In PWR 1, I wrote a piece titled “Here’s Why I Shun Harry Potter, and You Should Too.” To write this thinly-disguised rant, I had to debate whether one can separate art from the artist. In The Death of the Author, Barthes labels literature “the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.” Barthes posits that stripping accreditation or intent from a work removes the author’s identity from the piece—that separating art from the artist (or author, in this case) is not only possible, but a “trap” into which all literature falls. Fundamentally, I disagree: the author’s presence persists within their phrasing, their pacing, their literary devices deployed… It’s the author’s personal imprints that shifts words into art. Barthes believes that textual meaning must come from “not the author… but the reader.” While I don’t disagree, Barthes leaves out a critical component: prior to a reader creating meaning themselves, the author must craft an environment that fosters the ability to do so. Barthes forgets that the ability of a reader to bring in their own experiences and create their own interpretations relies on the author’s desire to permit the reader to do such.
Barthes’s birth of the reader involves shifting focus from author to reader to create meaning from work. But consider the nature of open-endedness within works: an author has the ability to be explicit, to bluntly state opinions/takeaways and end it there—minimizing reader interpretability. Sure, readers can form opinion and disagree with the author on the message stated, but that differs in result from Barthes’s shunning of attempts to “decipher” the author’s intent. I both watched a playthrough of The Beginner’s Guide and played Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and The Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist; in the former, the player follows as a narrator describes their friend’s games, and attributes meaning to their content, even going so far as disobeying the original creator’s wishes and modifying the game to do so.
In the latter, the player follows along as an ever-increasingly-stressed narrator loses control of their story/game, and the player can create their own meaning by disobeying the narrator—at least, that’s what my peers believe (see 1,2,3,4,5,6). I disagree. I zoom out.
Arrival at these conclusions from playing these games requires considering the games’ narrators as the author. However, contrary to Barthes’s methodology, I look to the authors’ past work on The Stanley Parable, particularly its metagame nature, and conclude differently. The narrators are not the authors of their story, but yet another component of the story which manifests itself as the game being played. The authors‘ (Davey Wreden and William Pugh’s) spirits are imprinted within both works: both games include a steam page with metagame narrative elements.
Both games create an environment where a player is bound to listen to a narrator slowly lose control. Both games include a (limited) selection of choice or the illusion thereof. Both games end with a narrator in distress and a player who likely will make their own meaning from the mess.
While my peers leave the games in contemplation, this was possible only due to the authors’ intentional creation of a cryptic story open to interpretation. By considering the creators’ other works, one can note a recurring theme, a sort of intent that stands out: the authors create narrative experiences that speak to players by manipulating their expectations of what a game is, and leave players to question what a game could be or mean. Even if Barthes considers text
“…a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture…”
Barthes omits that the author chooses how to fold, manipulate, and weave the tissue into its final product before the reader gets to interact with it. Without the author’s willingness to set the stage with a subjective, interpretable story, the death of the author would not result in a birth for the reader, or a unique interpretation based on a reader’s past experiences. Even if the author dies, the author’s ghost still haunts the narrative: the author’s tendencies, narrative approach, and literary preferences will always be present and impactful within the work, even lacking attribution. You will always be at the mercy of the author’s ghost.
After posting, I noticed how the tone and choices made in this submission screams me. I warp nonsensically, seemingly unrelated anecdotes into my narrative. I use a ton of semicolons, colons, and em-dashes, and I take the opportunity to be contrarian and combative (see: linking others’ posts) whenever I can. I’m not sure that if you stripped all the submissions from this cohort’s names from the writings that you would be unsure this was written by me. It was forged from my mannerisms, my thoughts, and my history, and my ghost will forever be imprinted upon this work. You could not pry my identity from this post’s cold, dead hands. And I think that just further proves my point.