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A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again 139

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In the 1960s the poststructuralist metacritics came along and turned literary aesthetics on its head by rejecting assumptions their teachen had held as self-evident and making the whole business of interpreting texts way more complicated by fusing theories of creative discourse with hardcore positions in metaphysics. Whether you're a fan of Barthes. Foucault, de Man, and Derrida or not, you at least have to credit them with this fertile miscegenation of criticism and philosophY: criti · cal theory is now a bona fide area of study for young American phi losophers interested in both Continental poetics and Anglo-American analytic practice. H. L. Hix is one of these young (judging by his author photo, about twelve) u.s. philosophers, and I'm pretty sure that his 199 Marte d'Author: An Autopsy is a Ph.D. dissertation that was more th an good enough to see print as part of Temple University Press's "The Arts

and Their Philosophies" series. One of the wickedly fun things about following literary theory in

the 1990s is going to be watching young critics/philosophers now come­ along and attack their poststructuralist teachers by criticizing assump tions those teachers have held as self-evident. This is just what Pro fessor Hix is doing with one of the true clarion-calls that marked th shift from New Criticism and structuralism to deconstruction, Rolan ,\ Barthes' 1968 announcement of "The Death of the Author." Barthes' seminal essay has prompted twenty-three years of vigorous interjourn al debate among European theorists (pro-death) and u.s. philosophen (anti-death, mostly), a debate that Hix has impressively compiled ami arranged between two covers, and a debate that he has, rather Ie:"

impressively, sought to resolve by accusing all parties of not being nearly complicated enough in their understanding of the term "author"'s in - and extensions.

Ifyou're not a critical-theory jockey, then to appreciate why the meta­ physical viability of the author is a big deal you have to recognize the difference between a writer - the person whose choices and actions ac­ count for a text's features - and an author - the entity whose inten­ tions are taken to be responsible for a text's meaning. Hix, paraphrasing the ever-limpid Alexander Nehamas, uses the old saw about 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: Everything in the text was put there ... by monkeys at Smith-Coronas. But ... there would be no way to account for the meaning of the text's features, because ... the monkeys could not have meant anything by their typing." Authors are monkeys who mean.

And for Romantic and early-twentieth-century critics, textual inter­ pretation was author-based. For Wordsworth, the critic regards a text as the creative instantiation of a writer's very self. Rather more clini­ cally, 1. A. Richards saw criticism as all and only an effort to nail down the "relevant mental condition" of a text's creator. Axiomatic for both schools was the idea of a real author, an entity for whose definition most critics credit Hobbes's Leviathan, which describes real authors as persons who, first, accept responsibility for a text and, second, "own" that text, i.e. retain the right to determine its meaning. It's just this definition of "author" that Barthes in '68 was trying to refute, arguing with respect to the first criterion that a writer cannot determine his text's consequences enough to be really responsible (Salinger wasn't hauled into court as an accessory when John Lennon was shot), and with respect to the second that the writer's not the text's owner in Hobbes's sense because it is really critical readers who decide and thus determine what a piece of writing means.

It's Barthes' second argument here that's the real poststructural death certificate, and this line is really just an involution of the New Critics' WWII-era reaction against Richards and the Romantics. The New Critics, rather level-headedly at first, sought to dethrone the

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author by attacking what they called "the Intentional Fallacy." Writers are sometimes wrong about what their texts 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, ba­ sically, for the New Critics; it matters only what the text says. This critical overthrow of creative intent set the stage for the poststructural show that opened a couple decades later. The deconstructionists ("de­ constructionist" and "poststructuralist" mean the same thing, by the way: "poststructuralist" is what you call a deconstructionist who doesn't want to be called a deconstructionist), explicitly following Husserl and Brentano and Heidegger the same way the New Critics had co-opted Hegel, see the debate over the ownership of meaning as a skirmish in a larger war in Western philosophy over the idea that presence and unity are ontologically prior to expression. There's been this long­ standing deluded presumption, they think, that if there is an utter­ ance then there must exist a unified, efficacious presence that causes and owns that utterance. The 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 of the im­ mediacy of the speaker: he's right there, and we can grab him by the lapels and look into his face and figure out just exactly what one sin­ gle thing he means. But the reason why the poststructuralists are in the literary theory business at all is that they see writing, not speech, as more faithful to the metaphysics of true expression. For Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault, writing is a better animal than speech because it is iterable; it is iterable because it is abstract; and it is abstract be­ cause it is a function not of presence but of absence: the reader's ab­ sent when the writer's writing, and the writer's absent when the reader's reading.

