Self-Aggrandizement and Clarification about Bryant's Stance as Biographer (in Cody Marrs's 2019 collection of essays)

This is from Bryant's essay, “The Biographical Re-Turn:  Writing Melville Biography and the Example of Women” in the Cambridge U P book edited by Cody Marrs, The New Melville Studies (2019).

In looking at this I focus on Bryant's acknowledging the risk of making his biography a mirror of his own desire. That is precisely what he did with Melville's texts in FLUID TEXTS. I mean, he read at least some the less clearly written words of a manuscript not to see what they said, what Melville had intended the marks to mean, but what he (Bryant) wanted them to say, what he preferred them to say according to his "rhetorical agenda." Let me quote a passage from p. 19:

[This is Bryant:] I read a crucial, illegible word in the Typee manuscript as 'promotion'; whereas Hershel Parker sees it as 'peroration'. The word Melville intended is one word only; the scribble we both 'see' is the same; but the readings we give to it vary with our differing rhetorical agendas. I doubt that Parker and I, or anyone else, will be able to resolve this issue; all we can do is engage in a discourse upon the intended text, and its intentionality is defined by that discourse.

[This is HP again:] Several comments. There is no manuscript of Typee. We know only of 16 leaves from the first draft. In innumerable places Bryant self-aggrandizes himself as working with an entire manuscript. No, 15 leaves, one having been transcribed perfectly in the NN edition.

Another comment.  The word I transcribe as “peroration” is NOT an illegible word. Bryant can challenge my transcription, and I can argue from context that my reading is right, but the word is, finally, not illegible. It is what Melville intended it to be.
Prejudice can distort our transcriptions, certainly. I found an instance or two where the meticulous Jay Leyda put down the wrong word because he expected that something unfavorable would be revealed by the writer or revealed about someone else. We can see what we expect to see.

But misreading because of our expectations is a different thing from transcribing according to “our differing rhetorical agendas.” In transcribing the Melville family letters my agenda was to put down what the family members wrote in the order they intended it to be read. If the writer put the location down in a line (ARROWHEAD, say) and later wrote a sentence that started on that line and jumped over the location, I jumped over the location too and transcribed what the writer wanted to say and did say, despite the inadvertently self-imposed obstacle of the location that was in the way, later.

I had no rhetorical agenda. I wanted to transcribe what the author wrote. Remember,
Bryant is talking on the basis of his transcription of sixteen known leaves from the first draft of TYPEE—one leaf long known in the NYPL and fifteen that went to the NYPL as part of the “Augusta Papers” of 1983. It is unfortunate that the wording Bryant uses implies that there is a full manuscript of TYPEE. There is no such thing as “the TYPEE manuscript.” Referring to the surviving pages as “the TYPEE manuscript” instead of “the surviving leaves from the first draft of TYPEE” deflects our attention from what Bryant is actually working with—sixteen leaves, not a full draft of a book. This is sleight of hand, self-aggrandizing on a grand scale. I have reason to think that there were readers of applications at NEH who did not realize that only 16 leaves of the draft of Typee are known.

When I worked with Bryant’s transcription a few years ago I found what I decided (in my old-school scholarly  fashion) were 2 mis-transcriptions in the first 11 lines on the first side of the first surviving leaf. --Two errors in the first 11 lines!--In both cases, Bryant’s “rhetorical agenda” seemed to be pushing pretty obviously inscribed neutral words into sexually charged words. This suggested to me that his “rhetorical agenda” was a sexual agenda. I did not go on trying to verify his transcription of the draft leaves.

Much later I got enough money together to purchase Bryant’s MELVILLE UNFOLDING: SEXUALITY, POLITICS, AND THE VERSIONS OF “TYPEE”: A FLUID-TEXT ANALYSIS, WITH AN EDITION OF THE “TYPEE” MANUSCRIPT. Again, the title startles me, and not just the “SEXUALITY” part. No, this book cannot contain an edition of “the TYPEE Manuscript” because such a thing has never been seen by a living person and presumably has not existed since 1846, when it was discarded in London after compositors set from it. There are “versions” of only a very limited number of passages of TYPEE, not “versions of TYPEE.” And if my sample from the first leaf is representative, then “Sexuality” really may reflect Bryant’s “rhetorical agenda” perhaps as much as the words Melville wrote in those surviving few leaves of the first draft.

What does the philosophy of transcribing by “rhetorical agenda” lead to? Are there no such things as misreadings? Are there no misreadings but only products of  varying rhetorical agendas? Anything goes? Are we in a textual kindergarten where we make every child feel equally proud of himself or herself? What Jimmy transcribes is just as good as what Suzie transcribes? Do we say, “And Debbi, what a beautiful transcription!” “Johnny, what a transcription!”?  Well, I remember what Harrison Hayford said at the last MLA Melville Society meeting we attended, the one in Chicago in 1990, when the audience applauded the idea that Hawthorne had put Melville into an early story before he had heard of Melville, “Then we are operating under a different notion of evidence.” All the while the satanic red-bearded stranger at the door kept shouting, “THE FACTS DON’T MATTER!”