I. The reception-oriented editorial concept
Regarding themselves as middlemen between the authors and the
reading public, nineteenth-century critical editors exercised a remarkable
reticence; they spoke little of their own activity. This is true of Karl
Lachmann and Franz Muncker in the edition of Lessing's Complete
Works; of Muncker in the "critical-historical" edition of Klopstock's
Odes; and, above all, of the editors of the Weimar Goethe
edition.
Precedence of text presentation over the critical
apparatus
The Preface to this critical Goethe edition in 143 volumes extends to
only seven pages, and the information about the numerous manuscripts and
prints of the poems in the first volume occupies a mere six pages. The
apparatus of variant readings is also maximally concise, being meant as no
more than a "critical appendix".[18]
The presentation of the texts as the author intended them finally to be given
to the public was considered of greater importance than the description of
manuscripts and prints or the details of variants and versions. The editors'
reticence reflects their decision on what matter they considered more or less
worth communicating to the reader. If one recognises two different editorial
aims, each attainable on the basis of authentic and authorial records as
preserved for modern authors: firstly, to reconstruct the shaping and
reshaping process of literary works, and secondly, to define the particular
form of a work with which the
author wished in the final instance to be publicly identified, it is clear that
the editors of the Weimar edition unambiguously gave precedence to the
second. The processes of composing and revising a work were merely of
historical antiquarian interest to them.[19] Generally cognisant of Goethe's
attitude
to his literary output as embodied in the last edition of his works which he
himself supervised (the
so-called "Ausgabe letzter Hand"
[20]),
they considered it their moral duty to respect his final intentions almost
unconditionally.
The serious lack of information within the apparatus, crucially
insufficient details about the manuscripts and the selective and isolative
rendering of the variant readings[21]
have been explained as due to the fact that the "editors of the Lachmann
school"[22] were still bound to the
model of editorial technique in classical philology. There may be some truth
in this, even though, if so, the method has not become outwardly
effective—the apparatus, for instance, is not arranged in the form of
footnotes. However, the explanation casts underserved aspersions on the
pioneers of editing in modern German philology, making them appear as
indiscriminate imitators. What brings them close to their colleagues in
classical philology is a formal matter: the merely selective consideration of
witnesses not chosen as editorial base texts. Yet the reasons for such
selectivity differ. In the case of classical philology, the selection
serves to justify the critically constituted text and is hence determined by
its purpose. In modern editing, by contrast, the author's authentic or
authorised text did not require any justification, and the selection of the
variants was thus not linked to any objective aim, but was subjectively
motivated. This explains the methodological aimlessness of the apparatus
in the Weimar Goethe edition. It is determined by "the most respectful
consideration for the wider circle of educated readers."[23] "Negligences or mere spelling
errors" in
the manuscripts are excluded as an unnecessary encumbrance; it is only
variation which "is heard in the spoken language and which affects the
syllable count and hence, in verse, the metre" that is considered worthy of
record.[24] This guiding rule, it is true,
is not observed consistently.[25] The
apparatus of the Weimar edition has been called a "dead
apparatus"[26] by one of its fiercest
critics. With regard to individual volumes this is certainly an unfair
criticism, but as an overall appraisal it does characterise the curiously
functionless nature of the apparatus. The editors can hardly have remained
unaware of the obvious difference between transmissional variants (the
concern of classical philologists) and the genetic variants integral to the
author's own manuscripts.[27] Yet they
clearly were at a loss how to deal with these,[28] because they saw themselves
primarily
neither as textual critics nor as documentary historians, but as
readers. This understanding of their role corresponds to their
model of the author.
The model of the author in the 2nd person—the
self-realising author
Editorial opinion in the early period of German philology held it to
be the author's essential characteristic to be able to communicate his own
self through his text, and not to draft and compose a text. According to
such understanding, the author is a subject oriented towards listeners and
readers (including critics), and observing and assessing himself creatively
from their perspective, i.e., in the 2nd person. The editor, in his role as
reader and through his endeavour for supra-individual self-determination,
represents as it were the other self, the author's partner, and vice versa.
