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THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR ROLAND BARTHES Roland Barthes is a key figure in international intellectual life. He is one of the most important intellectual figures to have emerged in post-war France and his writings continue to have an influence on critical debates today. When he died in 1981, he left a body of major work but, as many of his friends and his admirers claimed, with still more importantwork to come. I can't possible hope to do justice to the diversity of his various writings here - I can only point you in the direction of Culler (1983), Moriarty (1991) and Rylance (1994) where you will find good accounts of his career - so I will plunge straightaway into a discussion of Mythologies, which is one of his earliest and most widely-read works. Mythologies is one of Barthes's mostpopular works because in it we see the intellectual as humorist, satirist, master stylist and debunker of the myths that surround us all in our daily lives. "The Death of the Author" by Roland Barthes (from Image, Music, Text, 1977) In his story Sarrasine Balzac, describing a castrato disguised as a woman, writes the following sentence: ‘This was woman herself, with her sudden fears, her irrationalwhims, her instinctive worries, her impetuous boldness, her fussings, and her delicious sensibility.’ Who is speaking thus? Is it the hero of the story bent on remaining ignorant of the castrato hidden beneath the woman? Is it Balzac the individual, furnished by his personal experience with a philosophy of Woman? Is it Balzac the author professing ‘literary’ ideas on femininity? Is it universalwisdom? Romantic psychology? We shall never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing. No doubt it has always been that way. As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with aview to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself, this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins. The sense of this phenomenon, however, has varied; in ethnographic societies the responsibility for a narrative is never assumedby a person but by a mediator, shaman or relator whose ‘performance’ — the mastery of the narrative code —may possibly be admired but never his ‘genius’. The author is a modern figure, a product of our society insofar as, emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, of, as it ismore nobly put, the ‘human person’. It is thus logical that in literature it should be this positivism, the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology, which has attached the greatest importance to the ‘person’ of the author. The author still reigns in histories of literature, biographies of writers, interviews, magazines, as in the very consciousness of men of letters anxious to unite theirperson and their work through diaries and memoirs. The image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centred on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions, while criticism still consists for the most part in saying that Baudelaire’s work

is the failure of Baudelaire the man, Van Gogh’s his madness, Tchaikovsky’s his vice. The explanation of a work is alwayssought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author ‘confiding’ in us. Though the sway of the Author remains powerful (the new criticism has often done no more than consolidate it), it goes without saying that certain writers have long since attempted to loosen it. In...