The critical edition—two contrasting concepts
In 1899 Wilhelm Dilthey gave a programmatic lecture under the
heading "Archives for Literature." It was largely thanks to this lecture that
manuscript bequests of poets and writers were approved as archive material
and ultimately taken into state care.[3]
Dilthey, Schleiermacher's biographer, regarded original manuscripts as an
invaluable key to an understanding of their authors. He wanted to see them
collected and researched
in literary archives. He felt a "human breath" emanating from "drafts,
letters, notes"
[4] and considered it the
joint aim of the appreciative reader and the researching literary historian to
comprehend them. "What would we give today to be able to read into the
souls of Aeschylus or Plato, through such simple and direct statements" (p.
5). An author's manuscript remains could, as it were, fill in the blank
spaces in an author's involuntary self-interpretation of his life philosophy,
only partially rendered if "isolated and coolly presented in print" (p. 5). Yet
however highly Dilthey assessed the cognitive value of literary manuscripts,
for him they were not intrinsically significant—for instance, as
witnesses
to unknown versions of the text—but indirectly as a part of an entire
body of evidence, from which the author's understanding of the world
might be deduced. Manuscript archives, accordingly, were not viewed as
a preparatory facility for
editorial work; on the contrary, such collections would "considerably
reduce" the need for printed publication (p. 16).
The central historical interest here is not in the work and its genesis,
but in the author and his interpreter. It is ultimately the latter's
concern—as reader and researcher—to comprehend the
existing work
of the author; to express this in terms of experience: "to acquaint himself
better with his own self."[5] The
author is thus possibly better understood by his interpreter than he
understood himself, because he was not conscious of his own creative
activity.[6] If it be the common goal
of authors and interpreters to develop a durable and representative
understanding of humanity on the basis of a shared experience of the
fundamental conflict between an individual and a social identity, interpretive
empathy, according to Dilthey, weighs decidedly on the social side of the
scale. With regard to the affirming of one's own intrinsic existence,
moreover, the positions of the artist and the interpreter are exchangeable.
Dilthey hence always stressed the "homogeneity of intellectual life"
("Beiträge", p. 251). In his theory of the humanities, creative and
interpretive activity correspond structurally, receptive contemplation taking
precedence over action in both cases. This receptive contemplation is based
in an unforced openness and receptivity for external and internal perceptions
(e.g., memories)—a view formalised, for example, in Dilthey's
much-quoted circular definition of
experience—expression—comprehension. Since Dilthey sees
the
process by which literary expression is shaped as largely unconscious, he
grants it little importance compared to actual experience. It is not the ability
of expression, but merely the degree of that ability which distinguishes the
author from the interpreter. Similarly, it is only the intensity of the powers
of mind and intellect by which they differ. The decisive factor here is that
literary production is viewed
from the perspective of the recipient, who wishes to open or entrust himself
to the author. This attitude, profoundly influenced by Goethe and the spirit
of his age, has had a sustained effect in German literary studies. It is also
evident in the development of the modern Germanist edition—as
illustrated by the Weimar Goethe edition and the Stuttgart Hölderlin
edition (see below:
The reception-oriented editorial
concept).
A wholly opposite attitude to the process of literary production
underlies the so-called "critique génétique" which has arisen
in
France since the 1970s and concerns itself with the textual genesis of
literary works as evidenced in the original manuscripts.[7] It has developed out of French
structuralist literary theory, with which it shares a methodical objectivism
concentrated on exploring the text in its spatial/temporal dimensions. What
distinguishes it from structuralism is a broadening of the field of
observation and vision: behind the text as a closed and semeiological object,
its perspective takes in the actual production of the text ("textualisation",
"avant-texte", "le texte n'existe pas"); behind the written form
("l'écrit") it views the actual writing ("l'écriture"), behind
the
printed work the original manuscript.[8] This extension of the critical object
to
include the original handwritten
documents is not only quantitative; it also affects the reader's or
interpreter's attitude to the works, now enriched by a "third
dimension",[9] to their authors, and
of necessity thus ultimately to himself.
