Authorial Shift: A Readerly Experiment

[sinngeist]

In Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, Jorge Luis Borges asks us to imagine, among other things, what the effect would be of reading a given work by a certain author A as though it were written by a different author B. His example, if I recall correctly, is of imagining St. Augustine’s Confessions as being written by James Joyce. I think this kind of experiment reveals the striking extent to which we rely on paratextuality—parts of the book like the author’s name, the title, etc.—when interpreting a work of fiction or of non-fiction. With respect to this, are there any works that you would have preferred reading if they had been written by another author, or that you would have interpreted in a vastly different manner had you thought them to be written by a different author, or that you wish had been written by another author? Or, if you had the power, are there any two books the names of whose authors you would like to exchange on every existing copy of them, just in order to see the effects on readers or on the consequent interpretation of each of the authors' corpora?


Here are a few of my own examples:

Alice in Wonderland, by Vladimir Nabokov

Pale Fire, by Lewis Carroll

The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, by Jean-Paul Sartre

Hamlet, by Samuel Beckett

Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes*, by Jorge Luis Borges

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, by Leibniz

The Monadology, by Wittgenstein


I'll continue to think of more. But generate your own, and explain your choices.


*This is a paper, rather than a book.

[Fluffy]

Uh... I think it would have been funny to read Little Women as written by Toni Morrison, but that's just silliness.

Seriously, I'd like to know what would happen if I switched the jackets on all the Irving Stone novels in here to say that the books are by Dumas or Tolstoy. Would people take Irving Stone's books (Lust for Life, etc) more seriously if they thought that a "literary" historical fiction writer had written them?

[Nie]

I have to wonder what Fight Club would be like if written by William Shakespeare.

The number one reason my house mate, Rohan, loves the book is because it was written by Chuck Palahniuk. Rohan really can't stand Shakespeare due to the language style of the time, so he probably wouldn't have read Fight Club if it had been written by Shakespeare, meaning one his favourite books and movies wouldn't really be part of his life. I wonder how that would make him different, if at all.

[KoNeko]

Hmmm. How about if Karl Marx wrote something like The BFG or something? I wonder what he'd have to say about giants collecting dreams and redistributing them...

[Fluffy]

Or Robin Hood, for that matter. Hehehe.

Along similar lines... what if Michel Foucault had written "The Man in the Iron Mask"? Oh, the fun he could have had with the power relationships there....

Oooh, horrible thought: what if Timothy LaHaye and his lot ("Left Behind" series - a weird, Christian Fundamentalist apocalypse story) had written the Chronicles of Narnia? Particularly "The Last Battle"?

[Calavera Diablos]

I think I have an equally frightening idea: Ayn Rand's Fables.

After reading Gaiman and Pratchett's amusing take on the apocalypse, I'd love to see their take on the entire Bible. ;D

[gabi]

admin said:

Uh... I think it would have been funny to read Little Women as written by Toni Morrison, but that's just silliness.

umm, right. i laughed out loud for way too long after i read that.

well, if gaiman and pratchett are re-writing the bible, can we have christopher moore (lamb) re-write the left behind series?

or how about sun tzu and slaughterhouse five?