The Third Eye: Editorial Visions of the Draft Text

In a 1993 Paris Review interview, Toni Morrison identifies the value of editing: "Good editors are really the third eye. Cool. Dispassionate. They don't love you or your work; for me that is what is valuable — not compliments. Sometimes it's uncanny: the editor puts his or her finger on exactly the place the writer knows is weak but just couldn't do any better at the time."1This essay explores that "uncanny" editorial vision of literary drafts, drawing on conceptions of the draft text from Continental genetic criticism and Anglo-American editorial theory. In addition, I consider descriptions of editorial activity from the growing body of scholarship on the practice of professional editing and from accounts of professional literary editors and literary agents who often perform important editorial roles in the contemporary publishing world. While genetic critics and editorial theorists have approached the processes of composition and revision from an author's perspective, I read the draft text through an editor's sight. Because most texts, when they reach an editor, have advanced from a potential version, in Peter Shillingsburg's terms, to a developing version, the point of entry for an editor is necessarily different.2 This orientation, I argue, has aesthetic, epistemological, and even ontological implications for the draft text itself: editors operate along a conceptual horizon of how a draft text might develop, emerging from what an author has produced but also from potential becomings within an editor's imaginings. While editors interact with a text at multiple levels of its production - from acquisition to marketing to distribution ­- I focus primarily on instances of editors (re)shaping draft texts, at the micro- and macro-levels, in ways that have seemed valuable to both partners in the publishing process. I consider a range of examples along the way, primarily from postwar American fiction, but my main goal is to outline a conceptual framework within which to consider the work of professional literary editors, as distinct yet derived from the relationship between authors and texts.3

Reading an author's manuscript through an editor's "third eye" entails seeing an aesthetic object that is partially imaginary, but that is also framed by the real parameters of the draft version. While authors begin with a blank page or a blank screen, editors intervene at an intermediate stage in the production process, often steering or shaping a draft text toward an ultimately distinct form and content. In practice, most scholarly editions have positioned the text along author-centric lines, within intentionalist, materialist, or fluid-text horizons. None of these options leave much room for readers to genuinely occupy an editor's "third eye" in relation to unpublished versions. An edition that sought to account for an editor's developmental interventions might offer readers alternate arrangements of a text's component parts to capture the aesthetic implications of reading the work in one sequence or another. A scholarly edition premised on an editor's conception would downgrade both intentionalist and materialist frameworks, by privileging neither the author's aim's for the text's progression nor practical negotiations among authors, editors, and publishers preceding publication. Rather, this kind of edition would come closest to the embedded awareness of possible textual versions in a fluid-text edition, highlighting an editor's specific role in generating or discarding particular versions.

Editorial vision is also framed, of course, by commercial concerns. Jonathan Galassi, editor at Farrar Straus and Giroux, has compared his role as an editor to being a "double agent." Galassi explains that "Since he represents the publisher (who employs him) to the writer, and the writer (to whose work he is committed) to the publisher, his loyalties are inescapably divided, for though these interests should ideally coincide they often appear to be or actually are in conflict."4 Michael Pietsch, the CEO at Hachette - and former editor of David Foster Wallace at Little, Brown and Company - makes a similar point as a kind of career advice for editors in commercial publishing: "the more the editor understands how the books she acquires fit within the company's entire enterprise — the more she thinks like a manager — the better she'll be able to influence the success of the books she's taken on and shape a successful career."5 While market considerations always play a significant role, I ultimately see the double agent metaphor as pushing too far in the direction of the market. Most editors (and now agents) display an even greater loyalty to their perception of the draft text in its best possible form; accordingly, I emphasize editorial vision in terms of Morrison's "third eye" as the most productive way to engage with the kinds of revised texts that editors intervene on and reimagine. While editors at commercial firms necessarily aim both to optimize a text's marketability and to bring out the "truest" version of the work, Morrison's metaphor tilts further away from a purely commercial sensibility. Her work on Toni Cade Bambara's posthumous novel, which I refer to below, demonstrates this balance.

As Susan L. Greenberg notes in her extensive study of the history and practice of professional literary editing, editors have engaged in developmental editing since the nineteenth century, "assisting the author by showing an imaginative openness to the possibilities of a text," while increasingly taking on publishers' necessary commercial motives of "offering something to the public that is at once distinctive and sustainable."6 Professional editors - from their early incarnations as nineteenth century publishers' "readers," to the emergence of the modern editor in the 1920s, to the pronounced shift toward an ever more market-oriented mindset since the 1980s - have always defined their relationship to a draft text from this kind of developmental perspective. The specific manifestations of editors' "imaginative openness" can often be difficult to trace, as professional editors have tended to downplay their roles in relation to authors, and scholarly approaches to textual revision have often echoed that silence. But several important studies in the last few years — such as Greenberg's A Poetics of Editing (2018), Tim Groenland's The Art of Editing: Raymond Carver and David Foster Wallace (2019), and Abram Foley's The Editor Function: Literary Publishing in Postwar America (2021), among others — have begun to bring editorial work out of the scholarly shadows. This essay aims to continue in that direction by defining the ways in which editors (re)imagine draft texts and outlining directions for scholarly approaches to editing that will more fully incorporate professional editors' epistemological perspectives.

