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II. The production-oriented editorial concept

Whereas Goethe's works were edited in the Weimar edition according to the reception-oriented concept, the first critical edition of Schiller's Complete Works of 1867-1876 provides an early example of the production-oriented editorial concept.[56] Some of its fundamental principles have been applied or at least adumbrated in this critical edition which is more concerned with a "history of Schiller's mind" (Schiller, 1, p. v) than with the Schiller who, within limits, determined the way in which his work should be read in the individual publications he instigated. (In a short life, it was not given to him to publish his collected works.) For his editors, Schiller's identity as he wanted it to be understood through his works was less important than what he produced in writing during his lifetime. Karl Goedeke, the editor, declared it his primary desire to document Schiller's creative mind in its individual artistic outpourings as set forth both diachronically and synchronically in their order of conception. It was his aim "faithfully to reproduce of each greater or smaller composition the earliest existing form, be it from a manuscript or printed source" (Schiller, 15, 1, p. v). Not the final authorised version but the earliest available one provided his base text. Moreover, since the aspect of authorial production took precedence over that of communicative self-determination, it was logical that the process of composition and revision should be reproduced as comprehensively and accurately as possible.[57] The record of Schiller's textual alterations (which, in fact, is not complete) shows the endeavour to present them not just as the results of alterations, i.e., deviations from the edited base text, but as acts of alteration with indications of how the changes were effected. This represents an important step in raising the status of the literary

work process, the writer's crafting shop as opposed to his self-sufficient 'thought workshop'.[58] How fundamental a step this was may be concluded from the editor's explicitly formulated insight that it carried consequences beyond the typographical conventions of text reproduction as designed for the readers. "Only photographic reproduction could give an idea of what the writer considered worthy of notation in the course of his work. Only photography, too, could clarify his manner of composition, which deleted letters and font variations do not suffice to illustrate. Yet it seemed an essential task to approximate the creative process as far as this may be visualised through the medium of print." This statement appears in the preface to the last volume of Goedeke's Schiller edition published in 1876 (15, 2, p. vi). Almost a century later, in 1975, the first volume of the Frankfurt Hölderlin edition drew the conclusion for editorial technique from such insight: facsimiles of Hölderlin's manuscripts complementing diplomatic transcriptions of their textual layout and a representation of the textual genesis became an integral part of the critical edition.[59]

For a long time the significance of the Schiller edition was not duly appreciated. It never became a model for methodology[60] and barely affected twentieth-century philologists who developed the production-oriented editorial concept.[61] Its most apparent innovation is a reconceived critical apparatus, yet this could not be developed from Goedeke's edition in which the apparatus was outwardly arranged according to the pattern of the apparatus criticus in classical philology. In modern editorial theory and practice the emphasis shifts from the reproduction of the text to the critical apparatus.

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.

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]

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.