The Text, the Author, & the Ideology
Defining a Narrative Materialist method to analyse ideology in fiction, Part 1
I’m preparing a bunch of articles, but I thought it would be useful to first explore some of the “Narrative Materialist” approach, starting with some groundwork to analyse the ideological subtext in fiction. Looking at the author, their context, but more importantly the ideology that we all unknowingly carry.
In this article, I’ll try to clarify Authorial Intent, Ideology, and Ideological Subtext, and why they matter.
This is firstly an article that’s useful to me (putting down my own thoughts and organizing them), but I’m hoping it can be useful to others, even though a lot of it is broad and abstract.
This is a follow-up to Narrative Materialism, and to be clear on my own angle and bias: This substack and what I write on it will generally follow the framework established in that article, which is one of Historical Materialism in my own way (which, if you don’t know, is a Marxist methodology).
To start with, let’s get a few basic things out of the way. Let’s define any creative work (writing, game, movie, music, other media…) as having form, content, text and subtext, with as many forms for each of those as there are forms of creative works.
Form refers to a work’s appearance, composition, techniques and outward design, it can also be seen (in a non-pejorative way) as the surface-level of a work, the interface through which people will interact and experience the work.
Content broadly refers to a work’s substance, what it attempts to say, whether that’s voluntary or involuntary meaning. Content can then be split into text and subtext.
Text is the most direct form of content, usually a direct meaning communicated by the author, and one that is explicit and obvious to the observer.
Subtext is more murky. It refers to some meaning or content that is not being explicitly said by the author and requires “reading between the lines”. This is generally seen as being mostly voluntary by the author, albeit indirect.
But what about what we see in a creative work that the author didn’t put there, and how much of the subtext is really conscious? Can a creative work carry meaning that the author didn’t mean to imply, and that we don’t consciously experience? Is such an implicit subconscious meaning still materially “there” or is it only in the mind of the reader? Is it even possible to experience a work in a way that is entirely disconnected from its author?
Authorial Intent & The Death of the Author
This is a wide and complicated topic, too wide for this article (as well as a topic that would require a lot more reading on my end to talk about with confidence), so I will put some limits. This is less about the various methods of literary criticism and more about how some of them are often utilized to cut off a particular kind of (ideological or systemic) criticism, and about how much we get stuck in an exclusively individualistic framework when it comes to creative work (whether in experiencing it or criticizing it).
Originally, a lot of this revolves around an essay by French philosopher and literary critic Roland Barthes in the late 60s, but there is a wider philosophical trend happening in the background of that time.
In 1967, Barthes wrote “The Death of the Author”1, which broadly argues that the author of a creative work (in his narrower context, writing) is fundamentally irrelevant or divorced from the work itself.
“ In his story Sarrasine Balzac, describing a castrato disguised as a woman, writes the following sentence: 'This was woman herself, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive worries, her impetuous boldness, her fussings, and her delicious sensibility.' Who is speaking thus? Is it the hero of the story bent on remaining ignorant of the castrato hidden beneath the woman? Is it Balzac the individual, furnished by his personal experience with a philosophy of Woman? Is it Balzac the author professing 'literary' ideas on femininity? Is it universal wisdom? Romantic psychology? We shall never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, of every paint of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing. “ (142)
The essay is about more than that (such as the changing social status of, and the changing institutions related to, the particular French academic “author” of the 1960s, and the rapidly changing relationship between authors and their work), but the basic premise sounds pretty ridiculous now given how impossible it seems to separate a text from its author, and how blurry the line is between a “neutral” and clearly defined text as it is when it leaves the author’s hands and the ever-increasing quantity of paratext: the numerous and easily accessible details of the author’s life, their social media accounts where they regularly respond to questions and even confirm or deny a particular authorial intent, and the enormous amount of popular context and discourse surrounding any creative work at all time.
