Professional Documents
Culture Documents
SUPy
published 2009
135798642
o.
List of Illustrations
viii
Acknowledgments
Introduction
ix
1
38
57
75
5. Tennyson's Process
117
6. Dickinson's Process
168
239
Bibliography
Index
269
287
PJlLtc^c
0>lyU>
94
95
113
114
127
129-31
142-43
148
137
161-63
185
189
192-93
200-201
209
viii
205
234
222
ix
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
which was a gift I did not expect, and Christopher Ricks for two Hvely and
constructive conversations.
I am grateful to GilUan Beer and Susan Manning for their encourage
ment at the very earliest stages of the project, when it was most needed,
as well as for constant support throughout my academic career. Others
who are always intellectually generous and deserving of my thanks and
who have contributed here include James Butler, Stephen Gill, and Stephen
Parrish. I am also indebted to James McLaverty and Paul Eggert for their
kindness and willingness to respond to core chapters of the book and to
Peter Shillingsburg for involving me in his annual Symposium on Textual
Studies, which has been extremely stimulating. At Lancaster I have been
fortunate in the support of colleaguesparticularly Simon Bainbridge,
Arthur Bradley, Jo Carruthers, Cathy Clay, Keith Hanley, Tony Pinkney,
and Michael Sandersas well as that of the Reading Group, Tracy Mansell,
Caroline Rose, and Brighid Webster. My thanks to Sheila Fyfe for check
ing my French and German and to Charlotte Avery, Ben Quash, Bart Van
Es, and Wei-Wei Yeo-Lee for being constant friends, critics, and readers.
Finally, I wish to thank my brother, my sister Gill, and my parents for their
unwavering faith in me, and lastbut never leastJohn Hilliard.
Some of the material in the book has been previously published elsewhere.
The section on "Denial of Origins' in chapter 2 appears in an extended
form in Textual Cultures (FaU 2007): 100-117. Chapter 3 appeared in an ear
lier form (here significantly revised) in TEXT 17 (2005): 55-91; a much fuller
discussion of unintentional meaning than the one given here in chapter 3
occurs in an article for The Emily Dickinson Journal 14 (2005): 24-61. Mate
rial on Wordsworthian microanalysis in chapter 4 previously appeared in
Studies in Romanticism 44 (Fall 2005): 399-421. Thanks to Wayne Storey at
TEXT and Textual Cultures and David Wagenknecht at Studies in Romanti
cism for allowing reproduction of previously published material.
All images from Wordsworth's manuscripts are reproduced by permis
sion of the Wordsworth Trust, Dove Cottage, Grasmere.
All images from Tennyson's manuscripts held at Trinity College, Cam
bridge, are reproduced with the kind permission of the Master and Fellows
of Trinity College, Cambridge.
All images from Tennyson's manuscripts held at The Houghton Li
brary, Harvard, are reproduced by permission of The Houghton Library,
Harvard University The Presidents and Fellows of Harvard College.
The Tennyson transcription from MS Ashley 2104 pages 24-25 is made
with the kind permission of The British Library. The British Library. All
Rights Reserved.
xi
i
o
This book is about the Hterary text before it becomes a completed work of
art. It takes as its focus the prepublication work, the draft materials, that
constitute text as process. For too long, textual process has been treated as
the province of scholarly editors or drawn on in a largely secondary way by
critics delving below the surface of the published text. The time has come
for a reevaluation of this alternative aspect of the literary work. This study
presents textual process as something not only of interest to editors and
textual theorists but as material worthy of philosophical definition and'a
full critical response.
The book has two primary objectives. First, it seeks to understand the
nature of the text in a state of process and its status relative to the completed
work. Second, it aims to develop a critical method and a hermeneutics for
interpreting the text in this state. Put simply: we need to understand what
text as process is, and then think about what to do with it.
In his essay "Genetic Texts," the German textual critic Hans Walter
Gabler declares, "Fundamentally the issue is whether, critically, the pro
cess of the writing is, or is not, integral to the product of the writing."' Such
an issue is of central importance to this book. Although it is focused on the
draft materials of a work, this study is ultimately concerned with enlarging
our definition of "text" to understand text as process alongside the com
pleted text. It does not seek to define textual process as something entirely
apart from the text in a completed state but as part of the continuum of
the text, for which the concept of a single, stable state is in part an illusion.
Necessarily, however, understanding process demands a recognition of its
difference from the final product as well as its vital connection to it. It must
be allowed to be both a part and apart.
TEXT AS PROCESS
INTRODUCTION
critical divide, structurally and conceptually; his last three books have all
been concerned with the concept of "versions" of a text and the value of
"multiplicity." At the heart of his theory is a concept of "textual instability"
defined in opposition to a model of "textual stability" involving a single,
authoritative text: "Textual instability, in a similarly simple view, is just
the opposite: the absence (or lack) of a single correct or best or most au
thoritative text."' Stillinger takes this further in relation to Coleridge with
a definition of "textual pluralism" in which "each version of a work em
bodies a separate authorial intention that is not necessarily the same as
the authorial intention in any other version of the same work.""* His book
thus argues for independent multiple versions of Coleridge's poems as the
most appropriate way of presenting (and responding to) works that are the
product of obsessive revision and rewriting.
Stillinger provides a useful and important model for the kind of work
I will be doing here. He convincingly unites literary and textual criticism,
and his work is immensely valuable in establishing such approaches as ac
ceptable. On the whole, though, for Stillinger, the key issue is his concern
with the valuingor democratizingof different draft versions of a text
rather than with allowing the debate to shift to critical use of editorial ef
fort. Of course Stillinger is deeply interested in composition, in process
rather than product, and he also has some interesting discussion of issues
of readership and of multiple intention. In relation to Coleridge, for exam
ple, he wonders "whether he had any intentions at all in the conventional
sense." However, Stillinger's primary interest is less in textual process it
self than in the appropriate presentation of compositional material.
A second Anglo-American study that connects text-critical and
literary-critical thinking is Hershel Parker's Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons.
Parker's "textual-aesthetic approach" seeks to study the text as process
through the use of biographical and textual evidence and an "aesthetic"
judgment about what constitutes the best version of a text. As its title sug
gests, the book argues against New Critical principles and the situating of
meaning intrinsically within a literary text.
Parker almost always focuses on the text immediately before publica
tion or in its development around the act of publication, with authorial
intentionality "built into the words of a literary work during the process
of composition."' This "original intention" establishes an ideal authorial
version of the text that is then in danger of being lost by the author's own
subsequent actions: "All valid meaning is authorial meaning, but in stan
dard literary texts authorial meaning may be mixed in with non-sense,
skewed meanings, and wholly adventitious meanings which result from
tampering with the text, by the author or someone else." He continually
TEXT AS PROCESS
INTRODUCTION
TEXT AS PROCESS
INTRODUCTION
parison across and between writers. There may be those who would ques
tion whether such a framework is necessary and would want to assert that
all writers are unique. However, if the study of process is to develop beyond
the province of editorial specialists working on individual authors, then
enabling such comparison seems to me to be essential. It is only when we
begin to consider what constitutes a first-draft state, say, rather than what
constitutes a Tennysonian, or Joycean, or Wordsworthian first draft, that
textual process itself becomes the central focus of investigation.
Second, this study compares European and Anglo-American editorial
principles and draws on French genetic criticism as an underpinning for
Anglo-American studies in a way that has not previously been undertaken.
It seeks to make an Anglo-American readership far more aware of the use
fulness of the critique genetique but ultimately draws on European prac
tices to develop an approach emerging from its own tradition.
Finally, a third claim for the book's originality lies in its self-conscious
hermeneutical practice when analyzing draft materials. In relation to the
three nineteenth-century case studies," textual analysis moves backward
^^d forward, across draft text and published text in a wide range of ways,
bringing together different kinds of meaning to offer a new form of in
terpretation. Such hermeneutic practice is rarely undertaken on the textcritical side of studies of process, where critical concern is usually with
the relative status of texts rather than with their interpretation. On the
literary-critical side, while there are some excellent individual readings of
literary texts that draw on underlying draft materials, (particularly for au
thors for whom there is a strongly established interest in the drafts), this
is rarely undertaken in a consciously methodological way or as part of a
larger field of study.
I stated earlier that the core concern of this book is to understand what
text as process is and then to decide what should be done with it. This
concern underpins the overall structure and organization of the study.
The first three chapters introduce, contextualize, and develop the com
positional method presented in chapter 3, beginning with a comparative
overview of Anglo-American, German, and French editing principles and
attitudes toward genesis. The next three chapters apply that method in
different ways to the poetic process of Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Emily
Dickinson. The final chapter concludes with a full philosophical account
of the nature of textual process, of the making of meaning and the kind of
interpretation it requires. The book thus seeks to illustrate the usefulness
of its own theoretical conclusions by direct application of such ideas to
draft materials and further reflection on them.
Ultimately, this work intends to move "genetic criticism" forward in
6
7
TEXT AS PROCESS
A.oc.e^^
This chapter sets out to explain the importance of recent advances in tex
tual criticism and theories of editing for the emergence of a compositional
method and a study of text as process that is dependent on the way in
which such materials are presented. Without the shift in attitude of the last
twenty-five years, away from the privileging of final authorial intention
and in favor of multiple textual versions, this book could not exist. It is
important, therefore, to understand the history and nature of accessibility
to draft material alongside the development of any method for interpreting
that material.
This chapter gives three accounts of the development of textual criti
cism and its relation to "genetic criticism" in terms of Anglo-American,
German, and French practices to make clear the text-critical foundations
that underlie this study and the timeliness of it as a way of thinking about
process that could emerge only once editing principles allowed for the
valuing of such material. It also seeks to illuminate, by comparison of three
traditions, the development of editorial principles out of a particular his
tory and culture in a way that will allow, in the ensuing chapters, for a look
back at the Anglo-American tradition to redefine the way ahead.
.
^
>
TEXT AS PROCESS
CONTEXTUALIZING PROCESS
In the 1960s and 1970s Fredson Bowers took up Greg's principles and
adapted them further in relation to nineteenth-century texts. However,
whereas Greg (like Lachmann and McKerrow) was dealing with lost origi
nals and derived texts, many of the nineteenth-century manuscripts Bow
ers was working on had survived, so that at this point, the debate over
what the copy-text should be began to shift more firmly to grounds of
intentionality and questions of authority: issues that arise from the pres
ence of manuscript material. In "Some Principles for Scholarly Editions of
Nineteenth-Century American Authors," Bowers defines Greg's distinc
tion between accidentals and substantives as being between two kinds of
authority, with the authority of the word (content) divided from that of
the forms (spelling, punctuation, and so on). He differed from Greg in as
serting that the final manuscript version of a text should generally be the
copy-text because this was closest to final authorial intentions: "An au
thoritative edition is one set directly from manuscript, or a later edition
that contains corrections or revisions that proceeded from the author."'
Bowers also codified his principles into rules of practice and articulated a
kind of scholarly apparatus that was then adopted by the Center for Edi
tions of American Authors (CEAA, founded in 1963). The Center defined
a series of principles and standards for critical editing in strongly intentionist terms in the Statement of Editorial Principles and Procedures (1967,
rev. 1972). This document gives a clear account of the Center's main aim;
"[T]o make the works of important American writers available, and avail
able in texts which reflect the authors' intentions as fully as surviving evi
dence permits."' Speaking of the editor's role, it states: "The editor aims to
establish, as far as surviving evidence permits, a text which presents, both
in its accidentals and its substantives, the author's intention."' The kind
of edition that emerges from such principles is described by G. Thomas
Tanselle: "What is now referred to as a 'CEAA edition,' then, is the specific
10
11
text.'"'
In the early twentieth century, R. B. McKerrow adapted the Lachmann
method to the editing of Elizabethan texts, first using the term "copy-text"
in 1904 to make clear the importance of deciding on the most authori
tative manuscript (the "best" text) by careful study. He established quite
strict principles for deciding on a single authoritative text, reacting against
the unreliable judgments otherwise involved in creating eclectic texts:
"McKerrow's attitude doubtless sprang from his overreacting against the
abuses of some nineteenth-century editors, who felt free to choose among
variant readings without adequate study of the nature and origin of the
TEXT AS PROCESS
12
CONTEXTUALIZING PROCESS
13
TEXT AS PROCESS
CONTEXTUALIZING PROCESS
GENETIC CRITICISM
14
Anglo-American Attitudes
Having established that editing practices clearly anticipate the emergence
of a "compositional" or "genetic" criticism in Anglo-American studies, we
need also to consider why such a criticism has been slow to emerge. The
term "genetic" was first used in its literary sense by Wimsatt and Beardsley
in their seminal essay "The Intentional Fallacy."^ In that (New Critical)
work, it is equated directly with a narrow, limited interest in biography
and the personal history of the poet: "[W]e submit that this is the true
and objective way of criticism, as contrasted to what the very uncertainty
of exegesis might tempt a second kind of critic to undertake . . . the way
of biographical or genetic inquiry."^ In the next essay of The Verbal Icon
("The Affective Fallacy"), the question of a genetic criticism is returned
to again: "The Intentional Fallacy is a confusion between the poem and
its origins, a special case of what is known to philosophers as the Genetic
Fallacy. It begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the
psychological causes of the poem and ends in biography and relativism."^'
Here, "genetic" is taken to refer to the author's reasons for writing rather
than the materials of the process.
Both critics go on to discuss the idea of "genetic criticism" at greater
length elsewhere and to give fuller definitions of it. In Aesthetics, Beardsley
states: "I call a reason Genetic if it refers to something existing before the
work itself, to the manner in which it was produced, or its connection with
antecedent objects and psychological states."^ This offers a potentially
broader definition. However, Beardsley then proceeds to condemn such
an approach, primarily by narrowing the focus of meaning to evaluative
issues: genetic reasons are used to assess the fulfilling or not of intention,
or to judge the work as successful, skillful, original, or sincere. On this
basis, he argues, "Genetic Reasons... cannot be good, that is, relevant and
sound, reasons for critical evaluations."^' Thus, he adheres to the argu
ment as first given in "The Intentional Fallacy" that while such material
may be used primarily for evaluation of the author's "success," this is not a
valid critical act.
Wimsatt's later essay "Genesis: A Fallacy Revisited" is equally condem
natory of intentionist critics "wishing to throb in unison with the mind of
the artist."'" As in "The Intentional Fallacy," Wimsatt sets up a contrast
between, on the one hand, response to an artwork as private, personal, and
a reflection of the personality of the creator, and, on the other, response to
it as objective and public, with meaning embodied in the text itself Like
Beardsley, he condemns the use of genetic material for any evaluation of
15
TEXT AS PROCESS
CONTEXTUALIZING PROCESS
the work on the basis of the author's abiUty to express personal events, or
to fulfill his original intention, and asserts that authorial intention can, in
any case, never be fully known. Even where external knowledge of the au
thor is used in conjunction with textual interpretation, Wimsatt states that
such knowledge is really embodied in the text: "[I]nterpretations appar
ently based upon an author's 'intention' ofl:en in fact refer to an intention as
it is found in, or inferred from, the work itself."'' In sum (and as one would
expect from a founding father of New Critical methods), Wimsatt consid
ers that if a work of art requires the support of external evidence to com
municate its meaning, then it is a poor work of art and that the author's
intentions at the time of planning or writing may well be very different
from what is actually produced (and therefore are largely irrelevant since it
is only what is produced that matters). He affirms that "[t]he intention out
side the poem is always subject to the corroboration of the poem itself"'^
All of these points are convincing as they stand, but only in relation
to a view that the primary aim of genetic criticism is "the search for the
author's generative intention."" Wimsatt fails to allow for the possibility
of replacing a search for "what the author meant" with analysis of actual
genetic material. Both critics are unable to recognize that a very different
kind of interpretive act might take place in relation to the material itself,
one that would be interested in valuing the process revealed by it rather
16
17
CONTEXTUALIZING PROCESS
TEXT AS PROCESS
18
text being valued for its particular historicity (synchronic). Early material
is thus to be reproduced as an intrinsic part of an edition and treated as
necessary documentation of the development of the whole. The reader of
the edition is seen as performing an active role, engaging with and using
the edition to release the text for interpretation. Concerns over authorial
intention were removed from the German editorial debate at this point,
and a clear distinction between Anglo-American and German approaches
began to emerge, so that while "the Anglo-American endeavor has tended
to edit the author, the central German concern over the past decades
has increasingly become to edit the text.""' For some time, German edi
tors have been concerned with such questions as the distinction between
"readings" (Lesarten) and "variants" {Varianten) of the text and with what
constitutes the documentary body rather than with questions concerning
which authorial version to privilege. Zeller sums this up: "What distin
guishes more recent German editions both from most earlier editions and
from recent English ones is fundamentally a different understanding of
the notions of version (Fassung) and of authorial intention and authority
{Autorisation\ and ultimately a different theory of the literary work and
its mutations.""
