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РАЗДЕЛ 5. ЗАРУБЕЖНЫЙ ОПЫТ
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ББКШ300.1 ГСНТИ 16.21.33; 17.07.65 Код ВАК 10.02.19; 10.01.08
K. G. N'Guessan
Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire
IN THE NAME OF THE AUTHOR AND OF THE TEXT: WRITING AS (PRO)CREATION
ABSTRACT. Writing can be seen as an act of (pro)creation. It is a complex process through which the author combines words to give a meaning. A single idea at the beginning, the text progressively takes form as other ideas are brought in. In doing so, a strong "filial relationship " is created between the text and the writer, a creator-created object relationship. Also, like in the process of human procreation which takes several months, the construction of a text is achieved through a long mechanism of reflection, choice of words, language, crossing outs, rereading, and rephrasing to have a final product. This article first shows how the text is constructed. Then, it explores the way this process of construction reveals the author as a "father, " bringing to light the metaphor of human (pro)creation. In fact, the metaphor of procreation at stake here hints at the creation of the text as it confers to the writer (creator), a property right on his text (created object). Thus, in the same way as the child that comes to life thanks to its parents, the literary text exists thanks to the author. KEYWORDS: author; text; (pro)creation; creator; metaphor; authorship; writing.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: N'Guessan Kouadio Germain, Ph.D, Associate Professor of the English Department, University Felix Houphouët-Boigny, Côte d'Ivoire; 01 BP V34 Abidjan 01, Côte d'Ivoire, office;5A; e-mail : [email protected].
Introduction
The creative art is the product of the imagination of the author. It first germinates in the latter's mind and progressively gets a well-structured frame in the same way a seed germinates and develops to become a plant or a tree. Like a spider's web, it starts with a single thread to which many other threads are successively attached to finally make up a whole structure. Before becoming a whole text, the process of writing generates thinking. One might have an idea, but in the process of writing nothing may be left of that idea. Thus, ideas are brought in as contributing elements. Bit by bit, the story takes shape and becomes a whole structure. This structuring requires from the author to lean on paradigms, styles or patterns that may be personal or are borrowed from other authors or models. This brings to light the notion of authorship, which I metaphorically compare in this paper to procreation. The objective is to inspect the creation of the literary text as a process that reflects the act of procreation. Clearly, I intend to show that writing is a long, hard, and time-consuming process in the same way as procreation is a complex and divine act that requires from man and woman preparation and engagement.
Indeed, while writing his text, every single idea of the writer is fertilized or strengthened by others to make up the narrative. My comparison between "procreation" and "writing" is an inclusive allusion to authorship that obliterates gender differentiation — since the author can be a male or female individual — to insist on the capacity to (pro)create. To better investigate this comparison, I will look into the way the writer organizes his text, that is to say how the text reveals (from the point of view of semiotics and structuralism) as a structure where each element is defined only according to its relation-
ship with the others. Also, the analysis of this interrelation between the textual elements complies with deconstructionist perspective and contributes to the larger field of philology by exploring the writer's language, style, and grammar. Finally, once finished, the text becomes the writer's creation whilst the process of writing symbolizes procreation.
1. In the Beginning is the Text
To begin with, it is important to recall this question that French philosopher and critic Michel Foucault asked in 1969: What is an Author? Or put differently, who deserves being called an author or who can claim such title? The importance of this question relates to the fact that many people think that writing is a simple exercise of putting ideas on a sheet of paper and probably get someone to publish them to believe they are writers or authors. In fact, claiming authorship is more than that. It is a complex exercise of thinking and organization. For Foucault, writing is an interplay of signs arranged less according to its signified content than according to the very nature of the signifier. Writing unfolds like a game that invariably goes to manifest beyond its own rules and transgresses its limits. In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is, rather, a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears (http://www. movementresearch.org/classesworkshops/melt/ Foucault_WhatIsAnAuthor.pdf).
Though writing is a game, it is ironically difficult and complex since failure to master its rules can be harmful. Playing this game is both theoretical and technical: there are the critical work of arranging the textual elements and how the author proceeds to create his work. Writing can be an individual or a collaborative enter© N'Guessan K. G., 2016
prise. An author may decide to write alone about something or together with other au-thor(s). But in both cases, author(s) must show complete involvement in what they write.
