STAN S. SEM.II

8/13/2019 STAN S. SEM.II

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DUNAREA DE JOS UNIVERSITY OF GALATI

FACULTY OF LETTERS

DEPT. OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

Critical theories and practices

- optional course in English language for 3rd

year students -

Lect.dr. Stelua Stan

Galai, 2007


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CONTENTS

1.

Introduction 5

2. Decoding Roman Jakobsons diagram: a dynamic vision ofthe terms 7

3. From biographical criticism to the different positions of the20

thcentury literary criticism and theory regarding the concepts

ofauthorandauthorship 12

3.1. The authority of the biographical detail: pros and cons;

Je est un autre - identity and otherness; what it means to

dissociate the book from its author 12

3.2. The autonomy of the literary text as seen from different

perspectives: Structuralism, New Criticism,

Post-structuralism 17

3.3. Some positions in favour of the return of the

great absentee 27

4. The author-authorship relationship in metafiction 324.1. The identity crisis in postmodernity 32

4.2. The ontological level of the postmodern writer.

Playing with the structures of authority in

metafiction 36

4.3. Authors and Authority 42

5. Bibliography 44

6. Topics for discussion 46


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MOTTO:

Cine vorbete n oper? E vorba de relaia dintre creator i oper n

gndirea criticdin secolul nostru i, cu precdere, de statutul autorului

n noile forme de interpretare. Am acceptat i eu, cum au acceptat

atia, disocierea lui Proust dintre omul care scrie i omul care triete

i m-am bucurat fr rezerve cnd am aflat c, n fine, autorul a fost

trimis la plimbare. Apoi am constatat c, sub o formsau alta, autorul

revine n text, cntre omul care scrie i omul care triete nu-i chiar o

prpastie de netrecut, cstrlucirea operei nu ne vindecde dorina de

a ti ceva despre autorul care a scris-o. Autorul e mort, dar moartea lui

a lsat un gol care ne face sne amintim mereu de el.

(Simion 1993:1)


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Depending on the angle, the different critical or theoretical tendencies

consider one term or another as unknown, or sees them statically or dynamically, as

elements that only exist or as the same elements, this time at work. In other words,

using a terminology that proves once again how tributary we are to the universe that

we carry and that carries us, the terms of the above-mentioned equation are seen as

products or productions (in one of the subchapters of the present study, we shall

return to the author seen as the creator of a text or of himself, the work seen as text or

textualization, the reader as meaning consumer or meaning producer).

When giving the present study the structure it has, we also thought of an

equation or a diagram, Roman Jakobsons, the same as Liviu Papadima did in his

study, Literatur i Comunicare. Relaia autor cititor n proza paoptist i

postpaoptist1.

One cannot but notice how intricate the paths to human knowledge are:

overwhelmed with the complexity of the world(s) to be known, man has always tried

to organize the huge amount of data taking into account different criteria, approaching

from different angles the world, but also the text or the world as text (as the post-

structuralists see it). Then, man compressed the outcome of this sequence of

operations into formulas, equations, diagrams, theories or architypes. When he

thought he had found the figure in the carpet, as Henry James calls it, after having

established the moulds, man set about showing the others how these can be broken,

undermined, de-structured, de-centred. Or, as Eugen Simion put it, it is so very

characteristic of human nature to try to encode what has just been decoded.

Consequently, the author of the present study, as I have already mentioned,

will start from a very simple diagram and a few sets of questions in an attempt at

facilitating a better understanding of the subtle and mysterious relationship between

the work and an author who tries to discover and re-create himself while writing.

1For further information, see Liviu Papadima, Literaturi Comunicare. Relaia autor cititor n

proza paoptisti postpaoptist, Ed. Polirom, Bucureti, 1999.


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what has been called objective criticism(Practical Criticismin Great Britain,Russian Formalism,New Criticismin the United States) dominated the study

of literature in schools and universities until the 80s. This critical method lays

the stress on the analysis of the text, of the work itself, free from its author,

public or the extra-linguistic universe;

beginning with the 70s, what was traditionally understood by the relationsbetween the universe, the author, the reader and the work, has been troubled

by Structuralism and Deconstructivism, both questionning even the most

elementary mimetism of language and, consequently, of literature; even more

than that, the structuralists and the deconstructivists attack what was taken for

certain, that there is a stable relationship between words, their meaning and

the things outside the text that they are a symbol of. Language is no longer

only a means that the author uses to tell (his) truth about (his) reality, it even

createsthat truth about that reality. Last but not least, the spoiled child of the

last decades, the reader, becomes the main concern of the reception theories.

The theme of the present study being the author and the relationship between him and

the other terms of the above-mentioned equation, we thought it fit to change the order

of the terms and place the author in the centre, trying to make the relations more

dynamic and bidirectional. We consider that this might be a useful starting point for

the analysis of the central, periferal or no role at all that the different critical and

theoretical approaches assigned to the author:

universe/extralinguistic reality/ideology

author/scriptor/meaning producer

work/text/discourse (seen as) product/producing

reader/consumer/(re)producer of meaning(s)

Running the risk of being considered too didactic in our approach, we still thought it

was worth beginning from the scheme above in an attempt to organize, as we have

already mentioned, a huge volume of information, offered most of the times in an

elitist language, and also to facilitate the access to and the choice of one or another of


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the theoretical and critical methods meant to help the reader over the threshold that

separates the literary text from the world (as text).

The position we suggest is a relativistic not a pluralistic one as, in our view,

the various theories are not all compatible with one another and, by no means,

complementary, adding together to form a single comprehensive vision. The reader,

as well as the analyst, is rather confronted with a choice between conflicting theories,

too great a variety of alternatives and open questions, and will not find a comfortably

easy solution to that choice within the confines of literary theory alone.

Taking into account what has already been considered an overtheorizing of

literature which seems to undermine reading as an innocent activity, the reader

might feel frustrated to lose this innocence. Nevertheless, we strongly believe that a

true reader cannot ignore the questions the major literary theories have continually

asked during the last decades: questions about the author, the writing, the reader, or

what we usually call reality. As it happens with both literary criticism and theory,

even the focus is on one of the terms, none of the others is completely forgotten.

It has been said so often that the modern spirit is an interrogative one, its

dignity and courage lying in the questions it raises, not necessarily in the answers it

finds. Consequently, starting from the scheme above, we shall forward several sets of

questions, grouped together according to the terms they point at and the relationship

between them. As in a previous course for 2nd year students, The Reception of the

Literary Text, we focused on the reader, we thought it would be logical that this time

we should try to shed some light upon the author, trying to find answers to questions

such as:

1) the relation between author and text: is the text the intentional production of an individual, or an only partially intentional production, the unintended determinants of

which being one of or a combination of elements such as:

i. the psyche of the authorii. the psyche of the culture

iii. the ideology of the cultureiv. the particular socio-economic conditions of the production (the

placement and role of the artist in the culture, who pays for the


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production, who consumes it, what are the rewards for

successful production, how are they decided and, what are the

material conditions of production

v. the traditions of writing which pertain to the textvi. the traditions of the treatment of the particular subject-matter in

the culture and in the genre

is the text in fact almost entirely the production of the ideological andcultural realm, in which realm the author is merely a function, whose

role, aspirations, ideas and attitudes are created by the society in which

he lives? In this case, the text is a complex structure of cultural and

aesthetic codes, none of which the author has created, arranged around

traditional cultural themes or topoi, whereas the author himself, while

an existent being (his existence and effort are not denied), has little to

do with the meaning of the text, as he himself is simply part of (or,

constructed by) the circulation of meanings within the culture.

On the other hand, if we take into consideration the expressive function of the

literary discourse, we can ask a couple of questions like:

how do writers introduce themselves to their readers: as an impersonalinstance in the work, or a personal one manifesting itself through the

work?

to what extent and in what way do writers open or shut to the readerthe access to the individuality of the person who produces the text and

remains outside it or steps inside? What masks do they take on and

why?

2) the relation of author and text to society:

as the author is operating within a certain cultural milieu,

in what ways does she represent in her text, deliberately and/or unconsciously,the understandings of the world that the culture holds?

in what ways does she represent in her text, again deliberately and/orunconsciously, the understandings of what art is and does, the aesthetic

ideolog(ies) of the time?


