Authenticity or Hyperreality in Hypertext Editions

Notes Towards a Searchable "Recherche"

by Dirk Van Hulle

Abstract

Time, the main subject of À la recherche du temps perdu, is treated by Marcel Proust in a linear way. This linearity is an important aspect of the reading experience of this modernist novel, which the non-linearity of hypertext might disturb. Nevertheless, not all parts of the Recherche were finished when Proust died in 1922, and since Proust’s working method is characterized by a constant shuffle of textual units or ‘lexias,’ hypertext may serve as a perfect tool to visualize the ‘avant-texte’ of the Recherche. Since the creation of a hypertext environment involves several editorial decisions, the editorial task may be compared to a musical performance, rather than to the preparation of a musical score. The possibility to offer an electronic facsimile of the documents may give the reader the impression of being confronted with the original document, but this quasi-authenticity is a hyperreality that can easily be manipulated. Whereas traditionally, the score was the performance of the editor, electronics offer a unique opportunity to separate these two aspects of a scholarly edition, so that the editor plays a double role as the creator of a digitized version of the documents, preferably a digital facsimile with a transcription in a software-independent markup-language (the score), and on the other hand as the creator of a hypertext edition (a performance based on the score) which could be offered as an alternative spin-off product for reading texts, so that the role of the reader becomes twofold as well.

Contents

1. Introduction

2. Time and linearity

3. Space and non-linearity

4. The score and/or the performance

1. Introduction 

L’image de notre amie que nous croyons ancienne, authentique, a été en réalité refaite par nous bien des fois. Le souvenir cruel, lui, n’est pas contemporain de cette image restaurée, il est d’un autre âge, il est un des rares témoins d’un monstrueux passé. (I.617)

The purpose of this article is to investigate how and whether a modernist text (in casu À la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust) might be presented as a hypertext, and what the consequences could be with regard to the question of authenticity and the traditional roles of the actors involved in the literary production. The working definition of the notion of ‘hypertext’ that will be used in this article is the one suggested by George P. Landow in Hypertext 2.0:

Hypertext, as the term is used in this work, denotes text composed of blocks of text - what Barthes terms a lexia ¹ - and the electronic links that join them. (Landow 3)

The explicit reference to Roland Barthes in Landow’s definition of hypertext shows the prominence of this author of "The Death of the Author" in theoretical writings on hypertext, together with "Derrida, Foucault, and others" (Landow 91). According to Landow, "hypertext blurs the boundaries between reader and writer" (Landow 4) ², but while this boundary is blurred, another one is installed between "readerly" and "writerly" texts. This distinction by Roland Barthes corresponds - according to Landow - with a distinction between printed text and electronic hypertext, "for hypertext fulfills ‘the goal of literary work (of literature as work) [which] is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text. (...)’" (Landow 4). This evolution, which is as often acclaimed as it is denounced, is cynically summarized by Manfred Schneider in his review of the facsimile edition of Kafka’s Der Process:

Die Literatur und ihre Wissenschaft haben den Autor, das Werk, den Geist dekonstruiert; jetzt bleibt nur noch ein Phantom: der Leser. (Schneider 5)

The modernist authors under discussion, however, are not authors of hypertexts. Although the concept of hypertext may serve as an excellent device to present the avant-texte of their works, they are the authors of a printed text as well. The electronic presentation of their works therefore needs to emphasize the tension between the production and the product rather than reject the notion of linearity or two-dimensionality of the printed text in favour of hypertext’s "multidimensionality". A synoptic edition in the manner of Gabler's Ulysses still remains invaluable, precisely because of its linear representation of the chronology of the writing process. For this chronology does not become multidimensional by calling time the third (Hay) or the fourth (de Biasi) dimension.

