So, I hear you might be thinking about killing the author. it’s an exciting time in any person’s
life when they’re deciding which literary theory to apply to the way they read texts,
but it’s important to know what you’re getting into, and make sure that this literary
theory is the right one for you. What is it about death of the author that
appeals to you, the reader? Before you start applying literary theories, you want to make
sure that you’re doing it for the right reasons. There are an awful lot of young people out
there who rush into death of the author without really understanding its intended purpose. Are you trying to enhance your understanding
of a text by secluding yourself from authorial intent or a body of work, or are you trying
to excuse yourself from potential guilt when you find out that your favorite author might
be a shitbag, and you don’t want to examine what that author does with their platform? There are a lot of people out there who advocate
separating art from the artist so they won’t have to examine the ethics of consuming art
from people who use their platform to do things that might be a little iffy. Maybe even harmful. Before we jump in, we need to understand that
applying a literary theory and examining the ethics of watching the usual suspects knowing
now what we know about its director and star are two very separate issues. And it can be confusing, and you need to be
careful not to conflate the two. With that in mind, let’s talk about death
of the author. Is death of the author right for you? Are
you ready to kill the author? And is death of the author really even possible to apply
to any text in our platform- and personal-brand-obsessed culture? Well today we’re going to talk about that,
learn a little something, and maybe... even have a little fun. The fault in our stars is a 2012 novel written
by John Green. The plot of the novel revolves around two
teenagers named Hazel Grace Lancaster and Augustus Waters, the former living with terminal
cancer and the latter in remission from his, as they begin a relationship. In the process of developing their relationship,
Hazel Grace shares her favorite book of all time, "An Imperial Affliction" by a man named
Peter Van Houten, with Augustus. Though she loves the book, the book’s ambiguous
ending is a source of consternation for Hazel, and she longs for nothing more than for the
notoriously reclusive Van Houten to tell her what happens after the book ends. And so Augustus, having banked his wish from
the make a wish foundation, uses that wish to make a trip to Amsterdam with hazel and
her mother to meet Van Houten. But when they finally meet Van Houten, the two
find not the kind, empathetic author that they imagined, but a drunken misanthrope who refuses
to answer their questions. "I can no more tell you what happens to her
than I can tell you what becomes of Proust's Narrator or Holden Caufield's sister or Huckleberry
Finn after he lights out for the territories" What happens after the book ends is nothing,
he insists. The book is fiction. It didn’t happen. It’s not real. To which a livid Hazel Grace responds: "BULLSHIT. That's bulllshit. Just tell me! Make something up!" Hazel has tied the idea that there is a life
for these characters after the book ends with her own narrative - she needs to believe that
there is a life for these characters beyond the text, because she sees so much
of herself in the text, right down to the protagonist living with terminal cancer. But in the end, the author of her favorite
book has no answer for her. And when, months later, feeling guilty about
the way their interaction had ended, Van Houten does come up with an answer, but Hazel no longer
wants to know - so neither she nor we, the reader, find out the fictional author’s
intent. Furthermore, "The Fault in our Stars" itself has
an ambiguous ending - we do not find out what becomes of Hazel Grace - how much longer,
if at all, Hazel survives her disease. As a solitary text unto itself, "The Fault
in our Stars" could be read as an argument in favor of death of the author. Not only is the author completely unlike what
the leads expect him to be, the author has no answers for them. Seeking his authorial intent is an exercise
in futility - the author has emotionally moved on from the book, and if he does have an answer
to Hazel’s question, he is not obligated to share it. But moreover, his intent does not matter - the
book does not speak to Hazel because of the author’s intent, but because of the text
itself. The text in isolation is what means so much
to Hazel. As a text, this seems to be the theme of "The Fault in our Stars" - that a part of growing up is to stop looking to other people, especially authors,
to explain the meaning behind texts, but instead to figure out what your own reading is. Of course, we can’t know if this was the
author’s intent based on the text alone. Fortunately, thanks to the magic of the internet,
we do know exactly what the author thinks. In a 2014 tweet, Green got a lot of attention
and ten thousand retweets with the proclamation, “Books belong to their readers.” Green elaborated on that stance in an interview
in 2014: "I think authorial intent is pretty irrelevant, and I tend to agree with the school
of literary criticism that proclaims the death of the author." When pressed on what happens after the end
