Like German philology, Anglo-American textual criticism developed first as a practice, more so, it seems to me, than in France or Italy where theory and practice have evolved hand in hand. Just as at the centre of the history of German philology we find the enigmatic and fragmentary works of Friedrich Hölderlin and Franz Kafka, Anglo-American bibliography focuses on textual problems posed by important authors: the Elisabethans in Britain, the nineteenth-century American writers in the United States, Shakespeare, the English romantics and most recently James Joyce on both sides of the Atlantic.
The editing of Shakespeare's plays was, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century the domain of British gentleman-scholars, mostly writers or men of the church. Modern methods were inaugurated by a number of key figures on the basis of the special problems posed by the edition of Shakespeare's texts. Like the classical, biblical and Old German texts for which Karl Lachmann's stemmatology had proved successful, Shakespeare's works lacked authorized documents. But unlike classical and biblical texts which were disseminated and which survived in manuscript form, the history of Shakespeare's texts is one of printed documents. Eighteenth or nineteenth century editors had little concern for historical context. Stanley Wells writes of them:
The work of these early editors was carried out in relative ignorance of the theatrical and printing conditions that prevailed in Shakespeare's day; ... the emendations they made were governed by literary, grammatical and linguistic standards of their time and by the stylistic and theatrical tastes of individual editors [and] ... while the 'good' and "bad" quartos received a great deal of attention and use, scholarly opinion had not really crystallized into any settled view of their varying claims to authority (Stanley Wells, "Shakespeare: Select Bibliographical Guides," quoted in Williams and Abbott, 2).It is through the thorough study of the book as a physical and historical object that the New Bibliographers attempted to establish more reliable editions of the texts of the plays by Shakespeare and other dramatists of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. In order to do that, these scholars had to acquire, next to a detailed knowledge of the theatre practice in Shakespeare's day, an even more thorough understanding of the way books were set, printed, proofed, bound and sold.
Analytical bibliography begins with the physical examination of a book in order to establish how exactly it was first produced and then disseminated, what the relationship is between different editions or impressions, how and when they reached the reading public. The amount of historical work that has been done on English printing presses has been so successful and extensive (and we should not forget the equally important fact of the continuity of archives in the relative absence of violent conflicts on British soil), that it is almost possible to determine exactly where, when and sometimes even by which typesetter, a book was produced.
Central in this type of study is the book as a physical object and to an analytical bibliographer it does not make any difference whether the book he studies happens to be Shakespeare's First Folio or a bible or a theological treatise or an almanac. The importance of this type of work, which was often ridiculed and derided by the literary critics, cannot be underestimated and without it, wider-ranging historical studies of the importance of books and of the printing press would have been impossible.
The central position of Shakespeare's oeuvre in the editorial work of the first generation of New Bibliographers is crucial to an understanding of their work. The theoretical frame established by R. B. McKerrow, W. W. Greg, F. P. Wilson and A. W. Pollard was to a large extent based on the practical problems editors of Shakespeare's plays are confronted with. At the centre of the editorial theory of New Bibliography is the concept of corruption, the fact that no single version of a text is not corrupt and this is quite clearly the case of the text of Shakespeare's plays. In this respect they share an important characteristic of the biblical or classical Greek and Latin texts Lachmannian scholars had been working on: the absence of authorial documents. It was only logical that the New Bibliographers would find Lachmann's methodology convenient: it seemed that in both cases scholars had to rely on different and divergent versions of a single but lost original. The purpose of the analysis of the differences among these versions (the Quarto or Folio texts of Shakespeare's plays, for example) was to establish the exact genealogical relationship among the different texts (the Lachmannian stemma), in order to eradicate, in a second movement, those errors and mistakes that were due to a faulty transmission, to errors by scribes, copy-editors, typesetters, printers. The purpose of the whole process is a text that has been tidied up, that has been saved from all alien (or non-authorial) interventions, a text that represents as closely as possible the author's lost and irretrievable "original" work.
In order to create a more systematic strategy for dealing with problems of transmissional corruption, the British editor Ronald McKerrow used his knowledge of printing processes to establish the last edition to contain authorial corrections in his edition of the works of Thomas Nashe. This version of the text McKerrow called "copy-text" and he used it as the basis of an edition in which he only corrected clear printing errors. McKerrow was a pioneer of the use of material or analytical bibliography. In the introduction to his "Notes on Bibliographical Evidence for Literary Students and Editors," he deplored "the curious ignorance of the most elementary facts of the mechanical side of book-production during the Tudor and Jacobean period" among the best of literary scholars (McKerrow 1911-13, 217). In 1927 McKerrow published An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students in which he presented his student audience with a clear portrayal of Elisabethan printing practices. He demonstrated how a detailed knowledge of these processes enabled the trained scholar to detect their traces in the finished product, the physical object of the book. Fourteen years after his "Notes on Bibliographical Evidence," McKerrow claimed that in 1927 he no longer needed to convince literary scholars of the Shakespearean period of the relevance of material bibliography:
We are all now for 'bibliographical' methods, keenly on the watch for every least indication of disturbance in the accurate transmission of a text, sorting out by many subtle and ingenious methods the first, second, or third stage of the composition, the original draft, the first completed form, the revision for this, that, and the other purpose, and so on (McKerrow 1972, 2).It seems clear that a new paradigm had established itself by the mid-twenties.
