I love teaching
first-year classes. There’s an expectation sometimes that this won’t be the
case, or that more advanced courses offer more exciting situations, which they
can do, of course, but the way in which the adjective ‘undergraduate’ can be
used as an insult seems to me not so much snobbish as silly. Undergraduate
teaching makes you work. The students don’t have to be there, and they’re also
none too sure if they’re going to persist with your discipline. Each lecture
becomes an exercise in both attention-seeking (of a good kind, hopefully, and
often, I’ll admit, of the more common and vain variety too), and advocacy. With
first years you have to argue for your discipline in a way more advanced
settings are less likely to require. This is a situation radicals and reformers
ought to revel in, and for good reasons: asking a room why they’re working the
way they do – what the point, in my local experience, of English is at all –
sets the question off in unexpected directions.
Today’s my last day of
teaching for the semester. I take a 100-level course in narrative theory, and
it’s one of the most stimulating teaching experiences I’ve had. The course
itself is – or should be, or is as I fantasize it – an exercise in ostranienie,
estrangement, V-effekte. Narratology tries to make the tasks and approaches of
literary texts blurt out their own secrets and techniques, to operate upon the
body of literature (we murder to dissect, friends!) in ways that will render it
less mysterious, more amenable to common discussion, dissension and debate.
I’m convinced this is a
good thing, and teaching it over a few years now – to a group of unruly, often
bored, not always enthusiastic teenagers and others – convinces me to that we’ve allowed a
great loss to take place in accepting defeat in the so-called Theory wars.
Theory, our opponents suggest, took away from the ‘Common Reader’, reduced the
literary experience. My feeling, interacting with students dealing with
University English for the first time, is that this taking way may well be
worthwhile. If literary studies are kept inside the vocabulary of ‘taste’ – a
discourse sitting in its impenetrability along with wine appreciation and
interior decorating – what masquerades as critical judgement will remain a
substitute code of class, a way of indicating allegiance to a social order that
need not justify itself because ‘distinction’ clothes itself in the language of
feeling.
Our opponents, of
course, take quite a different account of these last decades’ battles. Here is
C. K Stead:
Barthes, and I think
Foucault too, has announced ‘the death of the author.’ Barthes’s essay on this
subject is difficult; and there is a sense in which it can be said to be
wrong-headed, perverse and untrue. The more we read the work of any of the
great writers, the more we have the strong impression of a single personality
encompassing the whole oeuvre. Dead or alive, the author lives in every
sentence; and recognising this, the ‘common reader’ is likely to feel a certain
impatience with Barthes’s argument.
This is nonsense, and
lazy nonsense too. Would a teacher of Stead’s obvious erudition and distinction
accept a student essay announcing that ‘Shakespeare, and I think Webster too,
wrote a play called The Duchess of Malfi’? Besides, this ‘strong
impression of a single personality’ may be what suffocates literature, what
turns readers from texts, what blocks new impressions and readings.
Why I love Roland
Barthes
Barthes, of course,
announces no ‘death of the author.’ Obviously J. K. Rowling, Dan
Brown, Patricia Grace et al are all very much alive, however much or
little of their ‘strong personality’ we may feel from time to time. Barthes’
piece, far from being an ‘announcement’ of the kind Stead doesn’t even deign to
read, is a polemic, a political-aesthetic intervention, and an argument –
amidst the rebellion and chaos of 1968 – against the author function in favour
of the reader and reading. What has author-centred criticism produced?
For
Barthes,
Classic
criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the
only person in literature. We are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled
no longer by the arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of good society in
favour of the very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or destroys; we know
that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the
birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.
How
true this is for the era of the book club, the literary festival and enforced
celebrity! Book reviewing and discussion is forced from the pages of newspapers
while writers are coerced into ever-more restrictive routines of appearances,
interviews and promotions. ‘Good society’ sets up the writer as a model for the
‘knowledge economy’ while at the same time disdaining writing, ambiguity,
excess, interpretation. Kerry Prendergast, the (thankfully ex-) Mayor of
Wellington used to talk about ‘creative people’, as if the arts were a realm
apart from the proles serving lattes. Barthes’ polemic is, before everything
else, an instance of democratic radicalism, insisting on the productive role of
the reader.
A
democratic role. Most frightening, in all this, for ‘traditional’ criticism, is
the suggestion that study may be forced to encounter the object itself –
language in all its slipperiness and ambiguity – instead of the closed meanings
of authorial interpretation:
“Once the Author is
removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an
Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified,
to close the writing. Such a conception suits criticism very well, the latter
then allotting itself the important task of discovering the Author (or its
hypostases: society, history, psyche, liberty) beneath the work: when the
Author has been found, the text is "explained" - victory to the
critic.”
This rhetoric is
unthinkable without its context in 1968 – Barthes’ call (‘the birth of the
reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author’) is a slogan alongside
‘be realistic, demand the impossible’ aiming itself against the deadening
authorities of a capitalist system demanding stable meanings, compliant
reader-workers, and efficient, unambiguous transmission of signs. (A
counter-argument from another era, that consumer society in fact relies on the
flourishing of Barthesian reader-producers, seems to have fallen away during
the War on Terror: you were either with ‘us’ or with the terrorists, and the
stability of Author and Authority, to say nothing of the Bible and Christ
himself, reasserted itself with a startling lack of ambiguity).
