(PDF) Dissertation June

1 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ……………………………………………………………………… 2 Key Words ………………………………………………………………….. 4 Introduction ………………………………………………………………….. 5 Chapter 1. ‘The Author is Always Already Dead’: Parallels Between Ancient and Twentieth-Century Views of Writing, and a Theory of the Literary Process 18 Chapter 2. The Text as an Utterance: The Shaping of the Modern Reader-Author Relationship during the Eighteenth-Century Printing Revolution ………............. 40 Chapter 3. Approaching the Text as an Object: The Formalist Impulse.... 59 Chapter 4. Rereading Wimsatt and Beardsley, Barthes, and Foucault on “The Death of the Author”………………………………………………. 80 Chapter 5. Singling Out the Book Singling Out the Reader: An Interpersonal Theory of Reading …………………………………………………………………... 102 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………….. 130 Bibliography ………………………………………………………………... 134 Hebrew Abstract ………………………………………………………........ 142 2 ABSTRACT This dissertation develops a theory of reading as a reader-author relationship. "Reader-author relationship" is an expression that makes no sense in terms of the formalist-based approach to the literary text, which dominated twentieth-century critical theory, treating the text as an object of scientific study, an objectively given set of linguistic data. The well-known expression "death of the author," coined by Roland Barthes, sums up the tendency of dominant branches of twentieth-century critical theory, in particular formalist/structuralist criticism, New Criticism and deconstruction, to describe the text as a fully autonomous linguistic object that has no connection to the personality or intentions of its author. This "objectification" of the text leaves out a crucial aspect of the literary text as an instance of language taking place between two persons, the author and the reader. The text is not only an object but also a kind of an utterance, in spite of the indefinite time that may intervene between the instance of writing and the instance of reading. And an utterance always passes in the interpersonal field, within some kind of a relationship. The common interpersonal basis shared by spoken and written language receives in this study an interdisciplinary grounding in literary theory and criticism, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and developmental psychology. The view of language as an ethical attitude of the self to the other, developed by Emmanuel Levinas, provides a common denominator for spoken and written language, in spite of their deep and obvious differences. Levinas's concept of "the saying," the primary exposure to another person, which leaves its trace in any finalized and structured "said" (a proposition, an idea, a rhetorical construction or a text), is applicable not only to spoken utterances but also to written texts. Psychoanalytic intersubjective views of language, e.g. by Eric Santner and Jean Laplanche, include written communication along with spoken. Laplanche asserts the primacy of "signification to" (person-to-person address) over "signification of" (linguistic transmission of content) in written language. Santner discusses literary texts' ability to "single out" their reader and enter into a mutually transforming relationship with the reader. Finally, some developmental psychologists (notably, John Bowlby and René Spitz) conclude that the development of language in 3 infants is directly dependent on the relationship with the mother or other primary caregiver. The interpersonal relationship being the "prime mover" of language acquisition sets a model for interpersonal relationship being a precondition for making and interpreting any particular utterance, written or spoken. That such precondition exists is persuasively shown, for instance, by Walter Benn Michaels and Steven Knapp's hypothetic example of a poem written by a wave on the sand: if there is no "author" presupposed behind it, be it even the poetic spirit of the sea, the signs on the sand cannot be regarded as language. The same necessity of presupposing an interlocutor behind the written (and even more specifically, printed) text has informed the dominant readerly and critical practices in the age of mass print, when the author of the mass-produced and mass- distributed text should become more remote and abstract for the reader than ever before. Paradoxically or not, it is in the age of mass print that readers begin to develop the strongest author-oriented ways of reading. Authors, represented by and known through their books, become readers' best friends, models for emulation, addressees of heated marginalia, spiritual guides, and merely human beings who could be studied and understood through their writing. Even though these ways of reading came to be widely regarded as unprofessional since the early 20th century, they never went out of use even among professional critics, in spite of being marginalized by most schools of critical theory. Yet it would be incorrect to summarize "theory" as uniformly and effectively dispensing with the author. It seems that "the death of the author" was more of a trend of academic fashion, a ruling, largely unwritten "grand narrative" that shaped the academic discourse of the past few decades. The anti-author "ideology" does not seem to be a well-grounded theory, after all, when one examines the seminal texts that were universally quoted as grounding the necessity to exclude the author from critical discussion. A re-reading of Wimsatt and Beardsley's "The Intentional Fallacy," Barthes' "The Death of the Author," and Foucault's "What Is an Author?", performed in this dissertation, shows that neither of these articles conclusively shows that the author should be excluded from critical consideration of the text. What is more, critical 4 practice did involve considerations of the author's intentions and personality even in the vogue of "anti-author" theory. 5 KEY WORDS - reader-author relationship - ethics of reading - language as attitude (of the self to the other) - critical theory - text as an object vs. text as an utterance - the literary process - subjectivity 6 INTRODUCTION In my dissertation, I wish to make a theoretical statement on the nature of reading as a reader-author relationship. How can one still speak of a theory of reader-author relationship after "the death of the author" that was, to a great extent, the foundation of critical theory in the twentieth century? How can any reader presume to have access to the author's mind through the author's text, when every reader knows how ambiguous, misleading and elusive written words can be? How can one express a wish, moreover, to bring back the author's authority over the text, after it has been fought by formalist and structuralist theorists in the name of the literary scholar's status as a scientist, and in the name of the reader's freedom? I argue that the author's presence to the reader is vital, not even as a guiding star for the discipline of literary studies, which can keep out the infinite non-valid readings, as E.D. Hirsch argued in the 1960s. It is vital as the individual reader's psychosocial and ethical necessity, an interlocutor from whom the words of the text proceed. While the text is undoubtedly a physical and linguistic object that can be handled, mass-produced and studied, it is also quite as obviously an utterance that proceeds from the writer, at the one end, and is received by reader at the other end of, the literary communication. It is impossible to view literary communication as direct and unmediated, like spoken communication when the interlocutors are present to each other. Yet leaving out the interpersonal, communicative aspect of literary text, as twentieth-century theory often did, renders a very disheartening and, I believe, inaccurate view of how literature functions. It is certainly possible to integrate the two aspects of literary text, as an object and as an utterance. For instance, the German Romantic hermeneutics of the early 19th century, one of the first sustained "scientific" theories of literature, did take both of these aspects into account. As a matter of fact, I will read the most radical 'anti-auteurist' texts of the twentieth-century literary theory, against what is believed to be the grain, and show that none of them presents the text as exclusively an object, severed from its author and retaining nothing of the author's voice and personality. 7 My purpose here is to create a theoretical framework for the experience of reading as attending to a voice that speaks the text to the reader. I argue that the very gesture of attending to such a voice is what makes reading possible. Applying this claim to literary studies, I will demonstrate the crucial role of the reader's personal relationship with the authorial personality that the reader presupposes as the source of the text, and often actively seeks to recover from the text. My assumption, shared by other theorists of literature such as E.D. Hirsch and Walter Benn Michaels, is that reading a literary work is impossible without presupposing some kind of an interlocutor on the other side of the text that one is reading. This assumption is confirmed by studies in the history of reading, e.g. Robert Darnton's and Heather Jackson's works on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers. Twentieth-century literary theory proceeded for the most part as if such interlocutor is not and need not be presupposed by the reader or the critic. Yet the metaphor of "voice" consistently used in twentieth-century academic criticism is, in my opinion, an irreducible remnant of the notion of literary text as a communicative utterance passing in interpersonal ethical space. My argument initially arose in response to the concept of "death of the author," a dominant, basic myth of academic critical theory in the last decades of the twentieth century. "Death of the author" does not only refer to the author's obvious absence at the time when her text is read, but suggests that the text is a fully autonomous linguistic object, in which the individual voice of the author is irretrievably lost. One of the shortcomings of this view of the literary text is that it fails to accommodate the crucial ethical and psychological dimensions of reading. Such a view does not account for the sense of a living voice experienced as speaking to the reader personally and directly, or for the reader's getting a clear sense of the author's personality while reading her text, and assuming a personal attitude towards that personality – all of which are common and basic reading experiences. To make these experiences a legitimate topic of theoretical discussion, one needs to adopt another view of literature, centering on the interpersonal aspect of the literary text, viewing the text not as an exhaustive locus of 'literature' but as a central vehicle in a complex interpersonal process that from now on I will refer to 8 as 'the literary process'. I will introduce a number of basic theoretical concepts that describe and analyze the reader's side of the literary process, in other words, the reader's ethical, aesthetic and psychological relationship with the text and the author. The Text as an Object vs. the Text as an Utterance Much of the theory of the literary process has to revolve around the dual nature of literary text as both an object and an utterance. On the one hand, the text exists as a physical object that has such objective properties as length, printing font, layout on the page, color of letters vs. paper or screen background etc. One can also list with the objective properties the exact number of occurrences of each word, figure of speech or grammatical construction, i.e. the objective features the text has as a linguistic rather than a purely physical object. All these properties can be perceived and analyzed as long as the text is not being read. When the text is read, those physical properties effectively disappear for the reader, as noted, for instance, by George Poulet. The text becomes instead a speech proceeding from someone, and this is an ontological duality that characterizes all written texts. Plato's comparison of written words, in Phaedrus, to silent painted figures that sometimes appear to talk and sometimes "preserve a solemn silence" indicates that this duality was noticed already in antiquity. At the turn of the 18th century, this duality was reflected in the distinction drawn by the theorists of Romantic hermeneutics between two modes of interpretation: the one "grammatical," aimed at interpreting the text as a linguistic object, the other "psychological," aimed at recovering the author's specific intention and personality on the basis of the text viewed as the author's utterance. Among twentieth-century theorists, the duality of the text as object vs. utterance was touched upon by phenomenologists of reading, first of all Wolfgang Iser, with his concept of the "virtual text" produced by the individual reader on the basis of the objective, printed text, and by George Poulet, who analyzed the exceptional status of the book among other objects. The being of a book, as Iser defines it, consists in reality of both the author's text and of the readings that readers 9 give it. According to Poulet, once reading begins, the book ceases to exist (for the reader) as a regular physical object, while the reader, in his turn, also has to "suspend" his or her own being for the duration of reading, in order to bring the text to life and allow it to be, allow its "thought" to "think itself" in the reader's mind. In both of these views, the reader actualizes the text as a voice or a consistent thought process by means of the energy, time and attention s/he spends on the reading, which contributes to the being of the book. The reader's expenditure of energy, time and attention, as a self-imposed obligation, or on the author's demand, or on demand by a third party such as a teacher, has an ethical aspect as well. The book, in its turn, amplifies or supplements the being of the reader and plays an important part in defining and refining his or her own subjectivity. Thus, the existence of the text can be presented as a three-stage process, beginning with the single event of the author writing the text, and terminating multiply in each reader's separate reading. The text proceeds from its author as expression or a species of utterance in the process of writing. Then, at the stage of publication, printing and distribution, it becomes a finished, static set of printed signs, a linguistic, physical and commercial object. Reading converts the text from an object into an utterance again. This premise is confirmed by various kinds of evidence. For instance, one may look at conversational marginalia collected by Heather Jackson (2001), which respond directly to what the author says in the text, testifying to the readers' need to situate the words of the text within a mutual conversation. Walter Benn Michaels and Steven Knapp (1975) analyze a hypothetical case of a Wordsworth poem written on the sand by an unknown agent, and demonstrate that unless the reader presupposes a personal author who intentionally wrote this text (whether the spirit of the dead poet, or even the sea itself), it cannot be regarded as a text at all. The reader's need for the author as an interlocutor may also receive an indirect but fundamental support from the data of developmental psychology, which suggest that in the first months of life, perception and interpretation of objects is dependent on the availability of a permanent caregiver, a human interlocutor who has a sustained relationship with the infant (Bowlby; Spitz; The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language). In other words, it 10 appears as if language, as an aspect of relationship with others, may be more fundamental to the constitution of human psyche than abstract thinking or even visual perception. This may be a reason why, in spite of its independent existence as an object, the written text can be read (as well as produced, see Ong 1975) only by way of recalling the primary interpersonal situation of address on which language is founded. Language as an Attitude, and the Ethics of Reading While it would be impossible to claim that literary text is equivalent to oral utterance, it is still possible to view the institution of literature as based, like other kinds of more direct communication, on the notion of language as a basic human attitude towards another human being. Most twentieth-century theorists adopted a sign-oriented view of language, where language is approached as a system of signs that exists prior to or independently from its use for human communication. By contrast, language can be viewed as primarily an ethical attitude of the self towards the other, according to the language-based anthropological ethics proposed by Emmanuel Levinas; only when the basic relationship between the self and the other is assumed, can one analyze language as a system of signs and a mechanism of communication originating in and informed by the interpersonal relation, in each particular instance when language is used. Applied to the literary text, this approach brings into view the relationship between the reader and the author as a basic condition for reading. Levinas's work provides a strong philosophical basis for viewing language as the core of human mind and society, and as primarily a gesture of address. Levinas discusses language as an attitude of the self towards the other, prior to being a sign system. According to this view, addressing the other in conversation is the properly ethical alternative to objectifying the other, which can take various forms, from theorizing about the other to such an extreme as killing her/him (Levinas 1969). To describe the literary text as a reader-author relationship, I will use such key concepts as phenomenon vs. speech, relating to the object/utterance duality of the text, the concept of the speaker as the signifier (Levinas 1969), and 11 "the saying" (the subjective) vs. "the said" (the linguistic) as the two components of any utterance (Levinas 1981). All of these concepts outline a "human-centered" view of both oral and written language, which I believe can be a useful counterpart to the sign-centered view endorsed by twentieth-century literary studies.1 In keeping with Levinas's view of language, the object/utterance duality of the literary text involves an ethical dimension: the reader may assume different attitudes to the text depending on whether s/he is experiencing it as an object or as an address from another person. Joseph Hillis Miller, who discusses the possibility of an ethical obligation towards a text in his book The Ethics of Reading (1987), struggles with the problem of defining an ethics of reading on a purely textual basis, separately from all other aspects of reading, e.g. political, social or interpersonal. Hillis Miller's argument tends towards defining reading as a primary activity setting its own ethical imperatives independently of all other spheres of life. This approach is based on Kant's way of defining aesthetic judgment as independent, separate, purified from all other kinds of judgment. "The ethical moment" of reading proper, according to Hillis Miller, can be isolated by the reader when s/he has a sense of obligation towards the text itself, an "I must" that is not derived from any of the reader's real-life relationships, obligations or inclinations (Hillis Miller 1988). In this view of ethics of reading, the text is treated as an independently existing object that can be taken out of the turbulent sphere of human relationships. A diametrically opposed approach is adopted by Wayne Booth, who treats the literary text as a point of intersection of multiple human relationships, all of which carry with them a range of responsibilities and thus can be discussed in ethical terms (Booth 1988). For instance, if literature can influence lives of real readers and even society as a whole, writers and readers share responsibility for such changes, or lack thereof. Significantly, even when discussing the writer's and the reader's responsibility to the text itself, which means for the writer to make the text as excellent as s/he can, and 1 My use of Levinas's theory of language to assert the role of the author is to some extent against the grain of Levinas's understanding of the concept of "author." He never uses the words "author" or "creator" in an unqualified or fully positive sense, associating them with the "imperialism of the subject" (see e.g. Outside the Subject). In this sense, his understanding of the word "author" is close to Barthes', which is not surprising, since in the post-war France, where they both lived and wrote, academic criticism and the literary canon it established were very powerful and "imperialistic." 12 for the reader, to give it sufficient attention, Booth still defines this responsibility in interpersonal terms – as a responsibility towards "the implied author." The contrast between Hillis Miller's and Booth's arguments shows that seeing the text primarily as an utterance, a vehicle of communicative relationship, allows one to discuss a broader range of ethical aspects of literature. Yet it is now recognized that both Booth's work, The Company We Keep, and Hillis Miller's The Ethics of Reading were equally important in "spark[ing] up the current 'pursuit of ethics' … in literary studies" – as Patrocinio P. Schweickart and Elizabeth A. Flynn recognize in their inclusive overview of reader-response studies.2 Treating the text as representing its author has an additional ethical and humanistic dimension: it is a preservation of a personality, paying respect to a unique individual. As E.M.W. Tillyard writes, "I believe we read Keats in some measure because his poetry gives a version of a remarkable personality of which another version is his life" (The Personal Heresy 35). Conceived in this way, reading becomes a labor of commemoration, paid to individuals who invested much of their lives into their contribution to the common store of culture. I will use Virginia Woolf's critical essays as an example of such criticism. The Role of Reader-Author Relationship in the Constitution of the Reader's Subjectivity. Viewing the literary process as a mode of human intercourse, and reading as being addressed, sheds new light on literature's role in the constitution of the reader's subjectivity. It has been recognized since antiquity that literature plays a crucial role in character formation, because it provides examples and evaluations of different types of character and ways of conduct. This is "ethics of reading" in the most basic, ancient sense – the role of reading in the constitution of an individual and collective "ethos." This understanding of an ethics of reading is the source of the conventional metaphoric representation of literature as food: one becomes what one reads in the same way as one becomes one reads. This metaphor obviously 2 Patrocinio P. Schweickart and Elizabeth A. Flynn, Introduction, Reading Sites: Social Differences and Reader Response, 11. 13 implies the view of text as an object that the reader consumes. However, there is a complementary metaphor, as familiar as the first one, building on the interpersonal aspect of the text – the metaphor of one's books as one's company, where "books" stand first of all for their authors. One is formed by the company one keeps, by the circle one communicates with. It is usually assumed that this happens by force of example and imitation. I will argue that, in addition, there are other processes at work when the reader creates and enjoys a selected circle of favorite books and authors; these are processes that affect the reader's subjectivity, and help the reader gain a stronger sense of who he or she is. The texts that a particular reader singles out are often described by readers as addressing, speaking to, singling out him or her with particular force. I suggest that the singling out should be regarded as mutual: not only does the reader choose the text that appeals to him/her, but also the text, in its turn (as implied in the expression "appeals to"), "singles out" the reader who has chosen it because of his/her special qualities of mind that enable this particular reader to appreciate and love this particular book; the voice in the text addresses him or her individually. Eric L. Santner discusses "singling out" as constitutive of subjectivity (Santner 2001). One can also use Louis Althusser's concept of interpellation as creating the subject, even though Althusser is rather negative and cheerless about the whole process of ideology creating its subjects by harsh interpellation while radically undercutting the individual freedom. Here the process of the other’s interpellation creating the subject will be discussed in a more positive light. Levinas' concept of "the saying" makes an even closer link between language and subjectivity. In Otherwise than Being, it is precisely the "saying," the communicative exposure to another, which constitutes subjectivity. Being as such, the individual's continuing existence, which persistently struggles against being interrupted, is not subjectivity yet. Subjectivity, or "otherwise than being," begins with the individual's exposure to another, stepping out of her/his self-contained existence, getting out of phase with her/his self because "subjecting" itself to the obligations created by the very proximity of the other. Levinas creates an intricate web of connections between the concepts of proximity, responsibility, substitution 14 (of the self for the other), signification (or more fundamentally, "signifyingness"), "saying," and subjectivity. Part of these connections rests on the logical structure of "the-one-for-the-other," which organizes the relationship of responsibility and substitution, as well as that of signification (the sign stands-in-for the signified). At one point, Levinas cites the relationship of maternity as typifying this structure of proximity-responsibility-substitution-signifyingness. The interpersonal relationship, and in particular the mother-child relationship, as the primary site of language where meaning is generated, will be of crucial importance in my argument. I will show that the reader-author relationship can also be the site where meaning and subjectivity are generated. Reading of literature as constitutive of the reader's subjectivity has acquired particular importance in the age of modernity, especially during and after the "printing revolution" of the late 18th century. This happened, first, because the rates of literacy, and thus the sheer numbers of readers and of books, skyrocketed then and have continued to increase ever since. This enabled ever growing numbers of individuals to have their subjectivity be profoundly influenced by reading. Another, corresponding reason is that in the modern age, the increasing dominance of liberal individualist values made unique personal identity a more desirable "commodity," while at the same time, the demographic explosion, urbanization and industry of mass production made it more and more difficult to be unique in one's multi-million community. Thus reading became important for the modern individual's sense of self, not only because one's choice of books (as socially signifying objects) designates one's belonging to a particular social circle, but also because the reader's self is formed and enhanced by the valuable relationships s/he contracts in the process of reading, with those who speak the text (there are also literary characters who speak in the text, and the reader’s relationships with them are another crucial part of reading, but the present dissertation deals only with authors, who "speak" their texts to the reader). "The Printing Revolution" and the Modern Condition of the Literary Text Compared to the closer social relationships between readers and authors of literary texts that existed in the narrow literate communities of the Middle Ages and 15 Renaissance (a situation of proximity between readers and authors to which, due to the World Wide Web, we are returning today), the mass production of books created a new condition for the literary text which I term, following Bertrand Bronson, "the veil of print" – the author being personally unknown to the reader of his/her text. On the one hand, reading texts by authors with whom the reader is not personally acquainted poses for the reader a challenge of coping with written utterances coming from an impersonal source; on the other hand, it also provides a new resource for a special kind of communication. The reader has access to what Wayne Booth defines as "the author's better self" (Booth 1988) – the implied author who delivers a discourse more perfect than any discourse one is likely to hear from real-life interlocutors. This kind of encounter, even though it is not a real-life encounter, has a great degree of reality of its own, because it can have a very real influence on the reader's life and personality. Robert Darnton describes the passionate and life-transforming way in which early readers of novels responded to their favorite works, which he calls "Rousseauistic reading." Even though he says that we can barely imagine such an intense response to a text today, there is still a lot of faith put by writers and educators in the character-shaping and world- transforming powers of literature. More generally, the reader's approach to the text as conveying its author's personality, and as a way of establishing a relationship with the author, is defined by Barbara Hochman as "friendly reading," or "reading for the author." Hochman brings plentiful evidence of such reading from nineteenth- and early twentieth- century American sources. I will show that the practice and theory of such reading were by no means limited to the United States. For instance, they are epitomized in the critical works of Virginia Woolf and in E.M.W. Tillyard's theory of literary communication. The boom of printing industry and the corresponding rise in the rates of literacy during and following the "printing revolution" created a new social and psychological situation for the literary text, its producers and consumers. The "printing revolution" was believed by some, at the time, to be the real cause of the French revolution, and both of these events constitute a threshold of modernity as 16 we know it. Having access to a range of affordable texts, including literary texts, allows one to choose one's values and beliefs more freely. Having a way of encountering, in texts, personalities a lot more "other" than the long-familiar faces of one’s immediate acquaintances, one is less rigidly confined to one's surroundings and native community. When otherness or difference is not encountered physically but only "virtually," one is less prone to be threatened by it and therefore immediately condemn and reject it. Such 'inoculation' against intolerance may be a very real connection between the Latin noun for 'book', liber, and the liberal way of thinking3. Thus, the spread of literature into wide and remote audiences is not only a feature of the modern 'literary process,' but a real cultural achievement of modernity. The last general point I would like to make is that I have treated the Western reading and writing world as a cultural continuity in time and space: from the Archaic and Classical Greece to the first decade of the third millennium in time, and from Russia to the United States in space. I felt such a universal approach to be suitable for the present study, which aims to uncover universal foundations of reading. I believe that the proposed view of the literary process and the reader- author relationship should be applicable also beyond the Western culture. Overview of Chapters Chapter 1 draws a comparison between the ancient and twentieth-century academic views of the written text, where both regard the text as essentially an object, presupposing the author's being "dead" or absent. By contrast, Chapter 2 examines the alternative view of text as an utterance, evidences of which can be found at a different historical cross-cut, at the time of the printing revolution in the 18th century. In the records of reading experiences from that period, one can see readers of literature in an effort to perpetuate or recreate an earlier (medieval and Renaissance) situation of the literary text as "addressed" to the reader by a personally familiar, or at least socially accessible author. In other words, the literary 3 I was first alerted to the idea of connection between these two words by Tal Rozenblat, a student in my course on "Ethics and Literature." 17 process, the communication between the reader and the author seems to be based, for these readers, on the author's personal presence to them, as they convert the text from a printed mass-produced object back into an utterance. Chapter 3 outlines the formalist literary theory’s view of the text as a physical and linguistic object, which developed starting from the 18th century in parallel with the readerly approach described in Chapter 2, "reading for the author." The overview in Chapter 3 includes a possibility for integrating these two approaches, which was offered by the Romantic hermeneutics in the early 19th century. Chapter 4 analyzes three foundational texts that inaugurated "the death of the author" in the twentieth-century critical theory: W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley's "The Intentional Fallacy," Michel Foucault's "What is an Author?" and Roland Barthes' "The Death of the Author." This chapter offers a reading of the three articles against the pervasive myth that they effectively dispense with the author's role in the reading of the text. Closer attention is devoted to Roland Barthes' article, read in the context of his work as a whole. In particular, I compare and contrast Barthes' article with his last book, Camera Lucida, which makes important statements on the expression of personality in and beyond code, and in effect, argues against "the death of the author." In Chapter 5, I propose a theory of reading as a relationship with the author, based on the concept of language as an attitude of the self to the Other, foundational for both spoken and written language. Apart from Levinas's philosophy, I draw on E.M.W. Tillyard and Virginia Woolf, as examples of author-centered theory and criticism; psychoanalytic theories of communication and subject-formation by Eric Santner and Jean Laplanche; and insights from developmental psychology by John Bowlby, René Spitz and John L. Locke, which confirm the primacy of language as an attitude and as a relationship in the constitution of the human subject. 