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What is a Literary Draft?
Towards a functional typology of genetic documentation by Pierre-Marc de Biasi (ITEM-CNRS) According to the usual definition, a rough draft ( brouillon ) designates, very broadly, a work manuscript written with the intention of correcting it for use in the composition or definitive polishing of a text. To take only its literary sense, this definition carries the advantage of having a wide application and the defect of having, to make up for it, under these very loose specifications, a reduced comprehensibility. This explains why the word is frequently used and why a certain embarrassment often accompanies its use for philologists and literary historians, enamoured of terminological rigour. The difficulty is all the more palpable nowadays in that a new breed of researchers – specialists in literary genetics – have brought the rough draft centrestage by laying stress, over the last few years, on the remarkable benefit that the critical study of texts could derive by recourse to these genetic documents, in which the work of art becomes interpretable through the very movement which gave birth to it. Originating from widely diverging critical outlooks and working on corpora which are themselves in great contrast to one another, these literary geneticians do not constitute, in the official sense, a “school”, which would have its own terminology fixed in place by dogma. Their panoply of ideas and concepts can alter as they acclimatize themselves to works and to critical orientations chosen to interpret the avant-texte *: a genetic study of the unconscious in the rough drafts of a poetic work will not use exactly the same terminological instruments as a narratological study on the compositional genetics of the writing of a novel. Whatever approach is chosen and corpus examined, however, genetic critics have grown accustomed to making to mesure, as precisely as possible, the categories with which they try to classify and interpret genetic documentary evidence. And among these typological conceptions, the category of the “rough draft” has, over the last twelve years or so, been the object of various attempts at definition, principally in the shape of monographs on genetic research. The result of all this is that the signification of the word “draft” nowadays has rather a broad margin of uncertainty. For the textual critic, concerned neither with manuscript nor with genetic development, the word continues to mean, according to its usual definition, a vague generic term designating the approximate and negligable domain of all that precedes the finished version of the text: a sort of opaque space in which the structures of signification and style are not yet in place and which remains resistant to interpretive designs upon it. For the literary genetician, whose time, on the contrary, is devoted to understanding the pre-textual process, the draft is an essential link in the chain of transformations which have led from the work project to the definitive text: a crucial moment in the avant-texte stage. If, however, geneticians are in principle agreed as to the importance of the rough draft, the content of this consensus remains ultimately undecided, and the concept itself papers over extremely varying realities, according to the corpora studied and, above all, according to the type of genetic study envisaged. Microgenetic analysis, which sets up and interprets the total compositional development of a short textual fragment, opposes itself to macrogenetic research, which looks at one or several complete collections of genetic documentation, and which studies large-scale phenomena, and they will not necessarily have the same outlook on the “rough draft”. Microgenetics might, due to the restricted dimensions of its object, adopt the hypothesis of an expanded version of the concept of the rough draft (and extend it, for example, to cover development from the very first initial workplans to textual adjustments made just before publication). Macrogenetics, more sensitive to the diversity of genetic ingredients, attentive to pre- *See note on the use of the French word avant-texte , at the beginning of this edition of Yale French Studies.
textual structuration problems, and studying objects of vast dimensions (thousands of pages long, for example), will have a tendency to privilege a more tightly marshalled definition of the rough draft, conceiving of it exclusively as the compositional space, completely distinct from manuscripts concerned with the pre-planning, the structuring of the scenario, or documentary research. In short, each will develop their definition of the rough draft in accordance with their objectives. While this attitude appears perfectly justified when the definitional principle is clearly announced, it still seems that an overall consideration of the problem has not as yet been forthcoming. This will be the aim of the present typological study, within the specified limits of one genre. Defined as instrumental to the composition and honing of a text, the rough draft constitutes a step almost always indispensable for the writer, which leads one to reflect that, in one form or another, drafts have probably always existed, even if few examples prior to the middle of the 18th century have survived to our times, with the exception of a handful of cases all the more striking because of their rarity^1. By contrast, because of significant cultural and intellectual changes which modified thinking and behaviour from the latter half of 18th century Europe onwards, literary drafts have been preserved, by the writers themselves, with some care, right through the 19th and 20th centuries, and sizeable collections of manuscripts represent the great literary corpora of this period in archives today. In the case of certain works, practically every handwritten piece of work can be accounted for. Research in these archives shows that the use of the rough draft varies very considerably depending on genre and author, and sometimes, in the case of a single author, on the work. While non-existent or very little used by some writers, the rough draft reveals itself to be, in the majority of cases, a decisive step in the creative work. Using different writing techniques, but comparable amounts of work, each page of definitive text called for five or six pages of drafts for novelists like Balzac or Flaubert; tricky passages possibly demanding up to fifteen or twenty pages of successive redraftings. In the Flaubert archives, the rough drafts of Madame Bovary come to thousands of pages (including scenarios, copies and documentary research, a total of around 3700 large manuscript pages); around 2500 sheets for l’Éducation sentimentale are to be found, written for the most part on both sides, and, together with