book history is concerned with how these meanings are influenced by factors often beyond the control of authors themselves, with how they are intimately connected with (among other pressures) those exercised by the publishing industry, agents and editors; the ruling discourses of reviewing and the economics of bookselling and advertising; censorship or other kinds of state control or public moral or political pressure; the exigencies of popular reception, serialisation or abridgement (and also educational institutionalisation); the valorising economics of literary prize cultures; and, indeed, academic study.
If what is at issue is an imperative to chart and trace the predicaments of text and of the textual (print or otherwise), then, as McDonald (1997, 120–21) suggests, rather than asking what book history can contribute to literary criticism, one might well turn the question on its head and ask what might be the “relevance of literary interpretation to book history”. Book-historical studies, studies in the cultures of script and print, studies of the institutions of text or of the literary might then be all regarded as offering the prospect of “nuanced, responsible” accounts of the vagaries of meaning and the contingency of validating categories (including “literariness”), an account that “refuses to accept the assurances of traditional historicism, or to define itself against reading, criticism” and, crucially for McDonald (2003, 241), “theory”. McDonald (2003, 231) observes that theory and book history both seek in effect to focus on “the problematics of dissemination and its implications for classical ideas of close reading”: theorists interested in text (implicitly influenced, McDonald suggests, by post-structuralism—he labels them “ahistorical textualists”) seemed to have squared up, in one understanding of what might be thought of as a literary culture war in the 1980s and 1990s, against bibliographers and literary sociologists (“historical documentalists”) without acknowledging their shared concerns. “The point”, McDonald (2003, 232) concludes, is to recognise that an interest in the literary need not exclude a concern with the material, and vice versa. The point is, in his words,
not to celebrate the document at the expense of writing—in Derrida’s sense of the term—but to study its attempts to contain the disruptive forces of dissemination, and, in so doing, to make publishing history the foundation of a larger history of reading (McDonald 2003, 232).6
McDonald expands on this in a 2006 essay, offering a description of disparate responses not to the general question of the nature of textuality and dissemination, but to the question of literariness itself in the wake of what he calls “theory’s successful bid for hegemony” (McDonald 2006, 215) in literary and cultural studies. His complex argument hinges on revisiting Derrida’s much-quoted—even “notorious”—claim “[i]l n’y a pas de hors-texte”, which McDonald notes has been translated variously as “[t]here is nothing outside of the text” (by Gayatri Spivak in 1976) and “[t]here is no outside-the-text” (by Derek Attridge in 1992) (McDonald 2006, 222). Hors-texte, McDonald (2006, 223) notes in an original departure, is, however, also “a technical bookmaking term roughly translated as ‘plate’ (as in ‘This book contains five color plates’)”—hence Derrida is here indulging in a pun that invokes this meaning alongside “hors-texte” (or “outside-the-text”), his “play on words (or on a hyphen)”. McDonald (2006, 223) here draws our attention to “Derrida’s lively bibliographic imagination”, suggesting that the notorious statement “announced neither a triumphant nor a culpable break with history”. It is worth quoting McDonald fully further:
The play on words inventively underscored Derrida’s sustained commitment to putting in question received assumptions about what is outside and what is thought to be inside writing. As the literal rendering suggests (“There are no plates”), the idea that there is a secure division between, say, illustrations and the main text is an illusion fostered by the materiality of the book (e.g., by the use of special high-quality paper for the plates). Since illustrations, like paratexts, frame writing (or vice versa) and since writing has a capacity to exceed all frames, there can be no assured sense of where the text proper begins or ends. … Understood in this way, Derrida’s playful pun illustrates how his thinking connects rather than separates theorists and book historians by pointing to their shared interest in radically rethinking the idea of the book (McDonald 2006, 223).
For Derrida, in other words, it was never a question of the text over the book, but rather an understanding that the text always already implies—and requires attention to—its implicatedness in a material instantiation, or at least in a context that makes any interpretation of [i]l n’y a pas de hors-texte as a refusal of relation fatuous.
* * *
The redeployment of printing terminology serves in a different context to highlight another long-running tension between theory and materiality—although in this case it is the term’s unwitting polyvalence that is useful, and the tension is less diffused than in other regionally or period-centred fields of study. Isabel Hofmeyr and Sarah Nuttall contextualise their comments about the “pressing” urgency “for a more material engagement with the text” in “postcolonial literary studies” (hitherto too dependent “on a markedly abstract notion of text”) through reference to Homi K. Bhabha’s “use of the word ‘stereotype’—defined by him as an ambivalent strategy by which colonizers pathologically re-iterate their simultaneous dread of and desire for the colonized” (Hofmeyr & Nuttall 2001, 3, quoting Bhabha 1994, 81–82). Stereotype, however, has another meaning, Hofmeyr and Nuttall note, in a move not unlike McDonald’s re-reading of Derrida. This other meaning “derives from the world of nineteenth-century printing where a stereotype is a plaster-of-paris, papier-maché or metal mould taken from a hand-composed page of metal type thereby allowing the page to be broken up and the type to be used elsewhere” (Hofmeyr & Nuttall 2001, 3). There is mileage in exploring the resonances of the latter meaning for the former: both text and print facilitated anthropological knowledge, on which colonial authority drew to facilitate its rule over those it interpellated as its others. Print facilitated orthographic reduction and proselytising intrusion, serving the spread of Western education and religion and reducing the “native” to a type whose common traits were no less recognisable to the European than the words and letters describing him capable of being repeated—endlessly, literally and metaphorically—through stereotyping and metal stereotype. Print and power, in other words, are inextricably co-imbricated.
Throughout the 1990s, materialist critics of the textual idealism of colonial discourse analysis—of what Stephen Slemon and Helen Tiffin (1989, x) call its flight into “a domain of pure ‘textuality’”—began themselves to call for “assessments of the material conditions of cultural production and consumption in post-colonial societies” (Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin 1995, 463). By the time these editors of the 1995 Post-Colonial Studies Reader came to revise the collection for a second edition, published in 2006, they could include a number of extracts from studies of just these processes and operations (including from Graham Huggan’s important 2001 The Postcolonial Exotic; see Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin 2006, 397–425), including engagements with the history of the multiple textual embodiments of literary works and with the history of their reception and commodification. Bruce King (1996, 18) had echoed these calls, writing in the mid-1990s that attention needed to be paid to “actual social contexts, cultural networking, and literary careers of writers”. And these writers came to include those Homi Bhabha and Edward Said had not been interested in uncovering—that is, those whose textual production contested Orientalist inscription, those who did not merely mimic and conform to stereotype (however ambivalent and fractured Bhabha allowed for these to be). Priya Joshi (2002, 13), for example, in her study of the novel in British India, comments that Said’s Orientalism, while doubtless transformative for the study of colonialism, was “curiously silent on the responses and resistances to the totalizing practices of the metropole occurring on the ground during the colonial encounter”. Said and others following him paid little attention to the reception of colonial representations that formed the basis of study for colonial discourse analysis. Gauri Viswanathan’s Masks of Conquest and Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather likewise overlook
