Readerly/writerly

Hello folks, just dropped in with some semi-random thoughts inspired by Jim and Jeremy's recent discussion of readerly/writerly text and that whole lit crit theory thing.

One thing that always bothers me about Foucault (and out of all the post-structuralist types he's my favourite) is that his history is a little, er, vague. There's a line in his 'What is an Author?' which basically states that 'around about the Enlightenment X happened' - when exactly? (and by the by, Barthes wrote 'Death of the Author'). So our first step is putting the post-structuralists into context. Foucault is trying to articulate what he wants from a new late-C20 form of writing, and thus he must differentiate it from the 'old' - hence the binary oppositions . Both Barthes and Foucault are usually read as criticising the old restricted, dominating forms of writing against the new pluralist 'writerly' forms which they envisage. While I'm unsure about Barthes, I think its a disservice to read Foucault like this - yes there is an almost utopian desire to liberate texts from the old strictures but there is also an acceptance that these will merely be replaced by new and different kinds of strictures ('tho hopefully more honest).

No - I can't agree - the fixed meanings and metanarratives can be found they just cannot necessarily be merged into one over-riding 'meaning' for the entire text. The meanings co-exist, complementing and contradicting themselves, but leaving it for the reader to put them together how she sees fit.

Nice description. I think this ties in well with all that we've said about Wolfe and Modernism. I don't believe that Wolfe abdicates control of his texts to the reader in any complete sense. Sure, he sets up dummy levels of narrative to distance the reader from any secure narrative centre, but there are ways through the narrative. Not sure that Wolfe's narrators are strong enough to be described as the dominant partners though - they are peculiarly slippery.

I always thought that the point was not to accept authority blindly, but to analyse the way authority is constructed before accepting it (even if only tentatively. Post-structuralism does not necessarily condemn the notion of authority, merely contextualise it, and accept that a text (I prefer the concrete term 'book' to this work/text confusion - it allows covers, introductions, footnotes, and artwork to have an authority that co-exists with the linguistic units) may have multiple authorities. What is the authority of Severian for example? Does he possess the same kind of narrative authority that Gene Wolfe does? We want a sense that the writer

Well yes, but what about the narrator? True to his torturer profession, Sev is a very controlling narrator, who sometimes misleads us. But he makes mistakes. He may not know what the hell he is talking about, but I'm sure GW does. There are always extra levels of authority - no text contains just one dominant mode of authority, although the narrative structure may try to convince you that it is otherwise. You can read all of Long Sun as straight objective third person narrative, and then be blown away when you find out that it is actually Horn's literary construction of Silk.

Barthes wrote 'Death'. Foucault wrote the far more interesting 'What is an author?'

Of course it is! Despite everything that's been drawn from Foucault's words I maintain that his essay does not (unlike Barthes) destroy the need for authors. He expects us to understand the origins of the concept, and show how the 'author' of a text works to guarantee the authority of the book. What kind of authority would Kilgore Trout's 'The Shadow of the Torturer' possess?

Disagree here - perhaps from having done too much boring literary research, but the nature of authors and their authority has changed many times. In medieval times an author was a quite different thing - he could be someone who has rewritten or annotated a prior text, he could be an 'auctor' referred to as a guarantee of the veracity of certain statements, scientific, religious or otherwise. This guarantee was contained in the name of the auctor, not in his words. Nowadays we cite authorities and the name marks the place where we can find objective proof for our assertions, especially in scientific debates. In the eighteenth century there was a distinction between authors who wrote for the greater good and were real literary craftsmen (Pope's saving his work for seven years) and the commercial Grub Street 'hacks' who in many cases did not have the inherited fortunes which allowed them to concentrate on small circulation poetery and instead had to write for money in the forms that would generate the most sales.

