David F. Hult TEXT EDITING

David F. Hult

TEXT EDITING: PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE

s I’ve been thinking about Romanic Review’s 100th anniversary, I was Atempted, as I gather many participants on the program were, to dip into some of the frst issues of the journal in order to take a look at the sorts of articles being published in 1910 and the few years following. Among other observations, it is intriguing for us to discover the preponderance of studies devoted to either linguistics or philological topics as well as, historically speaking, to medieval and Renaissance literature. Only a handful of articles over the frst ten years extend into the seventeenth century and beyond. This of course refects the nature of graduate training at the time as well as the individuals who were forming graduate students and future professors at the most prominent institutions of higher education: Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Columbia and a handful of others. Among the medieval contributions, I was struck by the slight number of studies devoted to editions of shorter texts—at the time, a more common type of contribution to the French journal Romania—or to editorial questions in general, which seem to have been relegated to the review section. My attention was thus drawn, for rather different reasons, to two items in volume 1, dated 1910. The frst was a review of an article that had been published the previous year, in July 1909, in the Transactions of the Con- necticut Academy of Arts and Sciences. Written by an assistant professor of Spanish at Yale named Frederick Bliss Luquiens, the article under review had the straightforward yet provocative title “The Reconstruction of the Original Chanson de Roland.”1 The reviewer, J. A. Will, summarily dismissed the young professor’s argument, accusing him of subjectivity and specious reasoning. The second item in that frst volume of Romanic Review that attracted my attention appeared in the second fascicle for 1910, an article by the distin- guished French medievalist Joseph Bédier, innocuously entitled “Richard de Normandie dans les chansons de geste.”2 The author’s name is printed at the end, followed by the date, December 22, 1909, and the place, New York City.

1. J. A. Will, rev. of Frederick Bliss Luquiens, The Reconstruction of the Original Chan- son de Roland, Romanic Review 1 (1910): 333–6. The article in question appeared in Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences 15 (July 1909): 110–36. 2. Romanic Review 1 (1910): 113–124.

The Romanic Review Volume 101 Numbers 1–2 © The Trustees of Columbia University

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There would at frst blush seem to be little affnity between the Yale professor arguing somewhat loosely in favor of the “technical excellence” of the Oxford manuscript as a way of approaching a satisfactory “reconstruction” of the archetype of the Roland and Bédier’s own work at the time, which concentrated on analyses of the epic tradition that would lead to the publication of his four-volume Légendes épiques, the frst two volumes of which had appeared in 1908 and the fnal two of which would be published in 1912 and 1913. The Romanic Review article, which was later incorporated into the Légendes épiques, as were many of his articles devoted to epic at that time, studied the anachronistic presence of Richard the First, duke of Normandy, in a number of chansons de geste related to the cycle of Charlemagne in order to add one more piece of evidence in support of his thesis concerning the learned and clerical origins of French epic, which defed the prevailing orthodoxy of popular origins. Before coming back to a possible relation between these two items in the frst volume of Romanic Review, a few words should be said about the impor- tance of the period between 1907 and 1913 for editorial work in France and Germany, the status of the Chanson de Roland as an exemplary editorial challenge, and Joseph Bédier’s career-long contributions to the theory and practice of text editing. As is well known, Gaston Paris, through his courses and his landmark publication of the Vie de Saint Alexis in 1872, had intro- duced a method of text editing developed in Germany that was perceived as more scientifc than the less systematic approaches of his predecessors. The method, commonly associated with the German textual scholar Karl Lach- mann, attempts to establish the interrelationships between and among extant manuscripts of a given work in order to show how they relate to the now-lost common archetype, itself a descendant of the authorial original. Organizing these manuscripts in a family-tree arrangement, called a stemma, the method provided a quasi-mechanical method for determining the text of the archetype from all remaining manuscript witnesses. Post-Gaston Paris, the so-called stemmatic method dominated editorial circles. In 1890, in his very frst editorial project, Bédier produced, following the precepts of his master, an edition of a short narrative by the early thirteenth-century author Jean Renart, the Lai de l’ombre.3 As far as the Chanson de Roland is concerned, the situation in France was rather complicated, for it was the Germans who were at the cutting edge of textual scholarship.4 In 1872, the same landmark year that

