The Writer Writing

by Francis-Noel Thomas

In an age of authorless, contextless, deconstructed texts, Francis-Noël Thomas argues that it is time to re-examine a fundamental but neglected concept of writing is an action whose agent is an individual. Addressing both general readers and scholars, Thomas offers two cases, Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan and Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu , read against the background of the authors' large, eccentric, and surprisingly similar claims about their texts as acts. He examines what happens when we take these claims seriously enough to find out why the authors made them in the first place and what bearing they have on the texts themselves.

Originally published in 1993.

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Hardcover

First published January 1, 1992

Reviews

[Billie Pritchett]

In The Writer Writing, Francis-Noel Thomas has two agendas. One is to show the goals George Bernard Shaw had in writing Saint Joan and Marcel Proust had in writing In Search of Lost Time. The other is to promote the interpretation of literary works as the intentional acts of authors.

According to Thomas, Shaw was a propagandist writer who believed all art was political and that his own art's purpose was to advance the cause of socialism driven by an elite intelligentsia. Meanwhile, Proust wrote to advocate literature as the pinnacle of truth that can only be realized in the self-expression of the artist. Thomas joins Shaw and Proust in this text as writers with clear goals who can be judged as succeeding or failing to the extent they achieved their goals.

Thomas goes a long way in demonstrating that Shaw wrote as a propagandist and Proust as a romantic and that the two authors' works can be appraised on these merits. But Thomas fails to establish the stronger claim he wishes to use these two authors to demonstrate, namely that literary works ought (only?) be judged to the extent that they fulfill the purposes of their authors. Thomas' main support for the claim is that it jibes with common sense and therefore any other construal of literary interpretation bears the burden of proof, one which it can't meet.

It is not so clear to this reader that authorial intent is the only or even main criterion by which readers read or ought to. As much as an aesthete may bemoan the possibility a reader puts down Junot Diaz's Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao because of its sexist depictions of women, there seems to me to be nothing wrong with putting down a book for this reason. A book can of course be appraised on grounds that have nothing to do with the author's intent.

Another Noel, Noel Carroll, argues in his brilliant little On Criticism that the only real criterion for art or literary criticism is that critics give as sound reasons as possible for their opinions. Hear, hear. Meanwhile, our author, Francis-Noel Thomas, insists on interpreting texts in only one way, because he is militating against what he takes to be fashionable postmodern literary nonsense. To the extent Thomas has pushed a polemic, he has succeeded. But he fails to convince us of his limited literary worldview. There are many ways to interpret a text.