Since the introduction of generative artificial intelligence models, newly-released books can be and have been plagiarized with AI-generated copies within a day of their release. Students are increasingly using AI to author papers in their name. The public is increasingly asking what the point of funding human art is when artificial intelligence can pump out imitations quicker and cheaper.
The author has rather thoroughly been killed, and the perpetrators aren’t just AI, but a host of temporal and economic pressures; the person who benefits from the idea that the author is unimportant is the one who doesn’t want to pay the author. Oddly, reading through some literary criticism of the past 100 years might have you believe that this is the greatest thing that could happen; that in fact, authorless (in effect, AI)* writing — having no intention, being merely the probabilistic arrangement of words — is the greatest writing, a revolution of the sort Michel Foucault theorized†. The rise of AI represents a heaven for all who oppose authorship. Frankly, it might be easier to make a poem out of the letters floating in a bowl of SpaghettiOs or to put your novel through a randomizer before printing so readers can decide what order the words should go in.
Sarcasm aside, I do believe recent trends in writing and reading practices have revealed the importance of the author’s role in the reading/meaning-making process. We deserve to reconsider our artistic perspectives and return human writing to the center stage, to make art that means something.
When we look at modern readers, who are increasingly interested in memoirs, nonfiction and writers with interesting personal histories, we don’t see a desire to kill the author (I mean this in the literary theory sense: distancing them from their writing). For many, the author is the most interesting and important part of a work of art. The numerous celebrity books in stores worldwide owe their success to the fact that the lives behind them are dramatic and rare. Sarah Manguso’s Two Kinds of Decay, a nonfiction flash collection about the writer’s experience with a virtually unheard-of auto-immune disease, while having its own merits, likely wouldn’t have been a success if sold without the promise that as strange and tragic as it was, it was real. And frankly, the truth and vulnerability of the collection makes it more interesting. Authors have shown that they don’t need to distance themselves from the text to generate intrigue and mystery. Torrin Greathouse embodies herself in her poetry, creates a canvas of her soul, and in doing so, creates the most powerfully worded poems I’ve ever read. The reason these authors are able to succeed even while being transparent about their presence in their work is because their intention, what the text means, is still mysterious due to the complexity of its execution.
A good theory about how art should be created needs to describe our reality as closely as possible, just as a good scientific theory does. In the 17th century, scientists determined that since all waves they’d observed passed through a medium — such as sound through air — light had to pass through an invisible medium known as luminiferous ether. When further observations contradicted this and showed that light can pass through vacuums, we came up with new theories. In the modern era of writing, we must again develop new theories to accommodate our interest in saving the author.
Just as the historical theory of ether is still taught in high schools and universities as a part of introducing the modern theories of light, a new aesthetic theory should also be defined by what it is not and should be put in contrast to the past. Each era and its critics have defined art by their own passing whims, and have by no means been in consensus over how serious the author’s intentions should be taken when reading their works, so I’ll limit myself to addressing the arguments of just a few figureheads of the last 111 years.
Some of the more extreme ideas, which I previously alluded to, came later in this period, such as that the author’s intentions are undefinable in their writing since the reader forms their own ideas about the text in their own head, detached from the author‡. Others claim that writing actually can’t have any meaning since to claim it means one thing would be to ignore all the other things it means (being an amalgamation of words, influences, mindsets, etc., each with different meanings).
One example, put forth in Foucault’s “What is An Author,” proposes that modern writing is a “voluntary obliteration of the self … Where a work had the duty of creating immortality, it now attains the right to kill, to become the murderer of its author.”§ This may be the goal of some writers; Foucault gives Kafka and Mallarmé as examples (for the uninitiated, Kafka wanted all of his works to be destroyed and has been immortalized on his part accidentally; Mallarmé wrote in such a way as to center the reader rather than himself; the modernist movement of the early to middle 20th century is said to do this as well). In general, however, writers are just as vain as ever. A common reason writers, and especially aspiring writers will give for their craft is either to become famous, remembered or understood. Most of us are not very keen on dying, and it shows in our work.
Still, Foucault’s essay does good work to ascertain how the author functions with respect to the text. I also use the word “author” to refer to something other than the writer it’s associated with. While he certainly wouldn’t agree, in this essay, I identify authorship as the writer’s intentions within the text, both conscious and subconscious. Intention is what sets human writers apart from AI. By defining intention this way, I don’t intend to limit a work’s true meaning only to what the author thought of while putting pen to paper. The author’s intention can also encompass things within the conceptual mood their work pursues. Criticism that conceives of something outside the scope of the writer’s thoughts does not necessarily violate the conceptual mood which the writer intends to communicate, and therefore doesn’t necessarily violate their intention. In this way, criticism can build on a writer’s work, not just illuminate it.
