The Death of the Author

Balzac's Sarrasine example of a sentence with multiple possible speakers: the hero, Balzac (the man), Balzac (the author), universal wisdom, or romantic psychology.
It's impossible to know the true speaker because all writing is a confluence of voices.
Literature creates a voice without a specific origin, a neuter space where identity is lost, including the author's.
Once a story is told for its own sake, separate from direct action on reality, the author's voice loses its origin, and writing commences.

In primitive societies, narratives are delivered by mediators (shamans, speakers) admired for their skill, not personal genius.
The author is a modern concept arising from English empiricism, French rationalism, the Reformation, and the rise of the individual.
Positivism and capitalist ideology have further emphasized the author's person.
The author dominates literary history, biographies, interviews, and the personal connections writers make between their lives and works.
Criticism often explains works through the author's personal failings (e.g., Baudelaire's work as his failure, Van Gogh's as his madness).

Some writers have attempted to subvert the author's role.
Mallarmé: Language should replace the author; language speaks, not the person. Writing accesses a pre-existing impersonality.
Valéry: Questioned and mocked the Author, emphasized the linguistic, almost random, nature of writing, and championed the verbal condition of literature.
Proust: Blurred the lines between the writer and characters.
- The narrator isn't who saw, felt, or writes, but who will write. His life became a work modeled after his book.
- Example: Montesquiou is derived from Charlus, not the other way around.
Surrealism: Sought direct subversion of codes through violating expected meanings and automatic/collective writing, which helped secularize the image of the Author.