Editor's Choice
How can Barthes's "Death of the Author" be applied to Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author?
Quick answer:
Barthes's "Death of the Author" can be applied to Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author by emphasizing that the meaning of a text should not be controlled by the author. In the play, characters seek an author to define them, paralleling Barthes's idea that readers should interpret a text independently from its creator. This aligns with Barthes's view that the author's role should be diminished, allowing the audience or readers to derive meaning themselves.
Barthes's essay, "The Death of the Author," challenges the idea that the author is the one who we look to for the ultimate meaning of his or her text. He writes, "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." He suggests that reliance on the author is a bad thing, because it creates a hierarchal relationship, almost religious or capitalist in nature, where the "Author-God" controls the interpretation of the text. Instead, he prefers all meaning to come from readers, suggesting that the text means nothing until it is read. He concludes: "We know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the...
Unlock This Answer Now
Start your 48-hour free trial and get ahead in class. Boost your grades with access to expert answers and top-tier study guides. Thousands of students are already mastering their assignments—don't miss out. Cancel anytime.
Already a member? Log in here.
reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author."
"Six Characters in Search of an Author" overlaps with these ideologies in the sense that the characters do not have fully fleshed out personalities and lives, so they are searching for an author to give them their meaning. I imagine that Barthes would urge these characters to find their own path, or, if this is not possible, he would say the director of the play or the audience should do so instead. In any case, the supremacy of the author would have to be dismantled, and he would find the very premise—that the characters are trying to access the author—to be problematic.
Pirandello's play was first published in 1921, while Barthes's influential essay on the death of the author first appeared after more than forty years, in 1967. In spite of the differences in the historical and cultural context as well as the two authors' ideological positions, we could apply Barthes's ideas that the author is merely a "scriptor" whose text exists independently from him/her to Pirandello's play. The fact that the characters of the play surprisingly claim to be looking for thier author comes close to Barthes's idea that a text exists separately from its author who is not to be considered the authority on his/her works. The meaning of a text, therefore, is not to be found in the author's intentions as it is constantly renegotiated with every different reading. In addition, by pointing to the fictionality of the play, the characters in Pirandello's oeuvre challenge the status of the author among the audience, inviting the public to question the action that is occuring on stage.