D. F. McKenzie-Bibliography and The Sociology of Texts (1999) PDF

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Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts

In Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, D. F. McKenzie
shows how the material form of texts crucially determines their
meanings. He unies the principal interests of both critical theory
and textual scholarship to demonstrate that, as all works of
lasting value are reproduced, re-edited, and re-read, they take
on different forms and meanings. By witnessing the new needs
of their new readers these new forms constitute vital evidence
for any history of reading. McKenzie shows this to be true of all
forms of recorded information, including sound, graphics, lms,
representations of landscape, and the new electronic media. The
bibliographical skills rst developed for manuscripts and books
can, he shows, be applied to a wide range of cultural documents.
This book, which incorporates McKenzies classic work on orality
and literacy in early New Zealand, offers a unifying concept of
texts that seeks to acknowledge their variety and the complexity
of their relationships.
D. F. McKenzie was Emeritus Professor of Bibliography and
Textual Criticism, University of Oxford.
BI BLI OGRAPHY AND THE
SOCI OLOGY OF TEXTS

D. F. McKenzie
iuniisuio n\ rui iiiss s\xoicari oi rui uxiviisir\ oi caxniioci
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom
caxniioci uxiviisir\ iiiss
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK
40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia
Ruiz de Alarcn 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain
Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa
http://www.cambridge.org
First published in printed format
ISBN 0-521-64258-2 hardback
ISBN 0-521-64495-X paperback
ISBN 0-511-03654-X eBook
D. F. McKenzie 2004
1999
(Adobe Reader)
Contents
list of illustrations page [vi]
foreword [1]
bibliography and the

sociology of texts
[7]
the sociology of a text: oral
culture, literacy, and print in
early new zealand
[77]
Illustrations
1 Droeschouts First Folio Shakespeare by Nicholas Wade [30]
Reproduced from Word and Image I, no. 3 (1985), 259
2 Bas-relief of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi [80]
Reproduced by courtesy of the Alexander Turnbull Library,
Wellington
3 Colensos case [100]
Wellington
4 Page of text from Colensos New Testament [106]
Wellington
5 a & b Signatures from the Declaration of Independence and
the Treaty of Waitangi [118119]
Wellington
1
Foreword
The familiar historical processes by which, over the centuries, texts
have changed their form and content have now accelerated to a degree
which makes the denition and location of textual authority barely
possible in the old style. Professional librarians, under pressure from
irresistible technological and social changes, are redening their disci-
pline in order to describe, house, and access sounds, static and moving
images with or without words, and a ow of computer-stored informa-
tion. By contrast, academic bibliography has only recently begun to nd
fresh stimulus in those developments and to tap the new experience
and interests of students for whom books represent only one form of
text.
Although bibliographers have always found interest not only in
books themselves but in the social and technical circumstances of
their production, it is again only recently that historical bibliography
has gained acceptance as a eld of study. The partial but signicant
shift this signals is one from questions of textual authority to those of
dissemination and readership as matters of economic and political
motive. Those relationships are difcult to pin down, but they are
powerful in the ways they preclude certain forms of discourse and
enable others; and because they determine the very conditions under
which meanings are created, they lie at the heart of what has come to be
known as histoire du livre, a form of inquiry relevant to the history of
every text-dependent discipline.
Bibliography and textual criticism have, since at least the 1920s,
normally formed part of a training for scholarly research in literary
history, and they remain indispensable tools. But literary history and
scholarship no longer look quite as they did. Denitive editions have
come to seem an impossible ideal in the face of so much evidence of
authorial revision and therefore of textual instability. Each version has
some claim to be edited in its own right, with a proper respect for its
historicity as an artefact; and yet the variety of authorized forms has
opened up editorial choice in new ways, even to the point of creating,
through conation or even more adventurous forms of adaptation,
quite new versions thought appropriate to the needs of newly dened
markets. Redirecting bibliographical inquiry in a fruitful response to
recent developments in critical theory and practice is certainly not easy.
There is a paradox too in the ease with which new technologies now
permit readers to reconstruct and disseminate texts in any form they
wish, with few fully effective legal constraints, let alone those of a past
scholarship which might have conferred another kind of authority. In
many ways such uncontrolled uidity returns us to the condition of an
oral society.
When giving the Panizzi lectures, my purpose was to express a need
and to stimulate discussion, and discussion there certainly was. In 1986
I took on one of the most exciting and demanding roles any teacher
could wish inducting each years new intake of research students to
the English Faculty in Oxford. The chronological range of their topics
and the diversity of their interests demanded both a rigorous reduction
of bibliographical principles to those readily seen as relevant to every-
ones needs, and then the application of those principles to an almost
innite number of authors, periods, genres, and media, and to widely
differing conditions of printing, publishing, reading, listening, or view-
ing. Eight weeks were devoted to text production (the archive of sur-
viving texts, the labour force that created it, the materials that form it,
the technologies and processes involved in making it, and the formulae
for describing it in its full variety), and then another eight weeks were
spent on the sociology of texts in which the students themselves
explored, in a series of case studies relevant to their own research, the
complex interrelationships of those conditions of production and the
kinds of knowledge they generated.
2
Foreword
My own journey to that end took fresh shape thanks to the generos-
ity and guidance of Philip Gaskell. To the world at large his authority
is manifest in the expository brilliance of his New Introduction to
Bibliography and From Writer to Reader, but it was his intimate know-
ledge of the late seventeenth-century documents of the Cambridge
University Press and his characteristic willingness to share them, that
made possible the resurrection of an early printing house, its resources
of type and presses, and the day-to-day activities of its managers,
compositors, pressmen, correctors, joiners, and smiths. Its detailed
records of pricing, type set, sheets printed, and wages paid supplied
the evidence needed to reconstruct the working processes common
to all printing houses of the hand-press period and the complexity of
the working relationships within them. For the rst time, scholars had
a dynamic model of the manner in which printed books were made.
Since the economic principle of concurrent production which it
revealed implied that no one book would ever contain all the evidence
needed to explain how it must have been produced, the new model was
disconcertingly at odds with many assumptions then current in ana-
lytical and textual bibliography. Only by studying total production at
any one time could a pattern be reliably discerned, and as the time and
interests of most editors were usually and understandably limited to a
single text, the kind of scientic certainty once sought in analysing the
printing of their text seemed less attainable than ever. As comparable
evidence for other houses had failed to survive, it followed that for
most books any detailed account of their physical production was
irretrievable. There was one further important implication. While the
processes of composition, correction, and printing were universal, the
relationships between them on any one day were constantly changing
in the number of men and their output, in the resources they might de-
ploy, and in the number, quality, and edition quantities of jobs on hand.
Paradoxically, this extension of knowledge about the context of
book production, while it induced a scepticism about the kinds of truth
some forms of analytical bibliography might yield, also opened up the
discipline in at least three ways. First, because the conditions of pro-
duction were so much more complex than had hitherto been thought,
Foreword
3
it released the subject from the straitjacket of induction, giving it a
new imaginative life in the speculative range it now demanded. Second,
and ineluctably, in seeking to recover the complex conditions by which
texts and their multiple meanings came to be made, it drove inquiry
into ever widening circles of historical context. The logic of such an
extension may be seen even in the practice, common in seventeenth-
century London, of splitting up a book so that several printing houses
might work on it at once. This again was a principle of concurrency
whose attendant complexities in such cases demanded study of the
trade as a whole if there were to be any hope of understanding the
actual conditions of production. Third, it directed critical attention to
other forms of visual evidence in the books themselves as determinants
of meaning, especially the role of craft conventions in choosing a size
and style of type consonant with the subject, its disposition on the page
for clarity or emphasis, the functions of white space and decoration,
the relation of format and paper quality to genre and readership, and
so on.
For a book is never simply a remarkable object. Like every other tech-
nology it is invariably the product of human agency in complex and
highly volatile contexts which a responsible scholarship must seek to
recover if we are to understand better the creation and communication
of meaning as the dening characteristic of human societies. To that
end, the replication of comparable forms of inquiry for manuscripts,
lms, recorded sound, static images, computer-generated les, and
even oral texts, should therefore be notable, not for what is different
about them, but for what is common to them all in their construction
of meaning. The recognition that those forms of record and communi-
cation are not disparate but interdependent, whether at any one time
or successively down through the years, implies such a complex struc-
ture of relationships that no model is likely to embrace them all. At best
perhaps we can acknowledge the intricacies of such a textual world and
the almost insuperable problems of describing it adequately and yet
still travel imaginatively and responsibly within it. For ultimately what
gives the highest signicance to the history of all such forms and their
making is their far from silent witness to a wealth of human experience
4
Foreword
whose recovery is the principal end of our scholarship. As to print,
its study might be called histoire du livre, or the sociology of texts, or
even (since books have been traditionally its source and substance)
bibliography.
The great thing about lectures is that they can be given a teasingly
speculative quality: ideas are offered with an implied request that an
audience use its imaginary puissance. I hope these Panizzi lectures will
give such a sense of being open and responsibly speculative. They are
accompanied by a more detailed paper on the Treaty of Waitangi. This
too was rst given as a lecture, in this case to the Bibliographical Society
in London, where its general principles were intended to encourage
a European audience more immediately knowledgeable about the
arrival of printing some centuries earlier in other manuscript cultures.
Thus it extends my notion of the sociology of texts in a context quite
different from that of the London book trades. It continues to have
for me a more personal value in helping to make some sense of the role
of oral, manuscript, and printed texts in determining the rights of
indigenous peoples subjected to European colonization and to the com-
mercial and cultural impositions of the powerful technologies of print.
Interpretation of the treaty remains a highly sensitive political issue and
the signicance of its implications for New Zealand society demands,
by contrast with the Panizzi Lectures, the sub-text of full documenta-
tion with which it is here supported.
William Congreve wrote at the end of the preface to his rst book in
1691, I have gratied the Bookseller in pretending an Occasion for a
Preface. Following that old custom, so too have I. It remains only for
me now to express my gratitude, rst, to Nicholas Wade for his per-
mission to print his image of Droeschouts First Folio Shakespeare
as seen through the text of Ben Jonsons poem to its reader, and to
the trustees of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, for the
plates in the essay on the Treaty of Waitangi. Among the many others
to whom I owe thanks for their support and advice, cautionary and
corrective, I mention in particular Albert Braunmuller, Tom Davis,
Mirjam Foot, Linda Hardy, John Kidd, Harold Love, David and
Foreword
5
Rosamond McKitterick, David Norton, Brian Opie, Sarah Tyacke, and
Ian Willison. I owe a very special debt to Roger Chartier for giving the
book a much wider circulation in French than it has hitherto received
in English, and for his highly perspicacious preface to that edition. The
graduate students I was privileged to teach in Oxford for some ten
years were a constant source of inspiration. In their intellectual quality,
enthusiasm, dedication, and most of all perhaps their ingenuity in so
creatively extending our inquiries into the kind of bibliography now
demanded of us, they have carried the discipline forward into quite
new areas while continuing to demonstrate its central role in our
understanding of all forms of text. Finally, this new edition of the rst
series of Panizzi Lectures is most welcome for the opportunity it
gives me to thank in a ttingly public manner their onlie.begetter,
Mrs Catherine Devas, a lover of books and of the scholarship devoted
to them. Oxford had long had their Lyell Lectures and Cambridge
their Sandars, but London offered no comparable series devoted to
the scholarship of the book until Mrs Devas proposed that the British
Library might host such a project. The generosity of her benefaction
has brought into being a lectureship of great distinction, whose close
association with the British Library is ttingly celebrated in the name of
Sir Anthony Panizzi, the great Victorian librarian and effective creator
of the British Museum Library in Bloomsbury. His administrative bril-
liance and political astuteness, but most of all his moral intelligence, in
afrming and securing the nations commitment to the principle of
free access to knowledge as the essential condition of a true democracy,
still have their exemplary and admonitory force. To the trustees of the
Panizzi Lectures Trust, I again record my gratitude for the compliment
of their invitation and my hope that their expectations and those of the
donor may have been in some measure fullled.
6
Foreword
BI BLI OGRAPHY AND THE
SOCI OLOGY OF TEXTS

For Stuart Johnston
I
Bibliography an Apologia, in Collected Papers, ed. J. C. Maxwell (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1966), p. 247; published originally in The Library, 4th series, 13
(1932), 11343.
:
Ross Atkinson, An Application of Semiotics to the Denition of Bibliography,
Studies in Bibliography 33 (1980), 5473.
9
1
The book as an expressive form

My purpose in these lectures one I hope that might be thought tting
for an inaugural occasion is simply to consider anew what biblio-
graphy is and how it relates to other disciplines. To begin that inquiry,
I should like to recall a classic statement by Sir Walter Greg. It is this:
what the bibliographer is concerned with is pieces of paper or parch-
ment covered with certain written or printed signs. With these signs he
is concerned merely as arbitrary marks; their meaning is no business of
his.
I
This denition of bibliography, or at least of pure bibliography,
is still widely accepted, and it remains in essence the basis of any claim
that the procedures of bibliography are scientic.
A study by Mr Ross Atkinson supports that view by drawing on
the work of the American semiotician, C. S. Peirce.
:
It can be argued,
for example, that the signs in a book, as a bibliographer must read
them, are simply iconic or indexical. Briey, iconic signs are those
which involve similarity; they represent an object, much as a portrait
represents the sitter. In enumerative bibliography, and even more so
in descriptive, the entries are iconic. They represent the object they
describe. Textual bibliography, too, may be said to be iconic because it
seeks, as Mr Atkinson puts it, to reproduce the Object with maximum
precision in every detail. In that way, enumerative, descriptive, and
textual bibliography may be said to constitute a class of three referential
10
Bibliography and the sociology of texts
sign systems. Analytical bibliography, however, would form a distinct
class of indexical signs. Their signicance lies only in the physical dif-
ferences between them as an index to the ways in which a particular
document came physically to be what it is. It is their causal status that,
in Peirces terms, makes the signs indexical. In the words of Professor
Fredson Bowers, writing of analytical bibliography, the physical fea-
tures of a book are signicant in the order and manner of their shapes
but indifferent in symbolic meaning.
,
I must say at once that this account comes closer than any other
I know to justifying Gregs denition of the discipline. I am also con-
vinced, however, that the premise informing Gregs classic statement,
and therefore this renement of it, is no longer adequate as a denition
of what bibliography is and does.
In an attempt to escape the embarrassment of such a strict deni-
tion, it is often said that bibliography is not a subject at all but only, as
Mr G. Thomas Tanselle once put it, a related group of subjects that
happen to be commonly referred to by the same term.
Professor
Bowers virtually conceded as much in dividing it into enumerative or
systematic bibliography, and descriptive, analytical, textual, and his-
torical bibliography.
,
The purity of the discipline which Greg aspired
to is to that extent qualied by its particular applications and these in
turn imply that his denition does not fully serve its uses.
The problem is, I think, that the moment we are required to explain
signs in a book, as distinct from describing or copying them, they
assume a symbolic status. If a medium in any sense effects a message,
then bibliography cannot exclude from its own proper concerns the
relation between form, function, and symbolic meaning. If textual
bibliography were merely iconic, it could produce only facsimiles of
different versions. As for bibliographical analysis, that depends abso-
,
Bibliography and Textual Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), p. 41; cited by
Atkinson, p. 63.
Bibliography and Science, Studies in Bibliography 27 (1974), 88.