the preparatory notes, close on 3500 sheets for Bouvard et Pécuchet. In contrast to the definitive manuscripts studied by philologists from the 19th century onwards, these “snarled-up” (“ embrouillés ”) documents, covered in crossings-out and additions, often difficult to order and decode, have only recently acquired the status of research object worthy of systematic analysis. By substituting the study of the writing processes (which implies a systematic examination of the whole collection of a work’s manuscripts) for the list of variants (compiled by philologists almost exclusively on the basis of the definitive manuscript or, at best, on the very last compositional states), genetic criticism has placed the rough draft at the centre of its investigations. From the point of view of the genesis of a work, the rough draft can be considered as a sort of text laboratory, in which it becomes possible to piece back together an essential phase of the writer’s work, by tracing each one of the writing movements, observing, as if at the time it took place, choices, indecisions among the array of invented possibilities, bursts of speed and moments of discouragement or block in the composition, sudden inspirations or chance errors that sweep aside the difficulties and set the writing off again in a new direction. The rough drafts tell a kind of day by day story at once logical, symptomatic of affect and phenomenological, which is none other than the life of the writer at work: a secret tale, almost always absent from literary biographies, and which constitutes nevertheless the crux of what we would like to know about the author. Above all, however, it is in the rough drafts that the exact role that might have been played by this or that source in the composition can be identified and evaluated; the location and the bearing of autobiographical inspiration in the writing can be pinpointed; and the narrative, dramatic or symbolic structures, which will constitute the very foundations of the work, can be seen being built up, piece by piece. In short, the rough draft enables us to be present at the birth of the motivations, strategies and (^1) Some manuscripts of Petrarch’s work, for example, as well as Montaigne’s Essais , Pascal’s Pensées , etc.
(almost) as if compositional collected materials could be interpreted in this typology’s terms, on condition that certain stages or genetic categories are deemed void or non- existent. The particularities specific to certain corpora will obviously entail a refocusing each time the typology is applied, which might, for example, cause redistributions of intensity to show up, in the relative importance granted by the writer to this or that phase of the process, or changing preferences as to the type of documents the writer uses for the composition proper, without, one hopes, these particular configurations disrupting the general typology to the point of calling the whole conceptual arrangement into question. I will define the collection of genetic documentation ( dossier de genèse ) as the whole body of known, classified and transcribed work manuscripts and documents, connected with a text whose form has reached, in the opinion of its author, a state of completion or near completion. When fairly complete, the genetic documentation of a published work generally exhibits four overarching genetic phases which I have entitled the pre-compositional, compositional, pre-publication and publication phases^3. Each one of these four phases can be broken down into several moments and several functions to which the individual types of manuscripts are related. The body of documents generally referred to as “rough drafts” of a work corresponds for the most part to manuscripts from the second phase (labelled “compositional”), but, in certain cases, this body can also include some entries grouped under the first phase (“pre-compositional”), prior to it, and certain mutations normally grouped under the third phase (“pre-publication”), after it. To take just the compositional phase, the study of manuscripts often enables us to make out several steps which cause developed scenarios, general sketches and partial roughouts to succeed each other (with the function, for example, of developing the contents of an inital workplan or scenario , sometimes without shaking off the list-like or sub-compositional style which characterised the first phase). These are followed by notes on documentation to be used in composition ; then a succession of compositional states in the true sense (that is, true rough drafts , which proceed progressively to full sentences, and possibly to the admixture of various documentary sources, in a general process of structuring and articulating the material-turned-text). Finally, we can distinguish a series of advanced rough drafts followed by fair copies more or less reworked (undertaking rewrites and specific corrections to an already stabilized base text), in the stage which immediately precedes the fair copy of the pre-definitive manuscript , and then the final manuscript. These last belong to the pre-publication phase but can still sustain substantial modifications. It can be seen that an understanding of the “rough draft” can only be constructed differentially: it only makes sense, because of its mediatory and heterogeneous nature, when brought into a relationship with a whole set of functions and documents which can hail from quite distinct moments of the process of the avant-texte ’s evolution. In order to consider this more closely, I think this is the moment to present, in synthetic and synoptic guise, a general table of the stages, phases and operational functions which enable the ordering of different types of manuscript according to their location and status in the process of production of a work. The complete conception of the “rough draft” can then be seen represented in the context of an evolution in which it constitutes only a transition (more or less expandable according to the extension required for the concept) in the chain of transformational phenomena which lead from the initial idea to the published text. Typology of Genetic Documentation (^3) ‘Les phases de la genèse et la question de l’édition téléologique’ {‘Genetic Phases and the Question of Teleological Publication’}, paper given at the bilateral Franco-Russian conference ‘Methodology in the Critical Edition’, at Pushkin House, Leningrad (Saint Petersburg), October, 1989 (papers published in Russian). Text reprinted in a simplified form as ‘Genetic Criticism’ in Introduction aux Méthodes critiques pour l’analyse littéraire (Introduction to Critical Methods for Literary Analysis) , ed. by D. Bergez (Paris: Bordas, 1990), pp. 5-
