In April 2024, British author J.K. Rowling appeared in the news for the same reason she’s been wont to gain attention lately—not for writing acclaimed new books, but for writing long social-media rants against the transgender community. In the latest iteration, she offered to go to jail under Scotland’s new Hate Crime and Public Order Act.

Many fans—including queer and trans readers who took refuge in the world that the Harry Potter series conjured—feel that Rowling has betrayed them. They find themselves in the position of choosing whether to renounce a beloved fandom or look past a politics they find hateful.

But Harry Potter fans aren’t the only readers facing this dilemma. In recent years, the ability to follow the lives and politics of writers in real time through social media has changed the reader-author relationship. How much should we allow the life of the author to influence our experience of their work?

When a beloved local used bookstore recently closed down after 30 years in business, I found myself in my personal version of this saga. For my final purchase, I chose Henry Miller’s memoir Big Sur and The Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch from its discounted, dwindling stock.

It was the end of an era—but also, my conscience ached. I was going home with yet another book that I felt that I shouldn’t have, written by an author who was an absolute fiend to women.  I have a row of Henry Millers. All the F. Scott Fitzgeralds and George Orwells any English major would ever need. Jean-Paul Sartre’s mammoth Being and Nothingness.

Miller is perhaps the most guilt-inducing. Though a brilliant writer, he saw each and every woman he encountered—including his five wives—as a character to exploit in his books. When women appear on the page, they’re mostly just bodies, available (or not quite available) for sexual encounters. Here’s his idea of a simile, taken from his autobiographical novel Tropic of Cancer: “Paris is like a whore. From a distance she seems ravishing, you can’t wait until you have her in your arms. And five minutes later you feel empty, disgusted with yourself. You feel tricked.”

George Orwell’s female characters—either whores or prudes—don’t fare much better than Miller’s. And while his Down and Out in Paris and London shattered every one of my naïve illusions about the 1920s, he couldn’t write a three-dimensional woman even if it could have ended a war. Orwell’s first wife was deeply involved in the early work that made him famous, but largely erased from his stories. In his private literary notebook, he wrote down “two great facts about women”: “One was their incorrigible dirtiness & untidiness. The other was their terrible, devouring sexuality …” Fitzgerald, meanwhile, stole entire excerpts from his wife’s diary for his books and had her locked up in a mental institution. Sartre saw women as either mistresses or unobtained conquests, on the page and in life.

I have read biographies of and memoirs by all of these writers, and I always come away feeling uncomfortable about their treatment and views of women. And yet, these are some of my favorite writers. I confess to loving everything they have written. Their prose styles possess me. I look to them for inspiration in perfecting my own craft as a writer. Still, more often than not, I thumb past the icky bits of their books and their biographies. I burn simultaneously with admiration, jealousy, and discomfiture.

In 1967, the literary theorist Roland Barthes proposed a very simple concept in an essay titled “The Death of the Author.” Barthes argues that an author’s personal traits or biography should play no role in a reader’s interpretation of their literary output. The reading experience should remain objective and unrestricted; the written work should exist almost as an individual of its own, separate from its creator.

So, do I have the right, in this current cultural climate, to exercise the “The Death of the Author” clause to keep reading the books I like? “To write is, through a prerequisite impersonality (not at all to be confused with the castrating objectivity of the realist novelist), to reach that point where only language acts, ‘performs,’ and not ‘me,’” writes Barthes. In other words, it’s what an author has put on the page that is up for scrutiny and debate—not the background circumstances or life events that may or may not have influenced the writing.

This quotation particularly speaks to me because as a writer, I fret about my readers scouring between the lines of my fiction for traces of me rather than accepting my characters and worlds as imagined ones. Likewise, I wouldn’t want a reader to look more or less favorably upon my work because of my personal life or political views.

As readers nowadays latch on to “receipts,” meaning the author’s life choices or past errors, as indicators of the worth of their work, “The Death of the Author” has evolved in meaning. Subsequent critical approaches have argued that it’s important to incorporate the world in which a book was written into its reception. Furthermore, in this age of social media, authors’ lives unfold in real time for all to see, as opposed to the more private past, where they largely controlled how much and what of their private lives were made public.

One of the most visible sites of this debate is Rowling’s aggressive campaign against trans people. Some Harry Potter fans have renounced Rowling’s work entirely; others remain staunchly loyal to Rowling as a literary icon, whatever her prejudices. And then there are those lingering in the middle who follow the “Death of the Author,” and continue to appreciate the Harry Potter series on its own, as a separate entity from its notorious author.

In contrast to Rowling, the authors on my shelves—Miller, Orwell, Fitzgerald, and Sartre, and their misogyny—are all long in the past. They’re not personally profiting off my purchase of their books, nor are contemporary women being personally harmed by the writers’ objectification of them. The death of the author—taken literally—is my greatest consolation.

I’m also consoled by the knowledge that difficult authors still have lessons to impart and important conversations to start—not just in spite of but sometimes because of their odious points of view. My advice to the Harry Potter fans, in their precarious situation, is not to feel overwhelmed with guilt. They need to remember that they are just readers, not gatekeepers, and they are not responsible for Rowling’s unfortunate views. Fans of the Harry Potter series are also not obligated to side with her in real life just because they enjoy and appreciate a fictional fantasy world (which, by the way, can be enjoyed without necessarily purchasing the merchandise).

Our relationships with books can operate on the same basis as our relationships with people: They are not obligated to be perfect, and they would be unhealthy and under too much pressure if they were. My flawed array of writers forces me to think critically about what I’m reading. I can appreciate their prose styles without adopting their beliefs. I am also challenged by these authors to expand my repertoire to include other artists, whose work doesn’t have so much baggage attached.

Reading widely and diversely is one of the greatest forms of lifelong learning. It’s important to read beyond the views that one agrees with, and to understand that writers, like all human beings, are complex and flawed. For the sake of my education as a reader, writer, teacher, and person, I have to keep telling myself: I am doing no wrong.

The post Authors Aren’t Perfect. Why Should Readers Have to Be? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In 2015, Kaufman and Kristoff published Illuminae, a sci-fi novel they’d spent the past few years working on. If you haven’t read it, you really should. It’s possibly the most startling, innovative book released this century: an epistolary narrative told through transcripts and medical reports and Artificial Intelligence subroutines. It not only incorporates space battles and warp drives and zombies—you know, the good stuff—but also happens to be an extraordinary piece of storytelling, buttressed by rich, complex characters. Unsurprisingly, it rocketed up the New York Times bestseller list while spawning two sequels.

It also has a body count in the low five figures. Kaufman and Kristoff love killing people—they make George R.R. Martin look timid and indulgent. After Illuminae’s rapturous reception, the two co-authors began to wonder: What would happen if they invited their readers to die?

The book’s document-driven style allows each and every victim to be immortalized. Minor or major, pulled out an airlock or eaten by a brain-sucking alien, each character has a name. For the sequels, Gemina and Obsidio, Kaufman and Kristoff offered their audience a chance to be murdered. All you had to do was send in proof of a pre-order and a legal release, and you too might be on the casualty list.

It’s such a simple thing—pedestrian, even—but hundreds of the book’s fans vied for a chance to die in a universe they’d come to love. Full disclosure: So did I. I’ve yet to find out if I’ve been selected, but I’ve always fancied being stabbed by a lunatic infected with a space-born insanity virus. At a push, I’d settle for being torn apart by a rip in the space-time continuum. I’m not picky.

Kaufman and Kristoff aren’t the only ones doing this kind of thing. There are plenty of writers, filmmakers and artists figuring out ways to shift audiences from passive consumption to active, enthusiastic engagement—where they not only get to enjoy the finished product, but also play a small part in its creation. Take another Australian collective, the hip-hop crew Bliss n Eso. Despite their name, they’re a trio—Bliss, Eso, and their DJ Izm—and they make the kind of anthemic, party-friendly rap music that easily propelled them to the top of the charts in their homeland (their latest album, Off The Grid, released this past April, was their third to go to number one). For their new single, “Moments,” the trio asked fans on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to send in video and photos of their best memories, which would then be stitched together into a music video framed by the song.

Now let’s think about the art coming from California.

This isn’t an arbitrary choice of location. A.A. Gill called California, and Los Angeles in particular, a hub of our civilization. “Even if you have never been here, this place has touched you—more than that, it has run its smoggy, soft hands all over you. … It is the 20th century’s incarnation of classical Athens, of Rome, Constantinople, or Renaissance Florence.”

He knew what he was talking about. California has spent decades exporting its art. As a state, and as an artistic community, it has engaged more audiences than anywhere on the planet. And I’m not just talking movies. Think about the influence of fine artists like James Turrell or Ed Ruscha, architects like Frank Lloyd Wright, musicians like NWA and Kendrick Lamar. California creates, and the world listens—or watches, or reads, or walks around in gawping awe. The state has been doing it for so long that its approach to audience has solidified, compacted like a fossil under the La Brea tar pits: We make. You enjoy.

I don’t want to oversimplify this. California is an enormous place with a wild and diverse artistic landscape. But it has an artistic output worth, conservatively, a shade under $300 billion, according to LA Weekly—and that was in 2015. I submit that a very, very sizeable chunk of that art is designed to be passively consumed. Buy your ticket, sit your ass on a seat. And tell your friends!

Ersatz, corporate-sponsored social media campaigns aside, you can’t actively participate in a Hollywood movie any more than you can grow wings and buzz the Hollywood sign. (Oh, you could always be an extra—or move to Los Angeles and try to make it work as an actor, a screenwriter, whatever. But then, of course, you’d no longer be an audience member. The machine would have swallowed you up.)

So if there’s one thing that Kaufman, Kristoff, Bliss n Eso, and hundreds upon hundreds of other artists across the planet can teach California, it’s this: It makes sense to involve the audience. I’ve no doubt that Illuminae would have been successful as a series even if it had had a traditional marketing campaign—it’s that good—but I also have no doubt that those who had their names X’d out, as the heroes refer to anyone who gets killed, will remember both the series and the authors for a very long time. And if you think the folks who get to relive their favorite memories courtesy of an Aussie rap crew with a silly name aren’t going to buy that group’s next album—and the next—you’re crazy.

California needs to catch up. The good news: There are signs this is changing. In fields like visual art and theater, audiences are increasingly being encouraged to help the creators build something remarkable. Perfect example: the Living Digital Space exhibition in 2016, held at Pace Art + Technology Gallery in Menlo Park, where the artists teamLab created a 20,000 square foot multi-installation. Visitors helped make the art using a variety of programmed light displays that would alter based on their input, generating visuals that wouldn’t be possible without their decisions. The artists provided the tools, and the public got involved—Pace had to extend the exhibition by several months to keep up with the demand.

Another example: in 2017, the Center Theatre Group hosted an event called Remote L.A.—a piece of public theater where audience members donned headphones so a disembodied voice could guide them through the city. In doing so, they weren’t just consuming art—they were actively participating in it, through their interactions with members of the public (who were presumably a little confused to see small groups of people wandering around, wearing headphones and slightly puzzled expressions.)

But international artists are leading the charge there—and the kicker is that both Remote L.A. and Living Digital Space relied on artistic contributions from non-Californian creators. These artists are bringing audiences inside the tent, making them a part of their art in ways which wouldn’t even have seemed possible 15 years ago. California can learn from them.

Personally, I won’t be satisfied until Hollywood can insert me, an audience member, into a Deadpool sequel for Ryan Reynolds to murder in real time in a horrible and hilarious way.

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