Editing and digitising marginalia

Voltaire’s comments on Frederick II’s L’Art de la guerre, Clement Draper’s depictions of chemical processes, Herman Melville’s pencil scores, or Samuel Beckett’s reading traces… these are all what we define as marginalia: the reader’s markings in the margins of a book. These markings are difficult to pin down in terms more specific than scribbles, references, and thoughts captured on a page. There is no apparent common rule that groups them together and specifies how they should be understood as a whole, even though they are often studied as an ensemble or a genre. Furthermore, the line – if there is a line – that defines the margins themselves is not always evident, and that is why scholars are constantly questioning what marginalia are, while trying to differentiate between the primary text and its annotations. As Laura Estill acknowledges in her article ‘Encoding the edge: manuscript marginalia and the TEI’, ‘perhaps there are easier distinctions to be made when marginalia is handwritten in printed books – although even then, in the case of authorial revisions, stop-press corrections, or (say) Whitman’s notes in another book, there is no easy answer as to what is “marginal”’.

A discussion of what exactly this marginal space is and how it interacts with the text is crucial when considering the central query of the Editing and Digitising Marginalia workshop: how can the marginalia of source material be encoded as fully, accurately, and helpfully as possible? By trying to define the purpose and character of Voltaire’s, Draper’s, Melville’s and Beckett’s marginalia, Nicholas Cronk, Gillian Pink, and Dan Barker; and Zoe Screti, Christopher Ohge, and Dirk Van Hulle respectively delved into the challenges of digitally editing marginalia, which requires a completely different framework of analysis compared to pre-digital editions or even digital facsimile editions. Following on from the OCTET colloquium on Writers’ Libraries, this workshop explored the importance of studying authors through their reading practices. It focused on the editorial choices behind digitally encoding marginalia, with the added layer of complexity that derives both from the difficulties and the possibilities of the digital medium.

When designing a data model that could represent marginalia as a key component of Voltaire’s complete works, for example, the verbal elements were comparatively easier to encode than the non-verbal marks. Voltaire used different materials to underline, draw, and mark the pages he was reading, or he folded, licked, and stuck them together. How can these practices possibly be translated into the digital sphere? For this digital project, the source material came from the transcribed print volumes of the Corpus des notes marginales de Voltaire, which were themselves one step removed from the original source material, since they had already undergone an editorial process that transformed the original squiggles into typeset signs.

Dan Barker, ‘The aim of digitising OCV’, picture taken by author.

Dan Barker, the Digital Consultant at the Voltaire Foundation, explained in his presentation ‘The aim of digitising OCV’ how he had created a system of mark types to record these marks in order to reproduce source material fully, accurately, and helpfully. He classified a mark according to nodes (the points where the lines meet or cross) or edges (uninterrupted lines) to convey their nature, presence, and relationship to the text. Even if the method does not account for the colour, medium, intensity, or even authorship of marginal marks, readers will be able to search for specific classifications of marks and see if Voltaire used them more than once and where. It is a process that operates within the principles proposed by Gillian Pink of what a new-born digital edition of a manuscript should be: legible, containing both visual and non-verbal elements, and searchable, taking into account the modernisation of the transcription to avoid the potential pitfalls of searching for idiosyncratic spellings.

The issue of searchability was further discussed by Zoe Screti, a postdoctoral researcher at the Voltaire Foundation, in her paper ‘Alchemical marginalia written in prison and cataloguing marginalia’. The quantity and diversity of Clement Draper’s marginalia, in the shape of memory aids, summaries, symbols, diagrams, or eyewitness accounts, are not reflected in the catalogue entries of his archival materials. That discrepancy points towards an incompatibility in the way catalogues were built and the questions that scholars are asking now, hence why Screti is updating the system with usability and consistency in mind, both of which aim to make sources of marginalia accessible and discoverable.

She has access to a subset of Voltaire’s manuscripts and is cataloguing them from scratch, which provides her with a decision-making margin that others might not be able to work with. They are also small in size, allowing for a detailed granularity that would be difficult to obtain if working with Draper’s notebooks, for example. But the challenges of ensuring that catalogues keep up with the pace of research on marginalia remain, in big and small collections alike. If we want to be able to locate specific categories of marginalia, as is the case with Voltaire’s non-verbal markings, and include nuances in our current search and text analysis tools, they need to appear in the catalogue entries, and that means going beyond filters and single codes.

Voltaire’s non-verbal annotations to the Marquis de Vauvenargues’s Introduction à la connaissance de l’esprit humain and their appearance in the Voltaire Foundation’s edition of the marginalia.

Finally, both Melville’s and Beckett’s marginalia are representative of common methodological issues in terms of how to create a uniform TEI data model. As Christopher Ohge explained in his talk entitled ‘Melville’s Marginalia Online, with some general provocations’, there is no solution that covers all cases of marginalia encoding, and that is why current projects have very different data models. He provided an overview of those differences, showing how in Keats’s Paradise Lost, a Digital Edition or Whitman’s marginalia to Thoreau’s A week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, marginalia are wedged into the hierarchy of the existing text to make it work within different structures, while Archaeology of Reading has a bespoke XML tagging structure with a marginalia attribute.

But changing content IDs and crossing over the hierarchy of line elements or having a general term that does not include subtleties is not the methodological solution chosen for Melville’s Marginalia Online. This research tool uses software developed by the Whitman Project to generate the page coordinates of the already uploaded facsimile images, to find a page directly with a word search. Melville’s marginalia are encoded in a <div> tag with several attribute values, so as to include all detail and information. The question posed by Ohge then was as follows: how much context is needed to understand marginalia, and how much granularity?

In an intervention entitled ‘Editing Beckett’s Marginalia’, Dirk Van Hulle answered by stating that it depends on the author, the type of marginalia they wrote, and the resources available for the digital project that provides such context. One of the key elements that digital marginalia allows, as is the case with Beckett, is an insight not only into the reader himself, but the underlying structure of all his drafts and notebooks: a network of markings that, in turn, puts into context how his reading engendered his writing.