{the table should be inserted at this point} Functional Typology of Genetic Documentation This typology, then, relocates the question of rough drafts into the context of a global evolution. Process and Chrono-typology This functional typology of genetic documentation is presented as a table with two ways in. The horizontal axis realigns the different categories of genetic documents, by sub-group, according to their operational function and on the basis of their alliance with a definable moment of the genetic process. From left to right, the table can be read as the framework of a completed genetic study: it moves from process to documents, from the widest typological conceptions to the most finely-tuned of descriptive categories. From right to left, the logic is instead that of a study which takes semi- empirical data (the genetic ordering of genetic documentary material) as a starting-point from which to piece back together the over-arching articulations of the genetic movement, to identify the processes at work and construct a global interpretation of the collected evidence. The vertical axis presents the genetic process as a continuum and enables the realignment of the different document types by the chronological and logical order which links each step of the process along the temporal axis. It leads from a provisional avant-texte , where the hypothetical traces of the very first formulation of a compositional pre-project may be perceived, still in the unnameable state of vague, unstable idea, right through to the possibility of handwritten corrections made by the dying author to the final edition of the work printed in his or her lifetime. Conceived of in this way, the table is intended to represent the complete spectrum of the transformations which constitute the very object of the genetic approach: the writing process, described according to its stages, its phases, its operational functions and according to the types of document which are linked to each of these sequences. This typology is a chrono-typology: each of the denoted moments takes on meaning from the relationship of contiguity by which it establishes itself as the intermediary link in a chain of modifications developing along the axis of a temporality and logic: that is, of a teleology. This teleology, however, with its heuristic and structural undertones, does not imply any finalist presupposition at all. The table presents the continuous unfurling of a general model of pre-textual production which allows us to take in a full cycle, synoptically, going from a crystallization of a primitive pre-project to the publication of the printed work. Yet this continuity is only a model, which, when used to interpret a real genetic evolution, must take into account all sorts of ruptures, doubts and reversals: until the “pass for press” stage is reached, that is, throughout the pre-textual coming into being of the work, nothing can ever be considered as absolutely guaranteed. The inital processes can set off one or more “false starts” which in some cases end up in a blockage serious enough to put off the composition by several months, sometimes by several years; even in the compositional period itself, when the project would seem to be safely in place, radical doubts can lead the writer to give up his or her original idea completely, so as to follow up leads that nothing (or almost nothing) had prepared us for; and even at the far end of the journey, at the final step of the corrected proofs, the avant-texte can still undergo considerable upheavals which will radically modify the image and dimensions of the text eventually published. This typology then, should be seen, not as the picture of the actual genetic unfolding, along the axis of time, but as the abstract diagram of the logical links which let us name and classify genetic documentation relative to its function. If, apparently at the last step of proof correction, the writer is not content just to tinker with details, and if he or she then takes up the practically finished text again, against all expectation, in order to plunge into a new campaign of large-scale rewrites, then it could reasonably be said that these corrected proofs function for the writer as a new tool for textualization, that is as a rough draft or a corrected fair copy. It can be said, for this particular case, that, contrary to type, the pre-publication phase, theoretically given over to the manuscript’s finishing touches, has been given a compositional function. Although by no means frequent, these
dated and deciphered, since they are neither legible nor interpretable in their raw state. The avant-texte does not therefore mean the material manuscripts (a typological inventory of them makes up the fourth column, Document Type ), but rather the critical discourse by which the genetician, having laid out the objective results of their analysis (transcriptions, relative dating, ordering, etc), reads them as successive moments of a process. The typological table’s first column thus offers conclusive and generic classificatory concepts; which could be used to interpret, in their logical concatenation, the synthetic results of research that has, prior to this, analyzed the documents (listed in column 4), according to their operational functions (column 3) and decided which one of the three pre-textual phases (of column 2) they belong to. Without judging the contents of these classificatory concepts in advance, contents which are always specific and possibly missing in certain cases, they enable us to name, at the level of the abstract model proposed by this typology, a series of seven major stages constituting the avant-texte as a chain of “partial processes”. The avant-texte can be interpreted in its overall specificity by assessing to what extent each one of these processes makes its presence felt, and by looking at their nature, content, relative intensity and the way they link up together. It is these processes which are ultimately interpreted by the study of a text’s genetics. —provisional avant-texte stage: before any verifiable appearance of the compositional project, this process transforms the body of sources at the author’s disposal in his or her own manuscripts and work notes, into a pending structure potentially oriented towards this project. —exploratory avant-texte stage: before any verifiable decision made to undertake the compositional project, this process constitutes, for the writer, an informal exploration of possible ideas, during the course of which, a compositional pre-project takes shape. —preparatory avant-texte stage: the initial process by which the project proper takes shape, a decision-making process, but also one of conception and in certain cases, of pre- planning. —outlining at avant-texte stage: the processes by which the conception and the pre- planning of the project are reworked in a compositional framework, in terms of overarching and partial structuring. —documentation