Untitled - witz cultural

131RECONFIGURINGTHE AUTHORof the self so central to moral, criminal, and copyright law. The editor of theSoncino edition of the Hebrew Bible reminds us thatBalaam's personality is an old enigma, which has baffled the skill ofcommentators. .He is represented in Scri pture as at the same time heathen sorcerer, true Prophet, andthe perverter who suggested a peculiarly abhorrent means ofbringing about the ruinof lsrael. Because ofthese fundamental contradictions in character, Bible Critics assume,that the Scriptural account of Balaam is a combination of two or three varyingtraditions belonging to different periods . . . Such a view betrays a slight knowledgeof thefearful complexity of themind and soul of man. lt is only in the realm of Fablethat men and women display, as it were in a single flash of light, some one aspect ofhuman nature. lt is otherwise in real life. (568)Given such long observed multiplicitiesof the self,' we are forced to realizethat notions of the unitary author or self cannot authenticate the unity ofa text.8 The instance of Balaam also reminds us that we have access to himonly in Scriptures and that it is the biblical text, after all, which figures theunwilling prophet as a fractured self.How the Print Author Differsfrom the Hypertext AuthorAuthors who have experienced writing within a hypertext environmentoften encounter certain predictable frustrationswhen returning to write for the linear world of print. Suchfrustrations derive from repeated recognitions that effectiveargument requires closing off connections and abandoning lines of investigationthat hypertextuality would have made available. Here are two examplesof what I mean. Near the opening of this chapter, in the midst of discussingthe importance of L6vi-suauss to recent discussions of authorship, I madethe following statement: "L6vi-strauss's presentation of mythological thoughtas a complex system of transformations without a center turns it into a networkedtext-not surprising, since the network serves as one of the main paradigmsof synchronous structure"; and to this text I appended a note, pointingout that in The Scope of Anthropology "L6vi-Strauss also employs this modelfor societies as a whole: 'Our sociery a particular instance in a much vasterfamily of societies, depends, like all others, for its coherence and its veryexistence on a network-grown infinitely unstable and complicated amongus-of ties between consanguineal families"" At this point in the main text,I had originally planned to place Foucault's remark that "we can easily imaginea culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an author"("What Is an Authorl" 138), and to this lemark I had considered adding theobservation that, yes, we can easily "imagine" such a culture, but we do not