Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007
14.1 The author
Unit 14 Authorship and intention
Section 3 Attributing meaning
It seems obvious to assume that a text is created by an author (or by a group of authors). It also seems obvious to assume that an author (or group of authors) has a particular intention about how that text should act on a reader and how it should be interpreted. The concepts of author and intention appear to be central, even indispensable, notions that offer a necessary point of origin and guide to meaning for any given text. Indeed, it is our sense that a text (or art object) was designed by human agency that encourages us to believe that it will be worthwhile spending time interpreting it. And the goal of our interpretive efforts, we assume, is to discover the author’s intention. Despite these common-sense assumptions, however, the concepts of author and intention are less straightforward than they seem.
14.1 The author
14.1.1 A brief history of the author
Our assumptions about authorship and intention are related to assumptions about what an author does in creating a text. One historically influential view is that the author is a sort of skilful craft worker, who draws on and reworks the conventions of the cultural tradition but always remains less important than that tradition. This view is associated with literary practices and criticism in Europe broadly from the Middle Ages up to the eighteenth century. The neoclassicism of the eighteenth century, for example, placed emphasis not so much on an author’s originality as upon the way a text conforms to the conventions of classical literature (the literature of classical Greece and Rome) and to established ideas. This outlook is summarized in Alexander Pope’s definition of good poetry (true wit) in 1711: ’True wit is Nature to advantage dress’d; / What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed’ (An Essay on Criticism, II, 297-8).
Toward the end of the eighteenth century, however, the intellectual and artistic movement known as Romanticism developed a significantly different view of the author and of creativity, with particular emphasis on the individual imagination and on inner feelings. The Romantics held that an author discovers original material for creative work somewhere inside himself or herself rather than in the tradition. In 1800, William Wordsworth defined poetry as ’the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ (’Preface to Lyrical Ballads’). Thus the author becomes the guarantor of what might be called the text’s authenticity (original, sincere, natural). The Romantic view of the author became very influential throughout nineteenth-century Europe and beyond. It survives today as a popular ’common-sense’ assumption about artistic creativity.
Criticism of the Romantic view of authorship and creativity characterized the modernist aesthetic theory of early twentieth-century Europe and the United States. In his influential essay ’Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), the poet and critic T.S. Eliot effectively resurrected and modified preRomantic views of the author in order to attack the Romantic focus on individual creativity. Eliot argues that the individual poet’s mind is and should be subservient to the literary tradition, which he defines as the ’existing monuments’ of the whole literature of Europe from Homer to the present. For Eliot, the popular interest in a poet’s individuality and personal emotions is misguided, and he proposes instead that we should focus on what he calls ’significant emotion, emotion that has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet’. In effect, Eliot is calling for a shift in attention from poets to poetry, and suggesting that a poem’s originality is derived not from the inner life of the poet but from the way it both fits into and modifies the literary tradition. Eliot’s thinking significantly influenced a whole generation of writers and scholars, especially the New Critics who taught in British and American universities from the 1940s onwards.
In the 1970s, a number of critical groups in Europe and the United States began to examine what we might call the politics of authorship. This involved investigating the way marginalized groups, such as female, black, working-class or gay writers, have had to struggle in order to represent particular, marginalized social experiences. One area in which such work has been particularly influential is feminist literary history, which has drawn our attention to many women writers from the past who had been lost to modern readers. One of the reasons for the disappearance of these authors is that, in certain historical periods and places, it was considered improper for women to be published authors. As a consequence, some eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century women novelists were published anonymously or under a male pen name (e.g. Charlotte Bronte as Currer Bell).
From the late 1960s onwards, post-structuralist theory - especially in the writings of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes - attempted to do away entirely with the notion of the author and authorial intention. In an essay provocatively called ’The Death of the Author’ (1968), Barthes makes the following key suggestions:
1 The author is, by definition, absent from writing (in contrast with speech, which generally implies the presence of the speaker).
2 A text is not a unique artefact, emerging through a kind of immaculate conception from a writer’s brain. Rather, the conventions and language that make up the text (any text) are available to the writer precisely because they have been used before (see Unit 13, Intertextuality and allusion). A text is ’a tissue of quotations’, ’a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash’.
3 Barthes claims that ’Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature.’ This focus on the writer is an exercise of institutional control: ’to give a text an Author . . . is to impose a limit on that text’.
4 Barthes therefore seeks to transform reading into a productive practice in which the reader is liberated from the process of discovering, or pretending to discover, what the author intended. For Barthes, a text’s meaning is generated in the creative, playful processes of reading, not of writing.
5 Encapsulating these arguments, Barthes concludes that ’the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author’.
The notion of the author’s ’death’ is not, of course, to be taken literally. By announcing the death of the author Barthes was attempting to kill off the tendency in literary criticism and educational institutions to use the notion of the author, and his or her supposed intentions, to limit the interpretive possibilities of reading. The continuing influence of Barthes’s essay points to the fundamental nature of the questions he poses: questions about the symbolic role played by the author and by authorial intention in imposing a kind of law on what might otherwise be a free play of interpretation.
Barthes’ announcement of the birth of the reader was taken up in other theoretical developments, particularly the Reader-Response criticism that began to emerge in the late 1960s and 1970s in the work of Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish. As Fish developed his theory he assigned a smaller and smaller role to both the author and the text itself, even suggesting at one stage that the reader is the ’author’ of the text that he or she reads - a banishment of the role of the author that is even more radical than Barthes’s. Yet the report of the death of the author seems to have been an exaggeration. Many literary theorists, critics, students and general readers seem unable or unwilling to accept that reading can proceed without consideration for authorial intention. In recent years, there have been at least two book-length announcements of the ’return’ or ’resurrection’ of the author (see Burke, 1998 [1992] and Irwin, 2002). The critical debate about authorship and its impact on theories and practices of reading looks set to continue as long as the category of ’the author’ remains viable.
14.1.2 Modern media and the future of authorship
An emphatic illustration of the complexity of authorship is offered by texts typically created by a team or group of people, such as films, television programmes, theatrical performances or music CDs. Contributions to a film text may be made by many people, including actors, camera operators, lighting and set designers, script writers and editors, make-up artists, directors, producers and even test audiences in some cases. Nonetheless, we tend to assume that a film’s ’author’ is its director, who is supposed to have final artistic control. This view played a central part in the politique des auteurs developed by the French Cahiers du cinema in the 1950s, and in the related auteur theory of Andrew Sarris in the United States (see Caughie, 1981). In this view, an ’auteur’ (an especially valued director such as Alfred Hitchcock) is considered to be the person who expresses his or her personal vision coherently across the corpus of films that he or she makes. In other words, it seems as if we want to hold on to the notion of the author even in creative processes that involve teamwork.
The case of film mentioned here relates largely to studio forms of production in which high production costs mean that there are limited opportunities for individuals to play the central part of ’author’. The same is true in other instances of corporate production of contemporary media (consider, for example, the credit list on any commercial multimedia CD-ROM). But the recent development of digital technologies of media production means that an increasing amount of cultural texts of various kinds can now be produced on personal computers and in home studios. The implications of these developments for our notions of authorship are as yet unpredictable. One view is that the new media technologies allow anyone and everyone to become an author (anyone can have a home page, post material on the Internet and become a ’blogger’). A second view suggests that the new interactive media technologies will eventually remove the need for a clear-cut concept of authorship altogether.