Article about the death of the author and from Work to text. PDF

Preview

Summary

this article review is meant to provide a short analysis of the two essays written by Roland Barthes (The death of the author / form work to text). In this regard, we would like to shed light on brief summary about Roland Barthes, his biography and the main ideas that he wrote about in his literary ...

Description

ELCS Master Program 2019/2020

Date: January 20th, 2020

Master Seminar: Methodological Issues in Literature / Contemporary Civilization Instructor: Dr. Mohamed Saleck Oumar

Student name: Ould Ehine Ahmed H’Meide

ID: A33216

Abstract To begin with, we would like to say that this article review is meant to provide a short analysis of the two essays written by Roland Barthes (The death of the author / form work to text). In this regard, we would like to shed light on brief summary about Roland Barthes, his biography and the main ideas that he wrote about in his literary criticism. In depicting his biography, we intent go further in order to come up with the main ideas behind these two essays. Frankly, who is Roland Barthes, and what exactly is he trying to convey throughout these two essays? Roland Barthes, in full Roland Gérard Barthes, is a French Philosopher, Linguist and Semiotician. He was born November 12, 1915, Cherbourg in France and died March 25, 1980. He was one of the leading structuralist thinkers of the 20th century. He built his concept of the transformation of our approach to literary works based on the theories of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), Julia Kristeva, and Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975). Barthes noticed back in the 1970s that a change was taking place in how we approach language and literary written works, pointing out that disciplines were breaking down their borders and beginning to interact. Barthes viewed this move as part of the development of thought on linguistics, anthropology, Marxism, and psychoanalysis — and he pointed out that the adjustment in attitude was not coming from the “internal recasting” of these disciplines but from “their encounter in relation to an object which traditionally was not a part of them.”

He wrote some books such as his first book, Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (1953; Writing Degree Zero), was a literary manifesto that examined the arbitrariness of the constructs of language. In addition to his writing to several different books, he wrote about some essays among them “The death of the Author” and “The Rustle of Language (From work to Test)”. Those that we wish to elaborate in this article review. Based on his literary criticism, we can say that Barthes is one of those rare individuals who made significant contributions to many fields. He is one of the innovative post-structuralists,

and was one of the first to see the applicability of semiology to a wide range of topics. Despite the fact that he was not the first to discover how the structures of linguistics could be applied to all of the human sciences, he was one of its most elegant practitioners since he was one of the most important literary critics of the twentieth century, and he made significant contributions to semiology. Furthermore, Barthes pointed the way for poststructuralism and showed how literary criticism could reveal not unity but fragmentation. His early work drew on Saussure’s semiology and Lévis-Strauss’s structuralist analysis of mythology, by late 1960s, he had taken structuralist analysis to a certain limit, discovering in literary and cultural texts plurality of possible interpretations and dizzying kind of bliss in the contemplation of them. Though his “Introduction to the structural analysis of narrative” (1966) is, in many ways, an exemplary structuralist analysis, is also stands at transition point in Barthes career, a point at which the idea of regulated and centered structure is transformed into the idea of unregulated, decentered process of reading. Like Foucault, he rejected the conventional figure the author who originates the work as we what we will elaborated in the death of the author. But by the late 1970s Barthes’s intellectual stature was virtually unchallenged, and his theories had become extremely influential not only in France but throughout Europe and in the United States. Other leading radical French thinkers who influenced or were influenced by him included the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, socio-historian Michel Foucault, and philosopher Jacques Derrida. In his essay death of the author (1968), Barthes makes two main points as to why the death of the Author is an inevitable and beneficial occurrence. To begin with the first point, Barthes states that the author is merely a way through which a story is told. They neither create the story nor form it, these have already been done. The author is merely retelling this story that has already been told many times. His argument against original thought is very persuasive, especially considering the many ways stories have been logically broken down into a predictable sequence of events. He argues that authorship is a linguistic function “never more than the instance writing, just as I is never more than the instance saying I”. The author is a subject position in a text or discourse, not a psychological being, locus and origin of aesthetic and the ethical values. Based on this and throughout his essay, we can say that Barthes pointed out that the meaning of a text is not owned or fixed by the author's intent. Barthes is not describing the literal, physical death of an author. In fact, He is being figurative in that, free from any attribution to an author, a text opens itself to more interpretations by the reader. In other words, the death of the Author is the birth of the reader. He presents the idea that a literary work should be judged without the influence of the author’s life, loves, and desires. The second point is that literature is what should be evaluated and not the author himself. In addition to that, Barthes criticizes the reader's tendency to consider aspects of the author’s identity, his political views, historical context, religion, ethnicity, psychology, or other biographical or personal attributes, to distill meaning from his work. In this critical schematic, the experiences and biases of the author serve as its definitive “explanation.” For Barthes, this is a tidy, convenient method of reading and is sloppy and flawed. If the readers were to view the work through the Author’s eyes then they would gain no benefit from the reading. By associating the Author with the text, the text is automatically limited. Instead of drawing their

