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III.
Textual Error and Textual Fault ("Textfehler")
Our great sensitivity to contamination will be countered from the viewpoint of the Greg principles in the following way:—in transposing the last reliably authoritative substantive variations into the copy-text, which is binding only for the accidentals, one is basically not mixing different versions, but simply cleansing the last version of non-authorial intervention. I am prepared to agree that under quite specific circumstances this is indeed the best way to produce the correct authorial text; namely, if one has as copy-text an autograph printer's copy, if the author can be shown to have read the proofs only cursorily, and directly after the production of the copy, and finally if he can be
Where these conditions are not fulfilled, the Greg establishment of text runs in danger of contamination. What I mean can best be demonstrated by an example. Because it is a matter of relationships within a work, it is necessary to present the relevant passages within the context of the work. For this demonstration a ballad by C. F. Meyer is particularly suitable, for which ten textual witnesses have survived from the years 1871-1892. I discount the earliest manuscript because the second document (designated here as H1) has been revised to such an extent that it and the subsequent versions cannot easily be related to the first. The nine documents H1-D9, on the other hand, can be registered in synoptic sequence in such a way that the alterations of each as against the preceding one can be read off; only text which varies from that of the directly preceding version is registered in each case. Text deleted in the manuscripts is in [square brackets]. Certain variants in punctuation are given in the margin; orthographic variants are listed at the end, so as not to encumber the presentation with them. The nine authoritative documents are as follows:
| H1 | Manuscript written by C. F. Meyer's sister, dated "January 1873". |
| H2 | Manuscript written by Meyer's sister. Revision of H1. Printer's copy for D3. |
| D3 | First printing in an almanac, 1873. Deviations from H2 only in punctuation (subtitle and l. 19) and orthography. No misprints. |
| D4 | Authorised reprint in an anthology, 1876. Deviations from D3 in wording (subtitle and l. 33), and in punctuation, and graphical changes. Meyer to the editors: "I wish to read proof myself". 8 probable misprints. |
| D5-D9 | C. F. Meyer, Gedichte, 1st-5th editions, 1882-1892. D5 is a revision of D4. D6-D9 alter only punctuation (D8 l. 20; D9 l. 13) and orthograph. In each case Meyer worked over the five editions of the collection thoroughly, and read the proofs, particularly of the first three, carefully. |
| D5-D9 have no stanza division. At line 11, H1 displays alternate readings ("Alternativ-Varianten"), neither of which is deleted; both therefore have the potential for subsequent adoption. In punctuation and orthography, the synoptical presentation follows the first printing D3. Orthographic variants not registered in the synopsis are: title, 22, 33 Komturs, Komturei D9 6 Küssnach D7-D9 6 dreissig D4D5D8D9 31 rot D5-D9 35 Heimschritt D7-D9 |
Ragt' bleich im Mondenglanz empor.
Ragt weiss im Mondenglanz empor.
I still consider "Thor" in D4 to be a misprint, but in spite of this I consider my emendation to D5-D9 to have been wrong. I now believe that "Thor" corresponded to Meyer's intentions when he produced the version D5 from D4, and I believe that in contrast to the versions H1H2D3 his intention shifted from the optical, say, to the acoustic, from the image "Thurm und Chor" to the alliteration "Thurm und Thor." This alliteration is very well-suited to the popular tone and archaic language (l.27) of a ballad treating of legendary material. Because of the somewhat singular architectonic conditions, the optical image is an artistic touch which can scarcely be appreciated. There is no indication that Meyer rejected the variant "Thor". But one cannot say whether he recognised the misprint as such and consciously adopted the variant in the text of D5. Be that as it may, I believe that D4's misprint influenced the alteration of intention observable throughout D5, and that it is given authority by this new intention; thus in D5-D9 it can no longer be regarded as a textual error (as it was in D4).
