Probably this has always been the case: once an action is
recounted, for intransitive ends, and no longer in order to act directly upon
reality — that is, finally external to any function but the very exercise of
the symbol — this disjunction occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author
enters his own death, writing begins. Nevertheless, the feeling about this
phenomenon has been variable; in primitive societies, narrative is never
undertaken by a person, but by a mediator, shaman or speaker, whose
"performance" may be admired (that is, his mastery of the narrative
code), but not his "genius" The author is a modern figure, produced
no doubt by our society insofar as, at the end of the middle ages, with English
empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it
discovered the prestige of the individual, or, to put it more nobly, of the
"human person" Hence it is logical that with regard to literature it
should be positivism, resume and the result of capitalist ideology, which has
accorded the greatest importance to the author's "person" The author
still rules in manuals of literary history, in biographies of writers, in
magazine interviews, and even in the awareness of literary men, anxious to
unite, by their private journals, their person and their work; the image of
literature to be found in contemporary culture is tyrannically centered on the
author, his person, his history, his tastes, his passions; criticism still
consists, most of the time, in saying that Baudelaire's work is the failure of
the man Baudelaire, Van Gogh's work his madness, Tchaikovsky's his vice: the
explanation of the work is always sought in the man who has produced it, as if,
through the more or less transparent allegory of fiction, it was always finally
the voice of one and the same person, the author, which delivered his
"confidence."
Death of the author
Roland Barthes
