Maurice Couturier writes:

 

Like Maxim Shrayer, I apologize for entering the debate about the death of the
author with a reference to my own works, specifically my essays "Nabokov ou la
tyrannie de l'auteur" (Paris: le Seuil, 1993) and "La Figure de l'auteur"
(Paris: le Seuil, 1995). Some of you may remember Brian McHale's bitter
criticism of my essay of the subject in "Nabokov Studies" (Volume 2, 1995)
entitled "The Great (Textual) Communicator, or, Blindness and Insight". to
which I responded only recently in "NOL". Here is what I said:

"Brian McHale strongly criticized my approach, claiming at the outset that “it
is the sort of reading that Nabokov would have endorsed and might even, one
imagines, have undertaken himself, the sort of reading that his texts
anticipate and for which they are, as it were, pre-programmed.” Although
McHale’s statement might be read as a compliment, it was in fact a criticism. I
wonder whether McHale had read, previous to writing his review, Nabokov’s
lectures on literature: they have little in common with my interactive
approach, which takes into account the author’s as well as the reader’s blind
spots, together with their respective insights. His chief criticism is the
following: “Couturier’s commentary is at its best when it is most in touch with
the narratological paradigm, and with Genette’s narratology in particular.
Conversely, his readings are (relatively) weaker – less lucid, less tautly
organized, less persuasive – whenever there is no particular descriptive
paradigm to underwrite them.” He further accuses me of being “strangely
ungrateful towards [my] intellectual benefactors”. McHale should have noticed
that I had borrowed my title and some of my ideas from one of
those “benefactors”, Barthes [who sat on the pannel of my doctoral defense at
the Sorbonne and wrote a laudatory report], and that it was another such
“benefactor”, Gérard Genette, who had published "Nabokov ou la tyrannie de
l’auteur". After publishing "La Figure de l’auteur", Genette had also agreed to
my writing a third book on the same subject, but I never found time to do it,
largely because I had, in the meantime, been appointed editor-in-chief of the
Pléiade edition of Nabokov’s novels. Barthes’s theoretical views changed
considerably throughout his life, as did Genette’s, which shifted from
narratology to aesthetics. McHale, steeped in deconstructionism more than in
structuralism proper, was suggesting in his criticism of my books that all
interpretations ought to be based on existing hermeneutics, and that the task
of the critic was to apply a given interpretative grid to the text at hand, not
realizing that he was thereby programming the speedy obsolescence of critical
essays – a position sanctioned by the book market I am afraid, hermeneutics
with a scientific ambition being often short-lived in the field of literary
criticism. I grant McHale that even the most unsophisticated critic is
unconsciously tapping some interpretative grid, but this does not imply that
all sophisticated critics should be content with applying known hermeneutics.
If literary criticism and literary theory are to serve not only pedagogical but
epistemological and aesthetic functions, their practitioners must be capable of
breaking new ground and of contributing in their own fashion to the hermeneutic
venture.
Though I did not respond to McHale’s attack, it is tempting to claim that I won
the argument given the frequent appearance in Nabokov scholarship of the
subtitle of my book, the “author’s tyranny”, but I realize this is not the
case, since those who borrow it usually do not mean the same thing as I do.
Nabokov’s opinions on literature are so strong that many of his exegetes have
felt the need to stick to a kind of criticism he himself practiced or would
have sanctioned; and they have refrained from venturing into more daring
interpretive realms, psychoanalysis for instance."

What, then, would be McHale's reaction to my psychoanalytic study of Nabokov's
novels, "Nabokov ou la cruauté du désir" (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2004) which is
not author-centered?

Sorry for this long contribution to the debate.

Maurice Couturier