June Reading: "The Death of the Author" by Roland Barthes

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This month we’re reading “The Death of the Author” by Roland Barthes. It was first published in English translation in 1967, in the avant-garde journal Aspen, and only published in the original French in 1968, in the journal Manteia. It was later included in Barthes’ book, Image-Music-Text, in 1977.

I’ll provide only a brief introduction here, because the essay is very short and is best approached directly.

Barthes replaces the author with the reader. He argues that the meaning of a work of literature does not come from its author, and that the text has many possible meanings, produced in the act of reading. The figure of the author is a cultural invention that functions to impose a limit on interpretation.

Wimsatt and Beardsley in 1946 had already rejected appeals to authorial intention, identifying “The Intentional Fallacy”:

The error of criticizing and judging a work of literature by attempting to assess what the writer’s intention was and whether or not he has fulfilled it rather than concentrating on the work itself.

— J. A. Cuddon, A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory

Barthes goes further, shifting attention from author to reader and questioning whether there is any single meaning to be found at all.

What next?

I recommend the following approach.

  1. Read the essay in full:
    Outlines and AI summaries are useful to complement your reading, but please read the thing itself as well. It’s short, and widely available online.

  2. Interpret the essay:
    Before evaluating it, try to work out what it’s saying.

  3. Focus on what interests you:
    You don’t have to evaluate the argument in its entirety. You can focus on parts of it, making connections with other philosophical works or with your own experience and observations.

When you refer to what Barthes has written, do it directly by quoting the text, thus making explicit exactly what you’re referring to. This helps to keep the discussion anchored and prevent people talking past each other.

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Reading the thing itself.

I should probably paraphrase but I can’t do that until I’ve read and have an understanding. Of both content and the author. So, already, I come with a bias.

The author is not dead — a great hook, though!

I feel like I need to quote this part verbatim, even if it is a translation and a step away:

THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR — ROLAND BARTHES

In his story Sarrasine, Balzac, speaking of a castrato disguised as a woman, writes this sentence: “It was Woman, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive fears, her unprovoked bravado, her daring and her delicious delicacy of feeling”

Who is speaking in this way?

Is it the story’s hero, concerned to ignore the castrato concealed beneath the woman?
Is it the man Balzac, endowed by his personal experience with a philosophy of Woman?

Is it the author Balzac, professing certain “literary” ideas of femininity? Is it universal wisdom? or romantic psychology?

It will always be impossible to know, for the good reason that all writing is itself this special voice, consisting of several indiscernible voices, and that literature is precisely the invention of this voice, to which we cannot assign a specific origin: literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes. — Barthe_DeathofAuthor

So much nesting of stories and questions…posed by the author to engage me and other readers.

Do I need to read Balzac’s Sarrasine?
The characters and identities created by another character in the story of Barthes?

Why bring attention to male/female sexual characteristics and nature? Woman important in capitals. Man as castrated male singer disguised in female clothes. Why?

Barthes asks who it is that is speaking the sentence. He distinguishes between 1. the story’s hero (fiction?) 2. Balzac, the man (personal experience and philosophical ideas/beliefs) or 3. Balzac the author (literary competence describing feminine aspects acting out on a page or stage).

Is Balzac showing or speaking a personal or universal wisdom in his writing? Is it mixed with his psychology or romantic attitudes? Specific speculation? Ideas and imaginings?

Barthes states that it is impossible to know the answers.
For him, all writing is a special Voice (my capitalisation) of many voices. Apparently, ‘indiscernible’. How true is this? What is it to be incapable of being discerned or distinctive? It is helpful to know the context and circumstances of all involved.

As for literature, Barthes describes it as a neuter, a composite of escapism. Where identity is lost, especially that of the author.

How does he reach this conclusion?

Literature is a broad category of all written works reflecting general aims.
The stories within this are particular and personal. They are richer than the neutral category. Here, there is no loss of identity. How could there be?