,
Principally in Bibliography, Pure Bibliography, and Literary Studies, Papers of the
Bibliographical Society of America 47 (1952), 186208; also in Bibliography,
Encyclopaedia Britannica (1970), III, 58892.
11
lutely upon antecedent historical knowledge, for it can only function
with the assistance of previously gathered information on the tech-
niques of book production.
o
But the most striking weakness of the
denition is precisely its incapacity to accommodate history. Mr
Atkinson is quite frank about this. Accepting the bibliographers pre-
sumed lack of concern for the meaning of signs, he writes: we are left
now only with the problem of historical bibliography. He cites with
approval the comment by Professor Bowers that the numerous elds
concerned with the study of printing and its processes both as art and
craft are merely ancillary to analytical bibliography.
,
He is therefore
obliged to argue that
historical bibliography is not, properly speaking, bibliography
at all. This is because it does not have as its Object material
sign systems or documents. Its Object rather consists of cer-
tain mechanical techniques and as such it must be considered
not part of bibliography but a constituent of such elds as the
history of technology or, perhaps, information science.
Such comments, although seeking to accommodate bibliography to
semiotics as the science of signs, are oddly out of touch with such
developments as, for example, the founding of The Center for the Book
by the Library of Congress, the American Antiquarian Societys pro-
gramme for the History of the Book in American Culture, or proposals
for publication of national histories of the book, of which the most
notable so far is LHistoire de ldition Franaise.
I am not bold enough to speak of paradigm shifts, but I think I am
safe in saying that the vital interests of most of those known to me as
bibliographers are no longer fully served by description, or even by
editing, but by the historical study of the making and the use of books
and other documents. But is it right that in order to accomplish such
projects as, for example, a history of the book in Britain, we must cease
to be bibliographers and shift to another discipline? It is here, if
anywhere, that other disciplines such as history, and especially cultural
o
Atkinson, p. 64.
,
Encyclopaedia Britannica, III, 588.
12
history, are now making demands of bibliography. Far from accepting
that historical bibliography is not, properly speaking, bibliography at
all, it is tempting to claim, now, that all bibliography, properly speaking,
is historical bibliography.
In such a world, Gregs denition of the theoretical basis of biblio-
graphy is too limited. As long as we continue to think of it as conned
to the study of the non-symbolic functions of signs, the risk it runs is
relegation. Rare book rooms will simply become rarer. The politics of
survival, if nothing else, require a more comprehensive justication of
the disciplines function in promoting new knowledge.
If, by contrast, we were to delineate the eld in a merely pragmatic
way, take a panoptic view and describe what we severally do as biblio-
graphers, we should note, rather, that it is the only discipline which has
consistently studied the composition, formal design, and transmission
of texts by writers, printers, and publishers; their distribution through
different communities by wholesalers, retailers, and teachers; their col-
lection and classication by librarians; their meaning for, and I must
add their creative regeneration by, readers. However we dene it, no
part of that series of human and institutional interactions is alien to
bibliography as we have, traditionally, practised it.
But, like Panizzi himself, faced with everything printed in a world in
change, we reach a point where the accretion of subjects, like the col-
lection of books, demands that we also seek a new principle by which
to order them. Recent changes in critical theory, subsuming linguistics,
semiotics, and the psychology of reading and writing, in information
theory and communications studies, in the status of texts and the
forms of their transmission, represent a formidable challenge to tradi-
tional practice, but they may also, I believe, give to bibliographical
principle a quite new centrality.
The principle I wish to suggest as basic is simply this: bibliography is
the discipline that studies texts as recorded forms, and the processes of
their transmission, including their production and reception. So stated,
it will not seem very surprising. What the word texts also allows, how-
ever, is the extension of present practice to include all forms of texts,
not merely books or Gregs signs on pieces of parchment or paper. It
13
also frankly accepts that bibliographers should be concerned to show
that forms effect meaning. Beyond that, it allows us to describe not
only the technical but the social processes of their transmission. In
those quite specic ways, it accounts for non-book texts, their physical
forms, textual versions, technical transmission, institutional control,
their perceived meanings, and social effects. It accounts for a history
of the book and, indeed, of all printed forms including all textual
ephemera as a record of cultural change, whether in mass civilization
or minority culture. For any history of the book which excluded study
of the social, economic, and political motivations of publishing, the
reasons why texts were written and read as they were, why they were
rewritten and redesigned, or allowed to die, would degenerate into
a feebly degressive book list and never rise to a readable history. But
such a phrase also accommodates what in recent critical theory is often
called text production, and it therefore opens up the application of the
discipline to the service of that eld too.
In terms of the range of demands now made of it and of the diverse
interests of those who think of themselves as bibliographers, it seems to
me that it would now be more useful to describe bibliography as the
study of the sociology of texts. If the principle which makes it distinct
is its concern with texts in some physical form and their transmis-
sion, then I can think of no other phrase which so aptly describes its
range. Both the word texts and sociology, however, demand further
comment.
I dene texts to include verbal, visual, oral, and numeric data, in
the form of maps, prints, and music, of archives of recorded sound, of
lms, videos, and any computer-stored information, everything in fact
from epigraphy to the latest forms of discography. There is no evading
the challenge which those new forms have created.
We can nd in the origins of the word text itself some support
for extending its meaning from manuscripts and print to other forms.
It derives, of course, from the Latin texere, to weave, and therefore
refers, not to any specic material as such, but to its woven state, the
web or texture of the materials. Indeed, it was not restricted to the
weaving of textiles, but might be applied equally well to the interlacing
14
or entwining of any kind of material. The Oxford Latin Dictionary
suggests that it is probably cognate with the Vedic tas
.
t
.
i, to fashion by
carpentry, and consequently with the Greek and .
The shift from fashioning a material medium to a conceptual sys-
tem, from the weaving of fabrics to the web of words, is also implicit in
the Greek a web or net, from to weave. As with the
Latin, it is only by virtue of a metaphoric shift that it applies to lan-
guage, that the verb to weave serves for the verb to write, that the
web of words becomes a text. In each case, therefore, the primary sense
is one which denes a process of material construction. It creates an
object, but it is not peculiar to any one substance or any one form. The
idea that texts are written records on parchment or paper derives only
from the secondary and metaphoric sense that the writing of words is
like the weaving of threads.
As much could now be said of many constructions which are not in
written form, but for which the same metaphoric shift would be just as
proper. Until our own times, the only textual records created in any
quantity were manuscripts and books. A slight extension of the prin-
ciple it is, I believe, the same principle to cope with the new kinds
of material constructions we have in the form of the non-book texts
which now surround, inform, and pleasure us, does not seem to me a
radical departure from precedent.
In turning briey now to comment on the word sociology, it is not
perhaps impertinent to note that its early history parallels Panizzis.
A neologism coined by Auguste Comte in 1830, the year before Panizzi
joined the staff of the British Museum, it made a eeting appearance
in Britain in 1843 in Blackwoods Magazine, which referred to a new
Science, to be called Social Ethics, or Sociology. Eight years later it was
still struggling for admission. Frasers Magazine in 1851 acknowledged
its function but derided its name in a reference to the new science of
sociology, as it is barbarously termed. Only in 1873 did it nd a local
habitation and a respected name. Herbert Spencers The Study of
Sociology, published in that year, provides a succinct description of its
role: Sociology has to recognize truths of social development, structure
and function.
15
As I see it, that stress on structure and function is important,
although I should resist its abstraction to the point where it lost sight of
human agency. At one level, a sociology simply reminds us of the full
range of social realities which the medium of print had to serve, from
receipt blanks to bibles. But it also directs us to consider the human
motives and interactions which texts involve at every stage of their
production, transmission, and consumption. It alerts us to the roles of
institutions, and their own complex structures, in affecting the forms
of social discourse, past and present. Those are the realities which bib-
liographers and textual critics as such have, until very recently, either
neglected or, by dening them as strictly non-bibliographical, have felt
unable to denominate, logically and coherently, as central to what we
do. Historical bibliography, we were told, was not strictly bibliography
at all.
A sociology of texts, then, contrasts with a bibliography conned to
logical inference from printed signs as arbitrary marks on parchment
or paper. As I indicated earlier, claims were made for the scientic
status of the latter precisely because it worked only from the physical
evidence of books themselves. Restricted to the non-symbolic values of
the signs, it tried to exclude the distracting complexities of linguistic
interpretation and historical explanation.
That orthodox view of bibliography is less compelling, and less
surprising, if we note its afnities with other modes of thinking at the
time when Greg was writing in the 1920s and 1930s. These include cer-
tain formalist theories of art and literature which were concerned to
exclude from the discussion of a work of art any intended or referential
meaning. They were current not only in the years when Greg was
formulating his denitions but were still active in the theory of the New
Criticism when Fredson Bowers was developing his. The congruence
of bibliography and criticism lay precisely in their shared view of the
self-sufcient nature of the work of art or text, and in their agreement
on the signicance of its every verbal detail, however small. In neither
case were precedent or subsequent processes thought to be essential
to critical or bibliographical practice. The New Criticism showed
great ingenuity in discerning patterns in the poem-on-the-page as a
16
self-contained verbal structure. It is not I think altogether fanciful
to nd a scholarly analogy in analytical bibliography. Compositor
studies, for example, have shown a comparable virtuosity in discern-
ing patterns in evidence which is entirely internal, if not wholly
ctional.
I shall return to that analogy with the New Criticism, but I am more
concerned for the moment to emphasize the point that this con-
nement of bibliography to non-symbolic meaning, in an attempt to
give it some kind of objective or scientic status, has seriously impeded
its development as a discipline. By electing to ignore its inevitable
dependence upon interpretative structures, it has obscured the role of
human agents, and virtually denied the relevance to bibliography of
anything we might now understand as a history of the book. Physical
bibliography the study of the signs which constitute texts and the
materials on which they are recorded is of course the starting point.
But it cannot dene the discipline because it has no adequate means of
accounting for the processes, the technical and social dynamics, of
transmission and reception, whether by one reader or a whole market
of them.
In speaking of bibliography as the sociology of texts, I am not con-
cerned to invent new names but only to draw attention to its actual
nature. Derridas Grammatology, the currently fashionable word
Textuality, the French Textologie, or even Hyphologie (a sugges-
tion made, not altogether seriously, by Roland Barthes) would exclude
more than we would wish to lose. Nor is bibliography a sub-eld of
semiotics, precisely because its functions are not merely synchroni-
cally descriptive. Our own word, Bibliography, will do. It unites us as
collectors, editors, librarians, historians, makers, and readers of books.
It even has a new felicity in its literal meaning of the writing out of
books, of generating new copies and therefore in time new versions.
Its traditional concern with texts as recorded forms, and with the pro-
cesses of their transmission, should make it hospitably open to new
forms. No new names, then; but to conceive of the discipline as a soci-
ology of texts is, I think, both to describe what the bibliography is that
we actually do and to allow for its natural evolution.
17
Nevertheless, I must now turn to consider the special case of printed
texts. In doing so, the particular inquiry I wish to pursue is whether or
not the material forms of books, the non-verbal elements of the typo-
graphic notations within them, the very disposition of space itself, have
an expressive function in conveying meaning, and whether or not it is,
properly, a bibliographical task to discuss it.
Again, I sense that theory limps behind practice. At one end of
the spectrum, we must of course recognize that Erwin Panofsky on
perspective as symbolic form has long since made the theme familiar;
at the other end, we nd that Marshall McLuhans Understanding
Media has made it basic to media studies. In our own eld, Mr Nicolas
Barker, on Typography and the Meaning of Words: The Revolution in
the Layout of Books in the Eighteenth Century; Mr David Foxon on
Popes typography; Mr Giles Barber on Voltaire and the typographic
presentation of Candide; Mr Roger Laufer on scripturation or the
material emergence of sense are all distinguished bibliographers
demonstrating in one way or another, not the iconic or indexical, but
the symbolic function of typographic signs as an interpretative system.
8
Words like the articulation or enunciation of the book in this sense
make similar assumptions. Discussions of the morphology of the book
8
Nicolas Barker, Typography and the Meaning of Words, Buch und Buchhandel
in Europa im achtzehnten Jahrhundert, ed. G. Barber and B. Fabian, Wolfenbtteler
Schriften zur Geschichte des Buchwesens 4 (Hamburg, 1981), pp. 12665; D. F. Foxon,
Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade, rev. and ed. James McLaverty
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); Giles Barber, Voltaire et la prsentation
typographique de Candide, Transmissione dei Testi a Stampa nel Periodo Moderno I
(Seminario Internationale, Rome 1985), 15169; Roger Laufer, Lnonciation
typographique au dix-huitime sicle, ibid., 11323; LEspace visuel du livre ancien,
Revue Franaise dHistoire du Livre 16 (1977), 56981; LEsprit de la lettre, Le Dbat
22 (November 1982), 14759; see also Barbara R. Woshinsky, La Bruyres Caractres:
A Typographical Reading, TEXT: Transactions of the Society for Textual Scholarship 2
(1985), 20928. Those examples from the past, implying a consciousness of the non-
verbal resources of book forms to enhance and convey meaning, may be paralleled
with others from current research into text design. A useful summary is James
Hartley, Current Research on Text Design, Scholarly Publishing 16 (1985), 35568;
see also James Hartley and Peter Burnhill, Explorations in Space: A Critique of the
Typography of BPS Publications, Bulletin of the British Psychological Society 29
(1976), 97107.
18
in relation to genre or to special classes of readers and markets assume
a complex relation of medium to meaning. Journals like Visible Lan-
guage and Word & Image were founded specically to explore these
questions. The persistent example of ne printing and the revival of the
calligraphic manuscript, and numerous recent studies of the sophisti-
cated displays of text and illumination in medieval manuscript produc-
tion, also share a basic assumption that forms effect sense.
,
Perhaps on this occasion the simplest way of exploring some of these
issues as they relate to the expressive function of typography in book
forms, as they bear on editing, and as they relate to critical theory, is
to offer an exemplary case. I have chosen the four lines which serve
as epigraph to The Intentional Fallacy, the distinguished essay by
W. K. Wimsatt Jr. and M. C. Beardsley which was rst published in
The Sewanee Review in 1946.
Io
It would, I think, be hard to name
another essay which so inuenced critical theory and the teaching of
literature in the next forty years or so. Briey, they argued that it was
pointless to use the concept of an authors intentions in trying to
decide what a work of literature might mean, or if it was any good. And
of course exactly the same objection must apply, if it holds at all, to the
interpretation of a writers or printers intentions in presenting a text in
a particular form, or a publishers intentions in issuing it at all.
Let me say at once that my purpose in using an example from this
essay is to show that in some cases signicantly informative readings
may be recovered from typographic signs as well as verbal ones, that
these are relevant to editorial decisions about the manner in which one
might reproduce a text, and that a reading of such bibliographical signs
may seriously shape our judgement of an authors work. I think it is
also possible to suggest that their own preconceptions may have led
Wimsatt and Beardsley to misread a text, that their misreading may
itself have been partly a function of the manner in which it was printed,
,
For an excellent example, see Michael Camille, The Book of Signs: Writing
and Visual Difference in Gothic Manuscript Illumination, Word & Image I, no. 2
(AprilJune 1985), 13348.
Io
The Sewanee Review 54 (Summer, 1946), 46888; subsequently collected in
The Verbal Icon (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954).
19
and that its typographic style was in turn inuenced by the culture at
large. My argument therefore runs full circle from a defence of author-
ial meaning, on the grounds that it is in some measure recoverable, to
a recognition that, for better or worse, readers inevitably make their
own meanings. In other words, each reading is peculiar to its occasion,
each can be at least partially recovered from the physical forms of the
text, and the differences in readings constitute an informative history.
What writers thought they were doing in writing texts, or printers and
booksellers in designing and publishing them, or readers in making
sense of them are issues which no history of the book can evade.
The Intentional Fallacy opens with an epigraph taken from Con-
greves prologue to The Way of the World (1700). In it, as Wimsatt and
Beardsley quote him,
It has not, I think, been observed before that, if we include its
epigraph, this famous essay on the interpretation of literature opens
with a misquotation in its very rst line. Wimsatt and Beardsley say
that Congreve wrote the following scenes, but Congreve was a delib-
erate craftsman. He said he wrought them. Since the words quoted are
ascribed to Congreve, I think we are clearly meant to accept them as
his, even if the essay later persuades us that we cannot presume to
Congreves authorized version of 1710 reads:
20
know what Congreve might have intended them to mean. By adopting
that simple change from wrought to wrote, Wimsatt and Beardsley
oblige us to make our meaning from their misreading. The epigraph
thereby directs us to weaken the emphasis that Congreve placed on his
labour of composition: he writes of the Pains it cost him to hammer
out his meaning. The changed wording destroys the carefully created
internal rhyme, the resonance between what, in the rst line, Congreve
said he wrought and, in the second line, its fate in being reduced
to naught by those who misquote, misconstrue, and misjudge him.
Congreves prologue to The Way of the World put, in 1700/1710, a point
of view exactly opposite to the one which the lines are cited to support.
Less noticeable perhaps are the implications of the way in which
the epigraph is printed. For Congreves precise notation of spelling,
punctuation, and initial capitals, the 1946 version offers a at, even
insidiously open form. Congreve wrote that He owns comma with
Toil comma he wrought the following Scenes. In their performance
of the line, Wimsatt and Beardsley drop the commas. By isolating and
emphasizing the phrase, Congreve may be read as afrming his seri-
ousness of purpose, the deliberation of his art. Wimsatt and Beardsley
speed past it, their eyes perhaps on a phrase more proper to their
purpose in the next line. What their reading emphasizes instead, sur-
rounding it with commas where Congreve had none, is the phrase if
theyre naught. By that slight change they highlight Congreves ironic
concession that an authors intentions have no power to save him if an
audience or reader thinks him dull. Congreve, without commas, had
preferred to skip quickly past that thought. Wimsatt and Beardsley
allow us to dwell on it, for in their reading it would seem to justify their
rather different argument.
Those shifts of meaning which result from the variants noted are, I
believe, serious, however slight the signs which make them. But there
are more. In his second couplet, Congreve writes:
Damn him the more; have no Commiseration
For Dulness on mature Deliberation.
21
Again, it suits the purpose of the epigraph to remove Congreves
irony, but as irony is crucially dependent upon context, the loss is per-
haps inevitable. Reading the words literally, Wimsatt and Beardsley
must take them to mean: If you really think my scenes are dull, dont
waste your pity on their author. But you will note that Congreve gives
upper case Ds for Dulness and Deliberation. Those personied forms
allow two readings to emerge which tell us something of Congreves
experience. The rst is that these abstractions have human shapes (they
were sitting there in the theatre); the second alludes to the age-old
combat between Dulness and Deliberation, or Stupidity and Sense.
By reducing all his nouns to lower case and thereby destroying the
early eighteenth-century convention, the epigraph kills off Congreves
personied forms, and by muting his irony, it reverses his meaning.
Where Congreves irony contrasts his own mature Deliberation with
the Dulness of his critics, their meaning has him saying the reader
knows best.
If we look again at the form and relation of the words Toil, Scenes
and its rhyme-word Pains, we note that they, too, have initial cap-
itals. The convention thereby gives us in print a visual, semantic, and
ultimately moral identity between Congreves own description of his
labours (Toil . . . Pains) and their human products who people his
plays. The text as printed in the epigraph breaks down those visual
links by depriving the words of their capitals. One set of meanings,
which stress a writers presence in his work, is weakened in favour of a
preconceived reading which would remove him from it.
Small as it is, this example is so instructive that I should like to
explore it further. It bears on the most obvious concerns of textual
criticism getting the right words in the right order; on the semiotics
of print and the role of typography in forming meaning; on the critical
theories of authorial intention and reader response; on the relation
between the past meanings and present uses of verbal texts. It offers
an illustration of the transmission of texts as the creation of the new
versions which form, in turn, the new books, the products of later
printers, and the stuff of subsequent bibliographical control. These are
22
the primary documents for any history of the book. By reading one
form of Congreves text (1700/1710), we may with some authority afrm
certain readings as his. By reading other forms of it (1946), we can chart
meanings that later readers made from it under different historical
imperatives.
I may believe as I do that Wimsatt and Beardsley have mistaken
Congreves meaning; that they have misconceived his relation to his
tradition; that they have misreported his attitude to his own audience
and readers. At the same time, their misreading has become an histori-
cal document in its own right. By speaking to what they perceived in
1946 to be the needs of their own time, not Congreves in 1700/1710,
they have left a record of the taste, thought, and values of a critical
school which signicantly shaped our own choice of books, the way we
read them and, in my own case, the way I taught them. The history of
material objects as symbolic forms functions, therefore, in two ways.
It can falsify certain readings; and it can demonstrate new ones.
To extend that line of argument, I should like to comment briey
on the word Scenes. We recall rst that Congreves Scenes cost him
Pains. Next, we should note that his editors and critics have, almost
without exception, replaced his meaning of the word with a com-
moner one of their own. They have dened them by geography and
carpentry, as when a scene shifts from a forest to the palace. For
Congreve, by contrast, they were neoclassical scenes: not impersonal
places in motion, but distinct groups of human beings in conversation.
These made up his scenes. For him, it was the intrusion of another
human voice, another mind, or its loss, that most changed the scene. The
substance of his scenes, therefore, what with Toil, he wrought, were
men and women. Once we recover that context and follow Congreves
quite literal meaning in that sense, his rhyme of Scenes with Pains
glows with an even subtler force. What he hints at is a serious critical
judgement about all his work: beneath the rippling surface of his
comedy there ows a sombre undercurrent of human pain. In a more
mundane way, that perception may direct an editor to adopt a typo-
graphy which divides Congreves plays into neoclassical scenes, as he
himself did in his edition of 1710 where we nd them restored.
23
With that last example, it could be argued that we reach the border
between bibliography and textual criticism on the one hand and liter-
ary criticism and literary history on the other. My own view is that no
such border exists. In the pursuit of historical meanings, we move from
the most minute feature of the material form of the book to questions
of authorial, literary, and social context. These all bear in turn on the
ways in which texts are then re-read, re-edited, re-designed, re-printed,
and re-published. If a history of readings is made possible only by a
comparative history of books, it is equally true that a history of books
will have no point if it fails to account for the meanings they later come
to make.
Though at times they may pretend otherwise, I suspect that few
authors, with the kind of investment in their work that Congreve
claims, are indifferent to the ways in which their art is presented and
received. There is certainly a cruel irony in the fact that Congreves own
text is reshaped and misread to support an argument against himself.
Far from offering a licence for his audience and readers to discount
the authors meaning, Congreve is putting, with an exasperated irony,
the case for the right of authors, as he says in another line of the pro-
logue, to assert their Sense against the taste of the town. When Jeremy
Collier wrenched to his own purposes the meaning of Congreves
words, Congreve replied with his Amendments of Mr. Colliers False
and Imperfect Citations. He too had a way with epigraphs and chose for
that occasion one from Martial which, translated, reads: That book
you recite, O Fidentinus, is mine. But your vile re-citation begins to
make it your own.
With that thought in mind, I should like to pursue one further
dimension of the epigraphs meaning which is not in itself a matter of
book form. It nevertheless puts Congreve in the tradition of authors
who thought about the smallest details of their work as it might be
printed, and who directed, collaborated with, or fumed against, their
printers and publishers. One such author is Ben Jonson. As it happens,
Wimsatt and Beardsley might with equal point have quoted him to
epitomize their argument that an authors intentions are irrelevant.
This, for example:
24
Playes in themselues haue neither hopes, nor feares,
Their fate is only in their hearers eares . . .
II
It chimes in perfectly with the very end of Congreves prologue
although, here, his irony is too heavy to miss:
In short, our Play shall (with your Leave to shew it),
Give you one Instance of a Passive Poet.
Who to your Judgments yields all Resignation;
So Save or Damn, after your own Discretion.
To link Congreve with Jonson is to place his prologue and what it
says in a developing tradition of the authors presence in his printed
works. In that context, Congreves lines become a form of homage to
his mentor, an acceptance of succession, and a reminder that the ght
for the authors right not to be mis-read can ultimately break even the
best of us. For not only had Jonson inveighed against the usurpation of
his meanings by those of his asinine critics, but he was a dramatist who
for a time virtually quit the public stage to be, as he put it, Safe from
the wolves black jaw, and the dull Asses hoofe. Jonsons rejection of
free interpretation is venomous:
Let their fastidious, vaine
Commission of the braine
Run on, and rage, sweat, censure, and condemn:
They were not meant for thee, lesse, thou for them.
I:
Congreves ironies allow him a more tactful, more decorous, farewell.
Less tough, more delicate, than Jonson, he did leave the comic stage,
sensing himself expelled by the misappropriation of his works, con-
vinced that his meanings would rarely survive their reception. The
imminence of that decision informs his prologue to The Way of the
World. It was to be his last play, though not his last major work. On
mature Deliberation, he found be could no longer bear the deadly
II
Ben Jonson, The New Inne, epilogue, ll. 12.
I:
Ode to himselfe, ll. 710.
25
Dulness of his critics. By respecting not only the words Congreve uses
a simple courtesy but also the meanings which their precise nota-
tion gives, we can, if we wish, as an act of bibliographical scholarship,
recover his irony, and read his pain.
In that long series of Pyrrhic victories which records the triumphs of
critics and the deaths of authors, The Intentional Fallacy has earned a
distinguished place for the argument which follows its feat of mispri-
sion. Its epigraph is no celebration of Congreves perspicacity in fore-
seeing a new cause; it is, rather, an epitaph to his own dismembered
text. A vast critical literature has been generated by this essay, but I
am unaware of any mention of the textual ironies which preface it.
With what seems an undue reverence for the tainted text printed by
Wimsatt and Beardsley, the epigraph has been reproduced in reprint
after reprint with exceptional delity, its errors resistant to any further
reworking of a classic moment of mis-statement, resistant even to the
force of the argument which follows it. It is now incorporate with
Congreves history and with that of our own time.
Yet if the ne detail of typography and layout, the material signs
which constitute a text, do signify in the ways I have tried to suggest,
it must follow that any history of the book subject as books are to
typographic and material change must be a history of misreadings.
This is not so strange as it might sound. Every society rewrites its past,
every reader rewrites its texts, and, if they have any continuing life at
all, at some point every printer redesigns them. The changes in the
way Congreves text was printed as an epigraph were themselves
designed to correct a late Victorian printing style which had come to
seem too fussily expressive. In 1946, good printing had a clean, clear,
impersonal surface. It left the text to speak for itself.
This newly preferred form of printing had conspired with shifts in
critical opinion. Eliots theory of the impersonality of the poet affected
to dissociate the writer from his text. The words on the page became
what Wimsatt called a verbal icon, a free-standing artefact with its
own inner coherence, what Cleanth Brooks was to call (as it happens)
a well-wrought Urn, a structure complete in itself which had within it
all the linguistic signs we needed for the contemplation of its meaning.
26
The unprecedented rise of English studies and the decline of classics
made quite new demands of teachers of literature. At one level, the crit-
ical analysis of prescribed texts was an efcient way to teach reading
from what was irreducibly common to a class, the text itself laid out on
the page in a kind of lapidary state. At another level, it brought into
sharper focus than ever before the fact that different readers brought
the text to life in different ways. If a poem is only what its individual
readers make it in their activity of constructing meaning from it, then
a good poem will be one which most compels its own destruction in
the service of its readers new constructions. When the specication of
meaning is one with its discovery in the critical practice of writing, the
generative force of texts is most active. In that context, the misreading
of Congreve in 1946 may be seen as almost a matter of historical neces-
sity, an interesting document itself in the nature of reading and the
history of the book.
And it is a physical document. We can date it; we can read it; we can
locate it in the context of The Sewanee Review and the interests of its
readers; we can interpret it reasonably according to the propositional
intentions of the anti-intentionalist essay which lies beneath it. It is, I
hope, unnecessary to multiply instances. This scrap of prologue, this
fragment of text, raises most of the issues we need to address as we
think about books as texts which have been given a particular physical
form.
But as a dramatic text, it was originally written to be spoken, and
so other questions arise. Can we hear the voice of the actor Thomas
Betterton conveying orally the ironies we now read visually? Con-
greves autograph letters show no concern for the niceties I suggested
in the form of the epigraph. Am I therefore reading an interpretation
of Congreves meaning by his printer, John Watts? Is Watts merely
following a general set of conventions imposed at this time, with or
without Congreves assent, by Congreves publisher, Jacob Tonson?
Who, in short, authored Congreve? Whose concept of the reader do
these forms of the text imply: the authors, the actors, the printers, or
the publishers? And what of the reader? Is a knowledge of Jonson,
Betterton, Congreve, Watts, and Tonson a necessary condition of a
27
true reading? Does my own reading betray a personal need to prove
that a technical interest in books and in the teaching of texts, is not
radically disjunctive, that bibliographical scholarship and criticism are
in fact one? Visited by such questions, an author disperses into his
collaborators, those who produced his texts and their meanings.
If we turn to the 1946 epigraph, similar questions insist on an
answer. Does its removal from context entirely free it from irony? Do
the slight changes of form alter the substance? Are they no more than a
case of careless printing in a new convention? But the crucial questions
for a history of reading, and the re-writing of texts, are these: did the
intentions of these two authors (something extrinsic to their text) lead
them to create from Congreves lines a pre-text for their own writing;
and, if so, did they do it consciously, unconsciously, or accidentally?
To venture into distinctions between conscious and unconscious
intentions would be to enter upon troubled waters indeed. The prob-
able answer is, I fear, banal, but as an illustration of the vagaries of
textual transmission it should be given. The anthology of plays edited
by Nettleton and Case, from which Wimsatt would almost certainly have
taught, includes The Way of the World, the prologue to which in that
edition inexplicably reads wrote for wrought. We must therefore, I
think, relieve Wimsatt and Beardsley of immediate responsibility, and
we should certainly free them from any suggestion of deliberate con-
tamination. But I wonder if they would have ventured to choose the
lines had they been more carefully edited.
I,
The case, however, is not altered. If we think of the physical con-
struction of Congreves text in the quarto of 1700 or the octavo edition
of 1710, and its physical re-presentation in 1946, then at least we begin
by seeing two simple facts. One gives us the historical perspective of
an author directing one set of meanings in a transaction with his con-
temporaries. The other gives us an equally historical perspective of two
I,
I am indebted to Professor Albert Braunmuller for suggesting the probable source
of the error. In fairness to Wimsatt and Beardsley, whose matching essay, The
Subjective Fallacy, warns against readings uncontrolled by the formal limits of
the words on the page, it should be said that they might well have welcomed and
accepted as constituting a more acceptable text the lines as originally printed.
28
readers creating a reverse set of meanings for an academic indeed, a
scholarly readership whose interests in the text were different. Each
perspective can be studied distinctively in the signs of the text as
printed. Those signs range in signicance from the trivial to the seri-
ous, but far from importing the authors irrelevance, they take us back
to human motive and intention. In Congreves case, they reveal a man
of compassion whose scenes record the human struggle they spring
from as the very condition of his writing.
In one sense at least, little has changed in critical theory since
1946. New Critical formalism and structuralism on the one hand, post-
structuralism and deconstruction on the other, all share the same
scepticism about recovering the past. One of the most impressive objec-
tions to this critical self-absorption, to the point of excluding a concern
for the complexities of human agency in the production of texts, is
Edward Saids The World, the Text, and the Critic. I can only agree with
his judgement that As it is practised in the American academy today,
literary theory has for the most part isolated textuality from the
circumstances, the events, the physical senses that made it possible
and render it intelligible as the result of human work.
I
Commenting
upon Said in his own book, Textual Power, Robert Scholes pursued the
point: At the present time there are two major positions that can be
taken with respect to this problem, and . . . it is extremely difcult to
combine them or nd any middle ground between them.
I,
Scholes
described those two positions as the hermetic and the secular.
To return now to my larger theme: Gregs denition of what biblio-
graphy is would have it entirely hermetic. By admitting history, we
make it secular. The two positions are not entirely opposed, for books
themselves are the middle ground. It is one that bibliographers have
long since explored, mapped, and tilled. Their descriptive methods far
surpass other applications of semiotics as a science of signs. In the
ubiquity and variety of its evidence, bibliography as a sociology of texts
has an unrivalled power to resurrect authors in their own time, and
I
The World, the Text, and the Critic (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p. 4.
I,
Textual Power (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 75.
29
their readers at any time. It enables what Michel Foucault called an
insurrection of subjugated knowledges.
Io
One of its greatest strengths
is the access it gives to social motives: by dealing with the facts of trans-
mission and the material evidence of reception, it can make discoveries
as distinct from inventing meanings. In focussing on the primary
object, the text as a recorded form, it denes our common point of
departure for any historical or critical enterprise. By abandoning the
notion of degressive bibliography and recording all subsequent ver-
sions, bibliography, simply by its own comprehensive logic, its indis-
criminate inclusiveness, testies to the fact that new readers of course
make new texts, and that their new meanings are a function of their
new forms. The claim then is no longer for their truth as one might
seek to dene that by an authorial intention, but for their testimony as
dened by their historical use. There was a year 1710 in which Tonson
published Congreves Works, and there was a year 1946 in which
some lines from the prologue to The Way of the World were quoted in
The Sewanee Review. Wimsatt and Beardsley might be wrong from
Congreves point of view, but, given their published text, they indubi-
tably are, and it is a very simple bibliographical function to record and
to show their reading indeed, in the interests of a history of cultural
change, to show it up.
Reviewing Scholes in The Times Literary Supplement, Tzvetan
Todorov gave a blunt appraisal of the relation of the then American
literary scene to the traditions of western humanism: If we wish to call
a spade a spade, we must conclude that the dominant tendency of
American criticism is anti-humanism.
I,
Bibliography has a massive
authority with which to correct that tendency. It can, in short, show the
human presence in any recorded text.
I8
Io
Michel Foucault, Two Lectures: Lecture One: 7 January 1976, in Power/Knowledge:
Selected Interviews and Other Writings 197277, ed. Colin Gordon (Brighton:
Harvester Press, 1980), p. 81.
I,
Against all Humanity, Times Literary Supplement (4 October 1985), p. 1094.
I8
A variant photo-construction by Nicholas Wade may also be found in his Visual
Allusions: Pictures of Perception (Hove and London: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1992),
p. 124, where it forms part of an extended discussion of literal portraits.
To the Reader.
This Figure, that thou here seest put,
It was for gentle Shakespeare cut;
Wherein the Grauer had a strife
with Nature to out-doo the life:
O, could he but haue drawne his wit
As well in brasse, as he hath hit
His face; the Print would then surpasse
All, that was euer writ in brasse.
But, since he cannot, Reader, looke
Not on his Picture, but his Booke.
B.I.
30
1 Droeschouts First Folio Shakespeare by Nicholas Wade.
Reproduced from Word and Image I, no. 3 (1985), 259.
31
2
The broken phial: non-book texts

