"The Death of the Author"
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
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.
by Roland Barthes
(from Image, Music, Text, 1977)