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Genesis 2023: The Draft and its Environs
Essays

The Author as Reader: Modernist Marginalia and Authors’ Libraries between Exogenesis and Intertextuality

Dirk Van Hulle
p. 69-89

Abstract

A writer’s interaction with external source texts is usually referred to as exogenesis in genetic criticism. The exogenetic paradox, according to Pierre-Marc de Biasi, is that exogenetic passages “tend inevitably to be progressively converted into endogenetic material”, which contributes significantly to what he called the “definitional limits” of exogenesis. This article suggests that many of these “definitional limits”, however, may also be due to genetic criticism’s sometimes rather biased focus on only one aspect of the author: the author-as-writer. This implicit bias is teleological in the sense of a natural inclination to pay attention in the first instance to reading traces that contributed more or less directly to the writer’s own oeuvre. To counterbalance this implicit teleological bias, this essay attempts to also present the other side of the coin: the author-as-reader. This has a theoretical implication as it helps us draw the contours of the concepts of “intertextuality” and “exogenesis”, based on the premise: every writer is also a reader.

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1Marginalia, commonplace books, research notes, and reading journals constitute a significant part of a writer’s creative space. In the dialectic between the creative event and the environment, a writer’s library is one of the most tangible examples of a creative ecology, testifying to the many brains that writers sometimes borrow for their literary projects (Van Hulle 2022a). Some writers are very open about their use of their library as a tool. The Iranian-Dutch writer Kader Abdolah, for instance, recently noted in a newspaper that his “reading behaviour” (“leesgedrag”) is determined by the new book project he happens to be working on. Thus, Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore and Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum are compared to an old timer which Abdolah used to have when he was still living in Iran, and which he could repair and pimp to his heart’s content. Similarly, he takes apart all the screws, nuts and bolts of Murakami’s or Grass’s novel to understand and learn from their tricks and stratagems (Abdolah 2024, 12). The personal library thus becomes a “reading reservoir” (“leesreservoir”) with a clear purpose: to read in order to write.

2But Abdolah’s description also raises the question whether authors are always writers, implying that whatever they read is always already part of a writing strategy and part of their authorship, or to what extent it is also possible to study an author as a reader.

3Within the field of genetic criticism, a writer’s interaction with external source texts is the province of exogenesis (Debray Genette 1977), which Pierre-Marc de Biasi defined as “the logic of intertextual processes accompanying the work’s creative movement” (de Biasi 2020, ¶ 2). The difficulty of this definition is that it includes another theoretical concept that constantly seems to require redefinition: intertextuality. This article examines how the two concepts of exogenesis and intertextuality relate to each other and offers a suggestion to address the “definitional limits” (¶ 42) of exogenesis.

1. Traces of Reading

4In bibliography, there is a long history of reconstructing certain individuals’ personal library as a material object of study. The Oxford Bibliographical Society, for instance, has published several volumes with titles like “The Library of Robert Burton”, “The Library of Thomas Cranmer”, “The Library of John Ruskin”. Lucy Gwynn recently reviewed them and one of the points she emphasizes is “the unavoidable truth that a personal library may contain many books that their owner cares very little for, whilst lacking some crucial titles which were borrowed or accessed elsewhere” (Gwynn, Rundle, and Woudhuysen 2024, 184).

  • 1 See, for example: D’Iorio and Ferrer (2001), Campioni et al. (2003), Van Hulle and Van Mierlo (2004 (...)
  • 2 In the original French: “la trace, toute la trace et rien que la trace” (Hay and Lebrave 2010, ¶ 5)

5The neighbouring discipline of genetic criticism is interested in a non-material topic — the dynamics of creative processes — but it does use material traces to study it and is therefore naturally interested in authors’ libraries too.1Material traces of the creative process have been central to the conceptualization of the discipline of genetic criticism from the start. Louis Hay, for instance, swears by “the trace, the whole trace and nothing but the trace” (Hay in Hay and Lebrave 2010).2

6But identifying something as a trace almost inevitably generates the curiosity to know what it is a trace of. For instance, clusters of doodles in the manuscript of a novel may indicate a pattern of spells of writer’s block during the creative process — as is the case in the manuscript of Samuel Beckett’s Murphy. Or an author’s comparatively limited number of new output (resulting in a reduced number of traces) and their use of old notes may be indicative of physical illness or an emotionally difficult period (Bell and Davidson 2024). Also in cognitive terms the notion of “traces” is tantalizing in that it teases researchers with something quasi-unobtainable: a sense of the cognitive processes behind creative writing. Still, while it is not possible to look inside a dead author’s brain to see what went on in their mind while they were reading or writing, the traces of their reading do allow us — to a certain extent — to see what the author saw and how they saw it. For instance, when Jason Scott-Warren discovered that annotations in a copy of a Shakespeare first folio in Philadelphia were in the hand of Milton, this gave us “the opportunity to read Shakespeare through Milton’s eyes” as he said in an interview with The Guardian (Scott-Warren qtd. in Flood 2019).

  • 3 Coleridge elevated marginal notes in his books to a genre in and of itself, and his “marginalia” th (...)

7While the subtitle of Heather Jackson’s landmark publication Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books provides a very concise, no-nonsense definition of the phenomenon (Jackson 2001), for the purposes of this article, I would like to consider reading traces by both “marginalists” and “extractors” (Ferrer 2004), because in literary studies and textual scholarship both types of reading notes have traditionally been considered a “marginal” phenomenon and seldom been given a prominent place in scholarly editions, with only few exceptions confirming the rule.3 In many ways these marginalia mark various boundaries between what is there and what is no longer there.

What is there: authors’ “extant” libraries

8Every author is also a reader. Traces of their reading can typically be found in the form of marginalia in the books they read or in the form of reading notes and excerpts in separate notebooks. To study an author’s marginalia, we first need to recompose their “extant” library. Very often, books that were once owned by an author have been auctioned and dispersed over various private collections and holding libraries. The digital paradigm creates new opportunities to digitally reunite the extant books of an author’s library. For instance, Beckett’s copy of Macbeth is currently in a private collection. Still, even though the physical copy is not publicly available, the collector is willing to share scans of Beckett’s marginalia. These scans enable us to digitally reunite this book with the rest of the extant library (Verhulst and Van Hulle 2022).

9Authors’ extant libraries present researchers with a range of challenges. Marginalia can be verbal or non-verbal, such as underlinings, marginal marks or dog-ears. In the latter case, it may be difficult to ascertain the authorship. Anyone may have drawn a line in the margin or folded a corner of the page. But certain characteristics, such as the straightness of marginal lines or the size of dog-ears may become a sort of signature revealing the author’s involvement, as in the case of the characteristically large dog-ear in Beckett’s copy of the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica that marks the entry on Manichaeism (vol. 17, p. 573), from which he excerpted passages in his production notebook for a performance of Krapp’s Last Tape. Some books in an author’s personal library challenge Hay’s creed to stick to the trace, the whole trace and nothing but the trace because they contain what Axel Gellhaus called “non-marginalia”: sometimes a book in an author’s extant library is marked on several pages, but it is actually the content of an unmarked page that had an impact on their writing process (Gellhaus, Van Hulle, and Van Mierlo 2004). Another challenge is the question as to what belongs to the extant library. When we say “library”, we think in the first instance of books, but what about magazines? Do they belong to the library? What about newspapers? What about clippings from newspapers? In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, professional newspaper cutting agencies were sometimes engaged by authors or patrons, as in the case of James Joyce. Among the Joyce papers in several archives there are hundreds of clippings from newspaper articles in which he is mentioned. Many of them are just literary gossip, but some of them have exogenetic value because Joyce made use of them to write new works. Including this kind of information in the author’s personal library would be a way of treating literature as cultural heritage and drawing attention to its material dimension, in other words, a way of establishing “what’s there”. But this “thereness” should not blind us to what is not, or no longer, there. Making it a habit of referring to these books as an author’s extant library has the advantage of implicitly reminding ourselves of the existence of other types of library reconstruction and enhancing our awareness of what has been lost.

What is no longer there: “virtual” libraries

10If only part of a writer’s personal library is still extant, the reading notes in separate notebooks can give us a sense of what is no longer there — the phantom limb of the library, as it were. A writer’s notebooks, their diaries or correspondence are often the closest one can come to recovering lost reading material.

11In the case of Virginia Woolf, for instance, her sixty-seven reading notebooks — recently made available online — are instrumental in establishing how much research went into her writing. Thus, to write the essay “Modern Novels”, published in the Times Literary Supplement in 1919, Woolf took notes on James Joyce’s Ulysses (RN 31) before the first edition came out (1922).

  • 4 Later published as “Modern Fiction” in The Common Reader in 1925.

12Joyce in his turn read Woolf’s essay “Modern Novels” in the Times Literary Supplement4 — probably from a newspaper clipping, without even knowing that it was written by Woolf, as her essay appeared anonymously in the TLS. Joyce took only two notes, and only one of them made it into Finnegans Wake — in Chapter 7, the negative portrait of Shem the Penman. To write this chapter, Joyce took notes from numerous negative reviews of Ulysses. From Virginia Woolf’s essay, he only used the negative comment “poverty of mind”: “A work of such originality yet fails to compare […] with Youth or Jude the Obscure. It fails, one might say, simply because of the comparative poverty of the writer’s mind.” Joyce jotted down the words “poverty of mind”, crossed them out, and used them in the drafts and eventually in Finnegans Wake.

  • 5 Excerpted from the following passage: “we seek to define the element which distinguishes the work o (...)

13In addition to this note, however, Joyce also jotted down the words “incoherent atoms” — which did not make it into Finnegans Wake. They derive from the same essay and even though they may sound negative, they are based on a positive statement reflecting Woolf’s modernist aesthetics: “Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance […]” (Woolf 1919, 189).5 Even though, in utilitarian terms, Joyce did not “use” his note “incoherent atoms” in his own work, his reading of this passage does contribute to an intellectual framework within which Joyce operated (and of which he appears to have been aware, as the reading note shows) to give shape, in his own unique manner, to modernist ways of imagining the workings of the human mind. The “incoherent atoms” ground Joyce’s writing in an aesthetic context that bolsters the idea that Finnegans Wake is an attempt to let the reader step into the “riverrun” of a “stream of consciousness” and experience the workings of the human mind, “the atoms as they fall upon the mind” in Woolf’s terms. The note did not lead to Finnegans Wake directly. It is part of the many hundreds of notes that constitute the vestiges of Joyce’s “Work in Progress”, as it were. Or in terms of Gestalt psychology: they constitute the “ground” against which the “figure” of Finnegans Wake emerges. When it comes to traces of reading, it seems important to pay equal attention to both used notes and unused or vestigial notes.

2. Exogenesis

  • 6 Exogenèse est le nom donné, en critique génétique, à la logique des processus intertextuels qui ac (...)
  • 7 “Apart from its definitional limits […] the exogenetic domain seems to manifest, by its nature, a c (...)
  • 8 “This conversion of the exogenetic to the endogenetic takes place primarily as an effect of textual (...)

