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