of "The Fault in our Stars" in a way that remarkably mirrors the way Hazel presses Van Houten,
Green stated in a now-deleted 2012 blog entry: “I’m different from Peter Van Houten in
many important ways, but in this respect (and some others) we are the same: I have access
to the exact same text that you do. My thoughts about the world outside of that
text are not any more informed or authoritative than yours. It’s not my book. It’s your book. I don’t make decisions about things that
happen outside the text of the book; I can’t read something that isn’t there any more
than you can." It’s kind of rare to find an author with strong opinions on the concept of death of the author, who goes out of their way not only to avoid
making comments on what happens outside of the text, but to bake that very notion into
the text itself. But, of course, Green’s approach is not
the only one. If we’re talking about inserting authorial
intent into texts well after they have been published, then we need to talk about the
hippogriff in the room. But first! In 1967, French literary critic and theorist, Roland Barthes published his essay, "La mort
de l’auteur," or “The Death of the Author,” which was published in English the following
year. The simplest reduction of the essay’s thesis
is that readers should pull away from the tenet of traditional literary criticism that
focused on authorial intent, and instead adopt a more text oriented approach that focused
on the interaction between the reader and the text, not between reader and the author. But to understand how this idea first came about--first,
we need to put ourselves into the headspace of French academia in the mid-1960s. Across academia, but particularly in Humanities-related
fields like literature, linguistics, philosophy, and anthropology, we were seeing a trend away
from a Structuralist methodology--i.e., a methodology that saw facets of human culture
as intrinsically related to a broader, overarching system or structure--
By the 1960s, academia had now saw itself trending towards a “post-structuralist”
point of view, fueled by thinkers like Foucalt, Barthes, and my good friend Derrida. Post-structuralism questioned the more binary
relationship of structuralism--that you couldn’t make X assumption about X person/social group/work
of art just because X person came from a certain place, experienced a certain thing, spoke
a certain language, ate a certain thing for breakfast, etc. And if it’s beginning to sound like “post-structuralism”
involves a lot of complicated French naval-gazing academic bloviating, that’s because it does. But for the purposes of keeping this short
and sweet, we’ll keep our discussion of post-structuralism contained to where it concerns
Barthes, and novelists. In "Death of the Author," Barthes argues that
“Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative
where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.” In other words, Barthes argues that a piece
of text is fundamentally divorced from the author who made it. And if it seems like a simple concept now,
keep in mind: In particular to the literary and visual arts,
up until the 1960s, much of a creator’s work in academia was examined through a lense that
tied together said creator and their life. Biography was king in helping to interpret
or understand a work of art. Take, for example, William Shakespeare’s
"Macbeth." Traditional readings of the text would argue
that an understanding of both Scottish history and Shakespeare’s life are fundamental in
understanding the play itself-- how it pays homage to King James I, who was king while
it was being written, and how it reflects the king’s relationship to the author--King
James was also the patron of Shakespeare’s acting company at the time. But for Barthes, none of this background information
would be pertinent in reading "Macbeth." Meaning, to Barthes, lies in the language
of a text itself and whatever impressions the reader creates from it. The Author is less of a God and more of a
mere scriptor. And according to Barthes’s contemporary Foucault, ”The
work, which once had the duty of providing immortality, now possesses the right to kill,
to be its author’s murderer.” Does it though? French literary theorists in the mid to late
1960’s probably weren’t too concerned with pop cultural fanworks and their relation
not only to text, but to authorial intent and the author’s body of work, in no small
part because it was not an organized Thing in the way it would be only a decade later. But in discussions of death of the author
and pop culture media, the interaction between author and fans is extremely relevant. Take, for instance, a writer like Anne Rice,
who takes an unusually hardline stance on fanworks, especially fan fiction: From Rice’s official website: "I do not
allow fan fiction. The characters are copyrighted. It upsets me terribly to even think about
fan fiction with my characters. I advise my readers to write your own original
stories with your own characters. It is absolutely essential that you respect
my wishes." RESPECT THE AUTHOR’S WISHES, FANS. HOW DARE YOU MAKE THE GAY VAMPIRES EVEN GAYER? And Rice was not fucking around either. To be in
Anne Rice fandom in the mid-2000’s was to play a dangerous game of threats of C&D’s
and of litigation, and the near sum totality of fanworks relating to the vampire chronicles
