From Emperor to Expat: Who is an Author?

The Oxford dictionary defines ‘Author’ as a writer of a book, article or document. The author assumes a central role here. This definition is challenged in the fields of literary and cultural studies and has evolved significantly from an object of authority to subject of critique. How we perceive and interpret texts has changed this common conception. Literary studies shifts our questioning of how the author is central to the text to is the author even necessary for the text. 

The author is understood conventionally as the creator of the work/text. One would not be wrong to hold this understanding for most of literature’s existence. Literary studies has challenged this position of the author and has redefined it. The first instance of this we’ll look at is the formalist approach. Formalism stressed on critical approaches to the inherent features of the text and invalidated the author and related influences from ‘outside’ the text. The Encyclopedia of the Novel (2011) describes the formalist’s approach as one which separated the author and society from the literary work such that one is concerned with just the text at hand. What then becomes of the author in this framework? The author no longer was the central figure as far as the text and its meaning was concerned. The intentions of the author become irrelevant, they become a mere ‘writer’ of the text, stripped of their ‘genius’ status. This genius status was a luxury enjoyed by the concept continued in the Romantic idea of the author in literary studies. The author in the romantic period was considered the sole creator and legal owner of the text. We can observe an obvious supremacy of the author as the creator and controller of meaning. Notions of authenticity and creativity were frequently associated with the author in this period among others. In his essay ‘The Romantic Artist’, Raymond Williams dates the ‘wild genius’ idea of the author back to the poet’s definition in Plato’s Ion. 

Objections to the romantic idea of the author arose in subsequent literary movements and two critics whose discussion on the author’s concept we’ll see here are Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. To understand what these critics say about the author, one must first understand that these theories attempt to ‘decenter’ (remove from significance) the author from the process of meaning-making of the text. By pushing the author away in this fashion, we strip the concept of authorial intent, control of interpretation, and significance with respect to the text. This fundamentally diverts us from the conventional definition of an author and what they stand for. In ‘The Death of the Author’, Barthes’ essay published in 1967, he criticises literary critics and their obsession with the author when engaging with literature by saying: 

“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. Such a conception suits criticism very well, the latter then allotting itself the important, task. Of discovering the Author (or its hypostases: society, history, psyche, liberty) beneath the work: when the Author has been found, the text is 'explained' - victory to the critic”

Barthes calls the author and what they bring to the text as the limitation and a restriction on further ‘explanation’ of the text. ‘A final signified’ here means a final meaning of the text. By assigning the author to the text, Barthes accuses the critic of discovering the author, who is ‘beneath’ the text and not the text itself. The author here was the figure that suited literary critics for the purpose of meaning making. Now the author is seen as a limiter and barrier to making meaning of the text. In the same essay, Barthes asks us to ‘kill’ the author, in whom we can not find the meanings that the text holds. What we see here is an extreme notion of the ‘author’ where they are a figure who should be ignored completely when consuming a text. The author is treated in a similar but milder manner by Foucault when he talks about the concept’s workings in his lecture titled ‘What Is an Author?’ given in 1969. Of the various aspects of the author figure he highlights, we see the ‘limiting’ nature of it here:

“The author is not an indefinite source of significations which fill a work; the author does not precede the works; he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction”

The understanding of the author here is far apart from the person we usually intend and is the abstract figure that it is in culture. This is what happens with Barthes’ understanding of it as well. Foucault’s take on the author here is very similar to Barthes and the freedom that fiction/text can give us in dealing with it becomes what an author impedes. To Foucault, the author is not the source for the endless significations(interpretations/meanings) that a text can provide. This then is the author: someone who is not the authority over a text or the central figure for its interpretation. 

To eliminate the author's earlier position entirely is undoubtedly an extreme position when considering the author and the real-world implications of its transformation. These ‘decentered’ approaches to the author faced objections from critics for it invalidated the authorial intentions and voices of marginalised communities. In the entry for ‘Author’ in The Encyclopedia of the Novel published in 2011, the following quote describes a case for the author’s centrality: “Postcolonial subject’s aspiration to affirm a speaking- and writing-self—one whose unique interiority is meant to represent an oppressed (or formerly oppressed) collective—is necessarily invested in the preservation of a certain relation between author and text”. Postcolonial literature is literature written by individuals from formerly colonized countries. These voices are of formerly subjugated voices and their texts are representative of it. Here, the author is closely tied with the text as their identity and background inform the text and its interpretations very closely. In such a case, the author can not be done away in the fashion other approaches to the author do. This very argument is used in minority studies, feminisim and queer theory. 

Our treatment of the concept of ‘author’ is informed by our location socially, culturally, and politically. The only constant we see in the historical understanding of the author is its changing nature. Recent understandings have moved the author away from the seat of authority and have decentered and centered it through the various frameworks of literary and cultural studies. So who or what is the author? It is only a figure that the reader is provided with (generally) when engaging with a text. It is a choice, an unlocked door that lies with the text. It is to the reader and the critic a choice which gives and takes away meaning(s) from the text.