Notes
1. The “genetic” approach to editing has a fairly long history in Germany and France, though it gained impetus in Anglo-American editing most noticeably in the mid-twentieth century. For some extremely helpful introductions to genetic criticism, see the following: Hans Zeller, “A New Approach to the Critical Construction of Literary Texts,” Studies in Bibliography 28 (1975): 231-64; TEXT 3 (1987); Hans Walter Gabler, George Bornstein, and Gillian Borland Pierce, eds., Contemporary German Editorial Theory, Editorial Theory and Literary Criticism (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995); Yale French Studies 89 (1996); Word & Image 13.2 (April-June 1997). One of the earliest editions of English literature employing these methods is Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr., eds. Billy Budd: Sailor (An inside Narrative) (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1962). Additionally, John Bryant’s The Fluid Text: A Theory of Revision and Editing for Book and Screen, Editorial Theory and Literary Criticism (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2002) provides a valuable application of genetic methods to the editing and representation of manuscripts—Bryant’s focus being Melville’s Typee manuscript. A good article on the application of genetic methods from a more traditional perspective is Albert J. Von Frank’s “Genetic Versus Clear Texts: Reading and Writing Emerson” (Documentary Editing [December 1987]: 5-9). Von Frank’s account of how genetic methods allow more insight into an author’s intentions and the literary value of his/her work bears a striking resemblance to Geoffrey Keynes’s arguments in his editions of Blake, in that both strive to amalgamate genetic methods with a more reader-friendly text; it thus strikes a compromise between strictly genetic/diplomatic methods and intentionalist, literary-oriented methods. Two critical works on the VALA/Four Zoas manuscript that I found particularly helpful because of their focus on its genesis are Andrew Lincoln’s Spiritual History: A Reading of William Blake’s Vala or The Four Zoas (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1995) and John B. Pierce’s Flexible Design: Revisionary Poetics in Blake’s Vala or The Four Zoas (Montreal and Kingston, London, and Buffalo: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1998).
2. “Intentionalist” (or “idealist”) editing has been the predominant trend in Anglo-American editing for much of its history. W. W. Greg’s “The Rationale of Copy-Text” (Studies in Bibliography 3 [1950-51]: 19-36) serves as something of a “base text” for this approach (though it has a history before Greg), while Fredson Bowers and G. Thomas Tanselle, among many others, more recently have carried the tradition through their work as editors and in individual publications. Luckily, however, these editors and others like them base their editions on sound scholarship and careful examination of all the evidence in question in the process of making their (authorially) final text.
3. For both my biographical and my bibliographical history of the manuscript, I am especially indebted to two works by G. E. Bentley, Jr., for their account of Blake’s life and collection of records related to it: Blake Records: Documents (1714-1841) Concerning the Life of William Blake (1757-1827) and His Family […], 2nd ed. (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2004); and The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2001). While Bentley’s views and data are not universally accepted, he has done easily the most intensive and useful bibliographical work on the manuscript to date, not to mention his invaluable biographical pursuits.
4. Blake’s watercolors for the Night Thoughts project are reproduced in Edward Young, Night Thoughts, with Illustrations by William Blake, 2 vols. (London: Folio Society, 2005) and John E. Grant et al., ed., William Blake’s Designs for Edward Young’s Night Thoughts: A Complete Edition, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1980); for the published engravings, see Robert N. Essick and Jenijoy LaBelle, ed., Night Thoughts, or, The Complaint and the Consolation: Illustrated by William Blake, Text by Edward Young (Mineola: Dover Publications, 1975). According to Paul Mann (“The Final State of The Four Zoas,” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 18.4 [spring 1985]: 204-15), Blake even might have received copperplates from Edwards along with the blank leaves, though no direct proof of this hypothesis is extant. However, Bentley cites a correlation between the size of the central panels of the Night Thoughts engravings and Blake’s Jerusalem plates; see Blake Books 641-42.
