THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR
BY ROLAND
BARTHES
TRANSLATED BY RICHARD HOWARD
(FROM IMAGE, MUSIC, TEXT, 1977)
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In his story Sarrasine Balzac, describing
a castrato disguised as a woman, writes the
following sentence: 'This was woman herself,
with her sudden fears, her irrational whims,
her instinctive worries, her impetuous boldness,
her fussings, and her delicious sensibility.'
Who is speaking thus? Is it the hero of the
story bent on remaining ignorant of the castrato
hidden beneath the woman? Is it Balzac the
individual, furnished by his personal experience
with a philosophy of Woman? Is it Balzac
the author professing 'literary' ideas on
femininity? Is it universal wisdom? Romantic
psychology? We shall never know, for the
good reason that writing is the destruction
of every voice, of every point of origin.
Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique
space where our subject slips away, the negative
where all identity is lost, starting with
the very identity of the body writing.
No doubt
it has always been that way. As soon as a
fact is narrated no longer with a view to
acting directly on reality but intransitively,
that is to say, finally outside of any function
other than that of the very practice of the
symbol itself, this disconnection occurs,
the voice loses its origin, the author enters
into his own death, writing begins. The sense
of this phenomenon, however, has varied;
in ethnographic societies the responsibility
for a narrative is never assumed by a person
but by a mediator, shaman or relator whose
'performance' - the mastery of the narrative
code -may possibly be admired but never his
'genius'. The author is a modern figure,
a product of our society insofar as, emerging
from the Middle Ages with English empiricism,
French
rationalism and the personal faith of the
Reformation, it discovered the prestige of
the individual, of, as it is more nobly put,
the 'human person'. It is thus logical that
in literature it should be this positivism,
the epitome and culmination of capitalist
ideology, which has attached the greatest
importance to the 'person' of the author.
The author still reigns in histories of literature,
biographies of writers, interviews, magazines,
as in the very consciousness of men of letters
anxious to unite their person and their work
through diaries and memoirs. The image of
literature to be found in ordinary culture
is tyrannically centred on the author, his
person, his life, his tastes, his passions,
while criticism still consists for the most
part in saying that Baudelaire's work is
the failure of Baudelaire the man, Van Gogh's
his madness, Tchaikovsky's his vice. The
explanation of a work is always sought in
the man or woman who produced it, as if it
were always in the end, through the more
or less transparent allegory of the fiction,
the voice of a single person, the author
'confiding' in us.
Though
the sway of the Author remains powerful (the
new criticism has often done no more than
consolidate it), it goes without saying that
certain writers have long since attempted
to loosen it. In France, Mallarme was doubtless
the first to see and to foresee in its full
extent the necessity to substitute language
itself for the person who until then had
been supposed to be its owner. For him, for
us too, it is language which speaks, not
the author; to write is, through a prerequisite
impersonality (not at all to be confused
with the castrating objectivity of the realist
novelist), to reach that point where only
language acts, 'performs', and not 'me'.
Mallarme's entire poetics consists in suppressing
the author in the interests of writing (which
is, as will be seen, to restore the place
of the reader). Valery, encumbered by a psychology
of the Ego, considerably diluted Mallarme's
theory but, his taste for classicism leading
him to turn to the lessons of rhetoric, he
never stopped calling into question and deriding
the Author; he stressed the linguistic and,
as it were, 'hazardous' nature of his activity,
and throughout his prose works he militated
in favour of the essentially verbal condition
of literature, in the face of which all recourse
to the writer's interiority seemed to him
pure superstition. Proust himself, despite
the apparently psychological character of
what are called his analyses, was visibly
concerned with the task of inexorably blurring,
by an extreme subtilization, the relation
between the writer and his characters; by
making of the narrator not he who has seen
and felt nor even he who is writing, but
he who is going to write (the young man in
the novel - but, in fact, how old is he and
who is he? - wants to write but cannot; the
novel ends when writing at last becomes possible),
Proust gave modern writing its epic. By a
radical reversal, instead of putting his
life into his novel, as is so often maintained,
he made of his very life a work for which
his own book was the model; so that it is
clear to us that Charlus does not imitate
Montesquiou but that Montesquiou - in his
anecdotal, historical reality - is no more
than a secondary fragment, derived from Charlus.
Lastly, to go no further than this prehistory
of modernity, Surrealism, though unable to
accord language a supreme place (language
being system and the aim of the movement
being, romantically, a direct subversion
of codes-itself moreover illusory: a code
cannot be destroyed, only 'played off'),
contributed to the desacrilization of the
image of the Author by ceaselessly recommending
the abrupt disappointment of expectations
of meaning (the famous surrealist 'jolt'),
by entrusting the hand with the task of writing
as quickly as possible what the head itself
is unaware of (automatic writing), by accepting
the principle and the experience of several
people writing together. Leaving aside literature
itself (such distinctions really becoming
invalid), linguistics has recently provided
the destruction of the Author with a valuable
analytical tool by show ing that the whole
of the enunciation is an empty functioning
perfectly without there being any need for
it to be filled with the person of the interlocutors.
Linguistically, the author is never more
than the instance writing, just as I is nothing
other than the instance saying I: language
knows a 'subject', not a 'person', and this
subject, empty outside of the very enunciation
which defines it, suffices to make language
'hold together', suffices, that is to say,
to exhaust it.