3. Le Lai de l’ombre (Fribourg: Imprimerie et Librairie de l’Œuvre de Saint Paul, 1890). This edition was printed prior to Bédier’s defense of his doctoral theses in 1893; his complementary thesis, in Latin, was devoted to a study and edition of the poetry of Colin Muset. 4. For a superbly informed, yet compact, overview of the editorial history of the Chan- son de Roland, see Joseph J. Duggan’s general introduction to the three-volume collab-

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saw the appearance of Gaston Paris’s Saint Alexis, Léon Gautier produced an edition of the great epic based upon the more eclectic approach of the previous generation and, with the intention of vulgarizing medieval French literature for a broad public, included a modern French translation of the text, which was somewhat unusual at that time. It was a runaway success, with numer- ous reprintings and revisions. It remained the primary edition of the Roland read and referred to in France up until the time that Bédier fnally produced his own edition in 1922. However, during the same period, German scholars were at work applying the stemmatic method to the various manuscript witnesses of the Roland, as well as producing editions of many other medieval French works that for some reason did not attract French scholars. Theodor Müller’s third, defnitive edition of the Roland, predicated upon one hypothetical genealogical tree, appeared in 1878. Instantly criticized by another German scholar, Edmund Stengel, in his review of the edition, it nonetheless became the scientifc edition of the work until Stengel produced his own edition, based upon a different hypothesis, in 1900. It would be fair to say that in the scholarly world, Stengel’s edition was thereafter widely recognized as the authoritative edition of the French epic poem and therefore the dominant model at the time Romanic Review was founded. As Joseph Bédier was undermining the orthodoxy concerning the genesis and authorship of the chansons de geste, gradually inching toward the case of the Roland, he had said little about any attendant editorial questions. How- ever, as Alain Corbellari has noted in his defnitive intellectual biography of Bédier, following observations made by Gilles Eckhard, Bédier showed signs as early as 1907, in his edition of the Folies Tristan, of distancing himself from the mechanistic Lachmannian method, destined to produce an edition more hypothetical than “real” in that it does not correspond exactly to any existing medieval document.5 In the Folies edition, he clearly adheres to the text as found in the manuscript instead of extensively emending it to correspond to an idea of what the author would himself have composed, as a later, German-leaning, editor, Ernest Hoepffner, would do. Another important moment in the edition of early French texts occurred in 1910: the foundation of the Classiques Français du Moyen Âge, which until the last ffteen years or so has been the most important conduit for Old French texts used by scholars and students of literature. The series founder was Mario Roques, a very close associate of Bédier who clearly idolized him, and the person upon whom Paul Meyer conferred the editorship of Romania that same year.

orative edition he directed, La Chanson de Roland / The Song of Roland: The French Corpus (Turnhout (Belgium): Brepols, 2005) I: 5–38. 5. Alain Corbellari, Joseph Bédier: Écrivain et philologue (Geneva: Droz, 1997) 548–49.

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This is the setting in which the Spanish professor from Yale made his remarks concerning what he called the reconstruction of the Chanson de Roland: he fundamentally discounted the Stengel edition because it gave an aesthetically fawed account of the text as refected most notably in the Oxford manuscript and praised the Müller edition, which had been abandoned by scholars after Stengel’s achievement; he did so not because it was an impec- cable product, but because in its stemma, it placed the Oxford manuscript in a singular and prominent position. Luquiens’s concluding guidelines for the future editor of the Chanson de Roland stipulated that the latter should “never alter the Oxford manuscript to accord with the other redactions except for an imperative reason” and that he should “exclude from the Oxford manuscript whatever may be proved due to copyists.”6 Although Luquiens expressed his intention to “publish a series of articles” in which he would develop this argument, he does not appear to have followed up on the promise; the only other article he wrote on the topic of the Roland of which I am aware is a six page reply he published in 1913 in volume 4 of Romanic Review, in which he addressed both the negative review published in volume 1 of the journal, as well as one, not surprisingly, published by the German editor Stengel, whose work he had critiqued.7 Nearly ffteen years later, in the Commentaries he added to his edition of the Roland, Bédier expressed his approval of the article by Luquiens. This was followed ten years later in one of Bédier’s last publica- tions, by a three-part article entitled “De l’édition princeps de la Chanson de Roland aux éditions les plus récentes: nouvelles remarques sur l’art d’établir les anciens textes,”8 in which he makes a fairly magnanimous gesture: look- ing back after a remove of nearly forty years, and after wondering (ironically, as usual) whether Stengel’s extensive renovation of the Roland was at the