This assumes you want to contain a text. Why do we reread favourite texts? We read them because we constantly find new things in them alongside the familiar. Reading is always a problematic experience, but we create a dominate reading which is the least contradictive. This is containment, of a sort, and I believe we do it all the time. The point is that our containment is not permanent, merely a device of reading which allows us to construct a coherent narrative. [wasn't too sure about the whole weasel thing, but liked this bit:]

Yes - the problem with simple post-modern pluralism is that we cannot read BotNS as a cookbook, or a treatise on shelving. The reason for this is that the text possesses certain qualities which limit the plural possibilities - one of these is the author. What Foucault does is to try to make clear the way the author limits the possible significations of a book. I maintain that this isn't a bad thing - it is neither good nor bad. Our knowledge that GW wrote BotNS produces a very different reading (partly because of the stature of our author) to the same book as written by Kilgore Trout.

I think this is an example of Foucault flipping the familiar argument on its head for us (cf his arguments in 'A History of Sexuality' where he flips the trad Victorian repressive hypothesis on its head). Whether historical evidence supports this discursive trick is another matter....

I think the utopian/socialist goal of a new kind of writing in post- structuralist theory was always the weakest point. What intrigues me is the scope for questioning concepts of authorship and authority which are too often taken for granted. That doesn't mean we must erase their existence, merely understand the way we read the 'new Gene Wolfe novel' in different ways to the 'new Jeffery Archer novel', and the way the presence of the author has a bearing on our reading of their narrators.

But they can be stabilised in the reading process. One of my favourite bits of post-modern theoretical writing is a little comment by Frederic Jameson about the way late 20th century conspiracy theories are the last gasp of those who cannot accept pluralism. Instead they manage to construct a narrative out of disparate and contradictory evidence to make the chaotic events of the twentieth century make sense. But this is what we always do - we construct narratives out of the material at hand, guided by the author/obstructed by the author. Just because we can't quantifiably have a 'correct' reading, it doesn't necessarily follow that we can't distinguish between 'good' and 'bad' readings. At this juncture we probably need a quote from Whitman's 'Song of Myself'. Anyone got it to hand? Jonathan Visit Ultan's Library - A Gene Wolfe web resource http://members.tripod.co.uk/laidlow/index.htm Jonathan Laidlow University of Birmingham, UK

Jonathan, Thanks for the interesting comments. As I indicated in my original post these are some potentially interesting ideas but I'm not sure how to apply them. Your input goes a long way to helping. Jim's thoughts about readers wanting to be dominated seems right (and the S+M metaphor is cool, if perhaps something already covered by somebody like Camille Paglia or Judith Butler). But domination is usually accounted an undesirable condition. As Orwell knew, look at how he drew a negative picture of the proles complicit in their own domination in Nineteen Eighty-Four. This was perhaps then one of the radical implications of Foucault, that he offered a chance to challenge and resist the power structure of the text, or better, of discourse (by identifying its breaks and disunities, eg of the subject or the author).

What's wrong with this? I think for F. the point was to resist or to transgress, not to free oneself up from power. He did distinguish between "power" and "domination".. power was always accompanied by resistance, especially at the sharp end where it was being applied, but as for domination, well not much room for resistance as a slave or a woman in an abusive relationship (his examples). But perhaps even there... Jim:

I prefer Foucault's term "discourse" which is somewhat above the level of the statement, though you have to plough through Archaeology of knowledge to work this out (one of his last structuralist books thank goodness). Discourse is what is formed by the archive, the set of rules which determine what can be said, remembered, appropriated, re-used or forgotten. Anyway, the point is that there is authority in discourse, it frames simply what can be said or how it is said. His examples are madness, criminality, and sexuality. By the way the upper quote is from Jim not me.

Sorry, sorry!

This seems useful. There is a great Foucault discussion list: http://lists.village.virginia.edu/cgi-bin/spoons/listinfo.pl?list=foucault.i nfo Thanks again Jonathan. If you're in Chester next week I'll buy you a pint! I'll be home for the holidays. __ Jeremy W. Crampton http://geog.gmu.edu jcrampto at gmu.edu Dept. of Geography & Earth Science [MS 1E2] ’Tis true; there’s magic in the web of it. George Mason University --Othello (III.iv.69) Fairfax, Va 22030

Indeed there's not. But that's precisely the problem - Foucault and too many po-mo's don't seem to be able to tell the difference between chattel slavery and the compulsion to stay up until one finds out what's going to happen with Councilor Lemur. To the extent that they deny or overlook the difference, they are simply being fatuously provocative. To everything turn turn turn, moderation in all things etc. A society where all of life is subject to military regimentation is appalling to contemplate. A society where the army is subject to military regimentation is to be desired. A society where you get to choose whether you join the army in the first place, and have predictible opportunities to leave it after you join, is better yet. One of the great things about Jonathan's postmodernism is that it seems much more nuanced than that of his forebears (Foucault, Barthes etc).

