review

Dirk Van Hulle, Genetic Criticism: Tracing creativity in literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.

Genetic criticism (critique genetique) emerged from the practice of publishing texts of modern fiction in France in the 1970s. At the international conference Avant-texte, texte, aprè-texte, held in Mátrafüred in 1978, the most important French representatives of genetic criticism (Louis Hay, Jean Bellemin-Noël, Raymonde Debray-Genette, Almut Gressillon, and Jean Lebrave) gave lectures alongside the Hungarian participants. The proceedings of the conference were published in French by Édition du CNRS and Akadémiai Kiadó in 1982, edited by Loius Hay and Péter Nagy.[1] This direct contact may have been one of the reasons why the reception of genetic criticism in Hungarian literary studies was relatively lively from the early 1980s, in contrast with the “lukewarm reception” of Anglo-American criticism, as Van Hulle discusses in his book (19–24.). In the decades that followed, Helikon: Irodalomtudományi Figyelő [Helikon: Literary Review] and other journals regularly published selections from important essays in genetic criticism. Elements of genetic criticism as a method of scholarly text editing have also appeared in the practice of textual criticism in Hungarian critical editions.[2] The Textological Committee of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences discusses genetic edition as a special type of edition in its Alapelvek az irodalmi szövegek tudományos kiadásához [Principles for the scholarly edition of literary texts]. Despite this, not many genetic editions have appeared in print in Hungary, the principles of genetic criticism are now increasingly being applied to digital scholarly editions.[3]

The latest trends in genetic criticism and their impact on Hungarian textological practice were presented in the thematic issue of Helikon in 2021, edited by Attila Buda and Ágnes Major, where Hungarian readers may have encountered the name of Dirk Van Hulle, professor at the University of Oxford and director of the Centre for Manuscript Genetics at the University of Antwerp, and co-director of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (www.beckettarchive.org). Van Hulle’s book, published in 2022, is called Genetic criticism: Tracing creativity in literature. The title itself emphasises that the task of textual science is not only to produce texts, to transcribe manuscripts accurately, or to produce notes, but also to examine how human creativity is reflected in these written works, and what interpretative experiences can be derived from the study of the genesis of texts. The author makes it clear in the Introduction that genetic criticism is not only a scientific method but also a reading strategy. As he notes, “knowing how something was made can help us understand how and why it works” (xix). Genetic criticism as a reading strategy brings out two dimensions of literature: the unfolding of the author’s creativity, i.e. the temporal dimension, and the material dimension of the traces of the writing process as a cognitive process. The latter involves the archival research of a variety of documents, which is combined with such “concrete, transferable skills” (xx) as transcription methods and digital scholarly editing. It also raises some important theoretical issues, e.g. authorship as collaboration between the actors in the creation of a literary work, authority, authorial intention, or intertextuality. These theoretical issues are discussed in detail in Chapter 4 (Strategies of Reading). The book is divided into two major parts, Genetic and Criticism, in which the author introduces the reader to the details of these fields of study with the help of many illustrative examples.

In the first part, Van Hulle provides a general introduction to genetic criticism, outlining the historical framework and the related disciplines (bibliography, book history, philology, and scholarly editing), as well as describing certain key concepts (e.g. genetic map, endogenesis, exogenesis, epigenesis), and the “lukewarm reception” of the movement in the context of Anglo-American criticism. Next, he explains how a virtual genetic dossier is compiled and what it contains and introduces the reader to further basic concepts. Van Hulle also describes the different types of archives and genetic documents that are the subject of the research. A “horizontal” description of the different types of documents is followed by a “vertical” description of the field. Using the example of one of Samuel Beckett’s plays (Krapp’s Last Tape), Van Hulle demonstrates the method of analysing the contents of a genetic dossier, establishing the absolute chronology of documents and the relative chronology of textual versions. The question of chronology belongs to the temporal dimension of genetic criticism, while the distinction between document and version, and the discussion of transcription, digital facsimile, intradocument and interdocument variants, is concerned with its material dimension.

