If you’ve ever spent some time in literary circles, you must’ve heard about the death of the author. In the 1967 English translation of his original French essay, Roland Barthes debuts the theory that author and work must be separated, and the work interpreted without much reference to its creator. After quoting from French author and playwright Honoré de Balzac’s novella Sarrasine, Barthes asks (emphases mine):

“Who is speaking in this way? Is it the story's hero…is it the man…is it the author…professing certain "literary" ideas…Is it universal wisdom?...It will always be impossible to know, for the good reason that all writing is itself this special voice, consisting of several indiscernible voices, and that literature is precisely the invention of this voice, to which we cannot assign a specific origin: literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.”

These are good questions, ones I agree should be asked by every discerning reader. The problem, though, is that the answers Barthes offers are not robust. It is not “impossible to know” what voice speaks in a text—we may not be sure, but we may discern (and do so intelligently, with sufficient foreknowledge of allied matters) who speaks in a text. That is literally what the whole field of English Literature (or literatures in other languages) rests upon. And sure, we may not be able to “assign a specific origin,” but that, in itself, does not immediately make literature a “neuter…where all identity is lost,” especially not that of “the body that writes it.”

When I learned of this concept, the first question that came to my mind was the same I ask with most things: Who profits from the erasure of the authorial identity, and who suffers from the refusal to bind author and text? The answer should be obvious, but in case it’s not, I may simply point to how every piece of artistic media, literature inclusive, in the history of humankind, has been employed for purposes both good and ill. Literature has been equal parts a source of joy, progression and furtherance, as well as a backbone for erasures, wars and regression. To disconnect author from work is to assume that the author has no intent, that the author makes art for art’s sake. But the author always has intent, even when it’s subconscious. The fact of this hasn’t stopped this point-of-view from being accepted and employed at all levels of literary engagement, though—from institutions of teaching and practice to the public sphere.

So, to phrase this differently: When an author-as-person is revealed to be someone of ill-intent and ill-will, what do we do? Still consider them dead, their art disconnected and standing on its own? Or do we engage with the art with acknowledgement of—or, better yet, through the lens of—who and where it came from?

*

I’ve never been to a big-venue music concert. When I recently let this info slip at work, a colleague who’d just been telling me about his recent visit to a Taylor Swift Eras stop was aghast. Did I not love any artist enough to attend their concert? Of course! I could totally see myself investing in going to watch Janelle Monáe, Paramore, Rihanna, Aṣa, Lous and the Yakuza, to name a few, perform live. But my colleague, once he'd recovered from the incredulity, was of the belief that not even once attempting to watch these artists perform meant that perhaps I didn’t actually care about them as much as I thought.

That’s not quite the case (I avoid most concerts because I struggle with crowds & ear-blasting noise), but even if it was, I wonder: Does it really matter? If one loves an artist just an okay amount, does that de-legitimize their enjoyment of the artist’s work? I understand the origins of his position, though. I can see how choosing not to make a significant personal investment in an artist and/or their work may be interpreted as the lesser choice. Afterall, we live in an age of fan hives and armies, an age where anything but effusive praise of and uncritical support for an artist (or any other person of celebrity status) is often unwelcome.

These same tendencies are also very much present in the literary world. Authors, unhelped by the constant push to promote the self alongside (and even more so than) the work, have to become “personalities” in ways that are not always detachable from their work. (We can talk about how this often pressurizes and complexifies matters for authors from historically marginalized communities, but I digress). Authors, in essence, increasingly occupy the same space as performers who sell art by also selling an image of themselves. And readers, increasingly, occupy the same space as fans, consumers who increasingly establish a relationship with the person as much as they do with the work.

And therein lies the first conundrum: because by building this kind of relationship with the artist—sometimes even more so than their work—the very process of reading begins to shift, becomes less of its own activity and more of one filtered through the lens of “What relationship do I have with this author?” The author, at some level, begins to precede the work. On its own, that is not an issue of significant concern—people have always read and supported their favourite authors. This only starts to come under the microscope when, one day, the reader suddenly learns that they’ve been in a relationship with, say, a not-so-great person, or even more commonly, a person who is quite human, with all the blind spots and fallibility to go with it.

When your favourite author suddenly becomes “outed” as “problematic” (to whatever extent that term can capture various positions on the moral totem pole), it can feel like a betrayal. Suddenly, the reader is not just a reader, but a jilted lover. It doesn’t matter that the author behaving badly hasn’t actually jilted us, and that “good writing” and “good stories” have never been synonymous with “good person”. We have opened our hearts and made room for the person beyond the story, and therefore will feel the pain of an imminent break-up. It’s unlikely that we will pick up said author’s work in the future without completing some form of mental reconfiguration.

And therein lies the most important lesson: that the art, and its maker, are so intertwined that it’s truly impossible to completely separate one from the other. And yet, in the same way, it’s just as impossible to completely separate the action of reading from the reader and their thoughts, feelings, and positionality.

This, and many other concerns surrounding our current reading dispositions, is at the heart of a recent essay collection by Elaine Castillo, titled How to Read Now.

