The missing ingredient in Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author”

In “The Death of the Author,” Roland Barthes attempts to shift the responsibility for the construction of meaning within literary works from the author to the reader herself. This should be rather clear from the title of the piece, and it’s justified by his elegant contention, “The true locus of writing is reading” (5). This is because of the reader’s need to synthesize the various cultural spaces and contexts in which the given texts are based, as well as the prerogative of the reader to unify the “multiplicity” of the given texts (6). Such an argument makes clear that the meaning of a piece comes from those who soak it in. It’s not just inherent in the piece itself, as something toward which every reader may strive; it’s in the actual reading itself.



However, in the case that bare language itself, as well as the author’s own lived experience in writing the book—or, in the pointed case of Proust, of intermingling the life of the piece with his own (3)—are still insufficient to, even for the author’s interpretation of her own work, guarantee a sense of meaning, then this brings forth several questions, including the following: What is the role of the author who reads her own work in constructing meaning from it? (For short, I’ll call this person the writer-reader.) Barthes omits the case of the writer-reader and her perspective on her own work. Thus, he leaves open the possibility of her reading her own piece to construct meaning from it.

Potentially, the role of the writer-reader is unique and based temporally: In the immediate process of writing and revising, the consciousness of an author of her situation and the context around her work may be much more limited, as compared to a retrospective look. This is true, too, in the process of revising an unfinished work, as compared to rereading a finished product. However, even my use of “temporally” may be too ambiguous in relying on time as a metric. Given that the particular and vivid learning experiences that may cause a writer-reader to alter her perspective on her work are not equally distributed across months and years, the mere passage of time seems to be less important. In this case, a writer-reader’s exposure to works of art and literature by other authors—after her original production of her work—may bring forth new knowledge that changes her perception of her own work. Barthes may concede that an author who has witnessed enough (another ambiguous term, I know) exposure to others’ work may be distant enough from her work to construct reasonable meaning from it.

However, even the above contention relies upon distance as a metric for constructing meaning: The farther one person is, ideologically or experientially, from her former self, the more likely or able she is to construct meaning from her work. Such case ignores that of a ignorant author, who composes a work and proceeds to not learn anything afterwards. Her perspective years later, in this hypothetical example, would be nearly identical to that of the moment she was writing it. Would she be incapable of constructing meaning from her own work, years later? This writer-reader may not be well-informed enough to collect and unite the multiplicity of her work, as distance might allow, but distance may not be the only ingredient to allow for this sense of enlightenment.

The question of which authors, if any, are privileged to and/or capable of constructing their own work likely cannot be answered after a single paper of this size. And yet, such a question is a critical component in Barthes’ contention on meaning and significance in art and literature. We should have a reasonable consensus about such an argument for the sake of knowledge and learning, but also because the ramifications are omnipresent in the world around us. Indeed, they impact our most basic conceptions of whom we can trust and listen to: Would we have faith in a director who critiques her own film, even if she were academically trained to do so? Would we have faith in people who make one argument, but change their opinion after hearing other perspectives? Would we believe that a politician actually understands the stories and allegories she brings forth in a self-written speech? For the case of better understanding how we should behave in the world around us, as we enter the information age, the death of the author and the rise of the reader may prove to both gain tremendous importance and relevance, and it is critical for us to engage with them.