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English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, Volume 38, Number 2,

1995, pp. 195-203 (Review)

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/elt/summary/v038/38.2.small.html

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"Why Edit Anything at All?"
Textual Editing and Postmodernism:
A Review Essay

Ian Small
University of Birmingham

George Bornstein and Ralph G. Williams, eds.

Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. viii + 318 pp. $45.00

PALIMPSESTIS AVOLUME OFESSAYS by some of today's most

distinguished textual critics. It had its origins in a conference held in
the University of Michigan in 1991, and if the book is a fair reflection of
that conference's proceedings, it must have been a particularly stimu-
lating forty-eight hours. It is a consistently interesting collection which
takes as its subject some of the key issues in literary studies today.
Indeed, in keeping with a recent trend among editorial theorists, the
volume claims that issues encountered by textual scholars are the
central issues of the discipline, and in this sense it aspires to a larger
readership than the ranks of textual-editors.
Unfortunately, the book's sheer size and diversity makes a review
which does justice to all its contributions impossible. However, one of
the merits of the collection (and, by implication, of George Bornstein's
and Ralph G. Williams's editing) is that we are invited to read it not just
as a series of occasional pieces, but rather as an examination of "post-
modernist" thinking about textuality and textual identity, issues which,
as I have suggested, reach well beyond debates about the current state
of editorial theory. Most of the individual essays are of an extremely
high standard and well worth reading on their own account; my com-

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ments, however, will restrict themselves to what I perceive to be the

larger argument of the volume.
The title itself draws attention to the book's underlying thesis, that
all texts possess a "multilayered" quality which is often hidden from the
reader, but which can be investigated and illuminated by the modern
textual scholar. In the words of George Bornstein's lucid introduction,
"although we tend to think of major works as fixed or stable, a surprising
number of them display upon examination a palimpsestic quality. . . .
Increasingly, such works have come to seem contingent and constructed
rather than unitary and fixed" (1-2). The issue at stake here is the
opposition between postmodernist concepts of meaning—that is, its
emphasis on indeterminacy, arbitrariness and artifactuality—»and
those concepts of authority, intention and determinate meaning which
have traditionally been used in literary studies. The editors suggest that
textual editing must not only embrace postmodernism theoretically, but
that it also must find ways of realizing its implications at a practical
level. In this sense, Bornstein suggests, the metaphor of the palimpsest
is useful, because it places an emphasis on what he terms "versions,"
rather than ideas of closure and stability (well represented, Bornstein
claims, in the famous New Critical metaphor of the "well-wrought urn").
The text-editor seeking a cohabitation with postmodernism, though,
encounters two kinds of difficulties. First there is the practical problem
of how best to represent those "versions" in a neutral way in a scholarly
edition, an issue which is aired in this volume by discussions of the
potential of electronic texts; secondly, and I think more importantly,
there are the ontological consequences of postmodernism itself. These
last concerns are crystallized in questions of value and identity-<-in
Peter L. Shillingsburg's words, the question "what then IS the work
itself." Perhaps a simpler way of formulating all this is in terms of a
series of issues which were once straightforward for traditional literary
critics and editors. In what ways does a postmodernist epistemology
problematize the familiar questions: "How do we edit texts," "Why do we
edit the texts which we do edit," and "Why do we edit texts at alH*
Few of the essays in this volume address all these questions, but read
together they set up an interesting dialogue about them. Many of the
contributors focus on the problem of authority and hierarchy; that is,
whether the editor should represent the palimpsestic quality of a
text—its "versions"—and, if so, how to achieve this ambition in a neutral
or value-free way. Implicit in these questions are a set of political

