La Condition McGann

Kevin Kiernan

Department of English
University of Kentucky
ENG102@ukcc.uky.edu

 

McGann, Jerome. The Textual Condition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1991. Pp. xiv + 208; 11 illustrations. Paper, $10.95.

 

Jerome McGann shows that he is still in top textual condition in this new collection of essays, published as the third title in the series, Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History. Despite the marketing claim on the back cover of the paperback that these are all “new essays,” five of the seven chapters have appeared in print before, as McGann himself spells out in his Preface. Their latest manifestation, with a new introduction and conclusion, is nonetheless a persuasive argument for McGann’s persistent thesis that the meanings of texts change with changing bibliographical circumstances, even when the texts do not change linguistically. Readers will enjoy a bargain in the interesting interplay of the chapters, the wide-ranging discussion of textual and editorial issues, and the irresistible occasion to play the role of McGann’s materialist hermeneut by analyzing the implicit collaborations of the author and his latest publisher.

 

The first four chapters, Part One, are grouped under the title of the Borges story, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” a reference darkly explicated by a passage on book production from Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The last three chapters, Part Two, come under the heading of “Ezra Pound in the Sixth Chamber.” The locale of this title harks back reassuringly to the same Blake excerpt, but the accompanying passage on instability and impermanence returns us instead to “The Garden of Forking Paths,” which in turn delivers us to Kathy Acker’s disorienting epiphanigram, “The demand for an adequate mode of expression is senseless,” from Empire of the Senseless. These loose-fitting framing devices, texts themselves, make different senses in their new settings, encouraging us to read the chapters as well as these texts in unconventional, “non-linear” ways. An ideogram of this kind of reading decorates these two pages in a little “text-tile,” with the threads of the warp pointing off in one direction and those of the woof pointing another way.

 

An insistent message of these essays is that a text is “a laced network of linguistic and bibliographical codes” (13), a textual condition that has profound implications for authors, editors, textual scholars, publishers, and readers. In this textual condition the establishment of a text, for example, becomes a contradiction in terms. An editor cannot stabilize a text, because the act of producing an edition in itself further destabilizes it, creating a palimpsest of the previous edition, overwritten by new bibliographical codes for new social situations. While an editor may strive to recreate the social context of its first appearance, and may even successfully recreate some of it, the new edition primarily produces a new text for a new context. As McGann puts it, “The textual condition’s only immutable law is the law of change” (9). It is therefore imperative to read carefully the changing bibliographical codes and the new sociohistorical conditions in order to comprehend the linguistic codes they silently influence.

 

Although his scholarly focus is on texts written during the past two centuries, McGann is aware that the textual condition of premodern literature, and the textual methods of studying it, provide some useful models for these postmodern perceptions. Among other things, medievalists will recognize the discipline of codicology, the bibliographical analysis of a manuscript codex, in the attention McGann urges us to pay to what he calls bibliographical codes. “We must turn our attention to much more than the formal and linguistic features of poems or other imaginative fictions,” he tells us. “We must attend to textual materials which are not regularly studied by those interested in ‘poetry’: to typefaces, bindings, book prices, page format, and all those textual phenomena usually regarded as (at best) peripheral to ‘poetry’ or ‘the text as such'” (13). McGann argues that one cannot formulate a convincing theory of textuality because each text is a particular social event best investigated as an individual case study. He opts for a “materialist hermeneutics” that treats texts as “autopoietic mechanisms” working “through a pair of interrelated textual embodiments we can study as systems of linguistic and bibliographical codings” (15).

 

The opening chapter, “Theory, Literary Pragmatics, and the Editorial Horizon,” takes off from a provocative question pointed at McGann at the 1989 meeting of the Society for Textual Scholarship (STS). “If you were editing Byron’s poetry now,” he was asked, “what would you do?” (19). McGann responds by recounting his gradual discovery, while producing a more or less traditional “eclectic” edition during a period of upheaval in editorial and literary theory, “that texts are produced and reproduced under specific social and institutional conditions, and hence that every text, including those that may appear to be purely private, is a social text” (21). McGann argues that, if they attend to “editorial horizons,” to the specific social conditions of textual production, editors and textual scholars will find themselves moving inevitably toward literary pragmatics in their search for a theory of texts (22). Among three “case histories” elaborating and illustrating his ideas, McGann reviews a syllabus for one of his graduate seminars, revealing his way of inducing students to gratify their “interests in literary criticism within the orbit of the practical work of scholarship” (47).

 

The second chapter takes up the question, “What is Critical Editing?,” and continues the critique of eclectic editing. Matthew Arnold’s editions of his Empedocles from 1852 to 1867 illustrate the inappropriateness here of combining texts around a “copy text” and incorporating emendations to produce an “ideal” text. Arnold’s successive editions, while almost identical linguistically, display radically different texts and authorial intentions by variously including, excluding, and reordering individual poems. “These bibliographical–as opposed to linguistic– variations,” McGann observes, “are of the greatest importance for anyone wishing to understand Arnold’s poetry” (51). The semiotic significance of bibliographical codes and the way they continually change the linguistic ones is unusually apparent in the case of William Blake, who meticulously hand-tinted each engraving of his poems. Blake labored, in McGann’s words, “to bring the bibliographical signifiers under his complete control” (58). His intentions are thus undermined by editors concentrating on linguistic codes alone, while at the same time generating their own scholarly bibliographical codings that are sharply at odds with the ones Blake worked so hard to provide. It is a shame that McGann’s publisher obliges him to illustrate his points with a monochrome reproduction of a hand-tinted plate from Blake’s Jerusalem. The effect is disturbingly reminiscent of Ted Turner’s colorization of old black and white films for TNT.