6. Luquiens, “The Reconstruction,” 136. 7. This article, included under the rubric “Miscellaneous,” is likewise entitled “The Re- construction of the Original Chanson de Roland,” Romanic Review 4 (1913): 112–17. Luquiens died in 1940, apparently still working actively as a Professor at Yale, as evidenced by a reference to him by Henri Peyre in a letter he sent to the Dean in late 1939 regarding the future of the graduate program in Romance Languages (See Henri Peyre: His Life in Letters, ed. John W. Kneller, collected and transcribed by Mario Maurin [New Haven: Yale UP, 2004]: 96ff). It is interesting to note that a former student of Luquiens published in 1952 an English translation of the Roland that the Yale professor had prepared prior to his death—a translation that, in accordance with his convic- tion expressed in the 1909 article that the Baligant episode was an interpolation in the archetype of the Roland, totally eliminates the episode, amounting to approximately 1000 lines in the Oxford manuscript! 8. The article appeared in Romania 63 (1937): 433–69 and in Romania 64 (1938): 145–244 and 489–521.

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time a cause for celebration, he adds: “Il se trouve que la thèse de Theodor Müller, tombée depuis tant d’années dans le décri, ou plutôt dans un oubli plus injurieux encore que le décri, en fut retirée en 1909 par un érudit améri- cain, Frederick Bliss Luquiens; en 1912, je l’ai revendiquée à mon tour. Nous en avons été blâmés [. . .].”9 Bédier’s solidarity with the American was itself criticized by Cesare Segre in his own, widely admired edition of the Roland that made its frst appearance in 1971, in which he dismissed the Yale professor’s argument as dilettantish.10 Yet no less a textual scholar than Frederick Whitehead, in a 1961 “historical review” of the textual criticism of the Chan- son de Roland, called the appearance of Luquiens’s article “The ‘Copernican revolution’ in Roland criticism,” adding that the “outstanding merit of [his] work has” undoubtedly not “yet been suffciently recognized.” He goes on to assert that Bédier “entered the fray” with the 1927 publication of his Com- mentaries and that “his approach is to all intents and purposes identical with that of Luquiens.”11 What, indeed, are we to make of Bédier’s editorial theory and Luquiens’s controversial yet precocious argument on behalf of what some call the “pre-excellence” (précellence) of the Oxford manuscript? Aside from the two philologists occupying space in the inaugural volume of Romanic Review and sharing a certain vision of the Oxford Roland, one other factor is of note. Do you recall my mention of the dating of Bédier’s Romanic Review article? Late December 1909. Indeed, as Corbellari details it, Bédier’s frst visit to the United States took place in the last three months of 1909, when he was on a mission to “poursuivre des recherches relatives à la diffusion de la connaissance de la langue et de la littérature française.” He did a virtually non-stop tour of fve universities, delivering, as he specifes in a letter to the patroness who made his trip possible, “des leçons d’université” and not “des conférences d’apparat et d’agrément.” He was given total free- dom as far as the choice of topics was concerned, so he adds that “ces leçons porteront toutes sur mon ‘dada’ des Légendes épiques: ce que j’apporte aux Yankees, c’est en réalité mon 3e volume des Légendes épiques et le commence- ment du 4e.” 12 He delivered twenty-seven leçons in all, from October 11 until December 10, with two other institutions and several other lectures tacked on at the last minute due to the success of his visit. Clearly the publication of his Romanic Review article was a result of his November visit to Columbia, probably one of the leçons he delivered on that occasion, and he signed off

9. Romania 64 (1938): 183–84. 10. Cesare Segre, ed., La Chanson de Roland (Milan: Ricciardi, 1971) xv. 11. F[rederick] Whitehead, “The Textual Criticism of the Chanson de Roland: An Historical Review,” Studies in Medieval French presented to Alfred Ewert in Honor of his seventieth Birthday (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1961) 76-89 [79]. 12. All quotations from Corbellari, Joseph Bédier 306.

