Barthes is dead.

So, the question I found myself struggling to answer after reading Barthes was- “is it me who doesn’t get it, or is he producing pure, unadulterated, argument salad?” This question of course comes with a bias against me. He is a published theorist/critic/polemicist (it might be well, I feel, to coin the world ‘thocremicist’ to describe his particular approach. It might help to inhibit anyone having a clue what we are talking about- I feel that would be appropriate) and I am an undergraduate student. This bias is finite though, and my rule of thumb is that if a major writer still appears violently incomprehensible after a fourth reading then, as far as I’m concerned, he is. That is how I feel about the issue, but let me try and instantiate my state of phenomenological being into you through the hermeneutics of doubt and put forward in a plane defined by the cross section of five tangential lines of analytic critique that reveals his polemic as the construct of misconceived conflations in his theory of writing- a view electric, dark and oblique.

Not.

Instead let me raise four points about his argument that left me less then convinced (ah…. English).


1.

“Writing is the neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of a body of writing.’

Umm, ‘neutral, composite, oblique’, that’s three adjectives. Who does this guy think he is, Lowell? No, this is not poetry my friend. Whenever I read that line it leaves my mind’s eye peering at a sort of gray space with weird lights coming in from different directions, and if I’m not looking closely will forget that it masks a complete vacuum in his argument. It means nothing. And that is not the only example of poetic bursts.

And as a defence of my acerbic criticism, let me point out that I am not convinced by the argument raised earlier that because it is a polemic he can do what he wants. Well, he can, of course, but that does not mean I have to read it if it does not conform to the basic, and very essential purpose, of argument (argument = polemic, same thing, there are no special rules when using a higher register synonym) which is of course to be correct. It must claim to be correct and coherent and, of course, better then what it is arguing against in terms of its rational content. He can just write what he wants, but if it is not sensible, he can’t claim both poetic license and respect for his argument. It makes me feel sympathy for all the poor teachers who have had to mark the sections of my essays which are super high register and erudite but completely opaque (which, btw is intentional, it covers the fact that I don’t know what I’m talking about), always leaving comments like, ‘he seems to have great ideas, just can’t get them across’. Barthes seems to be electrically charged by great ideas he can’t quite get round to saying strait. That might just be the style of his milieu though, I have the same reaction to Derrida.

2.

He claims that the author dies, but is actually just dramatising his challenge to an antecedent concept of Author by the literary establishment. It is a revision of ideas, and it is not the same idea when he says the Author as this older concept, and the author who dies every time writing begins. His dead Author is an opposite but equal reaction that is patently false. And again it is not a defence that he didn’t REALLY meant the author is dead. It happens to be what he said.

3.

His justification from literature are not convincing. Particularly Proust. I mean you have to be in a real intellectual tangle to find an author writing about his own life as an aspiring author to be revolutionary. And that notion that Proust ‘made his very life a work for which the book was a model’, is apparently achieved by my favourite phrase in the whole shambles, an ‘extreme subtlization’. That’s right, subtle-i-zation. I need say no more.


4.

He justifies himself on unverified sources that smack of the cloistered dogma’s of post-war French philosophy. He claims that ‘linguistics’ has shown that ‘the whole of enunciation is an empty process’. I don’t know if ‘linguistics’ would agree. Also, referencing what may be Derrida, or one any other of those theorists, that ‘we know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single theological meaning but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash’. Well, fine, except it is not like Progress, the advance of the sciences. It is a new formulation of ideas about literature which makes itself seems brilliant mainly by defacing the idea which preceded it. It asserts that until I read this genius theorist I did in fact look at writing this way… which neither I, nor anyone else, ever did. It is called the Straw-man fallacy in logic (although I will admit that is all I can recall from logic.


In conclusion, then, let me just ask, ‘How can you kill the author?’. Barthes sources, read like gospel in no way convince me, and, as far as I am concerned the author isn’t dead. And as a polemic, well done. Its like imgaining cities without people, in which case sure, a question to ask would be ‘how on earth does that work, I can’t imagine?’. But that is not the case, its properly impossible. It may be, of course, that he is trying to assassinate what is already an academic kadaver, entombed deep within the catacombes of theory, already dead in its usage by theorists to the people who actually read books. In that case though, who cares anyway? This assault belongs in those catacombes fighting the dead.

The author is a real part of a work. Unquestionably so. A voice has a speaker, it is the window of the soul. So prose has an author. Its not like having a weird author is any different. Elliot’s attempts to mask and deface his own involvement is an enourmous part of the appeal of his works. Who else but an enigma could be entitled to speak in the voice of god (‘Son of man’). Still more so, if the author was a machine, and we felt the passion of the intellect, then it would be amazing. I said a few classes ago that the historical personality does not inform the ideal author that we construct in our minds. And yes, that is true. But I realise that that is not because the author is not important in their real sense. Our words, the way each of us talk and write is imbued with a special manner. It is a manner which we cannot hide. You come to know the mind, perhaps the soul rather, of a great author from his works. It is a connection of intimacy that is fundamental to the pleasure of reading...

And you can’t just kill it. It doesn’t make sense.