{"id":89,"date":"2018-04-24T23:37:21","date_gmt":"2018-04-25T03:37:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209\/?p=89"},"modified":"2018-04-24T23:44:15","modified_gmt":"2018-04-25T03:44:15","slug":"consider-the-author","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209\/uncategorized\/consider-the-author\/","title":{"rendered":"Consider the Author \u2022 Miranda Wang"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have been guilty of skipping the preface. And the foreword to the preface. And the prologue to the foreword to the preface. It only recently occurred to me that a school of literary theorists, headed by Wimsatt and Beardsley, are ready to formally clear me of blame: The New Critics are not interested in authors\u2019 intentions or their biographical details. They believe that the intentions of authors are elusive, and moreover, irrelevant. Anything a text says is there in the text, already. Wimsatt and Beardsley are prodding at the how-to of reading\u2014should we poke around authors\u2019 private correspondence and life history as we read, or would doing so distract from, or worse yet, obscure the meaning of the text itself? On this matter, let me chide my idleness: I hope to reenact how a text\u2014David Foster Wallace\u2019s 2005 commencement speech delivered at Kenyon College, This Is Water<\/em>, in this case\u2014can have a ghostly, mitigated author buried within it, and why knowing more about authors and their intentions would help us get at readings that would otherwise escape us. [1]<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"

A bandanna-free David Foster Wallace, Kenyon College, 2005<\/p><\/div>\n

It will prove helpful to begin with the intuition that inspired the Wimsatt Law forbidding readers from considering authorial intents\u2014namely, that intentions are tricky to nail down. Careful observers will find that we never had access to authors\u2019 intentions, merely their statements<\/em> of intentions, at best. Mediated by language, these statements inherit the problematic nature of all writing: they are \u201cregulated less by the content [they signify] than by the very nature of the signifier\u201d (Foucault 116). Free of their object referent, the statements could well have very little say on author\u2019s true intensions; what we can be sure of is that intentions are only ever available to us in a state corrupted by projections of biases from the language\u2019s user. The consequence of this observation is ubiquitous yet often glossed over. This Is Water<\/em> deems it significant enough to meditate, on a literal level, how differing interpretations, colored by self-centeredness, can stem from one formulation. At one point in the text is a \u201cdidactic little story\u201d of an atheist and a religious man, the former of which is saved in a blizzard by a couple Eskimos. Where the religious sees proof of God\u2019s existence, the atheist knows only \u201call that happened was that a couple Eskimos just happened to come wandering by\u201d (Wallace 16-23). The text spells out the obvious take-away: \u201cIt\u2019s easy to run this story through a kind of standard liberal arts analysis: The exact same experience can mean two completely different things to two different people, given those people\u2019s two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience\u201d (Wallace 24). At the same time, it is hesitant to announce even such a relativist reading definitive, accusing the analysis of assuming that \u201chow we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice, of conscious decision\u201d (Wallace 28). The point here is simply that, like how religious orientation and education background can prefigure individual interpretation to some degree, statements of intents is a fair playground for prejudice\u2014authors unintentionally spin their intentions. Therefore, \u201cintensions\u201d have no business being taken at face value, as the final word for how a text is to be understood.<\/p>\n

A related but different thesis involves projections from readers\u2019 end of the communication. If it holds that representations are chained by biases, it must also hold that \u201caspects of an individual, which we designate as an author\u2026 are projections\u2026 of our way of handling texts\u201d (Foucault 127). Who, or what we commonly deem as \u201cthe author\u201d is no more than \u201cthe configuration of the author\u201d (Foucault 127). Here it is not hard to imagine a sense in which authors die in writing\u2014their communicative abilities lamed, their messages truncated. More interestingly, writing is not only \u201cthe sacrifice of life itself; it is a voluntary<\/em> [emphasis added] obliteration of the self\u201d (Foucault 117). The speaker of This Is Water<\/em> is blatantly aware that his or her persuasion is limited. The text is interjected three times by utterances along the lines of \u201cbut if you\u2019re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise old fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don\u2019t be. I am not the wise old fish\u201d (Wallace 6-7). Rather, it is dutifully acknowledged that \u201cyou get to consciously decide what has meaning and what hasn\u2019t\u201d (Wallace 95)\u2014that readers must figure into the interpretation of the text.<\/p>\n

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But I cannot honestly toll the death knell on authors, not seriously. They are not totally wiped out on so many levels. One might argue that an image of Wallace is too readily available: he leaves \u201ca legacy composed not only of his novels and essays, and of pieces written about him\u2014official obituaries, elegies, and scholarly papers\u2014but also of a vast and growing system of Web sites, e-mails, message boards, and blogs\u2014and comments on those blogs, and comments on those comments, ad infinitum\u201d (Krajeski). I would argue it is not coincidence that for an author whose work is strewn with footnotes, Wallace had a similarly annotated life. He worked with mediums whose author is hard to kill. Pause on the particularity of the commencement address as a literary form, and the difference in potency of the author\u2019s presence is apparent. Unlike fiction, where authors orchestrate characters, the speaker of This Is Water<\/em> aligns with Wallace the public writer persona I construct. It is a longish interview session of \u201cSay, what do you have to tell the bright, young minds?\u201d The Wimsattian readers will have to confront the \u201cproblematic nature of the word \u2018work\u2019\u201d\u2014or, \u201chow a work can be extracted from the millions of traces left by an individual after his death\u201d (Foucault 119). This Is Water<\/em> abounds with instances where the speaker names his or her designs: \u201cObviously, you can think of it whatever you wish. But please don\u2019t dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon\u201d (Wallace 126-127). Even when concession is made to readers\u2019 interpretive freedom, communicative power is not annihilated. The Wimsatt-minded would maintain that even in non-fictional writing, claims made by the \u201cI\u201d of the text is to be attributed to an anonymous addresser, but I would be kidding with myself to give that in the speech\u2019s inception form, delivered on a \u201cdry and lovely morning\u201d (Wallace 10), its addresser is not be the writer Wallace persona I keep painting. In our case, at least, I am comfortable pronouncing the author not quite dead.<\/p>\n

In fact, it is seriously questionable whether the hardly feasible Wimsattian project is desirable, at all: Underpinning true authorial intents is impossible, but the study of authorial images is not harmful nor unfruitful. While it is true that learning about what authors say they meant cannot place meaning in the text that isn\u2019t there in the first place, that such information has no independent authority, the image we have can serve as clues pointing to features within the text previously unnoticed, or even unnoticeable. So long as an analysis is supported with textual evidence, there is no good reason to exile statements of intents. Indeed, there is good reason not<\/em> to be a Wimsattian. Investigation of authors\u2019 images adds \u201cdiscursive properties\u2026 irreducible to the rules of grammar and logic\u201d (Foucault 137). The close reading Wimsatt and Beardsley propose is a closed reading, terrified of proliferation of text. But multiplicity is hardly daunting; it often makes the text an awful lot more interesting. Allow me to bring in a sample of Wallace\u2019s remarks and biography outside of This Is Water<\/em> in piecewise fashion, and stage how they inform the search for textual evidence revealing new readings:<\/p>\n

Exhibit A: Like all authors, Wallace is frequently asked in interviews to touch on the design of his work. The gist of his replies is something two-fold: \u201cReally good fiction\u2026 [would] find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it\u201d (McCaffery 26). With this in mind, we discover the fundamental matters of writing for Wallace in the background of This Is Water<\/em>. There is in the text a detailed account of a tediously mundane supermarket trip that exemplifies the \u201crat race\u201d (Wallace 123) of adult American life. The text follows up with, \u201c[t]he point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in\u201d (Wallace 76): \u201c[Y]ou get to decide<\/em> how you\u2019re going to try to see it\u201d (Wallace 94). Taking note of how the text reconstructs \u201cwhat\u2019s dreadful\u201d in an attempt to \u201cmove people\u201d (McCaffery 32), This Is Water<\/em> is no longer dealing only with solipsism and compassion; it is also grappling with the question of how to write.<\/p>\n