at avant-texte stage: the processes by which the writer, in certain cases, finds it necessary to equip him or herself with further documentation, in greater or lesser quantities, to sift and transform it ready for integration into the composition. —composition at avant-texte stage: the processes by which the composition proper is performed, through all the rough drafts to the definitive manuscript. —post-compositional avant-texte stage: the process of definitive rewriting and checking performed, after the composition proper, on a fair copy of the definitive manuscript, then on the proofs which will be used in publishing the text. The final handwritten changes are recorded on the set of typed-up proofs bearing the writer’s signature under the pronouncement “bon à tirer” {French publishing practice; the English equivalent would perhaps be the phrase “pass for press”. See footnote 4 below}. The Text Stage and Textual Genetics Where it exists, the pronouncement “bon à tirer” (“pass for press”) marks the moment when the author decides that he or she can put an end to the general and local metamorphoses of the work, which can thus be manufactured and offered to the public in this form^4. From this moment, we leave the pre-textual domain for the textual history of the work: a history in which the author is still in a position to act upon his or her text^5 , and which can be diverted via the publishing of a “pre-first publication” (^4) The practice of the editor requiring the author to sign to the definitive state of the changes to be made to what they have agreed between them as the final set of proofs, has a history, albeit relatively recent. That being said, for material reasons of lack of space, few of these documents seem to have been preserved. Editors’ archives, however, perhaps hold some wonderful suprises in store. In France, IMEC (the Institution for the Conservation of Contemporary Publishing) has set itself the task of safeguarding, inventorying, and making this type of document accessible. (^5) Either by last minute corrections as the editor marks up the manuscript for the printer, or by intervening as the text is actually being manufactured: for example by means of instructions about the layout or typography handed to the editor, or even, later still, at the printers, by making adjustments to the material type-setting itself,
version^6 , in serial form in the press, or which ends directly in the publication and distribution of the “first edition” in book form. This is the “text” of the work, but, of course, it is not necessarily the final state of the text. The work might see several editions during the author’s lifetime, on the occasion of which the author would have every right to modify the text on new sets of proofs, and it would move into the “variant text” stage. These modifications can be substantial, and even lead to new partial recompositions or to restructurings, for which the author will make use of rough drafts, fair copies, a definitive manuscript, etc, under the same conditions as during the original composition. However important, these modifications (or “variants”) which, from new edition to new edition, can produce perceptibly different versions of the work, do not, nevertheless, have exactly the same status as the transformations to be seen in the collected genetic documentation for the original work. The mutations of the avant-texte took place in a private writing domain where everything was possible at any time, including total production stoppage, even if the work seemed to be heading towards the achievement of a publishable text. By contrast, modifications post-publication are made in a public sphere where the book’s reality cannot be ignored: they successively affect versions of the text, all equally definitive of the ‘same’ work^7 , and which can claim the status of a completely separate text each time, without it being in general possible to recognize the logic of a process comparable to the pre-textual one between them^8. Textual variants (or “edition variants”) can be numerous and substantial: they necessitate the fixing of the text’s identity over and above all the modifications that can appear in the course of different re- editions. Apart from the exceptional cases^9 , the text of the modern literary work is therefore conventionally taken from the “last edition of the author’s lifetime”, to which the final handwritten corrections may possibly have to be added, marked for a future re- edition by the writer, who was ultimately prevented from checking them by death. This definitive image of the work marks the farthest reach of the field of investigation proper to genetic studies. Finally, in order to be completely coherent, the hypothesis of a further stage should be inserted after the textual stage, that of the post-text, which corresponds to the publishing future of the work (its various editions) after the demise of its author. Many interesting cases fall into this category, from the posthumous edition of a text either as numerous 16th century authors were in the habit of doing (a procedure which caused interesting cases of variants within the print run of a single edition). This is, of course, not to mention the set of authorial paratexts which the author must supply as quickly as possible to the editor, if it has not already been done: the preface, the final version of the title, the subtitle, the table of contents or the synopsis, the dedication, etc. The paratext can also be subject to the genetic approach. (^6) The issue of pre-first publication editions by serial in the press comes up for a great many 19th and 20th century texts. It is far from simple to resolve, since, as serial-novels of the 19th century, Balzac’s works, and the celebrated case of the Revue de Paris edition of Madame Bovary , admirably demonstrate, considerable variations can very frequently be noted, between the pre-first publication edition and first publication in book form. In certain cases, frequent in contemporary literature, the edition of the work in pre-first publication form in the press can simultaneously constitute the conclusion by publication of one textual stage, and the starting- point (pre-compositional) of the avant-texte of a much more significant new version, which will end in the publication of the work in book form: a published novella could for example turn into the initial scenario of a vast novel. But would we still then be talking about the same work? (^7) Unless this rewriting ends in the publication of a radically different new work, nevertheless given the same title. Apart from these exceptional cases, the dilemma of how to mark the threshold, beyond which a variant version of the text has moved far enough away from its initial model to be evaluated as a different work, becomes a very legitimate