The Nihilism of Modern Literary Criticism (Updated)
Modern literary criticism has worked hard to remove the privileged position of the author in the interpretation of their works. Many people trained to follow its dictates often do so ignorant of the philosophical presuppositions it suggests. Yet these premises should be disturbing to any Christian. Here, however, I am concerned with only one of them, and the one which is the most important: what exactly are we to make of the relationship of an author with the story and characters they have created? It is analogous to the relationship between God with us. If an author does not have authority over their own work, then the author of creation, God, does not have any authority over his. Moreover, when people suggest the critical idea of “the death of the author,” they are following through with the philosophical and cultural “death of God” which preceded it. God, and the lack of authority or relevance of God in the modern world, is the real foundation of modern literary criticism. For if the author has no authority over his or her creation, then God, the author of the greatest story of all – the story of salvation history – has no authority over that story. By rejecting the relevance of the author, one is rejecting the relevance of God in history.
Indeed, this is what one would expect from a relativistic culture which has drunk from the cup of nihilism. When the author of life is rejected, then all that one has left is a bleak world view with no more meaning than what an individual makes for it. The same, however, becomes true in sub-creation. Since there is no ultimate creator, then the notion of creator and the authority a creator would have if he existed has been rejected. An author cannot be seen as a sub-creator; what, then, is an author? It is someone who needs to be removed; we should discuss the “scriptor” instead of the author. Indeed, the notion of an author is a “tyrannical” notion because the author as authority creates unjust limits on a text and the individuals who would read it. This is exactly what Barthes understood and applauded in his essay promoting “The Death of the Author“:
Once the Author is gone, the claim to “decipher” a text becomes quite useless. To give an Author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the writing.[...] Thus literature (it would be better, henceforth, to say writing), by refusing to assign to the text (and to the world as text) a “secret:’ that is, an ultimate meaning, liberates an activity which we might call counter-theological, properly revolutionary, for to refuse to arrest meaning is finally to refuse God and his hypostases, reason, science, the law.Why cannot the individualism and relativism underlying this interpretive scheme be seen by many of its present-day adherents? In part, it is cultural. We have been led to believe in the autonomy of the individual, that anything and anyone who would limit that autonomy must be as a tyrant. Since the author of a text would limit my interpretation and use of that text, they are working to enslave me, the reader, and so to combat such bondage, I must strike out and proclaim, even more, my own freedom and autonomy over such limits. They can have any opinion they want over their own work, but they can’t demand its adherence by others because such a demand destroys freedom. This understanding of autonomy is idolatrous, and it is no wonder it is used to reject God’s authority to make moral demands upon us.This is not to suggest we have no free will, and with it, no sense of personal autonomy. But it must be seen only as finite freedom in relation to the infinite freedom of God. “Only if man, aware of autonomy, detaches himself from the realm of all-embracing divine freedom and sets himself up against it does this secularization (or de-sacralization) become a Titanism that is forgetful of God.” Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: IV: The Action. trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), 475. It is the over-stretching of that autonomy which we find in today’s world, because there is no proper authority, no sense of limit, which we see or accept. Order cannot exist because there is no God; there is no proper reading for a text because there is no such thing as authority. It is in this framework that C.S. Lewis criticized T.S. Eliot. “Surely it is natural that I should regard Eliot’s work as a very great evil. He is the very spear head of that attack on peras which you deplore” C.S. Lewis, Letter to Paul Elmer More in The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis: Volume II. ed. Walter Hooper (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004), 163.The chaos which develops is the chaos of a relativism without authority. In literary criticism, it leads to the death of the author, and this can only exist in a society where its metaphysical equivalent, the death of God, is lived out as a given.
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It is analogous to the relationship between God with us. If an author does not have authority over their own work, then the author of creation, God, does not have any authority over his.
God is Truth. What God reveals to us by definition is Truth. J.K. Rowling is not God, therefore she is not Truth. As a fallen human, she has the ability to lie after the fact. We have not only the right, but the responsibility to evaluate her work and see if it matches what she is telling us (or at least not find any inconsistencies).
If no inconsistencies are found, then we can suspend disbelief long enough to accept what she is telling us as truth (whatever truth is with regard to a fictional story which was created by her). This still doesn’t mean she’s telling the truth, but only that what she is telling us is believable.
If I don’t wish to believe that the fictional character, Dumbledore, is gay, then without proof in the story (or a believable backstory on the part of the author), I don’t have to.
Henry says:
” … what exactly are we to make of the relationship of an author with the story and characters they have created?” … “when people suggest the critical idea of “the death of the author,” they are following through with the philosophical and cultural “death of God” which preceded it …”
You make a profound analogy here. It is one that deserves further exploration. But the analogy can be applied in another direction as well.
