-
Editor's Notes
- George Herbert Journal
- George Herbert Journal
- Volume 21, Numbers 1 and 2, Fall 1997/Spring 1998
- pp. 129-131
- 10.1353/ghj.2013.0006
- Article
- Additional Information
Editor's Notes The fourth volume in the George Herbert Journal Special Studies & Monographs series, to be published simultaneously as the next issue of the GHJ, Volume 22, will be a Festschrift of essays on Renaissance literature for Professor Edward W. Tayler, edited by Eugene D. Hill and William Kerrigan. All previous volumes in the series are still available: Joseph H. Summers' Collected Essays on Renaissance Literature ; George Herbert in the Nineties: Reflections and Reassessments, edited byJonathan F.S. Post and Sidney Gottlieb; and Chauncey Wood's edition of Henry Herbert's manuscript of biblical paraphrases, Herbert's Golden Harpe or His Heauenlie Hymne. Each volume costs $10 for individual subscribers to the GHJ. Contact the Editor for discounted prices on multiple copies and class orders, and for review and examination copies. We are actively seeking proposals for future volumes in this series. Our basic area of interest is Herbert-related materials, broadly interpreted. Send all proposals and queries to the Editor. Paul Eggert and Margaret Sankey begin their collection of essays on The Editorial Gaze: Mediating Texts in Literature and the Arts (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998. xvi + 233 pp. $53) by directly acknowledging the strong reactions provoked by their subject matter: "The light (or pall) of recent editorial theory, depending on your point of view, illuminates or obscures the practices of editors; it creates new understandings of the conditions of textuality or it needlessly stirs up dust about them" (p. vii). The eleven essays gathered here vigorously debate the value of contending editorial theories, most often in the context of describing practical issues and problems that come up while editing a wide variety of texts, including nineteenth-century melodramas, a popular Canadian novel, oral songs from thirteenth-century Iceland, and early Australian vocal recordings. While the emphasis seems to be on what most readers would define as non- or anti-canonical texts, pride of place in the volume goes to a long essay on George Herbert by the scholar formerly (and still occasionally) known as Randall McLeod, but herein identified as Random Cloud. "Enter Reader" offers a "look at" rather than what is usually described as a "literary-critical interpretation" (p. 1; italics in original) 130Editor's Notes of "Superliminare" and "The Altar." Cloud wants us to "gaze" rather than "read" for several reasons: to remind us of "the physicality of reading" (p. 4), to restore a sense that "graphic values are paramount" (p. 9) in our encounter with a printed text, and to shake us out of conventional habits of reading that bind us to mistakes and misperceptions, some of which are perpetuated by editorial misrepresentations of a text. "Superliminare" and "The Altar" stand at the entrance to Herbert's "Church," a position whose significance we will never understand properly unless we pay attention "to what we usually neglect — to headlines, titles, pagination, gutters, white spaces, letter-spacing, rules, ornamentations and other features of formatting and layout — such as our turning of leaves" (p. 5). In a stunning analysis too detailed to summarize briefly, Cloud demonstrates how these texts (and any meanings we derive from them) are precarious (dependent on often elusive details) and fluid: there were two manuscript versions of Herbert's poems as well as the first printed edition of 1633, each of which has some "authority" — a term called into question by Cloud here and elsewhere — and each of which is significantly different from the others, so much so that we can't even confidently assess the exact status of titles and headlines , let alone whether "Superliminare" is one poem or two. He applauds this kind of fluidity, asking us to watch or "wetness" it (p. 16) — not the worst of the wordplay that characterizes his essay — and acknowledge, if not celebrate, the richness of textual instability . But there is another kind of fluidity he is more wary of: that introduced by ongoing editorial interventions. He uses facsimile reproductions to illustrate the editorial transformations of these poems, culminating in the 1674 edition that, among other things, reconfigures the stanzas of "Superliminare" so that they are almost inevitably read incorrectly, and eliminates one of the most marvelously subtle and effective aspects of earlier presentations of...