The acceptance and celebration of the new paradigm is even clearer in the works of the next generation of bibliographers of whom W. W. Greg is undoubtedly the most important and most influential. In the year McKerrow published his Introduction to Bibliography, the same publisher brought out a slim study. Greg's The Calculus of Variants offers a set of formal rules to establish the relationship between variants of a text. What is interesting in the introduction to this book is not so much the reference to the relatively new science of formal logic (Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica and "the modern logic of Peano and Wittgenstein") as the self-conscious motto from Whitehead that Greg gave the book:
It is not going too far to say that the announcement that physicists would have in future to study the theory of tensors created a veritable panic among them when the verification of Einstein's predictions was first announced.--A. N. Whitehead (Greg 1927, iv).The same attitude of a representative of a self-conscious new science can be detected in a programmatic essay Greg published in The Library. For Greg, the essence of bibliography is the following: "Books are the material means by which literature is transmitted; therefore bibliography, the study of books, is essentially the science of the transmission of literary documents" (Greg 1932, 115). A major characteristic of Greg's new bibliography is that this endeavour is "quite independent, theoretically, of the meaning of the text.... I am much mistaken if more and greater critical mistakes have not arisen from reliance on the supposed meaning of the text than from all other sources of error put together" (123-124).
In the Lent Term of 1939, W. W. Greg gave the Clark Lectures at Trinity College in Cambridge. The text of these lectures was published in 1942 by the Clarendon Press as The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare and this delay gave Greg the opportunity to address a suggestion of Ronald B. McKerrow in the latter's Prolegomena for the Oxford Shakespeare which had been published just after Greg gave his lectures. Greg accordingly opens his book with his own "Prolegomena-On Editing Shakespeare" in which he offers a slightly different conception of what a Shakespeare editor should do than what had been suggested by McKerrow. The difference of opinion between kindred spirits deals with McKerrow's concept of "copy-text." In his Prolegomena, McKerrow had suggested a reintroduction of the literary judgement Greg wanted to keep out:
Obviously, if a work has been transmitted to us in several [substantive] editions ... it will, in the absence of any external evidence as to the relationship of the texts, be the duty of an editor to select for the basis of a new edition that text which in his judgement is most representative of the author and most nearly in accord with what, in view of his other works, we should have expected from him at the date to which the work in question is assigned (McKerrow, quoted in Greg 1951, xxii, fn. 1).Greg seems so surprised with what he perceives as McKerrow's return to the "aesthetic" practices of an older generation of editors, that he chooses to disregard McKerrow's words about the "absence of any external evidence as to the relationship of texts" and to paraphrase McKerrow's position as follows:
It is suggested (by McKerrow) that an editor should choose on literary grounds the text that on the whole best represents what he supposes the author likely to have written at the date to which he assigns the work in question, and that he should then abide faithfully by the chosen text (xxii).Greg, needless to say, disapproves of the use of literary judgement in the choice of copy-texts and he argues that an editor's choice of a copy-text "should so far as possible be determined, and in fact normally is determined, by the theory he has formed of the character and relationship of the manuscripts (or other authorities) used in the preparation of the texts" (xxii). In other words, Greg reaffirms the stemmatological model that editors, including McKerrow, had derived from Lachmann.
Why the choice of a copy-text is important becomes evident in the fifth of the set of rules proposed by Greg: "Having selected his copy-text an editor should reprint this exactly save for demonstrable errors, subject to necessary reservations in cases where there are alternative authorities no one of which can be assumed to be consistently more trustworthy than another" (xxvi). Greg argues against McKerrow's "conservative" view which would stick to the readings in the copy text, "except in cases of 'manifest and indubitable' errors (i.e. errors that are obvious in the text itself without reference to any other)" (xxvi-xxvii). In opposition to this view, "eclectic" editors (Greg is aware of the problems this term may create, but "critical" does not seem to be an alternative [xxviii]) claim that "it is preferable, where authority is divided, to weigh the claims of each variant individually" (xxvii).
In the essay "The Rationale of the Copy-Text," Greg's most important contribution to the theory of textual editing and arguably the most central statement in the Anglo-American tradition, he again used Ronald B. McKerrow as his sparring partner. In the first paragraph, Greg writes that McKerrow not only invented the term "copy-text" but later gave it "a somewhat different and more restricted meaning" (Greg 1970, 17). The idea of one manuscript "possessing over-riding authority" only arose after the introduction of the genealogical classification of manuscripts, but there are different views of this problem and Greg even believes that "the classical theory of the 'best' or 'most authoritative' manuscript, whether it be held in a reasonable or in an obviously fallacious form, has really nothing to do with the English theory of 'copy-text' at all" (19). Greg introduces a crucial distinction
between the significant, or as I shall call them 'substantive,' readings of the text, those namely that affect the author's meaning or the essence of his expression, and others, such in general as spelling, punctuation, word-division, and the like, affecting mainly its formal presentation, which may be regarded as the accidents, or as I shall call them 'accidentals,' of the text (19-20).Greg needs the distinction to revise the concept of copy-text by moving it even further from the temptations of an eclectic "best text" approach to which, Greg believes, even McKerrow had succumbed. To this "tyranny of the copy-text," Greg posits an alternative.