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on it just before sailing back to France at the end of his stay in the U.S. But he also visited Yale for four lectures in late October. Here I can only offer some random speculation: Is it possible that he went to Yale to speak of the chansons de geste and that the Spanish professor who had just published his somewhat daring speculations on the Oxford manuscript of the Roland and his severe critique of the seemingly authoritative edition at that time would not have come to these lectures, would not have somehow managed to share his work with the professor from the Collège de France? Would he not have presented him with a copy of his article? Lacking any additional evidence, such as reference to him in Bédier’s correspondence (which Corbellari does not mention), I cannot answer these questions with certainty. But Whitehead is mistaken when he says that Bédier waited until 1927 to “enter the fray” initiated by Luquiens: in fact, only two years later, in 1912, Bédier published what Corbellari’s bibliography lists as Bédier’s frst contribution to Chanson de Roland scholarship, an article in Romania entitled, interestingly enough, “De l’autorité du manuscrit d’Oxford pour l’établissement du texte de la Chanson de Roland,” which would be included that same year in volume 3 of the Légendes épiques.13 There is in it no mention of Luquiens’ article, even though the latter’s early diffusion is beyond doubt, as evidenced by Stengel’s review in 1909 and Paul Meyer’s ambivalent paragraph review published the same year in Romania. I am far from suggesting that Bédier might have brought something back to Paris with him from the Yankees other than what must have been splendid memories of a very successful cultural and intellectual performance. But I do fnd the timing suggestive. In 1913, a scant three years after Bédier’s visit to the United States, one year after his article on the Oxford manuscript of the Roland, and the same year as the publication of the last volume of the Légen- des épiques, the scholar of the Collège de France published a text that is widely considered to have initiated a “Copernican revolution” (to borrow White- head’s phrase—we now would probably call it a “sea change”) in editorial methodology: namely, the preface to his totally redone second edition of the Lai de l’ombre of Jean Renart—twenty-three years after his frst, Lachman- nian, edition. Here he formulated the position that would come to be known as the Bédierist position in text editing, especially as it would be elaborated ffteen years later in two articles Bédier published in Romania and gathered together in pamphlet form the following year, 1929—a return to these questions that can be explained by his need or desire to respond to Dom Henri Quentin’s serious questioning of his analysis and his proposal of a superior scheme in his 1926 Essais de critique textuelle. That position, in the simplest

13. Romania 41 (1912): 331–45.

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(and, I confess, most reductive) of terms holds that whereas in principle the distribution of extant manuscripts in a stemmatic relationship should yield a mechanism by which an original text can logically be generated that would explain what is found in these manuscripts and by what paths it occurred, it never does in practice. If, for instance, the manuscripts of a particular tradition can be classifed in three families and, say, two families have one word whereas the remaining family has another word in the corresponding place, all other things being equal, the former has to be the one transmitted from a higher level of the stemma and the latter, a scribal revision. But the “law” that Bédier dis- covered was that in the overwhelming majority of editions, manuscripts end up being classifed into only two families. When that happens, when there is no majority consensus on the text, the editor is largely free to choose whatever she or he prefers from one of the two families. This leads to the phenomenon of which Stengel’s 1900 edition of the Chanson de Roland could be considered a poster child: an edition that has no recognizable connection to any of the extant manuscripts, inserting as it does over six hundred lines from other manuscripts into the account provided by the Oxford manuscript and altering, by Bédier’s count, nearly a thousand lines of that manuscript, which served nonetheless as the base for his edition. Bédier rejected these highly composite texts and turned to the method he was already tacitly beginning to put into practice, that of reproducing a single manuscript with a minimum of editorial intervention. It is nonetheless startling to see the rapidity of the transition: in 1912, Bédier’s conclusion about the Oxford Roland was still expressed in Lachmannian terms; only one year later, he fred his frst volley in a battle that would for many, but not all, editors discredit the Lachmannian approach. I might add that with his close ally Mario Roques at the helm of both Romania and the Classiques français du Moyen Âge, Bédierism in text editing quickly became the orthodoxy in French editorial circles. It is interesting to note the differences and similarities between Bédier’s approach to the Oxford manuscript and that of his American predecessor. First, neither one attacks the Lachmannian approach or its application. Both agree that the Oxford manuscript, representing alone one of two families, has as much authority as all the other textual witnesses combined.14 They also concur that the editor has the choice of following Oxford to a greater or lesser extent, with the option of preferring the reading contained in the other family when all witnesses differ from the Oxford text. But where their approaches diverge radically is in the manner of reaching their goals. Luquiens’s argument

