ABSTRACT
The author is a modern figure, a product of our society insofar as, emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, of, as it is more nobly put, the "human person." (Barthes, 1968, 142-43)
W th this sentence Roland Barthes in his essay "The Death of the Author" sug-gests how the humanist perception of the subject is traditionally re-presented by the role of the author: the individual
who gives life to and nourishes the work. Barthes counters, however, with what is by now a familiar critique: "it is language which speaks, not the author" (1968,143). Barthes as structuralist ties this critique of subjectivity to what he perceives as a shift of power and authority from the author/owner to the writing itself (and then to the reader, Barthes concludes in this essay). The resulting emphasis on writing and reading as production necessarily leads to a critique of the 'work' as that entity complete in itself, whole, and encapsulating a meaning that transcends time and history. Rather, writing becomes 'text'. In
beginning to define 'text', Barthes provides a fine working definition of intertextuality:
We know that a text is not a line of words releasing a single "theological" meanmg (the "message" of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of wntings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. /1968, 146)
Derrida, too, in a discussion of ecnture/writing, denies single theological meaning when he says: "The specificity of writing [is thus] intimately bound to the absence of the Father" /1981, 77). Derrida's pomt is that there is no such thing as a sovereign subject of ecriturej rather, there is a system of relations between the psyche, society, the world, and so forth. This system of interrelationships is intertextuahty: the multiple writings-cultural, literary, historical, psychological-that come together at any 'moment' in a particular text. In the following discussion I use Barthes's essay "From Work to Text" in conjunction with two novels, Foe and Friday, to illustrate, first, the move from work to text, and second, aspects of intertextuality.