Even at the time when anti-intentionalist theories achieved their largest influence, a historically common impulse when reading is to wonder about the authorial intentions within a text. We often look to learn about the writer’s life, actions, influences and/or essays, while comparing these details to the aspects of the art at hand. Where would Ernest Hemingway’s criticism be if not for the basic observation that he was impacted by World War I; Sir Philip Sidney by race; Oscar Wilde by his homosexuality; Franz Kafka by his depression. Is “Hamlet” less meaningful because it’s named after Shakespeare’s dead son? When reading a story, readers hold the question, “Why does this matter?” The real-world context — the life of the author, their social paradigm, and the interactions between them and the text both as they impact the writing and as the writing impacts them — is often where you find the answer, not just in what it represents, but what it changes in the artistic or political landscape. Often, great novels and poems are considered great because of their real-world influence more than their artistic merits. Studying the real-world implications of a story is, of course, important for understanding the text in its unity. The reader achieves immersion by reaching into the space between them and the author, where meaning belongs to both.
Literature is an important method of communicating emotional understanding rather than literal understanding. In reading “The Metamorphosis,” one feels the burden of depression rather than simply understanding it. Literature acts beyond the simple idea-transference of rhetoric. Most textbooks probably couldn’t signify this feeling because they tell you how depression works, but they don’t show you how it feels. Still, emotional and literal understanding work hand in hand. Still, you would need to know what depression is to understand “The Metamorphosis” on an emotional level. In the same way, knowing about Kafka’s specific experience with depression would deepen a reader’s understanding of the story. The author should not and cannot be cut out of the interpretation. After all, how can writing exist as a form of communication without the author to communicate it?
When communicating, a human writer necessarily imbues their writing with intention — as long as they are the one choosing the words and/or their order. The author acts as the filter when writing, just as probability does when AI writes. The author makes choices, both conscious and subconscious, and thereby fixes their writing with their intention. Some aspect of themself is associated with the words, haunting them. They exist undefinable but still approachable. A reader can approach the author’s intended meaning logarithmically, similar to how one can accurately identify a leaf without knowing all the forms a leaf could take.
No choice can be made without some level of intention. Not even Mallarmé or Kafka could avoid signifying something about themselves in their writing. Unreliable narrators and other authorial tricks may obscure their intention, but never remove it. The words that an author recalls when writing reflect their history, their experiences, and their personality. “Jocund” was introduced into my vocabulary by John Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” The word thereby becomes representative of my having read that book and my resonance with the text. It is one part of the many experiences that together give me my identity; not a large part — after all, I really don’t like the poem — but a part of me nonetheless. Every time I use the word, I draw on and express that part of myself. A similar complex of authorial signatures exists within any text I write, whether or not they are all discovered in exactitude. Each word represents a part of me. The words of any author are the ones that have occupied their mind, and what occupies their mind, viewed from above, is a picture of themself. This is the basis of writing as self-expression.
The idea of anti-intentionalism overlooks the fact that readers are able to understand the author’s expressions more or less how they’re intended to — especially when the author is skilled — because there’s so much overlap in our methods of communication and our understanding of words. When I say “body and blood,” you know what those refer to on a literal level because you’ve seen and used “body” to refer to bodies and “blood” to refer to blood so many times and in such consistent ways that for each of us, it signifies more or less the same. There will always be differences, but few enough that you can still know that I am referring to body, blood and all of the typical associations that come with that. Maybe depending on the context, your idea of my meaning will be modified. Maybe if a reader’s understanding of bodies is markedly different from the author’s (through repression or trauma, for instance), a slightly different image comes to mind. The phrase “body and blood” has religious connotations for Catholics that Buddhists may not understand. Say an artist plays with the words to evoke meaning. They craft a poem to develop their perspective on religion and sexuality and how they relate, and they place the phrase “body and blood” all over the poem to create the connection. A reader who’s renounced Catholicism to indulge in the pleasures of rampant premarital sex then comes along and says, “The poem is making a connection between religion and sexuality.” The writer has guided them to this reading with their intention.