The reading stance common to both is evaluative, positively or negatively.
The editor's understanding, then, of his own role is modelled on his
assumptions about the author. If he views the author first and foremost as
a judicious reader of his works, he does not in principle desire to be
anything else. He considers everything that links author and reader to be
more important than what separates them. If, on the other hand, he sees the
author primarily as the producer of his texts, he conceives the editorial task
ultimately only in terms of their reproduction from a common ground of
subjective creativity. In
either case, the mode in which the author is viewed is irreducibly
voluntative and at best only approximately suited to given conditions of
writing and transmission.
If the editor favours the model of the author in the 2nd person, it
implicitly follows that he wishes the author to determine in which version
and in which order his texts should be edited. In other words: he does not
wish to give room to editorial judgement or discretion in these matters. The
editor thus sees himself akin to an advocate, an executor of the author's
will, before the forum of his readers. This is an attitude obviously
determined by ethical principles, since it implies that the writer is taken
absolutely seriously as a person and that his intention is respected as the
highest editorial principle. The consequences of this kind of editorial ethos
as they emerge in relation to the creative and revisional work of the author
are: a limited interest in textual criticism and source description on the part
of the editor, and a modal misinterpretation of the author's work.
The author's intention
The author's intention, as is well known, is a fundamental concept
much debated in editorial theory.[29]
By and large it seems that, despite the problems involved, it cannot be
relinquished without negative consequences for critical editing. If it were
renounced, if editors were to declare the very concept of authorial intention
on principle to be outside their province, discernible expression of such
intention would be entirely subject to editorial discretion, if not indeed
arbitrariness.[30] Too little
consideration however has usually been given to the fact that the notion of
authorial intention can be applied in two different ways: as intentio
recta (author in the 2nd person) and as intentio
obliqua
(author
in the 3rd person). It is the second way which is relevant to textual
criticism. The question here is, whether a text or textual part or particle as
transmitted is, or may be considered, intended (meant) by the author.
Editorially, the predicate "intended" may on principle be attributed
to a specific textual finding or its emendation only when modified as
"possibly intended".[31] Yet the
"possibility" is subject to many degrees of certainty and probability or
uncertainty and improbability, in much the same way as what a third party
intends (or means) can only be known on the basis of everyday
suppositions. The editor assumes responsibility for adjudicating intention in
a manner different from that for his making descriptive statements which
can be verified or falsified from the extant textual materials. Whereas the
reasoning behind descriptive statements can be completely objectified, if
need be with the help of explicit conceptual definitions and rules of
procedure, this is not the case with assertions of textual criticism
concerning the degree to which a transmitted text can be intended (meant).
These are always only partly objectifiable, and the editor can only
vouch for them on the basis of an understanding and knowledge which he
has gained in his role as reader, interpreter and textual critic. Hence they
always hold good only in relation to the editor's familiarity with the
author's voluntative and linguistic behaviour.[32]
Whereas editorial theory has hitherto been dominated by the
reciprocal editor/author relationship in the 1st and 2nd person—the
reception-oriented editorial concept—or the one-directional
editor/author
relationship in the 1st and 3rd person—the production-oriented
concept—the implications of the notion of authorial intention may be
clarified from a perspective in which the author occupies the 2nd and 3rd
person. The author's literary activity displays two sides: on the one hand
it fulfills a specific purpose, the production of texts, and on the other hand
it is a form of expression, a way of articulating the self in the text. The
concept of authorial intention may be differentiated accordingly.
