University of Virginia Library

IV

An unintended consequence of the recent disputes over editorial
aims and methods has been the uncovering of a great deal of confusion
about the meaning of copy-text and what constitutes the "Greg-Bowers
approach." This development is potentially promising, since latent misunderstandings
are the more damaging. The shift in editorial focus,
from preconceived method to immediate thought, suggested by Tanselle
in "Editing without a Copy-Text," provides the logical grounds
for clearing the confusion away. Thoughtful Greg-Bowers practitioners,
social textual theorists, or adherents of any other editorial approach
ought to find in this essay the intellectual inspiration to achieve their
particular aims to a high standard of scholarship.

While "Editing without a Copy-Text" attempts to move editing
beyond the limits of the particular methodological preconception of
the Greg-Bowers approach, it also preserves and proceeds from the approach's
universal advantages. Among these are, first of all, a great body
of practical editorial experience, from which emerge the other advantages—the
intense focus on textual history, the high scholarly and technical
standards, and the tradition among its best practitioners of the free
exercise of informed judgment. Sustaining this common editorial heritage,
it may even be said, is the better part of Tanselle's aim. Today's editorial
climate, however, is clouded in places with barely qualified rejections
of the entire Greg-Bowers experience. While the critics have made many
valid points, they have also fallen too often into fundamental misunderstandings.
If these are allowed to stand, then little advantage will be
taken of Tanselle's essay, and so any assessment of the essay's prospects
must engage the criticisms. The most convenient way to do this involves
considering the social text as advanced in Jerome McGann's writings,
since here the criticisms are reasonably conceived.

Jerome McGann has been the most conscientious in attempting to
give the sociological approach to editing a theoretical foundation, and
in his writings one finds many fair assessments and criticisms of the
Greg-Bowers editorial approach. These are marred, however, by some
less informed remarks, indicating that McGann has absorbed a few tired
misconceptions about author-centered editing. Despite Tanselle's many
painstaking demonstrations of their illogic, these misconceptions have
appeared year after year as straw-men, set up and knocked down by the

opponents of author-centered editing, and sometimes mistakenly defended
by those in favor of it. From these misconceptions a reductive
shadow of the Greg-Bowers approach is cast, devoid of the approach's
defining nuances and flexibility of application. The emphasis on the
exercise of sound editorial judgment is especially absent, as is an awareness
of the theoretical and practical growth the approach has gone
through in recent decades. In place of variegated thought and rich
editorial experience come the impoverished notions of the copy-text as
a "best text," and of the critical text created according to the Greg-Bowers
approach as a timeless, ahistorical, and therefore ideal representation
of the author's intentions for his or her work—or, in McGann's
words, "a pure abstraction."[30] This second notion is openly proclaimed;
the first tends to steal into discussions or take hold of editions semi-surreptitiously.

Indicative of the problem is a passage in McGann's 1991 collection
The Textual Condition in which two editorial outcomes are falsely set
in opposition to each other—"the production of an eclectic text" and
"the production of an edition which displays and analyzes the historical
descent of the work."[31] The former idea is identified with the Greg-Bowers
approach, and the latter is represented as being foreign to it.
Yet the two outcomes are not logically opposed, and a scholarly edition
of a work taking the Greg-Bowers approach should contain both an
eclectic critical text reflecting a particular moment in that work's history,
and a critical apparatus with the evidence necessary to reconstruct
other historical moments. Bowers has been much criticized by McGann
and other editors on subjects ranging from his overall interest in reconstructing
authorially intended texts, to the particular choices he
made in the works he edited. What is interesting about a great deal of
this criticism is that it is based, at least in good part, on the evidence
that Bowers published in his editions. One may go as far as to say that
the second of McGann's two editorial outcomes—"the production of
an edition which displays and analyzes the historical descent of the
work"—owes more to Bowers than to any other editor of anglophonic
literature. Early on in his project of transferring to the field of American
literature the more exacting standards of English Renaissance bibliography
and editing, Bowers declared it the duty of editors to place all
their "textual cards on the table—face up."[32] He demonstrated what he

