How Should We Understand Roland Barthes’s Claim That “the Author Is Dead”?

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Published with permission from Shizai Gouzi. You can also follow the author on Zhihu under the same name, 实在狗子.

An answer to “How should we understand Roland Barthes’s claim that ‘the author is dead’?”

This answer will have four parts. The first offers a direct reading of Barthes’s essay “The Death of the Author.” The second explores the background to its writing (and includes a short, contentious note arguing that the kind of author Barthes wanted to kill had never existed: it was his own invention). The third looks at Foucault’s response to “The Death of the Author.” The fourth argues that Barthes did not kill the author completely: even in Barthes’s own work, the author never truly died.

1

Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” is a very short paper (essay?), which makes a close reading possible. In the first paragraph, Barthes quotes a passage from Balzac’s Sarrasine to pose a question: who is speaking? The author, the narrator within the work, the historical circumstances, or the unconscious?

In the second paragraph, Barthes gives his answer: “once an action is recounted … the voice loses its origin, the author enters his own death.”¹ Because what makes the author speak is overdetermined, a unified cause is always absent: the author is decentered. Nor can the true center be located. Here Barthes explicitly announces the death of the author. He also points out that the status of “author” is merely a historical product, not something eternal: the author is a modern figure produced by our society. The author is not self-sufficient. Yet we habitually regard the author as “God” and search the author’s life for the meaning of the work. (This is somewhat like certain forms of medieval biblical interpretation.) This was the practice of many French academic scholars at the time, and the principal target of Barthes’s criticism.

This leads into the next paragraph: “Though the Author’s empire is still very powerful,” writers such as Mallarmé have already tried to challenge it. In Mallarmé’s poetry, it is not the author who speaks: he tries to let language itself speak. Valéry, absorbed in a “psychology of the Self,” was not as advanced as Mallarmé, but he too “never stopped questioning and mocking the author … he emphasized the linguistic nature of writing and regarded recourse to the writer’s inner life as superstition.” Proust, meanwhile, accomplished a great reversal: he “did not put his life into the novel … but turned lived experience into literary creation.” These two formulations may not seem very different. As Wang Min’an explains: “Life is no longer the center of the novel. Lived experience becomes literary creation, and the book becomes the model for that creation. The relationship between life and book is reversed.” Previously, life came first, followed by writing; now writing is life itself. The narrator in Proust’s novel is preparing to write, not already writing. The “automatic writing” advocated by the Surrealists completely desacralizes/decenters the author: the author lets the unconscious/subconscious write, rather than letting conscious thought do the writing. We used to think the author came before the work; now we discover that work and author appear together. Unlike their literary predecessors, the Surrealists no longer deliberate at length: they pick up a pen and let the unconscious write. If we accept Lacan’s view of language and the unconscious (language is the unconscious, or language is structured like the unconscious),² we can go further: the work comes before the author. The linguistic system exists before the author’s utterance, and that utterance will be absorbed into the system. The author becomes a vanishing mediator. And, just as the phrase says, he vanishes.

In the latter half of the essay, Barthes describes the text as a “space of many dimensions,” made up of innumerable discourses: there is no original text. For Barthes, this textual plurality converges in one place—the reader. “The unity of a text” can reside only with the reader (its end), not with the author (its cause).³ Classicism has always neglected the reader. Now is the time to overthrow “the myth of the author” and let the reader rise!

2

The essay can be read as an attack on old-school scholars represented by Raymond Picard. In the 1960s, On Racine sparked a controversy between Barthes and professors of literary history. In New Criticism or New Fraud?, Picard accused Barthes of impressionism and relativism. He also considered Barthes’s taste “bad” and found him insufficiently “objective.” (Barthes pointed out that “good taste” came from seventeenth-century classicism, and objectivity from nineteenth-century positivism: neither had universal value; each was merely the particular product of a particular period.)⁴ For Barthes, author-centered interpretation closes the text. Classical interpretation prefers to search within the text for the author concealed behind it—the author’s individual psychology, history, and so on. Once the author has been found, the text has been fully explained. Author-centered interpretation effaces difference. Kill the author, however, and we can experience what Nietzsche felt in The Joyful Wisdom after dispensing with God: the sight of an open sea. For Barthes, that sea is the text.

