It Takes a Village (a Village with Authors)

In my last blog post, I considered the possibilities of moving away from eulogizing the author and instead breathing life back into that position by suggesting an analogy of authorship based on an author-parent/text-child dynamic. In a couple of the readings since, most recently “Rhetoric in  New Key: Women and Collaboration,” I’ve seen how dangerously close this proposal nears the problematic “model of the author as God the Father of the Text” (274), which is how Toril Moi puts it. The problems with this type of model are easily discernible to anyone looking for how women or collaborative authors take part in this tradition, as Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede discuss, or anyone who recognizes more abstract and universalized modes of understanding (at least in academia and other intellectual bodies) that stress the social, the contextual, and the dialogic over the individualist monolith of prior authorship constructs. I do think, though, in abandoning that holy and patriarchal analogy, that an author-parent analogy freer from such phallic and absolutist description may be too quickly dismissed.

      First, most of us have heard or read authors consider a work “my baby.” Some of us may even feel that way about our own writing, recognizing what at least looks like invention or creation. This perspective, of course, can lead to a view that reduces creation to its most immediate, overlooking the necessary presence of a multitude of other factors, working collaboratively, in that creation. In terms of textual authorship, this involves the teachers who teach writers that language, the literary tradition, the readers who read that text, the printers who print it, the social, cultural, and historical moment offering exigence, and so forth.

     However, in recognizing that popular practice of conflating authorship/creation/ownership, as well as some of the ways the author-function works, I do think the parent analogy works. In fact, if we agree that authorship is collaborative and social, there may not be a better analogy for that process than human reproduction, one of the more basic and popular forms of human interaction. Fundamentally, human reproduction is collaborative: the process can only happen with at least two people, despite all of the advancements in modern science; similarly, our language is only our language in the way it connects us as humans (at least two), or symbol-using animals. And if we shift our focus, we can clearly see the presence of other factors (and people) at play, from something as physically basic as the ground we stand on and the air we breathe, to something social and biochemical like sexual or reproductive drive and the food we need to eat, or to something more cultural and social like maternity/paternity leave, the opportunity for daycare, the safety of communities, etc. The old quote, “It takes a village to raise a child,” comes to mind here, and emphasizes the presence and necessity of the community or the social, though it should be recognized that villages take just as much part in creating that child.

     Further, we can acknowledge the ways parents are used like the author-function. Authors offer categories we use to understand texts, to the point that we expect similarities, just as parents offer others the means through which to see children (assumptions about values, intelligence, etc.; someone to call in case of an emergency). To go further, consider the similarities in how extramarital children (described pejoratively as bastards--I've been reading A Song of Fire and Ice) and anonymous texts have traditionally been treated: is there anything more pressing than finding origins? Doesn't that lack of history suggest a lack of identity, or something cut off from tradition and history? Is it not often read negatively, the obvious example being that an anonymous text is dangerous or false?).

     Foucault also notes how the author-function is used to assign responsibility, just as parents take responsibility for their children until those children reach a point of maturity where they are expected to take responsibility for themselves, just as we come to see how texts operate separate from what their authors may have wanted or intended (though, if we consider the ways parents of criminals are treated, we know that this never occurs completely). Essentially, both the creators and the created are given agency—parents and authors, children and text—but we do not lose sight of the human influence that brought that text into discursive circulation.

     Why do I need to use this type of analogy? I’m not sure. It may be an issue of a propensity toward seeing and valuing the individual, which could very well and ironically be a result of my environment; or an issue of philosophy—Humanism, for instance—or asserting the humanness of human behaviors, like our language;  or something else entirely. But it is an analogy that, I think, both helps and limits my understanding of the principles of our class and readings. My questions for you, then, are as follows:

1. Do you see a movement away from the human in contemporary authorship studies? If not, do you think some (i.e. me) are conflating the human with the individual? Or the human with the patriarchal human?

2. Does the author as a parent, with the qualification that we avoid supernatural or patriarchal constructs, work as an analogy? What are the problems with such an analogy?

3. If you find yourself using an analogy to understand authorship, what is yours, and why do you think find it useful or appropriate?

*P.S. Late is late, but I apologize for limiting the time all of you had to read this post with it being as late as it is, especially after this issue was brought up in class last week. My schedule is being changed.