Give me liberty and give me death

"The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author." I very much agree with this quote and the argument that preceded it, but I'd like to take it a step further. I believe that the death of the author and the subsequent birth of the reader entails also a sort of resurrection of the writer with a new creative license (zombie Balzac?).  This liberty comes from the abolition the past trend where "the explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it," so that an author can broach new literary subjects without fearing a reactionary witch hunt resulting from personal association - be it for violating social taboos, breaking laws, including characters who have a vague resemblance to living public figures, or a character that too closely resembles their own Mama (this instance would probably incur the most painful outcome). I believe this freedom to develop different personas and experiment within them, if fully attained across the board, could be an enlightening event for the Greater Literary Field. This way I don't have to wait till my crazy Mama dies before I write about her (that was not me talking, Mom - there is no "author" here).

The ultimate attainment, according to Barthes is "to reach that point where only language acts, 'performs', and not 'me'." In this explanation, I recall actors and their role in enunciation, which I believe is the perfect example of this ideal of performance since their personal identities (well, the vast majority anyway) are not taken into account as the spectator interprets their characters or the greater work as a whole. Furthermore, their on-screen personas don't follow them into reality (again, this is in general - I can't look at Michael Richards without thinking about Kramer). Even after watching American Psycho, and after he went psycho, I had no difficulty in believing him to be the valiant Dark Knight. 

One of Barthes' arguments, however, doesn't really ring clear for me: "A text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology." The social factor of language is not a new idea (although thanks to Saussure, I've been reminded almost 10 times in 10 small pages) so it would follow then that a reader's interpretation of language would be intrinsically related to their history with the language - and in history I include biography and psychology too. The mental image that is summoned by language is unique to the reader and has already been formed in the past and stocked in their 'dictionary', and this signifier won't change significantly when the signified is encountered again in a different context (I think I am recalling Lacan correctly).

In fact, even if it was somehow possible to extricate the personal self (reader) from the reading, it is my humble opinion that the reader should be encouraged to bring their own personality to the work. I believe this would even further open the text and break down the limits imposed on a work, which for Barthes can occur with the death of the author. If the author dies for the sake that his reader and book can live, I believe that these two latter should be able to live in multiple states, in multiple personalities, in multiple histories. They shouldn't need to exist like zombies: living but with dead souls, always on the search for a brain to revive their humanity.  

I really like the other Barthes articles and had intended to talk about them here but at this point I feel like a zombie.