existed in locked down private livejournal groups. I bring up Rice because on some level, she
has a lot in common with "Harry Potter" author, JK Rowling, but in this one crucial regard,
they are miles apart. From the onset of Harry Potter’s popularity,
JK Rowling has shown an interest in engaging with the fandom and, at most times, been downright
encouraging of fanworks, not limited to fan art, fan fiction, fan resource sites, and
other things created by her audience. Said Rowling’s agent at Christopher Little
Publishing, “JK Rowling's reaction is that she is very flattered by the fact there is
such great interest in her Harry Potter series and that people take the time to write their
own stories.” So, at a surface level, this seems like an
ideal creator-audience relationship: Your favorite author is not only fine with you
and your Tumblr friends writing stories about her characters, but she’s an open book when
it comes to answering any and all pedantic nerd questions you might have about your faves. What could go wrong with that? Well largely, it’s the one thing she has
in common with Rice, namely the sense that they are masters of the universe that they created
as authors - Ever since she joined Twitter, Rowling has
had a tendency to post-scripturally insert context, meaning and intent into her text
long after the text has been published, which many fans love, but just as many take issue
with. Not just because of injecting non-textual
intent, but because some of that intent comes laden with #implications. Like, sure, we get that lycanthropy is a stand-in
for disease stigmatization, but Rowling double-downing on it and then explicitly stating
that it is a wizarding world AIDS analog while making one of the main werewolves in the series
essentially a child predator with the explicit evil intent of infecting people with his disease
is... And then there’s Dumbledore. At a public reading of the then recently published
last book in the series, "Harry Potter and The Deathly Hollows," when a fan asked if Dumbledore
had ever loved anyone, Rowling responded: 'My truthful answer to you...I always thought
of Dumbledore as gay... and that added to his horror when Grindelwald showed himself to be what he was. To an extent, do we say it excused Dumbledore
a little more because falling in love can blind us to an extent, but he met someone
as brilliant as he was and, rather like Bellatrix, he was very drawn to this brilliant person
and horribly, terribly let down by him.' She added: 'Yeah, that's how I always saw
Dumbledore. And even in 2007, that kind of intent declaration
was already begging the question if representation just for representation’s sake, especially
when there is no actual reference in the text to Dumbledore’s sexuality, was actually
helpful or if it was just shoehorned tokenizing for the sake of staying relevant. It is, in effect, claiming representation
without having to do any of the work of including it in the text, because hey. Authorial intent. And yet, after all this, despite multiple opportunities to codify Dumbledore’s sexuality into the actual text, she still
hasn’t done it. Rowling had the opportunity to actually codify
this into later texts, as she is the sole credited writer for both Fantastic Beasts
movies, the latter of which touches directly on Dumbledore’s angst over his relationship
with Grindelwald but… no homo. LGBT representation in the Harry Potter-verse
exists only in the paratext, in the authorial intent - therefore, according to Barthes,
it does not exist at all. That said, of course authorial intent influences
fan culture, and inevitably creeps into the way people read the text - people take authorial intent
as word of god, and use it to shut down readings that conflict with the authorial’s post-scriptural
intent. And that... kind of sucks. It’s all well and good - and valid - to
restrict discourse on the Harry Potter series to the text itself, and not what the author
says about the text. But here’s the thing - that is neither how
consuming art nor human nature works. Text is inevitably consumed with paratext
- and paratext influences the way the reader interprets the text. Simply knowing the Discourse around Harry
Potter influences the way you read Harry Potter - whether you want it to, or not. In literary theory, paratext refers to materials
supplied by authors, editors, printers and publishers. This concept has more recently expanded to
anything relating to the text - ranging all the way from cultural context to personal brand to size and nature of online platform and, most importantly, to personal identity. It’s not that trying to apply Barthes's idea
is invalid, but that given the way culture is trending and how the focus on personal
brand and identity is only increasing, even an author that tries to let their work speak
for itself can never really die. Foucault was actually way more hardcore than
Barthes--where Barthes stuck to literary theory, Foucault saw “The Author” as a bigger
problem within a wider system of thought who got in the way of The Discourse. To Foucault, the author is an “ideological
figure” - that people assign meaning to the authors text just by virtue of who is
saying it, rather than the meaning inherent in the text. But Foucault considered the decree that the author
has disappeared to be an empty one without praxis, and stated that “we must locate
