The Death of the Literary Work

Margit Sutrop

Philosophy and Literature, Volume 18, Number 1, April 1994, pp. 38-49 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/phl.1994.0067

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/417848/summary

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Margit Sutrop

THE DEATH OF THE LITERARY WORK

More than twenty-five years have passed since Roland Barthes

issued his manifesto, "The Death of the Author,"1 where he
complained that classical criticism had never concerned itself with the
reader but only with the one who writes. Declaring that "we" must
reverse the myth, he said: "the birth of the reader must be requited by
the death of the Author."2
Three years later, in 1971, Barthes published a new essay, "From
Work to Text," where he proclaimed that there was a need for a new
object—the Text, in opposition to the traditional notion of the work.3
We might well say that he had announced that the birth of the text must
be requited by the death of the work. At least many literary theorists of
that time read this essay in just this way.
Both claims of Barthes became influential and found a lot of
supporters. The author was sidelined by the reader who, instead of
understanding the literary work and laying out the meaning in inter-
pretation, now claimed to be producing meanings of texts. Together
with the author, the literary work was excluded and replaced by the
text.

Barthes articulated the need for a new object—the text—for he

thought that the work was related to the meaning, behind or within the
work. In order to prove that the task of the literary criticism is not to
find out what the work means, he found it necessary to claim that the
author was dead. Hence, the real content of the metaphor "dead
author" is that there is no transcendent figure at the origin of a text's
meaning.
A new object—the text—was needed for the same purpose. It had to
let the critics produce meanings for the texts, instead of describing the

Philosophy and Literature, © 1994, 18: 38-49

 Margit Sutrop39

hidden meaning. It offered the critics the desired possibility of seeing

themselves as co-authors, allowed them to feel like creators. For most of
the literary critics the substitution of the literary work by the text also
had axiological foundations. To speak about works meant to be
concerned with "great things" with exceptional auras. Texts were
something more worldly, something that the critics could work on. The
literary work was not in fashion anymore. Anybody who didn't want to
be out-of-date had to use the more fashionable notion of the text.
But this general agreement about the displacement of the work by
the text concealed the fact that although everybody spoke about texts
there was no consensus about what the text is. The word "text" was used
imprecisely, in many different ways—even by the same critic. "Text" has
by now so many different meanings that its use seems to be altogether
meaningless. All is text. Text is all.
It seems to me that some roots of this terrible mess can be found in
Roland Barfhes's article "From Work to Text," where he articulated the
need for this new object. Barthes's essay is full of contradictions, and he
himself attaches to the notion of the text two radically different
contents; therefore it is not clear in what sense the text is the opposite
of the work.
Curiously, there has been a lot of discussion about the death of the
author but the death of the literary work has hardly been resisted. It has
been taken for granted that the literary work closes itself on a signifed,
that the work is a closed, finished object which hides its meaning. I
think there are good reasons to doubt this claim. But the refutation of
this premise is a topic of another essay. My main point here is to argue
that the literary work has lost its content because the notion of the text
has had such an important extension.
Even among the literary theorists who agree with this extension of
the concept of the text to the concept of the work, not all oppose the
text to the work in the way Barthes did. Many reader-oriented critics are
convinced that every text has its meanings only in reading. As the
meaning is produced, assembled or constituted in the reading process,
it is always subjective, individual, plural. Reader-response critics, differ-
ently from Barthes, don't distinguish texts from works on the basis of
their relation to the meaning. They describe texts as authorized
products which have their response only in reading, and works as the
products of the reading of the texts. But even there the literary work
becomes the victim of the text and the work will be sidelined.
In the second part of this article I will compare the phenomenologi-
40Philosophy and Literature

cal theory of the Polish philosopher Roman Ingarden and the reader-
response theory of the German critic Wolfgang Iser. What I am
interested in is how Wolfgang Iser, while denying Roman Ingarden's
approach to the literary work, makes this important extension of the
notion of the text—in the spirit of Barthes—at the same time giving the
notion of the literary work a radically new content. I will try to show why
Iser at first describes the literary work as the communication process
between the author's text and the reader's individual disposition but
later abandons the concept of the literary work altogether.