It will be helpful to look more closely at the basic principles that in
form the German editorial theory of "versions" in the work of two critics:
Siegfried Scheibe and Hans Zeller. Siegfried Scheibe's article "Zu einigen
Grundprinzipien einer historisch-kritischen Ausgabe" (published in Texte
und Varianten) is an influential piece that establishes the new concept of
editing in terms of versions."' His position is then further defined by Zeller
in his seminal 1975 article "A New Approach," published in Studies in Bib
liography (and thus made available to an Anglo-American readership). In
his essay, Scheibe sets out to define core issues in German editing such as
the question of authorization {Autorisation), the status of the text, and the
nature of textual fault {Textfehler). In a later essay, "On the Editorial Prob
lem of the Text" (1989), Scheibe makes an argument in favor of authorized
versions on the basis of a model of staged authorial intention, allowing for
a temporal dimension. He states of different versions that they each con
tain "the work in the form that the author considers right, good, and rep
resentative of his or her intention in this new phase of labor. But the first
textual version, the first writing down of the text, also showed the work
in a form that the author believed to be right at that given moment."'" He
concludes: "Each version shows the work as it represents a specific point in
time and a concrete phase of the author's personal, artistic, and ideological
development.""
Scheibe's essay also raises the question of what constitutes "the text"
19
TEXT AS PROCESS
and of how much equahty to grant to different textual "versions."^ He reininds us of a distinction between the author's view of equality and that of
the editor: From the author's point of view the versions are decidedly not
equally valid. . . . But for the editor, all versions are in principle equal."
he German position repeatedly emphasizes the difference between the
author's and the editor's perspective on the text rather than attempting
to conflate them. For the most part the editorial perspective, in terms of
reception, is privileged over the authorial one, in terms of production. This
emphasis is reversed in French genetic criticism, as will be seen."
Finally, Scheibe reminds us of an unequal factor in German editions
that is easily overlooked:
Logically, therefore, all textual versions should be reproduced in a
historical-critical edition, insofar as they survive. At the same time,
such editions do not give all textual versions equal prominence, since
as a rule they make a distinction between 'Edited Text'... and so called
apparatus. Usually only the versions chosen as 'Edited Text' are printed
in their entirety; all others are more or less reduced to their variant pas
sages with respect to the 'Edited Text'. But these variants themselves are
Text exactly like the 'Text' of the fully reproduced version.
This is an important point for Anglo-American readers. In spite of the
strong arguments m favor of multiple versions and the principle of textual
appearance of the text in many editions is not equal at
all Scheibe goes on to state that in principle any text can be chosen as the
edited text, so long as its place within the chronology is made clear, but
certain versions are far more likely to be privileged.
Turning to Hans Zeller's work, one of the most surprising facts about
It is how early it seems to be in pointing out the limits of the Greg-Bowers
principles and how clearly in advance of McGann (who does acknowledge
Zeller s 1975 article in Critique). Zeller also seems to be unusual among Ger
man editors m that he orients himself in relation to the Anglo-American
position rather than in relation to French critique genetique, which pro
vides a stronger focus for most of the other commentators.
In 'A New Approach to the Critical Constitution of Literary Texts,"
Zeller argues against the creation of an eclectic text from a number of au
thorized versions on the basis of final intention. He prefers to recognize
difference between those authorized versions and to designate each one as
a distinct version" rather than combining them to create a single "final"
text. Zeller's position is underpinned by semiotics, with the work as a whole
being viewed as "a complex of elements which form a system of signs."^ He
20
CONTEXTUALIZING PROCESS
goes on: "Seen in this way a version is a specific system of linguistic signs,
functioning within and without, and authorial revisions transform it into
another system
Since a text, as text, does not in fact consist of elements
but of the relationships between them, variation at one point has an effect
on invariant sections of the text." In other words, the concept of text here
is of a whole body of interrelated structures within a system rather than
a discrete final object. The aim of the German historical-critical edition
is thus to reproduce a complete textual history over time, with a corre
spondingly fluid sense of the text as a developing object, rather than to
attempt to create a single "definitive" state of a text. Further definitions
then followin terms of authorization (those versions of a text approved
by the author) and textual fault (the suspension of authorization on certain
grounds). In general, the German approach is to limit editorial interven
tion and decision-making wherever possible.
Zeller's earlier (1971) article, now translated and published in Con
temporary German Editorial Theory (CGET) as "Record and Interpreta
tion," is equally valuable and seeks to outline a method for producing the
historical-critical edition. As in all his work, he shows a good knowledge
of Anglo-American principles and defines his own position partly in op
position to them: "Instead of the author's intention, which can only am
biguously be inferred or suspected based on the written records, we choose
as a model of text constitution the intention that the author attested to in
those records."' Such a comment reminds us of the strong influence that
German reception and reader-response theory has had on these editorial
principles. At its heart, this is a methodology based on giving the reader
access to as much material as possible, and with a corresponding lack of
critical commentary and analysis on the part of the editor: "Not from an
interpretation but only from the record and its documentation may new
interpretations be gained."" Again, this is made explicit toward the end of
Zeller's earlier essay: "The text is delivered to the user not for permanent
ownership, but rather as a task in which to participate."'
Finally, Gunter Martens's 1989 essay "What Is a Text?" in CGET pulls
together many earlier principles and clearly defines two German positions:
an bid-fashioned one that recognizes the need to reproduce variants but es
sentially sees them as outside the text; and a theory of "versions" that views
the text as a dynamic whole in which variants are different versions of the
text and revision is incorporated into the idea of the text itself He states
of this position: "In part, it also assumes that the various stages of a work's
genesis and revision belong to one and the same text, simply representing,
that is, various versions of the one text.... Every transmitted version of a
text is, in principle, equally valid."^ Martens's essay then goes on to con-
21
TEXT AS PROCESS
CONTEXTUALIZING PROCESS
sider the emergence of this model from semiotics, reaching the position
that "[p]recisely because the text is a fixed sign in the traditional sense and
at the same time breaks or negates the sign, and unfolds its productivity in
this tension, it cannot be reduced to one pole of this dialectical movement.
It is both static and dynamic, is itself a unity of opposites."^ This last sen
tence, then, provides the essential idea underpinning the concept of ver
sions, meaning that the edited text must allow for the "doubleness" of the
text's existence. The editor "must structure a scholarly edition in ways that
articulate both aspects of a literary text: The static and the dynamic, the
fixedness and the breaking up of this fixedness.""
This brief consideration of principles of German textual editing shows
that it develops in the latter half of the twentieth century in a very dif
ferent direction from that of Anglo-American scholarship and editing.
Editorial principles encompass the materials of process and incorporate
them within the very concept of the "text" to be edited. German editorial
theory thus displays an extremely positive attitude toward compositional
material; "The sui generis edition of working drafts and manuscripts (the
Handschriftenedition) has become a central concern, indeed sometimes an
autonomous objective, of German scholarly editing."^ At the same time,
however, this does seem to raise the question of why, if editorial principles
bring such attention to manuscript material, a literary-critical method and
school has not also developed to make full use of such material in German
editing, the aim at all times is to provide a clean and clear metastructure
containing distinct elements with minimized editorial commentary. Ac
tivities that in Anglo-American editing would be defined as part of the
critical editor's role (and thus as "editorial," falling somewhere between
editing and critical activity) German editors would define as "criticism"
and separate from the presentation of the text or manuscript. The confu
sion this creates can be felt in the very use of the term "genetic criticism,"
which, in the German tradition, refers primarily to textual criticism and
i's concerned with how best to present the genesis of a text, or with the dis
tinction between reception and production texts and their relative status.
It does not refer to any kind of literary-critical (interpretative, analytical)
use of that genetic materialas an Anglo-American scholar might assume
literary studies.
Traditionally, in an Anglo-American scholarly editionsuch as the
volumes of the Cornell Series for Wordsworththe contents of a single
volume (following CEAA guidelines) would consist principally of; a schol
arly introduction; explanation of editorial procedure; the reading text;
headnotes and transcriptions for each manuscript contributing to the text,
in chronological order; and appendices (possibly including shorter read
ing texts of passages not included in the final published text). In such a
structural model it is possible that a reader might simply work from the
reading text without ever really engaging with the lengthy apparatus at the
back of the book. Variant material is represented, often quite fully and as
it appears on the manuscript page, but usually in a different place from the
primary reading text, or texts. More significant than the structural organi
zation, however, is the editor's conception of his or her role. In the AngloAmerican tradition the borders between "objective" editing activity and
"subjective" critical commentary are relatively fluid, so an introduction to
the text will almost certainly include some critical thinking, and this is also
likely to be the case for interpretation of the order of text and manuscripts
as articulated in the headnotes to the manuscript apparatus. In German
that it would.
Two English-language editions that attempt to connect AngloAmerican and German editing are worth brief consideration: Hans Walter
Gabler's synoptic and critical edition of Ulysses and James Mays's edition
of Coleridge's Poetical Works for the Bollingen Series. Gabler's edition
combines the German model of genetic editing for the synoptic text (which
appears on the left-hand pages of the work) with Anglo-American critical
editing for the reading text (on the right-hand pages); "Tying the edition
into the two editorial traditions simultaneously was necessary to meet the
complexities of the very task of editing Ulysses."^^ Gabler's German roots
can be seen at a structural level in the way that the edition goes straight
into the text in volumes 1 and 2 with all editorial commentary placed as
apparatus in the back of the third volume. More important, however, it is
representative of modern German editing in its attempt to represent pro
cess visually on the page, with parallel versions of texts and time dimensio;is brought into play. The synoptic text, which involves a "procedure of
telescoping several transmitted records in a single presentation," is com
mon within more recent German editions.^ Gabler makes this text the
focus of the edition. Controversially, his aim is not to produce a text that
resembles the first published version but one that draws on and privileges
Joyce's autograph manuscripts (before typing, copying, and printing). Ga
bler claims that this text is the "document text of highest overall authority"
above the first edition of 1922 and states that "the edition endeavours to
recover the ideal state of development as it was achieved through the traceable'processes of composition and revision at the time of the book s publica
tion." He distinguishes the published text from the text he is representing
here: "The first edition comes closest to what Joyce aimed for as the public
text of Ulysses. Yet it does not present the text of the work as he wrote it."'
One of the strengths of Gabler's edition is the appropriateness of a synoptic
22
23
TEXT AS PROCESS
CONTEXTUALIZING PROCESS
approach for the material, a point made by Philip Gaskell in From Writer to
Reader: "Such a genetic presentation is particularly appropriate for Ulysses
because from the final draft stages onwards Joyce developed the book very
largely by adding to the text."^" It is relatively easy to follow Gabler's text
once one has adjusted to the symbols indicating different kinds of revision
on the left-hand pagealthough any serious comparative work on those
changes cannot be carried out unless the reader also refers at the same time
to the manuscripts (also available in a separate facsimile edition).
James Mays's Coleridge edition clearly follows the German modelhe
presents the Poetical Works in three volumes with two parts each devoted
to Poems {Reading Text) and Poems {Variorum Text). In his introduction.
Mays engages with recent editorial debate and with German and French
editing, stating, "I have adopted some of the features of this GermanFrench tradition in editing, I hope without prejudice."'' For the Variorum
Text Mays gives a brief headnote for each poem and then uses symbols on
the transcription page to denote kinds of revision, sources, and different
textual versions. At the bottom of the page are also further variants, the
division between the two positions being explained in the introduction as
"one of convenience, since both kinds of variation affect meaning."''^
In both Gabler's and Mays's editions a key issue is the relationship be
tween the synoptic text and a single-state reading text. Is the coexistence of
these two presentations of material a major conceptual contradiction? Tan
selle considers it to be so, asking of Gabler's edition. Why, one is bound to
ask, should there be a separate 'reading' text if all the variants are an essen
tial part of the work?"'' However, D. C. Greetham, responding to Tanselle,
argues that Gabler's synoptic text successfully "moves in both horizontal
and vertical axes at once" (i.e., it is both synchronic and diachronic in itself)
and that also having the reading text (as a purely diachronic text) allows
the edition to offer "both of Jakobson's disorders (similarity and contigu
ity) and both of Saus;sure's axes (vertical and horizontal) simultaneously."'"
He continues, "[T]his dual reading forces the reader's eye and concentra
tion to recognize the two dimensions of textual warp and woof.""
In the case of Mays's edition, however, matters are complicated by the
editor's own account of the relationship between synoptic and reading
texts (which are not on opposing pages but in two different volumes). In
his introduction. Mays clearly aligns his synoptic text with the German
structuralist model (although with some reservations) and states: "I be
lieve that the essential advantages of the European manner of proceeding
have been retained. These enable a reader to hold in mind a sense of the
way the poems move, as they often do, simultaneously in several planes:
that is, the way the poems move laterally, as a series of independent ver
sions, and vertically, as one version overlays and succeeds another."' This
synoptic mode of presentation is partly chosen because of the nature of
Coleridge's compositional habits: "The method is specially suited to texts
which underwent continuous revision, which was not always directed to a
24
25
single end.""
In Gabler's Ulysses the synoptic text is privileged over the reading text
in what McGann calls "the most dramatic representation of the work's
postmodern textuality. In an earlier edition the 'clear text' on the rectos
would have been the editor's ultimate object of interest."' However, in
the Coleridge edition, when Mays turns from the variorum volume to the
reading text, he asserts, "The Variorum sequence is the foundation of the
p'resent edition, but the Reading Text is what it supports," and again, that
"it is equally part of the edition, indeed it is the edition in the strict sense
(the Variorum sequence merely contains the material for it)."" Such state
ments seem to give priority to the reading text over the synoptic one. Thus,
the German structuralist principles of the variorum (which not only pre
sents texts synoptically but also goes so far as to collate textual misprints
and nonauthorial changes) are now countered by a strongly authorial ap
proach. For the reading text. Mays also chooses a principle of "variable
copytext," again to reflect Coleridge's inconsistent attitude toward his own
material." However, the principle followed is either "to give the version of
the poem which reflects Coleridge's concern, up to the time he lost inter
est" or to select a version that depends on recognizing "Coleridge's mean
ing before it was modified by second thoughts or other circumstances."'
Thus, selection of reading texts is decided on highly intentionist grounds,
and grounds that are subjectively determined. Mays willingly acknowl
edges this, and he also justifies it on the grounds that "[t]he problem is
more acute in theory than in practice. The text for each poem in all but a
few cases selects itself."^ Nevertheless, the edition does not so much serve
to unite Continental and Anglo-American editing practice as to leave the
two volumes, at best, as two entirely separate texts and, at worst, in conflict
with each other. This is not to condemn Mays, who clearly has considered
all of these issues with care and who has good reasons for thinking that this
editing approach is particularly suited to this poet. However, it does show
the limitations of the synoptic approach (if it always has to be supported by
an alternative text that works against it) and the ongoing conflict between
what sounds good in theory and what is actually of use to readers.
On the whole, then, at a practical level, the German model allows for
good localized textual comparison (line by line); it creates a sense of text
as process and introduces a time dimension into editing; and it tries to
be democratic in relation to different versions of a text. However, it is not
TEXT AS PROCESS
CONTEXTUALIZING PROCESS
allow it).
