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Born-Digital Manuscripts and the Contemporary Author. “Carport” from Marcel Beyer’s Ezra Pound Poem Cycle, for Example

Gabriele Wix
p. 105-121

Abstract

Today, the basic material evidence of authorial activity has migrated to the electronic realm. Considering the theme of the 2022 ESTS conference Histories of the Holograph. From Ancient to Modern Manuscripts and Beyond, we find that there is no clear cut between “modern”, e.g. private documents, be they handwritten or typed, and “beyond”, e.g. digitally created. Rather, there is a transitory stage between modern and digital writing processes, which is the focus of the essay. This in-between does not only concern contemporary authors who were anchored in typewriting and then switched to creating their manuscripts on computers. The so-called digital natives born from the 1980s onwards have also grown up in a culture of paper, and publishing in books and other print media continues to coexist with digital forms of publication.
From a philological and critique génétique perspective, the first part of the paper addresses the question to what extent the transitional situation is reflected in present born-digital writing processes. The genesis of “Carport”, a four-line poem by the 2016 Büchner Prize winner Marcel Beyer will serve as a case study for this. As part of a cycle on Ezra Pound, Beyer’s text may be of special interest to English-language scholars. Beyond its brevity, the poem lends itself to study: The born-digital writing process spans eight years and is documented in twelve bundles of drafts, saved in private storage media. In addition, the storages are carefully paginated, dated and annotated, which blends the roles of author and editor. We are thus faced with the rather uncommon situation, even in born-digital writing processes, that the author himself provides a well-ordered dossier génétique. A provocation for the editor? A fortunate circumstance for the textual scholar and the genetic critic?
Engaging with digital writing processes usually means engaging with a living author. Moreover, in the present case, the drafts are embedded in a kind of logbook, generating an emphatic presence of the author beyond the writer in the sense of Roland Barthes. This is why the second part of this paper reflects on which questions the contemporaneity of author and scholar raises for research, especially with regard to the current boom in academic studies of contemporary literature.

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Modern and Beyond

1Sifting through piles of manuscripts, deciphering and dating the documents (mostly handwritten notes, drafts, excerpts and typescripts), sorting out so-called hot and cold stacks of paper, reconstructing the chronology, creating diplomatic or linear transcriptions of manuscripts and revised typescripts, but also the joy in the aesthetics of the manuscripts, rightly considered as art objects by the critique génétique (Grésillon 1999, 157), the pleasure of having read into a handwriting so that one succeeds in deciphering initially unreadable passages, the delight of finding the pieces that complete the puzzle — that was the editor’s work creating a dossier génétique or a facsimile edition in the modern era.

2Since the 1990s, the basic material evidence of contemporary authorial activity has migrated to the electronic realm. Handwritten manuscripts of contemporary poets appear to us almost as historical and as a reminder of a pre-digital, ‘modern’ age. Considering the theme of the 2022 ESTS conference: Histories of the Holograph. From Ancient to Modern Manuscripts and Beyond, the preposition “beyond” seems chosen for good reason: The “born-digital manuscript” or the “born-digital holograph” spans a wide field. On the one hand, new literary practices are emerging in the context of media and technical upheavals. According to Annette Gilbert, the possibilities of automated processing of texts are being used aesthetically far beyond the mere capturing, copying and typesetting of texts; the spectrum ranges from filtering and searching through a text, to counting, sorting, comparing, summarising and translating (Gilbert 2019, 511; see also: Gilbert 2022, 34–50). Rainald Goetz, for example, wrote an internet diary as early as 1998 — the term blog did not yet exist at that time — into which any user could plug in. But eventually, it appeared as an 860-page book in 1999 and was then removed from the net (Goetz 1999). Jason Huff and Elizabeth Tonnard, to give another example, used the possibilities of automated processing of texts aesthetically. In their case, they used Word’s auto-summarise function to generate the shortest poems from famous works of world literature (Huff 2010; Tonnard 2010; Gilbert 2019, 511). Authors, such as Thomas Kling (1957–2005), are in turn deeply attached to writing by hand (Stüssel and Wix 2013; Wix 2016), and his digital writing processes (Ries 2018), which tend to replace the typewriter rather than initiate medially induced experimental writing processes, account for a comparatively short, albeit significant period of his literary output.