This is the process through which art is often written and consumed, and the anti-intentionalism espoused by Foucault and more prominently by Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” is frankly not descriptive of this reality. It doesn’t describe how so many people when reading a work can arrive at the same — or at the very least similar — interpretations of a writing’s meaning as the author intends. It denies writing as communication, it denies the writer’s skill in manipulating associations, and it says that there should be no attempt to understand each other through fiction, that it’s impossible to utilize the commonalities in our language to approach a true understanding. It insists on a world that is lonelier than ours. If the only meaning that matters is what’s internal to the reader, why read at all? Why write? Literature is about directing the creation of meaning in the reader’s head. The author directs. If this were to be avoided and intentions were unnecessary, we wouldn’t read, we would make up our own minds with no interest in authorial direction. You read so you can understand the thoughts and feelings of others; sometimes the author, and sometimes the characters the author embodies. Readers can understand a text because they are guided along the path of meaning-making by the author, who is always present in what they write, even if as a ghost. After coming to an understanding, they decide whether they agree.
Of course, the idea of “The Death of the Author” is built partly out of semiotics and must be debated in that field as well. For uninterested readers, I’ve written footnotes and phrased the argument both in semiotic language and in simpler terms. I will confine the most abstract responses to this paragraph. Foucault supports “The Death of the Author” with his assertion that the “interplay of signs (is) regulated less by the content it signifies than by the very nature of the signifier.” In layman’s terms, writing creates meaning mostly internally, through the words chosen, and less through the story and its historical/social context. This runs counter to the Saussurean॥ observation that a piece’s significations⁋ aren’t rendered or beheld in a vacuum but rather create meaning through their connections within the wider web of significations. Therefore, a story or poem cannot create meaning only internally, cannot only depend on the internal signifiers, and cannot be interpreted on its own. In other words, the social context a work is written and read within regulates the way it creates meaning in the reader’s mind. The context of the reader’s and — more importantly for the argument — the author’s lives cannot be removed from the web of signification, and cannot be removed from the interpretation of the story. The social context has invented the words used, imbued them with their connotative meanings, and created the world which is represented in the pages. “Animal Farm” could not have been written without the social context of Stalin’s regime it represents, without the values of fairness our societies have developed, without the language we inherited from our ancestors, nor without George Orwell’s experiential perspective on the Soviet Union. Each of these things are signified by the words of the text, as inseparable from them as gravity from mass.
The question remains: If the author cannot be eliminated, how should they incorporate themself into the text? There are an infinite number of pitfalls one can fall into. An author can be too removed and leave their ideas unexpressed, buried, choking out the words beneath six feet of abstruse mud, or they can gather 10 loudspeakers and blow your eardrums out. Most often, they pace uncomfortably around the middle.
As a case study, I’ll look at James Joyce’s first two novels and Stuart Gilbert’s 1930 guidebook titled “James Joyce’s Ulysses.” We’ll consider, through this discussion, how the reader is encouraged to engage with the text in the lens of anti-intentionalist theory and authorship (the works I’ve been addressing). This discussion is crucial to determining how modern writers should differ in their approach and better immerse the reader.
The introduction of Gilbert’s guidebook appeals to another kind of argument many of you have heard, but approaches anti-intentionalism from the perspective of writing rather than interpretation. It’s a similar argument to “The Death of the Author,” being part of the literary movement that led to Barthes’ theory, but it’s also less extreme. Joyce’s first novel, “A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man,” includes it in a broader aesthetic theory, which Gilbert abbreviates:
“The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluent and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself so to speak…. The mystery of the aesthetic like that of material creation is accomplished. The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”
Aesthetic emotion is static. “The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.” “The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire and loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts.”
To rephrase: The only good art is that which arrests the mind, inspiring static emotions, which Dedalus defines as pity and terror. Anything that encourages change — desire and loathing — is “pornographic,” “improper.” Both Joyce and Gilbert suggest the author should appear indifferent within their work in order to avoid making desirous, loathful, improper art.
The odd part about reading the full aesthetic theory — expanding over 14 pages — is that it’s one of the most transparent and kinetic (change-inducing) in the novel. It seems to scream, “THIS IS A THOUGHT THAT I — THE AUTHOR — HAD.” Gilbert himself only narrowly escapes attributing Stephen’s aesthetic theory to Joyce, quickening through that to say only that “Ulysses,” Joyce’s second novel, in which Stephen reprises as a character, was written with the aesthetic theory in mind (he connects it to the style of the novel and to Stephens’ actions in it).
