This was written after I discovered (from watching a Tom Hanks movie about a man and a dog) that my friend Paul Seydor, the author of PECKINPAH: THE WESTERN FILMS, was making a new career for himself as a film editor. I wrote the article planning to wait to contact Paul until I had an offprint to send him. As it turned out, he brought a rough cut of TIN CUP to our house in SE Pennsylvania on his way to see his mother in SW Pennsylvania--appropriate since my Great Grandfather Costner is Kevin Costner's Great Great Grandfather. The picture of us together was taken 29 March 2014.
The
auteur-author paradox: how critics of the cinema and the novel talk about
flawed or even "mutilated" texts
Studies in the Novel. 27.3
(Fall 1995): p413.
Critics of the
novel and critics of movies behave in strangely diverse ways when confronted
with mutilated or merely flawed texts. In cinema, a quintessentially
collaborative medium, critics bow to the power of a single controlling vision,
acknowledge that such vision can be damaged by one means or another during or
after filming, and routinely applaud attempts to restore that vision, typically
by reconstruction of the "Director's Cut," as new movie posters or
video-cassette packages proclaim. When dealing with novels, the production of
which is usually a quintessentially solitary task, many literary critics now
deny the power of a single controlling vision, deny the possibility that the
text they are familiar with could be badly flawed, resist the idea that for
some novels there can be no perfectly readable text, and denounce attempts to
remedy damage, such as the release of a reconstructed text of a novel.(1) The
auteur lives; the author is dead.
Film critics
understand that "desecration" can begin "well before" a
film even opens - Roy Frumkes's words in describing the effects of Sam
Spiegel's rushing David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia into release late in 1962,
"forcing six or more months of postproduction to be crammed into
four," and personally taking part "in the butchering of Lean's
less-than-fine cut."(2) Film critics also accept as common knowledge that
in part - even in large part - many coherent films can be rendered
incomprehensible by tamperings made after completion and initial release. David
Denby summarizes a late stage in the history of the already cut Lawrence of
Arabia: "In 1969, Columbia Pictures, readying the movie for television,
cut another fifteen minutes, at which point the complex characterization of
Lawrence, never entirely clear in any version, was rendered altogether
indecipherable."(3) The heading of the article on Lawrence of Arabia by
Roy Frumkes reads: "There was every chance the film could not be saved at
all" by the restorer Robert A. Harris: "No one had realized how
extensively it had been mutilated by unauthorized cuts, studio indifference and
time" (p. 285). In the world of cinema, reconstructors or restorers may be
heroes. Harris was driven by a "passion" that "led him to try to
reinstate the missing twenty minutes of film and sound footage" to
Lawrence of Arabia, says Jane Baeumler, who thinks that aesthetic qualities
such as characterization, coherence, and motivation were restored by Harris's
efforts:
Much of
Harris's work involved extending scenes that had been trimmed in the truncated
version - including a notorious sequence in which Lawrence is raped by a
sadistic Turkish officer. His main concern was to retrieve subtleties of
characterization and essential narrative information.(4)
Film people are
interested in the intended functions of scenes and the effects (deliberate or
inadvertent) of cuts; they are interested in processes - the creative process,
the process of deterioration, the process of restoration.
Criticism like
this by Frumkes, Denby, and Baeumler could be matched by many other comments on
Lawrence of Arabia and a good number of other films, from the relatively simple
restoration of a "Director's Cut" to an immensely complex restoration
such as was devoted to the 1954 A Star is Born.(5) A book which deals
repeatedly with flawed films is Peckinpah: The Western Films (1980),(6) in
which Paul Seydor studies the extant forms of the cinematic texts and relates
those forms to the circumstances of production. Writing fresh cinematic
history, he "reads" the forms of the text in the light of
biographical, historical, and specifically textual evidence. The result is
scholarship on important American aesthetic documents, and at the same time it
is the best sort of criticism, that which grows out of comprehensive
scholarship. Repeatedly, his scholarship allows Seydor to break free of
previous criticism, such as analyses which deplored a screenwriter's or the
director's failures at characterization when in fact the failure (a real
failure, accurately identified by the critic) resulted from the studio's
alterations of the "text." Seydor says of the studio's cutting of The
Wild Bunch: "many filmgoers and critics familiar only with the cut version
were, and are, bothered by the missing scenes and have, as a consequence,
criticized the film for its alleged weak characterizations and ill-motivated
characters" (p. 81). Peckinpah was blamed when he was innocent - when, in
fact, he had been victimized.(7)
In Seydor's
study a recurrent motif is the mangling of films during one or another stage of
production and another is the creation of coherent films which were
subsequently mangled. Often in Seydor's woeful tales what is lost is motivation.
