I-J

TEXTUALCRITICISMAND ETHICS: AN ENQUIRY

JOHNWINTER

WHAT ARE THE ETIllCS of editing texts from the past? What light can bethrown upon the ethical behaviour of the textual critic as he or she studies thetransmission ofevidence inwritten and printed form? Is it possible to conceptualizethe ethical dimensions ofprinted editions, and if it is, does this help us towards thefoundations of editing, or away from them? In recent years, as textual criticism hasbecome more heavily theorized, due attention has been given to the impact madeupon editorial practices by deconstruction and by other varieties of literary theory.These accounts have preserved and greatly extended the sort of alertness to therelationships between editing and other disciplines thatJames Thorpe signalled longago in 'The Aesthetics ofTextual Criticism'.' While much in the recent discussionshas ethical implications, systematic discussion of the ethics of editing scarcely exists.This paper contends that there is in fact quite urgent need for a greater and more fullyordered consideration of the ethical component in editorial processes if textualcriticism is to show itself fully capable of that self-criticism and awareness of itsworking premises which characterize a discipline.

Clearing the ground: ethical codes and ideologyIt is a major paradox of our age that ethical exhortations and prohibitions affectingconduct are out ofall proportion to the security and commonality of the ground onwhich they may be presumed to be based. The profession of ethical values in dailyoccupational and personal lives is extensive. Australian children can be offered'values education'; investors canput money into 'ethical' shares; members of theBritish armed forces are required to uphold 'family values' (presumably withoutenforcing these values with lethal weapons); scientific, psychological and socialexperiments and enquiries in universities are guided by recommendations of ethicscommittees; banks and other commercial enterprises publish ethical codes to governtransactions with clients who may be known to them nomore personally than byname and number; the Australian Journalists' Association Code of Ethics iscurrently being revised ... ; and so on. An enquiry into the ethics of textualcriticism may challenge an assumption that scholarly editors are somehowprivileged, CUt offfrom the previous examples, by reason of the fact that editors dealwithmaterial from the past and with the works of authors who are not only absent,but dead. Nevertheless, I wish at the start to foreclose the 'code of conduct' side ofthesubjeet, because it leads us to no position that is interesting or illuminating. Justas most of us manage daily with everyday definitions of truth, so, in the examplesgiven above, groups of people, united in function or objective, have published tothemselves and to people outside their group precepts that are both instrumentaland, very often, incapable of being reduced to each other. A professional code ofconduct, by its terseness and its purpose, has the characteristic of a set of axioms.Such axioms are likely to be pragmatically based. Behind them may be highly

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complex interests and even complex reasonings that sought to resolve conflictingmeans and ends. The formulated code, however, does not encourage access to thatreasoning orto the interests ofthe group. To this extent, at least, the examples citedare outsidewhat is ethically interesting. This paper, then, has no purpose to offer atextual critic's code of ethics, even as supplement to codes of editorial practice,covering such matters as how many copies of a printed text should be examined inpreparing an edition, as are prescribed by various scholarly editions centres through-out theworld.For rather similar reasons, this enquiry is different from enquiries into the

'ideology' of textual criticism, though of course what will be said will haveideological implications of its own. The time has longpassed since it was fashionableto claim that literature is 'value-free'. We did not need deconstruction to show usthat such claimsweresometimes rnadewith the effect of reinforcing value-structuresbeing promoted by the critic. Nevertheless, there is no guaranteed link between theassertion that the work of editors, like that of authors, is not value-free and thestatement that it is ideological. The word 'ideological' is, especially in liter-ary-critical circles, fashionable, emotive, and often loosely used. Often the termstands loosely for 'political', or indeed for a whole miscellany of values, thesystematic relations ofwhich are never proved. I see no purpose in resenting thisusage, and certainly none in denigrating the more careful examinations of, forinstance, the gendered ideologies of editing that have affected the formation andcontinuance of a canon, but it is necessary in this paper to clear the ground, so thatwhat is distinctively ethical in textual criticism may be discriminated. The blanketapplication of the description 'ideological' for the value-carrying aspects of textualcriticism can be inhibiting by its very inclusiveness and vagueness. By the sametoken, unsatisfactory consequenceswould follow from giving the word 'ethical' toogreat a burden and from failure to recognize that ethical values are only one kindamong many kinds of values.