As the metamorphosis of the literary work into the text was so closely
related to the birth of the reader, it is evident that the notion of the
literary work could have its comeback only after the return of the
author. In 1992 Sean Burke published a book entitled "The Death and
Return of the Author,"4 where he showed that the poststructuralist
attempt to remove the author was misguided and philosophically
untenable. This gives some hope that a book about the death and
return of the literary work may follow.
But so far, even the sharpest philosophical analysis has had no
influence on those speaking about the death of the author.5 Of course,
it is not an easy task to prove that the claim that the author is dead is not
true. Barthes's claim is not a sort of thesis that could be refuted by
arguments. In fact, Barthes was writing metaphorically and it is not
possible to upset a metaphor with the help of philosophical arguments.
It is similar to the situation where a champion in wrestling finds himself
helpless in a street struggle because he has relied on the holds of
classical wrestling. And even if there are strong arguments against this
claim that the author is dead, the critics remain deaf to them. They
simply do not want to lose their position, importance, and rights. Of
course, nobody wants to lose power.
On the other hand, there must be reasons why Barthes's manifesto
has been so influential, why it opened a new epoch in literary theory.
Barthes was not after all the first to speak against the author. Both New
Critics and Russian formalists had already for some time demanded
that the author be excluded. However, while the New Critics insisted
upon a focus on the words on the page and the Russian formalists on
the literariness of literature, Barthes was doing something different. He
suggested that the author had always been absent because of the fact
 Margit Sutrop41

that "writing is the destruction of every voice, every origin. Writing is

that neuter, that composite, that obliquity into which the subject flees,
the black-and-white where all identity is lost, beginning with the very
identity of the body that writes" ("DA," pp. 54-55).
This citation shows that for Barthes the removal of the author was
grounded in a new view of the discourse. Therefore, the birth of the
reader was also the birth of the text. Together with a shift from the
analysis of the structures to the analysis of the processes of signification,
the theory of the text was developed. Of course, not by Barthes alone
but together with Derrida, Kristeva, Sollers, and others who in the late
1960s and early 1970s were associated with the journal Tel Quel. Barthes
himself revealed that the definition of the text was elaborated for
epistemological purposes principally by Julia Kristeva.6
But although there was a whole theory developed by the text-
theorists to show that the removal of the Author transformed the
modern text, it is not clear in what sense their text is a new object. What
is the difference between the text and the work? Roland Barthes in his
article "From Work to Text" distinguishes the text from the work as
follows: "Whereas the Text is approached and experienced in relation
to the sign, the work closes itself on a signified" (p. 75). There are two
modes of signification that can be attributed to this signified: "on the
one hand, one can assume that it is obvious, in which case the work
becomes the object of a 'science of the letter' (philology); on the other
hand, one can assume that the signified is secret and ultimate, in which
case one must search for it, and the work then depends upon a
hermeneutic, an interpretation (Marxist, psychoanalytic, thematic, for
example). . . . The Text, on the contrary, practices the infinite deferral
of the signified [le recul infini du signifié] : the Text is dilatory; its field is
that of the signifier" ("WT," pp. 75-76) . Whereas the work is considered
to have meaning, the text, on the contrary, achieves plurality of
meanings, an irreducible plurality. Barthes underlines that "the text is
not coexistence of meanings but passage, traversal; thus it answers not
to an interpretation, liberal though it may be, but to an explosion, a
dissemination" (p. 76).
But this is not clear. Does Barthes wish to distinguish between two
ways of looking at the written word? If we approach and experience a
product of literature in relation to the sign, we read it as a text; if we
approach and experience a product of literature in relation to a unitary
signified, we degrade it to a work. Or is he speaking about different
kinds of writing: the products of literature are already closed on the
42Philosophy and Literature

meaning (they are works) or they are ready to achieve plurality of

meaning (in this case there are texts)?
Let us rephrase the question: does the difference come from what -we
are reading or from the way we read? Are the readers reading texts/
works or are the readers producing texts/works? In "From Work to Text"
Barthes articulates both possibilities. There is no one, unambiguous
answer to this question.
At first it seems that Barthes is speaking about two different kinds of
written word. This is where he warns us that "one must take particular
care not to say that works are classical while texts are avant-garde.
Distinguishing them is not a matter of establishing a crude list in the
name of modernity and declaring certain literary products to be in and
others out on the basis of their chronological situation" (p. 74). Here
he is against drawing the line between texts and works on the basis of
the time of production, but at the same time he seems to believe that it
is possible to draw this line between texts and works: "a very ancient
work can contain some text, while many products of contemporary
literature are not texts at all." This explanation tells us very clearly that
some products are texts or contain "some text," while others are not.
So, this suggests that for Barthes texts and works are different literary
products which should be approached and experienced in a different
way.
However, Barthes's next sentence leads us in absolutely another
direction. Barthes argues: "The difference is as follows: the work is
concrete, occupying a portion of book-space (in a library, for example):
the text is held in language: it exists only as discourse. The Text is not
the decomposition of the work, rather it is the work that is the Text's
imaginary tail. In other words, the Text is experienced only in an
activity, a production. It follows that the Text cannot stop, at the end of
a library shelf, for example; the constitutive movement of the Text is a
traversal [traversée]: it can cut across a work, several works" ("WT," pp.
74-75).
This radical turn makes me believe that now Barthes claims that the
real difference is the difference between an object and an event. Works
are concrete material objects that have been produced, texts are
experienced only in a production. Does it mean we have texts only as
reading processes? Or are texts produced in reading processes?
In "The Death of the Author," Barthes had claimed that the removal
of the author "utterly transforms the modern text (or—which is the
same thing—the text is henceforth produced and read so that the
 Margit Sutrop43

author absents himself from it at every level)" ("DA," p. 57). The text is
produced and read—ah, there's the rub! Barthes speaks about the text as
something that is both produced and read. But in order to be read, the
text must have been produced by somebody. Who could have produced
it? It could not have been the author as the precondition of the new
theory of the text is that the author absents himself at every level.
If the author is absent, there is only a reader left. It means that in
order to read a text, a reader must produce a text. How was it meant by
Barthes? That a reader produces a text he is going to read or that a text
is produced in reading? The last variant seems to be more likely, but
then the question—what is the reader reading?—still remains. If the
reader is reading the text, is it then the same text he is producing in
reading? If not, which text then? Who has produced this text the reader
is reading? But there seems to be little hope of finding the answer in the
articles of Roland Barthes or in the writings of other poststructuralists
as their theory is founded on the negation of any metadiscourse.
In the introduction to Barthes's essay, "Theory of the Text," Robert
Young has made it clear how hopeless and wrong it is to look for the
clear definition of the text in Barthes's writings. Young gives the
following explanation: "Just as text is not a stable object, so the word
text does not reify into a metalanguage. . . . So, in Barthes's essay, the
word enacts its own meanings, a wandering of signification which is,
precisely, text. The word and the concept text refuse to rest at any level
of arrested meaning, performing instead a play, a trembling and
overflowing of the signifiers, a stereographic shifting of signification."7
Barthes's theory of the text, which, in fact, should not be called a
theory at all (as it claims not to claim anything) , would not be worthy of
so much attention if it had influenced only the poststructuralists and
deconstructionists. But the truth is that it has caused the metamorpho-
sis of the literary work into the text also in those reader-oriented literary
theories that do not share this view of the discourse which grounds the
writings of Barthes and other text-theorists. The situation would not be
so complicated if it only meant replacing the concept of the work with
the concept of the text, thus abandoning the concept of the work
altogether.
However, several reader-oriented literary theories, although influ-
enced by the fashionable notion of the text, have tried also to preserve
the notion of the work by simply giving it a new content. In the
following let us look at the fate of this notion of the literary work, in its
new conceptualization, in the reader-response theory of Wolfgang Iser.
44Philosophy and Literature

II

Wolfgang Iser's reader-response theory (Wirkungstheorie) is often

thought to be a phenomenological theory. I think that although it is
true that Wolfgang Iser was inspired by the phenomenological aesthet-
ics of the Polish philosopher Roman Ingarden, his theory of reading
goes far beyond phenomenology. I wish to show that the main point
that distinguishes Iser's reader-response theory from Ingarden's phe-
nomenological aesthetics is their different understandings of what and
how the literary work is. While Ingarden was concerned with the
cognition of the literary work ofart, Iser is speaking about the reading of
the literary text.
The main subject of the investigations of Ingarden is the basic
structure and the mode of being of the literary work of art (in The
Literary Work ofArt)8 and the procedure which will lead to a knowledge
of the literary work; that is, Ingarden concerns himself with the
question of how the cognition of the work of art comes about and also
to what it does or to what it can lead (see The Cognition of the Literary
Work ofArt) .9 Wolfgang Iser is interested in what happens when we are
reading the literary text; he is describing the communication process,
the interaction taking place between the text and the reader (in The Act
of Reading)10 and trying to find an answer to the question—what
constitutes the literary text? (in The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting
Literary Anthropobgy) .u
Iser's most influential idea has been that reading is not a one-way
process from the text to the reader but "two-way traffic." The creative
role of the reader in the reading process results from the indeterminacy
in the text itself. Here Iser has picked up Ingarden's idea of the places
of indeterminacy (Unbestimmtheitsstellen) in the literary work of art,
especially in the stratum of "represented objects." According to Ingarden
this stratum consists of an unreal, invented, and imagined world which
includes people, things, processes, and events. While every real object is
completely determined, with imagined objects we never have complete
determination. As a literary work of art contains gaps, it is not
completely determined but is like a schematic formation (schematiches
Gebilde) , in which the places of indeterminacy are filled by the various
"concretizations" of the work.
Similarly to Ingarden, Iser speaks in "The Act of Reading" about
"schematized views" that are continually connected with each other in
the reading process and about the gaps that the reader fills in during
 Margit Sutrop45

