The Birth of the Scriptor - the Death of the Artist?

I've mentioned a few time that when reading and interpreting a novel, typically I prefer not to think about the specific author. So I was excited to read an essay titled The Death of the Author. I share Barthes' objection to the idea that a "true" reading of a text depends on the discovery of its author: "When the Author has been found, the text is 'explained' - victory to the critic" (1325). This is definitely something that irks me.

But (much to my surprise) I'm finding that I have trouble with criticism that totally denies the author. Barthes says that "the scriptor no longer bares within him passions, humours, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense dictionary from which he draws a writing that can know no halt: life never does more than imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an initiation that is lost, infinitely deferred" (1325). Now, I can put aside consideration of the specific author (Shelley, for example). But how can we deny that a text springs forth from human "passions, feelings, impressions" etc.

Barthes would say that the "feelings" that are being "expressed" are not feelings at all, but something else: "Did he wish to express himself, he ought at least to know that the inner 'thing' he thinks to 'translate' is itself only a ready-formed dictionary" (1324). This seems like a much too literal take on the idea that "we can't get out of language" that we've referred to in class. Perhaps I'm just not comfortable with the idea that my thoughts and feelings are actually "dictionaries."

If I have a question for this week, it would be this: In the effort to make the study of literature scientific, do we get away from the fact that literature is artistic human expression? Barthes says that literature "would be better from now on [called] writing" (1325). As critics of art, are we comfortable with this?

Incidentally, I found myself relating well to Frye. Though the Norton introduction to Frye tells us that he "insists that literature is an 'autonomous verbal structure' quite cut off from any reference beyond itself" (1302), the existence of archetypes suggests to me the existence of Jung's collective unconscious, in which case we can ignore the specific author, but we can still note that the text reflects our collective human dreams, desires, emotions, etc.

Perhaps Frye is not concerned with the origins of archetypes, but his acknowledgment of their existence in literature as in myth and ritual prevent us from making the (I believe) false observation that a work of literature exists in a vacuum.

Dan