Equivalence or precedence of the apparatus over the
text
If the editor sets the chronicler's approach above the reader's
perspective, the author's published and unpublished work, the final and the
earlier text versions, will rank equal with him. Goedeke was still undecided
on this matter. Only Schiller's "youthful attempts" did he qualify wholly as
"instances of his development and evidence of the history of Schiller's
mind" (Schiller, 1, p. v). It was not in editorial Schiller
scholarship but, remarkably, in a new critical edition of Goethe's works,
the so-called Academy edition,[62] that
this historical perspective came to be applied most decisively. This is
particularly remarkable since for Goethe's works authorised publications
exist in great numbers, a situation without parallel for Schiller or indeed
any other author in modern German literature. It is a transmissional
situation that does not exactly invite a levelling of ranks among the
witnesses to the evolution of the oeuvre and its
individual parts. The reasons for nevertheless adopting and consistently
upholding the historical perspective are mainly conceptual. The Academy
edition, in truth, was designed to replace the section of the "literary works"
in the Weimar edition.
[63] It not only
reflects an improved knowledge of the materials and a sharpened awareness
of the problematics of textual criticism, it was also intended to convey a
different perception of Goethe.
[64] The
"historical relief of Goethe's poetry, its outer metamorphosis which cannot
be separated from its inner metamorphosis" was to be set against the
"ahistorical nature" of the Weimar edition.
[65] Ernst Grumach, the first
editor-in-chief
of the Academy edition, took his guidance no longer from the author's final
communicated intention but rather from his original one: "It is only the
author's original intention—as far as this can be deduced from the
manuscripts and the first editions authorised by him—which can
reliably
inform the constitution of the text" ("Probleme", p. 45). In addition to its
critical function of recording and justifying the constitution
of
the text, the critical apparatus was entrusted with the historical task of
"relating a textual history" (
ibid., p. 47) ranging from
preparatory notes to the final version of the revised text.
Under Grumach's direction, the "historical relief" of Goethe's oeuvre
was to retain its peaks and elevations in the shape of the critically
constituted "best" texts in versions "adequately expressing the author's
intention".[66] This constitution of the
text was of course not to be achieved in the divinatory spirit of a Richard
Bentley, but in the historical manner of a Karl Lachmann, taking into
consideration "all extant textual witnesses and all factors which influenced
the textual history" (ibid., p. 6). For this reason Grumach
termed the Academy edition a "critical-historical" edition of Goethe's
works.[67] The "historical relief" was
levelled out by his successors, and the critical-historical edition became an
"historical-critical" one.[68] They
abandoned the aim of establishing a "best" text. The critical constitution of
the text through recension lost considerable importance in
favour of a greater respect for the preserved historical form
of
the text. Corruptions were to be determined only within the context of the
base text and were, if possible, to be emended only in relation to a
knowledge of that text. The process of recension was to be carried out on
the basis of internal evidence only, without recourse to text-genetic
knowledge about the author's habitual usages in the language and in his
writing.[69] Consequently corruption
was adjudicated within the limits of more or less obvious error.
This limitation in applying procedures of textual criticism resembles
the considered restrictive practices of the Weimar Goethe edition: les
extrêmes se touchent. A reserve towards textual criticism is
common to editors who see themselves primarily as the author's loyal
trustees and
those who see themselves preeminently as documentary historians of his
work. Grumach's successors indeed only pursued the path he took to its
logical end. In defining "the poet's original intention" as mainly binding for
the reproduction of the text, Grumach implicitly adopted a critical stance
that considered Goethe's creative behaviour as his essential characteristic.
The authorised first edition, or indeed the manuscript behind it, seemed
closest to the author's immediate production. "That which no longer
appertains to the process of poetic composition and revision, the
predominantly corrective, intended or unintended alterations in the later
printings and editions" was relegated to the critical apparatus.
[70]
With such partisanship for Goethe in his capacity as producer of
texts, the differentiating potential inherent in terms such as "composition"
and "revision" was apt to wane. To Grumach's successors, composition and
revision, conceptual and revisional work, creative and corrective shaping
were all indistinguishably aspects of a textual development
resulting equivalently in text or text versions.[71] This in turn made the choice of the
first
authorised printing or its manuscript source as the base text for the edition
questionable as such. It could only be maintained on extraneous grounds,
such as an allegiance to the established practice of the Academy edition
itself or to that of other editions.[72]
At the same time, the basis dwindled for a more demanding type of textual
criticism that would take the author's recognisable habits as a guideline,
when possible, for the constitution of the text in the case of
oversights or transmissional corruption. On the one hand, an attitude
equating the author's published texts with the unpublished ones would imply
seeing even the published ones essentially as the results of his creative
work. Yet if, on the other hand, the published texts and versions are
regarded as in essence not intended by the author, the textual critic is
deprived of a reliable basis for his judgement. Should he, as editor, follow
the linguistic and orthographic usage in the authorised prints, or should he
adopt usages deduced from the manuscripts—even though these may
vary
to an extraordinary degree?
