The Author

Andrew Bennett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134461332
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume investigates the changing definitions of the author, what it has meant historically to be an 'author', and the impact that this has had on literary culture. Andrew Bennett presents a clearly-structured discussion of the various theoretical debates surrounding authorship, exploring such concepts as authority, ownership, originality, and the 'death' of the author. Accessible, yet stimulating, this study offers the ideal introduction to a core notion in critical theory.

1
THE ‘DEATH’ OF THE AUTHOR

‘Those who say the author is dead’, quips the Australian poet Les Murray, ‘usually have it in mind to rifle his wardrobe’ (quoted in Crawford 2001: 15). Roland Barthes died in 1980, some thirteen years after declaring the author to be dead in ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967), and the wardrobe of his essay has been rifled ever since. Indeed, some would argue, extending and deforming Murray’s metaphor, that this author, Roland Barthes, this ruler of the empire of signs, was an emperor with no clothes. And yet his essay has done much to energize discussions of authorship in the decades since its first publication. In fact, Barthes’s announcement of the death of the author has had the effect of bringing to the fore the question of the author in literary criticism and theory. In what might seem to be a perverse confirmation of Barthes’s argument, the influence of his essay has in some ways been in direct conflict with his apparent intention. In the decades after its first publication in 1967,* Barthes’s essay was often taken as the last word on the author. The essay was often conceived

* A common misconception concerning Barthes’s essay is that it made its first appearance in 1968. The essay is even presented as such, in a perhaps understandable gesture of linguistic chauvinism, in the scholarly French edition of Barthes’s collected works (Barthes 1993–5: 2.491–5). In fact, though, Barthes’s of in terms of a theorist reading the last rites over the corpse of the idea of the author. And such an understanding often went no further than the ‘stark extremity’, as Michael North calls it, of the essay’s title (North 2001: 1377). The polemical aggression embedded within the phrase prompted a sense that Barthes was issuing a death-threat or indeed that he was engaged in an assassination attempt. Indeed, Barthes’s title was often taken synecdochically to stand for the whole iconoclastic project of poststructuralism, to which his work was increasingly allied. ‘Post-structuralism’, which involves, in this context, a radical scepticism towards the integrity of a subject’s thoughts, meanings and intentions, or of a subject’s ownership of those thoughts, meanings and intentions, was often interpreted as an assertion of ‘the death of the author’. And the weaknesses of Barthes’s essay, including its tendency towards unfounded generalizations, its neglect of academic or scholarly precision, and its wayward way with literary history, were often seen as the weaknesses of the project of poststructuralism itself.

There is, in fact, a reasonably straightforward sense in which Barthes’s declaration may seem to be relatively uncontroversial. One of the fundamental differences between speech and writing is that, unlike speech, writing remains, that it lasts after the person that writes has departed. This is a distinction that Plato commented on in the Phaedrus in the fourth century BC, that came to prominence again with the publication of Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology in the same year as that of Barthes’s essay, and that is also recognized by a more conventional theorist of writing such as David Olson (see Plato 2001c; Derrida 1976; Olson 1994: xv). In other words, unlike acts of speech, acts of writing can be read after the absence, including the radical absence that constitutes death, of its author. You can read this sentence now, in the ‘now’ of your reading, whether or not I am alive. In principle, writing operates in the same way in either case: structural

essay was presented at a seminar in 1967 and first published in English in the United States in the Autumn–Winter 1967 number of Aspen magazine (vol. 5–6). It was subsequently published in French in Mantéia 5:4 (1968), and collected in English in Image, Music, Text (1977), and in French in Le Bruissement de la langue (1984). The essay is now very widely available, having been endlessly reprinted in English in such anthologies as Caughie 1981, Rice and Waugh 1996, Burke 1995, Leitch 2001, Irwin 2002a, and Finkelstein and McCleery 2002. to writing is the possibility of the absence, including the death, of the subject who writes. By contrast, at least until Thomas Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877, the act of speaking necessarily involved the presence of the speaker. And even Edison’s invention made little difference to this principle, since the phonograph, the gramophone, the digital voice recorder and any other device that transmits or makes a copy of your voice is essentially a writing (‘-graph’, ‘gramo-’) rather than a speaking instrument. On one level at least, then, the assertion of the ‘death of the author’ may be seen as giving no more than proper recognition to the nature of writing and to its difference from speech.

