0 REATIVE COMPOSITION IN WORDSWORTH,

TENNYSON, AND DICKINSON

SUPy

University of Virginia Press Charlottesville and London

Umveraty of Virgin^^ University of VitginlJ 'M»'bytl..Reo,ora„dV»

Printed in the Urti.ed States of America on ac.d-fr.e paper

Pirst published 2009

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Library of congress Ca..lo^ng-in-Public.ti„„Dat,

siUon'in Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Dickinson / Text as process: creative

p. cm. includes bibliographical refaen«s »^^^^^

1. Wordsworth, ^ ^Criticism, Textual. 3. Dickinson, Emily, Tennyson. B™.' '809-^ on,1809-18y^-^""™ ,

1830-1886-Criticism. Textual. I. Title. PR5893.B87 2009

821'.7—dc22 2008033600

, j,„wines from the inside back cover of Trinity Frontispiece: A page of Tennyson ermission of the Master and Fellows Notebook 15 (0.15.15). (Reproduced with of Trinity College. Cambridge)

"I hardly know anymore who and where I am." "None of us knows that, as soon as we stop fooling ourselves."

—Martin Heidegger, "Conversation on a Country Path"

o.

I

List of Illustrations viii

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

L Contextualizing Process: Three Perspectives on Genetic Criticism 9

2. Theorizing Process: Origins, Agency, Intention 38

3. Reclaiming Process: Toward a Compositional Method 57

4. Wordsworth's Process 75

5. Tennyson's Process 117

6. Dickinson's Process 168

7. A Philosophy of Composition: The Coming-into-Being of the Literary Work 215

Notes 239

Bibliography 269

Index 287

PJlLtc c 0>lyU>

1. Wordsworth: early Prelude draft 94

2. Wordsworth: early Prelude draft 95

3. Wordsworth: draft for the end of The Excursion 113

4. Wordsworth: draft for the end of The Excursion 114

5. Wordsworth: ink scribble on Ruined Cottage draft 127

6. Tennyson: first-draft sequence for "Morte d'Arthur" 129-31

7. A spatial map of Tennyson's The Holy Grail notebook 137

8. A compositional map for Tennyson's Idylls of the King 142-43

9. Collected editions of Tennyson's 148

10. Tennyson: draft sequence for "Enid's Song" 161-63

11. Dickinson: "Fortitude incarnate" 185

12. Dickinson: "As Frost is best conceived" 189

13. Dickinson: "Those fair—fictitious People" 192-93

14. Dickinson: "Crisis is sweet and yet the Heart" 200-201

15. Dickinson: "Your thoughts dont have words every day" 205

16. Dickinson: "A little madness in the Spring" 209

17. Wordsworth: making the pen work in Ruined Cottage draft 222

18. Dickinson: "The Sea said 'Come' to the Brook" 234

viii

I want to begin by thanking the various institutions that have supported this project in substantial ways. Manuscript research at libraries in the United Kingdom and the United States was funded by an AHRC Innova­tion Award in 2003-4 for which I am extremely grateful. Lancaster Uni­versity also kindly granted me a sabbatical term at the very start and end of the project. While undertaking manuscript work, I was based at the Wbrdsworth Trust for three months and wish to thank Jeff Cowton, as cu­rator, and the late Robert Woof, as director, for their professional assistance but also for the warmth of their welcome into the community. I also thank Pamela Woof, Ann Lambert, and others at the Trust for their encourage­ment and support. Work on Tennyson's manuscripts took place at Trinity College, Cambridge, and the Houghton Library, Harvard. The librarians at Trinity were extremely helpful, and Clare Hall, Cambridge, allowed me to stay as a visiting scholar and be part of a supportive postgraduate commu­nity there. I would like to thank the staff of the Houghton Library for their helpfulness, particularly Betty Falsey, Tom Ford, and Susan Halpert. My thanks also to the curator of manuscripts, Leslie Morris. The Department of English and American Literature at Harvard University also kindly per­mitted affiliation, and the British Literature Colloquium group there al­lowed me to benefit from their seminar. Finally, my thanks to Amherst College Library (Special Collections) and to Daria D'Arienzo, curator, as well as to Tevis Kimball at the Jones Library, Amherst. During my research abroad, various people made me welcome, in particular James Engell, Leah Price, and the graduate students at Harvard. I also want to thank Isobel Armstrong for her company and conversation along the Charles River,

ix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

which was a gift I did not expect, and Christopher Ricks for two Hvely and constructive conversations.

I am grateful to GilUan Beer and Susan Manning for their encourage­ment at the very earliest stages of the project, when it was most needed, as well as for constant support throughout my academic career. Others who are always intellectually generous and deserving of my thanks and who have contributed here include James Butler, Stephen Gill, and Stephen Parrish. I am also indebted to James McLaverty and Paul Eggert for their kindness and willingness to respond to core chapters of the book and to Peter Shillingsburg for involving me in his annual Symposium on Textual Studies, which has been extremely stimulating. At Lancaster I have been fortunate in the support of colleagues—particularly Simon Bainbridge, Arthur Bradley, Jo Carruthers, Cathy Clay, Keith Hanley, Tony Pinkney, and Michael Sanders—as well as that of the Reading Group, Tracy Mansell, Caroline Rose, and Brighid Webster. My thanks to Sheila Fyfe for check­ing my French and German and to Charlotte Avery, Ben Quash, Bart Van Es, and Wei-Wei Yeo-Lee for being constant friends, critics, and readers. Finally, I wish to thank my brother, my sister Gill, and my parents for their unwavering faith in me, and last—but never least—John Hilliard.

Some of the material in the book has been previously published elsewhere. The section on "Denial of Origins' in chapter 2 appears in an extended form in Textual Cultures (FaU 2007): 100-117. Chapter 3 appeared in an ear­lier form (here significantly revised) in TEXT 17 (2005): 55-91; a much fuller discussion of unintentional meaning than the one given here in chapter 3 occurs in an article for The Emily Dickinson Journal 14 (2005): 24-61. Mate­rial on Wordsworthian microanalysis in chapter 4 previously appeared in Studies in Romanticism 44 (Fall 2005): 399-421. Thanks to Wayne Storey at TEXT and Textual Cultures and David Wagenknecht at Studies in Romanti­cism for allowing reproduction of previously published material.

All images from Wordsworth's manuscripts are reproduced by permis­sion of the Wordsworth Trust, Dove Cottage, Grasmere.

All images from Tennyson's manuscripts held at Trinity College, Cam­bridge, are reproduced with the kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge.

All images from Tennyson's manuscripts held at The Houghton Li­brary, Harvard, are reproduced by permission of The Houghton Library, Harvard University © The Presidents and Fellows of Harvard College.

The Tennyson transcription from MS Ashley 2104 pages 24-25 is made with the kind permission of The British Library. © The British Library. All Rights Reserved.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

All images from Emily Dickinson's manuscripts are reproduced by permission of The Houghton Library, Harvard University. © The Presi­dent and Fellows of Harvard College.

Texts of poems are reprinted and transcribed by permission of the pub­lishers and Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickin­son: Variorum Edition, Ralph W. Franklin, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: Har­vard University Press, Belknap Press, Copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1951,1955,1979,1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

xi

i o

This book is about the Hterary text before it becomes a completed work of art. It takes as its focus the prepublication work, the draft materials, that constitute text as process. For too long, textual process has been treated as the province of scholarly editors or drawn on in a largely secondary way by critics delving below the surface of the published text. The time has come for a reevaluation of this alternative aspect of the literary work. This study presents textual process as something not only of interest to editors and textual theorists but as material worthy of philosophical definition and'a full critical response.

The book has two primary objectives. First, it seeks to understand the nature of the text in a state of process and its status relative to the completed work. Second, it aims to develop a critical method and a hermeneutics for interpreting the text in this state. Put simply: we need to understand what text as process is, and then think about what to do with it.

In his essay "Genetic Texts," the German textual critic Hans Walter Gabler declares, "Fundamentally the issue is whether, critically, the pro­cess of the writing is, or is not, integral to the product of the writing."' Such an issue is of central importance to this book. Although it is focused on the draft materials of a work, this study is ultimately concerned with enlarging our definition of "text" to understand text as process alongside the com­pleted text. It does not seek to define textual process as something entirely apart from the text in a completed state but as part of the continuum of the text, for which the concept of a single, stable state is in part an illusion. Necessarily, however, understanding process demands a recognition of its difference from the final product as well as its vital connection to it. It must be allowed to be both a part and apart.

1

TEXT AS PROCESS

This book presents a methodology for the study of draft materials. In terms of future use it aims to provide a way of responding to textual pro­cess that can be widely used, disputed, and enlarged, forming the basis of a new subdiscipline. However, since it is the first study of this kind, and since such a methodology does not yet exist, it also provides a more fundamental definition of what scholars understand textual process to be. It examines the status of this material in philosophical terms, as well as explaining why a methodology for interpreting it has not existed until now (in Anglo-American studies at least), and it presents a new approach centered on re­claiming intention as a complex shifting state within process. The book seeks to articulate a self-reflective critical practice that thinks about what is being undertaken as it undertakes it.

The work is timely. The approaches it suggests could only really have come about at the end of the twentieth and the start of the twenty-first cen­turies. Only from the 1970s onward has Anglo-American editing advanced to a point that allows for the editing of literary works not merely in terms of a final single-state text but in multiple versions and with full reproduction of draft materials. The kind of critical work this book advocates can only begin to be widely practiced now, when the draft materials of many major authors are more accessible than ever before (in facsimile and scholarly edi­tions as well as high-quality web archives).^ It remains the case, however, that although access to such material has significantly increased, there has been, as yet, no attempt to respond to it in a systematic way within the Anglo-American scholarly community. Such books as have been written in this area tend to be viewed as offshoots from textual criticism and tend to focus on the writings of a specific author rather than offering larger ex­plorations of the nature and interpretation of the materials.

There are certain practitioners and theorists nevertheless who need to be acknowledged as influential for this work, primarily those textual crit­ics with a heightened awareness of their relation to literary criticism. These include Jack Stillinger's Coleridge and Textual Instability and Multiple Au­thorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius and Hershel Parker's Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons. More editorially centered studies that have also proved valuable include Philip Gaskell's From Writer to Reader: Studies in Edito­rial Method (with its useful range of editorial/authorial examples); Donald Reiman's The Study of Modern Manuscripts; John Bryant's The Fluid Text; D. C. Greetham's excellent Theories of the Text; and Philip Cohen's edited collection Devils and Angels: Textual Editing and Literary Theory.

Jack Stillinger and Hershel Parker require further consideration here as the two Anglo-American scholars whose work seems most to anticipate this study. Stillinger's work consciously straddles the text-critical/literary-

2

INTRODUCTION

critical divide, structurally and conceptually; his last three books have all been concerned with the concept of "versions" of a text and the value of "multiplicity." At the heart of his theory is a concept of "textual instability" defined in opposition to a model of "textual stability" involving a single, authoritative text: "Textual instability, in a similarly simple view, is just the opposite: the absence (or lack) of a single correct or best or most au­thoritative text."' Stillinger takes this further in relation to Coleridge with a definition of "textual pluralism" in which "each version of a work em­bodies a separate authorial intention that is not necessarily the same as the authorial intention in any other version of the same work.""* His book thus argues for independent multiple versions of Coleridge's poems as the most appropriate way of presenting (and responding to) works that are the product of obsessive revision and rewriting.

Stillinger provides a useful and important model for the kind of work I will be doing here. He convincingly unites literary and textual criticism, and his work is immensely valuable in establishing such approaches as ac­ceptable. On the whole, though, for Stillinger, the key issue is his concern with the valuing—or democratizing—of different draft versions of a text rather than with allowing the debate to shift to critical use of editorial ef­fort. Of course Stillinger is deeply interested in composition, in process rather than product, and he also has some interesting discussion of issues of readership and of multiple intention. In relation to Coleridge, for exam­ple, he wonders "whether he had any intentions at all in the conventional sense."® However, Stillinger's primary interest is less in textual process it­self than in the appropriate presentation of compositional material.

A second Anglo-American study that connects text-critical and literary-critical thinking is Hershel Parker's Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons. Parker's "textual-aesthetic approach" seeks to study the text as process through the use of biographical and textual evidence and an "aesthetic" judgment about what constitutes the best version of a text.® As its title sug­gests, the book argues against New Critical principles and the situating of meaning intrinsically within a literary text.

Parker almost always focuses on the text immediately before publica­tion or in its development around the act of publication, with authorial intentionality "built into the words of a literary work during the process of composition."' This "original intention" establishes an ideal authorial version of the text that is then in danger of being lost by the author's own subsequent actions: "All valid meaning is authorial meaning, but in stan­dard literary texts authorial meaning may be mixed in with non-sense, skewed meanings, and wholly adventitious meanings which result from tampering with the text, by the author or someone else."® He continually

3

TEXT AS PROCESS

returns to the question of "when intentionahty is built into a passage or a work as a whole," which is defined by him as being "at the moment of com­position, if at all."' In effect, then, Parker still seeks to establish a hierarchi­cally definitive state for a text (even if this is a state within process), which creates the major problem of how such a state can be established. (When is "original intention" fulfilled? What marks the "moment of completion" within composition after which a text can be "damaged" by the author?) Parker s own method in Flawed Texts (which is never explicitly defined) can be seen most clearly in his fifth chapter, on Mark Twain, in which he explores biographical information about Twain himself (the author's false presentation of the text's composition), biographical information about the text under consideration, accounts of different textual versions and textual history, the sequence of composition, the order of manuscripts, and critical discussion of compositional and publication decisions.

However, Parker's aesthetic bias leads him to treat the author in a re­markably judgmental way. He responds to the creative process, and to au­thors themselves, in value-laden terms: "If writers fail to achieve their full intentions during composition, they are even more likely to damage parts of what they had achieved when they belatedly alter a text."'" It seems to me that such an approach fails to understand the complex nature of intention, even as it raises intelligent questions about it. So, on the one hand, Parker makes helpful statements such as: "[AJuthorial intentionality is built into the words of a literary work during the process of composition, not be­fore and not afterwards," and "Criticism really is dependent upon textual knowledge ... evidence in drafts or the earliest complete version of a work may be of interest equal to that of the first (or any later) printed edition."" On the other hand, however, he can be extremely judgmental of both au­thors and critics. As Hans Walter Gabler points out: "Parker appears thus at bottom not to have shed his own allegiance to the modes of interpreta­tion and evaluation of New Criticism. He recognizes, it is true, writing as process. Yet the acts of revision which the process involves tend to fall victim as 'flawed texts,' to his evaluative grasp because he has so strongly privileged the original acts."'^

A more recent work that values textual process in similar ways to this study is John Bryant's The Fluid Text (2002). Bryant argues that all texts are "fluid," existing as different versions that flow into each other. He gives as h is goal a des ire to "chal lenge our tendency to def ine a mater ia l t ext . . . as a fixed thing, and to suggest new ways of reading, interpreting and teaching."" In his fifth chapter Bryant defines eight different characteris­tics of the "version" and relates this to three modes of textual production (creation, publication, and adaptation). His approach shares with my own

4

INTRODUCTION

a concern to respond to process as process and to recognize the value of shifting intentions in understanding this state of a text. However, his work is .primarily focused on the implications of such a position for the editing and teaching of texts (rather than for critical analysis). He also situates himself largely within the Anglo-American debate: French and German practices are defined together as genetic criticism and treated with a strong German bias. My own interest in the French critique genetique marks a significant distinction between this study and that of Bryant.

Finally, the highly influential work of Jerome McGann also clearly in­forms this book at a larger level, above all in the belief that text-critical and literary-critical practice can, and should, be vitally connected through a "symbiosis of editorial and interpretive work."'^ McGann's success in cri­tiquing the dominant intentional mode of textual criticism and in shift-ing the editing of texts away from an authorially centered perspective and toward a social one is, of course, well known. Where my work differs from McGann's, however, is in seeking to allow greater space for contextual and compositional knowledge (often "authorial" in nature). This book is con­cerned with trying to determine the nature of meaning and interpretation for text as process in a way clearly analogous to McGann's textual concerns, but it focuses on textual meaning at the earlier stages of the writing process, when the role of the author as individual is inevitably more pronounced. The work is therefore centered on a dialogue between linguistic/semantic and intentional or unintentional meaning on the page rather than a dia­logue between linguistic/semantic and social meaning. In part, this is an inevitable consequence of focusing on the stages of a text's emergence and development (as I am doing) rather than on the later stages of production and transmission (as McGann tends to do). The fact that McGann draws on manuscript materials primarily to explore the context of textual pro­duction can overshadow other contextual ways of reading such material, in particular the context of the poem's making.In sum, where McGann's work might be crudely reduced to the statement that "transmission is a part of meaning," my own could be summarized as "the making is a part of meaning." Ultimately, however, these two positions are not incompatible but complementary.

At least as significant as the Anglo-American context, for this study, is the work of French textual "geneticists." The critique gitietique presents a considerable body of scholarship and creative thinking about the materials of composition that lie closer to my own study than any work by Anglo-Ahierican critics. Studies such as Almuth Gresillon's Elements de Critique Genetique or Pierre-Marc de Biasi's La Genetique des Textes address many of the issues I consider here, in detail, with an impressive knowledge of a

5

TEXT AS PROCESS

number of major French writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centu­ries. The advantages of French retention of national authors in major col­lections in the Bibliotheque Nationale, as well as the support for focused research on such collections, are clear. Chapter 1 of this book will engage fully with German and French advances, and the method of chapter 3 is strongly informed by the critique genetique. At the same time, however, this study is not intended to be a mere conduit for French thinking. Rather, it attempts to articulate a distinctive Anglo-American model. This is in part a recognition that a genetic, or compositional, criticism is strongly defined by national traditions of editing and the nature of major writers within a particular cultural heritage. Although there is much to learn from other nations, the field must develop its own identity from within.'®

Finally, if the study of textual process is to emerge with any kind of credible status, then it also needs to engage with the theoretical (post-Heideggerian, phenomenological) denial of individual creative origins and of creative agency that has been highly influential within literary studies through its indirect manifestation in late twentieth-century French think­ing. Where the area of study under consideration is that of creative compo­sition, it seems to me essential to understand it both in terms of will, inten­tion, hnearity, teleology—"inauthentic" structures of being (in Heidegger's terms)—flnti in its relation to potential "authenticity." It is my belief that, even though the aesthetic of author as creator and an expressive model of literary creativity has been replaced by a fragmentary conception of the work as multiple texts in multiple dialogues, a full understanding of com­positional material nonetheless demands a response to that material that creates space for both conceptualizations. Put simply, I would argue that the core intentional structures of the creative mind (the "author"), even if a kind of delusion, are a necessary delusion for creative process and one worthy of study This argument is made in chapter 2 and again, more fully, in the final chapter.

What does this book do that no previous studies have done? Three claims can, I think, be made for it. First, it attempts to provide a universal methodology with larger application than for the three poets used as case studies here; it aims to provide a firm basis for an Anglo-American "ge­netic" criticism underpinned by a philosophical account of the nature of process. The book does not try to argue for a rigid methodological struc­ture but for a flexible framework that can be adapted and enlarged in the light of authorial quirks or generic differences (for example, the writing of a novel or play as opposed to poetry—poetic composition over time being the generic focus here). This is a potentially controversial ambition. One purpose of the framework for the study of process is that it allows for com-

6

INTRODUCTION

parison across and between writers. There may be those who would ques­tion whether such a framework is necessary and would want to assert that all writers are unique. However, if the study of process is to develop beyond the province of editorial specialists working on individual authors, then enabling such comparison seems to me to be essential. It is only when we begin to consider what constitutes a first-draft state, say, rather than what constitutes a Tennysonian, or Joycean, or Wordsworthian first draft, that textual process itself becomes the central focus of investigation.

Second, this study compares European and Anglo-American editorial principles and draws on French genetic criticism as an underpinning for Anglo-American studies in a way that has not previously been undertaken. It seeks to make an Anglo-American readership far more aware of the use­fulness of the critique genetique but ultimately draws on European prac­tices to develop an approach emerging from its own tradition.

Finally, a third claim for the book's originality lies in its self-conscious hermeneutical practice when analyzing draft materials. In relation to the three nineteenth-century case studies," textual analysis moves backward ^^d forward, across draft text and published text in a wide range of ways, bringing together different kinds of meaning to offer a new form of in­terpretation. Such hermeneutic practice is rarely undertaken on the text-critical side of studies of process, where critical concern is usually with the relative status of texts rather than with their interpretation. On the literary-critical side, while there are some excellent individual readings of literary texts that draw on underlying draft materials, (particularly for au­thors for whom there is a strongly established interest in the drafts), this is rarely undertaken in a consciously methodological way or as part of a larger field of study.

I stated earlier that the core concern of this book is to understand what text as process is and then to decide what should be done with it. This concern underpins the overall structure and organization of the study. The first three chapters introduce, contextualize, and develop the com­positional method presented in chapter 3, beginning with a comparative overview of Anglo-American, German, and French editing principles and attitudes toward genesis. The next three chapters apply that method in different ways to the poetic process of Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Emily Dickinson. The final chapter concludes with a full philosophical account of the nature of textual process, of the making of meaning and the kind of interpretation it requires. The book thus seeks to illustrate the usefulness of its own theoretical conclusions by direct application of such ideas to draft materials and further reflection on them.

Ultimately, this work intends to move "genetic criticism" forward in

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TEXT AS PROCESS

Anglo-American scholarship by bringing it to the attention of a much larger audience. It is to be hoped that such analysis will begin to be viewed less as a rarefied practice and more as an intrinsic part of literary studies. In the end, the book aims to redefine and enlarge literary-critical under­standing of the object of its investigation. Such recognition should lead to a further reintegration of text-critical and literary-critical responses to the literary work of art as well as an enlargement of interpretative practices to include the special demands made by the materiality of draft materials and the nature of text in a state of process.

This book addresses itself to multiple audiences. It will be working within familiar territory for textual scholars and theorists, who should be its most immediately receptive audience. It is also to be hoped, however, that the book will reach out to a larger readership by means of the indi­vidual authors used as case studies here and engage those working in the field of nineteenth-century literature who see before them a rich domain of surviving manuscript drafts but are not always sure how to journey

through it.

8

THREE PERSPECTIVES ON GENETIC CRITICISM

A.oc.e^^

%

•1 (M]any a literary critic has investigated the part ownership and ,

mechanical condition of his second-hand automobile, or the pedigree and training of his dog, more thoroughly than he has looked into the

qualifications of the text on which his critical theories rest. —Fredson Bowers, Textual Criticism and Literary Criticism

This chapter sets out to explain the importance of recent advances in tex­tual criticism and theories of editing for the emergence of a compositional method and a study of text as process that is dependent on the way in . which such materials are presented. Without the shift in attitude of the last twenty-five years, away from the privileging of final authorial intention ^ and in favor of multiple textual versions, this book could not exist. It is > important, therefore, to understand the history and nature of accessibility to draft material alongside the development of any method for interpreting that material.

This chapter gives three accounts of the development of textual criti­cism and its relation to "genetic criticism" in terms of Anglo-American, German, and French practices to make clear the text-critical foundations that underlie this study and the timeliness of it as a way of thinking about , process that could emerge only once editing principles allowed for the valuing of such material. It also seeks to illuminate, by comparison of three traditions, the development of editorial principles out of a particular his­tory and culture in a way that will allow, in the ensuing chapters, for a look back at the Anglo-American tradition to redefine the way ahead.

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TEXT AS PROCESS

ANGLO-AMERICAN TEXTUAL CRITICISM: "BEST TEXT" TO MULTIPLE TEXTS

Key positions in the development of Anglo-American editorial principles and textual criticism, before Jerome McGann's work, have been articulated elsewhere in considerable detail.' My aim here, therefore, is to give only a brief overview of early positions before moving to a consideration of more recent developments in the field that bear directly on textual process.

Modern textual criticism in English studies finds its origins in bibli­cal scholarship, from which two key stages for textual criticism originally emerged: "recension," the relationship between manuscripts in terms of a "stemma" used to reconstruct a text to a state as close as possible to the lost original: and "emendation," applying understanding of the problems involved in the processes of transmission to try and ehminate corruptions from the text.^ Drawing on this structure in the nineteenth century, Karl Lachmann developed a genealogical method for the editing of classical texts with the aim of determining the most authoritative text through a line of textual descent. The purpose of such a method was purification: "to 'clear the text' of its corruptions and, thereby, to produce (or approximate)— by subtraction, as it were—the lost original document, the 'authoritative text.'"'

In the early twentieth century, R. B. McKerrow adapted the Lachmann method to the editing of Elizabethan texts, first using the term "copy-text" in 1904 to make clear the importance of deciding on the most authori­tative manuscript (the "best" text) by careful study. He established quite strict principles for deciding on a single authoritative text, reacting against the unreliable judgments otherwise involved in creating eclectic texts: "McKerrow's attitude doubtless sprang from his overreacting against the abuses of some nineteenth-century editors, who felt free to choose among variant readings without adequate study of the nature and origin of the editions in which those variants appeared."'*

The resulting rigidity of McKerrow's approach was softened by W. W. Greg in his famous article "The Rationale of Copy-Text" (1950-51). Greg made an argument designed to give editors more room for some degree of individual judgment within a controlled framework, opposing what he described as "the tyranny of the copy-text," which encouraged editors to place too much weight on a single authority.® As is well known, Greg distin­guished between two critical acts: the necessity of adherence to copy-text for the accidentals (spelling, punctuation, and so on) and the text-critical decision to choose between substantive (content-based) readings. Accord­ing to Greg, the copy-text should be the earliest in a series of textual ver-

10

CONTEXTUALIZING PROCESS

sions in terms of accidentals because successive editions become increas­ingly divergent from the original (or lost original). Where there is more than one substantive text, then one must acknowledge that an alternative choice was possible. Hershel Parker gives a good clarification of the differ­ence between McKerrow and Greg and the significance of Greg's distinc­tion: "Greg had taken a crucial half step beyond Ronald B. McKerrow, who had realized that the first edition should be copy-text but had assumed that once you identify an author's hand in a later text you should adopt all of the verbal variants in that text except the ones which are manifestly erroneous. Greg by contrast allowed for compositorial error and casual alterations: the editor would choose to adopt only those variants which seemed clearly to be authorial."®

In the 1960s and 1970s Fredson Bowers took up Greg's principles and adapted them further in relation to nineteenth-century texts. However, whereas Greg (like Lachmann and McKerrow) was dealing with lost origi­nals and derived texts, many of the nineteenth-century manuscripts Bow­ers was working on had survived, so that at this point, the debate over what the copy-text should be began to shift more firmly to grounds of intentionality and questions of authority: issues that arise from the pres­ence of manuscript material. In "Some Principles for Scholarly Editions of Nineteenth-Century American Authors," Bowers defines Greg's distinc­tion between accidentals and substantives as being between two kinds of authority, with the authority of the word (content) divided from that of the forms (spelling, punctuation, and so on). He differed from Greg in as­serting that the final manuscript version of a text should generally be the copy-text because this was closest to final authorial intentions: "An au­thoritative edition is one set directly from manuscript, or a later edition that contains corrections or revisions that proceeded from the author."' Bowers also codified his principles into rules of practice and articulated a kind of scholarly apparatus that was then adopted by the Center for Edi­tions of American Authors (CEAA, founded in 1963). The Center defined a series of principles and standards for critical editing in strongly inten-tionist terms in the Statement of Editorial Principles and Procedures (1967, rev. 1972). This document gives a clear account of the Center's main aim; "[T]o make the works of important American writers available, and avail­able in texts which reflect the authors' intentions as fully as surviving evi­dence permits."' Speaking of the editor's role, it states: "The editor aims to establish, as far as surviving evidence permits, a text which presents, both in its accidentals and its substantives, the author's intention."' The kind of edition that emerges from such principles is described by G. Thomas Tanselle: "What is now referred to as a 'CEAA edition,' then, is the specific

11

TEXT AS PROCESS

combination of two elements—a text edited according to Greg s theory, combined with an apparatus providing the essential evidence for examin­ing the editor's decisions."'" From the mid-twentieth century onward, and at the heart of Bowers's principles and those of the CEAA, lies the concept

of final intentions. The question of what exactly constitutes final intentions, in editorial

terms, has been debated widely, and with considerable intelligence, by crit­ics such as Tanselle, Morse Peckham, E. D. Hirsch, Philip Gaskell, and James Thorpe, among others." Gaskell opposed Bowers's principle of favor­ing the final manuscript version over the first published text, questioning how one can know that final intentions are embodied in the manuscript: "At first glance it might seem that the manuscript will be the obvious choice for copy-text, for it is what the author actually wrote. But does it represent the text as the author wanted it to be read?"'^ In From Writer to Reader, Gaskell further distinguished between authorial intention and expectation and placed an emphasis on readers' needs and the audience. The text pre­sented by the editor should be "as authoritative as the evidence allows ... in the form best suited to his intended audience."" James Thorpe has also argued in favor of including the process of publication as part of the move toward final intention (and thus as a factor to be taken into account when choosing copy-text): "In many cases the author expected that his inten­tions would be completed by the agency of editor or printer in the matter of accidentals.... It is clear that a reversion to the authorial manuscript would, in such cases, actually thwart the author's intentions."'" These two critics thus directly anticipate Jerome McGann in viewing the social aspects of the text's production as an element constituting authority, but they are still bound to a theory that has a model of intention at its heart.

In the context of the Anglo-American tradition, McGann's social theory for textual criticism represents a major shift from the principles established before his participation in the debate. He defines the limita­tions of the author-centric intentionist approach and counters this with an alternative model in which authority is located not with the writer of the text alone but in the social forces and communal activity that bring the text into being. McGann very clearly works through the positions of his predecessors in A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism to pull together all previous approaches and take a significant step forward into territory that demands not only a new approach to editing but a different response to the texts being edited, and a widening definition of what textual criticism is. McGann thus represents a major challenge to the previously dominant view of the author's final intentions as the ultimate model of authority. For

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him, this concept of artistic autonomy is fundamentally flawed, since au­thority is "a social nexus, not a personal possession."" McGann argues that the text-critical debate should not be so strongly focused on the location of final authorial intention but that authority can equally well be located in the act of publication. Toward the very end of the Critique, McGann reminds us of "Greg's shrewd comment: 'Authority is never absolute, but only relative.'"'® The editor must choose his text according to particular needs and not attempt to create a single ideal text.

Peter Shillingsburg somewhat critically assesses the nature of Mc­Gann's intervention: "Because the net defined by 'authorial' authority eliminated readings essential to the text he wanted to produce, McGann redefined authority, creating a net that would hold alterations introduced by the production crews. . . . This expedient served his needs and those of other like-minded editors so well that his definition of authority has quickly gained the status of an alternative to the Greg/Bowers editorial school."" Shillingsburg suggests that McGann replaced one model of au­thority with another more suited to the kind of texts he was working with (particularly in the case of Byron) and to his own ideological sympathies. However, the full significance of McGann's challenge is not simply that it replaces one position with another but that it allows the possibility of more than one way of approaching a text and of more than one authoritative version of a text existing, according to the nature of that approach. What this also implies is an end to a view of editing itself as a practice in which the editor attempts to adopt a position of objectivity or uhimate judgment. Potentially, it allows the editor more space for individual expression and

' for a closer integration of literary-critical thought with text-critical acts. Editorial openness to "versions" of a text clearly affects the value accorded to compositional material. The tendency to view a work as more than a single entity leads the way to the next step of considering the value of the parts that make up the whole as of an interest equivalent to the whole itself (the identity of which is now also brought into question).