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Barthes continues (promise not to quote him at length!):

Probably this has always been the case: once an action is recounted, for intransitive ends, and no longer in order to act directly upon reality — that is, finally external to any function but the very exercise of the symbol — this disjunction occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters his own death, writing begins.

I don’t know what he means by ‘for intransitive ends’ when an author tells of an action. Is this a character or writer not requiring a direct object in the plot or story? If so, how does this lead to a lost identity?

Not ‘to act directly upon reality’ — is writing seen as an indirect or direct intervention or expression by an author? No matter. Isn’t the author always there? Even if the author is external to the act of writing, how is there a disjunction from the inner self?

Where does the voice come from? If not life and experience? This begins to sound biblical. The death of a crucified writer/person but whose story survives. God-like?

The writer/person/author is dead, long live The Author of The Book? No! :thinking: Assistance required.

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This struck me (with my biases) as uncannily in alignment with Goodman’s analysis of fictive reference. Presumably Barthes means to contrast

  • factual narrative, which we might report as “Balzac narrates this or that fact”, where “narrates” is a transitive verb in the grammatical sense outlined here: Learning English | BBC World Service

with

  • fictional narrative, where e.g. “Balzac narrates” makes the same verb intransitive, so that a subject for it (“Balzac”) suffices and an object (“this or that fact”) is redundant.

This chimes with Goodman’s suggestion to contrast

  • denotational reference by a description or a picture, where we may supply both of the terms to be related by a two-place relation of reference, and say e.g. “the painting depicts Churchill”

with

  • non-denotational reference, where we might say, intransitively because there is no Pegasus, “the painting Pegasus-depicts”, or just “the painting is a Pegasus-depiction”.

Obviously there are massive differences of approach here, but I reckon “Pegasus-depiction” correlates nicely with “no longer in order to act directly upon reality - that is, finally external to any function but the very exercise of the symbol”?

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I think “intransitive ends” just means that the action doesn’t reach into the real world the way it reaches within the fictional world: if a geologists warns a character of an earthquake, you - the reader - aren’t supposed to worry about an earthquake around you. (And it’s not because the earthquake is “elsewhere”, but because it’s all text.)

Disclaimer: I’ve read the text twice before, and I’ve now re-read it for the thrid time. I find it hard to read, partly because I haven’t read the works and authors referenced, and partly because it’s a very focussed polemic which leaves out things that would help me understand better.

My summary of the text would be: Barthes rejects the writing person’s authority over what ends up written, rejects the critics search for a “secret” meaning of the text, and wants to transition to the mutlitude of meanings a text might have for “the reader” instead, thus liberating the text to unfold its potential.

Barthes is hyper-focussed on the Author, though that’s just a major source of the kind of meaning-fixing he dislikes. He’s aware, for example, of the New Critics, who at the time were rejecting the Author, too, but would have substituted the objective meaning of the text which could be discovered via close reading:

See the parenthetical “even”?

People shouldn’t try to fix the meaning of the text down to one ultimate version. Not the Author, and not the Critic. I suppose the alternative is what the reader could get out of it:

The “without any being lost” seems to preclude real-life, flesh-and-blood readers. This seems to point to some ideal concept. A locus, a collection, of all that a text could mean.

Again, this is different from later formalist theories, like Wolfgang Iser’s “Implied Reader”, where Iser tries to find out how a reader who would get the most out of a text is predicted in the formal features of the text. (The most obvious example: a text written in English would require a reader who can read the language.)

I’m unsure, here, how Barthes’ idea would work out. For example, real life readers can misunderstand a text passage (by misreading, etc.) These misreadings are also part of the text’s potential, but I get the sense that Barthes is not thinking of that: “all the citations a writing consists of”. “The reader” here feels like an outgrowth of a text’s history, of alternative ways of sense making.

A real life reader who interprets a text in a particular way would look scarily like “the critic” he denounced earlier. So there’s the death of the author, and the birth of the reader, but I’m unsure in what way actual people are supposed to matter, here.

