Response to Barthes idea of disentangling a text

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Response to Barthes idea of disentangling a text
Barthes in his essay, ‘the death of the author’ states that an author is a historically and socially constituted subject; he is not just a person. He adds that an author can not exist outside a language and prior to it. This means that writing makes the author and not the author who makes the writing. The author according to Barthes is seen to have no authority over the text as he/she does not write it but only has power of mixing writings (Barthes 145). This implies that the author is disentangled from the text in that he/she does not have authority over the writings that he /she make. He criticizes the tendency of the reader to think about the facets of the identity of the author i.e. historical context, ethnicity, religion, political views, psychology and other personal attributes to extract significance from his work. However, to give the author a text and to give an explanation to that text is like limiting that text. Readers should separate works of literature from the creators so that to free it from interpretative tyranny because a single writing has many layers and meanings.
On the other hand, as Barthes talks about disentangling a text, he states that a text is a fabric of quotations which is got from numerous cultures instead of one person’s experience. He goes on to say that we can not detect accurately the intention of the writer in a text. He does not give a lot of recognition to authors and he mostly recognizes the reader. In his essay, he removes the writer from his prestigious position in the interpretation for the text and he places a lot of responsibility and authority to the reader. He does not get the connection between the author and authority of the text. In simpler terms, Barthes says that the author and the text are not related. Texts of literature do not express the thoughts of the author and therefore it is not sensible to decide the meaning of a particular text from the reference. What is known about the author is less to do with the text and what we can know about the author is just what can be deduced from the text. To insist that the reader is the most important in every text, Barthes says that the reader is the one who determines the meaning in the text and actively ingests the intention of the writer (Barthes 142).
In conclusion, the author has no authority over the text and once the writer is eliminated, claims to interpret a text are in vain. However, if...