ABSTRACT
Some years ago there was much talk of ‘the death of the author’ – not his literal death but rather the necessary disconnection of the author and his life from whatever texts bear his name. Roland Barthes’s essay on ‘The Death of the Author’ (1968) may be taken as representative. I quote from that influential work:
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. … The image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centred on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions. … The explanation of a work is always sought 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. … Linguistically, the author is never more than the instance writing. … His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any of them … a text is made up of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination … the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author. 1