14As indicated above, Pierre-Marc de Biasi defines exogenesis by referring to intertextuality.6 The paradox of exogenesis, however, is that, as soon as external or exogenetic sources are incorporated in a writer’s own text, they become part of the “inside” of the genesis, i.e. of the “endogenesis”. From this point of view, the acts of marking a passage in the margin, excerpting a word in a notebook, selecting a note and using it in a draft constitute a form of “conversion”. According to de Biasi, exogenetic passages “tend inevitably to be progressively converted into endogenetic material” (de Biasi 1996, 45), which contributes significantly to what de Biasi calls the “definitional limits” of exogenesis (de Biasi 2020).7 De Biasi sees these limits primarily in the sense of this “conversion”, which can be so perfect that the original source can become invisible.8 This is one of the areas of research where genetic criticism can be helpful: tracing the genesis may help discover or reveal such forms of invisible intertextuality (Van Hulle 2022b).

15But my suggestion is that there is another reason for the exogenetic paradox: the problem of the “definitional limits” (de Biasi 2020) of exogenesis may also be due to genetic criticism’s sometimes rather biased focus on only one aspect of the author: the author-as-writer, that is, an implicit teleological bias in the sense of a natural inclination to pay attention in the first instance to reading traces that contributed more or less directly to the “telos” of the writer’s own oeuvre.

  • 9 Raymond Chandler, for instance, made typed lists of similes and crossed out the Raymond Chandler, f (...)

16The rich tradition of genetic criticism in Joyce studies offers dozens of examples. Thus, in one of his Finnegans Wake notebooks Joyce noted down the line “Great Taskmaster’s eye” (VI.B.11.50), an excerpt from Milton’s sonnet “On his being arrived at the age of 23” lamenting that Time has stolen his “three and twentieth year” too soon, but eventually reconciling himself to the idea that “All is […] as ever in my great taskmaster’s eye”. Joyce crossed out the note with a red pencil when he used it to insert it in an early draft of what was to become chapter two of Finnegans Wake (on the first page of the so-called “Guiltless” Copybook; British Library MS Add 47471b). Joyce is certainly not the only author who crossed out notes when he used them in his drafts so as to avoid using them twice,9 and one cannot exclude the possibility that the practice may have been conducive to the tendency to focus on those notes that made it into the published text.

17As opposed to the author-as-writer, the author-as-reader may sometimes just be reading, say, a detective novel, for pleasure, without any direct purpose of using it for a work in progress. Due to the link between reading and writing implied in the definition of exogenesis, there is a potential implicit bias towards a writer’s purposeful research and reading notes that contributed directly to the writing process. To avoid this teleological bias, it seems important to also include unused marginalia and notes in genetic research. From a teleological or utilitarian perspective, for instance, Joyce’s note “incoherent atoms” (see above) was a “dead end”. This does not mean, however, that such “dead ends” and “notework” (Reader 2021, 3) are irrelevant. On the contrary, unused reading notes are important for the reconstruction and understanding of how creativity works. My suggestion is that unused or vestigial notes are therefore as relevant as the used ones. They provide concrete evidence of how much selective undoing or “decomposition” of other source texts often precedes composition. These traces of reading help us refine and nuance our knowledge of the marginal zone between reading and writing. Vestigial notes may seem purposeless from a teleological point of view, but they may actually be crucial elements in the study of creative writing processes. To investigate this it is necessary to briefly revisit the notion of intertextuality.

3. Intertextuality

  • 10 See “Le Texte clos” (The Bounded Text) and “Le mot, le dialogue et le roman” (1966), in Kristeva (1 (...)

18How does intertextuality (with its focus on the reader’s experience of links between texts) relate to exogenesis (with its focus on the writer’s interaction with external source texts)? The notion of “intertextuality” was coined by Julia Kristeva in 1966. She suggested that any text is “constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another” (Kristeva 1980, 66).10 Roland Barthes embraced the idea that every text “belongs to the intertextual” (Barthes 1979, 77), reinforcing his claim that “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author” (Barthes 1977, 148). The notion of intertextuality indeed bolstered the autocracy of the reader. Less than ten years after Kristeva had coined the notion of intertextuality, however, she took a distance from what she called the “banal” understanding of the study of sources (critique des sources or Quellenforschung): “puisque ce terme a été souvent entendu dans le sens banal de ‘critique des sources’ d’un texte, nous lui préférons celui de transposition” [since this term has often been understood in the banal sense of ‘source criticism’, we prefer the term transposition] (Kristeva 1974, 59-60; my translation).

19Intertextuality has the advantage that, unlike for instance the notion of “influence”, it does not imply what Michael Baxandall called the “wrongheaded grammatical prejudice about who is the agent and who the patient” (Baxandall 1985, 58–9). As opposed to the notion of “influence”, “intertextuality” emphasizes the role of the reader. One of the problems of “intertextuality” was that it was so broad that it had no practical use, and when one tries to narrow it to make it more serviceable, it “falls into source study of a traditional and positivistic kind (which is what the concept was designed to transcend)”, as Jonathan Culler noted (Culler [1981] 2001, 121).

  • 11 Cf. Genette (1982), Machacek (2007), Miller (2011), Baron (2012), Mason (2019), and Baron (2020).

