According to both Barthes and Foucault, writing and death have much in common. For both authors, the writer is dead once the words are written on the page. According to the two, the author must exit in order for the audience to properly understand and interpret the text. The text is about the language, structure, and form, not about the writing's relationship to the writer. In order to have a true relationship with what you're reading, text must cut all ties with it's creator, symbolically killing the author in the process.
Until reading Barthes and Foucault, I had never given this idea or concept much thought. In my mind, it is the author, more often than not, that causes someone to choose to read a particular piece of literature in the first place. For example, I choose a lot of the books that I read based on the credibility of the author. If I've never heard of the author, I'm more than likely not going to be inclined to purchase the book. But after reading Barthes and Foucault, I realize this way of thinking is rather ignorant. When I'm reading something by a notable author, I associate the ideas and quality of the message being conveyed with the author as a person, a figure. But is the fact that I'm constantly aware of the status and credibility of this figure taking away or diminishing my understanding of what I'm reading?
In Barthes' "The Death of the Author", he discusses the idea that "to give a text an author is to impose a limit on that text" (Barthes 877). Interpretation of a text is limited if it is done so with the identity of the author in mind. For Barthes, a text is more about the language and the way the reader interprets that language. To think in terms of the author is to chalk up a text's success or failure to that author's character. In reality, this is no way to truly analyze any work of art because it is not analysis of the work but of the figure behind the work. When the author dies, the reader is born and language is the real focus. "It is language which speaks, not the author" (Barthes 875).
According to Foucault in "What is an Author", writing was a traditional method for warding off death. Foucault states that "narrative is an effort renewed each night, to keep death outside the circle of life" (Foucault 905). But as time has progressed, writing has become more the tool of death rather than the tool to ward off death. The author is merely a function of the language itself, the author is the function of their writing (Foucault 907). Their death gives birth to their text. Harking back to one of my favorite series, Harry Potter, "one cannot live while the other survives". While this quote is referring to two people, it applies to the author-text relationship.
My takeaway point from all this is that the text is not successful because of the author, it is successful because of the language it employs. And if the author is the figure that defines the work, the work is limited. To truly analyze a text, one must ignore the author and read the text for the words themselves. For a text to be celebrated, one must deconstruct the author and place the language and structure of the work in the spotlight.
While I think I understand what each scholar is trying to say, I'm still admittedly a little confused. If I understand the points of both scholars, I'm not sure I completely agree. In some situations, yes, I think that it may be easier to interpret a text without the constant reminder of who the author is. For example, if I was reading a work written by an author I knew to be in opposition with my own views or someone I knew to be a characteristically bad person, I may be closed-minded and reluctant while reading their work, preventing me from truly understanding what I'm reading. But in other cases, I have favorite books and series that I love all the more for the fact that it was composed by a particular author. But even in that case, am I limiting my understanding of my favorite texts because I think highly of the author, instead of thinking highly of the language employed by that author? Is there a real yes or no answer?
- Jordan
I think your question at the end sums up my thinking on the subject, is there a real yes or no answer? I do truly believe that there are many limits in constantly focusing on the author's voice and persona while reading their text. Like Barthes said, giving a text an author limits its possibilities. For example, when I read A Farewell to Arms by Hemingway, I tend to seriously think of Hemingway himself. I imagine his actual experiences in the war and him fusing that into the characters and events.
ReplyDeleteWhen I think of Harry Potter I don't consider Rowling at all because his character is so distant from the author. As much as we like to think knowing the author affects how we read the text I think sometimes this can be altogether false. I think Hemingway making his characters so close to himself is what misleads us. He could easily write about outerspace but when when he writes about fishing in Old Man and the Sea you imagine him fishing because that's who he is. I don't think that is the reader's fault. I think it is the author's personal choice in choosing how close or distant their stories are from their real lives.
Hello Jordan,
ReplyDeleteI would argue that you would be limiting your texts when you consider the author too much. An author isn't the entirety of their writings, no matter how much work that they put into them, and conversely, a work isn't the entirety of the author. A basic example would be the fine literature piece 'Zombies Versus Unicorns', in which editor Holly Black stated that most of the writers gathered for the project wanted to write zombie themed stories, but were tasked with writing unicorn themed ones. To do their work, they had to separate themselves from their zombie writing desires and put the unicorn writing ahead of their wants and needs.
Ong further elucidates on this topic in his essay. ('Such special cases apart, the person to whom the writer addresses himself normally is not present at all. Moreover, with certain special exceptions such as those just suggested, he must not be present.'(Ong, 10). With 'he' being the writer, in this case, Ong is claiming that the writer has to separate themselves from their audience and themselves in order to communicate their idea. As you had mentioned in your blog post, understanding of texts can be limited with the explicit presence of both the writer and the audience.
While I agree that a text is absolutely limited by the constraints of attributing its qualities and meaning to those the author envisioned, I also think it can be freeing to view a text within its context, as long as one examines the interplay between the creator AND readership. The discourse between the two is something I think is incredible important, and something that I think maybe Foucault might agree with more than Barthes. I think it is fairly flawed to say that in order for something to exist, the other must symbolically die. This assumes no discourse, no interplay, and it assumes a static system that creates meaning simply on one end. While I don't assert that the system has to be linear at all, I don't think that a linear system is nearly as constrictive as one might think, as long as we realize that it is not JUST a linear system at work. Linguistics explores this idea that language is an unstable system of symbols on which we superimpose meaning, and yet if meaning is that incredibly arbitrary, why are some meanings more arbitrary than others? We must not go all together in one direction, but take into account all directions and their effects on each other.
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