The credibility of this assumption is strengthened by a comparison with the other instances of damage to the text in D4, to which the author responded by adopting some in D5 and by varying others. In ll.14a, 14b the postpositional subject has been mistakenly severed by a full stop in D4. D5 does not alter the faulty punctuation,[36] but instead the context; presumably the concluding stop in l. 14 drew Meyer's attention to the expendability of ll. 14a, 14b. We do not have to assume that the misprint in D4 caused an oversight in D5 (the omission of two lines), but that Meyer's reaction to the disfigurement in D4 was to retain what had originated as a misprint while altering the context in D5—parallel to l. 33 "Thurm und Thor". In ll. 32-34 we find further misprints in D4, whereby the verb forms "Verkündet'" and "Ragt'" lose the apostrophe, the only preterital sign. Whereas in
If I simplify the textual conditions in Meyer's ballad to schematic form, I can say that the relationship between the almanac printing D3 and the anthology copy D4 is analogous to that between an autograph manuscript and a faulty printing set from it, of which the author either did not read the proofs at all or only in a very cursory manner.[37] Such special conditions obtain to a considerable degree for Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, as was mentioned above. Following the Anglo-American usage, I can designate D3D4 as one version, and can call this the first version, since I discount H1 2. In this way D3 could be said to consist of the relationships between the elements A-H. In D4 the misprints F' G' H' replace F G H. If the editor wants to adopt this first version (D3D4) in the edited text, he will be well-advised to reverse D4's misprints F' G' H' in order to restore the potential of the relationships between the elements E-F, F-G, etc., established by the author.
| 1st version | {D3A — . . . — E — F — G — H {D4 A — . . . — E — F' — G' — H' |
| 2nd version | D5 A — . . . — e — F' — G — h |
| Contamination | D3/D5 A — . . . — e — F — G — h |
The example of Meyer's ballad, and also the example from Klopstock's epic quoted in footnote 15, and considerations of a general nature, lead us to the paramount understanding that for the production of a new version the source of the elements which the author uses in the text is immaterial; it does not matter whether the variants are original or extraneous, misprints (as we shall see, there are misprints and misprints) or variants introduced by a publisher's editor. In other words, for the elements of a text to be authoritative, and thus for the text itself to be authorised, it is not necessary to assume that the author recognised extraneous elements included in the text (compositor's errors and editorial intervention) as such; he may have regarded them as original text. The necessary condition for our establishment of text is only that he should have registered the readings in question. That this is the case is sometimes obvious (for syntactic-semantic reasons, etc.), and sometimes it can be demonstrated by interpretation (as in some cases in Meyer's ballad); for the remainder (for instance with other texts by the same author and by other authors), it is an assumption which represents a generalisation made on the basis of the demonstrable cases.
This is the root of the matter—here we have the cause of the difference between the establishment of text based on versions on the
Since it is evident that misprints, transmissional errors, or even conscious non-authorial changes need not necessarily remain unauthorised from the "second generation" on, and do not by their original nature alone entitle the editor to emend the text,[39] it is necessary to find a specific term in order to designate those places where the editor does have the obligation to intervene in the text as transmitted. I term them textual faults ("Textfehler"). The question arises, under what circumstances is one to assume not only damage to the text, but also textual fault; what conditions must be fulfilled? In the matter of textual fault, as with contamination (the very risk of which we want to avoid), our considerable caution is not imposed on us by diffuse timidity, or by apprehensiveness about the vindication of editorial decisions, but by specific notions of the most simple literary actualities, and by our experience in editing.
First, the theory. By now it has been made clear why authorisation in our sense is not to be related to individual variants, but to versions. Greg's criteria for establishing authority, cited in section I, assure the text only of the authority of individual elements, not of the version or work. If a variant is not to be rejected in favour of the original reading, Greg demands that it should have originated with more than 50% probability from the author. Even if the substance of the version did not prohibit this procedure, there would be other
Fundamentally, there are two attitudes towards the text: the attitude of the reader, the exegete or the editor, and the attitude of the author. (There can of course be permutations.) The former is typically the attitude one adopts towards the transmitted text, probably corrupt at times, which is to be edited and interpreted. The exegete presumes that the author's text arose not by chance but of necessity, that it is unique, unrepeatable, artistically complete, a text of maximum significance. Similarly the editor searches in the transmitted text for the one authentic text, in comparison with which all else will be textual corruption. His attitude can only be that of the most faithful scholarly accuracy. For the author on the other hand a text is something to be created by selection from the semantic inventory of the language, from the quantum of synonyms. That synonyms exist for him, synonyms in the broadest sense of the word, is shown by draft manuscripts with their substitutions which often form whole skeins of variants. In the end the author has made a decision one way or the other, but he could have decided differently. For him creative writing does not mean necessity, but the possibility of variation.
