'Author is a Modern Figure' Ronald Barthes

Regarding the origin of the author Ronald Barthes says that the author is the product of Modern Ages. To Barthes, the things that contributed to the emergence of the author include English Imperialism, French Rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation. Now the author connotes authority or the prestige of an individual. Thus, Barthes finds the authority of the author in all branches of literature such as history of literature, biographies of writers, interviews, magazines etc. The image of any of this braches of literature is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his life, his taste and his passions. So, by this comment Barthes wants to remind us about the position of author in modern literature and also subverts the relations of an author with his text.

Ronald Barthes's Definition of a Text as a Multi-dimensional Space

In his Death of the Author Ronald Barthes defines a text from post-structuralist point of view. Like the structuralists he does not believe that a text has a definite center and pre-defined logos.

According to Ronald Barthes a text is a multi-dimensional space. He contrasts an ordinary text with a theological text. The theological text has only single meaning. But unlike a theological text, a normal text can have a variety of meanings. For this reason Ronald Barthes calls a text as the multi- dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. He also compares text with a piece of cloth which is woven with quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of cultures. This remark is the central theme of post- structuralism. According to post-structuralism the meaning of a text is unstable or uncertain. Here, Ronald Barthes expounds this view. The meaning of a text depends on the readers not the authors. The readers will look from different perspectives and thus get different impressions about the text.

How does Showalter use Ardener’s Diagram to redefine the relationship between the “dominant group” and “muted group?”

Women have been left out of culture and history because history is considered to be a male centered term. Again there are some places where men cannot enter. In defining female culture, historians make a clear distinction between the male considered appropriate roles, activities, tastes, behaviors for women and the reality of women’s lives. Women’s sphere is defined and maintained by men. By this, women constitute a muted group.

To redefine the relationship between the “dominant group” and “muted group” Showalter takes help from Ardener’s Diagram. By the term “muted” Edwin Ardener suggests problems both of language and power. Both muted and dominant group (male) unconsciously generates beliefs but the dominant group controls the forms or structures which make the muted group bound to express their beliefs through the allowable forms of dominant structure. Ardener shows a diagram on the relationship of the dominant and muted group.

In the diagram, much of the muted circle “Y” falls within the boundaries of dominant circle “X”, there is also a crescent of ‘Y” which is outside the dominant boundary and is called “wild”. This wild zone is considered as women’s culture specially which means literary no man’s land, a place forbidden to men. The opposite thing happens to man’s “X” zone. Experimentally, it stands for the aspects of the female lifestyle which are outside of men. “X” zone of male alien to women. But metaphysically it has no corresponding male zone because all of male consciousness is within the circle of dominant structure and female knows all about male. Here from the male point of view, the wild “Y” is always imaginary. In terms of cultural anthropology, women know what the male crescent is like but men do not know what is in the wild.

In some feminist criticism, the wild zone becomes the place for the women-centered criticism, theory and art. It makes the invisible visible, the silent speak. French feminist critics would like to make the wild zone the theoretical base of women’s difference. In their texts, the wild zone becomes the place for the revolutionary women’s language, the language of everything that is repressed. Many forms of American radical feminism also romantically assert that women are closer to nature or environment. So, they should build the place fully independent from the control and influence of “male dominated” institutions- the news media, the health, education legal systems, art, theatre and literary worlds.

But we must admit that no writing is possible without dominant structure. No writing, no criticism, no publication is fully independent from the economic and political pressures of the male dominated society. The most important implication of this model is that women’s fiction can be read as a double voiced discourse containing a ‘dominant” and “a muted story.”

The concept of a woman’s text in the wild zone is a playful abstraction. Women’s writing is a “double voiced discourse” that always embodies the social, literary, and cultural heritages of both the muted and the dominant. Every step that feminist criticism takes toward defining women’s writing is a step toward self- understanding as well. Women writing are not then inside and outside of the male tradition, they are inside two tradition. Indeed, the female territory might well be envisioned as one long order, not as a separate country, but as open access to the sea.

The more important aspect of Ardener’s model is that there are muted groups other than women such as the blacks in America. In America the blacks belong to the muted group and the white dominant group. The dominant structure may determine many muted structures. For example a black America woman poet may be affected by both racial and sexual politics. So, cultural situation should not determine women’s writing, but women’s writing should be considered in the background of cultural pattern.

This reminds Alien Showlter about the duty and responsibility of female writers. A female writer who writes under the influence of the male dominated culture is more or less influenced by that culture. Now the duty of gynocriticism is to precisely map out the cultural field of women and prevent the influences of the dominant look on the muted group.

