Literary Criticism: The Author Loses Role

Quoting the sentence ‘This was woman herself, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive worries, her impetuous boldness, her fussings, and her delicious sensibility’ from the story of Sarrasine Balzac, Roland Barthes, exemplifies the fact that writing is the destruction of every voice. It destroys the point of origin. The subjectivity of the author will be slipped away. All the identity of the author will be lost. Only the body of the text is the identity that ever left over.
In the story of Sarrasine Balzac, the above quoted sentence is about a male singer, castrated at a very early age in order to preserve his sweet voice. Barthes asks, if it is possible to find out the actual speaker behind this expression is,
1. The hero of the story
2. Balzac the author
3. Universal wisdom
4. Romantic psychology
As soon as a fact is narrated this disconnection between the voice and origin occurs. The author enters into his own death. In olden societies, the phenomenon has a little difference.
In ethnographic societies, the responsibility for a narrative is assumed by a mediator (Shaman or relator). The performance of such a person (How masterly he narrates) may get admiration, but his ‘genius’ will not.
The author is a modern figure. It is a product of our society, emerged from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of Reformation. Later it is developed to be the prestige of the individual of the ‘human person’. This greatest importance to the ‘person’ of author is a representation of the capitalist ideology in miniature. The image of literature is then tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions. Criticism consists for the most part in explaining a work on the basis of the man or woman who produced it. The author thus confides within us through the more or less transparent allegory (the story, play, poem, picture etc, in which the meaning or message is represented symbolically) of fiction.
Certain writers such as Mallarme from France, foreseeing this danger, have worked to substitute language for person. The author may be seemed to be the owner, but it is the language that speaks. To write means to reach that point where only language acts. Mallarme’s theory suppressed the author in the interests of writing. This, in turn, restored the place of the reader.
Valery reduced the strength of Mallarme’s theory loading it with psychology of Ego. However, his taste for classicism led him to turn to the lessons of rhetoric. He stressed the linguistic. Throughout his prose works, he militated in favour of the essentially verbal condition of literature. For him, the writer’s interiority has been a pure superstition.
Proust was also concerned with the task of inexorably blurring the relation between the writer and his characters. He did this by making of the narrator not he who has seen and felt nor even he who is writing, but he who is going to write. Proust thus gave modern writing its epic. By radical reversal, instead of putting his life into his novel, he made of his very life a work for which his own book was the model. Charlus does not imitate Montesquiou but that Montesquiou — in his anecdotal, historical reality — is no more than a secondary fragment, derived from Charlus.
Surrealism contributed to this desacrilization of the image of the Author. Surrealism recommended the abrupt disappointment of expectations of meaning (the famous surrealist ‘jolt’), by entrusting the hand with the task of writing as quickly as possible what the head itself is unaware of (automatic writing), by accepting the principle and the experience of several people writing together.
Linguistics also recommends the destruction of the Author with a valuable analytical tool. A whole clear expression is an empty functioning perfectly. There is no need of mediating it with the person of the interlocutors. Linguistically, the author is never more than the instance writing, just as I is nothing other than the instance saying I: language knows a ‘subject’, not a ‘person’, and this subject, empty outside of the very clear expression which defines it, holds the language together sufficiently.
The removal of the Author is not merely a historical fact or an act of writing. It transforms the modern text to read in such a way that at all its levels the author is absent. The author becomes the past of his own book. Book and author stand automatically on a single line divided into a before and after. The author does not exist before the text. He is born simultaneously with the text.
Writing can no longer designate an operation of recording, notation, representation or ‘depiction’, as the Classics would say. It designates exactly what linguists call a performative a rare verbal form, exclusively given in the first person and in the present tense. The enunciation contains no other proposition than the act by which it is uttered. It is just like the declaration or I by the kings or by the very ancient poets. A modern scriptor is thus delivering a pure gesture of inscription, not of expression. The inscription has no other origin than language itself.
A text does not consist of words which release the theological message of the Author god. It is a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings blends and clash. None of them is original, but a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. The writer can only imitate an earlier gesture. His only power is to mix writings in such a way as never to rest on any one of them. Any of his expression is explainable only through words. The inner ‘thing’ he thinks to ‘translate’ is itself only a ready-formed dictionary, its words only explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely. Passions, humours, feelings and impressions of the scripter no longer exist. Only the dictionary, from which he draws writing, continues to exist.
When the author is removed, there is no need to decipher a text. It demolishes the limits imposed on the text. The concept of author keeps the script closed. Along with the removal of the author, the subjectivity of a critic is also lost. Criticism is not undermined because of this. Instead, it will become new.
Everything in a text is thus disentangled; nothing is deciphered. The structure is followed, like the thread of a stocking, at every point and at every level. The space of writing is ranged over, not pierced. Along with the writing, the meaning evaporates from it. No ‘secret’ is assign to the text as an ultimate meaning. Barthes calls it as an anti-theological activity – “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”.
In short, it can be said that the Balzac sentence is not said by any one. “Its source, its voice, is not the true place of the writing, which is reading.” Another example to make this clear is the recent research done by J.P.Vernant. The research demonstrates the constitutively ambiguous nature of Greek tragedy. Its texts contain words with double meanings that each character understands unilaterally, the perpetual misunderstanding is exactly the ‘tragic’. There is, however, someone who understands each word in its duplicity and who hears the very deafness of the characters speaking in front of him—this someone being precisely the reader or the listener. Thus the total existence of writing is revealed.
A text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation. But there is one place where this multiplicity is focused. That place is the reader, not the author. A text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. This destination is not at all “personal”, because he is without history, biography, psychology. He is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted. Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature. Let this ‘antiphrastical recriminations’ not make us fool any longer. To give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth. The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.