What are we to make of the “story” that an individual creates in his own life? Are we to follow Barthes advice and disassociate the “behaviors” and “events” in one’s life (the story) from the author of those events, namely, the individual? If so, what happens to terms such as “responsibility” or “ownership?” What then would be the meaning of individual freedom? What then would be the meaning of individual dignity? What then would be the meaning of law? Why should an individual be sent to prison if their “story” is disassociated from themselves as the “author” of that story? On what basis do contracts have any significance? And the list goes on.
Henry, why should we read ANY book besides the Bible? After all, isn’t it sufficient?
Gerald,
You are right, and much of the development along the literary theory works to deconstruct the notion of an “I”. This should not be surprising: if we are in the image of God, once God is destroyed, then there is nothing left for us to be us.
RCM
Sufficient for what?
The underlying question here is whether we regard a novel simply as a medium of communication, or as a ‘sub-world’ of its own. If a novel is a medium of communication, what the author SAYS she means by it is what the novel MEANS. It is possible, however, that authors (and painters, etc.) do not exercise perfect control over their creation (since, after all, they are only ‘subcreators’, reworking material that God has provided). In that case, their interpretation of their own work may not be infallible.
Thomas Mann once thanked a professor of literature for helping him to understand what The Magic Mountain “meant”–and he wasn’t being facetious.
The meaning of a work of literature is “constructed” between the author and his or her readers, and the meaning of the world is “constructed” between God and his creatures; this is the amount of “liberty” that God has, in a sense, surrendered to mankind, particularly after the Incarnation and the establishment of His “Body” on earth, as the supreme act of Love in history.
It is not surprising to me, however, that, in a culture so Protestant as this one, so many “Catholics” wish to flee from this divinely constructed freedom. However, the fundamentalism of Mr. Karlson and true Catholicism sort ill together.
Ms. Rowling has NO RIGHT AT ALL to tell us that her Dumbledore is “gay,” if she has left us nothing out of which to construct his “gayness.”
If an author does not have authority over their own work, then the author of creation, God, does not have any authority over his.
I guess I would question this assertion, Henry. After all, a human author must use language to create a story. According to Aquinas at least, language is a tool which mediates- it allows one person to communicate their intentions and thoughts to another. (See De Regimine Principum, i, i.) In using language, however, an author must submit, with little leeway possible (even Lewis Carroll’s language games relied on an established order to language), to its conventions. As such, once a story has been committed to language, it seems can have dimensions which the finite and fallible author did not intend. God on the other hand, creates and sustains all being without mediation. Even the contingent choices of free beings and secondary causes owe their existence entirely to God’s efficacious Will. There is not third thing which mediates between God and His creation.
I hadn’t read the comments previous to mine, so it seems I’ve rehashed, to a certain extent, what others had already said.
It would do well to not confuse the authority over one’s story and the events within it with the effectiveness of the author in realizing it. Those are two different issues. I have not claimed an author cannot poorly communicate their desires.
Henry,
OK, so if you accept that there can exist a gap between the story which the author has in mind and its realization on the written page, and if you accept that the author always has authority over the story, then you must locate the story in the mind of the author. The story as written would simply be a way to access the author’s mind. And if the written text lacks or logically excludes something which the author nevertheless intends, the author’s intention trumps the written text, which is merely an imperfect vehicle with which to access the mind of the author. That, at least, seems to cohere with the account of language which I find most persuasive (the Thomistic account).
Nevertheless, if this is what you mean, I don’t think it coheres with are usual notion of what a story is. I think of a story as “located” in the written text. Though that text owes its existence to an author, it nevertheless, if it is a coherent and well written story, will stand on its own two feet once put to the written page. When I read the Illiad, I don’t think of it primarily as a portal into the mind of a Ionian poet of the 7th Century BC, I think of it as a text which conveys an account of the clash between the Greek forces and the city of Troy. On further consideration, I may wonder what was going through the author’s mind when he wrote certain things, but this would be a secondary issue, and peripheral to what was actually communicated through the text itself.
I don’t think locating the story in the written text and making the principle of intelligibility and meaning in the story the written words leads to nihilism. I hold with Aristotle and Thomas that there are three parts to meaningful language: the written or spoken word which signifies, passiones animae or concepts, and the objects which are referred to by way of concepts. Language (taken as brute sounds or scratches on paper) become meaningful only by being conventionally joined to certain concepts, and those concepts are a pure means (a that by which) to refer us to something beyond the mind. Therefore we are not free, when reading a text, to give it any possible interpretation. The intelligibility of a text is circumscribed, to a certain extent, by the text itself, insofar as a text is to be taken as meaningful discourse in the sense I have just described. Nevertheless, the text itself, because of equivocation and vagueness, can be subject to differing interpretations. Other texts, however, due to their clarity, cannot be subject to differing interpretations.