The essay can also be read as a response to New Criticism. In the third paragraph, after “Though the Author’s empire is still very powerful,” Barthes adds a parenthesis: “New Criticism has often merely strengthened this empire.”⁵ This is an interesting qualification. The word “often” in “often merely” shows that Barthes recognizes that this is not always the case. American New Criticism was a major scholarly movement; of course it cannot simply be treated as a single undifferentiated whole. W. K. Wimsatt unearthed Francesco De Sanctis’s notion of the “intentional fallacy” and gave it a radical interpretation. As Zhao Yiheng summarizes the distinction: De Sanctis believed that what a work cannot express is its author’s rational intention, whereas the New Critics believed that a work has nothing to do with any intention of its author.⁶

The point of this detour through New Criticism is to make one thing clear: “the death of the author” had already appeared in other forms. Barthes merely stated it explicitly—and made a tremendous impact. When those Surrealist writers were frantically practicing automatic writing, hadn’t they already proclaimed the author dead through their actions?

The comparison with Nietzsche’s “God is dead” is revealing. The author is, in effect, God in the secular domain of literature. Nietzsche’s “God is dead” was intended to end metaphysics; Barthes’s death of the author was intended to end author-centered interpretation in literature. Both also regarded the death of God/the author as, to some extent, a good thing. After God’s death comes the will to power; after the author’s comes the reader. Both open up new possibilities. For Barthes, the author-centered readings that preceded him were actually theological readings.

Here we can see a third possible response from Barthes. As a structuralist, Barthes was once absorbed in structures. In “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” in particular, he tried to bring every work into a unified order. In 1967, Derrida published three classics of deconstruction: Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, and Speech and Phenomena. In a lecture, Derrida explained the important deconstructive notion of différance—a notion that had appeared in his work as early as 1963—as follows: “Différance is neither a word nor a concept … it is the origin or production of differences, the difference between differences, the play of differences … it is not a being-present, however splendid, unique, important, or transcendent you make it sound. It governs nothing, rules nothing, and flaunts no authority at any time or place.”⁷ Différance overturns logos and says goodbye to structuralism.

Reading Derrida also shook Barthes’s faith in structuralism, and “The Death of the Author” is the best evidence of this. Barthes immerses the text in a complex network made up of innumerable texts—a network with no origin. The influence of Derrida’s différance is clear. Interestingly, after Barthes published “The Death of the Author,” Derrida wrote “The Deaths of Roland Barthes” as a tribute to him (in the positive sense).⁸

3

Foucault’s “What Is an Author?,” published in 1969, can be considered a powerful response to Barthes’s “The Death of the Author.” At the beginning of his lecture, Foucault poses the question: “What is an author?” Barthes’s answer is that “the author is a historical product.” But for someone as skilled at “archaeology” as Foucault, this answer is clearly too broad. Foucault points out that both “author” and “work” mean different things in different periods. Works once created “immortality” (heroic epics) and defeated death (The Thousand and One Nights). Now, however, the work has become the opposite: it is itself a revolt against immortality, and it kills the author—Proust, Kafka, Flaubert. If we want to examine the author’s function, we must first attend to the connection between authorship and death. It is not enough simply to say “the author is dead” and leave it at that. Why does the author die? What does the author’s death bring us?

Yet it is not enough simply to repeat the empty assertion that the author has disappeared. Nor is it enough to keep repeating, after Nietzsche, that God and humanity have died together. Instead, we must locate the space left vacant by the author’s disappearance, trace the distribution of its boundaries and gaps, and attend to the functions released by that disappearance.⁹

Foucault argues that the author’s name indicates the context of a discourse and its standing within a society and culture. Not every act of writing produces an author—you may write something without publishing it, for example. Nor does every author need to write: someone else can write for you while others still regard you as the author. “Author-function” conveys Foucault’s thinking better than “author.” The author-function is “the mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within a society.”

Take Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club. Is the first-person narrator, “I,” the author, or is Chuck Palahniuk himself the author? The narrating “I” is not the “I” who wrote the story—Chuck Palahniuk—though perhaps both can count as authors. Moreover, as an author, you assume several identities that do not coincide. The “I” who thanks friends for their support at the beginning of a paper and the “I” who proves a theorem refer to the same person. Yet the former belongs to the social sphere, the latter to the scholarly sphere: these are two different roles. Here, “the effect of the author-function is to disperse (produce) these … simultaneously existing selves.” Any text created by an author contains multiple selves that jointly perform the author-function. Foucault himself summarizes it as follows:

1. The author-function is linked to judicial and legislative systems that encompass, determine, and articulate the domain of discourse.
2. It does not affect all discourses in the same way in every civilization and at every time.
3. It is not defined by the act of attributing a discourse to its producer, but by a series of specific and complex operations.
4. It does not simply refer to a real individual, since it can simultaneously produce multiple selves and multiple subjects—subject positions that will be occupied by individuals from different social strata.