The second part of the book discusses the critical and theoretical issues raised by the practical application of genetic criticism. Van Hulle introduces the notion of the ecology of writing as a metaphor and model to illustrate the dynamics of writing. As he writes: “I would like to use the metaphor of ‘ecology’—in the broad sense of the interactions among organisms and their environment, and more specifically, in this context, a continuous interplay between the author as an intelligent agent and various other agents, objects, and cultural phenomena in their environment—as a ‘model of’, rather than ‘model for’, genetic criticism” (76.). One of Van Hulle’s particular research fields is the study of writers’ real and virtual libraries, the marginalia and other extracts in books that show how writers relate to other writers’ works, which is also discussed in this book.

The key question in the next chapter (3.2 The ecology of document) is how the social and physical environments affect the writing process. In other words, how the use of different analogue (pencil, pen, typewriter, etc.) and digital tools (e.g. speech recognition) influences the production of text. Following McKenzi’s notion of the sociology of text, Van Hulle develops the concept of the sociology of writing to illustrate how the writer interacts with others (peers, confidants, friends who read the manuscript, editors, typists, censors, literary critics, readers, etc.) in the process of creating a work, and how this affects the development of the work. The study of collaborative moments in the production of literature also broadens the horizon of genetic criticism, which has traditionally focused on the pre-print phase, the so-called avant-texte. However, the study of the sociology of writing also includes agents who become involved in the collaboration after the manuscript has been produced (such as the editor, the censor, or the critic), and who influence the development of the text during or after printing. This analysis already belongs to the epigenetic dimension of text development. Also broadening the earlier research focus is the study of concurrent writing processes, analysing how a writer’s concurrent writing projects can influence each other.

Chapter 4 discusses the theoretical issues raised by the study of the literary work using the method of genetic criticism. In other words, how does genetic criticism read a work that exists in different versions? On the one hand, Van Hulle examines the possibilities of reading authorial interventions in manuscripts, above all cancelations as traces. On the other hand, he demonstrates how traces in a manuscript can help reveal what the author read, or more specifically, what literary works can be proven to have influenced the creation of a work. In discussing the reading of traces, Van Hulle also deals with the crucial issue of authorial intention and argues convincingly that the study of ‘authorial intention’ in genetic criticism is different from the reading of literary works in literary studies in general: “the key question is not so much what the artist wanted to convey or intended to mean, but also and especially what the artist did and intended to do. Likewise, remit of genetic criticism is to investigate not so much what the writer intended to mean, but what they did, undid or intended to do (the intention to write a sequence of characters or words)” (127.). The analysis of the traces of reading leads to the question of intertextuality. Van Hulle combines the French concept of intertextuality with Jerome Mc Gann’s “textual condition” and introduces the term “intertextual condition” through the example of James Joyce’s Finnigan Wake. The purpose of genetic criticism as a reading strategy is to determine the “genetic code” of a work by revealing the invisible intertextual connections between the external source texts that influence the genesis of the work.

In Chapter 4, the author uses concepts with exemplary precision, defines the scope of similar concepts (intertextuality, exogenesis, source criticism, etc.), and correctly recognizes the theoretical challenges of contemporary literary studies. As with ‘authorial intention,’ the concept of ‘authorial mind’ requires careful definition. Van Hulle goes beyond the Cartesian thesis that separates mind and matter and assumes that consciousness consists of the relationship between the organism and its environment. He claims following Edwin B. Holt: “This model can be usefully applied to the situation of a writer at work: what Holt calls the relation between the organism and its environment corresponds to the relation between the writer and their material environment” (147.). In the next part of the chapter, Van Hulle explores and answers the question how the cognitive process underlying the writing process can be reconstructed by examining the surviving material traces of writing. Finally, he outlines a genetic narratology based on the notions of structuralist narratology, which, by paying attention to the contextual dimensions of the text, moves towards postclassical narratologies.

