A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

In this essay, Wallace reviews Morte d’Author: An Autopsy, a book by H. L. Hix. The book discusses a literary theory by Roland Barthes known as the “Death of the Author,” which posits that a book’s meaning does not necessarily derive from the author’s original intent. Instead, the meaning varies according to what readers infer, entirely separately from the author and the author’s original intentions. Wallace’s essay title alludes to Mark Twain’s quote that reports of his death had been greatly exaggerated, interpolating the quote to suggest that the Death of the Author has been greatly exaggerated.

Wallace begins with a discussion of 1960s literary critics such as Barthes, Foucault, De Man, and Derrida, crediting them with the “fertile miscegenation of criticism and philosophy” (138) that came to dominate late-20th century literary criticism. Hix’s book, Wallace explains, is a response to the Post-structuralist movement (as represented by the authors mentioned above), just as their theories were a response to earlier critics, who emphasized authorial intent over everything else in their criticisms.

Wallace credits Morte d’Author as a “tight piece of work” (141) but claims that Hix falls victim to the tendency toward scholarly over-analysis that affects many published PhD dissertations. Hix’s book dives into the debate around the Death of the Author, claiming that “all the debaters have oversimplified what ‘author’ really means” (142).