Regarding the major literary movements, Elaine Showlter says, in the history of literature women also have no place. The movement Renaissance was not a movement for women. The Romantic Movement was also not for women. Now it is the duty of “gynocriticism” to provide women with a respective place in the history of literature.

In order to make the rule of muted group more clear Alien Showlter says, from female perspective a text is not only mothered but also parented. A women’s text confronts both paternal and maternal forerunner and must deal with the problems and advantages of both lines of inheritance.

Thus women’s text is rich in the experience of both muted group and dominant group. In this way, she uses Ardener’s model to show the condition as well as the possibility of women.

In Preface to Shakespeare, how does Dr. Samuel Johnson Defend Shakespeare's Mixing of Comic and Tragic Elements?

Johnson in the Preface to Shakespeare holds that the mingled dramas of Shakespeare are not only effective but also fulfill the proper function of drama much better than pure comedy or tragedy. Shakespeare, in Arnold’s view, incurred the biggest censure “by mixing comic and tragic scenes in all his works. And this very faculty of Shakespeare made him-

“Even nobler than both the Greek and the Roman dramatists”

Referring to the charge that Shakespeare has mixed the comic and tragic scenes, Johnson points out that the Shakespeare’s play are not in a “rigorous sense,” either tragedies or comedies, but composition of a distinct kind. Shakespeare’s plays exhibit the real state of earthly life which partakes of good and evil, joy and sorrow, mingled in various degrees and endless combination. Shakespeare says Johnson has united the power of exciting laughter and sorrow not only in one mind but in one composition. In other words, Shakespeare was equally at home in writing tragic and comic plays and he could combine comic and tragic elements in one and the same play. Almost all his plays are divided between serious and Ludicrous characters and they sometimes produce sorrow and sometimes laughter.

This was a practice contrary to “the rules of criticism”. But Johnson says that there is always an appeal open from criticism to nature. The object of literature is to give instruction by pleasing. A play in which the comic and the tragic have been mingled, is capable of conveying all the instructions that tragedy or comedy aims at because such a play is closer to the reality of life than either pure tragedy or comedy. The mingling of tragic and comic scenes does diminish or weaken the vicissitudes of passion that the dramatist aims at. There are many people who welcome comic relief after a scene producing the feeling of melancholy.

Now we should look at the historical background of the matter. It is true that, on the whole, the ancient classical dramatists had kept tragedy and comedy strictly apart from each other. Neo-classical drama of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Italy, France and even England tried to observe the line of demarcation between tragedy and comedy. But Shakespeare was a romantic, not a neo classical dramatist. The free use of tragedy and comedy in the same play is one of the most striking and familiar features in the work of Shakespeare and other romantic playwrights of his time. Romantic drama reveals in variety of effect, while tragic comedy or the mixed play was, according to Addison, one of the most monstrous inventions that ever entered into a poets thoughts.

Neo-classic criticism showed a curious tendency to out Greek the Greeks in strictness. Aristotle indeed says that tragedy represents an action which is serious: and Greek tragedy in practice has little comic relief; yet it has some. We find some comic elements in Homer himself. Homer’s gods are sometimes used for a comic purpose, as well as men like Thersites or Irus. For the middle Ages, the mixture of tragic and comic was as natural as breathing, and it produced their best dramatic work. The greatest Elizabethan tragedies were half the child of comedy, not only because Polonius in Hamlet, the Porter in Macbeth, and the fool in Lear produce some of their most striking scenes. Johnson, it must be pointed out, justifies tragic-comedy on conflicting grounds.

In the twentieth century, T.S.Eliot has argued that, though human nature may permanently crave for comic relief, it does not follow that this craving should e gratified. Eliot upholds the doctrine of ‘the unity of sentiments,’ T. S. Eliot also said that the desire for comic relief springs from a lack of the capacity for concentration.

There is no reason why a tragedy must be absolutely laughter less and there is equally no reason why a tragedy should not be laughter less. Perhaps only one rule remains valid about humor in tragedy, namely that humor must not clash with the tone of the whole. It is extraordinary how seldom this fault is found in Shakespeare. Mercutio and Thersites, Pandarus and Polonius, the Grave diggers and the Porter and Cleopatra’s clown are certainly not out of place in the plays in which Shakespeare had depicted them.

Johnson is undoubtedly a critic of neo-classical school. However in his defence both of Shakespeare’s disregard of the unities of time and place and Shakespeare’s mingling of tragic ad comic elements. Johnson seems to deviate from the rigid stand which neo-classicism adopted. Strictly speaking, neo-classic theory did not permit the mingling of tragic and comic in the same play. But it is possible to argue that Johnson defends such mingling on the fundamentally neo-classic ground that the imitation of general human nature not only permits but demands it. Shakespeare’s plays, combining comedy and tragedy, show real human nature which “partakes of joy and sorrow.”

