The Death of the Author

A running theme of the essay, especially prominent in sections two, six, and seven, is that the literary criticism of Barthes’s day was a sham. For Barthes, the critic-emperor has no clothes. He regards literary criticism as an industry that disingenuously elevates the author and the author’s biography to profit from its own authority and prestige by supplying a steady stream of final (but bogus) interpretations of texts. Barthes’s disdain for the practice of critics who interpret texts by what is outside of them is palpable whenever he refers to them.

For example, Barthes downgrades critics who claim to discover the meaning of a text in its author’s biography: “The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it” (143). Later, Barthes writes, “when the author has been found, the text is ‘explained’” (147). Barthes puts references to explanation in quotes and italics to belittle the literary criticism of his day, which was called explication de texte (“text explanation”). Explication de texte involved minutely close reading paired with tracing out every single cultural and biographical element that could possibly contribute the text’s meaning. It was essentially the official approach scholars had to subscribe to if they were to rise in the French academic ranks. For Barthes, this was corrupt hubris. However, his opposition was not just motivated by a dislike for the traditional ways of the French Academy. It was out of a regard and even love for language itself, which, as this essay argues, critics abuse and disfigure through explication de texte. For Barthes, criticism attempts to interpose itself between writing and reading, disrupting the intimacy of the encounter between the reader and the text.

Some critics have read “The Death of the Author” as a satire partly making fun of literary critics. (Satire refers to the use of irony and ridicule to expose the folly or wrongheadedness of a person, group, or idea.) While this may be something of an exaggeration, it has some merit. First, if Barthes really believed that no final meaning resides in or can be deciphered from a text, why did he write an essay? In Section 3 he writes that any distinction between the author problem in literary texts and other kinds of text is “invalid,” so he cannot exclude his own writing.

Barthes certainly seems to be aware of the paradox of the undertaking at several points in the essay. This is most revealed where the essay parodies the kinds of conventional techniques relied upon in standard works of literary criticism. For example, at the beginning of Section 7, Barthes writes: “Let us come back to the Balzac sentence” (147). This is a standard critical convention whereby a critic, having posed a difficult or puzzling question at the outset of an essay, returns at the conclusion of the essay to reveal some deeper truth or meaning that has been uncovered. But Barthes does not return to Sarrasine in his conclusion, and nothing more is revealed about “who is speaking.” Immediately after mentioning Balzac, Barthes simply turns away to examine a thesis about Greek tragedy.

The invitation to “come back to the Balzac sentence”—a sentence still as obscure in its authorship as it was at the beginning, if not more so—is a feint making fun of this critical convention that always promises a final, deeper revelation. Doubling down on this satirical move, his mention of Greek tragedy then footnotes an essay by the classicist Jean-Pierre Vernant. Footnotes have two functions, one referential and the other rhetorical; the first is to help a reader locate a text that is being referred to, the second is to claim authority for one’s own writing by assuring readers of some prior, more original source. All of this this is highly and intentionally ironic given Barthes’s overall argument. The opening sentence and the footnote are like little jokes making fun of the ego of critics. One can almost hear Barthes snickering in the background.