20In The Birth of Intertextuality, Scarlett Baron delineates how the term “came to be used as an anodyne, all-purpose way of denoting any kind of connection between texts” (Baron 2020, 19). Critics such as Gérard Genette and others have therefore not stopped looking for ways in which the notion could be made practicable.11 Genette framed intertextuality as “a relation of co-presence between two or more texts” in a way that was explicitly more “restrictive” than Kristeva’s (Genette 1982, 8). In the mid-1990s, Geert Lernout similarly advocated a “constraining context”: “Take away intention and context, and the only thing left to say about a text is that it can mean anything at all” (Lernout 1995, 47). While Lernout presented genetic research as a “constraining context”, Pierre-Marc de Biasi sees it — notably exogenetic research — in terms of an expansion of the research field:

Le concept d’exogenèse a donc reformulé, en termes de processus, la notion d’intertextualité, initialement conçue pour l’interprétation du texte littéraire publié, de manière à la rendre opérationnelle pour élucider les phénomènes temporalisés de la genèse. Cette adaptation, qui revient à un élargissement significatif du champ d’analyse (non plus seulement le texte mais aussi son dossier de genèse), ne remet pas en cause le lien organique qui rend solidaire les deux notions, ni ce que l’exogenèse doit historiquement à la théorie de l’intertexte ; mais elle s’est traduite, de l’une à l’autre, par une transformation substantielle des points de vue critiques, des méthodes d’approche et des objets de recherche.

[The concept of exogenesis has thus reformulated the notion of intertextuality — which was initially conceived for the interpretation of the published literary text — in terms of process, so as to make it operational for elucidating the processual phenomena of the genesis. This adaptation, which amounts to a significant expansion of the field of analysis (no longer only the text but also its genetic dossier), does not call into question the organic link that holds the two notions together, nor what exogenesis owes historically to the theory of intertextuality; but it has resulted in a substantial transformation of critical viewpoints, methodologies and objects of research.]

(de Biasi 2020, ¶ 2; my translation; emphasis added.)

21Looking back from a twenty-first-century perspective, Geoffrey Miller summarized the various viewpoints by discerning a reader-oriented and an author-oriented approach (Miller 2011, 285). In the former, it is the reader alone who creates meaning by making a link between texts; the latter focuses on authorial intention as it aims to determine which allusions the author intentionally wanted their readers to be able to recognize or discover. The dichotomy resembles, but is not identical to, the distinction E. D. Hirsch made in “The Politics of Theories of Interpretation” (Hirsch 1982) between the “autocratic” norm (a reader’s present, ad hoc cypher key to interpretation) and the “allocratic” norm (the reader’s decision to adopt somebody’s past choice of cypher key). This distinction is more nuanced than “reader-norm” vs “author-norm” and can be usefully applied to intertextuality.

4. Autocratic and Allocratic Intertextuality

22A notorious example of autocratic intertextuality is Theodor Adorno’s reading of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. Adorno’s essay “Versuch, das Endspiel zu verstehen”, one of the most fascinating articles every written on this play, was based on a lecture he gave in Frankfurt in Beckett’s presence. On 29 February 1961, the head of Suhrkamp Verlag, Siegfried Unseld, organised a celebration in Beckett’s honour in the Kantate-Saal next to the Goethe-Haus in Frankfurt. Earlier that day, Beckett was invited to have lunch with Adorno. During their conversation, Adorno insisted on reading the protagonist of Endgame, Hamm, as an intertextual reference to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Beckett, however, said that he had never thought of Hamlet when he called his character Hamm, the name of Noah’s son according to the biblical Book of Genesis. According to the biographer, James Knowlson, Beckett even became “a little angry” on this occasion and later that day, when Adorno gave his talk as part of the celebration in Beckett’s honour and kept making the intertextual link between Hamm and Hamlet, Beckett whispered in Unseld’s ear (according to Unseld’s account): “This is the progress of science that professors can proceed with their errors!” (qtd. in Knowlson 1996, 479). It is not impossible that Beckett’s whispered message got a bit distorted during transmission, but even if we take this potential Chinese whispers effect into account, the gist of the anecdote concisely illustrates the point of intertextuality as opposed to exogenesis. As a reader, Adorno obviously has every right to make an intertextual connection between Hamm and Hamlet. From the author’s perspective, however, Adorno’s “autocratic” reading clashed with the way Beckett himself experienced and remembered the exogenesis.

23Michael Riffaterre defined intertextuality as the reader’s perception of links between a work and others which preceded or followed it (Riffaterre 1980, 4). But “the” reader in this definition is a generalization. The intertextuality discussion usually focuses on the autocracy of each reader. Yet, a reader can also take an “allocratic” stance by deciding to study how another reader read a particular text in the past. Here, a rapprochement between genetic criticism and bibliography may be mutually beneficial. Knowing how a book affected previous readers may enrich our experience of reading, as G. Thomas Tanselle notes in his introduction to Bibliographical Analysis:

Every artefact, every physical object made by human beings, is a record of human effort at a particular time and place, as well as a tangible link to all the succeeding moments of its life. Our understanding of the story each one tells enriches any use we make of it. We use books primarily for reading; and the experience of reading is deepened by knowing how the makeup of the text and the details of its design, on the pages in front of us, came to be as they are and how they affected previous readers

(Tanselle 2009, 2).

24At the same time, genetic criticism may open up bibliography’s focus on “the makeup of the text and the details of its design” to include marginalia.

