The Death of the Author (Roland Barthes)

 

Introduction:

Roland Barthes, one of the most influential and brilliant critics in the twentieth century, was a staunch advocate of semiology and structuralism. His famous treatise “The Elements of Semiology” (1964) and famous essay, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of the Narrative” made memorable contribution to the evolution of semiology and structuralism which were initiated by Ferdinand de Saussure. In the beginning he wanted to ‘found a science of literary criticism.’ Later, under the influence of Derrida and Lacan his interest shifted from the general rules and constraints of narrative to the production of meaning in the process of reading.

Critical analysis:

In his famous essay, “The Death of the Author” Barthes asserted that “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.” In his most important work of literary criticism S/Z (1970) he comments exhaustively on Balzac’s famous story “Sarrasine”. His method of analysis provides an insight into structuralist  narratology. In the “textual Analysis of a Tale” (1973) by Edgar Allan Poe, he breaks down the text in lexias or small units of sense. Barthes aimed at showing how each small unit carries “many different meanings simultaneously or in different codes.”

Barthes proposes that structuralism is capable of an explanation of any sign system of any culture. He also perceives that such an explanation necessities a theology of meaning or explanation. This gives rise to the idea of ‘meta language’ which implies beyond language or second order language. Each order of language implicitly relies on a meta-language by which it is explained. Meta-language means “the language and terminology used to talk analytical about language itself.” In the course of interpreting one another the metalanguages will suffer ‘aporia’ or indefinite regression and thus, will vanish ultimately. He defends structuralism.

In “The Death of the Author” Barthes points out that the reader must cultivate an independent concept of the text and must completely dissociate himself from the author. When the writing begins, “the author enters into his own death.” In the capitalist ideology great importance has been attached to the “persona of the author.” The author still occupies a dominant place in histories of literature, biographies, magazine and interviews. Men of beliefs have been anxious to establish close relationship between authors and their works through diaries letters and memoirs. Literature is tyrannically author centred. An author’s life, readings, tastes, passions etc. are supposed to influence his writings. But “criticism consists for the most part in saying that Baudelaire’s work is the failure of Baudelaire, the man, Van Gogh’s his madness, Tchaikovsky’s his vice.” Barthes disagrees with the established view that “a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it…”

 Barthes's essential argument is that the author has no sovereignty over his own words (or images, sounds, etc.) that belong to the reader who interprets them. When we encounter a literary text, says Barthes, we need not ask ourselves what the author intended in his words but what the words themselves actually say. Text employ symbols which are deciphered by readers, and since function of the text is to be read, the author and process of writing is irrelevant.

 "The death of the author" notion means that meaning is not something retrieved or discovered, having been there all the while, but rather something spontaneously generated in the process of reading a text, which is an active rather than passive action. Barthes does not intend to suggest that the death of the author lets any reader read any text any way he or she like (though others aside from Barthes perused this line of thought). What Barthes is suggesting is that reading always involves at least a little bit of writing or rewriting of the text's meaning.

 Barthes's "The Death of the Author" is an attack on traditional literary criticism that focused too much on trying  to retrace the author's intentions and original meaning in mind. Instead Barthes asks us to adopt a more text oriented approach that focuses on the interaction of the reader, not the writer, with it. This means that the text is much more open to interpretation, much more fluid in its meaning than previously thought.       

 Referring to the New French Criticism, Barthes observes that Mallarme was “the first to see and foresee in its full extent the necessity to substitute language itself for the person who until then had been supposed to be its owner.” Language supersedes the author. Writing requires impersonality and objectivity. It is the language which ‘acts, performs and not the author.” Mallarme suppresses the author in the interest of writing and thus, restores the place of the reader. Proust too denies the superiority of the author in his work. Linguistics has recently provided the destruction of the author with a valuable analytical tool by showing that the whole of enunciation is an empty process, functioning perfectly without their being any need for it to be filled with the person of the interlocutors. The writer is nobody in writing. It is the language that matters. Brecht distances the author from his work. The test is made and red in such a way that at all its levels the author is absent. The author exists before writing a book, but ceases in exist when it is completed. He or she is the past of his/ her book. Barthes points out that “the author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lines for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child.”

Conclusion:

In modern time the writer has no existence. “He is born simultaneously with the text.” He has no being preceding or exceeding the writing. The reader interprets a work. The author has no place. Barthes concludes “ it is necessary to overthrow the myth, the birth, the reader must be at the cost of the author.”