The fetishization of the writer's hand, of the authentic signature, of the autograph manuscript becomes the strongest consequence of the dematerialization of works whose identity lies in their author's creative inspiration, his way of linking ideas or expressing the feelings of his heart. The author's hand is now the guarantor of the work's authenticity, dispersed among the many books that distribute it to readers. It is the only material testimony to the writer's immaterial genius. When the autograph no longer exists, it has to be invented. Hence the proliferation of forgeries, the most spectacular of which was that of Shakespearian manuscripts by William Henry Ireland, who in 1795 exhibited several of the playwright's autograph texts in his father's London home: letters sent to his patron, the Earl of Southampton, his very Protestant Profession of Faith, and the original manuscripts of King Lear and two lost but fortunately rediscovered plays, Henry II and Vortigern and Rowena. Edmond Malone, Shakespeare's publisher and biographer, was the first to uncover the deception, comparing Ireland's forgeries with authentic documents, including "an unpublished facsimile of Shakespeare's handwriting". In the late 18th century, this also led to the creation of a market for literary manuscripts, whether in the hand of an author or a copyist, and to the development of collections of autograph signatures.
The strong link between autograph manuscripts and the authenticity of the work was internalized by certain writers who, before Flaubert or Hugo, became archivists of themselves. Such was the case with Rousseau, who kept his drafts of La Nouvelle Héloïse , four copies in his own hand and annotated copies of three editions, thus constituting a genetic file of several thousand pages. The same is true of Goethe, who was concerned with the preservation of his manuscripts, letters and collections, and entitled one of his essays "The Archive of the Poet and the Writer". In both cases, the concern for a complete edition of the works may have guided this concern for archives, but even more so an intense personal relationship with writing that does not detach writings, even published ones, from the hand of the writer.
The existence of literary archives composed by authors themselves has profound consequences for the very delimitation of "work". We know, for contemporary times, how Borges manipulated the canonical content of his work, excluding three books written between 1925 and 1928 (Inquisiciones, El tamaño de mi esperanza and El idioma de los Argentinos) and choosing with his publisher and translator, Jean-Pierre Bernés, the texts that were to constitute it, including reviews, chronicles and articles hitherto kept outside the boundaries of the Obras completas. We know, too, what discussions there are about the limits of Nietzsche's work, between the "proliferation" jokingly suggested by Foucault, going so far as to include in the work the indications of an appointment or an address, or a laundry note possibly found in a notebook of aphorisms, and the "rarefaction" proposed by Mazzino Montinari, excluding from the work his most famous book, The Will to Power, composed as such not by Nietzsche, but by his sister Elisabeth from notes, sketches and reflections left by her brother with no intention of turning them into a book.
