The Book as Artefact: Text and Border (Variants 4)

VARIANTS 4 The Journal of the European Society for Textual Scholarship

General Editors H.T.M. van Vliet and P.M.W. Robinson ESTS Board Members Chairman: H.T.M. van Vliet, The Netherlands Secretary: Peter Robinson, UK Barbara Bordalejo, UK Andrea Bozzi Joao Dionisio, Portugal Daniel Ferrer, France Richard Finneran, USA (STS) Luigi Giuliani, Spain Anne Mette Hansen, Denmark Bodo Plachta, Germany Dirk Van Hulle, Belgium

This page intentionally left blank

The Book as Artefact Text and Border Edited by

Anne Mette Hansen, Roger Lüdeke, Wolfgang Streit, Cristina Urchueguía and Peter Shillingsburg

AMSTERDAM - NEW YORK, NY 2005

Cover design: Pier Post The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 90-420-1888-7 ISSN: 1573-3084 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2005 Printed in The Netherlands

Variants 4 (2005) The Book as Artefact Text and Border The Book as Artefact Edited by Anne Mette Hansen Paul Eggert Version — Agency — Intention: The Cross-fertilising of German and Anglo-American Editorial Traditions Peter L. Shillingsburg Practical Editions of Literary Texts Ragnheiur Mósesdóttir “Good white paper, with a new, clear and elegant typeface”: Early Arnamagnæan Editions Eva Nilsson Nylander To the Glory of Mary: Liber Scole Virginis at Lund University Library João Dionísio Tables of Contents in Portuguese Late Medieval Manuscripts Rüdiger Nutt-Kofoth The Book in the Poetological Concept of Stefan George: Some Remarks on the Physical and Iconic Side of the Published Text — with an Editorial Conclusion Dirk Van Hulle The Limited Edition Unlimited: Samuel Beckett’s Fugal Artefact

5 29

57

77 89

111 133

Text and Border: The Borders of the Text Edited by Roger Lüdeke, Wolfgang Streit and Cristina Urchueguía George Bornstein The Book as Artefact: Historicizing Ezra Pound’s First Thirty Cantos JJulia Briggs Writing by Numbers: An Aspect of Woolf ’s Revisionary Practice Michael Groden Proceeding Energetically From the Unknown to the Known: Looking Again at the Genetic Texts and Documents for Joyce’s Ulysses Geert Lernout The Dimension of the Text J John McCourt Writing on the Edge: Trollope’s An Eye for An Eye J Jerome McGann From Text to Work: Digital Tools and the Emergence of the Social Text Fritz Senn The Potency of Error (exemplified in Joyce’s Ulysses) The Interpretive Consequences of Textual Criticism Edited by Peter Shillingsburg John Bryant J Versions of Moby-Dick: Plagiarism, Censorship, and Some Notes toward an Ethics of the Fluid Text Marta L. Werner Emily Dickinson’s Futures: “Unqualified — to Scan”

151 165

183 197 211

225 241

257 287

VARIANTS 4 2005

Reviews and Book Notices Edited by Dirk Van Hulle Hans Walter Gabler Thomas Bein, Rüdiger Nutt-Kofoth, Bodo Plachta, eds., Autor — Autorisation — Authentizität Sam Slote Jed Deppman, Daniel Ferrer, and Michael Groden, eds., Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-textes Geert Lernout Domenico Fiormonte, Scrittura e filologia nell’era digitale Jed Deppman Louis Hay, La Littérature des écrivains: questions de critique génétique Mike W. Malm Alexandra Braun-Rau, William Shakespeare’s “King Lear” in seinen Fassungen. Ein elektronisch-dialogisches Editionsmodell James Cummings Barbara Bordalejo, ed., Caxton’s Canterbury Tales: The British Library Copies; Peter Robinson, ed., The Miller’s Tale on CD-ROM Charles F. Fraker The Latin Chronicle of the Kings of Castile. Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Joseph F. O’Callaghan M. J. Driscoll Mats Dahlström, Espen S. Ore, and Edward Vanhoutte, eds., Literary and Linguistic Computing, vol. 19, no. 1, April 2004 Joseph J. Gwara James Moran, Wynkyn de Worde, Father of Fleet Street Carmen Peraita Pedro M. Cátedra and Anastasio Rojo, Biblioteca y lecturas de mujeres Siglo XVI Geert Lernout Andrea Bozzi, Laura Cignoni, Jean-Louis Lebrave, eds., Digital Technology and Philological Disciplines

301

305 312 315

318

322

326

337 340

352

357

Nuria Martínez de Castilla Muñoz Carlos Alvar and José Manuel Lucía Megías, eds., Diccionario filológico de literatura medieval española. Textos y transmission Book Notices Matthijs de Ridder Joep Leerssen and Marita Mathijsen, eds., Oerteksten. Nationalisme edities en canonvorming Dirk Van Hulle Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, eds., The New Media Reader Vincent Neyt Raimonda Modiano, Leroy F. Searle, and Peter Shillingsburg, eds., Voice, Text, Hypertext: Emerging Practices in Textual Studies Notes on Contributors

360

365

367

369 372

The Book as Artefact

This section consists of seven papers presented at the 2003 colloquium of the European Society for Textual Scholarship which took place at the University of Copenhagen, 21st-23rd November 2003. The “Book as Artefact” was hosted by the Arnamagnæan Institute, the local organisers being Anne Mette Hansen and M. J. Driscoll. It was funded by the Danish Research Agency. The theme was the book, both as the material embodiment of the text and as cultural artefact in its own right, and it thus continued the material focus outlined in the inaugural colloquium in Leicester in 2001, “The Book in the 21st Century”, and the second colloquium in Antwerp 2002, “Reading Notes”. Topics of papers spanned areas such as textual theory, analytical bibliography, palaeography, codicology, textual criticism and the history of the book, with special emphasis on the relationship between form and meaning. In his paper Paul Eggert challenges the theme of the colloquium by surveying some efforts to acknowledge editorially the original embodiments of late nineteenth and early twentieth century works, and some conclusions were drawn about the limits of artefactual knowledge for the editorial arena in its differing German and anglophone traditions. Peter Shillingsburg takes a new philological approach to textual scholarship and editing to demonstrate the semiotic complexity of the book as artefact. Using examples from Thackeray and Byatt, he explores the art of the physical book in relation to the art of verbal construct it contains in the light of a book’s endurance as a physical fact through time and as literary fact through transmissions into other forms. Ragnheiur Mósesdóttir’s paper focusses on the history of the book, in her analysis of the make-up of the early editions (1772-1832) of Icelandic manuscripts published by the Arnamagnæan Commission: their paper, type-faces, printing and layout, compared with other Danish publications of the same period. Attention is also given to methods of sale and to contacts with printers and publishers. Eva Nylander shows how a thorough codicological analysis of a 14th century song book of the Cathedral of Lund adds to the knowledge of liturgical text and the development of the Marian cult in Lund. João Dionísio reflects on the function of tables of contents in Portuguese lit2

VARIANTS 4 2005

erary manuscripts written or promoted by princes of the Avis dynasty during the first half of the 15th century, in relation to text extension, gender and programmed readership. Rüdiger Nutt-Kofoth discusses how one may edit the poetry of Stefan George (1868-1933). George developed a poetological concept in which the material side of his works (paper, form, décor ad type-face) became part of his poetry, drawing attention to the conflict between the text-critical function of an editor and of a facsimile edition (the only way, it seem, to reproduce textual materiality) which has no textual consciousness. In his paper Dirk van Hulle confronts two different materializations of the same text, Samuel Beckett’s Stirring Still (1989) published in a limited, first, signed, de luxe edition, and as a text in a newspaper questioning to what extent the artefactual appearance is an integral part of the text. Anne Mette Hansen

The Book as Artefact

3

This page intentionally left blank

Version — Agency — Intention The Cross-Fertilising of German and AngloAmerican Editorial Traditions Paul Eggert I Scholarly editors have traditionally treated texts as ideal: that is, as existing independently of the materials on which they happen to have been recorded. This observation applies differentially to the German and Anglo-American traditions. As its methodology and theory was gradually developed after World War II, the German historical-critical approach came to put all its stress on historical versions, selecting one version to serve as the reading text, and recording the others in an ingenious form of non-lemmatised apparatus. Much effort was put into theorising versions. The historisch-kritisch Edition represented a marriage of the synchronic and the diachronic dimensions of text that a combination of philological method and Prague Structuralism had sensitised editors to look for and to record. The problem seemed to be solved. But the book, as carrier of text, fell out of the editorial purview. In the Anglo-American tradition, things went in a different direction. Type-facsimile or photo-facsimile editions were supposed to take care of the work’s documentary status, which was secondary and of merely bibliographical interest; but editorial mediation of one kind or another would be required if the text of the work itself was to be made available to readers in a new act of publication. The work, in being a work, had an ontological status that justified this editorial extraction of text not just from its material embodiments but from its historical versions as well. The accompanying imperative — that a single text had to be prepared for a new readership — pushed, by the 1960s, towards a seemingly unstoppable conclusion: that the text so established should rest on the editor’s judgement of final authorial intention. Variant readings from rejected versions would be recorded in the apparatus criticus; but versions were not alternative versions, they were rejected versions. All the historical

versions would, to a lesser or greater extent, be rejected; but one of them would in practice have to be chosen as copy-text and emended according to the announced standard of textual authority, typically authorial intention. This conclusion has been pilloried for the last two decades. But it still has supporters, which is an interesting matter in itself; and what has to be recognised is how persuasive and practicable it was. It answered to the needs of readers and the economics of university presses. The case was argued for dramatic works of the seventeenth century, in particular Shakespeare; it was extended into nineteenth- and twentieth-century works of American and British literature and even into editions of philosophical works (William James) and was finally making a push towards dictating the terms for editions of medieval literature and editions of historical documents. We know what happened: the belief in the work as an expression of an author faltered under the twin pressures of French literary and cultural theory on the one hand, and a rebirth of old- and new-fashioned historicism on the other. Works did not have an ideal form: that was suddenly old hat. Works once again had historical forms; they sprang out of the historical and biographical contexts that affected them; or they recirculated existing discourses rather than being created ab initio. Medievalists objected that scribal culture, of its very nature, produced different texts of the same work; scribes were not printing machines but participants in an evolving, collaborative textuality. Randall McLeod fulminated (so beguilingly) against critical editors who were blinded by their own Greg-Bowers theory: he showed that some of them literally could not see the bibliographical evidence in front of their eyes. They were not true believers in descriptive and analytical bibliography: their scholarly editing had in effect betrayed bibliography.1 Under this continued assault, authorship has had necessarily to take a back seat while we inspected, once again, how the engines of textuality actually worked; and we have wanted to look at the bodywork of the 1

E.g. Randall McLeod, “Gerard Hopkins and the Shapes of his Sonnets”, Raimonda Modiano, Leroy F. Searle and Peter Shillingsburg (eds), Voice, Text, Hypertext: Emerging Practices in Textual Studies (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), 177–297.

6

VARIANTS 4 2005

textual vehicle as well, at the trim and the paintwork. Many of us have been happy passengers in this new vehicle of material textuality. We have learnt to pay more attention to the carriers of texts, to their look and feel, and to how they are propelled, by what mechanisms. It has seemed more important to bear in mind, for example, that playscripts were written to be performed to specific audiences and often for specific actors; that playscripts today often emerge out of workshops and active collaboration with actors so that the playwright is only in a limited sense the author; that Victorian subscribers to circulating libraries usually had luxury three-volume novels in their hands, physically very different to Colonial or Tauchnitz editions, which usually offered much the same text but were based on a different contractual arrangement between publisher and author. Being alert to these things undoubtedly makes one more responsive to the actual conditions of production and reception of the work. But why is such responsiveness important to the editor? Here is a practical example. Let us say that one is editing a late nineteenth-century novel. One is having, in this particular case, to assess the relevance to the editorial project of the appearance of two newspaper serialisations twenty years after the early ones, in a different country, and after first, second and third editions of the work have already appeared. Not to collate editions appearing after the author’s lifetime is usually justified on the ground that the author could not, except under extraordinary circumstances, have affected their text. The practical benefit of this rationale is that at least it puts limits around editorial projects and means they have some chance of being completed. But it rules out of consideration those later printings and editions in which most readers actually encountered the work. It says, in effect, that readers are irrelevant to the question of textual authority. The Cambridge D. H. Lawrence Works series, for instance, goes a step further and does not collate serialisations or magazine appearances after the first, unless there is clear evidence that Lawrence became involved once again. There is an allied resistance in the Cambridge Conrad Works edition to collating Tauchnitz editions. These English-language editions typically appeared in Leipzig soon after the London first edition. The Paul Eggert Version — Agency — Intention

7

assumption is that Conrad was unlikely to have been involved in correcting their proofs and that, textually, they led nowhere: they had no descendants. Underlying these exclusions is the belief that the work is an intentional object needing to be tied tightly to the author: non-authorial chaff is to winnowed away, leaving behind the authorial seed in its unalloyed condition. So, in other words, the further the version in time or place from the first manuscript and first edition the more suspicious the editor must become. Who cares what thousands of European purchasers actually read? Equally, serialisations have little or no prestige. Descriptive bibliography, in its service of collectors, privileges the book, especially the first edition, over the newspaper or magazine: it is not just copy-text theory that accounts for the high frequency with which either manuscript (with its authorial presence) or first edition (with its bibliographical prestige) was chosen to serve as copy-text in Greg-Bowers editions. So, in these ways, Anglo-American editing of early modern and modern works became a right little, tight little island of self-justifying methodology, floating on but oblivious to the wider ocean of textuality that supported it. In a paper I gave in 1992 I objected to this narrowing of focus and advocated a wider conception of bibliographical study. I described what I called the “bibliographical life” of a work as one that should be seen as extending from the first stirrings of the idea, through writing, revision, and through all stages of production and reception.2 Reading and writing I saw as intimately connected at every stage, and all being worthy of study. Publishers, publishers’ readers, typesetters and printshop supervisors, reviewers and generations of readers who make the work their own, all actualise it. A work is performed under many names, although only a couple of them — the author’s and the publisher’s — appear on the title-page. With literary works, then, there is no such thing as an aesthetic object: to the extent that we talk as if there is, it is a little conspiracy we have 2 Published as Paul Eggert, “Document and Text: The “Life” of the Literary Work and the Capacities of Editing”, TEXT 7 (1994), 1–24. See also, “The Literary Work of a Readership: The Boy in the Bush in Australia 1924–1926”, Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Bulletin 12 (1988), 149–66.

8

VARIANTS 4 2005

entered into because it rewards us. It names and appears to contain in an unproblematic way the thing we wish to discuss and therefore need to edit. Unfortunately this reward typically suppresses much of the evidence that texts live before, in and after the written or printed documents that record them. Readers assimilate in solitude the texts they read; they discuss them, and the texts take on a social life; but readers return to the documents for their authority. Books, though inert documents in themselves, determine how texts are physically presented, what their extent and limitations are. Books influence how texts are read. A work that continues to be reset, or only reprinted with new dustjacket designs, is responding in some way to new ideological or other currents. Publishers sniff the cultural wind, and make their financial decisions accordingly. So, to return to the example of the late nineteenthcentury novel, serialisations published in another country twenty years after the first, may be revealing after all: and if, as I discovered, their bowdlerisation reveals more about a newspaper proprietor’s catering to the religious sensitivities of a conservative readership in Montreal when a Sydney readership had apparently had no problems with the offensive wordings twenty years earlier, then so much the better. This in fact is the situation with a popular late Empire bushranger classic that I am co-editing at the moment, Robbery Under Arms by Rolf Boldrewood. Our decision to collate and record the Montreal serialisations will not appeal to the editor who has a tight conception of what a literary work is: but who knows what it will open up, what support and stimulation it will offer to understanding of the movement of copyrights around the Empire and their textual adaptations?3 This is the kind of work that, during the 1990s, came widely to be referred to as book-historical or print-culture research.4 Supported by 3 Since giving this paper in Copenhagen in 2003, research into the political-Imperialist agenda of the Montreal newspapers’ proprietor, Hugh Graham, has linked the serialisations to the Boer War (1899–1902): see Appendix in the forthcoming Academy Edition (University of Queensland Press, 2006). 4 Its earlier formations were conceptualised and organised according to different emphases, e.g. as histoire du livre or as a subdivision of bibliography. For the latter, cf. Simon Nowell-Smith’s comment in his Lyell lectures of 1965–6: “What may be called the legal, commercial and general aspects of bibliography deserve as much attention as the enumerative and analytical because of

Paul Eggert Version — Agency — Intention

9

a very successful, professional society and already having given rise to many national history-of-the-book projects, the movement has been a 1990s and later phenomenon. A marriage between book history and the post-Greg-Bowers editorial theory of the 1980s and 1990s was, to me, a godsend. The one extended the other. I had been theorising it in the 1992 paper without knowing what to call it. The study of the book as artefact can be expressed as bibliography or as social history: the history of any particular work spans and indexes the two, as we study its versions and public appearances in its lifetime. A good edition can serve as a lightning rod of both bibliography and social history: their descriptions and generalisations get tested with the suddenly revealing emanation of an actual example in all its historical complexity. Bibliographical and textual details, and especially variants, beg for explanation in terms of agency and cause. Analysis of discourse, as a mode of historical explanation, helps relatively little at the level of detail with which scholarly editions have to deal. Nor does the idea of materiality in either of the ways that Jerome McGann or Margreta de Grazia invoke it help enough. In their different attempts to deconstruct the history of authorship and thus to dislodge it from its previously central position, they have been throwing out the baby with the bathwater.5 The marriage of book history and editorial practice, on the other hand, returns individual agency to the intellectual stage. Despite the fact that, in Germany and elsewhere, a generation of editors of historical-critical editions have laboured with great skill and dedication to record the precise sequence of revisions for the apparatus of their editions, the theory that underlies their efforts privileges authorial agency only at the level of the version. Once a version is deemed to have been authorised it may be recorded. But textual authority in the AngloAmerican sense is a different matter. It is unknown in the postwar

the assistance they can give to what I conceive to be the ultimate justification of all bibliographical exercise, the understanding of writers and their texts”: International Copyright Law and the Publisher on the Reign of Queen Victoria (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), p. 104. 5 For this argument about McGann, see Eggert, “Document and Text”, 14–24 and, for de Grazia, “The Way of All Text: The Materialist Shakespeare”, Voice, Text, Hypertext, 155–68.

10

VARIANTS 4 2005

(especially post-1960s) German tradition; it has been replaced by the concept of authorisation.6 Authorisation operates only at the macro-level of the version; textual authority, on the other hand, operates down to the level of the word or even the punctuation mark. Works have lives and they are nearly always collaborative. So it follows that, to sort out the question of authority, the editor must determine the agent responsible for the variant reading and only, in the absence of evidence, fall back upon the textual authority of the document. This is essentially how copy-text editors operate. When German editors reject such eclectic mixing of readings taken from different historical versions, they believe they are on firm ground. But in taking this principled stand they are ruling out any chance of establishing a theory to guide their choice of reading text. German editors pride themselves on the theoretical coherence that underpins their editions but the question of the reading text, which is the central one for ordinary readers, is usually adjudicated on merely pragmatic grounds.7 And when German editors emend their chosen reading text for any Textfehler (textual faults) that may be present, they attribute the necessity to a structural failure of the text when what they are doing, seen from an Anglo-American point of view, is giving textual authority to their own trained judgement. I do not object to this — not at all — but I would like to see their cards placed face up on the table, which is how Fredson Bowers famously described transparency in editorial procedure.8 Let us not fool ourselves about what we are doing.

6 Argued (in 2002) in Eggert, “Autorität des Textes oder Autorisation: Die postkoloniale Adaptation herkömmlicher Editionsverfahren für Robbery Under Arms,” Thomas Bein, Rüdiger NuttKofoth and Bodo Plachta (eds), Autor — Autorisation — Authentizät, Beiheft zu editio 21 (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2004), 315–24. 7 For an enlightening but uncritical account of this pragmatism see Bodo Plachta, “In Between the ‘Royal Way” of Philology and “Occult Science”: Some Remarks about German Discussion on Text Constitution in the Last Ten Years”, TEXT 12 (1999), 31–47 [35–43]. 8 In his textual editor’s general introduction (“A Preface to the Text”) to the first title (The Scarlet Letter ) of the Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1962). By virtue of the recording of variants putting the reader in possession of “the total substantive evidence for textual transmission available to the textual editor … [a]ll cards are on the table, face up” (p. xlvii).

Paul Eggert Version — Agency — Intention

11

II So far I have been criticising both traditional Anglo-American copy-text editing and German historical-critical editing from the viewpoint of an expanded definition of the work that would have both text-historical and book-historical dimensions. The traditional Anglo-American editorial rationale has been premised, we can now see, upon the need for exclusion so that the intentional object, the text of a work, could emerge clean and unscathed from the corruptions and compromises involved in publication. This appealed to readers and publishers alike but it respected an ontology of the work that has now passed. The German historical-critical rationale aimed to record the historical forms of the work — but only the authorised ones — with minimal emendation of the reading text and as full a record of variant texts as possible. But this text-oriented approach also excluded book-historical aspects of what I have been calling the life of the work. The German approach is not as historical, or as complete and helpful in its historical recording, as it seems at first sight to be. A counteracting, more recent development in German editorial methodology has been an increasing reliance upon facsimile presentation, forgoing an edited text in favour of a transcription, or by building the edition around the facsimile rather than the edited text. This development nearly eliminates in the first case, or minimises in the second, the role of traditional editorial judgement in what German editors call “text constitution”. Looked at in another light, however, it appears to be not so much a break with tradition as the determined extension of a prevailing editorial logic — that of the prime importance of authorised historical versions.9 Various attempts have been made in recent years to supersede the 9 See H. T. M. van Vliet’s review of the historical-critical editions of Georg Büchner’s Dantons Tod and Lenz: “New Standards in German Editing”, TEXT 15 (2002), 384–93 and Plachta, “Between the ‘Royal Way’”, 43–6. Multiple presentation of the text in order to highlight different perspectives upon it (its genesis, editorial alterations to avoid censorship, and its eclectic borrowing from sources), is a feature of the Büchner edition. Plachta observes that the other, facsimile-only route transfers editorial responsibility onto the reader and leaves the question of a common source for quotation of the work unresolved. Scholarly editing becomes “a mere documentary service enterprise” (p. 47).

12

VARIANTS 4 2005

exclusiveness of the Anglo-American approach. Mainly the innovators have responded to the crisis in theoretical understanding of works and texts by trying to shift the source of textual authority away from the author: whether to performance (in the case of dramatic works) or to the document itself (in the case of poetry and the novel). I have been observing such attempts in the Academy Editions of Australian Literature series that I general-edit. Richard Fotheringham, the editor of Australian Plays for the Colonial Stage, has argued for the textual authority of performance on two grounds: (1) that popular colonial plays such as the ones he is editing were usually adaptations or extensive plagiarisms of existing plays from the London stage rather than original creations; and, not being of high literary worth anyway, their capacity to reveal, say, the workings of an important creative mind is very limited; and (2) that the plays functioned socially (as meeting place, fashion arena and mirror of the times), so that the closer the edition could get to the actual conditions of performance the more historically informative it would be. In fact some of the plays he is editing were performed only once or twice, one of them not at all because it was refused a licence by the Colonial Secretary, and in one case, a play called The Kelly Gang that had a long stage history from 1899, the only extant manuscript seems to have been used for performance but its text is contradicted in some ways by the published playbills advertising the play and summarising the plot, scene by scene. In practice, then, the appeal to performance tends to fall back to the historical authority of the text of the document. With one interesting exception the nine plays collected in the volume are extant in only one documentary form, either in manuscript, revised typescript or printed form — printed usually for distribution on the night of the performance so that the audience could follow along in theatres that were still lit. This was especially the case with pantomimes where many of the verbal jokes could only be appreciated by looking at their strange spellings (see Figure 1). This is a pantomime called The House that Jack Built. It is probably a free adaptation, a loose plagiarism of a pre-existing British pantomime that is not extant but is known from a plot description. The Australian adaptation, written by William Mower Akhurst, was staged and the playscript published in Melbourne in 1869. Paul Eggert Version — Agency — Intention

13

In 1871, Akhurst’s playscript was localised for a Sydney performance and also published. Localising a pantomime involves adding or rewriting topical references to the people or events being satirised.

Figure 1: Cast list for The House that Jack Built (Melbourne, 1869) General editors do not always get their own way, and certainly in the Academy Editions of Australian Literature series I have been encouraging editorial innovation. So when the editor insisted that, according 14

VARIANTS 4 2005

to his criterion of performance, the Sydney adaptation in relation to its audience was on an equal footing with the Melbourne in relation to its, we had to come up with a textual display that enacted this decision. The obvious solutions would not do. Parallel texts were out of the question, simply because for most of the play the two versions are virtually identical. The use of the space would not have been justified. The printing of, say, the Melbourne text as the reading text with the Sydney relegated to an apparatus at the foot of the page would not have respected the editor’s criterion and would also have been difficult for the reader to follow, since on some occasions the Sydney variants are whole scenes of very long passages. Fotheringham proposed an enfolded text, previously only an experimental conception.10 Settling on a page design proved to be unex10 Richard Fotheringham (ed.), Australian Plays for the Colonial Stage 1834–1899 (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2006). Bernice Kliman had coined the term in her so-called enfolded-text edition of Hamlet published as “The Enfolded Hamlet”, Shakespeare Newsletter, Extra Issue (1996), 2–44. In her 1991 parallel-text edition of Hamlet where she presents the three versions Q1, Q2 and F1 side by side, she had the luxury of a very wide format. The enfolded-text idea was the next step. It was an innovation. It brings Q2 and F1 Hamlet together in a single reading text by designating the unique elements of either, line by line, in signifying brackets: { } for Q2-only elements, < > for F1-only. Q2 is the “copy-text” (p. 2). Long s’s are shortened editorially and some variants in F1 deemed “immaterial” (p. 2) are ignored. These are mainly ones of punctuation and capitalisation. Unmarked text is implied to be invariant, but in these (unpredictable) cases of “immaterial” variants it may in fact be variant. This compromise helps achieve legibility. The Academy Edition of The House that Jack Built routinely records all variants, including punctuation variants, thus eliminating this unpredictability (but with the exception of the declared silent categories). Any editorial interference is recorded at foot of page. Legibility does not seem to have been compromised by our extension of the recording and by our use of a different way of signalling variation. Kliman deals with the many passages of F1-only material by using the line numbering system of Charlton Hinman for the Folio. It numbers from start to finish in one sequence rather than starting the line numbering anew in each scene. All such F1-only material is placed in < > repeated around every line. Similarly Q2-only material is allotted the F1 line number followed by +1, +2, etc. These conventions lead to a more heavily marked text than that of the Academy Edition, and the use of the Hinman line numbering also acts as limitation on clearer forms of presentation since a cut-off has to be made after every line (or after every line and its turn-over continuation, a modern habit that started with F1). Kliman’s use of the traditional term “copy-text” is clear and functional, but it seems to cut off the possibility of a theoretical breakthrough here. “The Enfolded Hamlet” was originally assembled as a working document for the Variorum Shakespeare project but she was encouraged to publish it. In fact, she says she prefers F1 as a copy-text for a normal edition because it is likely to have been “contaminated [changed, enriched] by the theatrical experience . . . of Shakespeare’s colleagues” on the stage (p. 2).

Paul Eggert Version — Agency — Intention

15

pectedly difficult, since we had to imagine a workable marriage between editorial policy and ease of access for the reader. Anyone experimenting with innovative layouts sooner or later realises, as they try to anticipate the preparedness of the reader to master the system of marking, that they are inventing a new grammar of the document, and that they are anticipating a new poetics of reading. The job of doing this makes one realise, with a shock, what an achievement the normal presentation of text represents, an achievement in both senses, naturalised but not inherently natural. Fifteenth-century printers must have been faced with related dilemmas: would a reader realise, for example, what a title-page was when a colophon was expected? Figures 2–4 show our solution, which we cannot pretend is a perfect one but is at least superior to the many alternatives we rejected. In our enfolded edition, text common to both scripts — Sydney (S) and Melbourne (M) — is unmarked. Text that is unique to either script is identified as follows: • Single-word, short phrase and single-line substitutions are given with the M reading appearing first, followed by the reading in S. The siglum M or S precedes and concludes each section of unique text. Where a Melbourne-only variant is immediately followed by its Sydney equivalent, a forward slash separates them. All Sydney-only material and sigla are printed in a sansserif font (the normal font is seriffed). • For larger blocks of Melbourne-only or Sydney-only material a vertical line is drawn down the margins and “M ONLY” or “S ONLY” is placed in the right margin at the start of the block and at the beginning of any subsequent pages. • For variants of punctuation, capitalisation, hyphenation and spelling, M is taken as copy-text and variants in S are recorded in the foot-of-page apparatus.11 11 However, if S corrects an error in M this is accepted and given as source in the apparatus, and the M variant is recorded in the same manner. Emendations noted in the apparatus to the left of the square bracket which are not sourced to M or S are editorial. Material in square brackets is editorial in origin. Other editorial emendations, signalled by a superscript letter, are listed at the foot of the page, with the exception of the declared silent categories.

16

VARIANTS 4 2005

Figure 2: Page 245, Academy Edition of The House that Jack Built

So, for instance, in Figure 2 (which is p. 245 in the edition), the text is common to both scripts until the sixth line where Jack’s name is given as Jack Melbourne in M and Jack Sydney in S, a change picked out via the sigla and slash. Text held in common then resumes. Lines 12–13 are in S only: note the change in font. Figure 3 (p. 267) has a Paul Eggert Version — Agency — Intention

17

Figure 3: Page 267, Academy Edition of The House that Jack Built

series of S-only or M-only blocks of text, and a stage direction only in M, picked out by the relevant sigla, before and after. Scene IV (in Figure 4) appears only in S and is so marked in the margins. The textual assembly is operating at the level of the version: two versions are simultaneously 18

VARIANTS 4 2005

Figure 4: First page of Scene IV, Academy Edition of The House that Jack Built

displayed and simultaneously readable with very little sense of relegation. The assembly is both text and apparatus. Fotheringham has been able to make some emendations by appeal to performance as his principle of textual authority. He has emended Paul Eggert Version — Agency — Intention

19

the title of one of these plays (called Arabin: Or, The Adventures of a Settler). The playbill advertisements carry this title. However, the faircopy manuscript, the copy-text, is entitled Arabin; Or, The Adventures of a Colonist. This latter title derives, as the play does itself, from a novel by Thomas McCombie. But the word “Colonist” was a contentious one in 1840s Melbourne when both novel and play appeared. It indicated the rich landowning class who were trying to restrict the poorer classes from getting access to good grazing land. The playwright J. R. McLaughlin (or perhaps the theatre proprietor) must have seen danger or a loss of income if the title were not changed to a more anodyne one. Thus the contemporary audiences actually saw a play about a “Settler” not one about a “Colonist”: so Fotheringham goes with the social authority of the performance and emends the reading in his copy-text. The same principle partially justifies his interventions to provide stage directions when the logic of the stage requires their presence but they are missing or incomplete. For example, a character cannot come on stage if he has not yet left it. This principle of emendation is of course invoked with sensitivity to the workings of the colonial stage, not the stage of today. A German editor might designate these failures of the copy-text as Textfehler; but I see a justification in the need of the modern reader or actor to be able to make sense of the playscript. This is why characters’ names are conventionally presented in small capitals. It is a visual clue allowing actors to skip quickly ahead to see when their next speech or entrance will occur, and for readers to follow this process. But, like other drama editors, Fotheringham is far more conservative when it comes to emending the dialogue. He is prepared to tolerate all kinds of non-standard usages and misspellings and under-punctuation or eccentric punctuation, at least in relation to the non-printed sources, on the grounds that the manuscripts were the actual material base from which the plays were produced. But when he gets to a nonsensical reading of a particular word or phrase, there are only two choices: either stick with the reading in the copy-text (i.e. documentary authority) or ask the dreaded question of intention: what did the writer intend to write at this point? Appeal to documentary authority leaves the editor stuck with the nonsense. There are occasions when this seems the better alternative, 20

VARIANTS 4 2005

forcing the editor to salvage a possible meaning in an explanatory note, rather than suppressing it via emendation. The copy-texts are messy. But sometimes it seems quite clear what the writer intended to write but only a slip of the pen prevented it. Misnumbered scenes are an obvious example. The misremembering of a character’s name is another. In Life in Sydney, for example, Tom has just been praising Miss Jane as “Devilish pretty, devilish well educated for an old colonist’s daughter, and devilish rich in the bargain.” Jerry answers Tom: “Then I should say you’d be a devilish foolish fellow if you didn’t marry me.”12 This is how the manuscript reads. It is not a suddenly camp moment in the play. Participating in the work, the editor as expert reader detects the problem and comes up with the emendation (“marry her”). It is obviously what the writer would have written had his attention not strayed. There is another example, in Arabin. The alcoholic and dissolute gentleman-settler Mr Willis has called in Dr Arabin to treat him for his illness. He insists on paying the doctor for his visit. Arabin, who is also a gentleman, declines payment. Willis replies (in the manuscript): Oh, I must persist, Doctor! I shall not, otherwise, either walk or converse with you. I am not miserably poor, though I have unfortunately lost my health reckoning.13

For a long while we struggled to make sense of this. Could “health reckoning”, we wondered, be an early nineteenth-century idiom that had since been lost? The OED does not record it. Was it another slip of the pen? If so, for what? The editor and I were both stumped. Working on the first proofs it suddenly hit me what the problem was. The word “reckoning” should have been, but is not, underlined in the MS to indicate that it is a stage direction. That is, Mr Willis is reckoning (counting out) his coins to pay Dr Arabin. What follows now made sense: Come, you must accept of it, or we meet no more. (gives the money)

One could invoke the doctrine of Textfehler and treat the mistake as a temporary failure of a semiotic system; in this way one would be invoking 12

Fotheringham (ed.), Australian Plays, p. 75.

13

Ibid., p. 144.

Paul Eggert Version — Agency — Intention

21

the authority of the definition of text deriving from Prague structuralism. But why?, when it is abundantly clear that someone — an agent, a person: possibly the author or, if not, a copyist — wrote a wrong sign, as we all do, whenever we are writing too fast or with our attention wandering. At this level of textual detail appeal to the document (or artefact) as a source of textual authority fails. If instead the emendation is justified as unavoidable because it creates a serious impediment for readers in their understanding of the text, the editor is appealing for recognition of the fact that the edition must serve as a mediation of the original document for present-day readers. But lurking in the background here, actuating the decision to emend even though consciously unaddressed, is an interpretation of intention, of what the writer meant: thus individual agency creeps back onto the editorial stage just when it seemed to have been dispensed with. Editors of plays may invoke the authority of performance, next find themselves retreating to the authority of the document that underlay the actual performance, only to find themselves ultimately back where all of this debate started: with intention. That is because, at bottom, documentary or artefactual texts are not self-identical. To be realised, texts need readers; they are inert documents otherwise. The writer, in the case of a manuscript, is continuously his own first reader. Copyists, typesetters, editors and readers of the first and later editions participate in the actualisation of text. To ignore this out of loyalty to the German editorial theory of the 1970s, that text is a semiotic system, is not wise. Authorisation as an editorial principle stands on shaky ground, it seems to me, the moment it descends from the level of the version to that of the individual reading. It refuses responsibility for discriminating between the agencies (the author, the copyist, the typesetter) from which the dubious reading results. The German doctrine of authorisation shields editorial attention from a basic truth: that, within the version, textual authority is a mixed one: that is, different individual agents may be responsible for different readings.

22

VARIANTS 4 2005

III I would like to believe that the Australian editions have benefited from exposure to both the German and Anglo-American methodologies, but are actually beholden to neither. Certainly the editorial theory movement of the 1980s and 1990s gave us some freedom to innovate. Mostly, we do not create eclectic texts: copy-texts are nearly always taken from an existing document whether printed or manuscript or typescript, and emendation is kept to a minimum. The laying out for the reader of the record of revision and correction, whether by the author or, if it is interesting, an editor or publisher, we see as a worthwhile editorial goal. We are interested in presenting what the first Australian audiences read, and then recording in foot-of-page apparatus what changes were made to the text as it was taken up, usually by London publishers, and then distributed back to Australian readers in this new, often abridged or edited form. We want to dismantle the textual effects caused by the British domination of the colonial book trade. The Montreal serialisation of Robbery Under Arms was just an added and unexpected twist. To edit in a country that has been at the periphery of a print culture centred in London, is to be forced to recognise that literary works, produced under such conditions, cannot be treated editorially as if they existed in an ideal realm of their own as aesthetic objects: one cannot responsibly ignore the textually distorting effects of the imperial marketplace. So far our rationale is acceptably historical, somewhat in the spirit of a historical-critical edition even if neither consciously invoking its rationale nor having the luxury of extra volumes in which to lay out the apparatus. But in our critical edition in the Colonial Texts Series of Catherine Martin’s novel of 1890, The Silent Sea, the editor Rosemary Foxton went one bold step further.14 This edition attracted some criticism in a review-article written by H. T. M. van Vliet who was otherwise quite positive in his views about five of the six Australian editions he was simultaneously reviewing. He expressed reservations about this one as he believed he had detected errors, deriving from Greg and Bowers,

14

(Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1995).

Paul Eggert Version — Agency — Intention

23

creeping into the editorial method.15 Catherine Martin’s novel was serialised in a newspaper in her home town, Adelaide, the capital of South Australia, and simultaneously in a Melbourne newspaper. The serialisations ended at roughly the time that Bentley published the three-volume first edition in London. The printer’s copy for the two serialisations had been triplicate proofs of the Bentley edition. Martin was in France when she received the proofs and had to work fast to meet deadlines. She sent one set to Melbourne either unrevised or very little revised; she revised the second set for Adelaide, and then, in a separate act of revision, revised the third set for Bentley. The manuscript from which the proofs were set is not extant, nor is any copy of the proofs. Collation of the Melbourne, Adelaide and Bentley typesettings established the scenario I have described. That is, whenever there was a revision in Adelaide, it nearly always had a corresponding one in Bentley but was often further developed; and Bentley has many revisions not present in Adelaide. The Melbourne text never participates in the process and retains errors and nonsenses that both Adelaide and Bentley correct. The edition aimed to lay out for the reader the trail of authorial revision. Ideally we would have chosen the manuscript as copy-text; failing that, the proofs, but all are lost. Fredson Bowers had argued in the 1970s that whenever one has radiating texts — that is, two or more new typesettings all set from a common, lost ancestor — it is theoretically possible to reconstruct the text of that ancestor. He was working with the stories of Stephen Crane whose manuscripts were typically sold to a syndicating agency which set them up in type and often sold proofs (rather than plates) to many newspapers, who in turn completely reset the proofs for publication. Bowers argued that an editor can always go one step behind extant typesettings that radiate from a common ancestor, but not two steps.16 15

In editio 16 (2002), 169–81.

16

Fredson Bowers, “Multiple Authority: New Problems and Concepts of Copy-Text” The Library, 5th ser., 27 (1972), 81–115. See further my “Dealings with the Firm of Greg and Bowers: A Personal Tribute to, and a Reconsideration of, the Work of Fredson Bowers, 1905–1991” Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Bulletin, 15 (1991), 73–88.

24

VARIANTS 4 2005

Foxton’s work confirmed Bowers’s argument. There was no way to retrieve the text of the manuscript, but the text of the lost proofs was retrievable. Since the Melbourne serialisation had not been revised (or, if so, very little revised), its wordings were those of the proofs (or as close as we could get to them); but the accidentals in Melbourne had been housestyled and so could not be used for the purpose. The accidentals in Adelaide were also the result of a typesetting subsequent to that of the Bentley, plus the Adelaide substantives had been altered by authorial revision. However, the accidentals of the Bentley first edition could be assumed to be the same as those of the proofs since they were the same typesetting, but the Bentley substantives had been altered, even more than Adelaide, by a second round of authorial revision. None of this could be established with one hundred percent accuracy, but the tendency of the evidence was overwhelming. So which version should be chosen for the reading text and which should be recorded at foot of page? Van Vliet argued that we should have chosen one of the extant versions and recorded the other two.17 It is true that one hundred percent accuracy could have been achieved in representing the text of an extant document, although there would have been perhaps two hundred or more emendations of outright error no matter which version we chose. But that would have confused matters for the reader who was hoping to use the apparatus to follow the trail of authorial revision. Some of the revisions for Adelaide, Martin’s home town, seem to have been made so as not to offend local sensitivities. But that was not the imperative for the Bentley revisions. Yet all versions of this text are a manifestation of the life of the work such as I was postulating in 1992. We chose to assemble for readers an agented and chronological series of textual decisions. The clearest way to do so was to reconstruct the text of the lost proofs by eclectically combining the wording of the Melbourne typesetting with the accidentals of the Bentley first edition. 17 Van Vliet felt that the Adelaide (or Melbourne) version might serve best as reading text because more likely to preserve the author’s, or at least Australian, habits of idiomatic expression. However, the collations show little or no evidence of Martin revising proofs with this purpose in mind for Adelaide, and she did not revise for Melbourne. In both cases, the Australian typesetters were working from a British typesetting.

Paul Eggert Version — Agency — Intention

25

Foxton created as nearly as possible the text of the lost proofs. At foot of page she was now able to lay out for readers the separate stages of authorial revision for Adelaide and the Bentley edition that the author undertook. To create an eclectic text, in the Anglo-American tradition is generally to desert the authority of the document or artefact in the name of an intended text. In our case, the editor recreated the text of a document that happened no longer to be extant. And she did it by the application of copy-text editing principles. So our reading text is not established as a text of final authorial intention in the Greg-Bowers manner. Rather it is a text of the earliest stage of authorial intention that can be retrieved. A number of conclusions emerge from this discussion: 1. When we want to understand works down to and including the level of textual detail we need to know whose lives have shaped them, and how they have. Works, in other words, are always agented and they are dynamic. To assume that it is sufficient to treat texts editorially as a structure of semiotic relationships, the definition of text underlying German historisch-kritisch Editionen, allows one to be rigorous but it may not throw light on what is actually there. 2. Appeal to the artefact and to the text inscribed in it does not necessarily provide firm historical grounding. It delays and may disguise the underlying and (from the reader’s point of view) more fundamental question of agency. 3. If readers may be said to participate in the life of the work — that is, my expanded definition of 1992, now reinforced by the book-historical dimension — they cannot be deemed irrelevant to the scholarly edition either. That is, the needs of readers are a defensible source of textual authority. Naturally, appeal to this authority competes with appeals to the historical grounding of the document or artefact and with appeals to intention. 4. Editors should not be afraid of creating eclectic texts. We should create them if and only if they serve a good purpose. Recreating the text of a lost artefact (as in the case of the proofs of The Silent Sea) is, I believe, one such good purpose. Scholarly 26

VARIANTS 4 2005

editions exist to preserve the textual record accurately, but also to stimulate readers: they are there to keep study of the work alive. They should not be only museum pieces. 5. Each successive movement brings its own blindspots: the marriage of the new editorial theory and book history will in due course need to have its wedding vows inspected too.

Paul Eggert Version — Agency — Intention

27

This page intentionally left blank

Practical Editions of Literary Texts Peter L. Shillingsburg

The Problem A schizophrenia in literary scholarship dividing scholars between their research and their pedagogical commitments has been long identified as an occupational, apparently, incurable disease. Interestingly, indications that this disease disables careers and weakens teaching programs are countered by celebrations of the healthy sharing of original research with “disciples” in the classroom. Grants for student-conducted research as a teaching strategy support the latter view, while jazzing up courses and dumbing down scholarship for the classroom stand witness to the former. One manifestation of this division, damaging to both research and pedagogy, is found in frequent separation of textual criticism from literary criticism: the former usually associated with Dr. Dryasdust, Mr. Pedant, and Dr. Syntax; the latter associated variously with important social insights, politically charged criticism, empyrean heights of fancy, elegant articulation of the mysteries of art, or communion with the muses of art and theory. Neither of these constructions withstands close scrutiny, though cases of impacted narrowness among textual critics and of ideological biases or frivolous flights of fancy among literary critics can be found to support them. One palpable detrimental result of the rift between textual and literary criticism manifests itself in editions of literary texts—the basic tools of both research and pedagogy. Scholarly editions in magisterial tomes that few people use stand in monumental contrast to textually naive and misleading texts used everywhere in classrooms where ignorance and misinformation about textuality pass unnoticed and, worse, where the critical insights and interpretive nuance enabled by textual criticism remain hidden—in fact, are not believed to exist. This problem has been noted and discussed before. Fredson Bowers put the case very clearly in two early 1960s essays designed to provide

rapprochement between classroom needs and pure research.1 About the same time fiery essays by Bruce Harkness2 and a series of reviews of paperback editions orchestrated by Joseph Katz3 lamented the problem and suggested ways to address it. The other side of the argument, represented by writers such as Lewis Mumford, Edmund Wilson, and Peter Shaw,4 exercised their righteous indignation against the ponderous, slow, pretentious, and excessively expensive scholarly editions of the day. Since those days, when editorial pursuit of authorial final intentions and New Criticism were at their peaks, dramatic revolutions have restructured both textual criticism and literary criticism. Where textual criticism had pursued a desire to prepare the best possible, most reliable text for use by critics and students alike, it now generally denies that there can be a single best text or that one text could or should be established as more reliable than the rest, because multiple texts of the same work vie, each in its own right, for attention and interpretation. More dramatically, where once the linguistic text, as a “verbal artefact”, fully represented the work, the cultural and material work commands equal attention. Similarly, where literary criticism had focused on the aesthetics of the well-wrought work, for which, presumably a well-wrought edition was essential, it casts a broader eye on cultural studies and finds in discourse analysis and reader response greater and more immediate importance than in elusive authorial intention or, apparently, “faithfulness 1 Fredson Bowers, “Established Texts and Definitive Editions,” Philological Quarterly , 41 (1962), 1–17; and “Practical Texts and Definitive Editions,” in Two Lectures on Editing: Shakespeare and Hawthorne (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1962). 2 Bruce Harkness, “Bibliography and the Novelistic Fallacy” Studies in Bibliography 12 (1958): 59–73; and a review of the Clarendon Jane Eyre, in Nineteenth Century Fiction 25 (1970), 91–97 [see also the response from Ian Jack and Margaret Smith a few issues later]. 3 Under the heading “Practical Editions” Katz and a number of other scholars undertook to evaluate the currently available paperbacks of given titles. The series appeared in Proof (1970–1973) vols. 1–3. 4 Lewis Mumford, “Emerson Behind Barbed Wire,” New York Review of Books 19 January 1968, 3–5; Edmund Wilson, “The Fruits of the MLA” NYRB , 26 September 1968, 7–10; and 10 October 1968, 6–14. The sharply rational responses to these criticisms are found in the CEAA’s pamphlet, Professional Standards and American Editions (New York: MLA, 1969). Peter Shaw, “The American Heritage and Its Guardians,” American Scholar 45 [1975–76], 733–51.

30

VARIANTS 4 2005

to originals”—a phrase suggesting naïve positivism. Such easy generalizations are, of course, not to be credited, for the real changes have been far more complex and nuanced than such a summary suggests. But one would think that such deep and significant developments in our conceptions of what constitutes textuality and in how texts are used would have had an effect on the production of both scholarly and classroom editions. Indeed, in both arenas, great changes have evolved. Yet, one thing remains constant: an unclosed gap between knowledge about textual histories and the interpretive insights of textual criticism on one side and classroom pedagogy and literary criticism on the other. Some significant efforts have actually been made to bridge both the theoretical and practical divisions between textual critics and literary critics. Fredson Bowers’s Textual and Literary Criticism (1959) put the case from one side, asking that the views of textual critics concerning the interpretive enterprise be acknowledged by literary critics. Herschel Parker’s Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons (1983) presented the case from an interpretive critic’s point of view, but he managed to alienate both sides of the debate, telling textual critics that they had been pursuing the wrong goal and telling literary critics that adventitious readings plagued their work. There was more than a little truth in Parker’s remarks on both sides, but his work failed to reconcile the disparity of views. More important have been the efforts by Jerome J. McGann, begun with the publication of A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (1983) and Textual Studies and Interpretation (1984). In conference papers and subsequent books, like The Textual Condition (1991) and Black Riders (1993), he has demonstrated over and over that interpretation of texts is weakened when it is conceived as an activity coming after textual criticism has been completed, presenting for literary critics uncluttered, complete and perfect well-wrought urns. He demonstrates repeatedly that, instead, interpretation of a work is strengthened by grappling with its indeterminate, messy, multiple, historical texts, the products of events and forces that leave their significant markings in texts and which complicate and enrich and destabilize interpretation. Even the most exciting recent developments in textual criticism, the recognition of the importance of the “bibliographic code”—the “body Peter L. Shillingsburg Practical Editions of Literary Texts

31

language” of books—has failed to make much of a dent in the traditions of classroom text publication. Among the most compelling presentations of this approach are works by Marta Werner, Nicholas Frankel, and George Bornstein, showing spectacularly that bibliography, book history and textual criticism enrich interpretive criticism.5 Nevertheless, anthologies of poetry, in particular, seem dedicated to the notion that poems exist essentially apart from their originating contexts or material appearances; for, by presenting all poems in a homogenized type font, they deny each poem’s body language. And yet these insights should have made a difference—though such a statement merely repeats what has been said for fifty years. There must be a different thing to say or a different way to say that textual scholars know fantastic textual facts with clear interpretive consequences. Such material is, unfortunately, normally hidden away in expensive and complexly designed scholarly editions. Why does this critical material systematically fail to find its way into classroom texts? Or when it does find its way there, why is it truncated, misleading and off-putting? A few examples will demonstrate the critical value of textual information and show the disappearing act in classroom editions. A. S. Byatt’s Possession An examination of the relation between the art of the physical book in relation to the art of the verbal construct it “contains” leads to demonstrations of the semiotic complexity of “the book as artefact”. The book concerns us as art in two senses (as a material art object or, at least, a crafts object and as a lexical art object or sign object). These aspects of texts affect us both as readers of literary works and as interpreters of social and cultural histories. Literary works index social and idiolect networks or communities both by their physical attributes as well as by their literary qualities. These propositions can be demonstrated by A. S. Byatt’s best seller of 1992, Possession: A Romance. Its cover design imitates the covers of popular romance fiction, making the book fit in comfort5

Marta L. Werner, Emily Dickinson’s Open Folios: Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing (U Michigan P, 1996); Nicholas Frankel, Oscar Wilde’s Decorated Books (U Michigan P, 2000); and the very readable and persuasive book by George Bornstein, Material Modernism (Cambridge UP, 2002).

