I don't think I can
overstate the influence Roland Barthes' “The
Death of the Author” has had on me. It (along with chapter one
of this
book) launched the line of inquiry that led me to my current
studies, which makes it basically responsible for both my current
life and my foreseeable future.
I'm still wrestling
with it, because I am still trying to figure out the concept of
authorial intent.
Mostly, I think I'm with Barthes: externally established authorial
intent is of no account; we have no access to the psychological state
of the author as ey was writing; and we should want
no
such access beyond what we have in the text itself. Ricoeur makes
this a little clearer, I think, by distinguishing in speech between
the utterer's
meaning (what
the speaker intends to say) and the utterance
meaning (what
the sentence in fact says), and explaining that in written discourse
we only have access to the latter. What I get from this is that if
“what the text says” and “what you meant to say” are not the
same thing, that's your fault for not writing it better.
But there's an additional layer of complication, which is: is there
any such thing as “what the text says”? Texts don't have mouths.
They don't say anything unless somebody reads – that is, interprets
– them. So I'll refine that accusation: if “what somebody reads
in your text” and “what you meant to say” are not the same
thing, that's your fault for not writing it better.
But
is that fair? It's the principle I generally operate on, but it's
hard work. If, say, someone
calls me out for problematic assumptions in something I wrote, my
first instinct is to defend myself by 'splaining, “That's not what
I meant!” But I stop. I remind myself that intent
is not magic. I remind myself that externally established
authorial intent does not matter. I wrote what I wrote, and if even
one person reads something problematic there, the problem lies with
what I wrote, not with eir reading of it.
But.
But.
I
also have a belief – a tenuous belief, a belief I am struggling
with, a belief to whose demolition I am open, but a belief
nonetheless – that anyone
can read anything in(to) any text.
And is it then fair to hold the author responsible for everything
that could be read into eir text?
Anyone
can read anything in(to) any text. Does that mean you can take “A
Modest Proposal” at face value, ignoring its satirical intent?
Does that mean you can reformat “i
carry your heart with me (i carry it in”and declare it a short
story, rather than a poem? Does that mean you can replace every
instance of the word “nunnery” in Hamlet
Act
III Scene I with “ham sandwich”?
Well...
I don't like that phrasing. I don't like telling people what they can
and can't do with texts. Of course you can
do
any of those things. You have a find and replace function in your
word processing software. And I take a First Amendment approach to
reading texts – I believe you have the right to read any way you
want to. I also believe that everyone in the entire world has the
right to tell you that your “Get thee to a ham sandwich” reading
of Hamlet is
utterly ridiculous.
But
you know what? You don't have to listen to the entire world. If you
find more meaning in “Get thee to a ham sandwich” than in “Get
thee to a nunnery”, you
can do that to Hamlet.
Really. It's called fanfiction.
At
its best, fanfiction is a glorious corrective, an enactment of
what-might-have-been. “Get thee to a ham sandwich” is a flippant
example, but there are countless examples of people rewriting texts
that spoke to them, and making them speak better.
Star Trek fan
who wishes TOS had more women in it? Gender-flip
Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. Twilight
fan
unhappy with its total queer erasure? Make
a Jakeward
slashvid. Rationalist Harry
Potter fan?
Rewrite
the series with a rationalist Harry Stu.
Fanwork
is awesome because it blurs or even erases the boundary between
reading a
text and writing
it.
There's no clearer demonstration of my belief that all readings are
also writings.
However
– if all readings are also writings, to what extent can an author
be held accountable? Death of the author is a great concept, but in
this world of internet
discourse that's neither exactly speech or exactly writing,
author accountability matters. And comments sections mean that, when
it comes to blog posts and tweets and Facebook status updates, we can
have access to the utterer's meaning as well as the utterance
meaning.
This
idea that what we're doing online is a whole new form of discourse
still needs a lot of work, and I'm getting pretty excited about doing
some of it.
I think there arises the simple problem that intentionality does hold some moral weight within our society. This gets expanded into writing in certain ways. Libel as a crime is clearly dependent on the author's intention, as is copyright issues regarding parody.
ReplyDeleteIn some ways, I feel that it is not reasonable to say that authorial intent is irrelevant, yet also to hold author responsible for the effects of their work. Things can be too easily misrepresented, misinterpreted, and other such things.