Hello and welcome back to yet another lecture
on Literary Theory.
Today we will move from Structuralism that
we have been discussing in our previous lectures
to Post-structuralism and we will make this
transition with the help of the writings of
Roland Barthes.
And Roland Barthes is especially important
as a figure of transition because he stands
like a connecting bridge, whose works allow
us to move from the structuralist insights
provided by people like, Saussure, or Lévi-Strauss
to Post-structuralism, which both dismantles
the edifices of Structuralism as well as builds
upon them.
So, before therefore, we enter into a discussion
of the theories proposed by more strongly
identified Post-structuralist figures like
Jacques Derrida, for instance or Michel Foucault,
Roland Barthes will provide us with a kind
of necessary prelude, and as usually preludes
are, this will be a comparatively short lecture
which will be compensated by a longer one
on Derrida.
So, Roland Barthes was born in 1915 in northern
France and he graduated from the University
of Sorbonne in Paris where he studied grammar
and philology.
Now, throughout his career he held a number
of teaching positions, both in France as well
as abroad in places like Romania, for instance,
Egypt, and America.
Today he is most widely known for his essay
which declared and some would say declared
rather scandalously “The Death of the Author”.
And this particular essay was first published
in an American journal called Aspen in 1967
and was made available to the French public
at large in a French version which was published
in 1968.
So, as you know this dates 1968 is very important
as far as this lecture series is concerned
and we have been encountering this date for
quite a number of times in our lecture series.
And in that particular year in 1968, Barthes
essays radical denunciation of the controlling
figure of the author in a text resonated perfectly
well with the fiery student movements that
were unfolding in the streets of Paris and
their resentment against authority as such
any authority.
Indeed this particular essay evoked two very
important responses from Michel Foucault and
Jacques Derrida, who represented in 1968 the
face of new generation of intellectuals in
France.
Thus, Foucault wrote his seminal piece “What
is an Author” in 1969, which many believe
was an attempt to critically engage with Barthes
pronouncement of the author’s death.
On the other hand Derrida referred back to
the essay “The Death of the Author” when
he was writing an homage to Barthes after
his death, which he titled “The Deaths of
Roland Barthes”.
But, as we will see, the essay announcing
the death of the author forms only a small
part of the theoretical work produced by Barthes.
However, before we try to get somewhat more
comprehensive view of Barthes, I would like
to refer to a highly publicized debate that
took place between Barthes and a Sorbonne
professor by the name of Raymond Picard and
I want to refer to this debate because this
gives us an idea about the radically new kind
of thing really that Barthes was doing, the
radically new kind of criticism that he was
putting on the table.
Now, in 1963 Barthes published a book length
study which was titled in French Sur Racine,
which in English literally translates into
On Racine.
And, it was a book that explored the 17th
century playwright, the works of the 17th
century playwright Jean Racine who is widely
regarded as one of the greatest figures of
the French literary tradition.
Now, this study reflecting Barthes’ unique
variety of Structuralist criticism was received
by the public at large and was recognized
as a key text of what was then looked upon
as the changing face of literary criticism
and was at that point identified as new criticism.
Now, here please do not confuse this particular
critical approach to literature that was represented
by Barthes with the earlier school of critical
thoughts that we have studied as Anglo-American
New Criticism because Barthes criticism builds
upon the work of Saussure and Levi Strauss
in a way that the work of critics like Eliot,
for instance, or Richards never did.
So, the criticism that is represented by Eliot
by Richards, for instance, that is what is
now known as New Criticism, Barthes today
would be referred to either as a Structuralist
or as a Post-structuralist, but during the
1960s Structuralism was new, the kind of thing
that Barthes was doing with literary criticism
was new and that is why it was referred to
locally as the new criticism.
So, please do not confuse between the two.
Now, coming back to Barthes book on Racine,
it created such a big uproar in the academic
world that Raymond Picard chose to write a
pamphlet against it and he chose to attack
that book as a representative of a new kind
of critical development which he considered
to be rather dubious.
And therefore, the name that Picard chose
for his 1964 pamphlet was this, “New Criticism
or New Fraud?”
So, clearly he considered the criticism the
variety of literary criticism that Roland
Barthes was doing as a kind of fraud.
Barthes in his turn retorted back by publishing
in 1966 a book length defense of his own position
and he titled that defense “Criticism and
Truth”.
In which he argued, Barthes argued, that the
old criticism against which his new criticism
was being compared and which was represented
by figures like Picard for instance was actually
not criticism it was simply a way of judging,
passing judgment on a particular set of literary
texts for instance.
Now, Barthes on the other hand considered
the purpose of criticism to be different from
this old school of judging a literary work
and he writes about this when he states, and
I quote: “Books of criticism are born, offering
themselves to be read in the same manner as
the strictly literary work, although the status
of their authors is that of critic and not
writer.
If new criticism has any reality it is there:
not in the unity of its methods and even less
in the snobbery which, it is so comfortably
asserted, supports it, but in the solitude
of the act of criticism, which is now declared
to be a complete act of writing.”
Now Barthes adds that in the change circumstances
the author and the critique are no longer
regarded as and I quote, “the superb creator
and the humble servant”, but rather they
both have as a common métier the same language.
