00266--ROLAND BARTHES and His Works

ROLAND BARTHES (1915–1980)

Writing Degree Zero  Michelet  Mythologies  Critical Essays  Elements of Semiology  Criticism and Truth  The Fashion System  Empire of Signs  Sade, Fourier, Loyola  The Pleasure of the Text  Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes  A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments  Image, Music, Text Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography  The Grain of the Voice: Interviews1962–1980 The Rustle of Language

00170--'THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR' BY ROLAND BARTHES

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.

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.

00139--S/Z by Barthes. 5 codes identified by Barthes in S/Z are:

Roland Barthes

            Barthes book S/Z was published in  1970.  The  book is above Balazac's thirty page story 'Sarrasine'.  Barthes's method of analysis is to divide the story into 561 'lexies' or units of meaning, which he then classifies using five 'codes', seeing there as the basic underlying structures of all narratives.

            The five codes identified by Barthes in S/Z are:

1)        The proairetic code - This provides indications of actions.  ('The ship sailed at midnight'  they began again', etc)

2)        The hermeneutic code - This code poses questions or enigmas which provide narrative suspense.  (For instance the sentence 'He' knocked on a certain door in the neighbourhood of Pell street' makes the reader wonder who lived there, what kind of neighbourhood it was, and so on).

3)        The cultural code - This code contains references beyond the text to what is regarded as common knowledge.  (For example, the sentence 'Agent Agentis was the kind of man who sometimes arrives at work in odd socks' evokes a pre-existing image in the reader's mind of the kind of man this is - a stereotype of bungling incompetence perhaps contrasting that with the image of brisk efficiency contained in the notion of an 'agent'.

4)        The semic code -  This is also called the connotative code.  It is linked to theme, and this code when organized around a particular proper name constitutes a 'character'. 

5)        The symbolic code - This code is also linked to theme, but on a larger scale, so to speak.  It consists of contrasts and pairings related to the most basic binary polarities male and female, night and day, good and evil, life and art, and so on.  There are the structures of contrasted elements which structuralists see as fundamental to the human way of perceiving and organising reality.

00116--"The reign of the author has also been that of the critic" Explain.

            The task of the learned, scholastic critic was to reveal the meaning of the text and to help the poor readers in grasping that single meaning.  In order to unearth this single meaning, there should be a single meaning as such.  The same pre supposition keeps the author as an institution.  The author keeps the secret meaning in his heart.  The shrewd critic finds it out.  The author declares that the critic is right and lands his attempts.  Barthes attacks the concept of such a critic through these words:

            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.

00114--What is Barthes's opinion about the traditional practice of seeking the author's help in deciphering the text? OR How does the removal of the Author widen the scope of a work?

            Traditional criticism used to take the help of the author in deciphering the text.  Barthes questions the very concept of deciphering a text.  In his view there is nothing to decipher in a text.  The readers duty is only to disentangle the text of plural meanings.  He holds that "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".  If we question the authority of the author and remove him from the scene, it makes the work better.  Vast possibilities of meanings open up.  Hence he sees the death of the author as a semantic necessity.

00113--How does Barthes revolutionise the concept of the text? OR How does Barthes question the existence of an intact meaning in a text?

            Barthes' name is commonly remembered with his conclusion:  "the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author"  According to him, all narratives share structural features that each narrative weaves together in different ways.  Despite the differences between individual narratives, any narrative employs a limited number of organizational structures that affect our reading of texts.  Barthes argues that we should take this plurality of codes as an invitation to read a text in such a way as to bring out its multiple meanings and connotations.  Rather than read a text for its linear plot (this happens, then this, then this), rather than be constrained by either genre or even temporal progression, Barthes argues for what he terms a 'writerly' rather than a "readerly" approach to texts.  According to Barthes, "the writerly test is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world is traversed by some singular system like ideology.  This reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages.  This closing of the text happens as you read, as you make decisions about a work's genre and its ideological beliefs.  Barthes exemplifies this in 5/2, in which he takes a short story Balzac (Sarrasine) and analyse each individual sentence for its relation to five master codes.  In other words, Barthes' go is to illustrate how "plotting" (plotting) as it is traditionally understood, is in fact a retroactive construction.  We usually see a text as conforming to a plot triangle (an opening exposition followed by rising action, a conflict leading to a climax, then falling action leading to a resolution).

            Barthes compares narrative to a constellation.  According to this logic, there is no necessity that we begin a story at the beginning and proceed to the end; a "writerly text", according to Barthes, has multiple entrances and exists.  Barther's form of criticism ultimately "consists precisely in manhandling the text, interrupting it".

00111--How does Barthes establish that Author is a construct?

            In the 1920s itself, structuralism proved three things about the workings of language and hence literature.  The primary assumption is that meaning occurs through difference.  Meaning is not identification of the sign with object in the real world or with some pre-existent concept or essential reality; rather it is generated by difference among sings in a signifying system.  Saussure argued that there is no natural or innate relation between the signifier and the signified.  Secondly Saussure argued that signs only make sense as part of a formal, generalized and abstract system.  His conception of meaning was purely structural and relational rather than referential:  primacy is given to relationships rather than to things.  Signs cannot be defined in terms of some 'essential' or 'intrinsic nature'.  Signs refer primarily to each other.  The traditional notion has been that language is a medium of communication and it communicates a reality, which is pre-existent.  But structuralism argued that it is language, which constitutes reality.  The critics like Barthes took these findings and applied it in the study of literature.  Once there arguments are applied in the care of literature, the author turns out to be a mere construct.  Barthes does only this.