The present relevance of the problemsIt may be asserted that ProfessorRuthven's claim, made nearly a decade ago, that toopen the pages ofa bibliographical journal is to enter a time-warp is no longer valid(if, indeed, it was valid in 1985).' Editorial theory has had its skirmishes with literarytheory, has made some accommodations, and attempted its own theorizing. Still,new editions of texts are appearing, and other editions are being reprinted, that givelittle witness to the oppositions that have riven literary and cultural studies in the.last decade. Two of these oppositions bear directly upon the ethical aspects ofediting.First there is the challenge to the assumption of the total coherence of cultural

evidence, ofwhich textual evidence is a part:We live today in the age of partial objects, bricks that have been shattered tobits, and leftovers. We no longer believe in the myth of the existence offragments that, like pieces of an antique statue, are merely waiting forthelast

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one to be turned up, so that they may be glued back together to create a unitythat is precisely the same as the original unity. We no longer believe in aprimordial totality that once existed, in a final totality that awaits us at somefuture date.'

This observation upon our culture is an observation upon the relation of the presentculture to its past. The observation, in its imagety of fragmented statuary, may alsobe read as ametaphorfor amode of editing that dominated Anglo-American textualbibliography for most of this century. Bowers's 'strifping the veil of print' from aversion of a text in the effort to recover the quality 0 amanuscript that is· lost, likethe principles of textual emendation employed by Greg and subsequent adherentsto copy-text editing, takes original purity and unity as a premise. Indeed, theratification of textual restoration is to be found in that premise. This is sowhetherthe original unity is held to reside in a single version of a text, in a recoverable ordemonstrableset of related versions, or in some hypothesized entity,a metaphysicalconstruct called an author. If the textual critic removes the belief in the 'primordialtotality' and removes the belief, to which the new edition will be witness, in the'final totality', then there follows the need to revise both the sense of the historicityof the text and of the teleology of editing. This matter does not lie totally in thedomain of either historiography or metaphysics, however. To assume that it doeswould be to marginalize the ethical import of editing at the start, by accepting anunexamined claim, familiar enough sinceWittgenstein, that facts contaminate valuesand values contaminate facts. Textual criticism, perhaps more overtly and insis-tently concernedwith accuracy, 'with getting things right', than any other humanediscipline {even history has placed at the centre of its many means ofprogression the distinctively ethical notion ofwhat Iris Murdoch calls 'truth-seekingas virtue'.' Ifyou change the conception of what, as textual critic, you need to beaccurate to, then you change the ethical status of your discourse (that is, of the textthat is presented in an edition, togetherwith whatever is attached to it by the editorby way of annotation).The second issue rests on the fact that the writings of textual critics in this

century, and the statements of editorial principles applied in editions, have turnedagain and again to notions of authorial intentions. If this concept is still not quitetotally discredited, it is at least one of which all textual critics are now wary.Dubious though the concept may be, indeed even more dubious than has perhapsbeen realized, because of general failure by textual theorists to discriminate in-tention and motivation in accounting for the human acts that issue in written orprinted evidence, either the retention or the displacement of intention from textualtheory has relevance precisely to the discernment of values in editing. Broadlyspeaking, to edit a text in an effort to recover and then fulfil an author's intentionswas an effort to reach andsanction the authenticity ofthe text. A weak and a strongaccount of this enterprise are possible. The weak account may be given with helpfromJonathan Dancy's expression of 'directions of fit' in his recentMoralReasons.6If authors have intentions for their works, and if texts are instances empiricallydefining the works, editors may consider that what is in individual texts does not

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always accord with the author's intentions. What's wrong here is in the uneditedtexts. The editor, dissatisfied with what is in the texts, attempts to align, in a newtext, his or her editorial intentionswith the author's intentions, to get the directionsof fit compossible and parallel, not asymmetrical.The strong account sees intentionists, as they may be called, as the textual

equivalents of individual-will theorists in philosophy. Iris Murdoch claims thatphilosophical exponents of individual will take over the old 'transcendent unifyingfunction, operating as a sun-like source ofvalue, conferring sense upon the world and

t.he individual as centre'.' Intentions have beenused by textual cntles as such a sun·like solirce of value'. Remove them; or removethe beliefthat they are accessible, or applicable, and you need either another sourceof value, or to face the implication that there is no such source at all.

