The Editor's Dilemma: Conrad's Revisitings of His Works

Abstract

Except for his revisitings of printed text in his own hand, few emendations can be known for sure to have been with Conrad’s approval or even knowledge. The trouble is compounded by there being two Conrads: the Conrad who came from the sea and became a published author in 1895 in his late thirties, and the seasoned author at almost twice that age in his early sixties, full of honors, who wrote most of his prefaces for collected editions of his previously published books in about 1919 to 1921. Additionally, the many variants among editions of Conrad’s texts owe their existence to house-style interventions, typing errors, typesetters’ lapses, and unwarranted interference with syntax, lexicon, and semantics by publishers’ editors. Moreover, differences between a publisher’s copy editor and a bibliographic editor lead to diverse editions. While the former aims to correct a text, improve its style, make a better book, even, of the raw preprint matter or a previously published edition, the latter aims not for a better book, but an authoritative one, as close as possible to the author’s intention; the task is not aesthetic or grammatical but forensic. The purpose of this paper is to challenge the very notion of the possibility of an authoritatively definitive text.