3The phrase “modern and beyond” already suggests it: There is no clear cut between “modern” e.g. private documents, be they handwritten or typed, and “beyond”, e.g. digitally created. Rather, there is a transitional phase between modern and digital writing processes, and this transitory stage is the focus of the essay. The in-between does not only concern authors who were anchored in typewriting and then switched to creating their manuscripts on computers. The so-called digital natives born from the 1980s onwards have also grown up in a culture of books and paper, and the publication of books and other print media continues to coexist with digital forms of publication.

Considering the In-Between: A Born-Digital Holograph by Marcel Beyer

Author and Poetology

4From a philological and critique génétique perspective, this paper addresses the question to what extent the transitional situation is reflected in present born-digital writing processes. The genesis of “Carport”, a four-line poem by the 2016 Büchner Prize winner Marcel Beyer, will serve as a case study for this. It is part of a 203-page PDF documenting the material traces of a writing process that spanned eight years.

5Within the discourse about the death and the return of the author, to which I will come back later, it is an almost subversive pleasure to first introduce the author with an iconic photo (see Fig. 1).

Figure 1: Photograph of Marcel Beyer, by Jens Gyarmaty.

Figure 1: Photograph of Marcel Beyer, by Jens Gyarmaty.

Image reproduced with permission from the copyright holder.

6Beyer is a highly acclaimed poet, novelist, librettist, and essayist. Two examples may outline his poetological approach. First, a recent work, which has met with great public response, the libretto for an opera by the Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa, premiered in July 2018 (Beyer 2018). It is based on the novella Das Erdbeben in Chili (The Earthquake in Chile) by Heinrich Kleist. The plot and the central theme of the novella were transformed into an opera collage that transmits the suspension of any social norms in this historical disaster scenario to the contemporary events surrounding the nuclear accident due to the tsunami in Fukushima, as well as to the current right-wing populist attacks (Wix 2018). Second, the poetry collection in question, Graphit (Graphite), published in 2014 (Beyer 2014). The first association of the title might be a pencil, a common writing tool. But according to an author’s statement in a talk in Cologne in 2015, the title refers to the graphite dust which his wife, artist Jacqueline Merz, works with in her studio — Beyer does not use a pencil, but a Lamy pen, lead F for handwritten notes. The title of the poetry volume returns in the title of the first poem. In this text, Beyer blends his memories of a visit to his friend, poet Thomas Kling at Neuss in the 1990s, into a report on the shooting of Eisenstein’s film Alexander Newski in Moscow in 1938. The key link between the two places is a view on the production of artificial snow: machine made snow using water at the Ski Hall in Neuss, naphthalene and chalk in Moscow. The poem ends with the lines,

[…] Einmal quer durchs
Jahrhundert führt, am Pistenrand
hier, eine Schattenspur: Graphit.

[… Once leading straight through the
century, at the edge of the slope
here, a shadow trace: graphite.]

(Beyer 2014, 17)

7This image of “a shadow trace” mirrors a crucial point of Beyer’s poetological program: Tracing historical events from the present back to the past, from the past into the present, blending motifs, combining and installing dissembled elements, unmasking the layers of historical tradition — especially these layers which are tending to conceal themselves. Accordingly, the writing process is based on a kind of collage or montage technique, which is a key point in Beyer’s writings (Wix 2017, 2019).

