Bernard Sharratt's Little Parallelepiped

Extract

Sharratt has taken the place for which the name of his father predestined him. In Blackwell’s English Literature department his book, if book it is, fits squarely on the shelves, or interlopes roundly, between the texts ascribed to Shakespeare and the works produced by Shaw. Physically, at least, it has the shape and weight of a book. Legibly printed, fondly designed, it also has a marvellous photograph of the Author on the jacket. Apparently taken on a motorway lay-by one misty Kentish dawn, perhaps on his daily jog, he is at first blush gazing truculently out into the far distance. On second inspection, however, like Wittgenstein’s famous duck-rabbit, he turns out to have his eyes slanted resolutely upon oneself — his reader, the innocent eye, his hypocrite lecteur. To go by her latest communication Dame Helen Gardner isn’t going to like Reading Relations. To drop some more illuminating names, the other waiting space into which this little parallelepiped so engagingly enters is the clearing between Terry Eagleton and Gabriel Josipovici (Marx and Nietzsche, or if you prefer: Raymond Williams and Roland Barthes).

For a start, the very idea of a book, with an author, has become questionable. In 1969, in a journal rejoicing in the name of Man- teia, Roland Barthes wrote of “the death of the Author” (I don’t say that he was the first to do so). The story goes roughly as follows. Once upon a time, in the pre-modem cultures, the responsibility for a narrative was assumed by a relator, a shaman or a seanachaidh, whose “performance” might be admired, but whose “genius”, “originality”, etc. if such concepts had existed, would have counted as a defect and embarrassment