the reading. But there is an important difference in their approach to

those "places of indeterminacy." Iser has picked up Ingarden's idea of
the places of indeterminacy and considered them to be the basic
element of the aesthetic response. But he set those gaps in the text while
Ingarden located them in the literary work of art.
Iser himself has not commented on this difference. He admits that
he uses the term "schematized views," coined by Ingarden, but he
presents the idea in such a form that one may easily get the impression
that Ingarden had also spoken about the places of indeterminacy as if
they were to be located in the text. Iser refers to Ingarden, saying, "The
text itself simply offers 'schematized aspects' through which the subject
matter of the work can be produced, while the actual production takes
place through an act of concretization" (Act, p. 21).
What is this that is produced through an act of concretization? For
Ingarden it is the concretization of the literary work of art and not the
literary work itself as Iser represents Ingarden's theory. Only a misun-
derstanding of Ingarden's claim lets Iser insist: "From this we may
conclude that the literary work has two poles, which we might call the
artistic and aesthetic: the artistic pole is the author's text and the
aesthetic is the realization accomplished by the reader. ... As the reader
passes through the various perspectives offered by the text and relates
different views and patterns to one another he sets the work in motion,
and so sets himself in motion, too." So Iser took the object which
Ingarden had called the literary work of art and renamed this as text.
He did not abandon the concept of the literary work altogether but
gave it a new content.
Although Ingarden describes the literary work of art as a schematic
structure that contains gaps, partially filled in by the reader, he does not
believe that the existence of the literary work is dependent upon the
reader. His claim is that just in the same way as the existence of the
musical work is not dependent on its current performance, the
existence of the literary work does not depend on a single act of
reading.
Ingarden's main desire is to establish that the literary work of art is
not a psychological phenomenon, that it is transcendent to all experi-
ences of consciousness, both of the author and the reader. He was
engaged in the struggle against psychologism just as his teacher
Edmund Husserl was. Therefore, Ingarden assigns to the literary work
of art a peculiar mode of being: "The literary work as such is a purely
intentional formation which has the source of its being in the creative
46Philosophy and Literature

consciousness of its author and its physical foundation in the text set
down in writing or through other physical means of possible reproduc-
tion (for instance, the tape recorder). By virtue of the dual stratum of
its language, the work is both intersubjectively accessible and reproduc-
ible, so that it becomes an intersubjectively intentional object, related
to a community of readers" (LW, p. 14).
Ingarden believes in the intersubjective accessibility and the identity
of the literary work because it is guaranteed in his opinion by the
meaning-units that form the second stratum of the literary work. In The
Literary Work ofArt, Ingarden calls verbal meanings ideal entities, in the
spirit of Edmund Husserl. In The Cognition of the Literary Work ofArt, he
characterizes them as the objective intentional correlates of mental acts
which have the same structure at every time when the same meaning is
intended. The meaning is transcendent to these acts, and therefore it
can remain the same in all acts which intend it. At some point of time,
meaning simply is conferred on it or joined with a verbal sound.
Understanding a sentence means actualizing the meaning intentions in
that sentence.
It is by means of this stratum of meaning-units that Ingarden finds it
possible to talk about the existence of the literary work of art itself as
something transcendent to the individual acts of the consciousness of
the reader and the author. Ingarden's explanation of the literary work
of art as an intentional object that has a heteronomous way of being
thanks to the semantic units is not, however, acceptable to Iser. He does
not share Ingarden's phenomenological view of verbal meanings as
ideal entities or as objective intentional correlates of mental acts.
Unfortunately, Iser does not present his own theory of verbal mean-
ings. We can learn about it only in a roundabout way as he refers to his
own position in citing F. Smith's book Understanding Reading. "Meaning
is at a level of language where words do not belong. . . . Meaning is part
of the deep structure, the semantic, cognitive level. And you may recall
that between the surface level and the deep level of language there is
no one-to-one correspondence. Meaning may always resist mere words"
(Act, p. 120).
Iser does not agree with Ingarden that the reader's task is to find the
meaning intention, to perform the appropriate signitive acts, which
lead to the intentional projection of the objects of these acts, the
intentional objects. Instead, Iser speaks about the image-making activity
of the reader. While we read, we are continuously and unconsciously
constructing images (BiId) in a process Iser calls "passive synthesis." The
 Margit Sutrop47

