Category: Barthes

I remember that when I was in elementary school, the most common question in the tales that were on the textbooks of Literature was: “What does the author wants to say?” Roland Barthes would find this question terrible, castrating. And so do I. I think that the question should be: “What does the text says to you?” In Literature (and in Art in general), nobody has the last word. The interpretation that one could give to a text is as valid as the idea the author has of it. I remember a Peruvian writer who attended to a conference about one of his novels. At the end he said: “I didn’t know that I wanted to say so many things.” So, I agree with Barthes that we shouldn’t give to the author the category of “God”, the one who has the last and real opinion or interpretation of a text.

But I can’t agree with Bathes when he radicalizes his argument and says: “To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing” (147). Really? In my opinion, the problem of this asseveration is its generalization. Sometimes, knowing the author, his biography, his possible intentions and other details that surround his work, far from “close” the interpretation, gives new clues. I will illustrate my point with an example. The following is a poem of the Peruvian poet César Vallejo (here is the English translation: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15272):

A MI HERMANO MIGUEL
In memoriam

Hermano, hoy estoy en el poyo de la casa.

Donde nos haces una falta sin fondo!

Me acuerdo que jugábamos esta hora, y que mamá

nos acariciaba: “Pero, hijos…”



Ahora yo me escondo,

como antes, todas estas oraciones

vespertinas, y espero que tú no des conmigo.

Por la sala, el zaguán, los corredores.

Después, te ocultas tú, y yo no doy contigo.

Me acuerdo que nos hacíamos llorar,

hermano, en aquel juego.



Miguel, tú te escondiste

una noche de agosto, al alborear;

pero, en vez de ocultarte riendo, estabas triste.

Y tu gemelo corazón de esas tardes

extintas se ha aburrido de no encontrarte. Y ya

cae sombra en el alma.



Oye, hermano, no tardes

en salir. Bueno? Puede inquietarse mamá.

(source: http://www.literatura.us/vallejo/completa.html)

Of course, one could give an interpretation of this poem without knowing anything of the author and his life. But, it is not casual, I think, that in many of the critical editions of the poems of Vallejo and in the university classes about him, is taught that he actually had an older brother named Miguel who died tragically in 1915 and that in some editions appears that “In memoriam”. This fact help us to understand better the poem, to decipher the ambiguity that the poetic voice creates with the game of hide and seek that is presented in the verses. So, knowing this, “impose a limit on that text”? I think not. On the contrary, it gives an important clue and opens the interpretation to many more variants (the notions of death that could be underlined, the not acceptance of it, the sense of absence, the love between brothers, etc.).

In my opinion, Barthes makes an important contribution highlighting that the readers have the power to appropriate the text. Taking his metaphor that the Author is like the father of the text, we could say that, as Son, the text has his own life, creates his own relations with the readers. But, saying that “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author” (148) seems too much to me. The author could provide an important approach, no the definitive, but at least something to take into consideration. In synthesis, we should make a demystification of the author, but not “kill” him.

[César Vallejo and his last wife, Georgette, in Paris, where he was auto-exiled from 1923 until his death in 1938]

Barthes proposal elaborates about who should defines the act of literature. He defends the idea that the Author is “a modern figure” that has been supported by the positivism,  the culmination of capitalism, and now (in 1967), he argues literature can not rely on the Author but the Reader. The Author, says Barthes, is “to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing” (147). The Reader, however is a “space” where all the quotations holds together and all the traces find a field.

I agree a lot with Barthes. It is true that the Author became in a mercantilist object, a name who can probably sells or not. For instance, Joanne Rowling had to change her name to J. K. Rowling so it could be most “memorable” for readers. As you probably know, many publishers analyze the names of Authors for marketing process, because is not a person whose name will appear on the cover of a book, is a “brand”, you are selling a product.

I agree also with the idea that critic uses to rely on how to identify episodes of the novels with the real life of the authors. It is pretty common. And easier. Sometimes readers need to feel that behind those amazing stories is a real person who lived those actions, therefore, they empathize with the Author because it seems that not everything that he or she wrote was really made up.

Sometimes, literature itself, disputes the idea of what is an author. In Summertime (2009) J. M. Coetzee, South African writer and Literature Nobel Prize 2003, presents the third part of what it is known as his fictionalised autobiographical trilogy (the first and second parts were Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life (1997) and Youth: Scenes of Provincial Life II (2002)). The novel was built with different points of view: some of them are interviews that a journalist carry out with the purpose of finding out how was the life of the writer J. M. Coetzee, who is already dead when the interviews take place, once he returned from USA to South Africa; some parts seems like notebook notes, a diary written by John Coetzee, where the readers can see ideas that spin around John Coetzee’s mind. In the book occurs something unusual for a autobiography: John Coetzee is created from many perspectives. Old lovers or acquaintances tend to describe John Coetzee as a cold, aloof, and odd man. Some says that he was really into languages. None of them remember him as an attractive or handsome man.

The intriguing fact here is that the “autobiography” is written by J. M. Coetzee, so he is making fiction to deconstruct the link that relates the character John Coetzee with the real writer J. M. Coetzee. Is also known that Coetzee does not offer many interviews and he do not talk much about his real life. Here, then, he offers a fictionalised idea of his life, that maybe has some brushstrokes of his reality, and maybe those readers who want to relate his fiction with reality can be a little satisfied.

