McGann 1991

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Jerome McGann. The Textual Condition. Princeton: UP, 1991. Print.

Intro

  • a “materialist hermeneutics” (15), anti-idealist and pushing back on a reader response and hermeneutic criticism that supposes relative stability on one side of the textual transaction
  • 3 Both the practice and the study of human culture comprise a network of symbolic exchanges. Because human beings are not angels, these exchanges always involve material negotiations. Even in their most complex and advanced forms— when the negotiations are carried out as textual events— the intercourse that is being human is materially executed: as spoken texts or scripted forms. To participate in these exchanges is to have entered what I wish to call here "the textual condition."
  • 4 Today, texts are largely imagined as scenes of reading rather than scenes of writing. This "readerly" view of text has been most completely elaborated through the modern hermeneutical tradition in which text is not something we make but something we interpret. The difference from the approach taken in the present study is crucial.
  • 6-7 De Man (and thus deconstruction) had a "fundamental argument with empirical and positivist traditions of philology and criticism...This error took its origin in the scholar’s faith that disciplines of knowledge could arrive at textual realities, could bring substantial truth to literary studies. De Man labored to show the illusions involved in any project that believed ut could close, even for a moment, the hermeneutic circle." This with Tanselle: "...in writing down a message, one brings down an abstraction to the concrete, where it is an alien[.]” “Tanselle and De Man, in other respects so different, come together as textual idealists.”
  • 8 There is another way of thinking about texts. According to this way, the study of texts begins with readings of the texts, as De Man says... The readings, as Derrida has shown, are structured philosophically— and historically actuated— as writinfs. According to this view, the physical embodiment of text is not in itself the sign that the text has been “damaged," or that we have entered a world of “intractable” materialities and temporal aporias...[9] These are figures, as it were, of perfect limitation.... None of these figures [poems like “La Belle Dame” or like Marilyn Monroe] are “universally” perfect; each displays perfection within a concrete set of determinants that have different spatial and temporal coordinates.
  • 9 The world comes into focus when we ask James McLaverty’s provocative question: "If the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre in Paris, where is Hamlet?" In this world, time, space, and physicality are not the emblems of a fall from grace, but the bounded conditions which turn gracefulness abounding.
  • 10 Two persons see "the same" movie or read "the same" book and come away with quite different understandings of what they saw or read. Do not imagine that these variations are a simple function of differentials that reside "in the readers"...the differences arise from variables that will be found on both sides of the textual transaction: "in" the texts themselves, and "in" the readers of the texts.
  • 11 Literary works do not know themselves, and cannot be known, apart from their specific material modes of existence/resistance. They are not channels of transmission, they are particular forms of transmissive interaction.
  • 12 One breaks the spell of romantic hermeneutics by socializing the study of texts at the most radical levels. This means emphasizing two related aspects of the textual condition. First, we must see it as an interactive locus of complex feedback operations [beyond the textual horizon of rom. hermeneutics]....One must also demonstrate the semiotics [13] of the text as that has been the subject of attention of bibliographers, sociologists, economists, and tradespersons of various kinds. We must turn our attention to much more than the formal and linguistic features of poems or other imaginative fictions.
    • Suarez 2003 on the difficulty of actually doing this well
  • contrasting Genette’s paratext/text distinction with his "stronger" sense of "text as a laced network of linguistic and bibliographical codes...By studying [14] texts through a distinction drawn between linguistic and bibliographical codes, we gain at once a more global and a more uniform view of texts and the processes of textual production.”
    • this is superceded effectively by the De Grazia & Stallybrass 1993 model of the material text: there is no immaterial linguistic content. (From JTK, 3-17-18: "the concept of “the material text” from Peter Stallybrass et al. took over and rendered McGann’s distinction a little superfluous. It was a necessary intervention to make in the late 80s and early 90s, but now it sounds self-evident. Nobody — not even formalists — would say anymore that text/language is cleanly separate or separable from its instantiation in a material thing.")
  • 14 Poets understand texts better than most information technologists. Poetical texts make a virtue of the necessity of textual noise by exploiting textual redundancy. The object of the poetical text is to thicken the medium as much as possible— literally, to put the resources of the medium on full display, to exhibit the processes of self-reflection and self-generation which texts set in motion, which they are.

