Mihaela Ursa
“Babeş-Bolyai” University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
No Man’s Text:
Where Should the Author Go?
Abstract: The present text is a development of a series of suggestions that I made in my 2005 volume, entitled Scriitopia sau Ficţionalizarea subiectului auctorial în discursul teoretic (Writerutopia Or Fictionalising the Authorial Subject in Theoretical Discourse, Cluj: Editura Dacia), especially chapters “II.1. Re/authentication: the fictional author” and “III.5.a. Responsibility: the ethics of authoriality”. In Scriitopia, I was mostly concerned with assertions of the disappearance of the author and, consequently, with the methods and techniques involved in the author’s comeback. In this paper I investigate, with a special application on South-American authors such as Borges, some other aspects of the authorial relation: the intentional or non-intentional refusal of attribution, of one’s own name or identity, or even the refusal of writing itself, as well as the opposite allegation of authority over someone else’s writing or authorial presence. Jorge Luis Borges, Miguel de Cervantes, Enrique Vila-Matas, Fernando Pessoa and Guilleragues are the authors invoked in support of my analysis.
Keywords: Authorship; Real / Fictional Author; Borges; Cervantes; Pessoa; Vila-Matas; Guilleragues; Possible-Worlds.
A Literary Hoax: The Disappearance of the Author
The idea of the author’s disappearing suffers from an argumentative deficit. How can one claim that the author is dead, when texts and works keep appearing and being published, apparently written by somebody, or when interviews with authors show us that they are – if not entirely optimistic – at least very much alive and kicking? How can anyone’s contention be that a text can generate itself or that a text is completely and utterly autonomous, when some author’s name always certifies on the cover that an attribution is made there, that a certain possession or proclamation of property is being reinforced. I pretend not to see the real stake of the claim that the author is dead and I purposely mix the terms and levels of the authorial debate, in order to stress the whole magnitude of the deficit that I have mentioned above, especially in contexts apparently supporting “the hoax” of the authorial disappearance. There are indeed particular texts, where the author literally finds various ways of “escaping” his own creation. Still, the disappearance of the author is claimed in debatable terms, mostly invoked in theoretical texts, where it mainly serves to a redefinition of the author as function (Foucault), position (Derrida) or relationship (Barthes). On the other hand, an entirely different literature of “the authorial disappearance” gives new meaning to the phrase.
It is certain that any text affirms an author. One way or the other, it gives away a certain form of authorial presence, however fictive and invented in the course of reading it may be – although the historically determined identity of its author is not necessary for the coming to being of this fictional presence. The textual solution to the author’s lack of scriptural affirmation is the invention of a fictional author. This intuition feeds the nominal techniques of pseudonymy or heteronomy, so promising and rewarding to writers of all cultural ages.
Heteronyms: acting, lying and telling the truth
Heteronyms complement different types of authors. To the histrionic one, heteronyms offer a theoretically infinite gallery of identity masks or substitutes. The first value of heteronomy is, therefore, dramatizing, role-playing. Wearing one mask or another, the writer can pretend to be someone else while remaining, all the time, himself. As such, he playfully understands otherness as a role. A second value of heteronomy is compensative: the artist who hetero-names himself may do so in order to escape too fix an identity, or too burdening an attachment to one cause or another. The same mechanism is activated by external constraints or threats that prevent his free expression. Otherness becomes almost an opposable term, the absolute Other of a well established Identical. Being another one means, in this secondary context, being an entirely different one from a referential id. Still, I only consider the third value of heteronomy to be authentic, entirely genuine. This particular form of hetero-naming is entirely about the disappearance of the author, that is about his going away to a textual place from where he may never come back.
When Fernando Pessoa uses heteronomy (becoming Alvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis, Coelho Pacheco, Bernardo Soares, Jean Seul, Antonio Mora, Alexander Search, Charles Robert Anon, Raphael Baldaia, or even his own claimed master, Alberto Caeiro, as well as Baron de Teive or Vicente Guedes), he does so self-destructively, most probably to reduce his own voice to silence – a silence that must have seemed to him much more overwhelming and tempting at the time than any form of utterance in Fernando Pessoa’s voice.
Baron de Teive, “the suicidal heteronym”, reinvented by Enrique Vila-Matas, is one of “the No writers”, composing The Education of the Stoic only in order to speak, as we find out in the subtitle of his only manuscript, “on the impossibility to practice a superior art”. To the Baron de Teive, Fernando Pessoa is no longer a reference, since he is completely another one, to the annihilation of any comparability criterion, of any referential relationship. It is here where the heteronym displays its real otherness.
Writing about love: a woman or a man?