He quotes Peckinpah on having to sit in the cutting room and watch someone else
cut down Major Dundee: "'What I worked so hard to achieve - all of
Dundee's motivation (what it was that made him the man he was) - was
gone'." This was material Peckinpah had "'both written and shot and
cared very much about'," but which the studio "'had thought
unnecessary to the total effect of the film'" (p. 52). (This notion that
the "total" effect can be achieved without a great deal of the total
material is one that links the studio executives to textual theorists and
literary critics.(8)) For all his sympathy with Peckinpah, Seydor judiciously
explains that some movies have been damaged less than others. The
"mutilation" of The Wild Bunch in no way approached "what was
done to Major Dundee (or what, later, would be done to Pat Garrett and Billy
the Kid)," Seydor says (p. 84), yet "the net effect of the cuts is to
diminish the epic scope slightly, reduce some of the ironies moderately, and
lessen the complexity of characters and character motivations
considerably" (p. 85).
In discussing
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Seydor acknowledges that critics have suggested
that the movie seems to have suffered little from whatever cuts were made. For
leaving this impression he credits Gordon Carroll and Roger Spottiswoode: they
fought with the studio on Peckinpah's behalf so as to "guide the picture
through the bargaining sessions with some of its dramatic sense and unity
preserved intact" (p. 199). He describes what can survive as interpretable
and powerful even after severe cuts:
since what was
cut are those scenes in which character motivation, social pressure, and
personal and professional obligation are seen to generate action, incident, and
decision, the released version has, to be sure, a "ritualistic,"
"mythic," rather "existential" "purity" that is
not without a certain hypnotic power, beauty, and fascination. All the same,
that purity remains a pretty sporadic, because largely serendipitous, affair,
and it is of no help whatever toward filling in the narrative lacunae. (P.
199)(9)
Some of the
undeniable power is adventitious, unintended by Peckinpah, and consequently
uncontrolled. Informing Seydor's book is a belief that true artists strive to
achieve old-fashioned aesthetic goals of coherence and even unity: "Many
of the scenes [in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid] are interlocked with
Peckinpah's usual intricacy so that, as with The Wild Bunch, removing something
in one place usually means something else falling out or failing to cohere
fifteen pages or several minutes later" (p. 200).
Reviewers of
Seydor's book readily accepted his descriptions of the damage the studios had
done to Peckinpah's films. Library Journal used the compound form
"mutilated / re-cut" to describe the films;(10) Booklist used
"sabotaged";(11) Film Quarterly used "mutilation" and
referred to Seydor's discussion of "particular damage done by studio
cutting";(12) Western American Literature decried the "butchery . . .
of individual scenes."(13) In the practical world of cinema critics,
almost no one defends the cuts of a film made by the studio. Early in 1963,
however, W. N. D. Mason-Lowe wrote a letter to Films and Filming in defence of
the hacked up version of Lawrence of Arabia that was shown shortly after its
world premiere in a 222-minute version:
When the film
was first shown, for reasons of time it was a rough, uncut version. At the
Metropole now it is a finished picture and with David Lean's twenty minute
cutting he has now completed his original intention. Whether or not the film is
better now is beside the point. But it is certainly not the prerogative of any
member of any audience to enter upon something they know nothing about.(14)
The cutting was
of course not Lean's, and absolutely no film critic echoed Mason-Lowe's
sanguine refusal to judge or to complain. Derek Elley, looking back on this odd
letter, commented scathingly: "Who, one wonders, was 'W. N. D.
Mason-Lowe?'" (p. 28). In literary criticism, critics fearlessly rush in
to defend one mutilated text or another, often denying that it could possibly
be damaged; in film criticism, any such hapless critic would be asking for the
fate of poor W. N. D. Mason-Lowe.
While film
people share much of the language of old-fashioned literary criticism and talk
freely about the one subject now most studiously avoided by literary critics
(the creative process), they may reveal a limited understanding of just what
can go wrong in a form such as the novel. Seydor quotes Peckinpah as saying:
"'The worst that can happen to a novelist is that his book goes out of
print, but it survives, somewhere, in libraries, at least, in its original
form'." Seydor glosses this comment incautiously: "In other words, in
the traditional arts when an artwork fails we can be pretty sure it is the
artist's failure. But when a film fails, whose failure is it?" (p. 53).
