Roland Barthes is famous for his concept of "the death of the author," an idea with which I am in violent disagreement. The basic idea (read about it here) is that a work can be considered totally in isolation from its author, at least partly because it is impossible to reach inside the author's head and figure out exactly what the author's intentions were. The implication is that, when attempting to interpret an author's work (or that of a painter, sculptor, etc.), no legitimate insights can be gained by referencing the author's life and putative character.
A friend of mine mentioned "the death of the author" in passing, which set me off. I hereby reproduce my emailed rant, with some minor edits:
"The death of the author and all that sort of that thing."
Bleh. Barthean bullshit. I never bought into the idea that text can be ripped away from its creator. Text isn't "autonomous"; it's always connected to something, some context. Why wouldn't it be? I always found it highly inconsistent when the PoMo crowd would say, "It's all about structures and power dynamics," implying that a given text hints at a mass of shifting interconnections... then in the same breath proclaim that there is absolutely no connection between the text and its author. You can't have it both ways. Either text is always "in context" or it's decontextualized, and if it's in context, then part of that context includes the text's provenance.
This has major implications in a field like scriptural hermeneutics. Quite often, some religious scholar or pastor will pipe up with the thought that our modern interpretations of scripture may have veered too wildly from the original intentions of the authors. A specific example of this is the "genre mistake" that comes from interpreting, say, the Genesis accounts of creation as literal, historical, journalistic fact. The consequences of such decontextualization are real: fundamentalism, often supported by a naive literalism that ignores the possible intentions of the ancient writers, can lead to bigotry and violence. We see this all over the place these days. So I call bullshit on Roland Barthes, who seemed unwilling to fathom the possibility that humans are capable of more than just bracketing-- they can also use their native empathy and imagination to try and put themselves in the shoes of the authors they read.* Are they guaranteed to succeed? Of course not. But a bloke like Barthes doesn't even want to try, and that attitude bespeaks a silly absolutism.
Another example: let's say an author constantly returns to the theme of child molestation. While I'd agree that we shouldn't assume that the author was him/herself molested (English majors often pretend to be amateur psychotherapists, dammit, and they're usually partial to Freud), it should be obvious that the author has some sort of fixation on the molestation theme. Doesn't this fixation hint at a possible line of inquiry for the reader to pursue? Shouldn't a seeker of truth try to find out more about the author's personal life in order better to understand where the author is coming from?
On top of all this, "the death of the author" is bad metaphysics, in my view. Buddhism says there's no fundamental self, but this stance is only superficially in agreement with the idea of authorlessness. What Buddhism is actually trying to say is that personality manifests continuity, but that this continuity is not indicative of any solid, permanent core. There's no Kevin-ness holding Kevin together (just aggregates propelled in the same direction by karma), but at the same time, it's possible to see that Kevin is a discernible Kevin-stream (if that's not too urinary an image). By the same token, Barthes goes wrong, in my opinion, when he refuses to acknowledge the discernibility of author-streams, of the ways in which the author him/herself is reflected or echoed in a given work, and the ways in which that author-stream flows through other works by the same author.
Anyway, there's me on the death of the author. If context matters, then the author is without a doubt part of a work's context.
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*This is my nod to Husserl and the field of phenomenology. Bracketing (the technical term, coming from the Greek, is êpoché, often pronounced by speakers of American English as "eh-poh-kay") involves the setting aside of one's own prejudices, preconceptions, and predilections in order to make room for the above-mentioned empathetic outreach that allows one to imagine and experience, to a high degree, the lifeworld of the Other, whether that Other be a religious Other, or a cultural Other, etc. I'm not fully in the phenomenological camp (bracketing remains, for good reasons, a controversial topic), but I do strongly believe that we often say "put yourself in my shoes" because, to a large extent, it's possible for us to do so. Empathy is part of being fully human; lack of empathy is generally the mark of the sociopath.
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I don't have a copy of "The Intentional Fallacy" handy, so I'm a bit rusty on this, but I'll have a go.
ReplyDeleteThe point of the "death of the author" is to place the author as no more important than the reader, and anything the author says should be reflected in the text. If there is no support in the text, no matter what the author says or thought, the information is not useful, and what you're doing is biography and not critical reading.
Edward Said did a lot of reading of Joseph Conrad, and references biographical details in his analyses in CULTURE AND IMPERIALISM, but these are only hints to go back to the text.
Miles Davis said, if can't say it in eight bars it isn't worth saying. If it isn't written in the text, why the F should I care?