That, thirdly, is of course precisely what has been claimed by some literarytheorists: there is no such thing as human nature, only a network of codes that areemployed by peoplewithout their being aware of it. Ifwe accept this deterministicview of the world, then we need to ask if there is any room left for ethical values ingeneral and in an activity such as textual criticism in particular. Ifwe reject the view,then we need to be able to show whether ethical values in general and in textualcriticism in particular are a casualty of the rejection; if they are not, we still need tobe able to show the security of their grounding. .

Thefourth challenge to the inclusion ofethical values in textual criticism followsfrom relativism. Much relativism in literary and textual criticism is what BernardWilliarnswould probably class as 'vulgar relativism'.8 The view of culture expressedabove by Deleuze and Guattari implies that values, if they exist at all, are relative:neither absolute and unified in the beginning, nor moving towards unity andabsoluteness in the future. Versional editing, in its varieties since the new approachto the constitution of texts discussed by Hans Zeller, is an example of relativistthinking: The question here is: does cultural relativism, or the view that allexamples of human utterance, writing and printing have their constitution in theirinternal relations, making them insusceptible to amalgamation in· a new textualversion without contamination, affect the ethical values that the editor deals in?

The fifth and irreducible reasonwhy textual criticism presently needs to examineits ethical dimensions is that despite all the challenges offered by recent theories ofliterature to the old notion of the integrity of texts and of authorship, no-one hasremoved the fundamental concern of textual criticismwith error. No textual criticwould now define the subject as narrowly as Housman did in the 1920s'0 by statingits goal as the detection and rectification of error, but a theory of editing that offersno discrimination whatsoever between readings that are errors of transmission orproduction and readings that are not has yet to appear; andwe need not lament itsabsence. Not all errors are ethical errors: a misprinted electrical circuit can lead toa train-smash; a keyboard operator who pressed the wrong key is hardly to beaccused of moral turpitude for that action. The relevant question is whether adiscipline that includes the discovery and rectification of error, whether producedby human ormechanical or electronic means, can responsibly exclude the possibility

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that errormay include the ethical. It is not to slight the enormous effort that textualcritics have given to the practical testing and treatment of textual error to say that,conceptually, error remains a remarkably unexamined component of the discipline.I believe that there is some risk that the understanding of error in textual criticismmay be hijacked by notions of error, of verbal play and linguistic contradiction,promoted by deconstruction. These notions are largely inimical to the inclusion ofethics.

Paradigm cases ofethically-based textual criticismWe have only to go back to the eighteenth-century British edition-industry torecognize the deep and overt ethical implications for individuals and society thatediting once had. To edit Shakespeare or Homerwas to make an investment in thestability and grandeur of the editor's own culture or to attempt an indissoluble linkbetween the editor's own culture and classical culture. Pope's advice to writers tofollow Homerwas made concrete and exemplary by his edition ofHomer. Since theadoption of neo-classical models in drama made the lively extension of the fullShakespearean canon into playwriting difficult, other than by copious allusion, themost effectiveway to venerate Shakespeare was to edit his plays, and it can hardly bedoubted that the longevity of returns upon Johnson's editorial investment,especially, has been greater than that of the discursive, critical commentary uponShakespeare that followed, even from Hazlitt and Coleridge. Eighteenth-centuryediting ofShakespeare and classical authors may now be seen as, in part, an assuranceagainst cultural deterioration, comparable to the nineteenth-century 'life and letters'tradition, inwhich (in the main) a highly selective and benign view of an authorwhohad recently died could be preserved by uniting (ostensibly) the venerating secondaryand the primary sources, the latter often silently emended orwith silent omission ofthose letters deemed damaging to the subject. Comparable also are the 'memorialedition' and the monumental edition issued in an author's own lifetime. Hardy'sWessex edition ofhis novels and, even more notably, James's New York edition areinstances of the Edwardian andGeorgian flowering of this opulent institutionalizingof the author's work. Revision, establishment of accurate text, and books as mem-bers of a series issued as a distinctive economic unit are here ethically coextensive.The essential ethical component in this paradigm of editing is the contract. 11

