University of Virginia Library

VI

Reading through the writing on textual criticism and scholarly editing that has been published in the final years of the twentieth century is a rather dispiriting experience, with few bright spots, because so much of it is not only inexcusably jargon-filled but also needlessly scornful of previous thinking. That a lot has been written would be a good sign only if it translated into a substantial increase in understanding. But much of the commentary has followed a pattern all too common in intellectual discourse: it repeats points that are currently in vogue and attacks what went before, without meeting counterarguments that have already been expressed. It proceeds in a fashion aptly described by a marvelously compact phrase of Adam Michnik's, "mantra rather than discourse."[109] Thinking will not move forward unless counterarguments are addressed, so that a more comprehensive, more broadly perceptive, statement can be made. The reason that this process has not occurred more often is that a great many people are not interested in conversation, in dialogue: they wish to enforce their own points of view, and they simply do not listen to possible objections to their arguments and go right on saying what they said in the first place, as if no other observations had been made in the meantime.

The most noticeable recent illustration of this phenomenon in textual criticism involves some of the scholars who wish to be associated with the idea that texts are socially constructed. They believe that they can support their position by criticizing authorial intention as an editorial goal (and analytical bibliography because it was developed by scholars who held that goal); and they persist in making the same criticisms, even though inaccuracies in those criticisms have been noted and—more importantly—even though the logical fallacy of promoting one emphasis by denigrating another has been pointed out.[110] Even if the criticisms of

authorial intention were sound, the validity of the social approach would not thereby be confirmed. It should be obvious, however, that both approaches are valid and that both are indeed necessary to understand the entire history of works, from their initial creation to the unending sequence of public responses to them. The recent attention to the postproduction part of this history has indeed clarified and enriched the study of documentary texts and their physical embodiments, and we should be delighted by it. But there is no reason why such study must be pursued at the expense of the other part of the story.

Those who have taken an either/or position, suggesting that an interest in authorial intention is futile, unproductive, and outmoded, have shown by their manner of proceeding that they are more concerned with promoting a particular point of view than with welcoming all approaches that can contribute to fuller understanding. They, like so many people in all walks of life, think in terms of winning an argument rather than of participating in a conversation. A wonderful phrase of Jeffrey M. Perl's comes to mind in this connection: in the Winter 2002 number of his journal Common Knowledge (8: 1-6), he entitled the opening piece "Civilian Scholarship." If scholarship, or any other discourse, is civilian rather than military, then it is founded on "metaphors of conversation or friendship rather than on metaphors adopted from those of sports and war, of `sides' that one must `take' " (p. 5). Referring to such common beliefs as that "strife is productive" or that quarreling is a game, Perl says, "The world deserves better of those employed to think and write and educate." One of the best expressions of this general view comes from an essay of Gordon N. Ray's called "Books as a Way of Life":

Understanding rather than victory: this is the motto for civilian scholarship. It is a motto negated by a large number of recent writings on textual and editorial theory.

We need not worry, however, as long as writers of the caliber of Grigely and Shillingsburg come along. And as a way of identifying hopeful signs for the twenty-first century, I shall mention two publications of its earliest years. The first is a superb essay by Phillip Harth, written as a review of the first two volumes of Paul Hammond's Longman edition of Dryden.[112] This edition is partially modernized, and Harth devotes most of his essay to demonstrating, with great patience and clarity, the folly of spending time on a task that is not only impossible to carry out satisfactorily but also counterproductive, since the results, far from assisting the reader, form a barrier to understanding. After demolishing the often-repeated notion that the spelling and punctuation of sixteenthand seventeenth-century editions necessarily reflect compositorial practice more than authorial preference, Harth shows how Hammond's "concern to expunge all signs of the compositor's intervention results inevitably in the omission of prosodic, figurative, and stylistic elements for which the poet himself was responsible" (p. 241). Since Hammond does not modernize any quotations (from Dryden or anyone else) in his annotations, Harth is given the opportunity to make a basic point applicable to all modernization: "readers will quickly adjust to the unfamiliar appearance of those excerpts and experience little difficulty in reading and understanding them. They will want to do so, in fact, as they find themselves drawn more and more into observing the process of historical recovery" (p. 244). These readers will then, of course, "come to wonder why an exception was thought to be necessary" for the main text. Harth's essay is one of the best discussions of modernization we have ever had; it should be pondered not merely by all editors but by all readers.

