The Textual Condition

Jerome J. McGann

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691217758
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria norteamericana

Over the past decade literary critic and editor Jerome McGann has developed a theory of textuality based in writing and production rather than in reading and interpretation. These new essays extend his investigations of the instability of the physical text. McGann shows how every text enters the world under socio-historical conditions that set the stage for a ceaseless process of textual development and mutation. Arguing that textuality is a matter of inscription and articulation, he explores texts as material and social phenomena, as particular kinds of acts. McGann links his study to contextual and institutional studies of literary works as they are generated over time by authors, editors, typographers, book designers, marketing planners, and other publishing agents. This enables him to examine issues of textual stability and instability in the arenas of textual production and reproduction. Drawing on literary examples from the past two centuries--including works by Byron, Blake, Morris, Yeats, Joyce, and especially Pound--McGann applies his theory to key problems facing anyone who studies texts and textuality.

The Garden of Forking Paths

In the fifth chamber were unnamed forms, which

cast the metals into the expanse.

There they were received by men who occupied the

sixth chamber, and took the form of books and were

arranged in libraries.

—William Blake, The Marriage of

Heaven and Hell

Theory, Literary Pragmatics, and the Editorial Horizon

AT A PANEL discussion during the 1989 meetings of the Society for Textual Scholarship (STS) I was asked the following question: “If you were editing Byron’s poetry now, what would you do?”

That pragmatic (and deceptively simple) question raised complex problems in literary theory, critical method, and—finally—textual hermenuetics. It did so, however, in a particular context which now calls for some explanation. Before taking up those larger matters, therefore, I shall have to rehearse the context of the question.

When I began editing Byron in 1971 I had no special editorial expertise. I had not sought the job, was surprised when I was asked, and I accepted without knowing what would be involved in such a task. This state of original innocence is important to realize because it forced me to set aside two years for studying textual and editorial theory and method. That course of study, moreover, was undertaken from a distinctly Anglo-American perspective, which effectively meant that I kept seeing my subject within the horizon of what has come to be called the Greg-Bowers (or “eclectic”) theory of editing.

Armed by these studies, I began the project of the edition: searching out the documentary materials for the texts and preparing these materials for Byron’s early works (i.e., the poems written through 1815). Serious problems began to emerge very quickly, for I had decided that I would test my methodology by editing The Giaour first. This seemed a good thing to do because The Giaour involved such a large and complex body of documentary materials. As it turned out, work on The Giaour threw the entire project into a condition of crisis. It became clear to me that my framework of editorial theory—in effect, the theory of the eclectic edition—was not adequate to the problems presented by The Giaour. As I sought to solve these problems, I began a new series of investigations into textual and editorial theory—this was from 1976 to 1978. These inquiries concentrated on a historical investigation of textual studies in general, with a particular concentration on classical, biblical, and medieval textual studies from the late eighteeenth century to the present. My object was to try to understand the larger context in which the eclectic theory of editing had developed.

As a consequence, I finally began to understand what I was doing in my edition—what was possible to do, what was not possible, and why these possibilities and impossibilities existed. As the edition went forward, I no longer struggled against the limitations imposed by the Oxford English Texts series format, and I accepted that, for better and for worse, I had (undeliberately) undertaken to do a certain kind of edition, a critical edition squarely in the Greg-Bowers line of eclectic editing. I also accepted the fact, though far less easily, that in 1977 I was too far gone in the edition to take full advantage of computerized word processing as an editing tool. Once again my ignorance had closed down certain possibilities; and when I later (1984) learned about hypertexts and their powers, I had to swallow further regrets arising from my backward history.

What does it mean to say that an edition of Byron begun in 1987 would look very different from the one I began in 1971? Obviously it is to say that during those seventeen years I acquired a certain critical and theoretical understanding of texts and textual studies. But it is also to say that the practical and material demands of editing cut back across my previous views about theory and critical reflection in general.

Between 1971 and 1987 one overriding fact grew upon me as I worked to produce the edition of Byron: that texts are produced and reproduced under specific social and institutional conditions, and hence that every text, including those that may appear to be purely private, is a social text. This view entails a corollary understanding, that a “text” is not a “material thing” but a material event or set of events, a point in time (or a moment in space) where certain communicative interchanges are being practiced. This view of the matter—this theoria or way of seeing—holds true as much for the texts we inherit and study as it does for the texts we will execute ourselves.

