Nr. 3 (12) anul IV / iulie-septembrie 2006 - ROMDIDAC

validate or invalidate the choices, which come up during the act of writing andthus makes the authorial intention into a “textual force”. He does not considerthat one explicitly written choice eliminates the previous attempts; for Gabler,writing another version does not mean that it annuls the others. His experimentfails to prove its scholarly eficacy since as his most critical opponent, JohnKidd, points out that Gabler’s errors make his point useless: a genetic editionshould be errorless, otherwise it cannot tell the story of any creative process.Instead, it raises suspicions about the whole text and the accuracy of editor’sinterpretations. Moreover, the synoptic edtion of 1984 became the startingpoint of the 1986 too vainly named “The Corrected Text.” Kidd underlines thefact that indications of the places where erasures occurred are erroneous:The 1984 apparatus records erasures that never existed and misses evenmore that do. If one goes to Philadelphia and holds up to a lamp each leaf ofthe second and shortest episode of the book, "Nestor," one can find in minutesten erasures not detectable in the facsimile, and not recorded in 1984. Twentypages from the start of the book and the transcriptions are in a mess. 3Displaying the various forms of textual concreteness as they appear inmanuscripts leaves the other authorial revisions that may come at a laterpoint during the printing process unreasonably aside. Gabler considers thatthe author’s mission ends when the manuscript is finished and submitted forpublication. Afterwards, authorial interventions do not seem to count for him, asif authorial intentions cannot be expressed but in a handwritten manuscript.In genetic editions, text augments itself by adding all contextual changesas if the history outside the text may have its share of the text by illuminatingcertain meanings: he refers to Pound’s Canto LI and the corrections madeafter July 1934 which can be read as shifting from initial authorial intentions toanother set. Gabler thinks that by juxtaposing these two sets one can figureout the “multiple directions and dimensions of meaning” (Gabler 115). In thiseditorial system, text becomes summa texturae, and inerent erasures, as longas they are legible, play an active part in the editorial game.Looking under the ErasureInterested in the physicality of the text, McLeod surveys Bridges’ editionsof Hopkins and the dialog between the two referring to Hopkins’ notations ofrhythm, accents, or punctuation. He also analyzes the alterations of the sonnetshapes produced by the editor and the significance each shape bears. Theway Bridges chose to cut Hopkins’ texts to fit into his notebook, on the onehand, and Hopkins’ answer to these remodellings, on the other, represent twodifferent responses to the body of the text. Obviously, for Bridges, titles, blanksbetween octaves and sestets, or other signs that accompany the text itself donot belong to the text. Thus, they can be cut, deleted, or trimmed according tohis Procustean logic: the text should fit the page irrespective of how much ofthe paratextual information is left out or where the text is mutilated and spliton two different pages. As for Hopkins, although he partially accepted theelimination of his “system of marks, all indicating the speech-movement” 4 ,he wrote back to his editor friend to reassure him that, in spite of their lackof consistency, his notation should be preserved to “mark where the readeris likely to mistake.” 5 The different sizes of colons used by Hopkins in PiedBeauty (1877) to focus the reader both on what comes after and on the rhymeEx Ponto nr.3, 200681