In 1967, French literary critic and theorist Roland Barthes published his essay The Death of the Author, and writers and critics have been wrestling with his ideas ever since. Barthes opened his essay with a series of questions that arose whilst reading the novella Sarrasine by Honoré de Balzac. He asks; ‘who is speaking?’ Is it the protagonist, the man Balzac, the author Balzac, or an ideology? Barthes’ answer to these questions is that ‘it is language that speaks, not the author’. He argues that once the process of writing begins ‘the voice loses its origin’ and ‘the author enters into his own death’.
Has “the author” really died? In a recent interview Jesse Armstrong, writer of Succession and co-writer of The Thick of It, spoke about writing satire and said, ‘when you put something out in the world, you’ve got no clue what’s going to happen to it’. An author does not have authority over their work’s meaning once it is published and in people’s hands. Barthes places the importance on the reader, arguing that it is the reader who gives the words on the page meaning.
Yet, the Cult of the Author is alive and well in the literary world today. Our approach to reading literature is often to work everything back to the author and their personal life. Reading becomes an act of investigative journalism instead of focusing solely on the text. This is especially true for female writers; they are constantly asked if their work is based on themselves. Phoebe Waller-Bridge repeatedly stated that Fleabag was not autobiographical. It’s as if male authors are given permission to be creative and produce literary work that is independent of their own lived experiences, whereas fiction written by women is assumed to be a thinly veiled memoir.
Barthes’ essay reads as a request for a more text-based focus on literature and he is correct that a book’s reading is not reliant on the author. You can have a valuable reading experience whilst knowing nothing about authorial intentions; the nature of language means significance can be found through just the words themselves.
“ROLAND-BARTHES-CIRCA-1970” by alyletteri is licensed under CC BY 2.0