Dr. Samuel Johnson's Evaluation Shakespeare in 'Preface to Shakespeare': Shakespeare as the Poet of Nature

“Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, and the poet of nature, the poet that holds up his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life.”

“Preface to Shakespeare” Para 8

One of Dr. Samuel Johnson’s most notable services to Shakespearean criticism is that he exposes the central style of Shakespeare’s plays as its universality. He passes the judgment that Shakespeare is a “poet of nature” meaning that through his works he reflects life-the real life and manners.

Shakespeare is a poet of nature who faithfully represents human nature in his plays. He does not falsify reality. Shakespeare is a poet of nature also because his characters are natural; they act and behave think and speak like human beings. His characters are the faithful representations of humanity. He deals with passions and principles which are common to humanity. He does not merely depict the particular manner and customs of any one country or age. His characters are not merely kings and Romans. They are above all human beings. So, his characters have a universal appeal. But this does not mean that they do no have any individual qualities. The speech of one character can not be placed in the mouth of another, and they can easily be differentiated from each other by their speeches. The dialogue he uses “seems to have been gleamed by different selection of common conversation and common occurrences.” They are also true to the age, sex or profession to which they belong. They are also true to type.

In Shakespeare’s characterization we find a realistic and convincing portrayal of human nature. Shakespeare does not depict persons of either fabulous excellence or unexampled depravity. The characters in his plays are not heroes but only human beings who act and think in the way in which the reader himself would act and think under the circumstances. Even where the agency is supernatural, the dialogue accords with real life. In his plays Shakespeare has shown human nature not only as it acts in real solutions but as it would be found in situation which may never arise.

Shakespeare is most original in his portrayal of characters. Johnson says that no writer before him, with the possible exception of Chaucer, has portrayed human character in such a realistic manner. Shakespeare has gathered his knowledge of human nature from this personal observation. This knowledge has enabled him to portray a multiplicity and diversity of character and to reveal subtle distinctions between man and man. In this respect, he has none to intimate, though he himself has been imitated by all writers. Whether life or nature is his subject, he gives evidence of having seen things with his own eyes.

It is because of the universality of his characterization that Shakespeare’s plays are full of practical axioms and domestic wisdom. From them can be formulated a philosophy of life, of great practical value in real life. He is not great only in particular passages but the entire conduct of his action brings out his greatness as a poet of (human) nature.

Shakespeare’s realism, says Johnson is to be seen also in the fact that he does no give undue prominence to the passion of love in his plays. Dramatists in general give an excessive importance to the theme of love and often violate probability and misrepresent life. Shakespeare knows that- “Love is only one of many passions,” and that it has no great influence upon the sum of life.

Johnson defends Shakespeare for his mingling of the tragic and comic elements in his plays on the ground of realism. Such mingling only serves to show us the course of the world in which “the loss of one is the gain of another, at the same time” “the reveler hastening to his wine and the mourner burying his friend.”

Nor does Johnson disapprove of Shakespeare’s violation of the unities of place and time. He defends Shakespeare o the ground of dramatic illusion. Literature is to be appreciated not by the literal sense but by the imagination. The audience’s imagination is kept very active when he watches a play. The audience knows that he is going to watch a fictitious reality. If an audience in a theatre can accept the stage as a locality in the city of Rome, he will also accept the change from Rome to Alexandria. The unity of time may like wise be violated on the same principle.

Shakespeare, says Johnson, is the originator of “the form, the character, the language and the shows” of English drama. He is the first playwright whose tragic as well as the comic plays succeed in providing the dramatic pleasure appropriate to them.

Thus Johnson shows his penetrating power which probes to the very core of Shakespeare’s wit and reveals its deep humanity and its sovereign realism.

A Study of W. J. Mitchell's “Postcolonial Culture, Postcolonial Criticism”

What changes does Mitchell notice in the field of literature and criticism?

W. J. Mitchell in his article “Postcolonial Culture, Postcolonial Criticism” discusses the changes that he had found in the present world’s literary culture. He considers “the process of imperial decline”, decolonization and the transferences and changes that are taking place in the world’s literary culture.

American Empire

Though the idea of empire can not properly apply in the case of America, Mitchell suggests that Americans have to acknowledge their status as an empire. Thereby, they will be able to achieve a clearer understanding of imperial decline and of decolonization. The recent transferences and reconfigurations taking place in the world’s literary culture will help them in this regard.

