from "Work to Text" by Roland Barthes

Discuss Barthes’s poststructuralist notion of intertextuality. What, for Barthes, differentiates or distinguishes “text” from [literary] “work”?

For Roland Barthes, intertextuality refers to the interrelatedness of a text with other texts. In his essay From Work to Text, he states that a text is “itself being the text-between of another text.” No text is original (it is how I get it). A text is but a composition with citations from other texts which, according to him, “are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read: they are quotations without inverted commas.” The author does not only cite other texts but also picks up meaning/message from other existing texts and expresses such meaning/message in his own way. Strictly speaking, then, a text has no author—he is not the text’s source. The author is merely an instrument to bring out the meaning which has already existed long before the author exists. After the text is born, the author is no longer that important. This implies: if one wants to find out the meaning of the text, one must not “find the ‘sources’, the ‘influences’” of the author (a belief which falls “under the myth of filiation”) because the author is not the text’s source. As Barthes clearly declares the death of the author, anyone can read and find the meaning of the text without the author (or the father). This idea supports the principle that there is no one meaning of a text (not even the author’s) but there are as many interpretations as there are readers.
In Barthes two essays From Work to Text and The Death of the Author, he gives vivid distinctions between Work and Text: (1) the work is displayed, while the text is demonstrated; (2) work is held in hand, text, in language; (3) work is the “book”, text, the “content”; (4) work is close to signifier, text, to signified; (5) work gives pleasure, text, enjoyment; and (6) work has an author, text, a dead author (only a “scriptor”). I would like to focus on the “author/scriptor” issue. For Barthes, a text has no author but a sciptor. He explains that the author is just the past of the text. The author exists as he tells the story, and he ceases to exist as the text is produced. On the other hand, the scriptor exists to produce but not to explain the text. Unlike the author, the scriptor “is born simultaneously with the text, [it] is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, [and it] is not the subject with the book as predicate.” The scriptor is aware that “his hand [is] cut off from any voice.” This creates a difference between a work and a text.