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.
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.
