Genesis Bologna 2024

In her seminal presentation of the term “exogenesis”, Raymonde Debray-Genette calls attention to the material requisite of genetic interpretations, as well as to the temptation of a causal link between an alleged source text and a target text:

Le terme d’exogenèse pourrait paraître dangereux aux puristes de la textualité s’il signifiait qu’on sorte des documents écrits (...). L’histoire des sources n’est généralement pas assez liée à l’étude des manuscrits et de leur aboutissement. Il est vrai qu’il n’est pas facile d’éviter le «ceci cause cela» (...) [Debray-Genette 1979: 29]

As to the material requisite of genetic interpretations, the exploration of author’s libraries has played a major role in the expansion that exogenetics has seen in the recent past, but how they articulate with a given author’s papers is not always clear. The uncertain status of these libraries makes them either fall under the category of “libraries” proper or else under the category of “archives”. For instance, in the books belonging to the «Filologia d’autore» series, the shared table of contents includes one chapter on the author’s library (“La biblioteca”) and another one on the writing desk (“Sulla scrivania”), thus suggesting a neat frontier between exogenetics and endogenetics. Such frontier is also visible in the first known photo of the papers and books that belonged to Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935): a large trunk full of documents on the foreground and in the back the library. In contrast to this sharp division, the Portuguese government decided to classify Pessoa’s archival documents, including both his drafts and his books, as bearing national interest [DGBNP 2008]. Considering that it could be useful to distinguish writer’s books that are genetically interesting from those that are not, traces of reading have been viewed as a touchstone in this respect [Biasi 1996: 43-44].

However, reducing via a criterion of materiality the bibliographic items that are genetically useful seems illusory. The type of connection thus established between author’s libraries and genetic studies resembles the triple bet of “Totocalcio”, the betting system on the results of Italian football matches. The bettor is expected to guess the results of a preset list of football matches indicating for each of them either 1, X or 2. As known, these indications mean that (1) the home team will win the match; (X) that there will be a draw and (2) that the victory of the visiting team will take place. The betting system admits multiple bets for each match, double bets when two results are predicted and triple bets when all results are predicted. If the gambler could make triple bets on all matches, there would be of course no sense to the betting activity and the gains would not compensate the cost. This is the reason why a limit to the number of bets is set in the rules of the game. The analogy here is that the genetic critic never knows beforehand if the reading traces she finds on a book or even if the physical existence of a book in a writer’s library is evidence of any genetic connection with the writer’s work.

Here is a brief illustration of the 1X2 condition. The perusal of Melville’s Marginalia Online indicates that no book by Torquato Tasso existed in the American author’s library and Melville is not known for having drawn from the Italian epic poet [Olsen-Smith & Norberg 2023]. Contrariwise, although no book by Voltaire is present in Samuel Beckett’s library, several marginal annotations testify to the relevance of the French philosopher in some of Beckett’s works [Van Hulle 2020]. As to books that are extant in an author’s library, the absence of reading traces in Fernando Pessoa’s copy of Proust’s Recherche suggests that the masterwork of the French novelist has no special impact on the

author of The Book of Disquiet [Pizarro, Ferrari & Cardiello 2022]. In contrast, from the absence of reading marks in most of Carlo Emilio Gadda’s extant books one cannot infer that they were not somehow used in his work, for Gadda was not a marginalist [Italia 2017, Lucarelli 2022]. Finally, there are many reading traces that bear no genetic link to the author’s writings: underlined passages, doodles and comments are frequently contingent to the reading process, with no demonstrable original and retrospective connection with the author’s work. Sometimes, though, such connection bears no doubt: personal copies of one’s published books with revisions are per se of genetic interest, as in the case of the reworkings of Pessoa’s 35 Sonnets [cota***]; on the other side of the spectrum, annotations may have a genetic status without any evident affinity with the annotated copy, which may have merely served as a writing material. Such is the case of a poem again by Pessoa pencilled on the final flyleaf of John Robertson’s Pioneer humanists. In the first part of this lecture, the above presentation showcases that the material condition of exogenetic interpretation is in itself misguiding if one aims at exploring source studies or, more precisely, if one is interested in locating the source for a passage in an author’s work.

Regardless of the more or less restricted scope of exogenetics, one of the rules of thumb in genetic criticism is to establish a persuasive link between two entities. Such a persuasive link emerges in the definitions that Grésillon and Biasi put forth of “genetic dossier”: the documents to be collected have to belong to a work or project of a work [Grésillon 1994: 242], they have to be connected with a text [Biasi 1996, 31, my italics]. This link is usually proven by textual coincidence of some sort and the models of detection thereof that have been mostly used so far focus on the shared lexicon, as in the case of Burghard Dedner’s historic-critical edition of Büchner’s works [e.g. Büchner 2000] or the research that has been developed by Jean-Gabriel Ganascia [2020]. In the second part of the lecture, I intend to revisit the assumptions of the lexical model, point out some challenges associated with this type of enquiry and indicate some desiderata, within the model and as an alternative or complement to it.

