Whodunit? Not the Author! : Unmasking 'Death of the Author' by Roland Barthes
Roland Gerard Barthes was an influential French philosopher and literary critic, who explored social theory, anthropology and semiotics, the science of symbols, and studied their impact on society. His work left an impression on the intellectual movements of Structuralism and Post-Structuralism.
In literature, structuralism is a way of analyzing and understanding texts by examining the underlying structures and patterns within them. It looks beyond the surface story and explores the deeper elements that give a literary work its meaning.
Post-structuralism in literature emerged as a reaction to and extension of structuralism. It challenges the idea that there are fixed, universal meanings in texts and instead emphasizes the idea that meaning is unstable, complex, and often shaped by individual interpretations.
Keeping these two definitions in mind, let's look at Roland Barthes' 'Death of the Author' :
In the first line, Barthes attempts to convey the central concept of his essay through the figure of Zambinella from Balzac's novella 'Sarrasine'. Barthes wonders if it is ever possible to know whose ideas are being expressed in the dialogues. Is this the novella's main character speaking? Is it the man Balzac, with his prejudices and judgments towards women, or someone else? Barthes successfully teaches us that we can never be sure if what a particular character communicates is coming from the author's own perspective or that of someone else.
He beautifully summarizes it in the following lines:
"...writing is the destruction of every voice, every origin. Writing is that neuter, that composite, that obliquity into which our subject flees, the black-and-white where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes."
This undoubtedly talks about how a writer loses himself in his work, saying, the writer is not himself but is his work. The work he has produced gives him an identity and not vice-versa so as Roland say - readers must not limit their interpretation to who the author is and his background but must take the literary work as an independent being and work on that, disregarding everything about the author. The author is independent of his work and the piece is an independent element on its own having no connection with its author. Roland encourages the reader to take the piece as it is and pry the author away from his work. Far from being a positive or creative force, writing is, in fact, a negative, a void, where we cannot know with any certainty who is speaking or writing.
"...writing is the destruction of every voice, every origin. Writing is that neuter, that composite, that obliquity into which our subject flees, the black-and-white where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes."
This undoubtedly talks about how a writer loses himself in his work, saying, the writer is not himself but is his work. The work he has produced gives him an identity and not vice-versa so as Roland say - readers must not limit their interpretation to who the author is and his background but must take the literary work as an independent being and work on that, disregarding everything about the author. The author is independent of his work and the piece is an independent element on its own having no connection with its author. Roland encourages the reader to take the piece as it is and pry the author away from his work. Far from being a positive or creative force, writing is, in fact, a negative, a void, where we cannot know with any certainty who is speaking or writing.
He expresses his resentment towards the importance given to authors in the following lines:
"...the image of literature to be found in contemporary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his history, his tastes, his passions; criticism still largely consists in saying that Baudelaire's oeuvre is the failure of the man Baudelaire, Van Gogh's is his madness, Tchaikovsky's his vice".
the inability of critics to pry the author from his work is what Barthes tackles in his essay.He tries to establish the fact that the author is not the authoritative figure of the text and that the meaning of the text does not reside in the author's intent, but in the reader's own individual interpretation.
the inability of critics to pry the author from his work is what Barthes tackles in his essay.He tries to establish the fact that the author is not the authoritative figure of the text and that the meaning of the text does not reside in the author's intent, but in the reader's own individual interpretation.
Although not explicitly stated, the foundation of Barthes' ideas seems to be firm atheism. The "Death of the Author" is a metaphor for the death of God, the author of all permanent and definite meanings. The philosophical implications of “The Death of the Author” transcend literature and are closely related to the postmodern trends of collapse of meaning, inability of originality, the death of God, and multiple discovery. The death of the author is the inability to create, invent, or be original.
This line of thought is explained further:
"The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination." The use of the word “quotations” expresses the idea that a text cannot really be “created” or “original”—it is always made up of an arrangement of preexisting “quotations” or ideas. Therefore, the “author” is not really an author, but rather a “scriptor” who simply puts together preexisting texts. Barthes used the French scripteur in his original essay, a rare French term which means, essentially, ‘copyist
Barthes ends his essay with a controversial 'verdict'
"...the birth of the reader must be requited by the death of the Author." He intends to say that only if we remove the author, there can be room for different interpretations from readers. Barthes is 'rejecting the traditional view that the author is the origin of the text, the source of its meaning, and the only authority for interpretation . This is what Barthes calls the 'birth of the reader' because by removing the author, we are placing the power of interpretation into the hands of the reader.
Citations :
Roland Barthes|Death of the Author|1967
Dr Oliver Tearle|https://interestingliterature.com/2021/10/barthes-death-of-the-author-summary-analysis|
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