Johnson is explicit about this: 'amendments are seldom made without some tokenof a rent'." The whole of the textual section of his Preface to Shakespeare givessubstance to this precept." The purpose of the edition is 'restoring the author'sworks to their integrity', an integrity of which the author himself was undulycareless, butwhich nevertheless gives sufficient authority to exert a force of contractbetween Shakespeare's mind andJohnson's inscription. There is a secondary butstill tangible force ofauthority for contract between editor and the 'first publishers'.Although 'much credit is not due to the fidelity, nor any to the judgment ofthe firstpublishers, yet they who had the copy before their eyes were more likely to read itright, thanwewho only read it by imagination'. Underneath this judgment is tacit

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awareness oftwo levels of instrumental reading, both interpretative, but the originalbeing done toserve thesetting oftype, the eighteenth-century editorial reading beingdone from 'injured' text. Johnson carries his humanistic values through suchmetaphors as this. The text, product of human genius and transmitted by humanagency, is itself animate. Thus contracted, the editor subordinates his or her Ownconjectures. The text is like a body, not to be violated. (We keep these metaphorscurrent today: 'type body'; 'the body ofthetext' as against its footnotes; etc.) Hence,Johnson says, 'as I practised conjecture more, I learned to trust it less; and after I hadprinted a few plays, resolved to insert none of my own readings in the text'. Suchethical contraction is done, of course, in the context of an ethical literary criticism:Shakespeare as the poet ofgeneral nature, whose principal failing is that his plays donot sort out good and bad examples of human behaviourwith didactic rigour. Thiscontract, sometimes spoken, sometimes left unspoken, runs through editing inEnglish to the present day. It is the contract of servant to master, with the differencethat since the eighteenth century the servant has exerted the greater capacity than themaster to fulfil the master's purposes.

The contracted editor may carry the contract further, into editorial annotation.Martin Battestin's signal contribution to the rationale of annotation speaks thelanguage of this ethical contract." His own edition of Joseph Andrews makesconcrete his advocacy of the need to carry to a twentieth-century reader dueexplanation of the ethical vocabulary that distinguishes Fielding's text."In some extreme cases, the textual critic as editor may replicate the ethical

value-strueture of the writer whose works are being edited, at least as the editor seesthese values. Tillotson's Twickenham edition of Pope's The Rape ofthe Lock is aprimeexamplehere.16 Produced in the erawhen the best way to promote Pope as apoetwas judged to be towin him recognition for his power as a moralist in a literaryculture remarkable for the weight of its ethical tone as well as the intricacy of itspoetic craft, the Twickenham Pope prints all the material that a reader needs towatch the full evolution of TheRape from its shortest version to the fullest, in whichPope's opening of the moral of the tale through Clarissa's speech in Canto V isincluded. The copious annotations are consistent with this purpose.In other extreme cases, the editor may feel heavily enough contracted to the

author that he or she feels justified in freeing the texts from constraints imposed bythe author or by others upon the author. The first condition exists most frequentlyin texts that have never been published: autobiographies, diaries, and letters. Thesecond condition, which may overlap the first, is that of literary works whichunderwent virtual or actual censorship during the author's lifetime. Novelists whowere astute judges of the periodical market in the nineteenth century could trim theirfiction to the moral tones of different magazines. Acquiescence in the moralcensorship by publishers' readers is as significant as the overtly repressive dictates ofMudie's Circulating Library and the other agems against whom many novelistsbesides George Moore strove in the interests of free expression. In treating boththese conditions, the editor may invoke not only the ethical preference of his or herown culture in advocating uncensored publication, but may invoke also a sense of

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I

the author's higher intentions: the authorwould have had this printed complete, hadhe orshe been able to. In such cases, the ostensible contract with the author becomesheavilymodified by an implied contract with the reader of the edition: not just thetruth, but thewhole of the truth, will be provided in this text.

