Authorship's Wake

Writing After the Death of the Author

Philip Sayers

• Éditeur: Bloomsbury Academic
• Année: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501367687
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Literatura
• Sous-sujet: Teoría de la crítica literaria

Authorship's Wake examines the aftermath of the 1960s critique of the author, epitomized by Roland Barthes's essay, "The Death of the Author." This critique has given rise to a body of writing that confounds generic distinctions separating the literary and the theoretical. Its archive consists of texts by writers who either directly participated in this critique, as Barthes did, or whose intellectual formation took place in its immediate aftermath. These writers include some who are known primarily as theorists (Judith Butler), others known primarily as novelists (Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace), and yet others whose texts are difficult to categorize (the autofiction of Chris Kraus, Sheila Heti, and Ben Lerner; the autotheory of Maggie Nelson). These writers share not only a central motivating question – how to move beyond the critique of the author-subject – but also a way of answering it: by writing texts that merge theoretical concerns with literary discourse. Authorship's Wake traces the responses their work offers in relation to four themes: communication, intention, agency, and labor.

Chapter 1

COMMUNICATION: MAGGIE NELSON AND THE LITERARY TEXT AS LETTER

How can you write, believing in Barthes?

—Zadie Smith, “Rereading Barthes and Nabokov”

1. Introduction

The question that Zadie Smith asks in the epigraph above is one version of the question this chapter attempts to answer. Smith, in an essay that compares Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” with Vladimir Nabokov’s “bold assertion of authorial privilege,” traces a shift that has taken place in her reasons for reading and her ways of doing so:

I’m glad I’m not the reader I was in college anymore, and I’ll tell you why: it made me feel lonely. Back then I wanted to tear down the icon of the author and abolish, too, the idea of a privileged reader—the text was to be a free, wild thing, open to everyone, belonging to no one, refusing an ultimate meaning. Which was a powerful feeling, but also rather isolating, because it jettisons the very idea of communication, of any possible genuine link between the person who writes and the person who reads. Nowadays I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.¹

“Communication,” “a connection with a consciousness other than my own”: these are notions we are accustomed to find suspicious. From Wittgenstein through Barthes to Butler (all thinkers with whom this chapter will engage), there are a great many reasons to be skeptical of writing’s communicative capacity. Considered from the point of view of the author, however, if writing is to be thought of as an attempt to say something to a reader—and for the writer this chapter will focus on, Maggie Nelson, it is—there seems to be little choice other than to place “a cautious faith in the difficult partnership between reader and writer, that discrete struggle to reveal an individual’s experience of the world through the unstable medium of language.”² The partnership is a “difficult” one, the faith the author places in it is “cautious,” and the medium through which they “struggle” to convey their experience is “unstable”: there is no returning to a naïvely idealistic view of the author as a single speaking subject who expresses their thoughts to another human being through a transparent medium. This chapter is concerned with the question of how literature responds to this bind. How might it be possible to think of writing as a form of communication after the death of the author?

I focus in particular on the prose work of Maggie Nelson, especially her 2015 book The Argonauts. The Argonauts is a nonfictional account of Nelson’s marriage to fluidly gendered artist Harry Dodge and their family together. At the same time, it is also a theoretical conversation with numerous philosophers, writers, artists, and critical theorists on topics including motherhood, queerness, identity politics, and language. The first section of this chapter lays out the stakes of the question of writing as communication and the problems involved. I focus in particular on the idea (a frequent one in Nelson’s writing) of the literary text as a letter—that is, the literary text as a form of authored communication. Then, in the second section, I theorize (via Ludwig Wittgenstein, Roland Barthes, Luce Irigaray, and Nelson) how one might think of writing as a form of communication that functions not in spite of the problems discussed in the first section, but by acknowledging them. If we want still to be able to think of literature as a way of “mak[ing] a connection with a consciousness other than my own,” I argue that we need to shift our definition of communication toward something like what Adam Phillips refers to as useful hearing: “Our words,” he suggests, “are not misunderstood, they are just more or less usefully heard.”³ In order to be usefully heard, I argue (following Wittgenstein) that it is necessary for the author to acknowledge the untenability of a notion of aesthetic communication as transparent and that it is precisely this acknowledgment that can create the space necessary for the reader to be able to usefully hear or read literature. In the third and final section, I return to The Argonauts in order to consider how the theoretical and ethical model of authorship and communication I describe functions in practice—how it manifests in the text’s formal characteristics and in its content. The text’s fragmentary form, its use of allusions, and the way it figures writing as a form of queer family-making help the text to achieve its communicative goals.

