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A SHORT ABSENCE OF THE AUTHOR (PRELIMINARY VERSION)

DAVID REITTER & KATJA SCHMOZ, UNIVERSITY OF POTSDAM, GERMANY

1. Brief History of the Author Role The concept of author and his relationship to his text and its readers (authorship) have undergone a signicant shift during time. The antique tended to envisage the arts more as copying than creating. In the Middle Ages, artists (in music, painting, writing) aimed at glorifying the creation and its creator, God. Authorship was closely linked to authority and a term reserved for a few recognized authors. Medieval writers aimed at re-interpreting the real world in the categories and structures dened by the ancient auctores. As [Pease 1995] states, ... every discipline in the trivium has auctores (Cicero in rhetorics, Aristotle in dialectics, the ancient poets in grammar), others were tied to the disciplines of the quadrivium. (Cf. [Minnis 1984]). The ancient authors were the only ones who could claim to achieve works that can be called original. Speaking in terms of (post-)modern criticism, writers did not yet reach a state of being subject in the texts. The late 15th century brought a notable change in the concept of authorship: Ancient authors eventually lost their monopoly position in on the authority market. [Pease 1995] has a plausible explanation for the new position of the authors: The discovery of the New World brought two essential phenomena that kicked o the change. Regularly, news from America were brought to Europe; news, that the linguistic repertoire (lexicon) and the structures of reasoning of the ancient auctores could not account for. Consequently, the sources of those news formed a new form of author, independent of ancient writings. Even more than Columbus discovery, another event destabilized the inherited cultural structures. In 1452, printing was invented. Low and middle class people learnt to read and write. Cultural authority was taken from the clergy and the monarchs. Luthers Reformation, started in early 16th century, supported the ongoing sociocultural revolutions. The new authors were free, free from cultural determination. Writing became a creative process, that [Pease 1995] links closely to the Gods work. Pease calls this new type of author genius. [?] and others incorporate the Author-Creator idea in their frameworks regarding later eras. While earlier writers merely reinterpreted their world in terms of ancient auctores, the new authors eventually created new imaginary (ideal) worlds, paving the way for revolutions. In the 18th century, another gure began to play a role in authoring. The new player, originally, was not meant to inuence the authors work being a subject. But eventually, the literary critic did so. Criticism and discourse became a determining factor in Barthes and Foucaults theories. Todays view of the author-text relationship emerged only slowly. While authors are, depending on the specic theory, seen as subject or mere gure, their texts are analyzed as non-linear works derived from multiple inuental sources. [Burke 1992]:
Date: November 2001 . Term paper in Post-Modern Short Stories, Prof. Renate Brosch, University of Potsdam, 2001.
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DAVID REITTER & KATJA SCHMOZ, UNIVERSITY OF POTSDAM, GERMANY

We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single theological meaning (the message of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. 2. Who is speaking? 2.1. What is an author? In his essay The Order of Things, Michael Foucault outlines a reinterpretation of the meaning of the term author. An author, he says, is a person who produces text, a book or, generally, a work. However, says Foucault, one can also be the author of a theory, a tradition or discipline in which other participants of discourse will in their turn nd a place. All new texts will be attributed to the original framework by these fundamental authors. Foucault calls their position transdiscursive. Homer, Aristotle played this role, and many others can be attributed to the origin of cultural paradigms, most obviously Marx, Freud. Having produced the possibilities and the rules for the formation of other texts, they became founders of discursivity.1 Jacques Derrida gives reasons for a strong position of the author within the process of cultural discourse. He sees the author as cause, source, master of text. Derrida entitles him as the transcendental signied, meaning the author being an essence which is created by text (as collection of signs) and gaining a (transcendental) quality which goes beyond material or personal existence of a mere human being (a writer). The author, according to Derrida, is beginning and end of his text. 2.2. Criticism is close to theology. Criticism, or simply: reading is an approach to learn about the creator (author). Notably, the development of the authors status can be linked to the role of God in cultural discourse. Nietzsche declared God dead and saw western morale as decadent. The death of God nally leads to the assumption of determinism and denial of human responsibility: A fatalistic assumption that occurs later in postmodern works, such as in the drama of Heiner Mller or Samuel Beckett. u 2.3. The role of the author in post-modern theory. In the following, we will elaborate on a discussion that took place from the 1960s on between Paris-based critics and philosophers, among them Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. The idea that authors are not absolute subjects over their texts is not a mere observation. It is also a theoretically derived view. [de Man 1984] notes that any autobiography that is being written can has its inuence back on its authors life. Consequently, de Man suggests that an author is governed by the technical demands of self-portraiture and thus determined, in all its aspects, by the resources of his medium. (Cited after Burke) The author governs the text, but he is also ruled by the text. Barthes has a radical solution for this dilemma. 2.4. Roland Barthes. Barthes began with questioning the auto-centric criticism as it was established. In On Racine, he argued in favor of an examination of texts in themselves. In Criticism and Truth (1963) he pointed out that the scientic discourse should focus on language as starting point for literary analysis. What began as a paradigm shift in the methods of literary study, eventually became a discussion, in which the authors presence in and his responsibility for a text was questioned.
1 This position is fairly close to the sense of the word auctores as used in the discussion of Medieval authorship.

