Intro:

So as a writer who loves reading, and has studied English lit for three years or more, I often get into debates or discussions about Death of the Author. I want to share my very important opinions on the subjects. I hope I can make this enjoyable, cause this topic has been done to death and never seems to be solved. I might be biased considering that I do make stories so I know that what I make is influenced by me. Well, with that out of the way, shall we continue with this meandering chat?

What is Death of the Author?

The Death of the Author was coined by the French theorist Roland Barthes in his famous essay Death of the Author, which argued that the author was a limitation on the reader’s interpretation of the text, and killing the author will liberate the reader to analyze the text better. Popular with post-modernist theorists like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, Death of the Author seeks to remove the authoritative influence of the author to allow for a subjective reality of the text as opposed to the objective reality.

Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing Death of the Author-page (149).

Why I am against it :

As an author I inherently dislike Death of the Author, to me, it robs the reader of understanding why the writer created something. Death of the Author takes away the intent and the motivation for why the story was written in the first place. Allegorical tales in particular cannot lose the authorial intent as there is often an overt intent for the reader to pick up on.

Animal Farm for example cannot be read in any way aside from Orwell’s intent of showing the failure of the Bolshevik Revolution and the establishment of Stalinist Russia, where the promises made following the fall of the tsar are eroded or perverted. Death of the Author would simply allow a reader to ignore the intent and the allegory behind Animal Farm, stripping out the meaning and history behind the text.

The same thing can be said for Journey to the West if the reader deliberately decides to not take into account the Chinese and Buddhist influences and cultures along with the allegory towards enlightenment. The reader is missing out on critical influences within the text that result in a less rewarding, less enlightening read. There is also the importance of the author's experience that influenced the text, from Edgar Allen Poe’s trauma over losing multiple family members to tuberculosis influencing Masque of the Red Death to Steven King’s drug abuse as represented in Misery with Annie Wilkes.

Removing the influences of the author’s personal experiences, the motivations conscious and subconscious influence the work, they should be considered as part of the analysis otherwise you are missing something out on important information that will improve the experience and witness the humanity of the author. If the reader ignores the historical setting or the author’s own life, then they are not getting the full story behind the narrative. It is a flawed system reliant on a desire to fight back the rebel against the established trend of studying the life of the author by declaring the author dead.

When I am for it :

However, my opinion on Death of the Author isn’t absolute. I do believe that sometimes the author’s opinion and experience are disconnected from the creative work, be it before or during the creative process. A mainstream example of this would be J.K Rowling’s infamous statement about Herminone’s race. I would like to thank T.B. Thelwell for this point after many hours of discussion.

Back to the subject at hand, before J.K Rowling got her staying power in the mainstream outlet with her opinions on trans people, she would often tweet/say aspects of Harry Potter’s worldbuilding or characters. The example mentioned in the previous paragraph is a good example. Despite the depiction within the book painting Hermonine as what J.K Rowling claimed she was black. Another example from Rowling was that Dumbledore was gay, despite never writing it into the books or movies. Is Dumbledore gay? If it isn’t in the books and only according to the whims of an author trying to be relevant then I would say no.

Authorial intent not shown in the book but only assured by the author afterward can be discarded. Sometimes we don’t know much about an author or artist, they might be a small indie artist who never got much information or authors who are long dead without much historical grounding. Shakespeare to an extent involves Death of the Author, we don’t know if he was an antisemite in The Merchant of Venice because people see Shylock as either an antisemitic character or a humane, sympathetic depiction of a jew unfairly persecuted by Christians.

I believe the latter, but I am also aware that people have claimed the former. Which one is closer to the authorial intent? We have no record of Shakespeare saying he hated or was sympathetic towards Jews, which he never would have met as they were banned from England at the time. So we have to turn to the text, how does the text depict Shylock? I could do a full blog post on Shylock and I might do it someday. But for the sake of brevity, I would like to show you one of the most important monologues of Shakespeare.

I struggle to not see Shylock as a human man pushed to breaking point by a cruel society that torments him every waking moment but demands him to not bite back, to be treated as subhuman, and to be content with it. We have no idea if this was Shakespeare’s intent and we probably never will. So you as the reader are forced to decide based on the text.

The other point T.B. Thelwell brought up was that sometimes authors are completely insane. Chris-Chan for example thought his horrific human centipede of sonic recolours was supposed to be made for children, not even realising that they were writing about their horrific existence complete with pornographic illustrations in their comic made for children. Death of the Author should apply and not apply to Sonichu because the authorial intent is completely at odds with the product created, what was supposed to be a fun comic for kids was a wish-fulfillment nightmare for a mentally ill manchild. You also cannot know about the author’s life because he keeps putting it into his story. Then you have Onisen, another creep whose work reveals another deeply disturbing mind of a sociopath who loves school shootings a little too much.

Onisen reveals himself to be a terrible person within the texts of his work despite his best efforts to paint himself like a hero. He is a classic unreliable narrator and writer due to how big a disconnect he has between his self-concept and what he is throughout Stones to Abbigale, This is Why I Hate You, and many other stories. Norman Boutin of Empress Theresa fame I think should be the last example of the death of the author. Empress Theresa is a wish fulfillment gone amock, complete with justifying tyranny and hypocrisy on a nearly comical scale. Norman wants us to look up to Theresa, to admire her as a good catholic girl despite her being the worst Christian possible.

The disconnect between what Norman thinks Theresa is as opposed to what she is, a godlike tyrant who can control gravity, doesn’t care about humanity when she wants to do something, and punishes those who do not get on their knees and worship her. Dany wishes she had the power of Empress Theresa. But unlike Dany, we are not supposed to fear Theresa, she is supposed to be the just and virtuous deliver from evil when in practice, she is the most evil person in the book.

Conclusion :

Art reveals art reflects on the author with all our thoughts, feelings, and opinions about the world. I know this for a fact as a writer. I know this from studying English literature for all those years. That is why I don’t believe that Death of the Author should be used without consideration for why the author in question wrote the work in the first place. You are missing out on historical context as well as the character of the artist.

You miss out on what influenced them and their personal views on the world. These are very important when it comes to studying literature and art generally. That doesn’t mean we must reject Death of the Author wholeheartedly, but it should be applied sparingly and with purpose, be it from mad creators clout chasers, or unknowns. The author might not always be available or reliable but when they are we should respect the author’s intent.