An author is taken to be someone acknowledged as responsible for a given printed (or sometimes written) work; that is, authorship is taken to be a matter of attribution by others, not of self-election. A writer is anyone who composes such a work. A writer therefore mayor may not attain authorship. A text is the content of any written or printed work, considered apart from its particular material manifestation.
THE NATURE OF THE BOOK. Print and Knowledge in the making. ADRIAN JOHNS. THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS. CHICAGO AND LONDON
Then I’m only a writer because I comment on books about writing or books about books[1]. I have no authorship because nobody has called me an author yet.
That reminds me something I read (by a writer who prefers to use the pen name of a dead writer[2]); people discussing the writer as a person and not as an author. Do we, by denying the authorship of poems and novels to writers and comment, instead, about the author as a person; become the creators of garbage knowledge? Do we really kill the authorship by discussing the person and not the author?
It is a question. I understand why to discuss the writer (or the musician or the filmmaker or the singer) as a person and not as an author. We don’t want authors to become the creators of reality by forcing reality to adjust to what they think reality should be without practicing it. We don’t want, any longer, Jean Rousseaus marauding around.
I elaborate.
In Ovejas y mierda[3],the character of Eudald is capable[4] of messing up with his mother’s car in order to film the afterwards rehabilitation and film true reality. Because, for him, a documentary shouldn’t become the interviews after the incident but the incident itself. In his mind, things have to be shown the way they happen even If you have to help reality to happen. He won’t stop at almost killing or raping.
Sick? It is horrid! This person is an… Yes. That. But he creates wonderful documentaries! (fictitious of course). Such an author should be stripped of their authorship… I understand why we discuss the person and not the author. I’m as emotional as anyone. However, does the person being horrible cancel automatically that they wrote, sing, film… “beautifully”?
I’m a jobless, lazy person. Am I as sick as this character? It worries me. And no, sometimes worrying about is not enough to proof you’re not a horrible person. Should I be denied authorship?
And by worrying a lot more about the last, do I become a worse person than the one I am?
Pasto kalo.
[1] As Mikita Brottman remarks in The lonely vice, now we have lots of books about books. Though I’m starting to think that started much before. When folklorists and writers like Barthes started to write about myths and folklore. They were writing about how stories come to life and what they’re made up. At times when people still took a pen and started writing without a manual.
[2] He is American.
[3] Literal translation of the title: Sheep and shit. Oriol Font i Bassa. 2018.
[4] No one can proof it but it is rumored and the author takes us by a documented (documentary translated into novel) format.
