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
drama, another genre of partly verbal performance works, there has been a similar trend to recognize the value of tangible texts that reflect performance. In a field previously dominated by a literary emphasis and a concern for authorial intention, this shift has been part of the larger movement to understand cultural products as socially constructed;
[20] but students of drama have something to learn from the methodology of oral-tradition scholars, who understand that having a performance text on paper is only the beginning of the process of recovering the work, which consists of much more than words.
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,
since a socially constructed text can contain unintended errors just as easily as can a text constructed by one person. Unless one wishes to refrain from all emendation of documentary texts, one is admitting the concept of intention. The real distinction here has nothing to do with intention: it is simply whether the focus is on the product of a single author or on a collaboratively constructed product. The second pair ("psychological endeavour"/"historical undertaking") displays the same problem: is human thinking not a part of history? The attempt to recover what one person thought in the past is no different from the effort to know what a group of people thought. Mental states are historical facts, which may be more, or less, recoverable in different situations. Lurking behind Grier's sentence is the unsupportable idea that a text surviving on paper is more "historical" than one that must be reconstructed. But the concept of critical editing in the first place arises from the recognition that surviving physical evidence is random and potentially misleading and that historical knowledge requires extrapolation from it. That intentions (of authors or diplomats, or anyone else) are never fully knowable does not distinguish them from the other historical facts that we wish to pursue.
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
contrast to literature, "the written text of a [musical] work, its score, is not self-sufficient" and "that text and work, therefore, are not synonymous" (p. 21). What he means by "text and work" is of course "text of a document and text of a work"; but even with that clarification, one cannot agree that the two are synonymous in literature. Since both literature and music use intangible media, tangible texts in both cases are sets of instructions for the recreation of works. Readers of verbal works are necessarily performers, and clues to some of their performances are preserved in the form of new editions or critical commentary. The fact that listeners to music may be further removed from a written text does not alter the fundamental situation, even if it does complicate the act of recreating the works, by making it a combination of the responses of the so-called performer and the so-called listener. Actually the listener is also a performer; and the performance traditions reflected in musical scores are not merely the product of "performers" but of performers-aslisteners and of audience members whose performances are communicated in essays and conversation. (An edition, which sets forth a text, and an essay, which—by responding to a text—implies a somewhat different one, are not so distinct as is often thought.) It does not serve Grier's purpose well to attempt to separate music from literature: a fuller elaboration of their essential similarity could have led to a subtler detailing of what differences there are.
[28]
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
reading could be unauthentic (and could perhaps be corrected or improved through shrewd emendation). In what sense, then, is it "good"? The construction of stemmata based on shared errors may indeed sometimes help to decide between competing plausible readings (the "express purpose" for which the stemmatic method exists, he asserts on p. 36); and the division of plausible readings into two categories, according to whether or not they are contested within the documents, has some relevance for this limited purpose. But to maintain the distinction in broader contexts, not explicitly focused on stemmatic analysis, is in effect to downgrade the role of editorial emendation; for when one takes into account any plausible readings thought of by the editor (that is, nondocumentary readings), some of the "good" readings may be just as seriously contested as any in the other category. To call them "good" is not only illogical in itself but also potentially inhibiting to further thought. However, despite the various problems I have mentioned, and others like them,
[29] there is enough sound advice in Grier's book to make it capable of having a beneficial influence on music editing.
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
when he needs it. One never feels that he is trying to show off or link himself with certain other critics. In short, he knows how to write.
[31]
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
their way in society—to show "how the meanings we create for a work of art or literature are (to a large extent) a product of the textual spaces we enter and engage in" (p. 3). An especially admirable aspect of his conception is its inclusiveness: he is interested both in the "very particular text" that someone is encountering (or has encountered) and in "the conditions under which this text has transpired to acquire the form" it now displays (or once displayed). What is important to him is "not the historical context of the work alone, or the social context of the critic alone, but the way these contexts overlap with the contexts of textual reproduction" (p. 4). Although it is not strictly accurate to call the histories of authorship and readership "synchronic," one understands that he is contrasting their relatively limited purviews with the diachronic "histories of textual transformation." Textual criticism, he recognizes, is a form of historical study, uncovering relationships among texts; and he wishes to emphasize that the examination of multiple texts "takes us closer not just to the process of composition, or the work's meanings, but closer to the vicissitudes of cultural activity" that brought these texts about (p. 7). Contemplating all these interactions gives one "textual consciousness"—which amounts to bringing everything one can learn about the history of a work into the context for experiencing the work in the present. Grigely claims no novelty for this approach, asserting that the "one enduring goal of textual criticism" has traditionally been "to make textual consciousness . . . a part of all critical activity" (p. 8). His contribution is to extend this approach to works of visual art, and by implication to works in all media, and his brief (ten-page) introduction is a masterly and eloquent expression of this vision.
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
it is worth calling attention to only because it helps to make clear how remarkably unpartisan Grigely's attitude is. He has his eye on something higher than critical infighting.
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.)
Near the end of the chapter, Grigely says that "Textual criticism and bibliography could therefore be redefined as disciplines that study manifestations of difference in cultural texts, wherein `difference' does not presuppose a genre or a system of values." And two sentences later, he urges the abandonment of the "either/or paradigms upon which critical editing has based itself" (p. 48). But textual criticism and bibliography are already conceived of as history, and therefore as the study of the eternal panorama of difference; the either/or paradigms, when they exist, come from editors, not from the textual criticism that underlies their work. Critical editors do sometimes follow an either/or approach in making emendations, but the best of them never believe that the texts they construct are the only responsible ones. It is hard to understand why Grigely should want to suggest that textual criticism (which, after all, offers essentially the outlook he advocates) is somehow causally linked with a style of editing he deems undesirable.
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
points, its tone and orientation inject a jarring note into the book.
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
a work, whether visual or verbal, is "always realigning itself and being realigned" (p. 179), according to the verbal and nonverbal information (such as museum labels or bookbindings) used by those experiencing the work. All textual transformations are to be respected as expressions of culture, which "
depends on remaking texts in order to exist" (p. 179); and textual criticism therefore enables us to discover that "the history of cultural objects . . . is not linear but discursive" (p. 180). Grigely's brilliant account of the social construction of texts surpasses in insight and eloquence the more famous treatments that are generally cited.
