(no subject)
THE AUTHOR IS DEAD
“In the final fight scene of a contemporary martial arts film, all the weapons-- guns, swords, whatever-- are knocked aside, out of reach, leaving the opponents with only their empty hands. It’s a symbolism I like, because in the end that’s how we all have to face the problems that beset us: When our hands are empty, what will decide the fight is what’s inside our minds.”
-Chuck Norris
As I write this the permeating idea of the author being dead is all at once flabbergasting and wholly frustrating, yet at the same time it is completely and undeniably logical.
The Author is Dead. Once we have written the words, they cease to be our words, our thoughts, our interpretations…we give them up to the wind. And they are promptly subject to the analysis of whoever is reading them. The vital meaning of a work depends on the impressions of the reader, rather than the passions of the writer. The significance of a text lies not in its origins, or its creator, but in its destination, or its audience.
The author cannot add to, clarify, or interpolate, the meaning of a text after the fact. The Author is Dead and those words will never be theirs again. It can be argued that they were never theirs to begin with, merely the reorganizations of pre existing phrases. Once something is written or spoken it merely exists as a subjective interpretation by someone else. Whatever those words meant to the author while they were inside, they no longer mean what they meant there…and they never will again.
The Author is Dead. How do you decide what something is or is not? Does it exist as whatever it is regardless of your knowledge of what it is, or can it only be determined by personal elucidation? Were you always human…or are you only human once you are considered to be portraying a certain number of generally accepted characteristics that make up the thing we label as a “human?”
As I write this the permeating idea of the author being dead is all at once flabbergasting and wholly frustrating, yet at the same time it is completely and undeniably logical.
The Author is Dead yet if you can't read I'll have existed but only in my head.