In Scholarly Editing in the ComputerAge, Shillingsburg provides a clear overview of the major approaches to scholarly editing in the mid-to-late twentieth century. Shillingsburg's own position (like that of Gaskell) turns away not only from an author-centered model for editing and textual criti­cism but also from the need to assert any single approach as the only cor­rect one: "[N]o single approach is the right approach. Critics and schol­ars need texts for different purposes."" He divides text-critical responses intO' four "orientations": historical/documentary, sociological, aesthetic, and authorial. In each case, authority is located in a different place: in the

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TEXT AS PROCESS

document itself, collaboratively between the author and publisher, in the editor and the author, and in the author. The first two approaches will lo­cate authority in a specific text; the aesthetic and authorial approaches are more likely to produce eclectic texts. Shillingsburg argues that the selec­tion made "depends almost entirely on where the editor locates or finds the textual authority by which he proceeds to purify the text," although he also points out that these approaches are not exclusive." One key point that Shillingsburg makes here is that, ideally, an edition need not be lim­ited by the approach that has been taken: "Having chosen the most ap­propriate orientation for the editing of a particular text, it is possible to prepare an apparatus that will make the edition useful to persons wishing that another orientation had been employed."^" This is an important point, since it suggests that material in a really well-presented edition is not nec­essarily trapped within the editorial principles that underlie it. Ultimately, Shillingsburg articulates a movement in editing toward a more subjective sense of the editor's role, one that allows for increasing interaction between textual and literary criticism. At the heart of his book is the assertion that "[t]he two keys releasing editors from the tyranny of their own theories are recognition of the multiple nature of literary texts and of the fundamen­tally critical nature of editorial theories."^' As he puts it in a later work, "editing is a critical enterprise that not only involves criticism but is in fact a form of literary criticism."^^

This leads us to the most recent phase of textual studies, in which tex­tual criticism and literary criticism begin to be brought together and the Anglo-American position moves ever closer to Continental practices. Both McGann's and Shillingsburg's positions can be seen to be underpinned by the work of the German critic Hans Zeller, and, as we shall see, ideas con­cerning textual versions and the study of draft material have been at the heart of German editing for some time. A more recent German critic, Hans Walter Gabler, also makes the case for much fuller critical use of draft ma­terial in "Text as Process and the Problem of Intentionality" when he states that "the published form of a work need not categorically be an editor's main, and overriding, point of orientation."" As Gabler emphasizes, inten­tion has imposed a strongly chronological and hierarchical structure on the critical edition and encouraged a focus on the establishment of a single text at the expense of the textual matter that precedes it. German scholar­ship is far more advanced in its ambitions for this material: it is willing to edit manuscripts as manuscripts {Handschriftenedition) without needing them to be "justified" by a final reading text, in a method that "emphasises the presentation of textual matter over the critical establishment of text, or texts."^"

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GENETIC CRITICISM

Anglo-American Attitudes

Having established that editing practices clearly anticipate the emergence of a "compositional" or "genetic" criticism in Anglo-American studies, we need also to consider why such a criticism has been slow to emerge. The term "genetic" was first used in its literary sense by Wimsatt and Beardsley in their seminal essay "The Intentional Fallacy."^® In that (New Critical) work, it is equated directly with a narrow, limited interest in biography and the personal history of the poet: "[W]e submit that this is the true and objective way of criticism, as contrasted to what the very uncertainty of exegesis might tempt a second kind of critic to undertake . . . the way of biographical or genetic inquiry."^® In the next essay of The Verbal Icon ("The Affective Fallacy"), the question of a genetic criticism is returned to again: "The Intentional Fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its origins, a special case of what is known to philosophers as the Genetic Fallacy. It begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological causes of the poem and ends in biography and relativism."^' Here, "genetic" is taken to refer to the author's reasons for writing rather than the materials of the process.

Both critics go on to discuss the idea of "genetic criticism" at greater length elsewhere and to give fuller definitions of it. In Aesthetics, Beardsley states: "I call a reason Genetic if it refers to something existing before the work itself, to the manner in which it was produced, or its connection with antecedent objects and psychological states."^® This offers a potentially broader definition. However, Beardsley then proceeds to condemn such an approach, primarily by narrowing the focus of meaning to evaluative issues: genetic reasons are used to assess the fulfilling or not of intention, or to judge the work as successful, skillful, original, or sincere. On this basis, he argues, "Genetic Reasons... cannot be good, that is, relevant and sound, reasons for critical evaluations."^' Thus, he adheres to the argu­ment as first given in "The Intentional Fallacy" that while such material may be used primarily for evaluation of the author's "success," this is not a valid critical act.

Wimsatt's later essay "Genesis: A Fallacy Revisited" is equally condem­natory of intentionist critics "wishing to throb in unison with the mind of the artist."'" As in "The Intentional Fallacy," Wimsatt sets up a contrast between, on the one hand, response to an artwork as private, personal, and a reflection of the personality of the creator, and, on the other, response to it as objective and public, with meaning embodied in the text itself Like Beardsley, he condemns the use of genetic material for any evaluation of

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TEXT AS PROCESS

the work on the basis of the author's abiUty to express personal events, or to fulfill his original intention, and asserts that authorial intention can, in any case, never be fully known. Even where external knowledge of the au­thor is used in conjunction with textual interpretation, Wimsatt states that such knowledge is really embodied in the text: "[I]nterpretations appar­ently based upon an author's 'intention' ofl:en in fact refer to an intention as it is found in, or inferred from, the work itself."'' In sum (and as one would expect from a founding father of New Critical methods), Wimsatt consid­ers that if a work of art requires the support of external evidence to com­municate its meaning, then it is a poor work of art and that the author's intentions at the time of planning or writing may well be very different from what is actually produced (and therefore are largely irrelevant since it is only what is produced that matters). He affirms that "[t]he intention out­side the poem is always subject to the corroboration of the poem itself"'^

All of these points are convincing as they stand, but only in relation to a view that the primary aim of genetic criticism is "the search for the author's generative intention."" Wimsatt fails to allow for the possibility of replacing a search for "what the author meant" with analysis of actual genetic material. Both critics are unable to recognize that a very different kind of interpretive act might take place in relation to the material itself, one that would be interested in valuing the process revealed by it rather than the designing cause that created it.

The earliest use of the term "genetic criticism" is, then, very specific and wholeheartedly negative, and may have had considerable long-term impact on the study (or lack of study) of this material in Anglo-American scholarship. Remarkably few Anglo-American critics have shown any real interest in reconsidering the use of the term or in turning their attention to draft material. The best-known exception to this is Hershel Parker, whose approach, as already mentioned, is both text-critical and literary-critical. Parker's basic argument, that material concerned with creative process has been overlooked as a result of New Critical practice, is a fair one: "It is customary and correct to attribute to the triumph of the New Criticism the severing of American academic criticism and theory from almost all (not just stupid and maudlin) biographical scholarship, and from almost all (not just incompetent and pedantic) bibliographical and textual schol­arship."'" He points out that "'The Intentional Fallacy' has of course cast a longer pall than its companion essay, 'The Affective Fallacy,' which the reader-response critics had to repudiate."'® Parker reminds us, too, that the New Critical assumptions of the first essay significantly outlasted New Criticism itself, with obviously negative consequences for the study of early textual material: "As New Critics were joined (and succeeded) by phenom-

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CONTEXTUALIZING PROCESS

enologists, structuralists, reader-response critics, deconstructionists, fem­inist critics and theorists, post-structuralist Freudians, and the rest, the influence of Wimsatt and Beardsley ... remained manifest in a pervasive distrust of biographical, textual, and bibliographical evidence."'® However, as I discussed in the introduction to this work, Parker's own method for responding to the New Critical position is not totally satisfactory either.

German "Versions"

In The Term and Concept of Literary Criticism," Rene Wellek gives a his­torical overview of the use of the term "criticism" in literary studies and compares its all-embracing use in England with that of other countries: France, Italy, and Germany. In relation to German criticism he informs us that, although the term "Kritik" traveled from France to Germany in the early eighteenth century, "something happened to dislodge the term and concept and to narrow it more and more till it came to mean only day-by-day reviewing, arbitrary literary opinion."" As a consequence: "In 'Germany the term 'Literaturwissenschaft' took the place of 'criticism' as used in the West. It succeeded while similar combinations such as 'science de la litterature' or 'science of literature' failed in the West."" This issue of terminology is telling in relation to the mode and methods of scholarship that such terms describe and can be extended to textual criticism, as Hans Waher Gabler makes clear when he compares the Anglo-American "criti­cal edition" to the German historisch-kritisch Ausgabe:

What Anglo-American editing has upheld is the adjective critical, reap­plying it to competing authorial variants and their treatment. The Ger­man type of scholarly edition, by contrast, has—in the face of modern texts—strengthened the adjective element historical (historisch). Con­comitantly, the element critical (kritisch) is understood to apply not so

,,much to the establishment of the text as to the analysis—the critique—of the text's genesis and history."

Other elements of terminology also reveal the assumptions underlying ed­iting and the influence of theory. So, for example, the use of the term "wit­ness documents (Zeuge) in German editions to denote manuscript mate­rials has its basis in the semiotic grounding of German editorial principles by which the text is released from authorial possession into its existence as a sign, or system of signs: "Manuscripts and prints are only the carriers of the received record, the 'witnesses'; they provide the basis for establish­ing texts.""" In Anglo-American scholarship the same material was, until

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TEXT AS PROCESS

recently, commonly called "prepublication material, reflecting the under­lying intentionist model (draft material is of interest primarily in leading up to and helping to explain the first definitive text). In French genetic criticism, where textual process is given the highest independent status by geneticists, the term used for it is the "avant-texte," which points to a ma­jor division between private and public textual material but also implicitly gives such material value (without this, the text would not exist).

A brief historical overview of German editing is necessary."' As in Anglo-American scholarship, German editing principles developed out of a lengthy philological tradition with origins (shared by Anglo-American editing) in Karl Lachmann's adaptation of editorial principles for medieval manuscripts to the German writer G. E. Lessing in the early nineteenth century. German editorial theory and practice began to diverge from ite Anglo-American counterpart in the 1940s with Friedrich Beif?ners edi­tion of HolderUn, which first allowed for the concept of textual variance in a model of "organic growth toward unity and superior aesthetic integ­rity.""^ A sense of Beif^ner's own position is given through the translation of Gunter Martens's 1971 essay from Texte und Varianten, when he says of BeiCner; "He emphasized the 'methodological principle of following, as if at the poet's side, the development and growth of lines and stanzas and of capturing the work of art at its birth and thereby penetrating to the fullest

depths of its meaning.'""' Hans Zeller outlines a slightly different line of development for German

editing. He compares the dominance of Shakespearean editing in Anglo-American scholarship to that of the editing of Goethe in German schol­arship where the final revised edition, overseen by Goethe himself, was initially adopted uncritically as the "standard text. Zeller tells us that this edition was revised in the 1950s, on principles similar to those of Greg, by Ernst Grumach: "[E]ach individual variant is investigated to see whether it originates from the author. If this cannot be made to seem probable the variant is not adopted in the text.""" However, this traditional model, which bears comparison with Anglo-American editing, was replaced by new principles for editing Goethe as defined by Siegfried Scheibe. Such ideas, involving a theory of versions, were taken further by Zeller himself

The new principles were developed in the 1960s under the influence of structuralism."' The work of the Prague structuralists led to a significant shift of interest away from the author to the text itself as a system of signi­fying practices. Zeller and Martens's edited collection Texte und Varianten (1971) is a seminal text that establishes the core principles of modern Ger­man editorial theory."® These principles view the text as a multiple con­struct coming into being over time (diachronic), with each version of a

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CONTEXTUALIZING PROCESS

text being valued for its particular historicity (synchronic). Early material is thus to be reproduced as an intrinsic part of an edition and treated as necessary documentation of the development of the whole. The reader of the edition is seen as performing an active role, engaging with and using the edition to release the text for interpretation. Concerns over authorial intention were removed from the German editorial debate at this point, and a clear distinction between Anglo-American and German approaches began to emerge, so that while "the Anglo-American endeavor has tended to edit the author, the central German concern over the past decades has increasingly become to edit the text.""' For some time, German edi­tors have been concerned with such questions as the distinction between "readings" (Lesarten) and "variants" {Varianten) of the text and with what constitutes the documentary body rather than with questions concerning which authorial version to privilege. Zeller sums this up: "What distin­guishes more recent German editions both from most earlier editions and from recent English ones is fundamentally a different understanding of the notions of version (Fassung) and of authorial intention and authority {Autorisation\ and ultimately a different theory of the literary work and its mutations.""®

It will be helpful to look more closely at the basic principles that in­form the German editorial theory of "versions" in the work of two critics: Siegfried Scheibe and Hans Zeller. Siegfried Scheibe's article "Zu einigen Grundprinzipien einer historisch-kritischen Ausgabe" (published in Texte und Varianten) is an influential piece that establishes the new concept of editing in terms of versions."' His position is then further defined by Zeller in his seminal 1975 article "A New Approach," published in Studies in Bib­liography (and thus made available to an Anglo-American readership). In his essay, Scheibe sets out to define core issues in German editing such as the question of authorization {Autorisation), the status of the text, and the nature of textual fault {Textfehler). In a later essay, "On the Editorial Prob­lem of the Text" (1989), Scheibe makes an argument in favor of authorized versions on the basis of a model of staged authorial intention, allowing for a temporal dimension. He states of different versions that they each con­tain "the work in the form that the author considers right, good, and rep­resentative of his or her intention in this new phase of labor. But the first textual version, the first writing down of the text, also showed the work in a form that the author believed to be right at that given moment."'" He concludes: "Each version shows the work as it represents a specific point in time and a concrete phase of the author's personal, artistic, and ideological development.""

Scheibe's essay also raises the question of what constitutes "the text"

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TEXT AS PROCESS

and of how much equahty to grant to different textual "versions."®^ He re-ininds us of a distinction between the author's view of equality and that of the editor: From the author's point of view the versions are decidedly not equally valid. . . . But for the editor, all versions are in principle equal."®®

he German position repeatedly emphasizes the difference between the author's and the editor's perspective on the text rather than attempting to conflate them. For the most part the editorial perspective, in terms of reception, is privileged over the authorial one, in terms of production. This emphasis is reversed in French genetic criticism, as will be seen.®"

Finally, Scheibe reminds us of an unequal factor in German editions that is easily overlooked:

Logically, therefore, all textual versions should be reproduced in a historical-critical edition, insofar as they survive. At the same time, such editions do not give all textual versions equal prominence, since as a rule they make a distinction between 'Edited Text'... and so called apparatus. Usually only the versions chosen as 'Edited Text' are printed in their entirety; all others are more or less reduced to their variant pas­sages with respect to the 'Edited Text'. But these variants themselves are Text exactly like the 'Text' of the fully reproduced version.®®

This is an important point for Anglo-American readers. In spite of the strong arguments m favor of multiple versions and the principle of textual

appearance of the text in many editions is not equal at all Scheibe goes on to state that in principle any text can be chosen as the edited text, so long as its place within the chronology is made clear, but

certain versions are far more likely to be privileged. Turning to Hans Zeller's work, one of the most surprising facts about

It is how early it seems to be in pointing out the limits of the Greg-Bowers principles and how clearly in advance of McGann (who does acknowledge Zeller s 1975 article in Critique). Zeller also seems to be unusual among Ger­man editors m that he orients himself in relation to the Anglo-American position rather than in relation to French critique genetique, which pro­vides a stronger focus for most of the other commentators.®®

In 'A New Approach to the Critical Constitution of Literary Texts," Zeller argues against the creation of an eclectic text from a number of au­thorized versions on the basis of final intention. He prefers to recognize difference between those authorized versions and to designate each one as a distinct version" rather than combining them to create a single "final" text. Zeller's position is underpinned by semiotics, with the work as a whole being viewed as "a complex of elements which form a system of signs."®^ He

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goes on: "Seen in this way a version is a specific system of linguistic signs, functioning within and without, and authorial revisions transform it into another system Since a text, as text, does not in fact consist of elements but of the relationships between them, variation at one point has an effect on invariant sections of the text."®® In other words, the concept of text here is of a whole body of interrelated structures within a system rather than a discrete final object. The aim of the German historical-critical edition is thus to reproduce a complete textual history over time, with a corre­spondingly fluid sense of the text as a developing object, rather than to attempt to create a single "definitive" state of a text. Further definitions then follow—in terms of authorization (those versions of a text approved by the author) and textual fault (the suspension of authorization on certain grounds). In general, the German approach is to limit editorial interven­tion and decision-making wherever possible.

Zeller's earlier (1971) article, now translated and published in Con­temporary German Editorial Theory (CGET) as "Record and Interpreta­tion," is equally valuable and seeks to outline a method for producing the historical-critical edition. As in all his work, he shows a good knowledge of Anglo-American principles and defines his own position partly in op­position to them: "Instead of the author's intention, which can only am­biguously be inferred or suspected based on the written records, we choose as a model of text constitution the intention that the author attested to in those records."®' Such a comment reminds us of the strong influence that German reception and reader-response theory has had on these editorial principles. At its heart, this is a methodology based on giving the reader access to as much material as possible, and with a corresponding lack of critical commentary and analysis on the part of the editor: "Not from an interpretation but only from the record and its documentation may new interpretations be gained."®" Again, this is made explicit toward the end of Zeller's earlier essay: "The text is delivered to the user not for permanent ownership, but rather as a task in which to participate."®'

Finally, Gunter Martens's 1989 essay "What Is a Text?" in CGET pulls together many earlier principles and clearly defines two German positions: an bid-fashioned one that recognizes the need to reproduce variants but es­sentially sees them as outside the text; and a theory of "versions" that views the text as a dynamic whole in which variants are different versions of the text and revision is incorporated into the idea of the text itself He states of this position: "In part, it also assumes that the various stages of a work's genesis and revision belong to one and the same text, simply representing, that is, various versions of the one text.... Every transmitted version of a text is, in principle, equally valid."®^ Martens's essay then goes on to con-

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TEXT AS PROCESS

sider the emergence of this model from semiotics, reaching the position that "[p]recisely because the text is a fixed sign in the traditional sense and at the same time breaks or negates the sign, and unfolds its productivity in this tension, it cannot be reduced to one pole of this dialectical movement. It is both static and dynamic, is itself a unity of opposites."®^ This last sen­tence, then, provides the essential idea underpinning the concept of ver­sions, meaning that the edited text must allow for the "doubleness" of the text's existence. The editor "must structure a scholarly edition in ways that articulate both aspects of a literary text: The static and the dynamic, the fixedness and the breaking up of this fixedness."®"

This brief consideration of principles of German textual editing shows that it develops in the latter half of the twentieth century in a very dif­ferent direction from that of Anglo-American scholarship and editing. Editorial principles encompass the materials of process and incorporate them within the very concept of the "text" to be edited. German editorial theory thus displays an extremely positive attitude toward compositional material; "The sui generis edition of working drafts and manuscripts (the Handschriftenedition) has become a central concern, indeed sometimes an autonomous objective, of German scholarly editing."®^ At the same time, however, this does seem to raise the question of why, if editorial principles bring such attention to manuscript material, a literary-critical method and school has not also developed to make full use of such material in German literary studies.

Traditionally, in an Anglo-American scholarly edition—such as the volumes of the Cornell Series for Wordsworth—the contents of a single volume (following CEAA guidelines) would consist principally of; a schol­arly introduction; explanation of editorial procedure; the reading text; headnotes and transcriptions for each manuscript contributing to the text, in chronological order; and appendices (possibly including shorter read­ing texts of passages not included in the final published text). In such a structural model it is possible that a reader might simply work from the reading text without ever really engaging with the lengthy apparatus at the back of the book. Variant material is represented, often quite fully and as it appears on the manuscript page, but usually in a different place from the primary reading text, or texts. More significant than the structural organi­zation, however, is the editor's conception of his or her role. In the Anglo-American tradition the borders between "objective" editing activity and "subjective" critical commentary are relatively fluid, so an introduction to the text will almost certainly include some critical thinking, and this is also likely to be the case for interpretation of the order of text and manuscripts as articulated in the headnotes to the manuscript apparatus. In German

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editing, the aim at all times is to provide a clean and clear metastructure containing distinct elements with minimized editorial commentary. Ac­tivities that in Anglo-American editing would be defined as part of the critical editor's role (and thus as "editorial," falling somewhere between editing and critical activity) German editors would define as "criticism" and separate from the presentation of the text or manuscript. The confu­sion this creates can be felt in the very use of the term "genetic criticism," which, in the German tradition, refers primarily to textual criticism and i's concerned with how best to present the genesis of a text, or with the dis­tinction between reception and production texts and their relative status. It does not refer to any kind of literary-critical (interpretative, analytical) use of that genetic material—as an Anglo-American scholar might assume that it would.

Two English-language editions that attempt to connect Anglo-American and German editing are worth brief consideration: Hans Walter Gabler's synoptic and critical edition of Ulysses and James Mays's edition of Coleridge's Poetical Works for the Bollingen Series. Gabler's edition combines the German model of genetic editing for the synoptic text (which appears on the left-hand pages of the work) with Anglo-American critical editing for the reading text (on the right-hand pages); "Tying the edition into the two editorial traditions simultaneously was necessary to meet the complexities of the very task of editing Ulysses."^^ Gabler's German roots can be seen at a structural level in the way that the edition goes straight into the text in volumes 1 and 2 with all editorial commentary placed as apparatus in the back of the third volume. More important, however, it is representative of modern German editing in its attempt to represent pro­cess visually on the page, with parallel versions of texts and time dimen-sio;is brought into play. The synoptic text, which involves a "procedure of telescoping several transmitted records in a single presentation," is com­mon within more recent German editions.®^ Gabler makes this text the focus of the edition. Controversially, his aim is not to produce a text that resembles the first published version but one that draws on and privileges Joyce's autograph manuscripts (before typing, copying, and printing). Ga­bler claims that this text is the "document text of highest overall authority" above the first edition of 1922 and states that "the edition endeavours to recover the ideal state of development as it was achieved through the trace-able'processes of composition and revision at the time of the book s publica­tion."®® He distinguishes the published text from the text he is representing here: "The first edition comes closest to what Joyce aimed for as the public text of Ulysses. Yet it does not present the text of the work as he wrote it."®' One of the strengths of Gabler's edition is the appropriateness of a synoptic

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TEXT AS PROCESS

approach for the material, a point made by Philip Gaskell in From Writer to Reader: "Such a genetic presentation is particularly appropriate for Ulysses because from the final draft stages onwards Joyce developed the book very largely by adding to the text."^" It is relatively easy to follow Gabler's text once one has adjusted to the symbols indicating different kinds of revision on the left-hand page—although any serious comparative work on those changes cannot be carried out unless the reader also refers at the same time to the manuscripts (also available in a separate facsimile edition).

James Mays's Coleridge edition clearly follows the German model—he presents the Poetical Works in three volumes with two parts each devoted to Poems {Reading Text) and Poems {Variorum Text). In his introduction. Mays engages with recent editorial debate and with German and French editing, stating, "I have adopted some of the features of this German-French tradition in editing, I hope without prejudice."'' For the Variorum Text Mays gives a brief headnote for each poem and then uses symbols on the transcription page to denote kinds of revision, sources, and different textual versions. At the bottom of the page are also further variants, the division between the two positions being explained in the introduction as "one of convenience, since both kinds of variation affect meaning."''^

In both Gabler's and Mays's editions a key issue is the relationship be­tween the synoptic text and a single-state reading text. Is the coexistence of these two presentations of material a major conceptual contradiction? Tan­selle considers it to be so, asking of Gabler's edition. Why, one is bound to ask, should there be a separate 'reading' text if all the variants are an essen­tial part of the work?"'' However, D. C. Greetham, responding to Tanselle, argues that Gabler's synoptic text successfully "moves in both horizontal and vertical axes at once" (i.e., it is both synchronic and diachronic in itself) and that also having the reading text (as a purely diachronic text) allows the edition to offer "both of Jakobson's disorders (similarity and contigu­ity) and both of Saus;sure's axes (vertical and horizontal) simultaneously."'" He continues, "[T]his dual reading forces the reader's eye and concentra­tion to recognize the two dimensions of textual warp and woof.""

In the case of Mays's edition, however, matters are complicated by the editor's own account of the relationship between synoptic and reading texts (which are not on opposing pages but in two different volumes). In his introduction. Mays clearly aligns his synoptic text with the German structuralist model (although with some reservations) and states: "I be­lieve that the essential advantages of the European manner of proceeding have been retained. These enable a reader to hold in mind a sense of the way the poems move, as they often do, simultaneously in several planes: that is, the way the poems move laterally, as a series of independent ver­

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sions, and vertically, as one version overlays and succeeds another."'® This synoptic mode of presentation is partly chosen because of the nature of Coleridge's compositional habits: "The method is specially suited to texts which underwent continuous revision, which was not always directed to a single end.""

In Gabler's Ulysses the synoptic text is privileged over the reading text in what McGann calls "the most dramatic representation of the work's postmodern textuality. In an earlier edition the 'clear text' on the rectos would have been the editor's ultimate object of interest."'® However, in the Coleridge edition, when Mays turns from the variorum volume to the reading text, he asserts, "The Variorum sequence is the foundation of the p'resent edition, but the Reading Text is what it supports," and again, that "it is equally part of the edition, indeed it is the edition in the strict sense (the Variorum sequence merely contains the material for it)."" Such state­ments seem to give priority to the reading text over the synoptic one. Thus, the German structuralist principles of the variorum (which not only pre­sents texts synoptically but also goes so far as to collate textual misprints and nonauthorial changes) are now countered by a strongly authorial ap­proach. For the reading text. Mays also chooses a principle of "variable copytext," again to reflect Coleridge's inconsistent attitude toward his own material.®" However, the principle followed is either "to give the version of the poem which reflects Coleridge's concern, up to the time he lost inter­est" or to select a version that depends on recognizing "Coleridge's mean­ing before it was modified by second thoughts or other circumstances."®' Thus, selection of reading texts is decided on highly intentionist grounds, and grounds that are subjectively determined. Mays willingly acknowl­edges this, and he also justifies it on the grounds that "[t]he problem is more acute in theory than in practice. The text for each poem in all but a few cases selects itself."®^ Nevertheless, the edition does not so much serve to unite Continental and Anglo-American editing practice as to leave the two volumes, at best, as two entirely separate texts and, at worst, in conflict with each other. This is not to condemn Mays, who clearly has considered all of these issues with care and who has good reasons for thinking that this editing approach is particularly suited to this poet. However, it does show the limitations of the synoptic approach (if it always has to be supported by an alternative text that works against it) and the ongoing conflict between what sounds good in theory and what is actually of use to readers.

On the whole, then, at a practical level, the German model allows for good localized textual comparison (line by line); it creates a sense of text as process and introduces a time dimension into editing; and it tries to be democratic in relation to different versions of a text. However, it is not

25

TEXT AS PROCESS

helpful when one wants to consider a long text across different versions or if one requires a whole sense of the text at each stage. The mode of editing necessarily condenses different layers of revision, and does so intelligently and well, as far as such things go. But it could be argued that the actual physical mass of a text, even of a revised text that contains much invariant material, is important, if impractical to reproduce.

It seems to me that one fundamental reason for the lack of German literary-critical engagement with compositional material is the physical presentation of the variant texts." The linear, synoptic version developed by the German tradition is difficult to work with because it destroys the spatial whole of each version of a text on the page and removes the compo­sitional context. Perhaps the ideal, in this editorial model, is to work with the combination of a synoptic text alongside full facsimile material (as in the case of Gabler's Ulysses and The James Joyce Archive).

What are the limitations of German editing theory in the wider sense? Gunter Martens makes clear the extent to which German theory has moved ahead of the current enthusiastic optimism for textual versions in Anglo-American scholarship, to the point of a strongly articulated resistance to such a theory by certain German editors. This leads Martens himself to raise some of the objections to it: It is impossible to avoid the questions of whether the immense expenditure of many editions is justified; whether the expectations for the representation of textual development are fulfill-able; and whether the large investment of time and effort disregards the es­sential interests of scholarship and the primary needs of readers."®" Again, in his later essay "What Is a Text?" (1989), after clearly articulating the need for editing principles that allow the text to exist both as process and as product. Martens is still compelled to conclude: It will not be possible to implement fully this theoretically based model of an edition of the text-genetic and text-arresting relationships in every case. Compromises will have to be made; foreshortenings of the comprehensive conception will be unavoidable."®' So one limitation of the theory of versions is that the prin­ciples of editing are not generally able to be fully implemented within the book edition (although of course electronic archives and hypertext would

allow it). A second limitation in the German model, already touched on, is raised

by Paul Eggert in his review article of CGET: "A great deal of thought in Germany has gone into enunciating the principles behind the display of historical versions of a work. Relatively little seems to have been devoted to the empirical question of which text ought to become more widely avail­able to the reading public through the editor's efforts."'® Determining what

26

CONTEXTUALIZING PROCESS

will serve as the "edited text" is left open to the German editor, even though this gives considerable prominence to whichever text is chosen within the edition. There is no real debate about the status or reason for choosing a particular edited text (as there is, of course, within Anglo-American schol­arship). Hans Zeller also makes a related point that the Anglo-American

f, tradition is "capable of differentiating between authorial and nonauthorial variants more reliably," and he repeatedly acknowledges the usefulness of analytical bibliography in Anglo-American editing (even if it has been put to misplaced ends).®'

We can conclude this section of the argument by comparing German and French responses to manuscript material, which many German com­mentators discuss. The first point to bear in mind has already been made— that for the Germans, "genetic criticism" does not denote critical analysis of texts but instead refers to textual criticism for genetic material. Gabler ihakes this point by implication when considering the question in relation to the French critique genitique: "What needs stressing, particularly for anyone accustomed to taking the text-critical view of manuscripts, is that •its points of departure as well as its aims are critical. Critique genetique does not innately exploit manuscripts as documents of the written for pur­poses of deriving scholarly editions from them. It discourses the analysis of manuscripts as writing."®® From a German perspective, the main ad-vafttage for French scholars working in this way is that they are not bound by a long tradition of scholarly editing, as German, British, and Ameri-cah'scholars are. In an article that goes some way toward trying to define the need for interpretation of genetic material in German criticism, Klaus Hurlebusch states: "From the beginning, the path followed by critiquegene-tique'differed from that of the German editorial genetics. Unlike the latter, the French approach did not have to ask itself the hermeneutical question: what sense does it make to turn one's attention toward textual materials preserved in manuscripts that originally had been significant only to the author?"®' Hurlebusch seems to look wistfully across to the freedom of French thinking: "One can hardly imagine the like within the Germanist -discipline. The independence of such investigations is here way-laid and blocked off by a reception-oriented hermeneutics that appears tolerable at most as a preliminary to critical editing."'" German editing theory thus makes a strong case for integrating manuscript material and the repre­sentation of text as process into the edition, but it does not appear to go further and consider the critical status, or use, of such material. It is time, then, to turn our attention to the French critique ginetique, which does make this its central concern.

27

TEXT AS PROCESS

French "Critique Genetique"

As might be expected from a still-developing field, French genetic criticism frequently raises questions about its own status, value, purpose, and scope, all of which are directly relevant to this study. Questions include:

. What is writing? How does one write? How does one analyse writ­ten language when the document stacks paradigm over syntax? What is literary writing? In terms of theory, what is the status of these "pre-texts"?

• Is this a new incarnation of philology? A heuristic study of manu­scripts? A critical procedure? An autonomous discipline?

• Is genetic criticism a theory of criticism or just helpful advice, some­thing like: keep in mind that manuscripts can also contribute to the understanding of literature? Can an original methodology be extrap­olated from an individual case and applied to another beyond stan­dard scholarly procedure?"

Unlike German criticism in this area, French criticism is released from the issues involved in a totalizing theory of versions, because it largely (though problematically) conceives of the avant-texte in autonomous terms as apart from the texte and viewed as a distinct ontological object.'^ French genetic criticism does not emerge out of French scholarly practice in editing but is placed in opposition to an outmoded traditional model: Geneticists react to the French editorial tradition, which opts systematically for the final version revised by the author (few exceptions confirm this rule).""

The critique genetique emerged in France in the 1970s. Avant-texte, the term for prepublication material, was first used by Jean Bellemin-Noel in 1974, and the term critique genetique was coined by Louis Hay in 1979. The history of critique genetique is bound up with the acquisitions of the Bibliotheque Nationale from the late 1960s onward.'" The acquisition of the manuscripts of Heinrich Heine led Louis Hay to establish a research team, funded by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), to work on the material. In 1974 a number of groups working on different authors' manuscripts combined to create the Centre d'Analyse des Manu-scrits Modernes (CAM), and then, in 1982, this center became a major re­search institution housed close to the Bibliotheque Nationale and called the Institut de Textes et Manuscrits Modernes (ITEM).''

The scientific context for funding is interesting in that it has shaped the nature of the work to quite a considerable degree; as French commen­tators point out, "genetic studies were from the start a team-effort. This

28

CONTEXTUALIZING PROCESS

Style of research, wary of personal intuitions and expressions, is in hne with the dominant scientific research structure of CNRS, which favors the laboratory model and well-defined methodological processes focusing on a well-defined corpus."'® Louis Hay, in the course of outlining broad inter­national and intellectual sources for genetic criticism, also emphasizes the importance of its being located outside the academic world of the univer­sity and as part of a more direct line of connection with writers themselves: "Et surtout: c'est dans la reflexion des ecrivains bien plus que dans celle des universitaires que la critique genetique a pu trouver des moddes" [And above all: it is in the reflection of writers far more than in that of academics that genetic criticism has been able to find its models]."

Theoretically, French genetic criticism locates its origins in a line of developing self-consciousness about poetic process that moves from Ger­man Romanticism (Goethe, Schlegel) through Madame de Stael and Poe. Precursors to the field exist in the form of manuscript studies of individual authors, but it emerged as a distinct area of study only when the focus turned away from the treatment of such material authorially, as a source of biographical or psychological information about an author, and toward a much more text-based approach in the 1970s.

