The Matter of the Page: Essays in Search of Ancient and Medieval Authors

Introduction: Presenting the Author

introduction presenting the author More than four decades have now passed since Roland Barthes announced “The Death of the Author.”1 Others had anticipated this obituary, and many have repeated it, although precise emphases have varied: authorial intent is unrecoverable or irrelevant; meaning is constituted by readers, or by communities thereof; the literary text is an instantiation of the social text; any of a number of things, some of them conspicuously unauthored, may be read as texts, and even as literature; what we call an “author” is really our projection of the “authorfunction ” we require for the work of interpretation.2 I shall not rehearse the myriad ways in which these moves have been salutary and liberating, including for this scholar (and author!), born after Barthes’s essay and raised to keep his authors safely buried and his attention elsewhere. If, however, this book makes an implicit case for resuscitating the author (or at least of reviving the habit of talking about her as a real person), it does so in the confidence that the author’s return, at this point, is scarcely likely to make us forget what we learned during her death. Why do I feel a need to bring her back, here and now? The germ of this book lies in the many years I spent living with an artist, from whom I learned that making art is a strange and beautiful thing, even as my education as a scholar seemed to leave me with fewer and fewer ways to talk about the strangeness and beauty of that making. Once the cigarette smoke had cleared 3 b and the canvas had dried, did those days, weeks, months of effort really no longer exist or matter? It was, perhaps, inevitable that I would be drawn, in my own simultaneous work on ancient literature, to the scenes of material struggle sometimes embedded there, like this one from the Roman poet Persius, whose author-function awakens after a night of hard drinking, needs to vomit but only manages to burp, and then tries to write: Iam liber et positis bicolor membrana capillis inque manus chartae nodosaque venit harundo. Tum querimur crassus calamo quod pendeat umor. Nigra sed infusa vanescit sepia lympha; dilutas querimur geminet quod fistula guttas. O miser inque dies ultra miser, hucine rerum venimus? Okay, got a book. And parchment (hair side yellow, flesh side white). Plus papyrus. And a knotted reed-pen. Damn! The ink clogs, hangs from the nib. Add a little water: Damn! There goes the black, here come thin drops, in twos. You pathetic loser, more pathetic every day: Has my life really come to this?3 I could not ignore my living painter, and increasingly, I felt I should not ignore my ancient poets, who likewise filled my days with such conspicuous evidence that, without their working, there would be no work. “This one was one who was working,” as Gertrude Stein says (repeatedly) in her 1909 “Portrait” of Picasso, a copy of which was given to me, incidentally, by an always working, always out-of-work actor-friend.4 “[T]he birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author,” concludes Barthes; all we have to lose are “God and his hypostases.”5 On its own terms, this would not be a bad bargain. But the liberating rejection of the author as an authority—indeed, as Authority Himself—seems inadvertently to have cost us something more down-to-earth: the author as “one who was working,” like Stein herself, who here as elsewhere is really working on her self-portrait as an artist. It is the latter kind of author rather than the former for whom the present book proposes to search: not the author as God, but the author as writer. And to be clear from the outset, I mean this word primarily in its most literal sense, for we shall go looking for the writer first and foremost in those moments in which literature seeks to preserve (some might say, “to stage,” and so be it) the scene of its own material creation. I shall endeavor to 4 i n t r o d u c t i o n b show that this is something far smaller—and infinitely more important—than a messy desk or studio: it is a sometimes split-second glimpse of what it means to make and...