Death of the Author & Richard Siken’s Twitter Account

Cropped Image of Saint Jerome Writing by Caravaggio

With the final sentence of Roland Barthes’ 1967 essay, “the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author,” a new era of literary criticism was born. In “The Death of the Author,” Barthes describes the literary landscape as “tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his history, his tastes, his passions,” responding to a culture where critics typically viewed the author’s intent as the ultimate authority on the interpretation of a text. 

But Barthes rejects this idea and pushes back against the singular importance of authorial intent. He asserts that the nature of language is infinitely interpretable, and as such, the meaning of a message cannot be imbued by the sender, but rather only interpreted by the receiver. In order for an interpreter of a text (a reader) to exist, the author’s authority over a text’s meaning (the Author) must die. Criticism, to Barthes, should center the reader of a text rather than a supposed word-of-God message imbued by the author.

However, Barthes’ essay was written in a time where authorial intent wasn’t always easy to decipher. Critics relied on biography to decipher the meaning of a text; a reader's interaction with an author was mostly limited to fanmail, attending readings and Q&As, or watching interviews. No one had a direct line to the author, and they certainly couldn’t thoughtlessly ask a writer a question without a certain amount of time, preparation, and effort. To a reader, the author was an unreachable, almost divine figure. 

Now, social media has closed the gap between creator and consumer. For better or worse, the internet has given the author a public, visible platform to discuss their writing, one that reaches both critics and the general audience. It has also changed, invariably, how fans relate to their work. J.K. Rowling, for example, has made liberal use of her platform, posthumously expanding the Harry Potter canon through interviews, answers to fan questions, and 280 character tweets: Dumbledore was gay, Hogwarts is tuition-free, Remus Lupin’s lycanthropy was a metaphor for HIV/AIDS (yikes). Whether these facts exist in the books is a different story (read: not really), but to some Harry Potter fans, Rowling’s declarations are law. 

To others, the death of the author became key to their engagement with Harry Potter. Especially in the wake of her public crusade against transgender women, many fans opt to separate the art from the artist and keep their participation in fan spaces free from Rowling’s influence. Controversy aside, this isn’t uncommon for any popular media: fan culture is quick to disregard both the author and parts of the text itself, centering less on canon content and more on the community of people that love it. For a fandom like Harry Potter, Rowling is unimportant to the reader’s enjoyment of the characters, world, and fantasy elements of the text. But what happens when a writer’s influence on their work isn't just subtext?

Richard Siken and his 2005 debut book of poetry, Crush, complicate the premise of Barthes’ essay. Written through an explicitly queer lens, Crush is raw, violent, unflinching, and in equal measure, full of love. It was a smash hit with critics, but also quickly became prolific on Tumblr. Siken was immensely popular in two main circles: first, with young gay audiences who deeply, personally resonated with Crush; second, among fans of cult, teen-oriented shows such as Supernatural and Sherlock, where it was commonplace to see his poems applied to imagined relationships between fictional men. While over time the buzz around Crush began to settle, Siken’s return to X (formerly Twitter) in July 2023 after his 2019 stroke revived these two groups and revealed a departure in how these audiences engage with his work.

To the first group, Siken and the speaker of his poems are one. His poetry was solemn and tragic, and so they expect him to be the same. They felt seen by his book, it helped them understand themselves, so they think that he will have the answers to all of their problems. To this audience, Siken not only has absolute authority over the meaning of his work but he is inextricable from it; even on his personal Twitter any departure of tone or style from Crush is seen as a betrayal. But while Crush was influenced by the death of Siken’s boyfriend in 1991, the collection is not autobiographical. Although he is a poet, and poets are good at putting complicated feelings into words, Richard Siken is not a therapist, he doesn't know what happens after we die, and he hasn’t figured out a way to overcome grief.

Via richardsiken on X

It is easy, especially in a medium as personal and ambiguous as poetry, to ignore Barthes and look only to the author for the meaning of a work, conflating author and speaker. But Siken is more than just a portrait in the About the Author section, and his writing is not a definitive reflection of his temperament or values. After all, wasn’t Neil Gaiman supposed to be a feminist author?

At the same time, nothing exists in a vacuum. Siken didn’t write Crush for no reason; it was informed by and exists in reaction to his experiences with love, death, and grief. But the second group, who engage with the poems through fandom, experiences Crush completely divorced from Siken and any influence he has over the text. Fragments of his poems are transformed and used as prompts, overlaid on photosets, used as titles and epigraphs for works of fanfiction. There is little engagement with Crush as a body of work, or even with a single poem in its entirety; this audience is more interested in the feelings and images of pain and desire that certain lines evoke and how these feelings can transform pre-existing media.

Via richardsiken on X

Of course, this is what fandom and fanworks have been doing since the 1970’s with Star Trek and Kirk/Spock. This isn’t a condemnation or investigation of fan culture and its tendency to subvert and complicate traditional readings of a text. Even in a time with direct access to an author’s thoughts, there remains no consensus on the “real” meaning of a work. And wasn’t that Barthes’ point, that ultimately, there can never be a consensus when it comes to the interpretation of language? That, no matter how fervently you work to send a message, you have no control over how people interpret it, how people use it and shape it according to their own experiences? 

The 20th anniversary edition of Crush releases May 27th. In the a new afterword Siken acknowledges his own authorial death, writing that the afterword “was the opportunity to provide the backstage passes, to reclaim and recontextualize the work, to explain everything. I tried, at first. I did. But the work didn’t belong to me, it never really belonged to me. It belonged to the reader.” Siken, it seems, is moving forward from a culture Barthes described as “tyrannically centered on the author,” leaving the reader behind to interpret his work as they see fit. So while anyone with an X account is free to ask Richard Siken a question, more often than not, they’re not going to get the answer they’re looking for.