The Death of The Author and Its Post-Modernist Implications:-

The end of Modernism signal the death of many things that modernism stood for. When we
talk about the Death of the author it’s not a singular thing that happened in Post- Modern
phase. End of Modernism and beginning of Post-Modernism also signalled and marked the
death of multiple frame works, various objects and subjective positions as well. For example
if we take the case of painting after the modernist period we saw gradual breakdown of a
form leading to a denial of subject and then brush stroke and texture demolished from
painting and we also saw the emergence of pop art with Andy Warhol. Digital art and
painting became a movement and a culturally ironic practice. During this period there was a
complete annihilation of painting technique. We also saw Death of art as an institution, the
idea of a text changed and even the author and authorship changed.

“The Designer As Author Producer Activist Enterpreneur Curator and Collaborator” by

Steven McCarthy, the author has much discussed in the field of graphic designing and also
elevated the position of a graphic designer to that of the author. Auteur theory talks that the
director is the “author” of a film. Stanley Kubrick has famously stated that one man writes a
novel, one man writes a symphony,it is essential that one man make a film. So these
discussions about the author is not limited to the printed words on a page, it is not limited to
books. Infact , it could be extended to a number of texts whether it is a graphic design or a
movie or anything that we see around. So in that sense the discussions and the discourses
generated about the author is very prolific and thriving field in itself.

If we try to trace the intellectual tradition of this even before Roland Barthes wrote ‘The
Death Of The Author’, we have an essay published by Wimsatt and Beardsley in 1946 titled
“Intentional Fallacy”. This work was a product of school of criticism known as New
Criticism. Intentional Fallacy is a work which went down in the history of literary criticism as
a seminal work which draw a wedge between the author and the text. So, this is in stark
contrast with the previous periods in literary history; where the author and the text function as
inseperable objects. New critics emerged in the 1940s and 1950s. The New critics argued that
the reader could never really know the author. So, knowing the author also becomes a very
contested notion and further in their arguments Wimsatt and Beardsley; they began to say that
it is not really belong to the author. It is detached from the author right from moment of its
birth and the text actually belongs to the public. The New Critics began to argue for a way in
which the text could be read in isolation with the author by focusing only on the practices of
reading.

So, from this moment we come to Roland Barthes ‘The Death Of The Author’ which is
published in 1967; 1967 is an important date in the history of literary criticism and also in
history of postmodernism. Infact, this is one year after the year that designates as the starting
point of Post-Modernism, this is also the year when Derrida published his celebrated work
‘Of Grammatology’. ‘Of Grammatology’ incidentally also becomes a foundational text of
deconstructive literary criticism. So, Barthes essay gets published as such a critical Juncture
in literary and cultural history and he very controversially titles it the ‘The Death of the
Author’.

Roland Barthes essay first appeared in an American journal titled ‘Aspen’. He is a French
Literary Critic and theorist. He is particularly important because he is located at the
intersection of Structuralism and Post-Structuralism. The title ‘The Death of the Author’ is a
pun on ‘Le Morte d’Arthur which could be translated as ‘The Death of Arthur’. The primary
arguement of this essay ‘The Death Of The Author’ is against a method of reading and
criticism that relies on aspects of author’s identity. It is important to see how Barthes
establishes a connection between the reader and the text. He begins to see that the reader is
directly related to the text and the text has an identity, the text begins to reach its destination
only through an engagement with the reader. Barthes works in general could be considered
as some of the earliest moves in rebelling against structuralist reading of texts. This is very
important because though Barthes began his intellectual journey as a structuralist but towards
the end, he is better known in history as a Post-Structuralist theorist or someone who rebelled
against the structural methods and practices of reading and criticism. Barthes also makes a
distinction between readerly text and writerly text. For him the readerly text is a sort of a text
which does not demand anything much from the reader; it only requires a passive reader
because the author has already sorted out everything for the reader. But on the other hand the
writerly text demands an active role of the reader. Reading becomes an active process only
when the reader engages with the text and participates in the meaning making process.
Barthes also argues that texrt’s unity lies not in its origin, but in its destination i.e reader.

Here it is also important to make a distinction between work and text. If reading is a textual
process then certainly the texts are very different from works. Barthes makes this distinction
in number of his works and some of his important works are ‘The Pleasure of the Text’
published in 1973 and ‘Image Music Text’- a compilation of his essays published in 1977.
Barthes argues that work is a physical object that occupies shelf space and is carried in hand.
It does not become a text untill it reaches the reader. A text is a process in language that is
decoded by the reader. The reader emerges as the single most important entity participating in
this meaning making process. And text also assumes a structure of a narrative negotiation
between language of the text and the reader. A work becomes a text not just when the reader
accesses it, but also when the reader refuses to engage with the authorial authority. So,
according to the Barthes, a text is a play between the text and the reader.

