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D. F. McKenzie-Bibliography and The Sociology of Texts (1999) PDF
D. F. McKenzie-Bibliography and The Sociology of Texts (1999) PDF
D. F. McKenzie
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK
40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia
Ruiz de Alarcn 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain
Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa
http://www.cambridge.org
D. F. McKenzie 2004
1
Foreword
history, and they remain indispensable tools. But literary history and
scholarship no longer look quite as they did. Definitive editions have
come to seem an impossible ideal in the face of so much evidence of
authorial revision and therefore of textual instability. Each version has
some claim to be edited in its own right, with a proper respect for its
historicity as an artefact; and yet the variety of authorized forms has
opened up editorial choice in new ways, even to the point of creating,
through conflation or even more adventurous forms of adaptation,
quite new versions thought appropriate to the needs of newly defined
markets. Redirecting bibliographical inquiry in a fruitful response to
recent developments in critical theory and practice is certainly not easy.
There is a paradox too in the ease with which new technologies now
permit readers to reconstruct and disseminate texts in any form they
wish, with few fully effective legal constraints, let alone those of a past
scholarship which might have conferred another kind of authority. In
many ways such uncontrolled fluidity returns us to the condition of an
oral society.
When giving the Panizzi lectures, my purpose was to express a need
and to stimulate discussion, and discussion there certainly was. In 1986
I took on one of the most exciting and demanding roles any teacher
could wish inducting each years new intake of research students to
the English Faculty in Oxford. The chronological range of their topics
and the diversity of their interests demanded both a rigorous reduction
of bibliographical principles to those readily seen as relevant to every-
ones needs, and then the application of those principles to an almost
infinite number of authors, periods, genres, and media, and to widely
differing conditions of printing, publishing, reading, listening, or view-
ing. Eight weeks were devoted to text production (the archive of sur-
viving texts, the labour force that created it, the materials that form it,
the technologies and processes involved in making it, and the formulae
for describing it in its full variety), and then another eight weeks were
spent on the sociology of texts in which the students themselves
explored, in a series of case studies relevant to their own research, the
complex interrelationships of those conditions of production and the
kinds of knowledge they generated.
2
Foreword
My own journey to that end took fresh shape thanks to the generos-
ity and guidance of Philip Gaskell. To the world at large his authority
is manifest in the expository brilliance of his New Introduction to
Bibliography and From Writer to Reader, but it was his intimate know-
ledge of the late seventeenth-century documents of the Cambridge
University Press and his characteristic willingness to share them, that
made possible the resurrection of an early printing house, its resources
of type and presses, and the day-to-day activities of its managers,
compositors, pressmen, correctors, joiners, and smiths. Its detailed
records of pricing, type set, sheets printed, and wages paid supplied
the evidence needed to reconstruct the working processes common
to all printing houses of the hand-press period and the complexity of
the working relationships within them. For the first time, scholars had
a dynamic model of the manner in which printed books were made.
Since the economic principle of concurrent production which it
revealed implied that no one book would ever contain all the evidence
needed to explain how it must have been produced, the new model was
disconcertingly at odds with many assumptions then current in ana-
lytical and textual bibliography. Only by studying total production at
any one time could a pattern be reliably discerned, and as the time and
interests of most editors were usually and understandably limited to a
single text, the kind of scientific certainty once sought in analysing the
printing of their text seemed less attainable than ever. As comparable
evidence for other houses had failed to survive, it followed that for
most books any detailed account of their physical production was
irretrievable. There was one further important implication. While the
processes of composition, correction, and printing were universal, the
relationships between them on any one day were constantly changing
in the number of men and their output, in the resources they might de-
ploy, and in the number, quality, and edition quantities of jobs on hand.
Paradoxically, this extension of knowledge about the context of
book production, while it induced a scepticism about the kinds of truth
some forms of analytical bibliography might yield, also opened up the
discipline in at least three ways. First, because the conditions of pro-
duction were so much more complex than had hitherto been thought,
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Foreword
4
Foreword
The great thing about lectures is that they can be given a teasingly
speculative quality: ideas are offered with an implied request that an
audience use its imaginary puissance. I hope these Panizzi lectures will
give such a sense of being open and responsibly speculative. They are
accompanied by a more detailed paper on the Treaty of Waitangi. This
too was first given as a lecture, in this case to the Bibliographical Society
in London, where its general principles were intended to encourage
a European audience more immediately knowledgeable about the
arrival of printing some centuries earlier in other manuscript cultures.
Thus it extends my notion of the sociology of texts in a context quite
different from that of the London book trades. It continues to have
for me a more personal value in helping to make some sense of the role
of oral, manuscript, and printed texts in determining the rights of
indigenous peoples subjected to European colonization and to the com-
mercial and cultural impositions of the powerful technologies of print.
Interpretation of the treaty remains a highly sensitive political issue and
the significance of its implications for New Zealand society demands,
by contrast with the Panizzi Lectures, the sub-text of full documenta-
tion with which it is here supported.
William Congreve wrote at the end of the preface to his first book in
1691, I have gratified the Bookseller in pretending an Occasion for a
Preface. Following that old custom, so too have I. It remains only for
me now to express my gratitude, first, to Nicholas Wade for his per-
mission to print his image of Droeschouts First Folio Shakespeare
as seen through the text of Ben Jonsons poem to its reader, and to
the trustees of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, for the
plates in the essay on the Treaty of Waitangi. Among the many others
to whom I owe thanks for their support and advice, cautionary and
corrective, I mention in particular Albert Braunmuller, Tom Davis,
Mirjam Foot, Linda Hardy, John Kidd, Harold Love, David and
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Foreword
6
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND THE
S O C I O LO G Y O F T E X T S
For Stuart Johnston
1
The book as an expressive form
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Bibliography and the sociology of texts
Bibliography and Textual Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), p. 41; cited by
Atkinson, p. 63.
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Atkinson, p. 64. Encyclopaedia Britannica, III, 588.
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Bibliography and the sociology of texts
Nicolas Barker, Typography and the Meaning of Words, Buch und Buchhandel
in Europa im achtzehnten Jahrhundert, ed. G. Barber and B. Fabian, Wolfenbtteler
Schriften zur Geschichte des Buchwesens 4 (Hamburg, 1981), pp. 12665; D. F. Foxon,
Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade, rev. and ed. James McLaverty
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); Giles Barber, Voltaire et la prsentation
typographique de Candide, Transmissione dei Testi a Stampa nel Periodo Moderno I
(Seminario Internationale, Rome 1985), 15169; Roger Laufer, Lnonciation
typographique au dix-huitime sicle, ibid., 11323; LEspace visuel du livre ancien,
Revue Franaise dHistoire du Livre 16 (1977), 56981; LEsprit de la lettre, Le Dbat
22 (November 1982), 14759; see also Barbara R. Woshinsky, La Bruyres Caractres:
A Typographical Reading, TEXT: Transactions of the Society for Textual Scholarship 2
(1985), 20928. Those examples from the past, implying a consciousness of the non-
verbal resources of book forms to enhance and convey meaning, may be paralleled
with others from current research into text design. A useful summary is James
Hartley, Current Research on Text Design, Scholarly Publishing 16 (1985), 35568;
see also James Hartley and Peter Burnhill, Explorations in Space: A Critique of the
Typography of BPS Publications, Bulletin of the British Psychological Society 29
(1976), 97107.
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Bibliography and the sociology of texts
For an excellent example, see Michael Camille, The Book of Signs: Writing
and Visual Difference in Gothic Manuscript Illumination, Word & Image I, no. 2
(AprilJune 1985), 13348.
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Bibliography and the sociology of texts
and that its typographic style was in turn influenced by the culture at
large. My argument therefore runs full circle from a defence of author-
ial meaning, on the grounds that it is in some measure recoverable, to
a recognition that, for better or worse, readers inevitably make their
own meanings. In other words, each reading is peculiar to its occasion,
each can be at least partially recovered from the physical forms of the
text, and the differences in readings constitute an informative history.
What writers thought they were doing in writing texts, or printers and
booksellers in designing and publishing them, or readers in making
sense of them are issues which no history of the book can evade.
The Intentional Fallacy opens with an epigraph taken from Con-
greves prologue to The Way of the World (1700). In it, as Wimsatt and
Beardsley quote him,
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the primary documents for any history of the book. By reading one
form of Congreves text (1700/1710), we may with some authority affirm
certain readings as his. By reading other forms of it (1946), we can chart
meanings that later readers made from it under different historical
imperatives.
I may believe as I do that Wimsatt and Beardsley have mistaken
Congreves meaning; that they have misconceived his relation to his
tradition; that they have misreported his attitude to his own audience
and readers. At the same time, their misreading has become an histori-
cal document in its own right. By speaking to what they perceived in
1946 to be the needs of their own time, not Congreves in 1700/1710,
they have left a record of the taste, thought, and values of a critical
school which significantly shaped our own choice of books, the way we
read them and, in my own case, the way I taught them. The history of
material objects as symbolic forms functions, therefore, in two ways.
It can falsify certain readings; and it can demonstrate new ones.
To extend that line of argument, I should like to comment briefly
on the word Scenes. We recall first that Congreves Scenes cost him
Pains. Next, we should note that his editors and critics have, almost
without exception, replaced his meaning of the word with a com-
moner one of their own. They have defined them by geography and
carpentry, as when a scene shifts from a forest to the palace. For
Congreve, by contrast, they were neoclassical scenes: not impersonal
places in motion, but distinct groups of human beings in conversation.
These made up his scenes. For him, it was the intrusion of another
human voice, another mind, or its loss, that most changed the scene. The
substance of his scenes, therefore, what with Toil, he wrought, were
men and women. Once we recover that context and follow Congreves
quite literal meaning in that sense, his rhyme of Scenes with Pains
glows with an even subtler force. What he hints at is a serious critical
judgement about all his work: beneath the rippling surface of his
comedy there flows a sombre undercurrent of human pain. In a more
mundane way, that perception may direct an editor to adopt a typo-
graphy which divides Congreves plays into neoclassical scenes, as he
himself did in his edition of 1710 where we find them restored.
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With that last example, it could be argued that we reach the border
between bibliography and textual criticism on the one hand and liter-
ary criticism and literary history on the other. My own view is that no
such border exists. In the pursuit of historical meanings, we move from
the most minute feature of the material form of the book to questions
of authorial, literary, and social context. These all bear in turn on the
ways in which texts are then re-read, re-edited, re-designed, re-printed,
and re-published. If a history of readings is made possible only by a
comparative history of books, it is equally true that a history of books
will have no point if it fails to account for the meanings they later come
to make.
