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critics such as Georges Poulet (1964) a literary work would embody the author's unique mode of consciousness, which the reader would then ideally reconstitute in his reading of the text. The phenomena of consciousness, properly, that is transcendentally, defined, were the constituents not only of the world but also of the literary work.19 |
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The Death of the Author was loudly proclaimed in Roland Barthes' famous pronunciamento in the late sixties,20 and the demise was echoed by Pierre Macherey, Michel Foucault and others. The author was but the epiphenomenal node of ideological or cultural influences, an epistemological or semiotic construct of the Zeitgeist or the unconscious, a processor of preformed materials through historical templates, or even the mere channel of language itself. In any case the author had been sadly misused in debates about literature and culture. Nietzsche, who also divorced the author from the work, put it more vividly in his Genealogy of Morals (3.4): the author is only a condition of the work, the soil from which it grows, perhaps only the manure on that soil. D.H. Lawrence's slogan: Never trust the artist: trust the tale offered the same advice, and even E.M. Forster had written in 1925 that "all literature tends towards the condition of anonymity . . .it wants not to be signed". (This should bother classical scholars the less, accustomed as they are to dealing with anonymous texts and such troublesome authors as Homer and the Greek tragedians or the writer(s) of the Historia Augusta, where the biographical information is scanty, untrustworthy, or nonexistent.21 For Nietzsche even Homer, the poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey, was "an aesthetic judgement".) |
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The emphasis then of New Criticism, and of Structuralist and Deconstructionist criticism alike, was centered largely on the text, which was strictly separated from the author. The difference between the competing theories lay in the problems perceived and the techniques of analysis and interpretation favoured. (Close reading however remained a methodological practice.) |
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One difference between the earlier and later forms of this emphasis might be detected. This was to be seen in the degrees of strictness observed in separating the text from the "real world," from "Life." The New Critics stressed the autonomy of the text, despite its firm anchoring in an established literary tradition; they insisted that the world created within the work of art was self-subsistent and was only to be judged by internal criteria. Nevertheless, to make the point once again, they were prone to introduce, |
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19 For bravura examples of psychoanalytical criticism, see Wilson (1941); for a discussion of phenomenological criticism, Magliola (1989) 101. |
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20 Barthes (1968) 14. Literary biographies of a popular and scholarly sort are as popular as ever, although there is a prudent tendency to avoid straight deductions from the work to the artist and vice versa. The person that suffers is now generally distinguished from the artist that creates, although exceptions are made in the case of such authors as D.H. Lawrence. |
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21 See, e.g. Lefkowitz (1982) on the sad state of literary biography in classical times. |
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