One evening early into this past October, Dr. John Kaag, an author and professor of philosophy at UMass Lowell, came to campus to present on Henry David Thoreau’s influential relationship with the recluse Perez Blood. Before the lecture, students were invited to join Dr. Kaag for an informal dinner where we could receive advice about the processes of writing and publication.

Around twenty students and academics crowded around a corral of tables in Grappone Institute. Thai food peppered the air, and motes of dust stirred from the busy room caught in the reclining sunlight. Gradually, conversation found its rhythm, and the writing-related anxieties of myself and fellow students became palpable, especially in contrast to Dr. Kaag’s cool self-assurance. It was easy, in my mind, to see the delineation between someone with infinite experience and expertise, and myself. But Dr. Kaag surprised me. “The reader is in charge, not us the authors,” he said. 

I had never before legitimized the relationship between author and reader enough to discern power dynamics between them; the effects of any power-exchanges had always been felt but so omnipresent and innate within the creative process that they never warranted further examination. But instinctively I agreed with Dr. Kaag: the fervent flare of nerves when a friend, or worse yet another writer, scanned one of my drafts was a frequent pang, and the duller, prolonged nausea as a published work circulated was not unfamiliar, either. And I could not forget the unending revisions to my writings, all in service of pleasing the reader. 

I was soon recommended to read Roland Barthes’ 1967 essay “The Death of the Author.” The name alone stirred confusion and concern: when I am writing, am I dying? By the time you read this, reader, am I dead? Barthes contextualizes his title in no less dramatic language: “once an action is recounted…and no longer in order to act directly upon reality…the voice loses its origin, the author enters his own death, writing begins.” But Barthes’ essay is primarily a critique on literary criticism’s overreliance on the context of an author’s life to derive the meaning of his work. On a most basic level, Barthes wants the author rendered powerless once his work is expelled, and the prose itself and readers to seize the available control. 

As a creator, I found Barthes’ ideas agreeable. I certainly don’t want critics thumbing through details of my life in search of a substantial parallel between the fiction I write and the reality I live. I was not blind to the obvious power of the creator, however: intimately, I remember the shock of first crying from words on a page. The author, through the device of his work, manipulates emotions in his readers, from euphoria to devastation to boredom.

And then I remembered the agony of author-me reading my own works: inflamed over commas and adverbs, half-heartedly sympathizing for my characters, and meanwhile brewing great self-pity. Was I now placed into the author-reader power struggle, and thus fighting with myself? Was the dead grappling with the living? I spiraled: how do the power-struggles complicate, when the author makes himself a character in his story, in name or spirit? Is the author then empowering the story-self while fighting the reader-self? Does the story-self topple them both? 

I was giving myself a headache.

The problem of the author, and his complicated relationships with any entity, are certainly not new. Some writers offload the burden of authorship by blaming the muses, or opium, or a contractual agreement with a publisher. In spite of its complications, the simple desire to write, and the pleasure of doing so, prove to be endlessly enticing. 

I thought back to that crowded and energetic room in Grappone and Dr. Kaag’s words. In part, he said what he did to legitimize our feelings of helplessness in the face of such daunting tasks as publication. But authors can also easily re-assert authority over their works when confronting criticism or reader dissatisfaction. The role of the author, his significance, is unstable; his impact is often exaggerated or downgraded, at least outside of academia, to console the affected party when they feel powerless. 

I can’t definitively say where the power in the reader-writer situation is, only that a reserve of power exists, constantly migrating throughout the processes of creation and reaction to where there is the greatest need.

I must ask: here, in the end, do you feel powerful?