Voice, Text, Hypertext

Emerging Practices in Textual Studies

Raimonda Modiano, Leroy F. Searle, Peter L. Shillingsburg, Raimonda Modiano, Leroy F. Searle, Peter L. Shillingsburg

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780295806938
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Voice, Text, Hypertext illustrates brilliantly why interest in textual studies has grown so dramatically in recent years. For the distinguished authors of these essays, a "text" is more than a document or material object. It is a cultural event, a matrix of decisions, an intricate cultural practice that may focus on religious traditions, modern "underground" literary movements, poetic invention, or the irreducible complexity of cultural politics. Drawing from classical Roman and Indian to modern European traditions, the volume makes clear that to study a text is to study a culture. It also demonstrates the essential importance of heightened textual awareness for contemporary cultural studies and critical theory—and, indeed, for any discipline that studies human culture.

PART I

Textual Space

Emerging Questions

Text and Theory in Contemporary Criticism

LEROY F. SEARLE

As the essays in this volume make clear, the enterprise of textual scholarship and editing has certainly not been immune to the drama of contemporary theory in literature and the arts. For an earlier generation, the vocation of editorial scholarship often seemed a haven (if not the very citadel) of intellectual probity, in which one could practice a science—mild and respectful, if sometimes dull—without being drawn into the relatively unregulated life of literary criticism and theory, where, as I. A. Richards remarked after a lifetime of experience with it, “an indecent disregard of fact is still current form.”¹ It has become increasingly clear, however, that almost every issue that has made theory a matter of controversy, crisis, and polemical debate hinges on the representational status of texts. While texts are presumably instruments of communication, they are also institutional facts and cultural interventions that may affect one’s sense of personal, religious, cultural, ethnic, or national identity, just as they shape historical cultures in manifold ways. To put a complex point simply, the study of texts cannot be cordoned off from the study of culture.

The essays collected here confirm this complexity, not in the mode of ideological passion or advocacy, but as matters of inescapable though problematic fact, whether the case in question is ancient or modern, oral or printed or digital. Indeed, part of the importance of these essays collectively lies in their probity, even when they are sharpened or playful, as investigations of textual complexities that reach far beyond the simple schema of a text as an author’s privileged communication with the public. More than that, they are the fruit of some two decades of intense and often controversial work that has increased our collective textual awareness, starting not from a primarily speculative posture but from a profoundly critical commitment to the historicity and the concrete materiality of texts.

In this sense, our understanding of the dimensions of textuality has expanded, not merely as criticism and theory have contemplated the death or decline of the intending author into an abstract “authorial function,”² or by way of the indifferent habit of treating anything and everything pertaining to culture as a “text” to be read, “theorized,” and incorporated into the abstract rhetoric of a general cultural critique. For literary theorists, the better reason to attend carefully to the work of contemporary textual scholars is that they have neither simply followed the topoi and fashionable agendas of current theory nor treated textual complexity as just another source of paradox that follows the inexorable flow of power across the social field. The striking transformation of editorial traditions that appears to be in progress has arisen precisely from within those traditions, coming to conclusions that are remarkably similar to what one finds in contemporary literary theory, but differently derived. In this volume, accordingly, there is one strain of reflection that seeks to narrow if not collapse the difference between literary theory and textual scholarship, but another which draws more directly on those elements of editorial tradition that acknowledge texts as pivotal and highly specific historical transactions that we cannot afford to treat casually because they enable, just as they define and limit, the scope of collective social and cultural life.

What Wlad Godzich has treated elsewhere as the “culture of literacy” in its post-Hegelian, poststructuralist moment of crisis³ is explored in these essays as an intricate mosaic of forces and influences, decisions and prohibitions, where any question pertaining to the authenticity of a text is transformed with sometimes startling swiftness into a far less tidy question of cultural authenticity. The essays here make vivid the reasons not to limit the idea of “literacy” to print, or of “text” to writing, as they show in case after case that what distinguishes a text from a casual utterance is not its formal medium so much as the weaving together of its elements, with careful and meticulous attention to how something is articulated, preserved, and transmitted. Whether we come at the question as writers or as readers, speakers, or listeners, we recognize texts to be intentional: they are for something (even if we are not sure what it is), just as they elicit our attention to the precise terms of their presentation. In the slogan of the architect Louis Sullivan (who borrowed it from Horatio Greenough), “Form follows function.”⁴ In cases where the intention of a text is overt, as in a manual for the repair of small engines or a textbook on medical physiology, the text itself ordinarily attracts little attention, because it appears to us subsumed in the subject it treats. But texts that seem to call attention to themselves foreground a common but intricate process, one that constitutes a subject in the very act of speaking or writing about it—and, in so doing, enormously complicates the problem of intentionality. This kind of textual self-reflexivity, whether in a philosophical essay, a religious recitation, a ritual pronouncement, or a literary work, demands that we attend to what follows from saying something in a particular way; and, more than that, it means that our projection of a future or possible pathway to what follows must depend not merely on our grasping the content, the message, but also on our apprehending that the method and the manner of the saying are evidence of an active power that the text invokes and incites.

Such problematic texts, however we may classify them, are the main subjects of the essays here, but a prevailing concern is to disclose a primary process of reasoning and thinking that textuality itself enables.⁵ The examples, moreover, are various and frequently strange, from lead tablets, nailed down and not even meant to be read, to butterflylike pieces of an envelope, bearing poetic lines pinned to pages of a manuscript (see the essays in this volume by Phyllis Culham and Marta Werner). In this respect, the central theoretical issue with texts is not any presumed ontological priority of speech over writing, nor is it a contrary legislative authority of the book over the voice or even the indeterminacy of signification and meaning. It is instead a common logic of annunciation that defines and renders intelligible a common and collective cultural space. Texts capture our attention as sites that enable those transactions, both public and private, which are not merely linguistic expressions but give shape and body to culture itself.

