One of the things I found just a bit curious about Andrew Goldstone’s post on book publishing was his assertion, in his diagram, that writers are the focus of literary study. I’d always thought it was the texts that were the focus, but perhaps Goldstone was simply asserting the priority of writers over readers.
In a comment Natalia Cecire introduces the notion of a meta-author:
In some ways this notion—or this literary moment—restores the primacy of an author, or let's say, meta-author (that is, the publisher), who controls the list. To privilege the early twentieth century for the ways in which it enables such a reading (whether or not the charismatic publisher model is quite appropriate) seems to be a bit of a retreat. For the mind-boggling publishing conglomerates we have now, we have to compass a notion of corporate meta-authorship (the way that Pixar authors an animated feature). At that point, I suppose, narratives fail.
The Pixar example is interesting. My initial impulse was to ask: But is the Pixar case any different from that of the collectivity that makes any film?
But that’s not quite right. For, in the case of live-action film, we’ve arrived at the convention of attributing the film to the director; in some case the director may also be the writer but this is generally not the case. But Pixar is NOT a director. It is a studio. Pixar films do have directors, but there does seem to be a tendency for the studio itself to overshadow the director. Thus WALL-E, for example, is a Pixar film, not an Andrew Stanton film. But then, Disney is like that too. There are directors for Disney features, but the films are generally attributed to the studio, not to the directors.
So, we’ve got: individual authors of books, directors of live-action films, studios producing animated features (Pixar and Disney) and now meta-authors, that is, publishing houses. I don’t think Cecire was proposing “meta-author” as a serious term of art; she was on her way to making another point, one involving a passage from Tocqueville.
Still and all, I note that it was not so long ago that the author was proclaimed dead. Not literally, of course, but as a causal agent in accounting for texts the author was deemed useless and authorial agency was dispersed into impersonal codes and social institutions. In this context Cecire’s meta-author looks like a ghostly being suspended between the creature that actually wrote the manuscript and the codes and institutions that distribute it and through which it is intelligible.
This business of agency is a tricky one, isn’t it?
Old Stories
My central case, the one I keep returning to, is that of the story-teller in the pre-literate band or village. Why? Because that’s where story-telling started. That practice and its dynamics thus seems to me to be the most basic case we have to consider.
My default position is that the envelope of the dynamics of these more modern cases is pretty much the same as the dynamics of pre-literate story telling. The more modern cases have more actors, in more differentiated and highly structured roles, but what is accomplished in the society, that is pretty much the same.
What IS accomplished? Well, that’s a bit of a mystery. For now, let’s say that people are entertained and let it go at that. That’s not entirely adequate, but it will do for now.
The interesting thing about this central case, the original case, is that it has no author. It has a story-teller, but the story-teller is not the author of the story he tells. The stories are traditional, they are passed down from one generation to the next, from one story-teller to his successor, and they are passed down more or less unchanged. I say “more or less” because, in the absence of written records or sound recordings, there’s no way to tell whether or not the stories ARE the same. Perhaps they drift a bit – almost certainly they do.
One might posit that surely there must have been a first telling, and so that first-teller is the author, but, really, do you want to try thinking that one through? How can you? We have no records. Such thinking-through would be all conjecture, and not much to guide it. No, there’s little value in entertaining such a conjecture.
So, those traditional stories in preliterate societies, they just are. Or we might want to attribute them to the group. For our story-tellers do have to please the group in which they live. During the telling they will respond to the audience and one can imagine that, over successive tellings over many years, changes will creep in. The story will never be quite the same.
One might also argue that THAT bit of conjecture is little better than thinking back to the first telling. Perhaps. But no matter. No matter how you look at it, authorship for these stories, these oldest stories, is a puzzle.
Authority
But what of authority, the authority these stories have in the group? That authority does not come from the story-teller. Indeed, the story-teller is as subject to the authority of those stories as are the other members of the group. Indeed, the story-teller is bound and beholden to the story itself. So wherein does the story’s authority reside?
The sociologist would likely locate that authority in the group itself. I’m not inclined to question that judgment. For, as I’m unwilling to posit the existence of some transcendent realm, I can’t see where else the authority could reside. The story-teller is just an agent or conduit for that authority.
And if the story-teller is, say, Mark Twain, and the story is, say, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, does that change the locus of the authority? No, the authority of that story does not come from Samuel Clemmens; he was merely a man with a white suit and a cigar. That authority comes from the group that values the story.
Not that I understand how that works. Not at all.
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