Index

The Book

A Bit of Barthes

Modernism

Postmodernism

Decentred

Author Options

Hypertechniques

Bibliography

Until recently, an author was an unproblematic concept; an author was simply someone who wrote a book. Roland Barthes' landmark essay, "The Death of Author", however, demonstrates that an author is not simply a "person" but a socially and historically constituted subject. Following Marx's crucial insight that it is history that makes man, and not, man that makes history, Barthes believes that an author does not exist prior to or outside of language. In other words, it is the text that makes an author and not vice versa.

"The writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings… in such a way as never to rest on any one of them" (146).

Thus the author cannot claim any absolute authority over his or her text because, in some ways, he or she did not write it. This is not to say that someone named Joseph Heller did not spend many months toiling away at a book called Something Happened, rather that we must re-think that it means when we say "Joseph Heller" and "Something Happened".

Barthes throws the emphasis away from an omnipotent, unified, subject as the site of production and on to the language itselfand, in so doing, hopes to liberate writing from the despotism of "the Work".

To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing…However by refusing to assign a 'secret', an ultimate meaning, to the text (and the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases-reason, science, law. (147).

It is easy to see hypertext as realizing Barthes' utopian dreams of writing liberated from the author. The ability for each read to add to, alter, or simply edit a hypertext opens possibilities of collective authors hip that breaks down the idea of writing as originating from a single fixed source. Similarly, the ability to plot out unique patterns of reading, to move through a text in an non-linear fashion, highlights the importance of the reader in the "writing" of a text-each reading, even if it does not physically change the words-writes the text anew with the individual emphases that create it's own meaning. However, this vision of hypertext as the epitome of the writerly text, finally allowing us to cast of the shackles of "the author", neglects the enjoyment that comes from surrendering to a masterful storyteller. Perhaps the greatest potential of hypertext, is not its alliance with the writerly text, but with The Book, with its possibilities, through fixed links and narrow path choices, of ever more ingenious ways of directing and surprising the reader. Barthes himself heralded the "Return of the Author" and the annihilation was always questionable.

Built by Scott Spicer. [email protected]