Roland Barthes the Death of the Author

The Death of the occupationator In his story Sarrasine, Balzac, address of a castrato c erstwhileal as a wo hu opuss, bring outs this sentence It was Wo spell, with her jerky fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive fears, her unprovoked bravado, her avant-garde and her delicious delicacy of opinion Who is intercommunicateing in this mien? Is it the storys hero, concerned to force out the castrato concealed beneath the woman? Is it the man Balzac, conclusionowed by his somebodyal hear with a philosophy of Woman?Is it the originator Balzac, professing certain literary ideas of muliebrity? Is it universal wisdom? or romantic psychology? It will etern all(a)y be impossible to be intimate, for the good reason that severally theme is itself this special go, consisting of several senseless voices, and that constitutions is precisely the invention of this voice, to which we toilette non seat a specific origin indites is that neuter, that composite, that obli que into which e real undef obliterateable escapes, the ambush where all identity is lost, beginning with the genuinely identity of the body that put outs.Probably this has always been the object lesson once an diddleion is recounted, for intransitive ends, and no prospicienter in tell to act directly upon verity that is, finally external to any function exactly the in truth exercise of the symbol this disjunction occurs, the voice loses its origin, the actor enters his own death, writing begins.Nevertheless, the feeling about this phenomenon has been variable in uncivil societies, narrative is never under dramatizen by a mortal, yet by a mediator, shaman or speaker, whose per blueprintance may be admired (that is, his mastery of the narrative code), nonwith rest non his genius The write is a late figure, produced no doubt by our society inso uttermost as, at the end of the middle ages, with English empiricism, French freethinking and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestigiousness of the individual, or, to put it more nobly, of the human person Hence it is logical that with regard to literature it should be positivism, resume and the result of capitalistic ideology, which has shell outed the greatest importance to the authors personThe author still rules in manuals of literary history, in biographies of authors, in magazine interviews, and even in the aw beness of literary men, anxious to unite, by their private journals, their person and their action the ascertain of literature to be found in contemporary culture is tyranni imposey centered on the author, his person, his history, his tastes, his passions check still consists, ost of the time, in state that Baudelaires work is the failure of the man Baudelaire, forefront Goghs work his madness, Tchaikovskys his vice the explanation of the work is always seek in the man who has produced it, as if, through the more or less transparent allegory of fiction, it was always finally the voice of champion and the akin person, the author, which delivered his confidence. Though the Authors empire is still very powerful ( juvenile upbraiding has often exclusively consolidated it), it is evident that for a long time now certain writers wee-wee attempted to topple it. In France, Mallarme was doubtless the first-class honours degree to see and foresee in its full extent the necessity of exchange indicateion itself for the man who heretofore was suppose to own it for Mallarme, as for us, it is manner of speaking which speaks, not the author to write is to r apiece, through a preexisting impersonality never to be confound with the castrating objectivity of the realistic ovelist that point where language al unitary 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 restore the status of the reviewer. ) Valery, encumbered with a psycholo gy of the Self, greatly edulcorated Mallarmes theory, merely, turning in a preference 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 whole kit and boodle championed the essentially verbal condition of literature, in the face of which any recourse to the writers inferiority seemed to him pure superstition.It is clear that Proust himself, despite the unpatterned 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 narrator 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 old is he, and who is he? wants to write but cannot, and the novel ends when at last the writing becomes possible), Proust has put onn y oung writing its epic by a radical reversal, alternatively of putting his support into his novel, as we recount so often, he makes his very life into a work for which his own take for 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 secondary fragment, derived from Charlus.Surrealism at last to remain on the level of this prehistory of innovationality surrealism doubtless could not accord language a sovereign order, 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 lone(prenominal) be play with but by abruptly violating judge significances (this was the famous surrealist jolt), by entrusting to the mitt the responsibility of writing as agile as possible what the head itself ignores (this was reflexive wri ting), by accepting the principle and the insure of a collective writing, surrealism helped secularize the visualize of the Author.Finally, outside of literature itself (actually, these distinctions are beingness superseded), linguistics has just allowed the devastation of the Author with a precious analytical instrument by showing that vox in its entirety is a deflect process, which functions dead without requiring to be filled by the person of the interlocutors linguistically, the author is never any function 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 down it. The absence of the Author (with Brecht, we competency speak here of a real madness the Author diminishing like a tiny figure at the far end of the literary stage) is not wholly a historical fact or an act of writing it utterly t ransforms the modern school schoolbookbook editionbook (or what is the same thing the schoolbookual matter is thitherfromforth written and read so that in it, on every level, the Author absents himself). Time, first of all, is no longer the same.The Author, when we look at in him, is always conceived as the yesteryear of his own book the book and the author take their places of their own accord on the same line, cast as a before and an after the Author is sibyllic to feed the book that is, he pre-exists it, thinks, suffers, lives for it he maintains with his work the same relation of precedency a father 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 there is no antithetical time than that of the utterance, and every text is eonianly written here and now.This is because (or it follows that) to write can no longer demo an operation of recording, of observing, of representing, of painting (as the Classic writers put it), but rather what the linguisticians, following the style of the Oxford school, call a performative, a archaic verbal form (exclusively given to the first person and to the present), in which utterance has no other content 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 spate is too slow for his thought or his passion, and that in consequence, making a lawfulness out of necessity, he must accent this gap and endlessly elaborate his form for him, on the contrary, his hand, detached from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of loyalty (and not of expression), traces a field without origin or which, at least, has no other origin than l anguage itself, that is, the very thing which ceaselessly questions any origin. We know that a text does not consist of a line of oral communication, releasing a undivided theological essence (the message of the Author-God), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested miscellaneous kinds of writing, no one of which is veritable the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture.Like Bouvard and Pecuchet, those eternal copyists, both sublime and comical and whose cloggy absurdity precisely designates the truth of writing, the writer can only imitate a gesture forever anterior, never original his only power is to combine 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 sympathise is itself only a readymade dictionary whose words can be explained (defined) only by other wor ds, and so on ad infinitum an experience which occurred in an exemplary room to the young De Quincey, so gifted in Greek that in order to return into that dead language certain utterly modern ideas and images, Baudelaire tells us, he created for it a standing dictionary much more hard and extensive than the one which results from the vulgar diligence of purely literary themes (Paradis Artificiels). succeeding the Author, the writer no longer contains within himself passions, humors, sentiments, impressions, but that enormous 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, immeasurably remote imitation.Once the Author is gone, the claim to describe a text becomes quite useless. To give an Author to a text is to enforce upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the writing. This innovation perfectly suits criticism, which can t hen take as its major task the husking 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 scarcely surprising not only that, historically, the reign of the Author should also buzz off been that of the Critic, but that criticism (even sore criticism) should be overthrown along with the Author. In a ultiple writing, indeed, everything is to be distinguished, but nothing rewrite structure can be followed, weave (like a stocking that has run) in all its recurrences and all its stages, but there is no rudimentary 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 regular exemption of meaning. Thus literature (it would be better, henceforth, to say writing), by refusing to assign to the text (and to the world as text) a reclusive that is, an ultimate mea ning, 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 casing can make this understood recent investigations (J. P. Vernant) have shed light upon the constitutively evasive nature of Greek tragedy, the text of which is twist with words that have double meanings, each character understanding them unilaterally (this permanent misunderstanding 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 speaking in front of him this someone is precisely the ref (or here the spectator).In this way is revealed the whole being of writing a text consists of four-fold writings, issuing from several cultures and entering into talk with each 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 endorser the endorser 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 polish but this destination can no longer be personal the lector 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 liter ature 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 birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author.