FOUND 18 February 2022--incomplete, rough, but I will put it on record
22
September-4 October 2009; 24 December 2009
11-19
March 2010; 29 March 2010
MAYBE
I CAN SALVAGE SEVERAL PARAGRAPHS.
Doing Biography Covertly:
Fifteen Years as a Textual Scholar
In the
previous chapter my topic was clear: what I brought to my work on Melville at
Northwestern in the 1960s. The decade and a half after going to USC are harder
to characterize. It looks as if I had kept biography at arm's length most of the
time, and later I wrote of this time as if what I was doing was antithetical to
biography. In an attempt at humor, portraying myself as having been frozen out
of the textual field by Fredson Bowers and his allies, I claimed to have been
reduced from being a metatextualist to merely a biographer. In fact, I tended
to think of my leading two different careers, one focused on Melville biography
still, one on textual histories of books by writers such as Mark Twain, Henry
James, Stephen Crane, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and Norman Mailer.
In the second career I pursued mainly the questions I had talked to James
Meriwether about--those involving textual evidence, textual theory, literary
criticism, literary theory, and creativity theory. Now it seems clear that the
work I was doing on the other American writers was also at bottom biographical.
Much of
my work met ferocious resistance in the 1970s from those who thought of
themselves as textual scholars, partly because I felt driven to expose the incompetence
and irresponsibility of the leading American bibliographer and textual
theorist, Fredson Bowers, lest we all be blackened by his follies, and partly
because everything I was learning about the compositional process set me at
odds with W. W. Greg's rationale of copy-text. What I was discovering about Fitzgerald,
Crane, and the others often outraged people who thought of themselves as
textual scholars but were blinded still by their New Critical training. I was violating
the doctrines of the New Textualism and exposing the emperor not only as naked
but as deformed and I was violating the almost identical doctrines of the New
Criticism. Beginning in the mid 1980s my work met ferocious resistance from
those who thought of themselves as critics and critical theorists who had
advanced beyond the New Criticism to a new view of the text as the result of a
social process rather than the product of a creative artist. By 1990 or so Greg was irrelevant and the text
as social product was triumphant. What no one seemed to recognize was that social-product
texts edited according to Jerome McGann or Jack Stillinger were no-muss no-fuss
jobs, since the "editors" were merely to take (most times) what had
been published as the copy-text (as James Thorpe had pronounced in the 1970s) and
not bother with manuscripts. It was almost the 1950s and early 1960s all over
again, when all the critic had to do was take up a Rinehart Edition of Vanity Fair, say, and write an essay in
its unity.
From the start at USC, savoring the California
freedom, I contrived new graduate courses in which I tried to unite literary criticism
with textual evidence. Bowers's Textual
and Literary Criticism had been mis-titled: he was mainly making the point
that literary criticism could be wasted if lavished upon an imperfect text. He
was not examining the assumptions of schools of literary criticism and how
those assumptions might relate to textual criticism. In the Fall of 1969 I
asked students to analyze the critical assumptions in the section from G.
Wilson Knight's The Wheel of Fire
reprinted in the Signet Measure for
Measure and the critical assumptions of several essays on The Red Badge of Courage and Gulliver's Travels. What strikes me now
is how early I was in guiding students to work with conventional literary
criticism and textual criticism, which already included in my mind the
forbidden topic of the author's intention. In trying to see how textual practices and critical
practices could be reconciled with what I was learning about the creative
process I was following up on the ideas that I had talked to James Meriwether
about in 1967.
Soon there was more to think with
besides my evidence from Melville. Year by year the CEAA was amassing a trove
of new basic textual evidence about American literature. Beginning in 1969, as
CEAA examiner I had the opportunity to study in detail the textual histories of
books by Franklin, Charles Brockden Brown, Hawthorne (the posthumous romances),
Mark Twain, Howells, and others. As a member of the CEAA Advisory Committee
1971-1974 I got to examine others' reports on textual histories and problems.