In the seminal article "Does 'Text' Exist?" Louis Hay outlines the paral­lel development of theories of the text (Barthes, Derrida, Kristeva) along­side that of genetic criticism, appearing to define the latter in opposition to a structuralist or post-structuralist approach: "Both the method and the object of study of genetic criticism are quite distinct [from the theory of the text]. Its method is the result of extensive empirical work dedicated to authors' manuscripts. .. . Genetic criticism retains from its origins an inductive approach, which builds up general models from a series of con­crete observations."'® At its narrowest, then, French genetic criticism is defined as an empirical, grounded, scientific approach to the materials of process. There are, however, obvious difficulties with this. Laurent Jenny, a skeptical commentator, points out: "Genetic criticism is searching for a phenomenon that is in effect unobservable, unobjectifiable: the origin of a literary work. Its object of inquiry is essentially unstable."" Moreover, in spite of Hay's apparent definition alongside, but against, a theory of the text in "Does 'Text' Exist?" such theoretical ideas have significantly influenced the field and its development. Pierre-Marc de Biasi describes how: "Struc­turalism allowed us to specify the decisive character of certain processes at work in writing.... Research advances in semiology culminated in a more dynamic analysis of these structural processes, making the text the center of a theatricized process of meaning."'"" In his article. Hay himself turns away from the rigid separations of structuralism, determining instead to

29

TEXT AS PROCESS

look "not at the opposition between pre-text and text, but at the relation­ship between writing and the written work." This leads him to his famous description of the avant-texte as a "third dimension" of tfext: "the writing is not simply consummated in the written work. Perhaps we should consider the text as a necessary possibility, as one manifestation of a process which is always virtually present in the background, a kind of third dimension of the written work."""

In spite of repeated attempts at self-definition, critique genetique as a movement always "remains paradoxical,"'"^ in part because of a conflict between its material, empiricist focus and its more intangible aspect. In the introduction to the collected essays of Genetic Criticism, the editors com­ment on such paradoxes in the field: "It grows out of a structuralist and post-structuralist notion of 'text' as an infinite play of signs, but it accepts a teleological model of textuality and constantly confronts the question of authorship. ... it examines tangible documents such as writers' notes, drafts and proof corrections, but its real object is . . . the movement of writing that must be inferred from them."'"' Such methodological contra­dictions also lead to the treatment of the material itself as having a double identity. In "Does 'Text' Exist?" Hay defines the field as locating itself both in "the material given" (document) and as an "intellectual construction" (avant-texte). This "dual status" means that genetic criticism is often con­cerned with methods of access to the material at the same time as working with it more critically.'"" Biasi also registers a "double objective" for the geneticist, in terms of rendering material readable as well as reconstruct­ing genesis; he describes the avant-texte as "no longer a set of manuscripts but an elucidation of the logical systems that organize it, and it does not exist anywhere outside the critical discourse that produces it."'"' Even the central term for the materials of study is thus problematically doubled.

In a roundtable debate of 1995, transcribed as "Archive et Brouillon" in Pourquoi La Critique Genetique? Michel Contat poses the initial question of whether it is possible to substitute the concept of avant-texte for that of archive. In the course of Contat's discussion with Jacques Derrida, the lat­ter seeks clarification of what is meant by avant-texte:

JD: Si j'ai bien compris, vous appelez avant-texte un etat d'ecriture qui precede I'etablissement legal de publication.

[JD: If I have understood correctly, what you call the avant-texte is a state of writing which precedes the legal act of publication.]'"®

Michel Contat responds by defining the limits and textual status of the avant-texte in these terms: "Avant son impression, avant la decision de

30

CONTEXTUALIZING PROCESS

1 auteur de publier— I'avant-texte etant en plus une construction critique" [Before its printing, before the decision of the author to publish. ... the avant-texte being, in addition, a critical construction].'"' Derrida goes on:

JD: Mais est-ce que le materiau brut, avant que vous fassiez un travail sur un heritage de brouillons, par exemple, sera un avant-texte?

[JD: But the raw material before any work was done on a study of the history of rough drafts, for example, would that be an avant-texte^]

MC: En principe, non. On parlerait de dossier preparatoire, de dos­sier documentaire. L'avant-texte serait deji le resultat d'une activite critique.

[MC: In principle, no. One would call these a preparatory dossier, or a documentary dossier. The avant-texte would already be the result of critical activity.]""

The debate makes two key points very clear. The first is that the French genetic model is not only aware of a distinction between avant-texte and text but that it also distinguishes carefully between diflferent states within the body of compositional material, defined as the manuscript, rough draft materials, and the avant-texte. In so doing, it looks back to distinctions originally made by Jean Bellemin-Noel in 1977 between the cultural and material object (manuscript), the gathering together and ordering of ma­terials (dossier), and the presentation of such materials in a reconstructed order (avant-texte). Second, it emerges that, by 1?95, there is a degree of un­certainty about such distinctions, with the possibility that all texts should be considered as one text. Unsurprisingly, Derrida rejects distinctions between one kind of text and another, asserting that no text is ever fully stable and that "I'archive est toujours un texte" [The archive is always/still a text].'"'

At its most extreme, the Derridean position raises fears that a possible Shift of emphasis onto process rather than product, the notion of "writing" as something equal to the completed work of art, will be achieved at the cost of the destruction of both. This anxiety is raised by Almuth Gresillon, who points to ^'an internal contradiction that genetic criticism helps to ex­pose. If one is interested in the manuscripts of works, it is because there is a link between the pre-text and the text and that the study of one will lead to an increased knowledge of the other. But at the same time, the impor­tance given to pre-texts undermines the sacrosanct auctoritas of the text, because it is reduced to the status of just another state among others.""" Laurent Jenny also notes that there is a paradox underlying the private/ public relationship between the two kinds of text: "A pre-text derives its

31

TEXT AS PROCESS

value from the consecration of the text that it precedes. But paradoxically, the establishment of the pre-text tends to dissolve the textual entity that was precisely the one that gave it this value."'" This is well put, but .it is rebutted by Biasi, who states of genetic criticism that it in no way seeks to strip the text of its poiesis. Its aim is to widen the concept of writing by opening up access to writing's temporal dimension: a dimension that would allow us to support the structural study of the text with a poiesis of

the avant-texte."^^^ Such near-contradiction in terms of the relative valuing of textual pro­

cess and final text lies at the heart of any attempt to work critically on draft materials and is present in this study as well. On the one hand, I want to validate process as an object of analysis in its own right and to consider textual material in a state of process in a way that allows for its difference from the published or completed text. On the other, I am arguing for criti­cal integration and movement across and between avant-texte and text, seeking an enlargement of the definition of literary studies to include this material. The critique genetique reveals that such delicate negotiations of position are part of the nature of working with compositional material.

The double focus of French genetic criticism makes it highly distinctive and important for this study. Unlike both Anglo-American and German traditions, where a genetic approach is for the most part only concerned with the production of editions, the critique genetique was from the outset as much critical as text-critical in focus. A sense of how relatively advanced the French are in their literary-critical use of genetic material can be felt in Gresillon's account, in EUments de Critique Genetique, of different theo­retical approaches brought to bear on draft materials in France (narrato-logical, thematic, psychoanalytic, socio-historical)."' Such a range of criti­cal responses seems to place the critique genetique significantly ahead of Anglo-American writing, which is still at the stage of justifying such mate­rial as being of significant critical value and has not yet achieved the level of a coherent, recognized field of study. Work in this area is far more likely to be "assimilated to a form of textual criticism or automatically assumed to be a branch of it.""" However, the range of approaches in France reflects an ongoing tension between theories of the text and critique genetique and the question of the extent to which the avant-texte is, or is not, to be con­sidered as just another kind of text. Gresillon expresses concern that such critical responses simply respond to compositional material in the same way as the published text: "Traiter l'avant-texte comme du texte, n'est ce pas forclore par avance tout espoir de th6oriser I'approche gen^ique pour elle-meme?" [Isn't treating the avant-texte as a text to foreclose in advance all hope of theorizing a genetic approach for its own sake?]."' This seems

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to me an important concern, one that is, again, always present in critical response to the text in a state of process.

A brief look at the French genetic edition may be helpful in considering the extent to which theoretical ideas emerge in the presentation of texts. French genetic editing asserts the need to make active choices, to select and to present a dossier as opposed to the all-inclusiveness of the German documentary method. This difference is immediately felt in the size of the editions. Unlike the substantial multivolume German structures, French editions seem to try and pack as much material as possible into a relatively small space.

My first example is Paul Valery: Cahiers, 1894-1914, edited by Nicole Celeyrette-Pietri and Judith Robinson-Valery The Cahiers were written by Valery, alone and in private, every morning as part of his daily routine from 1894 onward. They are neither a journal nor a rough draft for a pub­lished work but represent the poet's lifelong dialogue with himself They ^re, then, the ultimate genetic text of a genetic text that is "consciemment et volontairement ouverte et comme intrins^quement inachev^e" [con­sciously and voluntarily open and as though intrinsically incomplete]."® This edition has been preceded by a full facsimile edition of all the 260 notebooks in twenty-nine volumes and a selected edition of 3,000 pages. As a result, it is free to be partial, choosing to cover only the first twenty years of the notebooks up to the First World War. The principal justifica­tion for the edition is its presentation of the text in a typographically ac­curate form. The editors state that their main objective is "de presenter au lecteur un texte facile et agreable a lire" [to present to the reader a text that is easy and pleasant to read]."' In this, they certainly succeed. The page itself is faithful to the manuscript in terms of layout, with minimized code and reproduction of images and of manuscript originals throughout. The editors have, however, made judgments as to which images are significant (and thus reproduced) or not, and in relation to deletion (major deletions are marked, but minor ones are silently removed). What the edition pre­sents, then, is a kind of "genetic reading text" of notes, ideas, and doodles in a spirit of openness appropriate to the writer. The reader is invited to "les utiliser tout simplement comme tramplin pour pousser plus loin sa propre reflexion" [use them simply as a springboard to push his or her own reflections even further]."'

Another influential example of a French genetic edition is provided by Pierre-Marc de Biasi's 1988 edition of Flaubert's Garnets de Travail [work­ing notebooks] in a single volume of 999 pages. The edition contains a sub­stantial genetic framework of some complexity. In the front section Biasi presents the study explicitly as a genetic edition, gives a detailed history

33

TEXT AS PROCESS

of the manuscript collection and of editions of Flaubert, and then turns to his construction of the Garnets de Travail out of two previous group­ings of Flaubert's manuscripts [Garnets des Notes de Voyage and Garnets des Notes de Lecture). Once recategorized, the notebooks break down into two groups: thirteen small pocket notebooks {calepin d'enquete [notebook of enquiry]) that Flaubert took with him when he went out and four large notebooks (grand carnet d'idees [large notebook of ideas]) in which much of the major research and planning of the novels occurred. In a scientific-looking table Biasi represents Flaubert's use of these two kinds of notebook over time, and then looks in detail at the characteristics of each kind.

In the text of the edition itself, Biasi, like the editors of Valery's Gahiers, emphasizes his desire to make the material available to all readers. The notebooks are arranged chronologically in groupings relating to a major work, with a framework for each one giving a biographical and genetic context. The edition is surprisingly authorial in this respect, with Biasi giv­ing, in part, as his rationale the fact that "partir de 1851, la vie de Flaubert coincide assez precisement avec la genese de ses oeuvres" [starting from 1851, the life of Flaubert largely coincided with the genesis of his works]."'

In spite of this impressive superstructure, however, the text itself is dis­appointing. In his theoretical work La Genetique des Textes, Biasi defines different kinds of transcription as either "transcription linearisie" [linear transcription] or "transcription diplomatique" [diplomatictranscription].'^" The former uses code to represent deletion and addition and reads as a continuous text (not respecting line endings on the manuscript page). The

.latter reproduces the manuscript text as accurately as possible with mini­mal code. Clearly, in the Flaubert edition, Biasi opts for the first mode, even though in Genitique he states that for Flaubert, "I'id^al est la transcription diplomatique accompagn^e du fac-simile du manuscrit" [the ideal is a dip­lomatic transcription accompanied by a facsimile of the manuscript].'^' As Biasi makes clear in his introduction to the edition, if he had attempted a diplomatic transcription, the edition would have run to four or five vol­umes instead of one (and certainly the fact that the book is a single volume is a major attraction).

These two examples reveal editions much less bound to documentary accuracy and absolute inclusivity than the German model, much freer in spirit and with a strong emphasis on the usability and attractiveness of the volumes produced. The primary objective is making materials accessible to a wide audience that is expected to want to read and enjoy the text as process (not merely use it for scholarly purposes). A critical comparison of the two Continental models might suggest that, if German editions are unwieldy in their full facsimile pages with facing transcriptions and notes.

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CONTEXTUALIZING PROCESS

the French editions have a tendency to go too far in the other direction, compressing the transcription material and giving only a limited sense of the materiality of the manuscript. This is understandable in the light of theoretical distinctions between manuscript, dossier, and avant-texte, but it can make the final presentation frustrating for the user.

Certain key concepts and anxieties emerge over and over again in writ­ings about the critique genetique by its own practitioners. These include: debate over the relative status and relations between avant-texte and texte; ambivalence about allowing room for psychological states and processes and about using a teleological model of development (both clearly autho­rial); concern over the doubled definition of,the materials of composition as both document and avant-texte; and anxiety over the theoretical under­pinnings of the field and the mode of interpretation for it.

Some critics, however, have made use of the potential tension between authoriality and textuality in the critique genetique to develop nonau­thorial teleological structures in ways that are of considerable value to this study. As a second-generation genetic critic, Daniel Ferrer is unusual within the French tradition in expressing interest in overcoming the "cu­rious relation of exclusion and reciprocal comprehension [that] remains between production and product, genesis and work."'" In "Clementis's

rCap: Retroaction and Persistence in the Genetic Process," he outlines a model of "multiple teleology" (i.e., two-directional) with an anticipatory and retrospective vision for the avant-texte in which "every act of note-taking occurs with the expectation, however vague, that the note will somehow be used; therefore every part of the avant-texte in some way re-yerts back to the projective logic."'^' Ferrer argues that genetic criticism can run "downstream" but also "in a retrograde motion" by means of this projective logic: "each fragment of draft projects itself onto the horizon of its completion."'^" Again, unusually, Ferrer explicitly asserts the necessity of a teleological perspective: "[I]t is in vain that genetic criticism regularly exhorts itself to renounce a teleological vision of genesis. Teleology is not a critical artifact—it is inherent in the genetic mechanisms. However we will see that its teleology is multiple."'^'

In "Post-Genetic Joyce," Ferrer and Michael Groden revisit Groden's Ulysses in Progress (1977) in the light of historical developments away from an authorially centered teleological response to compositional materials and toward a more materialist one. Groden articulates this shift: [T]he sense of a teleological movement from early stages to finished product can be replaced at least provisionally by one of a textual field that extends back­wards and forwards between avant-texte and text. Seen in this way the process need not be interpreted as heading towards 'one great goal . . .

35

TEXT AS PROCESS

and the pubUshed text can be reconceived as a provisional central point, a 'caesura' in the line of writing."'^® This kind of flexible use of a teleological macrostructure for process draws close to the model of integrated working across and between avant-texte and text that I am interested in and will outline in chapter 3 of this work. Finally, another critic making (slightly less) flexible use of teleology is Pierre-Marc de Biasi, who argues that "the production of a text can be understood teleologically, but the process of its development reflects a logic intersected by many possible becomings."'^' His ideas, which significantly influence this study, will be explored in more detail in chapter 2.

What are the criticisms and limitations of the critique ginetique'? As we have seen, many of these are being self-consciously raised by those in­volved within the field, but from an outsider's perspective, there are a few more points to be made. Clearly, the major feature of this critical move­ment is that it has a very distinct identity and seems to stand alone—both in its emergence from a research center outside the academy and in its apparent (lack of) relation to traditional editing. In many ways, this posi­tion is both the strength and weakness of the critique genetique: while it is autonomous, it is also potentially marginalized as a movement. Within French genetic criticism there is a lack of engagement with Anglo-American criticism (perhaps not surprising) but also with German criticism—where cross-referencing is largely historical rather than theoretical. This is par­ticularly striking by comparison with the German position, where many commentators were keenly aware of French developments.

Finally, critique genetique does tend to be strongly methodological in focus, that is, to be about ways of organizing and categorizing material rather than developing a critical analysis of its own emerging from a full understanding of the nature of the material. Although I see nothing wrong with a range of critical approaches to composition, there is a need for a genetic criticism to clearly define the hermeneutics of reading the avant-texte, and I am not sure that this has yet been undertaken. Gresillon re­peatedly raises this issue in Elements, and in her final chapter ("Towards a Genetic Theory"), she goes so far as to state:

Si la genetique est bien une position critique et non une mode ou une science n^o-positiviste, comme on a pu le pr^tendre, elle doit se don-ner les moyens appropri^s pour lucider, evaluer et interpreter la genese des oeuvres. [If genetic criticism is truly critical and not a neopositiv-ist method or science, as it has been made out to be, it must adopt the appropriate means to elucidate, evaluate, and interpret the genesis of works].'^®

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CONTEXTUALIZING PROCESS

My attempt in this study to offer a philosophical account of the nature of creative process (in part to validate textual process as a field of study) and to explore the hermeneutic aspects of composition may therefore have something to contribute here.

Chapter 1 has shown that the emergence of a "genetic" or "composi­tional" criticism is strongly reliant on changing theoretical and editorial conceptions of the text in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centu­ries. However, the chapter has also revealed that the relationship of genetic criticism to "Theory" is far from straightforward. French genetic criticism aligns itself with such approaches when it attempts to explore its subject matter as another form of Barthesian "writing": representative of the "birth of the text." At the same time, as we have seen, the critique genetique does retain something of a positivist attitude toward its subject matter, seeking to treat it "scientifically," to assert an essential difference between avant-texte and text, and to organize and categorize responses to the material in ways both teleological and implicitly authorial. Critique genitique thus distances the material it studies from a conception of it as the thoughts on paper of a creative individual, but at a larger level it still implicitly respects all kinds of authorial acts and decision-making.

37

/lOCeyOyO

ORIGINS, AGENCY, INTENTION

Follow the accident, fear the fixed plan—that is the rule. —John Fowles, Wormholes

An Anglo-American compositional criticism would be in danger of reject­ing its own past if it simply accepted a German theory of versions, or the French critique genetique as its model. It must develop a method of its own for responding to the materials of process, a method that builds on, and emerges from, its own text-critical history.

For French geneticists the charge of any return to "philology" is insult­ing because in that historical and national context, the field has defined itself in opposition to such a concept of the text and of editing—and has advanced very rapidly as a result. The movement is, however, constantly anxious about, and vulnerable to, such a charge: If genetic criticism is to become something other than an extension of old, dependable philology, it must answer the questions it raises."' For an Anglo-American school such a charge is less problematic—genetic criticism in this context could emerge out of "old, dependable philology" as a positive, more intellectually and theoretically enlightened approach. That is, the study of textual process can draw on recent advances in text-critical and editorial thinking as well as locating itself in relation to a long tradition. A revisiting of the concept of intention—which has lain at the heart of the Anglo-American tradition for so long—is one possible way of developing a distinctive model. What is meant by this, however, is a more sophisticated model of intention than that of "final intentions," one that conceives of intentionality as a complex of mental states or acts fundamental to process and embodied in the mate­rials of composition. In "Post-Genetic Joyce, Daniel Ferrer gestures in the

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direction I am taking when he states, "Intention is revealed as a fluctuat­ing, time-bound transaction between a series of writing events and a series of external constraints."^ He also goes on to make a further leap from a def­inition of genetic studies primarily in terms of its materiality to consider that "genetic criticism (as opposed to strict textual criticism) is concerned not only with textual material but also (or primarily) with actions: speech acts, or rather acts of writing."' Again, such a position is very close to what I will be trying to articulate here.

This second chapter sets out to confront some of the theoretical prob­lems facing the Anglo-American literary critic who wishes to work with textual process. In particular, it addresses the question of how such work can position itself in relation to the "death of the author" and the appar­ent rejection of authorial intention as an element of interpretation. If we discard the authority of the author altogether, then how do we deal with process? If we respond to process simply in authorial terms, then how do we avoid a simplistic and limited understanding of the nature of language and meaning?

There are two main concerns for this chapter, as it attempts to pave the way for the method that follows in chapter 3. The first is to look at the treat­ment of creative process by late twentieth-century theorists and to explore some of the reasons this aspect of the text has been overlooked. A second concern is to revisit the concept of authorial intention in order to under­stand what is meant by such a term, the misconceptions associated with it, and its importance in relation to the study of draft: materials. Clarification is needed not only in relation to the literary debate over intention but also in understanding intention in terms of actions and philosophical intention­ality. Only once we have a clear sense of the role of both intentional and unintentional kinds of meaning can we begin to articulate any kind of com­positional or "genetic" method for the study of text as process. Chapter 3 will begin to articulate such a method, outlining a schematic structure by which to explore different phases of process. This is by no means presented as the only, or the uhimate, way of interpreting creative materials but is of­fered in the belief that some kind of universal framework (however limited) is required."

THE DENIAL OF ORIGINS

We can begin by addressing the way in which process has been overlooked as an area of literary study, in large part because of a theoretical position that might be termed "the denial of origins." As is well known, Jacques Derrida's position in relation to authoriality and authorial intention can

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TEXT AS PROCESS

best be understood by means of his opposition to a metaphysics of pres­ence" and "logocentrism" that privileges speech over writing by assuming that it is closer to the origin of meaning in consciousness. Using Saussure, Derrida shows that speech and writing are both defined by their existence as part of a system of language based on arbitrary signifiers. There is no transcendental signifier. Instead, meaning is created by the relationship of signifier to other signifiers, which also means that it has a limitless

context. Such an account of language and meaning inevitably brings with it a

denial of authorial origins: "The concept of origin or nature is nothing but the myth of addition, of supplementarity annulled by being purely additive."' A "metaphysics of presence" seeks to locate creative origins in the author s mind, but Derrida is committed to a doubled presence in which things are determined as much as by what is not there (absence) as by what is. The individuality of the sign is determined by its difference from all other signs, which it is not.

In an account of literature that views text as emerging in this way, little emphasis is given to individual human origins for the work. Instead, there is only the "trace" as a kind of remainder of origins provided by meaning in a limitless context with no embodied existence. Derrida states that a meditation upon the trace should undoubtedly teach us that there is no origin, that is to say simple origin; that the questions of origin carry with them a metaphysics of presence."® The Australian textual critic Paul Eg­gert, in a paper entitled "The Work Unravelled," argues that a Derridean concept of "writing" collapses the distinction between subject (material; documentary texts) and intended object (transcendent; the work) in a way that is problematic for any study of documentary materials: "[F]or editorial work to be defensible, subject and object must be separable; only then can explanations about the construction of the object—at least partly in terms of the personal agency of the subject—become possible."' Eggert seems to be articulating what I also want to argue here; that Derridean "writing," by treating all textual material as part of one text, denies any distinctiveness to text as process and prohibits the full exploration of it in both its actual and ideal conceptions.®

The most directly influential declaration of this denial of creative agency, for literary studies, comes in Roland Barthes famous essay The Death of the Author" when he states that "writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin."' Barthes goes on to declare of the modern "scriptor": "For him, on the contrary, the hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin—or which, at least, has no other origin than lan-

40

THEORIZING PROCESS

guage itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins."'" The author as God, sending out a message to be accurately deciphered and understood, is replaced by a decentralized model of language as an open, ceaseless system. Words are no longer the utterances of a creator but offer a shared act of participation in a preexistent totality. As with Derrida, the search for a final signified is replaced by a focus on the instability of the signifier. From such a perspective there is no absolute meaning, and there can be no meaning-origins. Instead, Barthes conceives of text as a perfor­mative event, arguing that "writing can no longer designate an operation of recording, notation, representation, 'depiction' .. . rather, it designates exactly what linguists... call a performative."" Later, in The Pleasure of the Text, he asserts, "On the stage of the text, no footlights: there is not, behind the text, someone active (the writer) and out front someone passive (the reader); there is not a subject and an object. The text supersedes grammati­cal attitudes."'^ The writer is emphatically "lost in the midst of the text (not behind it, like a deus ex machina)."^^

The easy adoption of Barthes' famous phrase and the brevity of his es­say have meant that his account has had considerable influence, although in a contradictory way for genetic criticism. The Barthesian "theater of "production" appears to have implicitly influenced genetic criticism in France but to have undermined it elsewhere. On the one hand, such a po­sition seems to centralize process as an essential part of existence (as open event). On the other, it implicitly opposes the concept of a teleology or history leading up to the present moment and thus works against any sys­tematic study of materials of process. For Barthes, a productive conception of text places reader and writer on the same level: "[I]t puts the (writing or reading) subject into the text."'" Such a thesis seems to elevate process, but it does so largely in terms of reading and at the expense of writing. Moreover, because it treats all kinds of engagement with the material in the same way, it silently omits "productivity" in, or for, a state of textual process. Perhaps it was because French genetic criticism already existed before any articulation of "writing" as the space of production that it was able (partly) to assimilate such ideas. Elsewhere, however, where there had been no systematic attempt to establish any kind of genetic criticism, such an account tended to stifle any exploration of process. ' Barthes strongly privileges the present moment in a way that allows the elision of the duration or sequence essential to understanding composi­tional process. He states:

The Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as the past of his own book: book and author stand automatically on a single line divided

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TEXT AS PROCESS

into a before and an after. The Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, hves for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child. In complete contrast, the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text... there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now.''

Such a position elides process. It involves a denial of will and agency (agency is now located in language rather than in the user of it) and a de­nial of duration for meaning-production. It does not allow for the concep­tion of writing as a highly repetitive process in which the now is built on, and exists, only as a result of repeated past "nows." This position is char­acteristic of existential phenomenology, and of a particular conception o

time (as well as language).'® Is it possible to counter such positions and create a space that wdl allow

for the study of textual process in ways that respect philosophical advances while also retaining space for authorial activity and a teleology of devel­opment? We might begin the attempt by agreeing with Barthes rejection of a certain kind of criticism that results from an overpnvilepng of the author. Equally, we can agree that Barthes' account must, rightly, lead to a refinement of the extent to which creative consciousness is allowed, or un­derstood, to control process (the location of agency as not entirely interior) and a redefinition of composition in terms of the nature of individual entry into the language totality. Process must, in part, be about the locating of the self within, and through, an all-encompassing verbal mode of being. However, the problem with a fully de-centered account for the study of process clearly lies in two areas; the denial of duration (which elides the materiality of texts) and the denial of agency. It seems to me that a study of process must necessarily retain some sense of human creative agency. Equally, a temporal model that extends beyond the "now" of the moment is necessary to fully allow for the nature of creative processes. The privileging of the "now" asserts the spontaneous act over the necessary re­turn to the "now" to reflect on and regenerate from it. Duration and return, as essential elements in the motive toward production of the literary work, demand the presence of creative agency, or at the very least a partial belief

in agency on the part of the creator. ,, r. One way of responding to the "denial of origins" articulated by Barthes

is to incorporate a more complex account of it from his own later writings. Ultimately, this can lead us toward the possibility that philosophical and linguistic accounts of language and meaning need not entirely rule out the need for individual participation with the language totality.

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THEORIZING PROCESS

In "From Work to Text" Barthes allows for the (admittedly negative) possibility of an alternative position to text in which the work is defined as something closed, contained, institutional, and "in a process of filiation"— identified with a need to "try to find the 'sources', the 'influences' of a work."" Text by contrast is that which has no center, is open-ended, par­ticipates in discourse. The work is a tangible, fixed object; text is an active process in itself, a field or space.

Barthes tries to argue that the distinction is not historical (books of an earlier literary period and aesthetic are works, while the right kind of mod­ern book is a text), but this is only partly convincing in the light of his han­dling of examples in Writing Degree Zero. It is clear, however, that text and work are not simplistically opposed. As he states elsewhere, "the text is, in the work, what secures the guarantee of the written object."'® In phenome­nological terms, text corresponds to an attempt to conceive of language as an object in its own right, while work stands for a response to the object as it relates to human need and use of it. These positions in turn determine the hermeneutic model applied to each of them.

Responding to Barthes, in "What Is an Author?" Michel Foucault takes up the problem of the disappearance of the authorial subject into "writ­ing." His distinction between "work" and "writing" follows Barthes' own distinction between work and text but, rather than assuming the auto­matic privileging of the latter, Foucault is more open in allowing for the problems created by the denial of authoriality. In relation to the work, Fou­cault makes this interesting statement; "A theory of the work does not ex­ist, and the empirical task of those who naively undertake the editing of works often suffers in the absence of such a theory."" Such a suggestion is clearly relevant to this study, which is, in part, about defining a "theory of the work" to allow for the study of process as a response to textual mate­rial that requires some sense of the authorial. It reopens the question left hanging in Barthes' essay as to whether material of any age can be both work and text. If both are allowed, then there is the possibility of placing emphasis on one kind of nexus or another for the study of textual process (that of the social discourse of intertext or the more personal discourse of compositional states and acts).

In his later study The Pleasure of the Text, Barthes' distinction between "pleasure" and "bliss" partly mirrors the earlier distinction between work and text. In the poetics of reading offered here by Barthes, reader and writer are both positioned around the play that is the text. Two kinds of relationship are envisaged; a false and a true contract. In the first, the writ­ing does not actively "desire" the reader, and what emerges as a result is "prattle" or a "frigid" text.^° The second relationship is subdivided. The

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TEXT AS PROCESS

text of pleasure concerns a sequence of utterances, a rapid consumption by the reader of another's discourse, while that of bliss is about the expe­rience of utterance itself, a slow, full reading, and one in which language is the reader's as much as it is the author's. The text of bliss is outside, beyond articulation, uncomfortable: "Text of pleasure: the text that con­tents, fills, grants euphoria; the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading. Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts."^' In The Pleasure of the Text Barthes explicitly allows for the partial collapse of the distinction between two kinds of reading (between work and text?) within the reader who "keeps the two texts in his field" to become "a subject split twice over" and "a 'living contradiction.'"^^ The ultimate pleasure exists, or is created by, the tension between such contradictions. The reader's aware­ness of them is, in the end, the delicate essence of existence: "to be with the one I love and think of something else: this is how I have my best ideas."" Barthes' presentation of readerly contradiction leads him to acknowledge that "'pleasure' . . . sometimes extends to bliss, sometimes is opposed to it" and to consider whether the difference between them is "only a dif­ference of degree."^" Thinking back to the earlier work/text distinction, it is clear that this is a crucial question for any kind of compositional criti­cism, because if the distinction between them is not absolute, then there is the strong possibility that we can move between a response to "work" and "text" for the same object.

It is clear that a study of textual process, of origins, must define it­self partly as work in opposition to text. Indeed, the distinction between avant-texte and text in French genetic criticism implicitly corresponds to the work/text distinction in a way that creates some of the contradic­tions informing the discipline. Foucault's definition of writing as not being about the acts of writing or the meanings of an individual negatively con­firms that it is just these rejected elements (of a work) that need to be in­cluded in a full interpretation of compositional process. At the same time, a "theory of the work," if this is what is needed to understand process, does not have to conform to Barthes' original picture of an outdated, closed-off, limited approach. A contemporary understanding of a work must be colored by knowledge of the existence of text against which it is defined, so that a return to a simplistic conception of authorial origins is not to be expected. Rather we can follow Foucault's suggestion to "return to this question, not in order to reestablish the theme of an originating subject but to grasp the subject's points of insertion, modes of functioning, and system of dependencies."^^ Foucault wishes to do this in such a way as to retain discourse as the center and focus of study: "[I]t is a matter of depriv-

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THEORIZING PROCESS

ing the subject. .. of its role as originator and of analyzing the subject as a variable and complex function of discourse.''^® Such a position is unsur­prising given Foucault s definition of the "author-function" in terms of a self-limiting discourse of control.^' However, a study that seeks to value and validate the process of creative composition may need to allow more room to the subject as agent and motive force.

Returning to Roland Barthes, it emerges that, in relation to process it­self, Barthes repeatedly plays off sequence (and implicitly, duration) against act/experience, so the pleasure of the text "supposes a whole indirect pro­duction" where bliss is "a pure production."^' His use of the term "produc­tion" is potentially misleading, however. Barthes states explicitly: "The text is a productivity This does not mean that it is the product of a labour but the very theatre of a production where the producer and reader of the text meet."2' Barthes' use of the theatrical metaphor can, I think, work to illustrate the difficulty his theory presents for process, as well as a deliber­ate blindness built into the very heart of that theory A theater production at the time that it is experienced (on, say, the first night) is a shared act between players and audience. However, even as we experience it in this way, we are aware that one reason it is called a "production" is because it has been produced, over time, by means of repeated rehearsals, individual preparation, and so on. Thus, the "now" of the first night exists only by virtue of an extended sequence of acts existing as duration behind and beneath it. Barthes and other theorists of the text insistently emphasize the first meaning of immediate active "production" over the second meaning of temporal extension (which may in a sense still be "present" in the "now" of the first night but also exists as prior to it and detachable from it). Thus, when Barthes writes of "process" in "Theory of the Text" he refers to the active engagement with, and in, something and not to the process of that process by which such engagement is achievable. Barthes' position allows only for process as active experience for both writer (writing) and reader (reading). Yet the writer is also a reader; his or her own reader and rereader, over time. Might the writer not be able at the same time to know that lan­guage exists outside and beyond his control (in an eternal "now"), and yet experience it as if it were the expression of a past thought—and to know that there is no possibility of authorial intention being the only meaning in a text, and yet to write as if there were? In other words, the writer does not, cannot, only experience text as "Text" but has to move between a con­ception of writing as work and text, responding to it as a grounded object being produced as well as an ideal one.