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2. Time and linearity

In an article on the Rossetti Archive, Steven Johnson compares the presentation in book form to the reduction from three to two dimensions in central perspective. ³ Jean-Louis Lebrave regards the reduction of the avant-texte to a linear, textual model as an illusion (Lebrave 214). Nevertheless, to a certain extent the writing process is precisely an attempt by the modernists under discussion to find a way to represent the impression of multidimensionality, of simultaneity, ‘superposition’ or ‘Zeitentiefe’ on a two-dimensional paper and even in a linear text. In his discussion of the opening pages of the Sirens chapter in Ulysses, Bart Eeckhout discerns three compositional strategies applied by Joyce to create a fugal atmosphere: 1. repetition, 2. intertwining (or intermittence of remarks, for example, between brackets, which Kristeva calls "des intermittences syntaxique" (368) with reference to Proust), and 3. simultaneity (or the technique of ‘portmanteau’ words such as "Siopold" (Ulysses I.595)). Eeckhout compares these three strategies to the "illusion of polyphony" created by Johann Sebastian Bach in his cello suites, which are also written down in a more or less linear way in the score.

The metaphor of a musical score, left by the author to be interpreted by the editor, is employed by Jean-Yves Tadié, general editor of the second Pléiade edition of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (Recherche, "Introduction générale" ciii). The use of this metaphor raises other questions such as the issue of the "authenticity" of performances and of the instruments one chooses to play on, or - translated to scholarly editing - the decision of the editors of the Pléiade edition to follow the text of the "cahiers d’additions" because this manuscript is more "authentic" than the text of the third typescript. ⁴ The notion of "authenticity" recurs in the discussion concerning the edition of Albertine disparue, the penultimate part of the Recherche, left unfinished when Proust died. Nathalie Mauriac Dyer, who calls the first (1925) edition of Albertine disparue an "editorial artifact" and a "posthumous ‘restoration’ unauthorized by the writer," ⁵ refers to her 1987 edition as "l’Albertine disparue authentique" (Mauriac Dyer, Sodome et Gomorrhe 15). Jean Milly, in turn, calls Mauriac Dyer’s edition a restoration and accuses her of "projecting her interpretation onto the unfinished work." ⁶ Milly compares his own, more "textualist" editorial method with the preservation (as opposed to the restoration) of an archaeological site. According to him, Mauriac Dyer’s dichotomy between "editorial artifact" and authentic text is too rigid. ⁷

Milly compares Proust’s writing method to a continuous process of assembling and disassembling of textual entities. Since, in the case of Albertine disparue the last movement was a disassembly, which Proust could not reassemble anymore before his death, several editors have attempted to finish off the unfinished work: Robert Proust by seeing to it that there was a transition from La Prisonnière to the last part, Le temps retrouvé, giving the impression that À la recherche du temps perdu was completed; Nathalie Mauriac Dyer by re-establishing the work’s last state during the author’s lifetime; Jean Milly by trying to present the texts as an interrupted work in progress.

Another option would be to offer the reader the opportunity to create his/her own assembly, in much the same way as most CD players enable the listener to determine his/her own "play mode". In this context, D.C. Greetham refers to several recordings that exploit this possibility:

John McGlinn’s Show Boat and Claudio Abbado’s Don Carlos both include appendices of variant scenes and arias that can be programmed into the playing sequence at the auditor’s will, and Nicholas McGegan’s Messiah provides instructions to the user to reproduce any of nine different versions of Handel’s text, with the tacit understanding that the user is not constrained by these nine, but can mix and match to produce infinitely variable (and nonauthorial) texts. (Greetham 17)

Significantly, Greetham refers to these works of art without mentioning the composer. The context of this comparison with recordings of music in a discussion of "the Gabler Ulysses" implies that, from Greetham’s point of view, the editor of a literary text is to be compared with the performer (or the producer of a performance, recorded on CD) rather than with the editor of musical scores. Peter Shillingsburg compares the musical performance to the reception performance:

In the analogy with music, constructing the reception text is like an orchestra playing the music. Response to the reception text is analogous to listening to and responding to the played music. The reader is orchestra and audience rolled into one for a literary work. (Shillingsburg 81)

Any reader is free to read only those chapters or passages of a literary work in which s/he is interested, in whatever sequence s/he likes, and making links (intended by the author or not) between different passages or between a passage and some extratextual event is inherent in reading. The question, however, is whether it is the task of the editor to act as the emancipator of the reader and to empower the reader to mix up the sequence fixed by the author so that the latter "loses certain basic controls over his text" (Landow 64) ⁸, as if the author were some kind of cruel dictator. No matter how laudable the intention to emancipate the reader from the editor’s decisions may be, a resulting hypertext edition enabling the reader to make his/her "own" decisions on the basis of readymade links may not become a perversion of emancipation either, a merely more deceiving form of patronization.

