Analysis of Madame Bovary
Deconstructing Authorship
In his first paragraph Barthes uses Balzac's Sarrasine's castrato character's inner voice to examine who's really doing the talking in a written work, since there are layers of meaning in the identity within the particular quote. One of my favorite aspects of post-modernist literature is its playfulness with the notion of authorship and recursive identity within a given work. John Barth's "Giles Goat Boy," a favorite and seminal work for me, starts with a forward deliberately attempting to put the authorship of the book into question (it is supposedly a 'discovered' manuscript of debatable origin). But Barthes claim "We shall never know (the author), for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin." It's a good point in a theoretical way, like the idea within Information Theory that the maximum amount of information that can be carried is with white noise (which by the way, is only a single construct within Information Theory, necessary to build other constructs on the formation of information within a signal). However, contending that we can never know, and that the text exists in a "negative oblique space where" everything slips away stands at odds with the practical reality that if the author and the author's creative genius wasn't there, the text would not exist in the first place.
One could allow that Barthes' point of view is suggestive and not absolute, or that it promotes a point of view to help shade meanings on traditional critical methods, but he's constantly painting himself into corners with absolute statements. He doesn't limit his point of view to contemporary authorship, or even to the author as a modern figure emerging from the middle ages. He states that "No doubt it (the loss of identity of the author in a negative oblique space) has always been this way", that as soon as narration occurs "the author enters into his own death". Barthes' claims that the author is a modern
In his first paragraph Barthes uses Balzac's Sarrasine's castrato character's inner voice to examine who's really doing the talking in a written work, since there are layers of meaning in the identity within the particular quote. One of my favorite aspects of post-modernist literature is its playfulness with the notion of authorship and recursive identity within a given work. John Barth's "Giles Goat Boy," a favorite and seminal work for me, starts with a forward deliberately attempting to put the authorship of the book into question (it is supposedly a 'discovered' manuscript of debatable origin). But Barthes claim "We shall never know (the author), for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin." It's a good point in a theoretical way, like the idea within Information Theory that the maximum amount of information that can be carried is with white noise (which by the way, is only a single construct within Information Theory, necessary to build other constructs on the formation of information within a signal). However, contending that we can never know, and that the text exists in a "negative oblique space where" everything slips away stands at odds with the practical reality that if the author and the author's creative genius wasn't there, the text would not exist in the first place.
One could allow that Barthes' point of view is suggestive and not absolute, or that it promotes a point of view to help shade meanings on traditional critical methods, but he's constantly painting himself into corners with absolute statements. He doesn't limit his point of view to contemporary authorship, or even to the author as a modern figure emerging from the middle ages. He states that "No doubt it (the loss of identity of the author in a negative oblique space) has always been this way", that as soon as narration occurs "the author enters into his own death". Barthes' claims that the author is a modern