In order to make that network visible and searchable, one of the solutions going forward is to use IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) as a means of engaging with marginalia. Making resources IIIF compliant ensures they are interoperable with other software, as well as easy to maintain as an online resource with which scholars can interact. It is also culturally inclusive, as it operates on a ‘blank canvas’ principle meaning that non-codex objects can be presented in full.

A piece of marginalia in Voltaire’s copy of the Marquis de Vauvenargues’s Introduction à la connaissance de l’esprit humain demonstrating a stark difference in line weight.

IIIF image viewers could potentially work with improving transcription software, such as Transkribus, to allow for comprehensive resources that can display an image of the page with all its marginalia, paratext, and physical attributes as well as an interactive description and viewable transcription. The ability to describe elements of a text accurately and efficiently via pinpointing areas that have their own locus of metadata, as IIIF is capable of, means that more effort can be devoted to accurate scholarship, which is precisely what Gillian Pink stated in her paper ‘Editing Voltaire’s commentary on Frederick II’s L’Art de la guerre – third time lucky?’ She proposed, for example, to use different colours for the different hands that worked on the manuscript (Frederick II, his secretary, and Voltaire) as a way to take advantage of annotation possibilities with IIIF. However, the question remains: how can we decide which textual blocks should be transcribed as a unit in order to properly represent Voltaire’s marginalia?

The various contributions to the Editing and Digitising Marginalia workshop helped us sketch some answers to this question. Nonetheless, many threads were left to pull, ensuring that, hopefully, there will be another workshop to show how all the projects have built on existing methods while defying their own limits and scope, so that we keep rediscovering authors through the marginal notes that they left.

– Joana Roque

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Digitising the margins: a classification of Voltaire’s scribbles

How to tell a king he writes bad verse

Would Voltaire have made a good PhD supervisor? Voltaire mentors Vauvenargues

Digitising the margins: a classification of Voltaire’s scribbles

The most famous squiggly lines relating to eighteenth-century writing are almost certainly to be found in Tristram Shandy. Sterne uses them to illustrate the non-linearity of stories (see about halfway down that page) and digressions from the main narrative, before reviving the device several volumes later to render graphically for his readers the movement of the stick brandished by the character Trim. But these squiggles from 1761-1762 are far from alone. Both before and after Sterne’s foray into wiggly line design, Voltaire was peppering the margins of his books with marginalia, which involved both verbal and non-verbal elements – that is, words and squiggles.

When a team of Russian scholars began to publish the marginalia from his library in the 1970s in the Corpus des notes marginales de Voltaire, they decided that a facsimile edition would be both too expensive and not sufficiently clear to read. They settled on a compromise editorial policy, which entailed transcribing Voltaire’s words and reproducing graphically any accompanying marks and lines (usually made in ink or lead pencil, but also comprising scratches or indentations in the paper, for example crosses scored with the thumb-nail). When the edition passed to the Voltaire Foundation, we adhered to the same principles for the remaining volumes, much to the chagrin of our typesetter, who nevertheless heroically drew hundreds of scribbles electronically to incorporate into the typeset file.

Vauvenargues, p.90; OCV, vol.145, p.484.

The example above and those that follow are from books that Voltaire annotated with the intent of returning them to their authors with suggestions for improvement. In principle this should mean a greater likelihood that any shapes drawn should be intelligible and contribute to the meaning of the verbal marginalia. Indeed, in the first case, in a copy of Vauvenargues’s Introduction à la connaissance de l’esprit humain, we can see that the vertical wavy line in the margin brackets the passage generally, and is connected with the note ‘peu déve / lop[p]é’ (poorly developed), while the second + sign links ‘sage’ in the printed text to ‘fort’ in the margin, indicating that rather than referring to a wise person, the author should be talking about a strong person (in opposition to the weak person indicated by the first + sign higher up).

Vauvenargues, p.48; OCV, vol.145, p.477.

Here Voltaire uses + signs again to flag the word ‘dans’ twice at the top of the page, and indicates by the curved line and a further ‘dans’ in the margin that Vauvenargues should be consistent in beginning each in the series of adverbial clauses with the same preposition. At the beginning of the new section lower down, he uses a sort of Greek gamma in the margin to show that an insertion should be made. All very clear for the addressee of the annotations. And between those two? The squiggly line in the margin is hard to interpret and may simply bear testament to his reading: did he stumble on this passage? Did he dislike it? Perhaps he wanted to write a criticism or a suggestion but couldn’t decide on what to say. At any rate, the squiggle draws our eye, nearly 300 years after it was penned, to a passage to which Voltaire must also have paid particular attention.

Frederick, p.122; OCV, vol.145, p.156.

This final example is a bit different insofar as it is not actually in Voltaire’s hand, but is a careful copy made of an original that was subsequently destroyed in the bombing of Berlin during the Second World War. Slanted crosses, several with double verticals (reminiscent of the letter H), indicate lines of verse by Frederick, king of Prussia, with which Voltaire, preeminent poet of his day, was unhappy and which are commented in the margins. The ‘gamma’ again probably draws the king’s attention to the replacement word written over the line. Here, the limits of the typeset page become apparent as the slashing lines and crosses come so thick and fast that it becomes difficult to fit them all in. An apparatus of notes at the bottom of the page helps, but the effect at first glance is really not quite the same.

Digitising these volumes, as part the Voltaire Foundation’s new initiative Digital Enlightenment, poses new challenges, but can it also bring new solutions? On first analysis the infinitely flexible nature of Voltaire’s squiggles seems to be at odds with the ordered discipline inherent in our approach to digitising the Œuvres complètes. We soon decided that we were not going to scan every mark in the source volume and virtually paste it into the digital text – not only would madness likely that way lie, but also considerable expense, and it would be a distinctly inelegant way of solving the problem. The more you look at the corpus of squiggles, however, the more you see that although in strict terms you have a very large number of different marks, you have a much smaller number of different types of mark, and if we can successfully classify and label those types, we can use that classification and those labels when we digitise the content. Instead of the data saying ‘here’s a picture of a squiggle’, it will instead say ‘at this point there’s a mark of type X.’

