The Concept of the Author in Barthes, Foucault, and Fowles

Author(s): Robert Siegle

Source: College Literature, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Spring, 1983), pp. 126-138
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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THE CONCEPT OF THE AUTHOR

IN BARTHES, FOUCAULT, AND FOWLES
Robert Siegle
Recent literary theory, especially that under the influence of continental
studies of culture, psychology, and the intellectual tradition, has become in
creasingly philosophical in nature. This focus upon fundamental premises

and methodological assumptions requires a careful response within any

field of literary study, as it amounts to an increasingly sophisticated and
critical perspective upon more traditional modes of criticism. But perhaps
nowhere is it more acutely relevant than in studies of contemporary fiction.

However perplexing such theory can be, it can nonetheless yield rich divi
dends in interpreting an innovative writer like John Fowles.

One way to illustrate the process of relating theory and fiction is to bring
to bear on an often-taugiu text like Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Wom
an one of the most extreme claims in post-structural writing, what Roland
Barthes proclaims with his customary flamboyance as "The Death of the
Author." ' We have grown accustomed to organizing our curricula, our re
search, even our research tools and journals around the literary giants from
whom we hope our students will absorb the wisdom of the humanistic tradi
tion. And yet Barthes and other theoreticians propose killing off the Author

in a maneuver which seems reminiscent of certain ill-fated designs upon the

golden goose. This assassination of the Author is one of the most difficult
concepts for undergraduates to assimilate, for by and large they are steeped
in the general Western ethos of individuality, and they find The French
Lieutenant's Woman, though at first glance puzzling, confirming as exis
tential version of individualistic ideology.

Though they might not formulate their assumptions so pointedly as

Barthes, their expectations coincide with his characterization of our main
stream approach to interpretation:
The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who pro
duced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent
allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author "confiding" in

us. (p. 143)

Such a procedure of explanation can cause problems with any text, but most
notably in certain anomalous novels that seem almost to flout our expecta
tion that a single voice is seeking us out for confidence. The French Lieuten

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THE CONCEPT OF THE AUTHOR

127

ant's Woman is notorious for its doubling back, for its juxtaposition of
conflicting personae of the authorial narrator, and for a variety of narrative

techniques that, especially in association with some of Fowles' comments in

essays and interviews, complicate any such straightforward concept of the

Author.

To see how this problem may be formulated, we need first to trace the
theoretical side developed by Barthes and his sponsor at the Coll?ge de
France, Michel Foucault. A look at Fowles' own comments on the subject
outside his fiction, and then at a sample of the narrative itself, will suggest
how necessary this approach becomes in an effort to explore fully aspects of
contemporary fiction that otherwise seem anomalous, perverse, or for the
most determined traditionalist, unnoticed.

The Theory
Foucault's answer in his essay "What is an Author?" is that the author is
a critical concept.2 Foucault's mini-history of the variations in our concept
of Author both over time and across disciplines is a healthy reminder of the
cultural origins of our enshrining the Author as an original, creative genius.
But it is Foucault's agenda for future work that is most relevant here, for he

urges us to move beyond "the theme of the originating subject."3 Fou

cault's manifesto is startling, for even in the work of a contemporary
theorist like Harold Bloom the author can still be said to get within the liter

ary rules and?"give rise to the designs which are properly its own," as
Foucault characterizes the view he seeks to displace. Foucault would have
us treat the Author neither as a "person" nor as an "originator," but as
"something like a subject." That something frees narrators and implied au
thors from our metaphysical expectations of selfhood, and suggests we see
them as "a variable and complex function" of forces within the fiction,
within the wider sphere of discourse, and within the institutional structures
of society. A novel like The French Lieutenant's Woman, or even a classic
like Vanity Fair, may seem troublesome mainly because the "plurality of
self" which we find in its narrator highlights for us the variability and com

plexity of the "author function" that Foucault points to in all fiction.

Foucault would endorse my metaphor of liberation because of his interest
in the variations and complications often lost in univocal interpretations.
Indeed, he calls the Author "the ideological figure by which one marks the
manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning," for in seeking the
univocal "one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free
composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction" (p. 159). Such
an investigative paradigm shows Foucault's interest in the history of sys
tems of thought, particularly as such systems (necessarily) regulate the

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128

COLLEGE LITERATURE

capacity of fiction to "recompose" the conventional concepts of reality

against which it lodges its own.
One direction which such a liberation could take is that pointed to by Ro

land Barthes, who argues?

. . . writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing

is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the
negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body

writing, (p. 142)

Reminiscent of Foucault's sense of the game of writing as "a question of

creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears"

(p. 142),4 Barthes' typically dramatic assertion argues the priority of system
over subject in our approach to texts?a precise reversal. But as a "negative
where all identity is lost," Barthes' concept of writing is more an overturn
ing than a simple reversal. To liberate the text from the metaphysical re
straints of the originating subject is to decenter its voice into the manifold
"conditions of exteriority" that account for it. Recalling to us that lan
guage replaces Author for Mallarm?, Val?ry, Proust, surrealism, and lin
guistics, Barthes thus alludes to a counter tradition within modern literature
which advocates a quite different concept of the Author from that which
dominates the American critical imagination.
In explaining this difference, Barthes contrasts the "author" of the tradi
tional metaphysical view and the "scriptor," who "is born simultaneously
with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the
writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate" (p. 145). This scriptor
arises from the relations Foucault outlines, and does not exercise the sort of
interpretive control or ideologically limiting function assumed in our more

conventional belief in the Author. The positing of a subject-predicate

model is rather like a back-formation by which beliefs in intentionality and

causality lead one to project a non-linguistic subject onto syntax. Barthes
instead argues the performative nature of any literary or linguistic utter
ance, with the Author being a product of the interplay among competing
discourses and conventions.

When we turn to Fowles' scattered comments on the issue, we can cer

tainly locate conventional ideas, as in the case of his observation that "the
whole meaning and commitment of the person who creates will permeate his
creations, however varied their outward form."5 Such a comment, together
with Fowles' general advocacy of existentialist notions, allows those with
traditional assumptions to constitute the familiar reading of Fowles and his
work. At the same time, however, one finds in the writings various strands
which work a different and opposed pattern, one which undermines the
sense of Author one might infer from the spiritual suffusion and unification

of a verb like "permeate. ' '

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THE CONCEPT OF THE AUTHOR

129

It may be that Fowles' well-known celebration of "mystery" is too easily

read in traditional terms, and that, as he says of religion, such terms are
"inherently parasitical on a deeper and more mysterious nobility in man
than any existing religion or political creed can satisfy" (p. 110). Beneath
our religion and political ideologies of selfhood lies a radically demysti

fied?and hence to our conventions "mysterious"?sense of "man" host

ing, in Fowles' image, the parasitical products of cultural discourse.

The presuppositions of our concept of author seem imperiled, for ex

ample, by Fowles' attack upon any remnant of faith in the immortality of
man or, even, in a soul. He says this at one point:
What survives death is putrescent stopped machinery. The consciousness is a
mirror reflecting a mirror reflecting a mirror; anything that enters this room
can be endlessly reflected and its reflections reflected. But when the room is
demolished, no mirrors, no reflections; nothing, (p. 38)

The passage bluntly denies any afterlife ("nothing"), any metaphysical ele
ment of the self ("machinery"), and any pseudo-divine ex nihilo creativity
("reflections reflected"). The metaphysical view of man arises, Fowles sug

gests, "because of the loose way we use T " in which the pronoun "be

comes an object?a third thing." But, he continues, "this 'soul' is no more

than the ability to observe, to remember and to compare, and to create and
to store ideals of conduct. This is a mechanism, not ectoplasm; the human
brain, not the Holy Ghost" (p. 38). The self is thus a "position in space and
time. Ultimately T is simply the common condition of all human men
tality ... a convenient geographical description, not an absolute entity"
(p. 85). Hence if we are to talk of the authorial self, it would seem we would

be referring to one point in time and space in the plane of "all human

mentality" as it happens to have reflected and recorded chance entrants

from its range of experience. That is a less authoritative point, and certainly
a less stable and unified point, than the self of the Judaeo-Christian tradi
tion Fowles unequivocally rejects (p. 110).
One sees Fowles putting this demystified sense of the "author" to work
as he determines the right voice for his material. He chooses the ironic voice
for its capacity to suppress the real "I" of the author, and continues as fol

lows:

So I have written myself another memorandum: YOU ARE NOT THE "I"

WHO BREAKS INTO THE ILLUSION, BUT THE "I" WHO IS A PART
OF IT.