“Carport”

8The poetry collection Graphit is structured in nine chapters. A cycle of five poems including “Carport” forms the eighth chapter (Beyer 2014, 171–192). Even if notes at the end of the book only give Ezra Pound as a reference for “Mein Blauhäher” (My Blue Jay), which is the longest poem with sixteen parts, centrally placed in third place, the five poems gathered in this chapter all make reference to Ezra Pound’s life and work (Mengeringhaus, n.d., 67). Regarding the complexity of the genesis and the German language, with which not all readers will be familiar, I focus on the first poem of only four short lines from chapter VIII, titled “Carport”, to present specific issues of the digital writing process. Figures of the first two pages may give an impression of this born-digital manuscript (Fig. 2 and Fig. 3). They also provide the frame of reference.

Carport

Ich saß da, in meiner Heimat, und
die Sprache hielt mich fest, in
meinem Carport, wo der Tod läuft
und das Leben aus Pappe ist.

[Carport

I sat there, in my homeland, and
the language held me tight, in
my carport, where the death runs
and life is made of cardboard.]

(Beyer 2014, 173)

9These verses might remind the reader of another text, and this is right. Beyer refers to the last lines of Ezra Pound’s Canto CXV, the one that immediately came to Allen Ginsberg’s mind upon hearing of Ezra Pounds death during a radio interview. Ginsberg spontaneously quoted the text and commented: “Great despairing end ...” (Ginsberg 1974, 185).

IN MEINER HEIMAT
WHERE THE DEAD
WALKED AND THE
LIVING WERE MADE
OF CARDBOARD

10This is the way to read Pound’s verses at the very beginning of Beyer’s drafts, bundle 1, p. 1 (Fig. 2). They are written in capital letters, and additional line breaks divide the three lines of Pound’s original verses into five (Pound 2012, 1172). ”OF CARDBOARD” is separated by a blank line.

Figure 2: Marcel Beyer: Mein Blauhäher, Konvolut 1, page 1.

Figure 2: Marcel Beyer: Mein Blauhäher, Konvolut 1, page 1.

Image reproduced with permission from the copyright holder.

Figure 3: Marcel Beyer: Mein Blauhäher, Konvolut 1, page 2.

Figure 3: Marcel Beyer: Mein Blauhäher, Konvolut 1, page 2.

Image reproduced with permission from the copyright holder.

11Alluding to Pound’s idiosyncratic and recreative way of translating (Hesse and Heitann 2001) — his transmissions from the source language to the target language are primarily inspired by visual, sonic and rhythmic perceptions, irrespective of the semantic content — Beyer transforms the word “cardboard”, German “Pappe”, into the phonetically related word “Carport”, an Anglicism frequently used in German. Likewise, the literal translation “Pappe” comes into play. Michael Kindellan’s words describing Pound could be transferred one-to-one to Beyer, “pre-eminent poet-philologist, literally in love with logos” (Kindellan 2017, 1). Pound’s German phrase “In meiner Heimat” (“in my homeland”) is evocative. It moves into Beyer’s poem almost casually, inserted in commas. While Pound’s phrase may also resonate as a rejoinder to the Wagnerian, ever-repeated formula of longing to "unserer Heimat" (“our homeland”) (Wagner 2013, 167 et al.), the focus now shifts to the contemporary connotations of the term "Heimat" in the field of tension between trivialising folklore, affection, existential need and right-wing populist agitation.

12The initial title of the poem, “Heim”, later removed in favour of “Carport”, also underlines the significance of Pound’s German expression. Non-German-speaking readers are reminded of the difference of “Heim” and “Heimat”: “Heimat” can be translated as “home” as well as “homeland”. “Heim”, however, covers “home” in the sense of house or apartment in which one lives and feels comfortable, and it does not cover “homeland”.

The digital-born dossier génétique

13The digital-born writing process of this four-line poem “Carport” is documented within twelve bundles of drafts for chapter VIII from Graphit, the part which relates to Ezra Pound’s poetry. The digital documents are saved on Beyer’s storage media; they were submitted as PDFs via an email attachment. The analysis focuses on these digital objects only. It does not consider any other (meta-)data, including any further temporary files or the “fragmented traces of the writing process scattered across multiple system locations” (Ries 2018, 391); data of the automatic process running in the background that would be relevant from a digital forensic perspective. The manuscript comprises a total of 203 pages and is dated January 24, 2006, to February 18, 2014. The organization into twelve individual bundles reflects the work steps, and the time they cover varies greatly, from a few minutes to over several years.

