In his article "The Death of the Author" Barthes describes the text not as "a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning... but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture... (the author's) only power is to mix writings" (876). Though Barthes may be offering up a rather extreme end of the structuralist argument in this contextualization of text in general, his notion of the "ready-formed dictionary, its words only explainable through other words" (877) finds a fitting example in Jonathan Safran Foer's newest work, Tree of Codes.
In this text (which can be sampled here), Safran takes an existing work- The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz- and literally cuts out words, connecting those left to create new sentences, a new story, a new book. Foer does literally what Barthes implies all authors do figuratively: he creates a "new" text using text that already exists.
On first hearing of Foer's newest endeavor, I felt skeptical. After all, if Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close seemed slantwise literary with its melee of fonts and pictures, then Tree of Codes- much moreso a mixtape- even further defies categorization. But after our discussion of Barthes today, I feel more inclined to accept these mix-and-matched novels as literature rather than misguided art projects. If we take Barthes at his word (pun intended?)- and I do- then the text inherently precedes the author, and Foer is truly a modern scribe in every sense of the word.
I had heard of Foer's project Tree of Codes and it reminds me of Austin Kleon's project called "Newspaper Blackout". Sample images can be seen here: http://www.austinkleon.com/category/newspaper-blackout-poems/
ReplyDeleteThe idea is very similar to Tree of Codes in that a person can take an existing text and by picking and choosing which words to appear or be erased, that person can create a new text or even poetry from the old text.
I think it's very interesting that you see the correlation between Barthe's idea that the author is never original and how Foer's and Kleon's projects take an unoriginal text and turns it into something original. I see another correlation between the literal application of constructing an original work from one preceding it and how that relates to our reading.
Foucault says that the author-function limits the reader's interpretation because more importance is placed on the idea of the author than on his text. In that context, do you see taking an already existing work as confining to the artist who wants to transform it into something new? For example, Foer's Tree of Codes will forever be linked to Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles. Does this support Foucault's claim that we live in a society which still believes that the author precedes the text?
I see Foer's Tree of Codes (and Kleon's "Newspaper Blackout") to be examples of how a text precedes the author; it seems that these authors very purposefully limited themselves to a single pre-existing work, perhaps to illustrate the very point that originality needn't cease to exist in such a highly contextualized space. And maybe also to prove that there is hope for the literary future, even at a time when creative licensing rights is floundering while pirating and mash-up art are more popular than ever.
ReplyDeleteNot sure about Kleon, but I know that Foer has received a lot of critical attention for his creative projects since Everything Is Illuminated was published in 2002. What's interesting to me is how the reception of these works really illustrates Foucault's supposition that "The author-function does not affect all discourses in a universal and constant way" (908). For instance, I think that if Tree of Codes had been Foer's first novel rather than his third, it would have been received with less attention qualifying than declaiming it.
And yes, I also think that the manner in which these texts have been received speaks volumes about our obsession with the persona of the author- we want to hear the authors explaining their texts, what it means to them to create a novel in this way, etc.; we just have to remember that, as Foucault says, "These aspects of an individual which we designate as making him an author are only a projection" (909)