University of Virginia Library

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.