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judgments about the role and responsibility of editors vis-Ã -vis their
readers: in simple terms, should editors aim to make value-judgements
on behalf of'the reader; or should they rather aim to help readers make
their own judgments? For D. C. Greetham, in common with several
essayists, embracing a postmodernist epistemology entails the latter
option: indeed, his use of terms such as "concealment" and "denial"
suggests that editorial decisions have a moral dimension:
[PJostmodernist editing operates under the assumptions of poststructuralist
différance, the continued deferral of absolute meaning, and the texts it
produces are scriptible not lisible, open not closed. External display of
structure is not inevitable in such an enterprise, but it can be an advantage.
. . . While it is true that externalization and display do not in themselves
guarantee the reader's poststructuralist play in the text, and it is true as well
that the converse (concealment of structure does not forbid readerly recon-
structions) is also not an automatic response to such texts, the almost
universal adoption of concealment over display in eclectic editions cumula-
tively endorses a disjunct between text and apparatus inimical to the contin-
ued intertextual interpénétration of the two. The procedural denial of
imported [misjquotation, from apparatus or elsewhere into the text is also a
denial of the basic epistemology of textual criticism. (16-18)
In the essay which follows, Peter L. Shillingsburg also demands that
access to the work requires access to all its texts or embodiments or
versions, and (like Greetham), he proposes this for the purpose of
"freeing" the reader from the arbitrary authority of the editor; indeed
Shillingsburg suggests that a rigorous pursuit of postmodernism should
lead editors to "keep value laden terms like established, definitive, and
total and complete out of their descriptions" (40). Moreover, both
Greetham and Shillingsburg argue that the practical corollary of this
political ambition exists in the power of the microchip: that—in Shill-
ingsburg's words—electronically-held text empowers readers to "iden-
tify the form, or forms, of the work they wish to deal with" (40).
If this was all that was being said, the volume would not be at all
noteworthy; after all, other textual theorists have been making similar
arguments for some time. However Shillingsburg is also interested in
the whole concept of what the "work" means—in the terms I used above,
he is concerned with the relationship between text-editing, textual
identity and ontology. In attempting to clarify that relationship, Shill-
ingsburg offers, as a kind of thought-experiment, a postmodernist
heresy (taken from George Steiner, an arch-idealist if ever there was
one) that what we call the work "is not made up of any particular words

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but, finding its expression in words of a variety of texts, the work is a

spiritual presence that lives through earthen vessels and transcends the
limitations of any particular embodiment of it" (38). Sbillingsburg's
point is that what we recognize as the work seems to exist independently
of any embodiments of it—that is, independently of any palimpsestic
inscription. In his essay Shillingsburg offers this suggestion chiefly in
order to demonstrate that a text existing in an electronic form does not
present any more inherent disadvantages than one which exists in the
more familiar codex form. This may indeed be the case, but Sbill-
ingsburg's "rhetorical questions" let Pandora out of the box. For if it is
true that the work exists independently of any its embodiments (as a
whole tradition of philosophical aesthetics, and most recently Richard
Wollheim, maintain) then why do we need to edit anything at all?
Moreover, if the "versions" do not impinge upon the identity of the work,
then why does the reader need to know about them?
In terms of postmodernist editing, Sbillingsburg's question—"What
constitutes a work?"—amounts to asking, What constitutes the identity
of a work, the identity of its versions and the nature of the relationship
between them? Here the metaphor of the palimpsest turns out to be less
useful than the editors suggest. The palimpsest recognizes not the work,
only its versions; moreover it takes the identity of those versions for
granted. So the "palimpsest" is simply there to be seen if we look hard
enough for it. George Bornstein argues as much in his introduction to
the volume, when he elaborates an opposition between versions, which
are "there," and the notion of a final text, which is the (arbitrary) product
of the values, choices and hierarchies of a certain kind of editor:
A theory of versions tends to shift our conception of the artwork itself from
product to process. Emphasis centers on the multiplicity of versions them-
selves rather than on privileging a final one to which the others seem mere
stepping-stones. Seen in that way, the palimpsest becomes less a bearer of a
fixed final inscription than a site of the process of inscription, in which acts
of composition and transmission occur before our eyes. (3-4)
This programme is reminiscent of Shillingsburg's desire to "free" the
reader: postmodernist text-editing assumes that the presentation of
"versions" is theoretically (but perhaps not practically) unproblematic
and value-neutral. As Shillingsburg suggests, the reader's values will
define the work. However, at this point there is a logical contradiction
waiting to ambush the postmodernist editor. At its heart it concerns the

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issue which Shillingsburg glimpses, but fails to resolve: the ontological