32

VARIANTS 4 2005

British Paperback

US Paperback

British Hardback

US Hardback

Peter L. Shillingsburg Practical Editions of Literary Texts

33

ably with the writings of Ann Rice and perhaps even Barbara Cartland as a marketed object.6 As a material object, the book resembles romance writings both for its subtitle (A Romance) and its covers, appealing by its appearance, its title, and its subtitle to a low-brow reading public. Literate audiences will at least initially disagree with this proposition because, even if they were not able to name the cover image, it evokes a Pre-Raphaelite style with a high-brow cultural and literary history. But imagine, if possible, readers unschooled in art and literary history but avid readers of romances by writers like Kathleen Woodiwiss, who might see in this image no more than a vaguely antique but arresting love story. In making this marketing ploy, Byatt and her publisher were not necessarily exploiting a gullible book-buying public, passing off a literary work of high-brow art as something that it was not. The book has most if not all of the formulae for romances as essential constitutive parts. But this Romance has led most readers to see it as a satire of the romance genre while at the same time being a very entertaining example of that type of fiction. I do not believe that many people looking for another romance to feed a habit formed by reading Ann Rice, Barbara Cartland, Kathleen Woodiwiss, Sydney Sheldon, and Danielle Steele would have been terribly disappointed or have felt betrayed, for most them seem to have enjoyed the mild send-up of the genre. Perhaps one reason for that reaction is that high-brow tastes are in for the same comic treatment; for Possession, while providing somewhat tongue in check homage to the po6 The pictures are from an excellent article by Helge Nowak “A.S. Byatt’s Possession for British and for American Readers”(http://webdoc.gwdg.de/edoc/ia/eese/artic97/nowak/8-97.html accessed 27/9/04) on the relation between the lexical and bibliographical codes of Byatt’s Possession. Nowak traces the differences between the British and American editions and Byatt’s negative reactions to the American changes. I do not repeat any of Nowak’s points, and I recommend her article as a comprehensive discussion of the topic.

34

VARIANTS 4 2005

etry and love lives of Robert and Elizabeth Browning, is also a hilarious send up of scholarly and fanzine Browning groupies. That is to say, if the book provides a biting or covertly nasty depiction of anything, it is not of romances and romance readers but rather of the silly foibles and small-minded infighting and greed of run-of-the-mill academics. While appealing in these ways to the romance-buying readers, Possession appealed in a very different way to those who recognized the cover picture as a detail from Sir Edward Burne-Jones’ painting “The Beguiling of Merlin” with its high-culture traditions and its extensive implications in the art world, the world of myth, and the democratising socialism of William Morris, for whose tapestry, wall-paper, and print works Burne-Jones provided so many drawings. It does not seem to be “a stretch” to suggest that, at least for those who knew its connections to Morris’s social agenda, the cover art invokes specifically the democratisation of higher education in England, which brought into academic scholarship and the pursuit of nineteenth-century poetry characters from families with no tradition of scholarship or appreciation for art and who accepted jobs in libraries and provincial universities not so much as a calling or even an avocation but just to make ends meet (Lucky Jim springs to mind). One might imagine these neophyte academics as having come from the ranks of readers who love escape literature—a label often placed on romances. And it would be plausible to elaborate the ironic play between the high culture of poetry and the culture of money which the American academy has been able to throw at research projects devoted to poetry like that of the fictional Randolph Ash and which puts into high relief Professor Cropper’s greed and self-love and self-promotion. These lines of thought converge on a reading of the closing scene of the book, which brings the rival scholars together on a very stormy night in a graveyard digging in the grave of the dead poet to find the lost letters and manuscripts buried there. Whatever our imagined unlettered romance reader might make of it, scholars have enjoyed the very satisfying, though standard, romance scene in which a violent gothic wind uproots an ancient tree and brings it crashing down on Professor Cropper’s Mercedes Benz, thwarting his get-away and exposing his attempted theft. Knowledgeable readers no doubt contemplate the implications of Peter L. Shillingsburg Practical Editions of Literary Texts

35

this literal disinterring of the author in the light of literary theory proclaiming the death of the author. Possession is not yet often taught in the classroom, but that does not keep this example from demonstrating what would happen if it were subjected to or when it gets subjected to classroom “textification” and its covers and its complex textual history, revealed by Helge Nowak, become homogenized and ignored. Classroom texts seldom enable a belief in the fruitfulness of seeing the book as artefact and the rich interplay of the lexical and bibliographical codes. W. M. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair Another example, one in which speculation plays little or no role, demonstrates the interpretive importance of textual information that somehow disappears from classroom texts. William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, to judge by the number of paperback editions now available (there were twelve in May 2004) is frequently used in classrooms. Its history is well-known to scholars and there are two quite good paperbacks in print: John Sutherland’s Oxford Classics edition, based on George Saintsbury’s Oxford edition of 1908, and my own Norton Critical Edition, based on the manuscript and first edition. But these are exceptions. The yellow front covers of the individual serial instalments of Vanity Fair show a clown on a barrel somewhere between Hyde Park and Trafalgar Square preaching to an assembled group of other clowns. Emphasizing the fact that the illustrations for Vanity Fair were drawn by the author himself, we can hardly escape the notion that the illustrated group represents a sardonic but not completely untrue picture of himself as author and us as readers, clowns all of us with a strong tendency to take ourselves seriously. This illustration has been commented on extensively by many writers who connect its images to references in the novel to clowns and puppets and fools and performers—actors all, pretending to be what they are not in fact—as what else could one expect in a book titled Vanity Fair and purporting to be a faithful representation of the Vanity Fair that was London. Which of us is not an actor? However, the newest paperback edition of Vanity Fair, the Penguin Classic, edited, introduced, and annotated by John Carey in 2001, is 36

VARIANTS 4 2005

a powerful witness to the gap between textual and literary critics. Put briefly, this edition misrepresents the text, provides misinformation about the textual history, and misinforms readers about the editorial procedure. These matters affect every reader of the edition. Carey lists my own scholarly edition of Vanity Fair (New York: Garland, 1991) in his bibliography, but does not otherwise say whether he collated the manuscript and the first and revised editions himself or relied upon the variants listed in that edition. My scholarly edition reproduces Peter L. Shillingsburg Practical Editions of Literary Texts

37

the text of the first serial printing, corrected from the manuscript and from later printings of the first edition, and lists all Thackeray’s revisions. And that edition includes all 200 or so illustrations Thackeray drew for the novel. The Penguin edition, by contrast, notes that in 1853, five years after the completion of the serialization, Thackeray was “content to have the book published without the illustrations.”7 Carey gives this as one of several reasons to reproduce that unillustrated edition, though Penguin does reproduce, on the page facing the claim to be reproducing the unillustrated edition, the illustrated title-page used in both the serial and first book edition. The argument for omitting Thackeray’s drawings is weakened, I believe, both by lack of historical information and by misinformation. Although Jerome McGann is not a Thackerayan scholar, he does draw on the work of Gordon Ray, who was one of the best, in order to give a counter opinion of the matter: From a scholarly point of view, it would be difficult to justify an edition of Thackeray[’s Vanity Fair ] that omits the illustrative matter handled at the documentary level of the work. For the novel is not merely “one of the best illustrated books in the world,” it is also an important “experiment in composite form as much as Edward Lear’s Book of Nonsense ” (1846)8 —as much, indeed, as the more famous “composite art” of William Blake. Indeed, Thackeray explicitly calls attention to his own composite art in the subtitle of his novel: “Pen (i.e., linguistic) and Pencil (i.e., graphic) Sketches of English Society.”9

McGann’s statement is not without its problems, too. In fairness to the Penguin editor it should be noted that “Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society” serves as the subtitle of the work only in the 20part serial, where, in fact, those words appear only on the title-page 7 Carey does not document a source for believing Thackeray was content with this decision other than the fact that the edition was printed. There is a note in the publisher’s records saying a copy of the first edition was given to Thackeray for editing in preparation for the “cheap edition”, and Thackeray did not turn down his profit share in the venture. Carey might have, but did not, refer to this information. It remains unclear what Thackeray actually thought or felt about the project. It was called the “Cheap Edition”, which might suggest an opinion of its literary value as well as of its market value. 8 Gordon N. Ray, The Illustrator and the Book in England from 1790 to 1914 (New York and Oxford: The Pierpont Morgan Library and Oxford UP, 1976), xxxix [McGann’s note]. 9

38

The Textual Condition (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991), 80.

VARIANTS 4 2005

printed on the yellow parts-wrappers. On the actual title page and in the running heads the subtitle is changed to “A Novel Without a Hero”. By 1853, the date of the edition claimed as the copy-text for the Penguin, the earlier subtitle calling attention to the illustrations is nowhere to be found. No doubt it was also missing from the edition the Penguin editor actually used as copy-text; for, a different copy-text was in fact used. Furthermore, to be accurate, McGann’s and Ray’s remarks, by referring only to the first, illustrated, edition fail to take up the question of what to do with the equally documentary fact of the 1853 unillustrated edition. But well-known and highly respected opinions such as theirs about the qualities and functions of the illustrations should have led the Penguin editor to re-examine carefully the forces that drove the 1853 edition; for, the mere existence of an unillustrated edition does not demonstrate that Thackeray or anyone else involved considered it an artistic advance or the fulfilment of a progressive goal for the novel, regardless of how contented they may have been to allow the book to be published so. Instead of re-examining the circumstances of the production of the 1853 edition, the editor justifies the omission of the illustrations from the Penguin edition and, by implication, from the 1853 edition with the opinion that the drawings never approach “the degree of mastery displayed by Thackeray’s writing”. Carey finds the illustrations occasionally “embarrassingly bad”. He gives this opinion as the strongest reason to omit the illustrations, regardless of McGann’s, Ray’s, and others’ opposite opinions of both their quality and function. Carey of course has a right to his opinion, but disappointingly he asks users of his edition to believe there is only one received or reasonable opinion. Already this edition makes serious choices for readers about how to read the novel without letting them know what alternatives might exist or that other scholars find them more attractive. Another reason the editor gives for omitting the illustrations from Penguin is that Thackeray’s view of some characters changed as the book progressed, rendering some of the early illustrations inappropriate—Dobbin, for example, is too clumsy or awkward at the beginning of the book to square easily with his portrayal as the only real gentleman in the book by the end. This point is not argued. The editor does not say Peter L. Shillingsburg Practical Editions of Literary Texts

39

how Thackeray, at the same time that he was writing the first third of the book and producing the awkward drawings of Dobbin, could have written a letter to his mother in which he already declares Dobbin to be the only truly admirable character—a letter that suggests Thackeray’s plan for Dobbin’s role in the book did not in fact change but rather that Dobbin developed as planned.10 A third reason, one which Carey does not give though I believe it would have strengthened his case, is that, since the text he chose to reproduce was unillustrated, it should remain so both because it would thus be true to its origins and because the text of the unillustrated version was revised to remove references to the illustrations—another fact not mentioned in Penguin. In the end, the Penguin edition demonstrates, without explanation, that the editor’s goal in making editorial decisions was to represent Vanity Fair as he wished to see it, as a retouched aesthetic object without regard to the work as a historical artefact or a historical textual version. Unfortunately, as with so many classroom editions, the editor is ambivalent and unclear in his statements about the edition he is trying to represent. He gives historical justifications for some decisions and aesthetic ones for others. He is not the first confused and confusing editor of Vanity Fair, but the unfortunate result is that readers are particularly at the mercy of the views of an editor who fails to give pertinent information that would qualify his editorial decisions. The Penguin editor does not even suggest that other approaches might be possible or fruitful, let alone better. So much for the illustrations. In textual matters the Penguin editor makes it appear that he examined carefully the textual differences between the manuscript, the first edition and the cheap edition. He dutifully and in traditional scholarly fashion lists emendations, indicating which emendations represent restorations of the manuscript, which restore the first edition and which are made on the editor’s own apparently unaided critical judgment. The emendations he draws from the manuscript and from the first edition are all required because errors were introduced during production of the 1853 edition and survived in the 10 Letter to Mrs. Carmichael-Smyth, 2 July 1847. Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, ed. Gordon Ray, II, (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1945), 309.

40

VARIANTS 4 2005

edition that Carey used as his base text. One acute emendation Carey introduces regularizes the name of Ensign Stubble, which is rendered inconsistently in the manuscript and in every other edition, including the two I edited. However, all but three of the other Penguin emendations, made “without support from the MS or 1848” (p. 866), had coincidentally already been made and recorded both in the 1991 Garland scholarly edition (cited in the Penguin edition’s bibliography) as well as in the 1993 Norton Critical Edition. One rather famous emendation that Carey and I both adopt “without support” was in fact first made by George Saintsbury for the 1908 Oxford edition (p. 187.18: respected for repeated—in the phrase: the auctioneer repeated his discomposure). The two emendations that Carey makes that I did not make, I had mentioned as possible emendations in the textual notes in my edition, where I explained why I declined to emend and, on reconsideration, would still decline to emend (p. 412.18: towers for towns and p. 591.9: Sir for Mr). Carey does not mention these earlier occurrences of his original emendations. For uninformed readers, the Penguin edition furthers the impression of textual responsibility and acumen by pointing out two or three of Thackeray’s revisions—i.e., places in the text that do not require editorial intervention but where revision shows the author at work. Regrettably, the Penguin editor manages to misreport the most important revision as the deletion of a sentence rather than the substitution of one sentence for another.11 Moreover, readers are not told that these two or three revisions are selected from among hundreds of revisions nor that textually the unillustrated version was systematically revised from its first published form so that it no longer referred to the illustrations. For example, in the serial and first edition, the narrator says: “But my kind reader will 11 The manuscript says: “Ill-natured persons, however, say that Rebecca was born before the celebration of her excellent parents union.” The first edition says, instead, “And curious it is, that as she advanced in life, this young lady’s ancestors increased in rank and splendour.” That is, Thackeray substituted a marginally morally acceptable statement for a marginally morally unacceptable one. John Carey leads readers of the Penguin edition to believe that the manuscript just had an extra sentence, which was “wisely cut” because it was “a pompous irony”. Of course, Carey may himself have thought the deleted sentence was a pompous irony, but he can have no knowledge of why it was cut, and he seems not to know that it was cut only when the new sentence about the advancing nobility of Becky’s ancestors was added.

Peter L. Shillingsburg Practical Editions of Literary Texts

41

please to remember that these histories in their gaudy yellow covers, (an accurate portrait of your humble servant) professes to wear neither gown nor bands, but only the very same long-eared livery, in which his congregation is arrayed.” This sentence appears nowhere in Carey’s edition, and, to be fair, neither does the illustration to which it refers. Yet it could be argued that this sentence is a crucial clue to readers about how to evaluate the voice of the intruding narrator and about how to picture him to themselves—a comic stage presence in costume, capable of, but not necessarily always, telling the truth. The clown contemplating himself in a cracked mirror in the one illustration the Penguin does reproduce is, arguably, the same one holding forth on the cover. Deprived as they are of the cover art and of the sentence referring to it, might readers still be able to recover the lost idea from this one reproduced illustration? At the least, an edition that purports to have a scholarly base and which is designed and marketed as a study edition could be expected to include such significant information. The real shocker, however, showing a nearly criminal naïveté about textual criticism and the basic responsibilities of editing, is that Carey misrepresents what he has done as an editor. The Note on the Text says plainly enough: “The present edition follows the text of the first cheap edition, revised by Thackeray and published in 1853.” That is not so. The text reproduced in the Penguin edition is based on the same text used in the previous Penguin edition, which in turn was based on some unknown late reprint that is riddled with errors—errors of which Carey shows himself completely unaware. For example, in Chapter 10, Becky gives “her advice as to the trees which were to be lopped in the shrubberies, the garden-beds to be dug, the crops which were to be cut,” and so on. All editions in Thackeray’s lifetime, including the 1853, say “garden-beds to be dug”; Carey’s edition says, “garden beds to bed up’—so did the previous, unemended Penguin edition, and so do two other cheaply produced modern paperbacks (Everyman and Pan). Somewhere in the multiple textual transmittals of the novel down through the years the corruption was introduced, and Carey preserves it.

42

VARIANTS 4 2005

I have not yet found the edition in which this error was first introduced, but it is not to be found in the 1853 edition nor in the multiple reprints of that edition up through 1864, by which time Thackeray was dead. If one were to speculate about this error, it is not difficult to imagine that in some unauthoritative posthumous edition the spacer in “be dug” dropped out and the “d” of “dug” drifted over next to “be” so that the phrase appeared to say “garden-beds to bed ug”. An editor, basing his own new text on that unauthoritative text, might have fixed that in the easiest possible way, by changing “bed ug” to “bed up” rather than by restoring “be dug”. Who knows when the hyphen in “garden-beds” was removed. Carey did not himself introduce either misreading, but he failed to detect and correct them. But why bother having to detect and correct errors in unauthoritative editions. Why not just go back to the text announced, the actual 1853 edition, and start there? Thackeray was not so sloppy a writer as to allow two forms of the same word to show up that close to one another. Many of his manuscript revisions eliminate such echoes. Had the Penguin editor actually done what he said he did—follow the 1853 edition—these errors would not have marred the edition. The Penguin edition of Vanity Fair, though undoubtedly itself now an historical artefact, in fact distorts the history of the text, chooses a copy-text of unknown provenance, and emends it to create a new neverbefore-seen text of the novel with some misinformation offered and a great deal of information missing. A little information about textual histories, especially when some of it is incorrect information, is not necessarily better than a total absence of pretence to give such information. In fact this editor has simply followed common practice in the production of practical editions: providing quasi-scholarly and quasi-aesthetic rationales for producing a cheap edition cheaply—after all, who will notice? Given this practice, is it possible that the editor or his publisher actually believe that serious or accurate textual scholarship is necessary in a classroom? And yet, for all that, Carey’s critical introduction to the novel is otherwise accurate, sympathetic, insightful, and well-written. I will return to the problem of good criticism written by those who do not take the Peter L. Shillingsburg Practical Editions of Literary Texts

43

time to sort out textual histories completely or accurately. Understanding this phenomenon is part of understanding the schizophrenia between research and pedagogy. Argument I It remains to be shown that the basic principles of textuality, a text’s sources, its formats, its contexts, its histories, its textual variants, and its proofread accuracy are matters of concern or importance, not only for basic research and the high and narrow investigations of textual historians but for critics generally and for students at the beginning of their literary studies. I will begin with textual accuracy, for in the minds of most scholars, it stands as paramount, but in the practice of classroom text editions it gets scant attention. In the autumn of 2003 many persons received and forwarded a series of emails relating to an alleged study at Cambridge about the effect of scrambled orthography in the message displayed here. Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Many thought it a good joke and passed it on to email friends for a laugh. A few thought it might have serious implications to do with dyslexia. One or two tried to trace the study and found that although there was no such study done at Cambridge, there had been a dissertation done at Nottingham University in 1976 on the subject of scrambled words on reading.12 Journalists wrote in to say wisely that yes, the ease with which the human mind corrects such errors is a common and unhappy experience in proofreading. There are bulletin boards where one can trace these discussions.13 To me the whole event struck like a bucket of ice water poured down my neck because as a textual critic much of my life’s work has been 12 Rawlinson, G. E. (1976) The significance of letter position in word recognition. Unpublished PhD Thesis, Psychology Department, University of Nottingham, Nottingham UK. 13

44

www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/∼matt.davis/Cmabrigde/.

VARIANTS 4 2005

dedicated to the notion that accuracy matters, that editing is not only the process of ensuring that typos are eliminated but that the precise words and the precise forms of the words in spelling, punctuation, fonts and so forth be preserved or restored as a necessary preliminary and adjunct to serious scholarly interpretation. I remember once being scandalized by a conference speaker who predicted that the holding capacity for new hard disks would in ten years’ time make it possible to store transcripts of the contents of whole libraries on one disk. When I asked who would vouch for the accuracy of such texts, I was told that we would just have to learn to put up with noise in the result. Looking at this rather obvious display of the fact that we can put up with quite a lot of noise made me think again about the basic assumptions of my profession. It made me want to re-examine the premises for scholarly editing. It made me think that in close communities of intellectual interest, such as that represented by textual critics and scholarly editors—a group to which I belong—there might be certain basic ideas that go rather a long time without examination because the in-group all agree and therefore can take these things for granted. Of course it is normal in any field of knowledge for research to lead to conclusions that will form the foundation of further work. But it is also a well-known phenomenon that the foundations of any profession need from time to time to be re-examined and that its accepted practices and methodologies be reviewed. This email made me begin to wonder if it was not time for a review of foundations. Such a review will require that many persons think about and discuss the subject, but I can make some suggestions about such a possible review. And the process will shed light on the schizophrenia affecting literary text production, though it will not offer a cure. I began by trying to think about the orthographic phenomenon illustrated in the email. The rules of that game are that first and last letters must remain the same and that no letters be left out or added. That means immediately that all one-letter, two-letter and three-letter words must remain spelled correctly. It means that four-letter words can only swap the two internal letters in one way. Thus, most words in most prose would be unaffected. But then I ran into the following three examples: Peter L. Shillingsburg Practical Editions of Literary Texts

45

1. A vheclie epxledod at a plocie cehckipont near the UN haduqertares in Bagahdd on Mnoday kilinlg the bmober and an Irqai polcie offceir 2. Big ccunoil tax ineesacrs tihs yaer hvae seezueqd the inmcoes of mnay pneosenirs 3. A dootcr has aimttded the magltheuansr of a tageene ceacnr pintaet who deid aetfr a hatospil durg blendur The person who presented these examples (on (http://www.mrccbu.cam.ac.uk/∼matt.davis/Cmabrigde/1.html and following) noted that each sentence is progressively harder to read. In part it is because of the increased length and increased technicality of the words in sentence three. In part it is because longer words allow moving letters further from their original position. And in part it is because single sounds represented by combinations of letters such as th, sh, ch, and by double letters like ee, oo, tt, ss, pp, and by multiple letters like augh, ough, and eaux can be split up or adventitiously created in the new scramble. Further reflection on the implications of these examples to textual criticism brings up one more very important consideration: that when errors or inadvertent or malicious or benignly intended alterations enter the text of a literary work in the real world of book production, nobody abides by the rules of this demonstration. The results range from the introduction of irresolvable bits of nonsense to the substitution of utterly plausible words—a substitution that usually passes under the radar screen of the most attentive readers. And yet, even this initial cursory analysis begins to do two interesting things, I think. First, it makes one look again, and from a different perspective, at one of the propositions that undergird textual criticism: the importance of textual accuracy. And second, it begins to reinstate a view that initially I thought was threatened by the first shocking example of how easily one reads scrambled texts. That view holds that a careful analysis of texts, of the ambiguity of potential errors, and an understanding of how people process texts is what textual criticism is about. The point of textual criticism is NOT to get the text right and accurate; it is to examine the history of texts for all their clues and evidence 46

VARIANTS 4 2005

in order to get a solid view of how they were created, deployed, manipulated, and appropriated so that we can better understand the history and significances of our books. Textual criticism is not the same as copy-editing to detect and correct typos and grammatical errors, nor is it the same as commercial editing to make texts more attractive or readable. Nor is it to be content with the publication of a text in one way because some author at some point either declared herself to be content—as Charlotte Bronte famously did when she thanked her publisher George Smith for taking care of her punctuation in Jane Eyre—or failed to declare himself either content or not content—as Thackeray failed to do concerning the unillustrated edition of Vanity Fair. Textual criticism is not about settling on a text and forgetting that it has an artefactual history with both material and semiotic dimensions. It is about understanding the textual condition and the particular ways in which individual editions and printings and even individual copies of books index their own histories and the networks of social, political, and economic conditions surrounding their creation and distribution. Argument II A second approach to whether basic principles of textuality are important to the serious reading of literary texts addresses the roles of revision, of provenance of texts, and of contexts. I am distinguishing here between reading for pleasure by sophisticated readers, whose enjoyment of reading is perhaps enhanced by their performance of the highwire act of reading richly and thickly out of the wealth of their personal skill and knowledge as readers—I say am distinguishing that kind of experience from the experiences of student readers confronting literary texts seriously (not primarily as a form of entertainment, though students frequently enjoy the texts they study) as intense engagements undertaken in part in order to learn how to experience an intense engagement with literary works and in part to engage a particular text intensely. How do students do that, how could they do it, and how should they do it? In some form these are questions editors should be asking as they prepare their editions. Unfortunately many instead ask, how have Peter L. Shillingsburg Practical Editions of Literary Texts

47

these editions been done before? what are the series guidelines for this volume? One gets the feeling that parts of the classroom edition are done proforma without serious attention to design or usefulness in the presentation of their work. Biographical information is given because that is normal, not because the information about the writer’s life seems to affect in important ways how one understands the text of the work. Textual information is given in ways that invite readers to skip and with no attempt to indicate in what way that information might be important to the reader’s notion of what the text says or which available alternative text is being presented. Explanatory notes are given as minimal identification of places or names or sources for literary allusions. In this area particularly editors seem loath to indicate the significance of materials identified in the notes—perhaps because there is always a reviewer ready to declare that no note was required and further explanation de trope. My favorite example of the use of textual information to help readers determine how to read the finally accepted text is from Vanity Fair.14 It helps us deal intelligently with the question of how Thackeray uses the commenting narrator in the book when the following information is withheld? When Sir Pitt, in Chapter X, tells his son, Pitt, not to “preachify” while Miss Crawley, the wealthy spinster aunt, is visiting, the first version in the manuscript reads: “Why, hang it, Pitt,” said the father to his remonstrance. “You wouldn’t be such a flat15 as to let three thousand a year go out of the family?” “What is money compared to our souls, Sir?” continued Crawley who knew he was not to inherit a shilling of his aunt’s money. [italics added]

The last phrase, in the narrator’s voice, “who knew he was not to inherit a shilling of his aunt’s money” was cancelled. The accusation instead becomes Sir Pitt’s, who says: “You mean that the old lady won’t leave the money to you.” However, after the father’s retort, the 14 I used this example in William Makepeace Thackeray: A Literary Life (Palgrave 2001), and in Manuscript—Variant—Genese, ed. Edward Vanhoutte. 15

48

The word “flat” replaced the word “simpleton” in the manuscript.

VARIANTS 4 2005

manuscript revision continued in the narrator’s voice, to make a bald assertion about the characters: “You mean that the old lady won’t leave the money to you”—this was in fact the meaning of Mr. Crawley. No man for his own interest could accommodate himself to circumstances more. In London he would let a great man talk and laugh and be as wicked as he liked: but as he could get no good from Miss Crawley’s money why compromise his conscience?. This was another reason why he should hate Rawdon Crawley. He thought his brother robbed him. Elder brothers often do think so; and curse the conspiracy of the younger children wh. unjustly deprives them of their fortune. [italics added]

This unmistakable narratorial commentary, telling the reader the exact moral standing of both father and son, is then also cancelled in favour of a musingly ambiguous question. In proof the passage appeared as follows: “You mean that the old lady won’t leave the money to you”—and who knows but it was Mr. Crawley’s meaning?

When the last version appeared in proof, someone (probably Thackeray) drove the doubtfulness home by adding italics to was: “and who knows but it was Mr. Crawley’s meaning?” The effect is to cast additional doubt on the only remaining narratorial statement in this scene. While the italics may intensify the suspicion that both Crawleys are corrupt to the core, one cannot say that the authorial commentary has actually directed the reader unambiguously. None of this information is in the Penguin edition, or any other classroom edition except the Norton Critical Edition. Should one conclude charitably that students of Vanity Fair would have no use for this kind of material? Or would it be fair to conclude that such material is left out of most editions because it is too much trouble to find it out and present it in ways that readers might find useful? Perhaps our biggest problem remains the basic ignorance of leading academics who are frequently called upon by leading book publishers to mediate editorially between literary texts and students. Maybe we should invite critics like the Penguin editor of Vanity Fair to explain, concerning the basic business of reading and teaching literary texts from the past, why they think the field of textual studies is adequately addressed Peter L. Shillingsburg Practical Editions of Literary Texts

49

by misinformation, little information, and critical but uninformed and under-explained editorial decisions. Perhaps textual critics are the ones who need to sit up and listen. On the surface, however, it appears that editors and publishers of classroom texts commonly neglect or misrepresent the intricacies and nuances of textual histories. Argument III The problems outside the field of textual scholarship are caused, to some extent at least, by the problems inside the field. It is time to look at the comfortable truths in the field implied by the phrases “established text” and “the book as artefact.” It is a fact that analytical bibliography and descriptive bibliography have paid extremely close attention to material texts since their inception. There is no book more detailed than Fredson Bowers’ The Principles of Bibliographical Description (1949) for learning how to look at the material object that is a book. However, it takes serious dedication to read Bowers’ book on how to look at a book. And Bowers does not tell the whole story. It took D. F. McKenzie’s The Sociology of Bibliography (1986) to get people generally to see that the significance of a work as a socio/economic object is coded into its material makeup just as much as in its lexical content. More often than not, it seems, the signals sent by the book as material object (the bibliographic code) were “unintended” by the author of the text (the lexical content)—though that is not always so. Nevertheless, the material object does signify hugely in ways that Fredson Bowers did not discuss in The Principles of Bibliographical Description. It was, furthermore, Jerome McGann and not D. F. McKenzie who popularized the concept of bibliographical codes,16 and he did a good job, for it has been years since I have been to a conference in which bibliographical codes did not feature. Just so, it has been years since I’ve been to a conference in which the tools of descriptive bibliography have been used to illuminate a lexical crux. If descriptive bibliographers can with any justice be said to have been blind to the social implications of the material objects they 16 Initially in a review of McKenzie’s book, “Theory of Texts” London Review, 18 Feb.1988, 20–21; and then in more detail in The Textual Condition Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991.

50

VARIANTS 4 2005

were examining, would it not be a shame if we were so dazzled by the bibliographical codes that we lost sight of the lexical implications of the minute differences in texts that frequently result from production and reproduction practices. I reflect for a moment on John Carey’s ability to produce a brilliant introduction to Vanity Fair while ignoring and misrepresenting bibliographical evidence of revision and the socio/economic significance of the cheap edition he says he chose as the basis for his student edition and ponder on the fact that, all things considered, the vastly greater source of signification in any book is its lexical content. And I ponder further the fact that the bibliographical code may index significances to us, but that in fact a much more important element in the historical apprehension of any work is the whole biographical, historical, cultural, and literary envelope that informed the composition and publication of the work—in whatever form—in the first place. What I am suggesting here is that literary criticism is enriched by textual criticism and by the history of the book, and by explorations of the bibliographic code and by the opening up of the historical contexts of the generation and production of works, but a far more important point is that textual critics and historians of the book must demonstrate the importance of these inquiries by writing detailed and difficult and important literary criticism themselves. Textual critics must do this because literary critics are carrying the day with lip service only paid to what I here claim is worthy of careful attention. Textual critics must edit student editions, not just the scholarly ones. They must write the critical essays, not just the textual ones. They must not bury their findings in an apparatus where it is difficult to find. They must not present the reading public with whole alternative texts without also explaining the interpretive consequences of their differences. They must not expect literary critics to come to them and ask them what they know. Literary critics have little reason to believe that textual critics know anything of interest to them because textual critics spend most of their time talking to each other and hiding their best insights in unfriendly places. And one wonders sometimes if textual critics are listening even among themselves. I earlier referred to Helge Nowak’s brilliant essay on the Peter L. Shillingsburg Practical Editions of Literary Texts

51

differences between the British and American Editions of A. S. Byatt’s Possession. It contains evidence of her very careful, detailed comparisons of the editions and her discovery of Byatt’s own comments on the differences. She discusses the possible implications arising from the fact that the American edition contains corrections of chronology, historical facts, and typos that are not corrected in the British editions, the fact that the American edition contains unauthorized changes actively opposed by the author, and that the later British editions contain corrections and revisions not found in the American edition. In short, there is no edition that made everyone happy or even that faithfully represented the work as it was conceived at any given point. They are all flawed and yet they each have aspects that make them superior to the others. And each is also the accurate witness to a social nexus and historical event. Nowak’s investigative work is clear and impressive. It is clear, too, that Nowak has been reading the literature of textual criticism, for though she (mistakenly in my view) aligns Carl J. Weber with the Greg/Bowers school of editing—mistaken both by giving Weber more credit than he deserves and by making a rather simple, monolithic school out of the really wide ranging and nuanced work of Bowers17 —nevertheless, as I say, Nowak refers cogently to “theorists that regard texts as [the] outcome of a collaborative effort by more than just their authors, and as a product that has been presented to different 17 [This is Nowak’s footnote] Over the last three decades, theorists in this field have developed an outlook on changes made to a text during its publication history that is now incongruous with, for instance, the one Carl J. Weber took at the beginning of the 1950s. He followed up the admonition quoted in the motto to my article with further pieces of advice:

The wise man will act differently. He will know his American edition before he goes far with it. He will trust it as he would a rattlesnake. He will neither quote from it, nor rely on conclusions drawn from it, until he has compared it, word for word, with the parent English edition, or has assured himself that the English author saw and approved of what his American publisher put into print for him.[footnote 28] Not only because of its anti-American overtones, this is a very biased view, yet not an uncommon one. When it is simplified to the point that later editions not overseen by an author can do only harm to his or her text, Weber’s view may be taken as an example for the Greg/Bowers school of editing (named after its leading proponents, W.W. Greg and Fredson Bowers). [For the whole of Nowak’s essay see http://webdoc.gwdg.de/edoc/ia/eese/artic97/nowak/8-97.html accessed 27/9/04] This apparently applies also to texts travelling in the opposite direction: For a closer look at American editions of British authors, cf. Bruccoli (1969).[Nowack’s note]

52

VARIANTS 4 2005

audiences in different historical situations. Consequently, rather than conceiving literary texts as unique stable entities — as ‘works’ —, many theorists now point to the diversness [sic] of textual ‘versions’, to all of which they grant equal status.” This is quite right and Nowak goes on to argue the various merits of each existing edition in an enlightened way. It is a bit of a shock, therefore, to read the conclusion she reaches: Did the American editor really do some harm in the process, as the embittered author feels? Seen without Byatt’s understandably personal bias, and without regard to the notion of the equality of all published versions, the American paperback’s bibliographic code is arguably more reasonable, consistent, and attractive, than the “British” presentation of the text. Any judgment on the reworking of the text itself (the linguistic code), meanwhile, remains to my mind simply a matter of taste — and not, as the author sees it, one of principle.

What can be the meaning of the throw-away phrase “the equality of all published versions”? And can it be the case that taste and not principles are involved in the choices among the competing editions? And why does this excellent article stop with a description of the variants and what appears to be a basic assumption that one will of course want to choose one of the options and to do so on the basis of taste? Are we so committed to the notion that either there must be a best text, or that our interactions with novels must be with one out of many editions. Are we so used to reading linearly and singly that we have not imagined the full uses of our own discoveries. I am not suggesting that there is anything wrong with Nowak’s approach. She has done a splendid job of examining and presenting the evidence. But I am suggesting that even though this is very good work, its conclusion has failed in a very ordinary way—a way that plagues much work by textual critics. We haven’t seen or presented the significance of our findings in conjunction with a major critical engagement with the work.

Peter L. Shillingsburg Practical Editions of Literary Texts

53

Conclusion I would like to suggest just one idea about reading works that I think would lead us to reject the notion that we really want readers to interact with the best text or that they should interact with some taste-based choice among alternative texts. Or that classroom editors should or can oversimplify and misrepresent texts on behalf of readers. This idea is that communication and understanding of texts, both spoken and written, involve a calculation of choices among options at every point in a sentence. When we hear that it was a green house, we understand that in terms of its not being a white one or a red one rather than essentially in its being green. If we are told that the footballer is out, we probably understand that as opposed to his being in bounds, but if we are told the boxer is out, we understand it as opposed to being still conscious and fighting. If we are told that there is no doubt but that the war in Iraq will continue for years to come, we might very well understand that the phrase “there is no doubt” is to be understood in opposition to other possible phrases for that position in the sentence such as “We fear that the war will continue” or “There is no possibility of a quick end” or “There are doubts about the duration” or “It will end quickly”. The point of this idea is that frequently if not always our understanding of a spoken or written word or phrase involves our casting it against its possible alternatives. Applied to textual criticism this idea suggests that textual variants give us clear indications of what the chosen text is to be understood in opposition to. We are better off as readers by seeing what was considered and changed than by having just one version with which to engage. Now, obviously, textual criticism does not give us a variant for every phrase in a book, nor at any point, with the possible exception of some of Emily Dickinson’s poems in manuscript, does it give all the relevant other possible phrases or words. Our reading strategies are not restricted to what textual criticism offers us or what the bibliographic codes indicate. But if we see the full potential interpretive consequences of variants both in lexical and bibliographical codes, and if we combine these observations with fuller critical readings, perhaps we can raise the consciousness of publishers and critics to the importance of full engagements with the panoply of the book as artefact. Perhaps we can have an effect on the 54

VARIANTS 4 2005

proliferation of cheap student editions and vanilla electronic texts that presuppose that the lexical text is all that matters. Perhaps even more important, such a result might help close the gap between what we know as researchers and what we present in the classroom. Perhaps we know too much to regale students with the whole load, but we don’t do them a favor by suppressing whole areas of knowledge and forms of investigation.

Peter L. Shillingsburg Practical Editions of Literary Texts

55

This page intentionally left blank

“Good white paper, with a new, clear and elegant typeface” Early Arnamagnæan Editions Ragnheiur Mósesdóttir On Thursday the 1st of October 1772 six gentlemen gathered for a meeting in Copenhagen. Four of them had been appointed by King Christian VII (1766-1808) to a Commission for the Arnamagnæan Bequest, two had for 12 years been the trustees of the Bequest, which had been established in 1760 to fund the work and production of text editions from the manuscripts in the so-called Arnamagnæan collection. The leader of this meeting was Bolle Willum Luxdorph, a royal administrator, who had taken a great interest in the collection of books and manuscripts that professor Árni Magnússon had left the University of Copenhagen in his will in 1730. Árni Magnússon and the manuscripts Árni Magnússon (1663-1730) was an Icelander, who came to Copenhagen in 1683 to study at the university, as was customary for the sons of the better families in Iceland. Copenhagen was at this time the capital of Iceland, which was part of the Danish realm for over 500 years, from the 1380s to 1944. Árni had grown up amongst books and learning. He had been specially influenced by his maternal grandfather, pastor Ketill Jörundsson, a learned man and a student of old Icelandic texts, which he copied extensively. After Árni came to Copenhagen he worked for the antiquarian Thomas Bartholin (1659-1690) and in this way he developed a keen interest in the collection and utilisation of Icelandic manuscripts, as well as Danish and Norwegian. In his public life Árni was among other things professor at the University and a secretary in the King’s private archives. In 1702 Árni was commissioned to go to Iceland to collect information on the fiscal status of the country and to conduct a universal census of the population, the first still-extant census in the world. He stayed in Iceland for 10 years, during which time he studied, copied

and collected manuscripts containing among other things the sagas of Icelanders and the kings of Norway. When Árni died in January 1730 he left behind a large number of books and manuscripts, a collection, — though somewhat reduced by the great fire of Copenhagen in 1728 — which was and still is the largest collection of early Scandinavian manuscripts in the world. Árni’s will established the Arnamagnæan Bequest, to give grants to two Icelandic students to work on the manuscripts and to edit the texts in his manuscript collection. Many years would pass, but finally in 1760 the Bequest became a reality. Two trustees were appointed by King Frederik V (1723-1766). They were Johann Christian Kall, royal advisor and professor of Hebrew at the University, and Bernhard Møllmann, royal advisor and also professor of antiquities at Copenhagen University. The manuscripts were kept under the observation of the librarian of the University Library, who was to make sure that they were not removed and to provide the students paid by the Bequest with the manuscripts they were to work on. Somehow, though, the publications did not materialise. This is presumably where Luxdorph stepped in. The Arnamagnæan Commission Luxdorph (1716-1788) was one of the highest ranking public servants in the monarchy, a keen book-collector, and it is likely that it was at his instigation that the king appointed the Commission. He had already many years earlier inspected the manuscript collection in its new domicile in the Trinitatis church tower, and he undoubtedly had a hand in matters when the charter for the Bequest was given in 1760. The other members of the new Commission were Jacob Langebek (1710-1775), royal councillor and head of the Royal archives, whose magnum opus is Scriptores Rerum Danicarum medii ævi. In his early years Langebek had also translated Kristni saga, the history of the christianisation of Iceland, the work that was to be the first publication of the new Commission.1 Langebek and Luxdorph were joined by two other distinguished gentlemen. The Icelander Jón Eiríksson (1728-1787), was a royal advisor as 1

58

Jón Helgason, “Fra Langebeks auktionskatalog” Opuscula 5 (1975), 181-215; 199.

VARIANTS 4 2005

well as a librarian at the Royal library and was well versed in the Nordic saga material. The fourth member of the Commission was Peter Frederik Suhm (1728-1798), the only one who was not employed by the king. Suhm was independently wealthy and published many works on history and literature.2 Hannes Finnsson (1739-1796), later bishop in Skálholt, was hired as a secretary to the Commission, and was a philologist in his own right. Thus, the members of the new Commission were men of social standing, who were both willing and able to make a difference. In the period 1772-1936 only minor changes were made to the organisation of the Commission. Members who passed away were replaced by new ones, who also were men of standing as public servants and men of letters. From 1772 to 1936 the Commission published 24 editions of texts from the manuscript collection and three facsimile editions. In addition to this there were other publications such as Árni Magnússon’s public and private correspondence, a two volume work on the life and times of Árni, and a catalogue of the manuscript collection.3 The early editions The charter for the Bequest from 1760 does give some guidelines as to how the work on the publication of the texts should be carried out. The manuscripts in the Arnamagnæan collection were first choice, but when they had been published the attention could be turned to other works concerning northern antiquity, history or language. There are clear guidelines as to the make up of the publications and the conditions of sale. De Bøger, som saaleedes af Legato oplegges, skulle alle trykkes paa godt hvid Papir, samt med nye, reene og ziirlige Typis. Ethvert Exemplar maa hæftes førend det sælges, paa det at Publicum kand viide sig sikker for Defecter. Priisen ansættes saa taalelig, som skee kand, da det er nock, naar Legatum omtrent bliver skadesløs. [The books thus published by the Bequest shall all be printed on good white paper, with new, clear and elegant typeface. And they are to be bound in cardboard before sale so that the public can be sure that they are not defective. The price is to be 2

P. F. Suhm, Historie af Danmark 1-14. (Copenhagen, 1782-1828).

3

For a list of the text publications see: http://www.hum.ku.dk/amkom/amkompub-dk.html [28 October 2004].

Ragnheiur Mósesdóttir “Good white paper...”

59

as moderate as possible, for it is enough for the Bequest to break as near even as possible.]4

There were, however, no guidelines as to which texts to publish. Before the appointment of the Commission in 1772, there had been talk of publishing Heimskringla (histories of the kings of Norway), Knytlingasaga (about the Danish kings5 ), and the poetic Edda. The new Commission, however, does not seem to have been interested in king’s sagas. In the minutes from the first meeting it only says, that it was decided: …at begynde enten med Christendoms-Saga, eller en anden liden Piece som da kunde trykkes i Octavo, med latinske bogstaver, samt latinsk Version og Orde Register, hvilken format for fremtiden ogsaa blev vedtagen at bruge til smaa Piecer. […to start with the history of Christianisation [of Iceland] or some such small pamphlet which could be printed in octavo format, in roman type-face, with a Latin translation and word list, the format also chosen for small pamphlets in the future.]6

One of the requirements of the Bequest was that there should be a publication at least every other year. The new Commission was hard pressed to deliver, so they needed to find a worthy text, not too long, and which could be published without delay. Kristni saga suited that purpose well, as Luxdorph explains in the introduction to the edition. It is short, yet its contents are important: it describes the christianisation of Iceland and links Iceland to the rest of Scandinavia, especially Norway, from whence Iceland was settled. It was published in 1773 and the Commission decided that the logical continuation would be to publish Hungrvaka [An appetiser], the history of the first five bishops of Skálholt. But again it seems that the editorial work was going slowly, so when in a meeting in November 1773 Jón Eiríksson produced a near complete edition of Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu (Gunnlaug the serpent tongue) 4 Samling af Bestemmelser vedkommende Det Arnamagnæanske Legat. Udgivet af Kommissionen for Det Arnamagnæanske Legat (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1892), 11. 5 Knytlinga saga had in fact been prepared for publication by Hans Gram, one of the executors of Árni’s will. It was indeed printed in part, but there was a dispute with the printer which led to the destruction of the impression. 6 Den Arnamagnæanske Kommissions Arkiv. The Arnamagnæan Institute, Copenhagen. AMKA 5: Forhandlingsprotokol 1773-1942. October 1 1772.

60

VARIANTS 4 2005

Figure 1: The title-page of Kristni saga, 1773

which he had worked on, the Commission took the pragmatic decision to make Gunnlaugs saga its second publication …med samme Tryk og paa samme slags Papiir som Kristnisaga, men in qvarto saaledes at Texten og Versionen trykkes paa hver anden Side, Noterne der i mod udi Spalter, da i øvrigt de der i blandt som kunde udgiøre heele Afhandlinger, skal trykkes bag efter Bogen. […printed with

Ragnheiur Mósesdóttir “Good white paper...”

61

the same type face and on the same kind of paper as Kristnisaga, but in qvarto, such that the text and the [Latin] translation are printed on every other page, the footnotes on the other hand shall be in columns, and those among them that could constitute whole treatises shall be printed at the back of the book.]7

Gunnlaugs saga is thus the first Icelandic family saga to be published in a scholarly edition. It was published in 1775, and Hungrvaka not until 1778. In fact the Commission entered into an agreement with Søren Gyldendal that he would pay for the publication of Hungrvaka, and the Commission would pay him a fixed price for each sheet of printing paper to safeguard him from suffering a loss. In return Gyldendal was to give 30 free copies to the Commission. This is not the only example of the lack of funds in the Commission, because the next three publications bearing the Arnamagnæan headpiece are in fact paid for by P. F. Suhm. These are Hervarar saga, Víga-Glúms saga and Eyrbyggja saga published 1785, 1786 and 1787 respectively. They are all in quarto format and resemble Gunnlaugs saga in their lay-out. Suhm was wealthy and had many students who worked for him copying manuscripts in the Arnamagnæan collection. These three publications are always listed among the Commissions publications — with Suhm’s name on the title page along with that of the Bequest, so that there is no doubt that he paid for them. In the years previously to this Suhm had published several works based on manuscripts from the Arnamagnæan collection, but they do not carry Árni’s vignette and can therefore not be considered to be Arnamagnæan editions. These are Landnámabók, which appeared in 1774, Rímbeigla and Orkneyinga saga, both published in 1780. The work that perhaps can be considered the most ambitious project embarked upon by the Commission, was the three volume edition of the poetic Edda, often called Sæmundar Edda after Sæmundr frói Sigfússon, who bishop Brynjólfur Sveinsson in Skálholt had credited with collecting the poems.8 Already in 1773 the Commission had made arrangements with Gunnar Pálsson, a poor Icelandic parson, to start translating 7

AMKA 5. 18 November 1773.

8

Philip Pulsiano (ed.), Medieval Scandinavia: An Encyclopedia (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1993), 149.

62

VARIANTS 4 2005

Figure 2: Hervarar saga with the headpiece of Arnas by J. F. Clemens

the poems. But this work dragged out, and the first volume did not appear until 1787, the second came in 1818 and the third volume finally appeared 10 years later. The Commission originally decided not to include the two most important Eddic poems, Hávamál and Völuspá, in this edition, the reason being that they had already been published Ragnheiur Mósesdóttir “Good white paper...”

63

by Peder Hansen Resen.9 It was however decided in a meeting of the Commission in 1818 that the third volume should contain these poems “…med aldeles ny Behandling, da Resenii Udgave er saa ubrugelig og fuld af Feil”. [“…dealt with in a completely new way, as Resen’s edition is so useless and full of error.”]10 In the first volume there appears one of the few scholarly writings that Árni Magnússon himself actually undertook, a biography of Sæmundur Sigfússon the Wise. This publication is also financed in the same way as Hungrvaka by the publisher Gyldendal, except for the engravings, which the Commission paid for. One of the things that delayed the printing of the second volume of the Poetic Edda was the scarcity of paper after the Napoleonic Wars. Gyldendal was in fact unable to provide the better quality paper for the printing of the 25 copies the Commission had requested. In the list of publications by the Commission there is an edition of Njáls saga, the most famous of the Icelandic family sagas, from 1772. In fact it was not published by the Commission, but rather by an Icelander named Ólafur Ólavíus, who had gained royal permission for the publication. This edition differs from the ones the Commission then started publishing in that there is no Latin translation to accompany it. In 1809 the Commission published a Latin translation of the text, the work on which had already been started in the 1790s and paid for by Suhm. At his death in 1798 the Commission took over the project. Thus one can say that there were no really clear boundaries between the Commission as a royal organ and the workings of its individual members. Format The Njáls saga edition from 1772 is not only different from the editions published by the Commission in that it does not have a Latin translation. The main difference is that it is set in black letter, the type face used for more popular books. This might indicate that Ólavius intended the book for his countrymen and not for the learned audience of Europe. 9 Peder Hansen Resen, Ethica Odini pars Eddæ Sæmudi vocata Haavamaal... (Copenhagen, 1665). Philosophia antiqvissima norvego-danica dicta Woluspa… (Copenhagen, 1665). 10

64

AMKA 5. 16 March 1818.

VARIANTS 4 2005

Figure 3: Njáls saga from 1772

The other editions here mentioned are of a different nature. Kristni saga and Gunnlaugs saga serve well to illustrate the make up of the early editions. Kristni saga is a large octavo format and Gunnlaugs saga in quarto. Their lay-out is basically the same. The text of the manuscript chosen as the main text is printed on the verso side and the Latin translation on the recto side of the following leaf. The variant readings and the notes are at the bottom of the page. They are printed in roman type-face. At the back there are indexes of names and places and in some cases also glossaries of terms. Some of the other early editions contain treatises Ragnheiur Mósesdóttir “Good white paper...”

65

on matters concerning the ancient times of the North. In Gunnlaugs saga there are three such treatises. The first on the exposure of infants, the second on the Nordic tongue — called Danish Tongue — and finally one on the meaning of the word viking.11 It is thus clear that the Commission was true to the stipulations of The Árni Magnússon Bequest: to make known to the learned audience of Europe the old texts in a form that would best enhance understanding of the field.

Figure 4: An opening from Kristni saga, showing the lay-out of the edition This way of publishing is obviously not far from the format of modern editions of these old texts. One might indeed compare the lay-out of the edition of Eyrbyggja saga from 1787 with the Eyrbyggja edition published by the Commission in 200312 and see that there is no great difference in 11 “De Espositione Infantum”, “De lingvæ septentrionalis appelatione: Dönsk Tunga” and “De Vocibus Vikingr & Viking”. 12

Eyrbyggja sive Eyranorum historia quam mandate et impensas faciente perill. P. F. Suhm... (Copenhagen, 1787). Eyrbyggja saga. The Vellum Tradition, edited by Forrest S. Scott. Editiones Arnamagnæanæ, Series A, Vol. 18. (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzels Forlag, 2003).

