A ‘Death of the Author’ approach is killing the ability to read the great works.
A ‘Death of the Author’ approach is killing the ability to read the great works.
C ollege students and noodly academics, in the words of the founder of Festivus: “I gotta lot of problems with you people.” One of the problems I have is with the distortion of writers’ great works as tribute to current trends.
For instance, Herman Melville’s. Everything Melville put down on paper had a reason, no matter how abstruse some of his writings might initially appear. Why would we not make the effort to see what he was getting at? Politics, mostly.
There has long been a debate within the humanities over whether academics should approach works with the author and his supposed intent in mind. In the landmark essay “The Death of the Author” (DotA), postmodernist French literary critic Roland Barthes posits that literature should be detached from the artificial constraints of what other academics think an author meant, as gleaned from biographical information, letters, diaries, and so on. John Trimbur, an Emerson College professor of writing, describes DotA this way:
The idea is that the author—along with all the other characteristic figures of modernity (the Freudian ego, the transcendental subject, the possessive individual, the revolutionary proletariat)—has now passed away, having been made obsolete and irrelevant, fragmented and decentered by changing relations of writing and reading in the era of postmodernism.
The death of the author just so happens to comport with the injection of modern politics into classic works of literature. Literary scholars and their students apply their own ideological bents to the study of great works, resulting in papers with eye-catching titles such as “Queering the Dick: Moby-Dick as Coming-Out Narrative” and exploring such themes as “Gender Transgressions in the Travel Writings of Herman Melville.”
As a reader of Melville, I find DotA assessments of his writings not only various shades of immoral — I picture academics jumping on Melville’s back as he hunches over the writing desk, wresting manuscripts from his hands, derisively spitting on him before flitting off to some American literature conference to say that whales represent late-stage capitalism — but also unforgivably lazy. I’m willing to say that DotA, as one of many modes of literary analysis, may have its uses. But it is one of the most corrupt, as it permits the reader to take his preconceptions and baggage and load it onto whatever work of literature is set before him. Confirmation bias, posited by Sir Francis Bacon in the 17th century, expanded in 1852 by Melville contemporary Charles McKay, and popularized for moderns by psychologists Jonathan Evans and Raymond Nickerson, dictates that humans are predisposed toward finding what they want in a text, study, or cloud formation.
Absenting Melville the man, the writer, from his work makes the reader, struck by the thunderous timbre of his prose, a little poorer. Although not true for every writer, in this case it’s fair to say the man writes what he knows, and it enriches us to know the man to know what he knows. Melville’s stories did not accidentally stumble upon themes of racial equalism, anti–corporal punishment, Calvinist theology, or Lockean liberal theory.
Melville is a sailor, always, and his stories rarely stray too far from the liquid troughs of the world’s oceans — excepting quick excursions on land chasing vice and pleasure that are the bluejacket’s liberty. He considers his shift from boyhood to manhood a function of four years at sea aboard merchant and military vessels, no longer subject to his mother’s fussing. I know from experience the selfsame effect seagoing has on a young man’s development — the unsolicited alterations to how one views the world, one’s fellow man, and God.
Melville biographer Andrew Delbanco writes of this transformative period for the author:
[Melville’s] predecessors in the gentleman-goes-to-sea genre . . . had never quite got beyond the tone of the Brahmin slumming among the hoi polloi, but Melville opened himself to the sailor’s life and became genuinely part of it. He shed his pretensions. He discovered that at sea competence counts more than breeding. He learned to live at a constant pitch of sentry alertness, since a split second of drowsiness or reverie could kill him.
He is philosophically a Calvinist, though rarely in faith — world-whipped and torn between profound doubt and hope in fickle divine grace. This theme threads throughout his novels and short stories, the breezes of preordained dooms toying with the sails of the individual. Novelist Paul Harding describes Melville in Barthian terms as an adherent of “religionless Christianity.” On a visit to Nathaniel Hawthorne — Melville’s fellow author and intellectual soulmate — Melville expounded on his thoughts on “Providence and futurity.” Hawthorne, in his notebooks, describes his friend’s Jacobian grappling with God:
[Melville] can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us. (Quoted in Mark Niemeyer, ed., The Divine Magnet [Orison Books, 2019], p. 29)
Dismissing — or simply missing — these titanic struggles within the writer’s soul in favor of one’s own ideological hobbyhorse is criminal. To unmake Melville for the claimed benefit of literary scholarship yields no such thing. Students should spend far more time learning about who an author was, his vision of the world, and his guiding philosophies, before reading themselves onto the yardarms.
Happy Festivus.