Section 2.
NOTE: For reasons that will become apparent, I’m probably going to quote mostly from the Stephen Heath translation here, which is the one found in the book, Image-Music-Text. But don’t worry, both translations are fine.
The section begins with a sentence that re-states what was claimed in section 1, adding that it has probably always been true, at least for narrative that does not act directly upon reality as ritual or magic narrative do.
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.
It seems that Barthes uses intransitive as an analogy to describe narrative with no object beyond its own artistic production and the associated play of language—as opposed to narrative with an instrumental role in ritual or magic, in which it is meant to have a specific effect on the world.
But as it happens, it’s not just an analogy, and @bongofury was on to something in giving us the literal (grammatical) meaning of intransitivity. Around the same time as this essay was written, Barthes wrote the following:
It would be interesting to know at what moment this verb began to be used intransitively, the writer no longer being the one who writes something, but the one who writes—absolutely: this shift is certainly an important change in mentality.
— “To Write: An Intransitive Verb?”, in The Rustle of Language
For Barthes, then, the grammatical sense of intransitive and the analogical sense—which is about the cultural or intellectual relation between narrative and the world—are actually very close. They are aspects of the same development.
@Amity I notice you were wondering about how to interpret “acting directly on reality”. Does what I’ve said clear it up at all? If you take the first two sentences of section 2 together, it definitely seems that he is thinking of the contrast between storytelling with ritual (or similar) function, and storytelling for its own sake.
Anyway, the claim is that when narrative is produced in this way—in novels, plays, and so on—there is a disconnect between the writing and any identifiable source. The “voice” of the text loses not just its physical origin but any and all possible origins; what looked like the voice of a speaker behind the writing is revealed to have no anchoring source at all. The Author, the authoritative origin, has disappeared, and the writing is thereby untethered. This disconnection and concomitant loss of origin together constitute writing, and this whole phenomenon is what Barthes is calling the death of the Author.
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QUESTION: The first sentence of this section does not seem to refer only to writing; it might also refer to oral storytelling. And yet, the sentence ends with “writing begins”. What’s going on?
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QUESTION: Is Barthes equivocating in his use of the term voice? If “writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin,” (§1) then what is the voice Barthes refers to a couple of sentences later in “the voice loses its origin”? I thought the voice was destroyed, not just disconnected?
- My own answer is that although these appear incompatible, there is actually just a shift between one metaphorical way of conceiving the phenomenon to another. When narrative becomes intransitive, what happens can be seen in two ways: (a) the voice no longer has an origin; (b) what we thought of as the voice is destroyed. But these are just describing the same thing.
It’s hinted at by “no longer”, and it becomes clear from the next sentence, that the approach in this section is historical and anthropological. Barthes is tracing an evolution in how the lack of the voice’s origin has featured or has been felt, historically and prehistorically, from societies in which it was never in doubt—where there was no celebrated figure of towering genius, centre and origin of the story—to capitalist modernity, in which the bourgeois individual becomes the locus of art.
The thing that prompted me to switch translations was “primitive societies” in the first Richard Howard translation. The original is societes ethnographiques, which is more accurately translated straightforwardly as “ethnographic societies”:
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’.
I suspect that back in the sixties the word “primitive” had the pejorative sense that it still has today. The advantage of the actual term used, though it wouldn’t be used today, is that it’s relatively neutral. It refers to the societies studied by ethnographers, ethnography being a big deal in France at the time, and very significant for thinkers like Barthes—the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, a structuralist anthropologist, was central to the 1960s French intellectual scene.
So-called ethnographic societies are tribal societies, oral cultures, and pre-modern civilizations in general. In these societies, the story existed independently of the individual “mediators” or “relators” who told it. It was a feature of communal cultural life, not the original creation—a “work of art”—of an inspired individual. The latter is the figure of the Author, and Barthes says it’s a modern phenomenon. He sketches the familiar development of individualism, leading to “positivism, the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology, which has attached the greatest importance to the ‘person’ of the author.”
The choice to end this evolution with positivism, as the supposed culmination of bourgeois individualism, is quite puzzling to me. I think of positivism as the project, beginning in the 19th century, to model all systematic knowledge on natural science, especially the focus on metrics and observed facts. It is the project that gave us sociology, an attempt (arguably) to turn the study of human society into a hard science. I can see that positivism and individualism may be part of the same process, but the former is not explicitly about the individual in any way I can discern.
Ok, I’ve done some research. Positivism was the reigning mainstream intellectual framework in early to mid-century France. The focus in positivist literary criticism was on observable facts, and that often came down to facts about the author. It makes sense that Barthes would make a point of opposing it; and just generally, it makes sense that as a thinker close to structuralism and (probably) Marxism, he would be against the mainstream.
That’s significant, but maybe it’s a historical quirk; I take the main point to be that the Author is a product of individualism, which in turn is a product of modernity.
Next, Barthes describes how this now manifests itself in ordinary culture, as the tyranny of the author. It’s a familiar picture: in the industrial and marketing machine of literary production, the celebrity of authors—their intentions, motivations, biographies and personalities—become the basic material for the presentation of literary works to the reading public.
But it’s not just about popular culture. Barthes says that criticism is still mostly about the Author, that the work is explained mainly with reference to the person who produced it. So even in professional literary criticism, interpretation is still in thrall to the figure of the Author: the work is read as a kind of cipher, or an indirect confession, with the Author’s life or psychology as the hidden key for the critic’s interpretation.