Is the author really dead?

Roland Barthes’ theory on the nullification of the author is based on his belief that literature has come to be “tyrannically centered on the author”. I don’t believe this is necessarily so, for several reasons.

I think part of the obsession with authors is, as was mentioned in the tutorial, the desire to ‘understand’ the person behind text with which one feels a strong affinity. When I read, I find it nearly impossible to not imagine the individual writing the words I am reading, and imagine their thought process, their The author therefore, for me, is an integral part of my reading process, a fictitious character I create that undeniably adds a more tangible human significance to the words on the page. This occurs whenever a text has a profound impact on me—whether positive or negative—and I feel a deep urge to connect in the extra-textual realm with the creator.

The importance of the ‘author’ as a concept is also, as Foucault argues, to do with grouping together a set of texts, styles or ideas under one name. An author’s name, when used adjectivally, can act as a point of reference for future literary texts, and can pithily describing the tone, style or plot of work that is similar to the original in one way or another. But when is an author so significant that they turn from a proper noun into an adjective? I think it is to do with creating something truly groundbreaking and original within a text, whether it be an idea, an use of speech or whatever, which becomes so widespread as to be forever attributed to a single individual, and all future texts which attempt to explore similar modes of expression forced to concede to the weight of their predecessors—what Pease calls a “cohesive cultural realm.” Barthes argues that such originality is impossible, what with all writing being merely a mash-up of already existing words and ideas, but it is when an individual manages to do so, and create something truly remarkable as the end product that true originality, or at least as much originality as we humans are capable of, is achieved.

What ­­­ Pease says is also true- that the author is crucial in the process of literary analysis and criticism, as when critiquing a work, one is simultaneously critiquing the author, or at least the author’s decision-making process in creating the text. The two simply cannot be disassociated from each other. By ascribing it an author, therefore, a text is given more weight and meaning, in a sense that would be impossible if it were just floating around in the void without an owner.

As Herrnstein Smith argues, the author’s evaluative practice of deciding what words, rhymes and structures to use in their texts is just as much a part of literary criticism as are external critiques. Where the problem with authors does lie, as Barthes argues, is when people start expounding a belief in some kind of objective truth regarding a text, in terms of what the text is ‘saying’ or what certain things ‘mean’ or ‘represent’. I think here, indeed, the existence of an author is stifling and severely limiting to one’s ability to engage with and, ultimately, enjoy a text. This is particularly the case with poetry, when the beauty of the sounds and rhythms is so often ignored in favour of analyzing the autobiographical references in the stanzas. I do not believe that all literature is ‘tyrannically centered on the author,’ however I do believe that the role of the author fulfils certain crucial functions in the process of not just literary criticism, but textual engagement and enjoyment.  

Barbara Herrnstein Smith, “Contingencies of Value”

In her essay “Contingencies of value, Herrnstein Smith investigates the things upon which our ability to evaluate texts are contingent, and concludes that we must be concerned, or at least be aware of, the agent and the time in which it is being evaluated. She outlines the tension between the desire to achieve an objective neutralism and emotive evaluations, which have come to be looked upon as something of a dirty word in literary criticism since the 20^th century. However, she asserts that evaluative judgment continues to be practiced, but in disguised forms, for example every time a text is published, included in an anthology, or in a series of ‘classics’, as we have seen in recent years with the “Popular Penguins”. Her article really got me thinking as to whether it is really no longer appropriate to simply come out with an instinctive feeling of love or hatred for a text. In tutorials, such statements are always qualified with close textual analysis (if we are game enough to make them in the first place), achieving some kind of middle ground between the two conflicting methods of literary criticism. It struck me that there is an element of arbitrariness about why we value texts—if a text, when it is written, is popular, it becomes more widely printed, more people read it, and thus becomes representative of a particular historical literary style, for example, a task that may have been fulfilled by any number of other contemporary texts.  This can be taken further when some texts are revered purely because of their ability to endure, as some kind of  ‘historical relic’ (49) thus blurring the literary and historical disciplines. This point lead me to consider Margaret Cavendish’s seventeenth century romances which, while they are generally regarded as lacking in any modern idea of literary merit, nonetheless continue to be studied and revered for their historical significance and their overall rarity, factors which are entirely external to the text itself. 