All the new CEAA volumes contained textual discussions and apparatuses which
demanded and rewarded scrutiny as I picked apart the arguments and applied them
to textual situations I knew. Year by year, Tanselle added a magisterial
contribution to Bowers's Studies in
Bibliography. That annual became richer and more relevant to American
literature, as did PBSA, and several new
(although short-lived) textual publications were started, among them Proof, Direction Line, the CEAA
Newsletter, Editorial Quarterly .In this period of burgeoning
information, several editors of the CEAA editions and other academics critical
of them began engaging in self-educating debates in which Greg and Bowers were
applied, re-evaluated, and sometimes qualified, if not challenged. A dozen or
two youngish scholars were beginning to rejuvenate a field that had been
declared off limits to all but dullards. It seemed that, gradually, awkwardly,
a new era in textual scholarship might be emerging.
Early caveats (rather than challenges) to the New Criticism
such as E. D. Hirsch's "Objective Interpretation" (PMLA 1960) treated the text as a New
Critic would, as immutable, and made no use of evidence of composition,
revision, and transmission, even though he argued that the meaning of the text
was the author's.
Pulling
rabbits out of hats. Blackballed from CSE meant that I had to work on isolated
projects, including Pudd'nhead and An American Dream. These were things that I
could do on my own, or with a single collaborator. And I could work on Henry
James on my own, and make use of work others were beginning to do on Dreiser
and Faulkner, especially. I could still contribute to textual studies, but from
the sidelines. When the chance came to write for Critical Inquiry I was acting
as a literary theorist; and none of the responders accurately said what I had
done. It was too radical, too basic, for them to grasp. That's the story: So
writing Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons was making the best of a limited and
limiting situation, where I was squeezed out, blackballed, silenced.
With so many textual studies being
published and also with so many facsimile editions suddenly appearing, most of
them unrelated to the CEAA editions, you could learn something about many
textual problems even if you were stationed far away from great libraries. In
the 1970s I found a series of challenging textual situations which I could
write about on the basis of commonly available books (some of them facsimiles)
and magazines as well as photocopies of manuscripts supplied by libraries. After a while I defined this part of what I
was doing as "pulling rabbits out of hats"--using photocopies of Mark
Twain Pudd'nhead Wilson papers from
the Bancroft Library, for example, or using the facsimile of the portion of the
manuscript of The Red Badge of Courage
housed in Virginia, or comparing (at the suggestion of Bruce Bebb) the Esquire
version of An American Dream against
the Dial Press version. This was textual work I could mostly perform without
going forth to the eastern archives and remaining there for prolonged periods
(although I did, for example, go to the Pierpont Morgan Library for Mark Twain
and eventually gained access to Mailer's storage vault and walked away with two
of his working ledgers for An American
Dream). Every year I worked on several diverse projects, hopscotching,
pushing one ahead then another. I was plugging away at author headnotes and
textual footnotes for the planned Norton
Anthology of American Literature from 1973 through 1978, and from 1972 on I
was writing the annual Melville chapter for American
Literary Scholarship. I found most of the writing dismaying because it
ignored biographical evidence, as in articles or even books which dealt with
the development of Melville as a
story writer without bothering to establish the chronology of the composition
of the stories and Israel Potter and The Confidence-Man. I
was writing portions of "Historical Notes" for NN volumes that were
not published for many years. And year by year I was engaged in two or more
over-riding projects from which I learned lessons about textual problems not
anticipated by Greg or Bowers on one side or W. K. Wimsatt and xxxx Beardsley
or E. D. Hirsch and James Thorpe on the other. Reading Shakespeare I had made
myself assume that difficult sentences and scenes should make sense. In the
1970s, studying and then teaching classic American texts which did not make
sense, I resorted to biographical and textual evidence (forbidden by the New
Criticism) to find out why.