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Moreover, the text not only will be an outcome of this situated imaginative process,

but will be structured in its production and in its reception by various material social

forces; consequently, one must ask questions such as these:

who is the intended audience? who has a say in the text's final form, directly (e.g. editors), or indirectly how is it paid for, and how it is distributed, who has access to it, under what

conditions, and what effects might these conditions produce?

what status does that kind of writing have in the culture?

3) the relation between author and reader (the communicational mechanisms):

what are the status and the role of the authorial voice? how are the different hypostasis of the author/narrator transposed into the text? to what extent does the author intend and succeed to establish a dialogic

relation between him and a reader open to such a relation?

what is the freedom the reader is left to decode and interpret the text?

These are only some of the possible questions raised by the issue of the relationship

between what we called the terms of a simple equation, which proves anything but

simple.


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will consider as its starting point two statements belonging to Liviu Papadima and

Eugen Simion, respectively:

Autorul unui text face inevitabil trimitere la un personaj social, chiar dacnu

ntotdeauna sociabil, ideologic, politic, cultural, psihologic, estetic .a.m.d.-, la o

urzeal de nsuiri i de evenimente omeneti pe de o parte, de imagini ale

acestora diseminate n spaiul curiozitii sau al memoriei publice pe de cealalt.

Nimeni n-ar trebui s fie att de naiv, se zice mai ales astzi! -, s ia aceste

imagini drept realiti. Fiecare ndjduiete nsccele pe care le acceptsunt,

dacnu adevrate, cel puin relevante purttoare ale unui anume fel de adevr.

(Papadima 1999:11)

Discutnd despre oper i acceptnd, ca un dat fundamental, prioritatea i

autonomia ei, suntem nevoii sne gndim, totui, i la cel care a scris-o, la omul pe

care noua noua critic l-a eliminat din ecuaia analizei. Nu este vorba de a ne

ntoarce la biografismul beuvian (la detestabilul procedeu de a explica opera prin

viaa autorului. Punctul lui (n.n. al lui Eugen Simion) de vedere este c, de la un

anumit grad al valorii estetice, opera i reclami i creeazautorul de care are

nevoie. []ncepem scitim opera frsne intereseze prea mult cine a scris-o, dar,

de la o treaptanumitde cunoatere, ncepem scutm pe exilatul care ateaptla

porile lecturii. [c]itim o carte de poemei, de la un punct al interesuluii al bucuriei

estetice, vrem ca autorul ssemene cu opera lui. La marii creatori, aceasta doua

natere se produce aproape invariabil: opera creeazun mit al autorului, dup ce

autorul a creat o opercare, prin fora ei, a intrat n mit.

(Simion 1993:2-3, 5)

The two quotations may well be considered somehow extended, but we thought it is

worth taking this risk so as to better illustrate the balanced positions that the two

writers express.

Our intention is to bring up to discussion once again a dissociation that we

believe to be just and, for a very long time, self-evident: on the one hand, there is

biographical criticism (the interpretation and the evaluation of a work having as a

single criterion its authors life and his social/superficial/empirical self) which is said

to be a false critical method, taken out of stage long ago; on the other hand, the


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authors profound/poetic self (considered (in)dependent, (un)conditioned by and

(un)conditioning the social self), the extent up to which this self manages to transmit

(itself) and re-create itself in/through the text, all this has been closely analysed by

psycho-analysis/psycho-criticism and Marxist criticism, while the concept of identity

has obsessively preoccupied feminist and postcolonialist criticism.

Proust used the notions of superficial/social self and deep self to criticize the

biographical inquiry that Saint-Beuve made use of when he approached or evaluated

writers and writings. All the same, Eugen Simion proved with minuteness and

responsibility that Proust himself proves himself guilty of the very same guilt.

Simions conclusion is that nu metoda duce la eec, ci insistena n metod

(1993:31).

Still, the contradictions and inconsistencies that were identified in Prousts

essays cannot drive us away from the main issue that he brings forth: the dissociation

that has to be made between the person and his work, between the author and his

book.

The domination of expressionism (characteristic of romantic aestheticism and

its belief in the uniqueness of the act of creation as a consequence of the uniqueness

of the creative individual) begins to decline in the second half of the XIXth century,

when the strong and close relationship existing between the author and his work is

getting weaker. The intention of (self)communication (because we still can talk about

intention since Wimsatt and Beardsleys intentional fallacy is not part of the

landscape yet) is replaced by the productive intention, the text not the author being

engaged in a dialogic relationship with the reader, a new reader this time, invited to

participate in the texts production.

The relativize or attenuate the authorial instance are frequently believed to be

reference points of the modernist literature, which also meant the decline of the myth

of the inspired poet, the romantic prototype of the creative genius, valued for his

sincerity, spontaneity and imagination. The feeling of the author separated from his

work can be sensed even while the piece of writing is being written, and becomes

clear the very moment the work is done.

Scriitorul nu se exprim, ci se creeazpe sine scriind. Produsul artistic reprezint, n

raport cu productorul su, o materializare a spaiului dintre identitate i alteritate.(Papadima 1999:16)


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In 1871, Rimbaud formulates his famous sentence: Car Je est un autre. If the

Romantic age has the cult of the creator, the post-romantic poets initiate the cult of the

work, and the two concepts, that of otherness and that of identity, will be so often

used both by modernist and postmodernist authors (implicitly or explicitly) and by

those who theorize over their works.

The coordinates of these phenomenon are extensively discussed by Eugen

Simion (1993:55-93), who identifies the causes that lead to the emergence and

evolution of the premises of the authors image falling from interest, and who brings

to the fore, in the same time, the instances when those proclaiming it contradict

themselves, when their subtle intelligence makes them accept the evidence, that

poetry merges into the existence and viceversa, only to give birth to a unique and

fascinating myth.

We could not have passed on to the positions of New Criticism, Structuralism

and Post-structuralism (which seem to totally separate the author from his work while

considering that his disappearance could be but beneficent) without considering at

least one of the many examples of what is known as commited literature, in which

the threefold relationship between the author, the text and the extra-textual world is

more than obvious.

J. P. Sartre, as well as most post-war writers, lived the nightmarish experience

of a war which destroyed all the anchors of stability that people had needed and

replaced them with chaos, nothingness and existentialist anxiety. We felt it would be

useful to give some of the main principles that existentialism dealt with.

Existentialism, the most famous representative of which is Sartre, stresses the

risk, the voidness of human reality and admits that the human being is thrown into the

world, the world in which pain, frustration, sickness, contempt, malaise and death

dominates. It was during the Second World War, when Europe found itself in a crisis

and faced with death and destruction, that the existentialist movement began to

flourish.

Sartre believed that philosophy must not be divorced from literature and the

arts. His theory that literature must take side is expounded in What is Literature. He

skillfully demonstrated how philosophical concepts and ideals can be dramatized in

literature. In his works, he portrayed how the individual must decide between the

enigmas confronting him: what is true; what is right and what is wrong; what to

accept and what to reject; what to be and what not; and, even, whether to be, or not to


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be. His own answer was that there are no objective values or authorities to rely upon.

The human being tries to avoid the anxiety of freedom by disowning liberty. But the

human being must accept accountability without subterfuge. In the plays Dirty Hand

and The Condemned of Altona, he once more looked at the problems of liberty,

obligation, and the assignment of action. Both plays end with the suicide of the main

character. In his plays, the protagonist is called to create his own values.

Even though the human being feels lost in an alien and hostile world, he

believed the human being must act. As for his own work, he wrote:

For a long while I treated my pen as sword; now I realize how helpless we are. It

does not matter: I am writing. I shall write books; they are needed; they have use all

the same. Culture saves nothing and nobody, nor does it justify. But it is a product of

man; he projects himself through it and recognizes himself in it; this critical mirror

alone shows him his images.

(Akram Tanweer,Essays on Existentialism, mailto:[email protected])

For Sartre, as for most post-war writers, the writer and analyst completely committed

to the text he produces, the relation between the person producing the text and the text

itself is a very complicated matter, which he sets out to analyze making use of a

perspective integrating psycho-analysis and Marxism. The final outcome is, not only

the man with his depths and his commitment, but, mainly, the MAN in his

complexity. Within the well-known relation, work/text-author/creator, new concepts

appear: history, action, freedom, choice, commitment, alienation, etc.