relation between a work and its versions.
The consequence of a postmodernist epistemology (as it is repre-
sented in this volume) is that "works" are constructed by the values and
prejudices of the editor, but that "versions" are simply there to be
revealed. In this view, then, there is no obvious relationship between a
work and its versions. Rather the opposite: there is a systematic attempt
to maintain that the two are quite separate, in the sense that it is
assumed that the values which define the work are derived not from the
versions, but from the editor or reader-as-editor. (It might be worthwhile
noting in passing that "traditional" text-editing assumed a formative
relationship between the two, in the sense that the editor's handling and
priorizing of "versions" was solely in order to present—or in postmod-
ernist terms, "construct"—the work.) If this suggestion is the case—that
is, if there is no necessary relationship between versions and works—it
is difficult to see why we need to know about versions, and more
importantly, why we need to see all the versions simultaneously. Put
more bluntly, if there is no logical connection between a work and
versions, why bother with editions of any kind?
But of course this postmodernist logic is not correct, and for one
simple reason: the versions (that is, the palimpsest) are not simply
"there" to be revealed. Versions, just like works, have to be identified,
and that process of identification, like any other process of identification,
willy-nilly involves values and prejudices. Thus our labelling of the
world (and the literary- and art-worlds are no exception) can never be
value-free. Indeed the recognition that the world does not come to us
pre-labelled (and thus value-free) has been a staple of twentieth-century
philosophy, and goes back at least to the work of Charles Peirce. The
central question, then, is where do the values which allow the identifi-
cation of the versions come from? The last essay in the volume, Clay-
borne Carson's account of the problems produced by the task of editing
the work of Martin Luther King, Jr., suggests an answer.
In this instance, the attempt to visualize the palimpsest revealed
what Carson calls "intense and extensive" plagiarism in much of King's
work. The point to notice, as Carson himself acknowledges, is that such
a description is not neutral; the identification and labelling of the
versions necessarily involve a simultaneous evaluation of them. It is not
the case that textual features have been seen and at some later point
labelled (or judged); seeing them and labelling them are coterminous

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activities, in the sense that what we find is always predetermined by a

conceptual set. If a postmodernist epistemology is true, it is true of all
knowledge: the identification of versions is as value-laden as the iden-
tification of works. Furthermore, the concepts of plagiarism and origi-
nality only make sense in relation to two further concepts, those of the
integrity and identity of a work. In other words the identification of the
versions (or, in the editors' terms, the apparently neutral description of
the palimpsest) depends upon a prior value-judgment about what con-
stitutes the work in question. To his credit, Carson makes no attempt
to evade this dilemma and is open about the value-laden nature of his
own editorial practice in identifying versions. The presence of other
texts are described as "appropriations"—that is, as strategic, selft-con-
scious political borrowings:
Recent literary criticism has made much of the ^determinant relationship
between linguistic symbols and the reality they claim to symbolize. Likewise,
King and other black leaders have long recognized that the democratic
rhetoric they appropriate from white political leaders originally signified a
racial reality African-Americans found unacceptable. The black leaders'
achievement was in using the political vocabulary of the dominant culture
creatively and ironically in order to change that reality. For King and other
African-Americans, the appropriation of hegemonic texts was a political act.
(313)
Carson's practice articulates the postmodernist dilemma: for not only is
a neutral presentation of "versions" impossible, it is also turns out to be
undesirable. Indeed Carson feels that it his responsibility as an editor
to make precisely those value-judgments which Shillingsburg explicitly
exhorts editors to avoid. It might be thought that King's public reputa-
tion represents a special case, but what is true of King's works is true
of all works. Works are important in a culture precisely because they
reflect or embody one set of values and not another. If a work were
multivalent in all its versions, it is hard to see how it could possess any
cultural value at all, and why, therefore, any editor would want to edit
it or, for that matter, any reader would want to read it. If individual
readers were really free to make their own works, then literary art could
have no social value or function because the whole notion of the social
only makes sense in terms of collective activity (that is, shared, agreed
and known values). In other words, we would have no need for editors
or editions. If postmodernist editors pursued their principles with
rigour, they would run the risk of putting themselves out of a job. But
of course in practice, as Carson demonstrates, postmodernist editing

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cannot be pursued rigorously, because the identification of versions—

visualizing the palimpsest—is not, and can never be, a neutral activity.
The argument which I am offering, then, is that versions are not
simply "there" as the metaphor of the palimpsest suggests; rather, they
have to be identified, and that process of identification depends upon a
value-judgment about a work. Versions are always versions of some-
thing, and in this sense it is probably more useful to think about the
term "versions" as simply that name which we give to a group of texts
which are distinguished from other texts by virtue of the fact that we
identify a relationship between them, and between them and a particu-
lar work. In this view, the concept of the work is logically coterminous
with the identification of versions: that is, it is not possible to argue that
versions and works can be separated for they are part of the same
valuing activity. An example drawn from my own experience of editing
Oscar Wilde's plays may make my argument clearer.
The Herbert Beerbohm Tree Collection in the University of Bristol
contains a wealth of documents relating to Tree's production of Wilde's
A Woman of No Importance in 1893. One of those documents is what
Russell Jackson and I have taken to be a working promptbook of the
play which contains a list of the cast of the first production (in the
Haymarket Theatre in 1893) and of a later revival. In other words, the
promptbook relates both to the first run (and therefore may possibly
have had Wilde's authority) and to a revival after Wilde's death. What
claims do we make on behalf of this document when we allege that it is
a version of A Woman of No Importance? Are the inscriptions within the
promptbook (whatever they are) to count as a version? If so, what
inscriptions exactly? Is the typed text a version in the same sense as the
marginal comments and emendations are? Do all the emendations have
the same status? Do emendations which refer to the revival matter in
the same way as emendations which relate to the 1893 production? More
pertinently, perhaps, how do we distinguish between these different
sorts of emendations?
In response, the postmodernist editor might argue these are exactly
the sorts of decisions that should be left to the reader, that the editor's
responsibility is only to reproduce the promptbook, a task which is now
conceivable given the resources of hypertext. The difficulty with this
answer is that it fails to acknowledge that the identification of the
promptbook as a document worth reproducing is itself the result of a
value-judgment. Russell Jackson and I initially selected the promptbook