Sorry for any typos…
Br. Matthew Augustine, OP says:
“God on the other hand, creates and sustains all being without mediation …” “There is no third thing which mediates between God and His creation.”
True. But God’s Creation is subject to uses God did not intend just as an author’s work is subject to uses that were not originally intended. Human freedom mediates between Creation and the individual just as it mediates between an author’s work and the various ways an individual might perceive or use it, often contrary to the author’s intent.
Yet, without the “author” there can be no sense of Truth. The predicament of the individual would be such that he would be forced to live in a swirl of non-being … the nightmare of nihilism. The ‘author’ is the center of gravity.
Is this not what Henry is articulating?
So, again, I think your analogy between the Creator and His creation and the author and his creation isn’t quite apt. While the author, in creating a story, must conform to the conventions of language, the words of which ultimitely aquire their meaning and intelligibility from things outside the mind, insofars a those things are the cause of our conceptions and our conceptions are linked conventionally to signs (sounds and scratches), whereas God creates all being without an intermediary, and created things are intelligibile insofar as they have actual being. The intelligibility of God’s creation comes exclusively from Him, whereas the intelligibility of a written story comes from language, which derives its intelligibility, in turn, from the world.
I hope what I’ve said makes sense and doesn’t mar Thomas’ understanding of language.
Matthew
I would agree that an author can be ineffective in his or her narration. That gap is a given. But they can also purposefully not disclose all the information of the events behind which a story is written (Tolkien is a key example of this). When an author does not disclose all the events behind a story, he still is the authority of the story. Others cannot dismiss what he later says just because he didn’t say it all before. Like if I experienced something today, and I write it out, only revealing half of it: just because I didn’t reveal it all does not mean the rest of my experience is therefore meaningless for a proper interpretation. The author of the story has the fullest experience of the story and it is from this he also has the authority to later reveal other aspects (no matter what reason he didn’t do so before).
I would agree, however, as I have said here and before, this does not mean an author knows all the meaning which is possible from their text. Just as I might not know or be able to interpret all I have experienced properly. However, my experience of it makes me the authority of it, and so if people suggest an interpretation of my experience which I see is faulty, I have the authority to say “that’s not it” just as I have the authority to say “you are right, that is something I didn’t see but follows what I experienced.” This is why it has not been an argument over meaning, but authorial control, which I have been engaging with, and the relationship between the author and the story he has created.
Gerald said:
But God’s Creation is subject to uses God did not intend just as an author’s work is subject to uses that were not originally intended.
Yes, I think we are in agreement here. However, what I am addressing is Henry’s assertion that if the author doesn’t have final say regarding the meaning and intelligibility of the story he or she has written, neither does God have the final say regarding the meaning and intelligibility of creation. I would say that in the former case, the intelligibility is mediated by the author’s words, wereas in the latter case the Author of being himself causes creation’s meaning and intelligibility. The latter can’t be attributed to a human author. Rather, the human author uses what is already meaningful (words and the ideas they convey) to construct a story.
Gerald,
I am very pleased that you percieve the point I am making and that you are able to add to it because it seems I have been unable to make it as clearly as I thought I did. Saying the author is the “center of gravity” is a good way of putting it!
Matthew
Even the story and the events with the story transcend words — in of course an analogous sense to the way God authors history. If the author, who knows of the events which are not put forward in his narration, is told because he did not put them forward in his narration that he cannot assert such events as being true to his story, then he has lost the authority behind his story we are talking about.
We must also understand this is the reason why St Thomas and others always looked to what an author said outside the text they are interpreting as a means of interpreting the text of that author. He realized the point I am making.
This is why it has not been an argument over meaning, but authorial control, which I have been engaging with, and the relationship between the author and the story he has created.
Am I right, then, that you see the story as located primarily in the author’s mind? Because if the story is what has been written or spoken, then the latter has a certian integrity and autonomy which even the author cannot touch. After having written the story the author may say, after the fact, “by the way, Achilles is two feet tall.” Then one might shrug their shoulders and surmise how that bit of information may have affected the story if it had been included. But as it was not included, the information is simply an interesting tidbit which shows what may have been the case about the story, rather than what is the case.
