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Sutherland, Kathryn. 'The Return of the Editor - A Response to Laury Mayer and
Julia Flanders, "Real
Editions for Real People: Electronic Editing and Women's Theatre
Writing".' British Women Playwrights around 1800. 15 April 1999. 7 pars. <http://www.etang.umontreal.ca/bwp1800/essays/sutherland_editor.html>
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Copyright © Contributor, 1999-2008. This essay
is protected under the copyright laws of the United States and
the Universal Copyright Convention. Publication (print or electronic)
or commercial use of any of the copyrighted materials without direct
authorization from the copyright holder is strictly prohibited.
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| 1. |
Lauryn Mayer and Julia Flanders use what they see as the distinctive features
of dramatic texts to begin to reconsider the kinds of access
that the electronic environment is currently assumed to provide
by both creators and users of e-texts. What they find unsatisfactory
about the situation they describe is its openness and indeterminacy
in relation to specifically declared goals; what, in a recent
important essay on the principles of text encoding, John Lavagnino
describes as the culture of completeness as distinct from adequacy.
Currently the encoder assumes, with some naivety and rather
more idealism, that once tagged in accordance with an accepted
scholarly encoding language, the text (any text) will give
up its meanings —meanings being determined by the functions of search tools provided with so-called
full text retrieval facilities. The adequacy that Mayer and
Flanders have in mind for the encoders of electronic text is
both more sophisticated and more avowedly partial than such
completeness, being based upon what they term 'the inflection
of genre'. They argue that electronic editors (and we are back
in the world of the edition with its determined and defended
subjective decisions) must 'envision functions' which derive
from the kinds of readings that a text's generic affinities
propose.
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| 2. |
Dramatic texts are a special case because of the complex textual relationships
in terms of which they exist. The challenge for the electronic
encoder is to accommodate this special case; and it seems that
the way to do this is to exploit 'the possibilities of the
electronic medium'. In the case of drama, the 'inflection of
genre' appears to have more than a little in common with the
capacities of electronic technology itself, so much so that
the perceived multiplicity of a play's existence—the diverse identities and operative categories of performance and print—are also the practical consequences of transference to the electronic medium.
In the electronic medium, as Mayer and Flanders point out,
'we can attach other media which extend the text's existence
into non-textual dimensions such as motion, sound, three-dimensional
space. We can attach video or still images of performances,
renderings of possible performance spaces, or sound recordings.'
In both cases (the electronic medium and the life of the play),
the printed word does not represent the only or privileged
form in which a work can possess or participate in textuality. |
| 3. |
One might restate Mayer and Flanders's point by adapting Barbara Hodgdon's insightful
phrase 'intertextual complementarity', (Hodgdon, p. 19) which
she uses to describe the rich multiple existence of the play
texts of Shakespeare: the electronic medium like the play
exhibits 'intertextual complementarity'. The cultural life
of the play, like that of electronic textuality, enacts such
complementarity as an exchange between kinds of production
which taken together reformulate notions of text as print
(fixity) into a constellation of textualities —staged representation, critical edition, reader-produced text, spectator-produced
text, director's text, actor's text, etc. (unfixity). Mayer
and Flanders refer to this shared quality as a 'permeability'
that characterizes the dramatic and the electronic medium.
Quoting David Seaman, they observe how issues of access in
the electronic edition are bound up with the capacity of
the encoded materials to 'play well with others' in a networked
environment, and how this permeability is vital equally to
the real life of dramatic texts.
