Subject: (urth) Readerly/writerly

From: Jonathan Laidlow <laidlojm at hhs.bham.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, 13 Dec 1999 10:30:01 +0000

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.

> > Writerly text: is ourselves writing (eg., surfing the Web, the narrative
> > that is created). Self-consciously aware of its own artifice and its
> > (failed) attempts at realism.
> >
> > Readerly text: meaning is stable, transmitted to the reader, dominating
> 
> First off, repeat after me:
> 
> 	"Il y a _beaucoup_ de merde dehors le texte."
> 
> Second, "dominating" is precisely what we readers want a lot of the time.
> As Dana Gioia once said introducing the poet Nina Cassian, "What we really
> want to do when we read a new poet is _surrender_."

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).

> > If we approach a text as a writerly text it is not
> > possible or desirable to start identifying fixed
> > meanings or metanarratives ("Wolfe just does track
> > the gospels"). In a writerly text, the reader is
> > in control.

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.

> >
> > --Is it possible to achieve the writerly text or is
> > it dependent on the prevailing social relations?
> > Barthes is supposed to have identified the
> > readerly text as the dominant mode under capital.
> 
> Cause readerly texts are bad and capital(ism) is bad. If one comes out of
> the Stalin-besotted milieu that gave us Barthes' generation of French
> intellectuals, that is. But I think the real problem with this particular
> theory is that poststructuralists don't really get the texture of pleasure.
> To wit:
> 
> Wolfe compares the writer/reader relationship to the torturer/client
> relationship, perhaps somewhat tongue in cheek. I would offer a different
> comparison: bondage of the sexual kind. Meaning the consensual practices
> that dominants and submissives get up to when they find each other,
> including the whole apparatus of safe words and trust-building measures
> that take place before and/or outside "the game." The dominant is
> certainly, um, dominant. And the submissive is dominated. That's what the
> submissive wants. That is what the submissive _permits_. It is, moreover,
> the dominant's _duty_.

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.

> What poststructuralists decry as the "authority" of a text is precisely
> what most of us want most of the time.

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
> knows what the hell he or she is talking about. Indeed, textual authority
> tends to vary inversely as the number of books thrown across the room in
> disgust. 

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.

> > According to Foucault ("The death of the author," 1969):
Barthes wrote 'Death'. Foucault wrote the far more interesting 'What 
is an author?'

> > ..implies that the notion of the author is a historical
> > construct (prior, we looked at heroes, presumably actors
> > in Greek myth and tragedy)

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?
> 
> BTW, in a trivial sense, the notion of the author _is_ a historical
> construct - used to be there were no authors (no writing frex), then there
> were. But what have we really said when we say something is a historical
> construct? I think the answer is, Sometimes a lot; Sometimes not much. In
> the case of the notion of the author, I favor the latter.

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.

> > ..efforts to contain a text are problematic..

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:] 
> Weasels can even give us a handle on the textual property of multiplicity -
> there may be a bunch of cages suitable for any given weasel. But there will
> be a lot more where the weasel doesn't fit, or fits poorly, or gets lost in
> all that room.

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.

> > ..historically, authors emerged as a category when
> > they became subject to punishment for their work.

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....

 > > ..relevant to today's efforts at erasing the author
> > (double blind peer review) which is actually just an
> > acknowledgement of the power of the author (and
> > the author always sneaks back in anyway).
> 
> Hey, good point! But if the author sneaks back in, does that mean the
> author isn't dead after all?

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.

> > For Foucault, neither texts (discourses) nor authors
> > are "unitary"--neither the subject nor discourse is stable.

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

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

---

From: Jeremy Crampton <jcrampto at osf1.gmu.edu>
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 1999 12:49:13 +0000

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).

>replaced by new and different kinds of strictures ('tho hopefully 

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...

>possess the same kind of narrative authority that Gene Wolfe does?

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.

>Barthes wrote 'Death'. Foucault wrote the far more interesting 'What 

Sorry, sorry! 

>on our reading of their narrators.

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

---

From: Jim Henley <jlhenley at erols.com>
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 1999 21:44:25 +0000

> -----Original Message-----
> From: urth-errors at lists.best.com [mailto:urth-errors at lists.best.com]On
> Behalf Of Jeremy Crampton
>
> <snip>
> slave or a woman in an abusive relationship (his examples).

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).

> what can be said or how it is said. His examples are madness,
> criminality, and sexuality.

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

---

From: Jim Henley <jlhenley at erols.com>
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 1999 23:38:21 +0000

> Behalf Of Jonathan Laidlow
>
>

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.

> authority that co-exists with the linguistic units)

Hey, this is excellent!

> What is the authority of Severian for example? Does he

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!"

> find out that it is actually Horn's literary construction of Silk.

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.

> Kilgore Trout's 'The Shadow of the Torturer' possess?

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...

> <snip interesting stuff>

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

> permanent, merely a device of reading which allows us to construct

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.

> [wasn't too sure about the whole weasel thing, but liked this bit:]

Hey, watch what you say about the weasel!

> What

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...

> That doesn't mean

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.)

> doesn't necessarily  follow that we can't distinguish between 'good'

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.

> Myself'. Anyone got it to hand?

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

---

From: Jonathan Laidlow <laidlojm at hhs.bham.ac.uk>
Date: Thu, 16 Dec 1999 14:11:23 +0000

> > 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.

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