III. The author's working procedures as a reflection of his sense of
self-being
Editors who adhere to the production-oriented editorial concept
consider it an important task of the critical edition to illustrate the author's
working procedures, be it indirectly by documenting and describing the
work's entire development and presenting the alterations it underwent, or
be it directly by providing reproductions of working manuscripts. However,
they do not acknowledge this process of illustrating working procedures as
an end in itself. Its principal aim is to serve as a control of the editor's
presentation of the text and its variants. This is also the primary function
of the manuscript facsimiles and their "typographic transcriptions" for
instance in the Frankfurt Hölderlin edition. Even their high degree of
documentary authenticity in relation to the author's working procedures is
really only to be understood as evidence corresponding to the meticulous
reconstruction of the genetic textual conditions. Yet do the writer's working
procedures merit observation
and documentation only with regard to their text-genetic results? Are they
of interest merely by their workshop handling of texts and variants, and not
also as the author's medium of expression? In other words: are these
procedures valuable only as a guide to new genetic states of greatest
possible textual authenticity, and not in themselves as a mode of articulation
of the writer who by their means created his texts? In one respect, that of
revision, the answer must be in the affirmative. Writers, especially in
earlier periods
of literary history, have repeatedly insisted how important critical reading
and re-reading was
for them and the consequent alterations
of
their texts. Pliny the Younger provides exemplary evidence in a letter
justifying the written dissemination of his speeches to readers by describing
with what critical care—and advice by friends—he revised and
corrected the text of a speech: "
Itaque nullum emendandi genus
omitto.
Ac primum quae scripsi mecum ipse pertracto; deinde
duobus aut tribus lego; mox aliis trado adnotanda, notasque eorum, si
dubito, cum uno rursus aut altero pensito; novissime pluribus recito, ac si
quid mihi credis tunc acerrime emendo; nam tanto diligentius quanto
sollicitius intendo. Optime autem reverentia pudor metus
iudicant".
[93] Acknowledging
an
habitual behaviour as important for himself, an author will also regard it as
noteworthy in literary colleagues.
[94]
Lessing, for
example, in reviewing Klopstock's Copenhagen edition of
Messias, discusses its revisions at great length. As an author
turned critic, he holds up many instances of Klopstock's textual changes for
demonstration and gives a reason for the trouble he is taking: "Changes and
improvements made by a poet like Klopstock in his works deserve not only
to be noted, but to be studied with the greatest diligence. By studying them
one can learn the finest rules of art; for what the art's masters well choose
to observe attains to the force of rules."
[95]
This was written in 1759, and thus at a time when literary good taste
was still acknowledged by writers and readers alike as a bond securing a
shared sense of the appropriate. The authors had the task of guiding taste
in so far as they took it upon themselves to improve their own artistic
sensibility by diligently studying master works of art, and by applying it in
turn to their own works to improve the sensibilities of their readers. A
writer who wished to be respected within the community of the literate did
well to apply the highest degree of literary judgement to his works. The
field to exercise his studied artistic sensibility was above all the redaction
and revision of his own texts and not their conception or production. This
exercise, however, was not a matter of "studium", but of "ingenium" or
"genius", an outflow of the individual's powers of imagination and
inspiration, and thus largely removed from conscious control. An author
who ceaselessly improved his works in
accordance with literary good taste thereby announced his claim to being
counted among the better authors.[96] The extent of the revisions he
undertook
in relation to the actual conception and production therefore indicates the
degree to which he saw himself as a community being and wished to be
recognised as such by others.[97]
Where this urge is about equal to the urge for creative individualisation, as
for instance with Goethe or Schiller in their classic periods, the relationship
also finds expression
in the working procedures. Given favourable conditions of transmission, it
is relatively easy to distinguish procedural phases: the primarily productive
phase of the preliminaries (notes, sketches, plans) and drafts (the drafting
of individual segments, first integral inscription of a whole text) on the one
hand, and the primarily revisional phase (fair copy, scribal copy, printer's
copy, proofs) on the other hand.
[98]
Such working procedures have a strong and purposeful forward
direction even at an early developmental stage. The author begins relatively
early after the initial inspiration to work towards an opus,
even
though he may be gaining clarity about its content and form only as it
progresses. The purposefulness of his working procedures mirrors his
teleological self-conception; his search for perfection in a literary work
reflects his will to a perfection of his personal existence. Despite all
possible individual distancing, his powers of imagination are bound to a
traditional image of man which he accepts as the highest standard of his
existence and self-being. It is not only his creative imagination which is
more or less dominated by such self-determination; his entire work as an
author is also so dominated. This means that his work is very much
oriented towards publication. For the author can only relate positively to
himself as a person if he succeeds in objectifying what
he recognises as the essence of that self, raising it to permanence and
providing for its unlimited internalisation by others. It is thus for the sake
both of his literary and, above all, of his personal self-affirmation that this
type of author views himself primarily as a community being. In this sense
his consideration for the literate reading public is genuine.
To the extent that the regulatory power of an objectifiable image of
man loses validity for the author's self-conception, his imaginative activity
begins to develop its own, and often superior, dynamics. Correspondingly,
the creative aspect (the recording, combination and evocation of
perceptions) gains significance for his work, while the process of revision
loses its functional essence. No longer limited to the revising of completed
texts and text segments, it extends to the development of new texts and
segments. Revision ceases to be clearly distinguishable from text
production, which itself in turn, moreover, becomes increasingly
characterised by an over-abundance of immediate, as opposed to retarded,
changes. Recent German poets, e.g., Georg Heym, Georg Trakl, Franz
Kafka,[99] offer numerous examples
of such characteristics in their working materials.
