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Disregard of the author's work due to modal misinterpretation
The great Stuttgart Hölderlin edition is held by German philologists to be exemplary of literary editions avoiding the information deficiency in the critical apparatus for which the Weimar Goethe edition is typical. The textual editor, Friedrich Beissner, records the manuscript variants in their entirety, including even the alterations irrelevant to the actual wording of the text; and he presents them readably. Without doubt, the critical apparatus is thereby significantly enhanced, even though it remains subordinated to the presentation of the text. As before, it is the writer's final and binding word that goes to constitute the edition text. The axiom of the reception-oriented editorial concept to honour "the poet's intention and his right to his work"[42] remains valid. In other words: the author is still granted the decision how his works are to be read. It is however debatable if this is possible in Hölderlin's case to the same extent as it appeared to be in Goethe's. For Hölderlin there exists neither a final revised edition nor "prints of individual works whose wording, since checked by the poet himself, should be binding for the editor".[43] Hölderlin's oeuvre has come to us largely as a legacy of unpublished manuscripts.[44] The editor's determination to let the author decide how his works should be read was therefore to be realised only by means of a text-genetical interpretation of the manuscripts, although these often enough are in the nature of heavily worked-over drafts.
Beissner's mode of text-genetical interpretation becomes fully apparent in his method and system of variant presentation. Its essential characteristic is to situate the variants within the context of a reconstruction
Beissner stressed repeatedly that his main concern was to develop from the "spatial confusion" of the manuscripts and their corrections a "chronological order of sequence" of genetic versions of the text. In this way he held that the genetic process could be rendered both presentable and comprehensible as a process.[45] The implicit consequences may be clarified by reflecting that the spatial dimension of an inscription, if irrelevant, can be considered so only from the reader's perspective but not from that of the writer. For the author, the spatiality of the writing importantly conditions his creative linguistic behaviour, enabling him constructively to negotiate his conceptions and their expression.[46] It is with the help of the spatial dimension that he renders his conceptualisations visible and available. He is in control of everything he has recorded in writing—which in turn may influence his imagination—as long as he is able to decide whether it should be retained or not. He can decide for as long as what he has written remains readable and decipherable to him. Deleted or otherwise invalidated passages must generally be taken to be included in such writing. Textual exclusions of this kind should therefore not be taken as definitive, i.e., as outright annulments, but as provisional deletions. Invalidated wordings within a manuscript must be considered potentially valid if still legible to the author. Conversely, all wordings left valid should be considered potentially invalid.
In his genetic representation of the manuscript texts Beissner sacrifices their spatial dimension. The alinear spatiality of draft initiations and alterations is turned into a linear temporality of text stages where each stage is definitively replaced by the next. This conversion is not a matter of mere externals. Rather, it reflects an assessment of the authenticity of the states of an unpublished text in autographs. The editor turns into definitive text what for the author in principle was only potential writing. Hence, the editor's system of genetic interpretation reinterprets the modality of the writing: from being author-related it becomes reader-related. Otherwise the editor's aim to make possible an "actively participating and co-productive view of the work in progress"[47] would indeed remain incomprehensible. It is in a manner the editor who produces genetic readings from the poet's draft fluidities. In so doing, he not only disregards the spatial dimension as something seemingly unimportant.
Favouring the reader's perspective, this edition abandons the fundamental difference between the author's and the reader's evaluation of writing. For the reader, the act of writing as such is unimportant; important is only its outcome in what the writing imparts. Taking writing to be merely a graphic medium of communication, and categorically equating the written and the oral utterance, the reader views the act of writing as a graphic realisation of inner speech. This receptive stance is by extension attributed to the author when it is implicitly assumed that his characteristic and essential activity is to affirm or reject his writing in the reading of it as an articulation of inward perceptions whose content core remains unalterable.
In the Stuttgart edition, Hölderlin—like Goethe in the Weimar edition—is primarily understood as an author who positively or negatively evaluates his writing as an immediate projection of his imagined self. The manuscript deletions and changes are not considered in their merely potential quality holding no prejudice for the author's final decision on a given text in publication; they are considered definitive. A deleted or unaltered result of changes is not seen as the last of several textual options, but as the "only possible form" or the "consummate form" of expression.[49] The editor seems to have been aware that this reader-oriented system of interpretation is incommensurate with the nature of authentic textual production, since he justifies his text-genetical representation as setting out the "ideal growth" of the text and not its actual development, which "cannot generally be deduced from manuscripts".[50] This is an acceptable argument under the premise that it is relatively unimportant to know how the author worked, and more important that "organic links" should not be severed.[51] However, the "organic link" between states of textual development is finally seen to be the articulate author reaching out for the perfect expression of his self.[52]
The disregard and modal misinterpretation of the writer's work evident in the Weimar edition is thus by no means overcome in the Hölderlin edition, even though its textual editor understood much better how to deal with the manuscripts than did his colleagues of the Goethe edition (Beissner, "Editionsmethoden", p. 73).
To summarise: the reception-oriented editorial concept does not promote an interest in an improved understanding of literary work processes. Hence it develops no analytic system, differentiating terminology or representationally adequate model for dealing with text changes in autographs.[53] Philologists who favour this concept are more intent on preparing poet editions for the general reader than work editions for the scholarly user.[54] As far as possible, they eschew specialised editorial professionalism.[55]
As long as there are authors who sufficiently clearly lay down their decisions on the versions in which they wish their texts to be read, and as long as there are readers willing to submit their souls to authorial guidance, this editorial concept cannot be considered outdated.
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