The Death of the Author

Or, in other words, how should we read?

Should we always seek to recover the author's intention in a text? Or is there a an abstract 'absolute' meaning contained in any text waiting to be recovered.

The author's intention sounds plausible when used as a phrase but in practice either the author has mastered their art and said (largely) what they intended (to which any paraphrase, even that of the author can only be a reduction or approximation) or they have failed, in which case knowing their intention may be instructive in teaching us why or how they have failed but it does not tell us the 'meaning' of the text. Otherwise intention and achievement would be identical in literature and William McGonagall would be one of Scotland's greatest (as opposed to best known) literary figures.

I believe that the 'search' for meaning in some didactic and reductive sense is damaging in all the arts but it is worst in literature because it temptations are so plausible. Translation from the visual or musical into the verbal so clearly loses information but the transformation of one text into it's 'meaning' - another text, seems so much safer. Not so. If it had such a simple 'meaning' that it can be reduced to a bundle of prose, it is not a work of art. It is a lecture and long winded one at that.

How then do we read a text? ( I do not say study; a text may be studied profitably in many ways, orthographically, economically, sociologically, psychologically but these studies have only a tangential relevance to our experience of literature at its purest and most naive level - the act of reading, the confrontation of individual and text.)

Any text is made of language. I submit that to undestand a text we must not only understand that specific language but language itself. What then is language?

Language is a tool for communication between people. It relies on a community to agree its meaning. It's interpretation is subject to this agreement (intersubjectivity) and is not absolute, when the language is alive. From the point of view of the contemporary user of a language - a member of the society that determines it - the meaning and use of language is subject to constant unknowing negotiation between members of the community. This involves the introduction of neologisms and altering the meaning of words as well as how these words affect and reflect the social organisation of this linguistic culture (and its many subcultures).

Of course there are authorities in language as in life. They negotiate from uniquely strong positions but they cannot control language nor prevent its constant reinvention much to the dismay of many of their adherents.

Language then has 'meaning' or rather utility only within a social context. This meaning is not consciously controlled by any one person or group nor is it absolute. It is a function of linguistic community. Of course within any one language there will be manifold linguistic subgroups, none more so perhaps than within English

Thus to understand a text we must understand it's linguistic (and therefore social) context. This is why that in order to understand texts from outwith our own culture, language and era we must study the language and the society which produced the text in order to best read it. For texts produced in our own context we do not and should not.