Awritingreader’s Weblog

Words are human-bound. Very plainly put, words simply cannot survive without their human vocalizers. Any Linguist will tell you that our oral ability to respond to symbols and speak words cannot (rather obviously) exist without people and furthermore, it cannot exist without people in relationship. The written word is not enough to constitute a language and no language can be scribed without a vocal equivalent.

Therefore, the insistence by Barthes and his contemporaries that writing must somehow be transcendent and freed from the author is merely illogical. It may seem like a trite criticism, but I cannot comprehend how a work is supposed to be so… untouchable, so… infallible in and of itself. To suggest that writing begins once the author “dies” just cannot be if the writing could never have been without that author. “To reach that point where only language acts, ‘performs’, and not ‘me’” (1467) simply cannot hold because the language only speaks what the author commands it to, and therefore the author speaks.

Barthes equates his theory of separation with that of Bertolt Brecht (German poet and dramatist). Brecht was known and famed for his new practice of theatre that called stark attention to the “fake-ness” of theatre in order to somehow make the content more powerful. As a result, theatre-goers were left mere observers of a spectacle and never allowed to emotionally participate in what they watched. Brechtian theatre is distant and disconnected because (in my personal theory) there is no room for honest emotional conversation between producer and consumer.

My fear with what Brecht and Barthes do by removing a human, relational element from the process is create only half the experience. Brechtian theatre was popular in its day because it was new and the masses are fickle. I feel confident in saying that most (not all) people now don’t really enjoy his style of theatre and it only remains a relatively widespread practice as a consequence of a “cultivate your aesthetic taste” mentality. Likewise, Barthian theory was not the end all of literary criticism. Somehow his theory didn’t provide all the answers and so others came along challenging, critiquing, and shifting his theories. Though perhaps reasonable within their respective theories, these ideas complicate when you factor in the necessary human component.