The true theory is, I contend, that the copy-text should govern (generally) in the matter of accidentals, but that the choice between substantive readings belongs to the general theory of textual criticism and lies altogether beyond the narrow principle of the copy-text (24).In a way, Greg is arguing against his own earlier call for objective standards and rigorous and formal rules. Even in the matter of accidentals the copy-text is not sacrosanct: scribal or typographical errors and errata must still be corrected, "misleading or eccentric spellings" must be emended when the editor is certain that they "emanate from the scribe or compositor and not from the author" and "[i]f the punctuation is persistently erroneous or defective an editor may prefer to discard it altogether to make way for one of his own" (27). It should be clear that Greg is nothing if not liberal in his editorial decisions.
"The Rationale of the Copy-Text" ends with very modest words: Greg writes that he simply wanted "to sort out my own ideas: others must judge for themselves. If they disagree, it is up to them to maintain some different point of view. My desire is rather to provoke discussion than to lay down the law" (33). In reality it might be argued that in Anglo-American bibliography, Greg's notion of the copy-text did much more than provoke discussion (although it did that too) and came very close to becoming law.
Greg's article was first published in Studies in Bibliography, a journal that had begun publication two years earlier and that marked a geographical shift of the New Bibliography from Britain to the United States. Before 1950 bibliographers had published in The Library, the periodical of the Bibliographical Society of London. From the early fifties Studies in Bibliography, published at the University of Virginia, took over that role. The New Bibliography had moved across the Atlantic and the central figure in that migration was Fredson Bowers, the founding editor of Studies in Bibliography.
It is hardly an exaggeration to claim that Bowers single-handedly invented the American wing of New Bibliography and he did so in a double capacity as theoretician and practitioner. He edited works by Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, Beaumont and Fletcher, John Dryden, Walt Whitman, William James and Vladimir Nabokov. He has written (and the Studies in Bibliography has published) scores of articles on technical editorial problems and his theoretical papers bristle with an array of examples from the most diverse authors and works.
Bowers did not publish Greg's "Rationale of the Copy-Text" by accident: his own pivotal work, Principles of Bibliographical Description (1949) was dedicated to Greg and he would remain a vociferous and, as the editor for more than four decades of Studies in Bibliography, a most influential advocate of Greg's approach. In fact, he shares in many ways the positivist and scientist sentiments that we have observed in the early career of Greg but that he qualified, if not abandoned, in his later writings. This positivism was not always well received, even by Bowers's peers: four years after the publication of the Principles, Geoffrey Keynes used his presidential address to The Bibliographical Society to complain to the membership of "the shadow which seems in recent years to have descended over our amiable bibliographical discipline ... we have been chastised with scorpions because we are not all Gregs" (quoted in Tanselle 1985, 180). And in 1963 Bowers was satirized in The Pooh Perplex as Smedley Force, a pedantic bibliographer.
The reasons for this animosity become clear when we look at the text of a number of lectures Bowers gave in 1958 at Cambridge University and in the headquarters of British New Bibliography, the Bibliographical Society in London. In Textual and Literary Criticism, Bowers is a forceful advocate of textual criticism against literary criticism and as Gary Taylor has pointed out in an article on the rhetoric of textual criticism, the order of the words in the title of the book is programmatic (Taylor, 48). From the very first words of his first lecture, Bowers presents bibliography as a discipline with shared goals and a common methodology, whereas literary criticism, "as we might expect" interpolates Bowers, is hopelessly divided. Although no critical school escapes Bowers's ire and although he recommends that "[e]very practising critic, for the humility of his soul, ought to study the transmission of some appropriate text" (Bowers 1959, 4), he is especially scathing about the anti-historical New Critics.
Central in Bowers's concept of bibliography is Greg's rationale of the copy-text, which became the basis not only for Bowers' thinking about editing and for his own editorial work but also, and more importantly, for the practice at the Centre for Editions of American Authors, which was established by the Modern Language Association in 1963 to coordinate editorial work in the United States. Greg's rationale was adopted in the guidelines that the CEAA issued and his recommendations had successfully been transferred from the Elisabethan to all successive periods. Henceforth the CEAA would signal its approval of new editions by a special seal and this approval was explicitly based on the acceptance of Greg's rationale. It is clear that a significant shift had occurred between the tentative suggestions of Greg and the C.E.A.A.'s imprimatur.
In many ways, the rhetoric of Bowers's public pronouncements harkens back to the scientism of the early Greg. This is most evident in "Some Principles for Scholarly Editions of Nineteenth Century American Authors." G. Thomas Tanselle has called this essay "one of the most influential" (Tanselle 1985, 188) Bowers has ever written and it almost amounts to a founding document of the C.E.A.A. Central again are the author's intentions: a genuine scholarly edition of a nineteenth century work cannot use modernized spelling because then it would disregard the intentions of the author. All nineteenth century texts of some length are in need of correction and as soon as one change is made, one had better be consistent and go the whole way. The very first step of a critical edition is "the determination of the exact forms of the early documents in which the text is preserved and of the facts about their relationship to one another" (Bowers 1969, 195). The second step is the choice of copy-text and in an authoritative edition that is necessarily the "manuscript, or a later edition that contains corrections or revisions that proceeded from the author." Needless to say that in this question, "the theory of copy-text proposed by Sir Walter Greg rules supreme": only those changes to the manuscript that can be directly attributed to the author (and not to editors, typesetters, etc) will be taken into account. In addition to the critical text, an edition should contain first a list of the internal variants in the first and in any other authoritative editions and secondly a complete list of all editorial changes in the selected copy-text. Thirdly, textual notes should discuss every arguable emendation (or failure to emend). The Historical Collation, finally, should "contain all the substantive alterations from the established edited text found in a group of significant later editions" (200).
