A Companion to the History of the Book (7 page)

But there is at least one assumption underlying my 1991 prescription that does need some modification, and that is the acceptance of the inevitable “decay” in the media. I think it is now well recognized that casting physical change as “decay” too easily plays into a Platonist view of the ideality of an irrecoverable originary form, from which all subsequent physical manifestations or embodiments are but shadows, lacking their own authenticity. If the enormously influential work of Jerome McGann (1983/1992, 1985, 1991, 1997, 2001) during the past two decades has done anything, it is to insist that all of these supposedly derivative and second-order states of text are integral to its totality of cultural expression, and that this ineffable “originary” form is but one (albeit an important one) of the various guises in which a text negotiates its way in history and society. In fact, in some cases, it is these very “belated” or “corrupt” states that have achieved the status of cultural icons, as witness the seventy-five-year reign of the “censored” version of Dreiser’s
Sister Carrie
(1900, 1912, before the manuscript-based Pennsylvania edition was published in 1981) or the similarly “cut” version of Lawrence’s
Sons and Lovers
(1913, before the Cambridge edition, similarly based on manuscript, of 1992, 2002). As is well known, there are some media (a good deal of opera, the plays of Shakespeare) in which the performance history – and thus general public awareness – is most frequently characterized by sizable cuts, judicious or otherwise, the Gielgud performance of the “full” text of
Hamlet
(whatever that is) being an anomaly.

None of this should surprise historians of the book, who typically study exactly this
Nachleben
(or “afterlife”) of the artifact. The “original” publication (or, beyond that, the author’s prepublication intention) is usually seen in book history as just one of a series of motivating forces that together create the “culture” of the book. But for textual scholars (and before them, for textual critics, even those with Housman’s sophistication), the attractions of this presumptive, presocial stage of textual production have had a long run in inspiring the efforts of textuists to “cleanse” or to “purge” the received text of its inevitable corruptions and to present an ideality of text fresh to current readers, a text that, in some almost beatified state, stood outside the history of its own production.

The shift I am acknowledging can be illustrated by a couple of examples from my own textual experience. In the first case, when I participated in the collaborative editing of Trevisa’s Middle English translation of the
De Proprietatibus Rerum
(
On the Properties of Things
), under the general editorship of M. C. Seymour (Trevisa 1975), there was an unquestioned assumption that what we were aiming to produce was a text as close as possible either to what Trevisa had actually written or at least to what he must have intended to write. The fact that our author had almost certainly made his “fair copy” of that text in the muniments room of Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire (one of the few remaining privately held castles in England) and that the current owners had refused the editors access to the room was a great hindrance but, at the same time, it ironically conferred enormous editorial license upon us as textual scholars. Lacking any possibility of an authorial original intention, we were free to construct this intention out of the inevitably “corrupt” scribal copies. In the mid-1970s, that meant arranging the extant manuscripts into a “family tree” (
stemma
) of relationships based on the charting of “error,” with the most erroneous at the bottom of the tree and those least affected by scribal intervention at the top. And we went even further than this. Since Trevisa’s Middle English was a translation from the Latin of Bartholomaeus Anglicus (for whom there was similarly no authorial autograph text), and since we assumed that Trevisa (a) was a good Latinist and (b) wanted to represent Bartholomaeus’ Latin accurately, we were presumptuous enough to use two Latin texts of the
Proprietatibus
as arbiters when a “crux” (or otherwise unresolvable ambiguity) occurred in the English witnesses. In other words, we were so intent upon this reach for origins that we were prepared to go beyond the actual English transmission to construct a text that Trevisa
ought
to have written, whether he did or not.

The basic ideology behind this arrangement and use of witnesses was for the most part thought unexceptionable at that time (though we did come in for a bit of flak for the over-reliance on the Latin). We were simply “doing what comes naturally”; for textual scholarship, just like any other intellectual or artistic endeavor, is always firmly embedded in its own culture and the basic assumptions about creation, aesthetics, and reception. Indeed, in a justifiably influential essay, and working under the “originalist” principles I have described for traditional textual criticism, Lee Patterson (1985) claimed that the Kane–Donaldson edition of the B Text of
Piers Plowman
(Langland 1975) was a “modernist” (and specifically a “New Critical”) edition, produced under the auspices of the late formalism of the mid-1970s, the same period as our production of Trevisa.