A second limitation in the German model, already touched on, is raised
by Paul Eggert in his review article of CGET: "A great deal of thought in
Germany has gone into enunciating the principles behind the display of
historical versions of a work. Relatively little seems to have been devoted to
the empirical question of which text ought to become more widely avail
able to the reading public through the editor's efforts."' Determining what
will serve as the "edited text" is left open to the German editor, even though
this gives considerable prominence to whichever text is chosen within the
edition. There is no real debate about the status or reason for choosing a
particular edited text (as there is, of course, within Anglo-American schol
arship). Hans Zeller also makes a related point that the Anglo-American
f, tradition is "capable of differentiating between authorial and nonauthorial
variants more reliably," and he repeatedly acknowledges the usefulness of
analytical bibliography in Anglo-American editing (even if it has been put
to misplaced ends).'
We can conclude this section of the argument by comparing German
and French responses to manuscript material, which many German com
mentators discuss. The first point to bear in mind has already been made
that for the Germans, "genetic criticism" does not denote critical analysis
of texts but instead refers to textual criticism for genetic material. Gabler
ihakes this point by implication when considering the question in relation
to the French critique genitique: "What needs stressing, particularly for
anyone accustomed to taking the text-critical view of manuscripts, is that
its points of departure as well as its aims are critical. Critique genetique
does not innately exploit manuscripts as documents of the written for pur
poses of deriving scholarly editions from them. It discourses the analysis
of manuscripts as writing." From a German perspective, the main advafttage for French scholars working in this way is that they are not bound
by a long tradition of scholarly editing, as German, British, and Americah'scholars are. In an article that goes some way toward trying to define
the need for interpretation of genetic material in German criticism, Klaus
Hurlebusch states:"From the beginning, the path followed by critiquegenetique'differed from that of the German editorial genetics. Unlike the latter,
the French approach did not have to ask itself the hermeneutical question:
what sense does it make to turn one's attention toward textual materials
preserved in manuscripts that originally had been significant only to the
author?"' Hurlebusch seems to look wistfully across to the freedom of
French thinking: "One can hardly imagine the like within the Germanist
-discipline. The independence of such investigations is here way-laid and
blocked off by a reception-oriented hermeneutics that appears tolerable at
most as a preliminary to critical editing."'" German editing theory thus
makes a strong case for integrating manuscript material and the repre
sentation of text as process into the edition, but it does not appear to go
further and consider the critical status, or use, of such material. It is time,
then, to turn our attention to the French critique ginetique, which does
make this its central concern.
26
27
helpful when one wants to consider a long text across different versions or
if one requires a whole sense of the text at each stage. The mode of editing
necessarily condenses different layers of revision, and does so intelligently
and well, as far as such things go. But it could be argued that the actual
physical mass of a text, even of a revised text that contains much invariant
material, is important, if impractical to reproduce.
It seems to me that one fundamental reason for the lack of German
literary-critical engagement with compositional material is the physical
presentation of the variant texts." The linear, synoptic version developed
by the German tradition is difficult to work with because it destroys the
spatial whole of each version of a text on the page and removes the compo
sitional context. Perhaps the ideal, in this editorial model, is to work with
the combination of a synoptic text alongside full facsimile material (as in
the case of Gabler's Ulysses and The James Joyce Archive).
What are the limitations of German editing theory in the wider sense?
Gunter Martens makes clear the extent to which German theory has moved
ahead of the current enthusiastic optimism for textual versions in AngloAmerican scholarship, to the point of a strongly articulated resistance to
such a theory by certain German editors. This leads Martens himself to
raise some of the objections to it: It is impossible to avoid the questions of
whether the immense expenditure of many editions is justified; whether
the expectations for the representation of textual development are fulfillable; and whether the large investment of time and effort disregards the es
sential interests of scholarship and the primary needs of readers."" Again,
in his later essay "What Is a Text?" (1989), after clearly articulating the need
for editing principles that allow the text to exist both as process and as
product. Martens is still compelled to conclude: It will not be possible to
implement fully this theoretically based model of an edition of the textgenetic and text-arresting relationships in every case. Compromises will
have to be made; foreshortenings of the comprehensive conception will be
unavoidable."' So one limitation of the theory of versions is that the prin
ciples of editing are not generally able to be fully implemented within the
book edition (although of course electronic archives and hypertext would
TEXT AS PROCESS
CONTEXTUALIZING PROCESS
29
TEXT AS PROCESS
look "not at the opposition between pre-text and text, but at the relation
ship between writing and the written work." This leads him to his famous
description of the avant-texte as a "third dimension" of tfext: "the writing is
not simply consummated in the written work. Perhaps we should consider
the text as a necessary possibility, as one manifestation of a process which
is always virtually present in the background, a kind of third dimension of
the written work."""
In spite of repeated attempts at self-definition, critique genetique as a
movement always "remains paradoxical,"'"^ in part because of a conflict
between its material, empiricist focus and its more intangible aspect. In the
introduction to the collected essays of Genetic Criticism, the editors com
ment on such paradoxes in the field: "It grows out of a structuralist and
post-structuralist notion of 'text' as an infinite play of signs, but it accepts
a teleological model of textuality and constantly confronts the question
of authorship. ... it examines tangible documents such as writers' notes,
drafts and proof corrections, but its real object is . . . the movement of
writing that must be inferred from them."'"' Such methodological contra
dictions also lead to the treatment of the material itself as having a double
identity. In "Does 'Text' Exist?" Hay defines the field as locating itself both
in "the material given" (document) and as an "intellectual construction"
(avant-texte). This "dual status" means that genetic criticism is often con
cerned with methods of access to the material at the same time as working
with it more critically.'"" Biasi also registers a "double objective" for the
geneticist, in terms of rendering material readable as well as reconstruct
ing genesis; he describes the avant-texte as "no longer a set of manuscripts
but an elucidation of the logical systems that organize it, and it does not
exist anywhere outside the critical discourse that produces it."'"' Even the
central term for the materials of study is thus problematically doubled.
In a roundtable debate of 1995, transcribed as "Archive et Brouillon" in
Pourquoi La Critique Genetique? Michel Contat poses the initial question
of whether it is possible to substitute the concept of avant-texte for that of
archive. In the course of Contat's discussion with Jacques Derrida, the lat
ter seeks clarification of what is meant by avant-texte:
JD: Si j'ai bien compris, vous appelez avant-texte un etat d'ecriture qui
precede I'etablissement legal de publication.
[JD: If I have understood correctly, what you call the avant-texte is a
state of writing which precedes the legal act of publication.]'"
Michel Contat responds by defining the limits and textual status of the
avant-texte in these terms: "Avant son impression, avant la decision de
30
CONTEXTUALIZING PROCESS
31
TEXT AS PROCESS
value from the consecration of the text that it precedes. But paradoxically,
the establishment of the pre-text tends to dissolve the textual entity that
was precisely the one that gave it this value."'" This is well put, but .it is
rebutted by Biasi, who states of genetic criticism that it in no way seeks
to strip the text of its poiesis. Its aim is to widen the concept of writing
by opening up access to writing's temporal dimension: a dimension that
would allow us to support the structural study of the text with a poiesis of
the avant-texte."^^^
Such near-contradiction in terms of the relative valuing of textual pro
cess and final text lies at the heart of any attempt to work critically on draft
materials and is present in this study as well. On the one hand, I want to
validate process as an object of analysis in its own right and to consider
textual material in a state of process in a way that allows for its difference
from the published or completed text. On the other, I am arguing for criti
cal integration and movement across and between avant-texte and text,
seeking an enlargement of the definition of literary studies to include this
material. The critique genetique reveals that such delicate negotiations of
position are part of the nature of working with compositional material.
The double focus of French genetic criticism makes it highly distinctive
and important for this study. Unlike both Anglo-American and German
traditions, where a genetic approach is for the most part only concerned
with the production of editions, the critique genetique was from the outset
as much critical as text-critical in focus. A sense of how relatively advanced
the French are in their literary-critical use of genetic material can be felt in
Gresillon's account, in EUments de Critique Genetique, of different theo
retical approaches brought to bear on draft materials in France (narratological, thematic, psychoanalytic, socio-historical)."' Such a range of criti
cal responses seems to place the critique genetique significantly ahead of
Anglo-American writing, which is still at the stage of justifying such mate
rial as being of significant critical value and has not yet achieved the level
of a coherent, recognized field of study. Work in this area is far more likely
to be "assimilated to a form of textual criticism or automatically assumed
to be a branch of it.""" However, the range of approaches in France reflects
an ongoing tension between theories of the text and critique genetique and
the question of the extent to which the avant-texte is, or is not, to be con
sidered as just another kind of text. Gresillon expresses concern that such
critical responses simply respond to compositional material in the same
way as the published text: "Traiter l'avant-texte comme du texte, n'est ce
pas forclore par avance tout espoir de th6oriser I'approche gen^ique pour
elle-meme?" [Isn't treating the avant-texte as a text to foreclose in advance
all hope of theorizing a genetic approach for its own sake?]."' This seems
32
CONTEXTUALIZING PROCESS
33
TEXT AS PROCESS
CONTEXTUALIZING PROCESS
the French editions have a tendency to go too far in the other direction,
compressing the transcription material and giving only a limited sense of
the materiality of the manuscript. This is understandable in the light of
theoretical distinctions between manuscript, dossier, and avant-texte, but
it can make the final presentation frustrating for the user.
Certain key concepts and anxieties emerge over and over again in writ
ings about the critique genetique by its own practitioners. These include:
debate over the relative status and relations between avant-texte and texte;
ambivalence about allowing room for psychological states and processes
and about using a teleological model of development (both clearly autho
rial); concern over the doubled definition of,the materials of composition
as both document and avant-texte; and anxiety over the theoretical under
pinnings of the field and the mode of interpretation for it.
Some critics, however, have made use of the potential tension between
authoriality and textuality in the critique genetique to develop nonau
thorial teleological structures in ways that are of considerable value to
this study. As a second-generation genetic critic, Daniel Ferrer is unusual
within the French tradition in expressing interest in overcoming the "cu
rious relation of exclusion and reciprocal comprehension [that] remains
between production and product, genesis and work."'" In "Clementis's
rCap: Retroaction and Persistence in the Genetic Process," he outlines a
model of "multiple teleology" (i.e., two-directional) with an anticipatory
and retrospective vision for the avant-texte in which "every act of notetaking occurs with the expectation, however vague, that the note will
somehow be used; therefore every part of the avant-texte in some way reyerts back to the projective logic."'^' Ferrer argues that genetic criticism
can run "downstream" but also "in a retrograde motion" by means of this
projective logic: "each fragment of draft projects itself onto the horizon of
its completion."'^" Again, unusually, Ferrer explicitly asserts the necessity
of a teleological perspective: "[I]t is in vain that genetic criticism regularly
exhorts itself to renounce a teleological vision of genesis. Teleology is not a
critical artifactit is inherent in the genetic mechanisms. However we will
is a major attraction).
These two examples reveal editions much less bound to documentary
accuracy and absolute inclusivity than the German model, much freer in
spirit and with a strong emphasis on the usability and attractiveness of the
volumes produced. The primary objective is making materials accessible
to a wide audience that is expected to want to read and enjoy the text as
process (not merely use it for scholarly purposes). A critical comparison
of the two Continental models might suggest that, if German editions are
unwieldy in their full facsimile pages with facing transcriptions and notes.
34
35
TEXT AS PROCESS
CONTEXTUALIZING PROCESS
Si la genetique est bien une position critique et non une mode ou une
science n^o-positiviste, comme on a pu le pr^tendre, elle doit se donner les moyens appropri^s pour ^lucider, evaluer et interpreter la genese
des oeuvres. [If genetic criticism is truly critical and not a neopositivist method or science, as it has been made out to be, it must adopt the
appropriate means to elucidate, evaluate, and interpret the genesis of
works].'^
36
37
THEORIZING PROCESS
/lOCeyOyO
38
39
TEXT AS PROCESS
40
THEORIZING PROCESS
guage itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins."'"
The author as God, sending out a message to be accurately deciphered and
understood, is replaced by a decentralized model of language as an open,
ceaseless system. Words are no longer the utterances of a creator but offer
a shared act of participation in a preexistent totality. As with Derrida, the
search for a final signified is replaced by a focus on the instability of the
signifier. From such a perspective there is no absolute meaning, and there
can be no meaning-origins. Instead, Barthes conceives of text as a perfor
mative event, arguing that "writing can no longer designate an operation
of recording, notation, representation, 'depiction' .. . rather, it designates
exactly what linguists... call a performative."" Later, in The Pleasure of the
Text, he asserts, "On the stage of the text, no footlights: there is not, behind
the text, someone active (the writer) and out front someone passive (the
reader); there is not a subject and an object. The text supersedes grammati
cal attitudes."'^ The writer is emphatically "lost in the midst of the text (not
behind it, like a deus ex machina)."^^
The easy adoption of Barthes' famous phrase and the brevity of his es
say have meant that his account has had considerable influence, although
in a contradictory way for genetic criticism. The Barthesian "theater of
"production" appears to have implicitly influenced genetic criticism in
France but to have undermined it elsewhere. On the one hand, such a po
sition seems to centralize process as an essential part of existence (as open
event). On the other, it implicitly opposes the concept of a teleology or
history leading up to the present moment and thus works against any sys
tematic study of materials of process. For Barthes, a productive conception
of text places reader and writer on the same level: "[I]t puts the (writing
or reading) subject into the text."'" Such a thesis seems to elevate process,
but it does so largely in terms of reading and at the expense of writing.
Moreover, because it treats all kinds of engagement with the material in
the same way, it silently omits "productivity" in, or for, a state of textual
process. Perhaps it was because French genetic criticism already existed
before any articulation of "writing" as the space of production that it was
able (partly) to assimilate such ideas. Elsewhere, however, where there had
been no systematic attempt to establish any kind of genetic criticism, such
an account tended to stifle any exploration of process.
' Barthes strongly privileges the present moment in a way that allows the
elision of the duration or sequence essential to understanding composi
tional process. He states:
The Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as the past of his
own book: book and author stand automatically on a single line divided
41
THEORIZING PROCESS
TEXT AS PROCESS
into a before and an after. The Author is thought to nourish the book,
which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, hves for it, is in
the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child. In
complete contrast, the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the
text... there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text
is eternally written here and now.''
Such a position elides process. It involves a denial of will and agency
(agency is now located in language rather than in the user of it) and a de
nial of duration for meaning-production. It does not allow for the concep
tion of writing as a highly repetitive process in which the now is built on,
and exists, only as a result of repeated past "nows." This position is char
acteristic of existential phenomenology, and of a particular conception o
time (as well as language).'
Is it possible to counter such positions and create a space that wdl allow
for the study of textual process in ways that respect philosophical advances
while also retaining space for authorial activity and a teleology of devel
opment? We might begin the attempt by agreeing with Barthes rejection
of a certain kind of criticism that results from an overpnvilepng of the
author. Equally, we can agree that Barthes' account must, rightly, lead to a
refinement of the extent to which creative consciousness is allowed, or un
derstood, to control process (the location of agency as not entirely interior)
and a redefinition of composition in terms of the nature of individual entry
into the language totality. Process must, in part, be about the locating of
the self within, and through, an all-encompassing verbal mode of being.
However, the problem with a fully de-centered account for the study of
process clearly lies in two areas; the denial of duration (which elides the
materiality of texts) and the denial of agency. It seems to me that a study
of process must necessarily retain some sense of human creative agency.
Equally, a temporal model that extends beyond the "now" of the
moment is necessary to fully allow for the nature of creative processes. The
privileging of the "now" asserts the spontaneous act over the necessary re
turn to the "now" to reflect on and regenerate from it. Duration and return,
as essential elements in the motive toward production of the literary work,
demand the presence of creative agency, or at the very least a partial belief
in agency on the part of the creator.
,, r.
One way of responding to the "denial of origins" articulated by Barthes
is to incorporate a more complex account of it from his own later writings.
Ultimately, this can lead us toward the possibility that philosophical and
linguistic accounts of language and meaning need not entirely rule out the
42
43
TEXT AS PROCESS
44
THEORIZING PROCESS
ing the subject. .. of its role as originator and of analyzing the subject as
a variable and complex function of discourse.''^ Such a position is unsur
prising given Foucault s definition of the "author-function" in terms of a
self-limiting discourse of control.^' However, a study that seeks to value
and validate the process of creative composition may need to allow more
room to the subject as agent and motive force.