In other words, the "I" who will make first-person commentaries here and
there in my story, and who will finally even enter it, will not be my real "I" in

1967; but much more just another character, though in a different category
from the purely fictional ones.6

Fowles makes explicit here the standard disjunction between a first-person

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COLLEGE LITERATURE

130

narrator?even one purporting to be the novel's author?and the biograph

ical personnage who collects the royalties. The disjunction is somewhat
complicated by the logical necessity of maintaining it also in this apparently
but therefore illusorily "direct" text. That is, the "I" making these com
ments about "an unfinished novel" is not the "real T in 1967" either, but
rather the authorial critic with all the conventions and stylizations that
govern the role. In both cases, the movement of disjoining these textual fea
tures from the " T in 1967" pulls with it not only the stable authority one
almost automatically associates with a talented and rational being, but also
the unity and consistency and other such traits we have grown accustomed
to expecting as necessary conditions of "an absolute entity." We have in
stead one of an infinite number of textual strategies ready to fill the authori

al slot in any given discourse the "real T " might engage in.
The issue is further complicated by the grammatical blurring in the equa

tion of "you" and " 'I.' " What can it mean to say that "You are the T
that is part of the illusion?" Perhaps the "real T " is always already "part
of the [textual] illusion." That is, given Fowles' earlier argument that what

stands behind these pronouns is a reflector rather than an agent, a

mechanism rather than a self, and that our habitual conversion from pro
noun to mythic concept is basically linguistic, we are pressed towards the
conclusion that no authorial 'I' is ever the "real T in 1967," but always al
ready a textual mechanism in one discourse or another. Even to persist in
the idea of a "different category" to describe author, narrator, and charac
ter, as Fowles does above, seems inconsistent with the larger implications of
the principles he advances, for they are all linguistic functions serving textu

al aims. Given the multiplicity of pronomial antecedents in the authorial

subject, it would seem that Fowles' principles would make that figure we
call the author a deceptive point at which to attempt a theoretical check of
textual freefall.

The Practice
The theories of Barthes, Foucault, and Fowles share much common
ground, and point towards a concept of the Author different from our stu
dents' expectations, and perhaps from our own thinking a decade ago. One
finds several aspects of this theoretical shift reflected in a representative sec

tion of The French Lieutenant's Woman like Chapter 35, a long "intru
sion" by the novel's authorial narrator ("authorial" because he often pre
sents himself assembling and managing this complex narrative). The chap
ter itself is part of a larger, almost allegorical structure paralleling the spe
cifically discursive qualities of sexuality, aesthetics, theology, science, and
history. Early in the novel the narrator alerts us to this elaborate compari
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THE CONCEPT OF THE AUTHOR

131

son by noting that his digression has much "to do with your Time, Prog
ress, Society, Evolution, and all those other capitalized ghosts in the night
that are rattling their chains behind the scenes in this book."7 For our pur
poses, this focus upon the discursiveness of these "capitalized ghosts" of
fers several ways to think of the Author in textual rather than ontological
terms.

Chapter 35 explores the analogy between sexuality and narrative rela

tions, and shows how one's place in each is so culturally conditioned as to
justify the kind of larger socio-historical perspective Foucault calls for, and
to make an approach in terms of the subject highly problematical. The
chapter begins by demonstrating the impossibility of authoring any view
point outside the current conventional frameworks. In a discussion of the
differences between Victorian and modern valuations of sexuality, we are
warned against "the error of supposing the Victorians were not in fact
highly sexed" and of "another common error: of equating a high degree of
sexual ignorance with a low degree of sexual pleasure" (pp. 212-3). Fowles
suggests the difference between Victorian abstinence and modern indul

gence is one of "vocabulary, a degree of metaphor" (p. 212). We have

made sense of change by valorizing the present, whereas Fowles describes
the difference as stylistic, or conventional, and elsewhere argues the "rela