the space left empty by the author’s disappearance, follow the distribution of gaps and breaches,
and watch for openings this disappearance uncovers.” In the year of our Lord 2018, we call that
thing ~ * ~ personal brand ~ * ~, and oh your precious discourse has indeed been overtaken
by cults of personality 50 years later. Fifty years later, the work does not possess
the right to kill, to be its authors murderer. Because the work will always be tied to the
brand, and in the brand lies a certain sort of immortality. What is Brand can Never Die. Foucault was a big proponent not only of shedding personal identity as it pertained to works, but of all the trappings of identity: “We would no longer hear the questions that have been rehashed for so long: Who really
spoke? Is it really he and not someone else? With what authenticity or originality? And what part of his deepest self did he express
in his discourse? What difference does it make who is speaking?” How one person of one gender or of one race
in one time in one place reads "Macbeth" will be read way differently than how someone else
in completely different circumstances will read it. Same with who writes it. And this is a huge shortcoming of Death of the Author in general - it assumes that all people from all backgrounds have
equal opportunity - they don’t - and that all texts have equal opportunity for exposure
based on merit of the text - they don’t. In a perfect world, Foucault would be right,
and everyone would have equal opportunity and all texts would be judged on their own
merit and not tied to either the author’s identity or to their body of work. But we don’t live in a perfect world, Michel, therefore
Foucault’s ideas and, to a lesser extent Barthes's, can really only exist in the world
of pure theory. Because who tells what story, what their background
is, and why they are telling it - matters to readers, and is only mattering more as
time marches on. If you read "The Fault in our Stars," independent
of any paratext and not reading the author’s note, all you know about the book is that
it was written by… a man, probably. That is as pure a reading as you are going
to get. But of course, this is not the reading most
people had - most people knew the paratext, because the author had a platform, and a very
large one. The author puts on a friendly affect for his
young, largely teenage audience every tuesday. "Good morning, Hank. It's Tuesday." Then you find out that the author was inspired
the write the text in part because of an actual human person who lived and died at the age
of 16. A human person who was also a youtuber, who
the author became friends with, in large part because she was his fan. This is not intent, but it is paratext, and
it does influence the reading of the book. As the "The Fault in our Stars" blew up in popularity,
so too did the backlash - who are you, John Green, to even write this story? Does it make it more legitimate that he knew
Esther Earl, or does that make it exploitative? Is the whole enterprise exploitative? In the years that followed, as "The Fault in
our Stars" continued to sell incredibly well, The Discourse began to focus on the author’s
identity, and the trend of so-called “sick lit” that the novel helped popularize. Which is to say nothing of the content of
the novel itself - people started to get upset about the fact that Hazel and Augustus share
their first kiss at the Anne Frank house. And there are sex scenes in this book - what kind
of a grown ass man writes sex scenes between two dying teenagers? What was that? Oh, shit. "The Fault in Our Stars" was a 2012 novel written
by me, John Green, In which, I, John Green, am accidentally a character. Kind of. Which is what this video's about. Sort of. What inspired, like, this idea that Van Houten was a reflection of you at your ugliest self? Well, I mean, I think before "The Fault in our Stars" was published, I was interested in the questions that I ended up writing about in "The Fault in our Stars." Because I'd been asked thousands of times, what happened to certain characters in my book, "Looking for Alaska." And I started to understand that my response to that, my like, somewhat defensive response to that of, like, I'm not going to tell you. Obviously, you know, obviously I wanted it to be ambiguous in the story. And I still want it to be ambiguous. I started to understand that that defensiveness that I had was misplaced ultimately. And so when people ask me the same question about Hazel or about "The Fault in our Stars," I do think of it very differently now. I feel much less defensive. I still don't feel like I have answers for them. But I understand the question. I understood that when people read books about people reading books, they inevitably put the author of the book -- especially if that person was a public figure -- into the story. Right? Like, I remember being a kid and reading "Catcher in the Rye," and putting J.D. Salinger into that story. I couldn't help myself. I felt like there was no way to write... about writing without me being a character in the story in some way. Like I was writing those parts of the book in 2010/2011. I understood by that time that I had a public life. And, you know, in my own life, when I was a kid, I read books with the authors as characters in them. I might have even known that I shouldn't, but I couldn't help myself. Like, we