In other words the critic’s work as well
as the author’s work involves engaging with
language as a medium of expression and doing
so, by and I quote again, “perceiving, separating,
dividing.”
Now these words perceiving separating and
dividing should remind you of the Structuralist
technique of approaching a narrative that
we have discussed in our previous lecture
on Levi Strauss, but let us for a moment go
back to the long quote that I just read out
and which you can
now see in this slide.
In this quote note that Barthes talks about
critics working as authors.
Critics are like authors in engaging with
language and he also says that the works of
criticism are “complete acts of writings”
which exist in, what he calls, “solitude”
in isolation and demands attention above and
beyond the literary work they might be commenting
upon.
So, the stress on language here shows that
we are dealing with the same long tradition
and criticism that was initiated by the linguistic
turn inaugurated at the beginning of the 20th
century.
We have already talked about this linguistic
turn.
So, this should be a familiar idea to you.
But the stress on completeness and on solitude
speaks of something more.
It tells us that by the 1960s especially in
Paris, there was a concerted effort by intellectuals
like Barthes to cut free criticism from the
role of simply judging or explicating literary
texts.
Critics were no longer to be servants to the
authors, but they were to be authors themselves
or the equivalent of authors.
Now since within the discipline of English
literary studies we identify theory precisely
with these intellectual currents that emerged
in France during the 1960s and that then went
on to create a wide network of legacy bearers,
we often end up treating theory as separate
from literature or as a parallel tradition
almost.
And I have already expressed my views about
this, about treating theory as separate or
as equivalent or as parallel to literature,
in my introductory lecture in this series.
But here I just wanted to point out that what
might have been one of the sources of this
thinking that theory is a field of study that
is independent of literature can be found
in the writings of Roland Barthes.
But now let us come to the actual literary
criticism done by Barthes which earned him
such resentment of people like Picard.
As I have suggested before, his criticism,
Barthes criticism, was primarily built upon
the Structuralist insights provided by Saussure
and Levi Strauss and as far as the Structuralist
technique of reading a narrative is concerned,
Barthes did not make any major innovations.
However the important thing that Barthes did
was that he revealed how the Structuralist
reading could have political implications
and could be used to critique the existing
power structure.
To understand this let us go back to one of
the very important insights provided by Saussure
because it is on that insight that Barthes
then builds his version of criticism which
has this political angle that I want to show
you.
So, the insight that I am talking about is
that signifiers and signifieds are connected
only randomly.
So, if you go back to our Saussure lecture,
you will see that we have talked about how
signifiers and signifieds, the word sound
tree and the thing with a wooden trunk and
leafy appendages, are randomly connected together
there is no inherent connection between the
two.
And indeed the meaning making ability of a
particular signifier or a constituent unit
within any structure is not gained, according
to Saussure, by being integrally connected
to a content outside the structure.
So, this is familiar grounds to you.
Rather Saussure argues that it gains meaning
through the relationship of difference that
it shares with other constituent parts within
the structure.
Now for Saussure this was true only of linguistic
structures, but as Levi Strauss had shown
the Structuralist way of thinking about the
meaning making process can be extended to
other things like, for instance, the kinship
structure of a society or how mythic narratives
operate and we have seen that in our lecture
on Levi Strauss and our analysis of the oedipal
myth.
Now, the Structuralist mode of reading can
be extended even further actually to understand
how meaning is generated in other more mundane
situations, like for instance driving down
the road.
While driving down or crossing for instance,
if we see that the traffic sign is red we
stop our cars or at least we should stop our
cars, and we do that because we interpret
the red sign, the red light that is glowing
in the crossing, to be a halt sign.
On the other hand if we see the green light,
then we continue to drive because we read
the green sign, the green light, as a signal
that the road is clear for movement.
Now the reason why we interpret red as halt
and green as go is not because there is any
natural or inherent relationship between these
color signals and the ideas of halting or
going.
Rather, green and red mean what they do within
the structure of the traffic sign through
their mutual relationship of difference and
this will mean any sign system that surrounds
us starting from the rudimentary system of
traffic signals to the more sophisticated
sign system of a literary language all relate
to external world through convention.
So, it is convention to stop to read the red
light as telling us to stop and it is convention
to read the green light as telling us to go
and these two signals connect with the external
world, these two signifiers connect with the
external world, merely through a habitual
relationship of certain ideas with them.
But if you look at conventions then you will
realize that conventions are tentative.
Since they are conventions that exist within
a particular social, cultural, and political
milieu, yet, each particular socio political
order makes it appear that the conventions
through which meanings of any sign system
is interpreted within it is universal, and
eternal, and perfectly natural.
Yet, this is clearly not so because we can
imagine very well an order, social order,
where the meaning of the red and the green
signal might be switched.
They will still share an oppositional relationship
between them, but we might start interpreting
through convention red signal as go and green
signal as halt.
Now this was precisely the insight that Barthes
brought to bear upon Structuralism.
The structure of meaning making at any given
point in time tended to naturalize the conventions
arising out of the world view of a particular
socio political dispensation.
