The Birth and Death of the Author

A Multi-Authored History of Authorship in Print

Andrew J. Power

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138311169
• eBook ISBN: 9780429859465
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Authorship
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Birth and Death of the Author is a work about the changing nature of authorship as a concept. In eight specialist interventions by a diverse group of the finest international scholars it tells a history of print authorship in a set of author case studies from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century. The introduction surveys the prehistory of print authorship and sets the historical and theoretical framework that opens the discussion for the seven succeeding chapters. Engaging particularly with the history of the materials and technology of authorship it places this in conversation with the critical history of the author up to and beyond the crisis of Barthes' 'Death of the Author'.

As a multi-authored history of authorship itself, each subsequent chapter takes a single author or work from every century since the advent of print and focuses in on the relationship between the author and the reader. Thus they explore the complexities of the concept of authorship in the works of Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate (Andrew Galloway, Cornell University), William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe (Rory Loughnane, University of Kent), John Taylor, "the Water Poet" (Edel Semple, University College Cork), Samuel Richardson (Natasha Simonova, University of Oxford), Herman Melville (and his reluctant scrivener 'Bartleby') (William E. Engel, Sewanee, The University of the South), James Joyce (Brad Tuggle, University of Alabama), and Grant Morrison (Darragh Greene, University College Dublin).

1 Fifteenth Century

Fathering Chaucer: Thoreau, Hoccleve, Lydgate, and the Invention of the First English Author

Andrew Galloway

For centuries the idea of a ‘beginning’ of English authorship has focused on Chaucer. Even when we debate the truth or distortion of this view, debate the authenticity of his primacy in coining or honing new words or new meters for English, and situate him amid or compare him to many another fourteenth-century writer who established or broadened some aspects of literary English or the vocation of an English author – Richard Rolle, the author of Piers Plowman, John Gower, the Pearl-poet, John Clanvowe, John Grimestone, Thomas Usk, and many others – it is still difficult to argue against the focus, nearly continuous since his death in 1400, on Chaucer’s image of founding literary English and English authorship. To understand the nature and ‘profession’ of medieval authorship requires a commitment to investigating wide tracts of literary materials, languages, and culture, but this is often pedagogically and professionally tenuous unless Chaucer is made somehow central to that pursuit. Professional scholars of later periods may not even have heard of other medieval authors. Yet generations of students like their teachers have memorised the opening sentence of the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, which in many educational contexts is the only memorisation of any poetry still regularly required, as if tightly grasping this one nugget of this one early writer were preserving the minimal essence for any account, past, present, or to come, of the development of English authorship.

It is understandable to urge modern readers and teachers to continue to insist on Chaucer’s ‘importance’ if only to prevent this last sole vestige of early literature from vanishing from modern perspectives. It is equally important, however, to scrutinise the history of this profile and its values, not in order to diminish or displace focus on Chaucer’s powerful and subtle poetry but to understand what the shifting focus on him as ‘founding author’ has brought into view or excluded, who has advanced it and with what aptness to their own literary, intellectual, and social outlooks and aspirations, and ultimately to find some critical purchase on the elusive but seemingly ever-verdant phenomenon of authorship in general. Medieval literary scholars, in fact – paradoxically enough, given the anonymity of most of their subject matter – have particularly pursued this topic.¹

The resulting diverse perspectives at least show nothing like inevitable canonicity. To emphasise a tactic of eccentricity rather than inevitability in my own pursuit of this topic, I proceed in somewhat oblique and regressive fashion. I consider first a minor but in some ways exemplary, even prescient, view of Chaucer’s modern authorial status, from mid-nineteenth-century New England. I then turn back to the most important initial creators of the view that Chaucer fathered English poetry: the two fifteenth-century poets, Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate, one of whom actually knew and (he claimed) learned from Chaucer, the other of whom fictitiously inserted himself into Chaucer’s most famous literary project. These three adopters and adapters of the idea Chaucer as author and ‘father’ of English literature show eccentric but in some ways pivotal varieties of this notion: first, those appearing at the beginning of modern American culture and embodying its values of innovation yet Anglocentric appropriation; second and third, those successively developed in the early decades after Chaucer’s death by English poets writing for the royal court, who sought to establish rather conflicting notions of ‘English poetry’ that could hardly presume social or institutional prestige or coherence of any kind otherwise. Amid the shifting configurations of the idea of Chaucer as first English poet, one constant is that fashioning and refashioning him in this role accommodates ever-changing postures of innovation and even rebellious independence while bolstering the reassurances that any such innovations and rebellions are strictly aesthetic and discursive rather than more widely social, psychological, or political. Any fashioning of authorship, however, expresses statements about the nature of authority in general. In Chaucer’s case these particularly involve vivid but paradoxical visions of history, media, interpretive communities, and institutional foundations and founders, all elements that provoke new constellations or inventions in the forms and worlds in which Chaucer has been later read and remembered.

A Late November Lecture in the Concord Lyceum

In a lecture on ‘Poetry’ on November 29, 1843, in the Lyceum of Concord, Massachusetts, given by a recent Harvard graduate, and rising essayist, and (equally important) known friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry D. Thoreau (who would move two years later to Emerson’s property on Walden Pond to begin several years of seclusion and writing), identified three poets he considered fundamental instances of ‘the poet’: Homer, Ossian, and Chaucer.² Of these, Ossian, the ‘ancient’ bard from some misty Gaelic past after Homer and before Chaucer, held the greatest ‘grandeur’. His ‘massive’ similes show this no less than his heroes’ manly laments. ‘If Ossian’s heroes weep, it is from excess of strength, and not from weakness, a sacrifice or libation of fertile natures, like the perspiration of stone in summer’s heat. We hardly know that tears have been shed’ (295). This was not unusual attention. In spite of steady scepticism, enthusiasm for Ossian was widespread after the 1760 supposed discovery and ‘translation’ by the Scottish schoolteacher James Macpherson; Goethe, whom Thoreau closely read, immediately made Ossian the focus of Young Werther’s heroic ideals and despair, and the 1844 editors of the Dial where Thoreau’s lecture on ‘Poetry’ was first printed inserted a footnote announcing a new edition of the translation of The Genuine Remains of Ossian: ‘we take pleasure in recommending this, the first literal English translation of the Gaelic originals of Ossian, which were left by Macpherson, and published agreeably to his intention’ (293 note).