When texts are interpreted, the readings frequently (“characteristically” is the word we should use for the period between 1940 and 1980) avoid reflecting on the material conditions of the works being “read” and the readings being executed. Those material and institutional conditions, however, are impossible to set aside if one is editing a text; and if one intends to execute a scholarly edition of a work, the social conditions of textual production become manifest and even imperative. Consequently, one comes to see that texts always stand within an editorial horizon (the horizon of their production and reproduction).

That editorial horizon entails serious consequences for the practice of literary theory as such—a practice (or set of practices) which came to dominate literary studies through the 1970s. Briefly, the editorial horizon forces one to reimagine the theory of texts—and, ultimately, the theory of literature—as a specific set of social operations. To the extent that recent theoretical work in literary studies has left its social dimensions unexplicated, a reasonable “resistance to theory” will be raised.¹

But as the editorial horizon forces one to confront literary studies as a specific set of social and institutional practices, the reemergence of a sociohistorically oriented “literary pragmatics” (as it has come to be called) turns back upon editorial and bibliographical studies.² In twentieth-century Anglo-American studies (culminating in the scholarship of Fredson Bowers), work in these areas had become as technical, specialized, and ahistorical as the formal and thematic hermeneutics that cut a parallel course in interpretive studies.

The editorial horizon—in the context of the 1970s and 1980s³—thus came to turn back on itself and on textual studies in general by its passage through a critical encounter with literary theory. The consequence was paradoxical in the extreme, for modern textual studies—which was founded two centuries ago in the deepest kind of sociohistorical self-consciousness—now appeared to itself as a scene of narrow empiricist and even positivist practices, with habits of reflexiveness maintained merely at the technical level, as specialized goals. The sudden and even catastrophic revolution in Shakespearean textual studies in the 1970s and 1980s was both the sign and the consequence of what had been happening (and not happening) in textual studies for the previous sixty years.⁴

In this context, textual studies today have begun to move in many new directions. The editorial horizon can now be seen not merely as the locus of certain established technical procedures, but as the very emblem of what is meant by the praxis of literature and the imperative to praxis. If, therefore, one tries to acquire a comprehensive understanding of literature and textual studies—a theory of texts—one is forced in the direction of literary pragmatics. “Theory of texts” comprehends, comprises a set of practices that will be elaborated in specific social and institutional settings.

For the remainder of this discussion I want to concentrate on the idea that the theory of texts is ultimately a set of institutional (textual) practices. To elaborate the idea I will offer three case histories. Two of these represent operations I have been actively involved with, and the third—which I shall consider first—is a hypothetical case.

II

The hypothetical case involves a question very like the one I began with: If one were to edit Dante Gabriel Rossetti today, what would one do?

In a moment I will plunge into a body of detailed and even technical matters, but before doing so I must call attention to the fact that the initiating question conceals a number of other important problems and questions. For example, why ask this question of D. G. Rossetti at all, a poet who is seen by the academy as a marginal figure? One might respond by saying that Rossetti’s works have not been edited since his brother William Michael undertook that task immediately after Rossetti’s death over one hundred years ago.⁵ This would be a perfectly good response, especially—as we shall see—in light of what we now know about the state of Rossetti’s texts.

But of course the same response could be given for William Morris’s poetry, or Swinburne’s, or any number of other writers. Why choose Rossetti in particular—or, perhaps even more to the point, why did I choose Rossetti?

That form of the question is pertinent because it forces into view the ethical and cultural interests that are at stake in a proposal to edit Rossetti. The fact that Rossetti’s work has been neglected is obviously relevant, but more relevant would be an explanation of Rossetti’s immediate cultural importance. Why do (I think) we need Rossetti now?⁶

Furthermore, the question asks “what would one do,” as if the editorial procedure were open to various options. This is in fact the case. Minimally one might ask whether a critical edition is being proposed, and whether the edition is being imagined as a complete edition or a selection—and why. The pursuit of these questions underlying the initial question would eventually force detailed explanations of such matters. In my particular case, it would (or should) reveal that an edition of D. G. Rossetti looms in my mind as important for two related reasons. The first I shall not deal with here: that Rossetti’s work (and the world which it both reflects and interrogates) has much to say to people in (or in the orbit of) an imperial culture like that of late twentieth-century America. Second, Rossetti’s works present an editor with a great opportunity: to make an edition of his writings a vehicle for displaying a significant range of issues and problems in textual criticism.