14. A formulation that the neo-Lachmannian Segre will turn on its ear, when he claims that, contrariwise, “Tous les autres textes réunis ont autant d’autorité que le texte d’Oxford.” (La Chanson de Roland)

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is based entirely upon what he calls technical and formal criteria such as symmetry, parallelism and coherence and comes from the perspective of interpretation rather than editorial theory. In fact, he uses his evaluation of the relative aesthetic merits of the texts presented in the Müller and Stengel editions in order to argue for or against the correctness of their stemmata. Hence, because the bloated text created by Stengel, as dictated by the mechanics of his stemma, is markedly inferior to Müller’s (and to the Oxford manuscript), his stemma is, quite simply, not the good one. Müller is not, however, exempt from criticism, for Luquiens fnds that he did not adequately carry out his task, which would have called for much closer adherence to the Oxford text. One could say that, at this early point, the Yale professor out-Bédiers Bédier, for the latter’s rather pale analysis, based upon fve passages, most of which had already been called into play by Luquiens, merely concludes, as per Müller’s stemma, that the Oxford manuscript has “as much” authority as all the others. One is tempted to side with Segre regarding the dilettantism of Luquiens, who failed to engage in a theoretical argument based upon philological or ecdotic method—as would soon be the case for Bédier. Yet Corbellari has suggested that Segre did not see the real “enjeu du débat”: “L’intérêt du travail de Luquiens ne réside pas dans la science (certes fort maigre) qui s’y déploie, mais dans la nouveauté de la perspective qu’il apporte quant à l’étude du Roland, puisque Luquiens est sans doute le premier érudit à saluer dans la version d’Oxford l’unité de conception de la plus belle des chansons de geste.”15 Yet what I fnd intriguing is how much at this point the perspectives of the two scholars intersect, with Luquiens, for all his lack of philological rigor, representing the type of aesthetic appreciation that was crucial for Bédier’s own approach, but that he would increasingly attempt to disown in his developing editorial method. For my purposes, Luquiens serves a heuristic function in highlighting in the most blatant of terms the conficted position that Bédier was negotiating. The essential problem for the French scholar—for every textual editor—is the duality of the editorial position itself, and there are no two ways around it: editorial choices are predicated upon judgment, subjectivity, and interpretation. Even the laziest Bédierist has to choose the manuscript to edit and defend that choice (unless, of course, it is a single-manuscript tradition). However, the editor is in a position of subservience, morally obliged to transmit faithfully the words of another. It is an in-between situation that recalls Jean Pépin’s important discussion of the originary meaning of the term hermeneutic.16 In ancient Greek, the term could be applied, as it is now, to exegesis of a text but it also was used frequently to denote verbal expression

15. Corbellari, Joseph Bédier 401. 16. “L’Herméneutique ancienne,” Poétique 23 (1975): 291–300.

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itself. The closest analogy to the present situation is the one produced by Plato in his Ion: the rhapsode is the hermeneus of the poet, mouthing the latter’s words before his audience, both passive conduit and active interpreter. The reason why the juxtaposition between Luquiens and Bédier seems compelling to me is that they mirror each other so closely when it comes to their aesthetic and stylistic judgments, but in so little else. When Bédier speaks, for instance, of the unity of the Chanson de Roland in his Légendes épiques, one could easily mistake him for the Yale professor. If we turn from this “encounter”—which is perhaps only an encounter in my own mind—to Bédier’s later, and I would say defnitive, critique of Lach- mannian editorial method, we fnd some interesting factors that are not typi- cally highlighted when Bédier and Lachmann are treated as representing very nearly polar principles of editorial practice, as I myself treated them just over twenty years ago in an article that appeared in Romanic Review.17 Let me quote the well-known passage with which Bédier closed his 1928 article and in which he provides the most compact summary of his method and its rationale:

