In Foucault's "What Is An Author?" he outlines 4 strategies "strikingly" similar to those outlined by Saint Jerome, specifically with "defining the author present" and when dealing with "authentication" (1484). Foucault describes his as follows:
1. The author explains the presence of certain events within a text, as well as their transformations, distortions, and their various modifications... through an author's biography or by reference to [their] particular point of view...
2. The author constitutes a principle of unity in writing where any unevenness of production is ascribed to changes caused by evolution, maturation, or outside influence.
3. The author serves to neutralize the contradictions that are found in a series of texts...
4. The author is a particular source of expression who...is manifested equally well...in text, letters, fragments, drafts...
Number 2 is where I'd like to focus, as it seems to answer a problem de Man brings up in "Semiology and Rhetoric." De Man finds that the "figural nature of language" undoes the "stable pattern that we assume to determine meaning" (1363). He finds "semiology" to ask not "what words mean" but "how they mean," within the language they function in (1367). Maybe Foucault's author is the unifier of the work's language. The author creates their own diegesis and moves within it, choosing certain words to disrupt or confirm "stable patterns" of meaning. As we discussed last week, "creature" is a word used often in our class to describe the monster, yet we were surprised when Shelley's use of the word covered not only the monster, but more often, actual humans. Within Shelley's diegesis, the monster is a creature... just like the rest of us humans. In using the word, she at once treats the monster and humans the same. Through the word, she literally unifies them. Shelley uses her language and diction to draw parallels that she cannot-or chooses not to- spell out for her readers.
I kept coming back to this usage of "creature" as well with respect to the human-monster relationship and trying to figure out how it fits together in the novel. I don't think we can consider human-monster a binary in the sense of Johnson's good-evil, justice-injustice, in some ways because her notion of "creature" connects them too closely. They become not polarities but conditions of one another, that humans can become monstrous and monsters are not entirely un-human, if that makes any sense.
ReplyDeleteMakes a lot of sense! I place human-monster on a spectrum, "creature" connecting the two... I just like rheumenating on what Shelley herself would think!
ReplyDeleteI love your point, thanks for the comment!
Diana