Global Textual Scholarship: An American View
On
March 18, 2015, at a symposium on textual studies in Japan, organized by Kiyoko Myojo and sponsored by
Saitama University and Keio University, I gave the following talk. The slides add nothing to the reading text.
Textual scholars everywhere have
some common objectives and some common obstacles. SLIDE 2 Our objectives are to understand
literature and represent it understandably to interested readers. This means we write introductions and
commentary and notes, which we think will increase another person's
understanding and appreciation for the beauty or wisdom of literature. It also means that we promote the creation
of new copies of the texts of literary works.
Anyone who has compared in detail any copy of anything with its original
can make a list of differences. There
are always differences. Sometimes the
differences are important. And so we
have two goals for our newly copied texts:
first, that they be accurate copies, and second, that we account for the
important differences in copies before ours.
Common obstacles to our goals are
ignorance, error, and poor judgment. It
takes uncommon skills to overcome these obstacles. Sometimes we can only minimize the
ill-effects of ignorance, error and poor judgment. We have, however, tools that will help
us. We have investigative skills,
proofreading skills, and analytical skills.
Our objectives and the skills needed to achieve them are shared by
textual scholars globally. Unfortunately,
the obstacles of ignorance, error and poor judgment are also global.
The good side of textual studies,
the side that investigates and exercises care, is not the same everywhere. Textual scholars do not all agree about how
to combat ignorance, error, and poor judgment.
They do not always agree about how to copy or edit or prepare texts for
republication. The methodsof textual
scholarship have sometimes been culturally determined, such that textual
scholarship, editorial principles, and interpretive criticism seem to have
acquired national tendencies. We may
therefore think that there is a German way, a French way, and an Anglo-American
way to conduct textual criticism. If
that is so, why should there not also be a Japanese method?
My aim here is to suggest that the
different tendencies associated with different countries are available to us
all. That is, I no longer believe that
there is a method of textual criticism that is right for German literature and
a different method that is right for American literature. I do not think that there is a Western way
and an Eastern way or that one is better than the other. They may be different, but there are
different things that a new edition can do.
We have choices. Instead of
associating one goal and method with a country, we can identify a number of different
goals for textual scholarship, and associate with each goal a methodology that
is suitable to its goal. For that
reason, I will be referring to a range of editorial goals, rather than to a
range of countries in which one or another method is dominant.SUMMARY 1
First, let me try to dissect textual
scholarship in a series of steps. SLIDE
3
1. All textual evidence is documentary. About literature,if one asks, "Where did
that come from?" the ultimate answer is ALWAYS, "It came from a
document, which may have been copied from another document." When one has reached the earliest surviving
document, one has reached the final shred of extant textual evidence. We do not have time machines with which to
ask authors in the past questions about what they are writing. The bedrock of our work is facts. SLIDE 4 Our facts are documentary. Our documents are material. Our texts are symbolic. Textual meaning is interpretive. Reading is interpretive. Reading depends on skills for analyzing
symbols recorded on material documents.
We are in a circle from which we cannot escape. Most readers operate with minimal textual
information; textual scholars require all the information. SLIDE 5
2. Therefore, the first task of textual
scholarship is to find all the documents and understand the order of their descent
from earliest times to now. We begin
with ignorance; we use our investigative skills, we collect documents on which
are written the texts we wish to examine and edit. We arrive at knowledge of documentary facts.
Our enemies are error, fatigue, poor judgment (oh, and lack of money). SUMMARY 2
3. When a textual scholar has found and
collected all the surviving documentary evidence, what is to be done with it? We have reached the first point of
difference among the world's textual scholars.
Instead of asking, "Which is the correct next step?" SLIDE 6 Let us ask, "What are the
possibilities?" I think all of the
possibilities I am about to list will be attractive to you, but the order of
their attractiveness may vary from one person to the next. Probably no editor will want to accomplish
all of them--too much work. SLIDE 7
a. Digitize images of all the
documents. That will make it possible,
from anywhere in the world, to see any document side-by-side with any other
document without traveling from Tokyo to Marburg and New York. SLIDE 8
b. Prepare a table of variants to show how all the
documentary texts differ from one another.
SLIDE 9
c.
Write a textual history that explains the relationships among the
variant documents and explains why we should care--why it is important to know. SLIDE 10
d.
Transcribe at least one of the documents so that the variants list can
be more easily used. Or transcribe all
the documents so that readers can select and read any one. Transcribing all the documents will also make
machine collation possible. SLIDE 11
e.
Edit one of the transcriptions to correct obvious errors. This will preserve the text as a historical documentary
text but will help readers avoid the distractions caused by scribal or
compositorial errors.
So
far no controversies. SLIDE 12 I have described what Historical/Critical
editions accomplish. It is also what
Anglo-American editors do before they start editing the work. Some editors think that this is the point at
which Anglo-American editors start ruining their work. We will discuss that in a minute. What we have so far: digital images,
transcriptions, lists of variants, and the textual scholar's explanation of the
textual history, the relationships among the documents, and an indication of
why all of that is important. That is
basic work. Every textual scholar should
do it. SUMMARY 3
But there are more possibilities.
