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The Death of The Author: 1. The Basic Nature of Writing According To Barthes

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477 views

The Death of The Author: 1. The Basic Nature of Writing According To Barthes

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sandra
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© © All Rights Reserved
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The Death of the Author

1. The basic nature of writing according to Barthes.


A: According to Roland Barthes, writing is the destruction of the voice, identity and
existence of the author. In traditional formulations, the author is the ultimate
authority of literary discourse. They uphold a work of literature as the spontaneous
and seamless extension of the author’s personality. Thus the best way to understand
meaning is to decode words in relation to the author. But in the system of thinking
suggested by Barthes, writing is a neutral, composite, negative and oblique locus.
Definite subject positions do not exist and one’s identity is irrevocably lost there. In
fact, the very process of writing begins only after the individuality and personal
voice of the author are erased.

2. How does Barthes regard the author as a recent cultural construct?


A: Roland Barthes opines that the author is a comparatively recent cultural
construct. Its historical roots and origins are connected with the paradigmatic shifts
in the Middle Ages, English empiricism, French rationalism and the unprecedented
centrality that the individual gained during the Reformation. All of them paved the
way for the capitalist ideology. This new perspective invented the author as a single
overarching agency and invested supreme importance on the presence and prestige
of the individual—the “human person.” Such a figure has ownership on the
property—literature—which is copyrighted and sold for profit. The author is still
crucial in histories of literature, biographies of writers, interviews and magazines.
Similarly we are familiar with cases where writers attempt to mediate between their
personal self and literary work by means of diaries and memoirs.

3. Enumerate the instances where the author is treated as dead.


A: Roland Barthes is happy to note that though the myth of the author is persisting
and is often a deeply ingrained cultural habit, there have been certain outstanding
exceptions. For example the French Symbolist poet Stephane Mallarme realized the
necessity of substituting language in place of the poet as the owner of the poem. For

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him it is language that speaks in a poem, not the author who is supposedly behind it.
His entire poetics consists of suppressing the author in the interest of writing.
Though slightly different from Mallarme, the French poet and critic Paul Valery,
who had strong classical inclinations, challenged and derided the idea of the author.
He stressed the linguistic aspect of writing and militated in favour of the essentially
verbal condition of literature. In his scheme recourse to the writer’s personal
existence is pure superstition. Marcel Proust was also bent on blurring the bond
between the writer and his character. Surrealism, although it never accorded
language a superior place, destroyed the idea of the author by upholding the tenets
of ‘automatic writing’ and by accepting the principle and experience of several
people writing together. Linguistics has recently destroyed the idea of an
authoritative author by showing that enunciation is an empty impersonal process
and that the author is a mere linguistic category who exists only within a discourse.

4. What are the implications of the removal of the author?


A: Roland Barthes cogently claims that the death or removal of the author has wide
and profound consequences. Primarily, it shatters and transmutes the idea of the
modern text by invalidating the generally accepted temporal relation between the
author and the text. In traditional formulations the author is supposed to be existing
before the text and nourishing it. It is like the relation between the father and the
son. In complete contrast to this common conception, the removal of the author
posits that the author exists only within the discourse. In other words, author is a
discursive agency which comes into being only as part of the reading process.

5. Barthes’s views on the myth of origin and originality.


A: Roland Barthes argues that a literary text is not a linear sequence of words which
innocently communicate the intention or desire of the author. On the contrary, it is a
space that is essentially linguistic and multidimensional. A variety of writings, none
of them original, blend and clash in this space. That is, the text is a mosaic of
quotations drawn from innumerable centres of culture. This position implies that we
have to reach the conclusion that the author does not write something from vacuum

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but finds and collates already existing linguistic structures. In this way the old
dream of pure and pristine self-expression becomes an impossibility, a myth. To
achieve the goal of self-expression the author ought to understand the fact that the
‘inner-self’ he desires to translate into language is nothing but a readymade
dictionary. The words of this dictionary are explainable only through other words.
So this is a never-ending process. Things which we call self, individuality and
emotions are created by language. They have no existence outside language. In
other words even psychic feelings which we place above and beyond the realm of
language do not exist without the linguistic discourse. We can thus go even to the
extent of saying that life does not do anything other than imitating the book, and the
book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation of that is lost, infinitely deferred.

6. What are the implications of the removal of the author in criticism and other
fields?
A: Roland Barthes says that the removal of the author has wide implications and
profound repercussions in the field of criticism. Traditionally, our knowledge about
an author (like his biography and political position) helps us restrict the linguistic
configurations within limits. That is, this knowledge delimits the sematic
possibilities of the text which can go on in the absence of such knowledge. We tend
to read a text in relation to a given author. Naturally we decode the text strictly
within the parameters created by our understanding of the socio-political views or
ideology of the author. It is from extra-literary sources that we get information of
this kind. In such models our reading strategies end up in unearthing the ‘intention’
of the author in relation with the society and contemporary ethos. Hence there is no
surprise that the reign of the author has been that of the critic as well. The critic had
the onerous task of finding and fixing meaning. But in the light of the new
theoretical explorations, we cannot decipher an absolute single meaning. All we can
do is to disentangle the multiple meanings in the mosaic of literary discourse. We
cannot find anything hidden beneath the linguistic structures of a literary work.
Writing ceaselessly posits meanings but they ceaselessly evaporate. In this way
reading of literature, and by extension any kind of writing, does not reveal hidden

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messages or intentions. On the contrary, reading liberates an activity which
proclaims the indeterminacy of meaning and thus challenges the basic premises of
reason, science and law.

7. How does Barthes envision the new role of the reader?


A: According to Roland Barthes, every utterance in literary discourse is a mosaic.
Each of them generates free-floating and multiple meanings. At times the meanings
are disparate and contradictory. The reader (not the author) is the only place or
agency where this multiplicity is focussed. The unity of a text lies not in its origin
(author) but in its destination (reader). But the reader is always impersonal. He is
not supposed to be aware of the social and psychological dynamics of the author and
that of the age or circumstances under which the text is born. On the other hand, at
any point of time, he holds together in a single field all the traces by which the
written text is constituted. Through an endless process the reader finds ever fresh
meanings. Barthes concludes that to give writing its future, it is necessary to jettison
the myth of the author: “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the
author.”

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