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I. The reception-oriented editorial concept

Regarding themselves as middlemen between the authors and the reading public, nineteenth-century critical editors exercised a remarkable reticence; they spoke little of their own activity. This is true of Karl Lachmann and Franz Muncker in the edition of Lessing's Complete Works; of Muncker in the "critical-historical" edition of Klopstock's Odes; and, above all, of the editors of the Weimar Goethe edition.

Precedence of text presentation over the critical apparatus

The Preface to this critical Goethe edition in 143 volumes extends to only seven pages, and the information about the numerous manuscripts and prints of the poems in the first volume occupies a mere six pages. The apparatus of variant readings is also maximally concise, being meant as no more than a "critical appendix".[18] The presentation of the texts as the author intended them finally to be given to the public was considered of greater importance than the description of manuscripts and prints or the details of variants and versions. The editors' reticence reflects their decision on what matter they considered more or less worth communicating to the reader. If one recognises two different editorial aims, each attainable on the basis of authentic and authorial records as preserved for modern authors: firstly, to reconstruct the shaping and reshaping process of literary works, and secondly, to define the particular form of a work with which the author wished in the final instance to be publicly identified, it is clear that the editors of the Weimar edition unambiguously gave precedence to the second. The processes of composing and revising a work were merely of historical antiquarian interest to them.[19] Generally cognisant of Goethe's attitude to his literary output as embodied in the last edition of his works which he himself supervised (the

so-called "Ausgabe letzter Hand"[20]), they considered it their moral duty to respect his final intentions almost unconditionally.

The serious lack of information within the apparatus, crucially insufficient details about the manuscripts and the selective and isolative rendering of the variant readings[21] have been explained as due to the fact that the "editors of the Lachmann school"[22] were still bound to the model of editorial technique in classical philology. There may be some truth in this, even though, if so, the method has not become outwardly effective—the apparatus, for instance, is not arranged in the form of footnotes. However, the explanation casts underserved aspersions on the pioneers of editing in modern German philology, making them appear as indiscriminate imitators. What brings them close to their colleagues in classical philology is a formal matter: the merely selective consideration of witnesses not chosen as editorial base texts. Yet the reasons for such selectivity differ. In the case of classical philology, the selection serves to justify the critically constituted text and is hence determined by its purpose. In modern editing, by contrast, the author's authentic or authorised text did not require any justification, and the selection of the variants was thus not linked to any objective aim, but was subjectively motivated. This explains the methodological aimlessness of the apparatus in the Weimar Goethe edition. It is determined by "the most respectful consideration for the wider circle of educated readers."[23] "Negligences or mere spelling errors" in the manuscripts are excluded as an unnecessary encumbrance; it is only variation which "is heard in the spoken language and which affects the syllable count and hence, in verse, the metre" that is considered worthy of record.[24] This guiding rule, it is true, is not observed consistently.[25] The apparatus of the Weimar edition has been called a "dead apparatus"[26] by one of its fiercest critics. With regard to individual volumes this is certainly an unfair criticism, but as an overall appraisal it does characterise the curiously functionless nature of the apparatus. The editors can hardly have remained unaware of the obvious difference between transmissional variants (the concern of classical philologists) and the genetic variants integral to the author's own manuscripts.[27] Yet they clearly were at a loss how to deal with these,[28] because they saw themselves primarily neither as textual critics nor as documentary historians, but as readers. This understanding of their role corresponds to their model of the author.

The model of the author in the 2nd person—the self-realising author

Editorial opinion in the early period of German philology held it to be the author's essential characteristic to be able to communicate his own self through his text, and not to draft and compose a text. According to

such understanding, the author is a subject oriented towards listeners and readers (including critics), and observing and assessing himself creatively from their perspective, i.e., in the 2nd person. The editor, in his role as reader and through his endeavour for supra-individual self-determination, represents as it were the other self, the author's partner, and vice versa. The reading stance common to both is evaluative, positively or negatively. The editor's understanding, then, of his own role is modelled on his assumptions about the author. If he views the author first and foremost as a judicious reader of his works, he does not in principle desire to be anything else. He considers everything that links author and reader to be more important than what separates them. If, on the other hand, he sees the author primarily as the producer of his texts, he conceives the editorial task ultimately only in terms of their reproduction from a common ground of subjective creativity. In either case, the mode in which the author is viewed is irreducibly voluntative and at best only approximately suited to given conditions of writing and transmission.

