(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.
