The Textual Condition of Nineteenth-Century Literature

Josephine Guy, Ian Small

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136471926
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik Geschichte & Theorie

In this important new book, Guy and Small develop a new account of literary creativity in the late nineteenth century, one that combines concepts generated by text-theorists concerning the embodied nature of textuality with the empirical insights of text-editors and book historians. Through these developments, which the authors term the 'textual turn, ' this study examines the textual condition of nineteenth-century literature. The authors explore works by Dickens, Wilde, Hardy, Yeats, Swinburne, FitzGerald, Pater, Arnold, Pinero and Shaw, connecting questions about what a work textually 'is' with questions about why we read it and how we value it. The study asks whether the textual turn places us in a stronger position to analyze the value of a nineteenth-century text—not for readers of the nineteenth century, but of the twenty-first. The authors argue that this issue of value is central to their discipline.

1 Introduction

I. THE TEXTUAL CONDITION OF LITERATURE

The term ‘condition’ implies a mode or a state of being. In the way in which we employ the term in this study, it implies an attempt to define not a property nor a quality of literature, but a set of circumstances essential to it—in other words, those circumstances which determine the modality of literature’s existence. To talk of conditions, then, signals an ambition to define what makes literature possible, rather than what constitutes it, a subtle but important conceptual shift. The subject of this book is the implication of this shift for understanding literary creativity and defining literary value. So although we refer to aspects of literary theory, we are not concerned with discussing the numerous attempts made by theorists to identify the features of a work which lead it to be labelled ‘literature’, or with the alleged political or ideological character of that labelling. In the same way, although we discuss details of literary history, we are not principally interested in providing a comprehensive account of the conditions which, at any given moment, made the production of a literary work possible or determined the way in which it was read and interpreted. The subject which does concern us is the usefulness of the turn away from properties to conditions, one closely associated with the work of Jerome J. McGann, whose 1991 monograph The Textual Condition was instrumental in popularizing the term.

We can get a sense of the significance of this shift when we consider how systematically essentialist definitions of literature have been contested and resisted over the past thirty years—effectively since the rise to academic respectability and then popularity of explicit literary theorizing. Referring to a 2002 PMLA forum entitled ‘Why Major in Literature—What Do We Tell Our Students?’, Gregory Jusdanis described the culmination of this process as an embarrassingly public admission of ‘professional self-doubt’ and, in the longer term, an act of professional suicide, insofar as it seemed to concede that students of literature have no proper object of study (Jusdanis 2005: 22). Setting aside the details of Jusdanis’s own attempt to restore the legitimacy of what he terms the ‘aesthetic autonomy’ of the literary, it is hard to disagree with his general observation that a failure to define what he terms literature’s ‘special value’ has fundamental implications for the disciplinary status of literary studies.¹ However the question the present book asks is whether the substitution of the study of textual conditions for that of the nature of literariness makes for a more intellectually secure investigation. And, more importantly, in what ways, if any, examining this new object of study can shed light on the question which Jusdanis and others have insisted it is the primary role of professors of literature to profess: the aesthetics of literary responses. To put this observation another way: can the interrogation of textual conditions fulfil the promise implicitly set out in McGann’s 1991 monograph by offering a less contentious, because a more concrete, way of talking about literary value?

Understanding the textual condition of literary works, an activity which we loosely define as the domain of ‘textual scholarship’,² is currently the province of three separate although related practices within literary studies. One of our tasks in this monograph is to examine the extent to which these practices are compatible with each other.³ These practices are: the empirical and theoretical observations of text-editors, including those advocates of genetic and electronic editions, and their interest in interrogating the concept of an ‘authoritative’ text and in identifying the relationship between a work and its versions. Second are the observations of textual theorists about the inevitably embodied nature of textuality and the consequent necessity of understanding a work in terms of its materiality, which can include paying attention to what Kathryn Ledbetter terms ‘an infinitely expressive web of influence that may include illustrators, editors, publishers, other periodicals, current events and ideology’ (Ledbetter 2009: 14). For convenience we refer to this body of work as textual materialism and its proponents as textual materialists. And third are the arguments made by historians of print culture (or the practice which is sometimes termed ‘the history of the book’), which maintain that details of literary works can be explained, at least in part, by the changing economics and technology of the publishing industry.⁴ Although in the present study the impact of developments in textual scholarship is assessed largely by reference to examples drawn from nineteenth-century literature, our conclusions have implications for literary studies in general. We draw on our own experiences as critics, historians, and editors of nineteenth-century literary works, particularly those of Oscar Wilde,⁵ in order to examine the implications of textual scholarship for the wider topics of literary value and literary creativity.

