Some formalist reflections on authorship–and I am not going to begin a journey some contemporary graduate school asshole is calling meta-reflection,which is what everyone in philosophy used tp understand by the term, ‘meditation,’ clearly not the meditation practiced by anyone seeking enlightenment, but then western philosophy in its use of the term meditation is surely not aligning itself with Buddhist meditative practices, even if there are parallels between those of the buddhists and those of certain kinds of monastic practices . . . an anatomy of authority in the matter of texts written would reveal what? What we can say and cannot say with respect for what we know about the limits of narrative and just what narration is; or, how many other voices and writerly authorities there are in a text, whether the voices are lyric, narrative or expositive–who am I now, here–is this me as I know who I am where I am in this world of when and where and how and–what do I say in answer to the inquiry, and this is very close to what was normally practices in disciplines of thought when today we have two say and connote meta-reflection.
There is a me who is not that me I know apart from this pen to page me I create each time I write. Heteroglossia is not a disease of the throat that afflicts only non-homosexuals . . .
The author herein implied–and there is always an implicit author of a text behind the narrator or the expositor you hear, listen to, take in through the process of reading–need you get all of this in extension? Yes, there is always an implicit author that the real author stands behind, and we do stand behind when we want to support, standing under when we want to know? In fiction, there is an implicit author–is this a new post to yet another lintel. I have said this already about standing under to understand, what do I know and how? I repeat myself often, saying again without gain? Repetition is redundancy or is it weaving motif?
Everyone experiences heteroglossia by nature. It is unavoidable on this stage the world, every one of us, you and me and all the I(s) I carry around as we, I am we, who am I? How many am I? I could also ask.
There is an implicit author in front of Fitzgerald, let’s say, in The Great Gatsby (I picked Gatsby because it is more popular and thus w=more widely know), the narrator being one of the characters, okay, but then this narrator must have a fictional author that is created by the author person who writes the novel in the world, the text that gets published, not the text that exists in the fictional world of the narrator who is in a fictional place so must then have a fictional authority that stands for the creator of that universe that embraces everything in the fiction, by the fiction, for the fiction, no? I am not herein going to discuss diction or one or another glossia . . . nor am I going to discuss what we once called voice, might still call voice, what is voice, whose voice is it . . .
I speak with many inflections, with many levels of speech found in my society–what the hell are any of us talking about when we talk about society and what of the fictional society descript or non-descript (scripted or not scripted?), only inferred, that exists for the implicit author, himself a fictional authority of the fictional universe as I have referred to above? But what if what we read is only a text because the real author has arranged the telling that has been told by the narrator . . . ? That author–or this author, me, is another mask I wear on the person I am? Person itself means mask, so then there are masks on masks we wear in the world just as my Self (capital ‘S’ by necessity) is made of many selves. What then am I saying, have I said?
There is always a fictional author of each text; each text to its unique author and only this unique author, this implicit author that could author no other text. This is who I am here,am now,will be forever, so long as these lines remain, I will live in this–the extent of who I am not limited to the text; there are inferences we can make for outside the text, but only in so far as they are rooted, we might say,grounded I recall my real author having said–we do share memories and we do share experience. Some of our tastes are the same. I cannot fathom the limit of how many what ifs you could spin.
A tale is sometimes called a yarn and it is yarn that is put into a spinning wheel and from this we get what a story does, spinning a yarn, spin a tale–nothing like pinning a tail on the donkey–a game i played for my birthday when I was kid, how old was I, maybe five, little more, our ground floor apartment in East Flatbush . . . who has written this not the same as the voice you hear as you read . . . the author with pen or keypad and the authorial voice as a mask of the writer, the mask that then has another mask placed over it, masks on masks and sometimes more than just this, within other masks layering the layers of masks depending on the text and the number of implied texts inside other implied texts somewhat different from the inferred texts. Who am I and who is it behind me? Who is it that I am behind and what does that mean or say to you or to anyone, and in what way could it be said? Another question to ask about writers, authors, tellers, narrators, expositors, what lyric interludes could I interject?
Another tale told by an idiot full of something other than sound and fury, there are too many stories told amounting to nothing, signifying apes, we are the story-telling ape, are we not? When all is tolled, all that is told is judged hierarchically for better or for worse, which way does the evaluation tip? How can up and down tip?
How do I not understand that years for the earth and years for me are not the same? I do not misunderstand this. Forty years for me and forty years geologically are not the same, of course; but then, what is geological is not the same as topological . . . let’s look at the beach forty years ago and the beach today after how many storms?
The Falling Leaf Review 