Collaboration in the work of writing extends to the reader as s/he plays an important role in the construction of the meaning of the text. One might even argue that without the reader, the text does not or even cannot have meaning. For it is through the activity of reading that the message contained in the text as well as the author's intention(s) are deciphered and revealed. When reading a text, the words (signs according to Foucault) that the author used and which can be considered just as an arrangement on a paper, are rendered explicit through an activity of interpretation or of critical reading. Through this activity, the reader makes inferences and draws conclusions. This calls into play knowledge of the events narrated, involvement in what one reads.
When authors decide to write a story or to create a style, they think first of how to weave the different threads or pieces of their story to make a unified whole. This occurs as a complex process which requires from them some predispositions in a complex discursive environment. Indeed, the author needs to know the contours of the environment of which he wants to write the story. Without this knowledge, it will be impossible for him to write his story. No text can exist without the author's mastering of the environment or the context of the story he wants to create. This privileged posture helps the author choose the elements of his story and organize them to create meaning.
The time an author spends to write his work shows the difficulty he has to master this environment. Put differently, the more the author knows about the environment of his story, the more quickly he can gather the information he needs to create his text. Or when he fails to grasp this environment, it becomes difficult for him to collect information and it takes him a longer time to write his story. In a word, the knowledge of an environment and its context is very important in the construction of a story. Thus, because the author usually writes for a reader or an audience, he must organize the elements that he chooses following a structure that informs his art.
The organization of a work is decided by the author according to his need. The structure, the plot, the mood, the setting, the characters and their development, the narrative levels, the storyline, the sequences, to quote but a few, are all chosen by the author in accordance with his desires, his intentions, and what he seeks to achieve as an artist. However, the author can be influenced by the outside world. For exam-
ple, something that he had considered trivial or less important at a certain moment of the storyline can suddenly reveals very significant and worthy of interest. Similarly, what he had thought very interesting may appear less important as the story progresses and he discovers or comes across new situations and realities. In both circumstances, a reorganization of his story becomes necessary. All these unexpected realities show how writing is a long and complex process made of rewording, rephrasing, crossing-outs, and reformulation. When an author sets out to write something or about something, he surely desires to pass on a message. The text, therefore, stands as a place of the manifestation of his ideological and creative intentions. At the same time, by writing, he invites his reader(s) to share his ideology and his intentions.
In a work of fiction, for example, the above mentioned elements are interdependent. They are bound together to such an extent that the removal or the misuse of one or some of them can disrupt the logics of the storyline or the organization of the whole structure and thereby, blur the message. Authors generally construct their texts basing on their own experiences or on those they have been told. Some say that they got inspired by situations they lived or heard of and to which they add new information to create a story. Others — mostly in autobiographical works — argue that their stories are real life events. Though fiction works are pure imaginations of their authors, the narratives are arranged as succession of ideas. Each text or genre has its own language. Thus, discussing the language in fiction, James Wood (2008) writes: If prose is to be as well written as poetry — the old modernist hope — novelists and readers must develop their own third ears. We have to read musically, testing the precision and rhythm of a sentence, listening for the almost inaudible rustle of historical association clinging of the hems of modern words, attending to patterns, repetitions, echoes, deciding why one metaphor is successful and another is not, judging how the perfect placement of the right verb or adjective seals a sentence with mathematical finality. We must proceed on the assumption that almost all prose popularly acclaimed as beautiful ("she writes like an angel") is nothing of the sort, that almost every novelist will at some point be baselessly acclaimed for writing "beautifully" as almost all flowers are at some point acclaimed for smelling nice [Wood 2008: 182].
Here, Wood stresses the importance of language as an essential feature in the construction of a text, precisely in prose writing. But the importance of his argument relates to how the reader judges the quality of the work.
To him, reading a text is like listening to music. When we read a text, we feel something musical, something pleasant to our ears, what Roland Barthes (1970) calls "pleasure." Syntax, rhetorical figures, choice of words, verbs, etc., are all cognizant to the author's style, desire, and intention or the editor's advice. They create this musicality Barthes talks about. When we read a text, this musicality deploys throughout the narrative structure. To appreciate it, we need to look into its organization.
Generally, a work of fiction has the following scheme: the exposition, the rising action, the climax, the falling action and the denouement. As such, the climax cannot come after the denouement. Similarly, the falling action cannot come before the exposition or the rising action. The removal or misplacement of one of these stages totally breaks the internal logics of this scheme and the text becomes deconstructed; the reader gets lost. Reading and correcting the manuscript, rewording, rephrasing, as the ideas come to the author, intend not only to keep the order of the story's scheme, but they are contingent for the text to get a good structure.
The acclaim granted to a work is greatly dependent on the way it is organized. The narrative may happen in one day, several weeks, months, even years or a whole lifetime. The plot can start in a specific place and end in another. Some characters can appear at the beginning of the story and disappear in the course of the narrative; new ones can be integrated. Tenses can change so can settings; flashbacks can be used. All these dispositions add to the structure of the text. Usually, texts that are qualified as popular or interesting by readers owe their quality to the author's arrangement of these elements and his development of the theme he commits to investigate. However, it is important to note that the quality of the structure is determined in large part by how effectively this structure works with the content. In a text, indeed, such features as transitions, text structure elements to draw conclusions and make inferences about the author's purpose, and relevant parts that reflect the author's purpose contribute to the quality of the text structure.
Such texts as Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) or Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) do not own their public acclaim only by the themes they treat but by the way the authors treat them. If both texts explore the persistent racism Blacks are faced with in America, they differ from each other by the authors' technique. For example, in Invisible Man, through the experience of a nameless character, Ellison inspects African Americans' symbolic invisibility in America through the institutionalized racism that deprives them of their
citizenship and makes them evolve as outcast. In terms of structure, Invisible Man exemplifies that of the jazz: the broken structure of that music (with the singer's incessant and sudden changes in tone and mood while striving to keep the same storyline) pervades the narrative. There are a Prologue and Epilogue. The text opens in the present, switches to flashback, and returns to the present, but a step forward from the Prologue so that sometimes the reader seems unable to follow the logical storyline. But taken as a whole, all this structuring chronicles the invisible character's odyssey to the North in search of a way-out. Even the idea of "invisibility," which is here a sight-based and not sound-based concept is nurtured by the structure of jazz: Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because he's made poetry out of being invisible. I think it must be because he's unaware that he is invisible. And my own grasp of invisibility aids me to understand his music. [...] Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you're never quite on the beat. Sometimes you're ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around. That's what you hear vaguely in Louis' music [Ellison 1952, Prologue: 8].
By turn sad, playful, shy, loud, drawing on different styles and traditions of writing, mixing constant refrains throughout the narrative, Ellison creates in Invisible Man a whole aesthetic of literary jazz.
In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston leans on southern folklore through Janie's language that reflects that of Black population at the time of slavery. Painstakingly, she crafts a text infused with southern language and folklore to make her character's voice at the same time lyrical, philosophical, and almost classical but also, colloquial, and real. Hurston succeeds in bringing her character's voice and that of the narrator together. This structuring pervades the whole narrative and even stands out as a stylistic trait of her writing. The following passage is a perfect illustration: "Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches. 'Ah know exactly what I got to tell yuh, but it's hard to know where to start at.'" (20) Here, the narrator's voice shows Janie's comparison of her life to a tree. When Janie speaks to the reader directly, Hurston utilizes a style that captures the sound of Janie's speech phonetically: instead of "I," we get "Ah." Instead of "you," we get "yuh." Also, we get a sentence that ends on a preposition
("at") — what the narrator would never do. Despite these differences, we notice that the narrator describes Janie's thoughts while Janie herself gives her words. In both cases, the text deals with the same character.
The narrative voices or linguistic levels — "plurilinguism" in Bakhtine's termilogy — traduce not only Hurston's knowledge of the folklore of her community, but her creation of a personal style that plunges the reader into southern language and speech. By staying true to their speech, Hurston represents her characters and refuses to change it for a more formal-minded audience. At the same time, Hurston's narrator, with lofty insights, demonstrates that despite what we might think about the characters' informal language, their inner lives are more lyrical. Finally, through her characters' informal language, Hurston celebrates the richness of African-American culture and shows that more than a stylistic choice, her use of that language helps show that it is something very special. As it can be seen, in both texts, beyond the description of Blacks' collective experience, Ellison and Hurston make of their creation something particular that reflects their personal inspiration and creativity and they impose it to their readers as consumers.
The judgment readers passed on a text is in large part influenced by how they know about what is written. This response to the text characterizes the writer's intention as something not just ideal but questionable through critical reading. No surprising, the readers of Beaudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal (1857), Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (2008) or Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) will show different even contradictory appreciations of these texts. Depending on the posture they have, they will not consider these works just as combinations of words intended to pass on a message but may let themselves be driven or influenced by their often personal emotions. As a matter of fact, readers interested in nature, dream, journey of the mind or lyricism will acclaim Les Fleurs du mal. Those who see slavery as a dehumanizing system to be abolished will read Beloved with passion, and those who want to discover the "hidden" side of Muslim religion will love reading The Satanic Verses. On the whole, readers whose expectations are not in line with these texts will find them uninteresting and worthless. By the same token, when Alice Walker published The Color Purple (1983), many critics reproached her with deviating Blacks' struggle. For them, as a black writer, she had better unite with her community to fight against their common social castration and victimization by white racist world instead of exposing Blacks' intra-racial problems. What is interesting in Walker's
approach and draws attention is her desire to teach that though it is essential for Blacks to unite to face their oppression, it is also important not to look sight of the behaviors and attitudes that contribute to destroy their community or delay its development. For her, only this introspective appraisal of their community can give them strength to overcome their hardship.
A text can be read from different perspectives. For example, there are those who find it in line with their world view and accordingly see it as a good one. Opposite to this first perspective are those for whom the text fails to respond to their perception of the world. For this group, the text is not good. They will therefore not recommend it or pass a good judgment on it. A good reading of a text requires that the reader takes into account this variety of perspectives. It helps him develop a critical analysis likely to help him avoid radical positions since he will know in advance that another possible interpretation of what he reads exists.
When reading a text, readers are invited into a communicative scheme. A text is organized around its function and not the author. That is to say that while writing, the author invests his text with some "divine" mission of teaching, sensitizing, and educating. Once written, the text is expected to fulfill this mission. African American popular lecturer, poet, and novelist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was mindful enough when she often ended her novels on a hope for a peaceful world: And now, in conclusion, permit me to say under the guise of fiction, I have essayed to weave a story which I hope will subserve a deeper purpose than the mere amusement of the hour, that it will quicken and invigorate human hearts and not fail to impart a lesson of usefulness and value [in: Foster 1994: 285].
Or:
There is light beyond the darkness, Joy beyond the present pain;
There is hope in God's great justice And the negro's rising brain.
Though the morning seems to linger O'er the hill-tops far away,
Yet the shadows bear the promise Of a brighter coming day [Harper 1987: 282].
The reception of Harper's text, indeed, amounts to the reader's ability to grasp the correlation between the socio-historical environment of Harper's time and the mission she invests her texts with. Her choice of words, language, and structure are intended to act on the reader's mind. Obviously, for a reader who knows this context, he will understand that Harper appeals to forget about the injustices against
Blacks and turn to a hopeful America. Put in the present world context where many people are victims of various kinds of injustices for their position (political, ethnic, sexual, cultural, religious), we can say that Harper's call is topical.
The achievement of the mission the author invests the text with rests on the organization of the textual elements he uses. It provides the text with an identity that differs from that of the author. Actually, both identities occur concurrently in the text as the story deploys without conflicting each other. The author lets the identity of the text evolve and embark the reader in its movements: it makes him dream, fly, sleep, laugh, weep, as the narrative unfolds. Thus, in the above quotations, this identity lies in an internal structure culminated or limited to the discourse through the text's invitation to ignore the injustices and turn toward an ultimate hope. In the extract taken from Iola Leroy, the "shadows," pictogram of suffering, that logically contrast with the "brighter coming day" infer this message of hope for a better tomorrow. In fact, despite their difficulties, Harper invites Blacks and beyond them, those people who are victim of injustices to take their sufferings as a source of inspiration to face their future with optimism. This appeal and didactic power Harper confers to her texts reinforce the idea that the quality of a text resides in the perfect organization of its elements by the author. This organization helps well articulate the theme that the author undertakes to investigate and the message he wants to convey. Finally, through the long and complex process of construction of his text, the author brings to the fore the act of procreation.
