If you haven’t read The Death of the Author by Roland Barthes, I highly recommend it in conjunction with Proust’s La Recherche, and should note that it only takes around 5 minutes to finish. In the essay, Barthes is explicitly detailing what theories Proust is analyzing through the narrator, those being the functions of the critic, author, and reader. Barthes argues that the symbol of the author rises with the modern age, and it is in this symbol that we falsely attribute the explanation of their work as belonging to the author. The argument is that it is language which speaks, not the author, and it’s through the author that this language can be performed. Failures of the critics, to Barthes, was that they held the author  as an epitomized figure who was thought to “nourish the book,” rather than being  “born simultaneously with the text.” (1) The consequences of this is that genius and talent a priori seems to fall, and is rather dependent on experience and tradition. Since language is ‘finished’, what the author composes has already been finished in a theoretical dictionary. One complaint toward the critic, is that once a text is given an author, a limit is imposed on that text which allows its composition to bear an ultimate meaning, thus allowing the critic to be victorious once they discover the author. When writing becomes an act without intending to assign a secret, it becomes a revolutionary activity, “an anti-theological activity.” (2) The final point Barthes brings up is, “Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author.” (3) So, with the death of the author, comes the birth of the reader, and it is only in the reader that literature is possible to exist and be deciphered.

One final note: it was nice to be able to understand this passage as a result from reading La Recherche. “Proust gave modern writing its epic. By a radical reversal, instead of putting his life into his novel, as is so often maintained, he made of his very life a work for which his own book was the model; so that it is clear to us that Charlus does not imitate Montesquiou but that Montesquiou – in his anecdotal, historical reality – is no more than a secondary fragment, derived from Charlus.” (4) How can we analyze the narrator’s plight of becoming a writer, reader, and critic with this essay in mind now, and also the separation of the public/private aspects of the artist?

Bibliography

1.) Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” 1967. Essay. 2.
2.) Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” 1967. Essay. 3.
3.) Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” 1967. Essay. 4.
4.) Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” 1967. Essay. 2.