14The texts are not written consecutively, since the author usually starts a new page after each saving, a working routine resulting from writing on the typewriter:

— das kommt noch vom alten Arbeiten mit der Schreibmaschine her: Wenn’s nicht weitergeht, wird das Blatt aus der Maschine gezogen, ein neues Blatt eingespannt, die neben der Maschine liegende Textstufe abgetippt bzw. korrigierend weiterentwickelt.

[— this still comes from the old way of working with the typewriter: if it doesn’t go any further, the sheet is pulled out of the machine, a new sheet is clamped in place, the text stage lying next to the machine is typed or corrected further.]

(Beyer 2015)

15This reference to the writing practice acquired with the typewriter and its transfer to the work on the computer leads to a fundamental question regarding born-digital manuscripts. At the same time, it confirms the thesis of an intermediate stage set up at the beginning: The transfer from writing practices with the typewriter to the computer outlined by Beyer is not only an individual experience. Rather, the orientation to paper (and book) as a text carrier and to the format of the sheet is preserved in the word processor, and the idea of the physical document is still to be found in the terminology of textual scholarship, as two quotes from a temporal distance of around 20 years will show.

The figure of the text “processed” on a computer is like a phantom to the extent that it is less bodily, more “spiritual,” more ethereal. There is something like a disincarnation of the text in this. But its spectral silhouette remains, and what’s more, for most intellectuals and writers, the program, the “software” of machines, still conforms to the spectral model of the book. Everything that appears on the screen is arranged with a view to books: writing, lines, numbered pages, coded indications of forms (italics, bold, etc.), the differences of the traditional shapes and characters. There are some tele-writing machines that don’t do this, but “ours” still respect the figure of the book — they serve it and mimic it, they are wedded to it in a way that is quasispiritual, “pneumatic,” close to breathing: as if you had only to say the word and it would be printed. 

(Derrida [1996] 2005, 30)

From the perspective of today’s everyday usage of the term ‘digital document’, it might be considered odd to still tie the term ‘document’ to the physicality of a text carrier, although obviously the term and concept is historically derived from physical documents and graphical user interfaces are still mimicking the physical document on the screen.

(Ries 2017, 146)

16Obviously, the pictorial idea of physical pages that can be touched, counted, and ordered, seems to facilitate dealing with the fluid data and processes hidden beneath the user interface. It remains to be seen whether this is a temporary transitional phenomenon or perhaps the expression of a fundamental need for spatial orientation after all.

17Beyer’s dossier génétique has a stringent structure. In the footer line, you find the pagination, the author’s name, the title of the work he is writing, and the number of the bundle. Usually the end of the respective draft includes a date and exact time, and sometimes some remarks on the working situation, the weather, or a comment on the draft itself. This is why the manuscript may be characterized as logbook (“Arbeitsjournal”), a format that causes a noticeable presence of the author’s person and is usually classified under “ego-material”. What is even more, Beyer not only used to storage his drafts, but also his excerpts, references and so on. From a critique génétique perspective, it is first worth taking a closer look at the two manuscript pages. On page one, various writing approaches can be traced below the Pound citation, whereby it is striking that a certain appropriation process can already be observed in the altered line break of the quotation described at the beginning. On the second page, there is a series of disjointed notes below the date of filing: material that the author did not use initially, but kept in stock.

  • 1 Jacques Derrida already reflected with great clarity in 1996 (Derrida [1996] 2005, 24), and treatin (...)