Proust’s work, in which memory is a crucial theme, was written at a time when memory was the reader’s main tool to make links with earlier occurences of a particular motif. This way, not only memory in general, but also the reader’s memory becomes part of the work. The content of Proust’s Recherche is reflected in the form of his text. In order to convey the experience of involuntary memory, it has no use to make explicit what can only be experienced by the reader himself. Therefore, Proust has created a linear text, corresponding to the linear chronology of time, in order to be able to show how anachronological our lives are - "(notre vie étant si peu chronologique, interférant tant d’anachronismes dans la suite des jours)" (Recherche II.003). By means of recurring motifs Proust has created a text which contains the potentiality of evoking involuntary memories, thus implying what becomes explicit in Le Temps retrouvé. This way, Proust has created the possibility for the reader to experience the literary equivalent of involuntary memory while reading. The question is whether the text does not lose much of its power when this potential energy is turned into kinetic energy by an e-editor who would link, for example, all the references to hawthorns (as part of his mission to emancipate the reader), so that this reader ends up with nothing but second-hand, high-lighted instances of textual memories, which enable him to follow the great experience the editor had whilst discovering and activating ⁹ the textual ‘rapports’¹⁰ for him.

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3. Space and non-linearity

Nevertheless, especially in cases such as the posthumous editions of the last parts of the Recherche, it is only fair that a reader should get the opportunity to consult the "text" in its fragmented form (as textual units in the cahiers), as well as to take notice of the sequence(s) considered (though not yet definitively fixed) by the author (for no matter how "dispersed" or "fragmented" Proust’s Nachlaß is, he did try to join together and blend the fragments until the very last night of his life). In this context, the Stroemfeld/Roter Stern edition of Franz Kafka’s Der Process should be mentioned. Since Kafka wrote the different chapters in separate notebooks and did not fix a definitive sequence of chapters, the editors of this "Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe," Roland Reuß and Peter Staengle, present them in sixteen separate volumes, so that any reader can arrange the chapters as he wishes and create his own ‘Trial’. ¹¹

This edition of Kafka’s Der Process is available on paper as well as on CD-ROM. From an extreme anti-electronic point of view, the question could be raised whether it is an editor’s task to translate a text that was meant to be published on paper into another medium if this medium offers more opportunities. This fetishist attitude, to use Proust’s expression, is what a musician such as Nigel Kennedy repudiates (with reference to musical performances) as a paradoxical form of disrespect for the past:

I have tried not to be seduced either by the ‘authentic’ movement - which, although reviving one set of historical skills, shows it has inherited the usual 20th-century disrespect for the past by ignoring the skills developed for musical communication over the last 150 years - or by the ‘romantic’ approach of doing what you feel like but with exactly the same vibrato and tone colour throughout. (...) In my opinion, if a piece of music belongs only to the time in which it was written, it should not be played today. Vivaldi’s Four Seasons has far more to offer us than mere historical interest. ¹²

If the editor may be compared to a performer of music, the question whether or not Bach’s harpsichord music was made to be played on a piano or a synthesizer applies to editorial theory as well. Hans Zeller sees the edition as a "Darstellung" - which can mean both a portrayal and a performance by an actor or interpreter; and the guiding principle of "Textdarstellung" - according to Zeller - is authenticity:

Die Textdarstellung ist dem Prinzip der Authentizität strikt verpflichtet. Ediert wird, was Heym geschrieben hat bzw. was der Herausgeber aus den autographen Schreibspuren erkennen, entziffern kann, ohne in der Wiedergabe seine Zuflucht zu nehemen bei einer bezeugten, offensichtlichen, geahnten, vermuteten, rekonstruierten Autorintention. (Zeller, "Heym" 248)

