II.
The Problem of Authorial Intention
The application of the Greg-Bowers copy-text theory requires the
interchangeability of variants from different versions. This requirement, as
far as I can see, rests on the assumption that the alterations made by the
author are isolated improvements within a concept which remains constant,
unless the opposite can be proved, which it rarely can. This assumption in
turn is usually accompanied by a particular notion of the mutations of a
literary work; in German studies this notion is rooted in Goethe's
understanding of himself as man and poet. As was described in the
introductory section, in establishing Goethe's texts from the final revised
edition, Grumach had in each instance adopted only substantive alterations
attributable directly to
Goethe, not, however, the alterations undertaken by Goethe's assistants
under his surveillance—not far-reaching standardisation of punctuation,
orthography and word forms. He regarded these as alien to Goethe's text,
often detrimental to Goethe's real intentions; that they were retained in the
Weimar edition (1887 ff.) is said to have been the result of "false piety".
At this point, criticism of Grumach's edition set in. Friedrich Beissner
founded his objections on "the right of the author to his own work", and
declared that for a complete edition the principle of the Weimar edition had
been unquestionably right in giving favourable consideration to the final
revised edition including the standardisation, because Goethe
wanted it, and sanctioned the procedure of his assistants, and
the result. An editor, however, would be obliged to carry out Goethe's final
intentions better than his assistants did at that time; he would have to
standardise according to more refined methods
and at the same time "preserve what was distinctively Goethe's". He would
only be entitled to reverse alterations which "could be proved to be in
opposition to Goethe's real intentions and which had been overlooked by
him."
[16]
The establishment of a text which appeals ultimately to the intention
of the author may easily give rise to controversy. To the process of
standardisation mentioned, which reflected in the main the scribal habits of
the 1820's, Goethe also subjected works which had come into existence 50
years earlier with quite different graphical characteristics, works which had
been the foundation of his literary fame. Thus according to his final
intention Goethe wished to appear before his readers not out-moded and
old-fashioned, but in modern, contemporary orthography. Would it not be
right for an editor citing the intention of the author in support of his
edition, believing himself obliged to carry out what the author himself no
longer carried out, to derive from this even the obligation to transpose
Goethe's works into modern spelling, "while with utmost sensitivity
respecting and preserving what is distinctively Goethe's"? Were this to
happen, a basic principle of the historical-critical
edition would be injured by the principle of the final intention.
The axiomatic preference for the final intention of the author as
against his earlier intentions can be seen in two ways. Either it is based on
the teleological notion that the work itself has a goal, or that the author
envisages one, and that in the course of time he brings his work nearer and
nearer to it; correlated with the work is a concept
which the writer's "improvements" can realise with increasing refinement
and precision. (Therefore it is emphasised that only a change in concept
hinders the application of the copy-text theory.) Or it is based on the related
morphological notion that the work is an organism, that its mutations are
a "development", an "organic growth", a continual process of ripening,
from the seed perhaps even to perfect maturity. This was how Goethe saw
his life's work. And this was how the editors of the Weimar edition saw
Goethe's final revised edition: "By nature [!] the last edition represents the
summit, the conclusion."
[17]
Moreover another concept is adduced, which in my opinion signifies
an old confusion of the textual and the legal spheres, namely when that
same edition is described as "Goethe's testamentary disposition", as "his
bequest", and when the editors feel themselves to be his literary executors,
and believe that they are commissioned by him to carry out what he wished
to undertake but did not himself complete. If one wanted to pursue this
editorial principle of final authorial intention to its logical conclusion, it
would lead in some cases to the annihilation of the object of the edition
through the edition: even today one would have to destroy The
Aeneid. For Virgil demanded of his friends Marius and Tucca that
they should burn the work which at his death was extrinsically complete,
intrinsically unfinished; it was to be destroyed for purely artistic reasons,
because it did not fulfill his standards. Augustus ordered them to publish the
poem.[18]
Franz Kafka demanded of his executor Max Brod that he should burn his
unprinted writings unread.[19] Instead
he published them. This time there was no emperor. But only the executor,
not the editor, can be set at odds by such an expression of the author's
wishes; the editor's philological task, here as elsewhere, can only be to
interpret extant documents and accompanying circumstances as historic
facts. In my opinion he has to deal with the intentions of the author not as
an executor, but only as a historian, and he should regard them not as
binding directives for editorial decisions, but as historical
phenomena.
