Authors and Writers - Summary

Barthes creates a distinction between authors and writers in his essay entitled

“Authors and Writers.” According to Barthes, the author performs a function, the writer an

activity. Not that the author is a pure essence: he acts, but his action is immanent in its object,

it is performed paradoxically on its own instrument i.e., language. The author is the man who

labours who works up his utterance and functionally absorbs himself in this labour or this

work. His activity involves two kinds of norm: technical and artisanal. But the paradox is

that, the raw material becoming in a sense its own end, literature is at bottom, a tautological

activity, like that of those cybernetic machines constructed or themselves. The author is a

man who radically absorbs the world’s why in a how to write.

Language is neither an instrument nor a vehicle: it is a structure. But the author is the

only man, by definition, to lose his own structure of language. Yet, this language is a

laboured substance hence it can never explain the world, in short, literature is always

unrealistic, but its very unreality permits it to question the world. Thus, the author

existentially forbids himself two kinds of language: first, doctrine and second evidence.

The writer on the other hand, is a “transitive man”, he posits a goal, of which

language is merely a means, for him language supports a praxis, it does not constitute one.

Thus, language is restored to the nature of an instrument of communication, a “vehicle” of

thought. Even if the writer pays some attention to style, this concern is not ontological. The

writer performs no essential technical action upon language, he employs an utterance

common to all writers. For what defines the writer is the fact that his project of

communication is naïve. He does not admit that his message is reflexive, that it closes over

itself. He considers that his work resolves an ambiguity, even if it appears to be peremptory.
 The author participates in the priest’s role, the writer in the clerk’s; the author’s

language is an intransitive act, the writer’s an activity. The paradox is that society consumes a

transitive language with many more reservations than an intransitive one. The author’s

language is a merchandise offered through traditional channels, it is the unique object of an

institution created only for literature. The write’s language, on contrary, can be produced and

consumed only in the shadow of institutions which have, originally, an entirely different

function than to focus on language. Writer’s production always has a free but also a

somewhat “insistent” character. The writer offers society what society does not always ask of

him and his language appears paradoxically more individual at least in its motifs than the

author’s language. The writer’s function is to say at once and on every occasion what he

thinks. That is, the social function of literary language is precisely to transform thought into

merchandise.

According to Barthes, our age produces the author – writer. His function is inevitably

paradoxical. He provokes and exorcises at the same time. His language is free screened from

the institution of literary language. This new group has a complementary function: the

intellectual’s style functions as the paradoxical sign of a non - language, it permits society to

experience the dream of a communication without system, to write without “style”, to

communicate “pure thought”. It is a model at once distant and necessary, with whch society

playa something of a cat and mouse game. That is, the author – writer is an excluded figure

integrated by his very exclusion.