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.