Authorial Corpographies
Performing Gender and Cultural Authorship
1The “Sleeping Beauties” of Literary Studies
In the last few decades we have witnessed what is undoubtedly a crucial event within Literary Studies: the rebirth of the Author as a central object in theoretical debates – a return which, even if it does not necessarily restore the powers bestowed on it by its progressive sacralization and singularization in Modernity, makes it a prominent star within cultural theory today. Despite such wide interest in reviewing the genealogies, functions, modes of existence, and, ultimately, the cultural and epochal narratives that support the notion of the Author and its multiple incarnations, the “sleeping beauty of Literary Studies”, which is the iconographic representation of the writer, has awoken only in recent years (to use an expression coined by Jean-Pierre Bertrand, Pascal Durand, and Martine Lavaud that appears extremely appropriate for the present issue of Interférences littéraires/Literaire interferenties.2) The vitality of this field of analysis, that has long been neglected for reasons that we shall have to consider,3 is manifested by, among others, the dossiers “Iconographies de l’écrivain” (published in this journal4) and “Figurations iconographiques de l’écrivain”5; the 2014 special issue of COnTEXTES. Revue de sociologie de la littérature, “Le portrait photographique d’écrivain”6; and other
1. This article and the special issue it introduces, “Gendered Authorial Corpographies.
Corpographies Auctoriales Genrées. Corpografías autoriales. Re/visiones de género,” are part of the research project “La autoría en escena. Análisis teórico-metodológico de las representaciones intermediales del cuerpo/corpus autorial” (FFI2015-64978-P), which is carried out by the Consolidated Research Group Cuerpo y Textualidad (2014 SGR 1316) of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona with funding from the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad del Gobierno de España and the Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER). The translation of this article (unpublished in Spanish) is by Lucía Giordano. We are grateful to Mayte Cantero and Katarzyna Paszkiewicz for their valuable remarks.
2. Jean-Pierre Bertrand, Pascal durand, and Martine Lavaud, “Introduction. Le portrait photographique d’écrivain vu de profil et de face,” COnTEXTES. Revue de sociologie de la littérature, nº 14, 2014 (http://journals.openedition.org/contextes/5914).
3. Key previous literature includes Federico Ferrari and Jean-Luc nancy, Iconographie de l’auteur, Paris, Galilée, 2005; and Jean-François Louette and Roger-Yves roche (dirs.), Portraits de l’écrivain contemporain, Seyssel, Champ Vallon, 2003. For a more comprehensive bibliography on this topic, see the introduction by David Martens, Jean-Pierre Montier, and Anne reverseau to L’écrivain vu par la photographie. Formes, usages, enjeux, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2017 (pp. 7-13).
4. Nausicaa dewez and david Martens (dirs.), “Iconographies de l’écrivain,” Interférences litté- raires / Literaire interferenties, nº 2, 2009 (http://www.interferenceslitteraires.be/nr2).
5. David Martens and Anne reverseau (dirs.), “Figurations iconographiques de l’écrivain,”
Image and narrative, nº 13/4, 2012 (http://www.imageandnarrative.be/index.php/imagenarrative/
issue/view/26).
6. Bertrand, durand, and Lavaud, op. cit.
interesting and more recent initiatives such as the Colloque de Cerisy “L’écrivain vu par la photographie. Formes, usages, enjeux (XIXe - XXe siècles)”.7
This belated “awakening” is somewhat conspicuous if we take into account that the iconographic representations of the writer play an essential part in the mechanisms of staging and vedetterization – to use José-Luis Diaz’s term8 – that have affected the author ever since the dawn of the “media regime.”9 In this context, such representations depend as much on the circulation of the name (renown) as on the reproduction and diffusion of the image (visibility) – even if it is, as Barthes puts it, that “of he who refuses images”10 –. The writer seems to turn inevitably into a representative or performer of “himself/herself ” or of his/her works in a spectacularized social space that is inseparable from the same media that have allowed the emergence of the celebrity category.11 The recourse to theatrical language in recent Author Studies – think, for instance, of Diaz’s scenographies12 or Jérôme Meizoz’s posture13 – is not merely metaphorical14: if “to write is to enter the scene”
– to quote Valéry’s famous formula15 – this does not only involve building an ethos in the scene of enunciation or providing oneself with an attrezzo or a comparsa in order to be placed within a dramatized and agonistic literary field. It also literally implies entering the artist’s or the photographer’s studio, the television show set, the stage ready for a recital or a conference, or allowing the documentary maker’s camera to follow one around. This visual, spectacular, corporeal and performative dimension is characteristic of being a writer from the very moment authorship takes on the features and powers granted to it by Modernity.16 But is this merely a deceitful and superfluous supplement to that “identity [...] specifically transmitted through literature”17 or to that “radical invisibility, never truly broken through” of the textual producer18? Or is it, as we propose, in fact constitutive of its author(ial) ity, if we understand it as the performative process of staging and re-cognition of those same features that allow the writer who assumes them to become an author?
7. See Martens, Montier, and reverseau, op. cit.
8. José-Luis diaz, L’écrivain imaginaire: scénographies auctoriales à l’époque romantique, Paris, Cham- pion, 2007, p. 3.
9. See Nathalie heinich, De la visibilité. Excellence et singularité en régime médiatique, Paris, Gallimard, 2012; diaz, op. cit., p. 123; Jérôme Meizoz, “‘Écrire, c’est entrer en scène’: la littérature en personne,” COnTEXTES. Revue de sociologie de la littérature, 2015 (http://journals.openedition.org/
contextes/6003).
10. Roland Barthes, “L’image,” Prétexte: Roland Barthes. Colloque de Cerisy, Paris, Union Génerale d’Éditions, 1978, pp. 305-306. See diaz, op. cit., p. 33.
11. On the links between authorship, visibility, and celebrity, see Martens, Montier, and re-
verseau, op. cit.
12. diaz, op. cit.
13. Jérôme Meizoz, Postures littéraires. Mises en scène modernes de l’auteur, Geneva and Paris, Slatkin Erudition, 2007; and La fabrique des singularités. Postures Littéraires II, Geneva and Paris, Slatkin Erudition, 2011.
