Would an author by any other name smell as sweet?

Barthes’ "Death of the Author" has been derided for failing to be all the things it did not set out to be: theoretically rigorous, airtight, self-critical, balanced. However, it so easily catapulted itself into the spotlight of literary discourse because of the very pithiness it attained by eschewing these criteria. Its message is effectively epigrammatized within its final sentence, “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.” How many pieces of theory can be summarized so sweetly? And how many pieces of theory are as well known (even outside the world of literary academia) as Barthes’?

“The Death of the Author” was a seed that implanted a revolutionary and provocative idea into the realm of literary theory. The essay was a spanner in the works certainly, but it also left room for other tools in the box to attempt to repair the author/text/responder mechanism. From their formation on paper, Barthes’ raw ideas were ripe for challenge, interpretation, and refinement into some dictum that could truly resonate with the contemporary practices of readership.

The inherent hyperbolism of Barthes’ prescription becomes apparent whenever the ‘issue of authorship’ is raised within a literary discourse. The enduring ‘life’ of the author is affirmed every time an academic essay uses an author’s name as a synecdoche for the book that he or she has written. It is beyond the thresholds of human curiosity to accept a text as authorless. A text is experienced as a dialogue rather than an expedition. At least within my personal experience of reading, a work of Fiction needs to be perceived as something that has been created, rather than something that merely is, in order to facilitate complete engagement.

But this does not mean that the author we consult with when reading a text is necessarily the actual ‘writer’ of the text or a singular person at all, a distinction pointed out by Foucault.

What is an Author? reconciles the inescapability of ‘the Author’ (upper-case) with the elusiveness of ‘the author’ (lower-case). In reassessing what is meant by ‘Author,’ Foucault points out that the nexus between original author and text can only be inferred from vaguely discernable fingerprints left on the work which can be matched to known facets of the author’s literary disposition. However, the reader is unable to distinguish these authorial fingerprints from the editor’s, the critic’s etc. The depersonalization of the author is usefully analogized by Donald Pease to Marx’s theory of the alienation of labour: “the author seems an effect of the critics’ interpretation rather than the cause of the work.” ‘Commodification’ has relegated the writer to the station of a production line, which feeds through to the editing of texts according to super-authorial agendas and finally the packaging of the products within the rapping of critical endorsements.

Yet despite the author’s ontological ambivalence we still reconstruct some avatar to sit next to us while we read the text, to ask rhetorical questions and reassure us that the text is ‘heading somewhere’. So the author is not definable as a singular entity, but it is definable by the function it serves the readily experience. Hence Foucault presents us with the ‘author-function’: “a variety of egos and a series of subjective positions” which is employed by readers to “construct…profundity or ‘creative’ power” and derive “relationships of homogeneity…authentification.”

Foucault really has hit the nail on the head with this one. Like God him/it/herself, the God-like, omnipresent author only exists for those that believe he/it/she does. For them, the author (or author-function, call it what you will) enriches, and anchors their reading experience. I truly believe that despite Barthes' Dawkins-esque proclamation, which many believe was literarily blasphemous, most readers have retained their faith in this author. Hence long after the writer is dead, the author remains alive and kicking.