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Great contributions so far. I may respond to some later. For now, I’ll say something about the intellectual and social context of the essay (thereby running the risk of doing exactly what Barthes says we cannot or should not do), and I’ll also set down its structure, to help me organize my thoughts.

I’ve read the essay a few times now and I like it a lot. It was groundbreaking when first published, and I think in some ways its lessons have not yet been properly absorbed (for instance, it seems habitual today to try to uncover the secret meaning lying beneath the text, as if interpretation were a matter of digging down to something hidden.)

The essay’s context

The essay was written when structuralism was beginning to give way to post-structuralism, and it reflects this turning point in its thesis, which builds on the former but steps beyond it towards the latter. Whereas structuralism located meaning in underlying systems of relations (especially language and cultural codes) rather than in the individual consciousness or authorial intention, post-structuralism would bring the very notion of a stable, authoritative meaning into doubt.

It was also a reaction against conventional literary criticism, which tended to treat the literary work as an expression of the author’s mind or as an execution of the author’s intention, or else located an authoritative meaning in the text that could potentially be uncovered by careful analysis.

The penultimate paragraph is unmistakably revolutionary in tone, and the fact that the essay was written not long before May 1968 is surely significant. I wouldn’t say the essay was meant as a direct political intervention—and if I’m trying to heed the lessons of the essay I shouldn’t even be wondering about that anyway—but it certainly has the flavour of the time and clearly wants to position itself as radical.

Whether the radical attitude of philosophers at the time was a result primarily of political and social conditions, or of the internal philosophical conflict between humanism and existentialism, structuralism, and the nascent post-structuralism, doesn’t really matter for us now. What matters is that the essay’s revolutionary rhetoric is part of what we have to make sense of (will doing so call into question the essay’s own message?)

The essay’s structure

There are seven sections or paragraphs:

  1. The reality: we cannot say who is speaking

  2. The modern invention of the Author

  3. The empire of the Author has already begun to crumble

  4. Contemporary literature: the scriptor replaces the Author

  5. The text as a tissue of citations

  6. Revolution: against the empire of Critic and Author

  7. The Author makes way for the reader

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Some thoughts on paragraph 1.

Unlike a song, a recited poem, or any spoken utterance, the nature of a piece of writing is that it is separate from the person who produced it, from a voice. The voice as the single source is obliterated in writing, and all that is left is the unique “special voice” that is confined to writing, the depersonalized voice of writing itself, “consisting of several indiscernible voices”. So what he calls the special voice of literature is not really a voice at all in the traditional sense he is otherwise using.

What we are left with is a multiplicity. Barthes uses an example from Balzac to show that the voice of a work of literature is irreducibly plural: he offers several plausible answers to the question, “Who is speaking in this way?” And because voice has traditionally served as the anchor of meaning, a plurality of voice implies a plurality of meaning.

So the essay begins very directly with a concrete instance of the semantic multiplicity that is so fundamental to the whole essay.

What’s the significance of the example? It’s not random. What strikes me about it is that it’s full of received ideas, prejudices and cultural clichés (about femininity) that could be seen to be speaking to us directly, without going through or originating in Balzac—and this is what Barthes is referring to later when he says that a text is a “tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture”.

Balzac is the prime example of literary realism, the project of accurately representing reality in fiction. Choosing him for the example is to be as provocative as possible; doing so calls into question the very idea that there is a reliable relation between writing and world, flowing through a single Authorial consciousness that faithfully reports reality.

In other words, realism makes a good target because more than many other literary modes, it depends on the authority of the Author. We are expected to read Balzac’s sentence as transmitting to us the reality of “Woman”, but what we get is actually a string of citations whose sources cannot be unified. The clichés come from literary tradition, common sense, and contemporary ideology. They had become natural in the language, and although Balzac draws on them, they don’t consitute a single voice speaking through him any more than they’re his own original observations.