For the deconstructionist, then, a writer's circumstances and inten­ tions are indeed a part of the "context" of a text, but context imposes no real cinctures on the text's meaning, because meaning in language requires a cultivation of absence rather than presence, involves not the imposition but the erasure of consciousness. This is so because these guys - Derrida following Heidegger and Barthes Mallarme and Foucault God knows who - see literary language as not a tool but an environment. A writer does not wield language; he is subsumed in it.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

Language speaks us; writing writes; etc. Hix makes little mention of Heidegger's Poetry, Language, Thought or Derrida's Margins of Philoso­ phy, where all this stuff is set out most clearly, but he does quote enough Barthes - "To write is ... to reach that point where only language acts, 'performs: and not 'me' " - so you get the idea that author-as-owner is not just superfluous but contradictory, and enough Foucault - "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" - so you can see that even the New Critics' Holy Text disappears as the unitary lodestone of meaning and value. For Hix's teachers, trying to attribute writing's meaning to a static text or a human author is like trying to knit your own body, your own needles. Hix has an even better sartorial image: "Previously, the text was a cloth to be unraveled by the reader; if the cloth were unwound all the way, the reader would find the author holding the other end. But Barthes makes the text a shroud, and no one, not even a corpse, is holding the other end."

Hix himself is a good weaver; Morte d'Author is a tight piece of work. Its first half is a critical overview of some of the major positions on authorial vital signs. Not only is there Hobbes and Frye on what an author is, there's Foucault v. Nehamas on just how to recognize what an author is, and Barthes v. William Gass on whether to even bother trying to find an author. There are also brief critical summaries of Derrida, Culler, Stecker, Booth, and Burke. Hix's discussion isn't com­ prehensive, quite: Heidegger and Hegel are scarcely mentioned, Husserl (a major influence on Derrida) is absent, as are such important con­ temporary figures in the debate as Stanley Cavell (whose Must We Mean What We Say? is at least as important to Hix's subject as Booth's Rheto­ ric of Fiction), Paul de Man, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak. And Hix's analysis of the players he does cover suffers from the scholarly anality that's so common to published dissertations, an obsession with the jots and tittles of making excruciatingly clear what he's saying and where he's going. Wearying t-crossings like "I will isolate three of his claims in particular, disagreeing with two of them and agreeing with the other," and microprecise critiques like "Wimsatt and Beardsley's error may be hidden behind the passive voice; Cain's is hidden behind the present tense" make the reader wish Hix's editor had helped him

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delete gestures that seem directed at thesis committees rather than paying customers.

Hix's obsessive attention to detail is perhaps justified, though, by the fact that Marte d'Author aims to be more than just a compen­ dium of views on the dead-author controversy. Hix promulgates his own theory of authorship, one that he claims clears up the debate and lays the foundation for a more sophisticated approach to literary criti­ cism in the wake of deconstructionism's plumeocide. Though his so­ lution to the problem isn't the universal solvent he leads the reader to expect, his project is still a neat example of that modern commissure where Continental theory and analytic practice fuse. What Hix of­ fers as a resolution to the debate is a combination of a Derridean metaphysics that rejects assumptions of unified causal presence and a Wittgensteinian analytic method of treating actual habits of dis­ course as a touchstone for figuring out what certain terms really mean and do.

Hix, early in his summary of modern theories about the author, di­ vides the extant views into two opposed camps. The anti-death guys still 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 debate "mistake ... one aspect of the author for the whole." All the debaters have oversimplified what "author" really means. They've done this because they've made what Hix calls "the assumption of ho­ mogeneity;' simplistically regarding "author" as referring to "a unitary entity or phenomenon." If we examine the way "author" is really used in critical discourse, Hix argues, we are forced to see the word's deno­ tation as really a complex interaction of the activities of the "historical writer" (the guy with the pencil), that writer's influences and circum­ stances, the narrative persona adopted 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. In other words, the entire post -1968 squabble has been pointless, because the theorists involved haven't bothered to consider what "author" truly means and embraces before they set about interring or resuscitating the patient.