one. Reciprocally, how far can the invariant text bear modification and still stay the same , without suffering an overall shift in identity? The novels of the Comédie humaine , among others, form an exemplary case for which to pose the problem, especially in terms of structural variation. A clarifying typological study of this subject should perhaps be undertaken, which would be capable of defining these transformations of the text in genetic terms. (^8) Although, of course, some very famous cases do exist, in which the published versions of the text are explicitly presented as stages of a truly continuous rewriting process: Montaigne’s Essais , for example. In a less spectacular way, and with variable modalities, a great part of the literary production of the 16th and 17th centuries (for which we do not, in general, have access to any work manuscript) seems to demonstrate that writers used successive editions of their works as stages of rewriting, a phenomenon which validates a call for a true genetics of the printed text. (^9) Such exceptions, nevertheless, are numerous and sometimes concern texts of primary importance: the text of Madame Bovary , for example, cannot be taken from the last edition of Flaubert’s lifetime, which gives an atypical and relatively retrograde state of it. The next-to-last edition must be chosen in preference.
or that, on the contrary, he or she is content to make the tiniest adjustments of expression, in order, for example, to avoid repeating a word or sound which had not been noticed up to that point. Lastly, endogenetics designates a procedure which can greatly overflow the domain of writing proper: a drawing or doodle can prove to be endogenetic, if it does not depict an external object, but is rather the projection of a fictive entity produced by the writing (the layout of an imaginary town—Yonville, for example—where the action of the novel unfolds; a person’s features; the spatio-temporal schema of an action or an invented object, and so on). By the same token, an abstract organigram, geometrical or numerical representation of a system intended to structure the writing (as in Perec’s case, for example) belongs to the domain of endogenetics, whether it is in the form of a notebook full of lexical entries (lists of words and drawings of objects to be introduced into the narrative) or of a structural grid which affects the sentence form of the narrative. Exogenetics designates any writing process devoted to research, selection, and incorporation work, focused on documentation which stems from a source exterior to the writing. It may be handwritten, or not; any documentary notes or copies; any quoted or intertextual matter; any results of inquiries or observations; any evidence of iconographical matter (that gives rise to a written transposition ), and in a general way, any written or text-image documentation , belongs by nature to the exogenetic category. Comments on things seen, on overheard or reported speech, sketches and drawings made on the subject in hand, friends’ letters giving useful information or anecdotes, reading notes, investigatory notebooks, newspaper cuttings, typescripts of interviews or conversations, printed textual fragments and marginalia, bibliographical references, confessions, essays and reports… the list is endless. The exogenetic empire knows almost no bounds, unless they could be said to the limits which, in good methodological faith, ought to circumscribe it to what is written and depicted (when what is depicted gives rise to a written transposition)^12. The province of exogenetics extends only to written or drawn documents, excluding the empirical objects or data to which they refer: a live landscape is not exogenetic, even if its precise description may be found in the work; it is the external referent of a written or drawn document which constitutes itself as image in the genetic domain, whether by an investigation carried out by the writer him or herself at the scene, or by a sketch, or by notes taken by a friend on behalf of the writer, or again by any intertextual element that the writer has borrowed from the textual domain. The stuffed parrot that Flaubert had delivered to him when he was writing Un Coeur simple and that he put on his worktable so that he should be flooded with the parrot’s spirit, was certainly much more to him than a document, but it cannot be said to belong to the exogenetic domain, any more than can the Dead Sea, which he claims to have “seen” when he began writing Hérodias. On the other hand, the notes for his trip to the East, which include descriptions of the Dead Sea, and the notes he made from them for Hérodias , as well as the drawings of deer that he made in a notebook (and did not use) to compose la Légende de saint Julien , are exogenetic. The descriptions and topographical sketches of the Normandy coast sent in the post to him by Maupassant for Bouvard et Pécuchet are equally exogenetic, in a completely different way, despite not being handwritten, as are the scraps of textal idiocy copied out for him by his friend Laporte (^12) The exogenetic quality of iconographical documents poses some difficulty. If it is a matter of a hand-drawn sketch linked to a written transposition of it, there is no problem. But what if we are faced with a reproduction chosen and used by the writer with no traceable sign of direct transposition? The lithograph of Brueghel’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony hung on the wall by Flaubert when he was writing la Tentation… does that count as an exogenetic entity? Probably not. By the same token, do the photos of the Middle East that Flaubert found in scholarly works, and on which he based certain descriptions of Machærous, make up part of the Hérodias exogenetics? To stay true to our method, we ought doubtless to stick to the notes made about these photos and recorded in his notebook; although this need not prevent us from studying these notes in conjunction with the source documents. But what about a childhood photo, associated with autobiographical writing? And how should we treat a photo (or video film) made by the writer him or herself to document the composition? In how far are such images different in nature from a hand-drawn sketch or drawing? And furthermore, how should we define the genetic status of a cassette recording made by the writer to serve in the composition? If it is an oral improvisation of the writing, a sort of autodictation recorded on a dictaphone, the material obviously has an endogenetic quality; if it is a recording of music, of oral testimony, or of an interview subsequently used by the writer in composition, the material seems exogenetic, but even then, should we not reserve this qualification for the written notes by which the sound data has been transposed or transcribed and sifted?
