Roland Barthes’s essay “The Death of the Author” has the distinction of being one of the few classic pieces of literary theory known by people who wouldn’t otherwise touch literary theory. I suspect that has to do with the catchy title. Barthes was one of the pithier French theorists of the 20th century; I wonder how he would have fared on (and more importantly, what he would have said about) social media. Mythologies is after all basically a blog in book form.
I often see “The Death of the Author”—or at least the concept that the author is “dead”—in the context of how to engage with the works of authors who support harmful (exclusionary, elitist, supremacist) causes or have done awful things. It is a separate question from “Should I financially support a morally reprehensible artists?” The answer to that, for me, is “no.” Often those who disagree will say that the author is dead (metaphorically), so it’s ok to separate the art from the artist. Barthes’s argument is a little different, however. He’s not here to give us permission to like art by bad people. He’s not so much killing the author as dethroning the author.
The phrase resonates with Nietzsche’s claim that “God is dead”: it’s not that “we” have somehow “killed” God, so he doesn’t exist anymore; it’s that Christianity is no longer the sole disciplining authority in society. We have so many other masters to choose from, or we could choose to have no master at all. Now we’re “killing” the author: that is, the author is no longer the sole authority over the text. Just as the death of God frees us to make our own moral choices, the death of the author frees us to make our own interpretative choices, tracing lines of flight out of the text itself rather than searching for the “correct” meaning, the one that the author intended.
These two quotes are the crux of Barthes’s argument:
We know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the Author-God), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture.
And
a text consists of multiple writings, issuing from several cultures and entering into dialogue with each other…but there is one place where this multiplicity is collected, united, and this place is not the author…but the reader.
The author is but one thread of that tissue. We ought to refrain from centering interpretations (or “explanations”) of a text that privilege the author’s biography or statements about the text above all others. Just because the author interpreted the text one way doesn’t mean a reader can’t take something else away from it. One of the most exciting things about writing is when a reader finds a theme or interprets an ambiguous passage in a way I hadn’t considered. Just because I wrote it doesn’t mean that I am the ultimate authority, the priest and sole legitimate interpreter of a sacred text. As a writer, my job is to craft a machine that produces feelings, sensations, thoughts, connections. I may construct it to produce certain feelings and generate certain images and questions, but when a reader, who is plugged into their own personal history and cultural context, plugs into it and turns it on, as it were, it produces something entirely different for them.
When I was an English professor I would often caution students against leaning too hard on “intention,” usually derived from biographical information, in their analyses of literary texts. More often than not, appeal to intention comes into play when a student is pushing back against a symbolic reading of a text. “How do you know the author meant this to be symbolic?”
Well…we can’t know another’s intention. And anyway it’s not through knowledge of the author’s intention that we are able to make these connections. Even if the author comes out and says, “this is a symbol/metaphor/allegory for X,” why would we take their word for it? The “true” meaning could be something personal to them, or it can be some sort of dog whistle for those in the know, and they’re trying to throw us off the scent (I’m mixing my dog metaphors here). Who knows. The point is that it really doesn’t matter.
And even if they were being honest about their intentions, the nature of language is open; communication does not move in one direction from speaker to hearer, writer to reader. Communication takes place within a context, through a text, and into a particular reader, often across gulfs of space and time. Maybe that’s where I would disagree with Barthes: he takes authority away from the author and gives it to the reader. The locus of interpretative “truth” is even more complex than that. (I put “truth” in scare quotes because we’re dealing with the “truth” of a literary text and not verifiable facts about the world.)
A work of art is capable of more than whatever the artist intended it to do. The role of the critic is to ask, “what can this text do?”1 and not “what does this text mean?” Sure, we can point to Lovecraft’s biography and we can explain his work through his racism (which was not a merely “a product of his time”; he was particularly virulent even by the standards of the 1920s and 30s, and his own friends and family often challenged his views) and say case closed, this means that, Lovecraft was bad and therefore his stories are bad. The true Horror at Red Hook is that there are too many immigrants there, and because of that, it’s a bad story that we shouldn’t read.
If we stopped there, with Lovecraft’s biography, we wouldn’t have gotten Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom or any of the other great works that open up Lovecraft’s aesthetic figures and demonstrate that they’re capable of so much more than what the author may have intended for them to do, mean, or represent. That is the mark of a great work of art: it lives again and again, acquiring new affects in new contexts. It’s why the zombie never really dies in popular culture: it’s always there to signify what we need it to signify.
Whether or not you want to buy books by a living author who is using that money to make the world worse is a separate question entirely. Finding the line between “not perfect” and “truly reprehensible” is a call we all have to make on our own. It’s an easier call to make the longer the author has been dead and largely irrelevant to the wider cultural discourse on whatever said author was shitty about, but I’m rarely able to show my work on that moral calculus, and I find it similarly difficult to judge others for their own decisions.
That this is a discussion at all is a consequence of art being reduced to content consumed in a market, and in the absence of any real democracy, the market is the only place where we can express political consciousness.
- A concept stolen from Bruce Baugh’s essay “How Deleuze Can Help Us Make Literature Work,” anthologized in Deleuze and Literature, Edinburgh University Press, 2000. It’s a great introductory text if you’re interested in Deleuze (& Guattari). ↩︎
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