How, then, to classify these marks? If you think of what makes up a mark or a squiggle, it will be one or more line-type marks, and where there is more than one line-type mark, they may meet or cross each other at a particular point. We call the line-type marks edges, and the points where they meet or cross nodes, and if you count the number of edges and nodes you find you have a ready-made way of classifying – and even sorting – your squiggles. For example:

 

has one edge, and no nodes:

 

has two edges, but still no nodes, and:

has one edge and one node. If we turn these counts into parts of a label (e.g. n0e1) we can start to distil order out of infinite variety, and we can pretty soon have an easy lookup for our digitisers to use:

There is, of course, a degree of discretion involved here in grouping marks according to type – there is a slanted line 10º from the vertical and another 10º from the horizontal, but what if we find a line precisely 45º from both? Or a vertical line that wiggles not once or twice but… seven times? Well, we may then need to add a shape and a code, but the method allows that, and if there’s one thing this digitisation exercise has taught us, it’s that until you’ve marked up the final full stop, novelty may at any time appear before you. Expect, and accommodate, the unexpected.

Using this method, we will be able to allow readers to search for particular marks. Or, more correctly, for particular classifications of marks, e.g. for ‘a straight line slanting from bottom left to top right at an angle of inclination less than 45º from the horizontal’ rather than for a specific slanting line. But the classification should be sufficiently specific that a reader encountering a mark in one text, and wondering where else Voltaire has used it, should be able to see the other relevant instances.

How will we deal with squiggles that defy classification? We defy squiggles to defy this classification! Time will, of course, tell, but we’re confident that we can accommodate anything that Voltaire felt necessary to add to the texts he was reading, blissfully unaware of the coding system that awaited his scribbles.

– Gillian Pink and Dan Barker, dancan Ltd

 

A publishing challenge – the metamorphosis of a major work

Every project in the Complete Works of Voltaire corpus seems to have its own special features that make it not quite fit into the mould of what has gone before. Our team meetings ring to the sounds of editors wailing: ‘But this is different!’ The principles that have served us well over the 50-year duration of the project have had to be agile and adaptable to cover the astonishing range of genres and styles covered by Voltaire.

Histoire de la guerre de 1741, Amsterdam 1755 (left: Bnf, Paris; right: Bodley, Oxford)

Even by the standards of the Voltaire Foundation, though, the Précis du siècle de Louis XV presents a unique challenge because of its complex genesis. Much of the material in the chapters of the Précis which cover the War of the Austrian Succession was first written by Voltaire for his Histoire de la guerre de 1741, a project enthusiastically started when he was appointed as historiographe de France in the 1740s. He never published it himself (though it was published, supposedly unofficially, and at least twice, in 1755), but rewrote and integrated large parts of it in his ambitious universal history, the Essai sur les mœurs. Later, he separated the material on Louis XIV (to become the Siècle de Louis XIV) and Louis XV, and the Précis (which was by this time not really a précis) became a work in its own right in 1769, with later chapters added in the 1770s to take account of, amongst other things, the king’s unexpected death in 1774.

Essay sur l’histoire générale, [Geneva], 1756 (Bodley, Oxford)

This genesis means that the collation and presentation of variants is different from what we usually do. Our usual process goes something like this:

1. Select a work by Voltaire
2. Assess the different editions and manuscripts of the work and choose the most appropriate base text (for example, the version that was last overseen by Voltaire, or sometimes the first edition, or else the edition that was most widely read during his lifetime).
3. Collate significant textual variants from other editions and manuscripts against the base text and present them neatly at the foot of the page.

Sometimes (particularly for example in the theatrical corpus) the variant versions are too divergent from the base text to be presented on the same page, and so in such cases we would print whole scenes or sections as an appendix, with a reference on the relevant page of the base text to direct the reader to where this material could be found.

Louis XV donnant la paix à l’Europe. Laurent Cars after François Lemoyne (BnF, Réserve QB-201 (170, 9)-FT 4). By kind permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

In the case of the Guerre/Précis project, though, it was clear that we were dealing with not one but (at least) two separate works. The remit of the Précis is much wider than the War of the Austrian Succession, the primary focus of the Guerre. Not to mention what we might call the Essai sur les mœurs stage in the middle, where the titles are dispensed with but the material is reused and moved around to create a narrative that fits into the wider universal history.

We decided early on that the Guerre needed therefore to be treated as a separate text, and, for the first time in a collection of Voltaire’s complete works, it is published in full. This has avoided some horrendous complexities of page layout had we tried to show all the Guerre material as variants to the Précis, as well as the awkwardness of chopping it up into gobbets for appendices. Being able to read the Guerre in its entirety allows the reader a richer understanding of this little-known and underrated text as well as of how it fits into the context of the Précis project. It has also allowed us to separate the manuscripts relating to the composition of the Guerre from those which relate specifically to the Précis, and to present variants from these in the most appropriate context.

However, it has meant that the overlap between the material in the Guerre and that of the Précis has to be shown in other ways. We decided to adopt the method of lightly shading passages in the Guerre to show when there is textual overlap between that text and the later Précis text. This has had the great advantage of showing the reader at a glance the scale of the reuse of this material, as well as allowing us to concentrate in greater detail on the text that is unique to the Guerre. For the shaded sections, readers are referred to the annotation of the Précis, whereas the unique Guerre text is annotated in full in that volume. As Voltaire edited the text as he reused it, we have ignored small differences in phrasing for the purposes of this exercise (see image for example) – but it does sometimes throw into relief small amendments made during the reuse process, for example, deciding to name someone, or amending figures of battlefield casualties etc. in response to new information.

