Daniel Brewer AUTHORS PRESENT and the EXPERIENCE of THE

Authors Present and the Experience of the Past Daniel Brewer AUTHORS PRESENT AND THE EXPERIENCE OF THE PAST ince the so-called cultural turn in literary studies in the United States, the Sexploration of the “literary feld” in the wake of the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s work in France, and the growing impulse to contextualize literature by relating its texts to larger discourse networks, what could previously be treated as “literary” questions seem now to require framing in terms that are insistently and explicitly social, historical, economic, and political in nature. The question of the author is certainly one of these no longer purely literary questions. Treating it must thus involve developing ways to understand the mechanisms and practices that serve to institutionalize the literary through the mediation of other practices, felds, and forces. Becoming an author in the eighteenth century certainly did require negotiating a complex set of factors that together determined the condition of authorship. Thanks to decades of fne-grained analyses, such as those of Robert Darnton, we possess detailed descriptions of the cultural arenas in France and Europe in which aspiring writers—and not a few devious hacks— sought recognition as successful authors. Yet the thicker these descriptions of a particular sphere become, whether they involve the “real” world of the printing industry, for example, or the more imaginary one of the republic of letters, the more the empirical mode seems destined ultimately to bypass, or worse to occult, the very object that provides access to and an understanding of that context, namely, the text. Examining the question of the author in eighteenth- century France is important, for the author’s early modern emergence helps us understand better the development of literature as concept, practice, and institution, as well as its location in and contribution to a broader intellectual feld. But if we return to the question of the author via an interpretive mode, the empirical-historical, that underreads or misreads the text, and thus that skirts the question of interpretation itself, we ultimately may be on unsteady ground when it comes to stating just what “becoming an author” could have meant. To avoid this risk, we can approach authorship as involving a double mediation consisting of both history and discourse, the implication of one within the other, and the one’s determination by the other. Thus phrasing the question of the author and authorship in literary and cultural-historical The Romanic Review Volume 103 Numbers 3–4 © The Trustees of Columbia University 286 Daniel Brewer terms must also account for the textual practices through which authorship took discursive form. Conversely, a discursive understanding of texts in which the question of authorial subjectivity is posed cannot neglect the relation between subjectivity and history. To focus exclusively on either a historical perspective or a discursive one is surely to misapprehend important features of eighteenth-century authorship. More signifcant perhaps, such an exclusive focus avoids the thornier issue of whether the historical can ever be excluded from the discursive, and the discursive from the historical. To decouple historical understanding from discursive understanding is to risk a double misapprehension both of history and of discourse, a misprision that fails to account for the reciprocal work of these two forms of literary and cultural understanding, each of which aims to explain, respectively, the workings of history and of discourse. The question then becomes one of imagining a way to write a genealogical history of authorship that could account for this double mediation of history and of discourse. Here follows one hypothetical version of such a history. The eighteenth century marks an important moment in the long history of authorship in France, a history determined by the complex interplay of social practices, cultural institutions, historical forces, and discursive forms. This history of authorship extends from the medieval auctor to—and likely beyond—the so-called death of the author popularized a half century ago by Roland Barthes and the “author function” formulated by Michel Foucault (partly in response to Barthes). The appearance of the author can be traced in this genealogical history of authorship by tracking the emergence of discursive forms and practices designed to establish the criteria for authoritative judgments and to found the writer’s legitimacy to make such judgments. Such statements would be ones that could be taken to be “true” above all, not because they are particularly inventive, artful, or beautiful, but because of their performative effect. Such qualities as inventiveness, artfulness, and beauty would be attributed to later forms of writing and thus can be applied only neologistically to earlier, medieval writing. To be an auctor in the medieval sense of the term, for instance, did not involve an individual scribe’s subjective expressiveness, artistic creativity, or aesthetic inventiveness but instead his ability to write in such a way as to display his skilled recognition of cultural authority. That authority resided in the auctoritate, the founding and authoritative texts of medieval culture that were signifed by the proper name and that established the rules and principles for thought, judgment, and behavior in the various branches of knowledge. As Donald E. Pease points out in his article “Author,” the work of the medieval scribe was “to interpret, explain, and in most cases resolve historical problems by restating these problems in terms sanctioned by auctores. These restatements commanded authority because they organized otherwise accidental events into an established context capable of making Authors Present and the Experience of the Past 287 them meaningful” (106). Insofar as we can imagine what the medieval scribe might have aspired to, it was probably not to establishing a new, innovative, or otherwise “modern” interpretation of authoritative texts but to becoming an author, that is, to being recognized as belonging to the body of authoritative references that would be referred to by future scribes. At a certain moment in this genealogical history of authorship, the status of the author no longer resembled that of the medieval auctor. What exactly brought about this historical change would need to be determined. For now though, we can note simply that there came a moment when what commanded authority in writing was not divine revelation, refected in canonical texts, or even the skillful negotiation of these authoritative texts but the expression of human experience, located in various places and times, expressed by writers, and felt at one remove by readers. The author gave voice and form to what was cast as an originary experience, and authority resulted not from conformity with a predetermined and recognized truth but from the discursive self-determination of individual identity as a basis for judgment.1 To explore in greater detail the eighteenth-century moment in this genealogy, we should frst anticipate briefy where the trajectory of this genealogy might point. Is it to an emergent modernity, one where the twin narratives of becoming an author and becoming modern intersect or overlap? The author’s “death,” as Barthes provocatively phrased it, certainly appears to be an end-stage event on the trajectory of authorship. By author, Barthes means what he calls a modern kind of subject, one that frst emerged at the end of the Middle Ages and that was later shaped, he claims, by such historical-discursive factors as English empiricism, French rationalism, and the Protestant faith in the individual. This authorial subject supplanted other forms of authoritative subjectivity to become the source of meaning, the person (in both a psychological and a grammatical sense) who/that registers thoughts, encodes wishes and desires, contends for power, represents the way things are, were, or should be, all through a writing over which the writer has mastery and that subsequent readers approach hermeneutically, as one would a secret to be revealed. That author is eclipsed, however, and made to disappear when 1. René Descartes, for example, in forging a discourse that would break with scholastic authority, performed discursively the experience of thinking. It is in this sense that the “I” of the Discours de la méthode came into being—not only as rational subject but also as author. Similarly, in formulating the experience of his own doubt as a constant negotiation of the claims of past authorities, Montaigne wrote in such a way as to try and to test authors and authorship, including his own. In these two overly familiar cases, as in many more, one senses the emergence of a different confguration, if not a “newer” and more “modern” one, involving author, authorship, and the authority to judge. 288 Daniel Brewer language takes the place of its so-called creator. It is then as if language speaks, or rather acts, and not the author. “Écrire,” writes Barthes, “c’est atteindre ce point où seul le langage agit, ‘performe,’ et non ‘moi’” (Mort 62). Henceforth the author is not that instance presiding over the text’s production; rather, the author is performed by writing and by the work of the text, becoming an aftereffect of the performativity of language. The authorial subject results not from what language states but from what it does. For Barthes, it is once the author has (been) “disappeared” that “l’être total

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