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III. The author's working procedures as a reflection of his sense of self-being

Editors who adhere to the production-oriented editorial concept consider it an important task of the critical edition to illustrate the author's working procedures, be it indirectly by documenting and describing the work's entire development and presenting the alterations it underwent, or be it directly by providing reproductions of working manuscripts. However, they do not acknowledge this process of illustrating working procedures as an end in itself. Its principal aim is to serve as a control of the editor's presentation of the text and its variants. This is also the primary function of the manuscript facsimiles and their "typographic transcriptions" for instance in the Frankfurt Hölderlin edition. Even their high degree of documentary authenticity in relation to the author's working procedures is really only to be understood as evidence corresponding to the meticulous reconstruction of the genetic textual conditions. Yet do the writer's working procedures merit observation and documentation only with regard to their text-genetic results? Are they of interest merely by their workshop handling of texts and variants, and not also as the author's medium of expression? In other words: are these procedures valuable only as a guide to new genetic states of greatest possible textual authenticity, and not in themselves as a mode of articulation of the writer who by their means created his texts? In one respect, that of revision, the answer must be in the affirmative. Writers, especially in earlier periods

of literary history, have repeatedly insisted how important critical reading and re-reading was for them and the consequent alterations of their texts. Pliny the Younger provides exemplary evidence in a letter justifying the written dissemination of his speeches to readers by describing with what critical care—and advice by friends—he revised and corrected the text of a speech: "Itaque nullum emendandi genus omitto. Ac primum quae scripsi mecum ipse pertracto; deinde duobus aut tribus lego; mox aliis trado adnotanda, notasque eorum, si dubito, cum uno rursus aut altero pensito; novissime pluribus recito, ac si quid mihi credis tunc acerrime emendo; nam tanto diligentius quanto sollicitius intendo. Optime autem reverentia pudor metus iudicant".[93] Acknowledging an habitual behaviour as important for himself, an author will also regard it as noteworthy in literary colleagues.[94] Lessing, for example, in reviewing Klopstock's Copenhagen edition of Messias, discusses its revisions at great length. As an author turned critic, he holds up many instances of Klopstock's textual changes for demonstration and gives a reason for the trouble he is taking: "Changes and improvements made by a poet like Klopstock in his works deserve not only to be noted, but to be studied with the greatest diligence. By studying them one can learn the finest rules of art; for what the art's masters well choose to observe attains to the force of rules."[95]

This was written in 1759, and thus at a time when literary good taste was still acknowledged by writers and readers alike as a bond securing a shared sense of the appropriate. The authors had the task of guiding taste in so far as they took it upon themselves to improve their own artistic sensibility by diligently studying master works of art, and by applying it in turn to their own works to improve the sensibilities of their readers. A writer who wished to be respected within the community of the literate did well to apply the highest degree of literary judgement to his works. The field to exercise his studied artistic sensibility was above all the redaction and revision of his own texts and not their conception or production. This exercise, however, was not a matter of "studium", but of "ingenium" or "genius", an outflow of the individual's powers of imagination and inspiration, and thus largely removed from conscious control. An author who ceaselessly improved his works in accordance with literary good taste thereby announced his claim to being counted among the better authors.[96] The extent of the revisions he undertook in relation to the actual conception and production therefore indicates the degree to which he saw himself as a community being and wished to be recognised as such by others.[97] Where this urge is about equal to the urge for creative individualisation, as for instance with Goethe or Schiller in their classic periods, the relationship also finds expression

in the working procedures. Given favourable conditions of transmission, it is relatively easy to distinguish procedural phases: the primarily productive phase of the preliminaries (notes, sketches, plans) and drafts (the drafting of individual segments, first integral inscription of a whole text) on the one hand, and the primarily revisional phase (fair copy, scribal copy, printer's copy, proofs) on the other hand.[98]

Such working procedures have a strong and purposeful forward direction even at an early developmental stage. The author begins relatively early after the initial inspiration to work towards an opus, even though he may be gaining clarity about its content and form only as it progresses. The purposefulness of his working procedures mirrors his teleological self-conception; his search for perfection in a literary work reflects his will to a perfection of his personal existence. Despite all possible individual distancing, his powers of imagination are bound to a traditional image of man which he accepts as the highest standard of his existence and self-being. It is not only his creative imagination which is more or less dominated by such self-determination; his entire work as an author is also so dominated. This means that his work is very much oriented towards publication. For the author can only relate positively to himself as a person if he succeeds in objectifying what he recognises as the essence of that self, raising it to permanence and providing for its unlimited internalisation by others. It is thus for the sake both of his literary and, above all, of his personal self-affirmation that this type of author views himself primarily as a community being. In this sense his consideration for the literate reading public is genuine.

To the extent that the regulatory power of an objectifiable image of man loses validity for the author's self-conception, his imaginative activity begins to develop its own, and often superior, dynamics. Correspondingly, the creative aspect (the recording, combination and evocation of perceptions) gains significance for his work, while the process of revision loses its functional essence. No longer limited to the revising of completed texts and text segments, it extends to the development of new texts and segments. Revision ceases to be clearly distinguishable from text production, which itself in turn, moreover, becomes increasingly characterised by an over-abundance of immediate, as opposed to retarded, changes. Recent German poets, e.g., Georg Heym, Georg Trakl, Franz Kafka,[99] offer numerous examples of such characteristics in their working materials.