Barthes’ essay reads more like a wish or a prophecy, one that was heavily debated and commented on by others of that time (most notably Foucault2), but that ultimately never truly realized. Various other movements and debates have raged over this question, and I personally find a lot of it to be confused, obscure and trapped in the gravity well of literary academia. A lot of what was said seems to have been misunderstood, and it is my opinion here that what Barthes was trying to say (which I’m still unsure of) has been largely lost and muddled.
I myself have an ambiguous stance on this. Of course a person experiences and interprets a work in a particular way, without necessarily being aware of the context and the author. Once a work leaves its author’s hands, it becomes a separate thing that can go to unexpected places and be interpreted in unexpected ways, and in this sense it kills its author.
But while the work might, in a sense, kill the author the moment it falls into someone else’s hands, the corpse of the author is still there as a kind of snapshot. The murder scene is spread all over the work, even if the body is hidden away. Traces of a struggle, the murder weapon, drops of blood as well as the faint smell of rot are all still there, and they cannot be removed.
That corpse is there, materially, in the work, although it might not be felt as clearly by everyone. A harmful trope or a violent idea might only be revealed and experienced in the work by some (like the painful stabs of sexist or transphobia-related tropes in Sarrasine, Barthe’s example, which irredeemably changes the reading for some), often the ones most affected by such things in the real world, and too often this does not include the author. We are not on equal grounds when it comes to how we experience a creative work, and creative works are not on equal grounds when it comes to how they are judged and how popular they might become. The experience of a creative work depends on many wider factors that we are usually not in control of, and creative works (and their authors) are never judged purely by their own merit.
For good or ill, experiencing a creative work can feel like a “neutral” experience within a “neutral” space where the author doesn’t exist. But while a reader might be fooled by the power of the written word to think that the creative work is something with no real subject or author, something which they can fully absorb in their own way and with their own interpretations free from any authorial influence, this is a lie.
It’s pretty ironic that Barthes’ essay is prophetizing a death that never occurred, when the essay itself was given credibility and impact specifically because of Barthes’ status as a respected author, his social and class character, and was spread through the particular circles and institutions of academia. I interpret Barthes’ essay in this way because of the surrounding context, the various avant-garde movements and rapid political changes of the 1960s in his own circles. My reading and understanding of it is spread over the context, my knowledge of the author, of other authors, their responses and countless other elements of paratext. I cannot separate Barthes’ essay, its impact, its intended or derived meaning, from him; It would be nonsensical to claim that I could ever read this essay in a way that is divorced from the author/context.
How the Author’s Death is weaponized
Coming back to the present, these complex questions over methods of literary critic have evolved and been transformed into a variety of tools or weapons used to discreetly limit how a creative work can be criticized.
Weirdly enough, there is a certain tendency to reject a particular kind of criticism by either invoking the death of the author (to say that there is no authorial intent or that any of it is irrelevant), or by rejecting the death of the author to the extreme and constricting the criticism only to that which is explicitly intended.
One way or the other, this often shuts down criticism and falls into a personal trial of the author (and by extension a fight between whoever wants to attack or defend them) which entirely misses the point. The author’s death is warped into a way to claim that either there is no real intent or context that’s relevant (“You’re just projecting what you want to see, stop thinking your personal interpretation is a universal one!”), or that only the clearly intended and explicit meaning is valid (“The author never explicitly said this, in fact they explicitly said the opposite or publicly explained their intent, stop forcing your views into it!”).
It is very understandable to occasionally want to separate an author from their work, because the work is personally important or valuable for example, even though an author might hold reactionary or harmful views or be using their work, platform or power to broadcast and propagandize these views. But here again, while work and author can be voluntarily compartmentalized, the author’s corpse cannot simply be ignored. Compartmentalizing is a conscious act, and already admits that the author still has presence and influence over how we experience the work.
This all goes in circles within the lens of this exclusive individualism, and everything is seen through the author, whether by their presence or their absence. Everything that tries to escape this lens is easily dismissed as speculation or projection, as performative or pointless, rejected back as a personal interpretation or some personal agenda.
But there is something else that is present in every creative work, carried by the author, willingly or not.