Theory, Literary Pragmatics, and the Editorial Horizon

  • 19-20 his process began by trying to edit Byron and realizing that the horizons established by Greg-Bowers Eclectic theory of editing were inadequate to The Gaiour
    • eclectic editing: ideal text, Platonic
    • "For Greg, history is not the enemy but the maker of meaning; nevertheless, its processes are detectable as errors that compromise authorial intention, and it is the task of the critical bibliographer to intercept them”— the process of editorial choices among variant readings a necessary but imperfect way to get to his goal: “to present the text...in the form in which we may suppose that it would have stood in a fair copy, made by the author himself, of the work as he finally intended it.” (Sutherland, “Anglo-American Editorial Theory,” Cambridge Companion 48-9)
  • 21 ...Texts are produced and reproduced under specific social and institutional conditions, and hence that every text, including those that may appear to be purely private, is a social text. This view entails a corollary understanding, that a "text" is not a "material thing" but a material event or set of events, a point in time (or a moment in space) where certain communicative interchange are being practiced.
  • ...texts always stand within an editorial horizon (the horizon of their production and reproduction). That editorial horizon entails serious consequences for the practice of literary theory as such[.]
  • 23-39 case studies of "how editorial horizons establish the field in which hermeneutical questions are raised and addressed" (39)
  • 23ff a hypothetical edition of DG Rossetti
    • special case of "Nuptial Sleep" sonnet in The House of Life and its history of inclusion and exclusion from editions: "No one now would print HL without 6a, I think, though it is important to see that in thus printing the sonnet editors are not following ‘the author’s (final) intentions.’ They are [27] establishing the/a text of HL, but the editorial work is completely involved in a hermeneutical operation... All editing is an act of interpretation, and this instance from Rossetti is merely a dramatic illustration of the fact."
  • 32 how choosing different editorial methods set the stage (the "hermeneutic definition") for different critical emphases when looking at "Nuptial Sleep"
  • 33 So we conclude that reproducing editions is one of the ways we produce literary meanings; and, we see once again that this aspect of literary production is as complex as the others and involves a ramified set of interconnected individuals and institutions.
  • 37 the problem in creating a romantic poetry anthology of dealing with the "dark age" of 1824-1832 between Byron’s death and Alfred Tennyson’s Poems, dominated by "supposedly vapid literary outlets" the annuals
  • 43-7 nice outline of Blake textual history for pedagogical purposes
    • worth remembering St Clair 2004’s point that reception-as-reviews is limited in scope
  • 47 To edit a text is to be situated in a historical relation to the work’s transmissions, but it is also to be placed in an immediate relation to contemporary cultural and conceptual goals. Nor are these simply the goals and purposes of the editor-as-technical-functionary. While that imagination of the editorial horizon remains common among editors and hermeneuts alike, it is deeply mistaken— not a "blinded" imagination but a deluded one.
    • to paraphrase Shelley, editors are the "unacknowledged legislators" of literary study (?)

What is Critical Editing?