for the Sottisier , intended for the “Second Volume” of Bouvard , or the Mémoires de Madame Ludovica , those indiscreet revelations of Suzanne Lagier’s life of easy virtue which Flaubert used in drafting Madame Bovary and l’Éducation sentimentale. In short, exogenetics does not designate the “sources” of the work (such and such a real person, place, literary work, etc), but the locatable trace of these source-referents in terms of documents (written or transposed) present in the collection of genetic evidential material. In the absence of any locatable trace in the work’s manuscripts, a highly probable source (for example the influence of Balzac’s Illusions perdues on the writing of l’Éducation sentimentale ) could become the object of the same kind of study but under the heading hypothetical exogenetics , in accordance with an analytical procedure that clearly differentiates it from exogenetics per se. Apart from its definitional limits, which exhibit certain peculiarities, the exogenetic domain seems to manifest, by its nature, a certain paradoxical dimension when it comes to its genetic evolution. For indeed, short of a particular decision on the part of the writer, to make the exogenetic signpost the very substance of the writing^13 , the pre-textual exogenetic elements tend inevitably to be progressively converted into endogenetic material. The inscription of their original exteriority is a volatile one, and beyond a certain developmental point, the exogenetic mark becomes so intimately integrated into its endogenetic context that it becomes barely recognizable. 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 (for example, a topographical comment, a detail or a situation borrowed from a literary work) may have become perfectly untraceable: it has metamorphosed into an organic part of the text, which, for the reader, points only to the writer’s imaginary and to the internal logic of the fiction, just like any other element of the work. This phenomenon is enough in itself to show the necessity of a fundamentally genetic approach to the question of sources. If the exogenetic element can efface its difference so completely, however, and allow itself to be absorbed so thoroughly by the endogenetic that it ends up by disappearing, is this not because the exogenetic procedure contains within itself the principle of its own effacement by writing? Rough drafts demonstrate perfectly how, even for the most realist of writers, the will to referential veracity remains a secondary necessity before the organic primacy of the work: selected first of all for its reality factor value, the exogenetic detail is forced into the original context of the rough draft; but as the endogenetic logic develops, the writer can be seen abandoning, one after the other, over the course of the composition, all the realist characteristics which had been the inital reason for choosing such a demonstrative detail. As it integrates better and better into its context, the detail sometimes ends up by becoming utterly unrealistic, even if it avoids quite simply running aground in a definitive shipwreck. This phenomenon leads one to question the very sense of “documentation” and exogenetics, whose real role might then be thought to be less to inform the act of writing than to offer it dialogic elements, which give a motivational and heuristic kick-start to the endogenetic process. More often than not, it is the relative heterogeneity of the exogenetic fragment, its foreign or antagonistic relationship to the writing, which is at the origin of the exogenetic process. Exogenetics can never be dissociated entirely from a ruse, through which writing manufactures the conditions of a productive confrontation in which it pits itself against the challenge of development in a hostile environment. Alterity develops conjunctive and transformational faculties in the writing: it provides favourable conditions for the mastering of an identity. Under cover of being documentation, exogenetics puts to work an intertext which often functions as a countertext with endogenetic value. Logically speaking, there is no such thing as a purely exogenetic element: every exogenetic fragment bears the primitive seal of endogenetics, and the opposition of (^13) Exogenetics more or less signalled as such (through all the modalities of the quotation, the pastiche, the parody and through hypertexual mechanisms in general) represents an important dimension of literary writing which offers itself for interpretation in the form of the palimpsest, as Gérard Genette’s theoretical research has demonstrated. It is nevertheless true that the greater part of the genetic approach to such phenomena still needs to be worked out.
