Comments on Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author”
Julie Gafney
Barthes proposes that authorship, and particularly the figure of the author to whom critics ascribe ultimate authority, are fictions. The relationship between author and text has, since the emergence of the Author, been imagined as linear and as temporally progressive; the author exists first, and the text follows. The author, like a father, creates, nourishes, and finally releases his progeny, but the child-text may (or must) always be understood in terms of its relationship to the author-father. This paradigm is a particularly useful device for critics because it limits the scope of the text and provides a context within which the text may be deciphered, where the critic can have the “victory” of comprehension of the text. Barthes challenges this limited way of reading and understanding texts by demonstrating its fabricated nature. Instead, he calls for a new way of reading in which a fictional unified meaning derived from the author’s relationship to his works is relinquished in favor of the acknowledgement of the inherent multiplicity of a text. The focus of this new process of reading is on the reader, instead of on the author; the author must effectively die in order for the more truthful kind of reading to take place.
I believe that Barthes is right: the figure of the author, particularly as constructed by critics, is fictional. But, I’m not certain that the only response to such knowledge is to remove the author entirely. Barthes’s theory necessarily places primacy upon language itself; he writes of Mallarme, “For him, for us too, it is language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality (not at all to be confused with the castrating objectivity of the realist novelist), to reach that point where only language acts, 'performs', and not 'me'.” By this formulation, Barthes does not do away with textual authority entirely, bur rather displaces it from the fictional figure of the author to the site of language. It is language, rather than the author, that speaks, performs, discloses and communicates to its reader. Language is thought of as being able to speak for itself. This seems to me to be a new kind of fiction. The primacy of language in this new model requires that we imagine a straightforward relationship between signifier and signified; that is, it requires that we imagine that words can communicate their meaning to the new, central, reader, without interpretive difficulty. I don’t think this is possible. The question of interpretation does not vanish when the author is spirited away. So, while it is useful to acknowledge the fabricated qualities of authorship, I don’t agree that the author must “die” to make way for a better way of reading and understanding. The fictional nature of the relationship between author and text does not obviate its usefulness.
Hello all! So, I've written up a little position above, but I'm not sure I'm right. I'm going to keep thinking about it, and I'd welcome your thoughts. I'm particularly wondering about the multiplicity of the authorless text, and whether that multiplicity does in fact account for the problematic idea of the text speaking for itself.
ReplyDeleteHi Julie,
ReplyDeleteGood post. I find your critique of Barthes's essay convincing, especially in your summarizing sentence, "the question of interpretation does not vanish when the author is spirited away." I had a similar reaction.
Ceding that Barthes is giddily utopian here, I still wonder whether he's on to something that we still haven't quite resolved. Early in the essay, he writes, "As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively...this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin" (1466). He follows this with the assertion, "a text is...a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash" (1468). I'll give the essay credit insofar as it seems to bring us to the brink of one of today's most pressing questions: The subject and object have broken down. Now what?
One question is whether Barthes helps us to resolve this question or whether he is just one in a long line of "poststructuralist" thinkers to pose the problem, but not the solution.
I'd be eager to hear what others think.
All best,
-Erin
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ReplyDeleteWhat was most interesting to me about Barthes' essay was his assertion that "it has always been that way." Narration itself (or, at least, narration "no longer with a view to acting directly on reality") entails, or even is, the disappearance of an author. The sentences in a literary work - such as that sentence that Barthes quotes from Balzac - cannot be considered the expression of anyone. Could it be the belief or opinion of the historical person Balzac that "This was woman herself" when the "This" never existed? Narration has always been in this sense anonymous: we might know who wrote or spoke, but we don't know - perhaps, more precisely, there is no one - whom the writing or speaking expresses. There has never been what we have - always vaguely, though without being aware of our vagueness - called an "author."
ReplyDeleteWhat has changed during history is only this: as Barthes puts is, "Our sense of this phenomenon...has varied." The author didn't die in our era. The author was invented, and maybe we're beginning to see that he or she is an invention.
Hi Julie,
ReplyDeleteGreat comments; I'm left thinking over your critique in the final paragraph, especially your comments about “interpretation”, and wondering whether some clarification of what we mean by the term might help us understand what both we as graduate students in English and Barthes are doing.
