Death of the Author

I have to say I really enjoyed this piece. Barthes' views on the relationship between author, reader, and text are innovative and engaging. He makes such bold statements so that you'd think theyre just waiting to be ripped apart and criticized horrifically, yet I have to say I agree with them. I see it.

He writes that writing is the destruction of every voice on pg. 1466. The voice loses its origin, though I dont think he would say that this statement means the voice has no origin in tradition. I think Barthes would agree with the theories of Eliot rather than Emerson if we decide to talk about tradition. When he says that the voice has no origin, I think he means that the meaning of a produced work, the voice from which the text speaks, is not definite. He gives the example of Balzac's Sarrasine where a particular sentence about femininity cannot be analyzed to find out exactly who the speaker is. Barthes says it could be the actual author's voice or maybe the author's voice imbedded in the text or maybe the protagonist in the story's voice. It is unknown. So the author and his own thoughts and assumptions and intentions has "died" in a sense when the words actually come out on the page. I like to think of the image of a pebble hitting a smooth surface on a pond where the ripples undulate outward or maybe a window cracking and fracturing into a million pieces. As soon as the words are written, interpretation and meaning can go anywhere. Now this line of thought leads me to wonder if Barthes could be for postmodernism, for this immersion of diverse interpretation and meaning. Now I know Barthes was all for the push for the universal grammar of narrative but then I learned that in his work S/Z, he has grown bored with structuralism and its search for common structure. The biography in The Norton Anthology seemed to paint him as this contradictory, quirky guy, so I wonder what he thinks of this idea of "anything goes" in the way of intrepretation and meaning.

But I do digress. I meant to write about Barthes' thoughts on tradition. I do not believe he thinks a work is a production of sheer imagination and originality, a perfect embodiment of Truth and Beauty in poetry that has already existed before time. Rather, I think Barthes does value tradition like Eliot does in that it impacts present work just as that present work impacts the past. But then Barthes gets even more particular then that. He's focusing on what actually happens when thoughts materialize into words. And I understand this. It's the whole thing about how no one can truly know another. A bit existential, yes. But it's true. One's thoughts can never entirely be known by another. All we have to communicate are our imperfect words, and those can be intrepreted in a million ways. Barthes puts the Author and the Text on a linear timeline and says the Author comes before the Text on pg. 1468. They cannot exist together. Rather, a scriptor with no origin is birthed within the text. He (or she) does not know himself. It is his language that simply knows a subject, not a person.

I do wonder about this last thought, though. Yes, I realize a whole person cannot be known simply through a text, but what if that piece of literature is wrapped up in that author's own personal experience, and the reader knows this? I just finished Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking and it was clearly about her very personal account dealing with her husband's death and her daughter's continuous hospitalization. I understand that the underlying themes of dealing with death and overcoming self-pity could be interpreted in any number of ways and could have been the voice with no origin, but the plot of the book was most certainly the voice of Didion. Would Barthes agree to this?