G. Thomas Tanselle.  "The Nature of Texts" from A Rationale of Textual Criticism (1989)

Books are not what you think they are.  At least, not in G. Thomas Tanselle’s view, as carefully delineated in "The Nature of Texts."  According to Tanselle, the book is the material medium through which a literary work is performed.  The performance, for Tanselle, is a collaboration of many factors, beginning with the edition and presentation of the work through the editing and publishing choices made by groups of people, and not necessarily ending with the reader working to re-create a sense of "the work" through the "set of instructions" for recreating the work, which is essentially what he sees the text as being. 

I can understand why he thinks of print texts as a set of instructions for recreating the work: he actually supports his argument well in many places, but for me especially when he discusses how he sees works of art as being quite a different category from print on pages.  He describes art as something immediately and physically experiencable, regardless of its state of repair or "edits".  In contrast, he sees the work of literature as sequences that have been arranged and many times altered in the process of printing, or mass-reproduction.  These word sequences are the "instructions" with which a reader can attempt to re-create the original literary work that exists, according to Tanselle, outside or beyond the physical medium through which the work is transmitted (however imperfectly).

Tanselle elaborates upon the idea: "Because the media of the sequential arts, however, are not tangible, works in those media can never be damaged physically; but we can never know, from surviving physical artifacts, what constitutes the texts of those works.  The artifacts may remain inviolate (at least as far as human intervention is concerned), but the exact contours of the works they attempt to transmit will forever be indistinct" (30).

Tanselle’s view shocks me. I feel somehow "scientifically superior," harder in my approach to textualities, than he (that old contest of hardness among sciences, that old feeling of the "softness" and inadequacy of the humanities).  I take from his viewpoint that there is no magical secret trove of first editiions lurking out there, nor an argument for a highly organized though geographically dispersed collective memory of "great works."  He is actually talking about a ghost in the machine! 

He actually believes in a ghost that animates the machine that is the structures of literary works, whereas I believe in the machine, working in collaboration with the reader in ways that have been pre-programmed by that invention’s historical and cultural frame.  Beyond this, I also believe that the machine’s very housing communicates its own set of instructions to the reader, and that the reader reacts to these extra-textual instructions in ways they cannot quite control….because we have not taught them to perceive them yet. 

I know, however, the many ways in which I agree with Tanselle.  I know that my British Edition of Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride does not tell the same story, in the same voice, with the same tone, as my American Edition.  It is a different book, and though it looked very pretty and even pleasantly pretentious as an artifact to put on my shelf when I decided to buy it, I hate to read it, and had to finally buy another American edition, which I immediately loved and read easily.

What created a different literary work between the two books, in collaboration with me?  For one thing, the paper weight and the look of the ink on it.  For another, the font choice in the British Edition, which was fussy and cramped.  The size and shape of the book made it awkward to hold and gave the sensation of reticence, forever giving me twinges of irritation in which I wanted to neatly crack its spine to see the words it was clutching from my view stingily in the middle of each two-page spread.  It was only when I placed this edition alongside my newly purchased American that I could see perhaps the most damning detail: the British had cut the text funny.  Sentences in the British gasped along from page to turned page instead of resting in comfortable blocks in plenty of sunny space in the American.  Voices broke off on one side of the dimly-lit British page only to stutter to life again after the page-turn.  The inked words sat not on the paper but deep in it, pitted and pocked, giving the eye the strain of a pair of unseasoned legs hiking up and down shallow cratered terrain for miles.

Was there a ghostly "work" which was awkwardly "performed" by this edition?  There was certainly the spectre of my memory of reading the American and loving it so much, and because of that, the unbearable sensation of reading this very different edition.