Poetry, Prosecution and the Author Function

Abstract

In 1969, partly in response to Roland Barthes' declaration of the death of the author, Michel Foucault addressed the issue of how we talk and think about authors. 2 Attempts to abolish the author, Foucault observed, will inevitably have limited success, because the concept has such a powerful cultural function -and one that seems all pervasive. '[W]hen we reconstruct the history of a concept, literary genre, or school of philosophy', Foucault noted, 'the author and the work', in contrast to almost all other interpretive filters, take on an inordinately powerful role in how we interpret texts (141). To understand why this is the case, Foucault set about addressing not the construction of the 'individual author' but what he called the 'author function', that is, in Foucault's words, 'the relationship between text and author and … the manner in which the text points to this "figure" that, at least in appearance, is outside it and antecedes it' (141).From this apparent promise of an analysis of the dynamics of literary texts, Foucault moved outwards to what reads, and has been read, much more like a socio-historical aetiology of the construction of authorship. How and why did texts come to be associated with authors, and what were the social, cultural and legal contexts that made the author function possible? These are all fundamental questions, and -whether in agreement or dissent -Foucault's essay, and its socio-historical dimension in particular, has long featured prominently as 'an obligatory reference' in discussions of modern authorship. 3 The idea of the author function has come to play a part in the law and literature movement, too, where issues of authorship and copyright constitute an important intersection of the two fields. 4 Yet the concept rarely features either in work on Greek and Roman authorship or on Roman law. 5 Foucault's author function and its later evolutions, however, are worth interrogating, not least because the concept has important implications both for how we think about ancient authorship and for how we might consequently think differently about the narrative of the emergence of authorship that we tell more broadly across disciplines. At the heart of the issue are the interactions between literature and the law. The juridical construction of the author is central to Foucault's argument andin one way or another -central, too, to the cultural emergence of poetic authorship in Rome.This chapter revisits Foucault's author function and the relationships that it exposes between law and literature in the context of the emergence of poetic authorship in Republican Rome. Where Foucault located the author function in the late eighteenth century and the * I am very grateful to the original audience of the conference paper on which this chapter is based, and especially to stimulating comments from Peter Candy, Matthew Leigh, Michèle Lowrie, John Oskanish and Alexander Schwennicke, as well as to the volume editors for their astute remarks. 2 Foucault (1969). The English text is from Joseph Harari'...