Above: Histoire de la Guerre de 1741, ch.24, l.264-69. Below: Précis du siècle de Louis XV, ch.26, l.78-83.

This decision necessitated another choice: should we shade only the material that was used in our base text of the Précis (Voltaire’s revised 1775 edition, amended by him shortly before his death in anticipation of a new version of his complete works), or should we include all the material that was taken forward from the Guerre, through the Essai and early standalone Précis editions, even if it was subsequently deleted? After discussion with the general editors, it was decided in the end that in the Guerre it was important to distinguish between what Voltaire reused, and what was only ever used in the Guerre. This means that not all the highlighted text will be found in the base text of our edition of the Précis – much of it can be found instead in the variants. The critical thing is that all the shaded text is accounted for and commented on in our edition of the Précis (OCV, vols.29A and 29B).

The Histoire de la guerre de 1741, OCV, vol.29C, publishing in October 2020, completes the three-volume set of the Précis du Siècle de Louis XV, with volumes 29A and 29B published earlier in the year, the general editors being Janet Godden and James Hanrahan.

– Alison Oliver

What else makes a critical edition?

Material constraints in publishing can sometimes have the beneficial effect of focusing attention anew on the importance of the intellectual content of the book. As has happened so many times over the years in bringing out the Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, a volume has turned out to be too big to fit comfortably into a single binding, and so it has been split into A and B volumes. The Introduction to Voltaire’s Siècle de Louis XIV will therefore be published in two parts: volume 11A contains the introduction proper, a prose study by Diego Venturino of the history, intricacies and import of this landmark historical work, with contributions from Nicholas Cronk and Jean-Alexandre Perras. And 11B will have… everything else. ‘But what else could be needed?’ a reader might be forgiven for asking. ‘Quite a lot’, the answer turns out to be.

The most straightforward content in 11B is probably the sequence of appendices presenting various texts that surround and shed light on the Siècle but are not part of the text itself: an unpublished manuscript; open letters published by Voltaire in periodicals; and finally forewords and prefaces from printings not chosen as the base text of our edition. These are presented as short critical editions in their own right.

By far the longest component, however, is the list of manuscripts and editions of Voltaire’s text. While a one-hundred-page section of painstaking bibliographical description might look dry and off-putting (see example above), it is a vital complement to both the introduction in volume 11A and the text itself, and fulfils several functions. It contains the detail of the history of the text: its prehistory, in manuscript state, and its print evolution. The latter tracks when Voltaire introduced changes into his work, whether by making corrections, adding new material, or rearranging it. The list shows which editions follow the latest changes made and, equally, which merely reproduce older versions of the text, thus revealing the relative significance of the different printings in the author’s lifetime. Various mysteries are explained: the edition bearing ‘Dresden’ on its title page (see example on the left) was actually printed in Leipzig, whereas the ones proclaiming Leipzig as their place of publication in fact were produced in Paris… Another, dated 1753, is in fact found to have appeared at the beginning of December 1752, all of which is elucidated and confirmed by Voltaire’s active and passive correspondence, as well as by some of the appendices. Each full description can be linked, via its siglum – a shorthand identification – to the textual variants given in the volumes of text, so that a reader, wanting to know more about the circumstances surrounding the different readings, can find the relevant information.

Finally, the list of editions serves as a reference tool for anyone in the world who comes across an eighteenth-century printing of the Siècle, since the detailed technical description allows one to identify copies, sometimes via small tell-tale signs, like a printing error, or a typographical ornament, which can serve to differentiate between two or more otherwise very similar editions. Connected to the list of manuscripts and editions is a dossier of illustrations, as well as a list of eighteenth-century translations of the text.

While most of the variant readings of Voltaire’s text are printed at the bottom of the page in the Œuvres complètes, a few are simply too long to fit. A digital edition would avoid this seemingly arbitrary distinction between variants based on length, but in a print edition, it makes most sense to give these longer variants their own space. Amongst volume 11B’s appendices are therefore an early list of marshals of France from the 1751 edition, before it was vastly expanded, and the early versions of chapter 24, which examines the period between the death of Louis XIV and the war of the Austrian Succession. This chapter has strong links to other works by Voltaire, namely the Précis du siècle de Louis XV, and an early version of part of the same, the Histoire de la guerre de 1741. Looking at how he modified and reused his material here is both illustrative of his working methods and also at the centre of a very real problem in editing Voltaire’s works: how to present material that moves between different titles over the course of the author’s lifetime.

Even after the author’s death, the text acquired accretions of various kinds. In the first posthumous edition of Voltaire’s works, one of his editors, Condorcet, added over a hundred footnotes. While obviously not part of the text, they do shed light on different aspects of it. For example, Condorcet wrote:

“When the first edition of the Siècle de Louis XIV became public, Fontenelle was still alive. People sought to set him against Mr de Voltaire. ‘How am I treated in this work?’ Fontenelle asked one of his friends. ‘Sir,’ he replied, ‘Mr de Voltaire begins by saying that you are the only man alive for whom he has set aside his resolve to speak only of the dead.’ ‘I do not want to know any more,’ Fontenelle declared; ‘whatever else he may have added, I must be content.’”

Or,

“Since in what follows, there will often be references to this monetary operation [inflation], and since Mr de Voltaire has not discussed its effects in any of his works, we may be forgiven for entering into a few details here…”

Or else,

“These [relief maps of Vauban’s Citadel of Lille] have since been moved to the Invalides.”

These are the main ingredients that make up this atypical volume of Voltaire’s complete works. A chance effect of page extent and the physical properties of bookbinding has resulted in a book that the scholarly community didn’t know it needed in quite the same way as a volume containing Voltaire’s text or an introductory essay; nevertheless, it would not be surprising if the tools and supplements that it contains, all part of what makes a critical edition, ultimately mean that quite a lot of readers end up calling it up from their libraries’ stacks.

