Death of an author- The unpopular opinion of 1967
“Reading is often viewed as a solitary act; that’s one of the reasons I love it, and it’s certainly my favorite escape and introvert coping strategy of choice.” ― Anne Bogel
In the 1967 French essay, "La Mort de l'auteur" by Roland Barthes, the concept of Death of the Author was introduced, raising a critical question on the relationship in authorship, that is the Author and their work- does the intention and background of the author stays relevant to the work once published and consumed by the reader?
Barthes took a flight from the prevalent author-centric approach to literature at that time, stating that once published, it shifts from authorial intent to a reader's lens, emphasizing perspectives and perceptions heavily. In other words- it doesn't matter what the author intended to convey, since once published, it belongs to the readers. As Barthes puts it- The birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the author
For the longest time, literary analysis heavily relied on authorial biography and deciphering the text based on the author's context while writing. To put it in simpler words, understanding the background of a poet like William Wordsworth to understand and substantiate a textual analysis with authorial intent. That being said, it narrowed down literary analysis to what the author wants to say, and not what the reader deciphers. In my first college semester, I took an elective where I read Anandmath by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, a landmark Indian novel that gave us a song “Vande Mataram” that fueled spirits of nationalism at the time of freedom struggle and became a thread of some sort that tied people together. Naturally, we learned the context of his writings and his biography to learn the authorial intent (which was pretty clear to anyone who grew up in India)
Roland Barthes had a different viewpoint than that, proposing a rather reader-centric approach. It provided autonomy to the text itself, detaching its sole meaning to the author and his authority and producer rights. One argument for the literary analysis at the time Roland wrote the essay was that common literary analysis had gotten highly restrictive, lessening the ambiguity the text might provide outside the authorial intent. This leveraged the contemporary literary analysis, putting the entire context and analysis on one text only, which is the one that the author wrote, and inferring what they meant to convey, giving an upper hand to the readers in terms of interpretation and having multiple inferences. In the modern age of digital media, it is translated in a director’s approach to a book that gets adapted into a movie or an art of some form making it a workshop for creativity and one’s thinking.
One of the criticisms can be easily the fact that this approach can dismiss an authorial intent and context that can provide important insights to understand the text. One might say that “death of an author” is a rather democratic approach which while does seem to dismiss the author’s context, gives multiple interpretations- which is precisely why it was criticized for leading to a potential loss of literary criticisms, losing historical and cultural contexts. From what I’ve interpreted in this essay, I don’t necessarily see the need to separate either of these approaches, as the critics have also been less dogmatic about the approaches. It isn’t necessary to separate the biography of an author for poets like William Wordsworth or it would lose its merit, but there has been openness to interpret it without the authorial context as well. It gives readers an active role to analyze the texts and add their own thoughts instead of keeping it a close-ended thought. Our minds are the culmination of thousands of universes crushed in and while the context gives a beginning point, we can't let it close off to just one viewpoint