This helps to explain why texts matter enough for us to fight over them, just as it goes some distance in clarifying why texts that seem to call attention to themselves, not as mere vehicles for information but as carefully and meticulously made things, seem fraught with intention and with the promise of meaning, all the more so as they may puzzle us. “Read me!” says the text; but when we do so, we have the uncanny sensation that the text is reading us. Textuality, in other words, is frequently a process of constitution and discovery, a specific mode of thinking that functions as one of the primary instruments of cultural legitimation. Texts allow us to see ourselves in thought, and to actively practice it, not in some splendid isolation but in and through others’ words. In a precisely complementary way, meticulous textual attention allows us to understand cultures and practices that would otherwise be literally unimaginable to us.

It is striking in these essays, particularly to someone whose main arena of professional interest is literary criticism and theory, that though the field of textual studies has been equally seared by controversy, the familiar literary rhetoric of crisis is largely absent here, and the currently ubiquitous word aporia—Aristotle’s term for getting stuck—doesn’t appear at all. On the contrary, what we see is a trajectory of argument and inference that is theoretically vital precisely because it does not return upon its own puzzlements but keeps steadily in view the oddities and peculiarities of revealing textual examples, solidly anchored in specific documents and practices that provide a ground for evidence, no matter how weird or baffling the evidence itself may prove.

Considering the theoretical dimension of textual studies in this way is hardly the story of textual editors coming down out of the ivory tower and into the mosh pit of theory (showing, as David Greetham puts it in his essay, that they “can be as post-anything as the best of them”). It is, rather, that the editor’s traditional task of establishing a text (as common legend avers Aristotle did with Homer so he could teach his most famous pupil, Alexander the Great) shows the editor first of all that there is nothing simple in the job, nothing obvious or cut-and-dried even in the reasons for doing it. Nevertheless, the editorial product, from Aristotle’s time to the present day, is liable to be received by pupils and the public (and, of course, literary critics) as if the text in hand is just the way it ought to be—and against which liability we may encounter editorial and authorial antics, just to remind us that the texts do not materialize out of thin air, even if the idea of making them may seem to.

In what could provide an apt emblem for this problem, William Blake’s “Introduction” to Songs of Innocence gives us a piper, caught up in his “songs of glee,” descending quickly from his tune to an articulate song, to the written text, which in the act of being inscribed with his “rural pen” did not simply record his song but rather “stain’d the water clear.” Nothing in textual studies belongs to the state of Edenic innocence, and textuality itself may be the very image of the Fall. But for Blake, as for contemporary textualists, it is no simple image of loss but of an ambivalent transformation. As the piper-turned-writer puts it, though his vision has vanished, he writes his songs “that every child may joy to hear.”⁶

Now that contemporary critical theory is old enough to have a popular folk history, conveyed through textbooks, anthologies, and other simplified narratives of who caused what, I would suggest that the role of editorial scholarship may prove even more revealing because even in its fiercest controversies it has generally shied away from sudden or daring leaps of political rhetoric or the sweeping conceptual claims that are such a prominent feature of critical theory. Editors who come to their vocation from a longer explicit history are apt to understand in a quite distinctive mode that their work with texts plays a foundational but always problematic role in the development of intellectual institutions (a fact that, as a “theoretical” discovery, seems always to come as a shock) because they are immersed in the details of how it happens, not in the scandal that the glorious free-play of verbal intelligence should ever be confined in a definite form.

Ironically, the theoretical turn in textual studies since the 1980s is a direct outgrowth of success for the modern (that is, post-Renaissance) editorial project that first domesticated and then institutionalized the very idea of “standard” editions of major authors.⁷ From the now hotly contested idea of a literary “canon” to the always hotly contested notion of a scriptural or religious “canon,” the idea of establishing “standard” texts is inextricably bound up with establishing narratives of national, ethnic, or religious origin, negotiating privileges or rights that belong to the citizen, even to the point of defining what it means to be a person who belongs to some particular community, just as it is shaped by the particular values and commitments of the editors who do the work.

The turn to theory in criticism, by contrast, has been much more starkly associated with crisis, with seemingly impassable paradoxes, in part because textual editors since the early Renaissance have done their jobs so diligently. The Stephanus edition of Plato made it possible, for example, to actually study Plato instead of merely worshiping him, so as to see how slippery is his conception of forms, just as editions of Shakespeare or medieval romances both create and complicate the idea of (national) literary history. On a shorter scale, we could date the rise of contemporary theoretical criticism from the dramatic collapse of formalism and structuralism after 1965,⁸ an event leading directly to radical forms of skepticism (by way of deconstruction) and to a rapidly escalating sense that perhaps the entire edifice of Western culture was erected on the sand of shifting signifiers, economic opportunism, and gross imperial ambitions. This pervasive mood of suspicion and crisis was accelerated, however, by democratic ambitions shaped by the same cultural history, which, since the end of World War II, have transformed higher education from a resource for the privileged few to a public project if not an entitlement for the many. Yet the very idea of public education as it emerged from Renaissance humanism was inescapably grounded in textuality, in the profound secular commitment to recover the authors (and thereby the authority) of the ancient world at a time of enormous turbulence and change. The culture of literacy, in this framework, takes shape as a culture of books, a culture of reading and writing, which is and always has been inflect...