5. Perhaps the best critic on Blake’s “conversation” with Young is Peter Otto. See especially Blake’s Critique of Transcendence: Love, Jealousy, and the Sublime in The Four Zoas (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000); see also his recent essay, “From the Religious to the Psychological Sublime: The Fate of Young’s Night Thoughts in Blake’s The Four Zoas,” in Prophetic Character: Essays on William Blake in Honor of John E. Grant, ed. Alexander S. Gourlay, Locust Hill Literary Studies 33 (West Cornwall: Locust Hill P, 2002), 225-62. Also see Jeremy Tambling, Blake’s Night Thoughts (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2005).
6. This intention may have remained as late as 1803, when Blake was at a very different place (personally and physically—see below). In a letter to Thomas Butts, Blake discusses how his “three years trouble” may be worth it, for he has created “a Sublime Allegory which is now perfectly completed into a Grand Poem” (Erdman, Complete 730). However, because written in 1803, these statements may apply to Milton or Jerusalem rather than The Four Zoas—perhaps an early version or early portions of either of these works, which were in fact printed and sold later. Still, it is worth keeping in mind that Blake never seems to have abandoned the desire “to speak to future generations” (ibid.) in his visionary works.
7. For a much fuller account of these bibliographical details, from scripts to pages and beyond, see Bentley’s Vala or the Four Zoas and Blake Books 453-64. Bentley argues persuasively that Blake was recopying drafted material on these proof pages, rather than using them for new text, which supports the view that he completed an early version of VALA that was then reworked heavily. Bentley was the first to recognize that p. 48/49, one of the proof pages, was also used as a backing sheet for a proof of a design for William Hayley’s A Series of Ballads, from June 1802 while Blake was at Felpham working for Hayley (see below). Bentley believes, then, that “Blake transcribed p. 48, and probably the rest of the poem, after June 1802” (Blake Books 455).
8. For Blake’s account of this experience, see his letter to William Hayley on 23 October 1804.
9. For more discussion on the title, see my article “Blake’s Four . . . ‘Zoa’s’?” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 39.1 (summer 2005): 38-43, along with the follow up discussion: Magnus Ankarsjö, “Blake’s Four ‘Zoas’!” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 39.4 (spring 2006): 189-90; Justin Van Kleeck, “‘mark ye the points,’” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 39.4 (spring 2006): 190-91.
10. “Revision site” is John Bryant’s apt term for any place where an author revises a text in some way (55 et passim).
11. Andrew Lincoln has made the most direct and influential examination of this particular crux in his article “The Four Zoas: The Text of Pages 5, 6, & 7, Night the First” (Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 12.2 [fall 1978]: 91-95). As we shall see, this entire issue of Blake Quarterly represents one of the most significant scholarly engagements with the VALA/Four Zoas manuscript to date.
12. The relevant articles in this issue of Blake Quarterly are by John Kilgore (107-14), Andrew Lincoln (115-33), and Mark Lefebvre (134); Erdman’s article, in which he accepts Kilgore’s solution, follows Lefebvre’s article (135-39).
13. Dowdey’s inspired “edition” of the manuscript presents a more drastic witness than Bentley in this regard, for it seems to fall to pieces as the editor-illuminator attempts to represent his experience of Blake so that others might experience Blake, at once abusing and adopting scholarly methods and all things “academic.” This early declaration from Dowdey sets the tone for a continuous haranguing of “academic” and scholarly approaches: “Trying to ‘understand’ the poem in an academic or abstract way will force you to stand outside it, unable to see through your own opaque shell of commonplace activity” (v). Ironically, he declaims academic/scholarly methods while also trying to adopt them (most clearly in his notes, which read almost like the apparatus in a typical scholarly edition à la Greg or Bowers).
14. Erdman refers to making things “fit” numerous times, but see especially his introduction to Night the Seventh in his textual notes in Complete (836).
15. Before editing Blake for Poetry and Prose in 1965, Erdman made his name as Blake critic with Blake: Prophet Against Empire in 1954 and elsewhere.