Though at times they may pretend otherwise, I suspect that few
authors, with the kind of investment in their work that Congreve
claims, are indifferent to the ways in which their art is presented and
received. There is certainly a cruel irony in the fact that Congreves own
text is reshaped and misread to support an argument against himself.
Far from offering a licence for his audience and readers to discount
the authors meaning, Congreve is putting, with an exasperated irony,
the case for the right of authors, as he says in another line of the pro-
logue, to assert their Sense against the taste of the town. When Jeremy
Collier wrenched to his own purposes the meaning of Congreves
words, Congreve replied with his Amendments of Mr. Colliers False
and Imperfect Citations. He too had a way with epigraphs and chose for
that occasion one from Martial which, translated, reads: That book
you recite, O Fidentinus, is mine. But your vile re-citation begins to
make it your own.
With that thought in mind, I should like to pursue one further
dimension of the epigraphs meaning which is not in itself a matter of
book form. It nevertheless puts Congreve in the tradition of authors
who thought about the smallest details of their work as it might be
printed, and who directed, collaborated with, or fumed against, their
printers and publishers. One such author is Ben Jonson. As it happens,
Wimsatt and Beardsley might with equal point have quoted him to
epitomize their argument that an authors intentions are irrelevant.
This, for example:
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Ben Jonson, The New Inne, epilogue, ll. 12. Ode to himselfe, ll. 710.
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Dulness of his critics. By respecting not only the words Congreve uses
a simple courtesy but also the meanings which their precise nota-
tion gives, we can, if we wish, as an act of bibliographical scholarship,
recover his irony, and read his pain.
In that long series of Pyrrhic victories which records the triumphs of
critics and the deaths of authors, The Intentional Fallacy has earned a
distinguished place for the argument which follows its feat of mispri-
sion. Its epigraph is no celebration of Congreves perspicacity in fore-
seeing a new cause; it is, rather, an epitaph to his own dismembered
text. A vast critical literature has been generated by this essay, but I
am unaware of any mention of the textual ironies which preface it.
With what seems an undue reverence for the tainted text printed by
Wimsatt and Beardsley, the epigraph has been reproduced in reprint
after reprint with exceptional fidelity, its errors resistant to any further
reworking of a classic moment of mis-statement, resistant even to the
force of the argument which follows it. It is now incorporate with
Congreves history and with that of our own time.
Yet if the fine detail of typography and layout, the material signs
which constitute a text, do signify in the ways I have tried to suggest,
it must follow that any history of the book subject as books are to
typographic and material change must be a history of misreadings.
This is not so strange as it might sound. Every society rewrites its past,
every reader rewrites its texts, and, if they have any continuing life at
all, at some point every printer redesigns them. The changes in the
way Congreves text was printed as an epigraph were themselves
designed to correct a late Victorian printing style which had come to
seem too fussily expressive. In 1946, good printing had a clean, clear,
impersonal surface. It left the text to speak for itself.
This newly preferred form of printing had conspired with shifts in
critical opinion. Eliots theory of the impersonality of the poet affected
to dissociate the writer from his text. The words on the page became
what Wimsatt called a verbal icon, a free-standing artefact with its
own inner coherence, what Cleanth Brooks was to call (as it happens)
a well-wrought Urn, a structure complete in itself which had within it
all the linguistic signs we needed for the contemplation of its meaning.
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27
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The World, the Text, and the Critic (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p. 4.
Textual Power (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 75.
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To the Reader.
30
2
The broken phial: non-book texts
The allusion in the phrase The broken phial is of course to the famous
passage in Miltons Areopagitica, where he speaks of books as having a
potencie of life, for they preserve as in a violl the purest efficacie and
extraction of that living intellect which bred them . . . a good book is
the pretious life-blood of a master-spirit, imbalmd and treasurd up on
purpose to a life beyond life.
Miltons use of the word violl is interesting, since, in the Greek, it
usually meant a broad, flat vessel, like a saucer; and in the Authorized
Version it is still translated as a bowl. The sense of its being a small
glass bottle, containing an essence, seems to have developed in the
seventeenth century. I have not pursued the inquiry further but I
imagine that this meaning relates to the use of glass tubes and phials in
scientific experiments. Their transparency would have been important
for allowing one to read the level of a liquid, as we do in a thermometer
or mercury-glass, or to see chemical reactions involving, for example,
changes of colour.
In this rather new sense, then, as used by Milton and later by Robert
Boyle, it heightens the idea of enclosure, of the text as contained, deter-
mined, stable, of the author within, both clearly visible and enduringly
present. When we note Miltons spelling of the word, we see that it
may also bear another meaning which we lose if we modernize it.
Given the spelling of the 1644 edition (violl), and Miltons delight in
music, there cannot be much doubt that we have here a typical Miltonic
pun: it is as if, in reading a book, we should also be moved by the
harmony of the work, what Shakespeare called the concord of sweet
sounds.
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In such phrases, Milton puts most clearly the idea of the book as a
sacred but expressive form, one whose medium gives transparent
access to the essential meaning. As I tried to suggest earlier, there is
a tradition in which print-inclined authors assume this. They use, or
expect their printers to use, the resources of book forms to mediate
their meaning with the utmost clarity. Even when writers, scribes,
illuminators or illustrators, printers and publishers, merely accept the
conventions of their time, with no innovative or specific intent, there
are still certain codes at work from which, if we are sensitive to them,
we can recover significant meanings we should otherwise miss or
misinterpret.
Against that tradition, however, which is ultimately Platonic, if not
Hebraic, for at one level it accepts the reality of a pure inner voice, and
at another, a realm of absolute truth, of ideal forms, there is of course
a counter-tradition which is also Hebraic and Platonic. If God said,
Let there be light and there was light, writing has interposed a dark
glass which obscures the light which was the voice of God. The precious
life-blood of Miltons master-spirit is inevitably watered down as it
is spread around. As Shakespeare puts it in Phoenix and the Turtle:
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Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author, in Image, Music, Text: Essays Selected
and Translated by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1984), p. 148. Michel Foucault,
in What is an Author?, raises many of the same questions as does Barthes, but
his essay seems to me far more sympathetic to the range of concerns which have
traditionally preoccupied those interested in the non-authorial dimensions of
textually transmitted knowledge. It appeared originally as Quest-ce quun auteur?,
followed by a discussion, in Bulletin de la Socit Franaise de la Philosophie 63 (1969).
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Bibliography and the sociology of texts
meaning, from the written or printed records of it. We are left only
with synchronic structures, and the conventions which regulate their
meaning as we read. It follows, of course, that if the meaning we read is
entirely a function of the structural relations within the verbal sign
system which constitutes a text, then it is not something in-herent
which can be ex-pressed at all. Meaning is not what is meant, but what
we now agree to infer.
Saussures insistence upon the primacy of speech has created a
further problem for book-based bibliography by confining critical
attention to verbal structures as an alphabetic transcription of what
are conceived only as words to be spoken. Other formalized languages,
or, more properly perhaps, dialects of written language graphic,
algebraic, hieroglyphic, and, most significantly for our purposes, typo-
graphic have suffered an exclusion from critical debate about the
interpretation of texts because they are not speech-related. They are
instrumental of course to writing and printing, but given the close
interdependence of linguistics, structuralism, and hermeneutics, and
the intellectual dominance of those disciplines in recent years, it is not
surprising perhaps that the history of non-verbal sign systems, includ-
ing even punctuation, is still in its infancy, or that the history of typo-
graphic conventions as mediators of meaning has yet to be written.
To revert briefly to Congreve, throughout that discussion one ques-
tion was implicitly begged: could it be said that Congreve personally
intended the meaning I read from his lines, or were the meanings
I attributed to them more promiscuously generated? The question is
both sceptical and anxious in its hope for reassurance. To keep alive
that tension between disbelief and confirmation, I have kept in reserve
Congreves explicit assurance in the edition of 1710 that Care [had]
been taken both to Revise the Press, and to Review and Correct many Pass-
ages in the Writing. By way of general explanation, Congreve added:
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Peter de Voogd has drawn attention to the marbled pages in the third
volume of Tristram Shandy, which Sterne calls the motley emblem of
my work. Each hand-marbled page is necessarily different and yet
integral with the text. As an assortment of coloured shapes which are
Peter de Voogd, Laurence Sterne, the Marbled Page and the use of accidents ,
Word & Image I, no. 3 (JulySeptember 1985), 279 87.
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37
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The Library, 6th series, 6 (June 1984), 138.
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ibid. I, 92.
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and observed: But you would agree, would you not, that the last 300
years have been somewhat exceptional?
For the Maori in New Zealand, the arrival of books and docu-
ments has made the last 150 years more than somewhat exceptional.
Despite the fact that Keri Hulme won the Booker Prize for her novel
The Bone People, texts in the form of written or printed documents
are still widely distrusted. This is mainly because of the strength of oral
traditions, but there is another, more sinister, reason. For many Maori,
the archetypal document the Treaty of Waitangi of 1840, by which
British sovereignty was secured over New Zealand stands as a symbol
of betrayal. It deprived them of their lands, and in taking their lands it
threatened their culture. This is not a question of arguing a case, or
proving a truth; it is a matter of daily living, or at least living daily
with the consciousness of it. For the Maori, their relation to the land
epitomized in their phrase for those who belong to the land, te tangata
whenua continues to be the most important subject of debate, and
land is significant, less for its commercial value although that may
now be a consideration than for its symbolic status. A site is picketed,
and public works on it opposed, more often to preserve its significance
in myth and legend, or ostensibly so, than out of material interest.
When looking into the implications of introducing printing into
New Zealand, the attempts to make the Maori literate, and European
exploitation of the legal power of documents over agreements reached
orally, I had occasion to look at the Maori signatures appended in
1840 to the Treaty of Waitangi. Some are signatures in the usual sense
of the word, but most are complicated configurations. A suggestion
worth exploring further is the possibility that these forms of writing may
in fact be representations of natural features of the tribal lands from
which the signatories came. For the British at the time, their textual
significance was crucial, because in European terms these little maps
if such they are signified assent to their assumption of sovereignty.
But if, for the Maori, they signified tribal lands over which they thought
they would continue to have sovereign control, under the queens
A sample may be seen in plates 5a and b at pp. 118 19 below.
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Myth Today, in Mythologies: Selected and Translated from the French by Annette
Lavers (London: Granada, 1984), p. 109.
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Arthur H. Robinson and Barbara Bartz Petchenik, The Nature of Maps: Essays
toward Understanding Maps and Mapping (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 1976), p. 43.