The material evidence of reading acts as found in books that are kept in a writer’s library contributes to lines of research that go beyond the identification of individual genetic links. Accordingly, the third part of this lecture will present how some aspects of Fernando Pessoa’s writings are interwoven with marginal annotations on his copy of Shelley’s works (ed. Thomas Hutchinson, 1904). The analysis of annotations on this copy points to the convenience of considering a web of connections, instead of the one-on-one link that is current in source studies. Further, because there is a signature - on the flyleaf of this book - with the name “Alexander Search”, one of the alter-ego characters to whom Pessoa attributed some of his juvenilia, the lecture will end with some remarks on signatures and metaleptic crossings, i.e., the interplay between the real world and a story world [Pier 2016].

References

Biasi, Pierre-Marc de. 1996. «What Is a Literary Draft? Toward a Functional Typology of Genetic Documentation.» Transl. Ingrid Wassenaar. Yale French Studies, no. 89: 26–58. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/2930337 

Büchner, Georg. 2000. Sämtliche Werke und Schriften: historisch-kritische Ausgabe mit Quellendokumentation und Kommentar, org. Burghard Dedner and Thomas Michael Mayer, Darmstadt, Marburger Ausgabe: vol. III, Danton’s Tod (4 vols.), ed. B. Dedner and Th. M. Mayer, col. Eva-Maria Vering and Werner Weiland.

DGBNP. 2008. Informação n.º 37. Lisboa: Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal. http://www.bnportugal.gov.pt/images/stories/agenda/2008/documentos/inf-37-dgbnp-2008-lurado.pdf 

Debray-Genette, Raymonde. 1979, «Génétique et poétique: le cas Flaubert». Essais de critique génétique. Paris: Flammarion, 21-67.

Ganascia, Jean-Gabriel. 2020. «Détection automatique de phénomènes intertextuels», Genesis, 51: 63-77. https://doi.org/10.4000/genesis.5671 

Grésillon, Almuth. 1994. Eléments De Critique Génétique. Lire Les Manuscrits Modernes. Paris: Presses universitaires de France.

Italia, Paola. 2017. Come lavorava Gadda. Roma: Carocci.

Lucarelli, Massimo. 2022. «La biblioteca dell’Ingegnere: note in margine alla presenza di testi

scientifici nel Fondo Gadda della Biblioteca del Burcardo». In: Testi scientifici nelle

biblioteche d’autore, a cura di Monica Zanardo, Padova: Padova University Press, 151-187.

Olsen-Smith, Steven and Norberg, Peter (eds.). 2023. Melville's Marginalia Online. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University. https://melvillesmarginalia.org/ 

Pier, John. 2016. «Metalepsis». In: Peter Hühn, John Pier, Wolf Schmid and Jörg Schönert, eds. The Living Handbook of Narratology. Hamburg: Interdisciplinary Center for Narratology, University of Hamburg. https://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/node/51.html 

Pizarro, Jerónimo; Ferrari, Patricio; Cardiello, Antonio (coord.). 2023. Biblioteca Particular Fernando Pessoa, Lisboa: Casa Fernando Pessoa.

Van Hulle, Dirk. 2020. «Stratégies de lecture exogénétiques: approches de l’intertextualité invisible». Genesis 51 | 2020. https://doi.org/10.4000/genesis.5602

La critique génétique est née de la rencontre entre un postulat de poétique - la création fait partie du créé – et une découverte scientifique – un manuscrit permet d'observer les étapes d'un processus d'écriture. Ce sont les méthodes d'observation de ce processus qui constituent la critique génétique en discipline de plein exercice. Elles s'articulent, en suivant les caractères du manuscrit, en une séquence de recherches interdisciplinaires.

Un manuscrit se présente d'abord comme un objet matériel, dont la production a laissé des traces analysables en vue de classer les feuillets d'un dossier, de les dater et de les localiser. C'est le domaine d'une nouvelle archéologie des manuscrits modernes. Ensuite: le manuscrit porte une image complexe, dont certains caractères sont des symboles de la langue. Ils sont analysés par les méthodes d'une linguistique génétique: celle de l'énonciation écrite.

En dehors des symboles linguistiques, l'image du manuscrit présente un complexe de signes, analysables par une étude sémiotique. Les systèmes sémiotiques sont propres à chaque auteur. Les tentatives de les classer en systèmes ou dans un ordre historique n'ont pas jusqu'ici livré des résultats convaincants.

Enfin, les opérations génétiques sont commandées par un ensemble de mécanismes neuro-moteurs dont l'étude appelle des échanges entre génétique et sciences cognitives.

Ces observations montrent qu'un changement de l'objet, du manuscrit à l'ordinateur, implique à la fois une différence dans l'état des archives et dans les méthodes d'analyse qui seront brièvement évoquées.

Pour avancer plus loin dans l'avenir, on évoquera rapidement ce que pourrait être le rôle de l'intelligence artificielle à la fois comme outil d'analyse et comme source de production textuelle.

Il caso dei Promessi sposi di Alessandro Manzoni, con le sue complesse vicende redazionali, offre un ottimo banco di prova per testare le varie possibilità di formalizzazione dell’apparato genetico, tali da rispondere a diverse esigenze di ricerca.

