Booth and Foucault: Murdering the Author

In 'What Is an Author?", Faucault states that "an author's name is not simply an element in a discourse...; it performs a certain role with regard to narrative discourse, assuring a classificatory function" (107). Put more sucinctly, an author's name is not merely representative of the physical person, but of all of the connotations, ideas, and themes contained in and represented by that authtor's work. For example, the name Ayn Rand represents not just the person, but The Fountaindhead, Atlas Shrugged, and the objectivist philosophy. Faucault's statement that the name of the author defines the works and ideas associated with them more than a physical person is similar to Wayne Booth's idea of the implied author. In 'The Rhetoric of Fiction,' Booth states the implied author is the conceptualization of the values a literal author attempts to imply through his writings. In other words, the implied author is a concept of the literal author informed by the reader's understandings of the ideas represented in his writing. In both theories, the name of the author is assoicated with that author's ideas more than the person himself. Faucault takes this concept slightly further in implying that by using a name to define works and ideas rather than people we are essentially killing the author: "the work...now possesses the right to kill, to be its author's murderer" (102). By stating that the author's name now represents an amalgum of works, concepts, and ideas rather than a specific person, we are essentially removing the author from his work. Wayne Booth's implied author concept has a very similar function. The work of Booth and the Chicago Critics is, in part, a response to New Criticism, a theory which holds that it is the work itself rather than the author's intent that is of central importance. Booth does not quite take such a hard line, but his theory does contend that true meaning comes not from the actual author's intent but from the reader's understanding or conceptualization of the author's intent. By shifting the emphasis from author to reader, the theory of the implied author can be seen as an attempt to divorce the author from this work. In the end, the theories of Faucault and Booth, can be seen as removing the author from the work by using the author's name to imply a set of ideas rather than an actual person.