Roland Barthes the Death of the Author

The Death of the origin In his story Sarrasine, Balzac, blab of a castrato disguised as a woman, writes this sentence It was Woman, with her sudden fears, her nonrational whims, her instinctive fears, her unprovoked bravado, her daring and her delicious delicacy of feeling Who is speechmaking in this port? Is it the storys hero, concerned to ignore the castrato concealed under the woman? Is it the man Balzac, displaceowed by his mortalal gravel with a doctrine of Woman?Is it the perceived Balzac, professing sealed literary ideas of femininity? Is it ecumenic wisdom? or romantic psychology? It will ever much be impossible to know, for the good reason that alone in all penning is itself this special voice, consisting of some(prenominal) indiscernible voices, and that lit is precisely the invention of this voice, to which we foot non assign a limited origin literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.Probably this has always been the model once an actionion is recounted, for intransitive block ups, and no longer in consecrate to act directly upon reality that is, finally external to whatsoever design provided the very exercise of the symbol this disjunction occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters his own death, theme begins.Nevertheless, the feeling about this phenomenon has been variable in rough societies, narrative is neer under contemplaten by a somebody, provided by a mediator, shaman or speaker, whose performance may be admired (that is, his domination of the narrative code), but non his genius The author is a new-made figure, produced no doubt by our society insofar as, at the end of the middle ages, with English empiricism, French rationalism and the face-to-face faith of the Reformation, it sight the prestige of the individual, or, to put it more nobly, of the human person Hence it is arranged that with regard to literature it should be positivism, resume and the result of capitalist ideology, which has accorded the superior 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, awkward to unite, by their private journals, their person and their work the image of literature to be found in contemporary culture is tyranni gripey centered on the author, his person, his history, his tastes, his passions reprehension still consists, ost of the time, in saying that Baudelaires work is the failure of the man Baudelaire, train 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 absolute allegory of fiction, it was always finally the voice of one and the same person, the author, which delivered his confidence. though the reservoirs empire is still very powerful (recent criticism has often that consolidated it), it is evident that for a long time now certain writers hold back attempted to topple it. In France, Mallarme was undoubtedly the first to see and foresee in its full extent the necessity of substituting spoken communication 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 r all(prenominal), 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 prepare the status of the bringer. ) Valery, encumbered with a psychology of the Self, greatly edulcorated Mallarmes theory, but, turning in a preference for classicism to the lessons of rhetoric, he unceasingly questi oned and mocked the Author, emphasized the linguistic and almost chance nature of his activity, and throughout his prose works championed the essentially communicative condition of literature, in the face of which any recourse to the writers inferiority seemed to him hop out 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 bank clerk 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 one-time(a) is he, and who is he? wants to write but cannot, and the novel ends when at last the writing becomes possible), Proust has tending(p) modern writing its epic by a positive reversal, instead of putting his life into his novel, as we say so often, he makes his very life into a wor k for which his own defend 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 tributary 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 merely be played with but by abruptly violating expected meanings (this was the famous surrealist shudder), 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, t hese distinctions are being superseded), linguistics has just plyed the destruction of the Author with a precious analytic instrument by showing that remark 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 comparable 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 edition (or what is the same thing the text is henceforth indite and read so that in it, on every level, the Author absents himself). Time, first of all, is no lon ger 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 declension, 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 go 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 at that place 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 appendage 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 scho ol, call a performative, a rare verbal form (exclusively given to the first person and to the present), in which utterance has no other depicted object 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 prospect 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 history (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 single theological meaning (the message of the Author- beau ideal), but is a infinite of many dimensions, in which are wedded and repugn various kinds of writing, no one of which is original the text is a waver of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture.Like Bouvard and Pecuchet, those eternal copyists, both sublime and comical and whose profound ridiculousness precisely designates the truth of writing, the writer can only imitate a gesture forever anterior, never original his only power is to ruffle 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 give 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 Hellenic that in order to translate into that dead language certain perfectly modern ideas and images, Baudelaire tells us, he created f or 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 abundant 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 past 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 just surprising not only that, historically, the reign of the Author should also declare 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. thus literature (it would be better, henceforth, to say writing), by refusing to assign to the text (and to the realism 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 pe rson) 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 ensample can make this understood recent investigations (J. P. Vernant) imbibe shed light 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 soul who understands each word in its duplicity, and understands further, one might say, the very deafness of the characters verbalize 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, event from several cultures and entering into dialogue with each other, into parody, into contestation but there is one place where this multiplicity is collected, united, and this plac e 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 stopping point 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 wherefore 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 unstained 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 line of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author.