Moby-Dick: A Longman Critical Edition (review)

R E V I E W JOHN BRYANT AND HASKELL SPRINGER, EDS. Moby-Dick: A Longman Critical Edition New York: Pearson Longman, 2007. Paper $19.95. 660 pp. H owever meticulous its editing, and however exact its apparatus, the appearance of an alternative scholarly edition of Moby-Dick cannot help evoking a sense of dubiety as well as interest. The Longman Critical Edition of Moby-Dick appears as the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of Melville’s masterwork approaches its third decade as the standard text for scholarly citation. Endorsed with a seal of approval by the Center for Editions of American Authors (or CEAA, succeeded today by the Committee for Scholarly Editions) the 1988 NN edition of Moby-Dick might be assumed to provide a “text that should not have to be re-edited,” to quote from the Center’s objectives laid out in 1971 by then Executive Director Matthew J. Bruccoli.1 As a paperback, moreover, designed and marketed as much for classroom use as for scholarship, the Longman Critical Edition will have to compete with the NN-based Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick, which has long served as the most lavishly supplemented teaching text. In actuality, though, there is plenty of sea-room for editions of Moby-Dick. The CEAA seal of endorsement on the NN copyright page identifies an authoritative edition not as the approved text, but as an approved text—official wording advocated by the late Harrison Hayford, General Editor of the Northwestern-Newberry Writings of Herman Melville and early member of the CEAA’s executive committee, whose support for the indefinite article in the CEAA emblem stemmed from his respect for the indefinite qualities of texts. More than most other major nineteenth-century American literary works, Moby-Dick requires careful attention to the challenges involved with capturing a literary work of art in the error-prone medium of printed text. Melville’s manuscript is not known to survive, and his decision to begin the process of typesetting and printing before completing it prevented him from making substantive changes to early chapters that were made necessary by his evolving intentions in later ones. The imperfect printed pages were bound and published as Moby-Dick by the American firm of Harper & Brothers. But C
2008 The Authors Journal compilation C
2008 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1 Matthew J. Bruccoli, “A Few Missing Words.” PMLA 86.4 (Sept. 1971), 587-89. 96 L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S R E V I E W Melville further revised and corrected a set of these proofs, and sent it across the Atlantic to serve as the copy-text for the London firm of Richard Bentley, where unauthorized additional changes ranging from typographical errors and omissions to acts of outright censorship were made to the text before it was issued there as The Whale. The work thus appeared in two different versions, the American and the British, and neither was fully authorial. Melville’s dissatisfaction with the process is apparent in his words to Nathaniel Hawthorne about “the imperfect body” of his book, which he also described as a “final hash” and a “botch” (NN Correspondence 213, 191). Whereas the NN Moby-Dick draws from both the American and British versions to provide an edition intended to approximate the work Melville would have produced if time, strength, cash, and patience had permitted him to realize his intentions before surrendering the work to publishers, the Longman Critical Edition (LCRE) takes a different approach. Rather than duplicate the “eclectic” editorial method of the Northwestern-Newberry edition, LCRE reprints the American edition as its reading text and highlights in bold gray type selected passages that differ from their counterparts in the partly revised, partly expurgated English edition, and from other adopted readings in NN. These highlighted passages, or “revision sites,” are addressed by editorial and critical commentary, or “revision narratives,” positioned amidst the reading text in the case of alterations judged by the editors to be deeply significant, and in an appendix for...