2. And the Text Becomes (Pro)creation
In this section, emphasis will be laid on the parental relationship between the author and his text. In the same way the child is brought to life by its parents, the text is made to exist by the author. Indeed, discussing the writer's creation of the character in her article "Le romancier et ses personages (1)" Nathalie Piegay-Gros writes: "The creation of the character is mainly achieved as the key moment in fiction writing. It can be thought of as procreation [...] Creating a character would be like giving birth to a person" [Piegay-Gros 2006: 15]. (All the translated parts of this article are mine. — K. N'Guessan). She adds: The character is conceived as the transposition of an experience or a real person. Without wanting to simplify this complex alchemy by which the novel draw on the novelist's experience, very often the invention is rooted in reality to lead to a fictional character: not that it simply reproduces it, but it displaces it, imposes on it different magnification methods, attenuation, hybridization... This last point is without
doubt the most important: a character of a novel is never the mere transposition of a real person; s/he is the product of a brewing between different traits of different persons and the novelist is himself involved in that [Ibid.].
Interestingly, Piegay-Gros's idea sheds light on the process of crafting the text as a metaphor of procreation. Actually, the act of procreation differs from the creation of the text in that the former is a complex and divine undertaking while the latter, though complex too, does not comprise the same divinity. My interest here in drawing a parallel between both creations is the relationship of dependence that the created object (child or text) entertains with the creator (parents or author). The child cannot exist without its parents. Similarly, the text cannot exist without the author. It then turns out that both created objects exist only because their creators exist. To extrapolate, we can say that these created objects exist because of their creators' will even if in the particular case of procreation many methods exist today which do not involve biological parents. The symbolic of the procreation in the construction of the text exemplifies the filial bond between the child and its parents. When the child is born, it is given a name to authenticate its parents' creative power on it. In some societies, this naming is a great ceremony that involves the whole community. It is the time when the child officially bears the name of its "creator" and the parents, in turn, officially leaves their imprint on their "creation."
In the context of literary creation, this public validation of the writer's authorship over the text occurs when the text is published, that is when it is brought to public readership. However, contrary to the parents/child creative bond, the creative link between the author and his text occurs differently. An author chooses the title of his text before it is known to the public. He decides about the name of his text before he starts writing. This name may change in the course of the writing depending on the events or the ideas as they come to the author's mind. For specific reasons, an author may decide to change the title of a novel he has been writing days, months, even years earlier. All the same, he can decide to change this name after he has finished writing his text. But whatever the situation, the final name is brought to public access at the end of his creation. At that moment, the text reveals as his "child." And like a name given to a child, this name or title the author gives to his text is imposed to readers.
An interesting aspect that greatly contributes to defining the text as procreation is what that grants the writer a property right over the text. Everything happens as if the author conceives a child: he creates his text, gives it a
name that is imposed to readers exactly as in the process of human procreation. Parents' long reflection to find a name for their child also happens with the author. Generally, names are very significant. They can determine the behavior of the persons who bear them. This is why in most African traditional communities, they are always chosen after consultation and sound reflection by elders. Sometimes, the naming ceremony is accompanied by rituals to solicit the ancestors' blessing and their leniency so that they help them choose a name that will positively impact the personality and behavior of the bearer. In the same way, choosing a title of a work is not an easy task for the author as this can impact the acclaim readers will grant his work. A title can incite readers to want to read a book in the same way it can make them dislike it. In other words, the more a title is inciting, the more it will arouse a large readership and the less it is inciting, the less it will receive public acclaim.
In creative art, the idea of procreation as what that is created and imposed is well articulated through such elements as narrative techniques, narrators' characterization, styles, rhetoric figures, among others. When an author creates a style, a theory or a concept, he decides about the name to be given to it and how to use it. As a consequence, readers or users wanting to use these elements are bound to take into account the context of use as defined by the author. Thus, someone who wants to use narratology is compelled to study the narrative techniques and structures as they intertwine in literary texts. Someone who wants to use orthodox Marxism is invited to look into how Karl Marx conceptualized his theory. The same thing happens with someone who wants to use feminism, deconstruction, semiotics, postcolonial theory or psychoanalysis. Each of these theories has its own operating principles and criteria. And those who want to use them are compelled to respect. Without respect to these principles, it is obvious that these persons are not using these theories.
