The Author

Barthes’ argument to kill the author in favour of the reader involves overlooking or, in the least, downplaying the context and reasons behind the text. Sure, it expands the possibilities of interpretation and opens texts up to new meaning but the context of production must always be present in the means of reception. To overlook the author harbours the possibility of passive consumption of dominant ideas and perspectives.

Questions of authority and authorship always bring to mind Gayatri Spivak’s work on the subaltern. For Spivak the subaltern is a gendered subject position deprived of ‘lines of social mobility’ (Spivak, 28). They are the othered Other of colonial texts and histories, rendered silent by authority, discourse and history. Barthes suggests ‘writing is that neutral, composite oblique space where out subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of writing’ (221). This positioning of writing as neutral fails to take into account the politics implicit within language (following Irigarian/Derridian phallogocentrism) and historical narrative. Writing is never neutral. It is always the product of a certain time and place. Yet, as Barthes goes on to suggest, not wholly defined by it. Barthes’ destabilisation of the universal subject position of “author” and ensuing workings of authority within texts opens up the possibilities of language and interpretation. As he suggests, ‘to give a text an author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing’ (223). This, I think, is where the work of Spivak becomes pertinent in our reception of texts. The fracturing of a text and looking toward the spaces of omission and silence in the process of interpretation is necessary to overcome the hegemonic perspective implicit within the literary tradition, because ‘the discourse of the universal historically has failed to include the testimony of its others’ (Miller, 24)

The reader is freed to construct meaning within the text but must also be wary of the politics inherent in the text. The death of the author brings with it the possibility of dismantling and fracturing the universal, the text as a totality.  Spivak writes about what cannot and may not be narrated. By understanding language as the origin and generative of meaning, interpretation becomes infinite and opens up the space of the text but the conditions of construction should be considered in the processes of reception and interpretation. Perhaps this is where Foucault’s call to look at the function the author plays comes in handy; to ask not who the author is but of the power and discourse inherent in the text, the way in which texts function upon us and to what function he serves and how does that affect subjectivity and the reception of the text (245).

In the case of Wild Cat Falling I read it in the belief that Johnson was Indigenous and it was the first novel published in Australia by an Indigenous author. The foreward by Stephen Muecke placed the novel within the context of Australian Indigenous culture, the history of colonialism and the importance and impact of the novel at the time of publication. Upon realisation of the fraudulent (or suspect) nature of Johnson’s purported cultural heritage my interpretation of the novel was completely different. As well as feeling sorry for the duped Muecke, I felt like it was another affront to the already disrespected and exploited Indigenous community. I am not saying that either reading was better, both were different and valuable experiences. And perhaps if I had known nothing about the author the politics of the novel would not have mattered – but I doubt I would have picked up the book in that instance. Perhaps a happy compromise to reach is to say that the author functions as a paratext, he’s not dead just resting.

Barthes, R., “The Death of the Author” in Finkelstein, D. and McCleery, A. (eds.), The Book History Reader, London and New York, Routledge, 2002, 221-224.

Foucault, M.  “What is an Author?” in Burke, S. (ed.) Authorship, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1995, 233-246.

Miller, N. “Changing the Subject: Authorship, Writing and the Reader” in Birotti, M. and Miller, N. (eds.) What is an Author?, Machester and New York, Manchester University Press, 1993, 19-41.

Spivak, G. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Point, Cambridge, Harvard UP, 1999.