Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages:
426. "the 'author' in its modern sense is a relatively recent invention...the product of the rise in the eighteenth century of a new group of individuald: writers who sought to earn their livelihood from the sale of their writings to the new and rapidly expanding reading public"; previously "in the renaissance and [its] heritage in the first half of the eighteenth century the 'author' was an unstable marriage of two distinct concepts": "the craftsman" and
427. "something hither"--"inspired--by some muse, or even god"; "in neither of these conceptions is the writer regarded as distinctly and personally responsible for his creation" but is "always a vehicle or instrument: regarded as a craftsman, he is a skilled manipulator of predefined strategies for achieving goals dictated by his audience; understood as inspired, he is equally the subject of independent forces, for the inspired moments of his work...are not any more the writer's sole doing than are its more routine aspects, but are instead attributable to a higher, external agency"; eighteenth-century theorists departed from this compounded model of writing in two significant ways. they minimized the element of craftsmanship...and they internalized the source of...inspiration" so that it now came "from within the writer himself": "original genius"
429. thus "from a (mere) vehicle of preordained truths...the writer becomes an author"; wordsworth's observation about the burden of responsibility this inheres: "ever Author, as far as he is great and at the same time original, has had the task of creating the taste by which he is enjoyed"; it's a catch, see: "the great writer who produces something original is doomed to be misunderstood"; to be great, the Poet "has to call forth and to communicate power" (<--wordsworth), "that is, empower his readers to understand his new work"
430. young: "[the author's] works will stand distinguished; his the sole property of them; which property alone can confer the noble title of an author; that is, of one who...thinks and composes"
431. lessing as the starving artist writing to his brother: "take my brotherly advice and give up your plan to live by the pen....it's the only way to avoid starving"
432. schiller's writerly positionality: "the public is now everything to me"
433. why they were starving & dependent on the public (18th-cent Germany): "with the rise of the middle classes, demand for reading material increased steadily, enticing writers to try to earn a livelihood from the sale of their writings to a buying public. but most were doomed to be disappointed, for the requisite legal, economic, and political arrangements and institutions were not yet in place to support the large number of writers who came forward"
434-8. writers got honoraria; publishers got privileges (sometimes), but nobody really got paid.
439. and thus enter the book pirates! (stage left)
440. where theory comes back in: "the problem of how these two levels of discourse--the legal-economic and the esthetic--interact is one that historians of criticism have barely explored. this is unfortunate because it is precisely in the interplay of the two levels that critical concepts and principles as fundamental as that of authorship achieved their modern form"
442. like robin hood, "the weight of opinion was for a long time with the book pirates[!] for the reading public as a whole considered itself well served by a practice which not only made inexpensive reprints available but could also be plausibly credited with holding down the price of books in general through the competition it created."
443-4. "a variety of defenses was offered for book piracy[!] but the most pertinent to the genesis of the modern concept of authorship are those which sought to rationalize the practice philosophically": ex. "the book is not an ideal object....it is a fabrication made of paper upon which thought symbols are printed"; <--"to ground the author's claim to ownership of his work, then, it would first be necessary to show that this work transcends its physical foundation"; & another ex. (christian sigmund krause) "once expressed, it is impossible for it to remain the author's property.... it is precisely for the purpose of using the ideas that most people by books"--who can then "do with it whatever [they] will. but the one thing [they] should be prohibited from doing is copying or reprinting it?....would it not be just as ludicrous for a professor to demand that his students refrain from using some new proposition he had taught them?....just let someone try taking back the ideas he has originated once they have been communicated so that they are, as before, nowhere to be found. all the money in the world could not make that possible"
444-5. fichte's magic trick: (1) "distinguishing between the physical and ideal aspects of a book--that is, between the printed paper and content" & (2) then further "divides the ideal" into "the material aspect, the content of the book, the ideas it presents; and...the form of these ideas"; thus pragmatically in addition to its physical form "the material aspect, the content of the book, the thoughts it presents also pass to the buyer," but "the form in which these ideas are presented, however, remains the property of the author eternally." & shazam! "fichte solves the philosophical puzzles to which the defenders of piracy had recurred, and establishes the grounds upon which the writer could lay claim to ownership of his work--could lay claim, that is, to authorship."
447. more philosophy: herder's "herb" & "animal" metaphors about taking in nutrients & making them organically into the flesh of the being; "goethe's description of writing as 'the reproduction of the world around me by means of the internal world which takes hold of, combines, creates anew, kneads everything and puts it down again in its own form, manner'";

any poem, even a long poem--a life's (and soul's) work--is a tremendous betrayer of its creator, often where the latter was least conscious of betraying himself. --Johann Gottfried von Herder

& then implications: this new idea of "the book as an imprint or record of the intellection of a unique individual--hence a 'tremendous betrayer' of that individual--entails new reading strategies. in neoclassical doctrine the pleasure of reading had derived from the reader's recognition of himself in a poet's representations (a pleasure guaranteed by the essential similarity of all men). thus pope's charge to the poet to present 'something, whose truth convinced at sight we find,/ that gives back the image of our mind.' with herder, the pleasure of reading lies instead in the exploration of an Other, in penetrating to the deepest reaches of the foreign, because absolutely unique consciousness of which the work is a verbalized embodiment"