The Author / The Narrator / The Character:
Interrupting the narrative hierarchy:
Who is writing who?
Drifting positions; nodes
Multiple authors - dispersing authority
Analysis of Nabokov's "Recruiting".
Structuralism - outline:
1. The nature of things is determined by their position within a larger
structure - whether social, psychological, literary, linguistic or political.
2. The individual should be comprehended through the structure and not
vice versa. The particular is incidental.
Language served as a primary model for all other social phenomena (in
particular through Saussure's analysis), since no act of speech has a
meaning outside a structure or code (semantic, syntactic).
How does language work? - synchronic analysis vs. diachronic (i.e.evolution
of signs within a historical context).
Relative meanings operating within a steady and closed system.
Parole - realm of individual moments of language use, particular
utterances or messages, whether spoken or written.
Langue - the (independent) system or code which allows for the
realization of the individual messages.
Langage - the heterogeneous totality with which the linguist is
faced and which may be studied from a variety of points of view.
The connection between Signifier / Signified within Signs is arbitrary.
The value of the sign is determined in its relation to other signs; its
Language does not reflect or refer to a reality, but rather creates it:
1. Because a natural link between sign and referent is absent, the connection
is preserved through an external code / system in order to allow communication
to be possible.
2. Meaning is created negatively - it is determined through difference
(i.e.what the signifier is not), and not through a positive referential
relation to the signified/ referent.
The Structuralists conclusion - not to involve the signified in
the process of producing meaning.
Only representation (the signified) is accessible; therefore investigation
focuses on representation alone (i.e.in exploring various systems of signification
such as fashion or myth).
Meaning is produced by a system of relations between signifiers. The "natural"
is a product of a system / myth.
Problems with the Structuralists' approach:
- Alienating language from its users.
Chomsky's solution - there are structures inherent in us - more immediate
and less arbitrary a system.
Even if language is arbitrary in its origin, it is not arbitrary in
- Structuralism undermines agency, responsibility. Disregards historical
It cannot explain change and growth, merely a single situation.
- Language is not stable. Structuralism is based on the assumption that
Post structuralism - the assumption of a stable structure is itself
shakey. There is no single "I" that can testify for relativity
and fragmentation. The categories themselves (e.g.Author, Subject, Point
of View) are not fixed.
Derrida - the fallacy of Structuralism: the metaphysics of "presence"
is shifted from reality to a structure of describable nature.
Roland - "The Death of the Author"
Barthes' early work focuses on exposing the ideological mechanism
behind the production of what is "natural" to us. The only way
out of an entrapment within a closed sign system -- within its conventions
-- is revealing the ideology at its base - the meaning producing mechanism.
The current article is written in the beginning of Barthes' transition
from Structuralism to Post-Structuralism.
In certain cultures text is conceived as sourceless, performed or transmitted.
That is, the "Author" is a product of our culture, a convention;
a reflection of a capitalist society concerned with ownership and the
prestige of the individual .
It is not the author but language that speaks. Analysis of text needs
to explore writing and writing structures rather than a speaking voice,
Detaching writing from a source releases the text from an anchor, an author's
intention. Weight shift to a (general) reader, and an indefinite range
of possible readings is opened.
Writing - the destruction of every voice, every point of origin.
The Author dies in the moment of writing.
As soon as a fact is narrated - no longer with a view to acting directly
on reality but intransitively,
outside function, the disconnection occurs - the voice loses its origin,
the author enters his own death and writing begins.
The author is never more than the instance writing: the "I"
in a text is a single instance of saying "I", it denotes a subject
(a. syntactic position) rather than an individual, a person. Its referent
is irrelevant (as well as inaccessible) to comprehending its function
and meaning in the writing.
Writing performs rather than documents.
The Author is always in the past of the text; whereas the Writer is simultaneous
with it. Writing always occurs now, in the act of reading it, enunciating
it, unpacking its structure.
There is no single theological meaning but a multidimensional space in
which a variety of writings blend and clash. A tissue of ambiguous meanings,
puns, paradoxes, contradictory quotations to be detected rather than solved.
Assigning the text an an author is equal to imposing a limit/an anchor/closure
on this mesh.
In the multiplicity of writing - everything is to be disentangled rather
than deciphered. The structure is to be followed at every point, rather
than reduced to a single angle.
The unity of a text is in its destination - the reader; though the reader
too is inscribed, not personal.
Hence, the birth of reader begins with the death of the author.
Michel - "What is an Author?"
Strives to cancel the imminent hierarchy between author and reader altogether:
roles are functions of use.
Following the structuralists, Foucault too agrees that the discussion
of authorship need not relate to the individual person or source.
However, according to him, the historical social reality should be given
consideration before and beyond the investigation of the closed linguistic
The evolution of language is functional. It is an outcome of a system
of control producing a variety of subjects (as well as means for knowing
them) for defined purposes and functions. Historical (Diachronic) analysis
is restored, but in relation to the evolution of functions within a (changing)
Presence is a sign of power. The presence of the Author function
in Western social discourse is a sign of the power attributed to it and
to its representation.
