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The Muddle of Minutiae, or What Text Should We Read: The Case of an Omitted Paragraph in a Forgotten Conrad Book Review Ray Stevens Western Maryland College MODERN LITERARY CRITICISM often seems a stormy sea of warring interests. Will British feminism conquer French feminism? Will deconstruction go its truncated way, following the Marxist dialectic that appears to have played a part in giving deconstruction its fragmented birth (with apologies to Saussure and Derrida)? Will the criticism that shifts thought from psychoanalytical discussion of the author to readerresponse analysis finally bring happiness to those who have forgotten that it was the author who wrote what some critics find their livelihood in trying to forget? Will cultural criticism (1980s variety) replace canon? Will biographical (1930s variety) and historical (1950s variety) criticism find a Carlylean New Birth in a new century? Will new criticism become new once more? Instead of joining the battle, let us idle for a moment in the calm haven of the textual critic who seeks the details of seemingly superfluous materials, trying to find a standard text that serves as a point of departure so that critical battles can be fought on calmer seas. Take, for example, a most minute piece of minutiae from the works of Joseph Conrad: an omitted paragraph. Conrad's friend and editor Richard Curie cut the paragraph in preparing a text for publication in pamphlet form of a book review written hastily by Conrad in 1906. So insignificant did Conrad believe the review to be, in fact, that by 1921, Conrad had forgotten that he had written it, and failed to include it in Notes on Life and Letters, a miscellaneous volume of essays on various topics. An essay such as Conrad's review of The Man of Property, written 305 ELT 36:3 1993 by the now almost forgotten Nobel Prize-winning John Galsworthy, is at best of minor importance in assessing the direction of modern literary criticism. An exercise in understanding the evolution of even a minor text such as Conrad's review, however, reemphasizes in a critical era inclined to forget such things the importance of the context within which a composition evolves—the factors that go into the development of the text that the reader, whether in 1906, or in 1922, or in 2001, eventually evaluates. However definitive a work of literary criticism might seem to be, there are often lacunae in the bridge from author to text that separate critics even more from the author to the written page, and, in turn, the written page from the reader who responds. Rather than forget the importance of such gaps in our knowledge that may lead to a sounder literary criticism, as some urge, it is imperative that critics understand, to the extent possible, what happens in the composition of the text. II The premise of this essay is central to textual criticism in the mainstream from W. W. Gregg through Fredson Bowers to the Modern Language Association's Center for Scholarly Editions: what text should one read, and how does one decide what that text should be? The textual critic argues that to enter critical dialogue about a text there should be critical consensus about what that text is. Because of the inevitable errors, both accidental and substantive, that enter the text (especially before the electronic transmission of text from author's computer to printer's computer eliminated many errors of transmission), and because the careful craftsman knows that even a misplaced semicolon can alter the meanings of closely argued texts, readers need to have the most accurate text possible, even though in critical approaches such as reader-response theory readers seem often to be privileged over text, and certainly over author. Thus, let us illustrate this obvious but sometimes overlooked point by examining the inception, reception, and textual history of "John Galsworthy," a major novelist's minor work of literary criticism. Today, if one by chance should stumble across "John Galsworthy" in its current text, it would most likely be a cursory reading out of idle curiosity as one seeks material in Conrad's various writings about the sea in Last Essays, the only location where "John Galsworthy" is...

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