Valéry remarked of the creative process: "There is no sense in consummating the word".[40] "In general I cannot take up anything I have written without thinking that I would have made something quite different out of it, had not an interference from outside" interrupted the creative process. Valéry saw no reason why he should be censured "because I presented to the public several, and sometimes even contradictory, texts of one and the same poem." On the contrary he felt tempted "to challenge poets to produce a multiplicity of variants or possible treatments for a single theme."[41] Such a situation naturally renders absurd the scholarly endeavours to find the one authentic text by considerations of probability. The claim to follow
To edit the text according to the intention of the author, when the singularities of his intention are known to us only through this text, can be achieved only if the text is in a certain sense redundant, that is to say, predictable. But this condition is fulfilled, as experiments have shown, only in the case of utilitarian texts (e.g., newspaper articles), and not in the case of poetic texts, which are distinguished from other texts perhaps only by their non-redundancy. Errors can as a rule be recognised as violations of a principle. But it is an idiosyncrasy of artistic structures that they themselves transgress the rules or codes which they have set up in the text, in favour of new codes (internal disautomatisation).
Our personal experiences in editing confirm what this theory would lead us to expect. In the introductory section I described the two-fold establishment of text in Goethe's epic poems, first according to Grumach's guidelines, then according to the stricter "basic principles" of his successors (see footnote 5). The statements about the number of misprints in the 1808 edition of the Works (A) diverge quite considerably: in Grumach's view there are 19 misprints in Achilleis and 54 in Reineke Fuchs, but according to the "basic principles" there are 6 and 8 respectively; in Hermann und Dorothea A has 13 misprints according to the one, 5 according to the other. When, as an editor, one has the opportunity of pondering over a text for a decade or two, one becomes increasingly sceptical of one's own judgement of textual fault, because in the course of time one observes a tendency to acknowledge what had previously been regarded as mistakes as being within the author's range of linguistic possibilities. Therefore, on the basis of theoretical considerations and of editorial experience, we have reached a point of view concerning textual fault and authorisation which is to a certain extent in opposition to the Greg-Bowers principles.[42] Perhaps I may be allowed to take up a comparison which Fredson Bowers once made in a discussion of editorial principles before Greg. He compares his own procedure to the criminal procedure of certain Continental codes, according to which the accused is required to demonstrate his own innocence. Our procedure is more like Anglo-American jurisdiction,
In conclusion I describe in outline our method of procedure, as far as it can be formulated in general terms at the present time. To begin with it is clear that in reckoning with the structure of specific versions we shall not start from the individual reading in order to define authorisation ("Autorisation"), but from the version. When certain conditions are fulfilled we attribute authorisation to a version as such, and treat individual passages as textual faults when there is sufficient evidence. Thus we mean by authorisation a provisional general quality, which may be intermittently suspended. It is assumed valid until the contrary is proved and is not conferred with the finality of the predication of authority according to Greg-Bowers. We regard as authorised those manuscripts which the author worked on himself, or which were demonstrably commissioned by him. Published texts are considered to be authorised if the author desired or approved their production, and if he influenced the text by supplying the printer's copy or by personal revision, or by revision undertaken at his request during the printing process.[43] (Where there is no authorised document, the text is established on the basis of that unauthorised document which is nearest to the lost authority.)
Textual fault ("Textfehler"), that is to say, an intermittent suspension of authorisation (in the case of unauthorised documents, an intermittent breakdown in transmission), occurs when two conditions are fulfilled: (1) when the reading in question admits of no sense in the wider contextual setting, or (particularly with modern literature) when it contradicts the logic specific to the text, the internal text structure; (2) when the results of analytical bibliography (in the broad sense of the term) confirm the suspension of authorisation. The bibliographical demonstration requires a detailed investigation of the circumstances of authorisation, such as is usual in Anglo-American studies. In the simpler cases the demonstration can be verified by lists of misprints, correction sheets, or by correspondence concerning individual passages, showing for instance that the author delegated the proof-reading of a particular sheet. There may be a whole cluster of arguments to be cited, whereby it is their convergence which is decisive.
