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Introduction

Writers’ Libraries, Creative Revision, and Histories of the Holograph
Olga Beloborodova et Dirk Van Hulle
p. vii-xiii

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1Building bridges has been an important task of the European Society for Textual Scholarship in the past decade. In 2012, ESTS co-organised its international conference in conjunction with the Arbeitsgemeinschaft für germanistische Edition in Bern; in 2013, in Paris, together with the Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes (ITEM). To continue this tradition, we tried to strengthen the ties with the international consortium GENESIS, working on genetic criticism around the globe in various disciplines. In March 2022, we therefore organised the conferences of GENESIS and ESTS back-to-back, in Oxford. They were preceded by a workshop of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project’s editorial team and an international colloquium on “Writers’ Libraries”, with a keynote by Daniel Ferrer.

2One challenge that both genetic criticism and textual scholarship face is the issue of marginalia. In the past, they have often been published separately from the text they relate to. The affordances of digital scholarly editing enable new ways of highlighting the interaction between text and marginalia. But this also requires coordination in terms of methodology, lest we reinvent the wheel and build bespoke editions that may work well on their own but do not speak to each other / are mutually incompatible. In literary studies, there is a growing awareness of the importance of studying authors’ libraries, since authors are also — and primarily — readers, and their reading affects their writing in various ways. In addition to the “extant” library, a topic of special interest is the “virtual” library — a reconstruction of books the writer read, but which have not been preserved, either because the writer made their reading notes based on a borrowed copy, or because the copies they used were lost or sold. It is often possible to, at least partially, reconstruct such a virtual library, but this raises even more methodological issues than the edition of an extant library, notably in terms of criteria for the inclusion (or exclusion) of books depending on the degree of certainty of uncertainty with which the exact edition of a particular source text can be established.

3Marginalia and other reading notes are a central research object in exogenetic studies. How they are processed in a writer’s drafts is a question that relates to endo- and epigenesis, characterized by layers of revision in successive draft versions, proofs or even editions, if the author gets the chance to revise their text (as in the case of the six editions of The Origin of Species published in Darwin’s lifetime). This type of creative revision was the theme of the GENESIS conference. As the subtitle “Exercises in Comparative Genetic Criticism” indicates, it was conceived as an explicit attempt to explore the possibility of studying creative processes, both literary and non-literary, from a comparativist point of view. Revising, reworking or revamping is a crucial element of any artistic process. In a narrow sense, this revision can be the late phase in the genesis shortly before the work of art is made public. In a broader sense, it may also include other forms of re-vision, of looking again.

4For instance, a 2018 exhibition of Rubens’ “intertextual” appropriations in Frankfurt (Städel museum) showed how the artist gradually processed his own impression and sketch of a sculpture of a Centaur and then used it to give shape to a painting of a religious theme, Pilate presenting Christ to the crowd (“Ecce Homo”). From this “intertextual” perspective, the painting acquires several layers of complexity. Not only does it show Christ with a Centaur’s torso, but the whole transformation of a Greek mythological theme into a Christian topic is a complex process, in which the artist’s drafts or sketches play a crucial intermediary role. Similarly, in literary studies, a writer’s notebooks and drafts play a pivotal role in the analysis of intertextual relations.

5In this context, Michael Baxandall’s criticism of the term “influence” (and implicitly of the term “source”) is still relevant, to all types of artistic research, from architecture to musicology, from art history to literary studies. “Influence”, he writes, is “a curse of art criticism primarily because of its wrong-headed grammatical prejudice about who is the agent and who the patient” (Baxandall 1985, 58).

6Another “agent” in this transformation is the audience — listeners, spectators, readers — adding “a dimension of experienced meaning”, to borrow Paul Eggert’s phrase (Eggert 2019, 173). The work of art is as much a process as it is a product and the audience is a crucial participant in this process. Researchers interested in the genesis of art works, or genetic critics, are “readers” in their own right. So are composers who listen to music, filmmakers who watch movies, writers who read books.