18Considering this type of material, we encounter a discourse on the continued existence of textual criticism that already emerged with the first advent of digital literary writing processes. As Thorsten Ries points out, Wolf Kittler already suggested in 1991 that instant corrections no longer left material traces and thus there was no longer any material basis for the editor. And in the case that the author himself saved deleted passages, the editor was out of a job (Kittler 1991, 235; Ries 2017, 129). Regardless of fundamental differences between writing with a word processor, by hand, or with a typewriter,1 we can argue that the first two pages of Beyer’s born-digital holograph already prove that in the digital realm, too, it is quite possible to follow a complex writing process in its inner dynamics, its virtual ramifications, its dead ends. The material provided by Beyer is not a document of digital self-archiving in favour of a fetishised preservation of the ultimate first draft, a behaviour that Kittler described with critical distance (Ries 2017, 130); it is a document of the author’s working material to keep the writing process going. This becomes all the more clear when tracing the genesis of the short poem over the entire material.

19Bundle 1 consists of ten pages, which all refer to “Carport”, titled “Heim” (home) at this stage. The writing process lasted one day, January 24 in 2006. There are six different storages within a very short time span, from 4:05 p.m. to 5:20 p.m., and a last one without time specification.

20To give an idea of the paratextual comments: the six storages in bundle 1 read:

Notizen, fünf nach vier, 24.1.06
[Notes, five past four, 24/1/2006]

Notizen, fünf vor halb fünf, 24.1.06
[Notes, five before half past five, 24/1/2006]

bis zehn nach fünf, 24.1.06
[till ten past five, 24/1/2006]

viertel nach fünf, 24.1.06 (fließt optisch nicht)
[quarter past five, 24/1/2006 (does not flow optically)]

zwanzig nach fünf, 24.1.06 so vielleicht? alles sehr rasch
[twenty past five, 24/1/2006 maybe? all very quickly]

(25.1.06: als ich es morgens, gleich nach dem Aufstehen, lese, habe ich plötzlich ‚Und der Haifisch, der hat Zähne‘ im Ohr, das gefällt mir nicht.)
[(25/01/2006: when I read it in the morning, just after getting up, I suddenly have “And the shark, it has teeth” ringing in my ears, I do not like it.)]

21Bundle 2 and 3 last till February 22, 2006. Beyer reviews the “sudden” writing process and considers the notion of “Heim”, writing down some further associations and research on Pound. While working on other poems of the Pound cycle, titled “Alba” (“Daybreak”) and “Hähersprache” (“Jay Tongue”), Beyer returns to the quotes of Pound’s canto CXV as well as to the draft for “Home”, later titled “Carport”, and inserts the lines into different parts of his poem “Hähersprache”. In 2007, a poem titled “Hähersprache” was published in a magazine (Beyer 2007a). Single lines of the drafts for “Heim” were scattered in the poem, and a text of four lines — identical with the one of the poem later titled “Carport” — appeared as part IX. An essay by Beyer on E. E. Cummings’ early poem "pound pound pound" was published in the same journal (Beyer 2007b). Here Beyer also refers to Cumming’s later poem to Pound, “crazy blue jay”, from which a relation to Beyer’s poem “Hähersprache” (“Jay Tongue”) can be drawn.

22More than 5 years later, in August 2011, Beyer returns to the Pound cycle. At the beginning of bundle 4, he notes on August 29:

seit vorgestern ungefähr geistert mir im Kopf herum: Hähersprache neu schreiben. Als Eröffnung einen Wochendurchgang, dann jeweils einen Tag (aus dem bestehenden, noch nicht wieder angeschauten Material der alten Fassung)

[since the day before yesterday, I’ve been thinking about rewriting Jay Tongue. As an opening a weekly run, then a day at a time (from the existing material of the old version that has not yet been looked at again)]

23He copies and pastes the version from 2006, and many approaches deal with “Heimat” and “Heim”. With longer breaks, he works on the Pound cycle again in September 2011, February 2012 and February 2014. Either he does not refer to the lines of the poem later titled “Carport” at all, or the procedure is similar to the prior ones. As far as bundle 1 to 12 is concerned, the logbook does not give any information about when Beyer decided to finally title the poem “Carport” and to place it at the beginning of his Pound cycle in Graphit. But the exact wording of the poem had already been realized on January 22, 2006, eight years before. In the end, the Pound cycle consists of five poems: “Carport”, “Alba”, “Mein Blauhäher” (“My Blue Jay”), a new version of “Hähersprache”, “Alba” — a poem of identical title, but different text — and “Argot”.