A dissatisfaction with the apparent displacement of questions about the ‘special value’ of literary works onto questions of politics, history, or ideology seems to have been felt acutely in nineteenth-century studies. A number of voices have objected to what they perceive as a gradual slippage from literary history to cultural history, and the consequent subsuming of literariness into a larger and less carefully discriminated category usually described as ‘discourse’ (Adams 2001; Goodlad 2003; Leighton 2007; Miller 2003). This development has often been attributed to what has been termed the ‘Foucauldian turn’ in nineteenth-century studies (a development we discuss in more detail in Chapter 2), and it is tempting to suggest that it might be countered by a parallel ‘textual turn’. However, the analysis we offer of the role of textual scholarship is not as optimistic as this opposition might lead us to believe. The various kinds of textual scholarship we discuss—text-editing, textual materialism, and book history—tend to be practised and evaluated separately, and the task of synthesizing their insights is not easy, partly because they are justified by different sorts of theoretical presuppositions.

To give a concrete example of this state of affairs: there is an obvious (and not easily resolved) tension between, on the one hand, the insistence by some textual materialists that we should read nineteenth-century literary works in their original textual embodiments, and in so doing pay attention to the signifying value of the medium in which they were printed (that is, to features such as paper quality, typography, and bindings), and—on the other—the propagandizing by text-editors of what has been termed the ‘fluid text’ made possible by digitization and electronic or e-editions (Bryant 2002). In the case of this digitized fluid text, as Warren Chernaik and Marilyn Deegan pointed out nearly twenty years ago, ‘the text as text only exists for the reader after it has first been re-created by the machine … the machine is interposed between text and reader as a physical necessity’ (Chernaik & Deegan 1993: 4). This concept of a constantly re-created text, a text in which electronic signals must be translated into something which the human eye can read, has a different ontological status from text understood as a physical, embodied object—a book or manuscript which can survive for hundreds of years on a library shelf, and which possesses by virtue of being a material object a variety of tactile and sensory properties. As we shall see, presuppositions about what constitutes text (or, when we speak of e-editions, about how text is constituted) can have implications for those properties (or qualities) held to be signifiers of literariness, and also for our understanding of literary identity. The fact that academic digitization projects are today often preferred to traditional codex editing, principally because it is presumed that they enable the editor to capture much more information about textual embodiments, exacerbates rather than resolves this tension.⁶ In this sense it is something of an irony that the medium—digitization—widely held to be superior in conveying information about a literary work’s materiality, is itself responsible for the progressive dematerialization of text.

There is a further element in this debate, arguably felt most strongly among academics in the United Kingdom. It concerns the ways in which institutions support literary research. The past two decades have witnessed a marked shift from what used to be termed ‘lone scholar’ research—what the French critic Laurent Jenny has termed ‘solitary artisanal, and unverifiable critical work’ typically realized in the speculative, individually authored academic monograph—to what might be called the ‘corporate’ project, one which involves the employment of a team of academics, including doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows, and which typically has as its main output some machine-readable resource, such as an interactive Web-based archive or a searchable and updateable e-text (Jenny 1996: 10). The reasons behind this shift are many and diverse and have to do with changing attitudes towards the funding of university research in Britain, as well as the desire to modernize the training of young researchers by enabling them to work on collaborative projects with experienced scholars, a pattern which allows humanities research to model itself less on Jenny’s figure of the ‘lone artisan’ and more closely on the joint projects familiar in the social and natural sciences. Nonetheless the fact that this shift has coincided with the textual turn of literary studies is hardly an accident: it is tempting to suggest that it was just such a turn that made the corporate literary project possible in the first place.⁷ As Jenny notes of genetic criticism (a particularly elaborate kind of modern text-editing), its ‘research methods’ claim the status of ‘a science’; seductively ‘scientific’ too, apparently, is its gargantuan appetite for machinery, for expensive and ‘complicated technological apparatus (scanners, data banks, computer-assisted reading stations, etc.)’ (1996: 10). Like other editorial projects, genetic criticism seems to offer an attractively concrete yet simultaneously specialized investigation into literariness: it can define in advance exactly what will be delivered, and can divide the research involved into a series of discrete tasks, capable of being undertaken by scholars at various stages in their careers.

