I am sure (or at least I hope) a great many feminist responses to the project of textual criticism have been written. If not, it’s certainly a topic that interests me for a final class project. To begin with, I am always slightly suspicious of disciplinary frameworks and debates carried out entirely by men. Those mentioned in these texts include Karl Lachmann, Ronald McKerrow, Joseph Bédier, W. W. Greg, Fredson Bowers, G. Thomas Tanselle, and Jerome McGann. From what I can deduce from McGann’s summation of the debates, nary a woman has chimed in. I suppose you could object that women were not as much of a visible presence within academic institutions during the heyday of these debates, but nonetheless, the obsessive concern about identifying and recuperating “the least corrupt line of textual descent” (McGann 65) strikes me as a distinctly male prerogative.
Although McGann did not necessarily espouse it (and sometimes asserted his departure from it), his Critique employed the language – over and again – of both anti-miscegenation and primogeniture, two concerns inextricably linked to charting and ensuring one’s “least corrupt line.” Ultimately, the project of textual criticism is about not mixing (avoiding contamination) and privileging what comes first (original intent). After all, the thing that is not mixed and that comes first is closest in form and expression to the author – the authority, the father, the utterance behind the scribe (God). The very word stemmatics, after all, is derived from “stemma” or “family tree,” and offers a process by which the “ancestral series” of textual variants can be chronologically ordered to mark out where contamination has entered. Bowers’s position, “that an editor must choose…the earliest in the surviving series of completed texts” is “based upon the idea that the original in such a series will be closest to the author’s final intentions [and] will be lease contaminated by nonauthorial interventions” (M 31). Thus, the authorial anxiety surrounding the proper dissemination of one’s legacy can be assuaged by maintaining a line that is earliest and therefore purest.
In the same vein, the textual editor Eugene Vinaver produced an edition of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur based on the Winchester Manuscript, which was discovered after the Caxton manuscript and considered much closer to the original Malory. As McGann points out, “Vinaver’s edition appeals to our longing to read texts which come as clearly and directly from the author’s hand as possible” (84); thus, we might be enabled to ignore the fact that the “location of authority necessarily becomes dispersed beyond the author,” (84) a seemingly anxiety-invoking premise. (The works of Shakespeare and God are two examples in which readers have been notoriously recalcitrant in conceding dispersed authority, yet where it is most likely true).
But literary production does not happen in a vacuum, as Tanselle and Bowers might have us think, and the “corrupting process of transmission” (40) is absolutely necessary and natural. I want to dwell here on the emphasis given to acts of dissemination in the books read for today. I take dissemination with two-fold meaning—it is both the propagation of the physical book, and the biological process by which offspring are created. But the nature of such disseminations (when taken in the literary sense) is that they come to be in a culture of literary production that is complex and recursive, “an aggregate of alien influence” (102). The base anxiety here seems to be that in the very utterance, or composition, of something – in the act of birthing something – one instantaneously loses authorial control; the offspring gets away, multiplies, transmutes, becomes alien. The line of inheritance, in other words, becomes tangled and perverted. Tanselle’s brand of textual criticism, then, is about restoring primogeniture, about not knowing what to do when “texts descend to us in multiple legitimate versions” (103).
In restoring the rightful heir, we erect not only a linear, teleological literary heritage, but also a national one. McGann quotes Wilhelm von Homboldt in his final pages, and connects the longing for author/father with that of the nation: “[It] is certainly most fruitful when one concentrates not so much on the works themselves but on the authors and the periods from which the works come. [T]his method…obliges us to search out the character and the entire context of a nation” (118).
In the same way that the Greg-Bowers-Tanselle brand of textual criticism is about restoring the earliest and purest teleological line of inheritance, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the curses inscribed on royal Assyrian statues. Obsessed with their posterity, Assyrian kings would inscribe curses on their statues to scare off anyone thinking of posthumously “contaminating” their image—which, after all, was meant to stand in for them for all time as a literalized form of progeny. The curse for altering or modifying the statue in any way called for sterilization of the desecrater, thus ending his capacity to produce his own offspring in an "eye for an eye" brand of law:
Whosoever should deface my statue
and put his name on it and say
“it is my statue” let Enlil, the lord of this statue,
and Samas tear out his genitals and drain out
his semen. Let them not give him any heir.
(from The Graven Image: Representation in Babylonia and Assyria, By Zainab Bahrani, 169).
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