Re: Look out for that Bread Truck, Roland!
Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@geocities.com)
Sun, 13 Sep 1998 18:56:35 +1000
> 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.
Really? Within my university it tends to be seen as fact; as having passed
through
> 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.
Well, yes and no. This is what I meant when I was a little sceptical about
Lomanno's idea that the intention becomes irrelevant once the text has
reached the reader. To put it another way to how I put it there, it's sort
of like a seed with no DNA. Of course it's always there, powering things,
but the idea is not to know that. I guess the best writers are the ones who
give the least impression that there's a lot of mechanics going on under
the smooth skin of the story. Salinger's a master at this, when I first
read TCIR I thought it was so wonderfully random; yet now I know how
tightly structured it is in some ways. In the end, a writer is a human
being like the rest of us and it's a little utopian to assume that he or
she doesn't have an ego that they're going to inject in there somehow.
`There was never a confessional passage written that didn't stink a little
of the author's pride in having given up his pride' (or words to that
effect, S:AI (: )
> 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.
... or as Flaubert said, `The author should be like God in His Universe ...
everywhere present but nowhere seen'. Which true, is a fine idea, but like
most ideas, the most is achieved by striving towards it than actually
achieving it.
> 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.
As an author myself I initially had much difficulty coming to terms with
the idea of the death of the author. But as I became involved in writing
for the theatre I realised that once a text enters the public realm it
becomes something so much larger than I and my ideas. True, I would never
let a book go out there that I wrote without big big letters spelling out
my name on it (:,and a piece of writing that I wrote is marked out for good
as My work, that I planted the seed and designed the seed and so forth. But
I don't see it as death of the author so much as birth of the author as
another reader and interpreter of his or her own work within the larger
context of the Text, which for me is a really exciting, somewhat
egalitarian prospect.
> 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.
Well, as I've indicated, I don't think I agree with that totally. I don't
think anything can be all or nothing in something like this. But I do think
that the division between lisible and scriptible texts is more simple than
that: I simply see it again as a matter of intention. It's sort of like the
Mark Twain quote : a classic is a book that everyone praises but nobody
reads' That, to me is one manifestation of the writerly text. Another is
something like S:AI, which as Will pointed out, makes a lot of sense to
other writers - possibly more than it would to a reader who wasn't one. And
Salinger's recent writings would, I imagine, make little sense to anyone
but Salinger (: Certain texts are written as exercises for the writer and
some as exercises for the reader - I think the division is as simple as
that.
> > 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.
Good point. That's why I love being a writer. If you don't like something,
you simply change it (;
All of this summed up I guess means that yes, the author is still there.
But he/she pretends they aren't(:
Camille
verona_beach@geocities.com
@ THE ARTS HOLE
www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/6442
THE INVERTED FOREST
www.angelfire.com/pa/invertedforest