tivity of recompense"?a principle "which allows, at any stage of evo

lution, any sentient creature to find under normal conditions the same com
parative pleasure in existing as all other sentient creatures of its own or any
other age" (The Aristos, p. 59). Though this belief would seem to argue for
a "human constant" beyond these stylized expressions, it also encloses any
individual within the expressive conventions that shape his desires, that in
effect constitute the conditions of possibility for those desires, regulating
his sense of what they are in the first place, and how one might go about ful
filling them. In terms of historical judgments, then, one cannot apply nor

mative labels like "undersexed" (to the Victorians) or "Naughty" (to the
Nineties) without betraying a temporal provincialism of vocabulary and
metaphor. One is not an objective historian assessing a practice, a person
originating a clear relation of events, but the pressure of a larger discursive
praxis against that of another era.
Hence Fowles goes so far as to argue that the Victorians may even have
been better off than we are since they may have been able to "experience a
much keener, because less frequent, sexual pleasure than we do" and may
have been "dimly aware of this and so chose a convention of suppression,
repression and silence to maintain the keenness of the pleasure" (p. 213).
Our freedom of indulgence and explicit knowledge about sexuality destroys
pleasure as well as "the mystery, the difficulty, the aura of the forbidden"
(p. 214). One can see that each discourse screens experiences according to its
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COLLEGE LITERATURE

norms and conventions; the error of one period's judging another lies in as

suming its own discursive conventions are "right," "natural"?that is,

nondiscursive, and therefore normative. One of those discursive conven
tions, of course, is the Author who for at least two centuries has been con
sidered an originating source rather than a derivation from larger structures

of belief.

This debate about the historiography of sex has another side to it, how
ever. One must keep in mind that the narrator proceeds within the norms of
pleasure shaping modern discourse, not at all within those of spiritual uplift
and public duty that shaped the Victorian discourse of restraint. Himself
within the modern discursive frame, he can neither mediate between the two
frames, as he appears to do, nor give us a necessarily true or even a Victori
an way of seeing nineteenth-century subject matter. Such an argument
against evaluative interpretation, one might contend, imperils the novel's
central thematic description of Charles' evolution to an apparently more
authentic state of being. How, that is, can one imply that an existentialist
approach is better than that of Victorian "prudence" if one is already, as
Fowles himself acknowledges, within the existentialist "vocabulary" and
"metaphor"? Charles' initial state would seem to be as full of recompense
as his final, more existentialist one.
One must conclude that this authorial voice is composed of at least three
contrary strands in contemporary thinking. One is a very contemporary rec
ognition that an authorial voice must be caught within the "vocabulary"
and "metaphor" of one point in the space and time of human mentality,
and hence is the voice of those external conventions contesting others (either
contemporary or historical) for dominance. At the same time, a second
voice is that of a kind of scientific positivism, insisting with an impossible
rigor on the repudiation of any condescending temporal provincialism at
the expense of the Victorians. A third seems unaware of the problem and
cheerfully valorizes existential awakenings. This is indeed a "variable and
complex function of discourse" we are confronting, to recur to Foucault's
description, and to speak of a single "modern" convention looking at the
Victorian convention is thus imprecise.
The Author as ontological being is thus, on closer examination, an inter
play among the narrative and interpretive codes or conventions which make
the authorial voice something other than the personal presence we may in
formally take it to be. The authorial voice is, in other words, a varying tacti
cal maneuver of the specific confluence of conventions discernible in a text,
even if at the same time it functions as if it were "authoritative" in the ar
ticulation of a theme. If the Author is thus a function of those conventions,

then not he but they are the delimiters of the text. Moreover, they are not
the single point of origin of the univocal subjective tradition to which
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THE CONCEPT OF THE AUTHOR

133

Barthes and Foucault stand opposed?they do not unify so much as they

disseminate the kind of different possibilities for meaning we have discov
ered at work in the novel's commentary on Victorian sexuality.
A further implication of the discursive nature of this voice is that it is less

a person commandeering conventions than a role played out in the cultural

drama of narrative. Again the analogy between sexuality and narrative is
important. Fowles makes it explicit when his narrator describes the "kind
of devious sexual approach" that characterizes the novelist's appraisal of a
potential model for a character (p. 319), or in the way a character like Sarah
models her sexual narrative like a work of fiction complete with all the trap
pings of what the narrator terms the "romanced autobiography" we all

maintain (p. 82).