When the policies and products of the C.E.A.A. became the centre of a controversy in 1968, it was not because of its theory of editing, but because of its practice. In two very negative essays in the New York Review of Books, the writer Edmund Wilson attacked the Centre for spending far too much energy, time and money (the C.E.A.A. had begun to receive funds from the National Endowment of the Humanities in 1966). Wilson heaps tons of scorn and ridicule on the MLA and on the Centre: the books they produce are pedantic, unreadable and unwieldy and should be replaced by a series of simple editions without apparatus, like the French Pléiade (in the course of his diatribe Wilson also proposed to get rid of the Ph.D. programme in literature because it is a "German atrocity" [Wilson, 173]).
The MLA considered Wilson's attack serious enough to defend itself by publishing a number of the letters written by editors of the CEAA-books in a pamphlet entitled, Professional Standards and American Editions. In this booklet the aspirations of the CEAA towards complete and scholarly editions of the major American writers of the nineteenth century were reiterated. Central are the professional standards which the CEAA applies in its editorial practice and these are based on principles "first formulated by Walter Greg and developed by Fredson Bowers" (Gibson, 1).
At no point in the discussion between Wilson and the editors of the CEAA is there a debate about the limitations or advantages of this theory and it is only in the seventies, when the role of Bowers as spokesman had increasingly been taken over by G. Thomas Tanselle that the Greg-Bowers theory began to be challenged in the United States. In a survey of the criticism of the C.E.A.A. until 1975, Tanselle could still claim that many of the recent discussions of the aims of the Centre were "naïve and parochial, and frequently ... uninformed or misinformed" (Tanselle 1979, 275). Only three critics of Greg's theory deserve Tanselle's closer attention because at least they do not labour under some serious misunderstanding. In "Reflections on the Foundations of Modern Textual Editing," Morse Peckham disagreed with the CEAA's application of Greg, on the one hand because he believes it is impossible to distinguish between substantives and accidentals and on the other because he does not think that reconstructing a text on the basis of the author's intentions is a meaningful (or attainable) goal. James Thorpe and Philip Gaskell both believe that setting and printing practices from the nineteenth century onwards have made authors to such an extent dependent on printers to correct their accidentals, that the first edition is far superior as a copy-text to the final autograph. Tanselle in each case upholds Bowers' application of Greg's principles to modern works.
Thorpe and Gaskell, and most of the other critics of the Greg-Bowers-Tanselle theory of copy-text, offered criticism from within New Bibliography. They shared its basic assumptions, especially its concern with the author's intentions. In 1983 a much more radical challenge to the current paradigm came in a book by Jerome McGann. A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism confronts the Greg-Bowers orthodoxy head on. In his reading of Greg's introduction of the copy-text theory, McGann stresses the absence of the concept of authorial intentions, which was only introduced in Bowers' interpretation. The theory of the copy-text was developed to deal with problems that are specific of the period before 1650. Greg himself wrote: "The thesis I am arguing is that the historical circumstances of the English language make it necessary to adopt in formal matters the guidance of some particular early text" (quoted in McGann 1985, 29). These problems relate to the fact that before the eighteenth century English printers lacked all standards for accidentals. McGann argues that Greg's procedures work reasonably well when there is no authorial manuscript, but in the modern period, when often we have at our disposal not just a final manuscript, but also drafts, corrected drafts, fair copies, typescripts, galley proofs etc, the situation is entirely different. In such conditions of abundance Bowers' choice of the earliest completed text as copy-text is not necessarily correct. In the case of a lot of writers, Byron e.g.,
many works exist of which it can be said that their authors demonstrated a number of different wishes and intentions about what text they wanted to be presented to the public, and that these differences reflect accommodations to changed circumstances, and sometimes to changed publics (McGann 1985, 32).Central in the Greg-Bowers-Tanselle theory of copy-text is the idea that we should try to free the author's text from all corruption by outsiders, which includes amanuenses, typists, publishers, editors, etc. McGann admits that the Bowers theory is so powerful because it is coherent and methodologically consistent, but that the modern works (which lack the monogenous pattern typical of Elisabethan texts) offer an empirical challenge to the paradigm.
Jerome McGann is not alone in his reluctance to extend the usefulness of Greg's rationale to nineteenth and twentieth century texts. In Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, the 1985 Panizzi Lectures, D.F. McKenzie argues that the interest of scholars has moved from analytical bibliography to something else:
I am safe in saying that the vital interests of most of those known to me as bibliographers are no longer fully served by description, or even by editing, but by the historical study of the making and the use of books and other documents (McKenzie, 3).McKenzie's view of the matter is clear in the title of his book; he proposes that "it would now be more useful to describe bibliography as the study of the sociology of texts" (5).
