THE DEATHS OF THE AUTHOR

Reading and Writing in TimeBy Jane Gallop

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2011 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5063-7

Contents

Acknowledgments……………………………………………1Introduction………………………………………………27PART I. The Friendly Return of the Author…………………….291. The Author Is Dead but I Desire the Author…………………552. The Ethics of Indecency………………………………….85PART II. If I Were a Writer and Dead…………………………873. The Queer Temporality of Writing………………………….1154. The Persistent and Vanishing Present………………………145Notes…………………………………………………….163Works Cited……………………………………………….167Index

Chapter One

THE AUTHOR IS DEAD BUT I DESIRE THE AUTHOR

In 1992, Seán Burke, writing the definitive study of poststructuralistanti-authorialism, declares Roland Barthes’s “The Deathof the Author” to be “the single most influential meditation onthe question of authorship in modern times.” Burke is commentinghere, we should note, not on the intrinsic value of Barthes’slittle essay but on its influence. Although the text in question wasjust a few pages in a little-known literary quarterly, its title hasbecome a widely familiar, world-renowned slogan.

According to Burke, it is often supposed that “The Death of theAuthor” was written in the midst of and “in mind of the studentuprising” (20). Barthes’s essay was published in France in 1968, theyear of the nationwide insurrection of students (and workers),and its tone seems perfectly to fit the publication date. Althoughactually written in 1967, “The Death of the Author” conformsto our image of “1968”—which surely contributes to our senseof the manifesto as historic. The “revolutionary” tone is probablybest typified by the text’s final sentence: “We now begin to ceasebeing dupes … we know that to give writing its future, it is necessaryto overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be atthe cost of the death of the Author.”

This sentence is dense with the rhetoric of revolt: We havebeen “dupes” of a “myth.” The moment is “now” to move towardthe future and reject (“overthrow”) the past. Barthes uses the firstperson plural and a sort of imperative (“we know it is necessary”)to exhort the reader to action. Finally, and most militantly, thisfinal sentence endorses violence as “the cost” of a new future.

If “The Death of the Author” is “the single most influentialmeditation on authorship in modern times,” it is this final sentencewhich is most often quoted. Actually not the entire sentence(which is longer and more complex than what I have quoted) butthe elegant, memorable last clause: “The birth of the reader mustbe at the cost of the death of the Author.” Barthes’s polemicalessay closes neatly on the five words of its title—a definitive, conclusive,triumphant ending. The last clause of Barthes’s manifestois taken as the definitive statement—not only Barthes’s but post-structuralism’s—on the question of the author. The author is thepast; critics should no longer be concerned with the author; heshould be dead to us. The ending is so perfect it has been taken asthe last word.

But the militant, elegant slogan is really only the end of a littleessay written in 1967. It is in fact not long at all before Barthesbrings the author back. In a book published in 1971, Bartheswrites: “The pleasure of the Text also includes a friendly return ofthe author.” This sentence appears in the preface to Sade, Fourier,Loyola. While “The Death of the Author” might be Barthes’s mostfamous text, especially to those not very familiar with or sympatheticto his work, Sade, Fourier, Loyola is one of his least readbooks. Thus the author dies in an overexposed Barthes and returnsin an underexposed Barthes; the imbalance in the reception ofthese texts tends to obscure the return and exaggerate the finalityof the death. And whereas the author’s death sounds historic andrevolutionary, his return is “friendly.” “Friendly” is a far cry indeedfrom the militant tone of the 1968 manifesto.

While for me “friendly” is the word that jumps out of this sentencefrom Sade, Fourier, Loyola, it is the last four words that areparticularly important to Burke, who would elevate “return ofthe author” to the status of the parallel phrase from 1968. Burkein fact entitles his book on poststructuralist subjectivity The Deathand Return of the Author; he would replace the familiar catchphrasewith this conjunction of two Barthes phrases in order to producea truer, more accurate representation of poststructuralism’s relationto subjectivity. While I am grateful to Burke for making meaware of the “return of the author” in Barthes, my interest in thereturn is not to find a better definitive figure for poststructuralisttheory, but rather to follow the vicissitudes of the dead author inRoland Barthes’s writing.