The novel thus exploits the sexual connotations of the relations among
the Author, the narrator, his characters, and his readers, in order to define
the discursive roles governing the principals' participation. At the very
least, one is reminded by this analogy of the importance of the purely
appetitive nature of our love of narrative, its gratification of our need to be
identified with another, its dependency upon shifting lines of dominance
and compliance among participants?akin to those in sexual relations?and
finally the necessary reliance upon the conventions of narrative courtship
that comprise a discourse with its repertoires of structural patterns and im
ages. If this is beginning to sound like Roland Bathes' work in The Pleasure
of the Text and A Lover's Discourse, it is because Fowles and Barthes are
working the same hofhology between narrative and sexuality although in
different directions.
Certainly this homology foregrounds the conventions governing each ac
tivity and assuring participants that they can play complex but relatively
predictable roles in either form of cultural intercourse. One may say, first of

all, that conventional cues open and close distance among participants, as
we have all suffered or enjoyed in love, and as critics like Wayne Booth can
so persuasively chart in fiction. In The French Lieutenant's Woman, the
voice quoting in epigraphs, describing Lyme in the 1860s, vividly evoking a
character's beauty or impatience, blowing away the plot as a fictional play
thing, analyzing the nature and grounds of a given response or interpreta
tion?this voice opens and closes differing relationships whose coincidence
within one text underscores the range possible within the discourse. Sarah,
as an authorial character, dramatizes the solicitation that opens a relation, a
solicitation paralleling that of the narrator eyeing the passenger in the rail
road car, as well as her own opening of a narrative relation in the Under

cliff. She also imposes her demands for submission that end Charles'
willingness to continue the relation in the final ending of the novel; such de
mands parallel, perhaps, those implicit in a text for a reader's conceptual
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COLLEGE LITERATURE

submission as well as Charles' earlier submission to her first narrative's fic

tions about Varguennes.

These openings and closings follow a tightly scripted set of conventions
that are part of a larger process of mutual fictionalization. In The French
Lieutenant's Woman, a transformation takes place similar to what Barthes

describes in A Lover's Discourse (in "To Love Love").8 It is the "Image

repertoire"?"the discursive site" and its images, forms, and structures?
that one loves or mourns rather than the "other," who is largely the "tool"
of the subject's desire. The "other" is most important as a participant in
the drama of discourse, necessarily submitting to the fictionalizations of the
subject. The subject in narrative fictionalizes himself in successive removes
as implied author, authorial narrator, authorial character, and fictionalizes
the readers whom he addresses in order to play his role in the drama of
narrative discourse. The reader's reciprocal fictionalizations of the author
are equally intense, and are playfully anticipated by the guises the author
suggests for himself (stocky passenger in a Victorian railway car, French

ified fop in an open landau, learned intellectual historian). Sarah, as

authorial character, makes of Charles what she needs

ters in her own unfolding life-narrative; Charles, the
struggles to make Sarah and her narrative conform to
toire, needs, and desires.
In these kinds of relationships, neither can have the

to advance the chap

character-as-reader,
his own image-reper
hope of wholly know

ing the other; neither can approach the other except in the forms inscribable

within the discourse in which both participate; neither is relevant to the

other except as a silent accomplice in the completion of a role; neither can
ever achieve the complete absorption of the other into his own discourse;
and neither can be described, analyzed, or defined except on the evidence of
a textual version of how each acts out his role in the discourse. These traits,
according to our allegory, are equally applicable to the nature of the "sub
ject" in narrative. Just as characters are functions of the interplay of all the
formal units in the novel, so readers are what takes place in their heads as
they verbalize relations among those formal units, playing out one of the
roles they authorize, and authors what takes place as they conflate, juxta
pose, circulate, superimpose, undermine, overextend, parody and otherwise
relate the linguistic, semantic, and literary codes at hand.

