The death of the author...?

La mort de l'auter.
(preliminaries of a larger essay i'm working on.... just my initial assessment)
Have you ever struggled with a book that you particularly didn’t see a point in reading, or found the verbiage of the book totally different from what you’re used to, or even found yourself asking if the plot is at all accessible? If you had, then Roland Barthes’ La Mort de l'Auteur is deceitful to say the least.
If I get what Barthes is getting across, then there’s a schizo-Balzac thing happening here: Balzac, the writer, who exists as a person (the ‘scriptur’), and Balzac the author—that voice you hear narrating a the text to you (the floating eyeball). The author, whom we usually assume we are conscious of when reading a story is, in Barthes' case, non-existent, or at least should not exist in terms of lit. criticism; he commands, “once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile.” Consciousness of the writer distorts because the “book and author stand automatically on a single line divided into a before and an after” and this is problematic as “every text is eternally written here and now” by the reading public.
The “language speaks, not the author, through a prereq. impersonality,” rendering the writer as conveyer of a message in the performative act of using the mosaic of words, phrases, and semantics from their culture, and for Barthes’ thesis, the author is irrelevant because “a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.” Put that way, we have the Ecclesiastical claim that ideas are not original, and this is at the heart of the linguistic theory that looks only at the elemental matter of sentences, down to their basic abstract units: words.  With this reasoning, words exist in the aether as units of discourse while we wiggle through them ephemerally when we write. (I guess it’s kind of like breathing oxygen i.e. I’m no more special than anybody else for breathing. So writers are using words like we breathe; the text may be special, but not the ‘scriptur’). Semiotic rules viz. the "I" example of the signified and the signifier.


Meanwhile…. his postulations break here: “By refusing to assign a ‘secret,’ [meaning] to the text, liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases - reason, science, law.” That seems to be a misconceiving of his own argument, because the dangerous thing here is that Barthes equate the frame of view for his (archaic) author to the god of the world the author created, but Barthes does not have the reader in that same frame (in an atavistic way, so he can prove his argument), that false-logic is the deceit that breaks the essay. This is exemplified by his example of the Greek Tragedy, which breaks his argument, for one, he talks about the double meaning in interlocutions that each “character [only] understands unilaterally,…this perpetual misunderstanding is exactly the tragic.” But how this ambiguity transfers to the audience is dubious, as we readers are removed from that world of the narrative, aware of the machinations, and observe from the same perspective as the author of the Greek play, or any work for that matter. The author seems very relevant if we are being truthful—sans surrealism where the author has distorted and has to figure out (or gave up the tasking duty of figuring out) his/her own reality—because the author frame and reader frame is usu. one, and it sometimes helps to know why the author has the idiosyncratic voice they are using. Not all the time but sometimes it’s helpful.
Rabinowitz’s (Authorial Reader...) tautological response ostensively threads that dilemma by splitting it in half.  The ‘authorial’ reader "recognizes that distorting presuppositions lie at the heart of the reading process," thus reading with the intentional fallacy of the author—we know that. While the ferocious Barthes want to end the authorial readership, Rabinowitz acknowledges that some readers will understand the allusions and plot devices used by the author in crafting a novel or poem. Fish’s ideas in How to Read a Poem are exactly Barthes’, although Fish is merely making an observation (and proving it, I might add). But, I’d expected a sort of solution to the Fish experiment, something like: look for the most obvious interpretation of a poem, and if it’s not there then lets find the author and look at their other works (and maybe bio), then we can evaluate the current poem. And if it’s still not there, then maybe it’s nonsensical: like the parody of intellectual piffle he wrote on the board to begin with. Overall, Fish’s meaning is that "interpreters do not decode poems; they make them" because the  "mental operations we can perform are limited by the institutions in which we are already imbedded," therefore meaning of a poem or text is "an ongoing accomplishment of those who agree to produce it,” not prepackaged and waiting for the reader. Also, meaning, according to Fish is not static once discovered by a group, but changes accordingly with the different groups in different environments over time, which ends up being a relativistic argument. 


          As a consequence of Barthes' post-structuralist linguistic theory, the results are displayed in many postmodern works that are highly self-conscious of the criticism of the work itself, so these books are self-referential and sometimes annoyingly ironic, to the point they just end up being truly belletristic (written for the sake of proving one’s knowledge of the aesthetic and a display of a vast survey of information). Novel writing, for a certain period was held captive by the ivory tower elite in the ghost of the “dead author”, who scattered all over the texts their morsels of erudition and refused to let a popular audience wade into that sea of knowledge—through their obscurantist forms. Luckily, that trend ran its course to some extent, and we are gratefully saved by the authors who wrote their way out of postmodernism—by a jolting reconciliation of the author and the reader through the dialogic of a weird inter-textual kinship.

Deriving meaning is criticism; and it's a bit embarrassing to derive meaning from a bunch of monkeys locked in a room—evolution style: no meaning, no intent—just hammering away at a typer; and of which monkeys somehow come up with Hamlet.

No comments:

Post a Comment