I’ve spent the last few weeks noodling through the gems in this book and their tangential concerns. I won’t venture into review territory here, as others have done better justice to that than I ever will. I particularly enjoyed Kathy Chow in the LA Review of Books boiling down the collection’s ethos to a simple question (“Who is this writing for?”), and one goodreads user usefully getting at the book’s essence in a lengthy sentence: 

“Castillo asks us to meet her vulnerability with our own, which is, I think, at bottom, precisely the kind of reading and seeing practice that she powerfully gestures at in these gorgeous essays: to read with openness, with depth, with constant complexity, to read as an opportunity to reiterate our closeness to each other, to strengthen our connectivity, to take up each other’s stories and open ourselves to each other’s silences—instead of an opportunity to shift burden, absolve debt, or refuse the intimacy of sitting in discomfort.” —@chai on Goodreads

Instead, I want to hone in on one specific passage in the chapter, “The Limits of White Fantasy,” wherein Castillo explains why some authors, after writing fantastic narratives about oppressed peoples defeating evil villains, sometimes so easily go down the slippery slope of becoming near-oppressors themselves (content note for allusions to rape): 

“I’ve personally never been particularly interested in separating the art from the artist, on impulse of exceedingly mild intellectual rigor, which has only ever served the powerful and protected abusers (we never hear about separating the art from the artist when a writer of colour wants her work to be read beyond the autobiographical, for example—people seem very keen to connect the art and the artist in that case—but god forbid someone tell the fuckboy who wants to read you another mediocre love poem that Pablo Neruda freely admitted to raping a Sri-Lankan chamber maid during his posting as a diplomat there). What I would point out, however, is that this very dynamic—taking stories of oppression and marginalization, stripping them of most of their racial and historical specificity (leaving just enough to add a frisson of exotic/erotic flavor, and recasting them with white bodies—is at the heart of most white fantasy, and thus is also the source of the incongruence that minority readers later struggle with, when those authors turn out to care little at all about the oppression they once so beautifully illustrated.

The truth is, these worlds may have only ever nominally been interested in oppression and difference—that shallow, cosplay-like understanding of oppression makes itself clear when authors like Rowling are taken to task for their actual opinions on marginalized people. I can no longer muster up disappointment when white authors whose works supposedly deal in equality and justice show themselves (and the reactionary readers who love them) to not be remotely interested in either equality or justice—not when both the inception and the material effect of that work necessitate lifting from the historical struggles of racial, sexual and economic minorities and replacing those bodies with white, cis, straight characters. Were these works ever truly concerned by justice to begin with? Or were they simply enamored with an appropriative of its language—its culture, its aesthetic, its narrative style? Oppression chic, equalitycore.”

from How To Read Now, pages 126-127

Oppression chic and equalitycore are not terms I would’ve ever believed would be so illuminating to me, but the moment I heard both, they immediately cemented the mixed feelings I’ve had about certain stories I’ve witnessed being mass-embraced without the accompanying critical engagement they deserve. Worse yet, oppression chic and equalitycore have taken so many forms in the global publishing world (specifically in the major English-language markets of the US and UK) that they’ve become synonymous with certain tropes or genres. The lowly or oppressed rising up to overthrow an oppressive monarchy is a staple of sci-fi and fantasy. In horror, the defeat of a monster by any means possible. In crime or thrillers or spy, the defeat of “bad guys” by “good guys.” And in the barrage of these narratives that wear the fashion of anti-oppression and pro-justice, we forget to look at where else in these very same narratives the storytelling is pointedly closemouthed about oppression and injustice.

I could point out a myriad of examples, but a cursory filtering of the 2-3-star Goodreads reviews of many overwhelmingly popular novels in, say, sci-fi and fantasy, will reveal at least one or two reviewers pointing out places where the author’s blind spots show. Some authors will have more blind spots than others, and when these authors have editors, publicists, reviewers, etc with similar blind spots, we end up with stories where the oppression is more chic than not, the equality more core than not. I’ve read novels that yell against caste-based oppression in their imagined world, while not only presenting rampant misogyny and homophobia in the same world, but also letting it go unexamined by the story to whatever level. If I could speak to Barthes, I’d ask him: “When an author writes a character that acts in ill-will against others but the text offers no signal for the reader to recognize an examination of said ill-will, where else do we attribute our understanding of this ill-will other than to the author who offers it?”

Perhaps it is due to this realization that we—authors and readers alike—will be forced to do this work of complexifying, that we attempt to find solace in positions of less discomfort. It’s a fantasy world, anything is possible, not everything is political. But that’ll be the wrong kind of solace. It’ll be doing the very thing Castillo describes: presenting a cosplay-level understanding of oppression, a wearing of the skin of the real-world oppressed. It is wilfully refusing to engage with the very essence of what art is for: to read with openness, with depth, with constant complexity, as that goodreads reviewer says, rather than to shift burden, absolve debt, or refuse the intimacy of sitting in discomfort. It is choosing to participate in oppression chic and equalitycore for the duration of reading; to be freed from thematic pressure to orient toward a real-world concern like actual oppression or justice, while being comfortable with an appropriation of, in Castillo’s words, its language, its culture, its aesthetic, its narrative style.

Defenders of not only this kind of reading, but also this kind of authorship, practice a deficient kind of literary citizenship. Perhaps there is a fear of letting go of the relationship one has built with the author who writes this way, a fear of examining the self, of an honest answer to the question, “What does it say about me that I didn’t realise or don’t mind that the author writes this way?” In answering this question, one will become forced to acknowledge the ties that bind the reader and their reading positionality, the story and its connections to the real world, and the author and their own positionality.

To strip away any of these aspects does not constitute a crime, but it is a wilful acknowledgement of only halfway participating in the consumption of art. We may prefer, for a while, or forever, to sort, sift and separate, to opt out of looking this truth in the face because we don’t have to. And truly, we don’t have to. But these truths will remain, whether we dress them in different, more palatable clothes or not. And honest, good literary citizenship requires all of us—reader, creator, publisher, everyone who participates—to turn our heads toward these discomforts, breathe deep, and look.