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

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It’s worthwhile to carefully consider this relevant dialogue:

Yes. The distinction makes it seem as if (1) is insignificant in any understanding of the text. (2) the historical and political situation is not to look for a ‘single source of truth’ in the author. But to see the author in situ, the circumstances of his being and becoming.

Yes. When Barthes speaks of the capitalised ‘Author’ (Section 3), there seems to be a turn from an individual ‘author’. For me, it is difficult to know what he means or is ‘condemning’ — a person, author, literary group of critics, a political concern or established tradition.

Though the Author’s empire is still very powerful (recent criticism has often merely consolidated it), it is evident that for a long time now certain writers have attempted to
topple it.

It is not obvious what or who Barthes is against. As you say:

Section 3 is long, as is one of Barthes’ sentences. Starting with ‘It is clear that…’ :slight_smile:

I think I counted 5 attempts to topple the powerful ‘Author’s empire’. Starting with the poet Mallarme, ending with linguistics.

Thanks for sharing this. Not sure how she would fit in with Barthes’ view. Is she a foe or friend?

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But note carefully that (1) is looking for the author’s motivations, intentions, and psychological states, to explain the text. I meant the habit among critics to seek the one true explanation of the text in the author’s life. That’s what Barthes is condemning (to anticipate your later question).

Exactly, that’s important. He is referring to the figure, the cultural character, or the supposed role in society. Author with a capital “A” refers to the idea of the one true source of meaning.

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Interesting sentence with its references and associations. ‘Literature’ (or 'writing) as a liberating force, refusing to assign ‘a secret’ or ‘meaning’ is given a role in refusing God?
Which Section is this from? Thanks.

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That’s a good way of putting it.

Yes, I wondered if anyone would pick me up on that. I was being overly reductive.

Yes indeed. My post about section 3 is going to attempt to cover some of that stuff.

This is a really good angle; I hadn’t thought of it, even though I’m quite interested in narratology (and recently tried not completely successfully to work out exactly what fabula and syuzhet meant).

I read it with much interest, and it seems you might be right about Barthes’ inaccurate use of linguistic terms—although it might still be possible that you’re not being charitable enough, I’m not sure. Anyway, I don’t want to get stuck on the intransitive thing at the moment, but I’ll be keeping your post in mind, because I suspect it’s important for understanding Barthes.

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Thanks for clarification. I was thinking of the reader not the critic. Before we can explain a text, we need to understand it.

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A reminder of the essay’s structure:

  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

Here I’ll look at section 3, particularly the idea that language speaks.

Barthes identifies several writers as precursors of the death of the Author: Mallarmé, Valery, and Proust. He also points to Surrealism, and outside literature to linguistics, which in their own ways moved in the same direction.

Mallarmé anticipated Barthes way back in the 19th century:

The pure work implies the disappearance of the poet’s own utterance, which instead yields the initiative to the words, through the collision of their activated unevenness: they light one another up with reciprocal reflections like a virtual trail of fire over precious stones, replacing the perceptible breath with the lyric inspiration of old or the rapturous personal course of the sentence.

— Mallarmé, quoted in Coke-Enguídanos, Mervyn (1983) “Towards a Poetry of Silence: Stéphane Mallarmé and Juan Ramón Jiménez,” Studies in 20th Century Literature: Vol. 7: Iss. 2, Article 5. "Towards a Poetry of Silence: Stéphane Mallarmé and Juan Ramón Jiménez" by Mervyn Coke-Enguídanos

So Mallarmé, according to Barthes, was one of the first to understand that what speaks in a work of literature is not the Author, but language itself.

The idea that language speaks, rather than the author or person, became popular in the 20th century. Heidegger, Gadamer, and Derrida all had ideas along these lines, and they were hugely influential. Personally, I find the idea intuitive and appealing, but I want to get a firmer and more precise grip on the idea. What exactly does it mean?