In most cases, the effects of developmental editing are mutually beneficial to the author and the editor, producing a revised manuscript that meets the standards of the literary market while remaining faithful to the spirit of the draft work. Edward Garnett, whom Greenberg cites as the "first publisher's reader to make a mark," cut about 60,000 words from D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers (1913), for instance, at a time when a "change in public taste" favored "shorter novels and tighter prose," with Lawrence embracing these changes.7 Similarly, Morrison's posthumous editing of Toni Cade Bambara's epic Those Bones Are Not My Child (1999) reduced a manuscript of an unpublishable 1,800 pages, which Bambara felt "didn't have an ending," to a book with a more manageable length of about 650 pages, with a conclusion that Morrison believed would honor Bambara's intentions.8 Even in cases with a clear potential for conflict — such as Edward Aswell at Harper and Brothers encouraging Richard Wright to effectively censor Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1941) to earn the imprimatur of the Book-of-the-Month Club, or Morrison's own editor, Robert Gottlieb, asking her to change a key word, "join," at the end of Beloved (1987) — the matter is rarely so simple.9 Gordon Lish, for example, extensively condensed Raymond Carver's prose to render his stories exempla of minimalism. Karl Ove Knausgård defends Lish's prolonged cuts, on the principle that "the job of the editor is to exert influence, not for his own good, nor necessarily for the author's, but for that of the book, and if we can suggest that Lish went too far, we must also ask in relation to what?"10 While Knausgård finds Lish's view of Carver's stories to be truer to "the book" than Carver's, others might very well conclude that in any or all of these instances, the editor in question was wrong in his judgment of the work or that the editor's response proceeded from a fundamental misreading of what the work in question actually entailed. All the same, these judgments would still view editors, however charitably, as operating in the best interests of the work as they have perceived it. Morrison, similarly, thinks of editing as a matter of adhering to "what the text is demanding, in that style, in that fashion."11

The notion of an editorial fidelity to an idealized conception of the work runs through many descriptions of editorial vision and practice, whether in concert or conflict with editors' double loyalties. As Peter Ginna explains in his introduction to What Editors Do, effective editing requires that "you must grasp what the writer is trying to accomplish in the book; sometimes this will be more evident to you than to the author. And to publish a book well, you must combine that understanding of the author's vision with the knowledge of the marketplace — of what readers are looking for and how they find it."12 While that editorial doubleness operates throughout the revision process that precedes publication, it also applies to the stages of the textual production process before and after a book's public appearance. As Pietsch's comment above suggests, editors' roles comprise both gatekeeper and contributor to a publishing house's overall list. Greenberg accordingly divides editorial work into four overlapping phases: selection, shaping, linking, and "relationships," a term that refers back to the overall interaction among author, text, and editor.13 Her sense of "linking," similarly, entails the placement of a newly published book within the context of the publisher's list, an identity expressed by the "specific material conditions" of a book's physical (or electronic) production, which express the "company that a text keeps with other texts," with editorial "shaping" extending from line-editing to conceptual interventions. 14 While Greenberg notes that these levels of editing are not always easily distinguishable given that minor changes to a sentence or paragraph may contribute importantly to a manuscript's overall aesthetic, as in Morrison's agreeing to change the final word of Beloved, accounts of editorial practice do typically include conceptual differences between the kind of close textual attention that ultimately ends in proofreading and the kinds of editorial vision that are more focused on a manuscript's structural trajectory. 15 The most significant editorial interventions often come from the phase of developmental editing, which Bloomsbury senior editor Nancy S. Miller defines by "such big-picture matters as structure, pacing, plotting, shaping an argument, gaps in the narrative, believability of characters, enhancing or cutting subplots, excising extraneous material, and interweaving strands into a cohesive whole — all this in order to get the 'bones' of the book in their proper shape."16 Miller's metaphor, as so often in editors' descriptions of their work, or in Knausgård's understanding of Lish's editorial role, positions the "book" as a potential aesthetic object waiting to be uncovered in the tangle of its draft versions, with editors guiding authors toward such eventual discoveries.

Editors necessarily develop different relationships with different authors, and even different relationships with various texts by the same writer. Similarly, editors' sense of how a manuscript might fit within their company's list will also shift, depending on their employer and the particular social and historical circumstances surrounding its business at a given time. Editorial perceptions are close to, but importantly distinct from, authorial understandings, often clarifying or pointing out problems that an author has not quite seen. Similarly, editors often glimpse a version of a work that does not exist in its manuscript form, but which seems realizable given the path charted so far. Editorial imagination is thus a creative act following from the initial stages of authorial invention, and typically secondary to an author's ongoing role in the production process. Diana Athill, a longtime postwar British editor at the firm Allan Wingate, for instance, recalls that her "only editorial intervention" in Jean Rhys's "early version" of Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), was noting that the marriage between Rochester and Antoinette (Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre) "became a disaster almost immediately, before it had been given time to exist." As Athill later learned from Rhys's correspondence, her advice to allow readers to see the marriage develop before it fell apart had served as an essential "clue" leading Rhys through her subsequent revisions, when "at once the marriage came alive and was launched on its complex and agonizing course."17 Even based on this fragmentary account, Athill's "intervention" is a clear instance of an editor seeing a narrative in progress through a reader's point of view, and sensing the insufficiently motivated turn in the marriage. We might well imagine that Rhys would have arrived eventually at a similar conclusion on her own, but Athill seems to have picked up on a key narrative flaw that would have interfered with readers' responses.