24To finally return to Derrida’s notion of digital writing machines being “wedded to the figure of the book”: It can be traced in detail that Beyer’s writing processes, as documented in the born-digital dossier génétique, are arranged with a view to the book, the division into chapters, the importance of the white space, the axes of symmetry in the arrangement of the poems, etc.

Ships at Sea

25In another dossier génétique, Beyer used to finish a part of the planned cycle without ever returning to it or changing anything anymore. In this case, the writing process is different. Over a long period of time, the writing process returns to the beginning again and again. In an e-mail-correspondence, the author answered my question regarding a certain stage in the writing process:

Es gibt ja für mich im Schreibprozeß keine Position des neutralen Beobachters, wie wir sie jetzt beide einnehmen, da wir die Arbeitsmaterialien vor uns haben. Aha, hier wurde diese Entscheidung getroffen, und aha, dort wurde jener Ansatz weiterverfolgt. Im in eine unbestimmte Zukunft gerichteten Schreibprozeß (wird aus diesen Ansätzen etwas oder nicht?) ist ständig die Hauptfrage: Wie dynamisiere ich dieses Material — ist dies ein Wort, das andere Wörter nach sich zieht — wie kann ich ein Stop & Go entstehen lassen, dessen jeweiligen Endpunkte / Löcher / Pausen eben nicht endgültige Löcher / Enden ergeben, sondern selbst wieder eine Spannung aufbauen, die in weiteren Textverlauf mündet?
Man will ja beim Schreiben nichts anderes als: Schreiben.
Insofern trifft man natürlich Entscheidungen — aber doch Entscheidungen weniger der Art von: “mit diesem Ansatz komme ich nicht weiter, also wähle ich einen anderen“, es läuft also gar nicht souverän ab, sondern eher wie: “aha, hier könnte ich vielleicht rasch etwas probieren.“
Ich habe also vielleicht drei Zeilen geschrieben — mir kommt in den Sinn: vielleicht könnte die ganze Sache gleich viel mehr Speed aufnehmen, wenn ich das zuletzt geschriebene Wort (oder den Halbsatz oder den Vers) an den Anfang stellen würde — gut, probiere ich das rasch einmal aus, speichere aber zur Sicherheit den bisherigen Ansatz ab, falls sich das Ausprobieren als Sackgasse erweist, denn ich möchte ja womöglich zum ersten Ansatz zurück. Klar unterscheiden sich solche Ansätze dann mitunter nur in einem Wort, oder gar nur darin, daß der Zeilen- / Versumbruch an einer anderen Stelle vorgenommen wird, aber auf diesen Minimalentscheidungen liegt im Moment des Schreibens die GANZE Hoffnung (nämlich in diesem Sinne: Ich glaube, wenn ich dieses letzte Wort in der Zeile an den Anfang der nächsten Zeile setzen würde, ergäbe sich eine Dynamik für alles, was noch kommen mag (von dem ich aber zu diesem Zeitpunkt noch gar nicht weiß)).

