2. Causal Orientation
The idea of an authorial orientation became a particularly controversial
editorial approach in the 1980s. By renaming it the causal orientation we wish to focus attention on the personal
involvement of all agents of textual change. Unlike the material or temporal, the
causal orientation focuses attention on the
author and on other persons involved in the writing, revising, and
production of texts. In determining who "did the text" and by what
authority the text was created or changed, the documents are treated as
merely the surviving evidence and the "moment in time" as a mere concept
about a finished product's "moment of completion"—both used to
help address the question of textual integrity. Literary works are
intentional creations, using the medium of writing in attempts to
achieve desired goals. The causal orientation's focus on human action
usually acknowledges human fallibility and often seeks ways to identify
and mitigate the results of fallibility. However, this orientation also
has a rich tradition of facing the pitfalls awaiting those who try to
identify and emend lapses in "intentions." And yet, no one disputes that
authors and others have or had intentions. Nor does anyone dispute that intentions have
physical and lexical consequences in the inscription or transmission of
texts. The problem is that the evidence pointing to intention is almost
always problematic because speculation about it is difficult and often
impossible to verify beyond dispute.
One way to avoid the appearance of attempting the impossible is to shift
the emphasis from intentions to effects. Asking "what difference is made by the change?" seems
more accessible and may initially seem superior to asking "what
was the intention of the person(s) who made the change?"
This shift in emphasis postpones or avoids the question, "whose
intentions are being considered—whether the author's, the
publisher's, or the reader's and editor's?" The shift also goes well
with a second way to avoid the pursuit of intention, which is to say
that the work we are really interested in is the product of a social
collaboration and so we do not need to distinguish editorially between
flawed and intended texts. The important issue is that a social complex
was involved.
On the other hand, "effects of the change" is also ambiguous. If effect
refers to how a reader is affected by the change, then the same problem
attends assessments of the effects of textual changes as that which
troubles the pursuit of intentions, for though a scholar can vouch for
the effects a change has on himself or herself, it is difficult to
verify that these effects were perceived or felt by other readers. For
our purposes, "intention" is restricted to the intention to make a
textual change, and "effect" is taken to mean the resulting textual
changes—both evidenced by marks on a document and variants in
inscriptions. Editors do provide narrative explanations for the effected
change, and readers can dispute those explanations. It is important that
textual critics restrict their speculation about intentions to the
interpretation of ambiguous or illegible or highly improbable
inscriptions. For the textual critic, it is a question about what the
author intended the text to be—what mark was intended to be
inscribed. It is not about what the author intended the text to mean or
how the author intended the text to succeed—though, of course, it
is impossible to separate completely the questions of what the text is from what the text means. Textual critics agree with literary critics that
intentions to mean or intentions to affect are both beyond our ability
to recover indisputably; and, even if we could recover them, they would
not restrict our own exercise of critical judgment about the success of
such intentions.
The causal orientation divides into two subsets for understanding and
using textual material: (a) the authorial and (b)
the social. Both the individual authorial and the
social subsets see the text as a deliberately (or inadvertently) agented
work which requires that students and editors address the work, not
primarily as documentary or historical, but as a record of human
actions. We think of the causal orientation as consisting of a continuum
between an authorial approach and a social approach. At any given time
and in any given document we might find the work of more than one agent
of textual change, with unequal authority or skill to make changes.
Should we value the work of one agent over that of others, or should we
value all agents equally? It is the authorial end of the scale that is
the most difficult and controversial. The social approach tends to
accept the work of all who are involved in the production of each form
of the work as if the work were a collaborative social and cultural
endeavor among equals, whereas the authorial approach seeks to attribute
the text to one or more agents whose work must be distinguished and
assessed separately—agents of varying skills and authority who
participated in creating and changing the text(s). Agents of textual
change can fail in palpable ways in their attempts to record the text of
the work as the text of a document. The text as achieved by one agent of
change (say the author) may differ from the text as revised or as
rendered by other agents of change (such as secretaries, editors, and
compositors) each of whom was fallible (including the author) in ways
that can sometimes be detected. The
causal orientation asks
us to choose whether to focus on the text created by and/or desired by
the author or on a text created or desired in concert with one or other
or all of the production personnel. Further it asks us to decide whether
to focus on the text actually achieved or, if there is sufficient
evidence, to discover texts attempted but not actually achieved.
In judging or assessing the variant texts, it would seem legitimate and
perhaps even necessary to judge the competence and authority of each
agent of change. Are all the compositors at work on a Shakespeare text
equally competent—whether apprentice, journeyman, or master
typesetters? Is the publisher's editor as good as or a better judge of
grammar, spelling, or public tolerance for edgy language than the
author? Does the censor have the same kind of authority over the text as
has the author? Can the scholarly editor restore the authorial reading
when either or both the publisher and the censor have overruled the
author?
