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]
During the 1995-2000 period, several concise (and generally excellent) accounts of foreign traditions were published in English, both in
Scholarly Editing: A Guide to Research (edited by D. C. Greetham in 1995) and, the same year, in a collection of pieces on the influence of Fredson Bowers abroad.
[35] For more expansive treatments during these years, one must turn to three large American anthologies (one on the dominant German emphasis and two—one of them not primarily in English—on the French), along with several articles in
Text and
Editio.
[36]
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
textual theory in the 1970s and 1980s. But whether the volume is useful in any other way seems doubtful. If the editors expected these essays to have a current value, they should at least have attempted to answer the criticisms that have since been made of the position set forth in the essays. But Gabler's introduction does not even recognize those criticisms; instead, it simply sums up the position, repeating the logical flaws inherent in it without seeming to notice them. The result is not conducive to winning over new admirers of the approach.
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
maintain, "Where the Anglo-American endeavor has tended to edit the author, the central German concern over the past decades has increasingly become to edit the text" (p. 2). What renders this statement nonsensical is of course the lack of parallelism between "author" and "text." One cannot edit an author but only the text of an author, and thus both groups of editors, not merely the German, are editing texts. His statement obviously means to place in opposition "texts of authors" and "texts of documents." A few pages later, surprisingly, he admits that the former has a value: a sentence begins, "Without denying the legitimacy of editing what the author intended" (p. 6). (How this is consistent with his earlier denigration of intention is difficult to understand.) If a critically emended text aimed at reconstructing one stage of the author's intention is legitimate, after all, then what is wrong with printing such a text in an edition, with an appended record of the variants in the surviving documents, just as intentionalist editors have regularly done? Gabler, and those holding the point of view he advocates, would answer that such an edition emphasizes, or "privileges," the critically reconstructed text over the documentary texts by offering the latter only in the compressed form of an apparatus subordinated to the fully presented critical text. Yet Gabler's description of German editions does not make them seem very different. The "aim of a German edition," he says, is to provide "a segment or slice from the text's history"—"an historically defined version of the work"—around which "the edition organizes the entire textual history in apparatus form" (p. 3). If this were the full story, one could say that the German approach, like the intentionalist, results in editions that present the bulk of the textual history of a work in apparatus form; the only difference between the two would then be that the text presented in full is in one case a critically reconstructed text and in the other a documentary text.
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
is not necessarily a mixing of versions, because some variants in the later document may be merely corrections of errors in the earlier document, not evidence of a new version.
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
1975 essay, the same point is made, and in a manner that sounds like an "Anglo-American" editor: "one must edit versions, and must edit every version either
in extenso or by recording its variants"; and passages with "textual faults" not only "allow" but "demand an intervention by the critical editor" (p. 107).
[38] Zeller, unaware that he has thus abolished the equation of versions with documentary texts, fails to see that intentionalist editors have carried to its logical conclusion the insight that he has falteringly introduced into his argument against intention as an editorial goal.
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
Editio.
[41] After an overly concessive start, his essay reaches an outspoken conclusion. He identifies "the main issue of difference between AngloAmerican and Germanic editing" as "the role of individual judgment and of emendation in scholarly editing" (p. 138). Another way of putting the point, as the last part of the essay makes clear, is to say that the central question concerns the "stage" of textual work to be presented to the public: the German approach "cuts off the exercise of interpretation at an early stage" (p. 148), whereas the Anglo-American
adds a "critically edited, eclectic text" to "the archival record" (p. 149). Using two examples, one from Goethe and the other from Thackeray, he shows that such "non-extant texts" sometimes provide "the only way to see a work as the product of the authorial trajectory of textual development," for "authorized" texts often contain revisions that do not reflect the author's intention ("miscarriages of delegated authority"). He is not saying that any one text is adequate by itself but that taking "a step beyond the documentary edition," adding one or more emended texts, is important for showing a historical stage not available (or easily extractable) from an exclusively documentary apparatus. The essay could have made even clearer a contradiction in the German approach: that its emphasis on existing texts suggests an interest in the social production and reception of texts, whereas its concern with authorization reflects an interest in authors, which is not served well by a prohibition against most emendations of documentary texts.
