A Post-Authorial Landscape: A Brave New World or Horrifying Dystopia?

I have started to believe that after Nietzsche it was only a matter of time before the author got the flick.  Once you kill god there is but a small jump to the Author-god and perhaps the stipulated nihilism which is the result.  However, nihilism and all the depressing rejection of truth and by implication beauty that goes with it, is, I think, not the sum of Barthes's parts.  

Despite the uncertainty the killing of the author brings, I see it as a world of possibility.  If the author Bathes disposes of is the Author-god then it must be a white, bourgeois, Western, male one.  Because this author is a god, he creates the reader in his own image.  In this Romantic theory of authorship the ideal reader is not a woman or a worker or even perhaps from India, but a reflection of the author himself; he is like him, has the same privileges of wealth and education and can be relied on to react in a preordained fashion.  Bathes tells us that in killing off the author we give rise to the birth of the reader.  I would contend the reader who is born is not the one in the symbiotic relationship with the Author-god, but one who is sometimes female, working class and not white.  If the author is dead then the reader is free to make the text in their own image; it is agency and freedom like never before.

To give example of an author one might dispose of I shall take T. S. Eliot.  When I first studied Eliot's poem 'The Wasteland' I found it quite haunting but also exceedingly irritating.  Never had I read such a referential poem in my whole life; I felt that it was so steeped in the classics to have only been written for those who were well versed in such literary tradition.  It is a technique I now understand to go back to Shakespeare and (despite what Harold Bloom may think) especially Chaucer and is not idiosyncratic to Eliot at all.  By removing Eliot from the picture we are left only with the reader; not a reader preconceived by Eliot but forced by democracy.  Such a reader would not feel overwhelmed – as I was – by the vast number of symbols and allusions but read the poem (aghast) for the poetry. 

Eliot published his own notes at the end of the poem, listing his references and directing the reader to his meaning.  This is particularly the type of author requiring removal, for Eliot not only functions as Author-god but lords over any subsequent meaning to be extracted from his poem.  Eliot is the type of poet who makes me feel that there is but one meaning of a text, that there should be no other interpretation, that there is no place for the reader.  However, one need not be a scholar of the cannon to understand the despair and frustration because the poem conjures emotions through images:

                   You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

                   A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

                   And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

                   And the dry stone no sound of water.        (20-24)

‘The Wasteland’ creates a feeling of such sparseness and desolation through its language that no further explanation is needed.  In many ways I feel Eliot sells himself short; his fear of not being understood led to the inclusion of the notes.  What he fails to understand is that the poem does all his work for him; it does not require his omnipotent presence.                 


Obviously I am not for removing forever every author from every text (having not fully finished this blog and leaving it for a while I had a comment about the negative implications for reading the death of the author renders and I must say that I agree with it.  The death of the author does put the reader in their own wasteland of doubt - pardon the pun).  Before reading Bathes I had never thought of a text or author in this way; like a relationship you could pull apart and question why it functioned as such.  For me, Bathes has open the way to seeing reading, authorship and texts as organic things which are much more subjective than I ever thought possible.  Though it is not an absolute way to understand literature it is a great way to think newly about it.