WHAT IS AN AUTHOR ?
[Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?]
Michael Foucault
[Critical summary of the essay for
Students of Indian Universities]
Dr. S. Sreekumar
Overview
This is a
lecture on literary theory given at the Collège de France on 22 February 1969
by Michel Foucault. It considers the relationship between author, text, and
reader; concluding that: “The Author is a certain functional principle by
which, in our culture, one limits, excludes and chooses. The author is
therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear
the proliferation of meaning.” Foucault's lecture responds to Roland Barthes'
essay "The Death of the Author".
Works
Mental Illness and Psychology (1954), Madness and
Civilization (1961), The Birth of the Clinic (1963), Death
and the Labyrinth (1963), The Order of Things (1966), The
Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), Discipline
and Punish (1975), The History of Sexuality (1976–1984).
Michel
Foucault uproots all our conventional notions about the relationship between a
book and its author. However, the
element of surprise is not there in Foucault’s position as Roland Barthes
(1916-1980) has traversed the same ground before him. “What is an Author?”
echoes many of the thoughts of Barthes on the subject of authorship expressed a
decade earlier in Writing Degree Zero
(1953).Foucault’s concept of author-function is characteristic of some
discourses like fiction but it is not the trait of discourses like letter
writing. Author function is connected to the system of property ownership that
became common in eighteenth century.
Foucault’s
attack on the concept of author is much stronger than that of Barthes. Barthes
did not transgress the boundaries of literary theory. He merely wanted to
activate the reader and place him at the center of discourse.
Let us
conclude this overview with an observation that to women and people of color
the question, “What does it matter who is speaking?” is relevant. For them ‘who
writes’ makes a difference. As one commentator puts it, “it is important to
know “who is writing” in order to interpret a statement in the context of
gender and race”.