– Gillian Pink

‘Une encyclopédie de ma façon’: le chef-d’œuvre méconnu de Voltaire

Voltaire a toujours soutenu la grande entreprise collective de l’Encyclopédie dirigée par D’Alembert et Diderot (consulter cet ouvrage en français ou en anglais). Il a rédigé une quarantaine d’articles pour le dictionnaire, mais avait toutefois quelques réserves sur certains articles: ‘La France fournissait à l’Europe un Dictionnaire encyclopédique dont l’utilité était reconnue. Une foule d’articles excellents rachetaient bien quelques endroits qui n’étaient pas des mains des maîtres,’ écrit-il à Francesco Albergati Capacelli le 23 décembre 1760. Une quinzaine d’années plus tard, il fera imprimer le charmant conte De l’Encyclopédie, qui fera encore l’éloge de cet ouvrage tout en lui reconnaissant certains défauts. Voltaire trouvait notamment que les articles avaient tendance à être trop longs ou trop subjectifs: ‘Je suis encore fâché qu’on fasse des dissertations, qu’on donne des opinions particulières pour des vérités reconnues. Je voudrais partout la définition, et l’origine du mot avec des exemples’ (à D’Alembert, le 9 octobre [1756]).

Après l’achèvement de ce grand dictionnaire, l’éditeur Charles-Joseph Panckoucke forme le projet de publier une réédition avec des corrections. Cela donne à Voltaire l’occasion de proposer des réductions et des réécritures du texte. Un certain nombre de manuscrits trouvés parmi ses papiers après sa mort semblent témoigner de ses efforts dans ce sens, textes déjà publiés dans les Œuvres complètes de Voltaire. Cependant, cette entreprise ne sera pas menée à terme.

Voltaire se décide alors à faire un dictionnaire ‘de sa façon’, où il se sert peut-être de certains articles écrits pour Panckoucke, et où il redéploie quelques-uns des textes qu’il a rédigés pour l’Encyclopédie. On retrouve donc dans ses Questions sur l’Encyclopédie (1770-1772) des thèmes et des sujets qui lui sont chers et omniprésents dans son œuvre (tolérance, critique biblique, questions juridiques, superstition…). Mais étant donné que ce n’est plus un ouvrage de référence, l’auteur ne suit pas les consignes qu’il avait préconisées pour le dictionnaire collectif. Le caractère plus personnel de ses Questions lui permet d’adopter par moments un ton ludique: il invente la fiction plus ou moins transparente du Mont Krapack, où une petite société de gens de lettres est censée vivre et travailler aux Questions sur l’Encyclopédie. De nombreux articles jouent l’effet de surprise. Le titre ‘Montagne’ annonce un très court article (de 120 mots seulement) qui évoque la fable de La Fontaine où la montagne met au monde une souris, afin de railler les matérialistes de l’époque, qui voulaient que la matière ait produit le vivant. Sous le mot ‘Rare’, l’auteur congédie la signification du mot en physique pour proposer une méditation sur le sens moral et esthétique: ‘on n’admire jamais ce qui est commun’, affirme-t-il avant de considérer l’émotion que nous éprouvons face aux livres rares, aux trésors architecturaux, à un rhinocéros à Paris. La fine satire ‘Gargantua’, enfin, évoque bel et bien le personnage de Rabelais, mais constitue une sorte d’allégorie où l’auteur, en disputant ‘des esprits téméraires qui ont osé nier les prodiges de ce grand homme’, vise en fait les miracles vécus par et attribués à maints personnages des Saintes Ecritures (Moïse, Josué, Jésus…).

La collection complète des Questions sur l’Encyclopédie, publiée par la Voltaire Foundation.

L’ouvrage des Questions sur l’Encyclopédie a disparu dans les éditions posthumes de ses œuvres. L’édition de la Voltaire Foundation, composée de huit volumes (2007-2018) sous la direction de Nicholas Cronk et de Christiane Mervaud, dont l’introduction de Christiane Mervaud vient de paraître, permet de redécouvrir ce texte, le plus long et sans doute le plus varié de Voltaire. L’introduction est la première monographie à être consacrée à ce grand ouvrage, et rend compte de sa genèse, des réactions d’époque, de sa relation complexe avec l’Encyclopédie, et des stratégies d’écriture développées par l’auteur.

Nous remercions tous les collaborateurs de cette édition, qui ont participé à l’annotation des articles, à la préparation des index, aux vérifications bibliographiques. J’ai eu personnellement l’honneur et le grand plaisir d’être associée aux huit volumes de la collection, et d’être secrétaire de l’édition pour six d’entre eux. L’édition critique d’un ouvrage de cette envergure ne peut être qu’un travail d’équipe, en l’occurrence mené sur une période de plus de dix ans, et qui représente en miniature l’entreprise des Œuvres complètes, elle aussi sur le point d’être achevée.

– Gillian Pink

La beauté du débris

André Chénier, par Gabriel-Antoine Barlangue (1950), d’après Joseph Benoît Suvée (1795) – Image WikiTimbres.

L’inscription des poésies d’André Chénier au programme de l’Agrégation de Lettres modernes relève du roman.

En 2006, avait été choisi le tome premier récemment paru (2005) d’une édition nouvelle des Œuvres poétiques entreprise par Édouard Guitton et Georges Buisson pour la maison orléanaise Paradigme. N’était jusque là disponible que la vieille édition Becq de Fouquières (1872) que les éditions Gallimard avaient choisi, en 1994, de reproduire dans leur collection « Poésie / Gallimard », volonté assumée – Chénier manquait à l’appel – mais choix par défaut, pour pallier précisément l’absence de projets aboutis d’édition moderne.