meant in his series of editions, beginning with the Centenary Hawthorne,
which presented literary works as they had rarely been presented
before. A critical reconstruction of an author-focused text which aimed
at what Bowers called an "inferential authorial fair copy"[33] was accompanied—indeed,
inextricably linked with—an unusually full apparatus
criticus, containing not only editorial reasoning (textual notes), but the
history of the work in its variants from document to document. Bowers
even reported authorial alterations in the manuscripts he preferred as
his copy-texts. Along with these illuminating innovations, however,
Bowers's editions, as was subsequently shown, also contained not a few
errors (great and small), needless inconsistencies, and even some apparent
sloppiness of form. That Bowers did not always practically fulfill
the promise of his pioneering editorial outlook, however, should not be
allowed to obscure his achievements. His editions left a good deal of
room for improvement, but much of this could be (and was) made on
Bowers's own terms—with more careful historical collations, clearer
presentations of the relevant textual evidence, a better understanding
of the relationship between the critical text and the apparatus, and a
greater appreciation of pertinent biographical and historical evidence
relating to the author and the work being edited.

Since Bowers presented his critical text within the larger context of
a scholarly edition, his editorial choices were by and large open to general
scrutiny—that is, the alternatives which might be argued over were
published in the apparatus. The regular exception, of course, was the
accidental variants, which Bowers for the most part did not report. The
guidelines of the Center for Editions of American Authors (CEAA),
which attempted to codify Bowers's approach to editing, did not, as a
practical matter, require scholarly editions to report them. In his own
editions, Bowers cast this practical compromise in more theoretical
terms—citing in the Centenary Hawthorne, for example, not only the
"copiousness" of the accidental variants as cause for omitting them, but
"their basic lack of significance" as well.[34] The unfortunate appearance

of this claim—that accidentals are basically insignificant—in the edition
to which many apprentice editors looked for guidance had the predictable
effect of routinizing the omission from scholarly editions of a class
of evidence which at least sometimes was important. Bowers preferred
to take an author's manuscript as his copy-text when this was possible,
and so generally it was the accidental variants of the first edition that
went unreported. The many critics of Bowers's preference for manuscript
copy-texts—most prominently, James Thorpe, Donald Pizer,
Philip Gaskell, and Donald McKenzie—would not, however, have been
satisfied with mere lists of the missing variants. While they disagreed
among themselves on a variety of issues, they all believed strongly that
the critical text itself ought to reflect the process by which an author's
manuscript accidentals were subject to printing-house modifications.
Yet given that the alternative accidentals would not be reported in the
apparatus, Bowers's choice was, from a scholarly standpoint, the less
inconvenient one. First-edition accidentals are, after all, in first editions,
copies of which are usually easier to consult than authors' manuscripts.
Harder to investigate would be variant manuscript accidentals left unreported
in an edition using a first-edition copy-text. McGann endorsed
the argument in favor of first-edition copy-texts in A Critique of Modern
Textual Criticism, holding that it is "clearly more sound than Tanselle's
and Bowers's, for it takes better account of the social dimension
which surrounds the process of literary production."[35] McGann's statement
shifts the definition of copy-text, if Greg's rationale is at all being
taken into consideration, since that was designed not to emphasize the
social dimension of texts, but to keep as close as possible to the author's
manuscript accidentals. We hardly need wonder what Greg's recommendations
would have been if authors' manuscripts of the works that
he studied had survived.

Despite his overall emphasis on the socialized text, McGann does
favor fairly heavy editorial intervention in certain circumstances—
though his reasons for doing so are not obvious. He defends, for example,
a regularized and modernized "reading text" for early modern
works, "to preserve the continuity of a . . . cultural resource."[36] While
arguments for modernization have long been made, McGann's is peculiar
in its aggressively negative assertions against those who eschew
modernization. Tanselle, as McGann notes, has made the obvious point
that casting a work of literature in the wording and spelling of a different
time period is an "ahistorical" practice; for this McGann accuses him

of failing to "recognize the historical dimension of all literary productions,"
and failing to understand that "[e]very literary production is
`ahistorical.' " As if it were not hard enough to understand how the
same person could be guilty of both these transgressions at once, McGann
goes on to chastise scholarly editors who seek to conserve Shakespearean
spelling and vocabulary, for burying "the factor of the intended
audience" under their "social and institutional ideology."[37] Whatever
may be McGann's precise meaning here, what comes through generally
is, on the one hand, the belief that an editor's prejudice against the
competence of modern readers to understand old texts is a sufficient basis
for radically altering them, and, on the other, the denial of scholarly
legitimacy to attempts to move closer, by following the evidence, to
what might have been the text of the author's final manuscript. According
to McGann such efforts are deceptive and reveal a "hypnotic fascination
with the isolated author."[38]