In The Pleasure of the Text, Barthes asserts the necessity of readerly pleasure being created by contradiction. Describing his own response to

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TEXT AS PROCESS

tragedy, he states: "I take pleasure in hearing myself tell a story whose end I know: I know and I don't know, I act toward myself as though I did not know."'® This last position, "I act toward myself as though I did not know," is particularly useful in relation to both the reader's and the writer's rela­tionship with language. Barthes writes: "Many readings are perverse, im­plying a split, a cleavage. Just as the child knows its mother has no penis and simultaneously believes she has one... so the reader can keep saying: I know these are only words, but all the sameP^ We need to consider whether this contradiction is capable of application not only to the reading process but also to the writing process, and to the writer as his or her own reader. In fact, the contradiction might then be capable of application in three ways: to the reader of the text (reader-text nexus); to the writer as reader and writer of a text (the writer-reader nexus); and to the reader of the writ­er's draft materials (reader-process nexus). The distinction between what is known and what is felt is crucial because it allows for the possibility in language that what is true (metaphysically) may not be felt to be true by those experiencing it, and, further, that the misapprehension itself may be essential to the production of the work of art (or ability to enter creatively into the language totality). Something similar seems to be advocated by Jerome McGann when he asserts: "We read in the same spirit that the au­thor writ, or at least we try to; and then—there and then—we also read not in that spirit—we read in different spirits. We are right to do these contra­dictory things because the texts themselves are, ab initio—and as the poet (Byron) said—'antithetically mixed' themselves."'^

This kind of tension, of both reader and writer capable of being held in simultaneous, yet conflicting states, might also be allowed for the reader-subject in relation to compositional material. The state of "I know and I don't know" could equally apply to the reader engaging with the authorial process of "death through writing" or, the "coming-into-being" of a text. In relation to compositional process, it is capable of creating space for a necessary authoriality without that authoriality becoming the dominant reason and motive for interpretation.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH AUTHORIAL INTENTION?

As "the denial of origins" debate illustrates, early twentieth-century at­tempts to validate the discipline of literary studies by means of objectivity and a search for normative meaning are replaced in the mid-to-late twen­tieth century by an approach, underpinned by phenomenology, that views both the reading and writing of literature in terms of an "event." Such a position inevitably brings with it a rejection of authorial intention, which is

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THEORIZING PROCESS

directly associated with an outmoded conception of the author as control-hng presence and of writing as an expressive act by a unique individual, in favor of a giving up of the self to a preexisting language totality. Inten­tion is discredited primarily because of its association with a search for an absolute fixed meaning behind the text rather than an understanding of meaning as a shared experience.

In the Anglo-American literary-critical debate, the problem with in­tention was first raised in Wimsatt and Beardsley's famous essay "The In­tentional Fallacy," which I discussed in chapter 1. This essay argued that

' the "fallacy" lay in a critical approach that assumed a vital relationship between authorial meaning and the meaning of a text. Instead, the essay stated that "the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art."" In a later restatement of this position, Wimsatt made clear that such a fallacy applied to interpretation as well as evaluation.'" A secondary argument made by Wimsatt and Beardsley was that of the extent to which, and the means by which, such intention could be revealed: "[T]he closest one could ever get to the artist's intending or meaning mind, outside his work, would be still short of his effective intention or operative mind as it appears in the work itself and can be read from the work."'® This is an interesting com­ment since it makes a distinction between intention in the mind and inten­tion in acts on the page, here defined as "effective intention." Ultimately, though, Wimsatt simply wants to assert the primacy of intrinsic meaning in the text itself over that of the writer.

We can move on, beyond literary-critical rejection of authorial inten­tion on New Critical grounds, by turning to more recent philosophical ar­guments. The rejection of authorial intention on the grounds of its interpre­tative shortcomings is argued very persuasively by Hans-Georg Gadamer in Truth and Method. In this work he looks back to nineteenth-century interpretative practices, particularly those of Friedrich Schleiermacher, to argue against a hermeneutic reconstructive model based on creative ori­gins—that is, a model in which "[h]ermeneutics endeavours to rediscover the nodal point in the artist's mind that will render the significance of his work fully intelligible, just as in the case of other texts it tries to reproduce Ae writer's original process of production."'® Such an approach is emphat­ically rejected by Gadamer: Ultimately, this view of hermeneutics is . . . nonsensical."" He views such reconstruction as "handing on a dead mean­ing" and his own arguments in favor of the work of art as active experience and "event" emerge in opposition to such nineteenth-century principles." Rather than a contrast existing between "art" and "life," Gadamer insists that art is life: "[T]he work of art is not some alien universe into which we

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TEXT AS PROCESS

are magically transported for a time. Rather we learn to understand our^ selves in and through it.'"' Gadamer insists that meanmg is not unbodied in the work itself, or in the mind of the author, but in each individual s engagement with the work from the perspective of their own developing understanding: "[W]hat is formed by the poet, represented ^7 ^e ac^ and recognized by the spectator is to such an extent what is meant fwSh. Significance of representation Ues-tha.^ or the actor's prowess as such are not foregrounded from it. The philo sophical concept of the work of art as an event denies value o agency means by which a work comes into being. As Gadamer Puts^^^ Tote diation means that the medium as such is superseded. Thus, herme neutics a parallel position to that found m existential phenomenol gy in the debate over the "death of the author" is found to exist, leaning is to be located in the activity of engaging with a text and making he expe^ rience of it part of our selves and cannot be seen to exist in an attemp to understand the creative mind that generated that text. The mtentiona i y of the writer's mind is rendered nonessential for a full response to the liter­ary work, which is now allowed to stand as an open space ready to unclose

'turrpoXlmerges from Heidegger's account of being in Bdn, and Time and is therefore (unsurprisingly) in agreement with the account of language that Heidegger gives and which, again, has implications for weight and value allowed to creative intentions. As he does for other ph nomena, so for language too, Heidegger seeks to respond to it no in terms of its human use value but in respecting it as a thing apart. Thus, he as . "'In what way does language occur as language?' We answer: Language speaks:"' Traditionally, language is viewed as a ceeding from man and representing inner feelings and thoughts m exter­nalized form. From this viewpoint, "[w]hat is spoken in the poem is what the poet enunciates out of himself What is thus spoken out, speaks by enunciating its content. The language of the poem is a manifold enun ating Language proves incontestably to be expression."" Heidegger sums up the traditional position: "No one would dare to declare incorrect, let alone reject as useless, the identification of language as audible utterance of inner emotions, as human activity, as a representation by concept.- In phenomenological terms, however, ception of language distorts by viewing it merely as man s tool Authentic existence requires that the individual no longer views himself as ^gent but now has a role in terms of "responding" to the preexistent language total­ity The result is to overturn an expressive conception of man s '"elationsh p to language. Thus, "Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of

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language, while in fact language remains the master of man. When this relation of dominance gets inverted, man hits upon strange maneuvers. Language becomes the means of expression. As expression, language can decay into a mere medium for the printed word."*'

Both Heidegger and Derrida are sympathetic to the ways in which writ­ers want to feel that they do possess the language with which they work. Derrida makes clear the way in which the nature of speech leads us toward a personal identification with it: "It produces a signifier which seems not to fall into the world, outside the ideality of the signified, but to remain sheltered—even at the moment that it attains the audiophonic system of the other—within the pure interiority of auto-affection.""® Derrida con­stantly articulates the doubleness of an authorial understanding of lan­guage and meaning (discourse) as opposed to the meaning totality (lan­guage as system)—indeed, one purpose of deconstruction is to bring to light the inevitable contradictions between these two conceptions. Thus, on the one hand, he asserts that "the person writing is inscribed in a de­termined textual system," but on the other, he is interested in the ways in which authors deliberately resist a full recognition of that fact."' Nicholas Royle states that "the logic of the supplement dictates . . . that the writer is always susceptible to being taken by surprise. A writer can never have complete command or mastery over what s/he writes."*' The phenomeno­logical denial of origins to authorial consciousness is therefore not strictly a denial of intention, but it must act to radically redefine the nature of in­tention, which can no longer simply be about the externalization of inner thought.

Gadamer's account of meaning, and Heidegger's and Derrida's of lan­guage, confirm two ideas with significance for the study of creative pro­cess: first, that the intention of the mind that creates cannot be assumed to provide an understanding of the thing created; and second, that the con­cepts of intention, will, externalization, and expression in relation to lan­guage and meaning form part of a limited understanding of the world. The creation of an "authentic" work of art occurs by giving up the will, not by asserting it."' Such a position, if it does not altogether discredit intention, certainly has the effect of dramatically marginalizing it.

This still leaves us with a paradox, however: how can even those who write against intention do so without having the intention of doing so? To deny intention altogether to creative engagement with language seems to be at odds with our own experience of such activity. This in itself raises the possibility of a response already touched on. One explanation of the para­dox must be that whether or not language really exists as a tool over which we have mastery, our experience of using it is as though this were the case

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TEXT AS PROCESS

at the time of use. Even if it is philosophically true that "language speaks," this is not how we experience it, and how we experience it is a crucial part of understanding creativity. So, although language as a thing existing be­yond and above individual use denies agency, an individual sense of agency may be necessary in order to create.

In conclusion, we could say that that there is everything wrong with authorial intention when:

1. It is assumed to be the primary purpose of interpretation. 2. It is understood to represent a normative absolute meaning held by

the text. 3. It is assumed to be a single, static, identifiable thing. 4. It is thought to be capable of complete reconstruction. 5. It is based on an understanding of language as purely expressive.

However, it seems perfectly acceptable to draw on authorial intention when:

1. It is understood by the creator as a motivating force for the coming-into-being of a literary work (without necessarily being fully under­stood by consciousness).

2. It informs our understanding and interpretation of the manuscript page as one dimension of it, along with other nonintentional mean­ing contexts.

3. It is understood to be dynamic and contradictory (forming part of a constantly changing stream of meaning).

4. It is understood to be capable of reconstruction primarily in terms of acts on the page.

5. It is based on an understanding of language as both expressive and experiential (performative).

It is easy to agree that intention should not be used as the fundamental ba­sis for interpretation of a work of art and that the truth of that work must exist apart from an understanding of its maker. However, the question re­mains whether this is true in the same way, and to the same extent, for the interpretation of the coming-into-being of the work of art (i.e., for the draft: materials of textual process). In interpreting process, our interest is, at least in part, in the way in which meaning comes about. We are no longer an­alyzing language merely in a context of absolute detachment from con­sciousness but in the (sometimes clumsy and awkward) participation of being with language. When the focus of study is not the "final" text but the draft materials, then authorial intentional acts, embodied on the page, may

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THEORIZING PROCESS

need to be a necessary element of our understanding—as they are not for the completed work of art. This is not to ignore altogether the phenome­nological redefinition of language and meaning as essentially external and preexistent but to suggest that we may need to respond to them in terms of our experience of them (internal, expressive) as well as in terms of their separate existence (external, prior to consciousness).

PROCESS, INTENTION, AND A CONTEXT FOR MEANING

It is still not clear exactly what is meant by "authorial intention," and it is necessary to pursue this further. The term "intention" encompasses two kinds of meaning—or two dimensions—that are often conflated and con­fused.'" First, there is a common understanding of intention in terms of everyday action: behaving in a consciously determined way that has con­sequences in the world. This kind of ordinary intention is understood in terms of a mental cause resulting in a physical effect. Its importance is made clear from the reliance of the law upon it. Legal intention draws on such a meaning of intention to determine the degree to which individual consciousness can, or should, be held responsible for its actions (and pun­ished accordingly).

Philosophical accounts of action also use intention in this sense but make a further subdivision between self-conscious deliberate intentions and intention as a part of the action. The distinction is first made by G. E. M. Anscombe in her early work on intention in which she distin­guishes between the intention with which a man does something and what he actually does: "In general we are interested, not just in a man's intention of doing what he does, but in his intention in doing it."" This is a distinc­tion between a preplanned and internally anticipated event and the more immediate putting of that aim or purpose into practice through action. I will return to it later in this discussion.

A second meaning of intention concerns the more specialized use of it in terms of phenomenological "Intentionality," particularly in the work of Edmund Husserl. The term is used to describe a certain state of being that is concerned with the way consciousness is directed toward an object. The state itself (belief, desire, fear) is the primary focus of interest rather than thd object of that state (which may or may not even be allowed to exist at all). Intentionality in this sense denotes a property of being that distinguishes the way in which humans respond to the world. It could also be understood in terms of a state requiring satisfaction—so that intention can be satisfied or fulfilled (or not) for the intentional consciousness. It differs from phil­osophical accounts of intentional action in that it is concerned primarily

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TEXT AS PROCESS

with an inner state relating to consciousness and not with causal links be­tween mind and act. It follows from such a position, considered in relation to language, that language is understood to be referential, based on acts of consciousness, with an inner state giving meaning to a linguistic act."

Opposition to an intentional account of being in terms of both causal events and Husserlian intentionality has already been touched on in dis­cussions of literary meaning and language. The later phenomenological rejection of intention as the core constituent of consciousness is based on a holistic conception of Being that denies a divide between mind and world. Instead, it is asserted that much of our activity in the world, including men­tal activity, does not involve conscious intentions at all. We might act in a way that appears causal, but in fact we are simply participating in a larger whole that does not demand deliberate actions and is therefore not pre­ceded by internal cause. In this account, meaning is grounded in a shared subject matter that preexists the creator. Textual meaning is understood to change those who participate in it and to exist not in consciousness but in engagement with the world.

Located somewhere between the two first understandings of intention comes speech act theory and John Searle's work in Speech Acts and Inten­tionality. We need to look at such ideas more closely since they do provide a useful way of thinking about intentional acts on the manuscript page. Before Searle, J. L. Austin's influential 1955 lecture series, published as How to Do Things with Words (1962), made clear the extent to which language is performative by distinguishing between words as utterance (locutions) and the way in which utterances also perform illocutionary (nonverbal) acts. Since "to perform an illocutionary act is necessarily to perform a lo-cutionary act," it follows that meaning is understood to encompass not just the verbal content of an utterance but also the context of its performance.'^ Searle takes such ideas further in Speech Acts when he defines the illocu­tionary act in terms of a preexisting background of shared conventions so that "speaking a language is performing acts according to rules."'^ In Speech Acts Searle acknowledges, "It might be objected to this approach that such a study deals only with the point of intersection of a theory of language and a theory of action."'® gy treating the use of language by consciousness as a performative event (action through words), speech act theory resitu-ates intention as embodied meaning in the world (i.e., an expressed utter­ance can be understood as the fulfillment of an intentional act).

Searle does not explicitly situate his account in relation to phenomeno­logical intentionality, although it is clear that much of his work is indebted to Husserl—particularly in the account of intentionality as "directedness"

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THEORIZING PROCESS

toward an object capable of being satisfied.'® Instead, in Searle's own expla­nation, intentionality can best be understood by means of direct compari­son with speech acts. The entire speech act involves a locutionary utterance in the context of shared conventions and rules that are illocutionary. The locution bears with it the force of an illocution. Speech acts are capable of being understood as "intentional performances" so that the performance of a speech act is the expression of an intentional state."

Searle's account of intentionality works to bring together two principal elements: a state of prior mental directedness (intention of doing) result­ing in ordinary actions (intention in doing). Searle states, "Intentionality is directedness; intending to do something is just one kind of Intentionality among others."" Intention "in doing" can occur with or without a prior directedness. This has the important consequence that all actions can be defined as partaking of intentionality in one way, although they may not all'involve self-conscious directedness. Searle's distinction between "prior intention" and "intention in action" emerges from this.'' Prior intention consciously causes intention in action, which in turn causes and is bound up with a bodily movement that will result in the satisfaction of the inten­tion. Searle states: "We say of a prior intention that the agent acts on his intention, or that he carries out his intention, or that he tries to carry it out; but in general we can't say such things of intentions in action, because the intention in action just is the Intentional content of the action; the action and the intention are inseparable."®" Searle considers carefully the means by which intention is bestowed upon action; it operates through the need to satisfy the intention "by intentionally conferring the conditions of sat­isfaction of the expressed psychological state upon the external physical entity."®' His account is useful for underpinning an intentionalist posi­tion that wants to present the case—as he does—that "there are no actions without intentions" and that there is no meaning without intention.®^ This can be achieved if all language is a kind of act, and all action is intentional (though not necessarily involving conscious intention). I do not want to go so far, however. This study deals with intentionality as part of a causal or teleological account of human actions that offers one way of responding to language and meaning but not the only way.

Such ideas can be translated back into textual terms with the aid of Peter Shillingsburg's distinction between "intention to mean" and "in­tention to do" (a distinction I draw on at a fundamental level throughout this book). In the chapter titled "Intention" in Scholarly Editing, Shillings­burg emphasizes the need to give a more complex account of intention, in Ways that strongly anticipate my work here, when he states: "Theorists

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TEXT AS PROCESS

have tended to think of authorial intention as having a single goal. They have tended to de-emphasize both the development of intention through stages, towards completion, on the one hand, and the change or contradic­tion of intentions on the other."" This leads him to develop a distinction between two different concepts of intention. The first of these, intention to mean," is defined in terms of fluctuating and changing authorial inten­tions that are experienced internally and therefore not recoverable (and contain unconscious elements in any case)." The second, "intention to do, is defined as "an intention to record on paper, or in some other medium, a specific sequence of words" that is "almost completely recoverable."®' The latter form is held in acts on the page undertaken by the author and is therefore far more capable of interpretative reconstruction.®® In sum, Shil­lingsburg states: "The intention to do is, with the three exceptions noted, [scribal errors, "Freudian slips," shorthand elisions] conclusively recover­able from the signs written; the intention to mean is inconclusively recov­erable through critical interpretation."®'

For the purposes of this book, the question to be asked is simple. To what extent is an intentional context a necessary context for the interpreta­tion of meaning? I want to suggest that we can agree with Heidegger. Ga­damer, and Derrida that it is not a necessary context for the interpretation of a completed work of art but to acknowledge that it is a necessary context for the interpretation of the coming-into-being of a work of art. An un­derstanding of textual process has to recognize that its meaning is in part concerned with the making of meaning. So, for the "completed work of art presented to the public, we can accept an ontological definition of mean­ing in terms of the open experience of the text, requiring no knowledge of origins, but when we direct ourselves toward textual process, then the experience of the object is also the experience of the making of the object (however limited or contradictory that experience might be). As such, it is necessary to respond to process both as partaking of the openness of lan­guage and as a sequence of intentional acts on the page that bring the object into being. We do so not because we seek to understand the mind of the creator but because we seek to understand the kind of meaning that exists when language is used as a tool for creative making, as well as understand­ing process as it participates in the openness of the completed work.

Finally, it is important to note that the relation of the reader to textual process is of a different order than that of the reader to the completed text, and this is also true in relation to creative intentions. When we read the fi­nal work, we are free to respond to the textual object in terms of whatever meaning we find in it. When we read the materials of process, however, it is clear that such materials were (probably) not written with the expectation

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THEORIZING PROCESS

that they would be read. This positions the reader very differently in rela-.tion to intention as an element of interpretation. Rather than intention be­ing clearly directed toward an audience to lead to a certain reading of a text (in Searle's terms, "the Intentional state expressed"), it is directed, at least in part, at the production of meaning, in other words, at itself ("the inten­tion ... with which the utterance is made").®® Thus, the nature of intention involved in the coming-into-being of a text is potentially of a different kind than intention capable of being satisfied. As such, it is no longer marginal to our understanding of the materials but becomes an essential part of it. The writer's intention within process is directed toward understanding his

•or her own intentions (which may, of course, never be fully achievable). We need to allow that the making of something through language appears to the writer to operate on the basis of speech acts (as the satisfaction of individual intention through acts on the page), while the meaning-content of language remains part of an open directedness—experienced in an uncovering that has no limits and can never be fully satisfied.

I want to argue that the making of meaning is in large part about recog­nizing, understanding, and redirecting meaning in an interplay of intended (planned) and unintended (spontaneous/unwilled) meaning. A pure phe-nomenologist might argue that such an account merely retrospectively im­bues a "nonintentional" object (draft text) with human intentionality. This is because an account of language as a system detachable from the living beings who participate in it (and essentially detachable by its very nature) leads to an account of intention as something that is retrospectively read into, or onto, the text. Geoffrey Bennington explains: "Insofar as you are inclined to attribute intentions to me ... you construct them retroactively on the basis of the text read, and the text read functions 'mechanically', in­dependently of the intentions you attribute in fact, after the fact, to its sup­posed author."®' Such a concept of intention defines it as reader-produced and suggests that attempted reconstruction of it has severe hermeneutical limitations. I want to argue, however, that some space must be allowed for such reconstruction, and further, that there is a distinction between readerly reconstruction of the intentions of another and a writerly recon­struction of his or her own intentions in the act of creating, both of which are of interest to the study of process. Reader and writer are both retroac­tively placing intention onto text, but the difference is that for the writer, this is not just a question of interpretation or self-interpretation but part of an active process and event: a sequence of acts will follow from that reap-propriation. For the writer at the time of writing, unlike for the reader, the draft text is still open to change so that the reading of intentions into it also results in acts on the page and changes to the language. I accept that there

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TEXT AS PROCESS

are limits to the retroactive reconstruction of such intentions on the part of the reader (and that we can still only access a writerly experience indi­rectly). Nonetheless, intention as a complex and changing sequence of acts must emerge as having a considerable role to play in our understanding of text as process.

56

3. TOWARD A COMPOSITIONAL METHOD

Books of rules can prove delusive guides. —Philip Gaskell, From Writer to Reader

PREINTENTIONAL AND NONINTENTIONAL MEANING

It emerges from chapter 2 that there must be three contexts for meaning that bear on the understanding of literary composition and the text in a state of process. These can be defined as follows:

L The Compositional Context (transparent, preintentional)' • Writer's own history, cultural knowledge, philosophical knowl­

edge, literary knowledge, and so forth • History of the world at the time of writing • Objects around the writer • People around the writer • People engaged in the production of materials • People engaged in the publication of materials

2. The Intentional Context (deliberate, intentional, unconscious, unintentional) • Context of authorial meaning as understood by the writer through

his own past acts • Developing narrative of composition • Meaning on the page understood sequentially/teleologically as acts

of consciousness occurring over time • Causal relation between mind and word on the page, and between

thought and action

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TEXT AS PROCESS

. Unintentional (accidental) meanings occurring as a secondary consequence

• Unconscious meanings and acts on the page 3. The Language Totality (unwilled, nonintentional)

. Ontological whole that allows the literary work to be brought forth

from it . Totality with which the writer already unknowingly participates

(into which he or she enters and that preexists him or her) . Sense in the writer of giving him or herself up to the totality

(unwilled openness) . Emergence of the work of art as an open work of truth accessible

to all

I want to argue that creative process emerges as a result of the writer mov­ing across and between these three contexts. To understand the process fully therefore, we need to understand it not from an exclusive approach, dwelling only within one of them, but in terms of the interrelations of cre­ative intention with different kinds of undeliberate acts. The first two con­texts might be understood as preparatory conditions for a creaUve giving up of the self in the third but, equally, the second context provides a nor­mative structure within which the writer feels himself in control, and upon which the other contexts bear.^ Thus, there is a dynamic between what the writer wills and intends and what is unwilled (and allowed to be unwilled), which drives forward the creative process. This dynamic could also be viewed as the writer's relationship to the world (on one side through t e compositional background) and to language and meaning (on the other). Only the interaction of one with another-the event field held within a certain framework—can bring the creative work into being. It is because of this movement between a core intentional structure and the constant engagement of this structure with preintentional and nonintentional con­texts that process must be viewed as a constantly shifting state, resulting in changing acts on the page, acts that are always potentially subject to

further change. . The method, then—which is really a suggested framework for interpre­

tative activity-is explained here in terms of a core sequence of intentional states and acts, necessarily offset by nonintentional contexts on either side. Creative intentionality is enclosed hy a compositional context within whic intentional acts occur, but it also "contains" the potential for an escape into the limitless context of the unwilled totality to which it is ultimately sub­servient. This allows us to respond to the materials of process both referen-tially—treating the manuscript materials as an intentional object bearing

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meaning in the form of intentional acts on the page—and ontologically, since those same materials also exist as part of the open truth of the work of art and of the individual in response to it. The framework suggested here as a way of thinking about compositional material as it develops over time is intended to have universal application insofar as all writers must work with, and through, such intentional states if they are to create. It is emphatically not intended to be prescriptive or to be used as a rigid, regu­latory structure.

We can begin by clarifying different ways in which the intentional core of'apparently controlled self-expression is constantly engaging with, or al­lowing space for, other kinds of meaning of which it is not fully aware. Where creative intention occurs as a (normatively) teleological structure and sequence, preintentional and nonintentional meanings are of a differ­ent kind altogether. First, then, we can address the preintentional composi­tional context. This is necessarily present as part of the extended existence of the individual who creates, but that individual may be unaware of such a C9ntext and so will engage with it to achieve everyday objectives without any conscious intention taking place. Such a concept corresponds to a phe­nomenological account of how we interact with our daily environment. In ^eing and Time Heidegger asserts that we understand the things around us to exist in terms of a "totality" of interrelated objects, all of which refer to some human task: "Equipment... always is in terms of its belonging to other equipment: ink-stand, pen, ink, paper, blotting pad, table, lamp, fur-nilfure, windows, doors, room."^ When we use a single object within that totality, we are not at all concerned with its separate nature but only with it as something "ready-to-hand" and forming part of a work on which we are focused. The totality accounts for physical objects but also for more abstract entities such as language and meaning—which we can then rec­ognize to be communicable by means of shared social and cultural con­ditioning—and for skilled acts we already know how to do and so can do "without thinking." Acts can thus occur that look like the product of will but may have been undertaken without conscious deliberation. Unplanned or spontaneous acts may also occur in response to unexpected events im­posed on us by the equipment totality—and these might also affect com­position as a result of interruption or other external factors. Finally, non-authorial intentions of various kinds will also come into play by means of the compositional context. These might be unnoticed at a level of domestic support, reassurance, or even practical assistance. As long as that support is contributing positively to the development of the work it will largely be taken for granted, but if it should start to affect it negatively, then the back­ground ceases to function as an invisible support-structure.'*

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TEXT AS PROCESS

So, to take the example of John Keats writing the sonnet "On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again," it is immediately apparent from the title that such a poem could not have been written without Keats having previously read King Lear. Indeed, in a letter to his friend Benjamin Bailey on January 23,1818, the poet presents the writing of the poem in terms of an intertextual cause-effect relationship: "I sat down to read King Lear yes­terday, and felt the greatness of the thing up to the writing of a Sonnet pre­paratory thereto—in my next you shall have it."® A context of charged im­mediacy and response is further enhanced by the material location of the fair copy of the poem "opposite the first page of King Lear in his facsim­ile reprint of Shakespeare's First Folio."® However, this prior context—to which the poem self-consciously directs us—is only the most obvious self-determined one. We might also consider that Keats couldn't write a sonnet without knowing what a sonnet was, or without being aware of his ability to articulate his feelings in poetry, that he couldn't do any of these things without being able to read and write in the first place and, beyond that, without having some conception of the value of language and meaning as fundamental elements of human communication. All of this preexisting background has to be in place for the creative act to occur, so that even the most apparently "spontaneous" act of composition occurs within a frame­work that both writer and reader tend to take for granted and not even to notice. An everyday ability to participate in creative process demands this compositional background.

When Keats encloses a copy of the sonnet in a letter to his brothers the next day, he gives a clearer account of its origins: "Nothing is finer for the purposes of great productions, than a very gradual ripening of the intel­lectual powers—As an instance of this—observe—I sat down yesterday to read King Lear once again the thing appeared to demand the prologue of a Sonnet, I wrote it & began to read."' The earlier letter had seemed to sug­gest a relationship between background and creative act in which reading led to writing—but in fact this is not what the letter actually does describe. Rather, the relationship is between a past reading and an anticipated future one, but it is the intermediate state of anticipation (between one reading and another) that stimulates the new creative act. In this case, the com­positional context is not merely "background" preparation. Instead, Keats seems to consciously manipulate the "background" so that it becomes ex­plicitly bound up with the process and the content of the writing (which, in the case of this poem, is itself about that process).

On one side of the embodied intentionality of the materials of process there is a preexistent compositional context. On the other, there is an un­willed giving up of the self to the language and meaning totalities. Here,

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the writer no lonpr conceives of him or herself as a creative agent "produc-ing an externalized representation of inner consciousness. Instead, such distinctions fall away as the individual participates in a preexistent holism It can only be in the ongoing moment of active composition that the writer 4as the potential to open him- or herself up to language and no longer to feel as if m control of process. Such moments constitute the experience of inspiration," since identity is lost and the self is felt to be possessed in some way outside it. Thus, the "spontaneous" acts as a kind of gateway out of-the preintentional and intentional states of being and into something other Such a nonintentional experience can only occur in an individual capable of operating intentionally, but also (crucially) of willingly giving up that mtention.« Once experienced, however, nonwilled Being asserts itself as prior to an intentional directed sense of self, and of a higher order.

CREATIVE INTENTIONALITY

AND UNINTENDED MEANING

Having understood the ways in which preintentional and nonintentional contexts are essential to creative process considered as a whole, I want fi­nally to return to the definition of intention in terms of a teleological core of self-conscious and unselfconscious intentional actions resulting in a kind of history of process on the page. If we respond to the materials of process in terms of applied speech act theory, then we can break process down into constituent states and acts, the core elements of which are em­bodied on the manuscript page. This allows for a kind of microanalysis of those acts and of unconscious and unintentional acts that come into exis­tence as a by-product of intention within the materials of composition At the same time, creative intentionality should be understood as a complex ot states and acts continually subject to each other and capable of both co­existence and conflict. Creative intention is always open intention for this reason: intentional elements are continually subject to other intentional elements.' This distinguishes it strongly from the concept of authorial in­tention within a completed work (which exists only as one possible reading ot the meanmg of the text among many others). Intention itself is an ongo­ing event within creative process, constantly being changed and redirected by the unintentional contexts with which it engages. In effect, it operates at the level of a motivating framework (itself supported by a prior unnoticed tramework) within which the author feels able to "let go."

In an earlier paper I outlined an intentional model emerging from Michael Hancher's paper "Three Kinds of Intention." "> I am indebted to his work for the way in which it defines different kinds of intention, although

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TEXT AS PROCESS

it holds a more strongly intentionist position than my own. Another excel­lent discussion of intention as a shifting complex of states is given by Peter Shillingsburg in Scholarly Editing, and his account also anticipates mine

We can begin by acknowledging the likelihood of some kind of holis­tic aim or programmatic intenh'on—particularly for any work of length. Such intentions might be internal (involving pre-textual composition), or they might be formulated in notes or letters as some kind of plan. Pro­grammatic intention is only ever going to provide the broad framework for a work, but it also probably represents the writer's wider ambitions and could be viewed in terms of a "challenge" the writer sets for him or her­self (and may fail to live up to). This "long-term" intention remains open for the entirety of the creative process, is subject to redefinition, and may never be fulfilled. Also present before writing (as part of this program­matic intention) is an anticipatory communicative aspect, an awareness of

anticipated audience." Second, it is possible to identify stages of partial fulfillment of localized

writing, which we might term contingent intention}' I would view contin­gent intention as combining a series of discrete intentional acts (intention-as-process) with a sense of those acts as part of a sequence or section of work (either of a single work across drafts or of a section within a larger work). Intention is contingent in that, although a short-term intention may have been satisfied, its fulfillment and its value within the whole work re­main dependent on other parts of the process and the wider context of the developing work and cannot be known until later. This is an ongoing state in which issues of priority, such as which version to privilege, are not yet active: a "holding" state. Such a concept is particularly important for a long work, representing stopping points that are nonetheless only provisional and known to be so by the mind that creates them. It must also be borne in mind that contingent intention is occurring in conjunction with acts of "spontaneous" (immediate) composition.''

If we follow John Searle in allowing that "every action has an inten­tion in action as one of its components,"'^ then we can also designate a kind of micro-intentionality, or intention-as-process within continent intention—and this corresponds more to Anscombe's "intention in doing rather than "intention 0/doing." Alongside acts of spontaneous composi­tion there must exist descending levels of intentional activity—from the writer's intentions for a particular day. or hour, down to his intentions m relation to a line, or phrase, or word. This intention-as-process involves both the physical act of lifting a pen and applying it to paper and the men­tal intentions involved at a word-by-word level. Micro-intentionality thus

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combines self-determined actions with a preintentional "know-how," drawing on the compositional context.

