On the Death of the Critic (or the Rebirth of Intention)

When I first read Roland Barthe’s essay “The Death of the Author” I thought it reeked of repressed Nietzschean overtones to somehow kill off the exact creator on which literary criticism thrived. As a writer myself, I felt that my intentions did indeed matter to what I was trying to say, regardless of how a reader might take my utterings. Of course, the question really comes down to the motivations of modern critics, who in positing the Intentional and Affective Fallacies have effectively neutered both the writer and the reader as essential to the meaning of a text and instead instilled themselves, and the techniques of The Academy, as the sole judges of interpretation. If the Author’s life were important to the meaning of a text, then it would be impossible to understand their work without getting somewhat of a biographical or psychological sketch, which a critic is perhaps less qualified or driven to do when they can just sit in their armchairs and ruminate on the text itself. However, looking at the mass of modern literature and art, without recourse to their creators or socio-cultural contexts, it is hard to see any of them as being all that meaningful. Stereotypically flat doctors, lawyers, and detectives abound, but they seem to say more when considering that these are modern cultural hero-types that ultimately sell. One thing that can be said about the authorial geniuses of the 1900s is that they could actually write, and not being burdened with fears of actually being attached to their work, poured their hearts onto their pages.

Literary criticism is a relatively recent phenomenon, and as such should be compared to other forms of textual interpretation, especially hermeneutics, which dates back far beyond divine medieval auctors to Greek attempts to interpret ancient mythologies. One of the biggest challenges that arises in interpreting myths, symbol systems (or perhaps any given literary text), is just how much the meaning is derived from the socio-cultural context in which the story was originally told. The fantastic exploits of gods and demons make about as much sense as modern comic book superheroes outside the cultural givens in which every act and symbol might offer some reflection on the beliefs of the culture. Through centuries of use in interpreting religious texts, hermeneutics eventually emerged within a broad philosophical framework that attempts to do justice to a work’s origins, to take a people seriously whose words might be otherwise meaningless or inconsequential to modern, Western perspectives. The Authors may be long dead, but what they intended is perhaps of a much greater importance, and texts can tell us an infinite amount about those who created them. Certainly an Author’s words can be misunderstood, but just because we can choose to ignore their intentions does not mean that what they meant for their writing does not also have some validity. Furthermore, this hermeneutic approach also requires the interpreter to empathize with the authors, to enter into an emotional dialogue that truly wants to understand them, and to do the ethnological, historical, and psychological work that is necessary to achieve any true understanding of a text, instead of hiding lazily under the dust-jackets.