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The Death of the Author: Postmodern Reading Aporias (Part I)

© Jessica Laccetti

The lack of adequacy in descriptions of the complex processes of reading has led Richardson to echo Elizabeth Freund's initial observation that the determinant text and the constitutive reader are locked in conflict. He further claims that "reader response criticism, for a while the most exciting development in literary theory and criticism, reached something of an impasse in the early 1980's." The impasse, according to Richardson, is due to two largely diverging views operating within reader response theories: "one largely monistic, fairly prescriptive, and generally compatible with a formalist perspective; the other subjective, personal, relativistic." In light of postmodernism's suspicion of "logic, linearity, progression, and completeness," any attempt to circumvent this deadlock must call into question reader response theories which assume either a Cartesian axiom of the singular reading subject or "assume[e] that reading a text is an act of completion: homogenization, coherence-building, the production of sameness out of difference."

Although it may seem, as Richardson suggests, that for Barthes, "[t] he birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author," Barthes, nonetheless, "participates in [the author's] construction." As Burke explains, Barthes "must create a king worthy of the killing." Equating "the author" with "bourgeois man himself" Barthes sees "giv[ing] a text an author is to impose a limit on that text." With no apparent author, the reader is free to discern the "open sea" of meaning.

Using Sarrasine, a classic text of pleasure in Barthes's lexicon, as emblematic of the scriptable text, he inverts the lisible ideal. Instead of privileging order, hidden substructures, and newly surfacing gestalts, Barthes transforms a "readerly" text into a "writerly" one by breaking its apparent singularity into lexias. Exchanging a classic authorial text which seems "closed" to intertextuality and refers only to the limited meaning of an external reality, for an "open" text, Barthes, as a "resistant and constitutive reader," encourages free play of intertextual connections with the "always already written" and the lisible: [e] ach code is one of the forces that can take over the text (of which the text is the network), one of the voices out of which the text is woven. Alongside each utterance, one might say that off-stage voices can be heard: they are the codes: in their interweaving, these voices (whose origin is 'lost' in the vast perspective of the already-written) de-originate the utterance: the convergence of the voices (of the codes) becomes writing.