The whole debate concerning musical performances on authentic instruments may not only result in refreshing new views on old music, but also in the oppressive rigidity of the musical equivalent of political (over)correctness, combined with the inconsistency of recording the "authentic" sound with high-tech material. Paradoxically, the new electronic media enable the performer/editor to combine a late-twentieth-century, digital way of listening/reading with a nostalgic manuscript fetishism.¹³ Electronic facsimile images are offered in order to allow the reader to check the editor’s decisions against the ‘original’, whereas this ‘original’ is in fact a hyperreality that - according to Manfred Schneider - should not be presented with the "promise of the original" and the "bathos of originality." ¹⁴

The possibility to scan a manuscript may give the reader the impression that he gets access to an authentic document, whereas in fact he may be looking at a thoroughly manipulated image (which is the result of several editorial decisions regarding the resolution, the colour, and other aspects of this representation). Therefore, Peter Robinson explicitly states that the Canterbury Tales project is not an archive:

There are many (...) who believe (...) that an electronic edition might not be an edition at all, but might be an electronic ‘archive,’ a ‘resource,’ an accumulation of materials without any editorial ‘interpretation’ at all, without the privileging of any one text at all. We - Norman Blake and I, the whole Canterbury Tales endeavor - are not of this party. (...) This does not mean that we will eventually impose our own text on the tales and call it definitive. But we certainly do not think our duty as editors ends with the gathering of manuscripts. (Robinson 110-1)

The comparison with music may cause some confusion because of the fact that a critically edited text is a representation of a work in the same tangible medium as the texts of the documents, whereas a musical performance is a representation of a work in another medium than the tangible medium of the texts of documents. But if these documents are digitized and transcribed, the situation changes. Peter Robinson and Elisabeth Solopova point out that the electronic representation of manuscripts and their transcription involves a series of translations and therefore acts of interpretation:

Transcription of a primary textual source cannot be regarded as an act of substitution, but as a series of acts of translation from one semiotic system (that of the primary source) to another semiotic system (that of the computer). Like all acts of translation, it must be seen as fundamentally incomplete and fundamentally interpretative (Robinson 111).

As a result the borderline between documentary editions and critical editions becomes blurred, and the editorial presence is not eliminated by calling an electronic edition an "Archive." On the other hand, since every edition has a certain impact on one or a few generations of readers, a critically edited text becomes a document of its own as soon as it is published. Peter Shillingsburg even argues that editing not only involves criticism, but is a form of literary criticism (Shillingsburg 147). Editing, therefore, is also a reading performance, comparable to musical performances.

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4. The score and/or the performance

Certainly with reference to classical music, the wide range of (inexpensively available) performances of the ‘same’ piece of music has undoubtedly enhanced a much greater awareness of the fact that every performance is only one of many interpretations. Therefore, Shillingsburg suggests that, for important literary works, we need "several scholarly editions: the edition representing the author’s final intentions, the edition representing the historical event of first publication, the edition representing the throrough revision - each would possibly affect the student in a different way. None would of itself be the work of art" (Shillingsburg 147).

If À la recherche du temps perdu may be regarded as an important work of literary art, it certainly deserves - apart from the several reading editions that already exist - an electronic edition which could present the work both as a product and a production, for example by means of hypertext linking. One of the general effects of this tool, according to Landow, is "that the text appears to fragment, to atomize, into constituent elements (into lexias or blocks of text); and these reading units take on a life of their own as they become more self-contained, because they become less dependent on what comes before or after in a linear succession (Landow 64). In another context, this description could serve as an excellent characterization of Proust’s working method, which Almuth Grésillon has called "écriture vagabonde" (Écrire sans fin 99). Nevertheless, it is highly questionable whether Proust ever thought of offering the "blocks of text" of his cahiers to his readers so that they could pick out the passages of their interest at random, arrange them in the order that would suit them best, and compile their own Recherche which would not necessarily have to start with "Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure".