While I will focus primarily on individuals employed as editors, the discussion that follows should apply in principle to all those who become involved in the editing process, a category that often includes authors' partners, friends, publishers, and, especially in the age of corporate publishing, agents.18 As Laura B. McGrath notes of contemporary literary agents' work in the "intermediate stages of book production," once the primary province of editors, "in their role as gatekeepers, they exercise a great deal of control" over authors' manuscripts.19 While such amateur editors have long had a place in the processes of textual production, the rise of conglomerate publishing in the 1990s has led agents to become more and more, as Dan Sinykin argues, "the publishing industry's invisible hand," reviewing manuscripts and working with authors on revisions as editors have been forced to focus more on marketing and sales.20 As John B. Thompson observes, contemporary agents are often former editors and publishers, as the corporate consolidation of the publishing industry in the 1980s and '90s coincided with a rising demand for agents.21 Indeed, Clayton Childress sees the contemporary overlap between agents' and editors' work to have generated a "localized and blended pidgin language with one another, which may be only partially decipherable to those on either side of them."22 Literary agents are now largely "double agents" in Galassi's sense, as they may well steer their clients toward publishers or editors with whom they have established relationships, and agents' editorial gazes follow from similar parameters. To cite one contemporary example, the influential agent Nicole Aragi recalls Jonathan Safran Foer's struggles to place his first novel, Everything Is Illuminated (2002). At Aragi's suggestion, Foer reorganized the manuscript, moving the "historical section right at the beginning" more toward the narrative middle, so that the book now "started with the modern-day voice" belonging to Alex Perchov. With the revised manuscript in hand, Aragi proceeded "to call up a few editors and say, 'You've seen this, but you haven't.' And people went for it."23 This is an especially striking interest of an agent taking on this key editorial function, as Aragi's vision of the narrative found a structure that had eluded both the author and the acquiring editors who had reviewed his manuscript. Aragi's response to Foer's draft text seems functionally identical to the kind of developmental editing that might occur once a manuscript has begun the editorial process within a publisher's parameters, as her "third eye" similarly perceived Foer's manuscript in ways that neither the author nor previous editors had seen..24

Returning editors to editorial theory

As Jerome McGann observed nearly forty years ago, the prevailing notions of how literary texts should be edited were grounded in the classical and medieval periods, when the "original" text of most works could only be hypothesized from surviving scribal copies, often separated by decades or even centuries from the point of original inscription25. Scholarly editors dealing with modern (i.e. since the 1800s) writers, in contrast, "stand in an entirely different relation to the editorial situation," given their frequent access to an abundance of prepublication materials.26 This historical trajectory may help to explain the relative paucity of attention to the specific role of (non-scholarly) editors among editorial theorists. The field has, of course, long paid rigorous attention to the effects of editors on texts and their authors, noting the particular consequences of editors' suggestions, queries, and demands. Further, since the 1980s especially, the notion that an author is but one of several actants within a publishing structure, has broadly taken hold. However, these investigations have largely proceeded from within an author-centric framework, rather than through an effort to occupy editors' perspectives on their own. As Grundy observes, "Textual editing is a large and rich field of scholarship. Coverage of professional editing is scarce."27

An additional contributing factor in this oversight has no doubt been the regular self-effacement that most editors have adopted in practice, following Maxwell Perkins's credo, "The book belongs to the author."28 As Evan Brier suggests, the effect of the typical "editor's silence in the bookmaking process" has been to "underwrite what Jack Stillinger calls the 'myth of solitary genius,' a romantic vision of authors working alone that in the twentieth century became a vital source of the novel's cultural and economic value."29 A handful of editors have become known to scholars or even the reading public, usually in association with particular writers — Perkins with Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Wolfe; Lish with Carver; Morrison with Bambara and Gayl Jones; Pietsch with Wallace — but most have remained largely or entirely in the shadows, for all but the most specialized scholars. Who was Gwendolyn Brooks's editor, for instance? Or Thomas Pynchon's? Who has edited the works of Junot Díaz, Zadie Smith, Viet Thanh Nguyen, or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie? In some cases the answers may turn out to bear importantly on the progression of an author's career, perhaps signaled in a book's acknowledgments before eventual archival evidence may come to light, but in general these figures have not seemed to need a specific or well-developed place within theoretical accounts of authorship and textuality.30 As a general rule, the archival evidence that has been the mainstay of genetic criticism and editorial theory has also often occluded editors' specific actions, with only second-hand accounts in correspondence, diaries, interviews, or memoirs. There are significant cases, some of which I discuss below, in which extant documents may directly bear an editor's mark, whether typescripts or other pre-production materials or correspondence, but even there the question of an editor's specific contribution to textual revision can be difficult to discern. Luc Herman and John M. Krafft's analysis of Pynchon's rewriting of McClintic Sphere, the Black jazz musician in V. (1963), for instance, demonstrates in detail how Pynchon reshaped that character between typescript and published novel. Even though Herman and Krafft are armed with a copy of the typescript and Pynchon's correspondence with his editor at J.B. Lippincott, "Cork" Smith, they only go so far as to conclude that the "rewriting of Sphere was influenced, if not prompted, by Pynchon's editor," and, more generally, that "Smith set Pynchon on the right track."31 Accounting for editorial vision at the genetic level of a text is often a matter of inference — something that is also frequently the case even when focusing primarily on authorial revision — a constraint amplified by editors' typical role in suggesting rather than directly making changes (cases like Lish and Carver aside). Nevertheless, we can at least flesh out the presence and effects of developmental editing, and thereby distinguish conceptions of a work in progress derived from an editor's response.