What Peckinpah says of a book is often true. The 1893 version of Stephen
Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets survived in a few copies (more held by
bibliophiles than libraries, perhaps) for more than half a century, during
which almost everyone who wrote on the book discussed the severely expurgated
1896 edition. Once attention was called to it in the 1950s, facsimiles of the
1893 edition and new editions of it were published, and that version soon
became standard, despite its tacit repudiation by Fredson Bowers in the
much-criticized Virginia Edition.(15) But it often happens that books get into
print after being expurgated, just as films get released after being cut by the
studio. A book that got slightly cut before publication, then was subjected to
severe expurgation before being re-released, is the American edition of
Melville's Typee.(16) In this case the English edition contains a fuller text
than the first American text, and much fuller than the expurgated text, so what
is lost are only those slight omissions which the English publisher said he had
made "on the score of taste" (Typee, p. 279). Sometimes when books
are cut before publication the "original form" survives, sometimes
not. The "original form" of Maggie survives, but the "original
form" of The Red Badge of Courage does not all survive. Most of it does,
in the final manuscript (including most of the original chapter 12, wholly
removed from the 1895 edition), and some of the rest can be recovered in
imperfect, unrevised form, from parts of the draft which fortuitously
survive.(17) Although some parts lost from the final manuscript cannot be
supplied from the draft, we have a fair idea of how many words are lost, though
not what the words were. We can make do with what we have and read the
reconstructed The Red Badge of Courage, reading something very close to what
Crane completed but not reading quite the full text and not reading some
passages in what had been their final form. As in film, the degree of
truncation, mutilation, and maiming varies from text to text. (The first
American Typee was not much censored, while what was published as Sartoris by
William Faulkner was "incoherent" and "ludicrous."(18)) As
in film, the amount of material lost is not always directly proportionate to
the damage done to comprehensibility. Very small cuts from the Esquire text of
Norman Mailer's An American Dream, each of them emphasizing the psychological
equality of the hero with another man, so disturbed the hierarchy of characters
that excellent critics reading the Dial text have printed wildly variant lists
of the main characters in the novel.(19) As in film, the extent to which
restoration is possible also varies in novels. (It was possible to make a
coherent reconstruction of the out of copyright The Red Badge of Courage;
legally, only Mailer could "authorize" the restoration of tiny
passages in An American Dream.)
Movie critics
do well when they are confronted with flawed texts. They talk in practical
terms about loss of motivation, damage to characterization, damage to
structure, and they celebrate an ideal text that is sometimes almost completely
recoverable, sometimes not. They do the best they can in supplying missing
passages and in suggesting their duration, thinking it important to acknowledge
gaps and imperfections rather than attempting to smooth them over. The
restorers took chances with the attention and patience of viewers when they let
the surviving sound track play during a scene in Lost Horizon (1937) while
showing on the screen what Alan Stanbrook describes as "production stills
and freeze-frame shots."(20) In his survey of film restorations, Stanbrook
treats the reconstructed Lost Horizon as a lurching, clumsy example, but
neither he nor any other film historian or film critic objects, in principle,
to the attempt to reconstruct a lost original. In the reconstruction of The Red
Badge of Courage ellipsis-dots mark six brief gaps in the 1895 edition; in two
of those, portions of the draft are substituted for the missing passages.(21)
Film critics would recognize those ellipsis-dots as parallel to their own
expediencies, to be justified by the result. Literary critics behave very
differently, for they are so enamored with the notion of a perfect artifact
that they cannot bear to read a text containing indications of loss or damage.
The pretend gaps of the deconstructionists were pretty to talk about a few
years ago, but even the hardest-nosed deconstructionist never confronted real
textual gaps.
In our 1974
study of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night,(22) Brian Higgins and I did
not trace Fitzgerald's dogged, miserable, brave, and sometimes brilliant
attempt to impose order upon his successive drafts of the Tender material,
first for the serial, then for the book, in all of which the flashback order
was built in (mature Dick Diver, then younger Dick Diver), and did not study in
detail the biographical circumstances through which, after the failure of the
book, Fitzgerald came to think that reordering the sections might give the work
a chance for success. Matthew J. Bruccoli had done that work.(23) Instead, we
showed how the edition published by Malcolm Cowley in an attempt to follow
Fitzgerald's late instructions(24) created far more problems than it solved. We
argued that during the composition what Fitzgerald wrote "at any stage was
written precisely the way it was because he had in mind the general way and
even particular ways it was affected by what he had already written and would
affect what he was yet to write" (p. 139). By the time he got to Book 2,
therefore, "almost every detail of what he chose to write was to some
extent a consequence of what he had already written and was designed to cause
certain effects in the mind of the reader who had already read certain
scenes" (p. 139). In Book 2 he had "calculated just what degree of
psychological shock he wanted the reader to experience as he passed from the
largely romanticized view of Dick in his maturity to the section on Dick's
wartime days" (p. 139). As we pointed out, Fitzgerald himself had provided
a precise definition of the reading experience: "it is confusing to come
across a youthful photograph of some one known in a rounded maturity and gaze
with a shock upon a fiery, wiry, eagle-eyed stranger" (p. 139). Our
conclusion was that pervasively, "in ways large and small, the reordering
of the sections of Tender is the Night alters or altogether destroys the
effects Fitzgerald elaborately calculated, and absolutely no evidence shows
that he desired or even foresaw the full consequences of his reordering."
At times, we continued, the experience of reading the Cowley edition "is
not merely different and largely adventitious but is actually illogical or even
nonsensical" (pp. 146-47).