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from all the other documents in the Tree Collection because we identi-
fied it as possessing a relationship with a work we knew as A Woman
of No Importance. If we had not come to the library with an idea of what
to look for—that is, those documents bearing a relationship to a particu-
lar work—we literally would not have known what to do. The only reason
I know that an article in a nineteenth-century periodical is not a version
of a particular Wilde play is because I carry in my head a concept of the
work (the play) which allows me to generate a closed set of the features
which define it. Of course it is possible that my concept of the work will
change over time because there is a dynamic relationship between the
work and versions. But the important point to bear in mind is that there
always are (and there always must be) boundaries to that relationship.
This circumstance in turn is simply a consequence of human cognition,
of the ways in which we label the world.
The dynamic nature of this relationship can be illustrated by another
example. In 1991 I was in the company of Peter Raby in the William
Andrews Clark Memorial Library when he discovered a document which
he identified as the earliest known scenario of The Importance of Being
Earnest.1 Most of the details—of character, plot, and so forth—contained
in the scenario were quite different from the work which we recognize
as The Importance of Being Earnest. So how did Raby know that this
document was indeed a version of Wilde's most famous play? In practice,
the judgment was immediate and intuitive, and one which all present
concurred in. But if we tried to dismantle that agreement, we would
find a very complex process of evaluation at work in which the scenario
was compared not simply to a printed text of The Importance of Being
Earnest, but to the whole panoply of versions which had already been
identified. Some of those versions resemble the scenario as much as they
do the printed text. Perhaps the way to understand this cognitive
process is not via the metaphor of the palimpsest, but by means of
Wittgenstein's notion of family resemblance. At the very least, we can
say that the identification of version is not a rule-governed activity. Like
critical judgments, it depends upon a complex set of evaluative proc-
esses.

The point to emphasize in all this is that the postmodernist editor

works under exactly the same conditions: without a concept of a work
to guide the identification and selection of versions, such an editor has
no choice but to reproduce everything written, literally every mark on
every page. Indeed in the case of a play, which is a social text, why not

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also include every performance? Such a Herculean (and ultimately

pointless) task ought to make even the most liberal-minded editors stop
in their tracks. My example is admittedly an extreme one, but it has the
advantage of illustrating very starkly a truth which all editors, post-
modern and traditional, must face up to: we simply cannot escape
value-judgments. In this sense it is significant that in other areas of the
discipline some critics, interested in the origins of art, have begun to
turn away from the postmodernist project in order to revive older
concepts of aesthetic integrity and aesthetic identity, because it is only
such concepts which permit an understanding of the social functions and
value of cultural artifacts: that is to say, a recognition of the social nature
of art and literature logically requires a recognition not of arbitrariness
and indeterminacy, but of precisely their opposites.2 Art and literature
cannot have social functions unless, at some point in time and for some
readers, they possess determinate meanings—that is, they exist as
works, and not as versions. In this respect it may be that the real
responsibility of the editor is not to give an illusory freedom to the
reader, but rather, as Claybome Carson does, consciously and openly to
make value-judgments on behalf of the reader. Perhaps the socially
useful task of the editor is to continue to do what generations of editors
have been doing—not attempting to make "final" texts, but producing
works useful for their readers in their time.

Notes
1. See Peter Raby, The Making of The Importance of Being Earnest," Times Literary Supplement,
no. 4629 (December 1991), 13.
2. A full discussion of this development is beyond the scope of a review essay. However, my own
interest in this line of argument, developed in collaboration with a colleague, may be found in Josephine
Guy and Ian Small, Politics and Value in English Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993); other recent works which I judge to be of a similar spirit include: Claire Badaracco, The Editor
and the Question of Value: Proposal," TEXT, 1 (1984), 41-43; Stein Haugom Olsen, The End of Literary
Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Colin Falck, Myth, Truth and Literature
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and David Novitz, The Integrity of Aesthetics,*
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 48 (1990), 9-20.

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