A SHORT ABSENCE OF THE AUTHOR

(PRELIMINARY VERSION)

Speaking to the authors, Barthes demanded a new consciousness of the authorrole in writing. Authors should include themselves as objects or gures, not as empowered, omniscient and omnipotent subjects in a text. The author, being present in a text and conceived as a manifestation of the Absolute Subject ([Barthes 1971a]), is dead. Consequently, the author should not be given any role in the analysis of a text. With his critique, Barthes takes a stand against authocentric methods of literary analysis. He does not aim, however, at critics with a modest conception of authorship. His articles, as portraied by [Burke 1992], address a nineteenth-century theocentrism seeing authority as the central quality of a text. Scientic discourse, according to Barthes, should use language as starting point for literary analysis. The author as origin of a text is dead. (Criticism and Truth, 1966) The consequence of this becomes clear when looking at the author function in sociocultural discourse. What started as an initiative against auto-centrism later became as death of the author object of discourse itself. 3. What does it matter who is speaking? Foucault answers this rhetorical question stated by Samuel Beckett. Foucaults agrees, at rst glance, in the basic idea Barthes gave: It should not matter at all who is speaking in a text. Meaning comes from within the text. In practice, however, interpretation of linguistic utterances (text) is never pursued by the naive, straight-forward question, what the (not existing) objective semantics of the text are. Jacques Lacan speaks of the subject who knows by which he means (among other things) the person whose presence makes utterance true. What is said (in the mass-media, in an expensive book, by a recognized teacher or a known criminal), is true or false not by virtue of the self-evident rightness or falseness of the utterance, but because speaker (the journalist, the book author, the professor, the convicted) in his very person has said it, in a context carrying with it the implicit promise No lies here. Taking part in discourse is not possible without attributing the contribution with a name indicating the source. A text without author is not present in the eld of discourse, because following discourse contributions never really address the original text, but the author of this text. Discourse is personalized, hence texts need someone to held accountable for. So, as Foucault realizes, the author function is only non-existent in an ideal world. 3.1. Remaining auctorial tasks. Barthes issues a demand of the authors: to treat themselves not longer as absolute, (powerful) subject, but as object or rather gure. It is not that the Author may not come back in the Text, in his text, but he then does so as a guest ... his life is no longer the origin of his ctions but a ction contributing to his work; there is a reversion of thew ork on to the life (and no longer the contrary); it is the work of Proust, of Genet which allows their lives to be read as text. ([Barthes 1971c] p.161) The pleasure of the Text also includes the amicable return of the author. Of course, the author who returns is not the one identied by our institutions (history and courses in literatur, philosophy, church discourse); he is not even the biographical hero. The author who leaves his text and comes into our life has no unity; he is a

DAVID REITTER & KATJA SCHMOZ, UNIVERSITY OF POTSDAM, GERMANY

mere plural of charms, the site of a few tenious details, yet the source of vivid novelistic glimmerings, a discontinuous chant of amiabilities, in which we nevertheless read death more certainly than in the epic of a fate; he is not a (civil, moral) person, he is a body ... For if , thourhg a twisted dialectic, the Text, destroyer of all subject, contains a subject ot love, that subject is dispersed, somewhat like the ashes we strew into the wind after death ... ([Barthes 1971b]) The Author himself - that somewhat decrepit deity of the old ciricism - can or could someday become a text like any other: he has only to avoid making his person the subject, the impulse, the origin, the authority, the Father, whence his work would proceed by a channel of expression; he has only to see himself as a being on paper and his life as a bio-graphy (in the etymological sense of the word), a writing without referent, substance of a connection and not of a liation: the critical undertaking... will then consist in returning the documentary gure of the author into a novelistic, irretrievable, irresponsible gure, caught up in the plural of its own text: a task whose adventure has already been recounted, not by critics, but by authors themselves, a Proust, a Jean Genet. ([Barthes 1971a] pp 211-212) References
[Barthes 1971a] [Barthes 1971b] Roland Barthes: The Death of the Author. 1968 Barthes, Roland: Sade Fourier Loyola, trans. R. Miller (London: Cape, 1977), pp.8-9. Originally published as Sade, Fourier, Loyola (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1971). Barthes, Roland: Image Music Text. 1971 Burke, Sen: The Death & Return of the Author. Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992 Foucault, Michel: Was ist ein Autor. In: M.F.: Schriften zur Literatur. Frankfurt 1988 Rabinow, Paul (Ed.): The Foucault Reader. In: New York: Pantheon, 1984. Foucault, Michel: What is Critique? In: Politics of Truth 23-82. Man, Paul de: The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Seabury Press, 1979. pp.217-53 Minnis, Alistair J.: Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages London: Scolar Press, 1984 Pease, Donald E.: Author. In: Lentricchia, Frank and McLaughlin, Thomas (Eds.): Critical Terms for Literary Study. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995

[Barthes 1971c] [Burke 1992]

[Foucault 1988] [Foucault 1988] [Foucault 1988] [de Man 1984] [Minnis 1984]

[Pease 1995]

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