Define "Author"

Reading: Pease’s “Author” from Critical Terms for Literary Study (1995)

Pease presents a stimulating, wide-ranging definition of the term, which is useful in the contention one can imagine stemming from it.  Bakhtin, with his theory of Dialogism, would not agree with Pease that “author” can signify “initiative”, “autonomy” or “originality”.  These notions of independence, self-sufficiency and a definable point of origin do not gel with Bakhtin's webbed view of literature.  Barthes would join in Bakhtin’s opposition to Pease, and argue that “author” cannot denote “authority”, or if it once did, this was an unpleasant and Essentialist dictatorship, and, accordingly, has been killed off.  Bayard, moreover, would deny the “initiative” part of Pease’s definition, as this implies a self-reliance that precludes active non-reading, if we take “author” to mean “author of a critical text”. 

As for the question Pease raises about whether the author-as-individual-subject is “self-determined” or a product of “material or historical circumstances”, I think it is reassuring to think that an individual is not simply a passive and written-on vessel.  But it is too Romantic to see the author as “self-determined” in an absolute and transcendent sense.  The idea that “material or historical circumstances” is the sole determinant suffers the same absolutist shortcoming.  It hints at Warner’s “cultural matrix” though, which is compelling. 

Can we not have a piece of every pie; part self-directed, part history and environment, part boundaries, part boundless all within the one author?  The pairs of opposite terms Pease presents us in which to couch the author do not have sufficiently gradations.  In terms of whether the author figure is a “source” or an “effect” of authority, I resist both extremes: the idea of an untrammeled point of origin, and the idea that the author is an arbitrary result.  

In regard to Pease’s acknowledgment of the Latin origins of the term “author”, I like “to grow” as an idea of the text growing out of the author who has grown out of his surroundings.  His experiences and influences; his personal and sensory environments.  I also like the etymological source “to tie”, in its evocation of the tying together or building in of multiple influences into a composite form.  I find “to act” also elicits a favourable response as it implies that human will is in there somewhere, and it hints at the climate of literary celebrity in which we are operating.

In terms of the history of the "author" that Pease traces, the concept of the “rule” of the auctor (a medieval figure of cultural authority) is disquieting.  It seems strange to use this word within a literary context, but I suppose less so in a medieval context.  “Rule” evokes literary dictatorship, which Barthes was rising up against.  No wonder, if the author is pictured in this light.  There is no longevity in an approach of authorial “rule”.  

In addition, the notion of the “genius”, in a world of their own, separate from culture and politics, something exceptional, preternatural, with absolute self-governance; this is a mythical construct!  The idea of producing one’s “own” work; this is such a complex possessive.  Can anything ever be “truly” one’s own, authentic self?  The author cannot be separate from culture.  Unless he never comes into contact with another human and is the single reader of his text.  

I find the postwar critics, who acknowledged “social, economic, political and gendered contexts”, more compelling than the New Critics’ “purely textual milieu”.  Humans are oriented within and negotiate these innumerable spheres of influence.  The idea of a “still-emergent social process” between the author and the critic is persuasive as it hints at an ongoing yet never fully realised unfolding of development and exchange.  Can we simply accept this idea of flux? 

Critical shmitical

Reading: Warner’s “Uncritical Reading” from Polemic: Critical or Uncritical (2004)

Warner persuasively problematises the academy’s unwillingness to embrace forms of reading other than “critical reading”: a hazy (mission-statement-esque) and thorny construct anyway.  (Sedgwick cites “paranoid suspicion” as the “dominant mode” on the critical landscape.)

I think we must question this anxiety in literary criticism to be too attached, which seems to stem from a view that getting too close might subsume our views to that of the text.  That it might hinder the forming of a parallel critical creation, a recolouring of a text, the coating of it in a publishable critical mindset. 

One danger of this is solipsistic distanciation, in the sense of the distant critic coming up with an answer to “solve” the text, and cherry picking bits of text that back up his ambitious rationale, and removing himself from so much content that might undercut his claim.  This could involve getting the text to bend to the pre-determined interpretation.  What comes first?  Perhaps it is naive of me to think that a text should precede interpretation.

Cavallo and Chartier’s idea of reading “through” a text is infinitely more appealing than distanciation, and it speaks to the insides of literature, which is surely where professors of literature want to be.  Yet perhaps this is more time-consuming and too “soft” because the inside of a text may be an overwhelming place where the critic is a subordinate, and might get stuck.  This place may not be as lofty or cutting edge as zipping around the outskirts of the text, so perhaps reading “through” a text is untenable in a manic competitive academic climate.

I affirm Warner’s argument that the academy needs to be open to types of reading other than "critical reading".  I do not think that what academics dub as uncritical reading practices (self-identification, immersion, daydream, sentimentality) are dead-ends in and of themselves.  I cannot believe that affect is solely a hindrance.  In any case, it can never be taken out of the equation entirely.  (Unless no reading takes place but rather, Bayard’s “active non-reading”, but that is taking distanciation to the extreme.)  Affect can stir a critical response.  Though I concede this may be the long route to critical reading; a circumlocution via affect.  Still, affect may inject particular force into one critical avenue.  What about consciously “loosing” oneself in the text?

(Affect is how I formed my essay idea, "the coming into discipline of the self", for the Brontës unit.  The disciplined self had been at the back of my mind since the outset of the course, when I reread Jane Eyre, and, in all of the uncritical ways of reading that we are advised against, such as self-identification, immersion and daydream, I found myself mapping and embedding my own character into that of Jane and of Charlotte.  I was captivated by, and flattered myself with identification with, the complex and enthralling disciplined self: small, pale and irregular, and yet a heroine, although I read this within a secular light.) 