18 CHAPTER 1 ‘THE AUTHOR IS ALWAYS ALREADY DEAD’: PARALLELS BETWEEN ANCIENT AND TWENTIETH-CENTURY VIEWS OF WRITING, AND A THEORY OF THE LITERARY PROCESS Ancient views of writing, in classical Greece and early Rome, display a surprising similarity to the ways in which twentieth-century critical theory describes writing. Both stress the written word's independence from the author who originates it: one can read and understand a written text in the absence of its author, while the text in itself does not guarantee that the reader understands the author's intention fully or correctly. With the ancients, this disempowerment of the author by the written text, as well as other related features of writing, made it a subordinate, second-rate, unreliable form of communication. Writing was metaphorically invested with the stereotypical feminine qualities of inconstancy, light-mindedness and unreliability – or, one could say, a fundamental "otherness" to the speech and thought that it is dependent upon. This "otherness" and lack of authorial control also led to uncanny, supernatural fears about writing in the ancient, in particular, classical Greek culture, and a sense that writing (as well as reading) compromises one's stable identity and respectability. For the 20th century theorists, the same features became positive, and elevated writing in their view to being a primary, archetypal form of language. Writing was discovered as a revolutionary force that has a potential of transforming the world and destabilizing unjust power relations established since ancient times – if only the readers recognize the extent of their freedom. The reader's freedom was conceived first of all as freedom from the author's intention, or metaphorically, as "the death of the author." Theory explored the potential of every text, and especially a canonical text, to be read against the grain, contrary to the conventional reading, or, as it came to be called, in a deconstructive way. Deconstructive reading emphasizes the superiority of the written language, and of language as a sign system, over any particular idea or standpoint that language can express, and over any particular individual or group who appropriates language for its narrow purposes. This has proved to be a fruitful and socially transforming approach; yet it 19 has an unwelcome implication of reducing the individual subject to being a function of "language"; it implies that individual utterance, intention and thought are secondary to the sign system in which they are embodied. In literary studies, this implication is definitely a drawback. To counterbalance this devaluation of subjectivity in the text and as opposed to the text, I propose an alternative view of the literary text as having a dual nature, both an object and an utterance, transformed from one state into the other in the processes of writing and reading, these stages constituting together a 'literary process'. This is a complex mode of existence of literary texts in culture, and it involves a relationship between the reader and the author, in which the text as an utterance is taking place. This chapter deals with the features and problems inherent in this relationship that have remained essentially the same since ancient times, but came to be viewed differently by the twentieth-century literary theory. Ancient Distrust of Writing “Death” or disappearance of the author of a written text is by no means a new idea invented by the twentieth-century literary theory. In the ancient times, an inscription on an object of art or on a tomb would be made for a future time when both the writer himself and his living memory in the minds of others would have passed away. "To whoever asks me, I answer the same thing, namely, that Andron, son of Antiphanes, dedicated me as a tithe" (in Svenbro 48). This inscription on an archaic Greek statuette dating from the 6th century B.C. effectively demonstrates the notion of writing that Western civilization has inherited from ancient Greece. First, writing is characterized by effacement of the human origin of the written utterance: both Andron son of Antiphanes who had intended the statuette as a tithe, and the nameless craftsman who had inscribed the words on the statuette, are invisible, absent, reduced to being mentioned in the third person at the time and place where the inscription is read. Secondly, the inscribed message is endlessly, changelessly, mechanically "reproduced" in time, no longer dependent on the presence of the origin of this message, the author, and regardless of who the audience may be. The written message emphasizes for the reader the impossibility of any direct 20 relationship with the author. In the case of this statuette, the first person, the “I” that pronounces the words of the inscription, is no longer a human being but an object, the statuette itself. In the case of an epitaph, another major written genre in archaic Greece, the speaker would often be the dead person resting under the tomb: "Salutation, O passers-by! I rest, dead, under here. You who draw near, read out who is the man buried here: a stranger from Aegina, Mnesitheos by name" (in Comment [OK1]: Replace with Svenbro 39). Thus, the status of the written utterance is established as radically epitaph to merchant or mariner different from that of the spoken one (including most of the period’s literature, which was meant to be recited, sung or performed, rather than silently read): the "speaker" of the written words has no physical voice, it is either an inanimate object, or a dead/absent person, and therefore in a sense quite powerless, compared to a real, present, flesh-and-blood speaker of an oral utterance, or reader of the inscription. Thus, one can say that the notion of "death of the author," or the sense that the author of a written utterance is by definition absent/dead, was widely current and had its own important function in the ancient Greek notions of writing. Along with the apparent powerlessness of such "speakers" as mute objects or the dead, they also confer on the written word an uncanny, sinister quality. Sigmund Freud in "The Uncanny" connects supernatural fears to several basic situations: dealing with the world of the dead, encountering an inanimate object that seems to display isolated signs of life, and being faced with unexplained recurrent repetition of the same phenomenon or sign. All of these components are inherent in written language, especially that of epitaphs. Rosalind Thomas mentions the Spartan prohibition of inscribing tombs, except those of warriors who died in battle, which may have to do with supernatural fears about writing (32). She cites Paul Cartledge (1976), who suggests that the Spartans' tombstone rule reflects the Spartans endowing the written word with "quasi-magical potency." Thomas adds that the same may be true of Athenians and other Greeks of the Archaic period. "It is remarkable," she continues, "how many of the earliest graffiti consist mainly of proper nouns, either claiming an object as someone's property or cursing someone else" (Thomas 32). Cursing someone in writing clearly implies attribution of (evil) supernatural powers to writing, while inscribing one's name on an object ‘ties’ the 21 object to the owner’s person with ineffable ties, and may also have a component of magical "warding off" of encroachers. As pointed out by William V. Harris, the first known reference to writing in the Western literature is Homer's reference in Iliad (vi.168) to semata lugra, 'baneful signs', the death sentence of Bellerophon that he unknowingly carried with him; and, as Harris further states, "writing continued to have sinister associations" (37, 48). The following passage from Plato's Phaedrus, perhaps the widest quoted one when ancient attitudes to writing are discussed, encompasses almost all aspects of 'the ancient distrust of writing' that I deal with here. Writing, Phaedrus, has this strange quality, and is very like painting; for the creatures of painting stand like living beings, but if one asks them a question, they preserve a solemn silence. And so it is with written words; you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing. And every word, when once it is written, is bandied about, alike among those who understand and those who have no interest in it, and it knows not to whom to speak or not to speak; when ill-treated or unjustly reviled it always needs its father to help it; for it has no power to protect or help itself. (275 D-E) This passage, which seems full of deep underlying anxiety about writing, echoes the phrase on the statuette discussed above, about "always saying one and the same thing," but with much more negative overtones. In this and some of the following passages of the Phaedrus, the written word emerges in four main aspects: as uncanny, orphaned, feminine, and capable of bringing disgrace upon the writer, in particular, by undermining his authority and respectability, or even by metaphorically attaching to him and/or his text a degrading sexual role. First, it is inanimate (a mere image of the "living and breathing" spoken word), yet nonetheless it speaks or makes an impression of being alive; it is also indefinitely doubled, which constitutes a classical case of an uncanny, even doubly uncanny phenomenon (showing indefinite repetition/doubling as well as pseudo-animation, all discussed by Freud in "The Uncanny")4. Secondly, the written word is an orphan, torn apart from its parent the author, metaphorically dead, who alone could 4 For a discussion of literature as an uncanny phenomenon, see Bennet and Royle (36-42). 22 guide it towards the right reception by the listener, and protect it from misunderstanding, equivalent to mistreatment. What is more, the thought written down is imagined by Plato in the Phaedrus as a “bastard” of the author’s mind Comment [OK2]: Arrange the (276A), and probably a female one (judging by other passages in this part of the passages here? Not clear where it’s gendered feminine Phaedrus), who is in every way liable to bring disgrace upon its father. Thus the written word is gendered feminine, and the writer assumes a somewhat discreditable role – that of a father of an illegitimate child. Furthermore, the very event of a "daughter" or the written word slipping out of its "father’s"/writer’s control and authority constitutes a disgrace to the latter. One can sense this attitude to the written word in Socrates’ assertion that trusting writing to “possess great certainty and clearness… is a disgrace to the writer,” an obvious error of judgment, a failure to recognize that “in the written word there is necessarily much that is playful, and … no written discourse, whether in meter or in prose, deserves to be treated very seriously” (277E). In other words, any writer should recognize that he loses control over his thought as soon as he sets it down in writing – and it becomes unclear who has the authority over the interpretation of the written text. Thus, Socrates' description of writing endows it with stereotypical feminine qualities of inconstancy, light-mindedness and unreliability – or, in other words, casts it as fundamentally "other" to the speech and thought that it is dependent upon. Writing as Contracting a Compromising Relationship This sense of the written text's "femininity" and its compromising the author's respectability receives a curious development further on in the Phaedrus, in Plato's comparison of writing to sowing seeds in a "garden of Adonis" (Phaedrus 276B). In one sense, this image actually implies comparing the author to a prostitute. A garden of Adonis is a shallow basket in which young women, especially prostitutes, would sow cereal and flower seeds on the midsummer festival of Adonis, celebrated with frivolous banquets on house roofs; the plants would grow very quickly in the summer sun but also wither soon because of their shallow root system and the summer heat, and were intended to be thrown into sea 23 or river at the end of the festival5. So on the literal level, Plato says that writing is a disposable, shallow-rooted thing created for one’s amusement – but the image he uses suggests a parallel between a writer and a prostitute. On another plane of this metaphor, the "father" of a discourse may choose to deposit the metaphorical seed of his thought into either the faithful, understanding, kindred mind of a (male) disciple, where it will be faithfully preserved unchanged, or into a lightweight, inferior, but on a deeper level also totally "other," unpredictable, uncontrollable, uncanny medium of writing (with its feminine connotations). The resulting "offspring" in the latter case – the thought recovered or reproduced by the later, remote reader – may be in fact a new, different thought, and is never guaranteed to bear enough likeness to the original thought of its "father." If a thinker still chooses to write, Socrates advises, he should keep his notes private, enclosed in his house (metaphorically, like a wife or a daughter), lest they betray and disgrace him in public, with other men. One might object that the profession of prostitution was not illegal in the ancient Greek cities (except for Sparta), as were homosexual relations. Yet, in spite of their being legal, the sexual and social roles of both female and male prostitutes were not enviable. There is no evidence that any women born in citizens' families ever chose to be prostitutes, not even hetaerae of the highest rank – this occupation fell to the portion of strangers from other cities who had no citizen rights, or freed slaves who had no other means of supporting themselves. As for men, if an Athenian citizen was discovered to have been a paid prostitute in his young age, he could be denied civic rights, because someone who submitted himself to others' pleasure in return for money has compromised his freedom and could not be trusted to disinterestedly defend the interests and values of a free city (as evident from the case of Timarchos, an Athenian politician who lost his civic rights because another politician, Aeschines, accused him of having engaged as a youth in sexual relations with wealthy men for material benefits). There is more evidence that the classical culture, both Greek and Roman, assigned the written word with metaphorical femininity. William A. Johnson quotes 5 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gardens_of_Adonis 24 a riddle from Antiphanes's comedy Sappho about the female 'letter' (a feminine noun in Greek) keeping her children in the folds of her dress: "What is it that is female in nature and has children under the folds of her garments, and these children, though voiceless, set up a ringing shout … to those mortals they wish to, but others, even when present, are not permitted to hear?" The answer is a letter (epistole), a feminine noun whose children are the letters of the alphabet. 'Though voiceless, they speak to those far away, those they wish to, but if anyone happens to be standing near the man who is reading he will not hear him" (Johnson 596). Here the personalization of the 'letter' as a woman goes together with a slightly uncanny, or at least a highly puzzling quality of written words to raise a soundless shout that can be heard from far away or not heard at close distance. Thomas E. Jenkins, analyzing the way letters and writing "act" as a kind of character in its own right in the comedies of Plautus, an early Roman playwright, discusses the suggestive case of the comedy Pseudolus. In this play, there is only one female voice, that of Phoenicium, a slave girlfriend of a nobleman's son Calidorus, and this voice is exclusively written. Her letters are being read aloud on stage and play a central role in advancement of the plot, and as a surrogate object of other characters' desire and struggle, yet when the girl herself appears on stage, she remains silent. "The letter has, in effect, usurped her voice: she speaks only through writing. …. In fact, her [written] voice and her body cannot exist on stage at the same time" (Jenkins 366). In other words, it is as if Phoenicium's writing itself becomes her body, and acts as a substitute for her body. In the opening scene, the clever slave Pseudolus reads her love-note and exclaims, "I see your girlfriend, Calidorus! …She's spread out on the tablets; she's lying in the wax" (Jenkins 366). Jenkins comments, "Pseudolus's wordplay pokes fun at the conventions of epistolarity, the means by which writing substitutes for the presence of the author," but also, because it's a love-note, there is an obvious "sexual double-entendre: she's ready for a tryst for Calydorus" (ibid.). Even though this is an isolated example, it confirms the idea of the written text being associated with femininity, the female body, and sexual power-relations. Moreover, the author, in this case a woman, is typically cast in an exposed and vulnerable position. 25 It appears quite certain that the ancient Greeks sometimes associated both writing and reading with a degrading sexual and/or social role, to various degrees of directness. Svenbro quotes a riddle from an Athenian poet Callias's play Alphabet Show, similar to the riddle from the play Sappho quoted by Johnson, only with more obscene connotations. "One woman (who may personify the art of writing) announces: 'Dears, I am with child. So help me Modesty,/ I'll spell you the baby's name – a long upright/ with short up-slanting strokes on either side,/ And then a circle on two little feet." According to Svenbro, the two letters she is talking about, psi (ψ) and omega (Ω), introduce obscene connotations in several ways: first, by belonging to the Ionian alphabeth and thus being illegitimate in the Athenian context, secondly, by their pictographic value, and also, apparently, by referring to some word(s) that the woman is ashamed to pronounce in full (Svenbro 61-2). Actors dancing the shapes of letters on stage, as in this play by Callias, and also in Sophocles's satiric play Amphiaraos, must have looked funny and grotesque, if the alphabet show was to have any comic value, and it reinforces Plato's view quoted earlier, that writing should never be regarded as something serious. The Reader is Being Had If writing endangered the authority and respectability of the author, no benefit accrued from this to the reader. On the contrary, because of the social conventions surrounding reading, the reader was exposed to degrading effects of his role in even sharper and more immediate ways than the writer. Svenbro provides some fairly extreme evidence that the ancient Greeks regarded written text as a somewhat queer way of communication: The Greeks … thought of written communication in terms of the pederastic relation, as can be seen in the Dorian inscription from Sicily … [that] attempts nothing less than a definition (one of the earliest known) of the nature of reading: 'The writer of the inscription will bugger (pigyxei) the reader'. Reading here implies taking on the role of the scorned passive partner, whereas the writer identifies with the dominant, admired active partner. The scorn of the reader illustrated in this metaphor, which is not an isolated case, perhaps explains why reading was a task often left to a slave, given that the function of slaves was precisely to serve and 26 submit. Here the slave is an instrument, an 'instrument gifted with voice'. (Svenbro 45-6) Such sense of the reader's situation developed, according to Svenbro, because in ancient Greece reading aloud prevailed; thus the reader "is lending [his] voice for the duration of the reading, a process in which the writing appropriates the voice, which means that while the reader is reading, his voice is not his own. He has relinquished it. … The process of being read [sic] consequently exerts a power over the reader's body" (45). The writer, no matter whether dead or far away, has the power to use the reader "much as he would a slave or a person or thing in his service" (ibid). The reader, in effect, loses or gives up his freedom for as long as the reading lasts. Svenbro quotes Socrates' injunction, "Well, slave, take the book, and read!", which typifies this attitude to the reader – performer of the text, as subservient to both the author and the listeners for whose benefit he reads (Theaetetus, qtd. in Svenbro 41). Moreover, in addition to the sense of being "used" by or subordinated to the writer (and the listeners), such relinquishing of one's voice to another's words implies compromising one's personal identity, as the passive role in homosexual act is considered to compromise male sexual identity. The reader in the Greek society is very much like the actor on stage, a performer of a set text, exposed to the same 'danger' of compromising his personal identity. The Greek word for actor, "hypocrites," has become in time a pejorative word for someone who has no integrity – does not mean what he says – like an actor on stage who speaks words that are not his own. The word "hypocrites" itself did not have such negative connotations for the Greeks, it acquired these connotations in the Byzantine culture, where theatre came to be condemned by the church authorities (see Walter Puchner on the Byzantine theatre). Yet it appears that the classical culture itself laid the foundation for the word "hypocrite" to become a term of negative judgment. This conclusion is not pronounced in Svenbro's article, but can be gathered from his argument about the similarity between the Greek concepts of theatrical stage and textual space, closely linking the functions of an actor and a reader. 27 If, in order to speak truly, a person has to speak en idiois logois, or 'with his own words' (another expression of Socrates), what are we to think of the archaic reader who deciphers aloud an inscription of the type, 'I am the tomb of Glaukos' to a group of auditors? (Svenbro 46) This situation has a strong farcical dimension, which Greek comic playwrights did not fail to appreciate. The reader, especially one reading aloud, whose voice is "usurped" by the text, involuntarily takes the part of a comic actor and loses, even if only temporarily and in pretence, his solid, respectable identity. Socrates in Plato's Republic expresses a concern about a similar loss of identity and respectability that can occur from play-acting, imitating for fun all kinds of persons, animals and even nature noises. He claims that "the same person will hardly be able to play a serious part in life, and at the same time to be an imitator and imitate many other parts as well" (Republic III, 27). While on the surface his statement seems to mean that a talent for imitation is a talent in its own right, like any other one, the whole context of this statement suggests that he thinks play-acting inappropriate for any man who considers himself serious and respectable. Socrates abhors the "sort of character who will narrate anything, and the worse he is, the more unscrupulous he will be; nothing will be too bad for him; and he will be ready to imitate anything …, the roll of thunder, the noise of wind and hail, or the creaking of wheels, … and all sorts of instruments; he will bark like a dog, bleat like a sheep, or crow like a cock" (Republic III, 28). Socrates' ideal is a state in which "human nature is not twofold, or manifold, [and] one man plays one part only" – in other words, where everyone's identity is absolutely clear, consistent and transparent, and corresponds to one's social role. Therefore none of these "pantomimic gentlemen" should be admitted into the ideal city (ibid), exactly like the poets, because they introduce fluidity and disorder into the established hierarchy of values, kinds of characters, and social roles. And it may be for the same reason, as Svenbro suggests, that in most of ancient Greek society "someone who reads must take care not to identify too much with the role of reader if he wants to remain free, or at least free of constraints imposed by others" – which may be the reason 28 why the Spartans limited the teaching of letters to "the strictly necessary" (Svenbro 46). Another Spartan regulation, introduced by Lycurgus, against setting the city's laws down in writing (Plutarch qtd in Svenbro 41 and Thomas 31) may have been made for the purpose of forcing everyone to know the law by heart. But another possible weighty reason might be to defend citizens from controversial interpretations, which the written text is particularly liable to, while orally transmitted laws are learned together with, and in the context of, their conventional interpretation. This is an example of how the ruling power shared authorial anxiety and protected its authority over the interpretation of a text that encoded its foundations, the text of the law, by preventing it from being written down. On the other hand, some Greeks authors could appreciate the power that the written word may impart to an artful user. According to Alexander Hollman, the historian Herodotos was fascinated with "how signs are manipulated," and showed much "interest in, and admiration of … manipulators of signs," which Hollman considers to be an expression of Herodotos' awareness of "his narrative persona as a master presenter and interpreter of signs" (280). Still, both of these examples similarly show the ancient Greek culture's apprehension about written messages being open to controversial interpretations and exposing both the sender/writer and the receiver/reader to dangers of miscommunication, ridicule, loss of status and authority. The Art of Writing as an Impostor While the written word posed these subtle power-related, social threats for the ancient Greek readers and writers, writing might also call into question the autonomy and power of one's memory and mind. According to Thomas, not only Plato in Phaedrus, but other philosophers of the Classical age expressed reservations about the increasing use of writing in education, and "as a substitute for the skills of discourse and discussion" (Thomas 33). For instance, a mathematician Oenopides rebuked a young man who owned a big library, that knowledge should be "not in a bookshelf, but in the heart" (ibid.). In light of this, it becomes clearer 29 why Socrates's terming a sophist Lysias "a writer of speeches" in the beginning of the Phaedrus is supposed to be derogatory. This attitude to writing is clearly expressed in the myth recounted by Socrates later in that dialog, about the Egyptian god Theuth bringing newly invented writing before the supreme god Ammon, as an outstanding invention that "will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories" (Phaedrus 274C). Instead of praising Theuth, Ammon says that the art of writing will increase forgetfulness and a false appearance of wisdom, because people will rely on writing more than on their own memories. A curious indirect evidence of this apprehension about writing supplanting memory can be found in Aeschilus's tragedy Prometheus Bound, where Prometheus says that he "gave them [humans] writing that retaineth all, / The serviceable mother of the Muse…" (lines 493-4). This account departs from the more conventional version of the Muses' genealogy, which says they are daughters of Mnemosyne (Memory). It follows from Aeschilus's text that writing, in its inventor Prometheus's account, usurps the position of Memory. Thus, writing for the ancient Greeks is a rather unreliable, unsettling, even threatening means of communication. While the written text appears to have been viewed as primarily an object, or a voice of an object, it threatened both the authority of the author and the personal autonomy of the reader, placing them in a precarious, unsatisfactory relation to each other. Writing's metaphorical femininity and orphanhood, its uncanniness and bizarre sexual connotations may account at least in part for its marginalization in the classical culture. Leonard Scinto quotes in the same breath from Aristotle and Saint Augustine, both asserting the secondary, derivative role of the written language. Aristotle in On Interpretation states that "written words are the signs of words spoken," and Augustine defines in De Dialectica, about six centuries later: "Every word is a sound, [but] when it is written it is not a word but a sign of a word" (Scinto 6). It appears that the ancient distrust of writing had to do with fear for one's identity, dignity and control. Writing creates a virtual double of the writer in which he may not recognize himself; his identity is mocked, questioned, threatened. In a culture that is predominantly oral, such "virtual double" of the speaker can be 30 perceived as rather uncalled for. I have received a clear sense of awkwardness and uncanniness created by writing down a piece of essentially oral narrative when my husband wrote an essay on his experiences in the second Lebanon war (he would not do it of his own accord, unless it was requested by a journalist friend for publication). The impression the stories and the storyteller made when listened to turned out to be unexpectedly different from the impression the text produced; it seemed the text was written by a different, barely recognizable person. Experiences like this help one appreciate the ancient apprehensions about writing as an unusual, uncanny object, involving writer and reader in bizarre, perhaps compromising, precarious and uncomfortable relationship, in particular, by calling into question their subjectivity, or sense of personal identity. The Twentieth- Century Vindication of the Orphaned, Feminine, Uncanny Writing - Lucky me, I'm an orphan! Sholom Aleichem, Adventures of Mottel the Cantor's Son Twentieth-century theory, one could say, came to celebrate writing because of its status as an unusual, uncanny object and its capacity of calling settled identities and roles into question. Plato’s description of the written word in the Phaedrus encapsulates not only the ancient apprehensions about writing, but also most of the issues central to the twentieth-century discussion of written language – as evident from Jacque Derrida's repeated engagement with Phaedrus in his discussion of writing. Critical theory's view of writing is different from the ancient view first and foremost in the positive attitude it takes towards the same features of writing that Plato and others were negative and uneasy about: its orphanhood (or 'death of the author' – Barthes 1968, Foucault 1969), uncanniness (Bennet and Royle), "unfaithfulness" to the author's original intention (Barthes, Derrida), and its subversive metaphorical femininity (Cixous). Moreover, theory inaugurated writing as the primary form of language, providing a model not only of communication but to a great extent of human mind and society (Lacan, Levi-Strauss). These post- 31 structuralist approaches brought to the surface the political aspect of language, the way it encodes, perpetuates and even enforces the existing power relations, as well as the way these power relations can be transformed by transforming language. A feminist reading of a nineteenth-century novel "against the grain" to uncover patriarchal structures suppressing the woman reader, or a Marxist reading of the same novel showing how it sweeps under the carpet the exploitation on which the characters' way of life is based, are ethically and politically ground-breaking. And the power of such "suspicious" readings lies in that they replicate, in a way, the ancient distrust of writing – they are looking for how the reader "is being had," not opting for the possibility of a "fair," direct relationship between the reader and the author, where each party is merely trying to do their best for the other. On the whole, the following section will demonstrate the twentieth-century theory's fascination and apprehension at the idea of writing as the powerful, mechanical, impersonal core of language. Derrida opens his fundamental discussion of writing in Of Grammatology with suggesting that By a slow movement whose necessity is hardly perceptible, everything that [has been] gathered under the name of language is beginning to let itself to be transferred to, or at least summarized under, the name of writing. … [I]t seems as though the concept of writing – no longer indicating a particular, derivative, auxiliary form of language in general …, no longer designating the exterior surface, the insubstantial double of a major signifier, the signifier of the signifier – is beginning to go beyond the extension of language. In all senses of the word, writing thus comprehends language. (Derrida 1974, 6-7) This constitutes a direct opposition to the view, dating back to the ancient times, of language as primarily oral and of writing as a derivative, disposable function of language. To argue this, of course, is to go against the crushing evidence of non- literal cultures that exist for millennia and use language without writing, and against basic facts of first language acquisition, where the child becomes fully proficient in oral language long before s/he learns to write. Derrida's argument, however, evades these facts by taking place on a more general (philosophical) and a more particular 32 (modern Western) plane at once. In modern Western societies writing is so pervasively important that we are "lost," situated nowhere unless we can find ourselves in "the world on paper," according to David R. Olson (1994). Olson can be classified as one of those genuine "grammatologists" who, according to Derrida, were in short supply in the late sixties, when specialists in writing studied the evolution of scripts without seriously engaging the question "What is writing?" (Of Grammatology 74-5). With Olson's statement in mind, it seems legitimate to say that for us "writing comprehends language," i.e. what we can say (or think) is largely determined by what has been written, and cannot be truly reflected upon until it is written down. But if it is now possible to say that writing is prior to spoken language, then there has been a revolution that overturned the old hierarchy where speech was unquestionably superior to writing. Concerning the grounds for such revolution, Derrida writes in “Violence and Metaphysics” (Writing and Difference): We know that all the gods of writing (Greece, Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia) have the status of auxiliary gods, servile secretaries of the great god, lunar and clever couriers who occasionally dethrone the king of the gods by dishonorable means. (101) A courier, a messenger is a subordinate who is supposed to faithfully deliver messages to and from the king – yet there is always a possibility of failure in transmission, of fallibility or unfaithfulness in the courier – hence the vulnerability of the powerful king to the subordinate messenger. The king of the gods, often associated with the sun, stands in this mythical binary pair also for the full, incontrovertible and authoritative presence of the speaker in spoken language, while the image of the moon stands for the written sign as the reflected, uncertain, ambiguity-breeding light, the light of thought and speech at a second remove that writing is limited to conveying, substituting for the speaker in his absence. For instance, in an endnote to Grammatology, Derrida cites a specific Egyptian myth about the moon being "created by the Sun-god to replace itself at night: it was Thoth [the inventor of writing] whom Rê designated for the exercise of this high function of substitution" (Derrida 1974, 328). The moon is also a female 33 counterpart of the sun in many of the Western mythologies, associated with fertility cycles and sometimes childbirth (for instance the Greek Artemis, goddess of moon and hunting, is also the patroness of women in labor) – which brings in the metaphorical femininity the ancients ascribed to writing. Also, as suggested above, the thought recovered from the written text is an altered, "other" version of the original thought, in the same way as a son in the patriarchal frame of mind is often seen as an altered version of the father, never sufficiently close to the original. The myth and the Western philosophical tradition privilege the male solar deity associated with live speech, presence, the father, and supreme authority. As opposed to the ancients, Derrida and other twentieth-century philosophers of language are on the side of the courier rather than the king in the revolution that they feel to be part of. This revolution designates writing as the defining aspect of language that has a potential to liberate the world from “mind-forged manacles,” in Blake’s phrase, such as the traditional metaphysics that privileged certain concepts over others and thus validated various forms of oppression. Revolutionary rhetoric animates Roland Barthes' 1968 theoretical manifesto, "The Death of the Author" – picking up on an ancient concept about writing discussed above. Roland Barthes writes in an exhilarated spirit that the reader is now free from the tyranny of the canonical Author, whose disappearance from critical discourse opens new horizons of freedom for the reader. The reader’s freedom to create the text anew becomes more valuable than preserving the author’s original thought unchanged. Thus in the 20th century, the absence of the author and the weakening of his control over interpretation, the feature that the ancients were most uneasy about, becomes the major positive quality of writing. "The death of God" announced by Nietzsche for the world at large took on the form of "death of the author" for theorists of literature (Sean Burke). In the realm of literary theory, the effort has been to achieve a greater freedom for the reader, at whose expense the supreme authority of the supposed, critically authorized authorial intention had been maintained. This attitude is expressed, for instance, in Roland Barthes' preference for "writerly" texts, inviting the reader to participate in “writing” the text by creating multiple diverse readings, over "readerly" ones, restricting the reader to a 34 strictly passive role of discovering the "correct" interpretation (see e.g. S/Z 4-5). Compared to the subordinate status of the ancient reader (reading aloud for the benefit or amusement of others), the modern reader is exactly the opposite, reading at his/her own leisure and for his/her own benefit and amusement; a reader is someone who has the time, space and means to engage in reading, and moreover, is free to choose, open and close the text of his/her own free accord. Compared to a radio listener or a TV viewer, a reader has incomparably more intellectual independence, as conveyed, for instance, in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. It is the TV viewer, not the reader, who is perceived in our time as "being had." Another well-known work representing writing as a liberating force is Helene Cixous' "The Laugh of the Medusa." In her essay Cixous very nearly approaches the metonymic substitution of writing for the female body, a substitution that was seen by the ancients as grotesque, but reevaluated by Cixous as liberating and empowering: "By writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into an uncanny stranger on display…" (880). Feminine writing, according to Cixous, is not only produced by a woman, but also produced in a new, feminine way, not constrained by the oppressive rules of male-dominated logic. Such writing must look uncanny and strange if judged by masculine standards, but it is called upon to make the woman feel at home with, not a stranger to, her own body and its desires. Moreover, Cixous attempts to undermine the very division between speech and writing: in feminine writing "[t]here is not that scission, that division made by the common man between the logic of oral speech and the logic of the text, bound as he is by his relation – servile, antiquated – to mastery" (881). This, with what is perhaps an irony of fate, is a rather close summary of Derrida's argument in Of Grammatology, where he questions the boundaries between what is conventionally understood as speech vs. writing. However, for Cixous this deconstruction of speech-writing opposition is a practical tool of gaining power for women. Instead of adopting the "antiquated" hierarchy between embodied, authoritative speech and secondary, disembodied writing, "Women must write through their bodies" (886). 