Sartre gives a new meaning to biography, placing the man not only in relation

to his writing, to the imaginary universe created by/through him, but, larger than that,

to an entire universe by which he is assumed and which he tries to take upon himself.

According to Sartre, the creator is irrevocably and irremediably tied to, the man, the

act of writing being a form of his existence in the world. This way, he tries to re-

create a lost unity and, by the example he sets himself, attempts at bringing the great

exiled back into the city, re-uniting the creator inside the work with the man outside,

omul profunzimilor (pe care l reclampsihologia abisali psihanaliza) i omul unei

condiii existeniale asumate (Simion 1993:96).

This new re-affirmation of the modern creators dignity, so much alike the

self-pride of the romantic genius, sounds familiar. Now, that the author is back in the


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characteristic feature making the difference between the literary and the non-literary

kinds of writing); both gave a central role in their definitions to ideas of structure and

interrelatedness, and treated the literary text as an object essentially independent of its

author and its historical context.

The New Criticism almost certainly constitutes the English-speaking worlds

major contribution to literary theory, and as such it has exercised until recently a

dominant influence on the teaching of literature in the United States and, to a lesser

extent, in Britain. In the last few years, however, with the entry of European literary

theory into British and American academic life, its prestige has definitely been on the

wane. Some good reason for continuing to read the New Critics work is that they

formulated a number of assumptions about literature and literary study that still play a

significant part in the academic world today. More importantly, their work is a valid

alternative to Formalism and structuralism, closer, maybe, to many critics and

readers feelings about literature and life.

Unlike Formalism or structuralism, the New Criticism, although emphasizing

the special qualities of literature, insisted on its connections with the real world, and

on the contribution it can make to coping with the problems of everyday human

existence. Again in contrast to Formalism and structuralism, the New Criticism may

be said to mean a return to empiricist and humanistic criticism, but from a different

stand.

In the British variant, the centre of interest is the analysis of the reading

process, the special focus being on the readers response to literature and on the

evaluation of this response, starting from the question What gives the experience of

reading a certain poem its value? How is this experience better than another?

(Richards 1967:1). Again, the author is left out.

Across the ocean, the American New Criticism remains true to the spirit of

Richardss work, also highlighting the distinctive properties of the literary text, but it

is much less interested in the reading experience than in the objective features of the

medium, the literary text itself (which Richards considered to be transparent, a mere

vehicle for conveying the experience of the author to the reader); American New

critics spend much less time on evaluation than on description and analysis, being a

great deal closer to Formalism, in this respect: close reading is the reading/critical

method they recommend, with as little focus on emotion as possible. The poet T. S.

Eliot, a most influential figure, had a stance strongly opposed to that of Richards,


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refusing to accept either that poetry consisted in the use of emotive language, Poetry

is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression

of personality, but an escape from personality (Eliot, in Jefferson and Robey

1988:80), or that poetry was simply a vehicle for communicating the authors

experience to the reader What a poem means is as much what it means to others as

what it means to the author(Eliot, in Jefferson and Robey 1988:80).

One further point that is often made to explain the nature of the New Criticism

is that it developed outside the ambit of the main university graduate schools, in small

colleges mainly in the South. Allen Tate, who like John Crowe Ransom, was a poet as

well as a critic, was a fierce critic of the historical scholarship of the graduate school,

with its positivistic assumption that the literary text expresses its place and time, or

the authors personality and nothing more (1959:7,54).

Intentional and affective fallacy

The idea of the authors disappearance is not a newfangled concept, James Joyce

being one among many modernists who stressed that the text stands apart from and is

different from the author, and that literature is an intertextual phenomenon, that texts

mean in relation to other texts, not in relation to the lives of the authors. It is not a

long step from the modernist position of the retreat or disappearance of the author to

the idea that the concept of the author as a concept through which to read and

understand literature has lost its validity and is more likely to mislead than to

illumine.

The same opposition of criticism and scholarship and the same demand that

criticism should concern itself with specifically literary properties are the inspiration

of two of the best-known theoretical products of the New Criticism, the essays on

The intentional fallacy and The affective fallacy written jointly by Wimsatt and

Beardsley and published in 1946 and 1949 respectively.

The two authors argue that a poem (short-hand, as usual, for a literary work of

art) is, and therefore should be treated as an object in the public domain, not the

private creation of an individual. The authors experience and intentions at the time of

writing are matters of purely historical interest, that do not contrary to the

intentional fallacy in any way determine the meaning, effect or function of hiscreation.


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As far as the authors experience is concerned, what counts from the

viewpoint of criticism is only what is embodied in the text, and that is wholly

accessible to anyone with a knowledge of the language and culture to which the text

belongs.

As for the authors intentions (intentionis design or plan in the authors mind,

having obvious affinities for the authors attitude towards his work, the way he felt,

what made him write), what counts is only whether or not he has succeeded in writing

poetry, and that too can be discerned by reference to the text alone. Thus, most of

what passes for literary scholarship is excluded from the sphere of criticism: studies

of authors lives, of their immediate environment, of their ideas about writing and of

the genesis of their works.

Eugen Simions stand is that scriitorul i pierde structura n structura

cuvntului. Eu atraduce a pierde prin a trece. Deposedarea (pierderea) este, n fapt,

o nountrupare(1993:125). In Wimsatt and Beardsleys words:

One must ask how a critic expects to get an answer to the question about intention.

How is he to find out what the poet tried to do? If the poet succeeded in doing it, then

the poem itself shows what he was trying to do. And if the poet did not succeeded,

then the poem is not adequate evidence, and the critic must go outside the poem for

evidence of an intention that did not become effective in the poem.

(Wimsatt and Beardsley, in Lodge 1972:334-5)

So, if the authors intentions do not come out clearly from the text, then the critic is

allowed to step out of it and explore the authors psychology and/or biography, but

then we can no longer talk about poetic studies, but about personal/biographical

studies:

There is criticism of poetry and there is author psychology, which when applied to the

present or future takes the form of inspirational promotion; but author psychology

can be historical too, and then we have literary biography, a legitimate and attractive

study in itself, one approach [...] to personality, the poem being only a parallel

approach. [...] there is danger of confusing personal and poetic studies; and there is

the fault of writing the personal as if it were poetic.(id.:338-9)


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The two authors distinguish between internal/public evidence (to be discovered

through the semantics and syntax of a poem, through our habitual knowledge of the

language, through grammars, dictionaries, and all the literature which is the source of

dictionaries, in general through all that makes a language and culture) and

external/privateevidence for the meaning of a poem (revelations in journals, letters or

reported conversations about how or why the poet wrote the poem). The use of

biographical evidence need not involve intentionalism, because while it may be

evidence of what the author intended, it may also be evidence of the meaning of his

words and the dramatic character of his utterance.

On the other hand, it may not be all of this.

The two representatives of the New Criticism, Wimsatt and Beardsley, attempt to

show how, for example, T. S. Eliots literary allusions (often supported by notes)

work: [...] whereas notes seem to justify themselves as external indexes to the

authors intention, yet they ought to be judged like any other parts of a composition

[...] (id.: 343). Eliot himself, when off guard in a note, comments on the difficulty of

saying what a poem means and adds:

I dont pretend that I quite understand

My own meaning when I would be very fine;

But the fact is that I have nothing planned

Unless it were to be a moment merry.

(id.:343)

While the intentional fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its origins, trying to

derive the standard of criticism from the psychological causesof the poem and ending

in biography and relativism, the affective fallacy is a confusion between the poem and

its results(what it isand what it does), trying to derive the standard of criticism from

the psychological effects of the poem and ending in impressionism and relativism. A

useful distinction that two authors point to is that between what a word means and

what itsuggestswhen talking about readers responses to texts.

The affective fallacy, they maintain, is the fallacy of arguing that poetry

consists in the emotive use of language, and that the primary consideration of the


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critic must therefore be the effect that the poem has on the reader. Wimsatt and

Beardsleys view is that a poem is not just a vehicle for conveying feelings, but an

independent object with distinctive features of its own. To study the effect of the

object rather than the object itself is to put the cart before the horse, since the cause of

the effect is to be found in the object, and besides that, the effects of literary objects

vary widely from one reading and from one reader to another. It is with meaning, not

with the effect, that literary criticism must be concerned; effect, being both variable

and private, is much better left outside the field of enquiry.

The authors conclusion is that the outcome of either fallacy is that the poem

itself, as an object of specifically critical judgment, tends to disappear.

Structuralism and Post-structuralism

The formula proposed by the well-known French writer and literary critic, Roland

Barthes, is, perhaps, the best provided definition of structuralism: a certain mode of

analysis of cultural artefacts, in so far as this mode originates in the methods of

contemporary linguistics (1970:412). So, any systematic extension of Saussurean

concepts may, broadly speaking, be regarded as structuralist. The hegemony of the

linguistic model (the premise of all structuralist thought) acquires a special

significance in the sphere of literature:

it, like any other form of social or cultural activity, may be analyzed todiscover the nature of its component signs and how the

system governing their use and combinations operates;

unlike other systems, literature is not only organized like language; it isactually made of language;

literature is thought by many structuralists to have a specialrelationship to language, in that it involves a unique

awareness of the nature of language itself. It is always

about language, as Tzvetan Todorov says, the writer

doing nothing more than read language.

The value placed on this formal approach reminds us of the American New Criticism,

and also of Russian Formalism, and the work of Roman Jakobson. Nevertheless,

structuralist criticism differs from both of them on some important issues, one of


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which being that it does not share the New Critics preoccupation with meaning; its

attention is mainly focused on the signifiers of literature, not on any signified, thus

setting aside all questions of content.

This means that the language of literature is no longer regarded as

subordinated to the message supposedly carried by the text; the primacy of language

is stated. Its organization precedes any message or reality, although, for practical

purposes in ordinary situations, we use language as if it were transparent and as if

meanings and intentions existed prior to it. Language in all its opacity becomes for the

structuralists the very content of literature:

[...] literature becomes a kind of extention and application of certain properties of

language [...]

(Todorov 1977:19)

The writer does nothing more than read language.

(Todorov 1969:84)

[...] he is someone for whom language is a problem.

(Barthes 1966:46)

It is this recourse to the Saussurean model which gives rise to the most innovative of

structuralisms extensions of the linguistic analogy: poetics, the general science of

literature.

The shift of focus from the individual text to literature in general brought with

it a new awareness of the different nature of different types of discourse about

literature,and of different ways of treating literature implied by them. Broadly

speaking, these discourses can be divided into reading, criticism and poetics, and in

the structuralist view these divisions are radical.

In Barthess view, criticismis quite different from reading:

reading is a process of identification with a work and a faithful reading will benothing more than a word for word repetition of the text;

criticism, on the other hand, places the critic at a certain distance from thework, getting him actively involved in constructing a meaning for a text and

not in passively deciphering the meaning.


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In the structuralist view there is no single meaning in literary works. This insistence

on the plurality of meanings in a text (Barthes says that if words only had one

dictionary meaning, there would be no literature) is the logical consequence of the

absence of any authorial intention in literature; the authors absence is far more

radical than it is in the case of the New Critics. The New Critics stress on the organic

coherence of the literary text took over the task of unifying meaning which could no

longer be attributed to the author. In structuralist theory there is nothing to take over

this task, so that ambiguity becomes polysemic, consisting of an unreconcilable

multiplicity of meanings.

A work is eternal, a critic once said, not because it imposes one meaning on

different men, but because it suggests different meanings to one man. In a view which

sees meaning as the product of the rules and conventions of different signifying

systems, there is no role given to private meanings or intentions on the part of

individuals.

This is what is meant by the decentering of the subject in structuralist theory,

most fully developed in the post-structuralist work of Lacan and Derrida. One of the

positions taken by post-structuralist theorists is that the author is dead. Its easy for

any reader who does not fully understand what the issues and the implications really

are to short-circuit such a theoretical position by saying of course there was an

author who knew what (s)he was doing look at the drafts, the letters to his/her

friends, the interviews, and so forth. Obviously, such a response would not be

helpful for several reasons:

the person doing the theorizing must have already thought through thedismissal of this proposition and a possible answer to such a reaction;

even when the author says he knew perfecly well what he was doing, criticstend to consider that he didnt because he could not be aware of his social or

cultural ideological environment, or fully aware of how profoundly he was

influenced by his own personal or cultural experiences, or relationships, or of

what implications the genre he was writing in had for the eventual meaning of

what he had to say;

furthermore, it is the question of interpretation and meaning: how do we knowthe author meant to mean what we think we know he meant (the already


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mentioned intentional fallacy)? How can we guarantee (and should we do that

for that matter) that we are reading the text exactly as the author would have

had us read it? ConsiderHamlet: if it were clear what Shakespeare meant by

Hamlet, we wouldnt have the hundreds of articles and books disagreeing with

each other.

We find ourselves trapped in a kind of hermeneutic circle: the author we construct is

out of our reading of him, then we say he knew what he was doing because she did

exactly what we predicted. The author is in the text only insofar as we try to read

him out of it. One of the strikes against autobiographies and biographies both as

guides to an authors thought and meanings is that they themselves are writings,

conforming to certain conventions. As to the authors readings of his own works,

Lawrence once saidtrust the tale, not the teller.

Coming back to the syntagm, death of the author, we cannot but mention that in

1968 Barthes publishes his famous and most influential essay, La mort de lauteur,

in which he tries to replace the author with the scriptor (it characterizes his

structuralist period, mention necessary since he will also have a post-structuralist one,

in which, as later indicated in the present study, he will find it fit to nuance his

position towards the authorial instance):

The Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as the past of his own book:

book and author stand automatically on a single line divided into a before and an

after. The Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before

it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a

father to his child. In complete contrast, the modern scriptor is born simultaneously

with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing,

is not the subject with the book as predicate; there is no other time than that of the

enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now...We know now that a

text is not a line of words releasing a single theological meaning (the message of

the Author-God) but a multidimentional space in which a variety of writings, none of

them original, blend and clash.

(Barthes 1968, in Lodge 1990:15)


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In other words, the scriptor, unlike the author, willingly accepts to lose what Barthes

calls propria structur i pe cea a lumii n structura cuvntului (n Simion 1993:

124). The much debated on relationship between the author/(already) scriptor/

producerand his work/(already) writingis seen as a relationship of relationships, not

as a mere causal one between a life and a writing:

i dacexistun raport ntre autor i opera lui (cine l-ar putea nega? Opera nu pic

din cer: numai critica pozitivistcrede ncn Muz), [...] e vorba de un raport ntre

tot autorul i toatopera, un raport de raporturi, o corespondenomologic, i nu

analogic.

(Barthes, in Simion 1993:126-7)

Like the later work of Barthes, the writing of Jaques Derrida is both a continuation

and a critique of structuralism from inside the structuralist system. We couldnt have

ended this chapter without mentioning his name attached to works like Structure,

Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences (1968), Of Grammatology

(1978), Dissemination (1982), which inaugurated one of the most influential post-

structuralist theories, deconstructivism.

Among the numerous concepts that Derrida makes use of to develop his

argument, it is worth pointing to logocentrism and diffrance, while his famous

assertion Il ny a pas de hors-texte(There is nothing outside the text/nothing except

text) is considered to be extremely influential for literary theory, in general, for this

claim contains echoes of the principles supported by a number of the major theories of

literature that have emerged in the 20th century.

If language in general is not governed by anything outside it, no more are

individual texts. This seems to have obvious parallels with the Russian Formalist

attempt to found an approach to literature that would exclude all factors external to

the texts history, psychology, and so on. Similarly, it appears to evoke the principles

behind the New Critics words on the pageaxiom.

There are certain aspects of Derridas own strategies of writing which are

likely to be familiar to anyone with an experience of literature. One that we took

interest in in the present study is his attitude towards the texts he is writing about:

because writing can never be governed by the intention and avowed aims of its

authors, Derrida thinks that he is bound, as we all are, to say more, less or something


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quite other than what he would mean/would like to say [voudrait dire] (in Jefferson

and Robey 1988:116).

