Text vs. Document

"To find flesh and blood is the ultimate purpose of reading and its sophisticated partner, interpretation."(McGann 161)

What caught me by surprise in this essay was mostly the first section of the "document", to take from Jerome McGann, in which, as demonstrated in the quote above, he requires finding life, literally, as part of the process of interpretation of a document.

He separates text from document and makes a strict and important distinction by stating, "For unlike texts, documents in fact do often have real holes in them, or are otherwise marked by marks of their actual historical passage (161)." McGann proposes that in order to be able to fully interpret a text, we must first see it as a document; recognize it's history, who wrote it, why it was written and what the physical journey of that document has been in order to interpret it.

As students of English literature we are asked to separate the speaker or narrator from the text, that this will not assist in interpretation. However, relating writer to narrative or in this case scholarly work, I have always argued, and in accordance to McGann is necessary for an accurate, or accurate as can be interpretation.

Because documents are not simply print words; at a specific moment in time, in a particular part of the country or planet, there was actually someone thinking, at a desk or some other physical place, about what to write, and more importantly why or for what purpose to write and probably thinking about a specific audience. All these components separate a text, a bloodless fleshless artifact, from a living breathing document. McGann goes on to explain his reasons for wanting to know answers to the above questions,

Because interpretation is a social act --a specific deed of critical reflection made in a concert of related moves and frames of reference (social, political, institutional) that constitute the present as an interpreted inheritance from a past that has been fashioned by other interpreting (161)

I completely agree with him.