English 5522 - Literary Theory and Criticism
What's In a Name?
From Foucault I add two more "functions of literature" (which is my inquiry's theme). First, literature functions as life insurance for the author. Once a work is published, the author lives forever (or at least until his work is lost and/or forgotten). Foucault says that the doctrine "of a spoken or written narrative [is] a protection against death" (1624). But he adds an interesting twist. Not only do the author's written contributions to the world create immortality, but they also "[attain] the right to kill" (1624). Since I am unfamiliar with both Proust and Kafka, I must for now assume that he means that a debunked work is lethal. This is an interesting notion, nonetheless, one that deserves further exploration if any of you care to comment.
The other function of literature is for the molding of the author's character. Foucault's words: "texts [. . . separate] one [author] from another, defining their form, and characterizing their mode of existence" (1628). This is reason enough to be cautious about what you write. Hopefully most of what I have recorded here in this semester-long multilogue (my new word meaning the discourse involving multiple explorations) will disappear. But take a writer like C.S. Lewis. His writing changed drastically over time (in line with changes in his philosophy). I am sure there are authors who are more obvious examples of this, but you get the point. I suppose Foucault would like to take the writer in light of all of his works, and establish him/her in a certain category. Maybe this is why there is a concern of the entirety of an author's "works," shopping lists included. With a comprehensive image of the author through his work/works, we can better understand an author. Once the author is defined, he can be named by what he believes. We see that this is what Foucault is up to when he says, "When we say 'Aristotle,' we are using a word that means one or a series of definite descriptions of the type" (1626). In other words, every author is a "school of thought" or in Aristotle's case "schools of thought." But can we misdiagnose what an author is? Certainly there are authors that we must address as an adjective, with the particular idea as the noun (i.e., Aristotelian epistemology, Nietzschian ethics). In this way, the author functions as a mode of thinking. Foucault says the author's name "is functional in that it serves as a means of classification. How convenient for Aristotle, the King of Classification. This, I think, makes him the class of Class-pretty classy, huh?
One comment more. When Foucault says "God and man died a common death," is he referring to God as the author of Holy Writ or in as in Nietzschian theology? (See how authors as category works so well?!) I'm curious as to what he meant by this. My man question remains-By using the accumulation of an author's writing, are we still in danger of misdiagnosing the author, hence, miscategorizing him? My computer tells me "miscategorizing" is not a word.