What Matter Who's Speaking?

"If it were proved that [Shakespeare] had not written the sonnets that we attribute to him , this would constitute a significant change and affect the manner in which the author's name functions."

"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."

"The function of an author is to characterize the existence, circulation, and operation of certain discourses within a society."

~Michel Foucault, "What is an Author?"

Remind yourself you are a twenty-first century critic. And then further imagine that you just discovered a piece of shocking evidence: the Shakespearean sonnets were not written by Shakespeare. No, not by that genius who wrote "Hamlet" and "Romeo and Juliet" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Instead, it was written by none other than... a woman!

The news has spread across the globe, the academic elite in an uproar over the news. Feminist critics pounce on the sonnets, beginning the Shakespearean critique from the eyes of its new writer. Everything has changed, hasn't it? The symbols are different, the language different, the meaning different. And all because of a name.

Foucault spoke about the nature of the name of an author, which is "not simply an element of speech." The name of an author, instead, separates works and groups of works from one another. And it's true. We know Emerson by his seeming long-winded, eloquent prose, the quasi-divine seer who transports knowledge to the reader. We can identify a Shakespearean sonnet any day through his speech patterns. And we do this with most art forms. Since I know music, let me take you to a Music History class. At the end of a music listening test (where we have to identify the composer and the work we hear), Dr. Dixon gives us a piece we didn't have to study for the exam, and for extra credit, we have to guess the piece and its composer. We search for defining characteristics of the great composers. We know them by their names, and we group their music into one category, distinct from any other composer. And it works with art, too. We can readily identify a Monet or Picasso painting by the generalizations we know about their work.

But what if the name changes, as in the Shakespeare example above? It destroys all our preconceived notions of the piece of literature. We can no longer say the author does such and such because that is what he or she normally does. We can no longer judge it against works by that same author... So, really, the name has a lot to do with it.

And now, I would like to bring this topic to the Bible. We have no collective author for this text (except God...). Instead, every book (or nearly every one) has been written by a different author, many of them also nameless. We can conjecture at names (and Biblical scholars often do), but that never changes the meaning of the text. Yes, an author can help us figure out context, but it never really affects meaning in this case. How does this fact fit in with Foucault? We have no authorial standard by which to judge the Bible (and some argue about the Bible as "literature." It is a sacred book, so how can it be literature at the same time?), no way to identify an author upon first reading. And yet this piece of inspired literature has lasted generations. And the Bible as a whole does "characterize the existence, circulation, and operation of certain discourses within a society," in this case, Judeo-Christian discourses. And we have lasted without specific authorial understanding for all these centuries. And Barthes' authorial theory in "The Death of the Author" seems to work for the Bible: "a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination." We don't have an author, and we cannot necessarily find one, but the unity lies in the destination, the way God speaks to us through the nameless writers of the Bible. In Foucault's words, "what matter who's speaking?"

Makes you think about how we categorize authors in general...