In February 1973 came a sickening violation--the
Penguin Moby-Dick in which Harold
Beaver had taken over most of the Hayford-Parker textual section, including not
only the list of variants between the American and English editions but also
the list of [ck 1967 MD] "Hayford-Parker Emendations" (consisting of
words not in either 1851 edition) and "Hayford-Parker Emendations
Considered." For these last lists he dropped our names and simply said
"Other Emendations Adopted" and "Other Emendations
Considered." Norton declined to sue. Twenty-four years later Beaver made
partial amends in a review of volume one of my biography in the edition of TLS that was for sale as I did research
the British Museum, just in time for the current TLS to speed my entry into the great old Reading Room during its
final week. In 1973 Beaver forced me to confront myself. On the one hand, I was
spending an inordinate amount of time trying to supply others with new
information, particularly with previously unknown reviews of Melville. I had
stuffed filing drawers at the Newberry with new reviews, only to be outraged
when researchers "discovered" them in there and submitted them for
publication. Hayford manifested a seemingly sincere deference to the
psychologist Henry A. Murray, willing to portray himself and Merton M. Sealts,
Jr., as mere drones assembling evidence for Murray to sample and possibly to
convert into living interpretation. I did not mind doing scut work, but I
wanted credit for it, whenever I could get it. And I was beginning to see that
making chronologies and collating texts may have been dog's work, but story by
story, book by book, that work was amassing information no one else had. With
the new mass of information available, a body just might learn to think freshly
about old issues and about questions that nobody had raised.
The defining moment in this part of my
career began when I walked into an undergraduate class early in 1972 prepared
to teach Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night
and found that the students had been sold the Cowley edition, reordered
chronologically. This was not truly a "Revised" edition, of course,
but an edition reordered with only tiny revisions. After an aghast moment I
launched into forty-nine passionate minutes on why they had been sold a
fraudulent book, showing them, for instance, that the originally order was
literally built into the reordered thing Cowley published, that everything in
certain sections of the book they held in hand was written to follow another
section, not to precede it--written so that as they progressed readers would
have particular passages in mind. Later that Spring I enlisted Brian Higgins, a
young Englishman just earning his PhD, to look at the problems with me. In his
initial response he pointed out that the mystery story element remains intact
in Cowley even though all mystery has been removed--in Cowley any reader knows
what Nicole was doing in the bathroom and why. We began work on an article that
grew beyond the standard eight-to-ten page explication--an unusual length but
appropriate for an unusual sort of study, but one which was incontrovertible
and, we thought uncontroversial. In the official Fall 1974 memo to the
department I explained what the article meant to my thinking: "Ever since
writing with Brian Higgins the long study of Tender is the Night which will appear in the next Proof I have become more and more
committed to writing lengthy essays which make detailed critical
interpretations on the basis of thorough study of textual problems." In
and out of the classroom through the 1970s I was working with critical
approaches and assumptions and trying to relate them to textual assumptions,
but the connections were difficult to push because the words (starting with
"textual" and "critical") might be the same but the
meanings might be different. Nobody in the CEAA had been talking about the
aesthetic consequences of rearranging large hunks of prose.
In 1975 at a party where I was talking
passionately about what I had been finding on several American novels, Max
Schulz asked a question chairmen just don't ask: "Why don't you teach what you're doing?" As a result of
that invitation, in the spring of 1976 I taught a course called "Textual
Evidence and Literary Interpretation." At the end of the semester I
annotated a copy of the syllabus for Max: "I think this goes in the
category of innovative courses. Despite the formidable subject matter, it was
the most exciting course I have ever taught. People elsewhere felt the
excitement, and courses are being devised in happy imitation of it." It
was true. The students were as excited as I was, almost, and colleagues around
the country were asking for the syllabus so they could construct their own
courses. In the next years I tried for
more precise titles without achieving accuracy and felicity. Texual evidence,
literary criticism, creativity, aesthetics, literary theory--unequal things met
and mixed [USE ART] in these titles. In the end the nearest I could get to
describing what I was doing was Textual
Icon/Textual Iconoclasm, which a colleague shot down. I settled for the infelicitous but accurate Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons (1984). (The Verbal Icon, of course, recalled the
influential 1954 New Critical masterpiece by W. K. Wimsatt.)
When I next taught this class nine students got eleven
publications from it, a few of them career-starting publications. I had gone as
far as I could go at USC and had moved into uncharted territory. Enough of
pulling rabbits out of hats. It was time to go East, to the libraries.
Looking back at this syllabus I see a gap, the
failure to assign anything on the creative process. It was not because I had
not looked, it was because I could find almost nothing applicable to literary
texts. John Dewey in Art and Experience
was the best I could find, but his treatment was brief. As I soon found, there was very
little written on the creative process that could help a textual editor make
sense of a variety of literary problems. You could find advice on how to make
your child creative, on how creativity is allied with mental illness, but you
could not find a serious study of literary creativity anywhere. I looked.
