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

Ex Ponto nr.3, 2006they underline by their presence have been equalized deleting any potentialresponse and obliterating authorial intentions, as well. In this case, there isno doubt that the editor intervened where he considered that his actions weremarginal but effective for consistency’s sake. Why should consistency be partof the literary cannon even against authorial intentions? Bridges’ stubbornessof reshaping Hopkins’ sonnets after the poet had redesigned their patternevidences the editors’ need of a coherent system and the author’s desire ofits novel, even irregular, appearance.In search of authorial intentions, McLeod recovered Donne’s text ofTo his mistress going to bed from under the ink layer. He built a plausibleargument that the Rosenbach Manuscript 6 can be a holograph version of theepithalamion because, as he will reveal, it contains the most direct expressionof the nakedness of the characters at the end. McLeod’s supposition thatthe covering of the text was caused by the uncovering of lovers’ bodies iscredible: he presumes the text was deliberately hidden “for the sake of thereader’s modesty or the censor’s prudery – or for the poem’s being deemedpornographic.” He also suggests that either by spilling ink on the text or byrejecting its publication, as it happened in 1632 when this text was deniedpublication, the poem has encountered several kinds of deletion. Usingtechnology (a Hamamatsu infrared video camera, a Scion Frame Grabber, anda computer), a photographer rescued the text by playing with contrasts andframings. The “hole text”, as it is called by McLeod because of the numerousgaps it contains in spite of the technological efforts involved, inspired its editorto create two versions: the first is an image, incomplete from a textual pointof view, the second, as it might have originally appeared, is refilled with thesigns that once might have rested on the page. Perfectly aware of the risks,McLeod pursues his restoration in order to draw attention to its unreliablenature and to subversively provide his own version. Actually, his attempt canbe compared with the cleaning of the Sistine Chapel, procedure that not onlyreinvigorate the colors, but also erase the long history of the (mis)usage of theplace. While commenting on this edition of a deleted text in connection withthe concept of authorial intention, one may face a great dilemma: to recoverthe text means to restore the authorial intentions as they were embodied in thetext, or to accept the irremediable deletion of the text, which means that thetext is not physically indestructible, and consequently, the author’s intentionsare neither, since they are located in the text.McLeod’s concern about the original shape of texts indicates the fact thathe relates the initial concrete realizations of poetic works to their authors’intentions, on the one hand, and to their potential significance, on the other.Considering the distinction made by E.D. Hirsch between meaning asembedded in the text by the author, and significance as what is revealed byreaders during the act of reading, 7 one may assert that McLeod is especiallyinterested in delivering both the meaning inscribed by the author in the shapeof his work and in the significance readers can achieve through the textualbibliographical aspect. Author’s intentions are located in the form of the textas well as they are in its conceptual content. To look at the first printed versionduring the author’s lifetime and at the other contemporary editions, or at itsold versions, closer to the original pattern, represents a more exciting reading,which provides more than the immediate reading of a piece of literature. Itprovides a mediated knowledge about the textual culture to which the textbelongs. Text is seen as a significant object in itself and its different printed82