Essay Ally

Roland Barthes Infinite Potential for Meaning

The acceptance of Roland Barthes’ “Author” is an acceptance of absolute and irrefutable meaning. If His word is law, then literature is a code that is decipherable; the direct association of one phrase to one interpretation removes the necessity for literature to be read at all. An Authorial voice once removed frees the literature to a vast infinity of interpretation and purpose. There is great liberty in denying the Author and vicariously through this action - God; it affords the reader an opportunity to affix his own meaning to life, and find some level of inner verity. Barthes voluntary culling of Authors provides a means of transcendence to a place beyond the world of scientific, rational, or theological.

Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing (1469).

Barthes believes that acknowledgement of the Author provides definitive meaning for every work. For to reject all intent but that of the author, is to accept that the function of literature is to convey one message subject to one clear interpretation. If text is clearly decipherable, then there is a clear answer to the question of meaning-this creates the potential for critics to be valued as sages of explanation. Barthes proposes instead to reject the Author’s importance at the anger of many critics.

Removing the author allows literature to become art:

In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the structure can be follow, ‘run’ (like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced; writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning (1469).

Literature without an Author can be read like a painting is viewed, dynamic in utility. Levels and shades of meaning can pour out of the writing, without a reader fearing misunderstanding. Barthes wishes for meaning to be disentangled in a sense. Text contains an infinitely complex web of meaning, any strand may be pulled and evaluated but the web remains forever dense with possibility-certainty becomes clearly impossible. This notion, long applied to visual arts, is as valid when applied to words.

In precisely this way literature (it would be better from now on to say writing), by refusing to assign a ‘ secret’, an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases-reason, science, law (1469).

The comparison of the Author to God is not altogether unfair. In the universe of their text, acceptance of their meaning is an acknowledgment of their words as law. If the Author is allowed to play deity, then their opinions become truisms. Infallibility and perfection arise with publishing a novel or poem. At the very least, if an author is allowed to reign supreme in the assignation of meaning, they are ministers to their own religion. The rejection of this inherent truth or subject is an anti-theological activity. Denying God is a freeing motion that allows enlightenment beyond the restriction of his Word. Barthes enables readers to both deny definite meaning and the existence of god in one fell swoop. We are [mankind] free to assign our own meaning to everything, and no longer destined to the major religions’ predestination-an alleviation of Calvinism! The soul is finally free from sin.

Barthes’ philosophy of individualism falls into the realm of existential. His notion of the Author as a restricting voice is a novel realization that allows the reader to cross a threshold into a world of thought beyond “God’s hypostases” (1469). We all experience a newfound liberation in knowing that the impossible is possible and all manner of meaning can be read from a single text, as some notions are not easily described by words outright. To be allowed to remove them from the text freely, gives readers self-importance.

So for Barthes there is no “secret” meaning to anything. The removal of the subject or Author’s importance (and God’s as well) is the weaving of an incomprehensibly large fabric of meaning. Where those before Barthes claim that life may have an essential and inherent meaning, Barthes is freeing everything to have an infinite number of allusions. The priest may tell us we have a purpose in being here and carry the sins of our ancestors; Barthes tells us to reject God’s command and even existence and open our eyes to a world that allows infinite perceptions of both text and life!