For the purposes of this discussion, I will briefly summarize the main camps within contemporary editorial theory and genetic criticism, necessarily glossing over significant distinctions and debates along the way. Anglo-American textual editing has largely oriented itself around either intentionalist approaches, seeking to determine an author's "final" intentions as a basis for scholarly editions, or materialist conceptions of the text, privileging the circumstances of publication as more expressive of the social nature of textual production. Following the lead of John Bryant and others, and, many scholarly editors have opted against making a single choice of text, instead presenting readers with an array of versions from which to assemble their own texts, especially with the expansive possibilities of digital editions. Continental genetic criticism, especially in its French, German, and Dutch iterations, has focused primarily on the development of texts from the earliest draft stages to the point of bon á tirer, or submission to a publisher. By assembling a genetic dossier or avant-texte, genetic critics and editors retain a strong sense of textual development as in process, exploring "every possibility, every virtuality, every impassioned excess that existed during the writing process that could have, had it only not been crossed out, become text."32

In order to think through a literary editor's "third eye" from within editorial theory, I will return to the perspective of developmental editing. Morrison summarizes the outcomes of this orientation:

Editing sometimes requires re-structuring, setting loose or nailing down; paragraphs, pages may need re-writing, sentences (especially final or opening ones) may need to be deleted or re-cast; incomplete images or thoughts may need expansion or development. Sometimes the point is buried or too worked-up. Other times the tone is "off," the voice is wrong or unforthcoming or so self-regarding it distorts or mis-shapes the characters it wishes to display.

In practice, as Rosemary Shipton explains, this level of editing involves "rearranging sections and paragraphs, condensing, and deleting extraneous events and facts," in addition to "address[ing] what is not there and, by astute querying, ask[ing] the author to fill in the missing narrative or information."33 Similarly, Greenberg understands the editor's developmental role as entailing "a relationship between author, editor and text, with the editor standing in for the eventual reader. An even briefer one-line summary can be added: "Editing is the art of seeing a text as if it is not yet finished."34

These visual metaphors convey the extent to which editing is removed from yet imbricated in the acts of creation and revision. While most authors gradually bring a draft text (or, far more likely, multiple draft texts) into being, using those materials to continue fleshing out textual details and directions, editors enter into a work in its interim state, advanced some way toward conclusion but still at an uncertain remove from that point. Editors often do not see a draft's earliest forms, but instead they begin their interaction with a draft text once it has already passed the "moment of the work's coagulation."35 Unlike writing itself, Morrison explains, editing "is such a different way of thinking about things. I don't have to exercise the same skills or talent. I don't create as an editor." Lish, though by all accounts a far more aggressive editor than Morrison, also distinguishes between his own creative work and his editorial activity, insisting that "I'm an editor, a reviser," and that he has approached the "sublime" in literature "Only, if ever, through my acts of revising the materials of others."36

Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's accounts of perception, phenomenology, and consciousness, Sally Bushell understands the various phases of composition as ones in which the "writer moves between a highly directed sense of being toward process (acts of revision, plans, aims, goals) and a giving up of him- or herself in the actual act of creation."37 For Bushell, the space of the draft text bears an important function for the author here, both as a conduit toward further creative development and as a material waystation along the often nonlinear arc of a project's ongoing revision. Hannah Sullivan, similarly, points to typescripts and other printed artifacts as endowed with a uniquely stimulating presence for modernist writers, most of whom still wrote by hand in their early drafts. She speculates that the experience of this "visual difference — seeing the same words in a new form — promotes the kind of self-critical, self-disowning rereading that promotes revision."38 Many more recent writers have continued working by hand at least at some early stages: both the Morrison collection at Princeton and the McEwan Papers at the Ransom Center, for instance, comprise handwritten notes and fragments, typescripts, and electronic files.

Of the five phases in the textual production process that genetic theorist Pierre-Marc de Biasi identifies—precompositional, compositional, prepublication, publishing, and postpublication—an editor's entry usually comes in the second or third. The compositional phase results in the production of "basic" or "advanced compositional rough drafts," along with notes, scenarios, summaries, schemes, and workplans, while the prepublication phase yields a "definitive manuscript" from which the materials of publication itself will develop (proofs, galleys, and eventually published books).39 These stages correspond roughly to Shillingsburg's three types of version: potential, developing, and essayed, where a potential version "has no physical manifestation" but leads to drafts, notes, and other authorial materials. "When the developing version has progressed sufficiently and been consolidated into an inscription of the whole," Shillingsburg continues, "we have a physical representation of what I would call an essayed version," which might take the form of a "finished" draft or typescript or book.40 Whatever theoretical vocabulary we might adopt, the initial phases or versions of a work — which are usually only apparent retrospectively as of the work, once that entity itself has advanced sufficiently toward its own state of wholeness or completion—seem clearly the "private idiolect" of the author,41 even if authors may well be writing and revising with editors, specific readers, or general audiences in mind. Where editors enter the picture, then, is a point at which once abstract ideas and plans have been distilled into more concretely shaped designs, but before the point at which those textual shapes clearly resemble their eventual published forms.