It is clear, then, that the notion of contract, largely ethical and contained in nolegal context other than that which may be provided by the continuance ofcopyright restrictions, appears highly flexible. Yet the degree of flexibility can bestbe appreciated by realizing that the ethical-contract basis of textual criticism is thecentral focUs of the tension between absolutism and relativism. Even beforeversional editing received theoretical anention, the provision of parallel-text editionsmade clearer what the conventional apparatus of a single-text edition presented,namely the sequential (therefore chronologically relative) issuing of texts in anauthor's lifetime. The impulse to give all of the textual evidence exhibits theabsolutist tendency. To contain the authoritative readings in a single text is to givethe fullest expression to that tendency. To override an author's spoken or silentapproval of a limitation imposed upon his or her expression while alive is to rankauthors' intentions and decisions, to invoke relativism. The problem here is theethical equivalent ofwhat happened frequently in literaty-critical accounts of realismwhen realism was a largely honorific term. Typically, critics would claim thatchosen authors were to be approved because their work was in the mode of higher,purer, ormore complete realism than that ofother authors. In textual criticism also,relativism can be masked by the appearance of absolutism. Even versional editing,even acceptance of the socialized view of authorship and of text as the articulationof bibliographic codes, cannot automatically get editorial practice out of this bind.Accepting that all editing is historical, unless an editor takes the blankly dispiritingposition that texts have no meaning and no capacity to evoke meaning, then theeditor is caught in an apparently unresolvable bind, with ethical implications.Unless the truth that the edition seeks is founded merely on a question-beggingnotion of intellectual honesty, then the categories of truth contained in the editionwill need to be discriminated. Taking as a hard case a Renaissance poem, we mayexpect it to contain plagiarism, done to the anistic canons of the time. Or taking aneighteenth-century critical essay, we may expect it to contain distoned quotation,closer to what wewould now regard as paraphrase, yet presented as we would treatquotation. An unmodernized text will preserve these characteristics. Conventionalthey may be, but their presence adds weight to the point that while an edition, to beof any value, must pass the test ofconsistency in its handling and presentation of theevidence, the validity of the edition cannot rest simply upon its coherence.Disparate conventions - intellectual, literary, onhographic, typographic, anistic-do not automatically settle themselves into systematic arrangement, not-with-standing the claims made for the 'networks' of language by structuralists. Thedecision-making interventions of the editor in assembling the new text (inamalgamating different versions or in choosing one version from many competingversions) are compounded by the activity of editor as annotator. Indeed, it would besurprising ifan editorwere for one moment duped by the requirement to believe in

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the linguistic self-consciousness of a text, or by the 'referential fallacy'. EvenHerben Davis's edition of Pope, bereft of editorial annotation and designed topromote the view that there is more than one way of presenting Pope's texts,preserves Pope's ownannotations.17 Granting that, on the structuralist view, Pope'sfootnotes could be pan of the language of 'high', creative genius, working above thelow, simple but shifting codes, nevenheless those footnotes penain to, sometimesquote from, the subordinate realm of language, the 'ordinary'. Textual critics arethus impelled, as literary critics are not always, to face the consequence of disparatelinguisticmeans used in the past to refer to 'theworld', its objects and its people, byusing a medium (the edition) that will be accessible to a range of code-usinglanguage-hearers of thepresent time. The consequence is that text is the secure baseforthe application of ethically loaded interpretation and evaluation, such as the kindjustified by Freadman and Miller in Re·1binking 1beory. Moreover, this base,viewed in this way, carries ethical (and many other) values into the future. It is oneof the most naive oddities of structuralist concepts of language that whereas, as IrisMurdoch puts it, literary language is treated 'as an experimental adventureplayground where what is imponant can only be said by poetic or quasi-poeticmeans''', andior all its concern (also naive) to locate an apriori ground for reality,it shouldgive language, including literary language, so shon a shelf-life. This is naivebecause ofthe overwhelming evidence that theworks of centuries ago have actuallyendured: even the most intense critical dubiety about the ideological conspiracypreservingworks in canons has been accompanied by zealous search for alternativetexts of the past. It is unworldly also because it blinks the assenion of individualpropeny rights concerning the texts of the present and fails to acknowledge thetechnological means that both enable and threaten those rights. A modern authorunder copyright law assens the moral right to the propeny, and the copyrightdeclaration prohibits unackn?wledged ,not only by presently availablemethods but also by methods hereafter lnvented . .

