How Roland Barthes desacralized the image of the author
Roland Barthes (1915-80), who was undoubtedly the most entertaining, witty and daring of the French theorists of the 1960s and 1970s is one of the handful of writers who can be said to have established the foundation for modern literary and cultural theory. His writings began to make the first moves in rebellion against the structuralist reading of texts. He is famous for many things: for announcing the 'death of the author'; for articulating the theory and practice of intertextuality; for promoting the study of cultural sign systems.
Among these the short essay "The Death of the Author" (1968) is the most discussed and accessible text in which Barthes rejects the traditional view that the author is the origin of the text, the source of its meaning, and the only authority for interpretation. His formula is utterly radical in its dismissal of those traditional humanistic notions of interpretation. His author is stripped of all metaphysical status and reduce to a location, where language, that infinite storehouse of citations, repetitions, echoes and references, crosses and recrosses.
Barthes says that writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. To take the example of literary works, the center has traditionally, been as the author: the source of all meaning the origin from which the literary works derives. If we treat the literary work as a structure, a language system, then it seems inevitable, only natural, to posit the author as the center (origin, source) of that structure. Just as God is seen as the author (center) of the universe as the system or structure in religious discourse, so the literary author is the traditional center of the work as structure. As a product of Literature and the classical tradition in France, the "author" was part of a system of political and economic authority that Barthes began working to dismantle from the 1950s. As Barthes wrote, "The author is a modern character." But more interestingly are the words he uses to describe the social condition of being an author: "...the author still reigns..." and "culture is tyrannically centered on the author..." In other words, by conflating the work and the author, the classical system of reading controls the interpretation to the authority of a single voice, that of the creator.
Barthes does not stop here, but explains the differences between a text and a work further. There is no doubt that the author has long been considered as the creator of a text. It has been thought in two ways. Firstly, it is human author who creates a text (or work as was thought traditionally) as God creates human beings. Secondly, a text's meaning is created as it was intended by an author. This concept of the author's role in creating a text's meaning has so much influenced literary criticism that the author has long been thought as the pivot of a text's meaning and thus the creator of the text. When we say 'work', we logically, unconsciously associate it with an author or producer or generator. And a text is different from work in terms of tangibility, a text is a site. So 'text' is a distinguished term. The authority not the author as a source of meanings and creator of the text has many consequences. As the author does not create meaning it is not possible for a reader to discover his intended meaning. A reader does not get the author when he reads a text. It is only the text that he gets and he is supposed to decode it with experience he has. His experience is totally different from that of the author. The language that he is provided in a text, is, moreover, not concrete like scientific data. Thus a text is able to create polysemy which is different to a reader than the intended meaning of the author.
"The Death of the Author" puts forward a series of ideas far more important than whether or not the Author is 'dead'. It is here that Barthes would write of the concept of "intertextuality". He thinks that the history of literature, biographies of writer, interviews, magazines or diaries or memoirs put more emphasis on the author's life than the text. Scholars also were interested in comparing and contrasting a text with its author. In this process we try to bring the author's personal life, his taste, passion, his view about the world etc. to get the meaning of the text. Barthes write that this is how the distinction between text and its author's life is eliminated. As a result a critic finds "Baudelaire's is the failure of Baudelaire the man, Van Gogh's his madness, Tchaikovsky's his vice." So, the both the failure and the success of the work completely depended on the author, shown in traditional criticism. Then he discussed those who also, like him denied the one-self of the author. For Barthes, as he has mentioned several times before, it was the nineteenth century poet Stephane Mallarme who understood that language speaks, not the author. In his poem Un coup de d'es, Mallarme explained the importance of the gaps between the words that rattled across the white pages like a die rolling across a casino table. "...the ensuing words, laid out as they are, lead on to the last, with no novelty except the spacing of the text. The 'blanks' indeed taken on importance, at first glance; the versification demands them, as a surrounding silence, to the extent that a fragment, lyrical or of a few beats, occupies, in its midst, a third of space paper: I do not transgress the measure, only disperse it..."
In other words, Mallarme equated words with silence or gaps, emphasizing the materiality of language and the pre-formative nature of reading. He says that language does not belongs to the author. He wanted to free the text from the clutches of the author.
As then several decades later came Surrealism. Due to the use of psychological surrealism, Barthes said, "helped desacralize the image of the Author." After a process of questioning and slow unraveling, from a structuralist perspective, the author's only tool is language itself and therefore trapped in language, authorship is never personal language. Compared to the strong pseudo "presence" of the Author, writing is neuter or "zero degree" or "white" and composite or plural, a site of the loss of the subject and of identity. Because, post-Enlightenment philosophy challenged the notion of the Cartesian subject, writing is the deconstruction of every voice and every origin. When one recounts/ writes/ represents, Barthes noted, a gap appears and the voice looses its "origin". Barthes opines that whatever writer writes that became an automatic writing and writing does not belongs to anybody.
The withdrawal of the author, Barthes wrote, "utterly transforms the modern text" and time is also transformed. When the author is "present", there is the before and after writing time, when writing begins, the author enters into his/her own death. In order to write one must utilize language,
and language, as Lancan asserted, "speaks the subject". The reader or " the scripter is born at the same time as his text and every text is written essentially here and now." Barthes christened writing as "performative". Barthes says that "the text is made up of a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture." and it is "futile" to attempt to "decipher" a text.