[There is, after all, no position of neutral observer for me in the writing process, as we both occupy now that we have the working materials at hand. Aha, this decision was made here, and aha, that approach was pursued there. In the writing process, which is directed into an indeterminate future (will these approaches become something or not?), the main question is always: How do I dynamise this material - is this a word that draws other words after it - how can I create a stop & go whose respective end points / holes / pauses do not result in final holes / endings, but rather build up a tension again that leads to further text development?
When you write, you want nothing more than: To write.
In this respect, of course, you make decisions — but decisions less like: “I can’t get any further with this approach, so I’ll choose another one”, so it doesn’t happen confidently at all, but more like: “aha, maybe I could quickly try something here”.
So I’ve written maybe three lines — it occurs to me: maybe the whole thing could pick up a lot more speed if I put the last word I wrote (or the half-sentence or the verse) at the beginning — well, I’ll try that out quickly, but save the previous approach for safety, in case trying it out turns out to be a dead end, because I might want to go back to the first approach. Of course, such approaches sometimes differ only in one word, or even only in the fact that the line / verse break is made at a different place, but at the moment of writing, the WHOLE hope lies in these minimal decisions (namely in this sense: I believe that if I were to place this last word in the line at the beginning of the next line, there would be a dynamic for everything that may still come (but of which I am not yet aware at this point)).]

(Beyer 2016)

26In his answer, Beyer points out the difference between the position of an observer who oversees the complete material at hand, and the author who just wants to keep the writing process going on and who does not know where that leads to at the end. Beyer’s digital dossier génétique is, in my view, an excellent example for writing into an openness for anything that comes, and simultaneously, a proof of the instability and indeterminacy of writing processes, the risk and the adventure involved in them. To put it in an aphorism by Lawrence Weiner: “We are ships at sea, not ducks on a pond.”

Contemporaneity

27What was considered “an impossibility” 20 years ago (Steinfeld 1997; Spoerhase 2014) is now a programme. “Academic research on contemporary literature is experiencing a boom” (“DFG-Graduiertenkolleg 2291: Gegenwart/Literatur. Geschichte, Theorie Und Praxeologie Eines Verhältnisses. University of Bonn” n.d.). This coeval turn leads to a fundamental change in the academic culture. Julika Griem, who also refers to Spoerhase, describes the emergence of an institutional “Gemengelage”, as we say in German (Griem 2015, 101). It is “an institutional situation producing role conflicts and increasingly fuzzy relations of proximity and distance […] when authors lecture on poetics and participate in academic conferences, when academics chair these authors’ readings and write reviews of their newest works” (“Schreibszene Frankfurt: Info. Schreibszene Frankfurt” n.d.). Referencing of author interviews (and e-mails) has become a habitualised research practice. As a result, the contemporaneity of author and editor redefines their roles as well as their relationship, particularly so regarding the postmodern decentring of the author.

28Beyer himself is very present in the academic discourse and open to answer any questions as he did, for example, concerning the semantic content of the title of his poetry volume. But this is just the moment, when the notion of authorship gets back close to its etymological meaning of auctoritas, authority, and here we are reminded of the academic discourse of the 1970s initiated by Roland Barthes’ 1968 essay “The death of the author” and Michel Foucault’s 1969 essay “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?”, a theory which was fundamentally questioned by Roger Chartier’s proposition about the return of the author in 1992. In Germany, the discourse was fuelled in 1999 due to an anthology edited by Fotis Jannidis et al., titled “Die Rückkehr des Autors” (The return of the author) (Jannidis et al. 1999). Authors like Beyer are up to date with the academic discussion. They know the discourse around the role of the “author” and reflect on their doing as “writers”, which is a vital prerequisite to collaborate with an author in academic research. Secondly, Beyer is well aware of the fact that a text once published is beyond the author’s authority.

29The turn to contemporary literature offers new research opportunities for textual scholarship. At one point, a practice of “Vorlass” (both on the part of the archives and on the part of the authors) has increasingly emerged alongside the practice of “Nachlass” (Sina and Spoerhase 2017). The term “Vorlass” does not exist in English. While “Nachlass” refers to an author’s posthumous papers, the term “Vorlass” denotes the papers an author has donated to an archive while he or she is still alive. Secondly, instead of traditional research in the literary archive or in a poet’s estate, there is the possibility of directly accessing living authors’ manuscripts, as is the case here in the context of a book project on Marcel Beyer’s writing processes. But that opens us up to sensitive areas in many regards.

