Flaws and Errors vs Character of the Material
I recently
acquired an oak burl that was riddled with carpenter ants and some rot. Burl wood is the result of disease or
damage. The tree attempts to repair the
damage and isolate the disease or invading fungus or insect. The result is a sort of gall of wood fiber
without a set grain direction. The
patterning can be beautiful, but the juxtaposition of rot and insect damage
with solid burl wood is erratic. One
could call it natural materiality, if one were aping aca-talk.
I cut pen
blanks from my burl. A pen blank is
about three inches long and 3/4inches square.
One drills a hole through the blank, inserts and glues a thin metal tube,
mounts it on a lathe with appropriate bushings, and shapes a pen body. What could go wrong?
Well, first I
ran into some soft sap wood that flecked off, leaving bits of exposed metal
tubing. In another effort I ran into
the channels left by the carpenter ants.
And in another effort I gouged the wood by holding the lathe tool at the
wrong angle. It got me thinking about
the differences between flaws in the material, errors of execution, and
discovery of the character of the wood.
Woodworkers often casually refer to "character of the wood" to
render beautiful that which appears anomalous.
Knots are the chief such objects.
In some woods the knots are surrounded by grain that curls and chips
during planing, leaving dips and small divots chipped out of the wood. Sanding might remove evidence of very shallow
divots, and a smooth dip might be said to follow the grain. Here is where a fine line exists between flaw
and error. Did the carpenter mar the
wood by breaking fibers or was the carpenter exposing and displaying the subtle
undulations of the wood?
It made me
think of the materiality of texts and the carpentry of editing. It might make more sense to compare
carpenters to writers, but writers create material objects from words, where
the material is merely a medium, not the thing itself (whatever that is). Editors, like carpenters, find the material
already in existence and seek to find how it should best express itself. Understanding the character of the material
makes it possible to work with the material to expose and display its subtlety. Some carpenters, like some editors, are not
interested in the material. Their eye is
on a conventional outcome: a text without flaws; a chair or a desk that looks
exactly like its mates and in which no undulations, subtle or otherwise, can be
detected.
My pen blank
with soft sapwood that flecked off the lathe declared itself unfit for the use
I sought. The ant channels offered a
different problem. They were not, per
se, character of wood. Yet, they were
endemic to my particular piece of wood.
Did their existence render my pen blank inadequate for the job? Or did they become a natural aspect to be
appreciated and cared for in the pen-making process? Is care, devoted to such material, a vain
attempt to salvage inadequate material, or is it an homage to the material?
Answers to
those questions vary according to the expectations and inclinations of the
person setting up as judge. In editing,
if one's expectations, one's predispositions and assumptions, about the
material are strong, one can run roughshod over the subtleties. If one's principles are strong, they might
prevent one from seeing how the material resists the editor's tool.
It has become
common these days to lump Anglo-American editorial practice into a catch-all
bin called intentionalism or idealism in order to contrast it (usually
pejoratively) with European editorial practice in a bin called materialism. The former is said to drive toward an
unachievable idealism, while the later pursues and cares for material
text(s). Both bins are damaging
oversimplifications: damaging because anyone buying into such stereotypes is
encouraged to become inured to the differences between flaws and errors and
between character of the material and character of the editorial
principle.
It is no
defense of realism or scholarship to say that the intentional character of
material texts is outside the purview of editing. Likewise, it is not defense of idealism or
criticism to say one can treat documents as mere temporal snapshots of intentional
works in progress. Both statements
contain truth and are thus more than a little bit attractive, but a true wood
worker respects the character of wood and rejects the flaws. To do otherwise is error.