The allusion in the phrase The broken phial is of course to the famous
passage in Miltons Areopagitica, where he speaks of books as having a
potencie of life, for they preserve as in a violl the purest efcacie and
extraction of that living intellect which bred them. . . a good book is
the pretious life-blood of a master-spirit, imbalmd and treasurd up on
purpose to a life beyond life.
Miltons use of the word violl is interesting, since, in the Greek, it
usually meant a broad, at vessel, like a saucer; and in the Authorized
Version it is still translated as a bowl. The sense of its being a small
glass bottle, containing an essence, seems to have developed in the
seventeenth century. I have not pursued the inquiry further but I
imagine that this meaning relates to the use of glass tubes and phials in
scientic experiments. Their transparency would have been important
for allowing one to read the level of a liquid, as we do in a thermometer
or mercury-glass, or to see chemical reactions involving, for example,
changes of colour.
In this rather new sense, then, as used by Milton and later by Robert
Boyle, it heightens the idea of enclosure, of the text as contained, deter-
mined, stable, of the author within, both clearly visible and enduringly
present. When we note Miltons spelling of the word, we see that it
may also bear another meaning which we lose if we modernize it.
Given the spelling of the 1644 edition (violl), and Miltons delight in
music, there cannot be much doubt that we have here a typical Miltonic
pun: it is as if, in reading a book, we should also be moved by the
harmony of the work, what Shakespeare called the concord of sweet
sounds.
32
In such phrases, Milton puts most clearly the idea of the book as a
sacred but expressive form, one whose medium gives transparent
access to the essential meaning. As I tried to suggest earlier, there is
a tradition in which print-inclined authors assume this. They use, or
expect their printers to use, the resources of book forms to mediate
their meaning with the utmost clarity. Even when writers, scribes,
illuminators or illustrators, printers and publishers, merely accept the
conventions of their time, with no innovative or specic intent, there
are still certain codes at work from which, if we are sensitive to them,
we can recover signicant meanings we should otherwise miss or
misinterpret.
Against that tradition, however, which is ultimately Platonic, if not
Hebraic, for at one level it accepts the reality of a pure inner voice, and
at another, a realm of absolute truth, of ideal forms, there is of course
a counter-tradition which is also Hebraic and Platonic. If God said,
Let there be light and there was light, writing has interposed a dark
glass which obscures the light which was the voice of God. The precious
life-blood of Miltons master-spirit is inevitably watered down as it
is spread around. As Shakespeare puts it in Phoenix and the Turtle:
Truth may seeme, but cannot be;
Beautie bragge, but tis not she . . .
In a mutable world, absolutes, by denition, are rare birds. We know
them only by report, and all reported information must suffer what the
telecommunications engineers call transmission-loss.
Plato himself made this point most delightfully in The Symposium.
Socrates there remarks that it would be very nice, Agathon, if wisdom
were like water, and owed by contact out of a person who had more
into one who had less. But such, of course, is not the way of things. The
event Plato records as a symposium is ltered down to us ten years later
through Apollodorus, who was not even there. Apollodorus, whose
memory in any case, we are told, is rather hazy, is merely trying to
recall what he was told by an equally vague Aristodemus, whose recollec-
tion of what Socrates had said Diotima had said, was scarcely reliable.
To unsettle us further, we are told that the text of The Symposium as
33
we have it is only a selection of bits from one particular version. As
Apollodorus says, it relates only the most important points in each of
the speeches that seemed to me worth remembering. Any hopes that
we might have had of the alternative version are instantly dashed, for
it was, in its turn, only a garbled account that Glaucon says he had
from Phoenix who was not there either but who, like Apollodorus, had
heard it from Aristodemus. To do him justice, Apollodorus checked
out the odd detail with Socrates, but in the light of a recital like that,
the claim by Barthes that the birth of the reader demands the death of
the author, is again, like all European intellectual history, only another
footnote to Plato.
I
Within that counter-tradition, not only is any recorded text bound
to be deformed by the processes of its transmission, but even the form
it does have is shown to be less an embodiment of past meaning than
a pretext for present meaning. Plato is often cited as one who deplored
the shift from speech to script, and in The Phaedrus he is of course
quite explicit about this. But he does in fact have it both ways. The
Symposium is not only a brilliant piece of writing, but, as a memorial-
izing act, its forms resurrect and make more of a night with Socrates
than Alcibiades ever enjoyed.
To come closer to our own times, the relegation of writing to the
indeterminate and endlessly transforming processes of textual dis-
semination is a by-product of Saussurian linguistics and some of the
structuralist theories built upon it. In privileging the structures of
speech over those of script, it displaced the older, text-based, philo-
logical, diachronic study of language, in favour of purely synchronic
analysis how people talk now. This shift in attention away from the
study of historical process makes it easy to conclude that we cannot
really presume to recover an authorial voice at all, or an intended
I
Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author, in Image, Music, Text: Essays Selected
and Translated by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1984), p. 148. Michel Foucault,
in What is an Author?, raises many of the same questions as does Barthes, but
his essay seems to me far more sympathetic to the range of concerns which have
traditionally preoccupied those interested in the non-authorial dimensions of
textually transmitted knowledge. It appeared originally as Quest-ce quun auteur?,
followed by a discussion, in Bulletin de la Socit Franaise de la Philosophie 63 (1969).
34
meaning, from the written or printed records of it. We are left only
with synchronic structures, and the conventions which regulate their
meaning as we read. It follows, of course, that if the meaning we read is
entirely a function of the structural relations within the verbal sign
system which constitutes a text, then it is not something in-herent
which can be ex-pressed at all. Meaning is not what is meant, but what
we now agree to infer.
Saussures insistence upon the primacy of speech has created a
further problem for book-based bibliography by conning critical
attention to verbal structures as an alphabetic transcription of what
are conceived only as words to be spoken. Other formalized languages,
or, more properly perhaps, dialects of written language graphic,
algebraic, hieroglyphic, and, most signicantly for our purposes, typo-
graphic have suffered an exclusion from critical debate about the
interpretation of texts because they are not speech-related. They are
instrumental of course to writing and printing, but given the close
interdependence of linguistics, structuralism, and hermeneutics, and
the intellectual dominance of those disciplines in recent years, it is not
surprising perhaps that the history of non-verbal sign systems, includ-
ing even punctuation, is still in its infancy, or that the history of typo-
graphic conventions as mediators of meaning has yet to be written.
To revert briey to Congreve, throughout that discussion one ques-
tion was implicitly begged: could it be said that Congreve personally
intended the meaning I read from his lines, or were the meanings
I attributed to them more promiscuously generated? The question is
both sceptical and anxious in its hope for reassurance. To keep alive
that tension between disbelief and conrmation, I have kept in reserve
Congreves explicit assurance in the edition of 1710 that Care [had]
been taken both to Revise the Press, and to Review and Correct many Pass-
ages in the Writing. By way of general explanation, Congreve added:
It will hardly be denyd, that it is both a Respect due to the
Publick, and a Right which every Man owes to himself, to
endeavour that what he has written may appear with as few
Faults, as he is capable of avoiding.
35
Not to be too philosophical about it here, such a statement gives us
condence to assume that, in his case, most of the forms we have in
that edition were intended. To that extent, the meanings were implied
and controlled. But it does not of course remove the problem. Any
specic instance could be an exception. And readers themselves of
course bring such different styles of readings to texts that they can quite
easily elude the subtlest forms of direction. These different styles are, in
some measure, culturally determined; and if a current theory of mean-
ing holds that an authors voice is muted, the ideas deformed, by print,
there will be a general disposition within the culture to act as if the
detail of past intentions and the forms of their expression are relatively
insignicant compared with present meanings.
By such arguments, the integrity of the authors text, its trans-
parency, and the formal unity of the book which embodies it, implied
in Miltons image of the phial, have been consistently broken down.
Today, one reads rather of the less-than-sacred text, the destabilized,
the indeterminate, the open text.
Laurence Sterne made the point about the indeterminacy of texts in
a beautifully urbane and comforting way in Tristram Shandy, but he
made it none the less:
. . . no author, who knows the just boundaries of decorum
and good-breeding, would presume to think all: The truest
respect which you can pay to the Readers understanding, is
to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to
imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself. For my own part, I am
eternally paying him compliments of this kind and do all in
my power to keep his imagination as busy as my own.
Peter de Voogd has drawn attention to the marbled pages in the third
volume of Tristram Shandy, which Sterne calls the motley emblem of
my work.
:
Each hand-marbled page is necessarily different and yet
integral with the text. As an assortment of coloured shapes which are
:
Peter de Voogd, Laurence Sterne, the Marbled Page and the use of accidents ,
Word & Image I, no. 3 (JulySeptember 1985), 27987.
36
completely non-representational, a marbled page as distinct from
a lettered one might even be said to have no meaning at all. Most
modern editions, if they do attempt to include them, and do not settle
merely for a note of their original presence, will print a black-and-
white image of them which is uniform in every copy of the edition. By
doing that, of course, they subvert Sternes intention to embody an
emblem of non-specic intention, of difference, of undetermined mean-
ing, of the very instability of text from copy to copy. Marbled end-papers
were common enough in ne bindings before Sternes time, but by
making his marbled page a textual feature, Sterne was clearly using a
most forceful and innovative example of expressive form. In one sense,
Sternes principles and practice here conrm the idea of textual indeter-
minacy, but in fact, in the very moment of denying the authority of the
author, the extraordinary specicity of a hand-marbled page deviously
conrms it. Like Plato, Sterne has it both ways.
Bibliography, in Gregs denition, would of course have side-
stepped all these problems of the indeterminacy of texts: its business, as
we have seen, was simply to record and compare manuscript and/or
printed versions. Textual criticism, however, could not quite so easily
avoid it. Since it was thought that it must have as its object a true text,
one different from each of its defective versions, some notion of the
text in a form its author intended was indispensable.
In tune with the times, however, that concept too has largely col-
lapsed. In textual criticism, the most obvious case of the unstable or
open text is created by revision. Where an author revised a text, and
two or more versions of it happen to survive, each of these can be said
to have its own distinct structure, making it a different text. Each
embodies a quite different intention. It follows therefore that, since any
single version will have its own historical identity, not only for its
author but for the particular market of readers who bought and read it,
we cannot invoke the idea of one unied intention which the editor
must serve. Historically, there can be no logical reason for editing one
version any more than another. We can make aesthetic choices, but
that is a different matter. We can choose, if we wish, to privilege an
authors second or third thoughts over his rst, but we need not. The
37
old idea that we should respect an authors nal intentions no longer
compels universal assent. The only remaining rule seems to be that we
must not conate any one version with any other, since that would
destroy the historicity of each.
All this makes perfectly good sense in terms of histoire du livre. The
versions are not only discrete but are telling evidence of a precise set of
signicances at successive points in history. But there is a curiously
cautious, conservative dullness about it. On the one hand, it rejects
the old idea of recovering the work as distinct from its versions; on
the other, it stops short in theory though never in practice of
embracing the notion of creative editing in the construction of new
versions. Such a policy may seem to be justied when we think that
texts might be edited creatively for political purposes.
,
But that argu-
ment is merely a disguised form of censorship and was sufciently
answered by Milton.
I nd it more worrying that such a view of the function of textual
criticism fails to account for intention as a speculative instrument
(in I. A. Richardss phrase), a means of creating a master-text, a kind of
ideal-copy text, transcending all the versions and true to the essential
intention of the work. In this sense, the work may be the form tradi-
tionally imputed to an archetype; it may be a form seen as immanent in
each of the versions but not fully realized in any one of them; or it may
be conceived of as always potential, like that of a play, where the text
is open and generates new meanings according to new needs in a per-
petual deferral of closure. Again, in terms of histoire du livre, this too
makes perfectly good sense. History simply conrms, as a bibliograph-
ical fact, that quite new versions of a work which is not altogether dead,
will be created, whether they are generated by its author, by its succes-
sive editors, by generations of readers, or by new writers.
,
For a development of this point as it might be applied to a specic political
problem, see the succeeding essay in this volume, The Sociology of a Text:
Oral Culture, Literacy, and Print in Early New Zealand, pp. 77130.
Literature on the psychology of reading is indicative. See, for example, Marlene

Doctorow, M. C. Wittock, and Carolyn Marks, Generative Processes in Reading
Comprehension, Journal of Educational Psychology 70 (1978), 10918.
38
Faced with those possibilities, ranging from an authors manipula-
tion of the most minute details of meaning in printed texts to the appro-
priation of texts as completely open to new constructions, the textual
critic is in a sad case of compromise. A convenient statement of the
kind of solution currently offered is that by Mr James McLaverty:
The editor needs to respect the integrity of the different ver-
sions of a work, and he should consider himself free of duty to
the authors nal intention. On the other hand, he must try
to establish the authors text, not that of the compositor or
house-corrector.
,
This does not entirely dispose of the concept of intention, but we
can see that it breaks it down by multiplying it out into distinct syn-
chronic structures and leaves us free to choose whichever one we wish.
In rejecting conation, it disposes of a diachronic use of intention as a
structure of meaning which embraces two or more successive versions.
And, nally, it continues to cast doubt on the printers role.
These are not esoteric matters. Should you be inclined in future to
read Shakespeares King Lear in the new Oxford edition, you will have
a kind of twistaplot choice between two versions, each substantially dif-
ferent from the other, and both quite different from the conated text
which we have hitherto read. If you wish to be a do-it-yourself editor
and construct your own text, the new edition will provide you with a
kit-set consisting of a couple of virtual facsimiles of the versions which
it declined to conate (but implies that you may). Like Plato and
Sterne, we can have it both ways.
At a moment like this, it is tempting to call in Aristotles distinction
between history and poetry as a model of the problem. History tells us
what was: it records the versions. Poetry the more serious and philo-
sophical art tells us what ought to be. To my mind, there is a moral
imperative in that ought which I personally nd compelling. It can
function in two ways. It may drive us, as historical scholars, to recover
a true text from the detritus of versions; or it may direct us, as creative
,
The Library, 6th series, 6 (June 1984), 138.
39
reader/writers, to generate the meanings that most matter to us. In
either case, there is an act of creation involved. Even scholars read, and
edit, with a mission. Editors make, as well as mend. The text is, in
Terence Caves word, cornucopian.
What price then Miltons phial? Even in those unspectacular ways,
we can see that critical experiment and textual theory have, at the very
least, crazed and clouded the glass, if not shattered it. The moment we
think of non-book texts, however, it breaks down altogether as an ade-
quate symbol of the traditional book as the object of bibliographical
and textual inquiry. What is clear is that Miltons concept of the
book and of an authors presence within it represents only one end of a
bibliographical spectrum. The counter-tradition of textual transforma-
tions, of new forms in new editions for new markets, represents the other.
A sociology of texts would comprehend both. It would also extend
their application to the scholarship of non-book texts.
To establish the continuity of bibliographical principle in non-book
forms, however, is not easy, and of course it is quite impossible to do
so even plausibly in the space of half a lecture. So again, one can only
be pragmatic and indicative, pointing out what seem to be parallel
cases, ones where the records have a textual function which is subject to
bibliographical control, interpretation, and historical analysis. It may
well be that, for present purposes at least, it is more convenient to think
simply in terms of homologies, of correspondent structures, suggesting
that, whatever our own special eld be it books, maps, prints, oral
traditions, theatre, lms, television, or computer-stored databases we
note certain common concerns.
To put the case at its most extreme, we should certainly have to
account for visual but non-verbal texts, as well as oral ones, both in our
own culture and in non- or pre-literate cultures, as well as in what are
now called a-literate communities, where there is a level of functional
literacy, but where the written or printed text does not have the status
still enjoyed by speech.
Let me begin then by asking if there is any sense in which the land
not even a representation of it on a map, but the land itself might
be a text. In their study of the Australian aboriginal tribe, the Arunta,
40
Spencer and Gillen devote a chapter to totemic topography: every
prominent feature of the landscape in the Arunta country is associ-
ated in tradition with some totemic group. Special rocks, caves, trees
and creeks, that have a local totemic signicance, are dotted over the
whole country.
o
It is not simply a matter of their being sacred objects,
although they may be that too, but of their having a textual function.
These visual, physical features form the ingredients of what is in fact a
verbal text, for each one is embedded in story, has a specic narrative
function, and supports in detail the characterization, descriptive con-
tent, physical action, and the symbolic import of a narration. Reverse
the telescope, of course, and it is just like the allegorical reading of land-
scape in, say, The Faerie Queene.
At the western end of the Mount Gillen range in Arunta land is a
small block of stone called Gnoilya tmerga. It stands
in the middle of a wide-open at, associated with a great,
white, dog man who came from Latrika, away to the west, and
wanted to kill all the dog men at Choritja. When they saw
him, the local Gnoilya men sang out Wunna mbainda erinna,
numma see, this is your camp, sit down. So he sat down
quietly and remained there, the stone arising to mark the spot.
If the stone is rubbed by the old men, all the camp dogs begin
to growl and grow erce. The last man to rub it was one of
the old Inkatas, who did so after the white men had come, in
order to try to make the dogs bite them.
,
A Eurocentric point of view does not make it easy to accept that land-
scape has a textual function, but, in that account, there is no way of
dissociating its physical features from the narrative. The stone in its
exact position means a story about the coming of the white men, and
it implies a future in which the texts of the Arunta, the legends of their
dreamtime, will be emended, not by scholars re-telling the story, but
o
B. Spencer and F. J. Gillen, The Arunta . . . a Stone-Age People, 2 vols (London:
Macmillan, 1927), I, 88. I am indebted to Professor Harold Love for this reference.
,
ibid. I, 92.
41
(as Harold Love put it to me) by mining companies blowing up moun-
tains in the search for minerals.
This is not, I think, too melodramatic a way of making a point about
the nature of texts. Where the case for Aboriginal land rights is being
most successfully made, against the literally entrenched opposition of
those with mining rights, it is by virtue of the stories which the land
holds, the codication in landscape of a whole tribal culture. It is the
narrative power of the land, its textual status, which now supports a
political structure dedicated to the belated preservation of the texts
which make up a culture.
If we can but think the question through that way round, think
not of books as the only form of textual artefact, but of texts of many
different kinds in many different material forms, only some of which
are books or documents, then we begin to see a principle at work which
has quite staggering social, economic, and political implications. The
argument that a rock in Arunta country is a text subject to biblio-
graphical exposition is absurd only if one thinks of arranging such
rocks on a shelf and giving them classmarks. It is the importation into
Arunta land of a single-minded obsession with book-forms, in the
highly relative context of the last few hundred years of European
history, which is the real absurdity.
I am reminded of a story told about a member of Jesus College,
Cambridge, which by virtue of its succession of very long-lived
masters, had a prodigious collective memory. A recently elected young
science fellow, so the story goes, was anxious to get a small reform
through the Governing Body. But having been warned that, in the con-
text of an Oxbridge college, nothing is trivial, from the placing of a
comma to the misplacing of a napkin, he did his homework with great
care. The time for the meeting arrived. When his item on the agenda
came up, he took some pride in assuring those present that, just in case
his proposal might be thought a little too radical, he had uncovered an
interesting precedent in the college archives. In fact, so keen had he
been to reassure them on this point, he had searched through all the
records for the last 300 years and found nothing seriously inconsistent
with his proposal. At which point, the Master lifted his head wearily
42
and observed: But you would agree, would you not, that the last 300
years have been somewhat exceptional?
For the Maori in New Zealand, the arrival of books and docu-
ments has made the last 150 years more than somewhat exceptional.
Despite the fact that Keri Hulme won the Booker Prize for her novel
The Bone People, texts in the form of written or printed documents
are still widely distrusted. This is mainly because of the strength of oral
traditions, but there is another, more sinister, reason. For many Maori,
the archetypal document the Treaty of Waitangi of 1840, by which
British sovereignty was secured over New Zealand stands as a symbol
of betrayal. It deprived them of their lands, and in taking their lands it
threatened their culture. This is not a question of arguing a case, or
proving a truth; it is a matter of daily living, or at least living daily
with the consciousness of it. For the Maori, their relation to the land
epitomized in their phrase for those who belong to the land, te tangata
whenua continues to be the most important subject of debate, and
land is signicant, less for its commercial value although that may
now be a consideration than for its symbolic status. A site is picketed,
and public works on it opposed, more often to preserve its signicance
in myth and legend, or ostensibly so, than out of material interest.
When looking into the implications of introducing printing into
New Zealand, the attempts to make the Maori literate, and European
exploitation of the legal power of documents over agreements reached
orally, I had occasion to look at the Maori signatures appended in
1840 to the Treaty of Waitangi. Some are signatures in the usual sense
of the word, but most are complicated congurations.
8
A suggestion
worth exploring further is the possibility that these forms of writing may
in fact be representations of natural features of the tribal lands from
which the signatories came. For the British at the time, their textual
signicance was crucial, because in European terms these little maps
if such they are signied assent to their assumption of sovereignty.
But if, for the Maori, they signied tribal lands over which they thought
they would continue to have sovereign control, under the queens
8
A sample may be seen in plates 5a and b at pp. 11819 below.
43
protection, then these enigmatic signatures may yet prove to be terri-
torial texts of some potency.
In such signs we can see the idea of place hovering between the
verbal and non-verbal but rising, as it were, to textual signicance.
The sign of the land here makes a man.
The same kind of indeterminate relation between indexical sign and
symbolic meaning applies to maps. If, instead of trying to decide what
makes them different from books, we were instead to seek out the
similarities of maps with other forms of text, we could note to begin
with that the specication of place-names is clearly a linguistic feature.
As such, these elements in maps are subject to the normal processes of
record and comparison, to establish a line of transmission or an afnity
of versions. The adoption of a reformed spelling, the substitution of
indigenous names for those of colonizing powers, the graphic location
and scaling of names, their typographic relation to an implied use, are
dimensions of symbolic meaning in the verbal text of a map. They may
not make sentences, but they are messages. The principles of textual
criticism apply no less here because the words are graphically, indeed
topographically, not grammatically or syntactically, dened. Differ-
ence, the essential ground of meaning in language, is here at least partly
a matter of distance.
But what constitutes a text is not the presence of linguistic elements
but the act of construction. As Roland Barthes says of texts as the ma-
terials of myth, all that is required is that they presuppose a signifying
consciousness.
,
Traditionally, a map has rarely shown what anyone
can see: its relation to reality is like that of words to the world almost
entirely arbitrary, not mimetic. Just as we see a landscape because we
have already named its parts and look for what we know for valley,
rock, and hill so maps take on meaning by virtue of the conventional
understanding given to signs and their structure in a particular text.
The most primitive expression of spatial relationships in a map is
more symbolic than representational, since it must involve scale and
,
Myth Today, in Mythologies: Selected and Translated from the French by Annette
Lavers (London: Granada, 1984), p. 109.
44
the omission of detail. Celestial maps are testimony to a phenomenal
power of compression. The at map expresses an ingenuity most
sharply expressed perhaps in the skills of projection. Illumination,
colouring, shading, calligraphy, compass-points, lines of latitude and
longitude, all testify to an increasing sophistication in the use of
graphic devices as expressive forms. Another, in one sense arbitrary,
convention in maps is their selectivity, the decision to select certain
features, but not others, by which to represent a milieu. Different maps
tell very different stories, and assume very different forms, according to
their function, or their point of view. Ptolemy mapped the heavens by
standing on earth. Galileo remapped them by imagining that he was
standing on the Sun. They are not, therefore, subject-specic, any more
than books, photographs, and lms are. Nor are they material-specic.
Nor do they deal uniquely in spatial relationships, since many kinds of
graphic and kinetic images do that.
We are all indebted to the work of Sarah Tyacke for tracing, in the
history of British maps, an important overlap with the book trades.
Io
For the making, distribution, and sale of maps has, like that of musical
scores, been only a specialized instance of a larger trade in the pro-
duction of texts, whether as manuscripts, block-prints, copper-plates,
etchings, lithographs, or photographic images, on paper or any other
material of widely different qualities, using type, ink, printing presses,
book formats, subscription publishing, and so on, exploiting a range
of markets, both domestic and foreign. The use of maps with a narra-
tional or explicatory text, as in accounts of voyages, whether real or
imaginary, is only another instance of how each mode of word and
image shares something of the others nature in story-telling.
To mention the map trade is to imply a market and therefore an
intended use. Maps also raise all the questions of intention and reader-
Io
See, in particular, Sarah Tyacke, London Map-Sellers 16601720: A Collection of
Advertisements for Maps placed in the London Gazette 16681719 with Biographical
Notes on the Map-Sellers (Tring: Map Collector Publications, 1978); Sarah Tyacke
and John Huddy, Christopher Saxton and Tudor Map-making (London: The British
Library, 1980); and English Map-Making 15001650: Historical Essays, ed. Sarah
Tyacke (London: The British Library, 1983).
45
response, without at the same time engaging the complexities which
arise from the exceptional ambiguity of that special class of texts which
we call literary. With maps, the deliberation with which devices are
used to dene meaning is clear. They establish precise relationships
between the physical phenomena represented within the map as text,
and, by assuming a correct reading, they also establish a precise
relationship between the reader and the text. And yet they can also
pluralize reading. For example, once dene a feature by colour and
the long-established principle of colour-separation makes it perfectly
easy to print out a version of a map which gives only, say, rivers, or only
railway lines, and so on. In other words, colour is both a combinative
creative tool in permitting multiple readings of the same text, as well
as multiple relationships within it (for example, the crossing of a blue
river and a black railway line implies or at least it had better imply
the new reading bridge), but it also permits a series of, as it were,
deconstructed readings of individual features.
Even in the 1970s, in their book on the nature of maps, Robinson and
Petchenik could still resist the idea that the information system within
a map was either a language or a text: The two systems, map and lan-
guage, they wrote, are essentially incompatible.
II
Their objections
were the familiar ones that language is verbal (meaningful patterns of
vocal sounds is their denition), that images do not have a vocabulary,
that there is no grammar, and that the temporal sequence of a syntax is
lacking. That denition of language logically entails a limited concept
of text:
As is true of the reader of text, the map percipient under-
stands some of the intended information on the basis of a
complex interaction of eye and brain. But certain differences
between the text reader and the map percipient are funda-
mental: the text reader must follow a particular sequence in
his acts of visual perception, and he must relate his visual
II
Arthur H. Robinson and Barbara Bartz Petchenik, The Nature of Maps: Essays
toward Understanding Maps and Mapping (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 1976), p. 43.
46
stimuli to a system of sounds and meanings rather than to
another system of visual images. If one merely looks at an
array of letter-gures, the process is never called reading. The
map percipient, in contrast, can and does enter the graphic
array at any point; he can stop at any point; and often he
relates the visual stimuli to other visual stimuli, rather than to
a system of sounds.
I:
For them, maps are silent, visual, spatial, and a-temporal. I am not
myself concerned to argue that maps are a language in that narrower
sense, merely that as constructions employing a conventional sign
system they constitute texts, and that, not as books but as texts, biblio-
graphical principle embraces them too. More recent writers will have
taken account of developments in the theory of language systems, but
it is unfortunate that the two principal theorists of mapping resisted
the more inclusive uses of the concepts of language and text. They
had already been employed by, for example, lm theorists who had to
work through many of the same problems of denition and general
theory. I think in particular of Christian Metz, whose 1968 Essai sur la
signication au cinma, available in English since 1974 as Language and
Cinema, had dealt with them in detail.
I,
I must make it clear that I speak of maps only as someone stimulated
to inquire into certain parallels with a eld I am more familiar with. It
does seem, for example, that the arrival of the orthophotomap, which
presents an image of the natural surface, raised much the same kind
I:
ibid. p. 45. On this point, see Camille, The Book of Signs, p. 135: the best form of
representation for refuting the arguments for the non-linguistic nature of visuality
and for understanding how an image can function on the same complex semantic
levels as a text is the medieval diagram. This was readable as scriptura and yet totally
dependent on presentation through pictura. See also J. B. Harley, Meaning and
Ambiguity in Tudor Cartography, in English Map-Making, pp. 2245, especially
note 103, p. 45: a systematic study of carto-literacy in early modern England is
required along the lines of D. Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order, Reading and
Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1980).
I,
Christian Metz, Language and Cinema (The Hague: Mouton, 1974).
47
of question about the object map as computer-stored information
now raises about the object book. So too does what I believe is called
remote sensing and digital mapping. Computerized cartography must
involve highly intentional programming and the manipulation of
graphics in ways which also create a temporal sequence, as indeed did
celestial maps in the form of the astrolabe or concentric globes, with
the help of which astrologers have been reading the heavens for
centuries. The creation of map images by electrical impulses, as for
example from outer space but it could be along any land-line
involves the use of sound in a physical medium translated into light.
It is not quite voice into graphics, but even the denitions offered
in the mid 1970s begin to look decidedly feeble. The metaphorical use
of the word map, as in mapping out a project, is easily extended
to concepts other than a milieu, and as easily reproduced in screen
graphics as is a traditional map.
Should we not at least be asking questions about the bibliographical
control of weather maps, which shift their forms ceaselessly on the
living-room screens of 98% of the population, or at which point one
stops a kinetic image to keep a record for posterity? But these problems
are common to all forms of text, certainly of all performative ones, and
it is at that level of abstraction, I believe, that we should collectively
be thinking how to deal with them. Future historians of cartography,
concerned to produce for climatologists a record of the transitions
from one state of the climate to another, may nd it decient, their
stemmatics frustrated, by our failure to devise an adequate biblio-
graphical principle to deal with them.
But to return to ways in which maps may signify as texts, it is I think
worth remarking the obvious for its human implications: that the
signs, whether verbal or non-verbal, may also express ideological mean-
ings. As such they can function as potent tools for political control
or express political aspirations. The visual adjacency of territories, the
border-line denition of linguistic, ethnographic, religious, or political
boundaries, may be an accurate record of the current facts, but the four
forms seldom correspond exactly. A visual denition in terms of any
one may be a subversive political act in terms of another.
48
Brian Friels play Translations is a perceptive study of these di-
mensions of maps as texts and of the economic, political, and cultural
implications of naming. Its action takes place in 1833 at a hedge-school
in an Irish-speaking community in County Donegal, where a recently
arrived detachment of the Royal Engineers is making the rst Ord-
nance Survey. For purposes of cartography, every hill, stream, rock,
even every patch of ground which possessed its own distinctive Irish
name had to be Anglicized, either by changing it into its approximate
English sound or by translating it into English words. For example,
a Gaelic name like Cnoc Ban could become Knockban or directly
Fair Hill.
I
It is a play full of implications for my own country where,
in 1985, the Maori ofcially reclaimed one of New Zealands most
beautiful mountains from British cartography which had made it
Egmont. As Taranaki, it now resumes its older history.
The question is one of the status of images as texts. It has now been
so fully explored by William Ivins and Roland Barthes that perhaps
there is not really any further resistance to it. Ivinss analysis of the
signicance of technological processes in determining how we read an
image how, for example, the engraving of paintings destroyed their
texture and stressed instead their composition and iconography was
a remarkably prescient account of things to come.
I,
Barthes has simply
taken the analysis further by establishing the continuity of photog-
raphy with prints. The camera may have rendered redundant the inter-
pretative skills and conventional sign systems of draughtsman and
engraver, but in at least two ways the photograph functions textually
as an interpretative construct.
First, any photograph is now recognized as yet another artice: the
frame selects the content; further selections of lm stock, lens, lter,
aperture, exposure, and light, set physical limits to the form of the
image; any number of modications can be introduced during devel-
opment, which may affect all or only part of the image; and, of course,
I
Brian Friel, Translations (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), p. 34.
I,
W. M. Ivins, Jr, Prints and Visual Communication (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1953).
49
paper quality, size of print, and the milieu in which it is seen, will also
determine the readings it gets.
Second, as Barthes demonstrates to great effect, the photograph only
signies at all because of the existence of a store of ready-made ele-
ments of signication (eyes raised heavenwards, hands clasped). These
continuities have of course a long history, not only in the graphic ex-
pression of emotion but in the rhetoric of gesture. When he reads Garbos
face, or the Roman fringe in Mankiewiczs lm of Julius Caesar, he
nds a cultural text. In Photography and Electoral Appeal, he writes:
the full-face photograph underlines the realistic look of the candidate,
especially if he is provided with scrutinizing glasses; and almost all
three-quarter face photos are ascensional, the face is lifted towards a
supernatural light which draws it up, and elevates it to the realm of a
higher humanity . . ..
Io
Such comments now seem almost naive when we think of the man-
ner in which we are exposed to the professional encoding of sincerity
in advertising and politics, but Barthes did a service in bringing past
practice into line with new technology and exposing the true nature of
the texts we were reading.
The same time-honoured devices of manipulative display can be
found more overtly in comic-strip Shakespeare. Words become noisy
with visual sound (ARRGH!!, in caps, double exclamation mark),
and the sectional division of the action into frames as in Johann
Grningers famed Strasburg Terence of 1496 almost puts the pictures
into motion. There are sudden cuts of time and place, rapidly shifting
camera angles, a mix of long shots and close-ups, a whole range of
montage effects.
I,
But, unlike the motion picture, you can stop the
action, ip it back and forth, change the emphasis and tempo, take
up a full page for an expansive, liberating image, cram it with small
panels to create a sense of claustrophobia, sharpen the angles to express
paranoia, or use splitting-images to suggest the schizophrenic. The
Io
In Mythologies, pp. 9293.
I,
I quote from a review by Bill Manhire of editions of Macbeth, illustrated by Von,
and of Othello, illustrated by Oscar Zarate (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1982,
1983), in The New Zealand Listener (19 January 1985), p. 34.
50
positioning of balloons to give the temporal sequence of lines is ingen-
iously contrived to create a text which, like theatre itself, combines
the verbal, visual, gestural, and colourful, in yet another regeneration
in response to what publishers conceive as new so to put it cultural
needs.
I hasten to add that I am not endorsing the form as a suitable one for
Shakespeare, but simply stressing the point that such a construction of
words and graphics is a complex, composite text, which seeks to impart
in print at least some of the elements of performance.
The relation of textual criticism to the realities of theatrical produc-
tion has always been one of embarrassed impotence. The dramatic text
is not only notoriously unstable, but, whatever the script, it is again
never more than a pre-text for the theatrical occasion, and only a
constituent part of it.
The sources of such an event are the dramatist, director, designer,
composer, technicians; its messages are conveyed by body, voice,
costume, props, set, lights; the signals are made in the form of move-
ments, sound, colour, even smells; light waves and sound waves channel
the messages of speech, gesture, music, and scenic forms to the senses
mainly the eyes and ears of an audience. These reader-receivers will
interpret them variously and respond with laughter, tears, yawns,
applause, whistles, boos, or even by leaving early. Those responses in
turn sustain, or disturb, the actors in their roles. As Thomas More
pointed out in Book I of his Utopia, if audience and actors fail to
observe the conventions which allow this complex text to come into
being, there is utter confusion. The range of codes and subcodes at
work here is extremely wide. They function in movement, space, cos-
tume, make-up, setting, music, architecture, rhetoric, as well as in the
idiolectal ways in which individual actors work, and in the dialectical
relationships of the plays themes, or of the company which performs
it, to the community for which it is written.
In many ways, it is those last considerations if you like, the socio-
logical dimension of production and reception which conrm the
textual nature of each element in a play. Under certain conditions of
censorship, for example, colour can be highly signicant; and of course
51
a theatrical event includes almost all the features of oral performance
skills, from repetition to extemporization and audience inter-play. It
is in a context like this that texts are perhaps best seen, not as xed,
determined artefacts in a specic medium, but as potential. All the
versions imply an ideal form which is never fully realized but only
partly perceived and expressed by any one. As such, the dramatic text,
like Sternes concept of Tristram Shandy, differs only in degree from
the dynamic forms of computer graphics.
When speaking of Panizzi in a recent bbc programme on the British
Library, Mr Alex Wilson said:
I think if Panizzi were alive today as I say to some of my
more traditionally-minded colleagues he would be more
radical, more adventurous, more outward looking, have the
biggest computer of the lot. He was a man for change and
adaptation, as well as a man for tradition.
I8
That seems to me absolutely right. And Panizzi, who, we should
now recall, edited Ariostos Orlando Furioso and Bojardos Orlando
Innamorato, would not, I think, have simply accepted computing as
just another technological aid, one more efcient than others for doing
certain jobs. He would have asked: on what unifying, intellectual
principle, does it relate to books? The round Reading Room itself has
become, of course, the gure of the man in expressing his perception of
the unity of knowledge. But I should like to remind you of its much
earlier expression in his study of Ariosto:
The general opinion has been, that the Orlando Furioso is
a collection of several poems on distinct subjects; and the
number as well as the denomination of these subjects, is
determined according to the idea which each critic or com-
mentator has formed of the work. But no one has hitherto
tried to discover whether there might not be in the Orlando
Furioso one main subject on which all the others depended, or
I8
Broadcast on 18 November 1985.
52
from which they were derived; whether the different branches
of this stately tree, although so widely spread, might not be all
proceeding from a single stem, concealed from the eye by
their own luxuriant foliage.
I,
If I might apply the gure in an aptly Renaissance manner: that prin-
ciple of unity Panizzi was seeking in the Orlando Furioso is no less the
subject now of bibliographical inquiry. What seem to be the different
branches, each with its own luxuriant foliage, are the several media in
which texts are stored and transmitted. But the single, hidden stem, the
source of the animating principle which ows in each different branch,
is the text.
To apply the gure even more specically, I should like to take an
example which reects on the relationship between computers and
books, and may affect any one of us.
As of 11 November 1985, under the Data Protection Act, 1984, some
400,000 computer users in Britain were required to register in com-
pliance with the law to protect individuals from the misuse of per-
sonal data stored on computer. As from March 1986, anyone might
seek compensation through the courts for damage and distress caused
by the loss, destruction, inaccuracy, or unauthorized disclosure of
information, and they might emend the text by having inaccurate
records corrected. As from November 1987, they have had right of
access to personal information stored about them on computer. But
those rights of legal redress, correction, and access do not apply to the
identical information the same text if it is stored in the traditional,
written, type-written, multi-layered, paper le.
One can, of course, understand the arguments from expediency for
such a distinction considerations of ownership, scale, ease of access,
and so on. But of any two individuals differently affected by the differ-
ent manner in which information about them is stored, one might well
feel that some central, unifying concept of the text had broken down.
One individual has access, and legal redress, and can revise the text; the
I,
Ariosto, Orlando Furioso. With memoirs and notes by Antonio Panizzi, 4 vols
(London: Pickering, 1834), I, xcv.
53
other has none, and cannot. In arguing for the centrality of a textual
principle in bibliography, whatever specic form the text takes, I am
not denying that we must ultimately return to the ne detail of each
kind of text and the professionalism, the scholarship, proper to it; but
just at this time it seems more needful than ever to recover the unity in
their otherwise disabling diversity.
In that same rich text of his which deals with so many of these ques-
tions, Milton reassures those made anxious by the division of Truth
into parties and partitions. Fool!, he exclaimed to one of them, see
you not the rm root out of which we all grow, though into branches?
3
The dialectics of bibliography now