Although Proust wrote his Recherche by shuffling and reshuffling "lexias" - to use the Barthesian term employed by Landow - he did not intend to present his work that way, and even explicitly asked the publisher to print the text as one continuous, linear succession of words, with as little interruptions as possible, integrating for example direct speeches in the bulk of the text. Several notes in his cahiers testify that it was his aim to melt together the numerous blocks of text ¹⁵ Jean Milly ¹⁶ denotes Proust’s writing as "écriture fondue" (Milly, Avant-texte 178) ¹⁷, and discerns a "double movement" ¹⁸ in Proust’s style, the second of which is a tendency towards an "osmosis." This osmosis on different levels leads to a visual result that reflects the content of his novel, the tension between the desire to "fix" reality, and the awareness that in order to do so, one has to melt it to release its most essential character, its volatility.

It is precisely this tension which an electronic edition could emphasize. Traditionally, the editor was supposed to fix ‘the’ text in a stable product. Since a few decades, it is rather the instability of a text that tends to be stressed. With reference to the facsimile edition of Kafka’s Process, Manfred Schneider notes that the reader’s freedom to create his/her own edition and read a text as an unfinished work (a process) is only made possible thanks to the fact that a work (Der Process) as a more or less coherent whole appears in or through the documents. ¹⁹

Whereas traditionally, the score wás the performance of the editor, electronics offer a unique opportunity to separate these two aspects of a scholarly edition. In an electronic environment, the score might be compared to a digitized version of the documents, preferably a digital facsimile with a transcription in a software-independent markup-language. On the basis of this (everything but interpretation-free) score, a hypertext edition could be offered as an alternative spin-off product for reading texts. In a similar way, the reader’s role becomes twofold as well. Just as one does not need to be a professional pianist to play a sonata by Mozart, a reader can decide to read the digitized documents at score level; or s/he may prefer to just read a reading text or a hypertext prepared by an editor, as one would go and listen to respectively a live-performance or a digital recording of the same sonata. No matter how many possibilities a CD player offers, it is only a way of presentation, offering but also inevitably privileging new ways of listening. Similarly, hypertext privileges a more fragmented kind of reading, which makes it an extremely useful way of presenting certain aspects of the text and the relation with its avant-texte, but since the creation of a hypertext environment is always selective and therefore subjective, it is perhaps desirable to apply hypertext linkings only at the performance level, as one of many possible interpretations of the score. After all, scholarly editing is perhaps in the first place one of the most active and careful acts of reading, and the only thing an editor can do is to enhance the awareness that whoever reads his/her edition is reading someone else’s reading. 

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About the Author

Dirk Van Hulle is a research assistant at the Antwerp James Joyce Centre (University of Antwerp, U.I.A.), working on a PhD dissertation on the writing process of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, compared to the geneses of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu and Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus. As a member of the Editorial Investigation centre for Text Encoding and Digitization (<ed>it</ed>) he has co-edited the Dutch publication on textual and genetic criticism "Editiewetenschap in de praktijk". For more information, see web pages http://ger-www.uia.ac.be/webger/ger/joyce/joyce0.html   ; http://edited-www.uia.ac.be/edited/