When we consider these micro-intentional acts in the immediate context of contingent stages, a distinction seems to emerge between a willed intention to do or make, without knowing exactly what, and a sub­sequent intention to communicate a certain meaning. This is a distinction between intention as motive force (to write something) and as meaning force (to communicate a particular idea). Alongside these, the actual act of creative composition occurs without any conscious intention. Contingent intention and intention in action depend on a relationship between giving oneself up to meaning and attempting to reassert control of it. Contingent intention therefore describes an interaction between immediate writing in an unwilled state, in which there is no need of conscious intentions, and a subsequent intentional return to that writing to achieve a sense that meaning-intention is satisfied through it.

One other consequence of the contingent nature of creative composi­tion, particularly for a long work written over time, is the possibility of a failure of motivation occurring as a consequence of the need to pause and recommence labor on a work. There are numerous accounts of poetic non-f ompletion for the Romantic period—when the acceptability of presenting an incomplete work to the world emerges for the first time—and clearly, the study of incompletion and "creative failure" (or the perception of it) is a potentially rich area of investigation for compositional criticism. Asked why he had never completed "The Recluse," Wordsworth is recorded to have remarked to an American visitor, George Ticknor: "Why did not Gray finish the long poem he began on a similar subject? Because he found he had undertaken something beyond his powers to accomplish. And that is my case.""

If the intentional core is structured on provisional and partial satisfac­tion for the writer (experiencing process as agent), then we also have to consider whether that satisfaction is finally achieved in terms of a total state of final intention. One question that the study of the literary work from' the direction of the text as process allows to be asked is, how "final" is the published text? I would question whether such a concept really exists for the writer, particularly in works of poetic length. In a brief discussion of Alexander Pope's "An Essay on Man," Richard Wendorf raises this issue: "If, as Valery suggested, 'a poem is never finished, it is only abandoned,' then authorial manuscripts—even more than their printed counterparts— should provide us with the materials for a poetics of abandonment. Such a poetics would be based of course, on a principle of imperfection."'® There is, certainly, the first presentation of a work to the public, which means

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TEXT AS PROCESS

that an endpoint of some kind is achieved and that a sense of fixedness and finality attaches itself to the work by virtue of its material form and reception. Without question, this brings into play a whole train of specific activities and anxieties for the author that are embodied in the composi­tional material in different ways. However, the finality represented by the moment of publication is, in effect, imposed externally. The writer might have gone on changing things, but now, time constraints, the fixing of type on the page, and other physical and practical needs determine the text in one form, the final' form of the first published text. For the writer, a sense of finality may be far more tenuous than for the publisher, printer, critic, and reader. Compositional material contains the potential and possibil­ity for many different kinds of poem, not just the one the world knows. Of course, various decisions led the poet to create this text and not that one, and those decisions were unlikely to have been entirely arbitrary, but the text is something more than the final product—as the very survival of compositional material illustrates. For the writer, I would suggest that the idea of final intention is really only one possible stopping point in the con­tinual process of contingent intention through which the material evolves. Potentially, such a process is endless, and for this reason, the writer may well go on changing the text after publication and right up to the end of his, or her, life.

Finally, we should briefly consider the concepts of unfulfilled intention and revised intention, which may or may not be allowed to exist at all (and which have the danger of assuming an overly linear/teleological structure for creation). The first describes a state similar to that of programmatic intention, existing at a distance from the period of core creative activity but occurring at a different moment in time within the compositional pro­cess. At some later point—possibly after the publication and reception of a work—the writer is forced to acknowledge that his original ambitions cannot be met because of the way the material itself has emerged. This may well result in future action, through revision or rewriting, in a further at­tempt to fulfill the original holistic aim. Arguably, unfulfilled intention is therefore no different from a further state of contingent intention, unless it is accepted that the return to a text after publication is of a fundamentally different order from the return to a text before publication.

Revised intention is also temporally situated after an act of publication or fixed completion of a text. This is similar to unfulfilled intention but im­plies that the writer, rather than still trying to meet his original objectives, returns to the work with changed objectives.'^ Such a change may occur as the result of a considerable time delay between first finishing the work and returning to it, so that the writer has lost sight of, or forgotten, his original

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mtentions. Alternatively, the changed context of his life and other works may have made the writer dissatisfied with those original intentions. Re­vised intention will result in material that is effectively defined as a sepa-rate work from the original and that differs from it intellectually as well as textually Richardson s Pamela might be cited as an example. According

dip Gaskell, The plot of Pamela, which had served as the vehicle for Richardson s first headlong inspiration, proved difficult to reconcile with

is later urge to give the novel a stronger moral purpose."" The novel thus exists m a first edition that presents Pamela "at her most natural but with crudities of tone and structure," in revised editions in which her "manners were refined, and in a rewritten version finally published in 1801 "in which Richardson used his mature technique to tackle the contradictions in the plot and to enhance its morality."^®

When compositional process is considered as a complex structure of interrelated states and acts, an important connection between time and in­tention also emerges. It might be argued that developing any kind of time structure for intention simply takes us back to an old authorial model of linear progress toward a "final ideal" text with the danger of falling into the teleological trap, in which a draft can only be read as a function of the

printed text. However, what I am describing here is a structure within which different kinds of time perspective on a work compete or coexist.^^ n so doing, I am partly influenced by the handling of teleology by French

genetic critics as a necessary but flexible element in genetic studies, as discussed at the end of chapter 1. At one level, of course, the text comes into being chronologically, but diflferent kinds of intention relate to dif­ferent points withm, or perspectives on, that chronological time span.^'

ontingent intention and intention-as-process involve a sense of fluid time m which intention is being acted out directly, or being rapidly overwrit-

n. The Other intentional states are either anticipatory of this core state (programmatic) or look back retrospectively on it across the divide cre-ated by the act of publication/completion (unfulfilled intention, revised intention). Intention itself changes according to whether it relates to a

xed point m time from which process is considered or to a fluid, changing process in action. ° ,

I would also suggest that in composition over time (as, for example wi h the writing of a long poem), a drive toward intention in any particular block of work IS often counterbalanced by an almost deliberate "resistance to m ention at a creative level through the piling up of indeterminate ma­terial and the creation of multiple possible creative paths (one of which may e fixed by the act of publication, but which is not the only possible

aping of the text). Michael Hancher makes an interesting observation

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that is relevant to such issues: "There are cases—most obviously, certain long works—in which the author never does face and reconcile his con­flicting tentative intentions^ for different parts of his text. Intention im­plies in itself a forward dynamic, a sense of purpose, an objective to be attempted or attained. But the creative artist may not want to be thinking in this way about the whole text at the point of writing one part of the text. It is highly possible, then, that programmatic intention might be at odds with contingent intention, or that there will be conflict within contingent intentional material. At certain points, the writer may want simply to pro­duce a mass of material with no particular shape or order that he can then draw on later. At this point, he may not want to be writing within an ac­tively shaping mass of material but to write with a deliberate lack of shape (within the whole—there will still probably be clear intentions for what he is writing locally). There may then need to be a denial of any sense of wider intention in the short term for programmatic intention to be achievable in

the long term.^' In conclusion, it is necessary to consider unintended meaning, which

occurs within, and as a by-product of, the intentional complex. It exists in the form of embodied acts on the page but contains meaning not nec­essarily attributable to the writer's intentional acts. In Intention, G. E. M. Anscombe states of the example of "offending someone" that "one can do this unintentionally, but there would be no such thing if it were never the description of an intentional action."^® Anscombe lists various kinds of "happening" that may be intentional or unintentional, such as intruding, offending, or kicking. In these scenarios, the possibility of unintended meaning comes into being in all its ambiguity. Such ideas are also explored by Jack Meiland in The Nature of Intention where he asks of intentional actions, "Can the agent try to do X and yet unintentionally perform the Y in question?"^' Again, like Anscombe, Meiland suggests that unintentional action occurs only within a framework of intended action. He tells a nar­rative in which one individual arranges to meet another at a certain time in a certain place. The individual goes there an hour early (as he thinks) to prepare but finds the person there anyway because it is in fact an hour later than he had realized. Meiland concludes: "Because he did what he did unintentionally, what he did is not the carrying out of his intention" (although it appears to be so to the other person).'" John Searle also briefly addresses the question of unintentional action with relation to the Oedipal

narrative:

Oedipus intended to marry Jocasta but when he married Jocasta he was marrying his mother. "Marrying his mother was not part of the Inten­

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tional content of the intention in action, but it happened anyhow. The action was intentional under the description "marrying Jocasta," it was not intentional under the description "marrying his mother" [T]he total action had elements which were parts of the conditions of satisfac­tion of the intention in action and other elements which were not.''

This account makes clear once more that the unintentional is brought into being as a kind of "by-product" of intention and that the outcome of an action can appear to be that of satisfied intention without actually being so. Searle goes on to offer a useful definition of the unintentional: "[W]e count an action as unintentional under those aspects which, though not intended, are, so to speak, within the field of possibility of intentional ac­tions of the agent as seen from our point of view."'^ Unintended action su­perficially appears to be in opposition to intended action, but it is, in fact, dependent on it.

Jack Meiland is relevant here in that he makes clear the importance of understanding intention in a temporal way: "These cases also show that we should not speak of the agent's doing or not doing X intentionally, but only of his doing or not doing X intentionally at a certain timeP^ Again, this is a very important point for understanding intention in relation to crea­tive process as a sequence of acts. Meiland continues: "[A]n agent may be performing an action intentionally at one moment and not intentionally at another moment while performing the action continuously."'"' This shows us that unintended meaning is strongly temporal and temporary within the creative process. It may exist only in a single state in an isolated way on a single manuscript page, or it may be converted by the author into intended meaning and then carried forward within the text for all future drafts. It is, however, likely to be either removed or incorporated at the next stage of process.

If the "unintentional" exists within compositional material as actions held in their physical marks on the page, then two kinds of unintended meaning result from this: "accidental" and "unconscious." The first refers to marks, stains, or other physical and material attributes of the manu­script materials that do not appear to bear any communicative intention. The second refers to unintended meanings, such as misspellings, miscopy-ing, unreadable words, repetitions, or occurrences of one word entered in place of another. In a reading of Keats's manuscript of "To Autumn," Helen Vendler shows that "some misspellings are suggestive. The sun is natur-ring (for maturing): orr (for or) has been proleptically contaminated by the upcoming/wrrow; red becomes (by contamination from reap) readP^ Such "errors" can prove extremely fruitful if the "wrong" word turns out

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TEXT AS PROCESS

to be more striking and unexpected than the one intended to be written. A psychoanalytic approach to process would of course focus on such acts as ways in which the unconscious breaks through to find expression.'®

A third kind of unintended meaning is more complicated and might be described as "consciously intended unintentionality." For example, a poet may intend to minimize intention in a work by introducing random elements, such as cutting lines up and jumbling them about. In this case, the writer manipulates the unintentional possibilities of meaning. Equally, the deliberate introduction of others' intentions might occur here if the writer consciously chooses to let another's intentions bear on the materi­als and so resigns his meaning in favor of someone else s.'^ Finally, and more conventionally, we should remember that traditional poetry always develops as a kind of compromise between meaning-content and sound or shape. Elements of form—meter, line length, rhyme pattern—are all ways in which semantic meaning is forced to confront more-or-less arbitrary boundaries and to allow itself to be redirected and reformulated by an ex­ternal structure that is "unintended" in a sense (although the poet has, of course, chosen to work within such a structure).

John Searle's final definition of unintentional action as "within the field of possibility of intentional actions of the agent" points to the ambiguity and uncertainty implicit in the unintentional.^® This is relatively clear in a case like that of Oedipus (where we can assume that there is no likelihood of him wanting to marry his mother so that the action is verifiably unin­tended) but far less clear when we consider it within the creative process, particularly in material terms. We cannot be sure whether unintended meaning occurs indirectly as an unconsidered consequence of, say, writing on a page of a certain size that may limit or constrict or shape that work, or whether such a shaping was actively envisaged and chosen by the writer from the start. One core characteristic of unintended meaning, therefore, is that it is highly ambiguous as to whether or not it is unintended. Certain writers—Emily Dickinson for one—seem to make use of such ambigu­ity." However, even where unintended meaning may pass unnoticed by the writer—existing only as part of the functionality of the compositional context—it always has the potential to be reinterpreted by later readers (or by the writer as a later reader).

It may be helpful to conclude this discussion of unintended meaning by a brief recontextualizing of the concept in relation to Derrida, as a reminder of the dangers of an overly intentionist approach. In a critique of speech act theory, Derrida opposes the way in which traditional speech acts set up a hierarchized opposition between serious, meaningful communication

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and some kind of "failed" communication. Such a model privileges fulfill­ment of intention through successful communication (in which intention is satisfied), with the result that "[n]onplenitude will be treated as though it were an extrinsic accident, even if it in fact occurs frequently, even if it takes place everywhere."^" Derrida argues that the relationship between intention and "plenitude" (satisfied intention?) is in fact a divided one; if plenitude is achieved, then intention "dies." Nonplenitude is therefore not a mere by-product of the drive toward fulfillment but an essential part of the nature of intention: "If nonplenitude (the non-telos) is therefore not an empirical accident of the telos, or even a simple negativity, one cannot take it into account as one might a contingent accident [P]lenitude is at once what orients and endangers the intentional movement.""" This is a classic Derridean reading, in which the fulfillment of intention, which appears to be its essence, is shown to be defined equally well by its nonfulfillment, or at least dependent on the possibility of it. For Derrida, then, unintended meaning precedes the intentional rather than existing as a by-product of it.

How does such an account relate to my definition of "unintended" meaning? Derrida seems to be discussing the satisfaction or nonsatisfac-tion of intention rather than the accidental nature of the "unintended" (for which the satisfaction of intention was not directly the goal). However, the way in which he asserts that the potential failure of intention to be fulfilled is bound up with its successful fulfillment could also apply to unintended meaning, which exists as an alternative articulation of one of the many possibilities held in language. A Derridean account of unintended mean­ing would presumably deny that it is a by-product of intention and see it simply as the alternative coming into being of latent meaning.

It is important to note that I am not arguing for the superiority of in­tended over unintended meaning in any way. Rather, I seek to show that it is often through the cross-interpretation of acts on the page that can be reconstructed as "intended" and those that are "unintended" that we can fully respond to the materials of process. In both cases, I would also want to allow that we cannot absolutely know the intentional act (though we can probably reconstruct intentional sequences) and cannot always be sure that the unintended is unintended. In a sense, then, I position myself somewhere between Searle and Derrida in relation to acts on the manu­script page. I find the distinction between intended and unintended com­positional acts useful and worth retaining, but I do not want to assert that only intentional acts are of value for our response to the manuscript object, not at all.

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TEXT AS PROCESS

A TYPOLOGY FOR THE STUDY

OF COMPOSITIONAL MATERIAL

I want to conclude this chapter by offering a typology that will clarify dis­tinct phases within the compositional process and thus provide a practical framework for critical response to such material. Thinking about the use of such a framework returns us to the question of what a compositional method is for and takes us back to the relationship between text-critical and literary-critical activity. Historically, a distinction has been made between literary criticism (an act of interpretation that has as its aim the produc­tion of meaning within a work) and textual criticism (an activity concerned with the presentation of a work and with details of form). However, as Peter Shillingsburg asserts; "The central concern of both textual critics and literary critics is meaning. The central focus or locus of that concern is the text. The problematic nature of meaning agitates literary critics and theo­rists; the problematic nature of texts agitates textual critics and theorists. Both should agitate us all."''^ The relationship between textual and literary criticism in the study of draft materials can be seen as a continuum with, at one extreme, controlled "textual" tasks (such as decisions about the spell­ing and presentation of words on the page) and, at the other, the subjective interpretation of a literary text in terms of its content and context. Between these two positions, a range of activities occur that involve varying degrees of critical intelligence and judgment, and in which the two areas frequently overlap. The outline I am about to provide is intended to suggest that the study of textual process could potentially range across the whole contin­uum (linking textual process to textual product) or involve engagement at a particular point or stage within process. A compositional method also has obvious application to editing practices (allowing the possibility of an edition structured to explore the materials by means of the framework or one phase within it), but it really aims at enlarging interpretative practice through a new form of critical analysis in which textual and literary-critical activity can both be employed for the full understanding of process.

Activities within editing that are defined by a teleological underpin­ning and nearer to a "text-critical pole" might include; clarifying the order of the manuscripts; developing a model for stages of composition relating manuscripts to each other; mapping this model onto biographical informa­tion; understanding a particular manuscript notebook or a particular se­quence within that notebook; or identifying characteristics of a particular text in terms of its composition by a particular author. For the literary critic working with an Anglo-American scholarly edition, many of these tasks are likely to have already been performed by the editor and to have been

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implicitly or explicitly articulated in the scholarly framework. If the edition works successfully, however, it should provide the scholarly reader with enough access to the material for him or her to be able to check and confirm the editor's conclusions for himself and to then use this material to explore the text further, or to release the material from a teleological perspective (which may be necessary in the first instance). If the reader is working with a facsimile text that has no scholarly framework, then some of these more "text-critical" tasks may need to be undertaken before analysis can occur. If the reader is working with an electronic presentation of the text, in the form of multiple versions, then the question of whether it is necessary to establish a teleological perspective on the manuscripts, or whether a radial structure is able to be immediately used, can be explored.

Once an initial sense of the structural relationships between composi­tional materials has been established, the reader can then begin to explore more interpretative, literary-critical ways of responding to that material. "Text-critical" activities represent a valuable preparatory element for work on compositional material. While not explicitly articulated within the framework I will give, such activities are implicitly present within it.

At the other "pole" is the use of materials of process to clarify and pur­sue cruxes within the published text that are revealed, explained, or con­tradicted by knowledge of the shape, structure, and development of the work in a state of process. This is a vital act, and one in which literary criti­cism and text as process are bound together. It is probably the way in which draft material is most frequently used by literary critics.

Between these two poles, and forming the core ground for a composi­tional or genetic criticism, are activities relating to specific study of the act of composition and of process considered either independently of "prod­uct" or the final meaning of the work. Such activities might focus on a par­ticular phase of composition, on the materiality of process, or on the way in which meaning emerges for a particular writer or form.

In chapter 2 of La Genetique des Textes, Pierre-Marc de Biasi formulates some of the stages and phases involved in the study of genetic material. He defines four stages of reahzation within the process;

phase pr^redactionnelle [precompositional phase] phase redactionelle [compositional phase] phase pre^ditoriale [prepublication phase] phase ^ditoriale [publication phase]^'

Only the first three of these phases involve the avant-texte. The prepub­lication phase ends at the point of "bon a tirer" [passed for press/ready to

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TEXT AS PROCESS

print], at which point the avant-texte becomes a text. In "What Is a Literary Draft? which argues for the value of studying the rough draft, Biasi sets out to provide "a general table of the stages, phases, and operational func-ions that enable the classification of different types of manuscripts accord­

ing to their location and status in the process of a work s production." The table, which can be found in Yale French Studies 89 (1996), provides a useful summary of Biasi's work and a model for my own typology It is defined y Biasi as a chronotypology"« and thus works horizontally, to describe

different aspects of each phase, and vertically, to denote the relationship of each phase to the next in a teleological line. Biasi insists that a causal struc­ture is essential in classifying genetic material, but he also asserts that

1 operation consistant kfaire comme si chaque brouillon successif chaque operation du scripteur representait une etape vers le but final qui est le texte. Cette representation heuristique est necessaire, mais elle n'est evi-demment pas adequate pour decrire la realite des conflits, des desirs, des hesitations qui caracterisent la genese. [the operation consists in acting as if each successive draft, each act of the writer, represented a stage toward the final goal, which is the text. This heuristic representation is necessary, but it is obviously inadequate to describe the reality of the conflicts, desires, and hesitations ... that characterise genesis]

In oAer words, a larger teleological framework needs to be in place to cat­egorize and to negotiate the materials, but the fact that it is present does not commit one to a rigid, goal-centered response to that material

Biasi also makes it clear that he is aware of the generic Hmitations of his table in What Is a Literary Draft?" and in his detailed account of the four phases (which I just outlined) in La Genetique des Textes, where se-neric emphasis on the novel comes through to color his account of each stage. This marks a key distinction between his typology and my own (which has Its own generic bias in favor of poetry). In comparison to Biasis tpology, then, my outline focuses more on the potential activi­ties of the critic than the characteristics of the textual material. It does not aim to be complete, only to give suggestions of possible activities that might be undertaken."^

A. The Compositional Context • Compositional environment (habits, place, space, people) • Equipment (pen, pencil, size and shape of materials, nature of

entry)

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. Breakdown of equipment (on page, in instruments, in larger context) °

Events/circumstances bearing on composition B. The Intentional Core Structure

Programmatic Intention • Pre-textual composition (mental and oral) . Motivation for composition (internal, external) . Relationship of text to other texts (of the author, of other authors) • Potential failure, change, or redirection of programmatic inten­

tion Planning, notes, outlines, lists, synopses

• False starts, undeveloped projects Contingent Intention • Moment of first draft

• Phases ofwork on a text (distinctions between first draft, draft fair copy, printer's copy)

• Compositional propulsion, means of stimulating or restarting composition °

. Points of contingent completion (fair copy-texts of part or whole work)

• Structural organization and reorganization

• to other text (of the author, of other authors) • Multiple versions, rewritings Intention-as-action (Micro-intentionality) • PhysKal aspect and appearance of text on the page

Physical aspect and appearance of manuscript notebook • Localized structural organization . Revision: immediate, interniittem, long-term, shaping, propulsive • hftect of changed context on meaning of words • Replacement of one word with another (reflecting changed

intention) °

• Creative judgment (changing intentions, how defined, how di­rected)

• Use and role of amanuenses • Abandoned works Act of Publication/Point of Completion • Concept of completion • Prepublication preparation of text • Distinction between revision and editing • Revision of proofs • Private prepublication printed texts

Increased effect of nonauthorial interventions

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Unfulfilled Intention/Revised Intention . Response to critical (or domestic) reception . Revisions to first edition and later editions • Enlargement of a work (once or more than once, over time) • Restructuring and rewriting • Revision or preparation of texts by author and others • Significance of last published lifetime edition • Significance of posthumous publications Unintended Meaning • Degree to which the unintentional is allowed to enter into the cre­

ative process • Local level within the text . Local level within the text by another (result of dictation, copying) . Effect of external factors, human and nonhuman (interruption,

mood, weather) . Effect of material factors (shape, size, form of paper) . Effect of printing and publishing methods and conventions • Unconscious intentions on the page (slips of the pen, misreadings,

miswritings) Nonauthorial Intention (This also comes under A) • Indirect effect of others on authorial intention, prepublication

(opinions of friends, family, editor) . Direct effect of others on the text domestically (copying, punctua­

tion, spelling) • Direct effect of others in preparation for publication (compositors,

typesetters, publishers) • Direct effect of material aspects of publication (number of pages,

layout, shape and size of text) • Indirect effect of others on future authorial intention, postpublica-

tion (reception by critics, journals, wider circle of friends) C. The Language Totality

• Interpretation of meaning content . Consideration of process as a "becoming" . Whole/part relations, hermeneutic circle . Consideration of the "spontaneous" (immediacy of writing) . External and authorial intertextuality

In the three chapters that follow, the framework I have just given will be applied and tested in various ways to the poetic draft material and com­positional practices of William Wordsworth, Alfred Tennyson, and Emily

Dickinson.

74

/loce^^

How it staggered me to see the fine things in thin ore! interlined, corrected! as if their words were mortal, alterable, displaceable, at

pleasure! as if they might have been otherwise and just as good! as if inspiration were made up of parts, and these fluctuating, successive,

indifferent! I will never go into the workshop of any great artist again.

—Charles Lamb, "Fragments of Criticism: The Disenchantments of an Original MS"

The study now moves from an editorial and theoretical account of com­positional process into critical analysis of draft materials. The next three chapters take as their focus three major nineteenth-century poets and a major edition (or series) for each through which to explore editorial and critical treatment of text as process. My aim is not to work through each stage of the typology given in chapter 3 for each writer but to discuss those elements of the typology that seem most applicable to the particular writer concerned. This also serves to make the point that I do not see the method as offering absolute, rigid principles. Rather, it provides a framework that can be drawn on with varying emphasis according to the characteristics of the materials under consideration.

As we saw in discussions of the material by practitioners of the critique genetique in chapter 1, text as process is freer, more fluid, more experimen­tal, more circular, and more repetitive than a "final" text, and working with such material is of a very different order. This is true at the obvi­ous physical level of reading manuscript pages but also in terms of the shape and content of material on those pages, in the relationship between different revisions of the same passage, the relationship between separate

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passages of work toward the same section of a poem in a notebook, and so on. At the same time, it is worth bearing in mind, always, the double paradox that textual process exists only as a consequence of the existence (and status) of the completed text, and also that editorial construction of compositional material (from the order of manuscripts, through the order of drafts, down to the words on the transcription page) constantly relies on and uses the completed text as a guide through which to achieve an accessible form.' This chapter centers on Wordsworth s creative practice for his two long poems The Prelude and The Excursion, revisiting different elements of the typology in relation to Wordsworthian composition.

The question of the extent to which elements of compositional material can be dissociated from the final form of the text (published or unpub­lished), and from the extended compositional process, is raised directly in the editing of Wordsworth's poetry.

THE CORNELL SERIES AND CONTINGENT COMPLETION

Over the last thirty years, the Cornell Series for Wordsworth has had a sig­nificant effect on understanding of the poet's canon and awareness of his writing process. The original proposal for the series was made by Stephen Parrish and John Finch to Cornell University Press in 1966 (although, ow­ing to various circumstances, the first volume of the series did not appear until 1975). The first three volumes proposed—Salisbury Plain Poems, The Prelude, 1798-99, and Home at Grasmere—as well as The Ruined Gottage, were published with a clear aim in mind: to "rescue these lost poems and to display for the first time a full and accurate record of the growth of Wordsworth's other poems, from his original drafts down to the final life­time, or first posthumous printings."^ These editions presented authorially unpublished material that had been overlooked or marginalized by earlier editions and yet was felt to be both substantial and significant for an un­derstanding of Wordsworth's poetry.

In the light of chapter 1, we might want to ask why a Cornell edition is not defined as a "genetic edition." Pierre-Marc de Biasi's distinction be­tween two kinds of genetic edition (horizontal/vertical) describes the latter as "la publication chronologique des documents se rapportant a la serie integrale ... des transformations successives qui permettent de compren-dre sa genese" [the chronological publication of documents relating to an integrated series of successive transformations that allow understanding of genesis].^ This sounds very much like a Cornell edition for Wordsworth. However, elsewhere Biasi makes an important and useful distinction be­tween a critical edition, genetically composed, and a fully genetic edition.

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WORDSWORTH'S PROCESS

The first is "a composante genetique mais centrees sur le texte et enrichies par des transcriptions" [of a genetic composition, but centered on the text and enriched by transcriptions].'' By contrast, a genetic edition does not aim to present the publication of a textual work or to establish a text but is centered on a presentation of genesis itself. The structural organization of a Cornell volume clearly privileges a reading text (or texts), with an intro­duction that provides a chronological account of how that text came into being and transcriptions revealing the full process. At the same time, how­ever, the underlying principle running throughout the Cornell Series for Wordsworth involves the privileging of earlier versions of texts over later versions revised by the poet. Thus, the series does have a strong interest in textual genesis but tends to be directed toward establishing a stable text or texts and is therefore not purely "genetic."

Jack Stillinger is the most vocal critic of the editorial principles un­derpinning the series. In "Textual Primitivism and the Editing of Words­worth," Stillinger criticizes the Cornell Wordsworth on the grounds that "its understandable eagerness to discover, promulgate, and extol early ver­sions to take the place of later ones, is in the process of doing away with the later Wordsworth once and for all."® Stillinger then runs through four problems that he identifies in the project: the difficulty of defining an "ear­liest complete state," the annotation, the exclusion of Wordsworth's final edited texts, and the influence of the series on future study.® In relation to the last point, Stillinger expresses concern over the "inadvertent standard­izing of these early texts."' His conclusion, closely related to the German theory of versions, is: "A healthier reaction would be to stop this nonsense about 'the worst of Wordsworth' and grant the legitimacy and interest, in­trinsic or in connections with other texts, of all the versions of The Prelude and the rest of the poems in the canon. Recent textual theory... favors this more catholic view, and it has the additional support of common sense: Wordsworth did, after all, write the 1805 version and the 1850."® In fact, ten of the twenty Cornell volumes present more than one version of a text as parallel reading texts, sometimes involving different manuscript ver­sions, admittedly, but also sometimes including both an early and a signifi­cantly later version (e.g.. The Salisbury Plain Poems, The Borderers). Two volumes—r/ie Ruined Cottage and The Salisbury Plain Poems—provide four reading texts.

Without question, the interest in early versions of Wordsworth's texts, evinced by Jonathan Wordsworth, Stephen Gill, and the Cornell editors, has brought to light much early poetry that previously existed only in man­uscript and to which previous readers of Wordsworth had no access. But how far should this go? The important distinction made in Continental

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TEXT AS PROCESS

genetic editing between text as process and text as product is partly under­mined by the creation of reading texts from draft material in the Corne Series. This becomes more problematic if texts such as The Rumed Cottage and The Prelude, 1798-99 are then removed from a compositional context to be reproduced elsewhere as discrete pieces. Donald Reiman, in his initial report on the early volumes of the Cornell Series for the Center for Schol­arly Editions, expresses such concerns. Of the inclusion of the Two-Par Prelude" within the third edition of the Norton Anthology, he comments; "To have these early texts available for the scholar and student is valuable; to have the two-part Prelude of 1789-1790 [sic] the only version of the Pre­lude available to students encountering WW for the first time seems to me

less unambiguously so."' r j On the one hand, it might be argued that separate publica ion of draft

material achieves one of the ambitions of genetic criticism by releasing manuscript material from its connection with the "final text, thus al ow­ing it to be considered and valued in its own right. On the other, the danger is that it does so at the expense of losing its identity as manuscript material. So the "good news" is that many students of English literature are now studying draft material of Wordsworth's poetry; the "bad news" is that they may not know that they are doing so, or, even if they do, that they wil simW respond to it as if it were a "final" text rather than developing spe­cific skills for the study of compositional material.

This is the kind of position that I think the French genetic critic Laurent Jenny is gesturing toward when he states; "To present a pre-text for reading is obviously to inaugurate it as a text. ... In this sense, a pre-text cannot be read and still remain a pre-text."'" The question it raises in relation to manuscript material is whether a critic's or editor's ambition for the mate­rial should be to create maximum reader awareness and accessibility tor a completed block of manuscript work (in which case its reproduction m the Norton Anthology is to be seen as a good thing), or whether the ambition should be to allow for full exploration of that material in a context where its status as a particular kind of text (representative of process, not product) is most valued. My own concern with valuing textual process would lead me toward the latter, rather than the former, position.

When we consider the editing of Wordsworth in relation to the typol­ogy given in chapter 3, it is clear that the concept of acte of contingent completion, occurring within the compositional process, is hig y signi cant for the editorial position adopted by the Cornell Series. Continent completion describes stopping places within the compositional develop­ment of a major work and might be represented most clearly by a fair copy manuscript that brings together disparate notebooks and unites a number

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of books for the final poem. With The Prelude, firm points of contingent completion are represented by final fair copy in the form of MSS U and V for The Prelude, 1798-99; MSS A and B for The Thirteen-Book Prelude; and MSS D and E for The Fourteen-Book Prelude}^ Such acts provide the con­tinuous (usually fair copy) textual material for Cornell as well as the justifi­cation for the establishment of a "fixed" textual version as the reading text. In The Music of Humanity, Jonathan Wordsworth makes the importance of such acts of completion explicit: "One's aim in presenting a text must clearly be to reproduce the poem exactly as it stood at a single point in time. The obvious point to choose is the moment of completion, before any revision has taken place."'^ The difficulty with this position, however, is the question of what constitutes a poem in a state of completion within the compositional process.'' Ultimately, the point to bear in mind is that for a writer such as Wordsworth there is no such thing as absolute completion; even a completed state is always contingent. Ray Carney, in an excellent review of the Cornell Series, makes this point; "But of course one of the things these manuscripts show is the extent to which the concept of a final text is itself a critical fiction in a case like Wordsworth's."''*

TWO LONG POEMS AND PROGRAMMATIC INTENTION

I want now to return to the concept of programmatic intention to consider it in relation to Wordsworth. Programmatic intention concerns the writer's anticipated plans and expectations for his work before any active, recorded composition. It has a partly abstract identity, corresponding to the writer's highest ambitions and standing as a measure by which he or she assesses the success, or otherwise, of the final achievement. It may also exist in a '.more tangible state in the form of notes, plans, scenarios, and so forth.

