Killing off the "sciptor"

When I first thought about the death of the author in which the authors identity has nothing to do with the literature itself. “Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where out subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing” (Barry, 185). Writing has no definitive meaning and when one is trying to relate the author to the text, the text all of a sudden has a definitive meaning with retrictions and bondaries. Once we begin to examine the author as a single person who is trying to communicate a message, we think more about the author experiences like, what time was the book written in, what was the author going through to make him or her create these characters? When we think as the author having influence over the writing we are constricting our ideas and over looking the literary text. Barry best describes this as, “the image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions while criticism still consists for the most part in saying that Baudelaire’s work is the failure of Baudelaire the man…” (186).

It is not the author which speaks to us but the language, language is the only thing that is impersonalizing. By restraining the author we are restoring the place of the reader, which enables us to see the text for what it means to the individual. We begin to look at questions like, what kind of impression do literary texts have on us? We have to remember ‘it is language’ which speaks to was and not the author himself or herself. Language is the reader’s ultimate secret, which can not be explained or defined.

The only purpose of the “scriptor” is to produce the text, “the is thought to nourish the book,
which is to say that he exists before it, think, suffers, lives for it, is in the relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child” (187). I think a better analogy is to say, the author is more like a pregnant women and when she gives birth she is no longer one with the baby. She has little to no control over what the baby is and is not going to eat like the author has little influence over how other people are going to view his or her work.
Dr. Bitch states that by using fictitious name the author kills themselves off and allows for the reader to focus solely on their own ideas. Dr. Bitch states, “pseudonyms make a text more fully public: by hiding the author’s identity, the author becomes potentially anyone.” With the potential to be anyone we are allowing our imagination or ideas on the text to grow. The reader can’t look up the author to see what kind of person she or he was. Once we know who the author is (passions, lifestyles. etc.) the text is at risk.. Because now we are not thinking about our own ideas but we are thinking what the author is trying to say.

It’s like reading one of your favorite books and always having this idea in our head of what the characters look like and then several years later Hollywood makes that same book into a movie. The characters that once were clearly defined by your imagination is now plastered on a big screen in front of you. The idea that you had will never be the same, all the ideas were destroy by Hollywood's interpretation. Just like if you were to look up the author and see how she or he might have been influenced to write the text.