14. See valérie stiénon, “Filer la métaphore dramaturgique. Efficacité et limites conceptuelles du théâtre de la posture,” COnTEXTES. Revue de sociologie de la littérature, nº 8, 2011 (http://journals.
openedition.org/contextes/4721).
15. See diaz, op. cit., p. 38 and Meizoz, “‘Écrire, c’est entrer en scène,’” op. cit.
16. In this regard, remember the classic article by Jean-Claude Bonnet “Le fantasme de l’écrivain,” Poétique, nº 68, 1985, pp. 259-277.
17. stiénon, op. cit.
18. Christian douMet, “De l’auteur représenté au frontispice de son libre,” J.-F. Louette and R.-Y. Roche, op. cit., pp. 13-23.
Meri Torras Francès We would like to propose the term corpographies – an adaptation of
the one suggested by Marie-Anne Paveau and Pierre Zoberman19 and applied by Paul Dirkx20 to the body of the writer – as a way to bring together all those iconographic representations of the author (including his/her audiovisual and live (in the flesh) appearances, already mediatized, that is, ritualized, mediated by previous representations and often spread by the media). Thus, we understand corpographies as “the inscription of sense into the body” and the “inscription of the body as sense”; as a “textual and semiotic [con-formation] of the body” according to
“situations and procedures more or less […] institutionalized.”21 Through this notion we would like to highlight the fact that all those representations entail the embodied and hence gendered appearance of the author, which leads us to the other theoretical focus in this special issue: Gender Studies. As we intend to show, the articulation of authorship, body, and gender in authorial corpographies turns the latter into an object of analysis and reflection that can provide relevant interpretative keys for both Author and Gender Studies.
In order to convey this idea, one last preliminary matter needs to be introduced. Without a doubt, the problem of authorship constitutes a central and unavoidable chapter in the agenda of feminist theory and literary criticism. Its very existence (disputed and discussed) as a discipline or as a field of interdisciplinary study depends on the postulation or the problematization of some link between bodies and corpus; between subjects whose common denominator has been traditionally conceived as a mark of the body and the cultural products those subjects supposedly produce. The reception of “The Death of the Author” at the heart of US feminist literary studies proves the importance of the matter. Although overthrowing the authorial figure of the “spiritual patriarch”22 was long due, Mary Eagleton reminds us that Roland Barthes’s decree was also denounced as a “premature” conclusion. It contributed to “invalidate [a] legitimacy […] achieved only recently and tentatively and, even then, only within certain parts of the globe” and now made it impossible to examine the reasons behind that fragile, tentative status.23 At the same time, it was celebrated as an opportunity to question the problematic identification of women, authorship, and expression of an autonomous subjectivity, or, to put it in Peggy Kamuf ’s words: the notions of “representation, expression, [and] the fully present intentionality of a subject” that still determine the way we conceive the relation between “writer and writing,” even if they “[contribute] essential elements to the metaphysical construction of women’s exclusion.”24
19. Marie-Anne Paveau and Pierre zoBerMan (dirs.), “Corpographèses. Corps écrits, corps inscrits,” Itinéraires, littérature, textes, cultures, n° 1, 2009 (http://journals.openedition.org/
itineraires/321).
20. See Paul dirkx (dir.), “Le corps de l’écrivain. Le corps en amont” (Sociologie de l’Art, nº 19, 2012) and “Le corps de l’écrivain. Le corps en aval” (Sociologie de l’Art, nº 20, 2012).
21. Paveau and zoBerMan, op. cit.
22. Sandra M. GiLBert and Susan GuBar, La loca del desván. La escritora y la imaginación literaria del siglo XIX, Madrid, Cátedra, 1998 [1979], p. 22.
23. Mary eaGLeton, Figuring the Woman Author in Contemporary Fiction, Houndmills and New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, p. 6.
24. Peggy kaMuF, Signature pieces. On the Institution of Authorship, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1988, p. 7. On the variety of views on authorship in feminist literary theory, see Toril Moi, “‘I am not a woman writer’. About women, literature and feminist theory today,” Feminist Theory, nº 9/3, 2008, pp. 259-271.
As this example shows, feminist literary theories have always faced a dilemma whether to come to terms with that “premature” death of the author or to conceive the cultural production as an expression of a female subject that “precedes the work” and is “independent from its journeys”25 and from the stagings of her being an author. Nevertheless, many proposals that deal with the relationship between gender and authorship have gone beyond this dilemma, conceiving the manifestations of authorship, more or less explicitly, as “artifacts” or cultural “objects”26. In other words, on the one hand, as the set of self- and hetero-representations and interpretations that configure the writer as an imaginary being for collective use, or, on the other, as the set of cultural narratives that determine what a writer is and shape those representations and interpretations. In this respect, we should mention some classic works such as Michelle Coquillat’s Poétique du Mâle, which shows that a recurrent feature in the “creative schemes” throughout French literature from the 17th century onwards is precisely its incompatibility with (the representation of) the female gender27; Christine Planté’s La petite Soeur de Balzac, in which the author offers an exhaustive historical and conceptual account of the discourses which turn the noun phrase woman author into an oxymoron28; or Joanna Russ’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing, a perceptive catalog of the ways in which traditional criticism has undermined the authority of women writers, thus depreciating and even de-artifying their products.29 To these reference works we should add studies on the representation of the woman writer in various periods, contexts, and mediums30, on the construction of specific female authorial figures31 as well as the extensive literature on the conceptualization of artistic authorship, its mechanisms of gender exclusion, and the presence of women creators in other fields of cultural production such as philosophy, art, and cinema.32
25. We are borrowing the expression from José-Luis Diaz, who places “a theory of the author worthy of that name” precisely beyond this alternative, and so in contrast with those approaches that understand it as a “full subject, preceding the work, independent from its journeys,” but also with “the modernist prejudices that [refuse] to take the author into account, arguing that the text, in its highest expression, must bring about the death of its scriptor” (cit., pp. 15-16).
26. On this contept, see David Martens and Myriam watthee-deLMotte (dirs.), L’écrivain, un objet culturel, Dijon, Éditions Universitaires de Dijon, 2012; or Eleonora cróquer, Escrito con rouge.
Delmira Agustini (1886-1914): artefacto cultural, Rosario, Beatriz Viterbo, 2009.
27. Michelle coquiLLat, La Poétique du Mâle, Paris, Gallimard, 1982. By “creative schemes”
Coquillat means the “fixed, unconscious structures on which experience and creative expression are built” (p. 435).
28. Christine PLanté, La Petite Soeur de Balzac. Essai sur la femme auteur, Paris, Seuil, 1989.
29. On the connection between signature and artification, see Nathalie heinich, “La signature comme indicateur d’artification,” Sociétés & Représentations, nº 25/1, 2008, pp. 97-106.
30. For some examples, we would like to refer the reader to the aforementioned volume by Mary Eagleton Figuring the Woman Author in Contemporary Fiction; to Suzanne W. Jones, Writing the woman artist: essays on poetics, politics, and portraiture, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991; and to Anne-Julia zwierLein (coord.), Gender and Creation: Surveying Gendered Myths of Creativity, Authority and Authorship, Heidelberg, Universitätsverlag Winter, 2010.
31. See, for example, the work of two contributors to this special issue: Marie-Laure rossi, Écrire en régime médiatique. Marguerite Duras et Annie Ernaux. Actrices et spectatrices de la communication de masse, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2015; and Thérèse courau, “L’ordre sexué du discours: le positionnement de Luisa Valenzuela dans le champ littéraire argentin,” doctoral thesis, Université de Toulouse Jean- Jaurès, 2012.
32. See, for instance, Michèle Le doeuFF, Le sexe du savoir, Paris, Aubier, 1998; Odile krakovitch and Geneviève seLLier (dirs.), L’exclusion des femmes. Masculinité et politique dans la culture au XXe siècle, Brussels, Complexe, 2001; Maria Antonietta trasForini, Bajo el signo de las artistas. Mujeres, profesiones de arte y modernidad, M. J. Cuenca (trans.), Valencia, PUV, 2009 [2007]; Agnese Fidecaro and Stéphanie Lachat, Profession: créatrice. La place des femmes dans le champ artistique, Lausanne, Antipodes, 2007; and Delphine naudier and Brigitte roLLet (dirs.), Genre et légitimité culturelle. Quelle reconnaissance pour les femmes?, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2008. See also the introduction by Michèle soriano and Laurence
Meri Torras Francès All these references reveal the interest in the category of the author in the
study of cultural production from a gender perspective, which, however, is not the case in the field of Author Studies, or at least not to a significant degree. As is well known, the theoretical and academic “renaissance” of the author has taken place to a large extent within the framework of francophone literary studies and across disciplines such as the sociology of art and literature, discourse analysis, socio- criticism, and the history of literature and ideas. Representative is, for example, Nathalie Heinich’s work on the category of the writer or the artist33, the revision of the concept of ethos and the articulation of the notion of the author’s image by literary discourse analysts such as Dominique Maingueneau and Ruth Amossy34, José-Luis Diaz’s research on Romantic authorial scenographies and the concept of the imaginary writer35, as well as Jérôme Meizoz’s work on the notion of posture.36 These are but a few important contributions already established in this field of study.37 The impact of this research is revealed by the large number of publications devoted to their discussion and to the analyses of the different “pieces” – including the iconographic ones – that function as a medium for the representations of the author.38 However, the number of volumes or monographs that take into account a gender perspective is strikingly limited, even more so work that considers gender as a productive theoretical and analytical category. It is virtually nonexistent.
H. MuLLaLy to De cierta manera. Cine y género en América Latina, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2014, pp. 9-26.
As regards the study of gender and cinematic authorship, we refer the reader to the bibliography analyzed by Katarzyna Paskiewicz in her contribution to the present issue, as well as to her recent publications Rehacer los géneros. Mujeres y cineastas dentro y fuera de Holywood, Barcelona, Icaria, 2017; and Women Do Genre in Film and Television, London, Routledge, 2018, which she coordinated together with Mary harrod.
33. Among others, Nathalie heinich, La gloire de Van Gogh. Essai d’anthropologie de l’admiration, Paris, Minuit, 1991; Être écrivain. Création et identité, Paris, La Découverte, 2000; and L’élite artiste.
Excellence et singularité en régime démocratique, Paris, Gallimard, 2005. Other works by the author on gender-related matters are: États de femme. L’identité féminine dans la fiction occidentale, Paris, Gallimard, 1996; and Les Ambivalences de l’émancipation féminine, Paris, Albin Michel, 2003.
34. See, for example, Ruth aMossy (ed.), Images de soi dans le discours. La construction de l’ethos, Lausanne, Delachaux et Niestlé, 1999; Dominique MainGueneau, Le discours littéraire. Paratopie et scène d’énonciation, Paris, Armand Colin, 2004 and Contre Saint Proust, ou la fin de la Littérature, Paris, Belin, 2006; Michèle BokoBza kahan and Ruth aMossy (dirs.) (2009), “Ethos discursif et image d’auteur,”
Argumentation et Analyse du Discours, 3 (http://journals.openedition.org/aad/656); and Pascale deLorMas, Dominique MainGueneau, and Inger Østenstad, Se dire écrivain. Practiques discursives de la mise en scène de soi, Limoges, Lambert-Lucas, 2013.
35. See, for instance, diaz, op. cit.; “Paratopies romantiques,” COnTEXTES. Revue de sociologie de la littérature, nº 13, 2013 (http://journals.openedition.org/contextes/5786); and “Les scénographies auctoriales romantiques et leur ‘mise en discours,’” in Delormas, Maingueneau, and Østenstad, op.
cit., pp. 29-50.
36. Meizoz, Postures littéraires, op. cit., and La fabrique des singularités, op cit.
37. See the interviews with Meizoz, Maingueneau, and Diaz in Interférences littéraires /Literaire interferenties: David Martens, “La fabrique d’une notion. Entretien avec Jérôme Meizoz au sujet du concept de posture,” nº 6, 2011, pp. 199-212; Reindert dhondt and David Martens, “Un réseau de concepts. Entretien avec Dominique Maingueneau au sujet de l’analyse du discours littéraire,”
nº 8, 2012, pp. 203-221; and Karen vandeMeuLeBroucke and Elien decLercq, “De l’écrivain au traducteur imaginaires. Entretien avec José-Luis Diaz au sujet de sa théorie de l’auteur,” nº 9, 2012, pp. 211-227.
38. See, for example, Denis saint-aMand and David vrydaGhs, “Retours sur la posture,”
COnTEXTES. Revue de sociologie de la littérature, nº 8, 2011 (http://journals.openedition.org/
contextes/4712); Sofiane LaGhouati, David Martens, and Myriam watthee-deLMotte (dirs.), Écrivains: modes d’emploi. De Voltaire à bleuOrange, revue hypermédiatique, Morlanwelz, Musée Royal de Mariemont, 2012; David Martens and Myriam watthee-deLMotte, op. cit.; and Reindert dhondt, Katrien horeMans, Beatrijs vanacker, and Karen vandeMeuLeBroucke (dirs.), “L’ethos en question.
Effets, contours et perspectives,” COnTEXTES. Revue de sociologie de la littérature, nº 13, 2013 (http://
journals.openedition.org/contextes/5674).
We are not just referring to the scarcity (however relative) of work that addresses gender issues in relation to, for example, the postural strategies or the positioning and representation of a particular woman writer or artist. What we would like to highlight is, in fact, a more structural issue. While feminist literary theory has not been able to ignore that the notion of author, the discourses about artistic authority and creativity, and the historical representations in which they materialized are ways in which art produces gender, it might not have been sufficiently acknowledged in turn that discourses on gender produce, pervade, determine, shape, and ultimately contribute to the notion of the author and all the aspects that are related to it. From this perspective, the category of gender and its productivity appears as another
“sleeping beauty” of Author Studies, and her lethargy might be the result of similar circumstances to those which have kept the analysis of authorial iconography (let us insist: inevitably embodied and gendered) on the margins of Literary Studies for such a long time.
That is why the present issue on “Gendered Authorial Corpographies” is not a publication on women artists that supplements the – undoubtedly valuable – research on iconographic and media representations of the writer in general. Our main goal is to present some provisional reflections on the production and productivity of gender when authorship becomes incarnate, that is, in those representations that invite us to read together, in the stagings of the cultural creator, the performance of authorship and the performance of gender,39 as well as other discourses related to the body, such as race and sexuality. In them, we also witness the incarnation of some of the conceptual foundations that sustain both categories: the incompatibility between the normative representations of authorship and the normative representations of the female gender; the implicit identification of the author’s body with the white, masculine body, regarded as unmarked or neuter; or the assumption that the author – unlike “the woman” – is defined by his inner being.
The following sections aim to offer some insight into these general problems, in order to provide an introductory framework for the case studies and the theoretical contributions drawn from them by the articles compiled here.
Taking into consideration the secondary role of iconographies in Literary Studies, we will examine some of the reasons of this neglect, while tracing a number of correspondences between iconography and women’s assigned role in relation to creativity, authorship and cultural authority. To counter the discourses that consider embodied stagings of the author as inessential supplements to writing or the work of art, we will look at some of the ways in which such stagings are fundamental to the performance of authorship and even contribute, paradoxical though it may seem, to the figuration of the Author apart from the body. These disembodying corpographies help to see how different bodies are read also in different ways when it comes to representing a literary or artistic corpus. In other words, they indicate how marks of gender –and ethnicity – contribute to or work against the re-cognition of the writer or artist through which, as we have said, he becomes an author.
39. See Ingo BerensMeyer, Gert BueLens, and Marysa deMoor, “Authorship as Cultural Performance: New Perspectives in Authorship Studies,” ZAA. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik.
A Quarterly of Language, Literature and Culture, nº 60.1, 2012, pp. 5-29; or Sonja LonGoLius, Performing Authorship. Strategies of Becoming an Author in the Works of Paul Auster, Candice Breitz, Sophie Calle, and Jonathan Safran Foer, Bielefeld, Transcript Verlag, 2016.
Meri Torras Francès
Autonomies and Subjections: Some Reasons for a Double Ab-
sence
40In their introduction to L’écrivain vu par la photographie. Formes, usages, enjeux, David Martens, Jean-Pierre Montier, and Anne Reverseau remind us that authoriality (“authorialité”), “the faculty of being an ‘author’, […] is of a necessarily political nature,” that is, inseparable from “the complex mechanisms through which an individual appears to be wholly himself in his relationship with others […] [and from] those parallel ones through which he is deemed fit for the social, collective function assigned to him.”41 The play on words in the title of the opening chapter,
“Literature is not a rootless culture” [“La littérature n’est pas une culture ‘hors sol’”]42 summarizes one of the aspects that are made evident by “the images which show writers”: the fact that “the relationship with the readers” – and, beyond that, with the collective spaces of cultural production and reception and even with the social, political, and media space – is “essential to all aspects of the literary ‘life,’ all actors included.”43 As a consequence, those images invite us to keep questioning the “rootlessness” of the literary that has been considered as a fundamental aspect.
Thus, such “rootless” or “autonomous” nature has been attributed to literary discourse and the disciplines studying their “legitimate” object (the Work or the Text, which have been understood as the outcome of an equally autonomous
“creative conscience” or as “closed and self-sufficient universes”44); to the restricted communities of creators or experts45; and, obviously, to an authorial entity whose own status depends on its distance and difference (its paratopia) from any exteriority that may alter the ownership of its signature.46 As we shall see, it depends more specifically on the separation and distinction between two kinds of alleged exteriority: social and biological life, opposed to an inner self that is conceived as solitary, unique and self-determined.
Autonomy – which is considered, together with singularity or originality, as a fundamental value of the literary and artistic ideology that crystallized in the 19th century – seems to be at the basis of that distrust of iconography which, as mentioned, has rendered the images of the writer “academically unthinkable”, turning them “almost [into] a […] taboo,”47 in an attempt to preserve the dividing line between an interior and an exterior in terms of discipline, text, and author.48
40. The following sections summarize and update some of the reflections presented in Aina Pérez FontdeviLa’s doctoral thesis: Un común singular. Lecturas teóricas de la autoría literaria, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2017.
