The Three (or Four?) Ages of Texts

 One part of McGann’s critique of contemporary textual scholarship follows a by now well-worn line of argument: modern editors have insufficiently historicized the objects of their study, and have therefore applied concepts whose coherence in one field cannot be maintained in another. For McGann, these fields seem to be chronological “ages,” though I don’t think he ever explicitly puts it that way. Here, I want to describe each of these ages, and suggest that we now (will soon?) require the addition of another. In each era, McGann envisions two “layers”: the layer of manuscript, and the layer of print; the density of each layer varies from period to period.

1.     Pre-printing press. (e.g. Homer, the Bible, Chaucer). From this period we only have manuscripts; because the institution of the printing-house doesn’t exist yet, those potentially “corrupting” factors (compositors, printers, etc.) are not of concern. The chief problem, however, is the miscopying (intentional or unintentional) of scribes; the task of the modern editor is thought to be largely stemmatic: to understand the succession and provenance of the manuscripts to pursue a notional “ideal text” (that might have actually existed, though it is long gone). The manuscript layer is not very dense; the print layer is, of course, empty.

2.     Early printing press. (e.g. Shakespeare and Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, the period that Greg’s essay addresses). In this period, printing houses had little regularity in practice; from this period, we have hardly any of the manuscripts that were presumably the bases for the printed editions. Often, the only way to “correct” one printed edition is to compare it with other printed editions. The manuscript layer is mostly empty; the print layer is rather dense.

3.     Modern era, or “vernacular scriptures.” (e.g. Romantics to the present). From this period we have mountains of manuscripts, letters, diaries, and printed editions. The problem is often not the absence of a manuscript that was the basis of a printed edition, but the presence of multiple “authorized” manuscripts. The manuscript layer (in which I include typed, unbound papers from the 20^th. c.) is impossibly dense (e.g. the fact of the Gordon Lish archives- can you believe there are Gordon Lish archives?); the print layer is rather dense.

It seems to me that we are nearing (or have recently reached) a point at which we will need to mark a new era, which will include not just the manuscript layer and the print layer, but also an “electronic” layer (suggestions for this adjective are welcome). To continue working along the lines that we have done for the last two centuries (where the author has top priority), we will need to negotiate not just a flood of unbound papers and sets of printed books, but also “stacks” of emails, text messages, tweets, video interviews, records of Google search terms, and much more.

So I have two questions for the class:

1.     Have we reached this fourth era?

2.     Is it possible that the changed conditions of this fourth era will at last exhaust (or at least downgrade) the author as the chief object of interest, leading scholars to employ different categories for our approaches?

So that I don’t come off as coy, I’ll briefly give my responses to these questions:

1.     I think the answer is no: we have not reached this fourth era. I think so primarily because of the case of David Foster Wallace. His unfinished novel, The Pale King, was constructed and published this past summer by his editor from (as I recall) printed fragments of an as-yet unformed novel. The editor noted that he couldn’t figure out the intended order of the chapters, but that some of DFW’s hand-written notes (presumably in the margins?) suggested his intended themes for the novel. DFW’s papers are held at the Ransom center, too; as far as I am aware (though I would be happy to be corrected), there has been little talk of digging through his old emails (which would probably be unbelievably exhausting- I bet they’re all seminar-paper length).

2.     Not in my lifetime, and not as long as English departments maintain period divisions. If we break up our departments along different lines (thematic, generic, etc.), maybe, but it seems more likely that an editor in 2050 will “publish” in some form The Collected Tweets of Jonathan Franzen. My guess is that someone will just sift through the wreckage of an author’s tweets, just as German philologists sifted through the wreckage of Biblical manuscripts 250 years ago.