16. This competition of edition text and footnote is most drastic in Bentley’s William Blake’s Writings, where the footnotes occasionally take up more page space than the text of the poem.
17. For more enlightening and enjoyable discussion of editing by Shillingsburg, see Resisting Texts: Authority and Submission in the Constructions of Meaning, Editorial Theory and Literary Criticism (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997).
18. A few Blake editions have been published since Magno and Erdman’s edition, though none including a new or significantly revised version of VALA/The Four Zoas. Ostriker’s was reprinted without changes in 2004, and Stevenson’s revised and expanded edition came out in 2007. (For my review of Stevenson, see Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 42.2 (fall 2008): 73-75.)
19. Before receiving the Seal, the Blake Archive also was awarded the MLA’s Prize for a Distinguished Scholarly Edition—becoming the first electronic edition to receive the award (see the Blake Archive’s home page).
20. The Whitman Archive is particularly relevant to Blake’s manuscript because the editors use an extensive set of textual symbols and methods of textual rendering in order to present genetic transcriptions of Whitman’s manuscripts. These devices and the methods for marking up and displaying them can serve, and indeed did serve, as potential models for an electronic edition of VALA/The Four Zoas (see below).
21. The larger collection in which Sutherland’s essay appears contains a wealth of enlightening new work on electronic editing and editions. Along with Sutherland’s essay, discussed here, also see Edward Vanhouette, “Every Reader His Own Bibliographer—An Absurdity?” (99-112), and especially Elena Pierazzo, “Digital Genetic Editions: The Encoding of Time in Manuscript Transcriptions” (169-85). Another similar and relevant article by Sutherland is “Material Text, Immaterial Text, and the Electronic Environment,” Literary and Linguistic Computing 24 (April 2009): 99-112 (her response to McGann’s “Rationale”). An even more thorough examination of digital humanities scholarship than the Ashgate anthology is A Companion to Digital Humanities; see especially Perry Willet’s “Electronic Texts: Audiences and Purposes,” and Martha Nell Smith’s “Electronic Scholarly Editing,” in which Smith may over-generalize a bit in claiming that “. . . under-informed skepticism has been replaced by the realization that critical engagements with new technologies are the best hope for advancing knowledge production in the humanities.”
22. For examples of work done on Blake in the field covered by Robinson’s second criticism, a lack of using computer assistance to analyze electronic editions, see various essays by Nancy M. Ide, such as: “Meaning and Method: Computer-Assisted Analysis of Blake,” Literary Computing and Literary Criticism: Theoretical and Practical Essays on Theme and Rhetoric, ed. Rosanne Potter (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1989), 123-41; and “A Statistical Measure of Theme and Structure,” Computers and the Humanities 23.4-5 (August-October 1989): 277-83. There is still much to be done with computer analysis, of course—and surely having more scholarly electronic editions available for analysis will be helpful in this regard, especially if built as Robinson wishes, so that they “present materials which can be dynamically reshaped and interrogated, which not only accumulate all the data and all the tools used by the editors but offer these to the readers, so that they might explore and remake, so that product and process intertwine to offer new ways of reading.” We can almost answer Robinson here with McGann’s affirmation that “One can build editorial machines capable of generating on demand multiple textual formations—eclectic, facsimile, reading, genetic—that can all be subjected to multiple kinds of transformational analyses” and, in the process, emphasize and build on the critical methods underlying the “machines” themselves (“Text to Work” 27). An editor can indeed, and with Robinson’s prodding and McGann’s assurances, perhaps more editors will build editions in these flexible, informative, and useful ways.
23. Scholars also interested in this genetic reconstruction of the manuscript, for the purposes of literary analysis/interpretation, are John B. Pierece, Flexible Design: Revisionary Poetics in Blake’s Vala or The Four Zoas (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1998), and Andrew Lincoln, Spiritual History: A Reading of William Blake’s Vala or The Four Zoas (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1995). Margoliouth also is greatly concerned with the genesis of the manuscript for his “disentanglement” of VALA from The Four Zoas, for which he relies heavily on the line numbers Blake put on many pages of the manuscript; however, the dates and reliability of these line numbers are both contentious issues, and both Bentley and Margoliouth attempt to interpret them but encounter serious problems in using them to order (or argue for an order) of the text.
