I am not an ardent, poststructuralist, "The Author Is Dead" kind of fellow. I mean, I get the point. Imagine if I said that "I brought my table home." I might be talking about the physical act of carrying said piece of furniture from my car to the house. But the "I" there implies that I have usurped, in some sense, the role the car played in getting me from the store to my residence, as well as any help I might have received along the way. And while it is "my" table in the sense that I paid for it, the credit for its design rests elsewhere. Authors are like table movers. With written texts, literary criticism seeks to shift agency away from the author to the interplay of language that creates meaning when a reader engages those texts. Less emphasis on the author simply gives credit, in my earlier analogy, to the folks in the Ikea factory and the power train in my car. This carries on an older tradition of trying to separate an author's manipulation of words from the artistic inspiration that led her or him to sit down in the first place!
In practical terms, there is still great value in talking about the author: "William Faulkner says this" or "William Faulkner says that" is a lot easier to think about than the work of an "author function." We all know that "says" is dependent on flimsy language conventions, and it requires accepting, in broad terms, at least, that what someone intended aligns with pretty blunt, commonly-accepted interpretations. I could believe that Charles Dickens wanted us to be generous to each other at Christmas, but I am more comfortable saying only that my personal reading of A Christmas Carol advocates any specific policy for dealing with the poor. In class, the author fades and re-emerges at various points.
But he, that is, Ernest Hemingway, was back with a vengeance this week. We continued looking into the textual history of A Moveable Feast, and we were treated to a most provocative position paper that talked about how the edition of his autobiography, edited by his wife and a Scribner employee after his death, did not represent his true intentions. Now, strictly speaking, I have no quarrel with this general argument. There is significant evidence that a lot more work was done on the published text than was acknowledged in 1964. (A new edition, from Hemingway's grandson, appeared this fall in order, apparently, to "restore" the author's version.) But the problem arises for me in the way the argument was framed. I believe that we can determine a potential effect, a meaning, based on some other version of the text. This analysis can call into question the sequence of the chapters, passages added or deleted, and other contentious material that can then be contrasted with what appeared in print. But, for me, it is too much to suggest that either meaning, or any possible meaning, represents Hemingway's intentions, when he killed himself with the book far from finished.
The first analysis of this kind I undertook, as a senior undergraduate myself, was of a collection Sylvia Plath's poetry, published posthumously by her husband, poet Ted Hughes. There was demonstrable evidence that Plath wanted to publish her poetry so that it found its bleakest point about four-fifths through the volume, ending with an optimistic sequence. The order we got, and the order that shaped her reputation, is of almost unbroken negativity. But, even in this case, it is more prudent to talk about the "effect it appears Plath sought" than it does her "intention": after all, readers might have responded identically to either version of the collection, influenced inexorably by her suicide.
We spent the first month of this class talking about the propensity readers have to put more trust in what autobiographical texts might say. Writers of their own life stories rely on the same language conventions as any writers, they employ many of the same narrative techniques as novelists. I am a little surprised, at this late date, amongst students this seasoned and cynical, to see them jump to the defense of the "intentions" of a man who showed only passing interest in ever actually publishing the work they read.
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