And I believe that this is the way in which texts should be regarded
altogether, in their relationships to one another, to their originators, and to
the conditions of their genesis and influence. I see the following parts, or
rather aspects, of the history of a work: (1) the history of the text, that is
to say, the history of its emergence and the alterations
made to it by the author; (2) the history of its influence and reception,
which begins as soon as the work, or parts of it, become known to other
people; (3) the history of transmission, that is to say, the process following
on from the textual history, where, even under the eyes of the author, the
work begins to be affected by those intentional and unintentional textual
alterations which accompany its dispersion. The aspects overlap at times;
unauthorised "facsimile" reprints ("Doppeldrucke") and pirate editions with
their distortions may provide the basic copy for an authorised revision of
the text. Of importance for our discussion is above all the interdependence
of factors of textual history and of influence and reception. Apart from rare
exceptions, it is safe to assume that authors want to be read, and that in
writing they think of a public. For this reason an author not only has an
effect on his readers, he is in turn affected by their reaction. It is not
possible (or only
rarely, in exceptional cases), when a work is revised, to give a detailed
account of the extent to which the reception of the first version, a change
in society, a change in the author himself and in his relationship to his
environment, a different incentive or purpose in publication, may be
involved in the revision, and this holds all the more true since right from
the beginning, before he even thought of writing, the author was exposed
to this play of forces from all sides. What is termed the intention of the
author is an undetachable part of these forces, and therefore seems equally
ill-suited as a criterion for editorial decisions or as a criterion for the
evaluation of literary works. Only the textual history is within the editor's
reach: notes, extracts, drafts, when they have survived, and then the
versions in chronological sequence, a diachronic succession of discrete
semiotic systems. The totality of the versions yields the diachronic pattern
of the work. Each individual
version yields a synchronic linguistic pattern.
If one imagines the textual history in the shape of a 3-dimensional
cylinder standing upright, then the different versions are horizontal planes
perpendicular to the axis of the cylinder. The purpose of the
historical-critical edition (apart from the necessary correction of mutilated
text) is to create an appropriate reproduction of this cylinder, that is to say,
of the complete textual history; while the purpose of a critical edition is to
reproduce a particular plane, that is to say, an individual version.
Contamination would mean the projection of one plane onto another. In the
historical-critical edition the editor selects one version (or, when there are
substantial differences between the versions, more than one) for
reproductions as the text in his edition, and he
presents the remaining textual history (or possibly all of it) in the
apparatus.
[20] From a historical point
of view the different versions are in theory of equal value. Each represents
a semiotic system which was valid at a specific time, which the author later
rejected, because he for some reason no longer found it adequate, in favour
of another version which matched his new intention. To explain the
alterations by saying that one assumes the author's intentions are still the
same but that he was not previously able to realise them so well, is to
declare him a bungler. Whether the author regards the alterations as an
improvement of his work, or as an enhancement of its literary qualities,
whether or not he declares the earlier version invalidated, or condemns
it—for the historian, for the editor, the alterations mean an adaptation of
the work to suit the altered circumstances, ideas and purposes of the author.
For the editor there is no "best
version". In selecting the text to be edited he is not bound by the final
intention of the author. He may, for instance, defend the young Goethe's
works against the revision of the 75-year-old, of whom it can be proved
that he in part no longer understood, or no longer wanted to understand, the
creations of his youth. The editor of Ernst Jünger's works will
probably reject the alterations which the author made to his earlier works
after the collapse of the Third Reich, and edit the original versions. In
specific cases the choice of version for the edited text may depend on very
different factors; the history of influence and reception may be decisive, or
again the degree of corruption or purity of a particular version. As long as
the editor sees his function as that of a historian, he has a wide range of
freedom in the selection of the version for the edited text, but this version
he must reproduce without contamination.
The establishment of a text oriented to the intentions of the author is
confronted with considerable difficulties when it becomes apparent from the
variants that the magnetic needle of the author's wishes is quivering in the
field of non-aesthetic forces. This leads to characteristic problems. The
printer's copies for the first edition of some of Nathaniel Hawthorne's
novels have survived, fair copy autographs. The manuscripts of The
Blithedale Romance (1852) and The Marble Faun
(1860) display traces of the influence of Hawthorne's wife Sophia. Crosses
in the manuscript of The Marble Faun, as the
editor tells us, mark places which Sophia noted in order to suggest to her
husband an alteration (in style or content). Usually the author complied, as
the corrections show. In three marked places, however, he resisted. One of
these places, with the phrase "vinous enjoyment", is characteristic of
Sophia's temperance convictions.
[21]
In the manuscript of
The Blithedale Romance Hawthorne
made excisions only in three places; two are concerned with liquor and one
with sexuality. It is not possible to ascertain, says the editor, to whose
initiative the deletions are to be traced, but it seems very probable that they
"were made in deference to the sensibilities of Hawthorne's wife. . . .
Although the deletions undoubtedly represent his final intentions, the causes
behind these intentions are suspect." "The reasons could not have been
literary."
[22] Therefore the deleted
passages have been re-adopted in the critical text. It
seems to me that in the editor's decisions the difference which obtains in
the case of
The Marble Faun, where Hawthorne resisted the
influence of his wife, does not find adequate expression, and for
methodological reasons I find the idea perplexing, that the editor should feel
obliged not only to make inferences about the final intentions of an author,
but also about the causes behind these intentions. I cannot regard the psyche
of the author and its analysis as a substantial foundation for editing.
All cases of actual and suspected self-imposed censorship give rise to
this kind of analysis. Fredson Bowers, as editor of Stephen Crane's
Maggie (1893), did not by any means put a veil over the
difficulties involved in such distinctions; he placed them clearly in the
foreground on several occasions.[23]
The first version of the novel could only be printed privately under a
pseudonym. When Crane found a publisher for it three years later, the
publisher demanded an attenuation of the drastic language, that is to say,
expurgation "to remove most of the profanity and perhaps some of the
sordid detail characteristic of the original version"[24] (in Crane's own phrase, "words which
hurt"). Problems arise, because it is clear that Crane voluntarily undertook
further corrections and in some instances it is not clear to which category
the alterations belong. This is the case with three deletions
in chapter 17 and with some modifications, which were carried out either
"under the impression that they would be required by the general agreement
. . . about the nature of the revisions",
[25] or for purely artistic reasons, for the
"softening of satire or of shocking detail".
[26] The editor feels obliged to come to a
decision on this score in each case, and to include in the edited text only
those departures from the first version which match "the author's final and
uninfluenced artistic intentions".
[27]
The investigation of the nature of the deletions in the 17th chapter
constitutes a highly impressive interpretation of the two versions of this
chapter ("Textual Introduction," pp. lxxviixci), and leads to the conclusion
that there are no grounds for assuming anything other than a deletion made
by Crane deliberately for literary reasons, in order to resolve an ambiguity.
One might of course ask
whether an investigation of this sort should be the concern of an editor or
of the textual critic, or rather of the literary critic.
[28] Greg's principles, in particular the aim of
clarifying "whether the later reading is one that the author can reasonably
be supposed to have substituted for the former,"
[29] and most particularly this "reasonably",
require the editor to undertake ad hoc investigations of this nature whenever
an alteration is suspect. However, would it not ultimately put him under the
obligation not only of examining the variants, say, stylistically, but also of
interpreting, with regard to the alterations, the original and the revised
version of the text, taking into consideration all its relevant dimensions, and
would this kind of interpretation not lead directly into the hermeneutic
circle, inasmuch as the revised version represents both the basis and the
goal of the investigation? It is indeed notable that
scattered through the comments of the editor on the motives behind certain
of Crane's softenings are phrases such as "could be", "it is not certain", "it
is possible", "probably".
