In what way does Barthes’ essay DOA brings out his theories of text and

intertextuality

The most eloquent theorist of intertextuality, who always attacked the notions of
stable meaning and unquestionable truth, was Roland Barthes. He is associated
with structuralism, post-structuralism, and semiotics. In his essay Theory of the
Text (1981), Barthes defined what he meant by the term ‘text’ and
‘intertextuality’. Barthes built his theory on both Julia Kristeva’s and Mikhail
Bakhtin’s work. A textual scholar is considered to be someone concerned with
manuscript studies, with the task of determining the validity of a text. Barthes
argued that not the ‘text’ is the material inscription of a ‘work’, but the ‘work’ is
the material, offering the possibility of meaning, closure and thus of
interpretation. The term ‘text’ is considered to be the act of writing. Barthes
makes it clear that we should not confuse the text and the work: “The work is
held in the hand, the text in language”.

One of the most widely-known features of intertextuality is Barthes’ claim of the

“death of the Author”. Barthes combines psychoanalytical and linguistic theories
to argue that the origin of the text is not a unified authorial consciousness, but a
plurality of other words, other utterances, and other texts. Therefore, Barthes
suggests that the meaning of the author’s words does not originate from the
author’s own unique consciousness, but from the place of those words within
linguistic and cultural systems. The author has the role of a compiler, or arranger,
of pre-existent possibilities within the language system. Each word, sentence,
paragraph or whole text that the author produces takes its origins from the
language system out of which it has been produced. Thus, the meanings are
expressed in terms of the same system. The view of language expressed by
Barthes in this way is what theorists have termed intertextual.

In the Death of the Author Barthes’ definition of the word “text” – “a multi-
dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and
clash.” - emphasizes that the writer of such text is never completely original
(demoting the God-like Author to a “modern scriptor” ). Bathes is saying that the
author or narrator who is really the voice of the author himself is becoming less of
an entity within the text itself. By drawing a contrast between the author and the
narrative voice and language he succeeds in distancing the author from his work
and adding to his disappearance. Barthes stresses that the author is the past to
his own book. These things have already happened to the author therefore
creating a gap between the author now and the narrator of the text as it occurs
(the “scriptor”). Therefore, the difference between the text and the work itself
becomes an issue. The text would be what would be happening to the author
right then and there, as the work as a whole would be associated with the author.
The distancing between the author and the narrator grows because of this and
adds to Barthes argument.

Barthes states that reading is the true “place of writing”, using the example of the
Greek tragedies with texts that contain words with double meanings that appear
one-sided to the characters. However, the reader (the audience) is aware of the
double meanings, implying the “multiplicity of writing” rests on the reader for
open interpretation. “A text’s unity lies not on its origin but on its destination.”
Pointing out the importance of the reader in literary analysis, Barthes shows that
Classic criticism was “imposing a limit” on texts by only focusing on the author
themselves. Barthes concludes that the primary determiner of meaning in the
text is the reader who does not just passively ingest the writer’s intention. Rather,
the reader is the active producer of meaning who arrests signifying play in the
manner that he or she sees fit.

Intertextuality for Barthes means that nothing exists outside the text. Barthes’
intertextual theory destroys the idea that meaning comes from, and is the
property of, the individual author. Graham Allen synthesizes this view by saying
that “the modern scriptor, when s/he writes, is always already in a process of
reading and re-writing. Meaning comes not from the author but from language
viewed intertextually”

According to Barthes the intertextual nature of writing turns both the traditional
author and the traditional critic, into readers. Barthes concludes The Death of the
Author with the following lines: “… a text is made from multiple writings, drawn
from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody,
contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused, and that
place is the reader, not, as hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on
which all the quotations that make up the writing are inscribed without any of
them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination… the birth
of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author”