The article also raises the very general question of what prevents a book from going out of fashion- is literary genius merely holding the key to universality of style and subject matter, in order to make it a relevant text throughout generations? The issue of trans-generational relevance of texts interests me greatly- the question of what makes a text timeless. Smith suggests the reason is that the texts are a product of “a series of continuous interactions among a variably constituted object, emergent conditions, and mechanisms of cultural selection and transmission”. (47) Which translates, I think, into ordinary speak as the fact that the same texts may remain relevant over many years within many different contexts due to various shifting external factors that result in a text maintaining cultural relevance for different reasons. The various formal ‘properties’ of a text are in fact externally determined, or at least given meaning to, and as such constantly shift with historical change. In many ways I feel that this links to the discussion of the death of the author, as it places far more importance on the audience of a novel than on the original intentions of the author, despite the fact that it may have been the intentional value decisions made by the author in the first place which have instigated its initial value, such as word selection, thematic choices etc. This has presented a significant challenge to how I have always felt about ‘classic’ texts, in that I always believed that such enduring work possessed some kind of superior universality than its less-remembered peers. The thought that Wuthering Heights could suddenly disappear from reading lists due to cultural changes in modern society seems both alarming and highly unlikely to me—what is more likely is, as Herrnstein Smith suggests, the society “makes texts timeless by suppressing their temporality” (50), by finding new ways to identify with the same texts in new contexts. What with humanity’s wonderful ability to manipulate anything into a desirable form if they so choose, I think Wuthering Heights will be safe for awhile yet.

Source:
Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value- Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory (Harvard University press: Cambridge, Massachusetts,1998) 

How to talk about books you haven't read

I really love that this article is in this course because, as a lover of literature, it really has made me question the source of this ‘profound anguish’ that I, like any person with in an interest or exposure to learning, constantly suffer when contemplating the sheer number of the books I will never read. It is a cruel irony that the more knowledge one obtains merely works to reveal to them how little they in fact know (was that Einstein?). This need for a ‘consolation’ of inadequate reading suggests that there is something inherent in literature that inspires anxiety in a way that other artistic mediums, such as visual art and film, don’t seem to—I would never fret about having not seen the Mona Lisa in the same way I do about my inability to finish Ulysses. This leads one to conclude that there must be a more significant social weight or value placed on the literary canon as a marker of one’s cultural sophistication.

Bayard attempts to diffuse this anxiety by asserting that the distance between reading and non-reading is far larger and more graduated than we like to think, thus complicating our perception of what it means to have 'read' or 'not read' something. This idea is explored somewhat in The Browser’s Ecstasy, which demonstrates a revolutionary way of reading- that is, getting brief glimpses of what may or may not be the essence of a book, and gaining pleasure or meaning from such a practice. This flouts the second rule of reading as expounded by Bayard: “the obligation to read thoroughly”. His discussion of skimming versus reading a book in its entirety raises questions of reading practice, in that there is actually more than one way of reading, and also makes us question what we expect or require from our reading practice.

