Thought-Filled Tuesday - Do Authors Really Matter?

In the Humanities class I am taking this semester, we are studying Postmodernism. I chose a work by Lawrence Weiner of words on a wall, A Rubber Ball Thrown on the Sea. Weiner didn't care what font or size or color was used to create this, he believed that the production of art didn't matter as much as the concept.

In a similar vein, there was a postmodern philosopher, Roland Barthes who wrote a paper entitled, The Death of the Author. Barthes’s essay summarizes itself in its final paragraph: “Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination” (189).

Not a shocking conclusion for an article entitled “The Death of the Author,” really, but truly radical idea in and of itself: that the Author, long the focus of literary study, is not in fact all that important – it is the reader that matters. To get to this point, Barthes begins with the observation that “The image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centered on the author… [and that the] explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author ‘confiding’ in us” (186).

Barthes conceives the author as chef, the text as food, and the reader as ingesting and digesting that which the chef has prepared. In Barthes’s opinion, only in entering the reader’s mouth does the food take on any flavor, and only in his stomach does it release any energy. Moreover, Barthes relentlessly reminds us that the author did not create (in the sense of bringing into existence) any of the ingredients in his dishes, and that the chef would cease to have any real purpose without his patrons, that it wouldn’t really do him much good to prepare meals that would merely sit on a table until they rotted away.


Do our lives as authors not matter? In Barthes vision of what an author should be they don't. Is skillful selection and combination of ingredients in ext to be completely ignored? And, is not the Author almost undoubtedly also a reader himself? What do you think? Do our lives, our backstories affect our work and make us important to the work or are we less important than the destination?