Incidentally, it’s worth noting too that Barthes published a book-length analysis of Sarrasine just a few years later in 1970, so when he wrote this essay he was probably already deeply engaged with the novel.

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Thank you for providing the text context and outline of the 7 sections.

Yes, so far, my written responses were frustrating due to my attempt to read without context and circumstance either historical, literary or personal. This goes against my nature and experience.

Your writing, dear Author, is clear and quite, quite brilliant :smile:

A lot to ponder…

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Thus literature (it would be better, henceforth, to say writing), by refusing to assign to the text (and to the world as text) a "secret:’ that is, an ultimate meaning, liberates an activity which we might call counter-theological, properly revolutionary, for to refuse to arrest meaning is finally to refuse God and his hypostases, reason, science, the law.

For Barthes the text is endlessly open. Endlessly arriving, it never arrives. I can’t help but think of Bakhtin.

Nothing conclusive has yet taken place in the world, the ultimate word of the world and about the world has not yet been spoken, the world is open and free, everything is still in the future and will always be in the future.

For Bakhtin, meaning is between those who converse. Meaning is not securely enclosed by this or that decontextualized phrase.

Here’s Barthes again:

there is one place where this multiplicity is collected, united, and this place is not the author, as we have hitherto said it was, but the reader: the reader is the very space in which are inscribed, without any being lost, all the citations a writing consists of; the unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination;

We might say that the hunt for authorial intention is an excuse to privilege my reading, the way the text shows itself to me. This is inauthentic : the “for-me-ness” of the reading is disowned. I hide behind a projection of the author.

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I appreciate this approach to reading the book. I find it easier to follow.

However, I also recognise the benefits of highlighting a sentence or paragraph meaningful to the reader. Anywhere in the book.

The problem I have, then, is to find the gem!

The 7 section outline acts as a useful reference.

I will use it in future, to help self and others navigate the pdf. I’ve printed it out and marked up the sections.

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Probably this has always been the case: once an action is recounted, for intransitive ends, and no longer in order to act directly upon reality — that is, finally external to any function but the very exercise of the symbol — this disjunction occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters his own death, writing begins.

@Dawnstorm comes closest to my way of reading it. The sentence that follows, in which Barthes brings up “primitive societies”, shows you what’s going on: it’s about the historical progression from narrative that functions as part of rituals, commandments, incantations, and so on, to narrative for its own sake (for art and entertainment). Narrative that’s meant to “act directly upon reality” is transitive, whereas narrative that no longer has that kind of function, like novels, is intransitive.

(EDIT: I don’t think it matters whether we say that the narrative has transitive/instransitive ends, or that the narrative itself is transitive/instransitive.)

@bongofury I’m not against bringing Goodman into the discussion but I can’t see how he fits, at least on this point—but I’m not sure I understand your comment.

EDIT: Here’s a good example of a narrative that is meant to “act directly upon reality”, i.e., a “transitive” one in Barthes’ terms. It’s part of the liturgy of the Eucharist, which is meant to effect transubstantiation.

For on the night he was betrayed he himself took bread, and giving you thanks he said the blessing, broke the bread and gave it to his disciples, saying:

TAKE THIS, ALL OF YOU, AND EAT OF IT: FOR THIS IS MY BODY WHICH WILL BE GIVEN UP FOR YOU.

In a similar way, when supper was ended, he took the chalice, and giving you thanks he said the blessing, and gave the chalice to his disciples, saying:

TAKE THIS, ALL OF YOU, AND DRINK FROM IT: FOR THIS IS THE CHALICE OF MY BLOOD, THE BLOOD OF THE NEW AND ETERNAL COVENANT; WHICH WILL BE POURED OUT FOR YOU AND FOR MANY FOR THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS. DO THIS IN MEMORY OF ME.

— Eucharist Prayers

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Section 2. The part that strikes me is when Barthes talks about the ‘phenomenon’ of the ‘disjunction’.

