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Yesterday saw me go through the process of selecting a textbook to use for a class I have been assigned to teach in the spring.  It had been some time since I had had the opportunity to do so, as my previous institution did not offer much flexibility in its textbook selection, and it was a bit frantic a search, but I got done what needed to get done.  I am relatively happy with the text I chose; it ought to offer my students and me more options for getting done the work I tentatively plan to have the class do.

As I worked (quickly) through selecting a text, the issue of editions came to mind.  In many cases, students, and the section of the general public they represent, come into classes thinking that there is one text, unitary and inviolate.  The words (which are to be read minimally if at all) are the words, period.

This is, of course, not true.

I have expressed to students before that in many cases, the words that are made available for reading go through several people before being read.  The writer has to write them, of course, and there are many occasions in which the writer is able to submit those words to general view without other interference (this blog, for example).  And while there is some value in offering the minimally-mediated insight into the writerly persona, there are also problems; we are all of us myopic in one way or another, letting slip things that other eyes would catch and making ourselves look just a little less intelligent thereby.  Thus the presence in professional writing of editors, reviewers, proofreaders, and publishers, each of whom alters or adjusts the text in some way.  Each alteration, following both McLuhan and McGann, changes the way in which the text can be read, however slightly.

An easy example, and one that has come up with my students in the past, is that of the Christian Bible.  I have on my shelves at this very moment several copies of the text, at least three of which label themselves as the King James Version; one of them is the Oxford UP Quatercentenary Edition of the 1611 printing, and the other two are commonly available at bookstores.  The words are not the same among the three.  Even the contents are not the same; the 1611 text includes entire books that the later editions omit entirely.  Which one, then, is the "authentic" text, the "real" one, is subject to an interpretation that has to include things beyond the words themselves.  At root, the text is not the text; it is a text, and there are others in competition with it.

If such is true for what is supposed to be the Eternal and Revealed Word of God, how much more true is it like to be for works that have no such lofty pretentions?  Surely the words of mere mortals cannot be expected to have the same power as those meant by the Almighty as the One True Way of life--yet even the text of Scripture is contested (and hotly, as it has been for seventeen hundred years and more).  That other, presumably lesser, texts then go through and exist in multiple editions, multiple competing versions of relatively equal validity, is not to be wondered at.  And this is why I get to select textbooks as I do.