In 1968, the year of the revolt in France and around the world, theorist Roland Barthes famously proclaimed the âDeath of the Authorâ, putting to rest the notion of the author as the originator/God and placing the reader centre stage. To be more precise, his essay was written a year earlier and first appeared in English translation in an American journal. Anthologized only ten years later (in 1977 in Image-Music-Text and then in The Rustle of Language in 1984), it had been photocopied and distributed as samizdat on campuses all over the world, which only enhanced its subversive appeal. The provocation of the death of the hegemonic authorial figure, however, spoke to the revolutionary atmosphere of 1968. Barthes and his circle, including Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze, to mention a few, were considered to be at the forefront of an intellectual revolution. Reviewing Barthesâs essay for The Guardian book review, Andrew Gallix describes le nouvelle critique as the âflavour of the month, much like its culinary counterpoint, nouvelle cuisine, albeit more of a mouthfulâ:
Their works often became bestsellers in spite of their demanding and iconoclastic nature. [âŚ] The whole movement seemed as provocative, and indeed exciting, as Brigitte Bardot in her slink, sex kitten heyday. Its defining moment was the publication of the racy little number called The Death of the Author. (Gallix 2010, n.p.)
Nevertheless, with the proclamation of the death of the author, the author was everywhere, even when it was difficult to separate individual voices and gestures from the collective.
During the events of 1968 in France, a collective voice emerged that began with committees formed to solve practical problems. Soon, however, collectivity became a mode of cultural production, from the anonymous authorship of the graffiti adorning the facades of Paris to experimentation with collective creation in the theatre of Ariane Mnouchkine and Jean Vilar. The occupation of the Odeon Theatre marked the protestersâ antagonistic relationship with institutional and bourgeois culture. The graffiti âArt is dead. Let us create our daily lifeâ sounded like an echo from both Barthes and Artaud. Like Barthesâs proposition, of the death of the author the death of art was also provisional. The other part of the inscription that called for âcreating daily lifeâ was really about a different way of making art: collective, embodied in the everyday, with the barrier between creator and audience erased. In Barthesâs radical proposition, the shifting of roles in the relationship between the author and the reader (spectator, participant) is shaped along similar linesâthe reader is no longer a consumer of the work; he or she is an active participant and, moreover, he or she is the focal point into which the work streams. In other words, the reader completes the meaning. Hence, the line between originator and recipient is blurred and the meaning and shape of the work are determined through a communication process. As summarized in Alfred Willnerâs assertion that the âdivision between those who create culture, in the artistic sense, and those who consume itâ (Willner 1970, p. 33) has been rejected, the cultural revolution of May 1968 played outâin the streets and within occupied state institutionsâa radical proposition similar to the one Barthes had written about a year earlier when proclaiming the death of the author and the rebirth of the reader. In both cases, the lines between passivity and activity were blurred. Theatre director Jean-Louis Barrault and one of the protagonists of the 1968 protests described the atmosphere in front of the Odeon in Paris in its full collective theatricality: âThe square outside had become a regular fairground: a man with a monkey, a man with a bear, guitarists, rubbernecks and more or less camouflaged ambulances. Slogans all over the wallsâ (Barrault 1974, p. 316). One of the leaders of the revolt, the German student Daniel Cohn-Bendit, commented: â[âŚ] the barricades were no longer simply a means of self-defence, they became a symbol of individual libertyâ (Cohn-Bandit and Cohn-Bandit 1968, p. 63). The barricade became a space, a stage, where collective improvisation in direct democracy could be performed.
That year, the Cannes Film Festival also turned into a stage for political action when, instead of showing their films, authors of the French New WaveâFrançois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Lelouch, Roman Polanskiâstood in front of the blank projection screen of the small Jean Cocteau theatre at the old Palais Croisette and called for the closure of the festival in solidarity with the protesting students and workers. Truffaut, who coined the term auteur1 cinema and foregrounded the role of the director as the absolute author of the filmâauthor with a capital âAââwas the most outspoken of the collective voices. He read the CinĂŠmathèque Defence Committeeâs proclamation calling a press conference to ask film-makers, artists, technicians, journalists and the festival jury to stand against the continuation of the festival to protest police oppression, the French government and the structures within the film industry. Directors MiloĹĄ Forman and Lelouch were the first to go onstage to announce that they had withdrawn their films from the festival; others followed suit. Truffautâs words, captured in the documentary film footage of the day, further electrified the atmosphere in the theatre: âThe radio announces by the hour that factories are occupied and closed, the trains have stopped running and the metro and buses will be next. So to announce every hour that the festival continues is just ridiculousâ (Cannes Film Festival, May 18, 1968).
