French post-structuralist Roland Barthes’ essay, The Death of the Author, emphasises the importance of the reader — at the expense of the author and critic. I went down something of a post-structuralist rabbit hole this week, and it led me to this fascinating piece of writing.
The Death of the Author, as the title might suggest, is a quite radical attempt to end the primacy of the “author”, whom Barthes argues is a modern creation that has come to dominate critics’ interpretations of meaning within texts.
In a social media age in which more people than ever identify as “author” or “critic”, the essay is quite refreshing in its quest to separate “person” from “author” and reposition text as not, by default, conveying biographic meaning for the person who wrote it.
Barthes argues that a critic can’t “decipher” a text’s authentic meaning. It is not something that — once found — can be neatly related back to the person who wrote it in a way that cracks a code as to their intentions in relation to their own self. Enter the reader, whom Barthes says has long been sidelined in considerations of how texts work.
The reader doesn’t decipher but rather “disentangles” text that does not have a fixed meaning. They do this by bringing their own experiences — of the world, of language, of culture — to the reading process. This allows various meanings to emerge, challenging notions of truths, “right” ways of reading texts and, I suppose, even author accountability.
On a promising note, it means readers are free to interpret texts in various ways. As a package-holiday tourist to the world of Barthes’s writing this week, I’m no expert. But I arrived at this essay with various experiences and knowledge that guide how I interpret the text. The next reader of this essay will interpret it differently. Likewise, readers of this blog post will bring their own experiences and knowledge to my words (just as they do to Barthes’s), which will inform how they engage with my (brief) analysis.
This sets the scene for some potentially interesting debate, not just in terms of this essay and my response, but writing more widely. Yet, I can also see implications in a world in which people have become vicious and even disingenuous in their fight for their “truth” to be “the truth”. (But perhaps that’s nothing new, anyway.) Post-structuralism advocates for a multiplicity of truth, but this comes with complications in an age in which fake news, “alternative facts” and multiple narratives drive culture wars. That’s a bigger discussion for another time — and one I probably don’t have time to “Author”. (Someone else can write it — I’m sure they have already — and I’ll happily be the reader!)
Some quotations from Barthes’s essay worth pondering further include:
A text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author.
Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature.
To give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the Reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.
The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.