While Bushell's account of authorial process draws on Merleau-Ponty's earlier work on language and intersubjectivity in Phenomenology of Perception, the standpoint from which editors perceive draft texts may more resemble the later phases of Merleau-Ponty's thoughts on aesthetics, in The Visible and the Invisible and elsewhere. Merleau-Ponty touches briefly on literature in his earlier lectures on aesthetics as well, collected in The World of Perception, where he suggests that a novel would "consist not in a succession of ideas or theses but would have the same kind of existence as an object of the senses or a thing in motion, which must be perceived in its temporal progression by embracing its particular rhythm and which leaves in the memory not a set of ideas but rather the emblem and the monogram of those ideas."42 Merleau-Ponty turns primarily to finished paintings in his later essays, but his understanding of how viewers perceive images as both visible and invisible - as participating in both real and imaginary registers - parallels the conceptual lenses editors take toward draft texts. Literary works in progress are also lodged between a real state (the published book they will become) and an imaginary one (the draft versions in which they temporarily reside). For Merleau-Ponty, the phenomenology of painting shows "that rather than being simply distinct from one another or completely confused with one another, the imaginary and the real always involve one another or participate with their contrary"; that is, the viewer necessarily perceives the imaginary through the real, as a painted image of a mountain shows not the mountain itself but "renders visible the conditions of perception" for both the canvas and the object it references.43

The imagined texts that editors perceive are both present and absent, but they are not themselves engaged in the same kind of process of becoming that Bushell outlines for authors. By seeing drafts both as the works they currently are and simultaneously as the works they could become, editors are approaching those texts in ways that parallel an author's vision, but that often perceive problems and possible solutions that lie at least temporarily beyond an author's imagination. We can see Morrison's sense of a "third eye" in practice through her own editing, as for instance in Gayl Jones's report that Morrison advised her to reshape the draft versions of her first novel, Corregidora (1975). Explaining that her "first version had everything in it except it didn't clarify enough relationships," Jones recalls that Morrison

felt that I should clarify the relationships between Ursa and her mother and between Ursa and Mutt. I added the scene where Ursa goes back and talks to her mother and also that one about Ursa and Mutt before the incident of the fall down the stairs. Now, that's very essential to the book. Both of those scenes are essential to the book.44

Given the fragmentary nature of Jones's narrative structure (which jumps ahead twenty years in the book's final two sections) and narrative style as it occupies Ursa's consciousness, the revisions made in accordance with Morrison's recommendations are especially significant, as the novel's "model of revision and recovery" for the traumas of Black history are woven into fragile narrative dynamics. 45 Ursa's visit to her mother, which recounts much of the generational traumas that have defined Ursa's life as well, comprises the bulk of the published novel's second section. Further, as "the incident of the fall down the stairs" opens the novel, the insertion of a later, retrospective scene compels readers to return to that initiating trauma and reconfigure that event within the novel's developing presentation of individual, family, and societal traumas. Within the first two pages, readers learn that Ursa "fell" down a set of stairs outside the café where she has been performing when she reports that Mutt "grabbed me around my waist and I was struggling to get free."46 Attentive readers will likely realize that this incident is actually the result of Mutt's violent actions, rather than Ursa's "fall," so Jones's addition of the later scene in which Ursa's mother recounts her own history of sexual violence repositions the book's opening within this larger familial and cultural history.

While there are numerous instances of productive interracial author-editor relationships, the gendered and racialized experiences that Morrison and Jones shared may well have contributed to Morrison's particular kind of editorial insight in the case of Corregidora. Indeed, Morrison's status as a "double agent" for Random House often resulted in her finding and developing writers who might not have come to the firm's attention otherwise, at a time when she was the only Black woman to work as a senior editor in a major publishing house. In this sense, Morrison's editorial sensibility was attuned not only to the potential reshaping of her writers' manuscripts, but also to the gaps in the Random House list that her editorial projects could fill. Reflecting on her own career, Aragi finds that she has "built up a list of authors who were in some way straddling cultures, or writing out of a sense of cultural dislocation," an attribute of her career that she sees as having emerged from her own "experiences of living between different cultures," with a Lebanese father and English mother.47 In both of these cases, the commercial and aesthetic doubleness generated by the editor's or agent's role in the literary marketplace becomes subsumed by a different kind of "third eye," not what an individual draft text might become, but by how a publisher's list or an agent's clientele might be redirected toward more multicultural ends.

Reading as an editor

Adapting a genetic approach to develop more sustained attention to editorial activity would mean both tracing various documentary routes such as archival holdings, correspondence, interviews, and memoirs, while adjusting the genetic frame to imagine texts in process the way an editor might. Contemporary genetic critics and scholarly editors are, of course, already deeply attuned to textual versions. Editors' perspectives are at once more constrained, by their (usual) fidelity to an author's aesthetic and narrative vision and by their awareness of how a title might better fit a particular literary market, but also variable, as editors' insights are ones that authors have not yet arrived at. I turn in this concluding section to a few more examples of editors applying their doubled sight to draft texts, to demonstrate the interpretive consequences for more sustained scholarly attention to editorial interventions.

