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Afterword: The Rebirth of the Author
Marshall Soules
An essay that rocked a whole generation of scholars, Roland Barthes' "The Death of the Author" declared that
A text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. (148)
Barthes' obituary dovetails nicely with many seminal theories of the postmodern moment: Bahktin's notions of dialogism and heteroglossia; Kristeva's extension of those ideas into the theory of intertextuality; Deleuze and Gauttari's schizoanalytic method resisting all the codes of oedipalization; and Derrida's critique of presence, among others. All claim to (re)construct the relationship between reader and author. At times, it seemed as if the generic author had been decentered so far from the origin of communication as to be terminally alienated and absurd. A stranger in a stranger land.
And in the academies the discourse about writing wobbled about its shifting epicenter as theorists debated the revolution in interactivity and agency prompted by video games and hypertext. What is narrative, and who shapes it more significantly - the writer or the reader?
For Barthes, the readerly text is the old paradigm in which writers imagined themselves in control - more or less - of their texts, and thus met the expectations of traditional readers. For some critics, the readerly text is authoritarian, since it imposes the author's will on the hapless detainee. In contrast, the writerly text gives the reader some of the writer's powers by allowing multiple possibilities for choosing one's own adventure. Confused? So were a few generations of graduate students following the publication of The Pleasure of the Text in the mid-70s. Is the author still dead for a new generation of writers?
* * *
The pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas - for my body does not have the same ideas I do. (Barthes, Pleasure, 17)
As water is the universal solvent, so is time the leveler of all playing fields. The pendulum which once swung away from the distinct vernaculars of such modernist writers as T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein or Margaret Atwood, now seems poised to swing away from the crafty impersonations of Michael Ondaatje, Lynn Crosbie, or Keith Harrison. Or will it?
Maybe the analogy of the pendulum is quite false in this case, with its suggestion that things must be all or nothing, truth or fiction, the writerly or the readerly. As they become more familiar with postmodern fare, readers and writers seem more adept at recognizing the apparent paradox at the heart of the text.
As a person who aspires to be both a better writer and a better teacher of writing, I'm often brought back to the present moment of this paradoxical text. Here I witness the struggle of my own writing - being both writer and reader simultaneously - and the struggle young writers endure to improve their craft. The work of the writer is often prodigious. Beginning with the search for the right word to capture the subtle meaning, stripping the melodrama from purple prose, hunting down or scaring up stories, or agonizing over the sensibility of the audience - the writer, especially the young writer, fights with inertia and apathy and limitations of every sort to wrestle unruly language into something more orderly. Language requires order even as it seeks to be free.
I don't underestimate the difficulty of writing well, just as I don't doubt that the writer, young or old, is fully alive in the moment of creation. Despite Barthes' hyperbole, the author is not dead; in fact, everywhere there is evidence that the author is alive and on the mend. The essays in this book are my proof.
Here we see the work of writers fully alive to the possibility of forging meaning in the face of cultural jabbering -not an easy task. We see the work of a community of scholars who demonstrate the highest respect for the talents of others without shying away from their own pursuit of excellence, their own voices. They listened to one another, and their writing resonates with the words and ideas they shared. There is no better evidence of the theories of Bahktin, Kristeva, even Barthes than in the writings of this book.
We hear a multiplicity of voices united by common aspirations. Ideas are contested and parodied in a dialogue both conscious and unconscious, on the surface of the text and far below it in the depths of the reader's inner ear. Here we encounter both the pleasures and the ultimate paradox of the text. To recast Barthes, "A text's unity lies both in its origin and its destination."
With every new writing challenge, writers affirm their commitment to community and individuality, origin and destination. Those contributing to this book do not doubt they are alive, nor that they are writers. It's been fascinating and humbling for me to take part in their dialogue.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. "The Death of the Author." Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill, 1977. 142-48.
---. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975. (original French version published by Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1973).
©
Marshall Soules 2002
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