0.8 Response to gregory nagy, homer multitext project  (Page 5/6)

Justification for rooting through the underwood of “non-substantive witnesses” was drawn from an interest in reception history. The works— Parzival , or Tristan and Isolde —in their dynamic and variable appeal to audiences were pursued through the later Middle Ages, and the variable texts served as the sources of information for how the works, as works, fared in public estimation. On the assumption that changing audiences modified the texts in transmission, their variation as attested in the non-substantive witnesses was read as indicator of changing value systems and social norms. As it happens, too, the variability in those living traditions to which their surviving traces bear witness were, in their turn, also attributed to oral transmission. At the same time, the superiority assumption for author-specific texts and the superior legitimacy of “conservative” editing was not fundamentally questioned. We still want our author texts, which we posit as stable, ideal and thus—let us face it—closed texts. The circumstance that the concept of the “closed text” has long lost validity in textual and literary theory has as yet hardly made textual critics and editors bat an eyelid.

Here is a meeting ground of arguments from theory, from history, and from editorial pragmatics. Besides being oriented towards the nature of texts and their transmission (the factors I have so far considered), all such arguments need to be doubly pivoted, too, on “author,” and on “authorship”: twin concepts that are historically variable both in themselves and in relation to texts and their transmission. For works such as the Iliad and the Odyssey , Parzival or Tristan und Isolde , respectively, “authorship” must be conceived differently than for, say, Faust or Wilhelm Meister , David Copperfield , or The Portrait of A Lady , let alone Lady Chatterley's Lover , Mrs Dalloway , Ulysses or Finnegans Wake .

Homer, Wolfram von Eschenbach or Gottfried von Strassburg are unquestionably (to our understanding) the authors of the former group. Yet at the historical juncture when the “orality” argument first (as far as I am aware) entered the assessment and historical critique of the Iliad and the Odyssey , it did so by way of putting in question the author. The authenticity (and historical reality) of Homer, the author, as vouchsafed by the Iliad and the Odyssey seemed no longer tenable on grounds of the instability through variability of the texts in transmission. The effort then (if I am not mistaken), since the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, went into re-assessing Homer's authorship, and therefore vindicating Homer the author, through assimilating the texts to the “one-authentic-text” paradigm. In other words, Homer became fashioned as an author like Goethe fashioned himself—and as textual criticism and scholarly editing fashioned not only Wolfram von Eschenbach or Gottfried von Strassburg, but went all out for establishing authors not only in, but essentially as their Texte letzter Hand . Textual variability became branded, wherever possible, as transmissional corruption and went into apparatuses; which even for variation from “the author's workshop” were generally resorted to as the storage place for what, by editorial fiat , did not belong in the edited text.