But for Barthes the consequences of this recognition of the author’s absence in principle are wide-ranging, and much is at stake in his essay, in Barthes’s declaration of radical textuality, of texts working independently of their authors. Barthes raises fundamental questions of literary interpretation and ‘appreciation’; he interrogates the nature of literary speech acts and of literary-critical judgements; he attempts to reconfigure our understanding of how texts work; he subverts long-held beliefs concerning the priority of the human, of individuality, of subjectivity and subjective experience; and he challenges conventional notions of biography and autobiography as well as traditional conceptions of the institution of literature and the nature and status of the literary work. In this chapter, I will try to account for the importance and significance of Barthes’s essay before moving on to consider Michel Foucault’s influential response to and development of his position in ‘What is an Author?’, an essay that may be said to re-open literary theory to questions of authorship and open authorship to the question of history. Barthes’s and Foucault’s essays constitute the founding statements of much subsequent critical and theoretical work on the author: almost forty years later we are still caught up in debates about the problem of authorship instigated by Barthes and Foucault in the late 1960s.

WHO SPEAKS?

Properly to assess Barthes’s argument about the author one would in fact need to engage not just with a single title or even a single essay but with at least three overlapping essays from the late 1960s and early 1970s – ‘The Death of the Author’ itself, ‘From Work to Text’ (1971) and ‘Theory of the Text’ (1973) – as well as with a number of Barthes’s books, including S/Z (1970) and The Pleasure of the Text (1973). But one would also need to engage with a wider cultural and intellectual context, a wider textuality and politics. In keeping with his emphasis on intertextuality, according to which a text is no more than a ‘tissue of . . . citations’ from multiple other texts (Barthes 1981: 39), and in keeping with a new, decentred sense of subjectivity and of textuality, Barthes remarks at the end of ‘From Work to Text’ that he has ‘in many respects only recapitulated what is being developed around me’ (Barthes 1979: 81). In this regard, an understanding of ‘The Death of the Author’ involves an understanding of some of the major mid-century philosophical and ideological critiques of liberalism and humanism. Nevertheless, I will try to focus quite closely in this discussion on Barthes’s most famous, most polemical statement, ‘The Death of the Author’.

Barthes begins his essay by asking us to consider a sentence from Balzac’s short story Sarrasine, itself the subject of his next book, S/Z, an extraordinary meditation on the multiple ‘codes’ of Balzac’s short story. The sentence involves a description of the protagonist of Sarrasine, a castrated man disguised as a woman: ‘This was woman herself, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive worries, her impetuous boldness, her fussings, and her delicious sensibility’ (quoted in Barthes 1995: 125). ‘Who is speaking thus?’, Barthes asks. His answer is that we cannot know who speaks. The sentence, he suggests, could be spoken by the castrato himself, by Balzac the individual, by Balzac as an author ‘professing “literary” ideas’, by ‘universal wisdom’, or by an idea of a person proposed by ‘Romantic psychology’. We cannot know who speaks, Barthes argues, indeed we will never know, because writing involves the ‘destruction of every voice, of every point of origin’ (p. 125). Barthes agrees with Stéphane Mallarmé’s declaration that the literary work, the ‘pure work’, involves ‘the disappearance of the poet’s voice’ (quoted in Nesbit 1987: 230). Barthes’s opening salvo in ‘The Death of the Author’, then, abolishes authorial voice, eliminates voice as origin and source, voice as identity, unity, as what Foucault will call the ‘principle of a certain unity in writing’ (Foucault 1979: 151). ‘It is language which speaks’, Barthes declares, ‘not the author’ (Barthes 1995: 126).

There are in fact other, more conventional ways in which Balzac’s sentence might be interpreted, ways in which its origin might be specified.

