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Craig White's Literature Courses Critical Sources Roland Barthes
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In his story
Sarrasine Balzac, describing a castrato disguised as a woman, writes the
following sentence: ‘This was woman herself, with her sudden fears, her
irrational whims, her instinctive worries, her impetuous boldness, her fussings,
and her delicious sensibility.’ Who is speaking thus? Is it the hero of the
story bent on remaining ignorant of the castrato hidden beneath the woman? Is it
Balzac the individual, furnished by his personal experience with a philosophy of
Woman? Is it Balzac the author professing ‘literary’ ideas on femininity? Is it
universal wisdom? Romantic psychology? We shall never know, for the good reason
that writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin.
Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away,
the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the
body writing.
No doubt it has always been that way. As soon as a fact is narrated no longer
with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say,
finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the
symbol itself, this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author
enters into his own death, writing begins. The sense of this phenomenon,
however, has varied; in ethnographic societies the responsibility for a
narrative is never assumed by a person but by a mediator, shaman or relator
whose ‘performance’ — the mastery of the narrative code —may possibly be admired
but never his ‘genius’. The author is a modern figure, a product of our society
insofar as, emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism,
French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the
prestige of the individual, of, as it is more nobly put, the ‘human person’. It
is thus logical that in literature it should be this positivism, the epitome and
culmination of capitalist ideology, which has attached the greatest importance
to the ‘person’ of the author. The author still reigns in histories of
literature, biographies of writers, interviews, magazines, as in the very
consciousness of men of letters anxious to unite their person and their work
through diaries and memoirs. The image of literature to be found in ordinary
culture is tyrannically centred on the author, his person, his life, his tastes,
his passions, while criticism still consists for the most part in saying that
Baudelaire’s work is the failure of Baudelaire the man, Van Gogh’s his madness,
Tchaikovsky’s his vice. The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or
woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less
transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author
‘confiding’ in us.
Though the sway of the Author remains powerful (the new criticism has often done
no more than consolidate it), it goes without saying that certain writers have
long since attempted to loosen it. In France, Mallarme was doubtless the first
to see and to foresee in its full extent the necessity to substitute language
itself for the person who until then had been supposed to be its owner. For him,
for us too, it is language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a
prerequisite impersonality (not at all to be confused with the castrating
objectivity of the realist novelist), to reach that point where only language
acts, ‘performs’, and not ‘me’. Mallarme’s entire poetics consists in
suppressing the author in the interests of writing (which is, as will be seen,
to restore the place of the reader). Valery, encumbered by a psychology of the
Ego, considerably diluted Mallarme’s theory but, his taste for classicism
leading him to turn to the lessons of rhetoric, he never stopped calling into
question and deriding the Author; he stressed the linguistic and, as it were,
‘hazardous’ nature of his activity, and throughout his prose works he militated
in favour of the essentially verbal condition of literature, in the face of
which all recourse to the writer’s interiority seemed to him pure superstition.
Proust himself, despite the apparently psychological character of what are
called his analyses, was visibly concerned with the task of inexorably blurring,
by an extreme subtilization, the relation between the writer and his characters;
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 (the young man in the novel — but, in
fact, how old is he and who is he? — wants to write but cannot; the novel ends
when writing at last becomes possible), Proust gave modern writing its epic. By
a radical reversal, instead of putting his life into his novel, as is so often
maintained, he made of his very life a work for which his own book was the
model; so that it is clear to us that Charlus does not imitate Montesquiou but
that Montesquiou — in his anecdotal, historical reality — is no more than a
secondary fragment, derived from Charlus. Lastly, to go no further than this
prehistory of modernity, Surrealism, though unable to accord language a supreme
place (language being system and the aim of the movement being, romantically, a
direct subversion of codes—itself moreover illusory: a code cannot be destroyed,
only ‘played off’), contributed to the desacrilization of the image of the
Author by ceaselessly recommending 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. Leaving aside literature itself (such distinctions really
becoming invalid), linguistics has recently provided the destruction of the
Author with a valuable analytical tool by show ing that the whole of the
enunciation is an empty functioning perfectly without there being any need for
it to be filled 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 enunciation which defines it, suffices to make
language ‘hold together’, suffices, that is to say, to exhaust it.
