Without a conventional narrative structure, how much control does an author lose?
The above Q ^^ was addressed in this week’s symposium.
Although not worded in this exact way, I have found that this question / issue has been touched upon multiple times over the past two years here at RMIT. They just love it.
I remember in one of my classes last year, the tutor mentioned how J.K Rowling had recently declared in an interview that 1) Dumbledore was in fact gay and 2) Harry and Hermione should have gotten together.
Those claims despite being strangely irrelevant, actually shed light on a different issue. The tutor had explained that this was an example of the ‘death of the author’ meaning that once a book has been written, made available for others to interpret and movie adaptations to be created, the author becomes somewhat insignificant. She believed that J.K Rowling by making these claims was in actual fact claiming back ownership of her work. She was reminding the world that she was the creator and she had the power to decide how her work should be received.
‘The Death of the Author‘ was a novel written by French theorist Roland Barthes. Barthes believed that a piece of writing and its author are two separate entities. The persona of the author is irrelevant, so by believing that they are inextricably linked is to place a limit on the text itself. By separating the two, readers are able to interpret writing in anyway they wish and aren’t biased by the expectations of the author. Barthes emphasised the fact that the meaning behind a piece of work is in the readers hands and not in the intentions of the creator.
So if you were to approach the question from Barthes perspective, it could be said that once an author produces a piece of work and presents it to the public, they loose all control entirely. It no longer belongs to them, but rather to the reader’s imagination.
– Caitlin
