The Variety of Scholarly Editing

G. Thomas Tanselle In the editorial activity especially in the scholarly editions the fundamental question has always been whether to approach a text historically or not. If the historical approach is chosen there!s another question comming up that is" how do the editors evaluate and reconstruct the past# Is there a place for the sub$ective component or the editing has to be completely ob$ective# %ll of these questions have been ansewered in a lot of different ways hence the variety of critical editions that exist. &hichever the method another important question is" is the editor aiming for some historical understanding# Since most of the texts are conserved in artifacts an editor can answer this question in a different ways because these artifacts can be considered 'witnesses from the past( or 'ob$ect of current utility(. So is it necesary to approach a text historically# There are two )inds of human expression" the one which uses intangible media transmitted via instructions and the one which uses tangible media. The transmission and conservation of both is problematic but in a different way. &henever we thin) of paintings and sculptures tangible media we thin) of artifacts which are the same thing as the wor)s themselves therefore 'editing( the artifact equals 'editing( the wor). This doesn!t happen with the wor)s which use the intangible media" we never get the actual wor) only the documents which are supposed to help us to understand what the wor) had actually been. The documents we get can never be *++, certain so the creation of the text of wor) is always a matter of con$ecture. -owadays we can tal) about two types of editing" the 'creative( editing in which the editor is collaborating with an author by correcting and improving his manuscript and the 'scholarly( editing underta)en by professional scholars whose purpuse is to reconstruct the text as it was meant by it!s author. In this case a historical aprroach is almost necesarily employed. The nonhistorical approach was generally supported by some schools and movements li)e -ew .riticism and /econstructivism. The held that the act of reading didn!t need a critical approach to the meaning of the text $ust because the saw the texts $ust as some groupings of words and punctuation signs. Therefore the followers of these schools didn!t see any point in altering or improving the texts of documents. /espite this practising of a nonhistorical approach the textual criticism has been mainly historically oriented since it!s very creation by the %lexandrian librarians. The main question explored by the editors has always been" what were the author!s last intentions# &hat what meant by him# Textual criticism consists usually in comparing the surviving texts of documents to evaluate their reliability as some sort of messages from the past. So as for the historical approach there are two different positions whose origin dates bac) to the %lexandrian library i.e. II 0.." does the editor have to )eep his intrusions and modifications to a minimum o is he supposed to remove and correct any corruptions accumulated in the text# Therefore the dilemma of the textual criticism is the way the human $ugdement is presented in the critical editions. Editors have to decide wheter we )now past better through artifacts or our imagination. The first position the conservative one is the one most commonly held but it has one susbstancial flaw" documentary text may contain errors and may be inaccurate so it!s the editor!s wor) to correct them. This style of wor) is also much easier than wor)ing with the editor!s

con$ectures. 1n the other hand editors who hold the second one run the ris) of being inaccurate but the incertainity is the price to be paid for the possibility of finding a more accurate text. The conservative approach results in a 'photographic( or a facsimile edition while the second one produces what we are used to call 'critical editions(. %nyway although the theory is very clear in practice there!s no absolutely conservative editions neither absolutely critical ones. Every method has it!s pros and cons and 'a coherent ratoinale of approach is properly a desideratum of textual scholarship(. It became possible to tal) about the editorial con$ecture only when the wolrdwide corpus of printed boo)s and manuscripts has been compilated because there!s enough versions and lectures to compare. The idea of this method proposing relations and compare belongs to 2achmann and it!s the very first compulsory step in any historical investigation. %nother problem comming up after this is the distinction between recension loo)ing for a common stemma in the surviving variants and readings and con$ectural emendation readings proposed by the editor. 0oth of these however are based on the human $udgement. The 2achmannian tradition urges to ma)e editiong extremely rigorous and always see)s for the ob$ectivity. There!re two different forms of the 2achmannian tradition. The first one uses statistical methods to analy3e the variants and the second one also called 'the best text( approach uses a single text which is supposed to be the best document and only supplies the obvious flows and errors. -owadays the range of goals literary and textual critics are aiming for go from considering a text a product of a single individual to those that consider wor)s to be a product of a collaboration $ust because all wor)s in all media can be view and considered both ways. The way the editor is going to approach his wor) is his own personal decision. 2ast but not least we have to mention that every single approach mentioned here is what ma)es the editorial activity inseparable from the literary criticism even though the textual criticism has been mainly viewed as a mecanical and completely ob$ective activity compared to the literary one. Textual criticism is open to new controversies and new debates since it!s able to put up some questions which will never be answered with certainity. Aidan Imamkulieva