Initial Impressions : The Death of the Author (1967)

Making sense of every major literary trend in the west is quite a task, I hate to admit. On the brighter side, the task of tracing a trend back to its roots is well cut out thanks to all the once path-breaking essays readily available now. A not-so-beneficial effect of giving in to this elaborate spread is the urge to argue with the dead thinkers and tell them why they are no longer relevant.

On this count, Roland Barthes is rather unfortunate to have been on the receiving end when he was very much alive. His essay “Death of the author” would have been spared all the backlash if it were alternatively titled “The birth of the reader” (Barthes uses the phrase in the text) but I think it wouldn’t have been his best known piece of work if not for the apocalyptic name.

In “The Death of the Author”, Barthes states that the role of the author in his work’s interpretation is non-existent. Barthes makes a case for the scriptor, an entity who is alive as long as the text is being conceived. The consequent birth of the work is accompanied by the death of the author, whose personal views, history and biography have no say in his text. This is to refute certain beliefs that claimed the act of discovering the author beneath the work is the same as explaining his text.

"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"

Assuming the author is only a scriptor, then what do we consider as the text's history? Barthes says,

"For him [the modern scriptor], 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"

For Barthes, the text’s origin always lies in language. Spoken like a true post-structuralist. 

Barthes eventually disowned “The Death of the author”. The essay, believed to have died a painful death, is resurrected conveniently from time to time, whenever a writer’s personal comments loom large over his/her text, undermining it in the process. This time around, it was J.K.Rowling who had to be wrested away from her work, in order to sustain its place in the sanctum.

I can trace this essay as a culmination of events dating back to Flaubert’s Madam Bovary, who mocked the romantic aspirations of hitherto novelists by degrading the characters of his own creation. Moreover, Flaubert wrote for the sake of style. The position of his imaginary adversary can very well be taken up by Dostoevsky, a writer whose exploratory mind almost always required larger than life characters. Barthes belongs to a school of modernists, postmodernists and post-structuralists, all of whom hail from Flaubert and from the wagon of modernist painters who cried “Art for art’s sake”. It is no surprise they grew naturally inclined to separate the text from the author, indirectly propositioning against Dostoevsky and his evocative craft. Barthes essay also comes across as a strong reaction to the psychoanalytic literary criticism tradition, where unmasking the author was akin to cracking the code of the text.

On speaking of the relevance of the essay, an author's assertion over his text is still unclear but I believe his influence must be acknowledged, even essential at times. Overt psychoanalytic reading is something I'm averse to as well (read: Hamlet and his Oedipus complex). But to remove the author from his text in totality also displaces his quest, awakenings and the unrest he hopes to evocate in his reader. At times, simply knowing the writer's history, political ambitions, his romantic inclination adds to the reading experience. Bharathi has always been read that way. Attempts to construct the identities of Shakespeare, Kamban, Thiruvalluvar from their work partly arise from the fact that people cannot live with the void. Oscar Wilde's homosexuality led the then conservative society to shun him, but the knowledge does enhance one's reading of "The picture of Dorian Gray".

On the other hand, the text can (and will) surpass the author's intent, as in the case of Anna Karenina where readers sympathized with the lead character instead of denouncing her. The text, in any case, will have the final say even if the writer goes all the way out and publishes his own notes.