Literary criticism has often taken precisely this assumption as its starting

point, and has presumed that a literary text is not necessarily saying what it intends to

say or even what it appears to say hence the need for critical interpretation. In a

sense, the very institution of literary criticism is concrete testimony of this

assumption.

Since Derrida has no special category for literature, and since, according to

him, neither the language of the texts we read, nor the language of the discourse in

which we discuss them, is exempt from diffrance, his solution for the nature of the

discourse about literature, is grammatology and deconstruction. The former is the

science of writing in so far as writing is regarded as a generalized phenomenon, as

archi-criture; the latter is the form grammatology takes when it turns its attention to

specific texts. A deconstructive reading tries to bring out the logic of the texts

language as opposed to the logic of its authors claims.

3.3. Some positions in favour of the return of the great absentee

We thought it would be useful to counter-balance some of the radical assertions we

have analyzed so far, with more author-friendly stances. In this respect, we have

found equally famous names.

Thus, if Barthes sought to replace author with the term scriptor and

announced the death of the author in 1968, not sentencing to death the person but

his authority and his clinging to his writing after it was done, the British writer,

critic and professor, David Lodge, replies:

Now my first reaction as a novelist is to contest these remarks to say to Barthes that

I do feel a kind of parental responsability for the novels I write, that the composition

is, in an important sense, my past, that I do think, suffer, live for a book while it is in

progress ...

(Lodge 1990:15)


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Whereas Barthes declares that the author is dead, the text he thereby produces is not

without an author. In Barthes criticism the auhtor returns -but in the displaced form

of Barthes metatextual account of the writing activity. In this view, then, the critic is

the real beneficiary of the separation of an author from a text.

(Pease, in Lentricchia 1995:112)

Beyond any dispute for supremacy between the author, on the one hand, and the

critic, on the other, the former persists in not letting himself driven away or even

anihilated. Many times, to the critics despair, culture keeps paying respect and

homage to the author, or even, in Liviu Papadimas words, it continues s-i

mitologizeze scriitorii, ... asimilndu-i unor repere simbolice cardinale ...(Papadima

1999:19).

Considering Derridas assertion about everything being a text, professor

Valentine Cunningham, reputed name on the British scene of literary history and

criticism, admits that it is a most important stand in the post-war criticism, but he

nuances it:

Sigur, totul este textualizat, cum totul este construit, este produsul construciei umane,

lumea n care ne natem este un construct, o lucrare a imaginaiei. Modul n care

lum cunotin de lume este plsmuit prin procese de construire a textului, de

contextualizare. Dar ideea clumea nsi este doar un text mi se pare un paradox

deosebit de interesant, ca snu spun o enormitate. Lumea nu este doar text. nu

putem textualiza pe seama a nimic. Scriem natura, evident, o ficionalizm, o

textualizm. i ca atare, textul naturii e altul de la o epocla alta. Dar materialul

lumii este doar att: material care devine text.

(Cunningham, in Anghelescu Irimia 1999:111-2)

Cunninghams position becomes explicit from the stand he takes towards concepts

which some radical post-structuralist theories banter, when they do not directly reject:

God, author, truth, and so on:

[o]dat discreditat ideea c pot exista enunuri cu valoare de adevr, orict am

intra n probleme de validitate a adevrului, ceea ce implicdiscuia despre realitate,

imaginaie, ficiune etc., ne poticnim evident. [o]dat discreditat ideea c estedatoria scriitorului sredea ct poate mai bine adevrul, ajungem ireparabil ntr-un


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impas. De aceea sunt de prere ceste periculos sse persifleze ideea cadevrul

este un scop, fie n literatur, ori n critic.

(Cunningham, in Anghelescu Irimia 1999:119-20)

Another British academic (because this is mainly the environment that provides the

oil that calms the permanently troubled American and, especially, French waters) is

Malcolm Bradbury. Professor Lidia Vianu comments, in the chapter At the Gates of

Commonsense in British Desperadoes at the Turn of the Millenium, on what she

considers to be an example of intelligible criticism that de-constructs in an ironic de-

constructivist manner, and de-flates some of the post-modernist and post-structuralist

airs. Bradburys book, My Strange Quest for Mensonge, Structuralisms Hidden

Her (1987), begins with Michel Foucaults question in the essay What Is an

Author?: What difference does it make who is speaking? Here is a list of short

quotations that seem to have no need for supplementary comments:

[t]hanks to Deconstruction, truth is very much an open question.

[t]he age of the floating signifier, when word no longer attaches properly to thing.

[f]ar from thought being written in language, language was writing thought, and not

doing it well.

The wind of change was blowing everywhere, and the day of the modern reader who

did not read a book at all was born.

What everyone was waiting for, everyone needed, was the coming of the centreless

centre, the presentless present, the writerless writing, the signless sign that would

draw everything together and put it into its true lack of relation.

It (Mensonges book) also had considerable appeal for British critics, who had

always taken the view that all authors were dead anyway, or if they were not then they

should be.

(Bradbury, in Vianu 1999:123-7)

Mensonge, in fact, has hardly ever been seen or heard speaking. He is the core of

mystery. He did not write, yet his book was published and vanished. He is the author

who denies himself: he is the absent absence, helping the deconstructivists dream

come true.


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Literary criticism meticulously sets about deconstructing the author as a

person. The death of the author, prerequisite for the birth of the reader, is explained

by the Deconstructionist author, who gets all the attention, while the original book is

dead and buried. He becomes the author (remember Pease?). Bradbury calls this an

illogicality, but he actually means fraud. He explains that Mensonges non-presence

is exactly what constitutes his authority, or rather, precisely, his lack of it.(Bradbury,

in Vianu 1999:126)

The supreme negation has Bradbury splitting with laughter, yet hiding this

heresy under the cult of Mensonge (lie). The great man declares This is not the book I

did not write, (...) and I refuse to acknowledge it as not mine. (Bradbury, in Vianu

1999:127)

Taking all this with a pinch of (French/English) salt, we shall see in the last

part of the present study that, once postmodernism settled in literature, one can easily

notice a sudden change (for the better, we would daresay) in the authorial instance

and in the interest in the man beyond his work, and literary genres, previously

considered as marginal (memories, autobiographies, confessions, diaries), will be

reconsidered.


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4. The author-authorship relationship in metafiction

4.1. The identity crisis in postmodernity

We proposed to make a short presentation of the postmodern condition (the major

focus for debates on cultural postmodernism), as Jean-Franois Lyotard called it,

when the metanarratives or grands rcits (that of human liberation associated with

the Enlightenment and the revolutionary tradition, or that of the prospective unity of

all knowledge associated with Hegelianism) lose their credibility (because they

produced a range of social and political disasters, from modern warfare, Auschwitz

and the Gulag to nuclear threat and severe ecological crisis) and make room for the

more modest events or petits rcits, a new source of legitimation.

If the modern Joyce allows the unpresentable to become perceptible in his

writing itself, in the signifier, the postmodern, in Lyotards view expressed in the

essay Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?, is that which puts forward

the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good

forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the

nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations, not in order

to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable:

A postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he writes, the

work he produces are not in principle governed by pre-established rules, and they

cannot be judged according to a determining judgment, by applying familiar

categories to the text or to the work. Those rules and categories are what the work of

art itself is looking for. The artist and the writer, then, are working without rules in

order to formulate the rules of what will have been done. Hence the fact that work

and text have the characters of an event.

(Lyotard, in Brooker 1992:149)

Jean Baudrillard, another influential theorist of postmodernity, tells us that we live in

the era of media reproduction. His early work questioned the tenets of both Marxism

and structuralism. Having argued for the dominance in modern capitalist societies of

consumption over production and of the signifier over the signified, Baudrillard has


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turned his attention in recent years to a critique of technology in the era of media

reproduction.

His increasingly apocalyptic and hyperbolic statements include the

sensationalist messages of the loss of the real and of the appearance of the culture of

hyper-reality, in which models determine yet undermine the real. In a world in

which there is talk about the transition from signs that dissimulate something to signs

that dissimulate (the) nothing, we can speak about the transition from a theology of

truth and its sometimes hidden character, to the era of the image that has nothing to do

with reality, being its own simulacrum.