7Genetic criticism is therefore not limited to a focus on the production process, but also involves a work’s reception. The GENESIS — OXFORD 2022 conference invited scholars from various disciplines (art history, architecture, musicology, literature, …) to reflect on the dictum “ex nihilo nihil fit” (nothing comes from nothing), comparing forms of artistic metamorphosis across various art forms.

8Adding a historical dimension to this comparative approach, the ESTS conference was dedicated to “Histories of the Holograph” and took place against the backdrop of an exciting historiographical book project, called A Comparative History of the Literary Draft in Europe. Reading notes and literary manuscripts are a constant in literatures of all ages and linguistic areas, and yet their role in writing processes in various traditions has seldom been the subject of systematic scrutiny in comparative literary studies. Likewise, literary histories usually do not take the writing process into account, leaving this domain largely within the purview of either palaeography or genetic criticism. Tackling this double (comparative and historiographic) gap is the idea behind this book project, run under the auspices of the International Comparative Literature Association’s Coordinating Committee for the Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages (ICLA/CHLEL) and expected to be published in the fall of 2024. The project focuses on literary drafts in European languages but transcends the continent’s geographical borders by including draft material from North American and postcolonial literatures. In conceptualising the project’s reach, we opted to focus primarily on aspects relating to the literary draft (i.e. the textual aspects of creative processes), but other, non-textual elements such as different kinds of material bearers (including born-digital texts) and non-literary drafts (i.e. aspects of creative processes that are not necessarily textual) are also included, in order to show that creativity at work crosses genre and media boundaries, and that comparing text production to other art forms can generate valuable insights.

9A comparative history of the draft is an important missing link in today’s literary historiography. One of the reasons of this gap is the disparate nature of literary manuscripts. In order to be able to produce an effective and comprehensive comparison of such a disparate cohort of manuscripts, the project works with eight categories of comparison, five of which (temporal, spatial, linguistic, generic, and editorial) relate mainly to the text of the manuscripts and three of which are non-textual in nature (material, intermedial, and conceptual).

10The ESTS conference focused in the first instance on the temporal comparison, for which the mid-eighteenth century is often used in genetic criticism as a watershed to distinguish modern manuscripts (i.e., private documents) from earlier (e.g., ancient, medieval) manuscripts, which are often scribal copies, i.e. meant for public dissemination. But even though holographs are rarer in the pre-modern period, they do exist: for example, Petrarch revised the scribal copies of his poems Rerum vulgarium fragmenta in the so-called “codex of sketches” (Codice degli abbozzi) of the Canzoniere. Similarly, the era of the “modern manuscript” needs to be confronted on the other end of its temporal spectrum with the era of the “digital manuscript” — the born-digital holograph, so to speak. By comparing drafts across periods (from early medieval documents to twenty-first century born-digital texts), the conference aimed to establish a dialogue between what are traditionally considered separate disciplines. The question to be asked and answered here is whether the function of the literary draft changes over time.

11In any historiographic investigation, the temporal component is inextricably connected to the spatial one. In Europe, different traditions of textual scholarship are based on different archival situations. For instance, the German tradition is to a large extent shaped by editions of Goethe’s works and the relative abundance of his extant manuscripts, whereas Shakespeare, whose works are marked by the relative lack of holograph manuscripts, has served as a paradigm for the long-standing Anglo-American tradition of bibliography and copy-text editing. In Italy, the concept and practice of filologia d’autore took root and blossomed due to the abundance of well-preserved manuscripts, some of which date back to the thirteenth century. A comprehensive comparative survey of these different traditions shows how particular influential archival situations have had an impact on various attitudes to manuscript studies in different regions in Europe and on postcolonial literatures.