Or so it would seem. In "Textual Criticism and Literary Sociology,"
Tanselle appraised McGann's initially keen appreciation of Hans Walter
Gabler's edition of Ulysses. [39] Tanselle pointed out that despite its use of
some counterproductive novelties—including a confused redefinition of
the term "copytext" (without the hyphen), to mean both the constructed
critical text and a stage in its construction—Gabler's method of editing
was essentially author-focused. Tanselle further showed that McGann's
endorsement of Gabler's edition as textually innovative was misplaced.
While the mode Gabler chose for presenting the textual history of
Joyce's work may have been unusual, the same kind of history is also
present in any good scholarly edition with a substantial apparatus. McGann
once believed that Gabler's arrangement of this history was a
fundamental improvement on Bowers's, while Tanselle explained that
such arrangements may reasonably differ as long as the history of the text
is expressed adequately. McGann eventually underscored Tanselle's
point, by backing away from his earlier appraisal. In his essay on Gabler's
Ulysses, McGann praised the editor's "synoptic continuous manuscript
text" as a "brilliant editorial reconstruction" that allowed "seriatim
reading" of Joyce's work as it had developed.[40] A few years later, however,
he questioned whether Gabler's edition could "illuminate" issues of

textual variation, and ironically asked, "Would anyone think that Hans
Gabler's edition of Ulysses is a work to be read?"[41]

Tanselle noted that Gabler's understanding of "copytext," the term
he attempted to redefine, was problematic to begin with, reporting
Gabler's belief that "By common consent, an editor chooses as the copy-text
for a critical edition a document text of highest overall authority."[42]
McGann expressed a similar understanding of the concept of
copy-text in his essay:

This definition of copy-text is not McGann's own, of course, but it illustrates
well enough the difficulty that even the most astute scholars have
had with Greg's conception of divided authority. McGann has also written
subsequently of "establishing" a copy-text, and of the copy-text becoming
"eclectic."[44] This difficulty caused mischief in the interesting
appendix of A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism. Here, under the
title "A Possible Objection" (pp. 125-128), McGann discusses exceptions
to his overall recommendation of an editorial focus on the socialized
text. He concludes that in situations of textual "expurgation,
suppression, and mutilation," editors had better focus on recovering
and presenting the text of the author. The inconsistency of this position
remains quite striking. One could expect an interest in texts as social
products to sharpen when dramatic differences separate authors' texts
from the versions permitted by publishers or governments or some other
controlling social factor. The examples McGann used to illustrate the
need for author-centered rather than social editing include the published
works of John Cowper Powys, which, according to McGann, were
ill-affected by the author's fear of lawsuits and a post-war paper shortage.
These are social factors, of course, as surely as others whose effects McGann
wants editors to respect, such as the imposition of printing-house
styles or publishers' wording changes on authors' texts. In his 1986 study
"Historicism and Critical Editing," Tanselle well expressed the dilemma

McGann faced by selectively advocating a socialized text: either, he
argued, McGann is recommending a socialized text only when the editor
finds it preferable—which amounts to a call for aesthetics-based editing—
or he is recommending it only when the author preferred it—which
shifts the overall editorial focus back to the author, where McGann supposedly
does not want it.[45]