Throughout the chapter, my most important interlocutors (other than Nelson) are writers and thinkers with whom Nelson herself engages in The Argonauts: Wittgenstein, Barthes, and Irigaray, as well as Judith Butler, Adam Phillips, Eve Sedgwick, and Donald Winnicott. This is a deliberate decision. It serves partly as a way of better understanding Nelson’s relationship with these thinkers but also stems from the desire to consider literature and theory (a categorical distinction that The Argonauts blurs) alongside each other, rather than one above the other. In their different modes, genres, and disciplinary contexts, these writers all share certain concerns, and I am interested in staging a conversation between them on relatively level terms, rather than bringing theory from a putative outside in order to apply to Nelson’s text.

2. Letters

2.1. The Literary Text as Letter

In Bluets (2009), Maggie Nelson describes her love for the final line—“Sincerely, L. Cohen”—of Leonard Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat.” “It makes me feel less alone,” she writes, “in composing almost everything I write as a letter. I would even go so far as to say that I do not know how to compose otherwise.”⁴ Whereas “The Death of the Author” made Zadie Smith feel lonely, “Famous Blue Raincoat” has the opposite effect on Nelson. The line “Sincerely, L. Cohen”—a kind of signature, a sign of the song’s authoredness—has some kind of communicative or community-forming effect. If “The Death of the Author” forecloses the possibility of communication, an assertion, like Cohen’s, of what Smith called “authorial privilege,” seems to reopen it. But the point I am interested in here is not primarily the fact that it is an authored discourse that makes Nelson “feel less alone”: what she feels less alone in is “composing almost everything I write as a letter,” and it is this statement of affiliation with the epistolary mode on which I want to focus.

What would it mean to take Nelson’s declaration here seriously and to think of her writing as a letter? I want to suggest that doing so is a good way of getting at this chapter’s question—how to think of literature as communication after the death of the author—because the letter is the paradigmatic example of a literary form that is both communicative and explicitly authored. Nelson’s The Argonauts is, I will argue, an attempt to think through how letters function as a communicative and authored form. Furthermore, it does so within a post–death of the author theoretical framework, by drawing on Barthes, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Judith Butler—that is, the very same thinkers whose work (both before and after Barthes’s 1967 essay) has helped render suspect the notion of writing as a form of communication. A reading of Nelson, then, can help get at the question of how literature more generally might function as a communicative form after the death of the author.

To think of literature as a letter is to engage in a conversation about what Janet Gurkin Altman has called epistolarity: “the use of the letter’s formal properties to create meaning.”⁵ Since Altman’s Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (1982), the critical debate around the concept has taken place in the context of work in a variety of genres and forms, from actual correspondence, to eighteenth-century epistolary novels, to less obviously letter-like texts, both novelistic and theoretical.⁶ A number of characteristics are relatively stable in these discussions: letters and other epistolary texts are thought of as authored, sent to a “specific you” as a part of a reciprocal exchange, and necessitated by a spatial separation between sender and receiver.⁷ Where critics tend to differ most is in the specific modality of this separation. For Derrida, for example, both the separation and the (connected) possibility of the letter’s failure to reach its intended recipient structure the epistolary mode.⁸ On the other hand, critics such as Margaretta Jolly—In Love and Struggle (2008)—and Liz Stanley—in 2011’s “The Epistolary Gift”—are more interested in the capacity of the letter to overcome the separation between writer and reader. Stanley and especially Jolly locate their theorization of the letter as “relational”⁹ in a specifically feminist politics: “Feminists—myself included—have idealized letters as ethical forms in which we hope that some equally idealized relational self can finally be expressed.”¹⁰ Jolly points to a tension between the masculine-coded genre of autobiography, frequently tied to a notion of the subject as autonomous, and the letter as a relational and feminized form, but suggests that the impact of the ethical turn in critical theory has been to universalize (and thereby to defeminize) relationality.¹¹