John B,
ReplyDeleteGreat comment. Thanks. I agree that the thrust of the Barthean concept is "there are no privileged perspectives," i.e., the naive reader's take on a work is no more or less legitimate than the author's.
My problem with this stance is its self-contradictory nature: from what authoritative perspective is "There are no privileged perspectives" being uttered?* It's a PoMo move toward relativism, but relativism is just another form of absolutism because it steamrollers all perspectives to the point that they all have the same value.
This feels intuitively wrong to me. For example: if someone were to tell me, after reading the Old Testament, that they felt the Book of Job was actually about anal sex, I'd tell them to stop smoking crack. I'm unwilling to assign their perspective equal status with other, more thoughtful ones.
By the way-- I think Miles Davis had some dazzling Zen moments in his short life.
Kevin
*If the claim is meant to be taken seriously, it's authoritative, which implies that it comes from a privileged perspective. So much PoMo is a recipe for meaninglessness when we so obviously live in a variegated field of meaning.
I entered the study of literature after a lengthy term as a science student, so I think my take on it is more practical. PoMo criticism is, essentially, a more useful model for me to apply than some supposed, essentially unprovable authorial intent.
ReplyDeleteI don't know which perspective is more "true" and I don't really care. When I read a text, my interest is in what that text can do for me, essentially. T.E. Lawrence may have been gay, but he hasn't written any works on anal sex. (There may be some suggestive passages (heh) but I really haven't looked) The gay perspective isn't very useful to me, I think, and until someone shows me a relevance to passages in the text (the previously unnoticed buttsex dissertation) this biographical detail is unimportant.
Now, I can take this fact as a clue, and try to find support in the text about anal sex. But if there is nothing well-supported in the text, it is not a claim I'll write about.
Likewise, if someone told me the Book of Job was about buttsex, I would ask them which passage specifically was concerned, and consider it carefully. If the evidence was lacking, I would support your assertion that crack was smoked. If they did, however, show me the verse about penises and assholes, I would say that they were onto something.
Intent has a little more import in religious works, though, because there is (sort of) a specific, single truth. Likewise, Feynman's LECTURES IN ELEMENTARY PHYSICS have a specific (and mathematically provable) truth to communicate. Authorial intent should be considered for these truths, and if the intent is not clear, well, it is a failure of the writer to make himself clear.
That's not to say that these can't be given a PoMo reading, because there can be more said, perhaps things of interest, other than those intended truths. As a writer, the one thing I have noticed is that I say a lot of things which are very true that I never intended to say every time I write.
John B,
ReplyDeleteThanks again for the comment. You wrote:
"Now, I can take this fact as a clue, and try to find support in the text about anal sex. But if there is nothing well-supported in the text, it is not a claim I'll write about."
I thought about this for a bit, because it sounds quite sensible. But my question would be: what constitutes "evidence" and/or "support"? This is a sticky problem, because most literature isn't written to be taken literally; ideas are often hidden behind metaphors and the like.
(E.g., does Sheena Easton's phrase "sugar walls" refer to her vagina or to her mouth? Most would argue for "vagina" as the legitimate interpretation, but neither "vagina" nor "mouth" is mentioned directly in the song, and the lyrics could support either interpretation.)
I also remain unconvinced of the usefulness of most PoMo approaches to literature (and life!) because those approaches tend to include a self-subverting or self-deconstructing aspect, thereby implying that one never really knows when one has arrived at a solid interpretation. So while authorial intent might not be provable, neither (according to PoMo thought) is anything else.
PoMo is antithetical to science, of course; science commits the grand sin of trying to establish universals (e.g., physical laws), which goes against the PoMo desire to avoid "totalizing metanarratives," i.e., universalized accounts of reality. Wholeness and integration are largely excluded from the PoMo project (for more on this, check out my friend's writeup on PoMo here).
I should back up, though, and concede that "PoMo" is a blanket term for widely disparate schools of thought. I suspect that some(!) aspects of PoMo thinking might be useful in the lit-crit realm, but what I resent-- and this comes from my own scientific-skeptical bent-- is when PoMo tries to get metaphysical, as has happened when, say, Derrida's followers take his "il n'y a pas de hors-texte" and make it into a larger claim (ironically, a totalizing metanarrative).
Kevin
Something I wrote above was misleading: I mentioned Sheena Easton's lyrics, but even though she performed "Sugar Walls," the lyrics were written by Prince.
