"While I don't think of Buck as a towering personality, I do think of him as a human being who in his lifetime and later received an incredibly cruel hatcheting by political and historical writers filled with the passions and guilt of Civil War times. . . .Since the guy suffered enough from such treatment, I would not be happy to see anyone start the old character assassination bit all over again, and I hope this isn't your plan -- sexwise or otherwise. A real character study would be fine."
(Philip Klein to John Updike in a September 10, 1968 letter)
Welcome!
From this page, using the image map above or using the navigational tools on the page, you can take a tour designed to provide you with: a history of how Special Collections acquired the materials; more details about the development of the manuscript materials; a discussion of the play's reception and its performance; and mention of the relationship between this play and Updike's novel, Memories of the Ford Administration. This tour was created with the student in mind, but everyone can appreciate the materials on this Web site.
Before you proceed on the tour, we hope to encourage you to think more critically about literary "drafts" or manuscripts.
When most people think of a draft, they think of a version of a final product. For example, as a student, you are probably most familiar with drafts you write for workshops, in which several students comment on your paper. You can incorporate these suggestions or disregard them when you revise. When you submit your portfolio, you include your drafts and your final paper.
If someone were to review your final portfolio, she or he might find multiple versions of the same paper with revisions, corrections, and comments in different handwriting. You probably edited your paper. Your peer reviewers commented on your paper. Perhaps a friend or roommate also proofread your paper. Someone looking at your portfolio might ask: Who is responsible for the comments and changes that appear on the drafts? Is the same person responsible for all the drafts? When were the drafts written? Which changes are incorporated from one draft to the next? A reviewer might even have problems identifying the "final" draft of a paper, because perhaps all the papers have comments on them.
When looking at literary manuscripts, many of these questions arise. But when reading the "final" product, for example, the Modern Library edition of James Joyce's Ulysses, most readers are not concerned with the process of how this edition came into being. And for those who are curious, many do not know how or where to learn about these processes. Obviously, there is a difference between exploring how an edition is created and how Joyce imagined and produced the novel. The first task can be documented by scholars, but some readers might doubt that we can ever know how Joyce came to create Ulysses.
There are scholars who are concerned with precisely these questions and even more complicated issues. Textual scholars look at all the materials associated with a particular text. A textual scholar would not merely be interested in looking at Buchanan Dying in its published form; he or she would look at all of the materials available in The John Updike Papers, including manuscripts, notes, correspondence, and related materials. This site gives you a peek at the materials a textual scholar might examine.
If you have heard of "textual criticism" before, perhaps you know the phrase because of its connection to biblical scholarship. The Bible is probably the most debated text in existence. Many of these debates are due to the age of these manuscripts, the lack of an obvious and single author, and the theological and cultural importance of this material. "Taking as its subject the transmission of texts, textual criticism lies midway between literary criticism, which focuses on works, and bibliography, which focuses on books as books. It seeks to identify the texts of a work and their various states, determine the relations between the texts, discover the sources of textual variation, and establish a text on a scholarly basis."1
Within textual criticism, different types of scholarly editing exist. The first, documentary or diplomatic or noncritical, attempts to reproduce a manuscript as a historical artifact. The textual critic engaged in documentary editing presents a text as it existed in a particular time and place. For example, the transcription of the First Quarto of Hamlet, based on at least one actor's memory of the play, is considered a "bad" quarto. Though scholars might not consider this the definitive edition of the play, this version does interest textual critics. If the First Quarto contains "sallied flesh" rather than "sullied flesh" or "solid flesh," then "sallied" must be used. In many cases, documentary editing is used for materials that an author never intended to publish. 2
Since documentary editing can be considered a form of historical preservation (or reproduction), documentary editions may use facsimiles to preserve the extratextual physical detail of the document. On this Web site, the scans of pages from the manuscripts function in this way. Yet, certain decisions about color, the dpi (resolution quality) used to scan, and the size of the scan have been made, and, therefore, these images are not exact replications of the originals.
When looking at these scans, you can see the many changes made by Updike as well as editors and proofreaders. To handle representing these changes, documentary editing also employs genetic or synoptic transcription. Crossings out, interlineations, multiple readings, and other marks often appear in manuscripts, such as Updike's. Genetic transcription allows the documentary editor to record textual variation and suggest its chronology. For example, Billy Budd by Herman Melville was unpublished in his lifetime. No acceptable edition existed until 1962, when the University of Chicago Press published a reading text, a result of critical editing, and a genetic text, a result of documentary editing. To create the genetic text, an exact transcript was made of the manuscript, leaf by leaf, based on the earliest version of each of the 370 leaves. Changes were noted on the leaves using brackets. The editors identified stocks of paper, matched the edges of leaves cut and torn from larger sheets, and traced the various colors of Melville's ink, crayon, and pencil, to better establish the chronology of these revisions. 3
On this site, the transcriptions use documentary editing conventions discussed in Mary-Jo Kline's A Guide to Documentary Editing (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).