In 1986
appeared Milton R. Stern's Critical Essays on F. Scott Fitzgerald's
"Tender Is the Night".(25) Stern did not reprint the Higgins-Parker
article, but in a section called "The Text Itself" he distilled
eleven points from it and rebutted them, one after the other, before he
declared: "In sum, it is totalitarian to declare as a matter of fact or as
a matter of settled opinion that one or the other version is the only version
that should be considered" (p. 25). Higgins and I had not said that no one
should consider the Cowley edition, but in fact only a few classes of readers
would need to, even aside from the fact that Fitzgerald's heirs now want to
keep it off the market. Fitzgerald specialists, a relatively small class of
critics, need to study that text, since they cannot talk about the history of
Fitzgerald criticism without having access to a text some critics worked from.
A smaller class of textual scholars might wish to use the Cowley text as a
teaching tool for a highly specialized class, for it is invaluable in showing
just how authors can go wrong when they wish, oh, wish! that they could remedy
some disaster, or when they wish, oh, wish! they could import intentionality
retroactively. But anyone who cares about the author's intention during the
creative process deserves to read a text as close as possible to what
Fitzgerald wrote when he was in control of his material, not the text Cowley
later printed. "Totalitarian" is a take-no-prisoners term, not a term
that opens the way to thoughtful discussion of aesthetic issues.
To judge from
the reaction of critics, one of the most unforgivable things I said in Flawed
Texts and Verbal Icons was that Pudd'nhead Wilson was unreadable.(26) I used
that term because the work published as Pudd'nhead Wilson contained two
principle sets of anomalies. The first anomalies arose in December 1892 when
Mark Twain joined a middle section written when Tom Driscoll was a white youth
(invented as a love rival to one of the conjoined twins) to a new ending and
then a new beginning written when Tom was part black and a slave. Mark Twain
did not revise the middle chapters to contain the idea of slavery and he did
not revise out all of the passages in which Tom remains the (white?) rival for
the affections of Rowena. A second set of anomalies was created in July 1893
when Mark Twain salvaged much of the manuscript by discarding many of the
scenes in which the conjoined twins figured, while removing (from the salvaged
portion) some but not all references to the twins' being conjoined, and
retaining some scenes that were conceived only because the twins were
conjoined. Some scenes in the salvaged book, such as the Democrats' nominating
David Wilson for mayor just after he had lost his first case, are absolutely
incomprehensible: in the longer manuscript the Democrats nominated him because
he had just successfully defended Luigi, one half of the conjoined twins, from
Tom Driscoll's charge of kicking him, the argument being that since the twins
had only two legs all told there was no way to know which twin did the kicking.
I was not suggesting emending anything in the text of Pudd'nhead Wilson -
merely that we need to recognize how it got to be in the form that was
published. Of course Pudd'nhead Wilson was readable, critics chorused - they
had been reading it for years! Susan Gillmann and Forrest G. Robinson convened
a conference at Santa Cruz to say so, and published the papers.(27) In their
lead article, "Pudd'nhead Wilson Revisited," James M. Cox brushed
aside the idea that there was something problematical in Pudd'nhead Wilson:
"I'm old fashioned enough to want to take texts as I find them" (p.
8). Gillman proclaimed, with equal conviction: "Parker is patently wrong
when he dismisses Pudd'nhead Wilson as 'patently unreadable'" (p. 238).
When David Denby called the television version of Lawrence of Arabia
indecipherable, no one rushed to denounce him as a philistine or a heretic; no
one said he preferred to take his movies as he "found them" on
commercial television. Why is it sensible to say something about damage to a
film and heretical to say the same thing about a novel?
Film critics want
to know details about the archival material restorers have access to, and
rather than taking the results on faith they are perfectly willing to
second-guess a reconstruction, as Alan Stanbrook zestfully does. By contrast,
the literary critics in the Gillman-Robinson collection act as if my account
might be accurate but in any case is too intimidating to challenge: it can be
ignored, but not challenged. Gillman and Robinson refer to my "painstaking
research" (p. viii), as a result of which I left things "now pretty
firmly documented" (p. ix). Robinson refers to the "plausible
reconstruction of the history of the novel's composition" (p. 22), allows
that "Parker's textual scholarship is of undoubted value," and says
that there "can be no serious quarreling with Parker's facts" (p.
23). Does this mean that there can be frivolous quarreling with my facts, or
that the facts may be ignored with impunity? Why did the State of California
pay for a very large convention where critics declared that my reconstruction
of the history of the composition is "plausible," instead of
dispatching scholars to the Berg Collection and the Pierpont Morgan Library to
find out whether it is true or not? One answer is that to the New Historicist
there is no truth. Being a New Historicist means you never have to do history,
never check a fact, because there is no such thing as a fact, only a plausible
opinion by the odd surviving old scholar. The original New Critics brought
their traditional scholarly training into their criticism; the members of the
next generation of New Critics and this new generation of New Historicists
throw up their hands in what looks like baffled hostility or awe disguised as
principled skepticism: "pretty firmly documented,"
"plausible"!
