Death of the Author
By Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard
Aspen no. 5 + 6, 1967.
The voice of writing: Who is speaking?
It’s hard to say because “all writing (...) consisting of several indiscernible voices, and that literature is precisely the invention of this voice, to which we cannot assign a specific 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.”
Writing as an action - a gesture - but to get to that point, the author must die.
“...once an action is recounted, for intransitive ends, and no longer in order to act directly upon reality — that is, finally external to any function but the very exercise of the symbol — this disjunction occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters his own death, writing begins.”
Example: Mallarme
“...for Mallarme, as for us, it is language which speaks, not the author: to write is to reach, through a preexisting impersonality (...) that point where language alone acts, "performs," and not "oneself": Mallarme's 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 reader.)”
Surrealism, writing, the author, and subversion.
“...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 only be "played with"; but by abruptly violating expected meanings (this was the famous surrealist "jolt"), 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.”
The alienation effect a la Brecht and the author’s death - leading to the birth of the text and the replacement of the author with the writer.
“...the text is henceforth written and read so that in it, on every level, the Author absents himself). Time, first of all, is no longer the same.”
“...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 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 operation of recording, of observing, of representing, of "painting" (as the Classic writers put it), but rather what the linguisticians, following the vocabulary 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 content than the act by which it is uttered…”
Elaborate the form within the gap to highlight the between-space, the place of origin of that which has no origin.
“...a text does not consist of a line of words, (...) but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture.”
“...the writer can only imitate a gesture forever anterior, never original; …”
The author to the text, period. Case closed.
“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.”
What is it about the author that kills the text?
“...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 have been that of the Critic, but that criticism (even "new criticism") should be overthrown along with the Author. In a multiple 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.”
Writing becomes reading: double (multiple?) meaning, existence.
“...ambiguous nature of Greek tragedy, the text of which is woven with words that have double meanings, each character understanding them unilaterally (this perpetual 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 reader (or here the spectator). In this way is revealed the whole being of writing: a text consists of multiple writings, issuing 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 place is not the author, as we have hitherto said it was, but the reader:..”
Who is the reader?
“...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.”
Why is the reader so important to writing?
“...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. “
What draws me to this text is the idea of the reader as spectator. Wollheim’s take would be ‘death of the painter’ is vital to painting so that the spectator may be born.