Editing Beckett - editing errors and the changing texts of Samuel Beckett

In the climate of post-structuralism the goal of retrieving something like an "original," "definitive," or "uncorrupted" text has been essentially discredited, since it assumes that an ideal text exists somewhere outside the process of reading it, or in the case of theater outside its "real-ization" on the stage. Such a critical climate has undermined the editor's traditional function of recovering and presenting something like an "original," "uncorrupted," or "corrected" text in its originary, prelapsarian purity.(10) This age of dislocation and plurality of meaning invites a concomitant plurality of texts, and textual editors may finally have to adjust their aims to embrace that plurality or multiplicity and settle for the more modest goal of the "best recoverable text" or set of texts.

On the other hand, the problem of whose words exactly we are reading, hearing, performing, and finally interpreting, the historical author's, his scribe's, some typesetter's, an editor's, or an over-zealous theatrical director's, is a question all too often slighted by post-structural theorists. On the one hand, if the literary text is created by the reader, and so differs from reader to reader, why bother with a quest for the uniquely authorial or "uncorrupted" document? One might simply suggest fatalistically that textual deviations, alterations, or corruptions are inevitable, another cultural force at work on any text, and in many cases it is that same cultural imperative which generated that text through a particular historical author in the first place. The simple answer to the question "Why bother?" is, however, that although there are innumerable kinds of hats, and noses come in an incalculable variety of sizes and shapes, a hat is not a shoe, and a nose is not a knee. How an author or editor fills the space on a page is at least as important as how the reader will fill the "literary space" left by the author; that is, what exactly the reader will turn into a text in her reading remains of utmost importance. Catherine Belsey, for one, poses the dichotomy of meaning and textuality as follows:

While on the one hand meaning is never single, eternally

inscribed in the words on the page, on the other hand readings do

not spring unilaterally out of the subjectivities (or the ideologies)

of readers. The text is not an empty space, filled with meaning

from outside itself, any more than it is the transcription of an

authorial intention, filled with meaning from outside language.

As a signifying practice, writing always offers raw material for the

production of meaning, the signified in its plurality, on the understanding,

of course, that the signified is distinct from the intention

of the author (pure concept) or the referent (a world

already constituted and re-presented). (406-07)

Despite such ideological sensitivity and authorial ambiguity, the question of accurate or even complete texts, those that represent as much of the author's creative process as possible, remains a pressing theoretical and practical issue, one given renewed energy (if not method) by the publication of Hans Walter Gabler's 1984 "synoptic" edition of Ulysses, the 1986 Vintage "Corrected Text" that followed from it, John Kidd's assault (more on the methodology than on the ideology) of the project, and now the proliferation of Ulysses. Gabler's Ulysses (and calling it that proclaims its difference from, say, Joyce's Ulysses, that is, from any single edition Joyce ever wrote or read), for all its many faults in design and execution, has at least refocused attention on these issues, and his "synoptic text" offers one possible solution to the problems of a postmodern theory of textuality and textual transmission by acknowledging the plurality of texts. As Jerome McGann notes: