Writing Writes

In the novel, the voice that speaks the first sentence, then the second, and so onward - call it the voice of the narrator - has, to begin with, no authority at all. Authority must be earned; on the novelist author lies the onus to build up, out of nothing, such authority. No one is better at building up authority than Tolstoy. In this sense of the word, Tolstoy is an exemplary author.

Announcements of the death of the author and of authorship made by Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault a quarter of a century ago came to down to the claim that the authority of the author has never amounted to more than a bagful of rhetorical tricks. Barthes and Foucault took their cue from Diderot and Sterne, who long ago made a game of exposing the impostures of authorship.

The Russian formalist critics of the 1920's, from whom Barthes in particular learned much, concentrated their efforts on exposing Tolstoy, above all other writers, as a rhetorician. Tolstoy became their exemplary target because Tolstoy's storytelling seemed so natural, that is to say, concealed its rhetorical artistry so well.

As a child of my times, I read, admired, and imitated Diderot and Sterne. But I never gave up reading Tolstory, nor could I ever persuade myself that his effect on me was just a consequence of his rhetorical skill. I read him with an uneasy, even shamefaced absorption, just as (I now believe) the formalist critics who held sway in the twentieth century continued in their spare to read the masters of realism: with guilty fascination (Barthe's own anti-theoretical theory of the pleasure of reading was, I suspect, put together to explain and justify the obscure pleasure that Zola gave him). Now that the dust has settled, the mystery of Tolstoy's authority, and of the authority of other great authors, remains untouched.

During his later years, Tolstoy was treated not only as a great author but as an authority on life, a wise man, a sage. His contemporary Walt Whitman endured a similar fate. But neither had much wisdom to offer: wisdom was not what they dealt in. They were poets above all; otherwise they were ordinary men with ordinary fallible opinions. The disciples who swarmed to them in quest of enlightenment look sadly foolish in retrospect.

What the great authors are masters of is authority. What is the source of authority, or what the formalists called the authority-effect? If authority could be achieved simply by tricks of rhetoric, then Plato surely justified expelling poets from his ideal republic. But what if authority can be attained only by opening the poet-self to some higher force, by ceasing to be oneself and beginning to speak vatically?

The god can be invoked, but does not necessarily come. Learn to speak without authority, says Kierkegaard. By copying Kierkegaard's words here, I make Kierkegaard into an authority. Authority cannot be taught, cannot be learned. The paradox is a true one. - On Authority in Fiction, Senor J.C. from Diary of a Bad Year, J.M. Coetzee