Fit audience, though few: this is what Barthes sets his face against, as he assembles a programme
for reading that will follow texts where they lead, bypassing the gate-keeping
figures of Author and Critic. Bureaucrats, Brecht told Benjamin once, are
afraid of production – they never know where it might lead. Texts have more
meanings than any single reading – or any Proper Noun of author – can possibly
contain. They’re generators of meaning, and they take part in an endless
process of generation:
“We know now that a text
is not a line of words releasing a single “theological” meaning (the “message”
of the Author-God) but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings,
none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations
drawn from the innumerable centers of culture. [. . .T]he writer can only
imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to
mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to
rest on any one of them. [. . .] Succeeding the Author, the scriptor no longer
bears within him passions, humors, feelings, impressions, but rather this
immense dictionary from which he draws a writing that can know no halt: life
never does more than imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue
of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred.”
The idea that this
attention to the ‘tissue of quotations’ that makes up a text involves any
neglect of ‘close reading’ and the textual textures older critics (or their
‘post-theory’ epigones) claim to treasure is dishonest, and the shrill
preaching from the Right that they are the defenders of Literature is baseless
arrogation. What could be more breathtakingly precise examples of close reader
than Barthes on Balzac, de Man on Wordsworth, Derrida on Montaigne? These are
readings that extend writing, to be sure; that, I suspect, is the productivity
that leads them to be so mistrustred.
What is the purpose of
the humanities?
Alain Robbe-Grillet
called Barthes “a thinker of slippage”, and this is his great beauty and his
great weakness. “Death of the Author” lives on as a text in a context quite
foreign to its production and initial reception. Activist, interventionist,
militant, Barthes’ writing has, in the following decades, been banalised in
departments of literature prepared to important exotic critical names without
facing the bracing challenge of the texts and ideas. He’s a writer now more
scoffed at than read and, in one sense, it is entirely understandable that this
should be so – if 1968 was in turn defeated by the neoliberal reaction from the
late 1970s on then the Death of the Author became impossible, a dream living a
half-life in English Departments abroad.
But Barthes’ example and
challenge remains. The humanities are, currently, everywhere under attack.
Insisting that what we do matters without further justification seems unlikely
to help in this situation: if the universities struggle to find allies as the
enemies of the humanities subject them to the language of profit, business
outcomes and ‘relevance’, we may be forced to look to our own practice for
reasons to ask for allies’ assistance.
This is the moment when,
for me, narratology and teaching matter. Too many people take Barthes to mean
that, with the ‘death of the Author’, anything goes, and that detail and
scrupulousness disappear. His essay suggests the opposite: dispensing with the
ideological myths of the Author as comforter and limit forces us to pay
attention to those much-vaunted ‘words on the page’ and their implications, as
well as the wider world of signification in which they operate.
In teaching, for me, the
promise of ‘Theory’ so-called is not its ability to bamboozle students (the
complaint of the outraged defenders of the Common Reader) but rather its
organising of materials so as to enable a common vocabulary for dispute. Mieke
Bal outlines the problem in a comment that has always inspired and troubled me:
“Teaching literature
essentially amounts to showing off, as it were, unintentionally intimidating
students: the more they find interest in the interpretation offered, the more
they feel personally incapable of doing something like it. Offering terms which
allow them to couch their views in publicly accessible language was in my eyes
an important gain to be drawn from such structuralist exercises.
But disillusion quickly
followed. For the terms of structuralist jargon, if understandable at all,
intimidated the students even more, and, interestingly, for the same reasons:
because, ultimately, the were not intersubjective, could not
be understood.”
The disillusion here, I
think, comes from our political moment – the great breakthroughs in literary
criticism have arrived, not via pedagogical reformation, but on the back of
political transformation. The Formalists share 1917 with the Bolsheviks; Barthes
can assume an audience in the student and unionist rebels and revolutionaries
of the ‘night of the barricades’ and the convulsions of 1968. Perhaps the Arab
Spring – and the end of postcolonialism – will produce new audiences, new
theories, new narratologies? Without this spur it is no wonder that Barthes’
insights desiccated into stylistic tics and academic mannerisms. That, though,
is no reason to dismiss him for these.
Roland Barthes is one of
the best stylists I’ve read, an exhilarating, provocative inspiration of a
writer. I felt an excitement reading him – and being taught him by people like
Andy Barratt and Simon Ryan in Otago, and Linda Hardy at Victoria – that in
turn prompted me to think about how close reading, textual analysis, and social
critique might profitably ‘blend and clash.’
A ‘post-Theory’
Humanities is no Humanities at all, and one that – if it is nothing more than
the well paid studying without thought to the object of study or the audience
for their research – scarcely deserves defending. The birth of the reader,
again, can commence only with the rebirth of the ‘Death of the Author.’
Sources
CK Stead, “English in
our Universities” The Writer at Work (Otago University Press,
2000), p. 117. Alain Robbe-Grillet’s line is from his Why I Love Barthes,
trans. Andrew Brown (Polity, 2011).
Many thanks to Pip Adam,
who was a silent but important and supportive presence through my teaching this semester. The
students protesting in solidarity with their Auckland brothers and sisters
offer another model too.
