What Matter Who's Speaking (Take Two)

"The name of the author remains at the contours of texts - separating one from the other, defining their form, and characterizing their mode of existence."
~Michel Foucault, "What is an Author?"

I know we read Foucault a while ago, but something happened the other day that made this essay very real to me. This will just be a short excursion into the Author, one that I have taken up before, but one that I'm finding is changing, in Barbara Herrnstein Smith's terms, with the changes in my personal economy.

Let me give you some background... I love quotations. I have spent hours searching the internet for the most profound ones. I love finding just the right quotation to fit into a paper or to fit what I'm feeling. And because I am inextricably connected to technology, I have compiled a "database" (a Word document of 65 pages at present) filled with what I like to think are the "best" quotations, arranged both topically and alphabetically. (Yes, can you say English nerd?). And every evening, I search through that database to find a quotation to put on my Instant Messenger away message. The quote usually has something to do with what I'm feeling that day, or what I've gone through, or just something that the astute person would find is saying much more about me (i.e. my "personal economy") that day than my own words would say.

The other night, I was looking up quotes on love (yes, can you also say "hopeless romantic" and "one who still believes in fairy tales," and further believes that the art of telling them - and having them - is being lost, just as Benjamin briefly talked of in his essay "The Storyteller"?). I found one on a website that was listed as anonymous. But I liked the quote, so I decided to copy it and put it on my away message for the evening. One of my friends actually looked at the quote when I put it up, and decided to do some sleuthing of his own. He found that the quote was from the movie "Meet Joe Black." That was enough to challenge how much I liked the twelve sentences I had just copied and pasted to represent "me" for that evening.

I have never seen the movie. But something didn't "sit right" with me. Something about taking a quote from a movie - with Brad Pitt, no less - and adhering to what this movie advocated seemed wrong, or at least not "erudite" enough. I had hoped it was an anonymous quote from something "better," such as an Elizabeth Barrett Browning sonnet. Now, her name would hold clout for me... but from a movie? Nope, I didn't like the quote any more. I told my friend that I was going to find a different quote, a better quote, one that has more "status" behind it... because more status means that it's more true. Before I even thought of Lit Crit, my friend challenged my sudden change of heart towards the quote, saying he liked it, and in essence, he also asked, "What matter who's speaking?" Lit Crit discussions hit me like a wall of bricks. Here I was placing the author's name above the words, saying that if the author was not respected or well-known or from a popular movie and not from a long-standing, tried and true text, then I couldn't like the quote, and I couldn't think of it as having truth. It seems absurd as I think about it, but for me at that moment (and I suspect at many other moments in my life), it did matter who was speaking.

For me, the realization of the author characterized the quote's "mode of existence." And until my friend pointed this out to me, I didn't even realize I was ascribing such an importance to the author's name.

I do find it interesting, though, that I was "ok" with not knowing the name of the author originally, that an "anonymous" author was better than a "petty" pop culture quote penned by some screen writer (what does this further say about my view of literature and authors on film? Am I saying right now that they aren't authors? In any other circumstance, I would be the first one to say that playwrights and screen writers are most definitely authors... but in my subconscious mind I have ruled out their ability to "speak" to me and for me... which actually bothers me a lot, since my very mode of life in this instance is directly contradicting what I say I'm "standing for").

In the end, I did change the quote for that evening. I found one penned by an author I had never heard of, but who nonetheless seemed much safer - more truthful and in better standing - than the movie. (How I determined that last fact is also up for debate). But this demonstrated to me in my own life the ideas we covered in class, and how much I really do care about who's speaking. And I have a feeling that extends to many, many, many more areas of my life, for better, or for worse...