Roland Barthes, in characteristically dense fashion, makes a great point about the relationship between the author and the reader. In a way, the text or piece of work created by the author rests upon a history of personal interpretation, to which the author develops their own personal interpretation, and then the reader takes the author’s interpretation and gives it their own meaning. Barthes argues that writing has no singular voice because a text is a mix of voices that has its origins across cultures, languages, and even past texts; he states how “no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture” (pg. 4). Any given text, thus, is just a blend of existing ideas. I agree with Barthes’ point that no text is truly original. Every writer absorbs and recombines earlier texts, cultural codes, and language they did not invent. Barthes alludes to the rise of individualism in modern society and how the idea of the author is a mark of the modern era, as stories were not tied to individual authors in older societies.
If we agree that no text is actually original because each existing text is just a blend of ideas, then we must also come to the understanding that maybe, the author must have been a reader once, thus applying their own interpretation to some other “unoriginal”, blended piece of work. An author, when developing their own work, will then depend on their knowledge of past interpretations to create the basis of their own work, which in turn, becomes a work that represents their own thoughts and interpretations. I argue that if we think of the author as an individual who was a reader themselves, we bring the role of the reader to the foreground. The author almost ceases to exist if we start to define their role as “someone who was once a reader.” We can stop focusing on the author, as there is no true, final meaning to any given text; the text can be interpreted in many different ways. If the author’s voice is itself the product of their own history as a reader, then authorship is simply reading that was eventually written down. This means the act of interpretation was never the author’s alone, but belongs equally to every reader who comes after.
In the game walkthrough of The Beginner’s Guide, Wreden, the narrator, marks a moment where Coda, the game designer, has implemented a feature where if the player walks through a beam, the player starts floating through space.
The narrator explains his own interpretation of what the game designer was trying to convey, but his interpretation clearly ends up being his own because. The narrator states: “Coda identifies something human about it, like how small it makes you feel in the face of this larger chaotic system…I don’t even know, I have no idea what he was thinking…” (Wreden, The Beginners Guide | Complete Game No Commentary, 6:41 – 6:56).
Wreden is remarkably honest about how, in the end, he simply does not know what Coda is trying to convey through their game design. Despite repeated exposure to Coda’s games and game development style, the narrator ultimately cannot access Coda’s interpretation, so he has to fill the silence with his own meaning. What he presents as an analysis of Coda’s game is really his own interpretation. This maps directly onto Barthes, as the narrator functions as a reader who mistakes himself for an authority on the author’s intent. But the moment he says “I have no idea,” he accidentally confesses what Barthes argues from the start. The author’s intention is and should be permanently unavailable, and any meaning assigned to the text is the reader’s own construction.
However, after doing a little Googling, I found that Wreden himself actually created this game, and that Wreden is actually Coda. I think Wreden takes on an interesting role within the relationship of author and reader (or game developer and player). Wreden essentially split himself in two: the author (Coda) and the reader (the narrator). In doing so, he shows that even an author, when reflecting on their own work, cannot fully recover their original intent. They become a reader of themselves. The narrator’s failed attempt to decode Coda is really Wreden admitting that authorship, once the work is made, is already lost. The meaning was never his to keep.
Thus, the role of the reader becomes most prevalent to the argument. The meaning of a text is created by the reader, not the author. If the author is simply a reader who eventually wrote, then the act of reading was always the more fundamental act. Meaning was never stored in the author; it was always being made by the reader.
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