Not surprisingly, I am pretty much in agreement with Hans, and with most of what I have been hearing.  In my essay, “Witness and Access,” forthcoming in the next issue of Textual Cultures, I try to show how book history can be enhanced by a focus on fluid texts, or versions, or revision.  History is change, and change is deeply embedded in textual versions, or rather in the forces that impel the revisions that create the versions.

But as Hans is saying, twenty years of theory has perpetuated the de-historicized notions of textuality that grew out of New Criticism, of which the Greg-Bowers (or at least eclectic editing) approach is the editorial embodiment.  What is needed is a theory of textual criticism that places not only textuality (and I would say textual process) at the center of historicism, but also historicism at the center of textuality.  And what is also needed is a critical vocabulary that critics and students can use to facilitate their deeper understanding of how texts evolve within book history and their culture, and in fact their own identities.  (I think you have to dive deep to solve this problem: in “America” one’s identity can be a moveable feast.)

At first I was deeply depressed by Alistair’s very cogent message because it resonated so much with my frustrations in dealing with colleagues, disciplines, and the profession.  No one gets me!  I mutter as I wander about my department or at MLA.  I don’t think our present discussion and insights are going to make a dint on the profession until critics and students find something compelling in what we do, and the way we see things.  But there is a lot that is compelling in bibliography broadly defined.  Those of us who teach texts as fluid texts invariably find, even in our first year students, a real excitement over the idea that a text is not the authoritarian solidity they have led to believe it is.  The discovery in class of a fluid text, a revision, or different versions (of say Typee, or of Moby-Dick, or a poem by Dickinson, or Whitman) sparks all kinds of student questions about how ideas get into print, and how print is altered and alters ideas.  When you point out an expurgation or censoring, students invariably get angry at the change, then they read more deeply to see what the different wording or expurgation actually means, then they begin to embrace the notion of change.  Soon you are doing cultural analysis on the basis of a little textual variant.  People like to observe revision because they are constantly revising themselves.  

My point is that the value of what we do as textual scholars and editors is graspable at very basic educational levels, and in order to get the message into the classroom and to those in our profession who do only “criticism,” we need to get books and e-texts that stress textual process into the classroom.  When Hans talks about pragmatics, he means practical criticism; but I think he is also getting at the logistics of pragmatics: our editions.

