Return of the Dead Author

In 1968, Roland Barthes declared the death of the Author and the birth of the Reader. The (post)structuralist's onslaught on agency has thrown into question the humanistic certainties of biography and literary authority. Intellectual developments in psychoanalysis and literary theory have meanwhile signaled the collapse of the unified subject and the need to challenge authority by stressing the slipperiness of language and meaning. “Writing,”or ecriture, is seen as slippery and evasive of any one stable meaning which could be attributed to any one author(ity). The notion of authority itself, with its investment in Being and Presence, is subjected to the most relentless scrutiny. Studies of the role of the reader have multiplied. Nonetheless, the author has never gone away. The new ethical criticism, as Lawrence Buell has pointed out, tends to argue for the importance of “authoredness,”— i.e., “to favor recuperation of authorial agency in the production of texts, without ceasing to acknowledge that texts are also in some sense socially constructed”(12).

Lawrence’swork isparticularly resistant to any reading that dismisses the importance of authorial intention, given that his intensions have been a recurrent topic of legal discourse since the banning of The Rainbow in 1915. The metaphors

governing Lawrence’s criticism had always been author-centric. In fact, Lawrence himself had set this trend. He did not go along with the impersonality theories

present in the modernist period. The techniques developed by such writers as Joseph Conrad and James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, were ones designed far more to disguise or conceal the personality of the author than to reveal it. When Stephen Deadalus speaks of the role of the artist in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, it is in terms of the removal of the creator from what he has created: “The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails”(221). Indeed, for Lawrence, the value of fiction cannot rest only in its expression of the author’s self-indulgent fantasies. But on the other hand, Lawrence did put so much of

himself in his novels that there was a strong sense of authorial presence in much of his writing. Critics have found it oddly difficult or inappropriateto try to separate“the man who suffersand themind which creates”since Lawrence himself never fully accepted the theories of aesthetic autonomy promoted in his lifetime by some

modernist writers. Undeniably, if the personal is sometimes artistically damaging to Lawrence, it is also a vital source of his greatest strength.

These things said, authorial presence is by no means easy to pin down in Lawrence’s fiction. While opposing the theory of aesthetic autonomy, Lawrence nevertheless moves beyond the Romantics and locates himself in the modern (or even postmodern) world. Lawrence himself claimed in several of his essays and letters the ability of a text to speak with its own voice despite the intentions so often ascribed to the author: “Theartistusually setsout—or used to—to point a moral and adorn a tale. Thetale,however,pointstheotherway,asarule”(SCAL 2). By proposing the two “blankly opposing morals, the artist’s and the tale’s”(SCAL 2), Lawrence implies that however deliberately a writer orders his or her words in accordance with a moral or intellectual purpose, the activity of “writing”will be at odds with that purpose. Following Nietzsche’s analysis of “the basic presuppositions of the

metaphysics of language,”Lawrence calls into question the presuppositions in

language of “unity, permanence, substance, cause, thinghood, being”(P II 482). The

“I”as a “speaking subject”is a convention: “If I say that I am, this is false and evil.

I am not”(P II 384). Therefore, there is no self-presence as a guarantor of meaning.

Lawrence’s motto—“Never trust the artist. Trust the tale”— suggests that language is powerfully wayward, ultimately eluding the control of any “master.” In spite of (or because of) that, language can provide wealth greater than any writer can consciously exploit or any critic can exhaust. For Lawrence, the author who recognizes that a tale may tell a truth the teller does not know or cannot tell is the author who would strive to tell truths his/her tale could not contain. With this recognition, Lawrence makes himself vulnerable as an author in his writing in a way that cannot be separated from his most serious creative purposes and achievements.