Yet Gillman and
Robinson in their introduction attempt to differentiate themselves and their
colleagues from the New Critics. To hear them tell it, the New Historicists
take "the incoherence in Twain's narrative" as "political
symptom, the irruption into this narrative about mistaken racial identity of
materials from the nineteenth-century political unconscious" (p. vii). One
might think this irruption could have taken place only very late in the
composition, after the narrative contained any mistaken racial identity, but
not so. To the New Historicist, the sequence of Mark Twain's brainstorms,
documented in notebooks and in the manuscript, constitutes no proof at all.
Robinson rebuffs me by saying that the "second Tom was there in Mark
Twain's imagination from the beginning, inscribed deeply within the 'matter of
Hannibal,' and bound to emerge as the dominant pattern of doubling continued to
unfold" (p. 41). Notice the New Critical belief in "dominant
pattern," projected onto biography, where every future possibility is
already always present.
The New
Historicists boldly declare their superiority to New Critical aims:
"Instead of searching for a hidden unifying structure, as did a previous
generation of New Critics, the scholars in this volume are after what Myra
Jehlen calls 'the novel's most basic and unacknowledged issues'," race and
sex (p. vii), even though race and sex were not issues at all until about half
of the manuscript was written. They go on: "Most of the essays in this
volume are subtextual studies which seize upon the text's inconsistencies and
contradictions as windows on the world of late-nineteenth-century American
culture," therefore seeking "to make the strata of Mark Twain's
political unconscious available for critical scrutiny" (p. vii). In
pursuing these inconsistencies and contradictions these critics ignore all the
real, verifiable textual inconsistencies and contradictions such as I detailed.
The more they try to distance themselves from the New Critics the more they
reveal their parentage. This is Michael Cowan:
It is perfectly
possible of course, as Hershel Parker
would argue, that this "dangling" plot reflects the haste and
carelessness of a "jack-leg" novelist more than crafted thematics.
However, it seems equally plausible to find such a truncation part of a larger
inconclusiveness . . . central to the themes of both Those Extraordinary Twins
and Pudd'nhead Wilson. (P. 246)
Such a
truncation may be inconclusive, but it is central to the themes. Robinson even
believes in a "submerged coherence" that runs through all the
scattered "parts" - presumably through Pudd'nhead Wilson, Those
Extraordinary Twins, and the rest of the manuscript, which Robinson never
consulted (p. 36). Plainly, Paul Seydor is hopelessly backward in alleging that
some of Peckinpah's films have been truncated or mutilated: he should have
sought larger patterns of inconclusiveness central to the themes of The Wild
Bunch and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.
The critics of
Santa Cruz claim to tolerate incoherence, but there is a cryptic reference to
"one of us" - either Gillman or Robinson - who believes that
"there is a discernible 'sense' running through the text's apparently
hopeless disorder" (p. viii). Somehow my "painstaking research"
(p. viii) has allowed these New Historicists the chance to "appreciate
more than ever before the so-called 'aesthetic anomalies' of the texts and
enjoy the opportunity - not exploited by Parker - to make sense of them"
(pp. viii-ix). According to Gillman and Robinson, "lapses in fictional
coherence make historical sense" (p. xiii). They have arrived at precisely
the stance of the New Critics I quoted at the end of my chapter on Pudd'nhead
Wilson in Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons, those hellbent on demonstrating the
perfect coherence of the text the author had warned was the least little bit
problematical. Forrest G. Robinson at one point comes clean about his
determination to find unity in disorder:
I want to build
a coherent critical argument about Pudd'nhead Wilson on the deeply fractured
textual foundation most recently brought to our attention by Hershel Parker. . . . It is essential to our
cultural health that we make as much sense as we can of the stories we tell and
retell ourselves, especially when they touch significantly on matters as
prominent and as vexed as racism and slavery. (P. 22)
The New
Historicists and the New Critics, we must conclude, are Extraordinary Twins,
after all. Robinson is personally tolerant of me, knowing that I am witless,
not malicious: "In his epistemology . . . as in other ways, Parker is
ill-prepared to glimpse the coherence of the incoherence" (p. 41). But
Robinson is a moral therapist on a grand scale while a barbarian like Parker
(did he know my father was half Cherokee and Choctaw?) threatens the
"cultural health" of America.
Robinson is not
alone in warning that Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons could damage public health.
Gary Davenport described my assumptions about authorial intention and the
existence of damaged texts as "dangerously mistaken" - dangerous
because I might lure an innocent reader to treat a literary work as if it were
a discursive work, not a perfect work of art: "The real value of an
'iconic' view of literature is that it precludes this confusion: it acknowledges
the irreducibly complex nature of literary intention by rejecting external
evidence that might apply to simpler expressions of intent."(28) That is,
anyone who, on the basis of biographical, textual, and bibliographical
evidence, concludes that a text is flawed and tries to see if something like
perfection can be restored, would be wise to keep that conclusion to himself or
herself lest it shake some reader's faith in the perfection of the verbal icon:
"the idea of the text is absolutely necessary - even if it is only a
necessary fiction - for the study of literature to make sense" (p. 504).