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ibid. p. 45. On this point, see Camille, The Book of Signs, p. 135: the best form of
representation for refuting the arguments for the non-linguistic nature of visuality
and for understanding how an image can function on the same complex semantic
levels as a text is the medieval diagram. This was readable as scriptura and yet totally
dependent on presentation through pictura. See also J. B. Harley, Meaning and
Ambiguity in Tudor Cartography, in English Map-Making, pp. 2245, especially
note 103, p. 45: a systematic study of carto-literacy in early modern England is
required along the lines of D. Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order, Reading and
Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1980).
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W. M. Ivins, Jr, Prints and Visual Communication (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1953).
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paper quality, size of print, and the milieu in which it is seen, will also
determine the readings it gets.
Second, as Barthes demonstrates to great effect, the photograph only
signifies at all because of the existence of a store of ready-made ele-
ments of signification (eyes raised heavenwards, hands clasped). These
continuities have of course a long history, not only in the graphic ex-
pression of emotion but in the rhetoric of gesture. When he reads Garbos
face, or the Roman fringe in Mankiewiczs film of Julius Caesar, he
finds a cultural text. In Photography and Electoral Appeal, he writes:
the full-face photograph underlines the realistic look of the candidate,
especially if he is provided with scrutinizing glasses; and almost all
three-quarter face photos are ascensional, the face is lifted towards a
supernatural light which draws it up, and elevates it to the realm of a
higher humanity . . ..
Such comments now seem almost naive when we think of the man-
ner in which we are exposed to the professional encoding of sincerity
in advertising and politics, but Barthes did a service in bringing past
practice into line with new technology and exposing the true nature of
the texts we were reading.
The same time-honoured devices of manipulative display can be
found more overtly in comic-strip Shakespeare. Words become noisy
with visual sound (ARRGH!!, in caps, double exclamation mark),
and the sectional division of the action into frames as in Johann
Grningers famed Strasburg Terence of 1496 almost puts the pictures
into motion. There are sudden cuts of time and place, rapidly shifting
camera angles, a mix of long shots and close-ups, a whole range of
montage effects. But, unlike the motion picture, you can stop the
action, flip it back and forth, change the emphasis and tempo, take
up a full page for an expansive, liberating image, cram it with small
panels to create a sense of claustrophobia, sharpen the angles to express
paranoia, or use splitting-images to suggest the schizophrenic. The
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Broadcast on 18 November 1985.
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Ariosto, Orlando Furioso. With memoirs and notes by Antonio Panizzi, 4 vols
(London: Pickering, 1834), I, xcv.
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other has none, and cannot. In arguing for the centrality of a textual
principle in bibliography, whatever specific form the text takes, I am
not denying that we must ultimately return to the fine detail of each
kind of text and the professionalism, the scholarship, proper to it; but
just at this time it seems more needful than ever to recover the unity in
their otherwise disabling diversity.
In that same rich text of his which deals with so many of these ques-
tions, Milton reassures those made anxious by the division of Truth
into parties and partitions. Fool!, he exclaimed to one of them, see
you not the firm root out of which we all grow, though into branches?
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3
The dialectics of bibliography now
In the rst two lectures I briey contrasted two concepts of text. One
is the text as authorially sanctioned, contained, and historically den-
able. The other is the text as always incomplete, and therefore open,
unstable, subject to a perpetual re-making by its readers, performers,
or audience.
To stress the rst is to conrm the usual assumptions of historical
scholarship: it seeks, as objectively as possible, to recover, from the
physical evidence of a text, its signicance for all those who rst made
it. To do that, I have argued, we must have some concept of authorial
meaning, consider carefully the expressive functions of the texts modes
of transmission, and account for its reception by an audience or reader-
ship. As a locatable, describable, attributable, datable, and explicable
object, the text as a recorded form is, pre-eminently, a bibliographical
fact. Its relation to all other versions, and their relation, in turn, to all
other recorded texts, are, again, pre-eminently, bibliographical facts.
No other discipline and certainly neither history nor criticism com-
mands the range of textual phenomena, or the technical scholarship,
to deal fully with their production, distribution, and consumption. By
commanding the one term common to all inquiry the textual object
itself bibliography can be an essential means by which we recover
the past.
As a way of further exemplifying one part of that argument the
relation of form to meaning in printed books I should like to consider
the cases of John Locke and James Joyce. Locke was so troubled by the
difculty he had in making sense of St Pauls epistles, that he decided to
go right to the heart of the matter. In 1707 he published An Essay for the
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Bibliography and the sociology of texts
Locke objects to the eye being constantly disturbd with loose Sentences,
that by their standing and separation, appear as so many distinct Frag-
ments. As he develops it, his argument about editorial and typographic
practice has far-reaching implications:
Those comments make it clear that Locke believed the form in which a
text was printed not only radically affected the ways it might be read,
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Bibliography and the sociology of texts
but might even indeed generate religious and civil dissension. He then
raises the whole question of authorial intention. As printed in verse, the
epistles frustrated those sober, inquisitive readers who had a mind like
his own to see in St. Pauls Epistles just what he meant; whereas those
others of a quicker and gayer Sight could see in them what they please.
For Locke, an essential condition of following a true meaning was a
proper disposition of the text, so that one might see where the Sense of
the Author goes visibly in its own Train. He then adds:
Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, with Wolfhard
Steppe and Claus Melchior (New York: Garland, 1984).
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Bibliography and the sociology of texts
The two principal papers from which Dr Kidd has kindly allowed me to cite the
examples given are: Thirteen. Deaths Number Structural Symbolism in Ulysses,
delivered at the Second Provincetown Joyce Conference, June 1983; and Errors of
Execution in the 1984 Ulysses, delivered to The Society for Textual Scholarship,
New York, April 1985. See also his contributions to The Irish Literary Supplement:
A Review of Irish Books (Fall 1985), pp. 4142.
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Bibliography and the sociology of texts
[It] also divides evenly into diurnal and nocturnal halves. The
sun sets in the seaside Nausicaa chapter, not with a sudden
plunge, but with a gradual waning, until daylight and Leopold
Blooms consciousness are extinguished on page 365. The
remainder of the book is set in darkness. . . . Bloom, seated
where shore and sea meet, attending the last glimmer of
midsummer light, and remarking the semicircular prole of
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60
Bibliography and the sociology of texts
are relative to a specic time, place, and person. This creates a problem
only if we want meaning to be absolute and immutable. In fact, change
and adaptation are a condition of survival, just as the creative applica-
tion of texts is a condition of their being read at all. The 1984 critical
and synoptic text of Ulysses has physically changed every previous
version in the act of replicating it. It has become in its turn a new
bibliographical fact; and it is these facts which constitute the primary
evidence for any history of meanings. They alone make possible,
in their sequence, any account of cultural change. Perceived from a
bibliographical point of view, therefore, the ostensible contradiction
between those two concepts of text, the closed and the open, simply
dissolves. But implicit in those comments are several points about the
nature of bibliography which it might be helpful now to make quite
explicit.
First, I imply that it is committed to the description of all recorded
texts. In principle, it is comprehensive, and therefore indiscriminate.
Any national collection formed largely by copyright deposit shows this
non-elitist, non-canonical, non-generic, all-inclusive principle at work.
International networking simply extends it. Ultimately, any discrete
bibliography of subject, person, or collection merely contributes to an
ideal of that universal bibliographical control. It thereby enables the
discovery of any possible relationship there might be between any one
text and any other text whenever, wherever, and in whatever form.
In other words, bibliography is the means by which we establish the
uniqueness of any single text as well as the means by which we are able
to uncover all its inter-textual dimensions.
Second, because it is bibliographys job to record and explain the
physical forms which mediate meaning, it has an interpretative func-
tion which complements and modies any purely verbal analysis. In
principle, it can full this function in any of the modes in which texts
are transmitted, not just printed books. It is therefore equally relevant,
as a discipline, to any structure of meaning which is recordable and
discernible.
Third, it impartially accepts the construction of new texts and their
forms. The conation of versions, or the writing of new books out of
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Bibliography and the sociology of texts
old ones, is the most obvious case. But the construction of systems,
such as archives, libraries, and data-banks, is another. In every case,
the elements from which they are constructed are bibliographical
objects. A test case would be the sale and dispersal of, say, the library
of a seventeenth-century scholar: we become acutely aware at such
moments of a librarys status as a text or a meta-text, and of its bio-
graphical and intellectual meaning.
Fourth, bibliography is of its nature, and not merely as a partial
effect of some more essential function, concerned specically with
texts as social products. The human and institutional dynamics of
their production and consumption, here and now, as well as in the
past, have therefore led me to suggest that we might nd in the phrase
a sociology of texts a useful description of its actual scope.
I must now turn to some exemplary cases of non-book texts and at
least try to set out my reasons for thinking that bibliography has a duty
to these. In doing so, it is worth recalling, I think, Hobbess comment
in The Leviathan that
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63
Bibliography and the sociology of texts
Jorge Luis Borges in Focus on Citizen Kane, ed. R. Gottesman (Englewood Cliffs:
Prentice-Hall, 1971), pp. 1278.
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Bibliography and the sociology of texts
65
Bibliography and the sociology of texts
66
Bibliography and the sociology of texts
67
Bibliography and the sociology of texts
Focus on Citizen Kane, p. 73. Robert L. Carringer, The Making of Citizen Kane
(London: John Murray, 1985), should also be consulted; there is a most useful
bibliography at pp. 16571.
In The Citizen Kane Book: Comprising The Shooting Script of Citizen Kane by Herman
J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles; The Cutting Continuity Transcript of the Completed
Film; preceded by Raising Kane by Pauline Kael (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 83.
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Bibliography and the sociology of texts
Her use of the word intentions is only the most immediate note of a
congruence with the traditional concerns of bibliography and textual
criticism. The relationship of the shooting script to the nished script
is much like that of a manuscript draft, not even perhaps a fair copy, to
a printed text, whereas the more boring cutting continuity comes
closer to the iconic record of a bibliographical description.
There are three versions of the shooting script as preserved in the
Museum of Modern Art in New York. Another, described as the sec-
ond, revised nal script, dated 9 July 1940, and earlier than any of the
other three, was submitted to the Production Code Ofce for clear-
ance. It passed the test except for some four or ve details. One of them
recalls the effects on Shakespeares text of the Act of Abuses of 1606:
Please eliminate the word Lord from Kanes speech . . . the Lord
only knows . . .. Another puts one in mind of Polonius, concerned
lest his son enter such a house of sale, Videlicet, a brothel, because
there was such a place nominated as a locale for set C. But the Pro-
duction Code demanded that it be dropped. What it is important to
know, as an aspect of Welless intention, is that the scene had only been
written in for trading purposes in the sure knowledge that it would
have to be cut, but in the hope that other, less obtrusive, items would
then slip through, as they did.
