Oh Meaning Where Art Thou?

“The image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions, while criticism still consists for the most part in saying that Baudelaire’s work is the failure of Baudelaire the man, Van Gogh’s his madness, Tchaikovsky’s his vice. 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” (1322).

Certain writers have tried to distance the text from the author. “Mellarme was doubtless the first to see and to foresee in its full extent the necessity to substitute language itself for the person who until then had been supposed to be its owner. For him, for us too, it is language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality to reach that point where only language acts, ‘performs’ and not ‘me’ (1323). This is the beginning of the death of the author. Things should not be written for the author themselves, they should be written with the reader in mind, otherwise the work is meaningless to all but the author. Barthes suggests using ambiguous characters to resist writing in oneself. When the author is distanced from the text it becomes more easily accessible and allows readers to find meaning.