Nel passaggio da una redazione all’altra Manzoni interviene infatti (con diverso dosaggio) su piani diversi: strutturale, narrativo e linguistico, ciò che ha richiesto una segmentazione del percorso in singole edizioni, adottando anche soluzioni innovative nell’ambito della filologia d’autore. Anche nell’ambito più propriamente linguistico tuttavia gli interventi autoriali rispondono a istanze diverse: lessicali e fonomorfologiche da un lato e sintattiche dall’altro, che a loro volta richiederebbero, per una percezione immediata, nuove soluzioni nella registrazione della varia lectio.

Constructing and using genetic apparatuses. The case of Manzoni's Promessi sposi (The Bethroted)

Alessandro Manzoni's Promessi sposi (The Betrothed), with its complex editorial history, offers an excellent case study for testing various possibilities and strategies for formalizing genetic apparatuses, in order to meet different research needs.

In the transition from one version of the novel to the next, Manzoni intervenes (to different extents) on different levels- structural, narrative and linguistic. Distinguishing between these different kinds of reworking poses relevant methodological problems. This complexity made it necessary to parse the philological work into different editions, each dedicated to a different phase of the editorial history of the text; and, more generally, required the devising of innovative methodological solutions for the representation of the variants. But even within the strictly linguistic domain, authorial interventions fall into different categories: lexical and phonomorphological on the one hand, and syntactic on the other. This in turn would require, in the interest of clarity and immediacy of perception, new strategies for the formalization of the varia lectio.

In a pamphlet published in English in 1738, the anonymous writer argued: ‘I take it to be a Question, whether the foulest and most interlined Copies are not, generally speaking, the best, since they seem to discover that the Author has an improving Genius, whilst the fairer ones, on the contrary, appear to be more barren and less inventive’ (A Letter to the Society of Booksellers, on the Method of forming a true Judgement of the Manuscripts of Authors, p. 48). The assertion is startlingly modern: that blotted sheets filled with deletions and corrections might contribute to meaning and value. More than 250 years later, the pioneering genetic critic, Louis Hay, argued something similar, declaring ‘manuscripts have something to tell us; it is time we made them speak’ (‘History or Genesis?’ Yale French Studies, 89 (1996), 207).

As the anonymous pamphleteer implied, the creative process poses physical challenges; the material artefact asks immaterial questions. Genetic criticism is only possible where evidence exists for the various stages of the writing process—notes, sketches, drafts, proofs—that can be read independently of the authority of a standard published form. Where sufficiently plentiful, such antecedents provide the individual departures and variations that together witness text in a state of becoming—sometimes called a genetic dossier. It is not certain whether the accumulation of such evidence is to be interpreted as teleological or anti-teleological, developmental or lawless: Bernard Cerquiglini’s ‘watershed’ between writing and print, the moment when ‘writing culminated and absolutely abolished itself’ (In Praise of the Variant (1997), 6-7); or Laurent Jenny’s ‘eternally anterior, minor, primitive, raw, illogical, but also polysemic, free, and fecund Other’ (‘Genetic Criticism and its Myths’, Yale French Studies, 89 (1996), 20).

Is genetic criticism also a method and theory, privileging a mainly modern writing practice and a canon based upon abundance rather than frugality? What of those writers whose working practices have been thrifty or whose literary archives, for whatever reason, are limited, disrupted or pared back? Can genetic processes ever be inferred? And what about writers/writings with the dirt of the printing press under their fingernails/printer’s marks on their pages, in whose practice it is not always possible to separate, as Cerquiglini asks, ‘the space of writing and that of mechanics’? To those textual critics working outside its methods yet fascinated and instructed by them, genetic criticism can appear dauntingly prescriptive in its operations. How flexibly, even freely, might we interpret it?

I will consider manuscript evidence from three English writers: Jane Austen, Frances Burney, and George Eliot. For each, evidence survives of progressive composition in draft form but in each case what exists poses a problem for a genetic reading. Austen’s fiction manuscripts offer collateral evidence in the shape of fragmentary drafts, variations upon subjects and narratives, and, one presumes, on practices that underlie texts that appeared in print but which have left no manuscript trace. How might we describe these manuscripts? How far might their evidence reach? Burney has left an abundant and dispersed archive whose reclassifications and confusions (some of her own making) render the shape of the writing project, the versions and limits of any work, problematic and contaminated. Reordering years later became for Burney a kind of writing forwards: a history of previous process resituated as future composition. In the archive much of this evidence now presents as debris or token specimen. How to read it/ where to place it? For Eliot, what survives of a multi-draft writing process takes the form of a series of single homogenized press-ready manuscripts. A self-declared organicist writer who readily documented her approach to composition, she accepted the distinction between writing and reading text, and understood that what is integral to how text emerges is not necessarily essential for its reception. But what the author claims as her way of working and what the material reveals are not the same. Can we work back through text prepared for social production to discover its processes of composition, unpeeling its final press-ready layer, to retrace the path from ends to origins?

What interests me in working through these examples of authors and materials is how far genetic criticism might be one among several critical procedures—a tool to use as occasion appears to offer—or must it be a totalizing theory. If it is a totalizing theory, am I breaking its rules?