Understanding of the text in isolation with the author and completely refusing to take into the
consideration the author’s intentions, sounds like a restatement of the new critical dogma of
literary work’s independence- autonomy- from its historical and biographical background
articulated by 1946 essay ‘Intention Fallacy’. Barthes work dismisses all humanistic notions
and in that sense it is not a quite new critical in its approach. According to Raman Selden, a
leading cultural theorist and critic, “the readers are free to open and close the text signifying
process without respect for the signified. Barthes argues that the author is a very modern
figure and this is significant point to be noted because he himself states that in primitive
societies, the author figure was absent. He was only a mediator or a speaker. His performance
was more valued by the public who gather to listen to a story or a particular rendition or a
narration as oral literature was prominent in the primitive socities. The performance of the
mediator or speaker was more valued than his ‘genius’. In this context it is also useful to
remember that if we look at the ways in which the idea of the author has evolved across
literary historical priods. In the earlier periods we come across a number of works who were
authored by anonymous authors because they considered it not very important to put down
their name against their own works. It was not important to identify the work in connection
with the author of the work. If we take the case of the first available Anglo Saxon text
‘Beowulf’ the author is anonymous and number of attempts have been made in the later
stages to see whether the author is a Christian writer or a Pagan writer influenced by
Christine elements. So, the current way in which we access the text is entirely based on the
identity of the author. There was a period in history where the identity of the author or even
the presence of the author was not very important. Till about fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
the author was not held responsible or accountable for a particular work that he produced.
The responsiblity and accountability entirely rested on the owner of publishing house because
he was the one who published it. Barthes tries to locate the author as a modern figure. It is a
constructed figure as this idea was not always there. It is produced by our society at the end
of the middle images. Barthes associates the emergence of the author as a modern figure in
connection with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of
reformation.

Peter Barry in his important work ‘Beginning Theory’ states that “The Death Of The Author
is a rhetorical way of asserting the independence of the literary text and its immunity to the
possibility of being unified or limited by any notion of what the author might have intended,
or ‘crafted’ into the work. Instead the essay makes a declaration of radical textual
independence: the work is not determined by intention, or context. Rather the text is free by
its very nature of all such restraints. Hence, as Barthes says in the essay, the corollary of the
death of the author is the birth of the reader.”

Barthes essay and his pronouncement of the death of the author needs to be understood
within the intellectual life of Paris especially in the 1960s. There was a particular move
within the European tradition from the 1950s onwards which placed an over emphasis on the
idea and the identity of the author. Barthes, in certain way, is responding to and reacting
against such dominant tendencies. It becomes very important to contextualise the essay ‘The
Death Of The Author’. This essay is a landmark text in the move from Structuralism to
Post-structuralism. This essay needs to be read in this transitional context and also as a
response to some of the things. This essay also needs to be seen as a part of an ongoing battle
within the fortress of French literature. French literature during that time particularly in the
late 1950s and 1960s was a part of a network of ownership and control. So, Barthes was in
multiple ways responding to these dominant tendencies of that period particularly in Paris.
Barthes displays against the enclosure of structuralism and the authority of formalism. In
1940s and 1950s, the dominant modes of understanding the literary texts were related in
connection with the understanding of the author. Barthes is challenging this traditional
literary critical approach and also foregrounding newer ways of looking at the text and the
author. The text has a revolutionary touch.

In this essay, Barthes is using the idea of death as an emancipatory event. The death of the
author does not mark the end of anything but it marks the beginning of a new kind of rear and
emancipatory reading in which the reader assumes more relevance than that of author.
Barthes never saw himself as a critic because he didn’t access on a particular literary works.
He only interpreted the semiotic significance of works. He was not adherent of traditional
literay critical practices, but by challenging those practices he was opening up newer avenues
for us to engage with the literature and culture.

Barthes ceases author to be a common sensible figure. According to him, author is a socially
constructed and historically constituted subject. Continuing with his structuralist tendencies,
he says that author does not exist prior to or outside of language. Barthes suggest that it is not
the author who makes the writing, but on the contrary writing makes an author. So, instead of
seeing writing as a product of the author, Barthes sees the author being constructed through
his writing. In Barthes own words, “The writer can only imitate a gesture that is alwys
anterior, never original. His only power is to combine the different kinds of writing, to
oppose some by others, so as to never sustain himself by just one of them; if he wants to
express himself at least he should know that the internal ‘things; he claims to ‘translate’ is
itself only a readymade dictionary whose words can be explained (defined) only by other
words, and so on ad infinitum.” Barthes is challenging the idea of the writer producing
original works. The writer only combines various kinds of things that already available.
Barthes is throwing emphasis away from an all knowing and unified intending subject as a
site of production and on to language and through this critical unpacking of the idea of the
author he hopes to liberate writing from the despotism of what he calls work. Writing
becomes the central factor rather than the work or the book or the text. The ultimate
communication is between the text and the reader and the author losses his significance
entirely in this sort of an analysis.

