Mistrusting the teller: a conversation about authorship
The artist usually sets out—or used to—to point a moral and adorn a tale. The tail, however, points the other way, as a rule. Two blankly opposing morals, the artist’s and the tale’s. Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.
— D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, Volume 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003/1923:14)
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not onesided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.
— T.S. Eliot ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’
Reports of the death of the author have been premature—or at least widely misunderstood or misapplied. But there can be no doubt that ‘the author’ is a kind of zombie; both dead and alive simultaneously, and an illusion of sorts: not non-existent, but not what we generally take it to be. As the authors of this project it is one of the most fraught questions with which we grapple in our practice. Here we present a conversation-by-correspondence on the nature, purpose—and identity—of the author, as it applies to us, and to the range of stories with which this project is concerned.
Edward: One of the ideas that people often find themselves trying out when they first approach narrative theory, is the notion that “we are all authors of our own story” which has all the appeal of a fridge-magnet aphorism. But it runs counter to the understandings we have tended to prefer which foreground the social and collective nature of stories. You must have heard people make this sort of claim—how would you respond to it?
Polly: I think the narrative response is to cry bullshit. But I suppose someone making that claim is trying to express that we all have a degree of agency in - even responsibility for - our lives. It goes too far by not recognising its own individualism or acknowledging the social worlds that shape our lives. An author appears to have total control over the destinies of her characters. Unlike an author, a narrator’s control is only partial: we are acting in worlds we did not create, alongside characters we did not write.
E: I think this is why Simone De Beauvoir has been such a recurrent character in this project: her definition of ‘bad faith’ was acting as if one is either totally constrained, or totally free. Examining our relationship with stories makes plain that we exist in a much more ambiguous space: always somewhat constrained, always somewhat free. Whereas the myth of the author is one of a godlike figure whose work bubbles up from her essential self. If we’re not free floating creative essences, but nodes of a complex cultural matrix, I wonder if there’s a more useful way to think of ourselves and our storytelling potential?
P: If we’re not authors, fully in control of our destinies then we are narrators, constructing versions of our lives, joining some dots and not others, to create apparently coherent life stories and identities. The dots we choose might change depending on circumstances, contexts, the mood even, that we find ourselves in at any given moment. I could tell my life story as a tragedy one day and a comedy the next without altering any of the facts, simply by foregrounding some features and ignoring others. What do you think these malleable identities mean for us individually and collectively as narrators as makers of meaning?
E: That meaning is always collective, social, and socially produced. At an absolutely literal level, each word I write to you, Polly, is only meaningful if and because you understand this combination of sounds, and the letters that represent them, as having shared meaning that pre-exists my writing of them. At the very least you, as a ‘reader’, are as important to whether these words are meaningful as I as ‘author’. This is at root of what is meant by the Derridean claim that ‘all language is quotation’. And even if I string those words together in a novel way, I do so because of all the social forces which have built me and my consciousness. Everything I have read shapes them, everything I have experienced, every solid idea with which I agree, every idea I take against, every idea that doesn’t stick - all of which is enmeshed in the feeling experience of consciousness that I, the supposed author, am. The words I choose to write are not only formed out of the social matrix in which I am sat - but have meaning (or not) as a result of that totality which is indifferent to me, but to which I add and change ever so slightly by existing and being part of it. So if the choices I make are the hallmarks of my role as ‘author’ (even without addressing the complex ways in which I don’t choose) then my choice is always at best ancillary to the social reality in which I participate. I cannot have any idea that belongs solely to me, which is why I cannot in some sense be an author. I think that has crucial implications for any number of everyday categories—the author, the self, the individual, innovation, the ‘inner life’, the supposed gap between thought and feeling, a person themselves... These categories are fatally compromised—exposed as fictions—and usefully so! But while this is a simple, relatively clear set of ideas which are hard to contest in the abstract, when they are personalised they become stickier and less intuitive to navigate.
P: Capitalism and liberalism both need us to operate as self-contained individuals, occasionally bumping into, but ultimately separate from, and in competition with, one and other. Both of us are invested in contesting that worldview. But I don’t think that acknowledging this absurdity necessarily denies that we are also sites of singularity: specific and distinguishable from others. You’ve occasionally written blog posts and attributed their authorship to both of us, and this invariably leaves me feeling icky. While I agree that it’s meaningless to talk about an author from whose individual fortress-self words, ideas, meanings well up and emerge, fully formed, neither are we bees. However appealing we might find the vision of society as a living organism, made up of human cells, that’s not how we experience ourselves. Just as you acknowledge above, your feeling-experience of consciousness is shaped and formed by everything you have read, everything you have experienced, all the people you have come into contact with, and the same is true for me. And, crucially, our experiences and so consciousnesses are different. We’ve worked on this project together, and the direction it has taken has been informed by both of us, but it’s also been informed by a host of others: Marx, De Beauvoir, Foucault among them. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari wrote ‘The two of us wrote anti-oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd’. I fully endorse the idea that anything you and I produce together, can, should and must be understood as having been produced by a crowd. But I find myself clinging to an understanding of myself as singular as well as multiple.