41. Martens, Montier, and reverseau, op. cit., p. 30.
42. The play on words is based on the double meaning of culture (“culture” and “crop”) and the technical meaning of the phrase culture hors sol, which refers to hydroponic crops, grown without any soil. Ibid., pp. 15-41.
43. Ibid., p. 30.
44. See MainGueneau, Contre Saint Proust, op. cit.; Le discours littéraire, op. cit.; and Dominique MainGueneau and Frédéric cosutta, “L’analyse des discours constituants,” Langages, nº 117, 1995, pp. 112-125.
45. MainGueneau, Le discours littéraire, op. cit. See also, further on, the distinction between work-centered and person-centered communities put forward by Nathalie heinich in “Entre oeuvre et personne: l’amour de l’art en régime de singularité,” Communications, 64, 1997, pp. 153-171.
46. On the concept of paratopia, see MainGueneau, Le discours littéraire, op. cit.
47. Martens, Montier, and reverseau, op. cit., p. 16.
48. On the value of singularity, see especially heinich L’élite artiste, op. cit. On the autonomy vs. heteronomy dichotomy, see BerensMeyer, BueLens, and deMoor, op. cit.; and Esteban Buch,
Those images appear as a “delicate because impure object” that fits badly “in the traditional division of the disciplinary fields at the heart of academia”49. Not only because they openly challenge the secular antinomy of word and image, but also because they link the “Thesaurus of great texts,” “closed and self-sufficient,” that constitutes Literature50 to “multiple media (books, press, screens…) and domains of cultural production (publishing, exhibitions, communication…)” that are considered heterogeneous and inessential.51
In the context of the vindication of the autonomy of the Text and language in general – which, according to “The Death of the Author,” was supposed to replace “[the person] who had so far been considered its owner” by “the essentially verbal condition of literature”52 – iconographic proliferation and the study of authorial corpographies also seem to jeopardize the idea of the work that operates on its own – or, in any case, in collusion with a reader “who has no history, no biography, no psychology” like the scriptor who has no “passions, humors, feelings, impressions.”53 This is illustrated by Christian Doumet when he deplores “the habit, so extended, […] of displaying the portrait of the author” on the “cover of the book.”54 According to him, such a habit could encourage us to forget that the only true and legitimate answer to the question “Who is speaking in a book?” is “the book itself” (“he who does not believe that books talk about themselves is not a reader”), by revealing what the author – Flaubert, in the example given by Doumet – “has been killing himself to conceal” [ce qu’il s’est tué à ne pas montrer]55. Is this not – he wonders – “first and foremost his own image”56?
Indeed, thinking the writer’s image is confirming, in a way, the return of that false owner, the failure – within “common culture,”57 at least – of the literary criticism that had “[dethroned it], within theory, in favor of the formal study of the texts.”58 And it is so because, as Martens, Montier, and Reverseau suggest in
“L’autonomie,” in N. Heinich, J.-M. Schaeffer, and C. Talon-Hugon (eds.), Par-delà le beau et le laid.
Enquêtes sur les valeurs de l’art, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2014, pp. 23-32. Through a dialogue with the authors quoted in the present article, we trace the genealogy of the link between authorship, autonomy, sovereignty, and singularity in Aina Pérez FontdeviLaand Meri torras
Francès (eds.), “Hacia una biografía del concepto de autor,” Los papeles del autor/a. Marcos teóricos sobre la autoría literaria, Arco Libros, Madrid, 2016, pp. 11-54.
49. Ibid., p. 8.
50. We are borrowing the expression from MainGueneau, Contre Saint Proust, op. cit., pp. 127 and 140-141, who criticizes the identification of literary discourse with a group of “masterpieces born from a dark ‘context of creation.’”
51. Martens, Montier, and reverseau, op. cit., p. 8.
52. Think of Barthes’s assertion: Mallarmé was “the first to see and to foresee in its full extent the necessity to substitute language itself for the person who until then had been supposed to be its owner.” In El susurro del lenguaje. Más allá de la palabra y la escritura, C. Fernández Medrano (trans.), Barcelona, Paidós, 1987 [1968], p. 64.
53. Ibid., pp. 69 and 64.
54. douMet, op. cit., p. 13.
55. “‘The illustration is anti-literary’, Flaubert wrote to his publisher. ‘You want the first fool who comes along to draw what I have been killing myself to conceal.’” (Ibid., pp. 21-22).
56. Ibid., p. 22.
57. Remember “The Death of the Author”: “the image of literature to be found in common culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his history, his tastes, his passions”
(Barthes, op. cit., p. 66).
58. Olivier nora, “La visite au grand écrivain,” P. Nora (dir.), Les lieux de la mémoire II. La nation, Paris, Gallimard, 1986, p. 582. The same apparent contradiction between the “theorization of the subject’s suppression” by writing and the visual and media omnipresence of the writer is pointed out by Nora in connection with those other authorial corpographies which are the audiovisual
Meri Torras Francès connection with the earlier text by Federico Ferrari and Jean-Luc Nancy, Iconographie
de l’auteur,59 it becomes evident that “Modernity has not put an end to the wish, in the process of comprehending a work as such [un ouvrage comme oeuvre], to make the author’s very being appear, which crystallizes especially in his face”: “even if it is presented as pure text, with no illustration, iconophobic even, the work calls for and requires a presence of some kind in the shape of an image.”60 However, the same words used to describe the survival of the author – “the wish […] to make the author’s very being appear” – help us notice that the author who returns embodied in the portrait might not be the sovereign entity which “The Death of the Author”
dethroned, but rather the “simple plural of ‘charms’”61 that goes back to Roland Barthes’s work – no longer “the subject, the foundation, the origin, the authority, the Father, from which the work stems”62 but an object of “desire” surrendered to the public’s imaginings; a “creature” molded by its “Pygmalion-readers.”63
To begin with, the autonomy and the author’s ownership of his (self-) representations as posited by the Text – understood as a unitary corpus assisted by its Father, as a “trace” both symbolic and material that originates from his spiritual Interiority64 – are problematized by iconographic representation at both ends of the process. Firstly, the writer is usually not the (only) “author of his/her images” but is at the mercy “of someone else’s gaze (illustrator, artist, photographer or moviemaker),”
someone who is often “also an author.”65 Thus, his/her iconographers join the comparsa of “authoriality assistants” who shape the author’s representation (and who do so, moreover, for their own purposes, fashioning themselves “by means of an interposed image”),66 showing that his/her “image of himself/herself ” – here understood in the broad sense of the word67 – is not, in fact, an image of his/
her own, but “the work of all those who take part in his/her public appearance.”68 Furthermore, while visual representation helps to put on show a distinctive authorial posture,69 it simultaneously presents us with a set of stereotypes,70 a “grammar” of the author’s iconographic representation that shows the repetitive and collective
appearances of the author, whose “spectacular cult” through “audiovisual illustration” seems to prevail over the “erasure of the person.”