We have not created a genetic text in a strict sense, because we have not attempted to carefully establish a chronology of revision on the leaves. Some discussion about Updike's use of different pens and pencils for revision occurs, but this discussion is conjecture.
A second form of scholarly editing is called critical editing. Critical editing works from the assumption that none of the existing documentary texts representing a work is completely satisfactory. It "constructs a text that may incorporate readings from several documentary texts and may include editorial emendations that establish readings not found in any document."4 Until the twentieth century, critical editing was most often found in classical and biblical studies, and was used on classical and vernacular texts that had been transmitted over centuries through manuscripts. For example, there are over five thousand manuscripts for The New Testament. Critical editing leads to the production of "critical editions," an apparatus that presents evidence used in producing the text, and provides the variants of the authoritative states. Textual critics must have a standard or criteria with which to judge the authority of variant readings. In the twentieth century, many textual critics claim to use authorial intention as the primary standard. Yet, the question of authorial intention (what is intention? how do we determine it? what is its real use?) has been hotly debated. How are we to know what an author intended, especially if that author is no longer alive?
In the case of John Updike, we can ask him (though some scholars might even assert that Updike can't be trusted to know his own authorial intentions). He supervised the production of Buchanan Dying, but as the materials on this Web site show, Updike frequently changed the text. A scholar could argue that Updike really intended an earlier version of the play to appear, but that he was pressured by his editors to make certain changes. That scholar could create another edition of the play. A scholar might also be interested in producing an edition of the novel Updike started. These are all legitimate areas of concern for textual scholars. 4
Many organizations exist for these textual scholars and for the curious to learn more about their work. For example, you can visit the Web site for the Society for Textual Scholarship, whose official journal is TEXT: An Interdisciplinary Annual of Textual Studies. The Association for Documentary Editing also has a Web site and a journal, Documentary Editing: The Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing. Another useful place to visit is the Web site for The Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, which has been in existence for more than fifty years and is responsible for Studies in Bibliography.
There are many useful and interesting resources available for those interested in textual editing. We hope that this site arouses curiosity about the much debated field of textual criticism. The bibliography presented below is not meant to be exhaustive.
Under "Criticism, Textual" the University Libraries' CAT lists more than 100 volumes. The listing below should provide some useful starting points and landmarks for investigation.
A good starting point might be Text: Transactions of the Society for Textual Scholarship, a journal devoted to textual criticism, mentioned earlier.
Bibliography and Textual Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964) by Fredson Bowers is a classic. D. C. Greetham's Textual Scholarship: An Introduction (New York: Garland, 1992) also presents a clear and thorough introduction to the field of textual criticism. Greetham is also the author of the more recent volumes, Textual Transgressions: Essays Toward the Construction of a Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1998) and Theories of the Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Jerome McGann is a well-respected authority on textual criticism and wrote A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) and The Textual Condition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). G. Thomas Tanselle, responsible for A Rationale of Textual Criticism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989) and Textual Criticism and Scholarly Editing (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1990) amongst other books, is also one of the foremost thinkers about this issue.
Many scholars have written about textual editing's relationship with other areas of literary study. For example, the collection Devils and Angels: Textual Editing and Literary Theory (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1991) edited by Philip Cohen, addresses some of these issues, as does Parataxis: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) by Gerard Genette. Other recent and interesting books include: Peter Ekegren's The Reading of Theoretical Texts (New York: Routledge, 1999); James Battersby's Reason and the Nature of Texts (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996).
There are also more general guides to textual criticism that function as "how to" manuals, such as A Guide to Documentary Editing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988) by Mary-Jo Kline, An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies. 3rd Edition (New York: Modern Language Association, 19989) by William Proctor.
We hope that as you proceed to the next stop on the tour, you will keep in mind the questions and issues raised here.
Remember, you can return to the main Web page and view
the manuscript materials.
Works Cited
1 William Proctor Williams and Craig S. Abbot An Introduction to Bibliographical And Textual Studies (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1999): 68. Return to text
2 Williams and Abbot 71-72. Return to text
3 Williams and Abbot 73-74. Return to text
4 Williams and Abbot 75. Return to text
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