DEATH OF THE AUTHOR – ROLAND BARTHES

            The Death of the Author is a 1967 essay by the French literary critic and theorist Roland Barthes. Barthes’s essay argues against traditional literary criticism’s practice of incorporating the intentions and biographical context of an author in an interpretation of a text and instead argues that writing and creator are unrelated.

            The essay’s first English language publication was in the American journal Aspen in 1967; the French debut was in the magazine Manteia. The essay later appeared in an anthology of Barthes’s essays Image-Music-Text (1977).

            In his essay, Barthes argues against the method of reading and criticism that relies on aspects of the author’s identity – her/his political views, historical context, religion, ethnicity, psychology, or other biographical or personal attributes – to distill meaning from the author’s work. In this type of criticism, the experiences and biases of the author serves as a definitive “explanation” of the text. For Barthes, this method of reading may be apparently tidy and convenient but is actually sloppy and flawed: “To give a text an author” and assign a single, corresponding interpretation to it” is to impose a limit on the text”.

            Readers must thus separate a literary work from its creator in order to liberate the text from interpretive tyranny ( a notion similar to Erich Allerbach’s discussion of narrative tyranny in Biblical Parables). Each piece of writing contains multiple layer and meanings. In a well-known quotation, Barthes draws an analogy between text and textiles, declaring that a “text is a tissue or fabric of quotations”, drawn from “innumerable centres of cultures, rather than from one, individual experience. The essential meaning of a work depends on the impressions of the reader, rather than the ‘passions’ or ‘tastes’ of the writer, “ a text’s unity lies not in its origins’, or its creator, but in its destination”, or its audience.

            No longer the focus of creative influence, the author is merely a “scripter”. The scripter exists to produce but not to explain the work and is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, and is not the subject with the book as predicate. “Every work is eternally written here and now”, with each re-reading, because the “origin” of meaning lies exclusively in language itself” and its impressions on the reader.

            Barthes notes that the traditional critical approach to literature raises a thorny problem: how can we detect precisely what the writer intended? His answer is that we cannot. He introduces this notion in epigraph to the essay, taken from Honore de Balzae’s story Sarrasine in which a male protagonist mistakes a Castrato for a woman and falls in love with him. When, in the passage, the character dotes over his perceived womanliness. Barthes challenged his own readers to determine who is speaking, and about what. Is it Balzac the author professing ‘literary ideas on femininity? Is it universal wisdom? Romantic psychology?...... We can never know. 

“writing” – the destruction of every voice,” defies adherence to a single interpretation or perspective. 

            Acknowledging the presence of this idea or variations of it in the works of previous writers. Barthes cited in his essay the poet Stephane Mallarme who said that “it is language which speaks”. He also recognized Marcel Proust as being concerned with the task of inexorably blurring….the relation between the writer and his characters;” the surrealist movement for employing the practice of “automatic writing” to express “what the head itself is unaware of” and the field of linguistics as a discipline for “showing that the whole of enunciation is an empty process”. Barthes’s articulation of the death of the author is a radical and drastic recognition of this severing of authority and authorship. Instead of discovering a ‘single theological’ meaning ( the ‘message’ of the author-god) readers of a text discover that writing in reality, constitutes “a multi-dimensional space” which cannot be deciphered,” only disentangled, refusing to assign a secret, ultimate meaning to text liberates what may called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases – reason, science, law.