"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet."
Shakespeare presents something here in Romeo and Juliet that we have been discussing in class for the last week. Does it really matter if we know who the author is? Juliet seems to disagree. If Romeo and Juliet had been written by any other starving artist, it would have been just as famous. Barthes and Juliet would have gotten along because he proposes the same idea.
Barthes argues that who the author is should have no relation to what the text means to a reader. Should there really be one meaning to everything we read or every piece of art we examine? Does having an author limit our personal interpretations? Yes, it does. If we go into an author's background while reading his work, it's easy to see what we are 'supposed' to take away from the reading. Even Foucault admits that an author is a limitation to the reader, although he considers that a good thing.
Maybe we should all think a little more like Juliet. The author is expressing their freedom of speech by publishing their work; shouldn't the reader have freedom of interpretation? Yes, it is only fair that someone recieve credit for their work, but sooner or later the author's name stops being simply the person who wrote it. Shakespeare isn't just the playwright who introduced Romeo and Juliet to the world, he's now a literary genious. Like we talked about in class, one piece of famous work doesn't make everything an author writes an instant masterpiece. So, what really is in a name? If we took away the author's limiting influence from their work, how much more could we get out of it? How many more possibilities and ideas could be formed and explored without being criticized as not being what the author had intended? There would be limitless discoveries to be made in the famous texts whose meanings have been drilled into our minds since middle school.
"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet."
What's in an author?
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And then Romeo would have to get in a fight with Roland Barthes for getting along so well with his girlfriend.... Just kidding. Actually, I think you're making a really good comparison. I'm trying to remember how the rest of Juliet's speech goes, because we can guess that what matters to her most is that Romeo is really cute... so, if we continue with your analogy, then where might we go?
ReplyDeleteAnd then if we start figuring this via Foucault, we might wonder whether cuteness was understood the same way in the 1590s when Shakespeare wrote as it is today. Understandings of cuteness seems to change over time, so how do we understand that change?
And then there is Gertrude Stein's joke in her children's book, The World Is Round, when her main character, a girl whose name happens to actually be Rose, carves around the trunk of a tree, "Rose is a rose is a rose..."
I like the idea that you posed about knowing too much about the background of the author; if we know what he's about, then it influences what we're supposed to take away from a text and leaves little to no room for our imaginations or own thoughts to create our own conclusions. This also, however, ties into what we've been talking about this past week. What if an author DID have some premeditated deeper meaning that he wanted us to take away, and it WAS influenced by his or her own background? Then, we'd entirely miss that if we didn't learn about who the author was and what he was all about.
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