A critical Transformation

A radical transformation has been occurred in literature. The most significant new literature is emerging from the former colonies, and the most provocative new literary criticism is coming from the imperial centers that once dominated them- the nation of Europe and America. In this context Mitchell cites Horace who long ago understood that the transfer of empire is always accompanied by a transfer of culture and learning. But today the cultural transfer is no longer one way. He undertakes to examine the nature of the transference between the declining imperial powers and their former colonies.

Nobel Prize

This shift in literary culture is evidenced by recent statistics. On Nobel Prize, outside the mainstream of European and American literature, Naguib Mahfouz[ first African to win the prize (1986)] won the prestigious Nobel Prize for literature. Nigerian Wole Soyinka became the first African writer to win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1986.

Booker Prize

The shift is also accusing in the field of other prestigious prize namely “Booker Prize.”(Keri Hulme from the remote West- coast of New Zealand.)

In America

The literary map is also undergoing a great change in the American Continent. Some examples of writers like Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Julio Cortazar are enough to suggest a cultural “translatio” from South to North, from Spanish to English, from the “circumference” to the center. Afro- American writers like Toni Morison, Zora Neale, Hurston and Alice Walker are also widely read in and out of the classroom, suggesting a shift in centre-margin relationship. There is also a “translation” from East to West. Milan Kundera, Joseph Brodsky, Jerzy Kozinsky are showing instances from so-called “Evil Empire”, who are reading adopted by the American readers. This also may prove the anti-imperialist self image of America.

Age of criticism

The critic and novelist Randall Jarrell mournfully declared that Europe and United States entered an “age of criticism”. He noticed the victory and influent of criticism on academics, mass media like magazine, journals etc. The critics had become celebrities among the audience. Even the most ordinary academic critic can now aspire to participate in a global network what Edward Said has called “Traveling Theory”. Critics fly between conferences on semiotics, narratology and paradigm change in places like Hong Kong, Camberra and Tel Aviv.

Contemporary criticism tends to subvert the imperial authority. Skepticism, relativism and anti foundationalist modes of thought such as pragmatism and deconstruction come to the Third World from the First. But they lack the authoritative force of traditional imperial culture. On the contrary critical movements such as feminism, black studies, and Western Marxism can hardly be said to speak with the authority of the imperial centre.

Thus, according to Mitchell changes have taken place in the fields of creative literature and criticism. While the former colonies are producing excellent creative, new literature the traditional centers are producing criticism. Though many imaginative writers of the Third World namely, J.M.Coetzee in South Africa, Ian Wedde in New Zealand, Toni Morrison in African America look with cautious fascination on contemporary criticism. They are unsure whether it is a friendly collaborator in the process of decolonization or a threatening competitor for limited resources.

Objections against the Orientalists as raised by Edward Said in his Crisis (Orientalism)

How did the Western scholars build a negative image of the orient according to Edward Said?

One of the objections Edward Said raises against the Orientalists in his Crisis is that the oriental scholars built a negative image of the orient. According to Said Orientalism was a kind of western projection onto and will o govern over the Orient. He also says that the Orientalists plotted oriental history, character and destiny for hundred of years. During this long course of action, the orientalists also built a negative image of the Orient. The Oriental scholars built a negative image of the oriental language, peoples, religion and cultures. The image they built quickly spread to the Western people, who hold a textual attitude to the Orient.

The Western scholars built a negative image of the oriental language and literature. How they created a negative image about the oriental language and literature is seen through the works of Friedrih Schlehgel.

Friedrich Schlegel, one of the prominent Orientalists, and philologists learned his Sanskrit in Paris. He tried to understand and interpret the Orient on the basis of language. But like other Orientalists he also assumed an unchanging Orient. In 1800 Schlegel typified the orient as the highest source of Romanticism. But the Romanticism he talked about had existed 2000 years ago. As for the Semiles, he “said that heir language was unaesthetic and they were also inferior and backward.” Thus, he made some arbitrary comments on the life, language and religious faith of the Orientals. But he was not qualified to make such comments, as his attitude to the Orient was merely a textual attitude.

But the ideas of Schlegel were widely diffused in European culture. And to the Orientalists, to whom language and race seemed inextricably tied, the good Orient was invariably a classical period somewhere in a long-gone India, whereas the “bad” Orient lingered in present day Asia, parts of North Africa and Islam everywhere.

But not only the individual thinkers, but also several societies and organizations of the scholars joined in the interpretation of the Orient.

