Reading Donald Pease’s article, ’What is an Author’, I felt that it pointed out some unique observations with regards to the popular notion we have of the author and the idea of genius. With its focus on how the idea of the author originated, and the way Pease then presents his notions about creativity, he also provided us as readers with a lot to reflect on. Pease’s article is not very long, but the issues it addresses are:
How the concept of authorship and genius are in fact controlled by boundaries and set definitions
That genius is labeled as such because of its ‘owned labour’.
In explaining the first point, we need to look at Pease’s ideas about how authorship came about. As he maintains, the act of invention began with the expeditions of fifteenth century European explorers into the New World. The world they encountered contained experiences and objects that had no parallel in Europe-in terms of being written about. Words, and later experiences were then invented to try to describe this world. Before this, written experiences were dominated by auctores-an official account of life and its procedures that was upheld by the monarchy. These new, modern accounts equalized the act of writing, and created the author; at the same time imbuing them with cultural and social authority. Pease makes the point though, that while the author was now freer in terms of their expression, their efforts became tied into, in turn, upholding social, economic and political structures of their civilizations.
Although authorship had started out as an inventive, independent means of expression, it soon turned into a collaborative, industry-run endeavour. This contrasts with the classical idea of the author; as an independent, totally self-sufficient source of creativity. This description, Pease argues, better fits the ‘genius’. The genius is labeled such, because of the fact that he owns his own ‘labour’. His work was undertaken purely for cultural and creative reasons-he did not work with other authors. Therefore, his work was truly his own and nobody else’s. This brings up the question: Is creativity devalued if it has been brought about by collaborative means? And does truly independent creative work actually ever exist? I do not agree with Pease’s ideas here about genius being justifiably different from authorship, on the basis on these questions-to me, even if produced individually, creative work always has traces of other works and influences in it.
After reading Pease’s article, it was fascinating to note how fixed ideas that we have about authorship, creativity and their nature, can be seen as being defined by rules and boundaries in these arenas and discourses. While their contributions formed the last part of his article, I will only mention them briefly: Barthes and Foucault both had different ideas regarding the complexities of creativity and the problems authorship faced. Barthes’s famous response was that the death of the author’s presence in the text then enables the reader to really be free, while Foucault insisted on the idea of the ‘fundamental author’. Wherein, the solution to this confusion surrounding the author’s identity and his role, is to enable the reader to connect with this dilemma-and from there, originality would occur.
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