The Perils of Studying English

Being an English student is like growing up in book world. We all have a desire to grow up quickly, to gain all the necessary knowledge and acquire enough theoretical confidence to function as a literary adult. But somehow the more we learn, the more we reminisce about a time when reading was simple, uncritical.

For Rita Felski, the process of gaining critical skills is one that encourages the student to read with suspicion. Once you learn to read critically, you can never really trust a text again – texts keep their true meaning hidden and ‘do not willingly surrender their secrets’. One must be paranoid. It is acceptable to admire a text, but one mustn’t be seduced into taking its words at face value. Only the literary text is given any type of concession, a subgenre which Felski concedes as slightly less deserving of vigilante attention due to its own awareness of and pre-emptive response to a critical audience.

The most apparent problem with suspicious reading is the loss/gain sensation that accompanies it: while we gain a new understanding of possible meanings, we are losing our textual innocence. It is a process of disenchantment. There is also the danger that we will get so caught up in the critical mode, in the ‘shinier, sexier, more charismatic vocabularies’ of formal criticism that we will take literary analysis too far. Once you start finding meanings in the hidden, abstract gestures of a text, there is the chance that everything will begin to look potentially meaningful. It is possibly to read into parts of a text that are actually perfectly innocent, if there is such a thing. What you might think is the “key” to unlocking a particular text may be nothing more than a set of unprovable connections made ‘meaningful’ when expressed in highbrow critical terms. You’ll end up like Bunny in The Secret History, with a John Donne essay that addresses Isaac Wharton and the absurd textual concept of metahemarlism instead.

Felski’s remedy to these problems is that of affective reading, a neophenomenological approach to the text. In layman’s terms this refers to feeling first and analysing second. Felski believes that no matter how well-versed in critical commentary we are, we still possess the ability to be struck by that which appeals to us, disarmed by the unfamiliar, put off by that which we find distasteful. In the literary upper class it is cool to be detached, to be able to read things that you don’t “like” but do “appreciate”, to read things that you honestly “love” but can still “see the flaws within”. Felski says – forget this. Take what you like, what you hate, what surprises and angers and enchants you, and then ask why. There is no need to be distant, simply a need to question our attachments.

                                              

I generally agree with Felski’s ideas, but have one problem – what of the books you have already read ‘critically’, that you have already studied and pulled apart? Most people feel a certain bitterness, for example, toward many of the texts that they studied in high school, “ruined” by overanalysis and strict, criteria-based assessment methods. I worry that this experience will be akin to taking in an optical illusion – once you’ve seen the lamp you somehow cannot remember how, at first, all that appeared was two faces looking at one another. Can we truly, as Felski claims, ‘make the familiar newly surprising’? Perhaps with time, and patience. Every time you read a text, you read it slightly differently, meaning that even the most clichéd interpretation can become less cumbersome over time. With any luck the book will eventually regenerate, leaving you fresh to be affected anew.

(We Are) Living in a Material World

And Hadjiafxendi is a material girl. While other literary critics (Barthes, Foucault) dwell in the realms of possibility, Hadjiafxendi draws attention to the book as a product – of both the publishing process and the context into which it is born.

Hadjiafxendi’s edited book, Authorship in Context, contains a series of essays that look at practices of authorship over the last two centuries. The book aims to address theoretical questions of authorship (What does it mean to be an author? Does the author have sole responsibility for their text?) by providing tangible examples that consider how the ‘literary, technological, cultural and historical conditions’ surrounding a text’s production affect the final product.

From my reading of Hadjiafxendi’s introduction, it seemed that two central ideas about authorship were being put across:

1. The Author in Collaboration

Barthes is well-known for his denouncement of the Romantic image of the artist as a poetic myth that ignores the indebtedness all writers have to the creativity of language.Hadjiafxendi however has a different reason for her disbelief in the concept of the singular, authoritative author – its impracticality.

