Text: Chartier, Roger. “Figures of the Author.” The Order of Books, pp. 25-59.

In the second chapter of his book The Order of Books, Roger Chartier deconstructs the way that past and present readers think of authors of texts.  He uses Foucault’s term “author-function,” which Foucault used in his famous essay “What is an Author?,” to describe this concept.

“Author-function” is an elusive term.  In essence, it refers to the way that a reader’s concept of the "author" functions in his reading of a text.  His interpretation of a text is shaped by his understanding of its author.  Without any concept of who the author of a text is, it is easy to develop many different interpretations of that text.  However, in light of an author’s gender, ethnicity, time period, political leanings, or other applicable known information, the text often leans toward one plausible interpretation.  For example, a reader’s interpretation of Invisible Man is greatly colored by her knowledge of its author Ralph Ellison as a black man fighting racial discrimination.  Her interpretation of the same novel would be quite different if the author was really a white person with a history of racist action.  Modern readers rely heavily on their knowledge of a text’s author, often without realizing it, to shape their interpretations of that text.

Necessary to a more complete understanding of the concept of author-function is an understanding of the social function of authors through the ages which Chartier lays out in “Figures of the Author.”  Chartier agrees with Foucault, an influential literary theorist who claims that the author-function changed in the 19th century when copyright laws were established.  With these new laws, “a system of ownership came into being . . . strict rules concerning author’s rights, author-publisher relations, rights of reproduction, and related matters were enacted” (qtd. in Chartier 30).  In other words, with copyright laws, the author was seen as the source of information and was given credit (and money) for that information.  Chartier agrees that author-function did change with these changing ideas of information as property, but he claims that the idea of the author-function is older and broader.

According to Chartier, there is evidence that the author served a functional role in the reading of texts in Medieval Europe (31, 59).  Foucault acknowledges that in the Middle Ages, anonymous authorship of “literary” texts was common, while the veracity of scientific texts was judged by the authority of the text’s author (31).  Chartier argues a slightly different perspective.  In the manuscript culture of the Middle Ages, there were some texts in the vulgar tongue that were often compiled and copied, and these texts “characteristically show no sign of the author-function” (56).  Yet Chartier claims that there were some Medieval “texts--whatever the genre--that founded their authority on the work’s attribution to a name,” Petrarch’s poetry for example (58).  This is early evidence of authors serving a functional role in the interpretation of texts.

Pre-eighteenth-century, early modern English and French authors of literary texts wrote for patrons.  They wrote what the patrons wanted to have written and were paid a prearranged sum.  The author had no ownership of the text; rather it belonged strictly to the publisher (32).  The author himself was unimportant.  Texts were instead viewed in terms of bodies of ideas and genres.  According to Chartier, this system led to the dominant role of author-function that exists predominantly today.  He asserts that “the affirmation of literary ownership, far from arising from a particular application of a modern individual property law, derived directly from the book trade’s defence of permissions to print--authorizations that guaranteed exclusive rights to a work to the bookseller who had obtained title to it” (32).

This “affirmation of literary ownership” manifested itself in the Statute of 1709 which gave authors the right to demand ownership of their work.  The Statute of 1709 changed the way society viewed texts and authors, as realized in 1760 when a court case elicited great debate and attention to the matter (36).  A text was "no longer characterized by the ideas that it embodied (since ideas cannot be the object of individual appropriation) but by its form--that is, by the particular way in which an author produces, assembles, and presents concepts.  The text . . . acquires an identity immediately referable to the subjectivity of its author rather than to divine presence, tradition, or genre" (36-37).  In other words, with the idea of author ownership, the author became very important to a text.  The author’s role became that of inventor/creator, looked to to create literature in a new, subjective way and present varying points of view.  Ultimately, the author was forced to write in new ways because he was responsible for bringing himself monetary profit and could not rely on his patrons.  Even though the author was not necessarily viewed any longer as the proprietor of information, he was viewed as an "expressor" of information, looked to to express ideas in a coherent, articulate way.  In this way, he was the owner of his text.

The advent of copyright laws was therefore not the advent of author-function even in literary texts, Chartier claims (30).  In reality, the legal actions that accompanied the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries merely solidified and perpetuated the idea of “the superb and solitary romantic figure of the sovereign author whose primary or final intention contains the meaning of the work and whose biography commands its writing with transparent immediacy” (28).

It is this view of the god-like author which has dominated thought through the majority of the twentieth century, perpetuated by Modernist thinking.  This view sees the author as an authority and the text as the expression of the author’s soul on paper.  From this belief stems the reader’s tendency to rely on his knowledge of the author to shape his interpretation of a text--the “author-function” that is dominant today.

There have been some recently who are trying to change the contemporary view of author-function.  Some have “proclaimed ‘the death of the author’ (as Barthes titled his famous essay) and stripped authorial intention of any special pertinence” (25).  And author-function will most likely change as internet texts with corporate or anonymous authors gain dominance.  The important thing is that we, as readers, recognize the way that our knowledge of authors influences our interpretations of texts and think critically about our readings as a result.