12Along with geography comes linguistic variety. If — as many linguistic paradigms claim — language has an impact on our cognitive and creative processes, a comparative perspective on writing processes in different languages should uncover notable differences in the creative process depending on the language in which a work is written. The most inviting cases for such a comparison are works by translingual authors, such as Samuel Beckett and Vladimir Nabokov. Because in most cases these authors are also translators of their work, the process of literary translation itself deserves a closer look, which leads us beyond translingual authors and into translators’ archives more generally. Very few translators actually preserve their manuscripts, but the few extant translators’ archives are treasure troves for a genetic investigation, as the bourgeoning field of genetic translation studies testifies. A comparative analysis of the translation process generates valuable insights into the cognitive processes of writing and helps reassess the somewhat undervalued status of the translator in literary historiography. Besides, translators’ drafts reveal to which degree the translation process is a collaborative affair between the author and the translator.

13While collaboration for translation purposes may seem logical and therefore not unexpected, the nature of authorship itself is (perhaps too easily) branded as solitary. At the same time, there are obvious differences in conceptualization depending on the literary genre: for instance, creating a theatre play is universally acknowledged as a collaborative effort that involves many different agents. By contrast, writing poetry and prose are generally considered to be the fruits of an author’s solitary labour — no doubt the legacy of the deeply entrenched Romantic notion of “genius”. A genetic comparison across genres, i.e., a comparative investigation into the writing processes involved in poetry, fiction and drama, furnishes us with tangible evidence that helps refine these stereotypical assumptions on the nature of authorship.

14One such refinement is the discussion of the role of the editor in the creative process. Contrary to popular opinion, the writing process does not end at the moment the manuscript is dispatched to the publisher but continues in the no-man’s-land between the author’s desk and the publishing house, involving editors and, consequently, editorial intervention. Despite Stephen King’s famous claim that “The editor is always right” (King 2000, 13), the role of editors in the writing process is often underrated and rarely studied. The editorial comparison allows us to revisit the editor’s contribution to creativity and foreground the sociology of writing that marks the creation of every text. Apart from the collaborative nature of authorship, such a comparison fleshes out a wide range of editorial interventions into the writing process: from seemingly more mundane matters of orthography and punctuation to drastic pruning, to such a degree that it ends up defining the author’s typically curt style.

15As mentioned above, creativity is not an exclusively textual matter, as it is influenced to a large degree by non-textual, material and medium-specific affordances and constraints. Both the temporal and spatial comparisons uncover a great variety of materials, from stylus tablets to tablet computers, from parchment to paper, from papyrus to pc. When Nietzsche started using an early precursor of the typewriter, he famously suggested in a letter to Heinrich Köselitz that writing tools have a cognitive impact: “unser Schreibzeug arbeitet mit an unseren Gedanken” (“our writing tools assist in our thought processes”; qtd. in Van Hulle 2019, 15) More recently, research conducted in writing studies revealed that college students deploy different planning and revision strategies depending on whether they are using pen and paper or a word processor (Hayes 1996; Van Waes and Schellens 2003). If it is true that our writing tools have an impact on our thought processes, the material comparison of literary drafts may offer us a rare insight into the workings of the creative mind, and a comparative history might uncover cognitive patterns as we are moving from paper-based to born-digital literatures.

16Similarly, a genetic comparison across different media gives us a more precise idea of how medium-specific properties affect the genesis of a work of art. The intermedial comparison covers a wide range of the audiovisual spectrum: architecture, film and television on the one hand, and music and radio on the other. For many of these media, the notion of adaptation will be of importance: as Ian McEwan reflected on his role as screenplay writer for the film version of his novel On Chesil Beach, “it’s a sort of demotion from God to a little cherub, or General to Corporal. […] Writing a novel is to address yourself to a finished literary form. The screenplay is not a finished form, it’s part of the recipe, it’s not the meal. It’s very, very different”(qtd. in “Ian McEwan and Billy Howle Discuss the New Adaptation of on Chesil Beach” 2018). Other forms, such as music and architecture, furnish us with useful models for comparative genetic criticism.