In Wordsworth's case, the nature of programmatic intention for either The Prelude or The Excursion is complicated by the fact that major individ­ual works are composed within a structure of programmatic intention for an even larger whole ("The Recluse") and are measured against the ambi­tions in play here. Wordsworth's decision not to publish The Prelude, made during the process of completing the poem in 1804-5, is related to the dis­placed importance given to the wider structure; "[I]t seems a frightful deal to say about one's self, and of course will never be published, (during my lifetime I mean), till another work has been written and published, of suf­ficient importance to justify me in giving my own history to the world."'' The 1814 title page presentation of The Excursion as "A Portion of The Rec­luse" stands as a public statement of this position, demanding that read­ers and critics be aware of the greater ambition.'® So the presence of the

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projected "Recluse" creates a superstructure and an abstract spatial model within which composition on parts of that model (two long poems) takes

This massive structure of programmatic intention, publicly declared, both helps and hinders Wordsworth as a writing poet. In part, it works to release individual works from the extreme pressure of poetic ambition be­cause it locates the satisfaction of programmatic intention elsewhere. The writing of The Prelude clearly reflects this. Wordsworth is able to work on it because he knows he really ought to be doing something else. In a letter of 1805 he says: "I began the work because I was unprepared to treat any more arduous subject and diffident of my own powers. Here at least I hoped that to a certain degree I should be sure of succeeding, as I had nothmg to do but describe what I had felt and thought, therefore could not easily be bewildered."'^ Beth Darlington notes of the decision to expand The Prelude beyond five books that "the enlargement of The Prelude enabled him to compose poetry associated with 'The Recluse' but to avoid direct confron­tation with his sense of inadequacy to proceed with it."'« Creativity in one area is partly stimulated by evasion of another.

Wordsworth's emotions on completing the 1805 Prelude also strongly indicate a sense of unsatisfied programmatic intention:

I have the pleasure to say that 1 finished my Poem about a fortnight ago. I had looked forward to the day as a most happy one; and I was indeed grateful to God for giving me life to complete the work, such as it is; but it was not a happy day for me I was dejected on many accounts; when I looked back upon the performance it seemed to have a dead weight about it, the reality so far short of the expectation; it was the first long labour that I had finished, and the doubt whether I should ever live to write the Recluse and the sense which I had of this Poem being so far below what I seem'd capable of executing, depressed me much."

The poet's internal value judgment means that programmatic intention is unfulfilled, and this seems to be a common experience in relation to this kind of long-term, ideal, preconceived aim. However, in Wordsworth's case, programmatic intention is not merely the poet's own but is also partly external and embodied in another man s mind.

The origins of "The Recluse" project are to be found in discussion be­tween Coleridge and Wordsworth in 1798 but remain unknowable in any detail because they were unrecorded at that time. From this point onward, Coleridge and Wordsworth's personal relationship is bound up with the development of "The Recluse," and there is a strong (and unusual) sense

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of shared programmatic intention that creates difficulties in terms of dis­tinguishing between Coleridgean intention on Wordsworth's behalf and either Wordsworth's understanding of this, or his own intentions. Stephen Gill describes the dynamic that is created between the two men in relation to Coleridge's letter of1799 to Wordsworth (in which he expresses the hope that early Prelude composition is for "the tail-piece of 'The Recluse'").^® Gill states: "This letter and Wordsworth's reaction set a pattern for future years. After a lapse of time Wordsworth surfaces with something demon­strably achieved. Coleridge, who in the same time has completed nothing, seems to welcome it, but actually disparages the work by wishing it were something else. In immediate response Wordsworth is checked, but then he reasserts more vigorously the validity of what he has been doing."^' As well as Coleridge's approval, the presence or absence of Coleridge in Words­worth's life is consistently significant for periods of active composition and of inactivity on the long poems.

Coleridge's involvement in Wordsworth's programmatic intention for "The Recluse" gives him enormous critical power because his opinion has the remarkable status of a kind of external, subjective judgment for the poet. He is not the creator of the work, but he has a creative status in re­lation to it. As a result, when the failure to fulfill programmatic intention invoiced externally, this acts as a powerful block on any further attempts, by Wordsworth, to continue with the work. For this reason, Coleridge's criticism of The Excursion must play a significant part in Wordsworth's inability to attempt to fulfill the original intention and to complete "The Recluse."^^

A programmatic element is present in both French and German theo­retical accounts of process when they attempt to make a universal differ­entiation between two major kinds of writing (and, by implication, writer). The critique genetique distinguishes between a "programmatic" form of writing and a "process-centered" one in which the programmatic writer relies on planning and creative anticipation to produce the work, while the process-centered writer is able to jump straight into drafting and re­drafting. The distinction has consequences for the nature and shape of the genetic corpus, so that a programmatic writer will tend to work within a larger structure of anticipated writing and conceptualization, while a process-based writer produces successive versions of a work building on itself.

In German hands, a corresponding distinction is offered but is articu­lated with a slightly different emphasis. Scheibe, in "On the Editorial Prob­lem of the Text," distinguishes between a work that is mentally composed before it is written down (resulting in a relatively clean text) and a work for

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which active creative thought occurs on paper through the act of writing (resuhing in a heavily revised and rewritten text). The Dutch critic Anne Marie Kets-Vree defines these two models as that of the "Mozart versus the Beethoven procedure," with the former involving genesis in the mind and the latter genesis on paper.^'

Scheibe's distinction has been taken forward by another German critic, Klaus Hurlebusch, who has made the fullest attempt thus far to define the two types in detail in "Understanding the Author's Compositional Method." His aim is to bring together the two aspects of writing that ex­ist in a dialectical tension between "the mainly reproductive, work-genetic writing process ('poiesis') and the mainly constructive, psycho-genetic writ­ing Cpraxis')."^^ In relation to its reproductive aspect, the writing process is viewed as a communicative act, anticipating readership from the start and being externalized and intersubjective. This mode of writing, Hurlebusch argues, values directedness toward a goal (text as product) and is likely to be teleological. The second mode (constructive) is focused on productivity within a more solitary, internal model of writing. From this perspective, texts are transitional stages in an unending process. Creative goals are not met by the completion of a text but are linked to personal self-development, and as a result, a writer for whom this aspect is dominant will be unable to separate him or herself from the work, which maintains a private signifi­cance even when published.^^ The heart of the distinction, then, is between an internalized or externalized self-conception in which the first type of writer will hold the writing within until it is perfect, while the second type is inclined to externalize and rework it in an external form.

Direct criticism of the attempt to articulate a universal distinction be­tween "two kinds of writer" has been made by Almuth Gresillon and Dan­iel Ferrer. Gresillon suggests that such a distinction cuts across all periods and literary movements and ignores the relationship between writing and its historical context.^® Ferrer proposes that in fact the "process" writer is simply a subcategory of the "programmatic" type, so that "process writing appears to be a particular case, or minimal form, of programmatic writ­ing."^' Pierre Marc de Biasi, who advocates the "two kinds" model, freely admits that there are many writers who fall somewhere between the two, or partake of both.^® This suggests that the distinction is really one of de­gree or tendency, offering a spectrum of activities rather than an opposi­tion, and, to be fair to Hurlebusch, his model does try to articulate this. In the terms of this book, the distinction could be easily understood as that between Searle's prior intention (programmatic) and intention-in-action (process-centered)—for which it will be recalled that prior intention is not essential for intention-in-action to occur. This would seem to support

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F.errer s point that the "two kinds" are really concerned with a preexistent stage that may or may not be present.

If we take Wordsworth as an example and attempt to align his practice to these models, it is clear that he might initially appear as a "program­matic writer, with a heightened awareness of the macrostructure (thus falling into the first category), but he is also very clearly a writer who views creative process as undetachable from the self and unending, and so could be defined as "psychogenetic." Moreover, his actual practice is often pro­cess-centered, building on itself through messy redrafting, although this is clearly not how he likes to think of himself. Thus, the complexity of the two kinds" model and the self-perception linked to either category ultimately draws attention to the compositional contradictions between

'speech and writing that so inform Wordsworth's poetry (in ways that are ^explored later in this chapter).

In terms of the compositional contexts outlined in chapter 2,1 would suggest that both of these "kinds" are participating in the doubled or framed intentional/nonintentional structure of composition, but to different de­grees. The writer who relies on plans is trying to maintain control of pro­cess (or the illusion of control through inner speech) as long as possible— b^t must eventually enter into open engagement with language. The writer wjio simply writes is able to enter more freely into the unwilled structure and depends less on the willed anticipation-and-return structure of inten-hon around it. This relationship is also in effect an interpretative—or self-interpretative one that demands that the writer move between two very different relations to the material produced: one in which he or she is the writer writing (experience of the making) and one in which he or she is the writer reading the written draft (experience of the thing made).

A literally constructive sense is felt in Wordsworth's compositional method in relation to his long poems. So, for example, in his introduction to- the Cornell edition of The Prelude, 1798-99, Stephen Parrish describes a slow process of assembly" for the first part of this early work.^' He states: Fpr Wordsworth it was mainly a matter of fitting pieces of verse together,

like parts of a puzzle."'" Such a model is, I think, fundamental for Words­worth and informs on a larger scale his long poetic composition from the very earhest work for The Prelude onward. Rather than viewing a long work as a continuous fluid whole, he tends to view it in terms of building blocks that can be moved around, repositioned, or taken out. Hurlebusch states of the constructive writer: "Larger texts result from a joining of text segments. This is due to the self-reflexivity of the writing process. The author's gaze oil the written has a decisive genetic significance for the writing ... texts emerge from acts of writing."'' As a writer, Wordsworth rehes heavily on

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what is already written, so that the text, in Hurlebusch's words, "fertilizes

itself." 32 For Wordsworth, first written composition is a difficult part of the po­

etic process. In his biography of the poet, Stephen Gill remarks; Through­out his life Wordsworth complained of physical symptoms whenever struggling with embryonic ideas or revising work whose particular form no longer satisfied him."'' In the Letters Wordsworth repeatedly describes his difficulty with the act of composition in physical terms. Writing to Coleridge from Goslar in 1798, he famously states; "As I have had no books I have bL obliged to write in self-defence. I should have written five times as much as I have done but that I am prevented by an uneasiness at my stomach and side, with a dull pain about my heart. I have used the word pain, but uneasiness and heat are words which more accurately express my feeling. At all events it renders writing unpleasant."'" Physical symptoms are used as an explanation for underachievement, and the poet here par y seems to recognize that he translates into terms of illness symptoms not so much about being physically unwell as a mental state of disturbance and excitement that could be viewed as a natural part of the imaginative and

creative process. . . Wordsworth's difficulties with first composition may, again, be par y

explained by the definition of him as a "constructive" writer in the sense that he requires composition to build on itself. When we think about first written composition within the whole compositional process, it is clear that what makes it such a unique stage is the fact that it has to generate its own material. Paul Eggert, in the article "Textual Product or Textual Process," makes this clear; "Revision is accorded the sanie importance as composition despite the likelihood that the author will often have been more intently engaged with the text when first writing it. Put another way, composition starts from scratch whereas revision is done to an existing text; at the time of revision the author is subject to a crucial textual influ-ence-the existence of a manuscript-that was lacking when he or she first

^''^mrrswSisapoetwho atboth intellectual andphysicallevels makes considerable use of a preexisting context for composition. It is not surpris­ing, in light of this, that the stage of composition he finds most physica y disabling should be that for which there is no preexistent material, is notable too that the letters expressing these feelings most strongly con­cern the early writing of the early Prelude. When Wordsworth comes to work on his second long poem. The Excursion, jh^blemys partly side­stepped by the presence of book 1 in the form of The Rumed Cottage. This provides him with a body of material in a fair copy state about which he

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feels confident. The poet can thus begin a new major work by revising and making changes to this piece, preparing it for its position as the first book of many, and in so doing leading himself on into fresh composition from an already established base.

COMPOSITIONAL INTERTEXTUALITY

A second aspect of Wordsworthian composition, to be considered across both The Prelude and The Excursion as developing long poems, concerns compositional intertextuality. In a consideration of what he calls "intertex­tual genetics," Gene W. Ruoff makes clear the ways in which, for a poet like Wordsworth, intertextuality is wide-ranging; "an adequate genetic criti­cism would have to understand a text as a confluence of diverse waves of influence. Any text has strong connections to its immediately preceding versions and to the prior body of a writer's work. It also has connections to a surrounding literary climate, which in the case of Wordsworth and Coleridge is embodied especially strongly but not totally in their mutual influence upon one another."'® Such ideas are allowed for in French genetic criticism through the distinction between "endogenetics" and "exogenet-ics." The former describes the development of draft materials out of other writing, the latter, development of draft materials by means of external sources and stimuli (but only other texts, not empirical objects).'^

My interest here is not so much in the author's relationship with exter­nal influences as it is with intertextuality as it exists within his own com­positional material ("endogenesis"). Paul Eggert, again, makes some inter­esting observations on this subject; "Textuality will be better understood, I believe, when it is opened out—not only when different textual states of a developing work (let us say, a novel) are compared to one another but also when elements of them are compared to other things the author was work­ing on while the novel was in progress.... These relationships within and between the author's writings form, as it were, an authorial intertextual­ity."'® A clear example of this in Wordsworth's case exists in relation to the epitaphic books of The Excursion. Wordsworth's writing here is strongly anticipated by his earlier poem "The Brothers" but is also colored by prose writing in the form of the Essays on Epitaphs written for The Friend, as well as his translations of the epitaphs of Chiabrera, which were all taking place when he was first drafting the poetry. The author later makes the connec­tion explicit by publishing the first Essay in the Notes to The Excursion.

However, I would suggest that there are (at least) two further kinds of authorial intertextuality existing within the compositional process. The first concerns intertextual activity involving the re-employment of mate-

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rial that is written for one context, in another. This is a core compositional activity for Wordsworth and occurs across a wide range of texts. The sec­ond concerns the juxtaposition of different materials within a single manu­script notebook. It is worth noting that the Cornell Series for Wordsworth structures each volume around a single or multiple textual product so that a range of manuscripts are represented according to whether a particular text is entered into them. What the Cornell Series therefore does not do is provide the alternative compositional perspective that also exists, but is easily overlooked, in the form of a single discrete manuscript that con­tains material toward a number of different texts within its covers. I want, therefore, to adopt the alternative perspective in order to explore material intertextuality in a single notebook.

The earliest Ptelude notebook is that of MS JJ (DC MS 19), written in Goslar in 1798-99. DC MS 19 bears within it a mixture of poetry and prose, of William's writing and Dorothy's, and of the mundane, the personal, and the poetic. Toward the front of the notebook, entered while in Germany, there is a prose account of a visit to Mr. Klopstock; Dorothy s account of leaving Hamburg and going to Goslar; German verb tables and grammar work as the young people attempt to learn the language. The Prelude draft runs forward from the back of the notebook, starting with Was it for this on the inside back page (89'), until it meets two pages of German verbs and then the "Essay on Morals," both inverted. Some years later, Dorothy reused the notebook for journal entries from Sunday, 14 February 1802, to Sunday, 2 May 1802, and this fills the middle portion of the notebook.

Looking across the contents of MS JJ tells us quite a lot about the na­ture of composition for this poet. Above all, it stresses that the notebook is shared—either William or Dorothy makes use of it at different times and for widely different purposes. The nature of these entries in physical terms (sometimes in pencil, at the back, in a shared book) also suggests a quite unaffected attitude toward the poetic draft material. Poetry is not accorded a particularly heightened status within the manuscript.

One kind of intertextuality within the notebook might be termed "spa­tial." In MS JJ, Prelude draft (working inward from the back) is followed by German verbs and the "Essay on Morals, and this raises an interesting question about the effect of materials on each other. It is uncertain whether the German verbs and the inverted "Essay" were already in the notebook before the poetry was entered." However, it is at least possible that Words­worth started writing the Prelude material in what was a limited space. This suggests that the physical context of the notebook may be significant for the psychologically difficult stage of first composition. Starting at the back seems to make a far less confident statement than starting at the front

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of a notebook. Starting in a space that does not stretch forward indefinitely may be easier than starting in an empty book.

The spatial entry and development of the early Prelude draft itself in this notebook is also significant in relation to the difficulty of first com­position for Wordsworth, and I want to think about this in a little more detail here. Both Stephen Parrish and Stephen Gill describe MS JJ Pre­lude material as developing "in a zig-zag fashion," but it is unclear what exactly this means."" The pattern disclosed is one in which Wordsworth seems to anticipate how much space he wants to fill in advance, working largely in blocks of three or four sides. So, he makes the first continuous entry on Z', working backward onto the opposite page, T. He then turns over a page and works forwards from X' to Y', at which point he runs out of space for reworking and finishes a rewriting of Y' on the bottom of W ^nd the top half of W. The next block is entered across V* and Win pen­cil and then recopied on W and X'' at which point Wordsworth turns the notebook sideways for no apparent reason. The third block is a clear run of writing over three sides from U' to V, again with the notebook turned sideways. The fourth block again assumes a three-sided run, starting on S* and working forward for three sides, breaking off on V with recopying of the boat-stealing scene of P on R'. A final entry occurs with a continuous three-sided run from P^ to again, with the notebook turned sideways.

Although this is the earliest surviving Prelude material, it is not all first-draft material but represents a mixture of copied text and draft. This serves partly to explain the way the poet works, since he may know, from work already written, roughly how long he expects a certain section to be. What emerges, though, is not really a structure that zigzags about but a carefully constructed method of building backward into the notebook from work already written. Each new accretion of the text is both constrained and re-

^ assured by the presence of the previously entered text that exists behind it (working inward from the back of the notebook). It thus provides a kind of stepped structure of support. The need for this, for Wordsworth, is clearly suggested by his extreme anxiety over first-draft composition and, at this early stage of his career, presumably an anxiety over writing a piece of any considerable length. He thus chooses to undertake a piece of cumulative extended writing within a strongly proscribed space.

The characteristic of working backward, illustrated here in a physical way, is also employed more generally in his draft materials at a level of poetic content, according to Duncan Wu. Commenting on the structural anomaly of Wordsworth having written the ending to the whole Thirteen-Book Prelude at the Five-Book stage, he states that "the technique of be­ginning with the conclusion and working backwards is common to other

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poems, including The Ruined Cottage and 'The Idiot Boy'; the knowledge that, with the ending safely committed to paper, he could retrace his steps at leisure, evidently gave Wordsworth a feeling of security.""'

Another kind of authorial intertextuality involving intellectual and physical juxtaposition exists within DC MS 19 in the close cohabitation of Wordsworth's fragmentary "Essay on Morals" and the early Prelude work. The "Essay" is an explicit expression of Wordsworth's dissatisfaction with Godwinian thought and with the form and mode of its communication. Its central, anti-Godwinian concern is that actions depend on habit, not reason, and he argues that it should therefore be the role of literature (and philosophy) to change the formation of habits for the better rather than to impose on them an unnatural rationalism. The moral value of the forma­tion of individual habits clearly compares to the kind of learning presented in the early Prelude; its scenes of guilt and imagined punishment are con­tained immediately before the "Essay" fragment, working in from the back of the notebook. In terms of the mode of communication as well, the sense that The Prelude not only presents an account of a certain kind of upbring­ing but also seeks to communicate it actively, must be felt as a poetic al­ternative to Godwinian or Paleyan schemes, rejected here as insufficient because "[t]hey contain no picture of human life; they describe nothing.""^ Poetry can convey moral truth in a more accessible way than philosophy, "purifying thus/The elements of feeling and of thought.""' In such ways, then, the argument of the prose fragment clearly bears a strong relation­ship with the poetic "pictures of human life" with which it cohabits in the notebook. The "Essay" bemoans the fact that "I know no book or system of moral philosophy written with sufficient power to melt into our affec­tions [?s], to incorporate itself with the blood 8f vital juices of our minds & thence to have any influence worth our notice in forming those habits of which I am speaking.""" The poetic draft material describes how:

The scenes which were a witness of that joy Remained, in their substantial lineaments Depicted on the brain,

By the impressive agency of fear, By pleasure and repeated happiness, So frequently repeated."'

While the prose piece argues for the need to act upon habit to good effect, the poetic draft describes and exemplifies the desired process. Whichever text was entered first, each bears upon the other.

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One other characteristic of this early Prelude material in MS JJ is worth consideration, and that is the turning of the notebook sideways (noted by Parrish in the Cornell edition but not commented on), in conjunction with Writing in pencil. The decision to do this seems to occur as a result of writ­ing on pages and W, where Wordsworth writes in pencil over the verso/ recto page divisions. In further pencil drafts of this material, on pages A/B and the inside back cover, the page is always turned sideways, and this then seems to prompt the copying of the passage in ink, also sideways, on X' as well as later separate ink entries.

Why write in pencil? There might be a number of reasons for this at a general level both practical and psychological. If writing outside, pencil is

.more practical, particularly in an early nineteenth-century context."® None of Wordsworth's actual writing implements (apart from his inkstand) have survived, so we cannot be sure exactly what he was writing with, or even whether he was using a quill pen or a steel-nibbed pen, though the former is'iargely assumed to be the case. Either way, these pens did not have any kind of reservoir and so if used outside would have required carrying ink as well. Pencil is both easier and more convenient. But there is also the sense that in writing in pencil one does so with the knowledge that the words can be erased if desired. This knowledge alone may have a liberat-ing^effect—whether or not the act of erasing is ever put into practice. If we compare the pages on which Wordsworth writes vertically in pencil with a horizontal (sideways) entry, we can see that on the vertical page, lines often slip down the right-hand margin because of lack of space, while, when he writes horizontally, his hand is larger and looser, apparently enjoying the luxury of length."''

I have considered this notebook so far primarily in order to work across the" disparate contents of a single manuscript (thus revealing an alternative perspective to that created by the Cornell editions). However, I also want to suggest that the real power of the manuscript and, I hope, of the kind of analysis I am arguing for, lies in the fact that we do not have to view it only in terms of the developing meaning of the whole but also in a discrete way that values the uniqueness of each page. A fine example occurs on one of the turned-sideways pencil draft pages, B', where the nature of the material form, the fading, half-readable pencil words, directly enacts the fragmen­tary meaning it contains:

When shape was [?not ?no] figure to be seen Low [?breathing] and steps

and sounds Of undistinguishable motion, steps"'

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When we respond to the page in isolation, it has a kind of beauty, I think, not only because of the evident fragility of the meaning it contains but also because of the unexpected and unintended enactment of its semantic meaning in its visual form. On B' this is felt in the "stepped" appearance of "and steps / and sounds"; in the almost faded form of "Low breathing"; and in the "undistinguishability" of the whole as it slowly rubs away over time. A similar effect occurs at the bottom of the preceding page, on A^ where redrafting ends with the lines:

That looked upon me how my bosom beat

With expectation"'

Here, the physical layout of words on the page enhances the meaning of the words, as does the fact that the line is left suspended. The question of whether Wordsworth intended such a meaning on the manuscript page is not the issue—although it seems at least likely that the powerful effect of reading the line "How my bosom/beat/with expectation" was not lost on him and that the page may have been left in such a way so it could act as a stimulus for further reworking. The point I want to make is simply that a certain kind of meaning does exist here, which is only held on this page as a unique object.

THE MICRO-"PRELUDE": FIRST-DRAFT ACTIVITY

I want now to turn to a more detailed analysis of compositional activity on the manuscript page. Instead of responding to draft materials of The Prelude in terms of its contingent stages, or of comparison between them, I want here to explore the "micro-Prelude," responding at a level of com­position in action.'" This will allow for the breakdown of textual process into its smallest constituent parts so that we can consider it as a series of widening circles, moving outward from a close focus on a single word in a line, to lines on the page, and then to blocks of developing work within the manuscript. It also allows for a refinement of our understanding of the nature of composition as a process that is both mental and physical by ap­proaching it in terms of a sequence of intentional acts. Finally, from such a perspective, activities such as revising and redrafting can be more closely considered, and distinct textual stages can also be defined. First-draft ma­terial is particularly appropriate for this kind of work.

It is necessary to return to John Searle's account of intention as dis-

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cussed in chapter 2. In Intentionality, Searle looks closely at the relation­ship between intention as a mental state and the action that results from it and argues for an "intention in action" that forms a part of every act,

^however small: "[T]he intention in action just is the Intentional content of jHe action; the action and the intention are inseparable."" Intention exists Both as a state in the mind and as the embodiment of that state as an event. |t combines an internal condition and its external fulfillment. Drawing on {lis earlier work in relation to speech act theory, Searle states: "There is a double level of Intentionality in the performance of the speech act. There 'is first of all the Intentional state expressed, but then secondly there is the intention in the ordinary . . . sense of the word with which the utterance is made."'^ In the same way, in an act of oral or written composition at a localized level, it could be argued that a double level of intentionality exists, embodying compositional "speech acts" on the manuscript page. As well as this kind of intention, there is also the presence or absence of conscious intention on the part of the person who acts—in Searle's terms,

V "prior intention."'' According to Searle, it is not possible to perform any action without intention occurring, but it is possible to perform an action without conscious intention: "[TJhere can be actions without correspond­ing prior intentions.... But there can't be any actions, not even uninten­tional actions, without intentions in action."'"

This study does not go quite so far as Searle in arguing that all action is intentional. Rather, as explained in previous chapters, it envisages a move­ment between willed, conscious intention and a giving up of the self to language (in the state of creative composition). Nevertheless, my account still assumes a return to conscious intention and a reclaiming of perceived ownership of language by the writer through acts of revision (which might also lead to a further giving up of the self, and so on). In relation to this in­tentional return, Searle is very useful. He sums up the small-scale activity involved in these terms: "[T]he whole action is an intention in action plus a,"bodily movement which is caused by the intention in action and which is the rest of the conditions of satisfaction of that intention in action."" The process can be understood as a sequence, the last three parts of which constitute the intentional act. Every return to a text (at the detailed level of "intention in action") will be undertaken with a very clear, localized focus on intended meaning. In terms of literary composition, then, we could say that Searle's "prior intention" effectively corresponds to intended acts on the page at a local level (word by word, line by line) in the core composi­tional processes of revision, correction, and rewriting.

The process can be more clearly understood in relation to a particular example from the earliest continuous Prelude material in MS JJ:

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ridge cliff alone While on the perilous edge I hung"

In reconstructing composition here, we could assume that Wordsworth begins by rereading the original line and finds himself dissatisfied with the word "edge," so he crosses it out and replaces it with one, or two, alterna­tives. In its smallest component parts, the process thus runs: prior intention (I intend to cross the word out); intention-in-action (I am about to cross the word out); bodily movement (pick up pen/place pen on paper); action (physically mark a line through the word)." In this particular example the sequence is either immediately followed by, or perhaps coterminous with, a second sequence: prior intention (I intend to replace an unsuitable word with another); intention-in-action (I am replacing an unsuitable word with another); bodily movement (place pen on paper); action (physically enter the word "cliff^' on the page).'®

In literary-critical terms, the critic would interpret this intentional se­quence by analyzing the resulting changes of meaning. So, it would appear that the word "edge" was too specific and narrow for Wordsworth's desired communication. He therefore replaced it with the word "clifT to create a more topographical sense of context and scale. Another intentional se­quence then followed, resulting in the addition of an optional replacement word, "ridge," which further enlarged the context and sense of place.

It would be tedious to undertake this level of microanalysis of inten­tional acts at any great length, but it is, I think, helpful to be aware of it and to see that the creative process for written composition is capable of being broken down to this extent. It is also worth noting that in another artistic medium—such as painting or sculpture—this kind of detailed tracing of intentions is likely to be impossible. In the written form, however, a con­nected narrative of intentional acts is recorded on the page and can be re­constructed with reasonable accuracy. Of course, we still cannot be sure of the amount of time occurring between any of the changes (apart from the evidence provided by changes of ink or hand), and we cannot access the all-important initial point of composition, which in this case produced the line "While on the perilous edge I hung alone." We can only ever reconstruct from beyond the point of first composition, reminding us how important, and unique, that stage of the creative process is.

For the writer, the process of replacing one word with another, and then, later, of physically revisiting his or her own small-scale changes of intention, helps him or her to see a developing meaning—which moves on from first composition and could even, potentially, not include any of the original lines in the final version. The words on the page become an active

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part of the creative process because it is through small, subtle changes to the base material that the poet gradually reclaims and refines the nature of communication and understands it for himself

If we read a compositional text just for its relationship to the final draft, then repeated words, deletions, and aborted passages or lines may have a localized significance but are not considered in terms of what they them­selves actually signify. If, however, we read a compositional text in such a way as to want to look closely at those lines because of the underlying process and actions they reveal, then we find ourselves undertaking a dif­ferent activity and becoming part of a different kind of reading process. The final completed version of the text is still of immense importance here in helping to retrace authorial activity, but it is now primarily being used, and valued, for that purpose. Reading the text in a state of process becomes a kind of puzzle in which words on the page signify a sequence of actions, of rapidly changing small-scale acts that can be reconstructed. This kind of reading allows for a full intellectual engagement with draft material as representative of creative process.

I want to pull back a little further now, to look not at a single line but at a single page of manuscript composition. The next two examples are both taken from MS JJ, the manuscript containing the earliest continuous work for book 1 of The Prelude. They concern two very well-known passages— the "raven's nest" and "boat-stealing" episodes (see figs. I and 2). The ear­liest version of the first piece is found on page X*, where a version written above the line across the page is immediately revised below it (see fig. 1). The first version runs:

{W {[?]ith what strange utterance did

wind the loud dry

Blow through my ears, lyhat colours vfhat motion did

The CO thedond

the lou

the colours of the sky

{not Wh The sky was {then

no sky Of earth & whith what motion move the cloud, As on the perilous brink cliff®"

93

ri '• " "Jit' "'k-'-Tir —

*• 2 f

Fz^. 1. Draft from DC MS 19 {Prelude MS JJ), X". (Reproduced by permission of the Wordsworth Trust, Dove Cottage, Cumbria)

t"2i-

»

Fig. 2. Draft from DC MS 19 (Pre/w^^e MS JJ), P. (Reproduced by permission of the Wordsworth Trust. Dove Cottage, Cumbria)

TEXT AS PROCESS

The passage is a continuation of material on Y' (running forward from the back of the notebook), where the lines are written in regular blank verse. This local context for X', as well as the nature of the work on the page, is such that it looks very much like an example of first written composition with no preceding oral work (an unusual state for Wordsworth).

To ascertain the order of writing and to reconstruct the compositional process, the usual editing procedure is to look ahead to the next version where authorial decisions and localized changes of intention are embodied in the new text.®' In this example it is easy to do so, since the next version is written out immediately below:

As on the perilous brink cliff

ridge cliff alone While on the perilous edge I hung With what strange utterance did the loud

dry wind Blow through my ears the sky seemd not

a sky Of earth, and with what motion moved

the clouds®^

What emerges on is a model of half-line composition for this first-draft material, which provides the poet with a number of different possible combinations. The initial entries on the page above the line are probably the two top half-lines "With what strange utterance did/Blow through my ears," with the word "wind" either also entered then, or at the time the words "the loud dry" were entered below the line. Initially, then, the lines could have read "With what strange utterance did blow through my ears/The loud dry wind" as well as "With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind / Blow through my ears.""

The next revision on the top half of the page perhaps occurs after the decision to place "loud dry wind" between the first two half-lines, and so now concerns the second half of the second line, which needs to be filled. Wordsworth plays with two options ("the colours of the sky" and "what motion did the cloud"). When he finally rewrites the passage, the first half-line option ("the colours of the sky") disappears. This may suggest that the line immediately below these workings, beginning "the sky was then no sky," is a revision of "the colours of the sky," which then leads to the entry of the two lines below, one using some of the crossed-out revision ("whith

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WORDSWORTH'S PROCESS

what motion move the cloud"), one of them a new half Hne, "As on the perilous brink cliff."

In the third stage of composition, below the line across the page, Words­worth (either immediately, or on returning to the passage) reaUzed that this Hne would work well as the start of this section and so began again, placing it first. Changes here are detailed—"brink" is rejected, perhaps be-caiise it suggests the position of feet rather than hands. "Edges" (as we have already seen) is crossed out as being too unspecific. "Ridge" or "cliff" are retained as options, for both of which assonance with "perilous" immedi­ately before them in the line creates a poetic effect.

An editor of a critical edition reading this will be asking, "How is this different from the kind of activity I undertake?" The answer is that it is not, in essence, different. In part, this book aims to create more space for such activities to be articulated, providing points of connection between text-critical and literary-critical activity The distinction occurs only in terms of the purpose for such analysis. Where the editor undertakes such tasks primarily to determine the sequence of draft material within a notebook or across manuscripts, and is unlikely to articulate it for the reader, the com­positional" or "genetic" critic can undertake such tasks to understand the rj'ature and process of composition, or to enrich understanding and analy­sis of the text by knowledge of its development.

