Said's article, "Traveling Theory," raises a few interesting questions about misinterpretation and misreading in the modern era; at the risk of being anachronistic, I am particularly interested in applying this theory to my work as a medievalist. Said's description of the "traveling" theory starting with Lukacs, moving to Goldmann, and ending with Williams addresses these issues of misreading, and how the cultural and historical setting of the traveling theory is important to understanding these shifts as more than misreadings.
Medieval manuscripts are influenced, in a way that modern manuscripts are not now (due to the print industry), by their method of transmission and their material culture; before the printing press, manuscripts were hand copied and disseminated. Even the closest "authorial" versions were not truly authorial, and the more popular a text became, the more scribes handled it, the more scribal errors occured, the more changes were made. Medievalists struggle with this, trying to identify an authorial text or at least a consistent one, often times to no avail. The attempts to eradicate scribal interventions and find the "true" text get at the attitude that Said describes as an "adaptation [that]... degrades theory, lowers it in importance, domesticates it somewhat..." (167). But particularly in a manuscript culture, Said's assertion that this "misreading" is less of a degradation and more interpretation, a "part of a historical transfer of ideas and theories from one setting to another" (168). This applies particularly well to the transfer of stories from one area of Europe to another in the Middle Ages; stories that originate as French fabliaux find their way into Boccaccio (Italian) and then Chaucer by the end of the fourteenth century. Not only this, it accounts for the benefits, or at least the fascinating parts of scribal error and manuscript culture. Rather than saying that "the only possible alternative to slavish coping is creative misreading," manuscripts and ever-changing texts are historical, cultural moments that are valid in their own right.
Medieval manuscripts are influenced, in a way that modern manuscripts are not now (due to the print industry), by their method of transmission and their material culture; before the printing press, manuscripts were hand copied and disseminated. Even the closest "authorial" versions were not truly authorial, and the more popular a text became, the more scribes handled it, the more scribal errors occured, the more changes were made. Medievalists struggle with this, trying to identify an authorial text or at least a consistent one, often times to no avail. The attempts to eradicate scribal interventions and find the "true" text get at the attitude that Said describes as an "adaptation [that]... degrades theory, lowers it in importance, domesticates it somewhat..." (167). But particularly in a manuscript culture, Said's assertion that this "misreading" is less of a degradation and more interpretation, a "part of a historical transfer of ideas and theories from one setting to another" (168). This applies particularly well to the transfer of stories from one area of Europe to another in the Middle Ages; stories that originate as French fabliaux find their way into Boccaccio (Italian) and then Chaucer by the end of the fourteenth century. Not only this, it accounts for the benefits, or at least the fascinating parts of scribal error and manuscript culture. Rather than saying that "the only possible alternative to slavish coping is creative misreading," manuscripts and ever-changing texts are historical, cultural moments that are valid in their own right.
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