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.