In thinking that intention might be "grasped through a study of
data," I was a thoroughly dangerous man whose views were "inimical to
the higher values of literary culture that have survived, somehow, from the
beginnings of literacy to our Age of Information" (p. 504). Something is
unfair about all this. Paul Seydor was every bit as dangerous as I was, but
nobody said his views were inimical to cultural health and the higher values of
cinematic culture.(29)
Of all the
attitudes displayed by critics of the novel toward the textual evidence in
Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons the strangest is a lack of curiosity about
variant forms of the text. I would have thought that lovers of Mark Twain would
have begged me to publish Pudd'nhead Wilson as he wrote it and first tried to
sell it, so they could understand the trajectory of his career, if nothing
else. I was sure every critic of Crane would be avid to learn just what it was
that the young author wrote, just what the thing called The Red Badge of
Courage was in 1894, when Crane was trying so hard to publish it, if only to
understand what he had in hand when he wrote George's Mother and the other
pieces of 1894. In an essay specifically on getting used to the form of The Red
Badge of Courage which Crane wrote,(30) I led readers through several months of
Crane's life, showing what Red Badge consisted of when various events were
occurring. My hopes for the essay were frustrated, for no Crane specialist
pursued my essay with a full reading of the novel as it stood for many crucial
months in the young man's life. Instead, Crane specialists, led by Donald
Pizer, most recently in a 1990 collection, have concentrated on trying to suppress
the reconstruction rather than trying to understand it.(31) In this Pizer
collection James Colvert devoted twenty-six pages to demolishing the
reconstructed The Red Badge of Courage, not to seeing how the parts of the work
function in the fuller version, not to seeing what the book meant in the form
Crane completed and tried for months to get into print. He mentions, in his
last section, that it is valuable to have the book in its early form - but only
"for what it shows about the development of Crane's mind and art as he
refined the theme and ruthlessly excised the windy and repetitive 'adolescent
ontological heroics,' as Parker aptly describes them" (p. 258). But the
excision took place some months into 1895, so Colvert still ignores the long
period in 1894 before the text was cut. In any case, "development" is
not shown in an author's hasty excising or in an author's thoughtless
compliance with an editor's excising. Anyone who wants to see Crane in the
process of developing has only to look at what he did when he worked from draft
to final manuscript.
The power of
the New Criticism is nowhere more obvious in the refusal of literary critics to
express any interest in learning just what a masterpiece was like when the
author finished it and tried to sell it. To talk about original forms of
literary works is to risk denunciation. Patrick K. Dooley cites the 1982 Norton
reconstructed text as "the 'infamous' Binder version of Red
Badge."(32) "'Infamous'"? Jack Stillinger calls me the
"most extreme theorist of textual primitivism to date," right behind
(or ahead of) Jonathan Wordsworth.(33) Why? Because I believed in the myth of
solitary creative genius, and even believed, he said, in something
"extremely dubious" - that "'genuine art is coherent'" (p.
227). What I had showed, indeed, was that genuine art is the product of a
process that pushes toward coherence, whether or not it achieves coherence. It
seems to me that acknowledging the power of the author, the authority of the
creative process, is a matter of ethics, a matter of our behaving responsibly,
as human beings, to other human beings, authors. Teaching a text closest to the
author's creative process, and reconstructing that text, if necessary, in order
to read and teach it, is, at bottom, an ethical matter. By this standard, it is
not the critics of the novel but the cinema critics who are producing ethical
criticism.
For half a
century, most literary critics have refused to acknowledge that interpretation
of literary works may depend upon biographical, historical, bibliographical,
and textual information. They have refused to acknowledge anything
problematical about familiar texts, even those an author warned readers
against; while this mind-set has prevailed, unsurprisingly, other familiar texts
are regarded as unproblematical only because no one has investigated their
textual history. If even the most resourceful critics are running almost on
empty when they deal with flawed texts, there is a direr possibility that much
criticism of the novel in general, not just novels with texts known to be
problematical, may be reaching something very like a dead end. If cinema
criticism is alive and well in part because its practitioners believe so
devoutly in the auteur, might the joyful celebration of the resurrection of the
author tend to revive studies in the novel?
UNIVERSITY OF
DELAWARE
NOTES
1 I wish to
thank Steven Olsen-Smith for criticizing and helping to verify this essay.
2 Roy Frumkes,
"The Restoration of 'Lawrence of Arabia'," Films in Review 40 (April,
1989): 285-91; the quotation is from p. 285.
