Suicide is the resurrection and reading of the author.

In After Words: Suicide and Authorship in Twentieth Century Italy, Elizabeth Leake examines Guido Morselli, Amelia Rosselli, Cesare Pavese, and Primo Levi, who share a distinction along with differences.

Leake writes: “This study begins with a gunshot wound, an overdose of sleeping pills, and two falls from great heights …” She continues:

This study investigates the interrelations between suicide and reading: both how the suicide of an author informs critical and popular interpretations of his or her writings, and how, after suicide, an author’s life becomes a text to be read. I will argue that suicide functions as a hermeneutical tool with which readers, critics, publicists, and the author him- or herself construct the author’s life.

The death of the author merely precedes his resurrection because the reader is too weak and too strong: too demanding and insatiable for the author of the text, the author as the text. The moral failing also seems to lie with the author. The mortal sin of J.D. Salinger, for instance, was not his hermetic life and shuttered work after the Catcher in the Rye. They were merely his turns in a perverse game of cat and mouse. His mortal sin was The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger. The author is dead, long live the very same.

< § >

—
Elizabeth Leake, After Words : Suicide and Authorship in Twentieth-Century Italy, Toronto Italian Studies Series (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011).