On Barthes

Barthes’ stance on who the author is in relation to their audience and story forces us, especially writers, to reconsider the level of importance placed on the author. As a writer myself, I have often spoken with other writers about how important I think it is to not speak when someone is talking to you about your work; mostly when it is a critique of something you’ve written. There have been countless times for me that someone has told me that they noticed a specific image or metaphor in a poem of mine that I did not in fact intend to add in. But to tell the reader that they are wrong takes away much of the magic of reading. The moment that I have stepped away from the page and put my pen away, it is no longer mine alone. It becomes a discussion between author and audience. This is what Barthes is saying in his “The Death of the Author.” He also claims that there is a “capitalist ideology, [from] which [society] has attached the greatest importance to the ‘person’ of the author” meaning that we, as a capitalist society, have become accustomed to the idea that the author is a person and that speaker is part of the author (Barthes, 1322). They become intertwined with this outlook and therefore become difficult to separate and then discuss separately. In modern day, we are often taught in English classes that when referring to the words spoken on paper it is not “author” but rather “speaker” of the piece. By distinguishing between the two, it forces the readers to think of the piece as its own separate entity. The same idea goes for the speaker and the reader. They must then also become a separate entity. This brings us to a total of three entities, the author, the speaker, and the reader, all of which have their own personal relationship to each other. Postmodernism clearly branches into this idea with its themes of metanarratives and intertextuality. When the author borrows a metaphor from another culture, for example, and someone else reads it without the prior experience or knowledge to understand it in the way that it was intended to be understood by the author, they may apply the experience and knowledge that they do have and come to a separate conclusion. Who is to say if one is more or less correct? Sure, in theory, the author knew what they were meaning to convey when they wrote the metaphor, but what if upon inspection, the later interpretation gives a deeper meaning to the piece. What if the way the reader understood the metaphor actually conveys the message the author way trying to convey in a clearer and more meaningful manner? Then is the reader correct? This is all to say that there is no one author and writers must extinguish the power of their words the moment they let their work out into the world.