“The Death of the Author” is easily Roland Barthes’ best known text. A short essay of just seven pages, it is hard to overstate the impact it has had on literary criticism in the English-speaking world and beyond. It routinely features in the reading lists of courses which introduce students to the foundational concepts of twentieth-century literary theory, and its central ideas have been rehearsed and adapted by many writers, artists and thinkers since its initial publication in English in the avant-garde American journal Aspen in 1967. The essay was then published in the French journal Mantéia in 1968, before being re-published in English in the collection of Barthes, Image, Music, Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath, London: Fontana, 1977. The essay has gained this status because it is a concise and forceful articulation of mid-twentieth-century literary theory’s increasing rejection of the figure of the author as guarantor and creator of the literary text’s meaning. Barthes and other theorists such as Julia Kristeva and Jacques Derrida argued that the text’s meaning is generated by the text itself, that is, by language’s ceaseless and unstable production of meaning. Rather than needing to defer to the author’s intentions, the reader is in fact the only valid locus of interpretation through his / her reactions to this textual production of meaning. Thus Barthes’ essay famously states in its closing lines that “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author” (Barthes, p. 148). In the theories of textuality which subsequently emerged in France and the United States, different schools of thought which sought to promote the reader’s interpretation and reception of the text as a field of study would use Barthes’ essay as a standard around which to rally.
The significance of Barthes’ text also lies in the fact that it draws together the thought of a number of different thinkers and disciplines which were responsible for influencing his thought at this time. With an implicit reference to Julia Kristeva’s ideas of intertextuality, Barthes states that a text is “a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture” (146). As Michael Moriarty points out, this is a useful way to think about Barthes’ essay itself, since it juxtaposes a diverse range of discourses without attempting to synthesise or draw them together, with the effect of creating quite a disjointed writing style (101). One of these discourses is that of linguistics, a field which had shaped Barthes’ view of literary texts from the late 1950s. In the first half of the twentieth century, linguists such as Ferdinand de Saussure and Viggo Brøndal viewed language as a structure where meaning is constructed by means of inter-relations and differences within that structure. The meaning that words possess, that is to say the link between signifier and signified, is an arbitrary convention, and it is the differences between words and their combination within structures which produces meaning, not any element essential in the word itself. This structuralist theory of language had considerable influence, within France, on several other disciplines, such as anthropology, history and the study of literature. Barthes and other theorists argued that literary texts form structures whose meaning is produced by the inter-relations existing between the elements which compose them. As Graham Allen observed, the idea of the death of the author has its origins in structuralism’s movement away from locating literary meaning in a single point of authority based outside the text, such as the figure of the author, and its exploration of multiple meaning on the level of the text itself (Allen 2003, 82).
However, by 1967 and the publication of “The Death of the Author”, Barthes was moving away from structuralist thought, particularly to the extent that the latter still perceived literary meaning to be a stable and identifiable outcome of the text’s structures. “The Death of the Author” begins with the question of who or what lies behind the narrative voice of Balzac’s short story “Sarrasine” – the character of the story? Balzac as author? Dominant ideologies of nineteenth-century French society and literature? Barthes concludes that the voice which speaks the literary text is ultimately unknowable, “for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin” (142). This emphasis on the radical emptiness of voice and the place from which language is uttered is influenced by linguists such as Emile Benveniste and Roman Jakobson, whose work on ‘shifters’ (pronouns whose meaning always remains the same, but which are defined, not by the objects they designate, but the perspective of the individual who speaks them – ‘I’, ‘you’, etc.) leads Barthes to view all discourses as being radically de-centred, and all textual meaning as thus being unstable and uncertain. He states that linguistics has shown “that the whole of the enunciation is an empty process” (145). There is no ‘I’ which speaks or writes the text, since ‘I’ is a product of the act of speech, and neither is there a stable meaning to be conveyed by the text, since the written text is what linguists call “a performative, a rare verbal form [...] in which the enunciation has no other content (contains no other proposition) than the act by which it is uttered” (145-6). An example of a performative might be “I name this ship X” or “I now pronounce you man and wife”: Barthes is emphasising that, like these utterances which enact their content only in the very act of utterance itself, the written text’s signification lies in its function as an enunciation, an act of discourse, and not in a separate content that it is presumed to ‘express’.
The linguistic discovery of the absence of the ‘I’ in discourse joins in Barthes’ text with the influence of Jacques Derrida’s recently published Writing and Difference, Speech and Phenomena, and Of Grammatology. But Barthes was already familiar with Derrida’s work from articles published in 1965 and 1966. Derrida’s work is a critique of ideas of origin and presence which he sees as underpinning Western metaphysics. The written text is bound up in this critique since writing enacts the play between presence and absence that Derrida seeks to trace – the written word traditionally being seen as a substitute (or supplement) for the temporarily absent presence of the spoken word. However, because this ‘presence’ is only ever a mythic one, meaning in writing is constantly deferred. The influence of Derrida’s thought is conspicuous in “The Death of the Author”, as Barthes dismantles the idea of the author as origin of the text in tones that echo Derrida: “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” (146). Following Derrida, Barthes views writing as a system which “ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning” (147). If no stable meaning is produced by the text, neither is there an author who pre-exists the text and who produces or creates it. Rather, Barthes speaks of the modern ‘scriptor’, who exists solely as a function of the discourse, as the locus of enunciation which language creates: “the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing [...] there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now” (145).
Barthes’ reluctance to provide interpretations of texts with reference to their authors’ intentions dates from the 1950s when he was influenced by new modes of literary criticism, such as that of the Geneva School (Jean Starobinski and Georges Poulet) and other critics such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Gaston Bachelard, Lucien Goldmann and Jean-Pierre Richard. This “criticism of interpretation”, as Barthes called it, produced critical readings which validated their findings with reference to factors outside the author’s conscious intention (sociological, historical, psychological). Traditional French critics viewed this nouvelle critique [‘new criticism’] with hostility, and in 1966 Barthes wrote a book called Criticism and Truth to defend himself and other critics from some of the attacks being made on their work. Already in this text Barthes called for a criticism that would move away from not only the author’s intention but from the figure of the author itself: “there cannot be a science of Dante, Shakespeare or Racine but only a science of discourse” (77). When in “The Death of the Author” Barthes comments that the new criticism has often done no more than consolidate the sway of the author (143), we might read this as a reflection on the fact that historical, sociological or psychological interpretations of literary texts can often retain the figure of the author as origin of the text’s meaning, albeit one unconsciously subject to external or internal factors.
Another way in which we might think about “The Death of the Author” is to see it as itself a piece of writing (Moriarty: 2), a writing which is as fully performative as the writing about which it speaks. Some aspects of the essay might seem to present problems from the point of view of logical consistency – Graham Allen has pointed out that in replacing the author with a reader who is “the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost” (148), Barthes could be accused of replacing one stable point of origin with another (Allen 2000, 75). Moreover, it might seem contradictory to trace the history of the idea of the death of the author with reference to the intentions of French writers such as Mallarmé, Valéry and Proust, since such an approach takes no more account of the text’s independent production of meaning than that of the new criticism which Barthes criticises. But surely any text which makes authoritative statements about the radically un-authoredness of any written statement must needs include its own processes in its sights? The least we can say is that the subject of enunciation who emerges in this text – ‘Barthes’ or the empty ‘I’ produced by the text and assumed to stand as creator for it – needs also to be brought into question if we accept the premises of “The Death of the Author”. We could interpret these problems with Barthes’ text as further enacting the unsettling loss of the writing ‘I’ that it outlines, and arising from the only power that Barthes sees the writer to possess, namely “to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them” (146). Another intertext which can be read here is Derrida’s essay “Structure, sign and play in the discourse of the human sciences” (1966), where the critic is urged to engage in the practices of a bricoleur, or an amateur enthusiast, adapting parts of a pre-existing and discredited discourse in order to dismantle it, as parts of a machine might be used as tools to take that machine apart. Although “The Death of the Author” generally retains little creative agency for the modern scriptor who replaces the traditional author, the section quoted above would seem to align him / her with Derrida’s bricoleur in this regard. Another possible intertext that we may need to consider is that of Barthes’ Criticism and Truth, published in the previous year, which calls for criticism to extend its consideration of the language and production of meaning at work in the literary text to the critical text’s own language; Barthes warns against a criticism which, “in declaring on the one hand that the work offers itself to be deciphered [...], but on the other hand in undertaking this deciphering using a discourse which itself is literal, without depth, closed off”, will inevitably fail to fully engage with what Barthes calls “the symbol”, or textual production of meaning (Criticism and Truth. 88). Instead, criticism should be allowed to develop irony, which Barthes defines as “nothing more than the question which language puts to language” (89).
However, whether or not Barthes as scriptor of “The Death of the Author” intended such intertextual reflections on the form of his essay, the text itself enacts this multi-dimensional space within which various discourses clash and blend, using concepts of the author to dismantle the idea of authorship. Towards the end of the essay, Barthes (or rather, ‘Barthes’) refers to the work of Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet on ancient Greek tragedy. Although the characters speaking in Greek tragedy are deaf to the double meanings of their words (like Oedipus cursing his father’s killer, unaware that he himself is that killer), both the double meanings and the deafness of the characters are perceived by the reader – in this case the spectator (148). Perhaps this is a good way to think about the performance that is “The Death of the Author”; each discourse used – be it historical, scientific or theoretical – and each voice which seems to speak it, is deaf to its own duplicity and the contradictions which arise when it confronts others within the text. Ultimately, it is for the reader to determine if and to what extent double meanings emerge in “The Death of the Author”.
Works cited:
Allen, Graham. Intertextuality, London: Routledge,
2000.
Allen, Graham. Roland Barthes, London: Routledge,
2003.
Barthes, Roland. Criticism and Truth, ed. and trans. Katrine
Pilcher Keuneman, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1987.
Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text, ed. and trans. Stephen
Heath, London: Fontana, 1977.
Moriarty, Michael. Roland Barthes, Oxford: Polity, 1991.
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Citation: O' Sullivan, Maria. "La Mort de l'auteur". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 11 May 2013 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=10350, accessed 15 January 2025.]
