John Bryant, The Fluid Text, A Theory of Revision and Editing for Book and Screen

I'm posting this for Ileana. -- Doug

Definition

"A fluid text is any literary work that exists in more than one version. It is 'fluid' because the versions flow from one to another."

"Fluidity is inherent both in literary texts and in the process of writing." Bryant considers all the variants, even those unauthorized by the authors such as adaptations in other media, as fluid texts. The so-called definitive text is a multiplicity of texts.

1. THE TEXTUAL DEBATE: INTENDED TEXTS AND SOCIAL TEXTS

The analysis of textual fluidity is a critical approach to both the act of writing and to the act of editing. When referring to Melville's case, Bryant makes no distinction between scribbles and revisions; they are both considered "textual fluidities," and, consequently, transcription of an almost illegible text and editing become equivalent challenges. His intention is to reveal their "critical nature" from the point of view of the author. He supposes there is a critical intention behind each correction made by Melville and considers that editors have to become "managers and explainers of the fluid text" (19).

The two versions of Melville's Typee represent a good example of a fluid text intended as such under external pressures and not only then. Neither the 1968 critical edition of Hayford, Parker and Tanselle which chose as a copy-text an early British version and restored what was missing from the American edition, nor the McGannian formula of a social/historicist edition is satisfactory, since none addresses fluidity properly. The critical edition, another variant added to the corpus of editions, simply describes fluidity without dealing directly with it. Such an edition contributes to the textual fluidity with another product. The social/historicist edition, on the other hand, presents the documents from the past from the point of view of the present, decontextualizing them in order to make readers experience them as events.

2. WORK AS CONCEPT: INTENTIONALIST HISTORICISM AND THE ONTOLOGY OF LITERARY WORK

Bryant tries to identify the place of "textual fluidity" in the paradigm of intentions – revisions – product. Tanselle's ontology of the literary product with its three states: work, text, and document, gives Bryant the opportunity to elaborate on ineffability of the work, not yet fixed in words of a document. However, Bryant is not content with Tanselle's concept of "ineffable" work and prefers the concept of "wording," as a better expression of what has not yet been a concrete, physical document. For him, intentions belong to the ineffable stage of the work although they are also embedded in the physical document. Because of this process of transmission from one format to another, they can be altered, since "writing itself […] is always a kind of miswriting" (34). In search of intentions the editor faces the same problem as restorers of the Sistine Chapel, fully aware of the fact that "restorations invariably require defoliation" (35). The reconstruction of a writer's past intentions is partially a failure. The more instances involved in the process of creation, the more difficult the process of restoration. In the case of Typee, it is necessary to distinguish between the original text and the influences or contributions of each of the editors.

3. WORK AS ENERGY: MATERIALIST HISTORICISM AND THE POETICS OF SOCIAL TEXT

By "work as energy" Bryant means a text which presents various interactions between private and public aspects in the form of literary versions, revisions, and adaptations, all made accessible to readers. Confronted with such a complex and fluid text, editors cannot but focus on the process of changing and make it evident as well as looking for the meaning of "the forces of change" (61). Constantly going back to Tanselle's concept of "work" as an open concept which is not necessarily limited to the concrete object and to McGann's concept of "work as event", it is not clear what Bryant's critique intends: to show the limitations of the previous definitions or to use them as much as possible to make his own intelligible. He uses Einstein's connotations of energy to emphasize the paradoxical nature of work as a physical text which reflects, in the flow of its variations, the alternation of individual and societal contributions, all the elements participating in the literary production such as: "writers, editors, readers, material products, and social events" (62). Bryant is interested in the effects of cultural or personal meddling on the poetics of revision. Changes occurred from one version to another should be made available so the readers have access to the cultural dynamics manifested through transitions.

4. THE FLUID TEXT MOMENT: VERSIONS OF THE VERSION

By a fluid text moment, Bryant understands a certain moment in which the author was determined to change his/her text in order to see it published (he cites Wright's Native Son) or in which a careless typo determined a series of readings and interpretations (Whitman's Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking). This last example: "I a reminiscence song/sing" leads him to the more substantial question "What makes a version worthy of critical analysis, and hence editing?" (70). In spite of Gabler's genetic edition principles, according to which variants are all equally relevant, and Stillinger's "textual pluralism," according to which each version displays a different authorial intention, Bryant believes that the entire range of versions makes a whole and each variant is dependent on the previous one. The concepts of "variation" and "version" do not serve his theory. A more suitable concept for Bryant is "revision," as "the root cause of all versions" (87).

5. READERS AND REVISION

8 characteristics of versions:

• Versions are physical but not always available.
  
• No version is entire of itself.
  
• Versions are revisions.
  
• Versions are not authorization.
  
• Versions are different.
  
• A version must be more than the sum of its variants.
  
• Versions have audiences.
  
• Versions are critical constructs.
  

Modes of Production of the Version:

Creation as it is documented in journals and letters, notes and rehearsals, working drafts, circulating drafts, fair copies or typescripts;

Publication: manuscript publication, print publication;

Adaptation in another format or genre, i.e. films.

Three kinds of readers:

• 1^st reader: writer who reads his own work;
  
• 2^nd reader: writer who self-edits and revises his work;
  
• 3^rd reader: the 1^st external reader (Eliot for Pound).
  

Bryant draws attention to the role played by cultural revisions which make the works "look like us" (109) that means a refashioning of the work to resemble the audience so distant from the original.

6. THE PLEASURES OF THE FLUID TEXT

Bryant idealistically hopes that he may offer for reading "the interval between any two versions" (114). His edition "imaginaire" is the editor's image of a writer's originating condition of work. This kind of self-conscious edition has two functions: a rhetoric and heuristic function. It is meant to offer a historicist and a cultural experience to the reader, who has to learn new reading skills while reading and getting the sense of the historical context of each revision. For such an ambitious project, Bryant supports an editorial strategy which combines both print and electronic technologies. The tyranny of the single reading text will be abolished. Readers and editors become two facets of the same object: one consumes what the other conceives as the most reliable edition. He promises the pleasure of reading a fluid-text edition "despite the formidable barriers of textual fluidity" (123). He proposes that editor should use the apparatus (notes, back matter; even though he is fully aware that readers may ignore these) in a more visible way; he has to map out distances between different versions, to evidence the versions' historicity to transform the reader into a less subjective interpreter. Presenting Gabler's synoptic edition of Ulysses and the critiques of McGann and Tanselle, Bryant praises the achievements of such an edition, with his only comment that Gabler should have used the conventional apparatus to unload the text. His only problem is to find the right proportion between the text and the accompanying apparatus so that to design an enticing page for the reader. He hopes that a well-balanced apparatus will please the reader.

7. EDITING THE FLUID TEXT: AGENDA AND PRAXIS

Editing fluid text should pay attention to the changes occurring from one revision to another. Although fluid text editions are fragmentary, they must present unfamiliar material in a familiar way; they must provide information about the history of revision. That means that the editors should become "narrators of revision" (144). The fluid text editions should be critical, pedagogic, comprehensive, and should realize the book/screen synergy. According to Bryant, only a combination between the codex and the hypertext can provide the best format. An electronic archive may store revisions and the computer may "emulate" textual fluidity (he does not say how!). Intraversional and interversional connections may use electronic formats to display the series of narrative revisions, the relationships inside a series of revisions of a work or outside these series, and relationships between revisions of other works by the same author.

The textual fluidity may expose the intricate process of writing in so far as it is determined by multiple factors, these being external to the writer or the larger context of writing. Its public is academia, critics, professional writers, or anyone in cultural pursuits.