Pauline Kael reprints the shooting script as revised, although there is
no table of variants. What we do have are brief notes on departures
from the script as the lm was made. Then there is the RKO cutting
continuity, dated 21 February 1941. Its apparatus consists of a brief note
(Slightly amended to correct errors in original transcription), but for
the rest, it represents a version of the full lm text which, in default of
being the lm itself, is a bibliographers dream of iconic accuracy. Like
a description of ideal copy, it enables one to test all actual copies in the
minutest details for sequence and completeness. For example, to cor-
respond with the authentic version, a copy must run for one hour, 59
minutes, 16 seconds, though it will run shorter on television. There are
seven reels, each divided into numbered scenes. The left-hand entries
in the description are details of the length of each of these in feet; in the
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Bibliography and the sociology of texts
centre are notes on the scene, the cameras and the actors movements,
and, under centred speech headings, the dialogue; on the right, is a
description of the manner in which the scene is changed.
To anyone familiar with the making or teaching of lms, these
details are commonplace. Again, my concern is merely to establish the
point that the older disciplinary structures of bibliography, in the
description of books and the construction of texts from the extant
versions, are closely comparable to those required for lm, and that
the common interest is at this stage served by acknowledging that the
discipline comprehends them both. It is ironic that in an age when type
for books is lm-set, and when, for purposes of storing the information
content of books, we would now turn them into photographic images
on plastic, the lm itself should still be labouring for bibliographical
and textual attention. Those which get it, like Citizen Kane, are the rare
exception.
Bibliographers as pure bibliographers may of course continue
to insist on making a rigorous distinction between books as we
commonly know them and non-book forms, and on the restriction
of pure bibliography to description and analysis of the book as a
physical object. But libraries and especially national libraries, with
a responsibility to the culture at large, past, present, and future are
under signicant pressure to evolve systems which accommodate
these new forms of text in a rational, coherent, stable, and yet socially
accessible way.
The pattern is already pragmatically there in the transformation of
our personal and city libraries. Some of us still buy books, of course;
but we also borrow them, and we have left to the public conscience and
public institutions the responsibility for preserving the newspapers and
periodicals that we dispose of. Most of us have music, and could have
videos, on disc or tapes, and the machines required to hear and see
them. We are beginning to store information at home in our own com-
puter les, or to buy access to other systems. That principle of buying
access is simply an extension of the old idea of the lending library: we
do not buy the book so much as the time in which to read it. With new
forms of text, we buy, in bulk, the reading, viewing, or listening time in
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Bibliography and the sociology of texts
the form of an entrance fee to the cinema, a hiring fee for the disc or
video, or a wireless and television licence fee for all or any texts that
might be made and transmitted in the year ahead, or we pay an access
fee for the information in a data bank. By decision of the United States
Supreme Court, it is no infringement of copyright there to record
television programmes in order to shift time. But in fact the tech-
nical capacity most consumers now command as readers, listeners,
or viewers to copy texts in that way, has also in part transformed the
notion of purchase as a form of acquisition and the ways in which
some of us at least form our personal libraries.
Such reections form the terms of an all too familiar litany over the
demise of the book. My concern is different. It is to nd the continuity
of these forms with past forms, of our new libraries with past libraries
in their traditional function as collectors, conservators, classiers, and
communicators, as classically exemplied by Panizzi. Even the use
of computer technology to supply information changes in only one
respect that traditional function. Whereas libraries have held books
and documents as physical objects, computer systems have been
mainly concerned to retrieve content. Library conservation and inter-
lending policies are already pushing certain classes of existing docu-
ment into that mode; and the creation and supply of new texts in
non-printed form for direct consultation on screen, or subsequent
hard-copy print-out, is increasing. The principle of record and access,
of catalogue and holdings, is not changed but only rened. It is too
seldom remarked that library systems inuenced computing in the
development of its capacity to process basic catalogue functions by
symbolic listing, selection, and arrangement. It should also be re-
membered that it was not the sophistication of computing in its early
stages which biased its use towards science, but its limited memory
and therefore its inability to handle the complexity and range of verbal
language as distinct from combinations of the numbers o to 9. Only as
its memory systems have grown has the computer changed its nature
from blackboard to book. It has at long last become literate and quali-
ed to join other textual systems. In time, I suppose, as it now learns to
speak, it will constitute an oral archive as well.
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Bibliography and the sociology of texts
The British Library Act specically empowers The British Library to extend its
sphere of interest into lms and other non-print materials. In a position statement
prepared for The British Library in 1985 on non-book materials, Catherine F. Pinion
wrote: It is clear that [non-book materials] represent a major and increasing
part of the nations and the worlds output and heritage of recorded knowledge.
It is arguable, if not self-evident, that they should receive equivalent treatment
to printed material, with regard to collecting, availability, preservation and
bibliographic control. In actual fact, the position is distinctly inferior in all those
respects. The use of the word bibliographic is inevitable in such a context, but it is
to be hoped that its still equivocal status, as signalled by the quotation marks, will be
speedily resolved.
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Bibliography and the sociology of texts
The position is improving. While correcting proof for the rst edition of this text,
I purchased (Woolworth, 7.95) a video-cassette of Citizen Kane. The regular note
in TV Times, however (paralleled in The Radio Times), makes an important textual
point: Feature lms shown on television are not necessarily in the form seen
in cinemas. Often several variations are made at the time of production for use
according to the intended outlet. In some cases cinema versions may be used,
with minor cuts for violence, explicit sex and bad language.
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74
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Faustus reads in Jerome only a single sense dictating a xed fate. What
he omits are the words that refer to mercy, the very foundation of
which if I may so put it is the variant reading, an openness to inter-
pretation, a deference to the spirit in preference to the letter. Trapped
by the paradox that texts are both closed and open, xed and exible,
dened by one context only to be redened in others, Faustus despairs.
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Bibliography and the sociology of texts
Instead of using judgement, he suffers it; and with his agonized cry
Ill burn my books he rejects the whole tradition of book-learning.
Of all the traditional enemies of books in this counter-mythology,
none are so powerful as re and water. These will devour sense, or
drown it, with more dextrous celerity than a whole cortge of critics. If
Faustus invokes the one, it is Prospero who invokes the other.
The Tempest towers above all other texts as an exposition of the
instrumentality of the book, a key to open the mysteries of nature, a
tool to oppress and conne the savage mind. Prospero makes plain how
much they meant to him when he recalls Gonzalo who,
of his gentleness
Knowing I loud my books, . . . furnishd me
From mine owne Library, with volumes, that
I prize aboue my Dukedome.
And yet one of the most remarkable perceptions in that spare but
innitely generative play is Prosperos even greater need to surrender
his power, and with it the books which bestowed it:
And, deeper than did euer Plummet sound
Ile drowne my booke.
Encased by his library, he had shut out the world.
Me (poore man) my Librarie
Was Dukedome large enough . . .
At the heart of the English Renaissance, a period unprecedented for its
readerly-ness and writerly-ness, two voices warn us that books are not
always enough.
It seems a simple point to end on, but the times again give it proof.
As the British Library begins like Prospero to dismantle itself, and
surrender its magic circle for the square, its redenition as a library of
texts, verbal, numeric, and visual, and in many different media, is also
imminent. Dening the ways our world might use them, the structure
that orders them, and the future scholarship that they must serve, will
demand of bibliographers more than I think we currently offer. It asks
no less than a new concept of the text in history.
76
T H E S O C I O LO G Y O F A T E X T: O R A L
C U LT U R E , L I T E R AC Y, A N D P R I N T I N
E A R LY N E W Z E A L A N D
Oral culture, literacy, and print in early New Zealand
79
Bibliography and the sociology of texts
80
Oral culture, literacy, and print in early New Zealand
The phrases European myth of . . . literacy and print as agents of change and
from memory to written record allude to Harvey Graff s The Literacy Myth:
Literacy and Social Structure in the Nineteenth-century City (New York, 1979), to
Elizabeth L. Eisensteins The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications
and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1979),
and to M. T. Clanchys From Memory to Written Record: England 1066 1307
(London, 1979).
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Bibliography and the sociology of texts
was. But just imagine the problems of trying to capture strange sounds
alphabetically, the miracle that underlies all our books. When one early
traveller recorded what he thought he heard as the Maori word for a
paradise duck, he wrote pooadugghiedugghie (for putangitangi) and for
the fantail diggowaghwagh (for piwakawaka), neither of which forms
translates visually the aural beauty of the originals. The place-name
Hokianga was rendered Showkianga, Sukyanna, Jokeeangar, Chokahanga.
Another village, Kerikeri, was heard and rendered as Kiddeekiddee,
Muketu as Muckeytoo. Those spellings are not only aurally inefcient,
but to a differently accultured English eye they may appear crude and
culturally primitive, thus reinforcing other such attitudes.
The absence of a philology (let alone a grammar and syntax for a
non-European language) made a rational orthography hard to devise.
Yet until there was an orthography, the teaching of reading and writing
was obviously impossible, and printing of course depended upon a
standard set of letter forms. Kendalls rst rough list of 1815 was revised
and sent off to Samuel Lee, Professor of Arabic at Cambridge. Kendall
and two Maori chiefs, Hongi and Waikato, joined him there in 1820, and
together they produced A Grammar and Vocabulary of the Language of
New Zealand. It was printed later that year by R. Watts, printer to the
Church Missionary Society in London. Kendall, unlike Marsden, was
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Oral culture, literacy, and print in early New Zealand
83
Bibliography and the sociology of texts
See David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: the Dynamics of
Indian Modernization 17731833 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1969). A distinction
must be drawn, of course, between reviving in print an already literate culture,
as in Bengal, and capturing the current forms of an oral culture in all its diversity
and levels of textual authority: see Bruce Biggs, The Translation and Publishing of
Maori Material in the Auckland Public Library, Journal of the Polynesian Society
61 (1952), 177 91.
Letter of 1 October 1833, Missionary Register (November 1834), 513. William Brown,
New Zealand and its Aborigines (London, 1845), p. 101, had been told the natives
would only learn every species of vice through the medium of the English
language.