The other twenty-first-century publication that I want to mention is David Scott Kastan's Shakespeare and the Book (2001), which illustrates

not only the lingering power of certain clichés but also, more importantly, the way in which an open-minded intelligence will see through and beyond them. The book is an engagingly written and perceptive account of Shakespeare in print—the literary Shakespeare that emerged through the editions of his work over the centuries rather than the Shakespeare of the theater (which is apparently all he aspired to be). Although the book is not, in one sense, primarily about textual theory, the basic issues that textual criticism must come to terms with pervade the book and are, from time to time, its explicit subject. If one were to read only the introduction, one would think that Kastan is another of those writers who repeat trendy clichés unquestioningly. Beginning with the assertion that he is dealing with a "hot topic,"[113] he states that he is "deeply suspicious" of the brand of editorial theory that "posits as its object of desire a work that never was, an ideal text of an author's intentions that no materialization does (or can) bear witness to" (p. 3). He believes that a concept of the work as intangible denies the work of "any effective principle of realization," and he adds, "Only as texts are realized materially are they accessible" (p. 4). The familiar arguments about the role of the physical in reading and about the collaborative nature of drama are repeated, but they lead him to a point not commonly made: that the printed text of a play, even one based on performance, has "its own compelling logic," and thus offers a different work from that of the performance. The point is valuable, though it takes him to treacherous ground: "Text and performance are, then, not partial and congruent aspects of some unity that we think of as the play, but are two discrete modes of production" (p. 9). Giving the printed play-text autonomy from the stage as well as from authorial intention obviously serves to justify his focus on the book as a social product.

His introduction unfortunately does not do justice to the more thoughtful view that emerges in the chapters that follow (although there is a slight hint in his unexplained admission that the concept of work as the author's "unrealized intentions" is "not without value" [p. 4]). In the final chapter he recognizes the value of all kinds of editions. A goal of reconstructing an "authorial text," he says, is "a reasonable but by no means necessary grant of authority to the intended text over the actual textual forms in which it is encountered"; "the author's intentions are of course a worthy, if elusive, object of study," and to pursue

them "the conventional understanding and practices of editing are appropriate." But "there must be alternative ways to conceive of the goals of editorial activity, ways in which the processes of materialization would not be understood as unwanted obstacles" (p. 122). These comments reflect an admirably comprehensive view of editing, a recognition that no one approach can adequately accommodate the differing kinds of interest we may have in every work. One may wonder how Kastan can end on a note so different from the way he started: the introduction, not the conclusion, is in fact the anomaly, for the book as a whole displays a broader understanding than his willingness to repeat stock phrases (and not only in the introduction) suggests. For example, the cliché that we are "heirs of a romantic conception of writing as individual and originary" (p. 48), is immediately followed by the recognition that some of Shakespeare's contemporaries held the same conception; and Kastan's treatment of Shakespeare's eighteenth-century editors, who strove to produce intended texts, is not condemnatory but rather accepting of their efforts as a manifestation of one of the interests that people do have.[114]

I should like to use these contradictory elements in Kastan's work as a way of summarizing two basic points about the nature of texts and of editing. First is his idea that "literature exists, in any useful sense, only and always in its materializations." The phrase "in any useful sense" is there because Kastan understands that "the work of the imagination" precedes its materialization in "a medium that is incommensurate with its refinement." Presumably for this reason he calls the concept of immaterial works "not logically impossible" (p. 4). But it cannot then be ignored on the grounds that a work, so conceived, depends on "physical supports" if readers are to experience it. Obviously an intangible verbal work can be transmitted only in oral or visible form, and every attempt to recover the author's original and later intentions must itself be given one of these two forms if it is to be communicated; but the attempt to reconstruct intentions, however mediated by editorial judgment and its presentation, is no different in kind from all other efforts to recover past events that are not directly available in living oral traditions or surviving physical objects.

