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That position is made clear in the (previously unpublished) introduction, indicatively entitled "Is There Anything to `Get Straight'?"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
(as its title, "The Hand from the Grave," suggests) with authorial intention, especially the editorial problem of reporting multiple or successive intentions. The opening and closing of the chapter provide worthwhile reading on this vexed subject, but the middle part is less satisfactory. After proclaiming it "a condition of the print medium that one text be in the foreground and alternatives be in some permanently subordinate position," he declares, "If no one has already announced the death of the editor as the conceptual authority over what the text says, I announce it here" (p. 18). The half-page that separates these two statements does not explain how one moves from the first (which places the blame on "the print medium") to the second (where the editor is responsible: Shillingsburg even adds, "The fact the print medium gives us no choice but to act as we do is no excuse"). One might conceivably say that the limitations of the codex form have given the editor a de facto authority (though even this is too strong, as we shall see in a moment), but certainly not "conceptual authority."
[95] There is of course nothing wrong with an editor's carrying some authority, by virtue of being an expert on the author's writing habits and style and on the textual history of the work. But such experts do not usually believe that they have "conceptual authority over what the text says": it is hard to imagine an editor of a codex edition with apparatus who does not hope that readers will examine the variants and evaluate the readings present in the main text. That few readers will actually do so is hardly the editor's fault—a point that Shillingsburg (rather confusingly in the context) seems to agree with, for he proceeds to say, "As a matter of fact, however, my quarrel is not with editors but with users of scholarly editions" (p. 19). He speaks of their "naive reliance on editors," their "blind faith": thus perhaps editors have had their authority thrust upon them. One must infer, if readers can be considered remiss in their use of codex editions, that such editions are usable—that it is possible for readers not to be so awed by the full presentation of one text that they fail to consider the readings from other texts recorded in the apparatus. What, then, is Shillingsburg finally saying?
[96]
In Chapter 4 ("Texts, Cultures, Mediums, and Performances: The French Lieutenant's Woman," pp. 105-119), the next of the new chapters,
there is no doubt about what he is saying. He uses the Fowles novel to illustrate the complexity of the act of communication set in motion by a literary work, focusing on "the temporal, history-bound `eventness' of text production and text reception as communicative acts" (p. 112); and he concludes (in the final sentence) that "having off the past as irrelevant or unnecessary because it is inaccessible represents a radical `presentism,' which is reductive and intellectually impoverishing." The main point here is unambiguous and important—so important as to deserve a better expression, not encumbered with an illogical summary of the opposing position. Some people do indeed feel that the past is irrelevant or unnecessary, but that feeling is independent of whether or not the past is inaccessible; others believe that the inaccessibility of the past is reason enough not to bother with it. But its inaccessibility cannot logically cause one to find it irrelevant or unnecessary. And of course there is an element of circularity in the conclusion, since one could say that a neglect of the past is impoverishing to those who find a knowledge of the past enriching in the first place. My own way of paraphrasing what I take to be his point would be as follows: if we assume as axiomatic that any increase in awareness is enriching, then a knowledge of historical contexts—as part of the mental framework one brings to a literary work— enlarges one's sense of possessing the work in the present, whether or not one is interested in the past for its own sake; and the fact that the past is not fully available to us provides no reason for declining to push our understanding of it as far as we can, just as we do with every other intellectual pursuit (none of which can ever be completed). This point of view is of course not new, but Shillingsburg's effective use of the Fowles novel to illustrate it gives it added force.
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
intentionality, and it has not done away with the author" (pp. 163-164). This welcome emphasis on multiple agency nevertheless slights one matter: the legitimate interest people may have in the product that readers of the past had in front of them, however full it was of features not intended by anyone. Shillingsburg's lack of attention to this matter makes the end of his chapter less precise than it should have been. When he says that editorial theory of thirty years ago "defined the problem too narrowly," he apparently means that it did not take the social construction of texts into account. I believe, however, that the narrowness of earlier theory is to be defined somewhat differently: its limitation lay not in ignoring the social side of text production altogether but in assuming that facsimiles took sufficient account of it, thus neglecting the intentions of publishers and other involved persons aside from the author. And these intentions are still generally neglected—which brings me to the same conclusion as Shillingsburg's, though by a different route. Recognizing that the social approach to literature involves two foci, production and reception (the first involving intention, the second concentrating on whatever the artifact displays), would make Shillingsburg's discussion even more effective than it already is.