Exploring a work's textual genesis involves reconstructing the text
chronologically and in a multitude of successive states and versions, each
discrete and of only relative validity. The reader is thereby presented with
a complexity of relations by which to read the text—he may select
and
combine them at will, exploring a textually structured field according to his
combinatory and imaginative powers. "L'organisation du texte sur la
feuille, les marginales, ajouts, renvois, less textes croisés [. . .]
dedoublent les systemes de significations et multiplient par là les
réseaux de lecture."[10]
"Critique
génétique" objectifies by philological means the tenet of
reception
aesthetics that in the act of reading the reader imaginatively shapes his own
texts.[11] The intellectual appeal of this
"approche génétique" to literary works is probably based
upon the
fact that, perhaps more than any other
methodology in modern literary studies, it satisfies the need for subjective
self-realisation in constructive activity, providing, as it does, a field for
developing analytical techniques, serviceable terminologies or distinct
methods of interpretation.[12] It is
hence characterized by a tendency towards specialisation and critical
self-sufficiency, a kind of "critique génétique pour la
critique
génétique". Indicative of this tendency is its abstract image
of the
author, removed into a sort of "instance écrivante".[13] "La notion même
d'écrivain se
dissout
dans l'incertitude"
[14] —to such
an
extent that the concept appears applicable no longer just to single
individuals, but also to collectives.
[15]
This view of the author as the subject of constructive writing operations
limited only by the instrumental conditions of his productivity reflects the
interpreter's understanding of his own self. It is a view not derived from an
objectified image of man serving an inter-subjective exploration of the self
as a community being, but from self-determined work in which the decisive
affirmation of the individual is embodied symbolically. The extent and
intensity of interest in the processes of production
as such and
their self-determining quality—for authors as well as for
readers—is
indicative of the strength of a will to self-realisation in the individual
striving for liberation from pre-formed social models. From the point of
view of intellectual history, it appears
particularly significant that there is a common ground between modern
critics and modern writers on this point. "On a déjà
beaucoup
parlé de cette conjonction entre une littérature qui traite de
sa propre
pratique et une critique qui explore les mécanismes du travail
littéraire."
[16] Both sides agree
that
a more suitable route to self-development can be found in productivity than
in receptivity. The fact that "critique génétique" hitherto has
been
concerned mainly with the autographs of those authors who are regarded as
the forerunners of modernism: Flaubert, Heine, Proust, Valéry,
Zola,
[17] also demonstrates this
affinity.
In the German-speaking world there is, as yet, no line of scholarship
comparable to "critique génétique." The Germanist literary
scholars
bent on systematically exploring the text genetics of literary manuscripts are
predominantly editors. Their investigations are hence for the greater part
guided by pragmatic interests. The perspectives that "critique
génétique" develops independently of practical editing can
be found
within the German-speaking world in critical editions and in related works
of editorial theory. Their main characteristics will be clarified with
reference to the Goethe Academy edition and the Frankfurt Hölderlin
edition (see below: The production-oriented editorial
concept).
The decisive criterion by which to contrast the reception-oriented and
the production-oriented editorial concepts lies in the difference of the image
that in each the editor coins of the author. In the case of the
reception-oriented concept, the author is understood as a person who, in his
literary expression, establishes an inter-subjectively recognised identity.
Here the author is mainly attributed with a characteristically deliberate,
even teleological, attitude towards himself, and hence towards what he and
others approve as constituent of a personal self. In respect of such identity,
the author and the editor occupy reciprocally exchangeable positions: each
is a literary producer and each is also the
discerning recipient of such production. Each sees himself as a self (1st
person) from the perspective of another self (2nd person) and knows
himself as the other (2nd person) for the other. In the production-oriented
concept, by contrast, the image of the author is modelled to the assumption
that his artistic intent is directed primarily towards his creative work and
not towards his own self, which is in principle veiled in obscurity. In
respect of this tendency towards an indeterminacy of the personal self, too,
the positions of author and editor are reciprocally exchangeable; each
relates to himself and to others as a subject (1st person) to the object (3rd
person). The relationship of the editor and the author to each other is that
of observer and observed creator of self-determined work.
