(Barthes)

In his landmark post-structuralist essay The Death of the Author, Barthes launches an argument against the traditional practices of scholarship whereby textual explanation is “always sought in the man or woman who produced it”. Observing the long and widely-held academic tendency to trace all in-text meaning back to “the author, his person, his life, his taste, his passions”, Barthes constructs authorship as semantically tyrannical - to the extent that “to give a text an Author is to impose a limit of that text.”

For Barthes, readers who would interpret Prospero as the Bard himself, or strive to connect the melancholy of the Brontë novels with the authoresses’ gloomy, secluded milieu simply perpetuate their own interpretative oppression. It is inadequate, he argues, to attribute the style and content of Van Gogh’s paintings to his bipolarity, or to assert that “Baudelaire’s work is a failure of Baudelaire the man”. The text and the one who wrote it are to be fundamentally disconnected if the readers themselves are to exercise any autonomy over their own experience.

From this point, the essay cites a number of key movers in support and advancement of this particular argument. Instrumental individuals noted include French symboliste Stéphane Mallarmé (who insists that “it is language that speakers, not the author”) and Marcel Proust (who inverted the art-imitates-life paradigm by making “his very life a work for which his own book was the model”). The cultural movement of surrealism, by promoting the practice of automatic writing and “ceaslessly recommending the abrupt dissapointment of expectationsof meaning” further contributes to this, in addition to the field of linguistics, which has asserted that the act of enunciation constitutes the existence of the enunciator, in the same way that “nothing is other than the instance of saying”.

Following on from this last principle in particular, the death of the author gives birth to what Barthes titles “the modern scriptor” - a being which is purely performative, and thus existent only in the moment of performance itself.

What this means in effect, is that the meaning of a text can never be objectively absolute – for in the absence of a speaker whose identity is characterised by authority (“the Author-God”), the intended significance of any (now disembodied) voice is rendered obsolete.  Instead, the text becomes the product not of a person, but of a multidimensional collective in which a fragments and quotations from “innumerable centres of culture” (always “anterior, never original”) are drawn together in “dialogue, parody and contestation”. In fact, the reader himself/herself becomes the very space upon which such multiplicity is inscribed, divested of personality in much the same way as the individual writer - to become “someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constitutes”. This direct access to meaning without hierarchy or limitation, the freedom to experience and interpret at will is what Barthes announced as the ‘birth of the reader’, a right to self-governance won at the involuntary sacrifice of the Author.