Editor= omnipotent?

How much say should an editor have in correcting another person’s work?

That’s the question I’ve been mulling over for the past week which, ironically, was triggered by my work in the Canadian literature course I’m taking this spring (and not the Editing Print and Online Media course I’m also taking, for which this blog is an assignment).

This course has us analysing text written pre-1914 – many of them pre-Canada – and I’ve been introduced to the shocking amounts of liberties editors and publishers back then took with early Canadian explorers’ journals.

Take, for example, Paul Kane: an artist who spent three years travelling what is now Western Canada to capture the lives of the Aboriginals peoples in the area through a series of paintings, sketches, and careful note taking.

Artist he was; wordsmith he was not. Much of the editor’s work seems to have been putting Kane’s scribblings into actual words, sentences, and paragraphs, but where it gets interesting is that his editor/publisher also took consideration to transform Kane from the uneducated, wild, adventure-man that he was into a prim and proper European gentleman.

Kane’s original text (in all its grammatical glory) about his first buffalo sighting reads as follows:

“I saw a band of about 40 cows and they hunters in full chase they ware they first Buffalo I had ever seene I was not long in turning my horses hed in the derection of thy chase after running about 3 miles I came nere up to a cow my hors became afrade after beating for about 2 Miles more I came close enuff for a shot when I found I had no ball I fired shot but without afect.”

Compare that with the published version, and it’s obvious that not only does Kane become a true gent, but in doing so, the course of events change entirely:

“Next day I was gratified with the sight of a band of about forty buffalo cows in the distance, and our hunters in full chase; they were the first I had seen, but were too far off for me to join in the sport.”

Unlike the real Kane, who in his excitement chases after the buffalo only to discover he didn’t load his gun, the published version of Kane never goes near the buffalo at all. Ian MacLaren, the scholar who studies these discrepancies notes that “this droll event is edited out of the book: presumably, no sportsman worthy of the name would have been so careless” (Creating Travel Literature, 90).

Kane's Assiniboine Chasing Buffalo (courtesy of Google Images)

As MacLaren elaborates further, editors and publishers at the time were very conscious of their readers and what their expectations were. Many of them believed in the four-stages theory which put Europeans like themselves at the highest point of civilization and “primitive” indigenous cultures at the lowest.

Because of this, editors worked hard to both elevate the civilized, gentleman-like qualities of the explorers whose work they were editing, and exaggerate (in some cases, fabricate) the uncivilized, barbaric behaviour of the native peoples these explorers encountered (like cannibalism, which MacLaren also discusses).

It doesn’t seem fair, but then again, they were doing exactly what editors (and students taking editing courses) are being told today: make corrections to the text that are appropriate for the target audience.

But when have they crossed the line? Is there a line, or does it fluctuate depending on the editor and the context? How much power can or should an editor wield over your written word?