66

VARIANTS 4 2005

the format, except that there is no Latin translation in the latter one, as we now have access to Old Norse dictionaries. But what model did the Commission have for the format of the editions? Britta Olrik Frederiksen has in a recent article13 discussed this development and has come to the conclusion that already in the early seventeenth century the practice of indicating variant readings was a reality in Scandinavian editions. Swedish scholars led the way, having presumably learned their trade from the Germans and the French. The French Scriptores series, which inspired Jacob Langebek to start his Danish series on the Danish medieval writers, of which only the first three volumes were published in his lifetime, seem not surprisingly to have inspired him not only as far as the content but as far as the form as well. His Scriptores series are among the earliest Danish publication to place the variant readings at the foot of the page.14 Langebek was a member of the Arnamagnæan Commission of 1772, so his influence surely must be felt here, and the fact that the other members of the Commission of 1772 also were men of standing, aware of the developments in the scholarly field of publishing, must have ensured that the publications followed the latest and most widely respected methods in text editing. The Arnamagnæan editions were usually printed in 500 copies each. This would seem to have been a standard number of copies for a learned publication.15 Of these one hundred were to be printed on better quality paper, so-called “writing-paper” also called Dutch paper in the archives of the Commission, the rest on French paper, which is not as heavy. As said before the type-face used for the editions is roman (antiqua), except for Njáls saga (1772). The main text is set with 14 points (mittel antiqua) and the notes with 10 points (korpus antikva). The translation is in italics, the same size as the main text, (kursiv antiqua).

13 Britta Olrik Frederiksen: “Under stregen” Varianter och bibliografisk beskrivning (Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, 2003), 13-78. 14

Ibid., 28. Jacob Langebek, Scriptores Rerum Danicarum Medii Aevii 1-9 (Copenhagen, 1772-

1878). 15 Harald Ilsøe, Bogtrykkerne i København ca. 1600-1810 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanums Forlag, 1992), 257-258.

Ragnheiur Mósesdóttir “Good white paper...”

67

Illustrations According to the charter all publications were supposed to bear a portrait of Árni Magnússon. So in its first meeting the Commission decided to set about having an engraving made from a painting owned by one of the Commissioners. In the first meeting Luxdorph asked whether “…ikke hans Hoved kunde stikkes a l’antiquo paa en Marmor Piedestal som Homer…blot med det Ord Arnas paa Piedestalen”. [“...his head could not be copperplated in the ancient style like Homer on a pedestal…with only the word Arnas written on it.”] And so they got Professor Johannes Wiedeweldt director of the Academy of Fine Arts to make a copy of the painting, and then the most renowned engraver of the day, J. F. Clemens, to make the vignette. There were in fact made two headpieces, one for the octavos and another one for the quarto editions. These were last used in the second volume of Snorra Edda in 1852. In 1869 a new portrait of Árni was made from the same painting as the old one, yet he is here much changed. In 1929 an adjustment was made to this headpiece, and the result is still used in the publications of the Arnamagnæan Commission. There were other illustrations. In Gunnlaugs saga there is a large insert engraving of the interior of an Icelandic farm in the “saga-age”. There are also engravings of lines from the different manuscripts used for the edition. For this purpose the Commission ordered an engraving of the first six lines of the manuscript Sth. Perg. 4 4to, which is in the Royal Library in Stockholm. This was not to cost too much though, as the dispute between the engraver and the Commission shows.16 It seems that the practice was to send leaves from the manuscripts to the engraver. In the Njáls saga manuscript AM 468 4to (Reykjabók), there is now a leaf missing which was there in the late 18th century when the manuscript was paginated. It seems that the leaf was just thrown away after it had been copied.17

16

AMKA 5. 6 April 1775. AMKA 35. Regnskabsprotokol 1750(59)-1897.

17

Njáls saga. The Arna-Magnæan Manuscript 468, 4to (Reykjabók). Manuscripta Islandica VI. (Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard, 1962), xix.

68

VARIANTS 4 2005

Editorial changes and new formats Until the 1880s there were no changes in the way the editions were laid out, with a Latin translation and notes in the same way as had been decided back in 1772. The last big edition in the old style is Snorri Sturluson’s Edda, the Prose Edda, published in three volumes from 1848 to 1887. In the nineteenth century the Commission was also involved in a totally new endeavour, facsimile editions of manuscripts. There are three such editions, all in octavo and in no way resembling the modern day sumptuous facsimile editions that now are getting far too expensive to produce. In addition to being a new way of publishing they are also the first to bear the new (improved?) headpiece of Árni Magnússon. The typeface has also become more modern, in line with advances in the printing process. The three facsimile editions were all produced at the instigation of P. G. Thorsen in connection with his work on runes.18 In the introduction to the first one Thorsen expresses the wish that this may be the beginning of a way of making the “vigtigste og skjönneste danske, islandske og norske Haandskrifter, som Legatet ejer, fremtræde i en saadan Monumentaludgave.” [“the most important and the most beautiful Danish, Icelandic and Norwegian manuscripts, owned by the Bequest, appear in such a monumental edition.”] It was however not until Ejnar Munksgaard began his splendid facsimile-publications in the 1930s that this work was continued. From now on the title page is also in Danish, there is no Latin translation, and the name of the editor starts appearing on the title-page, a practice only seen once in the old edition, in the publication of Hervarar saga in 1785. There was in fact some discussion in the Commission as to whether this was a desirable thing. Professor Finnur Jónsson stated that “…jeg er mest tilbøjelig til at holde på Traditionen. Læserne får tilstrækkelig Oplysning om Udgiverforholdet ved at Kommissionens Fortale omtaler det.” [“…my tentative leaning would be towards maintaining the old tradition. The readers receive enough information on the 18 Det Arnamagnæanske Haandskrift No. 24 4to…Valdemars sællandske Lovs første Femtedel, (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1869). Det Arnamagnæanske Haandskrift Nr. 674 A 4to…Elucidarius, (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1869). Det Arnamagnæanske Haandskrift no 28, 8vo, Codex Runicus, (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1877).

Ragnheiur Mósesdóttir “Good white paper...”

69

Figure 5: The first facsimile edition, with the new head-piece of Árni Magnússon

editorial work in the Commission’s introduction.”]19 As this discussion arose in connection with Finnur Jónsson’s publication of Snorra-Edda, another member of the Commission, Johannes Steenstrup, expressed the view that the content of the publication should determine whether the 19

70

AMKA no. 5. 18 November 1930.

VARIANTS 4 2005

name of the editor appear on the title-page, but he suggested that in this case it might be in order “…om den nu foreliggende Udgave, der sker ved et medlem af Kommissionen at bruge udtrykket: udgivet af Komm. Ved F. Jónsson.” [“…in the case of the present edition, which is done by a member of the Commission, to use the expression: Published by the Comm. by F. Jónsson.”]. Finnur Jónsson was a member of the Commission from 1906 and its chairman from 1920 until his death in 1934 and during his time as chairman he stood for all the Commissions publications. The role of the grant-receiving students was much diminished during his time, and has since completely changed. Printers, publishers and the public The first three editions were printed by Madame Godiche, whose print shop at the time was one of the most renowned in Copenhagen. From the start the Commission sought to make arrangements with book-sellers to take care of the distribution and sales of its publications. Kristni saga was distributed by the book-seller J. F. Heineck, which the Commission arranged to have 10% of the price of each copy sold. He was also to send some copies of the book to German journals so that it might be reviewed in time for the next book-fair at Leipzig. Gunnlaugs saga was also distributed by Heineck and he sent 50 copies of it to the Easter fair at Leipzig. But soon they came to an agreement with the publisher Søren Gyldendal, whose firm was establishing itself in the late 18th century. Gyldendal paid the publication costs of Hungrvaka in 1778, and in 1781 Jón Eiríksson further negotiated with Gyldendal’s heirs to have the firm bear the costs of the three volumes of the poetic Edda. The firm thus became the chief distributor of the Commission. There is evidence from the early nineteenth century that the Commission also sold their publications through other book-sellers, so there must have been some money in it. From the accounts of the Commission one can see that they received between one and two hundred kroner a year from Gyldendal from the sale of the books.20 Not a very large amount of money, by any standard. But then the charter for the Bequest stated that there should 20

AMKA 19-20. Sager til Kommissionens forhandlingsprotokol 1916-1924 og 1925-1936.

Ragnheiur Mósesdóttir “Good white paper...”

71

not be any direct financial gain from the sale of the publications, only that they should cover the production costs.21 Certain persons were to receive a copy of all the publications free of charge. Among them were the Icelandic bishops and chief magistrates, also certain foreign universities and learned societies in Sweden, Germany and England who pursued Nordic studies. Many asked for free copies, mostly students, and there does not seem to have been any difficulty in obtaining one directly from the Commission. A story from 1931 may serve to illustrate the way the publications were distributed. In that year there came a letter from the university library in Kiel in Germany asking for a free copy of the publication called Anecdoton, a thirteenth century Norwegian text, which had been published in 1815, and could in 1932 be bought from Gyldendal for one krone. Kiel also wanted a copy of the Latin translation of Njáls saga from 1809, listed at eight kroner.22 The then secretary of the Commission, Jón Helgason, has obviously been asked to see if there were copies to be had. On the letter from Kiel he has then written: “Af den første bog er der i de sidste 40 Aar bortgivet 5 ekspl., af den sidste 2, medens ikke et eneste eks. i samme aarrække er blevet solgt. 26/2 1931 J. H.” [“Of the first one five copies have been given away in the last 40 years, of the other one two copies, while not a single copy has been sold.”]23 The members of the Commission have then written their consent on the letter. So one must assume that the university library in Kiel was sent a copy of the two books. One of the interests of the Commission was the distribution of the publications abroad. As early as when Kristni saga was published there was in the minutes a mention of having copies sent off to the book-fair in Leipzig. And in the nineteenth century the Commission had an agent in Leipzig, Carl B. Lorck and later his associate Alphons Dürr.24 21

See above.

22

Books published by the Arna-Magnæan Commission,, (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1932), 3, 5. 23

AMKA 20.

24

AMKA 52. Dokumenter vedrørende salg af de af Kommissionen udgivne skrifter 1776-1977.

72

VARIANTS 4 2005

It seems that when we get into the 1930s the Commission is becoming more aware of the distribution side of things. And there arose a dispute with Gyldendal about advertising. The Commission suggested that Gyldendal produce a brochure in English about the Arnamagnæan publications. Gyldendal was not very keen on the idea — the costs would be too high, but finally in 1932 there appeared a brochure in English listing all the publications. The Commission does however seem to have been interested in changing distributor, and in 1936 they came to an agreement with the publisher Ejnar Munksgaard to take on the role. The old Commission’s final publication was Íslensk mialdakvæi, medieval Icelandic poetry, edited by Jón Helgason. Gyldendal published the first volume in 1936. Munksgaard then took over and most of volume two, which appeared in 1938, has him on the title-page as publisher. This volume also marks a new era in Arnamagnæan publishing, in that now for the first time there is a copyright clause included. Munksgaard was in this way a link between the old and new Commission, as he also became a member of the Arnamagnæan Commission appointed in 1936. What Munksgaard was in the publishing sphere for the Commission, professor Jón Helgason was in the editorial sphere. He also became a member of the Commission in 1936. He laid the foundation for the present-day publications of the Commission, with the two series Editiones Arnamagnæanæ from 1958, and Bibliotheca Arnamagnaæana from 1941.25 Reception As stated in the will of Árni Magnússon and subsequently in the Charter for the Bequest, the intention was to make the texts of the manuscript collection available to the public. This was not necessarily the general public, but certainly those who could read Latin and were interested in the history, language and literature of the North. As mentioned, the average number of copies printed of each edition was around 500. Today there are none left, and these editions can only very rarely be bought second hand. Judging from the lists of recipients of copies of the publications there were many takers and thus one might say that the 25

For a list of these see [28 October 2004]

Ragnheiur Mósesdóttir “Good white paper...”

73

purpose was reached. Within the limits of this paper it has not been possible to spend much time investigating reviews of the editions. But they were all reviewed, originally in Danish and German journals and later further afield. In 1773 there appeared a Danish review of Kristni saga, where the (anonymous) critic rejoices at the sight of this publication. The critic comments that finally it is possible to gain access to the texts of the old manuscripts, which has been difficult for different reasons. “Texterne, der ere saa vanskelige at læse, formedelst de mange, ikke altid eensformede Abbreviaturer, ere her blevne sammenlignede og udskreven, latinske Oversættelser forfærdiget, de behøvede Undersøgelser over mørke og vanskelige Steder anstillet og rige og fuldstændige Ordbøger kompileret.” [“The texts, that are so difficult to read, because of the many, not always uniform abbreviations, are here compared and written out, Latin translations are made, and the necessary examinations of murky and difficult places provided, and rich and complete dictionaries have been compiled.”].26 He does however criticise some of the Latin translations as not being thoroughly accurate, even if they convey the right meaning. In the same journal in 1775 there is a review of Gunnlaugs saga.27 The reviewer here is especially interested in the legal material that appears in the saga, which is not so surprising as the review is by P. Kofod Ancher, who at the time was in the process of publishing his work on the Danish legal history from Harald Blåtand onwards.28 He is also very interested in the treatise on the language that is printed after the saga. He praises the typography, which he says is “udført med Ziirlighed og Pragt.” [“done with elegance and magnificence.”] In Göttingsche gelehre Anzeigen in 1819 there appeared a review of the two first volumes of the poetic Edda, by Jacob Grimm.29 He is very impressed, yet surprised that 26

Kiøbenhavnske Kongl. Privil. Adressecontoirs Kritiske Journal 1773, No. 42 og 43, col. 465-474;

466. 27

Ibid., 1775, col. 305-310.

28

P. Kofod Ancher, En Dansk Lov-Historie fra Kong Harald Blaatands Tid til Kong Christian Den Femtes. (Copenhagen, 1769-1776). 29 Göttingische gelehre Anzeigen 1819, 1009-1019, reprinted in: Jacob Grimm, Kleinere Schriften I (Berlin, 1881), 212-227.

74

VARIANTS 4 2005

no-one in Germany at least seems to have been aware of this publication from the beginning. He complains that men have been taken (in) by the Ossian poem which has been translated into most European languages, but the Edda, which is such an important source for the ancient history of the Germanic peoples, has remained unnoticed. He praises the learned Danes for their patience and perseverance in the face of difficulty in getting the poems published. The Grimm brothers had published some of the eddic poems in 1815,30 and Grimm compares their edition with this new one which he sees as being far superior. Whether this is mock modesty is open to question. These are just glimpses from reviews of the early editions. There are many more to choose from and it would be a worthy study to investigate them more closely, not only for what they say about the editions, but also what they tell us about the world of Old Norse studies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Conclusion The 18th century saw a marked increase in book publishing in Denmark. There were many reasons for this. One may be that in 1770 freedom of the press became a reality for a short while. Another reason may be the increase in population which opened up a larger market. This meant that printers/publishers became attracted to Denmark.31 But this is not likely to have affected the workings of the Arnamagnæan Commission greatly. Their work was determined by the will of Árni Magnússon and the Charter for the Bequest. But they were not exempt from the workings of the real world. The fires of 1795 and 1807, the Napoleonic Wars and their aftermath, the state bankruptcy in 1812, among other things, made it very difficult to obtain paper for the printing. There were problems with stretching the Bequest sufficiently to pay for the publication costs as well as paying the stipends and the fees of the trustees and the secretary of the Commission. The main source for the history of 30 Lieder der alten Edda. Aus der Handschrift herausgegeben und erklärt durch die Brüder Grimm. I. (Berlin: Realschulbuchhandlung, 1815). 31

Ilsøe, 237.

Ragnheiur Mósesdóttir “Good white paper...”

75

the Commission, other than the publications themselves, is the archives of the Commission, and there one gets a glimpse of the problems there were. The Arnamagnæan Commission must be seen as a forerunner for and trendsetter in the scholarly editing and publishing of Old Norse literature, as well as in manuscript studies. On the basis of their work organisations such as the Det kongelige nordiske Oldskriftselskab, founded by C.C. Rafn in 1825, could continue and publish texts for the general public. Rafn was himself a member of the Arnamagnæan Commission and the same is true of most of the leading old Norse philologists in Copenhagen in this period. Even if these old editions now seem outdated and superseded by new ones, one can only agree with the words of the advertising brochure made by Gyldendal in 1932 where it says: In earlier times the Commission brought out editions of several of the most important works among the saga literature of Iceland. Later these editions were replaced by others which were more in accord with modern requirements, but the old ones remain of importance to the history of Scandinavian philology.32

32

76

Books Published…, 3.

VARIANTS 4 2005

To the Glory of Mary Liber Scole Virginis at Lund University Library Eva Nilsson Nylander Around 1060 the Danish king Sven Estridsen made a first attempt to organize a Danish autonomous church province by setting up eight dioceses, each with its own bishop.1 Henrik was bishop of Lund, Egino (d. 1072) of Dalby — only six kilometers away — but when Henrik died in the ominous year of 1066 (choked in his own vomit according to Adam) Dalby was suppressed and Egino moved to Lund (see Figure 1).2 After Egino’s death in 1089 Ricwal, a runaway canon from Paderborn, was appointed bishop.3 He was the man responsible for the increased building activity in the Cathedral, which like other projects of this size, was in continuous construction.4 The very early church dedicated to St Lawrence was initiated in around 1080 on the initiative of king Canute (see Figure 2). And when thus 40 years later, in 1103, the Northern region was finally divided from Hamburg-Bremen and organized as an independent administrative unit it was in Lund that Ascer (d. 1137), the first archbishop of Scandinavia, took his seat. To give a worthy, architectural background to this new power the church was enlarged and embellished. 1 For the early ecclesiastical organisation of Denmark see Adam of Bremen, Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum. Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Scriptores 7 (Hannover: 1977). 2 For the early ecclesiastical history of Lund see e.g. Ragnar Blomqvist, Lunds Historia. I. Medeltiden (Lund: 1951) with references; see also Lund — medeltida kyrkometropol. Symposium i samband med ärkestiftet Lunds 900-årsjubileum, 27-28 april 2003, Per-Olov Ahrén & Anders Jarlert (red.), Stiftshistoriska Sällskapet i Lunds Stift — Årsbok 2004, Bibliotheca Historico-Ecclesiastica Lundensis 47 (Lund: 2004) and Michael H. Gelting, “Da Eskil ville være ærkebiskop af Roskilde. Roskildekrøniken, Liber daticus Lundensis og det danske ærkesædes obhævelse 1133-1138 in ” Ett annat 1100-tal. Individ, kollektiv och kulturella mönster i medeltidens Danmark, red. Peter Carelli, Lars Hermansson & Hanne Sanders (Göteborg, Stockholm: 2004) 181-229. 3

For Ricwal see Lund University Library, Necrologium Lundense (Medeltidshandskrift 6) f.

143r. 4

For the history of the Cathedral of Lund see Thomas Rydén, Domkyrkan i Lund (Malmö: 1995) and idem, “Lunds domkyrka — det universella rummet”, in Metropolis Daniae. Ett stycke Europa, Kulturens Årsbok 1998, 98-115.

Figure 1: Lund University Library, Necrologium Lundense (Medeltidshandskrift 6) f. 174v: Nomina episcoporum nostrorum qui Sanctae Lundensi ecclesiae praefuerunt. a tempore Svenonis magni Regis [“Here are the names of our bishops who were in charge of the holy church in Lund from the reign of king Sven the Great”]

78

VARIANTS 4 2005

Figure 2: Lund University Library, Necrologium Lundense (Medeltidshandskrift 6) f. 1v: St Canute’s deed of gift of May 21st 1085: In Nomine Sancte et Individue Trinitatis. Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. Notum omnibus in Christo fidelibus esse cupimus qualiter ego Cnuto quartus Magni regis filius post susceptum paterne hereditatis regnum ecclesiam Sancti Laurentii quae sita est Lunde licet nondum perfectam dotavi ut illius agni qui tollit peccata mundi sit perpetim sponsa [“…In the name of the Holy and Indivisible Trinity Father, Son and the Holy Spirit. We desire that all those faithful in Christ shall know how I Canute, fourth son of King Magnus (i.e. Sven Estridsen) having inherited my father’s kingdom, have endowed the as yet uncompleted church of St Lawrence in Lund in order that for all time it shall be the Bride of the Lamb that takes away the sin of the world… ”].

Eva Nilsson Nylander To the Glory of Mary

79

The masons were most probably imported from Germany or from Lombardy in Italy (the Cathedral of Speyer, stylistically close to Lund, was about to be finished and labour was to be had) and the responsible architect, also a foreigner, was a man called Donatus. In June of 1123 the main altar in the crypt was inaugurated, in July of 1126 the north altar in the crypt, and in 1145 the main altar of the upper church, dedicated to the Virgin and to St Lawrence, the main patron of the church. More and more altars were constructed and in the late Middle Ages there were more than 60 chapels and altars scattered around the cathedral.5 In 2003, in the presence of queens, archbishops and bishops, Lund celebrated the 900th anniversary of its becoming the archbishopric of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Greenland, the Faeroe Islands, the Orkney Islands, the Hebrides and Rügen. For us, historians, philologists, book historians and cataloguers of mediaeval manuscripts, this was an occasion to look closer at one of the manuscripts from the Cathedral. The book chosen was, for a number of reasons, Medeltidshandskrift 14, nicknamed Liber scole virginis from a barely legible, late Mediaeval note on the upper flyleaf.6 It is a composite volume (“volume formé par la réunion d'unités codicologiques indépendantes”7 ) or a miscellany (“recueil constitué de pièces copiées en des lieux et en des temps divers”). It is a compilation of Marian texts with musical notation. As mentioned above it does not go back to the very early days of the church but it has on the other hand lived through and been used for maybe 200 years of liturgical life in the cathedral and 5 See Göran Axel-Nilsson, Thesaurus Cathedralis Lundensis, Lunds domnkyrkas medeltida skattsamling, Acta Regiae Societatis Scientiarum et Litterarum Gothoburgensis. Humaniora 30 (Göteborg: 1989); see also Ewert Wrangel, Konstverk i Lunds Domkyrka (Lund: 1923). 6 Angul Hammerich, Musik-mindesmaerken fra Middelalderen i Danmark (København: 1912); Liber scole virginis. En medeltida samling av Mariamusik i Lund. A Medieval Collection of Marian Music in Lund. Faksimilutgåva av LUB Mh 14 med inledning, transkription och kommentar — Facsimile edition of LUb Mh 14 with introduction, transcription and commentary by Folke Bohlin, Jeremy Llewellyn, Eva Nilsson Nylander, Nils Holger Petersen, Anders Piltz, Thomas Rydén and Eyolf Østrem (Lund: 2003). 7

See Denis Muzerelle, Vocabulaire codicologique. Répertoire méthodique des termes français relatifs aux manuscrit (Paris: 1985) or the on-line version: http://vocabulaire.irht.cnrs.fr/pages/vocab1.htm [22november 2004]

80

VARIANTS 4 2005

thus represents spiritual continuity in an interesting way. The nature of the book as a container of texts had changed structurally during late Antiquity.8 The classical book was unitary: a book, in the form of a papyrus scroll, consisted of one work of a single author or it might contain many works or the opera omnia of the same author gathered into an organic corpus. This was common even after the codex had replaced the scroll. In contrast the medieval world is characterized by a different type of book, the miscellany, where several texts by different authors are more or less coherently assembled in a single volume. The oldest examples of this “silent revolution” (as Petrucci calls it9 ), i.e. books originally produced as a miscellany with different texts, different authors, are to be found in the Christian environment among the papyrus codices of Egyptian provenance of the 4th century and the story can be followed up to the disorganized miscellanies of the church schools of the Western early Middle Ages. From a typological point of view almost all of the old examples of miscellanies belong to a rather low level of production, written in hurried, informal scripts and with none or very little ornamentation. Back to Liber scole virginis, where the term scola i.e. “choir” implies that is was owned and used collectively. We are dealing with a product destined for circulation in a very restricted group of users. It consists of three sections from a time span ranging from mid 14th century to the early 16th , a fact reflected in the physical structure of the book with its distinct units: 1. ff. 1-4, 11-17, parchment, copied in the 14th century, generously spaced and almost elegant and with 8 music staves per page (see Figure 3) 2. ff. 18-20, parchment, copied in the first half of the 15th century, more crowded and less elegant and with 11 staves per page (see Figure 4)

8 Armando Petrucci, “From the Unitary Book to the Miscellany”, Writers and Readers in Medieval Italy. Studies in the History of Written Culture, Armando Petrucci (New Haven and London: 1995), 1-18. 9

Petrucci (as in note 8) 8.

Eva Nilsson Nylander To the Glory of Mary

81

3. ff. 5-10, paper, copied in the late 15th century in a cursive hand and with 10 staves per page (see Figure 5) Apart from tears and wormholes there are also text gaps indicating missing leaves in at least four different cases.10 The book was further “restored” in 1964 by Hans Heiland und Sohn in Stuttgart, a restoration that disturbed and destroyed much evidence as well as the original collation of the book. It is generally agreed today that a close study of books as artefacts, the codicological aspect, indeed does produce new knowledge, of book production, of book markets, of literacy, of reading habits and of liturgical practice. And looked at from a codicological point of view the “object” Liber scole virginis, this complicated, composite manuscript/miscellany does yield more information (i.e. more than a mere analysis of the texts) even if this information is hypothetical or difficult to interpret, about the Marian cult in Lund 600 years ago. Returning to the contents and to the container: 1. The first part (ff. 1-4 and 11-17) of Liber scole virginis starts with the five antiphons for Vespers. These chants also belong to a Marian office (Stella Maria maris paris expers), traditionally ascribed to bishop Brynolf I of Skara (d. 1317) and this is supposedly the earliest source of this Vespers chants. The musicologists Jeremy Llewellyn and Eyolf Østrem by looking at various scribal mistakes have been able to prove that the scribe must have had a copy containing the whole office Stella Maria in front of him. The rest of the first four leaves is taken up by Marian Masses. It is unusual that there are no chants for Matins and Lauds and that the Vespers and the Masses are in the same book. They usually belong to different books. Llewellyn and Østrem suggest that this should be seen in the context of a letter of indulgence from Uppsala of 1298 (the letter was pointed out by Hans Helander11 ) stating that those who attended the 10

There are lacunae between ff. 2 and 3, 13 and 14, 16 and 17 and between 18 and 19.

11

Hans Helander, Den medeltida Uppsalaliturgin. Studier i helgonlängd, tidegärd och mässa, Bibliotheca Theologicae Practicae. Kyrkovetenskapliga studier 63 (Lund: 2001).

82

VARIANTS 4 2005

Figure 3: Lund University Library, Liber scole virginis (Medeltidshandskrift 14) f. 11r. The special care of the filigranated initial might reflect a scribal concern to mark a new section.

Eva Nilsson Nylander To the Glory of Mary

83

Figure 4: Lund University Library, Liber scole virginis (Medeltidshandskrift 14) f. 19r.

84

VARIANTS 4 2005

Figure 5: Lund University Library, Liber scole virginis (Medeltidshandskrift 14) f. 7r.

Eva Nilsson Nylander To the Glory of Mary

85

Marian Vespers on Fridays and the Mass on Saturdays would receive substantial indulgencies. What could be called a Marian Ordinary, i.e. chants to the Mass but with a Marian “colouring”, follow on ff. 11r-17v. The texts are the ordinary ones, the standard repertory of the Roman church in general and of the tradition of Lund archdiocese in particular, but with a Marian emphasis or twist, effected through rubrics like De domina pointing at an orientation towards Mary and through providing the chants with tropes giving prominence to her. The Ordinary cycle was in turn dissected by a cycle of Marian sequences. 2. The last three leaves (ff. 18-20) represent a second, complicated stage where chant openings are not marked and rubrics are few. They contain different poetic chants and chant types reflecting a tradition of sung Marian devotion which seems to have spread across Europe. This part gives the impression both of having undergone a systematic redaction but there are also additions, emendations and marginal notes by several hands over a long period of time. This would point at a successive and constant use by generations of singers. And whereas the rubrics of the first section refer to general feasts and to Saturday Mass, the rubrics of this part of the book refer to specific days of the week. This might indicate a change in the Marian cult from annual and weekly celebrations to a series of ceremonies throughout the week. 3. The third section, the paper part (ff. 6-10), contains a collection of chants given, unusually, in no particular order. They are sequences and responsories from various kinds of services according to no discernable logic. This selection in a way mirrors the first section in that Vespers and Mass are together, but apart from that there is no explanation to the unusual ordering of the sequences and the responsories. Three sections, thus, copied with roughly 75 years of interval between each section. There is a parallel pattern in another context tied to the same aspect of liturgical life in the cathedral. In the same way as the 86

VARIANTS 4 2005

compiling of the choir book can be seen as a sign of intensified Marian devotion so could the building activities in the church be interpreted as signs of a Marian “boom”.12 In 1346, thus contemporary with the first section of the book, a certain Niels Manderup founded an altar below the lectory wall, in close proximity of a large sculpture of Mary. Forty years later, in 1387, Queen Margaret buried the heart of her son Olof near this altar and after that it became a popular place among the Danish aristocracy and donations started coming in. The choir stalls, constructed in the middle of the 14th century, could be seen in this same context.13 Some hundred years later, between 1425 and 1434 — thus contemporary with the second section of the book — Archbishop Peder Lykke provided money for a new chapel to the Virgin, built close to the tower in connection to the south aisle. It was one of the most richly decorated chapels in the church and it became the tomb of several archbishops. By the end of the 15th century though it had been taken over by altars dedicated to other saints and it had lost much of its Marian connotations. Compensating for this Archbishop Birger Gunnersson in 1518, after the draining and restoration by Adam van Düren of the neglected crypt, in a very detailed foundation charter — Sanctuarium Birgerianum — gave instructions as to the establishment of new Marian services, contemporary with the third section of the book.14 According to several sources these services continued in some form well into the 1580s, long after the Reformation had otherwise changed both liturgy and church room. Also the Liber scole virginis was allowed a period of grace in the crypt while the winds of change had started to blow in the upper church. To conclude: the thematic, organized selection of texts — with performance in mind — makes this manuscript a miscellany, whereas in its physicity, that it is written/copied and assembled at different times, it could be described as a composite manuscript. By definition of course, most liturgical manuscripts, like lectionaries or missals are miscellaneous 12

Cfr. Thomas Rydén in the introduction to the facsimile edition (as in note 6) 31-33.

13

Ewert Wrangel, Korstolarna i Lunds Domkyrka (Malmö: 1930).

14

Cfr. Eyolf Østrem in the introduction to the facsimile edition (as in note 6) 36-39.

Eva Nilsson Nylander To the Glory of Mary

87

to their character but they are part of a standard, redactional tradition, adapted to a general, liturgical use albeit with a certain variation in local custom. This book however is something different, it is a liturgical “hapax“, a miscellany tailormade for a specific, spiritual situation about which we owing to this artefact think we know a little bit more.

88

VARIANTS 4 2005

Tables of Contents in Portuguese Late Medieval Manuscripts João Dionísio With the beginning of the royal dynasty of Avis, in 1385, book culture came to have a greater impact than before in Portugal.1 This apparent fact should not be disconnected from the political role book culture began to play from this time on. As far as literary genres are concerned, it seems crucial to underline how specula principum, which were scarcely documented in Portugal, from 1385 onwards turned out to be a fashionable type of literature at Court.2 This has seemingly to do with the memory and the effects of the election as king of Dom João I (1357-1433; King, 1385-1433) in Coimbra, a unique moment in the royal history of the country for, as Dom João was the natural son of King Dom Pedro I (1320-1367; King, 1357-1367), this lack of impeccable genetic credentials had to be compensated with a stronger reason for his royal accession. In fact, the representatives of the country gathered in Coimbra gave more weight to his specific competence to be a king than to his birth.3 It so happens that, apart from the importance obviously assigned to genealogy, specula principum focused on the set of qualities a king should have in order to rule well. Such a type of literature served the purpose of King Dom João I in the sense that it reminded the reader of what counted most in his election. Another genre supported by the royal family of Avis was the chronicle. João’s heir, Dom Duarte (1391-1438; King, 1433-1438), commissioned Fernão Lopes (138?-1459 or 146?) with the writing of a general national chronicle, starting with the first king and 1 The presentation of this paper was supported by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon. I acknowledge my debt to David Prescott, who revised and corrected my English. 2 João Dionísio, “Il Viridarium Principum di Andrea de Pace in Portogallo”, proceedings of the conference I Francescani e la Politica (secc. XIII-XVIII), held in 2002 (Palermo: Officina di Studi Medievali - Biblioteca Francescana di Palermo, forthcoming). 3

Fernão Lopes, Crónica de D. João I, I, Anselmo Braancamp Freire (ed.) (Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional - Casa da Moeda, 1973), 369; Armindo de Sousa, As cortes medievais portuguesas (1385-1490), I (Porto: INIC / Centro de História da Universidade do Porto, 1990), 88, 257, 259, 293.

ending in then present times. Lopes managed to accomplish part of this project, namely the part that has to do with the last kings before John and the beginning of his reign. One important goal of such a project was to show a linearity of royal succession that, despite the shortcomings of João’s birth, was not interrupted by his accession to power. The fact that the chronicle of John is about twice as long as Fernando’s (the previous king) and approximately four times longer than Pedro’s (who was the predecessor of Fernando) is a clear sign of Fernão Lopes’s particular attention to João’s reign. Besides, although he did not conclude João’s chronicle, this piece of historiography is consensually seen at the same time as a major literary piece and his most accomplished chronicle.4 Another sign of the way the new dynasty prized book culture is revealed by Dom Duarte’s library catalogue,5 the first of a non-religious kind to be known in Portugal, if one excludes lists of books inserted in testaments, which are functionally ancillary. This catalogue gives a fair idea of Dom Duarte’s wide literary interests, from religious books to others of an administrative, fictional or practical type. It should be also stressed that Dom João and some of his sons wrote or translated treatises of different kinds. King João wrote a cynegetic treatise, Livro da Montaria (ca. 1423-1433); Dom Pedro translated Cicero’s book on the civil duties, De Officiis (ca. 1430-1433), and, with the collaboration of a Dominican friar, João Verba (? — post 1434), wrote Livro da Vertuosa Benfeytoria (ca. 1429), inspired on Seneca’s De Benefficiis; and Duarte, apart from a handbook on equitation (Livro da Ensinança de Bem Cavalgar Toda Sela, finished ca. 1437-1438), concluded a moral treatise, Leal Conselheiro (i. e., “loyal counsellor”) at the same time. The title of the latter is substantially different from the others, in that it does not incorporate the term that is generically used no matter what genre is involved: livro (“book”). But not only does it omit the word livro, but it presents itself as a rhetorical personification, something that suggests the public should read this book in the same manner that one asks a loyal counsellor for 4 Teresa Amado, Fernão Lopes contador de História — Sobre a Crónica de D. João I (Lisboa: Editorial Estampa, 1991). 5 Livro dos Conselhos de el-rei D. Duarte (livro da cartuxa), João José Alves Dias (ed.) (Lisboa: Estampa, 1982), 206-208.

90

VARIANTS 4 2005

advice. In spite of the fact that Leal Conselheiro was little read, Rui de Pina (ca.1440-1522), who wrote the chronicle of Dom Duarte’s reign and of his successors, came to adopt this personification, giving it a wider range when he stated that, not only does Dom Duarte’s book function as a counsellor, but rather every book is a counsellor.6 Apparently a statement such as this suggests that books were becoming more familiar in Portuguese court milieus. At the other end of metaphorical transactions of this type, whereby bibliographical items are taken as human beings and vice-versa, let me recall that Alphonso the Magnanimous, King of Aragon and Naples, who became a possessor of today’s codex unicus of Leal Conselheiro, had the Arcimboldian phrase “liber sum” (“I am a book”) as one of his mottoes, which served as a caption for the emblem of an open book.7 In order to have a preliminary delimitation of the field in which I will reflect on tables of contents, it is useful to draw a conceptual frontier between this specific auxiliary mechanism and other similar, but substantially different devices, such as the tabulatio, the repertorium or the inventarium. To put it briefly, all of these devices function as means to rapidly locate a subject, a word, or a passage in a text or in a series of texts; thus all intend to facilitate the rapid consultation of texts.8 There are, however, some conspicuous differences, for the table of contents tends to be simpler in form and data than the tabulatio, also called index. The table follows the structure of the text; the index does not because 6 “[…] os lyvros, postoque sejam Conselheiros mortos, sempre porém ensynam, e dam verdadeiros e saaõs conselhos, muy livres e ysentos das paixooens dos Conselheiros vivos […]” [“books, although they are dead Counsellors, they nevertheless always teach and give true and sane counsels, rather free and exempt from the living Counsellors’ passions”]. Rui de Pina, “Chronica do senhor Rey D. Affonso V”, M. Lopes de Almeida (ed.), Crónicas de Rui de Pina (Porto: Lello & Irmão, 1977), 583. 7 Gennaro Toscano, “La formación de la Biblioteca de Alfonso El Magnánimo: documentos, fuentes, inventarios”, La Biblioteca Real de Nápoles en tiempos de la Dinastía Aragonesa (Valencia: Generalitat Valenciana, 1999). Besides, Alphonso promoted a historiographical strategy similar to the one sponsored by João and Duarte in Portugal in order to be recognized as the head of Aragon and Naples. See Eulalia Duran, “La imatge del rei Alfons”, XVI Congresso Internazionale di Storia della Corona d’Aragona. Celebrazioni Alfonsine, II (Napoli: Paparo Edizioni, 2000), 1401-1418. 8

Olga Weijers, “Les index au Moyen Âge sont-ils un genre littéraire?”, Claudio Leonardi, Marcello Morelli and Francesco Santi (eds.), Fabula in tabula. Una storia degli indici dal manoscritto al testo elettronico (Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 1995), 11-12.

João Dionísio Tables of Contents in Portuguese Late Medieval Manuscripts

91

it obeys an alternative order, such as the alphabetical one. The ordinary table is physically dependent on the codex that conveys the text it presents, while other indexes have a greater degree of autonomy even in codicological terms.9 Apart from this, tables usually play an absolutely instrumental role, whereas the index may be autotelic. Bearing this in mind, the Tabulae super originalia patrum by Robert Kilwardby, contrary to what its name may suggest, are an index. Sometimes we find one after the other, a contents table and an index, as in the manuscript from the British Library (MS Royal 5.C.iii): the first column of fol. 13r and most of the second column present the chapters that belong to the second and third parts of book III of Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum, the fifteen last lines of the second column show the beginning of the Abhominacio index, marked with an A in the right margin.10 Now and then we may also find a sequence of tables in the same manuscript, such as in Vidas e Paixões dos Apóstolos, the Portuguese translation of Bernardo de Brihuega’s book II of Genesi Alfonsii, which was a literary project ordered by Alfonso X (1221-1284; King, 1252-1284), King of Castile and Leon, in the third quarter of the XIII century. At the beginning of Alc. 280, a Portuguese codex that contains this text, there is a chapter list, and immediately after the conclusion of this list the series of the names of the apostles appears according to the order their stories are arranged in the text (see Figure 1). As a rule, although there are some rather complex tables that convey the author’s intention (in a way similar to some academic prologues I will mention afterwards) and then a list of chapters with a brief summary of each one, tables in the Middle Ages were generally ordinary lists of

9 Malcolm Parkes, “Folia librorum quaerere: medieval experience of the problems of hypertext and the index”, Claudio Leonardi, Marcello Morelli and Francesco Santi (eds.), Fabula in tabula. Una storia degli indici dal manoscritto al testo elettronico (Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 1995), 23-42; Peter Russell, Traducciones y traductores en la Península Ibérica (1400-1500) (Barcelona: Universidad Autónoma, 1985), 40-41; Charles F. Briggs, Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum. Reading and writing politics at court and university, c. 1275-c.1525 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 108-145; Tomás Martínez Romero, “Algunas consideraciones sobre la Tabulatio Senecae y su traducción catalana”, Euphrosyne XXIX (2001), 95-110. 10 Charles F. Briggs, Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum. Reading and writing politics at court and university, c. 1275-c.1525 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 140, 161-162.

92

VARIANTS 4 2005

Figure 1: Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa, Alc. 280, fol. 10r

João Dionísio Tables of Contents in Portuguese Late Medieval Manuscripts

93

chapter titles, a feature that became more and more disseminated after the XII century.11 I would like to view tables as an extra-textual or para-textual issue, an auxiliary mechanism of reading that embodies an aspect of the rhetorical ideal of claritas. This concept has to do with devices such as contents or chapters tables, titlings, paragraphing or marginal glosses. The existence of these tables presupposes that there is a system of textual organisation that comprehends the division of the work into parts and the identification of these parts through number and/or word reference.12 Actually, the diversity of reading possibilities will be the more successful if other auxiliary devices are available in the codex one is using: divisio textus through the introduction of chapter numbers and/or chapter rubrics; folio numbers; and current titles. The connection between claritas and these sorts of devices is made evident, for instance, by Alfonso de Cartagena (ca. 1384-1456), a Castilian author contemporary to the Portuguese princes I am dealing with. In the introduction to his translation of Cicero’s De Inventione he declares: aun por lo más aclarar, comoquier que en latín está todo junto e non tiene otra partiçión salvo la de los libros — es a saber entre el primero e segundo — pero yo partí cada libro en diversos títulos e los títulos en capítulos según me paresçió que la diversidat de la materia pidía.13 [“in order to make it clearer, though it is in Latin in a continuous way and has not been divided other than into books (that is, the first and the second), I have divided each book into titles and have further divided these titles into chapters according to what was called for, in my view, by the variety of the subject”].

Alfonso de Cartagena adopted the same procedure in the translation of Seneca’s De Providentia, which he thus explains: “Y aunque el tractado estava continuo sin alguna partición, partir lo he en capítulos, porque mejor y más cierto podáys hallar lo que notar vos pluguiere” 14 [“And 11

Olga Weijers, op. cit., 15-16.

12

Olga Weijers, op. cit., 12-13.

13

Alfonso de Cartagena, La Rethorica de M. Tullio Ciceron, Rosalba Mascagna (ed.) (Napoli: Liguori, 1969), 31. 14 Tomás Martínez, “Antoni Canals, Alonso de Cartagena i unes notes de literatura comparada”, Studi mediolatini e volgari XLI (1995), 116-46; 130.

94

VARIANTS 4 2005

although the treatise was written continuously and without division, I will divide it into chapters because this way you may better and more accurately find what you are pleased to read”]. One curious example of this type of practice is Enrique de Villena’s decision to divide his translation of the Aeneid (1427) and its enormous gloss into 366 chapters, one for each day of the year, in order to help the idle reader.15 If tables imply that there is a system of text division, the presence or the introduction of such a system does not imply that there has to be a table. In fact, as far as translations are concerned, being aware of the fact that text division might be a non-authorial feature may deter the translator from inserting a table for it could be regarded as a formal ratification of something the author was not responsible for. Although there is no reference in the translator’s prologue to text division, it is possible that the codex unicus of Livro dos Ofícios does not have a table for motives of this kind. It should be noted that the division in Dom Pedro’s and Cartagena’s translation of De Officiis do not match. Actually, although the information Cartagena gives in the prologue to his translation on the structure of the books of De Officiis is not uniformly conclusive, it suffices, with the observation of the extant manuscripts, to evince considerable differences when compared with the Portuguese translation.16 Besides, as Dom Pedro’s work was concluded after the Castilian humanist’s translation, he was surely aware of its existence (it was completed in Portugal, sometime between January and the summer of 1422,17 before the Portuguese prince departed for his European tour, in 1425)18 and would 15 J. N. H. Lawrance, “The spread of lay literacy in Late Medieval Castile”, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies LXII (1985), 83. 16 On the manuscript tradition of Cartagena’s translation see Alonso de Cartagena, Libros de Tulio: De Senetute, De los Ofiçios, María Morrás (ed.) (Alcalá de Henares — Madrid: Universidad de Alcalá de Henares, 1996), 101-149; on the Latin model of Pedro’s work see Jorge A. Osório, “A prosa do infante D. Pedro. A propósito do Livro dos Ofícios”, Biblos LXIX (1993), 107-127; 111112; see also María Morrás, “Traducción de los clásicos y tradición textual”, José María Maestre, Joaquín Pascual Barea, Luis Charlo Brea (eds.), Humanismo y pervivencia del mundo clásico. Homenaje al Profesor Luis Gil (Cádiz: 1997), 531-538; 534. 17 Alonso de Cartagena, Libros de Tulio: De Senetute, De los Ofiçios, María Morrás (ed.) (Alcalá de Henares — Madrid: Universidad de Alcalá de Henares, 1996), 17-18. 18 Francis M. Rogers, The travels of the Infante Dom Pedro of Portugal (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1961).

João Dionísio Tables of Contents in Portuguese Late Medieval Manuscripts

95

thus be aware of its different textual division. If this is true, it might have further inhibited Dom Pedro from inserting a table in the Livro dos Ofícios manuscript. At the same time, it is Dom Pedro himself who states in the prologue that in spite of his lack of satisfaction with the translation of book III, he thought it better to deliver the work with inaccuracies due to misunderstandings of the Latin text than to postpone completion until these problems were overcome. Such a statement indicates that this work was rapidly finished because of reader demands that were somewhat welcome in Dom Pedro’s mind. Likewise, the absence of the table in Dom Duarte’s handbook of equitation, also represented by a single manuscript, can be understood as one of several internal data that suggest that the book, as well as the text, was not finished. Notwithstanding the verisimilitude of the two explanations considered before in relation to the absence of a table in the Livro dos Ofícios manuscript, one should not forget that other copies could have been accompanied by tables, especially the one addressed to Dom Duarte, a hypothesis supported by a manuscript of the Livro da Vertuosa Benfeytoria that I will refer to later. Considering the corpus I have previously defined, it is actually limited to just a handful of manuscripts and no more than three texts: Livro da Montaria19 Lisbon, National Library, cod. 4352 Arrábida, Library of the Convent, 2076/[2646] Livro da Vertuosa Benfeytoria 20 Madrid, Royal Academy of History, 9/5487 Viseu, Public Library, Cofre, n.o 12 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Lyell 86 Leal Conselheiro21 Paris, National Library, Portugais 5

19 Livro da Montaria, Francisco Maria Esteves Pereira (ed.) (Lisboa: Academia das Sciencias, 1918). Adelino de Almeida Calado is about to publish a new edition of this text. 20 Livro da Vertuosa Benfeytoria, Adelino de Almeida Calado (ed.) (Coimbra: Universidade de Coimbra, 1994). 21 The two better editions are those by Joseph M. Piel (Lisboa: Bertrand, 1942) and by Maria Helena Lopes de Castro (Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional — Casa da Moeda, 1998).

96

VARIANTS 4 2005

A thorough analysis of Livro da Montaria is hampered by codex tradition: its XV century copy is a fragment 22 and the first complete manuscript surviving to this day that shows a table dates from the XVII century, the Arrábida copy. In order to contextualise the following observations, and to compensate the paucity of this corpus, I will have recourse to some XV century manuscripts of texts not written by members of the royal family. Starting with the name given to a table of contents, these lists were usually designated in Latin capitula, tituli or rubrice and, sometime later, received the less analytic and more synthetic title tabula.23 It is the Portuguese form of this word that we find in most copies: one sees the word tavoa at its head in Leal Conselheiro codex and the same noun shows up in Livro da Vertuosa Benfeytoria, not as the title of the table, which is headless, but mentioned in the author’s prologue. The same word occurs in Livro da Montaria, though this assertion is based on the late copy mentioned before. All in all, tavoa, by itself or inserted in an expression, is the most usual noun used to indicate the table of contents. In books of the same period one may find a more complete expression serving as the title (“Taboa dos capitolos”, [“table of chapters”], in Vidas e paixões dos Apóstolos;24 “tavoa das rubricas”, in the rubric that precedes the table of the second and third parts of the Portuguese translation of Christine de Pizan’s Livre des trois vertus)25 or a synonym («tavoada», “set of tables”, mentioned in the rubric that precedes the table of contents in Corte Enperial).26 As to location, all the books considered, with no exception, present the table of contents at the beginning, a rule that was eventually altered over the following centuries. Indeed, current use in Portuguese books up to some years ago was to put the table of contents at the end of the 22 Ramón Lorenzo, “Un fragmento dun manuscrito medieval do Livro da Montaria de D. João I de Portugal”, Verba 27 (2000), 9-32. 23

Olga Weijers, op. cit., 15.

24

Vidas e Paixões dos Apóstolos, Isabel Vilares Cepeda (ed.) (Lisboa: INIC, 1982), 3.

25

Christine de Pizan, O Livro das Tres Vertudes a Insinança das Damas, Maria de Lourdes Crispim (ed.) (Lisboa: Caminho, 2002), 205, 259. 26

Corte Enperial, Adelino de Almeida Calado (ed.) (Aveiro: Universidade de Aveiro, 2000), 5.

João Dionísio Tables of Contents in Portuguese Late Medieval Manuscripts 97

book. Not surprisingly, several editions of the texts I am dealing with have shifted their tables of contents from the beginning to the end of the text (e.g., Piel’s edition of Leal Conselheiro). Out of curiosity, let me draw your attention to a passage in the XVII century copy of Livro da Montaria, by Dom João I, where one finds explicit reference to this type of procedure: “Aqui se seguia a tauoa delles, a qual pusemos no fim” [“Here followed their table [i.e. of the parts and chapters], which we put at the end”].27 I will now focus on the correspondence of data in the table and data in the text. Since tables function through synecdoche, that is, showing a part of the text (the title) for the whole textual unity (the chapter), one might expect tables to further economise information and omit data that appear in chapter titles. That may happen, but in no way is it a regular feature, and on occasions one finds the exact opposite situation, the tables being less laconic than the text. For instance, Livro da Vertuosa Benfeytoria is divided into six books and the table of contents presents a short summary of each one in Viseu and Madrid manuscripts, but this information does not appear at the beginning of each part in the text itself. If we set aside some minor graphic differences in script, there is generally a perfect textual correspondence between the data of the table and the data of the chapter rubrics, and the exceptions to this rule have little meaning. Instead of using words, the tables sporadically show numbers such as in chapter XVI of book I, where one finds “iio logar” [“2nd place”], whereas in the chapter rubric there is “segundo logar”. A similar case in chapter VII of book IV: in the table chapter the number appears as an ordinal, whereas in the text it is written literally; then in book V, chapter IV, the table makes use of ordinal IVo , less space and ink demanding than the one used in the text, IIIIo . However, one comes across the reverse situation, the table presenting the rubric with more letters: in book V, chapter II, “que falla das obrigaçoões” [“that speaks about the obligations”], and in the text, “que falla de obrigaçoões”, without a determinant. But the clearer exception to a possible rule of synthesis attached to the table is 27 D. João I, Livro da Montaria, Francisco Maria Esteves Pereira (ed.) (Lisboa: Academia das Sciencias, 1918), 3.

