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Equivalence or precedence of the apparatus over the text

If the editor sets the chronicler's approach above the reader's perspective, the author's published and unpublished work, the final and the earlier text versions, will rank equal with him. Goedeke was still undecided on this matter. Only Schiller's "youthful attempts" did he qualify wholly as "instances of his development and evidence of the history of Schiller's mind" (Schiller, 1, p. v). It was not in editorial Schiller scholarship but, remarkably, in a new critical edition of Goethe's works, the so-called Academy edition,[62] that this historical perspective came to be applied most decisively. This is particularly remarkable since for Goethe's works authorised publications exist in great numbers, a situation without parallel for Schiller or indeed any other author in modern German literature. It is a transmissional situation that does not exactly invite a levelling of ranks among the witnesses to the evolution of the oeuvre and its individual parts. The reasons for nevertheless adopting and consistently

upholding the historical perspective are mainly conceptual. The Academy edition, in truth, was designed to replace the section of the "literary works" in the Weimar edition.[63] It not only reflects an improved knowledge of the materials and a sharpened awareness of the problematics of textual criticism, it was also intended to convey a different perception of Goethe.[64] The "historical relief of Goethe's poetry, its outer metamorphosis which cannot be separated from its inner metamorphosis" was to be set against the "ahistorical nature" of the Weimar edition.[65] Ernst Grumach, the first editor-in-chief of the Academy edition, took his guidance no longer from the author's final communicated intention but rather from his original one: "It is only the author's original intention—as far as this can be deduced from the manuscripts and the first editions authorised by him—which can reliably inform the constitution of the text" ("Probleme", p. 45). In addition to its critical function of recording and justifying the constitution of the text, the critical apparatus was entrusted with the historical task of "relating a textual history" (ibid., p. 47) ranging from preparatory notes to the final version of the revised text.

Under Grumach's direction, the "historical relief" of Goethe's oeuvre was to retain its peaks and elevations in the shape of the critically constituted "best" texts in versions "adequately expressing the author's intention".[66] This constitution of the text was of course not to be achieved in the divinatory spirit of a Richard Bentley, but in the historical manner of a Karl Lachmann, taking into consideration "all extant textual witnesses and all factors which influenced the textual history" (ibid., p. 6). For this reason Grumach termed the Academy edition a "critical-historical" edition of Goethe's works.[67] The "historical relief" was levelled out by his successors, and the critical-historical edition became an "historical-critical" one.[68] They abandoned the aim of establishing a "best" text. The critical constitution of the text through recension lost considerable importance in favour of a greater respect for the preserved historical form of the text. Corruptions were to be determined only within the context of the base text and were, if possible, to be emended only in relation to a knowledge of that text. The process of recension was to be carried out on the basis of internal evidence only, without recourse to text-genetic knowledge about the author's habitual usages in the language and in his writing.[69] Consequently corruption was adjudicated within the limits of more or less obvious error.

This limitation in applying procedures of textual criticism resembles the considered restrictive practices of the Weimar Goethe edition: les extrêmes se touchent. A reserve towards textual criticism is common to editors who see themselves primarily as the author's loyal trustees and

those who see themselves preeminently as documentary historians of his work. Grumach's successors indeed only pursued the path he took to its logical end. In defining "the poet's original intention" as mainly binding for the reproduction of the text, Grumach implicitly adopted a critical stance that considered Goethe's creative behaviour as his essential characteristic. The authorised first edition, or indeed the manuscript behind it, seemed closest to the author's immediate production. "That which no longer appertains to the process of poetic composition and revision, the predominantly corrective, intended or unintended alterations in the later printings and editions" was relegated to the critical apparatus.[70]

With such partisanship for Goethe in his capacity as producer of texts, the differentiating potential inherent in terms such as "composition" and "revision" was apt to wane. To Grumach's successors, composition and revision, conceptual and revisional work, creative and corrective shaping were all indistinguishably aspects of a textual development resulting equivalently in text or text versions.[71] This in turn made the choice of the first authorised printing or its manuscript source as the base text for the edition questionable as such. It could only be maintained on extraneous grounds, such as an allegiance to the established practice of the Academy edition itself or to that of other editions.[72] At the same time, the basis dwindled for a more demanding type of textual criticism that would take the author's recognisable habits as a guideline, when possible, for the constitution of the text in the case of oversights or transmissional corruption. On the one hand, an attitude equating the author's published texts with the unpublished ones would imply seeing even the published ones essentially as the results of his creative work. Yet if, on the other hand, the published texts and versions are regarded as in essence not intended by the author, the textual critic is deprived of a reliable basis for his judgement. Should he, as editor, follow the linguistic and orthographic usage in the authorised prints, or should he adopt usages deduced from the manuscripts—even though these may vary to an extraordinary degree?