SLIDE 13 The truth is that what we have done
so far replicates and explains the past.
It does not do anything about it.
Our scholarship shows who did well and who did poorly, but so far we have
worked only with documents. We have not
addressed the question, how do literary
documents become literary works. Most
readers who love literature, who love to read, who are very good readers, do
not care about documents. They care
about works. Documents are not
works. They are the evidence for
works. A literary document becomes a
work when a reader reads it, performs it.
A document is a material object; a work is a mind object--like
mathematical abstractions, or unicorns, or thoughts. Readers create mind objects from the
evidence found in documents. When the
whole history of documents is flawed in the normal ways that copies are flawed,
the editor replicates the flaws and the reader has to read through them or
around them. Perhaps the editor can do
something to make a new document that is better evidence of the literary work
than are any of the historical documents.
That idea is the basis for Anglo-American editing. SLIDE 14
This gives textual scholars a new additional possible task: Do something
with the facts.
f.
Use analytical skills to identify the author's work and the work of
those whose help was compatible with the author's purposes. Then, edit an eclectic text that reflects those
selected aspects of texts found in various documents. For example, eliminate the homogenizing work
of standardization and or eliminate censorship and compositors' mis-readings
that marred the historical documentary texts.
Always provide a list of your emendations. SLIDE 15
g.
Avoid editing altogether and, instead, write analytical essays about the
creative development of texts from the way author's used their source and the
way they revised from the earliest drafts though the most revised printed text. And write about the interpretive consequences
of variant texts in process.
SUMMARY 4
I
have tried to list these possibilities in a progressive order. SLIDE 16
With the exception of A (digitization of images),goals B, C, and D (variants
lists, textual histories, and transcriptions)
seem necessary to finish before the other goals can be attempted. The
reason I put A (digitization) first is that, now in the digital age, it seems
to me that it SHOULD be first. (If you
ask me, I'll tell you why later.) In
this progressive list of possibilities, I have avoided the question,
"Which is the right way to conduct textual scholarship?" Instead, the list supports a wish:
"Yes, if there were time and money, we would like to see all of
them." There are two reason why
there IS in fact both time and money.
That has not always been the case.
Editors have had to choose among these goals because editors have not
had the time or the money to accomplish all of them,and because the print
medium has placed upon editors certain requirements and limitation. One
resulting tendency is that editors have often defended their own choice of
goals and methods as the best solution for all editors.
SUMMARY 5
The result has been that
Historical/Critical editing, often associated with Germany, but seen often in
other European textual traditions, has focused on B, C, and E--making B (a
textual apparatus of variants), C (textual histories), and D or E(a transcribed
text, possibly with errors corrected) the end-point for scholarly editing. There are many reasons to stop there, though
most of these reasons have to do with print technology and no longer hold true
in the digital age. For many
Historical/Critical editors, the scholarly edition produces a one-stop, printed
source of historical information that can be used as the basis for other
purposes, such as editing student editions or conducting genetic studies.
Anglo-American editorial traditions,
on the other hand, tended to focus attention on F (extracting an eclectic text
that reflects the author's purposes better than did any historical text). Anglo-American editors did all the work of
B, C, and E, but they never thought they had the money to print and publish
these steps in the process. What the
American granting agencies tended to fund were editions that fulfilled, as best
that scholarly analytical skill could determine, the full fruition of
Anglo-American authorship. That required
eclectic texts.
Neither of these objectives of
textual scholarship exhaust what students of literature want to know about
documents and texts. Critique génétique
reflects investigative urges that are not fulfilled by collections of
historical documentary facts and are not content with anyone else's notion of
what the text should have been.
Instead, geneticists want to investigate the processes of textual
development. These include the processes
of creativity, of selection, of corruption, of intervention, and of critical
consumption. To conduct such studies
items B, C, D, and E are helpful, but in themselves areincomplete. To a geneticist, F (the eclectic edition) was
too narrowly focused on one way to distinguish right from wrong texts;
geneticists were interested in all texts.SUMMARY 6
Eclectic editions flourished in
America more than elsewhere. I will
argue that, when the eclectic edition has been properly understood, it will be
seen to have a legitimate place in the range of textual scholarship. We might even
all wish to seeeclectic editions supported.
Textual scholarship is so complex and diverse thatwe might think there
is enough work to do to establish the historical record and not enough time to
try to fix the errors of history. We say
we do not have enough time or money.
But that is no longer true for two reasons. SLIDE 17
The first reason is that in the
digital age the work of one editor or small group of editors can serve as the
foundation for another or many other editors.
This was not true in the print world.
Print projects had to be defined from beginning to end and completed
before publication. Once published in
print, a new project that wished to build on the accomplishments of the previous
project had to begin production processes from the ground up. Not so with digital projects. If one starts a digital project by creating
digital images of all the documents, one has a resource that will serve all
subsequent textual projects. That is
true even if a new textual scholar finds a reason to go see the originals
themselves. I hope there will always be
reasons and means to see original documents.