When the real is no longer what we were sure it was, there appears, besides

nostalgia, a kind of panic in its production which parallels the panic of the material

production. It is the reaction of the being who no longer knows who it is, in which of

the worlds it is, and, above all, ifit is; in an ocean of uncertainties, the being thinks it

can anchor only in what it can feel and possess.

Consequently the unprecedented development of technology in the nuclear era

brings about the consumerist societyand the mass-culture, which, in their turn will

lead to the great themes of postmodernism: the cult of catastrophy, the taste for the

apocalyptic and the void, the replacement of the event with the happening, the

contingent, the exhaustion, anarchy and absence. With its nostalgic and crepuscular

mood, postmodernity seems to be the expression of a multiple crisis, a phenomenon

creeping into art, economy, philosophy and social life in the same time.

The identity crisis tends to be considered the most symptomatic of all the

crises that postmodernity carries on or creates itself. The search for identity was an

imperative in modernism, reaching a climax in existentialist literature, for the gods

absence is felt as an absence(M. Heidegger). In postmodernism, man has already lost

the essence and meaning of his existence and this is no longer a tragedy for him. The

absence of the god does not affect him. He turns his face towards the past, but in a

different way than his predecessors used to do it. This turning is an ontological need

for spiritual regeneration. The modernist epistemological doubt (how and if we can

know the real world) is replaced with the ontological one (what is the nature of

reality, what are the possible worlds). In the arts, this tendency has periodically

appeared as a consequence of the exhaustion of the creative energies, caused by mans

final impoverishment.


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The Romantics nostalgically recovered the past, the expressionists revalued it

with excitement, the postmodernists parodically alter its substance. The identity crisis

is as old as man is. From Ghilgamess Epicto The Name of the Rose, all the literary

heroes have existed through the fervour they prove when longing after their selves or

seeking the essence and meaning of life. Man has always tried to find his identity, but

the crisis reached a climax the moment the self began to dissolve and disappear, when

the artist discovered himself as otherness(other than Rimbauds Car Je est un autre),

when instead of harmony we find chaos and the world has already revealed its lack of

meaning, or at least of a meaning accessible to man.

If, by this loss of traditional values, the artist becomes an other, the

postmodern author simply witnesses his own disintegration. The de-personalization

syndrome is spotted in the modernist character. In postmodernism, it is the author

himself who is aimed at, he no longer being a creator of worlds, but himself a fiction,

a product of the text, de-constructed by language.

Once the work done, the author may disappear, being excluded from the

dialogue between the text and the reader, the new spoiled child of criticism: The

author should die, says Eco, once he is done with his writing, not to trouble the texts

direction. This new authority of the text is so big that it becomes narcissistic, so

preoccupied with itself that it becomes a metatext.

Critical terminology gets richer with terms as intertextuality, metatextuality,

paratextuality, hypertextuality, architextuality, textualism, textual engineering,

a.s.o. The identity discourse concentrates upon itself until it becomes a

metadiscourse, provoking a crisis that leads to an increased loss of meaning; through

exaggerated reflexion on language, the signs tend to lose their referential value, being

reduced to mere lexemes, skillfully handled (it is no longer the authors talent/gift) by

some strange creatures that Ihab Hassan calls linguistic animals. The (exaggerated)

autonomy of language, consequence of the shade the signified was cast into, will call

for the apocalyptic image forwarded by Michel Foucault, that of the man who is

about to disappear, even to die from the signs that were born within himself.

David Lodge quotes in this respect Paul de Mans essay, Criticism and

Crisis, inBlindness and Insight(1971), only to contest him:

That sign and meaning can never coincide is what is precisely taken for granted in thekind of language we call literary. Literature, unlike everyday language, begins on the


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far side of this knowledge; it is the only form of language free from the fallacy of

unmediated expression The self-reflecting mirror effect by means of which a work

of fiction asserts, by its very existence, its separation from empirical reality, its

divergence, as a sign, from a meaning that depends for its existence on the

constitutive activity of this sign, characterizes the work of literature in its essence. It

is always against the explicit assertion of the writer that the readers degrade the

fiction by confusing it with a reality from which it has forever taken leave.

(de Man, in Lodge 1990:15)

Lodge feels that the more we come to the actual experience of writing, the more we

encounter paradox and contradiction, and lists a series of questions that structuralists

and post-structuralists will give one set of answers to, while humanist or expressive

realist critics another set:

are books made out of the writers observation and experience, or out of otherbooks?

does the writer write his novel or does the novel write the writer? is the implied author of a novel - the creative mind to whom we attribute its

existence, and whom we praise or blame for its success and failure - the same

as the actual historical individual who sat at his desk and wrote it, and who has

his own life before and after that activity, or an identity who exists only at the

moment of composition?

can a novel be true to life or does it merely create a reality effect? Is realityitself such an effect?

is the absence of the writer from his own text that which spurs him to refineand polish his language so that his meaning will be effectively communicated

without the supplementary aids of voice, gesture, physical presence, etc.,

which assist communication in ordinary speech? Or is the association of

meaning with presence a fallacy which writing, through its inherent ambiguity

and openness to a variety of interpretations, helps to expose?

Lodge suspects that most writers, himself included, would be inclined to say Yes and

no, or Both alternatives are true. He takes James Joyces work as an example of

verbal mimesis, of novels that arise from their authors experience; almost every


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incident and character in his novels and stories can be traced back to some fact of his

own life and experience, and he boasted that if the city of Dublin were to be destroyed

it could be reconstructed from his books, and yet he made large implicit and explicit

claims for the timeless and universal significance of those narratives.

Novelists are and always have been split between, on the one hand, the desire

to claim an imaginative and representative truth for their stories, and on the other the

wish to guarantee and defend that truth-claim by reference to empirical facts: a

contradiction they seek to disguise by elaborate mystifications and metafictional ploys

such as framing narratives, parody and other kinds of intertextuality and self

reflexivity or what the Russian formalists called baring of the device. Although not

absent from the classic realist novel, these ploys are particularly marked in

contemporary fiction, as if in response to or defence against the epistemological

skepticism of contemporary critical theory.

4.2. The ontological level of the postmodern writer. Playing with the structures of

authority in metafiction

In this chapter, we shall see that the author, not only comes back after having been

exiled, but he even plays with his absent presence/present absenceunder the readers

eyes.

Metafiction is fiction about fiction: novels and stories that call attention to

their fictional status and their own compositional procedures. The grandaddy of all

metafictional novels was Tristram Shandy, whose narrators dialogues with his

imaginary readers are only one of the many ways in which Sterne foregrounds the gap

between art and life that conventional realism seeks to conceal. Metafiction, then, is

not a modern invention; but it is a mode that many contemporary writers find

particularly appealing, weighed down, as they are, by their awareness of their literary

antecedents, oppressed by the fear that whatever they might have to say has been said

before, and condemned to self-consciousness by the climate of modern culture. The

literary critic, Harold Bloom, calls this fear, anxiety of influence, and thinks that this is

what urges authors to experiment.

In the work of English novelists, metafictional discourse most commonly

occur in the form of asides in novels primarily focused on the traditional novelistic

task of describing character and action. These passages acknowledge the artificiality


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of the conventions of realism even as they employ them; they disarm criticism by

anticipating it; they flatter the reader by treating him or her as an intellectual equal,

sophisticated enough not to be thrown by the admission that a work of fiction is a

verbal construction rather than a slice of life.

David Lodge, in The Art of Fiction, shows that there are at least two categories

to be distinguished here: the above one, and that of other modern writers, mostly non-

British (although John Fowles also belongs in this company) the Argentinian

Borges, the Italian Calvino and the American Barth, with whom metafictional

discourse is not so much an alibi by means of which the writer can occasionally

escape the constraints of traditional realism; rather, it is a central preoccupation and

source of inspiration. As the British critic mentions, there also are dissenting voices

that consider such writing as symptomatic of a decadent, narcissistic literary culture,

stories about writers writing stories, another regressus ad infinitum. But then, this is

also what Barth himself complained about in Life-Story, one of the pieces in his

collection, Lost in the Funhouse. Lodge characterizes this habit that writers of

metafiction seem to have, that of incorporating potential criticism into their texts and

thus fictionalizing it, as beingsneaky.