ReplyDeleteCome to think of it, this song-- and Prince's authorship of it-- is an example of why authorial intent is worth studying when trying to interpret a work: if we look at Prince's history, we see a man who often writes about sex and sensuality, who has appeared onstage "jacking off" his guitar (viz. the "climax" of the movie "Purple Rain"), luridly flicking his tongue, etc. All that history points us toward a vaginal interpretation as opposed to a simple oral interpretation of the "Sugar Walls" lyrics.
If we were to examine "Sugar Walls" without all this background, we'd be wasting time, I think, by starting quite unnecessarily from square one.
One could counterargue that the lyrics themselves are enough to imply vaginality, but this merely begs the question: the lyrics, taken alone and out of context, could also be interpreted as referring to a mouth, so which interpretation is more legitimate? If the answer is, "There are no privileged perspectives; both interpretations are equally legitimate," then I'd have to wonder why I bothered to try interpreting the song at all. When one claims there are no privileged perspectives, there's really nothing more to say.
In all that I'm saying, I'm not implying that there does, in fact, exist one and only one legitimate interpretation of a given work (song, painting, sculpture, dance, etc.), but that Barthes is wrong to so brusquely exclude the author's point of view from a consideration of the author's work. If the author's point of view is no less legitimate than any other point of view, then fairness would indicate that his/her point of view shouldn't be excluded.
Kevin
Not familiar with the song, but I'll have a go again . . . perhaps both interpretations are valid, and there is nothing contradictory about it. Doble entendre, right? At any rate, I would say that it is the responsibility of the performer to choose, if at all, and to convey that meaning in performance. Which is a cop out, but hey, what're you gonna do.
ReplyDeleteActually, I just read the lyrics. I would say that a sexual interpretation is pretty obviously supported, mouth or vagina or elsewise is not precisely important. If David Bowie in his Ziggy Stardust phase sang it, you would probably conclude it was about ass-sex (to return to your previous theme).
But I think the vaginal interpretation is stronger based on a few clues in the text, and I think that interpretation would be pretty obvious without the history of the composer.
On the other hand, Jesus and Mary Chain wrote both tender love songs and luridly descriptive songs of sex (and in fact many songs that are both). It is by considering the lyrics closely that you can determine which is which.
And there is no reason you can't use the history of the author as a clue. The only catch is, you need to support that claim in the text. I don't think EVERY Prince song is about sex (although, actually . . .)
The lack of complete answers is, in one sense, a strength of the "death of the author" claim. You can always build on an existing interpretation, or question it in a constructive way. If you had a definitive interpretation, it is time to toss the book out, right? It is the process that ultimately yields the most fruit.
Also, I wouldn't necessarily call PoMo antithetical to science. When I was taking my crazy-ass senior-level physics and astronomy courses, there was a lot less time spent talking about "the truths of the universe" (and in fact, I used it as a joke) and more time talking about models that approximate observations in a way that allows you to predict behaviors "close enough".
That, at any rate, is how I have come to see critical theory. Postcolonial theory, formalism, dialectics, all of this crap I study . . . It's not a cosmic truth, it's just a useful model that allows one to approximate observations within a useful margin of error.
As for PoMo and philosophy, I willingly tap out, it's not remotely my field.
Oh, and what is/isn't evidence or support? Well, that's a judgement call at the best of times. But just because an interpretation is shaky doesn't mean it can't have some use. It just doesn't get much attention.
ReplyDeleteTo go with the easy one, what about the "Dumbledore is Gay" interpretation of Harry Potter? That was the intent of the author, although Rowling never intended to make it explicit in the text, and it is certainly supported loosely.
However, the support is minor, and the conclusion that he is gay or straight doesn't affect the story of Harry (unless you get some sort of sick NAMBLA thing out of it, which was already subtly implied (to my recollection) by a character but doesn't have strong support).
It is a valid interpretation, but it is 1) weakly supported, and 2) not of much consequence, so it is not an interpretation that is worth much discussion, author's intent or not.
John B,
ReplyDeleteI think you're better than many of the academics who take PoMo and try to turn it into something it can never be, but once you start reading works by someone like Slavoj Zizek, you'll see the deep ties between PoMo thinking and the larger background of Continental philosophy (e.g., there is no truth, truth is just language games, rationality is bogus and/or oppressive, etc.).
But that is neither here nor there. The best illustration of the death of the author can be found in the banner image of this blog, recently discovered through Kathreb.
Kevin
By the way, I don't think anyone else is following this (in my opinion very interesting) discussion. That's kind of depressing.
ReplyDeleteKevin
covered truth pretty definitively.
ReplyDeleteI agree, at any rate, that I am a terrible defender of post-modernism, and I would very much like to hear a more astute authority than myself answer your points.