Hypertext and cybertheory: a challengeThe paradigm cases discussed above are vulnerable to the consequences of thetechnological changes by which text can be presented physically, or, moreaccurately, by the means that replace the panial physical stability of type with thepermeability, transience and instability of electronics. Ifwe assent to the abolitionof the author, and ifwe have not a text but a hypenext, then there follows the viewthat the 'text' is 'owned' by all of us or none of us. The user (assuming the lapse ofcopyright) has rights equal to or greater than the author's in the ordering of the textand in access to it. 'Text' is open, not closed. And it is capable of being melded withother meaning-carrying hypenexts that would previously have been physically,legally, and ethically discrete:We might now see the organizing structure ofHerben's 1be Temple as thatofa hypenext ... TheHypercard program given away with everyMacintoshcomputer can familiarize users with concepts of intenextuality and

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polyphonic reading that might once have figured in a seminar on Derrida. .. The notion of the matrix can be related to T.S. Eliot's insistence onhaving the whole of European art in one's very bones, while his notion ofindividual talent as effecting a shift in the internal relations of everypre-existing text can now be realized in the dynamic update features of multi·tasking operating systems.

Leaving aside the blatant misreading of Eliot, who wrote of the shift in relationsbetween works of an in an ideal order, not within works,2O it is interesting thatProfessor Sharratt envisages this 'brave new c;rberworld' and then movesimmediately to a 'political context' (my italics),' of government direction ofeducation. Having told us what bibliographers have wanted to hear for so long,namely that our discipline, pan of the 'ancillary skills' taught in English depart-ments, 'may now move more centre stage', Sharratt does not even hint at the ethicalsignificance of uninhibited access and free·wheeling transformation of oncemoderately stable (if 'injured') text. The contractual paradigm discussed above is atbest at risk, at worst irrelevant. If the previously identified panies to the unwrittencontract do not exist, what ethical contract could possibly function? A contract ofhypenext operatorwith himself or herself? But if the self is acknowledged to exist,we are back to the question-begging position of intellectual honesty. 'To thine ownself be true': but only today, or for this hour, because tomorrow we will conjoindepiction of the Floss with evocation of Windermere, putting The Prelude \1805,with a pinch of 1850) into prose format on the way. Anyway, why shou d thehypenext operator's self be said to exist, when the author's self is denied existence,hence rights?ProfessorSharratt's fantasy is not so far from the present condition that it should

not be taken seriously. Some textual critics may resist the brave new world hedescribes because it affronts their awareness of the presence of the human self,sometimes incarnated by intentionists. More than that, some textual critics havedoubtless been conditioned to resist the cyberworld by the fact that the traditionaldiscourse of textual criticism has been quite intensely puritanical. (There ispuritanism instrueturalism, also, as Iris Murdoch shows.) Morse Peckham's attackon the hagiography of textual criticism" could have been made even stronger bynoting the quality of the figurative language used in printing houses and in scholarlyeditions alike. Papers and cases are 'foul', a manuscript is 'clean', versions are'contaminated', editors are 'humble'. This language is continuous with the languageof an eighteenth-century printer's chapel, replete with its fines and forfeitures fortransgressive pressmen and compositors. The highly privatized notion ofauthorship, challenged by McGann, is part of this puritanical ethos. The strugglebetween veneration of author and the desire to absent the editorial self, in the nameof editorial humility, can be seen especially in the handling of annotation in editionsthat give perhaps three lines of text underpinned by almost a page of notes.

Theway through this problem is not, I think, simply to reassen the existence ofthe self, though the claim that recognition of 'inner space', of private and personal

