theoretical approaches that have been taken to texts in all genres and media. "My theories of the text," he says in the first paragraph of his introduction, "are thus theories of writing and of reading, theories of intention and of reception, theories of transmission and of corruption, and theories of originary conception and of social consumption and variation." The book, he adds, is "an account of the dialogics, pluralities, and contradictions that these multiple processes engender." One is willing to overlook the foreboding tinge of jargon here in order to welcome with enthusiasm the premise of an open-minded vade mecum to a complex set of interconnected attitudes. Any reader of the second page will have high expectations upon encountering Greetham's enlightened "contention that only by seeing the field whole can one begin to perceive the theory that is embedded in practice, those generally unacknowledged (because unseen) principles that drive both editorial and critical decisions."[87] I have always stated to my classes in textual criticism—as I assume other teachers of such classes have also done—that every editorial action implies a theoretical position, even though many editors have not consciously thought through their rationales. Therefore I was delighted to see Greetham say, "I will maintain throughout this book that all practice, even that which asserts
The book, however, does not measure up to the expectations thus aroused, and many indications of the basic problems are already evident in its introduction, which is entitled "Textual Theory and the Territorial Metaphor." The prevalence of territorial boundaries in intellectual discussion is a relevant matter for Greetham to address because his goal is to show the implications, for textual criticism, of literary theories that have primarily been discussed by critics with no interest in or knowledge of textual criticism. He quite properly wishes to break down what he calls the "territorial fallacy": "the assumption that certain activities, even certain foundational concepts, were inherently `natural' or proper in certain parts of the academic or scholarly map" and not in others (p. 4). The barrier between what have usually been called "textual criticism" and "literary criticism" has of course developed some cracks in recent years, and anything that will cause it to crumble at a faster pace is to be encouraged. Greetham's book, however, turns out not to be such a thing, for in two extremely unfortunate ways he eschews the openness that one had supposed he was aiming for.
One of the ways is symbolized by his insistence that he does not wish to help effect a marriage between fields as presently conceived; rather, his aim is to "co-opt" (a word he uses often) the language and approaches of literary theory, bringing them into "our own textual camp" (p. 5). In itself, the idea of showing that "theory" is not foreign to textual criticism is valuable; but to do so in a way that stresses only a one-way movement (a "co-option of the other disciplines" for use in "textual practice"), envisioning the relationship between "fields" as "cohabitation" rather than marriage (p. 6), only serves to reinforce boundaries. Should not those "other disciplines" import (if not co-opt) an understanding of textual transmission and its consequences? Are not the relationships reciprocal? What is wrong with the idea of a marriage? Greetham speaks of "the field of `text' " but it is "field," not "text," that I would put in quotation marks, for the study of texts—that is, "textual criticism," or the analysis of textual makeup and relationships—is not a field in the usual sense. If we think of fields as disciplinary units (such as sociology, philosophy, engineering, literature, and so on), they all use texts and therefore would benefit from approaching their texts with the insights and procedures that textual criticism, as well as literary criticism, have provided. Textual criticism is properly a part of every field, and only
The other way in which Greetham has failed to encourage the elimination of inhibiting boundaries is through limiting his purview to scholars rather than all readers, and indeed to textual scholars rather than all scholars. On his first page, he says he is dealing with theories that "encompass many of the current concerns of critical or literary theorists" but "always with a special focus on the force and meaning of text as it has been made phenomenologically available to use through the scholarly work of a long line of textual disseminators." On the next page he notes, "For well over two millennia, scholarly editors have been producing physical manifestations of various types of textuality." Near the end of his introduction, he states that his aim is "to illuminate the history and practice of textual scholarship" (p. 23). Why only "scholarly work" or "textual scholarship"? If, as Greetham believes and as is undoubtedly true, there is a theory or theories implicit in the practice of all scholarly editors, whether they recognize it or not, the same must perforce apply to all scholarly noneditors as well, and to all other editors and readers, however unscholarly they may be. It is by no means only scholarly editors who "have been producing physical manifestations of various types of textuality"; so have all the nonscholarly producers of anthologies, for example, or all the essayists who have ever quoted from or commented on other works. And why should we be concerned only with "physical manifestations"? All readers, whether or not they write anything down, struggle (sometimes consciously, sometimes not) with the competing and complementary concepts of textual significance that can be brought to every text. One might expect a book with the title Theories of the Text, a book aiming "to look at the field of `text' whole," to have encompassed
Unfortunately the sense that theory is a game, to be played for its own sake for the enjoyment of the thrusting and parrying, permeates the book. Greetham proceeds in a roughly chronological way to show "a cultural development from earlier formal and/or historical methods of analysis, via the language-based theories of structuralism and poststructuralism, and on to current considerations of society and gender" (p. 23), though he rightly insists that the book is not "either a history or a manual of practice." Instead it is a series of engagements with different concepts of human communication, in which each one is read "against the grain"—a favorite phrase that presumably means "critically" or "analytically" but which is revealing of Greetham's game-centered approach by suggesting confrontation and the hope of tripping up an opponent. These discussions do contain some astute observations on individual points, but they often contain questionable statements that undermine confidence in Greetham as a guide through the thickets of critical theory (despite his obvious acquaintance with a vast amount of material). For example, he sometimes seems to accept theorists' assertions without commenting on criticisms that have already been made of those assertions, and thus his account at such points lacks depth. One instance is his attribution to Jerome McGann of the idea (expressed in Greetham's words) that "the critical edition primarily empowers the linguistic not the bibliographical text" (p. 97). Even if we substitute "represents" for "empowers," the statement is still accusatory, and the ensuing discussion shows it was meant to be. Yet the criticism would carry greater weight if it took into account the reasons why the statement is not precisely accurate (facsimile editions can be critical) and why one might legitimately wish to focus on the "linguistic" text. Another instance is Greetham's assertion, following a discussion of "the essentialist and the physical positions" regarding textual ontology, that "literature cannot demonstrably be placed in one, and only one, of these classes" (p. 51). Why does he not comment on the concept of mixed media, which has been adduced to define combinations of language and visual effects in literature? Even if he does not find the concept helpful, his account is deficient if he does not bring specific arguments up to their present point and then try to move forward.
A related class of problem involves the "paradoxes" and "ironies" that Greetham likes to point out—ones that sometimes prove to be
Greetham similarly (and as pointlessly) finds an "irony" reflected in many of Jerome McGann's writings that follow his A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (1983), for in them (according to Greetham) McGann "paradoxically" discusses misinterpretations of his social theory. What is supposedly paradoxical is that "McGann has to rescue his own authoriality and to disempower the reality of socialized reading in order to assert the Critique as a document disempowering authoriality and rescuing socialization" (p. 376). But it is absurd to suppose that McGann's theory requires authors either to accept the interpretations of their work put forward by others or else to keep quiet. McGann has never denied that authors have intentions and may wish on occasion to reassert them. Debates between writers and their critics are, after all, part of the social process, with intentions being expressed, and perhaps misunderstood,
There is some irony in this confluence of ontological idealism with a suspicion of physical nature, for while eclecticism appeals to authorial presence as the authority for textual reconstruction, it works with only the "traces" of this authority in concrete forms that are inevitably corrupt.
(p. 40)If there is an irony here, then all efforts to reconstruct the past are ironic. We constantly use tangible clues, found in documents and other physical objects, as sources for attempting to recover past occurrences and states of mind. Greetham's pretentious statement (or, one could argue, misstatement) tries to manufacture an irony where none exists.
These are only a few examples, but I think revealing ones, of the tone and effects produced by the book's gamesmanship.[91] I shall look at one more passage, even though it deals with an essay of mine. (It is not my business here to comment on Greetham's many observations regarding my writings; but this passage is worth examining anyway for what it indicates about his approach.) Greetham believes that, in my "Textual Criticism and Literary Sociology" (Studies in Bibliography, 1991), my "questioning their [the social textual critics'] intellectual and rhetorical ability to carry out their own project" is a "deft manœuvre" (p. 399). Although I have never regarded anything I have done in an essay as a "manœuvre," my assertion on this score is irrelevant. The point is that, if a commentator on an essay (by anyone) assumes that the author is merely engaged in a tactical campaign to win a skirmish, the commentator is revealing a very superficial view of the nature of intellectual exchange. There are serious matters of substance to be talked about, but one would never know it from this way of proceeding. Greetham then goes on to say that my attempt "to `salvage' by co-option" (referring to my belief that the intentionalist and the social approaches are complementary, focusing on different parts of the full picture) is "a near-perfect example of the Kuhnian paradigm shift in operation," comparable to the "accommodations" made by the "Ptolemaic paradigm" when confronted with the "Copernican account of a heliocentric solar system" (p. 401). If Greetham really believed that this were an apt analogy, he would be revealing a failure to understand what movements and trends in literary
A word must be said about the style in which the book is written, if only because Greetham makes an issue of it at the end of his introduction, where he notes that his prose has been described as " `not for the faint-hearted.' " This point will strike a chord with his readers, who will have read the following sentence a few pages earlier:
Danto's depiction of a "fertile" vocabulary from philosophy ("dialogues, lecture notes, fragments, poems, examinations, essays, aphorisms, meditations, discourses", etc. (7)) having constructed the very generic identities through which literature is discussed would seem to counter Rorty's and Eagleton's rhetorical histories, except that, writing from within the concerns of analytical philosophy (and thus regarding the Referential Fallacy of literature as a real liability rather than as simply a necessary pose to ensure that there is "nothing outside the text" (see below, 359)), Danto's assumption that he has uniformly separated the tenor and vehicle in his list of "philosophical" genremarkers and that he can determine the direction of the influence in "what looks like a metaphor" must remain simply that—an assumption.
(p. 16)This sentence is somewhat longer than average, but the effect it creates is the same as that found in many passages where the individual sentences happen to be shorter. Greetham explains that "much of the terminology and argument of recent critical discourse does demand a denseness of reference and a reach into obscure (that is, `new and strange') speaking." A benefit, in his view, is "that the reader must slow down, must be given pause and reflection." There is a difference, of course, between having to slow down in order to reflect on profound ideas and having to pause just to disentangle the prose. But leaving that point aside, one must ask why the "obscure speaking" of theorists needs to be replicated in a discussion of those theorists.
Greetham seems to take for granted that such imitation is desirable,
V
In a field where there is so much turgid writing that mindlessly repeats fashionable views, one gratefully turns to Peter L. Shillingsburg's Resisting Texts: Authorship and Submission in Constructions of Meaning (1997), a book of subtlety, insight, and balance, written in lucid, jargon-free, and often forceful prose. No one who knows his earlier writings will be surprised by the quality of this book, for with Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age and numerous essays he has established himself as a force for coherence and good sense in the discordant world of textual criticism. Indeed, some of those earlier essays—including one of the best known, "Text as Matter, Concept, and Action"—are reused, in revised form, in the book. Out of nine chapters, six had previously appeared, between 1989 and 1996, and their collection here is welcome, not only because they deserve to be available in this convenient form but also because they contribute effectively to the point of view that the book as a whole maintains.[93]
That position is made clear in the (previously unpublished) introduction, indicatively entitled "Is There Anything to `Get Straight'?" He begins with an exemplary discussion of the role of history in literary criticism, of the reasons for being interested in both "historically intended meanings and present operative meanings" (p. 8), keeping in mind the impossibility of certitude in recovering the past. Then he turns to the real underpinning of the book, reflected in his statement, "Frankly, I do not hold that there is a superior view of textuality" (p. 10). Unlike so many writers in the field, he is not a partisan of one theory, hoping to discredit other approaches. Rather, he wishes "to understand and describe the principles governing the workings of a range of textual engagements" (p. 9). The word "understand" occurs several times in his declarations of the goal of the book: he is open to all our dealings with texts ("why and how we resist texts and why and how they resist us" [p. 10]) and simply wants to understand all "textual engagements." Only one theory ultimately matters to him—a theory that encompasses all our interactions with written (that is, material) texts. What he sets out to construct is a "theory of script acts," a term he coins for its parallelism with "speech-act theory." It may not be the best term for his purpose, however, because "script act" suggests an exclusive concern with production (by author, publisher, and so on)—or, if readers' responses are included, the implication would seem to be that readers are concerned only as parties to a communicative transaction. Shillingsburg acknowledges that most of his book relates to "communicative acts," but he adds that "readers might with perfect right refuse to care what communicative intention an author might have actually had or professed to have had" (p. 12). Since it was "a desire to understand how these reactions [the one just mentioned among others] come about that impelled this work," an emphasis on communication may not form a sufficiently broad base for what Shillingsburg has in mind.[94] That this question arises is a slight defect in the introduction, but it is overshadowed by the laudable general attitude set forth toward textual study.
