The Death of the Author: How should Literature be interpreted?
These are some of my thoughts about how books should be interpreted, from the perspective of a book's "meaning" or its symbolism. The way I interpret a book is considered out-dated by academics, but this is a quick explanation of how professionals interpret books today, and then explain my approach. I think the modern academic approach is valid, but only in certain contexts.

This doesn't apply to how entertaining a book is. Any book might be enjoyable to read, but when you dig deeper into a book to try to uncover deeper signficance and meaning, the method used to do this is not just a blind journey of personal taste and opinion. There is a path, sort of like a map, used along the way to guide you. Symbolism and meaning assume a collective process, that many people can agree on, not just appealing to random personal opinions.

There was once a French philosopher named Roland Barthes, and in the year 1967 he published a small essay about how literature should be interpreted and judged. He called his essay "La mort de l'auteur", "The Death of the Author" and this small essay completely changed the way books are read and interepreted today by academia. But while the ideas he wrote about in this essay are widely used today amongst literary critics, I still am not sure I can agree with it. I think about his idea a lot when I read books, but I still cannot fully accept it.

His idea works like this:

First of all, his essay is quite short, and an English translation of it can be read here:

Death of the Author

Traditionally, if someone reads a book and they want to learn what the message of the book is, they will want to learn something about the author. They will learn about what the author valued and felt when the book was written, and they might want to learn something about the life of the author. These details should then help the reader understand the book more clearly. The thoughts and feelings of the author, and his or her life-history, are naturally helpful in understanding the book, it is assumed.

But Roland Barthes said that this approach to understanding literature, or understanding any Art, is wrong. Like a good Frenchman who loves a Revolution, he said he wanted to "liberate the text from the tyranny of the author"....!

He argued that after a book is written, the author is "dead". After the book is written, all that exists are letters on a page. The author is no longer important. The story stands by itself, and the meaning of the book comes from the person who reads it, and not from the person who wrote it. The author doesn't "own" the book anymore. The author is simply the person who held the pen while the book was created. The book passed through the mind of the author, but the reader should never need to know anything about the author, since the author's thoughts and feelings are irrelevant in understanding the book. The only relevant thing needed to understand the book is what the reader thinks and feels, not what the author thinks and feels.

So, following this idea, when someone reads "The Zahir" by Paulo Coelho, and they want to understand the meaning of the book, they should never, ever try to learn anything about Paulo Coelho. They should not ask him to explain the book, and anything he says about the book carries no more authority than anyone who reads his book. Messages and meaning are never put in the book by the author, they are only put there by the reader, according to Barthes.

One of the reasons for this idea is that, sometimes, a book can contain more messages than the author may realize. For example, when Da Vinci painted The Mona Lisa he was probably just painting the face of a woman who was sitting in his studio. But he was also reflecting the changing cultural attitudes of his time, when people began to focus their attention less on religious things and more on physical things. So his painting contained this larger theme, even if he didn't realize it. His art contained more "meaning" than he realized. So, in this sense, the Art stands independent of the artist.

Roland Barthes said that everything that an author thinks and feels is received from his or her environment. No ideas or feelings are "born naked" in the mind of the author. Thoughts and feelings always come from outside of the mind, from the cultural environment the author lives in. These experiences and feelings are filtered through the mind of the author, and the best way to understand a book is to understand these cultural influences, and not the mind of the author that these influences pass through.

But this is my objection to this idea: if I agree with this idea then it is never possible to be wrong when interpreting a book. Every view is right, no matter how trivial. It allows any reader's interpretation to be equally valid as anyone else's, even if an interpretation is totally ridiculous. If a man sits in a bar and reads The Zahir and he interprets the book to be an allegory about how beer is made, then his understanding is correct. If I read the book and I interpret the book to be about how to open my heart to the power of Love, my interpretation is also correct. Both views are totally equal. If the author is "dead", then if the book is about beer to one man, and if it is about spirtuality to another man, then both of these views are equally right.

I do not agree with this. Much of Art today is judged against the idea that there is no absolute, objective standard against which anything should be judged. But I disagree. I do agree with Barthes that a book can contain deeper meaning than the author may realize. Some authors will say that "the book wrote itself". I have experienced taking a pencil in my hand and starting to draw, without knowing what I will draw, and I can be surprised by the result. Sometimes the "picture draws itself". So I agree that Art can have its own power, beyong my control.

But I think it is also possible to be wrong. It is possible to misunderstand a book. I think I am right if I say to someone that this book is not about beer, it is about spirtuality. But Roland Barthes would say no. If the book is about beer to a reader, then the book really is about beer. There is no way for any reader to ever be wrong. There is no "right" interpretation of anything.

I think it is possible to be wrong when interpreting a book. But, according to the modern approach to interpreting literature, no one can ever be wrong. If one person loves a book and another person hates the same book, that book has no value on its own. It is both good and bad at the same time, and we can never ask the author what he or she meant when it was written to help us. And I think this is ridiculous.

Are all interpretations are equal, no matter how silly? Or can someone learn something deeper about a book by learning about the author? Does learning about Paulo Coelho and his experiences helps in understanding his books? Or is a reader's own reaction all that is ever need to interpret any book?

I have been reading a bit these past few days about Paulo Coelho's personal history, and I think that this is very helpful in understanding what he writes. But the modern French art-world says that "The Author is Dead". None of his personal details are important. But I say no, the Author is always alive...