The narrative of Women in Love is precisely this kind of “de-authorizing”

enunciation. In a sense, the fact that Birkin doesn’tsucceed in convincing or persuading the other characters in the novel might be seen as a reflection on or a relativization of Lawrence’s power as a prophet and teacher. Birkin’s ideas are usually articulated with reservations and qualifications into a context in which their meanings and receptions may be modified. Ursula effectively reduces Birkin to absurdity by instantly spotting the insecurity underlying his insistence. She focuses on Birkin’sinability to practicewhathepreaches: “You don’ttrustyourself. You don’tfully believeyourselfwhatyou aresaying”(WL144). Gerald is similarly not persuaded by Birkin’sarguments—while revealing himself to be curious and

interested in Birkin’s ideas, Gerald remains aloof, detached, and finally unconvinced.

Like Ursual, he seems able to detect where Birkin’sutterancesareassertiverather thanauthoritative:“Butto Gerald itsoundsasifhewereinsistentratherthan confident”(WL 235). In a word, the effectiveness of Birkin’sideasis played off

against the reactions he provokes in his interlocutors.

Yet, the problem presented by Birkin is that, if we are not persuaded by his dogmatic pronouncement, what else is there to persuade us? Given the importance he attributes to authorial energy, it is less likely that Lawrence is really so humble about his talents or his role as an author that he hopes his critics will save the truth of his own art from the lie of his metaphysics. He is after all the acolyte of intuition and mystical lapsing from consciousness in a period when that mystical being once known as“the author”has sickened, failed and faded. Indeed, Women in Love “is pervaded by an expressive frustration and a sense of its own vulnerability”(Bell 1992:

100), yet it should not be ignored that Lawrence still “authorizes”Birkin’s

vulnerability in articulation by offering him responsive interlocutors, among whom Ursula is the most effective one. Accordingly, in effect, Lawrence’s interest in the ruptures, contradictions, absences, and meaninglessness which betray consciousness, is paradoxically countered by a strong urge to control. Put another way, it is as though Lawrence’s anti-authoritarian aesthetics emerges out of a need to counter his own authoritarian tendencies. Lawrence sees the ego’s mastery to be a horrifying mental tyranny, and yet it is a tyranny he himself is guilty of.

This is inextricably related to how Lawrence posits a relation between the author and his work. Like Eliot and Joyce, Lawrence also believed that the work of art must be considered separately from the personality and prejudices of the artist.

And yet, while admiring Cezanne’s attempt to withhold “personal emotion”from the objects of his art, Lawrence did not equate this attitude with a relinquishing of contact.

Lawrence did follow some of the ideas of the artists in Women in Love to reflect on the nature and construction of their and his own art. Both Loerke and Gudrun reject the Romantic expressive theory of art which holds that art is the spontaneous

manifestation of the artist’s essential being. Yet they together push this to the

extreme by denying any connection between themselves and their art. For Loerke, as has been indicated above, the gap between word and thing, language and being, is a radical alienation. It is a position implicitly criticized by Birkin’s way of freedom, which maintains “proud individual singleness”but accepts at the same time “the obligation of the permanent connection with others”(WL 254). More akin to Birkin’s position than to that of Leoke’s, Lawrence holds a tentative and dynamic relation with his art work. The author’s world and the novel’s world are neither identical nor separable, but in a relation of creative dialectic.

On the above account, what Birkin’s “authorized vulnerability”has taught us is that human subject as language being is both constituted and constitutive. As a prophetic writer, Lawrence surely sees himself as someone who has a message and who would wish his works in some sense to change real lives. Nonetheless, for that reason, he has been often dismissed as a preacher whose art too often collapses under the weight of its teaching mission. In effect, as I hope I have made clear earlier on, Lawrence continually interrogates and contradicts himself in his narrative. He allows what he perceived as an external voice to intrude into his work to challenge the voice he identified with himself. Recent literary theory privileging the text is able to show that the message of his text cannot be divorced from the medium itself. On the other hand, it is inadequate to reverse a traditional master-slave relation between the subject and its language at the expense of authorial intention. While recognizing that conscious being is to certain extent constituted and determined by language,

Lawrence holds a position that is by no means that of passively lamenting man’s unhappy insertion into a language game. As a writer with a strong sense of mission, Lawrence saw that the way for him to change people was through writing (Ingram 17).