A second example will perhaps clarify ways in which the detailed study of composition can provide an alternative perspective on the completed text. The famous boat-stealing scene provides an interesting example of revision being used in different ways within the compositional process. On the manuscript page of MS J J, V, this passage reads:

Of sparkling light When from behind that rocky steep till then The bound of the horizon just between

e} The summit & the stars a hugh} high cliff As if with voluntary power instinct

the oarsand

Upreared its head I truck again struck again

And growing still stature the huge With measured motion like a living

thing

Strode after [?me] Rose up between me & the stars & still

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TEXT AS PROCESS

With measured motion like a living thing

Strode after me®"

When one reads this manuscript page for the first time, the amount of rep­etition within it is striking. The example I want to look at is on the sixth line, where "struck again" is repeated at its end. The nature of this repeti­tion, and the author's compositional intention here, is not absolutely clear. It may well be that Wordsworth intends the second "struck again" to be a deliberate repetition of the first,,for poetic effect, as it is used in the final version. Alternatively, though, it may be an example of simple recopying over a rejected revision (probably "struck the oars again") that had made the original words unclear on the page, so that the author needed to reen­ter them. In this case the powerful repetition of "I struck & struck again," as incorporated in the next revised version (on R^), could come about as a result of recopying for clarification on the page, which, half-accidentally, reveals it as a creative option to the poet. Further repetitions of "With mea­sured motion," "strode after me," and "huge clifF' also occur on P.

The repetitions on the page of DC MS 19 are fairly typical of composi­tional text, where redrafting obviously creates similar versions of lines or repeated words on the page. What is less typical is that two repetitions in close proximity should then be used for dramatic effect in the completed text, in which the passage acquires a large part of its power from the use of repetition that unites the boy's movement on the lake with the shifting perspectives created by it and the consequent internal effects on him-

When from behind that rocky steep, till then The bound of the horizon, a huge Cliff, As if with voluntary power instinct, Upreared its head; I struck, and struck again, And, growing still in stature, the huge cliff Rose up®'

Is it simply coincidence that so much repetition should occur on the man­uscript page for this passage? Possibly But it is also possible that authorial activity here is actually concerned with "unintentional" composition. That is, the misreading of a revisionary act on the manuscript page can reveal a creative development to the author that he had not consciously intended. It is interesting, however, that we as critics can only really access this free, random aspect of creativity through a highly structured and close analysis of intentional acts. The emergence of the "unintentional" depends on its identification through the structures of intention.

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WORDSWORTH'S PROCESS

Jonathan Wordsworth, in a discussion of revision in the long poem, states; The history of the long poem serves to emphasize that composi­tion is in its nature backward-looking. Every time a poet seeks for the right word, he revises an earlier expression, on paper or within the mind. Every time he seeks to clarify an idea, he revises an earlier conscious thought, an earlier pre-verbal hunch."®® This account (while strongly authorial) seems to support the kind of recqnstructed model of intentional acts that I have undertaken here, as does his comment that "revision, in the sense of changing authorial intention, seems to be inevitable in the making of a lotog poem."®''

Close study of compositional material for its own sake begins to raise more complex questions about the nature of revision and redrafting. Is the kind of revision taking place in this early draft material, a[t the most active stage of the compositional process, of the same nature as that which takes place later in the process, or even at a much later date, when Wordsworth

•returns to an earlier text?®*

The difference may be merely one of degree, so that in early composi­tion a large number of words within any section of a text are changed and a larger number of possible options exist within a line and between lines. In later revision, the number of changes is considerably reduced, as is the likelihood of redrafting at any length. This would seem to suggest that the nature of revision is the same, only lessened in intensity, at a later time. One of the characteristics of early draft material is a willingness to allow change and experimentation. Different alternatives exist on the page, and there is a full range of possibility both for the localized composition and within the wider structure. As the text develops, particularly for a long poetic structure, the degree of possibility is closed down, because each in­dividual section is affected by what occurs around it. This suggests that a context of phases or stages of composition is an important element of the compositional act, and one that affects the nature of the revision under­taken. For first-draft material, the wider context is likely to be undefined

•and not yet physically embodied, and revision is therefore still able to lead to considerable changes in meaning, mood, or tone, if the poet requires it. The example given earlier ("struck and struck again") may illustrate how Creatively revision can function within this early stage. For later mate­rial, however, revision becomes increasingly circumscribed, because local meaning is affected by the wider context—in terms of mood and style as well as content—and the poet will not want to make a local change that might destabilize the whole. By the time of a full fair copy-text of a ma­jor work, or revisions to a published edition, the existence of the stable,

,fixed material around it must affect the nature and extent of the localized

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TEXT AS PROCESS

revision. So, although the physical act on the page remains the same—the crossing out of words or lines and replacement by others—the potential ramifications of the revision must be controlled, and this will affect the nature and range of revisionary acts.

COMPOSITIONAL CONTRADICTIONS (SPEECH, WRITING,

AND THE PRODUCTION OF THE LONG POEM)

I want now to look at the ways in which the poet's own sense of his role and his representation of it within the "final" text can seem at odds with the compositional acts and strategies that have produced it. I will move between the draft materials and the published work, between writerly self-identity and projected poetic identity. In Wordsworth Writing, Andrew Bennett considers two related issues: the "paradox of the poet for whom words are immaterial" and the linked conception that Wordsworth is "a poet who doesn't write poetry."® My concern here is also with this para­doxical, doubled position in relation to Wordsworthian composition, but I will be exploring it in, and through, the materials of process. My aim is to consider Wordsworth's "compositional contradictions" at both a repre­sented level in the completed work as well as in the underlying drafts. Two key areas of contradiction for Wordsworth are the linked issues of orality and spontaneity.

Orality allows the poet to retain a sense of the words as "his" in a way that twentieth-century philosophy has shown to be an illusion. The French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty asserts: "For the speaking sub­ject, to express is to become aware of; he does not express just for others but also to know himself what he intends."^® In other words, "the listener receives thought from speech itself."^' For Merleau-Ponty, "spontaneity," if it can be said to exist at all, does so by means of the self-generation of language.

In a Derridean sense, Wordsworth is clearly "phonocentric," viewing written words as secondary to speech and valuing an "absolute proximity of voice and being."'^ When Derrida describes a Rousseauvian position as tending to "confine writing to a secondary and instrumental function: translator of a full speech that was fully present," he could equally well be describing Wordsworth's position (which is hardly surprising in view of the two writers' shared historical and cultural context).^' At the same time, though, Wordsworth's very anxiety with an internal, self-generated model of composition and with an assertion of mental and oral over written creativity suggests that he recognizes the "awful" power of words, hold­

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ing "above all other external powers a dominion over thoughts."^" Much critical work has of course been undertaken in this area (by Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, James Chandler, Frances Ferguson, Mary Jacobus, and most recently Andrew Bennett) in relation to the self-division of language as spoken and written discourse and Wordsworth's doubled consciousness of it.

Oral composition stands as a kind of bridging state for Wordsworth between what he sees as pure interior poetry and the debasement of the written word. The spontaneous ideal is bound up with orality so that an "overflow" can pour forth directly from the body of the poet with emo­tional expression and verbal expression still connected. In a discussion of lyric voice in The Prelude, Mary Jacobus describes Wordsworth's reliance on poetic voice as a "surrendering to an auditory myth of self-presence."^' She points out that Wordsworth does not go so far as to envisage himself as the ancient poet composing to the harp but that he draws instead on the idea of listening to himself, "the myth of the 'inner ear,'" so that com­position is understood as the external recording of what has already been experienced as sound.^® She concludes: "No wonder Aeolianism pervades The Prelude; it is Wordsworth's defence against that inability to hear one­self think (or speak) involved in writing itself."'''' Orality creates an illusion of spontaneity—as a direct outpouring of self-generated creativity. Even if lines are actually composed one by one and then written down, or even if there is considerable oral and mental revision before writing, the poet can feel as though the process depends on internal rather than an external (textual) stimulus and as though creativity is somehow occurring outside the words in which it is uttered. The act of dictation, or of dictated revi­sion, is another way of creating this illusion in relation to the written word, and Wordsworth employs all of these methods in his own creative processes.^®

There is, clearly, an element of self-deception here. How "oral" is Words­worth's poetry? Certainly he composes outdoors often, and by uttering words aloud, but does he memorize large sections or does he work by speaking a line or a few lines aloud and then writing them down? Detailed evidence does not seem to be available as to how long or how much Words­worth composed orally before writing. Andrew Bennett skeptically sug­gests that "the image of Wordsworth engaged in walking and composing has as much to do with what he told people, particularly later in life, as it does with his actual compositional practice of at least the early years."^' In any case, in whatever way Wordsworth made the transition from voice into word, this activity is very different from being a truly "oral" poet, who, in

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TEXT AS PROCESS

an oral culture, would never seek to create a written version of the text and for whom each telling would be a new and unique experience.

Occasionally, and in an indirect way, Wordsworth seems to acknowl­edge that the "spontaneous" is a false compositional construct. In letters to younger poets, he repeatedly asserts the need for the poet to "labour" and take time over composition. In a letter to William Rowan Hamilton in 1816, he states; "Again and again I must repeat, that the composition of verse is infinitely more of an art than Men are prepared to believe Milton talks of 'pouring easy his unpremeditated verse.' It would be harsh, untrue and odious to say there is anything like cant in this; but it is not true to the letter, and tends to mislead. I could point out to you 500 passages in Mil­ton upon which labour has been bestowed, and twice 500 more to which additional labour would have been serviceable."®" There is a contradic­tion, then, between Wordsworth's own representation of the poet as orally "spontaneous" and the production of that (self)representation which, as he is well aware, depends heavily on a written, revisionary process. Words­worth, too, "tends to mislead."

A model of "spontaneous" oral composition can be represented in a more convincing way for a poem of no great length than for a long work. There is the possibility of direct correlation between poetic composition and the representation of poetic composition. This is not possible in the same way for a long poem-where both the poet and the reader know that such a poem cannot have been created in a single spontaneous act. The Prelude (1805) is written over a seven-year period; The Excursion is probably written over an eight-year period, with the poet, inevitably, laying work down and picking it up again for both poems during this time. Yet in The Excursion, as I have previously discussed elsewhere, the Poet character is not represented as an actively creative figure, and not at all as a writer.®' In The Prelude, which takes as its subject the means by which its subject becomes a poet, Words­worth does refer to the lengthy poetic process, but he does so in ways that either suggest orality or avoid representation of the written.

In The Prelude, the emphasis on poetry as a spoken rather than written discourse can be dramatically illustrated by referring to Lane Cooper's A Concordance to the Poems of William Wordsworth. For the word "speak" there are thirty examples in The Prelude, as well as eight uses of the word "speaking" and nine of "speech." By contrast, for the words "write" and "wrote," there are no uses whatsoever in either The Prelude or The Excur­sion, and the word "writer" is not included in the Concordance at all.®^ There can be no doubt that the poet is to be seen to speak freely rather than write his message.

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As is well known, opening sections of books within The Prelude often refer to the development of the poem itself, and the sense of its unfolding length, in terms of an oral discourse. Each time the poem pauses to discuss its own progress, usually in the first section of a book, it evades any men­tion of the act of writing:

Of these, said I, shall be my Song, of these If future years mature me for the task Will I record the praises, making Verse Deal boldly with substantial things

[T]hus haply shall I teach. Inspire, through unadulterated ears Pour rapture, tenderness and hope®'

Wordsworth often uses words that describe the act of writing but without dwelling on the physical aspect of it in any way. One word commonly used in this manner, which occurs frequently in both long poems, is the verb "to tell"—the poet writes of what is "told" and "untold."®" This emphasizes what is being done (a tale being narrated, an account being given) rather than how it is being done. As such, it is probably understood to describe an oral rather than a written act, but it could describe either. A particularly clear example of the deliberate use of it to avoid direct representation of the act of writing occurs with the very last word of The Excursion where the Poet-character concludes with the line "My future Labours may not leave untold."®' The line refers to the written act of the recording Poet-character—and implicitly also to Wordsworth as the potential author of future parts of "The Recluse"—but the poem refuses to directly acknowl­edge either as a writer. Other words, such as "record" and "relate," are sim­ilarly employed as verbs that are concerned with communication but place emphasis on the purpose of an action rather than on its means.

On the rare occasion where the act of writing is represented within The Prelude, it is with negative connotations. So in book 4, on his return to Hawkshead after Cambridge, the poet compares the brook, controlled within the garden and flowing without effort and at the loss of its true character, to himself:

And now, reviewing soberly that hour I marvel that a fancy did not flash Upon me, and a strong desire, straitway

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TEXT AS PROCESS

At signs of such an emblem that shew'd forth So aptly my late course of even days And all their smooth enthralment, to pen down A satire on myself.®®

Writing occurs at a level of doubled mockery: the adult poet judges his youthful self and envisages his own self-judgment. The written act is imag­ined and indirect. Elsewhere in the poem, a sense of the "written" is more commonly associated with the indirect act of reading words than with the direct act of producing them. In book 5, Wordsworth describes the power of books on the mind but bemoans the limitations of words as the only medium of external communication:

Oh! why hath not the mind Some element to stamp her image on In nature somewhat nearer to her own?®^

As a result, books are viewed as frail objects ("Poor earthly casket of im­mortal Verse!")®® in which (written) words wait to be released by the liv­ing voice. The act of writing is secondary to feeling—^"Why call upon a few weak words to say/What is already written in the hearts/Of all that breathe!"—and to the true communications of natural men:

Theirs is the language of the heavens, the power. The thought, the image, and the silent joy; Words are but under-agents in their souls®'

The Prelude is a poem that values its own creation, but not the medium through which it finds expression. The final poem's refusal to explicitly ac­knowledge the creative power of writing and the poet as writer means that the relationship between completed textual product and the process that brings it into being mirrors the model of divided self-representation at the heart of the poem. The process of making voice into word produces words that present poetry as voice in what Bennett calls the "inevitable paradox of a writer writing about his poetry as speech."'®

"THE PRELUDE" AND FIRST (WRITTEN) DRAFT

I want to return to Wordsworth's draft material to locate within it exam­ples of first written composition. Such material represents the moment of transition and translation from thought, or voice, to written word and thus

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WORDSWORTH'S PROCESS

the vital link between oral and written poetic composition about which Wordsworth is so uneasy.

First-draft material is often the least likely manuscript material to sur­vive, for two possible reasons. The first is simply that first draft is of least value to the poet during the active creative process: he or she rapidly moves away from it and no longer needs it. At a practical level, first draft is there­fore far more likely to get lost or mislaid than, say, the final fair copy-text of a poem. Second, a poet might well choose to destroy first-draft material, from an anxiety to protect the source of creativity or from a sense that the material is much improved at a later stage. Moreover, there is always a question of uncertainty over first-draft status: we can always identify the earliest surviving draft of any passage, but we cannot always be sure that it is actually the first written composition. The precarious nature of first draft in terms of survival is likely to be reflected in its physical characteris­tics on the page. In general, first-draft material involves rough handwriting (the poet is writing fast and getting ideas down), and it may contain a con­siderable amount of crossing out and revision, though this is not always the case (if the writer undertakes considerable mental composition first, for example). We also need to remember, then, that any discussion of "first draft" is always about "first written draft" and that it may well have been preceded by considerable mental or oral "rewriting."

The Prelude manuscript I want to draw on here is Prelude MS WW (DC MS 43), a pocket notebook containing early draft material for books 3-8 and book 12 of The Prelude, along with Dorothy's notes for the Scotch Tour of1803. The Cornell edition of the Thirteen-Book Prelude gives such a clear, enlarged photographic reproduction of the manuscript that it is a surprise when faced with the material object to see how fragile it is. The notebook embodies the vulnerability of its material in various ways. First, it exists in loose leaves, having been taken apart because the siblings were sharing it: "The dismantling of the notebook may have resulted from a tug between Dorothy's need for her notes . . . and Wordsworth's wish to use its blank pages for notes while out walking."" Second, its entries are all written in pencil, making it vulnerable to loss of clarity, and the words are extremely faint on the page. Third, it seems likely, as suggested earlier, that it was car­ried around outside: "The roughness of Wordsworth's drafts strongly im­plies, as Jonathan Wordsworth suggests, that many of them were written outdoors."'^ The pages are also extremely small (10.5 X 8.45 cm). Because of its loose-leaf nature, a clear order of entry within the notebook cannot be established, although blocks of work are clearly entered together, and sometimes the paper is partially joined.

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TEXT AS PROCESS

{ten Of holy chare {a a shepperd

[?pries] [?e] [?When there co]

[?When] A father of his people

When [?he] good

Is [?Said] and as the [?best] King''

This looks like an example of material that has not previously been articu­lated anywhere else. Instead of having lines whole and entire, the sound of them clear in the head before he begins to write, Wordsworth finds himself grappling here with each word. Where oral composition might be con­cerned with the overall sound and fluidity of a short passage (perhaps the unfolding of a contained narrative, or scene), this passage of written com­position concerns a more prosaic moment of introduction and the estab­lishment of character. This suggests that mental or oral first composition may not work with meaning in the same way as written first composi­tion can. The practical use of memory to retain text in the mind means that oral composition is likely to be concerned with short blocks of work, memorized images, or core lines. Although revision and redrafting can, of course, also take place in the mind, written composition is far better for allowing the playing out of simultaneous options, as can be clearly seen in this case. The first written act thus allows for a different kind of imagina­tive activity from the oral one. It is less fluid, and perhaps less impressive as an "overflow," but it also operates in a different way.

Finally, in Prelude MS WW, the famous "Imagination" passage from Wordsworth's crossing of the Alps is interesting because in its original con­text it seems to be an example of first written composition commenting on the act of first written composition. Wordsworth presents the effects of "Imag­ination" as actively intervening on spoken or written composition ("verse"):

A little while [?Imagination] crosd me here

{n

Like a{[?] unfatherd vapour, & my verse

{aused Halts in mid course. I p{a [?was]

[?in] cloud

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WORDSWORTH'S PROCESS

[8 draft lines here] as in

I paused was lost awhile [ ? ] a cloud

lost awhile A cloud which ere my verse

came to [?an end] Some azure mist & [?yet tis]'®

Originally, the passage articulates a sense of the writer as "lost" in lan­guage and possessed by it. When the passage finally appears in 1805 after the "Crossing of the Alps," however, "verse" (which could be oral or writ­ten) has become Song, and the effect of the imagination is described in much less creatively interventionist terms:

Imagination! lifting up itself Before the eye and progress of my Song Like an unfather'd vapour; here that Power, In all the might of its endowments, came Athwart me; I was lost as in a cloud, Halted without a struggle to break through"

Wordsworth does still attempt to describe the nature of poetic process ex­plicitly in the "final" text, but the very nature of that text as a stable product works against what he is communicating. By comparison, the uncertain, fragmentary repetitions of the draft version enact what they describe on the manuscript page as the verse "Halts in mid course" and the lines repeat themselves: "in cloud/I paused was lost awhile/a cloud/lost awhile/A cloud."

SPEECH, WRITING, AND COMPOSITIONAL

MOMENTUM IN "THE EXCURSION"

The elision of poet as writer also occurs in The Excursion. As I have previ­ously discussed elsewhere, the Poet-character is not represented as an ac­tively creative figure, and not at all as a writer, so that a discrepancy be­tween past and present, between the apparent "now" of the represented utterance and the "then" of writing, is strongly felt.'"" We can explore such issues further across the final poem and the manuscript materials of the poem by looking at the handling of openings and endings of individual books that are directly connected to the oral representation of the Poet.

One structure that contributes to compositional momentum for a long

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TEXT AS PROCESS

poem is the sequence of repeated endings and new beginnings for each book division within it. Such a pattern provides a kind of structural rep­resentation of the spontaneous act as sequence, a constant sense of fresh beginnings within and across a larger framework. Beginnings and endings are often very firmly marked on the page by both William and Dorothy in Wordsworth's manuscripts. An early example of this occurs with DC MS 16. It contains a decoratively written heading for "Adventures on Salisbury Viain I Part First" on 28' in Dorothy's hand and again for "Adventures on Salisbury Plain/Part second" on 40'. Also in this notebook, The Ruined Cottage receives the same treatment with "End of the first Part" on 49" and "The End" written very clearly on 56''. Of course, at one level these head­ings exist simply for clarification, but they also emphasize the way in which a sense of regular "beginnings" and "endings" provides one of the compo­sitional rhythms of the manuscript notebook.

In The Excursion, endings and beginnings are directly related to speech. We can see this clearly in an example from the end of book 6 and start of book 7 where the break occurs as a shift from direct speech to the Poet's reflection on what he has heard:

'But each departed from the native Vale, In beauty flourishing, and moral worth.'

While thus from theme to theme the Historian passed, The words he uttered, and the scene that lay Before our eyes, awakened in my mind Vivid remembrance""

The same structure is dramatically reversed for the end of book 8 and start of book 9:

as One Who from truth's central point serenely views The compass of his argument.—began Mildly, and with a clear and steady tone.

'To every Form of Being is assigned,' Thus calmly spake the venerable Sage, 'An active principle''"^

The inversion at this point means that the opening of book 9 coincides with direct speech for the only time within the poem, placing considerable emphasis on the Wanderer's important final speech.

110

WORDSWORTH'S PROCESS

For every book of The Excursion, the ending consists either of the end of a speech—the half-spoken apostrophe of the Poet ostensibly "thinking aloud"—or the Poet's framed response to the spoken utterance. Such mate­rial forms a "written" framework that must be taking place at a time distant from the dramatic action of the poem, yet the poem refuses to acknowledge the distancing act directly, so that even these frames are presented as if they

1 occur at a time contemporaneous with the actual utterance. In part, this krves perhaps to make a central Wordsworthian point about the nature of poetry: that you can be a poet "silently" without writing words down; that true poetry is about feeling and shared response. In part, this creates a work in which the poet must be recording, memorizing, and recalling all that is narrated, but the main part of the narrative is always presented as if it is speech or response to speech occurring at the time that we hear it.

When one looks across the poem as a whole, two basic models for book endings in The Excursion emerge. The dominant model is of an ending that concludes abruptly with the last line of a speech or story, and this holds true for books 3,5,6, and 7. In these cases, the ending of the previous book determines the nature of the beginning that follows it. The start of book 7, already discussed, provides an excellent example of the interlock-ipg structure of speech and response, in which the Poet's account allows the narratives to flow on around the opening of the next book.

A second kind of ending concerns a doubled structure, with a con­clusion first of speech and then of the book. For book 4 in DC MS 73, workings on 6^-7' and 7" all relate to the conclusion of the Wanderer's dis­course, which is presented as an ending within the ending: "Here closed the Sage."'"^ The contents of the book are framed by the presence of the Poet, who comments on what he has heard and returns the reader to a par-Hcular time and place. In the final version of book 4, the close of speech is followed by the close of day, and the ending of the book. This kind of ending also occurs for books 1 and 2. Again, the book ending is preceded by a clear statement of the end of a speech-"He ceased"; "So ends my do­lorous Tale. These books finally have a triple closure (speech, day, book). Such endings also affect the openings of the ensuing books (2, 3, and 5), which do not have to define themselves directly in terms of linkage to what precedes them and tend to concern themselves with an aspect of scenery, nature, or the journey.

Significantly, the conclusion of the entire poem takes this sense of more than one ending even further. At the end of book 9 we are given, first, the conclusion of the Pastor s speech—"This Vesper service closed"'"'—then the Solitary's brief words and departure, and finally, the conclusion to the poem itself as given by the Poet-character:

111

TEXT AS PROCESS

From this communion with uninjured Minds, What renovation had been brought; and what Degree of healing to a wounded spirit, Dejected, and habitually disposed To seek, in degradation of the Kind, Excuse and solace for her own defects; How far those erring notions were reformed; And whether aught, of tendency as good And pure, from further intercourse ensued; This—(if delightful hopes, as heretofore, Inspire the serious song, and gentle Hearts Cherish, and lofty Minds approve the past) My future Labours may not leave untold.'"®

The sense of repeated endings, or of an absolute ending repeatedly de­ferred, is felt in the published text at a syntactical level in the irresolution of the final sentence with its "What... & what... And whether."

Draft toward the ending occurs in only one surviving notebook (DC MS 73), where it is entered twice. The first version occurs on 46'; the second is a fair copy of this on IS'. The conclusion is strongly visual on the page in both cases; as a result of the word "End" written below the first version and "Finis-" below the second (see figs. 3 and 4). The poem, then, emphat­ically affirms that it is to end in an unresolved way.'"^ On the manuscript page, such irresolution is further reinforced by changes made to that last line:

And gentle hearts & lofty minds approve, {may

{[?may] {leave My future Labours shali not {[?le]

untold End.

untold My future Labours may not leave tmtold.

Finis

Thus, the final line bears the meaning "My future Labours may tell" but is unable to voice that meaning directly and instead brings with it the strong possibility of what might not be told.

All these levels of uncertainty also point toward the sense of an exter­nal reference for the poem's ending. Susan Wolfson notes of the Poet: "The muted interrogatives of his concluding lines, moreover, include himself

112

Fig. 3. Draft for the end of The Excursion. DC MS 73, 46'. (Reproduced by permis­sion of the Wordsworth Trust, Dove Cottage, Cumbria)

few^Sc^' i - . . 4 /^M J

prffeia#, • ,»®iS' • r®'. .'

't . , l' •

jr; • ,:-rf;', '^i^i't i

\.. :... »4. ir

'% 4^: ••^«^; "'"M3»:> iv"!;

• i''-j.. -;. <.51. •. •s^'- ' ' "Sf"^ ' ' ' V'.ss-::i;i;:t-

Pig. 4. Draft for the ead of The Excursion. DC MS 73,18'. (Reproduced by permis­sion of the Wordsworth Trust, Dove Cottage, Cumbria)

WORDSWORTH'S PROCESS

as well as the Solitary: 'What renovation,' 'What/Degree,' 'How far,' and 'whether aught' consign the Solitary's reformation to uncertainty, and the conditionals if and may suggest the Author's doubt about the reception and renewal of his own efforts.""" It certainly seems as if at this point, there is a sense of Wordsworth's own impinging anxieties about his wider ambitions outside the dramatic framework of the poem. From this perspective, the doubts in the Poet-character's conclusion about his ability to "tell" any­thing further also read like a self-fulfilling prophecy for Wordsworth writ­ing "The Recluse." The nature of the ending works against the very idea of there being any such confident assertion, either at a dramatic level in the poem or for the poet himself.

It might be assumed that the kind of fluid, dialogic response structures of the endings and beginnings of each book of The Excursion reflect a com­positional structure driving the writing of the poem, but for the later books at least, this does not seem to be the case. Instead, we find many of these endings and beginnings clustered together. A single manuscript notebook, DC MS 74, contains a total of seven beginnings and endings in the follow­ing order: the end of book 7 and start of book 8; the end of book 8 and the start of book 9; the end of book 6 and the start of book 7; and the end of book 5. For each of the endings and beginnings within this manuscript, the version contained there is either the only, or the earliest, surviving version. This seems to signal that the bringing together of the end and start of the later books is a conscious, and late, act within the compositional process— the fact that the manuscript contains such a number of these points of connection (without containing the whole of each book concerned) sup­ports such an idea. The nature of the beginnings and endings in DC MS 74 suggests that the act of linkage is not integral to the creative process, in this work at least. Beginnings and endings are largely a means of stitch­ing larger blocks of material together once that material is written rather than providing the impetus to write material in the first place. At the same time, such a structure is, in a sense, highly appropriate for this particu­lar poem. The self-conscious stopping and starting, the continuous "new beginnings," reflect the uncertainties and changes of position embodied in the character of the Solitary whose possible redemption lies at the heart of the narrative.

Alongside this account of a late linking-together of books, however, we do need also to be aware of an alternative model of self-generating begin­nings that exists for earlier books of the poem, by drawing on material previously written for another context. The openings of books 2, 4, 5, and 9 all import material from elsewhere. A number of interesting examples of The Excursion's use of "prebeginnings" as part of long poetic composition

115

TEXT AS PROCESS

can be found in DC MS 70. This is evident with the very first entry within that notebook, for book 4 on 16' beginning "Happy is he." This passage is originally found in Home at Grasmere MS R where these lines are not in­corporated into MS B. Wordsworth thus begins book 4 of The Excursion. which was to be the philosophical heart of the poem, with a dedaratwn o the need for human understanding of all forms of life that was ^ written for an entirely different context. As such, it can be compared to the opening of book 2, in which the description of the wandering Minstrel is lifled from DC MS 48, and the opening to book 9, in which the Wanderer s speech concerning "an active principle""" is taken from unused early Pre­lude material in DC MSS 15 and 16. In each case, the piece of earlier writ­ing seems to provide a base from which fresh composition (at a key point

within the later poem) can develop."' Is there a sense, then, in which Wordsworth's "compositional contra­

dictions" lead him to want to envisage long poem composition as some kind of "spontaneously" self-generating structure? Certainly it does look as though the concept of "The Recluse" works through The Excursion hj providing an intertextual "charge." Different elements of text, written for different parts of "The Recluse" and existing as a large central mass of un-situated material, can be drawn on in a process of textual self-generation. The characteristic Wordsworthian process—of drawing on the past to cre­ate in the present—is here played out in literal, material terms.

116

yioce^^

He spoke of the diseased craving to have all the trifles of a man of genius preserved, and of the positive crime of publishing what a poet

had himself deliberately suppressed. If all the contents of a poet's waste-basket were taken out and printed, and issued in a volume, one result would be that the things which he had disowned would be read by many to whom the great things he had written would be unknown.

—William Knight, "A Reminiscence of Tennyson"

As with the chapter on Wordsworth, this chapter is concerned with apply­ing theoretical ideas discussed earlier to the materials of process and thus with using Tennyson, in part, as a second "case study." However, it also hopes to offer a full critical exploration of the Tennysonian process. The first half of this chapter will therefore consider the different ways in which Tennyson "self-translates" as an essential part of his compositional practice, exploring his process in terms of a going out from the self and a return to it mediated by different forms of self-translation, as seen in Idylls of the King. The second half moves on to a consideration of the complex hermeneuti­cal structure created by Tennyson's long-term composition of the Idylls. It is still necessary to begin, as we did with Wordsworth, by considering the state of contemporary access to Tennyson's manuscript materials.

Policies of compositional protection, initiated by Tennyson and Hallam Tennyson, have partly retarded Tennyson scholarship. Tennyson deeply resented the treatment of the poet as a literary celebrity, complaining in his own lifetime about the intrusions created by unwanted visitors and autograph hunters. In anticipation of Wimsatt and Beardsley, he seems to have viewed the study of draft materials as an extension of misplaced

117

TEXT AS PROCESS

development of a "compositional hermeneutics" that might explore further the extent to which a specialist hermeneutic is needed for text as process, the extent to which this can or should be reconstructive rather than decon-structive, and the question of how far interpretative activity should seek to separate process from the final work of art. In this work, my primary aim has been to "come into [the circle] in the right way,"®^ but the ceaseless, turning act of understanding still goes on.

238

o4.e>:>

ABBREVIATIONS

Bd-T Martin Heidegger. Being and Time CGET Hans Walter Gabler, George Bornstein, and Gillian Borland Pierce,

eds. Contemporary German Editorial Theory PLT Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought

INTRODUCTION

1. Gabler, "Genetic Texts," 62. 2. Such accessibility raises a number of questions concerning the paradox

that increased electronic access can lead to decreased access to the original man­uscript and about the value of the original physical object over accurate virtual representation.

3. Stillinger, Coleridge and Textual Instability, vi. 4. Ibid., 119. 5. Ibid., 25. 6. Hershel Parker, Flawed Texts, x. 7. Ibid., 23. 8. Ibid., 3, ix. 9. Ibid., 182. 10. Ibid., 3-4. 11. Ibid., 23, 81. 12. Gabler, "Unsought Encounters," 158. 13. Bryant, Fluid Text, 2. 14. McGann, "Pound's Cantos," 38.

239

NOTES TO PAGES 5-13

15. John Bryant comments on two aspects ofMcGann's approach that impede ana ysis of text as process: "[H]e de-emphasizes the role of authorial intention in the shaping of a social text and seems to remove the crucial element of an individ­ual writers creativity from the shaping of bibliographic codes" (52).

. w o r e c e n t c o l l e c t i o n s o f e s s a y s g i v e a g o o d o v e r v i e w o f t h e h i s t o r i c a l

thTfh r translating key papers in

and Boria^nd bornstein.

textes (2004), ed. Deppman, Ferrer, and Groden. Special editions of journals are

Yal T hZ ^ overview of critique genetique; see in particular Yale French Studies 89 (1996) and Romanic Review 86.3 (May 1995).

1. CONTEXTUALIZING PROCESS

L See particularly Tanselle, "Greg's Theory of Copy-Text" and MrC^nn Critique of Modern Textual Criticism. ^

t. of "recensio" and "examinatio" at work see Maas, Tex-tml Crttiasm. The practice is also described by Gaskell. New Introduction to

CritiST' "Classical, Biblical, and Medieval Textual

3. McGann, Critique of Modern Textual Criticism, 15. 4. Tanselle, "Greg's Theory of Copy-Text," 176n7. 5. Greg, Collected Papers, 382. 6. Parker. Flawed Texts, 59.

