Kill the Author!

I subscribe to the belief that readers can’t really discover the intent of authors. The words of a text aren’t enough to indicate what the author was trying to do. It’s entirely possible that an author was trying to do one thing and ended up doing something completely unexpected. It’s also possible that the author couldn’t even tell you what he was trying to do, or if he did, he might not remember correctly. Therefore, I share the formalist assumption expressed by William K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Monroe C. Beardsley that “the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art” (1374-75). The words “available” and “desirable” are key. The intent is not available to readers, even if we ask the author.

Moreover, going off on a wild goose chase after the author’s intent as the key to understanding is not a desirable form of interpretation because it wastes time away from the text, and getting a juicy tidbit about the author’s intent may seem to close off all other possible interpretations. As Roland Barthes writes, “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” (1469). Interpretation is so much more complex and open-ended than the intent-only method allows. While knowing an author’s biography is useful, I don’t think it should end interpretation. Rather, it’s just one of the many tools the reader can bring to bear on interpretation.

I diverge from the formalists by valuing the reader’s role in interpretation. While the formalists eliminate the psychological/affective problems associated with the reader’s response by assuming a unitary “sufficiently informed” reader (Wimsatt & Beardsley 1399) who should arrive at the standard interpretation of great works, I don’t think texts have single meanings. Based on my experiences, I am likely to have a different reading experience not only with each text but with each time I read the same text as my “horizon of expectation” shifts (Jauss 1554). My understanding of the reader’s experience represents another reason why the author’s intent cannot determine interpretation: even an author who fully understands his own intent can’t predict how his text will affect me as a reader.

For all these reasons, I tend to avoid language in analysis that indicates I know the author’s intent. Instead, I talk about texts and what they do, and I talk about readers and how they might interpret texts. I’ve essentially killed off the author.

Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing provides a metaphor for the death of the author in the disappearance of the narrator’s father in the Canadian bush. We could read the father as the author and the narrator’s search as the reader’s attempt to make meaning from a text. Textual interpretation literally occurs in the novel when the narrator takes a look at her father’s papers. She reads the author’s various sketches of hands with numbers and words, as well as some “stiff childish figure[s],” and because she “can’t make sense out of them,” she thinks, “he might have gone insane” (69). In this example, the author is absent, if not dead, and the daughter is searching for his intent in producing such odd drawings. Because she doesn’t understand them, she jumps to the conclusion that the author must be crazy.

Yes, this isn’t a typical moment of literary analysis because the narrator is trying to find the author, not just trying to interpret his texts, and typically, we don’t jump to the insanity conclusion in interpreting literary texts. We assume the text has some basic literary quality, or otherwise, we wouldn’t analyze it. However, I think the metaphor of the search comments on reading. One might connect my equation between author and father to Derrida’s phallogocentrism, which implies a stable truth associated with patriarchy. In Atwood’s novel, the absence of the father suggests there isn’t a stable truth, there isn’t an author whose existence will explain everything. Instead, we’ve got fragments of meaning that need to be pieced together. This is the task of the narrator in the rest of the book, and it’s also the task of the reader in reading about her experiences. In the end, it’s the interpretive work, reading, and not the missing father that’s ultimately important.