98

VARIANTS 4 2005

found in the first chapter of book VI. The rubric transmitted by the table says: “Capitullo primeyro, que he prologo, en que sse dá ensinança do que sse tractará no livro seguinte” [“First chapter, which is prologue, where it teaches what will be dealt with in the following book”]; the text states: “Capitullo primeyro, que he prologo, en que sse mostra o que sse deve tractar no livro seguinte” [“(…), where it is shown what should be dealt with in the following book”]. This difference can be interpreted as a sign of the posterity of the table, probably made after the chapter titles were written in the text. Someone (one of the authors?, a scribe?) having realized that the phrase “o que sse deve tractar” was equivocal, may have decided to alter it in the table to make it unambiguous. Turning now to Leal Conselheiro, although in this work the general correspondence between table and textual data is maintained, the differences happen to be more relevant than in Livro da Vertuosa Benfeytoria. The introduction to the text bears no title, but it is called a “prologue” [“prollego”] in the table and only there is this word written in a script clearly larger than the one used to register the chapters. It is also served by a decorated initial, something that does not occur in the indication of other chapters, and there is no sign of reference to folio number, a regular feature as far as the indication of chapters in the table is concerned (see Figure 2). Thus a clearly different status is ascribed to the introductory text. In an approximately contemporaneous text of the Disputatio genre, Corte Enperial, this is specified in the note preceding the table in the single extant manuscript: “Este livro he chamado Corte Enperiall, em qui he desputada a ffe cristãa com os jentyos e judeus e mouros, segundo claramente se mostra nos capitolos em esta tavoada escriptos, por saber a quantas folhas jazem alem do primeiro prolego.”28 [“This book is called Corte Enperial [Imperial Court], in which Christian faith is discussed with the gentiles, the Jews and the moors, as is clearly shown in the chapters written in this table in order to know where they are found beyond the first prologue.”] 28

Corte Enperial, Adelino de Almeida Calado (ed.) (Aveiro: Universidade de Aveiro, 2000), 5.

João Dionísio Tables of Contents in Portuguese Late Medieval Manuscripts 99

Figure 2: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Portugais 5, fol. 1r

100

VARIANTS 4 2005

On the one hand, it suggests that it is needless to locate the prologue since it is placed by default at the beginning; on the other hand, it is as if the prologue did not belong to the text, something to which I will return later in this paper. Resuming the features of the Leal Conselheiro table, we see that the larger size of the chapter number reference when compared to the chapter title does not appear to be the better procedure for someone who intends to stimulate non-linear reading, but this was probably not Dom Duarte’s goal. It may have seemed more important to him to show the existence of a firm structure in his book than to convey information on the subject of each chapter. The difference in sizes in the table serves this purpose. Indeed, one function a table may have, if only in formal terms, is to attribute cohesion to the text, something that might occasionally be of relevance. One such case is precisely that of Leal Conselheiro, which amounts to being a compilation of texts written at different moments, most of them not originally programmed to form part of a book. In a text such as this one, cohesion results from textual data, namely found in the prologue, from non-textual data, of codicological type, and, last, but not least, from para-textual data, found for instance in the table of contents. Curiously, the possibility of non-linear reading that is facilitated through the existence of the table of contents conflicts with the explicit passage in Leal Conselheiro where Dom Duarte advises the public to read the treatise from the beginning to the end. This is due partly to Dom Duarte’s perception of the feeble textual unity of the text he had written. As had already happened in Livro da Vertuosa Benfeytoria, there are no significant differences between chapter titles in the table and the corresponding chapter titles in the text. One exception appears in chapter 64, the title of which is presented in the table as “das defiinçõoes speciaes dos VII pecados, primeiro da soberva” [“on the special definitions of the seven sins; first, pride”], whereas the text adds something at the beginning of the title: “Seguem-se as defiinçõoes (…)” [“Now follow the definitions…”]. Another exception has to do with the formula “cuja alma Deos haja” [“whose soul be with God”], in the title of chapter 98, which is absent in the table: chapter 98 was originally written some two years after Dom João I died; for the scribe who copied or made the João Dionísio Tables of Contents in Portuguese Late Medieval Manuscripts 101

table and for the time, rather later, when the table was written down, this formula could be dispensed with. There could have been another exception with chapter 95, but perhaps the abbreviation “.s.”, instead of corresponding to scilicet, as most editors in Portugal generally think, may stand in this instance for the Portuguese phrase “convem a saber” [“that is”, “I mean”, “namely”], which appears in the text chapter title (see Figures 3 and 4).29 Occasionally chapter numbers are not inserted according to the same system in the text and in the table. In fact, in number forty and the following units, the analytic form “XXXX” appears in the table, whereas in the text, it is the synthetic “R” that prevails. Let me remark, however, that number 90 and the following numbers are of the LR type in both places. A special characteristic of Leal Conselheiro is that it is composed of a treatise and of some additions, the latter having deserved a private table with the formal aspect of a chapter, number 91 (see Figure 5). As a conventional table, it appears at the beginning of the additions section and enumerates the following chapters progressively one by one; but, unlike a conventional table, each chapter is presented through a brief summary and numbered independently inside this concluding part of the text. This means that the number these chapters receive in the general table is not mentioned here, with another absence being that in this chapter there is no indication of folio number where to find each one. As to the function of these tables, one could speak of an anticipatory role that is somewhat shared by prologues. Evidence of this role can be found in XII century academic prologues, dealt with by A. J. Minnis in his influential study on the theory of authorship in the Middle Ages. The texts analysed were written in order to lead listeners and readers to authoritative works. As to the first type, it evolves around two headings, ante opus and in ipso opere, with matters of order being dealt with under this latter heading. In a more extended version of this type of prologue, 29 See Adelino de Almeida Calado, “Introdução”, infante D. Pedro and frei João Verba, Livro da Vertuosa Benfeytoria (Coimbra: Universidade, 1994), XCI.

102

VARIANTS 4 2005

Figure 3: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Portugais 5, fol. 2r (see in the middle of the right column: “Cap.o LRVo . das duas barcas .s. da ssãa e da rota” [“on the two boats, .s., the sane one and the broken one”]

João Dionísio Tables of Contents in Portuguese Late Medieval Manuscripts 103

Figure 4: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, fol. 87r, beginning of chapter 95, which bears the title “das duas barcas cõue a ssaber da sãa e da rrota” [“on the two boats, that is, the sane one and the broken one”]

104

VARIANTS 4 2005

Figure 5: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, fol. 84v, beginning of chapter 91, “da tauoa e declaraçom das cousas que adiante sõ scriptas” [“on the table and presentation of things that are written ahead”] João Dionísio Tables of Contents in Portuguese Late Medieval Manuscripts 105

observations are made on the number of books and on the order of the books. This sort of inquiry is absent in the second type of prologue analysed, one that is built up on a series of seven questions: “who”, “what”, “why”, “in what manner”, “where”, “when” and “whence” (or “by what means”). Although one might think of some sort of vague correspondence between modus (“in what manner”) and the structure of the text, this question has specifically to do with the particular mode in which the author wrote (for instance, verse or prose). A third type of academic prologue, and the most popular one, includes among its headings ordo, that is, the order of the work, the way it is disposed or arranged. In fact, ordo libri supposed presentation of the way the author deployed his materials. In spite of the fact that this heading was filled in a variety of ways, sometimes (depending on text genre, for example) it involved stating the number of chapters contained in a text.30 As a successor to the latter, in the so called “Aristotelian prologue”, book structure came under observation when one dealt with the causa formalis, which referred both to the forma tractandi, the writer’s method of treatment or procedure, and the forma tractatus (also named ordinatio partium or divisio textus), the arrangement or organisation of the work, the way in which the author had structured it.31 Although these are academic prologues, some of their facets appear in non-academic prologues, such as those that introduce the texts I have been taking into consideration. There are explicit allusions to ordering as a source of time saving and accuracy when consulting a work in the introduction to Vidas e Paixões dos Apóstolos. One such allusion in Livro da Vertuosa Benfeytoria is particularly interesting for it is corroborated by the position of the table, immediately after the prologue and before the text itself, in the copy that allegedly belonged to Duarte, by then already absorbed in time-consuming political activities as the right arm of King Dom João (who was in his seventies). This follows on from a long tradition, as speed in consultation is an issue frequently mentioned in 30 A. J. Minnis, Medieval theory of authorship. Scholastic literary attitudes in the later Middle Ages (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1988), 30, 15-19, 22-23. 31

106

A. J. Minnis, op. cit., 29, 118.

VARIANTS 4 2005

prologues that refer to the usefulness of tables.32 According to Dominicus Gundissalvus, who wrote De divisione philosophiae in the XII century, a book is divided into parts or chapters in order to make it easier to locate something among its contents. In such a case it is easier to have recourse to a definite chapter than to read through the whole volume, and with the help of distinct chapters, he concluded, the memory is much strengthened.33 The neighbouring function of tables of contents and prologues as an anticipation of what the reader may find in a specific book is sometimes stressed by codicological data, that is, by physical closeness. The Viseu codex of Livro da Vertuosa Benfeytoria has four non-numbered folios at the beginning, where the prologue and table of contents found their place, with the text itself starting at folio 5, the first of the numbered leaves. As for the Madrid codex of same text, it bears codicological evidence of this exact situation, for it is made up of one quire of four folios, with the dedication to Dom Duarte and the chapter list, followed by eighteen other quires of eight folios each and concluded by a single folio. Regarding the Bodleian copy of Dom Pedro’s work, it starts at the folio 2r and ends at folio 166v, lacking beginning and end, both prologue and chapter list being absent.34 The fact that this situation crosses borders is illustrated by a codex with the Castilian text of Martín Pérez’s Libro de las Confesiones, which lacks both prologue and tables: Madrid, National Library, ms. 9264.35 More important to me than to inquire into the presence or absence of genre status in tables of contents, is to remark how this type of tool is a sign of a change in mentality. As Weijers puts it, these tables are part of a need to systemise that had been perceived since the XII century in Europe and that became evident in Portuguese non-religious milieus at 32

Olga Weijers, op. cit., 12.

33

A. J. Minnis, op. cit., 23, 32.

34

Adelino de Almeida Calado, “Introdução”, infante D. Pedro and Frei João Verba, Livro da Vertuosa Benfeytoria (Coimbra: Universidade, 1994), LXXIII, LXXVIII. 35

Martín Pérez, Libro de las Confesiones. Una radiografía de la sociedad medieval española, Antonio García y García, Bernardo Alonso Rodríguez and Francisco Cantelar Rodríguez (eds.) (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 2002), XV.

João Dionísio Tables of Contents in Portuguese Late Medieval Manuscripts 107

the end of the XIV century and mainly at the beginning of the Quattrocento. A key figure in this process in Portugal is Dom Duarte, generally as a sponsor of written culture, something that can be ascertained through the development of royal bureaucracy during his time,36 and as an active supporter of book culture. It is not without meaning that he wrote an essay on how to read religious books, inserted in Leal Conselheiro as chapter 94. It is also noteworthy that different para-textual devices, including several tables of contents, appear in codex Alc. 386, which, by the way, has Duarte’s essay on reading at its beginning. This manuscript, now at the National Library in Lisbon, belonged to the Monastery of Alcobaça, probably the most important centre of book production in medieval Portugal. If the hypothesis I have presented elsewhere proves correct, this codex, that transmits a Portuguese version of Cassianus’ Collationes VIII-XVII, is based on a Court manuscript commissioned by Dom Duarte.37 In contrast with the features of this manuscript, the monastery of Alcobaça possessed a codex (Alc. 385) that contained the previous Collationes, with text division singly supported by chapter numbers, and thus with no table at all. But the most conspicuous example of the role Dom Duarte played, as far as tables are concerned, is found in Ordenações Eduardinas, a compilation of laws completed around 1436. This work is transmitted by three copies, and the most authoritative manuscript bears a table at its beginning that states: “Esta tauoa compos o muy alto e muy excellente el rey dom Eduarte. E he feita segundo o conto das folhas das rubricas. E onde folhas nom forem nomeadas entende-se que a rrubrica he scripta na folha susoscripta. E porque alguas lex passam duas e tres folhas se nom fara meençom mas saltara aa outra folha onde se a outra ley começa.” 38 [“This table was composed by the high and excellent King Dom Duarte. And it is done according to the number of the leaves of the rubrics. And where leaves are not numbered [in this table] it means that the rubric is 36 Judite Antonieta Gonçalves de Freitas, A burocracia do “Eloquente” (1433-1438). Os textos, as normas, as gentes (Cascais: Patrimonia, 1996). 37 João Dionísio, D. Duarte, leitor de Cassiano (Lisboa: Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa, 2000) (Ph. D. dissertation). 38 Ordenações del-rei Dom Duarte, Martim de Albuquerque and Eduardo Borges Nunes (eds.) (Lisboa: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 1988), 1.

108

VARIANTS 4 2005

written [in the text] in the previously numbered leaf [in the table]. And because some laws take two or three leaves, it [the number of the second or third leaf] is not mentioned, but will jump to the next leaf where the following law begins.”]

I would like to stress the importance consciously accorded to economical procedures in the introduction to this table and the unique status it has in so far as it presents us with its author’s name. On the one hand, tables were thus viewed as a textual artefact which deserved an author, on the other the name of the author meant that it was not debasing for a King (at least in Duarte’s eyes) to be known as the maker of a table. At the same time, it showed Duarte as a both relevant promoter and agent of new forms of accessing textual information in the first half of XV century Portugal.39

39 Aires A. Nascimento, “Nova idade, nova linguagem: entre afecto e alto desempenho de funções, a palavra no séc. XV português”, Aires A. Nascimento, Helena C. Langrouva, José V. de Pina Martins and Thomas F. Earle (eds.), Humanismo para o nosso tempo. Homenagem a Luís de Sousa Rebelo, (Lisboa: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 2004), 41.

João Dionísio Tables of Contents in Portuguese Late Medieval Manuscripts 109

This page intentionally left blank

The Book in the Poetological Concept of Stefan George Some Remarks on the Physical and Iconic Side of the Published Text — with an Editorial Conclusion Rüdiger Nutt-Kofoth

For hundreds and even thousands of years texts have been edited. From this tradition, textual criticism has developed into one of the main tasks of the editor, after indeed at first being the principal task. To fulfill this task, the editor examines all the records of a text. He or she uses the individual text carriers handed down to produce from them the text or the texts later printed in the edition. In 1971, Hans Zeller described this procedure in his article Record and Interpretation, which has become fundamental to German editorial philology, in the following way: The material manuscript itself, not the text of the manuscript, is the record. The manuscript requires [editorial] interpretation, however, and the result of the interpretation is the text. This act of interpreting the manuscript is the constitution of the text. […] The manuscript is not the text; it holds, it signifies the text.1

Zeller wrote this with regard to the manuscript as an object of editorial examination. He particularly referred to manuscripts that were difficult to decipher owing to numerous corrections with an obscure chronology. Yet he did not have in mind the specific nature of a manuscript, but its general character as a text carrier. In this respect, it does not 1 Hans Zeller, “Record and Interpretation: Analysis and Documentation as Goal and Method of Editing,” Hans Walter Gabler, George Bornstein, and Gillian Borland Pierce (eds.), Contemporary German Editorial Theory (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995), 17–58, 43; original german version: Hans Zeller, “Befund und Deutung: Interpretation und Dokumentation als Ziel und Methode der Edition,” Gunter Martens and Hans Zeller (eds.), Texte und Varianten: Probleme ihrer Edition und Interpretation (München: C.H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1971), 45–89, 79: “Nicht der Text der Handschrift, sondern die Handschrift selbst ist der Befund. Die Handschrift bedarf der Interpretation: das Ergebnis der Interpretation ist der Text. Diese Interpretation der Handschrift ist Textkonstituierung. […] Die Handschrift ist nicht der Text, sie enthält, sie bedeutet den Text.”

make any difference whether an impression or a manuscript is chosen as the basis of an edited text. In both cases, the edited text has to be gained from the text carrier handed down. Thus, the edited text and the text carrier basic to it belong to different categories. Therefore, the text does not lose any of its characteristic features when it is taken out of the context of its transmission and critically presented in the edition. By means of editorial treatment, it is able to cast off the garment of its transmission and appear to us in a new, better and more correct dress, namely that of the critical edition. Undoubtedly, this concept is based on a certain understanding of the text, that is, a primarily linguistic one. Yet what happens if, according to the records handed down, the text to be edited cannot be reduced to its linguistic character, because it obviously shows other features which are inextricably bound up with the physical character of the records and in the extreme case even have their focal point in this material side? Among these physical features are the iconic and tangible characteristics of original text presentation. In the printed book, these characteristics manifest themselves in the whole layout, the paper, the binding of the book and the form of the cover. This includes the typography as well as any kind of artistic book shaping. The physical and iconic character of a text achieves editorial significance if, like its “pure”, namely linguistic character, it was created by the author him- or herself, if the text is charged and connected with iconic and tangible meaning and thus gains its authentic and authorized form in this artistic unity. In this respect, the following considerations are, for example, close to Susanne Wehde’s view on the significance of typography. Wehde said in 2000 “that types can act as semantic quantities and the arrangement of types is able to present semantic processes, values and relations”.2 Referring to Jerome McGann’s distinction between “bibliographic code” and “linguistic code”, George Bornstein stated in his book Material Modernism (2001) the even more fundamental idea “that the 2 Susanne Wehde, Typographische Kultur: Eine zeichentheoretische und kulturgeschichtliche Studie zur Typographie und ihrer Entwicklung (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2000, Studien und Texte zur Sozialgeschichte der Literatur, 69), 11: “Ich gehe von der These aus, daß Schriftcharaktere selbst als semantische Größe wirken und die Anordnung der Schriftzeichen die Darstellung semantischer Abläufe, Wertigkeiten und Beziehungen zu leisten vermag.”

112

VARIANTS 4 2005

whole “bibliographic code” of the text can be understood “as an important constituent of meanings” which offers “important supplements to the “linguistic code’”.3 In this sense, this paper also wants to argue “for integration of the iconic or semantic features of the physical text with more traditional and purely lingustic considerations”, as George Bornstein and Theresa Tinkle put it in their collection of articles The Iconic Page in Manuscript, Print and Digital Culture (1998).4 The German poet Stefan George (1868–1933) may serve as an example of such an overlapping of pure text and text carrier and, additionally, of the integration of text and text carrier into a comprehensive poetological concept. This concept is characterized by a number of further strategies like the distribution structure of his publications or the formation of a closed circle of poets whose centre was George himself. Let me now give you an outline of these interrelations. His personal contact with the Paris circle of symbolists around Stéphane Mallarmé led to a formative influence of French symbolism on young Stefan George. From the concept of the French “L’art pour l’art” George subsequently developed his own concept of art and combined it with a carefully thought out strategy which comprised the whole area of public relations. This can particularly be illustrated by George’s magazine Papers for Art (Blätter für die Kunst), which first appeared in 1892. George explained the programme of this magazine in its first issue: The name of this publication already gives some indication of what it aims at: serving art, particularly poetry and literature, excluding anything concerning the state and society. / It strives for SPIRITUAL ART based on the new way of feeling and creating — an art for its own sake — […].5 3 George Bornstein, Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page (Cambridge: University Press, 2001), 2 and 1. — Cf. Jerome J. McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991, Princeton Studies in Culture / Power / History), 13–14. 4 George Bornstein and Theresa Tinkle (eds.), The Iconic Page in Manuscript, Print, and Digital Culture (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1998), 3. — For some of the following reflections cf. also Rüdiger Nutt-Kofoth, “Text lesen — Text sehen: Edition und Typographie,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 78 (2004), 3–19. 5 Blätter für die Kunst, [series 1], vol. 1, oktober 1892, 1: “Der name dieser veröffentlichung sagt schon zum teil was sie soll: der kunst besonders der dichtung und dem schrifttum dienen, alles staatliche und gesellschaftliche ausscheidend. / Sie will die GEISTIGE KUNST auf grund der neuen fühlweise und mache — eine kunst für die kunst —”.

Rüdiger Nutt-Kofoth The Book in the Poetological Concept of Stefan George 113

This programme, however, did not solely refer to the printed texts, but was also consistently mirrored in the way the magazine was organized. The Papers for Art already reflect his idea of a closed circle of poets by which George provided an organizational backdrop for his concept of art and at the same time gave to it a part of its character. The magazine initiated some kind of a circle long before the George circle formed itself, in which George was revered by his disciples as the “master”. The Papers were virtually inaccessible to the public, because they were published only in a small number of copies and, furthermore, were delivered only to “a closed circle of readers invited by the members”,6 as was programmatically stated on the title page, and could be bought only in three bookshops in Paris (later Munich instead), Vienna and Berlin. Their elite character was distinctly emphasized by this form of publication.7 At the same time, the Papers were sent to select persons who made them known to a public outside the narrow circle of collaborators. By deliberately withdrawing the Papers from the general conditions of selling magazines, George managed to give them an exclusiveness which set them off against other periodicals and made them clearly distinguishable. Since a special attractiveness was attributed to them, the Papers had to be considered an extraordinary publication which corresponded to its contents, the presentation of a new form of art allegedly referring only to itself. In this respect, George’s publication strategy becomes discernible as being extremely effect-orientated.8 The understanding of the magazine and its collaborators being a closed group seemed to be in 6 “Diese zeitschrift im verlag des herausgebers hat einen geschlossenen von den mitgliedern geladenen leserkreis”. This note can be found on the title pages of the individual issues of the Papers which were called “volumes”. 7

How consistently this concept was kept up to the end, is made clear by the note on the last page of the last issue of the Papers: “All issues as well as the works of the individual poets writing for the Publishing House of The Papers of Art are out of print.” — “Sämtliche folgen sowie die werke der einzelnen dichter im Verlage der Blätter für die Kunst sind vergriffen” (Blätter für die Kunst, series 11 and 12, 1919, 320). 8 How strategically planned all of George's publications were, is shown in detail by: Dieter Mettler, Stefan Georges Publikationspolitik: Buchkonzeption und verlegerisches Engagement (München, New York, London, Paris: K.G. Saur, 1979, Buch und Zeitschrift in Geistesgeschichte und Wissenschaft, 2). Some contemporary views on the criticism of George’s publication strategy can be found in: Peter-André Alt, “Hofmannsthal und die ‘Blätter für die Kunst’”, Klaus Deterding (ed.), Wahrnehmungen im Poetischen All: Festschrift für Alfred Behrmann zum 65. Geburtstag (Heidelberg: Univer-

114

VARIANTS 4 2005

keeping with the idea of “art for art’s sake” and the exclusion of anything concerning society which the magazine announced.9 Yet the distribution practice itself already shows that economic factors were not denied, but deliberately used to create a counter-concept which only supposedly strove for a retreat from social conditions and actually aimed at having a much more lasting effect by arousing interest in the above-mentioned manner. George’s publication practice has meaningfully been described with the formula “exclusiveness as trademark”.10 The publication of George’s own works followed very much the same pattern. Before the first public edition of a work by George came out in 1898, he had written already four volumes of poetry since 1890 which had appeared only as private impressions with 100 and 200 copies respectively. In 1898 George came into contact with the newly founded publishing house of Georg Bondi, which subsequently brought out all public editions of George’s works. Nevertheless, George kept on publishing a new work first as a private impression and only afterwards as a public edition. Like the individual copies of the Papers for Art, the private impressions of his works were thus made inaccessible to the broad public and achieved the same exclusiveness. This exclusiveness, however, manifested itself not only in the publication strategy, but also in the book itself. George’s collection of poems The Tapestry of Life and the Songs of Dream and Death, with a Prelude (Der Teppich des Lebens und die Lieder von Traum und Tod mit einem Vorspiel) may serve as a striking example. In 1899 the private edition of The Tapestry of Life, 300 copies of which were to appear in George’s private “Publishing Company of the Papers for Art”, was produced by the book artist Melchior Lechter. In 1917, almost 20 years later, Lechter emphasized in a summary of his programme of book art the overlapping of textual meaning sitätsverlag C. Winter, 1993, Beiträge zur neueren Literaturgeschichte, series 3, vol. 129), 30–49, 30. 9

See note 5.

10

This is the title of a chapter in: Bodo Würffel, Wirkungswille und Prophetie: Studien zu Werk und Wirkung Stefan Georges (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1978, Abhandlungen zur Kunst-, Musik- und Literaturwissenschaft, 249), 25–41: “Exklusivität als Markenzeichen”.

Rüdiger Nutt-Kofoth The Book in the Poetological Concept of Stefan George 115

Figure 1: Stefan George, Der Teppich des Lebens und die Lieder von Traum und Tod mit einem Vorspiel, [private impression: Berlin: Verlag der Blätter für die Kunst, printed by von Holten] 1900 [delivered November 1899], title page, leaf 3r (fig. 1–4: copy No 11, Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Münster, call number: 50 Fol 31)

116

VARIANTS 4 2005

and artistic book shaping, which is also a specific feature of George’s concept of poetry: In a book which is a work of art there are no accessories: everything is in its right place and equivalent in meaning. […] The book artist has to start from the very heart of the book, which is the work of literature, and to absorb it thoroughly if he wants to give an organic vision of this artistic centre. Even when only looking at the book, at the pages we shall be surrounded by the invisible soul of their verse or prose as if it were silent music, and there should be not a single moment of doubt as to its nature.11

On 19 September 1899, George mentioned to Karl Wolfskehl that Lechter’s book art was of prime importance to the private edition of The Tapestry of Life: “It is M.[elchior] L.[echter] who really gives greatness to my new book. A monument of highest dimensions which can hardly be put into words and explained to someone far away.”12 The volume contains three sections of 24 poems, with each poem consisting of four quatrains. Lechter represented this strict text structure by means of a symmetrical shaping of the pages.13 Each page takes the form of a two-part altarpiece. On the typographic level, the symmetrical structure is underlined by the titles of the poems that are placed on the outer sides of each page. This sacred,14 diptych-like shaping of the pages, which offers the printed text by George instead of the holy picture, is completed by arabesque Art Nouveau elements. The snakes and twigs 11 Quoted by Wolfhard Raub, Melchior Lechter als Buchkünstler: Darstellung, Werkverzeichnis, Bibliographie (Köln: Greven Verlag, 1969), 15: “Im Buche als Kunstwerk ist nichts Beiwerk: alles hat an richtiger Stelle gleiche Bedeutung. […] im letzten Grunde bildet das Dichtwerk den inneren Ausgangspunkt und somit auch das Kriterium für das Buch, von dem der bildende Künstler, wenn es wirklich von ihm aufgenommen worden ist, bei organischer Sichtbarmachung des Werkes auszugehen hat. / Schon beim Anblick des Buches, der Seiten, soll uns die unsichtbare Seele der Verse, der Prosa wie stumme Musik umfangen und uns keinen Augenblick über ihren Charakter im Zweifel lassen.” 12 Quoted in Stefan George, Sämtliche Werke in 18 Bänden, vol. 5: Der Teppich des Lebens und die Lieder von Traum und Tod mit einem Vorspiel (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1984), appendix, 88: “das grosse erst aus meinem neuen buch schaft M. L. Ein höchstes denkmal von dem man in die ferne schwer einen begriff geben kann.” 13 A description can also be found in: Bert Treffers, “Melchior Lechters Buchkunst: Eine Einführung,” Castrum Peregrini 179–180 (1987), issue: “Melchior Lechter: Der Meister des Buches. 1865–1937,” 5–19, 15–17. 14

On the importance of sacred elements to George’s book conception cf. Mettler 1979 (note

8), 43.

Rüdiger Nutt-Kofoth The Book in the Poetological Concept of Stefan George 117

Figure 2: Stefan George, Der Teppich des Lebens und die Lieder von Traum und Tod mit einem Vorspiel, [private impression: Berlin: Verlag der Blätter für die Kunst, printed by von Holten] 1900 [delivered November 1899], leaf 5r

118

VARIANTS 4 2005

Figure 3: Stefan George, Der Teppich des Lebens und die Lieder von Traum und Tod mit einem Vorspiel, [private impression: Berlin: Verlag der Blätter für die Kunst, printed by von Holten] 1900 [delivered November 1899], leaf 11v

Rüdiger Nutt-Kofoth The Book in the Poetological Concept of Stefan George 119

winding at the bottom and in the margins of the page mirror the weaving metaphor of the “tapestry of life”. Carsten Strathausen described these interrelations between text and book art as follows: This rigid and highly regulated structure points to the interconnectedness of the poems themselves and endows them with a kind of material presence. They are not only part of the larger collection, but literally constitute the book as a whole. The poems are the architectural inside, the inner skeleton of an outer shell that is commonly called a book. […] As in medieval manuscripts, George’s letters merge with the surrounding space, and his words literally find their place between other objects, such as the two candelabras on the title page, or they form a square whose surface resembles the carpet described in the title poem.15

The symmetrical layout corresponds with the voluminous format that approaches a square in large quarto (36,5 x 38 cm). Apart from the title page, there are three full-page subtitle pictures and a concluding picture. The use of vat paper and coloured, namely red letters in the title and at the beginning of the poems adds to the aura of exclusiveness that characterizes the most lavish edition of George to that date. Even the almost square form of the editorial commentary takes up the format of the book. The text of the commentary surrounds the individual number of each of the 300 copies on three sides and furthermore makes it a part of its base. With the help of this numbering, the individual copy, which by its nature is identical with any of an arbitrarily large number of copies, appears to have the qualities of a unique specimen. This impression was deepened by the remark: “On publication the [printing] plates were destroyed”.16 This remark was meant to show that no further copies 15 Carsten Strathausen, The Look of Things: Poetry and Vision around 1900 (Chapel Hill & London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003, University of North Carlolina Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures, 126), 18–19. 16 The whole editorial commentary, which is set in red capital letters and contains no hyphenation, goes as follows: “The whole layout of the book, including the title, full-page pictures, framing, and ornamental letters, was done by Melchior Lechter. Under his direction the work was printed at Otto F. Holten's printery in Berlin in november eighteen ninety-nine. Three hundred copies were made and given a serial number. The same format, paper, and cover as the ones on hand were used. On publication the printing plates were destroyed.” — “Die gesammte Ausstattung als Titel Vollbilder Umrahmungen und Zierbuchstaben ist von Melchior Lechter unter dessen Leitung das Werk im November achtzenhundertneunundneunzig bei Otto v. Holten in Berlin gedruckt wurde á Es bestehen dreihundert Abzüge mit der laufenden Zahl versehen alle in vorliegendem Format

120

VARIANTS 4 2005

could be produced. Thus, it explicitly denied the serial character of the individual printed copy. The public edition of this work was brought out by Bondi Publishing Company in November 1900, but was given the publication date 1901. It does without Lechter’s book art and thus deliberately reduces the “value” of this and the following nine new editions of the book up to the volume of the complete edition (1932). The public edition contains the dedication “Melchior Lechter” instead. Now the name of the book artist is combined with the work on the semantic level instead of his book art being transferred to the public edition on the iconic level: “Since this general edition has to go without the embellishments of the first one […], I may be granted the privilege of writing the illustrious name ahead of these pages, a name so closely connected with them and worthy of gracing them forever.”17 Thus, it becomes clear how the shaping of the book is related to the respective form of publication. According to George’s concept, the private impression is undoubtedly to be preferred to the copies printed in mass production, because it is much closer to the aura of the handmade unique specimen and thus to the manuscript itself. Right from the beginning, the manuscript itself played an important part in George’s literary concept. Since it was produced earlier than the private impression, it can represent the original even as a copy. Therefore, in 1891 George made 25 zincographic copies from the handwritten copy of the first texts he translated from Charles Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil (Fleurs du Mal).18 As late as 1909, George followed the same practice Papier und Einband á Nach dem Erscheinen wurden die Platten vernichtet” (Stefan George, Der Teppich des Lebens und die Lieder von Traum und Tod mit einem Vorspiel, [Berlin: Verlag der Blätter für die Kunst, printed by von Holten] 1900 [delivered November 1899], at the end of the unpaginated book, copy No 11, Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Münster, call number: 50 Fol 31). — In this sense, Lechter also regarded the individual printed copy as an “artistic original”. Cf. Karlhans Kluncker, “Dichtung und Buchschmuck. Melchior Lechter zum 50. Todestag,” Castrum Peregrini 179–180 (1987), issue: “Melchior Lechter: Der Meister des Buches. 1865–1937”, 20–60, 47. 17 Stefan George, Gesamt-Ausgabe der Werke: Endgültige Fassung, [vol. 5]: Der Teppich des Lebens und die Lieder von Traum und Tod mit einem Vorspiel (Berlin: Georg Bondi, 1932), 7: “Da diese allgemeine ausgabe den schmuck der ersten entbehren muss […] so sei es mir vergönnt den erlauchten namen vor diese seiten zu schreiben der mit ihnen so eng verbunden ist und der sie auf immer ziere.” This dedication can be found on p. 5. 18 Charles Baudelaire’s Blumen des Bösen, umgedichtet von [recast by] Stefan George. Zinkographic reproduction of the manuscript by C.A. Klein in 25 copies. [Berlin 1891].

Rüdiger Nutt-Kofoth The Book in the Poetological Concept of Stefan George 121

Figure 4: Stefan George, Der Teppich des Lebens und die Lieder von Traum und Tod mit einem Vorspiel, [private impression: Berlin: Verlag der Blätter für die Kunst, printed by von Holten] 1900 [delivered November 1899], editorial commentary, leaf 25v

122

VARIANTS 4 2005

Figure 5: Manuscript of The Year of the Soul, leaf 2r , facsimile in: Stefan George, Das Jahr der Seele: Handschrift des Dichters, im Jubiläumsjahr 1968, Verlag Helmut Küpper, vormals Georg Bondi, Düsseldorf, München 1968

Rüdiger Nutt-Kofoth The Book in the Poetological Concept of Stefan George 123

Figure 6: Das Jahr der Seele von Stefan George, [private impression], Berlin: Verlag der Blätter für die Kunst [private publishing house], printed by Otto von Holten, 1897, leaf 3r (Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Münster, call number: 1E 7569)

124

VARIANTS 4 2005

and produced 300 copies of his own manuscript comprising translated extracts of Dante’s Divine Comedy (Divina Commedia).19 From this angle, the printed book turns out to be no categorically different medium, but a transformation of the manuscript with certain deficiencies, as can be illustrated by George’s collection of poetry The Year of the Soul (Das Jahr der Seele). The setting copy of the 1897 private impression of The Year of the Soul was a collection of manuscripts by George. This collection was bound like a book and is considered “a first example of monumental creation”.20 The handwriting is straight, the letters are not connected, and the initials of the stanzas and verses are alternately red and blue. Melchior Lechter, who was already in charge of shaping this private impression, tried to imitate the handwriting typographically and to transfer it to the printed book.21 He adopted both the colouring of the letters and the makeup of the manuscript pages for the impression. This procedure also shows that George was eager to preserve the character of the manuscript in the printed book and to give to it the aura of the original. An important means to this end was typography. It did not have to be restricted to the special fashioning of the private impressions, but could also be used for the public editions. Therefore, George developed a special type, which was called Stefan George type. This type had been at his disposal since 1901 and could first be found in a publication by George in 1904.22 From 1927 onwards, George continued this strategy by adding in an appendix facsimiles of handwritten versions of certain poems to his complete edition published by Bondi. Thus, the reader of 19 Dante, Stellen aus der Göttlichen Komödie in Umdichtung, zincographic reproduction of George’s manuscript in the form of a private impression of 300 copies, printed at von Holten’s printery, Berlin 1909. 20 Georg Peter Landmann in the appendix of George, Sämtliche Werke (note 12), vol. 4: Das Jahr der Seele, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1982, 121: “ein erstes Beispiel monumentaler Gestaltung”. 21 Das Jahr der Seele von Stefan George (Berlin: Verlag der Blätter für die Kunst [private publishing house], printed by Otto von Holten, 1897). 22 For the first time in the third (the second public) impression of The Year of the Soul, 1904; cf. Kluncker 1987 (note 16), 53. — The types of this printing got lost in the Second World War. Of late, a digital reproduction of the George type has been available. It was developed by the Institute for Texual Criticism. See <www.textkritik.de/technik/stefan-george-schrift.htm> [27 September 2004].

Rüdiger Nutt-Kofoth The Book in the Poetological Concept of Stefan George 125

the printed text got an impression of what the texts looked like in the original manuscript.23 The re-connection between the printed texts and the manuscript versions was effected by the Stefan George type imitating George’s handwriting. This was preceded by a stylization of the handwriting until it approached printing: George changed the flow of his handwriting to a sequence of isolated letters that resembled a contemporary job sans serif type.24 The bound manuscript of The Year of the Soul shows an early form of this handwriting. From this basis, a type could be developed that was directly connected with George’s concept of poetry. The typographic unity of the line became the main element of this printing. The curves of the letters s and g were cut back to bring them nearer to the direction of the line. With the same intention, the letter e was modelled on the Greek epsilon and thus kept open at the right top. Moreover, the capital letters A and V lost their acute angles and their upper and lower ends respectively were combined by straight lines instead. In this way, they also contributed to the blocklike character of the line. The upstrokes of the small letters k and t were shortened, and one gets the impression that this was not done with other small letters like h, d or b only because this would have rendered them unrecognizable. Consequently, the lines assumed the shapes of blocks which made George’s use of small initial letters “look as monumental as the capital letters used throughout in Ro23 Cf. Mettler 1979 (note 8), 44–45; see also George’s remark to Hofmannsthal concerning an edition of Hofmannsthal’s poems in George’s private publishing house “Verlag der Blätter für die Kunst”: “Here I send to you new samples of the cover as well as of the type (it is my own one which I have tried to improve on for a long time). I think you will like it. You see that it approaches my handwriting: it is undoubtedly a good way to get away from the old thing after all modern designers of letters decorated the already existing ones with certain made-up flourishes. “ — “Ich sende hier neue proben des einbandes á sowie der schrift (meiner eignen an deren besserung ich schon lang arbeite) ich glaube dass sie Ihnen gefallen wird. Sie sehen dass sie meiner handschrift angeglichen ist: jedenfalls ein guter weg nachdem alle neueren zeichner von buchstaben die bereits bestehenden mit irgendwelchen erdachten schnörkeln versahen á um so vom alten loszukommen” (Briefwechsel zwischen George und Hofmannsthal, [ed. Robert Boehringer], 2nd expanded edition, München, Düsseldorf, 1953, 220; letter from 3 October 1904). — See various volumes of the complete edition published by Bondi: Stefan George, Gesamt-Ausgabe der Werke: Endgültige Fassung (Berlin 1927–1934) [Stefan George, Complete Edition of his Works. Final Version, Berlin 1927–1934)]. 24 Cf. Friedrich A. Kittler, Aufschreibesysteme 1800 á 1900, 3rd, completely revised new edition (München: Fink, 1995), 327.

126

VARIANTS 4 2005

Figure 7: Stefan George, Gesamt-Ausgabe der Werke. Endgültige Fassung, [vol. 4:] Das Jahr der Seele, Berlin 1928, 12

Rüdiger Nutt-Kofoth The Book in the Poetological Concept of Stefan George 127

man inscriptions”. George’s typography aimed not only at re-connecting the printed text with the unique aura of the manuscript, but also at giving to it an easily recognizable appearance in a world of mass-produced books. In this respect, his typography became a stereotype intended to make the product “George” an unmistakable one. It became a fixed formula in the whole system of a specific concept of literature. This system expressed itself very clearly both on the semantic level and on the level of outward form.25 For this reason, the Stefan George type has been called “a representative of George’s art”.26 Going beyond typography, Carl August Klein, the official editor of the Papers for Art installed by George,27 underlined the importance of the whole process of book fashioning to George’s poetological concept and said that the author had to be responsible for it: “Even the technical aspects of book production have partly to be undertaken by the author. Thus, he must not be accused of being vain if he rejects the printing and the paper of the common market products and claims that his creation should wear clothes suitable to its station.”28 This programmatic statement had already been published in the Papers for Art in 1893. At that time, it related not only to his arguments in favour of using Roman type instead of Gothic print, but also to the peculiarities of George’s linguistic signs, namely his unconventional spelling and punctuation as well as his constant use of small initial letters. Hence, it becomes clear that the iconic (and tangible) side of George’s texts is not isolated from the linguistic one, but inextricably bound up with it. Both sides together 25 Cf. Mettler 1979 (note 8), 76–77 and 103; quotation 77: “so monumental erscheinen […] lassen wie die durchgehenden Großbuchstaben in römischen Inschriften.” 26 Martin Roos, Stefan Georges Rhetorik der Selbstinszenierung (Düsseldorf: Grupello Verlag, 2000), 35: “Repräsentant der Kunst Georges”. 27 The actual editor of the magazine was George himself. Later, Klein even had to ask George for copies of a new issue. Cf. Karlhans Kluncker, Blätter für die Kunst: Zeitschrift der Dichterschule Stefan Georges (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1974, Studien zur Philosophie und Literatur des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, 24), 63. 28 Carl August Klein, Die Sendung Stefan Georges: Erinnerungen (Berlin: Verlag die Rabenpresse, 1935), 75–76: “Sogar für das Technische eines Buches ist der Verfasser mitverantwortlich, und man darf es ihm nicht als Eitelkeit vorwerfen, wenn er Druck und Papier der landläufigen Markterzeugnisse verschmäht und für sein Geschöpf eine standesgemäße Kleidung beansprucht.” The statement can also be found in: Blätter für die Kunst, series 1, vol. 5, 144.

128

VARIANTS 4 2005

form the textual image of George’s works, and this textual image is in turn part of George’s concept of the aura-like effect of the book. This aura-like effect was formulated as a maxim by the Papers for Art in 1896: We gladly undertake to entertain you with the outer appearance a good many times, because it is the never deceiving mirror of the inner core. Have you not realized yet that your German books and magazines are most detrimental to beauty, both the rough trumpery and parvenu splendour of the ones and the flat and sober ordinariness of the others?29

Thus, the outer form of the books assumed a major role within the hermetic structure of the circle of poets established by George and the publication strategy30 connected with it, a process which resulted from a broader understanding of poetical form. By means of their conceptional fashioning the books became “shaped objects, works of art” and thus distinguishable, separable and finally unmistakable products among a spate of mass-produced books.31 Since a literary work obviously consists of more than just the linguistic dimension of the text, which has been the basis of the critical text edition up to now, one must ask oneself the fundamental question of how the other dimensions of a text should be dealt with editorially. This applies particularly to authors in whose works these different dimensions overlap and complement each other. The iconic character of the printed text, its typography and layout, could be presented in the edition with the help of facsimiles. One has to bear in mind, however, that this presentation can only be of an additional nature. On the other hand, to present facsimiles alone would mean the abandonment of a critically prepared text. Yet textual criticism is the indispensable basis of any kind of editorial work. 29 Blätter für die Kunst, series 3, vol. 4, 98: “Wir nehmen es gern auf uns noch manchmal mit dem äusseren als dem nietrügenden spiegel des innern zu unterhalten. Seht ihr also noch immer nicht dass eure deutschen buch- und zeitschriftausgaben die schönheitswidrigsten sind sowol der rohe flitter- und emporkömmlingsprunk der einen als die platte und nüchterne alltäglichkeit der andern?” 30 Cf. the concise recent survey in the chapter “Character of the Circle and Publication Strategy” (“Zirkelcharakter und Publikationsstrategie”) in Rüdiger Nutt-Kofoth, “Dichtungskonzeption als Differenz: Vom notwendigen Scheitern einer Zusammenarbeit zwischen George und Hofmannsthal,” in: Bodo Plachta (ed.), Literarische Zusammenarbeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2001), 217–243, esp. 229–234; with additional literary references. 31

Cf. Mettler 1979 (note 8), 11: “zu geformten Gegenständen, zu Kunstwerken”.

Rüdiger Nutt-Kofoth The Book in the Poetological Concept of Stefan George 129

Therefore, the offering of facsimiles of the original impressions would be solely an addition to the edition which enables the reader to gain an insight into the text that the ordinary presentation of a critical text alone could not offer. In this sense, facsimiles of printed texts could take up the method of manuscript facsimiles that in the wake of the Frankfurt Hölderlin edition by D.E. Sattler (1975/76-) has been frequently adopted in modern German scholarly editing. And indeed, several critical editions have presented facsimiles of the original impressions in the meantime. The Innsbruck Trakl edition, for example, published facsimiles of the two volumes of poetry prepared by Trakl as a supplement to the edition. The Marburg Büchner edition published in advance first impressions of works by Büchner brought out either in Büchner’s lifetime or posthumously. Finally, the websites of the “Institute for Textual Criticism” offer, as an addition to the historico-critical Kafka edition done by the “Institute”, facsimiles of impressions of Kafka’s works that appeared in magazines or other collections during the author’s lifetime.32 In contrast to the iconic character of a printed text, the tangible dimension of a book is difficult to represent in an edition. Its paper or cover would be hard to imitate. At this stage at least, the efforts would assume unjustifiable proportions. Beyond the possibilities offered by photographic reproduction, the edition seems to have to restrict itself to mere descriptions when trying to give an impression of the original’s tangible qualities to the reader. Finally, a publication strategy like the one behind George’s conception of the “book” can of course only be presented in the edition by means of depiction. Nonetheless, I think it would be an important step if scholarly editors considered much more 32 Georg Trakl, Sämtliche Werke und Briefwechsel: Innsbrucker Ausgabe. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe mit Faksimiles der handschriftlichen Texte Trakls, ed. Eberhard Sauermann and Hermann Zwerschina (Basel, Frankfurt a.M.: Stroemfeld, 1995—); supplement: Nachdruck der Erstausgaben: suppl. 1: Georg Trakl, Gedichte: Originalgetreuer photomechanischer Nachdruck der Ausg. Leipzig, Wolff, 1913; suppl. 2: Georg Trakl, Sebastian im Traum: Originalgetreuer photomechanischer Nachdruck der Ausg. Leipzig, Wolff, 1915 (Basel, Frankfurt a.M.: Stroemfeld, 1995). — Georg Büchner, Gesammelte Werke. Erstdrucke und Erstausgaben in Faksimiles, [Dokumente zur Textgeschichte eines zensierten Werks — Originalzeugen für die Edition. 10 Bändchen in Kassette], ed. Thomas Michael Mayer (Frankfurt a.M.: Athenäum, 1987). — Franz Kafka, Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe sämtlicher Handschriften, Drucke und Typoskripte, ed. Roland Reuß und Peter Staengle (Basel, Frankfurt a.M.: Stroemfeld, 1995—); facsimiles of the prints published during Kafka’s life: <www.textkritik.de/kafkazs/kafkadrucke.htm> [27 September 2004].

130

VARIANTS 4 2005

seriously the possibilities of making facsimiles not only of manuscripts, but also of impressions. This applies especially to authors like Stefan George, whose poetological concepts transcend the limits of the linguistic level and find expression also in the material and iconic structure of the manuscript or the printed book. In this sense, the classical practice of preparing a text for an edition, as it was illustrated at the beginning by Hans Zeller’s statement, would have to be extended. The editor would have to take into account the fact that he or she cannot publish the naked text without considering the dress of the records handed down, because the outward appearance of the historical text can also be part of its aesthetic structure.

Translated from the German by Dieter Neiteler

Rüdiger Nutt-Kofoth The Book in the Poetological Concept of Stefan George 131

This page intentionally left blank

The Limited Edition Unlimited Samuel Beckett’s Fugal Artefact Dirk Van Hulle

The act of printing is often regarded as a freezing point. This metaphor is probably as old as the history of the book. A notable example is Goethe’s description in Dichtung und Wahrheit of the way in which Die Leiden des jungen Werthers took shape, when all of a sudden the fluid text became “eine solide Masse, wie das Wasser im Gefäss, das eben auf dem Punkte des Gefrierens steht, durch die geringste Erschütterung sogleich in ein festes Eis verwandelt wird” [“a solid mass, like water in a container on the verge of freezing, which by the smallest agitation is suddenly turned into ice”].1 At the same time, the history of print is also marked by an opposite tendency. Many authors show a different attitude and regard their writing as a process, in which the printed product is only a temporary freeze. For instance, Thomas Mann saw his writing as a constant process of deliquence and tried to remelt what had become a solid product and to keep productivity in a state of flux.2 This continuous polarity in attitudes is reflected in different forms of reading. With reference to Samuel Beckett’s later prose fiction, Andrew Renton recognizes the petrifying effect of publication, but also emphasizes its fleetingness: “What we read as a published text is a temporary solidification.”3 Instead of focusing on the stasis of the finished product John Bryant calls the reader’s attention to a more dynamic concept of “the fluid text”.4 In his typology of literary drafts the French genetic critic Pierre-Marc de Biasi 1

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethes Werke in 14 Bänden, ed. Erich Trunz (Hamburg: Christian Werner Verlag, 1967), IX:585. 2 Thomas Mann, Über mich selbst: Autobiographische Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1994), 74. 3 Andrew Renton, “Disabled Figures: From the Residua to Stirrings Still,” John Pilling (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Beckett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 167-183; 170. 4 John Bryant, The Fluid Text: A Theory of Revision and Editing for Book and Screen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 62.

employs the same metaphor to describe the bon à tirer moment [“ready for printing”], the “decisive moment when what had been in a pliable and mobile manuscript state up to that point becomes fixed in the frozen shape of a published text.”5 As with all comparisons, however, the analogy with freezing fluids does not hold in every respect, since the transition from a fluid into a solid substance implies that as soon as the liquid is frozen, its fluid state ceases to exist. But in many cases, especially during the last two centuries, the “fluidity” of the composition process has materialized in manuscripts that are carefully preserved. And vice versa, when an author decides to “remelt” his work, as in Mann’s case, the “frozen” product” does not disappear either. It continues to have an existence and an influence, both on reading and on writing processes. Even if an author considers his writing as a nigh on endless process, s/he often needs publication as an end to write toward in order to be able to continue writing. An author may be well aware of the impossibility of reaching a solid, unchanging, “frozen” or static form, and yet never give up trying. To investigate the ways in which a book’s production affects its writing and may have interpretive consequences for its reading, an adequate test case is Samuel Beckett’s penultimate text, Stirrings Still. The title already indicates the tension between the dynamic and the static. It can be read as an attempt to paint a still of the human mind, which proves to be impossible because of the constant stirrings due to self-consciousness. This work was published in two completely different formats: on the one hand as an expensive, limited, signed, de luxe edition, published by Blue Moon Books (in New York) and John Calder (in London),6 and on the other hand as a text in the newspapers The Guardian and the Irish Independent of 3 March 1989.7 These extremes are the two poles that determine the dialectics of this work’s publication history. The present study con5 Pierre-Marc de Biasi, “What Is a Literary Draft? Toward a Functional Typology of Genetic Documentation,” Yale French Studies 89 (1996), 26-58; 37. 6 Samuel Beckett, Stirrings Still, illustrated by Louis le Brocquy (New York: Blue Moon Books; London: John Calder, 1988). 7 Samuel Beckett, Stirrings Still, Irish Independent (Friday, March 3, 1989): 9; Stirrings Still, The Guardian (Friday, March 3, 1989), 25. The text also appeared in The Guardian Weekly.