 

In “The Socialization of Texts” McGann further develops his argument that texts are transmogrified by new productions with new receptions. The chapter itself will have a different impact in this book in Princeton’s series on Culture/Power/History than it did when it first appeared as a shorter article for Documentary Editing in 1990. As the author of other books published by Harvard, Chicago, and Oxford, McGann rightly stresses the importance of scholars and “institutions of transmission” in the socialization of texts. “Texts emerge from these workshops,” as he says, “in ever more rich and strange forms” (76). While he rejects the possibility of truly recovering the preceding frames of reference in critical editions, McGann envisions a recurring phoenix-like rebirth of texts in the impermanence and immutability of the textual condition: “The vaunted immortality sought after by the poetic impulse will be achieved, if it is achieved at all, in the continuous socialization of the texts” (83).

 

The title of Chapter 4, and of the current book, was first used for a paper about writing a paper about all the other papers at the 1985 STS conference. The textual condition is for McGann “positively defined by some specific type of indeterminacy analogous to the one I experience at this (whichever) moment” (89). For him the textual condition “exemplifies the scholastic version of what ordinary mortals have called ‘the human condition'” (89). The frailty of both states is brought home to him just as he is completing the paper. His computer crashes, leaving behind only the bone-chilling message, “BDOS ERROR” (sic). McGann reacts in a human way: “I freeze. I have not saved the morning’s work (I was inspired; I could not pause to interrupt the flow of the thoughts). I cannot save the file, I cannot exit the file, I can do nothing but strike the RETURN key ineffectually” (92). He tries despair. “It is clear. I am about to lose the morning’s work. The first completed text of my paper for the STS conference is lost forever” (92). There is a happy awakening two days later when the file is miraculously resurrected by his computer’s “recovery programs,” but then his mind recalls that his new circumstances require changes, revisions, new socializations of the pristine text. The final version, still in progress as he delivers the paper, transcends old cataclysms and concludes with a postlapsarian lament on the unfortunate separation of “scholarship” and “hermeneutics” (97-98). “Scholarship is interpretation, whether it is carried out as a bibliographical discourse or a literary exegesis,” he insists to his audience of textual scholars and now to us. “Though we scholars like to believe that one is prior to the other . . . this idea is at best a specialized hypothesis for programmatic work, and at worst a deep critical illusion” (98).

 

The first chapter in Part Two, “How to Read a Book,” implicitly coaxes us to go back and look at the preceding chapters with enhanced reading skills. We will read different texts the next time we encounter them. McGann begins this chapter with a funny and fascinating reading of what he calls “Reagan’s Farewell,” the now famous televised non-events in which former President Reagan, wherever he happended to be at the time, heads for his helicopter under a barrage of seemingly unheard and amiably unanswered queries from frantic reporters. Although not a literary text, the collaboration between Reagan as author (“the Great Communicator”) and the news media as publisher (with their well concealed bibliographical codes) nicely opens the way for a discussion of reading skills. McGann outlines important differences in the approaches to reading exemplified in Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book and Ezra Pound’s ABC of Reading, but points out that, in both, “‘reading’ is equated with deciphering the linguistic text” (104).

 

McGann suggests a new approach in his own 1-2-3 of reading, which he calls linear, spatial, and radial reading. Linear reading is the ordinary kind Adler and Pound talk about. Spatial reading takes in the semiotic codes of, for instance, the formatting of a page, by employing “the reading eye [as] a scanning mechanism as well as a linear decoder” (113). Radial reading, as the name implies, radiates out from the text, expanding it by reference to other resources. Scholarly texts encourage radial reading in various ways; for example, by taking the reader to different parts of the apparatus–the notes, the index, an appendix–which in turn generate further radial investigations (120). “Good readers have to read both linearly and spatially,” McGann says, “but both of those operations remain closely tied to the illusion of textual immediacy. Radial reading is the most advanced, the most difficult, and the most important form of reading because radial reading alone puts one in a position to respond actively to the text’s own (often secret) discursive acts” (122).