productive mechanism, the set of possibilities specific to each phase and, if need be, to the interior of each phase, to the “moments” or “steps” of this productive process^14. The final column, headed “ Document Type ” provides, in terms of descriptive categories, a detailed list of genetic documents which can be found for each of these moments or steps. These categories only concern documents that emerge strictly from the genetic domain (the collected documents, or dossier , of the genetics of the work)^15 , and only make up, in their attempt to be exhaustive, a series of strictly hypothetically possible documents. Most concrete collections will only comprise in reality a selection of these categories, the absent kinds corresponding either to documents which have existed but which have not been preserved, or to genetic operations which have not taken place. These descriptive categories are, on the other hand, dependent on a triple relativity which limits their field of usefulness to a zone circumscribed by history, genre and the genetic profile of the collected documents they are supposed to describe. Historical Relativity The descriptive categories apply to the types of documents to be seen in the period of around a century and a half which extends from the end of the first third of the 19th century to the 1980s^16. Over this period, several of the concepts used here (like “scenario”, “sketch”, “roughing out” [“ ébauche ”] , etc.) were developed by writers to refer to their own work, with considerable variations in meaning according to auther and period. The term “scenario”, for example, obviously does not have the same meaning for Flaubert (who diverted the word from its theatrical sense to mean the detailed workplan of a narrative work^17 ) as it would for a 20th century novelist for whom the term refers almost necessarily to cinematographic writing. But these historical variations of the genetic lexicon, whose impact should certainly be measured in the personal vocabulary of writers, remain quite easy to identify and do not seem to put obstacles in the way of establishing a general terminology, if every descriptive category used is given a clear definition, sharply delimited by its operational function and its specified adherence to one phase (endo- or exogenetic, writability or outlining, pre-compositional, compositional and pre-publication). The historical evolution of of writing techniques between 1830 and 1980 (media, writing implements, inks, etc) also does not seem to pose an insurmountable (^14) The term “moment” should designate the least finalized operational functions (associated with an objective that is still hypothetical or indeterminate) while the term “step” [ étape ] should be used to signal functions that concern a clear teleological procedure (associated with a determined outcome). (^15) It will have been noticed that the typological table does not include elements which in other respects could have an absolutely essential genetic research value, but which do not belong properly speaking to the genetic domain: the writer’s correspondence, for example, which, as regards external criticism, constitutes an irreplaceable database for the dating and interpretation of the collected genetic papers; even if, as in Flaubert’s case, this correspondence offers a veritable compositional diary. The same goes for “attestations” and other documents whose role might be decisive but which fall outside the actual collected genetic materials. On the other hand, a request for information formulated in a letter by the writer to a friend or specialist, and by the same token, its reply in letter form, even when not handwritten, or any other non-handwritten note giving the writer information which will be transferred into the work’s toolbag, all these do constitute completely separate genetic elements. (^16) From the 1830s, the date from which there are enough collections of genetic material to establish a typology, to the 1980s where the spread of personal computers, word-processing and desktop publishing seems to have modified the attitude of certain writers and transformed several aspects of the writing process. (^17) The term scénario is not recorded in Littré and many other dictionaries of the 19th century. The encyclopaedic Larousse gives: “Scenario: theatrical vocabulary direction , in metaphorical sense: ways in which one prepares to trick, seduce, win ”. Scénario was also used to speak of the action or the development of a play, notably in a written form. It is probably on the basis of this usage that Flaubert forged the personal sense that he gave the word for narrative writing: the scenario (initial detailed workplan) is in opposition to the scratching [ pioche ] (composition: as much the action–the act of composing–as its result: manuscripts snarled up in crossingsout). This opposition was already to be found in Balzac, in 1837, still denoting theatrical writing, in a passage from les Employés : “An author of plays […] is made up first of all of a man of ideas, whose job it is to find subjects and build the scaffolding or scenario of a piece of vaudeville; and then a scratcher [ piocheur ] whose job it is to compose the play”. The terms “ pioche ” and “ piocheurs ”seem themselves derived from the vocabulary of sculpture where they were used to refer to the initial work of sanding down; but a metaphorical reference should no doubt also be acknowledged to the vocabulary of the penal colonies. A fine lexicological study is waiting to be done on the history and transfer of metaphors in the genetic lexicon of writers and artists.