[97]
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
calling particular attention to the fallacy inherent in the idea of promoting a new view by discrediting earlier ones; as he sarcastically adds, "when the task is to make room for a new paradigm, it is, of course, counterproductive to be fair" (p. 213). Then he explains his own position: that there is "a significant distinction to be made between [verbal] works and physical representations of them," but that there is no "essential or `extant' conceptual or performance work that is the real work"; rather, "physical copies . . . point to and result from" the "human existential condition" to which works are intricately connected (p. 219). Documentary texts are "potluck texts," and most readers prefer to approach texts as "agent dependent" (p. 221). Thus critical editing is essential (along with the publishing of documentary texts), and multiple critical texts of a work are required to reflect the voices of different "authorizing agents" (p. 222). He ends with a tribute to the "courage, criticism, intelligence, and humility" of editors who alter documentary texts in order to produce texts that represent "integrity of voice or agency"—each such product being "only another recipe for the work" (pp. 224-225). None of this is new (and Shillingsburg would not claim otherwise), but it is a point of view often drowned out in contemporary debate. Having it set forth so ably is therefore a great benefit—and all the more so because it offers, I believe, the most constructive direction for editorial theory to take. Shillingsburg's book can be enthusiastically admitted to the small shelf of essential works in this field.
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
most emphatic statements. Reflecting on the continuing relevance of "individual action, desire, and intention," he declares, "I do not find persuasive or helpful the notion that publication grants viability to works which, as long as they remain in manuscript, are unfinished or unborn," and he vows that he "will go on harping on that string till times change" (p. 68). Times will indeed change, as they always do, and it will then seem strange that his harping was needed; but in the present he is a welcome presence, persistently showing the rationality of accepting multiple approaches.
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
would express it) from the more conventional approach is a welcome one: that all editorial work,
including that devoted to documentary editions, is—like all other acts of reading—a construction of meaning, which may or may not have a historical orientation; when editors publish their work, they are simply offering new documents that can serve in their turn as the grounding for further creations of meaning. Eggert's essay, besides providing a shrewd criticism of Foucault and Derrida,
[102] cogently shows the fallacy of believing that the "real story starts . . . at the reader-discursive level" rather than at "the initiating point of the production of meaning which is indisputably witnessed by the documents" (p. 111), by "the documentary record's having taken the particular form it did and no other" and thus testifying to the work of particular human agents (p. 112).
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
to the observation that "documentary texts [are] inherently unstable" (p. 55)—an unexceptionable point relevant to his argument, though he improperly and unnecessarily makes it a criticism of the traditional intentionalist approach.
[104] As editor of the Academy Editions of Australian Literature (on which he draws in this essay), Eggert puts into practice his principle of respecting both document and agent by allowing the specific rationale for dealing with each work to grow out of its particular textual history. This openness to alternatives is admirable, but there is inevitably a compromise involved if one approach is given precedence in each case—which is why he suggests the usefulness of supplementing the printed volumes of the Academy Editions with electronic texts (p. 56). Even if his conclusion remains vague on a practical level, he has made a contribution to theoretical discussion by emphasizing, in a distinctive way, how documents link us as much to personal agents as to social forces.
[105]
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'
"antiquarianism" (a term that I do not consider pejorative, and I assume Howard-Hill does not, either); all this means is that they respect historical evidence. But when he says that these scholars believe documentary texts to be relatively "unmediated witnesses to the creative processes and achievements of their originators" (p. 58), he ignores a major reason for the interest in "unmediated" texts: their value as a record of what readers had in front of them. And then when he says that the "vehemence" of these scholars' arguments "establishes original or facsimile editions as the only kind of edition that they value," he misses the opportunity to point out that such editions are in fact most appropriate for accommodating that unstated reason for valuing documents, not for appreciating "creative processes and achievements," which are best approached through critical texts. The second characteristic of the social theorists, he says, is that they are "all hostile to the New Bibliography"; but to add (correctly) that the New Bibliography is "the single most important advance in the development of Anglo-American editing" (p. 59) is hardly to the point, since that fact accounts in large part for their hostility in the first place. The point that needs to be made here is that analytical bibliography supports every approach to editing and indeed, with its focus on physical details, should be seen as a corollary to "antiquarianism." The third characteristic named by Howard-Hill is that "these scholars reject interpretation as part of the editorial function." Although it is relevant to note that such resistance is futile ("editors can scarcely refrain from an activity so pervasively human"), the more constructive point is that interpretation emerging out of specialist knowledge is essential to the growth of human understanding.
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
complementary, Howard-Hill would still have accomplished his purpose of characterizing the social approach, but in a more helpful way.
[107]
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]
