The Authorial Light, Diminished

I've been troubled lately by what I've read as contradictory statements by Foucault, Barthes and Ong. Only today do I realize what message these three philosophers are trying to put forward as a possible course of pursuit for literary students, scholars and thinkers.

Too often has there been a focus on the author in literature. Gustave Flaubert's masterpiece, "Madame Bovary", was, at the time of its publication (and to an extent, today), tainted by scandal. The unconventional nature of both the content and the style of the novel led to a lawsuit by a then-radical French government against both Flaubert and his publisher, deeming the work to be an indecent attack on morality and good taste. Although this is an important historic topic to consider and discuss when examining French literature as a whole, it diminishes from the novel itself. If literature is supposed to be a pure form of expression and reflection, then to drag it through the mud by forcing it to endure a very real legal conundrum, rather than keeping it a wholly abstract concept as a literary work, tarnishes its luster. Flaubert, ever the perfectionist and devotee of his own style and art form, surely must have felt the same way. Much has been made of his laborious and meticulous compositional process, but in the end, I'm certain he would have been much more interested to hear how contemporary and future readers would respond to his finished product.

To use a more recent example, Jonathan Franzen, the New York Times bestselling author, bristled when his lauded novel, "The Corrections", was placed on Oprah's Book List, inciting both abject fury from Oprah's devoted fanbase and serious discussion by literary critics and thinkers. His argument was that to popularize his novel would be to detract from its artistic merit. Although he makes his living by writing and publishing his works, for him the finished product is a much more aesthetic concept rather than part of the profitable inventory of a book retailer. Despite his attempts to stay out of the spotlight, Franzen has become a literary celebrity, and occasionally the man surpasses the work, a convention which he abhors.

The crux of the argument is that there should be a shift back to the literary work itself rather than focusing on the author. One author who achieved this "disappearance" as Foucault calls it is J.D. Salinger, who, after the upsurge in popularity of "Catcher in the Rye", disappeared from public life and forced scholars and students to focus purely on the work itself, having no other resource other than it available to them. Whether intentional or not, the author often receives more praise than the work itself because we have a need to humanize and put a face on inanimate objects like the contents of books. Of course the author should be recognized as the individual who conceived the work, labored over it, ruminated over the course it would inevitably take and actually wrote either with pen and paper or keyboard. The work is seen as the mere fruit of the man, rather than an actual artistic work which achieves individuality in its own right.

In fact, the work must itself become like a person, separate from its father or mother. If Ong states that the audience must become a fiction which interacts on a personal level with the work itself, then the text becomes like an individual, conscious entity, engaging the reader in discussion, reflection and pure narrative. Hemingway disappears in the shadow of his own works: each of his novels becomes a living, breathing companion which converses intimately and amiably, if wistfully, with the reader. Although hubris often prevents this vital separation, the course of literary development as it stands today demands that authors separate themselves from their works and let the readers interact with the work as they are wont to.