An edition of Rossetti, in short, can be imagined and carried out as a theoretical act of special importance at this critical moment in the history of textual studies. To reflect upon the possibility of such an edition is to see that making an edition—this edition in particular—is not a preinterpretive operation. By the same token, reading Rossetti (or any other author) in a particular editorial format means that one has already been set within a definite hermeneutical horizon.

In taking up the problem of editing Rossetti I will concentrate on his most important work, The House of Life (HL). But I must first consider briefly some of the more general problems to which I have been alluding.

Should the edition be a Complete Works, poetry and prose alike; or should it be Complete Poetical Works, perhaps with a selection of the prose? Should either of these include the translations, which represent such an extensive body of material? These are important questions, obviously, for it would make quite a difference if, for example, a press were to issue today a Complete Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti rather than some sort of selection. Were I free to make a decision about such a matter, I would without question say that a Complete Works was needed—not merely for technical and textual reasons (e.g., the standard available editions are inadequate textually) but for larger cultural reasons as well.

But the fact is that I would not be able to make such a decision on my own—any publisher would demand a voice in the matter. This brings up another important issue: who would publish such an edition? The options here are seriously limited, for various reasons. Furthermore, given the special problems of Rossetti’s texts and my theoretical goals, the choice of Oxford University Press (which would otherwise be a natural one)⁷ might in the end prove too problematic.

But let us pass beyond that initial set of problems and suppose them solved in one way or another; let us suppose as well that the next practical problem, how to gather the necessary materials, has also been solved.⁸ We then face the question of how to present the material that is to be included, and in particular how to present the work known as The House of Life. To answer that question we have to confront a prior question: What is The House of Life?⁹

It seems an easy enough question, at least if we judge by the texts that have come down to us as the standard ones used either by scholars in their specialized work, or by teachers in the classroom. But the question is no more transparent than is that master question of which it is merely a special case: “What is a text?”¹⁰

According to the standard classroom texts of Rossetti (e.g., Baum’s, Lang’s, and the texts presented in anthologies of Victorian poetry, and so forth),¹¹ HL is a sonnet sequence of 103 units—a basic group of 101 sonnets, so numbered; an introductory sonnet called “The Sonnet”; and the notorious sonnet known as 6a (originally titled “Nuptial Sleep”) that was published in the 1870 version of the work by Rossetti but was subsequently withdrawn by Rossetti when he was preparing the 1881 edition of his Poems, where he published a 102-sonnet version of HL. Rossetti died in 1886 without reprinting the sonnet.

In that year his brother William Michael published his two-volume edition of his brother’s Works, but sonnet 6a was not part of the HL sequence. This edition went through several reprintings, but William Michael Rossetti kept 6a out of the work until 1904, when he reinserted it. In 1911 he augmented his edition of his brother’s works and explained why he kept the sonnet back in his 1886 edition, and why he finally put it back in 1904:

My own comment on this sonnet, in the original preface to the “Collected Works” from which I omitted it, ran as follows: “‘Nuptial Sleep’ appeared in the volume of ‘Poems’ 1870 but was objected to by Mr. Buchanan, and I suppose by some other censors, as being indelicate; and my brother excluded it from ‘The House of Life’ in his third volume [i.e., 1881]. I consider that there is nothing in the sonnet which need imperatively banish it from his Collected Works. But his own decision commands mine: and besides it could not now be reintroduced into ‘The House of Life,’ which he moulded into a complete whole without it, and would be misplaced if isolated by itself—a point as to which his opinion is very plainly set forth in his prose paper, ‘The Stealthy School of Criticism.’ ” As I now hold that “Nuptial Sleep” ought to be “banished” no longer, I have inserted the item in its original sequence; I number it 6a, leaving the numeration otherwise unaltered. (653)

Although William Michael raises two strong arguments against printing sonnet 6a, when he tells us that he has changed his mind about the sonnet, he does not ad...