The dilemma is complicated by a tangled discussion involving copy-text,
which turns on the apparently needless question of whether the
expurgated, published version of Powys's novel Porius—the version that,
we are told, was "drastically cut back" because of the paper shortage—or
the unpublished, unexpurgated typescript text, should be used as the
copy-text of a critical edition of the unpublished text. In 1983, when
McGann's discussion appeared and most scholarly editors were concerned
with representing an author's final intentions, it was generally
thought that some works exist in versions too different to be adequately
presented in an edition containing a critical text of but one of the versions.[46]
Editions had already appeared, however, that ran counter to this
supposition, or at least demonstrated that scholarly editions could present
a great deal of textual history, including the details necessary to
reconstruct more than one version of a work. One of these editions,
Early Tales & Sketches, the previously mentioned collection of some of
Mark Twain's early writings edited by Robert Hirst, presented critical
texts of the early versions of magazine and newspaper stories that Mark
Twain later revised—sometimes extensively and sometimes more than
once—for a series of book collections. The variants from the later versions
were recorded in the apparatus. An editorial precedent for treating
a situation even more closely related to the one McGann describes, in
which an author's work was grossly altered for clearly practical reasons,
had also been set by that time. The Northwestern-Newberry Typee,
edited by Tanselle, Harrison Hayford, and Hershel Parker, appeared in
1968, and presented a critical text reflecting Melville's original intentions
for his work, as expressed in the first British edition, before he
acceded to the demands of his American publisher to soften his criticisms
of missionaries. In line with these examples of author-centered
editing (though without reference to them), McGann favors presenting
readers with an unexpurgated Porius; once this view is taken, it would

seem no choice remains concerning a copy-text, since we have been told
that there are but two significant documents—the author's original typescript
and the expurgated book version. By "copy-text," however, McGann
has McKerrow's meaning in mind, since Greg's rationale is only
a tool for preserving in a later, revised text, an earlier and presumably
less corrupt level of accidentals. McGann does mention accidentals, but
the meaning of his discussion about copy-text obviously turns on the
widely differing wording of the two versions of the novel.

Mix-ups like these have plagued Greg's conception of copy-text for
most of its history, partly because its adherents have employed the term
as loosely as its critics. Greg recognized two meanings for the term, corresponding
respectively to textual situations defined by a single authoritative
document, and those involving multiple authorities whose texts
relate to each other in linear fashion. His unique contribution—his
"rationale"—addressed only the second type of situation. Bowers, with
Tanselle's help, came to understand that it could not address situations
defined by multiple authorities which descend independently from a
common ancestor—that is, a nonlinear tradition. For clarity, he might
have added that neither can Greg's rationale be applied to works surviving
in a single authoritative source—a situation which, logically
speaking, is also nonlinear. Yet when creating critical texts of such works
(as Hawthorne's Fanshawe, for instance), Bowers and most CEAA-CSE
editors have called the single authorities their copy-texts. Greg also endorsed
this wholly different use of the term copy-text, meaning the document
whose text the editor "copies" out and then corrects:

Here the "copy-text" is the only "substantive" text. Greg then reemphasized
his special rationale for situations defined by "more than one substantive
text"—where the copy-text is followed "in accidentals," but
"allowed no over-riding or even preponderant authority so far as substantive
readings are concerned."[47]

Terminology is sometimes regarded as a secondary question by innovative
thinkers such as Greg, but one need not subscribe to the views
of Derrida to see that the labels by which ideas are known can sometimes
decide whether they are understood rightly or not. As Greg noted, McKerrow

"invented the term `copy-text' " in his edition of Nashe, "giving
a name to a conception already familiar," being "that early text of a
work which an editor selected as the basis of his own" (p. 19). The precedence
of this definition of copy-text, its simplicity, and its compatibility
with the sound of the term itself probably explains why it continues to
be used in the way McKerrow defined it. Had Greg labeled his innovation
"the rationale of multiple authority editing" or even "the rationale
for an accidentals text," some confusion might have been avoided. As it
was, Greg's modified definition of copy-text never took full hold in the
minds of many professed adherents, and so it is not really surprising
that its critics also should have found the concept difficult to grasp. McGann,
for example, cites "An Introductory Statement," issued in 1977
by the CSE (the successor of the CEAA), in which it is asserted that a
"primary requirement for any responsible edition is that it include a
statement identifying the document which supplies the copy-text—that
is, the text which the editor is following as the basic text."[48] The ancestor
of this document, the CEAA's 1972 "Statement of Editorial Principles
and Procedures," similarly defined copy-text as "that individual manuscript
or proof or state of an impression which forms the basis for the
edited text; in other words, it is the text which the editor follows at all
points except those where he believes emendation to be justified."[49] Both
definitions were augmented with extended discussions of how the copy-text
should be chosen and treated, especially in the 1977 document, and
generally presented thoughtful and clear guidelines for constructing accurate,
informative editions.

