A Rationale of Textual Criticism

G. Thomas Tanselle

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9780812214093
• eBook ISBN:
  9780812200423
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism History & Theory
• Index: Literature

Textual criticism—the traditional term for the task of evaluating the authority of the words and punctuation of a text—is often considered an undertaking preliminary to literary criticism: many people believe that the job of textual critics is to provide reliable texts for literary critics to analyze. G. Thomas Tanselle argues, on the contrary, that the two activities cannot be separated.The textual critic, in choosing among textual variants and correcting what appear to be textual errors, inevitably exercises critical judgment and reflects a particular point of view toward the nature of literature. And the literary critic, in interpreting the meaning of a work or passage, needs to be (though rarely is) critical of the makeup of every text of it, including those produced by scholarly editors.

ONE

The Nature of Texts

When Keats, reflecting on the Grecian urn, wrote that it could “express / A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme,” he was provoking us to consider the difference between pictorial art and works made of words. By calling the urn a “historian,” he made clear that he was concerned with it as a link to the past, not simply as an object appearing before his eyes in the present. The urn had been preserved through “silence and slow time”—and, he said, it could “thus” express the flowery tale more sweetly, more satisfyingly to the imagination. In so connecting the urn’s survival through time with its power of expression, is he only telling us that his rhyme is less good a historian because it provides a derived account and is not the primary evidence? Or is there also the implication that even a poem contemporaneous with the urn would be less satisfactory than the urn because the medium of poetry necessitates a different kind of passage through time? Keats does not comment on the inevitable deterioration of the urn, emphasizing instead its enduring presence, and rightly so: if the urn becomes discolored or chipped, we still have what is left of it directly in front of us. But do we ever know where a poem is? Can the artifacts that constitute our evidence for the existence of a poem provide us—as the urn does—with a means for ordering the randomness of life?

Although the “legend” depicted on the urn is “leaffring’d,” it is not a part of nature, however naturally it may have grown out of the anguish of its creator and however readily it may reflect what we believe to be the environment that nurtured it. The serenity of the immobile urn belies the teeming energy from which it emerged; in spite of the turbulence depicted on its surface, it appears tranquil in its provision of a framework for the arrangement of emotions. “All breathing human passion far above,” Keats says, for the urn has presented us with an enchanted space, where boughs cannot shed their leaves and actions are frozen outside of time. This “silent form” is a “friend to man,” allowing one—from the contemplative distance of art—to find patterns, and thus truth and beauty, in what had seemed the chaos of life. Poems, too, like all works of art, can serve this function. But where do we find them? Do we find poems in artifacts? Is a poem what appears in an author’s final manuscript, or in a first printed edition, or in a revised second edition? Or are these artifacts records of human striving, never quite giving us the works that transcend the daily efforts of survival? Is Keats suggesting that the urn is to be favored because its palpable stasis elevates it over works that cannot be directly apprehended? Is he then claiming that the urn is well-wrought for reasons different from those adduced by later critics who find that poems can be verbal icons? But do not manuscripts and printed books possess the same passivity as other inanimate objects, and may not their texts—however unfinished or incorrect their producers might consider them—offer the same satisfying remoteness that works of visual art do? If so, what is the relation between the reading of the various documentary texts of a poem and the experiencing of the work, or are they all separate works? Such questions, like the cold pastoral of the urn itself, tease us out of thought, for they reflect the insoluble enigmas of aesthetics. And they raise issues that textual critics must not fail to confront.

