The wicked fun here is to watch how Hix uses the deconstructtionists’ own instruments against them. Derrida’s attack on the presumption of metaphysical presence in literary expression forms Hix’s blueprint for attacking the assumption of homogeneity, and Hix’s attempt to “undermine” and “overturn” an essentially binary opposition of author-as-cause v. author-as-effect is a textbook poststructural move. 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 metaphysical stratosphere they zoom around in, Hix quite plausibly suggests that 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 determining viability, then say that a thorough definition of “author” is prima facie important because no satisfactory theory of text and reading 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 requires 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 commit the very homicide Barthes called for. The difference is that where Barthes simply argued that the idea of an author is now for critical purposes otiose, Hix so broadens the denotation of “author” that the word ceases really to identify anything. Nouns, after all, are supposed to pick things out. But while Hix claims that “to deny the assumption 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 making that locus such a swirling soup of intricate actions and conditions and relations that he essentially erases the author by making the denotation of his signifier vacuous. It ends up being a kind of philosophical 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 of Independence, 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 discussion of the “implied author” in first-person persona-lit like Browning’s “My Last Duchess” and Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” and it affords, believe it or not, a genuinely intelligible theory of how irony works. And ingenious 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 general lit.-lovers. His prose is often witty and conversational, and his talent for constructing test cases offers a welcome relief 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 background to the dead-author conundrum. But a reader who’s not comfortable with ghastly jargon like Foucault’s “The conception of écriture sustains the privileges of the author through the safeguard of the a priori” is going to get flummoxed, because Hix tends to toss quotations 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 going 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 erase or over-define the author into anonymity for all sorts of technical, 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
David Lynch keeps his head
1 what movie this article is about
David Lynch’s Lost Highway, written by Lynch and Barry Gifford, featuring Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, Balthazar Getty. Financed by CIBY 2000, France. ©1996 by one Asymmetrical Productions, Lynch’s company, whose offices are right next door to Lynch’s own house in the Hollywood Hills and whose logo, designed by Lynch, is a very cool graphic that looks like this:
Lost Highway is set in Los Angeles and the desertish terrain immediately inland from it. Actual shooting goes from December ’95 through February ’96. Lynch normally runs a Closed Set, with redundant security arrangements and an almost Masonic air of secrecy around his movies’ productions, but I am allowed onto the Lost Highway set on 8–10 January 1996. This is not just because I’m a fanatical Lynch fan from way back, though I did make my pro-Lynch fanaticism known when the Asymmetrical people were trying to decide whether to let a writer onto the set. The fact is I was let onto Lost Highway’s set because of Premiere magazine’s industry juice, and because there’s rather a lot at stake for Lynch and Asymmetrical on this movie (see Section 5), and they probably feel like they can’t afford to indulge their allergy to PR and the Media Machine quite the way they have in the past.
2 what David Lynch is really like
I have absolutely no idea. I rarely got closer than five feet away from him and never talked to him. One of the minor reasons Asymmetrical Productions let me onto the set is that I don’t even pretend to be a journalist and have no idea how to interview somebody and saw no real point in trying to interview Lynch, which turned out perversely to be an advantage, because Lynch emphatically didn’t want to be interviewed while Lost Highway was in production, because when he’s shooting a movie he’s incredibly busy and preoccupied and immersed and has very little attention or brain-space available for anything other than the movie. This may sound like PR bullshit, but it turns out to be true — e.g.:
The first time I lay actual eyes on the real David Lynch on the set of his movie, he’s peeing on a tree. I am not kidding. This is on 8 January in West LA’s Griffith Park, where some of Lost Highway’s exteriors and driving scenes are being shot. Lynch is standing in the bristly underbrush off the dirt road between the Base Camp’s trailers and the set, peeing on a stunted pine. Mr. David Lynch, a prodigious coffee-drinker, apparently pees hard and often, and neither he nor the production can afford the time it’d take him to run down the Base Camp’s long line of trailers to the trailer where the bathrooms are every time he needs to pee. So my first sight of Lynch is only from the back, and (understandably) from a distance. Lost Highway’s cast and crew pretty much ignore Lynch’s urinating in public, and they ignore it in a relaxed rather than a tense or uncomfortable way, sort of the way you’d ignore a child’s alfresco peeing.