Author Theory --The Work of Barthes and Foucault

What is the Position and Importance of the Author in Literature?

Dec 7, 2008

In 'What is an Author?' and 'The Death of the Author' Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes make seminal contributions to literary theory.

In both The Death of the Author and What is an Author? – written by Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault respectively - the basic premise is the same: a literary text is defined on its own terms by its own language; literature cannot be read and decoded in relation to its author.

Where the problem begins is that Roland Barthes, in The Death of the Author states that “the birth of the reader must come at the cost of the death of the author”, yet What is an Author? has Michel Foucault deconstructing the myth of the author and authorship, and investigating the relationship between the author and the work.

In the respective essays, Foucault and Barthes draw the same conclusion – that applied authorship distorts and limits a text – but Barthes denies the existence of the author, whilst Foucault undermines the author’s influence and authority.

Roland Barthes -- The Death of the Author

Barthes outlines this clearly when he states: “In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered…the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced” .

Simply, The Death of the Author argues that a reader gains nothing from a literary work if they know the feelings of the writer of the piece because a text becomes a text when it is put into writing; it is the text, purely because it comes into existence, not because it is created by an author and it is the language which gives it resonance.

This is the meaning behind Barthes’ assertion that: “It is language which speaks, not the author”.

Michel Foucault and 'What is an Author?'

Whilst Foucault’s conclusions coincide with the statement that “It is language which speaks, not the author”, he does not go so far as to say that the author, because of this, does not exist.

He accepts that literature must have an author and creator, just as it must have a reader: “One cannot turn a name into a pure and simple reference. It has other than indicative functions…When one says, ‘Aristotle’, one employs a word that is the equivalent of one or a series of definite descriptions” .

He respects that, as he writes, the name Aristotle brings with it the association that Aristotle wrote The Analytics, though also makes it clear that a description, by its nature, does not bring forth meaning. To say, for example, that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby, does not help us understand the meaning of the language of the text, The Great Gatsby.

Reconciling the Author With the Text

To illustrate this point, Foucault develops what he describes as “the author function”. He argues that the author exists as the creator of a work but his individuality becomes irrelevant upon the coming together of the text, because it is language which defines a text; an author is simply a name, not a code of meanings.

Foucault maintains that the author himself is a character; a work of fiction, who, in the process of writing, adopts certain personas and emotions: “Everyone knows that, in a novel narrated in the first person, neither the first person pronoun, nor the present indicative refer exactly either to the writer or the moment in which he writes” .

This conclusion serves as an expansion upon Barthes original argument that: “The author is never more than the instance writing, just as I is nothing other than the instance saying I” . What is an Author? argues that a writer who acts with the same authenticity as a fictional character, carries the same authority that a reader would attribute to the characters the author creates.

Foucault and Barthes argue in favour of the downfall of the authority of a writer. Barthes outlines this when he writes: “To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text” . Whilst Foucault agrees with this statement, he tries more carefully to explain the irrelevance of an author, being wary of Barthes attempt to create a universal truth about the non-existence of the author, which Foucault recognises as a historical institution and one which cannot be swayed as easily as The Death of the Author suggests.

The essays of Barthes and Foucault remain prominent examples of post-structuralist theory.

The copyright of the article Author Theory --The Work of Barthes and Foucault in Reference Books is owned by Chris Woolfrey. Permission to republish Author Theory --The Work of Barthes and Foucault in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.