So it’s not all glum, you just need a little imagination. I really don’t know why I’m so worried about writers. Being a writer is still predominantly a job for the boys. The assumption that things will be better for me if I’m my male colleagues’ keeper is wrong: For them, my male colleagues, things will always be better. So why am I worrying, then? In an ocean of general despair, it’s like worrying about the last European leper colony on the Romanian side of the Danube. I don’t know, it must because I’m doing okay. I just passed my taxi driver training.
WHAT IS AN AUTHOR MADE OF?
WRITER AND/OR AUTHOR?
Look at the years I’ve clocked in — and I’m still not sure about the name of my profession, or even what it’s for! If earnings qualify a particular human activity as a profession, then only a small number of writers can claim writing as theirs. Yet even so, the true purpose of the profession remains painfully unclear. Perhaps this uncertainty of purpose can be traced to the literary creator’s schizophrenic split into author and writer. In the 1970s, Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” upended literary scholarship and even today the text remains one of the briefest and most-cited in the history of literary theory. As Barthes maintains, the author is a scriptor, his or her function is the production, not explanation, of a text. Explaining would be to restrict a text’s meaning, and a text’s meaning resides in language, the way language works on a reader — it has nothing to do with the author or authorial intention, his or her identity, nationality, ethnicity, the historical context, and so forth. In his essay “What Is an Author?” Michel Foucault asserts that not all writers are authors, but that all authors are writers. The author’s performance of the authorial function is part of the text, but irrelevant to the interpretative process. Both Barthes and Foucault adhere to the thesis that the author is language, that is, that language is the author.
Whatever the case may be, perhaps more than ever before, contemporary writers cling to their symbolic authorial thrones with all their might, desperately self-identifying as authors. It could be that their anxiety is provoked by the plethora of new terms such as creative writer and creative writing, which presuppose the existence of uncreative writers, uncreative writing — and, God forbid — an uncreative imagination. The implied existence of both “creative” and “uncreative” writing, each being equally valid, is particularly hard for “creative writers” to accept. The dawn of the digital future has only increased the author/writer confusion — just think of the fan fiction phenomenon and collaborative writing projects; the attempts to establish collective authors and authorships; the popularity of self-publishing, internet novels, cell-phone novels, twitterature; the new flabbiness of the very concept of literature; the attendant de-canonization and re-canonization; the re-semantification of plagiarism and intellectual property; the culture of remix, and copy and paste; the changes wrought as the publishing industry tries to adapt to new technology; the surge of “amateurism,” and the concurrent flood of “professional” education, i.e., creative writing programs.
Ideas about “the death of the author” might still sound alluring in the texts of Barthes and Foucault, yet the literary context in which they were born has long been aborted. Our time is completely different, and brutally so. When someone steals the title of one of your books and uses it as her own, even gets in touch to let you know what she’s done — expectant of your blessing — and when you refuse, she accuses you of being overly sensitive about matters of intellectual property, as an author, it’s there, right there, your enthusiasm for any theoretical burial of the author and authorship wanes.
Do two people inhabit the body of he or she who works with the pen? The first, a diligent, self-deprecating hand worker, or “crafter of texts,” the second, his or her media persona, the “author”? Are readers co-authors? And if so, does only an “author” need readers, or does a “crafter of texts” need them too? In this rather promiscuous relationship, how do we assign authorship roles? If the author died forty years ago (as theorists claim), but is not yet buried, and has in fact been resurrected (as literary practitioners suggest), perhaps he or she should be issued a temporary ID card? But in which register should the author be entered — that of the living, the dead, or the resurrected?
The title of this essay was inspired by a question my young niece posed to me. She didn’t know what the word “author” meant, so as a diversion inquired, “What’s an author made of then?” And indeed, let’s start with that one — what is an author made of?
NAME
Starbucks is a kind of instant psychotherapy, boosting our self-confidence together with our caffeine levels. At Starbucks we buy a personalized little treat, a coffee that is ours and ours alone, because they even write our name on it.
When a bouncy young Starbucks barista asked me my name for the first time, I articulated it with conviction and clarity.
“Say what?!”
“Du-brav-ka,” I repeated.
“Say whaaaat?!”
I said it again, and then again, just louder. The people in line behind me were already bitching. A short while later, a plastic cup with “Dwbra” scribbled on it arrived. I relayed the episode to a countryman who lives in Los Angeles, where my Starbucks initiation had occurred. That was twenty years ago.
“Jesus, what a dumbass! Who told you you’ve got to give your own name?!”
To be honest, it hadn’t occurred to me not to.
“I always say Tito!” he fired.
“And?”
“And nothing. I just love hearing: Titoooo, your coffee’s reaaaadyyyy!”
I took his advice and tried using Marx and Engels, but the Starbucks crew didn’t quite get the message I was sending. In the end I chose a regular name. At Starbucks, I’m Jenny.
I learned my lesson: if I want coffee, I have to adapt, my personality has to conform. The barista’s ear only hears what it’s given to hear, and that’s Jenny. This is a story about authors and authorship. If an author wants visibility — and we all do — he or she has to adjust his or her general tone, it has to be a tone discernable to the imaginary ear of the populace at large. Jenny is a collection of vowels and consonants everyone hears. “Dwbra” is not. I know this. I’ve tested it out in many parts of the world.
Hmmm, “general tone,” what I do mean by that? The general tone is the context, and the context is dictated by the dominant literature, inevitably that of the predominant language, which is, at least currently, English. Our context is thus an Anglo-American one. What about other great literatures? Statistics confirm the jawdrop-ping fact that European countries translate significant numbers of American and British authors, yet translations make up barely three percent of Anglo-American publishing. Viewed in this light, the tastes of the German, Croatian, French, Swedish, Dutch, and other reading publics, are in many ways pre-formed, their ears attuned to “Jenny,” not “Dwbra.” Yet as we know, “Jenny” and “Dwbra” might be the same person, the same literary text, just with two different names. If the substance is the same, why is one text readable, the other unreadable; one heard, the other not; one visible, the other invisible? Why do the Dutch scuttle to the bookstore the minute the Booker Prize winner is announced, yet local literary prizes leave them cold? Why did Croatian journalists scribble long obituaries to Christopher Hitchens, when Hitchens’s books have never been translated into Croatian (and few have even heard of him), yet a rare Croatian literary success abroad is glossed in a few reluctant lines?