“The pleasure of the Text also includes a friendly return of theauthor.” While the last words of this sentence from Sade, Fourier,Loyola give Burke the title to his book, I recognize the first fivewords as the title of Barthes’s next book, published in 1973, oneof his best-known works. Although Burke reads The Pleasure of theText for additional evidence of the author’s return, what Barthessays there about the author is in fact more peculiar and moreevocative: “As institution, the author is dead: his person … hasdisappeared … but in the text, in a certain way, I desire the author.”

The author is dead, Barthes declares again, still in 1973. Theauthor is dead but—nonetheless—I desire the author. This sentenceappears in a chapter entitled “Fetish.” The standard Freudiananalysis of the fetish is that it represents the mother’s phalluseven though we know she has no phallus. We know intellectuallythat the mother has no phallus, but nonetheless our desire disregardswhat we know; the fetish represents a solution to the splitbetween what we know intellectually and what we desire. In ThePleasure of the Text, a book that affirms the reader’s perverse desires,Barthes uses this fetish structure to frame his relation to theauthor: even though I know he is dead and gone, I nonethelessdesire the author.

This is not exactly a “friendly return”: fetishistic desire is notnecessarily friendly. But both might be opposed to—or outsideof—what Barthes here calls “institution,” just as both would seemto contrast with the militant, polemical tone of the 1968 essay.Where Burke settles on the 1971 “return” as the appropriate figureto supplement the overfamiliar “death of the author,” I would likein this chapter to follow the various expressions of Barthes’s relationto the dead author.

* * *

After “The Death of the Author,” the first book Barthes publishedwas S/Z (1970). S/Z has in fact a quite special relation to the 1968essay. Based on a seminar that Barthes taught in 1968 and 1969,S/Z is an extensive and detailed close reading of the Balzac shortstory Sarrasine. “The Death of the Author,” written the year beforethe seminar, opens by quoting a sentence from the same Balzacstory.

After quoting Balzac, “The Death of the Author” proceedswith a series of questions: “Who is speaking thus? Is it the heroof the story? … Is it Balzac the individual? … Is it Balzac theauthor? … Is it universal wisdom? …” The 1968 manifesto thenanswers the questions with a declaration that goes straight to theessay’s polemical point: “It will be forever impossible to know, forthe good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, ofevery origin” (12, 142).

In S/Z, after quoting the very same sentence from Sarrasine,Barthes writes: “The origin of the sentence is indiscernible. Whois speaking? Is it Sarrasine? the narrator? the author? Balzac-the-author?Balzac-the-man? … universal wisdom? The crossing ofall these origins constitutes writing” (164, 172–73).

The series of questions is similar, with a few variants (for example,”individual” has become “man”). There are enough similaritiesthat this paragraph from S/Z could be considered a revisionof the opening of “The Death of the Author.” Which would makethe difference in the sentence following the questions particularlynoteworthy. Both sentences concern the essence of writing(writing is x; x constitutes writing). But, while in 1968 he speaksof writing as “the destruction of every origin,” using the rhetoricof violence characteristic of the manifesto, in 1970 writing hasbecome “the crossing of all these origins.” In the 1968 essay, thisparagraph is followed by one that proceeds to the heart of theessay’s topic: “The voice loses its origin, the author enters intohis own death, writing begins” (12, 142). In the 1970 book, theparagraph is followed by another, much longer quotation fromSarrasine, and then, using this second quotation as the slimmestof pretexts, Barthes devotes a long paragraph to the question ofthe author. That paragraph begins: “A classical story always givesthis impression: that the author first conceives the signified (orthe generality) and then looks for … signifiers, convincing examples”(165, 173). The paragraph ends by returning to this ideaand elaborating upon it: “The author is always considered to gofrom signified to signifier, from content to form…. The masteryof meaning … is a divine attribute, once this meaning is defined as… the emanation, the spiritual effluvium overflowing the signifiedtoward the signifier: the author is a god” (166, 174, emphasisBarthes’s).