Dès lors, il faut bien convenir, avec les anciens humanistes, qu’on ne dispose guère que d’un outil: le goût. Que ce soit un pauvre outil, fragile, décevant, et qu’on l’ait manié souvent avec témérité, c’est ce que les humanistes eux-mêmes se sont, hélas! souvent chargés de montrer, en tant d’éditions de style composite par eux publiées, au seizième siècle notamment. Certes, les fns qui ne sont que fns sont aussi dangereux que les géomètres qui ne sont que géomètres, et il faut bien de l’orgueil, ou plutôt bien de la vanité, pour se fer à son goût. Aussi, la méthode d’édition la plus recommandable est-elle peut-être, en dernière analyse, celle que régit un esprit de défance de soi, de prudence, d’extrême « conservatisme », un énergique vouloir, porté jusqu’au parti pris, d’ouvrir aux scribes le plus large crédit et de ne toucher au texte d’un manuscrit que l’on imprime qu’en cas d’extrême et presque évidente nécessité: toutes les cor- rections conjecturales devraient être reléguées en des appendices. « Une telle méthode d’édition, a écrit dom Quentin, risque d’être bien dommageable à la critique textuelle ». Peut-être; mais c’est, de toutes les méthodes connues, celle qui risque le moins d’être dommageable aux textes.18

17. “Reading it Right: The Ideology of Text Editing,” Romanic Review 79 (1988): 74–88. 18. Quoted from La Tradition manuscrite du “Lai de l’ombre”: Réfexions sur l’art d’éditer les anciens textes (Paris: Champion, 1970 [orig. 1929]) 71. This pamphlet

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The question of goût, namely the subjective, interpretive faculty of judgment, looms large in Bédier’s editorial argument; it is indeed omnipresent. The argument, he says, in favor of editing a single manuscript conservatively rather than abstracting from the manuscript tradition in order to produce a composite text is that it limits to the greatest extent possible the editor’s imposition of his or her own taste or interpretation in the operation. Bédier’s major goal in discrediting stemmatic constructions by demonstrating their fundamental arbitrariness was to unveil the signifcant amount of personal taste masquer- ading as scientifc method and the chimera of the mechanical generation of a critical text purportedly afforded by that method. Indeed, Bédier posits a psychological reason for why philologists happily construct hypothetical stemmata of three, four or fve families in their articles, but that when it comes time to edit, the stemma inevitably reduces to two: simply put, the editor at some point realizes, consciously or unconsciously, that too much power has been delegated to the mechanism that has been constructed—yes, we are not far from Frankenstein’s monster here; consequently, the editor reduces the number of branches to two in order to recover “une partie de l’autorité qu’il avait imprudemment aliénée.”19 In a passage dripping with irony (as is much of this mesmerizing study), Bédier goes on to say that he would not accuse editors of doing this consciously in order to “ruser avec la vérité” but rather by a “fatalité [qui] a pesé sur eux à leur insu”: “Des forces obscures, confnées dans les profondeurs du subconscient, ont exercé leur infuence.”20 This is, one might add, a semi-autobiographical refection on Bédier’s part, as he thinks back to his own Lachmannian work dating nearly forty years prior to this text. There are a few other components of Bédier’s discussion that I think have either been misunderstood or passed over. And this is perhaps where we can glimpse in Bédier not only the “present” but the “future” of text editing included in my title. His method is often referred to as the “best manuscript” method, maybe because that is the way it has been practiced by his epig- ones: for any given manuscript tradition, choose the best extant manuscript and edit as conservatively as possible, emending only when absolutely neces- sary. The “best manuscript” consequently takes the place of the authorial text and therefore has the same goal as the Lachmannian method but takes a markedly different path. Bernard Cerquiglini claimed nothing less than this when he assimilated Bédier and Lachmann in the article published in 1983, “Éloge de la variante,” that would be the kernel of his infuential 1989 essay of the same title: “Il est tentant de renvoyer sur un point Lachmann et Bédier

version reprints the articles as they appeared in Romania 54 (1928): 161–96 and 321–56. 19. La Tradition manuscrite 13. 20. La Tradition manuscrite 14–15.