The first chapter, one of the three previously unpublished ones, deals
In Chapter 4 ("Texts, Cultures, Mediums, and Performances: The French Lieutenant's Woman," pp. 105-119), the next of the new chapters,
The third of the previously unpublished chapters, "Individual and Collective Voices: Agency in Texts" (Chapter 6, pp. 151-164), is central to Shillingsburg's position, for it focuses on how "to integrate insights of the intentionalist and materialist `schools of editing' " (p. 157). He rightly deplores the "combative spirit" with which champions of the latter have insisted on "the `new' at the expense of the `old' " (p. 153), resulting in polarized thinking that lacks the subtlety required by the subject; indeed, the potential contribution of the new insight is undermined by simply supplanting "the authorial voice with the production voice" (p. 154). Instead, Shillingsburg stresses the importance of paying attention to the "multiple voices" present in every work. Each voice reflects agency or intentionality, and Shillingsburg repeatedly makes a point not often enough recognized: that "the social contract as a `school of editing' has not done away with agency for authority, it has not done away with personal responsibility for textual variation, it has not done away with
The concluding chapter, largely published in a periodical in 1996,[98] sums up Shillingsburg's inclusive position under the rubric "A Whirlwind of Possibilities" (a rather odd choice of title, since it suggests chaos rather than the order that Shillingsburg has in fact brought to the subject). After discussing briefly the two basic approaches to editing (accepting documentary texts and reconstructing intended texts), he gives a succinct historical account of twentieth-century editorial theory. It has the great merit (despite some imprecise, even erroneous, statements)[99] of
Since the publication of his book, he has continued to drive home his position in forceful essays. In the 1999 Editio anthology,[100] for example, he meditates on "losses"—especially the losses involved in accepting only one editorial approach and rejecting alternative ones. Those who "ride the cusp of the newest enthusiasm" (p. 2) often "attack the old in order to make room for the new" (p. 4); but earlier editions that did well what they set out to do should not be considered failures "just because the purpose for which they were designed is no longer the ruling fad" (p. 6). And in another piece the same year, called "Editing Determinate Material Texts" (Text, 12: 59-71), he criticizes Norman Feltes's belief in a Marxist "determinate material practice" to explain Victorian book production, pointing out that its reduction of authors and publishers to "simple, practically helpless, operatives in a determinate world" (p. 65) is analogous to the position of the social-contract textual critics. From there on, we are in familiar territory, though the piece contains some of Shillingsburg's
Another frequent commentator on textual matters, Paul Eggert, shares certain ideas with Shillingsburg, such as the permanent value of the concept of authorship and the recognition that different viewpoints can be complementary, not mutually exclusive. In a 1993 conference paper that he included, in revised form, in the 1998 anthology that he and Margaret Sankey edited, he proposes a way of "bridging the divide" between "social discourse" and "authorial agency."[101] He suggests that we distinguish between "the level of document" (the "level of physical inscription") and "the level of text" ("the meaning" created by both the producers and the receivers of documents [pp. 103-104]). This formulation, in his view, bridges the gap by recognizing, first, that "the historicity of the document records both the authorial agency and other contributing agencies" and, second, that "their textual work [their creation of meaning] will inevitably have been moulded by, even as to varying degrees it moulded, the discursive pressures of their period" (p. 111).
Thinking in this way is indeed helpful, though it is not as different as Eggert may believe from the more traditional distinction between the tangible "texts of documents" and the intangible "texts of works" (indeed, I think he could have avoided some awkwardness by using the word "work" instead of "text" for his second level). His central point, as I see it, could be summarized this way: just as the physical features of documents (including arrangements of words and punctuation) bear testimony both to authorial striving and to social conditions, so the works that can be created from documents run the gamut from those created by authors and other participants in the process of documentary production to those created by readers and editors (with their varying temperaments and backgrounds). The slight shift in emphasis here (as I
This point is at the heart of another paper of his written for a conference one year later than the one just discussed, and published in revised form in anthologies of 1995 and 1999.[103] Its title includes a pair of phrases—"historical version" and "authorial agency"—that are nearly identical with those in the earlier piece, and he sets as his task the formulation of "editing principles capable of holding [these] two strands in complementary balance" (p. 51). The key, as we know from the previous essay, is recognizing acts of individual agency in the physical features of documents: "what is irrefutable is that the physical inscriber—the individual textual agent—enters into the business of textuality" (p. 57). Examination of the drama physically enshrined in documents leads
T. H. Howard-Hill has also challenged some of the ideas of the adherents of the social approach to textual criticism.[106] Although he claims only to offer "general characterizations" of their attitudes, not rebuttals of them or reassertions of "the values of the `traditional' editing" (p. 58), he concludes that "their arguments lead nowhere any editor should wish to follow" (p. 62); and the force of his observations is weakened by what appears at times to be a lack of open-mindedness. Nevertheless, he makes some arresting points worth noting, beginning with his view of the social theorists' work "less as innovative than reactionary" (p. 51). These adjectives are of course not necessarily opposites, and I would rather say that this body of thought is both innovative and reactionary. In any case, its reactionary aspects are rarely remarked on; yet it clearly is a variety of the general tendency regarded as conservative in editorial tradition: the distrust of editorial intervention in documentary texts. To call the social theorists conservative is not to criticize them, however, but only to recognize where their thought falls in the cyclical movements that constitute the history of editorial theory.
Similarly, Howard-Hill's three "characterizations" of their thinking are valid, but one cannot feel very satisfied with the associated discussion unless some adjustments are made. First, he remarks on these scholars'
Howard-Hill's essay makes many useful points about the nature of the social theorists' position; what it lacks is a clear indication that their thinking is an important contribution to a comprehensive view of the range of editorial approaches necessary for the study of every work. When he says that their emphasis on facsimiles is a "dead end" (p. 61), his overly negative tone masks what I believe is his real meaning: that the reproduction of documentary texts is a dead end only if editing is limited to that activity and nothing else. This is the basic point that should have surfaced in his piece much more than it does: the social theorists' position is objectionable only to the extent that it denies the validity of other approaches. Howard-Hill is perhaps reaching toward this point when he says, quite correctly, that Greg, McKerrow, and Bowers "were pluralists to an extent that some more modern editors and theorists are not prepared either to acknowledge or to emulate" (p. 62). If the implications of this statement had been amplified through the essay, which would then have shown more clearly how critical and documentary editions are
I should like to mention here, at the end of this survey, my 1998 collection, Literature and Artifacts—not because it is by me, but because it includes my 1994 essay "Editing without a Copy-Text" (pp. 236-257), which forms an appropriate pairing with Greg's "The Rationale of Copy-Text," published at the beginning of the half-century. Indeed, I conceived of the essay as a replacement for Greg-not in a spirit of rejection but of completion. Greg's essay does not carry to a logical conclusion the idea that critical editing relies on editors' judgments, for by recommending the adoption of a copy-texst with presumptive authority it retains an element of the best-text approach (which Greg was attempting to move away from). It was my object to show, first, that editions offering critical texts will always be of value, alongside documentary editions, and, second, that a critical text should be a constructed text rather than an emended one. In other words, editors should not be thinking in terms of altering a particular existing text but of building up a new text, word by word and punctuation mark by punctuation mark, evaluating all available evidence at each step. The text that one would otherwise have chosen as copy-text would no doubt still often carry the most evidentiary weight as one decides on individual readings (so long, of course, as one had the same goal in mind). But the psychology of editing would be different because every element of the critical text would be the result of a positive action (in support of some goal, not necessarily final authorial intention); none would be the product of the passive notion of "retaining" something. Whether I made this case effectively is not for me to say, but I believe this shift in thinking is necessary to fulfill the underlying logic of critical editing. Greg's mid-century essay reverberated in many ways through the ensuing half-century, but only at the end of that period was it seen as a stepping-stone to a coherent concept of the role of judgment in critical editing.[108]
VI
Reading through the writing on textual criticism and scholarly editing that has been published in the final years of the twentieth century is a rather dispiriting experience, with few bright spots, because so much of it is not only inexcusably jargon-filled but also needlessly scornful of previous thinking. That a lot has been written would be a good sign only if it translated into a substantial increase in understanding. But much of the commentary has followed a pattern all too common in intellectual discourse: it repeats points that are currently in vogue and attacks what went before, without meeting counterarguments that have already been expressed. It proceeds in a fashion aptly described by a marvelously compact phrase of Adam Michnik's, "mantra rather than discourse."[109] Thinking will not move forward unless counterarguments are addressed, so that a more comprehensive, more broadly perceptive, statement can be made. The reason that this process has not occurred more often is that a great many people are not interested in conversation, in dialogue: they wish to enforce their own points of view, and they simply do not listen to possible objections to their arguments and go right on saying what they said in the first place, as if no other observations had been made in the meantime.
The most noticeable recent illustration of this phenomenon in textual criticism involves some of the scholars who wish to be associated with the idea that texts are socially constructed. They believe that they can support their position by criticizing authorial intention as an editorial goal (and analytical bibliography because it was developed by scholars who held that goal); and they persist in making the same criticisms, even though inaccuracies in those criticisms have been noted and—more importantly—even though the logical fallacy of promoting one emphasis by denigrating another has been pointed out.[110] Even if the criticisms of
Those who have taken an either/or position, suggesting that an interest in authorial intention is futile, unproductive, and outmoded, have shown by their manner of proceeding that they are more concerned with promoting a particular point of view than with welcoming all approaches that can contribute to fuller understanding. They, like so many people in all walks of life, think in terms of winning an argument rather than of participating in a conversation. A wonderful phrase of Jeffrey M. Perl's comes to mind in this connection: in the Winter 2002 number of his journal Common Knowledge (8: 1-6), he entitled the opening piece "Civilian Scholarship." If scholarship, or any other discourse, is civilian rather than military, then it is founded on "metaphors of conversation or friendship rather than on metaphors adopted from those of sports and war, of `sides' that one must `take' " (p. 5). Referring to such common beliefs as that "strife is productive" or that quarreling is a game, Perl says, "The world deserves better of those employed to think and write and educate." One of the best expressions of this general view comes from an essay of Gordon N. Ray's called "Books as a Way of Life":
I should not forget to mention that book-educated people of the sort I have been describing are rarely dogmatic. They tend instead to regard the world from what George Eliot in Daniel Deronda whimsically calls "a liberalmenagerie point of view." This state of mind infuriates the fierce partisan, but it enlivens social intercourse, and it holds out hope for the glorious day when mankind will cure itself of the plague of politics. The "literature of power" is above politics, having understanding as its aim rather than victory, and the books that embody it are thus a potentially unifying force in a divided world.[111]
Understanding rather than victory: this is the motto for civilian scholarship. It is a motto negated by a large number of recent writings on textual and editorial theory.