Giani Vattimo considers the postmodern author to be a weak one, someone

who cannot help intruding, getting on stage in an unexpected manner, and, many

times, in strange hypostases. This asks for a well-informed, attentive postmodern

reader, one who is prepared to be attacked and/or invited to play with experiments in

narrative mode/technique, with multiple fictional worlds, and with changing identities

both of the characters and the authors. Here follows three examples of such

instances: John Barths Lost in the Funhouse, John Fowless The French

Lieutenants Woman, Kurt Vonneguts Slaughterhouse Five.

John Barth:Lost in the Funhouse

Hunchbacks, fat ladies, fools that no one chose what he was was unbearable. In the

movies hed meet a beautiful young girl in the funhouse; theyd have hairs-breadth

escapes from real dangers; hed do and say the right things; she also; in the end

theyd be lovers; their dialogue lines would match up; hed be perfectly at ease; shed

not only like him well enough, shed think he was marvellous; shed lie awakethinking about him, instead of vice versa the way his face looked in different lights


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and how he stood and exactly what hed said and yet that would be only one small

episode in his wonderful life, among many others. Not a turning point at all. ... One

reason for not writing a lost-in-the-funhouse story is that either everybodys felt what

Ambrose feels, in which case it goes without saying, or else no normal person feels

such things, in which case Ambrose is a freak. Is anything more tiresome, in fiction,

than the problems of sensitive adolescence? And its all too long and rambling, as if

the author. For all a person knows the first time through, the end could be just around

the corner; perhaps, not impossibly its been within reach any number of times. On

the other hand he may be scarcely past the start, with everything yet to get through,

an intolerable idea.

The title story ofLost in the Funhousetraces Barths attempt to write a story about a

family outing to Atlantic City in the nineteen-forties. The central character is the

adolescent Ambrose, who is accompanying his parents, his brother Peter, his uncle

Karl, and Magda, a childhood playmate now a teenager like himself, and therefore an

object of sexual interest. Essentially it is a story of adolescent yearning for freedom

and fulfilment, an exhausted footnote to the great tradition of the autobiographical-

novel-about-boy-who-will-grow-up-to-be-a-writer, such asA Portrait of theArtist as a

Young Man and Sons and Lovers. It is intended to reach its climax in a funhouse,

where Ambrose is to get lost, though in what circumstances, and with what outcome,

the author is never able to decide.

In the passage quoted here, the questioning of conventional fictional

representation is artfully doubled. First, Ambroses romantic longings are rendered

through a parody of Hollywoods wish-fulfilment fantasies: In the moviesThis is

obviously bad art, in contrast to which the rendering of Ambroses actual frustrated,

tongue-tied, alienated existence seems realistically authentic. But then that

representation is undermined by a typical metafictional move what is known as

breaking the frame. The authorial voice abruptly intervenes to comment that

Ambroses situation is either too familiar or too deviant to be worth describing, which

is as if a movie actor were to turn to the camera suddenly and say This is a lousy

script. The voice of a carping critic is heard: Is anything more tiresome, in fiction,

than the problems of sensitive adolescents?The author seems to be suddenly losing

faith in his own story, and cannot even summon up the energy to finish the sentence

in which he confesses that it is too long and rambling.


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Writers often lose faith in what they are doing, but do not normally admit this

in their texts. To do so is to acknowledge failure but also to tacitly claim such

failure as more interesting and more truthful than conventional success.

Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse Five

The novel is as remarkable for its stunning frame-breaking effects as for its

imaginative use of time-shift (the flashback/ flashforward of the cinema, analepsis/

prolepsis for rhetoricians), by confessing:I would hate to tell you what this lousy little

book cost me in money and anxiety and time. In his first chapter he describes the

difficulty of writing about an event like the destruction of Dresden, and says,

addressing the man who commissioned it, It is so short and jumbled and jangled,

Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. The personal

experience on which it is based was so traumatic and so painful to return to that

Vonnegut compares his fate to that of Lots wife in the Old Testament, who showed

her human nature by looking back upon the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah but

was punished by being turned into a pillar of salt:Ive finished my war book now. The

next one I write is going to be fun. This one is a failure, and it had to be, since it was

written by a pillar of salt.

In fact, far from being a failure, the novel is Vonneguts masterpiece, and one

of the most memorable novels of the postwar period in English.

John Fowles: The French Lieutenants Woman

One of the meanings of the term authority is that of a power or right to enforce

obedience. So, literary authority implies the persuasive force by means of which the

writer manages to convince the reader, on the one hand, and manipulate character,

setting, time and plot, on the other hand. It, therefore, constitutes itself into a specific

technique of an authorially intrusive sort, aiming at somehow turning the author into a

tyrant and the text into a tyrannical construct.

In The Magus, Fowles offers the reader total freedom of perceiving the novels

message: So far Im concerned, there is no given right reaction. (Fowles,

Foreword to The Magus, 1984:10)


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After twelve chapters in which he has played with the historical fact anchored into the

real world, Fowless narrator abruptly confronts us with an irrefutable fact of a

different kind:

This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed

outside my own mind. If, until now, I have claimed to be reading their minds and

innermost secrets, it is because Im writing within and according to a convention

universally accepted at the time my story goes, that the novelist is like a god. He

might not be omniscient, but he tries to pretend he is.

With this gesture, the illusory reality of the fictional world is destroyed, and we are

offered instead, if not the realworld, at least areal world. For what is ultimately real

in the ontological structure of The French Lieutenants Woman, if not the authors

performance in creating that world?

The author occupies an ontological level superior to his world; by breaking the

frame around his world, the author foregrounds his own superior reality. The

metafictional gesture of frame-breaking is a form of superrealism, and is a risky

business. Intended to establish an absolute level of reality, it paradoxically relativizes

reality; intended to provide an ontologically stable foothold, it only destabilizes

ontology further. For the metafictional gesture of sacrificing an illusory reality to a

higher, realer reality, that of the author, sets a precedent: why should this gesture not

be repeatable? What prevents the authors reality from being treated in its turn as an

illusion to be shattered? Nothing whatsoever, and so the supposedly absolute reality

of the author becomes just another level of fiction, and the realworld retreats further.

To reveal the authors position within the ontological structure is only to

introduce the author into the fiction; far from abolishing the frame, this gesture

merely widens it to include the author as a fictional character. In Chapter 13, the voice

of the author intrudes upon his fiction to declare its fictionality, This story I am telling

...; in chapter 61, the author enters his world in the person of an interfering impresario

whose physical features caricature those of the real John Fowles. Thus, the cycle of

metafictional frame-breaking is repeated twice, once at the level of the fictional

world, once at the level of the author, who now is revealed as himself a fiction.


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In an effort to stabilize this spiral of fictions, metafictions, meta-metafictions, and so

on to infinite regress, various postmodernist writers have tried introducing into their

texts what appears to be the one irreducibly real reality in their performance as writers

the act of writing itself.

Ronald Sukenick: Thirteen Digressions

Thus arises the postmodernist topos of the writer at his desk, or what Ronald

Sukenick has called the truth of the page:

The truth of the page is that theres a writer sitting there writing the page. If the

writer is conceived, both by himself and by the reader, as someone sitting there

writing the page, illusionism becomes impossible the reader is prevented from

being hypnotized by the illusion of that make-believe so effective in the hands of the

nineteenth-century novelists but which by now has become a passive, escapist habit of

response to a creative work instead he is forced to recognize the reality of the

reading situation as the writer points to the reality of the writing situation, and the

work, instead of allowing him to escape the truth of his own life, keeps returning him

to it but, one hopes, with his own imagination activated and revitalized.

(Sukenick 1985:25)

Here we seem to be in touch with the real world at last, for what could be more

undeniably real than the actual conditions under which the writer has produced the

text we are reading?

Yet, according to Brian McHale in Postmodernist Fiction, ambiguities arise.

Someone sitting there writing the page is always only a fictional reconstruction of the

act of writing which depends on what has been written on the text we read. In this

sense, the writing itself is more real than the act of writing that presumably gave rise

to it! All this leads to an uncomfortable circularity that depends on the strangely

amphibious ontological status, the presence/absence of the author. Whenever some

element of ontological structure or some ontological boundary is foregrounded, the

authors role and activity is foregrounded with it: Who else could be held responsible

for the practice of foregrounding, who else could be credited with the intention to

foreground, if not her or him?


