When the Author died in France in 1968, it was Roland Barthes who with his essay "La mort de l'auteur" administered the coup de grâce. Jacques Derrida had already warned, in Of Grammatology, of the frivolity of thinking that "'Descartes,' 'Leibniz,' 'Rousseau,' 'Hegel,' are names of authors," since they indicated "neither identities nor causes," but rather "the name of a problem." Michel Foucault would later record an "author-function" arising out of the "scission" between "the author" and "the actual writer." The subtext for all three shimmered in the Parisian spring, in the great year of academic revolution, when the students took to the streets and even the sacred baccalauréat felt the tremor. Barthes's way of putting it was somewhat more inspiriting than the transmogrification of authors into functions or problems: "We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space, in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash." What Barthes was celebrating, in language permeated with the rhetoric of liberation, was release from the very idea of an origin; it was nothing less than that staple of the sixties, the death of God.
Barthes made sure his language told the story. The Author is "believed in"; his image is to be "desacralized," and with it his theological meaning. He is the God, "the origin, the authority, the Father" (as Barthes would write two years later), and not a very nice one. Literature is centered on him "tyrannically"; his "sway" is "powerful"; the new literature, now to be renamed writing, "liberates"; the Author is a myth it is "necessary to overthrow." Criticism, as Barthes would tell L'Express in 1970, could participate in "a kind of collective action." (Asked what it did, he answered, "It destroys.") The text, and the reader, are prisoners in the Bastille. With the erasure of the Author-God, the text, escaped from its Great Original, is revealed as an infinite regress of prior traces, of language, of ideas, of societal memories and assumptions. For "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," and the reading with it. To dissolve the Author is to inaugurate that exhilaratingly "anti-theological activity," the conversion of literature to écriture, which "ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it." It is "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."
This is a free excerpt of 427 words. There are 8,353 words (approx.
28 pages at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our Roland Barthes: Critical Essay by Clara Claiborne Park Access Pass.