Authorial working procedures directed primarily towards productive
writing cannot provide a fruitful object for studying an author's artistic will
in the sense of the Lessing quotation above.[100] They belong to a type of author
less
concerned with realising his artistic will or public recognition
as a superior writer than with individual self-realisation through the most
boundless development of his imagination. The more he opens himself to
his imagination and allows himself to be overwhelmed by it, the more his
writing loses the quality of a purposeful finite activity divisible into phases
such as preliminaries, drafts and revision. It develops a tendency, rather,
of becoming a mode of existence with which the author exclusively
identifies and in which he would wish to dwell for as long as possible.
Baudelaire and Flaubert, those founding fathers of the literature of
modernism, really did not wish to be anything but poets. Consequently,
their pronouncements on literary work in truth bear witness to their
individual lives and are meaningful only to themselves or their intimate
friends. Baudelaire, the champion of "gouvernement de
l'imagination",
[101] records in a
collection of notes: "Si tu travaillais tous les jours, la vie te serait plus
supportable. Travaille [six] jours sans relâche. [. . .] Je suppose que
j'attache ma destinée à un travail non interrompu de
plusieurs
heures."
[102] Flaubert, who called
himself "l'homme-plume",
[103] often
refers to his working procedures in letters. They bore unmistakable traits
of obsession, sustained as they were by a "génie de la gestation, une
sorte de jubilation, qu'on peut, si l'on s'en prend à l'homme,
qualifier
de folle ou de perverse."
[104] In the
course of composing Emma Bovary's seduction he commented: "Que cela
continue! car je suis fatigué de mes lenteurs. Mais je redoute le
réveil, les désillusions des pages recopiées!
N'importe, bien ou
mal, c'est une délicieuse chose que d'écrire, que de ne plus
être
soi, mais de circuler dans toute la création dont on
parle."
[105]
In a similar spirit Kafka records his mood of depression in situations
when the imagination failed him in his writing, or that of an intoxicatingly
inspiring extasy in moments when it ran free.[106] He appears himself to have
sensed a
spiritual affinity with Flaubert. Commenting on a few manuscript pages for
L'Education sentimentale, he wrote: "The crossed-out pages
[.
. .] do not represent nights of failing energy. On the contrary, these are the
very pages in which he wholly immersed himself, in which he lost himself
to every human eye. And even when writing these pages for the third time,
he experienced [. . .] this infinite happiness."[107] In his diary, Kafka articulated
how much
he considered productive writing as the only form of existence
commensurate with his self: "When I became aware within my whole
organism that writing was the most fruitful direction of my being,
everything thronged towards it and
rendered void all other abilities, directed towards the joys of sex, eating,
drinking, philosophical reflection and, above all, music. I emaciated in all
these directions."[108]
Writers who find their life's fulfilment in activating their imagination
by writing are, as a rule, scarcely able to adopt a clear stance towards the
results of their writing. Their relationship to their texts is basically
ambivalent. It tends to be positive as long as the texts provide a continued
or renewed stimulus for the imagination, yet negative when the animation
fails or
cannot be experienced any longer.
[109] Flaubert copied or rewrote
passages from
his novels or made "recopiages" (copies of pages of books he had read) to
put himself into a productive mood: "Certes Flaubert lit pour se
documenter, mais aussi et surtout par débauche imaginative, et ce
sont
les mots qui le debauchent."
[110] And
Kafka, clearly, was virtually incapable of substantially improving his short
stories in revision. His ability of critical (re-)reading was little developed.
Hence, his publications do not express decisions freely taken by himself and
specifically relating only to his texts. They are
determined, rather, by external factors alien to the author and to the
text.
[111]
The typical uncertainty of the authors mentioned with respect to what
their texts might mean to readers taking a receptive attitude towards them
signifies their fundamental lack of consideration for a readership
altogether.[112] Such lack is not so
much involuntary in the individual as a mode of intentional behaviour. The
authors—and they are not only modern ones, as the example of
Montaigne shows[113] —view
themselves primarily as individuals and wish to be seen and accepted as
such by others. Their daily existence becomes unbearable to the extent that
this self-image is not acknowledged. In the same measure, literary writing
assumes for them the significance of an authentic form of existence.
Bearing no relation to real persons, it excludes the everyday world from its
field of reference, and it is also creative, since the imagination can repress
thoughts of an everyday community existence and blot them out in
moments of happiness.
Documents of a mode of literary writing which, in fulfilling an
author's wish to be understood preeminently as an individual, constitutes an
essential articulation of his assumed form of life, are in this sense also
biographic documents. This is increasingly true: the more significant that
productive writing was for the author and the less important its textual
results, the greater the indeterminacy or secrecy in his work or being, and
the more clearly the work process shows signs of spontaneous inceptions or
abrupt conclusions (indiscriminate use of available writing space, such as
old letters, café menus, envelopes, pages torn from copybooks).[114] Such manuscript leaves body
forth an
author's innermost life sphere rather than his workshop activities. They are
not merely the sources for "textologists" interested in reconstructing the
genetic versions of the text, but witnesses sui generis which
crave attention for their own sake.
