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?