Notes

1. Cf. Barthes, S/Z 20, under the heading "Le texte étoilé": "On étoilera donc le texte, écartant, à la façon d’un menu séisme, les blocs de signification dont la lecture ne saisit que la surface lisse, imperceptiblement soudée par le débit des phrases, le discours coulé de la narration, le grand naturel du langage courant. Le signifiant tuteur sera découpé en une suite de courts fragments contigus, qu’on appellera ici des lexies, puisque ce sont des unités de lecture." Barthes immediately adds: "Ce découpage, il faut le dire, sera on ne peut plus arbitraire; (...)" (Back to the text)
2. Cf. Barthes, S/Z 10: "Pourquoi le scriptible est-il notre valeur? Parce que l’enjeu du travail littéraire (de la littérature comme travail), c’est de faire du lecteur, non plus un consommateur, mais un producteur du texte." (Back to the text)
3. "Submitting this sort of multilayered, time-sensitive information to the dictates of the book form is like attempting to represent a three-dimensional space within a two-dimensional medium" (Johnson 28). (Back to the text)
4. Pierre-Edmond Robert accounts for this editorial decision as follows: "(...) nous suivons la partie autographe de dactyl. 3, puis les Cahiers 59 et 62, plus authentiques que dactyl 3, remaniée par les éditeurs de 1923 (...)" (Recherche III.1739). (Back to the text)
5. "En 1925, les Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue Française (Librairie Gallimard) publient, au lieu de l’Albertine disparue de Marcel Proust et sans en prévenir leur lectorat, une ‘restauration’ posthume non autorisée par l’écrivain, également intitulée Albertine disparue et présentée comme le ‘tome VII d’À la recherche du temps perdu’. Ce volume est un artefact éditorial. Il n’a pas été sanctionné par Marcel Proust, et se trouve dépourvu d’assise philologique stable (...)" (La Fugitive xxiii). (Back to the text)
6. "Mais elle projette son interprétation sur l’oeuvre inachevée. On peut préférer une position éditoriale plus prudente, plus ‘textualiste’, qui extrapole moins, qui laisse les pierres en place et ne reconstruit pas l’édifice. J’opterais, en ce qui me concerne, pour un Sodome III composé de La Prisonnière et de mon édition ‘intégrale’ d’Albertine disparue. Cette dernière reconstitution, entourée des précautions indispensables, présente frnchement un chantier comme tel, au lieu de le poursuivre à la place de l’auteur sans connaître ses intentions précises. C’est, toutes proportions gardées, la même différence qu’entre préserver et analyser un site archéologique, et en effectuer la restauration, si intelligente soit-elle" (Milly, "À propos d’Albertine disparue" 73). (Back to the text)
7. "Ce manichéisme est dû à l’accent mis uniquement sur l’opposition "artefact éditorial" (affecté d’une valeur négative) versus ‘texte authentique’ (paré de toutes les vertus), qui se calque sur celle du faux et du vrai et sur celle de l’artifice et de la nature. Or tout est artifice en littérature. C’est la notion de montage qui devrait être retenue, car elle permet de dépasser ce dualisme simpliste. Chacun sait l’usage permanent que Proust faisait de la technique de construction-déconstruction-reconstruction" (Milly, "À propos d’Albertine disparue" 72). (Back to the text)
8. As hypertext editions might offer the equivalent of the "play mode" button of a CD player, it is also perfectly possible to offer the equivalent of a "random" button. In this way, the emancipation of the reader could be followed by the emancipation of the medium, and undoubtedly many more emancipations, adding "a kind of randomness" to what Landow calls "the reader’s text": "Hypertext linking, reader control, and variation not only militate against the modes of argumentation to which we have become accustomed but have other, far more general effects, one of which is to add what may be seen as a kind of randomness to the reader’s text. Another is that the writer (...) loses certain basic controls over his text, particularly over its edges and borders" (Landow 64). (Back to the text)
9. According to Ilana Snyder, Stuart Moulthrop’s hypertext called ‘Forking Paths’ "activates much of the potential for variation in Borges’s short story ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’." (Snyder 56) (Back to the text)
10. The "randomness" and "non-linearity" glorified by hypertext theorists such as Landow or Aarseth may perhaps seem to be prefigured in Proust’s famous definition of metaphors in Le temps retrouvé, in which he indeed questions the linear succession of descriptions of objects: "On peut faire se succéder indéfiniment dans une description les objets qui figuraient dans le lieu décrit, la vérité ne commencera qu’au moment où l’écrivain prendra deux objets différents, posera leur rapport, analogue dans le monde de l’art à celui qu’est le rapport unique de la loi causale dans le monde de la science, et les enfermera dans les anneaux nécessaires d’un beau style" (Recherche IV.468). But according to Proust, making the "rapport" or the links between these objects (and their descriptions) is the task of the writer, "rapport unique que l’écrivain doit retrouver pour en enchaîner à jamais dans sa phrase les deux termes différents" (Recherche IV.468). (Back to the text)
