Bradel Brainstorming – The Death of the Author · 8:51am Apr 16th, 2013
In the last week or two, I've found myself talking quite often about my approach to writing – or perhaps more accurately, to handling reader criticisms. I get the feeling I may approach this question differently than many other writers, so I thought perhaps I should set down some of my ideas in a blog post.
Now I'm no literati, mind, but I ran across an idea a few years back that really stuck in my craw. I did not like it. It felt wholly alien to me, in much the same way that Skinner's psychological behaviorism once did. And, I suppose, in much the same way that De Fenetti's rejection of countable additivity bothers many people.
This idea, which I could not bring myself to adopt, is usually referred to as "the death of the author", owing to an eponymous essay by Roland Barthes, a French literary critic. To sum up the idea here, it's that an author's work is entirely distinct from the author her/himself. There is fundamentally no merit in reading and criticism that grounds itself in knowledge of an author's life, her/his other works, or the historical context in which a work was written. Or to put it another way, the author of a story has no special right to interpret her/his own work authoritatively. Once a story is published, it's as if that story's author never existed.
You can perhaps see why I found this idea so distasteful. What does this say about continuity in larger works, like epic fantasy cycles? With minimal extrapolation, what does this say about the auteur theory of filmmaking? How can someone seriously claim that a creation is entirely divorced from its creator, and that the creator's background provides no bearing on interpreting the creation?
And yet...
It sat with me for a long time, this idea of the death of the author. It seemed so alien at first. But over time, twisting it around in my mind, I started to see it from a different angle.
As a theory of criticism, death of the author – oh, let's just call it DOTA, shall we, and enjoy the delicious irony of acronyms with multiple uses – DOTA may leave much to be desired. It may. I'm no longer sure.
But as a theory of creation, I would argue that it's the only responsible attitude an artist can take. If an author's work requires her/his readers to know information that's not present within the work itself, then the work is fundamentally flawed. If a reader can't understand a story as it's presented to them, generally speaking, this is the fault of the author.
I can hear some of you saying, "You can't be serious, Bradel! What about crossovers? What about side-stories? What about allusions? What about really damn bad readers?"
I am serious, though I'm aware we need to make certain allowances here. A story, or any other creative work, can require a minimum level of expected knowledge – but the work must be forthright about this. You can't throw a Pony/Potter crossover at people without warning them what's coming. You can't write a Past Sins parody without tipping your readers off beforehand that you're going to expect a working knowledge of the parodied material. And in neither case is it permissible to suddenly decide to turn your story into a Pride and Prejudice pastiche halfway through – assuming that the story will become incomprehensible to anyone who doesn't see what you're doing.
Now, a writer is certainly allowed to make allusions to other material. But the critical point is that understanding of the story itself cannot hang on understanding of these allusions. This way lies awful writing. If your readers can't decipher what you're saying in your story, you've committed a grievous sin.
Perhaps the best example I can find to illustrate what I'm talking about here is GhostOfHeraclitus's inimitable "Whom the Princesses Would Destroy". Here's a story that's so chock full of sly nods to "Yes, Minister" and Terry Pratchett that it could easily collapse under the weight of its prose. But it doesn't. Why? Because all those allusions are just bonuses for the culturally knowledgable reader. The story doesn't depend on them one whit. The narrative is entirely self-contained and comprehensible to any reader who can handle reading at an 8th grade level.
What, you didn't think I'd go Flesch-Kincaid it?
As for really bad readers, well, there's not much I can say on that front. No piece of creative work is ever going to be universally intelligible. It makes sense, though, to ask yourself before you get started on a project, "How accessible do I want this to be?" The more knowledge you require, the more complex you make your story, the smaller your potential reader base becomes. Sometimes, it may be worth doing this – it may let you tell a more serious story. But unless you're actively making the choice to alienate some readers to tell a more challenging story, there's really no point shooting yourself in the foot by just making everything you write difficult.
So I've come to an uneasy truth with DOTA. I firmly believe that if readers are failing to pick up on what I want my stories to communicate, that's a structural problem I need to correct. Going into the comments and explaining to readers what I'm shooting for in a scene can be a bit cathartic, but if I need to do that for the scene to make any sense, then it's a bad scene.