In claiming to be able to discover an original text from the fragments and vestiges that history has left us, textual criticism subscribes to this general idealism . . . textual criticism . . . deploys its erudition in a struggle to wrest from the past an originality that time threatens to efface, an originality it designates as the text. In this effort, then, textual criticism aligns itself more closely than might be expected with New Criticism. Just as New Criticism proclaims the text’s autonomy from historical forces, so does textual criticism reconstitute the text from the context of scribalisms in which it is submerged. (Patterson 1985: 86)

At this remove, the single most startling (and now embarrassing) sin of editorial
omission
that we made in the Trevisa edition was our very deliberate dismissal of the evidence contained in what at the time seemed to us an irrelevant, idiosyncratic, and almost perversely variant manuscript: Cambridge University Library MS Ii.v.41. This manuscript, unlike the other, more formally produced witnesses, was on paper not vellum, was written in a careless, casual, amateur hand, and was full of erasures, second thoughts, interlinear comments, and other marks of a highly “personal” take on the text. (Where the other witnesses read “loued,” the Cambridge preferred “desirid” and so on: variance for variance sake.) To our editorial purposes, it was simply unusable to help establish textual authenticity: we considered it a manuscript put together in a slapdash way, probably for the scribe/reader’s own use rather than as part of the professional production of the work. We thus placed it way off to the side in our
stemma
, in a graphically marginal position, with no obvious descendants.

That was then. What if I (or any other textual scholar attuned to the shifts of the early twenty-first century) were now confronted with the same set of witnesses? The irony is that the dismissed and unusable manuscript would probably have acquired a very different cultural status. It might not contribute much to a reconstruction of a putative original, but it would show the text in social negotiation, being worked on by an intelligent
user
, someone who was more concerned with making the
Properties
a part of his own culture than with reaching after a lost and unrecoverable authorial intention. If I were to edit the
Properties
now, in this period of the “socialization” of text, this aberrant witness would be the most fascinating, if still the least “authentic.”

The second example illustrates a similar shift but on a much larger scale. While by no means an expert on ninth-century Irish philosophy or theology, I was asked to contribute an essay on a recent edition of Eriugena’s
Periphyseon
to a commemorative issue of the
American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly
(Greetham 2005). The terms of this invitation were very specific, ideologically and methodologically: I was to examine the weighty, five-volume edition of the
Periphyseon
– produced under the auspices of the Corpus Christianorvm Continuatio Mediaeualis (CCCM) by a learned Jesuit, Édouard Jeaneau – “like the postmodernist you really are” (as the journal editor put it). What could this mean? Could there be such a thing as a “postmodernist” edition of an early medieval work in the same way that Patterson had posited “modernism” as the guiding principle for the Kane–Donaldson
Piers
of thirty years earlier?

As I began to do research into the history of the editing of Eriugena, I began to see what the journal editor had meant. I discovered that the precedent edition of
Periphyseon
, produced from the mid-1960s by Sheldon-Williams, was guided by the twin tropes of “satisfaction” and “fullness.” The editor had claimed that “[
t
]
he present edition
attempts to present the text with which the author finally came to be satisfied, and at the same time to exhibit the stages of its development” (1968: 1.27, italics in original), a teleological/processional relation that, as I was soon to discover, is inverted in the Jeaneau edition. Then, Sheldon-Williams had articulated his rationale for the critical apparatus by observing that “[i]n view of the fact that MSS RBP represent three successive recensions of the text it has been decided to give a full ‘positive’ apparatus criticus, and to do so, for the sake of consistency, even where a manuscript variant is merely a scribal blunder” (1.34).

