Modern literary criticism has worked hard to remove the privileged position of the author in the interpretation of their works. Many people trained to follow its dictates often do so ignorant of the philosophical presuppositions it suggests. Yet these premises should be disturbing to any Christian. Here, however, I am concerned with only one of them, and the one which is the most important: what exactly are we to make of the relationship of an author with the story and characters they have created? It is analogous to the relationship between God with us. If an author does not have authority over their own work, then the author of creation, God, does not have any authority over his. Moreover, when people suggest the critical idea of “the death of the author,” they are following through with the philosophical and cultural “death of God” which preceded it. God, and the lack of authority or relevance of God in the modern world, is the real foundation of modern literary criticism. For if the author has no authority over his or her creation, then God, the author of the greatest story of all – the story of salvation history – has no authority over that story. By rejecting the relevance of the author, one is rejecting the relevance of God in history.
Indeed, this is what one would expect from a relativistic culture which has drunk from the cup of nihilism. When the author of life is rejected, then all that one has left is a bleak world view with no more meaning than what an individual makes for it. The same, however, becomes true in sub-creation. Since there is no ultimate creator, then the notion of creator and the authority a creator would have if he existed has been rejected. An author cannot be seen as a sub-creator; what, then, is an author? It is someone who needs to be removed; we should discuss the “scriptor” instead of the author. Indeed, the notion of an author is a “tyrannical” notion because the author as authority creates unjust limits on a text and the individuals who would read it. This is exactly what Barthes understood and applauded in his essay promoting “The Death of the Author“:
Once the Author is gone, the claim to “decipher” a text becomes quite useless. 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.[…] Thus literature (it would be better, henceforth, to say writing), 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.Why cannot the individualism and relativism underlying this interpretive scheme be seen by many of its present-day adherents? In part, it is cultural. We have been led to believe in the autonomy of the individual, that anything and anyone who would limit that autonomy must be as a tyrant. Since the author of a text would limit my interpretation and use of that text, they are working to enslave me, the reader, and so to combat such bondage, I must strike out and proclaim, even more, my own freedom and autonomy over such limits. They can have any opinion they want over their own work, but they can’t demand its adherence by others because such a demand destroys freedom. This understanding of autonomy is idolatrous, and it is no wonder it is used to reject God’s authority to make moral demands upon us.This is not to suggest we have no free will, and with it, no sense of personal autonomy. But it must be seen only as finite freedom in relation to the infinite freedom of God. “Only if man, aware of autonomy, detaches himself from the realm of all-embracing divine freedom and sets himself up against it does this secularization (or de-sacralization) become a Titanism that is forgetful of God.” Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: IV: The Action. trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), 475. It is the over-stretching of that autonomy which we find in today’s world, because there is no proper authority, no sense of limit, which we see or accept. Order cannot exist because there is no God; there is no proper reading for a text because there is no such thing as authority. It is in this framework that C.S. Lewis criticized T.S. Eliot. “Surely it is natural that I should regard Eliot’s work as a very great evil. He is the very spear head of that attack on peras which you deplore” C.S. Lewis, Letter to Paul Elmer More in The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis: Volume II. ed. Walter Hooper (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004), 163.The chaos which develops is the chaos of a relativism without authority. In literary criticism, it leads to the death of the author, and this can only exist in a society where its metaphysical equivalent, the death of God, is lived out as a given.
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