However it is the argument of this book that textual scholarship cannot on its own address the issue of literary identity, for it typically does not tell us which authors—and then which texts of those authors—are worth attending to in the first instance. Peter Shillingsburg is particularly blunt on this point, arguing apropos of electronic editing that ‘[t]he value or importance of the work being converted to electronic form or created in electronic form is not the central concern’ (Shillingsburg 2006: 30). So there is a further reason to be cautious about the textual turn of literary studies. Although, as we will also show, textual scholarship consistently returns us to questions of literary value, it does not on its own possess the means to answer those questions, particularly through the provision of textual data, whether that data is about linguistic variants or the material properties of particular embodiments. In this book we shall suggest that a principal role of textual scholarship is to remind us of how insistently the concept of value is at the centre of both literary enquiry and our understanding of what constitutes literary creativity.

II. THE TEXTUAL TURN OF LITERARY STUDIES

In the way that it has typically been told by text-editors, the history of modern text-editing has something of a comfortable Whiggish feel to it, in the sense that an emphasis tends to be placed on an evolution by the late decades of the twentieth century from a naive and relatively under-theorized set of practices that centred on the recovery of an author’s ‘original intention’ into a sophisticated, highly theorized (and in some instances technically complex) discipline addressing what George Bornstein and Ralph G. Williams termed ‘the most interesting issues and problems in the humanities’ (Bornstein & Williams 1993).⁸ It is perhaps worth reminding ourselves briefly of the reasons behind that evolution, of why traditional theories of text-editing were perceived to be inadequate. In the hands of text-editors such as W. W. Greg and R. B. McKerrow and slightly later Fredson Bowers, the primary aim of the editor was held to be that of establishing an authoritative text of a work, when that activity presupposed that the literary value of a work could be most adequately realized in a single linguistic text of it. What precisely constituted that text was a matter of debate and depended upon how the individual editor viewed creativity in relation to institutional processes, particularly those to do with publication. Concepts such as a ‘corrupt’ text and ‘foul papers’, most familiar from the editing of medieval and early modern manuscripts, proposed that successive scribal (and later printed) copies introduced errors or corruptions to what was understood to be an author’s original intention, and so by implication to his or her realization of a literary work. In this view, authority was given to that textual witness over which the author could be demonstrated to have possessed the most control (usually that closest in time to an original, fair-copy manuscript). This textual embodiment was consequently held to be the least corrupt and so the most authentic witness to the work in question. For Greg, however, it was not necessarily the case that any single document was authoritative in all respects; so he argued for a separation between substantives and accidentals, thus enabling an editor to choose an early embodiment as copy-text, but emending it, where appropriate, in light of later substantive authorial changes.

Editors of post-Renaissance literature, by contrast, tended to view publication as an integral element of the creative process, in that the concept of an author’s original intention was taken to include the desire to place a literary work before a reading public: here the assumption is that literature is inherently social. In strong versions of this argument—which Shillingsburg describes as ‘artifactual’ editing and which he sees exemplified in the ideas and practice of James Thorpe (Shillingsburg 2006: 186; Thorpe 1972)—the literary work is assumed to be the product of the publication process, and so the integrity of a published text is always given precedence, even when it may contain non-authorial variants, including non-authorial accidentals. This concession in turn directs the editor to the problem of how to choose between published texts. One solution is to see each published text as a new work, and as we will argue in Chapter 2, this is broadly speaking Donald Lawler’s view of literary creativity. It turns out to have important implications for his treatment of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Treating each publication as a separate work is also implicit in the arguments of some textual materialists, a point to which we return. For an editor committed to the proposition that literature is social, other solutions are possible, however: for example, she may choose as copy- or base-text a first published edition by arguing that it is the initial act of placing a work in the public domain which represents the writer’s most significant realization of it. Revisions made to subsequent editions may be viewed as corruptions introduced through the influence of a variety of non-authorial agents and pressures, and these could include adverse comments from reviewers or poor sales. Alternatively, an editor who is more sanguine about the kinds of pressures that might be exerted on a writer, and who tends to correlate creative integrity with maturity and experience, might have recourse to what is termed the ‘final’ intention for a work—that is, to choose as copy- or base-text the last embodiment of the work over which it could be demonstrated that its author had control. In practice this often means the last version published before the author’s death, although in cases where an editor judges a writer’s creative powers to be in decline after a certain age, an earlier (but not necessarily the first) edition may be preferred. There is, in addition, a weak version of this argument, one which has informed some editorial treatments of William Thackeray (Harden 1989) and, as we show in Chapter 2, of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. In this view, an editor may choose to reprint the text of a published embodiment (often the last an author oversaw in his lifetime), but emend it in the light of authorial variants found in an earlier, unpublished manuscript, reasoning that the manuscript is witness to some crucial aspect of the work’s creative identity—typically authorial punctuation—which was lost in its subsequent transmission.⁹

