University of Virginia Library

The model of the author in the 3rd person: the author concealing himself as a producer of texts

Introducing the radical historicism of some of the volumes in the Goethe Academy edition means assuming the perspective of the re-producing editor as normative. If all versions of the text which the author has produced or assisted in are declared equivalent in principle, it is wholly for the editor to decide which one he should reproduce in full. Authorial decisions in this matter have no force. The author becomes a subject without intersubjectively binding intentions if what distinguishes the texts he published from those he left unpublished is nothing but their

material state in prints and manuscripts. In other words: the obligation of respect for Goethe's decisions as to how he wished readers to understand his works and himself loses its validity. The editor's obligation towards the author is replaced by his obligation towards the scholarly users of critical editions.[81] The ethos of the—modern—editor is thus basically object-oriented, its concerns are the oeuvre and the text. Hence, the demands raised by the supporters of the production-oriented concept for greater objectivity in critical editing are largely, if not exclusively, to be understood as a desire to strengthen its text orientation.[82] They feel responsible mainly towards the users of editions to whom methodologically verifiable information is due about the author's texts and their transmission.[83] The author, on the whole, is reduced to the role of a producing supplier of texts and text versions which editorially creative skill re-produces for all manner of uses. Intentionality is envisaged mainly in the general sense that an author must be supposed to have intended to produce everything he wrote, which is tantamount to rendering the notion of authorial intention irrelevant.[84] The author's willed disposition of intention is conceded only in relation to isolated instances of more or less obvious error. These are also regarded, however, under a perspective that places the author in the position of a third person: is x, y, z intended by him, could it be expected of him?

It stands to the credit of the Academy edition that it has established a terminology providing the most discriminatory editorial instrument hitherto developed.[85] It bears the unmistakable imprint of a double focus on textual production (author) and textual re-production (editor/reader).[86] Two examples may serve to illustrate its inherent focal constraints. Firstly, the editors are ready to admit that they have not succeeded in articulating an "unequivocal" definition of "an author's work (=opus)" (ibid., pp. 16-17). The reason is that they have posed the question exclusively from a point of view of editorial text orientation and editorial concerns. Individual and authorially integrated texts of course present no real definition problems. Yet a definition becomes difficult if not ultimately impossible in cases where textual criteria do not exist, e.g., when an author has contributed to a collaborative publication or revised the texts of others for publication. Obviously his contributive pieces cannot be termed "works". Where should the line be drawn? Should self-contained additions be claimed for the "works"? Yet these may be related to revisions elsewhere for which the author is not himself responsible. The matter cannot be decided solely with reference to the author's producing role. His role as a reader-recipient needs also to be considered. Significant for the author is not only his "work", i.e., the text he has himself composed, but every text, whether written by himself

or not, which he can read and affirm as a representation of his life and his self and which he can thus adopt as his own. The corrective revisions for publication and ultimately the published versions themselves of texts by himself or others provide evidence of such authorial attitudes of identification. The author's willed identity appears ultimately disregarded if an edition takes indications of his judicious reading behaviour into full consideration only when recognisable from his self-produced texts but treats them selectively when found in the texts of others. Admittedly, to come into focus at all where only the productive side of the author is relevant, such indications of a judicious receptivity towards his own texts or those of others have to be text-genetically misinterpreted as evidence of productive activity, or else disregarded altogether. If the Weimar edition shows that its editors could make little of a Goethe self-absorbed in the production of his texts, yet much of a Goethe conscious in revision of how they should and would be read, the reverse is true of the editors of the Academy edition. By default of their methodology, they saw little to interest them in a Goethe revisionally shaping public texts.[87]

Secondly: the predominance of the idea of the author as a producer of texts has consequences for the concept of authorisation, which becomes directly or indirectly correlated to the author's productive behaviour. Accordingly, the term does not denote the author's affirmative reading of texts as expressions of permanence of his self. Rather, it classifies witness documents as authorially produced or co-produced (holographs or scribal copies with autograph corrections), or else as authorially induced or instigated (scribal copies, prints). Documents demonstrably originating directly or indirectly through authorial activity are regarded as authorised. The purpose of the concept is to distinguish the editorially relevant witnesses from the irrelevant ones.[88] The criterion, however, is helpful only in the case of the non-authentic documents, the scribal copies and prints; that autograph manuscripts are relevant witnesses is self-evident. The concept of 'authorisation' is in truth meaningless for variant selection, though not for genetic reconstruction of texts performed by editors and users of critical editions. The tendency to equate authorially written text and authorised text carries considerable consequences for the assessment of text versions derived from the author's manuscripts.[89]