The 'death of the author': what it is and what it explains about the world of art

What is the "death of the author"? Perhaps you have heard of it, or perhaps it is the first time you have heard this expression. No, it has nothing to do with a physical death.

Rather, it is about something symbolic, a way of expressing in words one of the ideas that has been gaining the most strength in current literature. Intrigued? He continues reading; In this article we will discover what it is about.

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What is the "death of the author"?

In literature, this expression refers to the idea that the written text does not belong to its author, but is the patrimony of universal culture and, above all, of the reader. Obviously, the text itself has an author who has shaped it. However, what this idea proposes is that every text includes a series of concepts that already appeared at the time in other texts; that is to say, they are intertwined ideas that feed back and, therefore, belong to the historical heritage, and not to a specific and individual person.

When an author writes a text, he is capturing in it an infinite series of ideas that have already been expressed in previous texts. Thus, if a novel speaks, for example, of infidelity within marriage, it is compiling all the testimonies that have been reported in previous novels and stories of this fact.

The “death of the author”, as we will see, involves a kind of criticism of literary positivism, through which the author profits through a work that, in reality, and following the ideas proposed by this theory, does not belong to him, but to all humanity.

The first theorist: Roland Barthes

It was the French writer, philosopher and essayist Roland Barthes (1915-1980) who first shaped the concept in a work entitled precisely The author's death (1967). In this essay, Barthes proposed the bases of what would be the future theory. Specifically, it focuses on question the authority that ascribes to the author the sole and ultimate meaning of a text. In reality, and according to Barthes's theory, a text can have multiple interpretations, as many as there are readers. For the same reason, it is incorrect to place the entire weight of the meaning of the text on the author.

It is undeniable that an author composes a text with meaning. But it is also undeniable that the reader is the other subject (with a very diverse family, social, emotional, etc. context) who approaches the same text and, therefore, he's filtering it through his own experience.

Let's imagine, for example, that we have read a novel, and that we like the main character. What a great concept we have of this guy: he is good, strong, brave... in short, a true hero. Let us now imagine that an interview with the author of this novel comes into our hands. We devour it with tremendous enthusiasm, hoping to find in the writer's words exactly what we have perceived. Surprise! When asked about the protagonist, the author comments that he is a pushover, and that he does everything he does only out of an irrepressible desire to survive. No heroism, of course.

That is precisely what Barthes was referring to when he said that the meaning of a text does not rest solely on the shoulders of its author. A text is the result of a series of experiences of its creator who, in turn, has drawn on the experiences of other authors. But at the same time, the reader, who is an active (and not a passive) part of the process, takes ownership of the text and transforms it into something that fits their reality and that it makes sense in his own life. The original meaning of the character (the fainthearted who moves out of fear) does not adapt to the life of the reader who has seen him as a hero. The character is the same; the experiences that interpret it, different.

Therefore, and based on all this, Barthes argued in his essay that, for the reader to exist, the author must disappear. This is what he calls the "death of the author", a concept that has endured, and continues to endure, in contemporary literature.

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What is an author?

Roland Barthes also talks in his essay about the sense of belonging. According to this theorist, if the author is not the "owner" of his work (since it has collected a long tradition of ideas that existed before him), he should not profit from it. Yes, he is the one who has given shape to those ideas, he has molded them, he has transcribed them, he has given them a voice, but he has drawn from the sources of universal human culture and from all other authors who have existed before that he. Therefore, and according to Barthes, the importance given to the author in today's world is only fruit of capitalism, which has placed this author, the one who generates money, at the center of the entire process.

Barthes was obviously not the only one who supported this idea of ​​the “death of the author”. The playwright Bertolt Brecht also insists on this when he affirms that, in order to get closer to a text, one must distance oneself from its author. Only in this way are the different and necessary perspectives obtained for the text to acquire its full meaning.

On his part, at the conference What is an author? (French Society of Philosophy, 1969), the writer and philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) asks himself exactly this question: What does it mean to be an author? If the work survives the physical death of the author, then it means that it is autonomous. But it is that, in addition, Foucault also wonders: What is the work? The text is something dynamic, alive, an element to which one constantly turns and from which new and varied discourses are extracted.

Here Foucault introduces the idea of ​​"reactualization", according to which the text is returned to again and again, but in different sources. And how is that? Indeed; if a text is a communion of ideas that are not only found in an individual and concrete text, but in the universal human culture, we can access these ideas through various sources that, precisely, dialogue between them.

If we go back to the idea of ​​infidelity in a marriage, how many novels can we find that deal with this idea? From Anna Karenina from Tolstoy to the painted veil from W. Somerset Maugham, passing by Fortunata and Jacinta Galdós or the classical Madame Bovary of Flaubert. But we also find this idea in the medieval epic of Tristan and Isolde and also in the mythological stories of the Olympic gods. That is, the idea of ​​marital infidelity is developed in various sources, in various texts, and they all feed on each other, because the authors find inspiration in them.

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The text is something infinite

Michel Foucault follows Barthes' idea that the author must be erased, annihilated (metaphorically, of course) in order to give space to the interpretation of each reader. And, in reality, we can ask ourselves: is a work something finished? Is a novel, for example, something finite? We constantly witness a reinterpretation of the works, whether in the form of sequels, new adaptations films that offer more twists, or in reinterpretations in other formats, such as comics or paint. If we attend a book club and listen to the different interpretations that a paragraph (and not the entire work!) has depending on who read, we will realize that the work in question is alive, and then we will understand what this curious expression of the "death of the author".

However, a number of questions arise. Is the author of a text so unimportant? Barthes, Foucault, Brecht, all the theorists of the "death of the author", place the creator in a place of little relevance. This is so? While it is true that a work is a compilation of existing ideas, it is no less true that the The author exercises an active role, classifying, investigating, making, uniting and separating the concepts. The author is a craftsman, who works on his work as the potter works with the clay that already exists.. Is it fair, then, to reduce its role to the status of (almost) nothing? And where are the work, dedication and copyright in this theory?

We let you draw your own conclusions, if there are any. In the meantime, reread that book you read years ago. You will be surprised how differently you see it now. Is the book different? No, you are, and the book adapts to your reality. Or you to his, who knows.