Ronald Barthes,
French literary critic and theorist of structuralism and post-structuralism
announces the death of the author in order to have birth of the reader. Barthes
prolific output is consistently innovative and inventive to make him one of the
most important and influential critics of the twentieth century. It is as
assertion that struck at the very heart of traditional literary studies and
that has remained one of the most controversial tenets of post-structuralism.
He was a writer who disconcerted his disciples as well as his opponents by
continually rejecting one kind of discourse in favor of another, and to this
extent lived the assertion simultaneously with the text.
As for Bathes, writing is the destruction of
every voice, of every point of origin. It is neutral, composite and oblique
space where subject disappears and where all identity is lost. As soon as a
fact is narrated with a view to acting no longer directly but intransitively on
reality, the disconnection between the author and the writing occurs. The voice
loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, and writing begins.
Actually, the
idea of giving a text to the authority of an author is a long term process.
Barthes argues that the traditional notion of the author is a product of the
rationalist and empiricist thought of the Middle Ages that ascribes a central
importance to the individual human being- for a text. It is the person of the author
that is more important than the text. So, we see the author still reigns in
histories of literature, biographies of writers, interviews, magazines etc. We
also see in men of letters as anxiousness to unite their person and their work
through diaries and memories. Thus the image of literature centers round the
author, his person, his life, his tastes, his ideas and criticism also is
directed to that end. It is usually thought that the “explanation” of the text
is found in the man or woman who has written it. Thus the author becomes the
creator, God, and thus a theological entity who knows only about his creation,
his work.
Though the
influence of the author remains powerful, many pre modern writers have tried to
challenge the centrality of the author. In France, Stephen Mallerme was
undoubtedly the first whose poetry reaches the point at which language can be
said to be “speaking itself” through an impersonal writing. For him, it is
language which speaks, not he author. It ceases to be either a psychological
expression of the poet’s subjectivity or a representation of something external
to its own workings. Mallermie’s entire poetics consists in suppressing the
author in the interests of writing. Despite the supposed acuity of his
psychological analyses, Proust has, according to Barthes, written the epic of
modern writing. Surrealism and linguistic ideas also tried to remove the author
from the fixed and ever-occupying place.
The removal of
the author is more than an historical fact or an act of writing. But it means
to transform the modern text in such a level that it seems the Author is
totally absent. Here the temporality is different. When we believe that the
Author is present, we conceive him as the past of his own book; book and author
stand automatically on a single line divided into a before and an after. Here
the author is father, the book is his child, thought, and nourished by his
father. But the idea of the modern scriptor of is different. The modern
scriptor is born simultaneously with the text but no linear relation, no
preceding or exceeding, no “here and now” with the immediate enunciation of it.
It follows that “writing does not mean an operation of recording, notation,
representation and depiction.” But it is a “performative”, a rare verbal form
in which the enunciation has no other content than the act by which it is
uttered. Thus the modern scriptor buries the Author and traces a field without
origin- or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, language
which ceaselessly calls into question all origins.
Thus a text is
not a line of words with a single theological meaning or the message of the
Author- God but a multi- dimensional space in which a variety of non- original
writings blends and clash.(Like Collase). The text is a combination quotations
drawn from the innumerable centers of culture. The writer actually can not
writer, but to mix writings, to place the ones with the others, as never to
rest on any one of them. He should know
that his “wish to express himself” is a grotesque one because the “inner thing”
that he wishes to translate is only a ready-formed dictionary; its words have
man synonyms and can express indefinitely his thinking through those words. So,
the modern scriptor, succeeding the Author, has no passions, humors, feelings,
impressions but rather this immense dictionary (is) the source of his writing.
To Barthes, life is only the imitation of the book which itself is only a
tissue of signs infinitely deferred.
According to Barthes, to give a text an Author opens the path of
victory for the critic and a critic may easily explain the text. Thus the
critic finding out the Author “explained” the text. But modern idea wants to
suppress the critic along with the Author. When the author is removed, the
claim to decipher a text is futile. So in the crowd of writings, nothing is to
be “deciphered” but to be “disentangled”. The space of writing is to be ranged
over; writing ceaselessly posits meaning. In precisely this way literature, by
refusing to assign an ultimate meaning to the text, liberates what may be
called an anti theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary,
because it refuses to fix the meaning in God and his hypostases- reason,
science and law.
According to
Barthes, a text is made up of multiple writings drawn from many cultures and
entering into mutual relations of dialogues, parody, contestation. But there is
one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not
the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up
writing are inscribed without any of them being, lost; a text’s unity lies not
in its origin but in its destination. But this destination can not be personal.
The reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone
who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text
is constituted. Classic criticism has never paid an attention to the reader,
for it, the writer is the only person in literature. To give writing its
future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth. In short, the death of the
Author signals the liberation of the reader by the by the very assertion that “the
birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”