The way I think of it is that when you use language, you participate in something bigger than and prior to you, something with its own logic, internal relations, and ongoing developments. Language is not really a tool, completely under your control. You cannot use it as you please (and be effective). And that makes me think of a possible paraphrase of Marx:

Men make their own sentences, but they do not make them as they please; they do not make them with self-created words, but with words existing already, given and transmitted from the past.

— My paraphrase of Karl Marx in “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”

Rather than a mere communicative tool, language is more like a whole world, a world of concepts, ways of thinking, and ways of relating to others—in other words, it is coextensive with culture itself. To “master” language, then, is not to rule over it, but to know how to participate in it.

But we still have a logical gap. You could summarize what I’ve said so far by saying that pre-existing cultural-linguistic structures constrain how people speak and write. But this is to say a lot less than “language speaks, not the author”. For language to speak, we need an agency belonging to language itself.

As an occasional creative writer and amateur musician, I know what writers and jazz musicians mean when they say that when they get “in the zone”, they become channels for something bigger than them. And the thing is, I believe this is an accurate perception or understanding of the situation, not just a curious but delusional mental state.

I am tempted to appeal to the fact that language works, as music does, through the individual to a great extent unconsciously. Thus we have the following formula:

Pre-existing world (language as coextensive with culture) + Unconscious use of language = linguistic agency

But this is a bit problematic, since it takes us into psychology, and that’s not part of the structuralist tradition that Barthes comes from. It also doesn’t work very well anyway, because it doesn’t get out of the individual subject: one interpretation would be that even if you use language unconsciously, you are still the one who’s doing it, not language.

It turns out there’s a way of conceiving of the situation in structural, non-psychological terms:

Pre-existing structural system (langue) + The subject’s position within it = linguistic agency

This is better, but it still isn’t entirely convincing. It doesn’t follow from a subject having a position within a system that that system is acting through the subject.

The key is to see that in systemic terms, language is itself generative. It is not a passive, static grid, but a network that has its own dynamism, its own evolutions and interactions. After all, when a historical linguist, for example, traces the history of Indo-European languages, they are not directly asking questions about how individuals acted, about how they spoke or wrote, because the changes they trace happen at the level of the system, not at the level of individual speech acts. Those changes then constrain and enable what any individual can say or write.

So, if the system of language has its own dynamic that no single speaker controls, then every individual act of speaking or writing is not a private expression but a local instantiation of the ongoing life of the language. The author is just the place where that event occurs, not its origin.

A neat encapsulation of all this is to reverse the common conception and say that it’s not the human individual who speaks, but language. Whether the logical gap has been closed is maybe a matter of taste, or is not the most relevant question. The statement that “language speaks” is rhetorical and suggestive rather than 100% literal and logical—and it kind of feels like I’ve been doing something akin to explaining a joke.

So, it might not be appropriate to try and make it logically watertight (and if it’s contradictory, I needn’t resolve it, as Adorno would tell me). That said, trying to work out what it means has been very useful in strengthening my understanding of the essay and of the general idea of “language speaks”.

I’m only four sentences into the section, but that’s enough for now.

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Hmmm. So, all of this just to fight a habit of the critics looking at the life of an author for ‘the one true explanation of the text’?

I am sceptical. I think this is all a bit of a ‘strawman’. Who actually believes in an ‘Author-God’?

Barthes’ claim, the analogy of author to God, deifies the writer. Barthes theologises the author in an incongruous way. To meet his own ends.
Whatever they are.

How much does it characterise the rest of literary-critical discourse?

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I don’t think it’s a strawman at all. It may be less of a problem now (I’m not sure) but it was pervasive back in the sixties. As I said in my post about section 2, it was the primary way of conceiving of a work of literature in both popular and literary culture:

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I like to compare it to the figure of the film director, as auteur (and non-coincidentally, auteur means author). It was only after the 60s (I think) that the director of a film came to be regarded as the originating genius, the individual artist behind the film. There are other ways of thinking about a film production, for example as a collaborative effort. The number of important people involved in a film means that it is always impossible for the finished product to be traced centrally back to the director.

In literature, it is language itself that, analogically, has the role of collaboration: the writer enters into a collaboration with language to produce something that is never entirely in their control—and whose interpretation they therefore have no special claim over once it is published.

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I think it’s also to fight the general cultural habit of seeking a single definitive meaning. The emphasis on plurality instead is very significant, since it prefigures what we now call postmodern, meaning the condition characteristic of an era and also the philosophers associated with it (Foucault, Derrida). EDIT: And postmodern literature too of course.

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French auteur theory not only inflated the importance of the director, but promoted it. Prior to its influence (when the importance of the director was under-valued) the producer often chose the cast, the script, the music, etc. Producers like David Selznik had as much creative control of films as modern directors (almost).

To return to Levi-Strauss (I read the Barthes essay in grad school, several decades ago, but actually studied Levi-Strauss when I studied cultural anthropology), he would claim that myths (which clearly have no single author, as Barthes points out) have a grammar, like sentences. His explanations about how to parse that grammar (find the “oppositions”) were less persuasive.

Barthes’ notion that language is a collaborator is clearly correct. The “author” is often a shorthand used by the critic. What does Tolstoy mean? Perhaps that simply means, what do you understand from this section of the novel. Language, after all, has a tyranny on thought (Sapir-Whorf). And if Levi-Strauss is correct, the grammar of fiction or poetry also has a tyranny on the creative process. Hence it is a “collaborator”.

This reminds me of the endless thread about whether God is responsible for original sin. When the critic asks, “Why does Poldy Bloom feel guilty about tricking the seagulls by throwing scrumpled paper from that bridge? In Ulysses)”, one obvious answer is, because Joyce makes him do it. But the answer is trivial. More significant would be something the act reveals about Bloom’s character, or some importance it has to the structure of the novel. The common critical question is, “Why does Joyce have Bloom throw the scrumpled paper and then feel guilty, buy breadcrumbs and return to feed the gulls?” Perhaps Barthes would prefer this to be rephrased as, “What is the structural or grammatical significance of the scene?” Or, “What does the scene mean to the reader?” A further question might be, “Is this rewording trivial”?

Levertov clearly doesn’t promote the idea that the author is the sole arbiter of meaning. Nonetheless, as an author she “loves” the reader for finding a secret (of which she is unaware) in her poem, and for (most of all) believing there is such a secret. I’m not sure what Barthes would think about that.

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In Section 3, Barthes writes:

Mallarme’s entire poetics consists in suppressing the author for the sake of the writing (which is, as we shall see, to restore the status of the reader.)

Ignoring Barthes’ bracketed claim, I’d like to focus on Mallarme.

Q: Why or how did he suppress himself in his life poetry?

A: Found in this substantial and informative article. It tells of Mallarme’s longing, his productive and unproductive phases. How grief, love, personal finance transformed his poetry in the second half of the 19th century:

Stéphane Mallarmé | The Poetry Foundation

…

Barthes states that it was ‘necessary’ to ‘substitute language for the man who hitherto was supposed to own it’.

First, what kind of ‘man’ is alleged to have ‘owned’ language? Is it the classical traditional or realistic novelist? Or societal norms of perfection — the standards of the bourgeoisie?

No matter. There is no denying that it is the person who uses language to express their ideas in their own way and words. Even if the opportunity is not always there…their voices dismissed by the powerful…this is where the person as reader can be empowered.

Mallarme, the man and poet, persevered with his vision of language. However, he discovered that the personal cannot be suppressed. Love is the key!

In 1885 as in 1868, Mallarmé’s optimistic declaration of faith in his ability to attain his ideal world was followed by a failure to do so. This time, however, instead of lapsing into silence, he wrote and published poems about Méry Laurent, reflecting the successive stages of their relationship… — Stéphane Mallarmé | The Poetry Foundation

Barthes used Mallarme to support his argument. Indeed, Mallarme had his own vision of self-suppression but this, inevitably, failed.
Mallarme turned away ‘from the ideal world toward the world of reality’.

More readable and enjoyable to read of his influence:
Stéphane Mallarmé - Wikipedia

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That is one way of looking at it.
But AI has just reminded me that I have posted a lot on this and should give others a chance!
I knew this :wink:
Permission to say that all of this is prompting me to delve into the Philosophy of Literature:
Philosophy of Literature | Philopedia

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Here are my thoughts on the rest of section 3. I’ll look at Proust and linguistics, ignoring Valéry and surrealism.

Anyone who reads Proust’s In Search of Lost Time at some point asks the question: who is the narrator? Or, as I did, they may just assume that the narrator is Proust himself and that the novel is some kind of fictionalized autobiography. But he blurs the distinction intentionally, and keeps the narrator character somewhere between himself and an ordinary character in the book, such that he is always the person who is going to write the very book we are reading.

Barthes says that Proust reverses the conventional view that the author’s life comes first and is then put into the novel. With Proust, the novel in a sense came first, in that it conferred life and meaning on the author; it created a narrator character that Proust could project onto himself, thus transforming himself into the person who had gone through everything in the novel and had then written about it autobiographically.

In other words—and at the risk of making it mundane and psychological—Barthes is saying that the novel became the centrally significant thing in Proust’s life, that it was, even just as an imagined future finished work, the most important thing in his life and the basis of everything else he did.

Barthes illustrates this with a kind of causal reversal. The conventional reading is that the Baron de Charlus, a character in the novel, is based on Comte Robert de Montesquiou, the historical figure Proust actually knew. Barthes reverses this: the real Montesquiou is in a sense based on the fictional Charlus. Now, this is obviously not a literal claim, so what is it?

I think Barthes is pointing out an example of retrocausality: the real Montesquiou would be forgotten if he had not been immortalized in the fictional form of Charlus, so the character determines how we view the real historical person. (Retrocausality can also be seen in the phenomenon whereby historical events determine how past events are understood; and in the experience of reading a book, when the ending defines how the preceding story is interpreted. Obviously the word retrocausality is somewhat metaphorical here, as opposed to the literal meaning in the philosophy of physics.)

But Barthes goes a bit further to claim that because of this retrocausality, Charlus is culturally primary, now more real than the historical figure. Montesquiou, now, is a derivative secondary figure.

QUESTION:

It strikes me that what he says about Proust could be said about a great number of other novels, so I’m not sure Proust is the special precursor that Barthes claims he is. This is an important objection, because all the precursors he chooses were precursors or early pioneers of literary modernism: if we can see in much older works what Barthes sees in the ones he chooses, then we can question the very idea of precursors. Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, and Moby-Dick all undermine the Author in numerous ways. What Barthes claims is a special feature of early modernism has been a feature of literature for centuries. The question we should ask is, how could Barthes respond to this?

Next he turns to linguistics.

linguistics has recently provided the destruction of the Author with a valuable analytical tool by showing that the whole of the enunciation is an empty process, functioning perfectly without there being any need for it to be filled with the person of the interlocutors.

He is referring to Émile Benveniste’s essay, “The Nature of Pronouns”, which was published in 1966, just before Barthes wrote “The Death of the Author”.

I can only be defined by the instance of discourse that contains it and by that alone. It has no value except in the instance in which it is produced. But in the same way it is also as an instance of form that I must be taken; the form of I has no linguistic existence except in the act of speaking in which it is uttered.

— Emile Benveniste, “The Nature of Pronouns”

In other words, the I has no existence beyond the enunciation of “I”. This isn’t claiming that there is no person saying it, but that the linguistic subject is just that, a purely linguistic entity, which does not import any feature of the person—their psychology, motivation, intentions—into the enunciation. What is required for language to function in this case is just the formal position, the slot provided by language’s structure.

You can see why Barthes likes this. Maybe it’s another example of what @Dawnstorm was complaining about, his tendency to stretch technical terms from linguistics. Because the thing is, Benveniste is writing about spoken pronouns, not about writing and not about authors. On the other hand, Barthes does say that it’s an “analytical tool”—which may mean a useful analogical concept. In any case, I find it quite persuasive.

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Philosophical writing is often linguistically opaque and impenetrable, often, I am sure, deliberately so, but I feel that Barthes’s use of the word “intransitive” does describe what he intends to say.

Barthes argues that because of the ambiguous nature of language it is often impossible for the reader to know who is speaking, whose voice they are hearing and who the author is.

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. (Section 1 “The Death of the Author”)

The discussion is between the primitive man, the modern man and the post-structuralist.

The primitive man at a camp fire listening to a story that has been passed down from generation to generation, hearing the text as if the text itself was the voice. The text has a life of its own, exhibiting its own authority and separate to any particular author.

The modern man on a train reading a novel that he has bought at a bookshop on the way to work, seeing the text as the voice of a particular author from which its authority derives.

The post-structuralist stopping off at a Parisian cafe on his walk to the Sorbonne, understanding the text as an utterance having no other content than the act by which it is uttered, and all within a space of many dimensions (Section 3 “The Death of the Author”).

Barthes describes the first, that of the primitive man, as an intransitive act.

Probably this has always been the case: once an action is recounted, for intransitive ( verb with no object - I sleep - I speak) 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. (section 1 “Death of the Author”)

In what sense is the primitive man taking part in an intransitive act (characterized by not having or containing a direct object, Merriam Webster).

What can we say about the relationship between writing and the primitive man:

The writing is its own voice
The writing is the source of authority
The writing is its own author

The above do seem to be intransitive.

These are opposed to the relation between writing and the modern man.

The writing is given a voice
The writing is given authority
The writing has an author

The above do seem to be transitive.

So yes, Barthes’s use of the word “intransitive” does seem to be appropriate.

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Thanks for all your well-expressed thoughts in what, for me, remains a difficult text to read.

I’d like to focus a little on Barthes’ description of Valéry, his second writer who wanted to ‘topple the Author’s empire’. From the pdf Section 3:

Valery, encumbered with a psychology of the Self, greatly edulcorated Mallarme’s theory, but, turning in a preference for classicism to the lessons of rhetoric, he unceasingly questioned and mocked the Author, emphasized the linguistic and almost “chance” nature of his activity, and throughout his prose works championed the essentially verbal condition of literature, in the face of which any recourse to the writer’s inferiority seemed to him pure superstition.

I read the words and hear a condescending dismissal of the psychology of self. Why does Barthes take this attitude?

From Paul Valéry | The Poetry Foundation
Valery attached greatest importance to ‘his cult of the intellectual self’.

He wrote the line: ‘Je jouis sans fin de mon propre cerveau’ in a poem. This reflects his attraction to his inner mind or self. “I endlessly delight in my own brain”.

Is this of a psychological or a philosophical nature? Perhaps both.

Why does Barthes write of this as an encumbrance? Perhaps it is an impediment to his poetic work? Too much self? But this is part of who the poet, the writer is. Without this reflecting source, then what are we left with? The creation of a meaningless string of words?

Indeed, Valéry’s poetic output slowed to the merest trickle from 1892 to 1912 because at that time he apparently judged literature not the best medium for “enjoying his brain.” — Paul Valéry | The Poetry Foundation

The life and work of Valery (V) was complex and changing. Barthes talks of his never-ending questioning and mocking of ‘the Author’.

It is a pity that Barthes does not provide more information to support this.

I discovered in the poetry website that V. had an obsessive denigration of Pascal. There are speculations as to the reasons.

Despite his mental crises, V. was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 12 different years. There is much more to discover in: Paul Valéry - Wikipedia

V. apparently despised philosophy and psychology. The suggestion is that he suppressed and wanted to avoid interpretation of ‘meaning’. This seems to contradict his earlier love of his mind. Is this due to the external self and his love experiences?
The tensions and conflict seem to take their toll.

He criticized French novelist Marcel Proust. Valéry, it must be admitted, was blinded to a great deal in literature by his obsessive commitment to purity of thought. — Paul Valéry | The Poetry Foundation

Again, I would like to have read examples of how he ‘championed the essentially verbal condition of literature…’

From what I have read, V’s output varied but with similar themes. The combination of the conscious and the unconscious, mind and body (senses). The reconciliation of the inner and outer world.

I have no idea what Barthes means when he continues:

‘… in the face of which any recourse to the writer’s inferiority seemed to him pure superstition.’

Perhaps we would learn more about V. the ‘man’ by reading his work?
Or V.V.

Time to enjoy a poem, or two?

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Well-spotted. It’s a misprint: it should be interiority. That copy clearly isn’t the most accurate.

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Appreciate the correct version but not sure that it makes much more sense :roll_eyes:

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Barthes says that Valéry…

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.

Barthes is arguing against the view that a work of literature is best explained by tracing it back to the author’s intentions, motivations, and proclivities, i.e., his or her psychology, in other words his or her interiority.

Against this, he is arguing for the view that everything important to the meaning of the work is exterior, that is, public and out in the open. The reader is free to interpret it without being dictated to by the author, via the critic.

He says that Valéry recognized this, even though he was preoccupied with the workings of the creative mind. In Barthes’ view, it is the focus on language itself—the “essentially verbal condition of literature”—that gives us a better way of interpreting literature, so he is impressed with Valéry’s rejection of authors’ pretentions, but lightly criticizes his focus on psychology.

This (Barthes’ position) is a common and popular kind of position to take among thinkers coming out of the structuralist tradition. The roughly Cartesian idea that the workings of the mind are reliably observable by that very mind is something that was increasingly rejected in the 20th century, in favour of a view of language, literature, and culture as systems with their own features that are not reducible to individual psychology.

Barthes takes a self-consciously revolutionary position against self-appointed experts, and I happen to think this is relevant and justified, although for different reasons today than in the 1960s.

What Barthes is attacking could be broken down into two elements: (a) the author is the authoritative source of the work’s meaning and critics show us, through their knowledge of the author, how we must interpret the work; (b) the work’s meaning is a hidden secret to be uncovered.

Perhaps (a) is not as prevalent today, but (b) still is, as I observe from watching “BookTube” videos, reading Goodreads reviews, and reading the comments in the TPF creative writing events. This is why the thing about the essay I’m most interested in is the idea that the meaning is in the language and on the surface—something I’ve been arguing for years in discussions during the TPF events.

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The more I read this essay, the more it opens up, and yet the more mysterious it becomes. This is the first sentence in section/paragraph 4:

The removal of the Author … 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).

If, in modern times, the text is now made and read such that the author is absent, this implies that the absence of the author is not a fact about literature, as Barthes has presented it. It implies it is something historical and performative.

It means that the concept of the death of the Author is not an abstract scheme of literary ontology or a factual result of empirical investigation—it is something that is enacted to a greater or lesser degree, now that it has become part of the culture.

This raises the possibility that a work could be produced against the death of the Author, for example, an author writing a disguised allegory might be relying on readers to detect an intention that won’t be available from the text alone.

So the way I see it, in the essay Barthes moves between three positions:

  1. Ontological: the death of the Author recognizes the way literature is and always has been
  2. Historical: the death of the Author is a historical phenomenon, following the modern era of the Author
  3. Performative: the death of the Author is a phenomenon that can be enacted by ways of writing and reading

There’s some tension between these positions. I get the feeling that Barthes doesn’t want to be pinned down on it.