As more people were gathering, the film-makers decided to occupy the main theatre and it was there that Godard addressed ethical questions of art, political engagement and the auteur: âThere isnât one film showing the problems going on today among workers and students. Not one, whether by Forman, myself, Polanski, François. There are none, we are behind the timesâ (Cannes Film Festival, May 18, 1968). Godardâs words called for the artistâs political and ethical responsibility and for critically engaged work that would speak to it. The auteurs of the French New Wave had according to Godard, failed in making films that would answer to the political demands of their time. Yet, to mitigate these failings, the auteurs appeared in person instead of their films to assert an urgent political message that their creative outputs were too slow to articulate. These gestures of solidarity foregrounded the idea of the author as a political and ethical figure. The director of the festival had no other choice but to join the auteurs onstage and proclaim the Cannes Film Festival closed. The spectators did not get to see the films, but they did enter into direct dialogue with their auteurs and joined in the collective revolt. The auteur was no longer a hidden artistic force behind a film, but an embodied presence. The film directors appeared in the flesh to talk about politics, yet not to represent the films that they had withdrawn, but the films they should have made (but failed to) in order to respond to the political and social reality of the time. The auteur himselfâas an engaged intellectualâreplaced the art.
The paradox is in the proclamation of the death of the author. On the one hand, this became part of the revolutionary anti-hegemonic tactics of 1968. On the other, the events of 1968 found their immediate political and cultural articulation in the increased presence of artists, directors, performers, authors and auteurs who took centre stage as socially engaged intellectuals of the revolt. The death of the author fed into the cultural revolution of 1968, yet the author was more alive and present than everâbe it Jean-Paul Sartre standing on a box outside the Renault factory telling the workers about the student-worker-intellectual paradise to come, the auteurs of the French New Wave closing the Cannes Film Festival in solidarity with workers and students, the artists and writers who took the stage of the eighteenth-century Odeon Theatre in Paris to participate in debates, Simone de Beauvoir and Marguerite Duras leading the takeover of the offices of the Writersâ Union and declaring that âthe practice of literature is indissolubly linked with the present revolutionary processâ (in Holmes 1996, p. 198), or, indeed, the stars of le nouvelle critique proclaiming the death of the author. In his apparent demise, the author emerged as a performative figure at times serious in his/her commitment, at other times playful and parodic, mocking the solemnity of authority (including their own). The performativity of the author, which emerged in the annunciation of his death, opened the door to a playfulness that matched both the theatricality and presence of authorial voices in the streets, university lecture halls and theatres in the Paris of the 1968 revolt. The author, through his death and almost immediate resurrection, was not unlike the Groucho Marx figure of May 1968, conjured in the famous slogan: âIâm a Marxist with Groucho tendenciesâ.2 This figure, which combines the philosopherâs leftist thinking with the famous comedianâs bushy eyebrows and moustache, has epitomized the playful, theatrical rebellion against the symbolic violence of rigid hierarchical and ideological structures. What emerges out of these revolutionary tendencies in both political life and critical thinkingâeven if inadvertentlyâis the proclamation of the authorâs death as an essentially theatrical gesture. Through this proclamation of demise, the godlike authorial figure is deconstructed, but also almost immediately reassembled, sometimes as an intertextual reference, sometimes as a ludic, performative figureâa Marx with Groucho eyebrows.
Two Deaths of Roland Barthes
The death of Roland Barthes reads like a scene from an absurdist story in the style of Daniel Harms: The famous theorist has lunch with the soon-to-become president of France, François Mitterrand. It is February 25, 1980. On his way home, crossing Rue des Ăcoles, a laundry van hits him. A month later, the theorist dies of his injuries. In Laurent Binetâs novel The 7th Function of Language (2017), Barthes dies again in the same manner, however, this time his death is not an accident, but a murder mystery. Like this subchapter, Binetâs novel opens with Barthesâs death. While the circumstances surrounding it remain seemingly the same as previously described, the texts are inevitably different: âLife is not a novel. Or at least you would like to believe so. Roland Barthes walks up Rue de Bièvreâ (Binet 2017, p. 3). In this chronotopeâthe final space/time stretch of Barthesâs walk from Rue de Bièvre to Rue des Ăcoles towards the van that will hit himâBinet imagines what might have been the theoristâs thoughts and anxieties in that moment. These thoughts and anxieties, as Binet states, âare all well knownâ: they include his dead mother, his inability to write a novel, and his increasing âloss of appetite for boysâ (ibid., p. 4), but there is also an excitement specific to the day on which the theoristâs death will become imminent. The excitement, as we will learn later, had to do with Binetâs plot deviceâthe invention of the seventh function of language. Nevertheless, in the opening scene of the novel, Barthes, who is just about to suffer his deadly injuries, is brought to life. The famous theorist, the author of âThe Death of the Author,â emerges as a performative figure, not only as a textual entity in Binetâs novel, but as an intersection of text and embodiment. This two-dimensional Barthes that exists between the covers of the book is created out of verbal imageries and Binetâs playful imagination, but remains an embodiment of the author nonetheless. When the van hits him, âhis body makes the familiar, sickening, dull thudding sound of flesh meeting metal, and it rolls over the tarmac like a rag dollâ (5). Even though it is conjured through the text, the body of Barthes the author becomes a mortal body; it bleeds, its bones break, it feels pain.
In the preface t...