25Thus, for instance, we can study Samuel Beckett’s reading of, say, Dante’s Divina Commedia. Like any reading, this reading too is inevitably conditioned by Beckett’s own cultural predispositions. This conditioning is precisely what I am interested in: a historical interpretation of the Divina Commedia — reading the work not as I understand it, not as Dante understood it, but as Beckett did, based on the traces of his reading. This particular combination of intertextuality and exogenesis has at least two interesting consequences. On the one hand, unlike Riffaterre’s definition of intertextuality, it puts the focus not on “the” reader’s (any reader’s) experience, but on a particular reading experience — in this case the experience of a historical reader who was also a writer. On the other hand, unlike the usual implicit bias in exogenetic research, the focus is not mainly or solely on the author-as-writer (examining the intertextual elements the author uses in their own writings), but also on the unused intertextual links experienced by the author-as-reader.

  • 12 Beckett’s copy is a 1924 edition of La Divina Commedia, edited with annotations by Enrico Bianchi, (...)
  • 13 Also elsewhere in the Commedia, Beckett keeps finding links with other works. For instance in Purg. (...)
  • 14 John Milton, Paradise Lost: Books I and II, edited by A.W. Verity, “sometime scholar of Trinity Col (...)

26An allocratic approach to intertextuality is slightly different from both exogenetics and autocratic intertextuality. As discussed above with regard to exogenesis, Joyce in his capacity as author-as-writer borrowed a line from Milton (“Great Taskmaster’s eye”) to use it in Finnegans Wake. A counterexample illustrating allocratic intertextuality, also involving Milton, is Samuel Beckett, the author-as-reader, experiencing a link between Dante and Milton while reading the Divina Commedia.12 When, in Canto 19 of the Inferno, Beckett reads the line “calcando i buoni e sollevando i pravi” [“trampling the good and raising up the wicked”], he adds in black ink: “to good malignant, to bad men benign”, making a connection with Milton’s Paradise Lost, “So shall the world go on, / To good malignant, to bad men benign, / Under her own weight groaning” (Book XII). He also marks the passage “Sotto ciascuna uscivan due grand’ali, / quanto si convenìa a tanto uccello: / vele di mar non vid’ io mai cotali.” [“Under each shot forth / Two mighty wings, enormous as became / A bird so vast. Sails never such I saw / Outstretch’d on the wide sea.]” (Inf. 34, 46-48) — noting in the left margin, in black ink: “Cp. Miltons ‘sail-broad vans’: P.L. II.927” (p. 252).13 As a student, Beckett was familiar with especially the first two books of Paradise Lost, which he had already studied as a seventeen-year-old pupil at Portora Royal School. In his schoolboy copy of Paradise Lost,14 Beckett underlined the “vans” in Book II (p. 65), when Satan spreads “his sail-broad vans” (line 927), and he noted in the right margin that they are “suggested by Dante. / Inf. 34.49”. Similarly, at the back of his copy of Paradise Lost, where the Glossary explains that “vans” means “wings”, derived from “Ital. vanni, from Lat. vannus, “‘a winnowing-fan’ ”, Beckett again noted in the left margin, in the same black ink: “Dante’s Inf. 34.49.”

  • 15 Unless otherwise indicated, translations of Dante’s text are by Henry Cary, because that was the tr (...)

27And as a counterexample to the autocratic intertextuality of Adorno’s Hamm-Hamlet reading of Endgame, an instance of allocratic intertextuality is Beckett’s noting “HAMLET” next to a passage in Dante’s Divina Commedia. In the second canto of Inferno (p. 44) Dante comments on how he feels after having spoken to Virgil for the first time: “As one, who unresolves / What he hath late resolv’d, and with new thoughts / Changes his purpose, from his first intent / Remov’d; e’en such was I on that dun coast, / Wasting in thought my enterprise, at first / So eagerly embrac’d.” (translated by Henry Cary, Inf. 2.37-42)15 The tension between resolve and “unresolve” apparently made the young Beckett experience a link with the existential doubt in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Beckett is reading Shakespeare into Dante, as is any reader’s prerogative. Here, he acts as an autocratic reader; the marginal note “HAMLET” is a trace of the cultural dispositions that coloured his reading. But for us, as 21st-century readers studying this trace of Beckett’s 20th-century intertextual reading, this reading is allocratic because it defers to a past cypher key that governs the reading.

5. An Allocratic Approach to Exogenesis

28To further explore this type of allocratic intertextuality and connect it to the concept of exogenesis, two of Beckett’s early poems serve as a good example. They are referred to as “Text 2” and “Text 3” in the Collected Poems, edited by Seán Lawlor and John Pilling. “Text 2” is a French poem that opens with the line “Ce n’est au pélican” (Beckett 2012, 37); “Text 3” is an English poem (38– 39, 238–40) which was first published as “Text” in The European Caravan in 1931 (478-80). As the editors of the Collected Poems point out (316), Beckett probably wrote “Text 3” in 1930, while he was working on his long essay Proust for Chatto and Windus. The poem opens as follows:

Alas my scorned packthread!
No blade has smoothed the furrowed cheeks that my tears corrode.
My varicose veins take my kneeling thoughts from the
piteous pelican.

(Beckett 2012, 239-40; emphasis added.)

29The pelican is usually read in conjunction with Beckett’s contemporaneous poem “Text 2” (“Ce n’est au pélican”) and annotated as a reference to Alfred de Musset’s poem “La Nuit de mai”, which contains the allegory of the pelican, “rending its breast to feed its young” (Ackerley and Gontarski 2004, 88). The reference to Musset suggests a metapoetic statement, since the pelican feeding its young with its own blood in “La Nuit de mai” is compared to the poet nourishing other human beings’ souls with his sufferings. Chris Ackerley also mentions the link with Musset in his annotations to Watt to explain the phrase “like a pelican’s” (Ackerley 2005, 62). Following Riffaterre’s definition of intertextuality, the reader’s experience of intertextual links is, in this case, Chris Ackerley’s.