I understand this occurs when an author’s recounting of a character’s action is external. The writing is a mere ‘exercise of the symbol’. The ends are described as ‘intransitive’ - no longer acting ‘directly on reality’.

The ‘voice’ or personal relationship to the source (reality) is lost.

…the author enters his own death, writing begins. Nevertheless, the feeling about this phenomenon has been variable; in primitive societies, narrative is never undertaken by a person,

This is astonishing. Barthes talks of a ‘performance’ by a ‘mediator, shaman or speaker’. He suggests that it is admired for its ‘mastery of narrative code’ but not its ‘genius’.

What kind of stories are being told in ancient or primitive times? Narratives about people as they traverse or try to understand the world. Greek poetry and drama. To be sung and heard. On stage and in groups. So, yes, ‘transitive’ - in the sense of there being a transit or transfer of meaning.

It has personal and social meaning in its content not just in its performing. There is a connection and communication between speaker and listener.

What does Barthes mean by ‘genius’? Why is the narrator not admired for this attribute? There is a creative process involved. It may well be inspirational, even if not ‘original’.

Barthes contrasts this with the so-called ‘intransitivity’ of the ‘modern figure’ - the author.

According to Barthes, something has been lost. The voice of an author? Is the author or reader an example of an intransitive subject?

In Section 2, it is interesting to consider the difference between ‘subject’ and ‘person’.

Narrative is never undertaken by a person.

…the prestige of the individual, or, to put it more nobly, of the “human person” Hence it is logical that with regard to literature it should be positivism, resume and the result of capitalist ideology, which has accorded the greatest importance to the author’s “person”

…the image of literature to be found in contemporary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his history, his tastes, his passions; criticism still consists, most of the time, in saying that Baudelaire’s work is the failure of the man Baudelaire, Van Gogh’s work his madness,

This is more about literary criticism. Barthes is making a claim about the nature of language and writing.

It would appear that the only origin is language itself. It becomes more scientific. So what?

Isn’t this a kind of castration that Barthes talked of earlier? A scientific concept of the author or reader negating the actual personal?

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There is no denying the difficulties in understanding.

I think you, me and others are doing the best we can — thanks to all for explaining different perspectives.

Even if I’m not responding directly, please know that this is most valuable. So much to consider on different levels. Challenging, innit? :slight_smile:

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Would you have tried to explain (to yourself or anyone) the use here of “intransitive” without reference to the verbal binary?

In semantic terms a transitive verb is a two place relation, and an intransitive verb is one place. I couldn’t help being struck by this parallel with Goodman’s analysis, albeit granting the differences of approach.

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Thanks. I have never heard of Goodman or his analysis of fictive reference. Interesting how our mind makes associations. I will need to read more. I wonder if this will help:
Goodman’s Aesthetics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

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Not sure about this. Perhaps you can spell it out for me?
[Edit: no matter. I think I’ve got the gist]

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That’s exactly what I did when I explained Barthes’ use of the term. Maybe I shouldn’t have.

I was very confused by what you said but now I get it: you were explaining the meaning of instransitive. With that explanation plus my explanation of how Barthes uses it, I think we’ve got it all sewn up. :+1:

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This makes sense.
If it is the ‘action’ of Balzac, the writer, person and author of the characters’ fictional actions or behaviour, then yes, there is a difference of degree.

The author still reaches into their mental world for images, words and pictures. This is then expressed in the text for readers to imagine for themselves.

It is all text about the world, fictional or otherwise, created to produce thoughts and feelings in humans.

Of course, it is indirect. How could it be otherwise?

Writing is like painting a picture. Each layer makes the writing more complex. The end product blends the external and internal.

There is also subtext — readers engage with different kinds and levels of awareness and knowledge presented.

The author is more than a ‘performer’ of writing symbols. The reader is more than a decipher of code.