Ce choix du travail (par ailleurs considérable) d’Édouard Guitton et Georges Buisson s’était révélé fort problématique. Leur édition de Chénier affichait l’ambition d’être « scientifique » et définitive mais était étouffée par l’érudition (identification des papiers, spéculations sans fin sur les dates de composition de chaque pièce). Elle entendait revenir au texte premier mais se révélait assez interventionniste (ajout de titres fantaisistes pour L’Art d’aimer, modifications de la ponctuation avec mention du désaccord entre les deux éditeurs…). Sur le plan de l’interprétation, l’orientation était à la fois biographique et hagiographique, insistait sur le destin glorieux et tragique d’un poète sacrifié par l’Histoire. Enfin, le premier tome de 2005 regroupait pour l’essentiel les premiers essais de Chénier, ses « Préludes poétiques » et ne comprenait aucune de ses pièces reconnues par la tradition comme « majeures ».

Quand la rumeur a circulé que les poésies d’André Chénier revenaient l’année prochaine au programme de l’Agrégation – quand d’autres choix de poésies auraient pu être faits, mais c’est une autre question –, le premier réflexe fut de penser que serait inscrit le tome II des Œuvres poétiques paru en 2010 et comprenant, entre autres, les Bucoliques et L’Invention. Certes, l’opus second aurait réservé son lot de surprises, à commencer par le choix d’Édouard Guitton de « cess[er] de participer à cette édition, à l’occasion d’un différend sur la manière de rendre la ponctuation à la fois méticuleuse et anomale d’A. Chénier »…

Aurait réservé, car le choix des responsables du Ministère s’est porté pour ce « retour » de Chénier à l’Agrégation… sur la vieille édition Becq de Fouquières de la collection « Poésie / Gallimard ».

Inscription en hommage à André Chénier sur la tombe de son frère Marie Joseph au Père Lachaise.

Plutôt que de s’interroger sur et commenter plus avant les raisons d’un tel choix, on préférera rattacher ce « feuilleton » éditorial et institutionnel à l’histoire tragi-comique du corps poétique d’André Chénier qui fut, dès « l’origine », l’objet de toutes les attentions et de toutes les violences.

En 1872, Becq de Fouquières avait dénoncé la manière dont Henri de Latouche, maître d’œuvre de l’édition des Œuvres complètes d’André de Chénier de 1819, était intervenu sur le texte : pièces « altérées », « ïambes composés à Saint-Lazare […] disloqués, coupés, hachés ». La violence du propos était nourrie du sentiment que nombre de ces blessures étaient à jamais définitives : deux ans plus tôt en effet, en 1870, la maison de Latouche au Val d’Aulnay avait été pillée par les troupes allemandes et détruit l’ensemble des manuscrits de Chénier qui étaient en sa possession…

En 2006, après avoir déroulé l’histoire des atteintes ultérieures faites au corps poétique de Chénier (le classement par niveau d’achèvement par Paul Dimoff en 1908-1919 ; la distinction entre pièces finies et pièces ébauchées par Gérard Walter en 1940), Édouard Guitton et Georges Buisson proclamaient être parvenus à reconstituer le corps perdu, à réparer les dommages opérés par les précédents éditeurs : leur édition « réintègr[ait] résolument dans la trame d’une vie, afin de leur rendre mieux qu’un semblant d’unité, les œuvres du poète si souvent dépecées ou réduites à quelques pièces d’anthologie. » Quand on ne proposait de l’Art d’aimer jusqu’à eux que quelques « résidus épars que les éditeurs ont disloqué à qui mieux mieux », aveugles aux ruses du signifiant typographique, ils proclamaient : « Agissant à l’opposé, nous avons tenté de reconstituer l’A.A. d’A.C. ». Et de présenter plus loin un « remembrement ainsi substitué aux morcellements antérieurs », et une « réorganisation du corpus élégiaque. »

Gravure anonyme (probablement XIXème siècle) illustrant Caïus Gracchus, de Marie Joseph Chénier.

Sous ce qu’il faut bien appeler des fantasmes, dorment de nombreux mythes et une histoire familiale, dont je n’évoquerai pour finir qu’un fragment, littéraire. Deux ans avant la mort d’André dont il porterait sa vie durant le lourd poids, son frère Marie-Joseph avait fait jouer Caïus Gracchus (1792). Cette tragédie antique met en scène un héros romain, dont l’une des premières actions vise à récupérer le corps mort de son frère, égorgé sur ordre du sénat (« Je vis, je rassemblai ses membres dispersés / Ma bouche s’imprima sur ces membres glacés ») et de l’apporter à leur mère qui se remémorera douloureusement le moment « Où je vis à mes pieds le second de mes fils / De mon fils égorgé m’apportant les débris ». Plus avant dans la pièce, Caïus Gracchus ne ménagera pas ses efforts, dans une double résilience, politique et poétique, pour fédérer le peuple romain et retrouver le pouvoir : « Romains, ralliez-vous, rassemblez vos débris »…

– Jean-Christophe Abramovici
Université Paris-Sorbonne

Editorialités: pratiques et enjeux à travers les siècles

Après la journée consacrée aux « Matérialités » du livre, qui s’était déroulée en janvier 2015, la collaboration entre l’Université d’Oxford et l’Université de Fribourg (Suisse) – familièrement surnommée Oxfrib ou Fribox selon les goûts – a fait son retour en novembre dernier à la Maison Française d’Oxford, pour une troisième édition: « Editorialités: Practices of Editing and Publishing ».

Selon une pétition rédigée par le London book trade en 1643, le statut conféré aux professionnels du livre en France est tenu en haute estime, et on lui fait l’honneur de lui réserver une place à la « périphérie de la littérature » (cité dans Wheale, Writing and Society, 1999, cf. ici). La journée d’études a placé cette périphérie littéraire au centre de l’attention. Parce qu’il ne peut y avoir de centre sans périphérie, ni de périphérie sans centre, les intervenants ont montré avec conviction l’influence et le rôle essentiel de l’édition dans la création de l’œuvre littéraire. Deux perspectives générales m’ont semblé se dessiner: l’enquête sur les tenants et les aboutissants de la genèse du livre en tant qu’objet pour en comprendre davantage la signification, et l’étude des difficultés que peut poser l’œuvre à l’éditeur-critique, par sa nature problématique ou son contexte de création. (Pour les résumés des communications, voir ici).

