Textual Continuity

John K Young

doi:10.14434/tc.v14i2.33650

Abstract

While textual variation has long been understood as a defining element of the genetic process, and indeed of textuality itself, this essay considers textual continuity not as the absence of revision but as potential revision that does not occur. In the archival materials associated with Toni Morrison’s and Tim O’Brien’s novels, we find various instances of a text remaining meaningfully the “same” across different versions. This emphasis on continuity implies a further possible reorientation, toward a sense of works in development, with individual documents construed less as physical objects or containers and more as “temporal parts”.

Highlights

In Borges’s story, a Czech playwright, Jaromir Hladik, is about to be executed by a Nazi firing squad, but he prays for the chance to finish his work-in-progress, The Enemies
The problem, as Greetham might well expect, is that the “final” version of The Enemies is not transmissible, because its Platonic ideality corresponds to no documentary instantiation
Borges’s story eerily anticipates Tanselle’s claim that “a version of a work — not just the idea for a work — can exist in its author’s mind without being written down or recorded, as when an author has thought of a number of revisions for a new edition but dies before making note of them and before the new edition is called for” (1992, 81)

Summary

Introduction

In Borges’s story, a Czech playwright, Jaromir Hladik, is about to be executed by a Nazi firing squad, but he prays for the chance to finish his work-in-progress, The Enemies.

Results

Conclusion