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.