Of course, Gilbert might argue that the aesthetic theory passage is an unfortunate but perhaps necessary artistic lapse in “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” into rhetoric, rather than art. Readers could also respond that while Stephen is very conceited about his theory, other characters try to point out how much of an asshole he’s being in the same chapter. Likewise, they could argue that his aesthetic theory seems to contradict his other goals of expressing his sexual desire through art and of changing the souls of Irish people. Stephen bases his theory on the writings of the Catholic theologian, St. Thomas Aquinas, and yet he says he’s trying to escape the confines of religious doctrine. You could argue, using this evidence, that the aesthetic theory is not the view of the author. If one disregards Joyce’s intentions and tries to analyze this part of Stephen’s life only in the bounds of the stories, it’s very easy to look at the aesthetic theory as intentionally stuck-up and reductive. “Desire and hatred and change are unartistic? Who’s to say that? Who’s to say the author can’t be an interesting and mysterious character within their work of art?” I found myself asking those questions while I read, muttering to myself that the theory is not only reductive, it’s poorly founded. “If terror and pity are the only artistic emotions, then perhaps we should only study slasher movies and montages of people eating alone at restaurants,” I said.
Arbitrarily reducing beauty to emotions of stasis is just the sort of thing that suits Stephen as an immature character, and it’s entirely fitting for someone raised in and obsessed with Dublin as a focal point of his art; Joyce unaffectionately referred to the city as a “hemiplegia, or paralysis.” His art makes a consistent point of revealing the paralysis — one could say the stasis — of the city’s denizens. In the beginning of “Ulysses,” after the events of “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” and his explanation of the aesthetic theory, Stephen has developed a fear of bathing, his teeth are falling out, he lets others abuse him, and he’s failed as an artist so far. When I saw these consequences of Stephen’s static art obsession, there was little doubt in my mind that we were meant to distrust his aesthetic theory.
I still want to believe in this misreading, but I can’t, because Joyce himself seemingly condoned the aesthetic theory as a worthy contribution of the otherwise plagued mind of his character. Joyce even spoke with Gilbert and worked extensively with him on the guidebook. They almost certainly discussed his apparent use of the aesthetic theory while he wrote “Ulysses,” among every other aspect of the novel. Gilbert’s focus on it is likely indicative of the author’s intention for us to believe in the theory. This is to say, Stephen does suffer from the antisocial personality I before identified, but this suffering, as a side effect, enabled him to realize the “truth” of the inferiority of kinetic art.
My initial misreading of Stephen could only continue with a disregard for the author’s intentions, because for Joyce, stasis is different from paralysis, which stems from a lack of knowledge about one’s self. Stasis is different because it’s highly intellectual and self-conscious. Stephen is paralysed in his personal relationships, but not his artistic analyses. Accounting for this, I would say the contradictions of the theory are likely not merely dragging Stephen down, but challenging him to expand his mind further and reconcile all his different thoughts.
Now, following “The Death of the Author,” I could decide that “Ulysses” is my story to interpret and I can make what I want of it, but the resulting interpretation would be self-serving and uninformed. I don’t understand why people would exclusively like static art, so I would assume that they’re deluded and/or lying. And if any other readers disagree with me, it doesn’t matter, because it’s just my interpretation. Meaning is localized, distinct to every person’s head, and has no relationship to others, no ability to bridge the gap between us. If I insisted on denying the author’s intention, it would justify my ignorance, eliminate nuance and shut down discussion. If readers wish to avoid such indistinctions and misreadings as the one I have demonstrated, they will need to tolerate and understand that an author’s opinion can differ from theirs.
My misreading would fall under that class of “inspired” misreadings which create out of the author’s work, a different story based on their words, but not representative of them. Such misreadings are common and unavoidable sidesteps in the process of being guided by the author. They’re often fun to engage with, but serve more as daydreams than real criticism. Because they contradict, rather than building on or illuminating the author’s intentions, readers aiming at a truer understanding of a work of art should minimize them.
