How Many Authors Has a Yeats Poem & Who Are They?: A Review Essay

How Many Authors Has a Yeats Poem & Who Are They? A Review Essay K. P. S. JOCHUM Universität Bamberg David Holdeman Much Labouring: The Text and Authors ofYeats's First Modernist Books Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997 xiii + 255 pp. $44.50 DAVID HOLDEMAN'S BOOK is published as part of the series Editorial Theory and Literary Criticism, whose promoters are determined to challenge accepted or conventional editorial philosophies. By doing so they hope to go beyond mere bibliographical concerns, to redirect literary studies towards the ontology of poetic texts, and to read them in novel ways. An indication of this new direction is given in Holdeman 's provocative subtitle; one should have thought that a Yeats poem has one and only one author named W B. Yeats. Who and where are the others? Readers conversant with deconstruction and poststructuralism are sure to be put on the alert, but Holdeman does not engage in simple "poststructuralist freeplay," in constructions of theories for theory's sake; his ambition is to achieve consensus with his readers on a number of Yeats poems. Hence his arguments relating to multi-authorship are much more sophisticated than the tedious and superannuated attempts to proclaim the death of the author. Whether they are convincing and convincingly labelled remains to be seen. 172 JOCHUM : REVIEW ESSAY Basic to Holdeman's procedure is the distinction between text and work. Put simply, analysing a text means describing the combination of verbal and non-verbal signifiers, whereas a discussion of the work considers authorial intentions and multiple versions. He posits a hierarchical relationship between both by claiming that texts constitute works. Hence, a text's several "authors" would also be responsible for the shape of the work. The traditional school of editing, represented by W. W Greg and Fredson Bowers, held that "texts reflect their authors' final verbal intentions," that these authors are the poets and writers who figure on title pages, and that there are such things as final and authoritative texts which an editor should attempt to establish. Following such recent editorial theorists as James Thorpe, Philip Gaskell, Donald Pizer, Hans Zeller, Jack Stillinger, Jerome McGann, Hans Walter Gabler, and George Bornstein, Holdeman rejects the Greg-Bowers school. He recognizes that there is no compelling reason for privileging one (published) version of a work over any other or that there must be a version that represents an author's final and most perfect intentions at the cost of earlier versions which should then be discarded as superfluous or unworthy of further attention. Each published version may have a validity of its own; taken together, all versions will then constitute a diachronic pattern that a poet considers to be meaningful in itself. As a result of detailed investigations Holdeman is able to demonstrate that Yeats is such a poet. To his credit, he also recognizes that there are other poets and writers who revise their works with a final and perfect version in mind. Even Yeats himself found some of his books to be perfect for the time being and considered some of his revisions improvements instead of different versions ; textual stability is, after all, something relative, neither absolute nor entirely impossible. Holdeman also subscribes to contemporary editorial theory when he emphasizes the materiality of the text and the communal nature of its production. It is not the poet or writer alone who produces his work in splendid isolation. With a view towards publication he enlists the help of various agencies or persons, "authors" or "collaborators" in Holdeman's parlance, such as editors, publishers, printers, designers, papermakers, bookbinders, reviewers, and readers. Non-linguistic signifiers or "bibliographical codes," such as "paper, margins, ink, typeface, or binding," i.e., things over which a poet has no absolute control, generate or contribute to a work's meaning. 173 ELT 42 : 2 1999 All of this makes sense, especially when editorial theorists expend their labors on the texts and works of specific authors, as many of them have done. It is obvious that "no adequate account of the history of a work's meanings can be written without first compiling the history of its texts" (provided there is a variety of...