MDDM Ch. 76 ..a sort of Shadow ever in the Room [747.27]

[Bandwraith at aol.com]

As I mentioned previously, I continue to be struck by the 
idea that Ch. 76, introduced by Wicks as a speculation,
introducing Johnson and Boswell, functions as a meditation 
on "authorship" and the weaving together of texts, which is 
also alluded to on the final page of the chapter.

Johnson and Boswell seem to function as the perfect vehicle
for this, and Mason's questioning of Boswell, re: whether or
not Boswell himself ever had "a Boswell... of your own." [747.26],
reiterates that point, and emphasizes questions surrounding
Wicks' role in the general narration. What is Pynchon up to here? 
Is he confronting the reader and claiming authorship, or joining us 
as just another reader? Or, maybe he's out to defy any type of
categorization?

Here's an article from 1996 which might be relevant:


The Intertextual Web of Johnson's Dictionary and the Concept of Authorship

Anne McDermott


"One of Johnson's chief aims in embarking on his Dictionary was 
'to preserve the purity [...] of our English idiom' by including only 
such words as were used in 'the general intercourse of life' or could 
be found in the works of 'those whom we commonly stile polite writers'. 
He derived authority for the inclusion of many words and their meanings 
from their printed occurrence in books by the 'best' writers from 'the 
golden age of our language', and, as testimony, he included quotations 
from their works (Johnson 1747). These quotations he referred to as 
his 'authorities', but the nature of that authority is ideologically complex 
and has implications for the treatment of Johnson's Dictionary as an 
authored text.

"Recent developments in literary theory have drawn attention to the notion 
of authorship. Roland Barthes (1977) proclaimed the death of the author in
1968 and Michel Foucault (1979) has examined the consequences of 
regarding literary works as authorless, concentrating on an abstract author
function rather than a historical, biographical author. As a consequence, 
there has been a shift in deconstructionist literary criticism from study of 
authors and authorial functions to study of readership and texts. But other 
areas of literary study, including scholarly editing, have remained 
resolutely 
author-centred, and in the popular mind books are valued because they are 
written by named authors. The recent interest in historical dictionaries... 
has 
tended to draw attention to these problems of authorship because many of 
us are dealing with 'authored' texts in a genre which would not in the modern 
world be regarded as literary.

"Most people regard modern dictionaries as authorless....

"But most texts are not like this; the general direction of development in 
literary studies has been from the authorless medieval text towards 
more and more identification of the author as a real person, to the extent 
that texts come to derive part of their status from being written by a 
named author. It is this kind of authority that has been called into question 
by recent moves in literary theory....with historical dictionaries: early 
dictionaries announce their authors on the title-page and their content is 
often such as to identify the personal tastes and idiosyncrasies of their 
authors, while more recent dictionaries  are presented in a conventional 
format which minimizes the appearance of personal contribution by the 
lexicographer.

(...)

"All this raises interesting questions for Samuel Johnson's Dictionary... to 
what extent can we say that Johnson "wrote" his Dictionary, and what does 
it mean to speak of "authorship" of a dictionary? These questions are 
related to questions about the nature of authority which have been recently 
raised in literary theory, but does examination of these issues have any 
relevance for our understanding of a complex text such as Johnson's 
Dictionary?

"The influence of deconstructionist literary theory on literary studies has 
tended to fragment the unity of the author and to displace the author as 
the source and centre of the text. The author is no longer God-like and 
able to dispense "theological" meanings which it is the task of the 
critic-acolyte to decipher. Correspondingly, the text is no longer considered 
as the site of final, unified meaning authorized by the author; rather, 
meaning is located in the complex interplay of reader and text, and the 
author as biographical subject has been transformed into an intersection 
of ideologies and discourses. The author may still figure in the text, but 
only as a kind of fiction, a myth, or an ideological construct.

"According to Barthes, the text is irreducibly plural, a complex interlacing 
of voices and codes which cannot be made to cohere in a single expressive 
voice belonging to the author...

(...)

The image is suggested by the etymology of the word 'text': it is something 
woven, a fabric of citations from past texts and an interlacing of codes and 
signifiers. Barthes gives as an example..."

continues at:

http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/epc/chwp/mcdermot/

regards