Jerry Ward's post Katrina mention was more fun, but here is a 2021 attempt to deal with something so strange the writer does not want to believe it, on principle.

 

“Textual Continuity”--John K. Young, in 2021 Textual Cultures.

         Obviously, this selection belies many nuanced points of divergence among these theorists, but my point is the centrality of textual change (or possibility, fluidity, energy) to contemporary ideas of textuality and creativity. In coming at these ideas from the opposite direction, so to speak, I will be disagreeing in principle with Hershel Parker’s contention that “what goes unrevised to a greater or lesser extent goes unrethought, unrestructured, carrying its original intentionality in a new context where that intentionality is more or less at war with the different intentionality in the altered or newly written passages” (1984, 228–9). While it may well be the case, as Parker suggests, that authors in the process of revision “routinely” leave “hunks” of a text unchanged while focusing primarily on those areas undergoing revision (1984, 228), it is also often the case that an author does reconceive of the static portions of a new version as carefully as those denoting the “author’s flare-ups of revisional energy” (Eggert 2009, 210). In that respect, we might think of textual continuity as potential change that does not happen (but could, in principle, at another point in a text’s history). As Hannah Sullivan suggests in her study of 20th-century revision habits, an absence of revision “points to the balance between what changes and what stays the same” (2013, 4). My examination of textual continuity takes that term not in a teleological, Whiggish sense, but as cases of variation not occurring. . . .

 

         When Fallon included this story, now titled “The Last Stand”, in her 2011 collection You Know When the Men Are Gone, largely focused on the lives of military families, she changed Flip to Kit Murphy, though his wife’s name remains Helena, and revised his response to her question about his foot (which is linguistically identical in this version): “No.” He wanted to say that it was never going to be okay, that he couldn’t screw it up any more tonight than it already was. His eyes started to get used to the darkness and he could make out her outline by the alarm clock’s light, how she sat at the edge of her bed. (2011, 153) Clearly there is a good deal of variability even in this short example, including changes in the text’s title and the protagonist’s name, a shift from dialogue to indirect discourse, with its accompanying increase in readers’ access to Kit’s consciousness, and the merger of two paragraphs into one. The rewritten second sentence in the book version seems clearly to be a local case of “horizontal revision”, in Tanselle’s terms, as it “aims at intensifying, refining, or improving the work” (1990, 53), in this case adapting Kit’s broader pattern of reticence to encompass his failure (or inability) to express the depth of his physical and emotional pain, transferring what is an angry rejoinder in the magazine story to an entirely internalized response in the book chapter. But I also see the unchanged third sentence as manifesting a horizontal continuity, to adopt Tanselle’s taxonomy, insofar as these kinds of continuity “spring from the same conception of an organic whole as the original version manifested” (1990, 58). (I am inferring Fallon’s decision not to change this sentence on the basis of these two published documents, though the eventual availability of her archive might reveal additional layers of changing away from and then back to this version as she was assembling the collection of stories into a book.) Just as the shift to Murphy’s silence is consistent with the story’s broader portrayal of his character, so too is his perception of his wife sitting on “her bed” (she has deliberately reserved a motel room with two beds) an important element of his gradual, if begrudging, acceptance of her decision to end their marriage. Thus, I presume that Fallon here is working through the same process as Borges’s playwright, revising on the one hand and deciding to let the original text stand on the other, in both cases with an equally attentive eye to these textual moments’ standing in relation to a broader conception of the work. It could be the case, as eventual archival evidence might show, that Fallon’s revision process falls more in line with Parker’s conclusions about a lack of interest in revision in unchanged portions of a text. Fallon’s comments on the revision process for this story seem to suggest otherwise, however. In an interview with Christi Craig, for example, Fallon recalls Kit Murphy as one of the characters in the collection for whom she had a particular “soft spot”: “I’d say that I worked on his story, ‘The Last Stand,’ longer and harder than any other. Even after it was published in Salamander Magazine, I felt compelled to keep rewriting it, to infuse it with as much genuine experience as possible” (Craig 2012).