17Among this wealth of perspectives and angles, one should not lose sight of one of the textual agents at the core of any genetic investigation, namely the author. How do authors see their own writing methods, and how do they convey their views? Authors often express themselves in conceptual metaphors, which can be broadly divided into organic (e.g. the “embryo”, “birth”, “growth”, “germ” of a work) versus constructivist metaphors (e.g. writing as “a factory” or as “bricolage”). A more detailed comparative study of such metaphors fleshes out new insights that not only further shape the current models of genetic criticism, but — perhaps more importantly — give us a sense of how these metaphors change over time, which is illuminating for discerning future trends from past and present experiences. This glimpse into the future of authorship ties in with the two central questions of the historiographic theme.

18First of all: How does the inclusion of drafts in literary studies change the idea of literary history? The study of writing processes (genetic criticism) focuses less on literary successes and finished products than on conceptual hesitation, writer’s block, creative undoing and revision processes. Many literary drafts never led to a publication. A history of writing processes will therefore imply a welcome alternative to traditional literary histories, which tend to focus on (the reception of) successfully published works.

19And secondly: What are the consequences of this new comparative historiographic perspective (on the literary draft) for the future of manuscript research and literary criticism more generally? Are born-digital texts fundamentally different from ‘analogue’ texts in terms of their writing processes? What is the impact of digital technologies on the creative process? When a poet sends drafts of their new poem to friends on their smartphone; when a novelist like Jeroen Olyslaegers shares all of his preparatory research for his new novel online, how does that affect the concept of authorship?1 What is a draft in the case of a born-digital text? Recovering earlier versions can become more challenging as it is so easy to erase text, seemingly irrevocably, in a digital environment. Fortunately, we have new technologies (digital forensics and keystroke logging software) to help us shape the future approaches and methodologies of genetic criticism, armed with the insights from a historiographic perspective.

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Bibliographie

Baxandall, Michael. 1985. Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Eggert, Paul. 2019. The Work and the Reader in Literary Studies. Scholarly Editing and Book Histor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hayes, John R. 1996. “A New Framework for Understanding Cognition and Affect in Writing.” In The Science of Writing, edited by C. Michael Levy and Sara Ransdell, 1–27. New Jersey: Lawrence Erbaum Associates, Publishers.

“Ian McEwan and Billy Howle Discuss the New Adaptation of on Chesil Beach.” 2018. May 15, 2018. https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2018/05/on-chesil-beach-ian-mcewan-billy-howle/.

King, Stephen. 2000. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. London: Hodder; Stoughton.

Van Hulle, Dirk. 2019. “Towards a Comparative History of the Literary Draft.” Archiv Für Das Studium Der Neueren Sprachen Und Literaturen 256 (1): 1–17.

Van Waes, Luuk, and Peter Jan Schellens. 2003. “Writing Profiles: The Effect of the Writing Mode on Pausing and Revision Patters of Experienced Writers.” Journal of Pragmatics, no. 35: 829–53.

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Olga Beloborodova et Dirk Van Hulle, « Introduction »Variants, 17-18 | 2024, vii-xiii.

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Olga Beloborodova et Dirk Van Hulle, « Introduction »Variants [En ligne], 17-18 | 2024, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2024, consulté le 13 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/variants/1589 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/130s7

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Auteurs

Olga Beloborodova

Olga Beloborodova is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp (Centre for Manuscript Genetics). She has published extensively on Samuel Beckett, cognition and genetic criticism. She is member of the Editorial Board of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project. Her first monograph, The Making of Samuel Beckett’s “Play” / “Film” (Bloomsbury) was published in 2019. Her second book, Postcognitivist Beckett (CUP) came out in 2020.

Dirk Van Hulle

Dirk Van Hulle is Professor of Bibliography and Modern Book History at the University of Oxford, director of the Oxford Centre for Textual Editing and Theory (OCTET) and of the Centre for Manuscript Genetics at the University of Antwerp. He co-directs the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (www.beckettarchive.org) and is a curator of the Bodleian exhibition Write Cut Rewrite (2024-25). His publications include Textual Awareness (2004), Samuel Beckett’s Library (2013, with Mark Nixon), Modern Manuscript (2014) and Genetic Criticism (OUP, 2022).

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