Essay Club: The Death of the Author by Roland Barthes

"The birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author."

It’s that time again! Essay Club—now a monthly affair—is back. Last month we discussed Christopher Hitchens’ Fragments From an Education, an interesting (and rather personal) reflection on Hitchens’ time in the English boarding school system. Today we’ll be discussing one of the most influential essays of the 20th century, Roland Barthes’ The Death of the Author. This is another quick one—it only takes about ten minutes to read—but it covers a lot, so I recommend taking your time with it, and maybe even re-reading it once or twice.

Roland Barthes.

Roland Gerard Barthes (1915-1980) was a French philosopher and literary theorist. He wrote on a variety of topics, but had a particular interest in semiotics, the study of signs and symbols, and their use in communicating meaning. His work often involved the deconstruction of popular entertainment and contemporary events, through which he demonstrated how symbols and spectacle are used in the construction of modern myths.

Barthes was a lifelong academic who at various points in his life held teaching posts in Romania, Egypt, and Switzerland. However, he spent most of his life in France, where he lived with his mother until her death in 1977. Barthes never married; he died in 1980 of injuries sustained from a traffic accident, after which it was revealed that he had been (like many French intellectuals) homosexual.

The Death of the Author is one of the most influential essays of the 20th century. It contributed to the development of several leading literary and academic movements, including Structuralism and Post-Structuralism, and by extension Postmodernism and Critical Theory. If you haven’t read it already, you should—you’ll no doubt see echoes of Barthes’ ideas in many areas of intellectual inquiry today.

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The Death of the Author (1967)

Barthes begins by quoting a line from Honoré de Balzac’s novella 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”

The line refers not to an actual woman, but to a cross-dressed castrato—a man who was castrated as a boy to preserve his singing voice—whom the narrator, not knowing this secret, has begun to idealise and obsess over. To this Barthes asks: “Who is speaking in this way?” Is it the story’s protagonist? Is it Balzac himself, speaking from personal experience? Is it Balzac the writer, expressing literary ideas about femininity? Perhaps these aren’t the thoughts of a single man at all, but are instead an expression of ‘universal wisdom’ or ‘romantic psychology’. In Barthes’ view:

“It will always be impossible to know, for the good reason that all writing is itself this special voice, consisting of several indiscernible voices… literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.”

The “body that writes” is, to be clear, the author of a work—and here Barthes introduces his central thesis. In his view, a piece of literature is more than the expression of a single writer, and we limit ourselves if we read a work with only the author’s intended meaning in mind.

This is not a new perspective, as Barthes notes: “in primitive societies, narrative is never undertaken by a person, but by a mediator, shaman or speaker, whose ‘performance’ may be admired… but not his ‘genius’.” The idea of the individual author, then—or indeed, the Author, or “Author-God”—is a modern development, which Barthes links to various late-medieval/early-modern political developments which elevated the “prestige of the individual”. Even now, almost 60 years after the publication of Barthes’ essay, we see examples of this. Consider the way that we talk about great writers, great musicians, great actors, great directors—it’s almost always with a focus on their unique genius and inspiration, and the experiences that might have created them (“Baudelaire's work is the failure of the man Baudelaire, Van Gogh's work his madness…”).

So what happens when we remove the author? In Barthes’ view, this move is so powerful as to alter time itself. He elaborates:

“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: the 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.”

When the Author is removed, we’re left with only the text itself, a timeless, sourceless work that is “eternally written here and now”. The text no longer has a single intended meaning, but potentially infinite meanings. It is a “space of many dimensions”. If we choose to consider a text in relation to those writers and works that came before, we come to realise that it’s not a work of individual inspiration, but is informed by all of the stories and ideas that came before. If we consider a text in relation to those works that came after, we not only see how the text influenced those later works, but how it’s changed by them—new perspectives and interpretations become available, some of which may even contradict the intention of the author himself.

For Barthes, then, killing the Author is a revolutionary act. It is to “refuse God and his hypostases, reason, science, the law”—the text is liberated, and all interpretations become potentially valid. In the wake of this, it’s not the author who gives the text its meaning, but the reader, by which the text comes to consist of “multiple writings, issuing from several cultures and entering into dialogue with each other, into parody, into contestation”. This is, if nothing else, a far more interesting approach to literary criticism—and so Barthes concludes his essay with an exhortation:

“to restore to writing its future, we must reverse its myth: the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author.”

I found this to be a fascinating essay. Its influence on later movements is clear—note the deconstruction of the single ‘Great Man’ or definitive interpretation, and the elevation of subjectivity—and it’s not hard to see why. Barthes’ central thesis is a compelling one. As a writer myself, I’m in two minds about the idea of ‘killing the Author’. On the one hand, I almost see this as a threat. To have my work interpreted in a way that it wasn’t intended, or worse, to have it twisted and used against me, is a terrifying thought. On the other hand, I’ve never meant for my writing to be the final word on anything. If my work is simply the jumping off point for others to generate new ideas and interesting discussions, this is a great thing. There’s nothing new under the sun, after all, and I’m under no illusion that I’m breaking new ground.

What about the political implications? It’s all well and good to kill the Author for the sake of an interesting intellectual discussion, but when we look at the Academy (and wider society) today, these kinds of critical methods are now applied to almost everything. Barthes was himself an avowed leftist, strongly influenced by the Marxist tradition, and I have no doubt that he knew what kind of beast he was unleashing. Indeed, he often employed these methods in his other works to deconstruct traditional values and power structures. For those who would rather see these traditional institutions upheld or restored, The Death of the Author represents a genuine threat—one that, now that it exists, must either be dealt with or turned back on its creators. I’m in no position to suggest how this might be done, but I think there’s an interesting conversation to be had here. Perhaps you can all take this up in the comments.

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Questions and Housekeeping

Question time! I’m looking forward to seeing what you all thought of this essay. Here are a few questions to ponder:

• What did you think of this essay, generally?

• If you’re a writer yourself—how would you feel about someone ‘Death of the Author’-ing your work? Would you prefer that your own interpretation be the definitive one?

• To turn the essay on its head somewhat—to what extent do you think Barthes’ own circumstances contributed to the development of this idea?

• Given the political implications of this theory, is there a credible intellectual refutation of it that opponents might offer?

If you enjoyed this, please like it, share it around, and most importantly, give your thoughts in the comments. I don’t want Essay Club to be just me rabbiting on about essays, I’m genuinely interested in hearing what others think.

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The next instalment of Essay Club will be on the 23rd of March. We’ll be discussing In Praise of the Gods, an exceptional essay by Substack local Simon Sarris. Future essays will be chosen by me¹, but can be influenced by readers in the comments—if you have an essay you’d like to see covered in Essay Club, please post it below. Zan Tafakari expressed his interest in John Carter’s Cryptocracy last time, so I’ll very likely be covering this in April. Stay tuned!

1. Partly due to low vote counts, and partly because choosing the essay myself will keep me more motivated, and will lead to more interesting examinations and discussions.