134

VARIANTS 4 2005

siders the fugal relationship between these two forms of publication, and two other poles (the avant-texte and the author’s own translation), as they bear on the study of Samuel Beckett’s poetics of process and on the idea of literature in general. The limited edition unlimited Stirrings Still is about a man (“he”), sitting at his table, “head on hands,” waiting for “the one true end”: “And patience till the one true end to time and grief and self and second self his own.”8 In the second section of the text the protagonist wonders if he is still “in his right mind” (262). In the third and last section he seems to hear a sentence “from deep within” (264), but there is one crucial word he cannot catch: “oh how and here a word he could not catch it were to end where never till then” (264). This last section is a speculation on the nature of that missing word, which will determine whether it might be good or bad, great or sad “to end where never till then”. The absence of this decisive adjective places him in a dilemma: should he go on or stir no more? “Such and much more such the hubbub in his mind so-called till nothing left from deep within but only ever fainter oh to end.” (265) No matter how hard he tries, he remains in a state of uncertainty and there is nothing for it but to have patience: “Time and grief and self so-called. Oh all to end.” (265) Stirrings Still consists of less than two thousand words, yet Beckett needed more than five years and a few dozens of manuscript versions to complete it. After the publication of Worstward Ho in 1983, Beckett had said that the writing was over, which at first sight corresponds with the conclusion of Worstward Ho: “Said nohow on.”9 But apparently he did know how on. As the publication of his last two texts evidence, he continued writing, albeit rather hesitantly. For instance, the first manuscripts of what was to become Stirrings Still are marked by a constant oscillation between English and French. On the first manuscript Beckett started in French and switched to English; on the second manuscript he continued 8 Samuel Beckett, Stirrings Still. The Complete Short Prose 1929-1989, ed. S. E. Gontarski (New York: Grove Press, 1995), 259-65; 261. Hereinafter, quotations from Stirrings Still are referred to by means of the page numbers of this edition. 9

Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho Nohow On (New York: Grove Press, 1996 [1983]), 87-116; 116.

Dirk Van Hulle The Limited Edition Unlimited

135

in English and switched to French; and after four French versions of a section that eventually did not make it into the final text, Beckett started writing in English again. During the first three years of the composition process the writing proceeded slowly, apparently without a clear goal. It was only when the American publisher Barney Rosset was sacked from Grove Press in 1986 that Beckett found a destination for his writings. Rosset tried to set up a new publishing house and asked if he could perhaps publish Beckett’s first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women. After careful consideration, Beckett decided he did not want to publish this early work, because he thought it was “too awful”.10 But he promised Rosset a new piece. The sociology of the text thus gave a sudden teleology to the loose pieces of prose he had been writing in both French and English for the past three years. Still, it took him another two years to finish the text, which raises the question what is to be considered the “finished” text. The date indicated on the limited edition is 1988, suggesting that it represents the text’s first public appearance. But the border between the text’s private and public life is blurred because of the oral performances or public readings of the text before it was published. On Sunday, 2 October 1988, the Theatre of Literature Company (with Leonard Fenton, Karin Fernald, Sylvester McCoy) presented Stirrings Still at the Riverside Studios (Hammersmith, London). The performance, directed by John Calder (the English publisher of the limited edition), was part of the marketing. An “Invitation to subscribe,” preserved at the Beckett Archive of Reading University Library (RUL MS 3323), mentions that individuals or institutions ordering before 1 December 1988 could deduct 10 percent from the tidy sum of $1500 per copy. The text of the limited edition is printed on deckle edged Velin de Rives made by Arjomari, France, and the book is quarter-bound in parchment with a natural linen and cotton cloth, stamped with a motif by Louis le Brocquy in eighteen carat gold. Even though a first edition usually marks the transition from the private sphere of the manuscripts 10

James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), 699.

136

VARIANTS 4 2005

to the public domain, the limited edition was nonetheless a rather private enterprise, limited to 226 copies, numbered one to two hundred and lettered A to Z by hand and signed by both Samuel Beckett and the illustrator Louis le Brocquy. Moreover, an announcement that Stirrings Still by Samuel Beckett “will be published” by Calder follows the “sneek preview” of the complete text in the Irish Independent of 3 March 1989. The so-called 1988 edition of the book was published on Beckett’s eighty-third birthday in 1989, more than a month after the newspaper publications in the Guardian and the Irish Independent. A leaflet in the American facsimile review copy preserved in the Beckett archive in Reading (RUL MS 3405) also indicates “April 13, 1989” as the actual publication date of the limited edition. The Irish Independent treats the text as a regular piece of journalism: the first paragraph is printed in a larger font, as if it were an introductory summary of the rest of the text, whose paragraphing is slightly changed as well. The text in the Guardian lacks a word (“far as he could see” instead of “so far as he could see”), introduces an unnecessary capital letter (“Way” instead of “way”), and has four instead of three sections. They have to make room for an advertisement of the London Review of Books, which says: “Read the softback before you shell out for the hard” — followed by an image of a “softback” copy of the LRB. The slogan was inversely applicable to Calder Publications’s marketing strategy in that it encouraged the reader of the “softback” newspaper publication of Stirrings Still to “shell out” for the limited edition. What makes the Guardian publication so interesting is the tension between vulnerable integrity and confident sales talk, two extremes of literary production, two completely different attitudes presented on the same page: the London Review of Books recommends itself with the motto “The best of all possible words”; if anything, these words apply to the text by Beckett, but his device was: “fail better”.11

11

Beckett, Worstward Ho, 111.

Dirk Van Hulle The Limited Edition Unlimited

137

Explicit and Implicit Historical Connections: the Paratext The newspaper versions both lack the dedication “for Barney Rosset,” which is as crucial as the dedication “(For Mrs. Henry Mills Alden)” in the poem “Trees” by Joyce Kilmer. In Radiant Textuality12 Jerome McGann points out that this dedication line is not reproduced in the text of Brooks and Warren’s Understanding Poetry. It is significant that McGann allows the marginal, underground character Footnote to argue that — “of course” — the dedication is part of “the poem itself ”. One could argue that the same applies to Stirrings Still. Beckett’s empathy with Barney Rosset’s situation played an important role in the decision to release the text from the private atmosphere of the author’s workshop and prepare it for publication. This observation may not have direct interpretive consequences, but it might have some theoretical implications with respect to the status of other aspects of the so-called “paratext”. McGann’s “Footnote” pleads against uncoupling poems from their “explicit historical connections”.13 The adjective explicit raises the question to what extent implicit historical connections can be taken into account as well. Implicit does not necessarily mean immaterial; it may include the material evidence of the writing process as it is preserved in manuscript archives. What is “the poem itself ”? Is it a product or a process? If a newspaper uncouples the dedication from the text, it excludes a crucial element of what Gérard Genette called the paratexte.14 The paratext also includes the so-called avant-texte of manuscripts, typescripts and other preparatory material.15 Beckett’s last publication problematizes this issue. Comment dire (1989), originally written in French and translated into English by the author himself, is usually treated as a poem (for instance in the recent Calder edition of Samuel Beckett’s Poems 1930-1989), possibly because of its layout: 12 Jerome McGann, Radiant Textuality: Literature After the World Wide Web (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 42. 13

McGann, Radiant Textuality, 47.

14

Gérard Genette, Palimpsestes: La littérature au second degré (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1982), 10.

15

Genette, Palimpsestes, 11.

138

VARIANTS 4 2005

Comment dire folie — folie que de — que de — comment dire — folie que de ce — depuis — folie depuis ce — donné — folie donné ce que de — vu — folie vu ce — ce — comment dire — ceci — ce ceci — ceci-ci — tout ce ceci-ci — (…)16

What presents itself at first sight as a poem appears to be a failed attempt to write one single sentence, which might just as well be prose. The writing of the text proceeds gradually and whenever the author is in a deadlock he asks himself “what is the word,” as Beckett translated “Comment dire” into English. The text thus appears as a transcription of a composition process: “what is the word // folly — / folly for to — / for to — / what is the word — / folly from this — / all this — / folly from all this — / given — / folly given all this — / seeing — / folly seeing all this — / this — / what is the word — / this this — / this this here — […]”.17 As in Bach’s unfinished triple fugue in the Art of Fugue, with the signature theme B-A-C-H, Beckett’s last text can be seen as the author’s final signature: an unfinished sentence presented as a “finished” work, or a product presenting itself as a process. With his final statement as a writer Beckett shows how his works — as a whole — can be regarded as a process. His works are interrelated by means of both explicit and implicit 16

Samuel Beckett, Poems 1930-1989 (London: Calder, 2002), 112.

17

Samuel Beckett, Poems 113.

Dirk Van Hulle The Limited Edition Unlimited

139

intratextual references. In this case, the title of his last text refers to the paratext of the last but one: “comment dire” occurs in the first sentence of the first draft of Stirrings Still: “Tout tout le temps ˆ toujours ˆ à la même distance comme c’est comment dire? ...” (RUL MS 2933/1/1) Beckett’s writing method often consisted in harking back to his previous texts in order to go on writing, in accordance with the famous last words of The Unnamable: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”18 Toward the end of his career, Beckett went further in the application of this method, culminating in Stirrings Still, which — in Andrew Renton’s words — is “almost entirely composed of echoes and reiterations of his previous work”.19 In the manuscripts, the first appearance of the dedication “For Barney Rosset” occurs in MS 2935/3/9, followed by the date “July 1986”. Until then the versions of the text had either had no title or the title “End” (in manuscripts RUL MS 2935/3/2 and 2935/3/5). In July 1986 Beckett called it “FRAGMENT” (RUL MS 2935/3/9) so that the dedication almost became part of the title: fragment for Barney Rosset. The influence of the agents of book production on the writing process materialized in this and the subsequent typescripts. Thanks to this social circumstance the “End” turned out not to be the end after all, for Beckett considered one fragment too little to publish as a book, expanded the text with a second section, and added an S to the title: “FRAGMENTS / For Barney Rosset / July 1986” (RUL MS 1935/3/13). The two fragments were still not enough, according to Beckett, but the third was harder to write than he expected. On 19 December 1986 Beckett wrote to Rosset: “No sign of 3rd so far and fear little hope the way I am now.” James Knowlson quotes this line to illustrate the difficult composition process of the last section: “It was not until late 1987 that he was able to send on the final fragment to complete the text, which was published in a signed, de luxe, limited edition with illustrations by Louis le Brocquy in 1988.”20

18

Samuel Beckett, Molloy — Malone Dies — The Unnamable (London: Picador, 1976), 382.

19

Renton, “Disabled Figures”, 172.

20

Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 699.

140

VARIANTS 4 2005

These illustrations are also part of the “explicit historical connections”.21 Beckett had been introduced to Louis le Brocquy in 1978 and according to James Knowlson they remained on friendly terms until Beckett’s death.22 Louis le Brocquy made several studies of Beckett’s head. One of his portraits is the first illustration in the limited edition of Stirrings Still. It is remarkable that an author serves as a model for the illustration of his text. It gives the text a more autobiographical outlook than possibly intended. Since the first sentence (“One night as he sat at his table ...”) is preceded by Beckett’s portrait it becomes more difficult for the reader to make a clear distinction between author, narrator and protagonist. The reader is tempted to make a link between the portrait and the “he”. The same goes for the text in the Guardian, which is printed next to a large photograph of Beckett’s head. The text in the Irish Independent is interspersed with four caricatures of Beckett. The fourth is a copy of the first, thus serving as an illustration of the “second self ”. The text is also laid out around a photograph of Beckett’s head. All these illustrations seem to suggest that the text is about what goes on inside this head. Not unlike Endgame (with its setting consisting of a bare room with two small windows, resembling the interior of a skull) Stirrings Still may be interpreted as another “skullscape.” In view of the attempt to paint a still of the human mind an important scene is the moment when the protagonist sets out “to take thought”: “To this end for want of a stone on which to sit like Walther and cross his legs the best he could do was stop dead and stand stock still” (263). The stone is a reference to a famous poem by Walther von der Vogelweide, meditating on a profound existential question: Ich saz ûf einem steine, dô dáhte ich bein mit beine, dar ûf sazte ích mîn ellenbogen, ich hete in mîne hant gesmogen daz kínne und éin mîn wange, dô dâhte ich mir vil ange, wie man zer welte solte leben, ... 21

McGann, Radiant Textuality, 47.

22

Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 656.

Dirk Van Hulle The Limited Edition Unlimited

141

[“I sat on a stone, and crossed my legs. I put my ellbow on them and nestled my chin and cheek in my hand. Thus I probingly considered how one should live on this earth, ...”]23

Louis le Brocquy’s illustration of a man with his head on his hand looks like a variation on this theme. So does Auguste Rodin’s famous sculpture of the Penseur. After poetry and painting, this third art form may help elucidate another aspect of Stirrings Still, which — by analogy with Beckett’s skullscapes — might be called a skullpture. It is the attempt of an old man to keep his brain in shape. He sculpts his mind from the inside, concluding, with a bright token of common sense, that he must indeed still be in his right mind: “For could one not in his right mind be reasonably said to wonder if he was in his right mind and bring what is more his remains of reason to bear on this perplexity….” (262) James Joyce — as a young man — referred to sculpture when he formulated his aesthetic view on mimesis, based on a translation of Aristotle: “‘E tekne mimeitai ten phusin’ — This phrase is falsely rendered as ‘Art is an imitation of Nature.’” According to Joyce, the correct translation is “Art imitates Nature,” meaning “that the artistic process is like the natural process” (Paris Notebook, National Library of Ireland, MS 36,639/2/A, p. 24). This note, written on 27 March 1903, already contains most of the elements of what Linda Hutcheon calls “process mimesis”: “Reading and writing belong to the processes of ‘life’ as much as they do to those of ‘art’.”24 The metafictional reflex draws attention to the artificiality of the work of literature, suspending the suspension of disbelief. It “consciously manifests a concern for the aesthetic presence of the writing novelist”.25 The illustrations and pictures of the author in both the limited and the newspaper editions of Stirrings Still emphasize this concern. Hutcheon refers to the painting of “The Betrothal of the Arnolfini” with its mirror and the line “Johannes de eyck fuit hic” as part of the composition. Similarly, a text can draw attention to its own 23

Walther von der Vogelweide, Werke. Band 1: Spruchlyrik (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1994), 72.

24

Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox (New York and London: Methuen, 1984), 5. 25

142

Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative, 9.

VARIANTS 4 2005

composition process and invite the reader “to participate in the artistic process by bearing witness to the novel’s self-analyzing development”.26 In his aesthetic reflection Joyce applies his idea of “the artistic process” to sculpture: “It is false to say that sculpture (for instance) is an art of repose (...) for a work of sculptural art must be surveyed according to its rhythm and this surveying is an imaginary movement in space” (NLI MS 36,639/2/A, p. 24). The notion of “anxiety of influence” is perhaps not quite adequate to fully capture the complexity of Beckett’s relationship to Joyce,27 and if it is problematic to measure Joyce’s late texts to his early aesthetic viewpoints, comparing the latter to another author’s writings is even more so. Nonetheless, Joyce’s early meditations on art may shed a light on a particular aspect of Beckett’s “works in progress,” notably Stirrings Still. While “the text is always on its way towards becoming something of a sculptural object,”28 the reader is invited to survey Beckett’s skullpture and to participate in the artistic process. The way Louis le Brocquy visualizes the idea of self-consciousness as a “second self ” is a double contour around the male protagonist. But even though this double contour creates the effect of stirrings, the picture freezes the stirring consciousness at a certain moment, and thus inevitably misrepresents its elusiveness. Compared to the poet Walther von der Vogelweide, to the painter Louis le Brocquy and to the sculptor Auguste Rodin, Beckett is confronted with a bigger challenge: his subject does not even have a stone to sit on; even when the protagonist stands “stock still” his mind goes “on”. Beckett’s ambiguous fascination with motion and stillness is a constant in his work. The word “on” is one of the most important notions in his poetics of process — as distinct from Progress, on which it is a probing commentary. Not unlike the tree in Waiting for Godot life does not go anywhere, it simply goes on. Stirrings Still is a tale about what goes “on” inside the skull, a tale of ratiocination, to use the term Edgar Allan Poe coined to describe 26

Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative, 9.

27

See for instance Barbara Gluck, Beckett and Joyce: Friendship and Fiction (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1979). David Hayman further explores shared traits in “Joyce / Beckett / Joyce”, Journal of Beckett Studies 7 (Spring 1982), < http://english.fsu.edu/jobs/num07/jobs07.htm>. 28

Renton, “Disabled Figures”, 170.

Dirk Van Hulle The Limited Edition Unlimited

143

his first detective stories, but without the dénouement, for in Beckett’s text the process of ratiocination does not come to an end. Self-consciousness prevents the human mind of making a still of its own stirrings. Poetics of Process and the Fugal Artefact The notion of an “artefact” may be an adequate term to describe the limited edition as a research object in its own right, as well as to emphasize that literature, like any other form of art, is inevitably “made” (Lat. “facere”). Webster’s definitions specify that an artefact is an object showing human workmanship or modification, a product of artificial character due to extraneous agency. In literature, this agency is not confined to authors and readers. The aspect of human workmanship is sometimes neglected, but may have interpretive consequences. An artefact is usually defined in spatial terms. In the case of Stirrings Still the publications in the Guardian and the Irish Independent added a temporal dimension to this notion, exposing the text of the artefact (made for longevity) to the short-lived fleetingness of a one-day stand in a newspaper. In order to find a literary shape for the fleeting nature of time and life a fourth art form proved to be of help. In musical terms, Stirrings Still can be described as a fugue. The first French versions of Stirrings Still refer to “celui qui n’avait pas toujous échoué jadis dans ses tentatives de fuite et de poursuite” [“the one who in the past did not always fail in his attempted flights and pursuits”] (MS 2933/3). The genesis of this work of literature can be read as a fugue that does not end with the limited edition of Stirrings Still. Apart from the counterpoint publication in the Guardian and the Irish Independent, the English version was also “chased” by the author’s own French translation Soubresauts, published by Editions de Minuit. Beckett’s autotranslations create a no man’s land between languages. The title of his only opera libretto, neither, suggests the perception that life’s volatility cannot be caught in any language, neither in English, nor in French. But instead of leaving it at that, Beckett kept trying to “eff ” the ineffable and turned the fugal tension of “neither” into an integral part of his aesthetics. The tension between the theme and its fugal reiteration did not stop with the publication of the French translation. Chasing self-consciousness is as impracticable as reaching 144

VARIANTS 4 2005

the horizon or capturing the ephemeral. Elusiveness is therefore the greatest challenge to any creator of an artefact. The best approximation is similar to Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the turtle: he can only come closer but never catch up with it, suggesting the structure of a fugue. This fugal structure also applies to the publication of Beckett’s penultimate text. The attempt to lay down a still of the self in a stable artefact was disrupted by its publication in the newspaper. In the same issue of the Guardian, Frank Kermode wrote a review of the limited edition of Stirrings Still, pointing out the irony of this prose, “rich only in its unmatched parsimony,” being published in a limited edition, available only to a happy few: “The purchasers can henceforth meditate the destitution of their existence and simultaneously take pleasure in their privilege…. It’s a bit like buying a Porsche to mitigate angst.”29 In the meantime the more democratic version of Stirrings Still on the previous page had already taken its head start. This does not detract from the beauty of the bodywork of the Porsche edition. The “artefactual” appearance of the limited edition is an integral part of the text because it relates to its newspaper counterpart the way the English version relates to the French, the text to the avant-texte, the still to the stirrings, the “self ” to the “second self his own” (261), the “End” to “Time”. Beckett’s fascination with time dates back from his reading of Proust. The awareness of the past and its links with the present, most famously expressed in Proust’s idea of the involuntary memory, also applies to the past of the texts in which this idea was developed, that is, the composition and publication process. “What is common to present and past is more essential than either taken separately,” Beckett wrote in his essay Proust.30 The adjective “essential” has less to do with essentialism than with essence in the sense of perfume. The best way to enjoy the volatility of a perfume is by allowing it to escape its flask. Any attempt to fix the volatile is doomed to fail since the act of fixation annuls precisely its most characteristic element, its volatility. Marcel Proust has explored this theme in numerous ways, for instance in the image of the “carafes” 29

Frank Kermode, “A miserable splendour,” Guardian (3 March 1989), 26

30

Samuel Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues With Georges Duthuit (London: Calder, 1999), 74.

Dirk Van Hulle The Limited Edition Unlimited

145

in the Vivonne: Je m’amusais à regarder les carafes que les gamins mettaient dans la Vivonne pour prendre les petits poissons, et qui, remplies par la rivière, où elles sont à leur tour encloses, à la fois “contenant” aux flancs transparents comme une eau durcie, et “contenu” plongé dans un plus grand contenant de cristal liquide et courant, évoquaient l’image de la fraîcheur d’une façon plus délicieuse et plus irritante qu’elles n’eussent fait sur une table servie, en ne la montrant qu’en fuite dans cette allitération perpétuelle entre l’eau sans consistance où les mains ne pouvaient la capter et le verre sans fluidité où le palais ne pourrait en jouir.31 [“I enjoyed watching the glass jars which the village boys used to lower into the Vivonne to catch minnows, and which, filled by the stream, in which they in their turn were enclosed, at once ‘containers’ whose transparent sides were like solidified water and ‘contents’ plunged into a still larger container of liquid, flowing crystal, conjured up an image of coolness more delicious and more provoking than they would have done standing upon a table laid for dinner, by showing it as perpetually in flight between the impalpable water in which my hands could not grasp it and the insoluble glass in which my palate could not enjoy it.”]32

The idea that the notion of coolness is evoked in a more delicious and simultaneously more provoking way by showing it only en fuite [“in flight”] is applied by Beckett in his own works, most explicitly and literally in the “perpetual alliteration” (untranslated by Scott Moncrieff and Kilmartin) between Stirrings and Still, the “fluid” manuscripts and the “solid” edition. In Interpretation and Overinterpretation Umberto Eco compares the publication of a text to bottling: “When a text is put in the bottle (...) that is, when a text is produced not for a single addressee but for a community of readers — the author knows that he or she will be interpreted not according to his or her intentions but according to a complex strategy of interactions which also involves the readers.”33 It seems important not to uncouple the text from its paratext and to try and see 31 Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, 4 vols., ed. Jean-Yves Tadié (Paris: Gallimard Pléiade, 1989), I:166 (emphasis added). 32 Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, 3 vols., trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (London: Penguin, 1989), I:183-84 (emphasis added). 33 Umberto Eco, Interpretation and Overinterpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 67.

146

VARIANTS 4 2005

the “bottled” product in the context of its composition and publication history, so that the artefact appears as both container and content. If we understand literature as an encounter between private subjectivity and public life, the study of both the composition and the publication history are crucial in order to show this perpetual alliteration between product and process.

Dirk Van Hulle The Limited Edition Unlimited

147

This page intentionally left blank

Text and Border: The Borders of the Text

The papers in this section were drawn from the symposium Text and Border: The Borders of the Text, held at the Brenner archive of the University of Innsbruck from 24 to 26 of January 2003. The main objective of this conference was to intensify the dialogue between editors and philologists who focus on questions of edition and editing, both among themselves and in exchange with cultural scholars whose primary work is not in the field of textual criticism. The two central questions of the conference were: (a) What are the specific possibilities created by electronic editions, to present and spread texts, and to develop new ways of interpretation? (b) What mutual insights can be attained in the area of tension between textual criticism’s concerns with the historicity and materiality of texts on the one hand, and different theories and methods offered by general literary and cultural studies on the other? An editorial and literary scholar who has taught us how to bridge the gap between textual scholarship and literary studies is Hans Walter Gabler. Hence, this presentation of a discussion which he initiated and intensely shaped and is shaping is dedicated to him. According to the form of discussion chosen for the symposium, the different contributions were presented on site, but were accessible for all participants beforehand on the symposium’s homepage. All papers, in addition to a revised transcript of the discussions, are available on the web, by request to the authors. The Brenner archive, which made its rooms available to us, proved an ideal location for the conference. The director, Prof. Holzner, provided us with the assistance of Mrs Gerti Kratzer and this contributed greatly to the successful realisation of the symposium. Thus, it was possible for the discussion to include members of the University of Innsbruck and other Austrian universities alongside the invited guests. Furthermore, we would like to thank Dr. Harald Saller and Dr. Andrew Williams of the Munich research project HyperNietzsche for their support in the designing of our webpage. Finally, our special thanks go to the Volkswagen Foundation for their generous financing of this enterprise and to Variants for offering us a place to publish some of its result. Roger Lüdeke — Wolfgang Streit — Cristina Urchueguía

The Book as Artefact Historicizing Ezra Pound’s First Thirty Cantos George Bornstein

In a passage meditating the best way of recuperating Troubadour texts, Ezra Pound wrote: “There are three ways of ‘going back,’ of feeling as well as knowing about the troubadours, first, by way of the music, second, by way of the land, third, by way of the books themselves, for a manuscript on vellum has a sort of life and personality which no work of the press attains.”1 Original sources often indicate not only “personality” but also historical placement, as Pound himself both knew and demonstrated in his persistent archival labor. And while a “work of the press” lacked some of the stimuli and information of a manuscript on vellum, early printed forms of texts could still yield thicker description than more recent “reprints”, which was one reason that Pound reached back to Aldus and Wechel among other renaissance printers. Closer to his own time, from Morris onward a fine-press tradition in England created artful first editions superior in design and richer in information than subsequent commercial incarnations. That particularly characterised work by Elkin Matthews in Vigo Street, John Lane at the Bodley Head, and Lolly Yeats at the Cuala Press in Ireland. In his ongoing war with commercial publishers, Pound often experimented with such venues, especially in the 1910s and 1920s. They offered him both financial and artistic advantages, with a freer hand to exploit the material form of the text to carry additional levels of meaning. Most often those levels pertained to history and allowed Pound not only to add historical dimensions to the text but, even more importantly, to have the text act out its own historical contentions and to anchor it firmly in the events surrounding its own production. Nowhere was that more true than with the early forms of the first thirty cantos. 1 Ezra Pound, A Walking Tour in Southern France: Ezra Pound Among the Troubadours, ed. Richard Sieburth (New York: New Directions, 1992), p. 84.

The first three book incarnations of the early cantos all appeared in illustrated or illuminated limited editions from fine presses. First, in 1925 came A Draft of XVI. Cantos from the Three Mountains Press operated in Paris by William Bird. A large, oversized edition of ninety copies on fine paper sumptuously bound in gold-stamped morocco, that offering featured an initial and design to each canto by the young artist Henry Strater, whom Pound had personally chosen (and personally directed) for the work. Two years later followed A Draft of the Cantos 17–27 in an edition of a hundred and one copies meant to be uniform with the first but this time published in London by John Rodker, who operated the Ovid Press there. This time the artwork was by Gladys Hynes, who also included tail pieces for the cantos along with the opening initials and designs. And finally, A Draft of XXX Cantos appeared in 1930 from Nancy Cunard’s Hours Press in Paris, which Cunard had started by buying Bill Bird’s Three Mountains Press equipment. This time the text sported Vorticist initials executed by Pound’s wife Dorothy. Only after that, in 1933, appeared the Draft of XXX Cantos from Faber in the standard commercial format which has shaped presentation ever since. The word “Draft” carries importance, of course, indicating the ongoing nature of the Cantos project, which continues to this day most notably in the changing endings of successive printings and the changing treatment of the “forbidden” cantos 72 and 73. Along the way, though, the rich early codes of the earliest printings disappeared from the page. I should like to recover here both the bibliographic and contextual codes that historicised the early cantos in terms of major events of Pound’s own day, especially World War One and the revolutions in Russia and Ireland in the neglected Draft of Cantos 17–27 of 1928.2 2 Of the two other scholars who have considered at length the early physical forms of the first thirty cantos, Jerome McGann emphasizes bibliographic codes in relation to the history of bookmaking in his The Textual Condition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), chapter five, and Black Riders: The Visible History of Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), chapter two. Lawrence Rainey emphasizes first the dialectic between romantic and ironic or neo-Platonic interpretations of Sigismundo Malatesta in his Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) and then the financial stratagems of such fine press editions in his helpful pamphlet A Poem Including History: The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New Haven: Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, 1989) and the more recent Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). McGann and Rainey

152

VARIANTS 4 2005

Figure 1: Title page for A Draft of the Cantos 17-27

The title page of that volume assigned nearly equal prominence to Hynes’s illustrated capitals as to Pound’s own linguistic text. both upper and lower case for her work as opposed to all capitals for his, it proclaimed itself “A DRAFT OF THE CANTOS 17–27 OF EZRA POUND: Initials by Gladys Hynes” (see Figure 1). The use of red ink for the acknowledgement of Hynes looked back to Morris’s famous black and red designs for Kelmscott Press, and beyond them to medieval and both emphasize A Draft of XVI. Cantos rather than A Draft of The Cantos 17–27. An alternate form of their work is included in A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in The Cantos, ed. Lawrence S. Rainey (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). Cary Nelson has briefer remarks in Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory 1910–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), pp. 193–197.

George Bornstein The Book as Artefact

153

Figure 2: Opening of Canto 18 in a modern edition

renaissance traditions (see Figure 3). And in contrast to Henry Strater’s more conventional and antiquarian designs for the previous A Draft of XVI. Cantos, only one of which (for the twelfth canto) gestured toward the contemporary world, Hynes’s more unusual illuminations featured three depicting distinctively modern scenes — the illuminated initials for Cantos 18, 19, and 22. In oscillating among representations of Classical Greece, medieval and renaissance Italy, and the modern industrialised West her designs highlighted the parallels among the Trojan war, medieval and renaissance struggles (like those of Sigismundo Malatesta or 154

VARIANTS 4 2005

Figure 3: Opening of Canto 18 in A Draft of the Cantos 17–27

Pieire de Maensac), and World War One and the Russian revolution of the poem’s own day. The subject rhymes of the illustrations not only mirror and extend those of the linguistic text but also contribute a new dimension of their own by altering the artefact of transmission of a poem obsessively concerned with artefacts of transmission. Canto 18 stages stunningly the difference between original and present textual environments of the early cantos. Today’s reader encounters simply an ordinary black and white page with the title “XVIII” and an oversize typographic initial (see Figure 2). The linguistic code first recounts the invention of paper money under the regime of Kublai George Bornstein The Book as Artefact

155

Khan as an origin of modern finance and then limns its baleful 20th century result in the machinations of Zenos Metevsky (Sir Basil Zaharoff) and his cronies in the armaments business. In contrast, the reader of A Draft of the Cantos 17–27 faced a page offering the same linguistic code but this time with the title “The XVIII Canto” nearly surrounded by a huge and vivid red initial and shocking hand-drawn design foregrounding the links between economics, armaments, and death under what we now call the military-industrial complex (see Figure 3). Immediately under the title, the right-hand portion of the design depicts in modern style a modern factory, with most of the fourteen erect chimneys expelling the smoke of industrial activity. More ominously, though, below the bar of the “A” the left-hand part of the design depicts the product of such factories, namely the artillery and guns used in the First World War and in the Russian revolution. Another such gun lies outside the “A” above the bar, while within the “A” lies a skeleton representing both those who died in the war and the deathlike state of those whom the canto argues caused the war, the arms and munitions dealers. And although the armaments industry operated internationally, neither poet nor illustrator doubted where the center of corruption embodied in firms like Maxim and Vickers lay — if you look closely, you can see twice the “L S d” marking that indicates not a time-warp reference to the sixties hallucinogen but rather to the pounds, shillings, and pence of British currency. In one of the most grisly yet effective details, the trail of red drops down the lefthand margin represents graphically the blood spilled by the financiers and manufacturers. The financiers come to the fore in Canto 19, where in contrast to the familiar roman numeral and print capital of later New Directions or Faber editions (see Figure 4), another striking design by Hynes covers the entire top of the page in the 1928 text. There two well-dressed plutocrats, one on either side, act as puppet-masters of the hapless political rulers in the center (Figure 5). The accompanying text presents first an anecdote of a large capitalist company paying an inventor to keep his invention off the market rather than allow it to reduce their profits. Pound’s anecdote has its modern resonance even today, where drug companies regularly pay rivals not to produce cheaper generic versions of their highly prof156

VARIANTS 4 2005

itable proprietary drugs.3 The canto juxtaposes a series of such vignettes, including examples from Paris, Central Europe, the United States, and from the Irish, Russian, and Mexican revolutions. Here alas Hynes’s illustration functions insidiously, giving the entire canto an anti-Semitic spin present elsewhere in the Cantos’ staging of economic and social issues but largely lacking from this particular canto (though Pound’s hero Arthur Griffith was a notorious anti-Semite). If you look closely at the financier on the right, you will see that he incorporates the large nose, bald head and other features of the stock Jew in anti-Semitic caricature, one of whose pervasive themes is secret Jewish control of the sort pictured here. Plainly, Hynes’s illustrations could bring to the fore some of the lowest as well as highest moments of Pound’s palimpsest. After two intervening cantos featuring more medieval and renaissance motifs Hynes returned to modern content and style for the design to the twenty-second canto. The canto’s linguistic text (see Figure 6) juxtaposes anecdotes and vignettes illustrating the moral and social consequences of economic policies. The opening anecdote of Pound’s idealised grandfather building a railway in Wisconsin and arguing for educating rather than eradicating Native Americans contrasts with “the other type” of railroad builder, called in the poem “Warenhauser” after the robber baron Frederick Weyerhaeuser, whose chicanery earned him the title “the Lumber King.” The ensuing gallery of portraits includes the maker of high-quality turbine parts whose price precludes a big army contract, a contrast between Major Douglas and John Maynard Keynes as economists, Pound’s teenage adventure in Gibraltar (where the Jews come off better than in Hynes’s capital for Canto 19), and an anecdote of the failure of sumptuary laws in 13th -century Florence. Hynes’s capital for Canto 22 focuses the reader’s attention on the degradation of modern industrial production that underlies the succession of anecdotes in the following text (see Figure 7). Above the bar of the initial “A” it depicts a relentless armoured figure with elements of both robot and insect controlling a modern power plant or factory, while underneath 3 “How Companies Stall Generics and Keep Themselves Healthy,” New York Times 23 July 2000, pp. 1 and 14–15.

George Bornstein The Book as Artefact

157

Figure 4: Opening of Canto 19 in a modern edition

the bar huddle dispirited and exhausted workers. Outside the “A” itself swirl three trunks recalling the financial shenanigans of the Lumber King. Whereas the linguistic text tends to balance heroes with villains, the pictorial one emphasises instead economic oppression and its victims. The capital thus not only illustrates the words, it contributes new ideas and emphases to their meaning. I shall return to this characteristic of Hynes’s work at the end of this paper. The original division of the first thirty cantos into books called A Draft of XVI. Cantos, A Draft of the Cantos 17–27, and A Draft of XXX Cantos 158

VARIANTS 4 2005

Figure 5: Opening of Canto 19 in A Draft of the Cantos 17-27

shaped their significance in a way that supplemented the bibliographic code. It changed their “contextual codes” as well, that semiotic system established by re-ordering or redividing linguistic contents.4 In the case of the early cantos, the contextual code established three different units (1–16, 17–27, and then 1–30) all of which disappear in the palimpsest 4 For use of this term in relation to the poetry of W. B. Yeats, see my article “What is the Text of a Poem by Yeats?” in Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities, ed. George Bornstein and Ralph Williams (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), pp. 167–193, and the elaboration by David Holdeman in his book Much Labouring: The Texts and Authors of Yeats’s First Modernist Books (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).

George Bornstein The Book as Artefact

159

Figure 6: Opening of Canto 22 in a modern edition

of the current collected text of the entire poem. Yet excavation of those now-lost subdivisions matters, in that like the illustrations to 17–27 they reinforce the prominence of World War One and concurrent revolutions (especially the Russian one), and of parallels among the Trojan war, renaissance struggles, and modern upheavals, as well as of the importance of material objects of textual transmission. For example, A Draft of XVI. Cantos begins with the aftermath of the Trojan war in Canto 1 and ends in Canto 16 with first the prophetic Blake figure before Hell Mouth and 160

VARIANTS 4 2005

Figure 7: Opening of Canto 22 in A Draft of the Cantos 17-27

then the disaster of World War One and onset of the Russian revolution. Correspondingly, the first canto includes the famous passage about the renaissance publisher Wechel and his version of Homer, while the catalogue of carnage in Canto 16 emphasises the effect on writers and artists, both those like Gaudier Brzeska who died and those like T. E. Hulme who survived. A Draft of the Cantos 17–27 opens with deliberate echoes of the earlier George Bornstein The Book as Artefact

161

unit. Like the opening of the previous unit, Canto 17 harks back to ancient Greece even as its first words — “So that”-recall the end of the first canto. Similarly, Canto 18 opens with the “And” that also began Canto 1. These verbal echoes signal a wider congruence. Once again the book progresses from an opening invocation of Greek culture through medieval and renaissance material to the First World War and Russian revolution again. This time the climax comes in Canto 27, which evokes “tovarisch” or comrade. But instead of assigning tovarisch solely to the Russian revolution, which Pound came to disapprove of, the canto sets up a series of subject rhymes going all the way back to the classical world. “Surely we have heard this before” and “So that the Xarites bent over tovarisch,” writes Pound. The new cantos 28–30 added to make A Draft of XXX Cantos reprise the themes and parallels of the first two books before concluding with an extended passage on renaissance bookmaking that writes large the brief reference to Wechel back in Canto 1. This last point deserves more attention. The Cantos from beginning to end displays exceptional selfconsciousness about physical artefacts of textual transmission and about itself as such an artefact. Explicit reference to bookmaking begins with the famous apostrophe to Divus and Wechel at the end of Canto 1: Lie quiet Divus. I mean, that is Andreas Divus, In officina Wecheli, 1538, out of Homer.

The two lines remind us that Pound adapts here not Homer directly but rather Andreas Divus’s Latin crib for Homer, and further that that book was first printed in the renaissance by Wechel. As scholars have long recognised, this first canto thus constructs a cultural palimpsest of transmission, in which a classical Greek text comes by way of renaissance Latin into a modern English strongly influenced by Anglo-Saxon meters. It thus exemplifies the “ply over ply” construction which The Cantos mention eight times, starting with Canto 4.5 Much less noticed is that Canto 30 also ends with a passage on renaissance printing, thus having the end of A Draft of XXX Cantos echo the material self-consciousness of its be5 For a commentary on this much-noticed phrase from a more linguistic point of view, see Hugh Witemeyer, “Pound & The Cantos: ‘Ply Over Ply,’” Paideuma 8 (Fall, 1979), 2: 229–235.

162

VARIANTS 4 2005

ginning. Canto 30 ends with a letter from the printer Soncinus, who at Fano produced a famous edition of Petrarch for Cesare Borgia in 1503: Whence have we carved it in metal Here working in Caesar’s fane: To the Prince Caesare Borgia Duke of Valent and Aemelia …and here have I brought cutters of letters and printers, not vile and vulgar (in Fano Caesaris) notable and sufficient compositors and a die-cutter for greek fonts and hebrew named Messire Francesco da Bologna not only of the usual types but he hath excogitated a new form called cursive or chancellry letters nor was it Aldous nor any other but it was this Messire Francesco who hath cut all Aldous his letters with such grace and charm as is known Hieronymous Soncinus 7th July 1503 And as for text we have taken it From that of Messire Laurentino And from a codex once of the Lords Malatesta…6

The passage provides an extraordinarily thick description of textual production in northern Italy during the renaissance, bringing together the famous names of the master printers Hieronymous Soncinus and Aldus Manutius, both of whom Pound admired as much for the form of their books as for the classical and other texts that they transmitted. Recuperation of the early printed forms of the first thirty cantos reveals Pound’s entire project as aspiring to just such status. That is, he both evokes that illustrious print tradition in the verbal text and enacts it in the physical texts. Here Gladys Hynes’s initials carry a whole new aspect into the poem. For by their very presence they associate A Draft of the Cantos 17–27 with the traditions of renaissance fine printing, just as Henry Strater’s designs had for A Draft of XVI. Cantos and Dorothy Pound’s more Vorticist initials would for the first printing of A Draft of XXX Cantos. Hynes’s particular inspiration had come from an 1894 English printing of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili or Dream of Polyphilus, itself 6

The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1986), pp. 148–49.

George Bornstein The Book as Artefact

163

originally published by Francesco Colonna in Venice in 1499, whose combination of fine design and woodcuts made it a famous example of book production.7 Pound’s poem as material artefact thus exemplifies the very processes that it praises. Further, it gives those processes a political spin. Just as the finely crafted industrial products of Canto 22 challenged the inferior mass products encouraged by industrial capitalism, so do the editions produced by William Bird, John Rodker, and Nancy Cunard challenge standards of modern book production and exemplify a live counter-tradition, one that goes back through Morris and other late Victorian and early Modernist printers to their distinguished predecessors in the Middle Ages and renaissance. The book as object as well as the text that it contains constitutes Pound’s challenge to the modern world. The Cantos remained physically self-conscious about its own selfpresentation to the end. In Canto 116, the last complete one, Pound invoked “the record / the palimpsest” and wondered “who will copy this palimpsest.” Like the culture it championed, his own poem represented numerous layers of physical and cultural transmission. Some important ones of those layers have disappeared from the editions produced by modern publishers who copy the palimpsest of the words only. We must return to the original editions of A Draft of XVI. Cantos, A Draft of the Cantos 17–27, and A Draft of XXX Cantos to recover their lost artifactual meanings. Pound meant it literally when he wrote in Canto 11 and elsewhere: And they want to know what we talked about? “de litteris et de armis, praestantibusque ingeniis,” Both of ancient times and our own; books, arms, And of men of unusual genius, Both of ancient times and our own, in short the usual subjects Of conversation between intelligent men.

The Cantos itself is just such a book, if we will only take the time to uncover the palimpsest.

7

164

Rainey, A Poem Including History, p. 11.

VARIANTS 4 2005

Writing by Numbers An Aspect of Woolf ’s Revisionary Practice Julia Briggs Thanks to the synoptic edition of Ulysses, various studies of Yeats’s revisions, Valerie Eliot’s edition of The Waste Land manuscript and the transcription and publication of many of Virginia Woolf ’s manuscripts, it is no longer possible to read modernist texts without some awareness of the complex process by which they came into being.1 Typically, that process includes a formalising or tightening of structure at some stage, perhaps along musical lines. It might even be seen as a “call to order” after what Woolf (in the course of a discussion of Joyce) termed “the usual smash and splinters”.2 T. S. Eliot actually entitled the poems he wrote between 1935 and 1941 “The Four Quartets”, yet their structural model was not so much the classical quartet, which normally has four parts (although there were four poems), but rather the work which had established his reputation — the five-part structure, with a divided second section and a lyrical fourth section that was The Waste Land. As the manuscript notoriously shows, that structure was, in turn, the outcome of Pound’s judicious editing of the original drafts (“I DO advise keeping Phlebas”3 ). Though perhaps accidentally arrived at, it became the model for the later sequence of poems, — part of the process of building an ‘oeuvre’ as if it were an architectural monument such as Mallarmé had proposed. Comparable processes of revision or restructuring can be seen in the work of Yeats and Joyce, who opened up new levels of meaning and significance as they worked (though Auden’s rewriting or 1 See, for example, George Bornstein’s Introduction to Representing Modernist Texts: Editing as Interpretation (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1991), pp. 2–3, as well as articles by Richard J. Finneran and Vicki Mahaffey in that volume. 2 The Question of Things Happening: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 1912–1922, ed. Nigel Nicolson, with Joanne Trautmann (London, Hogarth Press, 1976), p. 598, to Gerald Brenan, Christmas Day 1922. 3 T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: a facsimile and transcript, ed. Valerie Eliot (London, Faber and Faber, 1971). p. 129.

suppression of earlier poems in the light of his own changing convictions, involves a rather different concept of the relationship between the artist and his work). The revisionary practices of Eliot and Yeats were evidently very different. Eliot’s compositional process characteristically involved re-using and re-arranging sequences, so that the opening of Burnt Norton was first composed as a chorus for Murder in the Cathedral, while the ‘Phlebas’ lyric was originally written in French and appeared at the end of his poem “Dans le restaurant”, then at the end of a long sequence entitled “Death by Water”; only in the published text of The Waste Land does it stand more or less alone as the fourth section. Yeats, on the other hand, reworked individual poems and re-ordered them within individual volumes. The novelists Joyce and Woolf revised towards the point of publication, making few changes thereafter. But both of them structured their material according to a formalist aesthetic, seeking to elicit further designs and meanings from it. Woolf ’s process of revision, I shall argue, sometimes included a consciously ‘formalist’ phase, as the work neared completion. Prose fiction’s central concern with the nature of time, lived or remembered, and its regularly repeated rhythms contributed to the number patterns thus produced.4 Most of the manuscripts of Woolf ’s novels have been transcribed and published5 — all except Flush and Night and Day (of which too little survives); yet despite the intense scholarly focus on her work over the last 4 Christopher Butler discusses the work of Yeats and Joyce in Number Symbolism (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), pp. 162–5; see also his essay on “Numerological Thought” in Silent Poetry: essays in numerological analysis, ed. Alastair Fowler (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970). 5 Melymbrosia: An early version of “The Voyage Out”, ed. Louise DeSalvo (New York: New York Public Library, 1982); Jacob’s Room: The Holograph Draft, ed. Edward L. Bishop (New York, Pace University Press, 1998); “The Hours”: The British Museum Manuscript of Mrs. Dalloway, ed. Helen M. Wussow (New York, Pace University Press, 1996); “To the Lighthouse”: The Original Holograph Draft, ed. Susan Dick (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982); ‘Orlando’: The Holograph Draft, ed. Stuart Nelson Clarke (London: S. N. Clarke, 1993); “The Waves”: The Two Holograph Drafts, ed. J. W. Graham (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976); The Pargiters: The Novel-Essay Portion of “The Years”, ed. Mitchell A. Leaska (Hogarth Press, 1978); Pointz Hall: The Earlier and Later Typescripts of “Between the Acts”, ed. Mitchell A. Leaska (New York: University Publications, 1983). In addition, S. P. Rosenbaum has edited Women and Fiction: The Manuscript Version of “A Room of One’s Own”, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992).

166

VARIANTS 4 2005

thirty years or so, there has been comparatively little research devoted to her processes of revision, even though Woolf preserved much of the material needed for such a study in the form of the holograph drafts of her novels (which she normally kept, recognising their future importance), comments in her diary on the progress of her work, and to a lesser extent in her letters. She increasingly came to use her diary as a means of analysing and reflecting upon what she was doing: at the inception of The Waves, she noted “I want to watch & see how the idea at first occurs. I want to trace my own process”.6 Indeed, in this instance, the diary account is so invitingly full that Leonard himself at one stage planned to use it for a discussion of Woolf ’s methods of composition: “I should like to compare her first draft with the final draft and also with what she says in her diaries at the moment about writing them. It happens that the last part of The Waves is extraordinarily interesting from this point of view as she gives a description in her diary of the actual writing of it”.7 Two complete drafts of The Waves have survived, excellently transcribed and edited by J. W. Graham, and many pages of her diary are devoted to the difficulties Woolf encountered in the course of writing it; even so, a great deal more is evidently missing. Though the second draft closely resembles the published text in terms of structure and sequence, it differs substantially in terms of the actual words on the page. In fact, as she recorded in her diary, Woolf carried out two further substantial revisions between the second draft and the first edition, first retyping the whole text since she could “see no other way to make all the corrections, & keep the lilt, & join up, & expand & do all the other final processes.” She added, “It is like sweeping over an entire canvas with a wet brush”.8 This revision took from 1 (or perhaps 5) May to 22 June 1931, and then, when that had been retyped by ‘Mabel’, her professional typist, she made a further set of changes, revising the interludes and the Hampton Court 6 The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. III, 1925–30, ed. A. O. Bell, with A. McNeillie (London, Hogarth Press, 1980), p. 113, Thursday 30 September [1926]. 7 Frederic Spotts, ed., Letters of Leonard Woolf (London: Bloomsbury, 1990), pp. 259–60, 24 May, 29 May 1941. 8 The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. IV, 1931–35, ed. A. O. Bell with A. McNeillie (London, Hogarth Press, 1982), p. 25, Wednesday 13 May [1931].

Julia Briggs Writing by Numbers

167

scene, between 28 June and 17 or 18 July.9 But the intervening typescripts on which she worked have not survived, either in the case of The Waves, or of any other of her novels. Virtually no typescripts of Woolf ’s novels have survived, although it was her practise to type up her morning’s work in longhand after lunch, and later to have the complete text professionally retyped for Leonard to read, and forward to the printers R. & R. Clarke in Edinburgh (who printed all but her first two novels on behalf of the Hogarth Press). Typescripts have only survived under exceptional circumstances, for example in the case of the “Time Passes” episode of To the Lighthouse, which Charles Mauron translated into French and published in the Winter 1926 issue of Commerce, before the novel itself was published on 5 May 1927 (in this case, the surviving typescript represents an intermediary stage of revision).10 Occasionally other such stages exist in the form of passages in proof. In the case of To the Lighthouse, a substantial passage describing the “unhappy years” after Mrs Ramsay’s death, remembered by James as he sails to the lighthouse appeared at proof stage, only to be cancelled (as Susan Dick’s edition records).11 Woolf ’s holograph drafts, exciting as they are for their record of the “primal scene” of creation, thus only tell a part of the story of composition. The rest of it must be inferred from the differences between the manuscripts and the published text. It was usually at this late stage of revision, and on the missing typescripts, that Woolf ’s formalist principles most evidently came into play. And at this stage, her diary and letters often have less to tell us about what she was doing, so that our knowledge of such changes depends on differences, additions or omissions, even on specific gaps such as divide one section from another (not quite the evidence of asterisks, nor of the aposiopesis that Woolf was so 9 “And yesterday, 22nd June ...I finished my re-typing of The Waves. Not that it is finished — oh dear no. For then I must correct the re- re- typing. This work I began on May 5th,” Diary IV, p. 30, [Tuesday 23 June], and cf. pp. 35–6, entries for 14, 17 July 1931. 10 See James M. Haule, “‘Le temps passé’ and the Original Typescript: an early Version of the ‘Time Passes’ Section of To the Lighthouse”, Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 29, no. 3 (Fall, 1983), pp. 267–311. 11 To the Lighthouse, ed. Susan Dick (Oxford, Blackwell for the Shakespeare Head Press, 1992), pp. 207–8.

