After reading Barthes’ Death of the Author piece, a few things stuck out to me…
Much of what I say is in response to cpetrus2’s opinion on the piece.
I completely agree with the assessment my colleague makes of “We Feel Fine” and “Whale Hunt.” I think Barthes would agree that these narrative works function to liberate the reader and exhaust all possibilities existing within it. I think this is very much because neither of these new media narrative forms is presented with any strong attachments to their authorship.
In my understanding of Barthes’ text, his qualms seem to be with the authorial power existing in conventional literary narration. I wold guess he’d be pleased with the way authorship is regarded (or the degree to which it is disregarded) in some of these new media narrations.
While I tend to agree also that some of what Barthes writes borders on melodrama, I couldn’t agree more with Barthes’ assessment that “once the author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile.” (147).Particularly in how Barthes believes authorship holds the key to criticism, I think his thoughts are spot on.
As we all have experienced in one form or another — likely in many forms — the human ego is strong. I think the ego and a feeling of self-importance or fulfillment plays a huge role in the writing we create, but also in our roles as readers and critics in particular. It’s apparent in our manic pursuit of meaning and explanation in the things we read. If we can’t create the writing we admire, it becomes our obsession to figure it out. At least this has been an experience I can relate to.
I think “paying homage” to the author is more often a means for reverencing ourselves as critics than the actual writer.
“To give a text an author is to impose a limit on that text…” (147). We seek to trap writing in a box to make it easier to draw definitive conclusions from it. The text, including its potential to extend innumerable strands of thought and morph many times in the mind of the reader, is contained and held in captivity by the conventions of the author.
This explains, in part, why many readers tend to cling to the “classics.” While many of the works may have been first admired for their literary prowess, the incredible amount of criticism has risen that genre to an almost equal footing. Shakespeare can’t be taught and appreciated without some understanding of popular criticism of his works.
Does this work to educate, inspire, inflate, or perhaps inhibit a reader’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s works? A worthwhile question.
It is in following this line of thinking that Barthes’ final conclusion can be best understood. “The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.” (148).
It is only after the text is liberated from authorship that we as readers can be truly unshackled in our thinking of it.
–On a side note, I found it interesting that Barthes decided to capitalize every mention of “Author” in his text. He seems to sarcastically illustrate the undue respect we pay to the person.