These desires for “satisfaction” (the “making complete” of a work as it progresses toward that most thorny of contemporary textual states, “authorial final intention”) and for “positive” evidence (again, for the sake of “fullness,” and in a confidence that the “scribal blunder” can be effectively distinguished from authorial idiosyncrasy) move the Sheldon-Williams edition in an epistemological direction that I saw as the almost total reverse of the Jeaneau. Where Sheldon-Williams aims for teleology and completion, authorial and transmissional, the proliferation of textuality in the Jeaneau edition sets out the “critical” edition as only one state in the presentation of textual variance, and allows the “synoptic apparatus” to become the “fullest” part of the editorial enterprise. Furthermore, what Sheldon-Williams hopefully enlists as a “ ‘positive’ apparatus criticus” is nonetheless presented in his edition in a conventional “inferior” textual space, in reduced type at the
bottom
of the page, so that its positivism is in fact a mark of its degenerative status, again a conventional assumption. In the massive Jeaneau edition, in contrast, the synoptically presented variant versions are no longer confined to this “inferior” position but are given a visual and spatial equality with one another (and, by implication, with the “critical” edition that sets the whole procedure in motion). In Jeaneau, the reader’s eye is forcibly moved to accept variance as a normative condition. The current edition thus holds the earlier editorial aims of “satisfaction” and “fullness” in abeyance, if they are accorded any value at all, in the face of textual fragmentation and proliferation. The editorial rationale now emphasizes not a “
produit fini
,” b u t “
une matière en fusion, non point d’un texte Établi et fixé de façon canonique, mais d’un texte en perpétuel devenir
” (Eriugena 1968–95: 1.xix). A “perpetual becoming” indeed. In these postmodernist days, we are a long way from “satisfaction,” preferring process and demonstrable incompletion (or “becoming”) over fulfillment (and “being”).

What do these two examples suggest about the current state of textual scholarship, especially as it differs from the model of just thirty years ago? And in what way is my present response to the question in the title of this chapter different from what it would have been in the earlier period? The most general response is that textual scholarship is not a discipline or a practice somehow immune from the ideological and philosophical pressures of its times. Just as Patterson (1985) remarked of the “modernist”
Piers
, any act of textual scholarship is going to be the product of a sometimes unacknowledged negotiation with what is literally “thinkable” in a particular cultural moment. During the hegemony of the organicism, completion, and unitary consciousness of the New Critical period in Anglo-American studies, it became just “natural” (or unquestionable) that the aim of textual scholarship should be to resuscitate and to make manifest this unitary consciousness as it was applicable to the recovery and construction of authorial texts. One of the mantras of this period was “the text that never was,” that ideal state not representable in any given historical documents but immanent in their collation and conflation. The “eclectic” text, as it became known, was like that of the 1970s’ Trevisa or the 1960s’ Eriugena: something lying behind or above the so-called “veil of print” and requiring the intervention of an editor convinced of the ethical requirement that full justice to authoriality could be achieved only by reaching for a romantic organicism beyond the raw and corrupt phenomena of the textual
remaniements
. In a word, textual modernism was (like that of modernism in music, in architecture, in painting, and so on) Platonist and essentialist. Modernism sought the “essence” of the specific medium, and in textual scholarship this essence was the purified, cleansed, and unmediated text of the author, usually presented in “clear text” editions, with all sign of editorial handiwork removed so that the reader was confronted with “the text itself,” shorn of both historical accretions and of the evidence of the editorial intervention that had recreated this text.

If this period of textual activity could be called Platonist, then the postmodernist descriptive mode might be seen as Aristotelian, in a reflection of the famous Raphael painting of the philosophical school of Athens, in which Plato is pointing upwards toward the ineffable empyrean and Aristotle is gesturing downwards toward the hard, phenomenological, untidy world of the here and now. The idiosyncratic and personal
Properties
manuscript and the proliferation of “
matière en fusion
” and the “
texte en perpétuel devenir
” in the Jeaneau
Periphyseon
are both representative of this concrete reality. They are not resolvable or organicist texts, and there is a sense in which they will be forever incomplete. That is their condition.