One rather banal observation suffices to suggest what is involved: the definitive text of a published or a publishable work is, with very few exceptions, the result of a process, that is, a progressive transformation, an investment of time that the author has devoted to researching documents, writing, correcting and recorrecting, etc. The literary work, closed in its perfected form and in a state of equilibrium that seems to be the immediate expression of its own internal necessity, nonetheless remains the mediated product of its own genesis.