The removal of the Author (one could talk here with Brecht of a veritable
‘distancing’, the Author diminishing like a figurine at the far end of the
literary stage) is not merely an historical fact or an act of writing; it
utterly transforms the modern text (or — which is the same thing —the text is
henceforth made and read in such a way that at all its levels the author is
absent). The temporality is different. The Author, when believed in, is always
conceived of as the past of his own book: book and author stand automatically on
a single line divided into a before and an after. The Author is thought to
nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers,
lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to
his child. In complete contrast, the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with
the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing,
is not the subject with the book as predicate; there is no other time than that
of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now. The fact is
(or, it follows) that writing can no longer designate an operation of recording,
notation, representation, ‘depiction’ (as the Classics would say); rather, it
designates exactly what linguists, referring to Oxford philosophy, call a
performative a rare verbal form (exclusively given in the first person and in
the present tense) in which the enunciation has no other content (contains no
other proposition) than the act by which it is uttered—something like the I
declare of kings or the I sing of very ancient poets. Having buried the Author,
the modern scriptor can thus no longer believe, as according to the pathetic
view of his predecessors, that this hand is too slow for his thought or passion
and that consequently, making a law of necessity, he must emphasize this delay
and indefinitely ‘polish’ his form. For him, on the contrary, the hand, cut off
from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression),
traces a field without origin—or which, at least, has no other origin than
language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins.
We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’
meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which
a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a
tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. Similar to
Bouvard and Pecuchet, those eternal copyists, at once sublime and comic and
whose profound ridiculousness indicates precisely the truth of writing, the
writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His
only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a
way as never to rest on any one of them. Did he wish to express himself, he
ought at least to know that 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; something experienced in exemplary fashion by the young
Thomas de Quincey, he who was so good at Greek that in order to translate
absolutely modern ideas and images into that dead language, he had, so
Baudelaire tells us (in Paradis Artificiels), ‘created for himself an unfailing
dictionary, vastly more extensive and complex than those resulting from the
ordinary patience of purely literary themes’. Succeeding the Author, the
scriptor no longer bears within him passions, humours, feelings, impressions,
but rather this immense dictionary from which he draws a writing that can know
no halt: life never does more than imitate the book, and the book itself is only
a tissue of signs imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred.
Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile.
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. Such a conception suits criticism very
well, the latter then allotting itself the important task of discovering the
Author (or its hypostases: society, history, psyche, liberty) beneath the work:
when the Author has been found, the text is ‘explained’—victory to the critic.
Hence there is no surprise in the fact that, historically, the reign of the
Author has also been that of the Critic, nor again in the fact that criticism
(be it new) is today undermined, along with the Author. In the multiplicity of
writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the structure can
be followed, ‘run’ (like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every
level, but there is nothing beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged over,
not pierced; writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it,
carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning. In precisely this way literature
(it would bebetter from now on to say writing), by refusing to assign a
‘secret’, an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text), liberates
what may be called 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.
Let us come back to the Balzac sentence. No one, no ‘person’, says it: its
source, its voice, is not the true place of the writing, which is reading.
Another—very precise— example will help to make this clear: recent research
(J.-P. Vernant) has demonstrated the constitutively ambiguous nature of Greek
tragedy, its texts being woven from words with double meanings that each
character understands unilaterally (this perpetual misunderstanding is exactly
the ‘tragic’); there is, however, someone who understands each word in its
duplicity and who, in addition, hears the very deafness of the characters
speaking in front of him—this someone being precisely the reader (or here, the
listener). Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: 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 and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said,
the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a
writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in
its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be
personal: the reader 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. Which is why it is derisory to condemn the new
writing in the name of a humanism hypocritically turned champion of the reader’s
rights. Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it,
the writer is the only person in literature. We are now beginning to let
ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of
good society in favour of the very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or
destroys; we know that 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.
See also Michel Foucault, "What is an Author?"
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