We need not worry, however, as long as writers of the caliber of Grigely and Shillingsburg come along. And as a way of identifying hopeful signs for the twenty-first century, I shall mention two publications of its earliest years. The first is a superb essay by Phillip Harth, written as a review of the first two volumes of Paul Hammond's Longman edition of Dryden.[112] This edition is partially modernized, and Harth devotes most of his essay to demonstrating, with great patience and clarity, the folly of spending time on a task that is not only impossible to carry out satisfactorily but also counterproductive, since the results, far from assisting the reader, form a barrier to understanding. After demolishing the often-repeated notion that the spelling and punctuation of sixteenthand seventeenth-century editions necessarily reflect compositorial practice more than authorial preference, Harth shows how Hammond's "concern to expunge all signs of the compositor's intervention results inevitably in the omission of prosodic, figurative, and stylistic elements for which the poet himself was responsible" (p. 241). Since Hammond does not modernize any quotations (from Dryden or anyone else) in his annotations, Harth is given the opportunity to make a basic point applicable to all modernization: "readers will quickly adjust to the unfamiliar appearance of those excerpts and experience little difficulty in reading and understanding them. They will want to do so, in fact, as they find themselves drawn more and more into observing the process of historical recovery" (p. 244). These readers will then, of course, "come to wonder why an exception was thought to be necessary" for the main text. Harth's essay is one of the best discussions of modernization we have ever had; it should be pondered not merely by all editors but by all readers.
The other twenty-first-century publication that I want to mention is David Scott Kastan's Shakespeare and the Book (2001), which illustrates
His introduction unfortunately does not do justice to the more thoughtful view that emerges in the chapters that follow (although there is a slight hint in his unexplained admission that the concept of work as the author's "unrealized intentions" is "not without value" [p. 4]). In the final chapter he recognizes the value of all kinds of editions. A goal of reconstructing an "authorial text," he says, is "a reasonable but by no means necessary grant of authority to the intended text over the actual textual forms in which it is encountered"; "the author's intentions are of course a worthy, if elusive, object of study," and to pursue
I should like to use these contradictory elements in Kastan's work as a way of summarizing two basic points about the nature of texts and of editing. First is his idea that "literature exists, in any useful sense, only and always in its materializations." The phrase "in any useful sense" is there because Kastan understands that "the work of the imagination" precedes its materialization in "a medium that is incommensurate with its refinement." Presumably for this reason he calls the concept of immaterial works "not logically impossible" (p. 4). But it cannot then be ignored on the grounds that a work, so conceived, depends on "physical supports" if readers are to experience it. Obviously an intangible verbal work can be transmitted only in oral or visible form, and every attempt to recover the author's original and later intentions must itself be given one of these two forms if it is to be communicated; but the attempt to reconstruct intentions, however mediated by editorial judgment and its presentation, is no different in kind from all other efforts to recover past events that are not directly available in living oral traditions or surviving physical objects.
Clearly every oral rendition and every printed text of what purports to be the same work produces a discrete experience, and each one is deserving of our serious attention. That an intangible intended work or series of works (versions) underlies such manifestations is also evident, as Kastan implicitly recognizes at various points. He notes, for instance, "the difference in the material relation of painters to their paintings and authors to the books that bear their names" (pp. 115-116). And despite his having complained at the beginning of his book about the idea that works "have a reality independent of the physical [or, one might add, oral] texts in which we engage them" (p. 3), he says at the end that Hamlet is "the name for what allows us comfortably to consider as some metaphysical unity the various instantiations of the play" (p. 133). This unity need not be a single text, of course, and he is right to say immediately that he is not referring to "some pre-representational original." Although he is speaking of a pattern that somehow connects all versions, he has nevertheless shown that we cannot do without the concept of intangible media (otherwise texts and performances would not be "instantiations" of something else)—and thus there must also be intended texts that antedate their instantiations.
The other point I wish to take up is what implications for editing follow from an acceptance of the importance of all texts—intended, recited, and tangible. The first question is whether there should be any editing whatever (in the sense of critical editing, which is what Kastan generally means by "editing"). Most discussions that propose as an editorial goal "the location of the text within the network of social and institutional practices" (p. 122)—and Kastan's is no exception—suggest that "arguably it becomes more difficult to justify editing at all." What is usually not made clear is that facsimiles serve only one aspect of the social approach to texts: they show what actually emerged from the publication process. An interest in the publisher's intention (or that of other collaborators with the author), however, requires a critically emended text, just as an interest in the author's intention does.[115] Although Kastan does not make this point explicitly, he understands some of the reasons for having "many kinds of editions," those that "attempt to restore the play he [Shakespeare] wrote before it was subjected to the demands of production in both the playhouse and the printing house"[116] as well as
each edition, like each performance, of a play becomes part of a cumulative history of what has been experienced as the play; and the more of this history that is available the more it becomes possible to measure the play's achievement and its effects.
(p. 124)[117]I hope my comments show how Kastan's book stands apart from the usual arguments for equating literature with material texts. Kastan seems on one level to want to accept the standard clichés, but his basic good sense forces its way to the surface and will not allow that to happen unequivocally. This struggle results in some contradictions, but it strengthens his account and is a hopeful sign for the future.
That there will never be an end to the re-editing of texts and the publication of new editions, no matter how many times those texts have been edited before, is a fact of life that Tom Davis, for one, would perfectly understand. In his refreshing, clear-headed, and witty piece called "The Monsters and the Textual Critics"[118]—an essay that ought to be
The nature of the world, dependent as it is on our perception, is such that no task, even those we may regard as purely scientific, is ever fully completed. We live, as Davis says, "from compromise to compromise." We may feel satisfied at one moment with what we have accomplished, but soon we will find it in need of redoing, just as others will have to do it in their own ways, and then do it again. In the ninety-eighth chapter of Moby-Dick, Melville describes the process of scrubbing down the decks after the oil has been extracted from a whale; but no sooner is this activity finished than another whale is sighted, and the whole sequence, from killing the whale to cleaning up the ship afterward, must be performed again:
Oh! my friends, but this is man-killing! Yet this is life. For hardly have we mortals by long toilings extracted from this world's vast bulk its small but valuable sperm; and then, with weary patience, cleansed ourselves from its defilements, and learned to live here in clean tabernacles of the soul; hardly is this done, when—There she blows!—the ghost is spouted up, and away we sail to fight some other world, and go through young life's old routine again.
In the face of this ineluctable cycle, we are better advised to embrace and cherish it than to lament it. Every editor who edits or re-edits a work is participating in an invigorating, if unending, struggle—the same one that literary critics are engaged in, though the less perceptive members of both groups fail to recognize their common pursuit. Textual critics, instead of being removed from direct engagement with literature—as many people imagine—are partaking of it fully. Their multifarious, unceasing efforts, which can never be more than tentative, exemplify the richest kind of experience that readers can have.
Notes
This is the sixth in a series of essays I have written covering the second half of the twentieth century; it, like the others, is limited to general theoretical writings in English and does not attempt to deal with textual studies of particular authors or individual editions. The first three essays, published in Studies in Bibliography [SB] in 1975, 1981, and 1986, were brought out in book form in 1987 as Textual Criticism since Greg: A Chronicle, 1950-1985. The fourth and fifth appeared in SB as follows: "Textual Criticism and Literary Sociology," SB, 44 (1991), 83-143; and "Textual Instability and Editorial Idealism," SB, 49 (1996), 1-60. (A portion of the last, in slightly revised form, was published as "Reflections on Scholarly Editing" in Raritan, 16.2 [Fall 1996], 52-64.)
W. Speed Hill has discussed seven of the first eight volumes in the series in "Editorial Theory and Literary Criticism: Lamb and Wolf?", Review, 19 (1997), 37-64.
It must also be said that Trevor Howard-Hill, as editor of Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, has done an excellent job with reviews (especially, one is tempted to say, when he writes them himself); but he cannot concentrate on textual matters, since the scope of his journal is much broader. Lengthy reviews of documentary editions also regularly appear in Documentary Editing.
Several are entirely devoted to individual authors and thus are outside the scope of the present essay. Many of the 1995-2000 volumes are recorded in notes 5-12 below, and some of them are taken up again at various later points in the essay. In the previous (1996) essay in this series (see note 1 above), I commented on the anthology phenomenon on pp. 1819 and discussed some of the volumes from the early 1990s on pp. 19-33.
Contemporary German Editorial Theory, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, George Bornstein, and Gillian Borland Pierce (1995); Editing D. H. Lawrence: New Versions of a Modern Author, ed. Charles L. Ross and Dennis Jackson (1995); The Literary Text in the Digital Age, ed. Richard J. Finneran (1996); The Margins of the Text, ed. D. C. Greetham (1997); A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in "The Cantos," ed. Lawrence S. Rainey (1997); and The Iconic Page in Manuscript, Print, and Digital Culture, ed. George Bornstein and Theresa Tinkle (1998).
Critical Issues in Editing Exploration Texts, ed. Germaine Warkentin (1995); Editing Early and Historical Atlases, ed. Joan Winearls (1995); Editing Texts from the Age of Erasmus, ed. Erika Rummel (1996); Music Discourse from Classical to Early Modern Times: Editing and Translating Texts, ed. Maria Rika Maniates (1997); Editing Women, ed. Ann M. Hutchison (1998); and Talking on the Page: Editing Aboriginal Texts, ed. Laura J. Murray and Keren D. Rice (1999).
New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, II: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1992-1996, ed. W. Speed Hill (1998); Texts and Textuality: Textual Instability, Theory, and Interpretation, ed. Philip Cohen (1997); The Editorial Gaze: Mediating Texts in Literature and the Arts, ed. Paul Eggert and Margaret Sankey (1998); Scholarly Editing: A Guide to Research, ed. D. C. Greetham (1995); and The Margins of the Text, ed. Greetham (1997). (George Bornstein, however, holds the record, having edited two anthologies before 1995 and two in the 1995-2000 period [see note 5 above].)
Editing Texts, Texte edieren, ed. Glenn W. Most (1998); New Approaches to Editing Old English Verse, ed. Sarah Larratt Keefer and Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe (1998); Reading from the Margins: Textual Studies, Chaucer, and Medieval Literature, ed. Seth Leter (1996; also published as a separate number of Huntington Library Quarterly, 58.1); A Guide to Editing Middle English, ed. Vincent McCarren and Douglas Moffat (1998); Reading Readings: Essays on Shakespeare Editing in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Joanna Gondris (1998); Studies in Stemmatology, ed. Pieter van Reenen and Margot van Mulken, with Janet Dyk (1996); The Literary Text in the Digital Age, ed. Richard J. Finneran (1996); Electronic Text: Investigations in Method and Theory, ed. Kathryn Sutherland (1997).
Such as Biographies of Books: The Compositional Histories of Notable American Writings, ed. James Barbour and Tom Quirk (1996); Essays on the Material Text and Literature in America, ed. Michele Moylan and Lane Stiles (1996); Editing the Text, ed. Marysa Demoor, Geert Lernout, and Sylvia van Peteghem (1998); Textual Formations and Reformations, ed. Laurie E. Maguire and Thomas L. Berger (1998); Ma(r)king the Text: The Presentation of Meaning on the Literary Page, ed. Joe Bray, Miriam Handley, and Anne C. Henry (2000); and Textual Studies and the Common Reader: Essays on Editing Novels and Novelists, ed. Alexander Pettit (2000).
"Textual Scholarship and American Literature," ed. Philip Cohen, Resources for American Literary Study, 20.2 (1994 [but published later]), 133-263, a collection incorporated in Cohen's 1997 anthology (see note 8 above); "Editing Novels and Novelists, Now," ed. Alexander Pettit, Studies in the Novel, 27.3 (Fall 1995), 251-450, four essays from which were included (some with revisions) in his 2000 anthology mentioned in the preceding note; [special issue on genetic criticism], ed. Michael Riffaterre and Antoine Compagnon, Romanic Review, 86.3 (May 1995), 391-598; "Textual Shakespeare," ed. Graham Holderness and Andrew Murphy, Critical Survey, 7.3 (1995), 239-379; "Editing the Literary Imagination," ed. Tom Quirk, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 29.2 (Fall 1996), 1-107; "Genetic Criticism," ed. Claire Bustarret, Word & Image, 13.2 (April-June 1997), 103-222; "The Text as Evidence: Revising Editorial Principles," ed. Andrew Gurr et al., Yearbook of English Studies, 29 (1999), 1-261; and "Making Texts for the Next Century," ed. Peter M. W. Robinson and Hans W. Gabler, Literary & Linguistic Computing, 15.1 (2000), 1-120.
