What happens, then, if both individuality and specific names are absent from a work? Such is the case with the 9/11 Archive, which is presented not by explicitly credited individuals but by "Foundations" and "Centers" of authors. There is nothing from which to assume that the individual lives of the authors significantly impact the creation of the website. On the website’s homepage, the intention of the authors—including their choice of format—is stated with perfect clarity: “The September 11 Digital Archive uses electronic media to collect, preserve, and present the history of September 11, 2001 and its aftermath” (911digitalarchive.org).
In light of this, Barthes notion of "the scriptor" in The Death of the Author may be more applicable to the creators of the Archive. "The scriptor no longer bears within him passions, humors, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense dictionary from which he draws a writing that can know no halt" (Barthes 877). These scriptors are merely channeling existing ideas concerning 9/11. These ideas are not necessarily personal. They even provide a venue for anyone to add their own ideas via the e-mail section of the website, making it an ongoing, growing work, "a writing that can know no halt."
"To give a text an Author," Barthes insists, "is to impose a limit on that text" (877). The authorless 9/11 Archive, then, is an unlimited text, free to reach for meanings that might otherwise be constrained by an individual author's context.
One of the sentences I like in Vanessa's blog is "Specifically, an author supposedly signifies a written work through his or her name," and the word I like the best in the sentence is "supposedly," because it poses a challenge.
ReplyDeleteI tested the idea of an author putting his name to a work as the sole signifier of a piece, and I came up with a fair amount of contradictory evidence.
I think it's possible to identify a writer's work through tone, structure, usage, and sometimes through subject. If I left a copy of a P.J. O'Rourke (former Road and Track columnist turned commentator)article next to, say, the script from a skit on Saturday Night Live on a table or on a copier, without their by-lines, I contend that a passerby would be able to identify the script and deduce the group of authors, and that they would be able to discern that that O'Rourke article was not written by the same people. I think the same is true of say, Charles Dickens and Emily Bronte. Unless the exerpts were really esoteric, it wouldn't be difficult to discern a paragraph from one author is not from the text of the other. The gnarly sailor from Great Expectations would probably not be found wandering the moors in Wuthering Heights. Tone and setting would provide further clues for the reader.