E: I take both ‘the individual’ and ‘the social’ to be existential givens—unavoidable facts, inescapable realities which we can abstract as poles which we dwell between. All human beings have (and always will) exist in that tension. The task of undermining liberal humanist individualism seems more urgent than troubling our sense of collectivity, because in this time and place the former is so overdeveloped and the latter so underdeveloped—I don’t think there’s any danger of mistaking ourselves for bees in ‘late capitalist’ Britain in 2020! I’ve probably typed more of the words, but does that make me ‘lead author’ and you a junior partner? That’s often been your anxiety. The mechanics of spewing the words out is a fairly arbitrary cut-off, only meaningful because of the overdetermined individualism of our times. The productive thing has been the contested conversations and each of them are a product of the totality of which we as a collaborative team are a tiny fragment: the ‘author’ of our book, or any given blog post, is not only not me, or you, but not me+you either. It’s me+you+everything else. My aim is not just to undermine the sharp delineation between us as individuals, but between us as a collective and the larger totality. And this is why I didn’t mind when the blog posts defaulted to having both our names. I still hold that view, but I’m not a sadist (I hope) so I’m not just going to lean into that ‘ickiness’, though I do wonder why ickiness necessarily matters? It seems like a double re-individualisation that’s therefore doubly fictional: pretending that ‘my’ singular authorship matters more than it does, and pretending that ‘your’ icky feelings matter more than I think they do—given that they are each produced by an over-determined ‘self’ that I think we’d both hold is fictional and illusory.
P: It strikes me as intellectually dishonest to suggest that there isn’t something uniquely productive about the process of putting pen to paper. You and I can talk for hours, testing, clarifying, provoking, and our sense of our subject has the quality of water—it shimmers and shifts. As soon as one of us attempts to capture the conversation on paper, it solidifies. Writing gives weight to thought by rendering it permanent, and public. If you’re the one writing, then your perspective will of course be represented more clearly that mine. You would need a god’s-eye view into my mind to perfectly express my contribution to the conversation. And even with the as-good-as-it-gets view that I have of my mind, I still have immense trouble mastering language to make what I think match what I say. Ideally, the finished piece does not express two unique and distinct (competing?) perspectives, but a new, socially produced meaning. And often that’s the case, but it strikes me as idealistic to imagine that this process always plays out in reality.
E: We’re extremely poor judges of our own minds: when we write, speak or express in some other way our feeling-thoughts, and thinking-feelings, we do so through a glass darkly, obscured by our cultural inheritances, our unacknowledged stories, our unconscious and unpalatable desires, our complexly intertwined transcendence and facticity which complicates significantly the freedom of our will. This is why I’d dispute that the person doing the literal writing ‘of course’ represents themselves better than the other: firstly, why should that be so, and secondly, so what if they do? They’re as likely to be wrong, to undermine, and to humiliate or ‘give away’ the self that is supposedly more clearly represented.
P: You ask why my feelings of ickiness matter. And my response is why wouldn’t they matter? I’m not asking anyone to build a political strategy based on my feelings, that would be bonkers, but I am suggesting that any encounter between embodied people results in bodily responses and that they have a role to play in alerting us to what is being produced—what meaning is shaped, and how, what power relations are formed, what is to be done, and how. I’m not trying to escape my icky feelings, but the alternative to attending to them is to repress them, and I think that repressed feelings lead to warped individuals and warped social relations.
E: Lots of things feel significant but we would want to resist: from the visceral (and somewhat justified) hatred of elites which animate insurgent right-wing political visions of a Trump-Bolsanaro-Farage tone, to the self-righteous liberal identitarian persecutions of the ‘vampire castle’ motoring a thousand ostracisations, suicides, and silencings. I think one has to follow through on the hope to ‘blur the lines’ and that means being sceptical of any given thought or feeling. Mistrust everything - especially that which arises in one’s own body! Because in this individualised culture, in which our atomised selves are held up as sacrosanct, we’re predisposed to take those phenomenon as unassailable certainties. They might be useful guides, but there’s no reason in themselves why they should be. I don’t suggest that the alternative to thinking ickiness matters is repression, with all the attendant ‘warping’ you suggest. Being led uncritically by feelings, or repressing them strike me as two different manic responses to our dumbly emotive age. We can notice a feeling, sit with it, notice that it has the quality of arising and passing away, and be curious about it. This strikes me as a method more likely to see it lead to insight than either elevating or repressing it. I think assuming feelings matter ‘just because they do’ is as freighted as the pole that thoughts matter ‘just because they do’. I think the danger of this age of feelings partly lies in that sort of claim: no-one believes that all thoughts matter ‘just because’ - it’s a matter of a moment for any of us to imagine ideologies, concepts and constructs we think are unhelpful, misleading, dangerous or wrong. We apply critical judgement to them—albeit haphazardly—and we have no problem in wanting some to be overcome. It’s a commonplace here and now to imagine feelings have automatic legitimacy, that they can’t be challenged because they cannot be read by the other (“my feelings are valid and you can’t challenge my feelings”), that we have an emotional ‘right’ to them, and that simply because they emerge they matter. I think this is why they are privatisable, because they have this unassailable status within much of our culture.
