Concepts of the Author
by Julia E. Mentan

Contents:
A Critical View
Summarizing Quotes

    The precarious state of the author in contemporary literary and textual criticism has been testified to in numerous contexts, perhaps the most provocative and ubiquitous of which is Roland Barthes' assertion in "The Death of the Author" (1968) that "the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author" (148).  Having dismantled the classical belief in a transcendental, single author who transmits final meaning to the reader, critics now seek to resituate textual criticism within models of discourse analysis, hermeneutics, and reader-response theory.  As Peter Shillingsburg in Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Theory and Practice outlines, traditional critical perspectives in textual studies which have privileged the sole intention of one author are being confronted with more radical postulations which locate authority outside of the initial author.  Jerome McGann takes this notion to one sociological extreme by stating that authority resides not in the author, but rather in the relationship between the author and the publisher of that author's text (Shillingsburg 9-15).  This introduction will thus provide initial insights into several theories of the author--or the death thereof.

For Barthes the author, as traditionally conceived, owns the work, is its father, its origin.  A text which is conceived as a woven tissue of quotations and voices from multiple sources is a text that is liberated from its owner--the author--and finally made available to the reader.  He specifically links the removal of the author with the great benefit of giving the text over as a gift to the reader.  The author constitutes a limit for a text; he or she is the "signified" which closes the writing, the mystery behind the work which gives criticism its hermeneutic triumphs.  The "reign of the Author has also been that of the Critic," Barthes writes.  But once a text is viewed as a "multiplicity of writing," as a structure of many threads that can "be disentangled" but not deciphered, a new space becomes available for the reader for what Barthes characterizes as an "anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases-reason, science, law" (147).  The reader--not the author--is able to be the proper witness for the "plural of the text" and provide it with unity, a unity which is not appropriative or limiting or owned because the reader remains anonymous, unlike the author.  The author has thus become nothing more than "the instance writing" (145).

Michel Foucault, in "What is an Author" (1969) concurs with Barthes' claim that the author disappears in the act of writing.  However, Foucault challenges the notion of écriture, which he believes grants a primordial status to writing and thus sustains the privileged position of the author (128).  As an alternative to écriture, he proposes that an author should be understood as a function of discourse, rather than as an entity unto itself.  One of the characteristics of the "author-function" which Foucault emphasizes is that the author-function is tied to institutional, legal, and penal systems which encompass and ultimately determine the realm of such discourses (134). Foucault thus locates the author-function within a social and historical context, not unlike McGann's positioning of the literary work within determinate social phenomena.

Alexander Nehamas, in "Writer, Text, Work, Author" disputes several of these Foucauldian postulates, pointing to inconsistencies which ultimately enfeeble Foucault's own project.  First, Nehamas provides a corrective to Foucault's assertion that the "author" only emerged during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a result of oppression and of reversal.  Foucault asserts that the literary author became formed as a result of creative transgression:  "Speeches and books were assigned real authors, other than mythical or important religious figures, only when the author became subject to punishment and to the extent that his discourse was considered transgressive" (130).  Foucault also posits that in the sixteenth century, it was scientific texts which required an identifiable authorship in order to be authentic, while literary texts needed no author--anonymity did not pose a threat to authenticity.  This constellation was radically reversed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries insofar as scientific texts were now accepted on their own merits, while literary texts required authorial authentication.  Thus arose the role of the author in literature.

Nehamas criticizes Foucault for presenting such a "direct transposition of the scientific author of earlier times" onto the literary author, as if one entity could directly replace the other (269).  Nehamas also critiques Foucault's historical reductionism, since Foucault bases his elaboration of the emergence of the author by only treating one aspect of ownership--ownership through penalization.  While Foucault ostensibly seeks to elaborate the "author-function" as an element of his theory of discourse, his brash transpositions of one function upon another (author-as-ex-scientist; author-as-criminal) are severely essentialist.  Nehamas explains, "Whenever and however the author emerged in modern times, it is not so much a person as a figure or a function or a role. . .  This absolutely critical distinction, … Foucault himself sometimes overlooks" (270).

Nehamas' next point of contention focuses on Foucault's conception of author itself.  Foucault seems to move from the notion of "author-as-function" directly to "author-as-fiction", reducing the author to one more fictional character within a text.  For Foucault, the traditional figure of the author is "the concrete expression of the idea that the purpose of criticism is to provide definitive interpretations of texts, revelations of their meaning" (271).  In seeking to re-situate the author away from this position of authority, Foucault relegates her/him to a mere fictional character.  Nehamas contests this authorial reductionism by positing a radically-situated transcendental author.  In order to explain this notion, he first distinguishes between "author figure" and Wayne Booth's term "implied author."  The implied author is "the product of the text and the creature of the writer.  In this respect, at least the implied author is very close to a fictional character" (273).  In addition, the implied author is contingent upon the text itself, since "even if several texts have been composed by a single writer, their implied authors are held to be distinct" (273).  An example of this would be to talk about "the author himself" in Emma represented by a reliable narrator, as opposed to the real writer Jane Austen.  In contrast, the author figure is not directly associated with individual works, but rather emerges from the entire corpus.  The author figure "in fact constitutes the very principle that allows us to group certain individual works together and to consider them as parts of such an internally related connection" (274).  Nehamas continues, "Since the author, as we have seen, is never depicted, but only exemplified, in a text, this figure is transcendental in relation to its whole oeuvre as well as to the individual texts of which that oeuvre consists" (274).  It is this author figure which plays a directive, regulative role in interpretation.  Just as the author must be distinguished from the writer, "so interpretation must be separated from the search for meanings concealed within the text and located in the writer's intention or experience" (275).  Instead, as we shall now see, Nehamas wants the text's surface juxtapositions to become manifest, not the text's deeper meanings.

Nehamas explains his theory by asserting that interpretation need not directly relate to a text's deeper meaning, but rather interpretation "is the activity by means of which we try to construe movements and objects in the world around us as actions and their products" (277, emphasis mine).  To understand interpretation as an activity or an action thus allows one to place a text within a "perpetually broadening" context.  Nehamas uses Proust's Remembrance of Things Past as an example:

Only when the narrator succeeds in writing about the flower's very silence and in seeing his experience of that silence as part of the process that finally enables him to become an author, that is, only when he takes this experience of "incomplete" understanding itself and gives it a place with the complete account of his life and his effort to become able to write, does his writing begin.  (279)