'This was woman herself, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive worries, her impetuos boldness, her fussings, and her delicious sensibility'
- Balzac
This week's readings fundamentally concern the role of the author as contributing value to a text, which, as one would entirely expect, poses an array of difficulties to consider:
- In what ways does the knowledge or consideration of a text's author inform a reading of a text? In what ways does it enrich it, or limit it?
- The complexity of the concept of 'author' must be considered also - what constitutes the 'author'?
- Is it merely a deliberately presented persona or reputation by the author themselves akin to a level of celebrity which both acts to reinforce and complicate elements within a text? (Such as in the case of strategically placed depictions of Whitman's everyman britches in Leaves of Grass and Pynchon's more recent deliberate elusive dematerialization from the public eye).
- Is it what we do know about their actual lives which informs our reading of a text?
- Does this effect produce a different result if experienced in retrospect of an author from a contemporary experience of one? Does it matter how long it has been since they've kicked the proverbial bucket?
"To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final, signified, to close the writing." (Barthes: 223)
For Barthe, the author cannot be responsible for the final meaning one may deduce from a text. For Barthe, to consider the Balzac quote above is to glimpse a plethora of possible readings all deduced and determined by reader alone.
For those of you unfamiliar with the Balzac text, or Barthe's suggested readings of it *insert your wildly imaginative propositions here*.
Barthe offer's the radical assumption that the birth of the reader - that is, the acknowledgement of the possibility of multiple meanings of a text catalyzed by the possible differing experiential factors on possessed by the reader (histories, biographies, psychologies and literary experiences) is at the mortal expense of the author. This is nothing more than the academic equivalent of diva dummy spit. However I'm not sure if i can detect whether such an expression is one of genuine and therefore hilarious intention or purposefully contrived to prove a point. I'd like to think it's the later.
I found Foucault's not-so undirected response far more satisfying, in poignancy and in the detail of his reasoning. While I agree with Barthes to the extent that the role of the reader must be considered a factor when extrapolating the shady features of 'value' from a text, I also believe that to disregard both a reader's knowledge of a writer (whether this be misguided, close to historically accurate or completely fabricated) is unwise. As is disregarding (and this may be a completely sentimental and self-indulgent observation made as a writer) the author's intention in creating the text to begin with. Perhaps it is terribly naive and unnecessarily romantic to think so, but I strongly believe that it matters that someone, writer or artist, decided, to create something at all, why it is they did so, and with what intention they did it with. Albeit, uncovering a precise reason or answer to why a text is created may be at times extremely difficult, this after resides with the artist, and the minds of the creative minded are hardly ever easily transparently discernible. What does matter, is that a text is not some hermetically sealed thing cut-off from author or reader. From the world, time and place it appeared in. If it were, it would be entirely pointless exercise and mute of any meaning at all.
- mia
Picture Credit here
For those of you unfamiliar with the Balzac text, or Barthe's suggested readings of it *insert your wildly imaginative propositions here*.
Barthe offer's the radical assumption that the birth of the reader - that is, the acknowledgement of the possibility of multiple meanings of a text catalyzed by the possible differing experiential factors on possessed by the reader (histories, biographies, psychologies and literary experiences) is at the mortal expense of the author. This is nothing more than the academic equivalent of diva dummy spit. However I'm not sure if i can detect whether such an expression is one of genuine and therefore hilarious intention or purposefully contrived to prove a point. I'd like to think it's the later.
I found Foucault's not-so undirected response far more satisfying, in poignancy and in the detail of his reasoning. While I agree with Barthes to the extent that the role of the reader must be considered a factor when extrapolating the shady features of 'value' from a text, I also believe that to disregard both a reader's knowledge of a writer (whether this be misguided, close to historically accurate or completely fabricated) is unwise. As is disregarding (and this may be a completely sentimental and self-indulgent observation made as a writer) the author's intention in creating the text to begin with. Perhaps it is terribly naive and unnecessarily romantic to think so, but I strongly believe that it matters that someone, writer or artist, decided, to create something at all, why it is they did so, and with what intention they did it with. Albeit, uncovering a precise reason or answer to why a text is created may be at times extremely difficult, this after resides with the artist, and the minds of the creative minded are hardly ever easily transparently discernible. What does matter, is that a text is not some hermetically sealed thing cut-off from author or reader. From the world, time and place it appeared in. If it were, it would be entirely pointless exercise and mute of any meaning at all.
- mia
Picture Credit here
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