"A Force in His Field: Fredson Bowers's Wider Influence," ed. Jo Ann Boydston et al., Text, 8 (1995), 25-100; "Teaching Textual Criticism," ed. D. C. Greetham and W. Speed Hill, Text, 9 (1996), 135-174; "Forum: Editing Early Modern Texts," ed. Susan Zimmerman, Shakespeare Studies, 24 (1996), 19-78; and "Medieval Studies at the Millennium," Studies in Medievalism, 9 (1997; "Medievalism and the Academy, I," ed. Leslie J. Workman, Kathleen Verduin, and David D. Metzger, 1999), 228-261 (on electronic editions). (On the subject of teaching, see also J. Paul Hunter, "Editing for the Classroom: Texts in Contexts," Studies in the Novel, 27 [1995], 284-294; C. W. Griffin, "Textual Studies and Teaching Shakespeare," in Teaching Shakespeare into the Twenty-First Century, ed. Ronald E. Salomone [1997], pp. 104-111; and Bodo Plachta, "Teaching Editing—Learning Editing," and Rex Gibson, "Editing Shakespeare for School Students," both in the 1999 Problems of Editing [see note 7 above], pp. 18-32, 180-199.)
William Proctor Williams and Craig S. Abbott's An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies, originally published in 1985, came out in a third edition in 1999. (An essay-length introduction also appeared during this time: W. R. Owens's "Editing Literary Texts," in A Handbook to Literary Research, ed. Simon Eliot and W. R. Owens [1998], pp. 63-81, which uses most of its brief space for two extended examples.)
Of the four checklists, one is an expansion of a previously published work: T. H. Howard-Hill's marvelously thorough and admirably indexed Shakespearian Bibliography and Textual Criticism: A Bibliography (2000), an updated revision of his 1971 volume (with coverage extended to 1995). (Among his other publications during this period was the 198089 volume [1999] of his Index to British Literary Bibliography.) A related checklist is Jeremy Lopez's "An Annotated Bibliography of Textual Scholarship in [non-Shakespearean] Elizabethan Drama, 1973-1998," Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 29 (2000), 17-76. The other two works have a broader scope, and the more comprehensive of the two is my Introduction to Scholarly Editing: Seminar Syllabus (1998), which attempts to provide basic reading lists for beginners as well as an extensive record of the literature of the field, including analytical bibliography. (I should note that a revised edition, expanded to 257 pages, was published in 2002; its listing of books and articles from the 1995-2000 period includes more items than are mentioned in the present essay.) The other checklist is clearly the least valuable of the four: William Baker and Kenneth Womack's Twentieth-Century Bibliography and Textual Criticism: An Annotated Bibliography (2000), containing 769 entries divided into six sections, in each of which the ploddingly annotated items are arranged alphabetically by author. It is hard to know who will find this volume helpful: the 225 entries under "Textual Criticism"—especially arranged and annotated as they are—will not readily guide a beginner into the field, and an advanced scholar will not wish to use such a restricted list to search for relevant scholarship.
Michael Hunter, "How to Edit a Seventeenth-Century Manuscript: Principles and Practice," The Seventeenth Century, 10 (1995), 277-310; Michael E. Stevens and Steven B. Burg, Editing Historical Documents: A Handbook of Practice (1997); Mary-Jo Kline, A Guide to Documentary Editing (originally published in 1987 and revised in 1998); and David L. Vander Meulen and G. Thomas Tanselle, "A System of Manuscript Transcription," SB, 52 (1999), 201-212. The last of these criticizes the other three for not adequately distinguishing transcription from emendation, since all three allow the task of transcription to include the alteration of certain features of the manuscript texts. (The Vander Meulen-Tanselle piece also presents a new form of inclusive notation that avoids symbols and permits readers easily to recognize the final reading at each point of revision.) I should perhaps call attention to another guide to transcription, even though it appeared after 2000: P. D. A. Harvey's Editing Historical Records (2001), which—despite being sensible in general and recognizing the dangers of normalization—does not entirely avoid the problem of those three earlier works (allowing, for example, categories of silent alterations). (Luciana Duranti's Diplomatics: New Uses for an Old Science [1998] deals exclusively with the archival management and authentication of documents and does not take up so-called diplomatic transcription.)
I have written about the events surrounding this publication in "The Librarians' Double-Cross," Raritan, 21.4 (Spring 2002), 245-263, which also reviews Baker's important related book, Double Fold: Librarians and the Assault on Paper (2001). Some of the earlier pieces in my campaign to save originals are collected in my Literature and Artifacts (1998); those from the period under review here are "The Future of Primary Records," pp. 96-123, and "Statement on the Significance of Primary Records [for the Modern Language Association's Ad Hoc Committee on the Future of the Print Record]," pp. 335-337.
There were other, if less public, instances of attention to the history of editing, such as Tim William Machan, "Speght's Works and the Invention of Chaucer," Text, 8 (1995), 145-170; Jean I. Marsden, The Re-Imagined Text: Shakespeare, Adaptation, & EighteenthCentury Literary Theory (1995); Charlotte Brewer, Editing "Piers Plowman": The Evolution of the Text (1996); Alain Corbellari, "Joseph Bédier, Philologist and Writer," in Medievalism and the Modernist Temper, ed. R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols (1996), pp. 269-285; Mary B. Speer, "Exhuming the First Guide to Editing Old French Texts: Prompsault's Discours sur les publications littéraires du moyen-âge and the Controversy of 1835," Text, 10 (1997), 181-201; Marcel De Smedt, "W. Bang Kaup, W. W. Greg, R. B. McKerrow and the Edition of English Dramatic Works (1902-1914)," SB, 50 (1997), 213-223; Carol Percy, "Earlier Editorial Practice vs. Later Linguistic Precept: Some Eighteenth-Century Illustrations," English Language Notes, 34.3 (1997), 23-39; Marcus Walsh, Shakespeare, Milton, and Eighteenth-Century Literary Editing: The Beginnings of Interpretative Scholarship (1997); The Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia: The First Fifty Years, ed. David L. Vander Meulen (1998); Reading Readings: Essays on Shakespeare Editing in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Joanna Gondris (1998); Michael E. Stevens, " `The Most Important Scholarly Work': Reflections on Twenty Years of Change in Historical Editing," Documentary Editing, 20 (1998), 81-84, 97; David George, "Eighteenth-Century Editors, Critics, and Performers of Coriolanus," Analytical & Enumerative Bibliography, n.s. 10 (1999), 63-71; David L. Vander Meulen, "The Editorial Principles of Martinus Scriblerus," in The Culture of the Book: Essays from Two Hemispheres in Honour of Wallace Kirsop, ed. David Garrioch, Harold Love, Brian McMullin, Ian Morrison, and Meredith Sherlock (1999), pp. 173-181; Steven Escar Smith, " `The Eternal Verified': Charlton Hinman and the Roots of Mechanical Collation," SB, 53 (2000), 129-161; and Carlo M. Bajetta's edition of McKerrow's 1928 Sandars Lectures in SB, 53 (2000), 1-65. Also during this period Joseph Rosenblum edited Sir Walter Wilson Greg: A Collection of His Writings (1998).
Editing Texts in the History of Science and Medicine, ed. Trevor H. Levere (1982); Editing Modern Economists, ed. D. E. Moggridge (1988); Critical Issues in Editing Exploration Texts (see note 6 above); Music Discourse from Classical to Early Modern Times (see note 6 above). The partially verbal genre of atlases has also been treated in Editing Early and Historical Atlases (see note 6 above). (On atlases, see also Mary Sponberg Pedley, "Atlas Editing in Enlightenment France," Scholarly Publishing, 27 [1995-96], 100-117.)
His 1997 essay "Oral Tradition into Textuality," in Texts and Textuality (see note 8 above), pp. 1-24, is both a concise survey of scholarly trends and also a manifesto for a way of reading that recognizes performance clues in the tangible text, allowing the text to "teach us to read it" (p. 15). (As the title of the essay suggests, he uses "text" only to refer to tangible texts. In my view, it would be preferable to regard the elements of the oral performance as constituting a text also; editors interested in the oral work could then be described as attempting to reconstruct the text of a performance from the text of a document. But my point is not a crucial one, since it only involves a matter of definition, and Foley's discussion is not affected adversely by his use of a different definition.) The essay draws on his fuller argument in The Singer of Tales in Performance (1995); see chapter 3, "The Rhetorical Persistence of Traditional Forms," pp. 60-98, where he speaks of the physical text as a "libretto for the reader's performance" (p. 97), once one learns that "traditional forms and strategies persist in texts as rhetorically active signals" (p. 95). Foley also wrote the chapter on "Folk Literature," a historical account of editing in the field, for the 1995 anthology Scholarly Editing (see note 8 above), pp. 600-626. For other recent instances of linking oral and written traditions, see Margaret Clunies Ross, "Editing the Oral Text: Medieval and Modern Transformations," in The Editorial Gaze (see note 8 above), pp. 173192, and the 1999 Toronto volume, Talking on the Page (see note 6 above).
See my 1991 essay in this series (see note 1 above), pp. 122-128. In Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (1997), W. B. Worthen has offered a thorough discussion of "basic questions about the page, the stage, and the acting of authority" (p. 4), drawing heavily on recent editorial theory ("Authority and Performance," pp. 1-43).
Of course, stage productions that have been filmed fall into the same category as cinematic works (as far as this one point is concerned); but the number of such films is tiny in comparison to all the dramatic performances that could not have been, or were not, filmed. (And of course such a film may not show every nonverbal detail that would have been visible to a theater audience, whereas in cinematic works the nonverbal elements that are visible in a given version are by definition the only ones that exist in that particular version of the work.)
"The Auteur-Author Paradox: How Critics of the Cinema and the Novel Talk about Flawed or Even `Mutilated' Texts," Studies in the Novel (see note 11 above), 27 (1995), 413426.
"Knowing the Score: Italian Opera as Work and Play," Text, 8 (1995), 1-24. The same volume of Text also contains Ellen J. Burns, "Opera as Heard: A Libretto Edition for Phenomenological Study," pp. 185-216. Other similar signs are Catherine Coppola, "The Working Relationship between Elliot Carter and Bernard Greenhouse: Implications Regarding Issues of Text and Performance," Text, 9 (1996), 315-325 (which cites as an analogy Philip Gaskell's discussion of Tom Stoppard in From Writer to Reader [1978]); and Robyn Holmes, "Australian Music Editing and Authenticity: `Would the Real Mrs Monk please stand up?'," in The Editorial Gaze (see note 8 above), pp. 209-226. The issues raised by recordings and player-piano rolls have also been discussed in recent years: Jeff Brownrigg, "The Art of Audio-Editing: Re-Presenting Early Australian Vocal Recordings," in The Editorial Gaze (see note 8 above), pp. 193-208; Kenneth Womack, "Editing the Beatles: Addressing the Roles of Authority and Editorial Theory in the Creation of Popular Music's Most Valuable Canon," Text, 11 (1998), 189-205; and Andrew Durkin, "The Self-Playing Piano as a Site for Textual Criticism," Text, 12 (1999), 167-188.
"The Definition of `Text,' " Text [Uppsala], 5.2 (1998), 50-69 (quotation from pp. 57 and 67). To him, this definition entails distinguishing texts of documents from texts in documents. The latter is the text that is part of a physical object; the former is the same "sequence" (of words and punctuation) wherever it appears (this is what to him is a "real text" because if "text" means "sequence," and sequence is an abstract concept, a physical text cannot "belong to the text concept proper" [p. 67].) I do not find this elaboration necessary, for I see nothing illogical in speaking of (for example) the identity of two texts in two documents. Sequence is simply the abstract concept used to analyze a combination of elements, and it applies equally to tangible and intangible expressions of that combination.