The first part our look at the novel suggested that the author was less the
source of judgments and insights than a feature of the nexus of literary,
philosophical, and cultural conventions criss-crossing in his text. This sec
ond section opens up another model for the "disappearance of the author"
into the roles possible for him as they become acted out in the text itself. To

see the author as the accumulation of discursive conventions and roles as

they interact in a text does indeed begin to provide a more reliable and use

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THE CONCEPT OF THE AUTHOR

135

ful conception of the Author than the subjective model Foucault would
have us eschew.

In the last third of Chapter 35, Fowles takes up the case of another
author, Thomas Hardy, and shows how the Author is constructed by an in
terpretation of textual elements, an interpretation subject to the hermeneu
tic problems we found in the passages on historiography. Fowles recounts
the case of Hardy's engagement to Tryphena, broken off at the discovery
that Tryphena was his niece rather than his cousin. Because the emotions of
the whole affair led eventually (Fowles argues) to both Sue Bridehead and
Tess, as well as to Hardy's greatest love poems, Fowles argues the benefits

of quashed love:
This tension, then?between lust and renunciation, undying recollection and
undying repression, lyrical surrender and tragic duty, between the sordid
facts and their noble use?energizes and explains one of the age's greatest
writers; and beyond him, structures the whole age itself. It is this I have di
gressed to remind you of. (p. 216)

The obvious import of the passage is something like Freudian displacement

in Hardy's case?frustrated love finding its aesthetic outlet.
Yet we must also be mindful that the opposition between lust and renun
ciation has already been exposed as a stylistic rather than a substantive dif
ference?a matter of vocabulary and metaphor, as the narrator puts it. The
focus, in other words, immediately falls upon the discursive conventions
noticed by the interpreter. Earlier we found Fowles himself arguing that the
author was one point in space and time reflecting the common structure of
human mentality and, moreover, reflecting it in terms of the emergent re
combination of conventions at that point in space and time. Here, we have
not a psychological argument about the experiences shaping a metaphysical
entity prior to the text or separable from its age, but a description of the
particular nexus of conventions discernible in what might perhaps best be
called a semiotic being. For the author in this case, Hardy, is traced through
the fictional and poetic creations that have drawn the notice of Fowles. The
"energizing" comes from the static between the discourse of passion and
that of morality, particularly as it is discernible to the contemporary reader

of the texts of Hardy's fiction, poetry, and biography. An interpretation of

discursive structures derived from fictional, poetic, or documentary texts
leads one to the semiotic being we call the author, Thomas Hardy.
The passage calls attention to this semiotic quality through the language
used to describe its central thesis. The set of terms on one side of the "be

tween" all involve the giving up of what we think of as the self to forces

quite beyond that self: lust (to another's sexual appeal), recollection (to
one's narrative interpretation of the past), surrender (to the "lyrical"
scripting of emotional release), and facts (to the cultural roles prescribed in
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COLLEGE LITERATURE

cases of consanguinity). But these forces all share purely cultural form
rather than the primordial naturalness we might expect in discussions of li
bidos and lust?the coding of sexual appeal, the artifice in recollective inter
pretation, the literary stylizing of "lyrical," and the ethical (or moral?)

stylizing in "sordid." The other set of terms?renunciation, repression,

duty, and use?all reflect either passive or active shaping of what is offered
according to even more specifically cultural ideas?tragic, noble, useful,

and the ever differently defined duty and conduct. What would have

seemed initially an attempt to explain the unique mystery and power of a

great novelist turns out also to be a dispersion of Hardy as an "absolute en
tity" into the various discursive conventions of culture contending for
thematic domination both of the text in which we inscribe our sense of him
and of that in which he himself worked out consciously or otherwise his
own history. The project is thus to collect the semiotic conventions that
make possible the texts we have.
What we find in Chapter 35, then, are at least three concrete ways to un
derstand the often mentioned notion of the author as a "textual strategy,"9
ways that fulfill the theoretical predictions with which we began. We found,

for example, that the author was less an authoritative entity dispensing
truth than a tactical voice of discursive conventions and their underlying as
sumptions, that he was less the court of final resort as to intentions and
thematic ends that the playing out of a courtship role stylized by the dra
matic conventions of the narrative process, and that his relevance was less
that of the definable, absolute entity whose "nature" or "structure" some