Yrs,
John Bryant




___________
John Bryant, English Department, Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY 11549
>>> Hans Walter Gabler <[log in to unmask]> 03/24/07 2:31 PM >>>
How right, Peter Robinson: a very interesting 
discussion – and all thanks to Jim. ‘A genius 
makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and 
portals to discovery.’ For me: the discovery how 
book- and bibliography-centered textual criticism 
still is, on anglo-american premises. It was of 
course a stroke of genius of the Gregs and 
McKerrows of the 20th century to put textual 
criticism on a bibliographical footing – that is, 
to take recourse, for texts to be edited, to 
close analysis of the books through which they 
were transmitted. So method-less was textual 
criticism until then (it seems; or so we are/were 
told) that ‘bibliography’ and ‘textual criticism’ 
could become virtually synonymous. Yet how 
strange this is/was, really. And moreover: not 
only how parochially an anglo-american way of 
constructing our area of scholarship; but also, 
how formalistic, and at bottom how a-historic an 
approach to editorial scholarship.
For the book, however, the marriage of 
bibliography and textual scholarship seems to be 
reaping benefits. It may be true (or, not overly 
distorting) to say that, before the privileged 
yoking together of the disciplines, bibliography 
registered books mainly from the outside, as 
material objects, in classificatory, taxonomical, 
enumerative ways. If so, it could perhaps, in 
contrast, also be posited that now, in terms of 
the history of the book as pursued in our day, 
books are being perceived much more in observance 
of the texts they contain/embody (as has 
variously been pointed out in our discussion). 
Hence, textual scholarship may be said to have 
whelped (Alistair: Jim will confirm that textual 
bibliographers have an eminent judge at dog shows 
in their pedigree!) the new offspring into the 
litter basket of Cultural Studies – which is 
where ‘History of the Book’ taxonomically belongs, as we seem to be agreeing.
And thus not, if there are two baskets to be 
distinguished, in that of textual criticism and 
editorial scholarship. Actually, the several 
self-positionings of textual criticism throughout 
the 20th century seem to me to have spawned 
progressions other than bibliography- and 
book-oriented ones, too. It remains interesting 
to me to observe how the German developments in 
textual criticism, for instance, opted rather for 
historicizing the texts, thereby, as it were, 
largely abstracting their transmission from the 
material conditioning of the documents/books that 
carried them. The drive behind this strategy was, 
it seems to me, analogous to the anglo-american 
desire to gain strength, and a discipline, through methodology.
Even more exciting for me personally, though, has 
been the mutation of such historicizing to an 
awareness of the genesis of texts. For now, what 
this awareness is proving capable of spawning, in 
its turn, is a re-recognition of textual 
criticism as criticism – and consequently a 
whelping (?!) of renewed foundations for the 
endeavour of criticism tout court. Admittedly, 
the challenge is, on a fundamental level of 
theory, yet to be met. But on a level of 
pragmatics, the new openings are discernible 
already. They center in particular on 
acknowledging the modern authorial manuscript as 
an object of analysis, interpretation, and 
editing in its own right – and the right(s) it 
claims are to much more, and to greater 
complexities, than to the traces of text (or 
‘spoors’ of text, as Peter Shillingsburg would 
presumably say) it bears witness to. Wim has 
reminded us of the perspectives on authorial 
manuscripts that critique g*n*tique may be 
teaching us in this respect. And I would also 
suggest that John Bryant’s discoursings around 
‘blo’ (on no account to be read as an unachieved 
‘blog’, I take it …) enact before our eyes that 
the engaging with a draft manuscript, even just 
in attempting to clear up what it codifies 
textually, will always already elicit a process 
of critical discourse. What is more: such 
critical discourse is uniquely (as towards draft 
manuscripts, that is) double-tiered. It is only 
on one of two levels that this mode of discourse 
is critically performative as we conventionally 
conceive of ‘criticism’, namely towards the text 
that is being written. On another level, a 
separate discourse may be developed plausibly to 
interpret the evidence of the manuscript writing 
(as opposed to: the manuscript text) as 
indicative, or indexical, of the thought 
processes and acts of decision behind the writing 
process. (‘Acts of reading embedded in the acts 
of writing.’) This other level is discernible and 
accessible in draft manuscripts, and/or at 
moments of revision in later manuscripts, only. 
It is lacking in fair copies and achieved texts 
in print; for, situated beyond the processes of 
writing, they preserve text pure, and alone.
Hence, the question of how to edit draft 
manuscripts, doing justice in particular also to 
their traces/spoors of writing processes, is but 
a secondary concern. It can but follow from a 
perception of authorial manuscripts as unique 
objects, in the first place. Which may imply that 
– besides ‘History of the Book’ – bibliography 
(as re-semanticized through textual criticism in 
the 20th century) has also spawned a new 
conceptual frame for understanding the challenge 
that modern authorial draft manuscripts posit to 
criticism, textual criticism, and editing alike, 
and together. Textual scholarship should rise to 
that challenge, which is in truth not just 
parochial to textual criticism and editing, but 
ultimately a challenge to re-theorizing as well as re-pragmatizing criticism.
To return finally to the History-of-the-Book 
issue as emanating in this discussion from the 
past week’s round table at Leicester: The upsurge 
of interest in the history of the book among 
textual scholars seems to me not as innocently 
forward-looking as it may appear at first sight. 
For one might ask: is it not perhaps a symptom of 
retreat of textual scholarship into a ghetto at 
second remove (remembering that, in the heyday of 
the ‘scholarship’-‘criticism’ dichotomy, 
‘bibliography-and-textual-criticism’ was happily 
sequestered already: happily so, that is, for 
both sides)? My suspicion is that, since ‘the 
bibliographical way’ in editing has been 
effectively shut off by all the theorizing that 
has been going on since 1983 – and has been 
urgently necessary –, the bibliographical 
orientation cum concern-with-texts, as it still 
survives (and fortunately survives, as I hasten 
to add), now seeks its continued outlet on books, 
if no longer on texts and their editing. If this 
is so, let it be so recognized, and fruitfully 
practiced – by all means. But let it also be 
acknowledged that this should not be so at the 
price of neglecting textual criticism and 
editing. The theorizing of the past two decades, 
while abating, has not as yet spawned a 
fundamentally fresh editorial practice, let alone 
new paradigms with a promise to last. At least as 
eager as to see a state-of-the-art historicizing 
of the book (of the past), would I be to see the 
scholarly edition of and for the future – and 
beyond that, a renewed bid of textual criticism 
to be – remain! – a foundational branch discipline of literary criticism.

Hans.