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Still from a short created by The Glossary, inspired by This Is Water<\/p><\/div>\n

Exhibit B: On how to achieve his two-fold ambition, Wallace commented, \u201c[r]eally good work probably comes out of a willingness to\u2026 sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. \u2026 Maybe it\u2019s as simple as trying to make the writing more generous and less ego-driven\u201d (McCaffery 50-51). Suddenly it is not so difficult to hear a similar ring in This Is Water<\/em>: when the text appeals to the ability \u201cto care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over\u201d (Wallace 120), we begin to wonder if the text can be extended to deliberate on the egos of authors and their \u201csort of\u201d dead status. More on his method, Wallace revealed a deviation from his earlier style: \u201cThe parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever almost made me die\u201d (Lipsky 174). This sentiment is, again, echoed in the commencement speech: \u201cProbably the most dangerous thing about an academic education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract thinking\u201d (Wallace 48). It is unsurprising that a Wallace scholar refers to biography in a footnote when he accredits \u201cWallace\u2019s more negative orientation\u201d for inspiring a shift for \u201ca relatively optimistic ethos\u201d in Wallace\u2019s successors (Konstantinou 106). The little piece of interview functions as the tipster for finding textual traces, which eventually informs a study of thematic modification.<\/p>\n

Exhibit C (and this one is hard to ignore): What happens to This Is Water<\/em> when we let in the fact that Wallace suffered depression and committed suicide three years after the speech? What of report that linked his dwindling final state with his suspension of an antidepressant, out of suspicion that it was \u201cinterfering with his creative evolution\u201d (Max)? The water churns; the image is now one of a martyr for literature, a patron-saint of the tortured genius, a celebrity writer dude. Let us revisit the supermarket scene: \u201cand of course there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the ADHD kids who all block the aisle, and you have to grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by, and eventually, finally, you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren\u2019t enough checkout lanes open\u201d (Wallace 70-71). The unflaggingly funny and warm address now takes on edges of chilling-in-hindsight darkness as we peer through the \u201cobsessive, recursive, exhausting, and pathologically self-aware prose style\u201d (Scott). When the text insists that the \u201ccapital-T Truth\u201d of life \u201cis about making it to thirty, or maybe even fifty, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head\u201d (Wallace 130), we now hear Wallace addressing a ghostly self. The suicide throws open the debate of whether his death defeats his cause\u2014does what might be considered his personal \u201cfailure\u201d at his project undermine all its value? Or, is there a sense in which he succeeded, executing his principle of sacrificing for readers all too well? These questions we would lose, were we Wimsattian readers. Some critics, despite their \u201cfear\u2026 that Wallace\u2019s work will forever be read through the way that he died\u201d, deem it impossible to fully understand Wallace\u2019s last and unfinished novel \u201cwithout reckoning in what Wallace was feeling and thinking about writing and about himself as a writer at the time he wrote it\u201d (Cohen 59). I would not say that this reading is the \u201cfull\u201d reading, or even the \u201cfuller\u201d reading, but I am ready to consider the additional insights into the book Wallace\u2019s life sheds light on.<\/p>\n

