About a week ago, I was flicking through a copies of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love and Other Demons in a bookshop in Nottingham, wondering whether to buy them. I remembered a lecturer back in November ordering us all to read some Gabriel García Márquez, promising we would not regret it. But in the end I bought another book, one originally written in English (these are the constraints that come with constantly thinking about what you could write about in an exam, in combination with student budget).
Gabriel García Márquez died yesterday. Upon hearing of his death, I felt guilty that I'd never read any of his work while he was alive. A similar thing has happened many times in the last year: I read Things Fall Apart around the time of Chinua Achebe's death and The Wasp Factory around the time of Iain Banks's death. Before he died last August, Seamus Heaney was merely the GCSE poet I didn't study. It's difficult to say whether it's a good or a bad thing that many people only read an author once he or she has died; the texts have new audiences, allowing them to become a more permanent part of literature, but it always seems a shame that the writer wasn't alive to see the effect of his or her work.
The real 'death of the author', then, far from any abstract Barthesian concept, highlights the cultural prominence we place on authors. We can critically detach a work from the person that wrote it, can eradicate any consideration of 'intention' and chant 'it is language which speaks, not the author' until we are blue in the face and have started to question whether 'author' is even a word. But, outside of an essay or a dissertation, literature is something that connects people, and real people, not just people as robotic networks of cultural experience. Literature, as it is felt on a daily basis, is about people writing books and people reading them; stories, experiences, language, the way that we communicate.
An author's death, like any other person's death, is a reminder of the fragility of individual human existence. An author's words leave a trail, both the shadows of a living, breathing person, and simultaneously so much more than them. Books are certain places and times and attitudes once their authors have died, but we continually relocate them and reidentify them with the people that wrote them, regardless of whether these books reflected the true places and times and attitudes of their authors. What would Sylvia Plath's poetry be without her immortal presence standing just behind it? It would still be wonderful poetry, but (again, outside of essay-land), there is, at least to me, something fascinating about Plath as a person that casts light (or darkness) on everything she wrote. Most people who read, watch and appreciate Shakespeare would be interested to find out exactly what it was he did before he appeared in the London theatre scene in the 1590s. People are always fascinated by people, even if it is only in the bikini shots in glossy magazines or in some weird social media trend.
The 'death of the author', in popular not literary terms, is an opportunity for celebration of the achievements of an individual, achievements that influence and form part of the body of literature that we are able to study critically. It seems ridiculous that Chinua Achebe is regularly attributed with the title 'father of African literature', and that Gabriel García Márquez is used as a similar poster-boy for Latin American literature, despite the fact that these writers only became active in the 20th century. It seems, at least to me, that statements like these are the fruits of a blinkered, Anglocentric vision, denying the literatures that shaped writers like Achebe or García Márquez (and even this statement is painfully overgeneralised!) However, at least these somewhat limited labels open up the discourse, allowing other authors and texts to emerge from where they may previously have been ignored, and allowing us to find fairer and more successful ways of discussing literature and author and culture.
Of course, I will now go on and read One Hundred Years of Solitude, and surely that can only be a good thing. In one of the multiple articles and obituaries surrounding this 'death of the author', Gabriel García Márquez is reported as saying:
'I don't really like to say this because it never sounds sincere, but I would really have liked for my books to have been published after my death, so I wouldn't have to go through all this business of fame and being a great writer.'
I would rather conclude with a quotation from his novels or short stories, but unfortunately I came across this 'business of fame', the words of others, before Gabriel García Márquez's own words. However, the prospect of these words, and the words of any writer, being discovered by new readers including myself, is the reason the popular cultural status of the author as a fellow human, writing to be read, remains important.
