The Archival Impulse and the Editorial Impulse

Abstract

There is no firm, outside vantage-point from which to survey and thus to define archive and edition as securely differentiated categories. As readers we inhabit the same textual field as the approaches to documents and texts that we seek to define. To record is first to read and analyse sufficiently for the archival purpose; to interpret is first to read and to analyse sufficiently for the editorial purpose. In practice, the archival impulse anticipates the editorial, and the editorial rests on the archival. We may envisage the relationship of archive and edition as a horizontal slider or scroll bar running from archive on the left to edition on the right. In this model every position on the slider involves interpretative judgement appropriate to its purpose. Every position along the slider involves a report on the documents, but the archival impulse is more document-facing and the editorial is, relatively speaking, more audience-facing. Yet each activity, if it be a scholarly one, depends upon or anticipates the need for its complementary or co-dependent Other. The archival impulse aims to satisfy the shared need for a reliable record of the documentary evidence; the editorial impulse to further interpret it, with the aim of orienting it towards known or envisaged audiences and by taking their anticipated needs into account. The sliding scroll-bar model dispenses with recently expressed anxiety about digital literary archives (special-purpose collections) replacing editions. The latter will continue to be prepared as long as there are readers whose requirements need to be served. The slider model helps us to survey the full range of archival and editorial possibilities. The term “representation” embraces the archival impulse. The editor’s aim, on the other hand, is less to represent something that is pre-existing than to present something (the text of a version, the text of a work, a process of writing) that typically has not existed in precisely this form before, together with the critically analysed materials necessary to defend the presentation.