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dos à dos; l’impressionnante méthode allemande et l’élégant empirisme fran- çais ont le même but: réduire et stabiliser ce débordement qu’est la tradition manuscrite.”21 But it seems to me that this is far from what Bédier was arguing for in his 1928 essay. At that point, as I’ve mentioned, he had already produced two editions of the Lai de l’ombre: his frst, Lachmannian, one in 1890 and his second, Bédierist, based on manuscript A, in 1913. In 1928, at the term of seventy pages of discussion, having run through eleven hypothetical stemmatic versions of the manuscript tradition, he comes to the conclusion that three manuscripts, A, E and F, all quite dissimilar, represent three “formes du texte” but that they are all “presque également cohérentes et harmonieuses.” Since all three are worthy, they all merit being edited. As Bédier goes on to say, since F was the manuscript reproduced by Jubinal in 1846, and he himself had already edited A in 1913—and here we note his silence on his frst, composite edition, which amounts to a fat disavowal—he goes on to state, “Il convient qu’on puisse lire aussi le texte E dans une édition où il soit fdèlement reproduit, comme l’ont été les deux autres.”22 He ends the second of his 1928 articles with that edition. Rather than concluding that the edition should be reduced to one “best” manuscript, Bédier argues for the publication of different manuscripts in order for the reader to have exposure to the three different states (or even more, as he had suggested in 1913) of the text. I would call this a particularly radical move that places itself at the limits of what we might call the authorial text and that betokens the kind of mouvance for which Cerquiglini was arguing in his controversial essay and which has been widely accepted as a legitimate approach to editing not only in the French feld but in English and Ameri- can literature as well. It must be said, however, that Bédier attenuates the radical nature of the gesture when he foats the suggestion that these three manuscripts might not refect different scribal moments or interpretations, but rather three states of the text as Jean Renart had reworked them. One can see in this shift of perspective a retrograde move to the comforting authorial fgure, accentuating once again a certain moral allegiance to the latter at the expense of the scribe and demonstrating a turn away from the radicality of mouvance as well as from the praise of the variant. But there is another way of judging this suggestion of three Jean Renarts and it has everything to do with the question of taste that Bédier brings up in his fnal paragraph but which, in fact, is at issue throughout the entire essay. Among the most striking aspects of Bédier’s 1928 argumentation (and that, I might add, is almost totally lacking in his landmark 1913 preface) are his

21. “Éloge de la variante,” Langages 17e année, no. 69 (1983): 25–35; 33. 22. Quotations from La Tradition manuscrite 68–9.

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irreverence and the humor that results from it. A cynical streak that one can detect building in his career leads him to see in every value-laden fgure used by critics and philologists precisely that: a fgure, a fction that needs to be unmasked. And I think that the author fgure is one of those—a mask placed over the fundamental contingency of the manuscript text. For instance, Bédier adorns his serious critique of stemmatic method with wry refections on the biological and organic metaphors used to undergird the method. When he frst mentions the image of the genealogical manuscript tree, he refects in a parenthesis: “Un arbre qu’on a pris coutume, je ne sais pourquoi, de dessiner à l’envers, racine en haut, branches en bas.”23 The topsy-turvy nature of the genealogical tree will be defnitively uprighted when, in the closing pages of the essay, he substitutes for it the man-made, non-organic image of the building: “La base de la construction, le rez-de-chaussée, est solide. Mais il en va autrement des parties hautes: seules, mais presque toujours, sont suspectes les lignes par lesquelles on relie des w, des x, des y et des z à O, « l’original », ou à O1, « l’archétype », car on peut, presque toujours, en modifer la disposition.”24 Up is down and down is up. The natural is decidedly unnatural. Furthermore, he refers to the “fore philologique,” the forest of trees with two branches resulting from editors who have lopped off (ébranché) all the others. On the other hand, the imagined trees of more than two branches, fgments of philologists’ imaginations, never bear fruit and remain “arbres secs, fguiers stériles.”25 Speaking of the mechanical nature of stemmatic production, Bédier mentions the name of Vaucanson, an allusion to the eighteenth-century inven- tor and creator of automatons, such as the mechanical duck, that was able to eat food, digest it and then defecate. As the Encyclopédie of Diderot says about Vaucanson’s automatons, which were very much the rage at the time, “Toute cette machine joue sans qu’on y touche, quand on l’a montée une fois,”26 neatly illustrating Bédier’s insidious remarks about the alienation of individual initiative in the theory, but not practice, of the stemmatic method. Most striking of all are Bédier’s irreverent refections on the “family relations” of manuscripts when, in his critique of Quentin’s method of classifcation, he says, “Le raisonnement est fondé, sauf erreur, sur ce seul principe: deux frères doivent normalement se ressembler plus qu’ils ne ressemblent à un de leurs cousins. Et ce principe est juste. Mais si l’un des deux frères s’est maquillé et travesti? Si un scribe très « particulariste », comme il y en a tant, imaginant à

