It was Barthes (1968) who coined the phrase 'The death of the author', in which he rejected the traditional view that the author is the origin of the text, the source of its meaning, and the only authority for interpretation. For Barthes, each text possesses a plurality of meanings, just as each 'I' which reads is 'already itself a plurality of other texts' and 'each text refers back differently to the infinite sea of the 'already written'' (Barthes, 1970, cited in Selden, 1985, p. 76). Thus to try 'to see all the world's stories..within a single structure' (Barthes, 1970, cited in Selden, 1985, p. 76) is a vain ambition which limits meaning and reduces the reader to a consumer of fixed meaning rather than turning the reader into a producer of meaning. Barthes states:
Textual analysis indeed requires us to represent the text as a tissue,..as a skein of
different voices and multiple codes which are at once interwoven and unfinished.
(Barthes, 1981, cited in Lodge, 1988, p. 193).
Yet what this also suggests is that any reading of a text, however good, will only be a partial one and 'as the reader adopts different viewpoints the text's meaning is produced in a multitude of fragments which have no inherent unity' (Barthes, 1970, cited in Selden, 1985, p. 77).
Barthes' contribution to literary theory is a useful reminder for all writers and readers and his contention that:
The worst sin a writer can commit is to pretend that language is a natural,
transparent medium through which the reader grasps a solid and unified 'truth' or
'reality'... Bourgeois ideology, promotes the sinful view that reading is natural and
language transparent; it insists on regarding the signifier as the sober partner of the
signified, thus in authoritarian manner repressing all discourse into a [single]
meaning ( Selden, 1985, p. 74).
has resonances in Culler's (1982) observation that:
Structuralists are convinced that systematic knowledge is possible; Poststructuralists
claim to know only the impossibility of this knowledge (cited in Gavey, 1990, p.
7).