Barthes’s concern in this essay is with who "is speaking" (114) in a literary text. His thesis is that "writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral space . . . where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost" (114).

Barthes’s begins by arguing that the "image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centred on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions" (114). Literary criticism, he argues, still consists for the most part in seeking an "explanation of a work . . . in the man or woman who produced it" (115). Such a view is predicated upon the assumption that a literary work is "always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the author ‘confiding’ in us" (115). Within this scheme of things, Barthes points out, authorship has long been conceptualised on the basis of two principal metaphors, the temporal and the paternal. The author is "always conceived of as the past of his own book: book and author stand automatically in a single line divided into a before and after" (116). Equally importantly, the author is thought to "nourish the book" (116) and to be "in the same relation of antecedence to the work as a father to his child" (116). Barthes hastens to add that such emphases are historically comprehensible: this attachment of the "greatest importance to the ‘person’ of the author" (114) is, Barthes asserts, the "culmination of capitalist ideology" (114) and its individualist ethos: the Author is a "product of our society insofar as, emerging from the Middle Ages and English Empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual" (114).

Barthes contends that Émile Benveniste’s comments on the nature of the first person pronoun and on the relationship between subjectivity and language have radical implications for such traditional views of the author. Recent research, he argues, has shown that the

whole of the enunciation is an empty process, functioning perfectly without there being any need for it to be filled with the person of the interlocutors. Linguistically the author is never more than the instance writing, just as I is nothing other than the instance saying I: language knows a ‘subject’, not a ‘person’, and this subject, empty outside of the very enunciation which defines it, suffices to make language ‘hold together’. . . . (116)

Drawing a distinction between "modern" (116) and classic texts which in his essay "From Work to Text" he would deny, Barthes argues that modern texts must be conceptualised as authorless. In lieu of an author, Barthes speaks of the "scriptor" (116) who neither precedes nor ‘fathers’ the text. Rather, s/he is

born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate; there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now. (116)

The scriptor's "hand cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin--or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins" (116).

For Barthes, consequently, the "text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God)" (116), as it were. The text is, rather, a "multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture" (116). The writer’s "only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others" (117). The writer does not "express himself": the "inner ‘thing’ he thinks to translate is itself only a ready-formed dictionary, its words only explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely" (117). As such, the ‘scriptor’ "no longer bears within him passions, humours, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense dictionary from which he draws a writing that can know no halt" (117).

Traditional criticism has been intent, as we have seen, upon "discovering the Author (or its hypostases: society, history, psyche, liberty) beneath the work: when the Author has been found, the text is ‘explained’" (117). To "give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing" (117), in other words, to arrest signifying play. Once the author is done away with, the "claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile" (117). Substituting the term ‘writing’ for literature, Barthes argues that in the "multiplicity of writing everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered" (117): there is "nothing beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced; writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out a systematic evaporation of meaning" (117). Writing,

by refusing to assign a 'secret', an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text), liberates what may be called an antitheological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases--reason, science, law. . . . (117)

Given the principle of différance at work in all signifying systems, the significance of an utterance has the capacity to disseminate in a potentially infinite number of directions.

However, Barthes does not deny that utterances are credited with a single meaning. Such a meaning is not simply found there, he contends, but is produced by the listener/reader who arrests signifying play. Pointing out that "[c]lassic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature" (118), Barthes argues that a

text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. (118)

In short, the "birth of the reader must be at the death of the Author" (118).

In summary, because the sign operates neither referentially nor expressively, literary texts do not reflect reality nor do the express the ideas of the author. Langue, predicated upon différance, precedes the author determining how s/he views external reality and his/her self. It is therefore useless to seek to determine the meaning of a text by reference, as E. D. Hirsch urges us to do, to the author’s intention. It is also useless to seek to verify the latter primarily by reference to what we know about his or her life. Within the traditional schema of the literary work, the author is conceptualised as something of a father to the work. Barthes points out that it may in fact be the other way around. What we know about the author is less the origin of the text than the effect of what we read there. We cannot confirm the meaning of a text by reference to the putative life of the writer; indeed, what we know about the writer is precisely what we can deduce from the text. The text, paradoxically, gives birth to the writer in this way. Barthes concludes that the primary determiner of meaning in the text is the reader who does not just passively ingest the writer’s intention. Rather, the reader is the active producer of meaning who arrests signifying play in the manner that he or she sees fit.

The question which Barthes ponders in this essay is the following: if literary texts do not refer to reality nor express the author’s original ideas, how exactly do texts produce meaning? The answer is: just as signs signify by virtue of their relationship of différance to other signs, so too do texts signify by virtue of their intertextual relations with other texts. All texts are caught up, like signs, in a incalculably enormous system of texts (analogous to the signifying system) which is also predicated upon différance. Like the sign, no text is an island unto itself, each text depending upon the other texts if it is to mean.