What if we have no indication of heteronyms being used? Does the projected fiction of an author influence in any way how we read a certain text? Let’s take a canonic example: the possible author of the five Portuguese letters, published in 1669 France. The literary convention they obey is the epistolary, a text of confessing one’s love to a lost and apparently treacherous lover. The letters have been attributed either to a Mariana da Costa Alcoforado, who the scholars of the 18-th century believe to be the author, or, according to Saint-Simon and most of the ulterior researchers of the text, to their “editor” and “French translator”, Guilleragues. In the first case, the letters are “true”, at least “biographic”, Mariana Alcoforado puts her own love and despair in the text, borrows her own voice to the discourse. In the second one, they are rather a proto-romance, the truth allegations are mere narrative conventions and the author is a man who tries to think and write like a woman in love. Although, in the history of interpretations, Guilleragues wins the authorial dispute, the text is still attached to Mariana Alcoforado’s name (s. the Romanian editions, among others). Why is it more appealing to believe the emotional proof, than the scientific, narratological one? Why is it easier to let Guilleragues flee from his own text in order to let his female character, the almost-nun, deeply and desperately in love, take hold of the authorial place as well? Maybe because a text about a weeping woman in love, took in by the nuns, though always kept at he gates, on the limen, who writes to her lover about her deserted heart and life, is easier to attribute to a female author. There seems to be an unwritten demand for consistency between the text and its author: a female (fictional) writer genuinely confessing her heartache must take the place of the (real) male author pretending to know how a woman feels and writes. There is a fictional (not fictive!) replacement: the identity of the author is nothing but a response to a fictional request of consistency. Guilleragues must have known everything about the importance of non-contradicting the public’s expectations, and so he chose to remove himself from the authorial claim.
Master and servant in the interpretative relationship
Interpreting literature, every critic is a reader of Guilleragues: the interpreter must accept the fictional author and, in order to proceed further, has to invent Guilleragues himsef. There is a treacherous translation present in any interpretation of literature: a translation of the authorial language, discourse and presence in the language, discourse and fiction of a presence. It is, after all, a question of fictional mechanics. It all starts – so the history of criticism says – with an act of duplication: an ancient manuscript is copied and, eventually, translated. We should not be surprised, than, by the power and frequency of a certain phantasm in our theoretical imaginary: the phantasm of an interpretation that is identical to its original text, an interpretation that is still a hermeneutic success and a literal copy of the primary manuscript.
This phantasm occupies the centre of more than one Borgesian text. In The Universal History of Infamy, for instance, Borges reinvents history. In here, history becomes the greatest manuscript of all, to be copied accordingly. Except the copier is intoxicated with the power of textual alteration, since he knows the alteration of the great text will automatically lead to the alteration of “reality”. What seems to be a more or less textual playing with factual data becomes an act of lucid re-invention of the world. Still, the phantasm of a new creation through interpretation, identical copy of a former one, makes its clearest appearance in Pierre Menard, the author of Don Quixote, from 1941.
The text fictionally investigates the author-related issues of authority and responsibility, but also of criticism, since Pierre Menard is convinced that censuring and praising are “sentimental operations that have nothing in common with criticism”. An involuntary reminder of the Guilleragues case is the multiple folding of Menard’s legacy in an intricate net of female permits: baronesses and countesses seem to have the ultimate decision rights over Menard’s manuscripts. His visible works recommend the character as a collector, his invisible ones speak about a copyist who found the secret of originality. At the end of an excruciating effort, whose traces are always erased and destroyed, Borges’ character becomes the incontestable author of chapters nine and thirty-eight of the first part of Don Quixote and a fragment of chapter twenty-two. His stake is neither the writing of a “contemporary Quixote”, nor mere duplication in a copy, but producing the same pages that Miguel de Cervantes wrote in his turn. As one should expect, nothing works as long as Pierre Menard tries to be Cervantes, repeating every second of his biography. Only remaining entirely Pierre Menard can he succeed to produce the most awaited for text which, though verbally identical with the one of Cervantes, is still completely original, “infinitely richer” and “much more subtle” than Cervantes’ Don Quixote. What did change, factually?
The first different thing is, of course, the act of reading. The end of Borges’ short story speaks about “a new technique”, meant to better and enrich the stuffy and “rudimentary” art of reading: the technique of deliberate anachronism and of mistaken attribution. This is why the most important variable becomes, ones again, the name of the author. Is this single alteration so powerful as to modify an entire fictional universe? Apparently, this lesson on the role of attribution will prove itself crucial for artistic experimentalists such as Andy Warhol or Marcel Duchamp, who will claim the transformation of the simplest most usual things into art on grounds of their signature alone.
Pierre Menard c’est moi
Pierre Menard is convinced that every person must be capable of every idea and even predicts a future attribution of any text to every one of us, as a proof of this capacity. The interpretative performance aims to virtually reconstruct any possible text as one’s own. The literality of such a reinvention is only matched by its originality by means of an author’s name, always wrongly attributed and yet rightly reinforced for the sake of the act of reading itself.
