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Text: Its Vicissitudes
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but it is only recently that the idea o f the text as the corrupted material form
in which the original intentions must be divined has been challenged. Mod
ern textual scholars such as Jerome McGann have sought to reconceive the
text as social act and to focus on the social pracdces and materials o f trans
mission and publication, from inks and papers to book prices and editorial
practices, and study these things as socially significant.'* McGann thus tries
to move away from the idea that the material practices involving texts are
above all so many possible forms o f corruption that may befall the final au
thorial intention, o f which the text ought to be the manifestation.
Through these recent developments the idea of text in textual schol
arship may come to intersect with other modern ideas o f text, but we have
yet to see how far this may go or how much o f a rapprochement there will
turn out to be. What I would stress here is that the idea o f text in tradi
tional textual scholarship presents a duality that will reappear in different
forms. The notion o f text is that o f a material object but also of the very
form o f the work, in its original, ideal state. Thus the term text gestures to
ward matter, manifestation; indeed, this is the colloquial notion o f “text” :
the text is the writing that you see before you, “the text o f this law,” for in
stance. But texts are o f interest above all because o f that which is or ought
to be carried by or manifested in the material text and are thus seldom
identified unreservedly with what appears on paper.
In Anglo-American New Criticism the notion o f “the text itself”
comes into its own in its most useful form— in an opposition; the text it
self, the aesthetic object o f literary study, as opposed to what it is said to
mean or reflect or manifest; as opposed to history or biography. Students
are enjoined to pay attention to the text itself, to cite evidence from the
text itself, to set aside what is said about it or about the author. They are
urged to focus on what the text says or, better, does, as opposed to what it
is supposed to say. “The text itself”— the emphatic pronoun so often ac
companies it— is a complicated positivity. The text itself is words on the
page, but despite the banning o f the intentional fallacy (confusing what
something means with what someone is supposed to have meant by it),
and despite the rule that arguments about meaning are not settled by con-
4.
See Jerome McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1991), 12.
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C O N C E P T S
suiting the oracle (that is, asking the author, directly or indirectly),^ the
New Critical notion o f the text is not wholly divorced from authorial in
tention, which takes the form o f a powerful posited teleology. The text is
the words on the page, yes, but these words are presumed to be organized
as a complex whole— otherwise we would not speak o f the text but just of
writing.
Michael Riffaterre, best known for his theorization o f intertextuality
nonetheless inherits and articulates this concept o f the text: “By textual-
ity I mean the complex o f formal and semantic features that characterize
a self-sufficient, coherent, unified text, and legitimize its forms, however
aberrant they may be, by removing any hint o f the gratuitous.”® The textu-
ality o f a text (its essence as text) is the complex internal organization that
sets it off from any context. I f aesthetic objects are, in Kants phrase, pur
posive wholes without purpose, it is the artistic intention embodied in the
text that warrants our expecting that the parts will be related to each other,
that obscurities will have their reasons, and that everything will contribute
to the effect o f the whole. Having said this, we have to stress that the work
itself reveals that artistic intention in ways that no information about the
writer and his or her plans or intentions can, so that the text itself, though
subtended by an artistic purpose, is separate from any other kinds o f infor
mation, which can all be regarded as ancillary and set aside through vari
ous oppositions (intrinsic/extrinsic, and so forth).
It was in the inherited context o f this idea o f the text— an autotelic
whole governed by a powerful aesthetic teleology— that Derridas lapidary
formula, “il n’y a pas de hors texte” [there is no outside-the-text] was inter
preted to mean something like “everything outside the actual text or texts
we are considering is irrelevant and doesn’t really exist,” whereas in Derri
das argument it means something like the opposite, that there is only text,
since you cannot get outside o f text.^ But I am getting ahead o f my text.
The structuralist moment is the turning point in the interdisciplin
ary fortunes o f the text, and the most important, both for interdisciplinar-
5. W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” in The
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