In the rst two lectures I briey contrasted two concepts of text. One
is the text as authorially sanctioned, contained, and historically den-
able. The other is the text as always incomplete, and therefore open,
unstable, subject to a perpetual re-making by its readers, performers,
or audience.
To stress the rst is to conrm the usual assumptions of historical
scholarship: it seeks, as objectively as possible, to recover, from the
physical evidence of a text, its signicance for all those who rst made
it. To do that, I have argued, we must have some concept of authorial
meaning, consider carefully the expressive functions of the texts modes
of transmission, and account for its reception by an audience or reader-
ship. As a locatable, describable, attributable, datable, and explicable
object, the text as a recorded form is, pre-eminently, a bibliographical
fact. Its relation to all other versions, and their relation, in turn, to all
other recorded texts, are, again, pre-eminently, bibliographical facts.
No other discipline and certainly neither history nor criticism com-
mands the range of textual phenomena, or the technical scholarship,
to deal fully with their production, distribution, and consumption. By
commanding the one term common to all inquiry the textual object
itself bibliography can be an essential means by which we recover
the past.
As a way of further exemplifying one part of that argument the
relation of form to meaning in printed books I should like to consider
the cases of John Locke and James Joyce. Locke was so troubled by the
difculty he had in making sense of St Pauls epistles, that he decided to
go right to the heart of the matter. In 1707 he published An Essay for the
55
56
Understanding of St Pauls Epistles. By Consulting St Paul himself. In
this essay he quite explicitly addresses the question of intention, and
the role of typographic form in obscuring or revealing it. More than
that, he implies that if we do not get these things right, they can have
the most serious social and political effects. He ascribes his problems in
reading the epistles to:
The dividing of them into Chapters and Verses, . . . whereby they
are so chopd and mincd, and as they are now Printed, stand so
broken and divided, that not only the Common People take the
Verses usually for distinct Aphorisms, but even Men of more
advancd Knowledge in reading them, lose very much of the
strength and force of the Coherence, and the Light that depends
on it.
Locke objects to the eye being constantly disturbd with loose Sentences,
that by their standing and separation, appear as so many distinct Frag-
ments. As he develops it, his argument about editorial and typographic
practice has far-reaching implications:
. . . if a Bible was printed as it should be, and as the several Parts
of it were writ, in continued Discourses where the Argument is
continued, I doubt not that the several Parties would complain of
it, as an Innovation, and a dangerous Change in the publishing
of those holy Books . . . as the matter now stands, he that has a
mind to it, may at a cheap rate be a notable Champion for the
Truth, that is, for the Doctrine of the Sect that Chance or Inter-
est has cast him into. He need but be furnished with Verses of
Sacred Scriptures, containing Words and Expressions that are but
exible . . . and his System that has appropriated them to the
Orthodoxie of his Church, makes them immediately strong
and irrefragable Arguments for his Opinion. This is the Benet
of loose Sentences, and Scripture crumbled into Verses, which
quickly turn into independent Aphorisms.
Those comments make it clear that Locke believed the form in which a
text was printed not only radically affected the ways it might be read,
57
but might even indeed generate religious and civil dissension. He then
raises the whole question of authorial intention. As printed in verse, the
epistles frustrated those sober, inquisitive readers who had a mind like
his own to see in St. Pauls Epistles just what he meant; whereas those
others of a quicker and gayer Sight could see in them what they please.
For Locke, an essential condition of following a true meaning was a
proper disposition of the text, so that one might see where the Sense of
the Author goes visibly in its own Train. He then adds:
And perhaps if it were well examind, it would be no extravagant
Paradox to say, that there are fewer who bring their Opinions to
the Sacred Scripture to be tried by that infallible Rule, than bring
the Sacred Scripture to their Opinions, to bend it to them, to
make it as they can, a Cover and a Guard for them. And to this
Purpose its being divided into Verses, and being brought as much
as may be into loose and general Aphorisms, makes it most use-
ful and serviceable.
One nds these points repeatedly conrmed in all popular debates
on moral issues. The most recent in my own experience is that about a
Homosexual Law Reform Bill before the New Zealand Parliament,
where, for nearly a year, members shot biblical verses from one side of
the House to the other like paper darts in a school-room. Their sub-
stance was equally puerile, they made a mess, demeaned serious debate,
and generated passions which led to serious civil disturbance. It was an
exact replay in 1985 of Lockes argument of 1707.
Some less contentious illustrations of this relation between book forms
and textual meaning may be drawn from the work of James Joyce. The
1984 critical and synoptic Garland edition of Ulysses has been wel-
comed as an impressive work of scholarship.
I
It offers in effect a parallel
reading of the novel, to which it imputes a many-layered and highly
complex text that carries the dynamics of an extended textual devel-
opment within it. On one page we have an editorial de-construction of
I
Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, with Wolfhard
Steppe and Claus Melchior (New York: Garland, 1984).
58
the documents into their successive moments of transmission and
modication by typists, printers, and by Joyce himself as he corrected
proof. This is imaged on the facing page by a new construction of the
work, one presumed to be implicit in the bewildering, genetic detail
which opposes it, but with an explicit claim to an authority higher than
that of any completed form known to Joyce. This, it is claimed, is the
emended continuous manuscript text at its ultimate level of composi-
tional development.
Given the evidence which it chooses to present, what the new edition
could not do was to represent the physical form of Ulysses as it was rst
published. I have therefore been intrigued to learn from Dr John Kidd
of ways in which the 1922 edition shows Joyce working to make textual
meaning from book forms, rewriting in proof in a creative interplay
with the fall of the text on the page, and nudging it into patterns of page-
to-text, which offer markers, boundaries, and divisions directly related
to its nal book form. Being largely peculiar to that edition, these cor-
respondent readings are automatically lost in any new setting which
does not keep the identical form. They are therefore lost from the new
edition, simply because its physical form is incompatible with them.
:
Some suspicion that Joyce, of all authors, would put the medium of
the book to work might have been aroused by the consciousness he
shows in Pomes Penyeach. His superstition about the number 13 is well
attested (This year is to be incessant trouble to me, he wrote in 1921 to
Harriet Beacher Weaver, adding in parentheses 1 + 9 + 2 + 1 = 13). His
mother died on 13 August 1903, and when he came to publish the poem
which he wrote about her death in Pomes Penyeach, he placed it 13th
in the book and called it Tilly as in the phrase Twelve and a Tilly,
or a bakers dozen. Its 12 lines of text and one of title repeat the idea of
both acknowledging and denying the reality of the number 13 and its
:
The two principal papers from which Dr Kidd has kindly allowed me to cite the
examples given are: Thirteen. Deaths Number Structural Symbolism in Ulysses,
delivered at the Second Provincetown Joyce Conference, June 1983; and Errors of
Execution in the 1984 Ulysses, delivered to The Society for Textual Scholarship,
New York, April 1985. See also his contributions to The Irish Literary Supplement:
A Review of Irish Books (Fall 1985), pp. 4142.
59
associations. The price of Pomes Penyeach was a shilling, or 12 pennies
for 12 poems, with the 13th free.
For that example and those that follow, and for permission to use
them here, I am indebted to Dr Kidd. The rst few are small, indicative
ones. On reading a letter from his daughter Milly, who had just turned
15 on 15 June, Bloom says Fifteen yesterday. Curious, fteenth of the
month too. More to the point, Joyces revision in proof gives the letter
15 sentences. But every editorial attempt to correct Millys adolescent
syntax and punctuation, by reverting to earlier versions, has of course
changed the count and obscured the point. So too, the passage in which
Bloom reects on the rate at which an object falls to earth (thirty-two
feet per second) is heavily revised in print to make it the 32nd sentence
in the paragraph, where reversion to earlier readings, as in the 1984
edition, obscures that convergence of sign and sense. On page 88, Joyce
added in proof a sentence of eight words to expand a newspaper death
notice. It reads: Aged 88, after a long and tedious illness. To page 77 he
added in proof the phrase seventh heaven; and on page 360, Bloom
meditates on cycles.
It is a commonplace that Ulysses retails the experience of one day
and one night in a lifetime, as well as of a whole lifetime compressed
into that single day and single night. But those general correspond-
ences emerge more nely in the way Joyce develops them in proof.
1904 was a leap year. Since it is mentioned four times in the book, Joyce
must have been highly conscious of it. The total number of days and
nights in a leap year happens to be twice 366, or 732. The text of the 1922
edition of Ulysses falls on precisely 366 leaves or 732 pages. In a personal
letter to me, Dr Kidd writes:
[It] also divides evenly into diurnal and nocturnal halves. The
sun sets in the seaside Nausicaa chapter, not with a sudden
plunge, but with a gradual waning, until daylight and Leopold
Blooms consciousness are extinguished on page 365. The
remainder of the book is set in darkness. . . . Bloom, seated
where shore and sea meet, attending the last glimmer of
midsummer light, and remarking the semicircular prole of
60
Dublin Bay, thinks there must be a divine order at work:
Done half by design.
That symmetry last appeared in the Odyssey Press edition of Ulysses,
published in Hamburg in 1932. It was issued in two volumes. The nal
section of the rst volume includes the phrase Done half by design,
signalling the reader to move on to volume two, the night volume, after
a full day with Bloom.
Dr Kidds examples do, I think, illustrate the force of at least one half
of my argument: that books can be expressive forms of some subtlety,
and that an editorial policy which ignores that fact is likely to bring
forth a text which, by its authors standards, is decient, though I have
no wish to criticize the Garland edition, which has its own distinct
purpose. Joyce engineered the publication of the 1922 Shakespeare
and Company edition to fall on his birthday. He received the rst two
copies that day, the second of the second, 1922. Some Joyce scholars
may be ruefully reecting that on this day of the year one also cele-
brates the feast of the purication.
I should like now to move back to that other, contrasting, concept of
text and its nature as open, unstable, indeterminate. In this sense a
sense in which the recent editors of Ulysses have employed it the text
is in some degree independent of the documents which, at any par-
ticular moment, give it form. It is to recognize too that no text of any
complexity yields a denitive meaning. The ostensible unity of any one
contained text be it in the shape of a manuscript, book, map, lm,
or computer-stored le is an illusion. As a language, its forms and
meaning derive from other texts; and as we listen to, look at, or read it,
at the very same time we re-write it. The word text-book, as rst de-
ned by Nathan Bailey in his Dictionarium Britannicumof 1730, reminds
us of this truth: Text-book (in Universities) is a Classick Author written
very wide by the Students, to give Room for an Interpretation dictated
by the Master, &c. to be inserted in the Interlines. Each student makes
his or her own text.
That recognition brings us full circle. Whatever its metamorphoses,
the different physical forms of any text, and the intentions they serve,
61
are relative to a specic time, place, and person. This creates a problem
only if we want meaning to be absolute and immutable. In fact, change
and adaptation are a condition of survival, just as the creative applica-
tion of texts is a condition of their being read at all. The 1984 critical
and synoptic text of Ulysses has physically changed every previous
version in the act of replicating it. It has become in its turn a new
bibliographical fact; and it is these facts which constitute the primary
evidence for any history of meanings. They alone make possible,
in their sequence, any account of cultural change. Perceived from a
bibliographical point of view, therefore, the ostensible contradiction
between those two concepts of text, the closed and the open, simply
dissolves. But implicit in those comments are several points about the
nature of bibliography which it might be helpful now to make quite
explicit.
First, I imply that it is committed to the description of all recorded
texts. In principle, it is comprehensive, and therefore indiscriminate.
Any national collection formed largely by copyright deposit shows this
non-elitist, non-canonical, non-generic, all-inclusive principle at work.
International networking simply extends it. Ultimately, any discrete
bibliography of subject, person, or collection merely contributes to an
ideal of that universal bibliographical control. It thereby enables the
discovery of any possible relationship there might be between any one
text and any other text whenever, wherever, and in whatever form.
In other words, bibliography is the means by which we establish the
uniqueness of any single text as well as the means by which we are able
to uncover all its inter-textual dimensions.
Second, because it is bibliographys job to record and explain the
physical forms which mediate meaning, it has an interpretative func-
tion which complements and modies any purely verbal analysis. In
principle, it can full this function in any of the modes in which texts
are transmitted, not just printed books. It is therefore equally relevant,
as a discipline, to any structure of meaning which is recordable and
discernible.
Third, it impartially accepts the construction of new texts and their
forms. The conation of versions, or the writing of new books out of
62
old ones, is the most obvious case. But the construction of systems,
such as archives, libraries, and data-banks, is another. In every case,
the elements from which they are constructed are bibliographical
objects. A test case would be the sale and dispersal of, say, the library
of a seventeenth-century scholar: we become acutely aware at such
moments of a librarys status as a text or a meta-text, and of its bio-
graphical and intellectual meaning.
Fourth, bibliography is of its nature, and not merely as a partial
effect of some more essential function, concerned specically with
texts as social products. The human and institutional dynamics of
their production and consumption, here and now, as well as in the
past, have therefore led me to suggest that we might nd in the phrase
a sociology of texts a useful description of its actual scope.
I must now turn to some exemplary cases of non-book texts and at
least try to set out my reasons for thinking that bibliography has a duty
to these. In doing so, it is worth recalling, I think, Hobbess comment
in The Leviathan that
The Invention of Printing, though ingenious, compared
with the invention of Letters, is no great matter . . . But the
most noble and protable invention of all other, was that
of Speech, consisting of Names or Appellations, and their
Connexion.
,
He reminds us here of what we are now having to re-learn: that print is
only a phase in the history of textual transmission, and that we may be
at risk of over-stating its importance. The relatively recent introduc-
tion of printing into non-literate societies has seldom endorsed our
traditional view of its efcacy as an agent of change. Even in our own
society, oral text and visual image have not only enjoyed a continuity
(albeit, enhanced by print), but they have now resumed their status as
among the principal modes of discourse with an even greater power of
projection. The origins of that revival are much older than we might
,
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan Or the Matter, Forme, and Power of A Commonwealth
Ecclesiasticall and Civil (1651), part I, chapter 4.
63
care to recall: the telegraph and photograph, telephone and phono-
graph, and even the motion picture itself, are all nineteenth-century
inventions. In retrospect, the failure to develop forms of bibliographic
control, adequate archiving, and proper public access on the model of
the traditional library is understandable. But the cumulative force
of those new media, together with even more recent ones like tele-
vision, magnetic tape, optical disc, and computers, and the signicance
of the texts recorded in them, are now such that further neglect is
inexcusable.
A future social historian, writing about the need for, and the politi-
cal appeal of, say, law and order policies in the 1980s, would nd the
traditional texts of novels, plays, newspaper reports of football vio-
lence, ofcial records of the parliamentary debates and legislation,
relevant and accessible. But they would be quite incomplete without
some account of television. I think in particular of a clip from a recent
news item. A class of small children were being asked if they liked to
watch programmes which had lots of violent action in them. One small
boys eyes lit up as he told the reporter how exciting he found it, how it
made him feel that he wanted to be strong like that, to run in and kick,
and knock people down. What do you want to be when you grow up?
asked the reporter. The instant reply was: A policeman. I am not
concerned here to pursue the interpretation of the text, but I am
concerned to note that it is a text, and that future access to it might
prove extremely instructive, not only about our present society, but
about the nature of the one we may have become 20 years hence. But
I cannot be sure how easy it might be to see a full range of lms, or rel-
evant television programmes; and the chances of a particular newsclip
surviving in an easily accessible form are even more problematic.
In many ways, the lm and video tape are the most complete
summation of a tradition of oral, visual, and written and typographic
communication. As the forms of text most immediately accessible to
non-literate or a-literate societies, they perhaps make the most urgent
demands of traditional bibliography for its descriptive methods, and its
skill in conserving and accessing textual records. Films are deliberated,
composed works in their total organization; as completed texts, they
64
are objects more amenable to complete study than, say, unrecorded
speech or a theatrical event. They have a physical length, a temporal
span, and repeatable presence. Their use of sound, image, colour, and
movement makes them an ideal starting point for the extension of
bibliographical principle from book to text.
But I think it is only proper to select an undisputed classic in which
to explore the analogies I should like to draw, and so I turn now in
tribute to the work of Orson Welles, in particular of course, to Citizen
Kane. It is a lm I think which might be familiar to most of us; certainly
it is one of the few to be given high canonical status, and therefore to
have an unusually rich supporting literature.
It opens and closes with a literal sign denying access, an image that is
both verbal and visual. It is posted outside Kanes immense mansion
of Xanadu, and reads NO TRESPASSING. It is a playful image of
enclosure, a detail of the lms tight textual construction, and of the
intimate reciprocity of its verbal and visual text. Xanadu is no true
pleasure dome. Reviewing the lm in 1946, Borges saw in it the familiar
structure of the centreless labyrinth, a world of fragments without
unity, a recurrent symbol of the archive, the library, the museum,
posing the same challenge to order, creating the same fears of failure.
With the prodigality of a Huntington or a Folger, or in this case even