The author's intention to produce and communicate a text:
what is meant and what is intended
Writing, as it transposes conceptualised linguistic utterances into the
spatial-visual dimension, is basically an artificial application of the
imagination. It necessarily has repercussions on the creative expression,
since it renders transitory conceptions permanent. However, the
representational mode of linguistic utterances is not altered in their
inscription. Hence, writing is not to be equated with acts of direct
communication in oral speech that cannot be revoked. This fundamental
distinction is not infrequently overlooked,[33] which leads to a modal
misinterpretation
of texts in autograph. Writing is without doubt an intentional act. Yet is the
result of this act, the written text, intended by the author? The answer to
this question is open where the author's attitude as reader to the text is
indeterminable. Such is in principle the case with all texts he has not (or not
yet) published. All that can be said about them is that the author intended
them as
possible results of his writing, or even that he
potentially intended them as definitive and no longer disposable
compositions. In respect to such texts, it is more profitable to rephrase the
question and ask whether they,
as they appear in written
form,
were meant, or could have been meant, by the author. Whenever one is
involved in transposing conceptions into words or into writing, that is,
when his own thoughts, and not those of his listeners or readers, are the
central focus, it is relevant to ask
what is actually meant by
what is spoken or written or
whether what
is spoken or written actually represents what is meant (particularly in the
case of an unusually or wrongly spelt word or one that does not seem to fit
the context). What is meant is primarily that which is objectively intended.
It represents the author's transitory textual resolution which could be
explained further as that which he possibly wished to convey or present for
reading by what he said or wrote.
The textual critic's scope for decision ends at the point where he
cannot question what is meant by the author—for instance in the case
of
two separate autograph versions of a text. Here it is not within his
arbitration, in his role as textual critic, which of the two should be
reproduced. If the author has actually communicated one version, that is,
released the contents and textual composition from his control and submitted
it to another's (e.g., a publisher's, who has it printed and distributed), it is
true to say that this version is intended by the author. But as what? Not as
a text produced, but as a text received, also by others. The communication
of a specific text version implies that the author, in his role as a reader, has
positively assessed it, with a regard, too, to other readers. This means he
has read and approved the text in the interest of other readers,[34] and in doing so he has asked
himself
whether his inner perception of man
and the world (the yardstick of his identity and linguistic mode of utterance)
is adequately reflected in it. Is the editor obliged to respect the author's
intention to objectify his ideal self? Unlike the author's textual intention
(i.e., what is meant), this represents, as it were, a higher degree of
intention and is often singled out as the "real", "ultimate" or "final"
intention. If this intention can be positively identified, then the editor is
indeed obliged to respect it. It concerns, after all, that striving for
self-determination and, eminently, for personal identity, to the expression
of which literature above all lends itself. However, the editor's respect for
the author's identity as objectified in
the literary mode does not relieve him of his duty to explore the genesis of
the text and exercise his judgment as textual critic on the documents of
transmission. It does not allow him to assume the attitude of a merely
corrective reader.
The editors of the Weimar Goethe edition were of a different opinion.
Choosing the "Ausgabe letzter Hand" as their basis, they believed the poet
had taken the greatest care and had been conscientiously exact in producing
a correct and final revised edition (WA I, 1, p. xix). Erroneously they
presumed that Goethe's intention to have his works seen into print
accurately with the help of an able philologist[35] had actually had a result
corresponding
to the intention. They did not recognise that the versions of the text printed
in that edition, precisely because they had been painstakingly prepared
verbatim et literatim, should editorially have been minutely
re-examined to see whether, on that microphilological level, they were as
intended by the poet. For it is true that, being the result of a work process,
every state of a text, in manuscript or in print, only represents the intended
state as a whole, and not in every detail. A
text in toto (which means also: a text read) such as that of
Goethe's final edition of his works is undoubtedly to be considered
authorised by the author; yet this does not apply in partibus
(meaning also: to the text as produced)—and especially not to
passages
where what the author meant can so easily be shown to have been subject
to unintentional changes by himself or by his helpers.[36] The crucial question of textual
criticism,
namely whether a printed text is also the intended one, cannot be ignored
a priori or narrowly interpreted with regard either to the
accidentals of spelling and punctuation or to individual words. It is
independent of the degree of authorisation in the preparatory phases of
reproduction.
