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

Marta Werner’s project of editing Emily Dickinson’s Late Papers is aperfect example in this respect. She employs three displays of the sametextual material: facsimiles of the fragments considered relevant for Dickinson’swork, their diplomatic transcriptions, and SGML-marked electronic texts. Shescanned the papers of unexpected and irregular format, which are inscribedwith texts that, according to Werner, cannot be edited without their corporealsupport: pieces of torn paper, envelopes, and drafts of never sent letters.Considering them images of texts readable in electronic media. Werner offers“a series of speculative and fragmentary ‘close-ups’ – a portrait in pieces,a constellation of questions.” 11 Among this disordered mass of documents,she discovers a shift of authorial intentions, more like a continuous processof refining the text through its corporeal suggestions, various placements ondifferent kinds of sheets of paper, or certain pinned gathering, a completelyphysical ordering of the text in sequences. Dickinson’s authorial intentions ofthe 1870s and 1880s focus on the graphematic aspect of text and the way inwhich these signs, letters, stresses, punctuation marks, scratches or cuttingouts, inscribe the text by their immediate presence. There is no “definitivetext:” it is no longer the last, ultimate, absolute, definitive, holy, sacred, perfect,accurate, legible work, but a provocative visual-textual body in search of itsproper multiplier. The epoch in which Dickinson bound her poems is far behind.Every gesture of the poet and every detail of her utensils and supports countas textual interventions and, consequently, produce text: random letters, linesover a text, cancellations in ink, become the unusual setting of her writing. Therichness of all these metatextual events raises the legitimate question: “Howcan an editor preserve their contribution to the text and make the text legible,process which would suppose the separation of the text from its significantcontext?” Since Marta Werner comes to the conclusion that there is no finalintention expressed by these fragments, she finds a convenient editorialsolution to present the images of the fragments as they are (as facsimiles inher books or scanned images on her website) and add her commentaries asnecessary guidance/directions in the textual labyrinth.In “Writing’s Other Scenes,” Marta Werner draws attention to the“mutilations” of the text or “textual wounds” that are abundant in Dickinson’smanuscripts. They are not simply erasures, which mark the change of initialauthorial intentions; they are part of the text that should be displayed, textthat requires the dialogical presence of writing and its crossing out. Studyingthe multiple ways of annulling the text, Werner reaches a double typology oferasure: cancellation, which corresponds to the more profound process ofself-censorship, and scratching, cutting out, striking out, which correspondto spontaneous authorial decisions. Irrespective of the critics’ classifications,“Dickinson’s crossing and re-crossing of her poem manuscripts show us thatpoems are articulated in a space that has no intention to maintain originalintegrity.” 12Ex Ponto nr.3, 200684Problematic Use of Erasures in Editing Authorial IntentionsThomas Tanselle assumes a commonsense perspective on the authorialintentions and the way in which they should be brought out during the editorialprocess. Authorial intentions are synonymous with the intended meaning andbecome the objective of the science of interpretation. Tanselle differentiatesbetween authorial alterations and alterations made by others. Although he