Literary and Cultural Theory, 2013

I found this week’s reading to be challenging, mainly as I disagree heavily with Barthes’ idea of ‘’The death of the Author’’. I do agree that the meaning of a text depends on the reader as we will probably all take away something different from our reading experience, perhaps due to Bourdieu’s idea of different ‘’tastes’’ which relate to one’s social position.

I disagree however that writing and its creator and unrelated. The author has created the work; therefore the author has formulated the words, the dialogue and the narrative according to his or her own tastes.

The reader is ‘born’ to interpret the writing. Yet this seems a rather unfair relationship as it is not reciprocated as Barthes does not permit the author to interpret the reader. Barthes implies that the reader will judge the text and respond to it, thus themselves becoming a critic, yet in reality the writer also passes judgement on the reader. A piece of writing exists because the author had a specific intent, and likely taken into consideration when writing would be the reader’s response. An artist cannot surely be disconnected from his masterpiece? Spectators may choose view and interpret a work of art separately and out of context of the artist who produced it, yet the artist is still omniscient within the work.

Talking about the death of the author also implies a previous existence; therefore there has been historically an author. The suggestion that writing is now dispossessed implies that it was ‘’possessed’’ in the first place. Yet it seems as if Barthes is implying that there has never been an authorial presence.

On a separate point I found the reading on Bourdieu to be very interesting where he talks about the fact that language is used as a mechanism of power. Also that the way in which we choose to present our social space to the world demonstrates our perceived notion of our place in society is highly intriguing. Bourdieu talks about ‘’the practical ‘attributive judgement’ whereby one puts someone in a class by speaking to him in a certain way (thereby putting oneself in a class at the same time)’’ (242) which demonstrates the ‘’power’’ of language and how it can be used positively or negatively. The idea that we are all ‘’potential object[s] of categorization’’ (245) I think is rather dangerous as one will either consider oneself inferior to or greater than the person or group to which one compares oneself.

When we totally submerged in a work of litterature, the characters of the book all come to life and perform before us. It seems like we observe all events occur one after another just around us. Writings of the author lead us to the ideally constructed world composed by him. Barthes’ idea about “lose the origin” is too objective to achieve. How do we supposed to do to completely ignoring the existence of the author who brings us to his world ? from my point of view, the reason that some masterpieces passes from generation to generation has something really important to do with the authors’ character. Every author has different experience which would affect his character and therefore their writing styles vary. When we read <<les Confessions>> by Jacques Rousseau, his whole purpose was to lead us to himself, to let us get into the spirit of him, and to know about what kind of person he really was, so how can we remove the author then? Maybe the reader and the author don’t have to be at opposite positions, they are connected in a vary nuance manner. The death of author is not necessary… Admittedly some works like folk tales do lost their origin, do they become easier to analyse?

It’s curious to see that several of us are feeling a little skeptical about the announcement of the “death of the author” and about the absolute power of interpretation given to the new-born reader. Admittedly I am also among those who were asking themselves: ” does the author has to die?”, it seems that we are somehow upset and feel resistant about this notion that the author figure should be completely erased from our reading experience.
However if you think about it, it is perfectly normal that these theorists would want to claim the importance of the role played by the readers in the equation, and it is true that the readers’ reception of the texts contributes just as much to a literary work, so what is really this reluctance in us to let go of the “author”? Maybe it’s because of the brutal image that Barthes’ announcement suggests: the death? Maybe it’s because of the insecurity brought about by the absolute absence of author/authority? Then I realized my emotional response to this announcement just goes to prove how deeply rooted is the author figure in my mind: during years of literary studies, we always start with an author’s biography before even looking at the text, a literary work is so closely related to its author that we always say “I love Flaubert’s works”, and we even invent adjectives like “Proustien” to talk about the style of the author. So what if some readers (like me) find it extremely difficult to exclude author from the text? I agree with Foucault when he says: “it is not enough, however, to repeat the empty affirmation that the author has disappeared”, what we need is a closer look at how the concept of “author” came to be and how it influences our reading experience.
According to Foucault in “What is an author?”, he states that what we call “author” is a “rational being” constructed as a result of the “author function” of discourses. The individual being/author in whom the critics discern “a ‘deep’ motive, a ‘creative’ power, or a ‘design’, the milieu in which writing originates”, becomes the author we know. (Constructed only by critics? Don’t the readers and their interpretations contribute to this construction of “author” as well?) The author, according to Foucault, “is a certain functional principle by which in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction.” The word “function” implies that “author” is used to serve a certain end, and that we have the need to use “author” to constrain fiction, a need that Foucault explains as “we fear the proliferation of meaning”. This statement somewhat explains the reluctance to make the author completely disappear: the author has descended from the state of the Author (as indicated by Barthes), but it’s not completely gone, for many readers it still is one of the means for interpreting the text.

