Linguistically, as Roland Barthes wrote, “the author is never anything more than the man who writes, just as I is no more than the man who says I”. The importance of the name of an author and ‘author function’ Michael Foulcault pointed out (I mentioned this in my previous reading reflections), seem to play no huge role in Barthes’s article The Death of the Author. Foulcault suggested that original founders (but usually not novelists) could also be authors of ‘what comes after’. But to Barthes, that would not be even worth a discussion. On the contrary, for him it is not the author who speaks - but the language! Moreover, he claims, that when the author enters his own death, writing begins. This would mean, that “the novel ends when at last the writing becomes possible” and that “the book itself is only a tissue of signs, a lost, infinitely remote imitation”. As he explains:
“The Author, when we believe in him, is always conceived as the past of his own book: the book and the author take their places of their own accord on the same line, cast as a before and an after: Author is supposed to feed the book — that is, he pre-exists it, thinks, suffers, lives for it; he maintains with his work the same relation of antecedence a father maintains with his child.”
But who is then the reader? Barthes defines him as “a man without history, without biography, without psychology; he is only that someone who holds gathered into a single field all the paths of which the text is constituted”. There is only one place for Barthes, that multiplicity of writings of a text is collected and united, and this place is the reader (and no the author). “The birth of the reader must ransomed by the death of the Author.”
Interesting thesis, since we always define an author as someone’s name written on the book we are reading! But according to Barthes, I would say it is the idea that counts. Once this idea is put on the paper, the author is gone. But does that mean that this idea does not have its owner anymore? If the author is death – would it make any difference if his or her name stays anonymous?
