Hi, readers. I just want to say, that I disagree with Roland Barthes' idea on the death of the author. Yea, I accidentally studied literature during my undergraduate years and they kept convincing me that the most modern kind of literary criticism is the New Criticism. The one neglecting the author's influence on the text they've written. It's because Barthes' idea suggesting that it is not objective to criticize the work of literature by involving the writer's background and point of view. What should be criticized is the text itself.
Unfortunately, Mr. Barthes, I am not convinced.
And Mr. Bathes' idea, is the one I kept on fighting against during my college years back then. I'm still against it until now.
Previously, long before college, I'm a writer. I write stories, poems, essays, anything I want to write. And I can tell you that I believe most "TRUE" writers don't have any particular obvious purpose in writing. We just want to write what we think and what we feel because it is much better to express them in writings than in any other ways in delivering our messages.
Thus, our writings are parts of us, the writers. Writings were born from their writers. You cannot easily separate writings from their writers. Neglecting the author's background or in other words "killing the author" in your criticism, is a humiliation of the nature of writing. Even if it's in the name of objectivity, I'm still against it. Because everyone is subjective when it comes to personal ideas and feelings. And the writing of literature is the personal connection between the text and the author. If you try to make it scientific, you ruin the beauty nature of writing.
If you criticize or interpret literary works in this way, your critics and interpretation will ruin the world that has been created by the author in the text. For example, I've read many interpretations on Seno Gumira Ajidarma's Wong Asu. Most of them exaggerate on the sexual parts of the story. Even Djenar Maesa Ayu tried too hard to create her Wong Asu version in a more sensual way. I guess they're just too much. Seno Gumira, as we all know, is a reporter. He reports news, deals with many people DIRECTLY, and creates stories about those people he's dealing with. He's not a biology teacher or a porn magazine provider who wants to teach you about sex. He wants to tell you about humans' lives. Moreover, he writes in the end of the story "Sayangilah Anjing, Sayangilah Sesama Makhluk Tuhan." (Love Dogs. Love Fellow God's Creatures). So I guess he already CLEARLY concludes his purpose in writing the story. If people neglects this message he writes (even if it is WRITTEN on the text), just because they believe that "the author is dead" and finally lead them to some irrelevant interpretations, then what is the purpose of literary criticism then? To understand literary works just as you please?
As a linguistic-addict who is interested in pragmatics the most, I always believe that we cannot simply translate utterances from utterances themselves. There is context connected to every utterance produced. We cannot neglect this context, otherwise we will not get the message of the utterance, or worse, wrongly interpret the message in the utterance.
This also applies in understanding literary works. If you don't know the context of the text, you will be "lost in the text" itself. So you must know something beyond the text. Author is just one of the things that you cannot separate from the text even though it "seems" to be separated.
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