Textual Unity Through Disconnected Voice

“A text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination”

The above quotation comes from Ronald Barthes The Death of the Author, in order to decipher its significance Ronald Bathes, Michel Foucault and Walter J. Ong's conceptions of author-reader relationship will be analyzed along side the writers notions of immortality. The persistent duality between reader and writer creates a paradigm by which all writing can be perceived.

To say, as Barthes does, that the author dies in the empty space of the page implies purpose and intention. With the writer cast into anonymity the reader is able to take full reign of the text in front of them and interpret it completely without the inhibitions of the history and biography the writer is burdened with (Barthes 875). Barthes contends that in order for writing to move forward as an institution it must jettison the classical reverence for the author and place new importance on the reader. “Suppressing the author in the interests of writing, which is, as will be seen, to restore the place of the reader" (Barthes 876). However to place all importance on the destination is to ignore not only the origin but also the journey that connects the two. This journey is the essence of the author, which is unquestionably of the utmost importance in the creation of the writing. Nevertheless that does not necessarily imply significance to the effectiveness of the text in terms of comprehension and impact.

In his work, What is an Author, Foucault views the inexorable death of the author as something less progressive than Barthes does. Foucault implicates the cultural practice of using writing as a means to “ward off death” and explains that the immortality a writer achieves comes at a cost (Foucault 905). In the process of writing the author must put the entirety of his originality onto the page and as a result accept his dearth (or absorption into) in his work. There is no way to truly divorce creation from creator, the two are inextricably tied, so tangled in fact, it could be said that they fuse and become one entity. The author achieves immortality in his work at the expense of his life as a man. The origin is in fact not the beginning of the writing process but the humanity of the author thus by default the destination is the piece of writing itself.

The author is removed from his origins as a man and dissolved into the essence of his work. Yet he lives on in the immortalization of what he has given the writing of himself. This personal sacrifice has a dual parentage, intentional sacrifice of the author and necessary sacrifice for the sake of the reader. Though the reader does benefit tremendously from the anonymity of the author it is not for such valiant reasons that the author withdraws into the space of the writing. Nor is it reasonable to assume that the author simply recedes into the space created by the aforementioned entanglement of author and writing. To write is to willingly renounce ones origins and endeavor to create a destination in which one can live on for all of eternity. It is the promise of preservation that coaxes the author into the perilous venture of writing.

According to Ong’s The Writers Audience is Always a Fiction, the writer has little in common with the orator. The orator speaks to each person in the audience as though he were having a conversation with them in which the end goal was some manner of persuasion. The writer writes of himself, for one individual reader. A work of writing is not experienced in a collective the way a speech is, it is an individual process that is experienced in private by an singular reader. Ong explains this in terms of appropriated language, “audience is a collective noun (Ong 11)”. No equivocal noun exists for “readers”, though the word is a plural of reader it does not imply the same communal group. The writer does not have a sense of his readers the way an orator does his audience because if he did he would never be able to pour himself into his work in the manner required for successful writing. An writer writes with a specific voice that will speak differently to each individual. Here in lies the importance of the reader and indifference of the writer. The writer sacrifices his essence as a man in order to disappear into the space on the page. Yet he does not do this with the intention of enabling the reader, rather to create a voice that will ultimately speak differently to each reader.

Through this process of intentional anonymity the writing is unified and the importance of the reader epitomized. Though the author creates the voice that carries the reader through the pages of the work, it is the job of the reader to interpret what they read and in doing so attribute distinctive meaning to it. The “death of the author” enables the reader to realize their potential while giving the writing a voice that can be understood by all readers while being intended for none of them.

~Mikaela McShane