Essay: Reasons behind Barthes ‘death of the author is the birth of the reader’

In this essay, I will be discussing the reasons behind Barthes proclaim about ‘death of the author is the birth of the reader’ As well as referring to Barthes’s arguments in ‘Death of the Author’, and discussing the significance of intertexuality.
Barthes Roland ended his critical essay with “Death of the author is the birth of the reader.” He argues that literary work or any other kind of writing should not be examined by the work’s origin, race, class, religion, background and the author who produced it. Instead of this, the reader should look at the work itself but not its creator. As a result of the reasons above, there have to be a distance between the author and the reader. According to (Barthes, 1998, p383) when criticising a writing, “the author, his person, his life, his tastes, and his passions” takes the interest. However, the author is required and forced to take responsibility of any lack of success or achievement of the work he made. Such as the examples suggested by Barthes “…Baudelaire’s work is the failure of Baudelaire the man, Van Gogh’s his madness, Tchaikovsky’s his vice” (Barthes, 1998, p383). Barthes never said this is the only possible way of understanding writing and that everyone has their own interpretation, whether it is good or bad, it is still a criticism.
The death of the author presents a liberty, independence for the reader to understand and analyse the text. However, the reader could re-write and re-produce the work through associating to its meanings as they appear in different settings. Furthermore, Barthes goes on that the author should not declare his authority over his or her text “To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with final signified, to close the writing.” Hence, writing for him again does not come from one single origin and does not have a birth, and finally does not have a particular stable source because every reader analyse it differently and it is not completed until its read. Barthes shows that the text is not the main material dedication of any author’s work but the work itself is the important material. He also made it very clear to us that we should not confuse between the work and the text “the work is held in the hand, the text in language” (Barthes, 1981, p39)
Intertextuality term produced by Julia Kristeva, who quoted “any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another.” (Kristeva ,1981,66) She says that none of the authors create the work from their own mind and perspective rather than use old texts to make up theirs. Barthes’s theory of text includes the theory of intertextuality. As the texts proposes variety of meanings and was made out of numerous current texts, research shows that Intertextuality for Barthes means that “nothing exists outside the text.” Barthes’s intertextuality theory demolish the fact that the meaning of the text comes from the author the perspective and mind. Adding to this, Allan (2000) combines Barthes’s perspective suggesting that “the modern scripter, when s/he writes, is always already in a process of reading and re-writing. Meaning comes not from the author but from the language viewed intertextuality” (2000: p74-75)
Intertextuality is very significant as a whole in comprehending the text. For Roland Barthes who claimed ‘The Death of The Author suggested that there is no such a text that is original, any text is a mixture and combination of the ancient texts. However, intertextuality is the framing of a text’s interpretation by another one and it is a way of accounting for the roles of literary works without relying on traditional notions of authorship. In addition to this, there are many features for Intertextuality including calque, allusions, and quotations and so on. Further to this, any text is a new tissue of the past citations meaning that when writers take from old texts, all the expectations, reactions of the old text give a new meaning and explanation to the native and real text.
Moving on to the origin of Authorship, according to the OED, the word ‘author’ is someone who is a ‘composer or a writer of a treatise or a book’ and someone who gives birth or existence to anything. It also states that the author with ‘authority’ as someone who has the authority or power over others. Finally the OED stated a significant meaning of an author as ‘one who begets; a father, an ancestor’. All these meaning started to develop in the eighteenth century. (Bennet, 2005, p6-7) The explanation of the OED’s identifies the word ‘author’ as the suggestion of a person who has the duty and who create texts as a (God-the father) as mentioned earlier, which he gives the word author the rights to own the text, and from here the writer has the authority to influence the reader by his thoughts and opinions. (Bennet, 2005, p7)
Authorship and authority most of the times, are combined with each other in terms of publication. (Miller, 1986, 3) Authority is related to the word ‘author’. However, we shall all know that any author should have the authority of the area he is interested in, yet the more the author publishes books and becomes more known to the public eye, he will gain more authority in the publication surface. However, Barthes’s ‘The Death of The Author’ as well as Foucault’s ‘What is an Author?’(1969) essays share the same principals points of authorship and authority throughout years of history. (Bennet, 2005, p5)Both of these essays shows the main argument and interpretation of authorship. In addition, according to Barthes essay ‘The death of the author’, there is a historic and social issues in terms of the relationship between the authorship and authority. This has been identified in Foucault’s work ‘author function’ or the so called ‘pragmatics’ of authorship. Authority is not always however presentable for the author. (Bennet, 2005, p5)
Through the ‘The Death of the Author, Barthes claimed the role of the reader as well as giving his statement about the difference between reading texts. In one hand, reading a text as ‘the product of an author’ and in the other hand ‘reading as ‘resulting from the thousand sources of culture’. Here we could say that thinking of a text as written by an author, gives us its own interpretation and that is the end of it. Nevertheless, ignoring the author could help us analysing the writing by our own way and give it the meaning we want. Culture, experience gives us texts and language, therefore, there is multiple meanings of a writing. And for this reason, we could say that the relation between the text and the reader it depends on the reader’s experience and knowledge.