Returning to Roland Barthes, it emerges that, in relation to process it
self, Barthes repeatedly plays off sequence (and implicitly, duration) against
act/experience, so the pleasure of the text "supposes a whole indirect pro
duction" where bliss is "a pure production."^' His use of the term "produc
tion" is potentially misleading, however. Barthes states explicitly: "The text
is a productivity This does not mean that it is the product of a labour
but the very theatre of a production where the producer and reader of the
text meet."2' Barthes' use of the theatrical metaphor can, I think, work to
illustrate the difficulty his theory presents for process, as well as a deliber
ate blindness built into the very heart of that theory A theater production
at the time that it is experienced (on, say, the first night) is a shared act
between players and audience. However, even as we experience it in this
way, we are aware that one reason it is called a "production" is because it
has been produced, over time, by means of repeated rehearsals, individual
preparation, and so on. Thus, the "now" of the first night exists only by
virtue of an extended sequence of acts existing as duration behind and
beneath it. Barthes and other theorists of the text insistently emphasize the
first meaning of immediate active "production" over the second meaning
of temporal extension (which may in a sense still be "present" in the "now"
of the first night but also exists as prior to it and detachable from it). Thus,
when Barthes writes of "process" in "Theory of the Text" he refers to the
active engagement with, and in, something and not to the process of that
process by which such engagement is achievable. Barthes' position allows
only for process as active experience for both writer (writing) and reader
(reading). Yet the writer is also a reader; his or her own reader and rereader,
over time. Might the writer not be able at the same time to know that lan
guage exists outside and beyond his control (in an eternal "now"), and yet
experience it as if it were the expression of a past thoughtand to know
that there is no possibility of authorial intention being the only meaning
in a text, and yet to write as if there were? In other words, the writer does
not, cannot, only experience text as "Text" but has to move between a con
ception of writing as work and text, responding to it as a grounded object
being produced as well as an ideal one.
In The Pleasure of the Text, Barthes asserts the necessity of readerly
pleasure being created by contradiction. Describing his own response to
45
TEXT AS PROCESS
THEORIZING PROCESS
tragedy, he states: "I take pleasure in hearing myself tell a story whose end
I know: I know and I don't know, I act toward myself as though I did not
know."' This last position, "I act toward myself as though I did not know,"
is particularly useful in relation to both the reader's and the writer's rela
tionship with language. Barthes writes: "Many readings are perverse, im
plying a split, a cleavage. Just as the child knows its mother has no penis
and simultaneously believes she has one... so the reader can keep saying: I
know these are only words, but all the sameP^ We need to consider whether
this contradiction is capable of application not only to the reading process
but also to the writing process, and to the writer as his or her own reader. In
fact, the contradiction might then be capable of application in three ways:
to the reader of the text (reader-text nexus); to the writer as reader and
writer of a text (the writer-reader nexus); and to the reader of the writ
er's draft materials (reader-process nexus). The distinction between what
is known and what is felt is crucial because it allows for the possibility in
language that what is true (metaphysically) may not be felt to be true by
those experiencing it, and, further, that the misapprehension itself may be
essential to the production of the work of art (or ability to enter creatively
into the language totality). Something similar seems to be advocated by
Jerome McGann when he asserts: "We read in the same spirit that the au
thor writ, or at least we try to; and thenthere and thenwe also read not
in that spiritwe read in different spirits. We are right to do these contra
dictory things because the texts themselves are, ab initioand as the poet
(Byron) said'antithetically mixed' themselves."'^
This kind of tension, of both reader and writer capable of being held in
simultaneous, yet conflicting states, might also be allowed for the readersubject in relation to compositional material. The state of "I know and I
don't know" could equally apply to the reader engaging with the authorial
process of "death through writing" or, the "coming-into-being" of a text.
In relation to compositional process, it is capable of creating space for a
necessary authoriality without that authoriality becoming the dominant
reason and motive for interpretation.
directly associated with an outmoded conception of the author as controlhng presence and of writing as an expressive act by a unique individual,
in favor of a giving up of the self to a preexisting language totality. Inten
tion is discredited primarily because of its association with a search for an
absolute fixed meaning behind the text rather than an understanding of
meaning as a shared experience.
46
47
TEXT AS PROCESS
or the actor's prowess as such are not foregrounded from it. The philo
sophical concept of the work of art as an event denies value o agency
means by which a work comes into being. As Gadamer Puts^^^ Tote
diation means that the medium as such is superseded. Thus,
herme
neutics a parallel position to that found m existential phenomenol gy
in the debate over the "death of the author" is found to exist, leaning is
to be located in the activity of engaging with a text and making he expe^
rience of it part of our selves and cannot be seen to exist in an attemp to
understand the creative mind that generated that text. The mtentiona i y
of the writer's mind is rendered nonessential for a full response to the liter
ary work, which is now allowed to stand as an open space ready to unclose
'turrpoXlmerges from Heidegger's account of being in Bdn,
and Time and is therefore (unsurprisingly) in agreement with the account
of language that Heidegger gives and which, again, has implications for
weight and value allowed to creative intentions. As he does for other ph
nomena, so for language too, Heidegger seeks to respond to it no in terms
of its human use value but in respecting it as a thing apart. Thus, he as .
"'In what way does language occur as language?' We answer: Language
speaks:"' Traditionally, language is viewed as a
ceeding from man and representing inner feelings and thoughts m exter
nalized form. From this viewpoint, "[w]hat is spoken in the poem is what
the poet enunciates out of himself What is thus spoken out, speaks by
enunciating its content. The language of the poem is a manifold enun
ating Language proves incontestably to be expression."" Heidegger sums
up the traditional position: "No one would dare to declare incorrect, let
alone reject as useless, the identification of language as audible utterance
of inner emotions, as human activity, as a representation by
concept.- In phenomenological terms, however,
ception of language distorts by viewing it merely as man s tool Authentic
existence requires that the individual no longer views himself as ^gent but
now has a role in terms of "responding" to the preexistent language total
ity The result is to overturn an expressive conception of man s '"elationsh p
to language. Thus, "Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of
48
THEORIZING PROCESS
language, while in fact language remains the master of man. When this
relation of dominance gets inverted, man hits upon strange maneuvers.
Language becomes the means of expression. As expression, language can
decay into a mere medium for the printed word."*'
Both Heidegger and Derrida are sympathetic to the ways in which writ
ers want to feel that they do possess the language with which they work.
Derrida makes clear the way in which the nature of speech leads us toward
a personal identification with it: "It produces a signifier which seems not
to fall into the world, outside the ideality of the signified, but to remain
shelteredeven at the moment that it attains the audiophonic system of
the otherwithin the pure interiority of auto-affection."" Derrida con
stantly articulates the doubleness of an authorial understanding of lan
guage and meaning (discourse) as opposed to the meaning totality (lan
guage as system)indeed, one purpose of deconstruction is to bring to
light the inevitable contradictions between these two conceptions. Thus,
on the one hand, he asserts that "the person writing is inscribed in a de
termined textual system," but on the other, he is interested in the ways in
which authors deliberately resist a full recognition of that fact."' Nicholas
Royle states that "the logic of the supplement dictates . . . that the writer
is always susceptible to being taken by surprise. A writer can never have
complete command or mastery over what s/he writes."*' The phenomeno
logical denial of origins to authorial consciousness is therefore not strictly
a denial of intention, but it must act to radically redefine the nature of in
tention, which can no longer simply be about the externalization of inner
thought.
Gadamer's account of meaning, and Heidegger's and Derrida's of lan
guage, confirm two ideas with significance for the study of creative pro
cess: first, that the intention of the mind that creates cannot be assumed to
provide an understanding of the thing created; and second, that the con
cepts of intention, will, externalization, and expression in relation to lan
guage and meaning form part of a limited understanding of the world. The
creation of an "authentic" work of art occurs by giving up the will, not by
asserting it."' Such a position, if it does not altogether discredit intention,
certainly has the effect of dramatically marginalizing it.
This still leaves us with a paradox, however: how can even those who
write against intention do so without having the intention of doing so? To
deny intention altogether to creative engagement with language seems to
be at odds with our own experience of such activity. This in itself raises the
possibility of a response already touched on. One explanation of the para
dox must be that whether or not language really exists as a tool over which
we have mastery, our experience of using it is as though this were the case
49
TEXT AS PROCESS
THEORIZING PROCESS
50
51
TEXT AS PROCESS
THEORIZING PROCESS
with an inner state relating to consciousness and not with causal links be
tween mind and act. It follows from such a position, considered in relation
to language, that language is understood to be referential, based on acts of
consciousness, with an inner state giving meaning to a linguistic act."
Opposition to an intentional account of being in terms of both causal
events and Husserlian intentionality has already been touched on in dis
cussions of literary meaning and language. The later phenomenological
rejection of intention as the core constituent of consciousness is based on a
holistic conception of Being that denies a divide between mind and world.
Instead, it is asserted that much of our activity in the world, including men
tal activity, does not involve conscious intentions at all. We might act in a
way that appears causal, but in fact we are simply participating in a larger
whole that does not demand deliberate actions and is therefore not pre
ceded by internal cause. In this account, meaning is grounded in a shared
subject matter that preexists the creator. Textual meaning is understood to
change those who participate in it and to exist not in consciousness but in
engagement with the world.
Located somewhere between the two first understandings of intention
comes speech act theory and John Searle's work in Speech Acts and Inten
tionality. We need to look at such ideas more closely since they do provide
a useful way of thinking about intentional acts on the manuscript page.
Before Searle, J. L. Austin's influential 1955 lecture series, published as How
to Do Things with Words (1962), made clear the extent to which language
is performative by distinguishing between words as utterance (locutions)
and the way in which utterances also perform illocutionary (nonverbal)
acts. Since "to perform an illocutionary act is necessarily to perform a locutionary act," it follows that meaning is understood to encompass not just
the verbal content of an utterance but also the context of its performance.'^
Searle takes such ideas further in Speech Acts when he defines the illocu
tionary act in terms of a preexisting background of shared conventions so
that "speaking a language is performing acts according to rules."'^ In Speech
Acts Searle acknowledges, "It might be objected to this approach that such
a study deals only with the point of intersection of a theory of language
and a theory of action."' gy treating the use of language by consciousness
as a performative event (action through words), speech act theory resituates intention as embodied meaning in the world (i.e., an expressed utter
ance can be understood as the fulfillment of an intentional act).
Searle does not explicitly situate his account in relation to phenomeno
logical intentionality, although it is clear that much of his work is indebted
to Husserlparticularly in the account of intentionality as "directedness"
52
53
TEXT AS PROCESS
54
THEORIZING PROCESS
that they would be read. This positions the reader very differently in rela.tion to intention as an element of interpretation. Rather than intention be
ing clearly directed toward an audience to lead to a certain reading of a text
(in Searle's terms, "the Intentional state expressed"), it is directed, at least
in part, at the production of meaning, in other words, at itself ("the inten
tion ... with which the utterance is made"). Thus, the nature of intention
involved in the coming-into-being of a text is potentially of a different kind
than intention capable of being satisfied. As such, it is no longer marginal
to our understanding of the materials but becomes an essential part of it.
The writer's intention within process is directed toward understanding his
or her own intentions (which may, of course, never be fully achievable). We
need to allow that the making of something through language appears to the
writer to operate on the basis of speech acts (as the satisfaction of individual
intention through acts on the page), while the meaning-content of language
remains part of an open directednessexperienced in an uncovering that
has no limits and can never be fully satisfied.
I want to argue that the making of meaning is in large part about recog
nizing, understanding, and redirecting meaning in an interplay of intended
(planned) and unintended (spontaneous/unwilled) meaning. A pure phenomenologist might argue that such an account merely retrospectively im
bues a "nonintentional" object (draft text) with human intentionality. This
is because an account of language as a system detachable from the living
beings who participate in it (and essentially detachable by its very nature)
leads to an account of intention as something that is retrospectively read
into, or onto, the text. Geoffrey Bennington explains: "Insofar as you are
inclined to attribute intentions to me ... you construct them retroactively
on the basis of the text read, and the text read functions 'mechanically', in
dependently of the intentions you attribute in fact, after the fact, to its sup
posed author."' Such a concept of intention defines it as reader-produced
and suggests that attempted reconstruction of it has severe hermeneutical
limitations. I want to argue, however, that some space must be allowed
for such reconstruction, and further, that there is a distinction between
readerly reconstruction of the intentions of another and a writerly recon
struction of his or her own intentions in the act of creating, both of which
are of interest to the study of process. Reader and writer are both retroac
tively placing intention onto text, but the difference is that for the writer,
this is not just a question of interpretation or self-interpretation but part of
an active process and event: a sequence of acts will follow from that reappropriation. For the writer at the time of writing, unlike for the reader, the
draft text is still open to change so that the reading of intentions into it also
results in acts on the page and changes to the language. I accept that there
55
TEXT AS PROCESS
3.
TOWARD A COMPOSITIONAL METHOD
56
57
TEXT AS PROCESS
. Unintentional (accidental) meanings occurring as a secondary
consequence
Unconscious meanings and acts on the page
3. The Language Totality (unwilled, nonintentional)
. Ontological whole that allows the literary work to be brought forth
from it
. Totality with which the writer already unknowingly participates
(into which he or she enters and that preexists him or her)
. Sense in the writer of giving him or herself up to the totality
(unwilled openness)
. Emergence of the work of art as an open work of truth accessible
to all
I want to argue that creative process emerges as a result of the writer mov
ing across and between these three contexts. To understand the process
fully therefore, we need to understand it not from an exclusive approach,
dwelling only within one of them, but in terms of the interrelations of cre
ative intention with different kinds of undeliberate acts. The first two con
texts might be understood as preparatory conditions for a creaUve giving
up of the self in the third but, equally, the second context provides a nor
mative structure within which the writer feels himself in control, and upon
which the other contexts bear.^ Thus, there is a dynamic between what the
writer wills and intends and what is unwilled (and allowed to be unwilled),
which drives forward the creative process. This dynamic could also be
viewed as the writer's relationship to the world (on one side through t e
compositional background) and to language and meaning (on the other).
Only the interaction of one with another-the event field held within a
certain frameworkcan bring the creative work into being. It is because
of this movement between a core intentional structure and the constant
engagement of this structure with preintentional and nonintentional con
texts that process must be viewed as a constantly shifting state, resulting
in changing acts on the page, acts that are always potentially subject to
further change.
.
The method, thenwhich is really a suggested framework for interpre
tative activity-is explained here in terms of a core sequence of intentional
states and acts, necessarily offset by nonintentional contexts on either side.
Creative intentionality is enclosed hy a compositional context within whic
intentional acts occur, but it also "contains" the potential for an escape into
the limitless context of the unwilled totality to which it is ultimately sub
servient. This allows us to respond to the materials of process both referentiallytreating the manuscript materials as an intentional object bearing
58
RECLAIMING PROCESS
meaning in the form of intentional acts on the pageand ontologically,
since those same materials also exist as part of the open truth of the work
of art and of the individual in response to it. The framework suggested
here as a way of thinking about compositional material as it develops over
time is intended to have universal application insofar as all writers must
work with, and through, such intentional states if they are to create. It is
emphatically not intended to be prescriptive or to be used as a rigid, regu
latory structure.
We can begin by clarifying different ways in which the intentional core
of'apparently controlled self-expression is constantly engaging with, or al
lowing space for, other kinds of meaning of which it is not fully aware.
