The Quoter's Privilege

Honestly, I don't remember much about Cao Xueqin's 18th century novel, Dream of Red Mansions (紅樓夢), beyond not liking it very much. I suppose that's not entirely true; I did like Jia Tanchun, but that probably has to do with the fact that she's an asshole like me. Anyway, I was sifting thru my crit. ed. of Yosano Akiko's Midaregami this afternoon, and I found a most conspicuous note on the back of a single page of a Yotsuba! tear-away daily calendar:

Cao Xueqin

"I must claim the quoter's privilege of giving only as much of the text as will suit my purposes," said Tanchun. "If I told you how it went on, I should end up by contradicting myself!"

I can't really recall if that's what the quote actually said, or even if it's representative of Tanchun. However, it is the kind of thing I think Tanchun would say, even if she hadn't, in fact, done so. It's this principle that seems, to me at least (others as a rule tend not to share my view - others meaning "my committee members"), to underly the vast majority of textual criticism: to make an author say, if not what you want them to, what you think they should have said. Some have accused me of being unfair in pointing this out (again and again and again), either because it's somewhat obvious and really doesn't bear repeating or because it damns the earnestness on the part of critics who reconstruct texts that are incomprehensible absent emendation. I really don't think it's either of these. It's not obvious, because we still talk about such silly things as the text's "corruption" and its truth lying (note the pun, please - okay, move along) somewhere in the unknowable (yet grossly surmise-able) past, and it's not damning, because honestly I don't think there's anything wrong with making a text say what you want it to. Sure, taken to an extreme, an individual could do real violence to a text but never without risk. You see, it's just as likely that someone will be as wreck-less with what you say, so generally, I think, people will police their own opinions. An illustrative example (paraphrased) from a recent meeting about my third chapter:

He: I don't think you're being very fair to Thomson in quoting him the way you do.
Me: Well, Thomson isn't very fair to Catullus in quoting him the way he does.

I'm not trying to get "revenge" for one of my favorite poets; I merely want to remind the (five or six) people who will read my dissertation that these cycles of reading and re-reading (or in the odd jargon of my diss, "reding") are a kind of invigorating trap: invigorating, because they allow the critic certain poetic exuberances, and a trap, because they may very well undergo the same treatment to which they submit their object of study. This is the game a literary critic plays. Perhaps this is why students from a recent class of mine continue to refer to this grad school "ending" exercise in pointlessness, whenever I bump into them, as my "distortion."*


*Although the real reason is a not entirely insignificant slip of the tongue when I was introducing myself at the beginning of the semester.