G. E. Bentley, "Blake's Works as Performances: Intentions and Inattentions

G. E. Bentley addresses the issue of
authorial intention in textual editing by exploring the variant
copies of William Blake's poetry in Illuminated Printing. Blake
devised the technique of illuminated printing to produce his works,
which he called “a method of printing which combines the painter
and the poet” and involves the coloring of manuscript copies made
from one plate. Because Blake created and reproduced all aspects of
each text by hand (including etching his text and design on copper
plates for printing), his method results in every copy being unique
in a significant way, which Bentley frames in terms of a performance.
Reviewing several of Blake's works, he poses the question: “How is
an editor to cope with this variety?”

With Blake's poetry, readers must do
the work of seeing; thus, editors of his works must figure out how to
accommodate the visual aspects of his works into their textual
editing practices. As Bentley notes about “The Tyger,” the reader
is meant to “absorb [the illustration] before he has apprehended
the poem” (137). He goes on to emphasize the importance even of the
shapes of Blake's letters, specifically analyzing the effect in
Songs of Innocence: “When one resets Blake's work in
conventional typography, one loses the flavour of the script itself—a
loss which may be crippling, as with the titlepage of Songs of
Innocence. The letters themselves burst into blossom, a winged
angel leans negligently on the “N” in the word “SONGS”, his
wings go behind the “N” and link it to the preceding “O”, and
above him flies a bird. Clearly a mere transcription of the letters
will lose almost all the exuberance of this blossoming page” (139).

Bentley argues for facsimiles over
transcripts of Blake's works and goes further to say that the
facsimiles should be “faithful imitations” not “merely
reproductions.” He insists that “the size must be true, the
colour of ink and the quality of paper must be like Blake's, the
plates must not only be in the order in which Blake arranged them but
they must face one another or be printed on one side only as Blake
arranged them, rather than as the convenience of technology or the
penury of the publisher dictates” (139). Blake did all parts of
production by hand in order to have complete control over his work:
“No compositors or printers or binders or publishers or advertisers
affected in any way the form of Blake's original works” (139).
However the form of his original works also seems to deter the
“interference” of textual editors.

Although all copies are produced from
the original plate that Blake etched, using this plate for the
purposes of textual editing is inadequate because it does not account
for the variants that appear in each copy made from the plate.
However, Bentley also notes that showing “all variants of that
plate side by side” (so the differences are apparent) compromises
“the literary and apprehended flow of the book” (150). He
concludes that “the only solution appropriate to Blake is to
reproduce each variant copy, that is, each coloured copy, in a
separate facsimile” (150). However I wonder at what point does this
become entirely unwieldy on an editorial level? Bentley ends on an
aesthetic note rather than an editorial one: “It is only when we
apprehend each work as a separate performance, when we can see the
colour and order and uniqueness of each performance that we can
apprehend it as Blake intended we should” (152). I understand this
on a level of appreciation for Blake's craft, but I am not sure that
Bentley succeeds in tackling his original question, “How is an
editor to cope with this variety?”

I want to close by relating some of
the issues Bentley raises to my own area of study, Victorian
literature. In Blake's work we clearly see illustration and
“illumination” as a significant part of the textual experience.
This quality is also evident in Dickens's work (although the issue of
production by hand us unique to Blake). Working closely with his
illustrators (Phiz, George Cruikshank), Dickens selected the scenes
to be illustrated based on those scenes which he thought needed
emphasis. These illustrators were guided by Dickens, but they were
also given freedom to express their talent—many of the
illustrations include visual details which are not described in the
text, but which enrich the narrative when taken in together (there is
a symbiotic relationship between text and illustration). Later
editions of Dickens texts will often include new illustrations of
entirely different scenes than those Dickens chose for this original
works. I am concerned with the authority of modern editors and the
“penury” of modern publishing houses which choose to exclude some
of all of the illustrations in reprints of Dickens texts, a choice
most likely guided by monetary concerns.

Another possibility, since nearly all
of Dickens works were serialized and nearly all were also illustrated
for the serial numbers, the illustrations could be viewed as having
importance for the serialized format than for the book version
(illustrations help make the key moments of the narrative stick in
the reader's mind from number to number, which were spread over a
long period of time). Bentley tells us that “Blake is primarily a
visual creator, even in his poetry” (137). I think the same could
be said about Dickens as a writer, his descriptive power creates what
readers call “the Dickens Universe” a textual world that has very
much to do with the visual imagination. The issue of serialization
was also of concern to me in last week's McGann & Tanselle
readings on copy-texts, since authors (or editors) would often go
back and make changes to smooth out the narrative before the serial
numbers were published as one book. Obviously this creating variant
copies of the novel, so which version does an editor use as the
copy-text?