Albert Rothenberg still had not published The
Emerging Goddess: The Creative Process in Art, Science, and Other Fields
(1979). He had in fact published a magnificent monograph on The Iceman Cometh which had been ignored
by literary critics, and never made it into American
Literary Scholarship and which never made it into O'Neill criticism, as far
as I know. When I read it, belatedly, after his book came out, I saw that we
had been blazing parallel trails at the time I had been hacking my way alone,
no one else in sight.
The greatest obstacle to thought was
the man who had been an innovator and liberator, Fredson Bowers. In the post-Mumford and post-Wilson climate,
the ongoing torrent of his publications became a problem for anyone who cared
about textual editing. Should you gloss over his increasingly subjective manipulations
of the texts and his increasingly weird apparatuses so as not to give aid and
comfort to the enemy? Could you criticize him at all in a way that would not
undermine the whole CEAA enterprise? In March 1974 I arranged to write an
article on the Virginia Maggie: A Girl of
the Streets for Katz's Proof 5
and by August 1974, during Nixon's last days, I had drawn in a young Englishman
Brian Higgins, who had written his USC PhD on Melville. I found the textual
work not "scientific" but the work of a peculiarly inattentive
egomaniacal mad scientist of a 1930s B movie. Bowers had leaned over backwards
in order to justify his preference for the expurgated 1896 edition over Crane's
honest 1893 book. The evidence would have supported only the most conservative
Gregian text, but Bowers had talked himself into justifying the 1896 text so
that the product was a titivated version of the 1896 expurgation: the mad
scientist was reaching for 1893 and seizing on 1896. Fantastic editorial
decisions (such as the deletion of the fat man in Ch. 17) were justified by
grotesque literary arguments. The textual lists were a horror. Even aside from
the fact that they contained far too many unjustifiable emendations and were
illogically and inhumanely designed, they were so weakened by omissions and
errors as to be totally useless. The CEAA had tied itself to the great
bibliographer who had descended into fantasy, no more capable of riding herd on
the expenditure of vast sums of money from the federal government than he was
of rounding up and riding herd on a list of variant words. Idealistic in those
days, I wrote up my evidence with the help of Brian Higgins and submitted it to
the CEAA in January 1975, asking that the seal given to Maggie be rescinded. On 4 June 1975 the CEAA Advisory Committee
refused to rescind the seal, and I was told in a letter dated 26 June that the
Committee felt "that it would be inappropriate for the CEAA to explain for
publications its reasons for refusing to withdraw a seal already awarded to a volume."
The CEAA closed ranks around Fredson Bowers. Worse, Katz abruptly dropped the Maggie article from the 1975 Proof then in September 1976 declined to
publish it in the next Proof either.
By then, on 11 February 1975, Bowers
had written to the director of the CEAA: "I am not at all sure of the
legal position in desealing a volume . . . . It is a purely hypothetical
situation, but a publisher of a desealed volume might question the legal basis
as causing him financial harm and bring suit with punitive damages, which I
suppose would be collected, if successful, from the individual members of the
Committee, or possibly MLA." He added: "It should be thoroughly
understood that under the copyright laws, this communication is my private
property, and that verbal dissemination as well as printed is covered by my
rights--indeed any form of reference in anything that could be construed as
public." The foot of a page contained this warning, all in capitals:
"CONFIDENTIAL COMMUNICATION. NO PART MAY BE PRINTED OR REFERRED TO IN
PRINT WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE WRITER ON PENALTY OF A PROMPT LAWSUIT." On
3 April 1975, Bowers wrote to John Gerber, who was heading the committee that
established the successor organization, the Center for Scholarly Editions:
"In my private and confidential view, the only person I think ought never
to be considered for the committee or chairman is Hershel Parker." The
blackballing worked. By never being a member of the Center for Scholarly
Editions I lost precious opportunities to evaluate new textual situations as I
had been doing for the CEAA. No one would touch the Maggie article. I thought for months that it would be published in
one particular bibliographical journal. The editors promised not to ask a
particular ally of Bowers's to review it, but they did, before they rejected
it. Through the late 1970s it was the best-known unpublished American piece of
textual scholarship.