By the end of the 19th century all the achievements of the Orientalist thinkers were helped by the European occupation of the entire near Orient. The principal colonial powers once again were Britain and France, although Russia and Germany played some role as well. The colonizers always look for some interests, may it be political, commercial, religious, cultural or military interest. With regard to Islam and the Islamic territories, for example, Britain felt that it had legitimate interests, as a Christian power, to safeguard.

How the Western scholars have built a negative attitude about the Orient is also seen the ways they portrayed the individual Orientalists, their queerness and Islam. The Orientalists have categorized all Orientals. To them, a single Oriental is first an Oriental, second a human being and last again an Oriental.

To the Orientalists, an Oriental lives in the Orient, he lives a life of Oriental ease, in a state of Oriental despotism and sensuality, imbued with a feeling of Oriental fatalism. The whole Orient is depicted as an example of a particular form of eccentricity. The Orientalists are always on the look, as described by Flaubert in his writings, some queerness that can be a new example of what Description de l’ Egypte called “bizarre jouissance.” Thus, when the Orientalists describe something queer about the Orient, it becomes the part of text which is ultimately used to define the whole Orient and Orientals.

The individual Oriental cannot shake or disturb the general categories of Orient. His oddness can nevertheless be enjoyed for its own shake. For example, we may take Flaubert’s description of the spectacle of the Orient.

To amuse the crowd, Mohammad Ali’s jester took a woman in a Cairo bazaar one day, set her on the counter of a shop, and coupled with her publicly while the shopkeeper calmly smokes his pipe.

Flaubert frankly acknowledges that this grotesque is of a special kind. The Orient is watched and the European whose sensibility tours the Orient, is a watcher. They are never involved always detached and always ready for new examples. The Orient becomes a living tableau of queerness.

And this tableau quiet logically becomes a special topic for texts. The Orient get himself confined into the text and presented as a subject under the observation of the West masters. Islam for example was typically Oriental for Orientalists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Carl Becker argued that although “Islam” inherited the Hellenic tradition, it could neither grasp nor employ the Greek, humanistic tradition. Moreover it is a sort of failed oriental attempt to employ Greek philosophy without the creative inspiration that we find in Renaissance Europe. For Louis Massignon (perhaps the most renowned ad influential of modern French Orientalists) Islam was a systematic rejection of the Christian spirit. Its greatest hero was not Mohammed or Averroes but Al- Hallaj, a Muslim saint who was crucified by the orthodox Muslims for having dared to personalize Islam. What Becker and Massignon left out was the eccentricity of the Orient. They threw out all what they found so hard to regularize in Wester terms such as Mohammed. Al- Hallaj was made prominent because he took himself to be a Christ figure.

The Orientalists from Renan to Goldziher to Macdonald to von Grunebaum, Gibb and Bernard Lewis- saw Islam as a “cultural synthesis” that could be studied.

Gibb delivered his lectures called Modern Trends in Islam in 1945 with a severe attack on Arabic civilization. He says that the Arabic students are brought up against the striking contrast between the imaginative, Arabic literature and the literalism, between imagination and reasoning. They are not rational like western students and lack the sense of law. They can not throw off their intense feeling for the separateness and individuality of the concrete events. For their aversion from the thought process of rationalism, Western students fail to understand them. Gibb asserts that the rejection of rationalist modes of thought and of the utilitarian ethic which is inseparable from them has its roots in the atomism and discreteness of the Arab imagination.

So, if anyone even wants to acknowledge or understand modern Islam ; Gibb’s those inaugural biases stand as an obstacle before him. These biases asked us to look at the Oriental Muslim as if he is yet within the seventh century, always different from the Western world. If Islam is flawed, they oppose any attempt to reform Islam, because they believe that Islam is unchanging and any reform is a betrayal of Islam. This is, in fact, the Oriental’s fate.

Eighteen years later in 1963 Gibb delivered another believe another believe on “Area Studies Reconsidered” where he agreed that “the Orient is much too important to be left to the Orientalists.” In his “Modern Trends” a new or second alternative approach to Orientalists was being announced. Gibb’s formula is very intentional here.

He said, “what we now need is the traditional Orientalist plus a good social orientalist working together: between them the two will do inter-disciplinary work.” But he felt that the traditional Orientalist will not bring outdated knowledge to bear on the Orient, he will just remind his colleagues that Orient can never be explained by Western thought and it is just a fancy.

These texts do not give the true history of Islamic countries, so the readers have to depend on the Orientalist’s meaningless language full of admiration for Orientalist wisdom. This is how, a more ad more dangerous rift separates Orient and Occident.