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Oral culture, literacy, and print in early New Zealand
Woon to the Wesleyan Mission Society, 24 November 1838: The press will be a
mighty engine in exposing the errors of [the Papists] system, Wesleyan Mission
Notices, n.s. 9 (September 1839), 142. Henry Williams, 2 December 1840: [we need]
a vigorous effort at this time to meet the present demand for books before the
Papists come forward with their trash, cited by Parr, A Missionary Library, p. 447.
The Roman Catholic mission arrived in 1838, its main press (a Gaveau) on
15 June 1841.
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Bibliography and the sociology of texts
1829: Not six years ago they commenced the very rudiments of learn-
ing: now, many of them can read and write their own language, with
propriety, and are complete masters of the First Rules of Arithmetic.
A visitor to one mission in 1833 noted:
The writing of the senior classes was really better than that of
most schoolboys in England; and what struck me much, it was
remarkably free from orthographical mistakes; which can
only be accounted for from the simplicity of their language,
each letter of which admits but one simple sound. Here also I
observed Chiefs and subjects, freemen and slaves, all incor-
porated into classes.
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Oral culture, literacy, and print in early New Zealand
For this long time past it has become fashionable for the
young people to try to learn to read . . . Such is the wish of
many of the Natives to learn to read, that on several occasions
they have brought pigs, which would weigh from fty to an
hundred pounds, and offered them as payment for a book,
consisting of sacred portions of the Scriptures, and the Liturgy
of the Church of England.
The impression is also given by the missionary reports that once the
rudiments were known, many a Maori pupil would go off and teach
others:
In every village there are several of the Natives who can read
and write: and a School is established among them by the
Natives themselves, where a number are taught to read and
write; and old and young are taught their Catechism. Their
desire for books is very great.
Missionary Register (February 1834), 119.
G. Clarke, 4 June 1833, Missionary Register (December 1833), 550.
William Puckey, 6 January 1835, Missionary Register (July 1836), 155.
G. Clarke, 12 February 1833, Missionary Register (October 1833), 468.
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Bibliography and the sociology of texts
The most useful accounts of literacy among Maori in the early period are
C. J. Parr, A Missionary Library, loc. cit., and Maori Literacy 18431867, Journal
of the Polynesian Society 72 (1963), 21134; and Michael D. Jackson, Literacy,
Communications and Social Change, in Conict and Compromise: Essays on the
Maori since Colonizations, ed. I. H. Kawharu (Wellington, 1975), pp. 2754. Related
studies are G. S. Parsonson, The Literate Revolution in Polynesia, Journal of Pacic
History 11 (1967), 3957, and Grard Duverdier, La Pntration du livre dans une
socit de culture orale: le cas de Tahiti, Revue Franaise dHistoire du Livre n.s. 1
(1972), 2751. Parrs thoroughness in noting so many primary references to Maori
reading and writing in the 1830s and 1840s has greatly eased my own search, and I
have found Jacksons admirable discussion most pertinent to my own because it is
specically concerned to examine Maori social change from the useful vantage
point of literacy (p. 28). Michael Jackson also directed me to Manfred Stanleys
Technicism, Liberalism, and Development: a Study in Irony as Social Theory, in
Social Development: Critical Perspectives (New York, 1972), pp. 274325, a suggestive
discussion of the philosophical implications of technology for social structure and
(if proleptically and only implicitly) histoire du livre.
Nevertheless I argue that early missionaries and recent historians alike have
misread the evidence for Maori literacy. If it ceases to be true of the 1840s, the
conventional view of the rapid attainment of literacy by the Maori in the 1830s
must be wrong: a literacy with any potency for social change is not so short-lived.
Having accepted the missionaries euphoric accounts of the 1830s, Parr asks of the
1840s: What happened? Where were the self-appointed teachers, the hundred mile
journeys to obtain books and instruction, the eager learners of letters, the crowded
day schools of only a dozen years before? (Maori Literacy, p. 221). Although few
Maori are today, in the simplest functional sense, illiterate, the written and printed
word is not the mode which they habitually use. The question is therefore an
even more fundamental one than whether or not the Maori failed to become fully
literate in the 1830s, or why the missionaries failed to teach them full literacy. It is,
rather, why has the Maori failed to become literate at all? Or, to shift the burden
of guilt, what is it about literacy and books that makes these technologies so
inadequate to cope with the complex realities of a highly civilized social experience
which the Maori know but which the literate mind too readily and reductively
perhaps tries to capture in manuscript and print?
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Oral culture, literacy, and print in early New Zealand
Hadeld, and Pompallier were intelligent men, but what could they
have understood by the words reading and writing for them to say:
Marsden, 14 March 1830, Missionary Register (January 1831), 58.
Marsden, February 1837, Missionary Register (April 1838), 137.
The Life of Henry Williams, ed. H. Carleton (Wellington, 1948), p. 137.
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Bibliography and the sociology of texts
and spelling it over until they are fully acquainted with every
word in it.
(London, 1955), p. 17. Illiteracy was probably high among British working-class
settlers. My own paternal grandfather was illiterate, signing both his marriage
certicate and his will with a cross; and my paternal grandmother, like many a
Maori chief and medieval king, wrote her letters by dictation.
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Oral culture, literacy, and print in early New Zealand
See Duverdier, La Pntration, pp. 4242, and William Ellis, Polynesian Researches,
during a Residence of Nearly Eight Years in the Society and Sandwich Islands, 2 vols
(London, 1829), I, 429 93, II, 20. Duverdier draws most of his material from Ellis.
91
Bibliography and the sociology of texts
Henry Williams, 29 August 1834, ibid. (November 1835), 258.
In McKay, A History of Printing in New Zealand, pp. 4849.
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Oral culture, literacy, and print in early New Zealand
It was inhibited by the primitive nature, cost, and scarcity of quills, ink,
and paper. A slate may prove that one can write, but not that one can
write to any purpose. Just as the oral element in reading persisted to
limit the full and easy visual perception of texts, so too a reliance on
writing and a readiness to use it could only grow slowly from a long
acquaintance with documents. Oral witness held its primacy over writ-
ten evidence for centuries in Europe; to have expected a non-literate
people to reverse that disposition within a decade was unrealistic, and
to presume that it has yet happened would be a mistake.
The main use of literacy to the Maori was not reading books for
their ideas, much less for the access they gave to divine truths, but
letter writing. For them, the really miraculous point about writing was
its portability; by annihilating distance, a letter allowed the person who
wrote it to be in two places at once, his body in one, his thoughts in
another. It was the spatial extension of writing, not its temporal per-
manence, that became politically potent in gathering the tribes and
planning a war a decade and more later. Historical time, dened by
Among those who currently afrm Maori rights and protect Maori mana, those
more conciliatory towards European attitudes stress the complimentary ease and
speed with which Maori are said to have become literate, those less conciliatory and
more radical, the supreme importance of the oral tradition and virtual irrelevance
of the European book. In practice, the oral mode rules. By compelling those who
speak eloquently to substitute a mode in which they are less uent, literacy can
function insidiously as a culturally regressive force. Such at least is how many Maori
experience it.
As Jane McRae reminds me, there are few Maori writers and very few who write
in Maori, but the tradition of oral composition and exposition continues, it is the
only tradition with literary structures or styles, and the sound text is usually all
there is to be read. Even within University Departments of Maori Studies, the book
is suspect. Manuscripts and printed texts in libraries, publications by Europeans on
Maoridom, are seldom consulted; oral etiquette, debate, and transfer of knowledge
on the marae are what matter. Such conditions encourage the spontaneous, orally
improvised, dramatic recreation of shared stories or themes and an evolutionary
concept of texts; the xed text, catching in print an arbitrary moment in the
continuum of social exchange, demands a different sense of history and its own
literal re-play. See Michael King, Some Maori Attitudes to Documents, Tihei
Mauri Ora: Aspects of Maoritanga, ed. Michael King (Auckland, 1978), pp. 918.
Jackson, Literacy, Communications and Social Change, p. 38; see also A. Buzacott,
Mission Life in the Islands of the Pacic (London, 1866), pp. 6667.
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Bibliography and the sociology of texts
Missionary Register (September 1834), 41819. Ibid. (April 1832), 192.
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Oral culture, literacy, and print in early New Zealand
Ibid. (October 1834), 460. See also Letters to the Rev. William Yate from Natives of
New Zealand Converted to Christianity (London, 1836).
See W. J. Cameron, A Printing Press for the Maori People, Journal of the
Polynesian Society 67 (1958), 20410; and Johannes Andersen, Maori Printers and
Translators, in McKay, A History of Printing in New Zealand, pp. 3347. An ofcial
Government newspaper, Te Karere o Nui Tireni, later Te Karere Maori, had been
printed in Maori from 1842 to 1846 and doubtless established an early role for this
medium.
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Bibliography and the sociology of texts
Ibid. July and September 1830, Missionary Register (January 1831), 67.
Ibid. 28 April 1831, ibid. (March 1832), 150.
96
Oral culture, literacy, and print in early New Zealand
As the Maori proverb says (one later recorded by Colenso), even a lit-
tle axe, well used, brings plenty of food. But with Yate as food gatherer,
the missionaries starved. Defeated in his own efforts, Yate returned to
Sydney the following year to supervise the printing of what, when it
arrived, he described as the most valuable cargo that ever reached the
shores of New Zealand 1800 copies of a book containing eight chap-
ters of Genesis and almost half the New Testament. On receiving
these books in 1833, Williams wrote home: I hope our good friends in
London will see in time the necessity of allowing a press and a printer.
The book contains 250 pages and abounds in typographical errors, not
less . . . than two to a page. It must not be offered without correction.
So much for colonial work. In 1836 Colenso was even less compli-
mentary about this early Australian export to New Zealand: poor
things, they reect no credit on the printer, less on the binder, and still
less on the editor it has been computed that there are not less than
1000 errors in the work. Yates ignominious effort in 1830 deprived
William Colenso of the honour of being literally New Zealands rst
printer, a New Zealand Caxton, as Coupland Harding was later to call
him.
William Colenso, a cousin of the bishop of that name, was born in
Penzance in 1811 and on 3 September 1826 was bound for six years to
a local printer, John Thomas. While still in his time he read his rst
6 July 1832, Letters of Henry Williams, vol. II (183038), typescript in the Auckland
Institute and Museum.