 

In “Pound’s Cantos: A Poem Including Bibliography,” McGann renews his assault on the idea, especially prevalent in American textual scholarship over the past forty years, that editorial practice and literary criticism ought to be separate and distinct activities. The descent of editions of Pound’s Cantos between 1925 and 1933, a dramatic movement from “a decorated and hand-processed work” under Pound’s complete control to a mechanically reproduced work controlled by his publisher, presents an editor with conflicting bibliographical codings (131). McGann argues that it is difficult, if not in fact impossible, to resolve the textual dilemma in a critical edition without engaging in interpretation. In seeking “to explore how meanings operate at the work’s most primary material levels” (130), he compares a page printed in red and black from the 1925 edition of the Cantos to later editions printed in black and white. McGann’s publisher, in an unintentional parody of the point he is trying to make, provides only a black and white illustration of the two-color printing. As in the case of the Blake illustrations, then, the reader is left to imagine the bibliographical codes McGann is trying to reveal. McGann’s arguments remain emphatic, however, with or without the illustrations. “Pound’s Cantos dramatize, on an epic scale,” he says, “a related pair of important truths about poetry and all written texts: that the meaning of works committed into language is carried at the bibliographical as well as the linguistic level, and that the transmission of such works is as much a part of their meaning as anything else we can distinguish about them” (149).

 

The final chapter, “Beyond the Valley of Production; or, De factorum natura: A Dialogue,” severely tests Acker’s dictum, quoted at the start of Part II, that “the demand for an adequate mode of expression is senseless.” Here McGann presents his ideas in an imagined conversation of three people talking about one of his papers. It is a bold and amusing experiment, successful in allowing McGann to take up positions he does not endorse and in forcing us to reflect on diverse modes of discourse, but I think unsuccessful in other respects. The first speaker is enthusiastic about McGann. “It was a fine lecture,” he proclaims, to get the discussion going, “–at once learned, elegant, and imaginative” (153). This speaker’s paraphrases certainly leave the impression of an important lecture, incorporating the substance of the book we are reading. The other interlocutors are less impressed. The second speaker is decidedly hostile, remaining, as she says, “unpersuaded by [McGann’s] polemical schemes,” and otherwise put off by “his often careless prose” (154). McGann subtly gets even by presenting her comments in the same McGannical prose. His forte is not natural dialogue, nor even the unnatural conversations that transpire at conferences. Thus his speakers forget they are speaking and use visual puns they wouldn’t be able to see, like “(re)produce” (163), “waste(d)” (168), “(re)membering” (171), and “(dis)orders” (172). Sometimes they even lapse into long, verbatim, block quotations with page references and footnotes, or rather endnotes. One thinks of Victor Borge making funny noises and hand gestures to furnish oral punctuation. The third speaker lapses into a rude soliloquy, notwithstanding a couple of peremptory asides to the second speaker, who improbably ignores these chances to retort until he is completely finished. They all apparently disband without a word of farewell.

 

The “Conclusion,” McGann says in an endnote, is a “printed version” of a lecture. Newly socialized, it is now a fascinating tour de force that weaves together many strands and loose ends of the preceding chapters into a fine and colorful text. The highpoint is a brilliant display of his argument about texts as empirical and social phenomena by means of a witty and perhaps even justified apotheosis of the typescript of his lecture into a cultural icon reverently preserved in the Library of Congress.

 

Given the prominent arguments of the book, it is hard not to notice that McGann’s ideas are in frequent counterplay, if not in actual conflict, with the modes of production of his silent collaborator, Princeton University Press. Some things, of course, are preordained. Before McGann can advise us of the laws of impermanence in the textual condition and of the final destruction of all texts, the Press assures us on the copyright page that the book meets “the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.” These far-sighted aims are not in focus with those illustrations misrepresenting the bibliographical codes of Blake’s and Pound’s works. Other bibliographical signs of a quick and inexpensive fix can be detected in the endnotes and the index. Endnotes eliminate formatting problems, but almost inevitably lure readers into scanning the notes as a continuous text after checking a particular note, or into ignoring many of the notes altogether in the course of reading the main text. In either case they work against the kind of radial reading that scholarly texts are meant to encourage. A simple index of names, while easy to compile, fails to provide even the most fundamental conceptual and thematic entries. It would be useful to be able to locate McGann’s widely dispersed comments on such issues as eclectic editing, materialist hermeneutics, bibliographical codes, and socialization of texts, less useful to be able to find passing references to the Tate Gallery, USA Today, and Yale University Press. There are signs in other of its bibliographical codes that the publisher has misread some of McGann’s linguistic ones. Perhaps most noticeable are the running titles where, for example, McGann’s “Theory, Literary Pragmatics, and the Editorial Horizon” is carelessly detheorized as “Literary Pragmatics and the Editorial Horizon,” or his “Pound’s Cantos: A Poem Including Bibliography,” loses its meaningfilled bibliography as “Pound’s Cantos.”

 

Although both authors and publishers grew increasingly blind or indifferent to the meanings of bibliographical codes during the age of mechanical production, the new textual condition of desktop publishing will assuredly restore the eyesight and interest of many authors. Publishers, as they continue their trend of requiring camera-ready copy from authors, will gradually relinquish their control over bibliographical codes, except for paper, institutional packaging, and of course marketing. Writers, if they are not already adept, will quickly acquire the power to supply no less than their own choices of type- faces, font-sizes, running-titles, footnotes or endnotes, indices, page-formatting, and color or monochrome illustrations. Sooner or later we will also gain control over the same things when publishing in electronic journals. For now (back then), the textual condition of my review of this important book remains to be seen when it reappears (right now) in PMC.