English poet and playwright William Shakespeare gave an interesting example of what that is created and imposed to users through his sonnet form with the rhyming pattern abab-cdcd-efef-gg. Any sonnet having this pattern is therefore known as a Shakespearean sonnet. This even emulated many poets such as African American poet Claude McKay in his famous poem "If We Must Die" (1919): If we must die — let it not be like hogs (a) Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, (b) While round us bark the mad
and hungry dogs, (a) Making their mock at our accursed lot. (b)
If we must die — oh, let us nobly die, (c) So that our precious blood may not
be shed (d) In vain; then even the monsters we defy (c) Shall be constrained to honor us
though dead! (d)
Oh, Kinsmen! We must meet
the common foe; (e) Though far outnumbered, let us show us
brave, (f)
And for their thousand blows
deal one deathblow! (e) What though before us lies the open grave? (f) Like men we'll face the murderous,
cowardly pack, (g) Pressed to the wall, dying, but
fighting back! (g) [Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers
1953]
All genres, theories, textual elements, writing techniques are created by authors with the intention of adding something to the intellectual debate of their eras. They also express a desire to leave something to their contemporaries and to the generations after them. It is fundamental therefore that they define the operating principles of their creations. As creators, only their desires are taken as norms. In this context, anyone seeking to use their creations is doomed to follow these norms.
When Jacques Derrida coined his decon-structionist theory, he defined what he meant by "binary opposition" and how it functions. Similarly, Gérard Genette developed a personal approach of poetics from Structuralism. His concept of Diegesis is very central in literary analysis, insisting on how time and space interplay and function in a work of fiction. To him, any narration is linked to this concept in the sense that the narrator in a text is an essential element of the story related. From this, Genette defined the different types of narrators: hetero-diegetic, homodiegetic, autodiegetic, extradie-getic, intradiegetic. My intention here is not so much to linger on these examples or multiply the examples but to highlight the idea that once created the author's concept or theory establishes itself as a norm. Thus, critics desiring to analyze time and space in a work of fiction have good reasons to use Genette's concept. Those who want to scrutinize the binary oppositions in a text have a basis to use Derrida's theory. As it can be seen, these examples indicate users' dependence on the approach to use in their analysis. Suffice for them to depart from the principles of the theory or the concept they want to use to give evidence that they are not using it.
The prizes awarded to various publications in different areas of research across the world serve to reinforce the creator/created object
relationship and the public acclaim granted to their authors. Many writers received national and/or international awards for their writings. These prizes demonstrate the recognition of their talents by the national and/or international intelligentsia. At the same time, they shed light on the notion of fatherhood and posit their writings or their discoveries (in the case of experimental sciences) as procreation. African American novelist Toni Morrison, for example, was awarded a Nobel Prize in literature in 1992 for the quality of her literature. Apart from this international recognition, she received other prizes from other national institutions of her country.
While writing their texts or processing their experimentations, these authors or scientists seek to demonstrate hypotheses or postulates. In the end, what is written or discovered proves to be interesting landmarks for the whole population of the concerned field to understand their own reality as human beings. All the literature about how theories function and how they can apply to other fields reflect the idea that the author is a creator. That users of theories and discoveries strictly follow the principles and rules defined by their authors is very important. As I have already said, only the parents (and sometimes his community) can decide a name for their creation. Published texts, theories or formulas created after many tests are accepted and will remain valid as long as other texts, theories or formulas are not developed to contradict them. Even when such situation occurs, these theories or formulas continue to evolve solely since each of them can defend or justify its operating postulates. In this context, all the areas concerned with these theories and formulas function as areas that are marked out. In turn, people in these areas seem to be imprisoned even if they have a relative freedom of action.
Though users are compelled to respect the structures of a text or the findings of a research, they feel a sort of freedom when it comes to analyze this text or use these findings. Indeed, the analysis of a text can lead to things the reader did not think about at first sight or things that the author himself did not think about while writing his text. Similarly, the use of the findings of a research can give way to other interesting researches, findings or discoveries. These often unpredicted but interesting situations bring to light all the significance of Roland Barthes's idea of "the death of the author." Discussing the fact that once the text is published, the author somewhat disappears to let his creation assume its own identity, that he no longer has authority over his creation, Barthes writes: Writing is the destruction of every voice, every origin. Writing is that neuter, that composite,
that obliquity into which our subject flees, the black-and-white where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes [Barthe 1986: 49].