This is precisely what Barthes showed in his
book Mythologies which is a fascinating collection
of Structuralist reading of things ranging
from wrestling matches to cinematic representations
to show of striptease.
In this book Barthes shows how the meaning
of things that surrounded people in the France
of 1950s were not natural or universal or
eternal, but were rather meanings generated
out of the bourgeois conventions.
Since, it was a bourgeoisie that represented
the major socio-political dispensation within
a capitalist world.
The way in which Barthes uses his criticism
to produce a commentary on the political status
quo already starts taking us out of the confines
of structuralism.
The way he points out that signifiers connect
to the outside world of signified through
conventions which are tentative and which
are related to particular social political
and economic milieus is already something
that goes beyond what pure Structuralism told
us.
Pure Structuralism that we encountered in
Saussure, for instance, and in Levi Strauss;
in Saussure, for instance, there is no political
dimension and no political dimension is also
very clearly identifiable say, for instance,
in Levi Strauss’ Structuralist analysis
of myths or kinship for that matter.
And Barthes starts bringing us closer to what
we now refer to as Post-structuralism.
So, here with Barthes we start our journey
from Structuralism and this additional political
dimension already brings us out of Structuralism
and on to Post-structuralism, leads us on
to Post-structuralism, and indeed we will
see in our future lectures how this exploration
of the element of political power goes on
to become a powerful concern in the Post-structuralist
criticism of someone like Michel Foucault
for instance.
But Barthes writings not only prefigured the
Post-structuralist position of Foucault, but
also prefigured some of the thought processes
that would underline the kind of Post-structuralist
criticism that would be inaugurated by someone
like Jacques Derrida and this Derridean kind
of Post-structuralism is best anticipated
by Barthes in his famous essay “The Death
of the Author”.
So, the first question that we need to ask
with regards to this essay is, why does Barthes
announce that the author is dead?
Which, as I said, some would regard to be
a very scandalous announcement indeed!
So, when we talk of an author we usually think
of a real living individual, who stands prior
to a particular text and who stands before
a particular text originates.
And he helps in creating that particular text
by pouring his own emotions, his own sensibilities,
and his own ideas into it.
That is how we usually consider the relationship
between a text and its author.
So, in other words the text is regarded as
an expression of the author’s self and of
his intention.
Therefore, the author is evoked as the ultimate
arbiter of what a text actually means because
he is regarded as the generator and controller
of meaning within the text that he has written.
Now according to Barthes the author is not
a reality, rather it is a bourgeois fiction
and just like the other bourgeois fiction
that he exposed in his book Mythologies, the
fiction of the author too presents itself
as not only real, but also as natural universal
and eternal.
So, for instance those of us who are conditioned
by the capitalist world order, all of us think
of texts that surround us as created by one
author or the other and that appears to us
as a most natural way of thinking about a
text and we believe that this is how people
have been thinking about texts throughout
the history of the world.
Now, the reason why Barthes believes that
the presence of a real life author behind
the text as a final arbiter of meaning is
an illusion is because like a true Structuralist
he considers meaning to be the product of
the internal relationships of difference that
signifiers have with each other.
In other words meaning cannot be poured into
a text which is ultimately a collection of
signifiers from outside by an author.
There was the author necessarily stands outside
the text or at least author as we usually
understand him, a real life individual.
Now a text therefore, cannot be the expression
of someone’s personality why because that
someone is always outside the meaning making
process of a language structure.
Barthes by pointing this out declares that
the death of the author figure is actually
not really the death, but actually the recognition
of the fact that author is a fiction.
So, what Barthes is doing is he is really
announcing the death of what was always a
fiction, a bourgeois fiction which was only
conceived or mistaken as reality.
But does this mean that Barthes believes that
texts get produced by themselves without any
human agency?
Do they fall from sky or can we say that they
are generated by a machine randomly?
No that would of course, be a very ridiculous
assumption and indeed Barthes does state that,
texts are produced by writers and by writers
we mean individual human beings.
But, what Barthes emphasizes is that this
writer that he is talking about cannot be
mistaken for an author.
Why?
Because a writer does not or rather cannot
pour his own ideas and sensibilities within
a text.
But can only act as a kind of dictionary a
kind of repository of a language that is always
already present before that writer and it
is from that language that he cites to produce
a text, it is from that dictionary that he
cites to produce a text.
In Barthes own words, “Succeeding the Author,
the writer no longer contains within himself
passions, humors, sentiments, impressions,
but that enormous dictionary, from which he
derives a writing.”
So, rather than defining a text as the expression
of the inner self of an author,
Barthes in his essay defines it, and I quote
as, “a tissue of citations, resulting from
the thousand sources of culture”.
And, this is because the writer cannot, but
use pieces of a language associated with a
particular culture through convention that
had already been used and already been reused
by others.
Writer or the process of writing, for instance,
is therefore, not only original but a series
of citations which recycles the same signifiers
that has already been used before.
So, with Barthes nullifying the presence of
an author behind the text, we arrive at the
verge of Derridean Post-structuralism and
it is this Derridean Post-structuralism that
we will take up in our next lecture.
Thank you.