difficulty to the listing out of genetic documents and operational functions^18. The terminology used here to designate the different types of documents is therefore offered as valid right the way through the defined historical period, within the bounds of the inventory and definition. Relativity of Genre These descriptive categories concern the genetic documentation of a narrative work (novel, récit , novella, tale, legend, etc.) and could only be imperfectly applied, doubtless, to the genetic study of a dramatic or poetic text. Substantial modifications remain to be thought through for each genre: some categories wil become redundant, other concepts will have to be formulated, according to substitutions which might be made to chime in partially with the general schema of this typology. Genetic Relativity The descriptive categories serving to designate the different types of documents and operational functions, make up a general table which in principle, can be applied to the majority of collections of genetic materials, but on condition that each corpus be considered to constitute a particular interpretation of this chrono-typology. The relative importance of the genetic steps is essentially variable according to writer. The table represents the moments of writing and the types of documents without marking any for special consideration: all the elements are given the same weight, although, of course, a writer’s work is individually characterized by the appearance into it of sizeable blocks of time which structure the genetic process in a unique way and create the image of a personalized procedure inventing its own habits and making to measure its own system of preferences from among all the possible writing media^19. Each individual genetic process will follow writing’s virtual steps to its own rhythm and following a unique itinerary which in most cases will not take in all the documents grouped together here, and which could even, in places, upset the successive genetic operations as given here, by reversals, which it is impossible to symbolize in a two-dimensional table. Finally (and this is the limit of all general typologies) some genetic material collections for novels, especially atypical ones, will prove uninterpretable in the terms of this chrono-typology, unless it is borne in mind that this table can be used to measure typical differentials, in relation to an abstract model which does not claim in any way to reconstitute the norm but to organize a virtual structure. Typology of Rough Drafts Two Conceptual Fields: Rough Drafts of the Work and Compositional Rough Drafts In this functional typology of genetic documents, the term rough draft appears by name (with the qualification “compositional rough drafts”) under the column- heading “Document Type” but only in the last section of the compositional phase, corresponding to the operational function “textualization” and the stage “ avant-texte compositional process”. Nevertheless, as the two markers placed in the “Stage” column indicate, it must also be accepted that in the wider sense, the concept of Rough Drafts occupies a much larger place in the pre-textual process and can serve as a generic term to designate a vast body of genetic documents: the zone which corresponds to the (^18) The steel nib progressively replaces the quill pen, and causes faint changes to the way manuscripts look, and later, towards the end of the 19th century, typing starts to make its presence felt and takes over, for certain writers, from the former handwritten fair copies, definitive manuscripts and copier’s manuscript, but does not, it seems, bring with it noticeable revolutions for operational functions in the process of writing, nor for the types of document produced by the authors. (^19) Proust used his notebooks for very different purposes from Flaubert; Stendhal, who wrote such prodigious quantities of marginal directions, avoided making outlines, the idea of a workplan or a scenario seeming to him to put an obstacle in the way of his imaginative faculties; as for Balzac, he had, as we know, a personal method of composition which, by the correction of successive printed versions, led him to rework “rough drafts”, in a way quite atypical for his time, as well as to follow a developmental model relying rather more on outlines; Aragon, according to him, condensed his outlining effort to the very first words of the project; Beckett used typed-up copies as corrected fair copies which could end up coming before new entirely handwritten versions; as for Giono, he gave a decisive importance to the initial choice of title, whose enigmatic formulation was supposed to serve as the regulatory concept for the structuring of the plot and the development of the composition, etc.
provisional process exploratory pre-initial Orienting pre-initial sources and recurrences of t h e idea •Previously collected genetic material •Workplans and unfinishe compositions •Notebooks, marginalia, documentation •Previous project or idea notes exogenetics -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
exploratory process and endogenetics Exploring pre-project formation •Exploratory workplans •Fragments of exploratory writing PRE- COMPOSITIONAL PHASE
Decision-making •Updated project notes or ideas
•Initial pre-planning notes Initial limit of genetic zone known as the Rough Drafts of the work on composition subject Conceiving •Preliminary research notes •Initial drawings, sketches, schemata •Initial workplans or scenarios preparatory process initial exogenetic and endogenetic outlining Pre-planning •General sketches, chronologies •Grand overarching roughouts •Overarching workplan or scenario outlining process =============== ==== ==================== Structuring =============================== •Developed workplans and scenarios •Notes on plot handling, chronologies AVANT-TEXTE endogenetic outlining general structuring of the composition
•Lists, partial workplans, sketches •Sub-compositional roughouts
•Reading notes and research notes
Researching •Iconographic notes or remarks research exogenetic writability composition •Topographical sketches and sche process specified •Various doc.s, non-handwritten letters COMPOSITIONAL
•Opening roughouts; partial roughouts PHASE Inclusion of research •Basic compositional rough drafts •Reworkings of overarching scenario compositional process endogenetic outlining and writability Textualising •Compositional plot-handling notes •Compositional schemata and sketches Restructuring or •Intermediate workplans and scenarios structural reworkings •Recapitulating summaries •Advanced compositional rough drafts •Corrected fair copies Final limit of the genetic zone known as the Rough Drafts of the work -> ==================== endogenetic writability PRE-PUBLISHING ==================== Finishing Touches =============================== •Pre-definitive manuscript •Definitive manuscript •Handwritten copies of definitive PHASE -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
post-compositional Preparing •Corrected copyist’s manuscript process endogenetic writability for publication •Corrected copies or typescripts •Corrected proofs ============================================================ Manufacturing == PASS FOR PRESS============ •Notes on layout Publishing •Pre-first publication edition (Press) PUBLICATION •First edition in book form