35 While deconstructive theorists, such as Cixous and Derrida, point out the artificial, fictional nature of the opposition or "scission" between oral speech and writing, they still retain and make use of the notion that writing is "other" to speech – a notion we have seen to be familiar to the ancient Greeks. Writing is the voice of an object, of a dead/absent person, of a woman, if she is regarded as an object or an 'absent', disempowered person; it can also be the voice of a machine. Derrida in Of Grammatology makes a very far-sighted prediction concerning computer languages, which were only emerging at the time when he wrote the book. "[T]he entire field covered by the cybernetic program will be the field of writing," and it may happen that "the theory of cybernetics [may] oust all metaphysical concepts – including the concepts of soul, of life, of value, of choice, of memory – which until recently served to separate the machine from man, – [yet] it must conserve the notion of writing, trace, grammé [written mark], or grapheme…" (Derrida 1974, 9). In the field of informatics, writing is clearly the privileged concept, which is a good evidence confirming Derrida's overall claim about writing gaining primacy, and he also perceives that such primary, non-analyzable, foundational concepts as soul, choice, or memory, will be open to reconsideration in terms of another, still more 'primary' concept of [pre]writing, or pro-gram. This reduction of the human to the mechanical or inanimate brings us back to the sense of uncanniness that Plato expressed about the machine-like reproduction of speech in writing: "silent figures" that "always say one and the same thing." Derrida formulates this tie between writing and the machine in Limited Inc.: "To write is to produce a mark that will constitute a sort of machine which is productive in turn, and which my future disappearance will not, in principle, hinder in its functioning" (Derrida 1988, 8). Not only can writing itself be viewed as a machine – in the last hundred years, the text has been often imagined as produced mechanically, bypassing all conscious authorial intention, since in the age of mass print most of the texts we read are produced with the help of machines. With the author's role dramatically reduced, a nonsense or authorless or automatically produced text becomes an archetypal instance of the literary text. This is a consequence of critical theory's tendency to absolutize the reversal in the power relations between the reader and the 36 author and to devalue the concept of authorial intention altogether. For instance, structuralist criticism may reduce the function of the author to mechanical recycling and recombination of already existing literary patterns, images and character types. Barthes's notion of the author as a sort of mechanical "scriptor" (Barthes 1968) and Foucault's concept of "the author-function" (Foucault 1969) both work in the same direction of undoing the author's claim to any special position as a special human being, entitled to any distinction or honor as an original creator. In Vladimir Sorokin's novel Blue Bacon-Fat (Goluboe Salo), there is a section describing a super-secret bioengineering project of cloning famous authors of the past – which I see as a brilliant parody of the notions of "scriptor" and "author-function." The cloned specimens, Nabokov-7, Tolstoy-4, Chekhov-3 etc., are curious biological objects, some of them physically resembling and some having nothing in common with the originals. Dostoevski-2 is "an individual of uncertain sex, medium height, with chest pathology (chest protrudes sharply forward) and face pathology (temporal bone accrete with nasal bone in the shape of a saw's handle)" (Sorokin 20). Akhmatova-2 is externally identical to the original at age 23, "grown in 1 year and 11 months. Heavy internal pathology, practically all organs displaced and immature… Produces frequent guttural sounds, sniffs her right shoulder and surrounding objects" (Sorokin 19, translation mine). The clones have to be stimulated into a script-process that will end in accumulative anabiosis, producing in their bodies a super-fuel, blue bacon fat, which is the final product of the whole enormously expensive enterprise. The by-products of the process are nonsensical, grotesque and obscene texts, brilliantly capturing the style and spirit of each original author and, one might say, annihilating it with their cynical pointlessness.6 Such presentation of writing can be said to detach the "style" or the 6 Unless one is struck by a glimpse of the writer's original personality still glowing in the parody in a somewhat tragic, horrifying way, which Sorokin seems to be strongly suggesting. Dostoevski-2, having finished his "script-process" and disconnected from bios-support, "is heavily deformed: the chest protrudes even more than before, having torn the environmental suit, the ribs have torn through the skin, so that entrails and the beating heart can be seen. Skull pathology has worsened, the "saw-handle" that stuck out of the face, now sticks out even farther, as if the Almighty tried in vain to pull it out of the man's progeny. It has grown over with thick black hairs. The hands of Dostoevski-2 look charred, the steel pencil has fused into them forever" (Sorokin 32, translation mine). If this is not a most touching tribute to Dostoevsky, I don't know what is. 37 "writing" from the originating author as a human being, and place the origin of discourse outside the subject, whether in the "language" as a whole (which becomes in this case something like a mystical, all-powerful entity), or in the genes, the biological code or 'program' that predetermines the author's written style/personality. For Barthes and Foucault in the 1960s, "the author" was a symbol or an umbrella term for the authority that the socially dominant groups and ideals exert over reading. Twentieth-century theory aimed at liberating and liberalizing the realm of reading, at freeing reading from the ideological restrictions that the revered figures of Great Authors embodied. I am not trying to vindicate the Author in this sense, as a factor restricting the freedom of interpretation and thus guaranteeing preservation of existing social order. Rather, I am interested in the author as the interlocutor of the reader, indispensable in ethical and psychological sense for the process of reading, and important for the reader's sense of self. The Literary Process In spite of their many reservations and apprehensions about writing, the ancient Greeks opted for using it extensively. The denunciations of writing by Socrates in Phaedrus reach us, of course, only because they were written down by Plato, and this fact ironically undermines Socrates' standing in this dialogue (as he explicitly said he feared). Yet if Plato did not write it down, Socrates' position and authority would have been undermined far more radically and decisively – they would have been annihilated by time and historical perturbations that destroyed the polis of Athens with its oral traditions and institutions. Moreover, writing has not only been a Noah's ark for the ancient culture's survival: it was a necessary vehicle of its development and flourishing, and was recognized in the Classical age as indispensable to "good life" in the Aristotelian sense – a meaningful life in a well- organized society, which befits humans as social and ethical beings (Harris 26). As for the literary texts proper, they were treated as valuable objects of art, and having them read aloud was a select entertainment in aristocratic companies (Johnson). Olson persuasively shows how the adoption of writing by the Greeks led to the 38 cultural leap of the 5th century BC, making for the incredible achievements of the classical Greek civilization. In the following chapters, I will try to show how writing in another specific form, as a mass-printed, market-distributed literary text, has shaped the modern age as we know it, and become a condition of personal (as well as social – but this is on the periphery of my argument) "good life" in the modern age. The reader's relationship with the text, and through the text with its author, may indeed be unsettling for the reader's already established sense of self, as the ancient Greeks noticed to their dismay; yet in the age of mass print, more or less coinciding with the modern age, calling into question one's settled view of oneself and the world is viewed in a much more positive light – not as deterioration of the subject, but as clearing new ground for potential development. Hence the twentieth- century celebration of writing as an agent of revolutions, an unsettler of moldy hierarchies. One may say that while the ancient Greeks (those whose writings reached us, in any case) viewed the text mostly from the point of view of the anxious author, someone with high social and intellectual status, who had everything to lose, the twentieth-century theorists of writing took the part of the free, solitary, exulting reader who has everything to gain. Both outlooks treat the text as an object that has become independent from its author and is fully at the mercy of the reader. By contrast, it is possible to view the literary text as an inextricable link in the chain of the literary process, always involving at least three elements: an author, a text and a reader. It may be a helpful change of paradigm if one no longer tries to conceive the nature of the text as only a self-contained, autonomous object, but sees it more inclusively, as both an object made of written signs and an utterance produced by the writer and an utterance revived by the reader. In our culture, which is not predominantly oral, one's proper identity is not lodged always and only in one's oral speech, and achieving cultural competence includes for us learning to live and have an identity also in the "world on paper," as a reader and a writer. "Living" in this second, written, virtual world necessarily involves interpersonal relations with other "written" subjects. Nor can one's own "written subject" be totally detached from one's real-life or "spoken" subject. We 39 cannot deal with the "world on paper" as a detached, totally separate field of existence. Even though a person will usually appear different in writing than in personal conversation, both identities are aspects of the same human being. The transition and connection between the two "worlds" is carried out in transforming one's intentional utterance into text when writing, and transforming text back into an utterance of another person when reading. The next chapter will deal in more detail with the way in which reading acquired its functions in the age of mass print that historically coincided with, and to a great extent shaped, the age of modernity. 40 Chapter 2 THE TEXT AS AN UTTERANCE: THE SHAPING OF THE MODERN READER-AUTHOR RELATIONSHIP IN THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY "PRINTING REVOLUTION" The Historical Situation of Literature and Reading in the 18th Century. The printing press was invented in the 15th century, making it possible to bring the written – now printed – word closer to many more readers than previously. Yet many historians of culture, literature and reading in Europe agree that it was only three centuries later that the new medium of print took its most profound effects on literary writing and reading. In the 1970s, the pioneering German school of history of reading, with Rolf Engelsing as its best known representative, proposed the notion of a "reading revolution" that occurred in the second half of the 18th century, involving a dramatic expansion of the reading public and a corresponding increase in the production of printed matter. According to Engelsing, these developments led to what he called an "extensive" mode of reading becoming dominant – cursory running through a lot of printed material, mostly light reading (novels, periodicals, almanacs etc.), and mainly for entertainment, without much rereading or dwelling upon any particular item. By contrast, the earlier, "intensive" mode of reading predominated when books were scarce and every reader only had access to very few books that s/he reread many times in a deeper, more respectful and meditative manner. Since the 1970s, when Engelsing's account was first published, it has been much contested and convincingly shown to be an oversimplification (see e.g. Robert Darnton, 249-50) – yet its pessimistic spirit is still very relevant and revealing. It is the spirit in which industrialization, mass production and marketing, and demographic explosion (in this case, of the circle of readers) are traditionally discussed by intellectuals. At first glance, the statistics of reading and printing in the late 18th century Europe looks unimpressing. For instance, among the German-speaking population, the share of novel readers ("extensive" readers) was approximately 1.5 per cent by the end of the century (Wittmann 288-9). This would sound like a negligible share 41 by today's standards, if the new population of readers had not exceeded by over 100 times the numbers of the German "learned" public (the nation's "extensive" readers, those who had access to a large and growing spectrum of texts) only a few decades earlier. The same rates of between 1 and 1.5 per cent of novel-readers in the nation have been established for England (according to Edmund Burke's contemporary estimation) and France in the late 18th century (Wittmann 288). In spite of this relatively low percentage of readers, there was a sense of an epidemic outburst of "reading mania" at the time: one German traveler reported from France that everyone in Paris is reading … Everyone, but women in particular, is carrying a book around in their pocket. People read while riding in carriages or taking walks; they read at the theatre during the interval, in cafés, even when bathing. Women, children, journeymen and apprentices read in shops. On Sundays people read while seated in front of their houses; lackeys read on their back seats, coachmen up on their boxes, and soldiers keeping guard. (quoted in Wittmann, 285) The contemporaries had an overall sense of a conspicuous, even shocking spread and democratization of reading – and many commentators expressed a sense that this democratization posed a serious threat to the existing political regimes and ways of life – a sense that was reinforced and confirmed by the subsequent events of the French revolution. A conservative Swiss bookseller quoted by Wittmann "expressed a conviction shared by many of his contemporaries in 1795: it was not the Jacobins who dealt the fatal blow to the ancient régime, it was readers" (284). But what concerns me here is not so much the political as the psychological consequences of the reading boom, and particularly the way it reshaped the relationship of the reader with the literary text and its author. The huge increase in demand for new reading material went hand in hand with corresponding increase in supply of new titles and in the output of the printing industry. To give only a few isolated examples, if the Leipzig book fair catalogue listed 1,384 titles in 1760, by the turn of the century this number had grown to 3,906 titles, while the number of copies also grew, especially if one takes into account the industry of cheap reprints (Wittmann 302). Lending libraries and "reading societies" or clubs multiplied throughout Europe, which indicates that the number of readers grew even faster than the outputs of printing industry (Wittmann, 42 Darnton). In Ireland, according to Peter Fallon, an "explosion" in the printing industry occurred between 1750 and 1800 (Fallon, Chapter 5). Significant as those changes might look at the time, they were only the beginning of the process that lead eventually to the welcome result of almost total literacy in the Western countries, and a variety and quantity of printed production that exceeds any imagination. Not only has readership extended to include all layers of society in the "literate" countries, but the population itself has grown, there began a demographic explosion, which practically never gets to be discussed along with literary issues, perhaps because of the ultimately basic, self-evident influence that it imposes on the conditions of literary writing and reading. There are hundreds of thousands of writers today, and billions of readers, and these numbers were unimaginable only two centuries ago. Today, the situation of a single reader facing the industry of letters can be described as follows: if you were to read 135 books a day, every day, for a year, you wouldn't finish all the books published annually in the United States. Now add to this figure, which is upward of 50,000, the 100 or so literary magazines; the scholarly, political and scientific journals (there are 142 devoted to sociology alone), as well as the glossy magazines, of which bigger and shinier versions are now spawning, and you'll appreciate the amount of lucubration that finds its way into print. (Arthur Krystal, "On Writing: Let There Be Less," New York Times, March 26, 1989) Even assuming that no single reader will ever want to acquaint herself with all the special publications in different professions (while in principle it could be said that anything written by a human being is of potential interest to me as a human being), even restricting the scope to literary production alone, the number of titles is still sufficient to give this average single reader a sense of personal nullity in the multi- million literary "city." According to the laws of free market, no book's or author's success or failure depends on a single reader's buying or not buying, liking or disliking it. And a single writer is faced with a corresponding problem of achieving any individual significance for herself and her work among the immense numbers of other writers. How a single work of literature acquires significance under these conditions, and how it could possibly help shape the writer's and the reader's sense 43 of personal significance and identity is the question out of which this study has grown. The answer that I want to suggest in this study is that personal significance arises between the individual reader and the individual writer interacting in the virtual space of the text. Authoring a Mass-Produced Text: The Writer's Side The present relationship between literary work, reader and author began to take shape about three centuries ago. This is how the profound changes in the English literature and its social context in the 18th century are described by Jane Tompkins: [O]nce the authors become dependent for their means of support upon the sales of their printed work [rather than on the generosity of individual patrons], the personal relation to their audience is severed and the relationship becomes more purely economic. […] Instead of taking place within the context of a social relationship, the production and consumption of literature go on independent of any social contact between author and reader. Literature becomes simultaneously both impersonal and privatized. Instead of writing a dedicatory poem on the King's new cellar, the poet writes an "Ode to Joy." (214) Tompkins's language in this passage looks neutral and descriptive at first – yet one can sense here a preference for the way literature functioned before the 18th century "revolution." Even without an explicit evaluative comment on Tompkins's part, the personal relationship between the author and her audience certainly sounds more humane and meaningful when pitted against the purely economic relationship emptied of any social contact. Later on in her article Tompkins exposes the Romantic and Victorian poets' "grandiose claims as to who their audience was," their sense of addressing all of humanity in a timeless fashion, the "deification of poetry that occurs in the 19th century." These, according to Tompkins, were a direct and unwelcome result of the fact that "there was no longer any way for the poet to measure the impact of his work on the audience, since the author and his audience were no longer personally known to each other" (218-19). She shows these claims to grandeur to be largely inadequate, divorced from social reality reflected by the literary market of the time: "while literature is hailed as England's most important 44 national resource, greater than the entire Empire of India, it is also spoken of as one of the worst possible ways to make a living." Furthermore, "while poetry is said to be 'divine' and to have a future that is 'immense', the kind of poetry for which these claims are made sells poorly on the marketplace. The Lyrical Ballads, typically, were remaindered, while exotic verse tales of the East sold in the thousands" (217). It should, of course, be remembered that in the long run, between 1800 and today, the Lyrical Ballads and poetry of their kind have outlived and probably much outsold those exotic tales of the East. But Tompkins's argument still indicates that in the Romantic period, there emerged a new kind of relationship between the poet and the audience, to which the greater part of the audience took generations to adjust. I would modify Tompkins's assertion that in the age of mass print "the production and consumption of literature go on independent of any social contact between author and reader." Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the 18th century printing revolution gave rise to, or greatly increased the role of a different kind of social relationship: the more hypothetical, imaginary, or virtual relationship that takes place between authors and readers by means of a literary text, and that is not equivalent to zero contact. Bertrand Bronson offers a more detailed version of the change effected by the medium of print on the relationship of authors with their audiences, and consequently on the nature of literature. He says that from as early as the English Restoration, gradually but increasingly, there develops a race of authors who write to an indefinite body of readers, personally undifferentiated and unknown; who accept this separation as a primary condition of their creative activity and address their public invisibly through the curtain, opaque and impersonal, of print: writers to whom in due course, as J.W. Saunders puts it, "Print became the normal, and in time entirely respectable, medium of communication with any audience, and prose the normal language of professional literary expression.7" (Bronson 302) Bronson poses the novel as a genre that emerged as writers attempted to cope with "the curtain of print," the uncertainty of the authors about their prospective audience 7 John Whiteside Saunders, The Profession of English Letters, 1964, p. 93. 45 that the medium of mass print created. Bronson analyzes how Defoe, Swift, Richardson, Fielding and Sterne each came up with his own, more or less satisfactory solution to the problem. Yet the problem persists until today, of how the publishing writer can establish a responsible and inspiring relationship with her audience, who in the age of mass literacy and print has become a "Cheshire Cat" (Bronson 310). Bronson's "curtain" or, as I will further call it, "the veil of print," is even thicker than, while it definitely includes, the separation that writing as such already imposes between the writer and the reader (as discussed in Chapter 1). It has all the distancing, absenting effect of writing, and it further involves the alienating mechanisms of publication, mass production and market distribution of literary texts, as well as the effects of the demographic explosion of literature's audience. Yet paradoxically, I will argue that this “veil” of print has served to create a new relationship between the reader and the author that came to be experienced as most intimate and most significant for the reader’s sense of self. A "veil" is probably a better word to describe the essential separation between the writer and the reader of literature in the age of mass print, because Bronson’s usage of "curtain" implies the possibility of drawing or opening it at will, and evokes an analogy with theatre, where the performance begins after the curtain is raised; as it happens with a printed text, the writer never comes into full view throughout the "performance" that the reader is witnessing. The veil is not there to be lifted but to be kept in place, allowing only a blurred glimpse of the face behind it; a veiled lady met in the street should be experienced by the passer-by precisely as veiled – clad in a certain mystery, which also surrounds her with an aureole of presupposed desire: not everyone is entitled to see her face, but everyone is supposed to want to see it, so she veils it. I will show that, at least when the veil of print was a new phenomenon, it actually heightened the readers' desire to know the author, to actually ‘see’ the face behind the veil. Bronson is mostly concerned with the writer's side of the problem, that is, with writing for an audience concealed behind a veil. Samuel Richardson, for instance, solved this problem of the indefinite addressee with great success by 46 developing the genre of epistolary novel – situating the discourse of his novels between already specified characters who write letters to each other. By identifying, characterizing, and fixing an audience of named individuals within the story itself, Richardson evades, or avoids, the vagueness of address that so constricts and formalizes the ordinary [writer of novels]. He writes to particular people whose friendly concern may be assumed; who naturally condition what he says and the way he says it. (Bronson 313) This fictional frame of personal correspondence does not only make the writer's task more concrete and manageable – it also helps the reader to become engaged in the narrative. All that remains for the reader to do is identify with the characters as they read the letters, in order that "emotion, … not recollected in tranquillity, but as reflected in the present pulse rate, [should] inevitably [animate] the new reader at whatever distance," as it animates the letter's writer and its recipient, into whose position the reader effortlessly slips (ibid.). Yet even in spite of this success, Richardson "was unwilling to leave [his Clarissa] to speak for itself, but had to be discussing it with all and sundry, in his own person" – since "the epistolary form unites us to the characters, not to the author" (315). Having technically solved the problem of address, Richardson remained dissatisfied with his isolation from the readers, for which he tried to compensate in personal conversations as much as he could. Another effective strategy of coping with the veil of print was adopted by Henry Fielding, particularly successfully in Tom Jones: [Fielding] had a great deal to say about his greatest novel [Tom Jones], about the forms of fiction, about the conduct of the narrative, about self-appointed critics, about the character and actions of his invented persons, about the conduct of life itself; and he chose to incorporate all this in the body of the novel, in introductory essays, in running comments, and in the witty, wry, ironic manner in which he reported events. He gives us so much of himself that in effect he becomes, not a character in the book, but the Master of Ceremonies, and much the most interesting person in it, if at the same time apart from it. We feel that we know him better, and more intimately, on his own chosen terms than anyone else to whom we are introduced. Without this 47 personal voice at all times in our ears, the book would be a vastly different sort of thing. (315) In other words, Fielding makes a straightforward attack on the impersonality surrounding a mass-printed literary work, by capitalizing on his own presence as an author in his text. If the reader didn't happen to meet him in person before opening his book – the author proposes to make acquaintance directly through the process of reading. Of course the reader who hasn't met the author before is designated by this strategy as the main, normative reader for whom the book has been intended – thus in a way reinforcing the "veil of print." It also goes without saying that contemplating such a verbal self-portrait of the writer is not equivalent to actually meeting him; the medium of writing still remains there between the writer and the reader, with all the limitations it imposes on communication. Yet this authorial strategy of explicitly coming forth from behind the screen of fictional action and cast of characters is a major friendly gesture of reaching out towards the remote, unknown reader, and according to Bronson, it worked. "Fielding's solution brings him and the reader into close relationship, and in his hands it is so successful as to serve as a model for a great part of the novel writing of the next century" (316). The Reader's Situation "This Side" of the Veil of Print While eighteenth-century writers’ strategies can be interpreted as called forth by the ‘veil of print’, the same can be done for readers' strategies. Along with the new "race" of authors described by Bronson, one can certainly talk about a new race of readers that emerged in the 18th century: readers for whom not knowing the writer of the book was a normal condition of reading. To the best of my knowledge, there are at present no studies searching for eighteenth-century readers' expressions of discontent with their situation as readers. Yet there is evidence showing that eighteenth-century readers did cope with problems imposed by the 'veil of print', even if they might not have had a clear sense of what these problems were. In order for us to understand these problems, it is helpful to compare the new social conditions of literary production and reception to the earlier ones, the way both Tompkins and Bronson do. Before the "demographic explosion" of readership and 48 the takeover of the medium of print, literature as a process took place in the field of personal relationships, or at least was first engendered between people immediately known to each other. When literacy was rare and literary interests were restricted to narrow upper class communities, the authors composed with a concrete audience in mind, for persons they knew and often depended on (e.g. lovers or patrons), for communities they were part of. The literary work was an utterance engendered in a network of direct interpersonal relationships, in the power field of the face-to-face; words of a literary work (unlike scholarly or religious texts) were in the first place addressed by the writer to concrete person(s) he knew, because readers and writers of literature were few and aristocratic. If the face-to-face is considered as a primary situation in which the individual receives his/her identity, then participating in the literary process, not only as an author but as a reader, played a serious part in constructing one's personal identity. Being a patron, lover, friend, or acquaintance of a writer would mean to have some part of one's life represented for one's reflection and preserved for the generations to come; thus one's life would be "singled out" as especially meaningful, worthy of attention, and further enriched with meaning. Even as late as the beginning of the 18th century there still existed something like an aristocratic context and residues of a patronage system for poetry – which meant that it was still addressed to a more or less well-defined circle of readers; a poet could still establish "a sympathetic and intimate rapport with that select audience of his" (Bronson 303). If a reader was able to enjoy a poem by someone like Matthew Prior, it designated the reader as a well-to-do, well-educated Londoner; the poet would count on "the community of education, the common circle of acquaintances at the university and in town, the same reading, a shared vocabulary, similar experiences, like amusements and games, a kindred range of allusion, clichés, tricks of phrase, speech cadences on a common tonic" between himself and his readers (ibid.). For the reader, in his turn, reading a poem that rendered a highly artistic version of his own specific context of life would reinforce his sense of himself as a member of some kind of a chosen elite, ensure one's unique – and privileged – place in the universe. In Prior's time, poets often 49 published their work by subscription – which also gave the individual reader a sense of being one of the poet's patrons, increasing the reader's sense of personal significance. Yet at the same time when Prior published his poems by subscription, without signing his name on the front cover (signifying, among the rest, that his readers all knew who the author was), the above pattern of relationship between the audience and the writer was being progressively replaced by a different, more democratic one. Fielding's opening of Tom Jones declares that "An author ought to consider himself, not as a gentleman who gives a private or eleemosynary8 treat, but rather as one who keeps a public ordinary9, at which all persons are welcome for their money" (Fielding 1, opening of Chapter 1). Fielding compares writing for the public with keeping an eatery, where "a bill of fare" (as he titles his opening chapter) has to be offered from the start to all customers so that they can choose whether to stay and treat themselves to what the author has to offer, or to go on to other kinds of (literary) products "with which the stalls abound." Thus not only does the author set himself as one among dozens of commercial competitors (even while he is making an argument for his product's greater excellence): he also positions his reader as one of the less wealthy, undistinguished city crowd. Becoming a mass commodity is more problematic for a literary work than for any other kind of a product. One can refer to William Morris, a Victorian socialist, idealistic writer, activist and entrepreneur, who was extremely unhappy about the economy and ideology of mass production, while nostalgically looking back to the medieval modes of production and social relations. Significantly, Morris's rebellion against the capitalist world took one of its expressions in founding the Kelmscott Press – a publishing house that combined socialist and Gothic revival ideas with Renaissance technologies, founded, in Morris’s words, “as an endeavour […] to re- attain a long-lost standard of craftsmanship of book-printing” (qtd. in Henderson, 388). Aside from trying to bring every worker’s labor closer to artistic work, to breathe significance and inspiration into every worker’s activity, Morris also waged 8 Gratuitous or beneficent (OED) – in either case, bypassing the monetary, market relationship. 9 A tavern or inn providing complete meals at fixed price (OED). 50 war on the aesthetic appearance of what I have called here 'the veil of print' – the drab look of cheap printed production, slab serif fonts, colorlessness, and many publishers' lack of concern not only for the aesthetic but also for the literary quality of the works printed. Morris perceived the poor aesthetic quality of the greater part of mass-produced books of the late 19th century as “a counterpart of the dismal meanness of the late Victorian suburbs” (Henderson 389), both representing the degrading conditions in which capitalist market and system of production place the working classes. When pressed by the public’s requests to increase the number of copies of the first Kelmscott book from 20 (intended as presents to friends only) to 200, Morris worried “lest the pressman succumb to the monotony of his task, and printing the same sheet so many times over, should fail to exercise the same scrupulous and minute care throughout” (qtd. in Henderson 392). But his two pressmen did fine on the whole lot of 200 copies. What is more, the objective of Morris’s press was to produce every book as a complete artistic whole – beginning with the manufacture of paper and down to the choice of the text to be printed; obviously, these principles dictated for Morris’s own writings to be the first choice, followed by works of his like-minded friends, and then famous Renaissance and medieval literary works such as The Canterbury Tales and chivalric romances. Morris designed special fonts for different texts, and ordered or created extraordinary title-pages. Ironically, counter to Morris’s socialist aspirations, but in keeping with the nostalgic pre-capitalist ideas behind his enterprise, the Kelmscott books were destined by virtue of their price and rarity for narrow elites, Morris’s immediate friends and his upper-class social circle – exactly according to the way literature functioned before the 18th-century “printing revolution.” Readers' Ways of Coping with the Veil of Print It appears that the numerous new readers in the 18th century attempted to preserve in some way the older order of things where the words of a literary work would come from a person they know, arise in a face-to-face situation, rather than coming out of an impersonal ‘nowhere’. The desire to personalize one's relationship with the author can explain some of the characteristic new strategies of reading that 51 blossomed in the 18th and early 19th century: conversational marginalia (electing one's favorite authors as friends of a special, superior kind), writing letters to authors, biographical curiosity, and viewing texts as representing, even standing as makeshifts for their authors (a way of reading that Barbara Hochman terms "reading for the author"). Heather Jackson in her study of marginalia sets out the period between 1700 and 1820 as an age of "sociable marginalia" that intensely show a need to communicate with other readers and the implied author. The most intensely personal marginalia of this period owe their quality to their having been produced in a social context, written like a letter to foster intimacy. (The eighteenth century was the golden age of the letter too.) At every level the personal element in the eighteenth century marginalia can be linked to their social function. (61) Before the printing revolution, marginal notes served mostly as learning aids intended for public use and written according to strict rules. The fact that marginalia became more personal in the 18th century was materially enabled by the growth of printing industry, which made personal ownership of books a more common phenomenon. "Private ownership and the expectation of continued possession […] played a part [in making marginalia more personal], affecting readers' attitudes toward books and their ideas of the uses that might be made of them" (50). At the same time, books remained rare and precious enough to call for wide sharing with friends and family, and to be passed down to the following generations – therefore it made a lot of sense to conceive of one's marginalia as a form of communication with other readers of the same copy of the book, who would normally be more or less closely related to the annotating reader. (Jackshon discusses the case of Cathy Earnshaw's extensive marginalia read by a total stranger Lockwood, in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, where one can see this very act of reading transforming Lockwood from a stranger into a curiously implicated insider of Cathy's life story – to begin with, it quite literally conjures the annotator's ghost.) But the advent of this more personal kind of marginalia also has an alternative, or perhaps a complementary set of possible explanations. In the first chapter of her book devoted to inscriptions of ownership, Jackson suggests that all 52 marginalia could be viewed as to some extent continuing or expanding the owner's mark of his or her own name on the book. I would add that in the age of mass print, marking the book as one's own does not only conform to the general rules and rituals of ownership of objects, but also answers a need to "individualize" one's own copy of a mass-produced book, and constitutes the first step in coping with the impersonality imposed by mass production. Furthermore, Jackson notes that "the vocabulary of conversation, friendly talk between equals, continues to be used of and by annotators" (82). Of course, she continues, "it is misleading in some ways" – no further reply can be expected from the text or its author to a conversational marginal note, and even if this note is addressed to another reader, the annotator is a lot less likely to get a direct answer to her note than if she were writing a letter. I think that in the 18th century this kind of discursive note, rather than being a means of communication proper, began to serve as a basic instrument of coping with the impersonality of the literary discourse imposed by the ‘veil of print’. Within the discourse that the mass-produced book brings ready-made to the reader, conversational notes create an interpersonal context in which the words of the book become "spoken" again, as if for the first time and specially for this reader. In the chapter entitled "Motives for Marginalia," Jackson suggests a very interesting view of conversational marginalia as expressing a basic convention of reading, similar to the "suspension of disbelief" required for watching drama. The frame of mind in which a reader can address a book as though it were another human subject, and present, is one we must all recognize. It can be compared to the more often discussed dramatic illusion, our voluntary and habitual submission to the conventions of the stage. It is not that we are actually hallucinating, believing the actors to be the persons they represent, and us invisibly in their company. Nor does any reader believe the writer of the book to be speaking the words in it, and available for conversation. This fact does not prevent us from cherishing the illusion of intimacy, much as we do in the theater. (Jackson 84) This frame of mind or, as Jackson suggests, convention of reading, can be explained by the reader's need to situate the discourse of the literary text between himself and a concrete, addressable author – with the possibility of involving other interlocutors, other readers that will join in the virtual conversation of reading. 