In her introduction she quotes Robert Darnton, who makes reference to a literary network that extends ‘from the author to the publisher...the printer, the shipper, the bookseller, and the reader’. This highlights the many stages of production and selection that influence and interrupt the imagined flow of the author’s thoughts onto the reader’s page.

So how much control does the author really have? In essays by Sage and Small, Authorship in Context looks back to 19^th century editorial practices to reveal the role editors necessarily play in shaping an author’s work, and how an author’s unique ‘vision’ can be affected by the opinions of their publishers. To be put into print is to be at the mercy of a system much greater than just the author, singular.

The monolithic author becomes an even more unfeasible creature in the postmodern era, as the 'literary' is expanded to include forms of media that necessitate collaboration. One example of this is the graphic novel, as explored in an essay by Punter. The creation of a graphic novel utilises a whole team of individuals – writers, artists, colourists, editors both traditional and digital – each of whom bring both their own ‘vision’ and their own set of influences to the project. The graphic novel therefore must be recognised not as a single text but a pastiche, a multiplicity of quotations layered on top of one another to give the impression of a holistic product. The idea of pastiche can also be applied to the work under consideration right now – Authorship in Context, as a collection of essays arranged into an edited book, it is both fragmented and whole at the same time.

This idea again takes on an interesting dimension when looking at online media, such as the writing that occurs within a web community. This type of writing holds the potential for an interactive experience in which readers can ‘write back’ to the original author, in doing so both challenging and adding to the original written piece, as well as becoming authors themselves.

2. The Suicide of the Author

The second idea that struck me as I read Hadjiafxendi’s introduction was also related to The Death of the Author. When considering the concept of authorial death, the author is often cast as the unwilling victim of a murder, perpetrated by the critic in the name of all other readers. However, by looking at the choices that certain authors have made in the production of their works, many cases are notable for the way in which the author has willingly partaken in their own death – an authorial suicide, of sorts.

The clearest illustration of this is in the literary pseudonym. Authorship in Context looks at both 19^th century author George Eliot and 20^th century journalist Flann O’Brien as examples. By constructing a separate identity (via the pseudonym) to fictively author a certain work, the real-world individuals detach themselves from its production. The author figure therefore exists only in relation to the text itself, perhaps the purest example of Foucault’s author-function. Although George Eliot is a problematic example of the movement away from the Author-God, seeing as the identity she created was the very embodiment of the male authority, the idea of giving up one’s rights to a book for the good of the book itself rings of self-sacrifice, thus qualifying as authorial suicide.

Another example of this can be seen in the modernist creative techniques of William S. Borroughs. Burroughs would make novels and films using the cut-up method, which involved scrambling words, phrases and scenes at random. This put the work in the hands of chance, automatically removing any the possibility of him having a superior, ‘authoritative’ understanding of the work.

Finally, related but not specifically within the category of authorial suicide is the idea of authorial decentralisation. Feminist and Post-Colonial authors have long clamoured for the destruction of the white male genius as sole literary authority, in order to open up the Literary Canon to unheard voices. Alexandru’s essay on the author Arundhati Roy engages with this idea through her consideration of what it meant for Roy to win the Booker Prize. Is this good or bad for the plight of the Other? On one hand, this can be taken as an example of a marginalised author making space for herself within the formerly homogenous canon. On the other hand, participating in the prize culture may simply add to the literary obsession with inclusion, exclusivity and the celebrated, capital-A ‘Author’. Alexandru considers the feasibility of a completely decentralised, non-hierarchical literary community.

Hadjiafxendi ends on a politicised and rather reflexive note – the final essay in the collection argues for the literary relevance of criticism itself, as well the necessity for critics to engage with global politics and the greater world they occupy. This, writes Hadjiafxendi, reflects the thrust of the entire collection. The need for authors to constantly reassess the shifting world they occupy is what Hadjiafxendi agitates for as a materialist. Materialist criticism occupies the space between purely theoretical criticism and actual writing practice, a space that mustn’t be neglected if authorship is to remain relevant over time.