I have a phenomenal amount of power over the interpretation of my stories. Because I'm their frigging author. But if I can't actualize the interpretation I want through my writing, that's my own creative failure, and I don't retain any post-publication authority to go back and say, "Oh, this is what Act III, Scene 2 really meant." It meant what it said, and if I didn't craft it well enough to lead the reader where I wanted them to go, then it didn't necessarily mean what I may have thought it did.
One last thing: for thoughts on a related topic, I'd recommend bookplayer's blog on Canon, Fanon, and Word of God, which takes a more detailed look at the reader knowledge expectation problem in a more limited context.
And that's all for this evening. The Author is dead. Long live the Author.
We had to do it. We had to kill him. The author needed to die, so that the story could live.
...I didn't cut him. Not really. There was no blood. No blood. I--I stabbed him and songs came out, and laughter, and the glitter of moonlight on an unsteady sea. But no blood. There is no blood on my hands. Not a speck. So it can't have been murder. We didn't kill him.
We set him free.
That's what happens when I write comments with a fever. Whee![1]
I'm inclined to agree, honorable Bradel. It's an uncomfortable notion, Death of the Author, and it seems that it is too often used as an excuse to impose whatever meanings you wish into a piece of fiction, the better to feed some private agenda.
The problem, I think, comes from the artifice that the literati employ. They are exceedingly learned, and can make words dance to clever dialectical tunes, and make them say whatever they wish. They are authors after the fact, in a way. If the author must give up on the weight behind his/her words, then so must they. But a reader that...oooh what did Salinger say--hold fast, friend, while I Google--"an amateur reader still left in the world—or anybody who just reads and runs."
Yes. A reader like that, well, what they see is certainly worthy of consideration. A sublation of the will of the author and their own, perhaps.
Sorry that the comment is so scatterbrained and possibly incoherent. I've a considerable fever and I'm not quite sure I'm in full command of my faculties.
[1] And, yes, I know Mark Anthony wasn't one of the conspirators. Let's say that the above is what Bradel says.
I'm not sure what to think of DotA and my opinions of it probably depend a lot of what the context is that your trying to use it. Certainly trying to keep the prerequisite knowledge required to understand your text (of any kind) would be a good thing. Of course, it's simply impossible to write something worthwhile that doesn't assume some kind of knowledge on the part of the reader. For a start, we are in the business of writing fan fiction here so we can assume familiarity with the source material.
Actually, one thing that fascinates me is how much more can be done in fan fiction because that familiarity can be assumed?
As for hardcore academic literature analysis, where DotA originates, I've never felt like I adequately understood the purpose of it or what makes a good piece of it so I'm not sure I can comment on it's usefulness there (it be fair, it's feels hard enough to recognise a good paper in my own field). I once pointed a literature student friend at Brandon Sanderson's notes on writing Mistborn and she was very strongly opposed to the idea of reading them because she wanted to form her own opinions of the final work. Apparently academic literature criticism is not interested in the process of writing, just the result.
(When you said "inimicable", I suspect you meant to say "inimitable".)
1012338
(um.... yes. wow that's a bad mistake to make, and I suspect I've been making it for years...)
I seem to recall seeing somewhere (Cracked.com I think) that Fahrenheit 451, a story known for being a tale against censorship, was actually about how radio is killing people's brains. However, the anti-censorship message is by far the thing most people take away here, no matter what the author originally intended. (This ties into to the concept of applicability I think, which is related, but still distinct, from DotA.)
OH hey, your comment in a Bad Horse blog lead me here. Hi Bradel!
This bleg is about three weeks shy of two years old. I'm... kinda scared now.
1012128 I agree with what Bradel says. And Ghost. But I'm still here to remind both of you:
It isn't. That's not what DOTA is about. That's "the intentional fallacy". DOTA claims that there is no such thing as an author because originality is impossible, because you can't learn anything you don't already know and because only God can create. Read it.
Or don't read it, because like all post-modern theory, it's very badly written, and leaves the actual arguments for everything it claims implicit in the line "We now know", which (to the initiated reader) means "Read your Derrida/Heidegger/Plato."
"From work to text" is about the same thing, and a little clearer.