00169--Why does Roland Barthes hold that Author is a construct?



Barthes begins his essay, “Death of the Author” quoting a sentence from the French writer Balzac This was woman herself, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive worries, her impetuous boldness, her fussings, and her delicious sensibility.”  Balzac is describing a Castrato [a male singer castrated at a very early age in order to preserve his sweet voice] disguised as a woman.  Barthes raises the following questions:
1)      Who is speaking thus?
2)     Is it the hero of the story bent on remaining ignorant of the castrato hidden beneath the woman?
3)    Is it Balzac the individual, furnished by his personal experience with a philosophy of Woman?
4)    Is it Balzac the author professing 'literary' ideas on femininity?
5)    Is it universal wisdom?
6)    Is it Romantic psychology?

Barthes himself makes the statement, “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.”   According to Barthes the author is a product of the western society which emerged from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, and French rationalism. 

The Author is a capitalist ideology which supports a master-theory.  It is something like considering the dramatist the complete authority.  Today we know that it is the audience which is the most important part of the success of the play.  The traditional concept is that the image of literature is centered on ‘the author’, his person, his life, his tastes and passions.  Often we try to explain some passages attributing their connection with a similar incident in the author’s life. 

Roland Barthes is against seeking the explanation of a work in the man or the woman who produced it.  Being a staunch follower of Saussure he liked to explain a text on the structural method.  He also agrees with the view that meaning is relational one.  The author is just an angel whose task is to combine words and phrases.  It is the reader who has to decide what the story is.  The Marxian philosophy also contributed to the destruction of the authors’s superiority.

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