Barthes’s point is that we understand the meaning of each text by relating it, segment by segment as we read, to bits and pieces of the other texts (texts of all kinds and not just literary texts) which we have internalised and absorbed into our consciousness. Even if we are illiterate and unable to read, we ceaselessly ingest all kinds of oral utterances which then form our consciousness in the same way that written texts do. For most persons, consciousness is formed out of a mixture of oral and written utterances. Barthes’s argument, you might recall, is that the Author should not be privileged in literary criticism in the way that he has traditionally been because the so-called Author has little agency and is little more than a ‘scriptor,’ more scripted than scripting. Language is not a vehicle or instrument which people use: it is, rather, the other way around. Langue speaks or writes itself through people, in the Derridean schema, the author’s hand being cut off from his intention and will. Texts, from this point of view, almost write themselves as scriptors merely regurgitate a zillion texts absorbed consciously or unconsciously. Hence, Barthes’s statement: "we shall not speak of the author, Edgar Poe, nor of the literary history of which he is part" (174).

Barthes’s goal in painstakingly segmenting the short story "M. Valdemar’ by Edgar Allan Poe is to demonstrate the complex intertextual process by which we all read without realising it. (He describes this as "reading . . . filmed in slow-motion" [174]. Moreover, he calls this a "textual analysis" [172] as opposed to the "structural analysis" [172] of Narratologists.) A given segment (what he terms a "lexia" [173]) in a text may be classified as belonging to a particular code if it shares a particular function with similar segments of other texts. Dividing the text into lexias is an "arbitrary empirical" (173) exercise "dictated by the concern of convenience, it is simply a segment within which the distribution of meanings is observed" (173). By meaning, Barthes means less the denotated meanings than the "connotations" (173) or "secondary meanings" (173). These "connotation-meanings can be associations" (173), he points out, as much as they may be "relations, resulting from a linking of two points in the text" (173). Later, he defines the code as "associative fields, a supra-textual organization of notations" (191). All codes are "essentially cultural: the codes are certain types of ‘deja-lu’ [already read], of ‘deja-fait’ [already done]: the code is the form of this ‘deja’, constitutive of all the writing in the world" (191). Some codes deal, for example, with the description of the actions taken by the characters or the solving of a mystery. Others refer to geographical locales or historical periods. Yet other segments may gesture to certain literary formulas with which most readers are familiar (e.g. ‘once upon a time’), etc.

Barthes identifies five main codes:

• Hermeneutic: this concerns the enigma which arises at the commencement of any utterance and the resolution of which the progression of the narrative defers: who is speaking? What is this about? Who dunnit? Etc.
• Semic: this concerns the connotations often evoked in characterisation or description.
• Symbolic: this concerns the binary oppositions by which humans ‘cut up’ the real; hence, a character may be described as a father (as opposed to son), a woman (as opposed to man), Life/death, etc.
• Proairetic: this is the code of action and concerns the basic sequential logic of action and behaviour.
• Cultural: this code embraces all references or allusions to that common reservoir of ‘knowledges’ (religious, medical, psychological, literary, etc.) which comprises a given culture. As Barthes puts it, this is the "code of knowledge, or rather of human knowledges, of public opinions, of culture as it is transmitted by the book, by education, and in a more general and diffuse form, by the whole of sociality" (191). There are several sub-codes subsumed within the cultural code: the scientific, the rhetorical, the chronological, the socio-historical.

Barthes’s point in reading in this way is to demonstrate that no text is a "finished, closed product, but is a production in progress, ‘plugged in’ to other texts, other codes (this is the intertextual) and thereby articulated with society and history in ways which are not determinist but citational" (172). Barthes is rejecting here the conventional Marxist focus on those socio-historical factors which determine the text. Textual analysis, by contrast, in seeking to understand its "‘signifiance’" (172) "does not try to find out what it is that determines the text (gathers it together as the end-term of a causal sequence), but rather how the text explodes and disperses" (172). He continues: "Our aim is not to find the meaning, nor even a meaning of the text. . . . Our aim is to manage to conceive, to imagine, to live the plurality of the text, the opening of its signifiance’" (173). His goal is to show "departures of meaning, not arrivals" (174) precisely because what "founds the text is not an internal, closed, accountable structure, but the outlet of the text onto other texts, other signs, what makes the text is the intertextual" (174), what he terms elsewhere its "combinational infinity" (174). The text is a "tissue, . . . a skein of different voices and multiple codes which are at once interwoven and unfinished, a stereophony" (193). Hence, Barthes’s insistence that he is not undertaking a structural or narratological analysis: "it is not a question of delivering the ‘structure’ of Poe’s story, and even less that of all narratives, but simply of returning more freely, and with less attachment to the progressive unfolding of the text, to the principal codes which we have located" (191).