97
Bibliography and the sociology of texts
Zealand, and his will, are in the Hawkes Bay Museum and Art Gallery. An edition
of his printing-house records and a thorough study of his work as a printer remains
to be done. R. Coupland Harding has written three brief accounts: New Zealands
First Printer, The Inland Printer 7 (188990), 5046; Relics of the First New
Zealand Press, Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute 32 (1900),
4004; William Colenso: Some Personal Reminiscences, The Press (Christchurch),
27 February 1899. Harding also printed several of Colensos papers, including Fifty
Years Ago in New Zealand. See also H. Hill, The Early Days of Printing in New
Zealand: a Chapter of Interesting History, Transactions and Proceedings of the New
Zealand Institute 33 (1901), 40726; and Johannes Andersen, Early Printing in New
Zealand, in McKay, A History of Printing in New Zealand, pp. 131. The fate of
Colensos Stanhope press is unknown; his Columbian is probably that now in Te
Papa Tongarewa, Wellington; his table model foolscap Albion (Hopkinson and
Cope No. 1964, dated 1845) is in the Hawkes Bay Museum and Art Gallery.
Colensos memorandum book for this time details his wages and the way in which
they were made up for composing, correction, altering heads, share of fat, or
reduced by candle ne and error in casting (the last cost him 16s 4d.), along with
other sharply observed features of an early nineteenth-century printing house.
98
Oral culture, literacy, and print in early New Zealand
In fact, getting the Stanhope ashore had been far from easy and lest
the parcels of type be seized for making musket balls they could not
be unpacked until safely landed. Most revealing, however, for what it
implies about the symbolic power of the press as distinct from the
realities of using one, is Colensos list of necessary articles which he
found to be absolutely wanting:
Colenso Papers, Hocken Library.
99
Bibliography and the sociology of texts
3 Colensos case
100
Oral culture, literacy, and print in early New Zealand
101
Bibliography and the sociology of texts
missionaries should supply some writing paper, that the rst sheet
from the press should be in Maori from the New Testament, and that
it should be small. The Epistles to the Ephesians and Philippians was
chosen. Colenso set it up, and on 17 February 1835 pulled proofs of
what he then thought was the rst book printed in New Zealand, the
printing ofce being lled with spectators to witness the performance.
On 21 February,
This rst fruits of the New Zealand Press, which the Lord
hath pleased to allow me to begin and complete, is very much
liked by the Natives. May it, being the Word of God, be the
means of making thousands wise unto Salvation and the
preface, as it were, to a more glorious diffusion of Gospel light
over these benighted lands.
On 19 May he printed what was in fact the rst English book, eight
pages octavo, a report of the New Zealand Temperance Society. Given
the later history of New Zealands licensing laws, it was indeed a
prophetic start.
Ibid., p. 9.
16 March 1835, Colenso Papers, Hocken Library; also Missionary Register (July 1836),
164.
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Oral culture, literacy, and print in early New Zealand
The wages I paid these two men were, at rst, the same as to
the two former pressmen, 5/- per day; but after a short time, at
their own request, their pay was altered to 25 cents, or 1/- each
per token, (10 quires = 1/2-ream,) besides which, as they
could not be always at press-work, they were paid 12 cents,
or 6d per hour for other work connected with the Printing-
ofce and Binding-room, and Warehouse, as, in drying,
and pressing, and folding the sheets, &c.; but would never do
anything in the way of distributing type, and even if a letter
should be drawn out, or be broken in their working-off the
forms, (which sometimes though rarely did happen,) they
would not, or more properly could not well, replace it; and
spoiled paper (if any) they had to pay for, which, however,
did not amount to much. Upham worked alone at Press for a
period of six months, after his companion left, (always a dis-
agreeable and slow process for one person,) and, of course,
from that time he was paid 2/- per token. He was a very good
and trusty pressman, and kept the colour well up, and his
rollers, &c., in nice working order.
Colenso records that when the book was nished a year and a half later,
in December 1837, the demand for copies became great beyond expres-
sion, from all parts of New Zealand, and nding it impossible to bind
Fifty Years Ago, p. 19.
103
Bibliography and the sociology of texts
them fast enough he sent off lots of 500 at a time to Sydney to have
them done (poorly done, as he later complained). Since the Maori were
said to value more highly any article they paid for than one given to
them free, the books were sold at 4s. each. As evidence of interest and
demand, Colenso makes the incidentally valuable point (distinguish-
ing reading from writing) that as not many of the principal Maori
Chiefs or their sons could then write, many of them travelled on foot
and barefooted to Paihia, from very great distances, to obtain a copy.
William Jowett, responding as clerical secretary of the Church Mis-
sionary Society to Colensos expressed wish for ordination, advised
him to turn his thoughts
For Yate, see Eric Ramsden, Marsden and the Missions (Sydney, 1936), p. 28; for
Markham, New Zealand or Recollections of it, p. 55. Sensing that the gure he had
heard might be optimistic, Markham qualied it in a note: For fear of exageration
[sic] say 8000.
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Oral culture, literacy, and print in early New Zealand
Harrison M. Wright, New Zealand, 1769 1840: Early Years of Western Contact
(Cambridge, Mass., 1959), p. 53. Wrights gures are calculated from the tables
(titles, formats, edition quantities) supplied by Colenso in The Missionary Register
(1840), p. 512, and (1841), p. 519. To keep the comparative base I have used the same
source, but a more exact calculation would have to include a few jobbing items
excluded from Colensos reports but included in his ledger. I have taken no account
of items printed before 1840 by the Wesleyan and Roman Catholic missions. Were
these added, they would simply reinforce the argument that literacy is not so easily
implanted as the arrival of printing might imply.
105
Bibliography and the sociology of texts
106
Oral culture, literacy, and print in early New Zealand
which came off his press and made up the various copies of those 16
items. A single octavo book of 224 pages printed in 5000 copies will run
up a total of 1,120,000 pages. It sounds impressive but in printing terms
it is only 5000 copies of each of 14 sheets. In 1840, Colenso printed 11
items, involving 18.875 sheets and 89,313 perfected sheets. One book, the
Psalms, accounted for a third of the setting and two-thirds of the press-
work. Colensos output as printer and therefore the effects of his work
were not at all on the scale suggested by millions of pages and by the
self-congratulatory tone of missionary reports and his own letters.
If this technical view of Colensos output checks us slightly, what
other evidence is there of reception? It is well known that people in an
oral society, seeing books for the rst time, often treat them as ritual
objects.
Richard Davis, 10 November 1832, cited by Wright, p. 176.
G. Clarke, Early Life in New Zealand (Hobart, 1903), p. 31.
Whiteley, 22 December 1836, cited by Parr, A Missionary Library, p. 445.
28 April 1839, ibid.
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Bibliography and the sociology of texts
Church History, thus giving a slightly different sense to the phrase the
church militant. Colenso picked up such a cartridge in which the paper
came from II Samuel and bore the words from chapter 19, v. 34: How
long have I to live? Markham said his servants melted down his pewter
spoons in 1834 to make musket balls of them, and the rst Volume of
my Voltaires, Louis 14. et 15. torn up and made Cartridges of them.
As the number of New Testaments disseminated was reaching
saturation point (one to every two Maori) in the early 1840s just when
the impact of printing should have been at its height we nd Selwyn
noting A general complaint in all parts of the country, that the schools
are not so well attended as heretofore. He remarked a growing indif-
ference to religion, and a neglect of the opportunities for instruction.
Another missionary comments that We have gained a very large
portion of this people but we have no hold on their children. By 1844,
Hadeld could say at last
Life of Henry Williams, p. 60. Fifty Years Ago, p. 42.
108
Oral culture, literacy, and print in early New Zealand
had failed lamentably to equip the Maori to negotiate their rights with
the Pakeha in the one area that really mattered to them land. Nor was
it merely a failure in creating literacy in Maori. In 1844 almost no Maori
spoke (let alone read) English. In that year a settler said he had met
only two who did so. Selwyn had recognized the need to break away
from the old policy and in 1843 produced the rst primer to help Maori
read English. Colenso followed up in 1872 on a Government commis-
sion with Willies First English Book, Written for young Maoris who
can read their own Maori Tongue and who wish to learn to read the
English language. For all his piety, Colenso saw also the need for
another innovation: in order to the greater and more general use of the
work, all words and sentences of a strictly religious nature have been
purposely omitted.
Historians have too readily and optimistically afrmed extensive
and high levels of Maori literacy in the early years of settlement, and
the role of printing in establishing it. Protestant missionary faith in the
power of the written word, and modern assumptions about the impact
imparted and imputed to the book. Paradoxically the Maori is very sensitive to
(because suspicious of ) the very form of a book, and gives an expressive intention
to features which a European takes for granted as mere accidentals and has
virtually ceased to see. For example, in a review of Michael Kings Maori a
Photographic and Social History (Auckland, 1983), Keri Kaa questions the very
depiction of corpses: The pictures of the tupapaku (corpses) I found most
disturbing . . . My initial reaction was to ask: Whose Nanny is that? Whose Mother
is that? Do their mokopuna mind about their taonga being displayed for all the
world to see? And again There is a strange combination of pictures on page 35.
At the top of the page is a picture of a tangi [mourning], underneath it one of a
woman cooking. Anyone who understands the concepts of tapu and noa [lifting of
tapu] would appreciate that the two should never be mixed by being placed
together on a page. (my italics) The New Zealand Listener (24 September 1983), p. 99.
Brown, New Zealand and its Aborigines, p. 99. Augustus Earle, Narrative of a
Residence in New Zealand, ed. E. H. McCormick (Oxford, 1966), pp. 13334, wrote:
I cannot forbear censuring the missionaries, inasmuch as they prevent the natives,
by every means in their power, from acquiring the English language. See also J. S.
Polack, Manners and Customs of the New Zealanders, 2 vols (London, 1840), II, 147:
[The Maori] take much delight in speaking the English language, and had the
Missionaries chosen to have taught the children this tongue, what an immense store
of able works could at once have been put into the hands of the native youth,
instead of a few imperfect translations on one subject, that may teach mechanical
devotion, but can never mentally illuminate the native mind.
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Bibliography and the sociology of texts
of the press in propagating it, are not self-evidently valid, and they all
too easily distort our understanding of the different and competitively
powerful realities of societies whose cultures are still primarily oral.
Yet, as Jowett told Colenso when congratulating him on completion
of the Maori New Testament, printing had helped to x the Maori
language albeit in one dialect and with some dangerous neologisms.
Colenso himself was later to make the point that the oral memory, as
a faculty, too easily absorbed and perpetuated the new and corrupt
words born of settlement and trade, taking up the simpler and degen-
erate forms used by the settlers. Had it not been for the missionaries
and Colensos printing, the language as it was at an early stage of Euro-
pean contact might well have been irretrievably lost.