P: We’ve diverged from questions of authorship into questions of thought and feeling. At the heart of my resistance to being named as the author of something that I didn’t write is difference. Sometimes I’ve felt guilty for being credited for something I didn’t chisel into shape, but the arguments for collectivity laid out above go a long way to assuaging that guilt—when we have shaped the meaning that your words express together, then I agree that the actual writing is a relatively small part of the process. But, just occasionally, I’ve been left feeling pinned down by weighty words to ideas that I don’t have a stake in. What is to be done?
E: We often have a slight related tussle in which I get cast as Mr Thought and you Ms Feeling, and living in a gendered culture that’s probably not entirely imaginary, but that’s not a team I’d choose for either of us. By the same token by which I’d look at the existential poles of individual-collective and compare them to our neoliberal culture and so put my effort into re-establishing the collective, when I see our Trumpian or performative, angsty, solipsistic culture, I don’t think it’s a deficit of emotion, but of critical engagement, that is tying us in knots. So when surveying the existential poles of thought-feeling, I think we need to add our weight to the thought pole. But crucially, in both cases, I’m not on the side of Thought and Collective beating or overcoming the Feeling and the Individual. I’m seeking a human experience deeply engaged with the ambiguous place between these poles: but that requires responding asymmetrically to the asymmetry of now. In practical terms, that requires all of us living with some feeling ickiness. I think part of this (anti)narrative project is learning to resist retreat to those poles out of fear of ambiguity. I don’t think it’s accidental that feeling is the pole we’ve retreated to en masse as the texture and tone of neoliberalism. Because feeling is presentable as individual in a way that thought is not. I don’t mean by that that collective emotion isn’t experienced: in a rave, a riot, a concert-hall, it’s palpable. But it’s untestable and uninterogatable: I can’t know that my ‘internal’ response is the same as yours, so emotion is susceptible to being understood as my private property, even in a collective context. If we both die of corona the day after this is posted, meaning in these thoughts lives on should anyone read it: however intense, the feeling of being surprised by a hare in a field on a walk, or the experience evoked by hearing a sublime Bruckner symphony dies with us—and is fundamentally incommunicable while we’re alive. I’ve long held that both thought and feeling are abstractions—what thought can we imagine that is free from feeling, and what feeling which is free from thought?—but nonetheless one of these abstractions is liable to be commodified and individualised in a way which the other resists, and so it becomes the currency of our age.
P: I’d say the same of thought. Language is always inadequate. We can never communicate perfectly what goes on in our bodies (bellies, brains, whatever). As much as anything else, that’s what Beckett is getting at in Not I and The Unnameable. Neither of the examples for intense emotion you used were shared. You weren’t on that Suffolk walk with me, and I’ve never shared a Bruckner symphony listening experience with you. Had we been together, I’d argue that those feeling experiences wouldn’t quite die with either of us. The precise texture of our feelings would be different, of course, but that’s always the case when anyone tries to express anything: thought or feeling: it’s messy. If expressing thought is easier than expressing emotion, I wonder whether that’s because we’ve cast emotion as somehow existing in a domain of unspeakable, mysterious darkness.
E: This is why I have so little faith in any system which appeals to our experience, as if experience was pure and reliable rather than mediated and unreliable. When we author collaboratively, it’s not just our collaborator who we lack insight into, but ourselves. At root, my interest in stories comes down to a deconstruction and crumbling of the self, and this is why these questions are so exciting to me: and why I am happy to have contradictions and work I’ve not undertaken directly attributed to me, why being publicly wrong is thrilling, and why collective forms of endeavour are reflexively instructive to be part of, if I am to understand who I am. I have always been drawn to the description of Wilfred Bion’s psychoanalytic explorations: he is said to have treated individuals as groups, and groups as individuals. We need both of those: to incorporate the ability to be wrong, self-contradictory, incoherent and competitive into the crowd which is the individual, and to respond holistically to the individual which, in this case, is the group that you and I are as ‘the unreliable narrators’—even when bits of that feel icky about it. The denial of individual agency has painful costs, but so does individual recognition. This is why the identitarian legitimation fantasies strike me as such a problem: there has been a violence in the loss of ‘marginalised voices’ but there is also violence to the supposed winners, and the palpable misery of the individualised victors of this fight cast such painful doubt on the desirability of raising up more diverse individuals as opposed to envisioning a more collective, universalist future.
P: And so that returns us to questions of authorship and helps complicate further the questions of art and authorship as vehicles for communication. At best, the power of the author is compromised: if I write a piece that comes out of our collective work, not only can it ickily not communicate your meaning, it cannot communicate mine either, or ours together. It jostles with the meanings of the world of which we are part, and the meanings of the readers plus the totality with which they are part. That jostling is a fertile and mysterious place in which all of these dichotomies—self-other, the one and the many, thought and feeling, the individual and collective—come under fire. Their collapse is icky, painful even, but insight so often entails subtraction, and such attendant but fruitful pain.
