The "Twice-told Tales" of Annie Saumont

Abstract

When in 1959 Fredson Bowers opined that certain American critics believed their raw material--the literary text--was discovered under cabbage plants, he was expressing an exasperation felt by many in fields of textual criticism and scholarly editing. (1) New Criticism had legitimized explication de texte, but appeared simultaneously to outlaw exploration of any extra-textual input from Author whose demise Barthes would anyway report eight years later. A quarter of century on, Hershel Parker would voice his own frustration at the persistent tendency to treat any literary as verbal icon, unique, perfect, and essentially authorless entity. (2) Meanwhile Louis Hay was asking if Text could be said to exist (3) and Jean Bellemin-Noel was exploring avant-texte. (4) Drafts, notebooks, scribbled addenda--any documentation bound up in fabric of text (5) became province of various interpretative groupings. Differences in some cases were of degree: Daniel Ferrer and Michael Groden might claim that a textual critic will tend to see difference between two states of work in terms of accuracy and error, (6) but textual analyst David C. Greetham in fact stresses that Textual scholars study process (the historical stages in production, transmission, and reception of texts), not just product. (7) And John Bryant would celebrate fluidity of literary work, noting that once we know given print-text is trace of an earlier revision process, we lean into that print-text more closely with new set of worries and wonders. (8) Each approach shares an interest in temporality of literary endeavors; in tracking their various incarnations. With regard to drafts, this approach can thus only be applied, as Laurent Jenny, citing De Biasi, has it, to that period during which manuscripts lose their communicating and distributing functions to become 'the trace of an individual creation'--from late eighteenth century, then, to time the widespread use of word processors relegated draft to oblivion. (9) But this is to overlook another phenomenon not restricted to last century--one offering similar opportunities for investigation of those personal traces even to scholars exploring post-1980s writers for whom corrected proofs mean consigning Track Changes to ether. Such is post-publication rework: true apres-texte. For where access to drafts is typically thwarted by technological advances, modifying of previously published piece of work is statistically more likely longer writer lives. Presenting French genetic criticism, Ferrer and Groden explain that it attempts to restore temporal dimension to texts; (10) it is also possible to extend this property, pace Jenny, to exploration of revisions of published texts. (11) Literary revision of previously published texts is not necessarily common but is not new. allongeails with which Montaigne's 1588 copy of his Essais is annotated constitute one famous example. George Sand's Leila, eponym of her essai poetique, dies peacefully in convent in 1839 edition, but six years earlier, was murdered. In 1977 John Fowles modified Magus (1966)--translated into French by subject of this essay--effecting rather more than stylistic revision. (12) Nor is genre fiction immune; in 2009 Jeffrey Archer published modified edition of his Kane and Abel, prompting Times to canvass five writers on desirability of such an undertaking. (None was tempted, novelist Kathy Lette remarking that it was taking idea of recycling bit far, and concluding It's book, not bottle. (13)) With regard to short fiction, one might cite Katherine Mansfield, who re-worked for later collections pieces first published in journals. Or Eudora Welty, who emphasized that when it's finally in print, you're delivered--you don't ever have to look at it again same year (1972) that much-expanded version of her 1969 story The Optimist's Daughter was published as novel. …