The Death of the Author does not mean the demise of the writer and points instead to the agency of the reader in bringing meanings to a text. When we give the text to the author the text explains and when the reader reads it, the text expresses. The unity of the text is not its origin but its destination. According to Barthes, "The birth of the reader must be at the cost of death of the author."
+
Among these the short essay "The Death of the Author" (1968) is the most discussed and accessible text in which Barthes rejects the traditional view that the author is the origin of the text, the source of its meaning, and the only authority for interpretation. His formula is utterly radical in its dismissal of those traditional humanistic notions of interpretation. His author is stripped of all metaphysical status and reduce to a location, where language, that infinite storehouse of citations, repetitions, echoes and references, crosses and recrosses.
Barthes says that writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. To take the example of literary works, the center has traditionally, been as the author: the source of all meaning the origin from which the literary works derives. If we treat the literary work as a structure, a language system, then it seems inevitable, only natural, to posit the author as the center (origin, source) of that structure. Just as God is seen as the author (center) of the universe as the system or structure in religious discourse, so the literary author is the traditional center of the work as structure. As a product of Literature and the classical tradition in France, the "author" was part of a system of political and economic authority that Barthes began working to dismantle from the 1950s. As Barthes wrote, "The author is a modern character." But more interestingly are the words he uses to describe the social condition of being an author: "...the author still reigns..." and "culture is tyrannically centered on the author..." In other words, by conflating the work and the author, the classical system of reading controls the interpretation to the authority of a single voice, that of the creator.
Barthes does not stop here, but explains the differences between a text and a work further. There is no doubt that the author has long been considered as the creator of a text. It has been thought in two ways. Firstly, it is human author who creates a text (or work as was thought traditionally) as God creates human beings. Secondly, a text's meaning is created as it was intended by an author. This concept of the author's role in creating a text's meaning has so much influenced literary criticism that the author has long been thought as the pivot of a text's meaning and thus the creator of the text. When we say 'work', we logically, unconsciously associate it with an author or producer or generator. And a text is different from work in terms of tangibility, a text is a site. So 'text' is a distinguished term. The authority not the author as a source of meanings and creator of the text has many consequences. As the author does not create meaning it is not possible for a reader to discover his intended meaning. A reader does not get the author when he reads a text. It is only the text that he gets and he is supposed to decode it with experience he has. His experience is totally different from that of the author. The language that he is provided in a text, is, moreover, not concrete like scientific data. Thus a text is able to create polysemy which is different to a reader than the intended meaning of the author.
"The Death of the Author" puts forward a series of ideas far more important than whether or not the Author is 'dead'. It is here that Barthes would write of the concept of "intertextuality". He thinks that the history of literature, biographies of writer, interviews, magazines or diaries or memoirs put more emphasis on the author's life than the text. Scholars also were interested in comparing and contrasting a text with its author. In this process we try to bring the author's personal life, his taste, passion, his view about the world etc. to get the meaning of the text. Barthes write that this is how the distinction between text and its author's life is eliminated. As a result a critic finds "Baudelaire's is the failure of Baudelaire the man, Van Gogh's his madness, Tchaikovsky's his vice." So, the both the failure and the success of the work completely depended on the author, shown in traditional criticism. Then he discussed those who also, like him denied the one-self of the author. For Barthes, as he has mentioned several times before, it was the nineteenth century poet Stephane Mallarme who understood that language speaks, not the author. In his poem Un coup de d'es, Mallarme explained the importance of the gaps between the words that rattled across the white pages like a die rolling across a casino table. "...the ensuing words, laid out as they are, lead on to the last, with no novelty except the spacing of the text. The 'blanks' indeed taken on importance, at first glance; the versification demands them, as a surrounding silence, to the extent that a fragment, lyrical or of a few beats, occupies, in its midst, a third of space paper: I do not transgress the measure, only disperse it..."
In other words, Mallarme equated words with silence or gaps, emphasizing the materiality of language and the pre-formative nature of reading. He says that language does not belongs to the author. He wanted to free the text from the clutches of the author.
As then several decades later came Surrealism. Due to the use of psychological surrealism, Barthes said, "helped desacralize the image of the Author." After a process of questioning and slow unraveling, from a structuralist perspective, the author's only tool is language itself and therefore trapped in language, authorship is never personal language. Compared to the strong pseudo "presence" of the Author, writing is neuter or "zero degree" or "white" and composite or plural, a site of the loss of the subject and of identity. Because, post-Enlightenment philosophy challenged the notion of the Cartesian subject, writing is the deconstruction of every voice and every origin. When one recounts/ writes/ represents, Barthes noted, a gap appears and the voice looses its "origin". Barthes opines that whatever writer writes that became an automatic writing and writing does not belongs to anybody.
The withdrawal of the author, Barthes wrote, "utterly transforms the modern text" and time is also transformed. When the author is "present", there is the before and after writing time, when writing begins, the author enters into his/her own death. In order to write one must utilize language,
and language, as Lancan asserted, "speaks the subject". The reader or " the scripter is born at the same time as his text and every text is written essentially here and now." Barthes christened writing as "performative". Barthes says that "the text is made up of a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture." and it is "futile" to attempt to "decipher" a text.
The Death of the Author does not mean the demise of the writer and points instead to the agency of the reader in bringing meanings to a text. When we give the text to the author the text explains and when the reader reads it, the text expresses. The unity of the text is not its origin but its destination. According to Barthes, "The birth of the reader must be at the cost of death of the author."
+
Comments
Post a Comment