The restrictive attitude towards exercising textual criticism evident in
the volumes of the Academy edition since 1963 is essentially the editors'
own choice. This needs to be emphasised, since there exist also restrictions
to textual criticism grounded in objective criteria, e.g., in the case of
authors who largely did not publish their work,[73] or in the case of authors
characteristically
undecided about which of their texts should be published, and in which
form; having perhaps written with no view to publication, extraneous and
alien as they felt it to be to them. Such authors, to be encountered
frequently since the Romantic Age,[74]
present such a variety of possibilities of articulation that the editor often
feels
acute incertitude about whom he is actually dealing with, what the author
could have intended and what is to be accounted for as within his potential
range. Yet a proper awareness of the author's perspective may still guide
the editor towards an unbiassed perception of the textual conditions. Here,
then, it is an author himself, as it were, who induces the restrictions of the
editor's text-critical faculty of judgment. By accepting them, the editor
respects the author's identity as manifest in his creative behaviour.
Given that every textual version, regardless of when it originated or
how it was transmitted, may have an equal claim to being rendered
in
extenso, every version, too, deserves the same measure of editorial
attention.[75] To the degree that
authorised printings and authentic or authorised manuscripts are considered
equal in respect of the text they document, their material differences gain
significance. The material characteristics of the documents, both textual and
bibliographical, which seemed only marginally relevant to the Weimar
Goethe edition, have a central information value in the Academy edition.
The detailed descriptions of the witnesses selected, which are contained in
its apparatus volumes published since 1963, serve largely to justify both the
record of texts and variants, and the genetic reconstruction. The record of
the variants to the fully rendered text is not only complete, it is also
presented by the same semeiographically
exact method of transcription as the text itself. With regard to this uniform
transcriptional method, the foreshortened record of variants in the apparatus
ranks equal with the extensive presentation of the text.[76] The emphasis in both cases is on
the
attested text rather than the authorially intended one. In its main aim and
method, the Academy edition is thus a document edition.[77] Moreover, with regard to the
number of
witnesses edited, each apparatus volume actually ranks higher than the
corresponding text volume.[78]
Where a scholarly edition is presented principally as a document
edition, the spatial dimension appears more important than the temporal
dimension. The text is understood primarily as an autonomous and visually
perceptible art object of a semeiographic nature, not as an author's aurally
perceptible verbal utterance, as under the reception-oriented editorial
concept. Siegfried Scheibe has expressed a sense of this modern editorial
conception of the text with welcome clarity: "An editor's aptitude is
revealed by his ability first to visualise a manuscript full of corrections as
if blank and untouched, in order then to recognise and to infer, as far as
possible, how, in discrete stages of composition, the blank pages were filled
with the characters and symbols of a 'text', and how parts of this 'text'
changed while others remained constant."[79] Scheibe also conceives of the
genetic
development of a literary work according
to such an inscriptional process of textual construction: the genetic stages
in the work's development correspond to the textualised states of its
pre-versions and versions (
ibid., pp. 16-17, 28). This is a
useful
notion of text and text development in editorial terms, since it promotes a
semeiographic analysis in close documentary harmony with the reproduction
of the textual witnesses. In the Academy edition, it has proved profitable
for the handling of the immediate witnesses to Goethe's work and that of
his assistants,
i.e., the manuscripts themselves. Their variants
are rendered with the greatest attention to differentiating detail.
Transcribing the manuscript variants with utmost exactitude, the edition
may be said to approximate quite closely Goethe's working procedures; it
certainly comes closer to them than does the Weimar edition in its selective
apparatus of readings. To be more precise: in its mode of editorial
presentation the Academy edition has been
adapted to the author's working method by means of a differentiated
rendering of the results of the work process: the acts of alteration are
captured in their results, and the results in turn are viewed as integral to
states or versions of the text. The author's work process is thus properly
speaking only indirectly documented and does not itself become the subject
of editorial presentation. Deleted passages and the structured spatial
arrangement of the text (variants as spatially co-ordinated textual elements)
are therefore not identified.
[80]
Scheibe's concept of text and text development serves in the Academy
edition not only as an instrument of editorial analysis, but also as the aim
of editorial presentation. The written traces of the author's working
procedures seem worth accounting for only in as far as they lead to new
versions of the text; what they may mean with regard to the author appears
largely irrelevant. The dominant perspective is
that of a reader who, provided with an edited text and variants, may
combine, as in a puzzle, those versions of the text and strands of text
development which at any given moment
he desires. In
gaining
a sense of text production, he is thus brought closer to the author.