When Barthes talks about death; his word ‘death’ is not directed at the idea of writing. He
doesnot dismiss the process of writing altogether, but on the contrary, he uses the term
‘death’ to address specifically French image of ‘auteur’. ‘Auteur’ is a French word for author
which means creative genius expressing an inner vision. Barthes is reacting against such sorts
of attributions to the author. He is also opposing a view of texts as expressing a distinct
personality of the author. The text need not at all reflect the personality of the author. It is
completely futile attempt according to Barthes to try to look for the personality of the author
within the text. He refutes the idea that authors consiously create masterpieces. He
completely rejects the idea that the author should be interpreted in terms of what they think.
In Barthes approach, the biography of the author ceases to have any relevance. He adds that
the author is no more imporant than the scientist. The biography of the author ceases to be
important just like the details about the personality of the scientist is forgotten after he
completes the experiment.

We totally admit the revolutionary ideas that this essay was foregrounding , we cannot
entirely say that the revolution of the essay happen all of a sudden. Infact, Barthes’
pronouncing the death of the author could be seen as an extension of the end of the unified
subject as Lacan has done in his re-reading of Freud. Marxist perspective understood the
author as a very modern invention just like Barthes does. Marxists believe that the idea of the
author was derived from the capitalist ideology and it is also a reflection of the capitalist
stress on control through authority. So, when Barthes is talking about the author, he is
actually trying to liberate the author from the certain common sensilic understanding
fromcertain traditional clutches. There is a romantic notion of the writer as a creator, writer as
a subjective identity. Wordsworth wrote, “Poet as a man talking to other man.” But Barthes
elevates the status of reader by announcing the death of the author. He argues that if a text
renders an insightful interpretation, it is not because of the genius of the author but because of
the personal experience of the reader. If it is the reader who brings meaning to the text and
there are multiple readers. So there is no limit to the number of interpretations available.

‘Tristram Shandy’ novel by Lawrence Sterne, the author felt that he was incapable of
describing about the character ‘Widow Wadman’ and so, he leaves a blank page for the
readers to fill in their own ideal description of the most concupiscible woman in the world.
John Fowles’ novel ‘French Lieutenant’s Woman’, the author confesses about the ‘Sarah
Woodruff’ character that the character is an enigma and he doesn’t know anything more than
the reader. Barthes’ essay in multiple ways consolidates all these events and gives it within a
theoretical critical frame work.

Barthes’ approach shares much in common with the Yale School of deconstructionist critics
who were popular in 1970s. The deconstructionist critics that made this School popular were
Paul de Man, Hillis Miller, Harold Bloom and Geoffrey Hartman. These critics insisted upon
the disjointed nature of texts, their fissures of meaning and their incongruities, interruptions
and breaks. Just like these critics, Barthes also believed that it is not the origin but the
destination that matters more.

In Barthes’ own words, “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...However by refusing to assign a ‘secret’, an
ultimate meaning, to the text(and the world as text) liberates what may be called an
anti-theological activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the
end, to refuse God and his hypostases, reason, science, the law.” When Barthes is trying to
liberate the text from the author, he is also trying to liberate the text from the limits which
had been imposed upon it by various external aspects.

Barthes begins the essay by adressing a problem in traditional critical approach to literature.
And he also aks this question- ‘how can one detect precisely what the writer intended?’.
Most of his arguments in this essay are all directed against schools of literary criticism that
seeks to uncover the author’s meaning as a hidden referent. And also there is an attempt to
entirely reject the journey seeking the final meaning of the text. Barthes argues that there is
absolutely no final meaning for a text, it is only the various meanings that particular readers
would assign to it. Barthes begins this essay with an epigraph that is about Balzac’s story
‘Sarrasine’. “It was woman with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive fears,
her unprovoked bravado, her daring and her delicious delicacy of feeling.”- Barthes asks a
series of questions :- “who is speaking in this way? Is it the story’s hero concerned to ignore
the castrato concealed beneath the woman? Is the Balzac endowed by his personal experience
with a philosophy of woman? Is it author Balzac professing certain literary ideas of feminity?
Is it a universal wisdom or romantic psychology?” He replies to his own questions that “it
will always be impossible to know”. What makes ‘The Death of the Author’ as Post-modern
essay is that Barthes doesn’t make an attempt to know rather he celebrates this impossiblity
to know because in this impossibility of knowing lies many possibilities of plural and
multiple interpretations. Within this impossibility also lies the liberating effect of giving
voice to the voices that were either to unheard of.