Explaining the Author-Function
UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL MUST BE ESCORTED
A real "I don't think that means what you think it means" moment.
What do these two things have in common?
I will tell you. They both make very good introductions to a post about the author-function. I've been talking about author-functions a lot recently, but to some of you it may have seemed like I just began talking about a strange new concept out of the blue. I explain it in my thesis, but that is unfortunately a) flocked and b) long. And some of you are fluent enough in theory to catch my references, but having read Foucault really shouldn't be a requirement for being able to follow my line of thought in this journal.
So hopefully, the two relatively real-world examples of the author-function at work given above will help me explain it. In the first case, I can say "I don't think that means what you think it means" because I can reconstruct what (I think or imagine that) the author meant--that people who are not authorized to enter alone can becomes authorized-of-with-an-escort--even though I find it at odds with the "literal meaning" of the words. What is at stake is the difference between two ways of constructing an author-function.
In the second case, I know what "queer" means today, and I can use it to even further tease out some (in retrospect, rather blatant) subtext to be found in FHB's stories. At the same time, I know that that use of "queer" wasn't as common or as widespread as it is today when FHB was writing. So I can read FHB's texts in two different ways: the gay version, and the "normal" version.
Neither of these two reading practices, despite the fact that they both rely on a conception of an author, are illegitimate. Indeed, any theory of signification that would render such common practices of reading would be by that a fact a reductio ad absurdim argument against itself. These are common, everyday moves which we have to be allowed to make.
But they are not moves which involve authors. At least not real authors, not living flesh-and-blood authors who smoke cigars and read the Guardian and have opinions of their own--God no. What both moves ultimately rely on is an idea of an author, constructed by the reader primarily from the text with help from some extratextual sources (my knowledge of the English language in both cases, my knowledge of common business practices and the conventions of door sign messages in the first case, my knowledge of the history of the word "queer" and the linguistic landscape of the Edwardian age in the second case). The actual author is nowhere in sight, and so the intentional fallacy has not been committed.
Here are some examples from Richard Lederer's linguistically-suspect (suspect because it relies sometimes on "rules" that aren't, most commonly rules about modifier placement) Anguished English. In each case, we manage to extract the "meaning" of a hypothetical author "in opposition to the literal meaning of the words" even though we know absolutely nothing about the actual author. We are utilizing only the texts in front of us, because we have nothing else at hand, but we are doing so in a way which involves speaking and thinking about authors. We aren't engage in strict exegesis as such, but a form of imaginative play:
The ladies of the church have cast off clothing of every kind, and they can be seen in the church basement Friday afternoon. [We "recognize" that the "author" meant "cast-off" (an adjective) instead of "cast off" (a verb and preposition), but we can also understand and snicker at the femslashy version. The two ways of reading the sentence do different things, but neither way is right or wrong.]
For Sale. Three canaries of undermined sex. [We "know" the "author" "really meant" "undetermined." But how do we know?]
Once I came across the idea of the author-function, in Foucault's "What is an Author?" I struggled with the idea. How was Foucault arguing we should engage the texts? Should we privelege authorial intent, or not? Was historical/biographical/cultural knowledge relevant, or not? Of course, the frustrating thing about Foucault is that he rarely argues anything. The few normative statements he makes are usually ones his method clearly cannot support, and leave the reader scratching their head and wondering how he could possibly write something so bone headed.
But a few months later, as I was working on my honors thesis, and trying to figure out how exactly one extracted the meaning of Nineteen Eighty-Four (a meaning that was precisely the opposite of its ostensible meaning), it suddenly clicked. Of course the author isn't a person, but a discursive function! How could it be anything else? I asked myself.
This allows the critic, as hermionesviolin has pointed out to me, to have their cake and eat it too. And as I am a fan of cake--especially chocolate cake--this is a good thing.