Canadian Critical Editions

CANADIAN CRITICAL EDITIONS 485 These two learned commentators on the works of a learned poet, a doctlls poeta if ever there was one, have significantly advanced knowledge and have done so in a way that is a pleasure to read. Canadian Critical Editions DAVID M. HAYNE John Lennox and Janet M. Paterson, editors. C!Ulllenges, Projects, Texts: Canadian Editing. De/is, projets et textes dans I'edition critique all Canada New York: AMS Press 1993· 117- $29.95 The 1972 Conference on Editorial Problems was the first devoted to 'editing Canadian texts.' The 1989 Conference, the twenty-fifth in a distinguished series, describes five Canadian critical editions, three in English and two in French, and concludes with an essay on textual editing. . Jacques Allard recounts the history of the critical edition of the works of Hubert Aquin (EDAQ), launched three years after the author's suicide in March 1977 and directed by Allard with the assistance of Bernard Beugnot and others. The administrative offices and archives of the project are located at the Universite du Quebec aMontreal, where Aquin taught briefly in 1969-70. Work began with the compilation of a Bibliographie a12alytiqlle of the papers and of studies of Aquin, followed by the preparation of a detailed chronology of the writer's life and intellectual activity (subsequently published under the title Itineraires d'Hllbert Aquin, 1992). A Bulletin was issued from 1982 to 1991 to report progress. Two major decisions had to be made at an early stage: whether to select only certain works for editing or to include all the extant papers, and how to deal with the audio-visual texts (radio, television, and film scripts). The first question was resolved in favour of indusivity; the second gave rise to a serious division of opinion among the contributing editors and led to a deferral of the decision to publish the audio-visual material. Allard concludes his paper by discussing some of the editorial problems raised by Aquin's first published novel, Prochain episode, which Allard was editing for the Lemeac edition of the works. In the second paper, Sherrill E. Grace relates her experiences during the editing of the collected letters of Malcolm Lowry, a task on which she began work in 1987The Lowry papers, held at the University of British Columbia and elsewhere, pose many difficulties for their editor, both because of the frequent private allusions they contain and because the author used them in a variety of ways. Grace gives examples of Lowry's re-use of letters in other contexts, including the text of Under the Vo!cmlo, and of the consequent difficulty of defining his correspondence by its function, a problem she has attempted to solve by adapting Bakhtin's theory of 'speech genres: The final section of her paper consists of her own parodic letter 486 DAV1D M. HAYNE addressed to Lowry, in which she playfully reproaches the writer for the traps he has set her and the gaps he has left in his papers. Zailig Pollock describes his part in the University ofToronto Press edition of the Collected Works of A.M. Klein, a collaborative project in which Pollock had _ responsibility for the Complete Poems (published in 1991) and the Notebooks. In the case of the poetry the problems were created by an abundance of manuscript versions and variants, which obliged the editor to devise complex stemmata to . reveal the diachronic pattern of the poems, or, as Pollock suggests in his title, to tell the story of the text. As more authors' manuscripts become available in microfilmed or photocopied forml the purpose of variant study is no longer to reconstruct the original, but to retrace the genesis of the text. The Notebooks, on the other hand, consist of incomplete passages that have little supporting material beyond what the editors can reconstruct of the biography of the author; they thus call for a different type of 'story-telling' as the editing proceeds. Pollock closes his account by proposing a provocative merging of the concepts of critical editing and critical study of literary texts: far from being distinct in their subjectivity or objectivity, the two methods have much in common as they confront...