The language that editorial theorists and professional editors use to describe categories of revision illustrates this intersection, as the theoretical models developed to account for authorial revision often resemble the practical approaches of editors adopting a quasi-authorial take on a draft. G. Thomas Tanselle, working within an intentionalist approach, notably distinguishes between "vertical" and "horizontal" categories of authorial revision. Vertical revision, Tanselle argues, "aims at altering the purpose, direction, or character of a work, thus attempting to make a different sort of work out of it," while horizontal revision "aims at intensifying, refining, or improving the work as then conceived (whether or not it succeeds in doing so), thus altering the work in degree but not in kind."48 The vertical/horizontal axis parallels the relationship for editors between developmental editing, which begins with a "look at the shape of the overall manuscript" vs. line-editing or copy-editing, with a focus on the micro-levels of the word and sentence. 49 Much of the controversy surrounding Lish's editing of Carver's first two books derives from the extent to which critics see Lish's revisions as vertical or horizontal, or whether they are changes in degree or kind. Enrico Monti, for instances, suggests that the story "Beginners," the version that Carver submitted to Lish, and "What We Talk about When We Talk about Love," the version published after Lish's editing, "read like two different stories."50 Much of Lish's editing, in this case and more generally, is of course of the horizontal variety, with relatively small changes to wording or sentence structure. 51 But the accumulation of so many horizontal editorial revisions, coupled with the large swaths of text Lish proposed cutting altogether, tilt his editing into the vertical dimension.52

Similar kinds of questions pertain to Perkins's extensive editorial work with Thomas Wolfe's first two novels, both of which were far too long in draft form to be reasonable candidates for commercial publication, at least in Perkins's judgment. 53 Over months of editorial collaboration, Wolfe and Perkins collaborated on a series of cuts, as well as the insertion of new material to establish new transitions, eventually reducing the manuscript by about 60,000 words. The results seem to lie somewhere between purely vertical or horizontal revisions, as the published form of Wolfe's first novel, Look Homeward, Angel (1929), highlights the character of Eugene Gant as the center of narrative consciousness, eliminating or condensing scenes that would lie beyond his narrative knowledge. From Perkins's point of view, these changes clearly seem horizontal in nature, as "the book" (in Knausgård's terms) should center on Gant's individual story to be most accessible to Wolfe's readers and to be truest to what Perkins perceived to be its narrative essence. James M. Hutchisson views Perkins's editorial suggestions very much along these lines, finding that this work could "be characterized as horizontal: condensation and clarification, directness of approach, unraveling of tangled situations, and elimination of repetitious passages."54 On the other hand, the text published as Look Homeward, Angel has seemed vertical enough in its changes from Wolfe's original manuscript to justify a scholarly edition of that version, with the title Wolfe first brought to Perkins, O Lost: A Story of the Buried Life. Arguing that the published form of this manuscript would have been about 200 pages longer than Homeward (about 825 pages versus 626), editors Arlyn and Matthew J. Bruccoli insist it would not have been "impossible to publish in one volume."55 More significantly, they find the edited novel's rationale of removing "material that deflected attention from Eugene's Bildungsroman" as distorting Wolfe's vision for the narrative, which they see as ultimately a "family and community panorama."56

Judgments of the version that Wolfe and Perkins collaborated on as either vertical or horizontal in relation to Wolfe's original draft are ultimately still grounded in an inherently authorial notion of textuality, but they can also be redirected toward the kinds of questions that editors ask about draft texts. Pietsch queries, for instance, "How much of the book's cost is paper? If it could be shortened by a signature, what would that mean to its bottom line?"57 Such determinations would not simply be a function of the length or extent of an editor's suggested changes, though. To return to an example at the other end of that spectrum, Gottlieb's request that Morrison consider changing the final word of Beloved to "join" was enough for her to worry that the "cognitive ecology" of the novel and the sense of "community" it would develop with its readers might be irrevocably affected by this revision.58 Both Perkins and Gottlieb were likely responding to their commercial sensibilities in these cases as well, by seeking a length that would be more affordable and thus profitable in Wolfe's case, and by asking Morrison to choose a less "'esoteric'" word, as Gottlieb's note on the typescript suggests.59

In some cases, an editor's marks on a draft text may exist in concrete form as notes on the manuscripts themselves, or as messages sent separately to an author, whether by letter, memo, email, or otherwise. Kate Medina, an esteemed editor and current senior executive at Random House, is renowned for sending authors an "enormous envelope" of notes, both marginal and summative. Those documents, Medina explains, "add up to some impression of what about the book needs to be improved, or what about the book is kind of hiding in plain sight inside it."60 The phenomenology of editorial perception is clearly in operation here once more, as editors like Medina are seeing a draft text not quite for what it is in that often liminal state, but as the contours around the more finished textual object "hiding in plain sight" amid an author's revision practice.61 The evidence of an editor's vision of the draft text is sometimes more ephemeral, but no less significant in its ultimate effect. If we think of textual change, from the draft stage through potential revisions to first and subsequent published editions, as a matter of "selection," as Robin G. Schulze proposes, we can make conceptual room for an editor's role in this inherently social process.62 Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) is an apt case in point, as gradual revisions over a period of several years considerably reshaped the narrative. Characters who were once significant, including the protagonist's white wife and a former lover of Mary Rambo's, Leroy, disappeared from the published novel, though material from Leroy's journal remains present in the prologue and epilogue, as a kind of "return of the Marxist repressed" in Barbara Foley's reading of Ellison's attempted erasure of the novel's leftist origins.63 This long process of revision finally led Ellison to seek editorial input from Albert Erskine, with whom he had moved to Random House, along with his friends Stanley Edgar and Knopf editor Harry Ford. (This is the stage at which most contemporary writers would turn instead to their agents' views on a manuscript.) It was Ford's suggestion that Ellison remove Leroy's journal as an overt presence, while the trio seem to have worked collectively with Ellison on the development of the novel's famous epilogue, which did not exist as of the summer of 1950.64