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4.3. Authors and Authority (Attempted conclusion)

The problem of authors and authorities has been a puzzling one for years. Nowadays

its connotations have spread beyond that of creator-creative practice. Its modern

history involves the history of culture itself, and of the idea of culture, as well as of

particular individuals, doctrines and approaches.

Starting from the opinions formulated by the three major Greek and Roman

commentators on literature Aristotle, Horace and Longinus2 - the subsequent

literary-critical activity has looked at the issue in terms of literary development and, at

the same time, of the inertia of any established intellectual discipline.

Critical discourse, consequently, is a relatively chaotic state of enquiry in

which different schools compete with one another and there is no common body of

belief. The individual researcher is forced to state and defend basic assumptions and

has very limited scope for building on the work of others

Authors stamp their works with personal features and beliefs that are the result

of both the sum of acquired knowledge and the individual experience that dictates

reactions to or against the previously established social, cultural, historical norms.

In its modern, existentialist acceptance, the question of authority is

paradoxically one of freedom and entrapment: once the author is allowed to

manipulate through fiction, he becomes a structure of authority that prevents him and

others from freely re-creating through reading. The investigation of freedom involves

the investigation of the nature of being, the plunging into consciousness.

Today we believe in the power of fiction to free and liberate writer and reader

alike, on condition that we acknowledge the possibility of demolishing old patterns

and pretensions with a view to building other possible worlds through fiction. Today

we no longer associate authority with Divinity, writing with Creation, but give them

both a personal, subjective meaning that includes the Human:

Existo singura definitie buna a divinitatii libertatea care ingaduie existenta altor

libertati. Si trebuie sa ma conformez acestei definitii. Romancierul continua sa fie un

zeu, deoarece creeaza (si nici chiar romanele moderne de avangarda, cele mai

2

see Patrick Parrinder, Authors and Authority (1991: 3): Aristotle relies on the consistency of anintellectual method and its verifiability; Horace principally on the force of his literary personality;Longinus on the cogent manipulation of methods \nd assumptions which are shared.


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aleatorii, nu au reusit sa elimine complet autorul); ceea ce s-a schimbat este faptul ca

nu mai suntem zei in acceptia epocii victoriene, atotstiutori si autocrati; dar, in

conformitate cu o noua conceptie teologica, primul nostru principiu este libertatea, si

nu autoritatea Iata o definitie de baza pentru Homo Sapiens.

(Fowles 1994:78)

Deliberately or not, all modernist writers have tried to flee from harsh reality and

escape into a dream-text where the merging of illusion with reality becomes possible.

The exodus is countered however by various forms of the return to the self, the

familiar, the end which becomes the start.3

The generation maturing at the beginning of the century saw themselves

experiencing a changing age, where instability and uncertainty were the factors that

led to this retreat into the inner dimension (although not always avowedly so). The

chaos that ruled the world and that had ruled the human mind was found a counterpart

in the disordered, fragmentary, essentially dislocated universe of fiction when both

were discovered unbearable, the return to the end was preferred and death chosen as

freedom.

If some modernist writers sought escape in death and committed suicide (V.

Woolf, E. Hemingway), the postmodernist ones, as already pointed at, were cut off

the hand by their critics. Nevertheless, it is common sense to assume that it is as

impossible for us to imagine a text without an author, or a busy pen or paintbrush

without some hand holding it, as it is for a text of any kind to exist without some text-

making hand. Texts are not made by machines.

It is in practice impossible for us to talk about texts without the presence of a

presumed writing hand and of the person the hand belongs to, and (sooner or

later) the history, the context, the ideology, the whole matrix of that person,

invading the discussion, as these had no doubt previously invaded the text.

3

this pattern back to the self and then back to the moment before the self, to an original state of blankobscurity, is articulated in various ways in by Freud and Nietzsche (seeBeyond the Pleasure Principleand The Will to Power)


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5. Bibliography

Anghelescu Irimia, M. Dialoguri Postmoderne, Ed. Fundaiei Culturale Romne,Bucureti, 1999.

Barthes, R. The Death of the Author in Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh (eds)Modern Literary Theory, OUP, 1989

Brooker, P. (ed.),Modernism/Postmodernism, Longman, London and New York,1992.

Cuddon, J. A.,Dictionary of Literary Terms, Penguin Books, London, 1982. Cunningham, V. In the Reading Gaol postmodernity, texts, and history, Ed.

Blackwell, Oxford UK & Cambridge USA, 1994.

Federman, R. Take It or Leave It, New York, Fiction Collective, 1976. Foucault, M. What is an author?, in David Lodge (ed.), Modern Criticism and

Theory, Longman, New York, 1998, pp.196-210.

Foucault, M. The Order of Discourse, in Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh (eds)Modern Literary Theory, OUP, 1989.

Fowles, J.Iubita locotenentului francez, Ed. Univers, Bucureti, 1994. Fowles, J.Mantissa, Boston, Little Brown, 1982. Harrison, B. Rhetoric and the Self, n Inconvenient Fictions. Literature and the

Limits of Theory, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1991.

Jefferson, A., D. Robey (eds.), Modern Literary Theory, B. T. Batsford Ltd.,London, 1988.

Lodge, D. After Bakhtin. Essays on Fiction and Criticism, Routledge, London,1990.

Lodge, D. The Art of Fiction, Penguin Books, England, 1992. Mavrodin, I.Poietici Poetic, Ed. Scrisul Romnesc, Craiova, 1998. McEvan, N. The Survival of the Novel. British Fiction in the Later Twentieth

Century, MacMillan Press, 1981.

McHale, B.Postmodernist Fiction, Routledge, London and New York, 1987. Papadima, L.Literaturi Comunicare. Relaia autor cititor n proza paoptist

i postpaoptist, Ed. Polirom, Bucureti, 1999.

Parrinder, P. Authors & Authority: English and American Criticism 1750-1990,MacMillan, London, 1991.


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Pease E., D. Author, in Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (eds.),Critical Terms for Literary Study, The University of Chicago Press, USA, 1995,

pp.105-116.

Selden, R., P. Widdowson (eds.), A Readers Guide to Contemporary LiteraryTheory, Harvester-Wheatsheaf, Hertfordshire, 1993.

Simion, E.Ficiunea jurnalului intim, vol. I, Existo poetica jurnalului?, Ed.Univers Enciclopedic, Bucureti, 2001.

Simion, E. ntoarcerea autorului. Eseuri despre relaia creator oper,Biblioteca pentru toi, Ed. Minerva, Bucureti, 1993.

Sukenick, R. The Death of the Novel, in The Death of the Novel and OtherStories, New York, The Dial Press, 1969.

Sukenick, R. Thirteen digressions, nIn Form: Digressions on the Act of Fiction,Carbondale and Edwardsville, Southern Illinois University Press, 1985.

Sukenick, R. Out, Chicago, Swallow Press, 1973. Vianu, L. At the Gates of Commonsense, inBritish Desperadoes at the Turn of

the Millennium, Ed. All, Bucureti, 1999.

Vonnegut, K. Slaughterhouse-Five, New York, Dell, 1971.

Wimsatt, W., M. Beardsley, The Intentional Fallacy. The Affective Fallacy, inDavid Lodge (ed.), 20th Century Literary Criticism A Reader, Longman,

London, 1972.


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TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION:

KEY WORDS OR ASPECTS TO BE HAD IN MIND WHEN SEARCHING

FOR INTERNET ARTICLES OR BOOKS

ON THE TOPIC OF THE PRESENT COURSE:

1. Contemporary literary theory some characteristics2. Expressive theories of art3. Author-text, author-reader, author-text-reality relationships4. The turning away from biographical criticism, beginning with

structuralism5. Existentialism and its influence upon literary theory6. The concept of authoras viewed by 20thcentury literary theory and

criticism

7. The autonomy of the literary text as seen by structuralists and post-structuralists

8. Roland Barthes death of authors birth of readers9. American New Criticism and the concepts of intentional & affective

fallacy

10.Deconstruction and its influence on the rethinking of the concept ofauthorship

11.Reactions against the downgrading

Documents

STAN S. SEM.II