  • 49 Wolf, Lachmann, Boeckh, "three foundational theorists in the tradition of German Enlightenment philology"
    • and biblical scholarship: the double helix of textual studies and secularization
  • 50 When one begins to prepare a scholarly edition, it makes a great difference which idea of critical editing one subscribes to: (a) the production of an eclectic text, or (b) the production of an edition which displays and analyzes the historical descent of the work.
  • 51 example of "Empedocles on Etna": "the E of 1852 and the E of 1867, though linguistically congruent, represent radically different texts. It seems to me the business of critical editing to make those differences clear."
    • first scholarly ed shows how E shuttled around the editions Arnold published to 1867: "these bibliographical— as opposed to linguisti— variations are of the greatest importance for anyone wishing to understand Arnold’s poetry."
    • 52 its a text "which was at once highly unstable and, at the same time, relatively error-free." Linguistic-only textual analysis obscured this multiplicity.
      • another example is Tennyson’s "Charge"— see McGann 1988
  • 52 bibliographic versus linguistic codes
    • 53 When we edit we change, and even good editing...necessarily involves fundamental departures from "authorial intention," however that term is interpreted.
    • 57 [weakness of "authorial intention governing the choice of copy text" argument] The weakness of the theory is that it largely ignores transmissice or communicative aspects of linguistic events.... Bibliographic signifiers...immediately call our attention to other styles and scales of symbolic exchange that every language event involves.
    • 58 As the process of textual transmission expands, whether vertically (i.e., over time) or horizontally (in institutional space), the signifying processes of the work become increasingly collaborative and socialized. ...The point is that authors (and authorial intentions) do not govern those textual dimensions of a work which become most clearly present to us in bibliographical forms.
    • Byron’s "Fare Thee Well!": linguistically relatively stable, but at least 3 versions incl. piracies circulating in the year it was written
    • 59 several distinct versions of these works with each having "virtually the same linguistic content. This is not at all unusual an unusual turn of events within the textual condition. The questions at issue are how textual criticism shall understand this situation, and how critical editors shall deal with it."
    • 60 in the case of bibliographical codes, "author’s intentions" rarely control the state or the transmission of the text.... Because editors tend to theorize their texts within "author intentional" models, however, these more complex aspects of textuality are not foregrounded in their work (I.e., their editions)
    • 61 ...the most important "collaboration" process is that which finds ways of marrying a linguistic to a bibliographical text. [Example of unauthorized printing of the Byron poem which is linguistically identical] The Champion text is important because of the new set of bibliographical codes (and meanings) which it set in motion.
    • These nonauthorial interventioms are important, theoretically, because they expose the problematic character of the concept of final intentions, which has become so important in c20 editorial theory. The concept represents itself as a determinate as well as determinable thing, at least theoretically: determinate because it excludes the "non-authorial," and determinable because a stemma I’d textual relations can be postulated and constructed. Authors’ relations with their readers and editors, however, are highly interactive. ...Texts are the locus of [62] complex networks of communicative exchanges, and the first of those exchanges is revealed at the time of a work’s initial period of production.
      • not arguing authorial intentions shouldn’t be used, but that it’s not the ultimate criterion
    • ...the archive [the surviving body of textual materials] includes not just original manuscripts, proofs, and editions, but all the subsequent textual constitutions which the work undergoes in its historical passages.
    • 65 The scholar’s text is a positive construction in its own right, a new stage of collaboration with the (now dead) author and his or her earlier collaborators.
    • 66 The point is that author’s intentions are always operating along with nonauthorial intentions, that each presupposes the other, and that no text ever came into being, or could come into being, without interactions between the two.
  • 66-8 Overall points:
    • 1) we have to distinguish between linguistic and bibliographic codes because the distinction "highlights the interactive nature of textuality as such"
    • 2) both sets generate meaning in exchange with each other
    • 3) focusing on linguistic text alone is premised on the problematic criterion of authorial intention and leaves out meaning making aspects
  • 68 final salvo: eclectic editing is but one method and in many cases "its employment would mean the very opposite of ‘critical’."

The Socialization of Texts

  • 69 Tanselle "The Editing of Historical Documents": a "plea that editors should give the greatest respect to the physical integrity of the documents"
    • he argues that editorial method doesn’t need to really distinguish between historical and literary texts
  • 71 The eclectic edition is by definition not a single authorial construct but a polyglot formation imagined by the editor.
    • especially so if based on print rather than manuscript
  • two binaries: historical document/literary document, private doc/public doc
  • 75 The universe of literature is socially generated and does not exist in a steady state.
  • Literary texts differ from informational texts by being polyvocal.
    • but isn’t one of those voices informational?
  • 76 Most important of all, however, so far as the aesthesis of texts is concerned, are the scholars and institutions of transmission who hand our cultural deposits down to us. Texts emerge from these workshops in ever more

rich and strange forms.

