On Death and Dying

Lomanno (lomanno@ix.netcom.com)
Sun, 13 Sep 1998 11:57:55 -0400

> To kill
> the author, you need to do a lot more than the theoryhead undergrad who
> blithely dispenses with Charlotte Bronte on his way to his Victorian
> Novel class.  

Well, duh! Unfortunatley, that is what some students tend to think: that
Barthes is saying that we may now dispense with all reason and everyone
gets "A's" in English because there are no longer any rules of
interpretation (Scottie B.--this means you!!) (And by the way, I'm a
woman). Individual interpretation does not mean the reader may draw
arbitrary conclusions willy-nilly. It means that based on the reader's
biographical and social experiences he/she brings certain ideas to the
text before it is even read. This is inevitable, and the author has no
control over who reads his/her text. Hence, the author's original 
intention gets lost in the process of reading.  

> The figure of the author, now deceased or deceasing, starts with the
> creation of the individual in the west.  Barthes associates this moment
> (or moments) with "English  empiricism, French rationalism, and the
> personal faith of the reformation"--these are the movements that took
> note of the importance of the individual and the individual opinion. 
> People can think and have their own ideas...they can synthesize
> empiracle data in an objective fashion without the mediation of some
> qualified figure like a priest or a parent, and thus they are
> individuals.  Thus, also, they can be writers.  They can have something
> to say.  They can mean something.  This is the basis not only of
> capitalism, but most western thinking since the late Middle Ages and
> especially since the Enlightenment.
> 
> Are we really ready to give this up?  The death of the author imports
> the death of the individual, ultimately, and we're not ready to do
> that. 

Barthes' ideas do not "kill" the individual; in fact, they support the 
individual. By allowing the reader to "write" the text, each reader
brings his/her entire life experience to that story. For instance, when
an author refers to politics or religion in a story, these ideas are
immediately subject to the reader's own agenda coming into it because
nearly everyone has strong and widely differing ideas about politics and
religion. This applies to any ideas put forth by the author.

Barthes writes in "Pleasure of the Text": Whenever I attempt to
'analyze' a text which has given me pleasure, it is not my
'subjectivity' I encounter but my 'individuality,' the given which makes
my body separate from other bodies and appropriates its suffering or its
pleasure: it is my body of bliss I encounter. And this body of bliss is
also my historical subject; for it is at the conclusion of a very 
complex process of biographical, historical, sociological, neurotic
elements (education, social class, childhood configuration, etc.) that I
control the contradictory interplay of (cultural) pleasure and
(non-cultural) bliss...

I am not at all afraid of the "Death of the Author." As I've said, I 
think it's inevitable. And I agree with the comments from many of you 
that said that if no one is around to read a text, there is always the
author as reader. But as soon as the author becomes reader, his "author"
status dies. I like these ideas because it suggests that texts are 
always alive and ever-changing. Why would we want stale texts that can
only be truly interpreted by the author himself? In this case,
Salinger's original intentions would be the only correct meaning of his
texts, and all we would need to do is ask him what he had in mind (as if
he would tell us), and then we would no longer need to read his stories
or even this list!