11. Hartmut Binder concludes in his review in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (November 22-23, 1997) that thanks to this facsimile edition every reader is free to read the narrative he wants to read: "jeder Leser kann die einzelnen (...) Hefte so arrangieren, dass er die von ihm gewünschte Romanhandlung erhält" (Binder 50). (Back to the text)
12. Kennedy, Nigel. Recording of Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, with the English Chamber Orchestra. Recorded in the Church of St John-at-Hackney, London, 28-29 November 1986 and 14 March 1989. EMI Records, 1989. (Back to the text)
13. In a review of the edition of Der Process, Manfred Schneider associates this aspect of the documentary edition with musical performances on original instruments: "Die Reproduktion der Handschrift lockt die Leser mit einer neuen Verheißung, die sich von der des Werks kaum unterscheidet: mit der Verheißung des Originals. Natürlich lächelt uns aus der Reproduktion keine Aura zu. Der Herausgeber sichert sich durch das Bild der Handschrift den permanenten Treuebeweis für seine Textdarbietung. High-Fidelity im Text entgleitet aber in dieselben heiklen Geschmackszonen wie Barockmusik auf Originalinstrumenten." (Schneider 5) (Back to the text)
14. "In gewisser Hinsicht versöhnt dieses Hyperreale der CD-Version mit der wachsenden Befremdlichtkeit, die sich über die gespenstische Gegenwart der Autorenhand legt. Der Gedanke jedoch, daß diese Ausgabe, deren erste Seiten erstaunen und berühren, nun alle die abertausend Seiten von Kafkas Hand ans Licht, in den Triumph der Edition ziehen will, schmälert dieses Vergnügen. Es ist kaum zu rechtfertigen mit dem Pathos des Originären, denn am Rande dieses falschen Originals wachsen die unguten Gefühle, die den Kitsch begleiten." (Schneider 5) (Back to the text)
15. In Cahier 71, for example, he uses the verbs "mêler" and "fondre" to denote the blending of different textual units. (Back to the text)
16. In Proust dans le texte et l’avant-texte, Milly emphasizes the osmotic aspect of Proust’s writing and its effect on punctuation in the text: "Le fondu entraîne une grande économie de pauses et évite une apparence hachée, ou martelée, ou à facettes; il adapte la continuité syntagmatique à la cohérence sémantique. C’est de lui que relève, en outre, la rareté des alinéas dans les manuscrits. La souplesse vient du choix permanent que se donne l’écrivain de varier sa ponctuation selon les types de discours et selon les effets particuliers recherchés." (Milly 184) (Back to the text)
17. Milly regards this as an heritage of impressionism and refers to a letter written by Proust to Anna de Noailles: "Nous retrouvons, étendue à la pratique de l’écriture, la manifestation d’une tendance esthétique héritée de l’impressionnisme pictural et qui lui est chère, la recherche par l’artiste du fondu, cette ‘unité transparente où toutes les choses, perdant leur premier aspect de choses, sont venues se ranger les unes à côté des autres dans une espèce d’ordre, pénétrées de la même lumière, vues les unes dans les autres, sans un seul mot qui reste au dehors, qui soit resté réfractaire à cette assimilation’. Ces lignes, adressées en éloge à Anna de Noailles pour un recueil de poèmes, conviendraient aussi tout à fait à la propre phrase spontanée de Proust." (Milly 178) (Back to the text)
18. This double movement is described as follows: "d’un côte, le dédoublement des éléments, leur mise en parallèle ou en antithèse, et, de l’autre, une tendance à l’osmose entre les termes disjoints, au fondu (...), ou au débordement d’un terme sur l’autre par le jeu des additions successives." (Milly 17) (Back to the text)
19. "Jeder Leser wird durch diese Ausgabe zu seinem eigenen Herausgeber erhoben. Das ist eigentlich die schönste Leserfreiheit, die man haben kann. Sie verdankt sich aber einer rasanten Entwicklung im Verständnis von Literatur, wo nicht mehr Werke und Autoren, sondern Texte, ja Schreibprozesse unterm Auge des Interpreten ablaufen. Aber natürlich ist der Schreibprozeß erst dann interessant, wenn ein Werk in den Blick getreten ist. Niemand würde den Roman eines Debütanten als reproduzierte Handschrift eines Fragmentes lesen mögen." (Schneider 5) (Back to the text)

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