30In their annotated edition of Beckett’s collected poems, Lawlor and Pilling also draw attention to another allusion by Beckett to Musset’s poem (this time described as a “Night of May hiccupsob”) in Beckett’s first novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women (Beckett 1992, 70). With these contemporaneous references the annotators corroborate the very plausible intertextual link with Musset, and gradually the reference establishes itself more fixedly among the community of readers. The autocratic intertextual readings by these authorities in Beckett studies thus reinforce each other and have a confirming effect. But mechanisms of canonical readings can also have a blinding effect. The French cautionary expression on railway crossings “Un train peut en cacher un autre” [one train may be hiding another] may be applicable here, because another allusion lurks behind the Musset reading, and it shows partly thanks to the adjective “pitoyable” in the second line of the poem: “Ce n’est au pélican / pas si pitoyable” — i.e., not so piteous as the piteous pelican of “Text 3”.

31The adjective “piteous” brings the slightly hidden reference to the fore, revealing it as yet another passage in Dante’s Divina Commedia: in Beckett’s personal copy the words “giudicio divin” (Inferno, Canto 20, line 30) are underlined in grey pencil with the comment “Jesus, the piteous pelican (Par. XXV.113)” pencilled next to it in the right margin. The reference is to “nostro pelicano” in Paradiso, Canto 25. So, thanks to the pencilled trace of Beckett’s reading, we can add an allocratic intertextual reading (referring to Dante) to the other intertextual readings by Ackerley and Pilling (alluding to Musset).

  • 16 For instance on page 228 of Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. Henry F. Cary, ed. with note (...)

32The word “piteous” may have been inspired by the English translation by Henry Francis Cary, which Beckett used during his early readings of the Divina Commedia. As Oscar Kuhns (1901) notes on two occasions in his footnotes to Cary’s translation, Cary sometimes uses the word “piteous” as a translation for “pii”, for which, he argues, “pious” would be a more appropriate translation.16Kuhns’s note about the adjectives “pious” and “piteous” goes to the heart of a crucial line on the same page as the one on which Beckett made the note “Jesus, the piteous pelican”: “Qui vive la pietà quand’è ben morta” (Inferno, Canto 20, line 28). The context in the Divina Commedia is the following: Dante sees the contorted figures of people who have committed the sin of false prophecy or divination; their heads are placed backwards on their trunks, with tears in their eyes. Dante feels pity and starts crying out of compassion. His guide Virgil reprimands him, because — in a Medieval frame of mind — showing pity for the damned proper is a form of defiance, questioning the fairness God’s judgement. So, “here piety lives when pity is quite dead”. What the young Beckett appreciated especially in this line is Dante’s extreme economy of words: he employs the word “pietà” only once to express two of its meanings simultaneously, both “piety” and “pity”. In his story “Dante and the Lobster”, Beckett fully developed the potential of this lexical coincidence and the resulting ambiguity in an aesthetics of translation as he makes the story’s protagonist, Belacqua, ask his professoressa how this could be translated, and lets her reply with the suggestion that it might be better to just leave it untranslated: “ ‘Do you think’ she murmured ‘it is absolutely necessary to translate it?’ ” (Beckett 2010, 12).

33The same professoressa also suggests to the protagonist that he “might do worse than make up Dante’s rare movements of compassion in Hell” (11). Thanks to the marginalia in Beckett’s copy of the Divina Commedia, it transpires that this is something Beckett actually did himself: he counted the moments when Dante cries out of pity:

Inf. 5, line 140-42 (p. 68) Inf. 6, line 58-59 (p. 71)
Inf. 20, l. 25-27 (p. 156)
Inf. 29, l.1-3 (p. 216)

34He marked these moments by numbering them in the margin. “Text 3” thus turns out to be, and can be read as, the result of a study of these four instances where Dante shows compassion in Inferno. The fourth instance is alluded to towards the end of “Text 3”:

Lo-Ruhama Lo-Ruhama
pity is quick with death.
Presumptuous passionate fool come now
to the sad maimed shades
and stand cold
on the cold moon.

(Beckett 2012, 240; emphasis added)

  • 17 Specifically, the reference is to Hosea 1:6, where Beckett underlined “Lo-Ruhama” (meaning “not lov (...)

35While “Lo-Ruhama” is a reference to Beckett’s Italian Bible,17 the line in italics is a reference to the fourth scene where Dante shows compassion: Inferno, Canto 29, line 6:

La molta gente e le diverse piaghe
avean le luci mie sì inebriate,
che dello stare a pianger eran vaghe;

ma Virgilio mi disse: “Che pur guate?
perchè la vista tua pur si soffolge
laggiù tra l’ombre triste
smozzicate?” MAIMED

  • 18 “POEMS by Samuel Beckett” in the Leventhal papers, MS-HRC-AJL-1-1. The typescript [1932], 23 pp., c (...)

36As a student of Italian, looking up the vocabulary he was not familiar with, Beckett underlined the word “smozzicate” and noted the translation “MAIMED” next to it. He subsequently made this intertextual reference invisible by removing the line in the revised version of this poem (as part of a typescript in the Leventhal papers at the Harry Ransom Center)18:

Lo-Ruhama Lo-Ruhama
pity is quick with death.
Presumptuous passionate fool come now
and stand cold
on the cold moon.

