If we grant that enacting curative measures around authorial awareness is difficult if not impossible, then we turn to the possibility of preventive methods instead. Readers could attempt to keep themselves in check whenever they stray too far from what is strictly within the text, but surely there are better uses of our time than disentangling perceptions of the text from perceptions of the author. There is no cure for cognizance knowledge is not so easily erased or suppressed. Insisting that I feign ignorance about the author’s identity while reading is like asking Eve to go about her days as if she hadn’t already consumed the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge – regressive, inefficient, and futile. Unless I cover my eyes such that I avoid ever glimpsing a proper name in a book, I know that I am reading Paradise Lost by Milton and not a Paradise Lost by Dryden or a Paradise Lost that miraculously manifested without a creator. This high-minded conception of a text as “detached from the author at birth” sounds rational in theory, but what should happen is often not what happens in practice (Wimsatt and Beardsley 1376). That is to say, the poem should stand apart from whoever’s hand penned it. Textual purists contend that knowledge of whether a poem was written by Milton or Dryden should not affect evaluation of that poem. Thus, the author does not come before the book most often, he or she comes attached with the book. It acknowledges that many readers have at least a rudimentary conception of the author (at the very least, a proper name) that will frame how they read the book. Rather, the analysis takes into account the fact that the lives of authors are often public knowledge in the same way their books are. If we view the Author as more of an author-persona than an author-person, an analysis incorporating the author does not purport to capture some unassailable, singular reality about the historical figure’s intentions or psychology (Walker). One can believe in the Author yet conceive of book and author as existing simultaneously. However, the Author need not be an anchoring antecedent on his or her book. In his seminal essay “The Death of the Author,” Barthes states, “The Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as the past of his own book book and author stand automatically on a single line divided into a before and an after” (145). More precisely, the author as sole creator of a text’s truth has diminished, but the author as image and description is well and alive (Foucault 121). Readers bring to many books things they at least think they know about their authors, and this author-image will frame how they read in ways that we as literary critics and historians shouldn’t just ignore. It doesn’t matter whether this image is correct or not it’s a kind of literary effect alongside a given novel’s other literary effects. The author, this is to say, possesses an image or reputation. When we read a novel or poem, the author is, in a sense, part of the fiction. “Milton’s Paradise Lost: Author and Book as Concomitant Experience”
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