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| 4. |
What bothers me about this argument is not the obvious usefulness of the general
comparison. Of course, the electronic medium, like the dramatic
medium, makes a difference to our understanding of text as
a register of signification with relationships to ideas of
authority, intention, or presence. But the electronic medium
will process all text in this way, and, in that specific sense,
Mayer and Flanders's argument from generic inflection goes
out of the window, because in the electronic medium, as in
the fixed print medium, each generic grouping is not its own
special case. There is a familiar assumption in Mayer and Flanders's
argument that electronic encoding even when it is working with
criteria of adequacy to specific tasks ('real editions for
real people') will enact the previous textual encodings of
a work (in the case of dramatic texts, their existence as events
as well as printed texts) as a simulation of their 'real' functions
rather than as a consequence of the hybrid textuality which is its own, defined by its
own functions, some of which may overlap with theirs. The real
point, as I see it, is that the electronic medium will encode
all generic forms thus. And I suspect that Mayer and Flanders
understand this and that is why the examples they choose to
enforce their point are from the works of Margaret Cavendish
and Elizabeth Cellier, the former a non-performance-based playwright
and the latter not a dramatist at all but a polemical pamphleteer. |
| 5. |
This brings me to the second part of Mayer and Flanders's essay, which is its
concern to propel us into a more thoughtful discrimination
of what we mean, as encoders, editors, and users of electronic
texts, by accessibility. The Brown University-based Women
Writers Project, of which Flanders is text-manager, was a
pioneer in exploiting electronic technology to widen access
(in that case, access to a female, anglophone culture) and
so to reshape the literary landscape. It has done impressive
work in raising the scholarly community's awareness of diverse
and alternative aesthetic traditions by the simple expedient
of bringing rare and out-of-print texts to light. In the
case of the WWP, accessibility has been partly defined in
terms of size—the Project's boldly imaginative understanding that rare texts become accessible
if you issue them in sufficient company. There is a confidence
and familiarity in numbers, which translates into a potential
for conversation—the conversation that a body of texts can generate trans-textually, as it were,
by being defined as a group (if only as a list in a catalogue),
and the conversation that a reading community can have about
them. In this essay, Mayer and Flanders refine that understanding
of access into a need to determine appropriate contexts for
individual texts.
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| 6. |
Contexts can be understood to imply a range of supporting materials and the editorial
or annotative function of selecting and interlinking those
materials so as to provide, in Mayer and Flanders's words,
'an edition legible by real readers'. This is only good sense,
though a robust defence of what might seem like a return
to the conventional practice of annotation must also now
be sensitive to the partiality and the value-laden implications
of such a definition of accessibility. Contextual environments
do not testify to a text's 'real' relationships but to a
prior perceived alienation from a text that the editor/encoder
as socially representative reader proposes to bridge on behalf
of a wider readerly community; in doing so the editor/encoder
does not merely serve the text and the community but creates
both, in terms of a set of held opinions. When Mayer and
Flanders argue that 'What needs to be understood better is
the relationship between access, editorial decisions, and what we have termed "permeability"', they are in effect arguing for a return to a form of controlled social practice
which creates the range of interpretation within which text
and reader/user become articulate. It could be argued that
this is no more than to come clean about what always happens
in every case of textual presentation, whether the contextual
function is confined to its minimal operation (as choice
of type fount, in the case of a printed document) or is apparently
(but only apparently) limitless in the form of an accretional
electronic archive. But since choices of context do not simply
illuminate texts but represent and reinforce possible readings,
it is not enough to designate either the resultant editions
or their reading communities as 'real editions' and 'real
readers'. It begs the questions whose 'real editions' and
whose 'real readers', and can either be understood separately
from the partial and subjective commitments of 'real editors'? |
| 7. |
As putative 'real editors' (and I for one welcome their return) Mayer and Flanders
have an agenda for the encoder, which is the representation
of textual complexity in the interests of permeability. Complexity
they define, through the force of their examples from Cavendish
and Cellier, as generic instability. In Cavendish's case, it
is the drama text which exploits print as a means of questioning
the normative conventions of the performance text. In Cellier's
case, it is the political pamphlet which signals, through its
typographical versatility, the potential for ludic enactment,
for voicing or performance, at the cost of textual decorum.
What these examples raise, intriguingly and excitingly, is
the challenge of encoding intra-textual instability as the
basis for the real electronic edition, and assembling an interventional
editorial apparatus that persuades us of this instability as
inherent to the text's identity. What Mayer and Flanders reprioritize, then, by their shift of emphasis from the inter-textual to the intra-textual
life of electronic texts, is the argument for the encoder/editor's
selection and rejection of meanings, and the fruitful possibility
of provoking disagreement—of being thought wrong. |
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Kathryn Sutherland
St. Anne's College, Oxford
Kathryn Sutherland is Reader in Bibliography and Textual Criticism, University of Oxford. She is the
editor of Electronic Text: Investigations in Method and Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).
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References
- Hodgdon, Barbara.The End Crowns All: Closure and Contradiction in Shakespeare's History . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991.
- Lavagnino, John. 'Completeness and Adequacy in Text Encoding'. in The Literary Text in the Digital Age. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. pp.63-76.
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