[30] The
reason for this does not by any means lie in a deficiency in the editor's
powers of analysis, but in the thing itself: if one has to reckon with purely
literary and purely censorial motives for alteration, one must also reckon
with a combination of the two. Firstly, in anticipation of the character of
the expected censorship, Crane could be led to undertake
alterations which also had literary value in the context of the new version.
Secondly, because of the systematic character of the work, purely censorial
alterations sparked off further alterations, determined at this stage by
literary considerations. Again in consequence of the systemic character of
the work, the contamination of the two historical versions in the edited text
gives rise to a third version. Though the editor may indeed give a rational
account of his decision at each point on the basis of the documents,
nevertheless to aim to produce the ideal text which Crane would have
produced in 1896 if the publisher had left him complete freedom
[31] is to my mind just as unhistorical as the
question of how the first World War or the history of the United States
would have developed if Germany had not caused the USA to enter the war
in 1917 by unlimited submarine combat. The nonspecific form of
censorship described above is one of the historical
conditions under which Crane wrote the second version of
Maggie and made it function. From the text which arose in
this way it is not possible to subtract these forces and influences, in order
to obtain a text of the author's own. Indeed I regard the "uninfluenced
artistic intentions" of the author as something which exists only in terms of
aesthetic abstraction. Between influences on the author and influences on
the text are all manner of transitions.
It is in the nature of certain areas of literature that, apart from
aesthetic purposes, obligations exist towards practical purposes and diverse
forms of non-literary ideology; this is the case with the so-called utilitarian
forms such as the essay, the pamphlet, memoirs, originally with all
rhetorical forms and with André Jolles' "Einfache Formen", fable,
didactic poem and satire, the mediaeval mystery play and legend, Jesuit
drama and Brecht's plays of instruction. Klopstock still does not recognise
any autonomous poetry of quality. His poetic message is bound up with his
religious convictions and obligations. The highest form of poetry, the
Christian epic, and religious poetry altogether, is proclamation of faith.
"The plan of the revelation is its prime rule", he says of the "sacred poem".
Nevertheless, in his major work, Der Messias, he undertakes
alterations and deletions for other reasons too, for instance in order to
prevent the work from becoming the object of
theological disputes detrimental to it.[32] For me it is inconceivable that editors
should be allowed to reverse such alterations on the grounds that they were
made for reasons neither religious nor poetic. In
German literature it was only during Klopstock's lifetime and later that
poetry laid claim to an autonomous area of its own, and even then it
naturally retained links with the rest of reality.
The editor oriented to the artistic intentions of the author is
confronted also with those puzzling situations which James Thorpe treats in
the second part of his essay, "The Aesthetics of Textual Criticism",[33] asking "what constitutes the integrity of
the work of art?" Often the editors of magazines intervene not only in the
accidentals of contributions. But even authors who have protested against
such changes often adopt them when they publish their periodical
contributions in book form, and seem to give them some kind of authority.
How is the editor to interpret this behaviour on the part of the author?
"Often we cannot be sure whether he makes suggested changes because of
a compliant disposition, whether he allows editorial alterations to stand in
later editions out of laziness, whether he reverts to earlier readings out of
pertinacity, or whether there is reasoned conviction in support of his
action".[34] Thorpe
comes to the conclusion that the intentions which amount to "the integrity
of the work of art" include "those intentions which are the author's,
together with those others of which he approves or in which he
acquiesces".[35]
I think that it is the difficulty, indeed the impossibility, of obtaining
a text attributable exclusively to the author, when conditions are really
complicated, which led Thorpe towards the recognition of an aggregate of
alien influences. In this he adopts a position very close to that of current
German studies being described here.