Where creative intention occurs as a (normatively) teleological structure
and sequence, preintentional and nonintentional meanings are of a differ
ent kind altogether. First, then, we can address the preintentional composi
tional context. This is necessarily present as part of the extended existence
of the individual who creates, but that individual may be unaware of such
a C9ntext and so will engage with it to achieve everyday objectives without
any conscious intention taking place. Such a concept corresponds to a phe
nomenological account of how we interact with our daily environment. In
^eing and Time Heidegger asserts that we understand the things around
us to exist in terms of a "totality" of interrelated objects, all of which refer
to some human task: "Equipment... always is in terms of its belonging to
other equipment: ink-stand, pen, ink, paper, blotting pad, table, lamp, furnilfure, windows, doors, room."^ When we use a single object within that
totality, we are not at all concerned with its separate nature but only with
it as something "ready-to-hand" and forming part of a work on which we
are focused. The totality accounts for physical objects but also for more
abstract entities such as language and meaningwhich we can then rec
ognize to be communicable by means of shared social and cultural con
ditioningand for skilled acts we already know how to do and so can do
"without thinking." Acts can thus occur that look like the product of will
but may have been undertaken without conscious deliberation. Unplanned
or spontaneous acts may also occur in response to unexpected events im
posed on us by the equipment totalityand these might also affect com
position as a result of interruption or other external factors. Finally, nonauthorial intentions of various kinds will also come into play by means of
the compositional context. These might be unnoticed at a level of domestic
support, reassurance, or even practical assistance. As long as that support
is contributing positively to the development of the work it will largely be
taken for granted, but if it should start to affect it negatively, then the back
ground ceases to function as an invisible support-structure.'*
59
TEXT AS PROCESS
So, to take the example of John Keats writing the sonnet "On Sitting
Down to Read King Lear Once Again," it is immediately apparent from the
title that such a poem could not have been written without Keats having
previously read King Lear. Indeed, in a letter to his friend Benjamin Bailey
on January 23,1818, the poet presents the writing of the poem in terms of
an intertextual cause-effect relationship: "I sat down to read King Lear yes
terday, and felt the greatness of the thing up to the writing of a Sonnet pre
paratory theretoin my next you shall have it." A context of charged im
mediacy and response is further enhanced by the material location of the
fair copy of the poem "opposite the first page of King Lear in his facsim
ile reprint of Shakespeare's First Folio." However, this prior contextto
which the poem self-consciously directs usis only the most obvious selfdetermined one. We might also consider that Keats couldn't write a sonnet
without knowing what a sonnet was, or without being aware of his ability
to articulate his feelings in poetry, that he couldn't do any of these things
without being able to read and write in the first place and, beyond that,
without having some conception of the value of language and meaning as
fundamental elements of human communication. All of this preexisting
background has to be in place for the creative act to occur, so that even the
most apparently "spontaneous" act of composition occurs within a frame
work that both writer and reader tend to take for granted and not even to
notice. An everyday ability to participate in creative process demands this
compositional background.
When Keats encloses a copy of the sonnet in a letter to his brothers the
next day, he gives a clearer account of its origins: "Nothing is finer for the
purposes of great productions, than a very gradual ripening of the intel
lectual powersAs an instance of thisobserveI sat down yesterday to
read King Lear once again the thing appeared to demand the prologue of a
Sonnet, I wrote it & began to read."' The earlier letter had seemed to sug
gest a relationship between background and creative act in which reading
led to writingbut in fact this is not what the letter actually does describe.
Rather, the relationship is between a past reading and an anticipated future
one, but it is the intermediate state of anticipation (between one reading
and another) that stimulates the new creative act. In this case, the com
positional context is not merely "background" preparation. Instead, Keats
seems to consciously manipulate the "background" so that it becomes ex
plicitly bound up with the process and the content of the writing (which,
in the case of this poem, is itself about that process).
On one side of the embodied intentionality of the materials of process
there is a preexistent compositional context. On the other, there is an un
willed giving up of the self to the language and meaning totalities. Here,
60
RECLAIMING PROCESS
the writer no lonpr conceives of him or herself as a creative agent "producing an externalized representation of inner consciousness. Instead, such
distinctions fall away as the individual participates in a preexistent holism
It can only be in the ongoing moment of active composition that the writer
4as the potential to open him- or herself up to language and no longer to
feel as if m control of process. Such moments constitute the experience
of inspiration," since identity is lost and the self is felt to be possessed in
some way outside it. Thus, the "spontaneous" acts as a kind of gateway out
of-the preintentional and intentional states of being and into something
other Such a nonintentional experience can only occur in an individual
capable of operating intentionally, but also (crucially) of willingly giving up
that mtention. Once experienced, however, nonwilled Being asserts itself
as prior to an intentional directed sense of self, and of a higher order.
CREATIVE INTENTIONALITY
AND UNINTENDED MEANING
Having understood the ways in which preintentional and nonintentional
contexts are essential to creative process considered as a whole, I want fi
nally to return to the definition of intention in terms of a teleological core
of self-conscious and unselfconscious intentional actions resulting in a
kind of history of process on the page. If we respond to the materials of
process in terms of applied speech act theory, then we can break process
down into constituent states and acts, the core elements of which are em
bodied on the manuscript page. This allows for a kind of microanalysis of
those acts and of unconscious and unintentional acts that come into exis
tence as a by-product of intention within the materials of composition At
the same time, creative intentionality should be understood as a complex
ot states and acts continually subject to each other and capable of both co
existence and conflict. Creative intention is always open intention for this
reason: intentional elements are continually subject to other intentional
elements.' This distinguishes it strongly from the concept of authorial in
tention within a completed work (which exists only as one possible reading
ot the meanmg of the text among many others). Intention itself is an ongo
ing event within creative process, constantly being changed and redirected
by the unintentional contexts with which it engages. In effect, it operates at
the level of a motivating framework (itself supported by a prior unnoticed
tramework) within which the author feels able to "let go."
In an earlier paper I outlined an intentional model emerging from
Michael Hancher's paper "Three Kinds of Intention." "> I am indebted to his
work for the way in which it defines different kinds of intention, although
61
TEXT AS PROCESS
62
RECLAIMING PROCESS
63
TEXT AS PROCESS
that an endpoint of some kind is achieved and that a sense of fixedness
and finality attaches itself to the work by virtue of its material form and
reception. Without question, this brings into play a whole train of specific
activities and anxieties for the author that are embodied in the composi
tional material in different ways. However, the finality represented by the
moment of publication is, in effect, imposed externally. The writer might
have gone on changing things, but now, time constraints, the fixing of type
on the page, and other physical and practical needs determine the text in
one form, the final' form of the first published text. For the writer, a sense
of finality may be far more tenuous than for the publisher, printer, critic,
and reader. Compositional material contains the potential and possibil
ity for many different kinds of poem, not just the one the world knows.
Of course, various decisions led the poet to create this text and not that
one, and those decisions were unlikely to have been entirely arbitrary, but
the text is something more than the final productas the very survival of
compositional material illustrates. For the writer, I would suggest that the
idea of final intention is really only one possible stopping point in the con
tinual process of contingent intention through which the material evolves.
Potentially, such a process is endless, and for this reason, the writer may
well go on changing the text after publication and right up to the end of
his, or her, life.
Finally, we should briefly consider the concepts of unfulfilled intention
and revised intention, which may or may not be allowed to exist at all (and
which have the danger of assuming an overly linear/teleological structure
for creation). The first describes a state similar to that of programmatic
intention, existing at a distance from the period of core creative activity
but occurring at a different moment in time within the compositional pro
cess. At some later pointpossibly after the publication and reception of
a workthe writer is forced to acknowledge that his original ambitions
cannot be met because of the way the material itself has emerged. This may
well result in future action, through revision or rewriting, in a further at
tempt to fulfill the original holistic aim. Arguably, unfulfilled intention is
therefore no different from a further state of contingent intention, unless it
is accepted that the return to a text after publication is of a fundamentally
different order from the return to a text before publication.
Revised intention is also temporally situated after an act of publication
or fixed completion of a text. This is similar to unfulfilled intention but im
plies that the writer, rather than still trying to meet his original objectives,
returns to the work with changed objectives.'^ Such a change may occur as
the result of a considerable time delay between first finishing the work and
returning to it, so that the writer has lost sight of, or forgotten, his original
64
reclaiming PROCESS
mtentions. Alternatively, the changed context of his life and other works
may have made the writer dissatisfied with those original intentions. Re
vised intention will result in material that is effectively defined as a separate work from the original and that differs from it intellectually as well as
textually Richardson s Pamela might be cited as an example. According
dip Gaskell, The plot of Pamela, which had served as the vehicle for
Richardson s first headlong inspiration, proved difficult to reconcile with
is later urge to give the novel a stronger moral purpose."" The novel thus
exists m a first edition that presents Pamela "at her most natural but with
crudities of tone and structure," in revised editions in which her "manners
were refined, and in a rewritten version finally published in 1801 "in which
Richardson used his mature technique to tackle the contradictions in the
plot and to enhance its morality."^
I would also suggest that in composition over time (as, for example
wi h the writing of a long poem), a drive toward intention in any particular
block of work IS often counterbalanced by an almost deliberate "resistance
to m ention at a creative level through the piling up of indeterminate ma
terial and the creation of multiple possible creative paths (one of which
may e fixed by the act of publication, but which is not the only possible
aping of the text). Michael Hancher makes an interesting observation
65
TEXT AS PROCESS
66
RECLAIMING PROCESS
67
TEXT AS PROCESS
RECLAIMING PROCESS
68
of it.
How does such an account relate to my definition of "unintended"
meaning? Derrida seems to be discussing the satisfaction or nonsatisfaction of intention rather than the accidental nature of the "unintended" (for
which the satisfaction of intention was not directly the goal). However, the
way in which he asserts that the potential failure of intention to be fulfilled
is bound up with its successful fulfillment could also apply to unintended
meaning, which exists as an alternative articulation of one of the many
possibilities held in language. A Derridean account of unintended mean
ing would presumably deny that it is a by-product of intention and see it
simply as the alternative coming into being of latent meaning.
It is important to note that I am not arguing for the superiority of in
tended over unintended meaning in any way. Rather, I seek to show that
it is often through the cross-interpretation of acts on the page that can
be reconstructed as "intended" and those that are "unintended" that we
can fully respond to the materials of process. In both cases, I would also
want to allow that we cannot absolutely know the intentional act (though
we can probably reconstruct intentional sequences) and cannot always be
sure that the unintended is unintended. In a sense, then, I position myself
somewhere between Searle and Derrida in relation to acts on the manu
script page. I find the distinction between intended and unintended com
positional acts useful and worth retaining, but I do not want to assert that
only intentional acts are of value for our response to the manuscript object,
not at all.
69
TEXT AS PROCESS
RECLAIMING PROCESS
OF COMPOSITIONAL MATERIAL
I want to conclude this chapter by offering a typology that will clarify dis
tinct phases within the compositional process and thus provide a practical
framework for critical response to such material. Thinking about the use
of such a framework returns us to the question of what a compositional
method is for and takes us back to the relationship between text-critical and
literary-critical activity. Historically, a distinction has been made between
literary criticism (an act of interpretation that has as its aim the produc
tion of meaning within a work) and textual criticism (an activity concerned
with the presentation of a work and with details of form). However, as
Peter Shillingsburg asserts; "The central concern of both textual critics and
literary critics is meaning. The central focus or locus of that concern is the
text. The problematic nature of meaning agitates literary critics and theo
rists; the problematic nature of texts agitates textual critics and theorists.
Both should agitate us all."''^ The relationship between textual and literary
criticism in the study of draft materials can be seen as a continuum with, at
one extreme, controlled "textual" tasks (such as decisions about the spell
ing and presentation of words on the page) and, at the other, the subjective
interpretation of a literary text in terms of its content and context. Between
these two positions, a range of activities occur that involve varying degrees
of critical intelligence and judgment, and in which the two areas frequently
overlap. The outline I am about to provide is intended to suggest that the
study of textual process could potentially range across the whole contin
uum (linking textual process to textual product) or involve engagement at
a particular point or stage within process. A compositional method also
has obvious application to editing practices (allowing the possibility of an
edition structured to explore the materials by means of the framework or
one phase within it), but it really aims at enlarging interpretative practice
through a new form of critical analysis in which textual and literary-critical
activity can both be employed for the full understanding of process.
Activities within editing that are defined by a teleological underpin
ning and nearer to a "text-critical pole" might include; clarifying the order
of the manuscripts; developing a model for stages of composition relating
manuscripts to each other; mapping this model onto biographical informa
tion; understanding a particular manuscript notebook or a particular se
quence within that notebook; or identifying characteristics of a particular
text in terms of its composition by a particular author. For the literary critic
working with an Anglo-American scholarly edition, many of these tasks
are likely to have already been performed by the editor and to have been
70
71
TEXT AS PROCESS
RECLAIMING PROCESS
72
.
.
73
TEXT AS PROCESS
Unfulfilled Intention/Revised Intention
. Response to critical (or domestic) reception
. Revisions to first edition and later editions
Enlargement of a work (once or more than once, over time)
/loce^^
Unintended Meaning
Degree to which the unintentional is allowed to enter into the cre
ative process
Local level within the text
. Local level within the text by another (result of dictation, copying)
. Effect of external factors, human and nonhuman (interruption,
mood, weather)
. Effect of material factors (shape, size, form of paper)
. Effect of printing and publishing methods and conventions
Unconscious intentions on the page (slips of the pen, misreadings,
miswritings)
Nonauthorial Intention (This also comes under A)
Indirect effect of others on authorial intention, prepublication
(opinions of friends, family, editor)
. Direct effect of others on the text domestically (copying, punctua
tion, spelling)
Direct effect of others in preparation for publication (compositors,
The study now moves from an editorial and theoretical account of com
typesetters, publishers)
Direct effect of material aspects of publication (number of pages,
positional process into critical analysis of draft materials. The next three
major edition (or series) for each through which to explore editorial and
critical treatment of text as process. My aim is not to work through each
stage of the typology given in chapter 3 for each writer but to discuss those
elements of the typology that seem most applicable to the particular writer
concerned. This also serves to make the point that I do not see the method
as offering absolute, rigid principles. Rather, it provides a framework that
can be drawn on with varying emphasis according to the characteristics of
the materials under consideration.
As we saw in discussions of the material by practitioners of the critique
genetique in chapter 1, text as process is freer, more fluid, more experimen
In the three chapters that follow, the framework I have just given will be
tal, more circular, and more repetitive than a "final" text, and working
applied and tested in various ways to the poetic draft material and com
with such material is of a very different order. This is true at the obvi
ous physical level of reading manuscript pages but also in terms of the
shape and content of material on those pages, in the relationship between
Dickinson.
74
75
TEXT AS PROCESS
WORDSWORTH'S PROCESS
The first is "a composante genetique mais centrees sur le texte et enrichies
par des transcriptions" [of a genetic composition, but centered on the text
and enriched by transcriptions].'' By contrast, a genetic edition does not
aim to present the publication of a textual work or to establish a text but is
centered on a presentation of genesis itself. The structural organization of
a Cornell volume clearly privileges a reading text (or texts), with an intro
duction that provides a chronological account of how that text came into
being and transcriptions revealing the full process. At the same time, how
ever, the underlying principle running throughout the Cornell Series for
Wordsworth involves the privileging of earlier versions of texts over later
versions revised by the poet. Thus, the series does have a strong interest in
textual genesis but tends to be directed toward establishing a stable text or
texts and is therefore not purely "genetic."
