No. 23. The Death of the Author of The Death of the Author
From "Beach Bodies", a work in progress.
A milk float.
Roland Barthes’ essay The Death of the Author was a thing when I was studying English Literature at the University of Edinburgh in the 1990s. We all had to read it, alongside TS Eliot’s Tradition and the Individual Talent and a handful of other foundational works of 20th century literary criticism. Apparently, some academics in the American Ivy Leagues had got into Barthes around the same time they were discovering Derrida and Foucault, and their peers in Britain, slavishly worshipful of whatever the cool kids in the cultural hegemon across the Atlantic were up to, naturally had to follow suit.
If you haven’t read The Death of the Author then the argument goes something like this: the author’s intentions are unknowable blah blah blah, “it is the language which speaks” something something something, the death of the author entails the birth of the reader, fin. It was a slight piece and impossible to take seriously, but several of my lecturers acted as if it were a revelation they had received on golden plates from the angel Moroni. I remember one of them, a foppish fellow with good hair wistfully addressing the lecture hall full of the older teenagers among whom he spent his days: “What else are we but a biological imprint of culture?” he mused. Well, moving clouds of energy for a start, I thought. Perhaps I would develop a still more reductive atomic theory of literature.
Despite its ephemerality, I felt quite hostile towards Barthes’ essay because people with power over me insisted on its truth, even though they rarely (if ever) put his theory into practice. Of course, once I graduated, I was restored to a world where nobody gave a shit about French literary theory, and The Death of the Author immediately lost all relevance. I stopped thinking about Barthes until one day a few years later I was talking with a friend who had endured similar bullshit while studying Fine Art at Goldsmith’s College in London. He told me how Barthes had died: run over by a milk float on the beach. It was a bizarre, absurd death, completely pointless, entirely lacking in dignity, rather like when the manic, emu-wielding puppeteer Rod Hull fell off the roof while trying to adjust his TV aerial, or when Mama Cass choked to death on a sandwich. But Barthes’ death seemed worse: to be a grand theorist struck down by an exceedingly slow-moving vehicle transporting bovine lactatory products seemed almost metaphysical, a statement by the cosmos on the superfluity of his work.
For many years, if I thought of Barthes at all, it was as part of this tableau — a beach; boys in trunks and girls in bikinis playing volleyball; a little boy flying a kite while his little sister builds a sandcastle, grandmother dozing nearby in a striped deckchair. An elegantly dressed 60-year-old French intellectual strolls past lost in thought, when suddenly a lumbering vehicle full of rattling bottles appears from behind a dune and crashes into him. And that was the end of Roland Barthes, theorist.
But then one day, about twenty years after I had first heard the story, I found myself thinking about Roland Barthes again, and how he had died under the wheels of a milk float. And immediately I had doubts.
First, what was a milk float doing on the beach? These vehicles were open on every side so that young lads could easily jump on and off as they delivered bottles (and latterly cartons) of milk to doorsteps in the mornings. The uneven surface of the beach would surely cause the bottles to tumble out of the milk float and sink into the sand. Furthermore, why would you be delivering milk on the beach itself? Beach houses are built on solid ground and are serviced by roads like all other houses. It didn’t make sense.
Second, milk floats don’t just move slowly, they move very slowly. So slowly, it would almost take effort to get hit by one. Milk floats had electric motors back when the technology was a joke, and they could only reach a top speed of around 16 miles per hour. Thus, even if the milk float had appeared from behind a dune very suddenly it would have been moving with excruciating, turtle-like slowness on the sand.
Finally, did France even have milk floats? These vehicles seemed very British to me; eccentric, rubbish, clapped out in a 1970s post-imperial-decline kind of way.
So I looked up Barthes on Wikipedia (whatever its other failings, Wikipedia is usually reliable when it comes to the deaths of famous people) and within seconds a belief I had held for two decades disintegrated. It turned out that Barthes’ death had occurred nowhere near a beach, and that milk had nothing to do with it. Rather, Barthes died on the streets of Paris, after he was hit by a laundry truck.
It was still an unfortunate, pointless way to go, but less absurd. Laundry trucks on the streets of the French capital no doubt moved quite fast; it was easy to imagine that you might not see one coming. I pictured Barthes stepping out on the street, crossing the road on his way home as he always did, when a truck came hurtling round the corner far too fast. Pan! Death of the author. Was the laundry dirty? Clean? I do not know. Remove the details of what the truck was transporting, and you are left with something quite ordinary: a simple, tragic traffic accident, like the one that killed little Iona Ross, whose mother was a teacher at my primary school, when she was eight years old.
But still, the knowledge that Barthes did not die on the beach, and that no milk float was involved, left me feeling unsettled. I had definitely heard a story about an author who had died on the beach and an eccentric vehicle was involved. I typed several variations of “famous author died on a beach” into Google, but the answers were unsatisfactory.