The term discourse is nebulous enough that there's no arguing with it. But to the extent that discourse is made up of texts or (Jonathan's term) books, the situation is quite fluid. For one thing, one of the tasks of authorship is to find new things to say, and ways to say things that have been previously unsayable. Let me be the first to aver that this ain't so easy. However, the full flowering of whiggish Britain did not prevent CAPITAL from being written. Nor did CAPITAL (or the Popular Front) keep Hayek from writing THE ROAD TO SERFDOM. TBoTNS did not (alas) foreclose the careers of Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. The new criticism did not stop Lentricchia (or whoever it was) from finding an aporia at the center of that Lucy poem, and the domination of the Academy by Lentricchia's fellows actually called the neotraditionalist "The New Criterion" into being. Textual authority in itself is multivalent and provisional. A political apparatus can limit access to texts, establishing a favorite set's hegemony, but you still end up with Luther's theses and The Cancer Ward. The dominant discourses of the bourgeois West on madness, crime and sexuality did not prevent Foucault's big long books, BTW. But to return to Wolfe, TBOTNS is full of madness, crime and sexuality. How would you say Wolfe's view of these things compares to Foucault's? [Speaking of multivalence, my spell-checker had some fun suggestions for this post...] Best, Jim **************************** "I once was lost but now I'm just blind" - Kid Rock

First off, thanks for the compliment, though Jeremy certainly adduces some literary forebears for the analogy. I don't recall reading anything by Paglia specifically comparing reading/writing to bondage & discipline, but I have read a lot of Paglia and I was certainly working from her theories of pleasure. Plus, I've read a lot of porn... Now, anent Wolfe and his narrators and dominance and authority: To me it's less a matter of controlling interpretation than controlling attention. The sheer gothic thrill of Dr. Crane's encounter with the real Councilor Lemur is anterior to any interpretation we make of it. A book dominates to the extent it commands your time - including time away from the book. (I recall being "dominated" by Arthur C. Clarke's Imperial Earth as a kid, but I go years without thinking about it and remember nothing except a terrific set-piece description of insomnia. OTOH, I spend entirely too much time thinking about the Sun books, even ones I haven't read yet. frex, I'm assuming that Blue will turn out to be Ushas and Green either Skuld or Lune, all before even reading OBW. This ties in with what you later have to say about Wolfe's authority as a writer - I'm being controlled by a book I haven't even opened. But Christmas is coming!) In other words, Wolfe is the dom and I am his sub. <g> Can a book dominate in the sense of being its own interpretive authority? Is that the idea? Is there an example of such a book? Agree with you about the slipperiness of the Wolfe narrators that I've encountered.

Hey, this is excellent!

Of course not. Sev lies. <gdr> I'm inclined to say that Sev doesn't possess the same kind of narrative authority that Wolfe does purely because Sev is a fictional construct. If we want to get all modernist, let's say Sev is more of a fictional construct than Wolfe is. I might be inclined to say that Sev constitutes Wolfe's narrative authority, but it's more than just Sev - it's all the stuff that makes us go, "Whoah!"

Well, not now I can't... Actually, you weren't the one that gave up that game for me; it was those darn cover designers at Tor. My fault for saving the Long Sun books until this month. Anyway, I agree with everything you have to say, though I would suggest that it's also possible to be disconcerted by finding out that LS is actually Horn's literary construction of Silk. In fact, I think Wolfe proves that he knows what he's doing when he has Horn immediately set about reestablishing his authority, to the extent Horn can. Were Horn to take the attitude, "I made it all up, your interpretation is as good as mine, tee hee," the ending might feel a little too much like "And then I awoke from my dream." And this may be what separates Wolfe's books from those of some authors who make a program of producing "writerly" texts in Barthes' sense - too often the project comes across as merely flip.