Jack Stillinger is the most vocal critic of the editorial principles un
derpinning the series. In "Textual Primitivism and the Editing of Words
worth," Stillinger criticizes the Cornell Wordsworth on the grounds that
"its understandable eagerness to discover, promulgate, and extol early ver
sions to take the place of later ones, is in the process of doing away with
the later Wordsworth once and for all." Stillinger then runs through four
problems that he identifies in the project: the difficulty of defining an "ear
liest complete state," the annotation, the exclusion of Wordsworth's final
edited texts, and the influence of the series on future study. In relation to
the last point, Stillinger expresses concern over the "inadvertent standard
izing of these early texts."' His conclusion, closely related to the German
theory of versions, is: "A healthier reaction would be to stop this nonsense
about 'the worst of Wordsworth' and grant the legitimacy and interest, in
trinsic or in connections with other texts, of all the versions of The Prelude
and the rest of the poems in the canon. Recent textual theory... favors this
more catholic view, and it has the additional support of common sense:
Wordsworth did, after all, write the 1805 version and the 1850." In fact,
ten of the twenty Cornell volumes present more than one version of a text
as parallel reading texts, sometimes involving different manuscript ver
sions, admittedly, but also sometimes including both an early and a signifi
cantly later version (e.g.. The Salisbury Plain Poems, The Borderers). Two
volumesr/ie Ruined Cottage and The Salisbury Plain Poemsprovide
76
77
TEXT AS PROCESS
genetic editing between text as process and text as product is partly under
mined by the creation of reading texts from draft material in the Corne
Series. This becomes more problematic if texts such as The Rumed Cottage
and The Prelude, 1798-99 are then removed from a compositional context
to be reproduced elsewhere as discrete pieces. Donald Reiman, in his initial
report on the early volumes of the Cornell Series for the Center for Schol
arly Editions, expresses such concerns. Of the inclusion of the Two-Par
Prelude" within the third edition of the Norton Anthology, he comments;
"To have these early texts available for the scholar and student is valuable;
to have the two-part Prelude of 1789-1790 [sic] the only version of the Pre
lude available to students encountering WW for the first time seems to me
less unambiguously so."'
rj
On the one hand, it might be argued that separate publica ion of draft
material achieves one of the ambitions of genetic criticism by releasing
manuscript material from its connection with the "final text, thus al ow
ing it to be considered and valued in its own right. On the other, the danger
is that it does so at the expense of losing its identity as manuscript material.
So the "good news" is that many students of English literature are now
studying draft material of Wordsworth's poetry; the "bad news" is that
they may not know that they are doing so, or, even if they do, that they wil
simW respond to it as if it were a "final" text rather than developing spe
cific skills for the study of compositional material.
This is the kind of position that I think the French genetic critic Laurent
Jenny is gesturing toward when he states; "To present a pre-text for reading
is obviously to inaugurate it as a text. ... In this sense, a pre-text cannot
be read and still remain a pre-text."'" The question it raises in relation to
manuscript material is whether a critic's or editor's ambition for the mate
rial should be to create maximum reader awareness and accessibility tor a
completed block of manuscript work (in which case its reproduction m the
Norton Anthology is to be seen as a good thing), or whether the ambition
should be to allow for full exploration of that material in a context where
its status as a particular kind of text (representative of process, not product)
is most valued. My own concern with valuing textual process would lead
me toward the latter, rather than the former, position.
When we consider the editing of Wordsworth in relation to the typol
ogy given in chapter 3, it is clear that the concept of acte of contingent
completion, occurring within the compositional process, is hig y signi
cant for the editorial position adopted by the Cornell Series. Continent
completion describes stopping places within the compositional develop
ment of a major work and might be represented most clearly by a fair copy
manuscript that brings together disparate notebooks and unites a number
78
WORDSWORTH'S PROCESS
of books for the final poem. With The Prelude, firm points of contingent
completion are represented by final fair copy in the form of MSS U and V
for The Prelude, 1798-99; MSS A and B for The Thirteen-Book Prelude; and
MSS D and E for The Fourteen-Book Prelude}^ Such acts provide the con
tinuous (usually fair copy) textual material for Cornell as well as the justifi
cation for the establishment of a "fixed" textual version as the reading text.
In The Music of Humanity, Jonathan Wordsworth makes the importance
of such acts of completion explicit: "One's aim in presenting a text must
clearly be to reproduce the poem exactly as it stood at a single point in
time. The obvious point to choose is the moment of completion, before any
revision has taken place."'^ The difficulty with this position, however, is
the question of what constitutes a poem in a state of completion within the
compositional process.'' Ultimately, the point to bear in mind is that for a
writer such as Wordsworth there is no such thing as absolute completion;
even a completed state is always contingent. Ray Carney, in an excellent
review of the Cornell Series, makes this point; "But of course one of the
things these manuscripts show is the extent to which the concept of a final
text is itself a critical fiction in a case like Wordsworth's."''*
TWO LONG POEMS AND PROGRAMMATIC INTENTION
I want now to return to the concept of programmatic intention to consider
it in relation to Wordsworth. Programmatic intention concerns the writer's
anticipated plans and expectations for his work before any active, recorded
composition. It has a partly abstract identity, corresponding to the writer's
highest ambitions and standing as a measure by which he or she assesses
the success, or otherwise, of the final achievement. It may also exist in a
'.more tangible state in the form of notes, plans, scenarios, and so forth.
In Wordsworth's case, the nature of programmatic intention for either
The Prelude or The Excursion is complicated by the fact that major individ
ual works are composed within a structure of programmatic intention for
an even larger whole ("The Recluse") and are measured against the ambi
tions in play here. Wordsworth's decision not to publish The Prelude, made
during the process of completing the poem in 1804-5, is related to the dis
placed importance given to the wider structure; "[I]t seems a frightful deal
to say about one's self, and of course will never be published, (during my
lifetime I mean), till another work has been written and published, of suf
ficient importance to justify me in giving my own history to the world."''
The 1814 title page presentation of The Excursion as "A Portion of The Rec
luse" stands as a public statement of this position, demanding that read
ers and critics be aware of the greater ambition.' So the presence of the
79
TEXT AS PROCESS
80
WORDSWORTH'S PROCESS
81
TEXT AS PROCESS
which active creative thought occurs on paper through the act of writing
(resuhing in a heavily revised and rewritten text). The Dutch critic Anne
Marie Kets-Vree defines these two models as that of the "Mozart versus the
Beethoven procedure," with the former involving genesis in the mind and
the latter genesis on paper.^'
Scheibe's distinction has been taken forward by another German critic,
Klaus Hurlebusch, who has made the fullest attempt thus far to define
the two types in detail in "Understanding the Author's Compositional
Method." His aim is to bring together the two aspects of writing that ex
ist in a dialectical tension between "the mainly reproductive, work-genetic
writing process ('poiesis') and the mainly constructive, psycho-genetic writ
ing Cpraxis')."^^ In relation to its reproductive aspect, the writing process is
viewed as a communicative act, anticipating readership from the start and
being externalized and intersubjective. This mode of writing, Hurlebusch
argues, values directedness toward a goal (text as product) and is likely to
be teleological. The second mode (constructive) is focused on productivity
within a more solitary, internal model of writing. From this perspective,
texts are transitional stages in an unending process. Creative goals are not
met by the completion of a text but are linked to personal self-development,
and as a result, a writer for whom this aspect is dominant will be unable to
separate him or herself from the work, which maintains a private signifi
cance even when published.^^ The heart of the distinction, then, is between
an internalized or externalized self-conception in which the first type of
writer will hold the writing within until it is perfect, while the second type
is inclined to externalize and rework it in an external form.
Direct criticism of the attempt to articulate a universal distinction be
tween "two kinds of writer" has been made by Almuth Gresillon and Dan
iel Ferrer. Gresillon suggests that such a distinction cuts across all periods
and literary movements and ignores the relationship between writing and
its historical context.^ Ferrer proposes that in fact the "process" writer is
simply a subcategory of the "programmatic" type, so that "process writing
appears to be a particular case, or minimal form, of programmatic writ
ing."^' Pierre Marc de Biasi, who advocates the "two kinds" model, freely
admits that there are many writers who fall somewhere between the two,
or partake of both.^ This suggests that the distinction is really one of de
gree or tendency, offering a spectrum of activities rather than an opposi
tion, and, to be fair to Hurlebusch, his model does try to articulate this. In
the terms of this book, the distinction could be easily understood as that
between Searle's prior intention (programmatic) and intention-in-action
(process-centered)for which it will be recalled that prior intention is
not essential for intention-in-action to occur. This would seem to support
82
WORDSWORTH'S PROCESS
F.errer s point that the "two kinds" are really concerned with a preexistent
stage that may or may not be present.
If we take Wordsworth as an example and attempt to align his practice
to these models, it is clear that he might initially appear as a "program
matic writer, with a heightened awareness of the macrostructure (thus
falling into the first category), but he is also very clearly a writer who views
creative process as undetachable from the self and unending, and so could
be defined as "psychogenetic." Moreover, his actual practice is often pro
cess-centered, building on itself through messy redrafting, although this
is clearly not how he likes to think of himself. Thus, the complexity of
the two kinds" model and the self-perception linked to either category
ultimately draws attention to the compositional contradictions between
'speech and writing that so inform Wordsworth's poetry (in ways that are
^explored later in this chapter).
In terms of the compositional contexts outlined in chapter 2,1 would
suggest that both of these "kinds" are participating in the doubled or framed
intentional/nonintentional structure of composition, but to different de
grees. The writer who relies on plans is trying to maintain control of pro
cess (or the illusion of control through inner speech) as long as possible
b^t must eventually enter into open engagement with language. The writer
wjio simply writes is able to enter more freely into the unwilled structure
and depends less on the willed anticipation-and-return structure of intenhon around it. This relationship is also in effect an interpretativeor selfinterpretative one that demands that the writer move between two very
different relations to the material produced: one in which he or she is the
writer writing (experience of the making) and one in which he or she is the
writer reading the written draft (experience of the thing made).
A literally constructive sense is felt in Wordsworth's compositional
method in relation to his long poems. So, for example, in his introduction
to- the Cornell edition of The Prelude, 1798-99, Stephen Parrish describes a
slow process of assembly" for the first part of this early work.^' He states:
Fpr Wordsworth it was mainly a matter of fitting pieces of verse together,
like parts of a puzzle."'" Such a model is, I think, fundamental for Words
worth and informs on a larger scale his long poetic composition from the
very earhest work for The Prelude onward. Rather than viewing a long work
as a continuous fluid whole, he tends to view it in terms of building blocks
that can be moved around, repositioned, or taken out. Hurlebusch states of
the constructive writer: "Larger texts result from a joining of text segments.
This is due to the self-reflexivity of the writing process. The author's gaze
oil the written has a decisive genetic significance for the writing ... texts
emerge from acts of writing."'' As a writer, Wordsworth rehes heavily on
83
TEXT AS PROCESS
84
WORDSWORTH'S PROCESS
feels confident. The poet can thus begin a new major work by revising and
making changes to this piece, preparing it for its position as the first book
of many, and in so doing leading himself on into fresh composition from
an already established base.
COMPOSITIONAL INTERTEXTUALITY
A second aspect of Wordsworthian composition, to be considered across
both The Prelude and The Excursion as developing long poems, concerns
compositional intertextuality. In a consideration of what he calls "intertex
tual genetics," Gene W. Ruoff makes clear the ways in which, for a poet like
Wordsworth, intertextuality is wide-ranging; "an adequate genetic criti
cism would have to understand a text as a confluence of diverse waves of
influence. Any text has strong connections to its immediately preceding
versions and to the prior body of a writer's work. It also has connections
to a surrounding literary climate, which in the case of Wordsworth and
Coleridge is embodied especially strongly but not totally in their mutual
influence upon one another."' Such ideas are allowed for in French genetic
criticism through the distinction between "endogenetics" and "exogenetics." The former describes the development of draft materials out of other
writing, the latter, development of draft materials by means of external
sources and stimuli (but only other texts, not empirical objects).'^
My interest here is not so much in the author's relationship with exter
nal influences as it is with intertextuality as it exists within his own com
positional material ("endogenesis"). Paul Eggert, again, makes some inter
esting observations on this subject; "Textuality will be better understood,
I believe, when it is opened outnot only when different textual states of a
developing work (let us say, a novel) are compared to one another but also
when elements of them are compared to other things the author was work
ing on while the novel was in progress.... These relationships within and
between the author's writings form, as it were, an authorial intertextual
ity."' A clear example of this in Wordsworth's case exists in relation to the
epitaphic books of The Excursion. Wordsworth's writing here is strongly
anticipated by his earlier poem "The Brothers" but is also colored by prose
writing in the form of the Essays on Epitaphs written for The Friend, as well
as his translations of the epitaphs of Chiabrera, which were all taking place
when he was first drafting the poetry. The author later makes the connec
tion explicit by publishing the first Essay in the Notes to The Excursion.
However, I would suggest that there are (at least) two further kinds of
authorial intertextuality existing within the compositional process. The
first concerns intertextual activity involving the re-employment of mate-
85
TEXT AS PROCESS
rial that is written for one context, in another. This is a core compositional
activity for Wordsworth and occurs across a wide range of texts. The sec
ond concerns the juxtaposition of different materials within a single manu
script notebook. It is worth noting that the Cornell Series for Wordsworth
structures each volume around a single or multiple textual product so that
a range of manuscripts are represented according to whether a particular
text is entered into them. What the Cornell Series therefore does not do
is provide the alternative compositional perspective that also exists, but
is easily overlooked, in the form of a single discrete manuscript that con
tains material toward a number of different texts within its covers. I want,
therefore, to adopt the alternative perspective in order to explore material
intertextuality in a single notebook.
The earliest Ptelude notebook is that of MS JJ (DC MS 19), written in
Goslar in 1798-99. DC MS 19 bears within it a mixture of poetry and prose,
of William's writing and Dorothy's, and of the mundane, the personal, and
the poetic. Toward the front of the notebook, entered while in Germany,
there is a prose account of a visit to Mr. Klopstock; Dorothy s account of
leaving Hamburg and going to Goslar; German verb tables and grammar
work as the young people attempt to learn the language. The Prelude draft
runs forward from the back of the notebook, starting with Was it for this
on the inside back page (89'), until it meets two pages of German verbs
and then the "Essay on Morals," both inverted. Some years later, Dorothy
reused the notebook for journal entries from Sunday, 14 February 1802, to
Sunday, 2 May 1802, and this fills the middle portion of the notebook.
Looking across the contents of MS JJ tells us quite a lot about the na
ture of composition for this poet. Above all, it stresses that the notebook is
sharedeither William or Dorothy makes use of it at different times and
for widely different purposes. The nature of these entries in physical terms
(sometimes in pencil, at the back, in a shared book) also suggests a quite
unaffected attitude toward the poetic draft material. Poetry is not accorded
a particularly heightened status within the manuscript.
One kind of intertextuality within the notebook might be termed "spa
tial." In MS JJ, Prelude draft (working inward from the back) is followed
by German verbs and the "Essay on Morals, and this raises an interesting
question about the effect of materials on each other. It is uncertain whether
the German verbs and the inverted "Essay" were already in the notebook
before the poetry was entered." However, it is at least possible that Words
worth started writing the Prelude material in what was a limited space.
This suggests that the physical context of the notebook may be significant
for the psychologically difficult stage of first composition. Starting at the
back seems to make a far less confident statement than starting at the front
86
WORDSWORTH'S PROCESS
87
TEXT AS PROCESS
WORDSWORTH'S PROCESS
poems, including The Ruined Cottage and 'The Idiot Boy'; the knowledge
that, with the ending safely committed to paper, he could retrace his steps
at leisure, evidently gave Wordsworth a feeling of security.""'
Another kind of authorial intertextuality involving intellectual and
physical juxtaposition exists within DC MS 19 in the close cohabitation of
Wordsworth's fragmentary "Essay on Morals" and the early Prelude work.
The "Essay" is an explicit expression of Wordsworth's dissatisfaction with
Godwinian thought and with the form and mode of its communication.
Its central, anti-Godwinian concern is that actions depend on habit, not
reason, and he argues that it should therefore be the role of literature (and
philosophy) to change the formation of habits for the better rather than to
impose on them an unnatural rationalism. The moral value of the forma
tion of individual habits clearly compares to the kind of learning presented
in the early Prelude; its scenes of guilt and imagined punishment are con
tained immediately before the "Essay" fragment, working in from the back
of the notebook. In terms of the mode of communication as well, the sense
that The Prelude not only presents an account of a certain kind of upbring
ing but also seeks to communicate it actively, must be felt as a poetic al
ternative to Godwinian or Paleyan schemes, rejected here as insufficient
because "[t]hey contain no picture of human life; they describe nothing.""^
Poetry can convey moral truth in a more accessible way than philosophy,
"purifying thus/The elements of feeling and of thought.""' In such ways,
then, the argument of the prose fragment clearly bears a strong relation
ship with the poetic "pictures of human life" with which it cohabits in the
notebook. The "Essay" bemoans the fact that "I know no book or system
of moral philosophy written with sufficient power to melt into our affec
tions [?s], to incorporate itself with the blood 8f vital juices of our minds &
thence to have any influence worth our notice in forming those habits of
which I am speaking.""" The poetic draft material describes how:
While the prose piece argues for the need to act upon habit to good effect,
the poetic draft describes and exemplifies the desired process. Whichever
text was entered first, each bears upon the other.
