Reading Is A Conversation (Or The Author Is Not Dead) ~ Reading Craft #6
What gives meaning to a text? The author or the reader? Or perhaps neither in isolation, because we do not exist in isolation. Let's chat about the death of the author, and intentionalism.
"Death of the author!" some readers proclaim—ironically enough, quoting an author to do so.
They declare the author irrelevant the moment the text leaves their hands, that the reader's interpretation exists in isolation, belonging not to the author but to the reader alone. Yet they forget that who the author was—their beliefs, their biases, their culture—is precisely what shaped the text in the first place.
In truth, reading is an asynchronous conversation between the author and their readers, and meaning can only emerge from that conversation—and not from a monologue from either the author or the reader.
The catch, however, dates back to the moment in which some scholars disagreed about this matter—and later on their work was, as often happens, taken out of context and gleefully distorted by the internet.
It’s time to review our history.
“Death of the Author” is an essay published in 1967 by Roland Barthes.
Barthes (1915 - 1980) was a French literary critic and theorist. He famously wrote:
[…] the image of literature to be found in contemporary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his history, his tastes, his passions; criticism still consists, most of the time, in saying that Baudelaire's work is the failure of the man Baudelaire, Van Gogh's work his madness, Tchaikovsky's his vice: the explanation of the work is always sought in the man who has produced it, as if, through the more or less transparent allegory of fiction, it was always finally the voice of one and the same person, the author, which delivered his "confidence."
And so the internet often reduces the above to the simplest explanation: the author’s intention when writing a book should be irrelevant once that book is published.
Except that Barthes wrote this essay in response to another essay (or, rather, in response to an entire school of thought) and thus taking his words out of context… does not yield the best interpretation.
That context dates back to 1946, when Wimsatt and Beardsley published an essay titled “The Intentional Fallacy”. They defined intention as the “design or plan in the author’s mind.” From there, the fallacy, in their view, lies not in the concept of intention itself, but in treating it as a recoverable standard for critical judgement:
The claim of the author's "intention" upon the critic's judgment has been challenged in a number of recent discussions […]. We argued that the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art. […]
…and the essay continues with Wimsatt and Beardsley attempting to argue that several critiques (or, in modern terms, “reviews”) of books that attempted to guess the author’s intention had no basis to reach any conclusion and, to some extent, gained no benefit from doing so.
“The Intentional Fallacy” took over in the United States from the 1940s to the 1970s—and towards the end of that period is when Barthes wrote his famous “Death of the Author” essay… which, granted, has a far more catchy title. This is why, nowadays, the proponents of the idea that authorial intention is irrelevant refer to it as death of the author.
That said, Barthes’s consider a nuance that Wimsatt and Beardsley did not quite address.