Where is the humanity? You make a good point:

I look at Barthes’ conclusion in Section 7:

…we know that to restore to writing its future, we must reverse its myth: the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author.

Barthes’ language is so mythically dramatic!

The obvious criticism is that there is no need for an Either/Or scenario.

People have always been both, haven’t they? Creators, receivers and givers of meaning. In life and death.

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Literary criticism is a form of literature. As is true for fiction, there is no “right” or “wrong” way to perform – only entertaining or dull, illuminating or confounding. Of course the author is not the sole arbiter of the meaning of his work. Neither is the reader. But there’s nothing wrong with critiques that emphasize the “intentional fallacy”, especially if they are entertaining and enlightening. When librarian Fannie Ratchford wrote “The Bronte’s Web of Childhood” she posited (incontrovertibly) that Emily Bronte’s brilliant poems were often penned by “characters” in a childhood game the 4 Bronte children (all geniuses) played. Of course this doesn’t dispel any reader’s interpretation of the poems, or add a word to the poems. But it’s fun, entertaining, and may increase the reader’s pleasure in reading the poems. That’s what criticism should do. The dry “new criticism” that attempts scientific and grammatical analysis of literature (using terms from grammar like “intransitive”) often fails to entertain. Dr. Johnson’s “The Lives of Poets” remains one of the great works of literary criticism, despite its biographical bent.

If the cult of the “author” is influenced by Capitalism, perhaps grammatical approaches to criticism are influenced by our preference for science over history, of the repeatable over the unique. (I also wonder if the grammatical terms Barthes uses may have broader meanings in the original French that are lost in translation.)

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Is the essay worthwhile

Only if the essay makes overall sense, then it would seem worthwhile to look at the specifics in more detail.

In trying to understand whether the essay makes overall sense, I can only compare it to my own understanding of the problem.

If Barthes is right and the author is dead, this essay should be read as a stand alone piece independently of both Barthes himself and the cultural and historical world that he happened to have lived in.

As there are two aspects to painting, the aesthetic and the representation, there are also the same two aspects to writing.

The aesthetic of writing

As in a Derain, the aesthetic of the shapes and colours cannot be explained in words by the artist, in a Balzac, the aesthetic of the syntax and semantics cannot be explained in words by the author. Good painting and writing have an aesthetic that poor painting and writing don’t.

Only the reader of a writing can discover the aesthetics within it, as the aesthetics of a writing exists only within the writing itself.

As only the reader can discover the aesthetics in a work, and as the aesthetics cannot be described in words, in this sense, as regards the aesthetics of a work, the author becomes irrelevant. In other words, “the death of the author”.

The representation within writing

The author may be certain in their own mind what they intend to say, and may believe that the writing does in fact express what they intended to say, but the inherent ambiguity within any language means that it is logically impossible for any reader to be able to determine the true intentions of the author just from the writings themselves.

The problem becomes circular in that even if the author did try to explain what they intended within their writings, their explanation would suffer from the same inherent ambiguity in language compounding the reader’s difficulty in their attempt to understand the author’s intentions. As regards the writing, again the author becomes irrelevant. In other words, “the death of the author”.

As the author found one meaning in their text, even though the nature of the text is inherently linguistically ambiguous, the individual reader is also able to discover one meaning in the same writing. An individual reader growing up in a specific society and culture does not exist in a state of ambiguity, but certainty as to the meaning of the words around them.

It may be true that different individual readers within the same society and culture may discover different meanings within the same writing, but perhaps we should not be thinking about the reader as an individual but as a collective of every reader within the same cohesive social and cultural space.

In both senses, whether the aesthetics or the writing, the author and their intentions can be said to be irrelevant to the reader. In other words “the death of the author”.

The essay agrees with common sense

The essay makes sense in arguing that the author is secondary to the writing itself, as much as for practical linguistic reasons rather than any deeper philosophical reasons. Consequently, it seems worthwhile to look at the specifics of the essay in more detail.