168

VARIANTS 4 2005

fond of, yet not so very different). Woolf nowhere describes what must have been a comparatively conscious and even deliberate process, and it is disappointing that the sums written in the margins or on the verso pages of her notebook usually seem to refer to the numbers of words she had written, or to the state of her finances. Much can be learned about Woolf ’s writing practise from her diary, letters, reading notebooks and unfinished autobiography, as well as from the hefty biographies of Quentin Bell (1973), James King (1994), Hermione Lee (1996), Panthea Reid (1996), Mitchell Leaska (1998) and others, yet there is still much to uncover. Woolf ’s first two novels, though far from conventional, were written according to a contemporary formula, — that of the novel of thirty-two chapters, referred to in her polemical essay on “Modern Novels” where she complained that they were constructed “after a design which more and more ceases to resemble the vision in our minds”.12 The Voyage Out has twenty-seven chapters and Night and Day has thirty-four, but between them and her third novel, Jacob’s Room, Woolf came to terms with modernism, as that novel graphically reveals. It reached her through the formalist theories of Roger Fry and the modernist practice of Katherine Mansfield in “Prelude”, T.S. Eliot’s Poems and Hope Mirrlees’s poem Paris, all of which Virginia typeset by hand; they became the second, fourth and fifth publications of the Hogarth Press, which from April 1917 stood in the Woolf ’s dining-room at Hogarth House, Richmond.13 Laura Marcus has argued that “The experience of laying out Eliot’s poetry on the page influenced Woolf ’s decision to use white spaces in Jacob’s Room; the gaps provide the reader with a sequence of separated scenes rather than a narrative, and create new forms of connection.”14 Certainly that novel’s white spaces were part of its experimentalism, but 12 “Modern Novels” (1919), The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. III, 1919–24, ed. A. McNeillie (London, Hogarth Press, 1988), p. 33 (this essay was later revised and published as “Modern Fiction” in The Common Reader). 13 In fact, Mirrlees’s Paris was published in May 1920, a year after Woolf ’s “Kew Gardens”, but it is dated 1919, and listed fifth in J. Howard Woolmer’s A Checklist of the Hogarth Press (London, Hogarth Press, 1976), whereas “Kew Gardens” is listed as seventh (p. 31). 14 Laura Marcus, “Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press”, Modernist Writers and the Marketplace, ed. Ian Willison, Warwick Gould and Warren Chernaik (London, Macmillan, 1996), p. 132.

Julia Briggs Writing by Numbers

169

they were not the result of setting Eliot’s work, since the Poems of 1919 were written in quatrains and rhyming couplets, not in vers libre, and she did not begin setting The Waste Land (1922; Hogarth Press edition, 1923) until she had finished writing Jacob’s Room (1922).15 Instead, it was Hope Mirrlees’s typographically highly experimental poem Paris that introduced her to the significance of the spaces on the page. Three accidentally surviving pages in proof with detailed instructions on lay-out from Mirrlees indicate just how difficult that task was, suggesting, moreover, that Mirrlees may have played a larger part than has previously been supposed in Woolf ’s turn to modernism. Very little of their correspondence has survived, but when Hope wrote to congratulate Virginia on Jacob’s Room, she responded with an expectation of understanding — “I don’t feel satisfied that I have brought it off. Writing without the old bannisters, one makes jumps and jerks that are not necessary.”16 The impact of a modernist aesthetic is first fully apparent in Woolf ’s short story “Kew Gardens”, written in the summer of 1917, though not published until May 1919. It reflects a post-impressionist sensibility, presenting the scene in terms of a painting with the primary colours, “red, blue and yellow” giving place to “green-blue...Yellow and black, pink and snow white”, and shining from among “heart-shaped and tongue-shaped leaves”. These sequences of colour and form occur within a highly formal design that depends (as some of her later structuring would do) on the alternation of binary opposites.17 The first, and most fundamental of these oppositions, later to be used as a key structural element in To the Lighthouse and The Waves, is the antithesis between the human and the natural world. “Kew Gardens” takes 15 “Early in 1923”, according to J. H. Willis, Jr., Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press 1917–41 (Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 1992), p. 72; see also her Diary, vol. II, 1920–24 (1978), p. 256 [Tuesday 17 July 1923], where she records herself telling ‘Tom’, “I’ve been setting up your poem. Its a good poem”. 16 The marked-up sheet of page proofs of Paris (pp. 13, 14, 15) are in the E. J. Pratt Library of Victoria University, Toronto; for the poem Paris, see my forthcoming edition in Gender in Modernism, ed. Bonnie Kime Scott (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2005/6); Woolf ’s letter to Mirrlees in A Change of Perspective: Letters, vol. III, 1923–1928 (1977), p. 3, [6 January 1923] 17 “Kew Gardens”, The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, ed. Susan Dick (London, Hogarth Press, new ed., 1989), pp. 90–5.

170

VARIANTS 4 2005

the form of a dialogue in which ordinary conversations alternate with the minute events taking place on the floor of the flowerbed, where we are given a snail’s eye view. But within that overarching distinction, the human conversations are themselves arranged in various binary combinations that create different pairings within the original division. The first and last of the four conversations take place between a man and a woman. The first couple are married and have a son and a daughter with them; they recall their earlier experiences of love: “Doesn’t one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees?”,18 while the last couple are courting. In between we overhear the conversations first of two men, and then of two women, — the first tuned to the spiritual, the second to the economic consequences of the war. The four couples are not only arranged according to gender, but also along lines of class difference, so that the first two couples are upper middle-class, and discuss metaphysical topics, while the second two are lower middle-class and discuss food. Within these divisions, there are further contrasts between homosexual and heterosexual erotic feeling, between madness and sanity, even perhaps between outside (the gardens) and inside (a tea-room, the palm house), creating a series of boxes within boxes, or wheels within wheels, as the story itself acknowledges: “But there was no silence; all the time the motor omnibuses were turning their wheels and changing their gear; like a vast nest of Chinese boxes all of wrought steel turning ceaselessly one within another the city murmured”.19 Such complex, binary alternations also recall the layout of blocks of print on paper that constitute a key stage in the process of hand printing. “Kew Gardens” was the second text that Woolf wrote to be printed on their new press; arguably, the first, “The Mark on the Wall”, was begun before she had fully grasped the processes involved. The Woolfs’ first printing press was small, and their earliest work was printed in folio, folding a single sheet of paper across the centre to form four pages. 18

Ibid., p. 91.

19

Ibid., p. 95.

Julia Briggs Writing by Numbers

171

They probably began by setting up the first three, printing off the two inner pages of the fold first, then adding page four, and printing the other side. Limited supplies of type would have made it difficult to set up more than four pages at a time (the surviving page proofs of Paris print the first three of a sequence of four pages). The folding of a single sheet of paper (with two sides) into two pages (each with a further two sides), and the rearrangement of these into pages 1 and 4, and 2 and 3 (or their equivalents) could be seen as corresponding to the binary opposition of the human and the natural world, then of men with women (1, 4) versus the same-sex conversations (2,3), and then the further divisions by class and content (1 and 2, which are back to back; 3 and 4). Thus the techniques of hand-printing may have reinforced the formalist lessons implicit in the modernist texts the Woolfs were printing. For Leonard, “Kew Gardens” was “in its own small way and within its own limits perfect; in its rhythms, movement, imagery, method, it could have been written by no one but Virginia. It is a microcosm of all her then unwritten novels, from Jacob’s Room to Between the Acts”.20 Certainly Jacob’s Room is the first of Woolf ’s novels to employ spaces as a way of breaking up the text, a method visibly different from the asterisks used, for example, in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) — a writer’s division as compared to a printer’s, perhaps. Jacob’s Room is also the first novel to employ significant chapter numbers, though the process by which Woolf arrived at these has to be inferred from a comparison of the surviving (but incomplete) manuscript with the published text. Woolf made many further changes after completing the surviving holograph; she added or omitted sequences, and altered the numbering of the chapters. The holograph ends, as does the published text, with a scene in Jacob’s room between his friend Bonamy and his mother, Betty Flanders, as she holds out his empty shoes. This scene, numbered ‘XXX’ in the manuscript, has become XIV in the book itself, partly, it would seem, to allow the previous chapter to become ‘XIII’. This long and brilliant chapter (which does not appear in the manuscript) 20 Leonard Woolf, An Autobiography, vol. II, 1911–1969 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 229 (cited by Laura Marcus, op. cit., p. 126).

172

VARIANTS 4 2005

takes place in London on the afternoon and evening of 4 August 1914. The traditional ill-luck associated with thirteen is usually derived from the number of those present at the Last Supper, an allusion appropriate enough for a chapter whose unwritten but expected climax was the betrayal, torture and death, not of an individual young man, but of a generation. The book as a whole gestures silently towards an ending signified as (MCM)XIV.21 Woolf ’s next novel, Mrs Dalloway, conceals its structural principle altogether: there are no formal chapter divisions, yet an examination of the spaces left in the text reveals a clear and appropriate twelve-part structure, corresponding to the twelve hours of the day (the book’s original title was “The Hours”).22 The individual sections do not correspond to sequential hours in the day, because Woolf recognised that “Time travels in divers paces with divers persons”. Noon, the twelfth hour of the day, is clearly the novel’s caesura, and a key moment. The ninth section accordingly opens, “It was precisely twelve o’clock: twelve by Big Ben; whose stroke was wafted over the northern part of London... — twelve o’clock struck as Clarissa Dalloway laid her green dress on her bed, and the Warren Smiths walked down Harley Street. Twelve was the hour of their appointment... (The leaden circles dissolved in the air.)”23

Big Ben also strikes near the beginning of the novel, and again at 11.30 a.m. (between the third and fourth sections), and finally at the end of the eleventh section. The sentence “The leaden circles dissolved in the air” is repeated on each occasion, and as David Bradshaw has pointed out, Big Ben is associated with patriarchal authority, perhaps even with coercion.24 Other section breaks are signified by different overheard 21 Jacob’s Room: The Holograph Draft, ed. Edward L. Bishop, p. 274, but the chapter numbers here are problematic, jumping from XVIII to XXX; Jacob’s Room (Richmond, Hogarth Press, 1922), pp. 268, 289. 22 Though at one stage, Woolf seems to have envisaged a sixteen-hour day (see “The Hours”: The British Museum Manuscript of Mrs. Dalloway, ed. Helen M. Wussow, Appendix 2, p. 416), and the novel’s action seems to run to fourteen or more, if it begins at ten a.m. and go on till after midnight. 23

Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (London, Hogarth Press, 1925), p. 142.

24

Ibid., pp. 8–9; 74; 280–1; David Bradshaw, ed., Mrs Dalloway (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. xxxiii–iv.

Julia Briggs Writing by Numbers

173

sounds — a car back-firing begins section two, an old woman singing section eight; the ambulance bell (fetching Septimus’s corpse) opens section ten, while the third section uses the aeroplane’s sky-writing as a link with the second section, and between individual consciousnesses.25 Through moments of shared awareness, Woolf sought to formalise the comparatively arbitrary transitions from one consciousness to the next, transitions that had characterised the writing of Jacob’s Room. And she seems also to have alternated male and female consciousness, at least in the opening sections, so that they run from Clarissa (section 1), to Septimus (though Clarissa and others also figure later) (2), to Clarissa again (3), to Peter Walsh (4). The comparatively short fifth section is a visionary sequence that is not ‘thought’ by any individual character, but represents the mind in sleep or vision, a shared unconscious, anticipating the “Time Passes” sequence in To the Lighthouse. Thereafter the alternations become more complicated. Section nine, which begins at twelve o’clock, is by far the longest, and effectively starts a new movement. It takes place within the consciousness of Septimus and Rezia, Richard Dalloway, Clarissa, Miss Kilman, Elizabeth, and then Rezia and Septimus again. The ambulance bell at the beginning of section ten takes us back to Peter Walsh whose consciousness has been absent from the preceding sequence, and redirects the action towards Clarissa’s party. In terms of a conventional time sequence, the first eight sections take place in the morning, before noon; section nine includes all the events of the afternoon, and sections ten to twelve are devoted to Clarissa’s evening party, so that in addition to the twelve sections, there is a further three-part time structure (in a ratio of 8: 1: 3). Woolf ’s next novel, To the Lighthouse, also employs a three-part time structure, beginning with an afternoon and evening (“The Window”), followed by a night (“Time Passes”), and a morning (“The Lighthouse”). The correspondence of the afternoon with the Ramsays’ lives, and the morning with their children’s also anticipates the more complex interweaving of hours, times and seasons with human lives in The Waves. To the Lighthouse was written very fast — Woolf later compared the 25

174

Ibid., pp. 23; 125; 227; 45.

VARIANTS 4 2005

experience to “Blowing bubbles out of a pipe”.26 From the outset, she pictured its three-part structure as further divided into sections, and there are fifteen of these in the manuscript version of the first part, though they don’t precisely correspond to the section divisions of the published text, which has nineteen sections, alternating, at least initially, between male and female viewpoints, as she had done in the early sections of Mrs Dalloway, though here too the alternation was not consistently maintained. Nevertheless, the oddly numbered sections — 1,3,5,7 — seem to be particularly connected with Mrs Ramsay (as they had previously been with Clarissa), and the even-numbered sections correspond to the male characters, Mr Ramsay or Charles Tansley, and to the world of reason and ‘fact’, contrasted with maternal warmth and kindness; for example section 2 begins with Tansley saying “No going to the Lighthouse, James”, whereas sections 1, 3 and 5 begin with Mrs Ramsay saying “Yes, of course, if it’s fine to-morrow,” “Perhaps you will wake up and find the sun shining and the birds singing” and finally, “even if it isn’t fine to-morrow ...it will be another day.”27 Mrs Ramsay begins and ends the first part of To the Lighthouse; her completeness and her desire to unify her family link her with the odd numbers, while her husband’s divisiveness associates him with the even numbers. Woolf ’s linking of the unity of women with the number one, and perhaps with prime numbers more generally, and of men with the doubleness (duplicity?) of two shows that she is creating her own structures rather than drawing on traditional numerology, where (according to Philo Judaeus), “it is the odd that is male, and the even female.”28 Writing “Time Passes” gave Woolf a great deal of trouble: it was to be ‘eyeless’,29 by which she meant, among other things, that there was 26 “A Sketch of the Past”, Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (2nd ed., London, Hogarth Press, 1985), p. 81. 27 To the Lighthouse, intr. Hermione Lee, ed. Stella McNichol (London, Penguin, 1992), pp. 19, 7, 19, 31. 28 Christopher Butler, Number Symbolism, p. 22; see also his article on “Numerological Thought” in Silent Poetry, where 2 is defined as “the first female number, and 3 the first masculine one”, p. 7. 29 Woolf described it as “the most difficult abstract piece of writing — I have to give an empty house, no people’s characters, the passage of time, all eyeless & featureless with nothing to cling to”, Diary III, p. 76, Sunday 18 April [1926].

Julia Briggs Writing by Numbers

175

no single point of view, whether of character or narrator: like section five of Mrs Dalloway, it is concerned with the unconscious, the dreaming mind as it floats through the house, or along the beach, imagining tidal waves or houses tumbling to destruction. The typescript that Woolf sent Charles Mauron for translation was divided into nine sections, and is substantially closer to the holograph than to the first edition. Preparing it for independent publication would have influenced its development, while having to re-integrate it into the novel involved further rethinking and rewriting (at this stage, a tenth section appeared). There may be some equivalence between the original nine sections of “Time Passes” and the nine chapters of The Waves, the novel that takes up the challenge thrown down by “Time Passes” to write of “the world seen without a self ”,30 and of the place of mystery beyond selfhood which we all share, and from whose “dark materials” spring both creation and destruction (as the final paragraphs of Between the Acts would make explicit). This is also the world of the novel’s italicised interludes which represent non-human nature — the cries of birds, the slow procession of sunlight and starlight, the breaking of the waves on the shore, and the life of the creatures that creep on the earth — the life that had also counterpointed the human conversations in “Kew Gardens”. The third part of To the Lighthouse (itself entitled “The Lighthouse”), gave Woolf the most trouble: “The problem”, she admitted to her diary, “is how to bring Lily & Mr R[amsay]. together & make a combination of interest at the end.” There were to be two endings — Mr Ramsay’s arrival at the lighthouse and the completion of Lily’s picture, — and she wanted, if she could, to make them happen simultaneously: “Could I do it in a parenthesis? so that one had the sense of reading the two things at the same time?” she asked herself.31 In the end she used the parenthesis for a different purpose and retained the alternation, bringing Lily and Mr Ramsay together not at the end, but at the centre of the third part. And just as the first part had initially alternated between the soothing voice of the mother, and the harsh voices of ‘fact’, so the third part 30

The Waves, ed. K. Flint (London, Penguin, 1992), p. 221.

31

Diary III, p. 106, [Sunday 5 September 1926].

176

VARIANTS 4 2005

alternates between Lily on the lawn, searching for her vision, and Mr Ramsay in the boat, sailing towards the lighthouse. Lily’s search for creative form (in parallel with that of her author) is contrasted with Mr Ramsay’s single-minded journey towards his goal. Here, too, the whole sequence begins and ends with the female principle, the principle of life, alternating with the even-numbered sections describing the voyage. Exactly half-way through, in the seventh of thirteen sections, Lily begins to feel Mrs Ramsay’s spirit return (“a sense of someone there, of Mrs. Ramsay”), and she sees the “brown spot in the middle of the bay” that is Mr Ramsay’s boat, “now half way across the bay”, at the same time as the reader is half-way through the third part. The voyage as a metaphor for the progress of a narrative is as old as the Odyssey.32 Such self-conscious, self-reflexive writing, conscious of the reader reading as the writer writes, is nowhere else achieved so elegantly or unobtrusively, though Orlando provides an intriguing parallel in its sixth and final chapter: here Orlando’s pregnancy seems to have originated (significantly, surely) in Kew Gardens in October, but lasts only for six months instead of nine, so that she is delivered on March 20th, the date that Virginia wrote to Vita to tell her that she had finished the book (which she had begun the previous October).33 That Woolf regarded the art (or should it be the act?) of creation as analogous to the sexual act (the writer must lie back and be receptive) is made explicit in the sixth chapter of A Room of One’s Own, the book written consecutively and closely linked to Orlando, as Winifred Holtby recognised in the first book-length study of Woolf ’s work.34 Each has six chapters and there are some striking parallels between them, Judith Shakespeare being the tragic female double of the Elizabethan Orlando. 32 To the Lighthouse (1992), pp. 196, 197. For an example of the poem as boat, see Spenser’s Faerie Queene, book 1, canto xii, stanza 42 (though Woolf did not apparently read it until 1935 — see Diary IV, p. 275. Wednesday 23 January [1935]). 33 Orlando, intr. S. Gilbert, ed. B. Lyons (London, Penguin, 1993), pp. 202–4; see also A Change of Perspective: The Letters of VW, vol. III, 1923–1928 (1977), p. 473 [20? March 1928], and Diary III, p. 177, Thursday 22 March (though the novel gives the date as “Thursday, March the 20th”). 34 A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, ed. Michele Barrett, (London, Penguin, 1993), p. 94 (and see p. lix for ‘act’, the U.S. variant). “Different as they are in form, the two books are complementary”, noted Holtby, Virginia Woolf: A Critical Memoir (London, Wishart, 1932), p. 161.

Julia Briggs Writing by Numbers

177

The thirteen sections of the third part of To the Lighthouse, with their careful joining of the two narrative strands at the mid-point, provided the initial impetus for this investigation,35 but their status is problematic since they were misnumbered in the first British edition, and Woolf apparently failed to notice or correct the numbering at proof stage (as sceptical readers will be amused to learn). The second section was misnumbered ‘3’ (the numbers in the first British edition are in arabic, though Woolf used Roman numbers in the holograph), and thereafter they run through consecutively until ‘14’, so that from section ‘4’ onwards, it is the even numbers that portray Lily on the lawn, not the odd.36 This misnumbering was corrected in the American first edition, but remained in the uniform edition and its immediate derivatives. The Everyman edition (1938) kept the fourteen chapters, but introduced a new division in the first section, so that a second section begins as Mr Ramsay “Suddenly...raised his head as he passed”.37 In the published text, the sections of To the Lighthouse are numbered nineteen in part one, ten in part two and (correctly) thirteen in part three. This tripartite structure may also correspond to the three beams of the lighthouse. Mrs Ramsay feels that “the long steady stroke, the last of the three, …was her stroke”,38 though in the book, the longest part, Mrs Ramsay’s part, comes first, rather than last. Confirming the connection between women and odd numbers, the third part belongs to Lily, while the second part is dedicated, not to the world of male reasoning but to its antithesis, the irrational world of nature and the unconscious. The sections in the first and third parts add up to prime numbers (13, 19), and with the 10 sections of “Time Passes”, the total adds up to forty-two, a multiple of six and seven, though whether this is an accident is difficult to decide. While it appears that Woolf took little or no interest in numerological patterns (unlike many renaissance poets, or contemporaries such as Yeats and Joyce), the number forty-two 35

Their relationship was first pointed out to me by Hans Gabler.

36

To the Lighthouse (London, Hogarth Press, 1927), pp. 233, 242, 318.

37

To the Lighthouse (London, J. M. Dent, 1938), p. 169.

38

To the Lighthouse (1992), p. 70.

178

VARIANTS 4 2005

seems to have been on her mind as she worked on the third part of To the Lighthouse, since the later pages of the manuscript include two separate sums adding up to forty-two, written out on verso pages.39 The Waves could be seen as playing variations on the sixes and sevens lurking behind the suggestive figure of forty-two, for it has six speaking characters and a silent seventh in the redemptive figure of Percival. The six are divided into three men and three women, and are then paired off in further ways: Susan and Bernard are linked by their different forms of creativity; Neville and Ginia by their focus on sexual love (both homo- and hetero-sexual), and Louis and Rhoda are linked by their sense of inadequacy, and the pressure of their inner lives. Percival is the silent hero, whose death at the centre of the novel takes place at noon, when the sun is at its zenith (he is also Jane Harrison’s “Spirit of the Year”, whose life and death are dedicated to reconciling the human community with nature 40 ). After the speed with which Woolf had written To the Lighthouse, Orlando and A Room..., the writing of The Waves seemed particularly slow. As discussed, it went through two complete drafts, and a further set of revisions in typescript. At a very late stage, Woolf ensured that all but one of the italicised interludes recorded the progression of the sun across the sky.41 It was in the process of transferring the manuscript to typescript that Woolf made another series of structural changes designed to bring out the novel’s innate form. She rewrote her text so that the different chapters themselves formed the structure of the wave whose rhythm and sound 39 The first sum (facing what would become section 4 of the third part) runs 25+17= 42, with the words “the stagnant past” or ‘part’) written beside it; the second sum is written on the back of a sequence not finally used, but located in section 11. This one runs 10+20+12=42, which is not so very different from the novel’s final structure, 19+10+13, except that the 10 and 20 are written in the reverse order in which they occur in the book. See To the Lighthouse: The Original Holograph Draft, ed. Susan Dick (London, Hogarth Press, 1983), pp. 265 verso, 335 verso. It is certainly an interesting number: the computer Deep Thought in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) gave “Forty-two” as the answer to the (unformulated) Great Question “Of Life, the Universe and Everything”. 40 See Jane Harrison, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (1912; London, Merlin Press, 1989), esp. pp. xvii, xix. 41 J. W. Graham, ed., The Waves: The two holograph drafts (Toronto and Buffalo, University of Toronto Press, 1976), introduction, pp. 35–6.

Julia Briggs Writing by Numbers

179

already permeated her novel: thus chapters 1 and 8 correspond and are concerned with being, alone and together; chapters 2 and 7 are concerned with time, 3 and 6 with language and self-awareness, while 4 and 5 reach the crest of the wave at noon, and its relapse, enacting the communion supper and the death of the hero, as described in the Gospels (or as the sacred feast and mourning that reconcile the tribe to nature in Jane Harrison’s Themis). Viewed both as individual particles and as a wave, the chapters allude to contemporary debates in physics: Gillian Beer has demonstrated Woolf ’s familiarity with the popular science of Arthur Eddington and James Jeans.42 Chapter nine, Bernard’s soliloquy, remains outside this wave figure, being at once a ‘summing-up’ of everything that has happened, and the deliberate abandonment of the structural principles from which narrative fiction is traditionally constructed, as “the wave breaks on the shore”. Numbers, like language, constitute a pattern-making system, and seem to carry some innate significance, whether in the form of a deck of cards or the numbering of chapter and verse in the Bible, or of any other structure that lays itself open to interpretation. It was Mallarmé, in part responsible for the formalist principles of modernism, whose last experimental poem warned that “A single throw of the dice will never abolish chance” (“Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard”). Some of the revisions that Woolf made in the process of preparing her novels for publication seem to have imposed on them formal, and even numerically significant structures, yet the texts and their author seldom display an awareness of this process. And though her last two novels depict the flight of time across a half-century and a day, respectively, they do not so obviously share in the formal precision that characterises To the Lighthouse and The Waves. Whatever justification Woolf had for her revisionary practise ultimately lies embedded in the structure of The Waves itself, with its complex interactions between the natural and the human world, its celebration of and mourning for the relentless numbers of time. The sun’s hourly progress across the sky, the earth’s yearly orbit, the monthly 42 Gillian Beer, “Physics, Sound, and Substance: Later Woolf ”, Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1996), pp. 112–124.

180

VARIANTS 4 2005

cycles of moon and tides constitute the primal rhythms of life on earth; our human need to find meaning in our circumstances, our desire to recreate form in art, as it negotiates its way through time and space, derive from these determining conditions of our existence.

Julia Briggs Writing by Numbers

181

This page intentionally left blank

Proceeding Energetically From the Unknown to the Known Looking Again at the Genetic Texts and Documents for Joyce’s Ulysses Michael Groden

Near the end of Ulysses, just before the two main characters part, the encyclopedically voluble narrator of the “Ithaca” episode tells us that Stephen Dedalus “affirmed his significance as a conscious rational animal proceeding syllogistically from the known to the unknown and a conscious rational reagent between a micro and a macrocosm ineluctably constructed upon the incertitude of the void.” Leopold Bloom, barely understanding what Stephen has said, takes comfort from the fact that, again in the narrator’s words, “as a competent keyless citizen he had proceeded energetically from the unknown to the known through the incertitude of the void.” One character moves abstractly out from what he earlier called “the now, the here,” the other moves experientially into what once was an unknown future but now is a known present.1 Stephen’s void is the gulf between the known and the unknown, Bloom’s between the present and the future (or, eventually, the past and the present). Earlier in the book, Stephen had put these two voids together in his thoughts about events that might have seemed possible but never came to pass: “They are not to be thought away. Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass?”2 Genetic critics face voids of various kinds as they confront the gap between the manuscript archive that they construct as the “avant-texte” 1 James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922, ed. Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior (1984; New York: Vintage, 1993), 17:1012–15, 17:1019–20, 9:89. (All quotations from Ulysses are identified, as here, by episode:line numbers.) 2

Ulysses 2:49–52.

and the text as it was published, and especially the gap between the traces of the creative process that the documents permit them to study and the process itself. As they move backwards from the final, known text to the unknown process that brought it into being, and attempt to reconstruct the unknown process that proceeds forwards to the known text, they also immerse themselves in the temporal movements that Stephen and Bloom together outline. Doing this, though, forces genetic critics to deal with two troublesome concepts — origin and teleology — and in doing so they restate Stephen’s and Bloom’s positions in quite different terms. Jean Bellemin-Noël, for example, warns against “reintroducing the idea of teleology” into genetic studies and says that “we must never forget this paradox: what was written before and had, at first, no after, we meet only after, and this tempts us to supply a before in the sense of a priority, cause, or origin,”3 but Daniel Ferrer argues that teleology “is inherent in the genetic mechanisms”4 and that “each genetic state not only depends on all the previous states but also alters their status in a kind of retrospective teleology. Each stage [...] identifies the relevant documents in the preexisting archive and turns them into the avant-texte leading toward that stage.”5 Louis Hay memorably describes the “moment of the writing itself ” as “stretched out between the author’s life and the sheet of paper like a drumskin on which the pen beats its message.”6 Hay’s drumskin, in some ways like Stephen’s and Bloom’s void, is a border between the known 3 Jean Bellemin-Noël, “Psychoanalytic Reading and the Avant-texte,” Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-textes, ed. Jed Deppman, Daniel Ferrer, and Michael Groden (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 31. Originally “Avant-texte et lecture psychanalytique,” Avant-texte, texte, après-texte, ed. Louis Hay and Péter Nagy (Paris: CNRS; Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1982). Italics in original. 4 Daniel Ferrer, “Clementis’s Cap: Retroaction and Persistence in the Genetic Process,” trans. Marlena G. Corcoran, Drafts, ed. Michel Contat, Denis Hollier, and Jacques Neefs, Yale French Studies 89 (1996): 230. Originally “La toque de Clementis, retroaction et rémanence dans les processus génétiques,” Genesis 6 (1994). 5 Daniel Ferrer, “Production, Invention, and Reproduction: Genetic vs. Textual Criticism,” Reimagining Textuality: Textual Studies in the Late Age of Print, ed. Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux and Neil Fraistat (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 51. 6 Louis Hay, “Does ‘Text’ Exist?,” trans. Matthew Jocelyn and Hans Walter Gabler, Studies in Bibliography 41 (1988), 73. Originally “Le texte n’existe pas: Réflexions sur la critique génétique,” Poétique 85 (1985).

184

VARIANTS 4 2005

and the unknown, between the author’s conception and the words that he or she can get onto the paper or screen and also between the existing text and the scholar’s attempt to reconstruct and interpret the writing process. But, unlike the void, the drumskin does not have to remain silent — in another memorable phrase Hay remarks that “manuscripts have something new to tell us: it is high time we learned to make them speak.”7 Genetic criticism lets us hear the music of the manuscripts, the drumbeat of the drafts. Paul Valéry wrote in one of his notebooks that “nothing is more beautiful than a beautiful manuscript draft [...] A complete poem would be the poem of a poem starting from its fertilized embryo — and its successive states, unexpected interpolations, and approximations. That’s real Genesis.“8 I claimed in “Ulysses” in Progress that Joyce “presented Ulysses as a palimpsest of his development from 1914 to 1922,”9 and if this statement is even partially true, then Ulysses is an example of those works that the editors of the Yale French Studies issue on “Drafts” describe as having “managed to retain something of the aura of their potentialities.”10 In such works, the various relationships between the text’s past and present — the ways in which the process leads to the text and the ways in which the text affects our sense of the process — are visible or at least implicit in the text itself. What happens when the “unknown” becomes more “known” not because we proceed more energetically or with better syllogisms but because the record itself changes? We are in a unique position at this moment because the manuscript archive for Ulysses is indeed changing. The huge collection of manuscripts that the National Library of Ireland acquired in May 2002 contains four notebooks with notes for all the episodes of Ulysses and fourteen copybooks representing ten drafts 7 Louis Hay, “History or Genesis?,” Drafts, p. 207. Originally “Histoire ou genèse?,” Les Leçons du manuscript, issue of Etudes Françaises 28:1 (1992). 8 Paul Valéry, “Poetry,” Cahiers/Notebooks, vol. 2, ed. Brian Stimpson, Paul Gifford, and Robert Pickering, trans. Norma Rinsler (Frankfurt and New York: Peter Lang, 2000), p. 219. Originally Cahiers, facsimile ed., 29 vols. (Paris: CNRS, 1957–61). 9 10

Michael Groden, “Ulysses” in Progress (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 23. Michel Contat, Denis Hollier, and Jacques Neefs, “Editors’ Preface,” Drafts, 1.

Michael Groden Proceeding Energetically From the Unknown to the Known 185

of eight episodes. In some cases — drafts for the “Sirens,” “Cyclops,” and “Oxen of the Sun” episodes — the new manuscripts fill in holes and complete draft stages that have been only partially extant for the past fifty years. In other cases — drafts for “Proteus,” “Sirens,” and “Circe” — new documents are now extant that represent additional stages of development for episodes that were partially documented before. In yet other cases — “Scylla and Charybdis,” “Ithaca,” and “Penelope” — early drafts have surfaced for the first time. This is a tremendously exciting development, and Joyce scholars have begun to look carefully at the manuscripts now that the National Library has made them available for investigation. I had the thrilling opportunity to spend two days with the manuscripts in November 2001. I was able to gain only a general overview of the documents and their contents and to notice only a few specific details in that short time, but some fascinating examples of Joyce’s writing did catch my eye.11 In the remaining space of this essay, I will look at three small details from the new manuscripts. I My first example comes from the very end of Ulysses. We have known for a long time that Joyce only gradually built up the rhythms of the last words of Molly Bloom’s monologue — tapping out “yes”es with his pen on the drumskin of the proofs. The fair copy of the book’s last words reads “[...] and first I put my arms around him and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume and I said I will yes.”12 He added “yes and his heart was going like mad” after “perfume” on the typescript, “yes” after “I said” on the first placards, and another “yes” before “I said” on the second placards, where he also capitalised the final 11 I have discussed my involvement with the manuscripts and summarised my findings about them in three articles: “The National Library of Ireland’s New Joyce Manuscripts: A Statement and Document Descriptions,” James Joyce Quarterly 39:1 (dated Fall 2001), 29–51; “The National Library of Ireland’s New Joyce Manuscripts: A Narrative and Document Summaries,” Journal of Modern Literature 26 (dated Fall 2002), 1–16 and “The National Library of Ireland’s New Joyce Manuscripts: An Outline and Archive Comparisons,” Joyce Studies Annual 14 (2003), 5–17. 12 Buffalo MS V.A.22; reproduced in James Joyce, The James Joyce Archive, ed. Michael Groden et al., 63 vols. (New York: Garland, 1977–79), 16:297.

186

VARIANTS 4 2005

“Yes.” On the fourth placards and first page proofs he added more “yes”es a few lines up.13 The National Library’s collection contains a draft of the “Penelope” episode — the first pre-fair-copy draft of the episode to become extant — and it contains a big surprise at the end: Joyce originally wrote “and I said I would yes,” before he crossed out “would,” and, in a currente calamo revision, wrote “will” next to it on the line.14 Richard Ellmann claimed long ago that Joyce came up with “yes” as the last word of Ulysses only in mid-1921 as he was drafting “Penelope,”15 and our sense of any genetic instability lying behind the ending of Ulysses has focused for the most part on that word. The new draft reveals something else: even after Joyce had settled on the concluding “yes,” his sense of the ending’s grammar, and hence of the emotional force of Molly’s closing memory, was in flux. The draft’s original ending is grammatically smoother than the revised version, since it continues Molly’s thoughts in a consistent verb tense, but it is also much less dramatic. The switch to “will” turns the last words into a memory of spoken dialogue as it changes the ending from the subdued subjunctive “would” to the decisive indicative “will.” “Will” no longer stands as the only possible penultimate word of Ulysses. The superseded “would” now appears just under “will” in the palimpsest. This new piece of evidence from the avant-texte allows the reader who has experienced it to have a new possible text in mind, one that, as Jerome McGann demonstrated regarding the different versions of Marianne Moore’s poem “Poetry,” allows or even forces “the interplay of the two texts” to be “at the centre of the reading experience.”16 13 Buffalo TS V.B.16.c, three sets of Harvard placards, Texas page proofs; reproduced in The James Joyce Archive 16:349, 21:368, 21:370, 21:375–76, 27:277. 14 The words are on page 19r (39) of the National Library’s “Penelope” draft (NLI II.ii.8). I thank Daniel Ferrer for pointing out to me that that the change was a currente calamo revision. 15 Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 531; rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 516. 16 “The Monks and the Giants: Textual and Bibliographical Studies and the Interpretation of Literary Works,” The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985, 1988), 87.

Michael Groden Proceeding Energetically From the Unknown to the Known 187

II My second example, an especially appropriate one in light of Louis Hay’s metaphor of an author’s pen beating out a text on a drumskin, comes from the “Sirens” episode. The National Library collection contains two new documents for this episode, one a very early draft (in the same copybook as an early draft of “Proteus”) and the other a later draft of the first half of the episode (a Buffalo manuscript contains the second half of this draft).17 The early document is quite startling: ten pages of a very early draft of part of the episode, followed by over fifteen pages containing fragmentary scenes. Most intriguingly, this draft of the episode that both deals with music and is written in the form of verbal music is pre-musical — it contains musical effects in some of its words, but the musical structure that intrigues, bewilders, and sometimes infuriates the readers of the published text is completely absent. The draft suggests an episode substantially similar to the first nine episodes of Ulysses, with their combination of narration, dialogue, and interior monologue plus local variations in language and imagery based on each episode’s particular theme. In that sense, the “Sirens” draft seems like the early parts of the first draft of the “Cyclops” episode, which, as I argued in “Ulysses” in Progress, indicated that Joyce at least briefly planned to continue using the narration-dialogue-interior-monologue technique before he entirely eliminated it for the first time in Ulysses.18 The later of the two new drafts is most immediately interesting because of its inside front cover. There Joyce wrote and underlined the words “Fuga per canonem,” followed by eight numbered Italian terms, including “soggetto,” “contrasoggetto,” “esposizioni,” and “pedale.” In a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver from August 1919, Joyce wrote that various passages she had mentioned in a letter to him “are all the eight regular parts of a fuga per canonem,”19 and critics have been puzzled and 17

Buffalo MS V.A.5; reproduced in The James Joyce Archive 13:32–56.

18

“Ulysses” in Progress, 124–25.

19

James Joyce, Letters, ed. Stuart Gilbert and Richard Ellmann, 3 vols. (New York: Viking, 1957, 1966), 1:129. He also used the phrase “Fuga per canonem” to describe the technique of “Sirens” in his 1921 schema for Ulysses; see Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (New York: Vintage, 1930, 1952), 30.

188

VARIANTS 4 2005

vexed by what, if anything, Joyce meant by these words. The copybook indicates that Joyce was serious about writing a verbal fuga per canonem. It also suggests what Joyce meant by the eight “parts” of a fugue. Critics have usually been frustrated in their attempts to locate eight musical voices in the episode, but Joyce’s list suggests that by “parts” he meant something like structural sections.20 What is clear is that he imposed a musical structure onto an episode that was already partially drafted, somewhat parallel to the way he superimposed the newspaper heads onto the “Aeolus” episode to break up the episode into a series of small article-sized units. At the top of the later draft’s first recto Joyce wrote the words, “Repeat phrases episode.” The draft does not include the bizarre — and notorious — series of fragmentary phrases that open the finished episode and that are usually interpreted as something like a musical overture, and this note might be Joyce’s reminder to himself to extract some phrases in order to construct that opening. The two “Sirens” drafts have the potential to significantly affect our sense of how Joyce wrote Ulysses. The earlier draft, located as it is in the same copybook as a very early draft of “Proteus” (which now becomes the earliest extant draft of any part of Ulysses), suggests that “Sirens” was drafted quite early, even as early as the first three Stephen Dedalus episodes. This might be what Joyce meant in a letter from 1916, three years before the fair copy of “Sirens,” where he said that he had written part of the middle of the book.21 I have always assumed that he referred to the fourth Stephen episode, “Scylla and Charybdis,” but he might have been speaking about “Sirens” and maybe even other episodes in addition to, or instead of, “Scylla.” The draft also confirms speculations about Joyce’s writing of Ulysses that Rodney Owen made in the early 1980s. In James Joyce and the Beginnings of “Ulysses,” Owen studied the few documents from the period 1912 to 1918 that were extant at the time in an attempt to piece together 20

For help in interpreting Joyce’s list, I thank Stephen Adams, Ruth Bauerle, Zack Bowen, Timothy Martin, and Adrienne O’Henly. 21

Letters 2:387.

Michael Groden Proceeding Energetically From the Unknown to the Known 189

what Joyce might have done in those years. In particular, he compared some notes at Cornell with the few Ulysses drafts from those years and concluded that “the first third of ‘Sirens’ was earlier and more complete than the rest” and that “the presence of the notebook echoes in ‘Proteus,’ ‘Scylla,’ and to a lesser extent in ‘Sirens’ and ‘Wandering Rocks’ suggests these episodes were among the earliest planned.”22 After twenty years, the new documents show that Owen was correct to put “Sirens” into the group of early-written episodes, with implications yet to be discovered.23 III My third and final example involves the most prominent restored passage in Hans Walter Gabler’s edition of Ulysses. In the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode, as Stephen discusses his wound-and-the-bow theory of Hamlet with three skeptical listeners in the National Library of Ireland, he first says and thinks these words: —If you want to know what are the events which cast their shadow over the hell of time of King Lear, Othello, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, look to see when and how the shadow lifts. What softens the heart of a man, shipwrecked in storms dire, Tried, like another Ulysses, Pericles, prince of Tyre? Head, redconecapped, buffeted, brineblinded. —A child, a girl, placed in his arms, Marina.24

Then, after Stephen’s thoughts and spoken words get briefly deflected, he returns to Marina: —Marina, Stephen said, a child of storm, Miranda, a wonder, Perdita, that which was lost. What was lost is given back to him: his daughter’s 22

Rodney Wilson Owen, James Joyce and the Beginnings of “Ulysses” (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983), 67–68. The Cornell notebook is called “The Alphabetical Notebook” in Robert Scholes, The Cornell Joyce Collection (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1961), 12, item 25, and “The Trieste Notebook” in The Workshop of Daedalus: James Joyce and the Raw Materials for “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”, ed. Robert Scholes and Richard M. Kain (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 92–105, where it is transcribed. It is reproduced in The James Joyce Archive 7:109–56. 23 For further discussion of the new “Sirens” manuscripts, see Daniel Ferrer, “What Song the Sirens Sang … Is No Longer Beyond All Conjecture: A Preliminary Description of the New “Proteus” and “Sirens” Manuscripts,” James Joyce Quarterly 39:1 (dated Fall 2001): 53–68. 24

190

Ulysses 9:400–7.

VARIANTS 4 2005

child. My dearest wife, Pericles says, was like this maid. Will any man love the daughter if he has not loved the mother? —The art of being a grandfather, Mr Best gan murmur. L’art d’être grandp … —Will he not see reborn in her, with the memory of his own youth added, another image? Do you know what you are talking about? Love, yes. Word known to all men. Amor vero aliquid alicui bonum vult unde et ea quae concupiscimus … —His own image to a man with that queer thing genius is the standard of all experience, material and moral. Such an appeal will touch him. The images of other males of his blood will repel him. He will see in them grotesque attempts of nature to foretell or to repeat himself.25

The text in the Gabler edition includes a line of dialogue and a paragraph of interior monologue (from “—Will he not” to “concupiscimus…”) that are not in any previous printed texts of Ulysses. Gabler explains the absence of these lines from the previously published texts by speculating that, after typing one phrase from the lost final working draft ending in ellipses and underlined to signal italics (ending with “grandp…”), the typist jumped to another phrase also underlined and with ellipses (ending with “concupiscimus…”) and omitted the words between the two sets of ellipses.26 The restored phrase, “Love, yes. Word known to all men,” is especially intriguing in light of Stephen’s questions from earlier and later in Ulysses as to what the word known to all men might be.27 One of the manuscripts in the National Library of Ireland’s new collection is a three-notebook draft of “Scylla and Charybdis,” the first pre-fair-copy draft of this episode to become extant. The passage in question is present in the draft, but, interestingly, only “Love, yes” forms part of the draft’s original text — “Word known to all men” is an addition. The paragraph of Stephen’s interior monologue in the new draft thus reads, “Do you know what you are talking about? Love, yes. Amor vero aliquid alicui bonum vult unde et ea quae concupiscimus….”28 This forms 25

Ulysses 9:421–35. Italics in original.

26

Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition, ed. Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior, 3 vols. (New York: Garland, 1984), 418, 1738. 27

Ulysses 3:435 and 15:4192–93.

28

The passage is on the second recto of the second of the three “Scylla” notebooks; Joyce numbered the rectos of the three notebooks continuously, and this one is his page 14. Italics in

Michael Groden Proceeding Energetically From the Unknown to the Known 191

an unbroken string of thoughts. Stephen’s mind darts from detail to detail: from Pericles and his granddaughter Marina to Miranda to Perdita, back to Pericles, then to Shakespeare and his relationship with his wife and daughter, which brings in the question of love. He resists being deflected when Richard Best picks up not the idea of love but the role of the grandfather and then answers “Love, yes” as the response to his selfinterrogation regarding whether he knows what he is talking about. The Aquinas fragments, which Don Gifford and Robert J. Seidman identify as conjoining various phrases from one sentence in Summa Contra Gentiles, distinguish between true love and desire: “love wills something to someone […] will some good […] when we want a thing […] desire it […]”29 In their form, these fragments from Aquinas resemble Stephen’s skimming of Deasy’s letter about foot and mouth disease earlier in the book, where a few prominent phrases registered in his mind.30 In their content, the fragments and the sentence they come from establish a contrast between selfless love, which “wishes something to somebody,” and the more selfish desire, in which “we rather love ourselves for whom we desire” the something.31 Stephen then picks up his last spoken words about a granddaughter and “another image” as he talks about the artist whose standard of experience is “his own image,” a phrase which William Noon, in his study of Joyce and Aquinas (published in 1957, long before original. The first of the two underlined/italicised phrases, “L’art d’être grandp .....,” is not in the Rosenbach manuscript fair copy (Ulysses: A Facsimile of the Manuscript, Clive Driver (ed.), vol. 1 [New York: Octagon, and Philadelphia: Philip H. and A.S.W. Rosenbach Foundation, 1975], “Scylla and Charybdis,” fol. 13). Gabler speculates that it is present in the lost final working draft, since it is part of the typed text on the typescript (Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition, 418, 1738; James Joyce Archive, 12:357). I did not transcribe the National Library draft fully enough to know whether or not the phrase is in the draft. 29

Don Gifford with Robert J. Seidman, “Ulysses” Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” revised ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 221. 30 “Foot and mouth disease. Known as Koch’s preparation. Serum and virus. Percentage of salted horses. Rinderpest. Emperor’s horses at Mürzsteg, lower Austria. Veterinary surgeons. Mr Henry Blackwood Price. Courteous offer a fair trial. Dictates of common sense. Allimportant question. In every sense of the word take the bull by the horns. Thanking you for the hospitality of your columns.” Ulysses 2:332–37. 31 “For love wishes something to somebody: hence the things that we desire, we are properly said to ‘desire,’ not to ‘love,’ but in them we rather love ourselves for whom we desire them.” St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Book 1, Chapter 91, section 3, trans. Joseph Rickaby, 1905. Online: http://www.nd.edu/Departments/Maritain/etext/gc1 91.htm> [14 December 2002].

192

VARIANTS 4 2005

Gabler restored Stephen’s quotation from Aquinas to the text of Ulysses), links to Aquinas’s “idea of man as an image of God.”32 What, then, about “word known to all men?” Since the publication of Gabler’s edition in 1984, critics have certainly focused on it as the core of the restored passage. They have usually seen the phrase as a deliberate echo of the earlier passage in “Proteus” where Stephen thinks, “Touch me. Soft eyes. Soft soft soft hand. I am lonely here. O, touch me soon, now. What is that word known to all men? I am quiet here alone. Sad too. Touch, touch me.”33 They also connect it to Stephen’s later plea to his mother, in one of the “Circe” fantasies, to “Tell me the word, […] if you know now. The word known to all men.”34 (Here, his boast to Bloom in “Ithaca” notwithstanding, Stephen seems to want to proceed from the unknown to the known — or from what he thinks is known to everyone but him — not by syllogism but by interrogation, by catechism, by recognizing Bloom’s strategy of relying on personal experience.) It is likely that Joyce at least sketched out “Scylla and Charybdis” around the time of “Proteus,” so a conjunction between those two episodes would not be surprising.35 But “word known to all men” appears in very different contexts in each of its three appearances in Ulysses: guilty and erotic in “Proteus” and guilty and anguished in “Circe,”36 but theological and artistic in “Scylla.” This suggests to me that the three phrases have little connection with each other.

32

William T. Noon, S.J., Joyce and Aquinas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 57.

33

Ulysses 3:434–36.

34

Ulysses 15:4192–93.

35

In 1948 Buffalo bought a ten-leaf draft of “Scylla” described as consisting of “fragmentary conversations, which appear altered in the final version,” but the manuscript got lost between Paris and Buffalo and has never surfaced. See John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon (comp.), A Bibliography of James Joyce 1882–1941 (1953; rpt. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1971), 140, item 5.b.iii (the source of the description); also Bernard Gheerbrant, James Joyce: Sa Vie, Son Œuvre, Son Rayonnement (Paris: Librairie La Hune, 1949), item 254; and Peter Spielberg (comp.), James Joyce’s Manuscripts and Letters at the University of Buffalo: A Catalogue (Buffalo: University of Buffalo, 1962), vii. The National Library “Scylla” draft is not the lost document but a later, more developed draft. 36 Cheryl Herr, “Theosophy, Guilt, and ‘That Word Known to All Men’ in Joyce’s Ulysses,” James Joyce Quarterly 18 (1980): 51–52. When Herr wrote this article, the phrase appeared only twice in Ulysses.

Michael Groden Proceeding Energetically From the Unknown to the Known 193

It is possible, of course, that Joyce added “word known to all men” in order to restore some text that he neglected to copy into the draft. As an insert, however, it seems to throw the passage off balance, disrupting the movement from “Love, yes” to the “Amor” of the Aquinas quotation. Isolated as an addition to an already consistent passage in the “Scylla” draft, the phrase can be interpreted in at least three different ways. First, it may be what it is often assumed to be: Stephen’s answer to himself that “Love” is the “word known to all men.” Second, the phrase is itself part of Stephen’s answer to his question, “Do you know what you are talking about?” He first answers “Love, yes,” but, as if recognising the inadequacy of that response, adds that love is a word known to everyone. Interestingly, Stephen seems to assume that the word being known to everyone demonstrates that he knows what he is talking about, whereas the original problem that he seemed to recognise was that he has not experienced a father’s love for a daughter.37 Finally, “word known to all men” might be a quotation that pops into Stephen’s head, perhaps a response to the word “love” that he thinks of as if by rote association.38 It might be a phrase from the Bible or from any of the Biblical commentators that Stephen knows so well, including Aquinas. Rather than identifying love as the word known to all men, it might mean something like love as the means by which the Word was made known to all men. It thus appears more like a momentary, isolated mental intrusion than an answer to Stephen’s questions. To appropriate Louis Hay’s metaphor one last time, the new Ulysses manuscripts will allow scholars to begin to get a more detailed and subtler sense of the drumskin on which Joyce tapped out his book. In the rhythms of Molly Bloom’s concluding “yes”es, the fugal structure 37 Gifford and Seidman say that “the key to the mystery seems to be not the word itself but the word-made-manifest. Only in the experience of love can the word known to all men be truly known” (221; italics in original). For a different analysis of the passage, including textual arguments for including or not including it in the text of Ulysses, see Richard J. Finneran, “‘That Word Known to All Men’ in Ulysses: A Reconsideration,” James Joyce Quarterly 33 (1996): 569–82. 38 Earlier, in the “Aeolus” episode, Stephen listened to Professor MacHugh quote John F. Taylor — “I heard his words and their meaning was revealed to me.” — and a phrase from Augustine entered his mind, as if involuntarily: “It was revealed to me that those things are good which yet are corrupted which neither if they were supremely good nor unless they were good could be corrupted. Ah, curse you! That’s saint Augustine.” Ulysses 7:839–44.

194

VARIANTS 4 2005

of “Sirens,” and the concordance or dissonance of the “word known to all men,” they provide us with a better opportunity than we have ever had before to let the Ulysses manuscripts speak to us. In small and large ways, they will help scholars close the gap between the known and the unknown of Joyce’s writing processes.