59. Op. cit.
60. Martens, Montier, and reverseau, op. cit., p. 22.
61. roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, Paris, Seuil, 1971, p. 13. On the deaths and rebirth of the author in Barthes’s work, see “Muertes y renacimiento del autor” by José-Luis diaz, in A. Pérez Fontdevila and M. Torras Francès (eds.), Los papeles del autor/a. Marcos teóricos sobre la autoría literaria, Arco Libros, Madrid, 2016, pp. 55-78.
62. Ibid., p. 68.
63. diaz, L’écrivain imaginaire, op. cit., p. 183.
64. On the genealogy of this notion, see for example Martha woodMansee, “The Genius and the Copyright: Economic and Legal Conditions of the Emergence of the ‘Author,’” Eighteenth- Century Studies, vol. 17, nº 4, 1984, pp. 425-448.
65. Martens and reverseau, op. cit., p. 156. See also Martens, Montier, and reverseau, op.
cit., p. 8.
66. diaz, L’écrivain imaginaire, op. cit., pp. 143-144.
67. That is, as the image of the author (v. BokoBza kahan and aMossy, op. cit.) or the imaginary writer (diaz, L’écrivain imaginaire, op. cit.) that emerges from his/her literary, biographical, media, etc.
self-hetero-representations and from his/her constant re-con-figuration by the authorized agents within the cultural sphere and by the audience, in a wide sense.
68. José-Luis Diaz (ibid.) borrows this expression from Jean-Benoît Puech’s “Du vivant de l’auteur” (1985).
69. Martens and reverseau, op. cit., p. 155.
70. dewez and Martens, op. cit., p. 16.
nature of the prêt-à-être author,71 which makes it possible to imagine and represent oneself as an author and to be acknowledged as such, also in the scene of the text and of “literary life.”72 In this way, the image shows one of the paradoxes that surround authorship in “the singularity regime.”73 This figure, on the one hand considered “beyond the common” and acknowledged for its distinction regarding cultural heritage or reproduction of any kind, finds itself on the other hand attired in the commonplaces of authorial representation, in recognizable motifs – which are thus repeated and susceptible to generalization – that enable the community that allots to it its “social, collective function” to distinguish its singularity and author(ial) ity.
The issue of iconographic representation opens up questions about other consequences of this community affiliation. Even if images respond to a postural strategy, more or less intended or “original,” “they are appropriated by a multitude of agents, in multiple media contexts and formats,” and are at the mercy of the usages and readings that result from their circulation.74 This does not only happen within a literary field that is allegedly autonomous, but takes place within a media space too, in which the creator’s “identity” as such is “confused” and the management and consumption of his/her figure is no longer in the hands of a community of peers. Within the vast scope of media visibility, the writer also comes to represent the category of celebrities, the holders of “visibility capital.”75 Such visibility capital is dissociated from merit, talent, and gift, as well as from the act through which these are realized (writing, in this particular case). On the one hand, because its functioning is endogenous and circular76: stars “are not reproduced because they are stars: they are stars because they are reproduced,” Heinich reminds us.77 On the other, because it associates the figure of the creator with the apparently antagonistic image of the performer.
Moreover, authorial iconography presents an embodied “subject whom to love”78 to those personalist kinds of admiration – to quote Heinich – which have been “[stigmatized] by intellectual circles as a form of alienation that belongs to popular circles” – remember Doumet: “he who does not believe that books talk about themselves is not a reader” –. In other words, it is considered as a mode of consumption that is peculiar to “common culture,” which indeed makes of it a
71. diaz, “Paratopies romantiques,” op. cit.
72. Remember that Meizoz locates the notion of posture on the “vertex of the individual and the collective” (Postures littéraires, op. cit., pp. 25-26), for it is created in relation to “a historical repertoire of ethos that have been incorporated, exhibited, transformed or emulated” (ibid., p.
23). Diaz, too, stresses the stereotypical and shared nature of images and authorial scenographies (L’écrivain imaginaire, op. cit., pp. 45-47).
73. As Heinich explains, the singularity regime that characterizes artistic axiology since the end of the 18th century favors “talent over learning or education, inspiration over regular, ordered effort, innovation over imitation of the canon, [and] genius over skill and work,” which implies the promotion of “all that is rare, out of the common, unique” and the projection of those qualities on the figure of the creator. heinich, L’élite artiste, op. cit., p. 40.
74. Martens, Montier, and reverseau, op. cit., pp. 8-9.
75. See heinich, De la visibilité, op. cit., pp. 43-53.
76. As Heinich explains, it is a category that has been “emptied of the heroic or, at least, praiseworthy dimension that used to characterize renown[;] it tends to fold back upon itself […]
becoming its own cause and justification.” Ibid., p. 256.
