Annotating the Imagination

Abstract

The editing of an author’s drafts of a novel or a story is itself a form of annotation, less obviously so than explanatory notes on literary allusions or geographical and historical references but just as important for tracing the paths followed by the author’s imagination in creating the fiction. The occasional direct annotations necessary to mark a doubtful manuscript reading are only the surface indications of a continual process of decision, for readings of semi-legible words are often interpretations dependent on the reader’s sense of the author’s imagination — imagination rather than style because the style of the finished work usually results from the author’s revision and polishing of an initial way of seeing. The thing described or the idea indicated in the drafts may be fully present in the imagination before it is fully expressed and styled in the way most fitting to the author’s intentions for the work as a whole. Or an idea may be less well-imagined, and the process of polishing may bring a subtly different idea into expression. In either case there is no guarantee that the word one might expect to see in a finished work is the word that appears in the draft, though one’s expectations may lead one to see it.