University of Virginia Library

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

theoretical writings, there are some outstanding contributions, but there are also many pieces that accomplish little more than to repeat currently fashionable points in an uncritical way.

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

Reproductions: The Material Origins of the New Bibliography" (pp. 23-44), Joseph F. Loewenstein strains to show that "determining" factors for the "project" of the New Bibliography were "avarice, envy, perhaps anti-Semitism, certainly chauvinism, forgery, the hoarding instinct, and sound recording" (p. 23).[77]

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).

The opening piece, Stephen Orgel's "What Is an Editor?" (pp. 2329), contains a single paragraph (the third one) that is perhaps the densest concentration of misstatements about analytical bibliography that I have ever seen. He claims one of the "traditional assumptions of modern bibliography" to be the "idea that spelling and punctuation have no rules in the period, and are a function of the whim of the compositor" (an opinion that no analytical bibliographer has ever uttered) and that "there are elements of a text that are inessential or merely conventional," which "don't affect the meaning and we can therefore safely change them" (an interpretation of Greg's "accidentals" that not only is incorrect but has nothing whatever to do with bibliography). A "subtext," he says, is that "the printing process is transparent," so that we can see what lay behind it; and "a still deeper assumption" is that "the text itself is somehow independent of its material embodiment" (two unthinkable assertions for an analytical bibliographer to make). It is hard to believe that Orgel is so uninformed, and equally hard to believe that he is intentionally slanting his argument. Another of these brief essays, W. Speed Hill's "Where We Are and How We Got Here: Editing after Poststructuralism" (pp. 38-46), is full of his familiar bywords: he is content, for example, to repeat the nonsensical point that "the underlying idealism of authorial intention as an editorial goal was never wholly compatible with the rigorous materialism of the analytical bibliographer" (pp. 41-42)—a point I shall comment on later, if any comment is needed. In Zimmerman's "Afterword" (pp. 71-74), her reference to "the New Bibliographer's presumption that Shakespeare's intentions can be recuperated" and to "the idealism of the New Bibliography" (p. 72) point to a basic flaw in recent discussions: the failure to distinguish analytical bibliography from a particular editorial theory.[78] Although the New Bibliographers were interested in authorial intention, the essential insight they publicized (but did not fully originate) was that printing processes affect texts; attempting to find out what happened does not imply a particular editorial rationale or a disparagement of the study of book design and the post-production history of books.

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

promisingly titled but disappointingly superficial as an overview of the recent "paradigm shift in textual scholarship" (p. xiii). Intentionalist editing is linked with "the modernist quest for pure form" (p. xxiii), "the dream of a pure and organically unified form divorced from context or meaning," which has had "an especially seductive appeal for artists and critics alike ever since the Romantic period" (p. xxii). No thoughtful writer could utter these fallacious points so unabashedly, or could imagine that "traditional" editors ever believed in "the objective recuperability of authorial intention" (p. xxiii). The level of the piece is symbolized by its reference to the outmoded convention-paper topics of the past that are "duly recorded in the dusty volumes deposited in one's campus library" (p. xix). Although the theme of the essay—that textual instability affects literary interpretation—is important, it is not well served by being treated as a revelation antithetical to earlier editorial thinking.[81]

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

project to fruition required great effort on Greetham's part. He should be warmly thanked for his devotion to the cause; the result is extremely useful.[82] His other anthology, The Margins of the Text (1997), stems from his suspicion (expressed in his introduction) that there may have been "something patriarchal, elitist, even racist, about the very construction of the traditional scholarly edition." The book consists of fourteen essays, half devoted to "the function of discourses not previously recognized as significant to scholarly editing" (given certain attitudes toward "class, race, gender, and so on")[83] and half dealing with the significance of what appears in "the margins of the book" ("marginalia, commentary, and apparatus"). Greetham's own contribution, "The Resistance to Philology" (pp. 9-24), discusses, rather unproductively, "the current marginalized condition of textual study in the academy" (p. 10).[84]

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-

sions: Essays toward the Construction of a Biobibliography (1998), contains twenty-one pieces from a twenty-year period (1977-97), four of which had not previously been published.[86] In keeping with his subtitle, there is a biographical introduction, and each of the essays is placed in biographical context by prefatory remarks. These "interweaves," as he calls them, along with the introduction, may ultimately be regarded as the most useful parts of the book, for they form a substantial account (totaling 151 pages) of the professional world of textual criticism in the last quarter of the twentieth century, in the form of a memoir by an active participant.