Deprived of my chance to work through
textual histories of CSE volumes, I seized other opportunities to focus in
great detail on a handful of American masterpieces. It happened that one of
them had been edited by Bowers. On 10 November 1974 I took on the chore of
reviewing Bowers's Virginia edition of The
Red Badge of Courage for Nineteenth-Century
Fiction along with his 1972 NCR / Microcard Editions The Red Badge of Courage: A Facsimile Edition of the Manuscript. I
had made one of my casual notes in 1972 that I should reconstruct the
manuscript of The Red Badge of Courage
(as far as possible) and read the book that way. I had not gotten round to it.
Now, after a time, I focused on what was wrong with Bowers's facsimile edition
of the manuscript. This elaborate, enormously expensive book, I soon realized,
was not a facsimile of "The
Final Manuscript." It contained in sequential pages a facsimile (some
edges carelessly cut off in the photographing) of those leaves of the
manuscript which Crane had given to a friend and which had ended up at
Charlottesville. It was a facsimile of that portion of the manuscript which was
at Virginia--the greater part of the whole manuscript, some of which survived
elsewhere and some of which was lost. Not in sequence at all but relegated to
the back by Bowers were the surviving pages of Chapter 12, the longest and by
all odds the most crucial chapter in the book. These pages were mislabeled
"Discarded Chapter XII," instead of something more accurate like
"Surviving Portions of Chapter 12."
When the book had been the manuscript
Crane was trying to sell, Ch. 12 had followed Ch. 11 and preceded Ch. 13. It
had been an integral part of the manuscript. It was typical of Bowers, who
tended to fixate on later texts not to realize that the value of a facsimile
edition of the manuscript would lie in presenting all the known leaves of the
final manuscript in sequence, whatever institutional or private library they
happened to come to rest in. In terms of textual theory, he was more or less
systematically abandoning the wise council of W. W. Greg and reverting to the
advice of Ronald S. McKerrow, taking any excuse to adopt readings from a late
text. What this showed, ultimately, was a predisposition to ignore the creative
process.
In November 1975, for one of the most
ecstatic two hour stretches of my life, I read the first eleven chapters, then
read the surviving parts of Ch. 12 and whenever possible filled out gaps with
portions of the fortuitously surviving rough draft, so as to get an idea of the
lost content, then read what had originally been numbered 13, and so on to the
end, reading the original words whenever they survived. Fleming's self-delusion
and vainglory was consistent throughout the book. If what Crane wrote had been
printed, there would have been no controversy over the young man's courage or
cowardice: the text was so mangled as to be uninterpretable in any final way. I
said in the review: "This rather motley and slightly incomplete
reconstruction, I wager, would be the best possible basis for New Critical
demonstrations of the unity of the novel--the sort of essays which have been lavished
upon mere reprints (or reprints of reprints) of the Appleton text, a text which
reached its final form as the result of omissions so hasty and ill-conceived
that several passages still depend for their meaning upon passages which were
excised." After I had read Red Badge
almost as Crane wrote it I went back into an undergraduate class at USC and
confessed that I had taught it wrong in the last class. Sitting on the corner
of the desk, a triangular tear in what a librarian called my Viet Cong pants, I
passionately explained how Crane meant the title to be understood. It was a
remarkable fifty minutes, the first time anyone in the world had taught The Red Badge of Courage from the text
Crane had tried so long and hard to get into print. In the evaluations two
students said I was incompetent because I had admitted not knowing how to teach
a book and had taught it again. Well, after Kent State all standards had been
thrown out the window, but I would continue to teach passionately.
When published in the March 1976 Nineteenth-Century Fiction, my article
contained as a final zinger my new student Henry Binder's discovery that, on
the most mundane level, Bowers had faked an essential CEAA requirement, a
Hinman Machine collation of first and last texts of the Appleton edition. On 8
April 1976 Bowers wrote "Dear Parker": "if I hear of any further
innuendoes about my expenditure of NEH funds, and the ethics of my work, you
will be hearing from my lawyer in the matter of libel, and so will any journal
that prints such remarks. I am in fact reserving action on some statements made
in this review." He sent a copy to the editor, who scoffed at the threat.
