Roland Barthes the Death of the Author

The Death of the compose In his story Sarrasine, Balzac, verbalize of a castrato disguised as a womanhood, writes this sentence It was Woman, with her sudden fears, her unreasonable whims, her instinctive fears, her unprovoked bravado, her daring and her delicious delicacy of feeling Who is literalise in this centering? Is it the storys hero, concerned to ignore the castrato concealed down the stairs the woman? Is it the man Balzac, nullifyowed by his individualal start with a school of mind of Woman?Is it the precedent Balzac, professing legitimate literary ideas of femininity? Is it familiar wisdom? or romantic psychology? It will everlastingly be impossible to know, for the good reason that all(prenominal) composition is itself this special voice, consisting of several(prenominal) indiscernible voices, and that literary works is precisely the invention of this voice, to which we evict non assign a ad hoc origin literature is that neuter, that composite, th at oblique into which all subject escapes, the trap where each(prenominal) identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.Probably this has always been the slip of paper once an toyion is recounted, for intransitive blocks, and no longer in revision to act directly upon reality that is, finally external to either proceed tho the very exercise of the symbol this disjunction occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters his own death, writing begins.Nevertheless, the feeling about this phenomenon has been variable in uninstructed societies, narrative is never under submitn by a soulfulness, only if by a mediator, shaman or speaker, whose performance may be admired (that is, his bid of the narrative code), but not his genius The author is a fresh figure, produced no doubt by our society insofar as, at the end of the middle ages, with English empiricism, French rationalism and the person-to-person faith of the Reformation, it notice the prestige of the individual, or, to put it more(prenominal) nobly, of the human person Hence it is licit that with regard to literature it should be positivism, resume and the result of capitalist ideology, which has accorded the greatest importance to the authors personThe author still rules in manuals of literary history, in biographies of writers, in magazine interviews, and even in the aw beness of literary men, neural to unite, by their private journals, their person and their work the image of literature to be found in contemporary culture is tyranni omeny centered on the author, his person, his history, his tastes, his passions disapproval still consists, ost of the time, in saying that Baudelaires work is the failure of the man Baudelaire, new wave Goghs work his madness, Tchaikovskys his vice the explanation of the work is always sought in the man who has produced it, as if, through the more or less artless allegory of fiction, it was always finally the voice of o ne and the same person, the author, which delivered his confidence. though the references empire is still very powerful (recent criticism has often however consolidated it), it is evident that for a long time now certain writers find attempted to topple it. In France, Mallarme was doubtlessly the first to shoot the breeze and foresee in its full extent the necessity of substituting linguistic process itself for the man who hitherto was supposed to own it for Mallarme, as for us, it is language which speaks, not the author to write is to reach, through a preexisting impersonality never to be confused with the castrating objectivity of the realistic ovelist that point where language alone acts, performs, and not oneself Mallarmes entire poetics consists in suppressing the author for the sake of the writing (which is, as we shall see, to heal the status of the conveyer. ) Valery, encumbered with a psychology of the Self, greatly edulcorated Mallarmes theory, but, turning in a p reference for classicism to the lessons of rhetoric, he unceasingly questioned and mocked the Author, emphasized the linguistic and almost chance nature of his activity, and throughout his prose works championed the essentially verbal condition of literature, in the face of which any recourse to the writers inferiority seemed to him gauzy superstition.It is clear that Proust himself, despite the apparent psychological character of what is called his analyses, undertook the responsibility of inexorably blurring, by an extreme subtilization, the relation of the writer and his characters by making the vote counter not the person who has seen or felt, nor even the person who writes, but the person who will write (the young man of the novel but, in fact, how aging is he, and who is he? wants to write but cannot, and the novel ends when at last the writing becomes possible), Proust has condition modern writing its epic by a extreme reversal, instead of putting his life into his nove l, as we say so often, he makes his very life into a work for which his own phonograph recording was in a sense the model, so that it is quite obvious to us that it is not Charlus who imitates Montesquiou, but that Montesquiou in his anecdotal, historical reality is merely a junior-grade fragment, derived from Charlus.Surrealism lastly to remain on the level of this prehistory of modernity surrealism doubtless could not accord language a sovereign place, since language is a system and since what the movement sought was, romantically, a direct subversion of all codes an illusory subversion, moreover, for a code cannot be destroyed, it can simply be played with but by abruptly violating expected meanings (this was the famous surrealist sway), by entrusting to the hand the responsibility of writing as fast as possible what the head itself ignores (this was automatic writing), by accepting the principle and the experience of a collective writing, surrealism helped secularize the image of the Author.Finally, outside of literature itself (actually, these distinctions are being superseded), linguistics has just communicateed the destruction of the Author with a precious analytic instrument by showing that observation in its entirety is a void process, which functions perfectly without requiring to be filled by the person of the interlocutors linguistically, the author is never anything more than the man who writes, just as I is no more than the man who says I language knows a subject, not a person, end this subject, void outside of the very utterance which defines it, suffices to make language work, that is, to exhaust it. The absence of the Author (with Brecht, we might speak here of a real alienation the Author diminishing same(p) a tiny figure at the far end of the literary stage) is not only a historical fact or an act of writing it utterly transforms the modern text (or what is the same thing the text is henceforth create verbally and read so that i n it, on every level, the Author absents himself). Time, first of all, is no longer the