Cooper and His Collaborators: Recovering Cooper's Final Intentions for His Fiction

Cooper and His Collaborators:

Recovering Cooper's Final Intentions for His Fiction

Begun in the late 1960s, "The Writings of James Fenimore Cooper" (www. wjfc.org) is a critical scholarly edition subscribing to the guidelines of the Modern Language Association Center for Scholarly Editions (and to those of its predecessor, the Center for Editions of American Authors.) As editorial policy, the Cooper Edition (CE henceforth) has followed a conservative interpretation of the prevailing theory and practice used to edit American fiction in the last half century. Specifically, CE has subscribed to the rationale of Walter Greg, as practiced in the editing of nineteenth-century American texts by Fredson Bowers, G. Thomas Tanselle, and others, by invoking the crucial importance of the "author's final intentions"—identifying and preserving what the editors believe the author finally intended for every aspect of the form and substance of the work at hand. As evidence of Cooper's final intentions, CE has taken holograph witnesses (extant authorial manuscripts and revisions) as well as variants which collateral evidence (based on Cooper's known practices in the extant holograph revisions) suggests are likely to be authorial. CE scholarly texts are thus eclectic: CE editors chose variants they judge to be authorial from texts subsequent to the copy-text to create a text ideally embodying Cooper's final intentions.

In the 1980s, these governing procedures for CE practice concerning the authority of final intentions, especially the distinctions between accidentals and substantives, were strongly challenged. Cultural and language theorists, from the New Critics through the post-modernists, had questioned on social and psychological grounds the capacity of individual authors to exercise full autonomy and control over their texts. Such theorists argued that overpowering relationships to other authors, to readers, to broad cultural movements and constraints, and to the body of language itself demanded a revision of the assumption that authors consciously understood and controlled "final intentions" in their works. Jerome J. McGann's A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983) brought these arguments home to the editorial community by showing from Byron's oeuvre and elsewhere that authors (especially poets) often produced multiple versions of texts for different occasions. Further, McGann argued forcefully that authors submitting manuscripts to compositors expected and often welcomed their interventions to perfect intentions indifferently realized in the manuscript delivered for composition. McGann's demonstration that Byron expected professionals in the printing shop or friends copying his manuscripts to normalize lapses and inconsistencies in his spelling and grammer rendered the concept of identifying and following authorial final intentions deeply problematic. ¹

This essay approaches the still-continuing debate about final intentions in the belief that the argument is best engaged not with theories or generalities but by illuminating the discussion through examining what is known about the practice of a specific author. My aim here is to examine these questions of final intentions and of the role of authorial collaborators through reviewing what we have learned about Cooper in the course of editing the twenty volumes of "The Writings of James Fenimore Cooper." Cooper did not set out as an author consciously to enlist collaborators, in the printing shop or elsewhere. Rather, through hard-won experience in seeing his manuscrripts through the press, he came to realize and value the roles compositors and others inevitably played in getting his words before the public. His challenge was to understand these roles and then to supervise, as closely as circumstances permitted, the inevitable limited collaborations that ensued. The issues are: How and where did collaborators (licensed and otherwise) succeed—or fail—in realizing Cooper's final intentions for his works? More specifically for editorial purposes, when manuscripts of Cooper's work in his own hand are extant, should CE scholars use as copy-texts such holograph witnesses? Or should they turn to first editions for which Cooper is known to have read proof and which may benefit from the improvements...