by Dawn Sands
For Edexcel GCSE English Literature essays on J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls, candidates have to write 16 marks of context in order to achieve full marks. I hate to begin this with a comment on the horrific topic that is the GCSE spec, so I promise I won’t dwell on it for long, but in the panic of exam conditions, I frequently find myself wondering whether 16 marks is really necessary, and if I might be able to present a better analysis of the text if I didn’t have to reinforce J.B. Priestley’s intentions every other line.
Roland Barthes, author of the 1968 essay The Death of the Author, would definitely agree that no, 16 marks’ worth of context is not necessary at all - and any comment at all on the context of the piece may be totally arbitrary. In his essay, Barthes advocated for the complete separation of the writer and their work, stating that the author is not a god-like master of their writing whose exact intentions we must try to seek out, but merely a channel through which meaning can be communicated. Instead of trying to put yourself into the perspective of the author as they were writing a text, Barthes argued that you must assume that the author and their writing were born at exactly the same moment - that being the moment that you, as the recipient, are reading it. Essentially, he said that the author’s specific intentions don’t matter at all in the way you choose to interpret a text - we should view pieces of writing entirely on their own, assuming that every meaning you can infer is completely correct if there is sufficient evidence found within the text, rather than outside of it, to back it up.
However, it can be argued that when it comes to plays such as Priestley’s An Inspector Calls, a lot of meaning can be lost if you don’t consider context of production. An Inspector Calls is a Socialist polemic, and knowledge of the time period and the environment in which Priestley was writing may be necessary in order to understand it fully. This is the case with many works of literature that have a political agenda behind them: in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, for example, so much analysis is lost if we refuse to see it as a parallel of the Russian Revolution. It is possible to draw your own conclusions without knowing this context, but, arguably, you cannot fully understand the extent of texts like these without it.
Norton’s translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, which I have enjoyed reading lately, comes with narrations of what was going on in Rilke’s own life as he was writing each letter, and these pieces of context provide such an insight into the motivations behind his words that so much would be lost if you read the letters in isolation. Arguably, however, it is wrong to look at letters such as these with the same analytical mindset as you look at a poem, a book or a play - they are not stories channelled through a narrator; in this case Rilke himself is the narrator, speaking directly to the reader. Therefore, these letters are in every way a reflection of his own life and because of this, every element of context we can give to them will be beneficial in some way.
Furthermore, when studying poetry, poems can be understood in much greater depth when viewed alongside other works by the same writer. For example, fairies (or faeries) are a common symbol of love in many works by John Keats - yet it is never the sweet, perfect love we see in sonnets, but something twisted and manipulative: in Keats, the supernaturality of love is alluring yet deceptive, and in a thread running through his poetry he seems to be constantly suggesting that love is something to be wary of. This may be best exemplified in La Belle Dame sans Merci, in which the subject of the poem, a beautiful faery, can be seen as an extended metaphor for the danger of falling in love. Faeries are dropped so casually into many Keats poems referencing love - When I have Fears; Ode to a Nightingale - and rarely ever in a positive light. Viewed in isolation, the reference to faeries in When I Have Fears, for example, does not seem particularly important, but if you know the context of Keats’ other poems, the line ‘Never have relish in the faery power / Of unreflecting love’ gains an entirely new meaning. In this way, metaphors such as these which run through many of a poet’s works act almost as a gateway into their minds; in studying the connotations of their repeated images it is possible to get a real sense of what they believed in, what they held close and how they perceived the world. There is even the potential to gain insight into their thought processes, too, just by piecing together fragments you see in individual works and seeing where they correlate.
In The Death of the Author, Barthes argues that this is not what we should be attempting to do when reading a text, stating that “this conception perfectly suits criticism, which can then take as its major task the discovery of the Author or his hypostases: society, history, the psyche, freedom [...] once the Author is discovered, the text is ‘explained’.” However, I disagree that attempting to discover something of the author through threads running through their work necessarily equates to considering the text explained. Although a writer’s poems, books or plays can bring on some greater meaning when viewed together (or viewed alongside other works of the period), it is still equally valid to look at them individually and glean some different meaning entirely - just because there is an argument for what the original intention was, as Barthes says, the author dies when you read their work, and their motive does not matter any more. Arguably, making interpretations of a poem and discovering the author’s intentions are two entirely different pursuits, and don’t necessarily need to be linked to each other at all.
Understanding the background behind polemics such as An Inspector Calls, knowing the context of letters like Rilke’s and glimpsing the essence of an author through their work are all fairly broad-scale things. While I may disagree with Barthes that the writer should be disregarded one hundred percent of the time, the argument that the author’s intention should be separated from individual works is extremely compelling. M.L. Rio, my favourite author, deliberately left many questions unanswered at the end of If We Were Villains so that readers could speculate and draw their own conclusions. Reading through her Goodreads answers (in completely un-stalkerish manner; I definitely did not read all of them going back to when the book was first published), she regularly states that revealing anything else about the plot would simply serve to diminish it and that, in order for the story to come into its full effect, the reader must be left to draw their own interpretations. Rio has described her thoughts about the end of the book as simply her ‘opinion’ and her ‘personal view’, rather than labelling her interpretation of the events as canonical. This is a perfect example of Barthes’ ideology of viewing the author and their work as entirely separate entities.
Although it is beneficial in some cases to view literature in conjunction with its context, as there is often something to be lost if you don’t, when it comes to reading texts in isolation, in my opinion, the author’s original motive is not particularly important. Although you may be able to guess at their intention, I believe that you don’t necessarily have to agree with it, and the reader can still take their words in an entirely different direction if that is what makes sense to them. The beauty of literature, for me, is that you don’t have to take everything at face value, and the almost scientific nature with which we can obsess over the author’s exact intention detracts from that beauty. A work of art or literature is whatever you, as the reader, want it to be, without the restraints of right or wrong, and I agree with Barthes that the writer’s interpretation of their text shouldn’t be seen as the ‘definitive’ or ‘correct’ one. Barthes’ essay brings more freedom to the world of literature and reduces the scepticism surrounding meticulous literary analysis, and for that reason, I believe it should be a mindset we adopt when looking at almost any text. So, in conclusion, I find my (slightly saner) self having to agree with my mid-exam mindset - while knowledge of the author might be good to have as background knowledge, it definitely shouldn’t be such an influence to the way you analyse a text, and enforcing so much reference to context actually restricts the level of analysis you are often able to make.
Links
~ original essay by Roland Barthes: https://writing.upenn.edu/~taransky/Barthes.pdf
~ Keats poems: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44475/la-belle-dame-sans-merci-a-ballad; https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44488/when-i-have-fears-that-i-may-cease-to-be; https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44479/ode-to-a-nightingale
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