Conrad's Working Methods in under Western Eyes: The Editorial Challenge

The Editorial Tradition for Modem Works of FictionIN 1989, the renowned bibliographer and editorial commentator G. Thomas Tanselle characterized the editorial pursuit in the following terms: "We have reason to persist in the effort to define the flowerings of previous human thought, which in their inhuman tranquillity have overcome the torture of their birth." His formulation is almost a definition of the category of literary works and of the aesthetic realm in which they exist. Tanselle is rarely as poetic as this. He does not quite say that works are objects but only that they have a special form of existence that puts them in a privileged realm, over and apart from other wridngs and over and apart from us.Tanselle is the principal inheritor, adapter, and articulator of the heritage of editorial thinking that comes down to us through Sir Walter Greg in his famous essay, "The Rationale of Copy-Text," in 1950 and through the legendary Fredson Bowers in his extensions of Greg's insight, after the 1950s, to cover the textual situations encountered in editing a great range of mainly nineteenth- and twentieth-century American and, later, British authors. This line of thinking affects the Cambridge Conrad edition fundamentally, although for the most part silently. The reason is a simple one.After Greg and Bowers, texts of final authorial intention could be arrived at with greater subtlety than before. It was no longer the older method of ascertaining which was the latest version that the author authorized for publication - the so-called "death-bed" edition. The problem with this approach - let us call it, in our case, the Heinemann Collected or the Doubleday "Sun-Dial" Conrad - is that, even if the author did make changes, choosing the last authorized edition as the basis of the reading text necessarily built in all the other changes made as an ordinary part of their job by typists, typesetters, and editors of the editions that intervened between the manuscript and it.Following Greg and Bowers, it became a matter of choosing as copytext the version that the author was most fully engaged in. This would typically be the manuscript; but, depending upon the author's compositional habits, it could well be a later document. The editor would then ascertain critically which of the changed readings in subsequent documents or editions could be attributed confidently to the author. Such readings would be deemed to be revisions. Being of later date than the chosen copy-text, they would be incorporated into it, thus creating in the one synchronic axis a single textual assembly from multiple diachronic sources. This could include readings from documents earlier than the copy-text if it were suspected that the person who had prepared it - a typist, say - had made errors that the author had not noticed but had passively authorized. These could be overturned.Once the copy-text is chosen, the method operates locally, at the site of the individual revision, rather than globally, at the level of the text as a whole. German editors in the 1960s were having none of this, and preferred what they believed to be the firmer position of adopting one of the historical texts as the reading text of the scholarly edition, primarily on the basis that it provided a useful anchor for the apparatus. But they were not prepared to emend that text. This is because they resisted the contamination of its historical and documentary integrity that the Anglo- American editor's exercise of critical judgement would necessarily entail. Hans Zeller argued that the Greg-Bowers editor would be constantly tempted to accept as a revision any reading that seemed to the editor to be a better one, an aesthetic improvement, made on the assumption that the author would only seek to improve the text.1 From the German point of view, this method produced, not the text of final authorial intention, but what might be called the text of editorial desire.How does the notoriously tortuous textual development of Under Western Eyes respond to these opposed editorial goals? …