UPDATE: I’ve revisited this topic in more detail and with more accuracy here. Go there instead, please.

‘Death of the author’ is a fairly grim name for a somewhat controversial approach to interpretation. Whether fortunately or unfortunately, it does not involve assassinating authors; what it does involve is denying them any right to their own work. ‘Death of the author’ is an interpretive model wherein the intent of the author is discarded (whether communicated by the book, interviews, random statements, second-hand, or otherwise), and the work is assessed by the reader independent of the meaning the author meant to invest into it, under the assumption that the reader’s interpretation is just as valid as the author’s, that they are identical in value and validity. For example, a normal interpreter might read Lord of the Rings, consider whether it is significantly allegorical, and decide, based off of Tolkien’s own words, that it is not, though the times in which it was written definitely influenced it. An interpreter applying ‘death of the author’, however, can look, recognize what appears to be an allegory on first blush, and ignore Tolkien’s words, proceeding to interpret the story allegorically. Despite this example, the reader’s interpretation, divorced from authorial dictates or intent, can be a useful part of analysis; it must, however, remain subordinate to the author’s intent.

 ‘Death of the author’ (hereafter ‘DoA’) conceals some truth, both pragmatically and artistically. Pragmatically, every reader will apply his own interpretation, at least in part, by virtue of not knowing everything the author intended, whether through paucity of information available or simple ignorance. Artistically, a well-written book will, upon completion, be complete, containing in itself all that is necessary to understand its main points, at least when combined with an assumed amount of common knowledge. Reading a book, taking it at its word, and interpreting it according to its own light and the authorial intent communicated through it itself is a valid method of interpretation. Furthermore, part of analyzing the skill of the author will include comparing his intent to the effect of his execution- in essence, setting the reader’s perspective against the author’s and seeing if they match. Generally, the better they match, the more effective the author was. Note that this process assumes an unbiased or immaterially biased reader; for a book such as the Bible, where sinful man delights to misunderstand and misinterpret, the reader will not properly understand except by the grace of God (James 1:17).

A point regarding DoA must be made: the problem of the model lies in its prioritization, not its components. Both authorial and reader’s interpretations possess validity (at least in regards to human works; see below). We must, however, remember that our interpretations are alterations of the story insofar as they do not line up with the author’s intent. Conversely, though, the story is imperfect insofar as it does not live up to that intent and insofar as that intent does not correspond to righteousness. The critical distinction here is that if the story we interpret is not the one the author wrote, it’s a different story (with the same basis), not an equally valid perspective on the same story. It’s fanfiction, not an alternate version released concurrent with the first.

The problem with DoA becomes apparent, however, when we consider how meaning is imbued into a story. When an author writes a book, he means each part of it to do something. If he’s lazy, a part may just be there to fill space, yes, but it still had an intent behind it, else it would not have been written. Sometimes, that meaning is self-evident. If I describe a horse, calling it a chestnut stallion with four legs, you can be pretty well assured, unless I’m an unusual sort of writer, that the object being described is a brown equine with the usual number of legs for such a beast. It’s how words work, particulary when we’re dealing with the tangible or the universally understood (a.k.a. temperature, sound, light). Where things get tricky is symbolism. Symbols, depending on how you define them, are everywhere (check here for a definition of symbolism). One specific subsection, however, the section that includes motifs, allegory, symbolism of the abstract, and the like (what we usually mean when we’re talking about symbolism in literature). All these symbols are creations of the author, invested with meaning by his intent in creating them.

When DoA is applied, though, symbolism starts throwing out false negatives and (more importantly) false positives, as people see things that were supposed to be there and don’t see things that were. The second is, honestly, worse. It changes meaning additively, altering the story being interpreted into something other than its intended self and thus usurping the author’s place. It’s the mistake of thinking blue curtains are emblematic of sadness when they, well, were just written as blue curtains. Other, more malicious changes can be made, even without resorting to symbolism’s soft and fuzzy hues; perhaps the most famous, outside of the halls of Biblical interpretation, is the persistent allegation that Frodo and Sam were engaged in a homosexual relationship in The Lord of the Rings, an assertion baseless in the story and repugnant to Tolkien’s work, but which many hold to nonetheless, placing their interpretation equal to the intent of the author.

Why, though, should this interpretation be less important than the author’s? At its heart, this question is the ‘death of the author’. Here’s where theology comes in. The assertion that the audience to whom the work of art is shown has an equal right to the author to decide that art’s nature is an assertion which, taken to its logical conclusion, denies God His right to judge the earth. It asserts that all subjective interpretations are equally true (granted truth by their status as a perspective, not their internal nature or correspondence to reality), and therefore that no singular objective interpretation exists. When applied to the Creator of the universe, this full-blown form of DoA, being a form of postmodernism or standpoint theory, would assert that angels and men alike have an equal right with God to define the world, to judge what it means. This notion is manifestly anti-Biblical. God asks of Job in chapters 38 through 41 a multitude of questions regarding the earth, and at the end of all these, in verse 3 of the final chapter, Job acknowledges that God, not man, is the arbiter of truth, of meaning. Based on this understanding, corroborated in a thousand ways throughout the Bible and by the premise of the Bible’s existence (a topic for another day, perhaps), we should recognize that to place our opinions on the world equal to God’s would be self-idolatry, blasphemy, and that if we cannot do it for God’s world, we should not do it for the works of art which, consciously or unconsciously, imitate that world and His creation of it.

One caveat should be interjected here. With God’s Word and His world, we do not have the prerogative to make up our own stories, grant them legitimacy. With the works of man, however, we can interpret them differently from the author’s ideas, imperfect as they are, though only with the recognition that our reinterpretations are not the original and should not be treated thus.

In the end, we must reject the standpoint epistemology of DoA, but we should retain a recognition of when the reader’s interpretation is useful. The text, the author, and the reader may all say different things, after all, when all three are human, and understanding literature requires we recognize that fact. With God’s Word, however, the text and the Author speak in perfect unison, middle C to middle C, and the reader’s interpretations are good only insofar as they correspond to this unison, though no man has yet plumbed its depths, save Christ Himself. Human books, of course, lack the perfect harmony and the divine preeminence of the Bible, and for man’s stories, we can be free to interpret them differently, so long as we recognize that our interpretations are not equal or equivalent to the author’s interpretations, that they are different stories insofar as they differ.

God bless.