own meaning from the text using their own experiences and therefore stimulating their own thoughts of their lives and how it connects with the world around them the reader is then restricted to trying to guess what the author meant. Barthes believes that if it is the reader who brings meaning to the text then there can be no limit to the interpretations available because everyone in the world has their own unique experiences that have shaped them. However,“To give a text an Author” and assign a single, corresponding interpretation to it “is to impose a limit on that text.” As a matter of fact, he claims that readers must separate a literary work from its creator in order to liberate it from interpretive tyranny (a notion similar to Erich Auerbach’s discussion of narrative tyranny in Biblical parables), for each piece of writing contains multiple layers and meanings. In a famous quotation, Barthes draws an analogy between text and textiles, declaring that a “text is a tissue [or fabric] of quotations,” drawn from “innumerable centers of culture,” rather than from one, individual experience. The essential meaning of a work depends on the impressions of the reader, rather than the “passions” or “tastes” of the writer; “a text’s unity lies not in its origins,” or its creator, “but in its destination,” or its audience. To demonstrate this further, in the place of author, Barthes produces the “modern scriptor”. A “scriptor” (a word Barthes uses expressly to disrupt the traditional continuity of power between the terms “author” and “authority”). This scriptor exists to produce but not to explain the work and “is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, [and] is not the subject with the book as predicate.” Every work is “eternally written here and now,” with each re-reading, because the “origin” of meaning lies exclusively in “language itself” and its impressions on the reader. Barthes notes that the traditional critical approach to literature raises a thorny problem: how can we detect precisely what the writer intended? His answer is that we cannot. He introduces this notion in the epigraph to the essay, taken from Honoré de Balzac’s story Sarrasine (a text that receives a more rigorous close-reading treatment in his influential post-structuralist book S/Z), in which a male protagonist mistakes a castrato for a woman and falls in love with her. When, in the passage, the character dotes over her perceived womanliness, Barthes challenges his own readers to determine who is speaking—and about what. “Is it Balzac the author professing ‘literary’ ideas on femininity? Is it universal wisdom? Romantic psychology? … We can never know.” Writing, “the destruction of every voice,” defies adherence to a single interpretation or perspective. Having exhausted all possibilities, the critic draws the conclusion that it is impossible to say for sure who the sentence should be attributed to. He goes on to describe literature as a space "where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes". The death of the author marks the birth of literature, defined, precisely, as "the invention of this voice, to which we cannot assign a specific origin". To sum up, we would like to say based what mentioned formely that Barthes’s essential argument is that the author has no sovereignty over his own words (or images, sounds, etc.) that belong to the reader who interprets them. When we encounter a literary text, says Barthes, we need not ask ourselves what the author intended in his words but what the words themselves actually say. Text employ symbols which are deciphered by readers, and since function of the text is to be read, the author and

process of writing is irrelevant. As it meant to be, The Death of the Author" is an attack on traditional literary criticism that focused too much on trying to retrace the author's intentions and original meaning in mind. Instead Barthes asks us to adopt a more text-oriented approach that focuses on the interaction of the reader, not the writer, with it. This means that the text is much more open to interpretation, much more fluid in its meaning than previously thought.