Hegemony & Ideological Subtext
Beyond the surface-level form and the intended subtext, there is always a deeper layer of meaning which can be broadly called Ideological Subtext. Ideological meaning will be, often unknowingly, poured into a creative work. This meaning will, often unknowingly, be absorbed by the person experiencing it. While the exact way each person will experience and absorb a work’s form and subtext might differ, the creative work does not materially change, nor does the corpse of its author and the ideology they carried ever fully rot away.
First, let’s define what I mean by “Ideology”. In the Marxist sense of the word, Ideology is an aspect of the dominant political power of a society (the superstructure) that it uses to justify itself3. It is a set of ideas which, taken as a cohesive whole, work to explain, justify, normalize and ultimately reproduce a particular society’s structure and system.
This was originally considered a more conscious exercise by Engels and Marx4, but this concept of Ideology now describes something much larger, more subconscious, and much more powerful. Gramsci developed the concept of the cultural hegemony, which describes the power of ideology over cultural norms by the ruling class of a society in order to make the dominant culture become the accepted norm5. Others such as Althusser built on the original Marxist idea to describe the various forms of ideological power and normalization through discourse and institutions6. Later theorists like Debord explored the newer, more pervasive forms of ideology in the now globalized dominant power (the Hegemony, dominating over all other states), in this new world where the hegemon has won so completely that we struggle to even imagine a different world with a different ideology. To Debord, in this new ideological world everything is now part of a strange “Spectacle” of inverted truth, constantly and invisibly reproduced, reflecting and replacing reality itself7.
In this sense, “Ideology” is now understood as something omni-present, so normalized that we struggle to see it. It has become the norm, and even when carrying it and broadcasting its words, we think of ourselves as “neutral” like Barthes claims writing to be. In the same sense that the modern globalized hegemony falsely claims to be the “end of history”, that “there is no alternative”, the hegemonic ideology dominates our thoughts so strongly that some have naively declared this a “post-ideological” world. Such a claim is, terrifyingly, deeply ideological.
We are all, willingly or not, influenced by this dominant ideology, and authors are unwilling carriers of it if they make no effort to see it. This is a very difficult and painful exercise, and many are frustrated by the perceived accusation : “I know what I think, and I know what I’m saying, how dare you imply I broadcast propaganda without knowing it?”
A great illustration of this is done by the 1988 movie “They Live” by John Carpenter, as explained by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek in the first part of his “Pervert’s Guide to Ideology”8 (captions are available).
Ideology is strange and hard to criticize, made worse because we are so often trapped in an exclusively individualistic framework, a framework that is of course reinforced constantly by the current ideology. We see criticism like this, inevitably, as an attack, a personal diagnosis, an emotional accusation on our own character and identity: It isn’t, but it is still painful.
When creating, and when critiquing a creative work, I think it is now more than ever necessary to dig deeper and outside of an individualistic lens, to unearth the ideological subtext of the fiction we experience and the fiction we create.
Alright, So what?
Here I will shift from a lot of abstract preamble and ideas to my actual point : Ideology is extremely important.
This might sound pretty vague or tame, like kicking down an open door, so I will elaborate.
While a lot of different tools exist for literary (or more broadly, media) critique, and the various questions of authorial intent and death of the author are still very relevant, I believe that Ideology has never been more important to understand, to analyse, to notice, to deconstruct and to act upon.
As Debord spilled a lot of ink on, and as Žižek mentions in that video, we are now living more than ever in a completely, totally, terrifyingly ideological world. Whereas before Ideology could still be felt as an outside thing, a layer on top of the real or an external force, its influence has now seeped and infiltrated into every single facet of our lives. I don’t think Ideology has ever been an outside element, but we have never been in a world so fully and totally dominated by only one ideology, we now have nothing to contrast and compare it to.
“ The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual excess produced by mass-media technologies. It is a worldview that has actually been materialized, a view of a world that has become objective. ”
Society of the Spectacle, Chapter 1, 5
What used to be just a false reality, a projected set of values used by the hegemony to justify and normalize itself, has won. The broader fight against it (and the hegemony) still rages on, and the internal contradictions of the hegemony are not (and cannot be, not by itself) resolved, but this particular ideological war of the 20th century has already happened, and the capitalistic/neoliberal Ideology won.
What this means, is that the Ideology is now, in a strange way, real. It is Ideology reified, made real. It is now by default, the norm, unconscious, even seen as something akin to a law of nature. It’s just how things are and how they will always be.
In this context, and given the goal of the Narrative Materialist approach that I’m trying to construct, staying “neutral” and weakly applying some literary criticism in an abstract bubble for the simple pleasure of doing so doesn’t cut it any more, there is a struggle currently going on. In this struggle, it is important that we start educating ourselves, developing tools and methods to understand the current Ideology, identifying what we are up against and training to recognize where and how it hides itself.
Not to become paranoid, not to create our own inquisitions and not simply to “attack” particular individuals, because this is pointless. This fight is impossible within an individualistic framework. In fact, being trapped in this individualistic framework is precisely ideological: the current Ideology maintains us in a framework of thought, in a philosophy, that is itself unable to fully understand (and to fully oppose) the current Ideology. The hegemon constantly works to keep us in a state of perceived helplessness, and it constantly works to absorb and co-opt anything that might pose a threat.
Recognizing ideology, as I’ve described in this article, is not really about the author any more, not directly. Everyone is a carrier of this victorious Ideology in some way, and unknowingly spreads it, defends it, helps it stay “real”. It’s no longer about authorial intent and direct meaning, it’s about what a lot of our media implies, normalizes, justifies, and hides, always in subtle new ways.
So the goal is to work, as hard as possible, to unearth Ideology and to reveal what it does. To ask the question : Beyond this text’s meaning, beyond what the author wants (or claims) to say, what is this text’s Ideology, what does it imply, who’s interests does it serve?
When looking at worldbuilding, fictional worlds, fictional nations, religions, cosmologies and politics : Where does this lead? What is it inspired from, what is it referencing or drawing parallels to, how does this world systemically function, what is its internal Ideology, what are its contradictions and how does it answer them?
I believe that a better way to deconstruct a creative work, both as a way to unearth the existing Ideology and to reframe the work into better stories, is to look through the lens of Materialism, of Dialectical Materialism and of Historical Materialism. To look at the underlying material conditions of a work and of whatever fictional world it imagines, to reconnect fiction with our own material conditions, our own experiences and stories, and to produce stories that contribute (in however small a way) to this struggle. Not “utilitarian” story-telling, not a rigid cage for writing, but simply better stories that do what stories have always done for People : create a relationship between us and the material world, a two-way relationship that makes sense of the world and allows us to enact change on that world.
Conclusion
This is the raw goal of what I want to write about here, and the intended goal of Narrative Materialism as an approach. I want to look at the media I like, the media I read, the media of a hobby I particularly care about, and unearth what it truly carries and implies, knowingly or not!
And from that deconstruction, I want to write (or to help write) better stories.
Next time, let’s apply all this rambling and these abstract terms to a specific example, and see how we can see it through the ideology-revealing glasses, how we can reframe it and how we can write better stories from there.
Barthes, Roland (1967). “The Death of the Author” (La mort de l’auteur). Aspen n°5-6, p.142-148.
Foucault, Michel (1969). “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur ?” (What is an author?). Bulletin de la Société Française de philosophie n°3, 63rd year.
Marx, Karl (1977). “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy”. Progress Publishers, Moscow.
Engels, Friedrich (1893). “Engels to Franz Mehring”, Marx and Engels Correspondence. International Publishers.
Gramsci, Antonio (1992), Buttigieg, Joseph A (ed.), Prison notebooks, New York City: Columbia University Press
Althusser, Louis (1970). “Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d’État (Notes pour une recherche)” (Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes for an investigation)). Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays.
Debord, Guy (1995). “La Société du Spectacle” (The Society of the Spectacle).
Žižek, Slavoj (2012); Fiennes, Sophie (director). “The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology”. Zeitgeist Films.