In most cases involving works published during the last century, the assumption of textual stability is not wildly wrong. It would be harder for McGann, McKenzie, Chartier, or de Grazia and Stallybrass to make the case for the attention to textual materials of recent authors who appear only in modern printed editions. Although, to use one of McGann’s examples, W. H. Auden’s decision to revoke “September 1, 1939” makes the editorial history of this one poem of critical moment, the majority of Auden’s poems reappear in various editions with wording, spelling, capitalization, and even punctuation that are almost identical. This relative stability is surely part of the reason those who live in a world of modern printed editions find the arguments for textual criticism first trivial and then deeply frustrating. Referring to one sanguine critic of Emily Dickinson and his assurance that the words on the page before him were the absolute poem, McGann notes that “he could not even see such problems.”39
As one moves away from the relative stability of modern printing, the challenge of textual variance becomes more pressing. The apparent stability of a mechanically printed text may on occasion be illusory (as McGann demonstrates, a reader who thinks there is no textual problem with regard to Dickinson or Auden is living in a fool’s paradise), but only a few novels or poems of the last two centuries would approach the degree of fluidity, the continual mouvance, that is the norm for vernacular texts in the Middle Ages. The stability of the modern printed text and its apparent existence as a self-contained object have set the limits of our understanding of what a text is. If we are to see the problem, we must try to understand how this has happened.
This development did not happen quickly or easily. Printed books were not inherently reliable or stable and only became so within an elaborate system of regulation. As Adrian Johns has shown, it took several centuries to move from the slippery world of pirated editions and clandestine volumes of the early book trade and establish something approaching modern copyright, in which author and text have clear and stable identities.40 Into the eighteenth century, “Unauthorized translations, epitomes, imitations, and other varieties of ‘impropriety’ were … routine hazards.”41 The tribulations of John Flamsteed (1646–1719), Astronomer Royal, at the hands of Grub Street pirates offer a case in point. Johns notes that an early modern reader “could not necessarily take for granted that something calling itself John Flamsteed’s Historia Cœlestis would be owned by Flamsteed himself as the product of his authorship.”42 In England, under the direction of the powerful Stationers’ Hall, a combination of commercial organization and government licensing gradually curtailed illicit copies and ensured reliable transmission. Only under these conditions could printed material inspire general trust, a precondition for the widespread dissemination of the new experimental philosophy to which Flamsteed was contributing.43 Once those conditions were established, however, it became very difficult to think outside them. As Johns notes, “We ourselves routinely rely on stable communications in our making and maintenance of knowledge.… That stability helps to underpin the confidence we feel in our impressions and beliefs.… Even the brisk skepticism we may express about certain printed materials—tabloid newspapers, say—rests on it, inasmuch as we feel confident that we can readily and consistently identify what it is we are scorning.”44 Reliable print was not just a prerequisite for modern ways of knowing but became inseparable from them. An author was someone whose writings had been accredited by being printed; knowledge was what could be expressed in a printed book.45 To this day the term “publication” in academic parlance essentially means printing. As print became knowledge, all that was not print ceased to be knowledge, so that both handwritten documents and speech fell increasingly into a nebulous realm of untrustworthy ephemera.
Not that print became more exclusive. On the contrary, one of the reasons it is difficult to think outside the norms of print is that print covers so much. While more prestigious texts would eventually circulate freely across much of the world in uniform and well-identified editions, cheaper forms of printed material would cover an ever wider range of social discourse. In Europe, steam-driven printing gave rise to a spate of cheap publications: posters, broadsheets, advertisements, political and religious pamphlets, billboards, journals, and newspapers, as well as popular novels, and these ventured into colloquial, erotic, and quotidian areas that had previously only been expressed in speech or private writings. By the time mechanical printing reaches its full force in the later nineteenth century, print almost seems coextensive with human discourse, as Marc Angenot demonstrates in his monumental study of the state of social discourse in Paris in a single year, 1889, a study based entirely on printed texts.46 The sheer volume of printed material, combined with its expansion into almost every area of human activity, reinforces the impression that print covers all that can be known.
In the Western tradition, the printed book sets the limits of our understanding of what a book is, and it is the printed book’s apparent self-sufficiency that may be the most difficult limit to think beyond.47 As a commodity that circulates in a marketplace of strangers, a printed book appeals to a social contract that tells the reader either exactly what the book is and who wrote it or alternatively, as in the case of generic fiction such as mysteries, westerns, or romances, what kind of a book it is. A book can indeed be judged by its cover; readers demand this much predictability. This implicit social contract is contained in the paratextual material—the title, colophon, prologue, jacket blurbs, and the like—and in the design and typography of the text itself. From the single object, one can therefore potentially reconstruct much of the book’s social status, as McKenzie demonstrates in the case of Congreve. These implicit contracts can then be assessed against the evidence of actual reading practice, the kinds of poaching and tinkering, or braconage and bricolage, that specific readers have inflicted upon their books.48 To express the problem in the terms used by Chartier, we might say that while the material support of the text can never be limited solely to its physical support in a concrete object, in the case of a printed book, the concrete object is broadly suggestive of the text’s prevailing mode of social reception.
A medieval manuscript, on the other hand, offers a readable text through a local social bond that in many cases will have left no discernible traces in the book itself.49 Devotional texts produced for lay readers were sometimes copied by the patron’s personal religious adviser, for example, who would supervise the use of the book as well its production.50 There is a strong likelihood that the Dominican friars mentioned in the special prayers added to one of the earliest English Books of Hours, the thirteenth-century de Brailes Hours, also acted as guides to the various devotional practices this small private prayer book supported.51 In this case, the surviving book might be regarded as but one instrument in a small devotional community or as an incomplete script for a devotional performance. To take a very different example, medieval love poetry seems to have deliberately encouraged the audience’s participation, casting the listeners in the role of judges while providing them with models they could draw on for their own flirtations, blurring the distinction between literary and social fictions or poem and courtly conversation.52 In each case, a complex set of skills—the ability to meditate upon a text or the ability to sing or chant verse or the ability to discuss the fine points of the art of love—was an essential part of the text’s performance but often left no traces in the manuscript itself. Our understanding of what constitutes literature, however, based as it is on the conventions of print, has predisposed us to overlook or dismiss these broader discursive circles.53 Despite the close attention given to provenance, the social networks surrounding a medieval book are generally conceived of as