Defenders of the Text
Who are the defenders of the text? A motley band of heroes—the scholars who discovered the text, preserved it, learned to read it, transmitted it, edited it, and published it. The essay is a funeral oration for them, and an argument that the oration is premature.
It moves through three eras of English criticism. The invention of the discipline by Richard Bentley and Alexander Pope, where conjectural emendation grounds itself in the critic’s genius and the text becomes the property of its author. The rise of ballad criticism and theories of communal authorship in the later eighteenth century. And the professionalisation of textual scholarship by records scholars in the employ of the state.
Running through it is a question about large language models. Both textual criticism and the model work over a shared body of public records full of gaps and corruptions, and both fill those gaps by generating text that was never there. Bentley’s Horace is a hallucination with a preface. What distinguishes the fabrications the tradition authorises from the ones it refuses? The essay declines to answer that the difference is simply genius, and argues instead that we should attend to the public textual domain on which both depend—the reservoir of the English language, which is our common property and our common responsibility.