The question of what gives a text its meaning, whether it comes from the author’s intentions, their life story, or the way readers interpret it, is at the heart of Roland Barthes’ essay The Death of the Author. This essay became a key statement in literary criticism and helped change the direction of modern critical theory.

Post-structuralism is a movement in critical theory that emerged in the mid-20th century, challenging the idea that meaning in language and texts is stable, fixed, or determined by a single authority. Instead, it emphasizes the complexity of language and the way meaning shifts depending on context, differences, and the interplay of various elements. In post-structuralism, Barthes questions the idea that a text’s meaning is fixed or can be found by looking at the author’s life. Instead, he sees the text as a lively space of language, where meaning comes from the reader.

To illustrate the idea, Barthes gives an example from Balzac, specifically from Sarrasine, and poses a question, namely: who exactly is talking here? Is it Balzac himself, a narrator as a character in the text, cultural wisdom, or a completely different entity?

In manifestation, Barthes toys around with the issue of narrative voice, showing how once the sentence is written, it cannot be attributed to any specific narrator anymore. From the start, his main point is: language surpasses its author, and text cannot be perceived as an expression of the author’s personality. As Barthes puts it:

“The author dies, writing begins.”

In order to understand the essay, it is important to put it into historical and intellectual perspective. Barthes lived in an era when literary criticism in Europe and America was still based on the practice of seeking meaning behind the text, such as the author’s life, psychological state, the ideology, and the “hidden intention” behind the text.

At the same time, structuralism tried to make sense of culture in terms of systems and relations, in place of the genius of an individual. Finally, post-structuralism came as a response to the nature of structuralism, which relied on the concept of the center too much.

Poststructuralism itself does not refer to “all meanings are free and infinite,” but preferably to the doubt in regard to the idea of centers, origins, and certainties. What is helpful for interpreting Barthes’ texts is the interpretation. Language cannot be considered as such things as a reflecting mirror of reality.

As noted by Poetry Foundation:

“One of the consequences of poststructuralism is the role of the reader. Now, it is more significant than the role of the author, since what the latter means is not clear, and any reading involves an interpretation.”

So, poststructuralism deconstructs the very concept of the natural center of meaning.

At present, Barthes initiates his critique against conventional literary criticism. Traditional critics tended to behave like detectives whose task was to find out “who really” wrote the text. Baudelaire’s literature was regarded as a failure on the part of Baudelaire, Van Gogh represented the signs of madness of Van Gogh, and so forth. In the opinion of Barthes, such a way of analyzing the texts depended much on the assumption. The author was the main carrier of meaning.

According to Barthes, the modern author is created by particular historical circumstances, not by nature. The author turns into “a modern figure,” emerging concomitantly as the cult of the personality, property, and sovereignty.

However, Barthes took his argument further by moving away from the question of “who writes” towards “what language does.” In making us understand, language existed before the Author. When the author writes, he is using a pre-existent system of signifiers.

As such, Barthes introduced another concept called “scriptor,” which substituted the Author. The scriptor, unlike the Author, was no longer considered an original maker who derived meanings. In its stead, the writer was now a person who arranged, combined, and activated language.

One of Barthes’ quotes shows his viewpoint is as follows: a text is “a tissue of quotations.” In a more accurate translation, a text is a weaving of quotations, as opposed to the coming out purity of creative vacuum. The meaning of a text depends on the interaction of different voices such as common speech, conventions of genre, previous texts, idioms of culture, and unconscious ideology.

Writers do not “copy,” Barthes states; absolute originality is a myth. Every text is created through traces, coming from various sources. Therefore, an “original work” can be regarded as a dialogue with the old.

Starting with it, Barthes places the reader in a situation which has hardly been recognized by classical criticism. While it isn’t the role of the reader to uncover the meaning created in such a sort of packaging by the author, he transforms the reader into a site where all the quotations confront one another.

It is captured in one of Barthes’ formulations in the essay:

“The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”

On the contrary, what it means is to take away the meaning of the text from the authority of the author and give it back to the process of reading. The text ceases to become a closed and pre-determined message and becomes an ongoing event of interpretation.

However, we must be very cautious not to reduce Barthes’ theory to relativism. Not that any kind of interpretation of the text was justified or that the texts could be interpreted in whatever way we desired; what Barthes was rejecting was the notion of a definitive meaning of the text. It lies in the head of its author and can be discovered by readers.

In the case of Barthes’ theory, any kind of interpretation should start from the text and be based on its sign system, structure, linguistic features, and connections with other texts. It is why the reader’s liberty is about interpreting more freely and being more responsive to the ambivalence of the text.

From such a point of view, the revolutionary power of the essay is not based on the belief in the center. As defined by Routledge, post-structuralism is a movement opposed to structuralism because of the latter’s belief in the possibility of explaining any system with the help of stable structures.

