 | Studies in bibliography |  |
I
Tanselle's essay focuses our attention on the point where Greg explicitly
limits the role of editorial judgment, and then demonstrates that this
seemingly modest restriction has had unexpected adverse consequences.
We are reminded that Greg's "strong endorsement of editorial freedom"
extends only to the text's substantives (Greg's term for the wording); the
copy-text "accidentals" (his term for the spelling, punctuation, word
division, and emphasis) are accepted almost automatically (p. 8). While
Greg also insisted that the editor be free to emend either the substantives
or the accidentals whenever there was cause to do so, his assumption
that a copy-text was needed at all was, in Tanselle's words, "founded on
a belief that there was usually insufficient evidence for reasoning about
accidentals" (p. 9). The copy-text, according to Greg, is to supply the
not clearly superior—that is, obviously authorial or having more recent
authority. Tanselle argues that if the copy-text is used as the "fall-back"
text to decide among variant accidentals, and if copy-text accidentals and
substantives are to be altered by the editor whenever there is cause to do
so, then it stands to reason that the copy-text will tend to be treated as
the fall-back text for the substantives as well. This amounts to the "tyranny
of the copy-text" which Greg sought to avoid (p. 9)—that is, the
copy-text as monolith, unyielding of any word or mark of punctuation
that has not been decisively disestablished by the editor.
Greg's rationale presumes an ancestrally linear series of texts, from
author's manuscript to printed editions. Other kinds of textual traditions
exist, and in the late 1960s Fredson Bowers encountered the most
common of these in some of the stories of Stephen Crane. The stories were
printed more than once, but each time from different, now-lost documents
of equal authority. Some appeared in one American and one
British periodical, with one printing based on a ribbon and the other
on a carbon copy of a typescript made from Crane's manuscript. Other
stories were syndicated in American newspapers: the syndicate received
a manuscript or a typescript of the MS from Crane, made a proofsheet
of it, and sent copies to subscribing newspapers, which used them as
printer's copy. The prepublication documents are all lost, so the extant
tradition for each story consists of multiple newspaper or periodical
printings. Each printing was independently derived of the author's
manuscript and therefore all have equal authority. An interesting variation
occurred when, surmised Bowers, second typescripts (also now
lost) were made of the manuscripts of some of the stories that had appeared
in periodicals, in order to furnish printer's copy for book collections.
For these stories, all printings have equal authority, but the periodical
printings descend from one typescript, and the book versions
from the other.[3]
Bowers gave the term "radiating texts" to the tradition he encountered
because the multiple printings of each story "radiate" independently
from their lost manuscript. Though Bowers recognized that each
printing was therefore of equal authority, he still attempted, apparently,
to base each critical text on a copy-text as defined by Greg—"apparently,"
because, as Tanselle pointed out, he chose his copy-texts "not
for their authority but for the extent of their agreement with what he
had already decided the text should contain."[4]
That is, after comparing
the texts of each printing, Bowers chose as copy-text the printing that
departed least from what he believed were the readings of the lost source.
He usually settled on the printing that was most often with the majority
wherever there was a variant. Bowers's apparatus reported all substantive
variants but only those accidental variants which had required him to
emend his "copy-text." Generally, according to Greg's rationale, accidental
variants in later editions in a linear series are assumed to be more
corrupt than those of an early copy-text, so excluding them from an
apparatus could possibly be justified. Radiating texts, however, are not
ancestrally linear, and the excluded accidental variants came from documents
of no less authority than those Bowers had chosen as copy-texts.