As a human being, the author has a voice and an identity. But while writing, that "voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death." [Ibid.] In fact, during the narrative process, "the author is supposed to feed his work, e.i., he lives before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it; he has the same relation of antecedence with his work that a father [or a mother] sustains with [his/her] child." [Ibid.: 52] Through the narrative structure, he provides his text with an identity and a voice. The latter assumes that identity and that voice as the creative activity progresses. Like a child who assumes the responsibility of his acts after he becomes mature, the text assumes its own voice all along the process of writing. This maturation becomes complete at the end of the process.
As a mature creation, the text speaks on its own behalf. The author ceases to intervene in the same way parents watch over their child until it reaches majority. Here, the parallelism between the parent/child and author/text paradigms in the context of procreation reveals again the idea that once mature, both the child and the text are left to their own. They no longer depend on their creators but evolve as independent identities. On the whole, the idea of the text as procreation alludes to the idea that by creating his text, the author makes it function as the parents contribute to conceiving the child. Through the act of writing, the author perpetuates this parent(s)/child dependency.
Conclusion
Like in the process of human procreation, the text has a creator. In this article, I have essayed to develop two aspects of the process of writing. In the first aspect, I tried to show how the author undertakes to construct his text. I insisted on the idea that this creation is a complex composure which requires from the author a whole knowledge of the environment and the context of the event he wants to write about. This knowledge is even a sine qua non condition to incite the reception of the text. This amounts to saying that the reception of the text critically depends on the author's arrangement of the different elements he uses to construct it. The second aspect of my argumentation was intended to show that by creating his text, the author metaphorically perpetuates the human act of procreation. All along the process of writing, the text is seen as a creation in the same way as a baby is conceived: it is given a name and an identity. A parallel was therefore drawn between the parents' naming of their child and
the author's giving a title to his text. Thus, as the child grows up and becomes mature, it assumes responsibility of its acts. Similarly, the text progressively reaches maturation during the process of writing and assumes an identity, a voice. Finally, both creations, after reaching maturation become independent identities and cease to be under the influence of their creators: the parent(s) and the author.
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К. Ж. Н'Гессан
Абиджан, Кот-д'Ивуар
ВО ИМЯ АВТОРА И ТЕКСТА: ЛИТЕРАТУРНОЕ ПРОИЗВЕДЕНИЕ КАК (СО)ТВОРЕНИЕ
АННОТАЦИЯ. Появление литературного произведение может восприниматься как акт рождения. Оно является сложным процессом, в который автор вовлекает слова, чтобы создать смысл. Начавшись с простой идеи, текст постепенно принимает форму по мере того, как в него включаются другие идеи. В этом процессе между автором и текстом возникает тесная «родственная связь», отношения «создатель — созданный объект». Подобно тому как процесс вынашивания ребенка длится не один месяц, построение текста проходит через стадии размышлений, подбора слов, форм, замен, перечитывания и переформулировки для того, чтобы получился конечный продукт. Настоящая статья, во-первых, показывает то, как рождается литературный текст. Во-вторых, исследуется то, как в процессе создания текста обнаруживается автор как его «родитель» и разъясняется значение метафоры зачатия человека. В действительности метафора, о которой здесь идет речь, предполагает такое восприятие создания текста, которое наделяет писателя (создателя) правом собственности на текст (созданный объект). Как ребенок, который рождается благодаря своим родителям, литературный текст появляется благодаря автору.
КЛЮЧЕВЫЕ СЛОВА: автор; текст; (со)творение; создатель; метафора; авторство; литературное произведение.
СВЕДЕНИЯ ОБ АВТОРЕ: Н'Гессан Куадио Жермен, доктор философии, доцент департамента английского языка, Университет им. Феликса Уфуэ-Буаньи, Кот-д'Ивуар; адрес; Кот-д'Ивуар, Абиджан 01, 01 почтовый ящик V 34, каб. 5А; e-mail: [email protected].