7 Bowers. "Some Principles for Scholarly Editions " 223

9. Ibid.. 4.

10 Tanselle, "Greg's Theory of Copy-Text." 194. In this article. Tanselle de­fends the princip es of the CEAA and responds to various criticisms of the center

f "TK r . of responses to the CEAA principles is given on pp 591-92 of The Center for Scholarly Editions: An Introductory Statement."

. Tanselle s article The Editorial Problem of Final Authorial Intention" thiltimr of footnote references to other participants in the debate at a te of mtendonality in terms of literary critical and philosophi­

cal terms will be reconsidered in chapter 2 of this work. 12. Gaskell, New Introduction to Bibliography, 339

«««) GaskelJ attacks CEAA principles (183-95). This leads to a critique of his own work by Tanselle in "Recent Editorial Discussion." 51-55.

14. Thorpe. Principles of Textual Criticism, 193. 15. McGann, Critique of Modern Textual Criticism, 48.

240

NOTES TO PAGES 13-19

16. Ibid., 104. 17. Shillingsburg. Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age, 88. 18. Ibid., 77 19. Ibid., 17 20. Ibid., 29. 21. Ibid., 89. 22. Shillingsburg, "Inquiry into the Social Status of Texts," 74. 23. Gabler, "Text as Process," 108. 24. Ibid., 112. 25. "The Intentional Fallacy" was first published in the Science Review 54

(1946): 468-88. It was revised and republished in The Verbal Icon (1956). 26. Wimsatt and Beardsley, "Intentional Fallacy," 18. 27 Wimsatt and Beardsley, "Affective Fallacy." 21. 28. Beardsley. Aesthetics, 457 29. Ibid. 458. 30. Wimsatt, "Genesis." 194. 31. Ibid., 210. 32. Ibid., 222. 33. Ibid., 224. 34. Parker, Flawed Texts, 214. 35. Ibid, 216-17 36. Ibid., 216. 37 Wellek, "Term and Concept of Literary Criticism." 30. 38. Ibid., 32. 39. Gabler, introduction to CGET, 3. 40. Martens, "What Is a Text?" CGET, 217. 41. For more detailed information see Gabler's introduction to CGET; Mar­

tens's two essays within that collection; and Plachta, "German Literature." 42. Gabler, "Unsought Encounters," 156. 43. Martens, "(De)Constructing Texts by Editing," 125. 44. Zeller, "New Approach," 235. 45. For an excellent account of the relation of structuralism and semiotics to

theories of editing, see the chapter "Structure and Sign in the Text" in Greetham's Theories of the Text, 276-325.

46. Martens and Zeller. eds.. Texte und Varianten. This work is not currently available in translation, although three essays from the collection are translated and republished in CGET.

47 Gabler, introduction to CGET, 2. 48. Zeller. "New Approach." 231-32. 49. This essay is not available in translation. 50. Scheibe. "Editorial Problem," 197 51. Ibid., 197

241

NOTES TO PAGES 20-24

52. Scheibe distinguisiies between "variants" and "readings." The term "readings" allows for comparison of unauthorized versions of a text or a com­parison between an unauthorized and authorized version. The term "variant" denotes two alternative, clearly authorized versions of a text. See also Martens, who takes these ideas further in "What Is a Text?" 210; 226n3.

53. Scheibe, "Editorial Problem," 199. 54. The distinction between reception- and production-based approaches is

made by Scheibe in "Editorial Problem" (195) and developed at length by Hurle­busch in "Understanding the Author's Compositional Method." I engage with the latter in some detail in chapter 4.

55. Scheibe, "Editorial Problem," 201. The same point about the problem of selecting the "edited text" is made by Zeller in "Structure and Genesis": "In prin­ciple, one must edit versions, and must edit every version either in extenso or by recording its variants in relation to another completely edited version of the work. (As a rule, therefore, only one single witness document provides the edited text)" (107).

56. Hans Walter Gabler is another exception to insular tendencies in Ger­man editing since he engages closely with both traditions (Anglo-American and French).

57. Zeller, "New Approach," 240. 58. Ibid., 240-41. 59. Zeller, "Record and Interpretation," 25. 60. Ibid., 47 61. Ibid., 51. 62. Martens, "What Is a Text?" 211. 63. Ibid., 221. 64. Ibid., 222. 65. Gabler, introduction to CGET, 4. 66. Gabler, "Genetic Texts," 69. 67. For a helpful discussion of the term "synoptic," see Hopker-Herberg, "Re­

flections on the Synoptic Mode of Presenting Variants," 79. 68. Gabler, with Steppe and Melchior, eds., Ulysses, 3:1894,1892. 69. Ibid., 3:1891. 70. Gaskell, From Writer to Reader, 235. 71. Mays in Coleridge, Poetical Works, cxxii. 72. Ibid., cxxxiii. Mays states: "Changes in rhythm caused by punctuation

are as significant as verbal changes, and changing the form of a word (underlin­ing it or putting it in capitals or quotation-ma/ ' modifies its meaning. Changes of tense go in the text, and variant forms, like iKidst' for 'mid', 'ne' for 'nor', 'ee' for 'eye', in the apparatus" (cxxxiii). In general, anything that affects meaning is in the text on the page rather than the apparatus at the bottom.

73. Tanselle, "Historicism and Critical Editing," 39.

242

NOTES TO PAGES 24-29

74. Greetham, Theories of the Text, 312,313. 75. Ibid, 313. 76. Mays in Coleridge, Poetical Works, cxxiii. 77. Ibid., Ixxx. 78. McGann, "Ulysses as a Postmodern Text," 297. 79. Mays in Coleridge, Poetical Works, cxiiv, cli. 80. Ibid., cxlv. 81. Ibid., cxlvi. 82. Ibid., cxlix. 83. In "Genetic Editing, Past and Future," the French genetic critic Louis

Hay also notes the limited emergence of a fully critical German genetic criticism: "This is partly for technical reasons: genesis presented in apparatus typography does not always lend itself easily to analysis" (120).

84. Martens, "(De)Constructing Texts by Editing," 126. 85. Martens, "What Is a Text?" 225. 86. Eggert, "Shadow across the Text," 320. 87. Zeller, "Structure and Genesis," 97. Zeller notes in passing that German

editing "does not distinguish in so marked a way between accidentals and sub­stantives as does Anglo-American practice" ("New Approach," 235) and suggests that this may be due to the nature of the German language itself (235n4).

88. Gabler, "Genetic Texts," 68. 89. Hurlebusch, "Understanding the Author's Compositional Method,"

75-76. 90. Ibid.,8L 91. These questions are posed by Gresillon, "Slow," 114; Hay, "History or Gen­

esis?" 192; and Compagnon, "Introduction," 395, respectively. 92. At the same time, there are some historical links between French genetic

criticism and German theory. In "Genetic Editing," Hay notes the significance of the Beif^ner edition and of German editing as one starting point for French thinking (118-20). H. T. M. van Vliet also points out the author's German origins in a review of Almuth Gresillon's book (translated into German) and the fact that Hay was originally a Heine scholar. See Van Vliet, "Gresillon, Literarische Handschriften," 339.

93. Compagnon, "Introduction," 397. 94. In "Critiques de la Critique Genetique," Hay states that in the early 1970s,

for the first time, the number of modern manuscripts in the national library's collection exceeded the number of medieval manuscripts (408).

95. For detailed information on the French context for genetic criticism, see Pierssens, "French Genetic Studies at a Crossroads"; Compagnon, "Introduc­tion"; Lernout, "Genetic Criticism and Philology"; Hay, "Critiques de la Critique Genetique."

96. Pierssens, "French Genetic Studies at a Crossroads," 620,

243

NOTES TO PAGES 29-39

97. Hay, "Critique de la Critique Genetique," 407. 98. Hay, "Does 'Text' Exist?" 68. 99. Jenny, "Genetic Criticism and Its Myths," 10. 100. Biasi, "Toward a Science of Literature," 41. 101. Hay, "Does 'Text' Exist?" 73,75. 102. Deppman, Ferrer, and Groden, introduction to Genetic Criticism, 2. 103. Ibid., 2. 104. Hay, "Does 'Text' Exist?" 68. 105. Biasi, "Toward a Science of Literature," 42,43. 106. "Archive et Brouillon. Table Ronde," 192. 107. Ibid. 108. Ibid. 109. Ibid., 207. 110. Gresillon, "Slow," 115. 111. Jenny, "Genetic Criticism and Its Myths," 23. 112. Biasi, "What Is a Literary Draft?" 54. 113. Gresillon, Elements de Critique Genitique, 147-75. 114. Deppman, Ferrer, and Groden, introduction to Genetic Criticism, 10.

This is not to say that Anglo-American critics are not working in a range of ways with genetic material for a range of authors but that such work occurs in isola­tion and without any sense of it being a distinct field of study. How many Anglo-American literary critics even know what is meant by the term genetic criticism!

115. GrtsiWon, EUments de Critique Genetique, 161. 116. Pietri and Valery, eds., "Preface," in Paul Valery: Cahiers, 1894-1914, 22. 117 Ibid., 26. 118. Ibid., 24. 119. Biasi in Flaubert, Carnets de Travail, 102. 120. Biasi, Genetique des Textes, 65. 121. Ibid., 66. 122. Ferrer, "'Clementis's Cap,'" 224. 123. Ibid., 227. 124. Ibid., 223, 227 125. Ibid., 230. 126. Ferrer and Groden, "Post-Genetic Joyce," 503. 127. Biasi, "Toward a Science of Literature," 38. 128. Gresillon, EUments de Critique Genetique, 204.

2. THEORIZING PROCESS

1. Gresillon, "Slow," 123. 2. Ferrer and Groden, "Post-Genetic Joyce," 509. 3. Ibid.

244

NOTES TO PAGES 39-45

4. The final chapter will return to some of the issues raised here to consider them more deeply by means of a philosophical enquiry into the nature of creative process.

5. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 167. 6. Ibid., 74. 7. Eggert, "Work Unravelled," 53. 8. It is important to bear in mind, however, that Derrida is not denying

the existence of authorial intention as one meaningful context; he simply (and rightly) denies it any absolute authority: "[T]he category of intention will not disappear; it will have its place, but from this place it will no longer be able to govern the entire scene and the entire system of utterances" ("Signature Event Context," 326).

9. Barthes, "Death of the Author," 142. 10. Ibid., 146. 11. Ibid., 145. Here, Barthes partly seems to anticipate my application of

speech acts to the text as process. However, his account elides the materiality of writing and thus the possibility of multiple returns to grounded acts.

12. Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, 16. 13. Ibid., 27 14. Barthes, "Theory of the Text," 38. 15. Barthes, "Death of the Author," 145. 16. A full philosophical account of phenomenological temporality, agency,

language, and meaning in relation to understanding process is given in the final chapter of this book.

17. Barthes, "From Work to Text," 160. 18. Barthes, "Theory of the Text," 32. 19. Foucault, "What Is an Author?" 207-8. 20. Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, 4,5. 2L Ibid., 14. 22. Ibid, 14, 2L 23. Ibid., 24. For a fuller exploration of such contradictions in relation to

Freudian disavowal, see Bushell, "Textual Process." 24. Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, 19,20. 25. Foucault, "What Is an Author?" 221. 26. Ibid. in. See also "The Order of Discourse," in which Foucault states, "It would of

course, be absurd to deny the existence of the individual who writes and invents" (59), but he views this individual as one who "takes upon himself the function of the author" (59). He thus distinguishes between "the sense of the speaking individual who pronounced or wrote a text" (58) and "the sense of a principle of grouping of discourses" (58).

28. Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, 25,26.

245

NOTES TO PAGES 45-53

29. Barthes, "Theory of the Text," 36. 30. Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, 47. 31. Ibid. See also note 23. 32. McGann, "Case of the Ambassadors," 163, 33. Wimsatt and Beardsley, "Intentional Fallacy," 3. 34. In "Genesis," Wimsatt states: "The design or intention of the author is

neither available nor desirable as a standard forjudging either the meaning or the value of a work of literary art" (222).

35. Ibid., 221-22. 36. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 166. 37 Ibid., 167 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., 97 40. Ibid., 117 41. Ibid., 120. 42. Heidegger, PLT, 190. 43. Ibid., 197 44. Ibid., 193. 45. Ibid., 215. 46. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 166. 47 Ibid., 160. 48. Royle, Jacques Derrida, 56-57 49. Such ideas are addressed fully in the final chapter of this book. 50. Useful overviews of intention from a literary, editorial, or philosophical

standpoint, are given by Patterson, "Intention" Tanselle, "Editorial Problem of Final Authorial Intention," 173-74; Greetham, "Intention in the Text," in Theo­ries of the Text, 156-205; McLaverty, "Concept of Authorial Intention in Textual Criticism": and Siewart, "Consciousness and Intentionality."

51. Anscombe, Intention, 9. See also Meiland's distinction between purpo­sive and nonpurposive intention in The Nature of Intention, 7-11; Kemp's distinc­tion between ulterior intention and immediate intention in "The Work of Art and the Artist's Intentions"; and Searle's distinction between prior intention and intentions in action in Intentionality, 84-98.

52. In this way Husserlian intentionality anticipates speech act theory. How­ever, although Husserl's account of language is referential to consciousness, he does also allow for an ideal "species" meaning. See Smith, "Towards a History of Speech Act Theory."

53. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 114. 54. Searle, Speech Acts, 36-37. 55. Ibid, 17 56. In Intentionality Searle has one reference to Brentano on p. 14 and one to

246

NOTES TO PAGES 53-61

Husserl on p. 65. He claims to be giving a logical rather than an ontological ac­count, but that account clearly corresponds to Husserl's in many respects, while going much further in terms of its causal conclusions.

57. Searle, Intentionality, 27. 58. Ibid, 3. 59. Hershel Parker adopts Searle's two kinds of intention in Flawed Texts,

allowing prior intention to apply to action "long prior to or momentarily prior to the act of writing" (23) and intentions in action to "the actual composing pro­cess" (23).

60. Searle, Intentionality, 84. 61. Ibid., 27 62. Ibid., 82. 63. Shillingsburg, Scholarly Editing in the ComputerAge, 33. 64. Ibid., 37, 65. Ibid., 36. 66. Ibid., 37 67 Ibid,, 38, 68. Searle, Intentionality, 27. 69. Bennington, Interrupting Derrida, 10,

3, RECLAIMING PROCESS

1. The compositional context corresponds to Heidegger's "equipment to­tality" in the ready-to-hand environment. Searle's "Background" for language would form part of such a context.

2. In a Heideggerian sense, the third context must always preexist the other two, and the being who creates. My account, however, while drawing on Heideg­ger, clearly moves away from him, particularly in asserting a movement into and out of "authenticity" at the heart of the creative act.

3. Heidegger, Be^T, 97. 4. This would correspond to Heidegger's description of malfunction in the

equipment totality and the point at which the "ready-to-hand" becomes conspic­uously "unreadiness-to-hand" (B&T, 103). It may seem odd to apply such an idea to human intervention, but when others are viewed insofar as they contribute to the creative process, then they do seem to function in this way.

5. Keats, Letters, 1:212. 6. Stillinger in Keats. Poems of John Keats, 588. 7. Keats, Letters, 1:214. 8. For a discussion (and rejection) of the idea of intentionless meaning, see

Knapp and Michaels, "Against Theory." They argue that intentionless meaning is "radically counterintuitive" (727) because meaning and intention are insepa-

247

NOTES TO PAGES 61-65

rable. However, I think their account of intentionless meaning on the beach is misleading for the reason given here: it does not allow that unintended meaning can only occur where there is already intention.

9. Open intention corresponds in editorial terms to "textual instability" as described in Hans Waher Gabler's article "The Text as Process." Gabler states: "[T]he text of a work under the author's hand is in principle unstable. Instability is an essential feature of the text in progress" (111).

10. See Bushell, Intention Revisited," for a more detailed engagement with Hancher's paper and for the emergence of my terminology out of his. Hancher distinguishes between programmatic intentions, active intention, and final inten­tion. Hershel Parker also engages with Hancher but criticizes him for not allow­ing for a fully active intention within composition: "Hancher can accommodate the period before the composition, the moment of completion, and the indefinite period afterwards; but during—the ongoing creative process itself—has no place in his theory" (Flawed Texts, 22).

11. In The Study of Modern Manuscripts, Reiman bases his core distinction between "public," "confidential," and "private" materials of process on the "social intentions of the writer" (40), which corresponds to an anticipation of audience. Reiman defines a literary work (such as a poem) as "public," even if it is never published, on the basis of such social intention: "Authors who intend that their work be published write with that end in view" (43).

12. My thanks to Michael Sanders for suggesting the use of the term contin­gent intention.

13. Throughout this section it is to be remembered that the intentional com­plex represents a return to what is already written by the writer and, in a sense, a reclamation of nonintentional being by acts of will.

14. Searle, Intentionality, 107. 15. Wordsworth, Letters: Later Years, 3:583nl. One factor in relation to incom­

plete longer works concerns the poet's ability to move from the kind of method required for shorter rather than longer composition. On this, see Thomas Gray's comment that "he [Gray] had been used to write only Lyric poetry in which the poems being short, he had accustomed himself, & was able to polish every part; that this having become habit, he could not write otherwise; & that the labour of this method in a long poem would be intolerable" (Correspondence of Thomas Gray, appendix Z, 3:1291). Keats's difficuUies over "Hyperion" probably fall into the same category.

16. Wendorf, "Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man," 47. 17. Keats s Hyperion" and "The Fall of Hyperion" again come to mind. 18. The existence of revised intention is debatable, and bound up with edito­

rial debates over the distinction between a "variant" and a "version" of a text. 19. Gaskell, From Writer to Reader, 75. 20. Ibid., 75, 76.

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NOTES TO PAGES 65-71

21. Gresillon, "Slow," 117. 22. James McLaverty's work makes good use of the temporal dimension in or­

der to retain an intentionist element while releasing a text (or editorial presentation of it) from absolute linear organization. See "Issues of Identity and Utterance."

23. Again, see McLaverty, who uses the philosophical example of "Theseus's Ship" (if all parts of the ship are reconstructed gradually over time, is it still the same ship at the end?) to reconsider the structural conception of the work in terms of "overlapping versions and of coexisting rival claimants to be the work" ("Issues of Identity and Utterance," 141).

24. Wordsworth's three principal versions of The Prelude would correspond to such a model. See also my discussion of contingent intention in relation to Wordsworth in chapter 4.

25. Programmatic intention anticipates contingent intention but also clearly overlaps with it and continues to be present "behind" it. Contingent intention is in a sense also "unfulfilled" at the time of writing and may only be definable as ^contingent" retrospectively.

26. Hancher, "Three Kinds of Intention," 831nl0. 27. See Shillingsburg, Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age, 35-36. 28. Anscombe, Intention, 84. 29. Meiland, Nature of Intention, 70. 30. Ibid., 81. 31. Searle, Intentionality, 101. 32. Ibid., 102. 33. Meiland, Nature of Intention, 87. 34. Ibid., 88. 35. Vendler, "Reading Keats in Manuscript," 40. 36. See Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life, in which chapter 6 is enti­

tled "Misreadings and Slips of the Pen." 37. Philip Gaskell makes a relevant observation concerning Charles Dick­

ens's practice of giving a single manuscript draft over to the compositors: "[I]ts sheer illegibility did sometimes lead to verbal errors. Indeed it is curious that Dickens, who must have been aware of some of these mistakes and of the rea­son for them, did not think it worth while to increase the legibility of his manu­scripts by using a little more paper" (From Writer to Reader, 143-44).

38. Searle, Intentionality, 102. 39. See Bushell, "Meaning in Dickinson's Manuscripts." 40. Derrida, afterword to Limited Inc., 128. 41. Ibid., 129. 42. Shillingsburg, "Autonomous Author," 22. 43. For a full account of each of Biasi's four phases (in terms of processes,

function of researcher, and documents) see the second chapter of Genetique des Textes. His account does influence my own given here.

249

NOTES TO PAGES 72-79

44. Biasi, "What Is a Literary Draft?" 32. 45. Ibid., 33. 46. Biasi, Genetique des Textes, 87. 47. My thanks to James McLaverty for suggestions and comments that di­

rectly inform the typology at certain points.

4. WORDSWORTH'S PROCESS

The section entitled "The Micro-'Prelude': First Draft Activity" has been previ­ously published as a paper entitled "Wordsworthian Composition: The Micro-Prelude" in Studies in Romanticism 44 (Fall 2005): 399-421. In that paper, a second section explores "first fair copy" activity in DC MS 21 (Prelude MS RV). There has not been space to retain it here.

1. My thanks to James Butler for reminding me of this important point. Something similar is suggested by the French critic Laurent Jenny's comment that "paradoxically, the establishment of the pre-text tends to dissolve the textual entity that was precisely the one that gave it this value" ("Genetic Criticism and Its Myths," 23).

2. Parrish, "Worst of Wordsworth," 91. 3. Biasi, Ginetique des Textes, 79. 4. Ibid., 69. 5. Stilhnger, "Textual Primitivism," 14. By "later Wordsworth," Stillinger

means the later editions and revisions of earlier works by the older poet, rather than later works.

6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., 20. 8. Ibid., 27. A position similar to that of Stillinger is articulated by Zachary

Leader in the chapter "Wordsworth, Revision and Personal Identity" in Revision and Romantic Authorship, but instead of concluding in favor of textual pluralism. Leader concludes with a return to respect for final authorial intention.

9. Reiman, Romantic Texts and Contexts, 135. Actually, Reiman is in error here in criticizing the Cornell editors for this reproduction of the early Prelude text. The "Two-Part Prelude" was first published in the third edition of the Nor­ton Anthology in 1974 and then in the Norton Critical Edition of The Prelude, 1799,1805,1850 in 1979. In each case, the text was the one prepared by Jonathan Wordsworth and Stephen Gill, not that of Parrish for the Cornell Series.

10. Jenny, "Genetic Criticism and Its Myths," 15. 11. Other manuscripts are more ambiguous. Manuscript M looks superfi­

cially like a point of contingent completion for a five-book Prelude but is actually copied out after the decision to write a distinct five-book poem has been aban­doned. It represents a contingent state within the longer process but not a discrete "state" for the poem. Manuscript C is another arguable case, an interim manu­

250

NOTES TO PAGES 79-84

script copied in 1819-20 and used for revision in 1831-32. Both MS M and MS C were, initially at least, copied for someone else rather than forming a core part of the poem's development (ahhough MS C does come to do this).

12. J. Wordsworth, Music of Humanity, 31. 13. Jack Stilhnger raises this issue in "Textual Primitivism and the Editing

of Wordsworth" when he comments on the "elusiveness of the 'earliest complete state' of a work" (14). Stephen Gill has also raised concerns about how far one can go in giving independent status to texts that were not initially intended as texts. According to Gill, "It is clearly legitimate to rescue from oblivion poems Wordsworth excised from his canon or did not publish at all" ("Wordsworth's Poems," 54).

14. Carney, "Making the Most of a Mess," 634. 15. Wordsworth, Letters: Early Years, 470. 16. Wordsworth, The Excursion, 35. 17. Wordsworth, Letters: Early Years, 586-87. 18. Darlington's introduction to Wordsworth, Home at Grasmere, 14. 19. Wordsworth, Letters: Early Years, 594. 20. Coleridge, Letters, 1:538. 21. Gill, Wordsworth: A Life, 171. 22. For more detail on Wordsworth's abandonment of the Recluse project

as recorded in the letters, see Darlington's introduction to Home at Grasmere, 26-32.

23. Scheibe, "Editorial Problem," 195; Kets-Vree, "Dutch Scholarly Editing," 143. Kets-Vree states, "Manuscripts of the Mozart type contain few or no variants because the genesis did not take place on paper, but in the author's mind. The author who works according to the Beethoven method, by contrast, starts with a rough version and then proceeds to delete and refine" (143).

24. Hurlebusch, "Understanding the Author's Compositional Method," 85-86. It is worth noting, however, that the French and German distinctions don't directly map onto each other (e.g., "constructive" seems to correspond to "programmatic," yet it is the French "process-centered" writing that builds on itself.)

25. Ibid., 85-98. 26. Gresillon, Sliments, 104-5.

*27. Ferrer, "Clementis's Cap," 225. 28. Biasi, Genetique des Textes, 33. 29. Parrish in Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1798-1799, 26. 30. Ibid., 21. 31. Hurlebusch, "Understanding the Author's Compositional Method," 96. 32. Ibid., 92. 33. Gill, Wordsworth: A Life, 160. See also Andrew Bennett's discussion of

Wordsworth's resistance to writing in his recent book Wordsworth Writing, and a

251

NOTES TO PAGES 84-90

comparable piece by Mark L. Waldo, "Why Coleridge Med to book came out after this study had gone to press, so I have not been Y incorporate a response to it as I would have liked.

34. Wordsworth, Letters: Early Years, 236. ^ 35. Eggert, "Textual Product or Textual Process, 62-63. 36 RuofF, Wordsworth and Coleridge, 16. fy. ?;:e distinction Is first made by Raymonde D' ;

tlque et Poitique," in Essah d, CritiqM Gtel.jue, ed. Louis Hay. developed by Biasi in "What Is a Literary Draft? 42 49.

39 wT^olm.'inWorlwlrth'sProse Worte gives theorderof^^^

and 23?eb 1799-the material as lplrobabVo.tlre!ywr«te„ between 6^ 1799- (30). Since the "Esssy" is also Inverted and entered a random number of p g ;™tiismore,lk=lythatit„as.„,.r^«

40. Parrish, introduction to Prelude, 1798-17^% i, <^ui.

^ 41. Wu in Wordsworth, Five-Book Prelude, 8. 42. Wordsworth, Prose Worfcs, 1:103. 43. Wordsworth, Prelude. 1798-99, 46, Reading Text, lines 137 38.

44. Wordsworth, Prose Wor;:s, 1:103. 4^3-35 45. Wordsworth, Prelude, 1798-99,53, Reading Text, lines 429-31,433 ^ 46. In "The Five-Book PreiuJe," Jonathan Wordsworth first suggests that

Prelude material (for MS WW) was written in pencil because it was wri

""47'TS\ooserhorizontalhandislesstrueofcopiedverticalinfcpassages,h ever Solm^bethatWordsworth initially turns thenotebooksidewaysmorde to try andrelease himself creativelybut then simply decides itiseasiertowrue the lines in this way (although his use of it for copying remains inconsistent) _

48. DC MS 19 (MS JJ), B'. All transcriptions essentially follow those of th

Cornell editions.

OT L'i teS=«"'»*sth.tengageintelllgentlywlth^ pre tLS'Zaterlal and issues of revision include: Brinkley Hanley. e^ pre-textuai mare Revision"; Brinkley, The

and -Tttcident in the Simplon Pass" Wolfson -The Illusion of Mastery"; and Schell, "Wordsworth's Revisions of the Mcent ot Q wdnn " For full-lensth studies, see Bennett, Wordsworth Writing; Manning, ZdingRomantics; Ruoff, Wordsworth and Coleridge; Magnuson, Colertdge an Wordsworth; and Sheats, The Making of Wordsworth s Poetry.

252

NOTES TO PAGES 91-100

51. Searle, Intentionality, 84. 52. Ibid., 27. 53. Ibid., 84. 54. Ibid., 107. 55. Ibid., 106.

fl. SSrierdltoSon between "prior intention" and "intention-in-

•edgew^Sff'»ratherthanjust"toremove'edge.-"Searlesta^^^ tional component can be as complex as you like" ^ ^^e poet's

59. Of course, the text will also contain a meaning eyo

conscious understanding.

M to »!e'of » tdeologlcal model dearly shapes our re^

as part of a teleological structure.

fs The femhlr th^^^^^ dry" is crossed through and yet retained is confus­

ing. One p^X is that WordLorth crossed

Cornell transcription page. „ . .r i:„poio7-i2 65. Wordsworth, Prelude, 1798-99, Reading Text, 45, hnes 12. 66. J. Wordsworth, "Revision as Making," 36-37.

68 B^h Gresillon and Biasi give detailed accounts of the nature of revi­sion within process. These will be discussed in more detail in relation to mi y

Bennett Wordsworth Writing, 3. Clearly, there is a degree of overlap

HSSSSSS positional pracuceb. ^ i • m"* mv work is more

Merleau-Ponty, "On the Phenomenology of Language," 90. 71. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 207. 72. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 12. 73. Ibid., 8.

253

NOTES TO PAGES 101-110

74. Wordsworth, Prose Works, 2:84. 75. Jacobus, Romanticism, Writing, and Sexual Difference, 169. 76. Ibid. 77. Ibid., 173. 78. See also Bennett, "Appendix on Poetic Dictation," in Wordsworth Writ­

ing, 175-77. 79. Bennett, "Wordsworth Writing," 6. 80. Wordsworth, Letters: Later Years, 2:454. 81. See Bushell, Re-reading 'The Excursion,' 169-78. 82. There are also no uses of the word "writing" for The Prelude, though

there are two for The Excursion. There are nine uses of the word "written" in The Prelude, and two in The Excursion. See Cooper, Concordance.

83. Wordsworth, Thirteen-Book Prelude, 1:310, AB-Stage Reading Text, book 12, 231-34, 237-39.

84. There are twenty-one uses of "told" and fifteen of "tell" in The Prelude; sixteen of "told" and sixteen of "tell" in The Excursion.

85. Wordsworth, The Excursion, 299, book 9, 795. 86. Wordsworth, Thirteen-Book Prelude, 1:152, AB-Stage Reading Text, book

4,49-54. 87. Ibid., 1:163, book 5, 44-46. 88. Ibid., 1:166, book 5,164. 89. Ibid., 1:166-67, book 5, 185-87; 1:311, AB-Stage Reading Text, book 12,

270-72. 90. Bennett, Wordsworth's Writing, 4. 91. Reed, introduction to Wordsworth, Thirteen-Book Prelude, 1:19. 92. Ibid., 1:19. 93. MS WW (DC MS 43), 18'-. 94. Wordsworth, Thirteen-Book Prelude, 1:173, AB-Stage Reading Text,

482-91. 95. MS WW (DC MS 43), 18\ 96. According to Bryant, "[T]he fact of the shifting of the words (not just the

shifted words themselves) has meaning" (Fluid Text, 97). 97. DC MS 70,7'. 98. DC MS 43 (MS WW), 28''. See also Keith Hanley's reading of this draft in

"Crossings Out," 120. 99. Wordsworth, Thirteen-Book Prelude, 1:189-90, AB-Stage Reading Text,

book 6,525-30. 100. See Bushell, Re-reading 'The Excursion,'169-78. 101. Wordsworth, Excursion Reading Text 229, book 6,1307-8; 230, book 7,1-4. 102. Wordsworth, Excursion Reading Text 275, book 8, 608-11; 276, book

254

NOTES TO PAGES 111-119

103. DC MS 73. 6^. 104. Wordsworth, Excursion Reading Text 76, book 1, 985; 103, book 2,930. 105. Ibid., 296, book 9,753. 106. Ibid., 296-97, book 9, 783-95. 107. WiUiam Galperin also discusses the multiple endings of the final text in

"'Imperfect While Unshared,'" 212. 108. DC MS 73,46^; DC MS 73,18^ 109. Wolfson, Questioning Presence, 123. 110. The line "an active principle" is from Excursion Reading Text 276, book

9, 3. 111. The use of earlier material as a stimulus certainly looks to be true for

book 2; see DC MS 47, 33'. The only surviving version of the book 4 opening in DC MS 74 (260 is probably copied from elsewhere, however, so the initial context of integration is not known. For discussion of these passages, see also the Cornell Series Excursion "Manuscript History: First Stage" (429); "Seventh Stage" (464).

5. TENNYSON'S PROCESS

1. Knight, "Reminiscence of Tennyson," 267. 2. Quoted in H. Tennyson, Memoir, 1:198. In the light of nineteenth-century

publishing habits this is not quite so destructive as it sounds, since the publishing house required a work in manuscript to be taken apart and printed in separate blocks of loose pages. (The high cost of handmade type in the first half of the century limited the amount of a work that could be printed at a time.) See Dooley, Author and Printer in Victorian England, 42-44.

3. Again, see Dooley, who writes of "the indifferent attitude many Victorian authors took toward their manuscripts once a work was printed" (Author and Printer in Victorian England, 127).

4. Quoted in H. Tennyson, Memoir, 1:198. 5. The only explicit written statement by the poet himself exists as a note in

the In Memoriam manuscript (Trinity Notebook 13) and concerns Spedding's notes within it: "[T]he private notes are not to be shown by her [Lady Simeon] to anyone—nor is anything to be copied" (not reproduced in The Tennyson Archive).

6. Christopher Ricks's The Poems of Tennyson in Three Volumes provides the clearest information about compositional order and dates for the manuscripts in relation to individual poems rather than particular notebooks. Far less useful is John Pfordresher's A Variorum Edition of Tennyson's "Idylls of the King."

7. Omissions are usually listed at the front of an individual volume but not referenced at the points where they occur within it. A notable example is the

255