Some drafts survive: one by Hobson of the preamble; one in the hand of Freeman,
Hobsons secretary, of the three articles and another version of the preamble; a fair
copy of a draft by James Busby. But they do not themselves constitute the English
text given to Williams to translate. Although Colenso provides an unrivalled
110
Oral culture, literacy, and print in early New Zealand
account of the treaty occasion, by far the most perceptive analysis of the texts
and their implications is that of R. M. Ross, Te Tiriti o Waitangi: Texts and
Translations, New Zealand Journal of History 6 (1972), 12967. The account I give
of the relationship of the texts is based wholly on Ross.
To add insult to injury, the Maori text printed as the rst schedule to the Act
contains, in the second article, numerous misprints.
111
Bibliography and the sociology of texts
That last example puts at its most extreme my argument about the
non-literate state of the nation in 1840 after ten years of intensive teach-
ing and ve years of proselytic printing. But even if we conne our-
selves to the Maori text, how literate were the signatories? As Cressy has
said, only one type of literacy is directly measurable the ability or
inability to write a signature and because the evidence of signatures or
marks is, in Schoelds words, universal, standard and direct, it has
come to displace the merely anecdotal, subjective, inescapably impres-
sionistic evidence found in missionary reports and hitherto accepted
by historians. Applying this test to the Treaty of Waitangi, what do we
nd? The number of signatories is in fact uncertain; estimates vary
from 512 to 541 and, in the manner common to many societies with
mass illiteracy, many of the names given were written out by the
government clerk on behalf of the chief concerned. On my count the
highest possible number of personal signatures, as distinct from crosses,
moko-patterns, or apparently quite meaningless marks, is seventy-
two. In almost every case the signatures are so painfully and crudely
It is also the most reductive form of literacy test. See David Cressy, Literacy and
the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor England (Cambridge, 1980), p. 53;
and R. S. Schoeld, The Measurement of Literacy in Pre-industrial England, in
Literacy in Traditional Societies, ed. Jack Goody (Cambridge, 1968), p. 319. Although
signatures are the only absolute test of minimal literacy, many who signed with a
mark may have been able to read but not write. See note 79, below.
See plate 5b for a sample. The treaty is supplemented and ultimately constituted
by a collection of sheets subscribed in different parts of the country between
6 February and 3 September 1840. In later times some Maori who could in fact write
their own names are said to have used their moko to give documents a more sacred
sign of approval, but in the 1840 treaty genuine moko appear to be rare. The
seventy-two signatures suggest a maximum literacy level of about 12 per cent or
13 per cent or, to use the international convention of stating illiteracy levels, an
illiteracy level of between 87 per cent and 88 per cent. Margaret Spufford, Small
Books and Pleasant Histories (London, 1981), p. 21, offers a convenient comparison.
In East Anglia in the seventeenth century 11 per cent of women, 15 per cent of
labourers, and 21 per cent of husbandmen could sign their own names, against
56 per cent of tradesmen and craftsmen, and 65 per cent of yeomen. In a survey
taken in 1848, European population in the larger Wellington area was given as 4824.
Of those, 2530 or some 52 per cent (1583 male, 947 female) were said to be able to
read and write, and 924 to be able to read only. A general summary of the Maori
population in much the same area taken in 1850 records (under Moral Condition)
112
Oral culture, literacy, and print in early New Zealand
written as to show clearly that they have not been penned by signator-
ies practised in writing and therefore uent in the art. We are forced
to conclude, given these numbers, that the Maori in the commemora-
tive plaque is unlikely to have been able to read what he was signing in
even the most literal way. Even if he could do that, the odds are loaded
against his knowing how to write his own name. Even if he could do
that, the evidence suggests that he wrote painfully and with only the
most elementary competence. Of course there were exceptions. But the
presumed wide-spread, high-level literacy of the Maori in the 1830s is a
chimera, a fantasy creation of the European mind. Even at Waitangi
the settlement was premised on the assumption that it was, for the
Maori, an oral-aural occasion.
Consider the way in which the treaty was presented: it was read out
in Maori by Henry Williams. That is, it was received as an oral state-
ment, not as a document drawn up in consultation with the Maori,
pondered privately over several days or weeks and offered nally as a
public communique of agreements reached by the parties concerned.
Without begging any questions about Pakeha intent to deceive, even
the Maori language itself was used against the Maori. First, much of the
detail of the English draft was presumed by Williams to be inexpress-
ible in Maori translation. Second, the forms of Maori used to commu-
nicate Pakeha intentions were, as Ruth Ross has said, not indigenous
Maori but Protestant Pakeha Missionary Maori, learnt from the dis-
tinctive dialect of the northern Ngapuhi tribe. Not only the concepts,
but many of the words, for all their Maori form, were English.
This is not to say that the Maori present were unaware of such things
but only that their mode of dealing with them was oral. It is a mode
which has its own dignities, but it has left virtually no matching record
to complement the Pakeha one. Those present were free to speak on
Wednesday, 5 February, but not thereafter. Hobson had intended
a total of 4711, of whom 1148 or some 24 per cent were said to be able to read and
write, and 414 to be able to read only. See Statistics of New Munster, New Zealand,
from 1841 to 1848 (Wellington, 1849), Table 30; and New Zealand: Further Papers
Relative to the Affairs of New Zealand [Papers by Command 1420.] (London, 1851),
p. 245.
113
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114
Oral culture, literacy, and print in early New Zealand
the extraneous aid of clothing, &c, from foreign nations. At the end of
that day the only one of public debate Maori opinion was clearly
opposed to the surrender of sovereignty and therefore of the absolute
control of their own lands.
The next day, Thursday 6 February (now celebrated as a public
holiday), some three to four hundred Maori were, in Colensos words,
scattered in small parties according to their tribes, talking about the
treaty, but evidently not understanding it. Nevertheless, Hobson now
wanted to make an end. Colensos printed report runs:
115
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116
Oral culture, literacy, and print in early New Zealand
me to sign that paper, but never told me what were the contents
thereof. [a comment implying Maori inability to read it].
The Governor: I am in hopes that no such reaction will
take place.
117
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118
Oral culture, literacy, and print in early New Zealand
119
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He says, Alas! an old man. He will soon be dead! and he was, but
the document lives on.
At this point we may return to textual criticism. The circumstances
described above do not mean that the treaty is a fraud and the docu-
ments useless. It means that they are only partial witnesses to the occa-
sion. Reconstructing a more authentic version of the understandings
reached between Maori and Pakeha in 1840 is a demanding task, but
not one unusually so to those who edit texts or construct statutes.
One of the most important elements in any such textual reconstruc-
tion is recognition of the Declaration of Independence (see plate 5a)
as a complementary document, rst subscribed on 28 October 1835 by
thirty-four chiefs of whom only four signed their own names. In the
next four years a further eighteen chiefs subscribed, of whom only
three signed (again with difculty) their own names. It was these chiefs
who constituted the invitation list for the meeting at Waitangi on 5
and 6 February 1840; it was these chiefs who were on Busbys private list
and whom he called upon to sign singly by their names as they were
written in the List of the Confederated Chiefs. (I quote Colensos
manuscript draft of his account: the printed version refers simply to
Busbys (private) list.) Because the last signature to the Declaration
had been subscribed as late as 22 July 1839, it is clear that this
Declaration of Independence continued to be a living afrmation
of Maori sovereignty. Its second article specically refers to Ko te
Kingitanga ko te mana . . . All sovereign power and authority was said
to reside entirely and exclusively in the hereditary chiefs and heads of
tribes in their collective capacity. The third article provided for annual
meetings at Waitangi, and it was these chiefs who were the main guests
there on 5 and 6 February 1840. As Claudia Orange has shown, Maori
understanding of the treaty was undoubtedly formed by their sense
that the independence (the rangatiratanga) and the sovereignty (the
mana) they had afrmed in 1835 and reafrmed by further subscrip-
tions as late as 1839, were not nullied by the treaty. British Colonial
Ofce attitudes may have changed in the meantime, but for the Maori
one document did not supersede the other: they lived together, one
complementing the other.
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Oral culture, literacy, and print in early New Zealand
It is in this context now that we must ask what it was that the Chiefs
of the Confederation are presumed to have surrendered at Waitangi in
agreeing to the rst article of the treaty. In all the English versions
of the treaty the chiefs cede to Her Majesty the Queen of England,
absolutely and without reservation, all the rights and powers of
Sovereignty. The question here is what the English meant and the
Maori understood by the word Sovereignty. Did it mean that the
chiefs gave up to the Crown their personal power and supreme status
within their own tribes, or was it only something more mundanely
administrative, like governorship? In fact the word used by Henry
Williams to translate Sovereignty was precisely that: kawanatanga, not
even a translation but a transliteration of Governor (kawana) with a
sufx to make it abstract. Such was his translation for the order of
morning service: that all our doings may be ordered by thy govern-
ance. What he signicantly omitted in translating Sovereignty (which
the Maori were being asked to surrender) was the genuine Maori word
mana, meaning personal prestige and the power that owed from it,
or even the word rangatiratanga, meaning chieftainship, the very words
used in 1835 to 1839 to afrm Maori sovereignty over New Zealand.
He had used both words in translating Corinthians chapter 15, v. 24
with its references to the kingdom of God and all authority and
power. By choosing not to use either mana or rangatiratanga to indi-
cate what the Maori would exchange for all the Rights and Privileges of
British subjects, Williams muted the sense, plain in English, of the
treaty as a document of political appropriation. The status of their
I do not impute to Williams any will to deceive the Maori by his choice of terms.
Attempts to establish a legal basis for the control of British subjects in New Zealand
by extra-territorial jurisdiction had proved unsuccessful. Furthermore, unless
Britain formally secured sovereignty, neither Britain nor the Maori could establish
an exclusive claim to the islands as against claims that might be made by other
European powers. (The Declaration of Independence of 1835 was a device to
establish the chiefs collective territorial rights and forestall an imminent French
claim.) In furthering both concerns, however dubious the exact legal status of the
treaty, the British Government was anxious to secure Maori assent and genuinely
hopeful that British sovereignty would not disrupt Maori life. Nevertheless, cultural
and linguistic suppositions on both sides, compounded by European assumptions
121
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assent is already questionable enough, but (since he did not read) had
any Maori heard that he was giving up his mana or rangatiratanga he
could never have agreed to the treatys terms. Williamss Maori version
of Hobsons composite English one set the trap which King Lear fell
into when (in a version published in 1608) he said to Albany and
Cornwall:
about literacy and the status of documents, frustrated that hope, and later (if then
still unforeseen) patterns of immigration destroyed it. Williams certainly shows
himself, at that critical time, to have been less sensitive than Colenso to Maori
modes of understanding.
