Book review: The Author Is Not as Dead as Claimed
John Farrell: The Varieties of Authorial Intention (2017)
Reviewed by Robert Daseler
Reviewed by Robert Daseler
The claim that any set
of French thinkers since Montesquieu and Diderot has transformed intellectual
life in the United States - as welcome as that proposition may sound to some - would not seem to bear serious consideration in the early decades of a century that
began with a concerted attempt to establish “freedom fries” as the designation
for potatoes in their most ubiquitously edible form. That is, one would laugh
the title off the shelves were it not for the acceptance in university and
college humanities departments across the country of assumptions about and
attitudes toward literature that came to full flower in Paris contemporaneously
with the Vietnam War and its immediate aftermath.
Those assumptions and
attitudes reflected a deepening hostility to the conception of authorship that
had prevailed in Europe and North America for at least two centuries, the
conception of authors writing works intended to represent the world as those
authors saw it, or to embody meanings of their choosing in what they considered
the most appropriate language for those meanings. Though these new
assumptions are old hat by now, it might be worth laying them up succinctly,
with the help of an authoritative source. In his essay “The Death of the
Author,” which was published in English in 1967, Roland Barthes wrote: [A] text is made of
multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations
of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this
multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto
said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make
up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies
not in its origin but in its destination.
Here the critic was
elaborating a literary theory that had been gradually developing, and not
entirely in France, for about 50 years, one that moved the center of attention
away from the author - her personal history, her other writings, and her
opinions - and toward the text as the sole site of meaning and importance. For
Barthes, giving credit to an author for a work of imagination amounted to
propaganda on behalf of capitalist ideology.
It would be
unfortunate if the somewhat dry and retrograde title of John Farrell’s
book The Varieties of Authorial Intention (2017) were to
discourage the general reader from buying it - and anyone
not discouraged
by the title might be by its price.... it relies on Farrell’s ability to
summon a persuasive account of how literary criticism has developed over the
past century and to focus a sustained attack on the textualist school of
literary theory, which has, as Farrell notes, so far triumphed in academia that
it is unusual to find any professor of literature who has resisted it...