30At an institutional level, giving insight into the working process can be honoured as an expression of Beyer’s personal concern for an author’s educational mandate, and at a personal level, as an act of confidence between author and scholar. And yet conflicts can arise. Possibly, there are expectations on the part of the author. Even if only assumed by the scholar, this might lead to self-censorship and concerns about living up to the claim, or about corresponding to the generosity in an appropriate way. There is no general answer. In the end, this is a question of maintaining academic probity and a question of personality of both author and scholar. From the institutional point of view, Griem is right: Changed academic contact zones facilitate data collection and research, coincidently creating these “fuzzy relations of proximity and distance”. Above all, the access to the genesis of contemporary texts is a far-reaching and stimulating opportunity for textual scholarship. For various reasons, be it the growing interest of literary studies in contemporary literature, or the change in posthumous (“Nachlass”) and anthumous (“Vorlass”) politics on the part of authors and archives, there is an increasing wealth of contemporary holographs, analogue and ever more digital — both ready for philology and genetic criticism.

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Bibliography

Beyer, Marcel. 2007a. “Hähersprache.” In Schreibheft. Zeitschrift Für Literatur, 69: 173–75. Essen: Rigodon-Verlag.

Beyer, Marcel. 2007b. “Zu E.E. Cummings Gedicht ‘Pound Pound Pound’.” In Schreibheft. Zeitschrift Für Literatur, 69: 173–75. Essen: Rigodon-Verlag. See also: http://www.planetlyrik.de/marcel-beyer-zu-e-e-cummings-gedicht-pound-pound-pound/2018/06/. Accessed December 1, 2024.

Beyer, Marcel. 2014. Graphit. Berlin: Suhrkamp.

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Notes

1 Jacques Derrida already reflected with great clarity in 1996 (Derrida [1996] 2005, 24), and treating this issue further would go beyond the scope of this article.

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List of illustrations

Title Figure 1: Photograph of Marcel Beyer, by Jens Gyarmaty.
Credits Image reproduced with permission from the copyright holder.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/variants/docannexe/image/1699/img-1.jpg
File image/jpeg, 4.3M
Title Figure 2: Marcel Beyer: Mein Blauhäher, Konvolut 1, page 1.
Credits Image reproduced with permission from the copyright holder.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/variants/docannexe/image/1699/img-2.png
File image/png, 54k
Title Figure 3: Marcel Beyer: Mein Blauhäher, Konvolut 1, page 2.
Credits Image reproduced with permission from the copyright holder.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/variants/docannexe/image/1699/img-3.png
File image/png, 69k
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References

Bibliographical reference

Gabriele Wix, “Born-Digital Manuscripts and the Contemporary Author. “Carport” from Marcel Beyer’s Ezra Pound Poem Cycle, for Example”Variants, 17-18 | 2024, 105-121.

Electronic reference

Gabriele Wix, “Born-Digital Manuscripts and the Contemporary Author. “Carport” from Marcel Beyer’s Ezra Pound Poem Cycle, for Example”Variants [Online], 17-18 | 2024, Online since 01 December 2024, connection on 14 January 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/variants/1699; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/130sd

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About the author

Gabriele Wix

Gabriele Wix lectured at the University of Bonn, Department of German, Comparative and Cultural Studies until the summer semester 2022, focusing on the interface between art and literature of the 20th and 21st century. She obtained her PhD in 2009. She is a member of the board of ESTS, and member of AGE. She is also the curator of exhibitions on international artists’ books and on writing processes. Her latest book publications include: Lawrence Weiner. Sail on. (2024); Max Ernst, Die Schriften (ed.; 2022); Thomas Kling, Werke in vier Bänden (ed. of vol. 1; 2020).

By this author

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Copyright

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The text only may be used under licence CC BY 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) may be subject to specific use terms.

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