53 Jackson uses Wayne Booth's concept of the implied author to designate the addressee of those marginalia that are addressed to a "you." This author – addressee of marginalia, "the person inferred from the text on the page" (86) – is very clearly distinct from the actual author, because, for instance, in such notes there is an illusion of equality and intimate familiarity that would be impossible if the annotator had the actual author in mind as a possible reader of her notes. Similarly to Jackson, Bertrand Bronson also brings up the concept of the authorial figure in the text that becomes for the new, wide reading public a substitute for a personally known author. Bronson calls this entity "the public's author," "the Y's X," where X stands for the author (unknown to the public) and Y – for the public (unknown to the author). Bronson does quote, with praise, Booth's Rhetoric of Fiction, which was published in its first edition several years before Bronson's book, but for some reason he does not use the concept of implied author that Booth defines in The Rhetoric of Fiction. Perhaps it is because Booth's definition, in spite of its surface similarity to Bronson's, differs in emphasizing the ultimate unity and objectivity of the "implied author," which is a result of assembling the totality "not only [of] the extractable meanings [of the text] but also [of] the moral and emotional content of each bit of action" (Booth, 73). According to Booth, "the intuitive apprehension of a completed artistic whole" allows one to perceive "the chief value to which this implied author is committed, […] that which is expressed by the total form" (Booth 1983, 73-4, original italics). If the implied author "is the sum of his own choices" (75), it implies that there is a correct, verifiable way of arriving at this sum. Bronson, on the other hand, emphasizes the multiplicity of possible "public's authors," the different degrees of different writers' accessibility to the public through their texts. His sense of the reader's "version" of the author as precarious and incomplete seems to describe a real-life reading more adequately. Bronson also emphasizes the ultimate insufficiency of "the satisfactions of a relation through the medium of print" (322) which until today draws readers to watch interviews and go to public meetings with writers whose books they have enjoyed. "We [readers] still want the closer connection: the face, the living voice, the charisma of a physical presence that we can touch" (322-3) – which can have 54 the added value of verifying or contesting our sense of the author's personality gained from reading his/her texts. For Booth, on the other hand, the implied author seems to be a satisfyingly complete vision of the author's "better self" (as he defines it in The Company We Keep) that was created simultaneously with the text, and that can be recovered by a competent reader as part of a routine reading process. While Jackson's concept of the reader's conversation with the author makes a strong parallel with the suspension of disbelief in watching drama, and so emphasizes the merely conventional and technically necessary character of the illusion of conversation in reading, Booth's concept of the implied author promotes the ethical value of choosing to pay attention to the moral unity underlying every literary text. Bronson's understanding of the reader-writer relationship has still another emphasis: it presents the public's version of the author as a variable that can change from one reader to another, and recognizes the reader's sense of dissatisfaction with only the textual, reconstructed version of the author, and the reader's desire for an actual meeting, or at least for biographical knowledge about the author. As Bronson's argument implies, this pattern of desire could not have fully emerged before the veil of print settled into place between the reader and the author, letting through only evocative glimpses of the author's personality, aside from the bare fact of someone having been present that side of the printed page. Rousseauistic Reading Robert Darnton describes a widespread phenomenon in the circles of 18th century readers that appears to be a direct and powerful way of counteracting the veil of print. It is the "Rousseauistic" way of reading – briefly defined, reading as cultivation of a passionate friendship with the characters and the author, which affects the reader's actual life. Darnton's chapter "Readers Respond to Rousseau: The Fabrication of Romantic Sensitivity" focuses on one reader, Jean Ranson, a French-speaking Swiss merchant from La Rochelle, whose correspondence with the STN publishing house (Société Typographique de Neuchâtel) Darnton analyzes. These letters mention dozens of books that Ranson ordered over the course of eleven years (1769-80) of correspondence with the publishing house, and it is clear 55 from both the list of titles and the letters themselves that Ranson singled out Rousseau as a special author in his library and life. [T]he one who occupied most of the space on his shelves and most of the discussions in his letters was Rousseau – "l'Ami Jean-Jacques" as Ranson called him, although Jean-Jacques was a friend whom he had never met and could know only through the printed word. Ranson devoured everything he could find by Rousseau. He ordered two editions of the complete works and a twelve-volume set of the posthumous writings. […] He was as hungry for information about the writer as for copies of the writings. "I thank you, Monsieur," he wrote to Osterwald [his friend, the founder of the STN], "for what you were so kind as to tell me about l'Ami Jean-Jacques. You give me great pleasure every time you can send me anything about him." Ranson was the perfect Rousseauistic reader. (222) Not only did this reader see this author as his special friend, he also looked up to Rousseau's writings and personality – which he saw as closely interconnected – for guidance in his personal, emotional and family life. The Rousseauistic readers, in Darnton's words, "threw themselves into texts with a passion that we can barely imagine" (251). Particularly Rousseau's epistolary novel La Nouvelle Héloïse evoked an unprecedented storm of enthusiasm, becoming the greatest bestselling novel since novels came into existence in the 18th century, and eliciting thousands of letters of admiration from readers that the author collected "in a huge bundle, which has survived for the inspection of posterity" (242) and which Darnton extensively quotes. According to Darnton, Rousseau differed from other contemporary authors of epistolary novels, like Richardson and Lessing, "in that he inspired his readers with an overwhelming desire to make contact with the lives behind the printed page – the lives of characters and his own" (244). This was a result of Rousseau's casting of the reader as an intimate friend who was expected to "throw himself into" Rousseau's works the way the author himself did; Darnton regards this as a new way of writing and reading, "transform[ing] the relation between writer and reader, between reader and text" (228). Extraordinary as the reception of Rousseau was at the time, it established the foundations for a whole new mode of reading, Romantic sensibility. 56 The flood of tears unloosed by La Nouvelle Héloïse in 1761 […] was a response to a new rhetorical situation. Reader and writer communed across the printed page, each of them assuming the ideal form envisioned in the text. Jean-Jacques opened up his soul to those who could read him right, and his readers felt their own souls elevated above the imperfections of their ordinary existence. Having made contact with "l'Ami Jean-Jacques," they then felt capable of repossessing their lives, as spouses, parents, and citizens, exactly as Ranson did a few years later, when he began to read Rousseau. (Darnton 249) In Darnton's account of the phenomenon of Rousseau and his readers, one can see a vivid example of the writer's and his readers' mutual and, to a great extent, successful attempt to reach beyond the veil of print. What is more, the phenomenon of Rousseau and his readers sets a precedent for the practice of reading as communing with the author’s and the reader’s own “better,” authentic, perhaps a future self. Interestingly, the personal intimacy created between the author, the characters and the reader in the absence of direct social contact (in fact, a great and unprecedented communicative achievement of modern society) was achieved partly by Rousseau's casting his characters in Héloïse and designating his best readers as recluses, living away from the corruptions of urban society, and definitely uncontaminated by its newer practices, including that of "extensive reading" (Engelsing) which Rousseau condemned. "When one lives alone, one does not hurry through books in order to parade one's reading; one varies them less and meditates on them more. And as their effect is less mitigated by outside influences, they have a greater influence within" (Rousseau, La Nouvelle Héloïse, qtd. in Darnton 231). One can find an almost exaggerated example of such a reader in Emily Dickinson, a deep-reading recluse, who wrote, about a century later: The Soul selects her own Society – Then – shuts the Door – To her divine Majority – Present no more – (303, lines 1-4) This can describe a Rousseaistic reader’s relationship with books, where the “society” of the reader’s soul is selected by the reader herself from “an ample 57 nation” (Dickinson 303, line 9) of authors, defining her identity and giving her a sense of sovereignty over her own world. It sounds paradoxical, but before the 18th century revolution, before the veil of print divided between the reader and the author, it was less easy to fall in love with “the ideal form envisioned in the text” (Darnton) – because the figure of the writer of a literary text was so much closer and more accessible to the reader, the relationship was so much more public, much too like any other social relationship. It can be said that in the age of mass print reading has become a more intimate, personal activity – Heather Jackson provides evidence to this effect in the changing character of marginalia, that turned from scholarly and formal to “sociable” and conversational in the 18th century, and further into “subjective,” deeply personal from the early 19th century on. With the dramatic growth of the writer’s audience, communication happens across but also by means of the veil of print: the author could never have personally met all these thousands of readers that his/her book eventually reaches. And the kind of contact that emerges between the reader and the writer’s “ideal form envisioned in the text” seems to be a thoroughly modern phenomenon – dissatisfying and contradictory like many other characteristically modern phenomena. On the one hand, there is no direct way for the author to know about a remote reader that reads his/her text with deep excitement and admiration – unless the reader writes a letter or comes up and knocks on the writer’s door. On the other hand, the reader’s contact with the writer, which the latter cannot feel, is still a kind of personal contact between two specific people – it is this writer’s book that the reader admires, not anybody else’s, it is this writer’s “ideal form” (Darnton) or “better self” (Booth) that the reader meets in the text. And while the writer, at his/her remote lodging, cannot feel this contact directly, there certainly can be a desire on his/her part to feel it, to get at least some indication of it. As Roland Barthes complained, “You write in order to be loved – but you don’t feel loved when people read you; probably in this discrepancy consists the writer’s whole fate” (“Literature and Significance,” Tel Quel 1963). Or, as William Dean Howells reassured in a lecture in 1899, “nothing good that the author puts into a novel is 58 ever lost. Someone sees it, feels it, loves it, and loves him for it” (“Novel Writing and Novel Reading,” qtd. in Hochman 71). This chapter has outlined the modern condition of the literary text, its reader and its writer, and the way this condition emerged in the epoch of the printing revolution. The next chapter will show how literary studies, a modern discipline that emerged at approximately the same time, was shaped by this new modern condition of literature. This discipline responded to the mass produced literary text in a way largely different from that of non-professional readers described above: rather than seeking to reestablish the absent interlocutor – the author – it evolved towards marginalizing the author and extreme objectification of the text, a tendency that culminated in the “death of the author” pronounced by mid-twentieth century critical theory. 59 CHAPTER 3 APPROACHING THE TEXT AS AN OBJECT: THE FORMALIST IMPULSE ‘The veil of print’ discussed in the previous chapter can be defined as a dramatic reinforcement and deepening of the duality between the text as an object and the text as an utterance. When the reader has no social access to the person whose ‘utterance’ the text originally is, what he or she is dealing with is only the physical printed text bearing no obvious relation to the person who wrote it, especially if published anonymously or under a pseudonym (and even if the author's real name appears on the cover, it still does not refer to anyone the reader personally knows). In this situation, the reader can opt for either suspension of disbelief (Jackson) and treating the text as an utterance addressed to him/her by the author who can be known by means of the text, or alternatively for the empirical approach to the text, treating it as a material, linguistic or aesthetic object that it objectively is. So far I have discussed readers who chose the first option and "read for the author" (in Hochman's term). Some of their contemporaries, usually the more professional readers – scholars and critics – gave priority to the other, objective aspect of the literary text, and began theorizing the text as a phenomenon existing independently from its author. For these readers, rather than being a representative piece of the author's mind, the text represents and is part of a larger reality of language or literary art, both of which were newly singled out as objects of systematic study in the 18th century (as, e.g., in Samuel Johnson's Dictionary project or Lord Kames’ Elements of Criticism)10. Jane Tompkins describes the situation in literary criticism starting from mid- 18th century as "the advent of formalism" (214-19). She refers to Lord Henry Home Kames as the first representative of formalist criticism, based on what he says about language and literary art in his discussion of emotions in the first part of his Elements of Criticism (1762): “The power of speech to raise emotions, depends entirely on the artifice of raising … lively and distinct images …” (Kames 112). 10 A more extreme way of treating the printed text as an object is the approach of a collector of books or a researcher of print culture – but these fields are out of the scope of the present study. 60 This definition illustrates the shift in the critical thought that brought forward language ("speech") and artistic technique ("artifice"), rather than the individual writer’s self-expression or communicated intention, as the agent that acts on the reader’s mind, and as the primary object of critical study. Eventually, this view of language as the primary, determining agent in the literary process developed into the post-structuralist view of the subject itself as secondary to language, a product and a function of language. The displacement of the subject by language is an extreme generalization of the formalist tendency to marginalize the author and elevate – or reduce – literary text and literary language to the status of objects or forces existing on their own, no longer a function deriving from a relationship between specific individuals. Further in this chapter I will briefly outline the development of the formalist approach to literature, concentrating on its tendency to depersonalize literary and critical writing and to objectify the text. The objectification of the text following 'the printing revolution' was further reinforced and regulated by the institution of copyright, discussed in the next section. Yet what can be termed the earliest comprehensive critical theory, the Romantic hermeneutics, took a very balanced approach to the text as an object vs. text as an utterance expressing the individual mind. Further, I will analyze the historical, philosophical and professional reasons for the formalist theory taking one route, of treating the text as an object, and abandoning the other, viewing it as an utterance existing in the elusive field of the psychological and the interpersonal. 'The Formalist impulse' that critical theory emerged from has brought about undeniable and unprecedented advances in literary studies. Yet its tendency to depersonalize the text and marginalize the author seems to be in need of compensating for, in a theoretical way, which I will outline in Chapter 5. Alienation of the Text from the Author in the 19th Century Barbara Hochman’s extensively documented account of the evolution of modes of reading in the 19th century America shows how viewing the book as an object came to prevail over “reading for the author” in the public discourse about 61 literature by the end of the century, especially among professional critics and scholars. “Antebellum authors were generally imagined as real people who could be known by their words like one’s neighbors or other social acquaintances” (Hochman 13). Even after the Civil War, it was still not uncommon even for academics, editors and educators to speak about books as representing their authors, as “embodiments of authors – ‘gentlemen in parchment’,” to say that ‘Books are only makeshifts for men’, or that ‘Good books … [l]ike living friends … have their voice and physiognomies, and their company is prized as good acquaintances’” (American periodicals qtd. in Hochman 12-3). Towards the end of the 19th century, however, “the imagined unity of author and text" was undermined in several ways (Hochman 25). First, the debate over copyright that lead to the passage of international copyright legislation in 1891 contributed to further objectification of literary text and its separation from the author. By figuring the writer as producer and the text as a product, like a table or suspenders, the arguments over copyright further distanced the idea of a book from that of a person speaking through it. … Imagined as property, a book was not merely an inanimate thing; it was an object independent of its author. … [A]uthors in the 1880s and 1890s were often seen as “vendors,” “piece workers,” or “fiction mills.” When books were depicted as mechanically generated objects – “the spawn of the press,” as Charles Dudley Warner put it – the figure of the author could appear almost extraneous to the process of creation. The indefatigable press with its bottomless “maw” was figured as a kind of sorcerer’s apprentice, with a near- demonic life of its own. (Hochman 25) By contrast, Clare Pettitt holds an alternative view on copyright as a tool for consolidating and perpetuating the author's personal identity and interests. In other words, for Pettitt copyright is not an evidence of legal separation between the author and his/her work, but on the contrary, a bond that ensures the work's permanent, legally defined relation to the author, and its becoming part of the author's identity, his or her "heritage" (aside from the obvious necessity of copyright for economical survival of a professional author). Yet I think these two views are mutually complementary rather than mutually exclusive. Hochman's account of the late nineteenth-century view of literature, as a quasi-industry 62 inseparable from the industry of the press, implies alienation of the text from its author. In Marxist terms, the text becomes equivalent to any other product alienated by the capitalist system of industrial production from the worker who makes it. Perhaps it is this alienation, in the first place, that makes necessary the re- attachment of the text to its author by copyright. Hochman lists more factors that increased the alienation of the writer from the text and the reader, for instance the multiple mediators that interposed between the author and the reader in the modern publishing industry: literary agents, editors, powerful publishing houses whose activity was governed by concerns of profit. In addition, the authors themselves fell into an increasing uncertainty about who their public was, because of a dramatic expansion of the American population, largely on account of new immigrants, and the growing mobility of people between places and communities. These demographic factors turned the writer’s audience into a threateningly heterogeneous, unpredictable crowd – which was one of the major reasons why the leading American writers at the time adopted a modernist impersonal voice (Hochman Chapter 2), contributing to the perception of the literary text as an object existing separately from its author. Moreover, “[t]he impersonal voice had become a sign of authority and value not only in American literature and criticism but also in history, ethnography, medicine, and other fields. Schoolchildren were encouraged to replace the first-person pronoun with the impersonal ‘one’ in their compositions and creative writing” (28). Thus the mode of “reading for the author,” taking the text as “speech” rather than a “phenomenon,” entering into a personal relationship with the text and its author, while it definitely survived into the 20th century, became delegitimized in the professional discourse about literature. Yet already in the early 19th century there had been scholars who perceived the problem of duality between text as an object and text as an utterance, and proposed a dialectical way of dealing with it. 63 Romantic Hermeneutics: Integrating the Text as an Object with the Text as an Utterance The dual nature of text as an object and an utterance at once was theoretically addressed as early as in the 1800s. Friedrich Schleiermacher, a German philosopher, the founder of the theory of hermeneutics, came up with a theory that presented the two aspects of text, a linguistic object vs. a representative sample of the author's mind, as a dialectical pair. When interpretive activity is directed at a text as an independent linguistic object, it is termed by Schleiermacher “grammatical interpretation,” which resolves any linguistic difficulties that arise in the way of clear understanding. Another way of reading the text, treating it as an utterance of a particular individual, is termed by Schleiermacher “psychological" or "technical interpretation” (he uses the word "utterance" inclusively, to subsume under it even such an essentially written source as the Bible, which is the main object of the early hermeneutics' investigation). As every utterance has a dual relationship, to the totality of language and to the whole thought of its originator, then all understanding also consists of the two moments, of understanding the utterance as derived from language, and as a fact in the thinker. (Schleiermacher 8) Both ways of interpretation are required, according to Schleiermacher, for an adequate understanding of an utterance (or a text). He does not theoretically privilege either kind of interpretation, even though in practice most of his published work is devoted to grammatical interpretation. However, in his previously unpublished lecture notes, now translated and published in English by Andrew Bowie, there are amazingly far-going insights on the dialectical relationship between subjectivity and language that retain their relevance today: Grammatical [view of the text:] The person with their activity disappears and appears only as the organ of language. Technical [or psychological view of the text:] The language with its determining power disappears and appears only as the organ of the person, in the service of their individuality, as in the former case their personality in the service of language. (94) This telegraphic marginal note on the handwritten text of a lecture dates probably from as early as 1805, and it could help to introduce balance into many 64 poststructuralist discussions about the primacy of language over the individual subject. Schleiermacher offers a dialectical view of the two alternative possibilities of perceiving the relation between language and the subject. In his description, this relation resembles the one between the chicken and the egg, where no hierarchy of priority can be imposed. In his outline of psychological interpretation, Schleiermacher equates the individuality of presentation with style. “The whole objective of psychological interpretation is to be termed complete understanding of style. … This objective is only to be achieved by approximation” (91). In other words, psychological interpretation, aiming at understanding the individual mind from which the text comes as an utterance, is in fact directed into infinity: the reader can attain only an infinitesimal approximation to the writer’s mind as expressed in the text. It appears natural that Schleiermacher did not pursue psychological interpretation on the same scale as grammatical interpretation, since his very definition of the former recognizes the inappropriateness of describing an individuality in a set of already established analytical terms. “Grammatically, one cannot summarize individuality in a concept, it wants rather to be intuited. [Translator’s note: ‘intuited’ in the sense that what one grasps is not reducible to the conceptual means one has of describing it, precisely because it is unique.] In the same way technically [i.e. with psychological interpretation]. There can be no concept of a style” (96). It could be inferred from these statements that an individual style is best designated by the individual name of an author which, at least initially, is not a concept. According to Schleiermacher, one can never exhaustively capture or understand an individual style by either analysis or comparison – a “divinatory” or “intuitive” effort is always needed in the end, “in which one, so to speak, transforms oneself into the other person and tries to understand the individual element directly” (92). In other words, the reader (in this case, professional critic) needs to enter into a direct, immediate, empathic relation to the author’s individuality as expressed in the text. Understanding the author’s individuality expressed in a literary text is outlined by Schleiermacher as the motivating but unattainable goal of psychological interpretation. 65 Wilhelm Dilthey, Schleiermacher's disciple, continued developing the school of Romantic hermeneutics and expanded his teacher’s tentative, cautious outline of psychological interpretation into a method that is more optimistic about results it can achieve but perhaps less theoretically rigorous. Dilthey posited empathy with the author or “transposition” of the reader’s consciousness into the author’s frame of mind as an effective means to reach “the highest form of understanding in which the totality of [the reader’s] mental life is active – re-creating or re-living” (Dilthey 226). The problem with the concept of "transposition" is, of course, that it is not verifiable: no reader has any objective way of making sure whether what s/he re- lives while reading is actually identical to the experience that the author attempted to encode in the text. (As twentieth-century formalist critics point out, such verification may not be possible even by consulting the author). Yet Dilthey's focus on empathy as an important interpretive force proved to be a fruitful idea, and its potential for literary theory is far from exhausted. Few of the twentieth-century theorists of literature took up the approach to interpretation outlined by Romantic hermeneutics. E.D. Hirsch uses both Schleiermacher and Dilthey extensively in his theory of interpretation. One can also name Georges Poulet as the scholar who comes closest to Romantic hermeneutics’ concept of psychological interpretation in his descriptions of the process of reading. He writes, for instance: "[A] book is not only a book, it is the means by which an author actually preserves his ideas, his feelings, his modes of dreaming and living. It is his means of saving his identity from death. … Indeed every word of literature is impregnated with the mind of the one who wrote it" (Poulet 46). More generally, the Geneva school of literary criticism to which Poulet initially belonged, foregrounded the function of literary works as expressing the individuality of their authors, and often searched for an individual unity binding together different works by the same author – continuing the nineteenth-century critical tradition of reading for the author. Interestingly, a scheme of intuitive empathic transposition as a means to understand another person’s psyche was employed by another Genevan, a psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger, a contemporary, rival and correspondent of 66 Sigmund Freud, who developed his method as an alternative to Freud’s psychoanalysis (see Susan Lanzoni). There is a short story titled “Miss Grief” by an American writer Constance Fenimore Woolson that reads like a close illustration of the principles of Romantic hermeneutics and of “reading for the author.” The narrator in “Miss Grief,” a young successful male writer, to a certain extent modeled on Henry James, receives an unexpected call from an unfamiliar woman, who from the moment of her entrance presents herself as his friend. “You are very happy, are you not, with youth, health, friends, riches, fame?” It was a singular beginning. Her voice was clear, low, and very sweet … I was attracted by it, but repelled by her words, which seemed to me flattery both dull and bold. “Thanks,” I said, “for your kindness, but I fear it is undeserved. I seldom discuss myself even when with my friends.” “I am your friend, “ replied Miss Grief. Then, after a moment, she added slowly, “I have read every word you have written.” (Woolson, 982) th In a way characteristic of the late 19 century, when, according to Barbara Hochman, the writers felt increasingly threatened and exposed in front of the unpredictably changing audience, the narrator is far from being pleased by the woman’s intrusive attention: she calls at his apartment seven times, day after day, before she finally gets his unwilling reception. But on her part, she reads “for the author,” in a way that is rapidly going out of fashion at the time, which corresponds to her starkly unfashionable appearance and lack of public success as a writer. Yet the narrator is struck by the accuracy and depth of her interpretation of his authorial intentions and his personality: … no point of meaning, however small, no breath of delicate emphasis which I had meant, but which the dull types could not give, escaped an appreciative and full, almost overfull, recognition which startled me. For she had understood me – understood me almost better than I had understood myself. (Woolson, 982) For the narrator, the experience is "startling" and very uncommon, and leads to an establishment of a very special friendship with the woman, Aaronna, also an "authoress" whose reader he becomes in return. “To understand the author better 67 than he understood himself” is a saying ascribed to Schleiermacher (qtd. in Steven Kepnes 7), outlining an ideal and, one might well say, idealistic goal of psychological interpretation, while it always remains an enigma for the reader how close s/he has come to such an ideal understanding. Woolson’s short story, written before she met Henry James in person (if the narrator is indeed modeled on James), can be said to express her wishful thinking as both a reader and a writer – dreaming that the author would recognize, upon personal meeting, that the reader has understood him (or her) in a more than merely perfect way. The Formalist Impulse for Marginalizing the Author The study of language as a separate discipline that began in the 18th century led to the establishment, in the English-speaking world, of English departments that studied current language and literature; so these studies became institutionalized over the course of the 19th century. Starting from the first decades of the 20th century, literary studies have undergone a transformation towards becoming a highly specialized academic discipline modeled to a great extent on empirical sciences. Even though the historical boundaries between the older and the newer types of literary scholarship are very fuzzy, one could say that pre-formalist literary scholarship and critical thought based itself on the natural diversity between individual writers and works. As long as every author and every major work was conceived as essentially unique, the literary scholar's proficiency consisted in acquainting himself with the broadest possible range of authors and texts. The Formalist impulse in literary studies consisted, first of all, in a shift of focus towards developing general, metatextual structural paradigms and theories of how literature works. The sheer quantity of new literary output, consistently growing in the age of mass print, would be enough to abolish the old concept of scholarship as being acquainted with all the literary field. Moreover, the objectification of the text that started in the 18th century attained a new degree in the early 20th century, owing to new developments in linguistics. Ferdinand de Saussure's theory of language gave language an unprecedented degree of autonomy, as a sign system, from the signs' referents in the real world. Thus a text could be now viewed, theoretically, as 68 completely detached from the reality in which its author lived and wrote. Both tendencies diminished the regard for individual authors as "sources" or "progenitors" of texts, and prevented literary scholarship from seriously considering the reader-author relationship as a basis of the literary process. This displacement of the author had a range of historical, philosophical and professional aspects. Gradually the practice of bracketing out the author's personality or possible intentions became standard and unquestioned in academic criticism. Moreover, as Seán Burke points out, with the advent of post-structuralism in humanities, the marginalization of the author received an additional philosophical foundation. This marginalization derived fresh validity from the idea of the subject as emerging from and dissolving into language, i.e. into the conventional structures of signification underlying and conditioning the individual mind. We have encountered this idea in Schleiermacher's dualist hermeneutics – but poststructuralist humanities elevated it to a governing status, dispensing with the other side of Schleiermacher's model, which reminded that language in every concrete instance originates from individuals. "Death of the author" was linked as a necessary correlative to the "death of God" announced by Nietzsche, and the "death of man." The latter was a process that took place not only in literary studies, but also in other branches of humanities and social sciences, e.g. in such disciplines as anthropology and psychoanalysis in the poststructuralist age (Burke 14-16), which undermined the modern, Enlightenment concept of the human subject as an autonomous, self-sufficient and coherent agent. As a result, by the 1970s-1980s, the myth of "death of the author" became a governing assumption for most of published and taught literary theory. However, literary criticism of the same period, including academic criticism, was far from following theory's imperative of disregarding the author. For instance, there is the case of Faulkner criticism, as analyzed by Stacey Burton (1996). Burton wonders at the "persistent author effect" (610) in Faulkner studies, that is, the fact that critics from 1950s and right into 1990s, regardless of the anti-auteurist theory prevailing for most of this time, persisted in taking clues for reading The Sound and the Fury from Faulkner's extensive paratext to this novel (interviews, preface and 69 appendix written for later editions, other fiction by Faulkner employing the same characters). While Burton concentrates on the undeniable drawbacks of such author-dominated criticism, it is still an evidence that in many professional readers' minds the novel continually bore an obvious relationship to its author. Therefore, Faulkner's declarations about this novel, which he often referred to as his most important work, were to be respected. Another random example of a critic reading for the author in the very vogue of anti-"auteurist" (Sean Burke's term) theory, in 1981, is Ben Siegel's examination of continuing popularity of Isaac Bashevis Singer, compared to the public's lack of interest in his brother, the novelist Israel Joshua Singer. [W]hy is [Israel] Joshua Singer so little read today? The reasons are both commercial and literary. Unlike Isaac Singer, Joshua is not a weaver of "satanic paradoxes." Influenced by the demanding humanism of Tolstoy and Chekhov, Stendhal and Flaubert, he is a realistic observer of modern man's social and moral tendencies. […] His kind of unflinching realism, however, has lost its luster in the past four decades. Today readers generally lack patience or empathy with the traditional novel – or with writers who adhere to earlier principles of style and structure. […] Even critics who rate his fiction highly attribute his declining popularity to his unyielding rationalism and lack of sentimentality. (Siegel 42-3) We see in this passage that it deals with relationships, over the period of forty years, between the reading public, Israel Joshua Singer, and his brother, Isaac Bashevis Singer. In order to make sense of these relationships, Siegel uses a personality-related range of concepts: he is writing a brief but comprehensive outline of Joshua Singer's character as a writer. Joshua Singer "is" an uncompromising, realistic observer of life; he has such personal qualities as rationalism and a high moral sense, and he lacks other personal traits, such as sentimentality or mystical streak, which contemporary readers, according to Siegel, are looking for in a writer's character. This is a piece of criticism that "reads for the author" at the time when anti-auteurist theory is most widely accepted. If, as Wayne Booth is reported to have said, a certain practice refuses to die in spite of centuries (in our case, decades) of theory, something must be wrong with the theory. 