As for Joyce’s application of the aesthetic theory, we can indeed see a more obscured, mystified authorship in “Ulysses,” and — while much harder to follow — it is better for it in some ways. For instance, Joyce’s criticism of his culture, and particularly the Catholic Church were very noisy in “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”. About a fifth of the book is devoted to a clergyman’s long-winded and morbid description of hell to a group of traumatized pubescent boys. There’s little room to wonder about why that was included in the novel. It’s there to show how the Church enforces sexual repression. “Ulysses” is less black-and-white and less prone to taking sides. Stephen’s cynicism, which is representative of many concerns Joyce had in real life, is thoroughly countered by the irreverence of Buck Mulligan and the maturity of Leopold Bloom. I think this effect is exaggerated by critics such as Gilbert, though, who describe it as a diminishment of the author. Even though Stephen’s/Joyce’s cynicism is more thoroughly called out for its bitterness in “Ulysses,” the anti-cynic view also belongs to Joyce. Its inclusion in the novel reveals his intention to pit these perspectives against each other and illustrate the complexity of his mind, which cannot fully accept either. As Stephen responds to the question, “Do you believe your own theory?/—No, (he) said promptly.” It’s not that you can’t tell what the author intends, but that he makes way for the characters to shine, refuses to accept simple reductions and mystifies his intention. He doesn’t do this by eliminating himself, but by revealing more aspects of himself to be in conflict with each other.
It’s true that the author’s presence in a piece can prevent the reader from achieving that kind of immersion, but it doesn’t always do so, as long as they foster a sense of mystery and draw readers in. Conflict, drama, change — those elements that so often result in kinetic emotion — are the author’s tools in this respect as they attempt to immerse a reader in the text. Joyce’s writing lacks a sense for drama and change, depending on the readers to add meaning into scenes that don’t develop themselves very well. In “The Sisters,” for instance, the reader is meant to assume that the clergyman who died after suffering from a paralytic disease, is implied to have gone insane from that disease with the revelation that he was found talking to himself alone. As someone who talks to myself alone, I did not make that assumption, and thus didn’t understand what the ending of the story meant for the main character, who looked up to the priest and took the advice of his insane mind. Much of his immersion and meaning-making also depends on esoteric references. He often borrows meaning instead of building it himself. When Joyce’s intentions, and the dramatic elements of his writing are too obscure, his stories fail for me, and probably for most readers. He would fall on the abstruse end of writers, often struggling to get readers invested and thereby receive and engage with his intentions, although for the few readers who can push past this, he does succeed in signifying reality with his stories.
Reality is too complex to fully encompass in one text, so to signify reality (part of achieving immersion) in their writing, an author can either simplify or mystify. Good art is mysterious, and mystery makes the text feel real because that is the only way to capture the impossible complexity of reality. As a brief tangent, “unrealistic” art — such as surrealism, fantasy or science fiction — can easily signify reality, sometimes more easily than realistic art due to their often more pronounced environmental drama, which draws the reader in.
Good art should immerse the reader, thereby effectively communicating the author’s intentions. The first goal should be to immerse the reader in the storytelling; it should grab your attention and sustain it. Second, it should immerse you in its meaning and ideas. But unlike an essay, the primary way art immersively communicates ideas — not the exclusive way — is by attempting to induce the reader to generate the ideas themself. The author mystifies their writing; dances around the point and demonstrates it in its implicit and refined ways. They pit ideas and emotions against each other, but they don’t say “this is the point” because to do so prevents the reader from doing it themself, kills the complexity of the text, and labels it unreal within the reader’s mind.
Good art is not achieved by limiting the fields of human experience only to static emotions, but by blending a great variety of emotions as closely as possible. The intention of the author must be potent and well-defined to work in such implicit ways. One can say that they distrust authority quite simply, but to properly and completely communicate distrust of authority in a character takes a more involved effort. It has to be attended to by both the writer and reader, whose interest should first be excited using drama, then mystified by the complexity of the writing. The writer and the author work through the display together and come to an understanding.
There’s more work to be done to discover new terms for modern art, but I leave you with the implication that the human reader and the human author, together, not apart, need to be the panel of the conversation.
*AI writing represents the closest thing to “authorless” actual composition can probably get. The process through which AI “writes” is based on probability: asking “what word is most likely to come after this one,” and using human writing as the stockpile to determine that information. The main difference between this process and human writing, which also uses our exposure to language to determine how and in what order words should be ordered, is that humans have an idea that they’re trying to express with those words, an intention. Having an intention for your words is what makes a human writing “authored.” AI is mimicking writing with intention, but has none of its own, and is therefore not authored.
†“What is an Author?” by Michel Foucault
‡“The Death of the Author,” by Roland Barthes, translated by Stephen Heath
§Translated by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon because I don’t know French and neither probably do you
॥”A Course in General Linguistics,” by Ferdinand de Saussure
⁋The object of observation (word, image, sound, etc.), called a signifier, and the idea of the object in the mind of the beholder, called the signified, together form a “sign” through “signification”