In the second part of Miguel de Cervantes’ novel, Don Quixote finds himself in the role of the reader: he becomes the receiver of his own story. He is far from being flattered, although this should please his desire of matching and exceeding the glory of the Arthurian knights for posterity. Rather, Don Quixote is extremely suspicious to the transformation of his “reality” into “a book”. This is why his first interest is towards the authorial responsibility of “telling the truth”. No axiological or aesthetic terms enter his motivation; he is not at all interested whether his book is “good” or “bad”. This is no wonder, since we already know he treats literature as life pattern, as ontological model, completely unable of perceiving the gratuitous nature of fiction, the conventional nature of literature. As such, he is completely unable to sign the fictional pact. As long as he questions the truth value of the book of which he is the protagonist, Don Quixote does not admit its fictional status or its right and power to establish a possible world, referential for his own destiny. Don Quixote is not pleased with being the protagonist of someone else’s book, because he claims authorial rights: not even the truth is his main concern, as he claims, but the possibility of telling his story his way (s. his attempt to “correct” the non-heroic parts of the book). There is no Don Quixote without a promise of authoriality of some kind, so the book of another must be refused. Oddly enough, his suspicion comes from his belief in reality and represents his attempt to preserve the realistic character of what he believes to be his book. Don Quixote’s book can never be a work of fiction.
Authors and maladies
An extraordinary essay-novel about “the No artists”, that is the artists who gave up writing, Bartleby and Co, by Enrique Vila-Matas, may in itself be a testimony on the author’s need to escape his own text. Vila-Matas considers Cervantes to be the one author who said good bye to literature “more beautifully” and “more moving” than anyone else. Before his real good-bye, on the dedication of Persiles, the last page he ever wrote, there is another good-bye in Cervantes’ Don Quixote that Vila-Matas notices. The clergyman in the eighteenth chapter of the first book says we gives up writing after already completing “over one hundred pages”, because he does not want to suffer the pain of creation any more, just in order to later expose himself to “the confuse judgement of the stupid people”. As complete an inventory as Vila-Matas’ novel is in its turn, I think that Don Quixote’s refusal of the book about his adventures is the loudest good-bye Cervantes says before leaving his text. Forced to publish the second half of his book in a hurry, upset by the publication of a fake Don Quixote novel, Cervantes quits writing before the last page of his novel, on grounds of authorial melancholy.
Among all the artists – real, but also invented – who appear in the novel of Vila-Matas, there is a peculiar character, introduced in chapter 57. His name is Luis Felipe Pineda, and he is the narratar’s classmate and his role model. The two of them become partners very much like Sancho Panza (here, “the hunchback”) and Don Quixote (here, Luis Felipe). Pineda distinguishes himself both in appearance and in education and cultural performance. The two lose track of each-other after school years, and they accidentally meet much later. The former “geperut” (hunchback), Pineda’s most trusted servant, finds his former friend and master married “to a fat, horrible woman, entirely similar to a Transsylvanian peasant”, with kids and a boring job, completely oblivious of the passion for literature, music and philosophy that they used to share.
I chose this last example for my case study, because Pineda is Vila-Matas’ version of Don Quixote refusal to author the book about himself. Luis Felipe Pineda is no other than Don Quixote, after he married the real Dulcinea (so similar in the non-enchanted eyes of the others “to a Transsylvanian peasant”) and gave up his questa. The human wreck of the character is explained, by the narratar of Bartleby and Co, as the result of a common failure of many a brilliant adolescent mind: “their soul leaves them”. The malady of Pineda is not the one affecting the author who leaves his creation, but that of replacing fiction with reality, of substituting possibility with necessity.
There are moments when the author flees from his text like Mary and Joseph from Egypt: to protect their own new-born, to grant him the possibility of bringing redemption. The redemptive value of fiction is augmented in such instances of mis-attribution or refusal of authorial identification, since the detachment from an originating figure makes room for the attachment to a fictional possibility of presence.
Primary sources:
1987 (for the edition). [1605-1615] Cervantes y Saavedra, Miguel de. Iscusitul hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha. Traducere de Ion Frunzetti şi Edgar Papu. Traducerea versurilor şi note de Ion Frunzetti, prefaţă de G. Călinescu, tabel cronologic de Edgar Papu. Bucureşti: Editura Minerva
1999 (for the edition). [1989] Borges, Jorge Luis. Opere complete, vol. I, traduceri de Cristina Hăulică, Andrei Ionescu şi Darie Novăceanu. Îngrijire de ediţie şi prezentări de Andrei Ionescu. Bucureşti: Univers
2003 (for the edition). [2000]. Vila-Matas, Enrique. Bartleby and Co, traducere din limba spaniolă, prefaţă şi note de Ileana Scipione. Bucureşti: RAO International Publishing Company
2008 (for the edition). [1669] Alcoforado, Mariana. Scrisorile călugăriţei portugheze, traducere de Simona Flueraru. În Despre dragoste şi alte întâmplări, antologie, pp. 315-334. Bucureşti: Univers Publishing House