If the editor favours the model of the author in the 2nd person, it implicitly follows that he wishes the author to determine in which version and in which order his texts should be edited. In other words: he does not wish to give room to editorial judgement or discretion in these matters. The editor thus sees himself akin to an advocate, an executor of the author's will, before the forum of his readers. This is an attitude obviously determined by ethical principles, since it implies that the writer is taken absolutely seriously as a person and that his intention is respected as the highest editorial principle. The consequences of this kind of editorial ethos as they emerge in relation to the creative and revisional work of the author are: a limited interest in textual criticism and source description on the part of the editor, and a modal misinterpretation of the author's work.

The author's intention

The author's intention, as is well known, is a fundamental concept much debated in editorial theory.[29] By and large it seems that, despite the problems involved, it cannot be relinquished without negative consequences for critical editing. If it were renounced, if editors were to declare the very concept of authorial intention on principle to be outside their province, discernible expression of such intention would be entirely subject to editorial discretion, if not indeed arbitrariness.[30] Too little consideration however has usually been given to the fact that the notion of authorial intention can be applied in two different ways: as intentio recta (author in the 2nd person) and as intentio obliqua (author

in the 3rd person). It is the second way which is relevant to textual criticism. The question here is, whether a text or textual part or particle as transmitted is, or may be considered, intended (meant) by the author.

Editorially, the predicate "intended" may on principle be attributed to a specific textual finding or its emendation only when modified as "possibly intended".[31] Yet the "possibility" is subject to many degrees of certainty and probability or uncertainty and improbability, in much the same way as what a third party intends (or means) can only be known on the basis of everyday suppositions. The editor assumes responsibility for adjudicating intention in a manner different from that for his making descriptive statements which can be verified or falsified from the extant textual materials. Whereas the reasoning behind descriptive statements can be completely objectified, if need be with the help of explicit conceptual definitions and rules of procedure, this is not the case with assertions of textual criticism concerning the degree to which a transmitted text can be intended (meant). These are always only partly objectifiable, and the editor can only vouch for them on the basis of an understanding and knowledge which he has gained in his role as reader, interpreter and textual critic. Hence they always hold good only in relation to the editor's familiarity with the author's voluntative and linguistic behaviour.[32]

Whereas editorial theory has hitherto been dominated by the reciprocal editor/author relationship in the 1st and 2nd person—the reception-oriented editorial concept—or the one-directional editor/author relationship in the 1st and 3rd person—the production-oriented concept—the implications of the notion of authorial intention may be clarified from a perspective in which the author occupies the 2nd and 3rd person. The author's literary activity displays two sides: on the one hand it fulfills a specific purpose, the production of texts, and on the other hand it is a form of expression, a way of articulating the self in the text. The concept of authorial intention may be differentiated accordingly.

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]

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

of the text's chronological development. The main focus is not on individual alterations, but on the representation of successive genetic versions. On the assumption that the author has replaced the earlier version by the later one, the later version is regarded as the one finally intended by him. If one accepts this system of text-genetic interpretation, Hölderlin's ultimate versions may indeed be constructed by stages from the heavily worked-over drafts. Yet is the implicit premise legitimate?

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.

He also neglects the specific productive (constructive) function which writing has for the author as a process of visually recording transitory reflections that acts as a reinforcement of his imagination. He degrades, in effect, the act of writing to a mere external reproductive activity of no importance for its written result, which is paradoxical especially for an author whose manuscripts show that he made superbly constructive use of their spatial dimension in drafting his texts.[48]

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.