You suggested that Barthes’ notion of “language” suggests that “meaning” can be communicated to a reader without “interpretive difficulty,” but you note that “the question of interpretation does not vanish” even when the author is dead. I would say: yes, and no. In Barthes’ notion of language, I’m not sure that there can even exist what we call “interpretation,” which has something to do with communication, because for Barthes, language simply is what it is—it has no “secret[s],” no underlying ground”: “everything is to be distinguished, but nothing deciphered.” To me, these words suggest that language is all surface, where there the questions of signifiers and signifieds simply don’t apply.
What your comment does suggest, however, is the persistence of “interpretation” as a presumed goal of…whatever it is we do (are we Barthes’ “Critics”? oh, no!). The question is whether “interpretation”, in your (and our) use, refers to (these are not all the options, of course):
1- the search for the correct meaning of a text (what Barthes calls “ultimate meaning”, in which case we are in fact his despised “Critics”);
2- the search for the possible meanings of a text at different times to different readers (a kind of pluralistic view of interpretation, which refuses to “arrest meaning”, but still seems to me to retain a view of finding a (not the) “right” interpretation, and therefore is still likely to fall under Barthes’ scorn); or
3- the search for a language adequate to the critic’s judgment of pretty much anything about or around the text. This is the view of David Bromwich, who suggests that it makes more sense to think of “criticism as a language for discussing representations of the way people live and think and feel…The idea of criticism as a language, rather than a map to a special province of truth, might well have gained acceptance while the New Critics were still active, had they chosen Wittgenstein rather than Coleridge as their guide.”
If anyone wants to explain why he brings up Wittgenstein here, then let’s grab some coffee.
It seems as though many of us here are addressing the same qualm in relation to Barthes’ Death of the Author, which is the extreme nature of Barthes’ stance. The act of divorcing an author from him work seems to hinge on the idea that the author’s experiences, what may or may not have shaped him and thus his writing, are not important. Rather than the “death” of the author, I believe a more productive approach to consider may be to perhaps place the author in a brief coma. It would be fruitful to suspend analysis of a work onto another plane, away from the author and the known or unknown occurrences in his life that may or may not have influenced him, yet, such a drastic approach as what Barthes seems to be espousing will handicap the reader. The reader will not be allowed the full scope of possible interpretations of the text. One reading is left out. This seems as preposterous to me as forging a new friendship with someone only for him to tell me that any mention of his life prior to my meeting him is off-limits.
ReplyDeleteI believe that the true crux of the matter is that, while perhaps we should put more emphasis on experiencing the text rather than merely explaining it away, we cannot negate that an author exists and that his experiences leading up to the writing of the text, as well as his own experience of the text, are important aspects of the text itself. While focusing entirely on the author may become debilitating, killing him off is just as much so. Barthes’ final phrase, “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author” is very troubling for me. WHY must one die for the other to be born? I do not find Barthes’ arguments concerning this at all compelling and I’m afraid that my analysis of the problem obviously borders much more on the “can’t we all just get along?” exhortation.
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ReplyDeleteI'm intrigued by Erin's comment that "The subject and object have broken down. Now what?" I'd like to further discuss this assumption in class, because one theoretical frame I keep returning to while reading Barthes is Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels' "Against Theory", in which they argue that the subject IS the object, and that a critic/reader cannot construe any meaning from the text without foregrounding the author's intent. In other words, the author's intent IS the work's meaning and cannot be distinguished from it. The theories, at surface, are polemical: Barthes argues that "text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination"; Knapp/Michaels argue that the origin IS the destination. Yet, the two camps have more in common than I think they'd like to admit: each extracts the literary product from the cultural, interpretive community in which it was created. In either scenario, author is scriptor, only K/M subscribe more agency to their scriptor, ceding that even if the process of 'scripting' yields subconscious or conflicting textures within language, what the text *means* is still what the author intended. Neither camp is interested in construing meaning based on the complex network of cultural and historical forces, and so their stark distinction between text-as-authorless and text-as-author seem to me to suggest flip sides of a coin.
ReplyDeleteOn a final note, and perhaps as an example we might use as a point of departure, here's a review of a book of essays about Anne of Green Gables. The review, entitled, "Leave Anne Alone!" bemoans the turn towards intense contextualization, such as one essay, which suggests Anne showed all the signs of suffering from fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (!). http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/06/16/leave-anne-alone/