Without specifically assigning responsibility for the development of the epilogue to any or all of Ellison's editorial triad, we can certainly infer their collective "third eye," which perceived the novel's first full draft as unfinished without a closing section to round it into a more discernible narrative shape. Those revisions are clearly attributable to Ellison, but the spark for these fundamental (or vertical) changes seems just as clearly to have come from an editorial ability to see the draft for what it was and for what it was not, but it could become.65 More generally, Erskine's editorial collaboration, as Daniel King has demonstrated in detail, was a key factor both in shaping the novel's published form and in creating an environment in which Ellison's work could develop into the kind of late modernist text it was promoted alongside, such as in an issue of Cyril Connolly's Horizon where a version of the "Battle Royal" episode appeared with new work by Jacques Barzun, Christopher Isherwood, and Wallace Stevens. King concludes:

The confluence of a publisher prepared, or prepared to be convinced, to take on avant-garde fiction by a minority author with an editor whose personal background and literary training made him a sympathetic ally, willing to fight for both the work and the author, made Erskine's Random House one of the very few places where Ellison's work on Invisible Man could come to fruition (11).66

As a final example of this dynamic between developmental editing and market awareness, I turn to Houghton Mifflin editor Camille Hykes's influence on the development of Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried (1990). As I outline at greater length elsewhere, O'Brien removed several chapters from a typescript, including three "Notes" and one titled "The Real Mary Anne." 67 In each case, these chapters would have clarified the ostensible truth or falsity of a preceding narrative: the "Notes" following "On a Rainy River" explained that O'Brien had not actually traveled to the Minnesota-Canada border while struggling with whether to honor his draft status. "The Real Mary Anne" would have insisted on the historical accuracy of "The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong," at least according to reports from various other veterans of the American war in Viet Nam, thus insisting on the veracity of the story readers are most likely to take as fantastical (in which a teenage woman arrives and becomes even more savage a warrior than the Green Berets). This provisional version of Things developed from O'Brien's work on several chapters first as magazine stories, with a fluid sense of how they might be arranged into a narrative whole; O'Brien wrote out possible sequences for the book while still determining which stories to include and producing new chapters. Hykes's two main editorial suggestions were to take out these chapters, and to rearrange the volume's contents, so that "How to Tell a True War Story" would shift from an early placement to the volume's center, "letting all the other works radiate out from it like the spokes of a wheel, like gravity & the sun & planets." In the same letter to O'Brien, she explains her rationale for deleting chapters that would seem to make overt the truth or falsity of a preceding story: "Why should the magician pull up his sleeve & tell us — Look, this is where the birds come from — when really, deep down, we knew it anyway?"68 At this point, O'Brien agreed with Hykes's recommendation to cut the chapters in question, but not to move "True War Story." Though O'Brien told me in an interview that he no longer remembered specifically why he had made these decisions, he affirmed Hykes's editorial judgment: "If Camille suggested it, she was probably right."69

The implications of a hypothetical published version of Things that includes "The Real Mary Anne" and "Notes" chapters are numerous and complex, but I'm interested here in how Hykes saw the draft text in relation to how she imagined the published book. In perceiving the narrative's structure and dynamics both from O'Brien's and the reader's point of view, Hykes engages in the kind of developmental editing that transforms the provisional text into a version that seems more suited to its initial public environment. In this process, Hykes engages with the material text itself, marking with an "x" those elements she recommends removing and using an arrow to propose the relocation of "True War Story," while also responding to a more immaterial, abstract sense of the narrative produced by the sequence of stories and the manner in which O'Brien performs his "magic tricks." While Hykes's vision of the essayed version functions as a complement to O'Brien's, and she notes that her recommendations are "Suggestions, only,"70 the frame through which the editor approaches the draft text is necessarily distinct from that of the author. To approach the documentary evidence of the typescript from a reconstruction of Hykes's point of view, then, would mean highlighting her interventions into the collection's organization and the ripple effects of removing "The Real Mary Anne" and selected "Notes" chapters. The resulting narrative is still heavy in metafictional elements, such as its dedication to fictional characters or the presence of a character called "Tim O'Brien," but the typescript version would have leaned into these elements even further. Moreover, while such questions of textual assembly tend not to feature as prominently in genetic accounts of authorial change, with their primary emphases on variability at the level of word or sentence, Hykes's attention to the volume's overall contents and organization is more expressive of an editorial gaze.

To produce a scholarly edition of the Things typescript, or to develop an interpretive account of its genetic development centered on an editor's vantage point, would mean highlighting the consequences of these structural decisions, and viewing the draft text at this more macro-level before attending to questions of line-editing and the like. While such an edition might highlight Hykes's comments within the space of the typescript, whether as a footnote or more prominently within the space of the reproduced draft page itself, a genuinely editor-centered edition would likely be most practical digitally. A codex volume would effectively multiply its page count beyond a reasonable range by reproducing draft texts in multiple arrangements, while a digital edition could, at least in principle, offer users multiple arrangements of a given text, to work through its unfolding according to an editor's provisional conception. As Elena Pierazzo notes, a digital editorial space is better suited to creating an "interactive, accessible interface which tries to present the user with a representation of the writing process, not just the end product."71 Fluid-text editions could also be especially amenable to capturing an editor's perspectives on draft texts. The kinds of revision narratives that Bryant outlines as "biographical miniatures sharply focused on single moments in [an author's] creative process" could be refashioned to narrativize the steps in an editor's combination of creative and readerly processes.72 Such an approach would also be helpful in representing for readers the possible power imbalances between authors and editors, which can run the gamut from Lish and Perkins exercising greater editorial control to O'Brien asserting his authorial independence more fully.