88
89
TEXT AS PROCESS
WORDSWORTH'S PROCESS
90
91
TEXT AS PROCESS
WORDSWORTH'S PROCESS
ridge cliff
alone
While on the perilous edge I hung"
If we read a compositional text just for its relationship to the final draft,
then repeated words, deletions, and aborted passages or lines may have a
localized significance but are not considered in terms of what they them
selves actually signify. If, however, we read a compositional text in such
a way as to want to look closely at those lines because of the underlying
process and actions they reveal, then we find ourselves undertaking a dif
ferent activity and becoming part of a different kind of reading process.
The final completed version of the text is still of immense importance here
in helping to retrace authorial activity, but it is now primarily being used,
and valued, for that purpose. Reading the text in a state of process becomes
a kind of puzzle in which words on the page signify a sequence of actions,
of rapidly changing small-scale acts that can be reconstructed. This kind
of reading allows for a full intellectual engagement with draft material as
representative of creative process.
92
I want to pull back a little further now, to look not at a single line but at
a single page of manuscript composition. The next two examples are both
taken from MS JJ, the manuscript containing the earliest continuous work
for book 1 of The Prelude. They concern two very well-known passages
the "raven's nest" and "boat-stealing" episodes (see figs. I and 2). The ear
liest version of the first piece is found on page X*, where a version written
above the line across the page is immediately revised below it (see fig. 1).
The first version runs:
{W
{[?]ith what strange utterance did
wind
the loud dry
Blow through my ears, lyhat colours
vfhat motion did
The CO
thedond
the lou
the colours of the sky
{not
Wh
93
ri
'
*^2
"Jit'
"
"'k-'-Tir
t"2i-
TEXT AS PROCESS
What emerges on
is a model of half-line composition for this first-draft
material, which provides the poet with a number of different possible
combinations. The initial entries on the page above the line are probably
the two top half-lines "With what strange utterance did/Blow through
my ears," with the word "wind" either also entered then, or at the time
the words "the loud dry" were entered below the line. Initially, then, the
lines could have read "With what strange utterance did blow through my
ears/The loud dry wind" as well as "With what strange utterance did the
loud dry wind / Blow through my ears.""
The next revision on the top half of the page perhaps occurs after the
decision to place "loud dry wind" between the first two half-lines, and so
now concerns the second half of the second line, which needs to be filled.
Wordsworth plays with two options ("the colours of the sky" and "what
motion did the cloud"). When he finally rewrites the passage, the first halfline option ("the colours of the sky") disappears. This may suggest that the
line immediately below these workings, beginning "the sky was then no
sky," is a revision of "the colours of the sky," which then leads to the entry
of the two lines below, one using some of the crossed-out revision ("whith
96
WORDSWORTH'S PROCESS
what motion move the cloud"), one of them a new half Hne, "As on the
perilous brink cliff."
In the third stage of composition, below the line across the page, Words
worth (either immediately, or on returning to the passage) reaUzed that
this Hne would work well as the start of this section and so began again,
placing it first. Changes here are detailed"brink" is rejected, perhaps becaiise it suggests the position of feet rather than hands. "Edges" (as we have
already seen) is crossed out as being too unspecific. "Ridge" or "cliff" are
retained as options, for both of which assonance with "perilous" immedi
ately before them in the line creates a poetic effect.
An editor of a critical edition reading this will be asking, "How is this
different from the kind of activity I undertake?" The answer is that it is not,
in essence, different. In part, this book aims to create more space for such
activities to be articulated, providing points of connection between textcritical and literary-critical activity The distinction occurs only in terms
of the purpose for such analysis. Where the editor undertakes such tasks
primarily to determine the sequence of draft material within a notebook or
across manuscripts, and is unlikely to articulate it for the reader, the com
positional" or "genetic" critic can undertake such tasks to understand the
rj'ature and process of composition, or to enrich understanding and analy
sis of the text by knowledge of its development.
A second example will perhaps clarify ways in which the detailed study
of composition can provide an alternative perspective on the completed
text. The famous boat-stealing scene provides an interesting example of
revision being used in different ways within the compositional process. On
the manuscript page of MS J J, V, this passage reads:
Of sparkling light
When from behind that rocky steep till then
The bound of the horizon just between
e}
The summit & the stars a hugh} high cliff
As if with voluntary power instinct
the oarsand
struck
again
97
TEXT AS PROCESS
WORDSWORTH'S PROCESS
When one reads this manuscript page for the first time, the amount of rep
etition within it is striking. The example I want to look at is on the sixth
line, where "struck again" is repeated at its end. The nature of this repeti
tion, and the author's compositional intention here, is not absolutely clear.
It may well be that Wordsworth intends the second "struck again" to be a
deliberate repetition of the first,,for poetic effect, as it is used in the final
version. Alternatively, though, it may be an example of simple recopying
over a rejected revision (probably "struck the oars again") that had made
the original words unclear on the page, so that the author needed to reen
ter them. In this case the powerful repetition of "I struck & struck again,"
as incorporated in the next revised version (on R^), could come about as a
result of recopying for clarification on the page, which, half-accidentally,
reveals it as a creative option to the poet. Further repetitions of "With mea
sured motion," "strode after me," and "huge clifF' also occur on P.
The repetitions on the page of DC MS 19 are fairly typical of composi
tional text, where redrafting obviously creates similar versions of lines or
repeated words on the page. What is less typical is that two repetitions in
close proximity should then be used for dramatic effect in the completed
text, in which the passage acquires a large part of its power from the use
of repetition that unites the boy's movement on the lake with the shifting
perspectives created by it and the consequent internal effects on himWhen from behind that rocky steep, till then
The bound of the horizon, a huge Cliff,
As if with voluntary power instinct,
Upreared its head; I struck, and struck again,
And, growing still in stature, the huge cliff
Rose up'
Is it simply coincidence that so much repetition should occur on the man
uscript page for this passage? Possibly But it is also possible that authorial
activity here is actually concerned with "unintentional" composition. That
is, the misreading of a revisionary act on the manuscript page can reveal a
creative development to the author that he had not consciously intended.
It is interesting, however, that we as critics can only really access this free,
random aspect of creativity through a highly structured and close analysis
of intentional acts. The emergence of the "unintentional" depends on its
identification through the structures of intention.
98
99
TEXT AS PROCESS
WORDSWORTH'S PROCESS
revision. So, although the physical act on the page remains the samethe
crossing out of words or lines and replacement by othersthe potential
ramifications of the revision must be controlled, and this will affect the
nature and range of revisionary acts.
I want now to look at the ways in which the poet's own sense of his role
and his representation of it within the "final" text can seem at odds with
the compositional acts and strategies that have produced it. I will move
between the draft materials and the published work, between writerly selfidentity and projected poetic identity. In Wordsworth Writing, Andrew
Bennett considers two related issues: the "paradox of the poet for whom
words are immaterial" and the linked conception that Wordsworth is "a
poet who doesn't write poetry." My concern here is also with this para
doxical, doubled position in relation to Wordsworthian composition, but
I will be exploring it in, and through, the materials of process. My aim is
to consider Wordsworth's "compositional contradictions" at both a repre
sented level in the completed work as well as in the underlying drafts. Two
key areas of contradiction for Wordsworth are the linked issues of orality
and spontaneity.
Orality allows the poet to retain a sense of the words as "his" in a way
that twentieth-century philosophy has shown to be an illusion. The French
phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty asserts: "For the speaking sub
ject, to express is to become aware of; he does not express just for others
but also to know himself what he intends."^ In other words, "the listener
receives thought from speech itself."^' For Merleau-Ponty, "spontaneity,"
if it can be said to exist at all, does so by means of the self-generation of
ing "above all other external powers a dominion over thoughts."^" Much
critical work has of course been undertaken in this area (by Paul de Man,
J. Hillis Miller, James Chandler, Frances Ferguson, Mary Jacobus, and
most recently Andrew Bennett) in relation to the self-division of language
as spoken and written discourse and Wordsworth's doubled consciousness
of it.
Oral composition stands as a kind of bridging state for Wordsworth
between what he sees as pure interior poetry and the debasement of the
written word. The spontaneous ideal is bound up with orality so that an
"overflow" can pour forth directly from the body of the poet with emo
tional expression and verbal expression still connected. In a discussion of
lyric voice in The Prelude, Mary Jacobus describes Wordsworth's reliance
on poetic voice as a "surrendering to an auditory myth of self-presence."^'
She points out that Wordsworth does not go so far as to envisage himself
as the ancient poet composing to the harp but that he draws instead on
the idea of listening to himself, "the myth of the 'inner ear,'" so that com
position is understood as the external recording of what has already been
experienced as sound.^ She concludes: "No wonder Aeolianism pervades
The Prelude; it is Wordsworth's defence against that inability to hear one
self think (or speak) involved in writing itself."'''' Orality creates an illusion
of spontaneityas a direct outpouring of self-generated creativity. Even
if lines are actually composed one by one and then written down, or even
if there is considerable oral and mental revision before writing, the poet
can feel as though the process depends on internal rather than an external
(textual) stimulus and as though creativity is somehow occurring outside
the words in which it is uttered. The act of dictation, or of dictated revi
sion, is another way of creating this illusion in relation to the written word,
and Wordsworth employs all of these methods in his own creative
processes.^
language.
In a Derridean sense, Wordsworth is clearly "phonocentric," viewing
written words as secondary to speech and valuing an "absolute proximity
of voice and being."'^ When Derrida describes a Rousseauvian position
as tending to "confine writing to a secondary and instrumental function:
translator of a full speech that was fully present," he could equally well be
describing Wordsworth's position (which is hardly surprising in view of
the two writers' shared historical and cultural context).^' At the same time,
though, Wordsworth's very anxiety with an internal, self-generated model
of composition and with an assertion of mental and oral over written
creativity suggests that he recognizes the "awful" power of words, hold
100
101
TEXT AS PROCESS
an oral culture, would never seek to create a written version of the text and
for whom each telling would be a new and unique experience.
Occasionally, and in an indirect way, Wordsworth seems to acknowl
edge that the "spontaneous" is a false compositional construct. In letters to
younger poets, he repeatedly asserts the need for the poet to "labour" and
take time over composition. In a letter to William Rowan Hamilton in 1816,
he states; "Again and again I must repeat, that the composition of verse is
infinitely more of an art than Men are prepared to believe
Milton talks
of 'pouring easy his unpremeditated verse.' It would be harsh, untrue and
odious to say there is anything like cant in this; but it is not true to the
letter, and tends to mislead. I could point out to you 500 passages in Mil
ton upon which labour has been bestowed, and twice 500 more to which
additional labour would have been serviceable."" There is a contradic
tion, then, between Wordsworth's own representation of the poet as orally
"spontaneous" and the production of that (self)representation which, as he
is well aware, depends heavily on a written, revisionary process. Words
worth, too, "tends to mislead."
A model of "spontaneous" oral composition can be represented in a more
convincing way for a poem of no great length than for a long work. There
is the possibility of direct correlation between poetic composition and the
representation of poetic composition. This is not possible in the same way
for a long poem-where both the poet and the reader know that such a poem
cannot have been created in a single spontaneous act. The Prelude (1805) is
written over a seven-year period; The Excursion is probably written over an
eight-year period, with the poet, inevitably, laying work down and picking
it up again for both poems during this time. Yet in The Excursion, as I have
previously discussed elsewhere, the Poet character is not represented as an
actively creative figure, and not at all as a writer.' In The Prelude, which
takes as its subject the means by which its subject becomes a poet, Words
worth does refer to the lengthy poetic process, but he does so in ways that
either suggest orality or avoid representation of the written.
In The Prelude, the emphasis on poetry as a spoken rather than written
discourse can be dramatically illustrated by referring to Lane Cooper's A
Concordance to the Poems of William Wordsworth. For the word "speak"
there are thirty examples in The Prelude, as well as eight uses of the word
"speaking" and nine of "speech." By contrast, for the words "write" and
"wrote," there are no uses whatsoever in either The Prelude or The Excur
sion, and the word "writer" is not included in the Concordance at all.^
There can be no doubt that the poet is to be seen to speak freely rather
than write his message.
102
WORDSWORTH'S PROCESS
103
TEXT AS PROCESS
WORDSWORTH'S PROCESS
the vital link between oral and written poetic composition about which
Wordsworth is so uneasy.
First-draft material is often the least likely manuscript material to sur
vive, for two possible reasons. The first is simply that first draft is of least
value to the poet during the active creative process: he or she rapidly moves
away from it and no longer needs it. At a practical level, first draft is there
fore far more likely to get lost or mislaid than, say, the final fair copy-text
of a poem. Second, a poet might well choose to destroy first-draft material,
from an anxiety to protect the source of creativity or from a sense that
the material is much improved at a later stage. Moreover, there is always a
question of uncertainty over first-draft status: we can always identify the
earliest surviving draft of any passage, but we cannot always be sure that
it is actually the first written composition. The precarious nature of first
draft in terms of survival is likely to be reflected in its physical characteris
tics on the page. In general, first-draft material involves rough handwriting
(the poet is writing fast and getting ideas down), and it may contain a con
siderable amount of crossing out and revision, though this is not always
the case (if the writer undertakes considerable mental composition first,
for example). We also need to remember, then, that any discussion of "first
draft" is always about "first written draft" and that it may well have been
preceded by considerable mental or oral "rewriting."
The Prelude manuscript I want to draw on here is Prelude MS WW (DC
MS 43), a pocket notebook containing early draft material for books 3-8
and book 12 of The Prelude, along with Dorothy's notes for the Scotch Tour
of1803. The Cornell edition of the Thirteen-Book Prelude gives such a clear,
enlarged photographic reproduction of the manuscript that it is a surprise
when faced with the material object to see how fragile it is. The notebook
embodies the vulnerability of its material in various ways. First, it exists in
loose leaves, having been taken apart because the siblings were sharing it:
"The dismantling of the notebook may have resulted from a tug between
Dorothy's need for her notes . . . and Wordsworth's wish to use its blank
pages for notes while out walking."" Second, its entries are all written in
pencil, making it vulnerable to loss of clarity, and the words are extremely
faint on the page. Third, it seems likely, as suggested earlier, that it was car
ried around outside: "The roughness of Wordsworth's drafts strongly im
plies, as Jonathan Wordsworth suggests, that many of them were written
outdoors."'^ The pages are also extremely small (10.5 X 8.45 cm). Because
of its loose-leaf nature, a clear order of entry within the notebook cannot
be established, although blocks of work are clearly entered together, and
sometimes the paper is partially joined.
104
105
Writing occurs at a level of doubled mockery: the adult poet judges his
youthful self and envisages his own self-judgment. The written act is imag
ined and indirect. Elsewhere in the poem, a sense of the "written" is more
commonly associated with the indirect act of reading words than with the
direct act of producing them. In book 5, Wordsworth describes the power
of books on the mind but bemoans the limitations of words as the only
medium of external communication:
Oh! why hath not the mind
Some element to stamp her image on
In nature somewhat nearer to her own?^
As a result, books are viewed as frail objects ("Poor earthly casket of im
mortal Verse!") in which (written) words wait to be released by the liv
ing voice. The act of writing is secondary to feeling^"Why call upon a
few weak words to say/What is already written in the hearts/Of all that
breathe!"and to the true communications of natural men:
Theirs is the language of the heavens, the power.
The thought, the image, and the silent joy;
Words are but under-agents in their souls'
The Prelude is a poem that values its own creation, but not the medium
through which it finds expression. The final poem's refusal to explicitly ac
knowledge the creative power of writing and the poet as writer means that
the relationship between completed textual product and the process that
brings it into being mirrors the model of divided self-representation at the
heart of the poem. The process of making voice into word produces words
that present poetry as voice in what Bennett calls the "inevitable paradox
of a writer writing about his poetry as speech."'