70 Yet, it would be a mistake to dismiss formalist theory out of hand because it marginalizes the author and the reader-author relationship. The "object" dimension of the text is definitely there, and it was a great achievement of literary studies to recognize that in a sense, they also deal with objective data, which call for scientific methodologies of study, similar to that of natural sciences. In the following sections, I will examine how formalist critical theory was a 'right', timely and adequate response in the historical conditions of its emergence. The Philosophical Bases of Formalist Criticism Russian Formalism and Anglo-American New Criticism are the two major critical movements arising from the "formalist impulse" that led to marginalizing the author in literary theory. Comparing and contrasting these two major streams in literary studies, Ewa Majewska Thompson uncovers common philosophical foundations that have informed both Russian Formalism and New Criticism. The first, according to Thompson, is the Kantian insight that we can have knowledge of reality only indirectly, through symbols and conventional patterns of thought11. To put it slightly differently, we can never deal with pure "content" or ideas, but only with their embodiments in conventional symbols. The implication for literary studies is that one cannot effectively separate the content or meaning of a literary work from its form. Coleridge introduced this originally Kantian idea under the title of "organic form" into the English critical thought, and about a century later Andrej Bely, a Russian poet and theorist, introduced approximately the same idea to the Russian intellectual arena in Symbolism (1910), a theoretical work that became very influential. Bely stated, with a direct reference to Kant, that symbols constituted both the form and the content of art. Kant also proposed in his Critique of Judgment, dealing directly with theory of art, to set out aesthetic judgment as a separate kind of perception and evaluation, distinct from other modes of judgment. Setting out art and aesthetic perception against other modes of human activity was foundational for both 11 Other writers, such as E.D. Hirsch and Priscilla P. Clark, also relate formalism in literary studies to Kant's philosophy. 71 Formalist and New Critical movement, both of which were anxious to define their field of inquiry as a discipline distinct from such neighboring fields as psychology, history or sociology. Thompson quotes an excerpt from Kant that sounds to me almost uncannily New Critical: I shall content myself with remarking that it is nothing unusual, in common conversation as well as in written works, by comparing the thoughts which an author has delivered upon the subject, to understand him better than he understood himself – inasmuch as he may not have sufficiently determined his conception, and thus have sometimes spoken in opposition to his own opinions. (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, qtd. in Thompson 54). I would say that here the phrase "to understand the author better than he understood himself" is used in a very different sense from Schleiermacher's, cited above: for Romantic hermeneutics, it means understanding the author as a person, a unique individual mind with original ideas and sentiments. In Kant, by contrast, this phrase refers to textual understanding: extracting from the words on the page their correct meaning, which may be miles apart from, and actually more valid than the author's intended meaning. In this passage, even the spoken language of "common conversation" is viewed as an object in its own right that one can explore at one's own leisure, like a written text. Thus the linguistic "givenness" of any written or spoken utterance, in its potential ambiguity, overshadows its immediate communicative aspect. The author of the utterance, in the above passage, is in fact displaced by his utterance: to understand "him" actually means to understand the words he has "delivered." The second philosophical ground of formalist criticism, according to Thompson, is neo-positivism, associated with the Vienna school of philosophy and such philosophers as Wittgenstein, Whitehead, Russel and Frege. This school of thought viewed language as an objective reality, a set of verifiable facts that can be handled according to common logical procedures, while denying the relevance of metaphysical questions in philosophical studies. The neo-positivist philosophers regarded such an approach to linguistic data as necessary for their discipline to be established as a science. As I have already pointed out, the same basic view of text as an empirical given characterized both the Formalist and the New Critical 72 approach to literary works. It seems that the concept of the author as radically external to the text, a "transcendental" source of the text's meaning and value, became for these two critical schools something analogous to the transcendental sources of philosophical meaning and value, which neo-positivist philosophy placed outside its proper domain of inquiry. Thus, both Kantian and neo-positivist ideas support the view of literary text as primarily an object existing in its own right rather than an utterance passing between individuals with a communicative purpose or placing them in an ethical relationship to each other. This view placed the author and the reader-author relationship beyond the focus of theoretical and critical attention. The marginalization of the communicative aspect of literary text has been explicitly spelled out by some theorists of formalism. As early as 1921, Roman Jacobson stated that poetry is 'language in its aesthetic function', 'expression oriented utterance'. In poetic language, in contradistinction to the emotive and practical one, the communicative function is reduced to a minimum. (The Newest Russian Poetry, qtd. in Thompson 94) Jacobson emphasizes the absurdity of treating a literary text as a personal utterance of the author, comparing it to "the behavior of a medieval public, beating an actor who played the role of Judas, or blaming Pushkin for the death of Lensky" (ibid., 95). Boris Eichenbaum, in a 1926 essay "The Theory of the 'Formal Method'," also states that the "formal method" has dispensed with the notion that literary form is always and only a vessel for communicating "content" – thus literary language is distinguished from language of practical communication (in Lemon and Reis 111- 115). For the New Critical theory, the same outlook on the literary text is epitomized in Archibald MacLeish's famous lines, "The poem should not mean/ But be" ("Ars Poetica" lines 23-4), quoted, in particular, by Wimsatt and Beardsley in "The Intentional Fallacy." This compact and enigmatic formula seems to be unambiguous in one way: it privileges the work's "objectness," its objective independent "being," over the communicative function of "meaning" anything to anyone. 73 The Historical Background of the Formalist Impulse in Literary Studies The tendencies of modern literature studies seem to be closely related to the general social and cultural tendencies at the time (19th and early 20th century). As technological progress and demographic explosion went hand in hand, it became ever more vital to have efficient mechanisms of managing ever greater amounts of goods, raw materials, people, information. Mass production, state administration, public health system, media, and every other institution of public life all were, as they remain today, in need of comprehensive and general theories that explain how things work in nature, society or the human body, and that help to understand and control various processes. The sciences were the first to respond to this need. By the beginning of World War I, the principle of marginalizing and overcoming the contingent irregularities in specific data about reality, in raw materials arriving to production lines, or in masses of citizens, became a firmly established common necessity in scientific research, mass industrial production, state administration and warfare. For literary studies, however, a generalized theoretical approach emulating empirical sciences, suitable for dealing with the ever increasing mass of literary works, was still a relatively new trend in the first decades of the 20th century. Much has been said on how and why language and literature studies became increasingly assimilated to the scientific model. In professional writing, as we have seen in Hochman's study, impersonal writing style became associated with professionalism and reliability. As Don Ihde argues in Postphenomenology, it was very natural for language and literature departments to strive for status, financing and respectability comparable to those of science departments. The coinage of the term "literary theory" was to a great extent a result of these academic pressures, as well as a tribute to the general historical tendency towards creating efficient, universally applicable theoretical models that successfully neutralize and subsume the heterogeneity of material, social and cultural reality. An example of the humanities' emulation of the sciences is the project of Unified Science that the Vienna school of philosophy initiated. After the Nazi invasion of Austria, Rudolf Carnap, the leader of the neo-positivist movement, 74 emigrated to the United States. There, together with Charles Morris and other scholars, he started editing The International Journal of Unified Science, and later The International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. Being advanced by philosophers, the idea of unity of scientific language that informed the "unified science" project indicates an aspiration on the part of philosophy to be empowered by associating itself with the dominant discourse of the time, that of the empirical sciences. One may speculate whether the strong positivist tendencies in philosophy and literary studies at that time might not be connected to the fact that both the philosophers of the Vienna circle and the Russian Formalists had to emigrate because of political turmoil at home . Might it be that thinkers who were exiled and uprooted from their home countries sought a firm "ground" in the imperishable domain of universal reason and in the idea of general, all-encompassing structures of thought, underlying and supporting whatever is left of the inhabitable world? The Intra-Disciplinary Reasons for Marginalizing the Author in Literary Studies I think that apart from the above external pressures, there were also important "internal" factors within the profession that made so many major literary scholars to work out formal, empiricist, science-inspired models and protocols for their field in the first decades of the twentieth century. First, a need was felt for the literary studies to become a well-defined, independent discipline in its own right. Secondly, there seems to have been a reaction against the nineteenth century mainstream in literary studies based too heavily on the personal: the critic’s or scholar’s sense of privileged personal access to the author’s mind, and the critic’s/ scholar’s personal (patriarchal) authority. The sense of times changing, of the oppressive Victorian ways of thinking and writing beginning to clear away, was acutely felt by early twentieth-century intellectuals in Britain. It is encapsulated in Virginia Woolf's widely quoted saying in "Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown": "In or about December 1910, human character changed" (96). While Woolf's statement refers to a very wide spectrum of social changes, a general unsettling of established hierarchies between the sexes and social classes, one can apply it in particular to the 75 character of literary studies that changed in a similar way. What can be called the nineteenth-century "cult of personality" of the author (usually male, white and educated), maintained by critics and scholars belonging to the same class, race and gender, began to give way to a more scientific and less elitist way of studying literature. A curious, if belated, reflection of this process can be found in a well- known debate between two Oxford professors, C.S. Lewis and E.M.W. Tillyard, published in 1939 under the title The Personal Heresy. Lewis, with a surprising short-sightedness, complained that modern criticism suffers from a "Personal Heresy" or "Poetolatry" – ‘reading for’ or idolizing poets' personalities. Such charge would be applicable to a great part of nineteenth-century criticism, but by the 1930s, when Lewis attacks "poetolatry," it is, in Tillyard's understated objection, "slightly shop-soiled" (31). As Pettitt shows in her book, the construction of the author's figure as a genius and a hero emerged and prevailed in the nineteenth century, as part of redefining intellectual labor and property in the emerging modern democratic society (8-14). At the time of Tillyard's debate with Lewis there is, on the contrary, "a strong modern tendency […] to belittle the individual in comparison with the race, the personal in comparison with the abstract," while "the opposite tendency to cling to the personal" that Lewis attacks "just fails to be modern" (Tillyard 32 – what Tillyard refers to by "modern" is "current"). In Tillyard's opinion, a better expression of this current tendency in literary studies are T.S. Eliot's words in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," stating that "the progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality." According to Eliot, "honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry" (Eliot 6-7). Time has proved Tillyard to be the more accurate observer, since the above quotes from Eliot's essay became standard for the English-speaking literary theory in the subsequent years. Eliot's formulations about the "impersonality" of literary creation work in the same direction, outlined above, of presenting literary works as solid objects of study rather than ephemeral emanations of the writer's mind that can be evaluated and discussed only subjectively, as part of the author's 76 personality that originated them, and in the context of the critic's personal attitude to the author. It was to a great extent due to Eliot's work that "[c]riticism has entered into its scientific estate. […] No longer simply the hand-maiden of literature, criticism has become more clearly and more clamorously an intellectual enterprise in its own right and acquired a new and, for many, a disturbing independence" (Priscilla Clark 223). An emphasis on literary studies as an independent science was also made by the Russian Formalists. As Boris Eichenbaum writes in 1926, "we [the Formalists] are characterized only by the attempt to create an independent science of literature which studies specifically literary material." By concentrating on the purely literary aspect of literature, the "formal method," according to Eichenbaum, "became a special science of literature, a specific ordering of facts" (Lemon and Rice 103). Also Wimsatt and Beardsley, quoted in more detail in Chapter 4, spoke on behalf of literary studies as a distinct, independent discipline. Two Different Humanisms: Pre-Formalist vs. Formalist Literary Studies It may, and has indeed appeared to many observers of the changes in literary studies, that the "old" nineteenth-century criticism, based on the personal and the particular, is the one properly entitled to be termed humanist, while the formalist approach, in the broadest sense of the term, is not humanist. The former approach is aptly represented in Priscilla Clark's article by the words of Sainte- Beuve, a nineteenth-century humanist and "moral critic," as Clark defines him: "For me, literature, the literary production, is not in the least distinct or separable from the rest of man and social organization" (1862, in Clark 228). Such holistic approach to the individual, society, literature and criticism is very appealing; yet thousands of twentieth-century critics, in particular race-, class- and gender- conscious ones, pointed out the racist, sexist and elitist traits of that nominally universal humanism of the nineteenth-century criticism. The formalist movement, placing humanist learning on the same scientific platform with other sciences, and denying the critic's privileged access to the author's mind as a member of the same cultural elite, made literary studies more democratic. Formalist tools for studying literary texts are, on the whole, more 77 accessible and can be acquired in a much shorter time than the superb level of literary and cultural competence (including mastery of the classical languages) that were requisite for a critic from the old intellectual elite. Thus the formalist trends in literary studies, with their objectification of the text and "banishment" of the author, in Hirsch's expression, opened access to non-elite readers, empowering their new, non-canonical readings achieved by formalist methods treating the text as an object in its own right. It can be said that formalism carried with it a different, underemphasized yet very real, democratic humanism. The empowerment of the "common reader's" reading is implied in all three seminal articles instituting the "death of the author" that I am discussing in the next chapter. In Wimsatt and Beardsley, there transpires the idea that one doesn't have to be "acquainted" with the author in any privileged way to make accurate appraisal of the work whose functional qualities can be judged by anyone, like that of "a pudding or a machine" (248). Barthes, in his turn, sets great stakes on the new, liberated reader that can be "born" if the author's tyranny over interpretation is removed – even though his highly idealized reader is an unrealistic figure. Foucault's article also contains a strong democratic message in its express desire for "anonymity" of literary discourse that would privilege no one. Yet, there have always been voices objecting against the Formalist impulse in literary studies. The principle of uniqueness of every work and author appears to be of continuing importance, and hard to reconcile with the homogenizing way in which theory deals with its data. In branches of study dealing with cultural reality, it still appears that one cannot discuss cultural phenomena apart from their heterogeneity. One graphic formulation of this objection can be found in Stanislav Lem's denunciation of Todorov's The Fantastic in 1974. Lem argues that while a zoologist can make a description of a "normal" tiger, a typical representative of a certain genus of cats, a literary scholar cannot as legitimately do the same for a "normal" story, because in that case "normal" will mean mediocre, "paradigmatically petrified," stereotypical – and this is evidently not what we want to be the "norm" for literary production. From the point of view of the reader-author relationship, literature or literary studies cannot exist without presupposing that 78 every author is fundamentally unlike all the other authors, and every new reading is different in some way from all other known readings. That is, the unique individuality of every writer, reader and text, no less than the unique and contingent particularity of every reading, are still a fundamental humanist aspect of literary studies. Conclusion The modern approach to the text as an object has indeed succeeded, to a great extent, in converting literary criticism into a science. It has been convincingly shown by the last two hundred years of the formalist tradition that language, or any particular text or genre, can be treated as an empirical object of study. Without denying the enormous achievements of the formalist theory, I am proposing a way of integrating and balancing it with what I see as its complementary counterpart, the more subjective kind of criticism, based on the critic's personal, idiosyncratic response to the text, on his or her individual interaction with the author represented by the text. This other approach to the text has been under-represented in literary theory. Because of their contingent, situated and particular nature, these individual interactions of readers with texts are hard to generalize about. Yet I think it is possible to make certain theoretical statements about the role of reading in an individual life, and the role of individual readings in literary studies. These readings can be re-integrated into a broader theoretical view if studied with a view to a psychoanalytic typology of readers (Norman Holland), a historical picture of how reading developed as a cultural practice (historians of reading such as Robert Darnton and Heather Jackson), or a sociological study of certain classes of readers (Janice Radway). Yet at the basis of these studies there still remains the elusive and unique interaction of the specific reader with the specific text, representing its author. It clearly transpires in all of these scholars' similar ways of writing, where the particular examples on which they found their theories are presented as equally important with the theories themselves. For instance, in Janice Radway's Feeling for Books, a study of the American "Book-of-the-Month Club," an enormous amount of attention is devoted to the actual people who worked as the Club's 79 "readers" or editorial board. Radway's book contains photographic plates with each one's photograph, and with photographs of their meetings, so that one can clearly see that what Radway is interested in are these specific people, as much as the unique enterprise they worked in, and its historical, cultural, and symbolic significance. In the following chapter, it is my purpose to show that the "grand narrative" or myth of the author's irrelevance deals rather superficially and uncritically with the seminal texts it cites as its foundations: Wimsatt and Beardsley's "The Intentional Fallacy," Barthes' "The Death of the Author," and Foucault's "What Is an Author?". However, if one rereads these texts with some attention, none of them goes as far as to actually nullify the role of the author in the literary process. 80 CHAPTER 4 REREADING WIMSATT AND BEARDSLEY, BARTHES, AND FOUCAULT ON "THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR" In this chapter, I will present three groundbreaking articles that set the theoretical and institutional foundations of the "death of the author" in mid- twentieth century: W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley's "The Intentional Fallacy," Roland Barthes' "The Death of the Author," and Michel Foucault's "What is an Author?". I will demonstrate that "the death of the author," as a local grand narrative in the academy, dissolves if one reads carefully and without preconceptions into the very works that have served to ground this grand narrative. As for Wimsatt and Beardsley's article, it never even attempts to deny the author as the origin of the text; all it does is question the practice of critical appraisal based on the author's supposed intention – a practice literary studies have done well to dispense with. Barthes and Foucault, belonging to the poststructuralist age, are more radical towards the individual author, yet neither of them assumes or unquestionably proves the author's irrelevance in the process of reading. I will discuss Barthes in more detail here, and show that a reading of Barthes' work that is not reduced to seeking support for the “death of the author” dogma reveals a different, unsummarizable, live thinker, whose writing is the very opposite of the dogmatic as well as of the impersonal (i.e. ostensibly authorless). I will analyze "The Death of the Author" in opposition to another influential text by Barthes, Camera Lucida, and show how the latter represents the central struggle of Barthes' career, to break free from all restrictive codes, systems of thought and representation. It is also essential to remember that there never was a uniform agreement in the academy about the "death of the author" – it has been, rather, under a continuing debate, in which the anti-auteurist party seemed to prevail for a number of years over its opponents, but did not always lead the way. For instance, E.D. Hirsch's famous argument against the "banishment of the author" in his Validity in Interpretation was published in 1967, a year before the definitive version of 81 Barthes' "Death of the Author," and two years before Foucault's equally influential anti-auteurist article. In other words, it would be wrong to present any period in the twentieth-century theory as completely 'anti-auteurist'. In this chapter, I will show how even the most radical of the anti-auteurist texts are divided within themselves. Wimsatt and Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy” In Validity in Interpretation (1967) E.D. Hirsch argued that the universally quoted fragments of Wimsatt and Beardsley's article are interpreted out of context, and that Wimsatt and Beardsley's "careful distinctions and qualifications have now vanished in the popular version which consists in the false and facile dogma that what an author intended is irrelevant to the meaning of his text" (Hirsch 11-12). (Further on in this chapter, I will argue the same about Barthes' "The Death of the Author," which became reduced in the academic canon to a similar superficial and distorting summary). "The Intentional Fallacy" (1946, revised 1954) is probably the widest quoted text when it comes to explaining why it is effectively prohibited to talk about "what the author wanted to say," and why it follows that "author" is no longer a relevant concept for interpreting a literary text. This may no longer be the prevalent situation in the academy today, but in the 1990s, when I started my studies in a literature department, it was common and natural enough. The article, when it first came out in 1946, became programmatic for the New Critical school of reading; it spelled out the theoretical underpinnings of bracketing out the author's intention, an interpretive practice that was already well- established in the academy, but had not yet gained a general acceptance. How far it was from generally accepted is evident from the examples of intention-oriented criticism that Wimsatt and Beardsley were able to collect from just three successive pages in a 1943 issue of The Explicator: "Should this be regarded as ironic or as unplanned?" "… is the literal meaning intended…?" "… a paradox of religious faith which is intended to exult…" "It seems to me that Herbert intends…" These examples are chosen from three pages of an issue of The Explicator (Oct. 1943). (footnote 248-9) 82 These examples show that Wimsatt and Beardsley are talking about a very specific critical problem: resorting to the author's intention as an important though hypothetical source that can validate the critic's reading of the work. Along the lines of Dilthey's theory of interpretation, assuming that it is possible for a reader to re- create the author's experience inscribed in the text, the critics quoted by Wimsatt and Beardsley assume that the author's intention can be retrieved, and provide a positive answer to their questions. The most memorable expression Wimsatt and Beardsley give to their rejection of this critical move is at the end of their article. They discuss there a hypothetical query addressed to T.S Eliot, whether or not he was alluding to John Donne in "Prufrock." They conclude that if posed in this way, the question "would not be a critical inquiry. Critical inquiries, unlike bets, are not settled in this way [by resorting to an ultimate authority, i.e. the author]. Critical inquiries are not settled by consulting an oracle" (262). It must have been this quote that became the inspiration for the well-known title of Critical Inquiry the journal. Thus, what Wimsatt and Beardsley attack in their article is first of all this practice of judging a literary work on the basis of the author's intention that the critic assumes he can access. This assumption positions the critic as a member of some chosen elite to which he and the author exclusively belong. To deny legitimacy to such assumptions, Wimsatt and Beardsley present poem, a genre that serves in their article as a quintessential example of literary work, as first of all a functional object, and only secondarily an utterance of a particular individual. Judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine. One demands that it work. It is only because an artifact works that we infer the intention of an artificer. "A poem should not mean but be" [Archibald MacLeish, "Ars Poetica" 23-4]. A poem can be only through its meaning – since its medium is words – yet it is, simply is, in the sense that we have no excuse for inquiring what part is intended or meant. … [P]oetry differs from practical messages, which are successful if and only if we correctly infer the intention. (248-49) The antithesis between "meaning" and "being" here is equivalent to the antithesis between text as an utterance and text as an object. For Wimsatt and Beardsley, the poem has both of these aspects: it is obvious to them that "the words of a poem … come out of a head, not out of a hat" (248). Because of its obviousness, this axiom 83 does not merit a long discussion: what Wimsatt and Beardsley concentrate on, instead, is the opposite aspect of the literary work as autonomous, an independent "complex of meaning" (249) that no longer depends upon the author's originating intention for its effect on the reader and the world. They incisively state that in spite of the obviousness of the author's primary role, "to insist on the designing intellect as a cause of a poem is not to grant the design or intention as a standard" (248). A blatant example of the latter, truly objectionable practice is when a critic declares an excerpt from Shelley's "Adonais" ("Life like a dome of many-colored glass/ Stains the white radiance of eternity" – lines 462-3) to be "not poetry" because "they express the frustrated will trying to compete with science" (252, italics mine). I think it is a true achievement of the formalist movement that we no longer can seriously accept criticism such as this. But while it is indispensable to develop objective criteria of a genre, so as to be able to state on more objective grounds whether a certain text is a poem, it is wrong to assume that objectively defining a poem's genre is as far as criticism should go. Not using the author's presumed intention as the ultimate criterion of critical judgment does not imply never getting into an emotional exchange with the author or speculating what moved the author to write certain specific lines. Wimsatt and Beardsley definitely assert that emotional, personal content is central for literature – with the reservation that the poet's experience expressed in a poem becomes "standard experience,"12 and thus public property, accessible to the reader in general and not only to the critic (250). All that Wimsatt and Beardsley actually assert is that critical practice should become, on the one hand, more scientifically rigorous and self-reliant, by not stating dependence on an inaccessible source (the author's intention), and on the other hand, more open and "democratic," by not assuming the critic's privileged familiarity with the author's mind. Therefore, Wimsatt and Beardsley's call to avoid "the intentional fallacy" does not have to be generalized to the extent of denying the author as a key figure in the literary process. Wimsatt and Beardsley, in any case, do not seem to have had such generalization in view, judging exclusively by what they say in their article. 12 In I.A. Richards's expression quoted by Wimsatt and Beardsley. 84 To Answer the Rhetorical Question, "What Does It Matter Who Is Speaking?" Michel Foucault’s essay “What is an Author?” (1969) opens and closes with a quote from Samuel Beckett, “What does it matter who is speaking?”13 Foucault treats it as a rhetorical question, outlining an ideal and, as he recognizes, unattainable, utopic state of literature, where no importance would be attached any longer to questions like “Who really spoke? Is it really he and not someone else? With what authenticity or originality? And what part of his deepest self did he express in his discourse?” (222). It seems desirable for Foucault that society arrive at a state where “[a]ll discourses, whatever their status, form, value, and whatever the treatment to which they will be subjected, would […] develop in the anonymity of a murmur” (ibid.) This may happen at some future time when the “author- function” is discarded by readers and critics, when the name of the author no longer dictates to us the ways in which it is possible to read a particular text, nor cuts off other ways of reading that are inconsistent with this author’s name. According to Foucault, our customary view of the author as the generous “giver,” “creator” of the text is the exact opposite of the function that (the name of) the author exerts in reality. In order to undermine this conventional notion of the author, which he considers outdated and oppressive, Foucault questions the whole modern presupposition that the individual is a primary given, an independent free agent, and a source of his own speech. Then, as a particular instance, it will follow that … the author does not precede the works; he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction. In fact, if we are accustomed to presenting the author as a genius, as a perpetual surging of invention, it is because, in reality, we make him function in exactly the opposite fashion. (221) Here the concept of author is discredited on several levels at once: first, as a self- deluding fiction maintained by the literate community, and secondly, as a hidden mechanism of control over this community. Thirdly, and most objectionably in my 13 Samuel Beckett, Stories and Texts for Nothing. New York: Grove, 1967, p. 85. 85 view, Foucault dissociates the concept of "author" from the physical person who wrote the text, and confines its meaning to the verbal label, the author's name, that is attached to most literary works recognized as such by the Western society. It is not clear what significance is left by this argument to the actual, corporeal person who invests so much of himself or herself into the writing of the text. Does the author, according to Foucault's view, not "enter into his work" at all, to use Clare Pettitt's expression? It also seems that Foucault also creates here, even if only by implication, an idealized figure of the reader, or of the readerly community, which is itself the true source of "a perpetual surging of invention," infinitely and anonymously spinning new meanings and new fictions. Further, Foucault ironically adopts the ruling power’s concern with the world’s “welfare” or “health,” a concern which is a pretext for exercising rigid control that in the case of literature takes the form of “the author” as an institution: How can one reduce the great peril, the great danger with which fiction threatens our world? The answer is: One can reduce it with the author. The author allows a limitation of the cancerous and dangerous proliferation of significations within a world where one is thrifty not only with one’s resources and riches but also with one’s discourses and their significations. The author is the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning. As a result, we must entirely reverse the traditional idea of the author. We are accustomed, as we have seen earlier, to saying that the author is a genial creator of a work in which he deposits, with infinite wealth and generosity, an inexhaustible world of significations. … ” (221) It is hard to determine whether Foucault is directly responding to E.D. Hirsch's argument in Validity in Interpretation, or whether he is independently taking a view opposite to Hirsch's on the authority that would restrict free proliferation of readings. According to Hirsch, some such authority is necessary to ensure that literary studies remain a coherent academic discipline. Foucault, on the contrary, seems to be subtly rebellious against the idea of such authority, and to wish for a different state of things. Hirsch coincides with Foucault in being vague as for who exercises this authority – while both are sure that some such anonymous, elusive authority is indeed at work. 86 To dispel the deceptively self-evident status of the subject as a fountainhead of discourse, and in particular the status of the author as the ultimate source of his text, Foucault asks: “How, under what conditions, and in what forms can something like a subject appear in the order of discourse?” (221). For Foucault, it is a question that leads to “depriving the subject (or its substitute) of its role as originator, and of analyzing the subject as a variable and complex function of discourse” (ibid.). Yet asking for the conditions of possibility of a subject "appearing in the order of discourse" does not necessarily imply that there is no such possibility. Also, Foucault does not describe the ideal state of anonymity of all discourse as an actual or easily achievable state – it is presented as a utopic, most likely unattainable future. On the whole, it seems that Foucault's article just fails to be a straightforward denial of the importance of the author in the process of reading, or for the institution of literary studies. It would be more accurate to say that Foucault is questioning the author as an institution, rather than asserting that the author is of no relevance. As for the question "What does it matter who is speaking?", my answer would be that discourse (including written discourse) is an intersubjective phenomenon, or process, and therefore no discourse, even a written one, can take place without human interlocutors who engage in it. Therefore the notion of the author as a person cannot be rightfully excluded from the theory of reading or of literature. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” Roland Barthes, in “The Death of the Author” (1968), makes a very large claim that “to refuse to halt [arrêter] meaning is finally to refuse God and his hypostases, reason, science, the law” (66). Thus, Barthes makes an explicit parallel between the author – the capitalized Author – of a great canonical “Work”, and God, the Author of the world. By this he elevates the issues of reading and criticism to the same plane of discussion as the destinies of the world at large; this gesture of assigning itself a central place in human knowledge was very characteristic of literary theory starting from the 1960s, when in a movement opposite to the self- delimitation of the early formalist theory described above, it began to re-associate 87 with neighboring disciplines of philosophy, psychology and psychoanalysis, anthropology, history etc.. Barthes' essay was one of the first to claim this new status of centrality for literary theory, a status that was also accorded to it by other branches of human studies that assigned an increasing importance to structuralist/semiotic study of cultural and social sign systems. Upon closer examination, the real trust of Barthes' argument is directed against the academic critical institutions, rather than the figure of the author as such. Yet nominally, he is arguing against the Author as the authority that in the capitalist individualistic system of ownership usurps the rights of possession and interpretation of the text The ultimate authority over interpretation should be transferred, according to Barthes, to the reader, whose birth is made possible by the author's "death" (and by overthrowing the critical institutions). The image of the new reader, however, is disturbingly idealized. For Barthes, it is a reader on whom no allusion, no subtle play of meaning will be lost – and that is by no means a picture of an average reader of literature. This article played a crucial role in discrediting appealing to the author's authority or presumed intention as a legitimate critical practice. Barthes has made the death of the author a fashionable idea, establishing it (paradoxically) by his own credit as a leading public intellectual, his name as a famous author, quite apart from the validity of any specific arguments that he uses to support it in his article. What I am arguing against is the myth created out of this article, the myth that served to firmly establish the practice of avoiding discussion of author's feelings, concerns or personality as they emerge from the text, in academic criticism. Another objection to the reception of this article by the intellectual community is that the concept of individual author is rejected merely because Barthes labels it "bourgeois," born with the capitalist, individualist era. Strictly speaking, "capitalism" and "individualism" cannot be reduced to their negative connotations, at least not in a scientific argument where they are used as key words for describing modernity. Of course Barthes' article is not a purely scientific argument – it is much more of a rhetorical, political, revolutionary text that aimed, and succeeded, along with many other such texts, to create a new reality, a post-1968 world, often termed postmodern, that we 88 now inhabit (descriptions of this world can differ dramatically, but it is my impression that it is after 1968 that many previously unthinkable changes became possible). But even if modernity has ended, and even if intellectuals have helped to end it by drowning its defining concepts of "capitalism" and "individualism" in negative connotations, I still think that the modern literary process, the writer's communication with the reader through the printed page, is one of this period's defining achievements that cannot be undone or ignored. The Role of "The Death of the Author” as a 1968 Manifesto Roland Barthes is known as 'the theorist who killed the Author' – or in any case announced the Author’s death to a great public effect in 1968, when, according to an anonymous saying quoted by Annette Lavers, “the structures took to the streets” (21). The date of the article’s publication is itself part of the myth. In fact, this article was first published in 1967, in an English translation in Aspen, an American multimedia arts magazine, a very unusual and innovative enterprise in its own right, launched and edited throughout its 6 years and 10 issues by Phyllis Johnson. As Molly Nesbit reports, "Aspen 5-6 is kept in a white box. Barthes essay is boxed in, one of twenty-eight pieces, nothing more than a pamphlet stuck between movie, records, diagrams, cardboard cut-outs and advertisements. The box encapsulates the spreading field of modern culture in a way that is quite advanced" (241). But Barthes’ article, that appeared in its 5+6 issue in 1967, passed largely unnoticed. The fame of this essay, which made Barthes’ own international fame, came only after its publication in French in the journal Manteia No. 5, 1968. The spirit of "The Death of the Author" powerfully resonated with the revolutionary moods of the moment, and as a result, an overwhelming majority of references to this article are to Manteia 1968, which came to be known as its first publication. Sean Burke in his illuminating book The Death and Return of the Author also stresses the revolutionary impetus behind Barthes’ article. But according to Burke, by the time Barthes writes this, there is no one to kill; he says that Barthes had to rebuild the powerful figure of the realist Author to a stature it no longer had at the time when he was writing the article, in order to demolish this figure to a 89 greater effect. I would say that Burke presents Barthes’ gesture as a sort of a ritual, resembling the burning of a scarecrow of winter at the Russian holiday of Maslenitsa to celebrate the coming of spring (just a few weeks before any actual signs of spring appear). Barthes gesture is as theatrical but also as ineffective, having little force of its own to bring on the change, which comes for totally different reasons. According to Burke, “[o]ne has to be deeply auteurist at heart to call for the Death of the Author” at the historical point at which Barthes does it (27). But this is only true for the English-speaking scene, the one Burke seems chiefly to have in mind, where New Criticism and other modernist approaches to literature had already been reigning in the academy for several decades. In France as late as the 1960s the official academic philology was largely hostile to the 'nouvelle critique', which was an umbrella term for all the critical approaches that dissented from the cult of the Author prevailing at the Sorbonne. Moreover, less than two years before writing his famous manifesto, in 1965, Barthes had received a thorough public 'whipping' from Raymond Picard, a Sorbonne literature professor, which was practically a punishment for not being 'auteurist'. Picard’s publication was entitled Nouvelle critique ou nouvelle imposture?, and while it centered on Barthes’ study On Racine (since Picard was a Racine scholar), it also denounced the 'new' (psychoanalytic, structuralist, Marxist, phenomenological) literary criticism as a collective intellectual fraud, a set of practices unified by nothing other than pretentiousness, snobbery, use of cryptic jargon and contempt for critical plausibility, objectivity, clarity and taste (these four features were later isolated by Barthes himself out of the stream of Picard’s denunciations). The majority of French and some Belgian organs of press enthusiastically greeted Picard’s publication, which resulted in a kind of a public execution, reported and analyzed by Barthes at the opening of his response, entitled Criticism and Truth, which came out in 1966. If one looks at “The Death of the Author” against this background, it no longer appears like an attack directed at a straw man. Michael Moriarty expresses what I sense to be a widespread notion about this essay – that is a text and a historical point at which structuralism reaches its logical culmination and becomes post-structuralism: 90 ‘La mort de l’auteur’ in some sense marks the culmination of Barthes’s critique of the ideology of the institution of Literature [characteristic of his ‘structuralist’ period] with its twin columns of mimesis and the author. Yet in its style and its conceptualization of the status of writing and of theory, it clearly marks a break with the structuralist phase. (102) While certainly agreeing with Moriarty about the transitional, threshold position of this essay, and about its marking a certain peak point in Barthes’ career, I still see two reasons why this article is not representative of what Barthes was doing at the earlier structuralist stage, or in fact, at any point in his career. First, it is heavily aporetical, or self-undermining, in a more obvious way than Barthes' writing often is. And second, this article goes, in a rather ironic but predictable way (predictable if one is familiar with Barthes' theories) against his lifelong commitment to freedom, the freedom of thought from myth. The Aporia of "The Death of the Author" In an amusing angry non-summary of this article, Steve Schroer takes to extreme a point regularly made by critics of Barthes (e.g., Margit Sutrop's and Donald Keefer's respective articles in Philosophy and Literature): “’The Death of the Author’ blows itself to pieces.” He tries to start out: “According to Barthes – no, I must not say ‘according to Barthes’. Moreover, I must not say "I"; or if I do, I must acknowledge that as soon as I write the pronoun, it ceases to bear any relation to the extra-textual human being who wrote it: ‘Writing is that . . . space . . . where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing’."14 “I don’t see how I can possibly be expected to summarize it,” concludes Schroer. Michael Moriarty, with a much more scholarly, tolerant and patient approach to this article, comes to a similar conclusion: The structure of the essay is fragmentary, articulated by no linear logic. It gives its own reason why this might be so: the linear utterance seems to suggest the unfolding of a single message towards a predestined conclusion; an eschatological, theological model (the New Testament completes the sense of the Old; the Last 14 Steve Schroer, “The Death of the Author,” Michael Hancher Homepage, 17 September 1996, (21 November 2004). <http://mh.cla.umn.edu/ebibss5.html> 91 Day reveals the significance of all human history). The fragment, on the contrary, prevents the discourse cohering into the continuous utterance of a single subject; it de-authorizes discourse. … The fragmentary structure keeps the signifier on top, where it belongs, prevents an ultimate meaning from arriving to close down its operations. (101) To use Barthes' own terms of later coinage, Moriarty presents his article as a "writerly" (crediting the reader as a co-author) rather than a "readerly" (author- dominated) text. But the fact that this article has powerfully shaped the public image of Barthes as someone who proclaimed a concrete event, “the death of the author,” and celebrated a fairly clear idea of the future where the reader will supplant the writer, shows that Barthes’ writing here is not so immune from cohering into a single line of argument with a single message. After all, most readers most of the time are not so well aware of the importance of fragmentation and read a piece of scholarly writing for its overall point. I think that a consistent and not inaccurate summary of this article is certainly possible. Barthes’ argument takes start with a quote from Balzac’s “Sarrazine,” where it is clearly not clear who or what is the source of a string of conventional descriptions of femininity. It may or may not be the main character, or Balzac the author, or any of such structures as “the ‘literary’ ideas of femininity,” “universal wisdom” or “Romantic psychology”15. Barthes considers this as an example of how the writer’s individual voice is irretrievably lost in the text. Moreover, such individual voice may not be at all a relevant concept to describe literary (or para-literary) writing: Barthes proposes an analogy between the writer and a shaman or an oral storyteller, who only “performs,” plays out preexisting structures of meaning, or cultural vocabularies. Crediting the writer as the “source” of his text is nothing natural or universal but rather, highly characteristic of the capitalist, individualist society. Moreover, he shows that in the work of Mallarmé, Proust and the Surrealist writers the myth of the Author has been already greatly undermined (which goes against Sean Burke’s objection that Barthes was not aware 15 Roland Barthes, “La mort de l’auteur,” in Le Bruissement de la langue (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1984), 61-67. All the quotations from "La mort de l'auteur" hereafter are my translations from Barthes' French text as it appears in Le Bruissement de la langue. 92 of the erosion that the authority of the Author had already suffered in his day). Barthes historicizes "the prestige of the individual, or, as we say more nobly, of the 'human person'" as an outdated "modern" phenomenon, in order to deny the personal agency of the author (someone who pre-exists his text and brings it into being), and support his claim that "the modern scriptor is born at the same time as his text; he is not furnished with a being that precedes or exceeds his writing" (65). By disconnecting the agent who carries out the writing from the actual person who writes, Barthes attempts to invalidate both the authority of canonical Authors over how their texts are read, and the critical institutions' whole activity, directed at preserving and strengthening these canonical personages. On the whole, I would say that Barthes' objection is directed first of all against the critical institutions, who posit the Author (the academically approved, rigid and limiting version of the author's personality, creative principles and techniques) as the ultimate goal of interpretation. "Explanation of the work is still sought in the person of its producer" (64): the auteurist academic critique, which draws much of its authority from the canonized Authors it has appropriated, congratulates itself on an intellectual victory whenever it succeeds to reduce a text to the intentions/ psychology/ socio-historical situation of its author, to say 'this is the meaning of this text, this explains it'. Barthes sees this, with reason, as “arresting” the meaning of the text – with all the unpleasant police-related connotations of this word. What is more, he takes the gesture of removal of the Author (as the ultimate explanation of the text) on to a more general plane, denying that there is any single “secret” that the text would contain and that only a competent, authorized critic could ultimately discover. This liberating denial, he concludes, is necessary to “give the writing its future,” to make way for “the birth of the reader” (67). If, after all, Barthes’ argument makes sense, where is the aporia, how does it undermine itself? I would define it not as a logical contradiction in terms, but as a contradiction between the explicitly stated verbal message, and the emotional message of the article; the aporia is lodged in the most extreme, radical, rhetorically catching statements that this article culminates in, and that give it its revolutionary 93 pitch. By polemically denying any importance to the writer’s subjective agency, saying that the internal world of the writer, which he might believe he is expressing is “nothing else but a dictionary already entirely composed” (65), Barthes makes his statement emphatic and memorable, but also aporetic. Is Barthes himself, then, expressing nothing, when he writes this article? Is his pathos of renewal merely picked up at random, without his subjective participation, from a “dictionary” of pathoi, his message – from a “dictionary” of messages? Does it mean absolutely nothing, then, that the reading public has received and remembered this pathos and this message as unique, new, Barthes’ own?16 There are some other problematic moments in Barthes’ argument, such as his referring to the linguistic science as some ultimate authority that has now finally demonstrated how “all enunciation is an empty process, that functions perfectly without it being necessary to fill it in by the persons of interlocutors” (63). By saying it in such an emphatic form Barthes actually mythologizes linguistics and gives a universal – and somewhat demagogic – sweep to a statement by Emile Benveniste that he quotes elsewhere more fully and adequately, and to much less public effect17. By positing the new nascent reader as “the place where [the text’s] multiplicity reassembles itself,” where “all the citations from which writing is made reinscribe themselves, without even one getting lost” (66), he sets up an unrealistic plank, unattainable for any real reader. The concept of implied reader might help here, but it was to be proposed by Wolfgang Iser only a few years later. Yet, if Barthes had limited his statement to a more moderate, theoretically sound “implied reader,” all its revolutionary momentum would have been lost, because you don’t need to fight for an Iserian abstract reader inscribed in the text, you don’t have to overturn real-world authorities, you don’t have to call for action – this “reader” is already there anyway. But to come back to the main inconsistency of this article: it consists in the assertion that the author’s individual “thinking, suffering, living” for 16 Derrida, in "The Deaths of Roland Barthes," proposes a beautiful solution of this dilemma of self- expression vs. choice of ready-made linguistic items: he says that Barthes would always choose the word that would be precisely right for him, the way one chooses a ready-made garment in a shop, one garment out of many that suits and expresses the chooser best (39-40). 17 Roland Barthes, “Écrire, un verb intransitif,” 26, in Le Bruissement de la langue (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1984), 21-31. 94 his text, “parenting” the text, presence in the text are obsolete or, more precisely, have to be considered as irrelevant. So present is Barthes with his passionate, political preferences and commitments in this article, that his talking about the author’s disappearance becomes most manifestly contradicted. Barthes’ message about the absence of the author and the unimportance of the author’s message is undermined exactly to the same degree to which the reader senses Barthes’ intense, personal rejection of the ‘auteurist’ literary school and his enthusiasm for the coming new age of reading. The fact that Barthes’ article is not a literary work is no impediment to saying this, since he states at one point that between literary and non-literary writing, “distinctions are becoming invalidated” (63). Annette Lavers, who is a very matter-of-fact, unsentimental reader of Barthes, nevertheless finds it important to remark on how she likes his textual presence, as opposed to those writers who actually lived up to “the death of the author” principle, trying to adjust to the ever accelerating change of "publishing waves." One survival tactic [in this struggle], not available to Barthes himself, has been the development of the new torrential kind of writing style. At first a reaction to the Medusa-like fascination of the all-conquering Structure, … [t]his writing seeks to be both sensuous and to exhibit the ‘logic of the signifier’, the very law of the unconscious which, as was shown by Freud and exemplified by Lacan, is an indefatigable and tasteless punster. These Joycean practices have undoubtedly increased the general awareness of the reality and resources of the material side of language and what it reveals about the workings of the mind; but they often seem very mechanical in contrast with Barthes’ inspired and subtle effects. (23-4, italics mine) Lavers here puts a finger on the stylistic distinction between those writers who enact the theoretically announced "death of man" and write as if they delegated their outdated subjective agency to language at large, and those who, like Barthes, continue to write as if language could be put in the service of the writer's personality and convey it to the readers. 95 “Sous les pierres, la plage” To approach my second point of objection to "The Death of the Author," it will be helpful to consider Barthes' earlier work and see what its main pathos was, what inspired Barthes to criticize the bourgeois mythologies and what gave him strength for the meticulous, almost unrealistically detailed examination of cultural and textual realities. If one looks at Mythologies, On Racine, or even such later works as S/Z and Sade, Fourier, Loyola, what unites them is a devotion to the material, visual or textual given, to what-is-out-there to be noticed. This devotion was reflected, for instance, in Barthes’ enthusiasm for Brecht’s theatre, with its literal faithfulness to the way things and persons look in real life. “In Brecht's theatre, if a chicken were to be plucked the actor did not mime or roughly approximate the action – the chicken was plucked.”18 The same faithfulness to the authentic look of things made Barthes admire Brecht’s stage costumes, in opposition to the pretentious aestheticism of the French directors (see his “Diseases of the Theatre Costume”). Of course no one can be more careful than Barthes in constantly recognizing that “reality” cannot be seen or made sense of outside of all codes – yet at the same time he is constantly struggling against all codes that can be possibly seen beyond (in other words, the “myths”), that have superimposed themselves over the more elementary, and thus less ideologically structured and restrictive, first-level code of language. Myth in Barthes’ system is a signifying superstructure above language, built by specific political forces in society, that directs and restricts one’s view of the world in a more tight, rigid and ideologically colored way than the more basic structures of language do. I would define Barthes’ lifelong effort – even though most of his readers do not see him making any consistent lifelong effort – in “unpaving” the familiar sidewalks of thought and looking under the bricks of myth to find a different, less (expectedly) structured, more authentic and more genuinely pleasurable reality. I think the 1968 motto of Parisian students barricading in the Latin Quarter and picking out pavement stones to throw at the police would also 18 "The Influence of Brecht," Encyclopedia Britannica, 1995. 96 make a nice motto for Barthes’ coat of arms: “Sous les pierres, la plage” – there is beach under the stones. In Camera Lucida, Barthes explicitly states his lifelong commitment to the politics of freedom of writing and thought: he admits to a discomfort I had always suffered from: the uneasiness of being a subject torn between two languages, one expressive, the other critical; and at the heart of this critical language, between several discourses, those of sociology, of semiology, and of psychoanalysis – but that, by ultimate dissatisfaction with all of them, I was bearing witness to the only sure thing that was in me (however naïve it might be): a desperate resistance to any reductive system. For each time, having resorted to any such language to whatever degree, each time I felt it hardening and thereby tending to reduction and reprimand, I would gently leave and seek elsewhere: I began to speak differently. (6) This gives a positive sense to his elusiveness and ambivalence with regard to the ideas, systems of thought, and ideologies that he played with during his life, and that his readers and critics are often baffled or disappointed with19. Even such apparently apolitical and clear-sighted discourses as sociology, psychoanalysis or semiology (largely his own creation) would eventually prove too limiting, one could say too myth-ridden, for Barthes to be happy with. Now, what happens in – or with – “The Death of the Author” is precisely the “hardening,” the ideological congealing of discourse that Barthes always tried to avoid. This article elevates Barthes’ pursuit of discursive freedom into a definite and radical statement – there is no Author, no God, no ground on which the text could rest. No, full stop. And this is where it immediately becomes dogmatic and available for teaching, learning and reproducing. At last Barthes could be caught at his word, employed in paving another convenient path of myth. Camera Lucida as "The Final Word from Barthes" Being the last book that Barthes published in his lifetime, and also its utopian aspiration towards a possibility of communication without a code, made Camera Lucida stand out in Barthes’ heritage. As Andy Stafford shows in Roland 19 E.g., this attitude is addressed in the first chapter of Culler’s Roland Barthes, titled “Man of Parts.” 97 Barthes, Phenomenon and Myth, this book was part of Barthes’ effort to start a “new life” and write in a new way after the death of his mother – a new life consisting in writing about his life, making it the main material of his writing (214- 18). Jacques Derrida’s special attention to this book, in “The Deaths of Roland Barthes,” had certainly contributed to the constitution of its fame, and also to establishing the connection between Camera Lucida and “The Death of the Author.” The connection Derrida creates is a very deep and poetical one, when he describes Camera Lucida as a book “whose time and tempo accompanied [Barthes’] death as no other book, I believe, has ever kept watch over its author” (36). This book is hard to place; in our university library, I had to climb to the fifth floor where literature on technology is stored, because it was classified as a book on the technology of photography. (In fact, Barthes begins with an admission that he never photographed, being "too impatient" for that. It is a pity he did not live to use a digital camera and comment on its principle of operation). Does Camera Lucida break with Barthes’ earlier theoretical beliefs, by saying that in the photograph “the referent always adheres,” that “the photograph is literally an emanation of its referent”? (80). This goes against the grain of the fundamental (post-)structuralist idea that a sign is by definition separate from, marks the absence of its referent. The latter notion, though, perhaps paradoxically, is fully there in Camera Lucida, since Barthes makes an extended association between photography and death. Or, if Barthes in this book is trying – and failing – to do the impossible, as Derrida argues, in speaking about his mother while defending her particularity and uniqueness from the inescapable symbolization and generalization that language involves – then it might be an illustration, a final practical testing of Barthes’ theoretical concerns20. I would suggest that this book could be seen as a culmination of Barthes’ career in that it finally brings into close theoretical focus the detailed and devoted attention to what is out there which marked Barthes’ work throughout his lifetime. 20 As suggested by Graham Allen in the article on Camera Lucida in the online Literary Encyclopedia. <http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=10352> 98 In Camera Lucida it takes shape as the photograph’s faithfulness to the "thatness," the unique, particular, not-yet-signifying existence of every concrete thing, person and event. “In the photograph, the event is never transcended for the sake of something else: the photograph … is the absolute Particular, the sovereign Contingency, matte and somehow stupid, the This (this photograph and not Photography)…” (4). The way Barthes looks at photographs, there is no proper place in them for code, they are the place, among all places on the surface of paper, among representations, where one can find refuge from the crushing pressure of the code, expropriating and dissolving both the one who uses it, the author, and someone else, some other person or persons, whom the author tries to preserve from death by inscribing in language, by representing. Photography gives us the world before it is captured and de-particularized by language. Another concept Barthes uses to describe what photograph is about is Lacan’s notion of the Real (ibid.) – what actually is out there, before it becomes displaced, absented or “perverted” by language. One could also think in this light about the caption that Barthes gives to the crucial photograph of his mother, central to the book and, significantly, absent from it, not reproduced in it: “The Winter Garden” photograph. He says that his mother appears on this photograph as a child of about five years old, by the side of her elder brother, in a conservatory full of plants that couldn’t possibly grow outdoors – is this not an Edenic setting, before the serpent destroyed its innocence by speech? – no matter how obviously artificial, a bourgeois oasis created in the midst of winter. The following quote clarifies the connection between the innocent, Edenic status of the photograph among other kinds of representation, and the "escape" from or reduction of language; the photograph can be imagined to be using language only in the most elementary, childish way: Buddhism says sunya, void; but better still: tathata, as Alan Watts has it, the fact of being this, of being thus, of being so; tat means that in Sanskrit and suggests the gesture of the child pointing his finger at something and saying: that, there it is, lo! but says nothing else; the photograph cannot be transformed (spoken) philosophically, it is wholly ballasted by the contingency of which it is a weightless, transparent envelope. (5) 99 Barthes seems to imply that the most transparent, “pure” or “innocent” state that language can attain is the pure deictic pronoun, “that,” “there” – which requires or presupposes the interlocutors’ presence to each other and to the object of their discussion – a situation fulfilled almost ideally by two people over an album of photographs, second only to the actual presence in the room of all those people from the pictures, all that life which is represented on the photographs, but giving those who look through the album the advantage of being the only “I” and “you” in the room, with all the others given to them on the photographs securely in the third person. For me, Camera Lucida (as well as Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes) approximates a utopian situation of the author and myself being present to each other, over an album of photographs, the author pointing to this house or that face that have been part of his life. But the passage quoted above attains to an even greater intensity, an almost religious pathos, in its tension between the unstructured “void” that precedes and follows meaningful speech, and an emergence out of the void of a single, complete, particular object as a result of a child, or a photograph, having merely pointed it out – with no reason for pointing it out that we could be sure of. It reminds me intensely of James Joyce's notion of epiphany as outlined in Stephen Hero, a draft version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: First we recognise that the object is one integral thing, then we recognise that it is an organised composite structure, a thing in fact: finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognise that it is that thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany. (190) Joyce’s protagonist is working out his own aesthetic theory – which is likely to have been Joyce’s own aesthetic theory at that point – and it culminates in a religious notion of epiphany. The short stories of Dubliners, written by Joyce between Stephen Hero and its later version, A Portrait of the Artist, seem to be governed by the impulse, desire, or method, of rendering full, complete attention each time to that one thing – something or someone in Dublin that reveals itself to him in its “thatness,” in the full radiance of its particularity. 100 Probably the widest used pair of concepts from Camera Lucida is the studium vs. the punctum of a photograph. By the studium Barthes means everything in the photograph that can be analyzed and described by any available method of analysis and description, as well as everything that can be learned about the photograph's historical context and specific circumstances. The punctum, on the other hand, is what strikes me in the photograph, what "speaks to me," in Barthes' expression. Not every photograph will have a punctum for every spectator. But the way certain photographs speak to certain spectators is immediate, direct, and hard to explain; the punctum appeals to the spectator independently of the studium, it very often happens before he or she knows anything about the photograph, and before he or she has any chance of analyzing the photograph's effect. Eric Santner uses Barthes' concept of the punctum as an example of excess of validity over meaning, in his psychoanalytic account of address and signification that I will discuss in the next chapter. To conclude, it is indeed possible to establish and play out a rich and deconstructible binary opposition between “The Death of the Author” and Camera Lucida, as, one could say for instance, the most political vs. the most lyrical “faces” of Barthes. For me, the article opposes itself to the book in that it denies all contact and all desire for contact with the author’s subjectivity in the text, and underplays subjectivity in general (for instance, and importantly, in its reduction – or unrealistic elevation – of the real reader to a stature of an ideal one). The book, as opposed to this, seeks for a most direct, unmediated, non-coded (analogue, like the principle of pre-digital photography) touch of the other subjectivity through a representation. Because of the author’s longing for the presence of his mother, the photograph’s indissoluble attachment to its referent becomes an ideal to be desired for in other modes of representation, first of all in writing. In the article, Barthes asserts a total sway of the code over the individual expression – language makes an individual “voice” unrecognizable among other “voices” that mix in the process of expression, and what is more, the source of this individual voice is not beyond language; the article asserts that there is no expression beyond compilation. In the book, there is an intense longing for freedom from code; the photographic image is 101 “literally an emanation of its referent”: the rays of light that once were reflected from the thing or person I see on the photograph are passed to me in just the same substance, as reflected rays of light, only deferred by chemical transformations in the silver-containing layer. Barthes uses the stunning metaphor by Susan Sontag, comparing these rays to the rays of a star that reach you after the star itself has disappeared (80-81). In opposition to “The Death of the Author,” the aspiration of Camera Lucida is towards actually touching the other person through the medium of paper, by the “touch” of eyesight. What Barthes calls the "referent" of the photograph is in fact also its source – the object that sends into the camera the reflected rays of light. In this sense, the star and the "referent" of the photograph can be compared to the person of the author who 'sends out' the text. I will further discuss the concept of "signifier" as the speaker/writer, the giver of the sign, as defined by Emmanuel Levinas in Totality and Infinity. The following chapter will present a view of the literary text and the reader- author relationship based on the primary situation of face-to-face address. This basic relationship between interlocutors, according to some theoretical, psychological and philosophical sources, is the foundation of all discourse, written and spoken. 