how explained the text than?as in the case of the reading we get of

Hardy?an interpretive construct built by the reader on the basis of both the
specific characteristics of the recombination of conventional elements in a
text and that reader's assumptions about interpretive procedures.
We have, in other words, found our close reading of this curious chapter
cohering in the light of the theories of Barthes and Foucault, but not neces
sarily in the traditional interpretive sense of a stable, univocal message re
layed from author to reader. Indeed, both author and reader become com

posites that take shape as interpretive connections are made among the
points in the text, just as the text becomes less a linear message than a cross
hatching of conventional "lines" (in all senses of the word), a series of over
lays of various code systems which, as they come together, disperse and re
combine in an apparently inexhaustible way. By addressing the retrospec
tive logic of interpretations, the chapter helps clarify them as "operations
that we force texts to undergo." I0 By aligning sexual and narrative relations

as discursive systems, the chapter reminds us of the highly conventional

quality of "the connections that we make, the traits that we establish as per
tinent." And by examining the case of Hardy, the chapter shows how "the

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THE CONCEPT OF THE AUTHOR

137

continuities we recognize [and] the exclusions that we practice" enable us to

read a semiotic being as "an absolute entity."

Such a thorough conflation of Foucault's investigative paradigm and

Fowles' fictional practice becomes possible only when one does not let tra
ditional ways of talking about authors impede "the free circulation, the free
manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of
fiction." I bring back at the end this key passage quoted at the outset be
cause for me, at least, it resonates with contemporary fiction like The
French Lieutenant's Woman in ways more suggestive and liberating than
concepts of more traditional fictional poetics. Indeed, as one surveys con
temporary fiction, one becomes increasingly convinced that it functions
within a different cultural paradigm that frustrates the poetics of an earlier
paradigm to "make sense" of it. That argument, however, is obviously too
large an issue to be developed here. In place of it, then, a final quotation
from Barthes' essay may perhaps serve as the most appropriate ending:
We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single "theo
logical" meaning (the "message" of the Author-God) but a multi-dimension
al space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and
clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres
of culture .... [T] he writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anteri
or, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with
the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them. (p. 146)

We too must adapt our reading practices so that we are equally nimble in
mixing and countering writings instead of attempting to "rest" on one that,
detached from what appears now as an Ozymandian monolith, has in its
new context become something different altogether.

NOTES
1 A 1968 essay available in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New
York: Hill & Wang, 1977).
2 Two versions of Foucault's lecture are available in English. The earlier version is
much as it was originally presented to the Soci?t? fran?aise de Philosophie in
1969, and is available in Language, Counter-Memory, and Practice, ed. Donald

F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977). A later version empha

sizes what Josue Harari calls Foucault's "politico-historical work" and is avail
able in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism edited by
Harari (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979); my quotations follow the later

version.

3 This paragraph quotes parts of p. 158 of Foucault's essay.

4 One is reminded as well of Jacques Lacan's contrast of "ego," an "imaginary"
construct roughly equivalent to what more traditionally is taken as the meta
physical self and the "subject." He speaks enigmatically of the subject as "al
ways a fading thing that runs under the chain of signifiers" rather than having
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138 COLLEGE LITERATURE

the unity and consistency we imagine in constructing the ego. This often quoted
phrase appears in "Of Structure as an Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to
Any Subject Whatever," in The Structuralist Controversy, ed. Richard Macksey
and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Pr ss, 1970),

pp. 186-195.

5 John Fowles, The Aristos, (New York: New American Library, 1970), p. 203.
Future references are noted parenthetically.

6 John Fowles, "Notes on an Unfinished Novel," in Afterwords: Novelists on

their Novels, ed. Thomas McCormack (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), p.
167.
7 John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman (New York: New American Li
brary, 1969), p. 82. Future references are noted parenthetically.
8 Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill

&Wang, 1978), pp. 31-2.

9 Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader {?\oom\ngion: Indiana University Press,
1979), pp. 10-11, where he calls the author one of the " 'actantial roles' of the
sentence," "an illocutionary signal (/I swear that/)," or "a perlocutionary op
erator (/suddenly something horrible happened/)."
10 The quoted phrases in this paragraph come from Foucault's essay, p. 150.

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