meaning, Iser claims, "can only be grasped as an image. The image

provides the filling for what the textual pattern structures but leaves
out" (Act, p. 9).
Imagistic in character, meaning is dependent upon the reader's
imagination; it is to be found neither in the words printed on the page
nor outside the book (i.e., referentially). Iser concludes that such a
meaning must be the product of an interaction between the textual
signs and the reader's acts of comprehension.
Iser speaks about the literary work as the communication process
between the text and the reader, as the event that takes place between
them or simply as the convergence between the text and the reader. In
his view, the work is more than the text, as the text takes on life only
when it is read.
Ingarden also spoke about the "life" of the literary work of art but
always only in a metaphorical, figurative sense. He said that "the literary
work 'lives' while it is expressed in a manifold of concretizations" (LW,
pp. 346-47). But at the same time he always stressed that the literary
work, although it may be fleshed out in concretizations, is different
from them. It is only expressed in them but each such development
goes beyond the work. On the other hand, none of the developments
goes as far as the work itself. An adequate concretization will contain
the work of art as the skeleton.
Ingarden makes a clear distinction between the work of art and its
concretizations. "Now the principle of differentiation of the literary
work of art itself from its concretizations lies in the assertion that the
work itself contains the places of indeterminacy as well as various
potential elements (e.g., aspects, aesthetically relevant qualities) , whereas
these are removed or actualized in part in a concretization" (CLW,
p. 241).
Having renamed the literary work as the text Iser cannot find a
proper place for the literary work anymore. The only possibility would
be to put the literary work in the place of the concretization in
Ingarden's model. But although Iser describes the literary work as the
constituted being of the text in the consciousness of the reader, he is
not ready to show the literary work as a psychological entity. He knows
how passionately this view has been rejected in phenomenology.
Iser finds the way out talking poetically about the virtual position of
the literary work between the text and the reader. Not defining exactly
the ontological status of the literary work, he posits the polarity of
artistic and aesthetic in the literary work, with the artistic pole seen as
48Philosophy and Literature

the author's text and the aesthetic as the reader's realization: "In view
of this polarity, it is clear that the work itself cannot be identical with the
text or with the concretization, but must be situated somewhere
between the two" (Act, p. 21).
But how can the same entity consist of two poles and at the same time
lie between them? The inability to find a suitable place for the literary
work in his theory has led Iser in his recent writings to avoid altogether
the concept of the literary work. It has been removed even from the
earlier articles. For example, in his essay "The Interaction between Text
and Reader," printed in 1980 in The Reader in the Text,12 Iser speaks about
the literary work having two poles and a virtual position between the
text and the reader. Nine years later, when the same article was
published in the collection of his papers, Prospecting: From Reader
Response to Literary Anthropology,13 he has removed just those two para-
graphs concerning the literary work.
The text has taken the place of the literary work and there is no place
left for the literary work anymore. The literary work has disappeared,
only the two partners in the process of literary communication, the text
and the reader, have been left. So, we are back where we started from:
the birth of the text has been requited by the death of the literary work.
But the abandonment of the concept of the literary work seems to be
unfounded. We still need valid arguments as to why we should speak of
texts instead of works.

University of Tartu, Estonia

1 . Barthes's essay, "The Death of the Author," was at first published in America in 1967;
it was republished in France in Mantéia 5 (1968).
2.Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author," in Contemporary Critical Theory, ed. Dan
Latimer (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989), pp. 54—59; hereafter "DA" in the
text.

3.Roland Barthes, "From Work to Text," in Textual Strategies, ed. Josué V. Harar
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), pp. 73-81; hereafter "WT" in the text.
4.Sean Burke, The Death and Return of the Author (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 1992).
5.See, for example, Peter Lamarque, "The Death of die Author: An Analytical
Autopsy," in British Journal of Aesthetics 30 (1990): 319-31. This is one of the best
criticisms of the claim that the author is dead.
 Margit Sutrop49

6.Roland Barthes, "Theory of the Text," in Untying the Text, ed. Robert Young (Boston:
Roudedge and Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 36.
7.Ibid, p. 31.
8.Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art, trans. G. G. Grabowicz (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1973); hereafter LWin the text.
9.Roman Ingarden, The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art, trans. R. A. Crowley and
K. R. Olson (Evanston: Nordiwestern University Press, 1973); hereafter CLWin the text.
10.Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1978); hereafter Act in the text.
11.Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
12.Wolfgang Iser, "The Interaction between Text and Reader," in The Reader in the
Text, ed. S. R. Suleiman and I. Crosman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980),
pp. 106-19.
13.Wolfgang Iser, Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).