Authorial working procedures directed primarily towards productive writing cannot provide a fruitful object for studying an author's artistic will in the sense of the Lessing quotation above.[100] They belong to a type of author less concerned with realising his artistic will or public recognition

as a superior writer than with individual self-realisation through the most boundless development of his imagination. The more he opens himself to his imagination and allows himself to be overwhelmed by it, the more his writing loses the quality of a purposeful finite activity divisible into phases such as preliminaries, drafts and revision. It develops a tendency, rather, of becoming a mode of existence with which the author exclusively identifies and in which he would wish to dwell for as long as possible. Baudelaire and Flaubert, those founding fathers of the literature of modernism, really did not wish to be anything but poets. Consequently, their pronouncements on literary work in truth bear witness to their individual lives and are meaningful only to themselves or their intimate friends. Baudelaire, the champion of "gouvernement de l'imagination",[101] records in a collection of notes: "Si tu travaillais tous les jours, la vie te serait plus supportable. Travaille [six] jours sans relâche. [. . .] Je suppose que j'attache ma destinée à un travail non interrompu de plusieurs heures."[102] Flaubert, who called himself "l'homme-plume",[103] often refers to his working procedures in letters. They bore unmistakable traits of obsession, sustained as they were by a "génie de la gestation, une sorte de jubilation, qu'on peut, si l'on s'en prend à l'homme, qualifier de folle ou de perverse."[104] In the course of composing Emma Bovary's seduction he commented: "Que cela continue! car je suis fatigué de mes lenteurs. Mais je redoute le réveil, les désillusions des pages recopiées! N'importe, bien ou mal, c'est une délicieuse chose que d'écrire, que de ne plus être soi, mais de circuler dans toute la création dont on parle."[105]

In a similar spirit Kafka records his mood of depression in situations when the imagination failed him in his writing, or that of an intoxicatingly inspiring extasy in moments when it ran free.[106] He appears himself to have sensed a spiritual affinity with Flaubert. Commenting on a few manuscript pages for L'Education sentimentale, he wrote: "The crossed-out pages [. . .] do not represent nights of failing energy. On the contrary, these are the very pages in which he wholly immersed himself, in which he lost himself to every human eye. And even when writing these pages for the third time, he experienced [. . .] this infinite happiness."[107] In his diary, Kafka articulated how much he considered productive writing as the only form of existence commensurate with his self: "When I became aware within my whole organism that writing was the most fruitful direction of my being, everything thronged towards it and rendered void all other abilities, directed towards the joys of sex, eating, drinking, philosophical reflection and, above all, music. I emaciated in all these directions."[108]

Writers who find their life's fulfilment in activating their imagination

by writing are, as a rule, scarcely able to adopt a clear stance towards the results of their writing. Their relationship to their texts is basically ambivalent. It tends to be positive as long as the texts provide a continued or renewed stimulus for the imagination, yet negative when the animation fails or cannot be experienced any longer.[109] Flaubert copied or rewrote passages from his novels or made "recopiages" (copies of pages of books he had read) to put himself into a productive mood: "Certes Flaubert lit pour se documenter, mais aussi et surtout par débauche imaginative, et ce sont les mots qui le debauchent."[110] And Kafka, clearly, was virtually incapable of substantially improving his short stories in revision. His ability of critical (re-)reading was little developed. Hence, his publications do not express decisions freely taken by himself and specifically relating only to his texts. They are determined, rather, by external factors alien to the author and to the text.[111]

The typical uncertainty of the authors mentioned with respect to what their texts might mean to readers taking a receptive attitude towards them signifies their fundamental lack of consideration for a readership altogether.[112] Such lack is not so much involuntary in the individual as a mode of intentional behaviour. The authors—and they are not only modern ones, as the example of Montaigne shows[113] —view themselves primarily as individuals and wish to be seen and accepted as such by others. Their daily existence becomes unbearable to the extent that this self-image is not acknowledged. In the same measure, literary writing assumes for them the significance of an authentic form of existence. Bearing no relation to real persons, it excludes the everyday world from its field of reference, and it is also creative, since the imagination can repress thoughts of an everyday community existence and blot them out in moments of happiness.

Documents of a mode of literary writing which, in fulfilling an author's wish to be understood preeminently as an individual, constitutes an essential articulation of his assumed form of life, are in this sense also biographic documents. This is increasingly true: the more significant that productive writing was for the author and the less important its textual results, the greater the indeterminacy or secrecy in his work or being, and the more clearly the work process shows signs of spontaneous inceptions or abrupt conclusions (indiscriminate use of available writing space, such as old letters, café menus, envelopes, pages torn from copybooks).[114] Such manuscript leaves body forth an author's innermost life sphere rather than his workshop activities. They are not merely the sources for "textologists" interested in reconstructing the genetic versions of the text, but witnesses sui generis which crave attention for their own sake.