77. Ibid., p. 21. The expression is from John Castles’s Big Stars (2007).
78. We borrow the expression from Barthes’s Sade, Fourier, Loyola, op. cit., p. 14.
Meri Torras Francès common figure.79 As opposed to the distinction that results from being acknowledged
by the community of peers – based “on the triple preeminence of the initiated over the profane, of the work over the person, and of the legible over the visible”80 – these forms of admiration inspire “adherence, empathy, and even identification and emotional fusion” with the artist’s persona, to whom “passions, moods, feelings, [and]
impressions” are attributed, at the same time that he is honored as a “[participant] in [a] human condition” that is defined as a common “condition of singularity fulfilled with more success by some.”81 In other words, what is celebrated is a singularity which is no longer “the artist’s own,” the incommensurable one from which the work is supposed to derive and which the latter allegedly verifies, but a characteristic shared with the community and required by it.82
As we can see, reflecting on the production and circulation of the visual image helps to challenge certain divisions or lines of distinction that are established by Literature and by the disciplines and communities in charge of its management, while calling into question some of the characteristics that have been ascribed to the authorial entity by these same communities and disciplines. Finally, it invites us to doubt the ownership of its (self)representation and its autonomy in the production of a “literary identity,” but, above all, its “rootlessness,” its distance, difference or privilege in relation to what is common, that is, to the ordinary and repetitive (as opposed to the unique, the singular or the original), as well as to a community – not only literary – of recognition. Nonetheless, there is still one last border associated to this gap that is clearly blurred by these appearances of the creator: the division which sets his interiority apart from that exterior “carcass” or insubstantial receptacle the material body is considered to be. Once this division is erased by iconogrpahic (therefore, embodied) representation, the author’s inner self appears to be linked not only to the public realm and “social life” – spaces of cultural reproduction – but also to material life and biological reproduction. In other words, the images of the writer obvioulsy contradict the conceptualization of the author as an incorporeal entity related to a spirit, soul or interiority whose actual embodiment is not the real body but the corpus, the work.
We find the echoes of such a distinction in the reluctance of those who denounce the supplementary, inessential, and even fallacious nature of images and in particular of the representations produced by the social and media existence of
79. heinich, “Entre oeuvre et personne,” op. cit., p. 163. As Heinich reminds us, we need to take into account that “lettered condemnation of the most common cult of personality forms could be put down to an operation of ‘distinction’, as defined by Bourdieu’s concept.” Through such an operation, “the scholar, main holder of discursive resources, [produces the confusion between
‘learned discourse’ and ‘elite’; ‘common sense’ and ‘popular’], [thus] establishing himself as superior, because comparable to the ‘elite’, as opposed to the ‘common’, depicted as inferior because similar to the people” (ibid., p. 167).
80. Nathalie heinich, “Les écrivains en proie à la visibilité,” Martens, Montier, and Reverseau, op. cit., p. 48.
81. heinich, “Entre oeuvre et personne,” op. cit., pp. 161 and 168.
82. As Heinich shows, singularity is a requirement, but also an effect of its communal celebration. While, in principle, “it is what justifies [the great man] being celebrated, it is also what is affirmed […] on each occasion” (heinich, La gloire de Van Gogh, op. cit., pp. 51-52) and, furthermore, what is produced by it: “Singularity is not, in fact, an objective situation, a substance inherent to the essence of an object or a being. It is a construction of which admiration is a privileged instrument:
it could be said that it brings the image to a halt, that it has a highlighting effect or interrupts the space-time continuum for a second, thus isolating an object which, from that moment on, can be considered unique, irreplaceable […]. Admiration establishes what is unique, before it actually makes it excellent: it is an agent of singularity” (Ibid., p. 145).
the writer. In her critique of the concept of posture, Valérie Stiénon argues that its alleged “stress on [corporeal and public appearance] tends to hinder the privileged access into a writer’s identity made possible by literature”; an “‘inner self ’ (in the Proustian sense) of the author” that “would be precisely [that which] is concealed, which is not easily turned into a figure.”83 This “invisibility” of a specifically literary
“dimension of the self ” brings to mind that other “radical invisibility” of the writer who, according to Doumet, is “killed” by iconographic proliferation. In the context of his affirmation of the “essentially anonymous” nature of writing, it is in the name of a different depth or of a different interiority that he calls into question the “habit, so extended, […] of displaying the portrait of the author” on the cover of the book: this causes the exterior “surface” to blur and even replace the interior
“complexity”. The “piece of flesh exhibited on the book” – which should be its
“supplement,” at the most – “turns into the actual object in the transaction.”84 However, Doumet adds a reflection that reveals how this kind of defense of the complexity or of the depth of writing might respond to a different logic. The
“supremacy” of image (and body) over text is also linked to another displacement, which, apparently, could affect the cultural consideration of “subjectivity”: it seems as if the latter “[had defected] from the old headquarters of the soul and the spiritual side […] to move to the subject’s skin. The skin, the portion of skin[:] such are, indeed, the modern vestiges to which the representation of ‘subjectivity’ gets stuck.”85 Consequently, as regards these criticisms of iconographic representation, could it not be said that what they contain is some kind of defense of a subject not subjected to the ties of the “skin”?
If those representations can indeed be linked with the previously mentioned processes of expropriation, alteration or commonalization, it does not seem farfetched to state that the subsidiary or supplementary space they have been assigned to, as against what is “strictly” literary, might also be intended to keep the authorial entity away from the space traditionally reserved to women in the cultural system. As we have suggested, the confusion between the “singularity regime” and the “media regime”, produced by authorial corpographies, confuses in turn the values that define the artistic creator and his production as it blurs the borders between prestige and massification, originality and reproduction, authenticity and imitation, or interiority and exteriority.86 First of all, it abandons the writer to the “sphere of (female) consumption” – as opposed to the “sphere of (masculine) production” – 87and, what is more, to out-of-control, unregulated consumption that does not relate to high culture protocols but to emotion, affection, and sentimentalism. As has recurrently been pointed out, it is not without significance that a female character, Modeste Mignon, has become a paradigm of such “possessive” consumption, which replaces the text and its signatory with the fascination for the “collective myth” it manufactures around the author88: because of “the fact that she is a woman,”
83. stiénon, op. cit.
84. douMet, op. cit., pp. 13-16.