As official statements, both documents were aimed at imparting vital
bibliographic and editorial wisdom to scholars engaged in editorial
projects who may not have had much experience in scholarly editing.
In line with their educative purposes, the statements may also have deliberately
emphasized that aspect of "The Rationale of Copy-Text" in
which Greg seems to reduce the importance of the distinction he himself
drew between accidentals and substantives, in order to encourage
editors to alter either whenever there was reason to do so. Tanselle, a
creator of the CEAA and CSE statements, would likely have been responsible

for this emphasis. In his influential essay of 1975, "Greg's
Theory of Copy-Text and the Editing of American Literature," he
stressed the "pragmatic"—and therefore provisional—nature of Greg's
distinction, reminding editors to follow the accidentals of the copy-text
only when they had no reason to do otherwise. He noted that resorting
to the procedural part of Greg's rationale in such circumstances "is
more satisfying than tossing a coin"—an endorsement whose obvious
meagerness was meant to illustrate the relative positions of procedure
and judgment in Greg's essay. Later in the 1975 essay, Tanselle reasserted
that "nothing in Greg's theory . . . prohibits the emendation of
accidentals in the copy-text when one has grounds for doing so."[50] This
remark was part of a brief response to Paul Baender, who, in his article
"The Meaning of Copy-Text," had suggested that the retention of the
concept of a copy-text was out of keeping with Greg's main observation,
that textual authority might reside in more than one document. Baender
was a CEAA editor and inspector, and in this published form of a paper
he first read in 1967, he endorsed the use of Greg's rationale for certain
situations, while describing other situations for which he believed it
was not suited. One of these involved the presence of multiple independently
descended witnesses of a lost original—exactly the problem
that Bowers would encounter a few years later and acknowledge as insusceptible
to Greg's rationale. In hindsight, Baender's early identification
of what Bowers later called "radiating texts" is eye-catching, as is
his further questioning of whether the concept of a copy-text was ever
appropriate, now that editorial "principles have become eclectic." Baender
suggested, for example, that McKerrow in his Prolegomena, Greg,
and Bowers "may not have realized the full implication of their eclecticism,
which in the long run rules out the designation of a single text,
basic text, or copy-text when there is more than one text of substantive
authority." In an attempt to understand why the concept was retained
even though McKerrow's early single-text rationale for which the term
was invented had been discarded, Baender guessed that perhaps it was
because "with respect to accidentals there still remained a single-text
criterion."[51] This was the remark that elicited Tanselle's objection,
quoted above; in saying this, however, Baender was not quite expressing
his own belief, but rather giving his estimate of the belief of others, and
the remark by itself does not indicate an aversion to the reasonable alteration
of copy-text accidentals. In "The Meaning of Copy-Text: A
Further Note," an earlier and more expansive answer to Baender, Tanselle
upheld "Greg's theory of copy-text" as applicable "to all situations,"
while attempting to dispossess Baender of his eccentric insistence on the
interchangeability of the terms "copy-text" and "printer's copy."[52] This
obvious misconception certainly harmed the reception of Baender's
other observations, which were also expressed too briefly, perhaps, to
encourage exploration of their potential implications. Baender, furthermore,
seems never to have pursued these matters, even in his own
editorial practices. Instead, in those early days before much editorial
experience had accrued in the field of American literature, Bowers and
Tanselle sought to foster a position according to which the copy-text of
Greg supplied "fall-back" authority for substantives as well as accidentals,
while stressing the importance of subjecting the whole copy-text to
a thorough critical examination. The plain intention of taking this
approach was to maximize editorial judgment, but the approach also
risked obscuring Greg's special contribution to copy-text theory; potentially
elusive, in other words, especially for newer editors, was Greg's
notion that for certain situations, the copy-text is only and at most an
accidentals text: "The true theory is, I contend, that the copy-text
should govern (generally) in the matter of accidentals, but that the
choice between substantive readings belongs to the general theory of
textual criticism and lies altogether beyond the narrow principle of the
copy-text."[53]