The editors of Text saw fit, for example, to publish Janis C. Bell's "The Critical Reception of Raphael's Coloring in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries," Text, 9 (1996), 199-215. The Society had been founded in 1979 as "an organization devoted to the interdisciplinary discussion of textual theory and practice" (as explained in the first volume of Text [1984 for 1981]). The "plastic arts" are also included in Pierre-Marc de Biasi's survey of the extension of genetic criticism to nonliterary and nonverbal works; see "Horizons for Genetic Studies," Word & Image (see note 11 above), 13 (1997), 124-134 (commented on very briefly in the treatment of critique génétique in part II below).
Strangely enough, he considers modernizing to be a part of the process of transcription (as on p. 2). (Cf. note 15 above.)
Unfortunately, however, Grier on occasion undercuts this welcome point, as when he allows himself to say, "Before anything can be done to a piece, performance, analysis, historical studies, its text must be made known to those who would pursue these undertakings. And the presentation of the text is the editor's job" (p. 37). This sounds surprisingly like the old notion of editors providing texts for critics to analyze—a notion not entirely overturned by Grier's next sentence, which calls an edition "not so much a tool, leading to higher ends, as an active, critical participant in those ends." For the split has already been asserted, rather than an emphasis on the editorial element in every reader's response and thus on the editor's task as essentially the same as that of all other readers.
Grier's accounts of the "semiotic nature of music notation" (as on pp. 25-27), which are apparently meant to distinguish music scores from verbal texts on paper, do not in fact do so: are not the meanings of letterforms and punctuation, like those of music notation, dependent on "context and convention" (p. 67)?
To name one more: Grier says that Greg's copy-text approach "fails as a theory for one simple reason: the difficulty in creating an unequivocal definition of substantive and accidental" (p. 107). This remark reflects a failure not only to understand the firm distinction Greg actually made but also to comprehend that the distinction is ultimately not central to the theory. Furthermore, to add that "the physical presentation . . . of the work and text can carry significant meaning" does not in any way contradict Greg's theory.
He is also a visual artist himself, and anyone who saw his installation "White Noise" at the Whitney Museum in August 2001 knows how elegant and moving his work can be.
The lucidity of Grigely's language stands out sharply in contrast to the prose of Nicole Fugman, who also examines art works in her attempt "to reconceptualize textual criticism and situate it in the ensemble of critique which encompasses philology, historiography, and aesthetics"; see "Contemporary Editorial Theory and the Transvaluation of Postmodern Critique," Text, 10 (1997), 15-29 (quotation from p. 19).
Even a label on the reverse, once one knows about it, plays its role: the reverse "is a still life because this is the location where the transience of the artwork is documented, where traces are accumulated of its passage through particular places at particular times" (p. 177). In an impressively wide-ranging book about the role of memory in culture (Cultural Selection, 1996), Gary Taylor offers similar observations on a painting, Velázquez's Las Meninas, noting that its position in the "edited collection" of the Prado affects its meaning and that works are inevitably subject to "transformations" (such as the photograph of Las Meninas in his book) as they become "dispersed among many members of a society." The generally unremembered or "invisible" persons who perform these transformations (including "reproducers, restorers, curators") may all be called "editors," and "the editorial process fundamentally affects everything we remember about the achievements of the past" (pp. 122-125, in the chapter entitled "Invisible Man," pp. 121-142). (He had made some of the same points in an earlier essay, "What Is an Author [Not]?", Critical Survey [see note 11 above], 7 [1995], 241-254.) Paul Eggert has also discussed the role of the viewer and restorer in the construction of works of visual art, in the third section of his "Where Are We Now with Authorship and the Work?", Yearbook of English Studies (see note 11 above), 29 (1999), 88-102.
The writers in Text were Hans Walter Gabler, Louis Hay, Jean-Louis Lebrave, and Klaus Hurlebusch; those in SB were Hay, Gerhard Neumann, Hurlebusch, and Siegfried Scheibe. I have discussed these pieces in the 1991 essay in this series (see note 1 above), pp. 112-118, and in the 1975 article cited there in note 37. (See also the 1996 essay in the series, note 85.)
"Towards a New Manuscriptology: Génésis, Volumes 1-6," Text, 10 (1997), 362-368. Falconer notes the emphasis on "the inner dynamics of writing, the poetics of composition rather than the context and circumstances in which that composition occurred" (which causes him to say that history is "singularly absent from these pages"); and he praises the journal's "openness to discussions of non-literary art forms" (p. 367).
The Greetham volume deals with traditions in German (by Bodo Plachta), Italian (Paolo Cherchi), Russian (Edward Kasinec and Robert Whittaker), Old and early modern French (Mary B. Speer, Edmund Campion), and medieval Spanish (Alberto Blecua and Germán Orduna), as well as Greek (Bruce M. Metzger, Mervin R. Dilts), Latin (R. J. Tarrant), Hebrew (Francis I. Andersen), Arabic (M. G. Carter), and Sanskrit (Ludo Rocher). (See also Edwin Rabbie, "Editing Neo-Latin Texts," Editio, 10 [1996], 25-48.) The Bowers assemblage (see note 12 above) includes comments on work in Italy (Conor Fahy), France (Wallace Kirsop), Spain (David R. Whitesell), and Japan (Hiroshi Yamashita). (For those who read German and French, current checklists of scholarship are published in Editio and Génésis; and see Jacques Neefs, "A Select Bibliography of Genetic Criticism," Yale French Studies, 89 [1996], 265-267.
An anthology largely on classical literature, Glenn W. Most's Editing Texts, Texte edieren (1998), has the laudable aim of helping to bridge the editorial "theory gap" between classicists and scholars of the modern literatures. As Most says, textual theory has been much more discussed in recent years by the latter group than by the former, which has "neglected or downplayed, for the most part, the thorny theoretical questions raised by the practice of textual editing" (p. viii). The contributions, however, will do more to give the modernliterature editors some examples of the work of classicists than it will to acquaint classicists with recent thinking among modern-literature editors. An effort with a somewhat similar aim in the biblical field is Ferdinand E. Deist's brief piece on "Texts, Textuality, and Textual Criticism," Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages, 21.2 (1995), 59-67; he wishes to acquaint biblical scholars with the ways in which textual criticism is affected by such movements as poststructuralism and deconstruction (which have "much in common with rabbinistic interpretations" [p. 66]), as well as to show the assumptions that underlie traditional textual criticism (but unfortunately he does not point out what is wrong with thinking of it as "preparatory text restoration" [p. 60]).
Eclecticism need not be associated only with an interest in authorial intention, for there are other goals that emendation can support. But that is a separate point.
I do not understand how Zeller got the idea that Anglo-American editors do not record documentary variants, including those in manuscripts. He even claims, incredibly, that the bias of Anglo-American editors has prevented them "from devoting the same attention to manuscript versions as . . . to the printed ones" (p. 97). Zeller's two essays commented on here are "Record and Interpretation: Analysis and Documentation as Goal and Method of Editing," pp. 17-58; and "Structure and Genesis in Editing: On German and Anglo-American Textual Criticism," pp. 95-123.
"In Between the `Royal Way' of Philology and `Occult Science': Some Remarks about German Discussion on Text Constitution in the Last Ten Years," trans. Dieter Neiteler, Text, 12 (1999), 31-47.
It is not clear what he means (especially in this context) when he says, "To my mind, . . . the edited text, and not the text reproduced in facsimile, must remain `the main part of an edition', because it is the edited text alone that enables the response of the reader" (p. 47).
"A Resistence to Contemporary German Editorial Theory and Practice," Editio, 12 (1998), 138-150.
Another way in which the essay could have been improved is that the distinction between "version" and "document" could have been made explicit. Near the beginning, Shillingsburg says that many of the essays in the German anthology state that reports of the historical record "take precedence over any attempts to meld versions into an eclectic text" (p. 141)—as if that is indeed how eclectic texts are constructed.
Among the French contributions are essays by Graham Falconer, Almuth Grésillon, Louis Hay, Jean-Louis Lebrave, and Jacques Neefs, names that will be familiar to those who have read in this area.
"Editing Manuscripts: Towards a Typology of Recent French Genetic Editions, 1980-1995," trans. Helène Erlichson, Text, 12 (1999), 1-30. Cf. his "What Is a Literary Draft? Toward a Functional Typology of Genetic Documentation," Yale French Studies, 89 (1996), 26-58.
The use of "text" to refer primarily to the final text of a work (as when a vertical edition "reaches the textual stage itself" [p. 26]) is a further drawback. The fact that every stage has a text is glimpsed only sporadically here, as in the phrase "the textual text" (p. 20). (Surely the problem is not entirely attributable to the translator.)
"Understanding the Author's Compositional Method: Prolegomenon to a Hermeneutics of Genetic Writing," trans. Uta Nitschke-Stumpf and Hans Walter Gabler, Text, 13 (2000), 55-101 (quotation from p. 64). Another unuseful attempt to cross geographical boundaries is the superficial and uncritical survey of national traditions by Marita Mathijsen ("The Future of Textual Editing") contributed to the 1998 anthology Editing the Text (see note 10 above), pp. 45-54—an anthology with a notably careless and unperceptive introduction, which finds an editorial "crisis" in "all three great traditions" (English, French, and German).
"Textual Perspectives in Italy: From Pasquali's Historicism to the Challenge of `Variantistica' (and Beyond)," Text, 11 (1998), 155-188.
"The `New Philology' from an Italian Perspective," Text, 12 (1999), 49-58; this article, translated by Marcello Cherchi, was originally published in Italian in a 1997 German anthology, Alte und neue Philologie, ed. Martin-Dietrich Glessgen and Franz Lebsanft, pp. 35-42.
David R. Whitesell, "Fredson Bowers and the Editing of Spanish Golden Age Drama," Text (see note 12 above), 8 (1995), 67-84; Carol Bingham Kirby, "Editing Spanish Golden Age Dramatic Texts: Past, Present, and Future Models," Text, 8 (1995), 171-184; H. T. M. van Vliet, "Scholarly Editing in the Netherlands," Text, 13 (2000), 103-129; Annemarie Kets-Vree, "Dutch Scholarly Editing: The Historical-Critical Edition in Practice," Text, 13 (2000), 131-149. Cf. van Vliet and Kets-Vree, "Scholarly Editing in the Netherlands," Literary & Linguistic Computing (see note 11 above), 15 (2000), 65-72.
I have discussed the first edition in the 1986 essay in this series (see note 1 above), pp. 39-45 (pp. 147-153 in Textual Criticism since Greg).
Such as the new opening of "Ideal Texts" (p. 75) or the new second and third paragraphs of "Economics and Editorial Goals" (pp. 123-124). One substantial insertion is a good five-page discussion of Hans W. Gabler's and John Kidd's differing approaches to editing Ulysses (pp. 109-114); and the chapters on the use of computers have a high concentration of revisions that take technical developments into account.
I wish his discussion had covered three points more explicitly than it does: (1) although he notes "the tendency to equate versions of the work with documents of the work" (p. 97), he does not comment on the possibility that a document may contain more than one version; (2) his claim that "authors cannot say in texts things that cannot be represented in linguistic or iconic signs on paper" (p. 96) illustrates his neglect of oral texts; and (3) he does not give very clear recognition to collaborative or social intention, in addition to authorial intention, as a possible goal of critical editing.
Whether this is the case of course depends on the relative skill with which the texts have been supplied with cross-references and lists of variants.
It first appeared on the internet, where it is available (in a text dated 6 May 1995, as of this writing) at <http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/public/jjm2f/rationale.html>. Its first printed appearance was in a shortened form in European English Messenger, 4.2 (Autumn 1995), 34-40 (which concentrates on the examples and leaves out the introductory section, the sections entitled "Hyperediting and Hypermedia" and "Coda," and the notes, as well as scattered shorter passages). The full version has been published with modifications (primarily the addition of several paragraphs to the discussion of Example D) in Text, 9 (1996), 11-32 (the text cited here) and in Electronic Text, ed. Kathryn Sutherland (1997), pp. 19-46. (In the title, "HyperText" has a capital middle "T" in the internet and Text appearances but not in the other two.)