The wicked fun here is to watch how Hix uses the deconstruc-

Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

lionists' own instruments against them. Derrida's attack on the pre­ ,~ umption of metaphysical presence in literary expression forms Hix's blueprint for attacking the assumption of homogeneity, and Hix's at­ tempt to "undermine" and "overturn" an essentially binary opposi­ t ion of author-as-cause v. author-as-effect is a textbook poststructural rnove. What's more original and more interesting is Hix's use of a kind of Austin/wittgenstein ordinary-language analysis on the extension of the predicate "author." Instead of joining his teachers in the meta­ physical stratosphere they zoom around in, Hix quite plausibly suggests Lhat we examine how smart readers really do use the term "author" in various kinds of critical discourse in order to figure out what the nature of the beast is before we whip out the spade or the de-fib paddles. His project, as he outlines it, seems both sensible and fun to watch.

Hix's actual analysis of author-ity is way less sensible and way way less fun. For one thing, his actual argumentation is wildly uneven. In the same breath, he'll recommend identification as necessary for de­ termining viability, then say that a thorough definition of "author" is prima facie important because no satisfactory theory of text and read­ ing is possible until there's a solid theory of the author, which begs the poststructuralists' whole question of whether a text even requires an author in order to be and to mean. Hix clearly does think a text re­ quires an author, and so what pretends to be a compromise between the Bury-Him and the Save-Him camps is really a sneaky pro-life apology.

But the incredibly baroque definition of "author" Hix comes up with by the book's final chapter, "Post-Mortem," seems finally to com­ mit the very homicide Barthes called for. The difference is that where Barthes simply argued that the idea of an author is now for criti­ cal purposes otiose, Hix so broadens the denotation of "author" that the word ceases really to identify anything. Nouns, after all, are sup­ posed to pick things out. But while Hix claims that "to deny the as­ sumption of homogeneity, though it entails that the historical writer is not the exclusive locus of meaning, does not entail that meaning has no locus;' he ends up preserving the idea of a meaning-locus by mak­ ing that locus such a swirling soup of intricate actions and conditions and relations that he essentially erases the author by making the de­

144 David Foster Wallace

notation of his signifier vacuous. It ends up being a kind of philo­ sophical Westmorelandism: Hix destroys the author in order to save him.

Though his conclusions do not resolve the problem they address, Hix's attempts to organize and defend them yield some impressive scholarly writing. He has a rare gift for the neat assembly of different sides of questions, and his complex theory has the virtue of being able to account for many of the ambiguities in the way we do in fact make such claims as that Luke is the author of the third Gospel, Jefferson is the author of the Declaration ofIndependence, George Eliot is the author of Middlemarch, and Franklin W. Dixon is the author of The Hardy Boys at Skeleton Cove. His section on "Schizoscription" is a fascinating d,iscus­ sion of the "implied author" in first-person persona-lit like Browning's "My Last Duchess" and Swift's "A Modest Proposal," and it affords, be­ lieve it or not, a genuinely intelligible theory of how irony works. And in­ genious examples, like that of the brain-damaged patient in A. R. Luria's The Man with the Shattered World who could write but not read what he wrote, not only help Hix argue against the notion that the writer is the ultimate "insider" with respect to his own work, they're also just plain cool.

It's Hix's flair for images and examples that may make Morte d'Author of interest to generallit.-lovers. His prose is often witty and conversa­ tional, and his talent for constructing test cases offers a welcome re­ lief from the painstaking academic detail he tends to fall into. I'm not sure just how much familiarity with twentieth-century literary theory the book requires. Hix does, roundaboutly, give most of the back­ ground to the dead-author conundrum. But a reader who's not com­ fortable with ghastly jargon like Foucault's "The conception of ecriture sustains the privileges of the author through the safeguard of the a priort' is going to get flummoxed, because Hix tends to toss quota­ tions like this around without much gloss. It's finally hard for me to predict just whom, besides professional critics and hardcore theory­ wienies, 226 dense pages on whether the author lives is really go­ ing to interest. For those of us civilians who know in our gut that writing is an act of communication between one human being and another, the whole question seems sort of arcane. As William (anti­ death) Gass observes in Habitations of the Word, critics can try to

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erase or over-define the author into anonymity for all sorts of tech­ nical, political, and philosophical reasons, and "this 'anonymity' may mean many things, but one thing which it cannot mean is that no one did it."

1992