A similar move is apparent in the work of other bibliographers in the late seventies and early eighties and the change is signalled in the establishment of the Society for Textual Scholarship and its journal Text. Most of these New New Bibliographers have given up the distinction between accidentals and substantives for a renewed interest in the typography and presentation of the text. Whereas Bowers and Tanselle attempt to edit an ideal "work," later critics refer primarily to texts as they appeared at a certain time and in a certain form. According to McGann and McKenzie, publishers, editors, typesetters in the modern period and the physical forms they create (paper, ink, binding) are at least as important to the meaning of the text as the intentions of an author. Editors should therefore give up the restrictions imposed by the Greg-Bowers tradition and create texts that reflect insights into the actual production of books.
Other editors and bibliographers aim their criticism at the static view of writing implied in the theory of the copy-text. According to Bowers and Tanselle, the aim of an edition is to capture the work as it was finally intended by the author. The only result of such critical editing is a static product, a series of words that represent what the author at one particular moment in time wanted to publish. But editors such as Peter Shillingsburg discovered that literature is much less static than Tanselle had imagined and that scholarly editions should reflect this reality. Shillingsburg believes that there is no single correct way to edit texts and that scholarly editions should therefore "present works of art primarily as process not primarily as product" (Shillingsburg, 26). Editors should give up ideas of the correctness of a single text in favour of destabilized and multiple texts:
A comprehensive view of textual criticism would promote, I think, editorial solutions that foreground multiple, unstable texts about which much is known but upon which little dogmatic confidence can be placed (42).It is clear from the choice of words that Shillingburg's position is considerably influenced by developments in literary theory.
Although most of the bibliographers who attack the Greg-Bowers-Tanselle orthodoxy use philosophical discussions and literary theory in their critique, and although some of them mention Hans Zeller's critique of eclectic editing in his article in Studies in Bibliography, most if not all of them, seem to have arrived at their position not so much as a result of developments in literary theory but of difficulties in applying the theory of copy-text to the authors they were editing. Changes in editorial theory were the result of editorial practice, not of literary theory. Jerome McGann writes that through his work on the Byron edition, he discovered "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" (McGann 1991, 2). Although Donald Reiman has rather different views on the nature of private documents, he too has moved from the Greg-Bowers view to the position of Jerome J. McGann and D. F. McKenzie. For Reiman it is precisely the difference between private and public documents that will determine the choice of copy-text. In the former case this choice is not too difficult because we typically have only one document. In the latter case, at least in "the era of the 'Gutenberg Galaxy,'" the final autograph can only be a transitional document:
To intend that a work be made public is (almost always) to will that it undergo the process of socialization. An author who sends a work to press understands that it will come out looking different from the way it appeared in the manuscript (Reiman, 109 and 111).But Reiman at least remains faithful to the doctrine of authorial intentions.
The movement among American textual scholars to give up the Greg-Bowers-Tanselle theory of copy-text, has been perceived by most of the editors as a paradigm shift. D. F. McKenzie still writes that he is "not bold enough to speak of paradigm shifts" (3), McGann does not have such qualms (119). But Thomas Kuhn's concept of paradigm includes the meaning of "preferred example" and it is useful to look at the implications of these theoretical discussions on the edition of a specific work. A most obvious example could have been Shakespeare, the author standing at the origins of modern Anglo-American bibliography. Gary Taylor has revolutionized Shakespearian bibliography by convincingly showing that there are two different versions of King Lear and that the differences between the Quarto and Folio versions are not (or not only) due to different kinds and degrees of corruption, but to authorial revision.
A more interesting example is Hans Walter Gabler's edition of James Joyce's Ulysses. On the one hand, the 1984 Ulysses is continuously hailed as the first product of the new spirit in textual studies. Almost every single contributor to Devils and Angels: Textual Editing and Literary Theory, a fairly recent collection of essays by the most important of the New New Bibliographers, refers to Gabler's work on Ulysses. In addition, quite a number of the editors and textual critics whose work I have mentioned above were involved in the edition or reviewed the work.
The three-volume Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition was published in June 1984. It was a quite novel form of edition: not only had the text completely been prepared on computer, it came in two different versions, a "synoptic" text on the left-hand and a reading text on the right-hand page. Although there seems to be nothing remarkable about the appearance of the reading text, the way it was established was new in Anglo-American editing. For an explanation we need a closer look at the left-hand page which contains the synoptic text. This is not a genetic display, since Gabler disregards those stages of composition that precede the first complete fair copy, the so-called Rosenbach manuscript. And it is not a complete record of the genetic history of the text; it only contains authorial variants, i.e. those changes and additions to the typescripts and page proofs that are in Joyce's hand or that can be shown to be authorial.
Most of the initial reactions to the new Ulysses were extremely positive and this is not surprising: most of the Joyceans who knew anything about textual matters had been either on Gabler's Advisory Committee or they were members of his editorial team. The most incisive reviews of the new edition came from textual critics who have not worked on Joyce: most of the early reviews in influential journals such as the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books were written by Joyceans with little or no experience in textual matters: Hugh Kenner, Denis Donoghue and Richard Ellmann. Jerome McGann, a non-Joycean textual scholar, reviewed Gabler's edition in Criticism under the title, "Ulysses as a Postmodern Text: The Gabler Edition."