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time-space, is a necessary component ofmoral life commands respect.23 Rather, theminimal condition for a defensibly-based theory of textual criticism is that theethical, however interpreted, must be given a place at the very start, and not bemerely super-added. The prudential advantage of this is that it avoids the delusiveclaims that textual criticism is based on scientific method (a claim that is demon-strably false) or that it is rationallr based. The second claim can be seen to beinsufficient, not because a textua critic's work cannot be shown to be usingrationally argued, empirically evidenced discourse, but because 'reason' in thesecontexts turns out to be a way of appealing rhetorically to a single and unifiedauthority. Thus, in place of a structuralist notion of value that is fundamentallyaesthetic,24 we can begin with a form of thinking that is not unified, not single, buton the contrary requires the unity to be earned by the making of decisions whichrecognize the worldly and human reference of the material to be edited. As IrisMurdoch claims, it is distinctive of the moral life that it grows in unity andcomplexity:Wemust 'give things their rights'. Contingent particulars, objects ... Can startleus with their reality and arrest obsessive mechanical thought-runs. Particularswhich are not art objects or persons, and are thus more unlike us, more resistantto our fantasy, more self-evidently contingent, can play this role. A goodconsciousness does not ignore or blur thesewitnesses, or overwhelm their privateradiance. Reflection on these rights may also help us to understand the analogousrights of those most important particulars, human individuals.25

Bringing things togetherIris Milrdoch's scepticism about generalizing views of the world as a basis forconduct is searching. That iswhy the political thought ofAdorno receives her moresympathetic treatment. Approaching from another direction, Jonathan Dancy'sMoral Reasons reaches a compatible conclusion. His book argues that 'generalistconceptions of moral rationality are incoherent', and he offers 'an account whichstresses very much the role of judgment in the particular case,.'6 I have suggestedelsewhere recently that textual criticism, if it is to prosper, needs to be sceptical of thetotalizing tendency promoted by some theories of literature and culture. Thefollowing propositions pull togetherthe contributionmade by thinking about ethicsto the welfare of textual criticism:

1. The discernment, recovery, and sometimes the removal of error in textsis an abiding concern of textual criticism. 'Misprintings' and 'misspellings'are words that show organization of some of the material elements of error'into their own units of material and formal elements'.27 Terms of blame orexcuse may be disassociated from instances of these categories of error, butthis does not mean that, as instances ofhuman behaviour, written and printedtexts do not also contain and transmit errors to some ofwhich moral judg-ments may be attached. Forgery is the extreme case. This is the formal sideofthe issue.

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2. As long as accuracy remains a goal of editing texts, the scrutiny ofwho isbeing accurate towhat, and bywhich means, remains a constant requirement.This paper has suggested that there is no reason to confine notions andstandards of accuracy to a realm outside the ethical. This is the instrumentalside of the issue.3. Textual reasoning is like moral reasoning in that it is not purely deductive,but analogical as well. Because the stuff of texts and their production is soheavilyweightedwith the contingent, so much a compound of deliberate actsand sheer casualties of brain, eye, hand and machine, deduction cannot carryall of textual criticism's aprlication of principles. There are cases wherewedo find an absence of textua principles from which we could deduce what todo. This absence, and the resulting puzzlement over what we call a crux,shows that there must be thinking other than deductive thinking needed.Textual principles, which are, anyway, often not completely consistent fromone edition to the next, do not really ensure much more than the coherenceof an edition. Editors expect to have to evaluate and justify particular de-cisions as well as to apply principles.4. While textual principles and ethical principles must differ because of thedifferent effects of attempting to universalize from them, they have, as thispaper has shown, enough similarity to establish that the application ofthought to textual criticism does not have to lie only in a negotiation betweenthe binary poles of 'rational' or 'scientific' thinking and certain theories ofliterature, language, and culture that have become fashionable.

These four propositions, I think, present the minimal conditions in which toconsider textual criticism and ethics together. Ifwe can be confident that both theconditions of text-production and of the treatment of text by scholarly editorsinclude ethical dimensions, then we are in a better position to fill the void that hasbeen created by the evacuation of ethics from some current editorial and lit-erary-critical persuasions. I hope to show in a more detailed way in a subsequentarticle how the ethical arguments presented above bear on the functions of handlingtext editorially.

Hobart

NOTES

1. lamesThorpe,PrinciplesofTextuaJCriticism (SanMarino, California: Huntington Library, 1972),pp.3-49; the essay first appeared in PMLA in 1965.

2. See, for example, the discussion of Catherine Belsey in Richard Freadman and Seumas Miller,Re·Thinking Theory: a Critique a/Contemporary Literary Theory and an Altemative Account(Cambridge: C.U.P., 1993), pp.22-23.

