A Rationale of Textual Criticism

I: THE NATURE OF TEXTS

ONE The Nature of Texts WH EN Keats, reflecting on the Grecian urn, wrote that it could "express / A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme," he was provoking us to consider the difference between pictorial art and works made of words. By calling the urn a "historian," he made clear that he was concerned with it as a link to the past, not simply as an object appearing before his eyes in the present. The urn had been preserved through "silence and slow time" -and, he said, it could "thus" express the flowery tale more sweetly, more satisfyingly to the imagination. In so connecting the urn's survival through time with its power of expression, is he only telling us that his rhyme is less good a historian because it provides a derived account and is not the primary evidence? Or is there also the implication that even a poem contemporaneous with the urn would be less satisfactory than the urn because the medium of poetry necessitates a different kind of passage through time? Keats does not comment on the inevitable deterioration of the urn, emphasizing instead its enduring presence, and rightly so: if the urn becomes discolored or chipped, we still have what is left 12 THE NATURE OF TEXTS of it directly in front of us. But do we ever know where a poem is? Can the artifacts that constitute our evidence for the existence of a poem provide us-as the urn does-with a means for ordering the randomness of life? Although the "legend" depicted on the urn is "leaffring 'd," it is not a part of nature, however naturally it may have grown out of the anguish of its creator and however readily it may reflect what we believe to be the environment that nurtured it. The serenity of the immobile urn belies the teeming energy from which it emerged; in spite of the turbulence depicted on its surface, it appears tranquil in its provision of a framework for the arrangement of emotions. "All breathing human passion far above," Keats says, for the urn has presented us with an enchanted space, where boughs cannot shed their leaves and actions are frozen outside of time. This "silent form" is a "friend to man," allowing one-from the contemplative distance of art-to find patterns, and thus truth and beauty, in what had seemed the chaos of life. Poems, too, like all works of art, can serve this function. But where do we find them? Do we find poems in artifacts? Is a poem what appears in an author's final manuscript, or in a first printed edition, or in a revised second edition? Or are these artifacts records of human striving, never quite giving us the works that transcend the daily efforts of survival? Is Keats suggesting that the urn is to be favored because its palpable stasis elevates it over works that cannot be directly apprehended? Is he then claiming that the urn is well-wrought for reasons different from those adduced by later critics who find that poems can THE NATURE OF TEXTS 13 be verbal icons? But do not manuscripts and printed books possess the same passivity as other inanimate objects, and may not their texts-however unfinished or incorrect their producers might consider them-offer the same satisfying remoteness that works of visual art do? If so, what is the relation between the reading of the various documentary texts of a poem and the experiencing of the work, or are they all separate works? Such questions, like the cold pastoral of the urn itself, tease us out of thought, for they reflect the insoluble enigmas of aesthetics. And they raise issues that textual critics must not fail to confront. Literature poses particularly perplexing aesthetic questions , for the corporeal reality of literary works has been, and remains, a matter of dispute. If we are not concerned with literature as an inheritance from the past, however, many of these questions are of little significance (and, as the formalists of the twentieth century have shown, it is not absolutely necessary for us to be so concerned-except to the extent that we must know a language, and perhaps the history of its words, to read literary works). If, for example, we think not of "works" (a term that implies previously created entities) but only of sequences of words that have come our...