University of Virginia Library

The author's intention to produce and communicate a text: what is meant and what is intended

Writing, as it transposes conceptualised linguistic utterances into the spatial-visual dimension, is basically an artificial application of the imagination. It necessarily has repercussions on the creative expression, since it renders transitory conceptions permanent. However, the representational mode of linguistic utterances is not altered in their inscription. Hence, writing is not to be equated with acts of direct communication in oral speech that cannot be revoked. This fundamental distinction is not infrequently overlooked,[33] which leads to a modal misinterpretation

of texts in autograph. Writing is without doubt an intentional act. Yet is the result of this act, the written text, intended by the author? The answer to this question is open where the author's attitude as reader to the text is indeterminable. Such is in principle the case with all texts he has not (or not yet) published. All that can be said about them is that the author intended them as possible results of his writing, or even that he potentially intended them as definitive and no longer disposable compositions. In respect to such texts, it is more profitable to rephrase the question and ask whether they, as they appear in written form, were meant, or could have been meant, by the author. Whenever one is involved in transposing conceptions into words or into writing, that is, when his own thoughts, and not those of his listeners or readers, are the central focus, it is relevant to ask what is actually meant by what is spoken or written or whether what is spoken or written actually represents what is meant (particularly in the case of an unusually or wrongly spelt word or one that does not seem to fit the context). What is meant is primarily that which is objectively intended. It represents the author's transitory textual resolution which could be explained further as that which he possibly wished to convey or present for reading by what he said or wrote.

The textual critic's scope for decision ends at the point where he cannot question what is meant by the author—for instance in the case of two separate autograph versions of a text. Here it is not within his arbitration, in his role as textual critic, which of the two should be reproduced. If the author has actually communicated one version, that is, released the contents and textual composition from his control and submitted it to another's (e.g., a publisher's, who has it printed and distributed), it is true to say that this version is intended by the author. But as what? Not as a text produced, but as a text received, also by others. The communication of a specific text version implies that the author, in his role as a reader, has positively assessed it, with a regard, too, to other readers. This means he has read and approved the text in the interest of other readers,[34] and in doing so he has asked himself whether his inner perception of man and the world (the yardstick of his identity and linguistic mode of utterance) is adequately reflected in it. Is the editor obliged to respect the author's intention to objectify his ideal self? Unlike the author's textual intention (i.e., what is meant), this represents, as it were, a higher degree of intention and is often singled out as the "real", "ultimate" or "final" intention. If this intention can be positively identified, then the editor is indeed obliged to respect it. It concerns, after all, that striving for self-determination and, eminently, for personal identity, to the expression of which literature above all lends itself. However, the editor's respect for the author's identity as objectified in

the literary mode does not relieve him of his duty to explore the genesis of the text and exercise his judgment as textual critic on the documents of transmission. It does not allow him to assume the attitude of a merely corrective reader.

The editors of the Weimar Goethe edition were of a different opinion. Choosing the "Ausgabe letzter Hand" as their basis, they believed the poet had taken the greatest care and had been conscientiously exact in producing a correct and final revised edition (WA I, 1, p. xix). Erroneously they presumed that Goethe's intention to have his works seen into print accurately with the help of an able philologist[35] had actually had a result corresponding to the intention. They did not recognise that the versions of the text printed in that edition, precisely because they had been painstakingly prepared verbatim et literatim, should editorially have been minutely re-examined to see whether, on that microphilological level, they were as intended by the poet. For it is true that, being the result of a work process, every state of a text, in manuscript or in print, only represents the intended state as a whole, and not in every detail. A text in toto (which means also: a text read) such as that of Goethe's final edition of his works is undoubtedly to be considered authorised by the author; yet this does not apply in partibus (meaning also: to the text as produced)—and especially not to passages where what the author meant can so easily be shown to have been subject to unintentional changes by himself or by his helpers.[36] The crucial question of textual criticism, namely whether a printed text is also the intended one, cannot be ignored a priori or narrowly interpreted with regard either to the accidentals of spelling and punctuation or to individual words. It is independent of the degree of authorisation in the preparatory phases of reproduction.

The editors of the Weimar edition exercised textual criticism with extreme reticence. They believed that they were basically entitled only to correct the final edition of Goethe's works, to eliminate obvious errors, but not to submit it to recension.[37] Valuing above all the edition's authenticity, they essentially did not regard it as the result of a work process, but as "the unmediated intimation of the author himself".[38] The editors' decision in favour of the final edition as the basis for their rendering of the text has its fundamental reason neither in textual criticism nor in historical research. The decisive factor for the Weimar editors was the author's self-determining will at the peak of his maturity, i.e., at the stage when his self-reflection in the mirror of his entire literary oeuvre was most consciously developed and his self-distancing ability with a regard for its readers was at its highest. Goethe's final edition represents the "pinnacle" of all his editions in his lifetime[39] in so

far as it attests his attitude towards the greater part of his literary oeuvre. It was obviously a complete matter of course for the Weimar editors to choose the poet's final edition and no other as the basis of their own.[40] This indicates that they were always more inclined towards a representation of the receptive-reflective Goethe than to Goethe as a literary producer. Their perception was of the poet who, conscious of his readers, affirmed or rejected what he had written, and not of the author who in writing would to a lesser degree have reflected the reader's perspective. Only from such partisanship could the poet's final edition have been accorded unquestioned canonicity. It is therefore no coincidence that evidence of the writer's work meant little to the editors of the Weimar Goethe edition, as shown in the critical apparatus. Likewise, it is no accident that they misinterpreted such evidence as the involuntary expression of Goethe's mind and intellect, as indicated in their qualifying the final edition of the works as "the unmediated intimation of the author himself".[41]