Manuscript Studies v. Genetic Criticism

Recently someone who I hadn't seen in some time asked me whether I was still working on genetic criticism. I said that I was -- in fact I was about to give a paper on the typescripts of The Waste Land at the conference we were both attending. Yet genetic criticism is a term I generally do not use to describe my work on modern literary manuscripts. The name of this blog, for one, indicates that I see myself as doing something differently. Generally I don't object to genetic criticism -- neither as a designation for the study of a writer's creative process, nor as a field of investigation, so my choice to name what I do by another name was not motivated by any polemic. Nonetheless, the result is that I'm possibly the only one using the term modern manuscript studies.

So why? I felt the need to put the study of modern literary manuscripts on a slightly different footing than that of my compères of the Institut des textes et manuscrits in Paris, where the traditions and methodologies of critique génétique were founded. Insofar the early practioners at ITEM built on, but also set themselves apart from, notions of "écriture" as propogated by poststructuralism, they turned to the study of writing in its material manifestations as it can be observed in authors' manuscripts. The methods they developed focussed on the procedural and temporal aspects of writing, and they continued in the first instance to be interested in the text of the manuscripts.

A manuscript contains of course much for than text or writing. It also consist of paper and ink; it has a specific size, weight (or quality) and colour; the writing that appears on it has a particular, very often determined by the physical dimensions and qualities of the paper as well as the circumstances in which the writing took place. Furthermore, the manuscript has a very particular function, which might be different from other manuscripts -- think, for example, of cheap school copybooks which many writers of the twentieth century appear to use for rough drafting: this type of object almost expects a mode of writing that is quite distinct from, say, the preparation of fair copy on regular-sized A4 paper. Apart from a function, manuscripts also have a purpose -- creating a text is different from preparing a text for publication -- each of which comes at a different moment in what one can call the "biography of the work".

In other words, each manuscripts consists of different entities or components of which the text is only one, and each of these components needs to be understood in its own right as well as in relation to the all the other ones. Moreover, the manuscript and all its components also relate to a broader context: the habits and idiosyncracies of the writer, the writer's life and his work, the writer's time and culture, and so on. As objects, manuscripts are embedded in their time and place: they answer to a broader set of habits and customs that, just as for the mediaeval period, fit in with the habits and traditions of the culture, and that despite the idiosyncracies of every writer.

The ITEM scholars were never blind to the practical and philological exigencies of studying manuscripts. Deciphering, preparing the avant-texte required skills and techniques to analyze the physical attributes of the manuscripts. But all-too often this kind of work was, on the one hand, devalued as preparatory; on the other hand, that preparatory work was only half formalized in proper methodologiescal principles and did in any case not go far enough regarding some of the physical detail of the manuscripts. Palaeography and codicology in the study of mediaeval manuscripts are well-established fields, but similar kinds of investigation are virtually non-existent for the modern period.

Some change, to be fair, is now now taking place in this respect, and some work is being done for instance on codicology. Even so, one of the drawbacks of the genetic focus is that the purview has always been on manuscripts that reveal the traces of creation. Any manuscript, in other words, that does not shed light on this process is declared of no interest.

Hence, my perspective is a broader one. I do not believe that the study of manuscripts is relevant only to understanding the creative process. Manuscripts can be of interest in their own right -- and their entire history (including their afterlife as they leave the author's hands and move into the hands of the publishers and possibly later the hands of the collectors) deserves to be studied.

One final polemic point though -- I resist using the term genetic criticism for there are those who see it as a form of literary criticism. It is true that the study of composition can shed light on the meaning and understanding of the final work, but to see the study of manuscripts as simply another heuristic method seems greatly reductive and goes counter to the larger historical enterprise that is the history of the book.