more pertinently a Pierpont Morgan, Kane poured into Xanadu speci-
mens of the worlds treasures in the hope of modelling in them a
system which eluded him in life.
Lying old and ill in their still dis-ordered midst, Kane dies muttering
the word Rosebud. We hear it in his old, old voice at the start of the
lm, which then proceeds by ashback to recover the story of his life,
the business of what Pauline Kael has called raising Kane.
In hopes of pinning down the meaning of the enigmatic Rosebud,
a reporter resurrects Kanes public life by running a nine-minute
newsreel made up of clips of its main events, but this ostensibly factual
source of evidence, the contemporary record of News on the March,
Jorge Luis Borges in Focus on Citizen Kane, ed. R. Gottesman (Englewood Cliffs:
Prentice-Hall, 1971), pp. 1278.
65
turns out to be as fragmentary and as full of false emphases as the
printed newspapers which Kane himself published. As if to prove yet
again that the truest poetry is the most feigning, Welless own lm sup-
plants the newsreel as the source of truth. In doing so, it re-presents the
news in its true complexity with a clarity and a penetration which
shows up the coarse conventions at work in the factual documentary
record.
Welles can re-present and date those conventions all the more read-
ily because ashback in lms has always required a high consciousness
of sign systems in order to establish a difference from the narrative
present. It is a resource that Woody Allen exploits to hilarious effect
in Zelig and The Purple Rose of Cairo. The rst, if you are so inclined,
may be read as a parody of all historical scholarship; the second, of all
post-structuralist criticism. But my point of course is that lms use, in
a way more accessible than in books, formal systems of datable signs to
recover the past. The conventions change with extreme rapidity, as
we can tell from our own experience of re-viewing an old lm we had
thought quite natural when rst we saw it. What once seemed to have
the innocence of truth betrays before long an embarrassing artice.
The press reporters search for the explanation of Rosebud is
frustrated. Oral witness fails too in its variant versions of the same
events. The documentary facts are silent. Only as the lm ends, and
we see a workman toss an old sledge into a re, do we catch a glimpse
of the answer in the period lettering of the word Rosebud painted on
the sledge. It is a trite, sentimental, novelettish note, but in it Kanes
voice becomes visible. The verbal image takes on graphic form, and like
the script itself becomes the necessary complement to the non-verbal,
visual constructions, which would fail of meaning without it.
As a text, Citizen Kane generates a critical dialogue which has numer-
ous afnities with literary criticism. In its counterpointing of an elusive
past with a questing present, its contrasting of the sub-literary genres
of newsreels and newsprint with the high-culture of the canonical
art-lm, in its posturing with hermeneutics as the search for meaning
within a closed structure, it is as fruitful a subject for critical inquiry as
most printed texts. If that seems too solemn an account of its range of
66
interests, then we can nd in its cinematic poetry, as we can in The
Dunciad, a vulgar, rumbustious, and always entertaining satire on the
muck-raking press as one aspect of the social history of printing and
publishing. Indeed, in its own attack on William Randolph Hearst, it
imitates its subject. Those themes are not trivial, and they are recorded
in a form which is so central now to the experience of our society, in
particular that of the students who will be tomorrows scholars, as to
warrant an advanced scholarship to serve it.
Such a scholarship might note in Orson Welles himself the role,
familiar in publishing, of the outsider as a signicant source of innova-
tion, the problems of funding, the threats of libel actions, the plot to
buy up the lm before its release and destroy the negative and all the
prints; the formal features of the nished lm, the semiotics of its
textual detail; the constraints of censorship indeed, the lms effec-
tual suppression during the McCarthy era; the authorship and versions
of the script, and subsequent re-releases; the manner of its distribution,
the history of its reception; the annotational realm of Kane as a gure
of Hearst, of the character Thatcher as J. P. Morgan junior, as well as
the allusive plundering of the lm by a generation of other directors.
The lm is a total social fact and a total text. Film-makers, spectators,
and critics all think in terms of lms as texts, because only some such
word makes sense of the discrete parts of which a lm is constructed.
The concept of a text creates a context for meaning. In other words,
we are back to the initial denition of text as a web, a construction of
warp and weft, and discover that, however we might wish to conne
the word to books and manuscripts, those working in lms nd it
indispensable. There is, I think, no prot to be gained by disputing the
point: one accepts that the word now has a meaning which compre-
hends them all. Those who wish to contain it by conning it to books
are like Miltons gallant man who thought to pound up the crows by
shutting his Parkgate.
Film theory of the 1960s and 1970s was still strongly inuenced by
structuralism in one way which bears signicantly on my own argu-
ment about pure bibliography (in the Greg-Bowers sense) and histori-
cal bibliography or the sociology of texts. In discussing photography,
67
for example, Roland Barthes drew a distinction between the nished
artefact as a closed construction and its context:
The emission and reception of [a photographic] message
both lie within the eld of sociology: it is a matter of study-
ing human groups, of dening motives and attitudes, and of
trying to link the behaviour of these groups to the social totality
of which they are part.
,
The message itself, he claimed, had a structural autonomy in what
it signied, and describing it was the business of semiotics. So too
Christian Metz drew a distinction between the lm as a textual system
(whether conned to a single lm or extended to the innite text of
what we call genre) and the cinema, which is the whole social complex
of a lms production and consumption. It is my contention of course
that this distinction ultimately fails, since the denition of meaning
in reading the conventional details of a text is logically dependent
upon prior decisions and social effect. Like typography as a conscious,
interpretative skill, every presentational feature of a lm is calculated to
express symbolic meaning. It is unceasingly deliberate in its selection,
shaping and pointing of signicance.
Since it bears on the parallel I am suggesting between books and
lms as expressive forms, I should like to take up this last point with a
comment from Gregg Toland, the director of photography for Citizen
Kane. In How I broke the Rules in Citizen Kane, he makes a distinc-
tion between photographic commands and conventions in shooting
the picture:
Photographically speaking, I understand a commandment
to be a rule, axiom, or principle, an incontrovertible fact of
photographic procedure which is unchangeable for physical
and chemical reasons. On the other hand, a convention, to
me, is a usage which has become familiar through repetition.
It is a tradition rather than a rule. With time, the convention
becomes a commandment, through force of habit. I feel that
,
Image, Music, Text, p. 15.
68
the limiting effect is both obvious and unfortunate. With
those denitions in mind, Ill admit that I deed a good many
conventions in lming Citizen Kane.
o
That is precisely what Congreve and Tonson must be said to have
done in designing Congreves Works (1710). The analogy here with the
technologies of print in relation to the nished book could be pushed
further by a more technical discussion of how Welles altered our per-
ception of reality by obtaining an unusual depth of eld, of the experi-
ments with high-speed lm stock, the treating of the lens surface to
eliminate refraction, the use of the twin-arc broadside lamp, the lap
dissolves and their relation to the foregrounding or backgrounding
of images, or the composition of shots. All those technical details are
of course peculiar to the construction of lm texts, not books, but
their function is still to create meanings by the skilled use of material
forms. In that, and in the relation of technology to expression, I think
the parallel holds. But it may be more readily granted in the area of
description.
Pauline Kael has edited the nal shooting script of Citizen Kane
dated 16 July 1940, and the subsequent so-called cutting continuity. She
explains the difference between them as that of before and after:
The shooting script is written before the lm is shot it is the
basis for the lm; the cutting continuity is a stenographic
record made from the nished lm. Cutting continuities tend
to be impersonal and rather boring to read, and if one exam-
ines only the cutting continuity it is difcult to perceive the
writers contribution. Shooting scripts are much more read-
able, since they usually indicate the moods and intentions.
,
o
Focus on Citizen Kane, p. 73. Robert L. Carringer, The Making of Citizen Kane
(London: John Murray, 1985), should also be consulted; there is a most useful
bibliography at pp. 16571.
,
In The Citizen Kane Book: Comprising The Shooting Script of Citizen Kane by Herman
J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles; The Cutting Continuity Transcript of the Completed
Film; preceded by Raising Kane by Pauline Kael (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 83.
69
Her use of the word intentions is only the most immediate note of a
congruence with the traditional concerns of bibliography and textual
criticism. The relationship of the shooting script to the nished script
is much like that of a manuscript draft, not even perhaps a fair copy, to
a printed text, whereas the more boring cutting continuity comes
closer to the iconic record of a bibliographical description.
There are three versions of the shooting script as preserved in the
Museum of Modern Art in New York. Another, described as the sec-
ond, revised nal script, dated 9 July 1940, and earlier than any of the
other three, was submitted to the Production Code Ofce for clear-
ance. It passed the test except for some four or ve details. One of them
recalls the effects on Shakespeares text of the Act of Abuses of 1606:
Please eliminate the word Lord from Kanes speech . . . the Lord
only knows . . .. Another puts one in mind of Polonius, concerned
lest his son enter such a house of sale, Videlicet, a brothel, because
there was such a place nominated as a locale for set C. But the Pro-
duction Code demanded that it be dropped. What it is important to
know, as an aspect of Welless intention, is that the scene had only been
written in for trading purposes in the sure knowledge that it would
have to be cut, but in the hope that other, less obtrusive, items would
then slip through, as they did.
Pauline Kael reprints the shooting script as revised, although there is
no table of variants. What we do have are brief notes on departures
from the script as the lm was made. Then there is the RKO cutting
continuity, dated 21 February 1941. Its apparatus consists of a brief note
(Slightly amended to correct errors in original transcription), but for
the rest, it represents a version of the full lm text which, in default of
being the lm itself, is a bibliographers dream of iconic accuracy. Like
a description of ideal copy, it enables one to test all actual copies in the
minutest details for sequence and completeness. For example, to cor-
respond with the authentic version, a copy must run for one hour, 59
minutes, 16 seconds, though it will run shorter on television. There are
seven reels, each divided into numbered scenes. The left-hand entries
in the description are details of the length of each of these in feet; in the
70
centre are notes on the scene, the cameras and the actors movements,
and, under centred speech headings, the dialogue; on the right, is a
description of the manner in which the scene is changed.
To anyone familiar with the making or teaching of lms, these
details are commonplace. Again, my concern is merely to establish the
point that the older disciplinary structures of bibliography, in the
description of books and the construction of texts from the extant
versions, are closely comparable to those required for lm, and that
the common interest is at this stage served by acknowledging that the
discipline comprehends them both. It is ironic that in an age when type
for books is lm-set, and when, for purposes of storing the information
content of books, we would now turn them into photographic images
on plastic, the lm itself should still be labouring for bibliographical
and textual attention. Those which get it, like Citizen Kane, are the rare
exception.
Bibliographers as pure bibliographers may of course continue
to insist on making a rigorous distinction between books as we
commonly know them and non-book forms, and on the restriction
of pure bibliography to description and analysis of the book as a
physical object. But libraries and especially national libraries, with
a responsibility to the culture at large, past, present, and future are
under signicant pressure to evolve systems which accommodate
these new forms of text in a rational, coherent, stable, and yet socially
accessible way.
The pattern is already pragmatically there in the transformation of
our personal and city libraries. Some of us still buy books, of course;
but we also borrow them, and we have left to the public conscience and
public institutions the responsibility for preserving the newspapers and
periodicals that we dispose of. Most of us have music, and could have
videos, on disc or tapes, and the machines required to hear and see
them. We are beginning to store information at home in our own com-
puter les, or to buy access to other systems. That principle of buying
access is simply an extension of the old idea of the lending library: we
do not buy the book so much as the time in which to read it. With new
forms of text, we buy, in bulk, the reading, viewing, or listening time in
71
the form of an entrance fee to the cinema, a hiring fee for the disc or
video, or a wireless and television licence fee for all or any texts that
might be made and transmitted in the year ahead, or we pay an access
fee for the information in a data bank. By decision of the United States
Supreme Court, it is no infringement of copyright there to record
television programmes in order to shift time. But in fact the tech-
nical capacity most consumers now command as readers, listeners,
or viewers to copy texts in that way, has also in part transformed the
notion of purchase as a form of acquisition and the ways in which
some of us at least form our personal libraries.
Such reections form the terms of an all too familiar litany over the
demise of the book. My concern is different. It is to nd the continuity
of these forms with past forms, of our new libraries with past libraries
in their traditional function as collectors, conservators, classiers, and
communicators, as classically exemplied by Panizzi. Even the use
of computer technology to supply information changes in only one
respect that traditional function. Whereas libraries have held books
and documents as physical objects, computer systems have been
mainly concerned to retrieve content. Library conservation and inter-
lending policies are already pushing certain classes of existing docu-
ment into that mode; and the creation and supply of new texts in
non-printed form for direct consultation on screen, or subsequent
hard-copy print-out, is increasing. The principle of record and access,
of catalogue and holdings, is not changed but only rened. It is too
seldom remarked that library systems inuenced computing in the
development of its capacity to process basic catalogue functions by
symbolic listing, selection, and arrangement. It should also be re-
membered that it was not the sophistication of computing in its early
stages which biased its use towards science, but its limited memory
and therefore its inability to handle the complexity and range of verbal
language as distinct from combinations of the numbers o to 9. Only as
its memory systems have grown has the computer changed its nature
from blackboard to book. It has at long last become literate and quali-
ed to join other textual systems. In time, I suppose, as it now learns to
speak, it will constitute an oral archive as well.
72
But one consequence of the computers retarded development for
many years has been a much slower recognition of the essential con-
sonance of its functions, like that of other non-book texts, with the
traditional purposes of libraries. Large, long-established, institutional
structures are not notable for their ability to adapt rapidly to changed
conditions, but if a common principle can be perceived and acted
upon, it does at least open up to us a politically important leadership
role. Once that is acknowledged, it is not a question of creating a
monolithic institution with the curatorial role of preserving all forms
of text (the National Sound Archive is part of the British Library; the
British Film Archive is not). What is important is the promotion of
inter-institutional collaboration in the pursuit of a common aim, and
the proper provision at last for the archiving and accessing, the biblio-
graphical control, of the new kinds of text.
8
That reection returns me to lm as my chosen case. The concept of
the archive has of course been recognized now in the use of the name
in several countries. Where lm library implies active lending and
limited retention, the lm archive implies the primacy of a custodial
function and a principle of access restricted to conditional consulta-
tion. But despite much individual, dedicated work, it is rare to nd
resources available on a scale commensurate with the need. MARC
(machine readable cataloguing) standards have been set by the Library
of Congress for the description of lms, but books remain privileged
over them, and in default of political imperatives with matching
resources, the application of standards as in my own country is
at best tful or highly selective. Although lms enjoy the benets of
8
The British Library Act specically empowers The British Library to extend its
sphere of interest into lms and other non-print materials. In a position statement
prepared for The British Library in 1985 on non-book materials, Catherine F. Pinion
wrote: It is clear that [non-book materials] represent a major and increasing
part of the nations and the worlds output and heritage of recorded knowledge.
It is arguable, if not self-evident, that they should receive equivalent treatment
to printed material, with regard to collecting, availability, preservation and
bibliographic control. In actual fact, the position is distinctly inferior in all those
respects. The use of the word bibliographic is inevitable in such a context, but it is
to be hoped that its still equivocal status, as signalled by the quotation marks, will be
speedily resolved.
73
copyright protection, in neither Britain nor New Zealand is there
any provision for their legal deposit. What is done is again done by
personal or commercial initiative, without legal sanction, and usually
without adequate funding for archiving in the full range of its obliga-
tions. The problems of access can therefore be acute. They range from
the philistinism which, in the name of commerce, has completely
destroyed artefacts of outstanding merit, to mutilation by censorship,
cutting, gross imping out with commercials, or the private retention or
suppression of cultural documents of such quality and signicance that
they should be in the public domain.
,
In the 1960s, British television
drama, in quality of scripting, performance, and production, was of a
standard it has rarely achieved since. But it might be difcult to prove
the point because many of the programmes have been destroyed. After
the exact number of transmissions for which, by contract, the per-
formers had been paid, Equity rules required the master and all copies
to be destroyed lest the contract be infringed by later, unauthorized
transmissions.
I think those conditions force us to ask: What principle, if it is not a
bibliographical principle, determines questions of authority, trans-
mission, and reception in all those cases? And in what measure must a
public library as the traditional custodian of books, and bibliography as
the relevant discipline, take up the cause for such texts?
I stress public because commercial considerations rarely bear upon
the past with much responsibility to historic depth. There are basically
three points: copyright, storage, and access. Copyright deposit puts all
specied works into the public domain and thereby ends all the uncer-
tainties that informal and private arrangements are heir to. Storage will
always be costly of space and labour, if the original artefacts are to be
kept. Just as vellum manuscripts were scraped clean for re-use, so too
,
The position is improving. While correcting proof for the rst edition of this text,
I purchased (Woolworth, 7.95) a video-cassette of Citizen Kane. The regular note
in TV Times, however (paralleled in The Radio Times), makes an important textual
point: Feature lms shown on television are not necessarily in the form seen
in cinemas. Often several variations are made at the time of production for use
according to the intended outlet. In some cases cinema versions may be used,
with minor cuts for violence, explicit sex and bad language.
74
are magnetic tapes vulnerable to re-use, with the destruction of the
texts already in them. A principle of economy in the service of private
interest renders all records vulnerable. Why keep them if the demand
year by year diminishes to the point where they are seldom consulted
and it becomes unprotable to maintain the structures which house
and service them? Even in the public realm, some texts are more equal
than others, a principle of frequency of use is invoked, and policies of
selective retention constantly advocated. But even given deposit and
proper storage, access to original artefacts which are machine-specic
will need batteries of historic equipment on which to re-play them. In
fact, it is more likely to involve the frequent re-copying (and, by a well-
known textual principle, their gradual degeneration?) to make them
compatible with new technology.
Those considerations suggest that only a traditional, bibliographi-
cally informed concept of library service, dedicated to the public inter-
est as a matter of principle and not of prot, will effect the preservation
of such texts, guarantee their authenticity, and ensure access to them.
I hope it is unnecessary for me to stress my personal interest in bib-
liography as the study of books and their history, but I hope there is no
mistaking either the earnestness with which I have been concerned to
argue the case for a comparable attention to other forms of recorded
texts. I may be mistaken in my premises and in my logic, but I have
tried to argue the case in terms of principles and continuities as I have
come to experience them. The book as we know it will, of course,
remain an important form of text for many purposes, the most
important. I want nothing to do with fashionable claims that as Tom
Stoppard might have put it the pages of the book are numbered. I am
well aware that, when we are so committed to the force, indeed here
to the encircling presence, of their tradition, it seems impossible, this
side of tragedy, to live without them. And yet there has always been that
counter-mythology which has afrmed the demands of the world,
against those of the book.
We nd it at work even in such a bookish novel as Umberto Ecos
The Name of the Rose. You will remember that a bibliographical curios-
ity there owers into life as Eco reconstructs from it an elaborate gure
75
of the ingeniously ordered, but labyrinthine, Alexandrian archive, only
to deconstruct it again in the old and fearful symbolism of the library
as a furnace. Fire consumes the books. As it rages, the librarian as jeal-
ous conservator of knowledge, the reader (if you like) as bookworm,
literally letter by letter eats the sole text of Aristotles treatise on
comedy in a desperate effort of enclosure. It is a last-ditch denial of the
multiple life of the text as a communal property, the ultimate image of
the library as a closed-book system. At the same time as it disappears
from view into its only reader, the text itself, unique and therefore
indistinguishable from the poisoned state of its physical form, con-
sumes and destroys him as it becomes wholly his. The moral is deadly:
we can become too absorbed by books.
Brilliant though it is, the factitious density of its inter-textual
comedy has The Name of the Rose, like all accounts of texts and their
readers, ending up as just another ction about a non-existent text, yet
another story (so to say) of Echo and Narcissus.
By contrast, Marlowes Faustus gives us, perhaps, the most poignant
statement we have of the tragedy which books can entail. When this
scholar Faustus selects his texts and constructs from them his own
version, his book of the self, he reads his way to hell.
Ieromes Bible, Faustus, view it well.
Stipendium peccati mors est: ha, Stipendium, &c.
The reward of sinne is death: thats hard.
Si peccasse negamus, fallimur, & nulla est in nobis veritas.
If we say that we have no sinne,
We deceiue our selues, and theres no truth in vs.
Why then belike we must sinne,
And so consequently die.
Faustus reads in Jerome only a single sense dictating a xed fate. What
he omits are the words that refer to mercy, the very foundation of
which if I may so put it is the variant reading, an openness to inter-
pretation, a deference to the spirit in preference to the letter. Trapped
by the paradox that texts are both closed and open, xed and exible,
dened by one context only to be redened in others, Faustus despairs.
76
Instead of using judgement, he suffers it; and with his agonized cry
Ill burn my books he rejects the whole tradition of book-learning.
Of all the traditional enemies of books in this counter-mythology,
none are so powerful as re and water. These will devour sense, or
drown it, with more dextrous celerity than a whole cortge of critics. If
Faustus invokes the one, it is Prospero who invokes the other.
The Tempest towers above all other texts as an exposition of the
instrumentality of the book, a key to open the mysteries of nature, a
tool to oppress and conne the savage mind. Prospero makes plain how
much they meant to him when he recalls Gonzalo who,
of his gentleness
Knowing I loud my books, . . . furnishd me
From mine owne Library, with volumes, that
I prize aboue my Dukedome.
And yet one of the most remarkable perceptions in that spare but
innitely generative play is Prosperos even greater need to surrender
his power, and with it the books which bestowed it:
And, deeper than did euer Plummet sound
Ile drowne my booke.
Encased by his library, he had shut out the world.
Me (poore man) my Librarie
Was Dukedome large enough . . .
At the heart of the English Renaissance, a period unprecedented for its
readerly-ness and writerly-ness, two voices warn us that books are not
always enough.
It seems a simple point to end on, but the times again give it proof.
As the British Library begins like Prospero to dismantle itself, and
surrender its magic circle for the square, its redenition as a library of
texts, verbal, numeric, and visual, and in many different media, is also
imminent. Dening the ways our world might use them, the structure
that orders them, and the future scholarship that they must serve, will
demand of bibliographers more than I think we currently offer. It asks
no less than a new concept of the text in history.
THE SOCI OLOGY OF A TEXT: ORAL
CULTURE, LI TERACY, AND PRI NT I N
EARLY NEW ZEALAND

Oral culture, literacy, and print in early New Zealand
79
In New Zealand the twenty years or so immediately preceding 1840
span the movement from orality, through manuscript literacy, to the
introduction of printing. In a minor way therefore they replicate in a
specic and largely quantiable context the Gutenberg revolution in
fteenth-century Europe. In that New Zealand context one signicant
document, the Treaty of Waitangi, witnesses to a quite remarkable
moment in the contact between representatives of a literate European
culture and those of a wholly oral indigenous one. It can be used as
a test case for measuring the impact of literacy and the inuence of
print in the 1830s; and it offers a prime example of European assump-
tions about the comprehension, status, and binding power of written
statements and written consent on the one hand as against the exible
accommodations of oral consensus on the other. Its variant versions,
its range of signatures, and the conicting views of its meaning and
status bring all those questions sharply into focus. Conversely, a fuller
understanding of the conditions of orality and literacy at the time it
was signed may help to dene more accurately the ways in which the
treaty might now be reconstructed, interpreted, and applied.
I
On 6 February 1840 forty-six Maori chiefs from the northern regions
of New Zealand signed a document written in Maori called Te Tiriti
o Waitangi, The Treaty of Waitangi.
:
In doing so, according to the
English versions of that document, they ceded to Her Majesty the
Queen of England absolutely and without reservation all the rights and
powers of Sovereignty which they themselves individually exercised
over their respective territories. That act of assent became the substan-
tive ground of British sovereignty over New Zealand.
,
Beneath a statue
I
This paper is based on an address delivered to The Bibliographical Society, London,
on 15 February 1983.
:
I have consulted the treaty documents as reproduced in Facsimiles of the Declaration
of Independence and the Treaty of Waitangi, ed. H. H. Turton (Wellington, 1877;
reprinted 1960).
,
I am most grateful to Paul McHugh for his legally informed endorsement of my
claim that Maori assent to the treaty became the substantive ground of British
sovereignty over New Zealand. There is, however, a body of opinion which regards
the treaty as having had no effect and British sovereignty as arising rather from the
occupation and settlements of lands inhabited by uncivilized native peoples.
80
2 From a bas-relief on a statue of Queen Victoria, Cambridge Terrace,
Wellington, erected to mark the Queens jubilee in 1887.
Governor Hobson is seated; Henry Williams (with glasses) stands
to his right; the Maori chief is anonymous
81
of Queen Victoria in the city of Wellington, the European literacy myth
implicit in that event of 1840 is complacently enshrined in the image of
a Maori chief as I say signing the treaty with quill pen (see plate 2).
The reality, as the printer William Colenso knew, and as we shall see as
we meditate the sociology of that text, was different.
Twenty-ve years earlier, the indigenous New Zealanders had been
completely illiterate. They were a neolithic race with a wholly oral cul-
ture and their own body of myths. Not one of their myths, however,
was so absurd as the European myth of the technologies of literacy and
print as agents of change and the missionaries conviction that what
took Europe over two millenia to accomplish could be achieved had
been achieved in New Zealand in a mere twenty-ve years: the reduc-
tion of speech to alphabetic forms, an ability to read and write them, a
readiness to shift from memory to written record, to accept a signature
as a sign of full comprehension and legal commitment, to surrender
the relativities of time, place, and person in an oral culture to the pre-
sumed xities of the written or printed word.
When Samuel Marsden

