Authorship and Masterpiece's Breakup via Barthes

I am intrigued by the power struggles between authorship and work that Barthes presents in his piece "The Death of the Author." Barthes paints this relationship as a bad romance. The author is constantly being held responsible for the work's actions,  the work is seemingly dependent on the authors support as it is being interpreted by critics and readers, and as a solution, Barthes comes in as Dr. Phil and buries the relationship, by demanding the death of the author so that the text may be judged objectively by the reader. But is this author death really necessary for the reader to judge a text objectively? Can a reader not understand the inspiration for a work without sacrificing objectivity?

Barthes opens his argument by explaining that this author death begins within the writing process itself, "as soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself, this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins."(875) Barthes is arguing that the author begins to die because writing occupies a space where identity is lost in order for the text to be internalized by the reader. From this perspective asking any insight into the authors inspiration for a text would be redundant because authorship Barthes argues has no influence on the outcome of the way the text is interpreted, it simply is. Yet, the tone of a work argues against this point. While the author certainly cannot tell a person how to interpret the words on the page, the tone and diction the author chooses gives the author agency in leading readers to particular interpretations of texts. I can understand Barthes point that the way we discuss literature is way to centrally focused on making connections between author's failures and their works, (he discusses van Gough's madness and Tchaikovsky's vice as examples (875)), but I hesitate to argue that this means we should ignore authorship completely for the sake of an objective reading.

While I agree with Barthes that we cannot hold authors accountable for a complete explanation of a text because just as much weight rests on our, the reader's, interpretation, authors cannot inextricably be removed from a text. Although we should not waste time trying to prove that Edgar allen Poe is the speaker in "The Raven,"it would be ludicrous to suggest that the tone of "The Raven" not tell us something about the the dark emotions the author experienced in writing the piece. While drawing this conclusion surely invites in a situation that might complicate a readers objectivity, it also provides an important context for the work at hand. For this reason I do not agree that the author should die for the sake of reader interpretation, but rather, we should be more cautious in our approach at understanding the separation between author and masterpiece.

-Sophia Koehler-Derrick