University of Virginia Library

Over-estimation of authorial composition due to modal misinterpretation

Within the terminology of the Goethe Academy edition the term "textual version" occupies a position of particular significance.[90] It is defined as follows: "Textual versions are completed or uncompleted executions

of a work which diverge. They are related to one another by textual identity and distinguished by their textual variance." Textual variance means a divergence in execution in terms of letters and punctuation. A revised manuscript may hence contain several textual versions (at the base level and the levels of revision). If such a manuscript is a holograph, all the versions contained within it are by definition authorised. What the author wrote is thus equated with what he intended. But what does this mean? Viewed logically, what is, and what can only be intended in this case is an adequate written expression of the author's imaginative perceptions. The distinctions between writing, expression and perception have disappeared, and writing appears equated with language representation. Whereas, under the reception-oriented editorial concept, writing is seen primarily from the reader's perspective as a merely reproductive act, it is the perspective of the writer activating his imaginative powers that dominate here. The author is viewed primarily as a producer recording his perceptions and, in doing so, evoking new ones. He is seen much less as a reader judging the written expression by whether it corresponds to his original perception or not. It follows that even that part of the author's work which he executed primarily in his capacity of reader is regarded as the production of new text. This new text, a version in relation to the earlier one, is by the editor judged to be a newly composed text which the author inscribed by means of variant notation merely to save labour. However, if textual versions really are newly composed texts that only accidentally appear in the form of variants, even these cannot really be variants, i.e., alternative possibilities of expression, but must be the definitive textual elements of distinct text versions.[91] Such modal misinterpretation of the variants as definitive components of authorial expression in new textual versions leads directly to the situation whereby the process of revision is understood as textual production and is consequently over-estimated.

It is a characteristic feature of the reception-oriented editorial concept to assume that what the author ultimately intends is an imagined and affirmable idea of himself as a person, in relation to which his creative ability of expression is secondary. Under the production-oriented editorial concept, the author appears in the inverse role: the primary regard is for the author's creative ability applied as boundlessly as possible; the will to commit ever-changing perceptions to inscriptional permanence is secondary. The notions of an accomplished expression and a perfected work can no longer be held; there remain only versions of the work in temporal succession that each represent new authorial attitudes. Accordingly, the identity of the author whose perceptions continually change finds expression not so much in the work as in the process of perception,

i.e., the author's working procedures. It is these that provide the real constant factor in the creative activity, and it was these that the editors aimed to bring to the fore in the Academy edition (ibid., p. 15), albeit in such a way that they might be understood as the means of textual production.

The Goethe Academy edition tellingly demonstrates that a preference for the author's productive rather than his receptive behaviour typically reflects a time-bound cultural self-image of those involved with literature. As will be clear, it is an attitude which is not suggested by Goethe's works themselves or their transmission, and which is far better suited to the works and manuscripts of more recent poets and writers who more often display a stronger leaning towards the productive function of writing than to the revisional one. In the case of such authors, versions of a work relating to each other in terms of identity and variance are usually scarcer than utterly divergent versions in the nature of independent texts.

Hölderlin's manuscripts also appear to reflect a primarily text-producing author. The Frankfurt Hölderlin edition is the only critical edition making a principle of an unrestricted presentation of the author's working procedures by means of manuscript facsimiles and diplomatic transcriptions ("typographic transcriptions"); at its core is a genetic reproduction ("linear representation") of the text. Faithful to its sources, and judiciously incorporating references to their graphics and topography where it synthesizes text by genetically conceived phase divisions, it nevertheless reflects Dieter Sattler's, its editor's, governing interest in the production and re-production of texts. Sattler himself draws attention to the fact that precisely this "process analysis" of manuscript findings and the consequent "textual constitution" are dependent upon editorial interpretation.[92] He also contributes to interpreting this interest in the author's productive behaviour in terms of a history of ideas when he declares for his own edition: "In its approach, it goes beyond the usual aims of literary scholarship in the same measure as it leaves a mental pigeon-holing behind [. . .]. Thus, if this poetry, achieved through self-sacrifice, is no longer given over to be enjoyed, if instead it serves an understanding of the necessity for individual and general opposition to 'imposed laws and their executors', the gain will actually depend less on the artificial end products than on the conditions and steps by which such thinking becomes aware of itself [. . .]. It would be worth relearning the power of thought which moves beyond its own self-sufficiency, the ultimate superiority of individual integrity over systems that survive only by calculated opportunism" (ibid., pp. 124-125).

This reveals a decided preference for a type of poet who develops

his ideas as independently as possible of considerations for others, of readers' expectations or their ability to understand his poetry, and who therefore has little need for self-distancing or self-censorship. It is an authorial condition preeminently attainable in the state of first writing down a text, yet less so in revising it. The genetic reconstruction of texts preserved in manuscript may hence be conceived as a means of penetrating towards the most freely imaginative author who, in this sense, is also the most individual one. His identity is often mysterious, indeterminable, to be reached out for only in such reconstruction. This model of the author reflects the self-image of the scholar definable by his interest in textual genesis. The quality which he values most in the author he claims also for himself, i.e., a minimal consideration for the community of readers and their wishes, which in turn means the greatest possible degree of individuation and boundlessness of self-being. Interest in supra-individual aims of authors is replaced by the greatest possible openness towards their reproducible procedures of composition.