102 CHAPTER 5 SINGLING OUT THE BOOK SINGLING OUT THE READER: AN INTERPERSONAL THEORY OF READING … Kissing me, Anna was kissing, more probably, the man who stood behind the poems that amazed her, a man who never existed; how could she know that I myself, when writing that book, was also desperately seeking him out, becoming convinced with every new poem that he cannot be found, because he doesn't exist anywhere. The words that he left were mere forgery, like footprints cut out in stone by Babylonian slaves that were used to prove some ancient god's descent to earth. But in fact, isn't this exactly how gods come down to earth? Viktor Pelevin, Chapaev i Pustota (Chapaev and Emptiness, 284). This chapter advances a theory of reading a literary text as a relationship between the reader and the author, based on the primary situation of face-to-face address on which language is founded, as outline in Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy. The paradoxical situation of the reader this side of the printed page consists in both being alone and participating in a dialogic exchange with the writer, the source from whom the text proceeds. E.M.W. Tillyard's debate with C.S. Lewis offers a fairly detailed description and an early theoretical view of how this exchange takes place. This special kind of dialogical relationship between the reader and the author animates the literary process, and in fact completes the creation of the text, over and over again with each new reading. Eric L. Santner proposes a theory of reading (not every reading but a "strong," passionate and innovative reading) as a creatio ex nihilo of the text, a rupture in the text's being. Virginia Woolf's criticism and theory is another crucial source on the creative reader-author relationship, as a partnership that "gives birth" to the "life" of the text, ensures its faithfulness to life. The other aspect of the reader’s relationship with the author in reading, is the "creation" or at least a reconstitution of the reader's own subjectivity as he or she reads. I provide a further grounding for Tillyard's view of reading, and for the 103 connection between reading and subjectivity, on the basis of philosophical work of Emmanuel Levinas, and of developmental psychology studies by John Bowlby and others. The key concepts from Levinas's work that I will discuss and employ are "the said" vs. "the saying," the speaker as the signifier; and language as first of all an attitude of the self towards the Other, prior to being a sign system. Other cardinal points of my argument have to do with the necessity of presupposing the speaker (author) of a written utterance in order for interpretation to take place; this necessary or inevitable presupposition is discussed, from different angles, by Walter Benn Michaels and Steven Knapp in their well-known article "Against Theory," and also by Eric Santner and Jean Laplanche, who argue separately but similarly that signification "to" or "from" is prior to signification "of." The Work as an Expression of the Author's Personality In The Personal Heresy, E.M.W. Tillyard unfolds a view of literature that is probably the closest to the one that governs the present study: literature as a resource where you can encounter a wealth of different personalities worth knowing, and experience them in a different way than if they were encountered in real life. In his debate with Lewis about the function of the author's personality in reading and criticism, they both agree that "it is possible through poetry to come into contact with a poet's temperament in a most intimate way" (34). While Lewis protests against blatant or exclusive concentration on the author's personality in the work of scholars and critics, and against replacement of textual criticism by anecdotal biographical pseudo-explanations, Tillyard defends reading for the author's personality as a legitimate practice that should not be banned from either the common reader's way of reading or academic critical practice. Tillyard's emphasis in the debate is precisely on what is important for my purposes here: on the literary text bearing a readable imprint of the author's personality. As he states concisely and convincingly, "Part of our response to poetry is in fact similar to the stirring we experience when we meet some one whose personality impresses us" (35). Lewis understands "personality" in literature as an accumulation of accidents leading to the creation of a particular text, like "Keats reading about the senators in 104 a little brown book in a room smelling of boiled beef" and later comparing oaks to senators. By contrast, Tillyard defines personality as a "mental pattern which makes Keats Keats and not Mr. Smith or Mr. Jones" (34-35). This pattern, Tillyard explains, is a dynamic rather than a static one, "the poet's personality is in the pattern of the sea rather than in that of a mosaic pavement," and it is manifest in both life and work of the author: "I believe we read Keats in some measure because his poetry gives a version of a remarkable personality of which another version is his life. The two versions are not the same but they are analogous" (ibid.). This analogy legitimizes 'reading for the author', by defining "author" as a specific mental pattern structuring both work and life of the writer. This approach of viewing the author's personality as the unifying agent behind both biography and work of the author, was still dominant on the Continent at the time of Tillyard- Lewis debate, and for some time longer. The previous chapter touched upon the conservative "auteurist" academic criticism in France, whereas in Switzerland there flourished in the 1930s a more innovative critical community, the Geneva School, which read works of the modern classics in the spirit of search for the mental pattern distinguishing the author and unifying his oeuvre (see Evelyne Ender). The Geneva School presupposed that the imprint left by the author's personality is objectively there on all of the author's works, and not ascribed to them by a critical community that has the power to do so, as argued by Foucault. Virginia Woolf as a critic worked according to the same governing principle. Most of her critical essays are devoted to authors (rather than specific works, theoretical ideas or stylistic devices). She creates outstanding verbal portraits of writers' personalities, based on her reading of their works, with some biographical support – mainly of the interpretive kind, sayings of other writers and critics that sum up in a meaningful way the essay's subject's character and life. Woolf's major interest is in creating an internally consistent, distinctive picture of every writer's character. For instance, she writes about Turgenev that in spite of the slightly ironic distance he maintains from his characters, this careful detachment is not "able to go to the root of the matter and eliminate the artist himself; his temperament remains ineradicable. Nobody, we say over and over again as we read 105 him, even in a translation, could have written this except Turgenev. His birth, his race, the impressions of his childhood, pervade everything he wrote" ("The Novels of Turgenev" 60-1). Moreover, when she wishes to sum up or make sense of a particular epoch, nation or creative method, she still uses the same language as for describing human characters: "the tragic violence of the Elizabethans," "the 'humours' of the Elizabethan stage" ("Oliver Goldsmith" 10-11), "the English mind is naturally prone to take its ease and pleasure in the loosest whimsies and humours" ("Reading" 171). Thus the character for Woolf is not only the major subject of her writing, but also a means of understanding and describing other phenomena, historical, social and literary. Woolf's criticism closely illustrates, while it pre-dates, both Tillyard's and the Geneva school's theory of reading for the author's character, and Wayne Booth's concept of the author's character implicit in the text as the author's "better self." For instance, in her analysis of Oliver Goldsmith she extracts both a profound insight into Goldsmith's individual character, and a valuable theory about the different degrees of personal openness and reserve that different writers show. […W]e are kept at arm's length by the urbanity of his style, just as good manners confer impersonality upon the well-bred. But there may be another reason for his reserve. Lamb, Hazlitt, Montaigne talk openly about themselves because their faults are no small ones; Goldsmith was reserved because his foibles are the kind that men conceal. Nobody at least can read Goldsmith in the mass without noticing how frequently, yet how indirectly, certain themes recur – dress, ugliness, awkwardness, poverty and the fear of ridicule. […] It is only necessary to open Boswell to make sure. There, at once, we see our serene and mellifluous writer in the flesh. "His person was short, his countenance coarse and vulgar, his deportment that of a scholar awkwardly affecting the easy gentleman." With touch upon touch the unprepossessing portrait is built up. (13) Woolf's reading of Goldsmith's work for recurring, partially repressed elements as reflecting the writer's personal preoccupations is an early (1934) instance of psychoanalytic criticism (it is well known that Woolf not only read but proofread the complete English edition of Freud's works). This way of reading is also in accordance with the critical philosophy of the Geneva School. Boswell's 106 description of Goldsmith is used as a counterweight to create a more balanced and complex view of the writer's character. Boswell's portrait, like all Boswell's portraits, […] has the breath of life in it. He brings the other Goldsmith to the surface – he combines them both. He proves that the silver- tongued writer was no simple soul, gently floating through life from the honeysuckle to the hawthorn hedge. On the contrary, he was a complex man, a man full of troubles, without "settled principle"; who lived from hand to mouth and from day to day; who wrote his loveliest sentences in a garret under pressure of poverty. And yet, so oddly are human faculties combined, he had only to take his pen and he was revenged upon Boswell, upon the fine gentleman who sneered at him, upon his own ugly body and stumbling tongue. He had only to write and all was clear and melodious; he had only to write and he was among the angels, speaking with a silver tongue in a world where all is ordered, rational, and serene. (13-14) The writer's ability to escape his limiting real-life self and to create a more excellent, distinguished, harmonious self in a more harmonious world seems to precisely illustrate Wayne Booth's idea of writing as creating a "better self" of the writer. To designate the markers of such better, self-created self, of the author's imprint on the work, Tillyard also uses a more familiar term, "style." What Tillyard says about style strongly resembles what Schleiermacher wrote about it, concerning psychological interpretation: One of the readiest ways of pointing to the function of personality in poetry is by means of the word style. 'Style' readily suggests the mental pattern of the author, the personality realized in words. Style in poetry is partly a matter of rhythm; and rhythm, Dr. Richards says very truly in Science and Poetry, 'is no matter of tricks with syllables, but directly reflects personality'." (Tillyard and Lewis 35-6) Rhythm is perhaps the most immediate manifestation of life; the body performs and manifests its life by rhythms of pulse, breath, neural activity, and all the other vital rhythms. The mind, in its turn, has its own rhythms of activity that have their own channels of output, which include speech and writing. One may note in passing that Tillyard's quote from I.A. Richards, the author of the concept of "affective fallacy," shows that Richards was not in fact a supporter of impersonality in literature and 107 criticism. For Tillyard, an artist's individual style is what makes his or her work "unlike" any other, "distinguished," set apart from all other authors and people – while it is also this individual, distinguishing style that enables the reader/ spectator to connect to the work and the author in a close personal way. This may appear like a contradiction, but it is in keeping with Emmanuel Levinas's view of the relationship with an Other, which is only possible if the Other is given credit as genuinely distinct and separate from the self. As Tillyard reports in one of his striking examples of such rapport between the spectator/reader and the author, I was surveying one […] of a number of Romanesque churches I was in the course of visiting in the Auvergne. Among other feelings experienced there presented itself to me with considerable emphasis and apparent spontaneity the one that I was sharing something with the man who had designed the church. The feeling seemed not particularly different in quality from that intimacy that can subsist or can be imagined to subsist in ordinary life between lovers or other people united in uncommon sympathy. It was certainly very different in circumstances, because I had no idea who the architect was or even whether he was known. Nor did I feel the least curiosity to find out [emphasis mine]. All that matters to me is that the feeling referred to appeared both personal and valuable. (Tillyard and Lewis 77-8) The example of an architectural rather than a literary work takes to the extreme Tillyard's point that art is a medium that communicates character. Even the totally non-verbal art of architecture, where personal authorship is conventionally less emphasized than in other kinds of art, operates, according to Tillyard, in the same way as other arts and first of all literature. The author's personality is in some way encoded, preserved and communicated by the completed work, and in Tillyard's view, it is the objective and permanent essence of personality, independent of the "accidents" of the author's name, biography and situation, all of which, in the above case, he had “not the least curiosity to find out.” In other words, this view stands in diametrical opposition to Foucault's view of authorship, where the author is nothing but a canonized name "encircling" the work and limiting the possibilities of its interpretation; Foucault seems to believe that once the name of the author is erased, the work becomes no one's discourse. For Tillyard, even the mute and anonymous "discourse" of a church's architectural design proceeds from a clearly identifiable 108 personality of the author, with whom the spectator can be situated in a certain relationship (in this case, "intimacy" and "uncommon sympathy"). Tillyard's view is even more convincing when applied to literary texts, which are an expression of the author's personality in a much more direct and unproblematic sense than works of architecture. Emmanuel Levinas's Theory of Language Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy of language allows to ground this view of reading and a corresponding view of writing (together, the literary process) in an ethical anthropology that allows to posit the same ethical, interpersonal foundations for both spoken and written language. Levinas's theory of language can be said to return, in a way, to the classical distrust of the written language and privileging of the spoken, which I discussed in the first chapter. As I showed there, this classical hierarchy came to be associated with other oppressive hierarchies, such as the absolute, intolerant dominance of the canonical interpretation of the Gospels, orally transmitted within the institution of the Church, over other, "heretical," alternative interpretations springing directly from unauthorized readers' independent reading of the sacred texts. Yet in Levinas's theory, the privileging of speech over writing is put in the service of a radically liberal and humanistic ethics that privileges the Other over the self. Language in Levinas's philosophical system is a foundational concept – but it is conceptualized in a very different way than in most twentieth-century linguistic, critical or philosophical definitions, which revolve around the notion of the arbitrary and conventional sign. Language, or discourse, is defined by Levinas as the properly human relationship established between the self and the other when they meet face-to-face. The alternative to the relationship of discourse is violence, not granting the Other the basic right “to be.” "To 'let him [the Other] be', the relationship of discourse is required" (Levinas 1969, 71). In a way, the Other's face and speech are equivalent to each other, since both are manifestations of the other human being, and both demand of the self an attitude appropriate for responding to 109 the Other (when capitalized by Levinas, this word means the irreducibly "exterior," ethically compelling aspect of the other person)21; both face and speech are an expression of the Other, thus both are inextricably connected to language (Levinas 1969, 70-1). The idea of language that emerges in the dialogical relationship between the I and the Thou originates with Martin Buber, but while acknowledging Buber as his source, Levinas points out that he approaches this relationship from a different angle, "by starting with the idea of the Infinite" (Levinas 1969, 69). According to Levinas, the only "site" in the world where I can encounter the Infinite and the absolute is in the face and speech of the Other. "Infinity" for Levinas is not a quantitative concept but a derivative of absolute exteriority, something that the self in principle cannot contain, absorb, totalize. Such an absolutely or infinitely exterior phenomenon is the Other. The interlocutor's presence is crucial for this encounter with the Infinite that can open up in the simple everyday event of a greeting and a dialogic exchange with another person. Therefore, Levinas asserts that "oral discourse is the plenitude of discourse" (Levinas 1969, 96). Written language, built around the speaker/writer's absence, is therefore subsidiary to the spoken. But if one takes another step further along this line, one can say that in the final account, written language also depends on the original, primordial presence of the speaker/writer. The speaker's functioning as such, in Levinas's system, is never solipsistic or abstract, but wholly depends on the presence of an interlocutor, an Other. Thus, for Levinas all the varieties of language, as well as of ethics, spring from one and the same source, the interpersonal – the presence of the Other to the self. Language being inseparable from the face-to-face situation, where each of the speakers "can come to the assistance of his discourse" (ibid.) is one of the frequent allusions to Plato's Phaedrus that permeate Levinas's discussion of language. Another central correspondence between Plato's and Levinas's thought is the concern, common to most of Western philosophy, with appearance vs. truth. 21 In fact, there is a pronounced theological dimension to Levinas’s term “the Other,” which I am mostly leaving out of the present discussion. For Levinas, the first and ultimate Other is God, who may transpire in the ethical relationship to another person, and is the ultimate source and standard for such relationship. 110 How does one ever distinguish between what one sees and what there really is? The key to this problem is found by Levinas in the nature of language. Paradoxically, not any material "givens" but rather the speech as the face-to-face with the Other is the heart of reality; the reality of everything else is measured with regard to that primary ethical and linguistic situation from which there can be no further “awakening.” In other words, Levinas places ethics before ontology, proclaims ethics to be "the first philosophy." Before the philosophical consciousness could have begun to think about beings, it is already involved in relationships with other beings, thus it is a logical and ethical mistake for a philosopher to proceed as if he were outside and independent from these constitutive relationships with other beings and connected to them, without "touch," only by the abstract ray of intellectual "sight." According to Levinas's view of language and perception, the latter is actually dependent on the former, the interpretation of the phenomenon appearing to the senses, and even its appearance, in the first place, as a separate phenomenon, is dependent on its prior thematization in speech, which already requires another person to have been present. Nothing perceived by the senses, no sign as an abstract member of a system of signs (like a dictionary entry) is self-explanatory, but always potentially or actually ambivalent, equivocal; what appears to the senses does not yet have the status of objective reality; this "ambivalence of apparition is surmounted by expression, the presentation of the Other to me, the primordial event of signification" (Levinas 1969, 92). Even the "objectivity" of objects is a function of a relationship of the thinking and perceiving subject with the society of others: Language makes possible the objectivity of objects and their thematization. Already Husserl affirmed that the objectivity of thought consists in being valid for everyone. To know objectively would therefore be to constitute my thought in such a way that it already contained a reference to the thought of the others. What I communicate therefore is already constituted in function of others. In speaking I do not transmit to the Other what is objective for me: the objective becomes objective only through communication. (Levinas 1969, 210, italics mine) In other words, Levinas denies the possibility for language or thought, or objects of language or thought, to exist in the abstract, without or prior to an actual society of 111 interlocutors – and he criticizes philosophical attempts (first of all, those by early twentieth-century German philosophy, which was his own intellectual “fatherland”) to theorize language in such an abstract way. In light of the above, it becomes clear how the two aspects of literary text, as an object and as an utterance, are related to each other. Vis-à-vis the printed text, the reader has only two options of dealing with it: s/he can either situate it as an utterance within an implicitly presupposed or explicitly imagined relationship with the author, or alternatively s/he can thematize and explore the text as an object in a conversation with other readers/critics who have already started a discourse about this text. In both cases, a relationship with an interlocutor, as in spoken language, is required to make sense of the “linguistic object,” the written text. Levinas makes an inextricable connection between the "abstract" thematization or positing of objects and the concrete relationship of discourse in which alone such thematization can be made. Thematization manifests the Other because the proposition that posits and offers the world does not float in the air, but promises a response to him who receives this proposition, who directs himself toward the Other because in his proposition he receives the possibility of questioning. Questioning is not explained by astonishment only, but by the presence of him to whom it is addressed. A proposition is maintained in the outstretched field of questions and answers. A proposition is a sign which is already interpreted, which provides its own key. The presence of the interpretative key in the sign to be interpreted is precisely the presence of the other in the proposition, the presence of him who can come to the assistance of his discourse, the teaching quality of all speech. Oral discourse is the plenitude of discourse. (Levinas 1969, 96, italics mine) The celebrated ambiguity of the literary text is, one could say, only theoretical but never actual, since any actual reading resolves the ambiguity either one way or another as if the author/speaker of the text were present. Critical readings that embrace several concurrent interpretations of an ambiguous text do so in the framework of a conversation with their readers – thus they still have to make each of the consecutive readings unambiguous. The discussion of several readings of an ambiguous text takes place as if the critic were present to his/her reader, as a 112 substitute for the author of the original text, who is viewed as absent if the text is read as ambiguous. The "outstretched field of questions and answers" in which any sentence (of a read text) is anchored and maintained is a beautiful image that provides a remedy against the vertigo generated by the poststructuralist view of language existing on its own, abstracted from those who speak it, detached from any concrete referent, revolving around an imaginary, mythical central Signifier that is only conventionally, conditionally present in the center. As for the term "signifier," Levinas finds what I see as a better use for it: he reserves it for the speaker who "emits" the (verbal or other) sign. As for the "signified," it can be always interpreted further, and thus transformed into another sign, so in itself the signified does not constitute a firm point of reference, the way the speaker himself/herself does. The sign does not signify the signifier as it signifies the signified. The signified is never a complete presence; always a sign in its turn, it does not come in a straightforward frankness. The signifier, he who emits the sign, faces, despite the interposition of the sign, without proposing himself as a theme. He can, to be sure, speak of himself – but then he would announce himself as signified and consequently as a sign in his turn. The Other, the signifier, manifests himself in speech by speaking of the world and not of himself; he manifests himself by proposing the world, by thematizing it. (Levinas 1969, 96) Applied to the written text, the basic structure of this view of language still holds, in spite of the greater "density" or opaqueness of the written sign interposing between the writer and the reader. If the written text is to be enlightening for the reader, there still has to be an interlocutor facing the reader through it, to make thematization of the content possible. In Levinas' other major work, Otherwise Than Being, he further develops his theory of signification as a relationship between the self and the other. He argues that the very relation of signification, the sign (or, in Saussurean terms, the signifier, the phonetic or graphic component) standing for the signified (the idea/concept/image associated with the sign) is analogous to, or can even be seen as a metaphor for, the primary ethical relationship of responsibility, proximity and substitution between the self and the other: one-for-the-other. In the relationship of 113 responsibility to the point of substitution for the other, "all my inwardness is invested in the form of despite-me, for-another. Despite-me, for-another, is signification par excellence" (11). Levinas uncovers a deep relatedness between signification (as being-for-another) and subjectivity: subjectivity is not equivalent to the self-illuminating existence of consciousness, nor is it quite equal to bodily existence (though paradoxically, it is the body-based concepts of proximity, sensibility and vulnerability that provide the basis for defining subjectivity in Otherwise than Being). Subjectivity for Levinas is precisely the otherwise-than- being, being out of phase with oneself, being displaced from one's secure "home" (as a consciousness that knows and is in control of its world), being exposed to another, saying to another. The concept of "saying" is a crucial one in Levinas's argument. "Saying" is exposure to another, the basic level of language. "Antecedent to the verbal signs in conjugates, to the linguistic systems and semantic glimmerings, a foreword preceding languages, it is the proximity of one to the other, the commitment of an approach, the one for the other, the very signifyingness of signification" (5). Whatever is expressed in spoken or written language is the "said" – communicated facts, information, opinions, or abstract concepts about the world – in which the "saying" disappears, leaving only a trace – and that trace points at the origin and the ethical aspect of communication, the presence of an interlocutor. The unblocking of communication, irreducible to the circulation of information which presupposes it, is accomplished in saying. […] It is in the risky uncovering of oneself, in sincerity, in breaking up of inwardness and the abandon of all shelter, exposure to trauma, vulnerability. (48) The concept of "saying" is extremely helpful in my argument for describing the reader's relationship with the author through the text. In the text, especially the literary text, a magnificently unrolled, elaborate "said," there always remains a trace of the "saying" of the text, the live moment of the author's exposure to the reader which can be called communication, but not in the profane sense. "Saying is communication, to be sure, but as a condition for all communication, as exposure" (48). 114 At one point in his argument, Levinas refers to the mother-child relationship, as typifying the relationship of proximity – responsibility – substitution –signifyingness, and so posits maternity as a model of relationship in which meaning is generated (75-80). I have some reservations about Levinas's comparison between maternity and "the restlessness of someone persecuted – Where to be? How to be?" (75). Yet the model or metaphor of maternity is a conventional and a highly relevant one for literary creation, especially when maternity is explored as an archetypal meaning-generating relationship. Both in mothering a child, and in creating a work of literature, there is a sense of "this is what my life is for." One's life is no longer self-contained and self-justified, but goes outward to pay for something, to buy something, in other words, to be substituted for by something that is more significant than itself – it comes to stand for or signify something other than itself. On the other side of the text, the reader's part in the creation of the text can be viewed in a similar light – as we have seen in Georges Poulet's phenomenology of reading: the reader's being, too, is temporarily "sacrificed," suspended, "holds its breath" in order to let the text be, to let its thought think itself in the host mind of the reader. Thus also reading, which definitely is a meaning-generating activity, can be seen as "otherwise than being," as a species of maternity, or in Levinas's terms, as "spirit holding its breath" (Otherwise than Being 5). The relationship between the reader and the writer as both "bearing" the text is artistically encapsulated by Virginia Woolf in her address to readers in "Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown": In your modesty you [the readers] seem to consider that writers are different blood and bone from yourselves; that they know more of Mrs. Brown than you do [Mrs. Brown is Woolf's epitome of the literary character, the character's life and reality, which the writer is obligated to convey and preserve in the work]. It is this division between reader and writer, this humility on your part, these professional airs and graces on ours, that corrupt and emasculate the books which should be the healthy offspring of a close and equal alliance between us. (118) Woolf's message to the reader is close, on the one hand, to the pathos of Barthes in "The Death of the Author," celebrating "the birth of the reader," the leveling of the reader's ‘rights’ in the creation of the text with those of the author. Yet what is 115 missing from Barthes' account is the sense of the writer's and the reader's personal partnership in ‘giving birth’ to a life that does not belong to either, the life of the text, for Mrs. Brown is, "of course, the spirit we live by, life itself" (119). Levinas’s Theory of Language in Light of Developmental Psychology Levinas's use of the mother-child relationship as typifying the relationship between the self and the Other strongly invites a recourse into developmental psychology, for further confirmations of language originating in the relationship of proximity, responsibility and love, which are at their strongest between a mother and a young child. Developmental psychology provides such evidence with quite astonishing readiness. There are a number of records about kings and rulers who were so interested in the question of origins of language that they conducted experiments on infants, placing them out of touch with human language yet under observation, to see what language they would start speaking – which would then have to be recognized as the most ancient one, the one that humans naturally acquire if left on their own. Herodotus records an experiment by the Egyptian pharaoh Psamtik I, who gave two infants to a shepherd to be raised among flocks, ordering him "that none should utter any speech before them, but they should live by themselves in a solitary habitation" (qtd. in Crystal 288). Another attempt was made by James IV of Scotland in the fifteenth century, who gave two children to a dumb woman and provided them with everything necessary in an isolated dwelling. In both cases the children are reported to have survived, but both chroniclers are uncertain about whether they spoke any language at all. Another experiment was ordered by a Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II of Hohenstaufen (1197-1250). As reported by the chronicler, a Franciscan friar Salimbene, He made linguistic experiments on the vile bodies of hapless infants, bidding foster-mothers and nurses to suckle and bathe and wash the children, but in no wise to prattle or speak with them; for he would have learnt whether they would speak the Hebrew language (which had been the first), or Greek, or Latin, or Arabic, or perchance the tongue of their parents of whom they had been born. But he laboured 116 in vain, for the children could not live without clappings of the hands, and gestures, and gladness of countenance, and blandishments. (in Crystal 288) Apparently, the chronicler implies that all the children died before they reached the age when speaking could be expected. One need not, however, go far back in history to find more numerous and not less tragic confirmations of the fundamental need of human infants for communication with another human being who speaks directly, specifically and affectionately to them. As recently as the 1940s, the world war left hundreds of infants without families, placed in hospitals and orphanages, in the care of nurses who could only provide for the elementary physical needs of the children but not for the emotional and communicative ones. The effects on the children's mental state and development were devastating. In the more extreme cases children developed what René Spitz termed "hospitalism" – a syndrome of dramatic developmental regression and physical decline caused by "total affective deficiency" in infants hospitalized in incubators before they had established a satisfying emotional relationship of at least six month with the mother. If separation followed upon six month or more of such relationship, it resulted in "partial affective deprivation," or "anaclytic depression," leading to the same effects as hospitalism though in less extreme forms (Spitz 1945, 1946). A number of psychological studies were conducted to determine to what extent uninterrupted maternal care, or care by a permanent mother-substitute, is crucial for early development. The disastrous effects of maternal deprivation were described by child psychiatrists such as Dorothy Burlington and Anna Freud, René Spitz, John Bowlby, and others. It was noted that language and emotional development were relatively more impaired, compared to other functions, in young children separated from mothers and placed in an institution. Summarizing previous studies in his 1951 Report for the World Health Organization, Bowlby points out that Studies … show that not all aspects of development are equally affected. The least affected is neuromuscular development, including walking, other locomotor activities, and manual dexterity. The most affected is speech, the ability to express being more retarded than the ability to understand. (Speech retardation is 117 sometimes made good remarkably quickly, Burlingham and Freud reporting that 'when children are home on visits … they sometimes gain in speech in one or two weeks what they would have taken three months to gain in the nursery'). (20) This agreement between different studies concerning retardation in language development suggests that of all basic skills, language acquisition is most dependent on the continuous relationship of personal affection established between mother and child in a family setting. This connection is further confirmed by the rapid progress that the children make in speech when they are lucky enough to be returned into their family (ibid.). Another, more recent study by John L. Locke, makes the same connection between the emotional tie with the primary caregiver and the development of language, but from a biolinguistic rather than medical-psychological point of view. Locke in his study asks a basic question much neglected by linguistics, what motivates infants to learn speech in the first place, how the infant first becomes interested in linguistic behaviour. In his opinion, "they do this not because they know about language and understand its importance, but because they have a deep biological need to interact emotionally with the people that love and take care of them" (8). Out of this fundamental need language arises as a means of fulfilling it. Locke also gives primary importance to the spectacle of speaking human face as the initial factor that first motivates the baby to pay special attention to speech sounds: "Whereas initially the voice may draw the neonate's attention to its source – the face – the mere appearance of the human face can focus the infant's attention on the vocal sounds of others" (Locke 23). He further proposes the concept of "linguistic face" – the visual (facial expressions, postures, gestures) and prosodic (intonations) component of language that was consistently left out by the twentieth-century linguistics, and which, for our purposes, expresses the primacy and "plenitude," in Levinas's term, of language spoken face-to-face. It is this aspect of language, according to Locke, that mediates and enables the infant's entrance into language as a grammatical, abstract system of signs. Not only the acquisition of the abstract grammatical system of language, but abstract thinking in general seems to be dependent for its emergence, in every 118 particular individual, on the "first language" of the first caregiver's loving face and address. W. Goldfarb (Journal of Experimental Education, 1943) reports impaired abstract thinking in patients who had suffered maternal deprivation in early childhood. This finding poses a theoretical problem for Bowlby (55), but is in strict keeping with Levinas's philosophy of language which is central for the present study. Goldfarb's finding concerning impaired development of abstract thinking in adults who suffered from maternal deprivation as infants may be a good evidence confirming Levinas's claim that perception and (abstract) thought are not possible antecedently to or separately from language. Language conditions thought – not language in its physical materiality, but language as an attitude of the same with regard to the Other, irreducible to representation of the Other, irreducible to an intention of thought, irreducible to a consciousness of …, since relating to what no consciousness can contain, relating to the infinity of the Other. (1969, 204). According to Levinas, without the relationship to the Other, which is speech, we could not begin contemplating sensual appearances as coherent and meaningful phenomena, in other words, could not begin developing abstract thinking, which deals with properties and relations of objects beyond what is immediately perceived by the senses. The latter, purely sensual and external aspect of the world on its own, is termed by Levinas "the silent world." "[A] world absolutely silent that would not come to us from the word, be it mendacious, would be an-archic, without principle, without a beginning" (Levinas 1969, 90). "A world absolutely silent, indifferent to the word never uttered, silent in a silence that does not permit the divining, behind the appearances, of anyone that signals this world and signals himself by signaling this world … – a world so silent could not even present itself as a spectacle" (Levinas 1969, 94). This is a powerful declaration, and might seem untenable without the equally powerful evidence of the young children who remain untalked to, and fail to learn the world on their own, using their senses alone. A world like this is, in the first place, uninhabitable, as it turned out to be for the vivisected infants of the Holy Roman Emperor. It is not by chance that the chronicler expresses himself in such an unusual way: "He made linguistic experiments on the vile bodies of hapless infants" (Crystal 288, italics mine). Linguistic experiments on 119 babies are referred to in a phrase used for actual physical intervention. The deprivation of speech, in its most primordial forms such as "clappings of the hands, and gestures, and gladness of countenance, and blandishments" (ibid.) seems to undercut not only the psychological constitution of a nascent subject but even its physical life (the psychological studies of the 1940s register the high mortality rate and increased susceptibility to infections among institutionalized children suffering from maternal deprivation). There are cases of infants raised by animals, who sometimes survive – perhaps because animals are, after all, some kind of others, some kind of "a society of interlocutors," in Levinas's expression, however grotesque his own words might sound to him in this context. "For the children could not live without clappings of the hands, and gladness of countenance, and blandishments." This is language as an attitude – for an infant, not even an attitude of the self towards the Other, but first – of the Other towards the self, the attitude that creates the self, or leads it out of the primeval darkness and silence, where there is no "I" or perception or speech. This is language as the epiphany of the Other who breaks through the screen of appearances/ phenomena and "associates me with himself" – or more likely, herself – before there is even a "me"; subjectivity is first constituted by this epiphany of the Other and her address in the primary language to the still unformed subject. As an attendance of being at its own presence, speech is a teaching. … Teaching, the end of equivocation or confusion, is a thematization of phenomena. … The presence of the Other dispels the anarchic sorcery of facts: the world becomes an object. To be an object, to be a theme, is to be what I can speak of with someone who has broken through the screen of phenomena and has associated me with himself. (TI 98-9) There is no indication that Levinas was thinking about developmental psychology when creating this inspired description of the role of the Other and language in the constitution of the human subject, but it sounds like a very profound description of an infant's situation vis-à-vis the world22. That Levinas did not intend such a reading is evident from other stages of his argument in Totality and Infinity, for 22 For an illuminating discussion of Levinas's concept of the Other see Samuel Moyn, Origins of the Other. 