S/Z is structured as a series of fragments. Barthes divides theBalzac story into passages of varying lengths, and quotes the entirestory in order, piece by piece, commenting as he goes, followingeach Balzac passage with a short commentary. The order ofBarthes’s commentaries seems simply to follow the order of whateveroccurs in Balzac’s text. For example, in the pages just cited,we have a Balzac sentence that leads Barthes to talk about the impossibilityof determining who is speaking, followed immediatelyby a Balzac passage that prompts Barthes to comment on the ideaof the author-as-god. We are led to understand that the proximitybetween these two ideas is arbitrary, suggesting no necessary connectionbetween them, occasioned only by the order of Balzac’stext. Yet these same two ideas (the impossibility of knowing whospeaks and the author-as-god) are in fact both found in the 1968essay “The Death of the Author,” which also quotes the first ofthese two Balzac fragments. (The second of these two fragments,I might add, has only the slightest possible relation to the author-as-godidea that Barthes derives from it.) The juxtaposition ofthese two ideas thus seems more than arbitrary.

Near the middle of “The Death of the Author,” Barthes writes:”We know now that a text is not made of a line of words, releasinga unique, sort of theological, meaning (which would be the’message’ of the Author-God)” (15, 146). While this parentheticremark is the single mention in the essay of the “Author-God,” itis absolutely central to Burke’s reading: “This co-implication ofthe writer and divinity … tacitly expatiates and enlivens Barthes’sessay” (23). This co-implication is, according to Burke, informedby a “homology”: “The author is to his text as God, the auctorvitae, is to his world” (23). While this homology is only “tacit”in “The Death of the Author,” we can see a more explicitly articulatedversion in the commentary from S/Z that comes almostright after the one paragraph in the book that clearly derives fromthe 1968 manifesto.

While the “Author-God” appears but once in “The Death ofthe Author,” as the essay progresses it increasingly uses a capitalized”Author” rather than the lower-case “author” with which itbegins (ending, as we know, “the birth of the reader must be at thecost of the death of the Author”). I read this capitalized “Author”as a version of the doubly capitalized “Author-God.” More centrally,the entire essay equates the author with God by putting theauthor in God’s place in the Nietzschean slogan “God is Dead.”

Barthes returns to the topic of the author-as-god near the endof S/Z: “The Author himself—the somewhat decrepit deity ofthe old criticism—can, or could some day, become a text like anyother: we will only need to renounce making his person … theorigin … whence would derive his work” (200, 211). The “Author,”capitalized as in the 1968 essay, is here explicitly equatedwith a “deity.” Yet, however the worse for wear, this god is not infact dead. The author-as-god is again, as earlier in S/Z, the originwhence flows the work, but if we could renounce that version ofthe author, then the decrepit old guy need not die but can rather”become a text.”

According to Foucault, in modern times writing underwent ahistoric reversal that transformed it from bringing immortality tokilling the author. I wonder if we see here in S/Z another turn ofthat screw: if the author can “become a text,” then, like a classicalhero, he need not die. Barthes hesitates as to whether this is possiblein the present (“can”) or only in the future (“or could someday”). The passage continues with future-tense verbs, seeming todecide that this transformation of the author must wait for thefuture, but it is worth noting that, at least for an instant, Barthesseems to think it already possible.

Burke considers this passage from S/Z to be “the annunciation”of “the return of the author” (48). While the use of futuretense verbs here definitely makes it some sort of announcement, Iwant to remark that the author here is not dead but only decrepit,and that while there is indeed a “return” in this passage, it is a differentsort of return: “The Author himself … could some day, becomea text … we would only need to give up making his person… the origin … we would only need to consider him himself asa paper being and his life as a bio-graphy (in the etymological senseof the term) … the critical enterprise will then consist in returningthe documentary figure of the author into a novelistic figure”(200, 211, emphasis Barthes’s).

Barthes uses and emphasizes the word “return” in this passage,but the return here is not a return from the dead, but a returnfrom documentary to novel, from nonfiction to fiction. This isin fact a rather strained use of the verb “return”; the combinationof strain and emphasis suggests Barthes may be troping on the return.We see the strain particularly in the odd phrase “returninginto,” a phrase which takes the transformation of “turning into”and marks it as a repetition—suggesting that this future transformationwill bring us back to an earlier (more original) state.

This idea of the author as “novelistic figure” will take on increasingresonance in later books by Barthes, and we will returnto it. I would like here also to remark the other word thatBarthes emphasizes (and strains?) in this passage: “bio-graphy.”Barthes hyphenates the word to make us see the “writing” in “lifewriting.”In Sade, Fourier, Loyola, published just a year after S/Z, hewill in fact experiment with a new kind of author biography.

Continues…
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