My concern in this chapter is not so much to insist on the fundamental importance of relationality over separation (or vice versa). Rather, I am interested in the question of how, while acknowledging the separation fundamental to the epistolary mode and the difficulties of bridging it, Nelson nevertheless works toward relationality—that is, toward a communicative effect. An example from Bluets is instructive here. Addressing a former lover, she writes:

I felt no romance when you told me that you carried my last letter with you, everywhere you went, for months on end, unopened. This may have served some purpose for you, but whatever it was, surely it bore little resemblance to mine. I never aimed to give you a talisman, an empty vessel to flood with whatever longing, dread, or sorrow happened to be the day’s mood. I wrote it because I had something to say to you.¹²

In a very literal way, this unopened letter is a failed act of communication. Nelson’s addressee, she imagines, “reads” the letter (by not reading it) against, or rather entirely independently of, her authorial intentions; he has his own inscrutable agenda for the text. Like the undergraduate Zadie Smith reading “The Death of the Author,” for whom the text is “a free, wild thing, open to everyone, belonging to no one, refusing an ultimate meaning,” he does with the letter whatever he wishes.¹³ Nelson wrote to him because she “had something to say to [him],” but his disregard of her desire forecloses the possibility of communication even before he has the opportunity to (mis)read its actual words. Communication in Nelson’s work is never taken for granted, always rendered precarious: nevertheless, the desire—“I had something to say to you”—remains.

2.2. Epistolarity and The Argonauts

Much writing on epistolarity focuses on actual correspondence and therefore frames its project as a shift in critical attention toward the letter’s literary qualities.¹⁴ By considering literature as in some sense letter-like, I am engaged in the opposite endeavor.¹⁵ It remains to consider, though, how we might have to rethink epistolarity in the context of The Argonauts. Like Bluets, the book describes acts of letter-writing, but if we are to take seriously Nelson’s claim of affiliation with the epistolary mode, it is important to acknowledge the ways in which her work—and literature in general—departs from the formal properties of the letter, in terms of its relation to the categories of both authorship and readership.

I want to suggest first of all that The Argonauts necessitates an especially nuanced approach to the question of epistolary authorship, in part because of the complexities of its relationship to genre. Although I would follow Linda Kauffman in arguing that epistolarity should be considered a mode rather than a genre¹⁶—that is, a text’s epistolarity does not determine its external formal features—I would nevertheless maintain that genre does have a bearing on the particular way in which a text performs epistolarity. The Argonauts flouts easy generic categorization, but Nelson has said that she does not mind the book being called “autotheory,” a term she takes from Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie (2008).¹⁷ This term might be understood as linking The Argonauts to the tradition of feminist “personal criticism” that Nancy K. Miller analyzes in Getting Personal,¹⁸ or to what Nelson has called “Wild Theory.”¹⁹ By this, she means “theoretical writing that falls out of boundaries or disciplines, or even sense-making,” a category that would also include Testo Junkie.²⁰ The Argonauts exists at the intersection of cultural criticism, personal narrative or memoir, queer and feminist theory, anecdote, and other genres.²¹ Accordingly, it resists the generic codes that influence a reader’s understanding of authorship and, like Miller’s personal criticism, qu...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• INTRODUCTION: “WORDS STREAMING IN YOUR WAKE”
• Chapter 1 COMMUNICATION: MAGGIE NELSON AND THE LITERARY TEXT AS LETTER
• Chapter 2 INTENTION: THE INCONSISTENT ANTI-INTENTIONALISM OF ZADIE SMITH AND JUDITH BUTLER
• Chapter 3 AGENCY: ROLAND BARTHES AND THE MEN WHO HOLD FORTH
• Chapter 4 LABOR: DAVID FOSTER WALLACE, COWBOY OF INFORMATION
• CONCLUSION: STUDY GROUPS
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint