1993
greatly exaggerated
In the 1960s the poststructuralist metacritics came along and turned literary aesthetics on its head by rejecting assumptions their teachers 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: critical theory is now a bona fide area of study for young American philosophers 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 1992 Morte d’ Author: An Autopsy is a Ph.D. dissertation that was more than 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 assumptions those teachers have held as self-evident. This is just what Professor Hix is doing with one of the true clarion-calls that marked the shift from New Criticism and structuralism to deconstruction, Roland Barthes’ 1968 announcement of “The Death of the Author.” Barthes’ seminal essay has prompted twenty-three years of vigorous interjournal debate among European theorists (pro-death) and U.S. philosophers (anti-death, mostly), a debate that Hix has impressively compiled and arranged between two covers, and a debate that he has, rather less 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.
If you’re not a critical-theory jockey, then to appreciate why the metaphysical viability of the author is a big deal you have to recognize the difference between a writer — the person whose choices and actions account for a text’s features — and an author — the entity whose intentions 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 interpretation was author-based. For Wordsworth, the critic regards a text as the creative instantiation of a writer’s very self. Rather more clinically, I. 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.