I agree with Harold Bloom that the self should not be banished from the critical equation.  (We have to make do, in any case, with the fact that the self is compulsory; the critical self as reader-writer, if we sidestep Barthes, Derrida, Bayard and so many others for a minute.)  The self should simply be aware of the “cultural matrix” in which it is oriented, and of the ethical frame in which it has been inculcated.  Like Warner, I affirm Mahmood’s point that the ethical informs the critical.  Just as the self informs the critical, the ethical informs the self.  Warner makes the excellent point that we need to explore these other territories we currently see as uncritical.

Vanessa Smith mentioned in a Brontës seminar that there has been an “ethical turn” in recent criticism.  She said that some critics make judgments about characters as if they were people.  I think, moreover, that we should not see the critic as a “character”.  We should not see the critic as one character, as the critic, constituted by a hazy across-the-board negative potential, but in terms of the indefinite article?  One critic is not the same as another critic.  This is not so as to elevate the ego of the critic as persona-individual, but perhaps as part of a plural “critic-function”, which is getting to what Foucault talks about in “What Is an Author”.  

Active non-reading

Reading: Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (2007)

To side-step the pleasingly tongue-in-cheek, the assuaging and the pragmatic allure of Bayard's proposal, and to cut straight to his thesis and my response, and perhaps to get overly serious--  


I can't affirm this provocative argument that "specialists" (that-is-to-say lecturers, advocates of literature) should renounce reading for active non-reading.  Bayard's concept is that by skimming “books about books”, perusing catalogues and glancing at back-covers, instead of reading individual books, these specialists develop a "cultural orientation" that speaks to the heart of the matter, in his esteem, which is the "relations between books", demonstrating a "love" of the totality of literature.

It is ironic that these "specialists" cannot come up with much probingly specific content within this frame.  Rather, they have an impressive faculty to feign (or hit accurately upon) the specific via a cultural compass that is so finely tuned as to be able to “deeply” place a book on a quick and surface encounter with it.  This is disquieting if remarkable: the priming of the mind to become a sort of catalogue.  Although it is good to maintain perspective, Bayard’s active non-reading, adopted single-mindedly, appears performative, illusory and sterile.  What is there beneath this elegant cultural soliloquising?  What new light can the active non-reader shed on a text?  Active non-reading is surely hollow, reductive to a bigger and greedier picture, and self-involved.  

A valuation of Bayard’s approach depends on the purpose an individual has with regard to books.  If theirs is the goal of mastery within the intellectual and literary sphere, or the appearance of this, then I concede that his is appealing.  However, the naïve student cannot remain quiet about the glaring lack that is evident in all this.  The emphasis on the "system" of ideas is missing all the delicious minutiae.  Minutiae are condemned as something that can be "drowned" in, but this drowning does not need to be negative.  What about Cavallo and Chartier’s espousal of probingly “through” a text?  Surely an academic can devote themselves to pouring over an assortment of the canonical texts within their area, and temper this with some non-reading on the side, and be enriched and stimulated with this combination?  Why does Bayard place active non-reading in such a position of replacement and dominance? 

Bayard’s active non-reading does not spend the time and effort required to enter into the text in an attitude of open interpretation that, if attempted, yields rich results and may reward the reader with surprise.  Bayard does not give due merit to surprise, uniqueness or closeness and infinite possibility of the connection between the interpreter and the text.  

Reading

Reading: O’Brien’s The Browser’s Ecstasy: A Meditation on Reading (2000)

O’Brien posits winningly that the child reader intermingles the personal, the imaginary and the sensory.  I find this compelling as it alludes to the difficulty of containing the experience of reading.  This draws me to consider the child writer as well as reader.  Here, Briony Tallis in McEwan’s Atonement is a case in point.  Briony’s disbanded boundaries between the imaginary, the personal and the sensory are significant (dangerous actually) because her desire for an extraordinary adult secret to catapult her to literary celebrity plays out in all of these frames.  Briony knows that she has no secrets.  When she sees the “scene” between Robbie and Cecelia by the fountain, and the “tableau” of Robbie and Cecilia in the library, she projects onto these her deepest impressions of the mysteries of adult emotions, which will elevate her writing to another level, without regard for the meanings of “real” and “fantastic”.  In this fused mass, the child writer places herself at “centre stage”, and other people become characters, and her word is final.

In O’Brien’s exclusion of adults in this dissolving of the boundaries between the personal, the sensory and the text, perhaps this is because adults’ personal and sensory environments, more vast than that of the child, stretch beyond the text at hand, and are unlikely to be consumed by it.  Or because the seasoned adult reader may employ protective mechanisms and diversionary faculties to distance himself from the text.  

In his third point, I see what O'Brien means about looking for something being an integral part of reading.  This sense of “a unique and specific correspondence” that is, in readers’ minds, especially designed for them, permeates the experience of reading.  A good book absorbs readers into it such that they feel an “uncanny” connection.  Readers are looking for something that links to themselves.  They are eager to find something out about themselves. 

In regard to O’Brien’s final meditation about browsing bliss, with its freedom, feast and escape, I felt all of these things when I read his work.  The words dripped with the possibility, craft and pleasure of reading.  O’Brien’s comment, “I eavesdrop on the murmur of overlapping conversations.  It’s almost as if the books read each other”, testifies to the rich and dialogic nature of literature, and hints that books browse and converse with each other, and reading provides an ‘in’ to this conversation.  However, as O’Brien explicates, browsing necessarily entails lack: “the gaps”.  It is like eating too quickly.