In the CEAA and CSE statements quoted earlier, the copy-text is
represented first as the overall authority for the substantives and accidentals
(unless emendation is warranted), whereas in the situations Greg
wanted to emphasize, the copy-text would be at most ("generally") the
authority for the accidentals. Logically, according to Greg's rationale,
no direct causal relationship should exist between the wording of the
copy-text and the wording of the critical text. If the two texts agree, it
should not be because the wording of the copy-text has simply been
followed in the critical edition; rather, the wording of all "substantive"
(authoritative) texts in a series collectively establish the wording of the
critical edition—where they agree and there is no other contradictory
authoritative evidence. Assuming, for example, the goal of a critical
text reflecting an author's later final intentions, it might even be said
that the wording of the later, revised text is more relevant, even in those
places where it agrees with the earlier copy-text, since a revising author
who allows some wording to stand might be conferring upon the unchanged
passages the fresh authority of his or her new intentions. Where
the earlier and later authoritative texts do not agree, the editor chooses

from among the variants, according to the chronologically limited set
of authorial purposes from which the critical text is being derived. In
this example, an editor would favor the later variants (minus errors and
changes not ascribed to the author) for the critical text, and report the
earlier ones in the apparatus.

Those editors of American literature who have understood the meaning
of Greg's rationale may not realize that the term "copy-text," in its
wider contemporary use—in fields such as Chaucer and Shakespeare criticism,
for example—usually carries its original meaning. Editing with a
copy-text, furthermore, ordinarily means following the text of a particular
document wherever possible, as this typical editorial statement,
taken from a (modernized) edition of Shakespeare intended for the
college classroom, indicates:

The copy-text is followed conservatively in all matters, that is, for each
and every play, whether it survives in a single substantive text or several.
The explanation of the use of the brackets invites readers to trust only
copy-text readings, and regard what has not come from there with suspicion.
Similar statements can be found in other editions of Shakespeare,
and also in modern editions of Chaucer's works, where the existence of
multiple independently descended manuscript witnesses of all the tales
would seem to discourage the assigning of preponderant authority to
any one.

In "Editing without a Copy-Text" Tanselle acknowledges that the
"basic meaning of the term `copy-text' has remained stable from McKerrow's
time onward—that is, the documentary text used as the basis for
a scholarly edition" (p. 11). On the other hand, he also notes that the
term "copy-text editing" is often used by Greg's critics to refer to the
editorial practices of his adherents—to the use, in other words, of Greg's
rationale. The term therefore signals, after all these years, either of an
old pair of opposites—a best-text approach, or an eclectic one based on
historical textual analysis. Greg was originator of this duality, and was
comfortable using the same term to describe the counterposed approaches,

since he felt each had its place. Many of those who took notice
of Greg's altered meaning of copy-text, however—whether to adopt it or
criticize it—had trouble keeping it apart from the earlier meaning, while
editors who were unaware of Greg's considerations (or McKerrow's
second thoughts) gave the term in its original sense a wide currency.
Whether because the term was too well suited to the meaning McKerrow
first gave it, or because the CEAA/CSE upheld an interpretation
of Greg's rationale that allowed the copy-text to be used as the fall-back
authority for the substantives as well as the accidentals, or simply because
easy-to-use "best-text" approaches will tend to drive out more
nuanced eclectic ones—whatever the cause or causes, that is—the further
existence of Greg's special sense of the term copy-text, as an accidentals
text, is in question. In "Editing without a Copy-Text" Tanselle recommends
that in constructing critical texts scholarly editors abandon Greg's
copy-text (while, of course, preserving his rationale concerning accidentals),
so that it will not be held up falsely, as a truth-giving mechanism,
nor used to disguise virtually noncritical reprints of previously
published texts as eclectic, critical texts. Should Tanselle's recommendation
gain wide acceptance, especially among Greg's followers, the
meaning of the term copy-text would, paradoxically, cease its sixty- or
fifty-year internal struggle, and resume its original and untroubled one-dimensional
appearance.