Foucault holds that the author does not precede the work but is constructed by our culture, performing a specific function: “organizing the free circulation, reproduction, decomposition, construction, and reconstruction of novels.”¹⁰ If the author, as an ideological figure, marks our fear of the proliferation of meaning, then Barthes kills the author precisely to make meaning proliferate. Thus, in “From Work to Text” (1971), Barthes bids a complete farewell to structuralism. In S/Z, he elevates the so-called writerly text, which can be aligned with Derrida’s différance. Contrasted with the readerly text, the writerly text is productive and can expand without limit. Barthes uses five codes to reread/rewrite Balzac’s Sarrasine, turning a structuralist method against structuralism. As Barthes explains, what he wants to suggest is “that each text was in a way its own model, and ought to be dealt with through its own difference”—rather than there being just one universal structure.¹¹

In the move from author to author-function, Foucault can be said to move from the primal father in Freud’s Totem and Taboo, who enjoys all women (all meaning), to a paternal function that operates as law/boundary—the Name-of-the-Father. Foucault also clearly recognizes that this author-function is itself unstable (unstable by definition) and may disappear. Isn’t that precisely what is happening in postmodern society? To some extent, Foucault’s dissatisfaction with Barthes’s simple removal of the author also corresponds to Lacan’s choice between “the father or worse.” Foucault did not choose the worse alternative. It is therefore not so difficult to understand Lacan’s remark, after Foucault’s lecture “What Is an Author?,” that Foucault had said everything he wanted to do.¹²

4

It is easy to misunderstand Barthes’s cry of “the death of the author” as excluding the author completely—from literary studies. Indeed, if we consider only “The Death of the Author,” there is not much wrong with that reading. In fact, however, Barthes himself did not exclude the author altogether. He explicitly proposed the author’s return. In Sade, Fourier, Loyola, Barthes writes: “The pleasure of the text includes the author’s amicable return. The author who returns is not the one recognized by social institutions; he is not even a biographical hero. This author, who first left his text, does not return as a unified whole … he is not a person in the civic or moral sense, but a body.”¹³

Here we can see that Barthes killed the author for no other purpose than to bring the author back. In a sense, this discontinuous author, who does not form a unified whole, returns as a ghost. This is a movement from Kant’s negative judgment to infinite judgment: from denying a predicate to affirming a predicate formed with “non-.” From killing the author to welcoming a ghost-author.

Barthes accepts only one kind of authorial return: that of a discontinuous, fictional author. In a 1971 essay, he explains the author this way:

It is not that the author will never return to his text, but if he is to do so, it can only be as a guest … his life is no longer the origin of his fiction (his novels); his life itself is fiction … it is the works of Proust and Jean Genet that allow their lives to be read as a text (and not the other way around).¹⁴

In Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes can be said to put his own theory into practice. The grammatical subject shifts between “I,” “he,” and “R. B.” It is hard to call this a biography in the traditional sense: it is fragmentary, playful, and sincere too. More than forty photographs precede the main text. (The book also includes Barthes’s paintings, facsimiles of letters exchanged with friends, and some apparently meaningless cartoons.) These may express things Barthes could not put into words. For Barthes, writing an autobiography is like suicide. We can therefore say that, through this book, Barthes killed himself and gained eternal life—as a discontinuous ghost.

References

• Who Is Roland Barthes? (谁是罗兰·巴特) — Wang Min’an
• Revisiting New Criticism (重访新批评) — Zhao Yiheng
• S/Z — Roland Barthes
• “The Death of the Author” — Roland Barthes
• Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes — Roland Barthes
• “What Is an Author?” — Michel Foucault
• Roland Barthes — Graham Allen
• On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism — Jonathan Culler
• The Death and Return of the Author — Seán Burke

Editor’s Note

When I was doing reading-comprehension exercises in high-school Chinese class, my teacher specifically reminded us to put quotation marks around “I” in our answers. Looking back, there was real insight in that advice.