The Death of the Author (1968) , written by Roland Barthes has many postmodern and poststructuralist implications. The essay is highly influential in decoding the meaning of the text without including the exterior elements into the text. Barthes tries to highlight the objectivity of the text and the subjective discourse of the text that is open ended with multiplicity of truths. It is a postmodern essay that projects the relationship between the reader and the text as well as the subtraction of author from the text.
The postmodernism believes that truth is an illusion that goes against the edifices of modernism. The modernist believes that truth is absolute and the essay accounts that truth is an illusion because it gives a multiple discourses and one cannot really counter the accurate truth within the text. It is highlighted in the opening of essay where Barthes have taken from Balzac novels where the narration is ambiguous for Barthes and cannot say whether the narrator is Balzac or the hero of the novel itself. This shows that Barthes or the readers cannot simply say that it is the hero who is narrating the story or the author himself who is narrating the story as the idea here is that the very basic truth about the text is its ambiguity and multiple flow of discourses.
However , the postmodernism also believes in the objectivity of the text. Barthes believes that the text contains an author name but it has been instituted since the Renaissance Period to account for an “individual” self. He sates that a text contains a language and it is through language a text communicates with the readers. It is not the author who speaks to the readers but the words and language of the text that speaks and convey various meaning of the text. Hence , Barthes highlight the objectivity of the text rather than being a subjective discourse about the author and the impersonality of the text. The very essence of the title herein lies where Barthes clearly points out that the author should suppress their biographies , emotions , personality into the text and it becomes a complete responsibility of the reader to bring forth the meaning making process within the text itself.
In addition to this , the essay also gives a discourse a postmodern implications on the very nature of the text. As the essay also aligns itself with poststructuralism, the poststructuralist believes in the superiority of writing over speech and hence in the essay Barthes gives a primacy to writing that establishes a meaning making process in the text. The author is replaced by the reader and the meaning of the text is at the mercy of the readers. Here , one can observe that the very nature of the text for the postmodernism has many multiple meanings and the meanings are asserted not the by the author but by the readers and hence the act of writing gives birth to the reader. Critically , the death of the author gives birth to the readers which the essay tries to clarify.
Furthermore , the postmodernism is a continuation of modernism in a sense that it follows some guidelines and principles of modernism. Barthes highlighted that a text is a “tissue of quotations” meaning that a literary text contains the elements of sources and references to other texts or in short term an allusions. He also asserts that no text is an “original” pieces and it also intrigues Eliot’s theory of impersonality or modernism that Barthes tries to highlight in the essay. He states that a text and the meaning making process can only be instituted only if one consider that meanings lies in the readership and not on the author. When the readers engage themselves to the writing , it generates multiple subjective discourses of various truths for the meanings that cannot be traced back to its origin but in its destination. Hence , one has to subvert the author from the meaning making process to really understand the text and do away with the idea that the author generates the meaning.
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