In the second essay from Work to Text, Barthes follows Derrida in recognizing that language is fundamentally “dilatory” a play of differences, deferrals, and displacements of meaning within semiotic and linguistic systems. Unlike the AUTONOMOUS “work” which fixes signification and reference, the “text” takes its shape and meaning from a fluid and multifarious network of signs. The distinction between “work” and “text” is coupled to a distinction between writerly and readerly texts. The writerly text is a text of bliss “ pleasure without separation” (Image164); it induces JOUISSANG and leaves the contended reader behind : it is “the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomfort ( perhaps to point of certain boredom) , unsettles the reader’s historical ,cultural, psychological assumptions , the consistency of his tastes, values , memories, brings to a crisis his relation with the language” (pleasure 14). Over against this notion of the writerly text is “what can be read, but not written: the readerly. We can call any readerly a classic text” (S/Z 4). It is a text of pleasure, “a comfortable practice of reading” (Pleasure 14). Based on this and the essay from work to text, we can say that Barthes argues that the relation of writer, reader and observer is changed by movement from work to text. In this light, we can observe Barthes's propositions of the differences between work and text in terms of method, genres, signs, plurality, filiation, reading, and pleasure. His philosophy is to support or initiate a shift in literacy study from work, which is the objects of literary study (novels, plays, poems, and the written word in general), to text, which is a complex of relations among readers, writers and critics as well as a complex of activities which include, reading, writing, intertextuality and production. In other words, "work" is an object or product and "text" is the production, consumption and inter-relations of that product. The origin of this shift from work to text, comes from Marxist, Freudian and Structuralist background. The Marxist influence is the shift from product (commodity) to production (labor value, self-production). Indeed, the concept of "text" is complex. From the Freudian (or Lacanian) influence, we get the "work" as that which is displayed - like a painting - and the "text" as the act of painting, relations among/between other paintings, paintings and the methodology of art. This would be the visual equivalent of intertextuality. Intertextuality is simply the relationships amongst all text, held together by metaphor, pun, metonymy, allegory, and direct reference. So, Barthes' philosophy here, is to shift literariness from objects (in a sense, the actual books themselves) to the relations among them - intertextuality. By doing so, Barthes aims to put the production of meaning in the hands of the reader. Barthes' sees this as giving the reader an equal share with the author in producing, or interpreting, the meaning of a work. There is also an anti-patriarchal and anti-"author"-ity here. By liberating the work from the grips of the author, the reader becomes an equal participant in the process: to join the reader and writer in a single signifying process. He implies that there is a concrete quality to some writing, which identifies it as a ‘text’ and not as a ‘work’. When discussing the issue of whether texts can be seen as a product of modernity, he comments, “There may be ‘text’ in a very ancient work, while many products of contemporary literature are in no way texts”. According to him, there exists a pleasure of certain works

but this pleasure is in the level of consumption (passive). As for the text, the pleasure is bound to ‘jouissance’ or the pleasure without separation. That is, the Text is a space of social utopia, which transcends social relations (author, reader, critic) and language relations (no language has a hold over any other). At the beginning and at the end of his essay, From Work to Text’, he attempts to maintain the distance between the binary opposition of "work" and "text" by defining each term in contrast to each other. However, at the end of his essay, he again insists that his "few propositions" do not constitute the articulations of a Theory of the Text and fail to form a meta-language, which would dictate how a text should be read. The theory of the Text is nothing but practice. In other words, the essay belongs to the textual world consisting of texts conceived as works. For instance, though he claims to avoid formulating a Theory of the Text, he cannot in fact escape the need to understand language through theorizing. Even though he signals his aversion to logical constructs by attempting to assert rather than attempting to explain what constitutes a work and what constitutes a text, he cannot do so without operating according to the dictates of a meta-language.

To sum up, Barthes aims to break away from the imposed authority of the author and to focus more on the production and relations of literature (this includes reading) instead of focusing on the objects of that production.

Recourses

Barthes, Roland. From Work to Text. (1977). Image-Music-Text. 155–164. London: Fontana....