Bowers discussed radiating texts in a group of essays, the first of
which, called "Multiple Authority: New Problems and Concepts of
Copy-Text," was published in 1972. As the title indicates, Bowers maintained
that editing a group of radiating texts involves choosing a copy-text,
even if the choice is a "theoretically indifferent" one, made only
for the sake of "convenience," after the editor "has reconstructed the
lost, common printer's-copy. . . ."[5]
Since Bowers chose his copy-text
after he had established his critical text, the copy-text was completely
outside his purposes, and imposed out of mere habit. His insights about
radiating texts recalled the way editors of ancient and medieval works
reconstruct a lost source when multiple manuscripts descending from it
survive—as Tanselle suggested in "Classical, Biblical, and Medieval
Textual Criticism and Modern Editing," an essay from 1983 containing
many forward-looking discussions on the relationship between judgment
added, even hit upon a simple guideline loosely applied in the editing of
ancient texts, known in that field by its Latin name, "difficilior lectio
potior" (the difficult reading is preferable). Bowers did not explicitly
cite this guideline, but he caught its gist when he observed that a less
common variant might be the authorial reading, since "a majority of
compositors faced with an unconventional accidental may sometimes
opt for normality, leaving the true authorial reading preserved only by
the dogged or indifferent few."[7]
Had Bowers pursued the relationship between modern radiating
texts and situations faced by editors of older texts, instead of attempting
to impose Greg's rationale on his problem, he might have felt comfortable
enough to allow his practical insights to shape his theoretical overview.
It was Tanselle who recognized the true implications of Bowers's
insights, which he revealed in his 1974 article, "Editorial Apparatus
for Radiating Texts." Here he recommended editing without a copy-text,
explaining that the critical text might be constructed of all the
independently derived printings, and supported by an apparatus recording
all variants, substantive and accidental.[8]
In 1979, Robert H.
Hirst became the first editor to follow Tanselle's recommendations, in
his treatment of radiating texts in Early Tales & Sketches, an edition of
some of Mark Twain's early writings. Both volumes in this edition contain
critical texts reconstructed from contemporary, independently
derived reprints of passages that first appeared in letters in now-lost
in the first volume, Hirst cited Tanselle's 1974 essay, and stressed
that for the radiating texts, "no copy-text is designated because none of
the authoritative texts is genetically closer to the original than the
other."[9] Following his own inclinations as much as Tanselle's recommendations,
Hirst also reported in the editorial apparatuses of the
radiating texts all substantive and accidental variants from all his sources.
When in 1990 Tanselle reprinted "Editorial Apparatus for Radiating
Texts," he remarked provocatively that "the idea of editing without a
copy-text, set forth briefly here in relation to one particular kind of
situation, has further applications that ought to be explored."[10]
That
Tanselle himself undertook the exploration was to be expected. In
"Editing without a Copy-Text" he reminds readers of Greg's warning
concerning the "tyranny of the copy-text," in which Greg maintained
that the failure to understand that accidentals are more often subject to
casual alteration, and substantives to purposeful—and therefore, more
potentially authorial—change
has naturally led to too close and too general a reliance upon the text chosen
as basis for an edition, and there has arisen what may be called the tyranny
of the copy-text, a tyranny that has, in my opinion, vitiated much of
the best editorial work of the past generation.[11]
Tanselle points out in his essay that like Bowers in his encounter with
radiating texts, Greg too was "somewhat tyrannized by the idea of copy-text,"
since he also recommended choosing a copy-text in a situation
where two or more texts are of equal authority—that is, when there
would be no justification for presuming the accidentals in one document
to be more authoritative than those in the other (p. 10). What clearly
concerns Tanselle most, however, is that in situations where a copy-text
is warranted according to Greg's rationale, it tends to interfere with good
judgment, by extending its influence, despite Greg's wishes, over the
wording of a text as well as the accidentals. The "role of the copy-text,"
substantives and accidentals) whenever there seems no other basis for
deciding" (p. 9).
