Obscure Invitations: The Persistence of the Author in Twentieth-Century American Literature by Widiss, Benjamin (review)

Abstract

Widiss, Benjamin. 2011. Obscure Invitations: The Persistence of the Author in Twentieth-Century American Literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press. $65.00 hc. $21.95 sc. 208 pp.In his new book, Obscure Invitations: The Persistence of the Author in Twentieth-Century American Literature, Benjamin Widiss concentrates on the risks and promises of death as a means for authors to achieve new relevance. Widiss is interested in the temporality of transitions and in how moments of becoming in a text are related to remembrance and the construction of authorial identity. Temporal dislocations such as belatedness are less a source of anxiety in Widiss's reading than a necessary means of achieving certain textual ends. According to Widiss, the author's invitation to the reader is to participate in acts of revision that end up obscuring the line between the author as a figure in the text and the writer, who initially appears to exist outside it, as the person who composes, revises, and publishes the manuscript. Widiss points to Foucault's sense of the death of the author as 'a constantly recurring event'-which immediately raises the question of finality (7). If the author becomes the object of the reader's search for authenticity-a search that the author invites the reader to carry out-then all that is necessary on the part of the author to avoid anachronism or stasis is to ensure that this search continues.Widiss approaches this idea through loosely associated readings of a series of twentieth-century texts that are all concerned with authorship, some of which are more closely related to his central ideas about invitation and obscurity than others. His reading of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying in particular has more to do with setting out how textual meaning (and the sense of the author that lies behind them) emerges out of moments of remembrance and moments of enactment, and feels somewhat out of place alongside texts in which the author appears as a character, such as Stein's Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Widiss argues that the death of the author not only appears staged in these texts, but becomes central to the revitalization of the author's significance as a subject and as a figure that haunts the structure and meaning of a text. The question of the temporality of writing becomes a conscription of the reader, an appropriation of the desire for the author as the means of bringing that author into being as a fully realized textual subject. The death of the author here makes possible the author's resurrection: Widiss reads Eggers, for example, as turn[ing] the backward-facing genres of memoir and elegy into a forward-looking document (131). Authorship, and writing about the author, become the site of rebirth rather than of mourning.For Widiss, this idea of authorship is present in works throughout twentiethcentury American writing, so that the author is no less a deliberate construction in the early half of the twentieth century and no less an elusive figure at the century's end. Rather, elusiveness and invitation feature throughout, as part of the same process of creating the figure of the author. To some extent, Judith Ryan has gone on to develop Widiss's case here in her recent book, The Novel After Theory (2012). Ryan argues that works such as Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin put the death of the author to use in service of the narrative, as a knowing source of textual recurrence that complicates that death in much the same way that Widiss indicates (36-37). In this case and others, she sees post-theory writers as deliberately taking the death of the author as yet another narrative device. Ryan, however, doesn't work to connect, as Widiss does, these post-theory reclamations of authorial death with early twentieth-century efforts at developing new conceptions of authorship.The range of material that Widiss attempts to examine as a result of this connection at times presents problems for his argument. …