A fair but not trivial question. I'm assuming we're considering this as if the fictional Kilgore Trout were real - we're not considering the question of what happens if Vonnegut writes a story reproducing the entire text of TBOTNS by Trout, or even Philip Jose Farmer writing TBOTNS while pretending to be KT. (One knew that someone was pretending to be KT.) So, here's where I may differ with Foucault and even, gulp, you. I think that there's an extent to which an author constructs his authority as he goes: the reader picks up the book, making a provisional grant of attention. What the author does with that initial grant determines the course of the relationship. Now, I can't deny that some writers come to some readers with a fair amount of credit already established. (Did I say "grant?" I meant "loan.") You give them more chances. You may be more inclined to go back to their books if they don't grab you the first time. (Am I starting to get all reader-responsey?) But TBOTNS works to establish its authority as it goes, and would do so even if it came under David Salvatore's by-line - we'd just never know it...

As opposed to now... <g> (Poor John Clute. It's hard work being defensive.)

Sure. Again, I think of textual "domination" being that which impels us to spend the time establishing interpretations and coherent narratives at all. But I don't disagree with any of what you say here.

Hey, watch what you say about the weasel!

This came up before. But this seems a good place to adduce Borges' "Pierre Menard." The narrator of that story claims that Menard's rewrite of Cervantes produces a radically new text. But Borges makes it pretty clear that the narrator of that story is a jerk, and maybe a fool. So...

I think the presence of the author is a sign of what ways of reading might and might not work. The problem is not so much that we won't try to read The Prodigal Daughter as "a powerful meditation on God, time, love etc" because it's by Jeffrey Archer. Rather, the book itself suggests to us that we'd be wasting our time to do so. In a sense, the nature of Jeffrey Archer's authority is something that gets constructed from the texts themselves. And in the meantime, Wow, that fight with the alzabo is really something. (I'm feeling compelled to stress the thrills&chills values of Wolfe's books this week.)

This is superb! I don't suppose you could manage to appear at the sacred windows of every high school english class in the land, could you? It would eliminate a host of sorrows.

Um, "I am Sarge. I disdain pulchritudes..." ? Best, Jim ***************************************** What if we only get what we deserve? Somehow, I couldn't quite summon the nerve" -- Costello/Bacharach

I agree too, but would add that it makes sense only within a community ofreaders that has decided on some criteria for 'good' and 'bad'. Crowley's Little, Big is almost certainly not intended as Christian allegory, butif Jim Jordan enjoyed reading it that way, I wouldn't insist that his reading was 'bad,' particulary if he wasn't arguing that his was the only'right' way to read it. Jonathan replied: Intentions are a messy business - certainly multiple, and often unverifiable (even if GW were to tell us his intentions for BotNS they may not have been his changeable thoughts at the time of writing, or his revised thoughts at the time of writing 'Otter'). If there is evidence in the text which Jim could marshall towards his argument then it would be what we might call a 'good' reading (as a community of fellow readers of the text). Yet a simple statement that it was a Christian allegory without supporting evidence might go some way towards a 'bad' reading. Using this argument we can 'contain multitudes' and accept each others variant readings as evidence of the slippery nature of linguistic units and their associated meanings. There is of course the added problem of the nefarious 'context'. Those of my students who've tackled 18th century satire without a knowledge of its specific resonances and conventions during that period invariably come a-cropper when they try to introduce modern notions of satire. I heard a recent story about Germaine Greer's recent work on the 17th century author Aphra Behn, where she argues that Behn had problems getting into print because she was a woman. Brum's own expert on 17th century women's writing and the early print indsutry pointed out that all writers of the period had difficulty getting into print (in their relations with publishers), and the fact that she was a woman was, in this case at least, incidental. In the case of my satirical students, they may well have written something interesting on the subject of satire, but it could not constitute a 'good' reading without some awareness of the nature of eighteenth-century satires. Jonathan Visit Ultan's Library - A Gene Wolfe web resource http://members.tripod.co.uk/laidlow/index.htm Jonathan Laidlow University of Birmingham, UK