Textual Criticism and its importance

I apologize for the late posting. I recently just acquired The Textual Condition by McGann at the local library so I decided to read a bit more about it and the book is so far fascinating. I find it very interesting that the idea itself can be limited by the textual condition of the material. As a writer, I am fascinated by this claim. He also mentions in the introduction, "...as the reader's pursuit of a meaning or closure in perpetual retreat beyond the horizon of the reader's vision" (McGann, 5). He makes a distinction between textual limitation and author's limitation and how it is never quite in reader's reach to grasp these. His quotation on Paul De Man's claim that the inspiration is already on decline as composition begins reflects this well: there are several limitations regarding writings. First, a physical textual limitation (ink, paper, investments...) and another is language limitation. Whatever the author truly means, the reader will not be able to quite grasp it just by its text. He also mentions the limitations of paratexts in the article. This was very interesting claim because we as readers never even look at paratexts most of the times. Introductions, preface, back of the cover, reviews may be abundant in certain books but most of the times, readers skip all this parts and go straight to the text itself. McGann says, "Texts are always full of noise, and the age-old struggle with the ambiguities and paradoxes of texts registers the unhappiness of information transmitters with a medium not ideally suited to their specialized purpose" (McGann, 14). His argument that the texts are often transmitters catch my attention. All the noises, or paratexts, attempt to deliver extra information to the readers but all of these are factors of textual limitations. The true inspiration can never be really delivered straight to us like how author imagined it. All in all, this textual reading gave me a great insight into how much we as readers know about the limitations of literature, language and its power of communication.