120 instance, from his enumeration of discourses that fall short of exemplifying a true, non-violent conversation that "lets the Other be." "Not every discourse is a relationship with exteriority. It is not the interlocutor our master whom we most often approach in our conversations, but an object or an infant, or a man of the multitude, as Plato says. Our pedagogical or psychagogical discourse is rhetoric, taking the position of him who approaches his neighbor with ruse" (TI 70). True as this statement might be, the example of an infant is clearly out of place in it. On the contrary, it appears that the case of an infant facing the Other (an adult, a parent) is a basic example of precisely the opposite, of how the speaking Other is literally, not ideally, prior and antecedent to the (infant) self. It is an example of how true discourse in its elementary form (as yet free of thematization or predication, rhetoric or ruse) does not only "let the [infant] Other be" but allows him or her to come into being. Jacques Derrida, in his extensive commentary on Totality and Infinity entitled "Violence and Metaphysics" (in Writing and Difference), suggests that language free of all violence (including that of rhetoric), as in Levinas's idealistic outline, is impossible: In the last analysis, according to Levinas, nonviolent language would be a language which would do without the verb to be, that is, without predication. Predication is the first violence. Since the verb to be and the predicative act are implied in every other verb and in every common noun, nonviolent language, in the last analysis, would be a language of pure invocation, pure adoration, proffering only proper nouns in order to call to the other from afar. In effect, such a language would be purified of all rhetoric, which is what Levinas explicitly desires; and purified of the first sense of rhetoric, that is, of every verb. Would such a language still deserve its name? Is a language free from all rhetoric possible? (147) This description fits almost point by point the first language of pure address, pure invocation, adoration and joy that most human beings are greeted with when they first enter the world, before predication or rhetoric in a conversation with them are ever possible. The first replies of a baby in the first conversations may not classify as "signification of" anything, but they are nothing other than language, according to Levinas's definition of language. As all speech, these first replies are addressed to 121 the Other, and called forth by the speaking presence of the Other. The first conscious smiles and the first sounds produced in reply to an address are the most basic speech, antecedent to all possibility of writing. Teaching the infant the very beginnings of language and, with it, humanity, is probably the most basic and universal of traditions, handed down by women from the very first, original speaker whom this tradition does not remember but whose smiling presence is being handed down like an Olympic fire – for how long, nobody can remember; this is not the kind of things that gets written down. No man remembers this, it's the other who remembers, a parent or other primary caregiver; no man or woman has access to this modest workshop (kitchen?) of language and self as a self – only as an Other, a mother or a father. The First Language as the Basis of Written Language What, then, does a baby's first "answer" signify? Essentially, "I am here, I hear you" – a sign the sole referent of which is the speaker, and the meaning of which is its intentional direction, its being addressed by the "speaker" to the other (much like, but much more than, the meaning of the word "test" sent in the first message to check a new electronic connection). This is a sign produced and oriented as a response to the presence of an interlocutor. This attitude of response to the other is at the core of speech; language in any given individual begins as signification of his or her presence and expression of his or her attitude towards an other. And we have seen strong indications, in readers' accounts of and generalizations about reading experience in Chapter 2, that the kernel of writing is the same: writing must be situated for the reader as another person's utterance, before interpretation can ever begin. A piece of (written) language, in order to be dealt with as language, has to be oriented by the reader as addressed by an Other to him or her – or at least thematized and disambiguated by an Other for him or her. When encountering an inscription in unfamiliar hieroglyphs or a nonsense poem, all that the reader understands is, someone has written this, and someone wanted to say 122 something to others, even if I (the reader) might not be one of these initially intended others. The evidence from developmental psychology shows that for the human being, the source of language (and in particular, of literary language) he or she receives and processes is essentially another human being. Early in the history of literature, a literary work would be often disseminated orally, by rhapsodes, bards, storytellers, who for their listeners were the person from whom the "text" immediately proceeded. Written or printed literary texts before the age of mass print proceeded, for the narrow elite circles of readers, from a person who was either a personal acquaintance, or a member of the same social circle who could be more or less easily found and met, if the reader felt so disposed. In the age of "the printing revolution," when literary texts came to be disseminated in thousands of copies into different layers of society, roughly from the late 18th century, the person from whom the text proceeded had to be identified with the actual author, who could be known from his or her text, even if personal access and acquaintance were unlikely. The least, and the most basic thing that the reader of a mass-printed text normally has to assume is that the writer intended to communicate something to an audience much wider than his or her immediate social circle. This necessity for the reader to situate any written text as proceeding from someone who wrote with a communicative intention is argued by Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels in their article "Against Theory" (Critical Inquiry 1982). While Knapp and Michaels's overall argument that “theory" is based entirely on an error of judgment is hardly convincing, they succeed in proving forcefully enough that no written statement can be interpreted as language unless the reader assumes an authorial intention behind that statement. Their first hypothetical example, a poem by Wordsworth written on the seashore by a wave, has become famous: Knapp and Michaels stipulate that the reader must either assume the text is intentionally written by some highly mysterious speaking agent, the thinking sea or the ghost of Wordsworth, and then it is read as a poem, or, if the inscription is genuinely authorless, the reader/discoverer must opt for work of nature as the cause of the appearance of traces in the sand, and then they cannot be treated as language 123 (727-9). The greatest strength, as well as the greatest weakness of Knapp and Michaels's argument is in their, possibly intentional, blurring of the boundaries between the pragmatic situation of spoken language and that of the written. Like E.D. Hirsch, whom they cite on the authorial intention being a necessary point of reference and orientation for the interpreter, Knapp and Michaels persist in calling the author "speaker": e.g. "For a sentence like 'My car ran out of gas' even to be recognizable as a sentence, we must already have posited a speaker and hence an intention" (Knapp and Michaels 726, italics mine). In fact, however, this exemplary sentence, taken out of Hirsch's Validity, is an example of a written sentence that poses a choice of interpretations for the reader, depending on whether its author lives on the planet Earth and owns a Ford, or lives on some other planet and has just emerged in his vehicle out of a cloud of argon. Hirsch writes that what a text means "is, and can be, nothing other than the author's meaning," and "is determined once and for all by the character of the speaker's intention" (Hirsch 216, 219). Substituting the word "speaker" for "author" or "writer" indicates that the author of the written utterance is assumed to be as good as present, and his or her intention directly accessible to the reader/interlocutor. The obvious fact that this is not exactly true undermines, in my opinion, Knapp and Michaels' attack on the theoretical enterprise as a whole; yet their argument can be taken as a forceful confirmation that the face-to-face relationship between interlocutors is an implicit pattern that underlies written language as well as spoken – only with writing, this initial relationship is overlaid by the technical difficulties of the interlocutors being separated by time and space. In Levinas's theory of language, the presence of an interlocutor as the source of any utterance is axiomatic, it has to be presupposed as a necessary condition for any proof: The interlocutor can not be deduced, for the relationship between him and me is presupposed by every proof. … This relationship is already necessary for a given to appear as a sign, a sign signaling a speaker, whatever be signified by the sign and though it be forever indecipherable. (Levinas 1969, 92, my italics) 124 The latter limit case of a communicative situation when the sign/utterance is indecipherable has been discussed by Jacques Lacan, Jean Laplanche and Eric Santner along similar lines, and with reference to written messages mostly. Laplanche in New Foundations of Psychoanalysis (1989) cites Lacan on "the image of hieroglyphs in the desert, or of cuneiform characters carved on a tablet of stone. … It means that the signifier may be designified, or lose what it signifies, without thereby losing its power to signify to" (45). An illegible hieroglyph is an extreme case of writing: not only the writer, but the writer's whole language is absent, and there is nothing that can come to its "assistance" or to the assistance of the helpless reader. Yet what remains, most paradoxically, is the writer's residual but ultimately personal and concrete presence to the reader, in his evident communicative intention. In another place Laplanche writes about "the translation drive" that such enigmatic messages create in the receiver, and an enigmatic message here means any message that contains more, in terms of either/both meaning and address, than the receiver can accommodate (Laplanche 1999, 190). For instance, this is how messages of seduction function, according to Laplanche: the addressee's desire is aroused precisely by what the message, in either word or action, does not make explicit, but intensely suggests to be hiding. The model of seduction is used by Laplanche in a broader context, as initiating an inexperienced individual into a new order of experience, like God in the book of Genesis initiating Adam and Eve into the order of the moral by the enigmatic/seductive prohibition of the tree of knowledge23. The surplus, or the inaccessible, unassimilated residue of such messages is, according to Laplanche, the source of energy feeding the drives of the unconscious; in other words, it is a mechanism by which the address of the Other builds the individual psyche. (One might add that it builds the addressee's psyche after the Other's own image, because the source of the uninterpretable, enigmatic component in a message is usually not the speaker's conscious intention, but his/her own unconscious, his/her being an enigma to him/herself.) 23 For a more elaborate discussion of the pre-Fall language in the Book of Genesis, and the traumatic introduction of Adam and Eve into the linguistic and ethical order, see Gerda Elata Alster and Rachel Salmon 1989, 1994. 125 The Reader Singling Out the Book Singling Out the Reader The theme of the surplus contained in the address of the Other is taken up by Eric Santner, in On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life. Santner reads Freud and Rosenzweig for what they have to say on "the too-much of life" – the excess or the remnant of daily communicative transactions that can't be absorbed or accommodated by the human mind, by the conscious, the consistent, the rational and the regular. A major example of such "remnant" is the unconscious of another person that we encounter, unregistered, in any casual contact. While most of Santner's discussion is devoted to the religious, social and political mechanisms based on the function of excess or remnant, the "remnant" of his book, the final section entitled "What Remains" is devoted to art. His reading of Rosenzweig's theory of art merits a long quotation, because it offers a precious insight into the way the reader interacts with the text as with an Other. In the Star [of Redemption], Rosenzweig correlates the central theological categories of the Judeo-Christian tradition – creation, revelation, and redemption – with aspects of the "life" of a work of art. In this schema, redemption is correlated with the reception of the work of art by an individual and, eventually, by a community that is in some sense constituted, called into being, by the work. In this view, a work finds its completion in acts of reception much as the world finds its fulfillment through the work of redemption, understood as the extension of God's revelation into the world through acts manifesting love of neighbor. But for Rosenzweig, a work's reception cannot be reduced to the unfolding of the inner logic of the work, the bringing to light of what is already in the work as a potential waiting to be actualized. … Rather, the act of reception, this completion of the work of art, represents a rupture in the life of the work – a "strong misreading" we might say – performed by one who feels singled out, addressed by it. By way of such an appropriation of the work in response to its singular mode of address, a work is endowed with a life beyond the order of knowledge, beyond a merely additive history of tastes and styles. Such "redemptive" reading can, to borrow the language of speech-act theory, never be reduced to a purely constative act of noting 126 the positive features of the work but depends instead on a dimension of performativity. (Santner 132-3) The most important in this description is, for my purposes here, the reciprocity of the relationship between the work and the reader, described by Santner here and further as mutual address and mutual "creation anew." The work singles out the reader by its "singular mode of address"; in a way, it makes a certain rupture in the reader's life, even if only in terms of the gap in the reader's other activities that the reading creates. George Poulet describes this rupture in the reader's being in a more comprehensive way, to which I will return later on. Yet the "loss" of continuity in the reader's existence may be compensated for by the book "calling into being" a new version of the subject who is the reader. The best known example of such renewal through reading is Saint Augustine's conversion by reading a page in the Bible. The work, in its turn, by being "strongly misread" passes out of the generally recognized, objective "order of knowledge"; it may become untraceable, it may disappear into the reader's private undisclosed mind – yet it has made a real-life impact, a new meaning has been created, the literary process has been completed, the text has been treated as it deserves. Moreover, some of the "strong misreadings" have the potential of founding a new community of readers for whom this new version of the work becomes an objective, recognized "meaning" of the work. The idea about the work being ‘completed or fully brought into being by the act of reception has found ample expression in reception theory, e.g. in Wolfgang Iser's work. But literary theory in general has been quite apprehensive about precisely this aspect of "rupture" or "strong misreading" that the individual reader can bring into the "life of the work," as evident for instance from the 1930s-1940s preoccupation with interpretive "fallacies." As Walter Benn Michaels notes in "The Interpreter's Self" (1977), the Anglo-American literary theory traditionally had trouble with "the problem of the reader's subjectivity," while its greatest fear was a situation in which the reader will be allowed or encouraged to grant his unconstrained subjective responses the status of "meaning." Their model of interpretation is the nineteenth-century scientific model of the autonomous reader or observer confronting an autonomous text or data. If all goes well, the reader 127 suspends his prejudices and interprets the text correctly. If all doesn't go well, the reader enforces his prejudices and makes the text over in their image. (Michaels 198) What Santner is looking for are precisely ways of undermining such nineteenth- century "linear" or "merely additive" approach in humanities, and of making space for what resists normativity, what stands "beyond the order of knowledge." In the terminology I propose here, what Michaels describes as normative for the Anglo- American theory, and what Santner resists, is the reader's interaction with the text as exclusively an object, inscribed with a finite and unchangeable message. The alternative way of interacting with the text, which, as Michaels confirms, literary theory found hard to accommodate, is the creation of (new) meaning in the relationship that the reader contracts with the text (and through it, with the author). One could say that applying Santner's concept of reading to literary studies takes one "back before" theory – every reading of every work has to be considered individually, without subsuming it under any categories. But in fact, attentive and inspired treatment of individual works, readers and readings (or to put it shorter, good criticism) has always been part of the best works of theory. Both the work and the reader, according to Santner and Rosenzweig, act on each other in a radical way; "The act of reception … changes everything: the work as well as the life into which it has been 'integrated'; in a sense, nothing remains the same" (133). Santner offers a convincing explanation of what is referred to as the "inexhaustibility" of the work of art. What makes a work of art inexhaustible, subject to multiple interpretations, is not simply an excess of content or information that, because of the limits of every human consciousness, requires multiple readings to "bring it out"; rather, this much noted inexhaustibility depends on the fact that every reading is, on a certain level, a kind of creatio ex nihilo. The details supporting a strong reading of a work only become visible retroactively, in light of the performative gesture that intervenes into its history of reception. In a certain sense, these details were not there before; they lacked ontological consistency. (Santner 133) This view of reading resembles, in a way, Barthes' vision of the new liberated reader who will be able to create the text virtually anew, unconstrained by the 128 tyranny of the Author, embodied by the critical institutions. Yet there is a significant difference: the radically re-creating reading of a text in Santner's account is invoked, in the first place, by the "singular address" that comes initially from the author and interpellates the reader as a voice of a specific person. The text, by this interpellation, calls the reader into being, as a new subject that exceeds the subject that the reader was before. Thus, once again, the "creation anew" of the reader and the text is mutual – and, to restate the obvious, it certainly does not happen to every reader with every book: they have to single each other out. The extent to which the literary text is dependent for its existence on the reader is well expressed by Poulet: unlike regular objects that can exist without anyone thinking of them, the contents of a text, "images, ideas, words, [all] objects of my thought" exist in the reader's mind, "have made themselves at home there. … [I]n this interior world where, like fish in an aquarium, words, images and ideas disport themselves, these mental entities, in order to exist, need the shelter which I provide; they are dependent on my consciousness" (43). The reader, in his turn, is displaced from his normal subjectivity. "Whenever I read, I mentally pronounce an I, and yet the I which I pronounce is not myself. … Reading, then, is the act in which the subjective principle which I call I, is modified in such a way that I no longer have the right, strictly speaking, to consider it as my I. I am on loan to another and this other thinks, feels, suffers, and acts within me" (45). My own being while I read, according to Poulet, becomes "suspended" (47). It is the same notion of being suspended, stopped in one's tracks that informs Louis Althusser's deeply negative account of interpellation as a technology by which individuals are transformed into subjects (by ideology): I shall … suggest that ideology 'acts' or 'functions' in such a way that it 'recruits' subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or 'transforms' the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: 'Hey, you there!' (Althusser 118) For Althusser, becoming a subject is first of all a subjection, a loss of freedom, encapsulated in his most frequently quoted example of a police hailing, "Hey, you 129 there!" Yet there evidently can be found different examples of interpellation, most of them in a face-to-face situation, rather than a call from behind one's back that makes one turn around with a start, as in Althusser's example. The kind of subject that interpellation produces, and the kind of experience it constitutes, evidently depends on who interpellates and for what purpose. A mother's interpellation of the infant, or a gentle interpellation of the reader by the book act in a totally different way than the rude interpellations by the less congenial "others," aside from the fact that they all create us as subjects; and, as Althusser himself recognizes, there is no other way for individuals to exist: "individuals are always-already subjects" (Althusser 119, original italics). Thus, I have tried to show in this chapter that literary texts both convey the authorial subjectivity to the reader, and interact like another subject, an interlocutor, an Other, with the reader. Moreover, the reader's own subjectivity is also at stake in the process of reading. The written language of literature, even though it is not equivalent to oral language spoken face-to-face, is still an intersubjective medium that develops a special kind of intersubjective relationship. Entering into a relationship with a literary text and through it, with its author, responding to the text's interpellation, allows the reader to come into being as a new, richer subject. Perhaps we could term it "a new cultural subject" who is connected to the author's and his or her own "better self." 130 CONCLUSION In my dissertation, I have attempted to construct a theory of reading as a relationship with the author. This theory aims to correct the imbalance created by the marginalization of the author in twentieth-century literary theory. In order to restore the role of the author in the literary process, as both the real-life point of the text's origin, and a figure that the reader needs, ethically and psychologically, in order to read, I have worked in three methodologically complementary ways. First, it was necessary to analyze "mainstream" texts of twentieth-century critical theory for their approach to the written language and the role of the author. Secondly, I searched for non-mainstream, alternative theories and practices of reading that placed the author and the reader-author relationship in the center of their concern. Thirdly, I have attempted to construct my own theory of reading as a reader-author relationship on the basis of the theories I found and with some support from other disciplines, philosophy, psychology and psychoanalysis. In order to understand why, how, and to what extent twentieth-century theory actually marginalized the author, I analyzed theory's approach to the written language and the issue of the author (chapters 1, 3 and 4). In Chapter 1, I found that theory's approach to writing, as a highly promising and yet formidable "machine" that can take humanity into an unknown, perhaps more advanced and liberated future, is not unlike ancient Greek attitude to writing, as a highly progressive and promising yet suspicious, uncanny and even possibly threatening technology. In Chapter 3 I have briefly examined the history of the "formalist" approach to literature, which began in the 18th century with lexicography and aesthetic theory, and culminated (so far) in the late twentieth-century poststructuralism, with its twin principles of "the death of the author" and "the death of man" – followed by the "accession" of the all-controlling systems of signs. In Chapter 4, I read three seminal articles that introduce "the death of the author," Barthes' article of the same title, Wimsatt and Beardsley's "The Intentional Fallacy," and Foucault's "What Is an Author?". The main objective of this chapter was to show that "the death of the author" was to a great extent a creation of these writers' intellectual audience, an 131 academic "myth," while it is possible to read these articles in a different, more balanced way. I attempted to show how they fall short of really annulling the author's importance in the text. It has also been my objective to see whether a counter-argument could be made against "the death of the author" without denying theory's achievements and its whole way of approaching literature (as Walter Benn Michaels and Steven Knapp do in their essay in defense of the author titled "Against Theory"). I have discovered that the twentieth-century formalist approach to the literary text can be dialectically reconciled with the reader's desire to see the text as coming from and representing its author. If one views the text as having dual nature, existing both as an object and as an utterance, then both ways of dealing with it are legitimate. Such a dialectical view of the text was adopted by the founder of hermeneutic theory, Friedrich Schleiermacher, in the early 19th century, but was later abandoned by critical theory. The possible reason for this abandonment was the difficulty of pursuing what Schleiermacher called "psychological interpretation," reading the text as an emanation and a representation of the author's mind, in the quasi- scientific framework that literary studies entered in the late 19th – early 20th century. In chapters 2, 3 and 5, I have collected alternative theoretical and readerly approaches to literature that treat the text as an intersubjectuve phenomenon, a medium of communication between the reader and the author, and as a representation of the author. The essentially intuitive and affective nature of "reading for the author," in Barbara Hochman's term, left "psychological interpretation," the abandoned side of Romantic hermeneutics, to the common reader, and there are indeed plentiful evidences of such readings in the age of mass print, when literary texts became available to a wide public of non-professional readers. Among the terms and theories describing reading as a relationship with the author, "reading for the author" is probably closest to describing this relationship the way I see it, as attending to the text as an utterance coming from a particular person and directly reflecting his or her personality. Robert Darnton's study of "Rousseauistic reading" in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe shows that the practice of "reading for the author" is by no means restricted to the United 132 States or to the first half of the nineteenth century when it was a normative reading practice there. Virginia Woolf created a series of brilliant and professional "readings for the author" in her critical essays, written in the 1920s and 1930s in Britain. The example of Woolf, as well as of other twentieth-century critics, most notably the Geneva School of criticism, show that reading for the author did not become an extinct or even a purely non-professional practice in the twentieth century. In Chapter 5, I have brought together several critical, philosophical and psychological sources to create an interdisciplinary theoretical basis for reading as a relationship, and to legitimize "reading for the author" as both a readerly and a critical practice. E.M.W. Tillyard's theory of text as an expression of the author's personality (1939) is probably the deepest theoretical analysis of this phenomenon by a literary scholar that I have encountered so far. Levinas's unorthodox theory of language defines it as an attitude of the self towards the other, and in a way, the ethical core of reality. Levinas's theory is both similar to other contemporary (poststructuralist) theories of language, because of the centrality they all accord to language, and diametrically opposed to the poststructuralist ones because it gives primacy to the speaker and the interlocutor, rather than the (machine-like) system of signs that forms the interlocutors themselves and prescribes the terms of their relationship. I have found a deep connection between Levinas's philosophy of language and the way language is acquired and imparted in the parent-infant relationship. Probing developmental psychology studies for evidence of such connection, I found some striking evidence in studies of linguistic and psychological development of infants under conditions of maternal deprivation (conducted by John Bowlby, Rene Spitz, Dorothy Burlington, Anna Freud, and other child psychiatrists and psychologists, among children brought up in World War II orphanages). The primacy of the face-to-face address in language extends, I am convinced, to written communication as well, in spite of writing being produced, by definition, for an absent interlocutor, and read in the absence of the writer. Finally, I have used more recent psychoanalytic theorists, Eric L. Santner and Jean Laplanche, to develop the theory of the readers relationship with the text 133 as with a human other, being addressed, interpellated, singled out by the text as in an actual address. While the reader interrupts her own life for the duration of reading in order to actualize the text, allow it to be, the text, in its turn, calls the reader into being as a new kind of a (cultural) subject, and allows her or him to come into contact with the writer's subjectivity, in a way the reader could not "meet" the author if they actually met. This study is only an outline of a theory of reading as a reader-author relationship. There are many possible directions for further study. It would be very interesting to trace the history of reading for the author in different cultural contexts and see to what extent it is universal and whether it changes from one culture and one historical period to another. It also appears promising and appropriate to complete the study of Levinas's theory of language, including his theory of authorship and writing, and his philosophical critical essays (in such works as Beyond the Verse and Proper Names). Another interesting direction would be exploring evidences of reading that affects and transforms the reader's subjectivity, his or her sense of self. I would also like to make a more systematic comparison between professional readers and "common readers," with respect to how they construct their relationship with the text/author. On the whole, the process of writing this dissertation has taken me from reading theoretical texts from several decades ago to the more recent studies in the history of reading, a field that seems to provide the best accommodation for the study of reader-author relationship. 134 BIBLIOGRAPHY Aeschylus. "Prometheus Bound." Aeschylus: Plays. Trans. G.M. Cookson. London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1960. 144-88. Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus (Notes Towards an Investigation)." Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001. 85-126. Barthes, Roland. "The Death of the Author." 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Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980. 201-32. Wimsatt, W.K., and Monroe C. Beardsley. "The Intentional Fallacy." The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1954. 3-18. Wittmann, Reinhard. "Was There a Reading Revolution at the End of the Eighteenth Century?" A History of Reading in the West. Eds. Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier. Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1999. 284- 312. Woolf, Virginia. "Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown." The Captain's Deathbed and Other Essays. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1950. 94-119. ------------. "The Novels of Turgenev." The Captain's Deathbed and Other Essays. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1950. 53-61. ------------. "Oliver Goldsmith." The Captain's Deathbed and Other Essays. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1950. 3-14. ------------. "Reading." The Captain's Deathbed and Other Essays. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1950. 151-79. 140 Woolson, Constance Fenimore. “Miss Grief.” The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. 2nd ed. Eds. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. New York: W.W.Norton and Co., 1996. 979-92. ‫‪141‬‬ ‫המחבר של טקסט שמודפס ומופץ המונית‪ ,‬בעשרות ומאות אלפי עותקים‪ ,‬היה אמור להפוך‬ ‫לאבסטרקטי ורחוק ביותר בשביל הקורא‪ .‬למרות זאת‪ ,‬בין אם זה פרדוקסאלי או לא‪ ,‬דווקא בעידן‬ ‫הדפוס ההמוני הקוראים התחילו לפתח דרכי קריאה ש"חיפשו" את המחבר ופנו אליו באופן יותר‬ ‫מובהק מאי‪-‬פעם‪ .‬מחברים‪ ,‬המיוצגים ע"י ספריהם‪ ,‬ידועים ומוכרים לקורא רק דרך הטקסט‪ ,‬הפכו‬ ‫לידידי נפש‪ ,‬מודלים לחיקוי‪ ,‬נמענים של הערות שוליים נלהבות‪ ,‬מנחים רוחניים‪ ,‬וסתם בני אדם‬ ‫שניתן ללמוד עליהם ולהבין אותם דרך כתיבתם‪ .‬למרות שמתחילת המאה ה‪ 20-‬דרכי קריאה אלה‬ ‫נתפשו כבלתי מקצועיות‪ ,‬אופייניות לקורא ה"פשוט"‪ ,‬הן אף פעם לא עברו מן העולם‪ ,‬אפילו בין‬ ‫מבקרים מקצועיים‪ ,‬למרות שהיו נדחקים ברוב האסכולות של תורת הספרות והביקורת‪.‬‬ ‫מן הראוי להוסיף כי אין זה נכון לסכם "תיאוריה" כמבטלת את תפקיד המחבר באופן כולל ועקבי‪.‬‬ ‫נדמה כי "מות המחבר" היה בעיקר זרם של אופנה אקדמית‪" ,‬מסטר נראטיב" שולט ובמידה רבה‬ ‫לא כתוב‪ ,‬אשר גיבש את השיח האקדמי במשך כמה עשורים אחרונים‪ .‬האידאולוגיה של התנגדות‬ ‫לרעיון "המחבר" אינה נראית כתיאוריה מבוססת היטב‪ ,‬אחרי שקוראים מחדש את המאמרים‬ ‫המפורסמים שצוטטו תמיד כביסוס להדרת המחבר משיח ביקורתי‪ .‬קריאה חוזרת שנעשתה‬ ‫בעבודה זו של וימסט וברדסלי‪" ,‬השגיאה האינטנציונלית"‪ ,‬בארת‪" ,‬מות המחבר"‪ ,‬ופוקו‪" ,‬המחבר‬ ‫מהו?"‪ ,‬מראה כי אף אחד ממאמרים אלה אינו שולל באופן אחיד או משכנע את תפקיד המחבר‬ ‫בקריאת הטקסט‪.‬‬ ‫‪142‬‬ ‫תקציר‬ ‫עבודת דוקטורט זו מציגה תאוריה של קריאה כמערכת יחסים בין קורא למחבר‪" .‬יחסי קורא‪-‬מחבר"‬ ‫הוא ביטוי חסר משמעות במונחי גישה פורמליסטית לטקסט ספרותי‪ ,‬שהיתה דומיננטית בתורת‬ ‫הספרות במאה ה‪ .20-‬גישה זאת התייחסה אל טקסט כאובייקט של מחקר מדעי‪ ,‬מערך לשוני נתון של‬ ‫סימנים ותכנים‪ .‬הביטוי הידוע "מות המחבר"‪ ,‬שהופיע לראשונה אצל רולן בארת‪ ,‬מסכם את הנטייה‬ ‫של זרמים דומיננטיים בתורת הספרות‪ ,‬בייחוד ביקורת פורמליסטית וסטרוקטורליסטית‪" ,‬ניו‬ ‫קריטיסיזם" אמריקאי‪ ,‬ודקונסטרוקציה‪ ,‬לתאר את הטקסט כאובייקט לשוני בפני עצמו שאין לו כל‬ ‫קשר לאישיות או כוונות של המחבר‪ .‬ההתייחסות לטקסט כאל אובייקט משמיטה היבט חיוני של‬ ‫טקסט ספרותי כמקרה פרטי של שימוש בשפה שמתרחש בין שני אנשים‪ ,‬המחבר והקורא‪ .‬הטקסט‬ ‫הוא לא רק אובייקט אלא גם התבטאות‪ ,‬פנייה בכתב אל האחר‪ ,‬למרות הזמן שמשתרע בין מעמד‬ ‫הכתיבה למעמד הקריאה‪ .‬והתבטאות עוברת תמיד במרחב בין‪-‬אישי‪ ,‬בתוך מערכת יחסים כלשהי‪.‬‬ ‫הבסיס הבין‪-‬אישי המשותף של השפה המדוברת והכתובה מקבל במחקר זה חיזוקים‬ ‫אינטרדיסציפלינאריים מתורת הספרות והביקורת‪ ,‬פילוסופיה‪ ,‬פסיכואנאליזה‪ ,‬ופסיכולוגיה‬ ‫התפתחותית‪ .‬ההשקפה על השפה כיחס אתי של העצמי אל האחר‪ ,‬שפותחה ע"י עמנואל לוינס‪ ,‬מהווה‬ ‫מכנה משותף לשפה מדוברת וכתובה‪ ,‬למרות ההבדלים הברורים והעמוקים ביניהן‪ .‬מונח "האמירה"‬ ‫של לוינס‪ ,‬החשיפה של העצמי אל האחר‪ ,‬שמשאירה את עקבותיה בכל "נאמר" מוגמר ומובנה‪ ,‬תקף‬ ‫לגבי התבטאות בעל‪-‬פה וטקסט כתוב כאחד‪ .‬השקפות פסוכואנאליטיות בין‪-‬אישיות על השפה‪ ,‬של‬ ‫אריק סנטנר וז'אן לפלאנש‪ ,‬כוללות קומוניקציה כתובה יחד עם מדוברת‪ .‬לפלאנש מביא דוגמה של‬ ‫היירוגליפים בלתי ניתנים לפיענוח כדי להדגים את הראשוניות של פנייה של הכותב אל הקורא‪ :‬גם‬ ‫אם אין לנו אפשרות להבין מה המסר‪ ,‬אנחנו עדיין מבינים שקיים מסר שמופנה אל מישהו‪ ,‬אלינו‪.‬‬ ‫כלומר‪ ,‬הפנייה הבין‪-‬אישית קודמת ל"נאמר" גם בכתב‪ .‬סנטנר דן ביכולת הטקסט הספרותי "לייחד"‬ ‫את הקורא ולהיכנס למערכת יחסים ש"יוצרת מחדש" גם את הטקסט וגם‪ ,‬במידה מסוימת‪ ,‬את‬ ‫הסובייקטיביות של הקורא‪.‬‬ ‫פסיכולוגים התפתחותיים‪ ,‬בייחוד ג'ון בולבי ורנה ספיץ‪ ,‬מסיקים כי התפתחות השפה בתינוקות‬ ‫תלויה באופן ישיר ביחסים של התינוק עם אמו או המטפל העיקרי‪ .‬יחסים בינאישיים כמניע ראשוני‬ ‫שרכישת שפה קובעים תבנית כללית‪ ,‬שבה יחסים בינאישיים הם תנאי קדם לכל אמירה או הבנה‪,‬‬ ‫בעל‪-‬פה או בכתב‪ .‬וולטר בן מייקלס וסטיבן קנפ מראים באופן משכנע שתנאי קדם כזה אכן קיים‪:‬‬ ‫הם מביאים דוגמה היפוטתית של שיר שנכתב על‪-‬ידי גל על חוף הים‪ .‬אם לא מניחים שהשיר נכתב ע"י‬ ‫מחבר כלשהו‪ ,‬דמיוני ככל שיהיה‪ ,‬אפילו רוח הים הפואטית – אי אפשר להתייחס אל הסימנים על‬ ‫החול כאל שפה‪.‬‬ ‫אותו תנאי קדם הכרחי של הנחת בן שיח מאחורי טקסט כתוב )או ליתר דיוק‪ ,‬מודפס( עיצב‬ ‫פראקטיקות נפוצות ביותר של קריאה וביקורת בעידן הדפוס ההמוני )החל מהמאה ה‪ 18-‬המאוחרת(‪.‬‬