As he himself says later, "Enthusiasts for hypertext sometimes make extravagant philosophical claims" p. 28).
McGann persists in distinguishing "poetry" and "expository text" in "Endnote: What Is Text?", in Ma(r)king the Text (see note 10 above), pp. 329-333. In this piece, he quite properly criticizes the limitations in the concept of text that underlies the Text Encoding Initiative, which concentrates on the "narrowly `linguistic' " elements and neglects the "more broadly `semiotic' " ones (p. 331); but the criticism is relevant to the encoding of all texts, not just those that he believes can be segregated as " `poetic' or non-informational forms of textuality" (p. 330).
As an analogue, he cites the study of the physical world, in which "it makes a great difference if the level of the analysis is experiential (direct) or mathematical (abstract)" (p. 12). But it is hard to see what parallelism McGann has in mind, for both the codex and the electronic presentations of textual evidence are empirical (or "experiential") in approach.
One rarely hears the other side: the codex form has its advantages, too, at least for some people. It is not necessarily the case, for example, that turning a few leaves is more difficult or time-consuming than entering a search command or pressing a key to move to a variant text. But there is no doubt that many (if not all) people will find it easier in electronic form to do many (but not all) of the things one wishes to do in the course of careful reading.
In his 1998 presidential address to the Society for Textual Scholarship ("Hideous Progeny, Rough Beasts: Editing as a Theoretical Pursuit," Text, 11 [1998], 1-16), which includes an interesting historical account of his Rossetti Hypermedia Archive, McGann repeats his baseless claim that "The value of computerization for the study of books and texts lies exactly in the fact that with computerized tools we do not bring books to study books"; he adds, "when our tools function at higher levels of abstraction from the materials we are studying, we create conditions for new orders of certainty" (p. 12). Another instance of his hyperbole in this piece: "Editing in paper-based formats, I came to understand, literally creates the set of contradictions that mark the differences between documentary and critical approaches to editing" (p. 7). These differences (which are not "contradictions," reflecting as they do complementary approaches) obviously exist on a conceptual level and cannot be created by one form of implementation. Documentary and critical presentations may often be easier to use in electronic form, but the differences between them obviously remain. Perhaps such misconceptions are related to a more basic one: his naïve belief that "the `hypothesis' represented by an editorial undertaking is very different from the hypothesis of a theoretical or interpretive book or essay" (pp. 7-8)—a strange point to make a few pages after the (correct) assertion that certain landmark editions "are polemical works bearing within themselves complex and far-reaching arguments" (p. 3).
Though they do contain some questionable statements, as when he calls a particular edition "a reader's edition, not a critical edition" (p. 18)—a problematical distinction under any circumstances, but especially so given his earlier comments.
He speaks only of libraries in which the books themselves are shelved according to a subject classification; but his basic point of course remains valid for those libraries where the books are arranged in accession order and where subject access is only through a catalogue.
She quotes him as saying that "the work is held in the hand, the text is held in language" (p. 3). But the work/text distinction that she believes has been undercut is the one more commonly made by textual critics, in which the signification of the two terms is approximately reversed. She allows this switch in usage to distract her from looking into the concepts that the terms refer to in each case.
The essays alluded to in this paragraph are: Renear, "Out of Praxis: Three (Meta)Theories of Textuality," pp. 107-126; Flanders, "The Body Encoded: Questions of Gender and the Electronic Text," pp. 127-144; Robinson, "New Directions in Critical Editing," pp. 145-171; Conner, "Lighting out for the Territory: Hypertext, Ideology, and Huckleberry Finn," pp. 67-106; Donaldson, "Digital Archive as Expanded Text: Shakespeare and Electronic Textuality," pp. 173-198; Lamont, "Annotating a Text: Literary Theory and Electronic Hypertext," pp. 47-66. (Another article of Flanders's, misleadingly entitled "Trusting the Electronic Edition," is a superficial discussion of the role of images in electronic editions; see Computers and the Humanities, 31 [1997-98], 301-310.)
He quite rightly implies the continuing value of consulting originals, as when he says that "the availability of a digital reproduction does not in any way render the original any less available" (p. 241). I must note by the way that this point is applicable primarily to manuscripts and pre-nineteenth-century printed items; a great many post-1800 printed items have been, and continue to be, destroyed precisely because some librarians believe that reproductions render the space-consuming originals unnecessary. (On this issue, see, among other essays of mine, the ones cited in note 16 above.)
The volume should have ended with Unsworth's thoughtful essay, not with the "Afterword" (pp. 245-248) by A. Walton Litz, who simply repeats glib exaggerations about how "electronic resources have profoundly affected many of our conceptions of the editor's function" (p. 245). (It must be noted that Finneran himself, in his preface, speaks of digital technology producing "a fundamental paradigm shift.") Litz is right to think of "electronic editing as another form of criticism" (p. 246) but wrong to believe the word "electronic" is necessary, since editing has always been a form of criticism. And it is strange that he then insists on the electronic editor's "nonintervention" (p. 248)—the impossibility and undesirability of which are recognized in several of the essays in the volume. (The titles of the essays mentioned in this paragraph are as follows: Hockey, "Creating and Using Electronic Editions," pp. 1-21; Shillingsburg, "Principles for Electronic Archives, Scholarly Editions, and Tutorials," pp. 23-35; Unsworth, "Electronic Scholarship; or, Scholarly Publishing and the Public," pp. 233-243.)
Ross, "The Electronic Text and the Death of the Critical Edition," pp. 225-231; Doss, "Traditional Theory and Innovative Practice: The Electronic Editor as Poststructuralist Reader," pp. 213-224.
As when he says that "hypertext allows a reader to escape the linearity imposed by print media" (p. 219).
This point is well taken even if one doubts Doss's notion that "the aesthetic character of the textual editor's job is more apparent in hypertext environments than in print" (p. 217). Another anthology substantially devoted to the computer—but in this case to its role in analyzing texts rather than presenting them—is Studies in Stemmatology (1996; see note 9 above), based on a series of colloquia at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, reflecting "the newly recovered field of stemmatology" (p. xii). The editors of the volume, Pieter van Reenen and Margot van Mulken, assert in their "Prologue" that the use of the computer for stemmatic analysis of difficult traditions has resulted in "heightened awareness of the limitations of the researcher's own capacities and those of the computer." This development, if true, is obviously for the good, as is the idea that the stemma "is no longer seen as an authoritative prescriptive scheme which an editor should blindly apply to his manuscript tradition"—something it should never have been. That the computer may somehow have helped to inject basic critical sense into the field is not, however, a reason to believe that "the implementation of the computer has fundamental theoretical implications" (p. ix). An example of the good sense that follows from regarding the stemma as "guiding and advisory," not "prescriptive" (p. 99), is Peter M. W. Robinson's contribution, "Computer-Assisted Stemmatic Analysis and `Best-Text' Historical Editing" (pp. 71-103). By "best text" he does not mean what that term has historically meant but rather uses it as a synonym for "base text" (or, one might add, "copy-text"), which is subject to emendations through editorial judgment. What he says, therefore, is not news to editors of modern literature, but it is good to have this clear statement of it applied to medieval literature.
See his "Reading, Scholarship, and Hypertext Editions," Text, 8 (1995), 109-124; and "Electronic Editions and the Needs of Readers," in New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, Il (see note 8 above), pp. 149-156. The quotations below are from the first.
A view that Germaine Warkentin has called "the untethered Utopianism of the new age of the computer" (in her review of The Margins of the Text, ed. D. C. Greetham [1997], in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada, 36 [1998], 128-130). Ian Small, too, has written of the illusory nature of the freedom that a hypertext archive supposedly offers, since hypertext is structured according to the values of the person(s) who set up the structure; his point is not to suggest that such values should be eliminated but rather to recognize the inevitability of value judgments and to affirm the importance of embracing them—"as editors," he says, "we ought to be as evaluative as possible." See "Postmodernism and the End(s) of Editing," in the 1998 anthology Editing the Text (see note 10 above), pp. 35-43 (quotation from p. 43); and "Identifying Text and Postmodernist Editorial Projects," Yearbook of English Studies (see note 11 above), 29 (1999), 43-56 (which reuses in its last six pages a substantial portion of the earlier article—pp. 37-43—in somewhat revised form).
"The One Text and the Many Texts," pp. 5-14 (quotation from p. 13). In his abstract of the essay, he characterizes a reconstructed text as "the text that best explains all the extant documents." In a similar vein, Jesse D. Hurlbut has stated that "part of the editor's role is to recommend possible directions one may choose to follow" through the mass of linked materials, such guidance of course reflecting "the editor's expertise and experience"; see "Shifting Paradigms and the Development of Hypermedia Editions," Studies in Medievalism (see note 12 above), 9 (1997), 228-238 (quotation from p. 233). (Hurlbut's generally sound discussion has its simplistic moments, however, as in the passage that tries to elaborate how electronic editing leads to "reevaluation of the need to designate a base manuscript" [p. 231], without truly seeing the issues or recognizing that they are independent of whether editions are published in codex or electronic form.)
"Historical Reading and Editorial Practice," in Ma(r)king the Text (see note 10 above), pp. 193-200 (quotations from p. 199).
"In Dreams Begins Responsibility: Novels, Promises, and the Electronic Edition," in Textual Studies and the Common Reader (see note 10 above), pp. 160-179.
Such as calling the search for authorial intention "romantic" (pp. 126, 127) and peaking of "the latent idealism of copy-text editing" (p. 130). The article appears in Pilgri- age for Love: Essays in Early Modern Literature in Honor of Josephine A. Roberts, ed. igrid King (1999), pp. 115-132 (the text cited here), and also in Problems of Editing (see ote 7 above), pp. 96-112.
Another unfounded complaint is that analytical bibliographers refuse to consider evidence external to the books under investigation. The irresponsible repetition of this criticism is symbolized by the fact that Hugh Amory, in the opening chapter of the first volume of A History of the Book in America (The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, ed. Amory and David D. Hall, 2000), refers to "what bibliographers casually dismiss as `external evidence' " (p. 43). Amory knew better, and it is regrettable that he allowed such a major work to be marred by his eagerness to criticize analytical bibliography.
The volume, she believes, not only "tackles textual issues in a new light" but also has a "readability" absent from the work of the New Bibliographers, whose writing she criticizes for being "prosaic and straightforward" and eschewing "extended metaphor or creative play" (p. 13). (Anyone familiar with, for example, Pollard's style will find this a strange assertion.) Even Barbara A. Mowat, in her contribution to the anthology, assumes "a post-New Bibliography world" (p. 144), though the New Bibliography remains crucial for her focus on the documentary texts rather than on the attempt to reconstruct authorial manuscripts ("The Problem of Shakespeare's Text(s)," pp. 131-148—an earlier version of which appeared in Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 132 [1996], 26-43). (I should add that the Maguire-Berger anthology, despite its introduction and opening essay, contains more essays of significance than most anthologies, and some of them are commented on below, notably a fine piece by Tom Davis.) Maguire was perhaps hoping to promote the kind of writing that appeared a few years earlier in an essay by Graham Holderness, Bryan Loughrey, and Andrew Murphy, " `What's the Matter?' Shakespeare and Textual Theory," Textual Practice, 9 (1995), 93-119: it contains a particularly extravagant passage in which the New Bibliography is said to involve not only the mixture of the "mechanistic language of materialism" and "an efflux of Platonic idealism" (p. 96) but also "a patriarchal sexualization of the text," in which "the manuscript is a version of the female body" and the "printed text interposes an opaque and obstructive `veil' . . . between the male desire and its object" (p. 97). (Later on the same page the New Bibliographers are found participating in a "re-enactment of the Christian myth," since they arranged for the "incarnated text" to be assumed into "the heaven of authorial intention." Later still: "that virtually all-male club the New Bibliographers evidently cherished beneath their respectable tweed jackets a perverse desire to ravish the printed text in order to release the perfect female body enclosed within it" p. 101].)
