The Restless Dead by Cristina Rivera Garza

Author:Cristina Rivera Garza
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
Published: 2020-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Undead Authors

The Autobiographical and David Markson (1927–2010)

DYING FOR

Given the dates when Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault introduced their ideas on the death of the author, and considering their immediately colossal influence on the reading public, we could conclude that the author (at least within a certain Western tradition) died more or less at the start of the second half of the twentieth century. Barthes published The Death of the Author in 1968, while Foucault delivered his lecture “What Is an Author?” to the Société Française de Philosophie in February 1969.1 Countering the romantic notions of writing that hinged on an authorial figure who privileged the expressive faculties of a lyrical I, Barthes asserted, in close adherence to Stéphane Mallarmé, that “only language acts . . . not ‘me.’” This statement launched a devastating critique (lethal, actually) against the empire of the author. And in doing so, it launched the hegemony of the reader. Because Barthes believed that the text “is made up of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into relations of dialogue, parody, contestation,” he argued that the author’s sole power consisted of mixing together these writings, which preceded her. In this way, she effectively translated what was always and inescapably already there. Untroubled by the question of textual originality, which was and remains an inquiry into the reliable expression of authorial interiority, Barthes insisted that the text is “a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture,” with a meaning revealed or forged—reconstituted, certainly—by the act of reading. Thus: “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.”

Some months later, before an audience that included Jacques Lacan, among others, Foucault asked “What is an author?” to interrogate the position from which the authorial role is carried out. Responding to a question raised in this case by Samuel Beckett (“What does it matter who is speaking?”), Foucault developed a critical analysis of the conditions—including the author’s name and its meaning, the appropriative relationship between author and language, and the attributive relationship between author and text—that permits the figure of the subject to emerge as the “originator” of discourses, not as a complex and variable function of them. Ultimately, it didn’t matter who was speaking. (It was to be expected that Foucault would reach this conclusion.) What did matter was, and is, to ask with respect to surrounding discourses: “‘How, under what conditions, and in what forms can something like the subject appear in the order of discourse?’ ‘What place can it occupy in each type of discourse, what functions can it assume, and by obeying what rules?’”

David Markson—an experimental US-American author, an attentive reader of Thomas Pynchon and William Gaddis, and the author of (among other books) Wittgenstein’s Mistress, was concerned with the death of the author.2 Literally. In his latest novels—especially in the series comprising Reader’s Block, This

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.