Three emotions came to me while reading “The Death of the Author” from Image-Music-Text by Roland Barthes. The first emotion was critical. I get a little defensive when I read that “writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away,” or shortly after, “the novel ends when writing at last becomes possible.” I suppose I felt this way because I’d like to think writing has that special place in the world where the subject becomes all the more enlightened with words. That comment on the novel also seems a bit harsh (and I’m not even that big of a novel fan).

Barthes does start making points that are less harsh and by the last page, I understand. “The Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as the past of his own book” makes sense, while still relatively depressing. Barthes uses the metaphor of the relationship between a father and his son. The Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, think, suffers, and lives for it. Or at least, that’s how it was. I wish Barthes made more of an indication that this parental relationship belongs in the past before introducing the idea that the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text.

I’m somewhat skeptical to this original idea, but mostly agree that writing can no longer designate an operation of recording. Instead, it’s more of a “performative,” a rare verbal form. Along with the skepticism, I again become critical when Barthes again attacks the writer. For example, Barthes claims that “the modern scriptor can thus no longer believe, as according to the pathetic view of his predecessors.” Really now Barthes, pathetic? Later, Barthes states that “we’re no longer fooled by the arrogant antiphrastical recrimination of good society.” If Barthes were to tone down the adjectives, maybe the reader’s response would be less critical and more understanding.

Despite the harsh adjectives used by Barthes, I still praise the author for pointing out what we’ve been oh so ignorant to. I can now see how expression is a thing translated from a ready-formed dictionary, how the author only has the power to mix writings, and how life never does more than imitate the book, that the book itself is only a tissue of signs, and that writing is to be disentangled and cannot be deciphered.

I feel like I’ve made progress until the last sentence which causes my last emotion: confusion. A texts unity lies in its destination, in the reader, instead of the origin and therefore the author. Here I thought Barthes was emphasizing the importance of the reader. The the last sentence says, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author. I thought Barthes was pushing for the death of the author…