On a side note, I’m pleased, Mr. Campbell, that you are blogging here. I have found your posts and comments very thoughtful. And, please, if I’m missing the point entirely blame it on my own ignorance and not willful belligerence. :)
Even the story and the events with the story transcend words — in of course an analogous sense to the way God authors history.
Are you talking about the events of the story and facts of history or rather the meaning of those events and facts? If the former, I don’t think the story transcends the written text. If you mean the latter, then it does, just as events and persons in the literal sense of Scripture can be a figure for something beyond themselves.
Even in this case, however, I think the human author is limited. If, on reading the “Harry Potter”, its author were to tell me that the events of the story are a metaphor for the destruction of old growth forests and the possible extiction of the spotted owl, I could rightfully disagree with her, as there is no likeness that would suggest such an interpretation.
Thank you Bro. Mathew Augustine and Henry for your kind words. It has been some time since my mind has had to “shed the cobwebs” like it did this afternoon. LOL
But this is not about simple gymnastics. Such exchanges are important, certainly to me and hopefully to others as well. We live in an era of “univocal thinking.” The tendency is to conflate differences and destroy intrinsic density. We must recover our appreciation of the analogy of being if the impact of relativism is to be reduced. One way to counter relativism is to unmask the richness of created reality that relativism denies. People will marvel once they realize that reality — including their own existence — is “more” than what they have been taught to believe. There is no richness in a univocal universe. Only sameness.
This has been an interesting discussion. I agree in general with Br. Matthew, although I think that the scholastic account of language works better for terms in a proposition than for literary ‘texts’. We read the Iliad in a different way than we read the Summa, in part because the process of creating these two texts was not the same. I have heard from at least one novelist that, as one writes, the story takes on a life of its own, which must then be re-interpreted.
I once heard author Ron Hansen digress about an undergraduate who had written a study of Hansen’s work. The study examined the place and use of color in Hansen’s writing. Hansen was originally trained as an artist, but to his knowledge he had never consciously made use of color in his literary work. He thought the essay was brilliant and insightful.
Given that this literary critic saw things Hansen never consciously intended, and that Hansen “authoritatively” recognized this critic as in some ways a better interpreter of his work than he himself, the unique authority of the author seems rather problematic.
Insofar as the author who dies is the atomized rationalist individual of Liberalism, I don’t think the Death of the Author position is necessarily bad. Take St. Paul’s line in Romans, from the lectionary yesterday: I know that good does not dwell in me, that is, in my flesh.
“The willing is ready at hand, but doing the good is not.
For I do not do the good I want,
but I do the evil I do not want.
Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it,
but sin that dwells in me.”
Paul himself does not recognize a unified self, except when that self is fully dwelling in the Lord.
The Death of the Author thesis takes its energy from the psychologization of man, which sees the self as driven and possessed by all sorts of hidden forces. While the Dead Author universe is impersonal, it is far more cognizant of the dependent character of the individual than Liberal anthropology. It seems a better fit for Pauline anthropology, too. The author is a flawed creature formed in community, not some perfect quasi-omniscient Genius.
In some ways, I see the Death of the Author as an opening to recover Plato’s concept of art as driven by the muse, or, if that is too pagan, the Spirit.
Gerald,
Beautifully put.
SMB,
Yes, I’ve studied the Thomistic account of language only insofar as it is used in scientific demonstration. The way language is used in narrative is going to be different, although I think the main insights remain largely unaffected. Let me just add that my position on this matter also stems from my experience of writing. Before I entered the Dominican order I had received a degree in creative writing. My experience of writing stories and receiving feedback in the workshop format is the reason I believe in an author’s merely relative authority. Oftentimes, in submitting a story for evaluation by my peers, they discovered things in the text of which I wasn’t aware. Or, they pointed out that something I was aiming at in the story which wasn’t realized. In any case, after receiving this feedback I would rewrite the story. When my peers evaluated my stories, they evaluated what was there in their hands, not what was in my mind. If their evaluations were not what I intended they would give the story back and expect it to be rewritten.
Extending such considerations to God as Author is a bit risky, but I would say that even though God can’t go wrong with respect to what he has created, nevertheless His creation, like the words of an author, have a relative autonomy once created. They possess their own being, intelligibility, and goodness, though these are only participated. This accounts for the autonomy of the natural, of reason, and of the secular. Not that these can be rightly turned against God or exist without Him. Though we possess our own being, goodness and intelligibility, we don’t possess them apart from and against their Creator. That said, I wouldn’t say, as I would for the authority a human author with respect to his work, that God’s authority is merely relative. Rather, God’s omnipotence and sovereignty is such that he can be the efficacious cause of all being and intelligibility without making void the freedom and autonomy of His creatures.