bought 200 acres of land at Rangihoua in 1814 for the rst mission
station, he drew up a deed of conveyance and solemnly had the Maori
chief sign it by drawing on it a copy of his moko or facial tattoo pat-
tern. The price was twelve axes, itself a potent symbol of the shift from
a neolithic culture to the iron age, the de-afforestation of New Zealand
and the pastoral economy to come. But the subtler, much more elusive
and indeterminate technology was literacy.
Consider its stages. In 1815 Thomas Kendall, the rst resident mis-
sionary, faced the problem of re-enacting one of the most momentous
transitions in human history, the reduction of speech to its record in
alphabetic form. Put like that, it sounds portentous, as in a literal sense it
The phrases European myth of . . . literacy and print as agents of change and
from memory to written record allude to Harvey Graff s The Literacy Myth:
Literacy and Social Structure in the Nineteenth-century City (New York, 1979), to
Elizabeth L. Eisensteins The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications
and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1979),
and to M. T. Clanchys From Memory to Written Record: England 10661307
(London, 1979).
82
was. But just imagine the problems of trying to capture strange sounds
alphabetically, the miracle that underlies all our books. When one early
traveller recorded what he thought he heard as the Maori word for a
paradise duck, he wrote pooadugghiedugghie (for putangitangi) and for
the fantail diggowaghwagh (for piwakawaka), neither of which forms
translates visually the aural beauty of the originals. The place-name
Hokianga was rendered Showkianga, Sukyanna, Jokeeangar, Chokahanga.
Another village, Kerikeri, was heard and rendered as Kiddeekiddee,
Muketu as Muckeytoo. Those spellings are not only aurally inefcient,
but to a differently accultured English eye they may appear crude and
culturally primitive, thus reinforcing other such attitudes.
,
The absence of a philology (let alone a grammar and syntax for a
non-European language) made a rational orthography hard to devise.
Yet until there was an orthography, the teaching of reading and writing
was obviously impossible, and printing of course depended upon a
standard set of letter forms. Kendalls rst rough list of 1815 was revised
and sent off to Samuel Lee, Professor of Arabic at Cambridge. Kendall
and two Maori chiefs, Hongi and Waikato, joined him there in 1820, and
together they produced A Grammar and Vocabulary of the Language of
New Zealand. It was printed later that year by R. Watts, printer to the
Church Missionary Society in London. Kendall, unlike Marsden, was
,
William Colenso, Fifty Years Ago in New Zealand. A Commemoration; a Jubilee
Paper; a Retrospect: a Plain and True Story (Napier, 1888), p. 27. Edward Markham,
writing in 1834, took a different view, criticizing what he saw as an over-simplied
orthography because it obscured regional and dialect differences, Thus Making the
Language Poorer instead of Enriching it: New Zealand or Reminiscences of it, ed.
E. H. McCormick (Wellington, 1963), p. 62. The circumstances surrounding the
reduction of spoken languages to their rst alphabetic or syllabic forms seem to
have received little attention. Judith Binney, The Legacy of Guilt (Auckland, 1968),
pp. 17785, discusses Kendalls work in the Maori language; see also Johannes
Andersen, The Maori Alphabet, in A History of Printing in New Zealand 18301940,
ed. R. A. McKay (Wellington, 1940), pp. 5774. Joyce Banks, of the National Library
of Canada, has worked on the Cree syllabary (which is still in use). Tamsin
Donaldson, Hearing the First Australians, in Seeing the First Australians, ed.
Ian Donaldson and Tamsin Donaldson (Sydney, 1984), looks at the motives
underlying nineteenth-century attempts at writing down two Australian languages,
Ngiyampaa and Wiradjuri, and at the effects of European assumptions on the forms
these writings took.
83
determined that Maori should not be anglicized; c, q, and x were
dropped for a start, but the Grammar at that stage still included letters
for non-Maori sounds thought necessary for foreign words f, hard g,
j, v, z and so it still ran to ve vowels, eighteen consonants, and one
digraph ng. It included sample sentences such as the performance of
the white man is good, the performance of the white man is exceeding
good, but linguistically at least the performance of the white man still
left room for improvement. Should stress marks be included, how
should long vowels be distinguished (by macron or doubling?),
o
were all
remaining letters really needed (since greater simplicity would enhance
its efcacy)?
In the next ten years by 1830 the alphabet was in fact reduced to
ve vowels and nine consonants, with only two forms remaining
unsettled, h and w. There were attempts to indicate a palatal h by add-
ing an apostrophe (as in Hongi) and the voiced w (pronounced rather
like f ), again by an apostrophe or by the combination wh. Colenso, as
printer, argued for the doubling of long vowels (to avoid special sorts),
the simple h (to avoid the troublesome Greek-style apostrophe), and a
digammic v for wh (to avoid setting two letters where one would do)
although wh was conrmed in 1842.
,
By then the foreign consonants
plus b, d, l, s, and y had been dropped and foreign words were rendered
in Maori forms: so missionary became mihanere, governor kawana.
Those decisions about letter forms were typographically efcient but
culturally explosive, for by giving English words a Maori semblance they
disguised their quite different conceptual import. But, clearly, the rst
great book printed in New Zealand, Colensos Maori New Testament
of 1837, is inconceivable without this prior shift from acoustics to
optics, the visualization of sound in a simplied and standardized
alphabet, and the human motivations at work in bringing it about.
Today the Maori language is written with the ve vowels, and ten
consonants h, k, m, n, p, r, t, w, ng, wh.
o
The length of vowels is an important discriminator of meanings in Maori: kaakaa
is a parrot; kaka a garment, bre, or stalk; kakaa is red-hot; kaaka a bittern or, as
adjective, poisoned-by-the-tutu. Practice in indicating long vowels still varies.
,
Fifty Years Ago, pp. 2427, 4749.
84
The pre-print years of its evolution (181530) were also those in
which the missionaries made a tentative start to teach reading and writ-
ing. The decision to teach those skills in the vernacular had long since
been settled elsewhere; in Bengal, for example, it generated a remark-
able renaissance in the indigenous culture.
8
It also seemed an efcient
policy. English was difcult to master and would have split the popula-
tion; a universal conversion of parent and child, of old and young,
was only conceivable if they were bound together by a common
speech within which the new learning could pass quickly, unimpeded
by language barriers. More than that, the missionaries were all too well
aware that English would give the Maori access to the worst aspects of
European experience. By containing them culturally within their own
language, they hoped to keep them innocent of imported evils. By
restricting them further to the reading of biblical texts and vocabulary,
they limited the Maori to knowledge of an ancient middle-eastern cul-
ture; at the same time the missionaries enhanced their familiar pastoral
role by making the Maori dependent on them morally and politically as
interpretative guides to Pakeha realities. Missionary expectations of a
rmly directed Maori literacy policy are betrayed in comments by
Williams and Puckey. In 1833 William Williams wrote that A reading
population, whose only book is the Word of God, cannot fail to make
a great moral change in the face of the country, as soon as that Word
begins to take effect.
,
And in 1842, when he should have known better,
William Puckey rejoiced that the Maori, having no other books to read
but Scripture and productions from Scripture, their pursuits must all
8
See David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: the Dynamics of
Indian Modernization 17731833 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1969). A distinction
must be drawn, of course, between reviving in print an already literate culture,
as in Bengal, and capturing the current forms of an oral culture in all its diversity
and levels of textual authority: see Bruce Biggs, The Translation and Publishing of
Maori Material in the Auckland Public Library, Journal of the Polynesian Society
61 (1952), 17791.
,
Letter of 1 October 1833, Missionary Register (November 1834), 513. William Brown,
New Zealand and its Aborigines (London, 1845), p. 101, had been told the natives
would only learn every species of vice through the medium of the English
language.
85
be of a sacred nature.
Io
Such a vision implied that priority be given to
the translation of the Scriptures into Maori. This ideological bias was
reinforced by doctrinal strife in 183940, just when the policy should
have been relaxed but when the Church Missionary Society faced
competition from Bishop Pompalliers Catholic mission and press.
II
To
study Colensos printed output is simply to look at the expression of
those policies.
Later in the century that emphasis on biblical texts was to have a
profound effect on Maori consciousness, providing a new source of
imagery in song and story and sharpening the expression of economic
and political pressures on Government. But no such consequence was
in the minds of the missionaries in the 1830s when the stress they placed
on the scriptures in Maori implied ideals whose naivety is now patent.
It is also present in the programme to teach reading and writing in
the mission schools. The enthusiastic reports back to London of the
remarkable desire of the Maori to learn to read, the further stimulation
of that interest through native teachers, the intense and apparently
insatiable demand so created for books, formed the cumulative pres-
sure to supply the one instrument thought essential to give instant
and local effect to universal literacy as the principal means to personal
salvation. I mean of course printing.
But what was the reality? Kendall set up the rst school with thirty-
three pupils in 1816, but it was not until the early 1830s that numbers
were at all signicant. There is almost complete accord in the reports,
not only that the schools were effective but that the Maori achieved
literacy with the greatest of ease. Of another school it was said in
Io
Letter of 6 June 1842, cited by C. J. Parr, A Missionary Library, Printed Attempts
to Instruct the Maori, 18151845, Journal of the Polynesian Society 70 (1961), 42950
(p. 445).
II
Woon to the Wesleyan Mission Society, 24 November 1838: The press will be a
mighty engine in exposing the errors of [the Papists] system, Wesleyan Mission
Notices, n.s. 9 (September 1839), 142. Henry Williams, 2 December 1840: [we need]
a vigorous effort at this time to meet the present demand for books before the
Papists come forward with their trash, cited by Parr, A Missionary Library, p. 447.
The Roman Catholic mission arrived in 1838, its main press (a Gaveau) on
15 June 1841.
86
1829: Not six years ago they commenced the very rudiments of learn-
ing: now, many of them can read and write their own language, with
propriety, and are complete masters of the First Rules of Arithmetic.
I:
A visitor to one mission in 1833 noted:
I was not prepared to nd, among a people who had previ-
ously no written language, so many who had benetted from
the instruction given in our Mission Schools . . . [In the Boys
School] I observed all ranks and ages, Chiefs and subjects, old
and young, bound and free, receiving and communicating
instruction, with a degree of decorum and regularity which
would have reected credit on a school of the same kind
in England. Catechisms, reading, spelling, writing on slates
from dictation, and cyphering, formed the employment of
the upper classes, while the lowest were engaged in learning
the alphabet and forming letters . . . [In the Girls School] The
senior classes read remarkably well, and write equally from
dictation on slates . . . Men of hostile tribes, even, now lay
aside their antipathies, and unite for instruction, disregarding
the person of a teacher, even if a slave, and valuing instruction
even from a child.
I,
The highly literate rhetoric of that description is itself revealing: the
writer, a Captain Jacob, transforms the schools routines into a vision
of the society he wishes to see evolving, one indeed better than his own.
Of the mission station at Waimate he remarked:
The writing of the senior classes was really better than that of
most schoolboys in England; and what struck me much, it was
remarkably free from orthographical mistakes; which can
only be accounted for from the simplicity of their language,
each letter of which admits but one simple sound. Here also I
observed Chiefs and subjects, freemen and slaves, all incor-
porated into classes.
I
I:
G. Clarke, Missionary Register (December 1829), 372.
I,
William Jacob, 13 March 1833, Missionary Register (January 1834), 60.
I
Ibid., 61.
87
Hobbs, writing in January 1833, noted:
For this long time past it has become fashionable for the
young people to try to learn to read . . . Such is the wish of
many of the Natives to learn to read, that on several occasions
they have brought pigs, which would weigh from fty to an
hundred pounds, and offered them as payment for a book,
consisting of sacred portions of the Scriptures, and the Liturgy
of the Church of England.
I,
The impression is also given by the missionary reports that once the
rudiments were known, many a Maori pupil would go off and teach
others:
In every village there are several of the Natives who can read
and write: and a School is established among them by the
Natives themselves, where a number are taught to read and
write; and old and young are taught their Catechism. Their
desire for books is very great.
Io
. . . many of the Natives, who are living at a distance, manifest
a great desire for instruction; and with very little assistance
from us, they are learning to read and write; and their efforts
have so far been crowned with success that they know some of
the letters of the alphabet and can write them.
I,
. . . there are many villages where Schools are conducted
entirely by the Natives, and some of them making con-
siderable prociency in reading and writing. The day is not far
distant, when the people generally will be able to read for
themselves, in their own tongue, the wonderful works of
God.
I8
I,
Missionary Register (February 1834), 119.
Io
G. Clarke, 4 June 1833, Missionary Register (December 1833), 550.
I,
William Puckey, 6 January 1835, Missionary Register (July 1836), 155.
I8
G. Clarke, 12 February 1833, Missionary Register (October 1833), 468.
88
But such reports are essentially anecdotal and less informative as
objective accounts than they are as expressions, at worst, of wishful
thinking or, at best, of a readiness to dene literacy, and therefore later
the effective impact of printed texts, at a level far below that demanded
by the social changes to which the Maori were being exposed.
I,
It is as
if the very notion of literacy itself compelled a heightened language of
self-approval and innite promise. Victims of their own myths, the
missionaries found what they wanted to nd, and reported what they
knew their London committee wished to hear. Marsden, Williams,
I,
The most useful accounts of literacy among Maori in the early period are
C. J. Parr, A Missionary Library, loc. cit., and Maori Literacy 18431867, Journal
of the Polynesian Society 72 (1963), 21134; and Michael D. Jackson, Literacy,
Communications and Social Change, in Conict and Compromise: Essays on the
Maori since Colonizations, ed. I. H. Kawharu (Wellington, 1975), pp. 2754. Related
studies are G. S. Parsonson, The Literate Revolution in Polynesia, Journal of Pacic
History 11 (1967), 3957, and Grard Duverdier, La Pntration du livre dans une
socit de culture orale: le cas de Tahiti, Revue Franaise dHistoire du Livre n.s. 1
(1972), 2751. Parrs thoroughness in noting so many primary references to Maori
reading and writing in the 1830s and 1840s has greatly eased my own search, and I
have found Jacksons admirable discussion most pertinent to my own because it is
specically concerned to examine Maori social change from the useful vantage
point of literacy (p. 28). Michael Jackson also directed me to Manfred Stanleys
Technicism, Liberalism, and Development: a Study in Irony as Social Theory, in
Social Development: Critical Perspectives (New York, 1972), pp. 274325, a suggestive
discussion of the philosophical implications of technology for social structure and
(if proleptically and only implicitly) histoire du livre.
Nevertheless I argue that early missionaries and recent historians alike have
misread the evidence for Maori literacy. If it ceases to be true of the 1840s, the
conventional view of the rapid attainment of literacy by the Maori in the 1830s
must be wrong: a literacy with any potency for social change is not so short-lived.
Having accepted the missionaries euphoric accounts of the 1830s, Parr asks of the
1840s: What happened? Where were the self-appointed teachers, the hundred mile
journeys to obtain books and instruction, the eager learners of letters, the crowded
day schools of only a dozen years before? (Maori Literacy, p. 221). Although few
Maori are today, in the simplest functional sense, illiterate, the written and printed
word is not the mode which they habitually use. The question is therefore an
even more fundamental one than whether or not the Maori failed to become fully
literate in the 1830s, or why the missionaries failed to teach them full literacy. It is,
rather, why has the Maori failed to become literate at all? Or, to shift the burden
of guilt, what is it about literacy and books that makes these technologies so
inadequate to cope with the complex realities of a highly civilized social experience
which the Maori know but which the literate mind too readily and reductively
perhaps tries to capture in manuscript and print?
89
Hadeld, and Pompallier were intelligent men, but what could they
have understood by the words reading and writing for them to say:
The natives . . . were carrying in their hands, the Litany, and
the greater part of the Church Service, with their Hymns, writ-
ten in their own language. The Church Service, as far as it has
been translated, they can both read and write with greatest
ease.
:o
I was much pleased to nd, that wherever I went I found some
who could read and write. The Church Service had been
translated into the Native language, with the Catechism,
Hymns, and some other useful pieces. They are all fond of
reading; and there are many who have never had an oppor-
tunity of attending the schools who, nevertheless, can read.
They teach one another in all parts of the country.
:I
What teaching one another might have meant is suggested by Henry
Williams:
One young man began to ask the meaning of letters. I wrote
them down for him, and in half an hour he knew them all, and
was teaching several outside. Numbers of others came until I
had no paper left of any description on which to write a copy.
At length they brought small pieces, to have the letters written
for them, and about 200, old and young, were soon employed
teaching and learning the letters with the greatest possible
interest. [Next morning] the boys brought their papers for
me to hear them their letters and asked what they were to
learn next.
::
Vast numbers learn to read and write who do not attend
school, by possessing themselves of a book or part of a book,
:o
Marsden, 14 March 1830, Missionary Register (January 1831), 58.
:I
Marsden, February 1837, Missionary Register (April 1838), 137.
::
The Life of Henry Williams, ed. H. Carleton (Wellington, 1948), p. 137.
90
and spelling it over until they are fully acquainted with every
word in it.
:,
They easily learn to read and write without the necessity of
constant teaching. It is only necessary to give them a few
leaets of easy reading, and to write some characters on bits of
slate to enable them to read and write their own language
within three months.
:
By comparison, R. K. Webb, in The British Working-class Reader, says
that at the Borough Road School, London, in the early nineteenth cen-
tury, it took twelve months to teach a child to read, and between three
and four years to write well and calculate.
:,
A more realistic account of
the nature of Maori literacy is that given by Fairburn in 1838:
There is scarcely a petty tribe now to be met with, where there
are not some who can write and read. I mention this more
particularly, as it must sound strange to an English ear to be
told that we have met with many of the self-taught Natives
who could write on a slate or paper so as to make their wants
known, while they could not read a single line from the book.
Their habits of idleness . . . are in some respects favourable to
their learning to read. Since they have got books among them,
they make use of them, I have not the smallest doubt, in the
way of amusement, in teaching each other; it seems to have
superseded their once favourite game of Draughts.
:o
That at least suggests the minimal competence achieved by many so-
called readers.
:,
Hadeld, 22 July 1840, cited by Parr, A Missionary Library, p. 438.
:
J. F. B. Pompallier, Early History of the Catholic Church in Oceana (Auckland, 1888),
p. 47.
:,
(London, 1955), p. 17. Illiteracy was probably high among British working-class
settlers. My own paternal grandfather was illiterate, signing both his marriage
certicate and his will with a cross; and my paternal grandmother, like many a
Maori chief and medieval king, wrote her letters by dictation.
:o
30 April 1836, Missionary Register (July 1839), 348.
91
If we reect that the teaching of elementary reading is primarily
oral/aural, not visual, because it involves the pronouncing and repeti-
tion of letters, syllables, and words (a practice reinforced where there
are few books, fewer texts, and group teaching), we can appreciate how
oral repetition from memory might masquerade as reading; and the
Maori used to an oral tradition had a most retentive memory.
:,
The
interconnection is evident in Kemps report of 1832: For want of more
Translations of the Scriptures, the Natives are almost at a stand: some
have committed to memory all that has been printed: I hope this will
soon be remedied by more being printed.
:8
Or Williams in 1832:
We feel the want of books for the Natives very greatly: what they at
present possess, they, generally, know by heart.
:,
Other specic reports
have their general interest:
The Natives manifest a strong desire to learn to read the
Scriptures . . . Wherever I go amongst the Natives, I hear
portions of the Catechism repeated. One Native, who, though
he cannot read, has learned a considerable part of the
Catechisms, puts the Questions to those around him; and
then he and the others repeat the answers.
,o
[I] visited a tribe in which the only teaching was done by
a Maori who had learned to read at Paihia and, returning to
his village, read the Scriptures to his countrymen. Before this
time they were in the habit of meeting, and repeating from
memory, the Confession and Lords Prayer, not any one being
able to read.
,I
My attention was called . . . to a blind man reading the Scrip-
tures . . . He came to me some time since, and requested that
:,
See Duverdier, La Pntration, pp. 4242, and William Ellis, Polynesian Researches,
during a Residence of Nearly Eight Years in the Society and Sandwich Islands, 2 vols
(London, 1829), I, 42993, II, 20. Duverdier draws most of his material from Ellis.
:8
3 January 1832, Missionary Register (September 1832), 406.
:,
6 July 1832, ibid. (May 1833), 243.
,o
C. Baker, 26 December 1831, ibid. (September 1832), 407.
,I
Fairburn, 30 April 1838, ibid. (July 1839), 348.
92
I would let him have a complete book. I asked of what use a
book would be to him, as he was blind. He replied that it
would be of great use; for though he could not see, he could
hear, and by possessing one he could let others read to him,
until he should see it with his heart . . . I [later] saw the poor
fellow lying on the ground with his book open before him, as
though he was pondering over its contents, repeating aloud
verse by verse.
,:
Poor fellow? The memorized text of course makes one a living library
in a way the read book cannot. Repetition of the catechism known by
heart, not read by eye was after all the higher proof of conversion.
Simply to illustrate the illusory nature of the presumed shift from
orality to literacy, I quote Sir Apirana Ngata, writing on The Maori
and Printed Matter as late as 1940:
The people preferred to hear the matter, whether written or
printed, read to them. Not only did this relieve the labour of
spelling out words, syllable by syllable, but it was closer than
mute transference through the eye to what they had been
accustomed to: it was nearer the old-time narrative of adept
raconteurs, or of poetical and priestly reciters. More than that,
the genius of the race preferred education through the ear,
conveyed by artists in intonation and gesticulation . . . The
printed matter indeed achieved a limited popularity, but for
every one who owned a copy of the Scriptures and Church
Liturgy or Rawiri, there were in my boyhood days still fty
or more content to listen to and memorize the words which
were read out of the printed books by the ministers, teachers,
or lay-readers.
,,
If reading, the passively receptive and more easily acquired art, could
be so easily evaded, what of writing? This was the active counterpart of
reading, a personally expressive skill, but one much harder to acquire.
,:
Henry Williams, 29 August 1834, ibid. (November 1835), 258.
,,
In McKay, A History of Printing in New Zealand, pp. 4849.
93
It was inhibited by the primitive nature, cost, and scarcity of quills, ink,
and paper. A slate may prove that one can write, but not that one can
write to any purpose. Just as the oral element in reading persisted to
limit the full and easy visual perception of texts, so too a reliance on
writing and a readiness to use it could only grow slowly from a long
acquaintance with documents.
,
Oral witness held its primacy over writ-
ten evidence for centuries in Europe; to have expected a non-literate
people to reverse that disposition within a decade was unrealistic, and
to presume that it has yet happened would be a mistake.
,,
The main use of literacy to the Maori was not reading books for
their ideas, much less for the access they gave to divine truths, but
letter writing. For them, the really miraculous point about writing was
its portability; by annihilating distance, a letter allowed the person who
wrote it to be in two places at once, his body in one, his thoughts in
another. It was the spatial extension of writing, not its temporal per-
manence, that became politically potent in gathering the tribes and
planning a war a decade and more later.
,o
Historical time, dened by
,
This point is well made by Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record.
,,
Among those who currently afrm Maori rights and protect Maori mana, those
more conciliatory towards European attitudes stress the complimentary ease and
speed with which Maori are said to have become literate, those less conciliatory and
more radical, the supreme importance of the oral tradition and virtual irrelevance
of the European book. In practice, the oral mode rules. By compelling those who
speak eloquently to substitute a mode in which they are less uent, literacy can
function insidiously as a culturally regressive force. Such at least is how many Maori
experience it.
As Jane McRae reminds me, there are few Maori writers and very few who write
in Maori, but the tradition of oral composition and exposition continues, it is the
only tradition with literary structures or styles, and the sound text is usually all
there is to be read. Even within University Departments of Maori Studies, the book
is suspect. Manuscripts and printed texts in libraries, publications by Europeans on
Maoridom, are seldom consulted; oral etiquette, debate, and transfer of knowledge
on the marae are what matter. Such conditions encourage the spontaneous, orally
improvised, dramatic recreation of shared stories or themes and an evolutionary
concept of texts; the xed text, catching in print an arbitrary moment in the
continuum of social exchange, demands a different sense of history and its own
literal re-play. See Michael King, Some Maori Attitudes to Documents, Tihei
Mauri Ora: Aspects of Maoritanga, ed. Michael King (Auckland, 1978), pp. 918.
,o
Jackson, Literacy, Communications and Social Change, p. 38; see also A. Buzacott,
Mission Life in the Islands of the Pacic (London, 1866), pp. 6667.
94
dated and legally binding documents, represented a much more pro-
found challenge to an oral culture used to reshaping its past traditions
to accord with present needs. It is a challenge that is still resisted.
On a journey in 1833 Williams received several letters which had
been sent on to him and his Maori attendants and he records the reac-
tion of other Maori who had not seen letters before:
This was an interesting particular for the people of the place,
as they were thus enabled to see the nature and value of writ-
ten characters, by the testimony of these their countrymen.
Our boys seemed to look for, and read over their letters, with
as much pleasure as we did ours, to the delight of all around;
they repeated them aloud, to the admiration of their auditors,
who were struck with wonder at hearing, as they described it,
a book speak: for though they expect that a European can
perform an extraordinary thing, yet they cannot understand how
it is that a New Zealand youth can possess the same power.
,,
In the early 1830s we see the hesitant beginnings of letter writing in
written requests for baptism, proving (as William Yate put it) that the
heart of the sanguinary and untutored New Zealander is as the heart of
the civilized and polished Englishman.
,8
The originals of course were
in Maori.
I, Pahau, am now writing a Letter to you. Perhaps you will not
be pleased with it, and send it back; and then, perhaps, my
heart will be sad, and I shall cry. Now, then, I am going to
write to you. Read it rst, from the top to the bottom, on this
side and on that side, before you say Nonsense, and throw it
away from you and tear it to pieces. Now, Mr Yate, listen to
what I am going to say upon this paper. I have been thinking
and thinking about what I am going to write; and now I am
thinking you will shut your ears, and will not listen to me.
This is what I am going to write: Remember, that if you say
,,
Missionary Register (September 1834), 41819.
,8
Ibid. (April 1832), 192.
95
Nonsense, it was you who said we were to put down our
wishes in a book.
,,
Another letter begins, in a vein reminiscent of Caxton: My ink is not
good, my paper dirty, and I am altogether ashamed.
o
Yet another, from
husband and wife: There are many mistakes in our twos Letter: and
Mary says, Do not send it: wait and talk when he comes to Kerikeri .
I
Those translations are insensitive (Yates use of our twos for the
dual pronoun in Maori reects upon him, not the writer), but there is
no mistaking the difdence, the insecure handling of this tool, the anx-
ieties attending exposure by this medium. These were not untutored
New Zealanders. They were the literate lite in Maori, not draught-
players turned scribblers but those trained to readiness for baptism.
The effective use of letters for political purposes was many years away.
Nor did printing of itself become a re-expressive tool for the Maori
until the late 1850s.
:
When it did so in Maori newspapers the essen-
tial motives, the effective contextual forces, were economic, political,
and military, not religious. He wahine, he whenua, e ngaro ai te tangata
by women, and by land, men perish. The forcing issue for the Maori,
then as now, was land. Only when literacy began to serve that supreme
social interest could it be signicantly achieved. Its roots in the texts of
an alien religion were inevitably shallow, despite the technology of
printing.
But for the missionaries, printing was the great hope. We feel very
much the want of a Printing Press, to work off some copies of por-
tions of Scripture, which could be read by several natives now with us,
Davis had written to the Church Missionary Society in 1827.
,
In 1828
,,
Ibid., Letter 6.
o
Ibid., Letter 7.
I
Ibid. (October 1834), 460. See also Letters to the Rev. William Yate from Natives of
New Zealand Converted to Christianity (London, 1836).
:
See W. J. Cameron, A Printing Press for the Maori People, Journal of the
Polynesian Society 67 (1958), 20410; and Johannes Andersen, Maori Printers and
Translators, in McKay, A History of Printing in New Zealand, pp. 3347. An ofcial
Government newspaper, Te Karere o Nui Tireni, later Te Karere Maori, had been
printed in Maori from 1842 to 1846 and doubtless established an early role for this
medium.
,
Cited by Parr, A Missionary Library, p. 432.
96
Williams wrote: We want a printer, and a printer we must have.
The
plea to the Church Missionary Society was twice repeated in 1829.
When the long-sought-after press did arrive, it was an anticlimax,
proving that technology in itself is nothing without a human mind and
dedicated skill to make it work in a context where it matters. In 1830,
William Yate brought a small press from Sydney, and a fteen-year-old
James Smith to help him. Neither Yate nor Smith had any professional
competence.
In his journal for September 1830 Yate noted that, in printing off
a few hymns in the native language, we succeeded beyond our most
sanguine expectations. These were the rst items ever printed in New
Zealand. We thank you for the Press, he wrote back to London, and
have no doubt but that, with the blessing of God, it will be an instru-
ment of great good in this Land. You will perceive by a copy of a Hymn
forwarded by this conveyance, that we shall be able, in a short time, to
manage it.
,
Others took his tone. Kemp reported that The Schools
will receive great benet from the Press, for we shall be able to get por-
tions of the Scriptures printed, as they are wanted.
o
No copy of their
Hymns is known to survive but Yate and Smith also printed a small
catechism in Maori, both extant copies of which testify to the printers
gross incompetence in planing the type, locking the forme, and making
ready. Writing of a new translation a year later, Yate faced facts: We
shall not . . . be able to print it here.
,
Henry Williams, two years after that rst experiment, told his
masters:
You have sent us out a Printing Press of a certain description
and a specimen of its production has been sent to you, accom-
panied with many expressions of delight but these were rst
feelings excited by the novelty of the work: there stands the
poor thing enshrined in cobwebs as an exciter for further
expectations and desires. It has been examined by a printer of
Ibid.
,
July and September 1830, Missionary Register (January 1831), 67.
o
Ibid.
,
28 April 1831, ibid. (March 1832), 150.
97
some experience who said he would not possess it as a gift . . .
Had we something respectable, our work would be more so
than it is at present.
8
As the Maori proverb says (one later recorded by Colenso), even a lit-
tle axe, well used, brings plenty of food. But with Yate as food gatherer,
the missionaries starved. Defeated in his own efforts, Yate returned to
Sydney the following year to supervise the printing of what, when it
arrived, he described as the most valuable cargo that ever reached the
shores of New Zealand 1800 copies of a book containing eight chap-
ters of Genesis and almost half the New Testament.
,
On receiving
these books in 1833, Williams wrote home: I hope our good friends in
London will see in time the necessity of allowing a press and a printer.
The book contains 250 pages and abounds in typographical errors, not
less . . . than two to a page. It must not be offered without correction.
So much for colonial work.
,o
In 1836 Colenso was even less compli-
mentary about this early Australian export to New Zealand: poor
things, they reect no credit on the printer, less on the binder, and still
less on the editor it has been computed that there are not less than
1000 errors in the work.
,I
Yates ignominious effort in 1830 deprived
William Colenso of the honour of being literally New Zealands rst
printer, a New Zealand Caxton, as Coupland Harding was later to call
him.
William Colenso, a cousin of the bishop of that name, was born in
Penzance in 1811 and on 3 September 1826 was bound for six years to
a local printer, John Thomas.
,:
While still in his time he read his rst
8
6 July 1832, Letters of Henry Williams, vol. II (183038), typescript in the Auckland
Institute and Museum.
,
An Account of New Zealand (London, 1835), p. 232.
,o
Life of Henry Williams, p. 185.
,I
Letter to Dandeson Coates, 9 January 1836.
,:
A. G. Bagnall and G. S. Petersen, William Colenso; Printer, Missionary, Botanist,
Explorer, Politician; His Life and Journeys (Wellington, 1948) is the standard life.
Colensos journals and his correspondence with the Church Missionary Society
are in the Hocken Library, Dunedin; his Day- and Waste-book, Paper-book and
printing-house ledger are in the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington; his
correspondence with Coupland Harding is in the Mitchell Library, Sydney; his
personal memorandum book, kept while he worked for Watts and travelled to New
98
paper to the Penzance Natural History and Antiquarian Society (on
Phoenician trade with west Cornwall) and compiled a history of
Penzance, The Ancient and Modern History of the Mounts, which was
printed and published by Thomas in 1831. In October 1833 he moved to
London and found work with Richard Watts and Son, Crown Court,
Temple Bar, printers to the Church Missionary Society and the British
and Foreign Bible Society.
,,
Some anonymous articles he wrote for the
religious serial The Pilot came for printing to Watts who recognized
Colensos handwriting. This led to an introduction to Dandeson
Coates, lay secretary to the Society, just as the New Zealand mission-
aries were again supplicating for a press. Commissioned as printer by
the Society and preparing to leave for New Zealand in 1834, Colenso
wrote in his diary: In addition to Satans temptations at having no
interest in Jesus, he assails me with You are going abroad, and are
unt for the work . In fact there was none tter. Colenso arrived at
Paihia in the north of New Zealand on 30 December 1834. The next day,
he records, Numbers of Natives came to see me and when they found
I was a Printer were quite enraptured crying out Pukapuka. Saturday
3 January 1835 was, as he wrote to Coates,
Zealand, and his will, are in the Hawkes Bay Museum and Art Gallery. An edition
of his printing-house records and a thorough study of his work as a printer remains
to be done. R. Coupland Harding has written three brief accounts: New Zealands
First Printer, The Inland Printer 7 (188990), 5046; Relics of the First New
Zealand Press, Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute 32 (1900),
4004; William Colenso: Some Personal Reminiscences, The Press (Christchurch),
27 February 1899. Harding also printed several of Colensos papers, including Fifty
Years Ago in New Zealand. See also H. Hill, The Early Days of Printing in New
Zealand: a Chapter of Interesting History, Transactions and Proceedings of the New
Zealand Institute 33 (1901), 40726; and Johannes Andersen, Early Printing in New
Zealand, in McKay, A History of Printing in New Zealand, pp. 131. The fate of
Colensos Stanhope press is unknown; his Columbian is probably that now in Te
Papa Tongarewa, Wellington; his table model foolscap Albion (Hopkinson and
Cope No. 1964, dated 1845) is in the Hawkes Bay Museum and Art Gallery.
,,
Colensos memorandum book for this time details his wages and the way in which
they were made up for composing, correction, altering heads, share of fat, or
reduced by candle ne and error in casting (the last cost him 16s 4d.), along with
other sharply observed features of an early nineteenth-century printing house.
99
A memorable epoch in the annals of New Zealand I
succeeded in getting the Printing Press landed. I was obliged
to unpack it on board, but, I am happy to say, it is all safe
on shore. Could you, my dear Sir, but have witnessed the
Natives when it was landed, they danced, shouted, and
capered about in the water, giving vent to the wildest effusions
of joy. Enquiring the use of this, and the place of that, with
all the eagerness for which uncivilized nature is celebrated.
Certes, they had never seen such a thing before! I trust soon to
be able to get it to work. May the father of Mercies . . . grant
me strength and ability to work it for His Glory! May it be
instrumental, under His blessing, in bringing thousands to the
Cross of our Immanuel! and of sending away that Sombre
pall of darkness and gloom, which the Prince of the power of
the Air has so long successfully wrapped around the inhabit-
ants of these islands.
,
In fact, getting the Stanhope ashore had been far from easy and lest
the parcels of type be seized for making musket balls they could not
be unpacked until safely landed. Most revealing, however, for what it
implies about the symbolic power of the press as distinct from the
realities of using one, is Colensos list of necessary articles which he
found to be absolutely wanting:
For the information of Printers I will just set down a few
of them; though I almost fear my relation will scarcely be
believed. There was no wooden furniture of any kind, nor
quoins, . . . no galleys, no cases, no leads of any size, no brass
rule, no composing-sticks, (save a private one of my own that
I had bought two years before in London, a most fortunate
circumstance!) no inking table, no potash, no lye-brushes, no
mallet and shooter, no roller-irons and stock, though there was
,
Colenso Papers, Hocken Library.
100
3 Colensos case
101
a massy cast-iron roller mould, and . . . no imposing-stone
nor page-cord; and, worst of all, actually no printing paper!!
,,
So ignorant and incompetent were Colensos mentors about the art by
which they set so much store. Colenso found a local joiner who made
him a few galleys, a small inking table, some furniture and quoins,
although he complained that these last were wretched things (partly
owing to the want of proper and seasoned wood,) and gave him an
enormous amount of labour, vexation and trouble. The joiner also
made him
two or three pairs of type-cases for the printing ofce after a
plan of my own. For as the Maori language contained only 13
letters (half the number in the English alphabet), I contrived
my cases so, as to have both Roman and Italic characters in
the one pair of cases; not distributing the remaining 13 letters
(consonants) used in the compositing of English, such not
being wanted . . . Such an arrangement proved to be a very
good one while my compositing was conned to the Maori
language only; but when I had any English copy to compose it
was altogether the reverse! then I had to pick out the dis-
carded English consonants as required from their lots put up
in paper parcels. Fortunately this occurred but rarely; except
at the time of the Treaty of Waitangi (1840), when I had nec-
essarily much printing work to do for the Government of the
Colony; and having no extra cases, was obliged to place the
letters required in little lots on tables, and on the oor!
,o
With the press in place and the type disposed, it was agreed that as all
parties, European and Maori, wished to see something printed, the
,,
Fifty Years Ago, p. 6. Writing to Coupland Harding on 31 December 1890, Colenso
recalled Williamss rst encounter with practical printing: Mr W., evidently,
had never seen Type-setting before: he was often in the Pg. Ofce, & well do I
remember his Exclamation of pleasing surprize on seeing a line spaced out in
cpg. stick he had often wondered how it was done to have all the lines of equal
length .
,o
Fifty Years Ago, p. 7.
102
missionaries should supply some writing paper, that the rst sheet
from the press should be in Maori from the New Testament, and that
it should be small. The Epistles to the Ephesians and Philippians was
chosen. Colenso set it up, and on 17 February 1835 pulled proofs of
what he then thought was the rst book printed in New Zealand, the
printing ofce being lled with spectators to witness the performance.
On 21 February,
twenty-ve corrected copies were printed and stitched and cut
round for the Missionaries; their wives kindly furnishing a few
sheets of pink blotting-paper from their desks wherewith to
form coloured paper covers for these tracts; which, of course,
had rst to be pasted on to stronger paper. This little book
was in post 8vo., Long-Primer type, and consisted of 16 pages
in double columns. For leads I was driven to the miserable
substitute of pasting paper together, and drying and cutting it
up! . . . And not being able to manufacture a roller, I was
obliged to do my best with a small makeshift ball of my own
contriving.
,,
Knowing nothing of Yates earlier efforts, Colenso wrote home to
Coates:
This rst fruits of the New Zealand Press, which the Lord
hath pleased to allow me to begin and complete, is very much
liked by the Natives. May it, being the Word of God, be the
means of making thousands wise unto Salvation and the
preface, as it were, to a more glorious diffusion of Gospel light
over these benighted lands.
,8
On 19 May he printed what was in fact the rst English book, eight
pages octavo, a report of the New Zealand Temperance Society. Given
the later history of New Zealands licensing laws, it was indeed a
prophetic start.
,,
Ibid., p. 9.
,8
16 March 1835, Colenso Papers, Hocken Library; also Missionary Register (July 1836),
164.
103
Earlier that year, on 23 March, having heard that supplies of paper
and more equipment for him had reached Sydney, he began setting
his one great work, the complete Maori New Testament. It was a
demy-octavo, set in small Pica, and running to 356 pages. He pulled the
rst sheets of a run of 5,000 copies on 23 June 1836. The Maori press-
men he later employed and paid 3s. a week were soon disenchanted
by the many disagreeables inseparable from this new and wonderful
art of printing, as Colenso put it, but on two subsequent occasions he
was able to secure the help of some American sailors who had trained
as pressmen before going to sea. Of the second pair he wrote:
The wages I paid these two men were, at rst, the same as to
the two former pressmen, 5/- per day; but after a short time, at
their own request, their pay was altered to 25 cents, or 1/- each
per token, (10 quires = 1/2-ream,) besides which, as they
could not be always at press-work, they were paid 12 cents,
or 6d per hour for other work connected with the Printing-
ofce and Binding-room, and Warehouse, as, in drying,
and pressing, and folding the sheets, &c.; but would never do
anything in the way of distributing type, and even if a letter
should be drawn out, or be broken in their working-off the
forms, (which sometimes though rarely did happen,) they
would not, or more properly could not well, replace it; and
spoiled paper (if any) they had to pay for, which, however,
did not amount to much. Upham worked alone at Press for a
period of six months, after his companion left, (always a dis-
agreeable and slow process for one person,) and, of course,
from that time he was paid 2/- per token. He was a very good
and trusty pressman, and kept the colour well up, and his
rollers, &c., in nice working order.
,,
Colenso records that when the book was nished a year and a half later,
in December 1837, the demand for copies became great beyond expres-
sion, from all parts of New Zealand, and nding it impossible to bind
,,
104
them fast enough he sent off lots of 500 at a time to Sydney to have
them done (poorly done, as he later complained). Since the Maori were
said to value more highly any article they paid for than one given to
them free, the books were sold at 4s. each. As evidence of interest and
demand, Colenso makes the incidentally valuable point (distinguish-
ing reading from writing) that as not many of the principal Maori
Chiefs or their sons could then write, many of them travelled on foot
and barefooted to Paihia, from very great distances, to obtain a copy.
William Jowett, responding as clerical secretary of the Church Mis-
sionary Society to Colensos expressed wish for ordination, advised
him to turn his thoughts
to the peculiarly useful (and therefore honourable) depart-
ment which you do occupy. The sight of that New Testament
in the Native language, which you have been privileged to
carry through the Press, is such a sight as lls my heart with
indescribable joy. Think now to what great ends it is capable
of becoming instrumental . . . it will, moreover, help the
xing of the language; and schoolbooks, and many other
books, will grow out of it. No doubt the spirit of God will use
this sword.
oo
There is one excellent point in Jowetts response to which I shall return,
but here I just wish to note again the ecstatic tone which belies both the
actual achievement and the future promise of literacy.
How many Maori could read before Colenso arrived? In 1833 Yate
had estimated that some 500 in the north could do so. In 1834, Edward
Markham ventured not less then ten Thousand people that can Read,
write and do sums in the Northern end of the Island.
oI
Rening such
impressionism by apparently objective fact, one historian turns to the
presumed demand for and effects of printing: between January 1835
oo
17 December 1838, reprinted in Fifty Years Ago, pp. 2122.
oI
For Yate, see Eric Ramsden, Marsden and the Missions (Sydney, 1936), p. 28; for
Markham, New Zealand or Recollections of it, p. 55. Sensing that the gure he had
heard might be optimistic, Markham qualied it in a note: For fear of exageration
[sic] say 8000.
105
and January 1840 Colenso printed 3,500,000 pages of religious material,
and in 1840 produced over 2,000,000 more gures as ignorantly
impressionistic (though true) as Yates and Markhams.
o:
Added to the
further information that Colensos New Testament was reprinted in
London in 1841, 1843, and 1845 (each time in 20,000 copies), it reinforces
the missionary notion of widespread literacy and the immense impact
of print. On those gures, by 1845 there was at least one Maori New
Testament for every two Maori people in New Zealand. Colenso felt
condent to write in his journal in 1840:
Here I may be permitted to remark the Press has been an
inst[rument] of very great good in this land . . . Howr. partial
it may be supposed I am in my opinion, I believe (and that
belief too is deduced from what I have seen and heard on the
spot) that the press has been more effective (under God) as an
instr[ument] of good among this people during the last 5 yrs.
than the whole body of miss[ionaries] put together.
As Colensos Day- and Waste-Book, paper-book, and ledger all sur-
vive, we can detail everything he printed for the years 183643. In terms
of histoire-du-livre econometrics we can say exactly what his output
was; but instead of using gures like three and a half million and two
million pages, a printer or bibliographer would use a quite different
measure. The basic unit of printing is not the page but the sheet, and in
the ve years from January 1835 until January 1840 Colensos output
amounted to only 16 items and required type to be set for only 34.15
sheets. The New Testament alone accounted for 22.5 of those 34.15
sheets and for 122,500 of the grand total of 145,775 perfected sheets
o:
Harrison M. Wright, New Zealand, 17691840: Early Years of Western Contact
(Cambridge, Mass., 1959), p. 53. Wrights gures are calculated from the tables
(titles, formats, edition quantities) supplied by Colenso in The Missionary Register
(1840), p. 512, and (1841), p. 519. To keep the comparative base I have used the same
source, but a more exact calculation would have to include a few jobbing items
excluded from Colensos reports but included in his ledger. I have taken no account
of items printed before 1840 by the Wesleyan and Roman Catholic missions. Were
these added, they would simply reinforce the argument that literacy is not so easily
implanted as the arrival of printing might imply.
106
4 Page of text from Colensos New Testament
107
which came off his press and made up the various copies of those 16
items. A single octavo book of 224 pages printed in 5000 copies will run
up a total of 1,120,000 pages. It sounds impressive but in printing terms
it is only 5000 copies of each of 14 sheets. In 1840, Colenso printed 11
items, involving 18.875 sheets and 89,313 perfected sheets. One book, the
Psalms, accounted for a third of the setting and two-thirds of the press-
work. Colensos output as printer and therefore the effects of his work
were not at all on the scale suggested by millions of pages and by the
self-congratulatory tone of missionary reports and his own letters.
If this technical view of Colensos output checks us slightly, what
other evidence is there of reception? It is well known that people in an
oral society, seeing books for the rst time, often treat them as ritual
objects.
Many people who know not a letter wish to possess them-
selves of a copy of the translated Scriptures because they
consider it possesses a peculiar virtue of protecting them from
the power of evil spirits.
o,
At an early church service,
Many of [the Maori] thought it highly proper that they
should be armed with books. It might be an old ships
almanac, or a cast-away novel, or even a few stitched leaves of
old newspapers.
o
The book was given a totemic power of warding off not only evil
spirits: in 1836 it was said that a Maori ghting party had refused to
storm a pa because of a printed Bible inside it and contented them-
selves with a blockade.
o,
In 1839 Taylor recorded seeing Maori with
mission books (or at least odd leaves from them) rolled up and thrust
through holes in the lobes of their ears.
oo
Books were also useful
for making roll-your-own cartridges. One book so used was Milners
o,
Richard Davis, 10 November 1832, cited by Wright, p. 176.
o
G. Clarke, Early Life in New Zealand (Hobart, 1903), p. 31.
o,
Whiteley, 22 December 1836, cited by Parr, A Missionary Library, p. 445.
oo
28 April 1839, ibid.
108
Church History, thus giving a slightly different sense to the phrase the
church militant.
o,
Colenso picked up such a cartridge in which the paper
came from II Samuel and bore the words from chapter 19, v. 34: How
long have I to live?
o8
Markham said his servants melted down his pewter
spoons in 1834 to make musket balls of them, and the rst Volume of
my Voltaires, Louis 14. et 15. torn up and made Cartridges of them.
o,
As the number of New Testaments disseminated was reaching
saturation point (one to every two Maori) in the early 1840s just when
the impact of printing should have been at its height we nd Selwyn
noting A general complaint in all parts of the country, that the schools
are not so well attended as heretofore. He remarked a growing indif-
ference to religion, and a neglect of the opportunities for instruction.
,o
Another missionary comments that We have gained a very large
portion of this people but we have no hold on their children.
,I
By 1844,
Hadeld could say at last
It appears every year more evident that our present system of
conveying instruction to these people is wholly inadequate to
their present wants; they have been brought to a certain point,
and we have no means of bringing them beyond that.
,:
What we have here is not only disillusionment about the actual
extent to which literacy of the most elementary kind had been
achieved, but a clear example of the way in which even the most so-
phisticated technology (print) will fail to serve an irrelevant ideology (an
alien religion).
,,
The missionaries and their great instrument of truth
o,
Life of Henry Williams, p. 60.
o8
o,
New Zealand or Recollections of it, p. 32.
,o
15 June 1843, cited by Parr, Maori Literacy, p. 212.
,I
Thomas Chapman, 28 March 1846, ibid., p. 213.
,:
Cited by Parr, A Missionary Library, p. 446.
,,
As Stanley writes, Physical machinery [sc. books?] cannot make men do
anything. People act or fail to act on the basis of their interpretations of the world
around them, interpretations embodied in language, institutions, and social
organization. The physical world created by human innovative effort reects in
the forms of material objects human assumptions, values, desires, and aspirations
(Technicism, Liberalism, and Development, p. 279). The rst part is true of
Maori resistance to literacy, the second of the missionaries in the value they
109
had failed lamentably to equip the Maori to negotiate their rights with
the Pakeha in the one area that really mattered to them land. Nor was
it merely a failure in creating literacy in Maori. In 1844 almost no Maori
spoke (let alone read) English. In that year a settler said he had met
only two who did so.
,
Selwyn had recognized the need to break away
from the old policy and in 1843 produced the rst primer to help Maori
read English. Colenso followed up in 1872 on a Government commis-
sion with Willies First English Book, Written for young Maoris who
can read their own Maori Tongue and who wish to learn to read the
English language. For all his piety, Colenso saw also the need for
another innovation: in order to the greater and more general use of the
work, all words and sentences of a strictly religious nature have been
purposely omitted.
Historians have too readily and optimistically afrmed extensive
and high levels of Maori literacy in the early years of settlement, and
the role of printing in establishing it. Protestant missionary faith in the
power of the written word, and modern assumptions about the impact
imparted and imputed to the book. Paradoxically the Maori is very sensitive to
(because suspicious of ) the very form of a book, and gives an expressive intention
to features which a European takes for granted as mere accidentals and has
virtually ceased to see. For example, in a review of Michael Kings Maori a
Photographic and Social History (Auckland, 1983), Keri Kaa questions the very
depiction of corpses: The pictures of the tupapaku (corpses) I found most
disturbing . . . My initial reaction was to ask: Whose Nanny is that? Whose Mother
is that? Do their mokopuna mind about their taonga being displayed for all the
world to see? And again There is a strange combination of pictures on page 35.
At the top of the page is a picture of a tangi [mourning], underneath it one of a
woman cooking. Anyone who understands the concepts of tapu and noa [lifting of
tapu] would appreciate that the two should never be mixed by being placed
together on a page. (my italics) The New Zealand Listener (24 September 1983), p. 99.
,
Brown, New Zealand and its Aborigines, p. 99. Augustus Earle, Narrative of a
Residence in New Zealand, ed. E. H. McCormick (Oxford, 1966), pp. 13334, wrote:
I cannot forbear censuring the missionaries, inasmuch as they prevent the natives,
by every means in their power, from acquiring the English language. See also J. S.
Polack, Manners and Customs of the New Zealanders, 2 vols (London, 1840), II, 147:
[The Maori] take much delight in speaking the English language, and had the
Missionaries chosen to have taught the children this tongue, what an immense store
of able works could at once have been put into the hands of the native youth,
instead of a few imperfect translations on one subject, that may teach mechanical
devotion, but can never mentally illuminate the native mind.
110
of the press in propagating it, are not self-evidently valid, and they all
too easily distort our understanding of the different and competitively
powerful realities of societies whose cultures are still primarily oral.
Yet, as Jowett told Colenso when congratulating him on completion
of the Maori New Testament, printing had helped to x the Maori
language albeit in one dialect and with some dangerous neologisms.
Colenso himself was later to make the point that the oral memory, as
a faculty, too easily absorbed and perpetuated the new and corrupt
words born of settlement and trade, taking up the simpler and degen-
erate forms used by the settlers.
,,
Had it not been for the missionaries
and Colensos printing, the language as it was at an early stage of Euro-
pean contact might well have been irretrievably lost.
I wish now to focus on one test of the missionaries efforts to teach
literacy in the 1830s, one test of Colensos effect after ve years print-
ing, one example of a text which offers textual and contextual prob-
lems. I return to the Treaty of Waitangi. (The name, by the way, means
the waters of lamentation.) The Authentic and Genuine History of the
Signing of the Treaty of Waitangi was written at the time by Colenso
although it was not printed until 1890.
On the morning of 30 January 1840 Colenso printed in Maori one
hundred copies of a circular letter inviting Maori chiefs in the northern
area to meet at Waitangi on 5 February. An English draft of the treaty
(a composite version by three men, Hobson, Freeman, and Busby)
had been cobbled together by the 3rd and was given to Henry Williams
on the 4th to translate into Maori. The rst English draft has not
survived.
,o
Williamss translation was discussed with the chiefs on
,,
On Nomenclature, in Three Literary Papers (Napier, 1883), p. 9. In this paper
Colenso also discusses the orthography of place names on maps and in school
geographies, raising many of the issues dramatized by Brian Friel in his play
Translations (1981). See also, H. W. Williams, Reaction of the Maori to the Impact
of Civilization, Journal of the Polynesian Society 44 (1935), 21643, esp. 23435.
,o
Some drafts survive: one by Hobson of the preamble; one in the hand of Freeman,
Hobsons secretary, of the three articles and another version of the preamble; a fair
copy of a draft by James Busby. But they do not themselves constitute the English
text given to Williams to translate. Although Colenso provides an unrivalled
111
Wednesday, 5 February; alterations were made and the revised Maori
version copied on to parchment that night by Richard Taylor. The
original copy of that revised Maori version has not survived. The fair
copy of it, made by Taylor on Wednesday night, was presented to the
chiefs next day, 6 February, for their signatures. It is this document in
Maori, a revised version of a translation into Maori made from a com-
posite English draft no longer extant, which is in the most literal sense
the Treaty of Waitangi. But its textual complexities do not end there.
Hobson also sent abroad, either to Sydney or London, ve English
versions of the Treaty. There are minor differences in three of them,
but the other two bear a different date, differ from the others in the
wording of their preamble, and differ critically from each other in
the second article. According to Ruth Ross, the extant Maori version,
the actual treaty as signed by the chiefs on 6 February, is not a trans-
lation of any one of these ve English versions, nor is any of the English
ones a translation from the Maori. They must therefore descend, with
greater or less accuracy and no authority, from the rst full English
draft, now lost, and made before the Maori translation in its rst and
revised forms. One English version sent to the Secretary of State was
endorsed by Williams, who said it was as Literal a translation of the
Treaty of Waitangi as the Idiom of the Language will admit of . This
cannot have been true, but a comparable disregard for strict textual
accuracy in our own day has led to the inclusion of one of the un-
authoritative English versions as a Schedule to the Waitangi Day Act
(1960).
,,
Other complications of textual authority derive from the fact
that names were added to the treaty over the next seven months, thirty-
nine such names being found on an English copy which the signatories,
being pre-literate, could not have read even if they had known the
language.
account of the treaty occasion, by far the most perceptive analysis of the texts
and their implications is that of R. M. Ross, Te Tiriti o Waitangi: Texts and
Translations, New Zealand Journal of History 6 (1972), 12967. The account I give
of the relationship of the texts is based wholly on Ross.
,,
To add insult to injury, the Maori text printed as the rst schedule to the Act
contains, in the second article, numerous misprints.
112
That last example puts at its most extreme my argument about the
non-literate state of the nation in 1840 after ten years of intensive teach-
ing and ve years of proselytic printing. But even if we conne our-
selves to the Maori text, how literate were the signatories? As Cressy has
said, only one type of literacy is directly measurable the ability or
inability to write a signature and because the evidence of signatures or
marks is, in Schoelds words, universal, standard and direct, it has
come to displace the merely anecdotal, subjective, inescapably impres-
sionistic evidence found in missionary reports and hitherto accepted
by historians.
,8
Applying this test to the Treaty of Waitangi, what do we
nd? The number of signatories is in fact uncertain; estimates vary
from 512 to 541 and, in the manner common to many societies with
mass illiteracy, many of the names given were written out by the
government clerk on behalf of the chief concerned. On my count the
highest possible number of personal signatures, as distinct from crosses,
moko-patterns, or apparently quite meaningless marks, is seventy-
two.
,,
In almost every case the signatures are so painfully and crudely
,8
It is also the most reductive form of literacy test. See David Cressy, Literacy and
the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor England (Cambridge, 1980), p. 53;
and R. S. Schoeld, The Measurement of Literacy in Pre-industrial England, in
Literacy in Traditional Societies, ed. Jack Goody (Cambridge, 1968), p. 319. Although
signatures are the only absolute test of minimal literacy, many who signed with a
mark may have been able to read but not write. See note 79, below.
,,
See plate 5b for a sample. The treaty is supplemented and ultimately constituted
by a collection of sheets subscribed in different parts of the country between
6 February and 3 September 1840. In later times some Maori who could in fact write
their own names are said to have used their moko to give documents a more sacred
sign of approval, but in the 1840 treaty genuine moko appear to be rare. The
seventy-two signatures suggest a maximum literacy level of about 12 per cent or
13 per cent or, to use the international convention of stating illiteracy levels, an
illiteracy level of between 87 per cent and 88 per cent. Margaret Spufford, Small
Books and Pleasant Histories (London, 1981), p. 21, offers a convenient comparison.
In East Anglia in the seventeenth century 11 per cent of women, 15 per cent of
labourers, and 21 per cent of husbandmen could sign their own names, against
56 per cent of tradesmen and craftsmen, and 65 per cent of yeomen. In a survey
taken in 1848, European population in the larger Wellington area was given as 4824.
Of those, 2530 or some 52 per cent (1583 male, 947 female) were said to be able to
read and write, and 924 to be able to read only. A general summary of the Maori
population in much the same area taken in 1850 records (under Moral Condition)
113
written as to show clearly that they have not been penned by signator-
ies practised in writing and therefore uent in the art. We are forced
to conclude, given these numbers, that the Maori in the commemora-
tive plaque is unlikely to have been able to read what he was signing in
even the most literal way. Even if he could do that, the odds are loaded
against his knowing how to write his own name. Even if he could do
that, the evidence suggests that he wrote painfully and with only the
most elementary competence. Of course there were exceptions. But the
presumed wide-spread, high-level literacy of the Maori in the 1830s is a
chimera, a fantasy creation of the European mind. Even at Waitangi