A more valuable way of critically examining the actual work of the New Bibliographers, and one of more direct usefulness to textual criticism, is offered by the two excellent essays that follow, by Paul Werstine and Michael Warren, which show the lack of foundation for Pollard's and Greg's arguments supporting the idea that certain quarto texts derived from abridgments for provincial use or from memorial reconstruction (Werstine, "Touring and the Construction of Shakespeare Textual Criticism," pp. 45-66; Warren, "Greene's Orlando: W. W. Greg Furioso," pp. 67-91). Werstine, indeed, always writes cogently and intelligently on the history of editorial thinking about Shakespeare; for another admirable example, see his "Editing Shakespeare and Editing without Shakespeare: Wilson, McKerrow, Greg, Bowers, Tanselle, and Copy-Text Editing," Text, 13 (2000), 27-53, which focuses on the disagreements among Wilson, McKerrow, and Greg and thus demonstrates "the enormously diverse principles for editing Shakespeare on offer in the early part of this century" (p. 46). (A somewhat less successful effort is his "Post-Theory Problems in Shakespeare Editing," Yearbook of English Studies (see note 11 above), 29 (1999), 103-117: although his point that play manuscripts took many more varied forms than simply "foul papers" and "prompt-book" is unquestionably worth making, his argument is less effective than it might be, owing to what comes across as an eagerness to criticize Greg and his followers, reflected in continual reference to their "grand narrative" and in reductive summaries of their position.)
Despite a number of unfortunate comments such as these in Zimmerman's "Afterword," it is for the most part a remarkable statement of points that are not usually made: see note 110 below. Paul Werstine, another contributor to the forum, certainly knows that analytical bibliography is independent of editing. However, his contribution, "Editing after the End of Editing" (pp. 47-54), is not up to his usual standard, though he is always worth reading. Here he seems to think one can criticize the effort to segregate compositorial and authorial characteristics by saying that it offers "no way to break the hermeneutic circle" (p. 49). There is nothing objectionable about searching printed texts for clues to the characteristics of an author's manuscript, even when the characteristics of such manuscripts are unknown: the process reflects the nature of the world, the condition (in one degree or another) of all research. What would be objectionable would be not to attempt the search at all. Of course, one may evaluate the care with which it is conducted; but if that was what Werstine was doing, there was no need to invoke the "hermeneutic circle."
The shallowness of much of his discussion is epitomized by his statement that "editors must prepare a text, but interpreters and theorists need only articulate an argument" (p. 11). To his credit, however, he also says (rather inconsistently) that "most cultural critics have not become aware that ontological assumptions underlie any attempt to constitute— and therefore to read or theorize—the text of a work" (p. 6). Still another example of a discussion guilty of merging New Bibliography and final authorial intention is Andrew Murphy's " `Came errour here by mysse of man': Editing and the Metaphysics of Presence," Yearbook of English Studies (see note 11 above), 29 (1999), 118-137 (see pp. 131-135), an essay that in many respects is a thoughtful meditation on the "desire for direct individual connection with the author" (p. 133)—though he goes too far in suggesting that intentionalist editors seek a "source of true, irrevocable, unitary meaning" (p. 135).
This essay serves as the introduction to his 1997 anthology, Texts and Textuality (see note 8 above), pp. xi-xxxiv, and is a revised version of his introduction to a special 1994 number of Resources for American Literary Study (see note 11 above), pp. 133-18.
Cohen even makes it appear that one of McGann's contributions is to show "that the physical form containing a linguistic text is also a text" (p. xvi). McGann would not wish to make this claim, worded in this way, for he knows that analytical bibliographers have long shown how one reads physical evidence to extract a narrative. But their narratives deal with printing history, whereas McGann's involve book design. Cohen compounds the problem: "Such a textualizing of what has traditionally been treated as the physical form containing a text renders analytical bibliography an even more interpretive discipline than it has been heretofore." How can it (or anything) be "more interpretive"? What he presumably means is that its scope is enlarged—which would be true if one calls the analysis of readers' responses to book design "analytical bibliography" (an extension I find unobjectionable). But the traditional kind of analytical bibliography still has its role to play, and the implication that intentionalist editors ignored design features is not true—for they (quite properly, given their goal) paid attention to design whenever it seemed to be an authorially intended part of a work. (The ubiquity of this inaccurate notion is suggested by Karen Bjelland's offhand and nonsensical remark that "even the bibliographical community has been slow to explore the meaning of its own codes given the continuing influence of Greg"; see "The Editor as Theologian, Historian, and Archaeologist: Shifting Paradigms within Editorial Theory and Their Sociocultural Ramifications," Analytical & Enumerative Bibliography, n.s., 11 [2000], 1-43 [quotation from p. 20].)
I should mention that an essay of mine, "The Varieties of Scholarly Editing," appears in this volume (pp. 9-32). Because my piece is introductory, it is unlike all the other essays, which focus on specific fields; and those other essays are what make the volume valuable. (The fields covered, and the scholars responsible for the coverage, are mentioned in note 35 above.)
A particularly detailed examination of gender in editing occurs in a different anthology, Textual Formations and Reformations (see note 10 above), where Valerie Wayne discusses, with effective examples, "the ways in which male compositors and editors have created texts that debase and efface women and members of other marginalized groups" ("The Sexual Politics of Textual Transmission," pp. 179-210 [quotation from p. 179]).
He concludes (in a fashion typical of his writing) that "if a combination of the [Supreme Court's] Feist decision [on copyright], personalist criticism, local knowledge, and the posthermeneutic dispensation can make us textually dangerous again, then perhaps the loss of philological face will have been worth it." To end with a comment about "losing face" trivializes the whole discussion. (For a perceptive and witty review of this anthology, see T. H. Howard-Hill's in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 92 [1998], 351357.)
If beginning students only knew, there are passages not worth their time, since the matters treated in them are handled more clearly and authoritatively elsewhere. A particularly vulnerable area is analytical bibliography: Figure 18, for instance, is useless and possibly misleading, and Figures 24 and 27 could certainly be improved as teaching devices (for they do not make clear that two inner and two outer formes are involved in each case); and the account of setting by formes for a folio in sixes (p. 285) is imprecise and would, I believe, puzzle a beginner. These instances, and others like them, are minor blemishes, to be sure, in relation to the whole work; yet in a textbook such blemishes are not trivial. (See also the third footnote in my 1996 essay in this series [see note 1 above].)
I have commented on some of the previously published ones in two earlier essays in this series (see note 1 above): my 1991 essay, pp. 128-130 (commenting on the pieces now prefaced by Interweaves 4-7; and my 1996 essay, p. 26 (Interweave 12), p. 30 (Interweave 17), and p. 48 (Interweave 9).
This admirable statement is unfortunately weakened by the phrase "both editorial and critical," which suggests that editorial decisions are not critical.
Greetham here chooses the fashionable verb "empowered" despite its inappropriateness for the point he is making; a less assertive expression (such as "reflective of") would convey the meaning better.
Bennett's essay (with the subtitle "The Editor And?/Or? the Text") appears in Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities, ed. George Bornstein and Ralph G. Williams (1993), pp. 67-96 (quotation from p. 90).
Greetham's discussion is rendered particularly unclear by his mixing of a separate point into the "paradox." Bennett says, in the passage already quoted from, "To isolate the editing of works of and by females . . . would defeat the very purpose that inspired `Classical' feminism itself." Greetham points out, correctly, that "the editing of works of and by females" is not the only form that feminist editing might take; and he suggests that if Bennett had tried to relate editing to a different kind of feminism, she might not have had the same doubts about feminist editorial theory and therefore might not have found herself in an "awkward position." It is of course legitimate to raise the question of whether her doubts are well founded; but the answer to that question has nothing whatever to do with the claim that her doubts (however they were formed) produce a paradox or place her "into a corner" (p. 440).
Many other problematical points could be cited, such as the repeated use of "the text that never was" (as on p. 367) to refer to the product of critical editing, or the related claim that "the result of eclecticism . . . is manifestly unhistorical" (p. 53)—with no new arguments offered to justify the continual assertion of these questionable ideas. There is even the claim that "The appeal of Reagan and Bush on the one hand and textual idealism on the other was both Edenic and teleological" (p. 372). There are also outright errors, such as saying that "New Bibliography" is a term "used to designate the technical research of analytical and descriptive bibliography" (p. 87).
This phraseology is itself off the mark, because no one has been arguing about the comprehensiveness of the intentionalist or the social approaches within themselves; the relevant point is whether the two fit together to form a more comprehensive overview. If a perceived "intentionalist" scholar argues that the two are indeed complementary, that does not make the intentionalist approach itself more comprehensive.
In two earlier essays in this series (see note 1 above), I have commented on four of the previously published chapters: in my 1991 essay, p. 131 (on the piece that is now his fifth chapter), and in my 1996 essay, pp. 37-41 (on the pieces that are now his second, third, and seventh chapters).
A related point: Shillingsburg thinks that an author's desire not to have a specific intention falls in a different category from authorial intention. For example, after saying that script-act theory is likely to focus on the use of language "to convey meaning," he states that the theory must also cover "script acts for which any response is equally appropriate, for which there was no attempt to imbue the language with intention to be understood or misunderstood" (p. 10). But such a situation is simply another example of authorial intention: the reader's response is defined in terms of what the author had in mind. Two pages later, he contrasts communicative acts with texts that "may never have had specific communicative force in their generation" and with those instances where readers choose not to care about authorial intention; but only the latter in fact describes a situation in which communication is not involved.
Shillingsburg admits, "I'm overstating my case." I would have preferred to read what he would have said if he were not overstating his case.
He is certainly not opposed to critical (emended) texts, for he believes an electronic edition should include "an archive of edited texts, or at least one edited text, produced to reflect the work of a historian or of several," along with images and searchable texts of "historical documents," as well as historical, critical, and textual commentary (p. 24). Are we to believe that the presence of documentary texts in full will counteract readers' apathy about textual matters and energize them into studying textual variants?
This distinction is not quite the same as Shillingsburg's between a "social contract" (in which an author willingly yields some authority to others) and a "production contract" (in which copy-editors or printers, for example, make alterations in texts). When he says that the social contract "should be binding on both the original printer and the modern editor" but that the production contract "has no more standing with a modern editor than the interference of any unauthorized third party" (p. 163), he leaves out the possibility of studying the texts that readers had available to them and were influenced by. (He also confuses the issue by including inadvertent as well as intended changes in the production contract. It seems strange not to include printers' and publishers' intended changes within the social contract, as part of what is entailed by the social process of bringing texts to readers. An interest in publishers' intended texts is not the same as an interest in the texts that were actually published.)
All of this chapter (pp. 207-225), except the fourteen paragraphs from the top of page 215 to the bottom of page 218, originally appeared under the title "Editions Half Perceived, Half Created" in Studies in the Literary Imagination (see note 11 above), 29 (1996), 75-88. The added material was in part restated and revised from "Editing Thackeray: A History," Studies in the Novel (see note 11 above), 27 (1995), 363-374.
As when he claims that the consensus view among American editors of the 1960s and 1970s held "that best and most reliable were synonymous with the author's final intentions" (p. 211), or when he asserts (not for the first time) that "multiple texts in printed form cannot avoid hierarchic presentation" (p. 211).
Negotiating Conflicting Aims in Scholarly Editing: The Problem of Editorial Intentions," in Problems of Editing (see note 7 above), pp. 1-8.
"Social Discourse or Authorial Agency: Bridging the Divide between Editing and Theory," in The Editorial Gaze: Mediating Texts in Literature and the Arts (1998), pp. 97116. I have conflated the two parts of Eggert's title because the "divide" is not really between editing and theory (since for each theory there are kinds of editions to carry out its principles) but—in the minds of some people—between two theoretical approaches (since some people feel that accepting one requires rejecting the other).
