FAQ U: What is the Death of the Author?

New blog series, “FAQ University”, to answer questions I commonly get in comments or discussions because of my blog! PSA: my computer is currently broken, so I can’t reply to anything for a bit :(

Often, I see people in independent spaces (of publishing or journalism) refer to the “death of the author” in pretty weird ways. I’ve seen some people say that whether the author is dead depends on the genre of the work. I’ve seen other people say that writing towards an intended meaning is unethical because you are imposing your own interpretation onto the reader. That’s all pretty goofy, but I think it comes from confusion about the difference between intent and meaning.

The author being dead is not a moral stance towards texts, and it’s definitely not an ethos of producing texts. It’s not something that applies unevenly to texts in general. It’s a principle of literary criticism to ensure that, when we’re reading a text, we evaluate it based on what is supported by the text itself. What the author declares about a text (or other external “clues”, like the author’s biography) is not textual evidence about a text’s meaning, nor does the author have a monopoly on interpretation.

Who’s Dead?

It is not incorrect to say that authors write texts with intent. This is true for most things. Humans and other animals (or anything else) have reasons for doing what they do, even if they are not conscious of it. Most people who write are conscious of some reason for why they want to write. Now, as a Freudian, I’ll be the first to admit that people are influenced by memories, associations, or motivations of which they are not aware. If you can recognize that, you are already getting the right idea here. For the sake of playing nice, though, let’s concede that authors write a text intentionally. Authors choose the topic of their work, and they choose their diction, or whatever else. Authors are actively engaged in producing a text, and they expect a certain outcome from their work (at least we’d hope so!).

However, the intent that produces a text is distinct from the received meaning of a text. When an author writes a text, they are producing something external of themselves. Whoever reads the text does not necessarily know the author’s intent in writing that text. Reading a text means you are processing it with your brain, and determining what it means based on your own knowledge or experience. All the time, you read texts without assurance of what they actually mean. It’s why we often miscommunicate with each other. You cannot guarantee what another person thinks, even if they tell you one way. All you can do is go off of what you have.

Often we read texts by authors who are literally dead. You can’t go and ask Mary Shelley why she wrote Frankenstein. Is it about the hubris of modern invention and science? Is it about how fucked up it would be if you were to make a guy out of dead guys? Shelley isn’t here to tell us. You have to read the novel for yourself and deduce from its contents what you think it means. Doing so is making an argument, since often texts have multiple interpretations. It’s why we often argue about what different books mean, or why they employ certain symbols in certain ways. I wrote a research paper at school about how scholars have conflicting views of the myth of Pandora’s jar, and I had to argue about which view was better supported by the text of the narrative itself. I chose to employ certain historical evidence about how material culture might reflect certain views of the text, but that evidence is secondary to the text itself. If a text does not support an interpretation of itself, then that interpretation is bunk.

Even living authors are dead when it comes to garnering meaning from a text. This is not because you cannot ask an author what they intended in writing something, because maybe you can. You can’t call up Homer about the Iliad, but you could probably email Noam Chomsky about formal grammar and get a response back because (apparently) he checks his inbox often. A more ‘fun’ example of this is JK Rowling’s declaration that Dumbledore is gay, or that wizards used to shit their pants and disappear the evidence before toilets were invented. These statements are not supported by the text, but they are imposed onto the text from the outside. You can even pit a text against its stated intent, by asking: if Dumbledore is gay, what is the textual evidence for this, and how does this impact his characterization? That is a more critical attitude than taking the claim at face value.

There are many such cases where an author’s stated intent contradicts what is apparent in the actual text. The simplest one is when the author simply does not succeed at communicating what they had wanted to communicate. A real-life example of this is when you say something that someone takes the wrong way, and you offend them. You might have intended otherwise, but the other person’s ‘reading’ of your words is always distinct from what you really meant to get across—in other cases where they comprehend you clearly, intent and meaning are separate even if they agree. Sometimes authors can even lie about their intent, like when bigots use dog whistles to obscure references to bigotry. The whole point of a dog whistle is to conceal intended meaning to outsiders, while communicating something different to those in the know. In all these cases, the intent behind something is on a different level from the meaning that people may glean from the message. This is why it’s important to look at texts critically and not take for granted what an author says about their own work.

The goal for authors is to communicate the meaning that they want to get across, even if that means that they fail at doing so, or if they lie about what they produce! The goal for readers is to critically read texts, or to interpret a text’s meaning in a way that is supported by the text. To put it one way, an author’s intent is a separate ‘text’ from the work itself. Likewise, any interpretation of that text is also a text that can be evaluated critically. A text itself might be composed of individual chapters or paragraphs or sentences or words. Instead of taking for granted that an author’s intent is the end-all-be-all, it’s better to analyze the text and see whether it agrees with the author, or whether the text accomplishes something interesting and cohesive itself!

It’s texts all the way down. Be conscious of which ones you’re smushing together.