the settlement was premised on the assumption that it was, for the
Maori, an oral-aural occasion.
Consider the way in which the treaty was presented: it was read out
in Maori by Henry Williams. That is, it was received as an oral state-
ment, not as a document drawn up in consultation with the Maori,
pondered privately over several days or weeks and offered nally as a
public communique of agreements reached by the parties concerned.
Without begging any questions about Pakeha intent to deceive, even
the Maori language itself was used against the Maori. First, much of the
detail of the English draft was presumed by Williams to be inexpress-
ible in Maori translation. Second, the forms of Maori used to commu-
nicate Pakeha intentions were, as Ruth Ross has said, not indigenous
Maori but Protestant Pakeha Missionary Maori, learnt from the dis-
tinctive dialect of the northern Ngapuhi tribe. Not only the concepts,
but many of the words, for all their Maori form, were English.
This is not to say that the Maori present were unaware of such things
but only that their mode of dealing with them was oral. It is a mode
which has its own dignities, but it has left virtually no matching record
to complement the Pakeha one. Those present were free to speak on
Wednesday, 5 February, but not thereafter. Hobson had intended
a total of 4711, of whom 1148 or some 24 per cent were said to be able to read and
write, and 414 to be able to read only. See Statistics of New Munster, New Zealand,
from 1841 to 1848 (Wellington, 1849), Table 30; and New Zealand: Further Papers
Relative to the Affairs of New Zealand [Papers by Command 1420.] (London, 1851),
p. 245.
114
to allow them the whole of Thursday to talk among themselves and
gave notice that the meeting would be reassembled on Friday for the
signing. The plan was changed and somewhat to Hobsons surprise the
meeting resumed on Thursday, 6 February. Hobson was content
to receive any signatures on that day from those willing to sign and
anxious to leave; but he would not allow any discussion, this not being
a regular public meeting. This meant the effective proscription of
any further oral argument by those who might have wished to discuss
the matter further, and none at all by those chiefs who only arrived at
Waitangi on that Thursday. Although Hobson assumed that a public
meeting would still be held on the Friday, the parchment copy of the
treaty in Maori was read out as a nished document on the Thursday
(its completion on the Wednesday night presupposed that Maori
modication would go no further). Those present on Thursday were
called upon to sign, and the business of Waitangi was fully despatched
that same day.
On the Wednesday Hobson had explained, with Williams translat-
ing, that if the chiefs did sign the Queen would protect them. In an
important sense this was true: many Maori wanted the British to estab-
lish some legal authority over their own unruly European settlers and
traders and incidentally by their authority to inhibit inter-tribal strife.
Busby, in a half truth, said the Governor had not come to take away
their land but to secure them in the possession of what they held. But
Te Kemara called his bluff and asked for the return to him of the very
land on which they were standing. Rewa, eloquent but sad, added,
I have no lands now only a name, only a name! Kawiti rejected
Hobsons plan: We are free. Hakiro supported him: We are not thy
people. We are free. Tareha: We, we only are the chiefs, rulers. We
will not be ruled over. What! thou, a foreigner, up, and I down! Thou
high, and I, Tareha, the great chief of the Ngapuhi tribes, low! No,
no; never, never. With a air for the dramatic, he held a canoe paddle
high in the air to deride Hobsons intolerable ambition. Tareha, says
Colenso, was also clothed in a lthy piece of coarse old oor matting
simply to ridicule Hobsons supposition that New Zealanders needed
115
the extraneous aid of clothing, &c, from foreign nations.
8o
At the end of
that day the only one of public debate Maori opinion was clearly
opposed to the surrender of sovereignty and therefore of the absolute
control of their own lands.
The next day, Thursday 6 February (now celebrated as a public
holiday), some three to four hundred Maori were, in Colensos words,
scattered in small parties according to their tribes, talking about the
treaty, but evidently not understanding it. Nevertheless, Hobson now
wanted to make an end. Colensos printed report runs:
The Native chiefs were called on in a body to come forward
and sign the document. Not one, however, made any move
nor seemed desirous of doing so till Mr. Busby, hitting on an
8o
Graphic as it is, Colensos account of the Maori-speeches understandably does scant
justice to the originals. As he wrote much later, Some of the New Zealanders were
truly natural orators, and consequently possessed in their large assemblies great
power and inuence. This was mainly owing to their tenacious memories, to their
proper selection from their copious and expressive language; skilfully choosing the
very word, sentence, theme, or natural image best tted to make an impression on
the lively impulsive minds of their countrymen . . . the orators knowledge of their
traditions and myths, songs, proverbs and fables was ever to him an inexhaustible
mine of wealth . . . All the people well knew the power of persuasion particularly
of that done in the open air before the multitude (The New Zealand Exhibition
(Wellington, 1865); section on Ethnology: On the Maori Races of New Zealand,
pp. 7071). What Hobson was up against may be judged from his letter of
17 February 1840, reporting the Hokianga meeting at which he had sought
further subscriptions to the treaty: The New Zealanders are passionately fond of
declamation, and they possess considerable ingenuity in exciting the passions of the
people. On this occasion all their best orators were against me, and every argument
they could devise was used to defeat my object (Facsimiles, p. [x]). Maori orators,
it should be noted, often enjoyed playing devils advocate. Colenso vividly recounts
the anger of Te Kemara (eyes rolling . . . extravagant gestures and grimace), but
adds: And yet it was all mere show not really intended; as was not long after fully
shown, when they gave their evidence as to the fair sale, &c., of their lands before
the Land Commissioners, I myself acting as interpreter.
All quotations here and below relating to the discussion and signing of the treaty
on 5 and 6 February are taken from Colensos own eye- and ear-witness report, The
Authentic and Genuine History of the Signing of the Treaty of Waitangi (Wellington,
1890), principally pp. 3233. Written immediately after the events described, it was
read and its accuracy conrmed by James Busby who was also present.
116
expedient, proposed calling them singly by their names as
they stood in his (private) list, in which list the name of Hoani
Heke (known, too, to be the most favourable towards the
treaty) happened to be the rst at least, of those who were
this day present. On his being called by name to come and
sign, he advanced to the table on which the treaty lay. At this
moment I, addressing myself to the Governor, said,
Will your Excellency allow me to make a remark or two
before the chief signs the treaty?
The Governor: Certainly, sir.
Mr. Colenso: May I ask your Excellency whether it is your
opinion that these Natives understand the articles of the treaty
which they are now called upon to sign? I this morning
The Governor: If the Native chiefs do not know the
contents of this treaty it is no fault of mine. I wish them fully
to understand it . . . They have heard the treaty read by
Mr. Williams.
Mr. Colenso: True, your Excellency; but the Natives are
quite children in their ideas. It is no easy matter, I well know,
to get them to understand fully to comprehend a document
of this kind; still, I think they ought to know somewhat of it to
constitute its legality . . . I have spoken to some chiefs con-
cerning it, who had no idea whatever as to the purport of the
treaty.
Mr. Busby here said, The best answer that could be given
to that observation would be found in the speech made
yesterday by the very chief about to sign, Hoani Heke, who
said, The Native mind could not comprehend these things:
they must trust to the advice of their missionaries.
Mr. Colenso: Yes; and that is the very thing to which I was
going to allude. The missionaries should do so; but at the
same time the missionaries should explain the thing in all its
bearings to the Natives, so that it should be their own very act
and deed. Then, in case of a reaction taking place, the Natives
could not turn round on the missionary and say, You advised
117
me to sign that paper, but never told me what were the contents
thereof . [a comment implying Maori inability to read it].
The Governor: I am in hopes that no such reaction will
take place.
So Colenso gave up, having expressed his conscientious feeling and
discharged what he felt strongly to be his duty. Then forty-six chiefs,
anxious to get home, played this new game and put their marks on
the parchment they could not read. They included chiefs who had
declaimed against signing; but (as Colenso records of one of them)
Marupu, having made his mark (as he could neither read nor write),
shook hands heartily with the Governor and left.
In one sense of course the still pre-literate state of the Maori was not
in itself the critical problem: an oral contract before witnesses could be
given legal standing and marks are legally acceptable as signatures. The
reality, however, is that all who draft documents secure an initiative,
determine the concepts, and choose the linguistic terms by which to
reveal or conceal them. A collective oral response is rarely unanimous
about details of wording; it tends to assume continuing discussion and
modication; and, lacking a documentary form, it is weaker in its
power to bind when a group disperses.
For the Maori present, the very form of public discourse and
decision-making was oral and conrmed in the consensus not in the
document. It is inconceivable that Williamss explanations to them in
Maori were wholly one way, that there was no response and no demand
for reverse mediation. In signing the treaty, many chiefs would have
made complementary oral conditions which were more important
than (and certainly in their own way modied) the words on the page.
For the non-literate, the document and its implications were meaning-
less; for the barely literate, the ability to sign ones name was a trap. At
the end of the rst day, as Hobson went to his boat, an elderly chief
rushed in front of him and looked staringly and scrutinizingly, says
Colenso, into the Governors face. Having surveyed it, he exclaimed in
a shrill, loud, and mournful voice, Auee! he koroheke! Ekore e roa kua
mate. Colenso was reluctant to translate but on being pressed did so:
118
5a From the verso of the Declaration of Independence subscribed by
thirty-four hereditary chiefs or heads of tribes at a meeting convened at
Waitangi on 28 October 1835
119
5b From a sheet supplementary to the Treaty of Waitangi listing those chiefs
of the Otaki, Kapiti, and Manawatu districts who assented to its terms
120
He says, Alas! an old man. He will soon be dead! and he was, but
the document lives on.
At this point we may return to textual criticism. The circumstances
described above do not mean that the treaty is a fraud and the docu-
ments useless. It means that they are only partial witnesses to the occa-
sion. Reconstructing a more authentic version of the understandings
reached between Maori and Pakeha in 1840 is a demanding task, but
not one unusually so to those who edit texts or construct statutes.
One of the most important elements in any such textual reconstruc-
tion is recognition of the Declaration of Independence (see plate 5a)
as a complementary document, rst subscribed on 28 October 1835 by
thirty-four chiefs of whom only four signed their own names. In the
next four years a further eighteen chiefs subscribed, of whom only
three signed (again with difculty) their own names. It was these chiefs
who constituted the invitation list for the meeting at Waitangi on 5
and 6 February 1840; it was these chiefs who were on Busbys private list
and whom he called upon to sign singly by their names as they were
written in the List of the Confederated Chiefs. (I quote Colensos
manuscript draft of his account: the printed version refers simply to
Busbys (private) list.) Because the last signature to the Declaration
had been subscribed as late as 22 July 1839, it is clear that this
Declaration of Independence continued to be a living afrmation
of Maori sovereignty. Its second article specically refers to Ko te
Kingitanga ko te mana . . . All sovereign power and authority was said
to reside entirely and exclusively in the hereditary chiefs and heads of
tribes in their collective capacity. The third article provided for annual
meetings at Waitangi, and it was these chiefs who were the main guests
there on 5 and 6 February 1840. As Claudia Orange has shown, Maori
understanding of the treaty was undoubtedly formed by their sense
that the independence (the rangatiratanga) and the sovereignty (the
mana) they had afrmed in 1835 and reafrmed by further subscrip-
tions as late as 1839, were not nullied by the treaty. British Colonial
Ofce attitudes may have changed in the meantime, but for the Maori
one document did not supersede the other: they lived together, one
complementing the other.
121
It is in this context now that we must ask what it was that the Chiefs
of the Confederation are presumed to have surrendered at Waitangi in
agreeing to the rst article of the treaty. In all the English versions
of the treaty the chiefs cede to Her Majesty the Queen of England,
absolutely and without reservation, all the rights and powers of
Sovereignty. The question here is what the English meant and the
Maori understood by the word Sovereignty. Did it mean that the
chiefs gave up to the Crown their personal power and supreme status
within their own tribes, or was it only something more mundanely
administrative, like governorship? In fact the word used by Henry
Williams to translate Sovereignty was precisely that: kawanatanga, not
even a translation but a transliteration of Governor (kawana) with a
sufx to make it abstract. Such was his translation for the order of
morning service: that all our doings may be ordered by thy govern-
ance. What he signicantly omitted in translating Sovereignty (which
the Maori were being asked to surrender) was the genuine Maori word
mana, meaning personal prestige and the power that owed from it,
or even the word rangatiratanga, meaning chieftainship, the very words
used in 1835 to 1839 to afrm Maori sovereignty over New Zealand.
He had used both words in translating Corinthians chapter 15, v. 24
with its references to the kingdom of God and all authority and
power. By choosing not to use either mana or rangatiratanga to indi-
cate what the Maori would exchange for all the Rights and Privileges of
British subjects, Williams muted the sense, plain in English, of the
treaty as a document of political appropriation.
8I
The status of their
8I
I do not impute to Williams any will to deceive the Maori by his choice of terms.
Attempts to establish a legal basis for the control of British subjects in New Zealand
by extra-territorial jurisdiction had proved unsuccessful. Furthermore, unless
Britain formally secured sovereignty, neither Britain nor the Maori could establish
an exclusive claim to the islands as against claims that might be made by other
European powers. (The Declaration of Independence of 1835 was a device to
establish the chiefs collective territorial rights and forestall an imminent French
claim.) In furthering both concerns, however dubious the exact legal status of the
treaty, the British Government was anxious to secure Maori assent and genuinely
hopeful that British sovereignty would not disrupt Maori life. Nevertheless, cultural
and linguistic suppositions on both sides, compounded by European assumptions
122
assent is already questionable enough, but (since he did not read) had
any Maori heard that he was giving up his mana or rangatiratanga he
could never have agreed to the treatys terms. Williamss Maori version
of Hobsons composite English one set the trap which King Lear fell
into when (in a version published in 1608) he said to Albany and
Cornwall:
I doe inuest you iointly in my powre,
Preheminence, and all the large effects
That troope with Maiestie, . . .
onely we still retaine
The name and all the addicions to a King
about literacy and the status of documents, frustrated that hope, and later (if then
still unforeseen) patterns of immigration destroyed it. Williams certainly shows
himself, at that critical time, to have been less sensitive than Colenso to Maori
modes of understanding.
A succinct and balanced account of many of the issues pertinent to the treaty
and British annexation of New Zealand will be found in Mary Boyds Cardinal
Principles of British Policy in New Zealand, The Treaty of Waitangi: Its Origins
and Signicance (Wellington, 1972), pp. 315. W. A. McKean discusses aspects of
international law as they affect the status and interpretation of the treaty (ibid.,
pp. 3548) but does not substantiate his claim that there is no substance in the
argument that the chiefs were misled or failed to understand the purport in English
of what they were signing (pp. 456, nn. 91 and 92). The best account of the
evolution of Colonial Ofce attitudes to British sovereignty and Maori interests
is Peter Adams, Fatal Necessity: British Intervention in New Zealand 18301847
(Auckland, 1977). An interesting account of later Maori interpretations of the treaty
is Claudia Orange, The Covenant of Kohimarama. A Ratication of the Treaty
of Waitangi, The New Zealand Journal of History 14 (April 1980), 6180. The
minutes of the Kohimarama Conference of July 1860 reveal confusion or ignorance
about the meaning of the treaty. One Ngatiawa chief said, It is true I received one
blanket. I did not understand what was meant by it; it was given to me without
any explanation by Mr Williams and Reihana. Paora Tuhaere dismissed the treaty
as Ngapuhis affair, and the Ngapuhi chiefs there present did reveal greater
understanding and acceptance of it as a covenant unifying Pakeha and Maori.
Tuhaere also remarked: The Treaty is right, but it came in the time of ignorance
and was not understood, adding that those Maori who signed but were not present
at Waitangi had least understanding of it. The Conference skirted the delicate issue
of sovereignty to stress rather the Queens role as protector, allowing the Maori to
believe that they retained sovereignty or mana over the land and political equality
with the Governor under the Queens protection.
123
where addicions implies mana, the attributes of ultimate personal
prestige and sovereignty as distinct from merely delegated authority.
Other textual problems are created by the versions. In the second
article the word rangatiratanga does appear in a context which (in
Maori) seeks to assure the chiefs of the rangatiratanga or full posses-
sion of their lands, their homes and all their possessions. Four of the
ve English versions, however, spell out that provision to read full,
exclusive and undisturbed possession of their Lands and Estates,
Forests, Fisheries and other properties which they may collectively or
individually possess. Although technically the English versions have
no textual authority, these explicit references to forests and sheries
have become a matter of great import and Maori today have found
good reason to plead the intention of those English versions against the
sparer wording of the Maori one.
8:
On the other hand, the Maori word
for what is guaranteed by the Crown (taonga, or precious possessions)
is almost innitely extendable and may include any or every element of
Maori culture, including the language itself. Even more signicantly,
indeed tragically, the English versions of the second article also require
the chiefs to yield to Her Majesty the exclusive right of Pre-emption
over such lands as the proprietors thereof may be disposed to alienate,
at such prices as may be agreed upon. Williamss Maori version
omitted to spell out and thereby legitimate under the treaty the
Crowns pre-emptive right to purchase Maori land. As a consequence,
the English versions have been taken to bestow legality on the actions
of successive Governments, while the Maori version seems morally to
justify the deep sense of grievance still widely suffered over Maori
land issues.
8,
Once more, Colenso, writing to the Church Missionary
8:
Fishing rights became a matter of contention when in 1983 the then Government
proposed to direct into the sea efuent from a synthetic petrol plant at Motunui.
The subsequent Report, Findings and Recommendations of the Waitangi Tribunal on
an Application . . . on Behalf of the Te Atiawa Tribe in Relation to Fishing Grounds in
the Waitara District (Wellington, 1983) includes a valuable rsum of many textual
issues raised by the present paper.
8,
Sir Apirana Ngatas literal translation from the Maori of the second article reads:
The Queen of England conrms and guarantees to the Chiefs and Tribes and to all
the people of New Zealand the full possession of their lands, their homes and all
124
Society, did not for a moment suppose that the chiefs were aware that
by signing the Treaty they had restrained themselves from selling their
land to whomsoever they will, and cited one Maori who, although he
had signed the treaty, had since offered land for sale privately. On being
told that he could not do that, he replied: What? Do you think I wont
do what I like with my own?
8
From a European point of view, one conditioned to accept and
apply document-based historical evidence as literally true or false, the
English versions of the treaty have proved a potent political weapon
in legitimating government of the Maori, even though standards of
textual and historical truth also derived from European traditions
oblige us to acknowledge the Maori version as the only authoritative
document, that which states the terms and bears the written marks of
assent. On any reasonable reading of the Maori, it surrenders less and
guarantees more than any of the English versions. Even so, from a
their possessions, but the chiefs assembled and all other chiefs yield to the Queen
the right to alienate such lands which the owners desire to dispose of at a price
agreed upon between the owners and person or persons appointed by the Queen
to purchase on her behalf (The Treaty of Waitangi: an Explanation (Christchurch,
1950), p. 7).
8
Letter begun 24 January 1840, cited by Bagnall and Petersen, pp. 9394. Again I
acknowledge the kind help of Paul McHugh. The Crowns pre-emptive right to
extinguish the native title had been long practised in colonizing overseas territories
and was most vigorously afrmed in the Royal Proclamation of 1763 which was seen
as protecting North American Indian lands from unscrupulous appropriation.
The English land law assumption that all rights to land derive from a grant by the
Crown clearly did not apply to new territories, where the aboriginal title rested
at law, not upon a grant from the Crown, but (exceptionally) upon the Crowns
recognition of aboriginal rights. To the British mind, however, it was unthinkable
that aboriginal and heathen notions of title should control the form of land
transfers to British settlers, and so the pre-emptive right was adopted as a way of
converting Crown-recognized title into Crown-derived title. From the British point
of view, it was undoubtedly seen as preventing the chaos which must have followed
from the operation of a mixed system, and at the same time (if fairly administered)
as protecting the Maori from land-jobbers. One has to concede that neither
Hobson nor Williams could have communicated the full import of pre-emptive
to those who were asked to assent to the treaty, but by so simplifying the issue in his
translation of the second article into Maori, Williams again showed less readiness
than did Colenso to penetrate the Native mind and explain the thing in all its
bearings . . . so that it should be their own very act and deed. One might be accused
of arguing from hindsight were it not for Colensos contemporary insight.
125
Maori point of view, the truth is not so conned, and signatures bear
no absolute authority. For the Maori, as I have already indicated, the
text was the consensus arrived at through discussion, something
much more comprehensive and open than the base document or any
one of its extant versions. Williams later defended himself, saying that
he had explained the text orally; but only the documents survived, and
successive Governments have chosen the English ones to act on when
these best served their ends. At a later treaty meeting, Mohi Tawhai said
that the sayings of the Pakeha oat light, like the wood of the whau
tree, and always remain to be seen, but the sayings of the Maori sink to
the bottom like stone.
8,
Manuscript and print, the tools of the Pakeha,
persist, but words which are spoken fade as they fall.
Print is still too recent for the Maori. Oral traditions live on in a
distrust of the literal document, and in a refusal by many young Maori
to accept political decisions based on it. Pakeha and Maori versions of
the past continue to collide. During a Russian scare in the 1880s the
Government of the day pre-empted the purchase of Maori land at
Bastion Point, a ne site overlooking Auckland harbour. When a more
recent Government proposed to resell it for luxury housing, it was
occupied for more than a year by Maori protesters. In my minds eye, I
can still read the vivid television news pictures of police and military
vehicles as they moved in on 25 May 1978 to evict the squatters. At such
moments literacy denes itself for many as a concordat of sword
and pen, of politics and script to the dismay and frustration of those
8,
Cited by Ross, op. cit., p. 152, from British Parliamentary Papers, 1845, XXXIII, 108,
p. 10. Despite the transience of the spoken word, there is a wealth of Maori speech
in manuscripts still to be studied. Some are tapu and unable to be consulted, but
the written transcripts of evidence delivered in Maori land courts are a rich source
of information about language and forms of oral witness to land rights as declaimed
in court. Elsdon Best records that when he was secretary to the Land Commission,
an old man recited 406 songs for him from memory, a genealogy which took three
days to recite and included over 1400 persons in proper sequence, and much other
evidence on the occupation of certain lands: The Maori School of Learning: Its
Objects, Methods and Ceremonies (Wellington, 1923), p. 5. See also Jane McRae,
Maori Manuscripts in Public Collections, New Zealand Libraries 44 (March 1983),
811.
126
whose modes are oral. Pakeha continue to assume Sovereignty where
radical Maori persist in believing that nothing so sacred as mana has
ever been ceded under the treaty, that Maori sovereignty was, and is,
intact.
8o
As it happens, the Maori text supports them.
In the reports Colenso has left us, he shows his perception of the
complex relationships of oral witness, text, print, and political and
economic power. For us, the texts in context quickly deconstruct and
lose their literal authority no book was ever bound by its covers. The
book, in all its forms, enters history only as an evidence of human
behaviour, and it remains active only in the service of human needs.
But must the story end there, in a conict of irreconcilable versions?
In terms of a sociology of the text, it is impossible to regard the Maori
version as quite complete, although it carries the highest authority,
nor the English ones as authoritative, although they are far more ex-
plicit. Like many dramatic texts, each has been born, here maimed and
deformed, of the pressures of context. In the rareed world of textual
scholarship, it would be commendably scholarly to deny any possibil-
ity of conation, any notion that the text of the Treaty of Waitangi is
anything other than its distinct historical versions. To conate the
versions would be to create a text that never was. The distinguished
textual scholar Sir Walter Greg had little patience with such timidity:
many editors, he wrote, produce, not editions of their authors works
at all, but only editions of particular authorities for those works.
8,
The principle of reconstructing an ideal text from all the versions is
vitally operative in legal opinion on the interpretation of treaties as
documents which must be interpreted in the spirit in which they are
drawn. In New Zealand, under the Treaty of Waitangi Act, an advisory
tribunal was set up and directed by Government to determine the
meaning and effect of the Treaty as embodied in the two [sic] texts and
to decide issues raised by differences between them. It was essentially
8o
See, for example, Donna Awatere, Maori Sovereignty (Auckland, 1984), and Bruce
Jesson, Reviewing the Sovereignty Debate, The Republican 48 (December 1983),
317, 1920.
8,
The Rationale of Copy-text, in Collected Papers, ed. J. C. Maxwell (Oxford, 1966),
p. 384.
127
an editorial direction which recognized the social inutility of a clutter of
versions, as distinct from the social value of a harmonized text.
The Waitangi Tribunal, however, afrmed an even higher principle:
A Maori approach to the Treaty would imply that its wairua
or spirit is something more than a literal construction of the
actual words used can provide. The spirit of the Treaty tran-
scends the sum total of its component written words and puts
narrow or literal interpretations out of place.
88
That spirit is only recoverable if texts are regarded not simply as
verbal constructs but as social products. Crucial to that development is
Pakeha recognition of their own myth of literacy and recognition of the
status of oral culture and spoken consensus. For many Maori, the spirit
of the treaty is best served by the Maori text, in which kawanatanga
means what it says (governorship, not sovereignty), in which the
taonga guaranteed by the Crown include all that is materially and
88
Report pp. 5263; the immediate quotation is on p. 55. A Bill of Rights for New
Zealand. A White Paper (Wellington, 1985), p. 37, proposes that the Treaty of
Waitangi is to be regarded as always speaking and shall be applied to circumstances
as they arise so that effect may be given to its spirit and true intent. Nevertheless,
Pakeha intentions to give legal effect to the treaty in a Bill of Rights, however
strongly entrenched, would destroy its tapu state and make it vulnerable to
legislative change: its mana would then be lost. As indicated in note 35 above, an
oral culture will generate, not a xed text, but a variety of versions which have their
local and topical value in giving life to the wairua of the text which comprehends
and transcends them all. Treaties are likely to become a more frequently used
resource, not only for ethnohistorical studies, but for concepts of text in complex
political, linguistic, and cultural contexts, for their mixed modes of oral and written
discourse, for their synchronic and diachronic dimensions, for their continuing
human implications (they are not exactly dramatic ctions), and for the forcing
circumstances which compel the law to offer what are essentially editorial
judgements. David R. Miller of the Newberry Library tells me that the microlming
of 9,552 Iroquois treaty documents has been completed, and an associated study
published: The History and Culture of Iroquois Diplomacy: an Interdisciplinary Guide
to the Treaties of the Six Nations and League (Syracuse, 1985). The value of treaties as
texts for analysis of diplomacy as a matter of cultural as well as political contact is
well demonstrated in Dorothy V. Joness Licence for Empire: Colonisation by Treaty
(Chicago, 1983). A. S. Keller, O. J. Lissitzyn, and F. J. Mann, Creation of Rights of
Sovereignty through Symbolic Acts, 14001800 (New York, 1938) remains a
convenient historical summary of European attitudes and practice.
128
spiritually precious, in which Maori and Pakeha share the Queens pro-
tection as equal partners. So understood, the treaty in Maori is a sacred
covenant, one which is tapu, and with a mana which places it above the
law, whereas the English versions distort its effect and remain caught in
the mesh of documentary history and juridical process. As the Maori
always knew, there is a real world beyond the niceties of the literal text
and in that world there is in fact a providential version now editing
itself into the status of a social and political document of power and
purpose. The physical versions and their fortuitous forms are not the
only testimonies to intent: implicit in the accidents of history is an ideal
text which history has begun to discover, a reconciliation of readings
which is also a meeting of minds. The concept of an ideal text as a cul-
tural and political imperative is not imposed on history but derives
from it and from an understanding of the social dynamics of textual
criticism.
Colenso died in 1899 at the ripe old age of eighty-eight, thirty-six
hours after penning his last letter to Coupland Harding. He left to
Harding two hundred pounds for his son, William Colenso Harding,
and all his printing materials, including my sole composing-stick
with which I did so much work both in England and in New Zealand.
Harding was a worthy recipient and was later to note: It was in this
stick that the Maori New Testament of 1837 was set, and also the Treaty
of Waitangi Truly, a venerable relic.
8,
8,
Letter to G. Robertson, 1 March 1899: Mitchell MS AC 83/4.

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Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts

bibliography and the

Bibliography and Science, Studies in Bibliography 27 (1974), 88.

Literature on the psychology of reading is indicative. See, for example, Marlene

With the prodigality of a Huntington or a Folger, or in this case even

When Samuel Marsden

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