Fredson Bowers, the most famous American bibliography of the time and at his
best a brilliant expositor of copy-text theory, had become a slovenly
researcher willing to fake research, a pompous, idiosyncratic literary critic,
and a vehement bully who silenced critics by threats of lawsuits and who
intimidated colleagues into acquiescing while he silenced genuine literary criticism.
His influence was still so powerful that some of the scholarly editions
imitated the worst of this textual practices and the weirdest of his
apparatuses. An enormous amount of federal money was being wasted every year.
Human life was being wasted. And by writing the Melville chapter in American Literary Scholarship I saw that
most of the publishing was wasted effort because so many academics were blindly
applying the New Criticism, blind to biographical information which might prove
their arguments impossible.
26 November 2006--I have to get a
narrative for the 1970s. The story is beginning to think about Reading,
Sequence of Reading, Authorial intention, Creativity, and simultaneously
beginning to look critically at editorial apparatuses (which are inhuman etc)
and editorial policies (which are counter to creativity etc). So reviewing
Maggie goes on while I am looking at many textual situations; then Red Badge
explodes, with my getting students involved;
What
Melville critics could not do, the ones supposed to write Historical Notes
The study of Tender is the Night had been thrust upon me in the most brutal way,
the intrusion of the incomprehensible Cowley edition into the classroom. Cowley
had handed me a hat with a rabbit in it, although I enlisted a partner in
pulling it out. I was willing to hunt down other rabbits so I could then pull
them out of hats.
One
such opportunity came when Robert Milder published an article on the unity of
Melville's intentions in Pierre. When did this come out?CHECK
Need
to say ALL THIS WAS BIOGRAPHICAL TOO
portraits
of writers doing what they do
Mark
Twain assuming that he can get away with violent shifts during composition and
drastic reordering afterwards and still have something that will make some
sense
Crane
a young sick kid beaden down and desperate to publish
Fitzgerald
under great strain hoping to find a way to get a second chance for his failed
masterpiece, Tender is the Night
Mailer
fearing to expose himself and wrecking the structure in the process
MUST
QUOTE PROHIBITIONS AGAINST USE OF BIOGRAPHY
Actually
QUOTE Wimsatt et al.
The level
of hysterical reaction by critics was almost unimaginably high. Milton R. Stern
declared that Brian Higgins and I were totalitarians in arguing for the
superiority of the first edition of Tender is the Night over the Cowley
edition, an attempt to embody Fitzgerald's later wishful notes that the book
might have succeeded if he had reordered some sections. Our defense of the book
in the order Fitzgerald wrote it (in which at one point he commented on the
purpose and effect of the order) was totalitarian; whatever the author later
said he wished he had done overrode what he had done during the creative
process. The level of hysterical reaction is clear, also, in the review of my
1984 Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons in
the Sewanee Review. There Gary Davenport declared that
"the idea of the [perfect] text is an absolute necessity" if the
study of literature is to make sense. If I had been right, the moment Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons was
published all "the higher values of literary culture that have survived,
somehow, from the beginnings of literacy to our Age of Information" would
have shattered. I was "dangerously mistaken," a threat to Western
Civilization if I had been right, according to Davenport;
my attempt to challenge the sanctity of texts was "inimical to the higher
values of literary culture that have survived, somehow, from the beginnings of
literacy to our Age of Information."
The
In his The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington:xxx:
University of Kentucky Press, 1954) Wimsatt reprinted this and "The
Affective Fallacy," another collaboration with Beardsley, as
"preliminary essays." "The Intentional Fallacy," in
particular, became one of the most influential critical essays of the twentieth
century. Reference to the 1954 was the best way I could find in 1984 for
identifying the nature of my iconoclastic treatise book--Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons. My book, I must acknowledge, was
rejected by textualists and literary critics alike, almost all of them still
under the sway of the New Criticism which Wimsatt and Beardsley had helped to
define. A quarter century and more later, Google Books and Amazon.com reveal
that Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons
has itself achieved near-classic status, cited approvingly by
In mid-July 2008 I glanced at Amazon's new list of anyone's
books that cite references by relevance or date, mainly books where the authors
cite an edition of Melville I have edited, that sort of casual thing. You can see from the listing on Amazon if
anything of substance has been said in the book. I ended up spending several hours on the
Amazon list for Flawed Texts and Verbal
Icons, then I went down Google Books listings for FT&VI. I was astounded at what has been said after
the reviews were in. Most of the
reviewers quite rabidly tried to kill it--either to protect the New Criticism
(at that late date) or to defend the now discredited Greg-Bowers editorial
theory and practice. In the Sewanee Review the critic said if I were
right Western Civilization would crumble since it is built on belief in the
Word. Now, a quarter century later, the reputation of the book is high, and
what's most interesting is that it has proved useful to an astonishing range of
scholars--editors of the Bible!
Medievalists! Shakespeareans! Musicologists! Conservationists!
Still worse, the power Wimsatt and
Beardsley and the other founders of the New Criticism was not only manifested
in a temporary sweeping away biographical study as a serious endeavor in the
academy but lasted. The tenets of the
New Criticism, as I argued throughout Flawed
Texts and Verbal Icons, were alive and well in subsequent fads such as
phenomenology, deconstructionism, reader response criticism, and the New
Historicism. The New Criticism dominates academic criticism to this day. Well
into the twenty-first century most reviewers of biographies are still New
Critics at the bone, never trained as scholars and incapable of judging
historical evidence. Biographers tend to forget just how much hostility there
still is toward biography. We also tend
to forget just how ignorant most critics are of what is involved in biographical
study even when they venture to write "A Brief Biography," as Robert
Milder did for A Historical Guide to
Herman Melville.
.
In Contesting the Subject the
mentions are by Stanley Fish, Alison Booth, and particularly Valerie Ross. I
tend to think that William H. Epstein's collection Contesting the Subject: Essays in the Postmodern Theory and Practice of
Biography and Biographical Criticism (Purdue, 1991) was part of an attempt
to co-op biography for postmodernism, so that postmodernism would rather take
over biography, leaving nothing of, say, traditional reporting of archival
research, but in Recognizing Biography
In Biography:
An Annotated Bibliography, Carl Rollyson includes an entry for W. K.
Wimsatt, Jr., and M. C. Beardsley's "The Intentional Fallacy," The Sewnee Review 54 (July-September,
1946), 468-487:
A
classic argument against taking the author's intention into account in
interpreting a work of literature. Wimsatt and Beardsley do not, however,
reject all biographical evidence since it "need not involve
intentionalism, because while it may be evidence of what the author intended,
it may also be evidence of the meaning of his words and the dramatic character
of his utterance."
In
my working collection of newish books on biography from Altick and Holmes to
Backscheider and Benton the only indexes in which I find references to Wimsatt
and Beardsley are William H. Epstein's 1987 Recognizing
Biography and his 1991 collection, Contesting
the Subject. (1991)and in the
earlier book the references are to Wimsatt as a Johnson scholar--a salutary
reminder that Wimsatt, now remembered as a theorist, was steeped in the facts
of the lives of Johnson and Boswell. By the early 1980s, Cleanth Brooks was
dismayed at the way he and Wimsatt were being remembered as if they had not
been scholars as well as theorists. In the chapter on "The Current
Practice of Theory" in my 1984 Flawed
Texts and Verbal Icons I recorded his concerns: "Cleanth Brooks
cautions me not to forget Wimsatt's own biographical studies and assures me
that he does not believe Wimsatt would have found anything to disagree with in
my description of the author at work in Chapter 1. While accepting Brooks's
judgment, I think the history of criticism shows that the language of Wimsatt
and Beardsley lent itself to extreme interpretation." The history of
criticism over subsequent decades shows the same extreme interpretation and,
more important, shows the enduring power of the ideas of the pioneering New
Critics over critics who called themselves structuralists, deconstructionists,
reader response critics, New Historicists, or some other name. The New
Criticism still dominates popular criticism and still fails to recognize
biographical scholarship or even attempts to subvert it.
Biographers still ought to be afraid
of the New Criticism, I believe, for even reviewers of biographies (excepting
only reviewers who are fellow biographers who write from documents, not other
biographies) are usually New Critics by training still. Instead, we biographers
see ourselves as heroic folk, fresh from the latest high adventure or embarked
on a new one. Biography, Stephen B. Oates declared in Biography as High Adventure (1986) "is currently enjoying
immense popularity in the United States"--and, of course, in the United
Kingdom. We were heroes all, but what are the academic critics making of our
treasures?
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