The substantiation of the two criteria would require a more
Irrt es verspätet noch am Felsenhang?
Ein armes Glöcklein, das die Erde sucht—"
The assessment of what is possible in the language of a text is subject to considerable uncertainty for the reasons of theory discussed above if for no other: the non-redundance of the work of art and its tendency to violate on certain levels the principles which it has itself established—causes which one may recognise in Goethe's observation to Eckermann, that a good poem must as a whole be rational, but in detail somewhat irrational. Therefore the logical criterion alone is inadequate, as the following example is intended to show. In the edition of Dichtungen which Georg Heym's friends produced with a certain nonchalance in 1922 from his literary remains, a stanza of the poem "An das Meer" begins with the lines: "Und etwas tauchen aus der Flut, der matten, / Gesichter, wesenlos vom Totenreich." When
If an editor assesses a passage only according to the criterion of sense, that is to say, only in terms of what he thinks possible for the author or for the text in question, there is always a danger that something unique, a neologism or an anomaly, may be removed from the text in favour of something more normal. A strange example occurs in the manuscripts of C. F. Meyer. The author had written: "Wie von grausem Bann befreit"; his sister made an alteration, presumably writing from dictation, and replaced the first two words by "Von dem", so that the passage now ran: "Von dem grausem Bann befreit". In print, it was rendered grammatically correct as: "Von dem grausen Bann befreit" (Poem no. 177 D5, l. 137). In the handbooks of historical German syntax and in the specialist literature on this subject there is no example from the nineteenth century of the strong form of the adjective after a definite article, as produced by Meyer's sister, so that it is easy to assume that the sister did not carry out the alteration to the end. But this anomaly occurs occasionally in Meyer's own uncorrected and unquestionably legible poetic manuscripts, for instance "Mit dem erschöpftem Pferd" (Poem no. 170 M6, l. 38); and again the reverse case which is perhaps even more noteworthy: "Mit beredten Mund" (Poem No. 158 M3, l. 44); again, in all the versions of the story "Angela Borgia" which appeared during Meyer's life-time: "Mit grausamen Genusse". It is significant that the manuscripts and the printed copy in the periodical still exhibit the strong form which one would expect at this point ("grausamem"), so that the supposedly faulty form does not derive from Meyer but from the compositor, that is to say, from another nineteenth-century user of the language, and Meyer did not alter it, but the editor of the prose in the historical-critical edition considered it to be a misprint and reversed it. C. F. Meyer was no linguistic innovator, and it is inconceivable to me that
In order to prevent this from happening, it is necessary to supplement the criterion of text-specific logic with the bibliographical criterion. This supplementation is necessary also because of the idiosyncrasy of the work of art referred to above, that it may violate the code which it has itself created. In the area of greatest authority, the autograph manuscript which is not simply a copy, one will be well-advised to admit no textual faults at all. The so-called slips of the pen, and such other disturbances of the writing process as may affect the author's projection of his work, occur, like all other deficiencies, against a specific meaningful background. A separation into deficiencies to be emended would only go to show that the editor's perspicuity is limited. One can of course object to the logical criterion by saying that the most insidious misprints are characterized as such, and remain undetected, because they do not generate a nonsensical text, but an impoverished, more trivial text, mutilated nevertheless. This is the case with the alteration of "Thurm und Chor" to "Thurm und Thor". Under quite specific circumstances, which have been described (Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance), such misprints would indeed need to be treated as textual faults. But in general one cannot discount the possibility that it is a matter of a "second generation" misprint which the author may not have recognised as a misprint, but which he registered and built into the semiotic system, that is to say, he authorised it and therefore it cannot later be reversed. If one regards cases of this sort as dubious, they are decided according to the editorial measures which we are recommending in favour of the textus receptus. This has the additional advantage that it is this text which is essential for the history of influence and reception.
A textual fault obliges the editor to intervene in the text. But emendation is only permitted in the edited text when the correction is unequivocal. In all other cases the textual fault or the gap in the text should be marked, that is to say, indicated by a mark in the text.
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