Roy GIBSON
Is there a Text in this OCT?
In an article for the TLS, Jasper Griffin compares the
history of textual criticism to the story of a frontier
town, where textual critics are gun-slingers rooting out
corruption and making the text-town safe for peaceful
readers and for the settler-commentators who follow. This
narrative raises all sorts of questions. But the one I
want to ask is how far a text can be made 'safe' for its
readers.
It can be argued that the great
19th-century addition of recensio
to emendatio
led to great advances in the consistency and quality of
texts. It made them 'usable'. In this sense, most of the
established texts of canonical authors 'will do'. But the
reassuring stability provided by an OCT's text (at the
top of page) and apparatus criticus (at the bottom) may
be illusory. I take as illustration Catullus, whose
textual history is (only) an extreme version of the norm.
Here recensio proves in the end to be of
limited use. Even when V - the lost Veronese ancestor of
most of the Catullan mss. tradition - has been
reconstructed, it provides a text that demands &endash;
but often defeats - emendation. V may have contained at
least 1,000 'errors'. The text of Catullus as we have it
today is thus, in a more literal sense than is usually
envisaged by modern critical theory, the creation of its
readers. Strikingly divergent editions of Catullus can be
produced by distinguished critics.
There can be no complacency among readers about this act
of creation. The text of Catullus in the OCT may be
'usable', but can never be regarded as definitive. In
what sense, then, is there a text in the OCT? One
ultimately unproductive response to this question would
be to press for the total freedom of readers to create
their own texts. (Not all variants or conjectures are of
equal interest or validity.) There is another way. The
art of textual criticism does not lack internal
theoretical debate. What practitioners sometimes lack is
the inclination to reflect such debates and
methodological doubts in their explicit practice. A
textual critic's rhetoric of certainty of choice - as
routinely found in the literature &endash; may be in
implicit conflict with the same critic's careful
documentation and preservation of the variants that have
not been chosen.
There will continue to be a need
for new OCTs, particularly for authors who lack a modern
critical text. But there is also a need for a new type of
text-critical edition - especially for today's students,
who are now often quite innocent of textual criticism.
Would it be possible to produce for the Anglophone market
an edition of Catullus (in codex or electronically) where
textual critical information was presented less
schematically, more discursively, in English (not Latin
& Greek), and with some idea given of the actual
impact of the various alternatives on reading and
interpretation? What benefits might there be in producing
editions of canonical authors which present mss.
information in a user-friendly fashion? Not the least of
such benefits might be increased access to variants and
the rich testimony they offer to the reception and
understanding of the text through the centuries.