Securing the Past. Conservation in Art, Architecture, and Literature (review)

Paul Eggert, Professor of English at the University of New South Wales, has written a fascinating book about a subject that has intrigued many a textual scholar: the relationship between the textual scholarship practiced on literary texts and other activities concerned with (to invoke Eggert's carefully chosen gerund phrase) securing the past. Eggert considers how several disciplines approach historical artifacts both material (buildings and paintings) and non-material (dramatic and literary works).

In the past, textual critics who have compared their methodologies to those of other disciplines have tended to assume that textual criticism as practiced on literary texts should be the model for everyone else. G. Thomas Tanselle's recent paper in Volume 57 of Studies in Bibliography, "Textual Criticism of Visual and Aural Works", is typical of this approach: its title depends on the metaphor that represents buildings, paintings, statues, and other material artifacts as texts and their conservation or restoration as "editing". Such an approach has two major disadvantages: it patronizes other disciplines, thereby alienating their practitioners, and it dismisses or ignores the declared premises from which those disciplines proceed, thereby reducing the chances of learning from them.

Instead of seeing the conservation and restoration of tangible artifacts as forms of textual criticism, Eggert approaches all attempts to secure the past—textual criticism, architectural conservation, the restoration of paintings—as related activities that come equally and without precedence under the heading of what, in America, is called "Preservation". Preservation is concerned with the historical status of entities as small as a tiny earring, as complex as an automobile or as sprawling as an entire town. Preservation's activities are supported by a multitude of organizations; some, like the National Trust for Historic Preservation, have broad-based, amateur memberships; others, like AMIS (the American Musical Instrument Society) are highly specialized and professional. The constituents of these organizations are sufficiently articulate to have created a substantial, diverse, and lively literature. Within Preservation, there are—at least in America—specialized functions with corresponding professional titles: curators are responsible for building collections and determining how the artifacts in those collections will be used. Conservators are responsible for the physical well being of artifacts: they perform the routine maintenance required to minimize deterioration. Restorers attempt to return artifacts to earlier states—to replace parts that have deteriorated and, sometimes, to undo the work of previous restorers. This is the disciplinary context within which Eggert is working—although he does not really describe it, and he does not always make the conceptually important distinction between conservation, which seeks to arrest or retard the effects of time, and restoration, which seeks to reverse them. This is no doubt because Eggert is not offering a survey of preservation; rather, he is picking and choosing examples that offer enlightening comparisons with one or another aspect of editing literary texts. Nevertheless, the effect of his approach is to invert the metaphor preferred by textual critics, so that editing can be seen as "the restoration of verbal works".

Eggert locates the beginnings of modern preservation in the nineteenth century, and he identifies the two schools of thought that have dominated engagement with historical artifacts ever since. On the one hand, there was the "idealist" approach that posits and seeks to recover some state of the work that existed at some point in the past, either in the real world or in the mind of a putative creator. Victorian "restorers" of medieval churches had such ideals in mind when they sought to return those churches to what was imagined to have been their medieval states, thereby producing buildings "that never were"—and, in the process, obliterating several centuries of purposeful (and often aesthetically valuable) modification. On the other hand, other Victorians accepted the validity of alterations in structure and decoration that the churches had undergone as they responded to changing religious and social functions. This view...