Michael Groden Proceeding Energetically From the Unknown to the Known 195

This page intentionally left blank

The Dimension of the Text Geert Lernout

The theoretical point I want to make was inspired by Hans Walter Gabler’s genetic edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses: I want to show that, despite the theoretical claims that have been made for genetic editions with three or four dimensions, editions can be linear or unidimensional without losing crucial information. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was right: literature is an art of the nebeneinander and texts are by their very nature linear. Unlike twodimensional paintings or three-dimensional sculptures, texts are, like music, daughters of time. Naturally there are a number of exceptions such as some of Mallarmé’s poems or so-called “concrete” poetry in general, or even some modernist and post-modernist prose works that exploit the possibilities of the two dimensions of the written or printed page. But the point about these exceptions is that they foreground and thus presuppose the essential linearity of both the writing and the reading act. Let us begin with an example from expository prose. When Jacques Derrida published his startlingly original book Glas, in which he juxtaposed in one textual space an essay on Jean Genet with a philosophical treatise about Hegel, no critic suggested that the philosopher wrote both columns at the same time, or that he first wrote the first line or first sentence of one column to jump to the first line of the other one, alternately writing a line or sentence in each. Even in the case of this overwhelmingly novel format, we can only presuppose the existence of a classically linear writing act which is, in the case of Derrida, usually based on a series of seminars that I at least cannot imagine as having been delivered in two simultaneous voices. The more cynical among Derrida’s readers may conjecture (as I do) that the philosopher first wrote one essay and then the other, and only then, discovering that they were of approximately the same length, adjusted the font and typography to make sure that the text on Hegel and the one on Genet ended at roughly the same time, or better, in this case, at roughly the same place (or page). The

same cynical readers look at reports of perceived connections between the two columns as purely coincidental effects that have more to do with the pressures that readers feel to make sense of what presents itself as coherent because it occupies the same space, than with anything within the text. The difference between these two is crucial: the fact that some of Derrida’s readers have found profound connections between the two columns does not in itself constitute proof. Textual critics know from experience that blatant misprints or other non-intentional Leerstellen stop neither ordinary readers nor sophisticated critics of making sense of sequences of letters or words that were never meant to mean anything and in the case of an experimental writer like James Joyce this is all the more so. The critical resistance to Hans Walter Gabler’s recovery of the “word known to all men” passage in Ulysses demonstrates both the strength and the weakness of the arguments of textual study against literary critics. The arguments of textual study are based on common sense and on empirical evidence, while the aesthetic or poetological arguments of the literary critics diverge in all aspects while only agreeing in their rejection of the disputed passage. In the case of Glas one might argue against those critics who manage to find meanings in the dialogue between the two columns of text, that the two editions of this book, the original one-volume Galilée edition and the two-volume paperback issued by Denoël/Gonthier, must carry different meanings since what the former presents as two columns the latter gives on different pages. For important parts of the text, the two editions do not coincide and what we see happening on the page in one edition differs from what happens in the other. But this does not seem to have obstructed the reading and enjoyment of this central text by an important contemporary philosopher who, needless to say, at this particular point of his career was engaged in actively attempting to deconstruct all textual coherence. As part of the same strategy, Glas does not have a beginning or an ending, with both texts abruptly starting and ending in the middle of a sentence. Textual coherence is to a large extent hard-wired in readers of texts and this finding has not just been noticed by writers of literature but is confirmed by neurological studies. Homo sapiens sapiens is, as Michael 198

VARIANTS 4 2005

Schermer and others have repeatedly demonstrated, the animal that will create causal (or linear) sense even when there is no sense available. Maybe Hugo von Hofmannsthal has put this most succinctly at the end of Der Tor und der Tod, when Death, shaking its head, exits the stage with this final speech: Wie wundervoll sind diese Wesen, Die, was nicht deutbar, dennoch deuten, Was nie geschrieben wurde, lesen, Verworrenes beherrschend binden Und Wege noch im Ewig-Dunkeln finden.1

Humans can find coherence in a text, even when its spatial distribution differs from the practice that Western writing has adopted ever since the first Mesopotamian scribe put stylus to wet clay. It is possible to observe in the history of human writing that there are no cases where narrative or expository writing is not essentially linear, from the cuneiform tablets with writing that ran from one side of the tablet over the side to the back and, if necessary, also on the four sides of the tablets, to the scrolls and codices that already have the columns of text we still use to organise our textual materials, even in an electronic form. The fact that some writing runs from right to left or boustrophedonically, in alternating lines in both directions, does not take away from the fact that most forms of writing and especially the alphabetical one are essentially linear. Most obviously, the act of writing itself is linear. It seems to be physically impossible to write more than one text simultaneously, just as one sentence has to follow the previous one, one word, one letter, even one stroke of a letter, follows another, and this despite the fact that some of us are ambidextrous and could physically write two different texts at the same time. If we compare writing on typewriters or on computer keyboards with making music on a piano or another keyboard instrument, one could argue that strictly speaking at least some music is not purely linear, because the performer plays a different piece 1 “How remarkable are these creatures, / Who can understand what is not understandable, / Can read what was never written, / Can masterfully bind what is mixed up / And who can find roads in the Eternal Dark.” Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Gesammelte Werke: Gedichte-Dramen I. 1891-1896 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1979), 297-8.

Geert Lernout The Dimension of the Text

199

of music with each of his hands (conveniently written on two separate scores) and when he plays the organ, his feet can play a third voice, and in the case of Johann Sebastian Bach, who put a stick in his mouth for this purpose, even a fourth one. But whatever way you perform it, the music remains linear, both for the composer who surely did not write the different parts simultaneously and for the listener who cannot easily distinguish which hand (or foot, or stick-in-mouth) is playing which notes. Although at every moment of the performance the performer must be able to make a distinction between his hands, simply in order to know what he has to do with them, for him too there is only one piece and that is linear. Something similar is true of orchestral music where the outcome depends on very many different musical lines played by a large group of musicians. But each of them reads and plays his own linear score and even the conductor, the person who is responsible for the overall effect, can in practice only attend to one group of musicians at a time: even the most accomplished director cannot simultaneously read a complete score both vertically and horizontally. Despite all modernist and post-modernist attempts to lure us into a textual field that is no longer one-dimensional, reading too is essentially linear. Of course we are quite capable of perceiving spatial relations between words or letters on a page and of course I have already mentioned the attempts on the part of writers and readers to break through the linear conventions of poetry and prose, but whereas on the stage we can have two or more singers and actors speaking or singing simultaneously (and some people even pretend to be capable of comprehending the different utterances of all participants), the sad reality is that when we read, we can only do so when we read one word or group of words after the other. This is the sense in which I claim that reading is linear: readers treat the different lines of the normal written, typed or printed page as one continuous line and the line breaks, at least in prose, or not only not perceived as meaningful (after all, these breaks depend only on the width of the paper), I think we can agree that line breaks, just like page breaks, are arbitrary and thus without significance. For both line and page breaks, we can carry out a very simple thought experiment to prove 200

VARIANTS 4 2005

this point: think of the prose text with which you’re most familiar, in the edition you have used most often, and then ask yourself which word occurs at the end of the first line and at the end of the first page of text. Some people claim to have photographic memories, but I haven’t met anyone yet who was able to do this. It demonstrates that reading prose is first and foremost a linear activity in which the two-dimensional lay-out of the text is not really relevant. The same is true of writing. As editors, and a fortiori as genetic editors, we should concentrate on the writer, and writers always write a word after they have finished writing another. This is most obviously the case within a single version of a text. Of course sometimes writers add or delete words or sentences to an already existing text, but the new words and sentences then fit into a new linear text, which is what the author is creating by this act of correction or addition. This is demonstrated when, as in the case of Joyce’s work on Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, the manuscripts become so complicated by additions upon additions that the result is a barely legible textual mess. If single versions, however complicated, consist of a single line of text, this does not change when we turn our attention to the text’s genetic history and consider different versions and drafts. What Joyce did next in the process of writing Ulysses and Finnegans Wake was to copy the barely legible textual mess of a particular draft, including all the different additions and emendations, onto a new page, with as a result a single and clean line of text. That he then proceeded to complicate that simple line with ever new additions does not matter all that much, because like before that new textual complex could be translated easily enough into a new linear text, eventually ending in the clearly linear texts that were published in 1922 and 1939. If anything, Gabler’s 1984 edition of Ulysses has demonstrated that most of the operations a writer can perform on a written text can be represented linearly. Although rhetorically there may be a benefit in referring to the second, third and fourth dimension of the text as many critics and theorists have done, that does not, in my opinion, alter this basic fact of life. Writing and reading seem to be essentially linear, but it is quite another thing to claim that they are one-dimensional. This may be to a Geert Lernout The Dimension of the Text

201

large extent purely a matter of vocabulary. A number of factors in the last hundred and twenty years have conspired to turn the word “onedimensional” into the ideological equivalent of passé. On the one hand we had Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott, a delightful geometric fiction in which a world of only two dimensions is disturbed by rumours of a third (and possibly fourth) dimension. Just a few decades later Einstein’s work confirmed the role of time as the fourth dimension in a time-space continuum and the ideological death-blow to the metaphor of a single dimension was certainly delivered by Herbert Marcuse in his for my generation so influential book One-Dimensional Man, which I read as a rebellious sixteen-year-old and of which, after all these years, I only remember that, if anything, it was definitely not a good thing to be one-dimensional. A second point is related to the first: as I will try to show, it is impossible to find a convincing metaphor to represent the role of the temporal dimension in the transmission of texts and it also seems impossible for an edition of a text (at least one that exists in different versions), to do justice both to the relationship between documents and to the integrity of each individual document. If we represent the genetic development of a literary text, we should, like Gabler, in each individual case make the impossible distinction between the entirely different acts of transmission and of creation, between on the one hand the author as passive scribe, trying to copy carefully the previous draft and in that process making the same mistakes as the traditional scribes, and on the other hand the author as creator of his own text, purposely altering his text whenever he feels it is necessary. Both in the case of Ulysses and in that of Finnegans Wake I see no way in which it would be possible to represent faithfully both the development of the text, which ends in and works towards the finished product in 1922 and 1939, and that of each individual draft independent of that development. This does not mean that some of the more autonomous stages, such as the publication in periodicals of chapters of both books, did not represent significant moments for Joyce and for his readers, or that these could not serve as the end-point of genetic editions. What I do mean is that after their publication, Joyce treated the Little Review or transition pieces in exactly the same fashion as any other draft in the series. The textual critic or editor should be well advised to 202

VARIANTS 4 2005

do likewise. This basic fact about texts and about language in general is reflected in the images with which genetic and textual theorists have defined themselves and their work. The most obvious metaphor for what it is that editors do, is that of restoration: over the years the work has accumulated the grime of time and has become unrecognisably different. This means that in order to be useful again we must polish it; the layers of dirt have to be taken away to reveal the original that was hidden there all that time. A slightly less palatable metaphor for the process of undoing the inevitable effects of textual corruption was used by Daniel Heinsius in the first draft of a most important text in the history of textual criticism. The expression “textus receptus” for the version of the Greek New Testament that would remain the standard edition of the most important Christian text until the end of the nineteenth century, was first used in the introduction to the second 1733 edition: Textum ergo habes, nunc ab omnibus receptum: in quo nihil immutatum aut corruptum damus. “Thus you have here the text that is now generally received, in which we offer nothing that is changed or corrupted.” The fact that this was no more than a proud boast (we would now say “blurb”) for an edition that was in fact not only cobbled together quickly on the basis of manuscripts that belonged, in the words of the Alands, to “the youngest and worst of the text types in which the bible has been preserved,”2 but that was in all respects (with the exception of the ink quality) inferior to the first Elzevier edition, should not concern us here. What is more interesting is that Daniel Heinsius has been shown to be the author of this introduction, on the basis of a first draft of the introduction, written on the first blank page of a Greek manuscript of the second half of the sixteenth century, after the Commentarii in Octateuchum, Reges, Paralipomena I-II by Procopius of Gaza. Again, it does not concern us here that we are able to date these pages and that we can be sure that Daniel Heinsius wrote them. Nor should we mention that at the time of writing the manuscript itself was the property of the University Library at Leyden and Heinsius himself the Head Librarian, not just writing in 2 Kurt Aland and Barbara Aland. Der Text des Neuen Testaments (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1989), 14.

Geert Lernout The Dimension of the Text

203

one of the manuscripts under his care but doing it in effect in order to moonlight for a commercial publisher. What does interest us is that the first version of the famous phrase was slightly different: Textum habes, iam receptum, ab omnibus receptum, in quo nihil immutatum, aut pe corruptum, nihil couriositati, nihil novitati datum. Quemadmodum a cibis muscae merito arcentur, ita istas ad hosce non admittimus, quos contactu. “You have here the text which is now generally received, in which we offer nothing changed or corrupted, nothing left to strangeness, nothing to innovation. Just as from food flies are rightly fended off, so we do not permit these corruptive factors to contaminate the present food.” The textual corruptions are flies that should be chased off, in order to protect the heavenly nourishment that lies underneath.3 Although there seems to be enough food for thought here, a third metaphor for textual corruption and its undoing is also concerned with pollution. According to a way of thinking that is even older than the annotations in Erasmus’s edition of the Greek New Testament, contemporary manuscripts of the bible or of other classical texts stand in the same relationship to the original as a polluted river to the purity of its spring: it is told of Charlemagne that he settled a dispute about the text of the antiphonar with the question: “Where do we get purer water, from the spring or from the brook?”4 . In that context it is the responsibility of the textual critic and editor to use his critical skills to imaginatively follow that river all the way back to the clear sparkling spring of the original form of the text. As Dirk Van Hulle has shown in a forthcoming book, both Proust and Joyce use related images in À La recherche and Finnegans Wake. In the latter book, it is the river Liffey, born in the hills of Wicklow who carries the dirt and grime of the city to her death in the Irish sea. Still another image was used by the appropriately named Paul Maas in his highly influential book of 1927 Textkritik. First he introduced the traditional Lachmannian idea of the stemma and pointed out that it derives from genealogy: “the witnesses are related to the original somewhat 3

H. J. de Jonge, Daniel Heinsius and the Textus Receptus of the New Testament (Leiden: Brill, 1971),

36. 4 Quoted in U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, History of Classical Scholarship (London: Duckworth, 1982), 17.

204

VARIANTS 4 2005

as the descendants of a man are related to their ancestor” and he adds, somewhat mischievously, “one might perhaps illustrate the transmission of errors along the same lines by treating all females as sources of error.” But this image is unsatisfactory and Maas compares textual transmission to a river in an uncharacteristically lively and complex simile that deserves to be quoted in full: A river comes from an inaccessible source under the peak of a high mountain. It divides underground, its branches divide further, and some of these branches then come to the surface of the mountain side as springs; the water of these springs at once drains away and may come to the surface at several places farther down the mountain side and finally flows onward in visible form overground. The water from its source onwards is of ever-changing but fine and pure colours. In its subterranean course it flows past several places at which colouring matters from time to time dissolve into the water; the same thing happens every time the stream divides and every time it comes to the surface in a spring. Every influx changes the colour of a certain part of the stream, and this part keeps the colour permanently; only very slight colour changes are eliminated by natural processes. The distinction between the dyed water and the original remains always visible to the eye, but only occasionally in the sense that the eye at once recognises a colour falsified by influxes; often only in the sense that the difference between the colours of the various springs is discernible. On the other hand, the falsified elements can often be detected and the original colour restored by chemical methods; at other time this method fails. The object of the investigation is to test the genuineness of the colours on the evidence of the springs.5

From this simile it seems clear that Maas is more interested in the exact course of the water from the different springs and in the balance of the colours than in the pure contents of the original spring, which is of course inaccessible by definition. Despite the shape of an obviously three-dimensional mountain, Maas depicts a world that is just as two-dimensional as the traditional Lachmannian stemma and that closely resembles it. But there is an important difference: no river is ever fed by a single source. In fact, if like Maas we talk about manuscript traditions deriving from a single archetype, we must turn the river image on its head in order to presuppose an inverted delta with a single source feeding very many different and increasingly 5

Paul Maas, Textual Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), 20.

Geert Lernout The Dimension of the Text

205

more polluted streams. And even then, Maas’s simile slips through our fingers the more we try to grasp it. Essential to flowing water is the factor of time, so where exactly on Maas’s mountain do we find the concrete text we are trying to reconstruct? Where is the original and where do we find each individual version? If Heraclitus was right when he claimed that you cannot step into the same river twice, it should also be impossible to cut a slice of the river or to identify an individual text or work in what is essentially just flowing water. Incidentally, this is also a problem that Joyce encountered when he was writing Finnegans Wake. In one of his textual sources he found that during one particularly dry summer the river Liffey had been dry for two minutes. This led to Anna Livia’s request at the very end of Finnegans Wake: “If I lose my breath for a minute or two don’t speak, remember!” (625.28) and this passage is ultimately based, according to Roland McHugh, on the Dublin Annals which report that the Liffey in 1452 was dry “for the space of two minutes [my italics].” But how can you measure the absence of water in units of time, or, for that matter, how could the Dubliners of 1452 measure two minutes? Isn’t it much more obvious that the river was dry for two miles? The problem of finding a spatial representation of the temporal dimension is one that is, as we have seen, as old as Flatland and in most popular expositions of the time dimension we find similar difficulties, as in another of Joyce’s sources, J.W. Dunne’s An Experiment with Time. In the same book that I quoted earlier Dirk Van Hulle points out that another sophisticated modernist writer, Marcel Proust, was also aware of the dimensional debate when he wrote about “cette quatrième dimension, celle du Temps, que je trouvais autrefois à l’église de Combray.”6 The same can be said about the textual scholars: a representative of the German approach, Hans Zeller, uses an image that we recognise from the popular books on Einstein that were being published in the beginning of last century: If one imagines the textual history in the shape of a 3-dimensional cylinder standing upright, then the different versions are horizontal planes perpendicular to the axis of the cylinder. The purpose of the historical-critical edition (apart from the necessary correction of mutilated text) is to create 6

206

“This fourth dimension, that of Time, that I had found before in the church of Combray.”

VARIANTS 4 2005

an appropriate reproduction of this cylinder, that is to say, of the complete textual history; while the purpose of a critical edition is to reproduce a particular plane, that is to say, an individual version. Contamination would mean the projection of one plane onto another.7

This is quite similar to what French geneticists have written on this subject: Louis Hay calls the genetic approach the “third dimension of literature,” which presupposes the two dimensions of the page in a similar fashion as Zeller does, while Pierre-Marc Biasi calls the genetic dimension, in keeping with the reference to the role of time in modern physics, the fourth dimension, which would really complicate Zeller’s picture of a three-dimensional cylinder. What these accounts have in common is that they all presuppose the supra-linear dimensions of a text. Before we go on, we must point out that there is an important difference between on the one hand Maas’s use of a stemma in the study of a work that exists in different manuscript copies and on the other the relationships between different genetic versions of a modern work such as Finnegans Wake. The difference, again, is one of dimensions: the stemma of a modern work will almost always be much more linear than that which attempts to describe different copies of a single work. When Michael Groden reconstructs the stemma of Ulysses in his introduction to his book Ulysses in Progress, we do not have a tree with different branches, but essentially a central trunk, one single line, with just a few short accidental branches, of which the Rosenbach Manuscript is the most important. Only occasionally will you have a branch that does not result in a new text but only leads to a private collector’s cupboard or vault. For most of the time, what we have in modern genetic manuscripts is a first draft that serves as the basis of the second draft, which is copied and revised again, and again, and again, ultimately leading to the printed book. Even what may appear to be endpoints such as the periodical and booklet publications of sections and chapters of Finnegans Wake are for Joyce mere stations on the way to the final form of the text. The printed versions simply became the base for more overlay in the next document in the genetic history of the final text. 7 Hans Zeller, “A New Approach to the Critical Constitution of Literary Texts,” Studies in Bibliography 28 (1975), 244.

Geert Lernout The Dimension of the Text

207

But this is not all: the relationship between the different documents is also different in the two kinds of stemma. Whereas in classical or medieval texts each document represents a copy and thus a version of the same text, modern manuscripts and drafts all have different texts, from a rough sketch to the finished form of the final page proofs. But even this is not all, of course, because two consecutive genetic texts may have radically different meanings and intentions and must thus be considered different texts. Yet as I said earlier, on at least one level they do resemble traditional manuscript versions: the later text begins its life as a not always very good copy of the earlier text which first had to be copied faithfully before new additions and revisions can be made. It is clear that the copying of a text, even when it is done by the author of the original, always remains a hazardous business that is subject to the same general types of mistakes that we can observe in classical or medieval manuscript traditions. This similarity extends to the most recent interest in individual documents, both in manuscript and in genetic traditions. There are theorists in the German, French and Anglo-American traditions who argue strongly against what they call “eclecticism”: the creation of an edition of a work on the basis of evidence from two different versions, because in that case you create a version that has never existed before. This is perhaps expressed most clearly by Siegfried Scheibe who writes “From an editorial point of view the text of a work consists of all the textual versions that have been produced in the course of the genesis of the work by the author himself or on his request.”8 Similar attitudes can be found among the genetic critics in France, most authoritatively in Almuth Grésillon’s Eléments de critique génétique when she defines the genetic edition as “an edition that represents exhaustively and in the chronological order the witnesses of a genesis.”9 In the French view, one should not try to establish a synoptic edition (which brings several levels together in one document) but instead editors should reproduce faithfully and one 8 Siegfried Scheibe, “Zum editorischen Problem des Textes,” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie. Sonderheft 101 (1982), 28. 9

Almuth Grésillon, Eléments de critique génétique (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1994),

188.

208

VARIANTS 4 2005

by one all the manuscripts of the avant-texte. What happens here, and what happened in a different manner in the Anglo-American schools of editorial theory, is the disappearance of the final printed form of the work as the telos of editorial labour. The ideal of this new type of edition is a diplomatic representation of a series of individual manuscripts. A similar movement can be found in studies of classical and biblical manuscripts in their attitude, not to the telos, but to the arche: if manuscripts used to be employed purely as a means of access to the allusive original text, there are now calls to look at them as artefacts in their own right.10 Of course, the careful examination of each individual version, be it manuscript or genetic, has always been a prerequisite for textual scholarship, but it is only when we stop instrumentalising these texts in seeing them purely as a means of understanding another text, that we can properly consider them as texts in their own right. Each version can then be seen as a text that deserves individual study and that should be seen as more than just a link in a long chain. Yet both in manuscript and in genetic versions, a single document only rarely represents a single state of the text. Manuscript versions have been corrected, either by the scribe or by somebody else, and glosses or marginal notes have been added. This is even more clear in the case of genetic manuscripts: almost by definition these consist of more than one layer of text. In the case of Finnegans Wake, Joyce’s fair copies are but a starting point of ever new additions and corrections, which fill up the page until the writer has no other alternative than to make a new draft. The result is that every individual stage of the genetic process contains traces of several different writing acts. Ideally the first stage is a simple transcription of the previous stage and the end result the basis of the simple transcription that will result in the next stage; but in between these two there may be several years’ worth of emendations or additions. Thus, even if we restrict our attention to single documents, we cannot avoid having to deal with the temporal dimension that is hidden in every document and most of the time we end up with at least two dimensions, 10 See Thomas Bein’s contribution to Bodo Plachta and H. T. M. van Vliet’s Perspectives of Scholarly Editing. Perspektiven der Textedition (Berlin: Weidler, 2002).

Geert Lernout The Dimension of the Text

209

exemplified in the classic German synoptic edition that uses different lines and different fonts to represent the successive versions that can be isolated in one document, as with D.E. Sattler’s famous Hölderlin edition. But Gabler’s Ulysses shows that with the use of diacritical signs it is easy to represent intradocument changes in a linear fashion. Gabler’s solution has two major advantages over Sattler’s practice. The first is that Gabler’s method makes it possible to represent interdocument changes too. For those users who want to be able to have immediate access to the genetic history of a particular passage without having to study either the documents, facsimiles of the documents or diplomatic editions, Gabler’s linear representation offers exactly what they need, at least from the Rosenbach manuscript onwards, and there is no practical reason why it could not also incorporate all kinds of earlier documents. The second advantage is even more dramatic: for those readers who are particularly interested in one stage of development of the text, the electronic base of the linear Gabler text should allow users to generate a linear version of any stage in the development of the text, which, after some more electronic manipulation, could link up with facsimiles of the appropriate documents. But what needs to be kept in mind is that Gabler’s genetic approach is decidedly author-centered and teleological: each individual document is not edited in its own right, but always in function of the editor’s reconstruction of the authorial contribution to the final text. In recent years different groups in Dublin, Buffalo, Eugene and Antwerp have been working on electronic editions of parts of the texts of Finnegans Wake and on that of Ulysses. Different solutions have been offered for the problems inherent in a genetic presentation of Joyce’s late texts, but what they have in common is that all either start from Gabler’s method or end up applying it. The central advantage of Gabler’s synoptic text is that at least in paper form, it offers a completely linear text that incorporates most of the information contained in the various documents that are relevant to the text’s genesis. What is lost, of course, is the appearance, the two-dimensional shape of the page of the individual document, whether it is a first draft or the final text. But that, it seems to me, is a small price to pay.

210

VARIANTS 4 2005

Writing on the Edge Trollope’s An Eye for An Eye John McCourt

For the purposes of this article, I interpret ‘text’ as “a body of writing” and by ‘border’ I mean margin, frontier, limit, periphery, both edge and boundary, the beginning and end that frame a text such as a printed book, just as a picture frame contains an image or set of images. The borders of a text are arbitrary — a novel, for example, is expected to conclude within a commonsensical number of pages — just as the borders of images are arbitrary and actually non-existent lines — conventions with which we read reproductions of physical reality. As real objects spill beyond the borders within which we limit them in their reproductions in the forms of painting or photography, so too books too can spill over beyond the arbitrary limits within which they were once placed — becoming hypertexts, being (re)placed in collected editions, being changed by discoveries of their avant-textes or by the corrections to mistakes included in earlier editions, being adapted for stage, for television screen or for movie screen, being re-written, expanded in sequels or reformulated in post-modern re-formulations. Around the issues of textual borders I would also like to keep in mind the theoretical turn commonly known as “Border Studies” and which signifies a sort of no-man’s land, what Bhabha refers to as an “inbetween space1 in which issues of identity and of cultural politics can be located and discussed, a ‘borderlands’ of postcolonial discourse which “constitute a textual contact zone where the dominant and the marginal cultures meet.”2 Conservative, Victorian Trollope might not initially seem a very promising case to be studied in these terms which are more usually 1 2

Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994, p. 38.

Jaishree K. Odin. “The Edge of Difference: Negotations between the Hypertextual and the Postcolonial”. Modern Fiction Studies, 43, 3, Fall 1997, p. 615.

applied to indigenous writers attempting to find narrative means of expressing the disrupted and disjunctive nature of their realities. At least at times, however, he did attempt to throw off the straitjacket of English colonial politics and of conservative English literary form, and thus became a liminal figure breaking into a new space, a borderland of encounter between the dominant British culture and the marginalised Irish periphery. As a result, he sometimes gave voice to the Irish experience in a new way for English readers and partially managed to break beyond the limits of the classic English novel in order to find a form more suitable for the subject matter he encountered in nineteenth century Ireland. Yet, in most of his Irish novels, we are confronted with an uneasy mixture of ‘Irish’ content which is ultimately too fragmented and ungainly to be successfully packaged within the polished and linear ‘English’ forms he adopted. Trollope was a writer who knew no quantitative limits. He wrote some 47 novels, most of them big, convoluted triple-deckers, many of which initially saw the light in a very different textual form as newspaper serialisations. Many others resist standard closure and leak into sequels and serialisations, becoming instalments in a bigger story. This is true of his Barsetshire Chronicles and of the more political Palliser novels. While Trollope’s habit of writing sprawling series of novels allows his readers renew acquaintance with well-known characters over a prolonged period of time, it also reveals a lack of discipline which is symptomatic of the formal weaknesses of much of his output but in particular of his Irish novels. Indeed the formlessness of the Irish novels cannot be fully explained by Trollope’s saying: “I have never troubled myself much about the construction of plot” or by the fact that, as Walter Allen puts it “he did not always know where to stop, where to draw his boundaries.”3 If a common criticism of Trollope’s novels is that they are sometimes weakened by their very length, this is often coupled with the belief that he “acquiesced rather too easily in the conventions of midVictorian realism, and therefore in the social and moral assumptions 3 Walter Allen, “The Last Chronicle of Barset” in Tony Bareham, ed., Anthony Trollope. London: Vision Press, 1980, p. 90.

212

VARIANTS 4 2005

those conventions express.”4 For this, Trollope is sometimes compared negatively with Thackeray or Dickens or George Eliot, who “were bold enough to push beyond the conventional boundaries of the novel form,”5 while Trollope, in Henry James’s words, “accepted all the common restrictions, and found that even within the barriers there was plenty of material.”6 In his early Irish work, and on occasion afterwards, Trollope seems morally compelled to break beyond the common boundaries of literary England, to go beyond the English Pale and return to matters Irish, to try and see beyond the stereotypes about the country that made him as a writer. There was no getting away from the fact that in order to become one of the quintessential English novelists, he had been forced to move beyond England, the psychological as much as the geographical entity. His autobiography reveals that prior to going to Ireland his views of the country were superficial and negative but he soon found that Ireland was pleasant and before long he was pleased to find himself to be in pecuniary circumstances which were opulent in comparison with those of my past life. The Irish people did not murder me, nor did they even break my head. I soon found them to be good-humoured, clever — the working classes very much more intelligent than those of England — oeconomical and hospitable.7

Thus, for personal and professional reasons, there is sometimes a sense of Trollope’s feeling obliged to write of Ireland and her wrongs for the English public. By accident or design he had become a border crosser, one who would have to accept that, following his initiation as a successful public servant and writer in Ireland, his outlook would, at least in part, be “betwixt and between”, be bicultural and biconceptual.8 4 Robin Gilmour, “A Lesser Thackeray? Trollope and the Victorian Novel”, in Tony Bareham, ed., Anthony Trollope. p. 182. 5

Ibid, p. 183.

6

Henry James, “Anthony Trollope” in Donald Smalley, ed., Trollope: The Critical Heritage, 1969, p. 540. 7

Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography, ed. P.D. Edwards, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999,

p.65. 8 Emily Hicks, Border Writing: The Multidimensional Text. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991, p. xxvi.

John McCourt Writing on the Edge

213

This would initially be a creatively liberating stance because the border crossing is “a site in which the border subject often discovers the cultural creativity and cultural authority to formulate ‘new models, symbols, and paradigms’.”9 As Anzaldúa puts it: “Living in a state of psychic unrest, in a borderland, is what makes poets write and artists create.”10 But rather than embrace models from his new country or invent ones with which to portray it, Trollope too often seems simply to crank into movement the classic turns and dynamics of the English novel. Thus he strains to encompass what he essentially considers an unruly and disorderly country within the confines of ordered English forms more suited to describing, as Declan Kiberd puts it, “a land of stable gradations of made lives” than an unstable society of “lives in the making.”11 What the Irish critic, James Pope Hennessy wrote of Trollope’s first novel holds for most of his Irish output: In form, The Macdermots of Ballycloran is an inchoate work, and, naturally enough in a lengthy first novel, it lacks discipline. But then it deals with a society in conditions of disruption — that chronic Irish state of disruption which had always persisted through the long centuries of British rule.

The more genuine Trollope’s attempt to penetrate surfaces, to break beyond the borders of a colonial reading of the country, to render the state of disruption which reigns in Ireland, the more the form of his novels suffers. His most successful ‘Irish’ novel, Phineas Finn, works precisely because it domesticates Phineas, it withdraws from Ireland, making the country little more than a point of departure and of occasional return for the eponymous Irish parliamentarian, and revolves around London, the metropolitan centre of the British Empire (Phineas actually becomes Undersecretary for the Colonies). The novel is a success within the terms of classic realism, it is replete with linearity, centredness, coherence, 9 Mae G. Henderson, “Introduction” to Borders, Boundaries, and Frames, ed., Mae Henderson. New York and London: 1995, p. 5. 10 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Spinters/Aunt Lute, 1987, p.73. 11 Declan Kiberd. “The War against the Past.” In The Uses of the Past: Essays on Irish Culture, eds. Audrey S. Eyler and Robert Garratt. Newark, N.J., University of Delaware, 1988, pp.24–53.

214

VARIANTS 4 2005

causation, closure, but it fails to give voice to Ireland, its contradictions and needs, except in a cursory and sometimes superficial way. When Trollope attempts to marry the typical effects of the realist novel to a more thorough exploration of the contradictions of the Ireland he knew, form and content are seen to clash and content is usually sacrificed. Thus, a novel such as his most courageous and most anticonformist Irish work, An Eye for An Eye, which tries hard to represent Ireland from within, and whose chief representative of British colonialism, Fred, is overcome with a sense of disorientation, displacement, ambivalence, a radical alienation when in Ireland, has to be judged as, at best, an aesthetic challenge, an only partially successful foray into Irish tragedy. No wonder then that Trollope’s more conservative English critics would chose to see his Irish novels as aberrations. Michael Sadleir, for instance, sees “Trollope’s Irish fiction as something from which he was fortunate to escape into more congenial subjects which came to him when he fell ‘beneath the slow, wise, soothing spell of rural England’ ”.12 He continues: Ireland produced the man; but it was left to England to inspire the novelist. Indeed one may go further. Ireland, having by friendliness, sport and open air saved Trollope from himself, all but choked the very genius that she had vitalised by her insane absorption in her own wrongs and thwarted hopes.13

Which makes for rather offensive reading when one considers that Ireland’s “insane absorption” shortly after Trollope arrived there was with nothing less than the Great Famine. For Sadleir, it is as if Trollope was in some way infected by Ireland. The implication is that he should have turned a blind eye and not got his pen dirty there, he should have followed the path of Maria Edgeworth who, following Catholic Emancipation in 1829, decided to cease writing about Ireland because the “realities are too strong, party passions too violent, to bear to see, or care 12

John Cronin, “Trollope and the Matter of Ireland” in Tony Bareham, ed., Anthony Trollope,

p. 24. 13

Michael Sadleir, Trollope: A Commentary. London: 1927, p. 143.

John McCourt Writing on the Edge

215

to look at their faces in a looking glass.”14 Sadleir goes on to claim that another of Trollope’s Irish novels “Castle Richmond is not in the classsic sense Trollope at all […] Castle Richmond must claim the attention of readers of Trollope for its ‘Irishisms’ and not for its fictional significance. It is a document, not a work of art; its appeal is to nationalist enthusiasm, not to the literary appreciation that knows no nationality.”15 Trollope’s sin appears to have been to pause to open a chink in the fictional frame which allows some light fall away from the comedy of manners and onto the harsh Irish situation, to give realistic voice to some of the horrors of the famine which is the novel’s ill-fitting background and which the English reading public — “the literary appreciation that knows no nationality” — clearly had little stomach for. But Sadleir can rest at ease: the fact that Trollope includes harrowing material connected to the Famine does not erase the fact that, more often than not, he fails to find an adequate representational mode for Ireland; in a word, starvation and silk do not sit easily together, as the chapter “The Last Stage”, reveals. Polhemus’s description of the novel’s priggish hero’s harrowing epiphany is telling: Taking shelter from the rain, he enters a peasant cottage where a young woman is slowly starving to death. He see a baby lying near the woman on the ground, and when he goes over to look at it, he finds that the baby is dead. All his grandiose schemes for Ireland end in the hopeless gesture of covering the little corpse with a silk handkerchief, and he learns the reality of suffering.16

While John Cronin’s assertion that “Trollope’s combination of the thesis novel with a novel of manners makes for an uneasy work”17 is correct, at least from the work’s formal unease with its own content, from the presence of a variety of material that does not fit harmoniously 14 Quoted in Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1972, pp. 452–453. 15

Michael Sadleir, Trollope: A Commentary, p. 387.

16

Robert M. Polhemus. The Changing World of Anthony Trollope. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968, p. 65. 17

216

John Cronin, “Trollope and the Matter of Ireland”, p. 29.

VARIANTS 4 2005

together, one gets a sense of the discomfort felt by Trollope when he chooses to linger in close proximity to Ireland’s woes. I’d like now to consider in more detail the case of An Eye for An Eye, which was published in book form in 1879. In a marked departure from his often light hearted early Irish works, it seems to more successfully find a suitable form with which to represent Ireland — tragedy — and it manages to foreground unexpected issues concerning both Ireland and England which had remained beyond the focus of Trollope’s creative scope up to that time. The novel, one of Trollope’s darkest, is dominated by two strange locations — Scroope Manor and the O’Hara’s cottage in County Clare — both of which are singularly unhomely, both a little ‘off ’ or deviant from the standard England of so many of his other novels. The image of a third location presented in the opening of the book is also unusual: it is a “private asylum” housing an “unfortunate lady” and it “is furnished with every luxury which it may be within the power of a maniac to enjoy.” She has “no one left belonging to her” and does not even “sigh for release.” Her mind works unconsciously as she repeats the Old Testament line incessantly “An eye for an eye, and a tooth of a tooth.” The author then tells us that “the story shall be told of the lady who dwelt there — the story of her life till madness placed her within those walls.” From the asylum we pass to Scroope Manor in Dorsetshire, “an Elizabethan structure of some pretensions” whose “park itself was large, and the appendages to it such as were fit for an earl’s establishment — but there was little about it that was attractive” (An Eye, p. 3). Trollope sets it apart, outside the English norm, writing that “there was none of that finished landscape beauty of which the owners of ‘places’ in England are so just proud” (An Eye, p.4). Sometimes its features are Gothic, and often it is described in negative terms of what it was not, being constantly compared unfavourably to a generic English ideal: The atmosphere of the whole place was gloomy. There were none of those charms of modern creation which now make the mansions of the wealthy among us bright and joyous (An Eye, p.4). To a stranger, and perhaps to the inmates, the idea of gloom about the place was greatly increased by the absence of any garden or lawn near the

John McCourt Writing on the Edge

217

house (An Eye, p.5).

But it is home to the Earl of Scroope and its very solidity is seen positively. Familiarity breeds safety and should guarantee continuity: The earl could talk for ever about the estate, every field, every fence, almost every tree on which was familiar to him. That his tenants should be easy in their circumstances, a Protestant, church-going, rent-paying people, son following father, and daughters marrying as their mothers had married, unchanging, never sinking an inch in the social scale, or rising — this was the wish nearest to his heart (An Eye, p. 82).

The supposed continuity from generation to generation soon reveals itself to be false: we find out that the Earl lost his first wife as well as his only daughter “just as she became a bride,” and that his son who was “thoughtless, lavish, and prone to evil pleasure” had married a “wife from out of the streets […] a painted hussy from France.” Shortly after the Earl’s second marriage, this only son also died and the Earl of Scroope was forced to choose his nephew Fred Neville as his heir and has him brought to visit the estate. Trollope locates Fred in his dismal, new home “out of the world” and shows him to be even further displaced by his being the impoverished son of a renegade member the Earl of Scroope’s family. Trollope moves his novel even further beyond the realm into Ireland by having Fred spend one last year there as an officer of the British army. He probably felt that Ireland was largely virgin territory for the English novel, being the subject, more often than not, of little other than travel writing. His attempt would be to make this land which was so foreign to most English readers seem both England’s Other and her double — an emptier, more chaotic version of the real thing. Seamus Deane has written tellingly about the English impulse to write about Ireland, commenting on selected aspects of this process whereby the urge to make what was strange — a recalcitrant Ireland — familiar, a part of the United Kingdom, produced not only a subversion of that initial urge but also did this by opening a new space for discourse. In the new space, various attempts to represent Ireland were predicated on the shared belief that the country had never been adequately (or at all) represented before. The sense of an initiatory

218

VARIANTS 4 2005

blankness, or emptiness, and the evolution of the techniques by which it could be filled is an abiding one in Irish writing.18

Ireland was, in order words, largely beyond the border of orderly English experience and of the limited frame of the ordered English novel. An Eye for an Eye, which contains several passages giving a vision of Ireland as a place which is strange, empty, and foreign, is an exception to typical British treatment of Irish subject matter. Trollope plays of his own vision of Ireland as sketched in the book against a more stereotypically biased English attitude which is expressed through the thoughts of Lady Scroope who bemoans Fred’s refusal to leave the army and complains of his failure to assume his responsibilities as heir to Scroope Manor: But this had not been done; and now there was an Irish Roman Catholic widow with a daughter, with seal-shooting and a boat and high cliffs right in the young man’s way! Lady Scroope could not analyse it, but felt all the danger as though it were by instinct. Partridge and pheasant shooting on a gentleman’s own grounds, and an occasional day’s hunting with the hounds in his own country, were, in Lady Scroope’s estimation, becoming amusements for an English gentleman. They did not interfere with the exercise of his duties. She had by no means brought herself to like the yearly raids into Scotland made latterly by sportsmen. But if Scotch moors and forests were dangerous, what were Irish cliffs! (An Eye, p. 18).

For Lady Scroope, safety, both physical and moral, is only guaranteed within the borders of familiar England, within the boundaries of “a gentleman’s own grounds.” In ironic passages like this, Trollope reveals himself to be an effective critic of aristocratic English thought on the subject. Lady Scroope is shown to be limited by her own closed, familiar world, to have become a prisoner of her blind acceptance of accepted values and as such she is the root of much of the novel’s tragic conclusion. As is shown in the following passage describing in the omniscient narrator’s voice the cottage in which Kate O’Hara and her mother live in County Clare, sometimes Trollope too falls into stereotype and defines the Irish cottage and landscape in terms of what they are not, that is, their English equivalents: 18 Seamus Deane, “The Production of Cultural Space in Irish Writing” in Boundary 2, An International Journal of literature and culture, Volume 21, no. 3, Fall 1994, p.120.

John McCourt Writing on the Edge

219

It was the nearest house to the rocks, from which it was distant less than half a mile. The cottage, so called, was a low rambling long house, but one storey high — very unlike an English cottage. […] It was a blank place enough, and most unlike that sort of cottage which English ladies are supposed to inhabit, when they take to cottage life. There was no garden to it, beyond a small patch in which a few potatoes were planted. It was so near to the ocean, so exposed to winds from the Atlantic, that no shrubs would live there. Everything round it, even the herbage, was impregnated with salt, and told tales of the neighbouring waves. […] About a half a mile from the cottage on the way to Liscannor there were half a dozen mud cabins which contained Mrs O’Hara’s nearest neighbours — and an old burying ground. (An Eye, p. 30)

What we notice immediately (apart from the topographical accuracy of the description) is that the house is located in a ‘wilderness’, an unsafe “blank space” and that it in no way corresponds to the English standard of what a cottage should be. While elsewhere Trollope contributes to a common English domesticating strategy of integrating Ireland culturally with Great Britain, presenting her as a ragged, uncouth but fundamentally similar to its nearest neighbour, or, in Castle Richmond writing that “Castle Richmond might have been in Hampshire or Essex; and as regards his property, Sir Thomas Fitzgerald might have been a Leicestershire baronet”, in An Eye for an Eye, he stresses the Clare region’s wildness, its Otherness, from Fred’s point of view as he thinks of the O’Hara ladies and their home: Accident, and the spirit of adventure, had thrust these ladies in his path, and no doubt he liked them the better because they did not live as other people lived. Their solitude, the close vicinity of the ocean, the feeling that in meeting them none of the ordinary conventional usages of society were needed, the wildness and the strangeness of the scene, all had charms which he admitted to himself (An Eye, 42).

Fred comes to hate the place whose very strangeness had once offered the possibility of adventure. Now its poverty is a cause for blame, for accusations of a lack of humanity or civilisation: How ugly the country was to his eyes as he now saw it. Here and there stood a mud cabin, and the small, half-cultivated fields, or rather patches of land, in which the thin oat crops were beginning to be green, were surrounded by low loose ramshackle walls, which were little more than heaps

220

VARIANTS 4 2005

of stone, so carelessly had they been built and so negligently preserved. […] The burial ground which he passed was the liveliest sign of humanity about the place. Then the country became still wilder, and there was no road. […] Now the place with all its attributes was hideous to him, distasteful, and abominable (An Eye, 109–110).

But Trollope does not identify with Fred, who sees Ireland, through the superficial, colonial lens offered him from his post in a regiment stationed at the Ennis cavalry barracks, as a romantic, exotic, wild place in which he can be a character in a personal romantic fiction and fulfil his aunt’s prophesy that he was “exactly the man to fall in love with a wild Irish girl” (An Eye, p. 17) and “indulge in that wild district the spirit of adventure which was strong within him” (An Eye, p. 13). He is also assured in his belief that “he was among people who were his inferiors in rank, education, wealth, manners, religion and nationality” (An Eye, p. 150) and condescends towards the girl who was his Irish sweetheart whom he fails to see as a woman worthy of his love but rather as “a plaything for an idle hour” (An Eye, p. 150) and later, as a mere animal, “a wretched, ignorant creature” (An Eye, p. 161). Trollope’s view of Ireland is more complicated. It is apparent that he is grappling with Ireland’s situation in a domestic plot being managed to do ideological work. He goes beyond the confines of stereotype and seeks to adopt and adapt indigenous visions of Ireland by engaging in an appropriation and a rewriting of a classic myth of Ireland — as perpetuated in songs, orations, poems he would no doubt have heard — as a helpless young maiden who is victimised and abused by a brutal English foreigner, by England itself. This is the underlying theme of the Gaelic aisling or vision poem, in which the speirbhean or dream woman is seen as both innocent and sexually attractive but is also viewed in political terms as the incarnation of the country which is abused. In the aisling, the woman-victim is often represented by Kathleen ni Houlihan who “has lost her land and her rights. She has been violated, raped, by England.”19 She awaits the day when her destined husband will come and restore her. Trollope presents us with two alternative versions of this 19 Robert Tracy, “Introduction” to The MacDermots of Ballycloran. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, p. xv.

John McCourt Writing on the Edge

221

feminised Ireland in an ironic parallel to the Earl of Scroope’s image of “daughters marrying as their mothers had married, unchanging.” Both Mrs O’Hara and her daughter can be read within the frames of this familiar trope of the Irish woman-victim: the former has been abandoned with her daughter by her husband, Captain O’Hara, who, according to Father Marty, is “a low blackguard” (An Eye, p. 94) while the latter, the “sweet innocent young lady” (An Eye, p. 97), Kate O’Hara (whose name sounds and reads like an anglicised version of Kathleen Ni Houlihan), falls in love with another deceitful Englishman, Fred, who makes her pregnant and disappears. Unlike other wronged Irish women who await an idealised foreign suitor, in an ideological and political twist of the familiar trope, Kate longingly awaits the very man who has wronged her. For Trollope, she has been treated disgracefully but it is clear that Fred must now assume his responsibilities and that this is the only solution that will make her happy. Father Marty is the spokeswoman for this belief: “Have you thought of the life of that young girl who now bears in her womb the fruit of our body? Would you murder her — because she loved you, and trusted you, and gave you all simply because you asked her; and then think of your own life?” (An Eye, p. 157). Read as an allegory of Ireland’s situation, Trollope goes along with the Irish version that England has wronged its sister isle but sees the solution in terms of England righting the wrong and marrying the Ireland it has mistreated, in terms of the Liberal campaign to save the Union “that English recklessness had endangered by instituting ‘justice for Ireland’.”20 As far as Kate is concerned this is a consummation devoutly to be wished. The tragedy of the novel is that Fred does not face up to his duties, that he is unable to shoulder the very real responsibilities which are fruit of his desire for adventure. England too, is criticised by Trollope for treating Ireland with too much lightness, and it is being warned (through Kate’s mother’s cold blooded murder of Fred) that the inevitable outcome of continued mistreatment will be violent. When the 20 Mary Jean Corbett. Allegories of Union in Irish and English Writing. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 187.

222

VARIANTS 4 2005

violent reaction comes it is unstoppable and totally predictable, bearing all the hallmarks of a tragic climax. The victims pile up: Fred is killed, his aunt, the Countess of Scroope is driven “to the verge of insanity”, Kate’s mother is put in an asylum, and Kate herself reduced to a passive state and longs for death “But as death cannot be barred from the door when he knocks at it, so neither can he be made to come as a guest when summoned. She still lived, though life had so little to offer her.” Only two very secondary characters, Fred’s brother Jack and Sophie Mellerby, girl the Earl of Scroope had hoped Fred would marry, benefit by marrying and taking over the estate. With them a partial re-composition is achieved. Trollope has taken us across many borders in this text. He has turned the novel’s attention to issues beyond his own usual remit as well as that of many of his Victorian counterparts — exploring psychological paralysis, madness, unmarried pregnancy, murder — and all in a most liminal location, a remote West of Ireland cottage, a place where a world ends and a harsh unforgiving ocean begins, where life is separated from the abyss by a drop of several hundred feet from the nearby cliffs, the cliffs of Moher. Mindful of Gloria Anzaldùa’s contention that “a border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge”21 , we cannot fail to acknowledge that Trollope has walked his reader down a series of narrow dividing lines (symbolised by those same cliffs of Moher which feature so prominently), which arbitrarily create a divide between England and Ireland, between Protestants and Catholics, between foreign and domestic, between stereotype and reality, between Other and Double, between madness and sanity, and that he has offered a vision of Ireland not only as England’s other but as its possible double, a worrying world where the safety of home seems almost impossible, where sanctuary is but an illusion, where events are tragically doomed to repeat and not instruct, where fragmentation dominates over closure and circularity prevails over chronological optimism. Within remarkable brevity, in just one hundred

21

Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, p. 3.

John McCourt Writing on the Edge

223

and sixty nine pages, he has crossed an important psychological border and written his one truly Irish novel, and for once enclosed himself within a form — that of tragedy — which leaves him no room for returns, rethinks or sequels.

224

VARIANTS 4 2005

From Text to Work Digital Tools and the Emergence of the Social Text Jerome McGann

I J. C. C. Mays’ much longed-for edition of Coleridge’s poems and plays, the Poetical Works,1 has finally, magnificently, appeared. Like another important edition of our time, Gabler’s Ulysses,2 these six books — three volumes, each in two parts — set an inspiring example of scholarly thoroughness and integrity. But their strength rests ultimately in something else — something quite rare in the scholarly editions of English speaking authors produced in the last 50 years. Mays is deeply sympathetic to Coleridge’s poetry — not unaware of or reticent to address its failings and limitations, but fronting all the work with what Desmond McCarthy, writing of Coleridge, called “the most delicate sympathy.” “When he writes of it […] his words are singularly moving in their subtlety and simplicity” (xc) That is McCarthy’s description of Coleridge on the subject of “affection-love” — a shrewd judgment unearthed by Mays from a 1939 newspaper review. The words perfectly describe Mays’s editorial treatment of Coleridge. The edition also has a most delicate sympathy with our own epoch and its remarkable scholarly adventures, of which Gabler’s Ulysses has been a famous instance. Mays’s edition is every bit as significant and challenging, and in this paper I want to investigate some of the issues raised by his work. They will help to clarify my principal subject, which I pose as a question: where is information technology driving literary and cultural studies and — not least of all — scholarly editing, the foundational discipline of those broad fields of work? 1 J. C. C. Mays, (ed.), The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poetical Works. Vols. I–III, Parts 1, 2. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001). 2 Hans Walter Gabler et al., Ulysses. A Critical and Synoptic Edition. Vols. 1–3 (New York: Garland Publishing Co., 1984).

