The Rebirth of the Author
You won’t believe what happens when ChatGPT meets French literary theory: the results will shock you!†
The Author died in 1967, murdered by an essay penned by a French literary theorist named Roland Barthes. Bearing the fitting title “The Death of the Author,” the essay rejects traditional literary criticism, which placed substantial interpretative weight on the Author’s biography and intentions.
For Barthes, assigning a text a single interpretation—namely, that of the Author is “to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the writing.” Killing the Author liberates texts, placing its meaning, its very value, into the hands of the Reader.
For Barthes, the writer of a text is a mere “scriptor,” an actor who
is born simultaneously with his text; he is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends his writing, he is in no way the subject of which his book is the predicate.
For Barthes, every text is “eternally written here and now,” drafted by a scriptor who has no special insights into its meaning.
ChatGPT has entered the room.
Intentions and the limits of knowledge
It’s hard to know someone’s intentions.
That’s a fairly well known problem in philosophy generally and for moral theory particularly. Indeed, the relationship between intentions and consequences is one of the great debates of 20th century moral philosophy.
Unpacking intentions is problem for traditional literary theory, as well.
Barthes begins his essay with a question about Sarrasine, a novella by Honoré de Balzac. Sarassine features a castrato posing as a woman. In speaking of the character, Balzac writes, “It was Woman, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive fears, her unprovoked bravado, her daring and her delicious delicacy of feeling.”
How, then, should we interpret that sentence? What are the author’s real intentions? Barthes points out that these are not easy questions to unpick.
Who is speaking in this way? Is it the story’s hero, concerned to ignore the castrato concealed beneath the woman? Is it the man Balzac, endowed by his personal experience with a philosophy of Woman? Is it the author Balzac, professing certain “literary” ideas of femininity? Is it universal wisdom? or romantic psychology?
In short, Barthes says, we cannot know whether a line uttered by a character represents the author’s views, that of the character, or something else entirely.
Only…can’t we?
It’s no particular stretch to assert that John Galt’s lunatic ravings about capitalism belong to Ayn Rand. But it’s not just hacky philosophy-disguised-as-novels that can be unpicked.
- Aslan is Jesus.
- Tolkien’s orcs are a stand in for the industrialized slaughter of WWI.
- David Copperfield is semi-autobiographical.
Entire genres—the satire, the allegory, the autobiography—rest upon readers understanding authorial intentions.
Barthes is absolutely right that some texts disguise the author’s intentions. It’s a style that’s especially prevalent in modernist and post-modernist literary fiction—exactly the sort of writing where the literary critic is most at home.
But it’s hardly representative of texts writ large.
Intentions matter
Consider a more everyday sort of example.
U.S. Customs and Border Patrol tweets a homophobic slur. Becky from accounting uses the same slur in a moment of agitation. In the abstract, someone hearing the two claims (rightly) finds them equally offensive.
But they are not equally problematic.
CBP is filled with would-be genocidal autocrats who carry guns and badges and regularly get away with torturing and murdering innocent people.
Becky from accounting imprinted on Kevin Smith movies as an irresponsible teen and forgets herself when she gets excited or annoyed.
The intentions of the author of a text matter.
What does Roland Barthes say about the author?
Roland Barthes was a French literary theorist who wrote about the concept of the “death of the author.” In his view, the author is not the ultimate authority on the meaning of a text, and the reader’s interpretation is just as valid as the author’s intended meaning. Barthes believed that the author’s personal intentions and biography are not relevant to the meaning of a text, and that a text should be understood based on its content and the way it is received by the reader.
— ChatGPT, responding to this subheading
My Twitter timeline is equal parts ChatGPT and “why are we still on this hellsite.” A small minority see ChatGPT as a powerful tool for think, a potential aid to research and writing. A much larger set takes a dimmer view, with reactions ranging from “machine learning is theft” to despair for the future of art to worries about the efficacy of pedagogical tools like the student essay.
I see ChatGPT as the embodiment (so to speak) of the ideal Barthesian scriptor.
For Barthes, all texts are “a tissue of fabric” drawn from “innumerable centers of culture.” No text is the product of a single, individual experience. Instead, Barthes says,
all writing is itself this special voice, consisting of several indiscernible voices, and…literature is precisely the invention of this voice, to which we cannot assign a specific origin.
A scriptor weaves together different bits of cultural cloth, producing something that, while new, is fundamentally a mixture of that which has come before. The scriptor adds no paricularly special meaning. The meaning is derived solely from the reader.
Or, perhaps, a script produces text from a massive training set, with all meaning derived from the reader.
Maybe algorithms drawing on machine learning will destroy art or force a complete rethinking of pedagogy. Perhaps they are stealing from others. Maybe they’ll come for white collar jobs, in the same way that automation has replaced many blue collar ones.
But maybe they’ll spark a reconsideration of the role of intention in wrestling meaning from a text, a return to a world in which the Author once again has things to say.
Perhaps the emergence of ChatGPT as Barthes’ perfect scriptor is a reductio ad absurdum of the Death of the Author.
Or maybe Barthes would have appreciated the irony if ChatGPT heralds the Rebirth of the Author.
† Subtitle authored by ChatGPT in response to the prompt “write a clickbait headline about chatGPT meeting french literary theory” (return)
