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I.
The Concept of Version ("Fassung")
"Eclectic editing", the establishing of a text from more than one authoritative document, comprises two types of multiple authority which are essentially different from one another, although they may occur in combination. In the first type, the missing original is represented by several radiating texts, from which their common original is to be reconstructed through the adapted application of the stemma rules of classical editing.[6] I too approve this procedure. What is under dispute here is the second type of multiple authority: only in this case do I speak of contamination. Here one eclectic text is produced from authoritative documents which differ from one another in essence through the intervention of the author. This eclectic text is supposed, among other things, to realise the final intention of the author, as far as this is possible on the basis of extant documents. In the first type of multiple authority the textual differences are exclusively errors caused by the process of transmission; in the second, there is an added difference between versions which is intended by the author. Texts with authorial variation I designate as different versions ("Fassungen"). In the most extreme case a version is constituted by a single variant. A holograph with one alteration which does not simply correct an error thus represents two versions of the text. Though it is unusual to express oneself in this way, it is not possible to give a useful definition of the concept in any other terms. The significance of the definition will become apparent immediately.
The main difficulty in realising Greg and Grumach's undertaking, namely in establishing a text representing as reliably as possible the demonstrably final wish of the author, lies in separating from one another transmissional and authorial variants. In order to achieve this, Greg set up the well-known rules: "An editor should in every case of variation ask himself (1) whether the original reading is one that can reasonably be attributed to the author, and (2) whether the later
Characteristic of this procedure is that the same set of questions is applied to each individual reading, and it is left to the discerning judgement of the editor to classify it. There can be no doubt but that what results is assured of the maximum authority with regard to the sum of all its elements.[8] The question is, however, whether the sum of authoritative readings yields an authoritative text. Should not the authority of a text be considered to extend equally to the texture of the text, to the relationship of its elements to one another and to the whole, and therefore to what constitutes a text as a text, to what makes it into a particular version?
As far as I know, the methods of textual constitution under discussion take this basic aspect of the version into consideration only in special cases: "In some literary works it is generally recognized that a revision may be so thoroughgoing — so motivated throughout by the author's altered political, social, or artistic concepts"[9] — that the variants cannot be transferred and the editing of more than one version in parallel texts or in separate editions is required, because the later version represents an entirely new creative act, and demanded in a sense a new manuscript. As examples the different versions of Wordsworth's Prelude are cited, or Henry James's revision of his early works
The question then arises as to whether it is in fact possible to mark a borderline between the two differently treated cases, whether it is practicable to make the distinction in every instance. One could not, for instance, decisively distinguish two versions by quantitative criteria, which might demand that the variants should exceed a certain number, or that a certain time must have elapsed before the revision. In the line "Dass endlich zerbräche das kühle Haupt", in the last version of Trakl's poem Passion (Agony), the manuscript has the adjective "kühle" (cool) for deleted "glühende" (glowing), but one cannot maintain that this alteration is more far-reaching than when in the same manuscript the "Purpurne Wolke" (purple cloud) is replaced by "Goldene Wolke" (golden cloud).[11]
The first stanza of Hölderlin's Feiertag hymn describes parabolically the condition after a storm. In the prose draft of the poem we read "vom erquikenden Reegen des Himmels"; in the metrical version "von des Himmels erfreuendem Reegen". At first sight one might not raise objections if an editor or commentator considered the two readings ("erquikenden / erfreuendem Reegen") simply in terms of stylistic improvement as the replacement of a commonplace expression by a clearly metaphorical adjective. Yet related within the text the matter looks different:
- 1 Wie wenn am Feiertage, das Feld zu sehn
- 2 Ein Landmann geht, des a) Abends, b) Morgens, wenn
- 3 Aus heisser a) Luft b) Nacht die kühlenden Blize fielen
- 4 a) Den ganzen Tag b) Die ganze Zeit und fern noch a) hallet b) tönet der Donner,
- 7 Und von des Himmels a) erquikendem b) erfreuendem Reegen
- 8 Der Weinstock trauft
In one quite specific case contamination in establishing a text is probably the only correct procedure. This is when it can be proved that the author did not make alterations which bore a relationship to one another and to the whole, but simply altered things here and there in isolation. But can that be proved?
In adopting the procedure of contamination the editor starts in general from the premise that the intention of the author and the concept of the work remain the same even when a revision is made, unless this assumption can be disproved by such obvious contradictions as that "Abends" and "Morgens", "Tag" and "Nacht" be synonymous. Such cases are regarded as special cases. But in the remaining cases the editor is to my mind doing in principle just what he would be doing if he were to adopt the procedure of contamination with Hölderlin, only it is less obvious. Fredson Bowers once said of a distinction of this sort, an editor who strains at a gnat may swallow camels too.
What is disturbing to me in this construction of categories is that it is not founded on any explicit theory, that it tends rather to mark as special cases those intractable instances which would in fact refute
Seen in this way, a version is a specific system of linguistic sings,
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