symploke

Those who best know what the editors of the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism went through in the process of producing it are probably the few people who, like myself, have edited collections of literary theory starting with the Greeks and ending last week. But we are disqualified from reviewing the book, or if we aren’t we certainly ought to be. Could I pretend to assess the book disinterestedly writing on the same computer that would also display the records of my children’s inadequate college fund. So I will not wonder at its weirdly misleading gloss notes (e.g., to Maimonides), or to sneer at those headnotes (e.g., to Lacan) that editors seem to have written more to impress each other than to enlighten the sort of students we teach. Or that the table of contents has exactly what one might expect by looking at all the other available anthologies.

But in fact my first reaction when asked by Jeffrey Di Leo to contribute to this Forum about the NATC (inevitably pronounced nat-see) was not to sharpen my poniard but to exclaim, “Good God! You too? Hasn’t that book been hyped enough already?” As anyone who has ever done an anthology knows, it’s almost impossible to get your own publishers to promote your work, to bring copies to conferences, train their sales reps to explain its virtues, spend a few bucks advertising it in the sorts of publications that might be read by the sort of people who would assign it. But the Norton had not only been massively advertised everywhere, there had been stories written about it. And not sober evaluative book reviews, mind you, but feature stories that made the arrival of the NATC sound like an adventure, a cross between the landing on Omaha Beach and Stephen Crane’s survival on an open sea in a rowboat far from shore.

That, at least, was the note struck by Scott McLemee in his 3,500 word feature for the Chronicle of Higher Education.¹ The titanic book had been long in the planning, conceived before 1989, “more than a dozen years ago,” by wise [End Page 243] staff members at Norton. Carefully surveying the terrain, chatting with professors, they determined that there would be “a ready niche” for a “comprehensive and authoritative collection.” Norton then waited until 1995 before signing Vincent Leitch, author of a 1989 survey of American criticism, as captain of the ship. William Cain and Jeff Williams came aboard later, as first and second mates, and finally the rest of the crew, Barbara Johnson, Laurie Finke, and John McGowan. The table of contents was created in a democratic manner that recalls the Nine Brethren granting certiorari: a theorist, be he Geoffrey de Vinsauf or Jacques Derrida, needed the votes of at least three editors to be included. With all on board the boat was launched towards its heroic destiny.

Then in November 2000, disaster struck like an iceberg: despite all its experience with anthologies, Norton discovered that NATC was running to 2,900 pages, way over estimates. Like an overfilled lifeboat, NATC had to be lightened or it would sink. “When I heard the news,” McLemee quotes Leitch as saying, “I was numb for about a week.” But Leitch quickly went through the stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and reached acceptance. Leitch asked each of his sub-editors to choose, like William Styron’s Sophie, a few least-loved texts to be sacrificed; but the editors insisted on a marathon meeting to argue it out. At the end of a fortnight, Goethe and Rousseau, Empson and Leavis, Showalter and de Lauretis, and two dozen other critics all walked the plank for the sake of the solvency of the enterprise. The Norton was delayed for six months but, as McLemee insisted, the trim made NATC a leaner, meaner competitor, ready to storm the beaches, take on the existing theory anthologies, and occupy its “ready niche...