The
removal of the Author (one could talk here
with Brecht of a veritable 'distancing',
the Author diminishing like a figurine at
the far end of the literary stage) is not
merely an historical fact or an act of writing;
it utterly transforms the modern text (or
- which is the same thing -the text is henceforth
made and read in such a way that at all its
levels the author is absent). The temporality
is different. The Author, when believed in,
is always conceived of as the past of his
own book: book and author stand automatically
on a single line divided into a before and
an after. The Author is thought to nourish
the book, which is to say that he exists
before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it,
is in the same relation of antecedence to
his work as a father to his child. In complete
contrast, the modern scriptor is born simultaneously
with the text, is in no way equipped with
a being preceding or exceeding the writing,
is not the subject with the book as predicate;
there is no other time than that of the enunciation
and every text is eternally written here
and now. The fact is (or, it follows) that
writing can no longer designate an operation
of recording, notation, representation, 'depiction'
(as the Classics would say); rather, it designates
exactly what linguists, referring to Oxford
philosophy, call a performative a rare verbal
form (exclusively given in the first person
and in the present tense) in which the enunciation
has no other content (contains no other proposition)
than the act by which it is uttered-something
like the I declare of kings or the I sing
of very ancient poets. Having buried the
Author, the modern scriptor can thus no longer
believe, as according to the pathetic view
of his predecessors, that this hand is too
slow for his thought or passion and that
consequently, making a law of necessity,
he must emphasize this delay and indefinitely
'polish' his form. For him, on the contrary,
the hand, cut off from any voice, borne by
a pure gesture of inscription (and not of
expression), traces a field without origin-or
which, at least, has no other origin than
language itself, language which ceaselessly
calls into question all origins.
We know
now that a text is not a line of words releasing
a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message'
of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional
space in which a variety of writings, none
of them original, blend and clash. The text
is a tissue of quotations drawn from the
innumerable centres of culture. Similar to
Bouvard and Pecuchet, those eternal copyists,
at once sublime and comic and whose profound
ridiculousness indicates precisely the truth
of writing, the writer can only imitate a
gesture that is always anterior, never original.
His only power is to mix writings, to counter
the ones with the others, in such a way as
never to rest on any one of them. Did he
wish to express himself, he ought at least
to know that the inner 'thing' he thinks
to 'translate' is itself only a ready-formed
dictionary, its words only explainable through
other words, and so on indefinitely; something
experienced in exemplary fashion by the young
Thomas de Quincey, he who was so good at
Greek that in order to translate absolutely
modern ideas and images into that dead language,
he had, so Baudelaire tells us (in Paradis
Artificiels), 'created for himself an unfailing
dictionary, vastly more extensive and complex
than those resulting from the ordinary patience
of purely literary themes'. Succeeding the
Author, the scriptor no longer bears within
him passions, humours, feelings, impressions,
but rather this immense dictionary from which
he draws a writing that can know no halt:
life never does more than imitate the book,
and the book itself is only a tissue of signs
imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred.
Once
the Author is removed, the claim to decipher
a text becomes quite futile. To give a text
an Author is to impose a limit on that text,
to furnish it with a final signified, to
close the writing. Such a conception suits
criticism very well, the latter then allotting
itself the important task of discovering
the Author (or its hypostases: society, history,
psyche, liberty) beneath the work: when the
Author has been found, the text is 'explained'-
victory to the critic. Hence there is no
surprise in the fact that, historically,
the reign of the Author has also been that
of the Critic, nor again in the fact that
criticism (be it new) is today undermined,
along with the Author. In the multiplicity
of writing, everything is to be disentangled,
nothing deciphered; the structure can be
followed, 'run' (like the thread of a stocking)
at every point and at every level, but there
is nothing beneath: the space of writing
is to be ranged over, not pierced; writing
ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to
evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption
of meaning. In precisely this way literature
(it would bebetter from now on to say writing),
by refusing to assign a 'secret', an ultimate
meaning, to the text (and to the world as
text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological
activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary
since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the
end, to refuse God and his hypostases-reason,
science, law.
Let
us come back to the Balzac sentence. No one,
no 'person', says it: its source, its voice,
is not the true place of the writing, which
is reading. Another-very precise- example
will help to make this clear: recent research
(J.-P. Vernant) has demonstrated the constitutively
ambiguous nature of Greek tragedy, its texts
being woven from words with double meanings
that each character understands unilaterally
(this perpetual misunderstanding is exactly
the 'tragic'); there is, however, someone
who understands each word in its duplicity
and who, in addition, hears the very deafness
of the characters speaking in front of him-this
someone being precisely the reader (or here,
the listener). Thus is revealed the total
existence of writing: a text is made of multiple
writings, drawn from many cultures and entering
into mutual relations of dialogue, parody,
contestation, but there is one place where
this multiplicity is focused and that place
is the reader, not, as was hitherto said,
the author. The reader is the space on which
all the quotations that make up a writing
are inscribed without any of them being lost;
a text's unity lies not in its origin but
in its destination. Yet this destination
cannot any longer be personal: the reader
is without history, biography, psychology;
he is simply that someone who holds together
in a single field all the traces by which
the written text is constituted. Which is
why it is derisory to condemn the new writing
in the name of a humanism hypocritically
turned champion of the reader's rights. Classic
criticism has never paid any attention to
the reader; for it, the writer is the only
person in literature. We are now beginning
to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the
arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of
good society in favour of the very thing
it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or destroys;
we know that to give writing its future,
it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the
birth of the reader must be at the cost of
the death of the Author.
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