La présentation initiale de la journée a d’emblée permis de concilier ces deux perspectives. Proposer des éditions modernes des manuscrits-recueils médiévaux invite à élucider les ressorts sous-jacents de leur compilation, à travers la recherche des réseaux de convergence et des réalités matérielles de production qui furent les leurs (Marion Uhlig).

Le plus souvent, l’enquête sur l’ethos du compilateur se mène via le paratexte. Une enquête d’autant plus nécessaire, dans le cas des textes de la Renaissance, car le terme d’« imprimeur-libraire », communément utilisé, est trop large pour déterminer avec précision la nature de l’intervention éditoriale (Nina Mueggler). Dans le cas de Gille Corrozet, Nina a également soulevé le problème décisif et récurrent de la confrontation de deux identités. Le compilateur étant lui-même auteur, que dire de son ethos éditorial, qu’il revendique consciencieux, fidèle et soigné, lorsque l’on constate une tendance à « ajouter du liant » et à anoblir le style des textes qu’il assemble?

Souvent, la transformation d’une œuvre par le geste éditorial relève d’une véritable démarche herméneutique. Louis le Roi, traduisant le Banquet de Platon, reterritorialise et assimile le texte source: la réorganisation signifiante du récit et l’importante présence de commentaires exégétiques, font du Banquet un texte chrétien (Antoine Vuilleumier).

Plusieurs autres exemples d’éditions guidées par un paradigme de lecture préconçu et adressées à un lectorat spécifique ont été développés. Grâce à une relecture critique des Parallèles Burlesques de Dufresnoy, inclues dans l’édition de J.F. Bernard des Œuvres de Rabelais (1741), Olivia Madin a notamment montré le rôle du paratexte dans la réappropriation féministe de l’œuvre. Emma Claussen a donné un brillant aperçu de l’engagement politique des rééditions successives de la Satyre ménippée dans le contexte des guerres de religion.

Dans certains cas, l’objectif de l’éditeur ne se limite pas à servir le texte original ou le lectorat contemporain, et peut avoir pour but principal l’autopromotion. A l’image de la démarche de justification et de valorisation de Louis le Roi dans ses commentaires, Corneille, de manière encore plus marquante, édite ses propres pièces pour en faire un répertoire de référence d’une théorie théâtrale universelle (Marine Souchier).

La question du positionnement de l’édition par rapport au texte source est centrale lorsque les obstacles imposés par le matériau textuel problématisent l’édition. Le texte épars que constitue Lamiel de Stendhal, assemblage de multiples réécritures et fragments dont la logique échappe souvent au critique, en offre un exemple probant (Sarah Jones). La relation entre éditorialité et fidélité par rapport à l’œuvre est d’autant plus problématique lorsque l’auteur fait preuve d’un engagement pugnace sur les modalités de la publication de ses propres œuvres (Jean Rime). Les écrits journalistiques de George Sand, à « logique médiatique » et rédigés collectivement, offrent, de surcroît, un nouvel exemple de tension entre l’œuvre à publier et la tradition éditoriale moderne, solidement ancrée dans une « logique de l’auteur ».

On a été amené à élargir le champ d’étude à d’autres genres. Le texte théâtral étant subordonné aux contingences des répétitions et à l’appropriation du metteur en scène, la représentation théâtrale déstabilise la conception habituelle de l’éditorialité (Vanessa Lee). Le médium non textuel du cours magistral ou séminaire entraîne également une série de problèmes pour l’édition. Dépendant de l’intermédiaire d’une transcription, elle-même, souvent déformante, le contenu du cours, consubstantiel à la présence physique de la voix, est en proie à se dénaturer (Sophie Jaussi).

 

La conférence plénière de Catriona Seth, riche d’anecdotes et d’exemples, a retracé l’histoire fascinante de la réception d’André Chénier à travers les éditions successives de ses œuvres. Chargées de fortes implications politiques au tournant du siècle, les éditions bâtissent une mythologie de l’auteur en tant que figure victimaire de la Révolution. Elles participent également à l’établissement de la gloire posthume d’un poète: à titre d’exemple, Latouche (1819) et Walter (1940) font du dernier vers du poète un vers nettement conclusif, presque épigrammatique, en parfaite corrélation avec l’image d’un poète posant un point final avant de monter sur l’échafaud. L’Anthologie de la poésie française co-dirigée par Catriona Seth conserve le véritable vers de conclusion, « Ce sera toi demain, insensible imbécile »; vers authentique, mais orphelin, non rimé, qui évacue l’effet de sublime.

Qu’Oxford fût le lieu de cette journée pourrait presque sembler opportun: l’Oxford University Press, bien sûr, mais également la Voltaire Foundation, font de cette ville un haut lieu de l’édition. La répercussion des choix éditoriaux comme engagement, fidélité, distanciation, clarification, justification, assimilation, unification, appropriation, promotion ou autopromotion soulèvent chaque jour des questionnements dans la maison abritant le travail de réédition de l’œuvre complète de Voltaire: l’article de Gillian Pink publié récemment (accessible ici) en offre un aperçu révélateur.

« Génialissimes ». C’est par ce terme qu’Alain Viala a décrit les intervenants dans sa conclusion générale en fin de journée. Le succès de cette rencontre revient avant tout aux organisateurs: Professor Alain Viala, Dr Kate Tunstall, Dr Emma Claussen, Gemma Tidman et Olivia Madin.

– Cédric Ploix, doctorant, St Hugh’s College

The Œuvres complètes de Voltaire are nearly fifty years old

John Renwick has been a member of the ‘Œuvres complètes de Voltaire’ team since 1970, and of its Conseil scientifique since 1997. Within OCV, he has edited over fifty individual texts, from ‘Amulius et Numitor’ (1711) to the ‘Fragments sur l’histoire générale’ and the ‘Fragments sur l’Inde’ (1773). He has signed the edition of twenty-eight articles in the ‘Questions sur l’Encyclopédie’ and forty-five chapters of the ‘Essai sur les mœurs’, and more than sixty entries for the forthcoming volume 9 of the ‘Corpus des notes marginales’. He is the editor of the major text ‘Traité sur la tolérance’.