As his title implies, McGann celebrates Gabler's break with the copy-text editorial practice dominant in the United States and he considers the new Ulysses as a seminal work comparable to George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson's edition of Piers Plowman and the revolution in Shakespeare studies first consolidated in Gary Taylor and Michael Warren's The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare's Two Versions of King Lear. Understandably, McGann is especially thrilled at what he sees as Gabler's departure from the Greg-Bowers-Tanselle concept of final authorial intentions: A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism was published in the same year as this review. In fact, McGann stresses those features of Gabler's work which undermine the Greg-Bowers-Tanselle tradition, especially the genetic presentation about which he claims that it turns Ulysses into a postmodern text, that it "completely overhauls the way we might think about the text as a whole [McGann's italics]" (McGann 1985, 291) and that it is "a text which Foucault would have admired, a text which re-presents a socio-history of Joyce's Ulysses" (299).
McGann's support for Gabler's edition seems to be motivated more by tactical reasons than by real sympathy, given that the basic thrust of Gabler's approach runs counter to McGann's own position. In A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism, McGann makes it clear that, especially in the modern period, the publication of a literary text is a collaborative effort. As a result, the editor should not follow the Greg-Bowers-Tanselle doctrine of working with the final manuscript, but typically choose a work's first edition as copy-text. This is exactly what Gabler does not do: in Ulysses: The Corrected Text there is no copy-text and the first edition is explicitly rejected, while no authority is accorded to later editions. The "base copy" or "basis text" as Gabler himself calls it, is built up on the basis of all the existing textual evidence, from the first more or less complete autograph to the final proofs. In the establishment of the genetic text, Gabler even makes a theoretical distinction between documents of transmission and documents of composition that explicitly excludes any form of collaboration. On principle only those variants for specific passages are accepted that exist in an authorial hand. So-called "passive authorization," the author silently accepting a variant reading, is ruled out on principle. That McGann is aware of this difference between his and Gabler's position is clear when he proposes to replace Gabler's "continuous manuscript text" by a "continuous production text," which would include transmissional variants (292 ). The only conclusion seems to be that McGann was so keen on accepting an edition that went beyond Greg-Bowers-Tanselle that he was blind to some of its real features.
Other representatives of the New New Bibliography have written with sympathy of Gabler's work. In Devils and Angels: Textual Editing and Literary Theory, the most radical representatives of what could be called "postmodernist" textual criticism refer to Gabler's Ulysses as an example of what they are trying to achieve. Peter Shillingsburg considers the synoptic text of Ulysses, with Michael Warren's King Lear and his own Thackeray, as an attempt "to emphasize alternative texts, or multiple texts, or indeterminate texts" (Shillingsburg, 41). In the same volume Paul Eggert sees Gabler's edition as an important phase in "the poststructuralist challenge to Anglo-American editing procedures" (73) and David Greetham, who has gone furthest in marrying textual criticism and post-structuralist theory, contrasts the postmodern synoptic text with the conservative and restrictive reading text. George Bornstein, the editor of another recent book on editorial theory in the humanities, even called the synoptic text of Ulysses "the current edition most embodying" a palimpsestic view of a literary work in which the text "becomes less a bearer of a fixed final inscription than a site of the process of inscription, in which acts of composition and transmission occur before our eyes" (Bornstein, 4). Another postmodernist editor fails to see that Gabler's edition explicitly excludes acts of transmission from consideration.
Initially the majority of Joyceans, unaware of textual issues, read the edition from their own critical perspectives, theoreticians such as Suzette Henke describing the 1984 Ulysses as a deconstructive statement:
We will be forced to read Ulysses as we now confront Derrida's Glas -- as a deconstructive, many-layered textual game of dialectical components. Ulysses becomes a lexical play field with infinite possibilities for joyous dissemination of the sèmes that compose its textual variants (Henke, 88).One Joycean critic did not agree: John Kidd, who had been opposed to Gabler's methodology even before the edition was published, first attacked Gabler's work in an interview in The Washington Post and he repeated the attack at the April 1985 conference of the Society for Textual Scholarship, where he concentrated on what he himself called factual errors and heavy-handed emendations. In June 1986, Kidd published an article in The New York Review of Books in which he repeated the charges he had made the year before. But it was only in February 1989, in "An Inquiry into Ulysses: The Corrected Text," an essay in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, that Kidd wanted to move beyond the discussion of individual mistakes and "errors of execution."
Surprisingly, Kidd's major statement contains next to no disagreement on theoretical principles. What it does do in the first couple of pages is a dissection of a few phrases in the "Foreword" of the 1984 edition. Kidd needs almost four pages of text to show that Gabler's claim that his is the first critical edition of any of Joyce's text is incorrect. The next section is devoted to the notion of copy-text Gabler uses, because Greg's essay on "The Rationale of Copy-Text" is "[t]he only work on the theory of textual criticism or principles of scholarly editing cited in Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition or in any of Gabler's writing on Ulysses" (Kidd, 417). This is quite certainly a deliberate misreading: Gabler does not, on p. 1879, refer to Greg's essay but to "Greg's rationale," to the concept as it had been developed by Bowers and Tanselle. If there is a consideration of the notion of copy-text, it is to Tanselle's "The Editorial Problem of Final Authorial Intention" that we have to turn and not to Greg's original essay. Kidd's comments show that Gabler's version of what constitutes a copy-text differs greatly from what Greg meant by the term and that is hardly surprising. It would be quite astonishing if Greg's procedure for the editing of Elisabethan texts would also be valid for the edition of texts for which we have an abundance of pre-publication material. Yet Kidd is quite right in his assertion that Gabler considerably alters the notion of copy-text in Anglo-American New Bibliography.
