The Death of the Author
reach, through a preexisting impersonality — never to be confused with the castrating
objectivity of the realistic novelist — that point where language alone acts, “performs,”
and not “oneself”: Mallarme’s entire poetics consists in suppressing the author for the
sake of the writing (which is, as we shall see, to restore the status of the reader.) Valery,
encumbered with a psychology of the Self, greatly edulcorated Mallarme’s theory, but,
turning in a preference for classicism to the lessons of rhetoric, he unceasingly questio-
ned and mocked the Author, emphasized the linguistic and almost “chance” nature of
his activity, and throughout his prose works championed the essentially verbal condition
of literature, in the face of which any recourse to the writer’s inferiority seemed to him
pure superstition. It is clear that Proust himself, despite the apparent psychological cha-
annaabi.ee 