\u201cThink of the old clich\u00e9 about the mind being \u2018an excellent servant but a terrible master.\u2019 \u2026 It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms nearly always shoot themselves in\u2026 the head<\/em>\u201d (Wallace 56, 58). The publisher of this booklet I quote from, when stretching This Is Water<\/em> to fill 138 pages, found the liberty to remove the line that follows in the original speech: \u201cThey shoot the terrible master\u201d. The edit\u2019s defendants claim that \u201cany mention of self-annihilation in Wallace’s work… now has a blast radius that obscures everything around it\u201d (Bissell), and that the removal preserves the original message. What I see, here, is a baseless executive decision: I am skeptical that the editors could distinguish the speech\u2019s \u201coriginal meaning\u201d in light of Wallace\u2019s new image any better than the next reader. Their crazed obsession with the \u201coriginal meaning\u201d is such that they even chopped at the text. This fear of diverging readings is quite contradictory, when we think about it, to their starting claim that language is independent of its object of reference as well as its speaker. In the wake of a case where the death of the author is made all too literal, we find tethered to the text a ghost-shaped author, who surrenders the authoritative say on what a work \u201cis supposed to mean\u201d, but haunts it, nonetheless, bound and inseparable to the artifice. As long as I treat authors as sites of inquiry, critics or editors will not succeed to pre-select for me what I may or may not know, in the hopes of funneling my understanding to fit theirs. Does it matter that Wallace\u2019s email handle was \u201cocapmycap@…\u201d? After all, who can lay claim to ever pinning down anyone\u2019s drives: \u201cMy Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still\u201d (Whitman). The point here is not that you must<\/em> consider the author; effective criticism is not about dogmas. To use Wallace\u2019s words, I\u2019m only asking that you be \u201caware enough to give yourself a choice\u201d (Wallace 89).[2]<\/a><\/p>\n

Notes<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> My approach is indebted to Michel Foucault, \u201cWhat Is an Author?\u201d<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> This essay was read by Jessica Zong.<\/p>\n

Works Cited<\/p>\n

Cohen, Sameul. \u201cTo Wish to Try to Sing to the Next Generation: Infinite Jest<\/em>\u2019s History.\u201d The Legacy of David Foster Wallace<\/em>, edited by Samuel Cohen and Lee Konstantinou, University of Iowa Press, 2012.<\/p>\n

Foucault, Michel. \u201cWhat Is an Author?\u201d Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews.<\/em> Cornell University Press, 1980.<\/p>\n

Konstantinou, Lee. \u201cNo Bull: David Foster Wallace and Postironic Belief.\u201d The Legacy of David Foster Wallace<\/em>, edited by Samuel Cohen and Lee Konstantinou, University of Iowa Press, 2012.<\/p>\n

Krajeski, Jenna. \u201cThis Is Water.\u201d New Yorker<\/em>, September 19, 2008, newyorker.com\/books\/page-turner\/this-is-water<\/a>. Accessed April 23, 2018.<\/p>\n

Max, D. T. \u201cThe Unfinished.\u201d New Yorker<\/em>, March 9, 2009, newyorker.com\/magazine\/2009\/03\/09\/the-unfinished<\/a>. Accessed April 23, 2018.<\/p>\n

Scott, A. O. \u201cThe Best Mind of His Generation.\u201d New York Times<\/em>, September 20, 2008, nytimes.com\/2008\/09\/21\/weekinreview\/21scott.html<\/a>. Accessed April 23, 2018.<\/p>\n

Wallace, David Foster. \u201cAn Expanded Interview with David Foster Wallace.\u201d Interview by Larry McCaffery, 1993. Conversations with David Foster Wallace<\/em>, edited by Stephen J. Burn, University Press of Mississippi, 2012.<\/p>\n

Wallace, David Foster. \u201cThe Lost Years and Last Days of David Foster Wallace.\u201d Interview by David Lipsky, 2008. Conversations with David Foster Wallace<\/em>, edited by Stephen J. Burn, University Press of Mississippi, 2012.<\/p>\n

Wallace, David Foster. This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life.<\/em> Little, Brown and Company, 2009.<\/p>\n

Whitman, Walt. \u201cO Captain! My Captain!\u201d Leaves of Grass.<\/em> Philadelphia, David McKay, 1891.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have been guilty of skipping the preface. And the foreword to the preface. And the prologue to the foreword to the preface. It only recently occurred to me that a school of literary theorists, headed by Wimsatt and Beardsley, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1944,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-89","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1944"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":96,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89\/revisions\/96"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}