Another famous idea associated with postmodernism is “The Death of the Author”, announced by Roland Barthes in his famous essay of that title, published in 1968.
Barthes attacks the idea that the meaning of a text is fixed by the author’s intentions. In particular, he takes issue with the idea of the author having God-like authority:
We know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the Author-God), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations.
He argues that believing in the Author as the source of meaning limits the text:
To give an Author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the writing.
For us as Christians, this immediately raises implications for how we approach the Bible. If there are no fixed meaning to texts, just the many and varied interpretations of the readers, how can God speak to us authoritatively through the Bible?
But more than this, Barthes goes on to draw a connection from denying the author as the giver of fixed meaning to a text, to denying God as the giver of fixed meaning to the world, saying:
“by refusing to assign to the text (and to the world as text) a “secret:’ that is, an ultimate meaning, liberates an activity which we might call counter-theological, properly revolutionary, for to refuse to arrest meaning is finally to refuse God and his hypostases, reason, science, the law.”
As Christians, can we just say “Barthes was wrong, there is actually a God, and so the author determines meaning after all?” I don’t think so. Barthes had a point, in that authors aren’t infallible in communicating their intentions; meaning is sometimes unclear and confused – the Author isn’t God.
But if we approach the idea of the Author from a Christian perspective, we’ll see that we don’t have to choose between the Author-God and the death of the Author.
The Bible tells us both that we are made in the image of God, and that we are finite and Fallen. Because we are made in God’s image, we should expect to be able to communicate meaning through language, because God is truth and he is the Word.
But we also recognise that our ability to communicate is limited; we don’t always say what we mean or mean what we say; we don’t have absolute control through our intentions over the meaning of what we write. We are limited, we get it wrong, we miscommunicate.
This brings me on to a wider point: even postmodernism in its most nihilistic forms has something to tell us. In postmodernism’s suspicion of ultimate truth and meaning, we can hear an echo of the words of Ecclesiastes, where the teacher proclaims “Meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless!” The Bible itself tells us that life “under the sun”, that is, without revelation from God, is vapour, a chasing after the wind. There is a place for the insights of postmodernism, because it describes the brokenness of a world under the shadow of the Fall.
Of course, as Christians, we cannot accept it as a total description of reality. We believe in the Son of God who has come from beyond the sun, and in the story of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, in the big story of Creation, Fall and Redemption, we have a source of hope and meaning. But as well as trying to bring hope to a postmodern world, we need to listen to the realities it describes.
Also, we can work to undo the damage of the Fall through Jesus’ redemptive power, through his Spirit at work in us. For example, when it comes to meaning and language, we can redeem them by using them truthfully and lovingly, rather than deceptively and as a power game.
To return to Barthes, the Author isn’t dead or divine, but human – finite and fallen but redeemable.
- Full text of The Death of the Author essay.