live in a perseonality-driven culture. Even then, we did. So, this book is called "The Fault in our Stars," and it is dedicated to my friend, Esther A lot of people are only going to read John Green books because they have this parasocial relationship with John Green, and you know, that's not invalid. I played into it, right? Like, it's not like I tried to avoid having a public life, like... I had an email address that they could Google. I had a YouTube channel where they could comment, like... where did I get off saying that's an inappropriate question to ask this person who has a Twitter? "I'm gong to a movie with Agustus Waters, I said. Please record the next several episodes of the ANTM marathon for me." That's the end of chapter one. I wonder if there's just something about human nature. There's like, if you read someone who tells a fiction, you feel connected to them. whether you know anything about their lives or not. Yeah, you at least feel a connection to the way that they imagined something, which is intimate in a way. And I don't know that there's any getting around that. And so the question for me is how do authors interact with stories that they've invented in this time? I feel like the idea of death of the author kind of stemmed partially from this culture that was very absolute, and Bathes kind of wanted to kill absolutes. But in return, it kind of created a different absolute. I used to believe that the author should disappear insofar as possible from the text and that the responsibility of the reader was to read the text and never think about the author. You know, like, I had this period in high school where I read everything in the context of the author. And then I had this long period of maybe 10 or 15 years where I tried to read nothing in the context of the author. And what I have arrived at at the moment, which I'm sure I will disavow in due time, is that there is no way for the author's brand not to participate in the text if the author has a public life. Or even if that author doesn't, right? Like J.D. Salinger famously did not have a public life. But he is all over those books. And, like, when people read them, they read them in the context of J.D. Salinger. And I feel like the absolutes in reading texts creates this problem where you're either constantly guessing the author's intent, or you're actively trying to divorce yourself everything you know about the world around you and the author. And I just don't think that's realistic or helpful. The more you know about my work, the more you know about my friendship with Esther, the more you see me in that story. My hope is that the book works if you don't see me in the story. And I would honestly feel like the book failed if it needed me to be successful. But at the same time, like, I am definitely aware of the fact that many of the people who read it do see me in it. I mean that's why I wrote that like, author's note at the beginning, was I wanted to try to protect insofar as possible--this is a little naive in retrospect--but I wanted to try to protect the friendships that I'd had that are important to me, that had influenced the story. I wanted to like, keep them mine? And that proved to be impossible? And now I read that author's note and I think like, oh, that's quite sweet that that author thought that like... just putting a note in the beginning that says don't read this autobiographically is gonna work The Fault in Our Stars is a 2012 novel written by John Green , in which two children go to great lengths to find out what happens after the ambiguous ending of the protagonist Hazel’s favorite book. The way they do this is to seek out the notoriously reclusive author, and find out the answer from him. But the entire idea is flawed from the getgo - not only does her hero let her down, she does not find her answer, because there is none, and that is a central theme of the text - sometimes, there is no answer, the universe is chaotic, life is unpredictable and you have no control of when you will die, and when you die you will not know what becomes of your loved ones. In seeking out the authorial intent behind a work of fiction, the two leads are trying to gain a sense of control in a chaotic universe, the sense that there is indeed an author of sorts to life, as they do not feel that they are the authors of their own stories, that they do not have control over their own fates. And indeed they do not - but in this case,
letting go of that desire for a sense of control is a part of growing up, which ironically,
neither of these characters will get to do. They must mature into adults while never living
to become adults. This is reflective not only of how we consume
media and the way media can genuinely touch and inspire people, but also of a very understandable
and human desire to transform that media. Narratives give us a sense of control in a
world that is generally chaotic and unpredictable. We need narratives to make sense of the world that we live in. But that does not mean that we have control
over the narrative. The character arcs of both Hazel and Augustus
are defined by letting go of that desire for control of their own narratives, and accepting
that life, short though it is, just doesn’t work that way, no matter how much they wish
it did. But that’s just my reading.
What does this have to do with Contrapoints?