Expand Your Jargon 3: Author Function

Who is the author of this prestigious blog? "Why, Leopoldtulip," you say. Who is the author of the esteemed Hardy Boys Casefile Mysteries, which are much more grown up and involve international intrigue unlike the traditionally sissy Hardy Boys mysteries? "Why, Franklin W. Dixon," you say. At which point literary theorist Foucault laughs at you, because you have played right into his hands!

Why, you ask? Because there's no such person as "Franklin W. Dixon," and a lot of people have written Hardy Boys mysteries over the years. The name "Franklin W. Dixon" is just filling a classification function--it helps us to group certain texts together (manly Hardy Boys mysteries) and exclude other texts (girly Nancy Drew mysteries). Similarly, "Leopoldtulip" isn't somebody's real name. Someday, the person who calls himself "Leopoldtulip" hopes to get an article published, and when he does, you had better believe the article isn't going to say it's by "Leopoldtulip!" You see, I use the moniker "Leopoldtulip" to group together certain texts, i.e. goofy ones. I'm not going to include my serious scholarship here. Neither am I going to include something as mundane as a shopping list. I include entries that accord with my Leopoldtulip persona. This blog constructs the AUTHORitative "Leopoldtulip canon," if you will.

This should give you the basic idea behind Foucault's conception of the "author function." Foucault emphasizes that the name of an "author" is always performing a certain role that is different from a proper name. Foucault gives the example, "If I discover that Shakespeare was not born in the house that we visit today, that is a modification which, obviously, will not alter the functioning of the author's name. But if we proved that Shakespeare did not write those sonnets which pass for his, that would constitute a significant change and affect the manner in which the author's name functions."

The question we might ask ourselves is, "Why would it make a bigger difference to us that 'Shakespeare' didn't write Hamlet versus 'Shakespeare' was born elsewhere?" The easy response would be to say, "Duh, because it is a bigger difference," but this begs the question. Sure, Shakespeare "the author" is big-time important to us! He's as American as apple pie! (Um, I mean, as English.) But it's not as if Christians are facing existential crises because they don't know who wrote I and II Samuel. What makes authorship such a big deal in some situations and not others? What makes Shakespeare's authorship a bigger deal than what color his eyes are?

So, what's the point of all this? I still find myself asking that question. I think part of the point is to imagine what it would look like if "author" didn't fill this function. Foucault notes that if the "author-function" lost its prominent role, we wouldn't be hearing the traditional questions like, "Who really spoke? Is it really he and not someone else?" Instead, we would be asking metalevel questions, "What difference does it make who is actually speaking?" What does it reveal about us and our own preoccupations?

In a future blog entry, I'm going to employ the idea of the "author function" to discuss how "authorship" functions when an author has been announced as dead, and he/she disputes this to the contrary.