An Analysis of Roland Barthes’ Death of the Author

An Analysis of Roland Barthes’ Death of the Author

“The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.” – Roland Barthes

Must the Author be dead to make way for the birth of the reader? In Roland Barthes’ essay “The Death of the Author,” Barthes asserts that the Author is dead because the latter is no longer a part of the deep structure in a particular text. To him, the Author does not create meaning in the text: one cannot explain a text by knowing about the person who wrote it. A text, however, cannot physically exist disconnected from the Author who writes it. Even if the role of the Author is to mix pre-existing signs, it does not follow that the Author-function is dead. Moreover, Barthes attributes “authorship” to the reader who forms meaning and understanding. The reader is, however, an abstraction “without history, biography, psychology”(Barthes 1469). These contexts – history, biography, and psychology – can only be set by the Author. Thus, the Author is alive and well because the text cannot exist without the Author, the mixing of signs is the Author’s art, and the reader’s meanings forming abilities are nourished by the Author.

According to Barthes’ notion of the “cut-off hand,” a text’s origin is language itself (Barthes 1468). Moreover, “linguistically, the author is never more than the instance writing, just as I is nothing other than the instance saying I: language knows a ‘subject’, not a ‘person’” (Barthes 1467). What about the Author’s physical presence? Certainly, language itself does not know its physical creator, but it is akin to shutting one’s eyes on reality to not acknowledge the Author who is “out there.” Because his texts were considered “da...

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1 “Himself”, “him”, “his”, and “he” are used for brevity in expressing pronouns of both the male and female genders.

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[1][1] “Himself”, “him”, “his”, and “he” are used for brevity in expressing pronouns of both the male and female genders.