85. Ibid., p. 17.
86. V. heinich, De la visibilité, op. cit.
87. On this distinction, see for instance trasForini, op. cit., pp. 179-182.
88. In the homonymous work by Balzac. See diaz, L’écrivain imaginaire, op. cit., pp. 184-188.
Meri Torras Francès it is possible to “attribute to [her] ‘hysteria’ a behavior that tends to confuse the
work in its essence with its ‘imagery.’”89
This association of the feminine with mass consumption, characteristic of
“common culture,” and with the transformation of the author into a “creature”
fabricated by his readers can be related to other confusions brought about by the writer’s visual and media existence. As we have already suggested, the collective genesis and fate of an image that makes the author recognizable and abandons him to (dis) figuration is also in contrast with the idea of “individual autonomy” understood as against “the preoccupation for the other’s gaze,” the idea of a personality’s
“authenticity”, “turned into itself ”, a “‘self ’ unmarred by social conditions.”90 The same conception – which Heinich associates with Rousseau’s thought – is at the root of one of the mechanisms of exclusion that explain the undermining of women’s authority as cultural producers in Western tradition.91 Taken as a “cultural artifact” produced by its representations and its consumption and modeled by the commonplaces of authorship, the author also becomes a “being manufactured by culture,” to use the expression with which Michelle Coquillat describes the role assigned to women within Rousseau’s work itself.92 While creation is depicted there as a return to a pre-social essence and the opposition of individual and group that guarantees authenticity and originality is underscored, common space becomes progressively feminized. Women become “[creatures] of the masses” – a kind of “soul of society” on which an existence depends that is devoid of an interior truth that would precede it93: they are subject to the gaze of the others and are programmed by the social code that configures them and which they can only reproduce.94
This conception entails several inter-linked consequences. Firstly, the specific role of women in the public sphere is that of the performer, the actress: thus,
“it seems that […] the woman is carrying out her proper function – that of copying another, whom she has not shaped, whom she has not created.”95 (And do authors not feature in the spectacle of literary and social life as actors or representatives of themselves, of their work, but also of the “imagery” of “all those who contribute to their public appearance”?). Moreover, this conception also implies the female incompetence to carry out “new, unprecedented actions.” Accordingly, it suggest, finally, that women’s artistic achievements are limited to the use of the code, to the reproduction of a received communal culture through which, at the most, they will be able to wear a mask of artistry96. In other words, they are limited to the fabrication of a necessarily superficial appearance turned to the exterior, that is, devoid of
89. Martens, Montier, and reverseau, op. cit., p. 18.
90. heinich, De la visibilité, op. cit., pp. 495 and 532.
91. We examine these mechanisms in Aina Pérez FontdeviLa, “Qué es una autora o qué no es un autor,” A. Pérez Fontdevila and M. Torras Francès (eds.), ¿Qué es una autora? Encrucijadas teóricas entre género y autoría, Barcelona, Icaria, 2018. See also Aina Pérez FontdeviLa, Meri torras
Francès, and Eleonora cróquer, “Ninguna voz es transparente. Autorías de mujeres para un corpus visibilizador,” “Autoría y género” (special issue), Mundo Nuevo. Revista Latinoamericana, nº 16, 2015, pp. 15-27 (http://www.iaeal.usb.ve/Mundo%20Nuevo/MN%2016/MN_16.pdf).
92. coquiLLat, op. cit., p. 123.
93. Ibid., p. 32.
94. Ibid., pp. 137-145.
95. Ibid., pp. 175-176.
96. Ibid., p. 33.
authenticity and destined to please someone else’s opinion and gaze, on which the existence of its authors, them being women, depends.97
To the identification with communal space and cultural reproduction we must add another association, even more evident and recurrent, that keeps women away from the autonomy, singularity, and originality that defines true creativity. It is the association of the feminine with procreation, considered as an “act of the body that reproduces the species,” as compared to creation, “the act of the mind that brings something new into existence.”98 Double subjection, then, to community and body, to cultural and biological reproduction, which might explain some of the commonplaces in the interpretation of literary and artistic works by women, often characterized as self-corpographic – engendered through a “mindless, unconscious, uncontrolled act of the body”99 or, in its positive version, through some natural spontaneity – or as confessional, autobiographical or even testimonial,100 that is, as incapable of transcending the biological and cultural experience of their “women creators,”
who then serve as sort of spokeswomen for their gender.
Actually, this interpretation is not limited to “female” production but also applies to those creators who belong to what Joanna Russ calls wrong groups – the others of the white, Western, heterosexual, middle- or high-class man.101 As María Lugones explains, the production of “culturally transparent” knowledge, art or literature – that is, the kind which can be read as universal, not rooted in a particular standpoint – presupposes the fiction of a Subject that is “out of history,”
“out of culture” (culture being understood in an anthropological sense that links it with immobility and repetition). As we suggested, a Subject that is also out of corporality, not marked with the “symbolic and institutional inscriptions […] of race or gender” that restrict and determine the lives, perspectives, and products of those who are regarded as the “rest” (sensual, emotional, carnal) from which that Subject must claim to be purified.102 “Women, the poor, the nonwhite, the queer, people whose cultures are denied and rendered invisible […]”103 as Lugones specifies, are thus imagined as lesser subjects because more subjected, which condemns them to creative heteronomy. “Gendered, racialized or ‘cultured,’” their products represent their collective and bodily marks – cultural, generic or racial.104
At the outset we referred to the concept of paratopia, which is crucial to understand the discourses and commonplaces that have permeated many of the representations and postures of the author throughout the 19th century until today. Without going into detail on the implications of this notion by Dominique Maingueneau,105 we could say that paratopia refers to the paradoxical space occupied
97. Ibid., p. 145.
98. Susan Stanford FriedMan, “Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor: Gender Difference in Literary Discourse,” Feminist Studies, nº 13/1, 1987, pp. 52-53.
99. Ibid., p. 65.
100. On this topic, see for instance russ, op. cit., pp. 29-31; or PLanté, op. cit., pp. 213-312.
101. russ, op. cit., p. 119.
102. Maria LuGones, “Pureza, impureza y separación,” M. Marín Domine (trans.), N. Carbonell and M. Torras (eds.), Feminismos literarios, Madrid, Arco Libros, 1999 [1994], p. 246.
103. Ibid., pp. 246-247.
104. Ibid., pp. 252-253.
105. MainGueneau, Le discours littéraire, op. cit.