Clearly every oral rendition and every printed text of what purports to be the same work produces a discrete experience, and each one is deserving of our serious attention. That an intangible intended work or series of works (versions) underlies such manifestations is also evident, as Kastan implicitly recognizes at various points. He notes, for instance, "the difference in the material relation of painters to their paintings and authors to the books that bear their names" (pp. 115-116). And despite his having complained at the beginning of his book about the idea that works "have a reality independent of the physical [or, one might add, oral] texts in which we engage them" (p. 3), he says at the end that Hamlet is "the name for what allows us comfortably to consider as some metaphysical unity the various instantiations of the play" (p. 133). This unity need not be a single text, of course, and he is right to say immediately that he is not referring to "some pre-representational original." Although he is speaking of a pattern that somehow connects all versions, he has nevertheless shown that we cannot do without the concept of intangible media (otherwise texts and performances would not be "instantiations" of something else)—and thus there must also be intended texts that antedate their instantiations.

The other point I wish to take up is what implications for editing follow from an acceptance of the importance of all texts—intended, recited, and tangible. The first question is whether there should be any editing whatever (in the sense of critical editing, which is what Kastan generally means by "editing"). Most discussions that propose as an editorial goal "the location of the text within the network of social and institutional practices" (p. 122)—and Kastan's is no exception—suggest that "arguably it becomes more difficult to justify editing at all." What is usually not made clear is that facsimiles serve only one aspect of the social approach to texts: they show what actually emerged from the publication process. An interest in the publisher's intention (or that of other collaborators with the author), however, requires a critically emended text, just as an interest in the author's intention does.[115] Although Kastan does not make this point explicitly, he understands some of the reasons for having "many kinds of editions," those that "attempt to restore the play he [Shakespeare] wrote before it was subjected to the demands of production in both the playhouse and the printing house"[116] as well as

those that "take the theatrical auspices [and presumably the printinghouse demands] of the plays seriously" (p. 123), including facsimiles. But this laudable inclusiveness is marred by his statement that, although there are "good reasons . . . for many kinds of editions," there are "probably not very good reasons for as many of the same kinds of editions as indeed we have." This statement can make sense only if one takes it as flippant, in the same way one would regard the observation that there are too many books about Hamlet. It is only a way of expressing a personal preference for one approach, or one set of judgments, over another. There can never be too many editions of any work because each one is part of the unending process of responding to the work. Kastan actually does understand this point:

I hope my comments show how Kastan's book stands apart from the usual arguments for equating literature with material texts. Kastan seems on one level to want to accept the standard clichés, but his basic good sense forces its way to the surface and will not allow that to happen unequivocally. This struggle results in some contradictions, but it strengthens his account and is a hopeful sign for the future.

That there will never be an end to the re-editing of texts and the publication of new editions, no matter how many times those texts have been edited before, is a fact of life that Tom Davis, for one, would perfectly understand. In his refreshing, clear-headed, and witty piece called "The Monsters and the Textual Critics"[118]—an essay that ought to be

known by everyone who takes reading seriously—he recognizes that textual criticism is in fact something practiced by everyone all the time. Textual criticism, whether of verbal texts or of any other part of our surroundings, is "impossible" in the sense that it can rarely result in certain answers; but it is "necessary" and therefore "universal." Those who edit texts should not lose sight of the combination of science and art involved. Like scientists who "run up all the time against the intransigence of nature" (p. 110), editors will come to dead ends in their research but still—by other means, those of literary criticism—must offer possible solutions to problems that are basically insoluble. If editors openly accept, and clearly express, the limitations inherent in their work, then textual criticism is "a perfectly possible and satisfactory activity: after all, we do it every day."

The nature of the world, dependent as it is on our perception, is such that no task, even those we may regard as purely scientific, is ever fully completed. We live, as Davis says, "from compromise to compromise." We may feel satisfied at one moment with what we have accomplished, but soon we will find it in need of redoing, just as others will have to do it in their own ways, and then do it again. In the ninety-eighth chapter of Moby-Dick, Melville describes the process of scrubbing down the decks after the oil has been extracted from a whale; but no sooner is this activity finished than another whale is sighted, and the whole sequence, from killing the whale to cleaning up the ship afterward, must be performed again:

In the face of this ineluctable cycle, we are better advised to embrace and cherish it than to lament it. Every editor who edits or re-edits a work is participating in an invigorating, if unending, struggle—the same one that literary critics are engaged in, though the less perceptive members of both groups fail to recognize their common pursuit. Textual critics, instead of being removed from direct engagement with literature—as many people imagine—are partaking of it fully. Their multifarious, unceasing efforts, which can never be more than tentative, exemplify the richest kind of experience that readers can have.