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

its empirical independence from theory, is, in fact, empowered by a theory or theories."[88]

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

those persons with knowledge of the substantive content of a field (or subfield) are truly equipped to engage in the textual criticism of that field's (or subfield's) texts. One of the serious territorial problems in need of correction is the idea that textual criticism is an independent pursuit and that persons wishing to read the "content" of a work can simply leave the question of what the text ought to be (if they think of it at all) to textual scholars. Whereas Greetham recognizes that "theory" should not be considered to reside in one area rather than another, he fails to point out that "textual criticism" is an analogous activity in that it supports every field and finds its natural home in all of them. His concentration on taking "theory" from such places as literary criticism, psychology, and anthropology and putting it into textual criticism is actually a mixing—or at least a confusing—of his "territorial metaphor." To straighten it out would require that attention be given to moving textual criticism (with theory all compact, to be sure) into the multiplicity of disciplinary fields.

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

all such instances of dealings with texts. By looking only at applications of theory to textual scholarship and at the controversies among scholarly editors, it cuts itself off from the ultimate purpose that all this activity is presumably directed toward, the fuller understanding of the meanings of texts.

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

merely glib and not in fact meaningful. Thus he finds a "dangerous paradox" in Betty T. Bennett's "Feminism and Editing Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley," an admirable essay that focuses (in Bennett's words) on "feminist criticism and its relationship to developing a theory of feminist editing."[89] "Such a distinction," Bennett sensibly says near the end, "is useful for purposes of inquiry, but is not meant to suggest that there should be a separate category of feminist editorial theory" (p. 90). Greetham believes that Bennett is thereby placed "in the awkward position of having to deny the validity of the very category in which her account of editing is produced" (p. 439); the resulting "paradox" is "the rejection of a category that informs the entire essay" (p. 440). The clauses that modify "category" in these two comments are remarkably imprecise. One could say that the possibility of a theory of feminist editing is the subject of Bennett's essay; but that of course means that feminist editing does not "inform" her essay in the sense of being a body of thought "in which" her essay is "produced." There is nothing more awkward or paradoxical in Bennett's essay than in any other instance where a writer examines a concept or position and raises doubts about it.[90]

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,

on both sides. To find an irony in McGann's efforts to clarify his intended meanings is to trivialize his whole approach. One more pointless "irony":

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

criticism signify. But that cannot be the explanation. Instead, his use of this comparison seems to be an indication of how unwilling he is to present the intentionalist approach in an open-minded way. Despite the seeming balance of his ensuing discussion, where he does not question "the competence or comprehensiveness of either theory,"[92] this sentence has the effect of planting in his readers' minds the notion that the intentionalist approach is (or will be) as dead as an earth-centered view of the universe. I am not charging him with a "manœuvre" but simply noting how his language appears to reveal a less than open frame of mind.

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:

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,

citing "classical decorum, a style suited to its subject": "there are many subjects and thus [note the connective] many styles included in the wide coverage of this book" (p. 25). The most extreme example is his chapter on deconstruction, which consists of a series of "Notes" to an "absent" text (an essay of his in the 1991 Studies in Bibliography), followed by a section of "Notes to Notes," which are themselves heavily footnoted. He admits that the result is "probably somewhere between imitation and parody" (p. 327). Although parody can, in skillful hands, be an incisive form of criticism, it more often (as here) seems self-indulgently sophomoric. Greetham labels his method in the "absent" text "a playful teasing out," a "Derridean jeu" (p. 326), and the same could be said of this chapter—and indeed, in one degree or another, of all the other chapters. They all seem to be the playing out of a game, though the cumulative effect of the constant allusions (to writers who have said something related to whatever point is at hand) is comic rather than playful. In reading this book, one scarcely gets a sense that texts exist for any reason other than to provide material for contentious theorists to argue about. It is regrettable that a book on such an important subject, written by a person with such broad knowledge of critical theory, should turn out this way.