  • 77 the "double helix" of linguistic and bibliographical codes, obvious by looking at a medieval literary manuscript and in many other examples "of works generated out of the production mechanisms developed by printing institutions," including the novels of Dickens and Thackeray or c19 serial fiction in general
  • 78 argument: textual theory needs to take more account of the "documentary and bibliographical level of literary works"
    • examples of the ways literary works exploit these documentary and bibliographical features: the symbolic pagination of 1922 Ulysses, the first edition of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, which had 66 decorated initials, 38 illustrations, etc.
      • he doesn’t mention it but Hack 2005 uses him to talk about Henry Esmond’s typography
    • Dickens’s “composite art" with illustration as a crucial element (in a text like Bleak House (1853), the illustrations arguably providing a third narrative voice, as Brandiann Molby has argued)
      • 81 A novel written for weekly serial publication, like Dickens’s Hard Times, is not merely written differently from one that is written for monthly circulation (or for no serial publication at all); it is produced differently and comes [82] into the reader’s view via vastly differently defined bibliographical structures of meaning.
    • 83 Kathleen Tillotson’s is a splendid edition of a great literary work, but perhaps we should want to argue that her edition is not the work of Charles Dickens. And perhaps we would be right in doing so. T’s edition stands in relation to D’s novel in the same kind of relation that (say) the Tatale Gallery stands to the paintings of Turner. Both gallery and edition force us to engage with artistic work under a special kind of horizon. It is far from the horizon under which D and Turner originally worked. It is, nonetheless, still an aesthetic and literary horizon, and that fact cannot be forgotten. Of course we cannot recover the earlier frame of reference; all we can do is make imaginative attempts at reconstituting or approximating it for later persons living under other skies.
      • a nice connection between the scholarly edition and the museum, compare Black 2000
  • 84 quoting Brian Doherty, "Context is Content" in a museum as in an edition (or any printed form)
  • tying bibliographical codes to ideology critique ("the concealed, and often nonconscious, ideological purposes and assumptions of certain institutional and systematic forms"): "scholarly editions have rarely exposed the hidden ideological histories which are embedded in the documentary forms of transmitted text" (85)
    • I’d say too we need a Sedgwick-ian sympathetic reading of the bibliographic
  • The work turned out of the Kelmscott Press...were meant to produced what Brecht would later call an “alienation effect"... In Morris’s great project, language itself began to return to its senses.

The Textual Condition

  • 89 cheeky - the textual condition as a scholastic human condition - "Indeed, the textual condition is positively defined by some specific type of indeterminacy analogous to be one I experience at this (whichever) moment.”
  • 93 IF TEXTS ARE TO BE PRODUCED CRITICALLY, WHETHER THROUGH WRITER, READER, OR EDITOR (ALONG WITH THEIR SURROGATES), THE TEXTS MUST EMPHASIZE THEIR RELATIONS AND THEIR RELATIVITIES
  • 95 But it seems to me, sometimes, that readers and editors may be seen as well, even as they are readers and editors, as authors and writers. And it also seems to me that authors and writers may be seen as well, even as they are authors and writers, as readers and editors. I am not "free" with respect to this text I am writing. Even as I write it I am reading it as if I were in another time and place— as if I were here and now, in fact— and my text, my "textualité,” is constrained and determined by a future which at all points impinges on my present text. This is to be in the textual condition.
  • 96 a nice and relatable Francis Bacon quote: "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested."
  • 97 It is not wisdom to encourage or maintain the segregation of positive [textual scholarship] and hermeneutical [literary critical] discourse. To do so may appear to promote clarity and precision [98]— may in fact at times do so, but may, and does, equally promote a serious diminution in critical thinking, properly so called.
    • useful framing for my project
  • 98 against simple positivism of bibliography vs criticism: "The truth is that all forms and states of knowledge, including factual and documentary knowledge, are mediated in precise and determinate ways. These medications introduce determinate— and hence critically specifiable— instabilities into every kind of investigation. Scholarship is interpretation, whether it is carried out as a bibliocritical discourse or a literary exegesis."
    • proto-Latour I think
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