While Chapter 4 focused on clarifying certain theoretical issues, Chapter 5 concentrates on practical matters while also raising conceptual problems relevant to genetic criticism or textual studies in general. This section widens the field of investigation from single text (avant-texte, text) to the Complete Works Edition and does so in the context of the analogue–digital medium shift, exploring the potential of digital scholarly editing and text analysis. At the same time, it does not lose sight of the fundamental question of what it means, from the point of view of the examination of the oeuvre, if an edition starts from the published works (the teleological approach) or aims to present the writing process that can be read from the various versions (the dysteleological approach). The practical part of this chapter, to some extent building on the concepts discussed earlier, describes how the genetic Complete Works Edition in a digital environment can be modelled along four different axes (digital archive and digital edition; endogeneis, exogenesis, epigenesis; nano-, micro-, macro-, megageneis; teleology and dysteleology), and how digital tools can be used to support a dysteleological approach, which is the organizing principle for genetic editions. Accordingly, a subsection is devoted to the new possibilities offered by the computer, namely “distant reading” at different linguistic levels (nano, micro, macro, and megagenesis), as introduced by Franco Moretti.

A genetic critical approach to born-digital literature has important practical and theoretical implications. Van Hulle does not accept the idea that the manuscript in the traditional sense of the word has disappeared in the era of born-digital literature. In his opinion, thanks to digital forensic tools and different keystroke-logging software, the writing process can be examined in the case of literary works produced on computers after the 2000s. Van Hulle also points out that digital documents, unlike analogue manuscripts, are immaterial, no longer physically but logically defined. Although compared to the analogue writing process, the new medium provides the researcher with a significantly larger and less structured set of data and also poses a challenge for textual criticism, as Van Hulle concludes, “the new medium creates new opportunities” (202.). In addition, he considers the development of the dynamic facsimile, a filmic representation of the writing process, a new opportunity for digital scholarly editing: “By analogy with the notion of a (static) digital facsimile in a parallel presentation of scan plus transcription in scholarly editions of analogue writing processes, it seems appropriate to call the writing footage a ‘dynamic facsimile’ because it tries to ‘do like’ (fac simile) what happens in the digital document” (202.).

In the Introduction, Van Hulle sets out two aims for his book on genetic criticism: “it presents new discoveries in genetic criticism and simultaneously introduces Anglophone audiences and a new generation of literary critics to this field of study” (xx). He not only summarises the concepts and methods of genetic criticism, which originated in France, but also extends its traditional framework: he takes on the task of analysing printed versions of the text in addition to the manuscript, as well as the genesis of the entire oeuvre, looking beyond the individual works. It is important to note that Van Hulle discusses the practical and theoretical issues of genetic criticism in the context of the analogue vs. digital medium shift. In his book, Van Hulle discusses both the works of the classical authors of genetic criticism (e.g. Louis Hay, Raymonde Debrey-Genette, Pierre-Marc de Biasi) as well as recent literature. Above all, he updates the theoretical basis of genetic criticism with the theses of Anglo-American literary theories. This is more than a gesture to the Anglophone audiences, it is a major theoretical innovation in a field that is no longer exclusively French. Thanks to this, the Hungarian researchers who are already familiar with French genetic criticism will find many novelties, and importantly, many illustrative literary examples in this excellent book.

[1] Louis Hay and Nagy Péter, eds., Avant-texte, texte, après-texte: publ. par Louis Hay. Colloque International de Textologie a Mátrafuered (Hongrie), 13–16. Oct. 1978 (Paris: Éd. du CNRS, Akadémiai Kiadó, 1982).

[2] Cf. Mateusz Antoniuk et al., “Eastern European Traditions: Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Slovak, and Ukrainian Literary Drafts”, in A Comparative History of the Literary Draft in Europe, eds. Olga Beloborodova and Dirk Van Hulle, Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages, 127–140 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2024), 137, https://doi.org/10.1075/chlel.35.09ant.

[3] Cf. “The process of realising such editions is, as we know, fully predicated on the digital medium: the type of genetic edition striven for today is the digital genetic edition.” Hans Walter Gabler, “The Draft Manuscript as Material Foundation for Genetic Editing and Genetic Criticism”, in Hans Walter Gabler, Text Genetics in Literary Modernism and Other Essays (Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2018), 209–219, 211.

The study was completed with the support of the National Research, Development
and Innovation Office (NKFIH), as part of the Babits Mihály verseinek és
műfordításainak kritikai kiadása [Critical Edition of the Poems and Literary
Translations of Mihály Babits] project, ID number K 138529.