Roland Barthes, a
critic and an advocate of structuralism and post structuralism, proclaims that
“the birth of the reader must be at the most of the death of the author”. It is
his point of turning towards post structuralism. It is such an assert that struck
at the very heart of traditional literary studies and that has remained one of
the most controversial tenets of post- structuralism.
Barthes most
important work of literary criticism is probably S/Z (1970), an exhaustive
commentary on a Balzac short story “Sarasine.” Barthes aims to show how they
carry many different meanings simultaneously on different levels. In S/Z, this
demonstration is linked to a distinction between the “Lisible” or
readerly classic text and the “Seriptible” or “writerly” modern text. Readerly
classic text makes its readers passive consumers, writerly modern text invites
its readers to an active participation in the production of meanings that are
infinite and inexhaustible.
As Barthes, writing
is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that
neutral composite, oblique space where subject disappears, and where all
identity is lost. The author enters into his death and writing begins.
Actually, the idea
of giving a text to the authority of an author is a long term process. It has
been related to Middle Ages, English empiricism, French rationalism and the
personal faith of the Reformation. All these revolutions give credit to the
“human person” an individual for a text. The author still reigns in histories
of literature, biographies of writers, interviews, magazines. Thus the image of
literature centers round the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his
ideas and criticism also is directed to that end. The explanation of a work is usually
sought in the man or woman who produced it. Thus the author becomes creator,
God.
Though the sway of
the author remains powerful, it goes without saying that certain writers have
long since attempted to loosen it. Stéphane Malarme, French symbolist poet,
felt the necessity to substitute language itself for the person. For him, it is
language, which speaks, not the author. Only language acts and performs. His
entire poetics consists in suppressing the author in the interests of writing.
It is seen to restore the place of the reader.
Proust himself was
visibly concerned with the relation between the writer and his characters.
Proust gave modern writing its epic. By a radical reversal, he made of his very
life a work for which his own book was the model.
The removal of the
author is not merely a historical fact or an act of writing. It utterly
transforms the modern texts. The text is hence-forth made and read in such a
way that at all its levels the author is absent. The temporality is different.
When we believe that author is present, we conceive him as the past of his own
book. Book and author stand automatically on a single line divided into a
before and after. The author is thought to nourish the book as a father of his
child.
In complete
contrast, the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text. The
scriptor exists to produce but not to explain the work. Here is no linear
relation, no preceding or exceeding, no subject or predicate. The modern
scriptor has no other origin than the language itself. The writer can only imitate
a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix
writings, to counter the ones with the others in such a way as ever rest on
anyone of them. Succeeding the author, the scriptor no longer bears within him
passions, humors, feelings and impression but rather this immense dictionary
the source of writing. Thus the modern scriptor buries the author and traces a
field without origin.
To attribute an
author to a text is to impose a limit on that text. When the author has been
found, beneath his work, the text is explained. A text is made up of multiple
writings drawn from many cultures. But its multiplicity is focused & that
place is the reader not the author. The reader is the space where all
quotations making up the text are inscribed without any of them being lost. The
author is dead here at the cost of the readers birth. However the reader is
without history, biography, psychology. He is not personal; rather he is
“someone” who holds the traces together in a single field by which the text is
constituted.
Barthes rightly says
that a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. The
destination is the reader where the author is absent completely. Classic
critics has never paid attention to the reader, & always emphasized on the
author. Barthes argues that we should now come out of the arrogant
antiphrastical so called society & give writing its future overthrowing the
myth, “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.”
