Epiphany and Ransom
The death of the author, the birth of the reader, and meaning forever, amen.
“The reader is the very space in which are inscribed, without any being lost, all the citations a writing consists of; the unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination.” — Roland Barthes
There are moments in one’s reading life when a text aligns so completely with one’s experiences or interests that one’s sense of self dissolves into the larger pattern of personhood, a pattern opened in dialogue with the writer. How, we readers find ourselves asking in these moments, could the author have known? It is a sort of crisis, overwhelming identity as it is customarily performed.1
In the seemingly solitary act of reading, one can be inundated with otherness that is also one. The poet David Mutschlecner recognizes this as radical contingency,2 an “at-once-ness” that blurs being and meaning: “the mystery of vitality is the mystery of community is the mystery of commonality is the mystery of poetry.”3
Not that there is a uniform response to the cosmic literary alignment described above. Some readers respond to a particularly transformative piece of writing by saying “I wish I had written that,” which I take to mean “I wish to be a creative vessel for that language.” Some readers attach to authors as to heroes, mentors, saviors, celebrities, saints. Some readers get a tattoo. Some readers put it nice and succinctly and say “I died.”4
I have read so much that has struck and shattered me,5 which is almost certainly why I run a bookshop, and which definitely explains this project, wherein the task is to affirm the reality of the reader’s experience of touching—holding, bearing—the wellspring of language.
Having neatly packaged the idea of the crisis in logical prose, I can now tear it open and speak personally: I had a reading experience the other day that broke my brain—threw it against the wall of a bigger brain, a greater being. It made me feel like an abstract expressionist painting, full of drips and dashes, layers and ooze. Colors everywhere.6
The greater being’s name is Ransom.
Some of you will be familiar with Roland Barthes’ notorious essay, “The Death of the Author” (1967). I thought I was, having read it in grad school.7 But something terribly ironic and fitting happened: while remembering Barthes’ core idea8 about the Author, I had forgotten9 Barthes’ revolutionary point about the reader:
“In this way is revealed the whole being of writing: a text consists of multiple writings, issuing from several cultures and entering into dialogue with each other, into parody, into contestation; but there is one place where this multiplicity is collected, united, and this place is not the author, as we have hitherto said it was, but the reader.”
The philosophy of this Substack, to say nothing of the bookshop’s Reader in Residence program, is decidedly prefigured in Barthes’ conclusion; it’s as if I set out to advance his thesis. Rather, the residency and “Reading Is Art” grew up like the essay’s ancestors, across the pond, only lately learning that they inherited a metaphysical family name.
But this is all subcontext. The crisis came on when I read the final sentence in Barthes’ essay:
“We know that to restore to writing its future, we must reverse its myth; the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author.”10
Most people know C. S. Lewis’ set of three sci-fi novels as The Space Trilogy. This is how I first knew them, and no surprise: The Space Trilogy is how the titles were (and still are) most commonly marketed. But fans of Lewis will tell you that it is more authentically known as The Ransom Trilogy.
Central to each book is the character of Dr. Elwin Ransom, philologist at the University of Cambridge and chance protagonist in a moral conflict of cosmic proportions. On one hand, the name Ransom is a loving callout to Lewis’ friend, J. R. R. Tolkien, professor of Old English, from which language the word is derived.11 On the other hand, in Perelandra, Ransom meets a divine entity who says that his name is “also ransom,” as in the ransom of Christ’s death over sin.
In any case, ransom is central to both “The Death of the Author” and Perelandra, which are central to my life, in turn. What does it mean?
The dictionary tells me plainly how ransom is performed: ransom is payment demanded or paid in exchange for the release of a prisoner. My experience as a Catholic tells me that this is how Christianity came about: how a traumatized people came to understand the state-sponsored slaughter of a kind man:12 Jesus’ individual life was held ransom for the collective sins of the world; returned to his father in heaven, the ransom was paid.
But hold on. Earlier in his essay, Barthes had this to say about the revolutionary potential of the Author’s absence:
“Literature (it would be better, henceforth, to say writing), by refusing to assign to the text (and to the world as text) a ‘secret’—that is, an ultimate meaning13—liberates an activity which we might call counter-theological, properly revolutionary, for to refuse to arrest meaning is finally to refuse God and his hypostases, reason, science, the law.”
Ransom as Christ, ransom as counter-theological. What is going on here??
To my mind, texts like Perelandra controvert Barthes’ idea that liberation should be necessarily counter-theological, because I’m not sure that theology need be ideologically binding.14 Lewis was certainly developing a radical theology across the trilogy, but like Joseph Campbell’s young Hindu friend reading the Bible for the first time, I “can’t find any religion in it.” It is too deeply possessed of the creative force of poetic faith, which David Mutschlecner articulates so beautifully:
“I do not leave theology behind so much as release it to become another thing. (In some way, words always wait for us to do this.) The theologian as theologian cannot do this. Where meaning is freed, meaning is at risk of loosing the parameters of dogma. This may be—for some—a fearful thing, but freeing meaning shows, in some manner, a kind of poetic faith. Poetic faith says that nothing of true value is ever lost, it is rather given new life. Truth rises as the light of language, deep from the well of words.
If I did not have David—and David did not have C. S. Lewis, Karl Jaspers, Nishida Kitarō, Robert Duncan, Dante &c. before him—I’d go with Barthes all the way. But does Barthes give us enough revolutionary momentum, enough love to refuse the arrest of meaning in, say, algorithms, computation, and the machine?
I get this terrible feeling that, despite Barthes’ clear rejection of empire and systems that sequester meaning to authoritarian ends, “The Death of the Author” opens the door to a philosophical justification of large language models and generative AI, tools that proceed from and exponentially reinforce our deeply unequal technological society.1516 For example:
“Succeeding the Author, the writer no longer contains within himself passions, humors, sentiments, impressions, but that enormous dictionary, from which he derives a writing which can know no end or halt: life can only imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, a lost, infinitely remote imitation.”
The book, like the person, is reduced to a sum of its devices. As brutal as this sounds (and as sad as it feels), I think I understand why Barthes is thinking this way. Until we admit of the distance between our signs and our lives, our techniques and our sentience, we will continue to manipulate both to fit the unsound structures within which we are situated.
Which brings me back to ransom: what makes the term so operative that thinkers as imaginative and different as Roland Barthes and C. S. Lewis used it to center their most poignant philosophies?
I’m not quite prepared to answer the question—I’m still awash in color. But even as I surrender to the seemingly pedestrian tasks waiting on my desk, the color intensifies. For what word do I now have eyes to see, over and over again, advertising new narratives? “Captivating.” As though the reader’s goal is to be taken by the author. What—or Who—gets released?
It seems like we may have lost track of what makes textual (narrative, poetic) encounters a good thing. Which I think is what preoccupied Barthes and Lewis—the ethics of literary imagination. For the former, ransom is a metaphorical tether between birth and death; for the latter, a person is ransom incarnate.
Something about selflessness, about sacrifice…
Do the scales ever balance out?
To my mind, this sort of crisis recalls Joycean epiphany: “a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself.” (Stephen Hero)
“This state occurs when a human being experiences the mystery of death as the final reality of every life.” (See: The Encyclopedia of World Problems & Human Potential)
The notion of radical contingency leads Mutschlecner to something he calls radical embrace: “Every being’s meaning is predicated upon a more inclusive meaning. This is as much as to say that there is nothing, nothing at all in the whole universe, that is not contingent upon something else. Nothing contains the necessary reason for its own existence. No creature can say: I simply am and always have been and always will be—I rely solely and strictly upon my own vitality. I lift myself up by my own bootstraps. Because nothing can say this definitively, everything is in radical embrace with everything else.”
Some readers become literary critics, which I fear is my own haphazard proclivity.
“I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.” (Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)
“If I were a painter, I should paint only colors: this field seems to me freed of both the Law (no Imitation, no Analogy) and Nature (for after all, do not all the colors in Nature come from the painters?).” (Roland Barthes, 1977)
This, as ever, points to the fundamental precariousness of reading, or of contemporary conceptions of reading. The common—which is to say socially accepted, structurally reinforced—view is that we read to understand, and that understanding pertains to the occasion of the reading act, the subject and object at hand. Therefore, to have read is to retain. Meanwhile, in real life, we read a book and forget most of what the book is made of, notwithstanding a general sequence of events, a few key characters, some striking sentences or sentiments.
In other words, we are far more impressionistic—and, crucially, imaginative—than we like to believe. It’s possible that the ability to refer back to specific material (which is the special advantage of the codex over the scroll), and now to digitally search for it, props up our false sense of command over the material. Which is why I propose that we read less to understand than to Understand: to carry meaning out into the overgrown field of our interpenetrating lives.
Which is, to paraphrase: the voice we identify with a writer is a cultural manifold; attributing it to a personality is an error seeded by empiricism, rationalism, and the Reformation, rooted in positivism, and tyrannically perpetuated by capitalism. Hence, “the modern writer (scriptor) is born simultaneously with his text; he is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends his writing, he is in no way the subject of which his book is the predicate; there is no other time than that of the utterance, and every text is eternally written here and now.”
My grandfather used to justify forgetting things by saying he had to in order to make room for remembering new stuff. Easy enough to dismiss as a clever joke, except for the fact that he died just a month shy of 100 years old, so who are any of us youngsters, really, to argue otherwise?
My emphasis
Ransom is a contraction of “Ranolf’s son.”
Donna Haraway: “I first started using the word ‘kin’ when I was in college in a Shakespeare class because I realized that Shakespeare punned with ‘kin’ and ‘kind.’ Etymologically they’re very closely related. To be kind is to be kin, but kin is not kind. Kin is often quite the opposite of kind. It’s not necessarily to be biologically related but in some consequential way to belong in the same category with each other in such a way that has consequences.” (See: LARB)
Presided over by an Author
Religion, from Latin religare “to bind”
“From 1978–2022, top CEO compensation shot up 1,209.2% compared with a 15.3% increase in a typical worker’s compensation. In 2022, CEOs were paid 344 times as much as a typical worker in contrast to 1965 when they were paid 21 times as much as a typical worker. To illustrate just how distorted CEO pay increases have gotten: In 2021, CEOs made nearly eight times as much as the top 0.1% of wage earners in the U.S.” (Economic Policy Institute)
I understand that by citing the above statistics without being able to draw distinct correlations to technological development, I’m painting in irresponsibly broad strokes. But considering the fact that the world’s wealthiest individuals came up in the realm of digital tech, I feel okay about my painting.