Critique of Roland Barthes

Roland Barthes in his "The Death of the Author" does not take into account the dynamic relationship between history, society, text and author. The understanding and creation of author and/or text is not just predicated by the text in a vacuum; rather, by its relations with its environs. The reception and understanding of Rochester's poetry are bound to the reception and understanding of the author. Rochester's life and how we accept it complicates the way that we receive and understand his poetry. Barthes touches upon an interesting subject in his essay when he claims that:

The image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centred on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions, while criticism still consists for the most part in saying that Baudelaire's work is the failure of Baudelaire the man, Van Gogh's his madness, Tchaikovsky's his vice. The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author 'confiding' in us.

Needless to say, this description of the author is meant to show the absurdity of limiting a text's understanding to its relationship with its author. However, the author is more complicated that Barthes wants to posit. It is the "explanation" that the reader seeks to find in the author within the text, without the text, and between the text that creates the dramatic tension of literary meaning and understanding. The author is dynamic, he/she does not limit meaning, but rather, pluralizes it. The author explodes the meaning when we consider the author's relationship with the text, with society, with history, with the attribution of a text to an author.