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Chapter 4 Interactions: Textual Nominalism and Editorial Realism A work of literature is more than its ‹nal version, but is it more than the superposition of the preceding versions? In his essay “Proust palimpseste” (1966) Gérard Genette dreamed of an edition containing all versions and preparatory notes of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (Figures I 64). Some thirty years later the metaphor of the palimpsest appeared as the title of an important collection of essays on editorial theory in the humanities edited by George Bornstein and Ralph Williams, emphasizing the different layers underlying each text. In his introduction, Bornstein draws attention to the “palimpsestic quality” of many major works we tend to regard as ‹xed or stable: “Increasingly, such works have come to seem contingent and constructed rather than unitary and ‹xed” (Palimpsest 2). In a review of Palimpsest, Ian Small focused on the ontological relation between a work and its versions. According to Small this relation is insuf‹ciently present in the metaphor of the palimpsest: “The palimpsest recognizes not the work, only its versions; moreover it takes the identity of those versions for granted” (“‘Why Edit?’” 198). Since a version is always a version of something, it implies some form of identi‹cation. No matter how objective the editor tries to be, this identi‹cation already involves a certain value judgment. A letter preserved in the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library was not recognized as the ‹rst version of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest until 1991, when Peter Raby identi‹ed it as such—which is not evident, since this early version is quite different from the play as it was ‹rst performed (Raby 13). Ian Small suggested Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblances as an alternative for the metaphor of the palimpsest. In the same paragraph (section 67) in which Wittgenstein introduces this notion of family resemblances, he immedi37 ately adds: “But if someone wished to say: ‘There is something common to all these constructions—namely the disjunction of all their common properties’—I should reply: Now you are only playing with words.” This remark is interesting with regard to the difference between “work” and “text.” Controversies concerning these notions in editorial debates do not differ that much from the scholastic discussions between realists and nominalists . When Occam argued that there is nothing common between one thing and another, he realized that it is nonetheless remarkable that the human mind apparently does manage to create universal concepts that seem to apply to more than one individual. Immanuel Kant distinguished between, on the one hand, an empirical approach, emphasizing the differences, and on the other hand a speculative approach, focusing on the similarities and identical features of creatures in order to classify them in species (684). This distinction is applicable to a similar tension characterizing the history of scholarly editing , not only in Anglo-American, but also in German and French traditions . Different approaches to scholarly editing constantly oscillate between a materialist approach, emphasizing the differences between documents , and a more idealist approach, focusing on what “lies behind.”1 Marcus Walsh refers to Richard Bentley, who claimed that the “essential nature and meaning” of the Bible remained unchanged in spite of the thousands of variants that were discovered in the Greek New Testament during the seventeenth and eighteenth century: “We recognize the Bible when we see it, and we know at least in essentials what it means” (“Fluid Text” 33). But as Peter Robinson points out, this is only true from a distance : “The text itself changes depending on how closely we are looking at it,” for “the closer we look at a text, the more variation we see” (“Is There a Text?” 106). Thus the focus shifts from an emphasis on correspondence to differences, for instance in John Bryant’s version of the “›uid text” concept: “When we read a ›uid text, we are comparing the versions of a text, which is to say we are reading the differences between the versions, which is to say we are reading distance travelled, difference, and change” (Fluid Text 62). The tendency to focus on differences may have been stimulated by scholars and philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze, according to whom the essence (as it is revealed in art) is “the ultimate Difference” (41). In order to illustrate his statement, Deleuze quotes Marcel Proust: “La diversité que j’avais en vain cherchée dans la vie, dans le voyage . . .” [The diversity which I had...

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