It could, for example, be read within a framework of a conventional distribution between the narrator and what Wayne Booth calls the ‘implied author’ (where the ‘implied author’ is the image or idea of the author suggested by the text, a more traditional way of talking about the author that avoids presuming beyond the text to an historical agent). Or one could consider the ways in which Balzac exploits the common nineteenth-century realist mode of ‘free indirect discourse’, whereby, through a kind of literary ventriloquism, a so-called ‘omniscient’ narrator speaks with a character’s words or from his or her perspective, making it impossible to pinpoint the precise location of narrator, author and character. But such strategies for explaining the origin, the ‘voice’ of Balzac’s sentence ultimately rely on an idea of Balzac himself, on authorial agency and control, on the idea that a text is ordered and directed by a certain unified, unique and singular subjectivity, by the mind or consciousness of Honoré de Balzac. Barthes, by contrast, suggests that writing radically subverts our sense of a stable voice, of a stable origin, for speech or language. He suggests that the instability or uncertainty of the source, of the voice, in Balzac’s novel involves the radical disappearance, indeed the radical nonappearance, of the author. Barthes uses Balzac’s sentence to argue that writing is fundamentally without origin. In doing so, he seeks to move authority away from the author, the author as source of the work, the fount of all knowledge and meaning, towards the system of language, the textual codes that produce effects of meaning: for Barthes, language speaks, not the author.

A REVOLUTIONARY POETICS

Barthes’s essay constituted a revolutionary critique of conventional conceptions of authorship and interpretation, part of the ‘veritable revolution’ of structuralism and poststructuralism (Couturier 1995: 13). But it was also part of a more general critique of authority itself: what is at stake is ‘the subversion not just of the ideology of authorship but of authority in all its forms’ (Moriarty 1991: 101). The essay was first published in an avant-garde, iconoclastic and formally experimental US magazine, Aspen, which in fact consisted of a box containing twenty-eight artefacts, including movies, records, diagrams, cardboard cut-outs, as well as more conventional texts. The issue was dedicated to Stéphane Mallarmé and included work by, amongst others, Marcel Duchamp, Alain Robbe- Grillet, Michel Butor, Merce Cunningham, Samuel Beckett and John Cage. The collection as a whole and Barthes’s essay in particular were aimed at confronting and subverting conventional ways of thinking about, of approaching or theorizing, literature and art, particularly with respect to conventional oppositions of ‘high’ art to low cultural values (see Nesbit 1987: 240–4; Burke 1998: 211; North 2001: 1378). And Barthes’s essay was written from within the context of Marxist, psychoanalytical, structuralist and poststructuralist transformations and deformations in philosophy, linguistics, anthropology and literary and cultural studies of late-1960s French intellectual culture. If the essay was written in 1967 and not, as has so often been assumed and sometimes even asserted, ‘at the height of the antiestablishment uprisings of May 1968’ (Leitch 2001: 1458), it is easy to see why this connection might be made. This indeed is revolution in the head.

Barthes is concerned to challenge, to destabilize and undermine what he sees as the oppressive, controlling, authority-figure of the author, ‘that somewhat decrepit deity of the old criticism’, as Barthes refers to it in S/Z (Barthes 1974: 211). He is concerned to subvert the power-structures embedded within the promotion of such a figure, within conventional accounts of authorship, textuality and the literary institution. For Barthes, the idea of the author is a ‘tyranny’ demanding a quasi-theological approach to reading and interpretation in which the text’s single, stable and definable meaning is understood to be underwritten by the author, by the author as a kind of presiding deity, by the ‘Author-God’. Even Barthes’s title itself, an allusion to Friedrich Nietzsche’s late nineteenth-century declaration of the ‘death of God’, links authorialism with theism. ‘To give a text an Author’, Barthes momentously declares, ‘is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing’ (Barthes 1995: 128–9). The traditional conception of authorship involves a sense that, as Barthes remarks in S/Z, ‘the author is a god’ whose ‘place of origin’ is the text’s signified or meaning. The critic, according to this logic, acts like a priest, with the task of ‘deciphering the Writing of the god’ (Barthes 1974: 174).

