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

precludes any sort of faithful summary. What is interesting from our point of view, however, is that
S/Z conjoins the two enduring principles of 'The Death of the Author', these being the refusal of
an instrumentalist conception of language, and the promise of the 'birth of the reader', though it
does so with unexpected results.
As Barthes journeys through 'Sarrasine' exposing the devices and conventions and the vast
network of cultural assumptions that underpin and generate the 'naturalness' of Balzac's tale, he
reveals that what calls itself the classic or readerly is a writerliness that dare not speak its name.
What is also revealed here is that in removing 'Sarrasine' from its scene of representation and in
lodging it in the realm of the 'already written', Barthes is, as he pledged, producing the text,
rewriting it, so to speak, before Balzac, before the dead hand of the author began to overlay its
narrative structures with a seemingly innocent rhetoric of naturalism. The deconstruction of
representation and the birth of the reader thus run concurrently. What is retrieved from the real is
rendered unto the reader; as the reading grows, representation recedes. And when Barthes has
come as far as he can toward demonstrating that 'it is no longer possible to represent, to make
things representative',61 when he has come as close as anyone has to fulfilling the promise of
the birth of the reader that closes 'The Death of the Author', we might be forgiven for anticipating
the triumphal declaration of the death of the author as achieved both in theory and in practice.
Yet, this is precisely what does not occur. As with other mythical sacrifices, resurrection and
rebirth are not long in coming. When a text no longer speaks the language of representation, the
death of the author becomes gratuitous. This is why the death of the author need never be raised
in connection with writerly texts, why Barthes does not explain what purpose authorial extirpation
might serve in the cases of Genet, the later Joyce, Proust, Bataille and others. This is why, too,
Sade Fourier Loyola can attempt to 'release Sade, Fourier, and Loyola from their bonds (religion,
utopia, sadism)', (9) and talk about the return of the author in the same breath; why Sade, 'a
writer and not a realistic author', Sade who 'always sides with semiosis rather than mimesis' is
such an exemplary figure in the renewal of the author. If a text has been 'unglued' of its
referentiality, its author need not die; to the contrary, he can flourish, become an object of
biographical pleasure, perhaps even a 'founder of language'. What Roland Barthes has been
talking of all along is not the death of the author, but the closure of representation. We need not
be surprised, then, that 'The Death of the Author' belongs to the earliest stages of S/Z. Nor that it
is at the end of S/Z—when Barthes has amassed 210 pages and 89 divagations devoted to
returning the readerly to the writerly, the real to the irreal—that the return of the author is
announced. When the scene of representation has dissolved around him, Balzac can come back,
an author of texts, no longer a scribe of reality; his work no more 'a channel of expression' but a
'writing without referent'. 62 It is for this reason that the death of the author and the annunciation
of his return can occur in such perversely close proximity. With representation annulled, the
crimes of the author are absolved, and even the arch-realist Honoré Balzac can receive a stay of
execution. Barthes recognised as much over the course of a 'two-year seminar . . . at the École
pratique des Hautes Études',63 a seminar that is itself the time of the death of the author, the
interregnum between S/Z as work-in-progress and realised project; the time spanning divagation
74 ('The Mastery of Meaning'), and divagation 90 ('The Balzacian Text'), a mere moment.
Some forty years prior to Barthes's work of this period, the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin
clearly saw the need to oppose mimetic and univocal conceptions of the text. For Bakhtin, the
traditional idea of authorship was entirely inapposite to the work of proto-modernistic writers such
as Rabelais, Swift and Dostoevsky, whose novels he characterised as polyphonic, that is, works
in which the authorial voice does not dominate other textual voices. Contrasting such texts to the
monologic voice to be found in traditional and epic forms, Bakhtin believed that this multivalent or
carnivalesque countertradition—which he terms Menippean—reflects a dissolution of hierarchies
and the emergence of an anti-authoritarian discourse. Bakhtin was not, however, led therefrom to
proclaim the death of the author, but instead reconceived the idea and function of the author in
accordance with the modalities and structures of the polyphonic novel.
The author in this mode of writing was not to be conceived as a transcendent, annunciative being,
but rather as that voice amongst the many which holds together the polyphonic strands of the
text's composition, an author who 'resides within the controlling center constituted by the
intersection of the surfaces-faces'.64 Nor either is the carnivalesque author in any way estranged
from the workings of his text. Bakhtin's position, as he says, 'is not at all tantamount to asserting a