Another side-benefit is an interesting discussion of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules—which, however, does not strike me as relevant to the topic at hand. The Rules do, of course, serve as an example of the continuing usefulness of the concept of individual authority for verbal works; but that example has nothing to do with what attitude textual theorists might reasonably hold toward the concept.
"Editing the Academy Editions of Australian Literature: Historical Version and Authorial Agency," in The Humanities and a Creative Nation: Jubilee Essays, ed. Deryck M. Schreuder (1995), pp. 69-88; reprinted (slightly revised) as "General-Editing and Theory: Historical Version and Authorial Agency" in Problems of Editing (see note 7 above), pp. 4258 (the text cited here). In this essay, he quotes from his essay-review of Jack Stillinger's Multiple Authority and the Myth of Solitary Genius (1991), "Making Sense of Multiple Authorship," Text, 8 (1995), 305-323, which ends with the same point as these other essays: with his text/document distinction, he believes, "the textual dimension of the work is returned to the documentary level in the act of physical inscription, only to re-emerge again, differently, whenever the document is read." Another comment in this review, a few sentences earlier, is that "the textual apparatus in critical editions might come to be seen as more important than the reading text"; this remark is not so startling as Eggert believes and indeed is very close to comments made by Fredson Bowers, Jo Ann Boydston, and other intentionalist editors. (See, among other places, my 1996 essay in this series [see note 1 above], p. 52.) He is wrong to claim that a critical text is "cut free of its historical moorings" (p. 322), but he is to be applauded for expressing the hope that "the critically edited text would be understood not so much as capturing the literary work in an essential form as participating in it" (p. 312).
He believes, surprisingly, that it is at odds with the traditional position, which— he thinks—posits a stable text of the work. But he hardly supports this idea by asserting, "The doctrine of final authorial intention has offered an achievable way of approximating the ideal text of a work, of keeping it singular" (p. 55). It was usually kept singular by the demands of the codex form, and the word "final" was an indication that multiple intentions were recognized (as the apparatus made explicit). Whereas Eggert says that editors of the past wanted to believe in the stability of texts of works, it would be more accurate to say that it was their critics who wanted to believe that this was their position. Other related problems appear in the essay: when, for instance, he discusses (pp. 53-55) the fact that authors' original intentions (in their minds) are unlikely to be transferred precisely to writing and that what does get written affects what else is written, he asks, "where does this leave editing which appeals to a criterion of authorial intention?" Behind the question would seem to be the assumption that intentionalist editors seek a single "original" intention rather than the intention(s) manifested in acts of writing. (Cf. my comments in the 1996 essay in this series [see note 1 above], pp. 58-59.) Lapses of this kind, however, do not affect the value of the main line of his discussion.
In developing his ideas for a 1997 conference paper, "The Work Unravelled" (published in Text, 11 [1998], 41-60), he produced a less successful effort to offer "a different conceptualisation of the literary work" (p. 43). A basic flaw is evident near the beginning when he surprisingly asserts that intended texts cannot be historical because people's minds cannot generally retain long texts in their entirety. But those who believe that intended texts are historical events have never, so far as I am aware, claimed that the quantity of text that can be held in the mind has any relevance whatever to the matter. Authors' or publishers' intentions, as traditionally talked about, are the intentions involved at each moment; those intentions reflect particular concepts, not the simultaneous awareness of every word and mark of punctuation previously selected. That texts are built up in this way on a physical surface does not in any sense invalidate the idea that the physical text may not faithfully represent the intended text and that the intended text is as historical as the documentary one. Eggert's essay proceeds dutifully to sketch the development of philosophical attitudes toward the subject/object problem and then envisages (with, he believes, Theodor Adorno's help) the "work" as something that "unravels, in every moment of its being, into a relationship between its documentary and its textual dimensions" (p. 58). As with the earlier essay discussed above, his use of "textual" to signify "referring to meaning" detracts from the clarity of this conception; but if one makes allowance for this problem, his statement then makes sense but is not in any way revolutionary, for the postulated "relationship" is what has always underlain textual criticism and all kinds of editing. That he uses the negative image of unraveling for this process is, however, strange (and unfortunate); a constructive metaphor of knitting or weaving would be more apt. (On the Academy Editions, see his "Editing a Nation's Literature: The Academy Editions of Australian Literature Project," Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Bulletin, 20 [1996], 146-153.)
In a later essay, "Where Are We Now with Authorship and the Work?" (see note 32 above), he again affirms the importance of the concept of authorship ("authorship has continued to answer to needs and to ways of knowing" [p. 99]) but recognizes that "agency" (which encompasses more than authorship) is "the most focused form of explanation we have in pointing to responsibility for the physical-inscriptional act of text" (p. 102). And he again sets forth positions that are in fact well established, but one cannot complain about such clear restatements of the obvious as the following: "if editors pursue it [final authorial intention] they need to be aware of their own participation in the standard and be aware that their definition of a textual source of authority is inevitably influenced by their own life and times" (p. 101); "the editor asks as the basic question not, What was the intended meaning? but, rather, What was the intended physical inscription?" (p. 102). The first is a given for all discourse; the second is how intention has regularly been defined by intentionalist editors.
In "The Dangers of Editing, or, the Death of the Editor," in The Editorial Gaze (see note 8 above), pp. 51-66. Still another writer who wishes "to address the opponents of critical editions" is Nathan Houser, who—as an editor of the Charles Sanders Peirce Edition—offers "a Peircean semiotics of critical editing" and makes a case "for the reality of authorial texts, which, as types, can guide the editing process" (documents are "the signs of the work," and "a work (as a type) stands as a dynamic object for the textual editor"); see "The Semiotics of Critical Editing: Is There a Future for Critical Editions?", in Semiotics around the World, ed. Irmengard Rauch and Gerald F. Carr (1997), pp. 1073-1076.
Among other scattered problems in his essay is his handling of what readers "require." I certainly agree that they need "mediated texts" (by which he means critical texts, though earlier on the same page [p. 61] he had said, with good reason, "A facsimile text is itself mediated"). But he calls this fact about what readers require a "painful truth," since apparently for him the reason for giving readers critical texts is simply that they desire "a received or acceptable text" and do not "want or need" to read the apparatus. The preparation of critical texts, however, has a higher aim than catering to readers' unenlightened preferences. It is not at odds with the effort to encourage readers to see the relevance of textual history to their own reading; indeed, critical texts with apparatus are—and should be publicized as—specialists' guides into, not away from, the complexities of textual history.
The first scholarly edition, I believe, to have explicitly followed my suggestion is the volume devoted to This Side of Paradise (1995, edited by James L. W. West III) in the Cambridge edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald. See also two reviews by Richard Bucci: "Serving Fitzgerald's Intentions without a Copy-Text," Text, 14 (2002), 324-333 (a review of Trimalchio, 2000); and his review of Robert Coltrane's 1998 edition of Twelve Men in the Pennsylvania Dreiser edition, Text, 14 (2002), 372-380. Robert H. Hirst plans to follow this approach in future volumes of the "Works of Mark Twain" series (University of California Press).
But not very often, except by Shillingsburg and me. One of the few other instances is Susan Zimmerman's "Afterword" to a collection of essays in the 1996 volume of Shakespeare Studies (see note 78 above and the passage to which it is attached). Zimmerman recognizes that "there is a danger in grounding a new editorial practice in a reaction to the insufficiencies of an earlier theory" (p. 72). In commenting on authorial intention, she again is more perceptive than the usual critics: "we should not propose that psychic processes themselves are suspect as an area of historical inquiry, or that such processes are not material" (p. 73). Her conclusion is worth remembering: "perhaps the most important question to bear in mind is not how accurately we represent the past, but how deliberately we formulate the theoretical premises by which we dare to investigate it" (p. 74).
Ray's essay (written for a 1972 conference) was first printed in Illinois Libraries, 55 (1973), 235-241, and then included in the conference proceedings, Reading in a Changing World, ed. Foster E. Mohrhardt (1976), pp. 20-30; it was reprinted in Books as a Way of Life: Essays by Gordon N. Ray, ed. G. Thomas Tanselle (1988), pp. 351-364. The quotation (from p. 362) I find so admirable that I have quoted it (or parts of it), in conversation and in print, on many occasions. One of the published instances is "Books, Canons, and the Nature of Dispute," Common Knowledge, 1 (1992), 78-91, reprinted in my Literature and Artifacts (1998), pp. 275-290; in that essay I take up at greater length some of the issues I am commenting on here. And in the third footnote I make this comment: "Because I have repeatedly . . . found fault with those who have opposed an intentionalist approach, it has sometimes been asserted that I am a `defender' of that approach. . . . It would be more accurate, I think, to say that I have criticized the arguments of many of those who have attacked the study of intention. But the pervasiveness of partisan thinking makes it difficult for some people to see dissent in any terms other than a defense of one line and hostility to another. I know of no grounds for being hostile to social textual criticism; but the arguments of many of its advocates are internally unsound, and therefore self-defeating."
"The Text of Dryden's Poetry," Huntington Library Quarterly, 63 (2000 [but published later]), 227-244.
In a slight 1996 piece he had said that editing is not only "a hot topic" but "arguably the hot topic"; see "The Mechanics of Culture: Editing Shakespeare Today," Shakespeare Studies (see note 12 above), 24 (1996), 30-37 (reprinted, with revisions and additions, in his Shakespeare after Theory [1999], pp. 59-70). This piece, now superseded by his Shakespeare and the Book, need not detain one.
David L. Vander Meulen, in "The Editorial Principles of Martinus Scriblerus" (see note 17 above), points out that Pope's fictional editor of The Dunciad Variorum (1729) aims through emendation to reconstruct an authorially intended text, not merely a particular documentary text; Vander Meulen, noting that this goal has in recent years been called "Romantic," then observes, "Scriblerus, in common with other eighteenth-century editors, applies those `Romantic' principles to vernacular literature in the century before they were supposedly devised" (p. 175).
I have discussed how such a critical text might be produced in the case of Melville, in "The Text of Melville in the Twenty-First Century," in Melville's Evermoving Dawn: Centennial Essays, ed. John Bryant and Robert Milder (1997), pp. 332-345 (especially pp. 337-338).
Contrary to what one might have expected from reading the introduction, Kastan believes that authorial intentions "matter" and are "to some degree . . . recoverable," though in the same passage he irrelevantly says that "in Shakespeare's case they are unavailable" (p. 121)—a pointless idea (though commonly expressed), for the "availability" of anyone's intention is a relative matter and one that does not affect the desirability of attempting to recover it.
This part of his sentence stands on its own and should not be introduced by the phrases he places at the beginning: "In the absence of an authentic original, indeed in the absence of a general agreement about what an authentic original might be, . . . ." Even if there were an "authentic original," there would still be textual issues that could be resolved more than one way; and people, quite rightly, would continually feel the necessity to produce new editions.
In Textual Formations and Reformations (see note 10 above), pp. 95-111. At this point it is worth recalling Kelvin Everest's point about editing being "at the heart of a living contemporary literary culture" (see the passage above to which note 72 is attached) and Joseph Grigely's view that culture "depends on remaking texts in order to exist" (cited at the end of part I above). Another relevant comment is Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht's: "every editor . . . adopts roles that are close to those of singers, poets, or authors, and . . . without taking this step, the role of the editor does not even begin to exist"; see his "Play Your Roles Tactfully! About the Pragmatics of Text-Editing, the Desire for Identification, and the Resistance to Theory," in Editing Texts, Texte edieren (see note 9 above), pp. 237-250 (quotation from p. 238). Still another fine essay that expresses the same general point of view is Marcus Walsh's "Hypotheses, Evidence, Editing, and Explication," Yearbook of English Studies (see note 11 above), 29 (1999), 24-42, which defends the interpretive basis of textual criticism: "Interpreters and editors are in the business . . . of making judgements in the light of available evidence" (p. 28). The resulting "probabilistic knowledge" is "valid knowledge": "Between the Scylla of unattainable fixity and certainty, and the Charybdis of relativism and scepticism, lies the world in which human beings live, in which we can understand each other" (p. 42).
| | |