All of this makes me question where the value really lies in books and reading. Is it just in talking about them, in which case one only needs to know, as Bayard suggests, its relation to other books in the literary canon? It is here that his argument (which I am inclined to belief is purposefully antagonistic), falls down, as it almost entirely ignores the possibility that a book’s actual worth lies in the pleasure of reading it, regardless of whatever social or cultural capital it may also possess. The second major flaw in his argument is that, while he is certainly correct in his belief that all one needs to know about a text is its place in the literary canon, (I myself having comfortably participated in several tutorials on Ulysses despite never having made it past the first page), such an argument is highly problematic, as it first of all requires that at least someone has read the book, in order to tell others about it, and that any knowledge or discussion of these books is limited to existing literary criticism; by not reading a book, your opinion of it and its canonical significance can never go beyond mainstream opinion, thus stagnating literary debate forever. It denies the possibility that there may be new ideas and new values to be found in one’s own reading of a text, and that future generations may have refreshing new views on old texts. Bayard does admit this fact himself, however finds the most significant flaw to be that it such dependence on others’ views makes it hard to achieve specificity in your discussions. But is being able to discuss a text ‘accurately’ sufficient? While Bayard certainly makes some valid and interesting points, I feel that the purpose is more to make us reassess our feelings towards the literary canon, and reading in general, rather than actually encourage us to give up reading entirely. As a reviewer in the Boston Globe stated, "I suspect Bayard may be winking at us all along". 

Faulkner's screenplay

I read the screenplay before I the short story, and felt that it would have been better to do it the other way around, as there were things in the screenplay that I didn’t immediately pick up on until they were clarified in the short story- namely, the ‘beaver’ game played by Claude and Ronnie throughout both texts, and the nature of Ronnie and Claude’s job in the navy. After reading the short story, I realized that this was largely due to the different forms and purposes of the texts; in order to get a fully formed understanding of the plot when reading a screenplay, you must take into account other elements than just the dialogue. You must be able to incorporate the stage directions into your understanding of the plot and character development, and constantly imagine yourself seeing it on screen at the same time as reading the words on the page. In a sense, a screenplay is only a tiny part of the final artwork, while the story is created as a whole, with no possibility for additions to be made, or further meaning applied through visual codes and film techniques. Themes and motifs are more wholly articulated, resulting in the whole thing appearing far more holistic and complete. There is a satisfaction in reading a novel or a short story that is not present when reading a screenplay, which is disjointed, awkward and somehow hollow.

                                   Gary Cooper and Joan Crawford in Today We Live (1933)

One of the most interesting aspects of reading these texts was the significant changes that occurred in the transition from story to screenplay. The inclusion of the female character Anne, in order to facilitate a romantic subplot (which in the end actually ends up being the focus of the entire plot) is a clear example of the requirements of mainstream Hollywood. It also draws attention to the purpose for which each text has been created; a short story is designed and almost expected to challenge, shock and engage the reader, whereas from a Hollywood film, one expects escapism, mindless entertainment and an overall confirmation of humanity’s essential goodness (through the inclusion of love, forgiveness and Ronnie and Claude’s sacrifice of themselves so that Bogard may live to marry Anne). In an article about Faulkner’s time in Hollywood I read that he was told by Hawks, the director of the film, “the first thing I want is a story, the second thing I want is a character”. I think this difference in value between the literary and cinematic worlds is absolutely clear as one sees Ronnie’s gruff, enigmatic character is diluted to an almost featureless background figure, and Claude’s heartbreakingly endearing kindness is transformed into an almost grotesquely British caricature, in order for a mainstream American audience to understand them on film. The cultural divide is also a significant issue at play in the transformation, as the natural dialogue of the story is replaced with overly minimalist  speech, to convey a ‘clipped’ British accent. It is very easy to be disillusioned by the value judgments of Hollywood that undeniably come across in examining this transformation. I feel that Faulkner himself aptly described this sentiment, in his Nobel Prize winning speech from 1949:

“A few years ago I was taken on as a script writer at a a Hollywood studio, At once I bean to hear the man in charge talking of ‘angles,’ ‘story angles’, and then I realized that they were not even interested in truth, the old universal truths of love and honour and pride and pity and compassion and sacrifice.”

Sources:

Bruce Kawin, Faulkner and Film, (New York: F C Ungar, 1977)

Faulkner's MGM screenplays edited with an introduction and commentaries by Bruce F. Kawin, (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982)