The editors of the Weimar edition exercised textual criticism with
extreme reticence. They believed that they were basically entitled only to
correct the final edition of Goethe's works, to eliminate obvious errors, but
not to submit it to recension.[37]
Valuing above all the edition's authenticity, they essentially did not regard
it as the result of a work process, but as "the unmediated
intimation of the author himself".[38]
The editors' decision in favour of the final edition as the basis for their
rendering of the text has its fundamental reason neither in textual criticism
nor in historical research. The decisive factor for the Weimar editors was
the author's self-determining will at the peak of his maturity, i.e., at the
stage when his self-reflection in the mirror of his entire literary oeuvre was
most consciously developed and his self-distancing ability with a regard for
its readers was at its
highest. Goethe's final edition represents the "pinnacle" of all his editions
in his lifetime[39] in so
far as it attests his attitude towards the greater part of his literary oeuvre.
It was obviously a complete matter of course for the Weimar editors to
choose the poet's final edition and no other as the basis of their own.
[40] This indicates that they were
always more
inclined towards a representation of the receptive-reflective Goethe than to
Goethe as a literary producer. Their perception was of the poet who,
conscious of his readers, affirmed or rejected what he had written, and not
of the author who in writing would to a lesser degree have reflected the
reader's perspective. Only from such partisanship could the poet's final
edition have been accorded unquestioned canonicity. It is therefore no
coincidence that evidence of the writer's work meant little to the editors of
the Weimar Goethe edition, as shown in the critical apparatus. Likewise,
it is no accident that they misinterpreted such evidence as the involuntary
expression of Goethe's mind and
intellect, as indicated in their qualifying the final edition of the works as
"the
unmediated intimation of the author himself".
[41]
Disregard of the author's work due to modal
misinterpretation
The great Stuttgart Hölderlin edition is held by German
philologists to be exemplary of literary editions avoiding the information
deficiency in the critical apparatus for which the Weimar Goethe edition is
typical. The textual editor, Friedrich Beissner, records the manuscript
variants in their entirety, including even the alterations irrelevant to the
actual wording of the text; and he presents them readably. Without doubt,
the critical apparatus is thereby significantly enhanced, even though it
remains subordinated to the presentation of the text. As before, it is the
writer's final and binding word that goes to constitute the edition text. The
axiom of the reception-oriented editorial concept to honour "the
poet's
intention and his right to his work"[42] remains valid. In other words: the
author
is still granted the decision how his works are to be read. It is however
debatable if this is possible in Hölderlin's case to the
same extent as it appeared to be in Goethe's. For Hölderlin there
exists neither a final revised edition nor "prints of individual works whose
wording, since checked by the poet himself, should be binding for the
editor".[43] Hölderlin's oeuvre has
come to us largely as a legacy of unpublished manuscripts.[44] The editor's determination to let
the
author decide how his works should be read was therefore to be realised
only by means of a text-genetical interpretation of the manuscripts, although
these often enough are in the nature of heavily worked-over drafts.
Beissner's mode of text-genetical interpretation becomes fully
apparent in his method and system of variant presentation. Its essential
characteristic is to situate the variants within the context of a reconstruction
of the text's chronological development. The main focus is not on individual
alterations, but on the representation of successive genetic versions. On the
assumption that the author has replaced the earlier version by the later one,
the later version is regarded as the one finally intended by him. If one
accepts this system of text-genetic interpretation, Hölderlin's ultimate
versions may indeed be constructed by stages from the heavily worked-over
drafts. Yet is the implicit premise legitimate?
Beissner stressed repeatedly that his main concern was to develop
from the "spatial confusion" of the manuscripts and their corrections a
"chronological order of sequence" of genetic versions of the text. In this
way he held that the genetic process could be rendered both presentable and
comprehensible as a process.[45] The
implicit consequences may be clarified by reflecting that the spatial
dimension of an inscription, if irrelevant, can be considered so only from
the reader's perspective but not from that of the writer. For the author, the
spatiality of the writing importantly conditions his creative linguistic
behaviour, enabling him constructively to negotiate his conceptions and
their expression.[46] It is with the help
of the spatial dimension that he renders his conceptualisations visible and
available. He is in control of everything he has recorded in
writing—which in turn may influence his imagination—as
long as he is able to decide whether it should be retained or not. He can
decide for as long as what he has written remains readable and decipherable
to him. Deleted or otherwise invalidated passages must generally be taken
to be included in such writing. Textual exclusions of this kind should
therefore not be taken as definitive, i.e., as outright
annulments,
but as provisional deletions. Invalidated wordings within a manuscript must
be considered potentially valid if still legible to the author.