For Barthes’s part, the structure of meanings is more complicated, and the way of interpreting a text by searching for the author of the text is to give it “a stop clause.” He refuses to accept the ending of any meaning. In such conditions, “good” texts are the provided ones in various ways of reading.

Instead of writing in the manner of a scholar who neutrally presents his thesis, Barthes uses the tone of a polemicist who is breaking the conventional modes of thinking through his essay. His language consists of dense and aphoristic statements and consists of many oppositions, such as the opposition of author to the reader, origin to purpose, and center to network.

In terms of its form-content relation, the essay questions the notion of a single authority, and is therefore written in such a manner.

Also, the death of the author is part of ideological history. The concept of the author is connected with a civilization, glorifying individuality, possession, and production of individuals. There, texts are perceived as commodities produced by an identifiable, traceable, and ownable source.

To Barthes, the perception of texts is quite similar to the logic of markets and laws. We seek the owner, the first, the right, and the responsibility. By negating the role of the author as the primary origin, Barthes negates the monopoly of meaning in the culture of our times.

When compared to daily practices in reading, you usually encounter a poem, novel, or a film, becoming more interesting when it is interpreted by different readers at different moments. You could bring issues of alienation to the discussion you have grown up amid migrations; you might focus on the problems of classes, and you might discuss gender issues.

Barthes provides a clue about how literary work is kept alive because it exists among readers. A good text, according to Barthes, does not get worn out through an interpretation.

Nevertheless, one of the main accusations here is neglecting the role of an author. It deprives the interpretation of its historical context. In many situations, having information about the social, political, or intellectual circumstances of the life of the author does contribute to comprehension of stylistic decisions, themes, and allusions made.

For instance, the historical approach is still significant since the work is the product of the specific knowledge conditions of which it was a part, the Poetry Foundation states. Therefore, interpreting the text of Barthes in its literal sense leads us to a conclusion. We should erase the whole in which the text emerged. However, the text was created under specific conditions of time, subject, and addressees.

The second objection arises from the interpretive approaches which continue to accord prominence to the author’s intention. Such critics as E.D. Hirsch, for instance, argue:

“The meaning of a text is dependent upon the intentions of the author, but the significance of the text varies in time.

As for Stanley Fish, he argues:

“The process of interpretation depends on the interpretive community instead of the text or individual readers.

The dispute about the “death of the author” is never-ending. Indeed, in such a sense, the position of Barthes regarding the meaning of the text not being defined by the author’s intention is valid. However, texts are created in reality and by real people.

Precisely because of it, what makes Barthes intellectually strong is the critical impetus behind the urge to move the point of focus. It compels you to consider whether, when reading a piece of writing, you are looking for the hidden meaning put there by the author or encountering a transcended language machine of individual consciousness.

In literary analysis, media, films, and in the contemporary digital age, in times when authors can be omnipresent in media through interviews and social media postings and through explanation, the temptation to reduce everything to the figure of the author is only increased.

On the other hand, it would be misleading to interpret the essay as a lesson for erasing the author from the context. Rather, it should be seen as an attempt to curb the power of the author to control the process of interpretation. Authors must not become the end authority that seals the meanings of a text forever.

While without an author there can be no history of a text, with the author becoming the central point there will be no history of the text.

Therefore, when considering the value of The Death of the Author objectively, we should note two aspects at the same time. Firstly, the essay is an excellent piece of literature. It reveals the nature of the author-myth, which is based on the idea of the author being a unique source of meaning. Secondly, the text also raises certain questions and provides an occasion for correction by different traditions. It stresses the significance of history, intention, and interpretative communities in reading.

However, it is exactly in the interval between these two aspects that the value of the work appears. The essay poses new questions about the nature of creation, power relations, and possibilities of a text.

The Death of the Author is the displacement of the idea of origin into the process of interpretation. In the text, the literary work lives on through language. Language cannot be ruled by a single authority, and the reader is the point at which the network of allusion, code, and history comes together.

Instead of forcing an unsophisticated binary opposition of the author and the reader, it teaches how literary meaning always arises out of it. And here is the strength of Barthes’ poststructuralist doctrine: it is a call to read.

References

  • Barthes, R. (1972). Mythologies (A. Lavers, Trans.). Hill and Wang. (Original work published 1957)
  • Barthes, R. (1974). S/Z (R. Miller, Trans.). Hill and Wang. (Original work published 1970)
  • Barthes, R. (1977). The Death of the Author. In S. Heath (Trans.), Image, Music, Text (pp. 142–148). Hill and Wang. (Original work published 1967)
  • Culler, J. (2002). Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (2nd ed.). Routledge.
  • Fish, S. (1980). Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Harvard University Press.
  • Iser, W. (1978). The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Johns Hopkins University Press.
  • Kristeva, J. (1980). Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (T. Gora, A. Jardine, & L. S. Roudiez, Trans.). Columbia University Press.
  • Rosenblatt, L. M. (1978). The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work. Southern Illinois University Press.