In a recent contribution (September 2016), Jeroom Vercruysse, the editor of Voltaire’s mock epic poem La Pucelle and many other texts since, reminds us of how he and a small number of colleagues were invited by Theodore Besterman to start producing a critical edition of Voltaire’s complete works. In it, he remembers – though fleetingly – how those ‘Founding Fathers’ translated their early aspirations into the concrete formulation of editorial policy. He mentions also their early recognition that such a vast corpus of work would require their having recourse to ‘d’autres dix-huitiémistes afin d’assurer la préparation et la publication de textes si divers’. And he concludes his reminiscences with the observation that ‘nous envisageons la sortie des derniers volumes vers 2020’.

His comments could not fail to elicit a positive response from this particular reader, who was one of the early second-generation recruits to be approached by Theodore Besterman (in 1970, I was a mere 31-year-old, the same age as Jeroom at the inception of the Œuvres complètes in 1967) and who, decades later (again like Jeroom), is still intimately associated with the enterprise which he also (just as fervently) hopes to see to its completion in 2020.

It is, however, and more precisely, the comments that Jeroom makes en filigrane about the original editorial approaches that embolden me to return to, and then to expand upon, a topic (that I first treated in 1994 [1]) that now – more than twenty years later – concerns more particularly the constant evolution of the original editorial principles over the fifty years that have intervened since inception in 1968 with the Notebooks, edited by Besterman, then in La Philosophie de l’histoire, edited by J.H. Brumfitt in 1969. Having constantly been a party to a redefinition and an expansion of those editorial parameters, I have been privileged, from beginning to what is now near-end, to witness the refinement of those parameters, a progressive process that has been responsible for making the OCV into what is arguably one of the most significant and thoughtful scholarly ventures of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The fact that it has also transpired to be a ‘formidable aventure intellectuelle’ makes it even more remarkable. How and why this came about is worth charting in a preliminary sketch that will one day (or so it is to be hoped) provide the impetus for someone to turn the whole question into a detailed study, because, in the time-honoured phrase, this topic is surely a beau sujet de thèse.

– John Renwick

[1] See John Renwick, ‘The Complete works of Voltaire: a review of the first twenty-five years’ in Pour encourager les autres. Studies for the tercentenary of Voltaire’s birth 1694-1994, SVEC 320, p.165-207.

Voltaire editor, edited and re-edited

The first posthumous edition of Voltaire’s complete works, printed in Kehl in 1784 and financed by Beaumarchais, was recently the subject of a 900-page thesis (Linda Gil, Paris-Sorbonne, 2014). The latest volume of the Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, not lagging far behind, at 604 pages, also started life with this 70-volume edition as its focus, in particular the nearly 4000 pages that make up what the editors call the ‘Dictionnaire philosophique’. Under this title, made up in large part of Voltaire’s 1764 Dictionnaire philosophique portatif (later La Raison par alphabet) and the 1770-1772 Questions sur l’Encyclopédie, the Kehl editors included a number of previously unknown articles and fragments.

A manuscript of one of the texts in this volume (article ‘Ame’, in the hand of Voltaire’s secretary, Wagnière). Bibliothèque de Genève, Musée Voltaire: MS 34/1, f.1.

Our edition of these texts attempts to pin down what they were, when (and whether) Voltaire wrote them, whether certain groups can be discerned amongst them, and to what degree the printed record of the Kehl edition reflects the manuscripts that were actually found after Voltaire’s death – as much as is still possible, that is, after two hundred years have elapsed, and when most of the manuscript sources have long since disappeared.

As the volume moved through the stages of the editing and publishing process, it proved to be a protean thing, changing shape several times: some texts originally included in the original list of contents were found not to belong in the volume after all; others were discovered or moved in from elsewhere along the way; and once or twice new manuscripts unexpectedly came to light, changing the tentative dating and identification of one or another of the texts. What began as a simple alphabetically ordered series of about 45 texts eventually took shape as a book in four sections (of uneven length) which covers the ground of all posthumous additions to Voltaire’s ‘alphabetical works’, usually under the title ‘Dictionnaire philosophique’, from 1784, through the nineteenth-century, right up to the present day, in the form of a fragment that has in fact never before been published at all.

The chain of editorial decision-making goes further back in time than one initially realises, however, starting with Voltaire’s own apparent intention to produce a compendium of excerpts from other people’s works. As Bertram Schwarzbach adumbrated in 1982, twenty-four of the texts in this volume (with a possible twenty-fifth), show Voltaire (or one of his secretaries, perhaps?) re-working existing writings by others in what sometimes strongly resembles current practices of copying and pasting, much as we move sentences and parts of sentences around using a word processor. This in no way suggests that Voltaire was guilty of plagiarism: to begin with, he did not publish these re-workings in his own lifetime; furthermore, the boundaries of editing, re-publishing and re-purposing in the late eighteenth century were different than they are today. But the fact that these manuscripts were found amongst Voltaire’s papers meant that his early editors believed them to be by him (with one exception, ‘Fanatisme’, which they recognised as an abridged version of Deleyre’s Encyclopédie article). Thus were these texts eventually published under Voltaire’s name in the Kehl edition, leading to a (partly) unintentional distortion of the Voltairean canon, perpetuated in all subsequent editions until the Oxford Œuvres complètes. Questions such as these are soon to be addressed more generally in a one-day conference: ‘Editorialités: Practices of editing and publishing’, and Marian Hobson has written elsewhere about the value of critical editions. It is in part thanks to modern-day editorial work that the editor-generated puzzles of over two centuries ago are now being unpicked: a neat illustration of just how much the role of editor has changed in that time.

– Gillian Pink