For him, though the authors, like all human subjects, are caught in the closet of articulation, they can initiate authorial beginnings (though never absolute) by

imaginatively doing things with words.²⁹ To employ the terms of Edward Said, Lawrence is the novelist who has construed “authority and molestation together as beginning conditions”(Said 83). The twin impulses behind the creation of the novel are tightly intertwined and not readily separated.

Therefore, the notion of author as an original creator with a unique voice cannot be simply discarded. What Roland Barthes’s essay is in fact presenting us with is the very author function it seemly seeks to eradicate. As a matter of fact, the coinage of

“the death of the author,”far from denying the authorial agency, refers (or should be regarded as referring) to the critique of the concepts of authorial originality and intentionality that have long been central to the humanist model which tends to ignore the signifying force of language and cultural discourses. It is in this sense that the thought of the thinkers mentioned above can inspire us—we are reminded that the question of ethical subjectivity does not arise outside of the self, but just from within it. It functions as a caution to evaluative processes, suggesting limits to the

processes. When Nietzsche finds, for example, that his work of transvaluing values is constituted by the values that he attacks, he can find no haven in neutrality or authority that will establish the value of his claims beyond question. A recoiling movement undercuts the questioning text as well as the questioned one. But subversiveness is neither a goal nor an ideal for the question of ethical subjectivity.

The point is to show that it is important to learn to ask questions in given

settings—i.e., to name things anew, to become alert to exclusions, to rethink what is ordinarily taken for granted, and to overhear what is usually drowned out by the predominant values. While recognizing that the subject is false and the terms used are flawed, Lawrence continues to write by relying upon a vocabulary and way of thinking which he nevertheless challenges and renews through an authorial

manipulation of his text. For Lawrence the writer, the goal of “questioning”ethical

subjectivity is to re-think, re-work, and re-write. What is questioned is not abandoned. What is questioned demands a “disturbed”return, one fraught with a sense of danger, worry, anxiety, and in Levina’s terms, “responsibility”.

NOTES

1 The humanist critics share a deep paradigmatic conviction that literature reveals humanity and that this is ethically good. Literary texts clarify the meaning of personas since they are centered on the human as traditionally understood: by stressing the moral goods of autonomy and responsibility, great books tell us how to live. They arguefor“thedemonstrablecapability offictionalliteratureto communicatetruth”(Freadman & Miller231).

2 Heidegger argues that Nietzsche’s treatment of art is the “reversal of Platonism”

(1979: 162). According to Heidegger, the choice of art over truth in Nietzsche’s work constitutes a “reversal of metaphysics”which signifies that art’s worth is to provide a better form of truth than the truth of philosophy and religion. Paul de Man challenges the Heideggerean reading of Nietzsche by emphasizing the

fundamental role played by rhetoric in Nietzsche’sattack on philosophy. De Man insiststhat“thefigurativestructureisnotonelinguisticmodeamong othersbut characterizeslanguageassuch”(1979: 105), and thus the seemingly eccentric, far-fetched, marginal or aberrant form of language have here become the essential characteristics of language. While Heidegger’s reductive reading of Nietzsche is too simplistic, De Man’s argument also raises some suspicion—if we don’t know the essence of truth, how can we know that a particular linguistic paradigm is what characterizes language as such?

3 For Habermas, the literary is a second-order form of discourse, language which cannot have a legitimate role either in intellectual critique or in the generation of forms of social life and value. In his latter work, Habermas has been more prepared to allow some limited value for the literary—he goes so far to admit that modernist literature and art, insofar as they are critical and innovatory, can disclose to us the experience of this world in new and defamiliarized ways (Habermas 1984:

236). However, he remains unconvinced by the claims that metaphor or narrative can or should have any serious part to play in the legitimate determination of social action or the acquisition of knowledge. The literary, according to Habermas, is finally to serve the rational discourse, rather than to question its self-identity.

4 Though in this study, I’ll from time to time quote passages from Lawrence’s

expository writing, I don’t mean to assume a consequential relationship between his metaphysical ideas and imaginative writing; i.e., I don’t think that Lawrence’s ideas pre-existed their imaginative expression. In fact, Lawrence himself claimed that his “pseudo-philosophy,”as he ironically called it, was “deduced”from his imaginative writings, which “come unwatched out of one’s pen”(FU 10).

