“The birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of
the Author.”
Roland Barthes (1915 – 1980) was a French literary critic
who applied Saussure’s and Derrida’s arguments to hermeneutics. Although he was
a prolific scholar, the two works of his which most directly concern us are
short essays: The Death of the Author and the Discourse of History (both in 1967)
In the first of these pieces Barthes argued that the Author –
the concept of a story-teller uniquely endowed with insight into the human
condition, and therefore qualified to speak on it from a place of authority –
was a modern invention. Traditionally, stories were told and retold through
tradition and ritual. In other words they came from a place beyond the
individual recounting the story, and their particular recitation of it was not
in any sense authoritative. What was authoritative was the tradition itself, of
which the particular storyteller was merely an agent of transmission.
Upon reflection, the traditional model was more faithful to
what actually happened during storytelling. Not only was the story not under the
“author’s” control to begin with (as per Saussure, concepts are derived from
language, which are handed to us as fait accompli), it was not under their
control in the process of transmission (where words and concepts seem to take
on a life of their own, and “ventriloquize” the “author”), and was not under
their control at the end either (since once words are written down, the “author”
can no longer control how they will be interpreted.) It was simply wrong, then,
to think of the “author” as in any sense the owner of the story. More properly,
he was a “scriptor” – a person who simply wrote down what was already latent
within the constellation of language.
Both the traditional and modern views were “logo-centric” in
that they relied on some outside agent to stand over, organize, legitimate, and
impart meaning to, the story. If literary criticism, like philosophy, were to become
aware of itself, it would have to be based on the primacy of language and the
legitimacy of multiple readings – which meant, in this case, that one could not
appeal to the author as an authority for assessing the meaning of a text. Just
the reverse – it was the reader who imparted meaning to the text, and it was
the text itself that he had to appeal to by way of justification. The idea that
the text had one fixed meaning, or that the meaning(s) existed independently of
the reader or their act of interpretation was simply nonsense. Far from deciphering
the actual meaning of the text, which was a kind of violence (Barthes argued)
directed at the multiplicity of meanings within it, literary criticism should
aim at liberating the meaning of the meaning of the text, or in other words at
placing it back in the hands of the reader.
In The Discourse of History Barthes discussed the work of
four historians (Herodotus, Machiavelli, Bossuet, and Jules Michelet), and
argued that their writing about history (and by implication that of other
historians) was essentially fictive. That is, it shared common narrative
devices, tropes, conventions, elements of plot and characterization, and so on,
as well as authorial rituals (not to mention the actual business of _reading_ a
history), which all made it possible (preferable, even) to understand a work of
history as literature. This was not exactly the same thing as saying that
history was bunk, or that it was all made up (though it wasn’t far from it
either) – but it was to say that the historian could claim no authority to say
what had actually happened. That would (again) be “logo-centric,” and the past
was in any case beyond the historian’s or anyone else’s ability to recall. But
even if we could recall it, we would still (following Nietzsche) have to reject
the implicit authority of “it happened.” After all, just because “it happened”
one way in the past didn’t mean “it” had to “happen” the same way today.
Other postmodernist historians took these ideas further and,
following Derrida’s prescription (“there is nothing outside of the text”), began
to approach historical documents with an eye toward an internal rather than an
external reading. In other words, they argued that the historian should imitate
the literary critic in pulling apart the assumptions and multiform meanings
within the text, rather than (as historians usually do) try to use it as a “window”
into the actual past. The past, like any other text, “preserves its secret.”
Biographical Information: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/mar/26/roland-barthes-camera-lucida-rereading
The Death of the Author: http://deathoftheauthor.com/
The Discourse of History: http://users.clas.ufl.edu/pcraddoc/barthes.htm
Part of a Series on Postmodernism (IX of XVI)
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