That's Not What I Meant

Recently, I witnessed a discussion between two friends in a bar. One of them lamented his father’s declining health and the prospect of navigating life without the old man’s advice. His friend tried to console him: “Whatever doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger.” The man who needed consoling was surprised to hear his friend quoting an American rapper. (He wasn’t.) I, on the other hand, was surprised that this rapper, who can’t stick to a stage name, quoted Frederic Nietzsche. In that moment, I wasn’t sure whether to celebrate the spread of Nietzsche’s ideas or mourn him, as I realized how truly dead he was for his famous maxim to be attributed to Ye.

Their exchange put me in mind of the ideas of Roland Barthes, the French literary theorist of the 1960s, famous for proposing that literary criticism and interpretation needn’t be bound by what the author thought or felt or meant. By freeing the reader from the interpretive cage of authorial intent, Barthes sought to liberate books from intellectual gatekeepers and people who had access to information.

Ironically enough, to fully appreciate the revolutionary nature of Barthes’ proposition, we must consider it in the context of his time. By untethering interpretation from history and tradition, Barthes sought to radically democratize the act of critique, effectively setting fire to the guardrails long imposed by the academy and its psychologists and historians. In his view, one ordinary reader’s perception of a text, varied, complex, and subjective, carried more weight and yielded more valuable insight than endless reformulations of an agreed-upon “meaning” sanctified by a thousand dissertations.

For Barthes, the author needed to die so that books might truly live in the modern world. No one living now had the opportunity to ask Hugo, Dickens, or Gogol about their artistic choices. And even those who might’ve crossed paths with Woolf or Hemingway or Kafka weren’t always predisposed to ask them the right questions (or them to answer).

Some authors left behind voluminous records, neatly organized and catalogued by diligent archivists in libraries accessible to the public. Others shared little, if anything, of their inner lives beyond what they wrote in their novels. Still others had their posthumous papers consigned to remote corners of dusty museum storerooms, forgotten to the point of disintegration and inaccessible to all but the most dedicated (and well-funded) of researchers.

In a world without Barthes, the work of the critic more closely resembles that of the archeologist than the philosopher. Crouched in dirt in some distant place, far removed from the human business of daily life, he brushes gently at the dust, hoping to unearth some hint or sign that will illuminate his understanding. So, too, the author-obsessed scholar flips the pages of a journal, pores over old birthday cards and grocery lists, building theories of character development on a foundation of supposition about the inner life of a person long dead whom he has never met and who knew nothing of what it means to live now.

Never mind that, should these theories gain wider acceptance, the later discovery of another, potentially contradictory documentary “clue”, or an interpretation of the old clues in new ways, brings down the entire scholarly and theoretical edifice. Never mind the mercurial nature of the creative mind, the ambition, or the simple passage of time that might’ve led the author to read his or her own work inconsistently. Never mind that those doing the reading of the grocery lists, birthday cards, and journals are, for the most part, members of a rarified social subset and perhaps not well positioned to appreciate the struggles of the average man or woman scribbling away in a garret.

But what to make of Barthes now?

In an age where technology has facilitated communication, enabled reach, and amplified marginal voices to an unprecedented degree, we no longer struggle against the constraints of scarcity and silencing. The borders and guardrails he sought to demolish no longer exist, even conceptually, to the point that the endless consumption of knowledge “nuggets” from around the world has come to define our intellectual progress. The job of the critic a century from now, should that role continue to exist, will require the patience of a saint: to sift through this abundance of material, this surfeit of intellectual detritus, to assign meaning to this meme, that text, or another email. A complete reversal of form for the same function.

And if the death of the author should extend to the death of the critic? Previous generations looked to the tastemaker and the arbiter for interpretation and guidance. Today, the “thought leader” and the “influencer” compete in the “attention economy” to tell us what we should think, preferably as a means to tell us what we should buy. Are we to entrust these new figures with interpretation? Or does the author of today have a moral and intellectual obligation to interpret their own ideas in real time?

In my view, yes. The work of authorship in this day and age must evolve into an interactive exchange between author and reader in the present moment through whatever tools we have at our disposal. We must resign ourselves to, or even make friends with, the very technologies that have pushed reading to the brink of extinction. To do less is to risk that the great ideas of our time, if they are even identified as such, arrive to the public in 140-character tidbits, sensationalized hot takes, and two-minute video snapshots.

Far too many of us made disdain for social media a calling card of our intellectual seriousness or artistic authenticity, dismissing those who took the time to build relationships and networks as unserious or, worse, profit-driven. Now, we pay the price for that elitism, isolationism, and classism in the form of irrelevance and an increasingly fragmented, soulless culture. We see the rise of political and religious fundamentalism and wring our hands. We go to our notebooks and our keyboards, wanting to sound the alarm with cautionary tales and warnings, only we find no one is listening. They are all on TikTok.

This is not the death of the author; it is the suicide of the author, and the consequences are too dire to ignore. We have walled ourselves up inside a tomb of our own making, gone beyond even Barthes, and must now resurrect ourselves, by whatever means necessary, be it panel discussions, YouTube channels, or trending sounds.

Nietzsche himself famously suffered from brutal reductionism, his ideas simplified and twisted by the Nazi regime to serve a racist, totalitarian agenda. Had he been on Instagram, notwithstanding his famous contempt for the masses, perhaps things might’ve gone differently. At the very least, he might not have needed modern scholarship to mount a campaign to rehabilitate his image in the post-war era.

We authors tend to be solitary animals; it’s par for the course, unfortunately. Often, this anxiety works as a massive force that rearranges the molecules of literary coal into a diamond. The new rock is rough, easy to disregard. Authorship now must extend to the cutting of this diamond, polishing it, and placing it under a spotlight. Not for admiration, but for preservation, discussion, and debate. In this way, we remind the reader that he is more than a simple consumer; he is a curator and an intellectual partner in crafting a world of ideas more satisfying and consequential than the constructed reality of the feed.