The title of my blog and, more locally, this entry originates with W. W. Greg, whose "Rationale of Copy-Text" remains a touchstone in bibliotextual studies today, some 50+ years after its original publication. Greg called "accidentals" those features of an author's work--spelling, punctuation, style--generally regarded as contingent rather than constuitive. In his textual universe, they were distinguished from "substantives," or linguistic content, the real locus of authorial meaning. Greg found it useful to differentiate the two types of codes--bibliographic and linguistic, accidental and substantive--for reasons editorial in nature, too involved to go into here. But the phrase "accidentals and substantives" has to some extent lost its moorings in Greg's famous essay and subsequently taken on a life of its own over the course of the last fifteen or so years, becoming a flashpoint in contemporary editorial theory. In one camp you have the elder statesmen of the Greg-Bowers tradition; in the other you have a younger generation of mavericks who hold that accidentals are substantives, a variation on the old saw that the medium is the message. In practice, this line of thinking has given birth to an entire fleet of archival editions, many of them electronic, of such canonical figures as William Blake, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman. One of the distinguishing marks of these archives is that they are image-based: by providing high-resolution images of original works of art, they are able to capture both accidentals and substantives with degrees of fidelity unimaginable in the pre-photographic era. Underwriting this reproductive model is the idea that form and content are an organic whole: you can't shoehorn Blake's expansive multimodal works into the cramped codes of letterpress transcription without grave semantic loss. Instead it is incumbent on the editor to transmit the gestalt--both substantives and accidentals--through the ultra-granular medium of photography. Things like font size and style, page layout, white space--all are semantically constuitive of the work.
"Every literary work that descends to us operates through the deployment of a double helix of perceptual codes: the linguistic codes, on one hand, and the bibliographic codes on the other." Jerome McGann's double-helix metaphor is familiar to any student of bibliography and textual criticism (The Textual Condition, 1991, p.77). In the context of Matt's entry on the strict separation of style and content in current web-design practice, I am struck by just how "organic" the metaphor is: each of the strands, linguistic and bibliographic, intertwines about a common textual axis. The free variation of style in electronic environments--the ease with which one skin can be swapped out for another--throws a monkey wrench into contemporary editorial theory. It will be interesting to see how textual theorists respond to it.