Let me briefly sketch the scholarly horizon, as I see it, of that question. We inherit two basic types of scholarly editorial method: facsimile and diplomatic editing, on one hand, and eclectic editing on the other. Both were deepened and renewed when the disciplines of modern philology emerged out of the historicism born in eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Two systematically presented variants on these basic methods emerged in 20th century editorial practice: the Anglo-American critical eclecticism culminating in the Greg-Bowers school, and the European genetic methods developed by a line of German and French scholars of the mid and late century. A third variant, social-text editing, was most vigorously proposed by the late D. F. McKenzie, who unfortunately died without completing his edition of Congreve, which was to demonstrate the praxis of his theory. I see my own work as a critical pursuit of McKenzie’s ideas. Mays deliberately locates his edition in relation to this general scholarly context. He is editing both the poems and plays of Coleridge, including the translations from Schiller. While he is forced to take a slightly different practical approach with the plays, a single editorial vision controls the project. In the interests of clarity, I shall concentrate my attention on Mays’s treatment of the poetry. The basic division of each “Part” of the edition into two volumes, one called the “Reading Text,” the other the “Variorum Text,” signals Mays’s editorial purposes. Corresponding to the numbered sequence of reading texts is an equivalently numbered series of variorum texts. The symmetry between the two texts extends to the graphical editorial presentation: the reading text is preceded by an introductory editorial note, more or less extensive, setting the poem in its biographical and socio-historical contexts, and (often) its later reception history. The variorum text begins with an editorial discussion of the textual witnesses that authorize its production. In many cases, of course, the variorum commentary discusses contextual matters that have far more than a narrowly technical (textual) import. While Mays’s editorial point of departure is, as we would expect, Anglo-American, this work is most strongly marked by the influence of the European genetic editorial methods as they were developed in var226

VARIANTS 4 2005

ious German and French editions beginning with Beissner3 and Beck’s edition of Hölderlin (1943–1985). However, certain complexities in the material, which he explains in scrupulous detail in his editorial Introduction, lead him to develop what he calls a “severely modified” (cxxi) version of a genetic edition (see especially cxxii–cxl). Mays’s deviations follow from his double editorial commitment to an edition that supplies both a critical and a readerly text. “[R]eaders approach texts for different reasons,” Mays observes, so that “The distinction is not between scholarly and literary readers […] but between different occasions for the same readers” (cxliv). Let me briefly postpone further consideration of this presiding editorial idea. For now it’s more important to complete our view of Mays’s general approach to the synoptic presentation he adopts in his Variorum text. His object, he writes, is to “enable a reader to hold in mind a sense of the way the poems move […] simultaneously in several planes: that is, the way the poems move laterally, as a series of independent versions, and vertically, as one version overlays and succeeds another” (cxxiii). Mays goes on to “promise a reader” of his edition that the “mechanics” of his graphical apparatus will not present such “an algebraic nightmare” as to obscure one’s “sense of the fluid reality” of “the way [Coleridge’s] poems move”. These remarks are highly significant, signaling once again Mays’s desire to refuse a “distinction […] between scholarly and literary readers.” What is this “fluid reality” that Mays perceives in Coleridge’s work and that he wishes us to experience? Mays uses the phrase to characterise a textual condition that is anything but continuous, uniform, smooth. On the contrary, an unsettled restlessness and mutability is pervasive, so that Mays speaks acutely of “the bewildering, shifting detail which encumbers” the poems (cxi–cxii). Mays’s general Introduction rings the changes on the changing, veering, random, and accidental characteristics of the corpus as a whole and of its individual works. “Coleridge’s verse appears from the start to be unfocused and uncertain within shifting 3 Friedrich Beissner, (ed.), Hölderlin. Sämtliche Werke. 7 vols. (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1943–1985). Friedrich Beissner, Hölderlin. Reden und Aufsätze (Weimar: Böhlau, 1961).

Jerome McGann From Text to Work

227

margins,” Mays points out. Consequently, the reader must expect to “move between shifting centers of gravity, must constantly refocus his or her attention, is required to interpret the text on the page with reference to several other kinds of text.” The original materials thus lead Mays to advise “Readers of the following pages” — readers of this edition — to “proceed like the readers of Finnegans Wake […] ‘fixed in a permanent state of multiple vision’” (clvi). Coleridge’s poems are not fluid Wordsworthian rivers like the Duddon or Derwent or Dove. They are fluid like that more ominous “sacred river” Alph in “Kubla Khan,” moving with odd and unpredictable motions, as if hesitating and testing passages through a maze. The poetry therefore must be handled with care, always understanding that “There is no rule” (cxliv) or coherent set of rules that can guide a scholar to safe and certain editorial choices. Mays’s sure sense of the “indeterminate” character of the work helps to make him the excellent editor that he is, keeping him close to his natural, native modesty. Because Coleridge, unlike Yeats or Stevens, “had no steady idea of the literary persona he was putting before the world,” very few of his poems, Mays observes, are “revised according to constant standards” (xcv). The relevant poetical materials therefore tend to be not merely unstable, but “haphazard” in their irregularities. They are fluid the way mercury is fluid. Mays’s description of “Kubla Khan”’s textual condition nicely illustrates “the pressures and considerations which a reader needs to bear in mind as he or she interprets the material in this edition”: The lack of evidence bearing on the composition of the poem, the curious nature of its single manuscript, the context and occasions on which Coleridge is reported to have recited it, the uncertainty of its paragraphing, Coleridge’s disinclination to annotate it, the obliquity and inconsistencies of the Preface, its separate half-titles and its classification as an Ode or Miscellaneous Poem in the collected editions, its dimension of political allusion. These considerations combine to suggest that Kubla Khan should be read very differently from a poem of pure enchantment. (xcv)

This editorial representation of “Kubla Khan” returns us to the “pressures and considerations” that drove Mays to the edition we have. Here is Mays’s summary statement of his governing view: “Coleridge’s 228

VARIANTS 4 2005

mind operated on several levels, in several ways, and moved easily between them. An edition should display — not obscure — the variety and vitality of his mind working” (lxxxviii, my italics). To say this is to adopt an essentially genetic editorial position. What brought Mays to modify it? Partly, I think, he recoiled from what he saw as the “algebraic nightmare” (cxxiii) of a genetic apparatus criticus, which in fact Mays’s edition finds means to simplify. A far more salient issue is at stake for Mays, however, and it surfaces most clearly in his twice-posed Coleridgean question: “What is a Coleridge poem?” (cviii, cx) Mays clearly intends us to ride this question back to Biographia Literaria, where Coleridge argues that the “kind” and “essence” of “a POEM” and “of POETRY itself ” are “nearly the same question with, what is a poet” (chapter 14). An edition that displays Coleridge’s working brain needs to show “how the poem existed in Coleridge’s mind” (cxx). A strictly synoptic procedure won’t do for Mays because many of the poems have multiple ways of existing in that mazy mind: often “deliberation alternates with chance, and different intentions exist side by side” (cxx), or they shift and mutate hapazardly. “There is no clear tendency which could provide the basis of a rule […]” (cxxi): Mays keeps repeating versions of that formula in his Introduction. Coleridge’s materials are unruly. The editor must therefore be, like the poet, “fluid and opportunistic” and like the reader, “fixed in a permanent state of multiple vision.” Mays’s editorial opportunism, however, always runs along genetic and intentionalist lines because the poems are always seen as Coleridge’s unique — if also uniquely various — creatures. This edition is a machine for a deep critical investigation of Coleridge’s “working mind.” Mays assiduously sets the Reading Text and the Variorum Text in a mirroring relation in order to facilitate an intimate dialectic between the two. But the relation is uneasily maintained, as we see when he says that the Variorum Text is the “foundation” of the Reading Text, which makes the latter its completed visible superstructure. But in fact Mays and his edition do not mean what that figure of speech implies. The figure is drawn from an editorial approach — that is to say, Greg-Bowers — which Mays himself, as he says, “do[es] not like” (cxliv) because it suggests Jerome McGann From Text to Work

229

that an “edition could be definitive.” More than that, it suggests that any text of any individual poem could be definitive. Later in the paragraph containing those remarks Mays explains himself more clearly. The Reading Text, he says, “is both clarification and simplification” of the textual condition visible in Coleridge’s unruly materials. The Reading Text “is […] necessary, given the complexity of some of the Variorum details.” The Reading Text, in other words, supplies a hypothetical platform from which one can survey and study both Coleridge’s materials and one’s own process of investigating those materials. In this view the Reading Text is a still point — though a relative still point — in the turning world of the unruly witnesses and their fellow-travelers. It is the editorial version of what Della Volpe called an interpretational quid. It’s very important to see Mays’s ambivalence on this crucial point. Consider this summary sentence: “The Reading Text is literally the edition, or one edition, for which the Variorum provides the materials” (cxliv). We want then to ask: well, which is it, “the” edition or “one” possible edition? From everything he writes in his Introduction we can see that Mays wants us to regard the Reading Text as only “one” of the possible reading texts that could have been settled upon (see especially cxliv–cxlix). As he points out, in such a complex set of conflicting “pressures and considerations” generated by the materials themselves, “choices of text are debateable” because, ultimately, “The grounds of choice are subjective and provisional” (cxlvii, cxlviii). But while the provisional character of the choices is admitted, an editor must finally make choices that will come into print: “The alternative […] is to refrain from editing. There is no other way” (cxlix). Because Mays is a learned and sensitive scholar we are more than happy to take his “provisional” reading texts as our points of critical departure in these volumes. Mays does not want to hide any textual complexity from our consideration, so taken is he with the mazy motions of Coleridge’s mind, so committed to putting those motions on display. Nonetheless, he doesn’t shrink from editing because, in his view, “The problem is more acute in theory than in practice. The text for each poem in all but a few cases selects itself ” (cxlix). This self-selection follows 230

VARIANTS 4 2005

from what Mays calls “The principle which has guided my choice” of Reading Text: “to give the version of the poem which reflects Coleridge’s concern, up to the time he lost interest (as he so often did)” (cxlvi). The principle is simply a version of the principle of “final intentions.” The reading texts select themselves because Mays’s methodology has been so carefully considered and executed. The “texts” are following their marching orders, as they should. Not that other local textual choices might not have been made for particular poems, or even that wholesale differences might not emerge if one were (for instance) to take “initial intentions” rather than “final intentions” as a basic guiding principle. In any case we would look for texts that seemed to select themselves. II Would computer technology be able to improve Mays’s editorial project in appreciable ways? For the project as such, I think the answer is no. Online accessibility is a publishing improvement and to that extent an educational improvement as well for any work of scholarship. But now imagine Mays’s six volumes transported into a browser environment. String searches would be possible, and with considerable effort one could prepare a digitally encoded version of the edition for different kinds of automated pattern analysis. All that would be clear gain. But then the downsides begin to declare themselves. We aren’t even close to developing browser interfaces to compare with the interfaces that have evolved in the past 500 years of print technology. A sophisticated, flexible, and stable system of graphical design and bibliographical codes stands ready to hand for a scholar wishing to build a critical machine for the complex analysis of textual works. If your object is to display “how the poems existed in Coleridge’s mind” — a mind you understand to be veering, unruly, and full of contradictions — these books blow away anything one might think to develop in our current and immediately foreseeable machine technology. (Of course if one had access for five years to the full resources of, say, MIT, I think something new and powerful could be designed and developed. But humanists like ourselves are not recipients of those secular blessings.) A good interface develops symbolic coding mechanisms that translate Jerome McGann From Text to Work

231

abstract relations into forms that a human being can optimally manipulate. In this respect, monitors — no matter how large or virtually dimensional — lack a key multitasking capacity possessed by books, which integrate visual and kinetic knowledge acquisition. When we escape the limits of the monitor that situation will change. But if Mays’s edition in electronic form seems an uninviting prospect, other digital projects have distinct attractions — for instance, a scholarly edition of Campion or Burns or Tom Moore. A bibliographical presentation of their work is crippled from the start, for obvious reasons. The greatness of Burns in particular has all but escaped academic attention because our critical interfaces have been bibliographical. To the degree that a computerized environment facilitates what digitists call “interactivity,” it necessarily brings a certain degree of tactile involvement. This will be far less complex and demanding than the kinetic environment summoned (and symbolically coded) in books. The difference explains itself when we recall a simple fact: that personal computers today function most powerfully as scholarly tools when we use them on our desks and in our libraries at home and elsewhere. In those places they get embraced by the more sophisticated, stable, and dispersed network of book technology. Remember how the explosion of the personal computer market took the business world by surprise? Had they a clearer grasp of their culture — the world engaged by Don McKenzie in Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts4 — this event would not have escaped their commercially-trained radar screens. Not without reason has the initial period of computerisation focused on linking library resources and digitizing reference tools. These events register the depth and importance of our bibliographical inheritance. At some point books and their technology will cease to be our encompassing informational environment; they will get incorporated into the digital network of artefacts and information that is springing up around us like — what? Tares among the wheat? A New Instauration?

4 D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. The Panizzi Lectures 1985 (London: The British Library, 1986).

232

VARIANTS 4 2005

So far as humanists like ourselves are concerned, that’s an event beyond good or evil. We have our hands full managing two imperative immediate tasks: deepening our understanding of book technology, and acquiring the skills needed to practice digital scholarship. The remarkably finished quality of Mays’s Coleridge edition makes it an especially rich resource for those related critical interests. To this point I’ve tried to describe as carefully as I can what the edition sets out to do and what it succeeds in doing. Now I want to ask what it doesn’t do. More specifically, what doesn’t it edit? One thing: it doesn’t edit what McKenzie called “the social text.” I give two examples, a small one and a big one. First the small one. In preparing the variorum text for poem no. 143, “To a Young Man of Fortune who Abandoned Himself to a Causeless and Indolent Melancholy,” Mays begins with a census of the documentary witnesses. These include three manuscripts (two holograph, one transcript copy in the hand of Mrs. Coleridge) plus eight printed texts (as well as a possible ninth, a variant of one of the eight). Of the transcript in Mrs. Coleridge’s hand Mays has little to say except this: “An untitled transcript in the hand of Mrs. C. […] has no textual significance (II (Part I). 430). For an edition aiming to expose “[Coleridge’s] mind working,” Mrs. Coleridge’s transcript needs no further comment, especially in the case of a relatively minor poem. And of course the transcript remains separated from the critical apparatus, which is geared to analyzing the linguistic “text” — its substantives and its most substantial accidentals. The example may stand for scores of others. It follows from the kind of edition Mays has undertaken. Although in cases like “Christabel” the discursive treatment of the witnessing documents is much more robust, the apparatus remains textual, and it scarcely begins to capture the contextual and transmissional information supplied in the commentaries and associated notes. For “Christabel” we get 30 closely printed pages that elucidate the material witnesses simply as they are bibliographical objects. This is the data that alone, for McKenzie, gives significance to the linguistic text by shaping it in terms of its social textuality. “How the poems existed in Coleridge’s mind” is a dialectical not a positive function. It is in fact an idea that Jerome McGann From Text to Work

233

is in continual process of construction by Coleridge’s readers and those other persons who engage to pass along Coleridge’s texts. We study and reconstruct the documentary record not to know how the poems existed in Coleridge’s mind but to see how they were perceived to exist. That Mays shares this view with McKenzie is proven by these splendid editorial commentaries and notes. In critical editions, this material is arranged to introduce and subserve the apparatus criticus, and so it does in Mays’s edition. But the commentary information is so replete and even excessive in relation to the needs of the apparatus that one registers a disfunction between the two. The discrepancy is particularly urgent in Mays’s interesting discussion of untraced, recited, and memorised “Christabels” and the nexus of related persons and occasions, including the secondary witnesses by which these works are known In the event, Mays’s apparatus comes to seem no more than his edition’s one publically acknowledged analytic offspring. Other children, legitimate and bastard, wander all about. A curiously reversed dynamic thus pervades Mays’s edition: the Reading Texts become, as he himself observes, devices for illuminating and negotiating a heterogeneous body of poetic materials, and the apparatus emerges as no more than one cutaway view of the complexity of that field of discourse. A traditional apparatus is organized as a body of self-identical facts testifying to the truth of the Reading Text they generate. In Mays’s edition, however, as the commentaries and notes for works like “Christabel” demonstrate with special clarity, the apparatus seems but one helpful means of finding our way into a more mazy, amazing, semiotic world. McKenzie wanted to develop more precise critical procedures for studying that kind of world. In his Panizzi lectures of 1985, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, he made his case for a “social text” editorial procedure. His critics — most notably Thomas Tanselle5 and T. HowardHill6 — remarked that while McKenzie’s ideas had a certain theoretical appeal, they could not be practically implemented. The ideas implicitly 5 Thomas Tanselle, “Textual Criticism and Literary Sociology,” Studies in Bibliography 44 (1991), 83–143. 6 T. H. Howard-Hill, “Theory and Praxis in the Social Approach to Editing,” TEXT 5 (1991), 31–46.

234

VARIANTS 4 2005

called for the critical editing of books and other material objects. But critical editing — as opposed to facsimile and diplomatic editing — was designed to investigate texts, which are linguistic forms, not books, which are social events. This practical objection raised by Tanselle and Howard-Hill can no longer be sustained. It is premised in the understanding that facsimile editing and critical editing are distinct and incommensurable functions. The Rossetti Archive was undertaken to demonstrate that the incommensurability is paper-based and can be overcome in a properly designed digital network. The demonstration has been replicated at least twice at U. of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities: in The William Blake Archive 7 and, even more comprehensively, in the emerging Walt Whitman Archive.8 One can build editorial machines capable of generating on demand multiple textual formations — eclectic, facsimile, reading, genetic — that can all be subjected to multiple kinds of transformational analyses. This means that the standard dialectical mechanism of a critical edition like Mays’s can be scaled up in a digital environment. One does not have to work from the pair of fixed platforms called (in Mays’s volumes) the Reading Text and the Variorum Text. “Given the complexity of the materials” some sort of hypothetical position, or platform, is needed for any analysis to be undertaken at all. The underlying logic of The Rossetti Archive was designed so that scholars using it could make choices about their platforms of critical attention, as well about the specific kinds of analyses they would choose to undertake. A digital organisation thus makes possible a significant departure from a paper-based apparatus. Mays’s edition follows the general model of lemmatized variants that all types of traditional editions use — including genetic editions, which do however develop some innovative graphical signing devices. Variant readings are culled for specific information from the apparatus’ analytic options. Because this information is 7 Morris Eaves, Robert Essick, Joseph Viscomi, (eds.), The William Blake Archive (). 8 Ken Price and Ed Folsom, (eds), The Walt Whitman Archive ().

Jerome McGann From Text to Work

235

formally structured in The Rossetti Archive (by inline markup), the analyses can be automated. But greater advantages follow from an automation process than analytic speed. The critical operations also acquire much greater flexibility. The scholar can define and specify the analyses, narrowing them to some particular question (e.g., which of the texts have uncorrected print material not in the chosen reference text as well as hand corrections to texts that are part of that reference text?); or expanding to questions that embrace documents outside the framework of “The Blessed Damozel”’s specific documentary materials (questions about genre, provenance, the physical character of documents, and so forth). For some of these analyses a database model is preferable to inline markup, and standoff markup offers other useful options. However the analyses are formally structured, a digitized approach facilitates social text editing. An even more interesting line of critical activity can be computationally accessed through user logs. This set of materials — the use records, or “hits,” automatically stored by the computer — has received little attention by scholars who develop digital tools in the humanities. Our neglect of this body of information reflects, I believe, an ingrained commitment to the idea of the positive “text” or material “document.” The depth of this commitment can be measured by reading McKenzie, whose social text editing proposals yet remain faithful to the idea of “the primacy of the physical object” as a self-identical thing. Reflecting on digital technology in a late lecture, McKenzie saw that its simulation capacities were forcing him to rethink that “primary article of bibliographical faith.” He did not live to undertake an editorial project in digital form. Had he done so I believe he would have seen his social text approach strengthened by the new technical devices. All editors engage with a work in process. Even if only one textual witness were to survive — say that tomorrow a manuscript of a completely unrecorded play by Shakespeare were unearthed — that document would be a record of the process of its making and its transmission. Minimal as they might seem, its user logs have not been completely erased, and those logs are essential evidence for anyone interested in reading (or editing) the work. We are interested in documentary evidence precisely because 236

VARIANTS 4 2005

it encodes, however cryptically at times, the evidence of the agents who were involved in making and transmitting the document. Scholars do not edit self-identical texts. They reconstruct a complex documentary record of textual makings and remakings, in which their own scholarly work directly participates. A central purpose of The Rossetti Archive project was to prove the correctness of a social-text approach to editing — which is to say, to push traditional scholarly models of editing and textuality beyond the masoretic wall of the linguistic object we call “the text.” The proof of concept would be the making of the Archive. If our breach of the wall was minimal, as it was, its practical demonstration was significant. We were able to build a machine that organizes for complex study and analysis, for collation and critical comparison, the entire corpus of Rossetti’s documentary materials, textual as well as pictorial. Critical, which is to say computational, attention was kept simultaneously on the physical features and conditions of actual objects — specific documents and pictorial works — as well as on their formal and conceptual characteristics (genre, metrics, iconography). The Archive’s approach to Rossetti’s so-called double works is in this respect exemplary. Large and diverse bodies of material that comprise works like “The Blessed Damozel” get synthetically organized: 71 distinct printed texts, some with extensive manuscript additions; 2 manuscripts; 29 pictorial works. These physical objects orbit around the conceptual “thing” we name for convenience “The Blessed Damozel”. All the objects relate to that gravity field in different ways, and their differential relations metastasise when subsets of relations among themselves get exposed. At the same time, all of the objects function in an indefinite number of other kinds of relations: to other textual and pictorial works, to institutions of various kinds, to different persons, to varying occasions. With the Archive one can draw these materials into computable synthetic relations at macro as well as micro levels. In the process the Archive discloses the hypothetical character of its materials and their component parts as well as the relationships one discerns among these things. Though completely physical and measurable (in different ways and scales), neither the objects nor their parts are self-identical, all can Jerome McGann From Text to Work

237

be reshaped and transformed in the environment of the Archive. Don’t misunderstand me. Our successes, as I say, have been minimal and some of our greatest hopes for the Archive have not been realised. Nonetheless, the proof of concept was a crucial break with tradition, freeing us to imagine what as yet we don’t know: how to build much better and more sophisticated machines of this kind. Building the Archive, for instance, has brought me to realise a possibility for these kinds of instruments that stared us all in the face from the beginning, but that none of us thought to try to exploit. A critical edition can clearly be built in digital form that allows a dynamical tracking and analysis of that recent literary discovery, the “readerly text.” This clearly also means that the fundamentally dynamical character of the textual condition can be digitally realised: the dialectic of the field relations between the history of the text’s transmission and the history of its reception. In a late lecture, “What’s Past is Prologue,”9 McKenzie speculated briefly on computerisation and textual criticism. His remarks came in the context of two ways that scholars were using digital tools: on one hand for electronic storage of large corpora, on the other for the dynamic modeling of textual materials. McKenzie saw the latter as the more interesting prospect, even if it would “represent a radical departure” from his central “article of bibliographical faith”: “the primacy of the physical artifact (and the evidence it bears of its own making).” (There is quintessential McKenzie: entertaining an idea that shook the ground beneath one of his cherished convictions.) Had he become more involved with the making of electronic editions, I believe McKenzie would have realised that, far from departing radically from such primacies, digital tools return us to them in the ways he found most interesting. For “the physical artifact” and “the evidence it bears of its own making” are both social in the sense that such objects, in particular such bibliographical objects, have been made and remade many times in their socio-historical passages. No book is one thing, it is many things, fashioned and refashioned repeatedly under different cir9 D. F. McKenzie, Making Meaning. “Printers of the Mind” and Other Essays, Peter D. McDonald and Michael Suarez S.J.(eds.), Amherst and Boston: U. of Massachusetts Press, 2002).

238

VARIANTS 4 2005

cumstances. Its meaning, as Wittgenstein would say, is in its use. And because all its uses are always invested in real circumstances, the many meanings of any book are socially and physically coded in and by the books themselves. They bear the evidence of the meanings they have helped to make. One advantage digitalisation has over paper-based instruments comes not from the computer’s modeling powers, but from its greater capacity for simulating phenomena — in this case, bibliographical and socio-textual phenomena. Books are simulation machines as well, of course, with hardcoded machine languages (we call those typography and graphic design) and various softwares (modes of expression — expository, hortatory, imaginative — and genres). The hardware and software of book technology have evolved into a state of sophistication that dwarfs computerisation as it currently stands. In time this discrepancy will change, we can be sure. McKenzie probably saw the computer as a modeling machine because of his attachment to “the primacy of the physical object”. Computers can be imagined to make models of such primary, self-identical, objects. But suppose, in our real-life engagements with those physical objects, we experience them as social objects, as functions of measurements that their users and makers have chosen for certain particular purposes. In such a case you will not want to build a model of one made thing, you will try to design a system that can simulate all the realised and realisable documentary possibilities — the possibilities that are known and recorded as well as those that have yet to be (re)constructed. McKenzie’s central idea, that bibliographical objects are social objects, begs to be realised in digital terms and tools. The Rossetti Archive proves that it can be done. But The Rossetti Archive as presently constituted at the level of interface has scarcely moved beyond the proof-of-concept stage. Despite the flexibility of its logical design, The Rossetti Archive largely appears as a website of accessible resources. Indeed, to this very moment most people — even scholars who use digital technology — think that building websites is the paradigm for digital scholarship in the humanities. Making hard-toaccess documentary materials available and searchable is clearly a useful Jerome McGann From Text to Work

239

thing, but it is only the opening move in the comprehensive transformation of humanities research resources that we already see taking place. Scholars using The Rossetti Archive ought to be given not a website of resources but an apparatus of tools that facilitate critical reorganisations and reconceptions of the underlying data. Right now the tools provided by the Archive have been largely built out of models drawn from the technologies of the book. Given what we know about the people who designed and built the Archive, that is hardly surprising. But having done what we have done, we now can see what we didn’t do and what we might and should do with our digital resources. In the next two years, then, as the Archive completes its final two installments, we will also be designing a set of interface tools that should be as critically flexible as Archive’s underlying hypermedia and markup tools.

240

VARIANTS 4 2005

The Potency of Error (exemplified in Joyce’s Ulysses) Fritz Senn Whatever pivotal forces are at work in Joyce’s verbal universe, an emphasis on how things go wrong plays an effective part. All his works exemplify the humanity of error. Joyce may have carried platitudinous insights farthest, into the processes of the mind and, above all, into verbal expressions, style and language. Nothing, on its surface, is ever ‘right’ in Finnegans Wake (“the wright side and the wronged side” signals the principle and acts it out, FW 597.11), but the practice set in at the very outset, say “them with the rheumatic wheels” in the first story of Dubliners. As publishers, reviewers and outraged readers testified all along, Joyce did things wrong without fail, he never seemed to conform. Like his selfappointed predecessor Daedalus, the arch-artificer, he sent his mind out towards structures or arts that were not as yet known, or accepted — “ignotas … in artes” in the proud boast lifted from Ovid’s Metamorphoses which is prefaced to A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man. In this headlong advance Joyce lost admirers as he pursued his provective path, irrespective of conventions; no-one ever could have predicted the next stage to come. Joyce was censured and censored all along. In his own Ireland the pendulum gradually swung the other way; at first the country vilified or neglected him (there are still letters to the Irish Times to this effect), in the meantime he has become a national icon. Nowadays genuine appreciation is at variance with crass commercialism. This outline focuses on errors, mistakes, whatever goes wrong, and it wisely refrains from any definition of what is right or wrong in which circumstances. Terms like “wrong, error, mistake” are employed in relation to goals or expectations; the main emphasis is on structural or lexical disruptions, a disregard for commonly observed, traditional norms (grammar, concordance, register). One of the effects of Joyce’s liberal training is a basic skepticism about all types of absolutes (though one still finds unquestioning certitude in Joyce scholarship.)

Plots generally hinge on a chain of mistakes, transgressions, errors of action or judgment, of wrong turnings, often criminal. Without them there would be neither tragedies, comedies nor epics. The authors of Genesis emphasized fatal disobedience, misdeeds, felonies, sin or deceit; in Greek mythology spite and an apple of discord triggered off an abduction and a disastrous war. History, the Irish variant in particular, consists of aggression, repression, catastrophes, these are, in their original sense, “turnings down”, wrong ones (at least for one side of any conflict). In this respect Joyce did nothing innovative. If anything he might have intensified a seemingly pessimistic view; he refrained from anything sensational and reduced his scale to apparent trifles and commonplace events. Joyce not only seems to withhold happy endings, he often does not seem to offer any endings at all. Conclusions are left to the readers. In Ulysses nihilistic readings have always been in conflict with amelioristic ones: will the Blooms’ marriage change in an essential way, is there any significance in the chance meetings of Stephen and Bloom? There is need to elaborate on Joyce’s realistic depiction of the state of colonial Ireland, its church, the poverty, the day to day frustration, stunted lives, stale marriages — all that is often subsumed under what he termed ‘paralysis’. “his mind’s bondage” (U 9.1016) The “soul of man” — according to Joyce’s by tongue in Charles Lamb’s cheek — can “change her view at every new approach”, her ‘age’ is “changeable as her mood” (U 14.1038, the whole episode, “Oxen of the Sun”, acts this out in style). The human psyche also changes everything within its province. More and more Joyce narrowed in on the human mind and its errant, labyrinthine and hazardous ways. From Dubliners to Ulysses perception and interpretation become increasingly subjective, individual. One way to characterize Joyce’s evolution was a growing discontent with the inevitable simplification that any verbalization of mental processes must entail. He tried to get closer to their presentation by refining or distorting classical techniques and adding some novel ones of his own. The “interior monologue” has become the best known device to depict the mind in its memories, its fumbling explorations and 242

VARIANTS 4 2005

perpetual assimilations. It seems to leave few things unchanged, that is as they were, ‘right’. Associations may go against linguistic rules, thoughts jostle each other and may or may not form themselves into tidy grammatical sentences. In a sophisticated mind like Stephen’s they generally do, but less so in Leopold Bloom: A run like “… out of all the taxes give every child born five quid at compound interest up to twentyone, five percent is a hundred shillings and five tiresome pounds, multiply by twenty decimal system, encourage people to put by money save hundred and ten and a bit twentyone years want to work it out on paper come to a tidy sum, more than you think” (U 8.383) is easy to parse, but even so may briefly conjure up a misleading collocation like “five tiresome pounds”. The French translation, not realizing that Bloom interjects a comment on the oddity of British pounds (pounds are tiresome in calculation) did take a wrong turning and came up with: “cent shillings plus ces fameuses cinq livres” (UF 158). What would not be permissible in written or even spoken prose may serve as verbal realism, as in Molly Bloom’s fleeting comment on genital hygiene: “… hed be so clean compared with those pigs of men I suppose never dream of washing it” (U 18.1356) where “those pigs of men” first functions as a complement in the preceding sentence and then as a subject for its sequel. In their nature budding associations are not concerned with right nor wrong, they just happen. As utterances they might become mistakes. Academics tend to note ‘misquotations’ in Ulysses, and in fact the novel abounds in faulty citations (according to scholarly standards). Memory as a misrule conserves transformations; in an interior monologue there is hardly such a thing as a “wrong quotation” as it appears in Molly’s recall of a letter she received long ago, including: “… your glorious Body everything underlined that comes from it is a thing of beauty and of joy forever” (U 18.1177). Possibly she misremembers Keats’s famous line which Bloom may have quoted accurately, it is also conceivable that Bloom already adapted the line on purpose. What technically would count as a mistake is an instinctive metamorphosis (in Finnegans Wake such approximations have become the norm). Fritz Senn The Potency of Error (exemplified in Joyce’s Ulysses)

243

“considerably misunderstood” (U 16.1596) When, in the very first story of Dubliners, Aunt Eliza’s refers to “newfangled carriages …them with the rheumatic wheels” (D D 1.263 f), she infringes rules of grammar and lexis. Joyce does not edit what characters say and less so what they think. This besgins and continues as linguistic realism and ends up as muddled semantic abundance in Finnegans Wake. A scrupulous editor faced with Joyce's prose would have been tempted to interfere and red-pencil numerous passages. Authors of less reputation than Joyce, let alone students in their formative years, would be accused of sloppy writing: “Stephen … heard warm running sunlight”; “Bantam Lyons’ voice and hand said” (U 1.282, 5.519). Carelessness in lesser minds in such cases turns into crisp, artful synaesthesia. How does one render in words something heard as indistinct noise or the semblance of known words? Molly Bloom ask her husband a sophisticated word that he does not seem to pick up. The text is a blank, and we only hear his response (a response to nothing on the page): “— Met him what?” (U 5.336). He appears to have understood “met him” but not the sequel, which is instantly provided when the word is visualized in an open book: ‘Metempsychosis’. It turns out later that Molly, presumably out of ignorance, transformed the Greek term into common words of her own experience, a suggestive “met him pike hoses”. Molly mispronounces a foreign word and splits it into homely familiar ones that Bloom does not hear accurately. The miscreation takes on a life of its own and will reverberate throughout. Straightforward communication would have caused no ripple at all. There is some convoluted point in Bloom's' wife meeting some ‘him’ in the course of the day, ‘hose’ adds an appropriate touch of eroticism (as in “shapely limbs in wellfilled hose” later on, U 13.170). The uninformed mispronunciation of metempsychoses underlines a key word: all Ulysses is also reincarnation of themes. In Finnegans Wake a phrase “met him pike hoses” would hardly look out of place any longer. As in real life, Joyce’s characters misunderstand each other. Bloom’s motives are generally suspect, partly because of his position as an outsider and on account of racial stereotypes. He in turn frequently uses the wrong, that is inappropriate, register, when in an impending argument 244

VARIANTS 4 2005

with an Irish nationalist he brings up such an eminently British sport as lawn tennis; the Irish nationalist, the ‘Citizen’, true to form, sees everything in (British or Jewish) black and (Irish) white. Bloom, generally on the wrong foot, tries to impress Stephen with the clichés he assumes to be intellectually sophisticated and, for example, misapprehends an offhand theological description of the soul as “a simple substance” and reduces it to a commonplace “simple soul” (U 16.765). Out of necessity, reports, since they requireselection, condensation, translation into language — falsify what they have to convey. Documents are unreliable; a seemingly factual newspaper account lists that a funeral of a “most popular and genial personality” (witnessed as a very paltry affair) was attended by CP McCoy (a name that Bloom obligingly had slipped in) and “Stephen Dedalus B.A.” , both were, as the subsequent comment puts it, “conspicuous by their absence” (U 16.1248-65. A researcher or biographer would have little reason to doubt the accuracy of such a marginal historical document. Oral tradition is even more chancy. According to newly circulated Dublin rumours Leopold Bloom (rendered as “L. Boom” in the same report) has won a lot of money on a race he never cared for and hardly knew about; this would be added to a suspicion that he was a sort of grey eminence for an emergent political leader, Arthur Griffith. Bloom in turn may go on believing that his transient acquaintance Stephen Dedalus has been lucky in meeting a girl, a Miss “Ferguson … Best thing could happen him”. Miss Ferguson, doubly fictitious, originates from a misconstruction of the Celtic god ‘Fergus’ overheard in fragments of a Yeats poem (U 15.4950). Any distinction between ‘fact’, historical evidence, report, legend, fairy tale, quotation, or rumour is completely suspended in Finnegans Wake. Which, by never being right, has eliminated falsity. In such trivia Ulysses infuses doubt as to what may be termed historical facts. Stephen Dedalus is meditating on what will become part of history as it is handed down, a few events, decisive or anecdotal in the life of some salient figures (Pyrrhus in this case), the accidentals of recording. Often bias is at work, so that we can choose between an noble, epic characterization of a woman, Mrs. Breen, “lady wife a dame of peerless lineage, fairest of her race”, and a malicious caricature: “the wife hotFritz Senn The Potency of Error (exemplified in Joyce’s Ulysses)

245

foot after him, unfortunate wretched woman, trotting like a poodle” (U 12.247-56). Bloom’s more sober view of the same woman in the morning may be more on target, he noticed her “[s]ame blue dress … Seen her best days…Shabby genteel. … Lines round her mouth” (U 8.260). Our readers’ memory may potentially link the actual “lines round her mouth” with her idealized “peerless lineage”. Lines tend to become distorted, the ‘real’ Mrs Breen remains a matter of parallactic speculation. In imitations or parodies (whatever the designation) period style or conventions tend to override not only expression but even facts. They may convert a hospital into a medieval castle or an Ottoman ceremonial court. The “Oxen of the Sun” chapter’s patent forgeries provide transient historical roles that are patently spurious for the same handful of unsuspecting contemporary characters. It is then the compulsively accurate Ithaca episode that tends to rectify subjective license by resorting to neutral, emotionless, accurate description in comic laboriousness. It also truthfully details falsifications, a spurious visit to a theatre and an invitation to supper (U 17.2251). In particular it does not distinguish between straightforward, jocular or ironic use of language (what looks like a malicious ducking “under a pump in the village of Swords” is impassively counted as a baptism, along with two genuine, ceremonial ones, U17.340). What starts out in Ulysses as solid realism gradually gives way to a sense of unreliability. “the usual crop of nonsensical howlers and misprints” (U 16.1267) Since this conference is in honour of Hans Walter Gabler’s manifold achievements some remarks about dilemmas he had to face as an innovative textual scholar may be apposite. Because of Joyce’s not very systematic and at times disarrayed procedure — on top of the inherent faultiness which is here being highlighted as a main concern — errors in the text (what went wrong in its laborious composition and transmission) had to be separated from those that are integrated in the fictional texture. What happens when an author who exposes human flaws and deviation is himself prone to error as, given the conditions, he must be? Is a misplaced “royal canal bridge” (U 10.1273; the passage moves the 246

VARIANTS 4 2005

Royal Canal North side to the south, the site of the Grand Canal) due to the inattention of an author who is otherwise so supremely familiar with his Dublin landscape, or is there some subtle play at work? And if a lapse could be proved, would an editor have to step in? The Critical and Synoptic Edition of 1984 refrains from corrective meddling. But frequently editors are in a quandary and, it appears, a no-win situation. Someone will always take another position, not infrequently reinforced by ignorance of the criteria involved. In a pedantic listing of the data by which the Church determines its movable feasts all older editions carried faithfully what Joyce had put down: “…dominical letters C B, Roman indication 2, Julian period 6617, MXMIV” (p. 622 of the first edition1922). The Roman date for 1904 is obviously off target. Less obvious, ‘indication’ is equally wrong, the rare technical term is ‘indiction’. The Critical and Synoptic Edition substituted ‘Indiction’ and ‘MCMIV’, both factually impeccable; a textual note justifies the editorial interference: Joyce intended the correct forms but somehow, under the pressure of hectic last minute revision, was distracted when the insertion was written down. The editor supplied what was inferred the author wanted to write, in conflict with what he did write, a departure from general principles in unusual circumstances. It is conceivable however that Joyce deliberately inserted the wrong term and number, which would be in tune with the many unquestionably erroneous items in an episode which strenuously aims at an accuracy it manifestly fails to achieve — an instance of all those right-go-wrong aspects that have here been belaboured. This view would open up a new set of questions (to whom, or which narrative agency, can the mistakes be attributed?) and lead into devious bypaths of interpretation. What might be simple editorial decisions in other texts become intrinsically delicate in Joyce. The Critical Edition is fully aware of the issues involved and preserves all the options for individual judgment. Not so a more recent editor, Danis Rose, who in 1997 provided a Reader’s Edition which set out to clarify the spelling and, above all, to repair the author’s own mistakes (as determined by the editor). A list in the ‘Ithaca’ episode details possible (though highly improbable) careers “for Bloom in the past”, it contains real existing persons, among Fritz Senn The Potency of Error (exemplified in Joyce’s Ulysses)

247

them “the reverend T. Salmon, D.D. …” (U 17.790). The editor interposes a factually correct “Reverend G. Salmon, D.D., provost of Trinity College” (Reader’s Edition, 602). The minor substitution of a ‘G’ for an authorial ‘T’ is based on a former Provost of Trinity College Dublin, George Salmon, the emendation is in accordance with external facts. The errant ‘T’ however is in tune with, not a Dublin civil register, but an earlier association of Bloom who had passed the Provost’s house: “The reverend Dr Salmon: tinned salmon. Well tinned in there” (U 8.496). This alimentary connection is also staged in the fantastic Circe episode where “the reverend Tinned Salmon” forms part of a hue and cry (U 15.4344). The Critical Edition judiciously retains the original wording. The deviant initial ‘T’ in its twisted wrongness invigorates the passage that otherwise would be trite and unmemorable. It is not a single letter that is at stake. The wayward ‘T’ substantiates a view that the overt factuality of Ithaca is partly problematic or at least intermittent. Errors also thicken the plots. “inadequate words” (U 12.796) Our use of language generally falls short of its aims to put reality or thought into adequate sounds or graphic symbols. It often fails to come to terms with its own innate standards. Stephen Dedalus can speak in faultless, intricate, allusive periods, sometimes, as in the Library chapter, beyond the range of realistic probability. In contrast Bloom's endearing fumbles in conversation appear all too human. He appears to co-author the ‘Eumaeus’ chapter which is bristling with sentences that aim at literary elevation and yet seem to be carried along by thoughts evolving at the spur of the moment. The results are less than grammatical and, at best, awkward. In ‘Eumaeus’ many, if not most, passages would hardly pass muster. “— Have a shot at it now, he ventured to say of the coffee after being stirred” (U 16.807). where the ‘shot’ suddenly introduced (in a book which also acknowledges some derivation from Homer’s Odyssey) is only determined with some delay. The result is a statement readers have to unscramble. Translations often act as control groups as they tend to streamline the ad hoc muddle into clearer coordination; no transitory misreadings occur in “— Jetzt versuchen Sie mal einen Schluck, wagte er bezüglich des Kaffees zu sagen, nachdem derselbe umgerührt war” 248

VARIANTS 4 2005

(UG 792). Literary style uneasily intermingles with ad hoc mind-script in ‘Eumaeus’. If a sentence begins “Anyhow, upon weighing the pros and cons, getting …”, readers are conditioned to expect a human subject (one that seems to be both weighing and getting something), but tracks are changed: “… getting on for one as it was, it was high time to be retiring for the night” (U 16.1603). The beginning of the sentence has been lost sight of in the process, this is common enough in daily speech but is not supposed to occur in the kind of well-wrought sentences the prose is trying to achieve. Again translators are reluctant to render the grammatical botch adequately and opt for plain sailing: “Jedenfalls aber war es, wenn man das Pro und contra abwog, nachdem es ja schon auf eine zuging, hohe Zeit, sich für die Nacht zur Ruhe zu begeben” (UG 827). It may be generalized that all translations of Joyce are more ‘correct’ than the original — which would be one way to characterize the author (and the gist of this submission). Precise language, where it occurs, inevitably has a ring of parody. The scrupulous enumeration of the Ithacan mode draws attention to its own mannerism: “Under a row of five coiled spring housebells a curvilinear rope, stretched between two holdfasts athwart across the recess beside the chimney pier, from which hung four smallsized square handkerchiefs folded unattached consecutively in adjacent rectangles and one pair of ladies’ grey hose with lisle suspender tops and feet in their habitual position clamped by three erect wooden pegs two at their outer extremities and the third at their point of junction.” (U 17.150). Geometrical pedantry looks at variance with the trivial vignette, and for all endeavours towards impassive accuracy disturbing overtones (“ladies’ hose” and “erect pegs”) cannot quite be eliminated. “incongruity and disproportion” (U 17.2213) Each episode of Ulysses, and distinctly so the ones in the second part, seems to have its own set of rules or code, evidenced in perspective, narrative slant, diction, style. At times even the typographical layout makes them instantly recognizable. Within such highly idiosyncratic textures occasional disruptive passages obtrude, erratic blocks, that are Fritz Senn The Potency of Error (exemplified in Joyce’s Ulysses)

249

set off in tone or mood. As Bloom walks home in the morning in the midst of prosaic observations and thoughts, a small paragraph abruptly flaunts poetic metaphors in a seemingly epic upbeat: “Quick warm sunlight came running from Berkeley Road, swiftly, in slim sandals, along the brightening footpath. Runs, she runs to meet me, a girl with gold hair on the wind.” (U 5.240). The sunlight brightening Bloom’s mood is real, the girl with gold hair presumably not. For a few beats a mode has been turned on that feels out of context. A similar lyrical burst diverges from the prevalent quasi-scientific vocabulary of the factual ‘Ithaca’ chapter: “The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit” (U 17.2039); so does an incongruous chain of Anglo-Saxon compounds with homely neologisms: “of what did bellchime and handtouch and footsteps and lonechill remind him?” (U 17.1249). If homogeneity were an aim such oddities would constitute stylistic flaws. Such “black holes” disarrange the surrounding narrative pattern and call for special assessment. On a smaller scale, in what purports to be a simulation the Gothic Novel style in “Oxen of the Sun” a mockery of Synge’s disalect or a contemprorary inset like “History is to blame” (U 14.1010-37) appear out of place. Disrupted patterns or changing textures encroach in later episodes. Joyce’s unsettling procedure might provoke us to replace the worn-out metaphor ‘text’ for literary artefacts by something more appropriate. The invention of weaving (texere, textum) made consistent patterns possible whereas Joyce’s macro and micropatterns keep changing. In other words, the formal design of the earlier chapters could not possibly predict what Sirens, Circe, Ithaca or Penelope would be like. In contrast to the Odyssey (whose hexameters at any rate ensure a formal consistency) every new weaving creates a different fabric. If anything, Joyce is not so much weaving consistently — or, like Penelope weaving and unweaving (yet her new webs must have been identical with the one undone) — as ‘rhapsoding’ in the original sense of stitching pieces (or songs) together. Ulysses can be seen as contrived patchwork, a “chaffering allincluding most farraginous chronicle” (U 14.1412) Many of the humorous effects depend on incongruities, mismatching of themes, words or styles, or odd metaphorical mixitures. “But that 250

VARIANTS 4 2005

vile decoction which has ruined so many hearths and homes had cast its shadow over her childhood days” (U 13.296). Minute discordant notes are struck throughout, the terms in “Bloom … was inclined to poopooh the suggestion as egregious balderdash” (U 16.1030) flagrantly move on dissimilar stylistic levels. Such dissonances are faintly prefigured in the pairing of ‘Stately’ with ‘plump’ in the book’s opening pair of adjectives; they already point to an elevated, stately diction that will preen itself mainly in the parodistic passages and, in contrast, to a predominant plump, down to earth rendering of ordinary life. The insidious errors and misapprehensions naturally affect our readings and interpretations. It is easy to be misled, to draw doubtful conclusions, to misapprehend — magnificent scope of course for conjectures and theses. Ulysses may well be the unique prose work to whose (factually) wrong scholarly interpretations a whole study has been devoted, Paul van Caspel’s Bloomers on the Liffey: Eisegetical Readings of Joyce's Ulysses, 1986, almost 300 closely packed pages of judicious fault-finding (with, no wonder, a few flaws of its own). “signal benefits to be derived” (U 16.557) Mistakes of course authenticate reality, they are part of the common texture of life, thought or utterance. Narratively they disconcert and titillate. Above all they economically compress significance. Each mistake carries its correction along, even minor errors become “portals of discovery” (U 9.229) and speculation. When Molly Bloom “phonetically or by false analogy” mistakes ‘alias’ for “a mendacious person mentioned in sacred scripture” (U 17.686), a more adequate name, Ananias, is invoked from a stock of traditional knowledge (or else supplied by intrusive commentary). That Arno Schmidt once opted for a less pertinent German form ‘Elias’ merely indicates the necessity for corrective supplementation. That ‘alias’ gratuitously provides a term for multiple nominal confusions in a book where Leopold Bloom is also Henry Flower, or Don Poldo de la Flora (just as Homeric Odysseus, famous liar, can also be Outis) is a possible fringe benefit on a meta-level of constant self-reflection.

Fritz Senn The Potency of Error (exemplified in Joyce’s Ulysses)

251

“The most vulnerable point too of tender Achilles” in Bloom’s mind (U 16.1640) nearly misses the proverbial tendon or heel of Achilles (Ireland as the “Achilles heel” of England occurred some pages earlier and was anatomically illustrated as a ‘tendon’, U16.1004). The misapplication may imply Bloom’s own tender feelings towards Stephen Dedalus: it certainly charaterizes him much more than heroic Achilles (who, however, in the Iliad did have his tender moments in relation to his friend Patroklos). It so happens that the diction of the ‘Eumaeus’ chapter, full of such malapropisms, generally lacks semantic or syntactic tightness, its prose is flabby as though its sinews or tendons were loose (“the sinews … were utterly powerless”, U16.10854). Such extrapolations are not at all compelling and merely represent our predisposition to convert mistakes into significance. Mistakes, or trite deviations from what is expected, energize many of Joyce’s sentences and turn them into linguistic events, full of tension or conflicts. This may account, at least in part, for their fascination. A resulting uneasiness calls for interaction where plain stylistic sailing might be insipid. The famous two sentences that Joyce claimed he laboured a whole day on, “Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely craved to adore” (U 8.638), do not quite automatically resolve into plain sense but appear to vibrate hauntingly. Grammatically, a description like “His slow feet walked him riverward, reading” (U 8.10) would not pass a nit-picking schoolmaster; ‘feet’ cannot be ‘reading’ but the trailing apposition ‘reading’ may account for the slowness of the feet; the lumbering syntax may reflect a hazardous synchronization of walking and reading. Awkwardness is part of the message. Finnegans Wake pushes speculative repair work to well-known extremes. Two birds, at least, can be hit with one stone. From “… nobirdy aviar soar anywing to eagle it” (FW 505.17) we extract the plain surface meaning effortless from the avian embroidery. A graphic unit like ‘Bismillafoulties’ (FW 357.5) of no previous lexical existence appears to strive towards the Irish traditional formula “Cead mille failties” (a hundred thousand welcomes) as well as the Islamic ‘Bismillah’ (“in the name of Allah”): as a distortion it may well be blasphemous. Numerically ‘Bismilla’ may be felt closer to two than ten thousand. A ‘fault’ seems to 252

VARIANTS 4 2005

be included, or else something ‘foul’ and thereby not fair. Possibly the extractions offered here are “foul ties”; a French ‘fou’ is thrown in for good measure. Some readers have discovered an adulteration of Bushmills whiskey. Nothing is right, but it would be hard to compress more semantic stimuli into 16 letters. By implication Joyce questions the very notion of right, correct or true, which does not mean that everything has to be relegated into nebulous relativity without any contours. It may be typical that Leopold Bloom’s first action is “righting her breakfast things on the humpy tray” (U 5.7). Objects are often defective, humps may be in the way of satisfactorily arranging cups and plates. To put things right remains a continuous endeavour, though hardly ever an achievement; it affects Joyce’s works and may well motivate a corresponding disposition in their readers. Abbreviations: D

FW U

UF

UG

James Joyce, Dubliners, ed. Hans Walter Gabler and Walter Hettche (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1993). James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 1939 (London: Faber and Faber, 1975).. James Joyce, Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition