Roland Barthes –The Death of the Author

Roland Barthes –The Death of the Author

Lecture notes by Dr. S. Sree Kumar

Barthes—the most brilliant of his generation—Writing Degree Zero—Mythologies[analysis of popular and high culture]—depends heavily on structuralist semiotics in the tradition of Saussure and Jakobson—The Elements of Semiology, Image-Music-Text—S/Z, a very important work—an exhaustive commentary on a Balzac short story ‘Sarrasine’—illustrates the method of Barthes—breaking down the text into small units or ‘lexias’—show how they carry different meanings simultaneously on different levels or in different codes—

 S/Z distinction between two types of texts—‘lisible’ or ‘readerly’ classic text [ readers are passive consumers]

 ‘scriptible’ or ‘writerly’ modern texts which invites readers to an active participation in the production of meanings that are infinite and inexhaustible.

The Pleasures of the Text—Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes –challenges the conventional distinction between critic and creator, fiction and non-fiction, literature and non-literature.

The Death of the Author

In ‘Sarrasine’, Balzac describes a castrato—

 “This was woman herself, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive worries…and her delicious sensibility”.

Who is speaking thus? Is it the hero? Is it Balzac, the individual? Is it universal wisdom?—we shall never know.

 Writing destroys every voice, every point of origin.

   “Writing is the neutral, composite, oblique space where the subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.”

 “It has always been like that—as soon as the fact is narrated…this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins”.

♫   The Author

♫    In ethnographic societies, the responsibility of a narrative is never assumed by a person but by a mediator/shaman.

♫    The author is a modern figure—emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism and French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation.

♫    The author lives in histories of literature, biographies of writers, interviews magazines etc.

♫    The image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centred on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions. The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end.

♫   Some writers tried to loosen the power and influence of the author:

i.              Stephane Mallarme—French writer—saw the necessity to substitute the author with language—suppressing the author in the interest of writing

ii.            Paul Valery—questioned the rights of the author—argued in favour of the verbal condition of literature.

iii.           Marcel Proust—blurred the relation between the writer and the characters[ His narrator is not he who has seen and felt, nor even he who is writing, but he who is going to write—

    The young man in the novel wants to write but cannot, the novel ends when writing at last becomes possible.

The removal of the author changes the modern text. The text has to be read in such a way that at all levels the author is absent. [ Formerly the author is thought to nourish the work—he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it—as a father to his child. In contrast the modern scripter is--]

  Born simultaneously with the text;

  In no way exceeds or precedes the text;

  Not the subject with the book as predicate;

  Every text is eternally written ‘here and now’ .

Writing is performative—[something like ‘I declare’ of kings or ‘I sing’ of ancient poets].

“Having buried the author, the modern scripter can thus no longer believe, as according to the pathetic view of his predecessors, that this hand is too slow for his thought or passion …”

“for the modern scripter, the hand is “cut off from any voice”.

TEXT

A A text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning.

A It is a multi-dimensional space in which variety of writings [none of them original] blend and clash.

A The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centres of culture.

A The writer has power only to mix writings, to counter the one with the others, in such a way as to never rest on any one of them.

A The scripter no longer bears within him passions, humours, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense dictionary from which he  draws a writing that can know no halt.

A Life never does more than imitate the book—the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred.

AUTHOR AND CRITIC

Once the author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. “To give a text an author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing”.

“The conception of the author suits criticism well. Criticism can try to discover the author. When the author is found and the text explained –victory to the critic!. Thus historically the reign of the author has also been that of the critic. Critic is today undermined along with the author”

  In the multiplicity of writing everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered.

  The structure can be followed but there is nothing beneath.

  The space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced.

  Writing ceaselessly posits meaning, ceaselessly to evaporate it

  Literature refuses to assign a ‘secret’, an ultimate meaning, to the text it liberates.

  It is an anti-theological activity.

  To refuse to fix meaning is in the end to refuse God , reason, science, law.

An Example—The Greek Tragedy

 Greek tragedy—consistently ambiguous—woven from words with double meaning—each character understands unilaterally—perpetual misunderstanding is exactly the ‘tragic’.

 The reader understands each word in its duplicity and in addition “hears the deafness of the characters speaking in front of him”.

The Reader : text is made up of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures. There is one place where all the multiplicity is focussed and that place is the reader, not the author.

The reader is without history, biography, psychology. He is simple, that ‘someone’. He holds together in a single field all traces by which the written txt is constituted.

Classic criticism never gave any importance to the reader.  For it the writer is the only person. To give writing its future it is necessary to undo this myth.

“…the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author”