Authors, We Need You! (Sometimes...)

The articles, “The Death of the Author” by Roland Barthes and “What is an Author” by Michel Foucault each give insight on the importance of the author and how the relevance of the author has changed. Reading each of these has led me to question the relationship between the author, the text, and the reader.

 Obviously the author is important in terms of who is writing and creating the text. In reading a text, whether or not the author is important depends on what one wants to accomplish in reading that text. Being an English major I find that there are different ways that I have been asked to interpret a text. What does the author mean by that? and How do you (the reader) interpret the text? are two ways of asking what a text means. In the first one, however, knowledge of the author is important. The second is not as important because it is asking for the reader’s thoughts of what the text is saying. 

The question of whether or not the author is necessary in interpreting a text is one I struggle to answer. The only thing I am sure of is the presence of the desire to know the author. I always want to know who the author of a text is, but in thinking of whether or not I need to know, I am not sure. Roland Barthes states in his text, “...linguistics has just furnished the destruction of the Author with a precious analytic instrument by showing that utterance in its entirety is a void process, which functions perfectly without requiring to be filled by the person of the interlocutors...”(876). He further explains that language has no problem speaking for itself. It is not the author but the words that will ultimately convey the meaning. Although I agree with the fact that one can absolutely interpret words on a page, I feel that there is so much more. Especially in the English language, what is written is not all there is to understand. It seems that texts are always multidimensional and the reader is always in search of the deeper meaning of that text. One may be missing out on this deeper meaning of a text by not knowing who it is that has written such text. 

In his text, Michel Foucault argues, “The author allows a limitation of the cancerous and dangerous proliferation of significations within a world where one is thrifty not only with one’s resources and riches, but also with one’s discourses and their significations”(913). This excerpt explains that the author limits us from the wrong interpretations of words. In not knowing who the author is, the reader is left to possibly misinterpret what they are saying. Knowing who wrote a certain text gives the reader a better chance of understanding the correct meaning of what the author has written. 

Isn’t that the whole point? Writing is like any other art form in that there will always be what the creator meant and what we actually take away from their work. In reading so many different texts and genres trying to come up with a meaning of a text, especially what we think is the “correct” meaning can seem impossible. Knowing who wrote the piece is never going to give us an answer as to what exactly the text is saying, but it comforts us into thinking that we have a hint. It is a starting point, something the reader has to go off of as opposed to starting from nothing with an anonymous author. 

Although reading a text with an anonymous author can be seen as a plus because the reader has no preconceptions when reading, it can have its negative aspects as well. I feel that reading a text with an anonymous author can be distracting. Rather than focusing on analyzing the piece that is to be read, one cannot help but wonder who is behind the text. Again, the knowledge of who the author is does not make it impossible to read the text, but it can become an unnecessary distraction. 

-Gabi