AUTHORS ARE DEAD WHEN THEIR BOOKS PUBLISHED

No work of arts is new. A creative writer is that person who writes popular letters in a strange way. The purpose of creative writing is to both entertain and share human experience, like love or loss. Writers attempt to get at a truth about humanity through poetics and storytelling. If you'd like to try your hand at creative writing, just keep in mind that whether you are trying to express a feeling or a thought, the first step is to use your imagination.

Types of creative writing include: Poetry Plays Movie and television scripts Fiction (novels, novellas, and short stories) Songs, Speeches Memoirs Personal essay. When a book is written and published for intellectual consumption, the moment one can refer to it as a book, that moment, the death of the author has been announced. It may not be in form of a book. It may be in any form. Whether a written or spoken text. When the death of the author is announced, immediately, a reader is born.

 A French literary thinker argues that Barthes argues against the method of reading and criticism that relies on aspects of the author's identity—their political views, historical context, religion, ethnicity, psychology, or other biographical or personal attributes—to distill meaning from the author's work. In this type of criticism, the experiences and biases of the author serve as a
definitive "explanation" of the text. For Barthes, this method of reading may be apparently tidy and convenient but is actually sloppy and flawed: "To give a text an Author" and assign a single, corresponding interpretation to it "is to impose a limit on that text". Readers must thus separate a literary work from its creator in order to liberate the text from interpretive tyranny (a notion similar to Erich Auerbach's discussion of narrative tyranny in Biblical parables). [1] Each piece of writing contains multiple layers and meanings.

 In a well-known quotation, Barthes draws an analogy between text and textiles, declaring that a "text is a tissue [or fabric] of quotations", drawn from "innumerable centers of culture", rather than from one, individual experience. The essential meaning of a work depends on the impressions of the reader, rather than the "passions" or "tastes" of the writer; "a text's unity
lies not in its origins", or its creator, "but in its destination", or its audience no longer the focus of creative influence, the author is merely a "scriptor" (a word Barthes uses expressly to disrupt the traditional continuity of power between the terms "author" and "authority"). The scriptor exists to produce but not to explain the work and "is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, [and] is not the subject with the book as predicate".

Every work is "eternally written here and now", with each re- reading, because the "origin" of meaning lies exclusively in "language itself" and its impressions on the reader. Barthes notes that the traditional critical approach to literature raises a thorny problem: how can we detect precisely what the writer intended? His answer is that we cannot. He introduces this notion in the epigraph to the essay, taken from Honoré de Balzac 's story Sarrasine in which a male protagonist mistakes a castrato for a woman and falls in love with him. When, in the passage, the character dotes over his perceived womanliness, Barthes challenges his own readers to determine who is speaking, and about what. "Is it Balzac the author professing 'literary' ideas on femininity? Is it universal wisdom? Romantic psychology? … We can never know." Writing, "the destruction of every voice," defies adherence to a single interpretation or perspective. (Barthes returned to Sarrasine in his book S/Z , where he gave the story a rigorous close reading.)

Acknowledging the presence of this idea (or variations of it) in the works of previous writers, Barthes cited in his essay the poet Stéphane Mallarmé , who said that "it is language which speaks". He also recognized Marcel Proust as being "concerned with the task of inexorably blurring…the relation between the writer and his characters"; the Surrealist movement for employing the practice of “automatic writing" to express "what the head itself is unaware of"; and the field of linguistics as a discipline for "showing that the whole of enunciation is an empty process". Barthes' articulation of the death of the author is a radical and drastic recognition of this severing of authority and authorship. Instead of discovering a "single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author- God)", readers of a text discover that writing, in reality, constitutes "a multi-dimensional space", which cannot be "deciphered", only "disentangled". "Refusing to assign a 'secret,' ultimate meaning" to text "liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases—reason, science, law."

 From the foregoing, one can deduce that the author of a book do not have any right to impose a particular meaning for the book. Once you can refer to yourself as a writer or an author, you are dead automatically. Your existence is not in any way significant to the book and its contextual meanings. Many may view the death of anything as a negative; however, the death of the author as described in Barthes’ article is very occurring in today’s literary works and can sometimes have a greater impact on the reader than the author’s presence alone. One of the things that Barthes emphasized was that when “this disconnection occurs, the voices loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins.” I agree with this stance and I especially believe that it is evident in some of the works that we have read such as Joyce’s Afternoon and Danielewski House of Leaves. In both of these stories the reader is able to take away his or her personal interpretation as oppose to many stories that have a known author throughout making the argument of x, y, or z. Further, after reading this article I started to wonder, “Does the author even matter even matter if their position in the story is not apparent?” At first I thought it did not matter.

My reasoning was because the readers would be able to formulate their own opinions without any biases on who the author is, what the author does, or the other contributions they made to the literary world. Then I started to think that the author is important and their contributions do matter for a number of reasons. For instance, knowing more about the author can help readers better understand the themes of the story or what the author would convey. And for me when our class found on a little bit more on Johnny I thought that his narration (although unreliable at times) was all the more interesting. Ultimately, I feel that as long as the
readers are able to gain something from reader the story, then it does not matter whether or not the author is present. Barthes stated that, “Once the author is removed, the claim to decipher becomes quite futile.” However, I believe that at this point the claim to decipher a text is at its greatest because there are endless interpretations the readers could create. “A text lies not in its origin but its destination”

 It is the duty of the readers to either subjectively or objective give their own meaning to a text without looking for the author or waiting for the author to provide meanings for the text. However, an author is expected to accept any meaning given to his/her work. Because in the literary sense, he/she is considered dead and the dead don't "talk".

© OLATUNDE BUSAYO SOLOMON

PENMIND WHATSAPP LECTURE 2016