Text Genetics in Literary Modernism and Other Essays
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Text Genetics in Literary Modernism and Other Essays HANS WALTER GABLER To access digital resources including: blog posts videos online appendices and to purchase copies of this book in: hardback paperback ebook editions Go to: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/629 Open Book Publishers is a non-profit independent initiative. We rely on sales and donations to continue publishing high-quality academic works. Text Genetics in Literary Modernism and Other Essays Hans Walter Gabler http://www.openbookpublishers.com © 2018 Hans Walter Gabler This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Hans Walter Gabler, Text Genetics in Literary Modernism and Other Essays. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2018. https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0120 In order to access detailed and updated information on the license, please visit https://www. openbookpublishers.com/product/629#copyright Further details about CC BY licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ All external links were active on 22/01/2018 unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher. Digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at https://www. openbookpublishers.com/product/629#resources ISBN Paperback: 978-1-78374-363-6 ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-364-3 ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-78374-365-0 ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-78374-366-7 ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-78374-367-4 DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0120 The OBP team involved in the production of this book: Alessandra Tosi (managing editor), Lucy Barnes (editing and copyediting), Bianca Gualandi (layout and digital production) and Anna Gatti (cover design). Cover image: The Milton manuscript (17th century). Image courtesy and copyright Master and Fellows, Trinity College, Cambridge, CC BY-NC 4.0. All paper used by Open Book Publishers is SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initiative), and PEFC (Programme for the endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes) Certified. Printed in the United Kingdom, United States and Australia by Lightning Source for Open Book Publishers (Cambridge, UK). Contents Foreword 1 1. The Rocky Road to Ulysses 11 2. ‘He chronicled with patience’: Early Joycean Progressions Between Non-Fiction and Fiction 47 3. James Joyce Interpreneur 65 4. Structures of Memory and Orientation: Steering a Course Through Wandering Rocks 81 5. Editing Text—Editing Work 111 6. Theorizing the Digital Scholarly Edition 121 7. Thoughts on Scholarly Editing 143 8. Beyond Author-Centricity in Scholarly Editing 169 9. Sourcing and Editing Shakespeare: The Bibliographical Fallacy 195 10. The Draft Manuscript as Material Foundation for Genetic Editing and Genetic Criticism 209 11. A Tale of Two Texts: Or, How One Might Edit Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse 221 12. Auto-Palimpsests: Virginia Woolf’s Late Drafting of Her Early Life 257 13. From Memory to Fiction: An Essay in Genetic Criticism 287 14. Johann Sebastian Bach’s Two-Choir Passion 301 15. Argument into Design: Editions as a Sub-Species of the Printed Book 315 16. Cultural versus Editorial Canonising: The Cases of Shakespeare, of Joyce 363 Bibliography 383 Acknowledgments 391 List of Illustrations 395 Index 399 Foreword On the front and back covers of this collection of essays is shadowed, and across the ensuing opening we discern, the entire evidence in writing of John Milton’s composition of the poem he began under the title Song and developed by stages of revision into At a Solemn Musick. John Milton is not a modernist author. Yet this double-page spread in his autograph of his earlier writing preserved as ‘The Milton Manuscript’’ (shelfmark R.3.4) in the Wren Library of Trinity College, Cambridge, shows every characteristic of authorial drafts from later times in later hands. Owing to a large tear in the leaf, a long set of line openings or middles of lines from the first writing attempt is lost, but the line fragments remaining indicate a draft in a sequence of thirty lines predominantly in pentameter, though intermittently shorter. There are frequent and significant revisions in wording—the last line goes through several permutations—as well as of line lengths. With a wholesale crossing- out of the block of writing in the page’s upper half, the second attempt commences in the white space below. Twenty-two lines towards a second draft of the poem, inclusive of two lines at the bottom of the page that show in the manuscript as heavily deleted, are here accommodated. Short lines segment groups of full pentameter-length lines into what appears to be a considered patterning. Verbal revision is again frequent. The second draft is brought to an end with eight lines that form the uppermost of three blocks of writing on the second manuscript page. Before the heavy deletion of the bottom lines on the first manuscript page, the second draft once more totals thirty lines. © Hans Walter Gabler, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0120.17 Fig. 1 John Milton, Song, in process of revision towards At a Solemn Musick. © Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, CC BY-NC 4.0 Fig. 1 John Milton, Song, in process of revision towards At a Solemn Musick. © Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, CC BY-NC 4.0 4 Text Genetics in Literary Modernism and Other Essays The second block of twelve lines on the second page revises the eight-line block above it and represents what material evidence the manuscript provides for a third draft of the poem. This third draft was not separately written out in its entirety, but is mirrored in the fair-copy text of At a Solemn Musick resulting from it. The last block in the lower half of the second page constitutes that fair copy. Relating the second draft and the fair copy to one another reveals the extent of the recomposition of the second draft into the third draft. The rewrite involved, implicitly, a cutting of the second four lines of the second draft on page one, and also confirms the heavy deletion of the last two lines on page one. The revision of the upper block into the middle block of page two evidences both significant variation of preexisting text and an expansion from eight to twelve lines. After the wholesale crossings-out of all second- draft and third-draft writing blocks, the fair copy alone, uncrossed-out, concludes the writing on the manuscript’s second page and ends the composition of the poem, except only for one significant revision of its last line when the poem appears in print. The manuscript line ‘To live and sing with him in endlesse morne of light.’ becomes in the published text: ‘To live with him, and sing in endless morn of light.’ This, besides muting the homeliness of living and singing along with Him, reproportions the line’s 3 : 3 stresses in the fair copy into 2 : 4 stresses in the published poem. This reproportioning instantiates for an additional and final time the 1 : 2 ratio of the double octave by which the poem is multiply structured. In the fresh-text addition to the second version, the proportion is conceptualised by its recondite technical term in Greek as ‘perfect diapason’ (line 23 of At a Solemn Musick). In reenacting in its last line that double-octave relationship, the poem climaxes prosodically in its heightened vision of sharing with the heavenly hosts anew ‘the faire musick that all creatures made | To thire great Lord whose Love thire motion sway’d’ (lines 21–22). This solemn music is what the poem is about. To understand how the two versions differently articulate the Song and envision the Solemn Musick, it is the numbers of Milton’s composition that crave attention. Numerological significance had strong roots in Hebrew erudition and Christian religion, as well as in the philosophic thought of Antiquity. For John Milton, numbers and number proportions were still semantically charged: theologically, philosophically, indeed musically. Writing Song in thirty lines and Foreword 5 segmenting these as twenty-two plus eight lines reflects the fact that Milton knew twenty-two as the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet by which Old Testament Scripture, and thus the old dispensation, could be signified. The number eight, by contrast, stood for the day of Christ’s resurrection, to which for example the octangular design of baptismal churches and fonts symbolically relate, and thus signifies the new dispensation of the New Testament. In terms of the number division of its lines, Song articulates through its form the subject that it sings. The revision of Song into At a Solemn Musick represents a rethinking of how to articulate the poem through its numbers. Its Solemn Musick becomes insistently expressed through musical proportions, now less of Biblical and Christian than of Platonic and Pythagorean origins. The dominant proportion is that of the octave and double octave. Milton’s strategic use of short lines to group the poem’s regular pentameter lines ensures that the poem’s structuring by musical numbers be recognised, allowing the reader stage by stage to follow the poet in dialogue with his writing, and responding to how the emerging text established its modifications of form and enriched its significance.