[Journal 3] In Defense of the Author's Continued Existence, Please and Thank-You

 

Barthes’ essay The Death of the Author offers some insight into how Barthes views the role of the author as creator of a work. It’s interesting, in many ways Barthes’ response here mimics essays which are critical of classical film autor theory: he writes that it is not always the case that the writer is entirely without agency in putting themselves into a work somehow: there are authors who can intentionally change or manipulate their writing so as to subvert expectations, to distance who they are and their history from the words they are writing down.

I believe Barthes went to a bit of an extreme here, claiming that “writing can no longer designate an operation of recording, notation, representation, ‘depiction’… rather, it designates exactly what linguists… call a performative… in which the enunciation has no other content… than the act by which it is uttered”. In this particular section it appears to me that Barthes is arguing that the author’s words themselves do not contain nuance, rather that words are merely a tool by which to convey an idea. That “the hand, cut off from any voice, borne as a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin – or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself.” He is concluding that the intent within an author’s word choice is unnecessary, and therefore “the modern writer [need not] indefinitely ‘polish’ his form”. While there is some merit to this notion – anyone can write, they don’t need classical education – word choice does make a difference, and a significant one at that. After all, Barthes could be writing these essays in a way that is easier to digest – he himself doesn’t need to have written “succeeding the Author, the scriptor no longer bears within him passions, humors, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense dictionary from which he draws a writing that can know no halt”, when he instead could have said ‘the author’s work is not tied to himself and his feelings but to the words he knows.’. He didn’t need to refer to the “objectivity of the realist novelist” as “castrating”, but he did anyway.

Ironically, (or perhaps, as he would say, “antiphrastical[ly]”) Barthes’ own essays convey a great deal more than just the words that the author is imparting, but his feelings on the matters upon which he speaks as well. The sentence, “did he wish to express himself, he ought at least to know that the inner ‘thing’ he thinks to ‘translate’ is itself only a ready-formed dictionary” clearly conveys a man scoffing at the notion that a writer may see their words as anything more than nouns and verbs and adjectives (as opposed to something with inherent poetic or artistic potential).

I write this in defense of the author, although in many ways I do agree with some of Barthes’ core concepts in this essay. I do believe that once the author creates a work, as soon as it is in the hands of readers it takes on new meaning beyond that which the author could ever intend; that “the reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination”. As a proponent of the study of fandom – of its history, its communities, the psychology and sociology that constitutes it – I am altogether far more an advocate of the audience than of the creator. However, that being said, the reader can find a personal destination within the works of an author – and especially if they use the works of the author to build something new and personal.

People using fandom to understand and shape their identity.

Overall, within my own work, I am of the opinion that viewers will make of it what they make. I’m not overly attached to the idea that everyone gets the exact same idea when they listen to my work – in fact, I’d be opposed to that notion. As I’ve stated before, I want each and every person to find something different in what I make, for it to connect to them uniquely, if at all; as each and every one of us is unique and has our own background. However, I know writers – young writers, modern writers – who spend hours carefully crafting just a few sentences, who treat the process as something akin to art, where the intensity of word chosen can change the implications of a paragraph. I believe both interpretations are valid and with their own merit, and that not all authors need to die in order for writing to have a future.