Out of Sorts: On Typography and Print Culture

At the Typographical Altar: Interlude for Randall McLeod

• At the Typographical Altar: Interlude for Randall McLeod Among the always interesting and amusing articles by Randall McLeod are two based on George Herbert’s seventeenth-century ‘‘The Altar’’ and ‘‘Easter Wings’’; to English literary historians, these are the loci classici of the shape poem.1 I assume that what drew Prof. McLeod to these poems was the difficulty they posed to the editorial enterprise; what draws me to them here is a similar difficulty they pose to what I have called the typographical enterprise. Modern textual criticism, which McLeod spent most of his early career undermining , is based (theoretically) on literals; these might be letters, typographical elements, or even speech sounds. Changes and variations in these letters through the history and accidents of transmission of any text are what modern textual critics record and, through a wide range of theories and methods , evaluate. How, I imagine Prof. McLeod thinking, would these same textual critics deal with the tradition of the visual image? not just images generally (which are transmitted I assume by the same imagined processes and missteps that apply to textual transmission), but those images that are transformations (or representations?) of originary typographical constructions? In printed editions, Herbert’s ‘‘The Altar’’ and ‘‘Easter Wings’’ appear in two basic forms. (1) The words of the poem are typeset in such a way as to form a shape similar to the object described in the poem. That is how these poems are represented in most modern editions; the typographical layout, in this case, refers directly to the meaning of the poem and even conveys that meaning. You can look in any modern anthology and find an example. (2) 94 interlude The object described in the poem (wings, an altar) is represented by an engraved image within which the words of the poem are engraved; this is the way these poems are presented in various eighteenth-century editions. Such engraved images may be considered legitimate products (or elaborations?) of the shapes implied in the two earliest manuscripts for Herbert’s poems. Or they may be accidents or mistakes of transmission. If Prof. McLeod was ever thinking what (for my own convenience) I imagine him to have been thinking, the richness of the evidence seems to have distracted him from this enterprise. Instead of exposing a particular problem in textual-critical theory, these poems and their histories presented him with a morass of error, murky affinities, and of course many examples of readerly interventions of the kind that enjoyed an especial currency at the moment of his writing these essays. ‘‘Easter Wings’’: FIAT fLUX What we know as ‘‘Easter Wings’’ is in modern editions one poem, represented visually as a familiar typographical shape that is easier to recognize than to describe. Prof. McLeod’s analysis of the poem in ‘‘FIAT fLUX’’2 is less an analysis of anything Herbert wrote or initiated than a record of reception in which McLeod allows editors to speak (or misspeak) for themselves. Following the introductory (or is it the central?) portion of the essay, McLeod constructs what he calls an ‘‘Easter Wings Gallery,’’ a section that constitutes the bulk of the essay (86–125). Included in this Gallery are summaries and quotations from eighteen editions of the poem from the 1836 Pickering edition through late twentieth-century editions, including anthologized versions from the late 1980s. I have read this article and the Gallery entries several times, and I am still not certain of the principle of order in the Gallery: I believe it is a formal one based on an analysis of the types of errors found in these editions. It is thus less an historical record of the reception of the poem than a catalogue of possible editorial errors: type facsimiles of modern editions masquerading as type facsimiles of (no more authoritative) early ones, mistranscriptions, disordered stanzas, uncritical definitions of the basic unit of concern (one poem or two); effacement of basic elements of the poem; ignorance. More precisely (or less so): At the Typographical Altar 95 Well, if mutation of messages is the way of this world, how are we to react to Herbert’s editors? Does their inexhaustible fertility issue in sublime adaptation or merely befuddled degeneration? Nothing is easier than to mock the editorial tradition. . . . A stroll through the Easter Wings Gallery shows appropriation drifting inappropriately according to fashion; this drift forestalls literary criticism ’s approach to a science. This...