The death of the author has been greatly exaggerated

I’ve never been comfortable with the suggestion that one can (or should) separate the art from the artist. To be critically literate is to question, examine, interpret and evaluate the ideas we read.

I recently wrote a piece of fiction and included an author’s note at the end. I submitted it to an academic journal (because, you know, they’ll take anything these days) and a peer reviewer critiqued my inclusion of the note as an unwillingness to cede control of the text.

He (I’ll assume he, since this anonymous peer reviewer also misgendered me as male) cited Roland Barthes’ “The death of the author” to make the argument that once a piece of writing is released to the world, it is the world who owns its meaning — not the author.

Nah, tho.

Must we kill the author?

I’ve never been comfortable with the suggestion that one can (or should) separate the art from the artist¹. Most of the time, when I hear this suggestion, its maker calls on the music of an abusive composer, or the canvases of a mysogynistic painter.

I suspect it feels safer to do this when clearly no problematic beliefs have been verbalised.

It gets a little trickier when someone’s advocating for an ableist comedian or a transphobic author. But people are still willing to do it — Harry Potter, after all, is a cultural staple of my generation. How could we throw that beloved baby out with the TERF-infested bathwater?

Barthes claimed in 1967 that “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author”. For him, a reading that fixated on writerly identity and intent would prevent us from recognising the legitimacy of our own readerly experience.

This, of course, assumes a zero-sum game: it’s either the author’s version or the reader’s version. One of them is (symbolically) dead — you choose.

Yikes.

I’ll do a divisive thing here and tell you that every person I’ve ever spoken to who advocates for separating the art from the artist has been a man.

I know that doesn’t make it a universal law, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence, either.

What so many people who argue against feminism do not understand is that feminism is not a zero-sum game. “I’m a feminist” doesn’t mean “women have been oppressed for long enough, now it’s their turn to oppress you”.

(Which, if you’re curious, is how JK Rowling lost her way.)

Or, to return to the problem of art and artists, the reader’s interpretation doesn’t negate the author’s, and nor is the opposite true. Interpretation of a creative work is always negotiated.

The artist’s intent will never be irrelevant, because their intent drove their choices: the shade of yellow they picked, the words they didn’t use, the title, the tempo, the journal they wrote it for.

The artist’s effect on the audience is also never irrelevant. Whether or not Ricky Gervais meant to offend families of terminally ill children by calling their kids “baldy” and asking them if they were “retarded”, he offended them. And me. And, hopefully, you.

The artist’s unconscious influences, too, are not irrelevant, though they may be much harder to see. Rowling, for instance, created a vast, culturally diverse pantheon of characters in the Harry Potter universe, but the only one who was queer-coded (Dumbledore) was depicted as having lived a good, celibate life after a youthful flirtation with one evil same-sex partner.

I don’t think this means her other characters aren’t good. I don’t even think it means that character isn’t good. What it perhaps means is that there are aspects of the author’s beliefs about gender that silently crept into her work even before she became consciously aware of them (in about 2018).

I certainly don’t think it means we can’t like Rowling’s books (although I’d very much prefer if we avoided sending money her way). I love Harry Potter. I was exactly the right age to grow up reading those books. But, knowing what I know, I have a duty not to ignore their genesis and their author’s influence on their meaning. I have a duty not to ignore the impact that might have on readers of the work, including myself.

That impact might be nothing. Or it might be positive. Which is great! But that is not a reason to avoid asking the question, knowing full well that we might not like the answer.

Living with the enemy?

This is what we mean by critical literacy. To be critically literate is to question, examine, interpret and evaluate the ideas we read/hear/see. It doesn’t mean rejecting them, although that must always be a possible outcome. (No evaluation is genuine unless there’s a possibility of judging something negatively.)

But even this is not enough. An aspect of critical literacy that is (as far as I’m aware) almost never mentioned is the need for reader reflexivity.

I don’t get to walk in and say “Right, author’s dead, so this is what their work means now.” I still have to contend with the plurality of viewpoints other than my own, as well as the influence of my own beliefs and biases on my interpretation of the work.

This is something we’re much better at doing when our interpretations are negative. If I say I don’t like something, I usually feel I have to justify myself. “I don’t like it because.” If I do like something, it feels much more acceptable to just say “I like it.” And I don’t feel obliged to defend my approval.

But I do still have to.

Because maybe I like it because the author, a white middle-class woman, has drawn on values and experiences which feel comfortable and safe to me as a white middle-class woman. Maybe I don’t perceive the parts of the text which are problematic or dismissive of experiences of rich brown men.

And maybe, if I want to defend that text (beyond simply choosing to enjoy it privately on the weekends), I have a duty to critically engage with diverse interpretations — including my own.

Nothing I’m claiming here is a universal truth. This is not about objective fact — it is everything to do with interpretation and subjective norms. To me, what I’m saying is morally right.

It’s an objective fact that you can watch Ricky Gervais uncritically. You can read Neil Gaiman’s incredible novels while ignoring the eight allegations of sexual abuse currently levelled at him.

I’m just saying you shouldn’t.

1. When I use the word “art” here, I use it to mean any form of creative expression: painting, writing, singing, dance, music, slam poetry, graffiti, topiary gardening. Choose any form you like — I mean them all.

And if your chosen form spits out a nice counterexample, please tell me about it! This isn’t about me being right, it’s about me learning.