Postmodernism showcases the web of knowledge echoes - challenging the romanticized image of the “traditional male author” which seeks to bury the identity of “others”.

One of the central discoveries postmodernism has made is to our understanding of representation. Traditionally, representation assumes an original; it takes as a given that what is being represented has an original, and that recourse to that original proves both the truth of it as original and the accuracy of its representation. Intellectual property laws, which largely came into effect in the 18th and 19th centuries with the printing press and the growing (international) market for literary productions, responded to this traditional understanding of representation. Any copies--representations--of the original must acknowledge their creator because that original is understood as having its genesis in the unique creativity of the author. Much of our unexamined belief in the author as a uniquely creative, inspired individual genius also solidified during this time. (3) Postmodern theories of authorship challenge the belief in the inspired, individual author. Language in particular has been a focus for this challenge. Postmodernism deconstructs the dualism of original/copy, positing instead a web of representations that echo and build upon prior representations, which likewise are indebted to still prior representations, and are prevented by their very nature as language from ever leading back to the original. At its boldest, postmodernism argues that there are no originals; all acts of language, and thus of representation, carry traces of past contexts that inflect their present meanings. The implications for authorship are dramatic.

Foucault's famous claim, that our traditional reverence for the author is the mechanism by which we throw up the gates and bar the door against the endlessly proliferating meanings of the text is, by now, both old hat and blithely disregarded:

The author is not an indefinite source of significations

which fill a work; the author does not precede

the work, he is a certain functional principle by

which, in our culture; one limits, excludes, and

chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation,

the free manipulation, the free composition,

decomposition, and recomposition of fiction....

The author is therefore the ideological figure by

which one marks the manner in which we fear the

proliferation of meaning. (159)

The author as we traditionally valorize him is a mechanism for classifying and controlling knowledge. For example, our penchant for associating various aspects of the text--word choice, mood, genre, and a host of other stylistic markers--with a particular individual is instead a determining factor limiting the meaning of the text, circumscribing the range of possible meanings a text can have, and ultimately "reduc{ing} the great peril, the great danger with which fiction threatens our world" by granting us mastery over the text (158). We further establish our mastery through the writer's biography, which, if known, shapes our expectations of the text's meaning, as can a record of the writer's explicit intentions regarding the meaning of the text. All of these signifiers of stable identity function to close the text off from a range of meanings.

The very nature of drama poses challenges traditional definitions of authorship. Jeffrey A. Masten, writing about Renaissance drama prior to the construction of authorship as an individualized demonstration of genius, argues that "collaboration was the Renaissance English theatre's dominant mode of textual production" (363). Postmodernism returns us to the possibility of interpreting drama as a fundamentally polyvocal art form that is inevitably "about" the thing it can't fail to perform: the endless indeterminacy of representation. In this way, drama ensures another series of collaborations takes place: between writer and readers, writer and performers, performers and audience. (4) Although playshave authorial signatures and therefore claim individual authors as their originators, the illusion of a single, overarching author that precedes the work is visibly undone by the elaborately highlighted participation of many contributors. Hall notes this contradiction in the development of Fair Use:

{The director} and several actors work through various

scenes from the play; I watch and take notes.

And I find this deeply ironic: I am writing a play

about the issue of using words and ideas that belong

to someone else, and there I am, looking for a line

an actor tosses out that is more effective than one I

wrote, or even one I haven't thought of at all. I

compliment the actor, thank the director, but the

line becomes one I have "authored." ("Fair Game?"

4)

Fair Use makes much of the polyvocal mode of its production to challenge the limiting function of traditional definitions of individual authorship.

Within the intertwining historical stories, this intellectually energetic play sets forth a fictional meeting between Stegner and Foote (who never met in real life), and engages critical questions surrounding our interpretation of Stegner's actions, including questions about copyright, creative license, and gender. For most of Act I, WS and MHF do not see each other, although MHF can hear WS as he quotes from her reminisces and his fictionalization of them. As the characters gradually become aware of one another--and of their own position as characters acting in a play within a play, they are sometimes frustrated at competing directions from Playwright and WS, and they often have opinions about the issues that emerge, particularly near the end of the play when Playwright is seeking some resolution, or "repose" for MHF and WS. All the characters except Historian are taking place in Playwright's imagination.

Although on the whole Fair Use paints Stegner as more guilty than innocent, even positing an apology from WS to MHF near the play's conclusion, and tends to argue for Foote as the unacknowledged center of the novel, the many intertwined voices, multiple character depictions, shifting timeframes, and simultaneous presentations of the material from various viewpoints emphasize the play's postmodernity, making the blame game impossible to win. Fair Use is literally a palimpsest of others' words in shifting contexts that simultaneously evoke the parallels between the characters and between the writers of these various interpretations of Foote. For example, Historian and Playwright both parallel Stegner's fictional Lyman. Like Lyman, who is also a historian, Historian has focused so self-absorbedly on his own research and intellectual expertise that he has missed much of the richness of his personal life; also like Lyman, his wife has left him. Playwright, too, shares Lyman's desire to find the truth and present it; also like Lyman, the truth she finds is already an interpretation that requires subsequent interpretations:

PLAYWRIGHT: I want to give another, I hope truer, version of Mary's life. And of what she meant by "angle of repose." Stegner has Lyman Ward define it as "horizontal, permanently." He has Susan and Oliver live in bitter silence to the ends of their lives. What kind of "repose" is that?

WS: (in a sudden, theatrical fit of weeping) "In all the years I lived with them I never say them kiss, I never saw them put their arms around each other, I never saw them touch!"

PLAYWRIGHT: (crossing to him) That was your anguish, WS. You gave that line to Lyman Ward--

WS: You gave that line to me!

PLAYWRIGHT: So.

WS: God. Let me out of this play!

PLAYWRIGHT: But it's true! You're working out your anger and grief, figuring out some element of your life, through someone else's story!

WS: Oh, and you're doing something so very different? (II: 87)

Like Lyman, she is struggling with a disintegrating marriage and only will look reluctantly at her role in that. Also like Lyman, there are some indications at the end of the play that forgiveness--or at least a negotiated truce--may be possible.

Fair Use makes much of other possible parallels, fore-grounding them for the audience: in Angle of Repose, Lyman gathers some news clippings that suggest his grandmother's adulterous romance and its tragic consequence in the death of her daughter, Agnes. These clippings are one of the things for which no factual parallel exists in Foote's life. As Playwright says, "A lot of people recognized the Footes in Stegner's play, thought he'd exhumed a well-hidden skeleton from the family closet" (II: 97). In a scene to which I will return later, Playwright confronts WS with news clippings describing accident he had while in a clandestine meeting with a graduate student. The accident happened; the woman and the clippings don't exist in fact? Identity is thus portrayed as fluid and subject to interpretation--sometimes wild interpretations based more on the interpreter's (un)conscious needs or desires than on any factual basis. In a postmodern sense, identity is not a fixed, definable essence that can be fully and accurately represented; as Fair Use shows, identity is constantly constructed, negotiated, and struggled over. That we rarely recognize the tenuousness of identity is due to the successful covering over of the shifting contexts present in every utterance.