My Guide to Literary Theory: The Author Problem

Does a text have an author? At face value this may seem an absurd question. Surely the author of a text is the person who wrote it? That may seem a perfectly sensible answer, but it is one deeply problematic to literary theory.  If a text has an author then they are the authority over said text and preside over its meaning. The task of textual analysis becomes the process of deciphering the author's intention, and the author's intention is the definitive meaning. 

Taking our lead from the skeptical thinkers in my last blog, we know we can undermine the author's authority by claiming that the writer is unaware of their own thought process. We can claim there are sociological, psychological, and historical factors that influence the texts meaning. The author's choice of language may give insights into the unconscious, the ideologies of society, or several other influences that the writer is unaware of at the time of writing. Furthermore, to give the writer authority is to undermine the reader's response. If we are only to concern ourselves with the author's intention then we must ignore our own interpretations of the text; no matter how well we can support our argument.

For many years literary analysis was only really concerned with the author's intention. It was accepted that what the author intended to portray in the text was where we found the meaning. In the 1960s, among a time of decent and protest against the authority of police, government and against the US involvement in Vietnam, universities and their academics took a strong anti-authoritarian stance. It was a stance that highly influenced the work produced at the time, and it is from that position that Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault  looked to remove the authority figure of an author from the equation.

Roland Barthes

In their works, Foucault and  Barthes would attempt to fundamentally change how academia approached literary analysis. Following on from Marx's insight that it is history that makes man and not man that makes history, Barthes theorised that it was the text that makes the author. In his work, "La Mort de l'auteur", (A pun on  Le Morte d'Arthur a text with multiple anonymous authors) Roland Barthes writes,

"[T]he writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings [...] in such a way as never to rest on any one of them" (146)

What Barthes is saying here is that a writer's role is only to lay out the language and ideas in a specific order on the page. The language, ideas and subjects already exist outside of the text, and therefore are not his own. Nothing can be said that has not been said before. This means that the author can not claim any authority over the text or its meanings.  Barthes has liberated the language from the police like authority of authors. He explains,

"To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing [...] [However] by refusing to assign a 'secret,' an ultimate meaning, to the text (and the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases--reason, science, law." (147)

I find Barthes' argument very compelling as it greatly opens up our analysis of a text. We are no longer held back by policing or delimitation of meaning. We no longer have to concern ourselves with deciphering author intention. We can approach the language as it is on the page not as it meant to the writer, but as it means to the reader. It is also a highly practical theory as we often do not have the author of a text around to appeal to. Why must we concern ourselves with Shakespeare's intention if we can never have the satisfaction of knowing if we are right?

Michel Foucault

Foucault, like Barthes, believed the author did not exist outside of the text. He differs from Barthes in that he acknowledged a problem in Barthes theory; that the very basis of this theory relies on the existence of authority. They depend upon the authority of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. Even Foucault himself writes from the position of authority. In "What is an Author?" Foucault solves this problem by claiming the author is a function of the text. For example it would be absurd to claim that everything Nietzsche wrote are a part of his works. He explains,

"It would seem that the author's name, unlike other proper names, does not pass from the interior of a discourse to the real and exterior individual who produced it; instead, the name seems always to be present, marking off the edges of the text, revealing, or at least characterizing, its mode of being. The author's name manifests the appearance of a certain discursive set and indicates the status of this discourse within a society and a culture. It has no legal status, nor is it located in the fiction of the work; rather, it is located in the break that founds a certain discursive construct and its very particular mode of being."

Foucault claims that the name of the author is just a name with no authority over the text ,but at the same time, the name acts as a representation of a field of discursivity . The names are placeholders; they group texts into tropes and ways of writing about things without presiding over them. This resolves the need for authority in a text without deferring that authority to the authors themselves.

I think its important to give some space in defense of the author. It could be argued that we do not defer to the author for meaning, but rather for human spirit. We like to celebrate the achievement of humanity and the genius of the authors. Consider Samuel Johnson's preface to Shakespeare in which he talks of being able to rate the works of mankind; making comparisons in the value of human genius.

"What mankind have long possessed they have often examined and compared; and if they persist to value the possession, it is because frequent comparisons have confirmed opinion in its favour. As among the works of nature no man can properly call a river deep, or a mountain high, without the knowledge of many mountains, and many rivers; so in the productions of genius, nothing can be stiled excellent till it has been compared with other works of the same kind."

To remove the author is to take away the human hand from the work It denies any human talent or genius in its production. We often enjoy the human ingenuity in great works. We celebrate the lives of Shakespeare and Dickens and enjoy comparing the talents of writers. All of this can not exist if we kill the author.

Interesting Thought: Where does the death of the author leave copyright law? If an author is only repeating ideas that already exist they can make no claim to own their work. Foucault considered copyright laws as a bourgeois construct; an attempt to claim ownership of that which was public property.

Whether you believe in the authority of the author, or that texts are authorless, Barthes and Foucault made a massive impact on the way we approach literary texts. It is still debated if they had successfully killed the author, but what they did achieve is opening up new approaches to literary theory. Their way of thinking has been an integral part of postcolonial, feminist, Marxist and queer theory, and their impact is felt across all schools of literary theory.

Barthes, Roland. "The Death of the Author." Image-Music-Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana, 1977. 142-48.

Foucault, Michel. "What Is an Author?" N.p.: n.p., 1969. N. pag. Web. <http://www.movementresearch.org/classesworkshops/melt/Foucault_WhatIsAnAuthor.pdf>.

Samual Johnson's Shakespeare preface http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/5429/pg5429.html