ROLAND BARTHES (1915-1968). Extract from “The Death of the Author” (1968)
Summary of the text:
The figure of the author is recent and appeared along with the discover of the
prestige of the individual. Therefore, this capitalist society has attached the greatest
important in literature to the person of the author. Literature is, then, tyrannically centred
on the author, whilst criticism consist in saying that one's work is the result of one's life. It
is, therefore, the allegory of the writer's life. Nevertheless, in Mallarmé's poetics the author
is suppressed in interest of the writing and Valéry never stop deriding the Author claiming
for the essentially verbal condition of literature.
The author was thought to nourish the book, the before. The modern scriptor is born
with the text, not preceding or exceeding it.
A text is not a message of the Author-God, theological meaning, but a variety of
writings blending and clashing. To give a text an author is to impose a limit on that text, but
texts refuse an ultimate meaning, liberate themselves from godlike authors. The birth of
the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author
Definitions:
- Author: Poststructuralist criticism challenges the category of the author as omniscient or
the single source of power in relation to a text, as an authority; meaning is not limited to,
fixed by or located in the person of the author.
- Sign: Swiss linguist Ferdinand Saussure noted that every sign (a basic unit of
communication such as a letter or a word) is made up of two components: the signifier (the
materially identifiable element such as a sound or a visible mark) and the signified (the
conceptual referent of the sign). Saussure argued that the relationship between signifier
and signified is not stable but arbitrary and based on social convention: English speakers
“agree” that the word/signifier horse refers to a certain signified: a type of four-footed
animal with hooves, a tail and a mane and which may be ridden by humans or used as a
beast of burden. However, for Spanish speakers, the signifier for this particular
referent/signified is caballo. The division of the sign, as well as its arbitrary relation to
reality, is central to twentieth century theory of language and literature.
