ABSTRACT
The conflation has resulted in certain critical procedures which either attempt to view a ‘subject of life’ behind the text or attempt to map a subjectivity derived from the prose works, assumed to be the subject of life, on to the subject of discourse of the poem. That the subjectivity of the real-world author may exceed all the subjectivities posited by its different discourses is generally not attended to, nor is the fact that the subject of discourse, the ‘self we encounter in the reading of a poem, has its own textual modes of existence, its own specificities of production within a poem as a linguistic and fictional construct. The naming of such a fictional, imaginary construct as the author is done through a process of inference, but such a move also has costs, as the whole debate about its merits and demerits, from the Russian formalists and New Critics onwards, makes clear (see Robey and Jefferson, 1986). On the one hand, it down-grades the textual modes of production of meaning by which a text functions as text; in this, its verbal and linguistic status is primary, which is sacrificed to considerations of text as symptom of personality. On the other hand, the differences in subjectivity constitution between a real-world subject and a fictional one are erased. In other words, there is a ‘gap’ between the two subjectivities of the author as empirical author and the fictional subject in poetic discourse, and the dynamism involved in the interpretative process as interaction between text and reader is neglected in the interests of paraphrase and simple mappings in which one subjectivity or ‘self is
read as synonymous with the other. Understanding in neither project is favoured by the conflation-since the subjectivity of the author as much as the subject of the text is simplified by such a procedure. There has, of course, been some movement away from such practices in literary criticism of this orientation in the use of notions like ‘persona’ to characterize the speaking subject of discourse, but usually the ‘persona’ is related to the subject of the author as being the author in a more expressive mode or frame of mind than usual.