What Gabler had suggested in his The Library review of the publication of the Rosenbach-manuscript and elsewhere, did not constitute, as Kidd claims, "a new view of the composition of Ulysses" (Gabler 1977, 420; see "Works Consulted" below for a list of Gabler's statements concerning his edition). It is an attempt to draw editorial conclusions from a view of the genesis of Ulysses that had been developed by many scholars: A. W. Litz, Michael Groden, and Philip Gaskell chief among them. Since on the one hand, we do not have a final manuscript, and since, on the other hand, we know from an inspection of the evidence that Joyce continued to revise until the very last page proofs, we do not seem to have any other choice than to take as our basic text the final authorial manuscript version of every segment. The synoptic text is the result of this initial work, showing where every individual authorial segment was first introduced, whereas in the reading text only the last authorial variant of every individual segment is retained. It is clear that Gabler's use of the term "copy-text" differs radically from that advanced by Greg, but it should also be clear that Gabler's proposed solution of the particular difficulties involved in editing a text like Ulysses deserves to be taken seriously and should not be waved aside contemptuously.
Contempt is also evident in a discussion of Gabler's essay in Studies in Bibliography. In uncharacteristically harsh terms Tanselle describes Gabler's "Synchrony and Diachrony" article in terms of "pretentious language" and "this verbiage" (Tanselle 1986, 37 and 38). In one of his regular review articles of the literature on textual editing, this time on the period of the late seventies and the first half of the eighties, Tanselle fiercely attacked Gabler's theoretical grounding of his synoptic approach. After briefly chiding Gabler's use of reproductions (Tanselle 1989, 32), Tanselle repeated his objections against the 1984 Ulysses in a review article on editorial theory published in the second half of the eighties (incidentally just before discussing two essays by Louis Hay). In a critical reading of both McGann's postmodernist defense of Gabler's work and of an article by Gabler, Tanselle stresses that McGann is wrong in describing the 1984 Ulysses as innovative and that Gabler fails to elucidate the theoretical tension between the synoptic and the reading texts.
Tanselle is quite unfair to Gabler when he concentrates his fire on a few infelicitous expressions instead of acknowledging that the peculiar problems in editing Ulysses can be well served with a synoptic presentation of the evidence. As we will see below, the genetic choice is one which is implied in one of the major differences between Anglo-American and German editing. One of the reasons for the advantage of a synoptic presentation of authorial variants over the critical apparatus proposed by Tanselle is that, in the case of Ulysses (and, I would argue, in that of Finnegans Wake), Joyce in more than 99% of the cases revised by adding to the text, and only very rarely by delition or by moving existing material.
The confusion about copy-text, which we have seen has puzzled scholars such as Jerome McGann and George Bornstein, should make it clear that Gabler does not use the traditional concept of copy-text, since the genetic build-up of the text replaces Greg's choice of one text as a base-text, which in the case of Ulysses would be hard to come by anyway. From the point of view of editorial theory, the critique of Hans Walter Gabler's edition from Kidd and from quite a number of other editorial critics, does not extend towards a redefinition of the basic tenets of Anglo-American editorial theory, and the underlying charge, most explicitly in Tanselle's "Historicism and Critical Editing," but at least implied in Kidd's comments, is that Gabler ventures beyond the limits imposed by the Greg-Bowers-Tanselle school of editing. Kidd would differ from Tanselle in his preference for the 1922 edition as copy-text, but both work explicitly within the confines of the theory of final intentions.
Precisely because the avant-garde of Anglo-American textual criticism constantly refers to Gabler's work as "European," and rooted in German editorial thinking on the one hand and French genetic criticism on the other, it is interesting to look at one European genetic critic's view of the edition. Paola Pugliatti of the University of Pisa has published a review and two articles on the new Ulysses and she contributed to a debate with Gabler at the 1988 Venice Joyce Symposium. In an article in Dispositio Pugliatti was able to elucidate the "global textual philosophy (and ideology)" of Gabler's work. After a brief history in French and Italian genetic criticism or textologie, Pugliatti criticizes Gabler for adhering to the Greg-Bowers school's belief in authorial intentions and his failure to take into account genetic principles. Pugliatti's critique of Gabler's work is much more theoretical in nature than Kidd's: in the three articles devoted to the 1984 Ulysses, she makes it clear that the German editor has failed to take into account the new developments in editing that first appeared in Italian philology and that were later further developed in the French étude génétique. Contrary to these developments in French-Italian editorial theory, and, more importantly, against Joyce's practice in writing and revising Ulysses, Gabler insists on final intentions and on the teleological view of the work as the final goal of the developing text.