First the algorithm proposed the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, but he drowned at sea and was subsequently washed up on the beach, and besides that, he died 64 years before the invention of the automobile. Then it informed me that an American writer named Gustav Kobbé had been hit by a seaplane either on the beach or near the beach in the early 20th century, but I had never heard of him, and I was certain that the death I was reaching for involved a vehicle with wheels. The algorithm wasn’t doing its job very well, so I texted my younger brother, David, who also studied literature and who has an excellent memory. Almost immediately he replied: Frank O’Hara. Run over by a beach buggy. An ex-girlfriend had written her undergraduate dissertation on the American poet and the details of O’Hara’s untimely demise had stuck with him for 22 years.
I had never read O’Hara, although I knew the name and had a vague sense that he was a poet of some significance from the middle of the 20th century. The algorithm’s failure was somewhat perplexing as many people had written about his death on the Internet; I even found a scan of the original report from The New York Times archive. O’Hara was only 40 years old when he died in 1966. When the beach taxi he was riding in with friends on Fire Island, New York, suffered a flat tire, he briefly stepped away from the vehicle and was struck by the dune buggy, driven by some young lad who was trying to impress a girl. O’Hara suffered terrible injuries and was rushed to a hospital on Long Island, where he died two days later.
But why had I conflated the two authors? There was nothing conscious about it obviously. I had learned the details of their deaths at around the same time but then my memory had overlaid the details of Frank O’Hara’s death by beach buggy onto that of Barthes’ death by laundry truck. But it had gone beyond simply mixing up the details; my hippocampus, it turned out, was also quite inventive, erasing both vehicles and replacing them with the milk float. This was the part that baffled me the most; without that detail I might never have questioned my faulty recollection of Barthes’ death. Perhaps, I thought, The Death of the Author had annoyed me even more than I realized, and my unconscious had invented the milk float to heighten the bizarre, existential pointlessness of Barthes’ death as an act of satire.
That was about as much introspection as I could be bothered with. I was ready to consign Roland Barthes’ milk float to the abyss of forgetting when, shortly before sleep, I had an epiphany. In the early 1970s Benny Hill reached the top of the UK charts with a novelty song entitled Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West) that included mention of a milk float in the lyrics1. Although it was before my time, the song had a long afterlife on TV clip shows and so I heard it growing up. In addition, Hill was strongly influenced by the “saucy postcard” school of British humor and many of his skits were set on the beach. In sketches such as The Beach of Waikiki (1975), A Feast on the Beach (1977) and Beach Hijinks (1978) he plays the role of a roly-poly buffoon who repeatedly outrages pretty girls in skimpy bikinis. Each time they get so irritated by his antics that they form a mob and seek vengeance, chasing after him as the credits roll.
Here at last was a beach/milk float connection. And now, I started to piece everything together. Like many comedians, Benny Hill was a rather lonely, melancholy figure. He never married, and was very close to his mother, living in her house for years after she died. This reminded me of a throwaway comment that my brother had made about Barthes: he had lived with his mother almost his entire life — 60 years! — and was devastated when she died.
The beach, the eccentric vehicle, the mother love: the chain of associations was clear. My memory had combined Benny Hill with Frank O’Hara and Roland Barthes. O my friends, it is from these loosest of connections and misrememberings that legends are made. But there’s more: I soon learned that the thematic currents linking the English comedian to the French intellectual ran still deeper than my unconscious mind had intuited.
For instance, Barthes spent much of his childhood in the French town of Bayonne, and throughout his life returned there for beach holidays. Indeed, as he put it in his essay On the Beach (1977):
Who among us has not spent hours splayed out on the sand? I remember: sounds and bits of phrases crisscross around me. If I close my eyelids, colors persist: blue, red, yellow; if I half open them lazily, I see unknown bodies passing through my lashes. All of this forms a beach effect.
Meanwhile, in Benny Hill’s sketch On the Beach (1984), the rotund comedian tries to pick up a beautiful girl in a bikini who is reading a newspaper. Hill buys her a beer, but when she puts the newspaper down to receive the glass she reveals that a baby girl is sitting on her lap. The bikini-clad girl promptly departs, leaving Hill with the baby. The baby drinks the beer and makes fart noises with a balloon. Later, Hill stumbles into a changing tent on the beach, and several ladies in varying states of undress are duly outraged.
A group of irate bathing beauties (plus an elderly man in his underwear) then chase the comedian around the beach, along a pier and up and down some steps until eventually Hill is reunited with the baby. He decides to abduct the baby. Hand in hand, they walk away from the camera together. Hill jumps into the air, kicking his heels.
But I digress.
Image: Freightliner belonging to Howards Dairies, No. 670, registration OHJ 420F delivering milk to cafes by Southend Pier, Essex, around 1970. By Bob1960evens - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0.
In fact, this too is misremembered. In the song, Ernie drives a milk cart.