Literature poses particularly perplexing aesthetic questions, for the corporeal reality of literary works has been, and remains, a matter of dispute. If we are not concerned with literature as an inheritance from the past, however, many of these questions are of little significance (and, as the formalists of the twentieth century have shown, it is not absolutely necessary for us to be so concerned—except to the extent that we must know a language, and perhaps the history of its words, to read literary works). If, for example, we think not of “works” (a term that implies previously created entities) but only of sequences of words that have come our way, links in the endless chain of language, the question of authenticity is meaningless (a point I shall return to later). But for anyone approaching a verbal statement (in the way Keats approached the urn) as a communication from the past, its location in space and time is the most basic of considerations: one must be able to distinguish the work itself from attempts to reproduce it. A work, at each point in its life, is an ineluctable entity, which one can admire or deplore but cannot alter without becoming a collaborator with its creator (or creators); a reproduction is an approximation, forever open to question and always tempting one to remedial action. Equating a reproduction with the work it aims to copy is incoherent, for an interest in works is a historical interest, and copies are the products of later historical moments. A reproduction may of course be regarded as a work in its own right, but the historical focus has then shifted. Artifacts can be viewed both as works in themselves and as evidence for reconstructing other works, but this dual possibility in no way lessens the conceptual gap between the two historical approaches to artifacts.

For those interested in recovering verbal statements from the past, the question of whether words on a page are works or attempted reproductions of works is not, on one level, difficult to answer. Even the most unsophisticated readers have sometimes decided that a particular formation of letters or sequence of words—apparently meaningless in the language being used or inappropriate in context—is a “typographical error” or a “slip of the pen,” and in so doing they have perhaps faced more aesthetic issues than they knew. They were first of all showing that they wished to understand what was intended by someone else. Whether or not this goal was attainable, they had set it as their object, rather than the free play of intellect in giving the text whatever meaning suited their own experience and temperament. Then they were implicitly claiming that they had been able to locate the real work—the real statement, though not necessarily the real or only meaning—hovering somehow behind the physical text, which had served as an occasionally unreliable, but always indispensable, guide to it. They were also recognizing that what they had recovered (or attempted to recover) was not simply someone’s thoughts but the actual expression of those thoughts—that (whatever we take the relation between thought and language to be) verbal works or statements are thoughts employing particular arrangements of words as their ultimate medium. Most people seem to realize that slips can occur in all kinds of verbal communication; for “literature,” however we may choose to distinguish it from other verbal messages, shares some family traits with its homelier relatives. Whether one is listening to a friend, a radio announcer, or a poet, or reading a postcard, a newspaper, or a novel, one transforms the seemingly erroneous and nonsensical into the seemingly correct and meaningful—and thus implies that the verbal statement is not coequal with its oral or written presentation. Not only philosophers but all who use language have at times concluded, in one way or another, that verbal constructions are abstractions, not bound by the shortcomings of their spoken or inscribed texts.

Commonplace as this perception is, it has had remarkably little effect on the way people respond to texts. Readers’ suspicions of textual corruption come in all degrees of sophistication, for the detection of error depends both on knowledge and on insight; and what one reader recognizes immediately as a misprint, another lacks the background or the talent to notice. Textual critics—that small band of historically minded readers for whom every word and every punctuation mark are suspect—stand at the opposite end of a continuum from those casual readers who, however inattentive, spot typographical errors from time to time. That such a range of readers exists is not surprising; the striking fact is how many ostensibly serious readers, including literary critics and professional students of literature, take their places in this continuum near the end occupied by the textually unsophisticated. Everyone may be aware of the potential existence of typographical errors, and a great many people also understand that texts of the same work may vary as a result of alterations, both intentional and inadvertent, introduced by the author or by others involved in the production of those texts. Nevertheless, most readers proceed to the reading of individual texts as if such troublesome facts had never entered their minds, accepting the texts in front of them with naïve faith. Critical sophistication in the extracting of meaning from words on a page can—and frequently does—coexist with the most uncritical attitude toward the document itself and the trustworthiness of its text.