What triggered my curiosity in the pile of readings of the past week was the revolution of the hermeneutics through phenomenology, and I am not talking here about a science of phenomenas, but rather about phenomenalisation. In that respect words don’t matter for what they express immediately, but rather for the differences they state in their actualisation. Probably Aristotel was the first to say that the Logos offers meanings right because it separates concepts. In my opinion Barthes Death of the author would not have been possible beyond these phenomenological assumptions. I find this gloomy, rhetorical death pretty cool though. This death of the author has its origin in the idea that the text is nothing but a “gramme”, or in other words a trace of what was almost about to be actualized by the author. These traces do not aim to point towards an origin, but rather they talked about the passage itself towards the Origin or the non textual source of the text itself. In other words once a text written, its author becomes automatically its reader, and interpreter. The separation between the author and his text is univocal and automatic precisely because the unique character of the writing act. This author can only once write a text, everything that follows is interpretation. We perceive then a distinction between the author and his thinking. His only merit is that he was the first to think his thinking. The great privilege of the author is only the fact that he was his first interpreter. But in that respect, I wonder, couldn’t we very well also speak about a possible death of the reader? I find myself so many times disappointed in front of a text that once I stroke my emotions and I try to revitalize that grammme, that trace that seemed to grasp the Origin and I am unable to repeat the experience.

What triggered my curiosity in the pile of readings of the past week was the revolution of the hermeneutics through phenomenology, and I am not talking here about a science of phenomenas, but rather about phenomenalisation. In that respect words don’t matter for what they express immediately, but rather for the differences they state in their actualisation. Probably Aristotel was the first to say that the Logos offers meanings right because it separates concepts. In my opinion Barthes Death of the author would not have been possible beyond these phenomenological assumptions. I find this gloomy, rhetorical death pretty cool though. This death of the author has its origin in the idea that the text is nothing but a “gramme”, or in other words a trace of what was almost about to be actualized by the author. These traces do not aim to point towards an origin, but rather they talked about the passage itself towards the Origin or the non textual source of the text itself. In other words once a text written, its author becomes automatically its reader, and interpreter. The separation between the author and his text is univocal and automatic precisely because the unique character of the writing act. This author can only once write a text, everything that follows is interpretation. We perceive then a distinction between the author and his thinking. His only merit is that he was the first to think his thinking. The great privilege of the author is only the fact that he was his first interpreter. But in that respect, I wonder, couldn’t we very well also speak about a possible death of the reader? I find myself so many times disappointed in front of a text that once I stroke my emotions and I try to revitalize that grammme, that trace that seemed to grasp the Origin and I am unable to repeat the experience.

In his essay, Fish addresses the reasons behind why the same reader will interpret different texts in different ways, and also why different readers will interpret the same text in a similar way if each reader interprets a text independently. In order to give an explanation on the one hand of the stability of interpretation and on the other of the orderly variety of interpretation, Fish proposes the theory of “ interpretive community”. According to Fish, the interpretive community is “made up of those who share interpretive strategies not for reading (in the conventional sense) but for writing texts, for constituting their properties and assigning their intentions”. (219). Each interpretive community share its own reading methodology and therefore depending to which interpretive community the readers belong, they make certain shared assumptions prior to the process of reading that influence their interpretation of the texts. This is the explanation for the stability of interpretation among different readers in the same interpretive community and why there are disagreements between different communities.

In my opinion, Fish is saying that the readers hold all the power in determining the interpretation, and both authorial intention and formal features are produced by their interpretive assumptions and procedures the readers bring to the text (basing on their personal experiences, cultural background and knowledge, rather than on the formal elements of the texts themselves to determine the way a work is interpreted, and what it means). The reader’s interpretive perceptions and the skills that one uses to interpret works are individually learned, and developed as they are traits that are not inherently with us; and depend on the assumptions shared by the interpretative community that the reader belongs, which explains why some of us interpret things a different way than others.

I understand and agree with Fish that certain nuances in meaning are subjective and projected onto the text by the reader, but are we to completely ignore authorial intention?