Look out for that Bread Truck, Roland!

Matt Kozusko (mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu)
Sat, 12 Sep 1998 13:51:36 -0400

There's a reply to Lommano below, but first:

All theorizing aside, western culture isn't really prepared for the
death of the author.  I certainly am not, and I don't think anybody I
know is.  Giving up the author means giving up a whole lot more than
biographical readings of texts and the idea that the author meant his
text to mean something.  Foucault touches on this when he notes that the
dead author tends to be replaced with an "author function."  Whether we
ascribe meaning to the author's intentions or to Reason, science and law
("God and his hypostases") is no matter; an author is more that just an
individual who writes literature; it's any source of meaning, any
meta-entity used to confine the old freeplay of the signifier.  To kill
the author, you need to do a lot more than the theoryhead undergrad who
blithely dispenses with Charlotte Bronte on his way to his Victorian
Novel class.  

The figure of the author, now deceased or deceasing, starts with the
creation of the individual in the west.  Barthes associates this moment
(or moments) with "English  empiricism, French rationalism, and the
personal faith of the reformation"--these are the movements that took
note of the importance of the individual and the individual opinion. 
People can think and have their own ideas...they can synthesize
empiracle data in an objective fashion without the mediation of some
qualified figure like a priest or a parent, and thus they are
individuals.  Thus, also, they can be writers.  They can have something
to say.  They can mean something.  This is the basis not only of
capitalism, but most western thinking since the late Middle Ages and
especially since the Enlightenment.

Are we really ready to give this up?  The death of the author imports
the death of the individual, ultimately, and we're not ready to do
that.  Sure, Barthes distinguishes between utterances "intended" (the
paradox continues) to affect reality and utterances "narrated" no longer
with that intention--that is, he recognizes that certain modes of
speaking and writing *do* have intentions, such as perhaps me saying
"hand me that copy of _Sarrasine_ over there," or "look out for that
copy of Sarrsine that's about to land on your head," which both aim to
alter the physical relationship of the contents of the immediate space,
but that "literature" especially isn't designed to act **directly** on
reality.  Sure, Barthes distinguishes between the two.  But to unravel
the thread of the author is to tear loose the thread of the individual. 
A lot of people think this is a good, desirable thing to do.  But people
don't generally think about what they're getting into.

Barthes himself notes the distinction between "lisible" (or "readerly")
texts and "scriptible" (or "writerly") texts.  The author is dead, as it
were, but some authors are more dead than others.  This is a sign that
we aren't quite ready to recognize any corpses.  It quickly becomes an
all-or-nothing kind of gesture.  Poststructuralsim (post Barthes-ism??)
seems to recognize the full range of implications in the death of the
author, finishing what Barthes started to say.        

> My main question here is, where does that leave Salinger's unread
> manuscripts? Can a text truly be "written" if no one is around to read
> it (kind of a spin on the tree-falling-in-the-woods question)? 

Okay, but isn't the author a reader, too, just once, as he writes the
story?  Scriptor and reader at once?  A text's unity lies not in its
origin, but in its destination....but origin and destination are one and
the same, that only time.  
 

-- 
Matt Kozusko    mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu