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Electronic Reserve Text From: Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text (translated by Stephen Heath). New York: Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 1977. The Death of the Author In his story
Sarrasine Balzac, describing a castrato disguised as a woman, writes
the following sentence: 'This was woman herself, with her sudden
fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive worries, her impetuous
boldness, her fussings, and her delicious sensibility.' Who is speaking
thus? Is it the hero of the story bent on remaining ignorant of the
castrato hidden beneath the woman? Is it Balzac the individual, furnished
by his personal experience with a philosophy of Woman? Is it Balzac
the author professing 'literary' ideas on femininity? Is it universal
wisdom? Romantic psychology? We shall never know, for the good reason
that writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin.
Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject
slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the
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[143] French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, of, as it is more nobly put, the 'human person'. It is thus logical that in literature it should be this positivism, the',epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology, which has attached the greatest importance to the 'person' of the author. The author still reigns in histories of literature, biographies of writers, interviews, magazines, as in the very consciousness of men of letters anxious to unite their person and their work through diaries and memoirs. The image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centred on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions, while criticism still consists for the most part in saying that Baudelaire's work is the failure of Baudelaire the man, Van Gogh's his madness, Tchaikovsky's his vice. The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author 'confiding' in us.. Though the sway of the Author remains powerful (the new criticism has often done no more than consolidate it), it goes without saying that certain writers have long since attempted to loosen it. In France, Mallarme was doubtless the first to see and to foresee in its full extent the necessity to substitute language itself for the person who until then had been supposed to be its owner. For him, for us too, it is language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality (not at all to be confused with the castrating objectivity of the realist novelist), to reach that point where only language acts, 'performs', and not 'me'. Mallarme's entire poetics consists in suppressing the author in the interests of writing (which is, as will be seen, to restore the place of the reader). Valery, encumbered by a psychology of the Ego, considerably diluted Mallarme's [144] theory but, his taste for classicism leading him to turn to the lessons of rhetoric, he never stopped calling into question and deriding the Author; he stressed the linguistic and, as it were, 'hazardous' nature of his activity, and throughout his prose works he 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. Proust himself, despite the apparently psychological character of what are called his analyses, was visibly concerned with the task of inexorably blurring, by an extreme subtilization, the relation between the writer and his characters; by making of the narrator not he who has seen and felt nor even he who is writing, but he who is going to write (the young man in the novel-- but, in fact, how old is he and who is he? --wants to write but cannot; the novel ends when writing at last becomes possible), Proust gave modern writing its epic. By a radical reversal, instead of putting his life into his novel, as is so often maintained, he made of his very life a work for which his own book was the model; so that it is clear to us that Charlus does not imitate Montesquiou but that Montesquiou --in his anecdotal, historical reality --is no more than a secondary fragment, derived from Charlus. Lastly, to go no further than this prehistory of moderni ty, Surrealism, though unable to accord language a supreme place (language being system and the aim of the movement being, romantically, a direct subversion of codes --itself moreover illusory: a code cannot be destroyed, only 'played off'), contributed to the desacrilization of the image of the Author by ceaselessly recommending the abrupt disappointment of expectations of meaning (the famous surrealist 'jolt'), by entrusting the hand with the task of writing as quickly as possible what the head itself is unaware of (automatic writing), by accepting the principle and the experience of several people writing together. Leaving aside literature itself (such dis- [145] tinctions really
becoming invalid), 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.
Linguistically, the author is never more than the instance writing,
just as I is nothing other than the instance saying I:
language knows a 'subject', not a 'person', and this subject, empty
outside of the very enunciation which defines it, suffices to make language
'hold together', suffices, that is to say, to exhaust it. The removal of the Author (one could talk here with Brecht of a veritable 'distancing', the Author diminishing like a figurine at the far end of the literary stage) 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). The temporality is different. 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. The fact is (or, it follows) that writing can no longer designate an operation of recording, notation, representation, 'depiction' (as the Classics would say); rather, it designates exactly what linguists, referring to Oxford philosophy, call a performative, a rare verbal form (exclusively given in the first person and in the present tense) in which the enuncia- [146] tion has no other
content (contains no other proposition) than the act by which it is
uttered --something like the I declare of kings or the I sing
of very ancient poets. Having buried the Author the modern scriptor
can thus no longer belIeve, as accordmg to the pathetic view of his
predecessors that this hand is too slow for his thought or passion and
that consequently, making a law of necessity, he must emphasize this
delay and indefinitely 'polish' his form. For him, on [147] Succeeding the
Author, the scriptor no longer bears within him passions, humours, feelings,
impressions, but rather this immense dictionary from which he draws
a writing that can know no halt: life never does more than imitate the
book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that
is lost, infinitely deferred. Once the Author
is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give
a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with
a final signified, to close the writing. Such a conception suits criticism
very well, the latter then allotting itself the important task of discovering
the Author (or its hypostases: society, history, psyche, liberty) beneath
the work: when the Author has been found, the text is 'explained' --victory
to the critic. Hence there is no surprise in the fact that, historically,
the reign of the Author has also been that of the Critic, nor again
in the fact that criticism (be it new) is today undermined along with
the Author. In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled,
nothing deciphered; the structure can be followed, 'run' (like the thread
of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing
beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced; writing
ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out
a systematic exemption of meaning. In precisely this way literature
(it would be better from now on to say writing), by refusing to assign
a 'secret', an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text),
liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an: activity
that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the
end, to refuse God and his hypostases -reason, science, law. example will help
to make this clear: recent research (J.-P. Vernant)(1) has demonstrated
the constitutively ambiguous nature of Greek tragedy, its texts being
woven from words with double meanings that each character understands
unilaterally (this perpetual misunderstanding is exactly the 'tragic');
there is, however, someone who understands each word in its duplicity
and who, in addition, hears the very deafness of the characters speaking
in front of him --this someone being precisely the reader (or here,
the listener). Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text
is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering
into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is
one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader,
not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which
all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any
of them being lost; a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its
destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the
reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that
someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which
the written text is constituted. Which is why it is derisory to condemn
the new writing in the name of a humanism hypocritically turned champion
of the reader's rights. Classic criticism has never paid any attention
to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature.
We are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant
antiphrastical recriminations of good society in favour of the very
thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or destroys; we know that to
give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the
birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.
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