This split between the activities usually called “literary criticism” and those traditionally labeled “textual criticism” is symptomatic of a widespread failure to grasp the essential nature of the medium of literature. Those who believe that they can analyze a literary work without questioning the constitution of a particular written or oral text of it are behaving as if the work were directly accessible on paper or in sound waves. That a work of literature can be apprehended either by eye or by ear, however, should be a persuasive indication that its medium is neither visual nor auditory. The medium of literature is the words (whether already existent or newly created) of a language; and arrangements of words according to the syntax of some language (along with such aids to their interpretation as pauses or punctuation) can exist in the mind, whether or not they are reported by voice or in writing. Although the communication of literary works requires such vehicles as sound waves or the combination of ink and paper, the works do not depend on those vehicles for their existence: it has often been pointed out that a literary work is not lost through the destruction of every handwritten, printed, and recorded copy of it, so long as a text remains in someone’s memory. We may doubt the accuracy of memory, but so should we doubt the faithfulness of sound recordings and of inscribed or imprinted texts.

These observations can be accepted regardless of the position one takes concerning the origins of, or the relationships between, spoken and written language or the relation of what we call language to what we call the world—for they presuppose only that a language can use both oral and visual signals, not that one of the two is primary or that meaning is derived from them by one mechanism rather than another. Nor are these points altered by the existence of works, usually called literary, that combine words with visual effects—for those works then become works of visual art as well. Furthermore, recognizing that all written or spoken texts of a work may be approximations, more or less exact, does not necessarily presuppose a concern with authors’ intentions, nor does it imply that literary works are unrealizable entities (though we can never know when they are realized). It is simply the logical corollary to the recognition that literary works do not exist on paper or in sounds. Whatever concept of authorship one subscribes to, the act of reading or listening to receive a message from the past entails the effort to discover, through the text (or texts) one is presented with, the work that lies behind. Even if one denies the idea of individual authorship altogether, one still measures each text against the potentialities of the language in which it is expressed and makes adjustments accordingly, postulating in effect an impersonal intention inherent in the usage of a linguistic community. Because a literary work can be transmitted only indirectly, by processes that may alter it, no responsible description, interpretation, or evaluation of a literary work as a product of a past moment can avoid considering the relative reliability of the available texts and the nature of the connections among them.

Literature shares some aspects of these difficulties with other arts, but it is unique in the congregation of issues raised by the problem of its ontology. Aestheticians have proposed many ways to distinguish the arts one from another, but their endeavor has neglected the textual approach: why textual problems take different forms in different arts and how the significance of emendation shifts with the media. All works of art have texts, whether usually called by that name or not, for they all consist of arrangements of elements; and all can be the objects of emendation, for those elements (or their arrangements) can always be altered, producing different textures. When the creator of a work makes changes in it, they are usually spoken of as revisions. Emendations are what other people, sometimes with scholarly aims and sometimes without, do to a work in an effort to make it more nearly conform with some standard they have in mind. Any alteration, no matter who makes it (and regardless of its extent), produces what in some instances may be thought of as a new version of a work and in other instances may be considered a separate work. How, or whether, to distinguish versions from independent works is a puzzling, but subordinate, question; before one is prepared to address it, one must confront the meaning of the act of alteration. One must try to understand what it means to take a pre-existing entity and introduce changes (whether repairs or innovations) into it.

Although I am raising this question in the context of aesthetics, it clearly has a broader application: when one alters a utilitarian object not to enhance its appearance but to increase its usefulness, that action either causes the object more nearly to resemble the form intended by its designer or else moves it farther away from that form. One may not care which is the case, as long as the object performs its function better. Yet implicit in each act of alteration—once one has decided to alter an object rather than leave it alone—is an attitude toward a historical question: whether the intended form is worth recreating through repair (rectifying flaws of execution as well as deterioration from time and use) or whether seeming improvements in that form should be attempted. The issue, in other words, is whether historical reconstruction or current effectiveness of operation should take precedence, when the two do not seem to coincide. There are reasons for choosing either approach: one is not intrinsically right and the other wrong. Deciding which path to follow is therefore a prerequisite to all other decisions on any occasion when one contemplates the alteration of an object. In this respect altering a tool or an appliance is no diff...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• I The Nature of Texts
• II Reproducing The Texts of Documents
• III Reconstructing The Texts of Works
• Postscript
• Index