In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

boundary 2 29.1 (2002) 177-222



[Access article in PDF]

The Return of the Author:
Privacy, Publication, the Mystery Novel, and The Moonstone

Sundeep Bisla

[Figure]

1

What might it mean to me for you to be reading these words? This mystery deserving a good deal more scrutiny than it has thus far received in literary criticism, this essay will be sticking with, more or less, this particular question for its duration. To propose and immediately dismiss one possibility: You certainly could not be said to be invading my privacy. Were I to accuse you of such, you would be justified in pointing out that it was an "invasion" that I myself had invited as a result of having submitted my manuscript to boundary 2 in the first place. If I had wanted, with regard to my thoughts on the author, to keep my privacy intact, it would have been better for me not to have published. For entering any type of "public domain" would seem to be itself so miraculously self-undermining an act as to justify the significant erosion, if not indeed the complete stripping away, of the claim to certain essentially identity-based—and therefore seemingly inalienable—rights, such as the right to privacy and the common-law right to perpetual ownership of one's unpublished manuscript. [End Page 177]

This is a difficult tightrope to walk: I want to be known but yet I do not want to be dispersed. Even while I willingly submit my manuscript, it has to be admitted that I cannot be assumed to intend to alienate my identity in full or to relinquish all claim to it. On the other hand, would it be much of an identity were I to keep it solely to myself? I might point out that had I not published you would never have known that I had any thoughts in this area; indeed, given the difficulty of differentiating oneself from the general populace, you could very likely never have known of me at all. This is a paradox we are all too familiar with in its more sensational guise in this day and age of the ubiquitous tabloid image of the Hollywood celebrity caught on a public street scowling at the photographer engaged in taking the candid shot. But that photograph, of course, represents merely an extreme example of the fraught negotiations with privacy taking place for us all everywhere and anywhere today—in the workplace, in the home, on the Internet.

Another, less obvious example of these negotiations with privacy—indeed, one that carries a surprising degree of significance with regard to the issue of a Right to Privacy—is the image of the mystery writer at the keyboard typing away at yet one more story written in that style we apparently cannot get enough of these days. The relationship between mystery writing and privacy stems from their common origin in mid-nineteenth-century cultural and legal discourse, specifically in the right of the author to keep the manuscript back from publication. Both, in their separate ways, are cultural manifestations of a worry about the individual's place within society, a worry that has, since the Victorian Age, only grown in significance, until, with the advent of the Internet and its rapid proliferation of outlets for publication, it has become one of the more critical issues facing our present-day legislators.

I will map out here a particular strain of discourse that views the author as creator, that strain having, for the last two centuries, recurred in various guises. The mystery novel is one prominent form taken by this recurrence. The author-as-creator's taking on of this particular genre, I will be arguing, is ascribable to a decision by the House of Lords in 1774 that denied the claims of the author-as-creator, replacing them with the claims of the author-as-disseminator and thereby bringing into being a situation in which the only safe place left for the manifestation of the author in toto (the one who would be manifesting...

pdf

Share