Authorship and attribution in Simone Martini's Saint John the Evangelist

¶ … Saint John the Evangelist by Simone Martini

Michel Foucault's essay "What is an author?"

As its title suggests, Michel Foucault's essay "What is an author" questions traditional notions of Western authorship. Most individuals view 'the author' of a literary work as self-evident. However, Foucault points out that what we view as 'the author' is itself a work of fiction. The most obvious fiction is that of the constructed, first-person narrator of literary works such as novels or poems. But Foucault states that the very notion of authorship, the idea of a unique and singular intelligence produced the works of Homer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Proust, etcetera -- is also false.

Another myth of Western authorship is the idea that creating a work of fiction conveys immortality to the writer. According to this myth, although the body's existence is finite, the author lives on in his or her work. Foucault reverses this equation, and suggests instead that authorship of a text actually kills the real individuality of the author. The author becomes subsumed by his or her language, and his or her text takes on a life of its own in the reader's mind. Traditional notions of literary interpretation strove to understand what authors really meant when they created their texts. The concept of 'original intention' is actually rendered null and void as soon as the author transcribes an idea into language. Foucault gives the interpreter equal value as the creator in the apprehension of a work of art: every reader or viewer creates the work anew.

Modern society has created the author to assign both fame and blame to texts, and thus creates a false sense that authorship is linked to the artifact produced by the author in the form of a text. However, due to changes in the cultural landscape, Foucault also argues that certain texts inspire more of a sense of attachment to notions of authorship. Recently, culture has ascribed more importance to the personal psychology of authors of poetry and novels, for example, more so than scientific texts, even though in the ancient world claiming authorship of scientific works was deemed important. This indicates that how we understand an author is a social production, not something inherent to the notion of 'the text.'

Foucault's point is manifested in the fact that it is only relatively recent in Western culture that texts have not been anonymously created, as they were during the era of Beowulf. Additionally, only since the enforcement of stricter copyright laws have texts become legally 'guarded' products. Another shift in the notion of authorship may be likewise occurring in the era of the Internet, after Foucault wrote, where authorship is often anonymous and uncertain. Foucault believes that regardless of the era, however, that 'the author' has always been a creation, and to insist upon a direct link between author and text limits one's flexibility of interpretation and understanding of the text.