key: cord-0060914-v18q6vp6
authors: Aryan, Arya
title: Conclusion
date: 2020-08-08
journal: The Post-war Novel and the Death of the Author
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-45054-0_5
sha: 35b70ef1d67aa2f6ba846f6e2e922b5474da2a90
doc_id: 60914
cord_uid: v18q6vp6

This chapter sums up the book’s main arguments and objectives in investigating the historical moment of the emergence of the concept of the death of the author in literary and cultural theory. To this aim, the book explores the so-called “theory revolution” that began to take shape in the late 1960s, with the writing of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. One focus of the investigation is the undertheorisation of gender in the work of these key theorists so that the focus of the first part of the book explored how, as opposed to death, women writers turn rather to madness as the gateway to a new authorship and agency. In this fiction, madness is re-engineered through writing into a reverse discourse describing the conditions of women’s suffering under patriarchal law. Also, the chapter summarises how more contemporary fiction explores postpostmodern (metamodern) constructions of authorship as a new transnational and global world emerges. As the writings of Coetzee, Rushdie and Mantel suggest, the author might now be seen to have a therapeutic function in an age of globalised risk and trauma: the author becomes a kind of therapist for the present and a curator of the past.

Coetzee, Mantel, in turn fought back against the killing-off of the author by critics and theoreticians, finding their own agency and a reassessment of authorship in the age of the supposed demise of the author.

This book also investigated the historical moment of the emergence of the concept of the Death of the Author in literary and cultural theory, which coincides with critics no longer seeing themselves as handmaids or explicators of the text, but instead viewing their relation to the text as one of creative rewriting. It examined the trajectories that authorship has taken before, during, and after the rise of Theory, in order to investigate some of the prevailing concepts and functions of fictional authorship from the 1950s to the present. To this aim, the book explored the so-called "theory revolution" that began to take shape in the late 1960s, with the writing of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault, each of whom questioned the foundations of the humanist Romantic/expressive concept of authorship. One focus of my investigation is the undertheorisation of gender in the work of these key theorists so that the focus of the first part of the book explored how, as opposed to death, women writers turn rather to madness as the gateway to a new authorship and agency in the feminist discourses of écriture feminine and the vexed question of "writing the body" that took centre stage in the new second-wave feminism of the 1980s. Feminist discourses on authorship did not appear until the 1970s (Germaine Greer, Kate Millett, Shulamith Firestone), though Virginia Woolf had directly addressed the question of female authorship in A Room of One's Own (1928), decades earlier. Again, what is evident is that writers such as Sylvia Plath, Doris Lessing, Margaret Drabble, and Muriel Spark, began to address questions of gender and authorship from the late fifties and early sixties, before the theoretical writings of second-wave feminism emerged. An enduring preoccupation in much of this writing is the desire to disclose the patriarchal binary that attributes a concept of pure rationality to the male but promulgates definitions of women as being more driven by irrational emotional responses, and with tendencies towards madness. In this fiction, madness is re-engineered through writing into a reverse discourse describing the conditions of women's suffering under patriarchal law and is thus seen to be a consequence of identity production under patriarchy.

The third part of the book examined how more contemporary fiction-written in the period after the decline of High Theory-explores post-postmodern (metamodern) constructions of authorship as a new transnational and global world emerges, driven by international capital with new forms of social control. As the writings of J. M. Coetzee, Salman Rushdie and Hilary Mantel suggest, the author (together with the novel) might now be seen to have a therapeutic function in an age of globalised risk and trauma: the author becomes a kind of therapist for the present and a curator of the past. The distinctive tone of this new fiction departs from the skeptical textualism of the postmodern to produce a new blend of the ironic and the sincere. This new author is both healer and wounded figure, committed to pushing the boundaries of the novel (towards the infinite) and to exploring the power of fiction in connecting to the globalised world, facilitating our understanding of the suffering of others on a more global scale. Like a shaman, this author-function also brings about positive change. The preoccupation with authorship, madness, and identity politics, returns in contemporary fiction (hence, the return of the author), but is refigured and re-engineered to address global risk and trauma. The author comes to function as a conduit for the traumatic and the wounded.

I argue that the author takes a more significant function in the life writing of writers with dual nationalities or "hyphenated identities", to borrow from Porochista Khakpour. It is therefore not surprising that there has been a great tendency among these writers to autobiography, memoir or fiction whose main character could be easily identified with the author. Authorship seems to be a means for construction of nationhood and individual identity. The author becomes a conduit between two separate worlds and augments connectivity between disparate communities while constructing and maintaining their autonomy and identity. The author is a mouthpiece for the many voices of our heterogeneous world.

The recent global Covid-19 crisis, which is still classified by the WHO as a pandemic at the time of composition of this book, is further evidence that we live in a much more connected world whose major crises are human-induced. It once again reminds us that these writers are correct in offering the author as a socially and politically committed medium and reformist who is concerned with healing the global world. Their prophetic anticipation of human-induced crises which require a global collective responsibility and solution has once again come true. They, together with Wallace's call for a new sincerity and seriousness as opposed to self-indulgence and playful culture of postmodernism, should be taken more seriously. In this sense, the author pushes the boundaries of fiction to become a voice and a mouthpiece not only for the invisible like the minorities (or animals as Coetzee emphasises) but also for the inanimate: the Earth which is in desperate need of protection from large-scale human destruction. The power of fiction is an important resource in anticipating, understanding and resolving our global crises and its potential impact on global scale. As recent novelists such as Mantel and Coetzee imply, fiction can liberate truth from sources of political power and cultural legitimacy. The fact that denials and lies of some politicians in response to Covid-19 pandemic have worsened its spread implies the need for a kind of fiction, together with the author, which remains sincerely committed to truth by creating alternative realities and establishing connectivity which is possible by honing our empathetic and sympathetic imagination skills. I argue that the author as a function exists and remains politicised. In his Nobel Prize speech Harold Pinter articulates that "when we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror-for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us" (2006, 23) . I can conclude that the novel is capable of breaking (de-constructing) the mirror for (reconstructing) alternative truths and will likely remain so.

The Author. London: Routledge

The Politics of Experience, and, the Bird of Paradise

Truth and Politics: The Nobel Lecture