The Death of the Author

The current academic trend in literary criticism these days is a theory spun in an essay by Roland Barthes (why are all the clever theoreticians French, when the French seem best at pastry, cheese, and wine? Hmm ...), known affectionately as The Death of the Author (DOTA). Let me caveat right here: I'm not an academic, I'm untrained in literary analysis, and if I abuse some key concepts I admit ignorance, but I'm not attempting to misstate the tenets of the theory. In this approach the reader (professor, student, critic) ignores intent, the author's statements and the author herself when evaluating the work (apparently mandatorily known as "the text"). No auteur theory here. They believe "the text" must stand on its own, apart from any biographical, historical, or other information outside the four corners of the document. Only the reader's interpretation matters (ignore the of-our-time narcissism). Thus the theory separates itself from attempts to read fiction as autobiography, historicism, and similar approaches. The approach is also called "The Death of the Author," because now the author is no longer important, only the reader's analysis has validity: "the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author." Long live the Reader! Yes, this is certainly one valid approach to literary interpretation, but only one among many, and not the most convincing. How often have you felt the author coming through the writing?

My issues with DOTA are several (I'm sure all my quibbles have been addressed before in much larger words and with many more footnotes). First, it seems artificial. We're going to evaluate a literary work, but first let us put on blindfolds and pretend that the author never existed. We have a novel, where and when did it come from, why is it in German, is the author female or male? Who knows? Not us. We're going to make believe there is no author, despite the loads of information we may know, because DOTA tells us to. Why intentionally handicap ourselves and put on blinders? Isn't literary analysis difficult enough without tying one hand behind our back? Like ice skating with bricks instead of skates, it just seems an affectation.

Next, it seems extreme, even if it aligns with the Literature Major Full Employment Act. Sure, what the author says about his work is not definitive and often may be misleading. I believe reading fiction as autobiography is usually a mistake and usually wrong; there's just too much we don't know (subject for another day). I don't subscribe to author worship. Authors making self-serving statements? Of course they do. In retrospect any number of authors have realized they're geniuses, and have the interviews, articles, and memoirs to prove it. So no, I don't take an author's statements at face value, and authors are often the worst person to explain their work. But it's extreme to throw everything the author says out the window, and the critics and academics, much like today's current crop of politicians, are not doing their job. It's an academic's responsibility to determine how much weight to give an author's stated intentions. A little? A lot? None? When was a statement made? How persuasive is it? A scholar's job is to determine what biographical or historical information, if any, we're going to include. That's part of the work, not just throwing up our hands. It's like a detective saying, we will not look at any information regarding the victim, let's make believe there is no victim. Now, let's solve the murder.

Following along with this, DOTA denies agency (another academically mandatory word) to the writer. A writer talking about the refugee experience may find she was actually explaining her sibling rivalry. Authors' ideas are not their own, everything is in the province of the reader. So whatever Barthes intended in his essay is irrelevant, it's only my opinion that counts.

Fourth, it's a bit of an oxymoron. DOTA decrees that the author is dead, hence the clever appellation. But we have loads of dead authors. Graveyards, anthologies, and ivory tower classes are full of them. Scholars spend a great deal of time excavating the detritus of dead authors, searching old attics, old trunks, old relatives, perusing letters, diaries, marginalia. Then the academics go off to write earth-shattering biographies full of new revelations that shed halogen-bright insights into the long-dead author's work. Well why are they doing all that, if the text speaks for itself. Wasting their time, apparently.

Finally (I could go on, but I already have), we lose so much by sticking strictly to the edicts of DOTA. Let's say a woman over 50 has enclosed a poem in a letter to a friend. In the poem is the line, "invisible, I step off the sidewalk," and in the letter is the line, "No one sees women my age, ah to be 20 again." If some academic, relying only on "the text," goes on to write about how our urban, mechanical society endangers people crossing streets, we're not helping anyone. If, after reading a poem about a sculpture, we later learn the name of the specific work, are we not to look at a photo of that sculpture? How does ignoring the sculpture add anything?

Hope you enjoyed my rant, all meant in good fun, from someone who enjoys reading using all my senses, all my faculties, all the tools available. I'm not giving up any of them. Happy reading. And where is Jacques Derrida when you really need him?  🐢