A succinct and balanced account of many of the issues pertinent to the treaty
and British annexation of New Zealand will be found in Mary Boyds Cardinal
Principles of British Policy in New Zealand, The Treaty of Waitangi: Its Origins
and Signicance (Wellington, 1972), pp. 315. W. A. McKean discusses aspects of
international law as they affect the status and interpretation of the treaty (ibid.,
pp. 3548) but does not substantiate his claim that there is no substance in the
argument that the chiefs were misled or failed to understand the purport in English
of what they were signing (pp. 456, nn. 91 and 92). The best account of the
evolution of Colonial Ofce attitudes to British sovereignty and Maori interests
is Peter Adams, Fatal Necessity: British Intervention in New Zealand 18301847
(Auckland, 1977). An interesting account of later Maori interpretations of the treaty
is Claudia Orange, The Covenant of Kohimarama. A Ratication of the Treaty
of Waitangi, The New Zealand Journal of History 14 (April 1980), 6180. The
minutes of the Kohimarama Conference of July 1860 reveal confusion or ignorance
about the meaning of the treaty. One Ngatiawa chief said, It is true I received one
blanket. I did not understand what was meant by it; it was given to me without
any explanation by Mr Williams and Reihana. Paora Tuhaere dismissed the treaty
as Ngapuhis affair, and the Ngapuhi chiefs there present did reveal greater
understanding and acceptance of it as a covenant unifying Pakeha and Maori.
Tuhaere also remarked: The Treaty is right, but it came in the time of ignorance
and was not understood, adding that those Maori who signed but were not present
at Waitangi had least understanding of it. The Conference skirted the delicate issue
of sovereignty to stress rather the Queens role as protector, allowing the Maori to
believe that they retained sovereignty or mana over the land and political equality
with the Governor under the Queens protection.
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Oral culture, literacy, and print in early New Zealand
Fishing rights became a matter of contention when in 1983 the then Government
proposed to direct into the sea efuent from a synthetic petrol plant at Motunui.
The subsequent Report, Findings and Recommendations of the Waitangi Tribunal on
an Application . . . on Behalf of the Te Atiawa Tribe in Relation to Fishing Grounds in
the Waitara District (Wellington, 1983) includes a valuable rsum of many textual
issues raised by the present paper.
Sir Apirana Ngatas literal translation from the Maori of the second article reads:
The Queen of England conrms and guarantees to the Chiefs and Tribes and to all
the people of New Zealand the full possession of their lands, their homes and all
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Society, did not for a moment suppose that the chiefs were aware that
by signing the Treaty they had restrained themselves from selling their
land to whomsoever they will, and cited one Maori who, although he
had signed the treaty, had since offered land for sale privately. On being
told that he could not do that, he replied: What? Do you think I wont
do what I like with my own?
From a European point of view, one conditioned to accept and
apply document-based historical evidence as literally true or false, the
English versions of the treaty have proved a potent political weapon
in legitimating government of the Maori, even though standards of
textual and historical truth also derived from European traditions
oblige us to acknowledge the Maori version as the only authoritative
document, that which states the terms and bears the written marks of
assent. On any reasonable reading of the Maori, it surrenders less and
guarantees more than any of the English versions. Even so, from a
their possessions, but the chiefs assembled and all other chiefs yield to the Queen
the right to alienate such lands which the owners desire to dispose of at a price
agreed upon between the owners and person or persons appointed by the Queen
to purchase on her behalf (The Treaty of Waitangi: an Explanation (Christchurch,
1950), p. 7).
Letter begun 24 January 1840, cited by Bagnall and Petersen, pp. 9394. Again I
acknowledge the kind help of Paul McHugh. The Crowns pre-emptive right to
extinguish the native title had been long practised in colonizing overseas territories
and was most vigorously afrmed in the Royal Proclamation of 1763 which was seen
as protecting North American Indian lands from unscrupulous appropriation.
The English land law assumption that all rights to land derive from a grant by the
Crown clearly did not apply to new territories, where the aboriginal title rested
at law, not upon a grant from the Crown, but (exceptionally) upon the Crowns
recognition of aboriginal rights. To the British mind, however, it was unthinkable
that aboriginal and heathen notions of title should control the form of land
transfers to British settlers, and so the pre-emptive right was adopted as a way of
converting Crown-recognized title into Crown-derived title. From the British point
of view, it was undoubtedly seen as preventing the chaos which must have followed
from the operation of a mixed system, and at the same time (if fairly administered)
as protecting the Maori from land-jobbers. One has to concede that neither
Hobson nor Williams could have communicated the full import of pre-emptive
to those who were asked to assent to the treaty, but by so simplifying the issue in his
translation of the second article into Maori, Williams again showed less readiness
than did Colenso to penetrate the Native mind and explain the thing in all its
bearings . . . so that it should be their own very act and deed. One might be accused
of arguing from hindsight were it not for Colensos contemporary insight.
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Oral culture, literacy, and print in early New Zealand
Maori point of view, the truth is not so conned, and signatures bear
no absolute authority. For the Maori, as I have already indicated, the
text was the consensus arrived at through discussion, something
much more comprehensive and open than the base document or any
one of its extant versions. Williams later defended himself, saying that
he had explained the text orally; but only the documents survived, and
successive Governments have chosen the English ones to act on when
these best served their ends. At a later treaty meeting, Mohi Tawhai said
that the sayings of the Pakeha oat light, like the wood of the whau
tree, and always remain to be seen, but the sayings of the Maori sink to
the bottom like stone. Manuscript and print, the tools of the Pakeha,
persist, but words which are spoken fade as they fall.
Print is still too recent for the Maori. Oral traditions live on in a
distrust of the literal document, and in a refusal by many young Maori
to accept political decisions based on it. Pakeha and Maori versions of
the past continue to collide. During a Russian scare in the 1880s the
Government of the day pre-empted the purchase of Maori land at
Bastion Point, a ne site overlooking Auckland harbour. When a more
recent Government proposed to resell it for luxury housing, it was
occupied for more than a year by Maori protesters. In my minds eye, I
can still read the vivid television news pictures of police and military
vehicles as they moved in on 25 May 1978 to evict the squatters. At such
moments literacy denes itself for many as a concordat of sword
and pen, of politics and script to the dismay and frustration of those
Cited by Ross, op. cit., p. 152, from British Parliamentary Papers, 1845, XXXIII, 108,
p. 10. Despite the transience of the spoken word, there is a wealth of Maori speech
in manuscripts still to be studied. Some are tapu and unable to be consulted, but
the written transcripts of evidence delivered in Maori land courts are a rich source
of information about language and forms of oral witness to land rights as declaimed
in court. Elsdon Best records that when he was secretary to the Land Commission,
an old man recited 406 songs for him from memory, a genealogy which took three
days to recite and included over 1400 persons in proper sequence, and much other
evidence on the occupation of certain lands: The Maori School of Learning: Its
Objects, Methods and Ceremonies (Wellington, 1923), p. 5. See also Jane McRae,
Maori Manuscripts in Public Collections, New Zealand Libraries 44 (March 1983),
811.
125
Bibliography and the sociology of texts
See, for example, Donna Awatere, Maori Sovereignty (Auckland, 1984), and Bruce
Jesson, Reviewing the Sovereignty Debate, The Republican 48 (December 1983),
317, 1920.
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Oral culture, literacy, and print in early New Zealand
Report pp. 5263; the immediate quotation is on p. 55. A Bill of Rights for New
Zealand. A White Paper (Wellington, 1985), p. 37, proposes that the Treaty of
Waitangi is to be regarded as always speaking and shall be applied to circumstances
as they arise so that effect may be given to its spirit and true intent. Nevertheless,
Pakeha intentions to give legal effect to the treaty in a Bill of Rights, however
strongly entrenched, would destroy its tapu state and make it vulnerable to
legislative change: its mana would then be lost. As indicated in note 35 above, an
oral culture will generate, not a xed text, but a variety of versions which have their
local and topical value in giving life to the wairua of the text which comprehends
and transcends them all. Treaties are likely to become a more frequently used
resource, not only for ethnohistorical studies, but for concepts of text in complex
political, linguistic, and cultural contexts, for their mixed modes of oral and written
discourse, for their synchronic and diachronic dimensions, for their continuing
human implications (they are not exactly dramatic ctions), and for the forcing
circumstances which compel the law to offer what are essentially editorial
judgements. David R. Miller of the Newberry Library tells me that the microlming
of 9,552 Iroquois treaty documents has been completed, and an associated study
published: The History and Culture of Iroquois Diplomacy: an Interdisciplinary Guide
to the Treaties of the Six Nations and League (Syracuse, 1985). The value of treaties as
texts for analysis of diplomacy as a matter of cultural as well as political contact is
well demonstrated in Dorothy V. Joness Licence for Empire: Colonisation by Treaty
(Chicago, 1983). A. S. Keller, O. J. Lissitzyn, and F. J. Mann, Creation of Rights of
Sovereignty through Symbolic Acts, 14001800 (New York, 1938) remains a
convenient historical summary of European attitudes and practice.
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Bibliography and the sociology of texts
spiritually precious, in which Maori and Pakeha share the Queens pro-
tection as equal partners. So understood, the treaty in Maori is a sacred
covenant, one which is tapu, and with a mana which places it above the
law, whereas the English versions distort its effect and remain caught in
the mesh of documentary history and juridical process. As the Maori
always knew, there is a real world beyond the niceties of the literal text
and in that world there is in fact a providential version now editing
itself into the status of a social and political document of power and
purpose. The physical versions and their fortuitous forms are not the
only testimonies to intent: implicit in the accidents of history is an ideal
text which history has begun to discover, a reconciliation of readings
which is also a meeting of minds. The concept of an ideal text as a cul-
tural and political imperative is not imposed on history but derives
from it and from an understanding of the social dynamics of textual
criticism.
Colenso died in 1899 at the ripe old age of eighty-eight, thirty-six
hours after penning his last letter to Coupland Harding. He left to
Harding two hundred pounds for his son, William Colenso Harding,
and all his printing materials, including my sole composing-stick
with which I did so much work both in England and in New Zealand.
Harding was a worthy recipient and was later to note: It was in this
stick that the Maori New Testament of 1837 was set, and also the Treaty
of Waitangi Truly, a venerable relic.
Letter to G. Robertson, 1 March 1899: Mitchell MS AC 83/4.
128