Free A Companion to the History of the Book by Simon Eliot, Jonathan Rose Page B

blunder” can be effectively distinguished from authorial idiosyncrasy) move the Sheldon-Williams edition in an epistemological direction that I saw as the almost total reverse of the Jeaneau. Where Sheldon-Williams aims for teleology and completion, authorial and transmissional, the proliferation of textuality in the Jeaneau edition sets out the “critical” edition as only one state in the presentation of textual variance, and allows the “synoptic apparatus” to become the “fullest” part of the editorial enterprise. Furthermore, what Sheldon-Williams hopefully enlists as a “ ‘positive’ apparatus criticus” is nonetheless presented in his edition in a conventional “inferior” textual space, in reduced type at the
bottom
of the page, so that its positivism is in fact a mark of its degenerative status, again a conventional assumption. In the massive Jeaneau edition, in contrast, the synoptically presented variant versions are no longer confined to this “inferior” position but are given a visual and spatial equality with one another (and, by implication, with the “critical” edition that sets the whole procedure in motion). In Jeaneau, the reader’s eye is forcibly moved to accept variance as a normative condition. The current edition thus holds the earlier editorial aims of “satisfaction” and “fullness” in abeyance, if they are accorded any value at all, in the face of textual fragmentation and proliferation. The editorial rationale now emphasizes not a “
produit fini
,” b u t “
une matière en fusion, non point d’un texte Établi et fixé de façon canonique, mais d’un texte en perpétuel devenir
” (Eriugena 1968–95: 1.xix). A “perpetual becoming” indeed. In these postmodernist days, we are a long way from “satisfaction,” preferring process and demonstrable incompletion (or “becoming”) over fulfillment (and “being”).
    What do these two examples suggest about the current state of textual scholarship, especially as it differs from the model of just thirty years ago? And in what way is my present response to the question in the title of this chapter different from what it would have been in the earlier period? The most general response is that textual scholarship is not a discipline or a practice somehow immune from the ideological and philosophical pressures of its times. Just as Patterson (1985) remarked of the “modernist”
Piers
, any act of textual scholarship is going to be the product of a sometimes unacknowledged negotiation with what is literally “thinkable” in a particular cultural moment. During the hegemony of the organicism, completion, and unitary consciousness of the New Critical period in Anglo-American studies, it became just “natural” (or unquestionable) that the aim of textual scholarship should be to resuscitate and to make manifest this unitary consciousness as it was applicable to the recovery and construction of authorial texts. One of the mantras of this period was “the text that never was,” that ideal state not representable in any given historical documents but immanent in their collation and conflation. The “eclectic” text, as it became known, was like that of the 1970s’ Trevisa or the 1960s’ Eriugena: something lying behind or above the so-called “veil of print” and requiring the intervention of an editor convinced of the ethical requirement that full justice to authoriality could be achieved only by reaching for a romantic organicism beyond the raw and corrupt phenomena of the textual
remaniements
. In a word, textual modernism was (like that of modernism in music, in architecture, in painting, and so on) Platonist and essentialist. Modernism sought the “essence” of the specific medium, and in textual scholarship this essence was the purified, cleansed, and unmediated text of the author, usually presented in “clear text” editions, with all sign of editorial handiwork removed so that the reader was