24. Electronic versions of Erdman’s text appear in the Blake Archive and the Blake Digital Text Project edited by Nelson Hilton; for the “experimental hypertext,” see F. William Ruegg’s Blake’s “The Four Zoas” Fetishized: An Experimental Hypertext.
25. Stevenson provides a serendipitous example of this larger editorial purpose in action, specifically applied to Blake, when in his first edition he states, “It is necessary for an editor to present a settled text” (Poems xii). It seems editors, even Blakean editors, are largely a Newtonian bunch—or even worse, Urizenic, as Paul Mann argues in his 1980 dissertation (64 et passim) and less forcefully elsewhere.
26. See the article by Rachel Lee and Ali McGhee in this volume of Romantic Circles Praxis, in which Lee and McGhee discuss their work on the Blake Archive’s forthcoming edition of An Island in the Moon.
27. I examined the VALA/Four Zoas manuscript at the British Library from 7-11 March 2005, during which time I checked my transcription against the original and also studied—and nearly got lost in—the illustrations; see my Coda.
28. W. W. Greg provides a classic definition of “substantives” and “accidentals,” plus an editor’s handling of them, in “The Rationale of Copy-Text” (21).
29. On the other hand, McGann makes a good point about the limitations of computers for display and browsing: “We are not even close to developing browser interfaces to compare with the interfaces that have evolved in the past 500 years of print technology” (“Text to Work” 17), not to mention the loss of physical interactivity in the “kinetic environment summoned (and symbolically coded) in books” (18).
30. McGann emphasizes this point, arguing that a hypertext edition or archive is formed to “disperse attention as broadly as possible,” with an indefinite number of “centers” and relationships possible (as modeled on the Internet and even the traditional library) (“Rationale” 29-30). Thus, it gives power to the user/reader because it does not dictate or privilege anything but gives many options as independent (but interrelated) items, be it whole texts or portions of texts (30). Daniel Ferrer addresses the virtues of hypertext for manuscripts and literary working papers specifically in “Hypertextual Representation of Literary Working Papers” (Literary and Linguistic Computing 10.2 (1995): 143-45.
31. McGann performs such an analysis-through-manipulation using D. G. Rossetti’s The Blessed Damozel in “Imagining What You Don’t Know: The Theoretical Goals of the Rossetti Archive”.
32. The ease with which electronic texts can be revised and updated also makes correcting these editorial mistakes a more feasible option than it is with print editions.
33. The Blake Archive has adapted Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standards for all of its electronic editions, though its Document Type Definition (DTD) is specific to the Blake Archive because of its stronger focus on physical objects. Similarly, the text tags for VALA/The Four Zoas and other manuscript works are based on TEI standards with changes to make them more appropriate for the Blake Archive and the works being encoded. The recent version of TEI standards, TEI-5, was released after our initial markup of VALA/The Four Zoas, so we will need to update the markup before publication.
34. See the Blake Archive’s many existing transcriptions for examples of their approach, plus their “Editorial Principles” in the “About the Archive” section of the site.
35. The scare quotes in my coda’s title suggest that the idea of experiencing some object/artifact “itself,” in its true and unmediated form, is contentious to say the least. For an excellent discussion of this veritable sub-field of textual criticism, see Hershel Parker’s article “‘The Text Itself’—Whatever That Is,” TEXT 3 (1987): 47-54.
36. I have to thank Morris Eaves in particular, along with Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi—together the three editors of the Blake Archive—for making it possible for me to access Blake’s manuscript. Morris Eaves wrote my letter of recommendation to the Library and so literally “cracked the safe” for me. I repaid him with a two-day crash course on the manuscript, which I believe still has him woozy.