(Beckett 2012, 39; MS-HRC-AJL-1-1, fol. 11r)

37While Beckett thus hides his Dantean study of pity in this revised version, he compensates the loss as it were by adding a new Dantean element: the name of Asdente, a shoemaker in Parma who deserted his business to practice the arts of divination and who therefore features among the “indovini” (“foretellers”) in Inferno, Canto 20. The first lines in the revised typescript version of “Text 3” read:

I am Asdente, I threw away my packthread.
No blade has smoothed the furrowed cheeks
that my tears corrode,
and my varicose veins take my kneeling thoughts
from the piteous pelican.

(39; MS-HRC-AJL-1-1, fol. 10r)

38The marginalia in Beckett’s personal copy of the Divina Commedia thus help us reconstruct (with an allocratic cypher key) something of Beckett’s reading experience and its impact on the exogenesis and endogenesis of “Text 2” and “Text 3”.

Conclusion

39As the above examples show, the relationship between intertextuality and exogenesis implies several agents in several roles, involving reading readers, writing readers, and reading writers. Intertextuality (in Riffaterre’s definition of the reader’s experience of links between texts) involves the role of a reader here and now, an autocratic “reading reader” who, like Adorno taking the liberty of reading Hamlet into Hamm, is free to make any connection between texts. The reading reader’s experience of intertextual links can potentially be expanded by opening up the corpus — not only the published text but also its entire genetic dossier, according to de Biasi’s definition, implying a form of expansion, “un élargissement significatif du champ d’analyse” (see above; de Biasi 2020). This experience entails a slight teleological bias as it tends to see the author in the first place as the producer of that genetic dossier. The exogenetic focus here is on the “reading writer” and the way they process their reading in their writing. But exogenesis can also entail an approach that chooses an allocratic rather than an autocratic cypher key and tries to retrieve some of the experiences of the “writing reader”. This author-as-reader or “writing reader” leaves traces of their reading (for instance in the margins of a book, in a separate notebook, or using tools like Kindle’s Highlights & Notes feature), traces which can remain vestigial, without necessarily serving any direct utilitarian purpose in terms of literary production.

  • 19 See the Beckett Digital Library (as part of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project): https://www.be (...)
  • 20 See the Beckett Digital Library (as part of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project): https://www.be (...)

40What this allocratic approach yields can be illustrated by means of two copies of the Bible in Samuel Beckett’s personal library. Beckett’s earliest reading of the Bible was framed by the Protestant Tullow Sunday School he had to attend every Sunday as a six-year-old boy.19 More than a decade later, the same but slightly older and less religious Samuel Beckett’s reading of the Bible was framed differently after he had read Voltaire’s Lettres d’Amabed, notably a footnote in which Voltaire enumerates all the obscene passages in the Old Testament, including Hosea 1:6 where Beckett underlined the name Lo-Ruhama (see above), but also passages such as Ezekiel 16:7, where he wrote a French translation with an explicit reference to Voltaire’s text: “Tu as ouvert tes cuisses à tous les passants. (Lettres d’Amabed)”. Beckett wrote these translations in the margins of his Italian Bible next to the relevant passages (Van Hulle and Nixon 2013, 181–182). As a result, some pages of Beckett’s Italian Bible are not just framed metaphorically (as in ideologically conditioned) by Voltaire’s frame of mind, but also literally framed by Beckett’s “enlightened” marginalia.20 Beckett’s reading was clearly intertextual, and even though there are no obvious traces of direct use of these Voltaire notes in Beckett’s own works, the “enlightened” framing of the Bible does testify to a major shift in both Beckett’s career and his ideological outlook on life more generally. To retrieve some of this historical framing, an allocratic reading strategy can make use of the traces of a historical reader to reconstruct the cultural dispositions that framed their reading. This modus operandi is also exogenetic, but it takes a different approach to the intertextuality involved in exogenesis: instead of taking the stance of the autocratic reader, it puts itself in the shoes of the author as reader.

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Notes

1 See, for example: D’Iorio and Ferrer (2001), Campioni et al. (2003), Van Hulle and Van Mierlo (2004), Levaillant, Gamboni, and Bouiller (2010), Pizarro (2010), Durante (2008, 2012, 2013), Belin, Mayaux, and Verdure-Mary (2019), Marchamalo (2011, 2020), Price (2011), Van Hulle and Nixon (2013), Oram and Nicholson (2014), Bamert (2021), Spedding and Tankard (2021), Höppner (2022), Jaspers (2022), Olsen-Smith (2022), Schönbächler (2024), Hölter (2024), and Van Hulle (2022a, 2023, 2024).

2 In the original French: “la trace, toute la trace et rien que la trace” (Hay and Lebrave 2010, ¶ 5).

3 Coleridge elevated marginal notes in his books to a genre in and of itself, and his “marginalia” therefore deservedly occupy six volumes in the 1998 Princeton completeworks edition.

4 Later published as “Modern Fiction” in The Common Reader in 1925.

5 Excerpted from the following passage: “we seek to define the element which distinguishes the work of several young writers, among whom Mr. James Joyce is most able, from that of their predecessors. […] Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.” (Woolf 1919, 189)

6 Exogenèse est le nom donné, en critique génétique, à la logique des processus intertextuels qui accompagnent le mouvement de création de l’œuvre. Ce terme désigne la dynamique qui anime le travail de l’écrivain quand il recherche, sélectionne et intègre des textes, des modèles ou des informations (documentaires, référentielles, littéraires, etc.) dont les sources sont extérieures à sa propre écriture” [Exogenesis is the name given, in genetic criticism, to the logic of intertextual processes that accompany a work’s creative movement. The term refers to the dynamics that drive the writer when they investigate, select and integrate texts, models or information (documentary, referential, literary, etc.) whose sources are external to their own writing] (de Biasi 2020, ¶ 2; my translation)

