So, there’s this guy.
A French guy.
A French sculptor guy.
He sculpts a sculpture that wins a competition.
Hooray!
To celebrate, this French sculptor goes to Rome. He loves theatre. He watches a Roman theatre performance featuring a girl.
A Roman girl.
A Roman theatre girl.
This French sculptor guy falls in love with this Roman theatre girl. This girl is named Zambinella.
But Zambinella is not a girl. She’s a guy. Zambinella is a castrato.
Castrato: a type of classical male singing voice equivalent to that of a soprano, mezzo-soprano, or contralto. The voice is produced by castration of the singer before puberty, or it occurs in one who, due to an endocrinological condition, never reaches sexual maturity.
wikipedia
This French sculptor guy falls in love with this Roman theatre guy. He mistook Zambinella as a girl because of Zambinella’s feminine singing. Hearing Zambinella sing for the first time, the French guy says, “It was Woman, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive fears, her unprovoked bravado, her daring and her delicious delicacy of feeling.”
This is the story of Sarrasine by French writer Honoré de Balzac. This is also the introduction to Roland Barthes’ essay “The Death of the Author.”
Referring to the quote above, Barthes asks the following in his essay, “Who is speaking in this way? Is it the story’s hero, concerned to ignore the castrato concealed beneath the woman? Is it the man Balzac, endowed by his personal experience with a philosophy of Woman? Is it the author Balzac, professing certain “literary” ideas of femininity? Is it universal wisdom? or romantic psychology?”
Much like the rate of attrition of a specific hard candy lollipop, the world may never know.
Barthes argues that an author’s true intentions are impossible to know. The author isn’t there to hold your hand while you’re reading. Interpretation is solely your responsibility.
Following this logic, Barthes continues that the author’s intentions are irrelevant. If Balzac was alive today and he dropped in while you read the quote above just to say, “Nah, this is something that actually happened to me. None of this universal wisdom, romantic psychology crap. She was a pretty dude. What can I say? C’est la vie.” You’d probably be like, “How did this French guy get into my house?”
But also, who cares what Balzy boy thinks. He’s dead.
Barthes argues that an author does not own their work and therefore is not the authority on its interpretation. As soon as the writer begins writing, he/she loses their voice. A story is more than the author’s individual experience. To write a story, an author takes from thousands of cultures and ideas that are not his/her own. Nothing is original. All writing has been inspired by something.
“the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture… the writer can only imitate a gesture forever anterior, never original. His only power is to combine the different kinds of writing, to oppose some by others, so as never to sustain himself by just one of them.”
The death of the author
Barthes argues meaning is found through reading rather than writing.
“a text’s unity lies not in its origins but in its destination.”
the death of the author
Barthes explains that the author “is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, [and] is not the subject with the book as predicate.”
The author dies as soon as we start reading.
I would argue that every piece of art has a dead author.
Have you ever interpreted a painter’s work differently? Or had a different feeling when listening to a song?
My friend Ryan put it perfectly at our book club meeting last Sunday.
Meaning lies in the beholder, then we choose to call it beautiful.
Ryan Rockenbach
But this isn’t to say the author is completely irrelevant. You need the author to interpret a story.
If Balzar wasn’t a person, but a chimpanzee, would you give Sarrasine the same meaning. If Sarrasine was written completely by chance by a chimp pounding on a keyboard, would you still call Zambinella a literary critique of feminist ideologies?
Probably not.
The presence of an author gives a work purpose, but the reader defines its meaning.
Next time you read something, remember that the author is dead.
Remember that I’m dead.
Or the me that wrote this is dead.
Because as soon as you read this, it’s not mine anymore.
I like that.
It’s liberating.