In conclusion it might be argued that the very fact that Gabler's edition has been attacked both on the ground of adhering and on that of failing to adhere to the Anglo-American tradition, seems to prove that his work occupies a position somewhere between European and American traditions. This is quite clear when we reread Gabler's own theoretical statements. From "Synchrony and Diachrony" onwards, he has made it quite clear that he sees his work in terms of Hans Zeller's structuralist critique of the eclecticism of the Greg-Bowers-Tanselle tradition from the perspective of German varianten editing: even the most minute difference between two texts of the same work creates two different versions that cannot be edited as one work. The linear presentation of the synoptic text is only necessary because Ulysses is written in prose: "Synchrony and Diachrony" contains a presentation of a poem by Milton that does not differ all that much from Zeller's transcription of the draft of a poem by C.F. Meyer illustrating Michel Espagne's article in Genesis 3. Even more explicitly, Gabler has analyzed the differences between Anglo-American and German approaches in "Unsought Encounters" and there he explicitly refers to French critique génétique in order to reject Hershel Parker's historicist return to authorial intentions (Gabler 1991, 158).
In the case of Joyce's later work, Gabler's is simply the most reasonable procedure. Both in the production of Ulysses and in that of Finnegans Wake, the final work on the texts was so chaotic that the first editions in 1922 and 1939 can in no way be considered to have a special authority. If we know that Joyce never undertook a systematic proofreading of any of the later impressions and editions and that we have, for both Ulysses and for Finnegans Wake, a more than reasonable amount of prepublication material, the conclusion is clear that it makes more sense to build up an edition from below, genetically. This strategy is facilitated by the fact that Joyce's work on these texts was almost entirely cumulative. In Ulysses and Finnegans Wake Joyce almost never deleted text or moved passages to another location. Gabler's synoptic presentation of Ulysses shows that this work can be done for Ulysses, and in A First-Draft Version of Finnegans Wake, David Hayman has shown that a similar presentation might also be used for Finnegans Wake, though the complexities of a full genetic transcription could probably only be mastered with Gabler's TUSTEP-programme and not with Hayman's typographical display of different textual layers, which resembles Meyer and Sattler's presentation of poetic texts.
The perplexing contradictions in the evaluation and even in the description of Gabler's work on Ulysses are due to a tension between two and maybe three different editorial traditions within Gabler's own project. Most critics have reported the discrepancy between the assumptions underlying the synoptic version on the one hand and the reading text on the other, but the two are in essence complementary. The synoptic text is not a full genetic record of the writing of Ulysses, nor does it pretend to be: it is a record of the construction of the continuous manuscript text from which the reading text can be abstracted. The theorists of post-Greg editorial theory have overemphasized the destabilizing nature of the 1984 Ulysses and Gabler himself may have been too keen to disassociate himself from the copy-text school by denying that his edition (and the German editorial theories on which it is based) has anything to do with authorial intentions. Tanselle failed to see that Gabler's eclectic procedures are much closer to his own than to German anti-eclectic editing. In the contemporary Anglo-American context, as Vicki Mahaffey has pointed out, Gabler is "quite conservative" in opting for what Joyce actually wrote (Mahaffey, 40).
The problem is that in the case of editing one of James Joyce's works Gabler simply did not have any other choice. Joyce made it quite clear that he wanted personal control over every aspect of the production process of his work, and evidence to the contrary is extremely shaky or beside the point. The fact that Joyce stopped revising as soon as Ulysses and Finnegans Wake were published and contented himself with the simple correction of printing errors, shows that the quite extensive process of revision (Ulysses grew by 30% between typescripts and book) had ended when the books were published. Another consideration is purely pragmatic: genuinely "destabilized" texts in book-format are impossible to read for a lay reader and therefore impossible to sell. In a market economy this means that no company can afford to publish such texts unless they are accompanied by reading texts, as is the case with D. D. Sattler's Hölderlin or Gabler's Ulysses.
Although the 1984 Ulysses and the controversy surrounding it have demonstrated that Anglo-American editorial theory is beginning to expose itself to German and French theories of textual studies, it has also shown that the common ground between the three traditions may be smaller than some American theorists believe. Ultimately, the writers' different working habits and different expectations about the actual form of their works may well make all generalizations about genetics and editions impossible.
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Fredson Bowers, Textual and Literary Criticism, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1959.
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Hans Walter Gabler, "Review of Ulysses: A Facsimile of the Manuscript, edited by Clive Driver," The Library, 5th Series 32 (1977): 177-182.
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--. An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students, Oxford: Clarendon, 1972.
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Donald Reiman, The Study of Modern Manuscripts: Public, Confidential, and Private, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1993.
Peter Shillingsburg, "The Autonomous Author, the Sociology of Texts, and the Polemics of Textual Criticism," Devils and Angels: Textual Editing and Literary Theory, ed. Philip Cohen, Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1991.
G. Thomas Tanselle, "Greg's Theory of Copy-Text and the Editing of American Literature," Selected Studies in Bibliography, Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1979.
--. "The Achievement of Fredson Bowers," Studies in Bibliography 79 (1985).
--. "Reproductions and Scholarship," Studies in Bibliography 42 (1989).
Gary Taylor, "The Rhetoric of Textual Criticism," Text 4 (1988).
William Proctor Williams and Craig S. Abbott, An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies, New York: MLA, 1989.
Edmund Wilson, "The Fruits of the MLA," The Devils and the Canon Barham: Ten Essays on Poets, Novelists and Monsters, London: Macmillan, 1973.
Hans Zeller, "A New Approach to the Critical Constitution of Literary Texts," Studies in Bibliography 28 (1975): 231-263.