The restrictive attitude towards exercising textual criticism evident in the volumes of the Academy edition since 1963 is essentially the editors' own choice. This needs to be emphasised, since there exist also restrictions to textual criticism grounded in objective criteria, e.g., in the case of authors who largely did not publish their work,[73] or in the case of authors characteristically undecided about which of their texts should be published, and in which form; having perhaps written with no view to publication, extraneous and alien as they felt it to be to them. Such authors, to be encountered frequently since the Romantic Age,[74] present such a variety of possibilities of articulation that the editor often feels

acute incertitude about whom he is actually dealing with, what the author could have intended and what is to be accounted for as within his potential range. Yet a proper awareness of the author's perspective may still guide the editor towards an unbiassed perception of the textual conditions. Here, then, it is an author himself, as it were, who induces the restrictions of the editor's text-critical faculty of judgment. By accepting them, the editor respects the author's identity as manifest in his creative behaviour.

Given that every textual version, regardless of when it originated or how it was transmitted, may have an equal claim to being rendered in extenso, every version, too, deserves the same measure of editorial attention.[75] To the degree that authorised printings and authentic or authorised manuscripts are considered equal in respect of the text they document, their material differences gain significance. The material characteristics of the documents, both textual and bibliographical, which seemed only marginally relevant to the Weimar Goethe edition, have a central information value in the Academy edition. The detailed descriptions of the witnesses selected, which are contained in its apparatus volumes published since 1963, serve largely to justify both the record of texts and variants, and the genetic reconstruction. The record of the variants to the fully rendered text is not only complete, it is also presented by the same semeiographically exact method of transcription as the text itself. With regard to this uniform transcriptional method, the foreshortened record of variants in the apparatus ranks equal with the extensive presentation of the text.[76] The emphasis in both cases is on the attested text rather than the authorially intended one. In its main aim and method, the Academy edition is thus a document edition.[77] Moreover, with regard to the number of witnesses edited, each apparatus volume actually ranks higher than the corresponding text volume.[78]

Where a scholarly edition is presented principally as a document edition, the spatial dimension appears more important than the temporal dimension. The text is understood primarily as an autonomous and visually perceptible art object of a semeiographic nature, not as an author's aurally perceptible verbal utterance, as under the reception-oriented editorial concept. Siegfried Scheibe has expressed a sense of this modern editorial conception of the text with welcome clarity: "An editor's aptitude is revealed by his ability first to visualise a manuscript full of corrections as if blank and untouched, in order then to recognise and to infer, as far as possible, how, in discrete stages of composition, the blank pages were filled with the characters and symbols of a 'text', and how parts of this 'text' changed while others remained constant."[79] Scheibe also conceives of the genetic development of a literary work according

to such an inscriptional process of textual construction: the genetic stages in the work's development correspond to the textualised states of its pre-versions and versions (ibid., pp. 16-17, 28). This is a useful notion of text and text development in editorial terms, since it promotes a semeiographic analysis in close documentary harmony with the reproduction of the textual witnesses. In the Academy edition, it has proved profitable for the handling of the immediate witnesses to Goethe's work and that of his assistants, i.e., the manuscripts themselves. Their variants are rendered with the greatest attention to differentiating detail. Transcribing the manuscript variants with utmost exactitude, the edition may be said to approximate quite closely Goethe's working procedures; it certainly comes closer to them than does the Weimar edition in its selective apparatus of readings. To be more precise: in its mode of editorial presentation the Academy edition has been adapted to the author's working method by means of a differentiated rendering of the results of the work process: the acts of alteration are captured in their results, and the results in turn are viewed as integral to states or versions of the text. The author's work process is thus properly speaking only indirectly documented and does not itself become the subject of editorial presentation. Deleted passages and the structured spatial arrangement of the text (variants as spatially co-ordinated textual elements) are therefore not identified.[80] Scheibe's concept of text and text development serves in the Academy edition not only as an instrument of editorial analysis, but also as the aim of editorial presentation. The written traces of the author's working procedures seem worth accounting for only in as far as they lead to new versions of the text; what they may mean with regard to the author appears largely irrelevant. The dominant perspective is that of a reader who, provided with an edited text and variants, may combine, as in a puzzle, those versions of the text and strands of text development which at any given moment he desires. In gaining a sense of text production, he is thus brought closer to the author.