Conversely, all wordings left valid should be considered potentially
invalid.
In his genetic representation of the manuscript texts Beissner
sacrifices their spatial dimension. The alinear spatiality of draft initiations
and alterations is turned into a linear temporality of text stages where each
stage is definitively replaced by the next. This conversion is not a matter
of mere externals. Rather, it reflects an assessment of the authenticity of the
states of an unpublished text in autographs. The editor turns into definitive
text what for the author in principle was only potential writing. Hence, the
editor's system of genetic interpretation reinterprets the modality of the
writing: from being author-related it becomes reader-related. Otherwise the
editor's aim to make possible an "actively participating and co-productive
view of the work in progress"[47]
would indeed remain incomprehensible. It is in a manner the editor who
produces genetic readings from the poet's draft fluidities. In so doing, he
not only disregards the
spatial dimension as something seemingly unimportant.
He also neglects the specific productive (constructive) function which
writing has for the author as a process of visually recording transitory
reflections that acts as a reinforcement of his imagination. He degrades, in
effect, the act of writing to a mere external reproductive activity of no
importance for its written result, which is paradoxical especially for an
author whose manuscripts show that he made superbly constructive use of
their spatial dimension in drafting his texts.
[48]
Favouring the reader's perspective, this edition abandons the
fundamental difference between the author's and the reader's evaluation of
writing. For the reader, the act of writing as such is unimportant; important
is only its outcome in what the writing imparts. Taking writing to be merely
a graphic medium of communication, and categorically equating the written
and the oral utterance, the reader views the act of writing as a graphic
realisation of inner speech. This receptive stance is by extension attributed
to the author when it is implicitly assumed that his characteristic and
essential activity is to affirm or reject his writing in the reading of it as an
articulation of inward perceptions whose content core remains
unalterable.
In the Stuttgart edition, Hölderlin—like Goethe in the
Weimar
edition—is primarily understood as an author who positively or
negatively
evaluates his writing as an immediate projection of his imagined self. The
manuscript deletions and changes are not considered in their merely
potential quality holding no prejudice for the author's final decision on a
given text in publication; they are considered definitive. A deleted or
unaltered result of changes is not seen as the last of several textual options,
but as the "only possible form" or the "consummate form" of
expression.[49] The editor seems to
have been aware that this reader-oriented system of interpretation is
incommensurate with the nature of authentic textual production, since he
justifies his text-genetical representation as setting out the "ideal growth"
of the text and not its actual development, which "cannot generally be
deduced from manuscripts".[50]
This is an acceptable argument under the premise that it is relatively
unimportant to know how the author worked, and more
important that "organic links" should not be severed.[51] However, the "organic link"
between
states of textual development is finally seen to be the articulate author
reaching out for the perfect expression of his self.[52]
The disregard and modal misinterpretation of the writer's work
evident in the Weimar edition is thus by no means overcome in the
Hölderlin edition, even though its textual editor understood much
better how to deal with the manuscripts than did his colleagues of the
Goethe edition (Beissner, "Editionsmethoden", p. 73).
To summarise: the reception-oriented editorial concept does not
promote an interest in an improved understanding of literary work
processes. Hence it develops no analytic system, differentiating terminology
or representationally adequate model for dealing with text changes in
autographs.[53] Philologists who favour
this concept are more intent on preparing poet editions for the general
reader than work editions for the scholarly user.[54] As far as possible, they eschew
specialised editorial professionalism.[55]
As long as there are authors who sufficiently clearly lay down their
decisions on the versions in which they wish their texts to be read, and as
long as there are readers willing to submit their souls to authorial guidance,
this editorial concept cannot be considered outdated.