3. K.K. Ruthven, 'Textuality and Textual Editing',Merid.an, 4 (1985), p.85.4. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guanari, Anti·Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophren.a, translated by

Roben Hurley et al. (London: Athlone, 1984), p,42.

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5. IrisMurdoch,Metaphysics asaGuide toMorals (London: Chatto and Windus, 1992), p.39.6. Jonathan Dancy,MoralReasons (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp.27.28.7. Murdoch, p.46.8. BemardWiJfu.ms,Morality:an Introductron toEtbics, Cantoedn (1972; Cambridge: C.U.P., 1993),

pp.20·25.9. Hans Zeller, 'A New Approach to the Critical Constitution ofLiterary Texts', Studies in Biblio.

graphy, 28 (1975), pp.23H4.10. A.E.Housman, 'The Application OfThoughllo Textual Criticism' (1921), in John Carter (00.),

A.E. Housman: SeleetedProse (Cambridge: C.U.P., 1961), pp.131-50.11. Although, as Ipoint out later, .he value of 'contract' is flexible, it will be seen that Iam arguing

forme recognition ofarather different notion from what has become familiar as the 'social con-tract theory of editing'. See Peter ShilIingsburg, 'The Autonomous Author, the Sociology ofTexts and Polemics of Textual Criticism', in Paul Eggert (00.), Editing in Australia (Canberra:English Department, University CollegeADFA, 1990), p,45. It is irrelevant here to argue for oragainst that theory, hut pertinent to point out that what distinguishesmy account is the elementof shaped volition, of editOrs acting to produce what ought to be the case; whereas the socialcODtraCttheory includes a 'naturally recognizable' contract 'in which authors, editors, printers,publishers, booksellers, book buyers, and readers are all caught up in varying degrees ofwillingness' (my italics) 1p.45). My remarks about ethical contract will, I hope, contribute a littleto progress in thinking about editing, by working outside the philosophical oxymoron inProfessor Shillingsburg's last clause. .

12. Samuel Johnson, Lives ofthe English Poets, 00. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford: O.U.P., 1905),vol.2, p.176.

13. Samuel Johnson, 'Preface to Shakespeare', in Bertrand H. Bronson (00.), Rasselas, Poems, andSelectedPoems, 3rd edn (New York: Holr, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), especially pp.301'{)3.

14.. Martin C. Banestin, 'A Rationale of Literary Annotation: the Example ofFielding's Novels',StudiesinBihliography, 34 (1981), pp.I·22. lan Small, 'The Editor as Annotator as Ideal Reader',in lanSmall andMarcusWalsh (eds), The TheoryandPraeticeofText-editing (Cambridge: C.U.P.,1991), pp.186-209, thoughtfully reconsiders the centrality of intention in annotating texts(without, however, exploring the ethical implications).

15. Martin C. Banestin (ed.),JosephAndrews (Oxford: Clarendou Press, 1967).16. Geoffrey Tillotson (ed.),PoemsofAlexanderPope, vol.2, TheRapeoftheLock, 3rd edu (London:

Methuen, 1962). Andrew Varney, 'Clarissa'sMoral in The RapeoftheLock', Essays in Criticism,43 (1993), pp.17·32, energetically disputes the capacity of Clarissa's speech to carry the moralmeaningofthe poem, buthis readingoftheTwickenham editorial policy appears consistent withmine. '

17. Herbert Davis (00.), Pope:Poetical Works (Oxford: O.U.P., 1966).18. Murdoch, pp,4849.19. Bernard Sharratt, 'Cybertheory', in Richard Bradford (00.), The State of Theory (Londou:

Routledge, 1993), pp.lO·ll.20. T.S. Eliot, SelectedEssays, 3rdedn (London: Faber, 1951),p.15.21. Sharratt,p.11. .22. MorsePeckham, 'Refketionsou the Foundatious ofModern Editing',Proo[, 1(1971), pp.122.55.23. Murdoch, p.347.24. Murdoch, p.313.25. Murdoch, p.347.26. Dancy, p.250.27. Julius Kovesi,MoralNotions (Londou: RoutlOOge, 1967), p.51.

BSANZBulletin, v.i8 noA. 1994