23. La Tradition manuscrite 5. 24. La Tradition manuscrite 71. 25. Quotations from La Tradition manuscrite 10–13. 26. Quoted from the article “Automate” in Diderot’s Encyclopédie, t. 1 (Paris: Briasson et al, 1751) 896 (rpt. Elmsford NY / Paris: Pergamon P, n.d.).

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plaisir des leçons de son cru, a maquillé et travesti le texte?”27 The essentially gender-bending qualities of certain manuscript copies subverts the natural order (and the hint of perversion in the fgure of the transvestite subtly bleeds over into that of the scientifc editor). Mocking as one would say nowadays, in a non-medieval context, the Holy Grail of textual criticism, the perfectly objective classifcation of manuscripts and the mechanical production of the fnal text, Bédier makes the following statement: “Et le vrai proft, c’est de savoir que voilà effacés, annulés, et que demain seront réparés les méfaits de ces légions de scribes, de remanieurs et de philologues qui, par distraction ou par ignorance, par fantaisie ou par pédanterie, ont altéré au cours des siècles les œuvres non seulement de notre aimable ménestrel, mais de tous les écrivains profanes et sacrés de l’Antiquité et du Moyen Âge.”28 Nothing, I think, is sacred in Bédier’s vision and nothing more important than for the reader to be able to exercise his or her faculties of analysis. Furthermore, mixing together the various categories of agents responsible for the transmission of the text—scribe, philologist, editor—begs the question of the most untouchable of categories, that of the author. Treated by some like a God, this reverence for the author-fgure could likewise remind us of the fgure of the hermeneut who, in ancient times, served as the trans- mitter of sacred doctrine. Towards the end of his essay, Bédier compares fve passages from one family of manuscripts that had previously been considered farther away from the archetype of the Lai de l’ombre than the family of ms. A, the one he had edited in 1913; his fndings show that in these fve cases, the readings of the former are decidedly superior to the latter, and so he concludes:

Nos cinq pesées lachmanniennes [. . .] ont mis en lumière le fait que les cinq leçons DEF considérées sont dues en tout cas à un homme fort intelligent, qui parlait la même langue que Jean Renart, écrivait du même style, rimait selon la même technique, et que les Muses avaient doué précisément des mêmes dons. D’où la question: ce double de Jean Renart ne serait-il pas Jean Renart lui-même? Il se peut que l’on réponde oui.29

By making his subjective assessments of these variants (and this judgment is based upon strikingly subtle interpretations of the text) a manner of determining the existence of the author, isn’t Bédier revealing that what differentiates the contingent (read: scribal) from the originary is, quite simply, the label

27. La Tradition manuscrite 54. 28. La Tradition manuscrite 40. 29. La Tradition manuscrite 65.

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that we apply to it? By treating his three manuscripts of the Lai de l’ombre as different editions of the text, by comparing variants in a critical apparatus to larvae, “pauvres choses bizarres, informes, difformes, quand on les regarde grouiller au fond d’un appareil critique”30 that take on meaning and charm when one puts them back in their context, that is, in the edited version of the text, isn’t Bédier uncannily thinking forward to what for him would have been unimaginable: the era of the computer, where conceivably every state of a text across a number of manuscripts can be not only consultable but considered in their own right as a “version” of the text? Finally, can we not suggest that surreptitiously, perhaps unbeknownst to him—perhaps not—, Bédier’s analysis helped pave the way for the death of the author as the fgure had been conceived in the nineteenth century?

University of California, Berkeley

30. La Tradition manuscrite 68.

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