Roland Barthes “the Death of the Author”
ROLAND BARTHES “THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR”
Barthes opens with a quote from Balzac’s novel Sarrasine where the author offers a description of a “castrato disguised as a woman” (142):
This was woman herself, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive worries, her impetuous boldness, her fussings, and her delicious sensibility. (Qts. in Barthes, 142)
Stereotypes aside, Barthes’ concern here is with “W ho is speaking thus” (142) in the novel: the “hero of the story” (142)? “Balzac the individual, furnished by his personal experience with a philosophy of woman” (142)>
“Balzac the author professing ‘literary’ ideas on femininity” (142)? “Is it universal wisdom” (142)? “W e shall never know” (142), he responds for “writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. W riting is that neutral space . . . where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost” (142). When
“writing begins” 142), he argues, the “voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death” 142).
In other cultures, Barthes claims, 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” (142). The concept of the author is historically- and culturally-specific, he argues, the product, that is, of a specific historical stage of a particular culture: the early modern period of
Western Europe. The notion of the Author is “a modern figure, a product of our society insofar as, em erging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism , 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’” (142-143). It is, he contends, only “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’
Barthes opens with a quote from Balzac’s novel Sarrasine where the author offers a description of a “castrato disguised as a woman” (142):
This was woman herself, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive worries, her impetuous boldness, her fussings, and her delicious sensibility. (Qts. in Barthes, 142)
Stereotypes aside, Barthes’ concern here is with “W ho is speaking thus” (142) in the novel: the “hero of the story” (142)? “Balzac the individual, furnished by his personal experience with a philosophy of woman” (142)>
“Balzac the author professing ‘literary’ ideas on femininity” (142)? “Is it universal wisdom” (142)? “W e shall never know” (142), he responds for “writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. W riting is that neutral space . . . where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost” (142). When
“writing begins” 142), he argues, the “voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death” 142).
In other cultures, Barthes claims, 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” (142). The concept of the author is historically- and culturally-specific, he argues, the product, that is, of a specific historical stage of a particular culture: the early modern period of
Western Europe. The notion of the Author is “a modern figure, a product of our society insofar as, em erging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism , 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’” (142-143). It is, he contends, only “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’