Certainly, for Lawrence, his fiction remained the primary vehicle for the expression of his artistic vision, and he often undercuts or relativizes in his fiction what he proposes in his expository writings. Thus Daleski offers the caution that “it is wise to regard the expository writings not as laboratory reports on experiments successfully concluded but as signposts to a road which is finally traveled only in art. In those writings Lawrence clearly did not use the precise instruments of a philosopher, and it was only embodying his ideas in the ‘pure passionate

experience’of his art that he could hope to establish their validity”(1965:19).

Therefore, my use of Lawrence’s expository writing should be read dynamically and critically with his fictional writing.

5 Harpham also argues a new account of ethics not as a kind of philosophy or as a guide toaction,butasavariablefactorof“imperativity”immanentin language, analysis, narrative, and creation—i.e., as a conceptual base: “Thus ethical problems

constitute a theoretically endless chain, a chain of command in which command is always countermanded by alternatives whose recurrence resists the commands it calls forth. This resistance is inherited from the basic terms of ethical discourse, whose paradigm is the compromised binary. From is/ought, through

freedom/obligation, I/one, subjective/objective, integration/permeability,

universalism/communitarianism, and other relations yet to be explored, ethics is a garden of forking paths, a discourse of mitosis that urges all who will listen to become such gardens themselves, to assume the form of ethics”(1992: 48-9).

6 Miller also adopts the “window”analogy in the following argument: “The world appears green. This may be because we are wearing green glasses. But the world may really be green. There is no way to tell, since there is no way to take offtheglasses”(1990: 98).

7 Harpham suggests that Miller “makes no provision for the possibility that the competition among evaluative systems for the right to describe is eventually won.

He tries . . . to rule out morality, with its choices and particularities. Ethics may suspend choice, may resist settled determinations . . . . But non-philosophers may not have this luxury. They must be moral as well as ethical, must interpret as well asunderstand”(1987: 145).

8 Lawrence Buell makes much the same kind of argument in indicating that “the newer ethical criticism envisages reinvention not as free play or an assertion of power but as arising out of conscienceful listening”(12).

9 Here I don’t mean that Lawrence’s use of language remains unchanged in all his work. In fact, during the course of his approximately twenty-year writing career, Lawrence changes not once but many times in his writing style as well as in his ideas. Therefore, while discussing the textual play in his text, I’ll identify which work I am considering by paying careful attention to chronology to avoid the danger of generalization about this writer and his work.

10 Gilles Deleuze, in his 1967 study, Difference et repetition, adroitly places

difference in the post-Kantian context of repetition in order to avoid what he views as the pitfalls of Hegel’s and Heidegger’s philosophy of difference. Beginning at least with Plato, Deleuze argues, repetition is viewed as a secondary phenomenon, a simulacrum to be viewed with suspicion and mistrust. In the philosophy of

representation, the key moment is one of recognition that invokes the adequation of thought to certain hypotheses taken as a starting point (Deleuze 1994: 253-4).

Relying primarily on Nietzsche and the “eternal return”as a model that breaks with the philosophy of representation, Deleuze proposes that “the movement does not go from the hypothetical to the apodictic, but from the problematic to the question”

(255).

11 In another book, Martin Jay offers an exhaustive array of examples: Bataille’s celebration of the blinding sun and the acephalic body; Breton’s ultimate

disenchantment with the savage eye; Sartre’s depiction of the sadomasochism of the

“look”; Merleau-Ponty’s diminished faith in a new ontology of vision; Lacan’s disparagement of the ego produced by the mirror stage; Foucault’s strictures against the medical gaze and panoptic surveillance; Derrida’s double reading of the

“look”; Merleau-Ponty’s diminished faith in a new ontology of vision; Lacan’s disparagement of the ego produced by the mirror stage; Foucault’s strictures against the medical gaze and panoptic surveillance; Derrida’s double reading of the