Language as Language; It's Birth as Death

          Roland Barthes’ essay, “The Death of the Author” is an intriguing piece that presents to us a powerful contradiction.  That paradox summed up as the author’s act of writing as his own death; birth of text begetting a death of the author.  He states that “Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin.  Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing”; that the first voice eradicated is that of the author.  He asserts that the attachment of narrative to the person who writes it and our idea of what an author is serves as a relatively new function born no more than a few hundred years ago and that meaning within a work is centered on the author’s life and experiences to a fault; that the author’s voice is lost in the voices their writings give rise to such as the voice the reader who reads adds to a text, the language, by writers who intentionally avoid writing characters they’ve experienced in their actual lives and so on.  Barthes speaks to make us aware of the implications that the existence of the author holds on our understanding and interpretation of literary works. 

By removing the author and the implications related to his existence we then can focus on other more numerous voices within the text.  Such implications that the author presents would be the author’s past and his life experience providing a context for the setting and characters within a narrative.  Another would be the belief that the author feeds his being into a narrative and acts as its God, suggesting again that the author’s life impacts the goings-on of a narrative.  However, when the author is removed we can focus on other ways to view a narrative.  One way would be to focus on the language without the implication of the author’s cadence behind the words; the way the reader speaks and reads the narrative may give rise to new interpretations and understandings of a work.  Removal of an author also assist in providing validity in many more interpretations of a literary work because the existence of a single author implies the existence of a single, correct, immovable intention and interpretation imposed by that author but without him that limit does not exist.  Ultimately, it is the death of our internalized concept of an author and all its implications that give birth to a much more vast array of readings and understandings for narratives; it breaths much more life to narrative than it kills off.