Authorship and the Active Reader According to Foucault and Barthes

The importance of the active reader is an underlying theme in both Barthes's "Death of the Author" and Foucault's "What is an Author?" At first glance, Barthes may seem to be arguing for the need to get rid of the author as a figurehead and Foucault may just be describing how an author becomes a figurehead, but the overall, both texts seem to be stressing the need for active readers in order to look past the figurehead author. 

The two texts intertwine very easily since Foucault's author function is actually the author Barthes is discussing in his text. When he says author, he is not referring to the writer of a work of literature, but rather the preconceived notion of the author as a figurehead which can easily distract a reader from what a text is truly about. Once a reader has access to a text, that text was already written in past tense regardless of how the book was designed to be read. The author (writer) of the text is already removed and cannot be there reading over the reader's shoulder and explaining what they meant by each word of the text. Readers must interpret the words of the text for themselves. An active reader will look into the words themselves and make their own meanings, which is what Barthes wanted. However, a passive reader may rely on author function and make assumptions about a text based on what they know about the person who wrote it. For example, it is common knowledge that Karl Marx wrote about socialism. If he wrote a children's book about puppies, then an active reader would determine the book was just meant to entertain children while a passive reader might view the book as being about socialism because of what they know about the author.

The removal of the author forces readers to be more active since they cannot rely on the author function to determine the meaning of a text, however, a truly active reader can figure out the meaning of a text even with the presence of the author. On page 877 of "Death of the Author," Barthes says, "The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author." What he means is not necessarily that the author must be removed from the text, but rather that it helps for the author to be removed from the text.

Barthes uses the example of Mallarme on page 875. According to Barthes, Mallarme was one of the first writers to realize that it is language that speaks in a text rather than the author. Mallarme saw that suppressing the author could effectively restore the reader, which is another way of saying the death of the author leads to the birth of the reader, which were Barthes's words on the same subject. For Barthes, the author "dies" (has power removed from them) so that the reader has power/agency. Foucault explains how the power/agency is in the hands of the author and how the idea of an author and their function can change over time. For Foucault, the power/agency is in the hands of the author since his definition of author denotes a sort of authority and a claim to authenticity. Considering his studies on power and punishment, one could only assume Foucault would also want to transfer the power from the author to the reader.

The conclusions Foucault and Barthes make about active readers and their desire to erase the author as a figurehead in order to promote active readership are extremely similar, but the way they treat the author in their texts differs slightly. According to Monica Lancini, Foucault views authorship from the inside in an effort to form a definition of author while Barthes focuses more on the consequences of authorship. Foucault states on page 115 of "What is an Author" that his essay is a sociohistorical analysis while Barthes wrote "Death of the Author" as a part of a performance art piece. Despite their different approaches to the subject, both Barthes and Foucault differentiate their definition of author from writer and call for active readers.

-Kayla Goldstein