A typical example is "An Indiana Campaign," a story that was syndicated by
Bacheller, Johnson and Bacheller, and printed in the Kansas City Star, the Buffalo
Commercial, the Nebraska State Journal, the Minneapolis Tribune, the San Francisco
Chronicle, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Bowers demonstrated that these six newspaper
printings, as well as subsequent printings in the English Illustrated Magazine and in
Crane's book, The Little Regiment and Other Episodes of the American Civil War (New
York: D. Appleton, 1896), were all based on separate copies of a master proof, and therefore
of equal authority. This proof was made, Bowers surmised, of a typescript of Crane's manuscript.
The typescript (either the ribbon or carbon copy) was, furthermore, probably the
source of another printing, in Bacheller's own Pocket Magazine. Thus, in all, nine printings
radiated from the lost typescript, independently transmitting its authority. A variant
example is "The Revenge of the Adolphus," which appeared in Collier's Weekly, Strand
Magazine, and Crane's book, Wounds in the Rain: War Stories (New York: Frederick A.
Stokes, 1900). Here, Bowers believed that the two periodical printings were based on a
single typescript made from the manuscript, one on the ribbon and the other on the
carbon copy, while the book printing was based on a second MS-based typescript; see Tales
of War, The University of Virginia Edition of the Works of Stephen Crane, Volume VI,
ed. Fredson Bowers, with an introduction by James B. Colvert (Charlottesville: Univ. Press
of Virginia, 1970), pp. lxix-lxxv, cxxix-cxl.
Library 5th ser., 27 (June 1972): 81-115, quotations from pp. 101-102. Bowers's later
considerations of radiating texts appear in "Remarks on Eclectic Texts," Proof 4 (1975):
31-76, and "Mixed Texts and Multiple Authority," Text 3 (1987): 63-90.
Bowers, "Multiple Authority: New Problems and Concepts of Copy-Text," p. 99;
for the customary version of this insight, see L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and
Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature, 3rd ed. (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 221-222; and Paul Maas, Textual Criticism, translated from
the German by Barbara Flower (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), p. 13 (C § 16 (a)). On this
subject, Sebastiano Timpanaro has explained (through the English translation of Kate
Soper): "anyone who has anything to do with the written or oral transmission of texts
(including quotations learnt by heart) knows that they are exposed to the constant danger
of banalization. Forms which have a more archaic, more high-flown, more unusual stylistic
expression, and which are therefore more removed from the cultural-linguistic heritage
of the person who is transcribing or reciting, tend to be replaced by forms in more common
use." (The Freudian Slip: Psychoanalysis and Textual Criticism, London: NLB; Atlantic
Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1976, p. 30 [English translation of Il lapsus freudiano:
psicanalisi e critica testuale, Firenze: La nuova Italia, 1974].)
Library 5th ser., 29 (September 1974): 330-337; Bowers took note of this article in
both "Remarks on Eclectic Texts" and "Mixed Texts and Multiple Authority" (see note 5),
but viewed Tanselle's discussion as an intriguing practical suggestion, without recognizing
its theoretical significance. Some years earlier, on the other hand, Paul Baender had recognized
that a copy-text would be out of place in textual situations defined by multiple independent
witnesses of a lost original: see the discussion toward the end of section VI of this
essay.
Early Tales & Sketches, Volume 1 (1851-1864), ed. Edgar Marquess Branch and
Robert H. Hirst, with the assistance of Harriet Elinor Smith, The Works of Mark Twain
(Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: Univ. of California Press), pp. 658, 659 n. 236.
G. Thomas Tanselle, Textual Criticism and Scholarly Editing (Charlottesville:
Bibliographical Society of the Univ. of Virginia, 1990), pp. 167-176, quotation from p. xiii of
the preface.
"The Rationale of Copy-Text," Studies in Bibliography 3 (1950-1951): 19-36,
quotations from p. 26. Greg's now-famous essay was delivered for him in 1949 at that year's
conference of the English Institute; it was also reprinted posthumously, with a few revisions
and corrections he left in manuscript, in W. W. Greg, Collected Papers, ed. J. C.
Maxwell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), pp. 374-391. References in this paper are to the
first, SB printing.
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