same.The Author, when we believe in him, is always conceived as the past of his own book the book and the author take their places of their own accord on the same channel, cast as a before and an after the Author is supposed to feed the book that is, he pre-exists it, thinks, suffers, lives for it he maintains with his work the same relation of antecedence a dumbfound maintains with his child. Quite the contrary, the modern writer (scriptor) is born simultaneously with his text he is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends his writing, he is in no way the subject of which his book is the predicate in that location is no other time than that of the utterance, and every text is eternally written here and now.This is because (or it follows that) to write can no longer designate an cognitive operation of recording, of observing, of representing, of painting (as the Classic writers put it), but rather what the linguisticians, following the expression of the Oxford school, call a performative, a rare verbal form (exclusively given to the first person and to the present), in which utterance has no other gist than the act by which it is uttered something like the / Command of kings or the I Sing of the early bards the modern writer, having buried the Author, can therefore no longer believe, according to the pathos of his predecessors, that his hand is too slow for his thought or his passion, and that in consequence, making a law out of necessity, he must accentuate this gap and endlessly elaborate his form for him, on the contrary, his hand, detached from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of schedule (and not of expression), traces a field without origin or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, that is, the very thing which ceaselessly questions any origin. We know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a sing le theological meaning (the message of the Author- beau ideal), but is a quad of many dimensions, in which are wedded and repugn various kinds of writing, no one of which is original the text is a interweave of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture.Like Bouvard and Pecuchet, those eternal copyists, both sublime and comical and whose profound fatuity precisely designates the truth of writing, the writer can only imitate a gesture forever anterior, never original his only power is to admit the different kinds of writing, to oppose some by others, so as never to sustain himself by just one of them if he wants to express himself, at least he should know that the internal thing he claims to transform is itself only a readymade dictionary whose words can be explained (defined) only by other words, and so on ad infinitum an experience which occurred in an exemplary fashion to the young De Quincey, so gifted in absolute that in order to translate into that dead l anguage certain abruptly modern ideas and images, Baudelaire tells us, he created for it a standing dictionary much more complex and extensive than the one which results from the vulgar patience of purely literary themes (Paradis Artificiels). succeeding the Author, the writer no longer contains within himself passions, humors, sentiments, impressions, but that wonderful dictionary, from which he derives a writing which can know no end or halt life can only imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, a lost, infinitely remote imitation.Once the Author is gone, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite useless. To give an Author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the writing. This conception perfectly suits criticism, which can and then take as its major task the discovery of the Author (or his hypostases society, history, the psyche, freedom) beneath the work once the Author is discovered, the text is explained the critic has conquered hence it is hardly surprising not only that, historically, the reign of the Author should also permit been that of the Critic, but that criticism (even new criticism) should be overthrown along with the Author. In a ultiple writing, indeed, everything is to be distinguished, but nothing deciphered structure can be followed, threaded (like a stocking that has run) in all its recurrences and all its stages, but there is no underlying ground the space of the writing is to be traversed, not penetrated writing ceaselessly posits meaning but always in order to evaporate it it proceeds to a systematic exemption of meaning. and then literature (it would be better, henceforth, to say writing), by refusing to assign to the text (and to the humankind as text) a secret that is, an ultimate meaning, liberates an activity which we might call counter-theological, properly revolutionary, for to refuse to arrest meaning is finally to refuse God and his hypostases, reason, science, the law.Let us return to Balzacs sentence no one (that is, no person) utters it its source, its voice is not to be located and yet it is perfectly read this is because the true locus of writing is reading. Another very specific exemplification can make this understood recent investigations (J. P. Vernant) engender shed crystallize upon the constitutively ambiguous nature of Greek tragedy, the text of which is woven with words that have double meanings, each character understanding them unilaterally (this perpetual be amiss is precisely what is meant by the tragic) yet there is someone who understands each word in its duplicity, and understands further, one might say, the very deafness of the characters speech in front of him this someone is precisely the reader (or here the spectator).In this way is revealed the whole being of writing a text consists of multiple writings, government issue from several cultures and entering into dialogue with ea ch other, into parody, into contestation but there is one place where this multiplicity is collected, united, and this place is not the author, as we have hitherto said it was, but the reader the reader is the very space in which are inscribed, without any being lost, all the citations a writing consists of the unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its ending but this destination can no longer be personal the reader is a man without history, without biography, without psychology he is only that someone who holds gathered into a single field all the paths of which the text is constituted.This is why it is absurd to hear the new writing condemned in the name of a humanism which hypocritically appoints itself the champion of the readers rights. The reader has never been the concern of classical criticism for it, there is no other man in literature but the one who writes. We are now beginning to be the dupes no longer of such antiphrases, by which our society proudly champions precisely what it dismisses, ignores, smothers or destroys we know that to restore to writing its future, we must reverse its myth the have of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author.