Sean Burke The Death and Return of the Author : Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida.

from Dickens's life, his activities in the law are researched and conjectures are made as to his
state of mind at the time of writing. In this way, criticism is forced to be perpetually lagging behind
the designs and dictates of the author whilst the work's language is seen as the simple means
towards a referential end. Language is thereby devalued to the status of an instrument, a passive,
mediative phenomenon which has no part to play in the construction of this anterior realm of
reality-as-given.
Correspondingly, the break with the author effects a severance of the text from its putative
referential obligations, and allows language to become the primary point of departure and return
for textual apprehension and analysis. No longer reduced to a unilateral system of conformities
with the 'world', no longer reduced to a 'single message', the text is opened to an unlimited variety
of interpretations. It becomes, in short, irresponsible, a ceaseless braiding of differences in which
any sense of 'the truth of the text', its original meaning in the world, is overrun by untrammeled
significative possibilities. This is the message—indeed the 'single message'—of 'The Death of the
Author'. To wit, that the abolition of the author is the necessary and sufficient step to bring about
the end of a representational view of language, for it is only through the function of the author as
the possessor of meaning that textual language is made obeisant to an extratextual reality.
Barthes states this quite dramatically in S/Z under the rubric of 'The Mastery of Meaning':
The author is always supposed to go from signified to signifier, from content to form, from idea to
text, from passion to expression; and, in contrast, the critic goes in the other direction, works back
from signifiers to signified. The mastery of meaning, a veritable semiurgism, is a divine attribute,
once this meaning is defined as
the discharge, the emanation, the spiritual effluvium overflowing from the signified toward the
signifier: the author is a god (his place of origin is the signified); as for the critic, he is the priest
whose task is to decipher the Writing of the god. 55
This nicely describes the futile shuttling between author and critic, encoder and decoder, when it
operates in this rudimentary manner. But here, as in other instances, he must overstate his case,
and, again, theological overtones supervene upon the author question. The acme of
representation, the ideal of verisimilitude hearkened towards by the proponents of 'pure realism',
casts the author in a role far removed from that of a textual divinity. As we have said, mimeticist
criticism must pass through the figure of the author in order to arrive at the objects of
representation, yet, in a purely mimeticist view, these objects are sufficient to themselves: the
author is merely the conduit or point of passage in this procedure, that neutral 'someone' who
records and observes without subjective biases or predilections of any kind. Marks of intention
and desire will perforce taint this process which aspires to a state of pure immediacy, perfect
translation, to the realisation of a language which acts innocently as a window onto the world.
Authorial presence here constitutes a transgression, it can only cast a shadow on the text of
vraisemblable, can only colour the window through which the reader looks. The purely mimeticist
text could certainly do without the author; indeed its greatest good might be something like the
self-effacement of the author in the act of writing. Witness Emile Zola formulating the theory of
pure realism:
The novelist is but a recorder who is forbidden to judge and to conclude. The strict role of a
savant is to expose the facts, to go to the end of analysis without venturing into synthesis; the
facts are thus: experiment tried in such and such conditions gives such and such results; and he
stops there; for if he wishes to go beyond the phenomena he will enter into hypothesis; we shall
have probabilities, not science . . . the novelist should keep equally to known facts, to the
scrupulous study of nature, if he does not wish to stray among lying conclusions. He himself
disappears, he keeps his emotion well in hand, he simply shows what he has seen . . . a novelist
who feels the need of becoming indignant with vice, or applauding virtue, not only spoils the data
he produces, for his intervention is as trying as it is useless, but the work loses its strength; it is
no longer a marble page, hewn from the block of reality; it is matter worked up, kneaded by the
emotions of the author,
and such emotions are always subject to prejudices and errors. 56
Indeed realist theory only comes to assign a significant role to the author when it has drifted from
the ideal of pure mimesis, as the represented field opens to admit the moods, personality and
experiences of the author as a subjective being. Nor, indeed, is it difficult to imagine arguments to
the effect that the decline of representation opens a space of greater authorial creativity as the