An Overview of Contemporary German Editorial Theory
by Kenny Ng

Scholars of German editing contest the idea of a single, adequate text as the ultimate aim of editorial work. They also regard authorial intentions as multiple, dynamic, and developing over time rather than a monolithic and static notion. In short, the German editorial mode rejects out of hand the very keystone of Anglo-American copy-text editing and the recovery of authorial intention in a work reconstructed through eclectic procedures. Refusing to sanctify the author, the German school turns its attention to the text's genetic development and the complexity of its production process, trying to delve into the various collaborative efforts at different stages that shape the "authority" over the text. In place of authorial intention, German editors speak of "authorization," invoking authorial agency only in regard to whether a given version's copying, circulation, or publication was "authorized" by--expressed the will of--its author. The German conception thus allows for social and collective factors, involving the influences of other parties such as editors, printers, readers (their expected responses), etc., which necessarily enter the production of a work in the modern era. In practical terms, the principle of authorization serves as an important guideline for editors to distinguish authorized witness documents (which entail the author's active revisions, augmentations, or rearrangements) from mere textual errors, or accidentals, in their efforts to devise a diachronic textual history.

The German theorists perceive textuality as at once structural and diachronic, which fundamentally renovates the traditional view of variant, version, and text. Basically, an "authorial variant" differs from a simple textual "error" in that it is by nature always a "systematic" alteration and stands in a relational context with the text. Theoretically speaking, a single variant can introduce a different "version" as a new system of artistic signs constitutive of the text. With respect to the notion of intentionality, every variant or each new version may be regarded as the expression of a changed intention that is valid at a different point of time. The various versions over time therefore form a diachronic sequence of distinct synchronic systems that together make up the history of the work. As for the concept of textuality, a text is characteristically multifarious, organized by systematic authorial variants at different synchronic stages; but at the same time these synchronic versions are essentially linked by their structural relationships as a whole. Considering the diachronic nature of multiple texts and volatile authorial intentions, it would not be difficult to notice the discrepancy between the German principle and the Anglo-American eclectic-text approach. For German theorists of editing, the practice of eclecticism runs the risk of synchronizing that which occurs diachronically; it also deprives the work of its historical dimension in projecting all distinct versions onto one level and producing out of them a fixed, unified text in the name of authorial intention.

It was not until Hans Walter Gabler's own exemplification and application of the German editorial principles, in his "synoptic" edition of James Joyce's Ulysses in 1984, did Anglophone readers see the theory at work. Gabler has rejected any single printed edition of the novel (i.e. a fixed, synchronic version) as a potential copy-text for his new version, claiming that any previous publication cannot fully and succinctly re-present "the totality (i.e. synchronicity) of the Work in Progress."; Judging that most of the typescripts, proofs, and printed versions are too corrupt to serve as a base for the "critical" edition in his own terms, Gabler privileged autograph manuscript texts as the sole authorized documents of Joyce. Purporting to reenact the author's writing process under his pen, and to reconstruct a work that Joyce wrote "alone" prior to any non-authorial interventions in later stages of the text's production, he nonetheless clings to rather conservative concepts of authorial intention and creativity as autonomous and solitary. The question remains as to whether it makes perfect sense to regard "the act and process of writing itself" as being only in the writer's solitary moments in producing the text, thus ignoring any textual changes willed by him during later stages of production. Gabler's rationale for choosing manuscripts as valid witnesses is that he needs to prioritize active over passive authorization--on the grounds that Joyce would have surrendered total control over his text to his collaborators.

Gabler's conservative intentionalist standing would be counterbalanced by his poststructural orientation to define textuality as unstable and changing, to encourage an open interpretation of the text by the reader. In the synoptic design of the book, a clear-text on right-hand pages is juxtaposed with, on the left-hand side, a complex code of symbols that documents the "growth" of Ulysses through different stages of the text's production. Gabler expects his "ideal reader" to build up a genesis of the text backward from the right-hand synchronous version to the left-hand synoptic apparatus, thus effecting a dynamic movement in the process of reading. For the German editor, then, it is the apparatus but not the clear-text that is the raison d'être of the edition. The Ulysses Gabler has reestablished is not a fixed literary object anymore, much less a definitive text presented for public consumption in the traditional way: it is a structural integration of versioning texts waiting to be reconstructed by active reading. In this regard, the synoptic edition calls one's attention to a particular generic quality of modernist writing: that its subject is often the act and process of writing itself. It is the dialectical process of reading, or interpretation, that constitutes textuality and finally confers meaning and authority upon the text.

References:

Contemporary German Editorial Theory (CGET), (eds. Hans Walter Gabler et al., Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995); Hans Zeller, "Structure and Genesis in Editing: On German and Anglo-American Textual Criticism" (CGET); Siegfried Scheibe, "Theoretical Problems of the Authorization and Constitution of Texts" (CGET); Gunter Martens, "What is a Text? Attempts at Defining a Central Concept in Editorial Theory" (CGET); James Joyce, A Critical and Synoptic Edition (Prepared by Hans Walter Gabler et al., 3 Vols., New York: Garland Pub., 1984); Jerome McGann, "Ulysses as a Postmodern Work," Social Values and Poetic Acts (Harvard UP, 1988).