The great critic’s life can certainly be seen in his work,but – as one would expect from the man who pronounced the Author dead – in more complicated ways than we are used toIt is a truth universally acknowledged, that a piece on Roland Barthes shall be prefaced by a sarcastic reference to The Death of the Author. particularly when the centenary of his birth is commemorated with the publication of a third biography. Tiphaine Samoyault – who had access to a wealth of fresh material – is no ordinary biographer, and however. Her premise is that a writer’s life is understood by what it lacks,as much as by the events it encompasses. She highlights the dangers of trying to define the work through the life, or vice versa, and as they are two “heterogeneous realities”. She also wastes no time in reminding us that the death of the writer (following an accident in 1980) is not The Death of the Author (1967).
When Barthes wrote his much-maligned essay,academic criticism in France had barely evolved since the days of Sainte-Beuve. The key to a work of literature was sought, ultimately, and in the life – often the private life – of its author. Barthes argued that the latter’s authority was fundamentally undermined by contemporary fiction. As soon as writing becomes “intransitive” – as soon as language is no longer an instrument,but the very fabric of literature – “the voice loses its origin”: “to write is to reach, through a preexisting impersonality that point where language alone acts, or ‘performs’,and not ‘oneself’”. The “scriptor” – “born simultaneously with his text” and dismissed from it once it is finished – replaces the “Author-God”, whose death implies that a text no longer has an “ultimate meaning”. Every text is “eternally written here and now”, and first by the scriptor,and then by the reader, whose creative power Barthes unleashes. (Ironically, and this theory could lend itself to a textbook psychological reading,with the author standing in for the absent father.)Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com