David Foster Wallance on Writer and Author

A writer, is the person whose choices and actions account for a text’s features. An author, is the entity whose intentions are taken to be responsible for a text’s meaning. Prof. Hix uses monkeys and typewriters to illustrate the distinction: “It is surely possible, though obviously unlikely, that a thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters could by sheer chance produce an encyclopedia. If they did, they would be able to account for all the features of the text: Every thing in the text was put there by monkeys. But there would be no way to account for the meaning of the text’s features, because monkeys could not have meant anything by their typing.” Authors are monkeys who mean.

• For Romantic and early-twentieth-century critics, textual interpretation was author-based.
• For Wordsworth, the critic regards a text as the creative instantiation of a writer’s very self, that is, relevant mental condition of a text’s creator.
• Both Romantic critics, and Wordsworth, have an idea of a real author, an entity which owns that text, that is retaining the right to determine its meaning.
• Barthes in ‘68 refuted the idea of real author, and argued that a writer cannot determine his text’s consequences enough to be really responisble for. In Hobbes’s sense, it is really critical readers who decide and thus determine what a piece of writing means.
• New critics’ WWII-era sought to dethrone the author by acttacking what hey called “The Intentional Fallacy.” Writers are sometimes worng about what their text mean, or sometimes have no idea what they really mean. Sometimes the text’s meaning even changes for the writer. It doesn’t matter what the writer means, basically; it matters only what the text says.

Poststructuralists attack what they see as a post-Platonic prejudice in favor of presence over absence and speech over writing. We tend to trust speech over writing because the immediacy of the speaker: he’s right here, and we can grab him by the lapels (the part on each side of a coat) and look into his face and figure out just exactly what one single thing he means. But poststructuralists see wirting, not speech, as more faithful to the metaphysics of true expression. For Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault, writing is better than speech becuase it is iterable; it is iterable because it is abstract; and it is abstract because it is a function not a presence but of absence; the reader’s absent when the writer’s writing, and the writer’s absent when the reader’s reading.

For Derrida, Heidegger, Foucault, meaning in language requires a cultivation of absence rather than presence, involves not the imposition but the erasure of consciousness. A writer does not wield language; he is subsumed in it. Language speaks us; Wirting writes; etc. Barthes said “To write is … to reach that point where only language acts, performs, not me” Foucault said, “ The writing of our day has freed itself from the necessity of expression; it is an interplay of signs, regulated less by the content it signifies than by the very nature of the signifier”. For Hix’s teachers, trying to attribute writing’s meaning to a static text or a human author is absurd.

Hix’s book “Morte d’Author” first half is critical overview of some of the major positions on authorial vital signs:

• Hobbes and Frye on what an author is.
• Foucault v. Nehamas on how to recognize what an author is.
• Barthes v. Willaim Gass on whether to even bother trying find an author.

Hix divides the views on author into two opposed camps. The anti-deaht guys see the author as the origin/cause of a text, and the pro-death guys see the author as the function/effect of a text. Hix posits that both sides of the debates mistake one asspect of the author for the whole. All debaters have oversimplified what author really means. They’ve done this becuase they’ve simplistically regard author as referring to a unitary entity or phenomenon. Hix argues, the word author is really a complex interation of the activiies of the historical wirter, that writer’s influences and circumstances, the narrative persona adapted in a text, the extant text itself, the critical atmosphere that surrounds and informs the interpretation of the text, the individual reader’s actual interpretations of the text, and even the beliefs and actions consequent to that interpretation.