3 David Denby,
"An Epic Masterpiece Revisited," Premiere 2 (Feb., 1989): 27-28; the
quotation is from p. 27.
4 Jane
Baeumler, "Shot by Shot: Restoring a Lost Scene from 'Lawrence of
Arabia,'" Premiere 2 (Feb., 1989): 54-56; the quotation is from p. 56.
5 See Ronald
Haver, A Star is Born: The Making of the 1954 Movie and its 1983 Restoration
(New York: Knopf, 1988).
6 Urbana: Univ.
of Illinois Press.
7 This happens
in literary criticism. See my Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons (Evanston:
Northwestern Univ. Press, 1984), p. 160, on a critic of Stephen Crane:
"[James] Colvert rightly notes 'the deterioration in the quality of the
writing' in the last chapter, 'the appearance of a tendency toward incoherence.'
But these faults are not in the MS version and they result from the loose ends
left when excisions were clumsily made. There are various sentences in the last
chapter which are literally incoherent because of the excisions. Colvert is
quite wrong in blaming Crane for being unable to convince us of something: he
had done it right in the MS."
8 See my
"'The Text Itself' - Whatever That Is," Text 3 (1987), 47-54,
especially my discussion of the common idea, best phrased by G. Thomas
Tanselle, that editorial decision rests upon the editor's "'interpretation
of the author's intended meaning as he [the editor] discovers it in the whole
of the text itself'" (p. 48); as I point out, there are many sorts of
circumstances where an editor can deal with "only part of the text itself
in what is widely accepted as being the text itself" (p. 49).
9 Substitute
"adventitious" for "serendipitous" and you have what I
frequently described in Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons - situations that make a
sense, and even a plausible sense, but one which cannot have been conceived by
or executed by the writer, where a passage conveys intentionality that cannot
be authorial. See for instance pp. 42-43, on Sanctuary, or p. 129, on
Pudd'nhead Wilson.
10 David
Bartholomew, Library Journal 105 (Feb. 1, 1980): 422.
11 David
Elliott, Booklist 76 (June 1, 1980): 1399.
12 Ernest
Callenbach, Film Quarterly 33.4 (1980): 21.
13 Mark Busby,
Western American Literature 15 (Winter, 1981): 309-10.
14 As quoted in
Derek Elley, "Lawrence Rides Again," Films and Filming (May, 1989):
28.
15 The response
to the Virginia Maggie is summed up by Edwin H. Cady, Stephen Crane, Revised
Edition (Boston: Twayne, 1980), p. 24: "In the realms of esthetics and
creative psychology, to say nothing of Crane studies, Professor Bowers, however
learned an expert in general textual bibliography, is an amateur. Like Donald
Pizer, Joseph Katz, and Hershel Parker
(and almost everybody else), I thought Bowers was wrong. As an original member
of the CEAA Board and the quondam general editor of a major edition, I felt
betrayed."
16 Typee: A
Peep at Polynesian Life, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel
Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern
Univ. Press and the Newberry Library, 1968), pp. 306-11.
17 Reviewing
Fredson Bowers, The Red Badge of Courage: A Facsimile Edition of the Manuscript
(Washington: NCR/Microcard Editions, 1972 and 1973) and Bowers's edition of The
Red Badge of Courage: An Episode of the American Civil War (Charlottesville:
Univ. Press of Virginia, 1975), in Nineteenth-Century Fiction 30 (March 1976),
558-62, I first laid out a plan for reconstructing The Red Badge of Courage.
Subsequently I supervised a reconstruction of the manuscript by my then-student
Henry Binder and, as guest editor of a special Stephen Crane number of Studies
in the Novel, heralded that reconstruction. See Binder's "The Red Badge of
Courage Nobody Knows," Studies in the Novel 10 (1978): 9-47. The
reconstructed text was first published in vol. 2 of The Norton Anthology of
American Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979) then reprinted as a separate
hardback by W. W. Norton in 1982.
18 See Flawed
Texts and Verbal Icons, pp. 47-48.
19 Flawed Texts
and Verbal Icons, pp. 181-212, especially pp. 196-207. The inability of the
critics to identify the four or five main characters is discussed on pp.
190-91; I conclude (p. 191) that the "failure of such good critics to
agree on something so simple as who the main characters are strikes me as the
best possible sort of empirical evidence that Mailer had indeed damaged his
novel - and by the smallest of excisions."
20 Alan
Stanbrook, "As It Was in the Beginning," Sight& Sound 59
(1989-90): 29.
21 The Red
Badge of Courage, ed. Henry Binder (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980), pp. viii and
163-68.
22 Brian
Higgins and Hershel Parker, "Sober
Second Thoughts: Fitzgerald's 'Final Version' of Tender is the Night,"
Proof: The Yearbook of American Bibliographical and Textual Studies, 4 (1975):
129-52.
23 Matthew J.
Bruccoli, The Composition of "Tender is the Night" (Pittsburgh: Univ.
of Pittsburgh Press, 1963).
24 New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1951.
25 Boston: G.
K. Hall.
26 See Chapter
5, "Pudd'nhead Wilson: Jack-leg Author, Unreadable Text, and Sense-Making
Critics," pp. 115-45.
27 Mark Twain's
"Pudd'nhead Wilson": Race, Conflict, and Culture (Durham: Duke Univ.
Press, 1990).
28
"Necessary Fictions," Sewanee Review 93 (1985): 499-504; the quotation
is from p. 503.
29 As I write
this article Paul Seydor is acclaimed by Michael Sragow in "Ty Cobb Was
Never Mr. Nice Guy," the New York Times (27 November 1994), along with the
director of Cobb, Ron Shelton: "The director and his film editor, Paul
Seydor, a former college English professor, are not afraid of using literary
techniques in their movies" ("Arts and Leisure," p. 24). The
emergence of the author of Peckinpah: The Western Films as the editor of a
major motion picture strikes me as confirmation that cinema critics, for all
their trafficking in fantasy, are far more professional, far more in touch with
the realities of American society, than most literary critics.
30 In New
Essays on "The Red Badge of Courage", ed. Lee Clark Mitchell (New
York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), see "Getting Used to the 'Original
Form' of The Red Badge of Courage" (pp. 25-47).
31 Pizer's
campaign against the restored Red Badge of Courage has been unremitting,
beginning with "'The Red Badge of Courage Nobody Knows': A Brief
Rejoinder," Studies in the Novel 11 (1979): 77-81, which evoked a response
by Henry Binder, "Donald Pizer, Ripley Hitchcock, and The Red Badge of
Courage," Studies in the Novel 11 (1979): 216-23. Recently Pizer has used
a collection of criticism in his campaign, the Critical Essays on Stephen
Crane's "The Red Badge of Courage" (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990), where
a commissioned essay by James Colvert, "Crane, Hitchcock, and the Binder
Edition of The Red Badge of Courage" (pp. 238-63) was wholly devoted to
attacking the restored text.
In a review of
Pizer's collection in Studies in the Novel 23 (1991), Mary Ann Shaw protested:
"one wishes fair representation had been allowed in support of the
'original and uncut' version of the manuscript by its leading proponents, Hershel Parker and his former student Henry
Binder" (p. 400). ln American Literary Realism 1870-1910 25 (1993): pp.
88-89, Eric Solomon glanced at the "full-blown, if gentlemanly,
demolition" of the reconstructed Red Badge of Courage by James Colvert,
then protested: "In my opinion, then, Donald Pizer, while hinting at this
volume's method in his introduction, has missed full disclosure. The book is in
many ways a response to the 1986 New Essays on "The Red Badge of
Courage", edited by Lee Clark Mitchell, which not only reflects
post-structural critical concerns but also employs the Binder text, thus doubly
offending Donald Pizer's stance. While selecting fine essays, Pizer also makes
certain that many of them lead to his own and Colvert's conclusion regarding
texts; the more enigmatic is the answer to what Henry Fleming learns about
himself and his world, the more appropriate is the shortened text that tends to
leave questions unanswered - and the more plausible are Donald Pizer's own
arguments. Fine. But I would have appreciated either a straightforward (no
irony or pun this time) explanation of editorial process early on or an
inclusion of some words by Binder or Parker on the textual matter - other than
those quoted by Colvert" (p. 89).
32 Stephen
Crane: An Annotated Bibliography of Secondary Scholarship (New York: G. K.
Hall, 1992), p. 110.
33 Multiple
Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (New York: Oxford Univ. Press,
1991), p. 227.
HERSHEL
PARKER is H. Fletcher
Brown Professor at the University of Delaware and Associate General Editor of
The Writings of Herman Melville (1968). He is the author of Flawed Texts and
Verbal Icons (1984), Reading "Billy Budd" (1990), and an editor of
The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 4th edition (1994). Cambridge is
the publisher of his and Brian Higgins's Herman Melville: The Contemporary
Reviews (1995). His edition of Pierre for Harper-Collins (1995) is illustrated
by Maurice Sendak. In the summer of 1996, Norton will publish the first volume
of his Herman Melville; the second volume is due out early in 1998. He is also
a work on an expansion of Jay Leyda's The Melville Log.
Abstract:
Cinema critics
and literary critics have totally opposing views of "flawed" or even
"mutilated" text. Paradoxically, the cinema critic readily accepts
restoration of the director's cut; the literary critic frowns on the concept of
reconstructing a flawed novel. Examples are given of films which went through
the cutter and had been restored. Paul Seydor's 'Peckinpah: The Western Films'
is cited as a scholarly document on flawed films. Several flawed novels have
also been cited and examined. These include Mark Twain's 'Pudd'nhead Wilson'
and F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'Tender is the Night.'
