0.8 Response to gregory nagy, homer multitext project  (Page 4/6)

On reflecting further on what Gregory Nagy has now given us to think about, not only do I find it easy to leave Zeller's view behind as at most a stepping-stone to what I trust is growing into a better understanding of the issue. I wish also to suggest that Gregory Nagy's strategy of invoking Aristarchus's complicity might, in its turn, be taken a step further.

To credit Aristarchus with understanding the orality nature of the Homeric transmission still has the air, or a whiff, of special pleading: of suggesting that Aristarchus might have seen the Homeric transmission as a special case, not necessarily comparable to other transmissions. But how, if the variability and dynamics characterizing that transmission were for Aristarchus instead (simply) an incidental manifestation of the fundamental nature of texts, and textuality, tout court ? What, in the transmission considered, appears to us, the way we are conditioned to texts, as a plethora of variants, might for him have been appreciable as a network of equivalents. Beyond so assessing the pragmatic level, we would also receive leads, as I suggested, to raising our considerations onto levels of principle, and of theory. Recognizing texts as by nature dynamic and variable would not only entail acknowledging that texts live by the life-force of language out of which they are formed (for who, after all, would deny that language lives wholly by its dynamic variability?). It would also mean acknowledging that the modes of their transmission, whether oral or written, are co-equal. With orality and writing thus recognized as (as it were) accidental features of texts and transmissions, what stands out as their substantive quality is, has always been, and will always be their dynamic variability.

We may take up the challenge from another angle, too, and reconsider transmissions as well as textual criticism and editing historically. What we will recognize easily is that the “new philology” claiming to be pioneering new understandings of transmissions was, at least as much, re-discovering that fundamental concept of textuality governing the methodology of the philologists of antiquity ( vide Aristarchus). The explorations of the textuality of the Chanson de Roland that Gregory Nagy cites, or of the four versions of the Niebelungenlied in Middle High German philology, would be cases in point of genuine parallels.

What Middle High German philology has increasingly investigated in recent years, moreover, are the textual variations in reception (extending over two to three centuries) of the central medieval epics, Parzival , say, or Tristan and Isolde . Such investigations have by and large still been carried forward against the opposite pole (as one might call it) of author-centricity. They have in a sense been explorations of all the transmissional evidence that, by force of method, was neglected or rejected by the nineteenth-century editors endeavoring to approximate the genuine original texts of Wolfram von Eschenbach, or Gottfried von Strassburg.