Hello. Today’s is Guest Thursday and the topic is Barthes and the author’s death. Our guest insists in using Anatole France for a pen name. Don’t confuse with the already dead author. Every typo is responsibility of the author since I only copy-pasted.
The author’s death
As I arrive in my town’s most ornate cathedral, I drop to my knees and beg God, Christ Jesus and a whole host of saints, demigods, and sitcom stars, living and dead, to please resurrect the author, our author.
More important perhaps, is how exactly did the author die? Roland Barthes appears to have discovered the corpse many decades ago, which marks him as the first suspect. Is it little more than a mystery novel?
Is his investigation simply an alibi, or the beginning of a cover-up? Was the author summarily executed for crimes against humanity, against aesthetics, against the author’s neighbor? Was the author hunted for sport? Did he accidentally trip and fall on a morning jog into a void that dropped him 500 feet high into the Great Salt Lake? Did the author die of old age, natural causes as they say? Did we, the audience, read him out of existence? Has the author gone underground and faked their death? Do I control the graceless movement of my own pencils?
Where might the author have gotten off too? If they are dead, might their reanimated corpse be a possibility? Is it just a name? What is the animating character? As someone who has tried their hand at organizing words, juggling punctuation, I find it has less and less to do with me. I’m just the mail carrier. Hard work it is too. With every manner of dog, dilapidated residence, long journeys among little shade in the summertime blues.
The continual vexations of a world without literary criticism. Professional blurbs. One peak at Goodreads will end us, you will forver regret any and all writing about literature. Oscar Wilde, Aristotle, Malcolm Cowley? In a world where vintage Amazon reviews have been published in book form, one can only look upon with jest the corpus of endless Goodreads pieces, full of familiar padding from middle school essays, endless elaboration on nothing at all. Is this the madness of one easily pertubed, or just a sickness, a side effect of our time. Endless rot, the slow decay and death of language as we know it? Is this what awaits us? When will the first novel written in animated gifs present itself to us? I eagerly await it. Would Barthes mourn the death of language? How is it killed? Is it just English? Perhaps it’s for the best.
I recall a friend, who in one of her endlessly phony attempts to impose her intellect upon me mentioning the Death of the Author as if it were a closed case, as if the perpetrator were behind bars in some prison rotting, awaiting his own execution. As if this were gospel truth. Perhaps this was her way of seeking a replacement for the religion of her youth.
I wonder now if she ever found another viable substitute for Christianity. Politics, perhaps, or television shows, which appear to have their own bibles and canons that bring the faithful to their knees, That cause endless doctrinal debate. That tear communities and marriages alike asunder.
As for us, dear Friends, pick up a copy of Mythologies by Roland Barthes, while you still can. It is a delight to the very end. Greta Garbo’s face, steak, soap, like never before, I promise you.
As for me, I suspect the author is never dead, they cannot be killed or erased. They are in fact more alive than ever, as we speak. We know their misdeeds, whatever they maybe, will be trudged up whenever his name is brought up in conversation, or casually mentioned online. Perhaps, indeed, their misdeeds have superceded the very work that brought them to our attention in the first place, for seeing a novel for sale at a supermarket is much more important than having read said novel. To conquer retail space, so as even those who want nothing to do with the written word, might spy your name out of their periphery is the ultimate for any author. Fame, name, brand recognition
Tellingly, the last discussion I had about Neruda was a catalog of his sins, not his work, which was of no consequence here. Perhaps, indeed, church is the place for literature, until a secular means of punishing the guilty, those who violate our inviolate, ever changing, transient, happenstance morals, forever is devised. I imagine we will soon exhume Aristophanes and find him, long dead, wanting.
Where do I actually stand on this issue? Nowhere in particular. I only know that things will change once again. Art is. Someone will pick up a book, I hope. Art will last, for me, who am I?
Once, long ago, I heard someone claim the author isn’t dead, before comparing JK Rowling to
Shakespeare. I no longer recognize this land in which we live. Literarally or otherwise. I don’t need a hero, I just need language dutifully, masterfully arranged. You can be pleased by anything, if you only try. Matriculation in the suburbs, pizza delivery on elephant, horseback riding on a trampoline, breeding pet grass.
Thank you for your time and may humanity forgive me my endless idiosyncrasies. May love leave.
A.F.