As substitutes for originals, however, digital images are as close as
can be produced. The next steps--transcriptions
and collations and the preparations of textual histories--focus on the documentary
record. These steps establish the facts
of the material and symbolic evidence. Of
course, transcribing texts is only as good as the proofreading; collation tables are only as good as the
design of the apparatus that displays them; and textual histories are only as
good as the analytical skills of the textual historian. But in all these tasks, it is the record of
facts that counts. Placed in a virtual
archive--that is, a digital archive--this part of textual scholarship offers a
valuable resource for further work in the ultimate task of understanding literature
and representing it understandably to readers.
The second reason that we now have
sufficient time and money do conduct all the work of textual scholarship is
dependent on the first. Whereas in the print era, a project need to be
planned and completed before publication, in the digital age, a project does
not need to be planned from beginning to end and completed before being
"published"--or rather before being launched on the Internet. If we start with the foundation of a virtual
archive, then a generation or more of other textual scholars can use the
images, transcriptions, collations, and textual histories in order to generate
additional scholarship and criticism.
The last time I was in Japan I talked about HRIT (Humanities Research
Infrastructure and Tools) as one environment designed to host a virtual archive
and to encourage and host scholarly contributions to the textual scholarship
needed to transform an archive into representations of literature for
interested readers. There are other platforms
that are now even more advanced than the one I envisioned. The most interesting of them to me is
AUST-ESE developed in Australia, originally for Australian Electronic Scholarly
Editing, but available for use with other literatures--at least other literature
using the Roman alphabet.SUMMARY 7
Time and money need no longer be
measured by how much time or money an individualeditor or a single project has
available in the foreseeable future.
Time and money now extends beyond our vision for virtual archives that
serve as a the basis for further editions, textual scholarship, and
interpretive criticism. Eventually, our project will become their project and may, someday be
finished. SLIDE 18
It
will have images of all the historical documents.
Transcriptions
of all the historical documents.
A
collation of variants among the historical documents.
An
explanation of the transmission of texts from document to document.
An
explanation of the nature of textual variation: who made the changes? why they made the
changes? which changes were accidental
and which were on purpose?
Commentary
and notes on the text. SUMMARY 8
I'll end with a short accountof why
I believe in the value of eclectic editions.
I was trained to believe that eclectic editions could be definitive and
stand on their own to represent both the history and the achievement of textual
art. They are NOT definitive. But they can be valuable.I understand
eclectic editions now as contributions to the overall achievement of textual
scholarship.
The English author, William Makepeace
Thackeray, worked for ten years as a journalist and writer of travel books
before his first great novel, Vanity Fair,
was published in 1847-1848. During that
time he worked with many publishers and proofread his work as typeset by many
compositors. Thackeray knew the printing
and publishing trades because he was friends with his publishers and familiar
with the printing offices. That is one
part of Thackeray.
Thackeray was also a smooth stylist, a
perfect speller, and a rapid writer, whose punctuation is barely adequate for
publication. Anyone looking at
Thackeray's manuscripts knows they cannot be published as written with any hope
that readers will think well of the printer.
But Thackeray did punctuate his manuscripts according to the rules he
learned in school. These rules were
rhetorical, designed to help readers by suggesting pauses of different lengths
as one reads aloud. The problem is that
Thackeray did not always put all the quotation marks in, sometimes his periods
look like dashes, and sometimes his ear for the sound of the sentence did not
match what was conventionally expected.
Hence, his manuscript punctuation needed some fixing up.
Compositors in England at the
mid-19th-century were paid by the amount of type that they set. They were required to correct errors for no
pay at all. And they were given
Thackeray's manuscripts exactly as he wrote them. Compositors were skilled workmen. They worked as fast as they could. They fixed Thackeray's punctuation by
following their own rules. Those rules
were grammatical rules designed to help readers by indicating the grammatical
structure of sentences. The quotation
marks and periods are in place. But the
pauses of different lengths which Thackeray had indicatedwere mostly changed to
grammatical indications of sentence structure.
The result was that the printed texts have far more punctuation than was
needed. SLIDE 19
The eclectic text I wanted had
Thackeray's manuscript punctuation, cleaned up somewhat, but not to the extent
imposed by compositors. It also had the
revisions that Thackeray made in proofs and which showed up only in the printed
texts. The eclectic text does not
substitute for, nor replace, the historical documents. Instead it does something that what no
historical document does, which is to representThackeray's writing as it would
have been had the compositors been less hurried and more in tune with
Thackeray's ear for style.
As textual scholars, we share many
tasks, we share many standards. But we
do not all want to accomplish the same goal in editing. And no matter how you edit, there is always
something your edition cannot do. So,
define your goal and explain your method.
If your work is accurate and your method is clear, then you have a right
to do what you did. But please do not
pretend that you have had the last word.
All the editions that went before you, and all the editions that will
come after you, have some appeal that yours does not
have. And yours will have an appeal that
the others do not have--if you are accurate and clear.SUMMARY
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