[42] As Shillingsburg says at the end, "when the inhibitions [surrounding individual judgment] become so draconian that the only allowable behavior is to publish undigested and undifferentiated data, it is time for a revolution" (p. 149). One would be well advised to skip the German anthology altogether and read Shillingsburg's essay instead.
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,
however, the only English contributions being part of Compagnon's introduction (the part on genetic criticism), a paper of mine called "Critical Editions, Hypertexts, and Genetic Criticism" (pp. 581-593), and four case studies on the manuscripts of English and American authors.
[43]
Although this publication will therefore not serve as a basic source for English-speaking readers, Compagnon's introduction (pp. 393-401) is well worth their attention, not only for its concise account of
critique génétique but also for the penetrating questions that it asks about this approach.
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,
compositors' errors) as they are in the posthumous texts of ancient authors; genetic criticism must deal with such variations, both before and after the point of publication, if it is truly to delineate authors' revisional processes. And Compagnon might also have noted that an interest in discussing revisions does not rule out listing them in apparatus form and that the Anglo-American tradition has certainly not been inimical to discursive treatments of variants, both within editions and as separate articles and books.
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
made by exponents of
critique génétique: the "pre-text," Grésillon says, plays a role "different . . . from the role of appendix that `variations' often play in critical editions, where they are removed from their genetic context, simply added on at the end of the book as a critical afterthought" (p. 117). The misunderstanding here almost seems willful, and it is certainly counterproductive. The most substantial other general essay in the collection is Pierre-Marc de Biasi's "Horizons for Genetic Studies" (pp. 124-134; translated by Jennifer A. Jones), which systematically goes through all the arts, verbal and nonverbal, pointing out how the "model for genetic analysis that emerges from the study of modern literary manuscripts can, without any possible doubt, be extended to other fields of creation" (p. 124). That "the archives of creation" in all fields are worth studying is an important point, though its recognition has hardly depended on
critique génétique.
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
mentioned above). And when, among his various attempts to accommodate the infinity of possible situations, he says that "the layer is itself a stack" (placed within a larger stack), one begins to wonder how real the distinctions are: how different is a horizontal edition of such a stacked layer from a "partial vertical edition"? This pretentious and verbose article is not an effective introduction to its subject.
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
of
variantistica in Italy but also compares that approach, which studies variants in their developmental context ("a set of steps aiming at some form of finality"), with
critique génétique, which looks at drafts as separate entities (without "any idea of progressive esthetic `achievement' "). But she quite properly observes that they are linked by a similar "aporia" or "contradiction," for both—in spite of their avowed focus— have to deal "with the transition from synchrony to diachrony, from structure to process, from the event to its history" (p. 186). She is in fact recognizing the artificiality of the limitation that each approach insists on. A less comprehensive article by Alberto Varvaro in the next volume of
Text
[48] finds a connection between the great prestige of textual criticism in Italy and its long tradition of dealing with modern literature. Varvaro generalizes rather too broadly at times, as in saying that American textual critics, unlike the Italians, have been "blinded by deconstructionism" (p. 57); but he (speaking for "we Italians") is wise in the general direction of his remarks, which hold that the study of variants need not lead one to regard "data banks" of documentary texts as the principal goal of editorial activity.
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
of Dutch editing: its great Renaissance accomplishment and its failure before the mid-1970s to think about methods for dealing with vernacular literature. The resulting need to catch up with developments in other countries caused post-1975 Dutch editors to draw as needed on different traditions, especially the Anglo-American and the German. Both van Vliet and Annemarie Kets-Vree, the other author (another editor at the Huygens Instituut), comment on the "methodological eclecticism" (to use Kets-Vree's phrase) of Dutch editing. This eclecticism suggests what thoughtful readers of all these essays must conclude: that each of these approaches—the German, the French, and the Italian, to the extent that it is fair to identify national traditions—has important observations to contribute but that each one by itself deals only with a limited aspect of textual history. We should be grateful that accounts of these national approaches are increasingly being made available in English, but they serve to underscore the dangers of all positions that lack comprehensiveness.