The questions to be asked are what allowed the Author to exist? what social
function (and status) does it serve as an institution? what are the conditions
in which these functions are realized? How does it contribute to and fit
within society's distribution of roles and power?
The Author's name is an act. It performs within a certain social dynamic,
and serves as a means of classification, grouping, exclusion and canonization
Foucault's goal - analysis of the author's function, the way in which
it is transferred, circulated, attributed, appropriated and operates within
a variety of types of discourses.
The subject should not be abandoned but reconsidered: understood in its
functions, intervention, system of dependencies.
The characteristics of the function/discourse:
- Object of appropriation. Originally - discourse (text) was an action,
a gesture, not a thing.
Since the end of the 18th century it has been caught within the economic
structures of property, ownership, copy rights. It is tied to legal
and institutional systems that regulate and determine the realm of discourse.
- The author function is not universal or constant.
For instance, in the Middle Ages it served to guaranty validity of scientific
writings, whereas today an agreed upon system of conventions provides
validation for a scientific text.
While in literary discourse meaning depends on the attribution of the
text to an author, a dependence which only evolved and crystallized
in recent time.
- The function is not formed spontaneously, but is rather constructed
through a complex operation and a defined set of procedures, based on
similarity in quality, style, ideology and range of time.
It evolves out of and confirms the assumption of unity.
- The text bears signs referring to the author (vs. speaker), such as
personal pronouns or adverbs of time and place.
These produce a multiplicity of positions (in time and place) and of
points of view, a plurality of egos/ subjective positions characteristic
of the Author function.
George Landow, Hypertext - "Reconfiguring the
1.The functions of reader and writer become in hypertext as well as
in contemporary theory more deeply entwined with each other than ever
One clear sign of such transference of authorial power appears in the
reader's abilities to choose his or her way through the metatext, to annotate
text written by others, and to create links between documents written
by others. What literature solicits of the reader is not simply reception
but the active, independent, autonomous construction of meaning. (p.71)
2. Intertextuality: hypertext and contemporary theory both agree in configuring
the author of the text as a text. Hypertext embodies many of the ideas
and attitudes proposed by Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, and others. For
all these authors the self takes the form of a de-centered (or centerless)
network of codes that, on another level, also serves as a node within
another centerless network. (p.72-73)
Radical changes in textuality produce radical changes in the author
figure derived from that textuality. Lack of textual autonomy like lack
of textual centeredness, immediately reverberates through conceptions
of authorship as well. Similarly, the unboundedness of the new textuality
disperses the author as well.
The network paradigm contributes importantly to this sense of the attenuated,
depleted, eroding, or even vanishing subject. Some authors, such as Said
and Heim, derive the erosion of the thinking subject directly from electronic
information technology. The arbitrariness and availability of database
searching decreases the felt sense of an authorial control over what is
written" (Heim, Electric Language, 220). A data base search, in other
words, permits the active reader to enter the author's text at any point
and not at the point the author chose as the beginning. (p.74-75)
"Digital writing turns the private solitude of reflective reading and
writing into a public network where the personal symbolic framework needed
for original authorship is threatened by linkage with the total textuality
of human expressions" (Heim, 215).
3.The third form of reconfiguration of self and author shared by theory
and hypertext concerns the de-centered self, an obvious corollary to the
Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze have spoken of contemporary knowledge (savoir)
as decentered; Deleuze's formulation is that knowledge, insofar as it
is intelligible, is apprehensible in terms of nomadic centers, provisional
structures that are never permanent, always straying from one set of information
to another" (Beginnings, 376). (vs. the notions of the unitary self situated
in a privileged position) (p.77)
The question of authority of writing makes sense only if the writing
in question is considered stable and documentary (Said).
Effective argument requires closing off connections and abandoning lines
of investigation that hypertextuality would have made available.
The linear habits of thought associated with print technology often force
us to think in particular ways that require narrowness, decontextualization,
and intellectual attenuation, if not downright impoverishment. Linear
argument, in other words, forces one to cut off a quoted passage from
other, apparently irrelevant contexts that in fact contribute to its meaning.
Repetitions and detours are eliminated. The linearity of print provides
the passage with an illusory center whose force is intensified by such
selection and elimination. (p. 80-81)
4.Within a hypertext environment all writing becomes collaborative writing.
The first element of collaboration appears when one compares the roles
of writer and reader, since the active reader necessarily collaborates
with the author in producing a text by the choices he or she makes. The
second aspect of collaboration appears when one compares the writer with
other writers‹that is, the author who is writing now with the virtual
presence of all writers "on the system" who wrote then but whose writings
are still present. (p.88)
Once ensconced within a network of electronic links, a document no longer
exists by itself. It always exists in relation to other documents in a
way that a book or printed document never does and never can. From this
crucial shift in the way texts exist in relation to others derive two
First, any document placed on any networked system that supports electronically
linked materials potentially exists in collaboration with any and all
other documents on that system;
Second, any document electronically linked to any other document collaborates
with it. (p.89)