In the nearly 25 years since Hykes's work with O'Brien on The Things They Carried, editors at larger firms have increasingly come to perceive authors' drafts as not only lodged between the imaginary and the real in Merleau-Ponty's sense, but also as imagined commodities. As John Behrendt would recall of his novel In the Garden of Good and Evil (1994) and its Random House editor Ann Godoff, "'She understood that it didn't need editing — it needed positioning.'"73 The "positioning" Godoff provided, in Behrendt's account, was focused on determining the most effective marketing strategy for the book, given its unconventional genre. Since then, Godoff and her peers have been defined professionally as much by their skill in acquiring authors and books as for their ability as, ultimately, readers. Such concerns were certainly present for Perkins or other editors from earlier generations, but the role of the commercial editor is now largely understood as what Medina terms an "entrepreneurial position."74 If editors have always been "double agents" between publishers and writers, they are now more openly allied with the corporate interests of the conglomerations that often own their firms. Many contemporary authors have also, of course, become much more directly involved in "positioning" their work through social media, as in Margaret Atwood's active Twitter feed or Jennifer Egan's incremental publication of the story "The Black Box" on that platform, before revised versions were eventually collected in The New Yorker and then in her novel The Candy House (2022).75 Such blurring of the lines between print and digital texts, and between authors' implied presences in those texts and in their social media incarnations, will likely lead to new kinds of questions for future scholars seeking to reconstruct editors' roles in shaping those various textual forms, even if the perspectives from which editors perceive potential texts remain largely unchanged. As Matthew Kirschenbaum pointed out a decade ago, from an archival perspective, "Electronic texts, files, feeds, and transmissions of all sorts are also now, indisputably, primary records," in addition to the "physical objects" that have historically been understood within that category.76 While New Yorker editor Deborah Treisman acknowledges that she was not "Twitter-aware enough" to appreciate the "very short paragraphs" in "The Black Box" when Egan originally sent her the story in 2012, an eventual Egan edition, especially one prioritizing editorial vision, would seek to account for Treisman's changing perspective on the text's material features. In addition, such an edition would represent the ways in which the chapter version of the story (titled "Lulu the Spy") was perceived by Egan's editor at Knopf, Nan Graham, and all three versions (Twitter, magazine, and book) by her agent, Amanda Urban.77 This hypothetical edition would also need to represent Egan's material process of composition, which entailed "buying a small notebook with eight rectangles on every page so that suddenly I was writing inside these small boxes," as she explains in an interview with Treisman.78 Tracking the progress of "The Black Box" from Egan's notebook to Treisman's inbox, to the series of Twitter posts and then to the pages of The New Yorker, and finally to The Candy House, would require accompanying editorial narratives of the text's assembly and reassembly, first as individual tweets gathered into a magazine story, and then as a chapter within the narrative and physical space of the novel, along with Egan's and her editors' changing perceptions of these texts and works along the way.

As this array of examples demonstrates, editors' perceptions of draft texts are importantly distinct yet derived from authors' visions. David Mitchell describes an author's process of composition and, implicitly, revision: "You start with a blank page, and the first word opens up possibilities for the second word. ... The second sentence opens up a multitude of third sentences, and on we go through that denseness of choices taken and choices not taken, swinging our machetes."79 For editors, and now for agents, there is a more constrained counterfactuality at work, as they enter this "denseness" after an author has already cleared one version of a path. The scenes added to the manuscript of Corregidora, or the gradual elision of Leroy from Invisible Man, or the removal of "The Real Mary Anne" from The Things They Carried, demonstrate that to approach draft texts from an editorial perspective requires adjusting our sense of their potentiality. Understanding a draft through a "third eye" reframes textual versions within the bounds of what they are not yet but what they could become.

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John K. Young is a professor in the English department at Marshall University. Previous and forthcoming publications include: Black Writers, White Publishers (2006), Publishing Blackness, co-edited with George Hutchinson (2013), How to Revise a True War Story (2017), and The Roots of Cane: Jean Toomer and American Magazine Modernism (2024). Young's current project, The Souls of Black Books, takes a genetic approach to the draft and revised versions of several key works of 20th-century Black fiction. is a professor in the English department at Marshall University. Previous and forthcoming publications include: Black Writers, White Publishers (2006), Publishing Blackness, co-edited with George Hutchinson (2013), How to Revise a True War Story (2017), and The Roots of Cane: Jean Toomer and American Magazine Modernism (2024). Young's current project, The Souls of Black Books, takes a genetic approach to the draft and revised versions of several key works of 20th-century Black fiction.

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Banner Image by Artyom Korshunov licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

References

I am grateful for the two anonymous readers for this journal and the journal's editors, who pointed out the ways in which the draft version of this essay had not yet become what it should have, and for equally helpful insights from Tim Groenland and Evan Brier.