Canons III

2 The problem of Western discourse
Tension over the Canon has also pointed to the problem of discourse in contemporary discussion, highlighted by Jacques Derrida and others. Western thinking has historically given prominence to the author-ity of the Author of the text. French structuralist critic Roland Barthes proclaimed “The Death of the Author” in his essay-cum-obituary of 1964. By “Author” he meant the author as used by critics to author-ise a particular interpretation of a text over another, the author as the object of discovery. He wrote:
We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centres of culture...Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on the text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing...We are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of good society in favour of the very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or destroys; we know that to give writing its future it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

The presence of the Author in the text is a powerful illusion, but an illusion nonetheless. The study of “Classics” - works by “great” “authors” - is thus dramatically undermined, so it seems. Barthes saw that texts had to be “disentangled” rather than “deciphered” - the notion of an “ultimate” meaning is untenable. Barthes was of course sensitive to the theological consequences of his manifesto: the Death of the Author was also the Death of God, the ultimate Author.
As a consequence, notions of literary value break down, a savage blow to the Western Canon which was conceived as a repository of values. Reading now needs to be suspicious of the construction of reality in texts, not sympathetic to it, less still guided by it. The perceived order in the rhetoric of the West is susceptible to deconstruction.