Death of the Author

[Cfrock]

In 1967, some French dude wrote an essay called "The Death of the Author" (he wrote it in French but I don't speak foreign so let's pretend he did everything in English). Death of the Author has become a part of critical literary theory and the basic gist is this:

The specific intentions or background of the creator of a piece of artwork are ultimately irrelevant to the interpretation of said artwork.

(I'm not quoting anyone there, I just thought Italics would make it look nicer ^_^)

Basically, there is no 'Word of God' when it comes to interpreting a novel, a film, a game, a song, whatever. I could write a story and say "This is about World War 2" and you could read it and say "This is about man's struggle with loneliness" and we'd both be equally correct, as long as we could support our reading with the text.

Not everyone agrees with this theory, though, and there are plenty of people who hold that what the author says is fact, or that the author's background influences the work itself. An example of the latter would be people who dislike Ender's Game because its author is a homophobe and not because of the content of the book itself.

I bring all this up because I saw the following screengrab on Reddit of a tweet J.K. Rowling posted in 2015:

This is such a perfect image to broach this subject with, I love it so much.

We have the author explicitly giving their word on how one of their characters should be interpreted. We then have someone employing Death of the Author and offering a different interpretation. Then we have someone who seems not to agree with Death of the Author implying that you can't disagree with stated authorial intent.

So why am I wasting everyone's time today? Well...

I have always felt that most people follow the Death of the Author theory when it comes to literary criticism (including films, television, everything ficitonal, not just books), but in recent years I've seen more and more people respond to fictional works based on the author themselves and not their work, which has me wondering how many people actually believe in Death of the Author compared with those who don't?

Hence the thread. What I want to know is whether or not you agree with Death of the Author or whether you don't. Do you think an author's (or creator's) intent and word is immutable, or do you think even the author is only allowed to interpret their own work? Does the background of a creator matter to you with regard to how you view their work? Got any examples?

Keep it strong, gang <3

 

[Spirit]

I agree with the Death of the Author theory.

I guess if the writer is good enough then the intent will shine through and most people will arrive at the same reading of the material naturally.

However no one is the same and everyone will read a body of work and take from said work something different on an individual and personal level.

I dont think the divide between the author's intent and the Death of the Author should be as vast as it is because writers should do better to put forward their intent within the material but at the same time it is only natural to form one's own opinion on a presented piece of art.

I feel like i could say a lot more but i think a lot of it would result in me chasing my own tail.

 

[Castle]

What's the point of writing fiction if we're going to let the author outright explain to us their intent? Of course, their intent should come forward solely through their work, not extraneously. But then their intention is open to interpretation. People are going to form their own interpretation regardless. It cannot be helped.

Rowling isn't the best example because she isn't a very good writer. I'd go so far as to call her a hack. She had great ideas, for certain. But a literary master she is not. Her meaning is difficult to convey because her writing can be so haphazard. If it wasn't her intention for readers to get the impression that Snake sacrificed himself to save his conscious then she wasn't conveying her meaning as well as she should have been.

Sometimes a writers intent is due to them muddying their meaning.

 

[Dizzi]

I don't really understand it.....

 

[YIGAhim]

If I were to think I was flying and no one else were there to tell me I was in fact, not flying, then I, in fact, flew.

A bunch of this George Orwell **** is going on. In the end, we don't exist. That is all

I agree with the theory. I do. You can interpret everything as you want because words can have double meanings, therefore changing what could've been said, making it easy to interpret things how you want them to be. If the author did not write that Snape was an amazing human being, than we can say it's possible he was, depending on morals and whatever. The author is just another reader after the book is finished.

 

[CynicalSquid]

I didn't know there was an actual term for this but I think about it constantly. I mainly associate it with music, however, because there are a lot of song lyrics I interpret differently than what the artist originally intended when writing the lyrics. I never really thought about it when reading novels.

I agree with the theory and I actually don't like when authors try to explain their original intent in the story. I think the beauty in art is that everyone has their own interpretation with what's going on. To go along with the Rowling example, I didn't even interpret Snape as a "grey" character. He was a double agent that risked his life to help Dumbledore with his cause and was an ass to Harry because he hated James. I didn't even think his death stood for anything. He just ended up dying because Voldemort mistook him as the master of the elder wand. The author trying to explain how it's actually supposed to be interpreted outside the book is kind of annoying. If you wanted us to think a certain way about a character or anything else that happened in the story, you should have just said it straight up in the book.

