0.8 Response to gregory nagy, homer multitext project  (Page 2/6)

It is interesting to observe that Gregory Nagy, in arguing for establishing Homer multi-textually, feels (and has over the years felt) an apologetic urge: a need to justify proceeding against the rules set up in the seemingly perennial Lachmann-Housman-Maas camp of classical textual scholarship and editing. Behind the “establishment” demand that these rules be followed—be followed under all circumstances (as it were)—lurks an attitude that material texts and transmissions are (under all circumstances) just simply raw material to be subjugated to safely codified scholarly operations in the discipline. An alternative stance has seldom gained dominance, namely that the individual nature of the transmitted materials be analyzed, in the first place, so as to inform the devising of methods and rules to apply to them on levels both of principle in textual criticism, and of pragmatics in editorial practice.

Very broadly speaking (and please forgive the simplification), Gregory Nagy's take on the situation, in face of the “establishment” camp, is something like: “The Homeric texts are by nature orality texts; this justifies deviating from editorial consensus and devising an alternative methodology for editing them.” Yet: on whom is really the onus of proof? After centuries of attempts at an “authentic,” “one-text,” maybe even largely “error-free,” and so ideally even universally to be accepted, Homer, is it not the order of the day to proceed with every ounce of courage of one's revisionary conviction and thereby challenge the establishment to prove one wrong? True enough, we get the sense that this is fundamentally what the Homer Multitext project is doing. I wouldn't be remarking on the friction of what seems traditional against innovative methodology were it not that I discern a fundamental contrast in theoretical assumptions behind it.

A famous case of reorientation in textual criticism and editing that shows some interesting parallels to the present case of Homer's epics is instanced, in Shakespearean textual criticism, by the “History” versus the “Tragedy” of King Lear . Since the eighteenth century and for over two hundred years, it was viewed according to what was taken to be a norm (a norm derived, indeed, from the classical textual scholarship in which the eighteenth-century Shakespearean textual critics were trained): namely, the norm of the author's one and only original text, a priori assumed to be inexorably corrupted in transmission—and, in the instance of King Lear , not just successively so corrupted in descending reprints, but differently corrupted in collateral printings, both of which were consequently assumed to be “witnesses” to that one original. The one and only original being posed as the norm, it was textual criticism, exercised to the end of re-establishing that original, that had to bend, methodically and argumentatively, to be serviceable. When the counter-hypothesis was proposed that the two printings reflected two distinct versions of the play, much rhetoric of persuasion was at first put forward to sway the establishment to accept the possibility of truth in the fresh perspective. So strong, even for the innovators, was the establishment undertow that the much simpler structuring of perception did for the longest time not occur to them: namely, to insist that the one-text model was (and had been, in the first place) both a perceptual and a conceptual misapprehension, regardless of its having held sway in Shakespearean textual scholarship for over two hundred years. What without apology needed to be put forward instead was that the norm for texts should be derived rather from what other traditions of textual criticism had long recognized (and, as it happened, had done so from materials of writing and transmission within their ken): namely, that texts are by nature variable and, typically, get revised and altered even under their authors' hands.