(a) An authorial approach would tend to favor the
work of the author over that of production personnel, but there is no
reason that the author's competence should not be questioned as well as
that of other agents of textual change.
(b) The social point of view, like the authorial,
focuses attention on the agents of change because this view holds that
literature is a socialized object. Textual agency consists of many
people working in concert to make and distribute a final product. It can
be argued, however, that it is not just an increase in the number of
people allowed to be agents of change, but rather that the social
approach entails a radically different notion of textual authority, one
that exists under an agreed contract entered into, usually but not
always formally, by the author and a representative of the production
process—the publisher. In place of the authority of creation or
authorship or of intellectual property, it is the social contract that
exerts its authority over the text. Furthermore, it can be argued that
this point of view respects institutions and guilds or traditions as
constitutive elements in the production of literary works. As is being
increasingly demonstrated by book historians, the industries that
contribute the materials and skills, the laws that influence industrial
practices through taxation and regulation, the laws of censorship, the
customs of decency and permissiveness, and technological developments,
to name a few, all have an influence on what writers write, what
publishers publish, and what readers read. It follows that a social view
of the literary work must deal with the actual products of these
influences in order to engage with and understand the social dynamics
that influenced a work.
In accepting the social product as the object of choice, the social
approach ends up with the same "textual condition" shared by the
bibliographic view: texts that cannot be edited without obscuring or
contaminating the social elements of the historical object. A new
edition is, of necessity, the product of a new social dynamic, not a
replication of the one claimed by the social "editor" to be the object
of interest. The logic of the social orientation, like that of the
bibliographic, requires one to deal directly with original materials,
and yet much of this type of criticism is based on derived editions and
facsimiles—to the detriment of the scholarship.6 Furthermore, if all the agents of change
are treated as
equal authorities over the text, such that the work is seen
as "co-authored" by all of its agents of change, much of the
power of this point of view is vitiated. The result of the authorial
approach, on the other hand, is more often than not an eclectic
edition.
A strict adherence to the dictates of either the social approach (one
blanket rule covers the actions of all agents of change and we accept
the results as a fact of history), on one hand, or the authorial
orientation (excluding the actions of all agents of change save those
whose ministrations served the author's intentions), on the other hand,
might lead to unsatisfactory distortions of the craft of textual
criticism. Understanding what the artist has achieved and how that
achievement failed or succeeded in the production process requires that
we pay attention and respect to both aspects of the causal orientation.
Anyone who has studied the genesis of a work of art knows that authors
sometimes welcome and sometimes deplore the help they get. Blanket rules
and rigid applications of them would seem to undermine the potential
achievements of textual criticism.
It could be that the best compromise, particularly in a print edition, is
for the text to be edited to reflect the work of art, as an artist's
work, accepting the intervention of others only when it supports the
artist's conception, rejecting it when it subverts that conception; and
to then construct critical, historical, and textual supplements to
account for the economic, political, and industrial complex of
production, showing the history of that art in the marketplace. This is
a compromise well in keeping with Anglo-American editorial
traditions, where the object of editorial work has always been the
production of a well-edited text and provision of an apparatus
that supports and explains the editorial approaches taken to develop the
newly edited text.7 But it is a compromise
not likely to be acceptable to the historical-critical editorial
practice often associated with German traditions. The reason is
understandable. The compromise between the social and authorial subsets
of the causal orientation presupposes that an editor is to adjudicate
among the archival textual elements that vie for the reader's attention
in order to produce a clear reading text (a new, never-before
extant text), with an apparatus that helps the reader see the work as
the editor saw it. By contrast, in the historical-critical
tradition, the object of textual criticism is to bring order to the
historical evidence by representing the history of the text—not
by interfering in the textual evidence to somehow rectify the
aberrations of history. In the historical-critical tradition it
is the purpose of textual criticism to collect and give coherent
arrangement to the record of historical evidence. The narrative of that
history is presented both in introductions and collations.
Information about the sources of changes should be given where possible,
but adjudication among competing authorities about what the text "should
be" is not admitted by historical-critical editors as part of the
textual critic's remit. In fact, the historical-critical approach
follows the material orientation, not the causal. By contrast with the
Anglo-American tradition, the historical-critical edition
has devoted its efforts to creating a comprehensive, coherent textual
apparatus which is attached to a historical (lexical) text accurately
presented. These are precisely the differences between the material and
causal orientations.