With the exception of artifactual editing, whichever of these rationales were chosen by individual editors—whether a fair-copy manuscript, a first or last published edition, or a published text emended in light of manuscript variants—they nonetheless had in common a basic set of assumptions about both the nature of literariness and an editor’s ability to recover it from the extant textual record. Of these, the most significant were the following: the proposition that authorial intention is coterminous with an agent (or possibly agents) and that it can be instantiated in a linguistic text; that the literary identity of a work is realized more fully in one particular textual embodiment of it than in any competitor; and that the textual embodiments of a given work can be arranged hierarchically in terms of the extent to which they represent a stage in the development towards that work (or alternatively the corruption of it). This practice is typically described as constructing a stemma.

It is precisely these assumptions which are challenged by the concept of what has variously been termed the ‘open’ or the ‘fluid’ text. The idea of the open text involved the repositioning of text-editing so that it could claim to occupy the centre ground of literary studies, a tactic which in turn depended on the willingness of editors in the late 1980s and early 1990s to abandon both essentialist and strongly teleological concepts of literary creativity, those concepts which assume that a literary work is most fully realized in a single textual embodiment. Bornstein described this development as a moment of intellectual ‘upheaval’ or something like an editorial paradigm shift, in which editing could be aligned with (rather than placed in opposition to) many of the assumptions about textuality generated a decade or so earlier by literary theorists—the most famous of which were ‘the death of the author’ and the primacy given to interpretative contingency. These assumptions had led to a distrust of editorial practices for which authorial agency and associated concepts (such as authorial intention and the notion of a stable or definitive text) were central. An editorial practice which could take account of the ‘social component in textual construction and transmission’ and which could acknowledge that textual instability was, in Bornstein’s view, at the cutting edge of the discipline (Bornstein 1993: 4). Important, too, as we noted above, were the opportunities offered by the availability of cheap computing resources which provided a technology capable of responding to and facilitating these new editorial theories, however imperfectly. A freedom from the physical and temporal constraints imposed by codex editions also meant freedom from the kinds of choices which earlier editors had been obliged to make, and thus a freedom too from the concepts—particularly that of a copy- or base-text—which had underwritten them. Openness and flexibility became the new watchwords of text-editing, as ‘postmodernist editing’ (to use Greetham’s term) operated under the assumptions of ‘poststructuralist différance’ producing ‘scriptible’ rather than ‘lisible’ texts (Greetham 1993: 17). The politics and ethics of text-editing also changed as editors now tended to see their role as the production of ‘polymorphic’ or ‘polysemic’ editions in which readers were empowered to make their own choices—to be freed from the authority of editors and to be able to construct their own texts. (Whether electronic editions are in fact used in this way, and whether there is evidence that readers want to become their own editors, are issues to which we shall return.)

Fundamental to the attempted accommodation of text-theory to critical theory was a rethinking of the relationship between the concepts of a text and a work. As Shillingsburg put matters, postmodern or electronic texts gave a new impetus to the question of ‘whether a work of literary art is or is not coterminous with its best representative linguistic text’, and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Novel
• 3. Poetry
• 4. Non-Fictional Prose
• 5. Drama
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index