My Take on Death of the Author

Wherein the dead are advantaged by virtue of not being able to screw up

With Neil Gaiman, one of my favorite authors, recently in the news for sexual misconduct, it’s time revisit that old familiar idea: Death of the Author.

Technically speaking, Death of the Author, introduced by Roland Barthes in a 1967 essay, is the idea that we don’t have to rely on an author’s intentions when making or interpretation of their own work. The reader can take ownership of the work, relying on their own interpretation rather than the author’s.

The phrase has however come to have another meaning, especially in the age of MeToo, which I would phrase as:

You can love what someone has created regardless of your opinion of its creator.

Once someone has put something out into the world, their creation can stand on its own; hating the author doesn’t mean you have to hate their work.

This is a concept upon which we as a society have to rely, lest we allow large swathes of our artistic and material canon be expunged simply because the people responsible for its creation harmed others in their personal lives.

That being said, there’s a ton of nuance how we treat this, so let’s take it slow.

Political Disagreement vs. Done Terrible Things/Hurt People

Here we’re going to compare J.K.Rowling, henceforth referred to as JK, with Gaiman. JK hasn’t hurt anyone that I’m aware of. There’s no questionably-consensual sex, no weird power dynamics where it’s unclear what happened. She didn’t murder someone or set an orphanage on fire.

No, JK did something far worse, if some corners of the internet are to be believed: she disagrees with certain pieces of progressive ideology with regards to trans people.

Now, people have a right to their own opinions. I like to say that “everyone has a right to be wrong, and they exercise it frequently”.

But, come on.

There’s a world of difference between an author who disagrees with you politically and an author who actually did direct harm to other human beings. You can dislike both, disagree with both, but they’re two vastly different cases. JK is not a criminal, and she has a right to express her political opinions, the same as everyone else.

More to the point, a person’s work does not necessarily have anything to do with their political opinions. Harry Potter isn’t anti-trans in any way I can feasibly detect.

The idea of “cancelling” an author is a sort of retributive justice: the author did bad things, and therefore we punish them by not giving them money or reading their work. The question then is: what level of ‘bad things’ deserves punishment? For me, expressing one’s political views doesn’t cut it, even when they differ widely from my own. I take free speech seriously. People should not be punished for lack of ideological conformity.

On the other hand, once an author has actually harmed people, has put that pain and hurt out into the world, well. I don’t know what level of punishment they deserve, but ‘no further success, at least for now’ seems reasonable.

Cancellation Advantages the Dead

Plenty of the authors we read are dead. All the classics, of course, but there are plenty of 20th-century writers who are now deceased: Pratchett, Asimov, Hemingway, Bradbury, Fitzgerald, and so on.

One issue with cancelling authors once they’ve done bad things is that it unfairly predisposes us to read the works of dead authors, since they can’t do bad things anymore. A living author has the opportunity to fuck up and get cancelled; a dead author does not.

This problem gets worse when we apply it to political disagreement, as with JK above, because the farther in the past an author lived, the more likely we are to have serious political disagreements. Plato might not have thought of women as people; Chaucer might’ve been fine with slavery. I don’t know, I’m not a scholar of either. But even though both are virtually guaranteed to have vastly different political opinions than any of us, neither is currently talking about them on Twitter/X.

Then you have the problem of availability bias. We live in a very high-information environment; when a famous author does something scandalous, we’re a lot more likely to hear about it now than we used to be, because we’re a lot more likely to hear about everything than we used to be.

In other words, if Shakespeare had murdered people on the side, would anyone have known? We certainly don’t. Authors today are a lot more likely to be discovered doing bad things than authors from a hundred years ago, because of social media and everyone having a camera in their pocket. Which means that, if we’re trying to only read the works of decent people, we’re unfairly biasing our sample because we’re blind to the misdeeds of the past.

Should we pay for a cancelled author’s works?

Assuming that you want to own a book of Gaiman’s, should you pay for his work, knowing that he got cancelled for sexual misconduct?

On the one hand, his misdeeds change nothing about the fact that he worked to create something you want. Exxon Mobile spilled loads of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, and you still pay them for gas. The US government has done some horrific things, and you still pay your taxes. What’s the difference?

On the other hand, paying for his work directly funds Gaiman and, possibly, keeps him in a position to continue doing misdeeds in the future. Isn’t that bad?

The way I’ve learned to treat this is that, once an author I like is cancelled, I try not to pay directly for their work. I’ll still read it or watch it or whatnot, but I don’t want the money I spend going to that person in particular if avoidable.

For books, getting a book from the library satisfies this, as does buying the book used.

For movies/TV, watching on a streaming service I’m already paying for satisfies this.

And there’s another factor at play here too: what if multiple people worked on a project? Gaiman and Pratchett wrote Good Omens, a fantastic book, together. Should this rule apply to it, even though Gaiman was only half an author? Truthfully, I don’t know; my moral intuitions fail me here. Given that Pratchett is dead and Gaiman is alive, my inclination would be to treat the book as if Gaiman wrote it alone for the purposes of cancellation. If Pratchett were alive I think I wouldn’t.

I also think that, once an author is actually dead, these constraints can be relaxed. The money their estate makes from the sale does not benefit their corpse.

The Advantage of Ignorance

Imagine you never watched the news or went on Twitter/X or found out about anything. Imagine that all you did was read the books you wanted, watch the movies you wanted, etc.

Isn’t that a lot easier than having to track who’s been cancelled?

As far as I can tell, the motivation for Death of the Author goes something like this:

1. I want to enjoy the art I like AND be a good person

2. Being a good person means not rewarding bad behavior from artists

3. I found out this artist whose work I like is behaving badly

4. Therefore I’m obligated to not reward that behavior

5. BUT I still want to enjoy the work, so now I have to separate it from the artist

6. Therefore Death of the Author

But the whole chain of logic hinges on step 3. If I never found out that the artist whose work I like is behaving badly, I’m never responsible for cancelling them, or not paying for their work, or whatever. There is no moral dilemma because I don’t have the information that creates it.

This means that I have an incentive to remain ignorant - to not see the bad things people do, to not keep up to date on which artist is in the news for what scandals. As long as I do that, I get to keep on enjoying what I enjoy, guilt-free.

(In fact I suspect this played a part in some of the more egregious Hollywood cases, where everyone sort-of knew something bad was going on but were incentivized to stay ‘ignorant’ for various reasons.)

And even if I do keep up with who’s been cancelled, there are artists whose work I enjoy that have done terrible things, but whose crimes have not seen the light of day. There has to be, statistically speaking. But I can’t exactly investigate the personal history of everyone whose work I read or watch, so I have to remain ignorant of it.

To put it another way, Gaiman is disadvantaged because his misdeeds were made public - for all I know, Hemingway did far worse, and yet he hasn’t been cancelled at all.

Collaborative Efforts

Books are usually written by one person, even if the research, editing, and publishing of a book is a multi-person job. Movies and TV shows, on the other hand, are collaborative efforts from start to finish. Hundreds of people work on them; should all of those people not be paid because of one person’s actions?

Let’s bring up Kevin Spacey, cancelled for past misdeeds. (Note that he has never been convicted of anything, interestingly enough, and there have been trials.)

He starred in the film The Usual Suspects, widely acknowledged as one of the best movies ever made, with one of the best twist endings in cinema. But he wasn’t the only person in the cast. He didn’t write the film, direct it, or do any of the non-camera jobs (lighting, costumes, makeup, set design, etc.). (The director, Bryan Singer, has also been cancelled, as it turns out.)

So if Spacey is cancelled, how should we feel about the movie? He’s a big part of it, but his work was only a small percentage of the total work that went into it. Cancelling the movie because he stars in it is punishing a lot of innocent people for one man’s misdeeds. Is that acceptable?

Well, if every single person who worked on the film was cancelled for misdeeds, that’d make cancelling the film a no-brainer. So there’s some kind of line or spectrum here. Should the movie be 1% cancelled? What does that look like?

If the goal of cancelling someone (aside from any kind of abstract sense of retributive justice) is to disincentivize the misdeeds of others e.g. deterrence, then it’s feasible to think that making a statement by cancelling a movie because of the actions of one of its stars incentivizes Hollywood to vet its stars more carefully. It also incentivizes the stars themselves to behave better.

But that would be like shutting down a business because one of its employees killed someone. It’s not anyone else’s fault that that person committed a crime.

A possible solution would be to credibly commit to not supporting (via not paying to see) any future projects involving the person who behaved badly, while still paying for/enjoying the work they’ve already done. This allows the numerous people innocent people to still benefit from their work, while disempowering the cancelled person going forward. I’m not sure if there’s a clean way to do that, however.

Temporality

What if an author only does the bad stuff after writing all the books we love? It’s not reasonable to expect people to retroactively hate their work. Both Gaiman and JK did the things people dislike/cancel them for well after much of their creative success. The person who wrote those books hadn’t yet done the bad thing - does that mean it’s okay to like the books they’ve previously written, but not any books they write in the future?

On the other hand, what if the author did the bad stuff thirty years ago? Where’s the forgiveness, or just the statute of limitations? Should someone be cancelled for something they did in high school? How do we draw these lines?

Kevin Spacey was cancelled for stuff he did decades prior to his Hollywood success. Did he deserve to be punished for alleged misbehavior that long ago?

When we seriously harm others, the effects ripple out into the world and last. There isn’t a time limit on the effects of trauma; someone who was raped can’t be expected to heal on a given time frame. But that doesn’t mean that punishing the person who hurt them, thirty years later, accomplishes any end beyond satisfying pure vindictiveness. It doesn’t really deter anything - who’s thinking about what might happen in thirty years? - and it’s not going to meaningfully change the culprit in ways that thirty years of time haven’t.

I don’t have a good answer here, but I will note that a functioning society requires a certain amount of forgiveness. There is a reason we have a statute of limitations. People change over time, and punishing someone for something they did decades ago is often not a useful thing to do.

Learning that an author you love is capable of doing terrible things hurts, because you’ve connected emotionally with that author’s work. But, assuming they did the bad thing after writing the work you love, the work you love was written by someone capable of those things. You just weren’t aware of it. The author hasn’t necessarily changed; your knowledge of the author has. You can choose to recontextualize your relationship with an authors work after gaining that knowledge, but I don’t think you have to.

In the end, the whole point of Death of the Author is that once something is put out into the world, it no longer needs to be bound to the person that created it. Your knowledge of that person’s deeds and misdeeds may change, but your connection to the work is something unique to you, and it doesn’t have to go anywhere if you don’t want it to. You are not a part of the author’s life; you can’t affect them or their actions, and unless you let them, they can’t affect yours.

In The End

Some percentage of the works we enjoy were created by terrible people, and that has to be okay, because demanding perfect moral behavior from everyone who makes the art we consume isn’t a reasonable thing to ask or expect.

We can hope that they’ll be better, that the artists we love will pass the low bar of being decent human beings, but art is not uniquely made by decent human beings. It can be made by anyone; that’s one of its best features.

Eventually, the author will die for real, and then we’ll have the benefit of having their work in the world without the taint of their misdeeds.

In the meantime, we can try to incentivize the decent behavior and disincentivize the bad behavior, and maybe that’s the best we can hope for.