Year 2: Death of the author

I have been reading a text called The Death of the Author by Roland Barthes. In this post I will be attempting to draw meaning from this one paragraph at a time.

The first paragraph opens with a sentence from Balzac that says "It was Woman, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive fears, her unprovoked bravado, her delicious delicacy of feeling". Then Barthes asks a question whether or not this sentence comes from Balzac’s own experience or knowledge or if it is universal wisdom or romantic psychology. Authorship provides freedom to be many people at once. The whole first paragraph suggests that the literature exists independently from the original author. It is hard to know where the author ends and the story begins.

The second paragraph backs this statement as it talks about how primitive societies undertake narrative. The narrator's performance is admired but not his genius. The text goes on to explain that the author is a modern concept and how much the person is appreciated through magazines, biographies, entries in literary history books and many others. Everyone remembers the author's personality, ideas and passions. Society tends to remember the author but not the person with his quirks and imperfections.