Roland Barthes (1915 -1980) earned reputation as one of the most outstanding French essayist and literary critic. His critical essays have influenced man literary and critical theories like Marxism, structuralism, and post structuralism and so on. He has been considered as one of the most outstanding exponent of Reader Response Theory.
‘The Death of the
Author’, the most contemplated critical essay by Roland Barthes is a landmark
in the history of modern and postmodern literary criticism. The essay was first
published in an American journal ‘Aspen’ in 1967. This essay attempts to
abolish the popular traditional theory of analysing the text from biographical
or personal contexts of the author. The essay opposes the established trends “in
ordinary culture … tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his life.”
BEFORE BARTHES
(TRADITIONAL CRITICISM):
Before Barthes, if we
examine the Victorian criticism of the 19th century and the New
Criticism of the first half of the 2th century, we come across the critics like
Saint Beuve, Taine and others who give more importance to the stud of the
biographical, historical, social conditions of the author before studying the
text. They hold the view that if one wants to analyse or interpret the text;
one has to dive deep in the biographical details of the author. They agree with
Milton’s idea:
“A good
book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit.”
THE DEATH OF THE
AUTHOR:
Roland Barthes writes:
“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.”
Barthes removes the
authority and importance of the author while interpreting the work of art. In
the preface to his essay, he asks a question, “How can we detect precisely what
the writer intended?” The answer is that we cannot. He says that it is we as
the readers who decide through the language of the text and not the artist.
Barthes refers to the poet Stephene Mallarme who said, “It is language which
speaks”.
Thus, he believes in
the Reader Response Theory. According to him, the meaning of the text cannot be
limited by the author because the reader interprets it in different was. Every
reader responds to the text in different ways and hence ever reader receives
different meanings. In short, meaning depends on the reader, not on the author.
The author is dead once he finishes writing his work.
THE IDEA OF
‘PRE-EXISISTING TEXT’:
The essay ‘The Death
of the Author’ rejects the idea of author’s intension, and instead develops a
reader-response theory:
“The
reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up writing are
inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin
but in its destination.”
The use of the word
“quotations” expresses the idea that a text cannot really be “created” or the
text of the author is never “original” - it is always made up of an arrangement
of pre-existing “quotations” or ideas. Therefore, the “author” is not really an
author, but rather a ‘scriptor’ who simply puts together pre-existing texts.
THE AUTHOR AS
THE SCRIPTOR:
Barthes considers the
author as the scriptor. He is not able to create or decide the meaning of his
work. The task of meaning falls “in the destination” - the reader. He
believes that the moment the author starts writing his work, a scriptor in him
takes birth and the moment he finishes his work, the scriptor dies. The
scriptor exists just to produce the work of art; he does not exist to explain
it to the reader. The reader attempts to fetch the meaning from the text itself
after reading and re-reading the text. The origin of meaning lies entirely in “language
itself”.
TEXT AND
TEXTILE:
The movement of post
structuralism during the second half of the 2th century brought about the idea
of multiplicity of meanings. Barthes goes in the line of post structuralism and
believes that each piece of writing contains multiple layers of meanings. He
draws similarity between text and textile and writes:
“The
text is a tissue (or fabric of quotations drawn from
the
innumerable centers of culture, rather than from one,
individual
experience.”
Thus, Barthes
shoulders the responsibility of fetching out the meaning to the reader. The
author has no role to play.
CONCLUSION:
Thus, we ma summarize
by saying that Roland Barthes’ critical essay ‘Death of the Author’ is a post
structuralist critical document which advocates for the multiplicity of
meanings. The essay gives importance to the reader and removes the authority of
the author. It showed a path to Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault who later
on stretched the movement of post structuralism further. Barthes comes out as
advocate of Reader Response Theory breaking all connections between the reader
and the author. In this regards, a French philosopher, Paul Ricoeur rightly
remarked:
“The
book divides the act of writing and the act of reading into two sides, between
which there is no communication.”
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