 

[Bowsette Plus-Ultra]

I also agree with Death of the Author.

When a piece of fiction is completed and sent out into the world, it takes on a life of its own. While the author did create it, it comes off as incredibly lazy to shoehorn int details through interviews (if you're a Dragonball fan, Akira Toriyama is terrible with this). I remember being frustrated when JK Rowling came out and said that Dumbledore was a big 'ol gay wizard, because nothing in the fiction drew people to that conclusion.

 

[Moblinking5000]

DotA may be the most ridiculous idea I've heard. Someone who writes a work knows what their intentions were better than anyone else, as they are the ones thinking about it at the time. You do not write the books, the authors do. How would they not know the intentions/reasons of their own characters? You kind of have to think about things like that to write a coherent narrative. People who argue against intent of the author is like arguing that the world is flat; ''DotA'' seems to be a way to pass off a similar line of logic that is both intellectually dishonest and irrational as the exact opposite.

 

[Cfrock]

How would they not know the intentions/reasons of their own characters?

Death of the Author doesn't posit that the author is unaware of character motivations or story themes or whatever else, it says that the author's answers to those questions don't prevent another person's answers being equally valid, even if those answers are different.

Take the example of Snape. JK Rowling states that "he died to save the wizarding world". That was her intent, that is why Snape died according to her. However, many readers don't interpret Snape's death the same way. The replier in the above example says Snape died to clear his own conscience, an interpretation no doubt drawn from the fact that Snape only ever betrayed Voldemort out of intense guilt over Lily Potter's death and would never have done so if she had lived. @PancakeSamurai said above that Snape died for nothing because Voldemort simply murdered him thinking he was in his way. According to the Death of the Author theory, all three of these interpretations are valid because all three can be justified with the text.

People who argue against intent of the author is like arguing that the world is flat; ''DotA'' seems to be a way to pass off a similar line of logic that is both intellectually dishonest and irrational as the exact opposite.

The theory doesn't say the author is 'wrong', it says the author's interpretation is just that, an interpretation, no more or less meaningful than that of any reader. The theory doesn't doubt or deny the authorial intention of a piece of art, rather the theory says that that intention shouldn't dictate how people view and respond to the work, i.e. just because Rowling says Snape died for the wizarding world doesn't mean a reader has to agree with that if they interpret his actions differently.

It's not really an equatable comparison to say this theory is like flat Earth advocacy. The Earth being round is a provable, physical fact. We know objectively that the Earth is round. There's nothing to interpret. Judging the motivations of people, or in the case of art, characters, is far less objective. Death of the Author asks us to view fictional characters and events with the same attitude towards understanding them as we do real people and events, and, in doing so, different people will arrive at different answers to the same questions without, according to the theory, anyone being wrong.

The following is a quote from JRR Tolkein:

"I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history – true or feigned– with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.

The Lord of the Rings had been read as an allegory for any number of things, from nuclear weapons, to environmentalism, to World War 2, but Tolkein always said that it was not allegorical because he never wrote it as an allegory. However, he never denied that people could find applicability in his writing, he never denied that his writing could be applied to various real world events or periods. What he's saying here is that people can interpret a piece of writing however they see fit and that's fine, but that the author's intention won't necessarily match that interpretation.

That's what Death of the Author is all about: Can readers interpret a piece of art differently to how the creator intended? It's not about saying the author is wrong, it's saying theirs is but one answer.

 

[Hero of Pizza Time]

I am somewhat conflicted.

I agree with most posts above, but I also think that the work was made to compliment the author's opinion rather than the other way around. So it's kind of like saying that when Einstein said "try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value," he actually meant that you should become rich and that "value" meant money. However, the message he was trying to get across was that people should be moral and not just rich. Words and stories are ultimately just tools to get a message across. It's kind of like a match; you use it to burn something like a candle but if you do it wrong you could set yourself on fire, but would that mean that matches are supposed to light you on fire? No. Would that mean that matches are supposed to light candles? No. A match doesn't have a natural purpose.