Thoreau cast Chaucer into a different mode of authorship. With Chaucer, ‘no hero stands at the door prepared to break forth into song or heroic action, but we have instead a homely Englishman, who cultivates the art of poetry’ (297). By Chaucer’s time, Thoreau asserted, ‘the towering and misty imagination of the bard has descended into the plain, and become a lowlander, and keeps flocks and herds. Poetry is one man’s trade, and not all men’s religion, and is split into many styles. It is pastoral, and lyric, and narrative, and didactic’ (298). Chaucer’s importance as the first nameable English poet to display ‘pure melody’ and ‘natural’ style granted him extraordinary status nonetheless, of a kind showing that bardic heroism is not the only kind of poetic primacy:

Seen from the side of posterity, as the father of English poetry, preceded by a long silence or confusion in history, unenlivened by any strain of pure melody, we easily come to reverence him…. Chaucer’s is the first name after that misty weather in which Ossian lived, which can detain us long. Indeed, though he represents so different a culture and society, he may be regarded as in many respects the Homer of the English poets. Perhaps he is the youthfullest of them all. We return to him as to the purest well, the fountain furthest removed from the highway of desultory life. He is so natural and cheerful, compared with later poets, that we might almost regard him as a personification of spring. (298)

Several of those themes come from what was well-established criticism, especially John Dryden’s influential preface to his translations of Chaucer’s and other ‘fables’ (1700): ‘as [Chaucer] is the father of English poetry, so I hold him in the same degree of veneration as the Grecians held Homer… Chaucer followed Nature everywhere, but was never so bold to go geyond her’.³ The parallel to Thoreau is evident even in Dryden’s use of a subordinate clause to note Chaucer’s status as ‘the father of English poetry’. But Thoreau’s perspective is shot through with a keener sense of the contradictions between Chaucer’s historical significance and his actual style, even with skepticism about the identification of any heroically individual ‘author’. Thoreau begins his lecture by remarking that ‘man is the great poet, not Homer nor Shakespeare; and our language itself, and the common arts of life are his work’ (292). Such unsettling views bring Thoreau close to ideas of Roland Barthes that ‘language’, not authorship, is the true basis of literary textual and creativity.⁴ Thoreau adds, ‘Poetry is so universally true and independent of experience, that it does not need any particular biography to illustrate it’. Yet with a wry concession, Thoreau indicates that readers need to invent authors when they cannot find them: ‘sooner or later’, he acknowledges, ‘we refer… to some Orpheus or Linus, and after ages to the genius of humanity, and the gods themselves’ (292–293).

For Thoreau, Chaucer’s poetry poses other challenges to traditional literary authority. Chaucer show ‘a simple pathos and feminine gentleness, which Wordsworth occasionally approaches, but does not equal’ – a ‘femininity’ Thoreau suggests is ‘not to be found in women… but is only the feminine in man’ (302). These are not traits mentioned by Dryden, or (apparently) any writer before Thoreau. Against Ossian’s hyper-masculinity, Chaucer’s originality depends on the poet’s ‘feminine’, domestic, ‘childlike’ perspective. Chaucer ‘confides in the reader, and speaks privily with him, keeping nothing back’, whereby the reader receives Chaucer’s words as if they were ‘the circumlocution of a child, but discovers afterwards that he has spoken with more directness and economy of words than a sage’ (301). Although Dryden compares what he thought was Chaucer’s uneven meter to the ‘infancy of our poetry’⁵ (Dryden misunderstood the pronunciation of Middle English verse, which in fact scans accurately in Chaucer), Dryden makes no suggestion that Chaucer’s outlook itself is childlike.

Broad reassessments of ‘poetry’ and ‘the poet’ were typical for American thinkers and writers of Thoreau’s period, eager to break free from more recent Anglo-European conventions; Emerson directly commented on the new world’s need for a new kind of poet, who Emerson did not think had yet appeared.⁶ Chaucer’s ability to cast away bookish authority and follow ‘nature’ seems a willed rejection of tradition and the ‘desultory life’ that surrounds Chaucer as well, a refounding rather than origin. This ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: The Begetting and Forgetting of the Author
• 1 Fifteenth Century: Fathering Chaucer: Thoreau, Hoccleve, Lydgate, and the Invention of the First English Author
• 2 Sixteenth Century: Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Traces of Authorship
• 3 Seventeenth Century: Authorial Identity and Print in John Taylor’s Common Whore and Arrant Thiefe Pamphlets
• 4 Eighteenth Century: Samuel Richardson’s ‘Murdering Pen’ and the End of the Novel
• 5 Nineteenth Century: Melville’s ‘Bartleby’ and the Prefiguration of the Author’s Own Preference Not to Write
• 6 Twentieth Century: La Mort de l’Auteur: James Joyce and the Birth of Writing
• 7 Twenty-First Century: ‘Who Is That Knocking on Your Door?’: Authorship, Print, and the Multimodal Comics of Grant Morrison in the Digital Age
• Bibliography
• Index