The idea of the author in the sense that Barthes is attacking involves a particular strategy of reading, it involves a sense that the text originates in and is therefore defined by and limited to the subjectivity, the mind, the consciousness, the intentions, the psychology and the life of the individual author. The author, in this model, not only ‘owns’ the text but owns, guarantees, originates, its meanings, its interpretations. The logic of this understanding of authorship entails a strictly defined role for the critic. The critic is at once fundamentally limited, fundamentally constrained, and at the same time the arbiter of a text’s proper interpretation, of its meaning. In other words, the critic is, on the one hand, limited by her sense of the author’s intentions, ideas, consciousness. The author is seen as asserting a god-like power, a power of omniscience and omnipotence over the text’s meanings. Meaning is ‘univocal’, limited to the sense authorized by the author. But on the other hand Barthes also sees this apparent limitation as a strategy of critical empowerment and aggrandizement, since the critic can now become the true judge of the text’s meaning, the guardian of authorial intention. The critic’s task is to identify the ‘Author’ (capital ‘A’) or, as Barthes says, ‘its hypostases society, history, psyché, liberty’. Once the critic performs this revelation, interpretation and the text are at an end: ‘victory to the critic’ (p. 129).

By redescribing the ‘modern’ author as ‘scriptor’ and displacing meaning from author to text, Barthes is able to argue that readers will be liberated from the oppressive control of authorial consciousness and critical guardianship. Authors, as K.K. Ruthven puts it, are ‘legal personages who both pre-exist and survive the texts they produce’, by contrast with ‘scriptors’, who are ‘wholly coterminous with the texts that engender them’ (Ruthven 2001: 112). Rather than a controlling consciousness, the scriptor is an agent of language. By using this term, the focus of the theorist’s interest can shift from attempting to understand the author’s intentions or the way that her life, thought or consciousness defines and limits the text’s meaning, to a certain thinking of textuality, of textuality without origin. The text is now understood as the site of a ‘plurality of meaning’, of ‘irreducible plurality’ (Barthes 1979: 76). For Barthes, the modern text is a ‘multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash’. Rather than a document with a single source and a single interpretation, this text is constituted as a ‘tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture’ (Barthes 1995: 128). Barthes’s text is intertextual. But this idea embraces a new conception of intertextuality that goes beyond specific and identifiable echoes, allusions, or references. Barthes’s is a radical intertextuality without origin. As he comments, in ‘Theory of the Text’, in an important recapitulation and rephrasing of ‘The Death of the Author’, a text is ‘a new tissue of past citations’ (Barthes 1981: 39). But these ‘citations’ by which the text is constituted are ‘anonymous formulae whose origin can scarcely ever be located’, they are ‘unconscious or automatic quotations, given without quotation-marks’ (p. 39). For Barthes, intertextual citationality is ‘anonymous, irrecoverable’ (Barthes 1979: 72). Such a model of textuality – textuality as intertextuality – eliminates the central, controlling power of authorial consciousness. The author is replaced by a decentred system of language, language as machine, as ‘dialogue, parody, contestation . . . multiplicity’ (Barthes 1995: 129).

THE TYRANNY OF THE AUTHOR

While Barthes’s essay is often conceived of as articulating a general philosophical or literary-theoretical position, it also in fact involves a certain thinking, briefly alluded to, of literary history, of the historicity of authorship. In the first place, indeed, it involves the proposition that the idea of the author is historical, that the author is a historical figure, but one who has had his day and who is now dead. But it also involves a claim about the invention of authorship at a certain point in the cultural history of the West, of Europe. It is this historicity of authorship that Michel Foucault will develop more fully in ‘What is an Author?’ and that we will examine in more detail in Chapter 2, below. For Barthes, the author is a ‘modern figure’ that emerges out of the Middle Ages, with ‘English empiricism, French rati...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION
• 1: THE ‘DEATH’ OF THE AUTHOR
• 2: AUTHORITY, OWNERSHIP, ORIGINALITY
• 3: THE ROMANTIC AUTHOR
• 4: FORMALISM, FEMINISM, HISTORICISM
• 5: COLLABORATION
• 6: THE QUESTION OF LITERATURE
• APPENDIX: AN AUTHOR LEXICON
• BIBLIOGRAPHY