7 “Apart from its definitional limits […] the exogenetic domain seems to manifest, by its nature, a certain paradoxical dimension […] the pre-textual exogenetic elements tend inevitably to be progressively converted into endogenetic material. […]” (de Biasi 1996, 45) Cf. “Outre ces limites définitionnelles, le domaine de l’exogenèse présente par nature une certaine dimension paradoxale quant à sa consistance dans le champ de la genèse. En effet, sauf décision particulière de l’écrivain qui ferait du signal exogénétique le principe même de son écriture, les éléments que l’avant-texte prélève dans l’extériorité de l’intertexte ont pour vocation la plus commune de se convertir progressivement en matière endogénétique.” (de Biasi 2020, ¶ 42)

8 “This conversion of the exogenetic to the endogenetic takes place primarily as an effect of textualization, an operational function whose execution essentially concerns the rough drafts. After undergoing its multiple transformations, the initial exogenetic element […] may have become perfectly untraceable” (de Biasi 1996, 46) Cf. “Cette conversion de l’exogénétique en endogénétique s’accomplit principalement sous l’effet de la textualisation, fonction opératoire dont l’exécution relève pour l’essentiel des brouillons. À l’issue de ses multiples transformations, l’élément exogénétique initial […] peut être devenu parfaitement invisible et impossible à localiser” (de Biasi 2020, ¶ 43)

9 Raymond Chandler, for instance, made typed lists of similes and crossed out the Raymond Chandler, for instance, made typed lists of similes and crossed out the ones he used, often marking the title of the work in which he had used it (Van Hulle and Nixon 2024, 50).

10 See “Le Texte clos” (The Bounded Text) and “Le mot, le dialogue et le roman” (1966), in Kristeva (1969, 145–6).

11 Cf. Genette (1982), Machacek (2007), Miller (2011), Baron (2012), Mason (2019), and Baron (2020).

12 Beckett’s copy is a 1924 edition of La Divina Commedia, edited with annotations by Enrico Bianchi, first published by Salani in Florence in 1892.

13 Also elsewhere in the Commedia, Beckett keeps finding links with other works. For instance in Purg. 3, 130, next to “Or le bagna la pioggia e move il vento” [“Now the rain bathes them and the wind moves them”], he writes: “Copied by Tasso. Cp. Aminta Act. 2. Sc. I. Line 64. ‘Ma le bagni a pioggia e mova il vento’ ” [But rain bathes and wind moves them] (p. 276).

14 John Milton, Paradise Lost: Books I and II, edited by A.W. Verity, “sometime scholar of Trinity College” (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1919), inscribed “S. Beckett. / Portora. / Jan. 26th / 1923”. Beckett also had a 1904 edition of Paradise Lost: A Poem in Twelve Books, 5th ed. ([1898] 1904).

15 Unless otherwise indicated, translations of Dante’s text are by Henry Cary, because that was the translation Beckett used when he was studying the Commedia (Van Hulle 2024). Corroborating examples can be found in the marginalia next to Inf. 26, 141; Inf. 28, 3; Inf. 34, 132; Purg. 10, 129; Purg. 15, 122; Par. 14, 104; Par. 22, 41-2 in: Dante Alighieri The Vision: or, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, translated by the Rev. Henry Francis Cary (1814).

16 For instance on page 228 of Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. Henry F. Cary, ed. with notes by Oscar Kuhns (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, s.d.), Purg. XII.18: “Pious would be a better translation of pii here than piteous.”

17 Specifically, the reference is to Hosea 1:6, where Beckett underlined “Lo-Ruhama” (meaning “not loved”), the name of the daughter of Hosea, whom God had told to “marry a promiscuous woman and have children with her”.

18 “POEMS by Samuel Beckett” in the Leventhal papers, MS-HRC-AJL-1-1. The typescript [1932], 23 pp., contains a title page, table of contents (27 titles) with autograph additions and emendations, and the typewritten text of 14 poems, including “Text 2” (09r), “Text 3” (10r-11r), and “Whoroscope” (12r-14r).

19 See the Beckett Digital Library (as part of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project): https://www.beckettarchive.org/library/HOL-BIB-1.html.

20 See the Beckett Digital Library (as part of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project): https://www.beckettarchive.org/library/SAC-BIB.html

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References

Bibliographical reference

Dirk Van Hulle, The Author as Reader: Modernist Marginalia and Authors’ Libraries between Exogenesis and IntertextualityVariants, 19 | 2025, 69-89.

Electronic reference

Dirk Van Hulle, The Author as Reader: Modernist Marginalia and Authors’ Libraries between Exogenesis and IntertextualityVariants [Online], 19 | 2025, Online since 01 December 2025, connection on 16 February 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/variants/1999; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/15do4

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About the author

Dirk Van Hulle

Dirk Van Hulle is Research Professor of English Literature at the University of Antwerp and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. He is director of the Oxford Centre for Textual Editing and Theory (OCTET), director of the Centre for Manuscript Genetics at the University of Antwerp, co-director of the MLA award-winning Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (www.beckettarchive.org), and PI of the ERC project ‘MARGINAL: Modern Authors Reading: Genesis in Authors’ Libraries’ (2026-2030). His book publications include the monographs Textual Awareness (Michigan UP, 2004), Modern Manuscripts (Bloomsbury, 2014), Genetic Criticism: Tracing Creativity in Literature (Oxford UP, 2022), Write Cut Rewrite (Bodleian Library Publishing, 2024, with Mark Nixon), and The Making of Samuel Beckett's Murphy (Brill De Gruyter, 2026 forthcoming).

By this author

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