Second, I know the Reader is an abstract idea on Barthes’ essay. However I can not stop thinking who could ever be that reader. Are all of us readers or only a selected group of people, who really knows that quotations and traces, can be? When Barthes said that the reader is a “space” I wonder if is a metaphor of a library, the Borges paradise. Or perhaps that idea of the Reader is Borges himself, this incredible good memory reader who, in spite of his blindness, was also a writer. I am thinking if we can be those kind of Readers. I do not have Borges’ memory, I do not belong to that elite where he grew up and belonged, I do not speak the languages that he spoke. Maybe I am a reader not a READER.

Perhaps the Reader is this ideal person who can discover a text and try to identify it. Wait: is not that a critic? But if the critics are only dedicated to the “task of discovering the author” (147), can be a critic a Reader or not? I am actually not sure about the definition of Reader.  I am not sure if Barthes is talking about the reader as an human being that still is “pure” and “naive”, and only reads for pleasure, and in this condition can interpret the reading with a clarity that a critics are not longer able to use because they have been corrupted for the critic’s vision.

In this order of ideas, maybe that Reader, still naive and pure, will probably need to identify himself or herself with the Author, and will try to find the Author behind his or her work… And the cycle will never ends.

Pour les francophones, voici un lien qui vous permettra de prolonger la réflexion sur la “mort de l’auteur”: http://litterature.ens-lyon.fr/litterature/dossiers/themes-genres-formes/la-figure-de-lauteur

In Mythologies, Roland Barthes takes up the challenge posed by Ferdinand de Saussure in his Course in General Linguistics: to elaborate “semiology” as what Saussure terms “a science which studies the role of signs as part of social life” (15). Or to put this another way: Barthes takes the world around him as a social text, which can be read more or less like any other and in which the elements that compose it are almost as arbitrary as any other.

But the social text is only almost as arbitrary as any other; for Barthes, we also need “to pass from semiology to ideology” (128), that is, to recognize that the myths that structure the text of everyday life are politically motivated. To adapt a line from Marx: the ruling myths of each age have ever been the myths of its ruling class. There is therefore often a rather complex play between arbitrariness on one level and necessity (or, at least, political motivation) on another.

Wine is a perfect instance of this combination of extreme malleability and narrow determination. As Barthes observes, in France wine “supports a varied mythology which does not trouble about contradictions” (58). For example, “in cold weather it is associated with all the myths of being warm, and at the height of summer, with all the images of shade, with all things cool and sparkling” (60). Indeed, Barthes notes that the fundamental characteristic of wine as a signifier is less any particular content or signified to which it is attached than that it seems to effect a function of conversion or reversal, “extracting from objects their opposites–for instance, making a weak man strong or a silent one talkative” (58). And yet however much Barthes makes hay of this chain of associations and contradictions, there is a point at which the arbitrary play of significations ends. For wine is still, fundamentally, a commodity; in fact, it is big business. The analysis therefore concludes with a sort of determination in the last instance by the economy:

There are thus very engaging myths which are however not innocent. And the characteristic of our current alienation is precisely that wine cannot be an unalloyedly blissful substance, except if we wrongfully forget that it is also the product of an expropriation. (61)

Hence for this reason, if no other, Barthes is far from suggesting some kind of interpretative free play: there is clearly a right way to read the myth of wine, and a wrong way; if we leave out the fact of expropriation, we have ultimately not understood the myth or its social function.

Elsewhere the moment at which interpretation comes to an end is rather more complex, and perhaps more interesting. Take the essay on “Toys.” This is basically a critique of realism. Let us be clear: the problem with conventional French toys, Barthes argues, is not so much that they are gender-stereotyped, that for instance girls are to play with dolls and boys are given toy soldiers. It is, rather, that toys are almost always loaded with meaning: “French toys >always mean something, and this something is almost always entirely socialized” (53).

Toys constitute, in other words, what Barthes elsewhere terms a “work” in contradistinction to a “text”; they limit the range of uses to which they can be put. Indeed, they limit children’s activity and expectation of the world to one predicated on use, rather than pleasure; on interpretation, rather than creation. And for Barthes use and meaning are both forms of tyranny, and they are both essentially dead. As he says of modern toys that are “chemical in substance and colour,” they “die in fact very quickly, and once dead, they have no posthumous life for the child” (55).

What’s curious, however, is the reading that Barthes provides, by contrast, of wooden blocks. Such toys are closer to a text than a work: they have no pre-set meaning; they are not premised upon representation, and so do not depend upon interpretation; the child who plays with them “creates life, not property” (54). So far, so good. But the strange moment comes when Barthes associates the open textuality facilitated by such open-ended play with wood. In a sort of poetic reverie, he praises the many characteristics of a substance that is “an ideal material because of its firmness and softness, and the natural warmth of its touch. Wood removes, from all the forms which it supports, the wounding quality of angles which are too sharp, the chemical coldness of metal” (54).

It’s not obvious, after all, that wood is any more “natural” (or indeed, any less “chemical”) than metal. Here, the point at which the play of signification stops depends less upon a political analysis of exploitation and expropriation, and rather more on a very familiar contrast between nature and industry, tradition and modernity. In short, here at least Barthes seems to be caught in a myth that he has merely made his own.