The Death of the Author

Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) was a 19th-century French novelist considered to be a leading figure in literary realism, a style characterized by close attention to physical detail and unsentimental representation of daily social life. He was the author of 36 novels, a dozen novellas, and many short stories, not including several works that were published posthumously. His masterwork was La Comédie Humaine (The Human Comedy), an ultimately unfinished multivolume work of interconnected novels and stories, of which the novella Sarrasine is part, and Eugenie Grandet is the first. Balzac was also known for his novel Le Pere Goriot. Balzac’s works treated the darker side of the human condition and the corruption rife in everyday society, subject matter he sought to draw from his own life experiences.

A major French poet and writer of the 19th century, Baudelaire wrote in a distinctively modern style that combined formal precision with close observation of everyday life while also taking up exotic topics and employing extravagant metaphors and symbols. His most famous collection is Les Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil), os which his well-known poem "The Albatross." Its prefatory poem “To the Reader” must have resonated with Barthes, as it addresses the “hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother.” In that famous line, Baudelaire emphasizes the interdependence of author and reader, both of whom are given to mental laziness that distracts from real art (as does belief in the centrality of the author for Barthes). Baudelaire’s poetry marked an important bridge from Romanticism to modernity and is considered a major forerunner of and influence upon symbolist poets like Mallarmé, Valéry, and others.

Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) was an English writer and critic best known as the author of Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821), a memoir widely considered to be the first major addiction narrative in Western literature. In it, De Quincey recounts first taking opium to relieve pain, describing the pleasure he derived from the drug. A longer section, however, is devoted to “the pains of opium,” in which he recounts the many deleterious physical and mental effects of his addiction. Barthes directly cites Baudelaire’s mention of De Quincey’s virtuosic skill with ancient Greek, a language that directed and shaped De Quincey’s remarkable English prose style. Barthes probably also meant his reference to De Quincey to resonate with his claim that “new writing” exists outside of time, for De Quincey describes how his experiences of being high on opium were ecstatic—that is, beyond time and space. De Quincey influenced many later writers, notably Edgar Allan Poe and Baudelaire.

Mallarmé was an important French symbolist poet of the 19th century whose work anticipated many aspects of 20th-century avant garde art and literary criticism, including structuralism and poststructuralism. Mallarmé is an apt inclusion in Barthes’s essay, as his poetry practiced a highly disciplined and rigorous attention to the poem itself—both its look on the page and its sound on the ear. He did this to eschew the possibility of readers determining precise meaning and to relegate meaning itself to a secondary place—or even no place at all—with respect to the work of art.

Paul Valéry (1871-1945) was a symbolist poet and writer much influenced by his friend and mentor Stéphane Mallarmé. Barthes refers to him as one of the writers whose work showed an understanding of “writing” as Barthes conceives it.