The model of the author in the 3rd person: the author
concealing himself as a producer of texts
Introducing the radical historicism of some of the volumes in the
Goethe Academy edition means assuming the perspective of the
re-producing editor as normative. If all versions of the text which the author
has produced or assisted in are declared equivalent in principle, it is wholly
for the editor to decide which one he should reproduce in full. Authorial
decisions in this matter have no force. The author becomes a subject
without intersubjectively binding intentions if what distinguishes the texts
he published from those he left unpublished is nothing but their
material state in prints and manuscripts. In other words: the obligation of
respect for Goethe's decisions as to how he wished readers to understand
his works and himself loses its validity. The editor's obligation towards the
author is replaced by his obligation towards the scholarly users of critical
editions.
[81] The ethos of
the—modern—editor is thus basically object-oriented, its
concerns are
the oeuvre and the text. Hence, the demands raised by the supporters of the
production-oriented concept for greater objectivity in critical editing are
largely, if not exclusively, to be understood as a desire to strengthen its text
orientation.
[82] They feel responsible
mainly towards the users of editions to whom methodologically verifiable
information is due about the author's texts and their transmission.
[83] The author, on the whole, is
reduced to
the role of a producing supplier of texts
and text versions which editorially creative skill re-produces for all manner
of uses. Intentionality is envisaged mainly in the general sense that an
author must be supposed to have intended to produce everything he wrote,
which is tantamount to rendering the notion of authorial intention
irrelevant.
[84] The author's willed
disposition of intention is conceded only in relation to isolated instances of
more or less obvious error. These are also regarded, however, under a
perspective that places the author in the position of a third person: is x, y,
z intended
by him, could it be expected
of
him?
It stands to the credit of the Academy edition that it has established
a terminology providing the most discriminatory editorial instrument
hitherto developed.[85] It bears the
unmistakable imprint of a double focus on textual production (author) and
textual re-production (editor/reader).[86] Two examples may serve to
illustrate its
inherent focal constraints. Firstly, the editors are ready to admit that they
have not succeeded in articulating an "unequivocal" definition of "an
author's work (=opus)" (ibid., pp. 16-17). The
reason is that they have posed the question exclusively from a point of view
of editorial text orientation and editorial concerns. Individual and
authorially integrated texts of course present no real definition problems.
Yet a definition becomes difficult if not ultimately impossible in cases
where textual criteria do not exist, e.g., when an author has
contributed to a
collaborative publication or revised the texts of others for publication.
Obviously his contributive pieces cannot be termed "works". Where should
the line be drawn? Should self-contained additions be claimed for the
"works"? Yet these may be related to revisions elsewhere for which the
author is not himself responsible. The matter cannot be decided solely with
reference to the author's producing role. His role as a reader-recipient
needs also to be considered. Significant for the author is not only his
"work", i.e., the text he has himself composed, but every text, whether
written by himself
or not, which he can read and affirm as a representation of his life and his
self and which he can thus adopt as his own. The corrective revisions for
publication and ultimately the published versions themselves of texts by
himself or others provide evidence of such authorial attitudes of
identification. The author's willed identity appears ultimately disregarded
if an edition takes indications of his judicious reading behaviour into full
consideration only when recognisable from his self-produced texts but treats
them selectively when found in the texts of others. Admittedly, to come into
focus at all where only the productive side of the author is relevant, such
indications of a judicious receptivity towards his own texts or those of
others have to be text-genetically misinterpreted as evidence of productive
activity, or else disregarded altogether. If the Weimar edition shows that its
editors could make little of a Goethe self-absorbed in the production of his
texts, yet much
of a Goethe conscious in revision of how they should and would be read,
the reverse is true of the editors of the Academy edition. By default of their
methodology, they saw little to interest them in a Goethe revisionally
shaping public texts.
[87]
Secondly: the predominance of the idea of the author as a producer
of texts has consequences for the concept of authorisation, which becomes
directly or indirectly correlated to the author's productive behaviour.
Accordingly, the term does not denote the author's affirmative reading of
texts as expressions of permanence of his self. Rather, it classifies witness
documents as authorially produced or co-produced (holographs or scribal
copies with autograph corrections), or else as authorially induced or
instigated (scribal copies, prints). Documents demonstrably originating
directly or indirectly through authorial activity are regarded as authorised.
The purpose of the concept is to distinguish the editorially relevant
witnesses from the irrelevant ones.[88]
The criterion, however, is helpful only in the case of the non-authentic
documents, the scribal copies and prints; that autograph manuscripts are
relevant witnesses is self-evident. The concept
of 'authorisation' is in truth meaningless for variant selection, though not
for genetic reconstruction of texts performed by editors and users of critical
editions. The tendency to equate authorially written text and authorised text
carries considerable consequences for the assessment of text versions
derived from the author's manuscripts.[89]