"THE PRELUDE" AND FIRST (WRITTEN) DRAFT
TEXT AS PROCESS
{ten
Of holy chare {a
a shepperd
[?pries]
[?e]
[?When there co]
[?When]
A father of his people
When [?he]
good
Is [?Said]
and as the [?best] King''
This looks like an example of material that has not previously been articu
lated anywhere else. Instead of having lines whole and entire, the sound of
them clear in the head before he begins to write, Wordsworth finds himself
grappling here with each word. Where oral composition might be con
cerned with the overall sound and fluidity of a short passage (perhaps the
unfolding of a contained narrative, or scene), this passage of written com
position concerns a more prosaic moment of introduction and the estab
lishment of character. This suggests that mental or oral first composition
may not work with meaning in the same way as written first composi
tion can. The practical use of memory to retain text in the mind means
that oral composition is likely to be concerned with short blocks of work,
memorized images, or core lines. Although revision and redrafting can, of
course, also take place in the mind, written composition is far better for
allowing the playing out of simultaneous options, as can be clearly seen in
this case. The first written act thus allows for a different kind of imagina
tive activity from the oral one. It is less fluid, and perhaps less impressive
as an "overflow," but it also operates in a different way.
Finally, in Prelude MS WW, the famous "Imagination" passage from
Wordsworth's crossing of the Alps is interesting because in its original con
text it seems to be an example of first written composition commenting on the
act of first written composition. Wordsworth presents the effects of "Imag
ination" as activelyintervening on spoken or written composition ("verse"):
A little while [?Imagination] crosd
me here
{n
108
[?was]
[?in] cloud
WORDSWORTH'S PROCESS
109
TEXT AS PROCESS
poem is the sequence of repeated endings and new beginnings for each
book division within it. Such a pattern provides a kind of structural rep
resentation of the spontaneous act as sequence, a constant sense of fresh
beginnings within and across a larger framework. Beginnings and endings
are often very firmly marked on the page by both William and Dorothy in
Wordsworth's manuscripts. An early example of this occurs with DC MS
16. It contains a decoratively written heading for "Adventures on Salisbury
Viain I Part First" on 28' in Dorothy's hand and again for "Adventures on
Salisbury Plain/Part second" on 40'. Also in this notebook, The Ruined
Cottage receives the same treatment with "End of the first Part" on 49" and
"The End" written very clearly on 56''. Of course, at one level these head
ings exist simply for clarification, but they also emphasize the way in which
a sense of regular "beginnings" and "endings" provides one of the compo
sitional rhythms of the manuscript notebook.
In The Excursion, endings andbeginnings are directlyrelated to speech.
We can see this clearly in an example from the end of book 6 and start of
book 7 where the break occurs as a shift from direct speech to the Poet's
reflection on what he has heard:
'But each departed from the native Vale,
In beauty flourishing, and moral worth.'
While thus from theme to theme the Historian passed,
The words he uttered, and the scene that lay
Before our eyes, awakened in my mind
Vivid remembrance""
The same structure is dramatically reversed for the end of book 8 and start
of book 9:
as One
Who from truth's central point serenely views
The compass of his argument.began
Mildly, and with a clear and steady tone.
'To every Form of Being is assigned,'
Thus calmly spake the venerable Sage,
'An active principle''"^
The inversion at this point means that the opening of book 9 coincides
with direct speech for the only time within the poem, placing considerable
emphasis on the Wanderer's important final speech.
110
WORDSWORTH'S PROCESS
For every book of The Excursion, the ending consists either of the end
of a speechthe half-spoken apostrophe of the Poet ostensibly "thinking
aloud"or the Poet's framed response to the spoken utterance. Such mate
rial forms a "written" framework that must be taking place at a time distant
from the dramatic action of the poem, yet the poem refuses to acknowledge
the distancing act directly, so that even these frames are presented as if they
1 occur at a time contemporaneous with the actual utterance. In part, this
krves perhaps to make a central Wordsworthian point about the nature
of poetry: that you can be a poet "silently" without writing words down;
that true poetry is about feeling and shared response. In part, this creates
a work in which the poet must be recording, memorizing, and recalling all
that is narrated, but the main part of the narrative is always presented as if
it is speech or response to speech occurring at the time that we hear it.
When one looks across the poem as a whole, two basic models for book
endings in The Excursion emerge. The dominant model is of an ending
that concludes abruptly with the last line of a speech or story, and this
holds true for books 3,5,6, and 7. In these cases, the ending of the previous
book determines the nature of the beginning that follows it. The start of
book 7, already discussed, provides an excellent example of the interlockipg structure of speech and response, in which the Poet's account allows
the narratives to flow on around the opening of the next book.
A second kind of ending concerns a doubled structure, with a con
clusion first of speech and then of the book. For book 4 in DC MS 73,
workings on 6^-7' and 7" all relate to the conclusion of the Wanderer's dis
course, which is presented as an ending within the ending: "Here closed
the Sage."'"^ The contents of the book are framed by the presence of the
Poet, who comments on what he has heard and returns the reader to a parHcular time and place. In the final version of book 4, the close of speech
is followed by the close of day, and the ending of the book. This kind of
ending also occurs for books 1 and 2. Again, the book ending is preceded
by a clear statement of the end of a speech-"He ceased"; "So ends my do
lorous Tale.
These books finally have a triple closure (speech, day, book).
Such endings also affect the openings of the ensuing books (2, 3, and 5),
which do not have to define themselves directly in terms of linkage to what
precedes them and tend to concern themselves with an aspect of scenery,
nature, or the journey.
Significantly, the conclusion of the entire poem takes this sense of more
than one ending even further. At the end of book 9 we are given, first, the
conclusion of the Pastor s speech"This Vesper service closed"'"'then
the Solitary's brief words and departure, and finally, the conclusion to the
poem itself as given by the Poet-character:
111
TEXT AS PROCESS
{leave
112
Fig. 3. Draft for the end of The Excursion. DC MS 73, 46'. (Reproduced by permis
sion of the Wordsworth Trust, Dove Cottage, Cumbria)
WORDSWORTH'S PROCESS
few^Sc^'i-.
.4/^M
l'
'^i^i't i
jr; ,:-rf;',
\.. :...
4. ir
115
TEXT AS PROCESS
can be found in DC MS 70. This is evident with the very first entry within
that notebook, for book 4 on 16' beginning "Happy is he." This passage is
originally found in Home at Grasmere MS R where these lines are not in
corporated into MS B. Wordsworth thus begins book 4 of The Excursion.
which was to be the philosophical heart of the poem, with a dedaratwn o
the need for human understanding of all forms of life that was
^
written for an entirely different context. As such, it can be compared to the
opening of book 2, in which the description of the wandering Minstrel is
lifled from DC MS 48, and the opening to book 9, in which the Wanderer s
speech concerning "an active principle""" is taken from unused early Pre
lude material in DC MSS 15 and 16. In each case, the piece of earlier writ
ing seems to provide a base from which fresh composition (at a key point
within the later poem) can develop."'
Is there a sense, then, in which Wordsworth's "compositional contra
dictions" lead him to want to envisage long poem composition as some
kind of "spontaneously" self-generating structure? Certainly it does look
as though the concept of "The Recluse" works through The Excursion hj
providing an intertextual "charge." Different elements of text, written for
different parts of "The Recluse" and existing as a large central mass of unsituated material, can be drawn on in a process of textual self-generation.
The characteristic Wordsworthian processof drawing on the past to cre
ate in the presentis here played out in literal, material terms.
yioce^^
116
117
TEXT AS PROCESS
o4.e>:>
ABBREVIATIONS
Bd-T
CGET
PLT
238
239
15. John Bryant comments on two aspects ofMcGann's approach that impede
ana ysis of text as process: "[H]e de-emphasizes the role of authorial intention in
the shaping of a social text and seems to remove the crucial element of an individ
ual writers creativity from the shaping of bibliographic codes" (52).
. w o recent collections o fessays give a g o o d overview o fthe historical
thTfh
and Boria^nd
bornstein.
textes (2004), ed. Deppman, Ferrer, and Groden. Special editions of journals are
Yal T hZ
^
overview of critique genetique; see in particular
Yale French Studies 89 (1996) and Romanic Review 86.3 (May 1995).
1. CONTEXTUALIZING PROCESS
L See particularly Tanselle, "Greg's Theory of Copy-Text" and MrC^nn
t.
of "recensio" and "examinatio" at work see Maas, Textml Crttiasm. The practice is also described by Gaskell. New Introduction to
CritiST'
3.
4.
5.
6.
9. Ibid.. 4.
10 Tanselle, "Greg's Theory of Copy-Text." 194. In this article. Tanselle de
fends the princip es of the CEAA and responds to various criticisms of the center
f "TK r
.
of responses to the CEAA principles is given on pp 591-92
of The Center for Scholarly Editions: An Introductory Statement."
. Tanselle s article The Editorial Problem of Final Authorial Intention"
thiltimr
of footnote references to other participants in the debate at
a te
of mtendonality in terms of literary critical and philosophi
cal terms will be reconsidered in chapter 2 of this work.
12. Gaskell, New Introduction to Bibliography, 339
240
Ibid., 224.
Parker, Flawed Texts, 214.
Ibid, 216-17
Ibid., 216.
241
242
243
4. The final chapter will return to some of the issues raised here to consider
them more deeply by means of a philosophical enquiry into the nature of creative
process.
5. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 167.
6. Ibid., 74.
7. Eggert, "Work Unravelled," 53.
8. It is important to bear in mind, however, that Derrida is not denying
the existence of authorial intention as one meaningful context; he simply (and
rightly) denies it any absolute authority: "[T]he category of intention will not
disappear; it will have its place, but from this place it will no longer be able to
govern the entire scene and the entire system of utterances" ("Signature Event
Context," 326).
9. Barthes, "Death of the Author," 142.
10. Ibid., 146.
11. Ibid., 145. Here, Barthes partly seems to anticipate my application of
speech acts to the text as process. However, his account elides the materiality of
writing and thus the possibility of multiple returns to grounded acts.
12. Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, 16.
13. Ibid., 27
14. Barthes, "Theory of the Text," 38.
15. Barthes, "Death of the Author," 145.
16. A full philosophical account of phenomenological temporality, agency,
language, and meaning in relation to understanding process is given in the final
chapter of this book.
17. Barthes, "From Work to Text," 160.
18. Barthes, "Theory of the Text," 32.
19. Foucault, "What Is an Author?" 207-8.
20. Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, 4,5.
2L Ibid., 14.
22. Ibid, 14, 2L
23. Ibid., 24. For a fuller exploration of such contradictions in relation to
Freudian disavowal, see Bushell, "Textual Process."
24. Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, 19,20.
25. Foucault, "What Is an Author?" 221.
26. Ibid.
in. See also "The Order of Discourse," in which Foucault states, "It would of
course, be absurd to deny the existence of the individual who writes and invents"
(59), but he views this individual as one who "takes upon himself the function
of the author" (59). He thus distinguishes between "the sense of the speaking
individual who pronounced or wrote a text" (58) and "the sense of a principle of
grouping of discourses" (58).
28. Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, 25,26.
2. THEORIZING PROCESS
1. Gresillon, "Slow," 123.
2. Ferrer and Groden, "Post-Genetic Joyce," 509.
3. Ibid.
244
245
246
247
248
249
11. In The Study of Modern Manuscripts, Reiman bases his core distinction
between "public," "confidential," and "private" materials of process on the "social
intentions of the writer" (40), which corresponds to an anticipation of audience.
Reiman defines a literary work (such as a poem) as "public," even if it is never
published, on the basis of such social intention: "Authors who intend that their
work be published write with that end in view" (43).
12. My thanks to Michael Sanders for suggesting the use of the term contin
gent intention.
250
script copied in 1819-20 and used for revision in 1831-32. Both MS M and MS C
were, initially at least, copied for someone else rather than forming a core part of
the poem's development (ahhough MS C does come to do this).
12. J. Wordsworth, Music of Humanity, 31.
13. Jack Stilhnger raises this issue in "Textual Primitivism and the Editing
of Wordsworth" when he comments on the "elusiveness of the 'earliest complete
state' of a work" (14). Stephen Gill has also raised concerns about how far one
can go in giving independent status to texts that were not initially intended as
texts. According to Gill, "It is clearly legitimate to rescue from oblivion poems
Wordsworth excised from his canon or did not publish at all" ("Wordsworth's
Poems," 54).
14. Carney, "Making the Most of a Mess," 634.
15. Wordsworth, Letters: Early Years, 470.
16. Wordsworth, The Excursion, 35.
17. Wordsworth, Letters: Early Years, 586-87.
18. Darlington's introduction to Wordsworth, Home at Grasmere, 14.
19. Wordsworth, Letters: Early Years, 594.
20. Coleridge, Letters, 1:538.
21. Gill, Wordsworth: A Life, 171.
22. For more detail on Wordsworth's abandonment of the Recluse project
as recorded in the letters, see Darlington's introduction to Home at Grasmere,
26-32.
23. Scheibe, "Editorial Problem," 195; Kets-Vree, "Dutch Scholarly Editing,"
143. Kets-Vree states, "Manuscripts of the Mozart type contain few or no variants
because the genesis did not take place on paper, but in the author's mind. The
author who works according to the Beethoven method, by contrast, starts with a
rough version and then proceeds to delete and refine" (143).
24. Hurlebusch, "Understanding the Author's Compositional Method,"
85-86. It is worth noting, however, that the French and German distinctions
don't directly map onto each other (e.g., "constructive" seems to correspond to
"programmatic," yet it is the French "process-centered" writing that builds on
itself.)
25. Ibid., 85-98.
26. Gresillon, Sliments, 104-5.
*27. Ferrer, "Clementis's Cap," 225.
28. Biasi, Genetique des Textes, 33.
29. Parrish in Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1798-1799, 26.
30. Ibid., 21.
31. Hurlebusch, "Understanding the Author's Compositional Method," 96.
32. Ibid., 92.
33. Gill, Wordsworth: A Life, 160. See also Andrew Bennett's discussion of
Wordsworth's resistance to writing in his recent book Wordsworth Writing, and a
251
52.
53.
54.
55.
Ibid., 27.
Ibid., 84.
Ibid., 107.
Ibid., 106.
edgew^Sff'ratherthanjust"toremove'edge.-"Searlesta^^^
tional component can be as complex as you like"
59. Of course, the text will also contain a meaning eyo
^^e poet's
conscious understanding.
M to
!e'of
the
material as lplrobabVo.tlre!ywrte between 6^
1799- (30). Since the "Esssy" is also Inverted and entered a random number of p g
;tiismore,lk=lythatitas.,.r^
40. Parrish, introduction to Prelude, 1798-17^% i, <^ui.
^ 41. Wu in Wordsworth, Five-Book Prelude, 8.
42. Wordsworth, Prose Worfcs, 1:103.
43. Wordsworth, Prelude. 1798-99, 46, Reading Text, lines 137 38.
44. Wordsworth, Prose Wor;:s, 1:103.
4^3-35
45. Wordsworth, Prelude, 1798-99,53, Reading Text, lines 429-31,433 ^
46. In "The Five-Book PreiuJe," Jonathan Wordsworth first suggests that
Prelude material (for MS WW) was written in pencil because it was wri
""47'TS\ooserhorizontalhandislesstrueofcopiedverticalinfcpassages,h
ever Solm^bethatWordsworth initially turns thenotebooksidewaysmorde
to try andrelease himself creativelybut then simply decides itiseasiertowrue
the lines in this way (although his use of it for copying remains inconsistent) _
48. DC MS 19 (MS JJ), B'. All transcriptions essentially follow those of th
Cornell editions.
OTL'i^teS="'*sth.tengageintelllgentlywlth^
th^^^^^
. .r i:poio7-i2
65. Wordsworth, Prelude, 1798-99, Reading Text, 45, hnes
12.
66. J. Wordsworth, "Revision as Making," 36-37.
68 B^h Gresillon and Biasi give detailed accounts of the nature of revi
sion within process. These will be discussed in more detail in relation to mi y
HSSSSSS
Bennett Wordsworth Writing, 3. Clearly, there is a degree of overlap
positional pracuceb.
^ i
253
252
74.
75.
76.
77.
254
255